Thomas North Whitehead

Thomas North Whitehead (31 December 1891, Cambridge, England – 22 November 1969, Cambridge, Massachusetts) was an early English human relations theorist and researcher, best known for The Industrial Worker, a two-volume statistical analysis of the Hawthorne experiments. He worked as a professor at Harvard University and Radcliffe College, and in the British Foreign Office during World War II.

Whitehead was the son of the prominent English philosopher Alfred North Whitehead, and was known as "North" to his family. He read economics at Trinity College, Cambridge, earning a B.A. in 1913. He then did graduate studies in mechanical engineering at University College London.

Whitehead served as an army officer in France and East Africa during World War I, taking a leave from his graduate studies to do so. On the completion of his studies in 1920 after the war, he began working for the Admiralty, and remained there until his 1931 move to Harvard.

During World War II, he again took a leave, this time from his professorship at Harvard, to work as an expert on American relations in the British Foreign Office. In 1940, before America entered the war, he advised Winston Churchill that American isolationism would not be a permanent obstacle, and after the Pearl Harbor attacks he communicated a message of solidarity to Franklin D. Roosevelt. It was also Whitehead's suggestion that Churchill compare America's proposed Lend-Lease policy to the Magna Carta, and that one of the original copies of the Magna Carta then on display in America be made into a more permanent gift to seal the deal. However, this proposal fell through because the British government did not own any of the four surviving copies of the Magna Carta.

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