Visitors to Economics in the Rear-view Mirror today have a special treat: the very first artifact in a gallery of this virtual museum dedicated to the many wing-nuts who have felt a calling to reveal the true error(s) in the ways of economists.
At the Hoover Archives I found some fascinating letters written to the Foundation for Economic Education’s chief economist, Vervon Orval Watts (1898-1993). Watts received his Ph.D. from Harvard in 1932 with the doctoral thesis “The Development of the Technological Concept of Production in Anglo-American Thought”. The letters transcribed below were written by the daughter of Laura Ingalls Wilder (author of Little House on the Prairie), Rose Wilder Lane, who was asked if she would review the famous Friedman-Stigler pamphlet published by the Foundation for Economic Education in 1946, “Roofs or Ceilings? The Current Housing Problem”.
From the Stigler-Friedman correspondence scholars have been long aware of the difficulties the FEE editors had with Friedman and Stigler’s use of the word “rationing” in the context of market allocation and their willingness to discuss income distribution policy at all. George Stigler was absolutely outraged and puzzled at such an attempt at editorial control. I am sure he would have been at least as amused as shocked by the accusations that he and Milton Friedman had been found guilty of writing a “most damnable piece of communist propaganda”.
On Vervon Orvall Watts:
V. Orval Watts’ obituary in the Los Angeles Times (April 1, 1993).
Watts’ 1952 Book Away from Freedom: The Revolt of the College Economists was republished by the Ludwig von Mises Institute (Auburn, Alabama) in 2008. “This book had a powerful impact on a generation — a kind of primer on Keynesian fallacies that still pervade the profession if not by that name.“
On Rose Wilder Lane:
Judith Thurman, “A Libertarian House on the Prairie, The New Yorker, August 16, 2012.
Judith Thurman, “Wilder Women: The Mother and Daughter behind the Little House Stories”, The New Yorker, August 10 & 17, 2009.
Ayn Rand’s Reception
For Ayn Rand’s reception of Rents and Ceilings, see Jennifer Burns. Goddess of the Market. Ayn Rand and the American Right. (2009), pp. 116-8.
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From Rose Wilder Lane letter to V. Orval Watts
October 11, [1946]
“…I have re-read RENTS AND CEILINGS with the intention of reviewing it. I am appalled, shocked beyond words. This is the most damnable piece of communist propaganda I have ever seen done. And I can prove that it is, sentence by sentence and page by page. What is the Foundation doing, good God, and WHY? Honest American writers in this country are hungry and desperate, blacklisted by the solid communist front holding the publishing field; why in decency (or lack of it) does the Foundation feed a couple of borers-from-within?…the Foundation writes checks for two of the most damnably clever communist propagandists that I’ve read for a long time. I’m physically sick about it.”
From Rose Wilder Lane’s letter to Orval Watts,
October 22, 1946
“…As to ROOFS OR CEILINGS, I think, from internal evidence, that the authors are consciously collectivists; I suspect, from the same evidence, that they intentionally did a piece of propaganda, a piece of “infiltration.” I did not see any of this at first; it seems clear to me now. If you will remember the pictures we used to see when we were children, a picture of trees and flowers that you suddenly saw was a picture of faces or of animals, that was the change in this piece of writing. I think those two men are dangerous. I have no other evidence, I know nothing whatever about them; I am convinced that they have had communist training. I say this confidentially at present, because I have only the internal evidence of this pamphlet.
I can of course explain in detail, and will if necessary. It is a laborious job, however, to analyze and explain the argument hidden under the surface argument and to put it so clearly that you will see it, when it is done to be concealed and in so skillfully done that it is concealed and works into a reader’s mind only by its implications. It is this skill which convinced me that it was not done accidentally, that it was done by trained men. The training is intended to defeat persons like me. It does; and I am not too hopeful that it won’t, in this instance. If you feel that you can ask Ayn Rand to do this job for you, I am sure she can do it much better than I.”
Source: Hoover Institution Archives. Papers of V. Orval Watts, Box 13.
Image Source: Rose Wilder Lane, 1942. Herbert Hoover Presidential Library Museum, in Boston Globe series “Little Libertarians”.