On Autobiography by Stephen T. Ziliak

“On Autobiography”

Recommendations for Reading (and Re-Reading)

Published on EH.TEACH

An on-line resource provided by the Economic History Association

September 2005

By Stephen T. Ziliak

Roosevelt University

Autobiography is one approach to teaching, not the or even my only approach, but what I do now. Autobiography in three acts, bibliotherapy in two. That’s pretty much it. As metonymy, you see, not in lieu of ____________.

I teach at Roosevelt University, a private, not-exactly-but-pretty-close-to-open enrollment institution in downtown Chicago. Roosevelt began as a College in 1945 when the faculty of the Central YMCA walked out in protest. Ninety-nine percent walked out, anyway, historians who seem to know will claim. The trustees were trying to cap the number of blacks and Jews admitted to Central Y. Northwestern University and the University of Chicago had enforced such quotas but the Y was supposed to be different, open, better. Roosevelt University would fulfill the original mission of the Y: it would admit any student, barring prejudice of any kind, so long as the student met what was (and still is) a rudimentary level of literacy and numeracy. In early Roosevelt yearbooks you ought to see the black and white pictures of school dances. Jack Johnson thought his Club Deluxe in Harlem was progressive.

It's not much like teaching at Emory University, or the Georgia Institute of Technology, two places I taught before coming to Roosevelt. It’s closer to CUNY; in other words, much harder work. It’s also a lot of fun. The average age of a student is 29. That's in Econ 101, and says nothing about the second standard deviation or the average age of a MA student. The students are African American, Hispanic, Jewish, and variously immigrant majority (increasingly from African and Eastern European nations). Traditional age students are increasing in share--especially downtown, in the Honors Program, and out at the suburban campus--but still they fill one corner of the room. Some live in a dorm. It’s still a commuter campus. Most have children, jobs, grandchildren, second jobs. Homework is to them a contested term. At home they do childcare, elder care, hair care, rehab care, and other feats of strength not strictly related to their assignment on the marginal rate of substitution.

I strive to build with my students a historically conscious teaching community. I learned it from Paulo Freire. Mainly I want them to talk and to write. To me. To each other. To the books. I want them to learn how to, as the economist Neil Browne puts it, “ask the right questions.” And I want them to claim personal responsibility for, as bell hooks puts it, “education as the practice of freedom.” But I was speaking here about autobiography, and bibliotherapy, and how they converge in my teaching of economics and history.

I’ve been asked to name some books that affect my teaching. Here are four.

1. Let Us Now Praise Famous Men (Houghton Mifflin, 1941 [1988]), by James Agee and Walker Evans.

A good book is to talking what a good hunger is to bread: seemingly infinitely large. Let Us Now Praise Famous Men is to me one of those books. I want, like I said, to hear my students talk at a higher critical level. So I’ll assign portions of Praise to them. Or I’ll simply tell them about it.

Agee was writing for Fortune magazine during the Great Depression, and wanted to kill himself (the thought of his own suicide was for years his daily nemesis, though his life did not end that way). At Fortune in the mid-Thirties his pay was low and his assignments were lower. (“Why don’t you do this piece on the cat who couldn’t meow?” Why don’t you bite me? and heavy usage of alcohol, were typical replies.) Agee had no time to think or to write the way he had begun to while a student at Exeter and Harvard, beautifully recorded now in a book of poems, Permit Me Voyage (Yale Younger Poets Series).

Sun came. A trip to Alabama. Getting to travel on Fortune's dime to the State of Alabama sounded like a good break. Seriously. The assignment was to travel with a photographer of his choosing---he chose his friend, the distinguished Walker Evans---to live with and to report on the economic lives of three tenant farming families. They did, staying with several families for several weeks. Fortune rejected his first draft---Agee had returned to New York with a book proposal and a giant pile of black and white photographs, not a publishable report for a business magazine. But that's, you see, our fortune.

