Category: War and Defense Economics

Looking through my files of material from the Gottfried Haberler papers at the Hoover Institution Archives, I came across an unpublished, heavily sarcastic “letter to the editor” of the Harvard Crimson by the economic historian Alexander Gerschenkron in reaction to John Kenneth Galbraith’s statement at an anti-war event at Radcliffe in which he suggested that students could reasonably consider boycotting the classes of professors engaged in classified research to protest that war. One of Galbraith’s targets was clearly his colleague Arthur Smithies. (“I assume that Professor Smithies would suppress all protest. Many will doubt the wisdom of this course as also, I trust, the wickedness of the secret work on which he is engaged.”) While the rules of English grammar are such that Galbraith did explicitly state “many will doubt…the wickedness of [Smithies’] secret work…”, it is a pretty cheeky way to simultaneously mention that there are indeed some who will see Smithies’ secret work in a wicked light.

The post ends with a later Harvard Crimson article that reports on Smithies’ career, with considerable emphasis on his work for the U.S. government (including the C.I.A.) on South Vietnam’s economy. We also see below that Thomas Schelling was so little amused by Galbraith’s boycott proposal as to have written a letter for actual publication in the Harvard Crimson.

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“Galbraith Asks Campus Blacklist of Recruiters”

The Boston Globe. 14 November 1967 pp. 1,9.

            Harvard economist John Kenneth Galbraith urged Monday that college students oppose the Vietnam War by publicly blacklisting war-linked campus recruiting agencies and by boycotting professors engaged in classified government research.

Speaking at Radcliffe College, Galbraith explained his blacklist as a “proclamation” on which signatories would state their intention to refuse to work for agencies, such as Dow Chemical Co. or the C.I.A.

A boycott of professors engaged in classified research, he said, would be a “particularly effective way of expressing your opposition.”

The former U.S. ambassador to India, publicly backed “moderate” student demonstrations before a packed Harvard Radcliffe group in Hilles Library.

He cautioned the students against protests that are “violent or in egregiously bad taste.”

These, he said, would “provide a welcomed handle for the opposition.”

Galbraith said he had discussed his blacklist and boycott proposals with colleagues and many found them favorable. He called both courses “legitimate means of dissent within the university framework of conduct rules.”

He originated the black-list concept at talks with business and government leaders who indicated that recruiters are “greatly concerned with campus recruiting demonstrations,” Galbraith said.

Turing to anti-war referenda, Galbraith advised they would have more chances of success if they were worded “for political reality rather [than] for candor.”

The San Francisco anti-war referenda would have had a good chance for approval had it been stated in “milder” terms, he said. (This referendum, which asked: ‘should the U.S. immediately withdraw from Vietnam?’ drew a 38 percent affirmative response.)

“It would be an enormous mistake to assume your protest efforts have been futile,” he told students. Only three years ago, he said the State and Defense Departments” would have assumed wide spread acceptance of escalation.

“But now, in the wake of widespread university opposition to the war, there has been a snowballing effect of mounting opposition.”

His talk was sponsored by the Committee for Effective Action, a student group “opposed to the war but frustrated by the means of opposing it,” explained its spokesman. This was the first of an expected four or five meetings with the faculty.

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Letter from John Kenneth Galbraith

The Harvard Crimson, November 16, 1967

To the Editors of the CRIMSON:

My distinguished colleague may be out of touch with recent discussion, but the issue is probably worth explaining. Students here and elsewhere have been told how they may not react to university involvement in military activities of which they disapprove. With other Faculty members I assume that this carries an obligation to say how they may react. I suggested (initially in Michigan and later here) that they organize to avoid employment in corporations of whose products they disapprove and classes of professors whose secret contracts they deplore. (I also suggested that this last was inapplicable under Harvard policy and that there be combined effort to find other forms of legitimate and effective protest.) I assume that Professor Smithies would suppress all protest. Many will doubt the wisdom of this course as also, I trust, the wickedness of the secret work on which he is engaged.

