MEMORANDUM

term in Berkeley and the second in Mexico. When the sabbatical was planned he had
possibly expected the monograph to be published before he left, and he had surely not
foreseen that he would have to read proofs and make editorial decisions while he was
travelling. But that is what happened.
Leontief travelled by car with his wife and his four-year old daughter. The first leg of
the journey was from Cambridge to Colorado Springs (Colorado) to attend the sixth
Cowles Commission research conference. It was the last such conference, the Cowles
Commission had moved its office from Colorado Springs to Chicago in 1939. Leontief
gave his lecture “Some results of an empirical study of the general equilibrium” on 12 July
1940. He was in good company, among those who participated where two of his students
at Harvard: Paul A. Samuelson and Trygve Haavelmo.
From Colorado the Leontief family drove in a leisurely pace to Vancouver and from
there due south through Washington, Oregon and Northern California to Berkeley where
they arrived in the beginning of September and lived in a house on Hilgard Street
throughout the semester. The World War had lasted for one year. Elizabeth Gilboy wrote
on August 26 from Harvard: “Littauer Center is pretty deserted at the moment, with
everyone either on vacation or in Washington running the Defense Committee. … Do the
Pacific Coast papers mention the war at all.”
At Bancroft Library at Berkeley Leontief looked up François Quesnay’s Premier
problème economique, published 1766, perhaps for the first time since he read it in
Petrograd. He extracted three sentences which he sent to Gilboy and asked for them to be
placed as a motto between the Foreword and the Introduction. He left it for the publisher to
decide whether an English translation should follow the French original (which didn’t
happen).
In November Leontief decided to spend some days on near a beach on the Pacific
Coast; he booked accommodation at Carmel, a short ride down the coast. 232 The foreword
of the monograph is marked as signed on November 15, 1940 in Carmel, California. The
foreword contained very little apart from the assertion that “preliminary research for this
investigation was concluded in 1931” at NBER. He showered lavish praise on the three
assistants who had worked with him on different phases of the investigation.
Information arrived from Harvard that the publisher’s processing plan had been
delayed. Originally, it was planned to have the book published by the first of December
1940 but that turned out to be impossible due to the many questions regarding charts and
tables. Harvard University Press did not get the final word on the manuscript from Gilboy
until 27 November 1940. The publisher wrote to Leontief two days later that the galleys
had just gone to the shop for paging. It would not be possible to publish the book before the
middle of January and hopefully before the end (it appeared one month later). The delay
232 Communication from Svetlana Alpers.
109