he established a new diagram of a society dominated by monopoly capital,
etched in irony
the sabotage of production by business, the sabotage of life by blind need for money profits,
pointed out the alternatives: a warlike society strangled by the bureaucracies of the monopolies forced by the law of diminishing returns to grind down more and more the common man for profits,
or a new matteroffact commonsense society dominated by the needs of the men and women who did the work and the incredibly vast possibilities for peace and plenty offered by the progress of technology.
These were the years of Debs’s speeches, growing labor-unions, the I.W.W. talk about industrial democracy: these years Veblen still held to the hope that the workingclass would take over the machine of production before monopoly had pushed the western nations down into the dark again.
War cut across all that: under the cover of the bunting of Woodrow Wilson’s phrases the monopolies cracked down. American democracy was crushed.
The war at least offered Veblen an opportunity to break out of the airless greenhouse of academic life. He was offered a job with the Food Administration, he sent the Navy Department a device for catching submarines by trailing lengths of stout bindingwire. (Meanwhile the government found his books somewhat confusing. The postoffice was forbidding the mails to Imperial Germany and the Industrial Revolution while propaganda agencies were sending it out to make people hate the Huns. Educators were denouncing The Nature of Peace while Washington experts were clipping phrases out of it to add to the Wilsonian smokescreen.)
For the Food Administration Thorstein Veblen wrote two reports: in one he advocated granting the demands of the I.W.W. as a wartime measure and conciliating the workingclass instead of beating up and jailing all the honest leaders; in the other he pointed out that the Food Administration was a businessman’s racket and was not aiming for the most efficient organization of the country as a producing machine. He suggested that, in the interests of the efficient prose cution of the war, the government step into the place of the middleman and furnish necessities to the farmers direct in return for raw materials;
but cutting out business was not at all the Administration’s idea of making the world safe for democracy,
so Veblen had to resign from the Food Administration.
He signed the protests against the trial of the hundred and one wobblies in Chicago.
After the armistice he went to New York. In spite of all the oppression of the war years, the air was freshening. In Russia the great storm of revolt had broken, seemed to be sweeping west, in the strong gusts from the new world in the east the warsodden multitudes began to see again. At Versailles allies and enemies, magnates, generals, flunkey politicians were slamming the shutters against the storm, against the new, against hope. It was suddenly clear for a second in the thundering glare what war was about, what peace was about.
In America, in Europe, the old men won. The bankers in their offices took a deep breath, the bediamonded old ladies of the leisure class went back to clipping their coupons in the refined quiet of their safedeposit vaults,
the last puffs of the ozone of revolt went stale
in the whisper of speakeasy arguments.
Veblen wrote for the Dial,
lectured at the New School for Social Research.
He still had a hope that the engineers, the technicians, the non-profiteers whose hands were on the switchboard might take up the fight where the workingclass had failed. He helped form the Technical Alliance. His last hope was the British general strike.
Was there no group of men bold enough to take charge of the magnificent machine before the pigeyed speculators and the yesmen at office desks irrevocably ruined it
and with it the hopes of four hundred years?
No one went to Veblen’s lectures at the New School. With every article he wrote in the Dial the circulation dropped.
Harding’s normalcy, the new era was beginning;
even Veblen made a small killing on the stockmarket.
He was an old man and lonely.
His second wife had gone to a sanitarium suffering from delusions of persecution.
There seemed no place for a masterless man.
Veblen went back out to Palo Alto
to live in his shack in the tawny hills and observe from outside the last grabbing urges of the profit system taking on, as he put it, the systematized delusions of dementia praecox.
There he finished his translation of the Laxdaelasaga.
He was an old man. He was much alone. He let the woodrats take what they wanted from his larder. A skunk that hung round the shack was so tame he’d rub up against Veblen’s leg like a cat.
He told a friend he’d sometimes hear in the stillness about him the voices of his boyhood talking Norwegian as clear as on the farm in Minnesota where he was raised. His friends found him harder than ever to talk to, harder than ever to interest in anything. He was running down. The last sips of the bitter drink.
He died on August 3, 1929.
Among his papers a penciled note was found:
It is also my wish, in case of death, to be cremated if it can conveniently be done, as expeditiously and inexpensively as may be, without ritual or ceremony of any kind; that my ashes be thrown loose into the sea or into some sizable stream running into the sea; that no tombstone, slab, epitaph, effigy, tablet, inscription or monument of any name or nature, be set up to my memory or name in anyplace or at any time; that no obituary, memorial, portrait or biography of me, nor any letters written to or by me be printed or published, or in any way reproduced, copied or circulated;
but his memorial remains
riveted into the language:
the sharp clear prism of his mind.
Newsreel LI
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Saw my baby there
All stretched out on a table
So pale, so cold, so fair
Went up to see the doctor
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Let her go let her go God bless her
Wherever she may be