Working the Dead Beat

by Sandra Martin

  Galbraith was so popular with the public and so prominently connected with government leaders that the profession couldn’t disregard him: they elected him president of the American Economic Association in 1972. True to his Canadian roots, he insisted that the association’s annual meeting be held in Toronto, the first time it had ever met outside the United States.

  As a populist, he contended that economics had failed as a field of study by pretending to be something it wasn’t — a hard science. As for economists, they had lost touch with the way economies actually operate in relation to political, social, and environmental factors by adhering like barnacles to mathematical modelling. “In making economics a non-political subject,” Galbraith once wrote, “neoclassical theory destroys the relation of economics to the real world . . . it manipulates levers to which no machinery is attached.”

  Economist Richard Parker described the Galbraithian method, in John Kenneth Galbraith: His Life, His Politics, His Economics, as dealing with issues as they emerge. “You don’t proceed from an abstract, atemporal, ageographical model, but from what you see around you and what you can feel around you,” Parker explained in a public lecture.

  Today Galbraith’s reputation rests on his talents as a writer of masterful prose, his historical influence as a presidential advisor, and his work as a pragmatic liberal economist who believed in government intervention as a countervailing economic force to unbridled capitalism. “I’m for a socially pain-free, decently egalitarian society,” he told the Globe and Mail in 2005, when he was ninety-six, still writing books and still in demand as a pundit.

  JOHN KENNETH (KEN) Galbraith was born on October 15, 1908, in the back bedroom of a two-storey farmhouse in Iona Station, a hamlet on the railway line connecting Detroit and Buffalo. He was the third of five children (although one sister had died of whooping cough before he was born) of schoolteacher and farmer William Archibald (Archie) Galbraith and his wife, Sarah Catherine (Kate) Galbraith (née Kendall).

  His parents weren’t rich but they weren’t poor either, owning two farms that together amounted to 150 acres. Although the Galbraiths were staunchly Liberal in their politics, Archie Galbraith was sufficiently disgruntled to become active in the United Farmers of Ontario, a protest movement that gained enough political momentum to win the provincial election of 1919.

  Many years later, Galbraith sardonically memorialized his family, which had emigrated from Scotland in 1819, in The Scotch, one of his most popular books. He recalled attending a political rally with his father in the middle of the First World War, when he was about eight. Needing a podium, the senior Galbraith mounted a large pile of manure and addressed the crowd. “He apologized with ill-concealed sincerity for speaking from the Tory platform,” Galbraith wrote. “The effect on this agrarian audience was electric. Afterward I congratulated him on the brilliance of the sally. He said, ‘It was good but it didn’t change any votes.’”

  His mother died after a short illness when he was fifteen, a tragedy that he mentioned briefly in his memoirs, A Life in Our Times, when he wrote: “My mother, a beautiful, affectionate and decidedly firm woman, died when her children — my brother, my two sisters, and I — were not yet all in their teens.” The family was devastated.

  Her husband, Archie, remote in his grief, never remarried and became even more active in community affairs. As for Ken, an avid reader, he found solace in books, taking advantage of the local library’s decision to change its lending policy from two books every two weeks to unlimited borrowing. Even so, he let his assigned schoolwork slump. He travelled the six miles to school in a horse and buggy with his siblings but was frequently late for class. Gangly, awkward at sports, and humiliated by his clumsiness in the compulsory cadet corps, he had to repeat his senior year of high school.

  After he finally graduated in 1926, he went to the Ontario Agricultural College (now the University of Guelph), about eighty miles northeast of home, because his father decided he should. Years later, Galbraith referred to the OAC in an interview in Time magazine as “not only the cheapest but probably the worst college in the English-speaking world.”

  He spent five years at the OAC partly because of his inadequate high school education and partly because he was diagnosed with “an incipient tuberculosis.” What made the difference for this decidedly indifferent student was the academic requirement that all students had to write weekly compositions. And this is where the physically inept but bright Galbraith came into his own.

