My Years with Ludwig von Mises
Chapter X. His Work and Influence
WHEN FRIENDS talked about my husband, they spoke of him as being “gentle.” He was gentle with me of course—he was a gentleman and he loved me. But, actually, he was not gentle. He had a will of iron and a mind like a steel blade. He could be unbelievably stubborn, but people would not detect that in daily life, for he had excellent manners. He was brought up at a time when Austria was an empire and good manners and self-discipline were not only a prerequisite of the court, but a must for a member of every cultured family. One does not lose good habits in later life, nor did Lu.
He would never sit down with me at mealtime, even on the hottest day, without wearing his jacket. I tried to convince him how comfortable he would be in shirt-sleeves, but he would not listen. One evening, however—it was unbearably hot, one of those humid ninety-degree days we have so often in New York, and we had no air conditioning at that time—I prepared dinner, set the table, put on my most beautiful nightgown, and called him for dinner. He came, as usual with his jacket on, and we started to eat. He did not notice anything until I got up to change the plates. “What are you wearing there?” he asked. I laughed and said, “Don’t you feel how hot it is?” He understood and laughed so hard that he had to wipe his eyes. Then he kissed me, took his jacket off, and for once I had won. But it was not a real victory, for to his last days he never would take his jacket off when he was with other people.
To make him change a decision he had reached was even more difficult. He hated the noise of air conditioners—in those days they were not as quiet as they are now—and he simply refused to have one installed in his studio. Nothing I said would change his mind. I finally had to ask the help of his doctor to convince him that his health would suffer from the heat in our apartment, which—he himself admitted—“was tropically hot in summer and arctic cold in winter.”
Once I spoke to Fritz Machlup about this stubbornness, and he answered: “With a man like Ludwig von Mises you don’t call it stubbornness—you call it character.”
When the doctor advised Lu to give up smoking, I was sorry—truthfully, not for him. I liked to see him with a cigarette, for then he was relaxed and in a good mood. He loved smoking, though it was not a passion. Nevertheless, it was not easy for him to give it up, especially while he worked. Sometimes when I entered his studio I could tell he had been smoking. I understood and would not have said a word, but he felt almost ashamed that the longing for a cigarette could overpower him and break his will.
Lu was so little interested in material things that it was difficult for me to give him a present. But one day I “hit” it. I gave him a subscription to the Metropolitan Opera. In the late 1940s it was very difficult to get a good seat, and only with the help of friends who “had connections” could I get an orchestra seat in the third row. This was still in the old opera house on Broadway. I did not have enough money to buy two tickets, and for more than ten years poor Lu, with something of a heavy heart, had to go alone, until one day he succeeded in getting a second seat.
The opera, our drives to the country, and our long walks were the only diversion and relaxation Lu took from the enormous amount of work he was doing. Other people in their sixties start to take life easier, slow down. With Lu it was just the opposite, and the simple explanation was that he loved his work.
It was a great satisfaction to him when the idea of a society for the free market and individual liberty, which he so often had discussed with Roepke and Hayek, came into being. As a memorandum of the society later explained:
The Mont Pelerin Society was organized in 1947 at an informal meeting of a group of European and American scholars who had become seriously alarmed about imminent threats to the preservation of a free society. The original group consisted of about 40 economists, historians, philosophers and journalists, invited, at the suggestion of F. A. Hayek and W. Roepke, by a group of men in Switzerland who shared concern about these problems. The participation of sixteen Americans was made possible by a donation of a similar American group. After ten days discussion of the most burning topics, at a place near Vevey called Mont Pelerin, the group decided to constitute itself into a permanent association for the study of these problems and to add gradually to its numbers by election of other persons holding the same basic beliefs.
Lu was one of the “founding fathers” of the society. He attended the first meetings without me, but in later years I usually went with him. The meetings were held in the beginning of September, so we combined them with our annual vacation and spent the summer in Europe. I loved the Mont Pelerin meetings. They were not only intellectually and spiritually stimulating, but were also enjoyable social affairs. Held in a different country each year, they were beautifully arranged for many years by our good friend, Dr. Albert Hunold, the society’s first secretary, and later by Ralph Harris, the indefatigable, always good-humored, diplomatic successor for this difficult task.
Going through the Mont Pelerin reports, I have discovered that Lu delivered only four papers to the society, one at Bloemendaal, Holland, in 1950, one in Berlin in 1956, the third in Princeton in 1958, and the last at Turin, Italy, in 1961. This does not mean that he was not heard from during other meetings. He participated in all discussions without any notes. One of his frequent quotes was from Luther: “Eine Rede soll keine Schreibe sein.” (“A speech is not an essay.”)
These meetings were rather strenuous for Lu. Everyone wanted a discussion with him, or at least to share his company during a meal. He was in the conference room all day long. But whenever a discussion or a speech bored him, he took out one of the little scraps of paper he used to carry with him and started to write. People who watched him must have thought he made notes, but he wrote nothing but irregular rows of figures, and once in a while he added them up. They must have been meaningless, and I considered them a sort of doodling, but I never asked him about it.
The Mont Pelerin meetings were important to Lu. He met old friends, made new ones, and from all over the world streams of thought flowed in, unheard and undiscussed before. Friends like Jacques Rueff, Louis Baudin, Ludwig Erhard, Hayek, Machlup, Helmut Schoeck, Haberler, Roepke, Gaston Leduc, W. H. Hutt, and Rougier met and had the opportunity for long debates. And all of these famous scholars were united in their dedication to human freedom.
Once in a while, however, someone—in Lu’s opinion—must have taken a crossroad or made a wrong turn. I remember a Mont Pelerin meeting that took place in Stresa. I sat next to Lu in the conference room listening to Machlup read a paper. Suddenly, I noticed Lu moving. I looked at him and saw that he was very excited; he seemed shocked by something Machlup was saying. It was near the end of the speech.
When we got up and went out, Machlup joined us, saying some pleasant, conventional words to me, putting his arm around my shoulder. When Lu saw this, he pulled me away from Machlup. “I don’t want you to talk to him,” he said. “I don’t want you ever to talk to him again.” He was so excited that I became frightened, gave Machlup a sign, and stayed behind with Lu. We went to our room, and I saw that Lu was really unhappy about Machlup. “He was in my seminar in Vienna,” Lu said, “he understands everything. He knows more than most of them and he knows exactly what he is doing.”
It was a hard task for me to make Lu forget and agree to see Machlup again. Machlup may have become an intellectual apostate, but he never changed his feelings of personal devotion to his beloved teacher. Two years later, when he and his wife, Mitzi, came up one day for tea, Lu really had forgiven and forgotten, and there was the same friendly atmosphere that had existed in former years.
More amusing may be the little story Dr. Albert Hahn told me at one of the Mont Pelerin meetings. “The other day,” said Hahn, “I was asked ‘What really is the difference between Haberler and Mises? They both came from Austria, from the same university, from the same school of thought.’ I answered: ‘Haberler says “Tout comprendre c’est tout pardonner.” [“To understand everything means to pardon everything.”] Mises says “Tout comprendre c’est rien pardonner.” [“To understand everything means to pardon nothing.”]’” Then Hahn added: “And of some economists you might say ‘Rien comprendre c’est rien pardonner.’ [“You can’t pardon something if you don’t understand anything.”]”
At a 1953 Mont Pelerin meeting in Seelisberg, Switzerland, the wife of T. Howard Pew asked me one morning to do some shopping with her, which I did. In the course of the conversation she told me: “You know, Margit, I ought to be very angry with your husband, but, of course, I am not.” I asked, “What is the matter, Mrs. Pew, what has happened?” She replied, “It was in 1949. I wanted so much to take a cruise with my husband, and finally he agreed. For months I had been looking forward to this cruise, for I knew I would have him all to myself for two weeks. And what happened? On the night of the departure he went out and bought Human Action. We boarded the ship, he started reading, and that was the last I got to see of him. He never stopped reading until we came back to New York. That was my cruise.”
One day during the meeting in Turin, Italy, we were invited by Italy’s President Luigi Einaudi, who was a colleague and good friend of Lu’s, to visit his summer house. The first thing for Lu—as usual—was to have a look at the library, and when he noticed all the familiar names of the famous economists, he said, “What a rare occasion to see all economists together in one corner.”
The meeting in Turin had been arranged by Professor Bruno Leoni, who for some time was secretary of the Mont Pelerin Society. A gifted scholar and professor of law, Leoni headed the Department of Political Science at the University of Pavia and shared Lu’s views on economics, the free market, and human liberty. Lu felt it deeply, as a great tragedy, when Bruno Leoni was brutally murdered in November, 1967.
After 1965, Lu knew it would be too strenuous for him to attend further Mont Pelerin meetings. He was especially sorry to miss the meeting in Japan, for in the early thirties he was offered a chair at one of the most important universities in Japan, and he then had promised me he would never go to Japan without me. Now—we could not go, even together.
But there was an even more important reason for him not to attend further conferences of the Mont Pelerin Society. He believed that the society’s policy on admission of new members was not consistent with its original statement of principles.
The members of the society who came through New York never failed to visit Lu: Hayek, the Roepkes, Rueff, Hunold, Hutt, Arthur and Barbara Shenfield. They often continued their discussions at our home.
Rebecca West and her husband Henry Maxwell Andrews also came to call on us. I did not know at that time that her son, the writer, Anthony West, called H.G. Wells his father. I knew only that it was taboo to talk of Wells in Rebecca’s presence. I had read almost everything she had written, and I thought her report about the war trials in Nuremberg was one of the finest pieces of journalism I knew. I admired her greatly. She had indescribable charm and was every inch a lady. Another reason I liked her so much—I confess it frankly—was her outspoken and genuine admiration for Lu.
Of all the Mont Pelerin members, we most frequently saw Frederick Nymeyer, who lives in Chicago and is an enthusiastic and dynamic follower of Lu’s ideas. Fred Nymeyer first wrote to Lu in 1946, when Nymeyer was still business counsellor for many big business firms and had to travel a great deal. His acquaintance with Lu’s books changed Nymeyer’s life. On January 12, 1951, he wrote to Lu: “As you know I have resolved to ‘have a fling’ in the publishing field, and I am interested in trying it out on Boehm-Bawerk. If I have any luck at all, I shall be interested in expanding the endeavor in order to provide people in this country with the whole framework of ideas with which you and associates of the same ‘school’ work.”
He started his new enterprise with a campaign for a speech Lu gave at the University Club in New York on April 18, 1950, “Middle-of-the-Road Policy Leads to Socialism.” This speech was published in the Financial and Commercial Chronicle on May 4, 1950, under a title Lu did not approve of. Nymeyer sent out hundreds of letters along with a pamphlet of the lecture text under the original title to awaken the public to the danger of interventionism. Nymeyer’s first great enterprise, however—an enterprise that led to the founding of the Libertarian Press in South Holland, Illinois—was publication of a translation of Boehm-Bawerk’s Capital and Interest, for which Lu had recommended Hans Sennholz and George Huncke as the ideal translators.
The correspondence between Lu and Fred Nymeyer was frequent, detailed, and extensive. Nymeyer, who in the fifties came regularly to New York once a month, never failed to take us out for dinner so he could talk quietly and at length with Lu. Being the gentleman he is, he had to take us home to our door by taxi and convince himself with his own eyes that we were safely indoors. While Lu was in the hospital in September, 1973, Fred Nymeyer wrote me a few kind words almost daily to help me keep up my courage. He, just like Lu, could never talk about his feelings.
In 1948, the Volker Fund, through the intervention of Leonard Read and Larry Fertig, agreed with New York University to underwrite Lu’s seminar. H. W. Luhnow, president of the Volker Fund, and the two brothers Cornuelle, who worked with Luhnow for years, took a great interest in Lu’s ideas and teachings. Besides providing the funds for the New York University seminar, the fund arranged other seminars for Lu. The 1952 seminar in California, the June, 1954, Conference on Economics and Freedom sponsored by Wabash College (Indiana), and a 1956 seminar at Chapel Hill, North Carolina, were made possible by the fund’s contributions. The fund also helped Lu to get a book by Louis Baudin translated and published. (Professor Baudin had spent his childhood in Peru, where his father was a French diplomat.) This book, originally titled L’Empire Socialiste des Incas, was brought out five years later by Van Nostrand under the title A Socialist Empire: The Incas of Peru. Lu considered the book to be very valuable, and he spent much time and effort to get it published. He also wrote a foreword to it.
The Volker Fund went out of existence in 1964. With the help of other foundations, Larry Fertig, who since 1952 had been on the Board of New York University, kept Lu’s seminar going until 1969.
September 14, 1949, must have been V-day in Lu’s life, for this was the day Human Action was published, and though we were in the Berkshires and spent the day as usual, hiking and sightseeing, we both felt its importance. All through the years, from the day Human Action came out, Lu had the book always near him. Almost daily he took it up, read a few words here, a passage there. Had he done so before a speech or before his lectures, I certainly would have understood. But, with his wonderful memory, Lu must have remembered every word he wrote.
I never found an explanation. “Why didn’t you ask him?” one might say. I could not. Everyone has in his heart and in his mind a certain guarded territory that should stay untouched and sacrosanct, even to a marriage partner. A question at the wrong time may mean trespassing and should be avoided. Nevertheless, for twenty-five years I tried to find the reason for Lu’s constant rereading of his own book. It was not vanity or pride; he was too humble for that. And never would he read his book in the presence of other people. With me it was different. I was as much a part of him as were his eyes, his mouth, his hands.
