This addition to our intermittent series “Get to know an economics Ph.D. alumna” is dedicated to the Radcliffe expert on Japanese industrial organization whose government career prospects were blocked for some seventeen years after she had been denied a security clearance. This was the work of General MacArthur’s “lovable fascist”, Maj. Gen. Charles Willoughby [a bit of backstory to Willoughby’s purge of Hadley is provided below].
Incidentally, The Diplomat (January 27, 2019) ran a story about Charles Willoughby with the title “Is This the Worst Intelligence Chief in the US Army’s History?” Plot spoiler: He and his boss MacArthur share the blame for the Yalu River disaster for the United Nations forces.
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Eleanor Hadley’s Memories of Radcliffe and Harvard
…Being somewhat at loose ends upon my return from Japan in the spring of 1940, I ended up attending the University of Washington in Seattle for the academic year 1940-1941. There I took courses in economics and in the Far East Institute, and found the Japanese-language instruction a great improvement over that I had known in Tokyo.
Finally pulling myself together, I decided to embark on a Ph.D. program in economics. It was not that economics was my favorite subject; but I assumed that I needed to build on my undergraduate work, which had been a degree in politics, economics, and philosophy. It had not occurred to me that I could choose any subject I wanted. Much as I loved philosophy, I did not see taking a graduate degree in it. Between politics and economics, I believed that the latter favored classroom discussion; and I thought that I could do reading about politics on my own.
I wanted to attend Radcliffe College; but the problem was how to finance it. Then, out of the clear blue sky, my great-aunt in Honolulu, who had lost her sister earlier that year, said that if I would spend the summer with her there, she would make it financially possible for me to enter Radcliffe that fall. I could scarcely believe my good fortune.
In Honolulu that summer, one of my America-Japan Student Conference friends from the University of Washington was enrolled in the U.S. Marines’ Japanese-language course. The Marines had decided that their service required some competency in the Japanese language. One thinks of Marines as ramrod straight. In fact, the course was so strenuous that every week my friend’s shoulders were slightly more rounded.
Cambridge, Massachusetts
Thanks to my great-aunt, I entered Radcliffe in the fall of 1941 to begin a Ph.D program in economics. I remember that, so splendidly ignorant as I was of the college’s setup, I said to the dean of graduate students with a catalogue in my hand, “I see Harvard faculty listed here, but where is the Radcliffe faculty?” She replied: “Don’t you know that we are medieval? There is no Radcliffe faculty.”
Radcliffe College, both graduate and undergraduate, consisted of students and administrators but no faculty. Harvard did not admit women; Radcliffe existed to provide a Harvard education to women. For undergraduate students, Harvard faculty crossed the Cambridge commons and delivered an identical lecture to the women. For graduate courses, women crossed the commons to Harvard Yard and attended classes with the men. And though Radcliffe’s graduate final exams were identical to what the men took, they were administered in Radcliffe buildings. It was the advent of World War II, and the consequent scarcity of both faculty and students, that disrupted the pattern of duplicative lectures at the undergraduate level. Graduate women were first admitted to Harvard classes in September 1941, just three months before Pearl Harbor.
The fall of 1941 was also the first time Radcliffe graduate women were permitted to sit in the reading room of Widener Library, then the main library for Harvard students. We sat at one designated table, and this table bore signs that could be seen from whatever angle one approached it, announcing, “This table reserved for Radcliffe students taking graduate courses.” Previously, female graduate students had been permitted to sit only in a room separate from the reading room about twenty by twenty feet in size.
In all, the college informs me, there were eighteen students in economics in 1941-1942, and fourteen in 1942-1943. I believe that most of these must have been in the Ph.D. dissertation stage, because when it came to graduate students that one actually saw in classes or in the dormitory, there were only three or four of us. The college speaks of total enrollment in the graduate school of the year 1941-1942 as having been 241; it was 253 in 1942-1943.
