Calvin Bryce Hoover
Calvin Bryce Hoover
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A member of the Duke faculty from 1925 until his retirement in 1966, Calvin Bryce Hoover (known to friends and colleagues as Bryce) served as chairman of the Department of Economics for twenty years, and from 1937 to 1946 was Dean of the Graduate School. He was a scholar of the first rank; in addition, he was a leader in public service.
From 1920 through 1958, he studied, taught and undertook research in the Soviet Union, Germany, Italy, France, Poland, Czechoslovakia, Denmark, Sweden, and Norway. His long history of service to government began in 1933 when he became economic advisor to the Department of Agriculture. During World War II, he was responsible as an O.S.S. official for Northern Europe and Poland and the penetration of Germany from those areas. After the war, as chairman of the German Standard of Living Board and advisor to General Lucius Clay, he prepared the Hoover Report, which established Germany's postwar level of production. He was an active participant in the implementation of the Marshall Plan, and the Organization of Economic Cooperation and Development. In 1947 he was awarded the Medal of Freedom.
His books include Economic Life of Soviet Russia; Germany Enters The Third Reich; Dictators and Democracies; International Trade and Domestic Employment; Economic Resources and Policies of the South; and The Economy, Liberty, and the State. His autobiography, Memoirs of Capitalism, Communism and Nazism, was published in 1965. He contributed numerous articles to newspapers, magazines and professional journals.
Hoover served as President of the American Economic Association (the first Southerner to attain that distinction), the Comparative Economics Association, and the Southern Economic Association; and was elected a Fellow of the Royal Economic Society. He was widely accepted as the founder of the field of Comparative Economic Systems.
He received his A.B. from Monmouth College, and his Ph.D. from the University of Wisconsin where he studied with John R. Commoner. He also received Litt.D. degrees from Columbia University, and Monmouth College; and a Doctor of Laws degree from Case Western Reserve University.
Hoover was a very popular teacher and thesis advisor. His students went on to prominent positions in the academic world (e.g., Juanita Kreps, and Charles Brice Ratchford who became President of the University of Missouri; business (e.g., James J. O'Leary, former Chief Economist, United States Trust Company of New York); and the media (e.g., Leonard Silk, editor at Business Week and economics correspondent for the New York Times). He was a noted raconteur who spiced his two-semester course on economic theory with accounts of conversations with John Maynard Keynes and of sharing a platform with Hitler. He was the unquestioned leader of the Department during most of his forty years at Duke University.
Additional information on Calvin Bryce Hoover's rich life and contributions can be found in the following. Some of the listed items are available below, while others are still being prepared.
Hoover was a correspondent with leading luminaries of his time, including several U.S. Presidents and a number of economists. The Duke University Archives collection of Calvin Bryce Hoover Papers includes personal letters from U.S. Presidents Hoover, Roosevelt, Truman, Eisenhower, and Nixon, as well as other government officials and leading economists, including Arthur Burns, Milton Friedman, John Kenneth Galbraith, John Maynard Keynes, Joseph Schumpeter, and Gunnar Myrdal.
Of special interest was an exchange between Hoover and John Maynard Keynes in which Hoover attempted to obtain Keynes' public endorsement of the controversial "Hoover Report," which addressed issues of German reparations, and economic reconstruction: