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.
Newsreel LI
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
Mary French
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 eyebro
ws 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.”
Miss Parsons sighed. “Well, Mrs. French, we’ll hate to lose you but it certainly is best for the child. There’s a better element in the schools there.” Miss Parsons lifted her teacup with her little finger crooked and let it down again with a dry click in the saucer.
Mary sat watching them from the little tapestry stool by the fireplace. “I hate to admit it,” Miss Parsons went on, “because I was born and bred here, but Trinidad’s no place to bring up a sweet clean little American girl.”
Granpa Wilkins had died that spring in Denver and Mother was beneficiary of his life insurance so she carried off things with a high hand. Poor Daddy hated to leave Trinidad and they hardly even spoke without making Mary go and read in the library while they quarreled over the dirty dishes in the kitchen. Mary would sit with an old red embossedleather Ivanhoe in her hand and listen to their bitter wrangling voices coming through the board partition. “You’ve ruined my life and now I’m not going to let you ruin the child’s,” Mother would yell in that mean voice that made Mary feel so awful and Mary would sit there crying over the book until she got started reading again and after a couple of pages had forgotten everything except the yeomen in Lincoln green and the knights on horseback and the castles. That summer instead of going camping in Yellowstone like Daddy had planned they moved to Colorado Springs.
At Colorado Springs they stayed first in a boardinghouse and then when the furniture came they moved to the green shingled bungalow where they were going to live that was set way back from the red gravel road in a scrawny lawn among tall poplartrees.
In the long grass Mary found the scaled remains of a croquetset. While Daddy and Mother were fussing about the furnishings that the men were moving in from a wagon, she ran around with a broken mallet slamming at the old cracked balls that hardly had any paint left on their red and green and yellow and blue bands. When Daddy came out of the house looking tired and grey with his hair untidy over his forehead she ran up to him waving the mallet and wanted him to play croquet. “No time for games now,” he said.
Mary burst out crying and he lifted her on his shoulder and carriedher round the back porch and showed her how by climbing on the roof of the little toolhouse behind the kitchen door you could see the mesa and beyond, behind a tattered fringe of racing cheesecloth clouds, the blue sawtooth ranges piling up to the towering smooth mass of mountains where Pikes Peak was. “We’ll go up there someday on the cogwheel railroad,” he said in his warm cozy voice close to her ear. The mountains looked so far away and the speed of the clouds made her feel dizzy. “Just you and me,” he said, “but you mustn’t ever cry . . . it’ll make the children tease you in school, Mary.”
In September she had to go to highschool. It was awful going to a new school where she didn’t have any friends. The girls seemed so welldressed and stuck up in the firstyear high. Going through the corridors hearing the other girls talk about parties and the Country Club and sets of tennis and summer hotels and automobiles and friends in finishingschools in the East, Mary, with her glasses and the band to straighten her teeth Mother had had the dentist put on, that made her lisp a little, and her freckles and her hair that wasn’t red or blond but just sandy, felt a miserable foreigner like the smelly bawling miners’ kids back in Trinidad.
She liked the boys better. A redheaded boy grinned at her sometimes. At least they let her alone. She did well in her classes and thought the teachers were lovely. In English they read Ramona and one day Mary, scared to death all alone, went to the cemetery to see the grave of Helen Hunt Jackson. It was beautifully sad that spring afternoon in Evergreen Cemetery. When she grew up, she decided, she was going to be like Helen Hunt Jackson.
They had a Swedish girl named Anna to do the housework and Mother and Daddy were hardly ever home when she came back from school. Daddy had an office downtown in a new officebuilding and Mother was always busy with churchwork or at the library reading up for papers she delivered at the women’s clubs. Half the time Mary had her supper all alone reading a book or doing her homework. Then she would go out in the kitchen and help Anna tidy up and try to keep her from going home and leaving her alone in the house. When she heard the front door opening she would run out breathless. Usually it was only Mother, but sometimes it was Daddy with his cigar and his tired look and his clothes smelling of tobacco and iodiform and carbolic and maybe she could get him to sit on her bed before she went to sleep to tell her stories about the old days and miners and prospectors and the war between the sheepherders and the ranchers.
At highschool Mary’s best friend was Ada Cohn whose father was a prominent Chicago lawyer who had had to come out for his health. Mother did everything she could to keep her from going to the Cohns’ and used to have mean arguments with Daddy about how it was only on account of his being so shiftless that her only daughter was reduced to going around with Jews and every Tom Dick and Harry, and why didn’t he join the Country Club and what was the use of her struggling to get a position for him among the better element by church activities and women’s clubs and communitychest work if he went on being just a poor man’s doctor and was seen loafing around with all the scum in poolrooms and worse places for all she knew instead of working up a handsome practice in a city where there were so many wealthy sick people; wasn’t it to get away from all that sort of thing they’d left Trinidad? “But, Hilda,” Daddy would say, “be reasonable. It’s on account of Mary’s being a friend of the Cohns’ that they’ve given me their practice. They are very nice kindly people.” Mother would stare straight at him and hissed through her teeth: “Oh, if you only had a tiny bit of ambition.”