John Bates Clark Biography from Amherst Yearbook 1894

This mid-life testimony about the career of John Bates Clark is interesting to compare to the Memorial Minute entered into the record by his Columbia colleagues one month after his death in 1938.

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JOHN BATES CLARK, who fills the Chair of Political Economy at Amherst, was born January 26, 1847, in Providence, R. I. His father, John H. Clark, was a manufacturer; his mother was the daughter of Dr. Thomas Huntington, the youngest son of Gen. Jedidiah Huntington, of New London, Conn. Professor Clark has, therefore, by right of inheritance, both the industrial traits and the conservatism of New England.

Until his twentieth year, his home was at Providence. In the public schools of that city, he fitted for college, and passed at Brown the first and second years of his college course. In 1867, owing to the — happily temporary — crippled condition of the faculty of that institution, he came to Amherst and entered as Junior the class of ’69. Before the close of the year he was called to the new home of his family, Minneapolis, Minn. It was the failing health of his father that had led to the removal from Providence, and that now broke in upon his academic course. At Minneapolis he assumed and carried for more than a year business responsibilities of considerable weight. Here, too, he came, for the first time, under the spell of the new Northwest; and each influence, that of business responsibility and that of the new environment, had in it a valuable tonic quality. Moreover, some of those who are privileged to know him best think they find the source of certain traits which they greatly like, in the filial solicitude which kept the thought of self far in the background at the very period in a young man’s life when it is naturally, and, perhaps justifiably, most prominent. An improvement, unhappily transient, in his father’s health, permitted his return in the fall of ’69 to Amherst, and the resumption of study with the class of ’71. Then came his father’s death and a second interruption of his course at Amherst; this time, however, it lasted but a year. He graduated with the class of ’72. It is, perhaps, noteworthy that his connection with ’69, ’71 and ’72 made him, for nearly equal periods, the classmate of Prof. H. B. Adams of Johns Hopkins University, and of Professors Garman, Morse and Richardson, who are now his colleagues at Amherst.

Of Professor Clark’s scholarship it is enough to say that, in spite of two breaks in his college course, which together covered fully three years, and in spite of the distracting and absorbing nature of the cause of these breaks, his standing at graduation was higher than that of any man of his class. Of his character during this period the best witness is the singularly deep and fine impression which he made on classmates and teachers.

While at Amherst President Seelye, then Professor of Mental and Moral Philosophy, advised him to give special attention to social and economic studies, and his interest in these developed rapidly under the instruction of this wise counsellor and powerful teacher. During his Senior year he made that analysis of wealth which was afterwards published in chapter first of “The Philosophy of Wealth.”

The three years following graduation were passed in Germany, Switzerland and France, in the study of economics and history. One semester was spent at Zurich, and a considerable period at Paris, but the larger part of his university work was done at Heidelberg under the direction of Professor Knies. It is worth remarking that these three years abroad were not, in the ordinary sense, wanderjahre; for the companionship of his mother and sister gave him, although a resident of foreign lands, the advantages of an American home. On his return to the United States in 1875, he married Miss Myra A. Smith of Minneapolis. In his home there are now three sons in various stages of preparation for Amherst College, and a daughter who has not yet decided between the claims of Vassar, of which her mother is a graduate, and Smith, where her father was an honored professor.

Professor Clark’s career as a teacher began in 1875 with an appointment to a lectureship in Carleton College, Carleton, Minn. A few weeks after the beginning of his work, a severe typhoidal illness led to an enforced vacation of more than a year. In 1877 he was appointed Professor of Economics and History at Carleton, and there he remained until 1882, when he accepted the Chair of History and Political Science at Smith College. In 1892 he was elected Professor of Political Economy at Amherst; during the following year he gave instruction both at Smith and at Amherst; in ’93 the transfer to Amherst was completed. In addition to his professorship at Amherst, he has held, since 1892, the position of Lecturer on Economics at Johns Hopkins University. The fact that both at Carleton and Smith the parting was with very great reluctance, bears pleasant testimony to the impression he made on the trustees, the faculty and the students of these institutions; and here at Amherst the appreciation, already marked, of his fine and sterling traits as man and teacher, is steadily growing.

In the promotion of economic science through the association of those who made its advancement their life work, Professor Clark has taken a leading part. In 1885 he helped to organize the American Economic Association, the largest and most active of its kind in the world. At its founding he was made third vice-president, and the chairman of the Committee on Economic Theory. In 1893 he was elected president; his immediate predecessor in this office was Professor Dunbar, of Harvard, who followed Gen. Francis A. Walker (A. C. class of 1860), the first president.

Professor Clark’s publications on economic subjects amount all told to thirty. These have appeared for the most part in the New Englander, the Political Science Quarterly, the International Journal of Politics, the Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science, the Quarterly Journal of Economics, the Yale Review, the Revue d’Economie Politique, and Palgrave’s Dictionary of Political Economy. The themes treated are indicated by the following titles : “The Law of Wages and Interest,” “Distribution as Determined by a Law of Rent,” “The Ultimate Standard of Value,” “The Genesis of Capital,” “Insurance and Business Profits,” “Trusts,” “The Influence of Land on the Rate of Wages,” “The Statics and the Dynamics of Distribution.” The articles first published in the New Englander, nine in number, were re-published with some others in 1883, under the title of “The Philosophy of Wealth.” This book was followed by a monograph on “Capital and its Earnings.” Another monograph, written in co-operation with Mr. Stuart Wood, was on “Wages.” Two of the articles that appeared in the Political Science Quarterly were re-published with two by Professor Giddings, in a volume entitled “The Modern Distributive Process.”

In their entirety these various publications present a system of Economics the central feature of which is a new theory of Distribution. According to this theory the existing industrial system, though containing abuses, is in principle sound; and the abuses will gradually disappear if the legal and moral forces of society acting in their own distinct and proper spheres can be made to do their full duty. Briefly told. Professor Clark in spirit, thought and method, is conservatively progressive. His presence at Amherst gives to every friend of the College cause for hope and cheer.

Source: Amherst Yearbook Olio ’96 (New York, 1894), pp. 7-9. Picture above from frontispiece. Another link.