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William Graham Sumner, 1840-1910
Influential and controversial arch-conservative economist and sociologist at Yale University.
William Graham Sumner was born in New Jersey, to a modest family of English immigrants. His father, a self-educated industrial machinist, moved to Connecticut shortly after. William Graham Sumner was educated in Hartford's public schools. Determined on a career in the Episcopal church, Sumner went on to enroll in Yale University, obtaining his BA in 1863, and then spent the next few years abroad in Europe - in Geneva, Göttingen and Oxford - studying ancient languages, church history and biblical scholarship.
Sumner returned to the United States in 1866, and took a tutorship at Yale, found his heavy teutonic brand of biblical scholarship was not really well-received. Nonetheless, Sumner pressed on with a clerical career, and became a deacon in New Haven in 1867 and was ordained an episcopalian priest n 1869. He served under another minister at the Calvary Church in New York, and in 1870, became a rector in Morristown, New Jersey.
Throughout all this, William Graham Sumner nurtured an interest in economics, first awaked in high school, when he stumbled upon Harriet Martineau's book. This interest finally caught fire around 1870, when he came across the sociological works of the British evolutionary theorist, Herbert Spencer. He decided to change his career, and in 1872, accepted an academic position at Yale College. The choice of Sumner was forwarded by the conservative Yale authorities, who wanted a cleric of impeccable credentials to counterbalance the simultaneous appointment of the more liberal and empirical-minded Francis A. Walker that same year, to the Sheffield Scientific School at Yale. Although Sumner was appointed to Yale College as a Professor of Greek and Ancient History in 1872, he began teaching economics and other social science subjects in 1876 Sumner was instrumental in reforming the American university system away from its old "divinity-classics" roots and towards modern subjects.
For the next few years, Sumner and Walker maintained a rivalry over the soul of Yale economics, which sometimes veered into personal animosity. Sumner's abrasive personality is believed to have driven Walker into eventually resigning from Yale in 1881.
Thoroughly wrapped in Spencer, Sumner was an outspoken Social Darwinist and leader of the American apologist school. Sumner defended radical laissez-faire as being justified by laws of evolution (esp. 1883), and decried any and all State interference in markets, . Sumner was an ardent opponent of bimetallism, protectionism, socialism, imperialism, etc. Sumner's famous analysis of social norms are contained in his 1907 book.
After Sumner's death in 1910, Albert Galloway Keller collected Sumner's essays and manuscripts in various books.
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