Owen Lattimore
Encyclopedia
Owen Lattimore was an American
author, educator, and influential scholar of Central Asia
, especially Mongolia
. In the 1930s he was editor of Pacific Affairs
, a journal published by the Institute of Pacific Relations
, and then taught at Johns Hopkins University
from 1938 to 1963. During World War II he was advisor to Chiang Kai-shek
and the American government and contributed extensively to the public debate. In the early post-war period of McCarthyism
and the Red Scare
, American wartime China Hands
were accused of being agents of the Soviet Union
or under the influence of Marxism
. In 1950, Senator Joseph McCarthy
accused Lattimore in particular of being "the top Russian espionage agent in the United States." The accusations led to years of Congressional hearings which did not substantiate the charge that Lattimore had been one (nor did wartime intercepted Venona cables refer to him as one). The hearings did document Lattimore's sympathetic statements about Stalin and the Soviet Union, however. Although charges of perjury were dismissed, the controversy put an end to Lattimore's role as a consultant of the United States State Department and eventually to his career in American academic life.
From 1963 to 1975, Lattimore was the first professor of Chinese studies at the University of Leeds
in England
, where he taught Chinese History, richly flavoured with personal reminiscences. He died in 1989 in Providence, Rhode Island
.
Lattimore's "lifetime intellectual project," notes one recent scholar, was to "develop a ‘scientific’ model of the way human societies form, evolve, grow, decline, mutate and interact with one another along ‘frontiers.’” He eclectically absorbed and often abandoned influential theories of his day which dealt with the great themes of history. These included the ecological determinism of Ellsworth Huntington
; biological racism, though only to the extent of seeing characteristics which grew out of ecology; the economic geography and location theory; and some aspects of Marxist modes of production and stages of history, especially through the influence of Karl August Wittfogel
. The most important and lasting theorist, however, was Arnold J. Toynbee
and his treatment of the great civilizations as organic wholes which were born, matured, grew old, and died. Lattimore's most influential book, The Inner Asian Frontiers of China (1940), used these theories to explain the history of East Asia not as the history of China and its influence, but as the interaction between two types of civilizations, settled farming and pastoral, each of which had its role.
, China
, where his parents, David and Margaret Lattimore, were teachers of English at a Chinese university. (His brother was the classics translator Richmond Lattimore
. One of his sisters was the children's author Eleanor Frances Lattimore
.) After being schooled at home by his mother, he left China at the age of twelve and attended schools in Switzerland
and St Bees School, England
(1915-1919), but returned in 1919 when it turned out that he would not have enough funds for attending university. He worked first for a newspaper and then for a British import/export related business. This gave him the opportunity to travel extensively in China and time to study Chinese with an old-fashioned Confucian scholar. His commercial travels also gave him a feel for the realities of life and the economy. A turning point was negotiating the passage of a trainload of wool through the lines of two battling warlords early in 1925, an experience which led him the next year to follow the caravans across Inner Mongolia
to the end of the line in Xinjiang
.
The managers of his firm, however, saw no advantage in subsidizing his travels, though they did send him to spend a year in Beijing
as government liaison. During the year he spent there before departing on his expedition, he met his wife, Eleanor Holgate. For their honeymoon they planned to travel from Beijing to India, he overland, she by rail across Siberia, a mammoth feat in the first half of the 20th century, but in the event the plans were disrupted and she had to travel alone by horse-drawn sled for four hundred miles in February to find him. She described her journey in Turkestan Reunion (1934), he in The Desert Road to Turkestan (1928) and High Tartary (1930). This trip laid the ground for his lifelong interest in all matters related to the Mongols
and other peoples of the Silk Road
.
Upon his return to America in 1928, he succeeded in receiving a fellowship from the Social Science Research Council
for further travel in Manchuria
, then for the academic year 1928/1929 as a student at Harvard University
. He returned to China 1930-1933 with fellowships from the Harvard-Yenching Institute
and the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation
.
In 1934, he became editor of Pacific Affairs
, published by the Institute of Pacific Relations
, which he edited from Beijing. Rather than have bland official statements, he made it his policy to make the journal a "forum of controversy." As he later recalled, he was "continually in hot water, especially with the Japan Council, which thought I was too anti-imperialist, and the Soviet Council, which thought that its own anti-imperialist line was the only permissible one...." As explained below, others later accused him of motives which were less scholarly than political. Lattimore sought articles from a wide range of perspectives and made the journal a forum for new ideas, especially from the social sciences and social philosophy. Scholars and writers of all persuasions were contributors, including Pearl S. Buck
, some Chinese literary figures, and dedicated Marxists.
After sojourns in New York and London and a trip to the Soviet Union, the Lattimores returned to Beijing in 1937. Owen visited the Communist headquarters at Yan'an
to act as translator for T. A. Bisson and Philip Jaffé, who were gathering material for Amerasia
as an activist journal of political commentary. There he met Mao Zedong
and Zhou Enlai
. He was impressed with their candor, but had a less favorable experience on his visit to the party school for national minorities. When he spoke to the Mongols in Mongolian, his Chinese hosts broke off the session.
in June 1941, President Franklin D. Roosevelt
appointed Lattimore U.S. advisor to Chinese Nationalist leader Chiang Kai-shek. In 1944, Lattimore was placed in charge of the Pacific area for the Office of War Information. By this time, Lattimore's political activities and associations had been under scrutiny for the last two years by the FBI, which recommended that he be put under "Custodial Detention in case of National Emergency". At President Roosevelt's request, he accompanied US Vice-President Henry Wallace
on a mission to Siberia and to China and Mongolia in 1944, for the US Office of War Information. The trip had been arranged by Lauchlin Currie
, who recommended to FDR that Lattimore accompany Wallace. During this visit, which overlapped the D-Day
landings, Wallace and his delegation stayed 25 days in Siberia and were given a tour of the Soviet Union’s Magadan concentration camp at Kolyma
. In a travelogue for National Geographic, Lattimore described what little he saw as a combination of the Hudson's Bay Company and the TVA, remarking on how strong and well-fed the inmates were and ascribing to camp commandant Ivan Nikishov 'a trained and sensitive interest in art and music and also a deep sense of civic responsibility'. In a letter written to the New Statesman
in 1968, Lattimore justified himself by arguing his role had not been that of 'snoop(ing) on his hosts.
