It is not quite clear whether the following exams that had been prepared for Swarthmore College’s honors economics degree were simply misfiled with Johns Hopkins’ political economy department exams or whether those exams had been been recycled expressly for examining Johns Hopkins’ economics majors. In any event we can add Broadus Mitchell’s two exams for Swarthmore here to those of later external examiners Paul Samuelson (1943), Wolfgang Stolper (1944), and Richard Musgrave (1946). The Swarthmore department exam for 1931 was also posted earlier.
A 90 page transcript of an oral history interview with Broadus Mitchell from August 14 and 15, 1977 can be found in the Southern Oral History Program Collection at the website Documenting the American South at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Selections from that oral history will be added later.
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Abstract from the Oral History Interview with Broadus Mitchell
August 14 and 15, 1977
John Broadus Mitchell was born in Georgetown, Kentucky, in 1892 into a family with roots in religion and education. Mitchell describes his upbringing and the strong influence of both his parents. Mitchell discusses his father’s education and career as a professor of history, his parents’ liberal political leanings, and their community involvement. Mitchell also describes his perceptions of race while growing up in Kentucky, Virginia, and South Carolina. Mitchell became an economic historian; he describes in detail how the textile industry shifted its base of power from New England to the southern states in the late nineteenth century, and he talks at length about the impact of industrialization on southern communities. Mitchell became particularly interested in the politics of labor and race. He explains the purposes of labor education programs—notably the Summer School for Women Workers at Bryn Mawr College in Pennsylvania and the Southern Summer School for Women Workers in North Carolina—and his participation in those endeavors. In the 1920s, Mitchell moved to Baltimore to teach at Johns Hopkins University. In the 1930s, he came under the administration’s scrutiny when he publicly spoke out about a lynching in Salisbury, Maryland, advocated for the admittance of an African American graduate student to the university, and began to embrace socialist politics. He resigned in 1939. During the years of World War II, he worked briefly at Occidental College and New York University before finding a tenured position in the economics department at Rutgers University. Mitchell continued to be involved in leftist politics during the 1940s, and in the 1950s he participated in a movement at Rutgers to combat McCarthyism in academia. Throughout this interview, Mitchell emphasizes the influence of his upbringing on his political beliefs, and he relates his own experiences to those of his siblings who also were engaged in activism related to labor and race. Towards the end of the interview, Mitchell’s wife, Louise, joins the interview and discusses her career in teaching, her own community involvement, and her efforts to balance the demands of work and family.
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Swarthmore College
DIVISION OF THE SOCIAL SCIENCES
HONORS EXAMINATION: ECONOMIC THEORY
May 17, 1934 at 8:30
Examiner: Professor Broadus Mitchell, Johns Hopkins
Please answer any five.
- What are the relative importances today of production, exchange, distribution, and consumption of wealth?
- “The business cycle is inherent in the capitalist economic system.” Discuss this statement.
- How do “pure profits” arise? Under what circumstances did the enterpriser, as a distinct functionary, enter economic life? What are some of the means of avoiding economic risk?
- Under what economic circumstances was the differential or Ricardian theory of rent announced? Explain the use made of this theory by Henry George.
- Discuss as many theories of interest as you can, indicating which seems to you to be the most reasonable.
- Explain (with the use of schedules and diagrams if you choose) how market price is determined under conditions of perfect competition. Discuss briefly monopoly price and class price.
- What was the Wage Fund Theory and why was it abandoned?
- Discuss the relationship between the Malthusian theory of population and socialism.
- Give your definition of money.
- What are the main arguments for and against fiat money inflation?
- How would you provide a cure for “technological unemployment”?
- What are some of the limitations upon conscious economic planning within the capitalist system as these have appeared during the present depression?
Swarthmore College
DIVISION OF THE SOCIAL SCIENCES
HONORS EXAMINATION: SOCIAL ECONOMICS
May 18, 1934
Examiner: Professor Broadus Mitchell, Johns Hopkins
Answer the questions marked with an asterisk and any four (4) others.
- *What do you consider to be the chief economic desire of the mass of the people of the United States? Explain.
- What would you say is the major thesis of the majority of text books in the principles of political economy? Is it accurate to say that these books are practically invalidated by the events of the past four or five years?
- Make an argument for the continuance of capitalism.
- Indicate the chief wastes of the competitive system.
- What is R.H. Tawney’s criticism of an acquisitive society?
- From the standpoint of probable future change, what have been the principal economic and political tendencies in the United States?
- *Discuss the effect of the present business depression upon the problem of economic reform in the United States.
- Give your judgment of the sufficiency of the single tax as a scheme of social reform.
- *Distinguish between “utopian” and “scientific” socialism.
- What are some of the relative advantages in compulsory unemployment insurance of the “company reserve” plan and the “pooled fund” plan?
- In your opinion, is widespread organization of labor indispensable to radical social reorganization in this country?
- If you consider that there is a theory of social reform running through the recovery measures of the present Administration, give your critical appraisal of it.
- *What would you recommend as next steps in the “New Deal”.
- In what respects can the experiment of Soviet Russia be taken as a guide for the United States? In what respects is it not a guide for us?
- *What book in the College library, no matter what the character or subject, has interested you most? Why?
Source: Johns Hopkins University. The Ferdinand Hamburger, Jr. Archives. Department of Political Economy Records.Series 6, Curricular Materials and Exams, Box 2, Folder “Exams, 1930-35”.
Image Source: Broadus Mitchell in his office, ca. 1938. From the Johns Hopkins university graphic and pictorial collection.