A Free Man
A long look back across the whole life. From Harlem to Chicago to the body of work that changed how people think.
- Interviewer
- Peter Robinson
- Program
- Uncommon Knowledge
- Topics
- His Life, Ideas
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Lightly cleaned for reading (36 of Sowell’s turns). Tap any timestamp to jump the video there.
Today, an interview with by far our most requested guest, Thomas Sowell, filmed last December. It's special. I've interviewed Tom over and over for a quarter of a century, but always we've been discussing one of his books. In this interview we're going to hear about Tom Sowell's life, the small home on a dirt road in North Carolina, then Harlem, then the Marine Corps. How Tom Sowell became Tom Sowell. Dr. Sowell has published more than three dozen books, by my count no fewer than 45, and with anthologies and revised editions, up to 70. Tom, welcome back.
Good being here.
I'd like to talk about your early life. Before you were born, your father, who was dying, asked his aunt to raise you, because your mother already had four children to raise on the wages of a maid. You didn't know until much later that you were adopted. Your father died before you were born, you have no memory of your mother, and yet you write, "These were some of the happiest times of my life." How?
I was much more of a celebrity at that point to my family than I've ever been since then. Years later, when I had a son of my own, like many new parents we wanted to know when the child is supposed to do this and that. So I asked the last surviving member of the family in which I grew up, "How old was I when I first began to walk?" She said, "Oh, Tommy, nobody knows when you could walk. Somebody was always carrying you." Later, when I did research on child development, I was struck by how much emphasis people put on those first three years for a child's development. When I thought back to that, I was really quite lucky, because those were probably the three happiest years of my life. I was adored. And the people who are constantly trying to get children out of the hands of their parents so the so-called experts can deal with them don't understand that the parents, who may not have PhDs, can do more for you than anyone.
The family in which you grew up was not educated.
When we moved to New York, the schools were so much more advanced than in the South. The tradition was to put a Southern kid back a year, but I talked the principal into letting me stay in my grade. It was a Pyrrhic victory, because I really wasn't ready. When I came home and asked the adults to help me with the homework, I was told, "We don't have enough education ourselves to help you." Later, when I was promoted to the seventh grade, there was such a to-do in the family. I said, "Why this time rather than before?" They said, "You've now gone further than any of us." To seventh grade.
[Odyssey] "The first house I remember was a wooden house on an unpaved street. There was a living room, a kitchen, and two bedrooms. In the kitchen, a wood-burning stove. The toilet was a little shed on the back porch. For light at night, we had kerosene lamps. It never occurred to me that we were living in poverty." Does that tell us poverty is in some element subjective?
Yes. Anyone who reads the history of the Eastern European Jews or the Irish before them, the conditions they lived under were worse than mine, but they didn't spend their time worrying about it. Milton Friedman mentioned his mother worked in what we call sweatshops, long hours, low pay, and he never heard her complain. She was glad to have the job, and it gave her a chance to learn English at the same time. But now you make such a to-do about it that everyone feels entitled to this or that.
1939, you're nine, and your family leaves North Carolina for New York. [Odyssey] "We had a gas stove, hot running water, and a built-in bathtub, all for the first time. The adults had never had the opportunities that I would now have in New York, including the opportunity for a good education, and they wanted me to make the most of those opportunities." That sounds like an immigrant account.
No question. Moving from the South to New York was almost like moving from Poland or Sicily to New York.
Describe your first trip to the public library.
Family members had gone ahead, as often happens, with immigrants as well as Blacks moving out of the South. And somehow in Harlem they ran into a kid who was very intelligent, very well-read. The light bulb went off: this is somebody who can help Tommy, because this kid knew things they didn't. Eddie Mapp was his name. They persuaded him to take me under his wing, and he decided to take me to a public library. I was puzzled why I was in this building with all these books, I'd never seen so many books, and I didn't have enough money to buy one, so what am I doing here? I was already thinking like a Chicago economist. It took a lot of persuasion to get me to take out a library card. I got the card and borrowed two books. I'd arrived in New York in May, wouldn't be in school until September, so there were no kids to play with. It was a dreary existence, so I had these books, and that's when I first got the habit of reading. At the age of nine, which is quite late. Eventually I'd have learned about public libraries, but eventually might be too late.
In the South you said white people were almost hypothetical to you. But there's an account of a white farmer selling produce, and you played with his little girl, and your adoptive mother said, "You've just taken your first step toward the gallows."
Yes.
So you get this sense of menace in the South. What about Harlem? Did Harlem feel safe?