The break became a book, and the book became a passion. It’s now a classic of American literature. To the student of economic history Let Us Now Praise Famous Men completes a dialectic with familiar neoclassical stories. To Agee, farmers were "caught" in a system "larger than themselves." They were literally trapped socially and immobilized economically, he suggested, and were, by virtue of not being owners of their fixed factors, bound to be screwed. You probably don't believe it, one good reason to teach the book. Try "A Country Letter" followed by "Colon: Curtain Speech" when teaching Alston or Lindert or Ransom and Sutch. You'll like what happens to the class participation index. And the critical thinking, too.

Even if you reject Agee's "model" (choice is not one of his principles) you should not reject the book. It’s a masterpiece of economic historical description and photography. Praise contains for example a section on the economics and biology of "Cotton" (in the Chapter called "Work") that is a model of what Geertz calls "thick description" and Explorations calls “redundant:”

[A]nd this is what the cotton is doing with its time: Each square points up. That is to say: on twig-ends, certain of the fringed leaves point themselves into the sharp form of an infant prepuce; each square points up: and opens a flat white flower which turns pink next day, purple the next, and the next day shrivels and falls, forced off by the growth, at the base of the bloom, of the boll. The development from square to boll consumes three weeks in the early summer, ten days in the later, longer and more intense heat. . . The development of each boll from the size of a pea to that point where, at the size of a big walnut, it darkens and dries and its white contents silently explode it, takes five to eight weeks and is by no means ended when the picking season has begun

Agee 1941 (1988), p. 334

As a teacher, Praise'll make you sit up in other ways: consider “the cruel radiance of what is" in any photograph by Walker Evans; the smells of a hot summer night “in the broken heart of Louis Armstrong” (p. 45). A description of a supple soft and sultry body Agee should not dare to touch. If you want to perk up a sleepy class ask your students to distinguish the definition of "tenant farmer" from that of "sharecropper" by reading out loud with them "A Definition" (pp. 454-8). It’s like Buster Keaton with sound.

I tell my students about Agee's childhood and other artistic achievements, and that's where books and autobiography converge.

I tell them about his Pulitzer Prize-winning novel, A Death in the Family (this gorgeous book is partly autobiographical: Agee's father died in a car crash when Agee was 6 ½ years old; the nostalgic prologue, "Knoxville: Summer of 1915," is itself so perfectly complete it inspired a now famous score by the composer Samuel Barber). I tell them about The Morning Watch, a novella about an annual ritual performed at Agee’s grammar school, St. Andrew's School-Sewanee, in Sewanee, Tennessee, of keeping Christ company on the cross by staying up all night Good Friday. I tell them about the film reviews in The Nation, the late nights with Charlie Chaplin, and screenplays such as The African Queen and my favorite, Night of the Hunter. And I tell them, sometimes endlessly, about Agee's Letters to Father Flye.

Agee was living with his family in Knoxville when his father died. Shortly after the death his mother took him and his sister south to Sewanee, a university town on the Cumberland Plateau, so that James (whom they called “Rufus" at that time) could attend the Episcopal boarding school there, run by the Order of the Holy Cross. Father Flye, bookish and kind, was its Headmaster. By the time Agee’s mother had moved away, Flye had become a parent, a mentor, and a life-long friend to Agee, and many of their letters survive.

My children attend St. Andrew's School. At this point the rest of my students, mostly Chicago born, sit up and listen more carefully. My children have met some of Agee's family. And until recently they lived with their mother on campus, in Father Flye's old house. When I’m there we’ll sometimes walk through the old cemetery, to visit Father and Mrs. Flye’s grave. Sewanee being a writers’ town, it gets more visitors than you’d imagine. There’s another connection. Like Agee and Agee's sister, my father and his brothers were also orphaned. This was decades later, around 1947. Four of the five boys, including my father, eventually solved their problem the way Agee and other orphaned Catholics at that time did: they took up residence at St. Meinrad Seminary, a Roman Catholic Seminary in southern Indiana. Three of the brothers stayed (my father being it may be clear not one of them).

When we speak of the economics of Praise I can’t help but speak of the history of the Letters. Agee's Letters speak of family, and loneliness, and economics, and history, and art, and literature, and race, and spirituality. (They also prove Agee's command of pure English.) Agee wrote often to Father Flye about St. Andrew's, as here in Praise:

I used as a child in the innocence of faith to bring myself out of bed through the cold lucid water of the Cumberland morning and to serve at the altar of the earliest lonely Mass, whose words were thrilling brooks of music and whose motions, a grave dance: and there between spread hands the body and the blood of Christ was created among words and lifted before God in a threshing of triplicate bells (ix).

