Worldly Philosopher: The Odyssey of Albert O. Hirschman (46 page)

This was the file’s last act. Finally, in October 12, 1966, the White House Office of Science and Technology submitted a request for Hirschman’s security clearance because they were considering hiring him as a consultant in their efforts to expand into Third World development. In the end, Hirschman never took up the post. Although the 1966 investigation thickened the file, it put an end to its career. How thoroughly the FBI scoured their own material by this point suggests that alarm about Hirschman’s past had all but vanished—or at least some caution had come to govern the earlier sources of information. Rather than rely on previous entries to the file (possibly, FBI insiders knew that much of the early history of personal intelligence gathering was tainted), the FBI launched a fresh round of inquiries—and for the first time began with
Hirschman’s own statement about his past and current “loyalties.” For once, he could represent himself before the FBI. To add a twist to this tale, at this occasion Hirschman was less than entirely disclosive. He had made this kind of false self-representation before, notably when he enlisted in the army as a Lithuanian. This time, his signed declaration of his non–US Army international travels from the time of his birth omitted all reference to his three-month sojourn as a fighter for the Republican cause in Spain. Otherwise, it was a very thorough statement. Why he excluded the reference is unclear—and by the time the FBI declassified the file in 2006, Hirschman could no longer recall such detail—but it suggests that he did feel, after so many years of unaccountable roadblocks, that there was something to hide, and that it had something to do with his fighting in Spain. It may be that his emphatic reply to Dauzat may have been a reflex to cover older efforts to sanitize his past, to purge a shadow he by then suspected was trailing him. We do not know—but it certainly speaks to intractable limits for researchers wanting to rely heavily on oral testimonies to reconstruct the past and the necessity to deal up front with the importance of that biographical uncertainty.

Either way, from July until October 1936, he told the FBI he had been living in France. It did not occur to any officer to double-check this claim against the earlier documented track record that he had been in Spain and that sources had verified his fighting on the Republican side. The only item that elicited any concern in 1966 was Ursula Hirschmann’s and her second husband’s—Altiero Spinelli—membership in the Communist Party in Germany and Italy, facts disclosed by the State Department in 1963 after Spinelli’s visit to the United States on State Department leadership grants (by then, Spinelli was one of Europe’s foremost advocates of unification).

The FBI ordered agents to conduct a new review out of its regional offices in Washington, Boston, New York, New Haven, Baltimore, Richmond, Los Angeles, St Louis, and San Francisco for agents “to verify education in Europe and residence of relatives in Europe through records reviewed and persons interviewed in the United States.” This yielded thirty-four interviews with “confidential informants,” including several
who “have knowledge of some phases of un-American activities, including communist activities in the Northern California area.” The reports from the field agents came in unanimously declaring that there was no reason to doubt Hirschman’s loyalty to the United States. It is not hard to spot the identity of some of these informants. One was based at Yale University and was well acquainted with Hirschman and his wife; he knew them from the time they arrived in New Haven in September 1956 and had ample opportunity to work with him. His evaluation was glowing and assured the bureau that there was no doubt about Hirschman’s reputation and reliability. It seems likely that the informant was the well-known political scientist, Charles Lindblom, whose name had appeared as a potential reference in an earlier document. Another report from the Boston office testified to one informant’s knowledge of Hirschman since his Berkeley days and that he had worked with him at the Federal Reserve Board from 1946 until 1948, until the informant himself moved to Harvard University; now they were neighbors. This could be none other than Alexander Gerschenkron. His declaration to the FBI is like Lindblom’s. Gerschenkron the informant even told the FBI that the University of Stockholm ran a regular seminar in its economics department, and the only readings on the syllabus were publications by Hirschman! Another testimony came from a former colleague from postwar Washington, Yale, and Harvard (where the unnamed source taught at the Kennedy School), also unequivocally vouching for Hirschman’s loyalty. This could only be the future Nobel Prize winner Thomas Schelling. Similar reports came in from former associates at the RAND Corporation. Los Angeles agents fanned out to the Santa Monica Police Department, the libraries of the
Los Angeles Times
and
Los Angeles Herald-Examiner
, and even the Credit Bureau of San Luis Obispo (where Hirschman had received his basic Army training and had been naturalized) to check his credit and arrest record. A New York agent, John D. Fleming, went to the newspaper morgue to find that it “contained no derogatory information.” He also paid a visit to the Rockefeller Foundation (which is how we know Fleming’s identity), where he also learned of Hirschman’s unblemished loyalty. On November 15, 1966, the FBI turned over its report to the acting attorney general.

With this inquiry, Hirschman’s shadow got separated from his body and was filed away in the archives of the FBI. It only saw the light of day again thirty years later in response to Freedom of Information Act request number 1030518-000 by this author. What should we make of it? The FBI’s reliance upon flimsy sources and bad information speaks for itself. So does the alarm posed by a foreigner with a “blind” past. The coiling of nativism with growing anti-Communism hysteria did Hirschman in by the early 1950s, when the Red-baiting reached its frenzied peak during Senator McCarthy’s inquisition. In Hirschman’s trajectory from loyalty to public service in the fight against fascism before 1945 and the effort to rebuild Europe’s economies after 1945 to his exit in 1952, there is also a larger arc. Having recently arrived in the United States in 1943, when he enlisted in the public cause, Hirschman had few contacts or friends in his adopted country who could serve as “informants” or witnesses about his character and work; there were no checks against the powerful inertial forces of suspicion and eagerness to believe sources that confirmed an ungrounded bias to mistrust. Two decades later, in the mid-1960s, the story was very different. A list of famous Ivy League professors, think-tank experts, friends, and associates became the champions he did not have in the 1940s and 1950s, when those charged with gathering information in the name of security were all too willing to rely on their own fallible judgment. As for Hirschman, while his shadow haunted him and at times drove him to despair, in the end he never lost his propensity to find creative ways to make the best of a bad situation.

