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Stuart Chase (March 8, 1888 – November 16, 1985) was an American economist, social theorist, and writer. His writings covered topics as diverse as general semantics and physical economy. His thought was shaped by Henry George (1839-1897), by economic philosopher Thorstein Veblen (1857-1929), by Fabian Society, and briefly by the Communist social and educational experiments in the Soviet Union to around 1930, though Chase was broadly a modern American liberal.
Chase spent his early political career supporting "a wide range of reform causes: the single tax, women's suffrage, birth control and socialism." Chase's early books, The Tragedy of Waste (1925) and Your Money's Worth (1927), were notable for their criticism of corporate advertising and their advocacy of consumer protection.Richard N Chapman (1992). 9780879725273, Bowling Green State University Popular Press. . ISBN 9780879725273
In 1929 Chase co-founded Consumers' Research, a consumer protection advocacy organization. Stuart Chase Papers FREDERICK SCHLINK, CONSUMER WATCHDOG
Chase married Margaret Hatfield in 1914 and had two children, Sonia and Robert. He and Margaret were divorced in 1929, and one year later, he married Marian Tyler, a violinist and staff member at The Nation who collaborated with him on several of his books; she survived him by three and a half years.
In 1921, Chase joined, along with economic philosopher Veblen, the Technical Alliance, which later became Technocracy Incorporated, part of the Technocracy movement. Chase also worked with the Labor Bureau, an organization that provided services for labor unions and cooperatives.
In 1927, Chase wrote Your Money's Worth, discussing advertisements that promise but fail to deliver products as advertised to customers who order them. In 1927, Chase traveled to the Soviet Union with members of the First American Trade Union Delegation and was the co-author of a book that praised Soviet experiments in agricultural and social management. In 1932, Chase wrote A New Deal, which became identified with the economic programs of American President Franklin Roosevelt. He also wrote a cover story in The New Republic, "A New Deal for America", which appeared days before Roosevelt promised "a new deal" in his speech accepting the presidential nomination of the Democratic Party. Whether Roosevelt speechwriter Samuel Rosenman got the phrase from Chase is unknown.
Chase's 1938 book The Tyranny of Words was an early and influential popularization of Alfred Korzybski's theory of general semantics.
Chase supported United States non-interventionism and was against U.S. entry in World War II, advocating this position in his 1939 book The New Western Front. After the war, Chase became involved in social science. In 1948, he published The Proper Study of Mankind in which he introduced the social sciences to several college campuses.
In a 1952 article, "Nineteen Propositions About Communism," Chase criticized the government of the Soviet Union (Stalinism), stating that its citizens, trade unions and farmers "had no power" despite the claims of Communist supporters. Chase also dismissed the Communist Party USA as "our minuscule menace" whose members consisted of "a high proportion of frustrated Neurosis and plain crackpots as well as some high minded- — a tragic group, this last."
Chase also quoted Herbert Philbrick (who had been encouraged by the FBI to infiltrate the Communist Party USA between 1940 and 1949) to the effect that "the McCarthyism and demagogues ... make the work of the FBI more difficult by confusing the innocent with the guilty."
In the 1960s, during the Presidency of Lyndon B. Johnson, Chase lent his support to the Lyndon Johnson administration's Great Society policies.
Chase died in Redding, Connecticut.
He is quoted in Hayakawa's Language in Thought and Action as having said, "Common sense is that which tells us the world is flat."
George Orwell mentioned Chase in his 1946 essay "Politics and the English Language". While discussing using language to express thought, Orwell mentions the claim held by Chase and others that abstract words are meaningless, and their use of this claim as a pretext for advocating a kind of political quietism. He adds, "One need not swallow such absurdities as this, but one ought to recognise that the present political chaos is connected with the decay of language, and that one can probably bring about some improvement by starting at the verbal end. If you simplify your English, you are freed from the worst follies of orthodoxy. You cannot speak any of the necessary dialects, and when you make a stupid remark its stupidity will be obvious, even to yourself."
In 1969 President Richard Nixon cited Chase's work in a message to Congress about consumer protection.
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