In January, 1950, Professor Hans Kelsen was in New York and became ill. He called us, and we went to see him in the Roosevelt Hotel. In the course of the conversation, he said to Lu: “You know, Mises, one thing bothers me already today.” “What’s that?” asked Lu. “That after your death the Austrians will define you in all biographies as one of theirs.”
In 1950 Lu and I travelled to Peru on the invitation of Pedro Beltran. This was a lecture tour sponsored by the Banco Central de Reserva, of which Pedro was chairman of the board. Pedro Beltran, who opposed the government’s policy of interfering with the freedom of elections due later that year, realized his activities might lead to his having to resign from the bank. So he delayed writing to Lu, and we had no idea whether we could make the trip or not. Finally, on March 16,1950, Pedro was able to write to Lu confirming the invitation for March 31. Lu lectured on “Plans for Economic Unification” at the University Nacional Mayor de San Marcos de Lima.
These two weeks in Peru were very exciting, for Pedro Beltran was forced to resign (April 8, 1950) as president of the Banco de Reserva. It also was a very strenuous time for Lu. Besides his regular lectures, he had to attend many official luncheons, meet many new people, answer many questions and give frequent interviews to the press. On top of that we were shown everything that was worthwhile seeing in Lima and its surroundings. At the end of the trip we were both exhausted and glad to get back to New York. Nevertheless, two days after our return Lu made a speech at the University Club (“The Economics of the Middle-of-the-Road Policy”).
Many of the previous and following summers we spent in Seefeld, Austria, which is very near Innsbruck. We stayed in a charming hotel built right after the war with the help of the Marshall Plan. Every room had a porch, where breakfast was served in the morning with the view of the Austrian Alps. With a chairlift we could go up 300 meters to the Gschwandkogel, a mountain with a restaurant and a sun terrace. Usually, we walked the way back, and on some days we went up to the Wildmoosalm, 1300 meters high. On the wide, green meadows we saw nothing but cows, grazing and chewing incessantly, watched over by a very young, beautiful girl who was friendly and talkative and who said she never felt lonely! Seefeld had so many possibilities that we could make a different excursion every day. In later years the place became so crowded and overrun by tourists that we did not like it any more. Traffic was so heavy and it became so dangerous crossing the streets that Lu one day advised me: “Cross the streets only when you can either follow a woman with a pram or be behind a priest. In both cases nothing ever will happen to you.”
In 1953, after a few weeks in Seefeld, we left Innsbruck for Rome, by train. The conductor told us that at 9 P.M. we would be in Verona, remaining there for an hour and fifteen minutes. “That gives us time,” said Lu, “to go into town and see where Romeo and Juliet lived.” I was amazed at this. I never would have dared to do it; I would have been much too afraid to miss the train.
When we arrived in Verona, the conductor locked our compartment and, as usual, we took a bus that took us to the center of town. We not only saw the house of the Capulets, but also the Piazza Bra (“Main Center”) and the famous amphitheater. All the coffee houses were crowded, people sitting in the streets, sipping their white vermouth or drinking a demitasse of strong, sweet, black coffee. Crowds came out of a movie house; the streets got more and more jammed; and I started to get nervous. Lu flagged a taxi, and we made it in time for our train and our friendly conductor. We travelled all night, and the next morning we arrived in Rome, blanketed by a heavy fog.
We stayed in the Hotel de Ville, one minute away from the Piazza Trinita dei Monti, its lovely church and the beautiful broad staircase that leads to the Fontana della Barcaccia on the Piazza di Spagna. Wherever we looked there were women selling flowers.
Lu was a wonderful guide. He had been in Rome before, and he showed and explained everything to me. We went to the Pantheon; we saw the tombs of King Humberto, King Emanuelo II, and Rafael.
On August 24 Lu saw Einaudi, and in the evening we had dinner at Carlo’s, an elegant place frequented by many well-dressed people. To my great amusement, I discovered a bidet in the ladies’ restroom!
The next day we made an excursion to the Castle Gandolfo, the Pope’s summer residence, and we passed the Anzio beachhead. Until then, I never realized how near it is to Rome. In the evening we had dinner at Alfredo’s, a must at that time for every visitor to Rome. Alfredo’s specialty was noodles and maccaroni. The owner himself prepared them, mixed them, whipped and beat them with a golden spoon and a golden fork, and only after this imposing ritual was the waiter allowed to give everyone his portion.
That night we walked back to the hotel, over the Piazza Augustus, beautiful in the moonlight shining on the tomb of Augustus. We followed the Corso to the Piazzo del Popolo and back to the Piazza de Spagna, where we climbed 132 steps to the little church next to our hotel.
On August 27 it was raining so hard that we could not get out of the hotel. Part of the wall of the Vatican had tumbled, the lights and telephone were out of service, the post office was flooded. In the afternoon, when we could go out, the shops in the streets and the windows in the houses were all lit by candles, adding to the somewhat small-town impression we got walking through Rome’s narrow streets.
One day we visited the American Library. At that time Mrs. Clare Booth Luce was the American ambassador to Italy. Lu was shocked: not a single book by a libertarian author was on the shelves.
We stayed in Rome two weeks, and it would have been one of the happiest and most beautiful trips we ever made, if Lu had been feeling better. He had stomach trouble all the time, and this frightened me so much that I could neither eat nor sleep. Only a year later, on a lecture trip, was I to learn what was wrong with him.
Lu was constantly working, but he never felt disturbed when Gitta, who at that time was still living in New York, came to see us with Chris, her little son. Chris and Lu had a very close relationship. Chris used to march right into Lu’s study, and the best toy he knew was Lu’s library ladder, which he climbed up and down perhaps twenty times in a row, Lu closely observing him, catching him in his open arms, both enjoying themselves enormously. Later Lu might take a book with pictures of foreign cities and explain them to Chris until I came in to take him out, for I knew Lu needed his time. Once in a while Lu took time off from his work to go with Chris to the Metropolitan Museum, where he showed him the armor and other collections interesting to a little boy.
A few years later we were visiting London. At the time, Chris was a boarding student at King’s School in Canterbury. The day before school vacation started parents were invited to attend a student performance of Macbeth. Don and Gitta decided we would all drive out to Canterbury so we could see the show and visit the beautiful cathedral. Chris was overjoyed when we arrived, and we asked him what part he played in Macbeth. Proudly he answered, “I am a knight.” Lu and I wondered whether we would recognize that knight among all the other fighters. But we did discover him. A huge beard was plastered on his rosy cheeks; heavy, high boots covered his legs; and in his hands he held something like a weapon. It was not only fun to see him, it was interesting to observe the intelligent way the English schoolmaster had produced his Shakespeare with these young actors, and it was really enjoyable to hear their excellent pronunciation.
