Robert Ellis Thompson

Background

He was born of Scotch-Irish parents, Samuel and Catherine (Ellis) Thompson, near Lurgan, County Down, Ireland, 1844. His father, driven by economic distress in Ireland, sold his freehold farm and came to Philadelphia in 1857.

Education

As a child he attended the local country school and the Donaghloney Presbyterian Church. He attended successively the Hancock, Harrison Grammar, and Central High schools, completed his preparation for college at Faires' Classical Institute, and graduated from the University of Pennsylvania (A. B. , 1865) with the highest honors.

He graduated from the Reformed Presbyterian Seminary, Philadelphia, in 1867.

Career

He had long planned to enter the ministry, and after graduating from the Reformed Presbyterian Seminary, was licensed to preach, and seven years later was ordained. After supplying vacant churches as far west as Illinois in 1867-68, he returned to the University as instructor in Latin and mathematics, and after three years was invited to give the newly established course in social science, being appointed professor in 1874. He became the first dean (1881 – 83) of the Wharton School of Finance and Economy, and continued to teach political economy after he was given (1883) the Welsh Professorship of History and English Literature. He had served in 1872 – 74 as librarian, was chaplain in 1889 – 91, and lectured widely on ethics and the social sciences in university extension courses.

Meanwhile, as an editor of the Penn Monthly, 1870 – 81, he was intimately associated with the Philadelphia protectionist group, including Henry C. Carey, who became Thompson's economic mentor. On relinquishing this post he became an editor (1880 – 91) of the American, a weekly similarly devoted to economics, politics, and literature. He was on the staff of the Irish World from 1884 and of the Sunday School Times from 1892 to the end of his career. He was an editorial contributor to Stoddart's Encyclopædia Americana (4 vols. , 1883 - 86), published as a supplement to the ninth edition of the Encyclopædia Britannica. The varied and voluminous reading and ready writing thus done added to his influence, his wealth of illustration, and his literary facility.

His first book, Social Science and National Economy (1875), which he used as a text with his classes, enjoyed popularity elsewhere. Written with the encouragement of Joseph Wharton, it was a talented exposition and vigorous defense of the position of the nationalist school of political economy, founded primarily upon the teachings of Carey but marked by Thompson's own personality. With him the nation became, and remained to the end of his life, not only an economic, political, and cultural entity, but an ordinance of God. His own nature fitted in with the buoyant views of the school; he attacked the Ricardian theory of rent and the Malthusian principle of population with more than academic ardor. His method was always in the main inductive, the result gaining much from aptness and concreteness of observation.

After a pamphlet on Hard Times and What to Learn from Them (1877), came his Elements of Political Economy (1881), a revision of his earlier work. An active advocate of a high tariff policy in the Blaine-Cleveland campaign of 1884, he was invited the next year to give lectures at Harvard which were subsequently published under the title Protection to Home Industry (1886), an arsenal of persuasive argument. He gave similar lectures at other institutions.

Suddenly, in 1892, his connection of twenty-four years with the University of Pennsylvania was severed. He considered himself forced out. It is probable that his differences with Provost William Pepper were occasioned by conflict with younger members of the Wharton School faculty recently returned from German universities. He declined the presidency of Lake Forest College, and discouraged a movement to make him professor of Christian sociology in Princeton Theological Seminary – a consequence of his Stone lectures delivered there and published as De Civitate Dei – The Divine Order of Human Society (1891), in which, as in other of his writings on social ethics, he espoused national will to social improvement as against the controlling influence of economic materialism.

In 1894 the second half of his career opened with his election to the presidency of the Central High School of Philadelphia. His early misgivings as to his executive capacity were banished by his brilliant success in greatly enlarging the school and enriching its instruction and influence. His cordial and intimate contacts with pupils and faculty produced an enthusiastic loyalty to him which was manifested on many occasions. He retired from the headship of the Central High School in 1920 in accordance with the new Retirement Act, after a vigorous protest by himself and many alumni and faculty members had failed, but he continued for a time his teaching of ethics and economics. He died in Philadelphia after a lingering illness.

Achievements

• Robert Ellis Thompson is remembered as an American educator.

Works

More photos

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  • The Historic Episcopate (Classic Reprint)

    (Excerpt from The Historic Episcopate At the first the wh...)

  • Political Economy for High Schools and Academies

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

  • Nature, the Mirror of Grace: Studies of Seven Parables

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

  • Elements of political economy: with special reference to the industrial history of nations

    (This book was digitized and reprinted from the collection...)

  • The Hand Of God In American History: A Study Of National Politics (1902)

    (This scarce antiquarian book is a facsimile reprint of th...)

Views

Thompson represents as well as anyone the unsuccessful struggle of national economic optimists against the rising tide of reformers, mainly socialists, who thought in international terms and preached class cleavage instead of a harmony of economic interests. In Thompson the moralist frequently threatened to hamper the economist.

Personality

He was a large, heavy man, with bald head, drooping eyelids, and an engaging smile. His salient characteristics were conviction, spiritual, mental, and physical vigor, and personal magnetism.

Connections

Thompson was twice married: in 1874, to Mary E. Neely who died July 8, 1894, and on August 18, 1910, to her sister, Catherine Neely, who with two daughters and a son of his first marriage survived him.

Father:

Samuel Thompson

Mother:

Catherine (Ellis) Thompson

Spouse:

Catherine Neely

Spouse:

Mary E. Neely