Worldly Philosopher: The Odyssey of Albert O. Hirschman

by Jeremy Adelman

  Perhaps it was his inability to remember his bootlaces. Perhaps he still had a habit of being dans la lune, as Varian Fry complained. Perhaps he was a bad shot. We will never know why, but Hirschman was pulled from a combat unit. It is also possible that an officer saw some valuable skills in the private. At Camp Roberts, he was tested for language and interpreting abilities, which must have impressed the brass because he was immediately dispatched to the Army’s Specialized Training Program, and there was talk that he was bound for Stanford to learn Japanese. But the idea of having him serve in the Pacific theater soon gave way to another—the Allies were deep into the planning stages for the first assault on Axis Europe, in Italy. He could clearly be more useful there, and his skills recommended him not for combat but for intelligence work. It was roundabout, but Hirschman found himself assigned to the Office of Strategic Services (OSS).

  Hirschman at Camp Roberts, 1943.

  In the fall of 1943 he took the train to Washington for a second time, where he would spend several months hanging around the OSS headquarters waiting for his assignment. Founded in June 1942, the OSS had a mandate to collect and analyze information and to conduct special operations not assigned to other agencies or services. Its director, General William J. Donovan, was still hiring staffers when Hirschman appeared on the doorstep. This was a club Hirschman wanted to join. (Eventually the headquarters would be home to eight future presidents of the American Historical Association and five future presidents of the American Economic Association.) Hirschman thought he could be of use two ways. One was the plotting that went into penetrating the Reich with OSS operatives comprising German and Austrian exiled socialists, communists, and labor activists who could conduct operations behind the lines. The other was the Research and Analysis Branch (RAB), directed by Harvard’s William L. Langer, who fanned out to recruit top minds from the country’s elite universities. This was also a club Hirschman could join. By the spring of 1943, Donovan was taking in German refugees such as Max Horkheimer, Theodor W. Adorno, Herbert Marcuse, Otto Kirchheimer, and Franz Neumann, a major figure among German socialists and author of an influential study of Nazism, Behemoth: The Structure and Prac tice of National Socialism. This “community of the uprooted” included Hirschman’s natural peers. It had the additional allure of allowing foreigners to join the world of the old school tie.6

  Wishful thinking brought personal expectations. Presuming he would stay in Washington and having received a travel fellowship, Sarah joined him from California in late fall 1943. They found a small flat near the zoo, a challenge in a capital swollen with the administrators of the war effort. Idleness afforded the couple some time to visit museums, take long walks, and talk of the future. The dreams of a career in economic intelligence and a home in Washington were not—as Albert and Sarah soon discovered—in the cards. Ten weeks after Sarah arrived in Washington, they learned that Albert was to be shipped out in early February.

  They were stunned. It was the first of a series of blows. But for the moment, they had to deal with imminent separation. The one thing they did decide was to have a baby. If Albert was going to die in Europe, Sarah wanted his child. They spent their remaining days together in the flat and wandering the streets. In late January, shortly before he was called to a naval base in Virginia to head out, they paid one final visit to the National Gallery. Standing before their favored paintings, Albert’s arm around Sarah’s shoulder, they talked about the art, keeping the war at bay. At the end of their visit, Sarah went to the restroom only to discover that she was menstruating. She was not pregnant. She erupted in tears. But with Albert waiting in the foyer, Sarah did not want to compound the mood. She cleaned herself up, wiping away the traces of her anguish; as she emerged she could not tell if Albert noticed. In those final moments together before Albert was sent to his ship, they conspired to be silent about their misfortunes.7

  Albert and Sarah in Washington, DC.

