Background
Abram Lincoln Harris was born into a comparatively middle-class African American family in Richmond, Virginia, on January 17, 1899.
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(This volume presents selections from the work of Abram L....)
This volume presents selections from the work of Abram L. Harris (1899-1963), acknowledged as the first black American economist to achieve prominence in academic life. Between 1927 and 1945 he served on the faculty at Howard University in Washington, D.C. Thereafter, he was a professor in the College at the University of Chicago. During the Howard years, Harris was a central figure among a remarkable group of black social scientists clustered at that institution. He influenced the thought and work of Ralph Bunche, E. Franklin Frazier, and Eric Williams. A frequent contributor to professional journals in economics, especially the Journal of Political Economy, Harris was recognized as perhaps the foremost expert on the comparative analysis of alternative approaches in economics.Race, Radicalism, and Reform includes an introduction by the editor that provides a chronology of Harris' life and an assessment of his scholarly contributions. A diverse array of Harris' papers is contained in the volume covering all the major themes he addressed in the course of a lifetime of research: the "Negro problem" in the United States, the interaction between race and class, controversies in American economic history, Marx and Marxism, the nature and content of institutional economics, and the economics of John Stuart Mill. What results is a comprehensive view of Harris' work, affording insight into important transitions in his thinking about radicalism and social reform. In particular, the book chronicles his movement from a left orientation in his youth to a moderate libertarianism in his later years.
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anthropologist economist academic
Abram Lincoln Harris was born into a comparatively middle-class African American family in Richmond, Virginia, on January 17, 1899.
As a result of his frequent contact with the meat shop's owner, Harris learned German and became a fluent speaker of the language. Harris' mastery of the language would help him later in life, when he examined the writings of German economists and social reformers like Karl Marx.
He attended Virginia Union University, graduating in 1922 with a Bachelor of Science degree.
Harris went on to earn an M. A. in economics from the University of Pittsburgh in 1924. His masters' thesis, "The Negro Laborer in Pittsburgh, " inaugurated his examination of African American workers in the steelmaking and coal-mining industries and led to two articles published in the mid-1920s in the National Urban League's journal, Opportunity, on the difficulties confronting African American miners. One of the central issues he explored was the antagonism African American miners faced from their white peers in the coal sector. He even addressed the phenomenon of "race prejudice" among white workers, native born versus new immigrants, as an additional factor inhibiting labor organization among all the miners.
Harris was the second African American to receive a Doctorate in Economics in the United States, following Sadie Mosell Alexander. But Alexander had not pursued an academic career. Harris' dissertation research at Columbia involved further work that examined the gulf between African American and white labor in the United States. He merged his Ph. D. thesis, completed and defended in 1930, with that of the political scientist Sterling Spero to produce a now-classic study of African American labor history, The Black Worker, published in 1931. Racial antagonism between workers, founded on economic conflict, was a central theme of the volume. White union exclusion of African Americans and the role of African Americans as strikebreakers played a prominent role in the analysis in The Black Worker.
Harris was consistent in endorsing construction of a racially united militant labor movement. Having joined the Howard University faculty in 1927, before completing his Ph. D. , Harris and his colleagues Ralph Bunche and E. Franklin Frazier formed a radical triumvirate of social scientists at the institution. They were principal figures in the attack on the older generation of "race men" at the NAACP's 1933 Amenia Conference. Harris was the main author of the so-called Harris Report, which urged the NAACP to embrace a more militant protest and class-based course of action, rather than a race-based approach. Harris also was the author of a Progressive Labor Party pamphlet in 1930 that called for the formation of a working-class political party in the United States.
After teaching for a year (1924-1925) at West Virginia State University (then called West Virginia Collegiate Institute), Harris took a position as director of the Minneapolis Urban League. During his year in Minnesota he prepared a detailed report on the condition of African Americans in Minneapolis. Relying heavily on statistics from surveys and from census reports, Harris documented in dramatic fashion the extent of social and economic inequality faced by African Americans in the northern city. He also devoted a substantial portion of the report to the extensive pattern of wage and employment discrimination faced by African Americans seeking work in Minneapolis, providing additional evidence of a racially split workforce.
In 1925 Harris published a semi-apocryphal essay entitled "Black Communists in Dixie" in Opportunity. The essay was accompanied by an editor's note reading, "This interesting narrative by Mr. Harris is an actual experience. The name of the city and the three leading figures have been changed. " Presumably the city was either Harris' native Richmond or Institute, West Virginia, during the period when he taught at West Virginia State. Harris exposed with sardonic humor the prevalence of racism among Southern white leftists, who would seek African American political support but exclude them from the central committees of the Communist Party. Harris also displayed decided cynicism about Bolshevist rhetoric.