John Kenneth Galbraith
Paul M. Warburg Professor of Economics

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Unsent, but circulated, reaction to Galbraith’s proposal
by Alexander Gerschenkron

HARVARD UNIVERSITY
DEPARTMENT OF ECONOMICS

M-7 Littauer Center
Cambridge 38, Massachusetts

Alexander Gerschenkron
Walter S. Barker Professor of Economics

November 16, 1967

The Editor
The Crimson
Cambridge, Massachusetts 02138

Sir,

It is with greatest possible interest that I have read of Professor Galbraith’s suggestion that students should boycott lectures of those members of the Faculty who are known to engage in classified research. This is a most original and stimulating idea, which is not surprising as nothing less novel and exciting could be expected from Professor Galbraith’s fertile mind.

The only thing that disturbs me are problems of implementation. Professor Galbraith abstained from discussing them, probably feeling that what mattered was to cast abroad a fine idea, while the rest could be safely left to more pedestrian minds. May I try to fill out the gap? Obviously, the first thing that is needed is to provide some machinery in order to discover just who is engaged in classified research. I suggest therefore, that the Student-Faculty Committee should immediately establish a special Sub-Committee charged with carrying out the requisite investigations. It should be called “Student-Faculty Sub-Committee on Un-Left Activities.” This Sub-Committee should interrogate members of the faculty. A difficulty to be faced will no doubt stem from the lack of subpoena powers on the part of the Sub-Committee. But the problem should not be insoluble. The Administration should be put under pressure to agree that those members of the Faculty who 1) refuse to appear before the Un-Left Sub-Committee or, 2) if appearing, refuse to name those colleagues whose connection with classified research is known to them, or 3) refuse to answer questions concerning their own classified research, should be informed by the Administration that such refusals constitute contempt of the Un-Left Sub-Committee, and, by the same token, must be regarded as acts of gross misconduct. In all fairness, the offenders should be given a fortnight to reconsider, but should they stubbornly persist in their hostile attitude, their connection with the University should be severed without further delay.

On the other hand, should the Administration hesitate to accede to the Sub-Committee’s fair and reasonable demands, which as Professor Galbraith likes to say are surely justified by the extraordinary situation in which the country finds itself, occupation of University Hall by the students should be the first natural step, if necessary, to be followed by other more stringent measures.

Thus Professor Galbraith’s idea appears to be altogether practicable. In conclusion, I cannot help praising his wise restraint. He could have suggested, for instance, that also lectures of those Faculty members who either themselves express Un-Left opinions or associate with colleagues who have expressed Un-Left opinions should be boycotted by the students. That he failed to make such suggestions agrees well with the sapient counsels of moderation which informed his speech.

Very truly yours,
[signed]
Alexander Gerschenkron

AG:dod

Note: For reasons well within this writer’s control, the foregoing epistle has failed to reach the editorial office of The Crimson.

Source: The Hoover Institution Archives. Papers of Gottfried Haberler, Box 12, Folder “GH—Alexander Gerschenkron”.

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Letter from John Kenneth Galbraith

The Harvard Crimson, November 16, 1967

To the Editors of The CRIMSON:

I am persuaded that at some risk of repetition I should be sure that there is no misunderstanding of my recent remarks on legitimate and non-violent forms of student protest as these concern University involvements with military activities. Two or three weeks ago in Detroit I was asked to comment on prospective efforts to obstruct physically the Willow Run laboratories operated on contract by the University of Michigan and engaged, I am told, on development of highly secret materiel for use in Vietnam. I urged not alone the futility but the adverse public effects of such action; I said that a better remedy lay against the Faculty members who ran this enterprise. Students might organize to avoid their classes, i.e., peacefully to boycott them. Last Monday evening at the meeting in the Hilles Library arranged by [Radcliffe] President Bunting to discuss legitimate forms of protest I repeated (along with others) this suggestion and added that this particular one would not be without effect on those who sponsored such work in a university but that it did not have application at Harvard where, wisely, the Administration frowned on secret contracts. I confess that I did not think of the possible application of my suggestion to confidential or secret consulting work or research by individual Harvard professors. A member of the Faculty has since invited the attention of those who are, with sufficient reason, sensitive to the association between the University Community and this war. Additionally, my reference to boycott, which of course means peaceful abstention, was evidently taken to mean some kind of physical action.

