Summary Information
Abstract
This collection consists of the papers of John Bates Clark, a prominent United
States economist, educator, and activist for international peace.
At a Glance
| Bib ID: | 4078613 View CLIO record |
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| Creator(s): | Clark, John Bates, 1847-1938. |
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| Title: | John Bates Clark
Papers
1848-1955
[Bulk dates: 1874-1938].
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| Physical description: | 7 linear feet (14 archival document boxes).
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| Language(s): | In English
and
German.
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| Access: |
This collection is located off-site. You will need to request this material at least
twenty-four (24) hours in advance to use the collection in the Rare Book and
Manuscript Library Reading Room. Please consult the Rare Book and Manuscript Library
for further information.
This collection has no restrictions.
More information » |
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Arrangement
Arrangement
Arranged in five series:
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Description
Scope and Content
John Bates Clark is best-known as an economist and teacher, and these aspects of his
career account for the majority of the material in this collection. Student notes,
research notes, newspaper clippings, manuscript drafts, published articles, and
correspondence between Clark and his colleagues document an academic career that
covered more than sixty years and gained Clark world-wide prominence. In addition, a
large assortment of lecture notes illustrates Clark's development as an educator
during these years. Most of the notes (both research and lecture) and the
correspondence are hand-written on loose pages. The drafts are a mix of hand-written
and typed manuscripts, while the published articles appear most frequently as
individual pamphlets which were arranged together in scrapbooks.
In the meantime, personal documents, correspondence, obituaries, and memorials
demonstrate not only Clark's life outside of academia but also the effect he had on
the lives of his family and friends. Clark's personal documents vary widely in
nature, but a representative sample includes Clark's 1872 passport, two US patents
which he shared, a memorial pamphlet for his colleague George Huntington, several
diaries (including an 1857 one belonging to Clark's father) and account books, and
the manuscript for a children's story. There is also hand-written and typed material
related to Clark family history and genealogy, including family trees and several
drafts of a written history. The personal correspondence in the collection
represents many friends and family. Finally, there are a number of obituaries for
John Bates Clark, clipped from newspapers and journals throughout the United States.
Please note that comments written by John Maurice Clark (one of John Bates Clark's
sons) appear occasionally throughout the collection. Also note that all newspaper
clippings appearing in the collection are facsimiles made due to the fragile
conditions of the originals. Although their material remained together, scrapbooks
were deconstructed for preservation purposes. Material which had previously been
part of a scrapbook is indicated both in the arrangement notes below and the folder
titles.
Series I: Correspondence, 1875-1955
Series I consists primarily of letters written to John Bates Clark over the
course of his professional life, and is generally arranged in alphabetical
order by sender. The major exception to this pattern is that letters of
condolence sent to John Bates Clark's wife, Myra Almeda Smith Clark, and
sons, John Maurice and Alden Hyde Clark upon John Bates Clark's death are
arranged at the end of the series. Further correspondence of this nature can
be found in the John Bates Clark Memorial Scrapbook, which is located in
Series IV, Subseries 2. Please note that in addition to letters written to
John Bates and Myra Clark, Series I also includes a substantial number of
letters written by them to others.
Befitting a public academic of Clark's stature, the correspondents
represented in Series I embody a litany of prominent academics and public
figures. These include Henry Carter Adams, Edward Bellamy, Nicholas Murray
Butler, Eugen von Böhm-Bawerk, Joseph Dorfman, Richard T. Ely, Robert
Erskine Ely, Franklin H. Giddings, Alvin S. Johnson, Henry L. Moore, Robert
Henry Inglis Palgrave, Simon N. Patten, Baron Yoshiro Sakatani, Joseph
Schumpeter, Edwin R.A. Seligman, James T. Shotwell, Ida Tarbell, Frank
Taussig, Francis Amasa Walker, and Woodrow Wilson, among others. In
addition, there is a large volume of correspondence between John Bates Clark
and various family members, including Myra Clark, his daughter Helen
Converse Clark Lancaster, and his sister Elizabeth "Lillie" Huntington Clark
Lyman.
