Background
Isaac Hourwich was born April 26, 1860 in Vilna, Lithuania, then part of the Russian empire. He was the son of Adolph and Rebecca (Sheveliovich) Hourwich.
(Excerpt from Immigration and Labor: The Economic Aspects ...)
Excerpt from Immigration and Labor: The Economic Aspects of European Immigration to the United States Destitution of the free immigrants before the era of the new immigration' About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.
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Isaac Hourwich was born April 26, 1860 in Vilna, Lithuania, then part of the Russian empire. He was the son of Adolph and Rebecca (Sheveliovich) Hourwich.
After graduation from the Gymnasium at Minsk in 1877 he began the study of medicine at St. Petersburg. Abandoning medicine he took up law as a career, receiving the degree of LL. M. from the Demidov Juridical Lyceum at Yaroslav in 1887.
Columbia College awarded him the Seligman fellowship in political science and in 1893 conferred upon him the degree of Ph. D.
While at St. Petersburg he became interested in social and political questions and at the age of nineteen he wrote a pamphlet, "What is Constitutionalism? , " which caused his arrest and imprisonment on a charge of treason. Upon his discharge nine months later he became an active worker in the cause of revolution.
After a second arrest for political reasons he fled to Sweden and thence emigrated to the United States. He was then thirty years old. For two years, 1893-95, he taught statistics at the University of Chicago. Then he returned to New York, was admitted to the bar, and began the practice of law. After several years he gave up legal work to enter government service. From 1900 to 1913 he was employed by the United States Bureau of the Mint, the United States Census Bureau, and the New York Public Service Commission.
After the war he was retained as counsel by the New York Bureau of the Russian Soviet Government. Hourwich was a talented and prolific writer. He published in 1888, in Russian, a study of the peasant migration to Siberia, and in 1892 The Economics of the Russian Village, in which he analyzed the problems of individual and collective land-holding in relation to crop production and peasant welfare. The publication which attracted most attention was Immigration and Labor (1912, 1921), which was denounced by one reviewer as "a very ingenious, clever and dangerous book" (H. P. Fairchild, in the National Municipal Review, October 1913). In it Hourwich attacked the arguments for the restriction of immigration contained in the Reports of the United States Immigration Commission (41 vols. , 1911). He denied that the data gathered by the Commission proved that immigration had reduced the wages of native labor or had increased unemployment and, rejecting theoretical argument, he adduced statistical support of his position from the Commission's reports. Although lacking in balanced reasoning, the vigorous style of Hourwich's book made it a formidable controversial weapon and it was given extended consideration in reviews.
His other publications include a Digest of the Commercial Laws of the World (1902); a study, in Russian, of the development of American democracy (1905); another study in Yiddish, of mooted questions in Socialism (1917), and a Yiddish translation of Das Kapital. At the time of his death, in New York City, he is said to have left an unfinished autobiography entitled "Memoirs of a Heretic. "
(Excerpt from Immigration and Labor: The Economic Aspects ...)
Hourwich was connected with a number of Jewish philanthropies and was interested in movements for reform in city government.
Quotes from others about the person
Hourwich was remembered by his friend, journalist William M. Feigenbaum, as "a man of charm and genuine brilliance" with a tendency to intentionally hold contrarian opinions. "People disagreed with him but he made them think to justify their position, " Feigenbaum recalled.
He was twice married: in 1881 to Helen Kushelevsky of Minsk, Russia, and in 1893 to Louise Joffe of New York.