I would like to urge in the most earnest possible fashion that there be no effort by anyone, students in particular, to identify and oppose in any manner the individual participation by Faculty members in confidential or secret tasks of the government. There is a radical difference between this varied and individual work and the classified contracts for weapons development which I had in mind. This individual work covers a wide range of matters and much, or most, has no bearing on military activity. Most of it is the work of those Faculty members with the strongest instinct for public service. An effort to discriminate between approved and disapproved work would import into the academic community an improper concern for the extra-curricular pacifists who are so engaged as to those who are otherwise disposed. It could also be a most disagreeable source of tension and suspicion.

As members of the Harvard community will be aware, I am not indifferent to the Vietnam war. I regard it as an appalling tragedy; to no other matter of my adult life have I devoted more effort than to opposing the war. But I would be profoundly and also greatly embarrassed were anyone to take my remarks at Radcliffe as an invitation to any form of opposition to the participants of individual Faculty members, on a public or confidential basis, in government activities. Needless to say, none of this impairs in any way my promise at the Radcliffe meeting to work with concerned Faculty members and students to devise other effective, legitimate and non-violent forms of protest.

John Kenneth Galbraith
Paul M. Warburg Professor of Economics

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Letter from Thomas Schelling in response to Galbraith’s boycott proposal

The Harvard Crimson, December 5, 1967

To the Editors of the CRIMSON:

While I’ve seen no indication that Professor Galbraith’s proposed boycott of professors who do classified research for the government is going to stimulate a new movement, it does raise important questions about the personal activities of faculty members and the ways they may be involved with the government, and about the appropriate selection of target for protest. May I explain why I think his proposal is probably not workable and, if not workable, objectionable?

Let me first point out that Professor Galbraith did not propose that students boycott those professors whose research is objectionable, nor did he clarify what research would be objectionable. His reference was merely to “classified” research. I’m sure that by almost anyone’s standards of wickedness (Galbraith’s term) some classified research would be found unobjectionable. People concerned about the dissemination of nuclear technology, about the limitation of weapons, even about ways of ending the war in Vietnam, often require classified information to do their work or, at least, have to be exposed to classified information in doing their work and cannot do it unless they are willing to safeguard what the government calls “security.” Even if the character of everybody’s classified research could be ascertained, drawing the line between the objectionable and the unobjectionable, or between what any reasonable man would consider objectionable and what some reasonable men might consider to be in the public interest, would require subjective judgments. (Most classified research, incidentally, is probably unrelated to Vietnam.)

Second, much of the unclassified research that goes on would be objectionable to people who oppose any kind of war-related research; and to exclude such unclassified research would be arbitrary discrimination.

Third, “research” itself is difficult to define. Many faculty members are occasionally consultants or members of advisory boards in various agencies, or participants in government-sponsored conferences, sometimes classified, sometimes unclassified. Whether their influence is benign or malignant would be hard to judge; so would the degree of support or implied approval in attendance at a meeting at which one criticizes a government program or decision.

And if unclassified contributions had to pass the same strict test as classified work, to qualify for boycott or immunity from it, one would have to ask whether an activity like the Peace Corps is to be treated as a propaganda arm of the Johnson administration or as a benign and constructive activity. Again a judgment depends on a complex evaluation of the different purposes that a government program may serve.

Finally, are Faculty members who are unaffiliated with the government in any fashion, classified or unclassified, but who openly support the administration’s policy toward Vietnam, to qualify for boycott? It seems strange to exclude them; but again the line would be hard to draw for those who neither wholly support the conduct or the war nor are wholly committed to one drastic alternative. (It is unclear to me on which side of the line Professor Galbraith would be placed.)