Series II: Unpublished Scholarly Materials, circa 1865-1936
Series II provides a view into the life of John Bates Clark as a student,
teacher, theorist, and public figure. Consisting in overwhelming proportion
of hand-written notes from Clark's college years to his death, this series
represents more than sixty years of academic production from Clark. It
ranges from written lectures prepared for formal courses to notes and
thoughts which Clark literally scribbled on the backs of envelopes.
Subseries II.1: Lecture Notes--Series, 1895-1923
This subseries contains groups of lectures and lecture notes which were
given as parts of courses or series. They consist primarily of lectures
given at Smith College, Carleton College, and Columbia University. The
folder titles given to them follow in most cases from those given by
John Bates Clark.
Subseries II.3: General Notes, circa 1865-circa
1935
This subseries contains three main areas of notes that John Bates Clark
took as both a student and professional economist. The first consists of
notes and notebooks which appear to have been from Clark's student days,
including notes for several classes taken at university in Germany.
Following this group are the few works by other economists that Clark
annotated and which have survived as part of this collection. The most
substantial part of this subseries is the collection of loose notes and
newspaper clippings which have been organized according to their primary
subject of interest. Most of the clippings but few of the notes bear
dates.
Subseries II.4: Administrative, Course, and Professional
Materials, 1899-1936
This subseries contains the small volume of material in the John Bates
Clark Papers relating to Clark's work outside of research and class.
Items range from administrative material related to teaching to
pamphlets of the New York Peace Society to reports and records relating
to Clark's occasional informal work with the federal government.
Series III: Published Scholarly Materials, circa 1880-1936
Series III comprises material related to the extensive bibliography of
published work produced by John Bates Clark. It includes drafts of articles
and book chapters, a selection of published material, and a number of
newspaper clippings concerning John Bates Clark and his work.
Subseries III.1: Drafts, circa 1880-1930
This subseries consists of a mix of hand-written and typed drafts for a
number of the many articles and books written by John Bates Clark,
including notable works such as
The Philosophy of
Wealth
(1885)
The Essentials of
Economic Theory
(1907) and
A Tender
of Peace
(1935). While most of the drafts are complete, note
that there are a substantial number of unidentified manuscript fragments
and individual chapters to longer works.
Subseries III.2: Published Articles, 1878-1935
This subseries represents the large volume of published articles written
by John Bates Clark that are in the collection. It begins with a small
selection of individually-bound works and a complete bibliography of
John Bates Clark's published work. With those few exceptions, the bulk
of the material in this subseries survived in the form of scrapbooks of
unknown origin. While the scrapbooks have been disassembled for
preservation purposes, the material they contained has remained cohesive
and in the original numbered order. Each scrapbook contains a table of
contents, and a master index and bibliography for the seven numbered
scrapbooks appears before Scrapbook One.
Subseries III.3: Reviews and Clippings, 1882-1936
This subseries contains reviews and notices (primarily from newspapers)
of Clark's published works, as well as clippings of articles which were
written about Clark.
Series IV: Biographical Materials, 1848-1957 (1868-1939)
Series IV consists of material related to John Bates Clark's personal life,
his death and legacy, and Clark family history and genealogy.
Subseries IV.1: Personal Documents, 1848-1937
This subseries holds a range of personal material from all facets of John
Bates Clark's and the Clark family's lives, and is particularly useful
in giving a glimpse of Clark's wide-ranging interests outside of
academic life. The earliest materials are an 1851 letter written by
Clark's great-grandfather, Daniel Clark, and an 1857 diary belonging to
Clark's father, John H. Clark. Representative items include two patents
held by John Bates Clark, the manuscript of a story he wrote for his
children, and several account books. There are also several folders of
documents related to Clark family history and genealogy.
Subseries IV.2: Materials Concerning the Death of John Bates
Clark, 1938-1957
This subseries contains several areas of interest. The first is a
collection of obituaries and memorials to John Bates Clark. Next are
documents related to the publication of
John
Bates Clark: A Memorial
(1938). This small book was written
and published by the children of John Bates Clark after his death, and a
copy of the book appears in this series. The third component of this
subseries is a memorial scrapbook of unknown origin (though it was
likely assembled by Myra Almeda Smith Clark shortly after her husband's
death), which has been disassembled for preservation purposes. The order
of the items from the scrapbook (including general papers, obituaries,
and correspondence) has been retained, as has the cover. Please note
that additional correspondence concerning John Bates Clark's death can
be found in Series I. Finally, this subseries contains a few individual
items related to John Bates Clark's death and legacy, most notably a
copy of the program from his memorial service at St. Paul's Chapel on
the campus of Columbia University.
