Childhood Reflections
Paul’s own accounts of his childhood contain much self-reflection. Clearly, his childhood was something he felt important, for he repeatedly referred to Freud’s claim that personality is formed between the ages of two and six, explaining the importance he attached to his experience on the farm.
Yetit was a story that he found difficult to write, for otherwise it is hard to see why there should be so many unfinished accounts of his early life, each with a slightly different emρhasis.f
There is a disarming sense of modesty and frankness in many of Paul's accounts of his life, admitting to several failings. He claims to have acquired a belief in evolution very early on, and he ascribed his intelligence to genetics: “I began as an out-and-out believer in heredity. My brothers and I were smart kids. My cousins all weighed in above the average.”55 He was congenitally smart and made no secret of it, at one point noting that in the early 1950s he was prescribed some medication that dulled his mind, giving him for the first time an insight into “how the other half lives.” His most frequently used self-description was “precocious,”56 but though this is often associated with early signs of brilliance, Paul did not see it that way. “Being an early developer in I.Q. is not a serious matter: all academics, even the pedestrian permanent assistant professors, are proficient in solving puzzles at high speed—which is what I.Q. tests mostly measure.”57 Having a high I.Q. did not enable him to draw the conclusion that his mother was pregnant until the night before the birth of his younger brother. He could clearly respect dimensions of intelligence that were different from puzzle solving and academic work, such as the more practical skills of his parents and those he encountered on the farm.
Though he had no idea that he would become an economist, Paul remembers himself as being aware of economic issues and events that supported his later Keynesian views.
His remark that he could see the Keynesian multiplier at work when he was on the farm is clearly a later interpretation, but he claims that he was aware at an early age of wartime prosperity as a result of high grain and steel prices, and of the sharp postwar recession that preceded the longer boom of the 1920s.58 He recalled an argument with his parents, presumably in the early 1930s, in which his mother retorted, “Don't you know, son, that times are really prosperous only during war?”—a view that accurately reflected the experience of those years.59 His family's misadventures in Florida when he was ten made him acutely aware of property speculation and bubbles that eventually burst. Even though he had no commitment to pharmacy, Paul's father had been more successful as a pharmacist than asf. One of these was written shortly after receiving an honorary degree from Valparaiso University in 1987 (aged 72). He had revisited Gary, only to find that the family drugstore and the Carnegie Library where he had spent so many hours had both been demolished. It is likely that his “Brief history of the Samuelsons” dated from the late 1970s, when his mother recounted their family history. a property speculator. Discussions on the stock market with his high school teacher Beulah Shoesmith were another sign of Paul's interest in finance, a branch of economics in which he would later specialize.
Paul's recollections of his past provide some clues to his parents' politics. He comments that his father was a “progressive Republican,” with emphasis on progressive. In 1924, his father voted, so Paul recalled, for “‘Old Bob' La Follette, of the Independent Progressive Party.” Stemming from immigrant stock, Frank had an aversion to inequality and thought that the democratic process should be used to reduce the inequalities brought about by the market.60 His father was enthusiastic about the sermons of Father Charles Coughlin. Coughlin was a Catholic priest whose sermons were, from 1926 to 1940, broadcast weekly over the radio, becoming very popular during the Depression years, when he moved from religion to economics.
He was an advocate of social justice through implementing radical monetary reforms. Though an enthusiastic supporter of Franklin Roosevelt in 1932 (with the slogan “Roosevelt or Ruin”), by 1936 Coughlin had turned against him on grounds that the reforms he was introducing were insufficiently radical. However, Coughlin's attacks on bankers moved in a direction that was widely considered anti-Semitic, causing Frank Samuelson to become disenchanted. His mother was presumably no conservative, if Paul could describe her as an early feminine activist. However, the main characteristic that he picked out when describing Ella was her certainty that she was right. He suggested that his own eclecticism was a reaction against this. On the farm, the Gordons were supporters of Warren Harding, and Paul clearly attached political significance to their gift of a celluloid elephant.The “serious” dimension of his precocity was not intelligence but boundless self-confidence. “Why did I think for a moment,” he wrote, “that I could be a great baseball announcer? Or, God help me, that I could even be a better ball player if only I ‘really' set my mind to it?”61 Part of the answer, he suggested, might lie in his being regarded as “cute.” This was something he hated: his mother would lovingly comb his long curls, which were not cut until he was four. When “cooing aunts lusted orally for [his] locks,” Paul snarled back “I'll trade you even.”62 However, he drew the conclusion that
Being “cute” must have contributed to my precocity.... [W]hen asked to “recite” I never needed any coaxing. At the age of three I drew a laugh when I announced, “And now I'll give you my encore.”63
He went on to describe this cuteness as “pseudo-pulchritude” that did not outlast puberty. Thus he never possessed “IT.” He wrote, “No Radcliffe College class ever asked for an old shirt of mine to be torn into fair shares for division among its many co-ed members.64 (That happened to Russ Nixon, a pal in the Harvard graduate school.)”65 Paul also gave his parents some of the credit for his self-confidence—nurture was important as well as nature.