We saw Chris afterwards—still in beard and boots—and we arranged for him to drive home with us the next morning. When we met Chris the next morning, he was still in his high boots. He could not get them off, so he had to sleep with them and wait for his father to help him.
In later years I often wondered why Lu did not talk about serious problems with Chris. I once asked him, and he said, “I am not going to influence him. As soon as he is ready, he will start asking questions.”
In 1954, Wabash College, with the help of the Volker Fund, arranged the Conference on Economics and Freedom. Lu shared the platform with Professor Friedrich August Lutz of Zurich and Professor George William Keeton of London University. Lu’s subject was “The Market and the Role of Saving.” We made the 870-mile trip to French Lick, Indiana, by car, and on June 15 Lu gave his first lecture.
I remember this summer so well because the second day after our arrival in Indiana Lu got seriously ill. I had to call the doctor at night. He had to give Lu morphine to ease his pain. But the following day Lu continued his lecture, and again he had a very serious attack, caused, as we then knew, by the gall bladder. Fred Nymeyer, who had heard of Lu’s illness, flew in from Chicago, ready to help if necessary. Every day Lu delivered his lecture in spite of pain and medication, and he had to go to bed immediately afterwards. It was a terrible ordeal for him, and the drive back to New York was an ordeal for me. Back in New York, it took time and many medical consultations before Lu was admitted to the Harkness Pavilion to be operated on.
His surgeon, Dr. David Habif, proved to be not only a first-class surgeon, but also a good psychologist and a warm, feeling human being. Nowadays people talk so much about the changed relationship between physicians and patients, with doctors coming more and more under attack. It is not my task to defend them, but I have to say that Dr. Habif earned my greatest admiration, which was shared by Lu after he recovered.
Lu was never a good patient. A hospital meant confinement, and his spirit would not take it. The third day after the operation Dr. Habif noticed that Lu rested quietly only when I was with him; he dismissed the private nurses and ordered the head nurse to show me everything I could do for Lu. The doctor himself came every morning before he started operating, and he paid Lu another visit at night before leaving the hospital. I remember one evening—it was very hot and humid and Lu was perspiring profusely—when Dr. Habif came in. He examined Lu, and without saying a word, he went to the drawer, took out a clean gown and changed Lu, never calling for a nurse.
Lu recovered very slowly. He had been in the hospital three weeks when Dr. Habif told me: “I want you to take your husband home tomorrow.”
“Doctor,” I said, “how can I? He is still draining.” “Never mind,” the doctor answered, “you can do what is needed. You’ll keep him home for a week, and whether he wants to get out of bed or not, you pack everything, have the car at the door, and take him to the Poconos. I give you my word, in three days he will be all right.”
I did what the doctor advised, and it worked like a miracle. Lu started walking the second day in the country, and after a week he was completely well and felt better than he had felt in years.
The months following his illness Lu wrote constantly. He wrote articles for The Freeman and for Dr. Howard E. Kershner’s Christian Economics—Kershner never could get enough contributions from Lu—and he wrote several German articles for his friend, Dr. Volkmar Muthesius, in Frankfurt, whose monthly magazine, Freiheitliche Wirtschaftspolitik, Lu thought to be an excellent contribution to freedom of thought.
In 1961 Lu praised Dr. Muthesius in “Foreign Spokesman for Freedom,” an article in The Freeman (March, 1961):
The great catastrophes that befell Germany in the first part of our century were the inevitable effect of its political and economic policies. They would not have happened at all or they would have been much less pernicious if there had been in the country any noticeable resistance to the fatal drift in the official policies. But the characteristic mark of Germany in the age of Bismarck as well as later in that of Ludendorff and Hitler was strict conformity. There was practically no criticism of the interventionist economic policies and still less of inflationism. The great British economist Edwin Cannan wrote that if anyone had the impertinence to ask him what he did in the Great War, he would answer “I protested.” Germany’s plight consisted in the fact that it did not have, either before the armistice of 1918 or later, anybody to protest against the follies of its monetary and financial management. Before 1923 no German newspaper or magazine ever mentioned, in dealing with the rapidly progressing fall in the Mark’s purchasing power, the boundless increase in the quantity of banknotes printed. It was viewed as un-German not to accept one of the “loyal” interpretations of this phenomenon that put all the blame upon the policies of the Allies and the Treaty of Versailles.
In this regard conditions in Germany certainly changed. There is in Germany today at least one monthly magazine that has both the courage and the insight to form an independent judgment on the economic and social policies of the government and aims of the various parties and pressure groups. It is the Monatsblaetter fur Freiheitliche Wirtschaftspolitik, edited by Doctor Volkmar Muthesius and published by the Fritz Knapp Verlag in Frankfurt. Excellent articles written by the editor and a carefully selected group of external contributors analyze every aspect of contemporary economic and social conditions.
Doctor Muthesius and his friends are unswerving supporters of free trade both in domestic and in foreign affairs. They reject the lavish bounties doled out to agriculture at the expense of the urban population, the immense majority. They are keen critics of the cheap demagogy of the government’s alleged anti-monopoly campaign. They unmask the dangers inherent in the privileges granted to the labor unions. . . . They prefer the Adenauer regime to the only possible alternative, a cabinet of Social-Democrats, but they do not close their eyes to the shortcomings of the Chancellor’s policies. And they are not afraid of repeating again and again that it is only thanks to the policies of President Eisenhower that West Berlin is still free from Soviet rule.
A periodical that openly and without any reservations endorses the free enterprise system and the market economy, this is certainly a remarkable achievement in the classical land of socialism whether imperial or social-democrat or nationalist.
Muthesius, well known and appreciated for his writings on economics and his editorial work, is an enthusiastic Goethe scholar, and Mrs. Muthesius, born in Weimar and a descendant of the Goethe family, shares this interest.
Besides the work mentioned above, Lu was supervising the new Yale edition of The Theory of Money and Credit, and he had started to work on a new book, which was to be published by Van Nostrand, The Anti-Capitalistic Mentality.
Another seminar, sponsored by the Volker Fund, was held in Chapel Hill, North Carolina, in 1956. This Conference on Free Enterprise, Freedom and the Good Society took place September 5-14, and had been arranged by Clarence F. Philbrook, a longstanding friend of Lu’s. It was meant mainly for economists and other scholars. Armen A. Alchian, professor of economics at the University of California, and Bertrand de Jouvenel, president of an economic research organization in Paris and a well-known writer, participated in the lectures. Lu spoke about “The Epistemological Problems of Economics.”
The Anti-Capitalistic Mentality appeared in 1956 and got excellent reviews. On October 19, 1956, David Lawrence reprinted the book almost in full in U.S. News and World Report. Lu had known nothing of this beforehand, and I still remember his surprise when I brought him the mail and the magazine with the headline on the front page: “‘What’s Behind the War on Business’ as revealed by Ludwig von Mises, World Famous Economist.”
