Waddill Catchings

Background

Waddill Catchings was born on September 6, 1879 in Sewanee, Tennessee, United States to which his parents, Silas Fly Catchings and Nora Belle Waddill, had gone to escape a yellow fever epidemic.

Education

He received a B. A. from Harvard, in 1901 and an LL. B. , in 1904.

Career

In the financial-panic year of 1907 he was hired by a New York City law firm at $10 a week. His subsequent success in assisting firms in bankruptcy led to his becoming a director of numerous corporations. During World War I he was a member of the advisory council to the United States secretary of labor and was chairman of the war committee of the United States Chamber of Commerce. Catchings' business associations were in a variety of fields, the first being mainly iron and steel, including the Central Foundry Company, the Platt Iron Works, and Sloss Sheffield Steel and Iron. After working in the export department of J. P. Morgan and Company from 1915 to 1917, he joined the banking firm of Goldman, Sachs and Company in 1918. By the time he resigned in 1930 he was the firm's president and largest shareholder. He testified at a Securities and Exchange Commission hearing that during the Great Depression the corporation lost more than $289. 5 million. He was knowledgeable about these industries as well as concerned with their financing. Prominent as Catchings was in commerce, finance, and industry, he is best remembered for his books. Money (1923) was the first of six volumes of similar import. All but one, Money, Men, and Machines (1953), written with Charles F. Roos, were written in collaboration with William Trufant Foster, his classmate at Harvard. In addition to Money, the two published Profits (1925), Business Without a Buyer (1927), The Road to Plenty (1928), and Progress and Plenty (1930). To the collaboration Foster contributed the structure of economic principles, while Catchings supplied wisdom from his business experience and probably most of the actual writing. The earliest books, Money and Profit, created a sensation in academic circles due to the works' lively, clear exposition and apt illustrations from daily life. Money was inspired by the postwar depression of 1920-1921, believed to have been caused by consumers' refusal to continue purchasing goods at inflated wartime prices. Catchings' manner as business practitioner turned professor recalled the example of economist David Ricardo, with the difference that Catchings always addressed the multitude, whereas Ricardo addressed the fraternity of economic initiates. Also, Ricardo's language was condensed, while Catchings had the gift of an engaging clarity of words. His approach was friendly and inviting, not monitorial or condescending. Foster and Catchings' economic theories recalled Alexander Hamilton's policy of abundant circulating media. They anticipated by a decade John Maynard Keynes's stress on the demand side of economics, but without Keynes's obfuscating equations and his advocacy of deliberate deficits in public finance. Foster and Catchings also had an influence on the spend-lend program of Franklin D. Roosevelt's New Deal. A nation "one-third ill-fed, ill-clothed, ill-housed" was one of Catchings' expressions. His last books were Do Economists Understand Business? (1955), Bias Against Business (1956), and Are We Mis-managing Money? (1960). Like the English economist Alfred Marshall, Catchings abhorred revolutionary change. He had a tenuous faith in the ability of gradual adjustment in the economy to bring demand into harmony with supply and keep it there. Contrivance must "modify the structure year after year in various ways so that human beings will be enabled gradually to create and enjoy better products and more of them, " he wrote. The great desideratum was a price level as nearly stable as possible. Catchings supported the Federal Reserve System, but he believed that its ability to control the price level by indirect regulation of the rate of interest was limited. In Catchings' view, the only viable currency was United States notes. "The volume of these notes in circulation, " he said, "could be increased promptly as the price-level fell and decreased promptly as the price-level rose. " Catchings felt that gold reserves would prove adequate to redeem all currency needed under this plan. He had total faith in his theory that the price level rose and fell directly with the money supply. Catchings lamented underconsumption, including unwise saving.

Achievements

• He created the Goldman Sachs Trading Corporation, a holding and investment company with assets in excess of $250 million. By the early 1930's Catchings directed corporations in a number of diverse fields, including leather, motion pictures (Warner Brothers), radio, television, recorded music (Muzak), tin cans, dry goods, rubber, pharmaceuticals, automobiles (Studebaker and Chrysler), typewriters, breakfast cereals, lumber, mail-order merchandising, music publishing, and electric power.

Works

More photos

• book

  • Road to Plenty

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

  • Bias Against Business: What the Economic Professors Are Teaching Today

    (A Brief Book For Businessmen.)

  • The Dilemma Of Thrift
  • Money, men, and machines,

Personality

Catchings was tall and slender, and had in later years a shock of white hair. He never lost a lingering southern accent. Despite his extraordinary successes he remained modest, reporting his business achievements sparingly in biographical dictionaries.

Connections

He married Helen Weaver on November 7, 1914. They had three children. They were divorced in 1930, and on April 29 of the same year he married May Francis.

Father:

Silas Fly Catchings Waddill

Mother:

Nora Belle Waddill

Spouse:

Helen Weaver

Spouse:

May Francis