Worldly Philosopher: The Odyssey of Albert O. Hirschman (40 page)

When he finally arrived in Washington, he checked into the Rogers Smith Hotel, pulled out a stationery pad in his room, and wrote a quick note to Sarah to say that he was back and waiting to see her. His days alone would soon be over.

The spirit becomes free only when it ceases to be a support.

  
FRANZ KAFKA

F
or many social scientists picking up the pieces of their scattered lives after years of war, peace meant the return to professional life. American universities, swelling with returning GI students, reclaimed their academics from Washington. Not a few of the veterans of the Office of Strategic Services became leading scholars of European affairs. But for Hirschman, the pathway was paved with anything but clarity. There was also a fledgling family to rebuild. Around Christmas 1945, Sarah received word from Albert. Anxious days, and then weeks, passed before she got the news that he had arrived in Washington and was waiting for her. Two years of warfare had kept them apart. Not exactly estranged, their lives had been profoundly altered. Europe, “home,” was in ruins. Katia was now a toddler—and had yet to see her father. When Sarah got Albert’s note from the Rogers Smith Hotel, she packed her bag immediately, left Katia in the hands of her parents in Beverly Hills, and headed for the nation’s capital.

The reunion of Albert and Sarah Hirschman was one of millions for veterans returning from war to face the challenge of reconstructing lives. Of the marriage between Albert and Sarah there were no doubts. But the rest—where to live, what kind of work, how to support a family—was completely in the air. The itinerant Albert had done this many times before. But now was he was not alone, and of this he was acutely aware. There was also the matter of how to launch a long-delayed economist’s
career, over which he had idled many hours fantasizing in Europe in the shadow of yet another war.

For the moment, Albert and Sarah focused on renewing their marriage and making the decisions about where and how to live. Sarah waited in the dismal room at the Rogers Smith as Albert made his rounds, depositing his dossier on crowded personnel desks of the burgeoning offices of the federal government agencies, hoping someone might be interested in a talented, published, multilingual economist. Between job searches, the couple looked into lodgings. The housing market was as glutted with home-seeking families as with job hunters. What they found was pricey, uninviting, or had been snatched up. “Even after a month after my arrival here, I still haven’t seen my daughter,” Albert complained. “I feel that this is getting much too long since by now all we have done in the past few days is wait for a seat on the train.”
¹
After three weeks of hovering in the capital, they decided to return to California and await news of Albert’s job applications. When they got back to Beverly Hills in mid-February, Albert wrapped his arms around Katia, and the two of them launched into a conversation about goldfish in the backyard pond.

Albert meets Katia, 1946.

The Chapiro’s home in Beverly Hills provided the setting for Albert to recover from the war. He lounged. He practiced his headstands by the side of the pool and played chess with visitors. With servants and in-laws, there was more than enough help to take care of daily chores. The house, filled with Russian, was not without its diversions. Musicians and performers would treat it as a way station when passing through Los Angeles. New Year’s brought out Heifetz, Rubinstein, and Piatigorsky for quartets and celebrating. Katia’s verbal skills and toddling about the yard were an endless source of fascination. Katia “is surprisingly affectionate” and “really very cute, not at all too fat,” he gloated. Still, parenthood took some getting used to. Katia was well behaved—meaning she “doesn’t cry when one leaves her lone, playing for hours by herself.” But the dirty work he was pleased to leave to Sarah. “America,” he mused, “has not yet invented a machine” when it comes to “bringing up baby.” It means “for all mothers here it is total slavery.” A natural feature of any domestic setting in Berlin a generation earlier, nannies were rare and expensive—“only for film stars and successful businessmen.”
²

No news from Washington. The city had spurned him before, and he did not want to repeat the experience. So, after a month in the California sun, he packed his bags and returned to Washington, promising Sarah he would find a job and a home. It was now becoming more urgent: Sarah was pregnant again—their second daughter, Lisa, was due in the fall.

Washington was a land of opportunity for an economist with international credentials and knowledge. Armed with his curriculum vitae, fresh copies of
National Power and the Structure of Foreign Trade
, and high hopes, Hirschman resumed his precatory tour of the capital. He wandered the halls of the old Foreign Economic Administration (to which the Board of Economic Warfare had relocated), the new Export-Import Bank, the Department of Commerce, and the Treasury, which was taking a leading role in handling the Europe’s crushing debts. His first stop-off was there, where he had arranged to meet one department head. He walked away optimistic. This man, he told Ursula, “offered me, I believe, a quite interesting job relating to the International Monetary Fund and Bank (Bretton Woods agreements). Because of that I submitted a
request to be admitted into the Civil Service and I will wait for the answer.”
³
But only silence followed. Phone calls yielded promises that positive news was forthcoming. It was not. “Unfortunately the position that had almost offered to me I was unable to get,” he complained to Ursula in mid-April, “because of a cut in governmental funds.”
⁴

