Martin Anderson (August 5, 1936 – January 3, 2015) was an American academic, economist, author, policy analyst, and adviser to U.S. politicians and presidents, including Ronald Reagan and Richard Nixon. In the Nixon administration, Anderson was credited with helping to end the military draft and creating the all-volunteer armed forces. Under Reagan, Anderson helped draft the administration's original economic program that became known as “Reaganomics.” A political conservative and a strong proponent of free-market capitalism, he was influenced by libertarianism and opposed government regulations that limited individual freedom. Anderson wrote and edited numerous books on topics concerning urban renewal, military manpower, welfare reform, higher education, and his experiences advising Reagan and Nixon. Later he coedited four books on Reagan's writings and coauthored two books on Reagan's efforts to negotiate nuclear disarmament with the Soviet Union.
Early life and education Martin Anderson was born in Lowell, Massachusetts, on August 5, 1936, the only child of Ralph and Evelyn Anderson, a dairy farmer and a nurse, respectively. In school he was a top student and student body president. In 1953, he was awarded a four-year scholarship to Dartmouth College to study engineering. He graduated in 1957 summa cum laude and remained at Dartmouth to pursue a double master's degree in business and engineering through the Thayer School of Engineering and the Tuck School of Business. In 1958, Anderson met his future wife, Annelise Graebner; the two married in 1965. They shared an interest in conservative politics and had campaigned together for Barry Goldwater in the 1964 presidential election. They later attended courses together at the Nathaniel Branden Institute and became friends with novelist and philosopher Ayn Rand, and through Rand met economist Alan Greenspan, who through Rand and Alan Greenspan's recommendation had begun his career in government.
Career
Academia In 1959, Anderson was named assistant to the dean of the Thayer School of Engineering, and he became acting dean that summer. In the fall of 1959, the Ford Foundation awarded him a fellowship to study economics and finance at the Joint Center for Urban Studies at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. At MIT, he became interested in urban renewal, which became the topic of his doctorate. He spent one summer working for the Ford Motor Company as a financial analyst. In 1962, he earned the first Ph.D. in industrial management ever granted by a college or university from the MIT Sloan School of Management. Upon graduating, he embarked upon a career in academia and writing. On July 1, 1962, Anderson began working as an assistant professor of finance at Columbia Business School. The same year, his dissertation, The Federal Bulldozer: A Critical Analysis of Urban Renewal, 1949–1962, was published by MIT Press. The dissertation's central thesis is that urban renewal was a failure because it didn't eliminate slums or create affordable housing; rather, it replaced slums with more costly housing that forced the poor to move elsewhere. The book was controversially received, including criticism among his fellow professors at Columbia University. Additionally, the book was bashed by Mr. Wilson, the Director of the Joint Center, an organization which sponsored the work, because he claimed that Anderson's work met only the minimum standards of scholarship by which the center conducts its studies. As the book was published with the support of the Joint Center for Urban Studies of M.I.T and Harvard, it was thought it would be an objective study. Rather, some saw the volume as a strongly partisan account and an unbalanced tirade against the federal program as a whole. Amongst a topic with charged opinions, when someone suggests the modification or elimination of a government initiative, as Anderson did, it is often met with a strong responses, which quickly became the case. Anderson's strong claims supported by unqualified and fragile evidence generated a hostile reaction among academics to The Federal Bulldozer. However, it established Anderson as an expert on urban renewal. It also brought Anderson to the attention of Richard Nixon. In 1965, he was promoted to associate professor; at age 28, he was one of the youngest teachers to receive tenure in Columbia's history. He was associate professor from 1965 to 1968. An updated paperback edition of The Federal Bulldozer was published by McGraw-Hill in 1967.
Advising Richard Nixon Anderson served as an adviser to the 1968 Nixon presidential campaign, Nixon's White House transition, and the Nixon administration.
1968 Nixon presidential campaign In 1967, members of Nixon's staff, Len Garment, Pat Buchanan, and Ray Price, invited Anderson to join Nixon's presidential campaign planning group as a policy adviser. In this role, he wrote a policy paper on ending the draft and moving to an all-volunteer force, “An Analysis of the Factors Involved in Moving to an All-Volunteer Armed Force.” Nixon echoed the sentiments expressed in Anderson's paper in an interview with New York Times reporter Robert B. Semple Jr. in December 1967. Along with Walter Oi and Milton Friedman, Anderson is credited with helping to end military conscription in the United States. In 1968, Anderson joined the Nixon presidential campaign, focusing on domestic and economic policy. As Nixon's chief urban affairs adviser, Anderson was tasked with developing policy to address the problems associated with America's low-income neighborhoods. He advocated for self-help with a call for increased African American ownership, a component of the movement now known as Black capitalism. A report written by Anderson on the subject of basic income, which quoted heavily from Karl Polanyi's The Great Transformation on the Speenhamland system, was credited by Rutger Bregman and Corey Robin with Nixon moving away from the idea of basic income, and by Bregman as, from there, ultimately providing arguments for various welfare reforms by Ronald Reagan, Bill Clinton and George W. Bush. Anderson's wife, Annelise Graebner Anderson, also worked on the campaign, traveling with vice presidential candidate Spiro Agnew. During this time, Anderson was introduced to economists Milton Friedman and Arthur F. Burns, who were to become his lifelong mentors.
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