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Published by EH.NET (November 2001) 
 
W. Robert Brazelton, _Designing US Economic Policy: An Analytical Biography of Leon H.
Keyserling_. New York: Palgrave, 2001. ix + 181 pp. $65 (hardback), ISBN: 0-333-77575-9.
 
Reviewed for EH.NET by Craufurd Goodwin, Department of Economics, Duke University. 
 
 
Leon Keyserling is a fine subject for an analytical biography. He was a notorious
intellectual anachronism, an unreconstructed remnant of New Deal radicalism set down in
the post-war Keynesian world, a low-tech economist in high places just when high-tech
economics was beginning to hold sway. He was a product of Columbia University
Institutionalism and a devoted disciple of Rexford Tugwell. His relations with the other
major figures at Columbia in his time have not been explored. He went to Capitol Hill in
the 1930s as an aide to Senator Robert Wagner and after the war was made a member of
President Harry Truman's first Council of Economic Advisers, then not the prestigious body
it later became. It is hard to get a measure of Keyserling's influence on policy and
events during his years in office partly because of his own reluctance to cooperate with
scholars of the period. He was certainly very vocal and energetic and he claimed credit
for most policies with which he was associated, from the Wagner Act to the Employment Act.
Most of the senior figures in government viewed him with affectionate amusement, and
occasionally mild annoyance because of his volubility. He repeated often many of Tugwell's
familiar ideas about the importance of balance in the economy, the danger in monopoly, and
the benefits to be gained from planning. But he is best known for a single idea that he
proclaimed day-in, day-out, that al problems can be solved with growth. If you are in a
recession you can grow your way out of it; if you suffer from inflation try the same cure.
It is ironic, considering his stance on the left of the Democratic Party, that Keyserling
may be seen as a pioneer of supply-side economics. Like the ideologues of the Reagan
Revolution, Keyserling insisted that demand management made sense only if it were seen as
stimulating supply.
 
But Keyserling's economic analysis was extremely unsophisticated and he was never able to
engage the macro economists of his time or to develop an intellectual following. During
Truman's first term he was vice chairman of the Council and he chafed under the leadership
of the far more conventional chair Edwin Nourse. Keyserling's brief period of real
influence was in the first two years of Truman's second term when he succeeded to the
chairmanship and before the outbreak of the Korean War. During this short window
intellectuals throughout the government became convinced that monopolies in both product
and factor markets were throttling American productivity and they argued that some
fundamental systemic reforms might be in order. In this environment Keyserling's ideas
were congenial. When the North Korean army marched south, however, such philosophizing
ended and Keyserling and the Council became nearly irrelevant as the economy was put once
more on a war footing. When Eisenhower came to office in 1953 some conservatives among the
Republicans argued that Keyserling had so politicized and discredited the Council that it
should be eliminated. But Eisenhower's choice for the new chair, Arthur Burns,
another product of Columbia Institutionalism, argued successfully that it should be
reformed and retained.
 
After he left office Keyserling continued to write profusely on his old subjects, mainly
under the auspices of something called the "Conference on Economic Progress," but his
influence on policy seems to have been slight. He was a rather bitter man. He had an
exaggerated view of his own importance and believed that others, notably John Maynard
Keynes, had been given undue credit for ideas that were really his. During the 1970s when
much research was
undertaken on economic policy in the Truman administration Keyserling declined to
cooperate and he did not, at that time, follow other Truman aides and deposit his papers
in the Presidential Library. On four different occasions during that period this reviewer
presented papers on Truman's economic policies at the Truman, Johnson, and Kennedy
libraries, and the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, where Keyserling was
present. Unlike most of the other veterans in attendance (for example John Snyder, Averill
Harriman, Charles Murphy, David Bell, Charles Brannan) Keyserling declined to cooperate in
enriching or correcting the record. He seemed to dislike "professors," perhaps because he
failed to complete his dissertation at Columbia.
 
But Keyserling did ultimately deposit materials in the Truman Library and so it seemed
that this book, by a professor of economics at the University of Missouri at Kansas City,
might finally answer the questions about Keyserling that have for long remained
unanswered. Unfortunately it does not. This volume is strange indeed. To begin, the author
seems to be completely unfamiliar with the voluminous scholarship on economics in the
Truman presidency, and even with the literature on the Truman presidency in general. How
can we take seriously a book on the Truman period that does not have in its bibliography
even the great biographies of Truman by David McCullough and Robert Donovan, the latter a
shrewd reporter who covered the whole Truman period and had much to say about Keyserling?
Nor is there mention of Michael Lacey's excellent collection of essays about the Truman
presidency or Francis Heller's volume on economics in the Truman administration (that
actually contains a paper by Keysrling), the foundational work of Barton Bernstein and
William Barber, or even the autobiographical account of his experiences as CEA chair by
Keyserling's nemesis Edwin Nourse. Instead of this abundant secondary literature,
Professor Brazelton turns most often to an unpublished master's thesis!
 
Professor Brazelton tells of his own warm personal relationship with Keyserling, and a
problem may be that he was not able to gain sufficient distance from his subject. But it
seems inexplicable that he used so few primary as well as secondary materials. He does not
appear to have used any of Keyserling's personal papers or the revealing White House files
that are just down the road in Independence. Keyserling's story is told here largely from
his various published documents and the published reports of the CEA - surely very limited
sources for an "analytical biography." The book reads rather like one of the authorized
biographies of famous people in the nineteenth century about whom "never is heard a
discouraging word." At the same time the book is riddled with errors big and small. To
give just some flavor, CEA member Neil Jacoby becomes Jacob, Agriculture Secretary Charles
Brannan becomes Brannon,the Austrian economist Boehm-Bawerk becomes Bahm-Bawerk, the
Brookings Institution becomes an Institute, and even the Council of Economic Advisers is
sometimes misspelled as Advisors. On top of all this, the little book of 181 pages is
priced at $65.
 
It is to be hoped that this work does not stand in the way of a serious biography of Leon
Keyserling, perhaps focusing on his role as standard bearer of Institutionalism in an
increasingly Keynesian world.
 
 
Craufurd Goodwin is editor of the journal _History of Political Economy_ (Duke University
Press) and the book series _Historical Perspectives on Modern Economics_ (Cambridge
University Press). He is working currently on aspects of the history of cultural
economics. A recent book is _Art and the Market_, niversity of Michigan Press, 1999.
 
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