Mitchell, Wesley Clair

(1874-1948)

   After obtaining his Ph.D. at the University of Chicago in 1899, Wesley Mitchell taught at the University of California, Columbia University, and the New School for Social Research. During World War I, he served as head of the Price Section of the War Industries Board. Mitchell founded the National Bureau of Economic Research in 1920 to undertake quantitative studies of the U.S. business cycle. He published a number of key texts, including two works entitled Business Cycles (1913, 1927). In 1921, he took part in the President’s Unemployment Conference. He succeeded Charles Merriam as chair of the Social Science Research Council in 1927, led the group that produced the president’s Report on Recent Economic Changes (1929), and chaired President Herbert Hoover’s Research Committee on Social Trends, which reported in 1933. That year Mitchell was appointed to the National Planning Board created to serve the Public Works Administration.

   He resigned in 1935 to concentrate on his work with the National Bureau of Economic Research. He was the author of several books, including Business Cycles (1913); The Art of Spending Money (1927); and with Arthur Burns, Reassessing Business Cycles (1946). Mitchell was president of the American Association for the Advancement of Science in 1938 and the Academy of Political Science from 1940 to 1941. Alongside Merriam, he showed the element of continuity in thinking about planning between World War I and the New Deal.