Adolf A. Berle

Career

Early career

Upon graduation Berle joined the US Army. His first assignment as an intelligence officer was to assist in increasing sugar production in the Dominican Republic by working out property and contractual conflicts among rural landowners. Immediately after World War I, Berle became a member of the American delegation to the Paris Peace Conference, advocating for smaller nations' rights of self-determination. In 1919, Berle moved to New York City and became a member of the law firm of Berle, Berle and Brunner.

The Modern Corporation and Private Property

Berle became a professor of corporate law at Columbia Law School in 1927 and remained on the faculty until retiring in 1964. He is best known for his groundbreaking work in corporate governance that he co-authored, with economist Gardiner Means, The Modern Corporation and Private Property. It is the most quoted text in corporate governance studies. Berle and Means showed that the means of production in the US economy were highly concentrated in the hands of the largest 200 corporations, and within the large corporations, managers controlled firms despite shareholders' formal ownership. Berle theorized that the facts of economic concentration meant that the effects of competitive-price theory were largely mythical. While some advocated trust busting, breaking up the concentrations of firms into smaller entities to restore competitive forces, Berle believed that that would be economically inefficient. Instead, he argued for government regulation and became identified with the school of business statesmanship, which advocated that corporate leadership accept (and theorized that they had, to a great extent, already accepted) that they must fulfill responsibilities toward society in addition to their traditional responsibilities toward shareholders. Corporate law should reflect this new reality, he wrote in The Modern Corporation: "The law of corporations, accordingly, might well be considered as a potential constitutional law for the new economic state, while business practice is increasingly assuming the aspect of economic statesmanship."

Roosevelt's Brain Trust

Berle was an original member of Franklin D. Roosevelt's "Brain Trust", a group of advisers who developed policy recommendations. Berle's focuses ranging from economic recovery to diplomatic strategy during Roosevelt's 1932 election campaign. Roosevelt's "Commonwealth Club Address", a speech written by Berle on government involvement in industrial and economic policy, was ranked in 2000 as the second-best presidential campaign speech of the 20th century by public address scholars. While remaining an informal adviser of Roosevelt after the election, Berle returned to New York City and became a key consultant in the successful mayoral election campaign of reformer Fiorello LaGuardia. From 1934 to 1938, Berle managed the city's fiscal affairs as its last Chamberlain. He was later appointed by La Guardia to the New York City Housing Authority, succeeding Baruch Charney Vladeck.

Assistant Secretary of State for Latin American Affairs

Then, from 1938 to 1944, Berle was Assistant Secretary of State for Latin American Affairs. Throughout the Roosevelt administration, Berle consulted on important international and industrial New Deal projects, such as the creation of the St. Lawrence Seaway, the development of the administration's Good Neighbor Policy toward Latin America, and the establishment of the International Civil Aviation Organization. Outside of Latin America, Berle argued "that control of the incomparable energy reserves of the Middle East would yield 'substantial control of the world.'" by 1941, Berle had charge of the intelligence activities in the State Department, working with the FBI in Latin America and the OSS in Europe. He was in touch with anti-fascist and anti-Communist Europeans, with the goal of building a liberal democratic coalition in Europe. Berle became entangled in incessant turf wars among intelligence agencies. Critics on the left accused him of being too hostile toward Moscow, and Secretary of State Cordell Hull was annoyed at his access to Roosevelt. In 1944 he was reassigned to take charge of negotiation with the Allies regarding a postwar commercial aviation agreement.

National Lawyers Guild

In 1939, Berle became an early member of the National Lawyers Guild (NLG). According to the NLG's A History of the National Lawyers Guild 1937-1987, two factions arose as early as 1940. External events heightening these tensions included the Hitler-Stalin Pact of September (1939), the Russian invasion of Finland (1940). One faction, led by Berle and Morris Ernst, supported New Deal policies. The other, led by Osmond Fraenkel and Thomas I. Emerson, supported freedom of speech and press as well as Anti-Fascism (seen at the time as a Popular Front stance, thus pro-Communist). Other issues supported by Fraenkel, Emerson, the National Executive Board and many chapters included: support for Loyalist Spain, criticism of J. Edgar Hoover and the FBI, and support for labor unions. Berle and Ernst recommended anti-communist oaths, which Fraenkel and Emerson opposed. Many Berle and Ernst supporters left the NLG by 1940. During the NLG's 1940 convention, newly elected president Robert W. Kenny of California and secretary Martin Popper of New York sought to persuade members to return. During a phone call from Kenny, Berle gave him a short list of lawyers to leave as a simple matter of "cleaning house": Kenny rejected the request.

