Adolf A. Berle

Adolf A. Berle

Berle in 1965
Chamberlain of New York City
In office
1934–1938
Assistant Secretary of State for Latin American Affairs
In office
March 5, 1938 – December 19, 1944 [1]
President Franklin D. Roosevelt
United States Ambassador to Brazil
In office
January 30, 1945 – February 27, 1946
President Franklin D. Roosevelt
Preceded by Jefferson Caffery
Succeeded by William D. Pawley
Personal details
Born Adolf Augustus Berle, Jr.
(1895-01-27)January 27, 1895
Boston, Massachusetts
Died February 17, 1971(1971-02-17) (aged 76)
New York City, New York
Spouse(s) Beatrice Bishop (m. 1927–his death; 1971)
Children 3
Profession Lawyer, diplomat, author, educator

Adolf Augustus Berle, Jr. (/ˈbɜːrli/; January 27, 1895 – February 17, 1971) was a lawyer, educator, author, and U.S. diplomat.[2] He was the author of The Modern Corporation and Private Property, a groundbreaking work on corporate governance, and an important member of U.S. President Franklin Roosevelt's "Brain Trust".

Childhood and education

Berle was born in Boston, Massachusetts, the son of Mary Augusta (Wright) and Adolf Augustus Berle.[3] He entered Harvard College at age 14, earning a bachelor's degree in 1913 and a master's in 1914. He then enrolled in Harvard Law School. In 1916, at age 21, he became the youngest graduate in the school's history.

Career

Early career

Upon graduation Berle joined the United States military. His first assignment as an intelligence officer was to assist in increasing sugar production in the Dominican Republic by working out property and contractual conflicts among rural landowners. Immediately after World War I Berle became a member of the American delegation to the Paris Peace Conference, advocating for smaller nations' rights of self-determination. In 1919 Berle moved to New York City and became a member of the law firm of Berle, Berle and Brunner.

The Modern Corporation and Private Property

Berle became a professor of corporate law at Columbia Law School in 1927 and remained on the faculty until retiring in 1964. He is best known for his groundbreaking work in corporate governance he co-authored with economist Gardiner Means called The Modern Corporation and Private Property, the most quoted text in corporate governance studies. Berle and Means showed that the means of production in the U.S. economy were highly concentrated in the hands of the largest 200 corporations, and that within the large corporations managers controlled firms despite shareholders' formal ownership.

Berle theorized that the facts of economic concentration meant that the effects of competitive-price theory were largely mythical.[4] While some advocated trust busting, breaking up the concentrations of firms into smaller entities in order to restore competitive forces, Berle believed that that would be economically inefficient. Instead, he argued for government regulation and became identified with the school of business statesmanship, which advocated that corporate leadership accept (and theorized that they had to a great extent already accepted) that they must fulfill responsibilities toward society in addition to their traditional responsibilities toward shareholders.[5] Corporate law should reflect this new reality, he wrote in The Modern Corporation: "The law of corporations, accordingly, might well be considered as a potential constitutional law for the new economic state, while business practice is increasingly assuming the aspect of economic statesmanship."[6]

Roosevelt's Brain Trust

Berle was an original member of Franklin D. Roosevelt's "Brain Trust", a group of advisers who developed policy recommendations—Berle's focuses ranging from economic recovery to diplomatic strategy[7]—during Roosevelt's 1932 election campaign. Roosevelt's "Commonwealth Club Address", a speech written by Berle on government involvement in industrial and economic policy, was ranked in 2000 as the second-best presidential campaign speech of the 20th century by public address scholars.[8]

While remaining an informal adviser of Roosevelt after the election, Berle returned to New York and became a key consultant in the successful mayoral election campaign of reformer Fiorello LaGuardia. From 1934 to 1938, Berle managed the city's fiscal affairs as its last Chamberlain. Then, from 1938 to 1944, Berle was Assistant Secretary of State for Latin American Affairs.[9] Berle's official duties in New York City and as an Assistant Secretary of State did not limit his perception of his real responsibilities or expertise, and in any case Roosevelt appreciated both his speech-writing skills and his advice on a wide range of international and economic concerns.[9] As a result, throughout the Roosevelt administration Berle consulted on important international and industrial New Deal projects, such as creation of the St. Lawrence Seaway, development of the administration's Good Neighbor Policy toward Latin America, and establishment of the International Civil Aviation Organization.[9] Outside of Latin America, Berle argued "that control of the incomparable energy reserves of the Middle East would yield 'substantial control of the world'".[10]

During his tenure as Assistant Secretary of State, Berle rented Woodley Mansion, which had once been owned by Grover Cleveland and Martin Van Buren, from secretary of war Henry Stimson in 1939. On September 2, Whittaker Chambers arrived at Woodley to tell Berle that several senior government officials, includingAlger Hiss, a respected member of the State Department, were members of a Soviet "aparatus" designed to influence U.S. policy and pass classified documents and information to the Soviets. Chambers' autobiography asserts that Berle and the journalist who set up the meeting, Isaac Don Levine, met with President Roosevelt and conveyed what Chambers told them, but Roosevelt unequivocally refused to take any action.[11] Hiss remained st the State Department during and after the War serving in sensitive positions, including as Roosevelt's principal adviser on Soviet affairs at the Yalta conference, as a delegate to the Dumbarton Oaks conference and as Secretary General of the San Francisco conference establishing the United Nations. In 1948, Chambers repeated his accusations to the House Committee on Un-American Activities. Hiss denied the accusation in testimony to the Committee, leading to his trial and conviction for perjury. Berle provided incorrect and misleading testimony before the House Committee about his meeting with Chambers, which was contradicted by both his notes taken subsequent to the meeting and a personal diary entry, in which he acknowledged that Chambers had implicated Hiss in espionage. Explaining Berle's evasive testimony, Allen Weinstein wrote in his book Perjury: The Hiss-Chambers Case: "His major concern in 1948, at a time when Berle was a Liberal Party leader in New York working for Truman's election, was to defuse, if possible, the influence of anti-Communist sentiment and of the case itself in that election year."[12]