  Sarah packed her bags and went back to Beverly Hills; uncomfortable there, she decided to go to New York, continue her studies in French literature at Columbia University, and wait for the war to end and her husband to return from the front. She moved into International House and immediately went to work on Denis Diderot’s novel, Jacques le fata liste et son maître. There was more news: Sarah learned that the last days in Washington had yielded one hope—she was pregnant after all. The problem now was that the rules of the residence forbade pregnancy and children—presumably because it set a dubious example to other young women. At the beginning, Sarah dissimulated. Among the other women in the residence Sarah quickly made some friends. When she was too tired she would enlist one to fetch her milk and cookies, until one day one of her companions said “You know, Sarah, you have a really nice face, but really you are getting fat! I mean, this idea of getting milk and cookies every night at midnight is not a good idea.” When it became impossible to deny, Sarah and two friends found an apartment near Gramercy Park for a while. As the birth approached, her parents paid a visit to New York to inspect the arrangements; they were not at all pleased at the unusual arrangement for their first—and possibly only—grandchild and prevailed upon their daughter to reconsider. Sarah wrapped up her studies, pulled up stakes, and moved back to Los Angeles to live with her parents. Katia was born in Santa Monica in October 1944. Baby Katia, raised and pampered by the Chapiro clan in a Spanish-style Beverly Hills house, would not see her father for two more years.8

  Albert’s posting brought with it more disappointment. Not only was he not in the RAB, but he would not be working on intelligence on Germany at all. Instead, he was assigned to work with a group of Italians and immediately sent to Algiers aboard a Liberty Ship—by then, the campaign on Europe’s “soft underbelly,” in Winston Churchill’s unfortunate words, had started. Moreover, Private Hirschman found himself laboring as a translator and slipped into a state of undying boredom. There was nothing nail-biting about his service. Hirschman’s hands were filled with books, not a gun; instead of fighting, he spent the war years reading. Before his hurried departure from Washington, he did have enough time to locate a copy of Machiavelli’s The Prince, the sole book he could take with him for his campaign; he thought it a fitting tome for the Allied liberation of Italy—to ruminate on the prospects for a restored republic by reading Italy’s greatest republican thinker. The problem was, Private Hirschman stowed his copy of The Prince in his “B” bag in the hold, so he had to spend the passage to the Mediterranean riffling through the ship’s library, which had been endowed with a collection of tedious detective novels. During the voyage, he also had to put the final touches to the preface of his manuscript, which he did; the hardest part was figuring out how to thank Condliffe with words that conveyed gratitude without “making him the inspiration for my work.” He also thanked Peter Franck, though with a wince, “but it is only fair.”9

  Hirschman spent seven months in Algiers, waiting as the US Army prepared to continue its assault on Italy and then inched its way up the peninsula. Whatever excitement had gone into figuring out how to beat the German and Italian armies in North Africa was long gone by the time Hirschman carried his gunnysack down the gangplank. The desert was turned over to the preparations for the Allies’ first assault on western Europe. The Italian campaign was a proving ground for the OSS’s ideas and practices in the field and were run out of the Secret Intelligence (SI) Branch. Notwithstanding the planning, there was chronic confusion and conflict over the role of intelligence in combat—and it took time, and some fierce fighting on the part of the enemy, for the army to make use of the SI information and analysis—until it hired Max Corvo to coordinate the field operations. The Sicilian-born and Middletown-raised Corvo had a distinct preference for hiring Italian-Americans; field agents had to be Italian to function close or behind the line, he felt. Corvo took few enlisted men into the SI.10

  By then it was clear what the OSS had in mind for Hirschman: to be an interpreter. During the Atlantic crossing he had been detailed as
a French instructor, so he knew that it was his language facility that his officers prized. Hovering around the villa overlooking Algiers where the OSS had set up its base, he devoured Italian and French newspapers and prepared oral reports for his commanders. “I am working pretty well,” he told Sarah a month after his arrival, “of my own initiative, and if this is successful I may have a chance that they might let me continue, and I am not asking for more. I am absolutely free to work here as I wish.” Idleness afforded some time for petites idées; looking out over Algiers’ rooftops from the villa, seeing the city’s laundresses drape their wet linens over the line, Hirschman wondered whether “we have been building houses so that there might be some points to hang the laundry to dry.”11 On the whole, however, playful tidbits were rare; waiting was too anxiety inducing to foster mind play.