In December, 1956, Lu received a note from Van Nostrand: “You may be interested by the attached indication of interest behind the iron curtain.” This note showed an order for The Anti-Capitalistic Mentality from a bookstore in Moscow.
Mention of the Russians reminds me of an incident that happened in 1959. Fortune magazine, commenting on a lecture by Professor Nathan Reich, wrote:
Communism has had no more fierce theoretical opponent than the Austrian economist Ludwig von Mises, now in New York. Nevertheless, Communists may some day erect a monument to him—that is, if they adopt a suggestion made by the chief adviser to Poland’s State Planning Council, Professor Oscar Lange. The story of Lange’s paradoxical tribute to von Mises was told recently, in 1959, by Economics Professor Nathan Reich in a lecture to the young ladies of Hunter College in New York. “In 1922,” Reich recounted, “five years after the seizure of power by the Bolsheviks, von Mises published a devastating attack on the economics of Marxism in which he exposed its lack of any rational substitute for the functions of the market and the pricing process. Mises argued that if the economic system is to function rationally—that is in accordance with the free choices of consumers—it must have an institution which would constantly and quickly register consumer preferences.
“While the run-of-the-mill socialist politicians could airily dismiss von Mises’ challenge as another attack of a bourgeois economist, Lange could not fail to appreciate the relevance of von Mises’ challenge—especially so since it came at a time when the new men in power were floundering helplessly in search for some workable substitute for the private market in their new society: they found no such blueprint in the voluminous Marxian literature.
“Like a faithful soldier in the cause of socialism, Lange took up the challenge. Like a good professor, he sat down and wrote a book in which he attempts to reconcile freedom of consumers’ choice and other attributes of a market economy with the concept of over-all socialist state planning. The challenge itself compelled the socialist economists to acknowledge the problem and do some more homework on the whole subject of direction of economic activity in a socialist society. By hurling that challenge in the faces of the socialist theorists, Mises performed a useful service to the cause of socialism.”
When, in 1956, Lu got the William Volker Distinguished Service Award, he got many congratulations. I have two files full of letters from all parts of the country. Chancellor H. T. Heald, New York University, wrote to him on June 21, 1956, as follows: “I was delighted to read that you have won the $15,000 William Volker Award for your distinguished service as a scholar and teacher. The award is recognition of your demonstrated capacity for leadership in your field and of course also redounds to the credit of New York University. Please accept our sincere congratulation.”
When I once told Lu: “Lu darling, even you have to agree, you are famous.” He smiled and answered: “You can recognize the importance of an author only by the frequency of references to his work by other scholars written at the end of a page—under the line.” “Isn’t it remarkable,” he told me on another occasion, “if a writer copies something from one book, they call it plagiarism—if he takes material out of several books, he is doing research.”
It was in 1955 that George Koether had the idea that a bust should be made of Lu for posterity. He spoke to his good friend Nelly Erickson, a sculptress, who works mostly with wood and marble. George had seen her portrait busts and he felt she would be enthusiastic about doing the work. Nelly was enthusiastic about the idea, but George told her: “There is one problem. Dr. von Mises is a very busy man; I must first get his permission and see whether he is willing to have it done.”
So George invited Nelly and my husband for lunch, and Nelly told Lu that she could do the work in six one-hour sessions. Lu was horrified, and he told her he could not spare that much time. But Nelly was persistent: “I will work while you work at your desk; I won’t disturb you at all.” Finally he agreed, and one or two days later they started. She put her armature on rollers and pushed it around the desk, never talking to him, never disturbing him; he never really posed. But one day she had to come near to him, to take measurements with her calipers. And suddenly his face, with the beautiful complexion he always had, got dark red. It embarrassed him terribly that a strange woman should come so near to his face and touch him.
When he came home that night and told me about his “adventure,” I felt I had to see the woman who stayed for hours around my husband and had to touch his face to be able to work. So the next day I went to his office in Gallatin House to meet Nelly, and immediately we became the best of friends. I liked her; I liked the bust; but I asked her to change the hair, which she did. When the bust was finished, my husband looked at it approvingly, smiled, and said slowly, “Yes . . . Yes.” He obviously was pleased. Nelly took the bust and worked at home on the details. Then she cast it in plaster in her studio and took it to the foundry, where it was cast into bronze by the lost-wax process, the same process the old Greeks used centuries ago, the only true and good reproduction for portraits.
At a dinner party George Koether presented the bust to my husband. It has its place of honor in our living room, a fresh rose or a carnation always next to it.
Lu took great interest in Dr. J. B. Matthews, the well-known anti-Communist. During the 1950s and early 1960s, Matthews and his wife, Ruth, often included us in their parties, which were gatherings for many conservatives. For a brief period in the 1930s Dr. Matthews had been a “fellow traveler,” a term he popularized when he became a staff member of the House Committee on Un-American Activities. At a turning point in his life, J. B. wrote in a moving letter of gratitude to Lu how much he was influenced by Lu’s writing. He fought the socialist trends in the United States until his death in 1966. Over the years, Ruth became one of my best and most loyal personal friends.
Among the many friends we had and kept for a lifetime was Sylvester Petro, for years professor of labor law at NYU, now director of Wake Forest Institute for Labor Policy Analysis in Winston-Salem, North Carolina. We saw Syl and his wife, Helen, frequently, and I remember well that, wherever Syl lived, he was always working—trying to make the walls of his studio soundproof!
I asked Syl one day when and how he met Lu for the first time. This was his reply:
Lu and I first met, I believe, in 1951 or 1952. The occasion of the meeting was a letter of appreciation which I had written to him about Human Action. I told him in that letter that I had never encountered such a work and thought it should easily rank among the greatest writings of mankind. . . . The main things that attracted me to Lu were the virtually superhuman qualities of intellect, of judgment, and of wisdom that he possessed in such extraordinary abundance. I have done my fair share of reading in the classics, in logic, in philosophy, in epistemology, in law, in economics, in social theory, in politics and all the rest. In spite of this rather wide reading, Lu’s work seemed to stand out sharply and brilliantly. It was on a different level from anything I had ever read before. Even Adam Smith’s great work, The Wealth of Nations, compared with Lu’s book, Human Action, seemed primitive and elementary. After reading Human Action, I read every other book of Lu’s that I could get my hands on. Those that I could not buy, I borrowed. Shameful as it is for me to say so, I think I even stole one—that is to say I never returned it to the person from whom I had borrowed it.
Lu was on excellent terms with Syl, and on February 26, 1957, Lu—to the excitement of the class—substituted for Syl in the Law School when Syl was on another important assignment.
Another example of Lu’s influence is Anthony Fisher, who founded institutes for economic research in London, Vancouver, B.C., Los Angeles, Amsterdam, and, recently, in New York. “All my efforts,” he once wrote me, “originally stem from Lu’s teachings, writings and activities. Ideas have consequences.”
