Frank P. Bourgin, 80, a retired Office of Emergency Management official who attracted national attention in 1988 when the University of Chicago reversed a 1945 decision and awarded him a doctorate after having initially rejected his dissertation, died of cancer Dec. 12 at his home in Chevy Chase.
Dr. Bourgin, who formerly owned a lighting fixture company in Chicago and operated a chain of clothing stores in northern Minnesota, came to Washington in 1970 as a program officer for the Office of Emergency Management, and he retired there in 1983.
As a young man, he had dreamed of a career in academia, and in 1945 as a graduate student at the University of Chicago, he submitted his dissertation to the political science faculty. The 617-page thesis examined views and economic policies of key figures in the early years of the Republic, including Thomas Jefferson, Alexander Hamilton, John Quincy Adams, and Albert Gallatin. All considered government a positive instrument in promoting economic and cultural development, he argued, a notion that contradicted what then was the prevailing conviction — that the federal government had operated by principles of laissez faire from its founding until the New Deal.
Published book:
The Great Challenge: The Myth of Laissez Faire in the Early Republic -1989
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