Much of the time in classes with the Harvard men I sat petrified with fear. The men were so knowledgeable-that is, most of the time. A number of them had previously held positions bearing on the topics under discussion. Economics was not a Mills College point of strength. If I had entered graduate school in philosophy I would have felt comfortable, but not in economics. Although Keynes’ General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money was published in 1936, it had not made the eco- nomics department of Mills College by the time I graduated in 1938. And in Japan, of course, I had had no exposure to the latest work of Western economists. Thus the General Theory was brand-new to me while familiar to most of my colleagues.
Graduate study in economics in the early 1940s was far from being a purely academic exercise. Students and faculty alike were in constant debate about how to apply what they knew to the urgent issues of the day. In the face of a catastrophic depression in the United States, where in 1933 one-fourth of the labor force was unemployed, Herbert Hoover had seen solutions in smaller government expenditures and balanced budgets. Franklin Delano Roosevelt, although campaigning in 1932 for balanced budgets, rapidly changed his mind once he was in office and saw solutions in terms of government expenditure in excess of tax income. The role of government in the economy was the defining point of a New Deal Liberal. Republicans were afraid of a large government role; Democrats were not. The difference was accounted for by differing views of market forces: would they always equilibrate demand and supply or were there times when they would be incapable of doing so?
The economics department of Harvard University was superb in the time period I was there. Among the faculty were Joseph Schumpeter (economic, thought, capitalism and socialism), Alvin Hansen (business cycles), Gottfried Haberler (international trade), Sumner Schlichter (labor), Wassily Leontief (input-output), Alexander Gerschenkron (economic development), John Williams (money and banking). The problem with a small institution such as Mills was that the department tended to depend on one individual. As one example, Harvard’s economics department was divided on the subject of Keynes, which made for great liveliness.
While the department had its share of outstanding men, it also had its share of prejudices. The faculty had only one Jew, Seymour Harris, and one was “enough.” Paul Samuelson, a few years ahead of me, would find no teaching offer from Harvard. Accordingly, he went slightly downriver and accepted MIT’s offer. In retrospect, how the department must have rued this decision.
The department, at this time, did not like the master’s degree, so in consequence the difference between the master’s and doctoral degree was the dissertation. As explained by the college’s official register: “The general examination for the Ph.D. is the same examination as for the Master’s degree.”
At a party I was introduced to Mrs. Chamberlin, a Frenchwoman who was the wife of Edward Chamberlin, the well-known Harvard economist who had already published his influential Monopolistic Competition. She asked me what field I was in and I said economics. Her wonderful reply was “Well, you don’t look like one,” which I regarded as a compliment.
I continued to study the Japanese language, this time using a text that included grammar. It was prepared by Sergei Elisseeff and Edwin Reischauer. Elisseeff had gone to Japan from St. Petersburg after the Russo-Japanese War, becoming the first Westerner to graduate from Tokyo Imperial University. After the Communist takeover of Russia in 1917, he emigrated to France where he taught Japanese and Chinese at the Sorbonne, and then from 1934 to 1960, at Harvard. Reischauer had grown up in Japan, where his parents were missionaries. After his graduation from Oberlin College, he entered Harvard as a graduate student in the fall of 1935.
It was almost impossible to study Japanese in Widener Library during that fall of 1941 without interruption. Anyone passing the table reserved for Radcliffe graduate students in the reading room and seeing the unusual script had to stop and inquire what it was.
That fall I attended my first “House” dance at Eliot House on the river as the guest of John Lintner, an economist who was to become a junior fellow (a much sought-after distinction) at Harvard with a specialization in public finance. I had two astonishing experiences. One was learning that one had to think of the outside temperature before adding a corsage to one’s outfit; if one were nonchalant in the late fall, winter, or early spring, the cold might do it in. Second, coming from the West Coast, I was flabbergasted to see the whole inner wall of the dining room (converted to a ballroom) covered to a height of six to eight feet with cases of sherry, bourbon, scotch, and gin. On the West Coast at that time, one could not even sell liquor within a mile of a public educational institution. At Mills College in the 1930s it was a “sin”to have even beer on the campus. Imagine that many cases of liquor on campus! Unbelievable.
