There are two principal purposes for this post. The first is to provide the salaries received by Columbia economics Ph.D. (1917) and later professor of economics, Frederick C. Mills, over his academic career. The second purpose is to provide a pair of obituaries for Mills and to insert him into the series “Meet an economics Ph.D. alumnus/a”.
Fun Fact: “In May 1914, twenty-two-year-old Frederick C. Mills accepted his first job: a two-month mission, authorized by the California Corn mission on Immigration and Housing, to join the itinerant work force in central California and investigate hobo connections with the violent clashes involving the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW).” See the transcribed blurb below for the 1992 book based on Mills’ notes and reports from his observer/participant hobo experience.
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Frederick Cecil Mills
(B.L., California, 1914; A.M., 1916; Ph.D., Columbia, 1917)
(born March 24, 1892)
Columbia University Service:
1919 Instructor in Economic, $1,500
1/1/29 Salary increased to $2,200
1920 Assistant Professor of Business Organization, School of Business, $3,000
1922 Salary increased to $3,300
1923 Associate Professor of Business Statistics at $4,500
1925 Salary increased to $5,000
1927 Professor of Statistics at $6,000
1928 Salary increased to $7,500
1931 Change of title — Professor of Economics and Statistics
1937 Salary increased to $9,000
1946 Salary increased to $10,000
1/1/47 Salary increased to $11,000.
1/7/53 Hepburn Professor of Economics at $12,000
Executive Officer of Department of Economics from 7/1/43 to 6/30/46.
Source: Columbia University Archives. Central Files 1890—, Box 396, Folder: “Mills, Frederick Cecil (1/1)”.
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In the Floating Army:
F.C. Mills on Iterant Life in California, 1914.
by Gregory Ray Woirol, Frederick Cecil Mills
University of Illinois Press, 1992.
In the Floating Army chronicles the awakening of social consciousness in a well-educated urban progressive and offers one of the most detailed personal accounts available of itinerant life in California just prior to the United States’ entry into World War I. In May 1914, twenty-two-year-old Frederick C. Mills accepted his first job: a two-month mission, authorized by the California Corn mission on Immigration and Housing, to join the itinerant work force in central California and investigate hobo connections with the violent clashes involving the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW). Mills set out, self-consciously clad in rags, expecting adventure. What he experienced firsthand, however, appalled and angered him. Using Mills’s daily journal and his reports to the commission, Gregory Woirol follows the young man’s progress. To meet migrant workers and study their employers, Mills took jobs in the orange industry, in a Sierra lumber camp, and on a road-building crew. He slept in ramshackle sheds and fresh-cut haystacks, and he learned to hop a freight with his fellow travelers, despite the railroad guards’ efforts to eject freeloaders. Throughout the Sacramento and San Joaquin valleys, he shared meals and boxcars with bitter men forced by a recession to seek menial jobs far from home, footloose men driven by wanderlust to accept only short-term employment, con artists who filled their pockets by less strenuous means, and pathetic wretches endlessly in search of a drink. In the decade before World War I, large numbers of men took to the road, seeking employment whenever and wherever it was offered. California already depended heavily upon seasonal workers to pick citrus fruits and other crops, build roads, and lay railroad tracks. But farmers and businessmen were rarely grateful for this convenient source of labor. They expected seasonal employees to accept squalid housing, inadequate rations and sewage provisions, insulting treatment on the job, and the “bum’s rush” out of town the moment work ended. Itinerant workers were shunned by the citizenry, cheated by employment agencies, and harassed by lawmen for loitering. This “floating army” of hungry, homeless men, assisted by IWW activists, protested these injustices both peaceably and violently. Mills spent several days conversing with IWW members, and he concluded “I have seen, to a very limited degree, some of the workings of the inner circle, the brains of this great army, the organizing force that is trying to tell this army of its strength, trying to teach them how to get their share of the goods of this world. And the message they bring, the message millions of men are listening to, is one of violence, bloodshed, ‘Direct Action’ they call it”.
Source: Book blurb from Google books.
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CU Emeritus Prof. F. Mills Dies Sunday
Was One of Columbia’s Foremost Economists
Frederick C. Mills, Hepburn Professor Emeritus of Economics and one of the nation’s leading economists, died Sunday after a long illness. He was 71.
A memorial service will be held today at 2 p.m. in St. Paul’s Chapel
Dr. Mills retired from the faculty of the Graduate School of Business in 1959. He had been a faculty member since 1919.
In 1953 Professor Mills represented all the Columbia faculties in delivering greetings at the installation of Dr. Grayson Kirk as president of the University. In that same year he was named Barton Hepburn Professor of Economics.
Professor Mills was born in Santa Rosa, Calif. He received his B.A. in 1914 and M.A. in 1916, both from the University of California, Berkeley. He was awarded his doctorate by Columbia in 1917.
Professor Mills was associated with the National Bureau of Economic Research from 1925 to 1953, as a member of the research staff. For the last ten years he has been a member of the board of directors of that group.
He also served as director of the survey of federal statistical agencies for the Hoover Commission. In 1934 he was president of the American Statistical Association and was elected president of the American Economic Association in 1940.
One of his numerous works in the field of economics, “The Behavior of Prices,” was chosen by the Social Science Research Council as the outstanding American contribution to economics since World War I. He received honorary degrees from both the University of California and Columbia. Professor Mills is survived by his widow, the former Dorothy K. Clarke, two sons and a daughter.
Source: Columbia Daily Spectator, Vol. CVIII, No. 68, 11 February 1964.
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U.C ‘Hobo’ Prof Dies In East
Dr. Frederick C. Mills, 71, who before he became a professor of economics posed as a hobo to gather labor statistics is dead in New York city.
Friends have learned of memorial services Tuesday in the chapel at Columbia University, where he was professor for 40 years until 1959.
In 1947 he received an honorary degree from his alma mater, the University of California at Berkeley, and was honored at a reception by his 1914 class mates. In 1961, Columbia University gave him an honorary degree.
LABOR STUDENT
At U.C, where he was a member of Phi Beta Kappa, honorary scholastic fraternity, he became one of the early day students of labor economics. While doing graduate work he posed as an itinerant laborer to work in hop fields and road camps.
It was on the basis of these investigations into the problems of itinerant labor done under the sponsorship of the Immigration and Housing Division that he was awarded his doctor of philosophy degree at Columbia. It was regarded as “an exciting” thesis.
He had received his masters degree at U.C. in 1961.
His work was not confined to academic halls. He was former president of the American Statistical Association, the American Economic Association, was special agent for the U.S. Commission on Industrial Relations, 1914-15 and a member of the Bureau of Economic Research from 1924-54.
SANTA ROSA NATIVE
A native of Santa Rosa, he was a graduate of Fremont High School in Oakland and has served overseas with the American Expeditionary Forces in World War I.
Dr. Robert Gordon Sproul, president emeritus of U.C, who was one of his lifetime friends, recalls that at U.C. Dr. Mills was an outstanding soccer player.
He is survived by his widow, Dorothy Clarke Mills; three children, William, Helen and Robert, two brothers, Harold F., and Robert, both of Oakland and two sisters, Mary Mills, of 1163 Ashmont Ave., Oakland, and Mrs. Ethel Smith of Nogales, Ariz.
Source: Oakland Tribune, Feb. 15, 1964, p. 22.
Image Source: Columbia Daily Spectator, Vol. CVIII, No. 68, 11 February 1964.