Grand Pursuit

by Sylvia Nasar

  • • •

  Even young men who had experienced the triumph of “brutality, cruelty and mendacity” over civilization assumed that civilization would eventually reassert itself.13 On August 31, 1918, hundreds of soldiers waited on a train platform in the Alpine resort where the emperor had declared war on Serbia four years earlier. A remarkable-looking man—short, taut, radiating nervous energy, with gaunt features, graying hair, and cold blue eyes wearing a K.u.K. uniform—strode through the crowd toward a skinny young corporal. “Aren’t you a Hayek?” he asked him. “Aren’t you a Wittgenstein?” the other shot back.14

  The Hayeks and the Wittgensteins were among Vienna’s leading families. The former were senior civil servants and academics; the latter, wealthy industrialists and art collectors. Friedrich von Hayek and Ludwig Wittgenstein were cousins, although the latter was old enough to be Hayek’s uncle. They had never exchanged more than a few words at family gatherings, but both had volunteered within a few weeks of each other, having welcomed the war partly out of the hope that facing death would make them better men. Both had endured months of semistarvation, grossly inadequate clothing, nonexistent shelter, influenza, malaria, and intensifying ethnic tensions. Both had taken part in the disastrous Piave offensive, the final desperate gesture of the hopeless Austro-Hungarian army. They had witnessed their comrades in arms wading through the mosquito-infested salt-water marshes, rifles held over their heads, until they fell. Unlike one hundred thousand other members of the K.u.K. army, they had survived.

  Hayek was anxious to get home to Vienna to learn whether his application to the air force had been accepted. Wittgenstein had taken leave from his unit in order to see a publisher who had expressed an interest in a manuscript he was carrying in his rucksack, the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, soon to be recognized as one of the most important works of twentieth-century philosophy. When the train for Vienna came, the two men got into the same compartment, and as it rolled eastward through the night, they talked.

  Wittgenstein went on and on about Karl Kraus, whose antiwar journal, Die Fackel, satirized the mendacious Austrian media and emphasized “the duty of genius” to seek and tell the truth. Hayek was troubled by Wittgenstein’s gloom about the future, but at the same time was profoundly impressed by his “radical passion for truthfulness.”15 When they arrived in Vienna, he and Wittgenstein went their separate ways. In another world war, Hayek would fulfill his own duty to the truth by writing The Road to Serfdom.

  • • •

  The best and brightest of the generation that had been too young to fight was Frank Ramsey, a protégé of Maynard Keynes. Like Keynes, Ramsey came from an old Cambridge family. His father was the head of a college and his younger brother the future archbishop of Canterbury. An awkward but brilliant great bear of a boy, Ramsey helped to translate Wittgenstein’s Tractatus when he was sixteen. At age nineteen he wrote a criticism of Keynes’s thesis on probability so devastating that Keynes gave up any notion of a mathematic career. He was drafted to revise the Principia Mathematica, Bertrand Russell and Alfred North Whitehead’s prewar attempt to reduce all of mathematics to a few logical principles.

  Ramsey was eleven when war was declared, and the war radicalized him, as it did many of the boys at his school. He upset his headmaster by threatening to switch from mathematics to economics, which he considered more likely to make the world a better place. Instead of specializing exclusively in mathematics, philosophy, or economics, Ramsey contributed original ideas to all three disciplines. He published only two papers in the Economic Journal before his tragic death from a botched operation at age twenty-six, but both became classics as Keynes accurately predicted.