  The real action was going on elsewhere. The RAB had dispatched units into liberated territories who sent back Field Intelligence Studies to OSS headquarters, which was run by Rudolf Winnacker, Donald MacKay, H. Stuart Hughes, and a group of “applied historians.”12 The inner circle of OSS men did the brain work. Boredom, war’s gangrene, soon set in and dominated the months in Algeria. “I am feeling a bit like a moron, because my work is so monotonous after a few days and I am not getting out enough.”13 OSS insiders irritated him: “A young American from Harvard whom I met in Washington has recently arrived and I might wind up working with him a bit. But he’s an insignificant guy though convinced enough of his own value. He poses stupid questions that make you want to die (stupid question = questions for which there is no intelligent reply) and rushes suddenly to judge everything with a sovereign tone while ignoring the country around him, its history, and its language.”14

  At first, playing chess helped, and he squared off with a neighboring Austrian sergeant, though by the end of March he complained that “I have lost my chess game, and I absolutely don’t know why.”15 He kept trying to find a way out of his limbo, appealing to officers who expressed an interest in finding meaningful work, only to be told the next day that he would have to wait. At one point, he even caught up with his old friend, fellow Nazi-escapee and LSE student Hans Landsberg, who had moved from the National Bureau of Economic Research to the OSS for the Italian campaign. They dined together one night and Albert spilled his miseries. Landsberg promised to do what he could to help, but to no avail. Albert told Sarah that “I was at first angry with him because I thought he was doing nothing to help me get out of this impossible situation. But the truth is that there is little to be done. One must be armed with patience, but it’s not always easy.” In Montaignesque style he concluded that “I see myself objectively as a ‘case’ and can understand how this experience is terrible for me.”16

  Restless and irritated, he tried to make the best of a miserable situation. One way to cope was to get away. Aside from Landsberg, Hirschman hunted for as many acquaintances as he could, in part for a ticket out and in part for company. He found a French inspecteur de finances, Jean de Largentaye, who had discovered John Maynard Keynes’ General The ory on his own, and “while his English is not very good, he translated the book himself,” and it had been recently published by Payot. Albert “had a sumptuous lunch” with de Largentaye (“served by an Arab boy!”), and explained to him Abba Lerner’s recent insights on public finance; he was so “eager to hear the latest news about economics that I did not have the chance to complement him for the meal.”17 Another economist he tracked down was an associate of Robert Marjolin’s, and he spent five hours with “very intelligent and sympathetic” company.18 And there was also one of France’s most famous Algerians, Albert Camus, whose books, L’Étranger and Le mythe de Sisyphe had appeared in 1942, which Hirschman snapped up at a local bookstore. Camus himself was spending the war years in France; undaunted, Hirschman looked up his brilliant and fiery wife, Francine Faure, who was herself despairing at being separated from her husband. She was the first, but not the last, to note the not unflattering physical resemblance of the two Alberts.

  However, his closest associates were Italians exiled in Algiers who congregated at Umberto Terracini’s house, where Albert spent many evenings discussing the future of Italy now that Mussolini had been toppled. Terracini, a former Communist and friend of Antonio Gramsci’s, had been cooped up with Colorni and others on Ventotene. Freed in 1943, he had left for North Africa.

