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Second
Conference of the International Thorstein Veblen Association
Severance Great Hall, Carleton College Northfield, Minnesota
30 May-1 June 1996
UNEXAMINED MOMENTS IN THE
LIFE OF THORSTEIN VEBLEN:
REFINING THE BIOGRAPHICAL REFERENCES
By
Russell H. Bartley
Department of History
University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee
*The author is Professor of History at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee
and wishes to acknowledge that institution's support of his Veblen research.
He expresses his gratitude as well to the staffs of the Minnesota Historical
Society, the Special Collections Department of the Stanford University Libraries,
and the Manuscript Division of the U.S. Library of Congress. He is especially
indebted to Charles Sims of Menlo Park, CA, who on two occasions made it possible
to examine Veblen papers in his possession, many of which he has since donated
to the Carleton College Archives, in Northfield, MN. The author acknowledges
with particular pleasure the assistance of his wife and co-researcher, Sylvia,
whose constant collaboration makes this paper very much a joint effort.
[Nota bene: This paper represents work in progress,
wherein archival material is quoted without prior authorization from the repositories
of origin. Any published reference to this paper should be framed accordingly.]
In our previous research on Thorstein Veblen's connection to Washington Island,
Wisconsin, we suggested that there were significant lacunae in the biographical
record of the legendary scholar and that, despite the ponderous legacy of the
late Joseph Dorfman,2 much remains to be discovered about the man Veblen was.
Indeed, it seemed to us, there were grievous faults in Dorfman's imposing work
which, overshadowed by sheer scholarly mass, had entered the literature on
Veblen as accepted truths--truths that did not necessarily tolerate close scrutiny;
that in the half century since Veblen's death had often grotesquely distorted
his persona; and which, perhaps, had also prejudiced critical appraisals of
Veblen's place in the intellectual history of the past hundred years.
Since the inaugural meeting of the ITVA in February 1994, where we first outlined
the implications of our Washington Island research,3 we have delved further
into the extant sources for Veblen's life, many of them newly recovered from
family heirs and only now available to scholars, based upon which we conclude
that all previous assumptions about Veblen originating with Joseph Dorfman
must be reexamined. Dorfman, in fact, got very little right in his portrayal
of Veblen the man. So pronounced are the distortions--gratuitous we are inclined
to think--that they would, as Stephen Edgell notes, seem to tell us more about
Joseph Dorfman than they do about Thorstein Veblen.4
One need not turn to new sources, however, to recognize the necessity of reappraising
Dorfman's Thorstein Veblen and His America.5 The evidence is plainly at hand
in the work itself. Here, as well as in his later study, New Light on Veblen,6
Dorfman offers (and ignores) evidence which negates the very picture he draws
of Veblen as the alienated, culturally marginalized academic who cared little
for teaching, lacked social graces and perversely violated accepted norms of
human conduct.7
Dorfman's further failure to document his sources with the requisite rigor
of postwar scholarship should have alerted Veblen scholars long ago. His subsequent
attempt to redress that failure with the inclusion of 398 footnotes--many of
them lengthy explications or verbatim excerpts from original sources--in his
326-page introduction to Veblen's Essays, Reviews and Reports (1973), while
useful, is nonetheless vitiated by the absence of a proper index to facilitate
access to the documentation contained in those notes. Both volumes, each in
its own way, frustrate the scholarly enterprise and thus call attention to
Dorfman's unable handling of the voluminous sources available to him.
In light of these manifest deficiencies, as we have noted in our earlier research,
it is quite remarkable "that for the past sixty years virtually all scholars
writing on Veblen have deferred to a single biographer, Joseph Dorfman, for
perspective on Veblen's life and personality." (The lesson to be learned
from this, observes Edgell, "is not that Dorfman blazed a false trail,
but that so many others followed it uncritically."9) Even more remarkable,
in our view, is the failure of interested scholars to critique Dorfman's 1934
volume as the genre it purports to be.
Directly stated, Thorstein Veblen and His America is not a biography. Not,
at least, by any acceptable convention of critical inquiry. It is rather a
chronicle of intellectual productivity interspersed, often arbitrarily, with
biographical data--some true, some questionable, others patently false; all
disconnected from anything approaching a coherent reconstruction of Veblen's
life.
The biography proper is confined to the initial 89 pages of Dorfman's 518-page
text (five chapters out of 24), where he traces the first 35 years of Veblen's
life. Thereafter, Dorfman offers readers disconnected biographical fragments
strewn across the book's remaining 429 pages: a few paragraphs on Veblen's
life in Chicago in chapter 15; several on his life at Stanford in chapter 16;
a number of paragraphs on the Missouri years in chapter 17; a few more on Veblen
in the nation's capital in chapter 19. Two paragraphs in chapter 21 recount
Veblen's move to New York City and his second wife's conimitment to a mental
institution (p. 411); two more describe his meeting with the Soviet representative,
Ludwig Martens (pp. 426-427).
In chapter 22, Dorfman devotes a single paragraph to Veblen's time on Washington
Island (p. 452), a second to his 1920 trip to California (pp. 455-456), and
a third to his rooming arrangements in the house of Alice Boughton and Mildred
Bennett (p. 450), while making only passing reference to Veblen's presence
at the New School for Social Research. He comments on the death of Veblen's
first wife, Ellen Rolfe, and records his subject's final remove to California
in two paragraphs at the close of chapter 23 (p. 496). He devotes a total of
eight pages to Veblen's retirement years in chapter 24 (pp. 497-504).
Dorfman's pioneering study of Thorstein Veblen, it follows, is neither "meticulous," 10 "conscientious," 11
nor "exhaustive,"12 much less "definitive," as Melvin Brockie
characterized it in 1958 13 and Jack Diggins too quickly repeated twenty years
later.14 Empirically, the work is "massive," as Rick Tilman has described
it. And it does provide "an able analysis of Veblen's economics and sociology." But
it fails roundly, in Tilman's words, "to offer a clear or consistent portrayal
of [Veblen] as a human being."15
To a considerable degree this failure would appear to be rooted in the author's
own personal circumstance. Joseph Dorfman, after all, was a very young man
when he commenced his inquiry into the life and times of Thorstein Veblen--much
too young to have gained the life experience that would have enabled him to
comprehend a man nearly half a century his senior. He had not yet celebrated
his 21st birthday when, fresh from undergraduate studies at Reed College, he
first approached Andrew Veblen about Andrew's renowned younger brother; he
was barely 30 when Thorstein Veblen and His America appeared in print.16 As
bright and intellectually gifted as Dorfman clearly was, he simply had not
lived enough to plumb the emotional depths of people decades beyond his years.
(Which of our own students might we deem sufficiently wise to make sober sense
of the lives we ourselves have led? Little wonder that Veblen dismissed Dorfman
as a viable biographer!)
Having accomplished the evidently heady leap from Portland, Oregon, to pre-Depression
New York City and--by virtue of his exceptional faculties--gained admittance
into the rarified academic circles of that singular metropolis, the young Dorfman
lost, it would appear, whatever perspective he might have had on himself, his
own immigrant origins, and the America of others. Manhattan became his chosen
window on the world; he himself a caricature of the myopic New Yorker whose
perception blurs at the Palisades. Civilization, it seems, resided in the City;
savagery in the broad hinterland west of the Hudson River.
It is doubtful that Dorfman ever grasped the reality of rural America, certainly
not in the years he was engaged on the Veblen project. Indeed, the scholastic
hubris with which he presumes--at age 26--to instruct Andrew Veblen on the
evidentiary requirements of scholarship and why he, Joseph Dorfman, had been
correct in his appraisal of the Veblens' cultural and linguistic marginality
(Andrew's persuasive evidence to the contrary notwithstanding) bespeaks both
metropolitan parochialism and an inflated sense of self peculiar to academic
novitiates.
