On the Economic Frontier: Walton Hamilton, Institutional Economics, and Education

On the economic frontier,
Far from Smith and Mill,
Stands dear old R.B.G.S.E.G.,
Would it had a hill!
Hail to Brookings, Alma Mater,
Alma Pater too,
World's salvation in the balance,
Gosh! What shall we do?

—Song sung by students at the Robert Brookings Graduate
School of Economics and Government, c.1926

Walton Hamilton was one of the leading proponents of the "institutional approach" to economics during the earlier part of the interwar period (Rutherford 2000). His most significant influence, however, came not through his own academic writing, but rather through the students he trained and the work he inspired. After his own graduate education at Michigan, and a short stay as a faculty member at the University of Chicago, Hamilton pioneered two fascinating educational experiments, the first at Amherst College (1916–1923), and the second at the Robert Brookings Graduate School of Economics and Government (1923–1928).

The list of graduates Hamilton and his colleagues produced is quite outstanding in terms of their future careers in academics and in government. A surprisingly large number of the cohort of institutionalists trained in the interwar period got their start with Hamilton and his colleagues at one or other of these places. These include Clarence Ayres, Morris Copeland, Carter Goodrich, Willard Thorp, Winfield Riefler, Stacy May, Isador Lubin, Mordecai Ezekiel, Paul and Carl Raushenbush, Louis Reed, Anton Friedrich, and Robert Montgomery. A number of his students were associated with the Research and Statistics Division of the Federal Reserve (Winfield Riefler, William J. Carson, and Woodlief Thomas), and many became centrally involved in the New Deal administration (particularly Ezekiel, Lubin, and Riefler). Other students, while less obviously "institutionalists," nevertheless absorbed much from Hamilton's programs (for example, John Nef, Max Lerner, and Dexter Keezer). Others still became some of the best-known critics of institutionalism (for example, Talcott Parsons and Paul Homan).

Hamilton and his students formed many connections with other academic centers of institutionalism, including the National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER) and the economics departments at Columbia, Wisconsin, Michigan, Texas, and elsewhere. More surprising, there were even close links between Hamilton and British "liberal" economists and academics. Hamilton's interests in the coal industry, in unemployment insurance, in regulation, in new forms of "social control," and in the policy ideas of the British Labour Party led him and a number of his students to develop personal connections with people such as Henry Clay, R. H. Tawney, John A. Hobson, Graham Wallas, and William Beveridge.

Beyond the influence of Hamilton's students, his educational experiments are of considerable interest in themselves. Hamilton rejected the idea of education as "ritual" and attempted to design programs that would treat education as an "adventure," a genuine intellectual inquiry in which the student could participate (Hamilton 1923). Hamilton's aim was to "teach the art of handling problems" and to produce people who could make "contributions to an intelligent direction of social change" (Hamilton 1926). He would start with an issue or a problem, search for the information and tools to approach that problem with little regard to conventional disciplinary boundaries, and be open and creative in the search for solutions. These ideas of being investigative, of being actively involved in the development of new methods of social control, and of being "on the frontier" of economic and social research, were a central part of what many young economists in the 1920s found so exciting and attractive about Hamilton and his programs.

Walton Hamilton: Michigan and Chicago

Walton Hamilton was born in 1881 in Hiwassee College, Tennessee, the son of an itinerant Methodist minister. He attended the Webb School in Bell Buckle, Tennessee, and between 1901 and 1903 he attended Vanderbilt University. Later, he moved to the University of Texas, from which he graduated in 1907. He then taught English and the classics in public schools for two years before returning...