Edward Albert Filene

• Edward Albert Filene
• Born: September 3, 1860
• Died: September 26, 1937

Merchant and reformer, was born in Salem, Massachusetts, the second son and second of five children of William Filene and Clara (Ballin) Filene. Both parents were natives of Germany. His father, a liberal who left Prussia in 1848, had been a merchant tailor in Boston and later owned a retail store in Salem. Soon after Edward’s birth the family moved to Lynn, Massachusetts, then to New York City in 1863. Financial reverses there brought them back to Lynn seven years later. In 1881 the elder Filene opened a retail store in Boston. Edward Filene was educated in the public schools of Lynn, except for an unhappy year and a half at a German military academy also attended by two of his brothers. Partly because of his limp, the result of a childhood accident, and recurring eczema during his adolescence, Filene was a shy youth and remained socially awkward for life.

Edward Filene’s failure to attend Harvard, which had accepted him as a student, was partly attributable to his eczema, as he himself said, but also the result of his father’s declining health, which forced Edward and his younger brother Lincoln to assume greater responsibilities in the family business. Determination to overcome these disappointments, combined with restless ambition, a philosophical temperament, and the political idealism inherited from his father led Edward Filene to carve out a niche for himself as an innovative leader in both business and civic affairs.

At the Filene store each brother took up duties best suited to his personality. Lincoln handled daily operations and human relations, while Edward, as president, developed ideas and policy. By 1891, when their father turned over the business to them, William Filene’s Sons had become a leading Boston department store, and soon it became one of the most profitable in America. Both as merchant and as social thinker Edward Filene believed in raising profits and the general living standard through mass distribution of goods made possible by such devices as chain-store efficiency and installment buying. One of the marketing techniques he developed to achieve these ends was the bargain basement, where slow-moving goods received progressive price cuts for every day they remained unsold.

Filene was an early advocate of medical and unemployment insurance, employee credit unions, minimum wages, and generally high wages, which would benefit not only the employees but also the business, through greater employee efficiency. The resulting prosperity, he believed, was the best way to insure peace, both domestic and international. As another means of attaining efficiency and industrial harmony Filene advocated sharing both decision-making and profits with employees. His most cherished project was a profit-sharing plan that included limited voting rights for employees through the Filene Cooperative Association, which he saw as an opening step to the eventual establishment of a cooperative enterprise owned and controlled by its employees, an example of what Filene’s attorney and adviser Louis D. Brandeis called industrial democracy. In fact, the workers used their power merely to achieve such short-range goals as fewer hours and more holidays; they never moved to assume control of the store. But fear of an employee takeover led some of those who had bought into the company to begin a struggle for control in 1911 that culminated in 1928, after prolonged litigation, when Edward Filene was deprived of all voice in the store’s management although he retained the title of president.

Filene’s social views found more direct expression in a lifelong involvement in civic affairs. His public service, like his business dealings, was inspired by his faith that people who are wellin-formed will act rationally in their own selfinterest. During a fight over streetcar franchises in the 1890s he was dismayed by the fragmentation of Boston’s business groups, and took the lead in organizing the Boston, Massachusetts, and U. S. Chambers of Commerce; the Boston City Club; and the Good Government Association. In 1909 he engaged journalist Lincoln Steffens, an authority on urban problems, to help formulate a five-year plan for the improvement of Boston. The resulting “1915 Movement,” which sought to mobilize and unite the energies of all classes, made some progress in education and public health but failed in its broader purpose, mainly because business groups were unwilling to support any but the conventional kinds of reform, but also because of Filene’s limitations as a leader. He was too arbitrary and dictatorial, too impatient to explain his ideas adequately to those with lesser minds, and too harsh in his criticism to be effective in political affairs.

In other forms of public service Filene made significant contributions. Many of the addresses he made to policy-making groups in which he was very influential were widely circulated. He served the U.S. government as a dollar-a-year man in World War I, and helped raise funds for the League to Enforce the Peace. An inveterate traveler with many influential acquaintances in Europe, he helped to persuade French and German leaders to accept the provisions of the Dawes Plan for the economic rehabilitation of Germany.

Filene’s hope for the evolution of a single producer-consumer class born out of what he called “companionate prosperity” continued for most of his life. In 1919 he founded and endowed the Cooperative League, later called the Twentieth Century Fund, to undertake by research into economic and social problems, and ultimately left it most of his fortune. In 1935 he established the Consumer Distribution Corporation to promote consumer cooperatives, particularly department stores, and in 1936 the Good Will Fund to conduct research and educational projects in cooperatives and other public affairs enterprises. A lifelong Democrat, he was a strong supporter of Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal. During the presidential campaign of 1936 he broke openly with the the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, increasingly disillusioned by what he considered the unenlightened and self-destructive behavior of the business class, which he had expected to take the lead in social betterment. Now this feeling of defeat, similar to that of many progressive reformers, was added to his sense of failure at being unable to pass his business on to his employees.

Edward Filene, who never married, lived unostentatiously in a house on Otis Street, but was something of a dandy in his dress. He has been variously described, with some accuracy in each case, as “a maimed and cheerless personality” and the “philosopher of our machine economy.” In 1937 while on one of his many European visits he contracted pneumonia and died in the American Hospital in Paris. At his direction, his ashes were returned to America and scattered over Boston harbor.

A representative sample of Filene’s work is found in a collection published by his former associates, Speaking of Change (1939). G. Johnson, Liberal’s Progress (1948) is the only biography. Important supplements are M. LaDame, The Filene Store (1930), and material on Filene in L. Steffens Autobiography (1931) and A. Mason Brandeis, (1946). See also the article by L. Filler in The Dictionary of American Biography.