Inasmuch as so many Radcliffe graduate students were from other parts of the country as well as from abroad, the dean of the graduate school, Mrs. Cronkite (it was a Harvard affectation to drop the “Dr.”) arranged sight-seeing tours of nearby New England towns for us on Saturday afternoons. These had come to a halt soon after December 7, when gasoline conservation became necessary.
Everyone who was beyond infancy in 1941 remembers where he or she was on December 7. I was starting Sunday dinner (at that time served by maids) in the Radcliffe graduate dormitory at one o’clock. We had just begun to eat that Sunday when someone reported hearing a radio report of a Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor. Perhaps more than others, I was incredulous that Japan would attack the United States. Japan, of course, had all sorts of differences with the United States, but for it to take us on in armed conflict seemed unbelievable. It was clearly foolhardy, but Japan’s military apparently reasoned that, owing to Japan’s alliance with Germany, their attack would draw the United States into the European war. And a two-front war they believed Japan could win.
My father used to say that one positive feature of war is that it brings persons and nations in touch with reality. Japan’s military discovered that reality was different from what they had imagined, and so did the United States. In those months following Pearl Harbor, when every news report brought word of Japanese victories and our defeats, respect for Japan’s military prowess increased a great deal.
Some of my Radcliffe friends went down to Washington, D.C., during the summer of 1942, on completing the 1941-1942 academic year. With the United States at war, everyone was anxious to contribute to the mammoth effort our country was facing, and to become involved without delay. I, however, held off, because I wanted to get through my Ph.D. “general” examinations first. The thought of taking exams on course work done years earlier was daunting to me.
Under the system then in effect in the Economics Department, one presented oneself in six fields, four of which were examined in the “general” examination. One of the six one was allowed to “write off” — that is, fulfill the requirement with course work. I did that in statistics. My four fields for the general exams were theory, money and banking, international trade, and economic history. The Ph.D. requirements also included qualifying in two languages — normally, French and German. Harvard granted my petition to use Japanese as my second language, my first being French. I don’t believe the Economics Department had ever had to consider such a request before. Having passed all of these exams in the summer of 1943, I then went down to Washington that fall.
The sixth field was the dissertation field, in which one took the separate, “special” exam. At this time, when I took the other general exams, I had in mind to make public finance my “special” dissertation field. But I later changed to industrial organization as a result of my State Department and MacArthur staff positions. It would be in industrial organization, therefore, that I eventually took the final exam after completing my dissertation, entitled “Concentrated Business in Japan,” in 1949.
One major legacy of my Radcliffe years is a lifelong friendship with a fellow economist from Peking, Shu-chuang Kuan. It was in Cambridge in that first fall of 1941 that I met Shu-chuang. Like me, she was beginning the program in economics, and we became close friends. Our friendship has lasted to the present day, although it was interrupted for a long time by events beyond the control of either of us; nowadays, we speak regularly by telephone although we live on opposite coasts of the United States.[1]
My second year at Radcliffe, I became a “head of house” of one of the smaller dormitories. Radcliffe used graduate students for that role rather than having older women as “house mothers,” as was done in a great many colleges. In 1942-1943 we were all graduate students with one exception, an older woman from Concord, Massachusetts. It happened that she invited me to join her on a particular Friday evening. Instead of simply saying that I had a previous engagement, I said I had an invitation to the waltzing party — an event considered of great significance among the “socially acceptable” persons of Boston. Her memorable reply was, “My dear, and only your second season!”
It was customary in that period for female students to wear skirts. That was the only attire considered appropriate for attending class. The Radcliffe dorms where we lived (there was no mixing at that time) were roughly a mile from the Harvard Yard. To walk that mile with legs clad only in stockings when the weather was well below freezing was so painful that I occasionally had to stop at the Commodore Hotel on the way to thaw out.