I could go on multiplying the difficulties of finding a reasonable line to draw between the non-university-administered activities of professors that are objectionable and those that are not, whatever one’s standards of wickedness; and, further, I doubt whether there is enough consensus on standards to make it possible to draw an agreed line, even if some people think they know where to draw it. If I’m right about this, any line has to be arbitrary, as Professor Galbraith’s line was arbitrary. (If Professor Galbraith interprets his original proposal as applying only to university-administered research, the line is clearer but only because more arbitrary.)

If, though, the line is arbitrary–if its purpose just to mark out an identifiable target without regard to the nature of the research itself or of the non-research activity–then, aside from the likelihood that an embarrassingly large number of angels will be caught in the netful of devils, there is the question of what is being objected to and what the purpose of the boycott is. The purpose can no longer be described as bringing pressure to bear to get objectionable activities terminated. Rather, it would look–to me, at any rate–as though a boycott were being used to induce a particular group of professors to join a boycott against the government, or to embarrass them for declining to join a boycott.

Whatever my feelings about Professor Galbraith’s protest movement, I resent his proposal that students organize to coerce me into joining it. And I hope nobody stays away from Professor Galbraith’s classes in a vain organized attempt to embarrass him into changing his politics.

T.C. Schelling
Professor of Economics

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An Academic [Arthur Smithies] in the War
By Seth M. Kupferberg

The Harvard Crimson, May 23, 1975

Edward F. Chamberlin, superintendent of Kirkland House, tells a story about a Kirkland celebration that took place some years back, when Arthur Smithies was House master. Smithies was pouring drinks for the members of the victorious House crew team, starting with the bow man and working towards the stern of the shell, and as he reached the stroke, someone brought word that he had just become a grandfather.

“He kept right on—he just said, ‘Coxswain!'” Chamberlin recalls, chuckling. ‘”Coxswain, take your wine…’ We almost died.”

Smithies–Ropes Professor of Political Economy and a long-time adviser in the Saigon bureau of the Agency for International Development—gave up his mastership—”certainly Harvard’s best job,” he says—last spring. (“You can stay on past 66 as a professor but you have to retire as a master,” he grouses. “It should be the other way around—the brain deteriorates before the body does.”) But the story of the Agassiz Cup celebration still seems characteristic of him—both in content and in style, for a certain kind of sharp, logical humor as well as, perhaps, a certain cheerful indifference to happenings that would excite or upset or change the attitudes of many people. It’s a style, arguably, that found expression in Smithies’s work in Vietnam as well as his praise of the Agassiz Cup winners—and there, it was likely to have larger effects and meanings, since it served a side in an internecine war instead of an intramural regatta.

At the simplest, most straightforward level, the Agassiz Cup story is characteristic because it’s about crew—the sport that in 1929 helped bring Smithies, a 22-year-old Australian law student, the great-grandson of the first Methodist minister in western Tasmania, a Rhodes Scholarship. Finding England “too structured for my taste,” Smithies went on to discover “the fleshpots of the United States” with a Commonwealth Fellowship and a Model A Ford, earn a quick Harvard doctorate in economics, return to Australia briefly to work in its treasury department, then settle in the United States for good.

Smithies accepted tenure at Harvard in 1949—partly “so I could take up rowing again”—and continued to work at budgetary and fiscal economics. He also demonstrated an idiosyncratic kind of firmness—”I’m a believer in strict academic requirements, but for something important, like seat-races, I would make an exception,” he once told a Kirkland House oarsman. In its more political manifestations, many students came to find Smithies’s firmness objectionable. “People used to go around screaming ‘CIA Agent!’ and things at me,” he recalls. For when anti-ROTC students occupied University Hall in April 1969 and opened the files of then dean of the Faculty Franklin L. Ford, one of the letters they released to The Old Mole, the underground Cambridge newspaper that folded in 1970, was from Smithies. Dated December 7, 1967, it read: “The Central Intelligence Agency has instructed its consultants to inform their official superiors of this connection with the Agency. I hereby inform you of my connection of ten years duration. I wish I could, add that there is something subtly interesting or sinister about it.”

