Henry R. Seager

The panic of 1929 has had various repercussions on the economic oracles who had agreed with Wall Street in declaring old-time principles to be obsolete. Some of them, on discovering the obsolete principles again in complete control, recanted publicly. Others retired judiciously from the public view. Others pointed out gravely that the trouble had been caused, not at all by excessive speculation but by occult influences such as “maldistribution of gold.” Still others, who had preached the gospel of spending instead of saving when the community’s extravagance was already foreshadowing the end, have adopted a defiant attitude, assuring disciples whom the crash had crippled that the cause of the panic was that the disciples had not spent enough in 1929. But along with this very diversified attitude of prophets whose prophecies had gone wrong, came welcome evidence that the great body of economic teachers had envisaged correctly the two dramatic chapters of events since 1927.

One of the economic writers who kept his feet on solid ground, who maintained at all times an even balance in his reasoning and who never lost touch with practical realities, was Henry Rogers Seager. On controverted economic questions, Seager’s basic ideas were positive and rarely changed. But he was never a dogmatist or intellectual bigot. His conclusions, not the less forceful for their total lack of professional arrogance, were always stated in the quiet, easy and conversational manner that characterized his intercourse at the Century. He was at all times ready to modify a preconceived judgment, if sufficient evidence appeared in the working out of visible financial or industrial phenomena; but the evidence had to meet the test of close analysis and changing circumstance. He frankly avowed himself to be always learning. But study of events in the bewildering economic panorama of the past sixteen years never led him into the familiar alternating pitfalls of refusing to modify rigid old-time dogma in the light of novel and convincing test of new conditions, or, on the other hand, of constructing overnight a brand-new economic philosophy to fit abnormal and temporary phenomena.

This cool and even judgment of events, with the strong common sense displayed in his conclusions, explains not only why Seager’s teaching was enlightening to his pupils, but why he was drafted upon so many important boards at Washington during the war and why, particularly, his testimony always carried weight with Congressional committees of inquiry. It was a real misfortune to the study of present-day economic and political conditions that Seager should not have lived to complete the close first-hand study of the Russian experiment, in which he had been engaged for months before his death at Kieff [Kyiv]. His conclusions would have been accepted, by those who knew his extraordinary power of economic insight, as superseding the whole mass of contradictory judgment and testimony which has thus far reduced the “Russian situation” to a merely confusing picture.

Alexander Dana Noyes
1931 Century Association Yearbook