"Any writer in the academic world is expected to judge his evidence," he
pretentiously informed the distinguished professor emeritus. "He is in the
last analysis responsible for what he says and cannot simply say 'I read it'
or 'somebody told me that'. Upon him rests the duty to be careful of his sources.
He is not supposed to be an 'innocent babe'."17
In light of Dorfman's subsequent, egregious mishandling of sources in support
of undocumentable preconceptions about Thorstein Veblen, this defensive protestation
of the scholar's obligation to handle sources with professionalism stands as
a severe indictment of Dorfman himself.
The essential preconception on which Dorfman hangs his interpretation of Veblen,
of course, is Veblen's alleged existential marginality, which Dorfman pretends
to explain with a priori assumptions about the nature of the Scandinavian immigrant
experience in the Upper Midwest. Key to Veblen's purported cultural angst in
Dorfman's scheme is language, that is, Veblen's assumed late acquisition and
thus imperfect command of English in an English-dominant society. It is, in
sum, a classic conceptual fallacy to which graduate students all too easily
fall prey (and for which Dorfman's academic mentors must also be held accountable):
the unsubstantiated deductive premise for which evidence is then sought.
To Dorfman's assertions that Thorstein "knew no English when he entered
Carleton" and that this illustrated "the effective cultural segregation
of the Norwegian settlement" in which the Veblens lived, Andrew responded
that it was "really incomprehensible that an advanced student in a high-standard
institution could make such statements awake and conscious.18 After recounting
the school textbooks, dime novels, handbooks, Harper's Weekly and other English-language
reading material readily available to a voracious reader like Thorstein in
that very same "culturally segregated Norwegian settlement," Andrew
offered Dorfman the following firsthand testimony:
Thorstein had English-speaking playmates as early as he could toddle 1/8 of
a mile to the nearest neighbor; and before that the neighbor's children were
daily at our house or in the yard. His four older brothers and sisters knew
and spoke English, with these other children, and more and more between themselves.
Thorstein was sent to school before he filled 5 years. He had a bilingual training
in speech, from the start. When he came to Carleton he spoke as correct and
idiomatic English as any of the young people he encountered, and his "rhetoricals"...
at once attracted attention for his facility in the use of idiomatic English.19
"Even though one may be only one mile or so from the Yankees and one may
do business with them," Dorfman countered obdurately, "it does not
follow that the Norwegian would learn English.
"If you should come to New York," he insisted, "I would show you
within five minutes walk from Columbia, areas where only Spanish is spoken, areas
where only Italian is spoken, areas where only Jewish is spoken. These people
have seen Americans and so forth but they and their children live the life of
their people in the old country."20
The sources on which he had based his assertion about Thorstein's ignorance
of English, Dorfman informed Andrew, were two Carleton classmates and remarks
on the subject allegedly made by Veblen himself as reported by former acquaintances. "Thorstein
always said he learned English as a foreign language," Dorfman argued. "It
is obvious that he must have learned it late and not at an early age, say 5"21
"The persons who told you that [Thorstein] knew no English," Andrew
replied, "told you what was not so." As for his younger brother's reported
statement to the effect that he had learned English "as a foreign language," he
had not meant what Dorfman understood. Thorstein's real native language, Andrew
explained, was Valdris and all the languages he subsequently acquired were in
that sense foreign, including literary Norwegian, which he learned to read only
after he had learned to read English.22
Endeavoring to put the question of Thorstein's mastery of English to rest,
together with the corollary matter of his alleged cultural alienation, Andrew
gave Dorfman his fullest, most persuasively explicated account of language
acquisition among the Veblen children:
I wrote you before that my younger brother and sister had English-speaking
playmates with whom they mingled daily from the time of Thorstein's birth.
They were the children of a protestant Irishman who lived about an eighth of
a mile away. There were several, at ages to fit them well as playmates of all
of ours. When the weather permitted the children mingled every day. The father
was a man of extensive reading and spoke good English, and the children spoke
correct English. Thorstein could not help learning English as early as he could
articulate words; and I know he did. There were other protestant Irish families
with whom we sometimes mingled. In our school district the Norwegians and these
orangemen usually stood together, as against the Catholic Irish, for the control
of the school. Of the different teachers we had 3 were Catholics, 7 were protestants.
Th[orstein] was early sent to school -- not quite five. His first teacher was
Valencia Eldridge, who was very fond of him. Under the circumstances he could
not grow up ignorant of English. By the time he was 17 he had read a great
deal (a voracious reader you call him). Much of this had been in Norwegian;
but our material in that language was scant. By far the greater part had been
in English, much of it fiction, but everything else that we could obtain. He
knew every word in the "National" spelling book, and synonyms and
opposites of every word. Long before this he could not be spelled down on any
word in the series of readers and spellers used. It was taken as a mild scandal
that he spelled down the teachers. Before 17 he knew Norwegian well enough
to write verses (and a lot of them) with facility; and he did the same in English.
Along the south side of the Norwegians was a large settlement of Germans. Naturally
Th[orstein] came in contact with them. So he learned German and spoke it without
difficulty. Indeed he never studied German in school, so far as I can find
out, still he read Kant and other difficult German matter that he got out of
Mr. Pentz's library, before he had any formal training in the language. In
addition to this, he knew the principal Norwegian dialects, not only to understand
them, but he could speak them with their individual idiom. Some of these dialects
differ in the same degree as the Swedish and Danish languages.23
Moreover, the erudition for which Veblen became known rested precisely on the
extensive reading he had done as a young man--principally in English-- of fiction,
history, mythology, and general science. It required "a grotesque imagination," Andrew
admonished, to conceive that Thorstein had arrived at Carleton ignorant of
English.24
While Dorfman was finally persuaded to modify his assessment of Veblen's language
acquisition and in his 1934 opus refrains from asserting that Veblen knew no
English upon entering Carleton, he could never quite let go of that first facile
preconception. In his extended introduction to the 1973 edition of Veben's
Essays, Reviews and Reports, he quotes B. K. Nordfeldt as stating that Veblen
had once told him that "until he was nine or ten his speech was Norwegian
and that Latin came next, on which English was built." In the same footnote
he writes that, according to Ellen Rolfe Veblen, Thorstein "knew practically
no English" when he entered Carleton. He records as well Mildred Bennett's
recollection of a conversation in which Veblen had told her that "his
English was quite limited when he entered Carleton."25
Returning to Dorfman's observations about the closed immigrant communities
within five minutes' walk of Columbia University, Andrew suggested that one
had first to know the cultural and economic background of "the great folk-wandering
that made the Middle West" and created the conditions in which the more
recent immigrant currents had "brought about the present conditions in
the cities" and "largely changed the complexion" of the eastern
part of the country. Such knowledge, however, could be acquired only through "a
great deal of study" and "years of voluminous reading" -- which
Andrew Veblen had in fact done and, as he here implied, Joseph Dorfman had
not. Andrew did not blame Dorfman for not having acquired knowledge that youth
precluded but did criticize him, and severely, for being "so crassly ignorant
of [his] own ignorance as to build up a fantastic misconception of the matter
and on that basis account for what thus proves (naturally enough) a condition
and influence in the evolution of Thorstein's personality."26
"My quarrel with you," Andrew reiterated, "is because you presume
to understand [the Norwegian immigrant reality] so as to use it in accounting
for the making of a peculiarly elusive (your own word) personality."27 And
Dorfman, manifestly, did not understand -- could not or, less charitably, would
not understand. Whatever the case, from the outset he reverts to a pattern of
a priori reasoning and selective documentation that violates the scholarly canon
and consequently vitiates the end product, just as Andrew Veblen had feared.
