Background

He was born on December 28, 1859 in St. Louis, Missouri, the son of William Taussig and Adele Wuerpel. The family was an educated and talented one, with a love of music and literature; Frank early became a competent performer on the violin.

Education

He received his early education in public schools and in Smith Academy in St. Louis and entered Washington University there in 1874, but transferred after a year to Harvard. An able student, he was also an active participant in sports and other college activities. After graduating in 1879, he traveled and studied for a year in Europe and then returned to Harvard, planning to enter the law school. Although he ultimately obtained an LL. B. degree in 1886, his career was not to be in the law. President Charles W. Eliot of Harvard persuaded Taussig to become his secretary, and he combined the work of this position with studies leading to a Ph. D. in economics. He received the degree in 1883, with a dissertation (published that same year) entitled Protection to Young Industries as Applied in the United States.

He received honorary degrees from four American universities and from Cambridge and Bonn.

Career

In 1882 he was appointed an instructor in political economy at Harvard, a post he continued to hold during the next four years while carrying on his administrative duties and his law studies. In 1886 he was promoted to assistant professor and in 1892 to professor. Thereafter, with the exception of the years 1901-03, when he was recuperating in Europe from a nervous breakdown, and 1917-20, when he served in the federal government his career was at Harvard.

When Taussig became an instructor at Harvard in 1882, economics as a university subject had but recently disengaged itself from the protective guidance of moral philosophy. It claimed one professor at Harvard, the distinguished economist Charles F. Dunbar , but very few chairs in the country. Taussig belongs to that small and select group, including J. B. Clark, E. R. A. Seligman, Henry Carter Adams, and Richard T. Ely, who were responsible for the early development of economics as a separate study in American universities.

As an economist Taussig's principal interests lay in the fields of value and distribution, international trade and commercial policy, and certain aspects of what might be called the sociology of economic leadership. In the first field his principal contribution was his Wages and Capital (1896). This was a theoretical work of a high order and one which has stood the test of time. But while he was interested in abstract reasoning, Taussig was also deeply concerned with the institutional setting of economic activity and with the applications of analytical propositions to public policy; and it is as a systematizer and clarifier of economic thought, rather than as an original theorist, that he is best known. His Principles of Economics (first published in 1911)--probably the most widely used economics textbook of its period, influential in England as well as in America--well exemplifies these qualities.

Taussig's voluminous writings on the tariff and commercial policy illustrate his competence in applied economics. He early chose the field of international trade as his own, and his interest in it continued throughout his life. His authoritative Tariff History of the United States (1888) went through eight editions. His International Trade (1927) was perhaps the principal American contribution in this field.

Like his great English contemporary Alfred Marshall, he built his intellectual edifice on the framework of traditional English economic thought, but, again like Marshall, he was an indefatigable student of facts and institutions and had an unquenchable interest in contemporary economic policy. Taussig's concern with questions lying outside the traditional framework of economics early became evident in a series of lectures published under the title Investors and Money Makers (1915).

The problem of how the leaders of a business society are chosen continued to interest him for the rest of his life. It led him to assemble, in collaboration with C. S. Joslyn, a large mass of materials relating to the parentage and upbringing of representative business men, the results of which were published under the title American Business Leaders: A Study in Social Origins and Social Stratification (1932). It also shaped the content of his last written work, "My Father's Business Career, " published in the Harvard Business Review after his death in 1941.

But Taussig made what was perhaps his greatest contribution to economics not as a writer but as a teacher and editor. The profession has known few teachers whose impact was as far-reaching or profound. For many years he taught the introductory economics course at Harvard to hundreds of undergraduates, and for more than three decades he gave Harvard's principal graduate course in economic theory.

In his teaching Taussig was always open-minded and willing to learn, and it was this attitude that his students carried away from his classes. The same broad tolerance was reflected in the pages of the Quarterly Journal of Economics during the four decades (1896 - 1937) when Taussig edited it. He opened its pages to many new and unorthodox writers, among them Thorstein Veblen, with whose ideas he himself strongly disagreed. An exacting editor who combined with his catholic tastes a rigorous standard of quality, Taussig helped in a very real sense to shape the development of economics in the United States.