Berle also was a major architect in the development of federal farm and home owners' mortgage programs and in the expansion of the Reconstruction Finance Corporation.[13] He was elected a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1944.[14]

After World War II

After the war Berle served as Ambassador to Brazil from 1945 to 1946. In October 1945, two days after the deposition of president Getulio Vargas, Berle pledged for the freedom of the Brazilian communists being incarcerated by the government since the beginning of the month, it was a sign of the New World Order.[15]

He then returned to his academic career at Columbia. Berle was a founding member of the New York State Liberal Party, a breakaway faction of the American Labor Party, which had lost support as a result of its sponsorship of Congressman Vito Marcantonio, a Communist fellow traveler. For nearly a decade Berle served as chairman of the Liberal Party. His main goal was to fight off far-left and Communist influences. He also chaired the Twentieth Century Fund for the two decades following World War II.

Berle briefly returned to government service for the first half of 1961, serving under President John F. Kennedy as head of an interdepartmental task force on Latin American affairs. During that time he was primarily involved in forming the U.S. response to a newly communist Cuba, which included both the failed Bay of Pigs invasion and the initiation of the Alliance for Progress, an economic development policy aimed at the region.[9]:325–334

Berle continued to write academic work related to corporate law. His article on "Property, Production and Revolution" was a key statement of the theory behind the Great Society program of President Lyndon B. Johnson.

Family

Adolf Berle married Beatrice Bishop (1902-1993) in 1927. They had two daughters, Beatrice Berle Meyerson, and Alice Berle Crawford, and a son, Peter A. A. Berle. In turn, they had 10 grandchildren.[16] In 1971, Berle died in New York City, aged 76.

His wife edited and published selections from his diaries posthumously in 1973 as Navigating the Rapids: From the Papers of Adolf A. Berle.[16][17]

Publications

Books
Articles

See also

Notes

  1. ↑ https://history.state.gov/departmenthistory/people/berle-adolf-augustus
  2. ↑ Funk, Charles Earle (1936). What's the name, please? A guide to the correct pronunciation of current prominent names. New York: Funk & Wagnalls. OCLC 1463642.
  3. ↑ http://docs.fdrlibrary.marist.edu:8000/findbrow.cgi?collection=Berle,+Adolf+A.
  4. ↑ Title: Corporate Responsibility, Business Motivation, and Reality. Author: Henry G. Manne. Publication: The ANNALS of the American Academy of Political and Social Science. Date: 1962. Page: 57. Online:
  5. ↑ Title: Corporate Responsibility, Business Motivation, and Reality. Author: Henry G. Manne. Publication: The ANNALS of the American Academy of Political and Social Science. Date: 1962. Page: 55. Online:
  6. ↑ p. 313, 1932 edition
  7. ↑ FDR’S Commonwealth Club Address: Redefining Individualism, Adjudicating Greatness, by Davis W. Houck
  8. ↑ Stephen E. Lucas and Martin J. Medhurst, “American Public Address: The Top One Hundred Speeches of the Twentieth Century,” paper presented at the National Communication Association, November 2000, Seattle,Washington. Cited in FDR’S Commonwealth Club Address: Redefining Individualism, Adjudicating Greatness, by Davis W. Houck
  9. 1 2 3 4 Schwarz, Jonathan A. (1987). Liberal: Adolf A. Berle and the Vision of an American Era. London: Collier Macmillan. ISBN 0-02-929170-4.
  10. ↑ Chomsky, Noam (2011-04-21) Is the world too big to fail?, Salon.com
  11. ↑ W. Chambers, "Witness" (1952)
  12. ↑ Allen Weinstein. "Perjury: The Hiss Chambers Case". Alfred A. Knopf, New York, 1978. Pg 66.
  13. ↑ Democracy and the New Deal encyclopedia.com, accessed May 4, 2010
  14. ↑ "Book of Members, 1780–2010: Chapter B" (PDF). American Academy of Arts and Sciences. Archived (PDF) from the original on 25 July 2011. Retrieved June 16, 2011.
  15. ↑ Gaspari, Elio (2014). Editora Intrínseca, ed. A Ditadura Derrotada (2 ed.). Rio de Janeiro. p. 121. ISBN 978-85-8057-432-6.
  16. 1 2 Kennedy, Shawn G. (14 June 1993). "Beatrice Berle, 90, A Doctor, Teacher And Medical Writer". New York Times Times. Retrieved 10 September 2014.
  17. ↑ Berle, Beatrice Bishop (1973). "Navigating the Rapids: From the Papers of Adolf A. Berle". New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich.

References

External links

Wikisource has original works written by or about:
Adolf Berle
Wikiquote has quotations related to: Adolf A. Berle
Diplomatic posts
Preceded by
Jefferson Caffery		 United States Ambassador to Brazil
30 January 1945–27 February 1946 		Succeeded by
William D. Pawley
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