Everything is relative. We didn't have the racial problems, but there were other problems, a lot of kids did more fighting at the school in Harlem. Because I still had a Southern accent, they'd pick on me. I'd try to reason with them, and one day, when I ran out of reasons, I simply grabbed one kid's head and smashed his face into a stone wall. And I discovered that people stopped bothering me. It's a lesson I have kept in my mind up to this present day.
I hadn't realized what a scrapper you were. Some schools were better than others, but you got a good education. How much credit goes to the schools, and how much was just that Tom Sowell was unusually bright? Nature versus nurture.
That's a tough one. I didn't meet my brothers until I was 20, and it was clear I was more like them than like anybody in the family that raised me. One time my brother was driving, we hit a traffic jam, and he said, "As idle as a painted ship," and I said, "Upon a painted ocean." Another time he said, "It was many and many a year ago," and I said, "In a kingdom by the sea." We'd been reading and remembering the same things. Later, when I had my son, my oldest brother came over, and I said I'd take him outside to introduce him to my son. He said, "I've already met him. We've had a conversation." I said, "How did you pick him out with all those kids out there?" He said, "Tommy, when I see a dozen kids all doing the same thing, and in the midst one kid doing something entirely different, I know who our mother's grandson is."
You got into Stuyvesant, one of the most prestigious public schools, you had to take exams. But the commute from Harlem took an hour each way, you got ill and missed weeks, and you dropped out of high school, and things got difficult at home, and you left home. So at 16 you're living in a room at the Home for Homeless Boys.
You have it sequenced a little off. I stayed at the Home for Homeless Boys three days, because I had a job. Then I moved into a little place with a room for rent, less than a third the size of my bathroom at home today. There was no closet, just a nail in the wall, and that was sufficient for my wardrobe at the time.
You considered becoming an illustrator, the training was too expensive. You tried out for the Dodgers. [Odyssey] "1949 would turn out to be one of the worst years of my life. It was a recession year, and I was plagued with recurrent unemployment. I finally got a part-time job working at night in a machine shop on the Lower East Side. I knew where to buy day-old bread for five cents a loaf and a jar of jelly for 10 cents. That and water constituted my meals." Was that to be endured, or did you learn from it?
Both. Years later in the Marine Corps, someone was selling something in the barracks for a quarter and everybody was snapping it up, and I was pondering it. Eventually I said, "I think I'll take one." And someone said, "Oh, Diamond Jim Sowell is gonna spend a quarter." Because I'd become very conscious of watching my expenditures from that experience in 1949.
[Odyssey] "One day I found an old secondhand set of encyclopedias for $1.17, and I bought it. One of the entries was about Karl Marx, to whose ideas I was attracted for the next decade. These ideas seemed to explain so much in a way to which my grim experience made me receptive." So in late-'40s America you turn to someone who explains things on class rather than race. Why?
It made more sense to me. But also the education system then and now offers very little in the way of explanations. There was nothing about the Federalist Papers or things like that. This was the first vision of the world there was, and when there's not much competition, you go with what looks the most promising.
You knew Marx backwards and forwards by the time you got to Harvard, but you didn't become a member of the party.
No, because I had skepticism. I'd been told the Communist Party in the United States was simply a branch of the Soviet Union's system. And the crucial thing: World War II was going on in 1941, and the Soviet Union was initially on the side of the Nazis. The Daily Worker, the communist newspaper, had been saying the United States shouldn't get involved in this war. Then in June 1941 Hitler invaded the Soviet Union, and suddenly they thought the United States should get into the war, literally from one day to the next. I read that in a book by Arthur Schlesinger Jr., so I went down to the main public library, got out the old copies of the Daily Worker, and read it for myself, something very few students are taught to do today. You go along with which way the rhetoric happens to be running, and if it sounds good, that's what you go with. But I checked it out for myself, and that immunized me from going that route.
You move to Washington and get a civil service job. [Odyssey] "At a number of fast food places downtown, whites could sit down and eat, but Blacks could only eat standing up at the counter. I went hungry rather than subject myself to that. In November 1950, I wrote a long letter to the Washington Star urging the desegregation of the city's public schools. It was the first thing I had written that I know was published." So you're conscious of racial injustice, and it makes you angry. And yet in your own life, race is a side issue. The main narrative is Tom Sowell working, trying to get ahead, reading books. How conscious was your thinking about how to handle the race question?
It was one of many things I thought about. But I was an empiricist. I knew that many of the things said to be causing one another don't stand up if you really scrutinize and logically analyze them.
