Edward Albert Filene was an American businessman and philanthropist. He is best known for building the Filene's department store chain and for his decisive role in pioneering credit unions across the United States.
Background
He was born in Salem, Massachussets The second son and second of five children, he was named after Albert Edward, Prince of Wales, who visited the United States in 1860.
His father, William Filene (originally Filehne), a native of Posen, Prussia, and the son of a well-to-do Jewish dealer in ribbons, had left Europe in 1848, at the age of eighteen. He became a merchant tailor in Boston and opened a retail store in Salem in 1856. Two years later he married Clara Ballin of Segnitz, Bavaria, like himself a person of firm moral character rather than religious sentiment and of a realistic disposition. The Filenes moved to Lynn, and in 1863 to New York City, but business reverses forced them back to Lynn in 1870.
Education
Save for an unhappy year and a half in a German military school, to which the parents sent their three older boys, Edward received his education in the Lynn public schools.
His declining health forced Edward to abandon college plans, though Harvard had accepted him, and to assume with his younger brother Lincoln full charge of their father's business.
Career
In 1881 the elder Filene liquidated several businesses specializing in women's clothing and accessories in order to open a small store in Boston.
Edward did his duty without bitterness, but his restless ambition stirred him to consider means of self-expression, in trade and out. Responsibility matured him. Though he was limited in social graces, his ability won respect.
As president of Filene's he evolved ideas and policy, leaving detail and human relations to his brother. By 1891 Filene's was a prominent Boston department store; in that year the elder Filene organized what soon became William Filene's Sons Company and turned full control over to the two sons.
A struggle for control set in, culminating after much litigation and bitterness in 1928, when Filene was shorn of all voice in management, though left with the office of president for the rest of his life. The loss of power was less of a disappointment to him than the failure of what was perhaps his most ambitious experiment: his hope of ultimately transferring the management of the store to its employees, through their Filene Cooperative Association.
For him, the broadened ownership of 1911 had been merely a preliminary step toward this goal. Meanwhile Filene's idealism had early turned to public affairs. First drawn to civic reform by a struggle over street-car franchises in Boston late in the 1890's, he responded fully to the mood of the progressive era.
In 1909 he called Lincoln Steffens to Boston to help him plan a broad campaign for city betterment. The resultant "Boston 1915" movement, an amorphous program to mobilize the energies of all classes against conditions which they all could agree were bad, typified Filene's undue faith that people will act rationally in terms of their interests rather than emotionally in terms of their prejudices.
The movement achieved some material improvements in schools, harbor facilities, and public health, but failed in its broader aim--in part, at least, because of Filene's weakness as a leader.
Filene pressed successfully for its authorization in Massachusetts and employed Roy Frederick Bergengren to further the idea throughout the nation.
In 1919 Filene organized the Cooperative League, which became, early in the next decade, the Twentieth Century Fund; he endowed it with trust funds he could not himself withdraw and ultimately willed to it the bulk of his fortune.
He served it as an interested principal who could be voted down as readily as any other, and was.
Originally expected to gather the facts in all fields of social endeavor, the Fund ultimately centered its efforts in the economic field. Its three-year survey of the security market was drawn on by Congress during the early 1930's in framing stock-market legislation.
In 1935 Filene organized the Consumer Distribution Corporation, intended to develop consumer cooperatives and particularly cooperative department stores. The next year he set up the Good Will Fund, Inc. (after his death, but not with his anticipation, the Edward A. Filene Good Will Fund), to conduct research and educational projects in cooperative and other public affairs enterprises.
As one of President Roosevelt's most influential supporters, he was given broad opportunities to defend and explain his purposes. Increasingly impatient with what he saw as unenlightened and self-destructive opinion among many of his peers in the business world, he broke openly with the United States Chamber of Commerce in 1936.
His last important public speech was an election-eve plea for Roosevelt's reelection that same year. Arbitrary and dictatorial with his associates, Filene nevertheless employed over the years a variety of able secretaries and aides, among them the young Glenn Frank, Ernest M. Hopkins, later president of Dartmouth College, and Charles Merz, later editor of the New York Times.
They gave him literary assistance in his numerous speeches and writings, though the ideas were always his own.
Of his books, four were especially successful: The Way Out: A Forecast of Coming Changes in American Business and Industry (1924), More Profits from Merchandising (1925), Successful Living in This Machine Age (with Charles W. Wood, 1931), and Next Steps Forward in Retailing (1937).
Filene contracted pneumonia at the conclusion of one of his many European visits and died in the American Hospital in Paris. By his direction, his ashes were returned to Boston and scattered in the Charles River Basin.
Politics
A lifelong Democrat, Filene found ample reason to support his party in 1932.
Views
Filene's interest in civic reform had a somewhat curious by-product: the advancement of the chamber of commerce movement. Impressed during the street-car fight by the fragmentation of Boston's business groups, he took the lead in organizing first the Boston and then the State Chamber of Commerce and subsequently helped to form the United States Chamber of Commerce. (As a good internationalist he was not content until an International Chamber of Commerce had been added. )
Always receptive to social experimentation, he believed that the Soviet system should be allowed to run its course freely for whatever benefit the rest of the world might derive from observing its successes and failures. He himself studied at close hand the Russian approach to the problem of mass distribution.
He lived simply and abhorred waste, but enjoyed comfort and was something of a dandy in dress. He took pleasure in his ever-widening circles of acquaintances and co-workers, including as they did presidents and premiers as well as businessmen and writers, but his incapacity for personal relations left him few close friends. Though he took satisfaction in his own abilities, he thought of himself as a failure, who had somehow not known how to pass on his business with manifest practicality to his employees.
Personality
A childhood accident left him with a limp and kept him out of boyhood sports; eczema during adolescence augmented his social shyness.
A quick thinker, he was too impatient to explain his ideas adequately to others, and his faith in his own judgment made him needlessly outspoken in criticizing his associates.
Quotes from others about the person
Glenn Frank, on the other hand, in his introduction to Filene's Successful Living in This Machine Age, observed that he came "as near to being the philosopher of our machine economy as we have yet produced. "