Philip Taft

Philip Taft (March 22, 1902 – November 17, 1976) was a noted labor historian whose research focused on the labor history of the United States and the American Federation of Labor.

Taft was born in 1902 in Syracuse, New York. His father died when he was still a young boy. His mother moved the family to New York City, where she took up work as a house cleaner.

Living in youth hostels and traveling the country by hopping trains, he took a long series of odd and day-laborer jobs: errand boy, factory worker, stable boy, power plant worker, ore freighter coalman, farm hand, oil field worker, mule skinner and many more. Taft joined the Industrial Workers of the World and, while working in the northern Great Plains as a harvest hand, became an organizer. Later he assisted with legal defense of IWW members in New York City where he was befriended by Roger Baldwin, a founder of the American Civil Liberties Union.

Taft attended night school in New York City and obtained a high school diploma in 1928. At the age of 26, he enrolled at the University of Wisconsin–Madison and graduated in 1932 with a bachelor's degree in economics. He then entered the doctoral program in economics at the University of Wisconsin–Madison. In graduate school, he took a job conducting research for one of his professors, Selig Perlman. Taft's contribution to the work was so significant that Perlman made him a co-author on volume four of "History of Labor in the United State" in 1935. In the same year he earned his doctorate.

Taft worked for the Wisconsin Industrial Commission and the federal Resettlement Administration before taking a job as an associate economist at the Social Security Administration in 1936. He was appointed an assistant professor of economics at Brown University in Providence, Rhode Island in 1937. He was chairman of the Economics Department from 1949 to 1953.

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