William Zebina Ripley

Background

William Zebina Ripley was born on October 13, 1867 in Medford, Massachussets, the only child of Nathaniel L. and Estimate (Baldwin) Ripley. His father, a descendant of William Ripley, who had come from England to Hingham, Massachussets, about 1638, was a manufacturer of jewelry in Boston.

Education

After attending public school in Newton, Massachussets, young Ripley enrolled at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. The unusual breadth of his interests was early evident. He graduated in 1890 with the S. B. degree in civil engineering, but remained for an additional year of graduate work in economics. He then went to Columbia University, where in 1893 he was awarded the Ph. D. in political economy. His dissertation, The Financial History of Virginia, 1609-1776, was published that year.

Career

Ripley's academic career began simultaneously at M. I. T. and Columbia. At the first, he taught in the department of political science (1893 - 95) and then in sociology and economics, rising from instructor to professor (1901).

At Columbia he was "Prize Lecturer" in physical geography and anthropology (or ethnology), 1893-99, and thereafter, until December 1901, in sociology. (For one year, 1901-02, he added a third appointment, as lecturer in economics at Harvard. )

The most influential of Ripley's early writings were in the field of anthropology. The Races of Europe: A Sociological Study, published in 1899 together with a slim companion volume entitled A Selected Bibliography of the Anthropology and Ethnology of Europe, grew out of a series of lectures he had delivered at Columbia and at the Lowell Institute in Boston.

In this study, essentially a synthesis of the findings of European physical anthropologists between 1860 and 1895, Ripley divided the population of Europe into three white races: the Teutonic in the north and the Mediterranean in the south, both of old European stock, and, in between, the Alpine, migrants from Asia who had brought agriculture and the Neolithic economy to central Europe.

Onto the polygenism of European physical anthropology he grafted an environmentalist approach, attributing various physiological changes to social and geographical conditions, but at the same time holding that the essence of each racial type was impervious to environmental forces.

At a time when few people made any distinction between race, language, and culture, Ripley's book served to clarify the concept of race for American social scientists. Its most significant impact, however, was upon nativists, who quickly incorporated Ripley's concept of static racial types into their arguments and then attributed to each type a set of psychological characteristics: to their preferred race, the Teutonic (or "Nordic"), an aptitude for leadership in government; to the Alpine, a plodding but virtuous character; and to the Mediterranean, an artistic and licentious bent.

After the turn of the century Ripley devoted most of his time to economics, but he still occasionally wrote or lectured on anthropology. One such lecture in which he suggested that the consequence of racial intermixture might be reversion to a primitive type, greatly influenced a well-known advocate of immigration restriction, Madison Grant.

In 1902 Ripley accepted appointment as professor of political economy at Harvard, where he remained until his retirement in 1933. He had meanwhile undertaken the first of many public service assignments.

As expert agent on transportation for the United States Industrial Commission (1900 - 01), he investigated the relations of the railroads with the anthracite coal industry. In the years following, Ripley served as general editor of Selections and Documents in Economics, a ten-volume series devoted to making technical material on economic questions more accessible to students and the interested public; he personally edited two of the volumes, Trusts, Pools and Corporations (1905) and Railway Problems (1907).

These reveal a man dedicated to the attainment of adequate service at reasonable rates from a vital industry. The battle to subject common carriers to public control had been won, but wise exercise of public authority remained to be achieved. To this end, he called for an informed public, a less corrupt and more enlightened railroad management, and broader vision on the part of federal and state governments.

Ripley urged the country to give proper encouragement to private capital; otherwise he believed the federal government must take over ownership of the railroads - he called a mixed proprietorship "unthinkable. " He based his conclusions on a voluminous mass of raw material, which he classified and realigned, finally formulating the governing economic principles. Because of his expert knowledge of transportation and labor economics, Ripley was frequently called into government service.

In 1916, as part of an investigation by the United States Eight-Hour Commission into the operation of the Adamson Act, he traveled widely to examine the working and living conditions of railway employees and prepared a special report on their wage schedules. During World War I he served the War Department as administrator of labor standards for army clothing (1918).