By autumn 1951 you're inducted into the Marine Corps, serving as an official photographer. [Odyssey] "No one who knew me in the Marine Corps ever questioned why I never made sergeant, but quite a few expressed amazement that I was not busted back to private."
I was not a conformist.
You were a tough young man, boxing in the Corps, fights. Where did the toughness come from?
Heaven knows. That could be the nature and nurture thing, because my oldest brother was a lot like that. He was working for the post office and some criminal did something, and he just went out there and overpowered him. And there were race riots in Washington in 1963. I phoned and couldn't get him at home, and later discovered he was out in the midst of the rioters, saying things like, "After you burn down this man's store, where are you gonna shop?" Now, I would not have thought a riot was a place for Socratic dialogue.
Actually, if you'd been in a riot, that's exactly what you'd have done. Student life. As you were leaving the camera store one night, you mentioned to the elevator man that you were too tired to go to school that evening. He became distressed, almost alarmed. What did he say?
He said, "You go in even though you don't feel like it." He was British, and he'd had an opportunity as a young man to go to Australia for some big opportunity, and he passed it up, and always regretted it since.
At Howard University you studied with Sterling Brown, a distinguished poet and literary critic. You gave him a short story, he marked it up, and you saw fiction wasn't your future. [Odyssey] "I did acquire an appreciation of the beauty and power of plain writing, which helped me the rest of my life."
I'd been writing fiction before that, and studying under Sterling Brown let me see, the writing doesn't have to be pretentious. You just put the words down there and roll.
So you discovered a mode of prose that fit you, unpretentious, straightforward, factual. You applied for a transfer and found yourself at Harvard. Your first midterm grades were two Ds and two Fs.
Yes.
[Odyssey] "Over the Christmas break, I memorized German words by the hour, worked out math problems, taught myself to use a slide rule, and went through the chemistry textbook, solving every problem from cover to cover. Things began to fall into place. I graduated from Harvard magna cum laude." Did Harvard teach you that academic work ethic?
It was simpler than that. One of my roommates said, "Tom, when are you gonna stop goofing off and get some work done?" I said, "Goofing off?" But when the grades came out, I thought it was time to reassess. I was told I'd have to shape up or ship out, and I didn't have any place to ship out to, so that narrowed the options. In the fall semester I had four Cs, in the spring four Bs. I was looking through the catalog one day and said to my roommate Mike, "Do you realize that at this late date I could still graduate magna cum laude?" He burst out laughing. And I did.
[Odyssey] "Harvard made a major contribution to my development, but when the time came to leave, I felt that it was not a moment too soon." Why?
There was a certain smugness. You may have heard the saying, "You can always tell a Harvard man, but you can't tell him much." I remember a few times I'd argue with those people, get them out on a limb, and then cut the limb off. My roommate said, "Did you really have to make a fool of him in front of all those people?" I said, "Don't give me too much credit. I had good raw material." He said, "You can't please all the people all the time." I said, "You're not pleasing any of the people any of the time." And it was true. It's painful sometimes, I get letters from young Black students who feel sorry for me for having gone through school during this racist period. And I thought back: I don't remember a single racist remark at Harvard. The closest thing was a student from Britain we referred to as "nasty, British, and short", and I was the one who said it.
You once told me the principal advantage of a Harvard degree is that you never again have to feel intimidated by somebody who holds a Harvard degree. From Harvard to Columbia, where you wrote your master's thesis under Arthur Burns, then doctoral work at Chicago with Milton Friedman and George Stigler. [Odyssey] "I was as well aware that the University of Chicago Economics department had a reputation for conservatism as they were that I was a Marxist." How did that work?
Worked out fine. I was much more in tune with them, and had much more respect for Chicago than I ever had for Harvard, because their approach was empirical. We didn't go on the notion that because we are the wonderful people, if we all believe something that makes it true. In Chicago you had to argue tooth and nail. Years later, in an interview for an appointment at UCLA, at that time known as the West Coast Office of the University of Chicago Economics Department, I opened by taking a shot at a senior member, which is not how you should act at an employment interview. A lady from the administration was so shocked at the fierceness she went to the chairman and said, "I've never seen such hostility." And the chairman, also a Chicago economist, said, "What are you talking about? These guys love Tom. Of course we're gonna hire him." Later I was invited back to Chicago to give a talk, and I asked the format. He said, "You know how these things go, Tom. You try to make your point, and we try to show what a damn fool you are." That's how Chicago economists operated. My respect was validated, toward the end of the 20th century, nine Chicago economists won the Nobel Prize, compared to one at Harvard.
