Mitchell, Broadus, 1892-1988

Broadus Mitchell, economist, historian, and liberal thinker, taught until 1939 at Johns Hopkins University, from 1947 to spring 1958 at Rutgers University, and from fall 1958 to 1967 at Hofstra University. He was the son of educator, Samuel Chiles Mitchell (1864-1948) and brother of educator, Morris R. Mitchell (1895-1976) and labor leader, George Sinclair Mitchell (1902-1962). His second wife was economist Louise Pearson Mitchell (1906- ).

Mitchell was a Professor of Political Economics at Johns Hopkins University, Occidental College, NYU, and Rutgers University before he came to Hofstra in 1958. He taught in Hofstra's New College program until his retirement in 1967.

Economic historian; interviewee d. 1988.

Broadus Mitchell was professor, author, politician, civic leader and civil rights activist, and labor leader.

(Parts of the following were taken from Jacqueline Hall's article on Broadus Mitchell in Radical History Review 45, 1989, pages 31-38.)

Broadus Mitchell, economic historian and ardent socialist, died on 28 April 1988 at the age of 95. Born 27 December 1892 in Georgetown, Ky., to Samuel Chiles and Alice Broadus Mitchell, he grew up in an academic family devoted to the New South panaceas of industrialization, education, and racial uplift. His mother was the daughter of the head of the Southern Baptist Seminary in Louisville. His father, who taught at Richmond College (later the University of Richmond), became president of the University of South Carolina in 1909, only to resign four years later when Governor Coleman L. Blease attacked him for favoring blacks over white womanhood. Mitchell had recommended that a Peabody Fund gift earmarked for black education go to the state college for Negroes rather than the white women's college. Broadus's siblings were Morris Randolph (1895-1976), educator and organizer and first president of the Friends World College; George Sinclair (1902-1962), textile industry labor leader; Terry, advertising manager of Waynesboro, Pa.; and Mary, wife of George Orr Clifford of Chapel Hill, N.C.

Broadus Mitchell was torn between journalism and academics. He first chose journalism, working off and on as a reporter between 1913 and 1918. He pursued graduate work in political economy at Johns Hopkins with the purpose of deepening his ability to write about the South's economic woes. His dissertation, completed in 1918, was published in 1921 as The Rise of Cotton Mills in the South . At Hopkins, he was drawn into social work and socialism, in part through his association with Elizabeth Gilman, one of Maryland's leading reformers. He also developed an enduring commitment to socialism, pacifism, and workers' education.

Although Mitchell opposed the U.S. entry into World War I, he served a brief stint in the army. After the war, he chose to join the faculty at Johns Hopkins rather than return to journalism. While at Hopkins, he took his students out of the classroom, guiding them on a trip to the Soviet Union, and using the city of Baltimore as a laboratory for illustrating the contradictions of poverty in the midst of plenty. He also conducted courses for immigrant workers, tried in vain to start a Labor College at Johns Hopkins, and taught first at the Bryn Mawr Summer School and then at the Southern Summer School for Women Workers.

Mitchell turned more sharply to the left as the Depression grew, and his 1931 investigation of two lynchings on Maryland's Eastern Shore earned him a reputation in the black community as one of the few sparks of liberalism at Johns Hopkins. In 1934, Mitchell ran for governor of Maryland on the Socialist party ticket against the Democratic incumbent who had failed to punish the protagonists in the Eastern Shore lynchings. Mitchell captured 7,000 votes, twice as many as Maryland Socialists had ever won before.

By 1938, Mitchell's advocacy of socialism and racial justice had alienated some of his senior colleagues and won him the enmity of the Johns Hopkins administration. In 1939, after fights with the administration over academic freedom and the admission of a black social worker to the graduate program in political economy, Mitchell resigned.

In 1935, three years before his troubles at Johns Hopkins came to a head, Mitchell's wife, Adelaide Hammond, whom he had married in 1923 and with whom he had two children - Sidney, who became a professor of English at Mary Washington College in Fredericksburg, Va., and Barbara Sinclair, who married Stefan Grove - divorced him. A year later, he married Louise Pearson Blodget, an historian to whom he was devoted and with whom he collaborated on a number of his later works. Broadus and Louise also had two children, Theodora and Christopher. In 1939, the Mitchells went to California, where Broadus taught at Occidental College. When he opposed U.S. intervention in World War II and took public stands on other controversial issues, Occidental's president refused to renew his contract. After two years at Occidental, the Mitchells found themselves back on the east coast with no means of support. After holding several temporary jobs, Louise began teaching at Mills College of Education, and, in 1943, Broadus took over the position of research director for the International Ladies Garment Workers' Union. When the war ended, Mitchell moved on to the Economics Department at Rutgers, where he taught from 1947 until he was forced to retire at age 65 in 1958.

Mitchell joined the Economics Department at Hofstra in the fall of 1958 and accepted the challenge of teaching in the University's experimental New College. There, he moderated a 1959 forum on communism. He also managed to bring onto the faculty a kindred spirit named Dorothy Douglas, an economist who had resigned from Smith when she became a target of red-baiting. When he was awarded an honorary degree and asked to deliver the commencement address in 1967, he took the opportunity to speak out against the war in Vietnam.

In 1967, at the age of 75, Broadus Mitchell retired once more. He spent the last years of his life in New York and on his beloved farm in Wendell, Mass.

Always an activist, Mitchell was above all an independent and dedicated scholar. All told, he wrote 17 books, counting those he co-authored, and numerous articles. During the 1920s, he wrote Frederick Law Olmstead, A Critic of the Old South (1924), which served as a vehicle for his own critique of the Lost Cause, and William Greed, Factory Master of the Old South (1928). With brother George Sinclair Mitchell, he published The Industrial Revolution in the South (1930). He was recognized as an expert on the life of Alexander Hamilton, on whom he wrote extensively, publishing numerous articles and books, including Heritage from Hamilton (1957); Alexander Hamilton (1957, 1962); Alexander Hamilton: The Revolutionary Years (1970); and Alexander Hamilton: A Concise Biography (1976). He also wrote American Economic History (1947); Depression Decade (1947); Economics: Experience and Analysis (1950); A Biography of the Constitution of the United States (1964, 1975); Great Economists and Their Times (1966); Postcripts to Economic History (1967); The Industrial Revolution in the South (1969); The Road to Yorktown (1971); and The Price of Independence: A Realistic View of the American Revolution (1974). Some of these works were written in collaboration with Louise Pearson Mitchell.