During the 1940s, Lattimore came into increasing conflict with another member of the IPR's board, Alfred Kohlberg, a manufacturer with long experience in the China trade whose visit to China in 1943 convinced him that stories of Chiang Kai-shek's corruption were false. He accused Lattimore of being hostile to Chiang and too sympathetic towards Chinese Communists
. In 1944, relations between Kohlberg and Lattimore became so bad that Kohlberg left the I.P.R, and founded a journal Plain Talk
intended to rebut the claims made in Pacific Affairs By the late 1940s, Lattimore had become a particular target of Kohlberg and other members of the China Lobby
. Kohlberg was later to became an advisor to Senator Joseph McCarthy
, and it is possible that McCarthy first learned of Lattimore through Kohlberg.
Meanwhile, accusations were made which later became public. On 14 December 1948, Alexander Barmine
, former chargé d'affaires
at the Soviet Embassy in Athens, Greece, advised Federal Bureau of Investigation
agents that Soviet GRU
Director Janis Berzin
had informed him prior to Barmine's 1937 defection that Lattimore was a Soviet agent, an allegation Barmine would repeat under oath before the Senate McCarran Committee in 1951.
, Joseph McCarthy accused Lattimore of being the top Soviet agent, either in the US, in the State Department, or both. The committee, chaired by Senator Millard Tydings
, was investigating McCarthy's claims of widespread Soviet infiltration of the State Department. When the accusation was leaked to the press, McCarthy backed off from the charge that Lattimore was a spy, but continued the attack in public session of the committee and in speeches. Lattimore, he said, "in view of his position of tremendous power at the State Department" was the "'architect' of our Far Eastern policy," and asked whether Lattimore's "aims are American aims or whether they coincide with the aims of Soviet Russia." At the time, Lattimore was in Kabul
, Afghanistan
, on a cultural mission for the United Nations
. Lattimore dismissed the charges against him as "moonshine" and hurried back to the United States to testify before the Tydings Committee
.
McCarthy, who had no evidence of specific acts of espionage and only weak evidence that Lattimore was a concealed Communist, in April 1950 persuaded Louis F. Budenz
, former editor of the Communist Party organ Daily Worker
, to testify. Budenz had no first-hand knowledge of Lattimore’s Communist allegiance and had never previously identified him as a Communist in his extensive FBI interviews. In addition, Budenz had in 1947 told a State Department investigator that he "did not recall any instances" that suggested that Lattimore was a Communist, and had also told his editor at Collier's magazine in 1949 that Lattimore had never "acted as a Communist in any way." Now, however, Budenz testified that Lattimore was a secret Communist, but not a Soviet agent, that is, he was a person of influence who often assisted Soviet foreign policy. Budenz said his Party superiors had told him that Lattimore's “great value lay in the fact that he could bring the emphasis in support of Soviet policy in non-Soviet language.” The majority report of the Tydings committee cleared Lattimore of all charges against him; the minority report accepted Budenz's charges.
In February 1952, Lattimore was called to testify before the Senate Internal Security Subcommittee (SISS), headed by McCarthy's ally, Senator Pat McCarran
. Before Lattimore was called as witness, investigators for the SISS had seized all of the records of the Institute of Pacific Relations
(IPR). The twelve days of testimony were marked by shouting matches, which pitted McCarran and McCarthy on one side against Lattimore on the other. Lattimore took three days to deliver his opening statement: the delays were caused by frequent interruptions as McCarran challenged Lattimore point by point. McCarran then used the records from the I.P.R. to ask questions that often taxed Lattimore's memory. Budenz again testified, but this time claimed that Lattimore was both a Communist and a Soviet agent.
The Subcommittee also summoned scholars. Nicholas Poppe, a Russian émigré and a scholar of Mongolia
and Tibet
, resisted the committee's invitation to label Lattimore a Communist, but found some of his writings superficial and uncritical. The most damaging testimony came from Karl August Wittfogel
, supported by his colleague from the University of Washington, George Taylor
. Wittfogel, a former Communist, said that at the time Lattimore edited the journal Pacific Affairs
, Lattimore knew of his Communist background; even though they had not exchanged words on the matter, Lattimore had given Wittfogel a 'knowing smile'. Lattimore acknowledged that Wittfogel's thought had been tremendously influential, but said that if there had been a smile, it was a 'non-Communist smile'. Wittfogel and Taylor charged that Lattimore had done 'great harm to the free world' in disregarding the need to defeat world Communism as a first priority. John Fairbank, in his memoirs, suggests that Wittfogel may have said this because he had been pressured out of Germany for having views unacceptable to the powers that be, and he did not want to make the same mistake twice. They also asserted that the influence of Marxism on Lattimore was shown by his use of the word 'feudal
'. Lattimore replied that he did not think that Marxists had a 'patent' on that word.
In 1952, after 17 months of study and hearing, involving 66 witnesses and thousands of documents, the McCarran Committee issued its 226-page, unanimous final report. This report stated that 'Owen Lattimore was, from some time beginning in the 1930s, a conscious articulate instrument of the Soviet conspiracy
', and that on 'at least five separate matters', Lattimore had not told the whole truth. One example: 'The evidence... shows conclusively that Lattimore knew Frederick V. Field
to be a Communist; that he collaborated with Field after he possessed this knowledge; and that he did not tell the truth before the subcommittee about this association with Field....'
