administrator counselor Industrialist
Robert Grosvenor Valentine was born on November 29, 1872, at West Newton, Massachusetts. He was the only child of Charles Theodore and Charlotte Grosvenor (Light) Valentine.
He was a descendant of John Valentine who was made a freeman of Boston, Massachusetts, in 1675.
Robert prepared for college at Hopkinson's School, Boston, and was graduated at Harvard in 1896.
From 1896 to 1899 and from 1901 to 1903, Valentine taught English at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, the intervening period being spent in the National City Bank, New York. Beginning in 1903, through the interest of James Stillman, he had a miscellaneous business experience with railroads and financial institutions in New York and Omaha until ill health from overwork forced him to retire from business in 1904.
During the administration of Theodore Roosevelt, he became private secretary to Francis E. Leupp, commissioner of Indian affairs, whose assistant he became in 1908. Upon Leupp's retirement in 1909, President Taft appointed Valentine to the head of the Indian Office. His administration of that office was a notable one. He was resourceful in the protection of the enormous Indian properties against the many attempts at encroachments upon them and was eager for the development of the best of the Indian cultures. One of his acts as commissioner created considerable political difficulties because of the religious susceptibilities that it awakened.
By an Indian Office circular, he prohibited the wearing of religious garb and the display of religious insignia in what had formerly been religious schools for Indians but had been taken over as government institutions. In the spring of 1912, the Indian Office under his administration was under political fire and a Congressional investigation followed. The committee in its report divided on political lines, the four Democratic members finding against him, and the three Republican members supporting him.
That same year, he threw in his lot with Theodore Roosevelt in the Bull Moose campaign and resigned from the Taft administration. The range of Valentine's experience thus far educational, financial, administrative, sociological was all useful though unconscious preparation for his real-life work, short as that was; for his significance, apart from his enduring work at the Indian Office, is that of the founder of the new profession of the industrial counselor.
With his insight and with astonishing courage for he had neither funds nor backers in the winter of 1912, Valentine advertised himself in Boston as an industrial counselor, thus inaugurating, so far as history records, the beginning of this profession. Basic to this profession was the need of what Valentine called "an industrial audit" which would bear the same relation to the social health of an industry that a periodic financial audit bears to the solvency of a business.
Such an industrial audit called for the invention of a technique adapted, by appropriate adjustments, to every variety of business. Valentine helped to install such an audit in diverse types of industrial organizations, just as he served as an adviser on labor problems for diverse clients. Like an old-fashioned lawyer, he served labor unions, employees, and public officials.
Valentine died from a sudden heart attack, survived by his widow and a daughter.
Notable among the services rendered the last-named was Valentine's work for Mayor John Purroy Mitchel in the very difficult transit strike in New York City, during the summer of 1916. Essentially Valentine was an educator. He disseminated ideas and imparted ferment in his work for his clients, as chairman of the first wage board under the Massachusetts minimum wage law (1913), as a lecturer at Wellesley College (1915 - 16), in formal addresses, and through the mere contagion of casual contact.
For four years, Valentine specialized as an adviser on industrial relations, and the impact of his example and achievements led to the recognition of the need of a body of specialists like himself. Others before him had diagnosed the so-called labor problem as essentially a human problem is the problem of men and women, with their impulses and desires, behind the mechanism of an industry.
Valentine was the first, however, to draw profound conclusions from this discernment. Just because the terms of this human equation, he argued, were subtle and excessively complicated, there was the greater necessity for making these elusive aspects of the relation of capital and labor the subject of organized study.
Instead of ignoring the human problem, or leaving it to caprice, Valentine maintained that personal relations must be studied with the same scientific spirit as are the processes of production and the fiscal side of business. Such knowledge, he was convinced, could be achieved only by professionals, that is, by men who devoted their entire time to it, with a function as well-defined as that of the lawyer or the financial expert.
Valentine was a poet by temperament who was dominated by scientific ardor to institutionalize sound human relations.
The astonishing aspect of his career is that he succeeded in establishing recognition of his idea of scientific order in the human aspects of industry although he had so brief a period for accomplishment.
In 1904 December 31, Valentine married Sophia French of South Braintree, Massachussets.
