ABSTRACT
The American Economic Association was officially inaugurated on September 9, 1885 in the Bethesda Parish building at Saratoga Springs, New York, following discussions among a miscellaneous group of scholars, ministers and social reformers who were attending the second meeting of the American Historical Association. The initiator of this venture, Richard T.Ely, a vigorous young member of the Johns Hopkins University faculty, was following the lead of his senior colleague in the history department of that institution, Herbert Baxter Adams, who was the founder and secretary of the older association. The dramatis personae and the location reveal the character of the enterprise,1 for there was at that time no independent academic discipline of economics with a recognized corps of practitioners; and religious inspiration and reformist zeal were to play a major role in the organization’s early history. The personal link between Ely and Adams symbolizes the connection between the rising tide of economic thought and the contemporary movement towards genuine ‘university’ education in the USA. Both men had embraced the Germanic conception of higher education and scholarship which formed the intellectual core of this movement; and they had received encouragement and advice from D.C.Gilman, the distinguished first president of Johns Hopkins, so that the two associations illustrate the exuberant activity of the institution at the head of the ‘academic procession’.
