Thomas K. McCraw, Historian Who Enlivened Economics, Dies at 72
By BRUCE WEBER
The New York Times, November 6, 2012
Thomas K. McCraw, a Pulitzer Prize-winning historian who used biography
to explore thorny issues in economics, died on Saturday in Cambridge,
Mass. He was 72.
Mr. McCraw earned a master’s degree and doctorate in
history from the University of Wisconsin and taught at the University of
Texas before moving to Harvard.
He had been treated for heart and lung problems, his wife, Susan, said.
Professor McCraw, who taught from 1976 to 2007 at Harvard Business School, won the Pulitzer for history in 1985 for “Prophets of Regulation: Charles Francis Adams, Louis D. Brandeis, James M. Landis and Alfred E. Kahn.”
The book focused on those men, of different eras, to illustrate how
government regulation of industry affected the American economy from the
late 19th to the late 20th centuries.
Adams was president of the Union Pacific Railroad in the 1880s;
Brandeis, the lawyer and Supreme Court justice, worked to curb the power
of banks and corporations in the late 19th and early 20th centuries;
Landis was chairman of the Securities and Exchange Commission during the
Depression, and Kahn was chairman of the Civil Aeronautics Board, which
deregulated airline fares in 1978.
The book was recognized for melding scholarship and engaging prose.
“Mr. McCraw explains sophisticated economic theory in accessible terms,”
The New York Times Book Review said, “and he has a historian’s knack
for isolating such basic American traits as a mistrust of big business
and for showing how regulators manipulated these traits to implement
their policies.”
In “Prophet of Innovation: Joseph Schumpeter and Creative Destruction”
(2007), Professor McCraw examined capitalism through the life story of
its leading 20th century advocate, with his Darwinian theory of
“creative destruction”: that businesses must be rendered obsolete and
extinct by other, better businesses if an economy is to move forward.
In “The Founders and Finance: How Hamilton, Gallatin and Other Immigrants Forged the American Economy,”
published this year, he wrote about how a nation born into financial
ruin after the Revolution saved itself and created a stable financial
system. He credited the efforts of immigrants like Alexander Hamilton,
born on the Caribbean island of Nevis, who was the nation’s first
secretary of the Treasury, and the Swiss-born Albert Gallatin, who was
the fourth Treasury secretary and whose almost-13-year tenure remains
the longest in American history.
“The key feature of his work is the use of biography,” said Geoffrey G.
Jones, who succeeded Professor McCraw as the Isidor Straus Professor of
Business History at Harvard. “You hear about personal lives,
motivations, but he manages to deal with issues, like regulation, that
are usually left to dry textbooks. That was his real gift.”
Thomas Kincaid McCraw was born on Sept. 11, 1940, in Corinth, Miss.,
near where his father, John, a civil engineer for the Tennessee Valley
Authority, was helping to build a dam. The family moved frequently, and
Thomas graduated from high school in Florence, Ala.
He attended the University of Mississippi on a Navy R.O.T.C. scholarship
and after graduation served four years in the Navy, mostly in Bermuda.
He earned a master’s degree and doctorate in history from the University
of Wisconsin and taught at the University of Texas before moving to
Harvard.
Professor McCraw lived in Belmont, Mass., with his wife, the former
Susan Morehead. College sweethearts at Mississippi, they married in
1962. His other survivors include a daughter, Elizabeth McCarron; a son,
Thomas Jr.; a brother, John; and three grandchildren.
Professor McCraw’s other books include “American Business, 1920-2000: How It Worked” (2000), a compact overview.
At Harvard, he developed a standard first-year course for M.B.A.
students, “Creating Modern Capitalism,” which enhanced the profile and
popularity of business history at the school and whose syllabus became a
textbook, now widely used, of the same name.
“He was a historian who made things accessible to a far wider range of
people than normally read scholarly works,” Professor Jones said. “And
not by trading down. The work isn’t simplistic. It’s engaged with
materials in the deep sense. It’s just very accessible. That’s a very
difficult thing to pull off. Very few academics can.”
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