The Clark Medal, November-December 1947

A week later, Samuelson received a very different letter from Douglas. Writing in his capacity as president of the American Economic Association, the letter was to tell Samuelson that he had been awarded the inaugural John Bates Clark Medal, as “the younger economist who has made the most dis­tinguished contribution to the main body of economic thought and knowl- edge.”⁶³ Douglas impressed on Samuelson the need for him to attend the presentation at the AEA dinner at the Knickerbocker Hotel in Chicago that December.

Given that it was the first time the medal had been awarded, and that any economist under the age of forty was eligible, it was remarkable that it was awarded to a thirty-two-year-old, for there were many strong candidates and Samuelson would have remained eligible for several years to come. His nomination was based purely on his articles; by the time voting took place, the committee knew that Foundations would soon be published, though they had not seen it or known the how economists would react to it.^k

j. Machlup had tried to recruit him to Johns Hopkins, even though he knew he had turned down Chicago. Though he surmised that Samuelson would get a call from Harvard, he thought he might be impatient, and assured him that Johns Hopkins could be built

up into a first-rate department, thereby implying that MIT could not (F. Machlup, December 2, 1947, Letter to Paul A. Samuelson, PASP 51 [Machlup]).

k. The other candidates were Kenneth Boulding and George Stigler (on the final ballot), with Albert Hart and John Dunlop having been in the final five. Unlike more recent medals, no specific reason for the award was cited, voting being on the basis of a list of publications and positions held.

Ralph Freeman was not able to attend the dinner, but several MIT faculty members did. One of them, Erwin Schell, from the Department of Business Administration, wrote to him about the occasion, copying his letter to all members of the two departments, quoting Douglas's remarks in full.

It is now my happy privilege to confer the John Bates Clark Medal upon a brilliant young economist, who, master at an early age of both mathematics and economic theory, has made extraordinarily penetrat­ing contributions to the theory of employment, production, distribu­tion, and value, and whose recent book [Foundations] stamps him as one of the masters of our craft. With an amazing production record behind him, he faces the future with the promise of even greater achieve­ments before him. In the name, therefore, of the American Economic Association, I now confer the John Bates Clark Medal upon Mr. Paul A. Samuelson of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, the uni­versity which Francis A. Walker [MIT economist and first President of the AEA] loved and which he did so much to promote.

I feel that from somewhere in Valhalla, the mighty figure of Francis

A. Walker is beaming with happiness.⁶⁵

Given such remarks, it is not surprising that Samuelson afterward wrote to Douglas to thank him for the “warm and gracious way in which he personally awarded the Clark medal,” saying that it was “an occasion that I shall long remember and cherish.”⁶⁶

Though Samuelson promised to keep silent, a copy of the letter telling him about the award had reached Killian. So on December 15, two weeks before the public awarding of the medal, when sending Beadle the list of supplementary readings for Ec. 12, Killian forwarded a copy of the letter to him, quoting to him the criteria according to which the award was made. Noting that the AEA's other major award was named after a former president of MIT, he was leaving Beadle in no doubt that Samuelson's activities were in no way undermining the reputation of MIT. To the contrary, he wanted Beadle to know that the growing reputation of MIT's economics department was closely connected with that of Samuelson, who had now made the deci­sion to stay for good.