17 Facts About Walter Weyl

Walter Edward Weyl was a writer and speaker, an intellectual leader of the Progressive movement in the United States.

Walter Weyl's most influential book, The New Democracy was a classic statement of democratic meliorism, revealing his path to a future of progress and modernization based on middle class values, aspirations and brain work.

Walter Weyl started young at Philadelphia Central High School and received a scholarship to the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania, entering as a junior and graduating two years later after studies under economist Simon Patten.

Walter Weyl studied law briefly and then went abroad for graduate work in economics at the universities of Halle, Paris, and Berlin.

Walter Weyl worked at a settlement house in New York.

Walter Weyl performed statistical surveys for the Bureau of Labor and the United States Department of the Treasury.

Walter Weyl helped John Mitchell, leader of the United Mine Workers, write Organized Labor: Its Problems, Purposes, and Ideals.

Walter Weyl started writing about the lives of new immigrants in popular magazine articles.

Walter Weyl had hoped but failed to be part of the US delegation to the Paris Peace Conference, but he traveled to Europe anyway in the winter and the spring of 1919 to bear witness to the postwar gathering.

Walter Weyl knew many of members of the Commission and spent a great deal of time composing numerous books in his head that might explain the complexities and tragedy of the conference.

In 1907 Walter Weyl married Bertha Poole, a labor organizer, writer, and fellow settlement house worker who came from a wealthy Chicago family.

Walter Weyl died of throat cancer on November 9,1919, at the age of forty-six.

Walter Weyl decried the excessive individualism of the age, calling for more effective collective action led by experts and the state and national governments.

Walter Weyl thought the US Constitution was too confining and that the selfishness of the rich was an obstacle to future reform.

Walter Weyl believed that progress called for more direct democracy, more regulation of trusts big business by the federal government greater efficiency in business and in the public sector and an increased role for organized labor unions.

Walter Weyl ridiculed the privileged and powerful but rejected socialism.

In 1912 Walter Weyl interpreted the Lawrence Strike for the Committee on Industrial Relations, an effort which received public notice.