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Veblen drew a fine self-portrait in an essay entitled, "The Intellectual Pre- eminence of Jews in Modern Europe," which he wrote toward the end of his career. He says there that the Jewish man of ideas is saved from being intel- lectually passive "at the cost of losing his secure place in the scheme of con- ventions into which he has been born and . . . of finding no similarly secure place in the scheme of gentile conventions into which he is thrown." As a consequence, "he becomes a disturber of the intellectual peace, but at the cost of becoming an intellectual wayfaring man, a wanderer in the intellectual no- man's-land, seeking another place to rest, farther along the road, somewhere over the horizon. [Such Jews] are neither a complaisant nor a contented lot, these aliens of the uneasy feet." Nothing could better characterize Veblen's own life. Intentionally or not, he summed up in this passage the price and the glory of his career.

A Marginal Norwegian

Thorstein Veblen was born on a frontier farm in Wisconsin on July 30, 1857. He was a son of the Middle Border that produced in his generation Lester Ward, Frederick Jackson Turner, Vernon Parrington, and Charles Beard, all men who, like himself, were to mount an assault against the re- ceived wisdom of the intellectual establishment of the East. But unlike these other men, Veblen was almost as much a stranger to the culture of the Mid- west as he was to that of the East.

Veblen was the sixth of twelve children of Norwegian immigrants, his par- ents, Thomas Anderson Veblen and Kari Bunde Veblen, having come to America ten years before his birth. They were of old Norwegian peasant stock, but had had a very hard time as children of tenant farmers in the old country. Veblen's paternal grandfather had been tricked out of his right to the family farm and had fallen from the honored status of farm owner to that of a despised tenant. His mother's father had likewise been forced to sell his farm in order to meet lawyers' fees and, crushed by this loss, had died still a young man, leaving Veblen's mother an orphan at the age of five.

After Veblen's parents emigrated to America to settle first in Wisconsin and then in Minnesota, they encountered obstacles similar to those faced by their parents in Norway. Land speculators drove them off their first land claim; in their second venture they were forced to sell half their land in order to pay usurious interest rates. Hatred of tricksters, speculators, and shyster lawyers ran deep in the family tradition and found characteristic expression in much of Veblen's later writing.

Despite such obstacles, the Veblens managed through hard work, thrift, and single-minded devotion to the agricultural task at hand to acquire a self- sufficient farmstead in Manitowoc, Wisconsin, where Thorstein was born. When he was eight years old, the family moved to a larger farm on the prairie lands of Wheeling Township in Minnesota. There his father became a leading farmer in the homogeneous Norwegian community, which, like other Norwegian farming communities, lived in almost complete isolation from the sur- rounding world. Norwegian immigrants seldom met Yankees, except for busi- ness reasons or at political conventions. Frugal, hard-working and somewhat dour men piously following the prescriptions of their Lutheran religion, they had contempt for the loose ways of the Yankees and saw in them the repre- sentatives of a shallow, pleasure-loving, impious civilization. To the Norwe- gians, the Yankees seemed to be speculators, wheelers and dealers all, men who couldn't be trusted, and whose ways were not only foreign but abhorrent. These sentiments also later found their way into Veblen's writings.

Although Veblen's parents were deeply rooted in the Norwegian com- munity and its traditional ways, they were nevertheless atypical. Their pious- ness notwithstanding, they refused to take part in sectarian quarrels over questions of theology or church government, which tended to split these com- munities. Thomas Veblen minded his own affairs and was respected in the community as a man of judgment and intelligence who, however, showed an unusual independence of conduct.

The son, quite early, took after the father. Children and elders alike were impressed by his precocious intelligence but found his almost compulsively independent ways unsettling. In his early youth, he had fist fights with the boys, teased the girls, and pestered the older people. In his adolescent years, he sublimated aggression into sarcasm, corrosive wit, and scepticism. When the time came for his confirmation, he submitted to the rite but made it clear that he had already lost the faith. All in all, Veblen was as maladjusted in the Norwegian community and as alien to its life styles as he was later to be in the American milieu.

From Coser, 1977:275-276.