Committee, and the Allies' Purchasing Committee. In addition, he provided services to the Army. It had no statistical office until early 1918, when Ayres's section came under military auspices and he was made a lieutenant colonel with a staff of fifty. He directed the Statistics Branch of the General Staff, preparing secret reports for them and for the White House. He was the first to apply modern methods of research, analysis, and presentation that he had developed at the foundation. He was assigned to General Pershing in France with a statistical staff of 250 people. His statistical summary, The War with Germany (1919), was then and now widely used by historians and analysts. He was assigned a similar role in 1940-42, with the rank of Brigadier General. He retired in 1942 and was awarded the Distinguished Service Medal. Cleveland In 1920, Ayres moved to Ohio as vice-president and chief economist of the Cleveland Trust Company. He edited a monthly economic review that was full of statistics and widely read nationally among business planners. After making pessimistic analyses of the state of the economy in the late 1920s, for example, he was one of the few economists to argue the October 1929 stock market crash foreshadowed a great depression. In the 1930s he argued in favor of public regulation of banking, minimized the negative side of abandoning the gold standard, and criticized the National Recovery Act, urging instead legislation to stimulate business to price and profit competition. These ideas were explained in his widely read book, The Economics of Recovery (1933). He was chairman of the Economic Policy Commission of the American Bankers Association for two terms, 1932-1941 and 1944-1946, and also served as an officer of the American Statistical Association, the American Economic Association, and the American Association for the Advancement of Science. Works His writings on educational subjects, besides reports and contributions to periodicals, are: A Course of Study for the Schools of San Juan (1905) Medical Inspection of Schools, with Luther H. Gulick (1908) Laggards in our Schools (1909, 1913) Open Air Schools (1910) Seven Great Foundations (1911) Health Work in the Public Schools, with May Ayres (1915) A Measuring Scale for Ability in Spelling (1915, republished by Mott Media, Milford, Michigan 1985) Many of his articles in educational journals have been reprinted, among them, The Effect of Promotion Rate on School Efficiency (1913). References Attribution Further reading