King, Willford Isbell, 1880-1962

Economist and chairman of the Committee for Constitutional Government.

Willford Isbell King, a noted statistician, economist, and one-time chairmen of the Committee for Constitutional Government, Inc., was born in Cascade, Iowa in 1880. The son of a lawyer, King moved with his parents in April 1888, to the North Platte Valley area of Nebraska. There, Dr. King received his primary and secondary education from the local schoolhouse teachers. He enrolled at the University of Nebraska and graduated in 1905. Eventually he moved to Wisconsin to attend the University of Wisconsin where he received the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in 1913.

While working on his Ph.D., Dr. King began teaching courses on political economy. In 1917, he left for Washington, D.C. to assume a position of statistician with the United States Public Health Service. Dr. King left this position in 1920 to become the economist for the National Bureau of Economic Research, in Washington, D.C. In 1927, King moved to New York City to accept a professorship of economics at New York University; he remained there until 1945.

During the Depression years, Dr. King opposed the New Deal. Instead, he advocated a sliding scale of wages based on production, no government intervention in business, currency expansion, the reduction of taxes in upper brackets, and the abolition of all levies on incomes of corporations and from invested capital. In 1933, King founded the Committee on Economic Accord, which later produced The Handbook of Accepted Economics . By 1945, Dr. King had retired from his position at the University to become chairman of the Committee for Constitutional Government, Inc. King served as chairman, and later as advisor to the Committee, which sought to "uphold Constitutional principles and our system of free enterprise."

Willford King lived with his wife, Jane Elizabeth Patterson, and their three children, Harold J., Hugh P., and Floria Jane, in Douglaston, New York. Both of King's sons entered the fields of economics and statistics. Dr. Willford I. King died at his home on October 17, 1962, at the age of 82.