MCCARTHYISM AND THE MATHEMATIZATION OF ECONOMICS

Historians of the social sciences and historians of economics have come to agree that, in the United States, the 1940s transformation of economics from political economy to economic science was associated with economists’ engagements with other disciplines—e.g., mathematics, statistics, operations research, physics, engineering, cybernetics—during and immediately after World War II. More controversially, some historians have also argued that the transformation was accelerated by economists’ desires to be safe, to seek the protective coloration of mathematics and statistics, during the McCarthy period. This paper argues that that particular claim 1) is generally accepted, but 2) is unsupported by good evidence, and 3) what evidence there is suggests that the claim is false.

Pickup on South Street

Chapter Abstract: Released at the end of the first cycle of postwar anticommunist noir (1947-1953), Samuel Fuller’s Pickup on South Street (1953) is a canonical Cold War picture; it’s also one of the most overdetermined films made during the McCarthy period, centrally concerned as it is with the atom or hydrogen bomb, sex and violence, treason and espionage, capitalism vs. communism, and the politics of informing. Whereas Pickup on South Street depicts both the police and FBI as crudely utilitarian, indifferent to the human costs of the national-security state apparatus, it simultaneously dramatizes the lives of its small-time hoods and hustlers for whom the threat of the “red menace” is less pressing than the day-to-day, dog-eat-dog grind of trying to remain in the black.

The FBI’s Aggressive Filing and Long Study of African American Writers Was Tightly Bound to the Agency’s Successful Evolution under Hoover

Retracing some of the main lines of FBI history, this part demonstrates how Bureau counterliterature was stamped by four distinct phases of the institution's developing Hoover era, altogether long enough to form a kind of police Mesozoic. It examines the glamorous and violent phase of Bureau history between the New Deal and the early 1940s. It then analyzes the changing shape of Bureau counterliterature during World War II, and does the same for the McCarthy period. Finally, it reviews the creative upheaval in Bureau counterliterature during the Black Power 1960s and 1970s. Author files and adjoining documents disclose that Hoover's FBI, the principal custodian of “lit.-cop federalism,” angled during all these phases to enlarge the state's ability to determine aesthetic value, scheming and networking like some National Endowment for Artistic Gumshoes. But these documents likewise show that his Bureau pursued changeable, art-educated enhancements of police tactics, converting varying currencies of literary capital into novel forms of criminological capital. Through both types of meddling, the Bureau paved the way to this book's second thesis, of necessity its most historically sprawling: The FBI's aggressive filing and long study of African American writers was tightly bound to the agency's successful evolution under Hoover.