Authors and Illustrators Database

Born: 1851  Davenport
Died: 1921
Parents: Ephraim and Elizabeth Douglass Adams
Spouse: Bertha H. Wright

Image	Title	Genre	Audience	Publisher	Date
	American railway accounting; a commentary	Non Fiction	Adult	H. Holt	1918
	The Science of Finance	Non Fiction	Adult	New York: H. Holt	1898
	Public debts; an essay in the science of finance	Non Fiction	Adult	New York, D. Appleton and company	1887
	The Relation of the State to Industrial Action	Non Fiction	Adult	Publications of the American Economic Association	1887
	Taxation in the United States, 1789-1816	Non Fiction	Adult	New York : B. Franklin	1884

What is the aim or goal of your writing: He turned his attention to the Johns Hopkins University, just opening at Baltimore, where he was awarded a fellowship. He devoted himself with enthusiasm to the studies in history and economics which he had begun in college. Within two years he received the degree of Ph.D., the first conferred by the young university, and one of the most significant, for it meant that American youths were beginning to think of careers in a field that had been neglected on this side of the Atlantic. He then spent two years in Europe, studying at Berlin and Heidelberg and also in France and England. Returning to America with an unusual equipment, for those days, he was appointed, in 1879, to a Cornell University lectureship in economics. Later he received a similar appointment at the University of Michigan and alternated courses of lectures between the two institutions. During the strike on the Gould railroad system in 1886, Adams gave expression to views on the relations of capital and labor that displeased an influential member of the board of Cornell trustees and led to his separation from the university. His opinions, if voiced twenty years later, would have been accepted without serious question. They had chiefly to do with the principle of collective bargaining, in which he believed and which later was generally accepted as a basis of relations between corporations and their employees. Indeed within four years the Cornell trustees invited Adams to return, but by that time he had become unwilling to give up the professorship at the University of Michigan to which President Angell had called him immediately on the severance of his relations with Cornell. Through Prof. Charles H. Cooley he was enabled to direct the statistical activities of the Interstate Commerce Commission almost from the beginning. He kept up his association with this work until 1911, a period of twenty-four years. He was in charge of the division of transportation of the Eleventh Census. For four years, beginning in 1913, he served as adviser to the Chinese Republic on the standardization of railway accounts. His book, American Railway Accounting, appeared in 1918. In his development of economic theory Adams had ever in mind the progressive advancement of the race. He was far from being a pessimist. Yet his discussions of finance were free from any vague idealism. He was one of the first economists to write fully and authoritatively on the peculiar administrative conditions that exist in America. His influence, direct and indirect, on the students and teachers of economics did not seem to wane during the four decades of his active career. The small group of pioneers among whom he was a leader in 1881 had become by 1921 a great company, in which his primacy was still acknowledged.

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Last Modified On: 6/24/2018 12:00:00 AM