In 1952, Lattimore was indicted for perjury
on seven counts. Six of the counts related to various discrepancies between Lattimore's testimony and the IPR records; the seventh accused Lattimore of seeking to deliberately deceive the SISS. Lattimore's defenders, such as his lawyer Abe Fortas
, claimed that the discrepancies were caused by McCarran deliberately asking questions about arcane and obscure matters that took place in the 1930s.
Within three years, federal judge Luther Youngdahl
dismissed the charges. Four of the charges were dismissed as insubstantial and not judicable; denying that he was sympathetic to communism was too vague to be fairly answered; and the other counts were matters of little concern, those which a jury would be unlikely to convict on matters of political judgment. In his book Ordeal by Slander, Lattimore gives his own account of these events up until 1950.
A Leeds student housing block is now named after him. While there, he also promoted the establishment of a Mongolian Studies Department. Lattimore had a lifelong dedication to establishing research centers to further the study of Mongolian history and culture. He is one of the few Westerners to have received recognition from the Mongolian state. The State Museum in Ulaanbaatar named a newly discovered dinosaur after him.
and is changed by it, and concluded that civilization is molded by its own impact on the environment. He lists the following pattern:
United States
The United States of America is a federal constitutional republic comprising fifty states and a federal district...
author, educator, and influential scholar of Central Asia
Central Asia
Central Asia is a core region of the Asian continent from the Caspian Sea in the west, China in the east, Afghanistan in the south, and Russia in the north...
, especially Mongolia
Mongolia
Mongolia is a landlocked country in East and Central Asia. It is bordered by Russia to the north and China to the south, east and west. Although Mongolia does not share a border with Kazakhstan, its western-most point is only from Kazakhstan's eastern tip. Ulan Bator, the capital and largest...
. In the 1930s he was editor of Pacific Affairs
Pacific Affairs
Pacific Affairs ' is a peer-reviewed scholarly journal that publishes academic research on contemporary political, economic, and social issues in Asia and the Pacific. The journal was founded in 1926 as the newsletter for the entirety of the Institute of Pacific Relations . In May 1928, PA adopted...
, a journal published by the Institute of Pacific Relations
Institute of Pacific Relations
The Institute of Pacific Relations was an international NGO established in 1925 to provide a forum for discussion of problems and relations between nations of the Pacific Rim. The International Secretariat, the center of most IPR activity over the years, consisted of professional staff members who...
, and then taught at Johns Hopkins University
Johns Hopkins University
The Johns Hopkins University, commonly referred to as Johns Hopkins, JHU, or simply Hopkins, is a private research university based in Baltimore, Maryland, United States...
from 1938 to 1963. During World War II he was advisor to Chiang Kai-shek
Chiang Kai-shek
Chiang Kai-shek was a political and military leader of 20th century China. He is known as Jiǎng Jièshí or Jiǎng Zhōngzhèng in Mandarin....
and the American government and contributed extensively to the public debate. In the early post-war period of McCarthyism
McCarthyism
McCarthyism is the practice of making accusations of disloyalty, subversion, or treason without proper regard for evidence. The term has its origins in the period in the United States known as the Second Red Scare, lasting roughly from the late 1940s to the late 1950s and characterized by...
and the Red Scare
Red Scare
Durrell Blackwell Durrell Blackwell The term Red Scare denotes two distinct periods of strong Anti-Communism in the United States: the First Red Scare, from 1919 to 1920, and the Second Red Scare, from 1947 to 1957. The First Red Scare was about worker revolution and...
, American wartime China Hands
China Hands
The term China Hand originally referred to 19th-century merchants in the treaty ports of China, but evolved to reflect anyone with expert knowledge of the language, culture, and people of China...
were accused of being agents of the Soviet Union
Soviet Union
The Soviet Union , officially the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics , was a constitutionally socialist state that existed in Eurasia between 1922 and 1991....
or under the influence of Marxism
Marxism
Marxism is an economic and sociopolitical worldview and method of socioeconomic inquiry that centers upon a materialist interpretation of history, a dialectical view of social change, and an analysis and critique of the development of capitalism. Marxism was pioneered in the early to mid 19th...
. In 1950, Senator Joseph McCarthy
Joseph McCarthy
Joseph Raymond "Joe" McCarthy was an American politician who served as a Republican U.S. Senator from the state of Wisconsin from 1947 until his death in 1957...
accused Lattimore in particular of being "the top Russian espionage agent in the United States." The accusations led to years of Congressional hearings which did not substantiate the charge that Lattimore had been one (nor did wartime intercepted Venona cables refer to him as one). The hearings did document Lattimore's sympathetic statements about Stalin and the Soviet Union, however. Although charges of perjury were dismissed, the controversy put an end to Lattimore's role as a consultant of the United States State Department and eventually to his career in American academic life.
From 1963 to 1975, Lattimore was the first professor of Chinese studies at the University of Leeds
University of Leeds
The University of Leeds is a British Redbrick university located in the city of Leeds, West Yorkshire, England...
in England
England
England is a country that is part of the United Kingdom. It shares land borders with Scotland to the north and Wales to the west; the Irish Sea is to the north west, the Celtic Sea to the south west, with the North Sea to the east and the English Channel to the south separating it from continental...
, where he taught Chinese History, richly flavoured with personal reminiscences. He died in 1989 in Providence, Rhode Island
Providence, Rhode Island
Providence is the capital and most populous city of Rhode Island and was one of the first cities established in the United States. Located in Providence County, it is the third largest city in the New England region...
.
