| Summary/Abstract |
Robert Nathan was not the most prominent figure in U.S. President Franklin Roosevelt’s wartime cabinet, but he got a taste of the public spotlight in April 1942 when Life magazine ran a profile of him. The journalist Joseph Thorndike, Jr. followed Nathan through a typical week in Washington, D.C. Thorndike lauded Nathan’s jocular personality and modest lifestyle. Photographs accompanying the article showed Nathan exercising in a boxing ring and preparing a pancake breakfast at home. What most impressed Thorndike, though, was the thirty-five-year-old economist’s statistical analysis and planning work for the U.S. government. Nathan, an ardent New Dealer, provided crucial research in the administration’s pioneering efforts to craft national income estimates during the 1930s. In January 1942, he joined the War Production Board. Wielding charts and graphs as weapons in fierce debates over how best to mobilize for the war, he made calculated projections of how to boost defense production while preventing another domestic depression. In Thorndike’s telling, Nathan was a patriotic public servant who used his statistical acumen to help fight the Great Depression and World War II.
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