Stuart Chase

Stuart Chase (March 8, 1888 – November 16, 1985) was an American economist, social theorist, and writer whose work ranged across consumer protection, political economy, general semantics, and the social sciences. Born in Somersworth, New Hampshire, he came from a New England family that had lived in the region since the 17th century. His father, Harvey Stuart Chase, was a public accountant, and Chase followed that path at first, attending the Massachusetts Institute of Technology from 1907 to 1908 and graduating from Harvard University in 1910 as a public accountant.

After Harvard, Chase joined his father’s accounting business in Boston, but he did not remain there. In 1917 he left accounting for a post with the Food Administration of the Federal Trade Commission in Washington, D.C. At the commission, he investigated waste and corruption, including work on the meat-packing industry with Upton Sinclair. That experience helped set the pattern of his public life: he wrote about systems, institutions, and the gap between what was promised and what ordinary people actually received.

Chase’s early political life took in a wide range of reform causes, including the single tax, women’s suffrage, birth control, and socialism. His thought was shaped by Henry George, Thorstein Veblen, Fabian socialism, and, for a time, Communist social and educational experiments in the Soviet Union around 1930. Yet he was broadly a modern American liberal. In 1921 he joined Veblen in the Technical Alliance, later connected with Technocracy Incorporated, and he also worked with the Labor Bureau, which served labor unions and cooperatives.

He became especially known for books that criticized waste, advertising, and unchecked business practices. The Tragedy of Waste appeared in 1925, and Your Money’s Worth, written with Frederick J. Schlink and published in 1928, examined advertisements that promised more than products delivered. In 1929 Chase co-founded Consumers’ Research, a consumer protection advocacy organization. He also traveled to the Soviet Union in 1927 with members of the First American Trade Union Delegation and co-authored a book that praised Soviet experiments in agricultural and social management.

In 1932, Chase published A New Deal, a title that became associated with the economic programs of President Franklin Roosevelt. He also wrote “A New Deal For America” for The New Republic, published shortly before Roosevelt used the phrase “a new deal” in accepting the Democratic presidential nomination, though whether Roosevelt’s speechwriter took the phrase from Chase is unknown. Later books showed the breadth of his interests: The Tyranny of Words in 1938 popularized Alfred Korzybski’s theory of general semantics, while The Proper Study of Mankind in 1948 introduced the social sciences to several college campuses. He opposed U.S. entry into World War II in The New Western Front, then later criticized Stalin’s USSR and the Communist Party USA while also warning that McCarthyites and demagogues confused the innocent with the guilty.

Chase’s private life also crossed into his work. He married Margaret Hatfield in 1914, had two children, Sonia and Robert, divorced in 1929, and in 1930 married Marian Tyler, a violinist and staff member at The Nation who collaborated with him on several books. In the 1960s, during Lyndon B. Johnson’s presidency, Chase supported the Great Society policies. He died in Redding, Connecticut. His words still attract readers because he asked plain questions about belief, language, money, and power. One line associated with him, “For those who believe, no proof is necessary. For those who don’t believe, no proof is possible,” fits a writer who spent much of his life testing public claims against lived results.