Labor economist Robert Hoxie (1868-1916) taught at the University of Chicago from 1906 to 1916. From the autobiography of Alvin S. Johnson we learn that Hoxie’s suicide would probably have come as no surprise to someone who knew him at all well.
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Alvin S. Johnson on his personal and professional friendship with Robert Hoxie
Of all the faculty I most enjoyed Robert Hoxie. He specialized in labor problems and had the enterprise to bring before his class all types of labor leaders, to state their aims and unfold their hopes. He had in unexampled degree the art to bring even the most stubborn-tongued labor leader to an adequate expression of his views.
Hoxie was square built and well poised, of ruddy complexion and bright eyes, well equipped with wit and humor, and, you’d have said, here, anyway, was a scholar well adjusted to life. But the fact was he was subject to terrible nervous crises. He imputed his condition to an attack of poliomyelitis in his childhood, which, while it did not cripple his limbs, impaired permanently his nervous structure. I questioned the validity of his explanation until I came to know him.
He was my good friend, and we saw a lot of each other. Whenever he could get free from his office he’d come to mine and insist that we go for a walk, even if the cold wind was blowing at forty miles an hour. However busy I was I would comply, for if I did not he would fall into a lamentable fit of depression, asserting that I no longer found him interesting.
When he was scheduled for a seminar paper I had a choice of unattractive alternatives. If I did not attend, he put this down as my judgment that he had nothing to say. If I attended, he felt sure that I detected all the points where the author of a seminar paper sidesteps difficulties.
Matters were simpler when we were alone together, on our walks or over the beer at the White City, where we could argue to the accompaniment of an orchestra playing with great éclat the scores of Traviata or Aïda. So far as I could, I kept away from contentious economic subjects.
One subject of contention would, however, inevitably intrude: Veblen. Hoxie loved Veblen with a love that passeth understanding. I admired Veblen’s genius, but Veblen and I could never get nearer each other than arm’s length. He regarded me as a plodding Dane; I regarded him as a romantic Norwegian. Whenever we found ourselves together in company we spoiled each other’s style. On occasion friends would urge me to remain away from a Veblen party, for Veblen never made himself interesting when I was around.
I considered Veblen good reading for the scholar who knew how to discriminate, but a singularly dangerous guide for anyone who followed him blindly. I asserted that Veblen’s Theory of the Leisure Class was really a satirical essay, with literary potency and scientific intent closely parallel to Carlyle’s Sartor Resartus. Both authors counted on the pleasure a reader gets out of judiciously worded insults to himself. Both liked to make use of the principle that two half-truths make a whole truth.
Such observations filled Hoxie with indignation, but pleasant indignation, for they proved to him that I fell far short of him in the understanding of the man he considered the greatest economist of all time. Hoxie boasted that his whole system of thought came from Veblen. It was Veblen who had taught him that all ideas of reconciling the interests of labor and the employer were a fantastic delusion. For the minds of labor and of the employer were built out of completely different philosophic elements. The philosophy the worker had hammered into him by his job ran in terms of cause and effect — the efficient cause. The employer thought in terms of values, purposes, final causes. As well try to mate a sheep with a tunny fish as try to bring efficient cause and final cause to an agreement.
I argued that this contrast was just a hocus-pocus. The employer, in considering the properties of a machine he is tempted to buy, or in considering how to cut the waste of material, is thinking in terms of cause and effect. The worker in demanding an enlarged take-home is thinking in terms of values.
I refused to concede that there are impermeable septa between the thinking of any two classes, indeed, between any two individuals. Business conceptions, labor conceptions, wander afield. Does one not encounter the divine who calculates on the “unit cost of saving souls”?
Years later Hoxie visited New York and asked me to come to his hotel for the evening. He was frightening in his appearance.
“Johnson,” he said, “I’m finished. I can see now, all my work has been bunk. All my writing, every lecture I have ever given, has been bunk.”
“What in heaven’s name has happened to you, Hoxie?”
“I’ve come to see through Veblen. You partly saw through him, but not the way I do.”
In an evening that extended until four in the morning — for I did not dare to leave him — Hoxie unfolded the rather inconsequential course of his deconversion from Veblen. They had disagreed on a personal matter and Veblen had treated Hoxie rudely. But Hoxie had always known that Veblen could glory in rudeness.
Such an incident could have been effective only as a catalyst. Hoxie had been working for months with Frey, a distinguished labor leader, on a book, Industrial Management and Labor. [sic, Scientific Management and Labor is the correct title] Undoubtedly he had been unconsciously accumulating cases that exhibited the shortcomings of Veblen’s theories.
“I got to thinking,” Hoxie said, “how could a man be so great a scientist and such a damn fool? And the more I thought, the more the idea rode my mind: how great a scientist is he? Johnson thought his science was phony.”
“No,” I said, “I never thought that. I thought you had to watch him. His equations didn’t solve, and he patched them up by rhetorical ‘by and large,’ for the most part.’ Almost all economists do something of the kind sometimes.”
“Veblen knew his equations didn’t solve, but he used them just the same. And his class dope; he pretended it was psychology. It was pure abstractions; no, not pure, but with a purpose.”
“We’re all purposive, Hoxie.”
“I wouldn’t care if it was just the matter of my finding out a phony I had taken for okay. But Veblen has been the premise of all my work. My work is all rotten with Veblenism.”
“Hoxie, I’ve read about everything you ever wrote. Your work stands on its own feet. Sometimes you’re wrong–not often.”
“Johnson, you know the basis of my labor theory. Two philosophies, the employer’s and the laborer’s. The first based on the final cause. the other on the efficient cause. You called that bunk the first time we met, when we were both on the American Economic Association program.”
“It is bunk,” I agreed. “But all that enormous amount of concrete investigation you have done is quite independent of any such premise. It stands.”
“No, it doesn’t. It’s all diseased, from that premise.”
I argued with Hoxie for eight hours at a stretch. Our positions were reversed, Hoxie was attacking Veblen, I was defending him. I marshaled as many telling and meaningful passages as I held in my memory, from Veblen’s Theory of Business Enterprise, Imperial Germany, The Engineers and the Price System, even from Veblen’s most sardonic and least sincere book, The Higher Learning. Finally Hoxie seemed to be calmed down enough, or wearied enough, for sleep. I left him, promising to visit him in Chicago and renew the discussion.
But before I could get around to a Chicago trip Hoxie killed himself.
Source: Alvin Saunders Johnson. A Pioneer’s Progress. New York: Viking Press, 1952. Pages pp. 204-207.
Image Source: University of Chicago Photographic Archive, apf1-02878, Special Collections Research Center, University of Chicago Library. Potrait colorized by Economics in the Rear-view Mirror.