On The Suppression Of Lorie Tarshis' Keynesian Textbook

The General Theory of Employment, Interest, and Money, by John Maynard Keynes, precipitated an intellectual revolution. It presents a macroeconomic theory that supports policies for eliminating severe depressions in capitalist societies. Some economists produced their own works in trying to understand it. I think of Joan Robinson's Essays in the Theory of Employment & Introduction to the Theory of Employment Alvin Hansen's A Guide To Keynes, for example, or A. C. Pigou's Keynes's General Theory: A retrospective view. Given Keynes' attacks on Pigou's work, the last is fairly extraordinary.

Lorie Tarshis wrote the first undergraduate textbook, from a Keynesian perspective, for students in the United States. Initially, it seemed that this textbook would be successful. Here is an account at the time of an ignorant, reactionary intercession into university teaching:

"Once the atmosphere of hysteria is ignited, the most dubious creatures rush to exploit the honest fears of decent Americans. The recent textbook witch-hunt provides an edifying example. In August, 1947, on the letterhead of an organization calling itself The National Economic Council, Inc., a man named Merwin K. Hart wrote to every member of the boards of trustees of colleges using Elements of Economics, an economics text written by Professor Lorie Tarshis of Stanford University. An enclosed review denounced the book for its exposition of the doctrines of Lord Keynes and identified Keynesianism as a form of Marxism.

Hart's letter had an immediate effect. Organizations of small businessmen passed resolutions in his support. Trustees and alumni wrote outraged letters to college presidents. Yet who was Merwin K. Hart? His record had long been known to students of the American proto-fascist demimonde. He revealed his own notion of Americanism some months later when, in a speech before Harvard's Free Enterprise Society, he inveighed against the Marshall Plan and 'the international Jewish group which controls our foreign policy.' And, at the height of Hart's campaign, the ideas of Keynes were under equal brutal and ignorant attack from another source: that is, from the Communists themselves. 'Keynesianism,' wrote William Z. Foster, 'collides with Marxism at every point.' Foster and Hart, in fact, agreed in objecting not only to Keynes but to such proposals as the Marshall Plan as well; by the kind of reasoning Hart uses on other people, he should have had to classify himself as a Moscow agent.

Fortunately enough college presidents knew Hart's record to stand up courageously to the uproar. Dr. A. I. Strand of Oregon State College wrote bluntly to Hart: 'Your hands are dirty and you smell of foul associations, and now you have the effrontery to set yourself up as the protector of American youth! A greater insult to education has never come to my attention.' The American Economic Association eventually appointed a special committee to deal with the attacks on the Tarshis book and on other economic texts.

The issue is more fundamental than simply the fatuousness of mistaking Keynes for Karl Marx. If all Communism meant was deficit financing, then it would be hard to persuade anyone that it was very terrible. A genuinely Communist textbook would be unacceptable for its distortions of fact, as a Communist teacher, who imported his party views into the classroom, would be an incompetent teacher. The deeper issue is the freedom of the teacher to teach his subject according to his most responsible understanding of it, and not according to the ukase of a board of trustees, a legislature, a political party or a foreign country." -- Arthur Schlesinger, Jr. 1949. The Vital Center: The Politics of Freedom. Boston: Houghton Mifflin: 205-207.

Schlesinger turned out to be wrong. Tarshis’ textbook was successfully suppressed. By the way, my sometime correspondent, William F. Buckley, was equally ignorant and vile in God and Man at Yale. Paul Samuelson, in writing his textbook, consciously tried to avoid Tarshis' fate. He wrote lawyer-like.

Schlesinger's book is depressing. He deplores the ‘lurid atmosphere’ created by Attorney General Mitchell Palmer, with his 'notorious red hunts'. He says the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC) is going too far. But, as you can see above, Schlesinger, one of the co-founders of the Americans for Democratic Action (ADA), is all about denying communists employment. He says that the US State Department should be promoting the non-communist left (NCL) in Europe and elsewhere. We need a Third Force. Perhaps Graham Greene read this before writing his novel, A Quiet American. Pyle, the title character, sponsors murder and mayhem in Vietnam in order to find this Third Force. Schlesinger did not have his priorites sorted.

If this is the best of liberalism, I do not want it. (I have yet to read Sam Moyn's 2023 book, Liberalism Against Itself: Cold War Intellectuals and the Making of Our Times.) There will be none of Matthew McManus' The Political Theory of Liberal Socialism if liberals remain afraid of socialism.