After a year of study in England,[6] Sprague was made Austin Teaching Fellow in political economy, a one-year fixed-term position, at Harvard College in fall 1899.[b][7] He became instructor in political economy in 1900[c] and was promoted to assistant professor of economics in 1904. The Imperial University of Tokyo appointed him as a full professor of economics in 1905, where he stayed until 1908 when he returned to Harvard as an assistant professor of banking and finance at the Harvard Graduate School of Business Administration.[6] He was made Edmund Cogswell Converse Professor of Banking and Finance in 1913, a post he held until his retirement in 1941.[5][9]
Following his stint at the Bank of England, he served as assistant to the Secretary of the Treasury in 1933, a role he left the same year due to disagreement over the optimal path to recovery for the US economy.[6]
He used his expertise for various positions in the private sector too. He was a director of the National Shawmut Bank and a foreign exchange advisor to the General Motors Corporation.[6] He died in Boston, aged 80.
Personal life
Sprague married Fanny Knights Ide[e] in 1905. They had two children, Katherine Ida and Theodore Wentworth Sprague. He had four siblings: Charles Wentworth, Maude, Arthur and William.[4] The number of publications he could author was limited by his poor eyesight.[1]
Theodore (1912 – 2000) would graduate from the University of Cambridge, attend Johns Hopkins University for a year and receive his PhD in economics and sociology from Harvard in 1942, writing about "Some problems in the integration of social groups, with special reference to Jehovah's Witnesses", then become a substitute instructor in sociology at the University of Connecticut. He went on to teach sociology at Earlham College and Colgate University. He became a competitive dog breeder after his retirement.[14][15][16][17][1][5]
Sprague, Oliver Mitchell Wentworth (1911). Banking Reform in the United States: A Series of Proposals, Including a Central Bank of Limited Scope. ISBN978-1360510019.