and was forced to recuperate at a sanitarium in Connecticut. After the Wall Street Crash of 1929, he was occasionally credited with having predicted the financial disaster. In December 1929, The New York Times said: "Three years ago [Ripley] spoke some plain words about Wall Street. An automobile crash and a nervous breakdown followed. A few weeks ago Wall Street had its crash and breakdown. Now Professor Ripley is preparing to return to his Harvard classes next February." He was unable to return to teaching until at least 1929. However, in the early 1930s, he continued to issue criticisms of the railroad industry labor practices. In 1931, he had also testified at a Senate banking inquiry, urging the curbing of investment trusts. In 1932, he appeared at the Senate Banking and Currency Committee, and demanded public inquiry into the financial affairs of corporations and authored a series of articles in The New York Times stressing the importance of railroad economics to the country's economy. Yet, by the end of the year he had suffered another nervous breakdown, and retired in early 1933. Ripley died in 1941 at his summer home in East Edgecomb, Maine. An obituary in The New York Times implied that Ripley had predicted the 1929 crash with his "fearless exposés" of Wall Street practices, in particular his pronouncement that: "Prosperity, not real but specious, may indeed be unduly protracted by artificial means, but in the end truth is bound to prevail." His book, Railway Problems: An Early History of Competition, Rates and Regulations, was republished in 2000 as part of a "Business Classic" series. Bibliography See also United States corporate law References Further reading External links 1867 births 1941 deaths People from Medford, Massachusetts Amateur anthropologists American anthropologists Harvard University faculty Columbia University faculty MIT School of Humanities, Arts, and Social Sciences faculty Columbia University alumni MIT School of Engineering alumni American people in rail transportation People of the Interstate Commerce Commission 19th-century American writers Presidents of the American Economic Association People from Edgecomb, Maine Economists from Massachusetts Economists from Maine Proponents of scientific racism