To me, a New England spring was an astonishing experience. February came and February went. March came and March went. It was not until April that the grass began to turn green and there were crocuses. In Seattle, as in Tokyo, spring begins early. In Seattle one can have pussywillows and crocuses in February, as well as the first blooms of the camellia. In New England, May is one grand riot as the season makes up for its slow start. Everything bursts into leaf and bloom at the same time.
A Year at the OSS
While still in Cambridge I had been recruited by Charles B. (Burton) Fahs [2] for a position in the Research and Analysis Branch, Far East, of the Office of Strategic Services (OSS), which was one of what came to be five competing intelligence groups in Washington, D.C. (The other four were the Army, Navy, and Foreign Economic Administration [FEA] organizations, and subsequently the Air Force Intelligence group.) Roosevelt favored competition in his government.
I entered the OSS as a P-3, the equivalent of today’s government service classification of GS-9. I was put to work assessing the significance of Japan’s wooden-shipbuilding program, which Japan had begun in response to the shortage of steel.
Even though it was conventional in that period to dislike Washington, I loved the city from the moment I arrived. But where would I live? Washington was still suffering an acute shortage of housing. I located an apartment, but it was still under construction. A Radcliffe friend, Ruth Amande (Roosa), said that I might join friends with whom she was sharing a house, and that is what I did for six weeks or so.
That is also how I came to know Ralph Bunche, for his secretary was part of the same household. Bunche was at the OSS too, but in another part of the organization. In 1944 he was invited to become an assistant secretary of state, the first African American to be so invited, and transferred over from the OSS to the State Department. Subsequently, Bunche won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1950 and was undersecretary of the United Nations from 1955 to 1971. His B.A. was from UCLA in 1927; his Ph.D., from Harvard in 1934. We had a friendly relationship, although not a close one, during the period when we were both at the State Department.
Source: Eleanor M. Hadley. Chapter 2 “Radcliffe College and Washington, D.C.” from Memoir of a Trustbuster: A Lifelong Adventure with Japan. Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 2003. Pages 42-48.
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Radcliffe Ph.D. Awarded June 1949
Eleanor Martha Hadley, A.M. [Radcliffe College, 1943]
Subject, Economics. Special Field, Business Organization and Control.
Dissertation, “Concentrated Business Power in Japan”.
Source: Radcliffe College. Reports of Officers Issue 1948-49 Session. Official Register of Radcliffe College, Vo. XV, No. 6 (December, 1949, p. 21.
Note: B.A. Mills College (Oakland, CA), 1938
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Career
1943 – 1944. Research analyst , Office Strategic Services. Washington, D.C.
1944 – 1946. economist, Department State. Washington, D.C.
1946 – 1947. economist, GHQ-Supreme Command Allies Pacific. Tokyo, Japan.
1950 – 1951. staff member, President Truman’s Commission Migratory Labor. Washington, D.C.
1956 – 1965. associate professor, Smith College. Northampton, Massachusetts.
(ca 1963-64 Fulbright Fellowship to Japan)
1967 – 1974. economist , United States Tariff Commission. Washington, D.C.
1972 – 1984. professorial lecturer, George Washington University. Washington, D.C.
1974 – 1981. group director international division, General Accounting Office. Washington, D.C.
1986 – 1994. visiting scholar, University Washington, Seattle, Washington.
Source:
https://web.archive.org/web/20211124081228/https://prabook.com/web/eleanor_martha.hadley/695543
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Books
Hadley, Eleanor. Antitrust in Japan. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1970.
_____________. Japan’s Export Competitiveness in Third World Markets. Georgetown: The Center for Strategic and international Studies, 1981.
_____________. Memoir of a Trustbuster: A Lifelong Adventure with Japan. Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 2003.
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Testimony before the Subcommittee on Antitrust and Monopoly, Committee on the Judiciary, U.S. Senate. July 29, 1964 pp. 147-161.