Nice. But why do I teach Praise?

It’s beautiful and faulty and simple and dense.

It’s counterpoint to neoclassical narratives.

It gets me talking about me and economics and history, and that gets my students talking about them and economics and history.

It was in the 1960s a passport to the South for northern Jews, blacks, and others who went to register blacks for the vote, reading it on the bus. (It may be time for such again.) Former President Jimmy Carter calls it his favorite book in the world.

Fine. But for me and my students Let Us Now Praise Famous Men is a passport to history and to a style of critical thinking worthy of the name. In this rich and freedom-forgetful nation of ours it’s a better cure for hunger than most bread is.

2. Black Metropolis: A Study of Negro Life in a Northern City (The University of Chicago Press, 1945 [1993]), by St. Clair Drake and Horace R. Cayton.

Under the self-imposed rule of freedom and social justice, Roosevelt University prospered. Its mission--- dedicated officially in 1945 by Eleanor Roosevelt---instantly attracted unusual people. Saul Bellow and Martin Bronfenbrenner taught at the Central Y. And Don Patinkin was a student there. Abba Lerner and Walter Weisskopf were professors of economics at Roosevelt, and Mayor Harold Washington and the Bayesian statistician Morris DeGroot were students. The History Department was also distinguished and colorful from the get-go. Christopher Lasch cut his teeth in it. And the tenured historians kept as long as they could a line open for assistant professor of history, Staughton Lynd, though he once flirted with treason by traveling to North Vietnam.

St. Clair Drake is another outstanding example of Roosevelt's mission. Drake, an African American, was a professor of sociology who earned his Ph.D. at the University of Chicago. He worked with W. Lloyd Warner and Robert Park, two leading figures in what used to be called "urban anthropology" and what I would now call, essentially, "the new social history." Drake faced in 1946 the same occupational hurdle W.E.B. Du Bois had faced decades earlier, with one difference: Drake wrote the better book (in time Stanford hired him away from Roosevelt).

Everyone’s heard of Du Bois' The Philadelphia Negro (1899). This is the ground-breaking empirical-ethnographic study he conducted by invitation of the Wharton family, showing nearly comprehensively the microeconometric and legal and sociological realities of northern urban racism (Du Bois was the first African American to study for the Ph.D. in Economics. He began at Harvard before he went overseas (harmlessly, he thought) to the University of Berlin, where he studied with Max Weber and Gustav Schmoller, his advisor. Three terms later, despite a strong letter of support from Schmoller, Harvard would not advance Du Bois to the final stages of the Ph.D. in Economics---not enough time in residence, they said. So Harvard’s History Department took him in and published his dissertation on the suppression of the African slave trade as Volume 1, Number 1 in the Harvard Historical Series. The rest is, you might say, “history.”)

Few today have heard of Drake and Cayton's Black Metropolis. But in 1945, the year it was published, the right people had. Financed by the Works Progress Administration, and introduced by Richard Wright, Black Metropolis is an astonishing portrait of "Negro life" on the South Side of Chicago. Properly speaking its subject is the production, consumption, distribution, and redistribution of wealth and poverty between 12th and 71st Streets, Cottage Grove and Wentworth: its subject, in other words, is the economic history of Bronzeville, "the Black Belt," before and after the Great Migration (379).

Black Metropolis is the second largest Negro city in the world, only New York's Harlem exceeding it in size. It is a city within a city---a narrow tongue of land, seven miles in length and one and one-half miles in width, where more than 300,000 Negroes are packed solidly . . . Peripheral to this Black Belt are five smaller Negro concentrations which are, in a fundamental sense, parts of Black Metropolis. Of Chicago's 337,000 Negroes a bare 10 per cent are scattered among the white population (p. 12).