Lattimore's "lifetime intellectual project," notes one recent scholar, was to "develop a ‘scientific’ model of the way human societies form, evolve, grow, decline, mutate and interact with one another along ‘frontiers.’” He eclectically absorbed and often abandoned influential theories of his day which dealt with the great themes of history. These included the ecological determinism of Ellsworth Huntington
Ellsworth Huntington
Ellsworth Huntington was a professor of geography at Yale University during the early 20th century, known for his studies on climatic determinism, economic growth and economic geography...
; biological racism, though only to the extent of seeing characteristics which grew out of ecology; the economic geography and location theory; and some aspects of Marxist modes of production and stages of history, especially through the influence of Karl August Wittfogel
Karl August Wittfogel
Karl August Wittfogel was a German-American playwright, historian, and sinologist. Originally a Marxist and an active member of the Communist Party of Germany, after the Second World War Wittfogel was an equally fierce anticommunist.-Biography:...
. The most important and lasting theorist, however, was Arnold J. Toynbee
Arnold J. Toynbee
Arnold Joseph Toynbee CH was a British historian whose twelve-volume analysis of the rise and fall of civilizations, A Study of History, 1934–1961, was a synthesis of world history, a metahistory based on universal rhythms of rise, flowering and decline, which examined history from a global...
and his treatment of the great civilizations as organic wholes which were born, matured, grew old, and died. Lattimore's most influential book, The Inner Asian Frontiers of China (1940), used these theories to explain the history of East Asia not as the history of China and its influence, but as the interaction between two types of civilizations, settled farming and pastoral, each of which had its role.
Early life
Although born in the U.S., Lattimore was raised in TianjinTianjin
' is a metropolis in northern China and one of the five national central cities of the People's Republic of China. It is governed as a direct-controlled municipality, one of four such designations, and is, thus, under direct administration of the central government...
, China
China
Chinese civilization may refer to:* China for more general discussion of the country.* Chinese culture* Greater China, the transnational community of ethnic Chinese.* History of China* Sinosphere, the area historically affected by Chinese culture...
, where his parents, David and Margaret Lattimore, were teachers of English at a Chinese university. (His brother was the classics translator Richmond Lattimore
Richmond Lattimore
Richmond Alexander Lattimore was an American poet and translator known for his translations of the Greek classics, especially his versions of the Iliad and Odyssey, which are generally considered as among the best English translations available.Born to David and Margaret Barnes Lattimore in...
. One of his sisters was the children's author Eleanor Frances Lattimore
Eleanor Frances Lattimore
Eleanor Frances Lattimore was an American author and illustrator born in what was called the American Compound in Shanghai and raised in China where her father, David Lattimore, taught English at a Chinese government university...
.) After being schooled at home by his mother, he left China at the age of twelve and attended schools in Switzerland
Switzerland
Switzerland name of one of the Swiss cantons. ; ; ; or ), in its full name the Swiss Confederation , is a federal republic consisting of 26 cantons, with Bern as the seat of the federal authorities. The country is situated in Western Europe,Or Central Europe depending on the definition....
and St Bees School, England
England
England is a country that is part of the United Kingdom. It shares land borders with Scotland to the north and Wales to the west; the Irish Sea is to the north west, the Celtic Sea to the south west, with the North Sea to the east and the English Channel to the south separating it from continental...
(1915-1919), but returned in 1919 when it turned out that he would not have enough funds for attending university. He worked first for a newspaper and then for a British import/export related business. This gave him the opportunity to travel extensively in China and time to study Chinese with an old-fashioned Confucian scholar. His commercial travels also gave him a feel for the realities of life and the economy. A turning point was negotiating the passage of a trainload of wool through the lines of two battling warlords early in 1925, an experience which led him the next year to follow the caravans across Inner Mongolia
Inner Mongolia
Inner Mongolia is an autonomous region of the People's Republic of China, located in the northern region of the country. Inner Mongolia shares an international border with the countries of Mongolia and the Russian Federation...
to the end of the line in Xinjiang
Xinjiang
Xinjiang is an autonomous region of the People's Republic of China. It is the largest Chinese administrative division and spans over 1.6 million km2...
.
The managers of his firm, however, saw no advantage in subsidizing his travels, though they did send him to spend a year in Beijing
Beijing
Beijing , also known as Peking , is the capital of the People's Republic of China and one of the most populous cities in the world, with a population of 19,612,368 as of 2010. The city is the country's political, cultural, and educational center, and home to the headquarters for most of China's...
as government liaison. During the year he spent there before departing on his expedition, he met his wife, Eleanor Holgate. For their honeymoon they planned to travel from Beijing to India, he overland, she by rail across Siberia, a mammoth feat in the first half of the 20th century, but in the event the plans were disrupted and she had to travel alone by horse-drawn sled for four hundred miles in February to find him. She described her journey in Turkestan Reunion (1934), he in The Desert Road to Turkestan (1928) and High Tartary (1930). This trip laid the ground for his lifelong interest in all matters related to the Mongols
Mongols
Mongols ) are a Central-East Asian ethnic group that lives mainly in the countries of Mongolia, China, and Russia. In China, ethnic Mongols can be found mainly in the central north region of China such as Inner Mongolia...
and other peoples of the Silk Road
Silk Road
The Silk Road or Silk Route refers to a historical network of interlinking trade routes across the Afro-Eurasian landmass that connected East, South, and Western Asia with the Mediterranean and European world, as well as parts of North and East Africa...
.
Upon his return to America in 1928, he succeeded in receiving a fellowship from the Social Science Research Council
Social Science Research Council
The Social Science Research Council is a U.S.-based independent nonprofit organization dedicated to advancing research in the social sciences and related disciplines...
for further travel in Manchuria
Manchuria
Manchuria is a historical name given to a large geographic region in northeast Asia. Depending on the definition of its extent, Manchuria usually falls entirely within the People's Republic of China, or is sometimes divided between China and Russia. The region is commonly referred to as Northeast...
