John M. Blair and Philip A. Hart: In MemoriamAuthor(s): Walter AdamsSource: Journal of Economic Issues, Vol. 11, No. 1 (Mar., 1977)Published by: Association for Evolutionary EconomicsStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/4224561 .

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JOHN M. BLAIR AND PHILIP A. HART

IN MEMORIAM

Christmas Week 1976 was marred by the loss of two prominent fighters for a free and democratic society.

Philip A. Hart, the gentle man from Michigan, animated by deep moral convictions, and rightly recognized as the conscience of the United States Senate, consistently stood in the forefront of the civil rights battles for human dignity and the antitrust battles for economic freedom. Like Estes Kefauver, his predecessor as chairman of the Sub- committee on Antitrust and Monopoly, Philip Hart helped us under- stand the significance of concentrated economic power and the threat it poses to a free society. An unassuming, unassertive, patient teacher, Senator Hart seemed blithely immune to the organized pressure of vested interests, obeying to the very last the command of Micah: to do justly, to love mercy, and to walk humbly with thy God.

John M. Blair fought for the same ideals, but in a markedly differ- ent style. A charismatic, flamboyant, and often cantankerous person, with populist roots in the American heartland, Blair exercised a pro- found influence on official Washington for more than 30 years. Com- bining an all-consuming interest in the study of political economy with a penchant for public interest activism, he left an indelible mark on the orientation of the economics profession and the thinking of gov- ernment policy makers. He was the prototype of the incurably curious scholar and the incorruptible public servant.

Blair's career in Washington started in 1938, amidst the electrify- ing excitement of the New Deal, and was one long, tumultuous battle against industrial monopoly and establishment economics. He was a young economist with the Temporary National Economic Committee (the Joint Congressional Committee which produced the landmark hearings and reports on economic concentration), with the U.S. Smaller War Plants Corporation, and later chief economist with the Federal Trade Commission. The captains of industry and the spokes- men for special interests quickly (and justifiably) came to regard Blair as an able analyst and articulate gadfly who was prepared (as Paul Douglas once noted on the Senate floor) to struggle valiantly and

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against considerable odds to "preserve the system of competitive cap- italism from the encroachments of monopoly."

Blair reached the acme of his government career when, in 1956, he became chief economist of the Senate Subcommittee on Antitrust and Monopoly. With the firm support, first of Senator Kefauver and later Senator Hart, he was the central motive force behind the sub- committee's extensive investigations of the structure, conduct, and performance of such industries as steel, automobiles, drugs, and oil. He made the subcommittee a prime forum for collecting evidence on administered pricing and its implications. Following Gardiner C. Means, much to the chagrin of the conventional wisdom in economics, he sought to demonstrate that administered prices were perversely raised in the face of falling demand and deepening recession in order to meet predetermined profit targets. He tried to show how such per- verse pricing tended to vitiate conventional monetary and fiscal policy and to aggravate the problem of inflation in the midst of recession-a problem for which traditional economic theory had no satisfactory explanation or cure. The subcommittee's record, produced under Blair's guidance and contained in some 50 volumes, will be a treasure trove for scholars and government officials for years to come.

After his retirement from the Washington scene, Blair wrote Eco- nomic Concentration, a widely used textbook in industrial organiza- tion, rich in data and replete with insights growing out of his govern- ment experience. The Control of Oil, published within a week after his death, represents the culmination of Blair's quarter-century interest in the oil industry, dating back at least to 1952, when the Federal Trade Commission issued its "Report on the International Petroleum Cartel," prepared under his direction and rated by friendly and hostile critics alike as of historic importance. In the book, Blair argues that the Seven Sisters of the international oil industry exercise pervasive monopoly control of supply and markets which is so inimical to the public inter- est that it must either be controlled by effective regulation or, pre- ferably, neutralized through comprehensive dissolution, divorcement, and divestiture.

John M. Blair was an institutional economist par excellence. He was a soldier in "that small but brave army of men who preferred to see the trust obscurely and imperfectly rather than to maintain error, reached indeed with clearness and consistency and by easy logic but based on hypotheses inappropriate to the facts." The ranks of that army are woefully depleted by the deaths of John Blair and Philip Hart.

Walter Adams Michigan State University

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