During Canada’s special year of centennial celebrations (1967), John Kenneth Galbraith proclaimed that “If I were still a practising as distinct from an advisory Canadian I would be ... concerned about maintaining the cultural integrity of the broadcasting system and with making sure Canada has an active, independent theatre, book-publishing industry, newspapers, magazines and schools of poets and painters.” Arguably one of Canada’s best-known personalities living outside his native homeland, Galbraith has been a major intellectual force in American liberalism for over half a century. [Photo, courtesy Harvard University/ Jim Kalett]

John Kenneth Galbraith has been an economist, ambassador, professor, editor, activist, and novelist. He is known as the czar, in the early years of World War II, of price controls in the United States, author of a controversial report on the effectiveness of the bombing of Germany, a speech writer for J.F. Kennedy, President of the United States, and author of a book, entitled The Scotch, about his heritage and birthplace, Iona Station, Elgin County, in southwestern Ontario. It proved popular except to the people he affectionately described.

Its unpopularity in Elgin County was the direct result of his sardonic wit and sinewy frankness. He once wrote of his Highland heritage, “If a man didn’t make sense, the Scotch felt it was misplaced politeness to try and keep him from knowing it.” Some have tried to tell Ken Galbraith that he did not make sense as an economist, but books such as The Affluent Society, The New Industrial State, and The Age of Uncertainty (a 13-week BBC TV series and book) made him both a celebrity and the world’s best-read and widely known economist.

Galbraith’s interest in economics began when he was an undergraduate at the Ontario Agricultural College (now the University of Guelph) and he recognized that there was something wrong with a system that produced excellent livestock and excellent crops that could not be sold. In his final year, he investigated the reasons by interviewing tenant farmers: his thesis in 1931 led to a scholarship on agricultural economics offered at the University of California.

There his professors noted his writing skills (as an undergraduate at OAC he wrote a farmer’s advice column for the St.Thomas Times Journal) and he became not only their student but also their scribe for various research projects.

On obtaining a Ph.D. in 1934, he joined Harvard University as an instructor. To further his knowledge on such subjects as economic principles, modern banking, and the economic beliefs of John Maynard Keynes whom he later met when he was granted a fellowship to Cambridge in 1937, he attended lectures given by leading professors. Before going to England, he married Catherine Atwater, a Smith College graduate, and became a U.S. citizen.

In 1939 he was made an assistant professor at Princeton. A year later he was asked to work as an economist in Washington and, in 1941, was named deputy administrator in charge of price controls for the office of Price Administration. “By 1943 we had virtually everything under control,” Galbraith later recalled, to the chagrin of many. Before political pressure forced him to leave the Roosevelt administration in 1943, he admitted that “I reached the point that all price fixers reach – my enemies outnumbered my friends.”

He joined Fortune magazine as a writer and later became an editor, returning to Harvard in 1948 because, as he wrote in his 1981 autobiography, A Life In Our Times, “I continued to believe that I should be at a university, teaching as necessary and writing on my own.”

In 1952 he wrote two books: The Theory of Price Control and the first of a trilogy on economic theory, American Capitalism: The Concept of Countervailing Power, which examined the American free market economy and its control. The book was attacked and Galbraith admitted in his autobiography that “there was ... an erroneous implication in the title and a euphoric tendency in the text.”

Galbraith produced the second volume of his trilogy in 1958. Influencing an entire generation, The Affluent Society was translated into a dozen languages and became an inter national best-seller. In it the 6' 81/2 " scholar examined, with biting candour and wit, the American obsession with overproduction of consumer goods and suggested more effort should be made to provide for such genuine needs as cleaner air, decent housing, and support for the arts.

Once again he was attacked for “an oversimplification of the issues,” a charge also made about the third volume of the trilogy, The New Industrial State, written in 1967. One critic called it “classic Galbraithian heresy” ; another economist described Galbraith as “a very talented journalist but a bad economist.” Galbraith admitted to errors in the third of the series but wryly observed in an interview, “It is not hard to admit errors that are cosmetically wrong. You can get a great deal of psychological pleasure out of saying ‘God, what a broad-minded man you are, Galbraith.’”

Besides writing books, Galbraith became a noted speech writer and political activist when Adlai Stevenson ran for president in 1952. In 1955 he attended a Senate hearing to give evidence on the state of the stock market. A negative comment caused it to drop and a subsequent headline read, “Egghead Scrambles Market.” In 1956 he went to India to take part in a study of its second five-year plan but got home in time to return to the political fray, writing not only on farm policy and economics for Stevenson again but condemning Nixon as vice president.

His political views and clout were further enhanced in 1960 when he not only wrote speeches for John F. Kennedy and, at the convention that nominated JFK for the presidency, was appointed floor manager for delegates west of the Mississippi. Shortly after winning office, Kennedy appointed Galbraith ambassador to India where he developed a close friendship with Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru and where his expertise in agriculture and economics was warmly welcomed. He was, however, critical of his own boss – Secretary of State Dean Rusk – and in July 1963 returned to resume his career at Harvard.

There he continued to lecture, write, make speeches and, in 1964, campaign for Lyndon Johnson’s election. He had, however, serious reservations about America’s growing involvement with Vietnam. He had visited the country at Kennedy’s request while serving as ambassador to India and had reported that he was against the sending of troops to support the incumbent regime. When bombs were dropped on North Vietnam in 1965, Galbraith donned the mantle of an antiwar activist.

Galbraith supported Eugene McCarthy in 1968 and campaigned for George McGovern in 1972 while continuing to teach at Harvard and produce several more books including in 1968, a novel, The Triumph, “a sardonic comment on the fumblings and failures of American diplomacy.” In the fall of 1972, he was invited with two other economists to visit China and, the following year, wrote a slim volume on his experiences. After he retired from Harvard in 1975, the BBC invited him to do a series of 13 TV shows entitled, The Age of Uncertainty, a series also shown in 1977 on CBC, PBS, and other educational stations. It reinforced the public’s perception of him as an economist able to make “technical matters understandable with wit, brio and adroitness” and further added to his celebrity status.

Publishing books, speaking in public and receiving honorary degrees (he has more than 40 of them) have continued. As Peggy Lamson wrote in her 1992 biography, Speaking of Galbraith, he wrote 13 books by 1972 and 15 since, writing in long hand roughly four hours every morning at his home in Cambridge, Massachusetts, his farm in Vermont, or a chalet in Gstaad, Switzerland. He has written five more books since Lamson’s biography, spoken a number of times in Canada where he still visits relatives and continues to comment on economic, social, and political issues of the day with an assurance that infuriates some, titillates others, but challenges all.

Mel James

Universities from around the world have recognized for over 50 years the achievements of the much respected Harvard University economics professor, John Kenneth Galbraith. In 1984, Galbraith, as viewed here, received an honorary Doctor of Letters degree from McMaster University (Hamilton, Ontario) in addition to addressing the graduating class. [Photo, courtesy McMaster Courier]