Philip G. Wright was born on October 3, 1861, in Boston, Massachussets, the son of a musician of distinction, John Seward Wright, and of Mary Clark Green. His grandfathers were Elizur Wright and Beriah Green. His boyhood and youth were spent in Boston.
He earned his way through Tufts College by teaching at Goddard Seminary and serving in the summers as postmaster, ticket agent, and printer at the Maplewood Hotel in the White Mountains. He graduated at the head of his class in civil engineering in 1884, taught mathematics at Buchtel College, Akron, Ohio, for two years, took the degree of M. A. at Harvard in 1887.
Later he worked as a civil engineer and a life-insurance actuary a few years. In 1892 he went to Lombard College, Galesburg, Illinois, and for twenty years at this small school he held the chair of mathematics, so to speak, nominally. His courses in astronomy, in financial history of the United States, in English theme writing were a delight and a lasting memory to his students. For many years the Wrights kept open house on winter Sunday evenings to students interested in books and reading. From this stemmed the Poor Writers' Club. The libretto of a musical farce-comedy, "The Cannibal Converts, " publicly produced by college students, came from Wright's facile pen at this time. In the basement of the Wright house was installed the Asgard Press, Wright and his wife bringing a book through all processes. Among its publications were three books of verse by Wright — The Dial of the Heart (1904), The Dreamer (1906), A Baker's Dozen for a Few Score Friends (n. d) — and a prose fantasy, The Plaint of a Rose, and a sheaf of juvenilia called In Reckless Ecstasy (1904) by Charles A. Sandburg. After teaching economics at Williams College (1912 - 1913), and at Harvard (1913 - 1917), Wright went in 1917 to Washington with his old friend and teacher, Frank W. Taussig, to serve as assistant to David J. Lewis, a member of the United States Tariff Commission. In 1922 he joined the original staff of the Institute of Economics, later part of the Brookings Institution. Before his retirement from the Brookings Institution in 1931 he had completed three volumes in the field of commercial policy — Sugar in Relation to the Tariff (1924), The Tariff on Animal and Vegetable Oils (1928), The Cuban Situation and Our Treaty Relations (1931) — and was joint author of another volume, The Tariff on Iron and Steel (1929). By 1933 he had produced two more formidable volumes of tariff studies, bearing on Pacific relations and Oriental trade. Before the American Economic Association in 1932 he presented the thesis that "if nations desire to maintain permanent peace, tariff making must be made subject to international law", receiving a spontaneous ovation. He printed privately in 1933, under the title Outcasts of Efficiency, a plan "to put the unemployed at work with the existing idle plant and machinery in supplying their own needs. " In his long poems, "The Captain of Industry" and "The Socialist, " he set forth the American business man, and the opposed revolutionary; in "The Cry of the Underlings" he achieved an authentic proletarian poem of bitter wrath and of a reckoning to come. In reprints of the latter in the labor press it has gone to millions of readers. In 1934 he and his wife completed a biography of their grandfather, Elizur Wright. Philip G. Wright died on September 4, 1934.
Philip G. Wright held that the federal government was the only agency "powerful enough to lift the pall of depression from the whole country, " and, though he constantly reiterated his view that Americans prize an economic order based on free enterprise, individual initiative, and private property, he argued that conditions were so desperate that inaction was hazardous, and that a new social mechanism to create a better adjustment between production and demand would save the existing economic system from collapse.
Quotes from others about the person
"Nothing better has been done by any economist of our generation. " (Frank William Taussig)
In 1888, Philip Green Wright married Elizabeth Quincy Sewall of St. Paul, Minnesota, also a grandchild of Elizur Wright, by whom he had three sons.
Sewall Green Wright was an American geneticist, known for his influential work on evolutionary theory and also for his work on path analysis.
Philip Quincy Wright was an American political scientist based at the University of Chicago, known for his pioneering work and expertise in international law and international relations.
Frank William Taussig was an American economist and educator.