1960, you become an economist at the Department of Labor. [Odyssey] "I had remained a Marxist despite being at the University of Chicago, but now my experience in Washington began a process of changing my mind completely." What did it?
Evidence. I'd been much in favor of minimum wage laws, the people have low income, they can get a better life. But at Chicago there was the idea that when you raise the minimum wage you cause lots of people to lose their jobs. There were two explanations of why unemployment went up in Puerto Rico, which I was studying: the minimum wage, or the storms that came through several years in a row and destroyed part of the sugar crop, reducing the need for workers. In Chicago they said if there are two contradictory theories, there ought to be some fact that fits one and not the other. So I made it my job to find it, and one morning I came in and said, "I've got it. We need statistical data on the amount of sugar standing in the field before the storm came in." I waited for the applause, and I saw looks of horror on the other economists' faces, like, "This guy has stumbled on something that'll ruin us all", because one-third of the money for the Labor Department came from administering the minimum wage law. I suddenly realized the people pushing this were not necessarily looking out for the poor; they were looking out for their own careers. They said, "We don't have those statistics." I said, "I'll bet the Department of Agriculture has it." He said I'd have to send a note up to the Secretary of Labor, who would confer with the Secretary of Agriculture. So I said, "The president said a journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step, so I'll write", I'm a summer intern in this place, "a note to the Secretary of Labor," which I did. And I am still patiently waiting for his answer, 50 years later.
[Odyssey] "This forced me to realize that government agencies have their own self-interest to look after, regardless of the interest of those for whom a program has been set up. The more government programs I looked into, the harder I found it to believe they were a net benefit to society."
Yes.
Your first teaching job is at Douglas College. You loved teaching. Here's a conversation with your department chairman. [Odyssey, chair] "The feeling I get, Sowell, is that you aim your course at the A and B students, but you've got to scoop lower and bring the C and D students up." [Sowell] "Anybody who can get into Douglas College can make a B in my course. The students you want me to concentrate on are those who don't want to get an education." And a few days later you left your resignation in his mailbox. You loved teaching, but insisted on standards. Any regrets?
No. I never worried about my academic career, because I could always make more money somewhere else, I'd worked at&T, back when it was the world's largest corporation, making at least twice as much. When I was teaching at Cornell as an assistant professor on a three-year contract, I had differences with senior members of the department. Someone said, "These are people who are going to be voting on whether your contract will be renewed." And I got up and walked out of his office and said, "Since I make my decisions as I see fit, I assume you'll make yours as you see fit." When I told my wife, she said, "What if you get fired?" I said, "I'll go back to AT&T. We can use the money." She said, "Give them hell."
At Howard, the department chair said, [Odyssey] "For God's sake, Sowell, you're not teaching at Harvard. Kids from these backgrounds can't handle a lot of abstractions and graphs." And you said, "Yes, they can, but not as long as they have administrators to intervene on their behalf." At Cornell, a kid in your summer program wasn't performing, you wanted him out, and the chairman said, "No, he's Black, we have to keep him." [Odyssey] "Unlike my long resignation letter at Howard, my resignation from Cornell consisted of only one sentence. I had learned the futility of trying to talk sense to people who don't want to hear it."
Well, if you want to be a politician protecting your career in academia, you can do that. There was no reason to, because I could always make more money somewhere else.
In 1980 you join the Hoover Institution. [Odyssey] "My position at Hoover would turn out to be the longest job I ever held, and the most satisfying. It would allow me to devote my time entirely to research." How old are you now, Tom?
94.
I received a letter from a young man in Ghana: "I am 31 and have all these years avoided economics because it was too complicated until I discovered Thomas Sowell. Send me books you deem relevant to leadership right here in Africa." I boxed up a dozen of your books and sent them to Accra. Are you conscious of the reach you've had through your books?
Not really.
Fifteen years ago, a big organization offered to fly you by private jet to Palm Springs to speak for an hour, for a staggering sum. Word came back, "Dr. Sowell is not interested. He's busy reading and writing." So it's the work itself. What keeps you at it, Tom?
It's something I feel like doing, and enjoy doing, and hope that some of it will make some difference to somebody somewhere.
[Odyssey] "In some ways, my life was much like that of many other Blacks. In other ways, it was quite different. Perhaps most important, I grew up with no fear of whites." Why was that important?
