"The basic moral problem that faces man as
he moves into the age of automation, the age
of accelerating conquest of nature, is
whether he is really fit to live in an
industrial society; whether his institutions
will adjust rapidly enough; whether he will
rivet himself with an absurd institution
like full employment in the economic order
when it is not only unnecessary but
unadministratable in anything but a slave
society; whether freed from the necessity to
devote his brain and brawn to the production
of goods and services, he can address
himself to the work of civilization itself."
(Louis O. Kelso, 1964)
ESOP:
Employee Stock Ownership Plan. The ESOP is
designed to build capital ownership into
employees of a business in the course of
efficiently financing its growth or other
worthwhile corporate objectives, without
touching employee paychecks or savings. As
to employees, the ESOP is that
constitutionally-mandated missing link that
gives them access to credit to buy the
employer's capital stock and, without
personal risk or liability, to pay for it
from the pre-tax earnings of the assets
underlying that stock. In other words,
equalizing their access to capital credit
with that of the already rich.
MUCOP:
Mutual Capital Ownership Plan. This
financing method is intended to provide
pooled ESOP financing for a number of
corporations while building diversified
portfolios of their stocks individually for
their employees.
CSOP:
Consumer Stock Ownership Plan. This
technique is intended for use by public
utilities, banks, insurance companies, and
other businesses where long-term
relationships between the producer and its
customers are the rule. Through the
intelligent use of credit, it builds capital
ownership for customers while providing
unlimited low-cost financing for growth of
the corporation, thus raising the power of
the consumers to pay for their purchases of
goods and services while raising the power
of the corporation to produce goods and
services. It would normally be used in
conjunction with an ESOP for employees.
GSOP:
General Stock Ownership Plan. The GSOP is
designed to build capital ownership into
politically designated classes of consumers
within the jurisdiction of the authorizing
government - state, local or federal.
ICOP:
Individual Capital Ownership Plan. A
financing device intended to create viable
capital estates for selected categories of
individuals while opening broad markets for
equity financing by corporations.
RECOP:
Residential Capital Ownership Plan. This
financing plan, in combination with
commercially insured credit financing, would
enable home buyers to purchase homes at less
than 25 percent of the out-of-pocket
principal and interest cost of similar
transactions today, by having their
acquisitions treated by tax and other
relevant laws as capital assets, rather than
as consumer items as at present
COMCOP:
Commercial Capital Ownership Plan. Ownership
of rental structures, such as office and
apartment buildings, factories, mines,
railroads, hotels, resorts, etc., is a major
source of capital cash income. Today such
structures and real estate generally are
owned by the excessively wealthy (whose
resulting income is thereby sterilized for
purposes of the consumer economy and denied
to those who could use it if the financing
had been COMCOP structured), who use such
acquisitions not only to satisfy their
antisocial greed, but to wipe out their
income taxes. COMCOP would enable commercial
structure ownership legitimately to be
spread over large numbers of people where it
can raise their power to produce the incomes
they need to make them powerful and
self-supporting consumers, maintain their
lifestyles, and to diversify their holdings
in businesses in which they become employed
as capital workers.
PUBCOP:
Public Capital Ownership Plan. This plan is
designed to provide low-cost financing for
capital instruments used by public bodies of
all types - office buildings, streets and
sidewalks, parks, street lighting, schools,
universities, subways, waterworks, harbors,
etc. It permits broad individual ownership,
through facilities corporations, by great
numbers of people, while providing low-cost
capital facilities to be leased at market
rates to cities and other municipal
corporations, states, the federal
government, and other public bodies. PUBCOP
is another tool in the arsenal of binary
economics to assure that each individual can
become employed as a capital worker and that
governments do not acquire economic power
that should be diffused throughout the
citizenry. PUBCOP financing would employ the
dual functions of binary financing devices.
It would be a major means of eliminating the
cost of wasteful, inefficient, and
inadequate public employee pensions while
providing much greater economic security and
incomes, both before and after retirement,
to public employees and others.
All of these plans are discussed and
diagramed in more detail in
Democracy and Economic Power: Extending the
ESOP Revolution through Binary Economics.
All rights reserved under
International and Pan American
Copyright Conventions.
