ABSTRACT
J. Laurence Laughlin, who brought Thorstein Veblen with him from Cornell to the University of Chicago, must have been an administrator with foresight and acumen. He continuously shielded Veblen from Chicago's cranky and power-mad President William Rainey Harper, made Veblen editor of the Journal of Political Economy and encouraged him to teach a course on socialism, which one student said no one else would have been allowed to teach. Veblen was continually at work on essays and notes for the Journal of Political Economy, and Ellen Rolfe constantly interrupted him while he was trying to concentrate. Ellen often cornered his students and tried to find out what he really thought about socialism, suspecting he was committed but refused to acknowledge it. Thorstein appeared to be warming up for The Theory of the Leisure Class, especially when he talked about the necessity for fashionable dress to hamper in some way its female wearer.
