Trusts, Anti-Trusts, and Consumer and Producer Sovereignty

Abstract

Jeremiah Jenks was Professor of Economics at Cornell (1891–1912) and then a faculty member in the New York University (NYU) Government Department and Director of the Oriental Institute. He was an influential public policy economist: President of the American Economic Association (AEA) in 1906–1907, and an ‘International Money Doctor’ in Europe, the Philippines, Mexico, China, and Nicaragua (Brown 2004; Lai 2009). Like Richard T. Ely, John Bates Clark and John R. Commons, he was part of the Social Gospel movement which had a profound influence on the AEA. Indeed, AEA membership was considered equivalent to the rejection of l aissez-faire, at least until Ely’s removal from the position of AEA Secretary in 1892 (Coats 1960). He was also an instructor at the prestigious Chautauqua programs which, according to C. Howard Hopkins (1967, 163), ‘contributed greatly to the spread of Social Christianity’. Jenks’ (1906) YMCA Political and Social Significance of the Life and Teachings of Jesus was a widely adopted Social Christian study guide: ‘Bible study ... turned enthusiastically to the social teachings of Jesus, with several hundred groups following Professor Jenks’s course’ (Hopkins 1967, 299; Brown 2004).