Adolf Berle

Adolf Augustus Berle, Jr. (1895-1971), was an educator, a diplomat, a government official, and a provocative interpreter of the United States corporate economy.

Adolf Berle was born in Boston, Mass., on Jan. 27, 1895. He earned his bachelor's degree from Harvard College in 1913 and his master's in 1914. He then entered Harvard Law School, from which he received his degree in 1916, at the age of 21.

Years of Public Service

After a year of law practice in Boston, followed by a year with the United States commission to negotiate the peace with Germany, Berle moved to New York City in 1919 to become a member of the law firm of Berle, Berle and Brunner, where he remained, taking frequent leaves for public and diplomatic service. He was professor of corporation law on the faculty of Columbia Law School from 1927 until he retired as professor emeritus in 1964. He was a member of the board of directors of such public, civic, and educational institutions as SuCrest and the Twentieth Century Fund of New York City, and École de l'Europe Libre, France. He was also chamberlain of New York City during 1934-1938.

In 1933 he began a long and distinguished career of high-level government assignments. He was a member of the original "brain trust" in the early years of President Franklin Roosevelt's first administration. He served as special counsel to the Reconstruction Finance Corporation (1933-1938), assistant secretary of state (1938-1944), United States ambassador to Brazil (1945-1946), chairman of the Task Force on Latin America (1961), and consultant to the secretary of state (1961-1962). At intervals throughout this period he also served as United States delegate to the Inter-American Conference for Maintenance of Peace (Buenos Aires, 1936-1937); and two Pan American conferences (Lima, Peru, 1938; Havana, Cuba, 1940). He was president of the International Conference on Civil Aviation and chairman of the American delegation (Chicago, 1944). Berle died in New York City on Feb. 17, 1971.

Structure of the American Economy

Berle's scholarly works include numerous law texts, legal, social, and economic commentaries, and treatises on the United States corporate economy. By far the best-known and most frequently cited of these works are The Modern Corporation and Private Property (1932, coauthored with Gardiner Means), The 20th Century Capitalist Revolution (1954), and Power without Property (1959).

In The Modern Corporation, Berle and Means presented an analysis of the structure of the American economy, showing that the means of production were highly concentrated in the hands of the largest 200 corporations, that this concentration was increasing, and that within the large corporations which so dominated the economy there was a clear divorcement of ownership from control. Since the American private-property legal system had been based on the assumption that those who owned property possessed the rights and power to use it for their own benefit, the Berle and Means thesis called into serious question the operability of the legal system on which the private-enterprise economy had been built.

In the two later volumes Berle advanced the companion thesis that management of large corporate enterprise, in addition to having become liberated from the control of corporate owners (stockholders), had acquired sufficient power to have become liberated from the market forces of competition as well. He concluded, therefore, that much of the economic theory pertaining to the functioning of the marketplace, which served as a rationale for the free-enterprise market economy, had been rendered obsolete by the accumulation of immense power in the hands of corporate management. This provocative thesis generated much debate among economists and legal scholars, a debate that still continues.

Further Reading

References to Berle's work are found in numerous discussions on the American economy. The American Economic System: An Anthology of Writings concerning the American Economy, compiled by Massimo Salvadori (1963), contains a useful section on Berle's analysis of the modern corporation. See also George A. Steiner, Government's Role in Economic Life (1957), and Peter d'A. Jones, America's Wealth (1963).

Additional Sources

Schwarz, Jordan A., Liberal: Adolf A. Berle and the vision of an American era, New York: Free Press; London: Collier Macmillan, 1987.

Adolph Augustus Berle, Jr., was a diplomat, teacher, and writer.

Berle was born January 29, 1895, in Boston, Massachusetts. He was educated at Harvard, receiving a bachelor of arts degree in 1913, a master of arts degree in 1914, and a bachelor of laws degree in 1916, in which year he was also admitted to the bar.

After military duty in World War I, Berle served as a U.S. representative at the Paris Peace Conference during 1918 and 1919. He opposed the conditions of the Versailles Treaty and resigned from the delegation. He returned to the United States and established his legal practice in New York City.

Berle began teaching corporate law at Columbia University in 1927. During the 1930s, he assisted the administration of President Franklin Delano Roosevelt in the formulation of New Deal legislation concerning securities and banking.

From 1938 to 1944, Berle was assistant secretary of state; in 1945 he was U.S. ambassador to Brazil; and in 1946 he returned to Columbia University to continue his teaching career. He helped establish the Liberal party and acted as its chairman from 1952 to 1955.

One of Berle's several publications was The Modern Corporation and Private Property (1932), written with coauthor G.C. Means.

Berle died February 17, 1971, in New York City.

Quotes:

"The art and science of asking questions is the source of all knowledge."

Adolf Augustus Berle, Jr.

Adolf Augustus Berle, Jr. (January 27, 1895 in Boston, Massachusetts – February 17, 1971 in New York City; his name pronounced "burley"^[1]) was an educator, author, and U.S. diplomat.

Contents 1 Biography 2 Bibliography 3 See also 4 References 5 External links

Biography

Berle was educated at Harvard, and was a member of the Paris Peace Conference after World War I. Unhappy with the terms of the Versailles Treaty, he resigned in protest. He 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. His book, The Modern Corporation and Private Property, which he co-authored with the Economist Gardiner Means remains to this date most quoted text in corporate governance.

During the FDR Administration, Berle worked on the New Deal and the Good Neighbor Policy.

As Assistant Secretary of State (1938-1944) in charge of security, Berle had a 1939 meeting, arranged by journalist Isaac Don Levine, with former Soviet agent Whittaker Chambers, two days after the signing of the Hitler-Stalin pact. In his notes of that meeting, which he titled "Underground Espionage Agent," Berle listed a series of names, including that of State Department official Alger Hiss, to which he appended the notation, "Member of the underground Com.--Active."^[2] In his 1973 memoirs, Levine wrote that Berle told him a few weeks later that he had brought the matter to FDR's attention, without success: “To the best of my recollection, the President dismissed the matter rather brusquely with an expletive remark on this order: ‘Oh, forget it, Adolf.’”^[3]

Berle later served as Ambassador to Brazil from 1945 to 1946, and was a founding member of the New York State Liberal Party. In 1961, he headed a task force for President John F. Kennedy that recommended the Alliance for Progress.

He published several books during his lifetime, including the groundbreaking work he authored with Gardiner Means called The Modern Corporation and Private Property, which was first published in 1932.

Bibliography

• Berle, Adolf Augustus, Jr.; Gardiner Means (1932). The Modern Corporation and Private Property. New York: Macmillan. OCLC 1411248. 
• Berle, Adolf Augustus, Jr. (1954). The 20th Century Capitalist Revolution. New York: Harcourt, Brace. OCLC 231023. 
• Berle, Adolf Augustus, Jr. (1959). Power without Property: A New Development in American Political Economy. New York: Harcourt, Brace. OCLC 582368. 
• Berle, Adolf Augustus, Jr. (1962). Latin America: Diplomacy and Reality. New York: Published for the Council on Foreign Relations by Harper & Row. OCLC 5147758. 

See also

• Corporate governance
• History of economic thought

References

1. ^ He told The Literary Digest his name was pronounced "as if spelled burley." 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. 
2. ^ Adolf Berle’s Notes on his Meeting with Whittaker Chambers
3. ^ Levine, Isaac Don (1973). Eyewitness to History: Memoirs and Reflections of a Foreign Correspondent for Half a Century. New York: Hawthorn Books. pp. 197–198. OCLC 604906. 

External links

• Biography
• FDR's Right-Hand Perjurer?

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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