Fledgling Social Scientist
Samuelson entered the Division of Social Sciences to be equipped with a broad training in the social sciences. In his first term he took subjects in anthropology, education, English composition, and sociology, of which he later picked out anthropology and sociology as two subjects he found interesting.
The Introduction to Anthropology was taught by Fay-Cooper Cole, a student of the leading anthropologist Franz Boas, who had founded Chicago's anthropology department in 1929.1 Cole's importance was sufficient for the writer of his obituary in Science to describe him as the “architect of anthropology.”2 Though his earlier work had been on cultures in Indonesia and Malaya, in the 1930s he was turning to the archeology of the midwestern United States. Samuelson was therefore being taught by someone at the top of his field and with broad interests in the subject. The course he taught covered themes Samuelson had already studied at length, with a particular focus on race. Cole's stance on race, shown in an article he had written two years before, was that scientific analysis indicated that many of the scare stories circulating about interbreeding and the superiority of one race over another could readily be disproven by scientific analysis.3 There was a need for great statesmanship and tolerance in dealing with problems of race, but although the mixing of races would create “more of a hybrid people,” there was no reason to fear for the America of the future.Samuelson’s teachers in sociology, the subject in which he had briefly thought about specializing, also went on to be eminent figures in their field. Leonard Cottrell, who worked as a probation officer for part of his career, took the statistical methods used to predict the success or failure of parole and applied them to marriage. He was also concerned with the philosophical problem of reconciling such statistical predictions with the fact that people were making conscious choices.4 Though it was Cottrell who taught the course in the autumn term, when Samuelson took it, in other terms the course was taught by Herbert Blumer, a student of George Herbert Meade and a major figure in the development of the theory of symbolic interactionism.a As an article by Blumer, “Science without Concepts” (1931), shows, they were both concerned with developing rigorous methods and with questioning the uncritical accumulation of concepts that were not rooted in evidence.
The course was, according to the syllabus, “basic,” covering the place of sociology within the social sciences, human nature, social contact and interaction, social change, and social progress as applied to problems of population, immigration, race, and crime. However, given the teachers’ backgrounds and the students’ prior training in the social sciences, it would have been surprising if there had not been considerable discussion of methods.Samuelson’s first term was completed by Education 201, a survey of the problems of the American education system, emphasizing secondary education, and a compulsory course on English composition, focusing on the topic of narrative. For this class he wrote an essay, “Rationalization,” on the theme of a friend’s suicide.
His social science education continued into the winter term, when he took a course in social history, Rise of New American and European Society, and two courses in political science—Introduction to Political Science and International Relations, both taught by Fred Lewis Schuman, an assistant professor who had been at Chicago since 1927 but had spent most of 1933 in Germany, seeing events unfold. The description of the International Relations course was couched in abstract terms. It dealt with “conflicts of nationality, imperialism, international trade, and foreign policy; elementary conceptions of international law; peaceful and hostile methods of international settlement, and the development of international organization.”5
a. Symbolic interactionism is the idea that peoples’ actions are based on what things mean to them and that those meanings are derived from social interaction. In one term Blumer was assisted by Wirth, who had taught Samuelson in the first year.
Though these were abstract problems, in January 1934, shortly after Hitler's rise to power, they were of more than academic interest, especially to a student of Jewish origins whose family roots lay in central Europe. The course must have been influenced by Schuman's own research, which included articles on American foreign policy and on the ethics and politics of international peace.6 Moreover, in the year that Samuelson took his course, Schuman published a series of articles on the theory of German fascism, German foreign policy, and “The Third Reich's Road to War.”7 In the last of these, he predicted an “inevitable” war and “irremediable disaster.”
Should the pattern of diplomacy revert to type, the revisionist coalition led by Nazi Germany may be expected to be consummated before 1940. Should earlier conflict be averted, the second World War may be anticipated during the decade of 1940 to 1950.8
It is easy to imagine how such analysis could have sparked Samuelson's interest in a diplomatic career: given his habit of talking to teachers outside classes, he would surely have encountered them even if they had not been part of the formal syllabus.
On February 28, after philosophical discussions of free will and determinism, and the idea that words were symbols (presumably an echo of the symbolic interactionism of his sociology teachers), he wrote in his diary:The idea occurred to me not long ago that I should carve out a career for myself in the Foreign Service as a diplomat. I sent away for the booklet on entrance requirements. It is by examination, and I think that with a year's study (and it might be worth the time), I could pass the exam sufficiently high to be admitted. Salaries start at $2,500 and there is prestige attached.9
However, reality soon sank in, for he continued, “However, with the depreciation of the dollar this is not so good. Moreover, right now the service is filled and there are no exams."b Becoming a diplomat was not a feasible option in the circumstances of 1933. This reasoning might conceal the realization that, as someone of Jewish descent who had attended neither a prestigious private school nor an Ivy League university, certain opportunities were largely closed to him.
b. The logic here is not clear, because prices were falling. Perhaps he was assuming that diplomats had to live abroad and were hurt by a low value of the dollar.
His diaries for 1934 mostly centered on his or his friends' girlfriends. However, on February 24, he was exploring a political stance.
But to turn to more important (oh yeah?) matters. For the last year or so I have been increasingly skeptical. In the field of politics, it seems to me that a rational analysis of the implications and consequences of any piece of legislation will make one increasingly hesitant about advocating it. Too often does one overemphasize the gains to be achieved, and underestimates the cost of those gains. “Wishful thinking” is particularly dangerous and prevalent in this field.
It seems that the more intelligently one examines a problem, the less dogmatic he becomes about answering it.
Thus the sage tends toward inaction—discussion, approbation and deprecation. But in this world, men devise activity, whether it be wisely directed at achievable goals or not, and so the charlatans, fanatics, demagogues, crusaders, etc., become the leaders of the people, and the wise people write pamphlets deploring the act after it has been committed.Why then do the people so blithely follow the moths again and again to the flame and get repeatedly burned? In the first place, it is kind to establish the fact that their following them caused them to be burned. And secondly, a new moth always comes along, and the great majority of people seem neither capable nor desirous of discriminating against moths.10
There was considerable skepticism here that led to an almost Burkean conservatism, suspicious of idealist promises to improve society. It supports claims he made, over fifty years later, to have been a conservative at Chicago. In a chapter reflecting on his life philosophy, he wrote, “I was taught at the University of Chicago that business freedoms and personal freedoms have to be strongly linked, as a matter both of brute empirical fact and of cogent deductive syllogism. For a long time I believed what I was taught."11,c In an unpublished autobiographical fragment, he wrote:
I was the proverbial tabula rasa as far as political economy was concerned: nothing to unlearn in that bloody sponge called my brain. Aaron Director's laissez-faire conservatism got first crack at me.
c. In this piece he went on to say that he had gradually acknowledged that this view did not fit the facts, explaining why Hayek's view that societies in which markets were not free would slide into serfdom was wrong.
I marvel that the worst virulences of that particular system got worked out of my system early.12
These claims, however, need to be qualified by the fact that Samuelson supported Roosevelt. He may have been a conservative, but it is not clear how deep his commitment was.