Shigeto Tsuru and the Other Students
In all his accounts of these years, Samuelson emphasized that his fellow students were as important for his education as his teachers, usually recounting a long list of names. “Harvard made us,” he wrote, “yes, but we made Harvard.”60 Samuelson’s view about the importance of fellow students was shared by his friends.
Tsuru cites approvingly Robert Triffin, a Belgian who was also studying economics, who claimed that he learned as much or more from “student colleagues of mine in the most brilliant class that Harvard probably ever had... than from the professors whose classes I attended.”61 And it was not just Harvard teachers and students who mattered, for the presence of Schumpeter, Haberler, and Leontief, and later Hansen, attracted young scholars on Rockefeller scholarships to Harvard. These included Oskar Lange, Abba Lerner, Paul Baran, Erich Roll, Nicholas Kaldor, Fritz Machlup, Nicholas Georgescu-Roegen, Oskar Morgenstern, and Jacob Marschak. Samuelson recalled meeting many of these visitors at the homes of Haberler and his wife, Friedl.62 According to Tsuru, “Almost every day, either at lunch or cocktail hours or late at night, was an occasion for heated discussion on the state of economic reasoning among us all.”63The cohort of which Samuelson was a member counted around twenty, almost half of whom were non-American. The only graduate of Harvard College in the program was the Japanese student Shigeto Tsuru, who had the advantage of having attended some of the courses as an undergraduate. Samuelson and Tsuru got to know each other because they were attending many classes together, having decided, somewhat unusually, to try to pass “generals” in one year. This involved a viva voce examination that was the main hurdle before the PhD dissertation and which qualified students for an MA with no further work.
As graduate students, Samuelson and Tsuru socialized together outside class regularly, playing squash and billiards, and attending burlesque shows at the Old Howard in Scully Square, in Boston. They often dined together with Triffin, in Adams Hall, where Triffin lived. Tsuru recalls, without giving the reason, that they were called “the three Musketeers.” They were often joined by other students, including Arthur Schlesinger Jr.—the son of Harvard historian Arthur Schlesinger Sr.— who was studying history. Close, lifelong friendships developed among Samuelson, Tsuru, and Schlesinger.64Tsuru, three years older than Samuelson, had attended high school in Japan, but in December 1930 he was expelled and arrested for radical political activity. His education in Japan was blocked. Unusual for a Japanese person at that time, while he had still been in middle school he had been given weekly English lessons from a native English speaker, which meant that his father was able to arrange for him to continue his education in the United States, where he went to Lawrence College in Appleton, Wisconsin. His choice of Wisconsin was motivated, at least in part, by the presence there of a German community, for he secretly harbored the intention of transferring to Germany at some point, for his German was better than his English. During his two years in Wisconsin, as well as working very hard to improve his English, he spent much time studying philosophy, becoming attracted to pragmatism, with its emphasis on “the practical results of alternative ideas.” Many years later he noted that since then, it had become a habit “to relate any policy proposal to its probable concrete consequences.”65 He also published his first academic paper, an experiment that involved asking American subjects to identify the meaning of pairs of contrasting Japanese words (such as bitter and sweet) from their sounds.
It proved impossible to go to Germany, for the Reichstag fire in February 1933 and the rise of Hitler ruled out studying in a German university? By then, he had greatly improved his command of English.
He considered staying at Lawrence College, for it had two good economists, one of whom wasu. The Nazi Party was attacking socialists and communists, as well as Jews. Harry Dexter White, who along with Jacob Viner and John Williams, was one of the cohort of international economists whose PhD had been supervised by Frank Taussig on the theory of balance-of-payments adjustment. It was, however, not White who persuaded Tsuru to move to Harvard, where Taussig was still teaching (though he was to retire in 1935), but his dean, who advised him that he should begin to focus on his main subject. So in 1933, he transferred to Harvard College with the intention of focusing on economics, where he completed his undergraduate education, graduating in 1935.66 However, even at Harvard, he could not focus exclusively on economics, finding the philosophy of Alfred North Whitehead and the cultural history of Crane Brinton too alluring, and psychologist Gordon Allport persuaded him to do further experiments extending his theory about the Gestalt of meaning. He did, however, find time to sit in on Schumpeter’s advanced economic theory lectures.
During the summer between graduating and starting the graduate program, Tsuru spent what seems to have been an idyllic summer relaxing at the lakes of Wisconsin, staying in summer houses owned by the families of two of his friends. One of these was Rosemary, the daughter of Alexander Wylie, U.S. Senator for Wisconsin, who had been in his class at Lawrence College. Rosemary invited one of her friends, Marion Crawford, to the house; it was here where Tsuru persuaded Marion, whom he thought very serious about her studies, to follow his example and move to Harvard for her junior year, though she would, of course, have to go to Radcliffe, the women’s college. The challenge of moving was made easier because Rosemary, who was already engaged to a Harvard economics student, Phil Bradley, was also moving to Radcliffe, and for the first year they could share rooms. It was not until her second year at Harvard that she could move into a dormitory in the Radcliffe quadrangle.