, then for the academic year 1928/1929 as a student at Harvard University
Harvard University
Harvard University is a private Ivy League university located in Cambridge, Massachusetts, United States, established in 1636 by the Massachusetts legislature. Harvard is the oldest institution of higher learning in the United States and the first corporation chartered in the country...
. He returned to China 1930-1933 with fellowships from the Harvard-Yenching Institute
Harvard-Yenching Institute
Harvard-Yenching Institute is an independent foundation dedicated to advancing higher education in Asia in the humanities and social sciences, with special attention to the study of Asian culture...
and the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation
John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation
The John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation was founded in 1925 by Mr. and Mrs. Simon Guggenheim in memory of their son, who died April 26, 1922...
.
In 1934, he became editor of Pacific Affairs
Pacific Affairs
Pacific Affairs ' is a peer-reviewed scholarly journal that publishes academic research on contemporary political, economic, and social issues in Asia and the Pacific. The journal was founded in 1926 as the newsletter for the entirety of the Institute of Pacific Relations . In May 1928, PA adopted...
, published by the Institute of Pacific Relations
Institute of Pacific Relations
The Institute of Pacific Relations was an international NGO established in 1925 to provide a forum for discussion of problems and relations between nations of the Pacific Rim. The International Secretariat, the center of most IPR activity over the years, consisted of professional staff members who...
, which he edited from Beijing. Rather than have bland official statements, he made it his policy to make the journal a "forum of controversy." As he later recalled, he was "continually in hot water, especially with the Japan Council, which thought I was too anti-imperialist, and the Soviet Council, which thought that its own anti-imperialist line was the only permissible one...." As explained below, others later accused him of motives which were less scholarly than political. Lattimore sought articles from a wide range of perspectives and made the journal a forum for new ideas, especially from the social sciences and social philosophy. Scholars and writers of all persuasions were contributors, including Pearl S. Buck
Pearl S. Buck
Pearl Sydenstricker Buck also known by her Chinese name Sai Zhenzhu , was an American writer who spent most of her time until 1934 in China. Her novel The Good Earth was the best-selling fiction book in the U.S. in 1931 and 1932, and won the Pulitzer Prize in 1932...
, some Chinese literary figures, and dedicated Marxists.
After sojourns in New York and London and a trip to the Soviet Union, the Lattimores returned to Beijing in 1937. Owen visited the Communist headquarters at Yan'an
Yan'an
Yan'an , is a prefecture-level city in the Shanbei region of Shaanxi province in China, administering several counties, including Zhidan County , which served as the Chinese communist capital before the city of Yan'an proper took that role....
to act as translator for T. A. Bisson and Philip Jaffé, who were gathering material for Amerasia
Amerasia
Amerasia was a journal of Far Eastern affairs best known for the 1940s "Amerasia Affair" in which several of its staff and their contacts were suspected of espionage and charged with unauthorized possession of government documents.-Publication:...
as an activist journal of political commentary. There he met Mao Zedong
Mao Zedong
Mao Zedong, also transliterated as Mao Tse-tung , and commonly referred to as Chairman Mao , was a Chinese Communist revolutionary, guerrilla warfare strategist, Marxist political philosopher, and leader of the Chinese Revolution...
and Zhou Enlai
Zhou Enlai
Zhou Enlai was the first Premier of the People's Republic of China, serving from October 1949 until his death in January 1976...
. He was impressed with their candor, but had a less favorable experience on his visit to the party school for national minorities. When he spoke to the Mongols in Mongolian, his Chinese hosts broke off the session.
World War II and after
Following the German invasion of the Soviet UnionSoviet Union
The Soviet Union , officially the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics , was a constitutionally socialist state that existed in Eurasia between 1922 and 1991....
in June 1941, President Franklin D. Roosevelt
Franklin D. Roosevelt
Franklin Delano Roosevelt , also known by his initials, FDR, was the 32nd President of the United States and a central figure in world events during the mid-20th century, leading the United States during a time of worldwide economic crisis and world war...
appointed Lattimore U.S. advisor to Chinese Nationalist leader Chiang Kai-shek. In 1944, Lattimore was placed in charge of the Pacific area for the Office of War Information. By this time, Lattimore's political activities and associations had been under scrutiny for the last two years by the FBI, which recommended that he be put under "Custodial Detention in case of National Emergency". At President Roosevelt's request, he accompanied US Vice-President Henry Wallace
Henry A. Wallace
Henry Agard Wallace was the 33rd Vice President of the United States , the Secretary of Agriculture , and the Secretary of Commerce . In the 1948 presidential election, Wallace was the nominee of the Progressive Party.-Early life:Henry A...
on a mission to Siberia and to China and Mongolia in 1944, for the US Office of War Information. The trip had been arranged by Lauchlin Currie
Lauchlin Currie
Lauchlin Bernard Currie was a Canadian-born U.S.economist from New Dublin, Nova Scotia, Canada, and allegedly an agent of espionage for the Soviet Union....
, who recommended to FDR that Lattimore accompany Wallace. During this visit, which overlapped the D-Day
D-Day
D-Day is a term often used in military parlance to denote the day on which a combat attack or operation is to be initiated. "D-Day" often represents a variable, designating the day upon which some significant event will occur or has occurred; see Military designation of days and hours for similar...
landings, Wallace and his delegation stayed 25 days in Siberia and were given a tour of the Soviet Union’s Magadan concentration camp at Kolyma
Kolyma
The Kolyma region is located in the far north-eastern area of Russia in what is commonly known as Siberia but is actually part of the Russian Far East. It is bounded by the East Siberian Sea and the Arctic Ocean in the north and the Sea of Okhotsk to the south...
