Dexter Merriam Keezer
(Brookings Ph.D., 1925)
BACKSTORY TO THIS POST
Just over one hundred years ago, the wife of the newly inaugurated fourth president of Cornell University, Margaret Kate Farrand (pronounced “Fair-And”) née Carleton, along with a first year graduate student in architecture, Charles Morse Stotz, the psychology professor Harry Potter Weld, and other co-conspirators, was able to pull off an academic hoax at the Cornell Women’s Cosmopolitan Club on December 3, 1921. News of the hoax was said to have even reached the ears of Professor Sigmund Freud of Vienna for his comment. The faux lecture with its slides (!) “The Freudian Theory with Later Developments” held by Professor Herman Vosberg, as performed by Charles M. Stotz has been transcribed and posted earlier:
The subject of this post, Dexter Merriam Keezer, was there and wrote about the event in his autobiography:
I expected the Cornell student newspaper, the Cornell Sun, would have a field day with the story but it printed nothing. And neither did any other local paper. So I wrote a story of Vosberg’s (and Mrs. Farrand’s) triumph and sent it to the New York World, where it ran as a column on the first page and on into the inner pages of the paper. The story was also picked up by some newspapers overseas. No one ever asked me if I wrote it and I never had occasion to tell anybody. I simply enjoyed the experience.
Source: Along an Entertaining Way: The Autobiography of Dexter M. Keezer, 1895-1991 (Kindle edition). 2019.
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The purpose of this post is to share more information about this Brookings economics Ph.D. alumnus (1925). Keezer recounted his experience as a graduate student at Brookings with an anecdote illustrating the administration of a Ph.D. reading exam in German thrown in to illustrate graduate student life as it was lived. The extract from Keezer’s autobiography is followed by a timeline of his life and career.
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Keezer on the Brookings Graduate School and his German reading exam
I soon found that the Brookings Graduate School had many interesting and admirable attributes, not least of which was what I understood to have been the primary purpose of Robert S. Brookings, for whom the school was named, in making it possible.
As chairman of the national board in charge of regulating prices during World War I, Brookings had been appalled by the low quality of advice available to the board from practitioners in economics and the other social sciences. So he decided to devote much of the fortune he had made as an eminently successful industrialist in St. Louis to helping supply the federal government with more competent social scientists and social science research. By 1916 he established in Washington the Institute for Government Research, the pioneer in national public policy research. It was followed in 1922 by the establishment of the Institute of Economics to concentrate on economic problems. And in 1924 the Brookings Graduate School was launched to increase the supply of those possessed of an appetite for public service and equipped with first-rate education in economics and political science to exercise it. Started as a part of Washington University in St. Louis, the school was subsequently transferred to Washington, where it was expected most of its graduates would have their careers.
When I got to the school it was in what was to prove a death struggle against being merged with the other Brookings creations and having its granting of graduate degrees discontinued. I promptly became involved in this struggle and became an ardent advocate of the school in its fight for existence, a very robust struggle. Harold Moulton, the head of the Institute of Economics, the leader of those who favored closing the school, concluded that while I was intense in my opposition to him I was fair-minded about it. This conclusion was subsequently to be a decisive factor in a major turning point in my working life.
One reason for not continuing the graduate school, it was reported, was that Robert Brookings, its principal financial benefactor, was disappointed that most of those who had studied at the school did not hurry to take government jobs but found more satisfying employment outside of its orbit. The irony of this, if true, is that when the country fell apart economically in 1929 and the Great Depression descended, those who had studied at the Brookings Graduate School flocked into the government and often secured posts.
The conflict over continuing the graduate school was, as is generally true of conflicts in higher education, conducted in terms of high principle. But it could have been, as I have found generally to be the case in such conflicts, that a clash of personalities was close to the root of it. Harold Moulton, the head of the Institute of Economics, and Walton Hamilton, the head of the school, had been the closest of friends and colleagues, but they came to have an intense disregard for each other and the institute-graduate school conflict intensified accordingly. One reason for my partisanship for the graduate school was that Hamilton was a great teacher of economics, a fact to which I have made reference elsewhere. One entry in my little daybook reads, “Prof. Hamilton is about the best teacher I have ever known. He even made a seminar in ‘research technique’ quite exciting today.”