Library of Congress Catalog Card
Number:61-6562
Louis Kelso's books,
The Capitalist Manifesto
and
The New Capitalists,
are now available to download in PDF
form. You will need the
Adobe Acrobat Reader to view and
print them.
The Capitalist Manifesto and The New
Capitalists together comprise the first
public statement of Louis Kelso's seminal
contribution to political economics - a
thesis Mortimer J. Adler, the co-author,
declared "the first clear and systematic
statement of the idea of capitalism that has
ever been presented to the world."
Despite its Cold War title, The Capitalist
Manifesto of 1958 is neither a defense of
traditional capitalism nor a polemical call
to revolution in the style of The Communist
Manifesto of 1848. It is a theoretical
blueprint of the physical and institutional
structure of the western private property,
free market system identified by Adam Smith
and the classical economists; repudiated by
Karl Marx and the socialists,
and pragmatically compromised by J. Maynard
Keynes. It presents specific proposals for
correcting and perfecting the present system
in the line of, and in the light of, its own
logic and principles. It invites men and
women of good will to set to work on the
task of building an economically just and
generally affluent society on the foundation
of a Capitalism redeemed of its historical
flaws.
Louis Kelso's vision of Capitalism was, in
Dr. Adler's description, "the economically
free and classless society which supports
political democracy and which, above all,
helps political democracy to preserve the
institutions of a free society." To Dr.
Adler's mind, this conception was "the most
revolutionary idea of the century."
Ten years after his death Louis Kelso is
beginning to be recognized as the originator
of a genuinely new paradigm in political
economics. Although introduced more than
forty years ago, its concepts are still
virgin terrain because, despite their
osmotic influence in the United States,
western and eastern Europe, Russia and now
China, relatively few people are familiar
with them.
Make no mistake, Louis Kelso's ideas are
just as controversial today as when he and
Dr. Adler introduced them in 1958. The
Austrian economist Schumpeter famously
defined Capitalism as "creative
destruction." That is also the effect of a
new paradigm on its parent discipline. Louis
Kelso's new paradigm targets, first of all,
the conventional premises of economics. But
since those premises are also embedded in
western political, economic and business
institutions, particularly the institutions
of finance, Louis Kelso's binary view
exposes the fallacies at their heart as
well.
In showing the obsolete ideas at the root of
key institutions - the institutions that
concentrate wealth and frustrate the
operating logic of the free market - Louis
Kelso changes the terms of the age-old
debate between Conservatives and Liberals
and Capital and Labor. And in doing that, he
moves to new and higher ground the
ideological issues that have made western
society a battleground ever since the
Industrial Revolution. To understand Louis
Kelso's binary paradigm is to look at the
economic and political world with new eyes,
from an exhilarating new perspective. The
social implications of this new view are
revolutionary in the best sense of that
word.
Louis Kelso was fascinated by technology. He
began his investigation of the Great
Depression with painstaking research on the
effects of technological change on
occupations, industries and the
macro-economy. While still in law school, he
published a monograph on how the computer,
hardly invented then, would revolutionize
the practice of law. He eagerly looked
forward to the day when the computer would
make instantaneous world-wide communication
possible. Unfortunately he died a few years
before the Internet could make this a
reality for him.
Now as we enter the new century and the new
millennium, Louis Kelso's binary economic
paradigm is even more important than when
first introduced. The demise of the Soviet
Union has left the western market economy
free to dominate the world on its own terms.
Understanding market forces and learning how
to exploit them to build stable industrial
democracies that are also Good Societies for
everyone who lives in them is our most
urgent task. Louis Kelso has given us the
tools - both conceptual and practical - to
accomplish this task. He has also inspired
us with his generous vision of the Good
Society that advanced technology still
promises despite centuries of
misunderstanding and misuse.
In gratitude for the life and work of Louis
Kelso, and also in honor of his co-author,
the late Mortimer J. Adler, whose
encouragement and collaboration made these
books possible, the Kelso Institute takes
great pleasure in electronically publishing
both The Capitalist Manifesto and The New
Capitalists. In so doing, we fulfill Louis
Kelso's dearest wish in life - that his
ideas be made accessible to those who will
use them to build institutions that advance
civilization and support individuals in
realizing their highest potential.
