Copland had been seeking leave to study abroad before Wilson had been persuaded to complete even a single year of the BCom. His ‘zest for study of contemporary developments in economic theory overseas was unsurpassed in Australia’ (Tom Fitzgerald).[7] His mentor, James Hight, did not visit Europe until he was fifty-seven years old. But Copland was not to wait: he had won a Laura Spelman Rockefeller Memorial Fellowship, another blessing of oil money to higher learning, and that was to take him to the United States and Europe.
He departed Sydney 8 April 1925, and crossed the American continent bearing an impressive diary of appointments. On 29 May he conferred with Herbert Hoover, then the driving Secretary of a reinvigorated United States Department of Commerce. Copland judged the meeting a success. There was a sympathy about their aims. Hoover was zealous for efficiency and rationality. He favoured a ‘scientific tariff uninfluenced by political considerations’. Copland approved. ‘There is a little of the politician but a good deal of the statesman … He gave a very decidedly favourable opinion to economists, and economics as a science’ (UMA DBC 29 May 1925).
He then visited the newly founded Duke University in North Carolina and dined with the anthropologist Bronislaw Malinowski, also visiting the United States on a Laura Spelman Fellowship. Malinowski told Copland he had recently ‘dined with two negroes at [the adjacent town of] Durham – this is probably the only time it had been done there’ (UMA DBC 1 June 1925).[8]
From New York he embarked for Europe. A few days after his arrival in London, he lunched with John Maynard Keynes and Lydia at Gordon Square (19 June 1925). He was not taken with Lydia: ‘no doubt she is a good dancer, but she looked very plain and her small figure did not suggest much capacity’. She was a ‘spoilt prima donna’. Keynes was also a little disappointing. ‘Keynes is not as tall as I thought and rather more effeminate’.[9] But they spoke ‘pleasantly’ for three hours. Keynes contended that Churchill’s worst error was not to restore the gold value of the pound, but to restore it at the old rate instead of a lower rate. Keynes said Classical economics ‘had rather worked itself out’, and that he was writing ‘a serious treatise on money’. This was the first knowledge to Copland of a book that was to loom in his policy analysis of the Great Depression, Keynes’ Treatise on money.
Copland was more unmistakably impressed by Joseph Alois Schumpeter, whom he met in Germany in the following month.[10] Schumpeter complained to Copland that Germany had ‘still too many so-called economists who are not at all advanced thinkers’, and welcomed the possibility of Australian students undertaking doctorates in Germany. ‘He had [the] idea that Japan and Australia were enemies and thought it very curious that Australia and Japan should be allies in war, but also very chivalrous of Australia to enter the war on behalf of England’ (UMA DBC 4 July 1925).