[2] In 1743, Nicholas Rogers established a 350-acre plantation in the wilderness of Welsh Neck, east across the Great Pee Dee River from Society Hill, in the adjoining Marlboro County.

John was a captain in the Confederate Army by the age of 19 and, after the war, started his own plantation in Society Hill that he named Belle Vue.

[7] After graduating, he taught at St. David's Academy and was acting principal for one year before entering Yale University for a second bachelor's degree in 1909.

Owing to a sense of civic duty and an interest in social reform, he switched to political economy in the doctoral program.

In 1893, Pareto had succeeded Léon Walras to the Chair of Political Economy at the University of Lausanne where he continued his work on general equilibrium theory.

Weak in theory and lacking the focus on detail necessary to produce the kind of data that was scarce in the pre-war era,[11] Rogers traveled widely, established relationships, spoke to people with first-hand knowledge and cultivated his skills as an observer.

On 12 May 1915, he wrote to his mother that, prior to the Lusitania, "... hearing the Germans so unjustly run down in French Switzerland, I got in the habit of putting in a word for them now and then".

[17] He was shocked and dismayed to learn the state of U.S. unpreparedness, administrative disorganization, the paucity of information on the economy and the unwillingness of business to co-operate.

[21] He had absorbed a good deal of Pareto's pessimism and was an admirer of such works as The Adding Machine and the essays of H. L. Mencken, as well as having witnessed first-hand the destruction in Europe, but Rogers did not share the disillusion of fellow intellectuals of the Lost Generation.

He advised the administration on fiscal policy from 1933 to 1934, was a special representative of the U. S. Treasury Department in the Far East in 1934, and was the American member of the Economic Committee of the League of Nations from 1933 to 1937.

On 13 August 1939, while on a mission to investigate the status of the Brazilian economy in the Hemispheric Defense Zone, his airplane crashed in the vicinity of Rio de Janeiro.

The James Harvey Rogers papers are available at the Manuscripts and Archives Division of the Sterling Memorial Library at Yale University.