Everything about William Z Ripley totally explained
William Zebina Ripley (
October 13,
1867 –
August 16,
1941) was an American
economist and
racial theorist who is today mostly famous for his tripartite racial theory of Europe. His work was later taken up by
white supremacists and
eugenicists. In his time, he was also quite famous for his criticisms of American railroad economics and American business practices in the
1920s and
1930s.
Biography
William Z. Ripley was born in
Medford, Massachusetts in 1867 to Nathaniel L. Ripley and Estimate R.E. Baldwin Ripley. He attended the
Massachusetts Institute of Technology for his undergraduate education in engineering, graduating in
1890, and received a master's and doctorate degree from
Columbia University in
1892 and
1893 respectively. In 1893, he was married to Ida S. Davis. From
1893 until
1901, Ripley lectured on sociology at Columbia University and from
1895 until 1901 he was a professor of economics at MIT. From 1901 onwards, he was a professor of political economics at
Harvard University. He was a corresponding member of the Anthropological Society of Paris, the Roman Anthropological Society, the Cherbourg Society of Natural Sciences, and in 1898 and 1900-1901, the vice president of the
American Economic Association.
The Races of Europe
In 1899, he authored a book entitled
The Races of Europe: A Sociological Study, which had grown out of a series of lectures he'd given at the Lowell Institute at Columbia in 1896. Ripley believed that "race" was the central engine to understanding human history. However, his work also afforded strong weight to environmental and non-biological factors, such as traditions. He believed, as he wrote in the introduction to
Races of Europe, that:
» "Race, properly speaking, is responsible only for those peculiarities, mental or bodily, which are transmitted with constancy along the lines of direct physical descent from father to son. Many mental traits, aptitudes, or proclivities, on the other hand, which reappear persistently in successive populations may be derived from an entirely different source. They may have descended collaterally, along the lines of purely mental suggestion by virtue of mere social contact with preceding generations."
Ripley's book, originally written to help finance his children's education, became a very-well respected work of early
20th century anthropology, renowned for its careful writing, compilation, and criticism of the data of many other anthropologists in
Europe and the
United States.
Ripley based his conclusions about race by correlating
anthropometric data with geographical data, paying special attention to the use of the
cephalic index, which at the time was one of the most consistent anthropometric measurements. From this and other socio-geographical factors, Ripley classified Europeans into three distinct races:
- Teutonic — members of the northern race were long-skulled (or dolichocephalic), tall in stature, and possessed pale eyes and skin.
- Mediterranean — members of the southern race were long-skulled (or dolichocephalic), short in stature, and possessed dark eyes and skin.
- Alpine — members of the central race were round-skulled (or brachycephalic), stocky in stature, and possessed intermediate eye and skin color.
Ripley's tripartite system of race put him at odds both with other scholars who insisted that there was only one European race, and those who insisted that there were dozens of European races (such as
Joseph Deniker, who Ripley saw as his chief rival). Ripley was the first American recipient of the Huxley Medal of the
Royal Anthropological Institute in
1908 on account of his contributions to anthropology.
The Races of Europe, overall, became an influential book of the
Progressive Era in the field of racial taxonomy. Ripley's tripartite system was especially championed by
Madison Grant, who changed Ripley's "Teutonic" type into Grant's own
Nordic type (taking the name, but little else, from Deniker), which he postulated as a
master race. It is in this light that Ripley's work on race is usually remembered today, though little of Grant's supremacist ideology is present in Ripley's original work.
Economics
Though he's today most often remembered for his work on race, in his time Ripley was just as famous, if not more so, for his work on
railroad economics. Ripley had worked under
Theodore Roosevelt on the United States Industrial Commission in
1900, helping negotiate relations between railway companies and
anthracite coal companies. In
1916, he served on the Eight Hour Commission, adjusting railway wages to the new
eight-hour workday. From
1917 to
1918, he served as Administrator of Labor Standards for the
United States Department of War, and helped to settle railway strikes.
Ripley was the Vice President of the American Economics Association
1898, 1900, and 1901, and was elected president of it in
1933. From
1919 to
1920, he served as the chairman of the National Adjustment Commission of the United States Shipping Board, and from 1920 to
1923, he served with the
Interstate Commerce Commission. In
1921, he was ICC special examiner on the construction of railroads. There, he wrote the ICC's plan for the regional consolidation of U.S. railways, which became known as the
Ripley Plan. In
1929, the ICC published
Ripley's Plan under the title
Complete Plan of Consolidation. Numerous hearings were held by the ICC regarding the plan under the topic of "In the Matter of Consolidation of the Railways of the United States into a Limited Number of Systems".
Starting with a series of articles in the
Atlantic Monthly in
1925 under the headlines of "Stop, Look, Listen!", Ripley became a major critic of American corporate practices. In
1926, he issued a well-circulated critique of
Wall Street's practices of
speculation and
secrecy. He received a full-page profile in the
New York Times with the headline, "When Ripley Speaks, Wall Street Heeds". According to
Time magazine, Ripley became widely known as "The Professor Who Jarred Wall Street".
However, after an automobile accident in January of
1927, Ripley suffered a
nervous breakdown and was forced to recuperate at a
sanitarium in
Connecticut. After the
Wall Street Crash of 1929, he was occasionally credited with having predicted the financial disaster. One article published in 1929 implied that his automobile accident may have been part of a conspiracy:
» "Three years ago [Ripley] spoke some plain words about Wall Street. An automobile crash and a nervous breakdown followed. A few weeks ago Wall Street had its crash and breakdown. Now Professor Ripley is preparing to return to his Harvard classes next February."
He was unable to return to teaching until at least 1929. However, in the early 1930s, he continued to issue criticisms of the railroad industry labor practices. In
1931, he'd also testified at a
Senate banking inquiry, urging the curbing of investment trusts. In
1932, he appeared at the Senate Banking and Currency Committee, and demanded public inquiry into the financial affairs of corporations and authored a series of articles in the
New York Times stressing the importance of railroad economics to the country's economy. Yet, by the end of the year he'd suffered another nervous breakdown, and retired in early 1933.
Ripley died in 1941 at his summer home in
East Edgecomb,
Maine. An obituary in the
New York Times implied that Ripley had predicted the 1929 crash with his "fearless exposés" of Wall Street practices, in particular his pronouncement that:
» "Prosperity, not real but specious, may indeed be unduly protracted by artificial means, but in the end truth is bound to prevail."
His book,
Railway Problems: An Early History of Competition, Rates and Regulations, was republished in
2000 as part of a "Business Classic" series.
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