  A free spirit with a passion for literature, psychoanalysis, and the many women who adored him, Ramsey personified Keynes’s attitude that whatever the limitations of formal logic, imaginative solutions could be found for social problems. Even as an undergraduate, he was indifferent to the notion, seemingly proven by the world war, that vast, impersonal forces beyond human control would determine society’s future. In a talk delivered at a meeting of the Apostles, the Cambridge secret society to which Keynes and Russell had also belonged as undergraduates, Ramsey announced that the “the vastness of the heavens” did not intimidate him. “The stars may be large, but they cannot think or love; and these are qualities which impress me far more than size does,” he said, adding, “My picture of the world is drawn in perspective, and not like a model to scale. The foreground is occupied by human beings and the stars are all as small as three-penny bits.”16

  • • •

  Appalled by the colossal waste of human life and capital in the war, Irving Fisher redoubled his efforts on behalf of public health and a postwar League of Peace. Between 1914 and 1918, he helped to found the Life Extension Institute, whose purpose was to promote best practices in individual hygiene and so further “the preservation of health . . . and increase vitality”17; coauthored a best seller, How to Live, on what today would be called wellness; and started campaigning in earnest for alcohol prohibition. Even as he argued for America to enter the war against Germany, he deplored the negative “eugenic” effects of sending the cream of the younger generation to be slaughtered and maimed on the battlefield. He became president of a labor group that lobbied for safety legislation, automatic cost-of-living wage increases, and universal health insurance. Oddly, the war seemed to strengthen rather than weaken his belief in modern science and man’s improvability.

  Before it was over, though, he suffered a grievous blow that might have caused a less confident man to question whether his certitude was justified. In the late spring of 1918, after months of nagging anxiety, he was forced to confront the agonizing possibility that his twenty-four-year-old daughter Margaret, to whom he was extremely close and who had recently become engaged, might be incurably insane. Shortly after her fiancé received his officer’s commission, she began to talk incessantly about strange portents, God and immortality, and her conviction that her fiancé would be killed.18 When it became obvious that she had begun hearing voices, and her behavior became more and more bizarre, Fisher took her to the Bloomingdale Asylum in upper Manhattan. The diagnosis, dementia praecox, was devastating. Unable to accept that Margaret was unlikely to recover, he tapped his contacts in the medical community in search of a more hopeful prognosis.

  He soon discovered Henry Cotton, the medical director of the New Jersey State Hospital at Trenton, who had been reporting extraordinary success in treating schizophrenia. A prominent psychiatrist and medical reformer, Cotton was convinced that mental illnesses were due to “focal infections.” What distinguished him from researchers with similar views was his willingness to apply his theory to his patients by aggressive removal of infected teeth, tonsils, colons, and reproductive organs. He claimed that he had completely cured hundreds of hopeless cases since the start of the war.

  This is what Fisher, a parent desperate to save his child and a true believer in modern medical miracles, wanted to hear. Elated at having found someone who promised a cure, Fisher had his daughter transferred to Cotton’s care in March 1919. When the doctor reported the presence of “pure colon bacillus,” Fisher assented to his recommendations for treatment. Cotton had two of Margaret’s wisdom teeth removed immediately. When she remained suspicious, delusional, apathetic, and perplexed, he had her cervix removed. Before and after the surgery, she was inoculated repeatedly with her own streptococcus bacilli, the last time in September. Later, Cotton had to admit to a Princeton audience that Patient Number Twenty-four was a “treatment failure.” Margaret died of septicemia on November 19, 1919, at the age of twenty-five.19

  Fisher was devastated. Yet he never questioned the wisdom of Cotton’s “treatment” or his conclusion that the origin of Margaret’s psychosis, and the indirect cause of her death, was her parents’ failure to deal in a timely fashion with her impacted wisdom teeth and her tendency to constipation. Nor was his boundless faith in medical science shak
en. If anything, Fisher’s campaigning grew more frenetic. He told himself over and over that some good would come out of the twin calamities of Margaret’s death and the war. In his mind, the two became inextricably linked. He predicted that society would enter “a period of life conservation” and use science to extend life and improve health: “The war has for a time withdrawn much of the world and destroyed and maimed a large part of that which it has withdrawn,” he said. “The world will seek the greatest possible salvage out of the wreck.”20

  • • •

  The wreck was beyond calculation: 8.5 million dead, 8 million permanently disabled, mostly young men. Ninety percent of the Austro-Hungarian army and nearly three-fourths of the French army were killed, wounded, imprisoned, or missing. “The toll of the war for our family is three killed and four others wounded, two seriously injured, out of a total of seventeen nephews and nephews in law in khaki,” Webb recorded. “Every day one meets saddened women, with haggard faces and lethargic movements, and one dare not ask after husband or son.”21

