That your grandfather Governor John Buchanan campaigned against federal voting rights acts, raised the poll tax, and established pensions for Confederate veterans—that all that goes unmentioned in the context of "I have shared in the emotional damage imposed by discrimination...", "From that day forward I have shared in the emotional damage imposed by discrimination..." and "'fairness' assumed for me a central normative position..." demonstrates either an absolutely stunning lack of self-awareness or a conscious intellectual judo move to distract attention from the racial politics of the white southern establishment: James Buchanan (2009): Karen Ilse Horn, ed, "Roads to Wisdom: Conversations with Ten Nobel Laureates in Economics" https://delong.typepad.com/document.pdf: "What did the Navy teach you?... I experienced overt discrimination for being a non-Easterner, a nonestablishmentarian. In the whole group of 600 boys, there were only about twenty who were graduates of Yale, Harvard, Princeton—all Ivy League. By the end of this first boot camp period, they had to select midshipman officers. Out of the 20 boys from the establishment universities, 12 or 13 were picked, against a background of a total of 600. It was overtly discriminatory towards those of us who were not members of the establishment...
James Buchanan (2009): Better than Plowing: "From that day forward I have shared in the emotional damage imposed by discrimination, in any form, and 'fairness' assumed for me a central normative position decades before I came to discuss principles of justice professionally and philosophically...
James Buchanan (2009): Karen Ilse Horn, ed, "Roads to Wisdom: Conversations with Ten Nobel Laureates in Economics" https://delong.typepad.com/document.pdf: "What did the Navy teach you?_ Those were formative years, from the middle of 1941 to the end of 1945, and they were very, very good for me. Luck played a tremendous role here again. First of all, I went off to that officers’ training school in New York. You had to be a college graduate for that. They trained us for three months. We went through the regular training in an accelerated way...
...At first, there was a boot camp, drills with rifles and marching and ropes and boats and things like that. Then we had courses in navigation, gunnery, seamanship, etc. We were about 600 boys. The locale was an old battleship from the Spanish-American war in the mud of the Hudson River, the ‘SS Illinois’. We lived on board that ship. We’d have classes there or in a warehouse building on the dock. James Tobin was in the class directly after me. Anyway, during the first month, I experienced discrimination, and it just got me all upset. If there is one thing I can’t stand—and that’s central—it’s when somebody is treated unfairly, whether it’s somebody else or whether it’s me. A disproportionate number of us were from the South and the West, as opposed to the upper East.
I experienced overt discrimination for being a non-Easterner, a nonestablishmentarian. In the whole group of 600 boys, there were only about twenty who were graduates of Yale, Harvard, Princeton—all Ivy League. By the end of this first boot camp period, they had to select midshipman officers. Out of the 20 boys from the establishment universities, 12 or 13 were picked, against a background of a total of 600. It was overtly discriminatory towards those of us who were not members of the establishment.
That made me into a flaming communist. I would have signed up immediately to the Communist Party had a recruiter come along. I had already had strong left-wing socialist leanings, but now it was stronger than ever. I think I felt this stronger than anybody else. Even today, there is a residue still there. I don’t ever get rid of that. Anyway, no recruiter came along, and I didn’t sign my name on any communist manifest. But I would have!...
#noted
