The Miller Institute

Adolph C. Miller was born in San Francisco on January 7, 1866. He entered the University of California in 1883 and was active throughout his student life. Upon graduation, he was awarded the Harvard Club Prize for graduate study at Harvard and then continued his studies in Paris and Munich. Following his return to the United States, he served as an instructor in Economics at Harvard before being appointed Assistant Professor of Political Science at the University of California at Berkeley, in 1890. The following year he accepted an Associate Professorship in Political Economics and Finance at Cornell University. After one year at Cornell, however, Miller was persuaded to move to the University of Chicago where he was given a full Professorship of Finance. In 1895, Adolph Miller married Mary Sprague (pictured on the left in the photo below), the eldest child of Otho Sprague, a prosperous Chicago businessman. In 1902, President Benjamin Ide Wheeler convinced Miller to return to Berkeley as Flood Professor of Economics and Commerce and to develop the newly established College of Commerce (the forerunner to the present Haas School of Business). After eleven years of service to the University of California, Miller resigned to become the United States Assistant Secretary to the Interior under his former classmate, Franklin K. Lane. The following year the Federal Reserve System was established and President Wilson appointed Miller to its Board of Governors, a position he held for twenty-two years under five presidents (Wilson, Harding, Coolidge, Hoover and Franklin Roosevelt).