Worldly Philosopher: The Odyssey of Albert O. Hirschman

by Jeremy Adelman

  The scheme worked. Gold got them out for a short séjour, and once in Marseilles, Beamish arranged to convene with the “Neu Beginnen four” in a brothel on rue Dumarest to plot their escape. Fry and Beamish huddled with the refugees. While they spoke in German in hushed voices, the prostitutes, who were busy flaunting and caressing, grew increasingly impatient. It became clear that the troupe ran the risk of discovery. Beamish stood up and announced, “Je me sacrifie,” and took one of the women upstairs to dispel any suspicion about the real reasons for the drinking on rue Dumarest. Fry recalled that Beamish left the room with a readiness that belied his words. Later, Mary Jayne Gold learned that Beamish’s companion told her pimp that he was an odd German client because he had no interest in sadomasochistic sex.43

  As the route became more congested—and better known—its dangers increased. There was great fear that authorities would discover it and crack down on the operation. Pétain was determined to demonstrate Vichy’s sovereignty with the one force with which he was familiar—the police. Since Marseilles was such a sore point, he announced his decision to visit the port with much fanfare and instructed the Sûreté nationale to scrub the south clean. Beamish left for Toulouse to explore alternative routes over the Pyrenees. When his train pulled into the station in one small border town, he saw a guard demanding papers from descending passengers. Beamish hung back, hoping he would move on. Instead, as the last one, he found himself trapped with the guard. His papers were fine, but the guard suggested they walk into town together. Hermant mustered his charm to chat him up. His tactic was too effective, for the guard soon found Hermant easy game for his jokes about weak-kneed Italian soldiers. He insisted that Beamish join him in a bar with some of his fellow guards. With no choice, Albert accompanied his new friend to the bar for a round of drinks. By the time he got away from his louche companions, he had long since missed his meeting with the committee contact. The trip to Toulouse was a waste. The next morning, Albert boarded the train back to Marseilles and headed straight to Fry’s hotel, where he found an anxious American. Fry breathed a sigh of relief, quickly took Beamish to a safe location, and explained that while he was gone French gendarmes had appeared at the office asking for “un nommé Hermant.” Fry told them that he had fired Hermant and asked why they were interested. They explained that he faced serious charges, “probably a dirty Gaullist!” It was clear to both of them that it was time for Beamish to leave before Pétain’s arrival in Marseilles.44

  By then, his own escape had been secured. One day, when Beamish was talking with Vice Consul Bingham, the American mentioned that he was trying to find a young German named Otto Albert Hirschmann and asked Beamish if he knew him. Beamish grinned, surprised but delighted. “I will tell you a secret. That’s me, you know.” Bingham was not altogether shocked that Hermant and Hirschmann were one and the same; by then he knew that behind Beamish’s smile was an inscrutable past. But he needed a bit of evidence. There was only one hope: Beamish sent a letter by courier to the owner of the little hotel on rue Turenne in Paris and asked her if there was still a trunk with his belongings, and if the trunk was still there, could she send his German birth certificate? Remarkably, she had kept the trunk (after the war, Hirschman retrieved it and still had it in his Princeton home) and immediately sent the precious document to Marseilles. Beamish produced it for Bingham. Bingham pulled out an envelope with a visa, shook Hermant-Hirschmann’s hand, and wished him well in the escape.45

  What accounts for this surprising turn? Unbeknownst, Hirschmann had forgotten about a letter he had written from Nîmes to his cousin Oscar in the United States. It triggered a sinuous effort to get him out of Europe. Oscar had learned that his cousin was in unoccupied France and anxious to get to the United States. By this time, it was clear that the Vichy government was turning German Jews over to the Gestapo. The problem for Oscar was that he could not support him on a tourist visa; beside, it would prevent Hirschmann from getting any work in the United States. Oscar went to the offices of the Rockefeller Foundation in New York “and spoke to someone there about Otto.” Oscar was directed to the General Education Board, “a straw to which I eagerly clung.” There, however, he was told that any scholarship application had to include a full dossier of scholastic merits, evidence of educational background, and publications. Meanwhile, communications from Albert had gone silent. Oscar felt he was getting the runaround and started to fret that he was going to lose his relative; his pleas for help grew increasingly alarmist.46 Meanwhile, he approached Max Ascoli, who in turn arranged an affidavit of support signed by Marion Stern—the youngest daughter of Julius Rosenwald (the founder of Sears and Roebuck), an active philanthropist through the Julius Rosenwald Fund, and soon to become Ascoli’s wife—to be sent to the American representatives in Marseilles.47 The Julius Rosenwald Fund had been opening the cases of German intellectuals they would sponsor as refugees and began the process of arranging “a special kind of visa,” Ascoli explained to Oscar, “which has been made possible by the President’s generosity.”48