Alger Hiss

During his tenure as Assistant Secretary of State, Berle rented Woodley Mansion, which had once been owned by Grover Cleveland and Martin Van Buren, from secretary of war Henry Stimson in 1939. On September 2, Whittaker Chambers arrived at Woodley to tell Berle that several senior government officials, including Alger Hiss, a respected member of the State Department, were members of a Soviet "apparatus" designed to influence US policy and pass classified documents and information to the Soviets. Chambers's autobiography asserts that Berle and the journalist who set up the meeting, Isaac Don Levine, met with Roosevelt and conveyed what Chambers told them, but Roosevelt unequivocally refused to take any action. Hiss remained at the State Department during and after the war in positions, including as Roosevelt's principal adviser on Soviet affairs at the Yalta conference, as a delegate to the Dumbarton Oaks Conference and as Secretary General of the San Francisco conference establishing the United Nations. In 1948, Chambers repeated his accusations to the House Committee on Un-American Activities. Hiss denied the accusation in testimony to the Committee, leading to his trial and conviction for perjury. Berle provided incorrect and misleading testimony before the House Committee about his meeting with Chambers, which was contradicted by both his notes taken subsequent to the meeting and a personal diary entry that acknowledged that Chambers had implicated Hiss in espionage. Explaining Berle's evasive testimony, Allen Weinstein wrote in his book Perjury: The Hiss-Chambers Case: "His major concern in 1948, at a time when Berle was a Liberal Party leader in New York working for Truman's election, was to defuse, if possible, the influence of anti-Communist sentiment and of the case itself in that election year."

In 1943, Berle's duties in the State Department involved political supervision of the various clandestine activities necessitated by the war. Working with his assistant Charles W. Yost, Berle liaised with the OSS, and with the Joint Intelligence Committee of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.

Berle also was a major architect in the development of federal farm and home owners' mortgage programs and in the expansion of the Reconstruction Finance Corporation. He was elected a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1944.

After World War II

After the war, Berle served as Ambassador to Brazil from 1945 to 1946. In October 1945, two days after the deposition of president Getúlio Vargas, Berle pledged for the freedom of the Brazilian communists who were being incarcerated by the government since the beginning of the month.

Berle served on the board of directors at the Society for the Investigation of Human Ecology, a front organization for the CIA’s MKUltra program. "I am frightened about this one," Berle wrote in his diary, regarding the organization's work on mind control. "If the scientists do what they have laid out for themselves, men will become manageable ants. But I don't think it will happen."

Berle was a founding member of the Liberal Party of New York, a breakaway faction of the American Labor Party, which had lost support as a result of its sponsorship of Congressman Vito Marcantonio, a Communist sympathizer. For nearly a decade, Berle served as chairman of the Liberal Party. His main goal was to fight off far-left and Communist influences. He also chaired the Twentieth Century Fund for the two decades following World War II.

Berle briefly returned to government service for the first half of 1961, serving under President John F. Kennedy as head of an interdepartmental task force on Latin American affairs. During that time, he was primarily involved in forming the US response to a newly communist Cuba, which included both the failed Bay of Pigs invasion and the initiation of the Alliance for Progress, an economic development policy aimed at the region.

Berle continued to write academic work related to corporate law. His article on "Property, Production and Revolution" was a key statement of the theory behind the Great Society program of President Lyndon B. Johnson. He was elected to the American Philosophical Society in 1965.

Personal life

Adolf Berle married Beatrice Bishop (1902–1993), the daughter of Cortlandt Field Bishop (1870–1935) and Amy Bend (1870–1957), in 1927. Beatrice was the granddaughter George Hoffman Bend (1838–1900), a member of the New York Stock Exchange and prominent in New York Society. Adolf and Beatrice had two daughters and a son. He had ten grandchildren.

• Beatrice Van Cortlandt Berle, who married Dean Winston Meyerson in 1953.
• Alice Bishop Berle, who married Clan Crawford, Jr. in 1949.
• Peter Adolf Augustus Berle III (1937–2007), a lawyer and member of the New York Assembly who married Lila Sloane Wilde in 1960.

In 1971, Berle died in New York City, aged 76. His wife edited and published selections from his diaries posthumously in 1973 as Navigating the Rapids: From the Papers of Adolf A. Berle.

Legacy

According to historian Ellis W. Hawley:

Of the “service intellectuals” helping to shape modern American government, Adolf Berle was one of the most brilliant, versatile, and influential. Moving in and out of governmental positions, attaching himself to rising men of power, and overwhelming weaker personalities with the sheer force of his intellect and the amazing breadth of his expertise, he helped to shape and Implement new policies in such diverse areas as corporate taxation, railroad reorganization, trade relations, sugar controls, Latin American affairs, and urban planning. Through his writings, moreover, he became a leading articulator and shaper of what later scholars would call “Corporate liberalism.” In The Modern Corporation and Private Property, he not only documented the rise of a managerial elite but set forth the possibility of its becoming a “neutral technocracy” imbued with an overriding sense of social responsibility and public trusteeship.