That Dorfman relies consistently on hearsay evidence to bolster his preconceived
notion of Thorstein Veblen as a culturally alienated intellect rather than
consider the richly nuanced, firsthand testimony to the contrary offered by
Veblen's erudite sibling illustrates perfectly the flawed scholarship on which
Thorstein Veblen and His America rests. Dorfman's failure to acknowledge the
wealth of information generously given him by Andrew Veblen, in turn, was at
once shameful and deceptive. That he failed to consider that information and
to accommodate his rendering of Thorstein Veblen to it is inexcusable--a sin
of commission for which both he and his academic mentors must bear the guilt.28
Dorfman's incompetent handling of Veblen's family background is compounded
by the contorted personality he fashions from that background (as Andrew had
anticipated)--a portrait that has prevailed in scholarly opinion down to the
present. Despite his professed admiration for Veblen, the mental image he conjures
of the man remains a twisted composite of negative qualifiers: "odd," "queer," "aloof," :conceited," "contemptuous," "supercilious," "indolent," "moody," "maladjusted," "insincere," "cynical," "mischievous," "rustic," "unkempt." Acknowledged
qualities of patience, generosity, sensitivity, wit, humor and intellect fail
to stem Dorfman's incessant repetition of offensive traits, which he invariably
proffers on the basis of unsubstantiated informant testimony--the very same
kind of testimony that he assures Andrew Veblen is inadmissible to the academic
writer. Just as he shows no judgment in according greater weight to the recollections
of former friends and acquaintances than to the firsthand testimony of Veblen's
learned brother, Dorfman demonstrates a striking inability to discriminate
among his sources generally. Time and again he simply repeats what "somebody
told him."
The perverse effect to which this undisciplined practice has worked is well
illustrated by the apocryphal tale of the hornets' nest, which Dorfman attributes
to Leon Ardzrooni and repeats as fact. According to Ardzrooni, he writes,
Veblen, in one of his walks, found a hornet's [sic] nest and shortly thereafter
met a farmer with an empty sack. He asked the farmer if he could borrow the
sack for a short while, returned to the nest, put the hornets into it, returned
the sack to the farmer, and said, "thank you." The farmer,says Ardzrooni,
is still looking for Veblen.29
The account is doubtful on its surface. Dorfman, apparently untutored in the
ways of the natural world, neglects to consider the nature of hornets and the
practical difficulty of introducing an active nest into a sack If the incident
happened at all, the nest was more likely an empty remnant of the previous
season utilized in good humor to josh a local neighbor--or, perhaps, to tweak
in the telling a gullible Ardzrooni, the gentleman raisin farmer from Fresno.
Dorfman offers no credible evidence that this incident ever occurred. Nor does
he clarify whether it was actually witnessed by his informant or in fact recounted
to him at some later date by Veblen himself. Yet prominent scholars have accepted
this tale uncritically as evidence of perversity in Veblen's personality. It
reveals "a buried sadism," avers David Riesman.30 It indicates that
Veblen's sense of fun "verged on the sadistic," echoes Jack Diggins.31
Neither Dorfman nor the others who have taken the tale of the hornets' nest
at face value demonstrate the slightest appreciation of rural humor. None,
certainly, has ever attempted to bag live hornets.
Far more serious than this unsubstantiated attribution of quirky comportment,
however, is Dorfman's portrayal of Veblen as a licentious philanderer who is
amorously intimate with university coeds, faculty wives and shadowy ladies "who
move in on him"--behavior that allegedly costs him his teaching positions
at Chicago and Stanford and which, true or false, further marginalizes him
as an erratic personality, with the attendant implication that his intellect,
too, is flawed. Several factors would appear to have conspired to produce this
prejudicial picture of Veblen, including, of course, his one (and only) documentable
extramarital relationship--while married to Ellen Rolfe--with the woman who
would in time become his second spouse, Ann Fessenden Bradley.
Dorfman's youth seems also to have been a factor, for considering the normal
course of human development it is doubtful that, still in his twenties, he
had fully come to terms with his own sexuality. Not marrying until his Veblen
manuscript was nearing completion (June 1932), he lacked the experience of
conjugal relations that might have afforded him some personal insight into
Veblen's emotional life. Much of what Dorfman writes in this regard seems more
the product of hormone-driven male fantasy than the result of mature scholarship.
One must also take into account the larger context of prevailing institutional
norms and societal mores in which Veblen's violations of accepted behavior
have been interpreted. The failure of Dorfman's academic mentors to provide
proper guidance on this problematic aspect of his dissertation and the readiness
of later scholars to embrace his salacious rendition of Veblen's private life
says more about the repressed nature of American sexuality than it does about
Thorstein Veblen. (American academics seem obsessed with Veblen's sex life,
Franco Ferrarotti pointedly remarked at the inaugural ITVA meeting. For European
scholars, such matters are inconsequential, have little bearing on Veblen's
intellectual legacy, and therefore merit scant attention.32) Jack Diggins,
by way of example, extrapolates from Thorstein Veblen and His America to sketch
a likeness of Veblen even more grotesque than Dorfman's raw depiction: Veblen,
Diggins writes, led "an inspired love life" characterized by "libertinism" and "unconcealed
womanizing."33 He was a "notorious philanderer" who delighted "in
shocking the sensibilities of Victorian America."34
In the same exasperating manner that Dorfman frequently avers the very opposite
of what the evidence he presents would indicate, Diggins acknowledges in one
breath that Veblen's relations with women constitute "one of the least
documented affairs in American cultural history," only to insist in the
next that Veblen was an incorrigible profligate. "Any person's love life
is a challenge to serious scholarship," he cautions. And Veblen "is
a frustrating cul-de-sac." Be that as it may, he incautiously hastens
to add, "there is no question that throughout his professional life [Veblen]
was involved in one affair after another, once with a colleague's wife who
later became the mistress of Anatole France."35
Diggins ought to have heeded his own sober counsel and eschewed these ad hominem
assertions first proffered by Joseph Dorfman, for in actual fact no one has
yet presented credible evidence that Thorstein Veblen was ever involved in "one
affair after another"--not in Chicago, not at Stanford; neither before
nor since. (It is roundly curious, in this regard, that one finds not even
a whisper of sexual impropriety on Veblen's part prior to his arrival in Chicago,
that is, throughout the first 35 years of his life. Are we to believe that
of a sudden, at life's midpoint, his virility burst its restraints, loosed
by the hedonism of turn-of-the-century Hyde Park?) Diggins' allusion to the "colleague's
wife who later became the mistress of Anatole France"--taken straight
from Dorfman--is a particularly infelicitous reference that illustrates the
proclivity of some American academics to bestud Veblen's imputed erotic exploits.
(A subliminal celebration of his fancied prowess?) It also highlights a case
of purposeful source manipulation that again raises questions about Dorfman's
Veblen scholarship more broadly.
The colleague to whom Diggins here refers was Oscar Lovell Triggs, an instructor
of English on the Chicago campus who, like Veblen, offended the academy's sense
of decorum and institutional wisdom;36 Triggs' wife was Laura McAdoo, sister
of Woodrow Wilson's Treasury Secretary, William Gibbs McAdoo,37 and at the
time of her liaison with Anatole France, the engaging 35-year-old divorce,
Madame Gagey--or as France preferred to call her, la belle Floridienne.38 The
import of this reference lies in the suggested linkage between Veblen's alleged
affair with the glamorous Mrs. Triggs and his subsequent departure from the
University of Chicago.
Dorfman provides few particulars in Thorstein Veblen and His America, stating
only that "in 1904, when Veblen returned from a trip to Europe during
which he had been seen in the company of one of his admirers, he found it advisable
to look for another position."39 In the 1973 volume, now in the fullness
of maturity yet unable to reconsider the assumptions of his youth, he inserts
the additional information about Laura McAdoo's involvement with Anatole France.
