John Rogers Commons

• John R. Commons
• Born: October 13, 1862
• Died: May 11, 1945

Economist, labor historian, and reformer, was born in Hollansburg, Ohio, near the Indiana border, the eldest of three surviving children (two sons, one daughter) of John Commons and Clarissa (Rogers) Commons. His father, of North Carolina Quaker stock, was a harness maker, newspaper editor, student of philosophy and religion, and a poor provider. His strong-willed mother, a graduate of Oberlin College and a former schoolteacher, was descended from New Englanders. Commons grew up in Indiana and always called himself a Hoosier. In 1882 he went to Oberlin, where his mother ran a student boarding house. After spending a year in the college preparatory program and suffering the first of a long series of breakdowns in 1885, Commons received his A.B. degree in 1888 and entered the Johns Hopkins University to study with Richard T. Ely, the economist. In 1890, having failed the examination for a third-year fellowship, he left without taking a degree and began a series of brief instructorships at Wesleyan University in Connecticut (1890-91), Oberlin College (1891-92), Indiana University (1892-95), and Syracuse University (1895-99). Each was terminated in part because of his activist identification with agrarian and labor radicalism. On Christmas Day, 1890, Commons married his Oberlin classmate, Ella Brown Downey of Akron. Of their five children only John Alvin (1891) and Rachel Sutherland (1894) survived early childhood.

In 1899, with funds from a wealthy friend and reformer, Commons opened the Bureau of Economic Research in New York City, which compiled price statistics for the Democratic National Committee. Later Commons wrote a report for the United States Immigration Commission based on his personal investigations in mines and factories. From 1902 to 1904 Commons was assistant secretary of the National Civic Federation, promoting the joint-conference method of settling labor disputes. In 1904, called by Professor Ely, he began a thirty-year career at the University of Wisconsin.

In his early teaching days Commons was active in the Christian Socialist movement and in 1894 published Social Reform and the Church. Other publications of this period reflect the developing breadth of his interests: The Distribution of Wealth (1893), Proportional Representation (1896), and Races and Immigrants in America (1907), a comparison of the economic behavior of different ethnic groups based on his trip for the Immigration Commission.

During his wayfaring years Commons acquired the philosophy and methods that along with his abolitionist heritage and Hoosier upbringing shaped his later career: his holistic view of the social sciences, belief in the churches as instruments of social reform, faith in conflict resolution rather than confrontation between economic interests, and reliance on practical experience and first-hand research. Commons always exhibited scorn for theoreticians and armchair academics, and would not let his students take their degrees without spending some time in “real work.”

Commons arrived in Madison just as the “Wisconsin idea” of cooperation between university social scientists and the progressive administration of Governor Robert M. La Follette reached its peak. The state was becoming a laboratory of social reform, and Commons was immediately called on to help. He advised La Follette on railroad legislation, and with the aid of students drafted Wisconsin’s civil service, public utility, and workmen’s compensation laws. He was consulted on child labor and cooperative legislation, and in 1911 helped draft the law establishing the Wisconsin Industrial Commission to regulate labor relations through industrial codes drawn up jointly by labor and management representatives, a principle Commons had advocated for years. He served on the commission from 1911 to 1913, earning the enmity of labor for his pragmatic recommendations.

Commons was also interested in applying his ideas on a wider field. Along with Richard Ely he formed the American Association for Labor Legislation in 1906, and from 1913 to 1915 worked on the staff of the United States Commission on Industrial Relations, created by President Woodrow Wilson to investigate the causes of labor unrest. While in Washington he and his family lived with other economists in a sort of commune called Blithedale. Reflecting on his Washington experience in his autobiography written in the 1930s, Commons observed that the commission, the first federal agency to bring together a group of trained economists, was the “original Brain Trust.” Now widely recognized as an expert in social work, Commons was on the staff of the Russell Sage Foundation’s Pittsburgh survey in 1906-07 and served on the editorial board of the related periodical, Survey. In 1907 he undertook a survey for the National Civic Federation, comparing public and private ownership of utility companies in the United States and Great Britain, concluding that public ownership worked better in Britain. From 1923 to 1925 was president of the National Consumers League, whose chief concern was wage and hour legislation. At that time he helped Sidney

Hillman establish an unemployment insurance plan for the garment industry. He was in Washington frequently in the 1920s, arguing the case of four western states who charged the United States Steel Corporation with regional price discrimination. His testimony before congressional committees helped to shape the Social Security Act, and through his widely scattered students, dozens of whom were working in the Washington of the 1930s, he profoundly influenced the reform programs of the New Deal.

Throughout these years the work for which Ely had called him to Wisconsin developed into a magnum opus. Beginning in 1904 Commons and his students scoured the country for manuscript and printed materials on the history of labor, published in the ten-volume Documentary History of American Industrial Society (1910— 11). In 1918 the first two volumes of The History of Labor in the United States were published under his editorial guidance; two more volumes, completed by his students after his retirement, appeared in 1935. The conceptual framework of both titles, a stage analysis focusing on the role of the merchant and the expansion of markets in American industrial development, was the hallmark of the “Wisconsin school” of economics.

Commons’s scholarly reputation also rested on his two theoretical works, The Legal Foundations of Capitalism (1924) and Institutional Economics (1934), both dealing with the role of collective (institutional) action in controlling and expanding individual action. The working rules of this relationship were not fixed by natural law, he argued, but changed as laws and customs changed. Commons hoped, prophetically, that just as English judges had molded a legal framework to conform to the customs of the merchant class, American courts would uphold the customs of the working class such as wage and hour legislation.

Commons accomplished all this in years of work days that began at 4 A.M., interrupted occasionally by physical and nervous breakdowns. He was a small wiry man with piercing eyes and a quizzical expression. Although somewhat retiring in manner he possessed a resilient and buoyant spirit that survived through the loss of his children and the sister who cared for him after his wife died in 1928, through his impoverished old age in a Florida trailer camp, to his death from myocarditis while on a visit to Raleigh, North Carolina. His chief consolation in his final years was the loyalty of his “Friday Nighters,” the students and disciples with whose help he made so many contributions to twentieth-century reform.

Commons’s papers are in the University of Wisconsin’s John R. Commons Library, established by his students, who also made possible the publication of The Economics of Collective Action (1950), which expresses the thought of his entire career and contains a full bibliography. See also Myself (1943). His work is evaluated in L. G. Harter, John R. Commons: His Assault on Laissez-faire (1962) and vols. 3 and 4 of The Economic Mind in American Civilization (1949-59). See also The Dictionary of American Biography, supplement 3 (1973).