Economics - Hugh Macaulay Endowment
EULOGY: Hugh H. Macaulay (1924-2005)
Eulogy Remarks by Bruce Yandle
October 23, 2005
Clemson Presbyterian Church
I am here to help celebrate the life of Professor Hugh H. Macaulay, Clemson University Alumni Professor of Economics. Always ready to chuckle, he would have reminded us that that great Clemson character and colleague Frosty Bauknight referred to him as an Aluminum Professor of Economics. Whatever the material, he is precious.
He wore a bow tie…, always. And these were made by Pinky, the love of his life, his partner, colleague, and soul mate. She made them from old neck ties, I’m told. I don’t know where the old neck ties came from, but I know this. In the Macaulay household, nothing was wasted.
Hugh had his own dress code, no matter the occasion. A while back it might have been called Sunday-go-to-meeting. The style of the day meant nothing to him. Presenting a proper model to his students meant everything.
He wore a steel brace on one leg, the legacy of a bullet suffered in France in World War II. He couldn’t wait to get in that war, he told me. He had volunteered.
Even with the brace, he walked vigorously…, and rapidly…, and with a certain noise all his own. Some of his students lovingly called it the Macaulay stomp. We could tell when he first set foot on the second floor of Sirrine Hall. He had a hard time slipping up on people.
His hair was cut close. His face, lively. His dark eyes danced as he talked.
He was a real live wire. And he loved to laugh…, and did plenty of it. And he loved to help other people laugh, and did a lot of that too.
If one did not know the meaning of Victorian manners of speech and conduct before, they would after spending time with Macaulay. In 35 years observing him, including many occasions that might have tested the patience of Job, I can tell you that Hugh rarely if ever uttered a word that would not past muster for My Weekly Reader. In my own way, I guess I tried to compensate.
Hugh knew well and followed the words of Adam Smith found in The Theory of Moral Sentiments. “One should think much of others and little of oneself,” Smith tells us. He told me early in my career when I still hadn’t gotten over having a PhD., “Bruce,” he said, “everyone you will ever meet, even the janitor, will know things you do not know. We must treat them all with great respect.”
Hugh had a keen intellect, a never satisfied hunger for knowledge and for opportunities to engage in conversation about ideas. He was a part of every serious discussion group in three counties. The Clemson Forum Club. Greenville’s Piedmont Economics Club, where he worked as program chairman for many years. The Torch Club. Just to name a few.
There was just one set of ideas that mattered above all others. Economics. On this, Hugh liked to quote J.M. Clark. He had "an irrational passion for dispassionate rationality."
Hugh was an economist. No, there has be a more profound way of saying this. As one of my country kin might have put it. He was just eaten up with economics. It was in his cells. In his DNA.
It was not just any old economics, either. It was the economics of the market. It was Adam Smith economics, price theory, trade, and monetary economics. It was what we in the business call the Old Time Religion. But it was even more than this. He had fully integrated classical liberal thought.
And was he ever good. Any time I had trouble getting an international finance problem organized in my mind, which was fairly often, I should add, I would go to Hugh. He would start laying out principles, then go to application, and before you would know it, the answer would be revealed. His many articles, his books and essays reflected the same strong logical application of economic theory to important policy issues. And even they would be sprinkled with the well- known Macaulay wit.
During those decades on campus, the preferred mode of conversation for Hugh was Morning Coffee.
Going for coffee with Hugh was fun. It could be hilarious. But it was always business. Always, always, he had a pen and small pad with him. Ere the conversation had gone for five minutes, Hugh would announce that he a question for the group. He would put down his pad and start drawing supply and demand curves. To curious passers by, the pictures may have somehow looked the same, but each application was different, and the analysis was always done with care and precision.
But Hugh was not an economist, just to be an economist. He had that opportunity after completing his Columbia University doctorate. He had taken a position at the U.S. Treasury in Washington, one that he greatly enjoyed. Hugh and Pinky, had lived in Chevy Chase, Maryland. The time there must have been wonderful. The stories told about it certainly were. But it was not teaching.
Hugh was a teacher, a teacher of economics. A teacher of research. A teacher of life.
He was born to be in the classroom…, and he knew that.
Students. They were the joy of his life. His door was always open…, as was his home. The number of times Hugh and Pinky had students in their home was legion.
His lectures were marvelous. He exams, tough. His grading was like a refiner’s fire.
But there were many students who said “I would rather take another Macaulay course and make a D than a course from someone else and get an A.”
He was inspiring to his students. For many, he was the one who set them on a new path, who wrote powerful letters nominating them for graduate school or a job, and who dropped notes of congratulations later when they were honored in their work. No matter where a Clemson Economist goes today, someone along the way will ask “And how is Professor Macaulay”?
