In memoriam: Robert J. Lampman, 1920-1997 - economist - Obituary

American Journal of Economics and Sociology, The,  Jan, 1998  by Frank C. Genovese

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John R. Commons recounted in his autobiography that "before accepting a position at Syracuse, he warned the chancellor that he was a socialist, a single-taxer, a free-silverite, a greenbacker, a municipal-ownerist, a member of the Congregational Church." His bouncing around from Wesleyan, to Oberlin, to Indiana, probably lead to this apparently felt need to "test the waters."

At Syracuse, his broad-ranging teaching of the social sciences gave him scope for expressing his concerns and disturbing the comfortable and their dependents - university officials. But in spite of his prior "full disclosure," his chair was abolished in 1899 by the Board of Trustees after he antagonized local business owners, by organizing a co-operative, and religious people, by defending Sunday baseball. He also had startled his craven brethren among economists at the eleventh annual meeting in 1898 of the American Economic Association by saying "Today it is Henry George and Karl Marx that have the large influence, because they represent the radical classes that are acquiring political power . . . Economists have not lost influence as a whole - only those who stand for a class which has passed the day of its political power."

"Upon firing him, the chancellor explained that his presence deterred would-be donors from making gifts. Furthermore, the chancellor declared that at a meeting of college presidents, ". . . all had agreed that no person with radical tendencies should be appointed to their faculties" (Lafayette G. Harter, Jr., in his John R. Commons, His Assault on laissez-Faire, Corvallis, Oregon State University Press, 1962, 19-24 passim).

His dedication to the quest of George, to lessen poverty, stayed with him all his life and was the root concern of the institutionalist school which he established at the great University of Wisconsin, which, true to its motto of "winnowing and sifting" allowed, and benefited greatly from the flowering of this tradition. Commons understood that there were other means to be pursued, as well as via tax policy, to alleviate and prevent poverty.

One was by eliminating a frequent cause, the loss of income incident to industrial accidents. It was through his efforts that workmen's compensation was introduced to the United States. He apparently had learned some of the "art" of economics - he secured the support of employers in Wisconsin and thus favorable action by the state's legislature.

His pupil, Edwin E. Witte, largely wrote, and shepherded through Congress, the Social Security Act with its multiple provisions. Before its passage, according to one account, eight out of eleven persons over the age of 65 were not only poor, they were indigent. Today we hear more concerns about how well-off older people are, rather than how such a condition might be spread further to other groups in the society. The need for corporate reform too goes largely unrecognized.

At the 1950 Commons birthday dinner, Witte noted that "Commons' students went everywhere and many of them made great contributions as scholars, public officials, or men of practical affairs." He "among university teachers" mentioned "Harry Mills, Ira Cross, Theresa McMahon, William Haber, Ellison Chambers, Selig Perlman, Don Lescohier, Elizabeth Brandeis, Kenneth Parsons, and Harold Groves." He added that most of these has not only been scholars but also "have made real contributions of a practical nature to human betterment." Of those "whose careers were mainly in the public service, he named Arthur Altmeyer, William Leiserson, Katherine Lenroot, Ewan Clague - and on a state level, Paul Rauschenbush, Maud Swett, and Meredith Givens." Witte also named many who returned to foreign lands and made great contributions to their countries. (Harter, ibid. 80).

While Henry George set the basic concerns that occupied Commons and his school, this second generation of Witte, and those he named in 1950, passed on this basic purpose, human betterment as the raison d'etre of political economy, a view often neglected by many of its teachers today.

This third generation includes among others, Theodore W. Schultz, Walter Heller (Council of Economic Advisors), Warren Samuels (Michigan State University), C. Lloyd Francis (who rose to the position of Speaker of the Parliament of Canada), John A. Gronouski (the last cabinet Postmaster General, ambassador to Poland, and first dean of the Lyndon Baines Johnson School of Public Affairs at Austin Texas), and Robert J. Lampman.

It is the recent passing of this last great pillar of the third generation of the Wisconsin School - the fourth to carry the burden imposed by Henry George on that school to contribute to the elimination and alleviation of poverty - that necessitates the writing of this article.

The test imposed by the motto of Antioch College, "Be ashamed to die until you have won a victory for mankind," was amply met by Robert Lampman.

He was born in Plover, Wisconsin, the son of a high school teacher, and he graduated from Wisconsin in 1942. This was after serving as president of the student union and garnering the Theodore Herfurth and the Frankenberger awards and Phi Beta Kappa membership. Thereafter he saw active service as a naval air navigator in the Pacific and once described to me the way one put a seaplane down along the valley between the ocean swells. He lived at the former airbase outside Madison while on the GI Bill and as a graduate assistant. He secured his doctorate in 1950 in labor economics under Dr. Witte.