…To get back to what I found notable characteristics of the Brookings Graduate School, one was its physical setting. On Northwest I Street a few blocks from the White House, a fine old townhouse provided spacious and inviting parlors, an attractive dining room, enough class room for the student body of about 35 and living quarters for part of them. It was an establishment which eased the rigors of graduate study by permitting and indeed encouraging some gracious living, an encouragement also given by the generous financial provision made by their fellowships.
The resident faculty was supplemented by visiting members who stayed for extended periods and by leading academicians from institutions around the country who paid briefer visits. The eminent British economist John A. Hobson came over from England for a semester while I was at the school. And great authorities in their fields such as Thomas Read Powell of Columbia, in constitutional law, and William E. Dodd of the University of Chicago, in history, joined the faculty more briefly. In the Washington governmental establishment and in the parade of business and industrial leaders descending on the capitol, the school had ready access to experts in almost everything and used it freely to provide a remarkably well stocked body of teachers.
My zest for the intensive course I had set for myself as a social scientist, with emphasis on the scientist, flagged a bit occasionally. Once after hearing one of his lectures had prompted me to read William E. Dodd’s “The Cotton Kingdom” I remarked in my little day book that “it seemed almost too interesting to be sound history, so great has been the influence of ‘science’ on my mind.” And after reading Bernard Shaw’s “Saint Joan” I noted in the little book that it was a “delightful relief from the dull discussions of economic problems. One who could long remain an economist and not become a boor would scintillate in any other field. Such are my reactions to the Brookings School today.” That was an off day, however. Most of the time I found what I was doing as a graduate student and otherwise interesting and enjoyable. And I made enough academic headway so that about a year after I arrived I was awarded a Ph.D. degree.
Mine was one of relatively few degrees that were awarded. The school was absorbed by the Brookings Institution two years later and its teaching and degree-granting operations were discontinued. Among the reasons given for this course was that, although he had endowed it generally, Robert Brookings was afraid that not enough money could be provided to be sure of continuing to be able to pay the imposing bills of a top-flight graduate school in economics and government. In getting money to finance research in these fields the consolidated Brookings Institution has had brilliant success and has carried out a large and influential program. One is permitted the suspicion, however, that it might have been a more vibrant enterprise if it had been able to continue the school.
The school’s student body while I was there included an international group of about 35 young men and women who, as they pursued their studies, continued to embrace about as many brands of political and economic philosophy – liberal, hardcore conservative, socialist, fellow traveler – as their number. Having them not only work together in the class and study halls but live together around the clock produced an often-seething amalgam calculated to invigorate any institution engaged in social science research. The inviting armchairs in the Brookings School’s parlors, part of its notable equipment, were occasionally used for slumber. But more often they were occupied deep into the night as flaming argument raged about the true gospel in the social sciences, a guaranteed tonic for those dedicated to finding out what the true gospel really is.
On my way to the degree I was required to demonstrate competence in reading the German language. I had somehow managed to get by in demonstrating such a competence at Cornell and a repeat performance was not a joyful prospect. In succeeding in meeting it, however, I had the sort of good luck which somehow accumulated when things are going well. I decided to give myself a tough training course for my German reading ordeal. I was told that an Austrian economist named [Eugen von] Böhm-Bawerk wrote remarkably refractory German so I decided to make one of his books my training field. I had only one small section of the book more or less mastered when the time for my examination arrived. It was given by Edwin Nourse who was subsequently to become distinguished as the first chairman of the newly created federal Council of Economic Advisors. Poking around for a book in his library on which to test my mastery of German, Nourse hit not only on the book by [Eugen von] Böhm-Bawerk on which I had been practicing but on one of the very passages with which I had struggled. I sailed right through the passage to certification that I had the German language very well under control. I was left with the suspicion that Edwin Nourse may have had knowledge in advance which enabled him to give me an especially merciful examination – a suspicion that was nourished by the feeling that he was much too kindly a gentleman to set me with wrestling with [Eugen von] Böhm-Bawerk with no previous exposure to his cruelly convoluted German. But I never tested my good luck to the extent of checking on my suspicion.