Louis O.
Kelso and Patricia Hetter Kelso estimates of the
relative real inputs to production in the American
economy of Labor (Physical and Intellectual) and Capital
over time assuming reasonably competitive markets. So
ingrained is the “ethic” of the “Labor Theory of Value”
that they thought it best to refer to Capital Owners as
“Capital Workers” in keeping with their understanding
that Capital instruments do “Work” - as surely as the
most diligent human surrogate worker – and that indeed
the observable trend is for Capital Instruments to do
ever more of the Worlds “Work”. The reflexive prevalent
attitude of equating “Economic” man with Essential Human
Values including the whole vast array of values around
the “Work Ethic” all contribute to camouflage and
maintain the fundamental miss-match between the way
goods and services are produced and distributed and
particularly their trends projected into the future.
Cybernetic contributions (now almost exponential) are
only adding to the much longer Historical trend.
Represents US Economy but applies to World trending. HHC
Louis O.
Kelso and Patricia Hetter Kelso estimates of the
relative real inputs to production in the American
economy of Labor (Physical and Intellectual) and Capital
over time assuming reasonably competitive markets. So
ingrained is the “ethic” of the “Labor Theory of Value”
that they thought it best to refer to Capital Owners as
“Capital Workers” in keeping with their understanding
that Capital instruments do “Work” - as surely as the
most diligent human surrogate worker – and that indeed
the observable trend is for Capital Instruments to do
ever more of the Worlds “Work”. The reflexive prevalent
attitude of equating “Economic” man with Essential Human
Values including the whole vast array of values around
the “Work Ethic” all contribute to camouflage and
maintain the fundamental miss-match between the way
goods and services are produced and distributed and
particularly their trends projected into the future.
Cybernetic contributions (now almost exponential) are
only adding to the much longer Historical trend.
Represents US Economy but applies to World trending.
HHC
Chart of
concentration of capital ownership in the U.S. over
time. The same general pattern applies to virtually all
economies of and the World Economy as a whole –
Plutocratic ownership and control of the real means of
production. With “The Labor Theory of Value” it only
worsens. HHC - Below Quotes @
www.kelsoinstitute.org
"Conventional wisdom says there is only one way to earn
a living, and that's to work. Conventional wisdom
effectively treats
capital (land, structures, machines, and the like) as
though it were a kind of holy water that, sprinkled on
or about labor, makes
it more productive. Thus, if you have a thousand people
working in a factory and you increase the design and
power of the
machinery so that one hundred men can now do what a
thousand did before, conventional wisdom says, 'Voila!
The productivity
of the labor has gone up 900 percent!' I say 'hogwash.'
All you've done is wipe out 90 percent of the jobs, and
even the remaining
ten percent are probably sitting around pushing buttons.
What the economy needs is a way of legitimately getting
capital
ownership into the hands of the people who now don't
have it."
(Louis O. Kelso, Journal Asset Based Finance, 1982)
"The trouble with today's techniques of finance is that
they're designed to make the rich richer. None are
designed to make the
poor richer. That's why the poor are poor. Because
they're not rich."
(Louis O. Kelso, San Francisco Examiner & Chronicle,
1978)
"The Roman arena was technically a level playing field.
But on one side were the lions with all the weapons, and
on the other
the Christians with all the blood. That's not a level
playing field. That's a slaughter. And so is putting
people into the economy
without equipping them with capital, while equipping a
tiny handful of people with hundreds and thousands of
times more
than they can use."
(Louis O. Kelso, Bill Moyers: A World of Ideas, 1990)
Louis O. Kelso (1913-1991) was a
lawyer and
economic thinker who sought to find a way to
preserve
capitalism from the competition of
communism as an alternative within the context of
the early
Cold War.
His non-conformist "capitalism" might be compared to the
peoples' capitalism ideas of
G. K. Chesterton in which ownership is distributed
to as many people as possible within the economy. Kelso
developed the idea of
Binary Economics to explain the need for expanded
capital ownership in light of industrial production and
the dominance of capital instead of labor.