  Buoyed by his newly discovered aptitude for the written word, he helped to found a college newspaper, the oacis, which gave him a touch of campus celebrity and the nickname Spike, which he much preferred to his high school moniker, Soupy. He began freelancing and produced a few pieces on agricultural issues for local papers, the St. Thomas Times-Journal and the Stratford Beacon Herald. His earnings — five dollars per column — enabled him to go to the 1930 International Livestock Exhibition in Chicago, a trip he said later was “the greatest triumph of my college days.”

  The Depression was eradicating farmers’ hard-won prosperity. That economic reality, which Galbraith and his family were experiencing on a visceral level, led him to conclude that “something was terribly wrong with the way agricultural markets worked,” according to biographer Richard Parker. That problem, an opportunity to do something about it, and a potential direction for his own future coalesced when Galbraith spotted a poster advertising graduate fellowships in agricultural economics at the University of California.

  He applied and was accepted. Late in July 1931, his father drove him to Port Stanley, where he boarded the Lake Erie steamer for its daily run to Cleveland and met up with the nephew of a family acquaintance. The two young men drove across the country in a gas-guzzling 1926 Oakland sedan to Berkeley, an academic institution that made more intellectual demands and offered greater opportunities than anything he had encountered at home.

  When he was asked by the Globe and Mail why he stayed in the United States, rather than returning to Canada after graduating from Berkeley with his doctorate in agricultural economics in 1934, he replied: “I had a choice between Washington and Ottawa, and my hesitation was non-existent. I was personally invited by William Lyon Mackenzie King and the alternative was the Roosevelt administration and the New Deal. And I have no recollection of a problematical or passionate struggle over the choice.”

  As a new graduate, he had a five-year teaching contract at Harvard University in Boston and summer jobs working for Roosevelt’s Agricultural Adjustment Administration. In 1937 he married Catherine (Kitty) Atwater, a Radcliffe student and linguist, and became an American citizen — the U.S. didn’t allow dual citizenship back then. The Galbraiths went to Europe on their honeymoon, where he hoped to meet with his hero John Maynard Keynes. That ambition was thwarted because Keynes, who would die a decade later, had suffered a heart attack.

  When Galbraith’s contract at Harvard expired, he taught at Princeton and then moved to Chicago to work in the U.S. Farm Bureau. Early in 1941, he became deputy administrator of the Office of Price Administration, responsible for setting U.S. prices to prevent wartime inflation and to encourage the production of military supplies. John S. Gambs, one of his early biographers, described Galbraith as “virtually the economic czar of the United States” he ran afoul of Republican congressman Everett Dirksen from Illinois. Accused of having “communistic tendencies,” Galbraith was fired in 1943.

  With a wife and two small boys to support — the Galbraiths would eventually have four sons — he actively solicited an editorial position with Fortune magazine, having rejected job offers there three times in the past. Publisher Henry Luce, the genius who had invented Time, Life, Fortune, and Sports Illustrated, didn’t share Galbraith’s liberal economic and political views, but he recognized the value of having them expounded in his pages. Years later, Luce wrote to President John F. Kennedy, “I taught Kenneth Galbraith to write. And I can
tell you I’ve certainly regretted it ever since.”

  Galbraith worked at Fortune for five years, elucidating the tenets of Keynesian economics to American business leaders. He took a leave at the end of the Second World War, when he was seconded as one of several directors of the U.S. Strategic Bombing Survey, to study the effectiveness of the Allied bombing of strategic and civilian German targets. He concluded that the carpet bombing of German cities had not hastened the end of the war, although the final reports of the survey were not as strongly worded as he would have liked.

  With Eleanor Roosevelt, widow of the recent U.S. president, and Hubert Humphrey, he co-founded the liberal interest group Americans for Democratic Action in 1947. The following year he left Fortune and went back to teaching at Harvard, occupying the Paul M. Warburg Chair in Economics, a position he held until his retirement in 1975. His colleagues, perhaps with some envy, called him “the most famous professor at Harvard.”