. In a travelogue for National Geographic, Lattimore described what little he saw as a combination of the Hudson's Bay Company and the TVA, remarking on how strong and well-fed the inmates were and ascribing to camp commandant Ivan Nikishov 'a trained and sensitive interest in art and music and also a deep sense of civic responsibility'. In a letter written to the New Statesman
New Statesman
New Statesman is a British centre-left political and cultural magazine published weekly in London. Founded in 1913, and connected with leading members of the Fabian Society, the magazine reached a circulation peak in the late 1960s....
in 1968, Lattimore justified himself by arguing his role had not been that of 'snoop(ing) on his hosts.
During the 1940s, Lattimore came into increasing conflict with another member of the IPR's board, Alfred Kohlberg, a manufacturer with long experience in the China trade whose visit to China in 1943 convinced him that stories of Chiang Kai-shek's corruption were false. He accused Lattimore of being hostile to Chiang and too sympathetic towards Chinese Communists
Communist Party of China
The Communist Party of China , also known as the Chinese Communist Party , is the founding and ruling political party of the People's Republic of China...
. In 1944, relations between Kohlberg and Lattimore became so bad that Kohlberg left the I.P.R, and founded a journal Plain Talk
Plain Talk
Plain Talk was the leading American anti-Communist magazine of the late 1940s. Edited by Isaac Don Levine, it featured articles written by many of the leading figures of the time....
intended to rebut the claims made in Pacific Affairs By the late 1940s, Lattimore had become a particular target of Kohlberg and other members of the China Lobby
China Lobby
In United States politics, the China lobby refers to any special interest group acting on behalf of the governments of either the People's Republic of China or the Republic of China to influence Sino-American relations. During most of the twentieth century, the term "China lobby" was usually used...
. Kohlberg was later to became an advisor to Senator Joseph McCarthy
Joseph McCarthy
Joseph Raymond "Joe" McCarthy was an American politician who served as a Republican U.S. Senator from the state of Wisconsin from 1947 until his death in 1957...
, and it is possible that McCarthy first learned of Lattimore through Kohlberg.
Meanwhile, accusations were made which later became public. On 14 December 1948, Alexander Barmine
Alexander Barmine
Alexander Gregory Barmine was an officer in the Soviet Army who fled the purges of the Joseph Stalin era. After settling in France, he later moved to the United States where he enlisted in the U.S. Army as a private during World War II as an anti-aircraft gunner, later joining the Office of...
, former chargé d'affaires
Chargé d'affaires
In diplomacy, chargé d’affaires , often shortened to simply chargé, is the title of two classes of diplomatic agents who head a diplomatic mission, either on a temporary basis or when no more senior diplomat has been accredited.-Chargés d’affaires:Chargés d’affaires , who were...
at the Soviet Embassy in Athens, Greece, advised Federal Bureau of Investigation
Federal Bureau of Investigation
The Federal Bureau of Investigation is an agency of the United States Department of Justice that serves as both a federal criminal investigative body and an internal intelligence agency . The FBI has investigative jurisdiction over violations of more than 200 categories of federal crime...
agents that Soviet GRU
GRU
GRU or Glavnoye Razvedyvatel'noye Upravleniye is the foreign military intelligence directorate of the General Staff of the Armed Forces of the Russian Federation...
Director Janis Berzin
Janis Berzinš
Jānis Bērziņš also Ian Karlovich Berzin or Yan Karlovich Berzin , Latvian and Soviet communist military official and politician.-Early years:...
had informed him prior to Barmine's 1937 defection that Lattimore was a Soviet agent, an allegation Barmine would repeat under oath before the Senate McCarran Committee in 1951.
Confrontation with Congressional Committees
In March 1950, in executive session of the Tydings CommitteeTydings Committee
The Subcommittee on the Investigation of Loyalty of State Department Employees, more commonly referred to as the Tydings Committee, was a subcommittee authorized by in February 1950 to look into charges by Joseph R...
, Joseph McCarthy accused Lattimore of being the top Soviet agent, either in the US, in the State Department, or both. The committee, chaired by Senator Millard Tydings
Millard Tydings
Millard Evelyn Tydings was an attorney, author, soldier, state legislator, and served as a Democratic Representative and Senator in the United States Congress from Maryland.-Early life:...
, was investigating McCarthy's claims of widespread Soviet infiltration of the State Department. When the accusation was leaked to the press, McCarthy backed off from the charge that Lattimore was a spy, but continued the attack in public session of the committee and in speeches. Lattimore, he said, "in view of his position of tremendous power at the State Department" was the "'architect' of our Far Eastern policy," and asked whether Lattimore's "aims are American aims or whether they coincide with the aims of Soviet Russia." At the time, Lattimore was in Kabul
Kabul
Kabul , spelt Caubul in some classic literatures, is the capital and largest city of Afghanistan. It is also the capital of the Kabul Province, located in the eastern section of Afghanistan...
, Afghanistan
Afghanistan
Afghanistan , officially the Islamic Republic of Afghanistan, is a landlocked country located in the centre of Asia, forming South Asia, Central Asia and the Middle East. With a population of about 29 million, it has an area of , making it the 42nd most populous and 41st largest nation in the world...
, on a cultural mission for the United Nations
United Nations
The United Nations is an international organization whose stated aims are facilitating cooperation in international law, international security, economic development, social progress, human rights, and achievement of world peace...
. Lattimore dismissed the charges against him as "moonshine" and hurried back to the United States to testify before the Tydings Committee
Tydings Committee
The Subcommittee on the Investigation of Loyalty of State Department Employees, more commonly referred to as the Tydings Committee, was a subcommittee authorized by in February 1950 to look into charges by Joseph R...
