Arrival

On April 15, 1935, Jacob Viner wrote glowingly about Samuelson to the Social Science Research Council, supporting his application for an SSRC fellowship.

Mr. Paul A. Samuelson, although an undergraduate, did dis­tinctly better work than any other member of my graduate course in Economic Theory during the past Quarter.

a. It is hard not to wonder about the identity of the student whom Viner thought might be more promising. The obvious name to come to mind is Milton Friedman, who had taken Samuelson’s application was successful, meaning that he was assured of a grant for as long as it took him to get a PhD. It carried an important condi­tion: that he could not hold the grant at the university where he had under­taken his undergraduate study. He had to leave Chicago.

He discussed the choice of where to go with his teachers and fellow stu­dents. Allen Wallis and Milton Friedman urged him to go to Columbia to learn statistics from Harold Hotelling. So, too, did all his teachers, without exception.² This was the university to which many Jewish students went. In the end, he chose Harvard, not on account of its economists, though Edward Chamberlin was a significant attraction, but “in search of green ivy”: he expected Harvard Yard to look like Dartmouth’s Hanover com­mon, surrounded by “white churches and spacious groves.”³ Confident that as a holder of such a prestigious award he would be accepted anywhere, he did not formally apply to become a research student: he simply went to Harvard.

Samuelson could have got to Cambridge on a Greyhound bus, but instead he decided to travel in style. The trip began with his first flight, in a Ford trimotor—a propeller-driven airplane with three motors—to Detroit. A boat then took him overnight to Buffalo, where he had what he described as his first culture shock on seeing older buildings.^b The shock would have been less had he made the trip to the East more slowly. From Buffalo, the trip became much less comfortable. The first discomfort was on the bus, mak­ing the nineteen-hour journey through New York State: Buffalo, Rochester, Utica, Binghamton, the Catskill mountain range, and finally New York City. In New York, he had arranged to stay with two friends from Chicago who had a room in a hotel on 22nd Street and Broadway, right near the Flatiron building. Whereas others were inspired by the city’s dynamism and its archi­tecture, Samuelson was not: “New York’s teeming masses, yearning to be free, depressed me then and still weigh down on me. I do get cold comfort from learning that the tallest skyscrapers are borne up by solid granite.”⁴ His friends were out when he arrived, so he left his two suitcases by the door and went down to the lobby clerk. Panic ensued when the clerk told him he should never have left his luggage unattended, and to pray it was still there. He claims that, being an atheist, his only prayer while rushing back was to Charles Darwin.

the price theory course a few years before, but he was an undergraduate at Rutgers, not Chicago.

b. His claim that he had not previously seen buildings more than twenty years old was clearly an exaggeration.

Samuelson recorded little about his two days in New York other than he learned that to be eligible for entry into Harvard, it was necessary to have evidence of immunity against smallpox. He had been vaccinated, and had the unmistakable mark on his arm to prove it, but getting a doctor's certificate to prove it relieved him of $50—as much as it would have cost to travel all the way from Chicago had he taken the Greyhound bus.

After his experience in New York, Samuelson was both relieved and excited to be on the Greyhound to Boston. He asked the driver to drop him at the YMCA, where he expected to be able to get a room. He had not taken account of the fact that, it being the beginning of term, they had been fully booked for weeks. The clerk wished him luck at the Athens Hotel, but he got the same answer there and was advised to try the men-only Technology Chambers, near the Huntington railroad tracks. Accosted by a prostitute on his way out of the Athens Hotel at 2:20 A.M., he had no choice but to try the Technology Chambers and luckily was able to find a room. Having found a room, he had only to register for classes at Harvard.

Registration at Harvard involved an encounter in which he claims to have alienated the department chair, Harold Hitchings Burbank, who was to become the focus of many resentments. Explaining that he had not applied in advance on the grounds that a paying SSRC Predoctoral Research Fellow could get in anywhere, and that he intended to “skim the cream” of Harvard on the grounds that he might not stay more than a year, Samuelson refused to take E. F. Gay's famous, but “sterile and dull,” course in economic history, taking instead Edward Chamberlin's Monopolistic Competition and Allied Problems in Value Theory, intended for second-year graduate students. It was emphatically not, as Samuelson put it, “love at first sight.” In his later reflections on his years at Harvard, he consistently characterized Burbank as anti-Semitic and as representing “everything in scholarly life for which I had utter contempt and abhorrence.”⁵ He was, however, accepted into the gradu­ate program.^c

In his first two years at Harvard, Samuelson was required to attend classes. In the first year, the core course was Ec.ιι, Economic Theory, the course made famous by Viner's teacher, Frank Taussig, but now taught by Joseph Schumpeter. In the first term, he also took Theory of Economic Statistics,

c.

taught by Leonard Crum.⁶ Evidence of what Crum taught is not clear, other than that he used an old textbook, but given his work, it seems likely to have been a course focused on practical problems of data analysis and inter­pretation, mathematically not very demanding given the courses Samuelson had taken in Chicago.⁷ Samuelson claimed that, at his initial meeting with Burbank, he argued his way out of taking this course, along with E. F. Gay's course, as mentioned earlier. However, he later wrote that Crum taught what was “not so much a course on statistics as against statistics,” warning students that it was a powerful weapon that might explode in their hands, and he obtained an A+ in it.⁸ What is more likely is that after taking the course in the first term, he managed to avoid taking the follow-up course in the sec­ond term, instead taking E. B. Wilson's Topics in Statistical Theory, which approached statistics in a way he found much more congenial. Samuelson also took Money and Banking with John Williams, who had a reputation as being the best lecturer in the department and whose courses were very popular, and Monopolistic Competition with Edward Chamberlin.^d