And five years later, in The Bard of Savagery, Diggins repeats the story, now
asserting what Dorfman had only implied, namely that Veblen did indeed have
an affair with Laura McAdoo and that his association with the University of
Chicago "came to an end when he scandalized the authorities by traveling
to Europe with [her]."40
Both Diggins and Dorfman seem captivated by Veblen's imputed ability to share
the bed of a woman who also bestows her amorous charms on an icon of French
belles lettres. Dorfman in particular embellishes the relationship by attributing
an importance to McAdoo in the life of Anatole France that she did not have. "She
played an important role in the development of one of Europe's finest writers," he
affirms, playing fast and loose with the evidence at hand. (Over thirty years
her senior, France was quite fully developed by the time he met the former
Mrs. Triggs.) France's liaison with Laura McAdoo, Dorfman writes citing biographer
David Tylden-Wright, "was one of his most serious affairs. She had literary
taste and some talent. France helped her with some articles and she was his
audience for much of Les Dieux ont Soif. This novel of the French Revolution
and the Terror is considered his greatest."41
Apparently wishing to link Veblen to the risqué circles of trans-Atlantic
haute culture, Dorfman selectively takes from Tylden-Wright only what serves
that end. He deceptively alters Tylden-Wright's statement that France's involvement
with McAdoo was "his most serious love affair since he had lost [his wife]" to
the assertion that it was "one of [France's] most serious affairs." He
neglects, moreover, to note that this relationship survived but a matter of
months and ended tragically when, spurned by France, McAdoo took her own life.42
As for Laura McAdoo's purported influence on the renowned writer, it could
hardly have been decisive given their respective life chronologies and the
brevity of their intimacy. Even in the case of Les Dieux ont Soif, notes Tylden-Wright,
she must share whatever influence may rightfully be hers with France's deceased
spouse, during whose life France had commenced the work. But more than to either
woman, Tylden-Wright insists, "Les Dieux ont Soif belongs to France himself," for
into the revolutionary experience of the late 18th century he "transfused
his own life experience." He played out "not only the revolutionary
drama, but his own personal drama, the conflict between his love of life...
and his fear of the various eventualities which he saw as pitfalls lying only
lightly below the surface."43
In Dorfman's mind, however, the exotic Laura McAdoo remains too attractive
a figure among Veblen's diverse coterie of acquaintances not to associate her
more intimately with Veblen, which he accomplishes by reporting his discovery
of a first edition of The Theory of Business Enterprise inscribed: "To
Mrs. Laura McAdoo Triggs, With all my heart. Thorstein Veblen."44 The
inscription, he implies, is suggestive of illicit romance. That he should think
so speaks eloquently of the neurotic sense of sexuality so prevalent in American
gender relations, both in Veblen's day and in our own.
This groundless assumption, in turn, inclines Dorfman to explain Veblen's exit
from the University of Chicago as a consequence of this latest in a purportedly
long series of trysts outside his marriage. (The apocryphal tale of Veblen's
once having replied to President Harper's expression of concern for the moral
health of faculty wives that "he had tried them all and they were no good," continues
to be recounted with evident delight by otherwise sober scholars.45) In the
McAdoo-Triggs matter, however, Dorfman possessed clear evidence to the contrary,
which he both ignored and concealed from his readers, to wit: Veblen's own
account of the incident as related in a letter to his friend, Jacques Loeb.46
Veblen's situation at Chicago, he informed Loeb, had never been good and recently
had become quite untenable, Harper having given him notice that he should "look
for no recognition or advancement" and would be let go "whenever
it can be done without inconvenience." He was being kept on the staff "as
a concession to Professor Laughlin" rather than by Harper's choice. "The
president's growing dislike," he wrote, "is connected with the scandalous
gossip which has apparently reached you, being the cause of it rather than
the effect." Harper's own office, Veblen assured Loeb, was the source
of that gossip.47 "At the risk of tiring you with loose talk," he
continued,
I will give you an outline of the last half-year's adventures. They are not
of such a character as to command belief on the part of anyone not familiar
with the methods of our executive. By way of premise, during last year the
wife of one of the faculty [Laura McAdoo Triggs] attended one of my courses
of lectures. This man (Oscar L. Triggs] was also persona non arata with the
president, at the same time that he is a friend of mine. Also, I had left over
from the manuscript of the book on Business Enterprise a somewhat long chapter
which offered an analysis of the working of business enterprise in the administration
of a university. This chapter I proposed to publish as a separate small volume,
and in the search for a publisher the manuscript came into the hands of the
president. The argument was, of course, of an entirely impersonal character,
but the president was apparently not pleased with it and seems to have seen
in it some reflexion on the regime here. This was in June last. At the close
of the school year I went to Europe for the summer, as did also the man and
woman spoken of above, with their child. Hurried counsel was taken to dismiss
me from the university on the ground of my having brought the institution into
disrepute. No intimation was given me of this proposed action, which after
all failed to come to anything because the newspapers refused to print the
reports given them. The matter being libellous, the papers refused to print
it without some one among their informants taking the responsibility, but these
informants who made up the story, being also aware that it was libellous, and
having nothing to fall back on, were unwilling to vouch for it. So it fell
through, leaving nothing but an added degree of ill feeling between the president
and me, and such damage to my reputation as these endeavors were calculated
to yield.
"Under these circumstances," Veblen concluded, I should be glad to
leave this place."46
No countervailing evidence available to Dorfman or any other scholar to date
approaches this document in its credibility and persuasive force. It is consistent
with what is known about Veblen's traditional sense of rectitude (not even
his severest detractors depict him as deceitful) and concords well with the
prevailing state of affairs on the University of Chicago campus at the time.
Veblen and Triggs, in turn, shared a disdain of conspicuous propriety, challenged
conventional wisdom, and indeed appear to have been good friends.49 There is
no reason to doubt Veblen's assertion in his letter to Loeb that he and Triggs
were friends still, six months after their return from Europe, a dubious proposition
had there been any impropriety in Veblen's relationship with Triggs' spouse.
The presence of the couple's child makes such an allegation all the more improbable,
unless one can show Veblen to have been a thoroughgoing degenerate, which the
evidence simply does not support.
Dorfman had access to this letter and actually quotes a portion of it in his
1973 volume, specifically Veblen's comments about Harper's displeasure with
his manuscript on business enterprise in university administration.50 Yet he
studiously avoids any reference to the remainder of the letter, which bears
centrally on the reason for Veblen's departure from Chicago, suppressing, in
effect, evidence that tends to negate the more lurid version of events which
he and others seem to prefer.
Press coverage at the time, moreover, would appear to substantiate Veblen's
account of the matter, which raises the further question of why Dorfman neglected
to utilize this elementary source. (Why has no other scholar done so?) On 20
June 1906, to cite a ready example, the morning edition of The Chicago Record
Herald carried a major front-page story headlined: "Professors Resign;
Mystery on Midway. Five Men Quit University Faculty in OneDay.
"Another 'faculty mystery,'involving the resignation of five members of
the teaching staff, has arisen at the University of Chicago," the article
announced. "The five professors severed their relations with the university
yesterday, some of them declaring in explanation that the big school, with its
$20,000,000 endowment from John D. Rockefeller, was not able to pay them sufficient
salary." University administrators countered that the resignations "were
perfectly incidental" and "not the result of university poverty."