His writings took on more of the tone and flavor of orthodox economics. Whereas he had defended Karl Marx from the conventional charges of the economists in a contribution to the Wesley Clair Mitchell festschrift in 1935, by the mid-1940s he was publishing essays explicitly critical of Marx. While he may have flirted intellectually with some of the most extreme libertarian perspectives in economics in the 1940s and 1950s —he eventually came to describe himself as a proponent of an individualistic brand of socialism patterned after the thinking of John Stuart Mill.
Harris seemed to harbor no illusions about the Soviet Union under Stalin in the 1930s, based upon his published work. Perhaps it was, and this is most likely, an accommodation made to facilitate his 1945 move from Howard to the University of Chicago.
With the move Harris became one of the first African American academics with an appointment at an historically white institution of the first rank. This was apparently an appointment he valued deeply, despite the fact that he never held a regular position with the faculty of the economics department, presumably due to his race. His position was exclusively in the undergraduate college.
The move was facilitated by the efforts of the renowned Chicago economist Frank Knight, who began publishing several of Harris' papers on themes in economic doctrinal history in the prestigious Journal of Political Economy as early as the late 1920s. The move also was aided in a negative sense by Harris' deteriorating relationship with Howard's tyrannical president, Mordecai Johnson.
It was the papers in the Journal of Political Economy that made Harris' reputation in the economics profession at large. Painstaking, careful, sometimes turgid, the papers were brilliant examinations of the perspectives of a variety of economists who had staked positions on how best to bring about social reform. These papers included critiques, comparisons, and reassessments of the perspectives of Thorstein Veblen, Werner Sombart, Karl Marx, Heinrich Pesch, and John Stuart Mill, among others. Harris' critical acumen was at its best here.
With the move to Chicago, where Harris was to continue teaching until his death in 1963, not only did Harris' work lose its prior radicalism but he wrote very little on questions of race relations and the economic status of African Americans. In fact, there was no further published work on race and economics until an essay of his appeared posthumously in a 1964 Rand McNally volume celebrating a century of Black emancipation. Here Harris can be found expressing views that would be echoed two decades later by the neoconservative African American economist Thomas Sowell. Harris minimized the role of discrimination in explaining African American economic disadvantage and emphasized the role of racial differences in human capital endowments, attributable to differences in familiar socialization processes in African American and white homes.
Harris' earlier work, including the fiery attack on African American entrepreneurs in his Negro as Capitalist, can lay a foundation for contemporary African American radical thought. His later work anticipated the posture of African American neoconservatives. All of his writings on race relations squarely address themes of interest in African American studies courses. His Journal of Political Economy essays continue to play an important role for economists who form an institutionalist school and for economists who are students of the history of economic doctrines.
But Harris also had an important, albeit indirect, influence on economic anthropology. While at Columbia he was a research assistant for Melville Herskovits and, in effect, designed Herskovits' reading course in economics. What Herskovits gleaned from Harris became the basis for the economic component of the theory that informs Herskovits' classic work The Economic Life of Primitive People.
Harris spent the rest of his life at the University of Chicago and died on November 18, 1963.
Harris is best known for his work as an economist and social critic of African American business. He had a heavy influence on both black radical and neo-conservative thought. A recipient of the Guggenheim Fellowship for Economics, Harris was one of the leaders of black economics through the early and mid-20th century. His early works such as The Negro as Capitalist set the precedent for contemporary African-American radical thought. Harris' great number of works on race relations such as The Black Worker served as a model for future African-American studies. His essays in The Journal of Political Economy have played a significant role for institutionalist economists and for economists studying the history of economic doctrines.
He is still widely regarded as one of the first African Americans to achieve prominence in academia in the early 20th century, and an influential figure on a wide range of African-American topics of interest.
(This scarce antiquarian book is a facsimile reprint of th...)
(This volume presents selections from the work of Abram L....)
Harris was a Marxist scholar and its theories influenced his work.
Harris' radicalism became more muted as the Great Depression era came to a close. He was to claim in his introduction to a 1957 collection of his essays that he was "emerging from a state of social rebellion still adher somewhat to socialistic ideas by the late 1920s. " However, the evidence suggests that Harris was solidly a socialist throughout the entire decade before World War II; indeed, he even advanced a critique of the New Deal based on its failure to address the fundamental problem of class inequality in the United States.
Still, it seems that Harris underwent an ideological conversion after the Great Depression.
Harris was associated with the Mount Pelerin Society.
As for Harris' personal life, for an individual with a somewhat austere demeanor and a taste for understated sartorial splendor, it was somewhat colorful.
He was married twice—first to California (Callie) McGuinn and later to Phedorah Wynn—his intensely personal correspondence with the journalist Benjamin Stolberg reveals that Harris had several extramarital affairs, at least during his first marriage.