He was chairman of the National Adjustment Commission of the United States Shipping Board, 1919-20. When the Transportation Act of 1920, which returned the railroads to private ownership after the war, authorized voluntary consolidation of existing roads, Ripley, as a special examiner for the Interstate Commerce Commission, submitted a plan (1921) for grouping all the nation's railways into twenty systems. With minor modifications, his report was adopted by the Commission as its program, and Ripley worked hard behind the scenes to reconcile differences among the railroads that stood in the way.

To his bitter disappointment, legislative approval did not come until 1932, by which time the crippling effect of the depression on the railroads prevented implementation of the plan. In accordance with his urge to improve railroad management, Ripley served as a director of the Chicago, Rock Island & Pacific Railway Company from 1917 to 1933.

During the 1920's Ripley returned to his earlier interest in corporation finance. His last book, Main Street and Wall Street, was published in 1927. A unified collection of essays, it focused on a number of disturbing developments in corporate practices and offered constructive remedial suggestions.

By general agreement, it was one of the most provocative and controversial economic studies of the period. The title essay, originally published in the Atlantic Monthly in January 1926 as "From Main Street to Wall Street, " dealt with the growing separation between corporate ownership and control through such devices as the establishment of holding companies and the issuance of nonvoting common stock.

Public reaction to the article swamped the offices of the Atlantic Monthly with letters and provoked a decision by the board of governors of the New York Stock Exchange to consider in future refusing to add to its trading list the securities of companies with nonvoting common stock. The article won Ripley a Harmon Foundation award and gold medal in 1927.

In 1927 Ripley sustained a serious injury in a taxicab accident in New York City, from which he never fully recovered.

He died at the age of seventy-three at Boothbay, Maine, near his summer home in East Edgecomb; the cause of his death is recorded as suicide by drowning. He was buried in the Boothbay Cemetery.

Achievements

• Ripley's most important writings are the two companion volumes Railroads: Rates and Regulation (1912) and Railroads: Finance & Organization (1915). He served as president of the American Economic Association (1933) and was awarded honorary degrees by Columbia (1929), Wisconsin (1930), the University of Rochester (1931), and Bucknell University (1931). He was also the first American to receive the Huxley Memorial Medal of the Royal Anthropological Institute of Great Britain and Ireland (1908), and was a corresponding member of the anthropological societies of Paris and Rome and of the Society of Natural Sciences, Cherbourg, France.

Works

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  • Railway Problems: The Making Of Modern Law

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

  • Trusts, Pools and Corporations

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

  • Railroads: Rates and Regulation

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

  • Railway Problems

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

  • The Financial History of Virginia, 1609-1776

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

  • Railroads

    (This is a pre-1923 historical reproduction that was curat...)

  • The races of Europe; a sociological study (Lowell Institute lectures)

    (This is a reproduction of a book published before 1923. T...)

  • The Financial History Of Virginia 1609-1776, Issues 10-12...

    (This is a reproduction of a book published before 1923. T...)

  • Trusts, Pools and Corporations, Ed. with an Introduction

    (This is a reproduction of a book published before 1923. T...)

  • Railroads; finance & organization

    (This is a reproduction of a book published before 1923. T...)

  • The Races of Europe: A Sociological Study (Lowell Institute Lectures) - Primary Source Edition

    (This is a reproduction of a book published before 1923. T...)

Personality

A rugged-looking man with an outdoor complexion, Ripley was at ease not only with his scholarly peers but also with mill and railroad workers and with country farmers.

Connections

On Feburary 20, 1893, Ripley married Ida Sabine Davis, daughter of Charles S. Davis, a Boston piano manufacturer; their four children were Ruth, Davis Nichols, William Putnam, and Bettina.

Father:

Nathaniel L. Ripley

Mother:

Estimate (Baldwin) Ripley

Spouse:

Ida Sabine Davis

Daughter:

Bettina

Son:

Davis Nichols

Son:

William Putnam

Son:

Ruth