In 1956 Louis Kelso invented the Employee Stock
Ownership Plan (ESOP) to put his ideas into practice. In
1958 he collaborated with the philosopher
Mortimer Adler to write The Capitalist Manifesto
that is considered the primary source of his economic
theories. Kelso and Adler followed this book with The
New Capitalists (Random House, New York: 1961). Both
books are readable online from the Kelso Institute.
The distributive dynamics of capitalism by Louis O
Kelso, self-published; 2nd edition (1956)
The Capitalist Manifesto, by Louis O. Kelso and
Mortimer J. Adler, Random House, New York: 1958;
reprinted Greenwood Press, Westport, Connecticut:
1975. Also published in French, Spanish, Greek and
Japanese.
ISBN 0-8371-8210-7
The New Capitalists: A Proposal to Free Economic
Growth from the Slavery of Savings, by Louis O.
Kelso and Mortimer J. Adler, Random House, New York:
1961; reprinted Greenwood Press, Westport,
Connecticut: 1975. Also published in Japanese.
ISBN 0-8371-8211-5
Two-Factor Theory: The Economics of Reality, by
Louis O. Kelso and Patricia Hetter, Random House,
New York: 1967; paperback edition, Vintage Books:
1968. (Originally published under the title How to
Turn 80 Million Workers into Capitalists on Borrowed
Money.) Also published in Spanish and German.
Democracy and Economic Power: Extending the ESOP
Revolution Through Binary Economics, by Louis O.
Kelso and Patricia Hetter Kelso, Ballinger
Publishing Co., Cambridge, Massachusetts: 1986;
reprinted by University Press of America, Lanham,
Maryland: 1991. Also available in Russian and
Chinese.
ISBN 0-8191-7909-4
WRITINGS BY LOUIS O. KELSO
Karl Marx: The Almost Capitalist, American Bar
Association Journal, March, 1957.
[2]
Corporate Benevolence or Welfare Redistribution?,
The Business Lawyer, January, 1960.
Labor's Great Mistake: The Struggle for the Toil
State, American Bar Association Journal, February,
1960.
Welfare State - American Style, Challenge, The
Magazine of Economic Affairs, New York University,
October, 1963.
The Case for the 100% Dividend Payout, Trends
(published by Georgeson & Co.), New York, December,
1963.
Poverty and Profits, by Hostetler, Kelso, Long,
Oates, the Editors, Harvard Business Review,
September-October, 1964.
Beyond Full Employment, Title News (the Journal of
the American Land Title Association), November,
1964.
Cooperatives and the Economic Power to Consume, The
Cooperative Accountant (published by the National
Society of Accountants for Cooperatives), Winter,
1964.
Why Not Featherbedding?, Challenge,
September-October 1966. (Reprinted in American
Controversy: Readings and Rhetoric, by Paul K.
Dempsey and Ronald E. McFarland, Scott, Foresman and
Company, Glenview, Illinois: 1968.)
The Economic Foundation of Freedom, The American
Prospect: Insights into Our Next 100 Years, Houghton
Mifflin Company, Boston: 1977.
Labor's Untapped Wealth: An Address by Louis Kelso,
Air Line Pilot, October, 1984.
WRITINGS BY LOUIS O. KELSO AND PATRICIA HETTER KELSO
Uprooting World Poverty: A Job for Business,
Business Horizons, Fall, 1964. (Reprinted in
Mercurio, Anno VIII, No. 8, Rome, Italy, August,
1965; Far Eastern Economic Review, Vol. L, No. 1,
Hong Kong, October, 1965. Winner of the First Place
1964 McKinsey Award for Significant Business
Writing.)
Poverty's Other Exit, North Dakota Law Review,
January, 1965.
Equality of Economic Opportunity Through Capital
Ownership, Social Policies for America in the
Seventies, edited by Robert Theobald, Doubleday &
Co., New York: 1968. (Excerpts from this essay
reprinted in Current, April, 1968.)
Reparations and the Churches, Business Horizons,
December, 1969.
Invisible Violence of Corporate Finance, The
Washington Post, June 18, 1972.
Man Without Property, Business and Society Review,
Summer, 1972.
Corporate Social Responsibility Without Corporate
Suicide, Challenge, July-August, 1973.
