THORSTEIN VEBLEN AND ST. OLAF COLLEGE: A GROUP OF LETTERS BY THORBJ�RN N. MOHN

Abstract

THORSTEIN VEBLEN AND ST. OLAF COLLEGE: A GROUP OF LETTERS BY THORBJ0RN N. MOHN EDITED BY KENNETH BJORK In the summer of 1890 Thorstein B. Vehlen was seriously considered for a position as teacher of science on the faculty of St. Olaf College, in Northfield, Minnesota. We are briefly informed of this fact by his biographer, Joseph Dorfman , who adds, "The administration personally liked him, but his religious views prevented his appointment."1 To one at all familiar with Veblen's later writings - which have been variously ignored, damned, and acclaimed - it is somewhat surprising that this independent and progressive social philosopher should have sought employment at a clerically controlled pioneer institution of the type that St. Olaf College represented in the nineteenth century; and his admirers may be tempted to consider the inevitable refusal as just another evidence of the bigotry endemic in the church college. A review of Veblen's early life and of the historical background of the school, however, reveals nothing unusual or unjust either in the application or in its rejection. In his infancy and youth, Vehlen was surrounded by the attitudes and principles that are associated with the Norwegian-American academies and colleges of the Middle West. Seven years after his birth on a Wisconsin farm in 1857, he moved with his family to Rice County, Minnesota. In a milieu at once conservative and pious, he knew the rural life of the Norwegian immigrants and the part played in it by religion; furthermore his biographer states that there is no evidence, in his early years, of opposition to the Lutheran church. When he left home at the age of seventeen to attend Carleton College he was actually considered as a 1 Thorstein Vehlen and His Amerìca , 78 (New York, 1934). 122 VEBLEN AND ST. OLAF COLLEGE 123 candidate for the ministry. Carleton - which like St. Olaf is located in Northfield - was then strongly imbued with the puritanism of the Congregational Church, and its faculty was composed very largely of ministers. Though Thorstein gained the reputation of being something of a cynic during these college days and began early to read scientific and sociological literature frowned upon by the theologians, he accepted a position after his graduation as a teacher at Monona Academy, a school that had been operated since 1876 by the Norwegian Synod at Madison, Wisconsin. His first year of teaching, 1880-81, was the last in the history of the academy, but it sufficed to acquaint the young instructor with the ideals and policies of the Norwegian church school. In one other respect the year was important: Veblen, who had begun the study of Old Norse somewhat earlier with his brother Andrew, was brought into a stimulating relationship in Madison with Rasmus B. Anderson, professor of Scandinavian at the University of Wisconsin. Anderson apparently quickened the younger man's interest in the cultural ramifications of his Norwegian background. Veblen next studied philosophy and economics at Johns Hopkins, and then for a doctorate in philosophy at Yale, mainly under the Reverend Noah Porter. It is evident that during the time he was at Yale, Veblen was a skeptic, though perhaps a mild one as he had been at Carleton; and his ideas in the field of religion were as yet a bit vague. In religious as in social and economic matters he was groping toward a philosophy that actually required years in which to mature. What is really significant is the fact that then, as later, his entire approach to the problems of society was traditionally philosophical and that it bore the clear imprint of theological influence. In 1884 he received the doctoral degree, after submitting a dissertation, interestingly, on "The Ethical Grounds of a Doctrine of Retribution." Although he was armed with a set of excellent recommendations, he was 124 KENNETH BJORK nevertheless unable to obtain a college teaching position either because of a native lack of aggressiveness, or the the fact that he was a "Norskie" of a not too highly polished type, or the tendency of colleges to rely upon divinity schools to supply their teaching staffs, or because of a combination of these reasons. All that we know...