Worldly Philosopher: The Odyssey of Albert O. Hirschman (35 page)

  
FRANZ KAFKA

T
hough it was less than a year after his escape from Europe, the bombing of Pearl Harbor hurried
National Power
. There was competition now for Hirschman’s attention, another fork in the road. One way pointed the way to a
vita contemplativa
, a road he yearned for after his itinerant and militant years in Europe. Another pointed the way to a
vita activa
dedicated to the struggle against fascism, a cause he’d rallied to like a reflex since 1931. Here was a new opportunity to enlist. He did so, almost immediately—less than two months after Pearl Harbor. A serious bout of pneumonia and then a tonsillectomy laid him up for weeks, delaying him. Still motivated by the urge to prove Hamlet wrong, to preserve within himself an idea of an integrated fighter and thinker, there was another reason for volunteering for a regimented life: having spent so many years with a dubious legal status, and with internment camps for enemy aliens filling up around California, he wanted his citizenship resolved. Necessity and conviction thus prompted him to volunteer for his third war, fighting under a third flag, for the same cause.

The pendulum, it seems, had swung back to action. But Hirschman did have a preference for how—not whether—to serve. There was one way to integrate “theory” and “practice,” to deploy his knowledge about the enemy as an “economic intelligence” agent. Here was an opportunity to make an old personal ideal real. Once he had recovered from his maladies,
he wrote to Kittredge at the Rockefeller Foundation in New York seeking advice and support. He did not think, according to Kittredge’s notes, “that he could serve most effectively by becoming a private for the 3rd time.”
¹
The program officer heard him out and agreed to send a letter to the adjutant general of the US Army testifying to Hirschman’s background and abilities. Kittredge did, adding emphatically, that “Hirschman states he is
not
a Communist” to calm the alarms about his service in the Spanish Civil War.
²
Accordingly, Hirschman himself wrote to the adjutant general following Kittredge, explaining that he was Lithuanian (this was still his passport, which no doubt augmented his anxieties about his legal status) but born in Germany, with the hope that “my linguistic knowledge or my professional training in statistic [sic] or economics or both, can put me to some use.” He added his expertise in the French and Italian economies, and included, for good measure, that he had worked for the Allies while in Marseilles helping “English and other Allied soldiers trying to escape from France and that the British Embassy in Washington has a record on my activities during this period.” He closed his offer on a note of principle: “I fervently hope that you will consider that my record as an active opponent to the Totalitarian countries may compensate to some degree the lack of American citizenship.” He prepared to take his medical exam in mid-February and asked the Rockefeller Foundation to defer his fellowship, fully expecting to be called for service in April or May.
³

A year passed before Hirschman fulfilled his quest. The delay remains a mystery (in part because a fire consumed a section of the National Personnel Records Center in July 1973). The delay did allow him to finish his book, however. In the meantime, the local draft board reclassified married men, which accounts for some of the delay. Then he was reclassified for “occupational reasons,” which struck the Rockefeller Foundation as odd because no one had “taken the initiative to obtain this change of status.” Because the overture to the adjutant general was going nowhere, he asked Rockefeller to cover a trip east—to the University of Chicago, Harvard, and Princeton—“to discuss his completed manuscript with prominent readers.” Mostly, he was keen to meet Jacob Viner. He also wanted to use
the trip to make a personal show of interest at the doorstep of the men he thought could most use his skills.
⁴

Other than Kittredge, Hirschman had no strings to pull when the American intelligence apparatus was being assembled out of the old boys’ networks of Ivy League faculty and graduate students. Hirschman was an outsider. He appeared at the Office of Strategic Services in Washington and the Board of Economic Warfare. Nothing came of his calling cards. Then he took matters into his own hands and enlisted in the infantry as a private.

On April 30, 1943, he was finally called to the Army’s San Francisco Reception Center. As he went, he could not put his anxieties about his citizenship aside: to the last minute sending corrections to his dossier lodged at the Alien Registration Division of the Justice Department. And yet, he remained obscure about some crucial details. For one, he left his German citizenship in the dark and preferred to introduce himself as a Lithuanian. We can only speculate on his reasons. Some might see him reversing his father’s denial of his Ostjuden roots. Most likely, with Germany being the enemy, he wanted to avoid detention. Either way, none of this appears to have dampened his induction into the army. He took his basic training just outside Berkeley for three months, where marching drills and shooting practice made up for the lack of proper training in the Spanish Republican militias or the French army. Then he was transferred south to Camp Roberts, just north of San Luis Obispo.