Employee Stock Ownership Plan, Business & Government
Insider Newsletter, July 30, August 6 and August 13,
1973.
Employee Stock Ownership Plans: A Micro-Application
of Macro-Economic Theory, The American University
Law Review, Spring, 1977.
The Greatest Financial Planning Tool of All . . .
Could ESOP Save General Motors?, The Financial
Planner, November, 1981.
Sychophantasy in Economics: A Review of
George Gilder's Wealth and Poverty, The Great
Ideas Today, Encyclopœdia Britannica, Inc., Chicago:
1982.
The Right to Be Productive, The Financial Planner,
August and September, 1982.
Tax Reform Is Not the Answer, Chief Executive,
Spring, 1983.
How We Can Achieve Lifetime Employment, Chief
Executive, Autumn, 1983.
Damning Binary Economics With Faint Praise,
Workplace Democracy, Summer, 1987.
Leveraged Buyouts Good and Bad, Management Review,
November, 1987.
The Great Savings Snafu, Business and Society
Review, Winter, 1988.
Why Owner-Workers Are Winners, The New York Times,
January 29, 1989.
Why I Invented the ESOP LBO, Leaders,
October/November/December, 1989.
Don't Meddle With ESOPs, The Journal of Commerce,
October 2, 1989.
Looking in a Marxist Mirror, The Journal of
Commerce, January 11, 1991.
ALSO RECOMMENDED - BOOKS
Curing World Poverty: The New Role of Property,
edited by John H. Miller, C.S.C., S.T.D., Social
Justice Review, St. Louis: 1994.
Binary Economics: The New Paradigm, by Robert
Ashford and Rodney Shakespeare, University Press of
America, Lanham, Maryland: 1999.
ALSO RECOMMENDED - WRITINGS
The ESOP According to Kelso, by Stuart Nixon, Air
Line Pilot, October, 1984.
The World According to Kelso, by Steven Hayward,
Inland Business, April, 1987.
Louis Kelso, Capitalist, Bill Moyers: A World of
Ideas II, edited by Andie Tucher, Doubleday, New
York: 1990.
The Binary Economics of Louis Kelso: The Promise of
Universal Capitalism, by Robert H. A. Ashford,
Rutgers Law Journal, Vol. 22, No. 1, Fall, 1990.
Louis Kelso's Binary Economy, by Robert Ashford, The
Journal of Socio-Economics, Vol. 25, No. 1, 1996.
Binary Economic Modes for the Privatization of
Public Assets, by Jerry N. Gauche, The Journal of
Socio-Economics, Vol. 27, No. 3, 1998.
A New Market Paradigm for Sustainable Growth:
Financing Broader Capital Ownership with Louis
Kelso's Binary Economics, by Robert Ashford, Praxis:
The Fletcher Journal of Development Studies, Vol.
XIV, The Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy,
Global Development and Environment Institute, Tufts
University, Medford, Massachusetts: 1998.
The Theory of Productiveness: A Microeconomic and
Macroeconomic Analysis of Binary Growth and Output
in the Kelso System, by Stephen V. Kane, The Journal
of Socio-Economics, Vol. 29, No. 6, 2000.
The Ultimate Management Team, by Chris Bayers,
WIRED, January, 2002.
Employee Ownership and Corporate Performance: A
Comprehensive Review of the Evidence, The Journal of
Employee Ownership Law and Finance, Vol. 14, No. 1,
National Center for Employee Ownership (NCEO),
Oakland, California: 2002.
Binary Economics, Fiduciary Duties, and Corporate
Social Responsibility: Comprehending Corporate
Wealth Maximization and Distribution for
Stockholders, Stakeholders, and Society, by Robert
Ashford, Tulane Law Review, Vol. 76, No. 5-6, June,
2002.
"The Roman arena was technically a
level playing field. But on one side were the lions
with all the weapons, and on the other the Christians
with all the blood. That's not a level playing field.
That's a slaughter. And so is putting people into the
economy without equipping them with capital, while
equipping a tiny handful of people with hundreds and
thousands of times more than they can use."
--Louis O. Kelso in
Bill Moyers: A World of Ideas, (1990)
The
Dean of Writers on Labor Issues for the New York Times
for over 40 years!
