Background
Edwin E. Witte was born on January 4, 1887, in Jefferson County, Wisconsin, the son of Emil Witte, a moderately successful farmer and minor local official, and Anna Yaeck.
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Edwin E. Witte was born on January 4, 1887, in Jefferson County, Wisconsin, the son of Emil Witte, a moderately successful farmer and minor local official, and Anna Yaeck.
Witte graduated from the University of Wisconsin – Madison in 1909 with a B. A. in history and immediately began graduate work. In June 1912 he interrupted his studies to assume the position of senior statistician to the Wisconsin Industrial Commission. Shortly afterward young Witte became secretary to Congressman John M. Nelson, and in 1914 special investigator of the United States Commission on Industrial Relations. The following year he returned to the university as instructor, and completed his qualifying exams in 1916 but did not return to his dissertation studies until the mid-1920s. He eventually completed his doctorate in economics in 1927.
From 1922 to 1933 he was chief of the Wisconsin Legislative Reference Library, established to provide lawmakers with quickly accessible, reliable information and expert bill-drafting service. Thereafter, while a university professor, he continued to serve state and federal government in a host of advisory roles. He was highly skilled in legislative technique and very sensitive to political procedures. For such qualities President Franklin D. Roosevelt's advisers chose him in July 1934 for perhaps the most important post of his life, executive director of a cabinet-level Committee on Economic Security that formulated the nation's basic social-welfare law, the Social Security Act (1935). Others had done more than Witte to advance the ideas of social insurance and federal involvement in welfare; but few reformers had his grasp of legislative technique, and too many had become embroiled in divisive debates, for example, over the broad pooling of unemployment insurance funds. Yet Witte's role was not merely that of neutral technician; he helped give U. S. social security its chief character. With strong faith in state government and lifelong skepticism of Washington, for example, he doubted the constitutionality of direct federal administration; and he continued to question its wisdom, later opposing the federalization of unemployment insurance. Politically cautious, Witte was less perturbed than many fellow reformers when certain groups were at first excluded from old-age insurance, or when the bill did not impose rigorous federal standards on participating state welfare programs. He did not consider systematically the macroeconomic implications of social security financing; even in later years, after the impact of Keynesian thinking, he thought much more in terms of guaranteeing individual workers' benefits than of transfer of wealth or of large money flows through the national treasury. Consequently he favored quasi-actuarial financing — not only in 1935, but throughout his continuing service to the Social Security Administration in advisory roles. Apart from social insurance, Witte delved deeply into labor mediation and its law. His most substantial book was The Government in Labor Disputes (1932), a careful description of public policy, court decisions, and legislation. In 1928 he helped draft the Norris-LaGuardia Anti-Injunction Act (1932). Among other mediation activities, he served the National War Labor Board, beginning in 1943 as director of the regional board in the key war-production district of Detroit and continuing in 1944 and 1945 in Washington as a full-time "alternate" member of the national board. From 1948 to 1953 he was a member first of a key presidential commission and then of the major national panel overseeing labor relations in atomic energy installations. In 1956 Witte was elected to the presidency of the American Economic Association. Although he had made no great contribution to economic theory, he had demonstrated an unsurpassed ability to translate key ideas into working practices, laws, and institutions. An uncommon number of his students by that time held significant posts throughout government.
Edwin Emil Witte died on May 20, 1960, at Madison, Wisconsin.
Edwin Emil Witte was a noted economist, who focused on social insurance issues for the state of Wisconsin and for the Committee on Economic Security. Witte's vast collection (approximately 300 boxes) of papers, including diaries, correspondence, research files, class notes, government reports, and clippings, is in the Manuscripts Division of the State Historical Society of Wisconsin.
Witte's boyhood had been Pietistic and centered on the Moravian church. As an adult he gave little time to religion (although formally a Methodist), yet he retained a kind of piety: not smoking, for instance, disinclination toward parties, and an almost fastidious devotion to straightforward honesty and conscientious hard work.
Edwin E. Witte thoroughly imbibed a faith that democratic government could serve the public welfare well-if only officials worked in a spirit of service, and if public-minded experts (including university professors) brought care and rationality to policy, law, and institutions.
Edwin E. Witte was a member of the Social Security Administration, the first Advisory Council on Social Security, the Federal Advisory Council on Social Security and the President's Committee on Administrative Management.
On September 2, 1916, Edwin E. Witte married Florence Elizabeth Rimsnider, a librarian; they had one son and two daughters.
