Thomas K. McCraw

Thomas K. McCraw, Isidor Straus Professor of Business History, Emeritus, at Harvard Business School (HBS), and former editor of the Business History Review, died on Saturday, November 3, 2012, following a long illness. Tom, a life member of the Organization of American Historians, joined the HBS faculty in 1976 and retired in 2006. He served as editor and coeditor of the Business History Review from 1994 to 2005. He was a gifted teacher, a prize-winning and prolific author, a remarkable editor, and a friend and mentor to generations within the business history community, and he will be deeply missed.

Tom wrote on a diversity of themes, always in a graceful and accessible style. The volumes that came from his graduate work, Morgan vs. Lilienthal: The Feud within the TVA (1970) and TVA and the Power Fight, 1933–1939 (1971) were inspired by his father’s work for the Tennessee Valley Authority. He wrote in the Preface to TVA and the Power Fight, “Of the many TVA employees who helped me, I owe the most to my father, John C. McCraw, a TVA engineer since 1933.” Both books explore government-business relations, a subject Tom continued to pursue in the edited collection Regulation in Perspective: Historical Essays (1981), and Prophets of Regulation: Charles Francis Adams, Louis D. Brandeis, James M. Landis, Alfred E. Kahn. Prophets of Regulation won the Pulitzer Prize for History in 1985 and, in 1986, the Thomas Newcomen Award for the Best Book on Business History. The New York Times described the book as “an exacting an illuminating account” that “explains sophisticated economic theory in accessible terms.”

The edited collection America versus Japan (1986) reveals Tom’s emerging interest in the competitive advantages of national economies. The textbook Tom edited, Creating Modern Capitalism: How Entrepreneurs, Companies, and Countries Triumphed in Three Industrial Revolutions (1997), a comparative study of the business histories of the UK, Germany, the US, and Japan, developed this interest and was used to teach the course “Creating Modern Capitalism,” required of all 900 first-year MBA students at HBS from 1996 to 2004. In this course, Tom and his colleagues, including Richard Tedlow and Nancy Koehn, introduced students to the idea that there were alternatives to American-style capitalism. The textbook also provided an important building block for the recent revival of interest in the history of capitalism in US history departments. Another notable book is American Business, 1920–2000: How It Worked (2000; revised edition 2009). Rather than being a simple march through events and major businesses, Tom focuses on the concept of decision rights, and where they are located in successful organizations.

The opening line of Prophet of Innovation: Joseph Schumpeter and Creative Destruction (2007) is an apt summary of the book: “This biography, by necessity, has two protagonists: Joseph Alois Schumpeter (1883–1950) and the phenomenon of capitalist innovation.” Not only does Tom succeed in delineating both protagonists, he also evokes Schumpeter’s milieu: fin de siècle Austria, Weimar Germany, and the US during and after World War II. The book received the Hagley Prize for the Best Book on Business History, the Joseph J. Spengler Prize for the Best Book on the History of Economics, and the biennial prize for research on innovation given by the International Joseph A. Schumpeter Society. In a review of Prophet of Innovation, the Economist wrote that McCraw “succeeds in getting inside the economist’s head, explaining not just what he thought but why he thought it. Beyond this, he also succeeds in painting a portrait of his times.” The book helped bring Schumpeter wider attention and recognition. In 2009, for example, the Economist started a new column titled “Schumpeter.”

The Founders and Finance: How Hamilton, Gallatin, and Other Immigrants Forged a New Economy, which was published shortly before Tom’s death, also uses biography, this time as a lens to examine the fiscal crisis facing the newly-established United States and the solutions that Hamilton and Gallatin devised to create long-term economic success. This book, and another that he was planning at the time of his death, focuses on the contributions of immigrants to building the US financial system (Hamilton grew up in St. Croix; Gallatin in Geneva). A review essay of The Founders and Finance is forthcoming in the Business History Review.

Tom began his academic career as a professor in the history department at the University of Texas at Austin, but came to Harvard Business School in 1973–74 on a Harvard-Newcomen Fellowship in Business History. He returned in 1976 for a two-year appointment as a Visiting Associate Professor and was named a full professor with tenure in 1978. He became the Straus professor in 1989. At HBS, with his fellow business historians Richard Tedlow and Nancy Koehn, he built enrollment for the course “The Coming of Managerial Capitalism” from 96 in 1979 to 406 in 1999. McCraw was president (1989–90) and a trustee of the Business History Conference, which presented him with its Lifetime Achievement Award for scholarship in 2009.

Geoffrey Jones, the current incumbent of the Straus professorship, remembers Tom thus: “A prolific and lucid author, he repeatedly made the case that history matters to the concerns of today. He was a master of using biography to deepen understanding of highly complex issues, but he was also a remarkable synthesizer, a skill he employed to pioneer the teaching of global business history in the 1990s. Charismatic, brilliant, and generous, Tom inspired generations of colleagues and students.”

Tom is survived by his wife, Susan (Morehead), his daughter Elizabeth McCarron, his son Thomas K. McCraw Jr., his brother, John C. McCraw, and three grandchildren.

—Harvard Business School
November, 2012