----------------- HES POSTING ----------------- 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. Copyright (c) 2001 by EH.Net. All rights reserved. This work may be copied for non-profit educational uses if proper credit is given to the author and the list. For other permission, please contact the EH.Net Administrator ([log in to unmask]; Telephone: 513- 529-2850; Fax: 513-529-3308). Published by EH.Net (November 2001). 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