He could never take much interest in the theology, sociology, economics of Carleton College where they were busy trimming down the jagged dogmas of the old New England bibletaught traders to make stencils to hang on the walls of commissionmerchants’ offices.
Veblen’s collegeyears were the years when Darwin’s assertions of growth and becoming were breaking the set molds of the Noah’s Ark world,
when Ibsen’s women were tearing down the portieres of the Victorian parlors,
and Marx’s mighty machine was rigging the countinghouse’s own logic to destroy the countinghouse.
When Veblen went home to the farm he talked about these things with his father, following him up and down at his plowing, starting an argument while they were waiting for a new load for the wheatthresher. Thomas Anderson had seen Norway and America; he had the squarebuilt mind of a carpenter and builder, and an understanding of tools and the treasured elaborated builtupseasonbyseason knowledge of a careful farmer,
a tough whetstone for the sharpening steel of young Thorstein’s wits.
At Carleton College young Veblen was considered a brilliant unsound eccentric; nobody could understand why a boy of such attain ments wouldn’t settle down to the business of the day, which was to buttress property and profits with anything usable in the debris of Christian ethics and eighteenth-century economics that cluttered the minds of collegeprofessors, and to reinforce the sacred, already shaky edifice with the new strong girderwork of science Herbert Spencer was throwing up for the benefit of the bosses.
People complained they never knew whether Veblen was joking or serious.
In 1880 Thorstein Veblen started to try to make his living by teaching. A year in an academy at Madison, Wisconsin, wasn’t much of a success. Next year he and his brother Andrew started graduate work at Johns Hopkins. Johns Hopkins didn’t suit, but boarding in an old Baltimore house with some ruined gentlewomen gave him a disdaining glimpse of an etiquette motheaten now but handed down through the lavish leisure of the slaveowning planters’ mansions straight from the merry England of the landlord cavaliers.
(The valleyfarmers had always been scornful of outlanders’ ways.)
He was more at home at Yale where in Noah Porter he found a New England roundhead granite against which his Norway granite rang in clear dissent. He took his Ph.D. there. But there was still some question as to what department of the academic world he could best make a living in.
He read Kant and wrote prize essays. But he couldn’t get a job. Try as he could he couldn’t get his mouth round the essential yes.
He went back to Minnesota with a certain intolerant knowledge of the amenities of the higher learning. To his slight Norwegian accent he’d added the broad a.
At home he loafed about the farm and tinkered with inventions of new machinery and read and talked theology and philosophy with his father. In the Scandihoovian colonies the price of wheat and the belief in God and St. Olaf were going down together. The farmers of the Northwest were starting their long losing fight against the parasite businessmen who were sucking them dry. There was a mortgage on the farm, interest on debts to pay, always fertilizer, new machines to buy to speed production to pump in a halfcentury the wealth out of the soil laid down in a million years of buffalograss. His brothers kept grumbling about this sardonic loafer who wouldn’t earn his keep.
Back home he met again his college sweetheart, Ellen Rolfe, the niece of the president of Carleton College, a girl who had railroadmagnates and money in the family. People in Northfield were shocked when it came out that she was going to marry the drawling pernickety bookish badlydressed young Norwegian ne’erdowell.
Her family hatched a plan to get him a job as economist for the Santa Fe Railroad but at the wrong moment Ellen Rolfe’s uncle lost control of the line. The young couple went to live at Stacyville where they did everything but earn a living. They read Latin and Greek and botanized in the woods and along the fences and in the roadside scrub. They boated on the river and Veblen started his translation of the Laxdaelasaga. They read Looking Backward and articles by Henry George. They looked at their world from the outside.
In ’91 Veblen got together some money to go to Cornell to do postgraduate work. He turned up there in the office of the head of the economics department wearing a coonskin cap and grey corduroy trousers and said in his low sarcastic drawl, “I am Thorstein Veblen,”
but it was not until several years later, after he was established at the new University of Chicago that had grown up next to the World’s Fair, and had published The Theory of the Leisure Class, put on the map by Howells’ famous review, that the world of the higher learning knew who Thorstein Veblen was.
Even in Chicago as the brilliant young economist he lived pioneerfashion. (The valleyfarmers had always been scornful of outlanders’ ways.) He kept his books in packingcases laid on their sides along the walls. His only extravagances were the Russian cigarettes he smoked and the red sash he sometimes sported. He was a man without smalltalk. When he lectured he put his cheek on his hand and mumbled out his long spiral sentences, reiterative like the eddas. His language was a mixture of mechanics’ terms, scientific latinity, slang and Roget’s Thesaurus. The other profs couldn’t imagine why the girls fell for him so.
The girls fell for him so that Ellen Rolfe kept leaving him. He’d take summer trips abroad without his wife. There was a scandal about a girl on an ocean liner.
Tongues wagged so (Veblen was a man who never explained, who never could get his tongue around the essential yes; the valleyfarmers had always been scornful of the outlanders’ ways, and their opinions) that his wife left him and went off to live alone on a timberclaim in Idaho and the president asked for his resignation.
Veblen went out to Idaho to get Ellen Rolfe to go with him to California when he succeeded in getting a job at a better salary at Leland Stanford, but in Palo Alto it was the same story as in Chicago. He suffered from woman trouble and the constitutional inability to say yes and an unnatural tendency to feel with the workingclass instead of with the profittakers. There were the same complaints that his courses were not constructive or attractive to big money bequests and didn’t help his students to butter their bread, make Phi Beta Kappa, pick plums off the hierarchies of the academic grove. His wife left him for good. He wrote to a friend: “The president doesn’t approve of my domestic arrangements; nor do I.”
Talking about it he once said, “What is one to do if the woman moves in on you?”
He went back up to the shack in the Idaho woods.
Friends tried to get him an appointment to make studies in Crete, a chair at the University of Pekin, but always the boyg, routine, businessmen’s flunkeys in all the university offices… for the questioner the bitter drink.
His friend Davenport got him an appointment at the University of Missouri. At Columbia he lived like a hermit in the basement of the Davenports’ house, helped with the work round the place, carpentered himself a table and chairs. He was already a bitter elderly man with a grey face covered with a net of fine wrinkles, a vandyke beard and yellow teeth. Few students could follow his courses. The college authorities were often surprised and somewhat chagrined that when visitors came from Europe it was always Veblen they wanted to meet.
These were the years he did most of his writing, trying out his ideas on his students, writing slowly at night in violet ink with a pen of his own designing. Whenever he published a book he had to put up a guarantee with the publishers. In The Theory of Business Enterprise, The Instinct of Workmanship, The Vested Interests and the Common Man,