Paul H. Aron papers, 1938-1991, bulk 1947-1991
Summary Information
At a Glance
- Call No.:
- BA#0624
- Bib ID:
- 7269092 View CLIO record
- Creator(s):
- Aron, Paul H., 1921-1991
- Repository:
- Rare Book and Manuscript Library
- Physical Description:
- 13.86 linear feet (33 manuscript boxes)
- Language(s):
- English , Japanese , Russian .
- Access:
- You will need to make an appointment in advance to use this collection material in the Rare Book and Manuscript Library reading room. You can schedule an appointment once you've submitted your request through your Special Collections Research Account.
-
This collection has no restrictions.
This collection is located off-site. You will need to request this material at least three business days in advance to use the collection in the Rare Book and Manuscript Library reading room.
Description
Scope and Contents
Paul Harvey Aron (1921-1991) was an expert on Japanese investments and a historian of the Soviet Union. Researchers interested in the Japanese stock market, Japanese industry, American investment in Japan, and Japanese investment in the United States in the 1970s and 1980s will be particularly interested in Series I. But the bulk of these files pertain to Aron's academic career, and will be of greatest interest for researchers studying Russian and Soviet history—in particular, Soviet historians and historiography in the 1930s (the subject of Aron's unpublished dissertation, much of which is included in Subseries II.3).
-
Series I: Professional Subject Files, 1949-1991 (bulk 1972-1991)
Series I contains files pertaining to Aron's career as a financial advisor. They are divided into three subseries, with the bulk contained in Subseries I.1: Daiwa Securities Subject Files. Files include correspondence, reports on business and finance, press clippings, and media appearances. A small amount of material is in Russian and Japanese.
-
Series II: Academic Files, 1938-1969
This series pertains to Aron's entire academic career, including his undergraduate and graduate school coursework. A small amount of material is in Russian. Before going into finance, Paul Aron was a professor of Russian and Soviet history at Sarah Lawrence College, having attained a master's degree and all but dissertation in the field from Columbia University. However, Aron's academic career was cut short when the American Legion accused him and several of his Sarah Lawrence colleagues of being Communists. In 1953, at the height of the Second Red Scare, he testified before the Senate Internal Security Subcommittee, declining to answer whether he had ever been a member of the Communist Party. A few weeks later, Aron resigned from Sarah Lawrence College. Though he would never again find employment as a history professor, Aron remained active in the Soviet and Russian history community through the 1970s, editing the journal Soviet Studies in History.
-
Series III: Personal Files, 1943-1975
This series includes materials relating to Paul and Beatrice Aron's anti-Vietnam War and anti-draft activism in the 1960s; records, ephemera, and correspondence pertaining to their son, Carl Robert Aron; letters from Aron's brother, William; and numerous birthday and Father's Day cards from family members. Also included are letters of commendation from American, British, and Soviet military officials with the Allied Commission for Austria, where Aron worked as a Russian-English interpreter from 1945 to 1946.
Arrangement
- Series I: Professional Subject Files, 1949-1991 (bulk 1972-1991)
- Subseries I.1: Daiwa Securities Subject Files, 1972-1991
- Subseries I.2: Soviet Union Subject Files, 1965-1991 (bulk 1990-1991)
- Subseries I.3: Other Professional Files, 1963-1968
- Series II: Academic Files, 1938-1969
- Subseries II.I: College Coursework, 1939-1940
- Subseries II.2: Graduate School Coursework, 1940-1945
- Subseries II.3: Dissertation Materials, 1938-1967
- Subseries II.4: Russian History Textbook Materials, 1950-1952
- Subseries II.5: Teaching and Research, 1938-1969
- Series III: Personal Files, 1943-1975
Using the Collection
Restrictions on Access
You will need to make an appointment in advance to use this collection material in the Rare Book and Manuscript Library reading room. You can schedule an appointment once you've submitted your request through your Special Collections Research Account.
This collection has no restrictions.
This collection is located off-site. You will need to request this material at least three business days in advance to use the collection in the Rare Book and Manuscript Library reading room.
Terms Governing Use and Reproduction
Reproductions may be made for research purposes. Permission to publish material from the collection must be requested from the Curator of Bakhmeteff Archive, Rare Book and Manuscript Library (RBML). The RBML approves permission to publish that which it physically owns; the responsibility to secure copyright permission rests with the patron.
Accruals
Materials may have been added to the collection since this finding aid was prepared. Contact rbml@columbia.edu for more information.
Immediate Source of Acquisition
Accession no. 94.
About the Finding Aid / Processing Information
Columbia University Libraries, Rare Book and Manuscript Library
Processing Information
Collection-level record describing unprocessed material made public in summer 2018 as part of the Hidden Collections initiative.
This collection was incorrectly associated with composer Paul Aron (1886-1955).
2023-09-2024-04 Inventory created and papers processed by Jenesis Williams (Columbia College).
2024-05-2024-06 Papers processing completed by Abigail Mankin (Barnard College).
2024-06 Papers arranged by Aaron Freedman (GSAS).
2024-07 Finding aid written by Aaron Freedman (GSAS).