Listen to what one of his former students has to say: “I first knew Hugh when he led an economics seminar during my graduate school days at Clemson. Single-handedly, he arm-wrestled some 16 of us into submission on matters of the free market through his energy, his intellect, and his good humor. You know, it really isn't necessary to say good things about Hugh; his goodness was self-evident in the way he conducted his life and in the way he treated others with respect and courtesy. He left a long, wide trail of fond memories with all who had the good fortune to be influenced by him. Please convey my sympathy to his family.”
For many years, Hugh directed Clemson’s small but strong Master of Arts program in Economics. Once a week, Hugh would take all the students to coffee at a local dining room where they would discuss the latest issue of the American Economic Review and economic classics. Indeed, sometimes I thought the initials M.A. stood for Macaulay’s Arguments. Today, in the John E. Walker Department of Economics he is known as the Godfather of the program.
Clemson. He had a special way of saying the word. His was a love affair with the university. He would talk about Thomas Clemson, about Mr. Calhoun, would tell endless stories about Frank Howard, and go with the best of them when it came to telling tales about old Clemson when every professor had a nickname. He talked about Misery Holmes, Speedy Brewster, and Wee Willie Klugh.
Hugh was a writer par excellence and a stylist grammarian who would gladly read and edit colleague's papers. His skill and speed in doing all this had been honed when he served as dean of Clemson’s graduate school where he was the final arbiter of theses and dissertations,
A paper returned from Hugh would have a multitude of marginal notes, comments squeezed between lines, and even little supply and demand diagrams drawn on the corners. And grammar? Yes, he would mark those split infinitives, but would never stop with the familiar proof reader’s marks. In the margin were the words, “an infinitive split asunder.”
To coauthor work with Hugh was to encounter a moveable feast of literature that went far beyond economics. In a draft chapter devoted to the efficiency of property rights, he would find a way to introduce Voltaire’s Candide, verses from the King James Bible, a line from Casey at the Bat, and for good measure, a few references to words from a Broadway musical.
Hugh was an unabashed lover of the market, competition, and individual freedom. No, more than lover, he was an evangelist.
Those who enjoyed Hugh’s company in a book discussion group now in its third decade would know what to expect if anyone slipped up and suggested a government solution might somehow solve a problem more effectively than the market. “Haven’t you been listening”? he would ask in a disappointing tone of voice, the one that might be used when he taught principles of economics to young freshmen. And to make sure we remembered, he would hold forth, often citing his favorite authorities, beginning with Adam Smith, moving on to Milton Friedman, then to Ronald Coase, back to Ronald Coase again, and finally ending with Will and Arial Durant.
Hugh was an economist, a lover of conversation, a master teacher, a reader, writer and scholar, but deep down inside he knew he was a Scot Presbyterian. His Scot genes would show their strength when one traveled with Hugh on state per diem. If per diem said one should only spend so much per day, then that was it. The number was absolute. Trips with Hugh during those wonderful days meant sharing a room in a Motel 6, where they left the light on for us. It meant packing a lunch of pimento cheese sandwiches, and driving late into the night to avoid yet one more motel bill. As his friend Gene Rich liked to remind him, “Hugh, no MacTavish was ever lavish.”
In recent years, macular degeneration began to take a toll on Hugh’s vision. Always ahead of the curve with the latest computer hardware and software, Hugh forged ahead, with never a complaint. JAWS is a powerful computer program that reads books in digital form, and Hugh would speak in glowing terms about the marvels of life that made even being blind an amazing experience. What JAWS didn’t read, Pinky did. And I know she read a lot.
If it were possible, and I don’t know how it could be, but it was, Hugh’s incredible recall of data, text, and authors seemed to become enhanced. And in his own special way, he became a consultant to others who suffered from the same problem.
I dropped by to see Hugh when he was first in the hospital. Still sedated somewhat from the surgery, Hugh did not seem to be fully awake. Even so, Pinky insisted that I come in and speak to him.
“Hugh,” I said, “I’ve come to tell you that markets work.” This roused him fully. “Thank you for telling me, Bruce,” he responded. “I thought that might be so. Now that I know for certain I can just go ahead and die in peace.” With that, he burst out with that famous Macaulay laugh. Pinky and I laughed too.
How can one end a eulogy about a marvelous friend, teacher, scholar, and counselor? Perhaps Bobby Burns the Scot ploughman poet can do that for us.
“For a’ that and a’ that, a man’s a man for a’ that.”
Hugh Macaulay was one more wonderful man.