The tinge of self-mockery—the impatience of a person who takes certain things for granted, maybe—was typical: the same slight aloofness you sense when Smithies says he spends his free time “rowing boats and toiling in my garden,” as though the joys of domesticity in Belmont, like England, are a little too structured for his taste. But that didn’t stop the CIA letter from kicking up a minor storm.

“The CIA is divided sharply into two parts—covert and overt,” Smithies—who says he was most recently consulted by the agency, regarding a report on the future of the Vietnamese economy, last year—explains now. “For about ten years I’d go down there and review their papers on national economic matters: I’ve never been the cloak-and-dagger type. But naturally they made a big fuss about it,” he concludes, with something close to approval. “That’s good tactics.”

It was partly an exclusive attention to improving tactics—rather than more fundamental questions about the Vietnam war—that the University Hall occupiers and other Harvard radicals objected to in Smithies, even before they discovered his CIA letter, Smithies traces his service as an Agency for International Development consultant, advising the Republic of Vietnam on its fiscal policy and rates of international exchange, to previous foreign-affairs interests that included involvement in administering the Marshall Plan. He says he was regarded as a liberal both as a young teacher at the University of Michigan, where he defended the Michigan Daily‘s right to take leftist editorial stands, and in his early years in the Harvard Economics Department, where Keynesians like him were still an embattled minority.

And he still offers qualified praise for radical economists like Stephen A. Marglin ’59 or other members of the Union of Radical Political Economists—for aiming at a historical perspective on economic systems. “I think if they’d let me I’d be more of an ally than I am,” he says. “I don’t like a narrow concentration on Marx—I think it should also include Weber and people like that. I also and not a socialist, and URPE people generally are socialists—I firmly believe in the mixed economy.” For his part, Marglin says he agrees with Smithies’s stress on “the historical nature of economic theory and the fact that neo-classical theory is not the pinnacle of economic thought.” But he claims that Smithies shares orthodox economists’ bias toward marginal improvements that don’t call basic assumptions into question—”that perspective divides him pretty fundamentally from most URPE people,” he says.

Even setting aside Smithies’s belief in a mixed economy, Marglin’s criticism isn’t too surprising—budgetary economics by definition focuses on evaluating means, not ends, which it takes more or less for granted. Smithies’s book, The Budgetary Process in the United States, begins by calling a description of the ways the government sets its priorities “quite enough for one volume and one author,” and it offers only one assumption about how the budgetary process should end up—that “government decision-making can be improved by the clear formulation of alternatives.” Like his work on the budget, Smithies’s work on Vietnamese fiscal policy took its basic political framework more or less for granted.

And like the Agassiz Cup celebration, it was carried on with a certain quiet bravado, even in defiance of what many people might think of as reflex reactions to human events. Apart from his consulting work for AID—which kept him in.

During the height of campus anti-war activity, Smithies recalls, “People used to go around screaming ‘CIA Agent!’ and things at me.” Saigon most summers—Smithies wrote several reports, comparable to other American economists’ and political scientists’ attempts to improve the Saigon government’s chances and provide scientific descriptions of its progress.

Like these other writers, Smithies’s descriptions often reflected Saigon’s assumptions and interests, and so worked to limit debate in the United States and thus to keep the Saigon government strong. Not all American analysts acknowledged this political effect of their writing, but to many of their critics. It was its most important aspect. For the politics underlying questions of Vietnamese economic development included more even than questions about who should manage development and profit from it. The human, political context AID economists could all but ignore also included the struggle over these questions that was killing people and making them homeless, the struggle in which the government AID belonged to was playing an increasingly dominant part.

In a 1971 report commissioned by the Institute for Defense Analyses, called “Economic Development in Vietnam: The Need for External Resources,” and based on a “planning assumption” of “military stalemate and withering away of the war, a process that can last for a decade or more.” Smithies called for $500 million a year in American aid to the Saigon government “during the next decade,” and $700 million more in financing, preferably from an international consortium of countries, “for the indefinite future.” And while noting some of the bad effects of the war on South Vietnam’s economy—such as an unfavorable balance of trade, governmental corruption, the destruction of bridges and the defoliation of forests—Smithies also took note of countervailing factors, such as “the increase in the expectations of the Vietnamese people,” which he suggested would remain after “the horrors of war” had faded.

