RICHARD T. ELY: PROFESSOR WITH A PASSION FOR RADURN

The famed economist was a key Radburn booster -- and resident

                                             

It was a familiar sight in Radburn in the mid-1930s: an old man – a rarity in the new community in those days – shuffling along, pushing a baby carriage.

He was Richard T. Ely, the dean of American economists, a professor whose work would help lead to the vast expansion of American home ownership in the decades before and after World War II.

Ely was the most accomplished of early Radburn’s many accomplished residents, and someone without whom “The Town for the Motor Age’’ might never have been built.

Ely was 78 and long retired from teaching when his family moved to Radburn in 1932. Yet the baby in the carriage was not Ely’s grandchild; it was one of two children born to him and his wife. She was one of his former students -- and more than 40 years his junior.

Ely was in those years one of Radburn’s most famous and eloquent advocates. But he shared with Radburn’s visionary founders a blind spot that, years later, would cloud his legacy: race.

Roots

Virtually forgotten today, Richard T. Ely was one of the most influential economists of the late 19^th and early 20^th centuries. In 1881, after graduate study in Germany, he joined the faculty of Johns Hopkins, which was becoming the prototype of the modern research university.

His students there included Woodrow Wilson, who would become the 20^th president, and Frederick Jackson Turner, the historian who would devise the famous “frontier thesis’’ on the development of American democracy. While at Hopkins, Ely also helped found the American Economic Association.

In 1892 Ely moved to the University of Wisconsin. But two years later a state education official tried to get him fired for allegedly advocating socialism in class (although Ely in fact rejected socialism). His subsequent vindication in an academic trial helped establish the principle of academic freedom in American universities. (The case was depicted in an episode of the 1964 TV series Profiles in Courage.)

Studio portrait of Ely while he was at the Universty of Wisconsin

Under Ely’s direction, Wisconsin’s economics program became one of the nation’s best. He helped pioneer the study of land economics and authored an introductory economics textbook used by generations of college students.

Most importantly, he laid the theoretical foundation for federal housing policies aimed at making America a nation of homeowners. Over the next few decades many of Ely’s students became prominent economists and sociologists. Many went into government service during the New Deal.

Richard T. Ely residence, Madison, Wisconsin

Ely also became a seminal influence in the development of the “Social Gospel’’ movement in the 1920s and ‘30s, which espoused the application of Christian principles to issues such as poverty, housing and war. That role later earned Ely a feast day on the liturgical calendar of the Episcopal Church.

An influential advocate

Ely may also have been the crucial link between Radburn’s founders and their most important benefactor, the philanthropist John D. Rockefeller Jr.

Rockefeller, like Ely a Protestant liberal and Social Gospel adherent, was by the 1920s focused on giving away the fortune his father had amassed.

In January 1924, as Alexander Bing was organizing the City Housing Corporation (CHC) to build the American “garden city” that would become Radburn, Ely wrote to a key Rockefeller advisor, Col. Arthur Woods. Ely argued that, despite misgivings about whether philanthropy could solve the housing problem, “a concrete demonstration near NYC would attract a great deal of attention and … make a profound impression upon the country.’’  

Ely called Bing “a hard-headed businessman of large experience,’’ the type who was “essential to curb and direct the energies of the enthusiast.’’ Rockefeller subsequently became the single largest private investor in the CHC, and attracted other investors.

Ely joined the CHC board and in 1930 wrote an article in the journal Child Welfare entitled “The Child’s Paradise (The Story of Radburn).’’ He regarded Radburn as “the urban experimental station’’ of the Institute of Land Economics, which he founded. (There was a rural counterpart in Montana).

In 1931, shortly before moving the institute from Chicago to New York, Ely married one of his former students, Margaret Hahn. He was 78, she 32.

They settled in Radburn, where they were the first owners of No. 2 Audubon Place, and had two children: William in 1932 and Mary two years later (when her father was 80).

The Elys were active members of the new community. In June 1933, Margaret was quoted in the minutes of a Citizens Association meeting discussing an attempt to better coordinate children’s activities, “as there is a feeling that the younger generation in Radburn is at times overstimulated.’’ She was elected secretary of the CA in September 1935, and was also president of the Garden Club.

But Ely was feeling his age. In an interview in 1970, former CHC lawyer Charles Ascher said he recalled the short, stout old man “falling asleep at board meetings.’’

The Depression derailed Ely’s vision that Radburn would grow into an “experimental station’’ for a new kind of suburb. More than half of homeowners defaulted on mortgages, forcing many to move or stay only as renters. The CHC filed for bankruptcy. In the fall of 1937 the Elys themselves moved to Manhattan.

Ely residence, 2 Audubon (c. 1932), is center, first house to left of apartment complex

‘The Negro question’

For all his achievements, Ely was -- like many leaders in the Progressive Era -- a racist. And his theories and disciples influenced housing policies that came to include the infamous practice of racially exclusionary “redlining’’ in residential financing.

Ely favored eugenics, and once wrote that blacks were "for the most part grown-up children, and should be treated as such." He wrote that black poverty was attributable, in part, to ignorance and “shiftlessness.’’  

After the 1908 anti-Black riot in Springfield, Illinois, Ely was invited to attend a conference on the status of African Americans. He declined, writing: “I long ago resolved that I would not take up the Negro question,” in order to have more impact elsewhere.

Similarly, Radburn’s founders – Alexander Bing and the architect-planners Clarence Stein and Henry Wright -- did not see racial equality as part of their mission. They were trying to build a successful model community, and feared that if blacks were allowed to live there, whites would refuse to.  

 Today, there are monuments to Richard T. Ely. A plaque in the University of Wisconsin’s Bascom Hall commemorates the trustees’ ringing declaration of academic freedom that resolved his academic trial. His former home in Madison is on the National Register of Historic Places.

But there is one less memorial to the old reformer. In 2020, amidst Black Lives Matter demonstrations, some of Ely’s views on race resurfaced. Shortly thereafter, the American Economic Association renamed its annual "Richard T. Ely Lecture" the AEA Distinguished Lecture.