  Ascoli and Oscar were being wishful about President Roosevelt; the saga of frustration and dashed efforts to get refugees out of Europe to safe American shores is well known. With the 1940 elections looming and isolationist sentiment on the rise, the White House was anxious not to be seen to take sides. It is hard to say whether the Rosenwald efforts would have worked. Instead, another channel opened up. Oscar, at his cousin’s suggestion, had appealed to Jack Condliffe for information to compile the dossier for the Rockefeller Foundation. This prompted Condliffe, who was wondering about the fate of his talented researcher when France collapsed, into action. During one of his visits to Washington, he dined with Leo Pasvolsky, a top aide to Cordell Hull, Roosevelt’s secretary of state, to make the case for bringing refugees from Europe. Pasvolsky (who was himself the child of Russian émigrés and who would later distinguish himself as one of the authors of the United Nations charter) sympathized but explained that the climate was hostile to refugees. For Hirschmann, perhaps there was another solution. Condliffe wrote immediately to his contacts at the Rockefeller Foundation. By the time Oscar paid a return visit to the Rockefeller Foundation in early October, its resources and connections were in motion on his behalf. One of the foundation’s program officers, Ruth Peterson, had been pulling a file together for Tracy B. Kittredge, who was familiar with the young economist’s work as the foundation’s chief in the Paris office. Kittredge, who had played an important role in supporting critical German and French social scientists who were being squeezed by nationalist pressures, was back in New York and equally anxious to rescue some of the Rockefeller social scientists. He agreed with Condliffe that Hirschmann was an unusual talent. They put together a fellowship that would sponsor Hirschmann to study and conduct research at the University of California at Berkeley. This was the trick; being a student unblocked the visa. On November 1, a cable from New York landed on the desk of Alexander Makinsky, the Rockefeller Foundation program officer dealing with the flood of refugees in Lisbon, with a fellowship notice and the necessary paperwork to expedite a US visa for one Otto Albert Hirschmann. Makinsky cabled American diplomats in France.49

  Now it was time for Beamish to leave. Since returning to the Hotel Luxe was too dangerous, a friend went back to his room, got some clothes, paid the balance of his bill, and checked out. Beamish bid goodbye to Mary Jayne Gold, telling her that he was making a habit of skipping town before the arrival of leading fascists. Fry met Albert a bit later and escorted Beamish to the train station, where they got his ticket to Banyuls. As the brakes were released and the train pulled out of the station, Fry grew depressed. “I felt peculiarly lonely after he left,” he recalled. “I suddenly realized how completely I had come to rely on him, not only for solutions to the most difficult problems, but also for companionship. For he was the only person in France who knew exactly what I was doing, and why, and was therefore the only one with whom I could always be at ease.”50

  When B
eamish got to Banyuls, he reconnoitered with the Fittkos. Hans suggested that Beamish ditch the rucksack he’d bought in Marseilles. They helped him get clothing and espadrilles so he could resemble a worker wandering in the hills to gather herbs. He threw away all his belongings, save those he could fit into a small musette bag—an extra pair of socks and his copy of Montaigne’s Essais. He spent the night in Banyuls and early the next morning, December 22, was teamed with some fellow crossers—two older German men. One, as it turned out, was a doctor from Berlin who had known Otto Albert’s father. Then the three refugees set out on their trek across the Pyrenees. At some point, one of the crossers grew so tired on the ascent, OA had to carry him part way. After seven hours of walking, they spotted some houses and a peasant herding his cows. Hirschmann asked him if this was Spain. “Sí,” and he pointed to the little town of Port Bou, where the border control officer sat in his hut. OA offered the herder some money, but the peasant shook his head; he did not help crossers for profit and wished them luck. Hirschmann nervously approached the border guard. The memories of the Civil War were still fresh, and the group in Marseilles grappled with repeated sagas of refugees being turned back at the border. In the end, the border guard joked with OA and asked him why he and his friends had crossed the mountains by cow path and not along the “good roads,” then stamped his Lithuanian papers and waved him into Spain. When Hirschmann got to Barcelona, he found the city a frightened shell of its former self. He said goodbye to his two fellow refugees and wandered a bit around the city revisiting sites he’d defended only a few years earlier, then boarded a crowded train to Madrid; it was just before Christmas and families were travelling to Madrid to visit relatives in Franco’s swollen prisons. Some of the passengers were clearly frightened and miserable; they cowered or hid under benches. Other passengers covered them with luggage when conductors or policemen trolled the aisles. Spain was even more terrifying that France was. In Madrid, he switched trains the next day to Lisbon; only when he finally crossed the border into Portugal did the fear begin to lift.51

  Lisbon was Europe’s chokepoint for refugees waiting to get out. Having come overland from the Pyrenees or by air or boat from Casablanca or Tangier, they flocked there in the tens of thousands. In tow came the spies and secret agents to keep an eye on civilians and each other. It was said that there were two currencies in Lisbon in 1940 and 1941, escudos and information. Anyone with ears could parlay the latter into the former. And cash was crucial for the one thing the refugees sought above all: a steamship ticket out of Europe. If the streets seethed with rumors and innuendo, they were also, by contrast with the rest of Europe, brightly lit. For the rest of war-torn Europe, nightfall came with orders to extinguish streetlights and draw curtains. In neutral, nocturnal Lisbon, windows glowed and cafes spilled into the streets. Hirschmann spent five weeks wandering the streets filled with refugees and hucksters waiting for his ship to depart.