  By 1950 Galbraith had tenure and had signed a publishing contract for what would become his breakthrough book, American Capitalism. Success often beckons tragedy to test the mettle of a supposedly lucky individual, and so it was with Galbraith. That March his second son, six-year-old Douglas, was diagnosed with leukemia. For Kitty Galbraith, the horror of watching her son die was compounded by her mother’s coincidental diagnosis with a brain tumour, tearing her from one bedside in Boston to another in New York City. Days after she returned from her mother’s funeral, Dougie, as he was called, died, shortly after his seventh birthday. Biographer Parker writes that the child’s grieving parents had given him the bicycle he had wanted for his birthday, all the while knowing he would never ride it.

  American Capitalism, which Galbraith dedicated to his dead son, was a bestseller in 1952 and is still in print more than half a century later. “Like a slingshot, American Capitalism propelled him beyond the gravitational pull of university life and professional economics,” according to Parker. Business Week was more explicit: “A brilliant and provocative book, witty, irreverent, and utterly merciless.”

  That bestseller was only the beginning. In 1954 he published The Great Crash, a book detailing the excesses and follies that had precipitated the Depression and which, Galbraith suggested, could make another crash inevitable. Two years later, on a visit to poverty-riddled India, Galbraith realized that a society begins to produce “unnecessary” goods as it becomes wealthier, with corporations creating artificial demand for their products through advertising. That insight led to The Affluent Society in 1958, a bestseller that made Galbraith’s name internationally. He portrayed a society in which consumer culture had run amok, social services were being neglected, and the private sector was being indulged at the cost of the public one — all of which increased the likelihood of both inflation and recession.

  Meanwhile he was also working as a speechwriter for Adlai Stevenson’s failed 1952 and 1956 presidential campaigns, later admitting he had erred in tailoring Stevenson’s message too much to the “intellectual elite.” That didn’t stop him from serving as an economic advisor to John F. Kennedy’s 1960 presidential campaign and working the floor at the Democratic convention. He also became a speechwriter and advisor to the young president.

  He was Kennedy’s ambassador to India from 1961 to 1963, persuaded First Lady Jacqueline Kennedy to undertake diplomatic journeys to the subcontinent, and was an early critic of the disastrous Vietnam War. While his observations and insights were circulated at the highest levels of the Kennedy administration, they were often dismissed by other economists and, in the case of the Vietnam War, by Kennedy’s military advisors, including the then hawk Robert S. McNamara.

  After Kennedy was assassinated, Galbraith worked as an advisor and speechwriter for Lyndon Johnson, drafting speeches for the “Great Society” legislation aimed at eradicating poverty and racism. After splitting with Johnson over the Vietnam War, he campaigned for Eugene McCarthy in 1968 and then worked for Democratic presidential candidates George McGovern in 1972 and Morris Udall in 1976. He supported Senator Edward Kennedy’s failed effort to run against Jimmy Carter in 1980.

  Following his retirement from Harvard, Galbraith remained in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and spent his summers at an “unfarmed farm” in Newfane, Vermont. He continued to criticize prevailing economic thought, attacking control of U.S. politics by the wealthy in The Culture of Contentment (1992). In The Good Society (1996) he set forth his vision of a just, equitable society politically organized to help the poor. In 2004, when he was ninety-five, he wrote The Economics of Innocent Fraud: Truth for Our Time, an essay arguing that corporate managers manipulate consumers and the government.

  Although Galbraith essentially said goodbye to his native country in 1925, he often reflected on his early days on the farm and the hard physical labour they entailed. His vision was clearly not clouded by nostalgia. “My mind on many matters still runs back to those early Ontario years,” he allowed the year before he died of complications of pneumonia in Cambridge, on April 29, 2006, at age ninety-seven, “particularly to the farm and particularly to the hard work on the farm. I consider one of the fortunate parts of my life escape from the routines of early agriculture.” His willingness to move on never stopped us from claiming him as one of our favourite sons.

