“The Grandfather of Technocracy”
By F. V. V.
(Milwaukee Journal, March 22, 1935, pp. 43-46.)
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Thorstein Veblen, the Wisconsin Son of Norwegian Immigrants, Who Was Perhaps the Greatest 
Economist and Sociologist of Modern Times, Lived Ahead of His Day, Says New Biography.

WHEN Thorstein Veblen died in 1929, an old and, according to his own opinion, frustrated man of 
72, he left among his papers a fragment of a codicil which read: "It is also my wish, in case of 
death, to be cremated, if it can conveniently be done, as expeditiously and inexpensively as may be 
without ritual or ceremony of any kind; that my ashes be thrown loose into the sea, or into some 
sizeable stream running into the sea; that no tombstone, slab, epitaph, effigy, tablet, inscription or 
monument of any name or nature be set up in my memory or name in any place or at any time; that 
no obituary, memorial, portrait or biography of me, nor any letters written to or by me, be printed or 
published or in any way reproduced, copied or circulated.”
But Veblen, whose books belong to present and future generations, whose thinking will probably 
outlast that of any other sociologist or economist of his day, could not expect his wishes to be 
respected. Already innumerable monographs on his life and theories have been published; 
technocracy, said to be based on theories expounded by Veblen, brought his name into the popular 
limelight a couple of years ago, and now, recently published by the Viking Press, Joseph Dorfman 
offers a complete, 500-page biography of the man, “Thorstein Veblen and His America.” The book 
is the basis of this article.
* * *
The era which engendered the social and economic theories to which Veblen gave expression in 
“The Theory of the Leisure Class” and “The Theory of Business Enterprise” and which made him, 
perhaps, the greatest American economist and sociologist of his day, was an era not unlike our 
own. This Wisconsin born son of Norwegian immigrants grew to maturity in the years of depression 
and sociological unrest that succeeded the post-Civil war boom.
It was the era which gave birth to Henry George and his single tax theory, Edward Bellamy and his 
socialistic Utopia described in “Looking Backward.” Herbert Spencer and John Stuart Mill found 
ready audiences for their books, and Marx was becoming the Bible of a growing cult of Americans 
who were discovering communism for the first time. The Chicago Haymarket riots startled even the 
most complacent capitalists out of their torpidity. More than a thousand strikes occurred in Illinois 
alone in 1886, and eight Polish working men were killed by the Wisconsin state militia in the Bay 
View riots, the worst strike of Milwaukee’s history. The Knights of Labor were being superseded by 
the American Federation of Labor, Emma Goldman was on the scene, and a little later Jacob 
Coxey’s “Army of the Commonweal” was marching on to Washington.
* * *
Thomas Anderson Veblen and his wife, Kari, were four and a half month on the long trip from 
Norway to Milwaukee in 1847. Both fell ill of a protracted fever aboard ship and all of their children 
died in mid-ocean. Arriving at Milwaukee practically penniless and physically weakened, Thomas 
Veblen walked the 28 miles to Port Washington, and immediately found work in the fanning mill 
factory of Stephen Olson, a boyhood chum from the old country. His wife, who had been late behind 
temporarily in Milwaukee, followed him to Port Washington, but the journey and the work proved too 
gruelling for both of them. Through friendly Stephen Olson the weakened couple acquired 40 acres 
of land.
A year later, Thomas’ brother, Haldor, arrived from Norway and now, pooling their resources, they 
obtained a pre-emption claim to 160 acres of wild forest land in Sheboygan county. But it was in a 
settlement of New England Yankees who referred to the newcomers as “Norwegian Indians” or 
“Scandihoofians” and declared negroes were “more deserving of a vote and the privileges of 
freemen,” than the Norwegians. The Veblen’s wanted to be among their own kind, sold their 
acreage for $800 and moved to Cato township in Manitowoc county, which was rife with Norwegian 
settlers. While a new farm was being wrought out of forest land, Thorstein Veblen, on July 30, 1857, 
was born in a house which still stands in Cato, as sturdy as when it was built by Thomas Veblen, 
who was a finished craftsman when it came to carpentry.
Thomas prospered, but was still dissatisfied. In 1865 he, his wife and seven children, ranging from 
an infant in arms to 16-year-old Andrew, moved to Rice country in Minnesota, where Thomas’ 
mother-in-law had previously taken up her residence, writing back glowing descriptions of the 
wondrous fertility of the prairie land. Thorstein Veblen wars then a child of 8.
As in Cato, Thomas Veblen became a leading farmer, although he knew no English. He was the 
first to install drains, to set out an orchard, to buy a “harvester.” It was a self-sufficient community in 
which he lived and it was an intensely nationalistic “little Norway.” The parochial school led a 
precarious existence, for the children’s labor was needed on the farms, and what little English the 
public school could teach was dissipated by the speech at home.
“Thomas Veblen vas taciturn”, writes Dorfman, “but Kari Thorsteindatter was a high spirited 
individual, ‘warmly and electrically religious.’ Like a sturdy, dominant woman of the sagas, she was 
counsellor, advisor, and often physician and surgeon in the community. … She knew the solution of 
her problems without the necessity of reasoning. ‘It was from her,’ wrote a brother, ‘that Thorstein 
got his personality and brains.’”
Thorstein was known as an “odd” child and noted for his “queer antics” in the community. He fought 
and bullied the boys, teased the girls, pestered the old people with stinging sarcasm and nicknames 
of such originality that they stuck through all the years. He not only obtained the easiest tasks, but 
devised ways whereby the other children did his work. “He had, already,” writes Dorfman, “a highly 
developed sense of economy of effort.