December 23, 1993
A. H. Raskin, 82, Times Reporter and Editor, Dies
By RICHARD SEVERO
A. H. Raskin, an authority on labor whose articles and
editorials ran in The New York Times for more than four
decades, died yesterday at his home in Manhattan. He was
82.
The cause of death was cancer, said his wife, Marge.
Mr. Raskin served The Times as a reporter, editorial
writer and as assistant editor of the editorial page.
Informative but never strident or accusatory, Mr. Raskin
was noted both for the thoroughness of his research and
for the clarity with which he presented his findings,
even when they concerned complex economic issues that
many readers might find arcane. Some said they believed
he was especially searching when writing about
inflation. A Remembered Lesson
On one occasion, Mr. Raskin explained why. In 1924, he
said, while his family was living in Seattle, his
father, Henry Raskin, a fur trader, decided to spend
some time in Russia so that he could buy Siberian furs.
Thus, the Raskin family temporarily relocated in Berlin
to await visas. When they reached that city, an American
dollar was worth 1,000 German marks. A few months later,
with postwar Germany suffering under runaway inflation
and badgered by its World War I enemies to pay
reparations, the Raskins found that a dollar could fetch
4.2 trillion marks. The family never forgot it.
"Never in my later career as a labor writer and
analyst," he said, "could I accept with equanimity the
notion that 'a little inflation can be a good thing.' "
Mr. Raskin covered, among other things, the travails of
desperate people who sought work during the Great
Depression and, after World War II, the emergence of
labor unions and leaders who had the strength and
sophistication to make the American labor movement a
formidable force.
He also described some of labor's darkest problems. In
1952 his articles about wrongdoers encouraged the
American Federation of Labor to set up a special
antiracketeering committee. For his work in this period
he won the George Polk Memorial Award, a Page One Award
from the Newspaper Guild and an award from the Society
of Silurians, a group of professional journalists. A
Quip From Hoffa
But not everyone was always pleased by what he wrote.
James R. Hoffa, the head of the International
Brotherhood of Teamsters, told him, "Abe, you're going
to scratch yourself on your typewriter one day and die
of blood poisoning."
John B. Oakes, editor of The Times's editorial page from
1961 through 1976, recalled that in his editorial
writing Mr. Raskin dealt with everything affecting labor
in the broadest sense, as well as with a wide range of
international and domestic affairs. Mr. Raskin, he said,
was the first person he had asked to join his staff as
his deputy. He was, Mr. Oakes said yesterday, not only
The Times's expert but also a nationally recognized
voice in the field of labor and industrial relations.
Mr. Raskin's ability as a reporter to coax stories out
of his sources was legend. Stanley Levey, a colleague
who also wrote about labor for The Times, called Mr.
Raskin "one of the most amazing telephone manipulators
since Alexander Graham Bell." Born in Canada
Abraham Henry Raskin was born on April 26, 1911, in
Edmonton, Alberta. After the Berlin adventure, he
settled with his family in New York, where he received
his secondary-school education at Townsend Harris Hall.
In 1927 he entered City College and majored in education
and government. He became interested in journalism and
edited the student newspaper, yearbook and literary
magazine. He was elected president of his senior class
and was graduated, Phi Beta Kappa, in the class of 1931.
He remained at City College for a time doing graduate
work, mostly because he was unconvinced that any jobs
were available, at least jobs that he might want. He
furthered his interest in journalism by working as a
campus correspondent for The New York Times.
In March of 1934 he joined The Times as a reporter. He
was assigned to cover unemployment and the work-relief
agencies set up by the Government to see the nation
through the Depression. His editors took note of his
aggressiveness, and his first byline did not come
easily. But almost from the start copy editors noted
that Mr. Raskin was usually very accurate, seldom made
the same mistake twice and produced copy that required
almost no editing. A rarity among reporters of his
generation, he even typed well.
In 1940 he filed an exclusive account of David
Dubinsky's being assaulted by Joseph S. Fay at a
convention of the American Federation of Labor in New
Orleans. Mr. Raskin did not see the assault, but his
sources within the labor movement were such that he
received an accurate account of it. At the time, Mr.
