Background
Virgil Justin was born on June 3, 1892 at Olean, New York, United States, the son of James Ernest Jordan and Lillian May Conrad. He spent his boyhood on the family farm near Cuba, New York.
Virgil Justin was born on June 3, 1892 at Olean, New York, United States, the son of James Ernest Jordan and Lillian May Conrad. He spent his boyhood on the family farm near Cuba, New York.
Jordan attended College of the City of New York, graduated with the B. S. , cum laude, in 1912. He had majored in economics and physics and pursued the former in graduate work at the University of Wisconsin in 1912. The following year Jordan studied at Columbia and Cambridge universities, and in 1914 at Stuttgart, Germany. The outbreak of World War I compelled him to return to the United States without receiving a degree.
While studying Jordan had jobs in butcher shops and as mechanic's helper.
From 1914 to 1920, Jordan was an associate editor of Everybody's Magazine. He joined the staff of the National Industrial Conference Board as editor of its publications in 1920, serving also as chief economist from 1924 to 1929. The Conference Board, organized in 1916 by leading business associations in order to share management experience and conduct industrial research, had expanded its activities under the guiding hand of the engineer Magnus W. Alexander during a period of notable prosperity. Under this influence Jordan left the Conference Board in 1929 to become economist on the new magazine Business Week.
After Alexander died, Jordan became the Conference Board's president on January 1, 1933. In the depth of the Great Depression, Jordan confronted grievously altered conditions. The economic collapse had reduced the Conference Board's membership, finances, and staff. The board organized a group of executives who gathered weekly, says the official history, "to study and try to find some means of stimulating business recovery. " But the group "was unable to agree on solutions to the many problems raised. " Nevertheless, he buckled to with his customary energy, and in the next years restored staff and salaries, expanded research, published a new business outlook periodical (Conference Board Business Survey). The board drew leading professors into its Economic Advisory Council, organized symposiums of specialists, and fostered gatherings of the general membership.
Newly established government agencies to assist the economy were assessed at round-table and dinner meetings. One such conference in May 1937, when Roosevelt had been persuaded to relax government "pump priming" and trust to resumption of business initiative, found Jordan in an expansive mood. He complimented his hearers, "a great group of able, earnest, experienced and public-spirited men joined in a common effort to promote the prosperity, security and progress of the American people by . .. strengthening the operation of the enterprise organization upon which it is based. " He lamented that the last four years had produced "a new, strange, unfamiliar and unfriendly world in which we live and labor today . .. ." After a passing reference to the masses' "eternal yearning for the golden age of plenty, without end, without effort, and without obligation, " he satirized the popular notion that "the state and its prestidigitators provide the magical all-powerful . .. agency which alone can manipulate the Aladdin's lamp of science and play the horn of plenty. " Instead, he would celebrate "the individual human personality, whose energies have been the source of all creative power, whose accomplishments have been the standard of all values, and whose development has been the end object of all sound economic, social and political institutions. " This was six months before the recession of 1937, which plunged Jordan deeper into the pessimism that had become his trademark.
In the demanding years of World War II and reconversion, Jordan's well-chosen staff continued to serve the needs of the great segment of American business represented on the Conference Board. His own statements, however, became more vehemently condemnatory of governmental intrusion into the economy. The board took pains to distinguish Jordan's personal bias from policy of the organization, as did Jordan himself.
In 1948, his health and judgment impaired, Jordan resigned from the presidency of the Conference Board with the title of chancellor, a nominal connection he maintained for fifteen years. In retirement he lived in Southern Pines, North Carolina. There a nurse found Jordan and his wife, who had both been ill, dead in a suicide pact.
Impotence became humiliation, in Jordan's view, under the rescue efforts of President Franklin Roosevelt's New Deal.
Quotations: To a critic of his gloomy forecasts he replied, "I don't mind at all that you find the opinions I express . .. distasteful. I do myself. In fact they make me quite ill at times because I take them so seriously. "
Jordan was tall and shaggily handsome" with brown hair and blue eyes.
In 1914 Jordan married Viola Scott Baxter; they had three children. After their divorce he married Gertrude Bascom Darwin in 1928.