Among the five faculty members who tendered their resignations was "Thorstein
Veblen, assistant professor of political economy and author of the two much
discussed books, 'The Theory of the Leisure Class' and 'The Theory of Business
Enterprise'." University counsel and business manager, Wallace Heckman, "declared
that one of the professors was 'let go,' but declined to give the reason for
the dismissal." It was rumored, the paper reported, "that Professor
Veblen might be the one in question, as his 'Theory of the Leisure Class' expressed
many radical views on political economy. The professor denied that he had been
discharged."52
There is not a word in this account to suggest possible improprieties as the
reason for Veblen's departure from Chicago, only the obvious suspicion that
he had been let go because of his "radical views." What had offended
university authorities, as Max Lerner long ago remarked, "was less [Veblen's]
unstable menage than his dangerous thoughts," for which they "got
back at him in many ways."53 Veblen's academic fame, concurs J. K. Galbraith
more recently, "came also from the reaction of the presidents of the institutions
in which he taught," who, on perceiving the "grave discontent" his
views occasioned among "college trustees and the adjacent business community,
found it wise to have him move elsewhere.
There is at work here an elementary sociological principle: quirks of personality
commonly ignored in the ideological conformist are not tolerated in the intellectual
heretic. Where the heretic's ideas challenge the dominant belief system and
cannot readily be refuted on the plane of rational discourse, they are discredited
through ad hominem attacks on the individual who articulates them. Typically,
those who engage in such personal vilification are themselves fast defenders
of the prevailing wisdom, which is, in effect, the primary mechanism for mediating
power in society. By force of his ideas, Lerner reminds us, Veblen threatened
to pull the temple down upon the Philistine's heads, for which he was predictably
reviled.55
Precisely how otherwise disciplined scholars have found it possible to indulge
in what amounts to a gratuitous, self-perpetuating execration of Veblen's personality
would require a careful inquiry into the personal history of each one. In Joseph
Dorfman's case, there is perhaps room to speculate about a felt need to surmount
his own immigrant background and that very sense of cultural alienation which
he so insistently attributes to Veblen. More to the point for purposes of the
present argument, however, is the disconnected nature of the biographical information
about Veblen which Dorfman offers scholars and the failure of most of these
same scholars to grasp that disconnectedness.
"Veblen was surely one of the strangest creatures ever to walk in the groves
of academe," hyperbolizes Jack Diggins, blissfully oblivious to the strange,
often wondrous fauna who inhabit the academy all around him. Examining what he
describes as a "rare photograph" of Veblen, Diggins imputes qualities
of stolidity, quizzicality and shrewdness to the eyes that "peer out" from
Veblen's "lean, rough face."56 In this same photograph, Robert Heilbroner
sees "peasant eyes" behind a "blunt nose," an "unkempt
mustache" that "hides" the mouth, a "short scraggly beard," and "lank,
flat" hair that is parted in the middle of "a gnomelike head" and
which falls "in an inverted V over a low and sloping forehead."57 (Did
he not drag his knuckles, simianlike, on the ground as well?, one wants to ask.)
Veblen covered his "Norwegian peasant physiognomy," Diggins tells
us, with "rumpled clothes" that "looked as though they had been
slept in." He wore collars "usually several sizes too large" (but
not in the photograph Diggins has before him), his trousers were "baggy," and
he kept his "thick woolen stockings" up by pinning them to his pant
legs. He carried a pocket watch "on a length of black ribbon which he
hooked to the front of his vest by a large safety pin."58 The safety pin,
Heilbroner notes, is visible in the photograph he and Diggins are examining.
The overall effect, he pronounces, is "a strange appearance [that hides]
a yet stranger personality."
The photograph that Diggins and Heilbroner remark upon is a 1920 portrait for
which Veblen sat at the prestigious Manhattan studio of Underwood & Underwood.
It was probably taken for publicity purposes at the request of his publisher,
B. W. Huebsch, and is reproduced as a frontispiece in Dorfman's Thorstein Veblen
and His America. A subsequent request by Huebsch to use a portrait of Veblen
for promoting Absentee ownership and Business Enterprise in Recent Times met
with the author's quick refusal: "I can only say," Veblen responded, "that
in my opinion such a portrait would have no value for the purpose whatever;
indeed I believe quite simply that it would have less than no value. On this
account, as well as on grounds of a senseless sentimental revulsion, I would
rather not."60 One wonders whether he perhaps had a premonition of the
injurious use future academics would make of his aging countenance. In any
event, the portrait noted by Diggins and Heilbroner is of "less than no
value" for the purpose they would utilize it.
Beyond the methodological folly of pretending to discover character traits
in an uncontextualized photograph, Diggins and Heilbroner neglect to compare
the Underwood portrait with an earlier image of Veblen reproduced in the same
Dorfman tome -- one that suggests none of the traits they would read into the
1920 photograph, rather portrays a self-possessed, stylishly attired University
of Chicago faculty member. And there are other photographs of Veblen as well,
some of them available at the time Diggins and Heilbroner were writing, each
one suggestive of additional moods and qualities. Even the six-image study
of Blanca Will's 1920 Veblen bust made by Sylvia Bartley for the current ITVA
symposium is instructive for the variety of perspectives it presents on a single
visage.62 Indeed, a second Underwood portrait of Veblen taken from a different
angle during the same sitting as the photograph described by Diggins and Heilbroner
itself differs markedly in the image it projects.43
The greater error, however, one that Diggins and Heilbroner commit here and
elsewhere and in which they are not alone, is to generalize perceptions of
particular moments in Veblen's life to his life as a whole. They fail, in the
present instance, to consider that Veblen is 63 years old, in marginal health,
and preoccupied by the hospitalization of his second spouse, of whom he was
very fond and who died in that same year of 1920. The "unkempt" Veblen
of "lethargic movements" and "rustic exterior" was but
a deepening shadow of earlier, more vigorous selves, not unlike other men who
survived six decades in an era when male longevity averaged less. He bore little
resemblance to the rakish academic of twenty years before, captured suggestively
in the second of Dorfman's two photographs, as well as in a recently recovered
snapshot from the same period in which, accompanied by his first wife, another
couple and the female companion of the photographer, all formally attired,
he impishly hams for the camera. 64
Because Dorfman's Thorstein Veblen and His America remains the standard biographical
reference for Veblen's life, its shortcomings as a biography necessarily contribute
to such error. While Dorfman offers a generally competent review of Veblen's
scholarship, as noted above, he provides no coherent account of his life; no
clear and accessible life chronology to which others can refer. Those who rely
on Dorfman, consequently, tend to telescope Veblen's life into a single undifferentiated
portrait.
Moreover, there are major gaps in Dorfman's reconstruction of Veblen's life,
which if filled would add significantly to our understanding of the man Veblen
was. His sojourns on Washington Island offer a ready example. The years between
Veblen's graduation from Carleton and his enrollment at Cornell are another,
especially his time in Stacyville, Iowa. Dorfman provides intriguing fragments
about this critical period but little of real substance; no firm basis, certainly,
for judgment regarding Veblen's delayed entry into the academic world as a
remunerated scholar.
Veblen's travels comprise yet another gap in our knowledge of his life, for
they were extensive by any measure and occupied a correspondingly large area
of his life experience, with all may imply for a proper appraisal of his intellectual
legacy. Contrary to Heilbroner's facile assertion that Veblen found the world "uncomfortable
and forbidding,"65 he would appear to have moved through it with an ease
and awareness uncommon in his own day as well, perhaps, as in our own. He engaged
the world, the evidence suggests, more fully and directly than many of his
latterday critics, themselves so immersed in the virtual world of globe-diminishing
air travel and electronic imagery that they no longer recognize the spatial
and experiential reality in which Veblen led his life.
While Dorfman offers an occasional reference to Veblen's movements and newly
accessioned sources promise additional insights, at the present time we still
know very little about the travel experiences themselves, often months in duration
and which took him to such out-of-the-way places as Nowhere, Idaho, Buck Prairie,
Oregon and Mancos Valley, Colorado, as well as to ancestral villages in Norway
and the cosmopolitan capitals of Europe. (He did much of his writing while
encamped at some of these remote locations, notably Buck Prairie, Mancos Valley,
and Washington Island.66) Scholars have yet to discover Veblen in these private
spaces, but also, it should be emphasized, in the more familiar settings where
our presumed knowledge of him proves quite incomplete as well.