  It was through Terracini that Hirschman filled in some missing pieces about Eugenio. On Ventotene, a group of prisoners including Eugenio, Altiero Spinelli, and Ernesto Rossi went to work on a manifesto for a postbellum Europe that would eclipse the destructive effects of nationalism by creating a federalist superstructure for all the European states. While a group effort, Rossi composed the final draft of “European Federalism,” wrote it on cigarette paper, and had his wife Ada smuggle the sheets out in the false bottom of a tin box, but it would not circulate until Eugenio later did an extensive revision.19 The nation-state—argued the manifesto—had ceased to be an effective way of organizing community life: its “desire to dominate” must now be placed under the guardianship of a federalist system to ensure the “highest level of freedom and autonomy.” Finished in late summer 1941, what is remarkable is how three prisoners could spend their energy envisioning a peaceful, democratic Europe when signs pointed toward a fascist victory, especially because Panzer divisions had begun to swarm into Russia in June. It is a testimony to their commitment to finding a source of light in very dark times.20

  Eugenio was transferred from the island to an ancient and isolated town on the mainland, Melfi. A few were sent with him, such as Manlio Rossi-Doria and Franco Venturi. Here the conditions were even worse. Ursula could not stand the confinement, and her affections for Eugenio were so depleted that she took their three daughters and went north in April 1943 to join Spinelli and Rossi. By then, the Italian underground was swelling and organizing into political affiliations. The summer of 1942 saw the birth of the Partido d’Azione (PA) in Rome. Known as Actionists, the PA’s founders picked up the Justice and Liberty legacy of the “third way” (terza via) to amalgamate socialism and liberalism. As German police clamped down on the underground, Spinelli left for Switzerland to work with a group of Italian exiles. Ursula joined him there. By early 1944, she was pregnant once more—this time, the baby’s father was Eugenio’s former coauthor, Spinelli. Albert got word of his sister’s paramour and pregnancy from his mother—which left him utterly dispirited. “The old difficulties that you know about,” he told Sarah, “have not been resolved, and this depresses me.” His mother’s letter left him in a “black mood,” for “I must now see that in my subconscious I had eliminated everything that we know, and I have been hoping for the reconciliation between her [Ursula] and Eugenio. But this news buries all these hopes.”21

  Terracini filled in the aftermath. Colorni escaped to Rome in the spring of 1943 with a medical permit and slipped into clandestinity, from which he edited the European program for Partido Socialista di Unità Proletaria (PSUI). With Ursula and Altiero now together with his daughters, Eugenio poured his energies into the socialist underground in Rome. He edited the Ventotene Manifesto, wrote its introduction, and took over the publication of Avanti! which issued the treatise. This done, Avanti! called for a mass mobilization to ensure that a postwar Italy give socialist ballast to European peace. One of his underground tracts, issued in August in 1943, argued that “the Federation must not be a league of states but a republic of all Europeans; the citizens of Europe must participate in its political and administrative activities through direct representatives and not through the medium of their national governments.”22

  Getting this news added to Hirschman’s anxiety to get into the field, behind the inching advance of Allied troops. Italy was the bloodiest of the western fronts. German forces under Field Marshal Albert Kesselring dug into the ridges and hilltops of the Apennines and ground down the Allied advance. Between January and May 1944, it took four major offensives to break the
spine of the Gustav Line, which allowed American troops to liberate Rome on June 4. Florence was free by summer’s end; it took nearly another year for the German armies in Italy to surrender.

  Daily dispatches relayed the advance to Algeria. As American forces neared Rome, Albert grew desperate to catch up with Eugenio. On June 22, Albert went to celebrate his wedding anniversary at Terracini’s home. When he arrived, Terracini pulled him aside with devastating news. The Allied liberation of Italy electrified the resistenza behind the lines; partisans squared off against fascist bands—such as the Black Brigades, formed in the summer of 1944 to bolster German troops. The distinction between combatants and civilians evaporated. Eugenio became one of its victims. On May 28, 1944, a neo-Nazi gang (the Caruso-Koch band) spotted him on the Via Livorno on the Piazza Bologna as he was en route to a meeting of the PSUI’s military command. Two of the thugs approached him and demanded to see his papers; Eugenio shrugged in contempt. The assailants shot him point blank. He died two days later at the San Giovanni Hospital, a week before American troops entered Rome.23