Today’s posting assembles a few items from the garden of internet archival delights that I stumbled across last night.
I’ll share in the actual sequence of “discoveries” just as one damn thing led to another. I’ll also lightly annotate with an indication of what I was thinking at each step of the way.
(1) The evening began, as it often does, with a refreshing dive into the Hathitrust.org digital archive, this time in search of artifacts related to the reception of/reaction to Marxian economics in American colleges and universities.
The first artifact that caught my eye (i.e. one that had either not come up before or I overlooked in previous searches) had the title “Making Socialists Out of College Students” by one Woodworth Clum, Western Reserve University (Class of 1900). The pamphlet had no explicit date but can be safely dated ca. 1921. The cover-art (posted above) from the San Francisco Bulletin by Ralph O. Yardley was simply irresistible. The purpose of the pamphlet was to name names of “pink” professors, i.e. socialist fellow-travelers and warn of their bad influence on their young students. Clum wrote: “…when I find a slow poison being secretly and successfully injected into our body politic through the class rooms, I do worry—and so should you.”
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If you find this posting interesting, here is the complete list of “artifacts” from the history of economics I have assembled. You can subscribe to Economics in the Rear-View Mirror below. There is also an opportunity for comment following each posting….
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[Woodward Clum identifies professors “valiantly fighting the socialist trend”. ]
You must not get the impression that the teaching of socialism dominates in the sociological departments [“social science departments” is more likely Clum’s meaning] of our American universities,—but its teaching is going on apace. The fact that so many professors have been discharged from leading universities for their unsound economic theories is evidence itself that the presidents and boards of trustees of those universities are keenly alive to the developments. It is the duty of all real Americans to strengthen the hands of those professors who are valiantly fighting the socialist trend. Hunt them up in your own community—and help them defend America.
Among such thorough American professors who are doing a heroic work at this time are Professor T. N. Carver of the Department of Economics, Harvard University, and Professor Laurence Laughlin, Emeritus Professor of Economics at the University of Chicago. Professor Carver has written a very clear preface to Brasol’s “Socialism versus Civilization,” published by Scribners and which should be included in every’: American library. Professor Laughlin has recently published ten pamphlets, exposing not only the fallacy of socialism but also presenting some very excellent suggestions concerning . present industrial difficulties.
When we say that parents of boys and girls attending: school in America should ascertain what sort of economics their children are being taught, it is in the hope that support and encouragement will be given to those educators who are endeavoring to develop sound American economics—just as much as to expose the teaching of economic fallacy.
Source: Woodward Clum, Making Socialists Out of College Students. Los Angeles: 1921.
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(2) Clum’s pamphlet reminds me of the first book of the young William Buckley, God and Man at Yale, that warned the world in general and Yale alumni in particular of the corrupting influences of atheist and/or Keynesian professors. Since both Thomas Nixon Carver (Harvard) and J. Laurence Laughlin (Chicago) have appeared multiple times in Economics in the Rear-View Mirror, my next step was to run down the books cited by Clum.
Boris L. Brasol. Socialism vs. Civilization with an Introduction by T. N. Carver, Professor of Political Economy at Harvard University. New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1920.
J. Laurence Laughlin. Tracts for the Times: Labor and Wages. New York: Scribner’s Magazine for March, 1920.
I The Solution of the Labor Problem
II Management
III The Hope for Labor Unions
IV Monopoly of Labor
V Is Labor a Commodity?
VI Socialism a Philosophy of Failure
VII Wages and Prices
VIII The British Industrial Crisis
IX British and American Labor Problems
X Extravagance
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(3) It is patently obvious from the slightest familiarity with the writings of Carver and Laughlin that both were highly critical of socialist doctrine so that the new questions were (a) who was this anti-socialist, Boris Brasol, for whom Thomas N. Carver wrote an introduction, and (b) what was the nature of their professional relationship? From the tone of the introduction there is really no indication of a particularly close relationship between the Carver and Brasol. Carver merely provided anti-socialist boiler-plate, presumably intended as a favor for a good cause.
And so who was Boris Brasol? Archive.org provides two documents identified as having been obtained under the Freedom of Information Act from the U. S. Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI):
Freedom of Information Act Documents.
Brasol, Boris-HQ-1 ; Brasol, Boris-HQ-2
Only one plot-spoiler from these FOIA documents now. What struck my eye was that Boris Brasol was clearly identified by a reliable source as having played a role in the propagation of the English translation of the anti-semitic, forged “Protocols of the Elders of Zion” in the United States.
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(4) Not just taking the FBI’s word for it, I found that the Anti-Defamation League (http://www.adl.org) identifies Boris Brasol as the publicist behind the publication of the Protocols:
American Debut
The Protocols were publicized in America by Boris Brasol, a former Czarist prosecutor. Auto magnate Henry Ford was one of those who responded to Brasol’s conspiratorial fantasies. “The Dearborn Independent,” owned by Ford, published an American version of the Protocols between May and September of 1920 in a series called ‘The International Jew: the World’s Foremost Problem.” The articles were later republished in book form with half a million copies in circulation in the United States, and were translated into several foreign languages.
By 1927 Ford had repudiated the “International Jew,” but hundreds of thousands of people around the world had been encouraged by his initial endorsement to accept the Protocols as genuine.
Source: Anti-Defamation League website.
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At the end of the day I have to admit that I am not sure how much one should fault the economist Thomas Nixon Carver for having had any dealings with someone like Boris Brasol. At the least we can count this as a case of a failure of intellectual due diligence on Carver’s part. Maybe Socialism vs. Civilization is not a bad book, but seeing where it has come from, I’ll leave reading it for now to historical experts mining the lunatic fringe of the American political right.