.
McCarthy, who had no evidence of specific acts of espionage and only weak evidence that Lattimore was a concealed Communist, in April 1950 persuaded Louis F. Budenz
Louis F. Budenz
Louis Francis Budenz was an American activist and writer, as well as a Soviet espionage agent and head of the Buben group of spies. He began as a labor activist and became a member of the Communist Party USA...
, former editor of the Communist Party organ Daily Worker
Daily Worker
The Daily Worker was a newspaper published in New York City by the Communist Party USA, a formerly Comintern-affiliated organization. Publication began in 1924. While it generally reflected the prevailing views of the party, some attempts were made to make it appear that the paper reflected a...
, to testify. Budenz had no first-hand knowledge of Lattimore’s Communist allegiance and had never previously identified him as a Communist in his extensive FBI interviews. In addition, Budenz had in 1947 told a State Department investigator that he "did not recall any instances" that suggested that Lattimore was a Communist, and had also told his editor at Collier's magazine in 1949 that Lattimore had never "acted as a Communist in any way." Now, however, Budenz testified that Lattimore was a secret Communist, but not a Soviet agent, that is, he was a person of influence who often assisted Soviet foreign policy. Budenz said his Party superiors had told him that Lattimore's “great value lay in the fact that he could bring the emphasis in support of Soviet policy in non-Soviet language.” The majority report of the Tydings committee cleared Lattimore of all charges against him; the minority report accepted Budenz's charges.
In February 1952, Lattimore was called to testify before the Senate Internal Security Subcommittee (SISS), headed by McCarthy's ally, Senator Pat McCarran
Pat McCarran
Patrick Anthony McCarran was a Democratic United States Senator from Nevada from 1933 until 1954, and was noted for his strong anti-Communist stance.-Early life and career:...
. Before Lattimore was called as witness, investigators for the SISS had seized all of the records of the Institute of Pacific Relations
Institute of Pacific Relations
The Institute of Pacific Relations was an international NGO established in 1925 to provide a forum for discussion of problems and relations between nations of the Pacific Rim. The International Secretariat, the center of most IPR activity over the years, consisted of professional staff members who...
(IPR). The twelve days of testimony were marked by shouting matches, which pitted McCarran and McCarthy on one side against Lattimore on the other. Lattimore took three days to deliver his opening statement: the delays were caused by frequent interruptions as McCarran challenged Lattimore point by point. McCarran then used the records from the I.P.R. to ask questions that often taxed Lattimore's memory. Budenz again testified, but this time claimed that Lattimore was both a Communist and a Soviet agent.
The Subcommittee also summoned scholars. Nicholas Poppe, a Russian émigré and a scholar of Mongolia
Mongolia
Mongolia is a landlocked country in East and Central Asia. It is bordered by Russia to the north and China to the south, east and west. Although Mongolia does not share a border with Kazakhstan, its western-most point is only from Kazakhstan's eastern tip. Ulan Bator, the capital and largest...
and Tibet
Tibet
Tibet is a plateau region in Asia, north-east of the Himalayas. It is the traditional homeland of the Tibetan people as well as some other ethnic groups such as Monpas, Qiang, and Lhobas, and is now also inhabited by considerable numbers of Han and Hui people...
, resisted the committee's invitation to label Lattimore a Communist, but found some of his writings superficial and uncritical. The most damaging testimony came from Karl August Wittfogel
Karl August Wittfogel
Karl August Wittfogel was a German-American playwright, historian, and sinologist. Originally a Marxist and an active member of the Communist Party of Germany, after the Second World War Wittfogel was an equally fierce anticommunist.-Biography:...
, supported by his colleague from the University of Washington, George Taylor
George E. Taylor
George Edward Taylor was a prolific and influential scholar of Chinese studies, professor at University of Washington, Seattle from 1939 to 1969, and director of the Far Eastern and Russian Institute at the University of Washington from 1946 to 1969. He became a naturalized U.S. citizen on May...
. Wittfogel, a former Communist, said that at the time Lattimore edited the journal Pacific Affairs
Pacific Affairs
Pacific Affairs ' is a peer-reviewed scholarly journal that publishes academic research on contemporary political, economic, and social issues in Asia and the Pacific. The journal was founded in 1926 as the newsletter for the entirety of the Institute of Pacific Relations . In May 1928, PA adopted...
, Lattimore knew of his Communist background; even though they had not exchanged words on the matter, Lattimore had given Wittfogel a 'knowing smile'. Lattimore acknowledged that Wittfogel's thought had been tremendously influential, but said that if there had been a smile, it was a 'non-Communist smile'. Wittfogel and Taylor charged that Lattimore had done 'great harm to the free world' in disregarding the need to defeat world Communism as a first priority. John Fairbank, in his memoirs, suggests that Wittfogel may have said this because he had been pressured out of Germany for having views unacceptable to the powers that be, and he did not want to make the same mistake twice. They also asserted that the influence of Marxism on Lattimore was shown by his use of the word 'feudal
Feudalism
Feudalism was a set of legal and military customs in medieval Europe that flourished between the 9th and 15th centuries, which, broadly defined, was a system for ordering society around relationships derived from the holding of land in exchange for service or labour.Although derived from the...
'. Lattimore replied that he did not think that Marxists had a 'patent' on that word.
In 1952, after 17 months of study and hearing, involving 66 witnesses and thousands of documents, the McCarran Committee issued its 226-page, unanimous final report. This report stated that 'Owen Lattimore was, from some time beginning in the 1930s, a conscious articulate instrument of the Soviet conspiracy
Conspiracy (political)
In a political sense, conspiracy refers to a group of persons united in the goal of usurping or overthrowing an established political power. Typically, the final goal is to gain power through a revolutionary coup d'état or through assassination....
