Bertram Myron Gross (1912–1997)

Bertram M. Gross was born in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. He received his B.A. in English and philosophy and his M.A. in English from the University of Pennsylvania. In the late 1930s, he began working for the federal government in Washington, DC. From 1938 to 1941, he worked at the U.S. Housing Authority. During 1941 to 1945, he served as a research director and advisor for a series of Senate committees. He wrote the Roosevelt-Truman full employment bills of 1944 and 1945, and was the primary author of the Humphrey–Hawkins Full Employment Act of 1946. From 1946 to 1952, he was executive secretary of the President's Council of Economic Advisers. In 1953, Gross moved with his family to Israel, where he served as an economic advisor to the Prime Minister's Office and as a visiting professor at Hebrew University in Jerusalem, where he established the program in Public Administration. He returned to the USA in 1960 and joined the faculty of Syracuse University's Maxwell School of Citizenship and Public Affairs for eight years. In 1961–1962, he also was a Fellow at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences in Palo Alto, California. From 1962 to 1963, he was the Leatherbee Lecturer at Harvard Business School. From 1970 to 1982, he was Distinguished Professor of Political Science and Urban Affairs at Hunter College and the CUNY Graduate Center in New York City. Since 1999, the nonprofit Campaign to Abolish Poverty/Full Employment Coalition has presented the annual Bertram Gross Award in his honor. He was the author of several books, and is best known for Friendly Fascism: The New Face of Power in America (1980). He was the father of David J. Gross, who won the Nobel Prize in Physics in 2004.