The following is an excerpt from the interview with Sweezy, where Paul talks about his father (conducted by myself and Sungur Savran in Great Barrington, Massachusetts on March 20, 1986). The interview previously appeared in Obirinci Tez (Thesis Eleven), a Marxist theoretical journal publised quarterly in Istanbul, Turkey since November 1985 as well as in Monthly Review, April 1987, v.38. Also available at:
http://www.glovesoff.org/history_files/sweezy/sweezy_tonak.html e. ahmet tonak ".....You have to understand that I probably would have gone that way, too. I was fortunate in not having to depend on an academic salary. My father was a banker; as a matter of a fact, he was the vice president of the First National Bank, which was one of the predecessor corporations to the Citibank now. In its day, under the leadership of George F. Baker, it was one of the leading forces in United States finance capital. Baker and J.P. Morgan were very close partners in effect. And at that time the First National Bank had only five vice presidents. Today, the Citibank probably has a hundred or more. The old First National was a corporate bank, I don't think it took deposits of less than a million dollars. It had very few personal accounts, and that's one of the reasons it couldn't survive in the later period. It had to merge with the National City Bank in order to survive at all. But there was a time when it was sort of an adjunct to the Morgan empire, a part of it. And my father was upper-level management, a vice president, of the First National. He wasn't very rich. He could have been but for the crash of 1929. He was heavily involved in many of the things that went bust in 1929. So it was not as though he had a big fortune, but enough to live on. That was necessary. In the United States, if you don't have access to a little surplus value, you know, you're not going to be able to play a really independent role in the intellectual environment. So I don't blame these people in any personal sense. I try to explain it and thank my lucky stars that I was able to escape those pressures, to which so many people succumbed...." On 7/5/09 6:45 AM, "Michael Perelman" <mich...@ecst.csuchico.edu> wrote: > Couldn't you put together quite a few people who moved from such an > environment to the militant left? I don't recall how high up Sweezy's > father was. Corliss Lamont. ... > > -- > Michael Perelman > Economics Department > California State University > Chico, CA 95929 > > Tel. 530-898-5321 > E-Mail michael at ecst.csuchico.edu > michaelperelman.wordpress.com > _______________________________________________ > pen-l mailing list > pen-l@lists.csuchico.edu > https://lists.csuchico.edu/mailman/listinfo/pen-l _______________________________________________ pen-l mailing list pen-l@lists.csuchico.edu https://lists.csuchico.edu/mailman/listinfo/pen-l
