sounds like he’s got talent, you teach them good, Pop.”
Pretty soon I caught up with our party in the parking lot. One of my classmates—his first name was Clay, he was from Grosse Point and his father was something big in the diplomatic service—was curious about my going off like that.
He said, “Who was that you were talking to?”
I said, “He’s my father.”
He said, “Come on, I don’t think that’s funny, you’ve got a warped sense of humor.”
Life is a very good writer. I’d give anything to be able to write dialogue like that. What an imagination.
Irving Fisher! Ever hear of him? The name doesn’t mean much nowadays but it was once to be reckoned with. He was for many years Yale’s most eminent economist. One study he put a lot of time into was ways and means to control the economic cycle, an undertaking at which, as revealed in the newspapers if not the history books, he was not conspicuously successful.
He did something to straighten out my personal economic cycle, though—my one-man economic cycle. It was Prof. Irving Fisher who created a job for me on my last visit to New Haven.
It’s very hard to figure out what you’re doing hanging around a college town when you’re no longer in college. The place where they catered to your head is best left far behind when you step into the world to do some paid-for work, otherwise all our categories, compartments for thinking over here, ones for doing over there, melt together, and you know what that can lead to—thoughtful action, activist thought, town-gown merger, the sort of thing that can get Mr. Agnew to seeing red in many more places than are so colored. There could even come out of the blending, the mind-body reconciliation, some worker-student joint ventures. Those aloof spires might eventually flop sideways and drop their frozen frills and inch into the spurned ghettos, metamorphosing into mobile libraries and medical checkup vans and consumer armories and strike headquarters and community action centers. Brain and brawn might get to belong to the same union and in fact talk face to face, exchange notes, listen hard. Finally, finally, people in the University might stop going on with their nonstop wind about alienation, and making it their field of expertise, and writing their doctoral dissertations on it, and moving on to other universities to teach it to other candidate-scholars of alienation, a thing more to be dodged than majored and lectured in. . . . Well.
Where was I. The next best thing to going to the college that rules the municipal roost is to work for it, especially since it hands out most of the jobs in the area. So I went to see one of the officials of the Sterling Library who’d been helpful to me when I was a student, Donald Wing. (I’d always had the utopian hope that one day they might build an annex to the Library and name it after him so it could be called the Wing Wing.) Donald said there was a parttime job open on the staff, that somebody was needed to come in and make order out of and catalogue all the Irving Fisher papers and memorabilia. Five mornings a week, 60 cents an hour, 12 bucks a week.
I took it. Next to nothing was in those days a lot better than nothing. On that kind of pay you could cough up three bucks for a furnished room and have enough left over for the 35¢ breaded veal cutlets at the Greek’s or the pork-chop sandwiches in the Dixwell Avenue greasy spoons.
Irving Fisher was an expert on tax structuring, fiduciary policy, how to keep inflation and deflation in line, interest rates, cash flows, balance of trade, what the Federal Reserve should reserve, and the like. He was forever going down to Washington to testify before Senate committees or act as consultant to government agencies, and often his services were called upon by foreign governments too. Then he began to be consulted less and less, and after a while not at all, and you could understand why.
The Great Crash and Panic of 1929 happened. For all his scholarly investigations into the reasons why boom economies go bust with such regularity, Fisher had never suggested to anybody that anything remotely like 1929 could or would happen. He had, in fact, ruled out any such possibility. After all, the Hoover people down in Washington were handling the system pretty much as he’d advised them to. His policies were specifically designed to keep us from going into decline.
Irving Fisher all his life considered himself the architect of prosperity, though it turned out he was more its wistful camp follower. It followed that any nation that used his blueprints would stay rattlingly prosperous. That’s the kind of thing that happens when gown gets such a swelled head as to imagine that it doesn’t have to go into town, just look it over from the highest University tower and through a bullhorn inform it what’s what.
Fisher wanted very much to know what had brought about the catastrophe all his ideas had been designed to prevent. He began to look about for etiological variables he might have neglected or underestimated. He found some dillies. Sunspots. It appeared that just before the Stock Market Crash there’d been significantly increased activity on the sun, where there had been spots were larger ones and where there hadn’t been any some showed up.
Looking over the terrestrial canvas more broadly, Fisher found other matters that seemed to rise and fall with the waxing and waning of solar spots, among them pregnancy rates, the incidence of coronary thrombosis, the number of highschool dropouts, crimes of violence, abortions, strikes, small-business failures, automobile purchases, gang wars, home foreclosures, divorces, any number of things. Prof. Fisher had hit late in life on the cosmic-cyclical theory of history and the cycles he suddenly turned up everywhere in human affairs he traced directly to the periodic variations in the sun’s acne. Again, that’s the sort of thing you see when you climb so far up those Gothic towers as to lose sight of the clutter of facts all about on the ground.
You can imagine with what mixed feelings the Hoover people down in Washington listened to Prof. Fisher’s strong new thoughts. In their innermost beings they must have felt a warm glow from top to bottom, an impulse to embrace the Professor and kiss him all over. After all, a theory that traced this economic avalanche to extra-terrestrial sources, sunspots or Halley’s Comet or the furthermost red stars or whatever, automatically absolved the Hoover Administration of all responsibility for the collapse, as well as the free-enterprise system it was constantly embracing and kissing. But they were just enough in touch with the pulse of the public to know that, however much they themselves cottoned to Fisher’s proposal to make economics a branch of astronomy, the American people wouldn’t buy it.
I’m not saying that overnight the nation had turned Marxist in its approach to economics, nothing like that. But with the pinch of very hard times, with all the belt-tightening, the scramble to eat, rudiments of a materialist interpretation of history had been planted in many heads, enough at least to make them look to the workings of the profit system for the culprit rather than to the sun’s sporadic discolorations.
Prof. Fisher, finding himself accorded the treatment a prophet usually gets in his own country, with all the other countries following suit, retired from his role as economist, in fact, retired from public life and teaching altogether. And he donated all the papers from his busy life to the Yale Library, thereby making work for me.
I was impressed by the reverse logic here. It was the Depression that finally divorced Prof. Fisher, the excommunicator of depression, from his function in the world, in short, eliminated his job, excommunicated him. It was the Depression that had eliminated all sorts of jobs for all sorts of people, including me. But it was in response to the Depression that the Professor gave all his papers to the Library, creating, finally, a job for me. Unless you’re a dialectician you’re just not going to understand much of what goes on in this dizzy, dippy, turnabout world.
This was early 1940. If you want to know what it was really like in those days let me sum it up by saying that I was making $12, a week and banking $3 out of it, and I wanted for nothing—nothing I wanted, outside