He never doubted that he was favored, and that even his elder brother Harold put up with this. Harold's lack of resentment was illustrated by the story of how one long-serving maid regularly asked Harold to run errands because she mistakenly thought he was the younger brother. Paul attributed the maid's mistake not to his size or physique but to his habit of being forever immersed in books. This may have contributed to the distance that developed between Paul and his brothers, for his younger brother Robert became closer to Harold than Paul was to either.Those who knew Paul were well aware that he bitterly resented being left on the farm. This may be one reason why he “psychologically left the den of the nuclear family,” immersing himself in books before he had physically left home. When drafting an autobiography, Paul projected this resentment on to having been deceived, not on to having been forcibly separated from his parents. He admitted to the pain of learning that his parents, after one of their visits, had departed while he was in a barn seeing to the horses, though he described the pain as momentary. In another account of deception he describes being told, on a visit to Dr. Georgi, that he was going simply for an examination of his tonsils. Having been dragged screaming to Dr. Georgi's new hospital, he had to be forced on to the operating table where, as the ether cap was put over his face, he cried “You've lied to me. You've cheated me.”66 At the age of seventy-two he said that he still resented this more than he resented being sent away from home during what he described as “the endless months of my infancy.” He was critical of his family's “pragmatic” attitude to truth, not simply in relation to the facts of life (which he learned from observing bulls and cows on the farm) but also more seriously in relation to adoption and step-parents. Paul's cousin Stanley, with whom he was very close, their ages differing by a mere ten days and who also spent time on the farm, was the son of his Aunt Sophie and her first husband, Fred Mendelsohn, but after their divorce and her remarriage to David Ratner, he was given the name Ratner and “brainwashed” into believing that David Ratner was his true father.
Paul claims to have been an embarrassment to his parents when, because of his precocious memory, he had once asked his cousin, “Stanley, which father do you mean? This one? Or the World War I soldier father?”67 Paul was silenced and twenty years later, when Stanley registered for the draft, he experienced the shock of discovering that his father was really his stepfather.Though he did not express it this way, Paul's story can be seen as typically American. Paul's reaction, on learning that his family name did not go back further than his father, was simply to dismiss his European roots as irrelevant: arrival in America marked a new beginning. Such an attitude chimes with the metaphor of new birth, which Paul used repeatedly to describe the most important new stages in his life. This characteristically American sense that breaking with the past can be liberating is perhaps another factor behind his immense self-confidence.68 It could also be linked to the peripatetic experience of his early childhood, which he presented in a positive light. His “chauvinistic” resistance to learning languages other than English can possibly be linked to this lack of interest in Europe, though he noted that in taking this position he failed to appreciate that his family's prosperity rested on his father's being able to speak the languages of Gary's Eastern European immigrants.
Paul repeatedly described himself as self-taught, through hours spent in libraries.69 This habit had started early. At the age of seven, when his brother Robert was born, Paul was already “living mostly in a world of books.” He remembered that “It was Curley [his older brother, Harold] who spent hours on the floor playing with the cute new addition; I merely turn my book pages with benevolent but absent-minded and distant approbation.”70
Paul's story involved mobility—the family's migration and its progress through moving from one city to another in search of opportunities—but he found moving difficult. Having found a new home, he wanted to stay there. His subsequent move from Chicago to Harvard was forced. Moving from Harvard to MIT was a move he made very reluctantly, even though it did not require his either leaving home or losing contact with his friends at Harvard. His wife's family were to provide the home he had missed through being sent to the farm and from which he had cut himself off by immersing himself in his books.