Harry G. Johnson : Scholar, Mentor, Editor, and Relentless World Traveler - 1923-1977

American Journal of Economics and Sociology, The,  July, 2001  by Max Corden,  James S. Duesenberry,  Craufurd D. Goodwin,  J. Allan Hynes,  Richard G. Lipsey,  Gideon Rosenbluth,  Paul A. Samuelson,  Elizabeth Johnson Simpson,  LAURENCE S. Moss

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What made Harry run? Who can provide cogent psycho-babble to explain these data? Of course, ambition was one explanatory factor. All the scholars I have known, without exception, have possessed ambition-even humanist saints like Jan Tinbergen or James Meade. Beethoven had no need for any self-doubt. Still, the early Beethoven went out of his way to try to top every mentor at his own game: Bach, Haydn, or whomever. When arrived at success, Beethoven deplored aristocratic patronage; while climbing the greasy pole he sought it out. Harry would go out of his way to drum up chair offers that he would certainly not accept. (The young Queen Victoria was counseled by Lord Melbourne on how a queen should act. Loving him, she observed her mentor closely. This led her to ask, "When the apples are passed around at dinner's end, I notice that you often take one or two even though you rarely eat even one. Why?" Melbourne replied gravely, "Mum, I like the feeling of command over them." Harry, I suppose, liked the feeling of first refusal.)

I spoke earlier of Johnson as driven. Also, his seemed to be a restless physiology. Stocky types are sometimes stereotyped as calm and ponderous. Well, when Pascal wrote that man can do everything but sit calmly alone in a room doing nothing, he might have been describing Johnson. (Newton, sitting with eyes closed in his Trinity room, working out mentally the elliptical differential equations of the two-body problem, cannot be classified as doing nothing!) Harry at rest could have beads of perspiration on his forehead. Enrico Caruso, the all-time great tenor, before every performance had butterflies in his stomach. Why then be surprised that so fertile an economist would show signs of insecurity? Victor Hugo, we learn, could demolish a dozen oranges and two haunches of beef at any meal. When late in life for no fathomable reason Harry opted to collect a Harvard Ph.D., on the eve of his final Orals he consumed an amazig run of freshly- picked sweet corn.

Some high achievers by nature require only a few hours of sleep. I think back to wonder whether Harry was one such. In today's pharmaceutical age, the elixirs that would have extended his life expectancy might have curbed his originality. Who can say?

On the evidences thus far provided, you would not expect Harry Johnson to be a namby-pamby, two-armed economist. And he was not. He formed decisive views and expressed them strongly. He was a formidable polemicist. Capable of random acts of gratuitous kindness there was inside Harry also trace elements of acerbic reprobation: If we put George Stigler at 100 in this department, Harry earned a solid 50. It did not make things better that Harry first served time at Cambridge, England when the factionalism there was intense and bitter. This did not nurture the St. Francis latent in him. Then, later, fate carried him to the University of Chicago, never known as a particularly harmonious environment even back in the time of Frank Knight, Jacob Viner, and President Robert Hutchins--or in its later reincarnations.