Francis Amasa Walker

• 1. Introduction

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  Francis Amasa Walker died on the 5th of January 1897 after returning from a dedication ceremony deep in the wilderness of Northern New York. He was exhausted and ill, and apoplexy took him within days. His funeral was held at Trinity Church in Boston, the very same church he had once threatened to build next to as a fundraising gambit. Walker was fifty-six years old.

  In that short life, he had commanded troops at some of the Civil War's bloodiest engagements, escaped Confederate captivity by swimming a river in the dark, led two of the nation's most consequential census operations, helped found the American Economic Association, and turned a financially troubled technical school into one of the world's great universities. He was also, by the end of his career, one of the most influential voices for restricting immigration along racial lines. Walker's legacy is one of the sharpest contradictions in American intellectual history: a man who broadened economic theory and expanded higher education, and who also supplied the intellectual framework for nativist exclusion. How one person carried all of that is the question this documentary sets out to answer.

• 2. A Boston Childhood

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  Oliver Wendell Holmes Sr. was the next-door neighbor when Walker was a small child in Boston, and the two families' sons grew up as playmates. Walker was born on the 2nd of July 1840, the youngest child of Amasa Walker, an economist and politician who had once run for mayor of Boston. The family moved to North Brookfield, Massachusetts in 1843, and it was there that Walker's education began in earnest at the age of seven.

  He studied Latin at various schools in Brookfield before being sent to Leicester Academy at twelve. By fourteen he had finished his college preparation, and he spent an additional year studying Greek and Latin under Lucy Stone, who would later become a prominent suffragist and abolitionist. Walker entered Amherst College at fifteen, a year earlier than his father would have preferred. Amasa Walker believed his son too young for Harvard and insisted he stay at Amherst, where Francis had already enrolled.

  At Amherst, Walker earned the Sweetser Essay Prize and the Hardy Prize for extemporaneous speaking. He joined and withdrew from Alpha Sigma Phi because of what he called "rowdyism," eventually settling with Delta Kappa Epsilon. He graduated in 1860 as a Phi Beta Kappa student with a degree in law and immediately joined the Worcester law firm of Charles Devens and George Frisbie Hoar. Devens, his legal mentor, would soon lead Walker into combat.

• 3. War and Capture

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  Walker enlisted as a sergeant major on the 1st of August 1861, after the commission he had been promised never materialized. By the 14th of September that same year, his commanding officer Charles Devens had already recommended him for reassignment as assistant adjutant general under brigadier general Darius N. Couch, with a promotion to captain. Walker would not see his first combat until May 1862 at the Battle of Williamsburg, but the war would mark his body permanently.

  At the Battle of Chancellorsville in May 1863, an exploding shell shattered Walker's left hand and wrist and lacerated his neck. A record from the 1880 census later documented what the doctors found: a compound fracture of the metacarpal bones of the left hand resulting in permanent extension. More than three decades after the battle, Walker received one of the first radiographs in the United States, which captured the full extent of that damage.

  Walker was promoted to lieutenant colonel on the 1st of January 1863, then to brevet colonel during the Richmond-Petersburg campaign. His capture came on the 25th of August 1864, when Confederate forces surrounded him at the Second Battle of Ream's Station. He escaped a marching column two days later but was recaptured by the 51st North Carolina Infantry after nearly drowning trying to swim across the Appomattox River. He was taken to Libby Prison in Richmond, where his older brother was also being held.

  In October 1864 Walker was released in a prisoner exchange. He resigned his commission on the 8th of January 1865 due to his injuries and deteriorating health. Major general Winfield Scott Hancock subsequently recommended Walker for a brevet brigadier generalship, citing his gallantry at Chancellorsville. President Andrew Johnson nominated him for the honor on the 9th of July 1866, and the Senate confirmed it on the 23rd of July.

• 4. Counting the Nation

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  Walker's appointment as superintendent of the 1870 census came by way of a letter from Secretary of the Interior Jacob D. Cox on the 29th of January 1869. The census that followed was an exercise in frustration. Walker lacked authority over the personnel, methods, or timing of the collection, all of which were manipulated by local political interests. It was also the first census in which emancipated African Americans would be fully counted. The work finished months behind schedule, and the public criticism contributed to a deterioration in Walker's health the following spring.

  What redeemed the 1870 effort was the Statistical Atlas of the United States, which Walker produced in the years after the count was finished. It was the first time visual statistics and maps had been used to report census results. The Atlas won Walker a first-class medal from the International Geographical Congress and formal praise from the secretary of the Smithsonian Institution.

  The 1880 census was a different operation. A new law, championed by James A. Garfield, allowed Walker to appoint trained enumerators free from political manipulation. When the 1880 count suggested that the Southern states' population had increased from 1870 at an improbable rate, an investigation confirmed that the 1870 figures had been wrong. Walker publicized the discrepancy, even though doing so directly discredited his earlier work.

  The 1880 census produced twenty-two volumes and was widely regarded as the best census the nation had conducted to that point. Walker used the moment to advocate loudly for a permanent United States Census Bureau. After Garfield's victory in the 1880 presidential election, speculation ran high that Walker would be appointed Secretary of the Interior. He chose MIT instead.