Source: Along an Entertaining Way: The Autobiography of Dexter M. Keezer, 1895-1991 (Kindle edition), 2019.
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The Life of
Dexter Merriam Keezer
1895. Born August 24 in Acton, Massachusetts.
1917-19. Service in the U.S. Army in World War I.
1919. Attended lectures at the Sorbonne.
1920. A.B. Amherst.
1920-21. Reporter at The Denver Times.
1922-23. Instructor in economics at Cornell University.
1923. A.M. Cornell.
1923-24. Assistant professor of economics at the University of Colorado.
1925. Ph.D. Brookings Graduate School of Economics and Government.
1926-27. Associate professor of economics at the University of North Carolina.
1927. Married Anne Mellett, June 22.
1927-28. Reporter at the Washington Bureau of Scripps-Howard newspapers.
1928-29. Visiting lecturer in citizenship at Dartmouth College.
1929-33. Associate editor of The Baltimore Sun.
1933-34. Executive director of the Consumer Advisory Board of the National Recovery Administration.
1934-42. President of Reed College.
1938. Bernard Moses Memorial Lecture held November 4 at the University of California, Berkeley. “The Problem of Controversial Issues in the Teaching of the Social Sciences.”
1938. LL.D. Amherst College.
1940. LL.D. Mills College.
1941. Chairman of a Commission set up by National Defense Mediation Board to study dispute between the Employers Negotiating Committee of Puget Sound lumber industry and the International Woodworkers of America.
Supplement to the Interdepartmental Report on the Douglas Fir Lumber Industry (November 1941).
1942-43. Deputy Administrator, Office of Price Administration.
1943. Economic advisor, U.S. Mission for Economic Affairs, London, England.
1944-45. Public member of the War Labor Board.
1945-1960. McGraw-Hill where he became director of the department of economics. His department developed annual surveys of capital spending and of research and development expenditures.
Vice-president, 1953-1960.
1955. L.H.D. Clarkson College of Technology.
1957. LL.D. Macalester College.
1959. LL.D. Elmira College. LL.D. Miami (Ohio) University.
1960-71. Economic adviser for McGraw-Hill.
1963-70. Trustee Elmira College.
1968-70. President of the Truro, Mass. Civic Association. In the mid-1970’s he campaigned against nude bathing at Brush Hollow Beach (Cape Cod).
1972-75. President of the Board of Directors of the Association for Improving Medical Resources of Outer Cape Cod
1991. Died of congestive heart failure on June 24 at the Orleans Nursing and Convalescent Center in Orleans, Massachusetts.
Selected Publications:
Problem Economics. With Addison Thayer Cutler and Frank Richardson Garfield. New York and London: Harper & Brothers, 1928.
The Public Control of Business. With Stacy May). Harper & Brothers, 1930.
The Light that Flickers: A View of College Education which Contrasts Promise and Performance and Suggests Improvements. New York: Harper & Brothers, 1947.
Making Capitalism Work. With members of the Department of Economics of the McGraw-Hill Publishing Company. New York: McGraw-Hill, 1950.
Editor and wrote the Introductory chapter to Financing Higher Education, 1960-70. The McGraw-Hill Book Company 50th Anniversary Study of the Economics of Higher Education in the United States. New York: McGraw-Hill Book Company, 1959.
New Forces in American Business, New York: McGraw-Hill, 1959.
Are We Slaves of Some Defunct Economist. Claremont Graduate School and University Center, 1963
Editor. The Performing Arts—Problems and Prospects, 1965.
A Unique Contribution to International Relations: The Story of Wilton Park, 1973.
Sources:
Who’s Who in America. Chicago: A.N. Marquis, 1962, p. 1652. Who’s Who in America, Vol. XX, 1976, p. 1679.
Obituary in The New York Times, 25 June 1991, p. D24.
Image Source: Amherst College, The Olio 1917, p. 221..