Word: veblen
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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...gift (and which John D. had originally thought of as just a good Baptist college) became a first-rank university almost at birth. As its grey, Gothic-style buildings sprang up on Chicago's dreary South Side, notable minds had nocked to it: Philosopher John Dewey, Economist Thorstein Veblen, Archeologist James Henry Breasted. It was a place of exciting research, fired by the spirit of scientific inquiry and by the yeasty pragmatism of John Dewey. "The result is wonderful," exclaimed William James in 1903. "A real school and real thought. Here [at Harvard] we have thought, but no school...
...join except the Socialist Party. He was a leader of such starry-eyed, leftish setups as the League for Industrial Democracy and the League of American Writers. For one year he was editor of the Dial, a famed fortnightly magazine whose staff included Philosopher John Dewey and Economist Thorstein Veblen; later he spent eight years as an active editor of the New Republic when that magazine was a small, bright influence guided by the liberal idealism of Herbert Croly...
...Cryptogamic. College presidents were not amused when Veblen described them (in The Higher Learning in America) as "Captains of Erudition" whose function was to accustom the sons of rough "Captains of Industry" to "genteel solemnities" and urbane forms of "dissipation." Earnest economists who had written cumbersome tomes of unintelligible prose positively hated Veblen when he leaned forward, assumed a poker face and gravely asked them: "If we are getting restless under the taxonomy of a monocotyledonous wage doctrine and a cryptogamic theory of interest, with involute, loculicidal, tomentous and moniliform variants, what is the cytoplasm, centrosome, or karyokinetic process...
...While the road of social criticism must always be lonely," pontificates glib Pundit Max Lerner in the introduction, "it need not be made bitter as Dante's exile." But Veblen-who was as different from Dante as Bernard Shaw is from Pope Pius-was not an easy man to employ or encourage. His conspicuous love of lechery caused him to be fired first from the University of Chicago, then from Leland Stanford. Hired as an economist by the U.S. Food Administration in World War I, he coolly proposed, says Lerner, "to do away with the merchants in the country...
...Veblen Girls. In the '20s Veblen, for all his misfortunes, became the hero of the sort of cult he most disliked. "Veblenism," mocked H. L. Mencken in Smart Set, "was shining in full brilliance. There were Veblenists, Veblen clubs, Veblen remedies for all the sorrows of the world. There were even, in Chicago, Veblen Girls-perhaps Gibson Girls grown middle-aged and despairing." But Veblen himself had had enough of public life. Nominated for the presidency of the American Economic Association, he coldly rejected it, remarking: "They didn't offer it to me when I needed...