  One person who spent some time with him while he was idle was the Rockefeller Foundation’s Alexander Makinsky, who had moved from Paris to the Portuguese capital in early August 1940 to deal with the efflux of artists and intellectuals. On Christmas Eve, Hirschmann cabled Makinsky from Madrid to assure him that he “was coming right through.” Two days later, he showed up at Makinsky’s offices and the two of them went out for lunch. Makinsky gave him his passage aboard the SS Excalibur and a travel advance to get him as far as Berkeley, California, where he was due to take up his fellowship under Jack Condliffe. At the same time, Hirschmann was not only looking westward across the Atlantic; he had his own personal list of refugees still trying to get out. One was Georges Huisman, the former director of the Louvre, who was wallowing in Vichy. Makinsky was interested, and Hirschmann promised to get more information. Within a week, he had tracked him down and was pulling together a curriculum vita for the foundation. At the end of the day, Makinsky wrote in his diary how “H is attractive, intelligent, full of a sense of humor,” a contrast to so many of his entries about the despair that saturated the city and its denizens.52

  As Hirschmann turned his back on Europe to open up a new chapter of his median state, he also took stock of what had transpired over the previous year. He was about to get out—but not without a feeling of bitterness. “I didn’t want to leave,” he later told Lisa Fittko, “I wasn’t interested in going into exile, I wanted to win.”53 At the same time, a whole welter of more confusing personal feelings got knotted inside. Writing to his mother and Eva, he brought them up to date in a few pages. “My ‘story’ is of course endless,” he explained. Some day he promised to relay the whole unexpurgated account. But for now, he joked, “I must say that I have had until now an amazing amount of good luck—but psst, I am seriously beginning to be superstitious as a result of it.” From his joining the French army to avoid the detention camps for Germans, he told his story of bicycling to Bordeaux and his good fortune in Nîmes (He confessed that he liked the name Albert Hermant “much better than my real one!”—suggesting that he was already considering a name change from Otto Albert). He summarized the work with Fry and his labors “for the common cause.” But he also shared some unusual disclosures, acknowledging the strains. “I felt terribly lonely during the whole period despite my multiple activities and the stream of people—often interesting and fascinating whom I saw.” Near the end of the letter he revealed inner turmoil that was less visible to those who were struck by his good humor. “As someone who is drowning I saw one person at least representative of every single period of my life.” If Lisbon afforded a moment to look back on a turbulent and trying year, it also promised him a new, but uncertain, future. “You know how reluctant I always was with regard to the States—I loved Europe and was afraid of America. But I realized soon that there was practically no choice, especially if I had any intention to write our family again one day.”54

  The SS Excalibur was one of the four combination cargo-passenger vessels of the American Export Lines, capable of crossing the Atlantic in eight days. From the summer, when it was used to carry dignitaries like the Duke and Duchess of Windsor, American ambassadors, and the Baron Eugene de Rothschild, it was retrofitted after the fall of France to take more second- and third-class passengers, replacing luxury with a cargo of depression and relief. The idleness aboard allowed Hirschmann to take some further stock of his median state; it was a rough crossing, and he spent most of it seasick, along with the other 180 passengers. “I am not a very great sailor,” he moaned as the vessel approached New York. But he was never one to pass up an opportunity; fortunately, there was a small library aboard the ship, as well as several chess boards and a ping-pong table. Then he met a young Czech woman “with whom I spent most of the time I didn’t play chess or ping-pong.” As he approached the end of his Atlantic crossing, he concluded the letter to his mother in the same self-detached style of Montaigne: “Examining my sentiments yesterday, I noticed that they were already somewhat Americanized. Indeed, I shall enter this country with the will of getting to something, of showing that I have merited the extraordinary chain of lucky incidents which have led me here. Though I still love France, I am of course disappointed in many ways, and this makes my fourth—or is it the fifth?—emigration easier for me.”55

  CHAPTER 6

  Of Guns and Butter

  The disproportion in the world seems, comfortingly enough, to be only an arithmetical one.

  FRANZ KAFKA

  SS Excalibur was scheduled to dock at Jersey City on the evening of Monday, January 13, 1941. Storms had battered the East Coast and delayed the vessel’s last leg from Bermuda. When it entered the mouth of the Hudson River on Tuesday morning, it was a frigid 13 degrees (F); the sky was a slate gray and was about to release its snow. The refugees shivered as they filed through the immigration offices at Elizabeth, New Jersey, and then scattered to their destinations. By the time Otto Albert Hirschmann handed over his documents—his Lithuanian passport and American visa—he had gotten used to the name Albert and was looking
forward to reinventing himself on new soil. He asked that his entrance to the United States be registered as Albert Otto. The agent added his own embellishment, a common enough contribution to the Anglicization of new arrivals, by dropping the second n from the surname. When he offered to simplify it more by removing the c, that was a step too far; the newcomer balked. Hereafter, Otto Albert Hirschmann became Albert O. Hirschman.