Our Own Hall of Fame

ROBERT R. NATHAN

NATHAN ‘BEST THINKER’

New Deal Brain Truster Sees Full Turn to Profs

DAYTON DAILY NEWS   February 18, 1961

BY MARY ELLEN LYNCH

Daily News Staff Writer

     The first economics that Robert R. Nathan came to grips with involved how to make a profit peddling pretzels around market houses and candy in the old Lyric burlesque theater.

     He made his projects pay (they also included jerking sodas, selling hose, box lunches to factory workers and peanuts at the circus) and they helped him get through the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School of Finance.

     BEHIND IT WAS THE childhood that began when he and his twin brother, Larry, were born, in Dayton on Christmas day, 1908.  Nathan was a bright student at Patterson elementary school, a brighter one at Stivers high school (editor of the paper, Class of ’27).

     He won a master’s degree in 1933 and a law degree from Georgetown university five years later.

     By that time, lanky, pipe-smoking Nathan was already entrenched in Washington as one of the most influential of the New Deal “brain trusters.”

     He started as an economist for the Department of Commerce, soon became chief of the department’s national income division and wrote several books, some of which are still used as college texts.

AS WAR LOOMED in 1940, he was named one of the 10 outstanding young men in the United States by the Junior Chamber of Commerce, turned down a lucrative business offer and joined the National Defense Advisory commission to become one of the earliest figures in America’s defense program.

     Two years later War Production board chief Donald M. Nelson picked Nathan as “the best thinker I can find” to head the board’s powerful three-man planning committee.  The trio was charged with making swift policy and planning recommendations on every phase of war production and purchasing.

     But Nathan refused to seek deferment, was drafted into the Army as a private and had the recoil on a 1903 Springfield rifle knock a hunk out of his nose before an old sacroliac ailment prompted his medical discharge late in 1943.

     Back in government, Nathan became the No. 2 man in the Office of War Mobilization and Reconversion, played a key role in the transition back to peacetime economy.

     In the spring of 1946 he resigned to head Robert R. Nathan Associates, a Washington economic consulting firm.

     SINCE THEN he has surveyed the crude rubber and pepper situation in Indonesia, organized a two-year study of Burma’s national economy, served as a consultant for the United States, France, Israel and the United Nations Korean Reconstruction agency.

     Nathan has directed economic surveys for the CIO and served as chairman of the executive committee of Americans for Democratic Action.

     Last fall he stumped the nation to urge the election of John F. Kennedy.

     At 52, he looks back on his own days as a young New Deal “Brain Truster” and happily predicts: “Professors again will be welcome in Washington.”

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