• 5. Walker's Economics

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  "The Wages Question," published in 1876, was Walker's first major scholarly work, and it set out to demolish the wage-fund doctrine, which held that wages were drawn from a fixed pool of capital and could not rise without some workers losing their share. Walker's alternative framing, which came to be called the residual theory of wage distribution, held that wages were what remained after other claimants on output were paid. His arguments later set the stage for John Bates Clark's marginal productivity theory.

  At the 1878 International Monetary Conference in Paris, efforts to re-establish an international silver standard were defeated. Walker had to write his report on the Exposition Universelle in only four days and returned home in October that year exhausted and discouraged. The trip nonetheless established his commanding reputation in monetary affairs.

  His 1883 book "Land and Its Rent," delivered first as Harvard lectures, was a direct response to Henry George's "Progress and Poverty" of 1879. Walker argued that economic depressions were caused not by land speculation, as George claimed, but by contraction of the money supply. He also disputed George's assumption that technical progress was always labor-saving.

  His 1896 book "International Bimetallism" landed in the middle of the presidential race between William Jennings Bryan and William McKinley. Bryan's Cross of Gold speech directly engaged Walker's position, quoting arguments about international monetary cooperation and rejecting the case for waiting on other nations to act. Walker was supported by Republican bankers and statesmen including Henry Lee Higginson, George F. Hoar, and Henry Cabot Lodge. Walker's textbook "Political Economy," first published in 1883, became one of the most widely used in the nineteenth century; the economist Robert Solow later appraised the third edition, published in 1888, as representing the state of the art of economics at the time.

• 6. Building MIT

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  William Barton Rogers, MIT's founder, first approached Walker about the presidency in June 1880, after the institution's finances had been badly weakened by the Panic of 1873 and the Long Depression that followed. Walker accepted formally in early May 1881, was elected by the MIT Corporation on the 25th of May, and his formal introduction to the faculty did not happen until the 5th of November 1881, delayed by the assassination attempt on President Garfield and Garfield's death in September. On the 30th of May 1882, during Walker's first commencement, Rogers collapsed mid-speech. His last words were famously recorded as "bituminous coal."

  When Walker took the post, enrollment stood at 302 students and the endowment at $137,000. By the time he died in 1897, enrollment had reached 1,198, annual degrees granted had risen from 28 to 179, faculty had grown from 38 to 156, and the endowment had reached $1.798 million. New programs launched during his tenure included electrical engineering in 1882, chemical engineering in 1888, sanitary engineering in 1889, geology in 1890, and naval architecture in 1893.

  The funding was hard to come by. Walker lobbied the Massachusetts General Court for a $200,000 grant and ultimately secured $300,000 over two years. Massachusetts eventually provided a total of $1.6 million in grants before the practice ended in 1921. Walker also declined repeated overtures from Leland Stanford to lead the new university Stanford was founding in Palo Alto.

  His curricular reforms addressed accusations that MIT was merely a trade school. He established Course IX, a general course emphasizing economics, history, law, English, and modern languages. The course was dissolved after his death, but the debate it sparked over the role of humanities at MIT continued for seventy years. Walker Memorial building, a neo-classical structure on the Charles River campus opened in 1916, was dedicated to him. A bronze bust of Walker was later removed from its pedestal and moved to the MIT Museum in 2022.

• 7. Immigration and Controversy

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  In 1882, Walker published "The Growth of the United States," arguing for restrictions on immigration on the grounds that recent arrivals lacked the industrial and intellectual capacity of earlier generations. By 1896, his views had hardened further. In an article titled "Restriction of Immigration" in the Atlantic Monthly, he described immigrants from Austria-Hungary, Italy, and the Russian Empire in language that historian Mae Ngai later identified as foundational to the modern American nativist movement.

  Ngai characterized Walker's belief as holding that the United States "possessed a natural character and teleology, to which immigration was external and unnatural." Walker argued that unrestricted immigration would lead to what he called "race-suicide" for Anglo-Saxons, and he connected immigration to what he described as the fertility decline of nineteenth-century Native Americans.

  Walker's textbook "Political Economy," which Robert Solow praised for capturing the economics of its era, also drew criticism from Solow for incorporating unsupported judgments on the capacities of Native Americans and immigrants.

  His brief tenure as United States Commissioner of Indian Affairs from 1871 to 1872 produced a more complicated record. His 1874 book "The Indian Question" catalogued more than 100 tribes, described a population he estimated at 300,000 natives, and argued that the reservation system was failing largely because of illegal settler incursions into native lands. He called for consolidation of reservations, legal enforcement against those incursions, government-sponsored training programs, and federal financial support structured as an endowment rather than annual appropriations. He also argued in the book for reparations, writing that the United States would be "clearer in our lives" if it did "justice and show mercy to a race which has been impoverished that we might be made rich." His ultimate conclusion, however, was that assimilation had to be the end goal. The Francis A. Walker Medal, awarded by the American Economic Association beginning in 1947, was discontinued in 1982, and the bronze bust at MIT was relocated in 2022, the same year that MIT's reckoning with his legacy became formal and public.