ABSTRACT
In the summer before Babe Veblen died, but while she was still in McLean Hospital, Thorstein Veblen made a trip to California. During the less than two years that Babe was in Bellevue and McLean Hospital, Thorstein doggedly continued teaching at the New School. Horace M. Kallen, who was acquainted with Veblen during his New School days, said: I recall how he was stirred by the Bolshevist revolution. In Veblen's September 1919 essay in The Dial, he correctly predicted that Russia, with its loose-knit and backward industrial system, would be difficult for an invading nation to overpower. Veblen knew, however, that what the Allied powers really feared was that the spirit of Bolshevism would infect the workers in their own countries. Veblen's predictions turned out to be correct about the United States. A confirmed rebel, he was undoubtedly affected by the conformist pressures in the 1920s, which discouraged his customary free-ranging attacks on sanctimony and conventionality.