It would not have been astonishing—with all the admiration and the many honors he received in the course of time—if Lu had changed. But he never did. He stayed as simple and humble as he was when I first met him. One day I told him: “You pay so little attention to human beings, it is only history that really interests you.” “How wrong you are,” he answered. “Your presence means much more to me than any event in the past.” Yes, he did love me.
Human Action and The Anti-Capialistic Mentality were translated into Spanish by Joaquin Reig, a lawyer who lives in Madrid. As soon as Reig read a Hazlitt article about Human Action in Newsweek, he got in touch with Lu and met him personally for the first time at the Mont Pelerin meeting in Kassel, Germany. From that day on a warm friendship developed, based on fealty to the same ideals.
In Stresa, during the 1965 Mont Pelerin meeting, Reig once spoke to Lu about monopoly and Rothbard’s Man, Economy and State, which had been published in 1962. Reig directed Lu’s attention to the fact that Rothbard, one of Lu’s most able and admiring pupils, did not completely agree with Lu’s analysis of monopoly. Lu replied: “I would subscribe to every word Rothbard has written in his study.”
About this Reig told me: “That was such a generous statement of Ludwig von Mises, to say that one of his own students had exposed one of his own ideas better than he himself had been able to do it, that my admiration for this man jumped sky-high.”
Rothbard became the leader of many young American followers of the Austrian School. Men like Jean Pierre Hamilius (Luxembourg), one of the ablest defenders of Lu’s teachings and editor of the Mont Pelerin Quarterly, Toshio Murata (Japan), Walter E. Grinder (U.S.), and George Roche (U.S.) are other notable adherents of the Austrian School.
In addition to our four trips to Mexico and our flight to Peru, we also went to Argentina, Guatemala, and Costa Rica. The trip to Buenos Aires—in June, 1959—was especially exciting, as it took place immediately after the dictatorship of Peron had ended. The country was in political turmoil. We arrived there on June 1, after a trip of twenty-nine hours, interrupted by two hours’ stay in Caracas, where we met Guido, my son. At the airport in Buenos Aires there was the usual reception, although it was the middle of the night. But thanks to Dr. Alberto Benegas-Lynch, our host, everything went smoothly, and an hour later we went to bed and slept until ten o’clock the next morning.
The first day was fully devoted to sightseeing. The traffic was unbelievable. There were no traffic lights and no policemen. Once we got into a traffic snarl; everything was tied up. Suddenly a man jumped out of his car and started to regulate the traffic. Cars backed up until they reached a side road, where they disappeared. It must have taken hours until order was restored.
Lu’s first lecture was preceded by a reception given by Dean Chapman of the University of Argentina. The lecture hall, tremendously large, consisted of two rooms, one for the original English lecture, the other where only the Spanish translator’s voice could be heard.
Both rooms were crowded to the bursting point, not even standing room was left. Rarely had I heard Lu talk so well; his voice was strong and the audience listened quietly. Lu lectured every third day, and the other days were filled with parties and receptions. Lu was disappointed about the Argentine custom of separating men and women at parties, which meant that we never were invited together in the afternoons or evenings. When it happened for the third time, I made a remark to Sofia Benegas-Lynch—Alberto’s wife—with whom I was very well acquainted by then, and I explained to her that this was a custom unknown in the U.S. and Europe and that Lu and I didn’t like to be separated. The next day, at the next cocktail party, I was invited together with Lu, but asked “not to tell anyone.” I was the only woman present except the hostess. A few years later—through Lu’s recommendation—the same group invited Sylvester Petro and his wife. By then everything was changed. There was no separation between men and women, and Helen was invited to every party with Syl.
Every time Lu lectured the rooms were overcrowded. They even had to add a third room for the many people who came to listen to him. Lu spoke about interventionism and about capitalism, subjects that for years the professors and students were not even allowed to read about. If anyone in those times would have dared to attack communism as Lu did, the police would have come in and taken hold of him immediately, and the assembly would have been broken up. I had suggested to Benegas-Lynch that he should show Lu’s books to the audience. The next day, neatly piled up in a glass case, all of Lu’s books were there, translations and originals, everything Benegas-Lynch could get hold of in one day. He had an outstanding gift for organization, and if ever a man was talented for a political career, it was he.
One morning, June 9, after a reception at Dean Chapman’s office, Lu spoke to the professors in a round aula. Inside this room was a sort of small cabinet with a table. Formerly this aula was part of the medical college, and the round table had been reserved for corpses. Lu spoke about economic calculation, a subject that most left-leaning economists do not like. How Lu stayed alive through all these lectures, cocktail parties, and interviews is still a miracle to me.
One of my nicest memories of Buenos Aires is a telephone call I received one afternoon. It was Renate Roepke, one of the twin daughters of Wilhelm Roepke. She was married to a French landowner, and I immediately invited them for dinner. We had last seen Renate in 1940 in Geneva before we left to flee to the United States. She was then about fourteen years old. Now she had bcome a beautiful, slim, tall woman with a striking resemblance to Ingrid Bergman, especially when she laughed. Her husband, strong, healthy, sensual, seemed to be one of those men who enjoyed the presence of women more than that of men. One felt the electricity between these two young people. It was a charming evening. We had much to talk about, in French, for Pierre did not know a word of English. They had their own plane and came over from their ranch in about two hours. Since then I haven’t seen Renate, and I often wish I could.
One day Benegas-Lynch sent his chauffeur, his car, and his secretary, a young Viennese girl, to show us Buenos Aires. We saw the beautiful harbor, the Rio de la Plata, which is an enormous river, Uruguay on one side, Argentina on the other. The width of the stream makes it seem an ocean. We also saw the districts where the poor lived, in shacks without water, wells in the street nearby. It was Sunday, and the people were clean and neatly dressed. But I saw men washing themselves in the rain puddles of the road, using soap and small towels. Everywhere we noticed dumps with an indescribable smell. We left Buenos Aires on June 16, and on our way back spent three days in Caracas, to be with my son Guido.
Lu’s last lecture trip out of the country was in 1964, on the invitation of Dr. Manuel Ayau and a group of his friends. On November 16 we went to Miami on our way to Costa Rica and Guatemala. As usual, we took a bus and crossed the city at night. Early next morning, we met the Sennholzes at the airport, had breakfast, and flew with them to San José, Costa Rica, where we were honored with a big reception at the Grand Hotel. Our host in Costa Rica was the Associacion Nacional de Fomento Economico. Dr. Ayau had come over from Guatemala to introduce Lu and Hans Sennholz, who delivered his first lecture in Spanish, but wisely decided later to return to the more familiar English language. Each of them gave three lectures, and there were plenty of microphones, earphones, and translators for everyone. But at Lu’s third lecture the power system broke down, and the dean of the philosophy department, who was chairing the meeting, translated Lu’s lecture—paragraph by paragraph—to the fanatic enthusiasm of the listeners.