Because there are a lot of people who are working out their fears. If you don't have that, you don't have that distraction. The first time I went to a school that was predominantly white was the seventh grade. They had ability grouping, and a 7AR rapid-advancement class for students with IQs 120 and above. Someone went through the records to find kids with an IQ of 120 who weren't in the R class, and there were four. The other three took the transfer immediately. I said, "I'm happy where I am." Fortunately, they put me in there anyway. I've never wanted to be part of something that was special. There are people whose lives have been ruined because they wanted to be in some special group. That's one of the great tragic aspects of academic life now, people out rioting for stuff they totally misunderstand, because they feel a need to be with a crowd doing these things that are supposed to be so great. That's one of the things Walter Williams and I had in common: Walter did not care what anybody thought about what he did. Our schools are turning out people who want to be part of some great something or other, and who therefore will go along with all kinds of things rather than questioning them.
A list of what Tom Sowell loves, facts, argument. What Tom Sowell hates, conformism. [Odyssey] "In New York, I passed through the public schools at a time when they were better than they had been for the European immigrant children of a generation earlier, and far better than they would be for Black children of a later era." You attribute that to luck.
A younger relative of mine, in her middle age, blamed herself for not taking advantage. She said, "I went to the same school you went to, Uncle Tommy." I said, "No, you went to the same building I went to. When you got there, it was not the same school anymore."
[Odyssey] "I happened to come along right after the worst of the old discrimination was no longer there to impede me, and just before racial quotas made the achievements of Blacks look suspect."
Yes. The other luck was that my first interest was the history of ideas, and the economics journals in Britain were more into that than the ones in the United States. So in my first decade of publishing I published more in Britain, two articles at Oxford, two at the London School of Economics, than in the United States. I never had to worry whether I was getting this because I was Black. They had no idea what color I was on the other side of the Atlantic. You submitted the piece of writing, and the piece of writing only.
[Odyssey] "It now seems almost as if someone had decided that there should be a man with all the outward indications of disadvantage, who nevertheless had the key inner advantages needed to advance." Who is the someone who made that decision? Have you ever thought through questions of religion or divine providence?
I've not thought in those terms. Years ago there was a favorable article about me expressing amazement that I could come through Harlem and go off to Harvard. I got a letter from an attorney who grew up three blocks from where I lived in Harlem, saying, "This is not such a strange thing. There are people like that in the tenement where I grew up." Over the years I've learned there are any number of people within a five-block radius of where I was who are both more financially successful and far better known than I am. It was a time, and the people of that time. One man told me there were times when his father, at dinnertime, would sit there watching the kids eat and not eating anything himself. When you come out of a family like that, and there's a good school system, it's not miraculous, you take off. Now you don't have as many families like that. In fact, you don't have that many families that have a father at all, and a lot of data shows that is a devastating handicap, mostly for boys but also for girls. So you've created the welfare state, destroyed the family, and the net result: you've made a lot of people worse off while you thought you were making them better off.
Ta-Nehisi Coates writes that "the American dream cannot exist without racial injustice." You suffered hard times, you were a Marxist for years, you opposed the Vietnam War. And yet you lived a version of the American dream. What's your summary statement on this country?
Like all other human societies, it was not perfect. But if you compare it not to perfection or an ideal, but to the other countries, it's hard to find another one that can match it.
[Odyssey] "The whole point of looking back on my life, aside from the pleasure of sharing reminiscences, is to hope that others will find something useful for their own lives." So may I take a stab? Very few people will ever possess your sheer intelligence, but we can all aspire to develop our abilities, to work at our abilities as you worked on yours. We can all reject victimization. We can all learn to think for ourselves. We can all defy high-sounding nonsense and insist on logic and evidence, and we can all display gratitude. Will you accept that?
That sounds good to me.
Tom Sowell, thank you very much.
Thank you.
[closing] I like Tom because I just like Tom, that laugh, the warmth, the quickness, the brilliance, the slightly cutting humor. But there are attributes I admire. The moral authority: Tom Sowell belongs to the last generation to have experienced Jim Crow. The intellectual self-confidence. The sheer work ethic, the Thomas Sowell Reader, Intellectuals and Race, Basic Economics fifth edition, Wealth Poverty and Politics, Discrimination and Disparities, Charter Schools and Their Enemies, Social Justice Fallacies, all books he wrote after turning 80, and he's at work on another right now. Always he thinks for himself. Always he insists upon learning the facts. Never has he been influenced by a mere climate of opinion. He stands on his own two feet and thinks with his own mind. Thomas Sowell is a free man. For Uncommon Knowledge, the Hoover Institution, and Fox Nation, I'm Peter Robinson.
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