Philip Taft

In 1977, Cornell University instituted the Philip Taft Labor History Book Award prize. The highly sought-after and prestigious annual award goes to a book of original research which explores

Philip Taft died in Providence on November 17, 1976, at the age of 74.

Taft retired from teaching in 1968. He maintained an office at Brown, however, and continued to conduct research. In 1975, he was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship to study the history of the labor movement in Alabama.

Taft was appointed in 1961 to a committee on labor-management reports established by the US Department of Labor, where he helped advise the department and draft rules implementing the Landrum–Griffin Act.

His "The A.F. of L. in the Time of Gompers", published in 1957, was for many years seen as the definitive history of the American Federation of Labor. Nearly 50 years later, it is still routinely cited by labor historians.

Throughout his tenure at Brown, Taft sought to use the university's expertise to improve society. In 1950, President Harry S. Truman appointed Taft to a committee of experts on the New England economy under the aegis of the President's Council of Economic Advisors. In 1952, Taft pushed Brown University to join with a newly formed Rhode Island businessmen's committee to study the economic problems of the state. In 1963, Taft won a grant from the Ford Foundation to study the financial difficulties confronting, and the economic impact of, an aging populace.

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. He was appointed an assistant professor of economics at Brown University in Providence, Rhode Island, in 1937. He was chairman of the Economics Department from 1949 to 1953.

Taft attended night school in New York City and obtained a high school diploma in 1928. At the age of 26, he enrolled at the University of Wisconsin–Madison and graduated in 1932 with a bachelor's degree in economics. He then entered the doctoral program in economics at the University of Wisconsin–Madison. In graduate school, he took a job conducting research for one of his professors, Selig Perlman. Taft's contribution to the work was so significant that Perlman made him a co-author on volume four of History of Labor in the United States in 1935. In the same year he earned his doctorate.

Philip Taft (1902–1976) was an American labor historian whose research focused on the labor history of the United States and the American Federation of Labor.

Taft was born on March 22, 1902, in Syracuse, New York. His father died when he was still a young boy. His mother moved the family to New York City, where she took up work as a house cleaner.