The much remarked irregularities in Veblen's personal life are a case in point,
where those who have attributed to him a pattern of licentious comportment
in his relations with women have neither scrutinized those relations chronologically
nor traced them into the biographical lacunae that still envelop Veblen. It
has been erroneously assumed, for example, that his pursuit of a position at
Stanford University was precipitated by an excess of profligacy in Chicago
and that physiologist Jacques Loeb pulled Veblen's chestnuts out of the fire
by intervening on his behalf with Stanford president David Starr Jordan. After
the McAdoo-Triggs "scandal" of 1904, his position on the Chicago
campus "became intolerable," as Heilbroner states the oft-repeated
tale, and he "began casting around for another post."67
In actual fact, Veblen had first approached Jordan about a possible teaching
position at Stanford five years before, upon publication of The Theory of the
Leisure Class, when his marital relations appear not to have been an issue
and his own dissatisfactions at Chicago had to do with rank and remuneration.
He had learned of a possible vacancy in Stanford's political economy faculty,
he wrote Jordan in March 1899, and wished to be considered for that position
should it materialize and his qualifications merit consideration. "I shall
in that case feel at liberty to trouble you with further information," he
advised, "as well as with letters from the head of the department here
and from men in the science elsewhere.
Veblen had already had Macmillan forward a copy of The Theory of the Leisure
Class to Jordan69 and the following month informed Jordan that letters of support
would be forthcoming from Professors Frank H. Taussig (Harvard), Jeremiah W.
Jenks (Cornell) and J. Laurence Laughlin (Chicago).70 Laughlin's letter is
especially interesting, for it offers additional insight into Veblen's situation
at the University of Chicago. Laughlin's only hesitation in writing on his
younger colleague's behalf, he assured Jordan, was that he would have to say
things "which might lose him to us."
Veblen, Laughlin wrote, "is one of the brainiest, deepest economists we
have, with an unusual preparation for his peculiar kind of work. No other man
in our department has as strong a hold as he on our graduate students." Veblen
got "a great deal out of all his students, keeping also a close personal
relationship with them."
In a formulation reflective of the ideological concerns of the day, Laughlin
reported that Veblen had been teaching the courses on socialism at Chicago "with
a breadth, depth and discretion that have always commanded admiration, but
never got us into trouble." That, he declared, "is the best test
I can give both of his scholarship and his general good sense. No man in the
country is better read than he in this subject. I might say much the same of
other topics which he has taught here for seven years."71
Laughlin told Jordan that he would not think of allowing Veblen to go to Stanford
if he could prevent it but that "in President Harper's view, there is
not just now income enough to grant Dr. Veblen the promotion which he has deserved." In
the circumstances, he could not fault Veblen for seeking employment elsewhere,
even as he yet hoped "that he will not be tempted away from us until we
can honor him as I think he deserves."72 The Stanford position did not
then materialize, although the groundwork would seem to have been prepared
for Veblen's appointment seven years later. In the meantime, his situation
at Chicago did improve as Laughlin had hoped, when he was promoted the following
year to the rank of assistant professor.73
Laughlin's reference to the "close personal relationship" that Veblen
maintained with his graduate students also warrants note, for it bears importantly
on the question of his relation's with university coeds and women generally.
Neither Dorfman nor later critics who dwell on Veblen's disdain of social convention
have entertained the possibility that Veblen recognized and encouraged intellect
among his students equally, without regard to gender. Where a male student
expressed admiration for Veblen, the critics- themselves socialized in the
culture of patriarchy--simply acknowledge him as more thoughtful or "abler" than
his fellow students; when a coed expressed such esteem, however, they reflexively
label her an "admirer," with the innuendo and social loadings which
that label carries. Veblen's intellectual discourse with females is dismissed
as "friendships" in which "he seems to have been the pursued
rather than the pursuer."74 Yet there is no such suggestion in Laughlin's
approving acknowledgement of Veblen's "close personal relationship" with
his students.
For Dorfman, it seems, Veblen's "friendships" with coed "admirers" could
only devolve into "affairs," of which there were any number in Chicago
and thereafter at Stanford.75 "He was always engaged in one liaison or
another," Heilbroner repeats.76 In Chicago, echoes Diggins, his "unconcealed
womanizing" proved intolerable, while at Stanford his "libertinism
... fully confirmed the notorious reputation he had brought with him."77
In California, "young coeds would visit his log cabin [sic!], and a few
would linger on for more than tea and conversation.77
All of which has been crudely fashioned from whole cloth, for no one -- let
me repeat -- has yet produced a scintilla of hard evidence to substantiate
these allegations of successive amorous affairs. What available evidence does
suggest is that from sometime after the turn of the century through his divorce
from Ellen Rolfe in 1911, Veblen maintained a single extramarital relationship
with Ann Fessenden Bradley, a former Chicago student whom he wed in 1914. No
documentation has yet come to light to indicate that prior to this relationship
Veblen was physically intimate with anyone outside his marriage--not that such
intimacy would have been out of the ordinary, given his spouse's physiological
impediments to normal conjugal intercourse.
There is intriguing evidence, on the other hand, that Veblen sustained serious
intellectual relationships with a number of women whose intellect he admired
and with whom he associated in genuine friendship. (His sister Emily may have
been the first woman with whom he shared such a relationship.) Indeed, Veblen's
readiness to share intellectually with the opposite gender -- rare in his day,
uncommon in our own -- is even evident in his relationship with Ellen Rolfe,
which transcended their divorce as marriage partners and endured until Ellen's
death in 1926.
Perhaps the most illustrative of these relationships is Veblen's longstanding
friendship with Sarah ("Sadie") Hardy, which dated from his first
years in Chicago through Hardy's marriage to San Francisco attorney Warren
Gregory to the end of Veblen's life. Dorfman, interestingly, refers to Hardy
several times and provides suggestive information about her association with
Veblen, yet once again fails to draw the appropriate inferences from that information
.
Like others of his graduate students, Veblen took more than a passing interest
in Sadie Hardy's intellectual development, at the same time as he seemed to
derive real benefit from her thoughts about his own work. In an exemplary piece
of correspondence penned to her in January 1896, on the eve of her departure
to the Hawaiian Islands for an extended period of rest and recuperation, he
first begs her pardon for writing in such "unprovoked fashion," then
for the "dubious stationery" on which he writes, justifying the paper
by virtue of the ease with which its surface accepts the ink, as well as the "subsidiary
consideration of its inexpensiveness."
"May it reconcile you to it," he further enjoins her, "that it
is also the particular paper upon which the Leisure Class emerges, so that it
is immediately at hand and resort to it means labor saving on that account also."81
Noting that Professor Laughlin had encouraged her--by way of "producing
something"--to undertake "some sort of an investigation into the
industrial situation in Hawaii," Veblen wrote Hardy that while this "was
no doubt well-meant advice" on Laughlin's part, it was "all wrong" and
she should "avoid all work along this line." She must have nothing
to do with anything "that savors of workmanship, especially not in the
way of practical economics," which, in Veblen's view, she was "by
no means specially fitted for nor inclined to."82 What he wished to propose
was of a rather different order.
"I have a theory which I wish to propound," he went on. "I do
not know how much, if any or all, of this I have told you before [as] I am under
the vague impression that I have already told you everything I ever knew or thought." Had
she heard it before, she was of course at liberty to ignore "the present
exposition."