Series V: Photographs, 1920-1938
Series V is composed of three picture-postcards sent by Myra Almeda Smith
Clark to John Bates Clark and two matted photographs of John Bates Clark's
interment service.
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Using the Collection
Offsite
Access Restrictions
This collection is located off-site. You will need to request this material at least
twenty-four (24) hours in advance to use the collection in the Rare Book and
Manuscript Library Reading Room. Please consult the Rare Book and Manuscript Library
for further information.
More information and link to off-site request form
This collection has no restrictions.
Restrictions on Use
Single photocopies may be made for research purposes. Permission to publish material
from the collection must be requested from the Curator of Manuscripts, Rare Book and
Manuscript Library (RBML). The RBML approves permission to publish that which it
physically owns; the responsibility to secure copyright permission rests with the
patron.
Preferred Citation
Identification of specific item; Date (if known); John Bates Clark Papers, Box and
Folder; Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Columbia University Library.
Finding aid in repository; folder level control
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About the Finding Aid / Processing Information
Columbia University Libraries. Rare Book and
Manuscript Library; machine readable finding aid created by Columbia University
Libraries Digital Library Program Division
Processing Information
Processed 2007 Nicholas Patrick Osborne (GSAS 2012). Finding aid written by Nicholas
Patrick Osborne in August 2007.
Finding aid Written by Nicholas Patrick Osborne (GSAS 2012) August 2007.
Machine readable finding aid generated from MARC-AMC source via XSLT
conversion December 2, 2008
Finding aid written in English.
2009/01/15
xml document instange created by Patrick Lawlor
2009/01/15
xml document instange created by Catherine N. Carson
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Subject Headings
The subject headings listed below are found in this collection. Links below allow searches at Columbia University through the Archival Collections Portal and through CLIO, the catalog for Columbia University Libraries, as well as ArchiveGRID, a catalog that allows users to search the holdings of multiple research libraries and archives.
All links open new windows.
Genre/Form
Subjects
| Heading | CUL Archives:
Portal | CUL Collections:
CLIO | Nat'l / Int'l Archives:
ArchiveGRID |
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| Böhm-Bawerk, Eugen von, 1851-1914. | Portal | CLIO | ArchiveGRID |
| Carnegie Endowment for International Peace.--Division of
Economics and History. | Portal | CLIO | ArchiveGRID |
| Clark, John Bates, 1847-1938. | Portal | CLIO | ArchiveGRID |
| Clark, John Maurice, 1884- | Portal | CLIO | ArchiveGRID |
| College teachers. | Portal | CLIO | ArchiveGRID |
| Columbia University--Faculty. | Portal | CLIO | ArchiveGRID |
| Economics--Study and teaching. | Portal | CLIO | ArchiveGRID |
| Economics. | Portal | CLIO | ArchiveGRID |
| Economists. | Portal | CLIO | ArchiveGRID |
| Ely, Richard Theodore, 1854-1943. | Portal | CLIO | ArchiveGRID |
| Ely, Robert Erskine, b. 1861. | Portal | CLIO | ArchiveGRID |
| Giddings, Franklin Henry, 1855-1931. | Portal | CLIO | ArchiveGRID |
| Johnson, Alvin Saunders, 1874-1971. | Portal | CLIO | ArchiveGRID |
| Marshall, Alfred, 1842-1924. | Portal | CLIO | ArchiveGRID |
| Moore, Henry Ludwell, 1869-1958. | Portal | CLIO | ArchiveGRID |
| Sakatani, Yoshio, 1863-1941. | Portal | CLIO | ArchiveGRID |
| Schumpeter, Joseph Alois, 1883-1950. | Portal | CLIO | ArchiveGRID |
| United States--Social conditions. | Portal | CLIO | ArchiveGRID |
| Walker, Francis Amasa, 1840-1897. | Portal | CLIO | ArchiveGRID |
| War--Economic aspects. | Portal | CLIO | ArchiveGRID |
| Wealth. | Portal | CLIO | ArchiveGRID |
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History / Biographical Note
Biographical Note
Professor of Economics, Columbia University, 1895-1923, and
Director of the Division of Economics and History, Carnegie Endowment for
International Peace, 1911-1923. When John Bates Clark turned eighty years old in
1927, the occasion was marked with extraordinary aplomb. Eighty guests from Clark's
professional and personal life were invited to a celebratory dinner, including such
notables as Nicholas Murray Butler, Irving Fisher, Franklin H. Giddings, Jacob H.
