Right wing economists had plenty of help from businessmen-trustees,
political pressure, and propaganda. Fred Lee has done a wonderful job
documenting this sad history of repression of economists. There is a
good history about the repression at the University of Illinois
Solberg, Winton U. Solberg and Robert W. Tomilson. 1997. "Academic
McCarthyism and Keynesian Economics: The Bowen Controversy at the
University of Illinois." History of Political Economy, 29: 1 (Spring):
pp. 55-81.
They describe how Howard Bowen and some distinguished Keynesians tried
to build a distinguished program, but ran into resistance from some
conservatives in the department. They drummed up right wing political
support for their protest, causing all the Keynesians to depart.
Here is a short section from The Confiscation of American Prosperity
regarding Samuelson
McCarthyism, of course, began well before McCarthy took center stage.
Richard Nixon rose to national prominence with his own pre-McCarthy
McCarthyism.
However, this new wave of anticommunism was successfully blacklisting
academics,
government officials, entertainers, and just ordinary people.
Paul Samuelson, whom I mentioned earlier, became a prominent target.
Samuelson's Keynesian-oriented book had become the most popular introductory
book in the United States after the right wing succeeded in pressuring
schools to withdraw support for Lorie Tarshis's earlier textbook. The
Veritas
Foundation was a leader in this effort (Leeson 1997, 125). A commentator
in the
right-wing Educational Reviewer asked: "Now if (1) Marx is communistic, (2)
Keynes is partly Marxian, and (3) Samuelson is Keynesian, what does that
make
Samuelson and others like him? The answer is clear: Samuelson and the
others are
mostly part Marxian socialist or communist in their theories" (MacIver
1955, 128).
Later, long after becoming the first American to win the Nobel Prize for
economics,
Samuelson recalled, "having tasted blood in trying to root the Tarshis
text out of colleges everywhere, some of the same people turned toward my
effort" (Samuelson 1997, 158). Samuelson succeeded at defending his
work, but
at a serious cost. In a 1977 lecture, Samuelson described how he felt
compelled
to go to great lengths to make his book less controversial:
if you were a teacher at many a school and the Board of Regents of your
university
was on your neck for using subversive textbooks, it was no laughing
matter.Many
months were involved in preparing mimeographed documentation of
misquotations
on the part of critics and so forth. Make no mistake about it, intimidation
often did work in the short run. . . . My last wish was to have an
intransigent formulation
that would be read by no one. . . .As a result I followed an Aesopian policy
of paying careful attention to every criticism of every line and word of my
text. . . . In a sense this careful wording achieved its purpose: at
least some of my
critics were reduced to complaining that I played peek-a-boo with the
reader and
didn't come out and declare my true meaning. (Samuelson 1977, 870--72)
--
Michael Perelman
Economics Department
California State University
Chico, CA
95929
530 898 5321
fax 530 898 5901
http://michaelperelman.wordpress.com
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