What Veblen wanted to share on this occasion concerned the future development
of economic science. It was, he felt, the task of the generation of economists
to which Hardy belonged to rehabilitate economics by bringing it "into
line with modern evolutionary science." The point of departure for this
rehabilitation, he wrote, will be the modern anthropological and psychological
sciences, perhaps most immediately, for economic theory in the general sense,
that folk-psychology which is just now taking on a definite form. Starting
from this preliminary study of usages, aptitudes, propensities and habits of
thought (much of which is already worked out in a more or less available form)
the science, taken generally, is to shape itself into a science of the evolution
of economic institutions. Detailed theoretical work will of course be in place,
as always, and "practical economics" will come in for its share,
and these things will have to come into an organic relation with the science,
which at present they have not. This theoretical work will have to depend closely
on psychological and ethnological data for its premises.
Whether or not economic science actually moved in this direction, Veblen told
Hardy, "a reading of some of the books which deal with anthropology in
outline would never come amiss." Such reading, he observed, "need
not be carried on for a purpose beyond itself, or with a view to systematized
knowledge." Should she decide to try it, she must not let it tire her. "Go
no further with it," he advised, "than your curiosity will carry
you, and never let it degenerate into a task. Drop it without compunction just
as soon as you are so inclined. If it does not interest you for its own sake
it is of no use to you anyway."84
Veblen offered to send Hardy "two or three elementary books" which
he had found useful. They were easy reading, he assured her, and he believed
that she would enjoy "at least a part of them." She should not despise
them, he added, "because they seem irrelevant; everything seems irrelevant
in anthropology if it is taken by itself, nothing if taken with the rest." He
offered to send her "another installment" should she want additional
books or wish to pursue some special topic.85
Veblen concludes his nine-page missive with a characteristic expression of
deference to his correspondent. "I know that I have been bold beyond the
limits of conventionality in this," he writes, "but you will be indulgent
because you know that I have a very uncertain grasp of the conventionalities
at best, and I hope you will not find that I have thrust myself gratuitously
and indelicately upon you with all this advice." (This brings to mind
the remark by Veblen's grandniece, Colette Sims Van Fleet, that Veblen was "conventionally
unconventional."86) Were Hardy to find him intolerably officious, he closed,
she should give him "a gentle hint" that she had had enough advice
and he would set himself "to the task of bringing about a shrinkage of
the supply."87
This is hardly the stuff of erotic license. It is reflective of Veblen's unusual
capacity for intellectual relationships with women--a capacity, the evidence
suggests, considerably more developed than the frivolity so inconsiderately
attributed to him. That very capacity for shared intellect, moreover, would
appear to have been the particular quality that best explains his more intimate
relationship with Ann ("Babe") Bradley, with whont he was sharing
books and ideas already in Chicago -- much as he did with Sadie Hardy -- and
who herself took an active part in preparing his own writings for publication.88
Veblen's relationship with Babe is central to an understanding of the individual
Veblen was and, as already suggested, would appear to lie at the heart of his
ill-deserved reputation for promiscuity. While many details of this relationship
remain to be documented, sufficient evidence has come to light to support the
conclusion that the "young coeds" who Diggins says visited Veblen
at his Stanford residence and "would linger on for more than tea and conversation" were
in fact one and the same woman, Babe Bradley -- twenty years Veblen's junior,
to be sure, but still a 30-year-old divorced mother of two, scarcely the inexperienced
coed of tender age that Diggins implies.
Veblen and Bradley appear to have entered into an intimately personal relationship
at least by Veblen's final year in Chicago and perhaps sometime earlier. Babe
had separated from her husband, Tom Bevans, and moved with her two young daughters,
Becky and Ann, into an artists' colony of single-story frame buildings near
Jackson Park left over from the Chicago World's Fair. They referred to this
location, which was situated on 57th Street in the shadow of the elevated tracks
of the Illinois Central R.R., as "The Corner of Indecision."
Late in life Becky still recalled a particular visit by their "tall quiet
friend, Toyse" [Veblen], who had come "to bring Babe a bunch of books
to read." Becky and her sister had been quarreling and were crying when
Veblen walked in. He took one look at their sorry faces and exclaimed, "Aha!
Just what I need. I have this little bottle and I need some tear drops in it.
Could I have just a few?" The tears, of course, evaporated and Toyse,
as they affectionately called him, read Babe and the girls "some poems
from a beautiful Chinese-red volume, by Swinburne."89
One of Bradley's neighbors at the Corner of Indecision was the Swedish immigrant
artist B. J. 0. Nordfeldt (1878-1950), who estabished a studio there in 1903
and for the next two years busied himself making etchings and wood engravings
of Chicago. In 1905, the year he left Chicago for the East Coast, Nordfeldt
painted two portraits of Veblen, one full-length, the other seated, both of
which appear to have been lost.90 In her late eighties Becky still remembered
Veblen sitting for "Nordy," who included her in one of the portraits
as "a little white ghost in the background" watching from a doorway.
Babe had objected to the purple and green shadowing of Veblen's face but Nordfeldt
dismissed her objection with the retort, "That's just the way he sits
around and looks."91
These circumstances place Veblen and Babe in each other's company during the
academic year 1904-05 and suggest a more than casual acquaintance. The evidence
for the next two years is thin but it appears that Veblen continued to visit
Babe and the girls even after he began teaching at Stanford. Then, in 1907,
Babe left Becky and Ann with their Bradley grandparents and traveled to Berkeley,
where she enrolled as a graduate student at the University of California. She
and Veblen saw each other that year on both sides of San Francisco Bay, when
she would visit him at Cedro Cottage, on the Stanford campus, or when he would
go to Berkeley to see friends and colleagues. Hanging on the wall of her rented
room on the north side of campus (2523 Virginia Street) was one of the portraits
Nordfeldt had done of Veblen two years earlier.92
The sequence of events over the following year remains to be sorted out, but
sometime in 1909 Babe and the girls took up residence on a piece of Bevans
family property several miles outside of Grangeville, Idaho, jokingly referred
to among themselves as "Nowhere." Veblen joined them in late December
of that year and was immediately stricken with a nearly fatal case of double
pneumonia. In what was a rather extraordinary drama in pioneer circumstances,
Babe nursed him back to health despite a local physician's prognosis that he
would not survive.93
Veblen and Babe had obviously been in communication and he did not appear in
Nowhere unannounced. Prior to his arrival he had shipped a Christmas trunk
filled with shoes, moccasins and slippers for all three -- two or three years'
worth of moccasins in half-size intervals for Becky and Ann. The top tray of
the trunk was filled with chocolates.94
By spring Veblen had recovered sufficiently to help with the milking and other
chores. He left Nowhere "before the Jersey calved."95 obliged by
his untenable marital situation to resign his position at Stanford, he was
no doubt preoccupied with his professional and financial future and wished
to utilize his remaining time as a salaried faculty member to seek out a position
elsewhere. (President Jordan accepted Veblen's resignation of 6 October 1909, "to
take effect July 31, 1910,1196 and recommended to the Board of Trustees that
for the second semester of the 1909-1910 academic year Veblen "be granted
leave of absence on full pay, the reasons in detail to be stated verbally to
the Board. 1197)
As the summer of 1910 wore on, Veblen grew pessimistic about his prospects
of obtaining a position for the next academic year and, in anticipation of
having to stay put in Palo Alto, he made arrangements for Babe and the girls
to relocate discreetly at Pescadero, just over the Coast Range and not far
from his cabin retreat on La Honda Ridge. (His wife Ellen continued to reside
near the Stanford campus and their divorce would not be finalized for another
year.) Not long after Babe, Becky and Ann had settled into a rented cottage
near Pescadero Creek, Veblen secured a position at the University of Missouri.
He left for Columbia in December 1910 and commenced his new teaching duties
the following February.