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Obituary
Eleanor Hadley spent her life standing up to oppression, dies at 90
By Sara Jean Green The Seattle Times, June 6, 2007
Eleanor Hadley rarely talked of her experiences as a young American woman tasked with democratizing the economy of post-World War II Japan, preferring instead to discuss politics and policy with guests who would stop by her Normandy Park home for an intellectual chat and a cup of tea.
She’d fought a 16-year battle to clear her name after she was secretly added to a McCarthy-era blacklist, but Ms. Hadley was never bitter — though she was plenty indignant in the grand, gutsy way that family and friends say she reacted to any injustice or abuse of power.
Ms. Hadley, who dedicated her life to academia and government service, died from natural causes at Seattle’s Swedish Medical Center on Friday (June 1). She was 90.
A 1986 recipient of Japan’s Order of the Sacred Treasure for meritorious service, Ms. Hadley was finally persuaded by a group of admirers to pen her autobiography, co-authoring “Memoirs of a Trust Buster: A Lifelong Adventure with Japan” in 2003.
“She was one of the very few women in a leadership position during the occupation” of Japan, said professor Kenneth Pyle, of the University of Washington’s Henry M. Jackson School of International Studies. “It was rare because it was a man’s world. … She was a very independent and assertive woman in an environment that did not encourage that.”
Eleanor Martha Hadley was born July 17, 1916, in Seattle, graduating from Franklin High School in 1934. Her father, Homer Hadley, an engineer, first conceived the idea of a concrete floating bridge across Lake Washington; and her mother, Margaret Hadley, was a pioneer in preschool education and the education of children with disabilities. Her brother Richard Hadley, who died in 2002, was a prominent Northwest land developer.
Ms. Hadley attended Mills College in Oakland, Calif., and was selected for a student fellowship at Tokyo Imperial University, said her nephew, Robert Hadley, of Normandy Park. From 1938 to 1940, she traveled extensively in Japan and China, becoming one of the first Westerners to visit Nanjing after the Japanese military massacred 150,000 to 300,000 Chinese in that city.
“She went to Japan a pacifist but came back from the whole experience with an understanding that there are times you have to stand up to horrible regimes,” her nephew said.
She returned to the U.S. to pursue her doctorate in economics at Harvard-Radcliffe University but was recruited in 1943 by the U.S. State Department to work as a research economist focusing on Japan.
At the end of the war, Ms. Hadley — then 31 — was asked to join Gen. Douglas MacArthur’s staff in Tokyo, where she worked to help break the zaibatsu, the powerful industrial and financial combines that dominated Japan’s economy.
Ms. Hadley returned to Harvard in 1947 to complete her doctorate and planned to join the newly created Central Intelligence Agency, Robert Hadley said. But the CIA job offer — and her security clearance — were mysteriously withdrawn. She didn’t learn until years later that she’d been labeled a Communist and was blacklisted by Maj. Gen. Charles Willoughby, MacArthur’s conservative chief of intelligence.
She later became a professor at Smith College in Massachusetts and George Washington University in Washington, D.C. For 16 years, she worked to clear her name and finally prevailed after Sen. Henry “Scoop” Jackson from Washington intervened on her behalf. She went to work for the U.S. Tariff Commission (now the International Trade Commission) and General Accounting Office, returning to the Seattle area after her retirement in 1984.
In addition to her nephew Robert Hadley, Ms. Hadley is survived by her nephew Scott Talley of Colorado Springs, Colo.; and nieces Alisa Scharnickel, of Arlington, and Lisa Hadley, of Honolulu.
Source: Web-archive copy of the Hadley obituary.
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Backstory: “The Purge of Hadley”
Source: Thiry, Martin. Chapter 2 “Eleanor Hadley: Anti-Trust in Occupation Japan”, Domestic Politics and Foreign Policy, US. 1946-1954: Three at the Intersection and What it Wrought. M.A. (History) Thesis, University of Hawai’i (August, 2007), pp. 56-58.