  World War I destroyed globalization, disrupted economic growth, severed physical, financial, and trade links, bankrupted governments and businesses, and led weak or populist regimes to rely on desperate measures that were supposed to head off revolutions but just as often hastened them. When the war was over, the victors as well as the vanquished were crippled by colossal debts and subjected to vicious attacks of inflation and deflation. Poverty, hunger, and disease, those Malthusian scourges, once again seemed to have the upper hand. In London and Paris as well as Berlin and Vienna, citizens of the great capitals of Europe were forced to realize that they and their nations were now a great deal poorer. Virginia Woolf could not stop brooding about the war and its devastating effects. In her novel The Voyage Out, published in 1915, a sheltered West End matron discovers that “after all it is the ordinary thing to be poor and that London is a city of innumerable poor people.” In Mrs. Dalloway, a decade later, “the war was over” except for victims like the suicidal working-class veteran Septimus Smith and the impoverished and crazed Socialist Doris Kilman, who continue to suffer five years on. In To the Lighthouse, Mrs. Ramsay and her family are haunted by the threat of tuberculosis, another of the war’s legacies.

  • • •

  The war had dealt a blow to the legitimacy of private property, free markets, and democracy while providing an impetus to violent revolutionary movements from Moscow to Munich. “The people are everywhere rejoicing,” observed Beatrice Webb anxiously on Armistice Day. “Thrones are everywhere crashing and men of property are secretly trembling.”22 From their respective positions in Austria and England, Joseph Schumpeter and Maynard Keynes tried to convince their countrymen that political healing would depend on economic recovery, as would any dampening of dangerous revolutionary ardor. Reviving the world economy would require the Allies to draw political boundaries that made economic sense, they argued; and, more important, to give up the fantasy that exacting reparations from the losers would make up their own losses. Both men pleaded for stabilizing national currencies, restoring the flow of credit, and eliminating trade barriers.

  Bertrand Russell, the philosopher, was among the many Western intellectuals who were convinced that “The Great War showed that something is wrong with our civilization.”23 His initial reaction to news of the Bolshevik Revolution was cautious optimism. He was prepared to believe that if not the promised land, Soviet Russia was at least a grand futurist experiment. But unlike many others who let themselves be swept away by their own hopes and fears, he made up his mind to reserve judgment until he had a chance to examine the new society that the revolutionaries claimed they were building—firsthand.

  Chapter VI

  The Last Days of Mankind: Schumpeter in Vienna

  The hour of socialism has not yet struck.

  —Joseph Schumpeter, 19181

  If Austria was a pathetic ruin . . . there was plenty of material, I thought, with which to rebuild the ruins.

  —Francis Oppenheimer, British Treasury Representative, 19192

  When the armistice was announced on November 11, 1918, Webb reported, London exploded in “a pandemonium of noise.” In Paris, there was “a wild celebration” until dawn. Even Berlin was “elated,” its citizens glad to be rid of the war and the dynasty that had dragged them into it.3 Of the four great European capitals, only Vienna was silent. An enormous gray crowd gathered in the Ringstrasse in front of the parliament building. A few soldiers stripped the imperial eagle from their uniforms and forced others to do the same. A mile or so away in the Berggasse, Sigmund Freud sat in his study and jotted in his pocket diary: “End of war.” Significantly, he avoided the word peace.4

  The disintegration of the multinational Austro-Hungarian Empire had been a fait accompli for weeks. A city with a population as large as Berlin’s, Vienna suddenly found itself the capital of a “mutilated and impoverished republic” of 6 million, one-tenth the size of the old empire. After a final session of the imperial parliament in which legislators hurled inkwells and briefcases at speakers’ heads, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, and Yugoslavia had seceded, taking many German-speaking lands with them. As a result, Austria’s eastern and northern frontiers now lay just beyond Vienna’s outer suburbs.5 And Austria’s new neighbors challenged even these borders and constantly threatened to invade. Meanwhile, Austria was in no position to defend itself or issue counterthreats. By November 12, after the emperor and his family had slipped into exile and the new republican government was formally proclaimed, the 4-million-man Austro-Hungarian army had completely dissolved. In the interval between the armistice offer in November and its signing a few days later, hundreds of thousands of soldiers had been imprisoned in Italian POW camps. Most wouldn’t find their way home for several years.

