16538 Goodhue Avenue
Nerstrand, MN, USA

Thorstein Veblen Farmstead

The Thorstein Veblen Farmstead is a National Historic Landmark near Nerstrand in rural Rice County, Minnesota, United States. The property is nationally significant as the childhood home of Thorstein B. Veblen (1857-1929), an economist, social scientist, and critic of American culture probably best known for The Theory of the Leisure Class, published in 1899.

Description and history

The Veblen farmstead stands east of Nerstrand in far eastern Rice County, off Goodhue Avenue north of Minnesota State Highway 246. Now reduced to 10 acres (4.0 ha), the property includes a house, chicken coop, granary, and barn with attached milking shed. The house, granary, and barn, were all built by Thomas Veblen, in the 1870s and 1880s. The house is a two-story frame structure, with a side gable roof, two chimneys, and clapboard siding. A single-story porch extends across the front, supported by square posts, with a balcony above. The granary is a small two-story clapboarded frame building, measuring about 25 by 30 feet (7.6 m × 9.1 m). The barn is two stories, and has a gabled roof.

Thorstein Veblen, born in Wisconsin in 1857, lived on this farm (homesteaded by his parents) as a youth and returned often as an adult, due in part to his inability to land a job, despite college degrees. The product of an austere agrarian upbringing, Veblen has often been called one of America's most creative and original thinkers. He coined the term "conspicuous consumption." The property's simple vernacular styling illustrates early influences on Veblen's life as the son of immigrants, growing up in a tightly knit Norwegian-American community. His book, Theory of the Leisure Class is distinguished by economic, social, and literary scholars.

The Veblens sold the property in 1893 and it continued to be an active farm until 1970, when the buildings fell into disrepair. The house has now been meticulously restored and the Preservation Alliance of Minnesota holds a preservation easement on the property.

National Register of Historic Places - Thorstein Veblen Farmstead

Statement of Significance:

Thorstein Bunde Veblen, economist, social scientist, and culture critic has often been called one of America's most creative and original thinkers. His work, that is contained in 11 books and over 150 articles and reviews, influenced all the social sciences and especially economics and sociology. Always the lonely thinker, the enigmatic and eccentric Veblen not only satirized prevailing institutions, dogmas, and values, he also contributed to the decline of the prevailing static, formalistic ways of thinking about economics and social development and helped pioneer the rise of a dynamical conception of a world in a perpetual process of evolution from one state to another. His social criticism and his social engineering prescription for change influenced the reform movements of his period and contributed to the social, economic, and political reforms associated with the Progressive Era and the New Deal. The Veblen Farmstead illustrates both the decisive influence of Veblen's parents and the social and cultural Norwegian environment in which he was raised on the development °f an individual who had a major impact on the development of American social thought.

History

Veblen’s Life
Thornstein Bunde Veblen was born July 30, 1857, on a frontier farm in Wisconsin. He was the fourth son and sixth child of an immigrant Norwegian family that had come to the United States ten years previously.

When Veblen was eight, the family moved to Minnesota to take up a 290-acre farm. Life on the Minnesota farm was austere; clothes were handmade, coffee and sugar were luxuries, and hard work was the rule.

Because the property nominated for National Historic Landmark status is a boyhood home, the influence of Veblen's Norwegian background on his work will be dealt with below, when the significance of his association with the farmstead is discussed.

To his family Veblen as a boy and young man seemed to contradict the family values. He played tricks on all and made fun of his Norwegian elementary school teachers. Above all, he disliked farm work and preferred to sneak away to an attic and read. According to his older brother, he was precocious, maturing mentally at an early age, but also given to pretending to know answers, when he did not.

When Veblen was 17, his now prosperous father decided that, like his older siblings, he should attend better schools. His father and mother hoped that he would become a minister. One day while Veblen was working in a field, his father called him to the buggy, where Thornstein found his bags packed. He did not know his destination until the youth and his father arrived at Carleton College in nearby Northfield, Minnesota.

The curriculum at Carleton, at the time a Congregational school in the New England tradition, stressed the classics, religion, and moral philosophy. Instruction emphasized the God given nature of laisse-faire capitalism and the status quo, upheld the virtue of common sense, and railed against skeptical thinking. Mathematics and the natural and physical sciences were neglected. Not surprisingly, Veblen, the budding iconoclast, found this atmosphere stultifying. Bored by most of the teaching, Veblen turned to independent reading and acquired his own education. Among his favorite authors during his undergraduate days were Kant, Hume, Rousseau, and Spencer. He was, however, attracted to John Bates Clark (who would later become a distinguished economist). It was Clark who first aroused Veblen's interest in economics. In his last year Veblen scandalized the pious Carleton community in a senior address on a "Plea for Cannibalism" and in a paper titled "Apology for a Toper." The two treatises rationalized the eating of human flesh and justified the consumption of the harder spirits. His Carleton mentors were probably glad and relieved, when the young eccentric graduated in 1880.

