Thomas Worsley, economist in New Deal, during WWII
WASHINGTON - Thomas B. Worsley, 97, an economist and procurement specialist who began his career in the administration of President Franklin D. Roosevelt and who returned to the public eye last month with comments on President Obama's economic policy, died May 17 at Halquist Memorial Inpatient Center in Arlington County, Va. He had complications from a broken hip.
When Dr. Worsley joined the Roosevelt administration in 1935, one of his first jobs was to travel to Cleveland to find out why banks had stopped lending money, a situation with many parallels to the current financial downturn.
He conducted a study of farm income and held other jobs in Roosevelt's New Deal before becoming a leading authority on government procurement and economic stability during wartime.
Nearly 75 years after he first came to Washington, the Bloomberg news service turned to Dr. Worsley for the long view of the nation's financial woes. Despite changes in the banking system over the years, he said, the similarities were striking.
"Banks weren't lending because they had so much bad debt on their books," he said in an April 2 interview, "what we now are calling by the fancy name, 'toxic assets.' " Bankers, he recalled, were "very unpopular with the general public."
In 1933, he said, banks had closed and "VIPs who came to the Inauguration couldn't cash checks at the hotels they were staying in." As a result, the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. was created to put banks and borrowers back on their feet.
Quoting economic thinker John Maynard Keynes, Dr. Worsley said the best policy for Roosevelt - and Obama - was for the government to borrow money to pump into the economy. Some of Roosevelt's greatest assets, Dr. Worsley added, were his personal popularity and the confidence he projected to the public.
"Everybody felt sort of close to him," he said. "Psychology is a big part of the picture. That's what John Maynard Keynes called 'animal spirits.' He said without animal spirits, people don't take positive steps. Without animal spirits, enterprise will fade and die."
He said he believed Obama was doing the right things to quell the nation's fears.
"I think he's doing an excellent job of explaining things," he said.
Thomas Blanchard Worsley was born in Columbus, Ga., and entered the University of Virginia in 1929, one month before the stock market crash that triggered the Great Depression. He received his bachelor's degree in 1933 and his master's in economics two years later.
After his work in the New Deal, Dr. Worsley joined the Office of Price Administration during World War II and served as a procurement officer and instructor in the Army. He completed his doctorate in economics at Virginia in 1949.
He worked on economic planning and anti-inflation measures at federal agencies before becoming a coordinator for government purchases at the Office of Price Stabilization during the Korean War.
From 1953 to 1963, he had a key role in designing the Army's procurement policies at Army Materiel Command and the old Office of the Chief of Ordnance. He then spent 10 years as a professor of management at the Industrial College of the Armed Forces at Fort McNair. After retiring in 1973, he was a consultant on economic stabilization with the Federal Emergency Management Agency.
Dr. Worsley was a member of the board of the University of Virginia's alumni association and helped establish the Jefferson Scholars Foundation, which awards merit scholarships to outstanding students at the university. A scholarship for students from Northern Virginia is named in his honor.
He was also an amateur historian of the Revolutionary and Civil wars and was president of the D.C. chapters of the American Revolution Round Table and Civil War Round Table, as well as the Alexandria Historical Society and Alexandria Civil War Round Table. In recent years, he advocated that a memorial honoring James Madison, the fourth president, be built in Washington.
His first wife, Virginia Carroll Worsley, died in 1967.
His second wife, Cary Mayo Worsley, died in 1998.
He leaves his wife of 10 years, Muriel de Marne Worsley of Alexandria; two children from his first marriage, William de Launay Worsley II of Arlington and Diana Worsley Pope; seven stepchildren, Mayo Dean of Leander, Texas, Spencer M. Williams of Somerset, Pa., T. Moore of Ashland, Va., Bruce Gyongyos of Cary, N.C., Katherine Werner of Waitsfield, Vt., Philip de Marne of Seattle, and Loretta de Marne of East Hampton, N.Y.; 19 grandchildren; and two great-grandchildren.