  The revolutionary firestorm that had been ignited by defeat and hunger in St. Petersburg in February 1917 was now spreading west to Budapest, Berlin, and Vienna. Two Marxists dominated Austria’s provisional government. Most observers had taken the inevitability of a Communist putsch for granted since January 1918. The week after New Year’s, militants at the Daimler-Benz works had struck to protest a halving of the flour ration. Half a million men and women who had been drafted by the imperial authorities to work in munitions plants had abandoned their factories. Rumors were circulating of an imminent uprising in Hungary and revolution in Germany.

  The city was bracing for the return of Austria-Hungary’s defeated troops. In The Last Days of Mankind, Karl Kraus, the antiwar satirist, warned that embittered, half-starved, armed hordes would turn Austria into a battlefield. “The war . . . will be child’s play compared to the peace that will not break out.”6 Hundreds of thousands of men, including the nineteen-year-old Friedrich Hayek, had abandoned their units on the Venetian plain and joined a “hungry, disorganized and undisciplined” mass exodus to the north. Along the way, they exchanged military horses, cars, and artillery for food and looted shops or set them ablaze. By early November, the mass was trying to squeeze through the single, narrow exit from Italy over the Brenner Pass and into Innsbruck. Gun-wielding soldiers commandeered trains. “Roofs, platforms, buffers, steps of carriages, even the engines themselves, swarmed with soldiers,” reported one correspondent. “Seen from a distance each train looked like a madly rushing swarm of bees.”7 Hundreds were thrown to their deaths when the trains roared into tunnels und under bridges, and their bodies littered the embankments on either side of the tracks.

  Determined to avoid Austria’s destruction by “bloody anarchy,” the civil servants of the now defunct empire simply tried to keep the trains moving. At one point, a British businessman reported, the Trieste-Vienna line was carrying off between seventy thousand and one hundred thousand men every twenty minutes or so. Worried about anarchy and Communist takeover, the bureaucrats set up depots at the outskirts of Vienna where soldiers turned in their arms before they entered the city. Inside the city, the police continued to report for duty. After an incid
ent in which some Red Guards “liberated” some food and weapons depots, the Social Democratic government hastily recruited unemployed factory workers into a peoples’ militia. Thanks to such measures, as well as to the overwhelming desire of Hungarian, Czech, and Yugoslav soldiers to get home as fast as possible, Vienna remained relatively calm.

  • • •

  The returning soldiers found a city under siege. In this most middle-class of European cities, there was hardly any food or fuel. Virtually from the moment the new republic was announced, no more manufactured goods left Vienna and no shipments of beef, milk, potatoes, or coal arrived. Not since 1683, when the city was briefly encircled by the Ottoman Turks, had Vienna been so cut off from the outside world. Travel to Munich, Zurich, or nearby Budapest became difficult, if not impossible. Mail service was fitful. Telegrams took two or three weeks to reach their destinations, if they ever did. Packages arrived without their contents or not at all. “Don’t feed the customs officials or railway workers,” Freud warned relatives in England.8

  It hardly needs saying that a city of 2 million must buy food from elsewhere in order to eat. Before the war, Vienna and the Alpine provinces had relied on imports from the non-German-speaking parts of the empire for nearly all of their potatoes, milk, and butter, one-third of their flour, and two-thirds of their meat.9 But Hungary had suspended exports to Austria in the middle of the war. Now Austria’s other new neighbors—mainly Czechoslovakia and Yugoslavia—imposed blockades. As the British high commissioner put it, “For hundreds of years trade has followed certain channels and lines of communication have developed accordingly. These channels and lines have been suddenly blocked . . . The result is districts that are starving close to districts having a superfluity of foodstuffs.”10