Philip Taft was an American labor historian whose research focused on the labor history of the United States and the American Federation of Labor.
15 Facts About Philip Taft
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Philip Taft's father died when he was still a young boy.
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Philip Taft's mother moved the family to New York City, where she took up work as a house cleaner.
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Philip Taft joined the Industrial Workers of the World and, while working in the northern Great Plains as a harvest hand, became an organizer.
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Philip Taft attended night school in New York City and obtained a high school diploma in 1928.
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Philip 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.
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Philip Taft was appointed an assistant professor of economics at Brown University in Providence, Rhode Island, in 1937.
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Philip Taft was chairman of the Economics Department from 1949 to 1953.
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In 1952, Philip Taft pushed Brown University to join with a newly formed Rhode Island businessmen's committee to study the economic problems of the state.
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In 1963, Philip Taft won a grant from the Ford Foundation to study the financial difficulties confronting, and the economic impact of, an aging populace.
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Philip Taft maintained an office at Brown and continued to conduct research.
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Philip Taft died in Providence on November 17,1976, at the age of 74.
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Philip Taft was and remains a well-known and highly respected labor historian.
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Philip Taft's papers are maintained at the Kheel Center for Labor-Management Documentation and Archives, which is housed at the Catherwood Library at Cornell University.
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The records consist mainly of research notes which Philip Taft gathered while writing manuscripts.