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Walton Hale Hamilton was born on October 30, 1881, in Madisonville, Tennessee, United States. He was the son of Hale Snow Hamilton, a minister, and Bettie Dixon Hudgings. He grew up in an atmosphere of small-town southern fundamentalism against the "eternal verities" of which much of the rest of his life was a continuing revolt.
Hamilton received preparatory schooling at the Webb School in Bellbuckle, Tennessee, from 1898 to 1901, attended Vanderbilt University from 1901 to 1903, and received the Bachelor of Arts degree from the University of Texas in 1907.
The University of Michigan awarded him the doctorate in 1913.
Hamilton's main interest was in history, which he taught in preparatory schools until 1909; he also was an instructor in medieval history at the University of Texas (1909-1910).
Hamilton was almost thirty when his interest shifted to economics. He taught economics at the University of Michigan (1910-1913). It was a field in which he remained - to the extent that his restless mind could fix on any field - for roughly the next two decades.
After a year of teaching economics at the University of Chicago (1914-1915), Hamilton became professor of economics at Amherst College, where his heterodox views on economics and the heterodox views of President Alexander Meiklejohn on education accorded well. He remained at Amherst until 1923, making a reputation as one of the younger institutional economists who broke with the dominant neoclassical school of Alfred Marshall and John Bates Clark. He was quoted as saying that he had mastered the techniques of marginal utility and supply-and-demand economics so as to be able to reject them.
When the Robert Brookings Graduate School of Economics and Government was founded at Washington, in 1923, Hamilton was appointed professor of economics. He became the effective intellectual head of its small faculty. The school broke new ground in graduate education, joining economics, politics, law, and intellectual history; moving away from the formalisms of the traditional system inherited from Germany; and stressing informal dialogue between students and faculty in a residential setting.
Hamilton had no intellectual system of his own. He was most deeply influenced by the iconoclasm of Thorstein Veblen, by the British Fabian socialists and guild socialists (Graham Wallas, Richard H. Tawney, G. D. H. Cole, and J. L. Hammond), by the political pluralism of Harold J. Laski, by Frederic W. Maitland's work in English legal history, and by the constitutional theory and practice of Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. , and Louis Brandeis. For students it was a heady brew, but for fellow professional economists it was too heretical and too formless. Largely under pressure from Harold G. Moulton, head of the Brookings Institution, support was withdrawn and the school was dissolved in 1928.
Hamilton then accepted a post at Yale Law School, where he taught the relations between law and economics until 1948. From 1945 until his death he was a member of the Washington law firm of Arnold, Porter, and Fortas. Hamilton was a rare instance of a law professor and legal practitioner who never attended law school or received a law degree.
It was also in the 1930s that Hamilton became involved with government service. He received considerable publicity when he became a member of the NRA Advisory Board, reporting directly to President Franklin D. Roosevelt and with special concern for the consumer (1934-1935), but resigned before he could achieve much. He was happier as a special assistant to the attorney general (1938-1945), a position in which he could work with a former Yale Law School colleague, Thurman Arnold, who was in charge of antitrust enforcement. Hamilton returned for a time to Yale Law School, then concentrated on his legal work in Washington, which was largely advisory and dealt with constitutional, labor, and patent law. Viewing his career as a whole, one must conclude that Hamilton scattered his energies, developed no theory, founded neither school nor doctrine. He had few disciples. Nevertheless, he left his mark on economic-legal research and thinking.
His central approach was institutional, in the sense that he looked for the fault lines between the movement of technology and economic circumstance and the response shown by the political and legal organization of economic activity, as well as the response in doctrines and thought. Skeptical of all packaged solutions, Hamilton was a particularist who believed that every industry and situation required its own specific approach. He left his deepest mark in the area he called "the government of industry. " Neither a statist nor a free-market believer, he moved always toward a "way of order" in which all the parties concerned - managers, investors, labor, consumers, the people - would play a role, have a voice in control, and benefit from the results.
He died in Washington in 1958.
Hamilton was tall and gangling. Never an eloquent lecturer but an exciting teacher, he delighted his students (who called him "Hammy") with his informality, wit, and irreverence for every establishment, including those of teaching and the law. In his last years he was partially blind but continued his legal work and writing.
In 1909 Hamilton married Lucile Elizabeth Rhodes; they had three children.
On July 20, 1937, after divorcing his first wife, he married Irene Till, who had been his research assistant; they had two children. Together they worked on a number of studies, especially on the costs of medical care and on the milk industry.
