Stanley Lebergott, interviewed by Fred Carstensen

Stanley Lebergott is Chester Hubbard Professor of Economics, Emeritus, at Wesleyan University in Middletown, Connecticut. He was born in Detroit, Michigan in 1918 and was educated at the University of Michigan (B.A., 1938; M.A., 1939). He taught at Wesleyan from 1963, following 20 years in the Federal Government, at the Department of Labor during the war years and at the Bureau of the Budget from 1948 to 1961, and a year as Visiting Professor at Stanford. He was President of the Economic History Association in 1984 and was honored with Quantity and Quiddity: Essays in U. S. Economic History (1987), a Festschrift edited by his colleague, Peter Kilby. The interview took place in Lebergott’s office in June 1992, and was conducted by F C of the University of Connecticut, who writes:

Sometimes we don’t do the obvious thing until circumstance forces it on us; then we realize how much we have missed. I had circled Stan Lebergott for nearly three decades without having had much of a conversation with him before the interview. Some of my ancestors were involved with founding Wesleyan, and a forebear was an early president, but my brother and I were the first men (it was until recently, remember, a men’s college) not to go there; if I had, Stan and I would have arrived together, and I would probably have been his student. I got closer when I went to Yale for graduate work, but Yale’s global vision (i.e., its insularity) somehow didn’t include Middletown. And then after a decade, I returned to Connecticut, now to the north and east of Wesleyan. Though I am a bit of a seminar groupie, my trips to Cambridge, New Haven, and Manhattan didn’t bring me together with Stan. So when I was asked to do this interview, I was delighted. It would give me the opportunity to do something very interesting and the excuse to open up a conversation with what – based on his public persona and those marvelous quotations with which he so often opens his chapters and articles – must

be one of the most engaging of scholarly minds. Indeed. What a wonderful conversation. I got excited about economic history all over again.