“Despite its general dislike of Veblen”, Dorfman continues, “the settlement was forced to admit that 
this ‘queer’ youth was brilliant. At confirmation he proved more than a match for the examiner on 
the hair splitting Lutheran church history and doctrine. He was expert in settling the never ceasing 
disputes over the meaning of Norse terms which agitated the emigrants from the various rural 
sections of Norway, with their different dialects. A younger brother remarked: ‘From my earliest 
recollection I thought he knew everything. I could ask him any question and he would tell me all 
about it in great detail. I have found that a good deal he told me was made of whole cloth, but even 
his lies were good.’”
Religious skepticism came early to Thorstein and, at 17, when he entered Carleton college at 
Northfield, Minn., he was recognized by his teachers as already something of an agnostic, though 
he was then studying for the Lutheran ministry because of parental wishes. He did not fit in well at 
the school, either intellectually or socially. Fellow students considered him “sneering and 
supercilious” and the faculty, too, was not enthusiastic over this youth with a “mind clothed in 
sardonic humor,” as one of them described it. “They were a little afraid of him,” observes Dorfman. 
He was no better adjusted, however, in the Norwegian community at home, where the neighbors 
“thought they (the Veblens) were snobbish, putting on airs, acting as if they were better than other 
people.”
After his graduation in 1880, Thorstein secured a position teaching at Monona academy in Madison, 
Wis., but nor for long. The academy closed permanently at the end of his first year there, and 
Thorstein, with chances of obtaining a scholarship at newly established Johns Hopkins university, 
went to Baltimore. From there he went to Yale, where, in 1884, he obtained his doctorate of 
philosophy.
Returning to Minnesota, he renewed his acquaintance with Ellen Rolfe, niece of the president of 
Carleton college. She declared the only change in him was that he now spoke with a correct “a.” 
Their marriage in 1888 pleased her family not at all. “A daughter of one of the leading families of the 
middle west was marrying an atheist, a shiftless son of a Norwegian immigrant.” Her father was 
among the builders of the Santa Fe and other railroads. As for Thorstein, he partly looked upon the 
marriage as a solution to his financial problems, and so it might have been, except that the Santa 
Fe Co. was soon involved in financial difficulties.
He and Ellen spent several years on a farm of her parents at Staceyville, Iowa. It was a period “of 
indecision and floundering,” but Ellen stood by him stanchly. Together they read Edward Bellamy’s 
“Looking Backward,” they studied Henry George, William Morris, the leader of English socialism, 
and the current books of John Stuart Mill and Spencer. Then, with funds supplied by Ellen’s father, 
Thorstein returned to school, registering at Cornell in 1891. It was the stepping stone to his career 
as instructor at the new University of Chicago, founded by the Rockefeller millions in 1892.
He taught economics, socialism.
Chicago, a huge industrial center, was feeling the full impact of the 1893 panic. “Sleeping forms of 
the homeless so thickly littered the damp cold corridors and stairways of the old city hall that one 
could scarcely pass through without stepping on them.” It was a fine laboratory for the promulgation 
of social theories and Thorstein had ample opportunity to expound his ideas when, shortly, he 
became editor of the Journal of Political Economy. Here at Chicago he wrote “The Theory of the 
Leisure Class” and “The Theory of Business Enterprise.” They brought him quick fame, if little 
money.
* * *
The chronology of Thorstein Veblen’s life becomes too involved to follow in a brief article. Dorfman 
describes the “shabby” treatment he was given at Stanford university in California after leaving the 
University of Chicago. There followed a number of years at the University of Missouri. There were 
years when he was connected with no school, years of enforced leisure which he occupied with the 
writing of his nine or 10 books, contributing to various reviews and journals. In 1918 Cornell 
university neglected to extend a call to Veblen, in spite of the fact that some of his friends offered to 
bear the entire burden of his salary there. In 1917 he was one of a group which prepared a 
memorandum for Col. House to be used as a basis for Woodrow Wilson’s peace negotiations. After 
the war he was one of the editors of the Dial for a time and he later became connected with the 
New School for Social Research.
Behind the long years of his neglect and discrimination at the hands of university authorities lies the 
fact that he was a difficult, uncompromising person to handle, at once one of the worst and one of 
the best of teachers. He was unable to find or keep an academic position consistent with his great 
abilities. Perhaps it was that his world was not ready and willing to accept his views. As one 
commentator has said, “Veblen was in reality one of those rare men who may be said to have been 
ahead of his time – ahead in the sense that what he said and thought was destined to be accepted 
by succeeding generations though they were rejected by his own generation. ‘Hence, he was lonely 
as an alien can be.’”
To summarize his views is manifestly difficult. He believed an economic system which defeated 
man’s instincts to work and create, which placed control in the hands of absentee owners and 
investment bankers and which existed by means of what he called “capitalistic sabotage” is 
inevitably self-doomed. He believed mankind is faced either with another regime of the dark ages, 
or with the full development of the industrial republic and machine technology. Yet this man, 
however “radical” his views are bound to be termed, was not a communist. Neither was he a 
doctrinaire socialist, and neither is he a technocrat or a new dealer, though Howard Scott has made 
capital of Veblen’s name and the college professors of the new deal regime have called upon 
Veblen for substantiation of their theories.
F.V.V.
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