“The war has provided Vietnam with paved highways from end to end, with more airfields than it can possibly use, with spectacular harbors, with an elaborate communications system, with power plants, and with potable water in Saigon,” Smithies wrote.” …While it is impossible to make an accurate inventory of the changes in the infrastructure during the war, the impression is inescapable that the plusses greatly outweigh the minuses.” It was the kind of report that led Frances Fitzgerald ’62 to call AID economics “perhaps the ultimate expression of American hubris.”

Today, Smithies—who says he grew to like Saigon very much, despite a “very rarefied atmosphere” that necessitated weekly trips to the provinces for a reminder that there was a war going on—is naturally less sanguine. “Whatever the merits of the cause. I’m deeply disturbed to see the U.S. forced into a position of unconditional surrender under any circumstances,” he says. “And it’s not clear to me that there is still a clear direction to foreign policy.”

“I wouldn’t have gone there unless I thought the objective of a free and independent South Vietnam was a worthwhile one,” he continues, “and it’s fairly obvious that we didn’t pursue that role at all effectively.” Nevertheless, Smithies stresses American advisers’ accomplishments in such areas as improving rice strains—”whatever side you’re on politically, this was a useful thing,” he says—and the importance of combating “the impression that everyone connected with Vietnam was a scoundrel.”

“I think the economic staff there was really doing a good job,” he says. “In the economic and financial areas there were some very good Vietnamese and some very devoted and sincere Vietnamese—extremely able and also extremely patriotic. I can’t say the same for some of the corps commanders—but in the welter of recriminations there’s a tendency to forget what was good.”

* * *

It took just a few days after the Provisional Revolutionary Government’s victory last month for Smithies’s acquaintances to stop asking him, as at least one had the first day, about “the end of those summers in Saigon.” In the burgeoning New England spring, Saigon seemed very far away. It seemed more appropriate to remember smaller-scale settings for imperturbability in the face of exciting or famous or upsetting people or events—the Agassiz Cup celebration, say, or the Kirkland House dinner two years ago at which Smithies gave President Bok a long, pointed introduction, replete with references to “the days when the University was interested in education—before the present administration took office.” (“These occasions can get very stolid if you don’t liven ’em up a bit,” Smithies explains now. “I think one ought to be mildly provocative—what do you think?”)

At most, it seemed in keeping with the intoxicating spring weather to remember Smithies’s 1969 visit to occupied University Hall—the only one by a master, possibly helping to inspire his belief that by playing a “civilizing role,” “the House system vindicated itself in 1969 as I haven’t seen it do before or since.” Smithies says the visit was mostly a matter of bravado, “rather foolish. I suppose,” but he still seems proud of it—he’s supposed to have informed an occupier who called him an administration spy that he had “rather more right to be here than you do.” The occupiers voted to expel Smithies, but they allowed him to speak first. “It was rather reassuring, in a way,” he said, but the occupiers evidently weren’t sympathetic—”all I remember just what he said, but the occupiers evidently weren’t sympathetic—”all I remember is that it was philosophically weird,” one of them said recently.

Meanwhile, Smithies continued to teach macroeconomic theory, scull on the Charles, lunch in the Kirkland dining hall, even be mildly provocative, if only because senior English majors in the House were taking general exams, on such moderately unlikely subjects as the poetry of T.S. Eliot ’10. “My wife and I used to be very fond of Eliot—I think we still are,” Smithies explained later, but at lunch, he didn’t seem so sure.

“But is it poetry–the broad-backed hippopotamus?” he asked his companions, a little quizzically. Then he proceeded to rattle off three or four stanzas: The broad-backed hippopotamus Rests on his belly in the mud; Although he seems so firm to us He is merely flesh and blood…

“Is that poetry–or is it just a jingle?” he asked again. No one offered an immediate answer: things were back to normal.

Steven B. Geovanis

Image Sources:  Left to right. Smithies and Galbraith from Harvard Class Album 1958; Gerschenkron from Harvard Class Album 1957.