John Kenneth Galbraith was one of the foremost economists of the 20th century. He was also an author, an advisor to American presidents, a public official and an intellectual. And for five years of his youth Galbraith was a resident of Guelph.
Galbraith was born in 1908 in Iona Station in Elgin County, Ontario, the second of the four children of Archibald and Sarah Catherine (nee Kendall). The boy preferred his second name, so he was Ken to family and friends.
The Galbraiths were prosperous farmers. Archie had once been a school teacher, but couldn’t support a family on a teacher’s pay.
Politically, the Galbraiths were what people today would call progressives. Like most of their neighbours in that part of Ontario, they were Liberal supporters. After Liberal Prime Minister Sir Wilfrid Laurier lost power in 1911, and then Sir Robert Borden’s Conservative/Unionist party brought in military conscription during the First World War, Archie became active with the United Farmers of Ontario, a political party that was a forerunner of the New Democratic Party.
Young Ken’s family and community life was one of hard work, and a deeply-rooted sense of responsibility and social conscience. Although Galbraith was a good student, he struggled with schoolwork after his mother died when he was only 15. At high school he somehow was tagged with the nickname “Soupy,” which he hated.
Galbraith graduated from high school in 1926. He then went to Guelph where he enroled in the Ontario Agricultural College. It was a two-and-a-half-hour train ride from Galbraith’s home, and the farthest away from there he had ever been. Guelph was a small town compared to Toronto, another couple of hours down the railway line, but it was still the biggest urban centre the country boy had ever set foot in.
The Ontario Agricultural College was Archie’s choice for young Ken’s post-secondary education. As a successful farmer and a man who kept himself informed about all matters of importance to him and his family, Archie would have been aware of the AOC’s solid international reputation and of its achievements in agricultural research. During the war he had undoubtedly followed the controversial stand the college’s pacifist Acting President, Professor Charles A. Zavitz, had taken against Canada’s participation in the conflict.
The OAC was affordable to students from middle-class families, and Ken met all the requirements for registration. He was 18, a youth of “moral character and physical ability,” and he could produce a certificate affirming that he had spent at least a year on a farm and had a “practical knowledge of ordinary farm operations, such as harnessing and driving horses, plowing, harrowing, drilling, etc.”
Years later, he would recall his first day on campus. “It was a lovely autumn day, the campus was extremely beautiful, the football team was practicing. I was shown to my room – and I felt I had arrived.”
The football coach and other athletics instructors must have been excited when they first saw Galbraith. The young man stood six-foot-eight, and a life of farm work had made him strong. But Galbraith did not perform well at all in sports. He was unimpressive at track. He wasn’t good at football. He tried hockey, and his most noteworthy accomplishment was to accidentally knock the puck into his own net – an embarrassing moment that was recorded in his class yearbook. He was encouraged to try out for the basketball team, but that, too, was a disaster.
“I was awkward,” Galbraith wrote later. “A fellow a foot shorter than I would take the ball away from me at centre. My coordination was extremely poor, and the crowd would react with contempt at my playing.”
Galbraith was much more adept at academics and was fortunate in having some very competent professors, especially English professor Orlando J. Stevenson. Stevenson was regarded as Canada’s leading Shakespearean scholar and was the author of numerous books, most of them about English literature. He was a progressive teacher who integrated classical music, poetry, literature, and the philosophies of the arts and sciences into the curriculum.
Stevenson required his students to write weekly compositions which he would correct and evaluate. It was Galbraith’s first involvement in writing and he soon became one of Stevenson’s favourite students. Galbraith helped found a college newspaper, the OACIS. In later years he claimed that he had enough editorial independence that the paper could “give maximum offence to the faculty.” But he also said, “I kept well to the side of safety.”
The newspaper gave Galbraith a degree of local celebrity. He gained the nickname “Spike,” which he had printed on a sweatshirt. He absolutely did not want anybody in Guelph finding out about “Soupy.”
Encouraged by his newfound ability, Galbraith tried his had at freelance writing and was excited to see his work published in newspapers in St. Thomas and Stratford. Soon he was writing a weekly column for which he was paid $5 per article [about $85 today].
As a student, Galbraith also had the opportunity to travel to places much larger than Guelph. On a trip that he called “the greatest triumph of my college days,” he visited the 1930 International Livestock Exhibition in Chicago, the agricultural facilities at Michigan State University and the University of Illinois. By then the Great Depression was dragging farmers into the depths of economic despair, and Galbraith began to suspect that the much-vaunted “free market” wasn’t working the way it was supposed to. He wanted to understand why, and what had caused the Depression, so in his final year at OAC, he took a course in agricultural economics.
Galbraith graduated with a Bachelor of Science in Agriculture as well as a scholarship in agricultural economics that allowed him to go to the University of California.
For him, the college in Guelph had been a bridge to a new world. Galbraith went on to become a diplomat and a leading authority on global economics. He was the author of four dozen books, including several novels, and over a thousand articles.
He taught at Harvard University as a professor of economics. By the time of his death in 2006 he had been named to the Order of Canada and was the recipient of the Presidential Medal of Freedom. He had received honorary doctorates from 50 universities, including the University of Guelph.
