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William Graham Sumner (1840-1910), was an American academic and professor at Yale College. For many years he had a reputation as one of the most influential teachers there. He was a polymath with numerous books and essays on American history, economic history, political theory, sociology, and anthropology. His popular essays gave him a wide audience for his laissez-faire : advocacy of free markets, anti-imperialism, and the gold standard. He was a president of American Sociological Association from 1908 to 1909. He graduated from Yale College in 1863, where he had been a member of Skull & Bones. Later he was appointed to the newly created Chair of Political and Social Science at Yale. As a sociologist, his major accomplishments were developing the concepts of diffusion, folkways, and ethnocentrism. Sumner's work with folkways led him to conclude that attempts at government-mandated reform were useless. He was a staunch advocate of laissez-faire economics. Sumner was active in the intellectual promotion of free-trade classical liberalism, and in his heyday and after there were Sumner Clubs here and there. He heavily criticized socialism/communism. One adversary he mentioned by name was Edward Bellamy, whose national variant of socialism was set forth in Looking Backward , published in 1888, and the sequel Equality. Like many classical liberals at the time, including Edward Atkinson, Moorfield Storey, and Grover Cleveland, Sumner opposed the Spanish American War and the subsequent U.S. effort to quell the insurgency in the Philippines. He was a vice president of the Anti-Imperialist League which had been formed after the war to oppose the annexation of territories. In his speech "The Conquest of the United States by Spain," he lambasted imperialism as a betrayal of the best traditions, principles, and interests of the American People and contrary to America's own founding as a state of equals, where justice and law "were to reign in the midst of simplicity." According to Sumner, imperialism would enthrone a new group of "plutocrats," or businesspeople who depended on government subsidies and contracts. In the 1870s Sumner was strongly influenced by the English evolutionary thinker Herbert Spencer; after 1885 or so Spencer's influence faded. Among Sumner's students were the anthropologist Albert Galloway Keller, the economist Irving Fisher, and the champion of an anthropological approach to economics, Thorstein Bunde Veblen.
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