Veblen left Carleton hoping to pursue an academic career. His first job, at Moonona Academy in Wisconsin, lasted a year. The school closed. Veblen then decided to follow his brother Andrew (father of the famous mathematician Oswald Veblen) to John Hopkins to study philosophy. At John Hopkins Thornstein studied Hegel and took further courses in economics. His favorite course was Charles Sanders Pierce's lectures in logic. Having impressed his teachers, Veblen decided to try for a scholarship. When he was turned down (as was John Dewey at the same time), he decided to transfer to Yale. At Yale Veblen steeped himself in Kant and continued to read widely. Above all he was drawn to the famous figure of William Graham Summner, the conservative social Darwinist who was trying to reform the religious oriented curriculum through the introduction of courses in modern science. Although Veblen's irreverence had by this time become habitual, he was an outstanding student and in 1884 Yale awarded him a PhD in philosophy. However, like others then and now, Veblen soon learned that his high degree and outstanding intellect did not lead directly to a job. Although he went into the world armed with glowing letters of recommendation from his teachers, he was unable to find employment. Bitter, disappointed, and dispirited he returned to the family farm in Minnesota.

Back Home Veblen explained to his ever tolerant and loyal family that he was ill and needed care. The family suspected laziness. For the next four years he walked in the woods, tinkered with inventions, and read anything and everything; political commentaries, anthropology, botanical studies, Norwegian myths and sagas, economics, sociology, and even Norwegian hymn books. "He read and loafed wrote a brother, "and the next day he loafed and read."

In 1888 Veblen decided to marry. His choice was Ellen Rolfe, the niece of the President of Carleton College, whom he had met during his undergraduate years. Ellen's family frowned on the union, but 'accepted the reality. To get the young couple started Ellen's prosperous uncle gave them a farm in Iowa, but then Thorstein had never shown any inclination to become a man of the soil. Although Veblen possessed personal connections to supplement-his academic letters of recommendation, he was again unable to find a teaching position. He was even turned down for a job as a railroad bookkeeper. Fortunately, Ellen shared Thorstein's intellectual interests and maintained an unshakable faith in his ability. The couple spent hours discussing their readings and were especially fascinated by Edward Bellamy's recently published Utopia "Looking Backward." The book, Ellen said became a turning point in their lives. Stimulated by the book, by his wife's prodding’s not to give up interest and hope, and by the populist unrest of the period, Veblen decided to go back to school and pursue economics as a discipline. After seven years of seemingly premature retirement, he, now 34, returned to graduate school at Cornell.

At Cornell Veblen came under the wing of the economist J. Laurence Laughlin, who obtained a fellowship for him. Encouraged by this support Veblen began to meditate on his vast reading and, of crucial importance, he took up the pen. His first work consisted of theoretical articles in the new "The Quarterly Journal of Economics." The papers established his credentials as a serious economist. When in 1892 Rockefeller's newly founded University of Chicago called Laughlin to head the economics department, Laughlin invited Veblen to go with him as an instructor. At the age of 35 Veblen finally had his first paying job.

At Cornell Veblen came under the wing of the economist J. Laurence Laughlin, who obtained a fellowship for him. Encouraged by this support Veblen began to meditate on his vast reading and, of crucial importance, he took up the pen. His first work consisted of theoretical articles in the new "The Quarterly Journal of Economics." The papers established his credentials as a serious economist. When in 1892 Rockefeller's newly founded University of Chicago called Laughlin to head the economics department, Laughlin invited Veblen to go with him as an instructor. At the age of 35 Veblen finally had his first paying job.

requirements as attendance and grades. Veblen simply had no talent for teaching. His attraction to the opposite sex, and its attraction to him, made him notorious. In 1904 his wife had finally had enough and reported one of his liaisons to university authorities. Although they valued the prestige a man of Veblen's reputation brought to the school, they could no longer ignore his unconcealed womanizing. When the administration broughtpressure to bear on Veblen to conform to academic propriety, he resigned. (At a faculty reception at one of the schools where Veblen taught, one of his colleagues is supposed to have told him that the faculty was worried about his philander reputation. Veblen is reported to have suavely surveyed the faculty wives present and then said to the concerned gentleman, that the faculty had nothing to worry about.)

Veblen's next stop was Stanford. At Stanford he did not change his erring ways. After three years of indignant toleration, the school authorities asked him to resign. Veblen then applied to several schools, only to receive vague and uncommitting replies. In 1911 H. J. Davenport, an admiring former student, finally helped him obtain a position at the University of Missouri. In the same year his wife, from whom he had separated, divorced him.

For Veblen Columbia, Missouri was an exile. He lived in Davenport's basement as a recluse and is supposed to have entered and exited the building through a window. By 1914 he had, however, again found female companionship and in that year, he married Anne Fessenden, a fellow divorcee with two daughters. He apparently did not seek intellectual companionship, but rather somebody who would and could take care of his everyday needs.

Veblen may have been miserable at Columbia amid the Rotarians and Shriners, but his seven years stay there was highly productive. In 1914 he published "The Instinct of Workmanship." Veblen considered this work, in which he brought to bear his readings in -psychology and anthropology in a theory of work as an inherently instinctual good in man, his single most important book. The was followed by "Imperial Germany and the Industrial Revolution" in 1915. This book examined Germany's participation in WW1 and decided that the Huns' aggression was the result of a feudal system untampered by democracy. Being about a timely subject, the book was widely read.

When the United States entered the war in 1917, Veblen offered his services to the nation. Moving to Washington he wrote several reports on the manpower shortage for the Food Administration. In general, his reports and papers for this and other agencies went unread, and he was shifted from bureau to bureau.

When the war was over Veblen moved to New York to write for "Dial," the "little magazine" of the liberal intelligentsia that has become a legend in American intellectual history. His articles, which called for the liquidation of the business system, were widely discussed.