In the spring of 1911, Babe and the girls moved from Pescadero to a ranch in
Buck Prairie, Oregon, east of Ashland. Veblen joined them there for the summer,
arriving with his campaign tent, camping gear and writing material following
the close of classes at Missouri. That summer, as noted earlier, he wrote chapter
five of The Instinct of Workmanship
At summer's end Veblen returned to Columbia, while later that fall Babe and
the girls decamped for Chicago. The chronology of their respective movements
over the next three years has yet to be established but enough is now known
to conclude that this was Veblen's sole intimate relationship at the time and
that it was moving inexorably toward full legitimation.
Veblen's divorce from Ellen was finalized in the Superior Court of San Mateo
County, California, on 20 January 1912. Significantly, the Court found that "no
evidence was offered or submitted by [Ellen] to sustain the allegations and
averments set forth in [her] complaint as to the ground of extreme cruelty," a
reference, no doubt, to Veblen's alleged "libertinism," "womanizing" and
general licentiousness. The divorce was granted on the grounds of abandonment
and failure to support.99
Ellen's failure to sustain the allegations of inveterate philandering she had
been making since their days in Chicago bears centrally on the argument advanced
in this paper, to wit: that there is no persuasive evidence to support these
allegations--none, certainly, that would be admissible in a court of law. Ellen,
it seems, was herself the source of the rumors, which then circulated in an
ever-expanding ripple effect as unsubstantiated hearsay.
Even David Starr Jordan was leery of these allegations and indicated as much
to Ellen. While he was perturbed by Veblen's failure to maintain proper Victorian
appearances,100 he had no factual basis to presume Veblen to be of "immoral
character." If the university had a legitimate need to know such facts,
he told Ellen, "it is necessary at the same time that we should know them
in some other than a general way." Responding to allusions she had made
to "official statements" about Veblen's conduct purportedly made
both in Chicago and at Stanford, Jordan disclaimed any knowledge of such statements. " Neither
myself nor the president of the University of Chicago possesses any information
on the subject at all," he assured her, "except such as has come
from rumors, and we know of no one except yourself who is in a position to
indicate what these rumors signify."101
Veblen's stepdaughter Becky, for her part, surmised that "it was easier
for university presidents and bureaucrats to believe the woman to whom Veblen
was at the time legally married"--herself from a prominent family of educators
and entrepreneurs--than accord any virtue to a divorced suffragette with socialist
leanings. When Ellen Rolfe made Veblen out to be a philanderer, they were quick
to accept her allegations. "She gave Stanford officialdom a good excuse
to fire [Veblen] by threatening scandal," Becky records,102 which may
have been what President Jordan wished to explain verbally to Stanford's Board
of Trustees in support of his recommendation that Veblen "be granted a
leave of absence on full pay" for his final semester at that institution.
We can only speculate about the phychology of Ellen's relationship with Veblen,
for it appears from afar to have been fraught with contradictions. Her apparent
possessiveness and readiness to inflict injury on the object of her affection
in order to keep him close are an all too familiar phenomenon in gender relations,
complicated in Ellen's case, perhaps, by her physiological under-development
and the sense of inadequacy to which it may have given rise. It is conceivable
that Veblen's intellectual relations with other women simply proved too threatening
to a spouse whose primal bond to her husband was itself intellectual.
It was another two and a half years from the granting of Veblen's divorce until
he and Bradley wed. In the interim they saw each other as the demands on their
respective lives permitted. They apparently spent time together in the Four
Corners area -- without the girls -- in the summer of 1912, where Veblen continued
to work on The Instinct of Workmanship. Babe had placed Becky and Ann in a
small East Coast orphanage during the previous year while she struggled to
make ends meet, then accompanied Veblen west. She had to leave him suddenly
to retrieve the girls from the orphanage when Becky contracted whooping cough.103
Veblen returned alone to Columbia, Missouri for the academic year 1912-1913.
Babe and the girls appear to have remained in Chicago until the summer of 1913,
when they and Veblen traveled together to Fort Garland, Colorado. At summer's
end Veblen again returned to Missouri, while Babe found a school for Becky
and Ann in Lindsborg, Kansas, where she rented a cabin and obtained temporary
employment. At the close of the school year she and the girls returned to her
parents' Ridgewood Court home, in Chicago.
She and Veblen were married on 17 June 1914 by Cook County Circuit Court Judge
Richard S. Tuthill104 and departed immediately for Norway on their honeymoon,
which in August was interrupted by the outbreak of war. Upon their return they
retrieved Becky and Ann from their Bradley grandparents, continued on to Columbia,
Missouri, and, at long last, set up housekeeping as a proper family.105
In commenting on an earlier draft of this paper a Milwaukee colleague felicitously
described Veblen's association with Ann Bradley as "a monogomous extramarital
relationship," which captures well its deeper meaning for the man Veblen
was.106 Whatever judgment one may pass on Veblen for not remaining steadfast
in his marriage to Ellen Rolfe, that defection alone is open to scrutiny --
and then only with the appropriate caveats about glass houses and first stones.
What Veblen seems to have desired -- and to have found --in his relationship
with Babe was the sustaining intimacy of compatible companionship that many
of us seek in life and which all too often eludes us. "People who called
him a philanderer," Becky insists, "just didn't know him. He wasn't
that sort of a person."107
The sort of person Veblen was, in conclusion, bears inexorably on the scholar
he is perceived to have been, for rare is the critic who unambiguously divorces
Veblen's ideas from the personality assumed to have produced them. Unfortunately,
the common distortions attributed to that personality by academics carry over
to the general public, where they seem to perpetuate themselves in a peculiarly
grotesque fashion. Thorstein Bunde Veblen, proclaims a recent issue of Viking
magazine, was an "outcast genius" --"lonely," "unappreciated," and "estranged
from society.
Quoting Jack Diggins, the author of this article describes Veblen as "an
unkempt, lethargic pedagogue who shunned the fraternal joys of companionship
and conversation and seemed to have no interest in intimacy." Nonetheless,
this unprepossessing man "had that indefinable essence known as sex appeal." Throughout
his professional life, we are again told, "Veblen engaged in one love
afair after another."109
He was "a character of which legends are made;" "a prankster;" "an
iconoclast who scandalized proud professors;" "the ne'er-dowell who
astounded everyone by becoming famous." His marriage to Ellen Rolfe ended
in divorce, "affairs on both sides" having been an "open scandal." His
second wife "suffered a mental illness and died two years later."110
"Deserted and lonely," Veblen retreated to his "isolated cabin
near Stanford," where "feeble, pale, ill, wistful, demonic, proud" and "impecunious," he
is said to have "died of a suicide [sic] shortly before the stock market
crash that seemed to confirm his dire economic predictions."111
Veblen's supposed suicide completes the image of the disfunctional personality
whose intellectual acumen must also be impaired. Like his purported propensity
to philander, however, it never happened. He died of heart failure in the presence
of his neice Hilda Sims, her husband Ralph, their teenage daughter Colette,
and his stepdaughter Becky.
Veblen had felt suddenly nauseous and had fallen trying to reach the upstairs
bathroom at his Menlo Park home. Ralph Sims lifted him to his bed, surprised
at how much his seemingly spare frame weighed, while Hilda summoned a physician
-- against Veblen's previously expressed wishes. "Thorstein whispered
'Let be' and pressed my hand ... to remind me that he had told me not to call
a doctor to fuss over him when he came to die," Becky recalled years later.
When the physician arrived, he injected adrenalin directly into Veblen's heart
with "a horribly large needle," but to no avail. Veblen had already
expired, much to Becky's relief, for she "just didn't want him to go through
that suffering for nothing." She sketched a death portrait on the spot.112
Rather than enhancing our sense of who Veblen was, the flesh and bones Veblen,
the literary license with which scholars and others have tended to write about
him serves only to obscure his individuality. Worse, it trivializes him. Posterity,
in sum, deserves better from the keepers of the historical record, be they
credentialed academics or citizen conservators of our cultural heritage like
the Sons of Norway, the Minneapolis publishers of Viking magazine.
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