Biographical / Historical
Paul H. Aron (1921-1991) was an economist who was an authority on Japanese investments. He attended City College and Columbia University. He served with the United States Army and was a Russian-English interpreter for the American, British and Russian members of the Allied Control Commission for Austria. He worked at the Dreyfus Corporation and at Daiwa Securities Ltd.
Paul Harvey Aron was born in 1921 in Brooklyn, NY to parents of German-Jewish ancestry. His father was a salesman and his mother was a homemaker. Aron had a younger brother, William, who would go on to become Director of the National Marine Fisheries Service's Alaska Fisheries Science Center in Seattle, WA.
In 1939 Aron enrolled at City College, where he took classes in history, including with the Marxist labor historian Philip S. Foner (1910-1994). In 1940, Aron graduated with a Bachelor of Social Science and enrolled for graduate studies in history at Columbia University's Russian Institute (now the Harriman Institute), where in 1941 he received his MA. From 1942 to 1946 he served in the U.S. Army, first at the Army War College and then as a Russian-English translator for the Quadripartite Allied Control Commission for Austria.
In 1946, Aron returned to Columbia to study for a PhD, writing a dissertation on Soviet historiography and the historian Mikhail Pokrovsky (1868-1932) during the First Five-Year Plan. Though Aron completed his oral examinations in 1950, he never finished his dissertation and obtained his doctoral degree.
While still in his doctoral studies, Aron also took a job in 1946 teaching political economy at the Jefferson School of Social Science, an adult education institution in New York City founded by the Communist Party. In 1948, Aron moved to Sarah Lawrence College to become a professor of Russian and Soviet history. By this point Aron had married Beatrice Feinstein, with whom he would have three children, Laurie, Carl, and David.
Beginning in 1951, Aron and other Sarah Lawrence faculty were targeted by the American Legion for suspected Communist ties. Despite public support from the college administration, in March 1953, at the height of the Red Scare, Aron was forced to testify before the U.S. Senate Internal Security Subcommittee, where he invoked the Fifth Amendment in response to questions about past affiliations with the Communist Party. A few weeks later, following condemnations in the local press, Aron resigned from Sarah Lawrence College. Despite several attempts, Aron would never again find employment as a history professor. Two book projects—an expansion of his dissertation, and an edited edition of Bernard Pares' A History of Russia textbook—were shelved. However, Aron remained active in the Soviet and Russian history community, serving as editor of the journal Soviet Studies in History, which published Soviet scholarship in English translation, from 1962 to 1979.
From 1952 to 1968 Aron worked as a management consultant for industrial corporations and local government economic bodies. He also moved his family, first to Worcester, MA and then to Bayside, Queens. In the 1960s, the Arons were active in liberal politics and the anti-Vietnam War movement, helping to organize a local anti-draft campaign and supporting the anti-war Congressman Benjamin Rosenthal (D-NY) (1923-1983), who represented the northern portion of Queens from 1962 to 1983.
Aron's career in finance began in 1968, when he was hired as a portfolio advisor by the mutual fund manager Dreyfus Corporation. A year later, he persuaded Dreyfus to invest $140 million in Japanese stocks—the largest amount ever invested by an American mutual fund in Japan, known in Tokyo markets as the "Aron shock." In 1972, Aron moved to the College Retirement Equities Fund (CREF), a teachers' pension fund. As a vice president and investment officer, he was part of a four-member team that managed a $4 billion portfolio, and in 1973 made CREF the first major regulated pension fund to invest in foreign markets.
In 1976, Aron became an executive vice president of the American unit of Daiwa Securities, the same broker who had placed his Japanese investments while at Dreyfus, and in 1983 was promoted to Vice Chairman, making him one of the first American executives to hold a senior position in a Japanese investment company. He helped the company expand in the United States from merely selling Japanese stock to American investors to offering a wide range of international investment services. He also helped Daiwa America become one of the first foreign-owned primary dealers in U.S. government securities and a major underwriter of American corporate securities. And he prepared the groundwork for Daiwa's lead in listing American securities on the Tokyo Exchange and trading them for Japanese clients.
As the Japanese economy surged in the 1980s, Aron became one of its most prominent American boosters. He was a widely quoted commentator on Japanese financial markets and industrial practices, particularly in robotics, and published 37 reports from 1981 to 1990 on international investment, economic growth, accounting, technology, management and labor, with an emphasis on Japan. Aron also managed to partially return to academia in 1976, when he began teaching international business and finance at the New York University Graduate School of Business. At NYU, Aron worked with the Soviet-American economist and pioneer of input-output analysis, Wassily Leontief (1906-1999).
In 1988, Aron retired from his day-to-day duties at Daiwa, though he continued to write on economic issues. In 1990, he traveled to the Soviet Union, meeting with businessmen, academics, and state officials on American and Japanese investment in the newly opened Soviet economy, and sought a partnership between NYU and Leningrad's new business school.
Aron died of heart, kidney, and liver failure in Manhattan in 1991.
Subject Headings
The subject headings listed below are found in this collection. Links below allow searches for other collections at Columbia University, through CLIO, the catalog for Columbia University Libraries, and through ArchiveGRID, a catalog that allows users to search the holdings of multiple research libraries and archives.
All links open new windows.