As ever, Hirschman relied on contacts. The Board of Economic Warfare (BEW) employed several of them, including Peter Franck and Lia Rein’s new husband. The OSS’s Economic Section was another; there was Hans Landsberg. It was the BEW, especially its Enemy Potential Division, that looked like the surest bet. After a day of meetings, and a discussion with staff that felt like a Berkeley seminar about the French and Italian economies, Albert spent the evening with Lia and her husband, sure that he would land a job. One of the senior staffers, Heinrich Heuser, the German author of a recent book,
Control of International Trade
, was especially eager to have Hirschman as a colleague, and the two exchanged ideas from their respective books. The division’s head, with a recently awarded PhD from Harvard, gave Hirschman an application form and spoke of his starting salary: $3,800 for the first year. Hans later told Albert that he’d left a very positive impression on Heuser. A few days later, he was summoned back to the BEW for a 3:00 meeting, brimming with expectation. Instead, he was informed, icily, that there would be no position. One of the brass pulled him aside and whispered in French, “
ne parle a
personne
de tout çela
[don’t mention this to
anyone
],” referring to Hirschman’s prewar past in Europe. At this point, Albert began to fret; either the bureaucracy was impenetrable or his background was a stain; his book upon which he pinned great hopes began to feel like a bottle thrown into the sea.
⁵

While job hunting, Hirschman also had to find a home. This was not much easier than finding a job. The federal government had swelled since the 1930s. Washington was no longer the seat of a pared-down, laissez-faire national government. The result was a crowded capital. It was Peter Franck—again in the same place at the same time—who suggested that he change his approach and invoke his status as a veteran with an ad in the local newspaper. After a few weeks of futility, Albert followed the advice,
with his own touch. One day the
Daily Evening Star
hit the stands with a unique posting. It began with a poem called “Away,” composed by a vet trying to find a home for his family. The lyrics worked: the next day one woman in Arlington Virginia read the ad, took pity on the vet, and invited the poem’s author—Corporal Albert O. Hirschman—to her bungalow. She offered to move into a large trailer in the backyard while the Hirschmans occupied the house until they could find something more permanent. A grateful Albert seized the offer. In all, the Hirschmans lived in Arlington for a year and a half before finally buying a house in Chevy Chase, Maryland, with the aid of Sarah’s parents, who also pitched in with buying the first car, a Ford sedan, to help manage life in the American suburbs.
⁶

Settling into Washington also meant taking care of family affairs in Europe. There were immediate needs: with food and medicines scarce in Europe, Albert used his contacts to send care packages of clothes, flour, coffee, sugar, diapers, and medicines for his proliferating nieces in Rome.
The Cooperative for American Remittances to Europe allowed standardized packages of 49 pounds of “surpluses” per family to be sent for fifteen dollars. There were also shipments of coats and boots for the grueling winters of 1946 and 1947. Mutti, meanwhile, was tough. She feuded with Ursula constantly and refused to move to Italy. Fed up, her son declared that “her behavior indeed is almost close to that of a mentally ill person and I am seriously contemplating consulting a psychiatrist in the near future.”
⁷
Finally, in 1949 she moved to Rome. There was also Eva, who had married Harold Roditi. Roditi was condemned to a wheelchair after being involved in violent clashes between left- and right-wing rivals in Paris in February 1934; which side he was on was shrouded with doubt. They had moved to New York, and when the Hirschmans set up in Washington, they were occasional visitors. Albert liked Harold, but he had to admit “that I do not have many common intellectual grounds with him.”
⁸
That marriage soon dissolved, and Eva, too, joined Ursula in the Italian capital. One New Year’s eve, she met Luigi Monteforte. They were soon betrothed and would have two children. Rome was becoming the new hub of the Hirschmann family and the destination for remittances and packages from Washington.

Albert, Katia, and Lisa on the beach, North Truro, MA, 1949.

The job hunting finally came to a close thanks to an old friend from the LSE, George Jaszi, who was now working at Averell Harriman’s Commerce Department and agreed to put in a good word there for him. Hirschman wound up at the Clearing Office for Foreign Transactions, headed by John Shirer. Relieved, in April he could finally look forward to a regular paycheck. But the work was dull. It kept him away from European concerns, and he was simply overqualified—which was soon apparent to his superiors, who also tried to help him move up, to no avail.
⁹
He confessed to Ursula that “it is certainly much harder to have courage to surmount the daily obstacles of life now than before. Now that die Träume nicht alle reifen [that all dreams have not come true], at least one would like to let oneself go, not to have to do superhuman efforts—for what? Simply to live.”
¹⁰

By chance, possibly through Alexander Stevenson, who was also at the same place at the same time as Albert, Albert’s name came to Alexander
Gerschenkron’s attention in October. “Shura” Gerschenkron had been brought from the docks of San Francisco by Howard Ellis to join the research staff of the Federal Reserve Board—what Sandy Stevenson jokingly called “that old mafia”—and was delighted to join the Ivy Leaguers and foreigners like Fritz Machlup and Gottfried Haberler. Gerschenkron quickly moved up the ranks to become head of the International Section, which allowed him to hire his own staff. He wanted someone to cover Western Europe, and especially Italy and France. Albert was the perfect candidate, and Shura was not going to be held up by procedural niceties. Gerschenkron called him immediately and invited Albert to his office at the Federal Reserve Board. The old colleagues brought each other up on the latest news, and at the end of the conversation, Gerschenkron got to the point: did Albert want to move to the Fed? The answer was an instant yes. He was elated; this might afford the opportunity “to travel to ‘my’ countries.” Just as important was what this meant for his faltering career: “My work is surely going to be very interesting and maybe I might be able to exert some modest influence on ‘high politics.’ ” A bit wishfully, if not naïvely, he told his sister that “all problems of foreign economic and financial policy are brought here before a council of five in which the FRB is one of the five (the other four: State Department, Treasury, Department of Commerce, and Export-Import Bank.” Here was a chance to have influence, as well as to enjoy the Board’s “independent research and the atmosphere that prevails there is quite like at a university.”
¹¹
It would have been hard for his job to live up to such lofty expectations. But for a while, it came close.