Drake and Cayton do not employ techniques of formal mathematical modeling. They do not estimate any regression coefficients and they are not in any way bamboozled by tests of statistical significance: they don't do them. But the book is empirical and historical, through the through. It's more comprehensive than The Philadelphia Negro (Du Bois, feeling chaffed by the ubiquitous evangelical element at his black Ohio college, chose to ignore the role of the church in black life). And with better and varied evidence, conveyed in elegant, urban, philosophical poetry, Black Metropolis is high on my list.

Swoop low at evening over a forest of water tanks feeding factories set upon the flatness of a prairie, and you will see Chicago's Three Million--her working men and women streaming toward their houses in the inner city, and her white-collar and professional people outward-bound to their homes on the periphery or in the suburbs. The night shift surges through the gates and the city turns into 133 square miles of lighted pin-points clustered about the lake beneath you (p. 5).

My students--descendents of the second wave of migrants, the farmers and croppers of the Deep South---live in the Black Belt. With Suzette, a black Jamaican, I live close by, on the edge of it, where "Midwest Metropolis seems uneasy about the Negro city growing up in its midst" (p. 12). Still. We shop in the Black Belt. We go (with Deirdre M) for jazz and jerk and late night bar-b-q in the Black Belt. We cheer for the White Sox in the Black Belt. We worship in the Black Belt. And I greet my students in the Black Belt.

For my purposes, then, Black Metropolis is a great book for students. But I think it is great for a lot of people’s purposes. If I'd have had the chance, I'd have tried to get it on Gerschenkron's short list.

Well?

3. Shifting Involvements: Private Interest and Public Action (Princeton University Press, 1981), by Albert O. Hirschman.

An important theme and fact of 20th century economic history is the enormous swelling of the size and shape of government in GDP. Many observers have devoted their energies to answering why---"Why," that is, "the large swelling?" A familiar but less common approach is to ask a counterfactual question, "What would economic (or social or ecological) history be like without the growth of government?" This is the kind of question Coase used to ply his life-long friend Abba Lerner with (Coase recently told me at Roosevelt); Lerner was of course a life-long socialist, open minded and open, David Colander has shown, to market-type thinking.

In Shifting Involvements Hirschman plants as usual an original perspective in these margins.

Essentially, he asks:

“Why do people sometimes devote a great deal of time and energy to the consumption of private goods and then suddenly, even instantaneously, switch gears altogether, away from the consumption of private goods and toward the production of a public good?”

Using anecdotal evidence from important episodes in history (such as the American civil rights movement), and drawing on the philosopher Harry G. Frankfurt's theory of metapreferences, Hirschman strives to elicit more than prove. That’s the virtue of the book, and why I’m recommending it.

Speaking as an economist I admit I’m both attracted and repelled by Shifting Involvements. Economic historical "proof" is a many-headed snake. And Hirschman can sink his teeth into you. But colleagues in economics desire deductive systems built on solid axioms, from ‘more is better’ to ‘completeness.’ They’ve got a point. One of the voices in my head, sometimes two or three, is similarly biased. Yet colleagues in history feel understandably choked off by the utilitarian and mock-solid basis, finding in history multiple causal structures for public and private behavior (if they haven't given up completely on cause and structure or public and private, as many have). I hear that, too.

I guess it’s the rhetorician in me that is attracted to Hirschman's elicitations of argument. Students in my view do not learn often enough the forms of economic historical reasoning that are not directly translatable into cliometrics. Shifting Involvements is a good example of why they should.

Maybe, Hirschman suggests, maybe a March on Washington is possible because the person doing the walking wants to be the kind of person who Marches on Washington. The opportunity cost of the March is in personal terms enormous---prohibitive, we can say, monetarily speaking; and the very idea of the March as a thing-in-itself is improbable, even impossible, for anyone with ordinary "preferences." Still.

Black Montgomery

stopped the bus with a boycott

increasing demand.

Likewise, it may be that the 19th century rise of social work and welfare is importantly connected to a widespread boredom with private life and excessive consumption following the end of war work. And so forth. Maybe.

The autobiography? It’s in the haiku.

4. The Rhetoric of Economics (University of Wisconsin Press, 1985, 1998), by Deirdre N. McCloskey

Like her teacher Alexander Gerschenkron, McCloskey could be neither the Friedman-groupie nor the maverick at the margin. In the late 1970s, while still at the University of Chicago, this leading economic historian discovered her interest in the rhetoric of economics. It wasn’t going to solve her problem at Chicago. But it has since done a lot of good for the rhetoric of economics and other human sciences.