The barracks were what Berkeley had not been: an American immersion. The Condliffe group had been an international hodgepodge. Hirschman had married a Russian who had grown up in Paris. He had studiously avoided the classroom and the residence halls where Americans might have invited him into the melting pot. The barracks rectified this isolation. The other soldiers were mainly from California, “ordinary Americans” as he recalled. He liked them, though he could never get used to the food. If Hirschman was supposed to become a soldier, there was one habit the army trainers could never drill out of him: he kept forgetting to tie his boots properly. For this he would be denied passes to visit Sarah, and so she had to come to Camp Roberts to see him. There are two revealing
photos of him taken at Camp Roberts. The first, with his company, reveals the disparity between the American army and the French one of several years earlier. Here the troops are all dressed alike, stand in neat formations, and look prepared to march into battle—a sharp contrast to the crew that was sent to repair rail lines in the Loire Valley. The other is of Albert Hirschman alone, tanned from training in the California sun, with his rucksack, rifle, and helmet, looking every bit the soldier. Sure enough, he confided to Kittredge that “I cannot help making all the time comparisons with the French army as to food, clothing, equipment, and treatment and as in every single respect the comparison is overwhelmingly in favor of the American army, my morale is exceptionally high.”
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Perhaps it was his inability to remember his bootlaces. Perhaps he still had a habit of being
dans la lune
, as Varian Fry complained. Perhaps he was a bad shot. We will never know why, but Hirschman was pulled
from a combat unit. It is also possible that an officer saw some valuable skills in the private. At Camp Roberts, he was tested for language and interpreting abilities, which must have impressed the brass because he was immediately dispatched to the Army’s Specialized Training Program, and there was talk that he was bound for Stanford to learn Japanese. But the idea of having him serve in the Pacific theater soon gave way to another—the Allies were deep into the planning stages for the first assault on Axis Europe, in Italy. He could clearly be more useful there, and his skills recommended him not for combat but for intelligence work. It was roundabout, but Hirschman found himself assigned to the Office of Strategic Services (OSS).

Hirschman at Camp Roberts, 1943.

In the fall of 1943 he took the train to Washington for a second time, where he would spend several months hanging around the OSS headquarters waiting for his assignment. Founded in June 1942, the OSS had a mandate to collect and analyze information and to conduct special operations not assigned to other agencies or services. Its director, General William J. Donovan, was still hiring staffers when Hirschman appeared on the doorstep.
This
was a club Hirschman wanted to join. (Eventually the headquarters would be home to eight future presidents of the American Historical Association and five future presidents of the American Economic Association.) Hirschman thought he could be of use two ways. One was the plotting that went into penetrating the Reich with OSS operatives comprising German and Austrian exiled socialists, communists, and labor activists who could conduct operations behind the lines. The other was the Research and Analysis Branch (RAB), directed by Harvard’s William L. Langer, who fanned out to recruit top minds from the country’s elite universities. This was also a club Hirschman
could
join. By the spring of 1943, Donovan was taking in German refugees such as Max Horkheimer, Theodor W. Adorno, Herbert Marcuse, Otto Kirchheimer, and Franz Neumann, a major figure among German socialists and author of an influential study of Nazism,
Behemoth: The Structure and Prac tice of National Socialism
. This “community of the uprooted” included Hirschman’s natural peers. It had the additional allure of allowing foreigners to join the world of the old school tie.
⁶

Wishful thinking brought personal expectations. Presuming he would stay in Washington and having received a travel fellowship, Sarah joined him from California in late fall 1943. They found a small flat near the zoo, a challenge in a capital swollen with the administrators of the war effort. Idleness afforded the couple some time to visit museums, take long walks, and talk of the future. The dreams of a career in economic intelligence and a home in Washington were not—as Albert and Sarah soon discovered—in the cards. Ten weeks after Sarah arrived in Washington, they learned that Albert was to be shipped out in early February.

They were stunned. It was the first of a series of blows. But for the moment, they had to deal with imminent separation. The one thing they did decide was to have a baby. If Albert was going to die in Europe, Sarah wanted his child. They spent their remaining days together in the flat and wandering the streets. In late January, shortly before he was called
to a naval base in Virginia to head out, they paid one final visit to the National Gallery. Standing before their favored paintings, Albert’s arm around Sarah’s shoulder, they talked about the art, keeping the war at bay. At the end of their visit, Sarah went to the restroom only to discover that she was menstruating. She was not pregnant. She erupted in tears. But with Albert waiting in the foyer, Sarah did not want to compound the mood. She cleaned herself up, wiping away the traces of her anguish; as she emerged she could not tell if Albert noticed. In those final moments together before Albert was sent to his ship, they conspired to be silent about their misfortunes.
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Albert and Sarah in Washington, DC.

Sarah packed her bags and went back to Beverly Hills; uncomfortable there, she decided to go to New York, continue her studies in French literature at Columbia University, and wait for the war to end and her husband to return from the front. She moved into International House and immediately went to work on Denis Diderot’s novel,
Jacques le fata liste et son maître
. There was more news: Sarah learned that the last days in Washington had yielded one hope—she
was
pregnant after all. The problem now was that the rules of the residence forbade pregnancy and children—presumably because it set a dubious example to other young women. At the beginning, Sarah dissimulated. Among the other women in the residence Sarah quickly made some friends. When she was too tired she would enlist one to fetch her milk and cookies, until one day one of her companions said “You know, Sarah, you have a really nice face, but really you are getting fat! I mean, this idea of getting milk and cookies every night at midnight is not a good idea.” When it became impossible to deny, Sarah and two friends found an apartment near Gramercy Park for a while. As the birth approached, her parents paid a visit to New York to inspect the arrangements; they were not at all pleased at the unusual arrangement for their first—and possibly only—grandchild and prevailed upon their daughter to reconsider. Sarah wrapped up her studies, pulled up stakes, and moved back to Los Angeles to live with her parents. Katia was born in Santa Monica in October 1944. Baby Katia, raised and pampered by the Chapiro clan in a Spanish-style Beverly Hills house, would not see her father for two more years.
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