On November 20 we left for Guatemala. Dr. Ayau has done for Guatemala what Montes de Oca, Velasco, and Navarro have done for Mexico. In 1964 Lu and Sennholz lectured at a small conference in Guatemala City. Ayau, a few years earlier, had started to introduce Lu’s writings and those of other libertarians to the public. He printed and mailed leaflets and pamphlets, and the interest grew so strong that in 1971 he could establish, with the help of friends, his own university. He named it the University Francesco Marroquin, after the sixteenth century teacher of free education. President Ayau considers it his life’s task to teach his country the economics of a free society, and he follows his goal with never lessening zeal and patience. The university library was named after Lu, and some of the professors were former students of Lu. As Henry Adams said, “A teacher affects eternity, he can never tell where his influence stops.”
In April, 1975, the University Francesco Marroquin celebrated its first commencement. Eight students were graduated. They gave the university a bronze bust of Lu, and I was invited to unveil it. Joaquin Reig, our good friend and Spanish translator of the Anti- Capitalistic Mentality and Human Action, was rewarded for his outstanding work and his love for freedom with an honorary doctorate. And all this was happening in a small state of Central America, in a city where there were already four other universities!
A story I was told by Dr. Ayau while I was in Guatemala comes to mind. Ayau remembered that he, some time after we had been in Guatemala in 1964, had invited Gottfried Haberler for some lectures. Haberler asked for a fee of $1000. “How come,” Ayau answered, “that you ask for $1000 and Professor von Mises only asked for $600?” “If Mises did it for $600,” Haberler answered, “I will do it for the same price.”
Robert Morris, whom we met years ago through Larry Fertig, was counsel for the Subcommittee on Internal Security of the Senate Judiciary Committee. Later he went to Texas and settled there with his family. In 1964 he founded a college of liberal arts, the University of Plano, twenty miles north of downtown Dallas. Since the buildings had not been completed, the first semester was conducted in Dallas. Bob Morris asked Lu to come to Dallas for some guest lectures, which would mark the beginning of a course on economics and which could then—on Lu’s recommendation—be continued by Percy Greaves. The first year, 1965, Lu gave two lectures. I looked through the few little notes he had made. In the first lecture he spoke about the origins of capitalism, the conflict between private and public ownership of the factors of production, and about underdeveloped countries. In the second lecture he told the students how the system works and what it means to have a capital shortage. He also spoke about the danger of inflation, and one of his notes reads: “The Croesus of the past—the common man today.”
As usual this lecture was followed by a question period, and Lu kept the written questions of the young students. Some of them are interesting: How would the world be made safe for foreign investments in view of the socialist governments of most underdeveloped countries? Do you think that there is a possibility of economic collapse in this country as bad as the crash in 1929? How clearly Lu must have shown them (in 1965) the dangers of inflation!
We returned to Plano in 1966, 1967, and 1969. Sometimes Percy Greaves came with us, sometimes he arrived later, but he always continued the course.
One day I called Lu’s attention to a little story in a magazine, which reported that so many call girls nowadays are college girls. “It lifts their profession,” remarked Lu, “but it will degrade the colleges.”
Once Lu told me about a professor who, during his lectures, always looked at one and the same person. Asked why he did this, he answered, “Before I start my lecture, I look for the face that seems to me the least intelligent. When I see a glimpse of understanding and interest in this face, I know I am presenting my subject in the right way.”
Over the years Lu was recognized and honored in many ways. Austria, the country he had loved so deeply that he never could shrug off or forget the stabs and bruises he had received, Austria, the land of his birth, in 1956 sent him through the dean of the University of Vienna’s faculty of law and political science a parchment renewing his doctorate of 1906. This was, according to the dean’s letter, a special honor, given only to the most meritorious of Austrian doctoral recipients:
Dear Colleague,
As you probably know, the Austrian universities customarily honor their doctors who made significant contributions to scientific progress or public life. Fifty years after their commencement they are honored through renewal of their doctorate. In your case the necessary qualifications for this honor are signally met, for you belong to those scholars who through their outstanding achievements have helped to enhance the prestige of Austrian scholarship, especially abroad. Your publications in the field of economic epistemology, monetary theory and policy have made your name universally known in international science. You furthermore will always be remembered for your successful activity with the Vienna Chamber of Commerce, which you served in a leading position for several decades.
Therefore, the faculty of law and political science has instructed me to forward to you the renewal diploma of your doctorate with their best wishes for your personal well-being and for your future scientific work.
The renewal of Lu’s doctorate presented a fitting opportunity for Lu’s many friends to honor him, not only with a Festschrift titled On Freedom and Free Enterprise, edited by Mary Sennholz, with contributions from nineteen of his most famous colleagues and friends, but also with a banquet, arranged by Leonard Read in the University Club. It was a grand evening in March, 1956, with remarkable speeches by Read, Machlup, and Hayek. Hayek had received advance information about the planned honoring of Lu by the University of Vienna and considered the party a good occasion to tell Lu and his guests. (See Appendix Two.)
On June 8, 1957, Grove City College granted Lu an honorary doctor of law degree (L.O.D.) at its seventy-seventh commencement. The college, founded and sustained by Howard Pew, had arranged with the help of Mary and Hans Sennholz an exceptional celebration in honor of Lu, and we spent a few remarkable days in Grove City, surrounded by friends and well-wishers.
In 1961, when Lu turned eighty, the Wall Street Journal honored him with an extraordinary editorial by William Henry Chamberlin:
Austrian-born Ludwig von Mises, long a resident of the United States, received a variety of tributes marking his 80th birthday. . . .
In these tributes there was something more than appreciation of a highly erudite economist and a teacher of remarkable brilliance and charm. For von Mises has been an evangel, a banner, a rallying point for all who believe in the superiority of the free market economy over state interventionism and collectivist planning. . . .
. . . in an age when collectivism has pounded so many breaches in the walls of economic principle, there is something inspiring in the spectacle of a man who, on the basis of an almost unsurpassed knowledge of economic history and theory, puts his foot down and says: “No. To quit the sure automatic judgment of the free market, the free play of prices against a background of sound currency, is to leave a sure road for a morass. For every problem that state interference with the free market may seem to solve two or three others, probably more serious, will come up.”
Here is the octogenarian economist, amazingly young and fresh in his attitude towards work and life, speaking for himself, in excerpts from his addresses and books:
“The alternative is not plan or no plan. The question is: Whose plan? Should each member of society plan for himself or should a benevolent government alone plan for them all?”
“Laissez-faire means let each individual choose how he individually wants to cooperate in the social division of labor. Let the consumer determine what the entrepreneurs should produce.”