Taussig's interest in applying economics to public policy naturally led him toward government service. On the local and state level he was a member of the Cambridge School Committee in 1893-94, of the Massachusetts Commission on Taxation in 1897, and of the Governor's Commission on Massachusetts Tax Laws in 1915-16. His major public service began in 1917, when he left Harvard on a three-year leave of absence, at the request of President Woodrow Wilson, to become the first chairman of the federal Tariff Commission. As the leading authority on the tariff in the United States, he found it possible to attract good men to the new agency, and the shape he gave to its fact-finding and judicial procedures, during his two years as chairman, left a permanent impress. In his personal views he was, as he put it, a "moderate free trader, " though he accepted the protection of "infant industries" as a valid exception. Taussig had known President Wilson for some years before his appointment to the Tariff Commission, and during his stay in Washington he became an adviser to the President on a broader range of questions than tariff matters. In 1919 he accompanied Wilson to Paris as a member of the Advisory Committee on the Peace; there he not only was a member of the subcommittee on tariffs and commercial treaties but also acted as draftsman of a number of the more general economic provisions of the Versailles Treaty.

After resuming his teaching at Harvard in 1920, he continued to serve on the President's Industrial Conference and, until 1926, on the federal Sugar Equalization Board. Taussig was sixty when he returned to Harvard, and the last twenty years of his life were devoted unreservedly to teaching and research. Most of his writing was finished by 1932, but he continued actively to teach until his retirement, at the age of seventy-five, in 1935, and he edited the Quarterly Journal of Economics until 1937. His faculties remained unimpaired, and he was able to complete, with some assistance, a thoroughgoing revision of his famous textbook in 1939.

Taussig was a large, strong, and vigorous man, though, as his breakdown in 1901 indicates, not tireless. In September 1940 he was overtaken by a cerebral hemorrhage and died peacefully in his Cambridge home. He was buried in Mt. Auburn Cemetery in Cambridge.

Achievements

• Taussig is credited with creating the foundations of modern trade theory. His work as a scholar and public official had won him many honors.

Works

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  • Selected Readings in International Trade and Tariff Problems

    (This book was originally published prior to 1923, and rep...)

  • The Currency Act Of 1900

    (This work has been selected by scholars as being cultural...)

  • The silver situation in the United States.

    (This book, "The silver situation in the United States (18...)

  • The Tariff History of the United States

    (This Elibron Classics book is a facsimile reprint of a 18...)

  • Inventors and Money-makers: Lectures on Some Relations Between Economics and Psychology Delivered at

    (This is a pre-1923 historical reproduction that was curat...)

  • Principles of Economics

    (This is a pre-1923 historical reproduction that was curat...)

  • Some Aspects of the Tariff Question: -1915

    (Originally published in 1915. This volume from the Cornel...)

Politics

He frowned on minimum-wage legislation for women as likely to upset the delicate balance of economic laws. He had little sympathy for debtors and their demand for inflation in the depressed 1890's, and he thought that an income tax could not be successfully administered in the United States. The function of issuing currency, he believed, should be left to the banks, to be exercised with a minimum of governmental restraint.

Views

He himself was essentially conservative in outlook.

Membership

He was a member in several foreign learned societies. He was elected president of the American Economic Association in 1904 and president of the Harvard Alumni Association in 1936.

Connections

On June 29, 1888, Taussig married Edith Thomas Guild of Boston. They had four children: William Guild, Mary Guild, Catharine Crombie, who married the economist Redvers Opie, and Helen Brooke, who became a distinguished physician. Mrs. Taussig died in 1910, and in 1918 Taussig married Laura Fisher, first director of the Boston kindergartens.

Father:

William Taussig

1826–1913

Mother:

Adele Wuerpel Taussig

1885–1918

Spouse:

Laura Fisher Taussig

1858–1930

Spouse:

Edith Guild Taussig

1861–1910

Daughter:

Helen Brooke

Daughter:

Mary Guild

Daughter:

Catharine Crombie

Son:

William Guild