Prophet of the New Deal
THE INNOCENTS AT CEDRO: A MEMOIR OF THORSTEIN VEBLEN AND SOME OTHERS --Robert L Duffus--
Duffus hails from a small town in Vermont. He got his schooling at California's Leland Stanford, worked for Editor Fremont Older's San Francisco Bulletin, the New York Globe under Bruce Bliven, and regularly comes through with a novel, a biography or some other book every second or third year, written with competence, measured skepticism and social sympathies. Duffus' latest book, The Innocents at Cedro: A Memoir of Thorstein Veblen and Some Others, suggests that he got a great deal of his color, flavor and method during a year (1907-08) spent as an adolescent dishwasher and caretaker in the household of Professor Thorstein Ve blen at Cedro Cottage near the Leland Stanford campus.
Father of Technocracy. The dates and facts of Veblen's life will not be found in Duffus' graceful, charming, nostalgic memoir. A farm boy from a Norwegian settlement in Minnesota, Veblen had the habit of looking at the U.S. economic and social systems as though he were an aloof and coldly calculating anthropologist from another culture. He wrote sardonic books about the workings of the U.S. economy in a style that seems "desperately accurate" to some, a sort of elephantine, academic pig Latin to others.
Some Veblenian titles, The Engineers and the Price System, The Theory of Business Enterprise, The Theory of the Leisure Class, will recall to the initiated that Thorstein Veblen was the mental sire of many a U.S. intellectual who grew up to be a technocrat. The initiated will remember, too, that Veblen has been praised and damned as the prophet of the New Deal. His influence on Rexford Guy Tugwell, George Soule, Stuart Chase and other New Deal economists has been profound. Anti-New Dealer Edgar M. Queeny (The Spirit of Enterprise), president of the Monsanto Chemical Co., has even gone so far as to make Veblen the source of practically all that is evil in modern America.
But Veblen is also the father of the so-called "Institutional" economists who try to describe the workings of the economic system without imputing either praise or blame. Duffus argues that Veblen was less interested in fostering a revolution than he was in describing what went on around him. Duffus recalls how Veblen shocked him one evening by remarking that there was one thing to be said for capitalism, "It works."
Woman Trouble. Veblen, with his wrinkled eyes, his habit of saying "I don't know" to all questions, and his casual ways, never comes vibrantly alive in Duffus' pages. Yet he pervades the narrative as the odor of a moth ball pervades a storage closet. Veblen was having "woman trouble" in 1908, but young Duffus did not know that. He owed his job as dishwasher and caretaker in the Veblen cottage at Cedro to the fact that Veblen's wife had walked out. With more kindliness than common sense, Veblen welcomed Duffus' father and brother as well. He also took on a socialist lady named Wilson, her mother and daughter. The Wilson family and the three Duffuses made the Veblen home anything but a quiet academic retreat.
Conspicuous Consumption. Duffus suggests that Veblen was happy during the year at Cedro. At least the old man sometimes smiled a slow smile, and sometimes talked, if not provoked to silence by a direct question. In The Theory of the Leisure Class, Veblen had argued that men kept animals primarily for reasons of affluent display, or "conspicuous consumption." Yet, at Cedro, Veblen sometimes rode a horse for the exercise. Like Veblen's biographer Joseph Dorfman (Thorstein Veblen and His America--TIME, Dec. 17, 1934), Duffus thinks the old man remained a Norwegian peasant boy up to the time of his death. He suggests that the Veblen criticism of industrial America was that of a backward-glancing agrarian, not that of a Marxist looking forward to a machine-made socialist Utopia.
This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.