The Teaching of Monetary Economics in the Early 1900s: Insight into the Development of Monetary Theory

A[bram] Piatt Andrew (1873–1936) was one of the leading monetary economists of the first two decades of the twentieth century. Beyond his professorial duties in the 1900s at Harvard, Andrew was special assistant to the National Monetary Commission, Assistant Secretary of the Treasury, Director of the Mint, and after World War I a member of the House of Representatives for fifteen years. In an earlier article, Warren Samuels (1972) reported on a student’s notes from Andrew’s 1905–6 course in Commercial Crises and Cycles of Trade, Economics 12b, which is of interest because of Andrew’s heavy reliance upon statistical material, the highly developed study of cycles and the attendant literature reflected in the course, and his treatment of Say’s Law. In a subsequent note, Samuels and Gray (1974) reported on the 1909 catastrophe in which a box of research materials and course notes, representing almost all of the materials he had prepared during his nine faculty years at Harvard, was tossed in error by a servant into Gloucester harbour only to be recovered in time by Andrew. We can now report on these salvaged materials, discovered at Andrew’s home, together with a few items which survived by not being thrown into the sea.1