Adolf Berle

Adolf Augustus Berle, Jr. (January 27, 1895 – February 17, 1971; his name pronounced "burley) was an educator, author, and U.S. diplomat.

Biography

Berle was educated at Harvard, and was a member of the Paris Peace Conference after World War I. Unhappy with the terms of the Versailles Treaty, he resigned in protest. He became a professor of corporate law at Columbia Law School in 1927 and remained on the faculty until retiring in 1964.

During the FDR Administration, Berle worked on the New Deal and the Good Neighbor Policy.

As Assistant Secretary of State (1938-1944) in charge of security, Berle had a 1939 meeting, arranged by journalist Isaac Don Levine, with former Soviet agent Whittaker Chambers, two days after the signing of the Hitler-Stalin pact. In his notes of that meeting, which he titled "Underground Espionage Agent," Berle listed a series of names, including that of State Department official Alger Hiss, to which he appended the notation, "Member of the underground Com.--Active. In his 1973 memoirs, Levine wrote that Berle told him a few weeks later that he had brought the matter to FDR's attention, without success: “To the best of my recollection, the President dismissed the matter rather brusquely with an expletive remark on this order: ‘Oh, forget it, Adolf.’”

Berle later served as Ambassador to Brazil from 1945 to 1946, and was a founding member of the New York State Liberal Party. In 1961, he headed a task force for President John F. Kennedy that recommended the Alliance for Progress.

He published several books during his lifetime, including the groundbreaking work he authored with Gardiner Means called The Modern Corporation and Private Property, which was first published in 1932.

Bibliography

• Berle, Adolf Augustus, Jr.; Gardiner Means (1932). The Modern Corporation and Private Property. New York: Macmillan.
• Berle, Adolf Augustus, Jr. (1954). The 20th Century Capitalist Revolution. New York: Harcourt, Brace.
• Berle, Adolf Augustus, Jr. (1959). Power without Property: A New Development in American Political Economy. New York: Harcourt, Brace.
• Berle, Adolf Augustus, Jr. (1962). Latin America: Diplomacy and Reality. New York: Published for the Council on Foreign Relations by Harper & Row.

References

See also

Corporate governance

External links

• Biography
• FDR's Right-Hand Perjurer?

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