  Jane Jacobs

  Writer, Urban Thinker, Social Activist

  May 14, 1916 – April 25, 2006

  TWO UNRELATED ACTS of civil disobedience disrupted Toronto mayor William Dennison’s annual levee on January 1, 1970. A girl of thirteen tried to shake hands with His Worship at the men-only event, and the Provocative Street Players, an offshoot of the Stop Spadina movement, arrived with a twenty-foot-long sign denouncing a proposed expressway through the downtown core. Security guards escorted the provocateurs outside the building, where they gave full voice to their musical lament “The Bad Trip.” The times were changing in Toronto the Good.

  The lead vocalist was the nineteen-year-old son of writer, activist, and urban theorist Jane Jacobs, the acclaimed author of The Death and Life of Great American Cities. She and her husband, architect Robert (Bob) Jacobs, had arrived in Toronto in June 1968, seeking a refuge for their draft-age sons from the voracious demands of fighting the American war in Vietnam.

  Almost immediately, the citizen-activist, who had brought a crosstown expressway to a screeching halt in New York City, was embroiled in a fight in her new country against the “single greatest menace” to the “most hopeful and healthy city in North America.” Before she was through, the expressway that would have cut a vicious swath through downtown neighbourhoods had been abandoned, and many of the local citizenry had been emboldened to have faith in their inherent good sense and ability to think for themselves.

  As a public speaker Jacobs was feisty, as a writer she was provocative, as a thinker she was original. Curiosity and common sense are the drivers coursing through her eight books, from her classic The Death and Life of Great American Cities (1961) through her final clarion, Dark Days Ahead (2004). Largely self-educated, she was an acute observer and an intellectual scavenger, storing facts and incidents in her prodigious brain for later analysis. From the small and the concrete — the street under her feet — she worked upwards and outwards, drawing a complex web of activity connecting neighbourhoods, cities, economies, and human behaviour to explain why some systems worked and others failed.

  The ideas that fascinated her have a common theme: local control, biodiversity, and how an organic harmony can reside in what, at first glance, seems chaotic. Nothing exists in isolation; the principles that underlie the workings of the natural world apply equally well to the economic one. A pragmatist rather than an ideologue, she didn’t tell readers what to think; she inspired them to look around with fresh insight and to have the confidence to act upon their own conclusions.

  “I studied city planning, and when I read her book [Death and Life] all of my city planning was turned upside d
own because she looked at it from a different angle — from the angle of the human being,” architect Eberhard Zeidler said after Jacobs died on April 25, 2006. “It changed my architecture because I started to think of architecture — no matter if you design a hospital or a factory or a house — not as a thing you do, but as a thing you do for people.”

  Her theory that cities are ecosystems that can be smothered by rigid, authoritarian planning; that busy, lively sidewalks help cities thrive as safe, healthy places; and that good urban design mixes work, housing, and recreation are now taken as gospel, but they were heretical when Death and Life was first published. It is often linked to other epochal works that were written in the early 1960s, books such as Growing Up Absurd by Paul Goodman (1960), Silent Spring by Rachel Carson (1962), The Feminine Mystique by Betty Friedan (1963), Understanding Media by Marshall McLuhan (1964), and Unsafe at Any Speed by Ralph Nader (1965).

  She was “completely original,” according to her editor, Jason Epstein. In his view, her later works, such as The Economy of Cities (1969) and Cities and the Wealth of Nations (1984), were just as important as Death and Life and will eventually become part of mainstream thinking and reading. Describing Jacobs as a “genius of common sense” with a “20/20 vision for reality,” he said she “saw something academic economists hadn’t seen because they get so caught up in other people’s abstractions that they can’t see what is really happening.”

  But because she was an original, people had trouble categorizing her. She was called everything from a self-styled economist to an urbanologist. Because she helped defeat the Spadina Expressway, she was branded a left-wing activist; because she believed competition is essential for communities to thrive and that subsidies are counterproductive, she was sometimes stamped a right-wing conservative; because she advocated in her most controversial book, The Question of Separatism: Quebec and the Struggle over Sovereignty (1980, 2011), that Quebeckers should decide for themselves if they wanted to remain in Canada, she was denounced as a separatist.