MARLBORO — A personal library of books that once served as intellectual fuel for a deeply influential economist and his linguist wife will find a new home at Marlboro College, which has received the collection of Catherine and John Kenneth Galbraith, who maintained a home in Townshend since 1947.
Marlboro College Library Director James Fein, describing the donation as “pretty much a coup” for the small college, estimates that almost 3,000 books have made their way from Cambridge, Mass., the longtime home of the Galbraiths, to the college's Rice-Aron Library, where they will likely end up in a named room with other Galbraith memorabilia.
John Kenneth Galbraith worked as an economist, diplomat, professor, and author of more than 40 books and hundreds of essays. He advised Presidents Franklin D. Roosevelt, Harry S. Truman, Lyndon B. Johnson, and served John F. Kennedy as ambassador to India from 1961 to 1963. By some accounts, Galbraith wrote Johnson's famous “Great Society” speech. He died in 2006.
Catherine “Kitty” Galbraith, who died in October, an accomplished linguist who was fluent in a number of languages, including Hindi, supported her husband in diplomatic circles, and co-authored a travelogue on India in the 1970s and wrote a number of articles.
Peter Galbraith of Townshend, who joined with his brothers Alan and James to donate the library, described the books simply as “my parents' personal collection.”
But the books had a storied history, and collectively define two lives devoted to scholarship, diplomacy, and community.
The books “were the backdrop of many events, from a meeting with Senator John F. Kennedy to a home stay of [Pakistan] Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto, whose portrait was taken with these books in the background,” Galbraith said.
Galbraith serves on the college's board of trustees, as did his father, who once called Marlboro “one of the jewels of American education.”
“There was a time when Marlboro was in deep financial trouble,” Galbraith said, describing his father's efforts to raise money to save the institution. “He believed it was important, and he did what he could.” He described both parents as “really generous people.”
A wide range
The collection will take “one, if not two, years to be processed and put into a location accessible to the outside world,” said Fein, one of four librarians at the college.
In looking at the variety of titles in the Galbraith's library, “I think you get a feeling for their interests,” Fein said.
The collection includes books from India that the Galbraiths collected during his ambassadorship, as well as a large collection on contemporary issues from World War II to the present.
Fein - who is no stranger to the collection, having worked with three volunteers from Marlboro to pack up and drive the books to Vermont - said that the titles include a large number of art books belonging to Kitty Galbraith and “quite a preponderance of literature.” Many of the books include inscriptions from their authors, Fein noted.
“And from my mother's side, the collection includes great classics, like Dickens and Robert Louis Stevenson, that go back to the late 19th and early 20th century, and French and German books that go back to the 1930s and before,” Galbraith noted.
The collection also includes books from Galbraith's maternal grandfather, Wilbur Olin Atwater, inventor of several versions of the calorimeter and the “Atwater system” used to calculate the caloric value of food.
“We received copies of everything [John Kenneth Galbraith] wrote,” Fein said, including foreign translations of the author's prodigious writings.
The family included some of Galbraith's papers in the donation as well, including three boxes of congressional testimony, Fein added.
A lasting legacy
Peter Galbraith, a former ambassador to Croatia and the author of two books on the consequences of the U.S. military invasion in Iraq, said the collection reflects the lives and legacy of his parents.
Galbraith described his father as “one of America's most favorite and most influential economists,” one whose “writings and views seem most amazingly prescient and well-suited for what we're going through these days.”
The stock market and real estate bubbles, fraudulence and recklessness in the financial markets, and other circumstances that have led to a worldwide economic recession is “very much what he predicted,” Galbraith said of his father, who told the Los Angeles Times in 1999 that “the speculative bubble always comes to an end - and never in a pleasant or peaceful way.”
In 2008, two of the Galbraith sons saw their books published: The Predator State, by James Galbraith, and Unintended Consequences: How War in Iraq Strengthened America's Enemies, by Peter Galbraith.
In the fall, as the condition of the economy worsened, the Galbraith brothers would look at Amazon.com's sales figures and notice that their father's title The Crash of 1929, which he wrote in 1954 in Townshend, consistently outsold their own new titles.
Proof of Galbraith's intellectual endurance - “even from the grave,” Peter Galbraith said with a laugh.