Dubinsky was head of the International Ladies Garment
Workers Union; Mr. Fay ran the Union of Operating
Engineers. Mr. Dubinsky had said some things about labor
racketeers that Mr. Fay thought uncharitable. Mr.
Raskin's article made page 1 of The Times. In 1977 he
wrote with Mr. Dubinsky a memoir called "David Dubinsky:
A Life With Labor."
In World War II, Mr. Raskin served as chief of the
industrial services division of the Pentagon, a job in
which there was one memorable episode.
In April 1944 President Franklin D. Roosevelt was vexed
with Sewell Avery, who was president and chairman of
Montgomery Ward, the retail merchandising corporation.
Mr. Roosevelt wanted Mr. Avery to make peace with a
union, as ordered by the War Labor Board.
When Mr. Avery proved intractible, two soldiers under
Mr. Raskin's command appeared at his Chicago office and
picked him up, still in his chair, and removed him. The
Government seized all of Montgomery Ward's offices, held
them briefly, then returned them to the company.
In 1946 Mr. Raskin was discharged from the Army with the
rank of lieutenant colonel.
After returning to The Times he also acted as a
consultant to President Harry S. Truman on universal
training, a program the President proposed that would
have organized a citizen reserve to reinforce
professional armed forces. The plan, which called not
for drafting young men but for training them as
civilians, was never adopted by Congress. In those same
postwar years, Mr. Raskin also helped organize the
Defense Department's Division of Industrial Relations.
Assessing a Newspaper Strike
In 1961 he joined the editorial board of The Times and
three years later became assistant editor of the
editorial page. One of his most notable performances in
the 1960's was his lengthy account of the 114-day New
York newspaper strike of 1962-63, which appeared in the
news pages of The Times in its first issue after the
strike ended.
The effort was a journalistic tour de force that
provided New Yorkers with a candid appraisal of what the
strike had been all about. And although it was critical,
in some respects, of some Times executives, it was
printed without editorial deletions of sensitive
material.
Soon after it was printed, the chief negotiator for The
Times resigned. The article was hailed by, among others,
James A. Wechsler, who wrote in The New York Post:
"It was a remarkable exercise in many ways -- but
perhaps most remarkable because it suggested that not
all virtue was on one side in the long struggle and
that, in the view of men who had lived through the long
days and nights," The Times's management negotiator "had
not been a flawless figure."
Mr. Raskin retired from The Times in 1977 but continued
to write. For a time, he served as editor of The Journal
of International Labor Affairs, published by the
Department of Labor. In the autumn of 1990 he had a
stroke. A Change in Vocation
He endured the disabilites that followed with a
determination to overcome them, but speech remained
difficult if not impossible. In September 1992 the Op-Ed
page of The Times carried excerpts from a piece he had
written for Martha's Vineyard magazine.
He wrote: "I now realize that my vocation in life has
changed. Now I represent the one million Americans who
cannot speak for themselves. My plight and theirs are
one: to inform the public that those of us who have lost
the ability to invent fluent phrases or sentences have
not lost the ability to think. We retain the skill to
communicate our thoughts and feelings, whether through
writing, picture boards, pantomine or facial expression.
We can still speak! We hope that you will listen with
your ears, with your eyes and always with your heart."
In addition to his wife, Marge, Mr. Raskin is survived
by two children from his earlier marriage to Rose
Samrock, who died in 1989. They are a son, Donald, and a
daughter, Jane Brown. He is also survived by a brother,
Bernard Raskin; three stepchildren, Mary Lou Frankel,
Jill Isaacs and Geoffrey Campe; three grandchildren,
David Raskin, Carolyn Raskin and Sarah Verneuille, and
two great-grandchildren.
A service will be held at 11:30 tomorrow morning at the
Frank E. Campbell Funeral Home at 81st Street and
Madison Avenue in Manhattan.
Correction: December 24, 1993, Friday
Because of an editing error, an obituary yesterday about
A. H. Raskin, an authority on labor whose articles and
editorials ran in The New York Times for more than four
decades, misstated his source of information about an
assault by Joseph S. Fay on the garment union leader
David Dubinsky at a 1940 convention in New Orleans. Mr.
Raskin was present and witnessed the attack.