Hollander, Dwight W. Morrow, Edwin R.A. Seligman, and Rexford Tugwell. A festschrift
was published to mark the occasion, featuring essays by prominent economists such as
Hollander, Seligman, Richard T. Ely, and Joseph Schumpeter. The American Economic
Review published a special supplementary issue devoted to the celebration. At 80,
John Bates Clark was a living legend in the world of economics. The path he had
taken to that point was one filled with notable achievements.
Born and raised in Providence, Rhode Island, Clark entered Brown University in 1865,
ultimately transferring to Amherst College in 1867. Clark quickly left the school,
however, to attend to his family's business when his father began to suffer the
severe effects of tuberculosis. It was only upon returning to Amherst in 1871 after
his father's death that Clark took a course on mental and moral philosophy taught by
Julius Seelye which he wrote of as the spark that lit a fire to his interest in the
formal study of political economy. Due in part to Seelye's encouragement, Clark
decided to pursue this field as a graduate student in Europe where he studied
political economy at the University of Heidelberg under the eminent German economist
Karl Knies from 1874-76. During this period, Clark also found time to marry Vassar
graduate Myra Almeda Smith in 1875 (they went on to have four children--Alden Hyde,
Frederick Huntington, Helen Clark Lancaster, and John Maurice) and to attend a
summer term in Zurich in 1876. He received his PhD from Heidelberg in 1877.
Upon returning home to Minnesota (the Clark family had relocated there during the
illness of Clark's father), Clark became part of what would become known as "the
first faculty" of Carleton College, at which he had briefly lectured in 1875. During
his tenure there as Professor of History and Political Economy from 1877-1882, Clark
taught Thorstein Veblen (among others) and began to publish the essays in the
Yale Review
which would form the basis of his first
book,
The Philosophy of Wealth
(1885). Clark then
went on to teach at Smith College as Professor of Political Science from 1882-1893.
From 1892-1895 he was both Professor of Political Economy at Amherst and a visiting
lecturer at the Johns Hopkins University. In the fall of 1895, he finally settled at
Columbia University, where he served as Professor of Political Economy in the
Faculty of Political Science until he became a Professor Emeritus in 1923.
By electing to pursue graduate study in Germany in the 1870s and then return to the
United States to teach, Clark placed himself at the leading edge of a movement of
American academics who pursued similar courses of study and employment and in the
process revolutionized the state of American academics. For Clark and those like
him, this revolution consisted of both the reorganization of the American university
system (including the introduction of rigorous distinctions between fields of study,
creating permanent faculty, and incorporating primary research into curricula) and
the professionalization of academic disciplines. In pursuit of these goals, Clark
was a driving force and founding member (along with several other economists of
similar professional weight, such as Henry Carter Adams, Richard T. Ely, Francis
Amasa Walker, and Charles F. Dunbar) of the American Economics Association. Formed
in 1885, Clark eventually served as the AEA's third president from 1894-1895. From
1895-1911 he was the editor of the
Political Science
Quarterly.
Clark owed much of his success as a leader in the fields of economics and political
economy to the reception of his early works. In 1885's
The
Philosophy of Wealth,
Clark strongly defended the place of theoretical
discussions in political economy at a time when abstract work was frowned upon,
declaring that "if obscurity still hangs over
principles
. . . the removal of it, besides having an incalculable value in
itself, will afford a welcome supplement to directly practical work" [emphasis
added]. This insistence on a theoretical grounding for economics was intimately
connected to the static-dynamic model which Clark based nearly all of his work on,
the premise of which was that a national or international economy was so complicated
that it was desirable to first establish relationships between various factors in an
ideal frozen or "static" state, and only then to attempt to derive the economic laws
governing a more realistic "dynamic" state which recognized change over time as a
factor.