You can hold yourself back from the sufferings of the world, that is something you are free to do and it accords with your nature, but perhaps this very holding back is the one suffering that you could avoid.

  
FRANZ KAFKA

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n 1952, Colombia was in the throes of a terrible conflict. Its capital was emerging from the worst urban unrest and destruction in the hemisphere’s history. Marauding gangs and sharpshooters no longer patrolled the streets, but charred buildings and empty lots remained as silent echoes of a spasm of violence that had since spread to Andean valleys and plateaus where guerrillas, militiamen, and the army fought for control. This was an improbable setting for a marginalized economist to make a big difference or a place for his family to make a new life. But, if nothing else, Hirschman’s displacement testified to the adage about how life’s best rewards come from what is least planned. The years that the Hirschman family sojourned in Colombia were, in many respects, the best of their lives. Adventurous, culturally exciting, and intellectually awakening, this war-torn country gave Albert Hirschman an environment to reinvent himself. Driven from the policy-making sanctum of the United States, Hirschman was quick to spin a virtue out of necessity. Some years later, when a colleague asked him why he moved to South America, Hirschman joked “I was born under Prussian rule, so when the emperor calls, I obey.”
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The emperor in this case was the World Bank. Known then as the International Bank for Reconstruction and Development, it had been created in 1944 to help fund the reconstruction of Europe after the war. In the end, the scale of the Marshall Plan dwarfed the bank’s budget, and the bank’s role never measured up to its billing. “I think we are going to be driven into a very different field sooner than I thought, into the development field” the bank president, John J. McCloy, told his executive directors in late 1947. The institution cast about for a new role in world affairs. McCloy—who, as the well-heeled Wall Street attorney to the Rockefellers and wartime senior servant in the State Department, epitomized the figure of far-seeing magnate—saw how quickly the world was changing with decolonization of what would soon be baptized the Third World. Here was an opportunity for the lending agency to help colonies lift themselves from poverty and backwardness. The idea was to secure them for free-market capitalism lest they fall into the hands of Communists—paradoxically through ambitious planning. The handmaidens of this conversion were, in Mary Morgan’s words, “economic missionaries.” One laboratory for this experiment would be Colombia, “the most ambitious undertaken so far by the Bank,” as its president noted. This was how Hirschman went from the reconstruction of Europe to development in Latin American, from the US government to a global agency, which gave him a privileged position to observe development close up, seeing warts and all, during its formative years.
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Sarah and Albert in the Llanos, Colombia, 1953.

Like the groping, improvising way in which world institutions refashioned themselves as the dust of the Second World War settled, Hirschman also sought new bearings. Years later, he reflected on the man he was when he arrived in Colombia. “I looked at ‘reality’ without theoretical preconceptions of any kind.” When he returned to the United States almost five years later, he discovered that “I had acquired a point of view”—one that was at odds with orthodoxies forged in American universities. While playful, this claim to self-enlightenment can be misleading. When he went to Colombia, Hirschman was hardly an ingénue when it came to markets and hidden springs of change. The frustrations as a Marshall Planner had hardened his skepticism of ideological formulae in the drag of abstract theories. What made the Colombian experience so distinctive was proximity: observing so closely, and for enough time, the process and effects of the decisions of which he was a part. The art of learning from doing and then watching closely, a sensibility already encoded from Colorni and Montaigne’s personal tutorials, accented his fascination with small things and routine behavior; it would become a cornerstone of a disposition that Colombia brought to fruition. He crisscrossed Colombia, pen in hand and paper handy, examining irrigation projects, talking to local bankers about their farm loans, and scribbling calculations about the costs of road building. He leaned toward what his future colleague, Clifford Geertz, would call “experience-near” knowledge, the insights of an actor, keeping the “experience-distant” concepts of the detached observer at bay, at least for the time being.

Colombia may have been a mess, but it was not Hirschman’s first graze with deep civil strife, although it would be his most prolonged. The country’s political climate crackled with tension by the 1940s. The assassination in 1948 of the Liberal Party firebrand Jorge Eliecer Gaitán as he walked out of his office in the Agustín Nieto building at the corner of Seventh Avenue and Jiménez Avenue (Hirschman’s office would be very nearby) set off a decade of civil war known eponymously as La Violencia. Two hundred thousand Colombians died at its hands until the military finally stepped in to put General Gustavo Rojas Pinilla in power in June 1953. The dictator began the slow process of containing partisan violence, albeit at a cost.

It was in this context that the World Bank decided to involve itself in the Colombian economy. One of the anomalies of Colombia was that it was a political mess, but an economically robust one. Its elites had always prided themselves on pragmatic modernization and openness to foreign ideas—and investments. In late 1948, as the republic was sliding into its political morass, Emilio Toro, the Colombian member of the Board of Executive Directors of the World Bank, approached President McCloy with a list of projects that might appeal to the lender. The upshot was a decision to send a mission, called a “survey,” to the fissiparous republic to come up with a master plan. The proposal went to the president of Colombia, Mariano Ospina Pérez, who endorsed it enthusiastically. Colombia would, in the eyes of its developers, be a model for others; maybe “development” could rescue its democracy. Such was the hope.
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