The door to Professor Lou Galambos' office is decorated with his children's artwork, and the adjacent bulletin boards are framed with postcards from all over the world, addressed to him by friends and colleagues. The history professor arrived exactly on time, punctual to the minute. "I'm the guy you've been waiting for," he announced as he came down the stairs.
The News-Letter (N-L): As a history professor, what period of history do you find the most interesting?
Lou Galambos (LG): Well, I did my undergrad work in classics - that's Greek and Roman history - and I read a good bit of early modern history and European history. I came to settle upon U.S. history in the 20th and 21st centuries. I bring it up to the present century. So I've done most of my work in the last 20 years on the period since the Second World War but I find the whole sweep of American history interesting. I'm particularly interested in how we've changed as a nation since about 1890.
N-L: I've read that you are interested in and have done extensive work in economic history, can you elaborate?
LG: I'm very interested in the way organizations in society function and ours is a society that's pervaded by very large scale organizations: national organizations, multinationals, global organizations etc. so I'm very interested in how they work and how they don't work, what they succeed at and what they fail at, essentially how they function. That has an economic dimension, it has a political dimension, it has a social dimension and it has a cultural dimension. I'm interested in all of those dimensions but they all funnel back generally to a view of how the economy has shifted overtime and how we've accommodated to that shift.
N-L: Why do you think history is so important?
LG: We all have ideologies, either strong or weak, and those ideologies have a past and a present and they project something for the future. When you read about the current political campaigns you have what seems to be an almost instinctive reaction to some things. Some things you like, some things you don't like. People you like, people you don't like. You already know all of that because it's already in your brain because it's a social ideology that you have picked up from the society. I think history helps us understand how those ideologies have evolved, how they've shaped behavior in the past. By understanding how economic systems have shaped behavior in the past we can better understand ourselves and how we fit in society and how other people fit in society. At the same time there are a lot of functions that history performs. One of them is that history enables you to expand yourself by for instance understanding something in the French Revolution, understanding it as someone then understood it, not as you would understand it today. As I said I did a lot of work in Greek and Roman history and it helped me a lot to understand aspects of historical behavior and where we came from because that blends in to our present day in many ways. I think that history helps you be more of a person. Then there are other kinds of history, as in economic history, where people stress causal relations or what shapes what. How much can we say about current policy for instance, or past policies? What did policy do in the great depression when we did A, B and C? Did policy change have any effect at all? Did it hurt people or help them? Whom did it hurt and whom did it help? We tried to change the agricultural system and inadvertently we hurt a lot of African Americans, who were forced off of their land, because white land-owning farmers controlled the system. Now those kinds of things can be understood when you look at the past and make you think about what you do in the present.
N-L: Tell me about your experience editing the Eisenhower Papers. What did that process entail? What did you learn?
LG: I learned a lot by studying Eisenhower, I learned a great deal about leadership. One of the things that gets left out of explanations of why things happen is leadership, it can't be quantified. There's no way to quantify leadership so it doesn't fit in a lot of social science paradigms about society and about organizations. Everyone who's in an organization, and that includes almost all of us, absolutely knows deep down in their heart that leadership matters but when they get around to analyzing something they can't count it and so it gets lost. The other thing I've learned from Eisenhower is just how important culture is in organizations. Culture to the way things function, the way things operate. Culture shapes a lot of what we do. When I started out I already knew a lot about structure about how to organize. I knew a lot about organizations and how they function but when you get down into the organization you realize a lot of it depends upon an organizational culture. Societies have different cultures and organize things in different ways. In some societies when people line up in a queue they line up in a very orderly way, but when you go to a New York train station everybody comes from outside of the queue. They don't queue up in an orderly way and that reflects American culture.It's done in different ways in different societies. In some societies you don't say no, you always say yes, although you may mean no, because you have a certain relationship to people. Obligation is different in different societies, for instance, if I have an obligation to you because of something dramatic that you did in my life that lasts, in some societies, for the rest of your life. I'm obligated to you and so those kinds of relationships matter a great deal. I think I learned that by studying what Eisenhower was doing. I also learned a lot of things about American politics, like how to deal effectively with the opposition, because you can't always be in charge and tell people what to do because they often have independent sources of power ... You're always forced to compromise in our system so you have to accept that and work with that.
N-L: One last question: Do you have any advice you'd give to your children or to college students today? Any wisdom you'd like to impart? LG: Aside from being flexible and being oriented to a global society I think the most important thing that I try to convey to my own children and that I think is important to students is to find out about you. Not what your parents think you should do or what your counselor thinks you should do but what you really want to do and care about. Then take your education as far as you can to get some technical and professional ability to provide you with a sort of base. I think it's very important to follow that professional path and Hopkins is very good about that, it has a lot of emphasis on that. You can go out with only an undergraduate degree and be an enormously successful person but the odds favor, it seems to me, people who develop some sort of professional ability wherever it is.
Lou Galambos is a professor of economic, business and political history of the United States with emphasis on institutional change in the period since 1880.