In
The Philosophy of Wealth,
Clark also began to
develop the idea that "wealth"--in an economic sense--could only be measured by
material goods of whose value all could more or less agree and which could be
transferred from one person to another. Clark continued to develop his conception of
the relationship between social value and material wealth in later groundbreaking
works, such as his 1888 extended essay "Capital and Its Earnings." In this piece,
Clark demonstrated that interest earned on capital bore a direct relationship to the
amount of wealth that capital was able to produce. In writings like "Capital" as
well as later works such as 1899's
The Distribution of
Wealth
and 1907's
The Essentials of Economic
Theory,
Clark developed a theoretical model that for the first time
identified capital, wages, and land as economic factors which were essentially
similar because their values were defined in direct proportion to their overall
productivity. Along the way, he also helped lay the foundation for what would become
known as the Neo-Classical school of economists by insisting that the world economy
contained a fixed supply of capital. This last point was became the crux of a
long-running debated between Eugen von Böhm-Bawerk and the so-called Austrian
School.
A fundamental idea inherent in Clark's studies of wealth and value was that the
pursuit of wealth might lead not only to the transfer of wealth from one individual
to another, but also its appropriation or perversion by artificial means. This idea
clearly troubled the religious Clark, who rooted a free-market economic theory in an
ethics oriented around altruism, cooperation and mutual benefit, themes which were
developed as early as
The Philosophy of Wealth
but
continued to mark his career. Not long after World War I, Clark wrote in this vein
that "the greatest problem for the world to solve, concerns itself not with national
boundaries nor even with national debts, but with this deeply rooted policy of
restricting production in the hope that the men who practice it may thrive at the
expense of others."
This insistence that an essentially free market would thrive and benefit all if
everyone agreed to play by certain rules resulted in a series of works such as
1901's
The Control of Trusts by the Natural Method
and 1914's
Social Justice Without Socialism,
in which
Clark clearly identified the problems of unethical business practices plaguing the
industrializing world yet was hamstrung by his insistence on free-market liberalism
to offer any solutions more concrete than an insistence on the observance of his
ethical standards. But while these works did little to advance any original economic
theory or policy, they nevertheless provided Clark with further rhetorical
ammunition in pursuit of his other great passion: the advent of world-wide peace.
In this pursuit, Clark was active throughout much of his life. He was a member of the
Lake Mohonk Conference on International Arbitration and a frequent speaker at its
annual meetings from 1895-1916. He was also an active leader of the New York Peace
Society in the 1910s and 1920s, and he served as a Vice President of the League of
Nations Union. Perhaps the influential position Clark held in his pursuit of
international peace was as the first Director of the Division of Economics and
History at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. Clark's successor, James
T. Shotwell, described the division's job as "study[ing] the nature and the
consequences of war and the interplay of the forces of war and peace in modern
civilization," and Clark pursued this study in the same way that he pursued his
economic interests: with a morally-guided pursuit of a theoretical understanding
that might pave the way for practical policy. The crowning achievement of Clark's
tenure from 1911-1923 at the Carnegie Endowment was his conception and original
organization of the group of international scholars whose inter-disciplinary studies
eventually became the multi-volume and multi-decade
Economic
and Social History of the World War.
The urgent nature of this and
similar work in Clark's mind was evident in his last book,
A Tender
of Peace
(1935). Published when Clark was 88 years old and just three
years before his death, it continued his record of insisting that international
cooperation was the only chance that nations had to avoid impending world war.
Throughout his long career, Clark was granted a plethora of honors, including
honorary memberships in both the Austrian Economic Society and the Royal Swedish
Academy of Science. He received honorary Doctor of Laws degrees from Amherst,
Princeton, Columbia, and Christiana (now Oslo) University in Norway, an honorary PhD
from Amherst, and an honorary Doctor of Political Science degree from the University
of Tubingen in Germany. In 1947, the American Economics Association named one of its
highest honors--awarded to "that American economist under the age of forty who is
adjudged to have made the most significant contribution to economic thought and
knowledge"--the John Bates Clark Medal. These honors and many more bear witness to
the high regard in which Clark was held by his colleagues in the United States and
internationally.
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