Robert J. McEwen S.J.

In mid-May Father Robert J. McEwen died suddenly while visiting relatives in Ireland. He had turned in grades and completed fifty years of teaching economics at BC just a few weeks earlier. Father McEwen was chairman of the department from 1957 to 1970, and a key player in the department's growth and development. In 1957 he received one of the first three Ph.D. degrees in economics awarded by Boston College. His thesis was on the "so-called" fair trade laws. He was "against them" according to Father Seavey Joyce, a member of his thesis committee. The following September Bob became chairman, taking over from Father Joyce. With the support of BC's president, Father Mike Walsh, Bob began the building of the department. He hired Alice Bourneuf in 1959. Alice was teaching at Berkeley, but she had lived in Chestnut Hill as a young woman and was enthusiastic about returning. I was in graduate studies at MIT at the time, and I heard of Bob's decision to hire Alice from Morrie Adelman. Morrie had known Alice at the Fed, and Bob asked Morrie what he thought of Alice as a prospective BC faculty member. Morrie was enthusiastic, but he cautioned Bob that he better be prepared to deal with a very strong personality. He evidently was. Alice came aboard, and she and Bob worked closely together over the next decade. Ed Kane, Ed Foster, and Albert Ando were brought over from MIT to teach mathematical economics. Leon Smolinski and Harold Petersen were two of five new faculty whom Bob and Alice hired during Alice's first year. In a volume of essays honoring Alice, Paul Samuelson wrote that "at AEA conventions, when Father McEwen and Alice Bourneuf appeared, department heads quaked for the ivory they were hoarding. The results are now history."

In his teaching, writing, and practical work Bob's economics was in the service of economic justice. The Jesuit economists of the late 17th century had concerned themselves with justice in economic life. Two of their major foci were the just price, and the conditions under which the payment of interest was morally legitimate. Bob carried this concern for justice into his work. The just price was described by his Jesuit forebears as the price reached by the actions of the community of buyers and sellers in the absence of monopoly, fraud, and collusion. Bob's interest in the consumer movement with its emphasis on information, consumer education, and vigorous exposure of collusion, and special interest lobbying was clearly in this tradition. Massachusetts Attorney General Edward McCormack appointed him as the first consumer representative in the Attorney General's office, and he was the first chairman of the Massachusetts Consumer Council when it was legislatively established. He was a close friend of late Speaker of the US House, John W. McCormack, and of the late Senator Paul Douglas of Illinois [of "Cobb-Douglas" fame]. He served on President Lyndon Johnson's Consumer Advisory Task Force, and at the time of his death he was still a major participant in consumer activities throughout the United states.

I never heard Bob talk about his views on interest and money, but he once taught money and banking, and one of his former students told me that Bob was critical of the practice of fractional reserve banking. Alice once said that after she joined the department she told Bob to keep his views on money to himself, and evidently he did. But I think he never abandoned them completely. Thirty years ago I read a review by Bob of a book on interest by a Jesuit economist, Thomas Divine. I was interested in the review because the book originally had been Divine's University of London Ph.D. thesis directed by my MIT graduate professor, Paul Rosenstein-Rodan. Bob expressed strong dissatisfaction with Divine's views on money. A few years back I read Divine's book, along with several other books on the usury question. Divine concluded that the source of the usury prohibition was not a judgment that interest was intrinsically wrong, but a historically conditioned judgment that when those who had abundance charged interest on pure consumption loans to members of the community in distress, the solidarity necessary for community life was seriously damaged. I asked Bob what he had meant by his criticism of Divine. His reply was that he believed that Divine had not dealt adequately with usury in modern life. Bob's view was closer to that of another Jesuit, Bernard Dempsey, whose book Interest and Usury, published by Harvard Press, was written originally as a Ph.D. thesis under Joseph Schumpeter. Dempsey regarded usury as intrinsically wrong. He believed that the practice of fractional reserve banking was usurious and the root cause of the business cycle. What bankers were doing was charging for the loan of something that in reality they did not have to lend. This conversation led me to believe that Bob still held the opinion of fractional reserve banking that I had heard attributed to him many years previously. He evidently accepted Dempsey's reasoning and criticized fractional reserve banking out of his concern for economic justice. But recognizing how far out of mainstream thinking his views on money were, he chose to focus his daily activities on questions related more directly to just price theory.

At a dinner celebrating the 25th anniversary of Bob's ordination former Attorney General Edward McCormack was called on for a few words about Bob. McCormack had been a candidate for the US Senate and was opposed in the Democratic primary by Ted Kennedy making his first run for public office. McCormack was Bob McEwen's candidate. In the televised debate McCormack turned to Kennedy and said "If your name were Edward Moore you wouldn't be a candidate in this election." The general opinion of the experts was that this direct attack on Ted as a Kennedy hurt McCormack seriously. Ted was elected and still holds the seat. McCormack's career in elective politics ended. At the dinner that evening McCormack told the audience that it was Bob McEwen who gave him that famous line, and thus probably ensured that he never became a US Senator. It was obvious that evening that Bob had many friends, and some of them went back a long way, former Dorchester friends, fellow Jesuits, fellow consumer activists, former students, political figures. And some of his oldest and firmest friends were from his days as a young Jesuit when he was moderator of the BC dramatics society. He was a good man, a good colleague, and a good and faithful priest. May he rest in peace.

Francis M. McLaughlin
Boston College

July 10, 1996