I for one am glad for it. It pulled me away from an increasingly routine job at the Indiana Department of Employment and Training Services, in Indianapolis. And took me to Eastern Iowa! But seriously, best of all, it brought me to Deirdre.

What’s the history of her Rhetoric, and what can you do with it?

In the late Seventies Friedman was at the Hoover Institution, Fogel had moved to Harvard, and George Stigler, though retired, was still setting the tone of departmental discussion. McCloskey was reading philosophy of science again (an interest she developed in graduate school but only casually and up to Popper's Logic). She was now reading Michael Polanyi, Stephen Toulmin, and Paul Feyerabend. She noticed that Stigler's rhetoric was couched in a 1920s positivism applied with a 1950s, McCarthy-like intolerance of disagreement. I know it sounds harsh. But intellectual life can, like the farming life, or the meatpacking life, be that way. Wayne Booth, the eminent rhetorician, invited her to give a talk in the English Department concerning "The Rhetoric of Economics." A little shaky still but she liked it; something important was brewing there. But she couldn’t get Stigler or Becker or Lucas to engage in a rational exploration of their own rhetoric of belief (Tobin complained to me once of a similar problem he had with them. I think he told a lot of people about that). In 1980 she resigned and moved to the University of Iowa.

Iowa named McCloskey the John F. Murray Professor of Economics and Professor of History. Her project was in truth to grow in her understanding of the rhetoric of economics, the art of economic persuasion. She talked less and less about Victorian failure and open fields and daily and excitedly about Aristotle, metonymy, Kenneth Burke, and the tragic tropes of the t-test. Her colleagues in economics—your teachers, perhaps—grew anxious. But by 1982 this leading historian had lectured around the world on her new paper, "The Rhetoric of Economics," and published it in 1983 in the Journal of Economic Literature. An instant cause celebre, the paper was a prelude to her now-classic book of that name and to five additional books on the subject, with sixty or so papers.

The Rhetoric of Economics is a strange contribution to Chicago School Economics. It shows that best practice economics is neither positivist nor monist; that Milton Friedman is not the high priest or tiny demon of positivism, and was not in 1953 when he published the "Essay;" it tries to show that poets and economists, with their leaves and coconuts, do not differ in methodology; that Marxist professors of English and Chicago professors of economics can learn from each other; and that an improved and pluralistic rhetoric of economics will follow the examples of Fogel, Coase, and Friedman.

You don’t have to see eye-to-eye with Deirdre’s economics to get a lot out of this book. My students don’t. I certainly don’t; often enough, I don’t, anyway (though I’ve noticed that the more time Deirdre and I spend together in Bronzeville, the closer our economic ideas become!).

Chapters 1 through 3 teach students to read rhetorically [see “Featured Guests,” BURKEOLOGY, this web site]. Chapters 4 through 6 give detailed examples of ways to do it, pulling the sheets back (gasp!) from Fogel and Coase. Chapters 8 and 9 show students the big payoff of a rhetorical reading (and I do apologize in advance, though only a little, for this transparent profile of my own work): statistical significance, the master trope of empirical economics, is neither necessary nor sufficient for the demonstration of economic or historical significance. Never has been. Never will be. But I know, you think that’s more elicitation of personal probability than it is proof of incontrovertible axiom. Maybe so. But the ball’s in your court. If you’re right, you and your best students will after reading and thinking about our papers (and new book) be able to prove it!

Meantime, three cheers for a great semester.

Steve Ziliak is Associate Professor of Economics at Roosevelt University. His book (with McCloskey), Size Matters: How Some Sciences Lost Interest in Magnitude, and What to Do About It, is forthcoming Spring 2006 with The MIT Press. He is currently at work on a biography of William Sealy Gosset.

BIOGRAPHY ~ HETERODOX ~ RHETORIC ~ FUN ~ FAMILY & FRIENDS ~ MUSIC ~ LECTURES ~ BOOKS ~ NATURE ~ JOIN THE ECONOMIC CONVERSATION