“If control of production is shifted from the hands of the entrepreneurs daily reelected by a plebiscite of the consumers, into the hands of the supreme commander of the industrial armies (Marx and Engels) or in those of the ‘armed workers’ (Lenin), neither representative government nor individual rights can survive. Wall Street, against which the self-styled idealists are battling, is merely a symbol. But the walls of the Soviet prisons, within which all dissenters disappear forever, are a hard fact.”
Von Mises has been a very persuasive evangel of his cause, which would have been called liberalism in the Nineteenth Century and might be more clearly described as conservatism in the Twentieth.
He is one of the most influential members of the Mont Pelerin Society, an international association of economists, political scientists, historians and journalists set up in 1947 on principles emphasizing the integral nature of freedom, the inseparable connection between a free economy, a free society and a free way of life.
Wilhelm Roepke, the noted German economist, now a resident of Switzerland, author of many books about the basis of a free economy and now president of the Mont Pelerin Society, said, in congratulating von Mises on his eightieth birthday:
“I would like to stress, on this occasion, how immense is my debt to Ludwig von Mises for having rendered me immune, at a very early date, from the virus of socialism with which most of us came back from World War I.”
Austrian-born Professor Gottfried Haberler, of Harvard, describes the rare stimulation which he and other then-young scholars derived from the seminar which von Mises held in Vienna before the war. First there would be hours of serious discussion. Then the participants would adjourn to a well-known Italian restaurant. There would be a final session in a famous Vienna cafe, lasting until 1 A.M. And the next day, fresh and fit, von Mises would appear at his office punctually at 9. . . .
And he shows just as much zest in presenting his views at New York University and other American forums as he did in his native Vienna so many years ago.
Lu’s friends honored him with an anniversary dinner, this time arranged by Larry Fertig in the New York University Club. Approximately 200 guests attended. Hayek was chairman, and Bettina Bien gave Lu, as a special present, a leather-bound copy of her bibliography of his work. The Mont Pelerin Society published a special Quarterly Journal, edited by Hunold, as a tribute to Lu, with contributions by Hazlitt, Fertig, Hunold, Haberler, Felix Kaufmann and Roepke.
In 1962 Austria awarded Lu another distinction. According to an Austrian information sheet of October 31, 1962, “The Austrian Ambassador to the United States, Mr. Wilfried Platzer, presented the Austrian Medal of Honor for Science and Arts (Oesterreichisches Ehrenzeichen fuer Wissenschaft und Kunst) to Dr. Ludwig von Mises on behalf of Austrian Federal President Adolf Schaerf. The award expresses Austria’s gratitude to her son for his distinguished activities as scholar and teacher and for his internationally recognized work in the fields of political science and economics.”
Ambassador Platzer invited us to a luncheon in Washington, and many of our friends and former students of Lu attended this party. The medal of honor is the highest decoration that Austria can bestow “on one of her sons,” such a distinction that it is only lent to the person so honored, for when he receives it, he gets at the same time a printed request to have it returned to Austria after his death.
In 1963 New York University awarded Lu an honorary doctorate of law, and the Wall Street Journal reported:
Of all the academic honors bestowed this month, as tradition prescribes, one struck us as particularly noteworthy. It was presented by New York University to Ludwig von Mises, the Austrian-born economist, long since U.S. citizen, now 81 years old. The citation is self-explanatory:
“Author of literally hundreds of books and articles, his major works are recognized as classics of economic thought. He has brought one of the most powerful minds of his age to bear on his subject and has clarified it with philosophic conscience and a scientific integrity of a rare order. . . .
“He is an eloquent scholar, a scholar’s scholar, and the force of his ideas has been multiplied manyfold by the able economists he has trained and influenced. For his great scholarship, his exposition of the philosophy of the free market, and his advocacy of a free society, he is here presented with our Doctorate of Law.”
How much this award reveals about the current academic climate in America, we would not try to guess. But it is interesting, in an age of encroaching regimentation, that it was given specifically with reference to von Mises’ philosophy. For one of his greatest contributions is his demonstration that socialism, or the planned economy by any other name, cannot provide a rational substitute for the functions of the free market. More than that: the free market and the free society are indissoluble.
In this sense von Mises is the champion not merely of an economic philosophy but of the potential of Man.
In July, 1964, we flew via London to Freiburg, Germany, where Hayek picked us up at the airport. On July 27 Lu received from Dean Rittener of Freiburg University the honorary degree of doctor of political science. Lu made his reception speech that evening. It was a friendly and intimate celebration, and in the following days the Hayeks took us around and showed us the beautiful old city. Lu—as usual—took special interest in the library, which consisted of 28,000 volumes, guarded anxiously by a ninety-three year-old librarian. We spent one evening with Edith Eucken, the widow of the well-known economist, Walter Eucken, who had been a good friend of Lu’s. Mrs. Eucken, a scholar in her own right, was once named by Lu “the Jacqueline Kennedy of the Mont Pelerin Society,” for she was always dressed with special good taste.
Looking back I don’t remember any signs of excitement, joy, or satisfaction about these various honors Lu received. When he was happy it was only because I showed him that I was happy. I knew he deserved every honor he got, and I made no secret of my joy.
In 1967 Lu was invited to go to Vienna for the fortieth anniversary of the Austrian Institute of Business Cycle Research, as they now called the Institut für Konjunkturforschung, which Lu had founded in 1927. But Lu could not attend. Five of his former students were present at the celebration: Professors Hayek, Morgenstern, Haberler, Machlup, and Tinter. The present head of the institute, Professor Dr. Franz Nemschak, sent Lu a little booklet, and with it he wrote: “If you look at this book I hope you will feel joy and satisfaction over what has become of your child in the last 30 years. We feel most gratefully towards you, the founder of the Institute. You live on in your creation!”
On March 15, 1969, Lu received a letter from Dr. William Fellner, then president of the American Economic Association:
Dear Professor Mises:
I take great pleasure in informing you that the Nominating Committee of the American Economic Association nominates you for election as Distinguished Fellow. The Committee met with the Executive Committee as an Electoral College of the Association and elected you on March 7 as recipient of this honorable award.
The award of Distinguished Fellow was instituted by the Association in 1965 and it may be granted annually to not more than two economists of high distinction in the United States or Canada.
This was accompanied by a citation praising Lu’s work. I hugged and congratulated Lu and asked him how he felt about this great distinction. “If it makes you happy,” he answered, “I am happy.”
Nine months after Lu had left me forever, I opened his desk and found among his scripts a stamped and signed letter with an attached copy addressed to Professor William J. Fellner, President of the American Economic Association, dated March 20, 1969. It read:
Dear Professor Fellner:
I heartily thank you and all the members of the Economic Association for the great honor of being elected Distinguished Fellow of the Association. With all good wishes for the future activities of the Association and its members.
I forwarded the letter with a few accompanying words to Professor Fellner, who very graciously thanked me with some kind words.
I will always wonder why Lu forgot, or neglected, to mail that letter.