…Hadley left Japan in September of 1947 to finish her doctorate at Harvard. The years ahead were black ones. She was recruited by the nascent CIA for analyst work, but she was unable to get a security clearance. She was turned down by several government agencies. She worked on the fringes of the Washington bureaucracy until 1956 when she got a job teaching at Smith College. In 1965 Henry “Scoop” Jackson took up her case. He was able to track down the retired Whitney who joined in the effort to clear her name. There was nothing in the GHQ-SCAP files to suggest disloyalty. At the end of 1966, through some machinations on the part of Jackson, Hadley was finally given her clearance. The years of banishment had been long. The climate in Washington had been harsh to one “under a cloud.” She had been blacklisted from before the coming of McCarthy and remained so long past his demise. Dean Rusk, an old college teacher, even refused his help.[214] “I was afraid to get a book out of the library (in those days)… [I] was miserable going through it,” Hadley remembers.
The mystery of why she had been blacklisted was eventually resolved. Major-General Charles Willoughby had been the head of SCAP’s Military Intelligence Section. Later an advisor to General Franco, he maintained extensive surveillance on Japanese radicals as well as reporting critically on American reformers within SCAP itself.[215] Willoughby was an ultraconservative and controlled censorship for SCAP[216] He had a personal rivalry with Whitney, which may have accounted for some of Government Section’s pursuit of reform: Whitney knew Willoughby would hate it. Willoughby brought extreme right-wing views and a Prussian bearing to his job. MacArthur called him “my lovable fascist.”[217]
Willoughby’s papers were declassified in 1975,[218] including a report on “Leftist infiltration into SCAP.” Hadley was mentioned. The concern was that she was dating a journalist. “Her relative immaturity… suggest the possibility.… [of] being exploited by leftists.”[219] Hadley shared her thoughts on Willoughby:
Hadley: Politics shaped his job. He was security. After five years of Mr. Bush we know how far security can be pushed. I enjoyed having dinner with foreign correspondents, US and European. It’s possible I said something one night. I was never informed about that.
Author: What were the specific accusations against you?
Hadley: No specific accusations whatsoever. It was all done very quietly. The black ball consisted of telling people in D.C. that I was doubtful. I “might” have spilled the beans, I “might” have been indiscreet, I “might” have indicated SCAP direction to foreign correspondents. All “might have’s”- Willoughby’s wonderment.
Author: Would you have led a different life if you had not been black balled?
Hadley: 17 years out of [one’s] most productive makes a dent.[220]
Without access to Willoughby’s files there is no way to confirm Hadley’s story. Still, I find it plausible. The forces around her, the clash of competing ideologies within SCAP and the US political scene, worked greater effects. I do not render judgment on the issue of zaibatsu dissolution. I simply do not know enough about it. What I do feel comfortable arguing is that the clash of ideologies within SCAP and beyond about zaibatsu dissolution became increasingly Orientalized the more it entered into the discourse of US domestic politics. And the more entrenched it became in US domestic politics the more Orientalized it became. The power of this convergence was more than enough to wreck Hadley’s career in government…
[214] Hadley, Memoir of a Trustbuster, 121-145.
[215] Bailey, Paul. Postwar Japan: 1945 to the Present. Cambridge: Blackwell Publishers (1995), 31.
[216] Dower, John. Embracing Defeat: Japan in the Wake of World War II. New York: W.W. Norton and Compnay (1999), 406.
[217] Schaller, Michael. Douglas MacArthur: The Far Eastern General. Oxford: Oxford University Press (1989), 121.
[218] His papers are on file at the MacArthur Memorial in Norfolk, VA, but not on-line. http://www.macarthurmemorial.org/archives_record.asp (accessed 1/30/07).
[219] Hadley, Memoir of a Trustbuster, 146.
[220] Eleanor Hadley, “Telephone Interview With Eleanor Hadley 1/25/07” (Honolulu-Seattle).
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Image Source: From the website World War II Database. Archived copy at web.archive.org.