Big Money (14 page)

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
,

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.

The sunshine drifted from our alley

 

HELP WANTED: ADVANCEMENT

 

positions that offer quick, accurate, experienced, wellrecommended young girls and young women . . . good chance for advancement

 

Ever since the day

Sally went away

 

GIRLS      GIRLS      GIRLS

 

canvassers . . . caretakers . . . cashiers . . . chambermaids . . . waitresses . . . cleaners . . . file clerks . . . companions . . . comptometer operators . . . collection correspondents . . . cooks . . . dictaphone operators . . . gentlewomen . . . multigraph operators . . . Elliott Fisher operators . . . bill and entry clerks . . . gummers . . . glove buyers . . . governesses . . . hairdressers . . . models . . . good opportunity for stylish young ladies . . . intelligent young women

 

Went down to St. James Infirmary

Saw my baby there

All stretched out on a table

So pale, so cold, so fair

 

Went up to see the doctor

 

WE HAVE HUNDREDS OF POSITIONS OPEN

 

we are anxious to fill vacancies, we offer good salaries, commissions, bonuses, prizes, business opportunities, training, advancement, educational opportunities, hospital service . . . restroom and lunchroom where excellent lunch is served at less than cost

 

Let her go let her go God bless her

Wherever she may be

She may roam this wide world over

She'll never find a sweet man like me

Poor Daddy never did get tucked away in bed right after supper the way he liked with his readinglight over his left shoulder and his glasses on and the paper in his hand and a fresh cigar in his mouth that the phone didn't ring, or else it would be a knocking at the back door and Mother would send little Mary to open it and she'd find a miner standing there whitefaced with his eyelashes and eyebrows very black from the coaldust saying, “Doc French, pliz . . . heem coma queek,” and poor Daddy would get up out of bed yawning in his pyjamas and bathrobe and push his untidy grey hair off his forehead and tell Mary to go get his instrumentcase out of the office for him, and be off tying his necktie as he went, and half the time he'd be gone all night.

Mealtimes it was worse. They never seemed to get settled at the table for a meal, the three of them, without that awful phone ringing. Daddy would go and Mary and Mother would sit there finishing the meal alone, sitting there without saying anything, little Mary with her legs wrapped around the chairlegs staring at the picture of two dead wild ducks in the middle of the gingercolored wallpaper above Mother's trim black head. Then Mother would put away the dishes and clatter around the house muttering to herself that if poor Daddy ever took half the trouble with his paying patients that he did with those miserable foreigners and miners he would be a rich man today and she wouldn't be killing herself with housework. Mary hated to hear Mother talk against Daddy the way she did.

Poor Daddy and Mother didn't get along. Mary barely remembered a time when she was very very small when it had been different and they'd lived in Denver in a sunny house with flowering bushes in the yard. That was before Brother was taken and Daddy lost that money in the investment. Whenever anybody said Denver it made
her think of sunny. Now they lived in Trinidad where everything was black like coal, the scrawny hills tall, darkening the valley full of rows of sooty shanties, the minetipples, the miners most of them greasers and hunkies and the awful saloons and the choky smeltersmoke and the little black trains. In Denver it was sunny, and white people lived there, real clean American children like Brother who was taken and Mother said if poor Daddy cared for his own flesh and blood the way he cared for those miserable foreigners and miners Brother's life might have been saved. Mother had made her go into the parlor, she was so scared, but Mother held her hand so tight it hurt terribly but nobody paid any attention, they all thought it was on account of Brother she was crying, and Mother made her look at him in the coffin under the glass.

After the funeral Mother was very sick and had a night and a day nurse and they wouldn't let Mary see her and Mary had to play by herself all alone in the yard. When Mother got well she and poor Daddy didn't get along and always slept in separate rooms and Mary slept in the little hallroom between them. Poor Daddy got grey and worried and never laughed round the house any more after that and then it was all about the investment and they moved to Trinidad and Mother wouldn't let her play with the minechildren and when she came back from school she had nits in her hair.

Mary had to wear glasses and was good at her studies and was ready to go to highschool at twelve. When she wasn't studying she read all the books in the house. “The child will ruin her eyes,” Mother would say to poor Daddy across the breakfast table when he would come down with his eyes puffy from lack of sleep and would have to hurry through his breakfast to be off in time to make his calls. The spring Mary finished the eighth grade and won the prizes in French and American history and English, Miss Parsons came around specially to call on Mrs. French to tell her what a good student little Mary French was and such a comfort to the teachers after all the miserable ignorant foreigners she had to put up with. “My dear,” Mother said, “don't think I don't know how it is.” Then suddenly she said, “Miss Parsons, don't tell anybody but we're going to move to Colorado Springs next fall.”