Stuart Chase
Stuart Chase (March 8, 1888 – November 16, 1985) was an American economist, social theorist, and writer. His writings covered topics as diverse as general semantics and physical economy. His thought was shaped by Henry George (1839-1897), by economic philosopher Thorstein Veblen (1857-1929), by Fabian socialism, and briefly by the Communist social and educational experiments in the Soviet Union to around 1930, though Chase was broadly a modern American liberal. Chase spent his early political career supporting "a wide range of reform causes: the single tax, women's suffrage, birth control and socialism." Chase's early books, The Tragedy of Waste (1925) and Your Money's Worth (1927), were notable for their criticism of corporate advertising and their advocacy of consumer protection. In 1929 Chase co-founded Consumers' Research, a consumer protection advocacy organization. Early life Chase was born in Somersworth, New Hampshire, to public accountant Harvey Stuart Chase and Aaronette Rowe. His family had been living in New England since the 17th century. He attended the Massachusetts Institute of Technology from 1907 to 1908 and graduated from Harvard University in 1910 as a public accountant. After graduating, Chase became part of his father's accounting firm in Boston. Chase married Margaret Hatfield in 1914 and had two children, Sonia and Robert. He and Margaret were divorced in 1929, and one year later, he married Marian Tyler, a violinist and staff member at The Nation who collaborated with him on several of his books; she survived him by three and a half years. Career In 1917, Chase left accounting and took a position with the Food Administration of the Federal Trade Commission in Washington, D.C. In the commission, Chase conducted investigations on waste and corruption, one of them being the meat-packing industry with Upton Sinclair. In 1921, Chase joined, along with economic philosopher Veblen, the Technical Alliance, which later became Technocracy Incorporated, part of the Technocracy movement. Chase also worked with the Labor Bureau, an organization that provided services for labor unions and cooperatives. In 1927, Chase wrote Your Money's Worth, discussing advertisements that promise but fail to deliver products as advertised to customers who order them. In 1927, Chase traveled to the Soviet Union with members of the First American Trade Union Delegation and was the co-author of a book that praised Soviet experiments in agricultural and social management. In 1932, Chase wrote A New Deal, which became identified with the economic programs of American President Franklin Roosevelt. He also wrote a cover story in The New Republic, "A New Deal for America", which appeared days before Roosevelt promised "a new deal" in his speech accepting the presidential nomination of the Democratic Party. Whether Roosevelt speechwriter Samuel Rosenman got the phrase from Chase is unknown. Chase's 1938 book The Tyranny of Words was an early and influential popularization of Alfred Korzybski's theory of general semantics. Chase supported United States non-interventionism and was against U.S. entry in World War II, advocating this position in his 1939 book The New Western Front. After the war, Chase