In his review essay on Alexander Gerschenkron’s Economic Backwardness in Historical Perspective, Albert Fishlow wrote: “a decisive point in [Gerschenkron’s] career, was the invitation from Charles Gulick, a Berkeley professor whom he had earlier helped in his research in Austria, to come to the United States. His acceptance marked the real beginning of his academic career that subsequently was to flourish over the rest of his life.”
Besides being the scholar who brought Gerschenkron to the U.S., Charles Adams Gulick had a life-long research interest in labor policy from his 1924 Columbia Ph.D. dissertation to the international bibliography on labor movements linked below. His two-volume work Austria From Habsburg to Hitler (1948), into which flowed some 12 months of intensive research and writing input from Alexander Gerschenkron, was “the great achievement of his scholarly career” according to the memorial note reproduced below.
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If you find this posting interesting, here is the complete list of “artifacts” from the history of economics I have assembled. You can subscribe to Economics in the Rear-View Mirror below. There is also an opportunity for comment following each posting….
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History and Theories of Working-Class Movements: A Select Bibliography. Compiled by Charles A. Gulick, Roy A. Ockert and Raymond J. Wallace. Bureau of Business and Economic Research and Institute of Industrial Relations, University of California, Berkeley, 1955. 392 pages.
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Charles Adams Gulick, Economics: Berkeley
1896-1984
Professor Emeritus
Charles Gulick was born and raised in Texas and had all his schooling there through the M.A. degree. The Texas influence on his speech and certain mannerisms of expression remained with him all his life. Certainly at the University of Texas he acquired key elements of his life-long economic and social philosophy. It was the Progressive era and he became committed to central themes of that movement–that the great aggregations of power must be controlled and humanized and that a larger measure of social justice must be won for the less privileged members of society. Not surprisingly, his first monograph, published in 1920 when he was 24, was on the subject, Open Shop vs. Closed Shop.
Having majored in modern European history for the B.A. and M.A. degrees in Texas, he moved to Columbia University to major in economics for the Ph.D., awarded in 1924. At Columbia, he became strongly influenced by the ideas and interests of Professor Henry Seager, a leading academic writer on the widely debated issue of what to do about the power of the large, rapidly growing industrial and financial corporations commonly known as trusts. Combining his growing interest in labor subjects with his interest in trust problems, Gulick’s doctoral dissertation was published as Labor Policy of the U.S. Steel Corporation. While serving as an instructor in Economics at Columbia, he continued to work with Seager and later co-authored with him a large volume on Trust and Corporation Problems. He also edited a volume of Seager’s essays.
Gulick joined the faculty of the Berkeley Department of Economics in 1926, where he served until his retirement in 1963. It was in the course of a trip to Germany for research purposes in 1930 that he almost by accident paid a visit to Vienna and acquired the interest in Austria that led him eventually to the great achievement of his scholarly career, Austria From Habsburg to Hitler, published in 1948 in two volumes running to 1900 pages. The sub-titles that Gulick gave the two volumes, “Labor’s Workshop of Democracy” and “Fascism’s Subversion of Democracy,” are expressive of the book’s major themes and of his twin interests in the contributions labor movements can make to democratic society and in the anti-democratic forces that citizens of democracies must continuously fight against. The German translation of this work was published in Vienna in 1950 and immediately won a large readership and wide acclaim. In the same year, the city of Vienna awarded Gulick a prize for “distinguished achievement in moral sciences,” an honor not ordinarily accorded to non-Austrians. In the years since, the book has continued to be esteemed as one of the authoritative accounts of the first Austrian republic and in 1972 the President of Austria presented a gold medal to Gulick for “Services to the Republic.” A somewhat abbreviated German-language edition of the book was published in Austria in 1976 and a new printing of the original English edition was issued in 1980. In keeping with his long preoccupation with the fortunes of the labor movement and democracy in Austria, most of the articles he contributed to academic journals dealt with labor questions or political issues in that country.
While Gulick served conscientiously on a variety of Academic Senate and administrative committees, his primary campus interest was in teaching and working with students, and many generations of undergraduate and graduate students knew Gulick as a dedicated teacher and adviser and as a friend and supporter. He was generous of his time in meeting with individuals and with groups of students. He also felt a responsibility to help improve student writing. It was perhaps prophetic that his first academic appointment as a graduate student in Texas was as Tutor in English. He became widely known among his students for his practice of sprinkling the pages of their papers with notations or corrections concerning spelling, grammar, syntax, punctuation, and inaccurate quotations. He even enlisted his wife’s assistance in this work. He regularly held seminars in his home and he and his wife entertained students on many other occasions. It was appealing to students to find that Gulick shared many of their ideals for a good society and that he could voice in colorful language many of their criticisms of current social ills. An illustration of his outspokenness is his title for an article he wrote for a Vienna magazine after Ronald Reagan’s first election as governor of California, “The Political Landslide in California: Mass Lunacy, Fear and Hate.”
Charles Gulick died on August 27, 1984, leaving his wife, Esther, a daughter, two grandsons, and two great granddaughters.
Van Dusen Kennedy / Clark Kerr / Lloyd Ulman
Source: University of California History Digital Archives. University of California: In Memoriam, 1985, pp. 164-65.
Image Source: The Blue and Gold, 1922. University of California Yearbook.