', and that on 'at least five separate matters', Lattimore had not told the whole truth. One example: 'The evidence... shows conclusively that Lattimore knew Frederick V. Field
Frederick Vanderbilt Field
Frederick Vanderbilt Field was an American leftist political activist and a great-great-grandson of railroad tycoon Cornelius "Commodore" Vanderbilt, disinherited by his wealthy relatives for his radical political views. Field became a specialist on Asia and was a prime staff member and supporter...
to be a Communist; that he collaborated with Field after he possessed this knowledge; and that he did not tell the truth before the subcommittee about this association with Field....'
In 1952, Lattimore was indicted for perjury
Perjury
Perjury, also known as forswearing, is the willful act of swearing a false oath or affirmation to tell the truth, whether spoken or in writing, concerning matters material to a judicial proceeding. That is, the witness falsely promises to tell the truth about matters which affect the outcome of the...
on seven counts. Six of the counts related to various discrepancies between Lattimore's testimony and the IPR records; the seventh accused Lattimore of seeking to deliberately deceive the SISS. Lattimore's defenders, such as his lawyer Abe Fortas
Abe Fortas
Abraham Fortas was a U.S. Supreme Court associate justice from 1965 to 1969. Originally from Tennessee, Fortas became a law professor at Yale, and subsequently advised the Securities and Exchange Commission. He then worked at the Interior Department under Franklin D...
, claimed that the discrepancies were caused by McCarran deliberately asking questions about arcane and obscure matters that took place in the 1930s.
Within three years, federal judge Luther Youngdahl
Luther Youngdahl
Luther Wallace Youngdahl was an American politician and judge from Minnesota. He served as an associate justice of the Minnesota Supreme Court from 1942 to 1946, then as Minnesota's 27th Governor from January 8, 1947 to September 27, 1951, and finally as a judge for the U.S...
dismissed the charges. Four of the charges were dismissed as insubstantial and not judicable; denying that he was sympathetic to communism was too vague to be fairly answered; and the other counts were matters of little concern, those which a jury would be unlikely to convict on matters of political judgment. In his book Ordeal by Slander, Lattimore gives his own account of these events up until 1950.
Legacy
The American Center for Mongolian Studies, together with the International Association of Mongolian Studies and the National University of Mongolia School of Foreign Service organized a conference entitled, "Owen Lattimore: The Past, Present, and Future of Inner Asian Studies" in Ulaanbaatar, Mongolia on August 20 and 21, 2008.A Leeds student housing block is now named after him. While there, he also promoted the establishment of a Mongolian Studies Department. Lattimore had a lifelong dedication to establishing research centers to further the study of Mongolian history and culture. He is one of the few Westerners to have received recognition from the Mongolian state. The State Museum in Ulaanbaatar named a newly discovered dinosaur after him.
Lattimore's theory on the reciprocation between civilization and the environment
In An Inner Asian Approach to the Historical Geography of China (1947), Lattimore explored the system through which humanity affects the environmentNatural environment
The natural environment encompasses all living and non-living things occurring naturally on Earth or some region thereof. It is an environment that encompasses the interaction of all living species....
and is changed by it, and concluded that civilization is molded by its own impact on the environment. He lists the following pattern:
- A primitive society pursues some agricultural activities, but is aware that it has many limitations.
- Growing and evolving, the society begins to change the environment. For example, depleting its game supply and wild crops, it begins to domesticate animals and plants. It deforests land to create room for these activities.
- The environment changes, offering new opportunities. For example, it becomes grasslands.
- Society changes in response, and reacts to the new opportunities as a new society. For example, the once-nomads build permanent settlements and shift from a hunter-gathererHunter-gathererA hunter-gatherer or forage society is one in which most or all food is obtained from wild plants and animals, in contrast to agricultural societies which rely mainly on domesticated species. Hunting and gathering was the ancestral subsistence mode of Homo, and all modern humans were...
mentality to a farming society culture. - The reciprocal process continues, offering new variations.
Further reading
- David Buck, "Owen Lattimore," in John A. Garraty and Mark C. Carnes, ed., American National Biography (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999): 248-250.
- James Cotton, Asian Frontier Nationalism: Owen Lattimore and the American Policy Debate (Atlantic Highlands, NJ: Humanities Press International, 1989). ISBN 0391036513.
- M. Stanton Evans, Blacklisted by History: The Untold Story of Senator Joe Mccarthy and His Fight against America's Enemies (New York: Crown Forum, 2007), esp Ch 29, "Owen Lattimore."
- Fried, Richard Nightmare In Red : the McCarthy Era in Perspective, New York ; Toronto : Oxford University Press, 1990 ISBN 019504360X.
- John T. Flynn, The Lattimore Story (New York,: Devin-Adair, 1953).
- Klingaman., William The Encyclopedia of the McCarthy Era, New York : Facts on File, 1996 ISBN 0816030979.
- Newman, Robert P. Owen Lattimore And The "Loss" of China, Berkeley : University of California Press, 1992 ISBN 0520073886.
- Oshinsky, DavidDavid OshinskyDavid M. Oshinsky is a Pulitzer Prize-winning American historian; he currently holds the Jack S. Blanton chair in history at the University of Texas at Austin and is a distinguished scholar in residence at New York University....
A Conspiracy So Immense : the World of Joe McCarthy, New York : Free Press ; London : Collier Macmillan, 1983 ISBN 0029234905. - Rowe, William T. "Owen, Lattimore, Asia, and Comparative History." Journal of Asian Studies 66, no. 3 (2007): 759-86.
- Schrecker, EllenEllen SchreckerEllen Wolf Schrecker, Ph.D. is a professor of American history at Yeshiva University. She is currently teaching and has received the Frederick Ewen Academic Freedom Fellowship at the Tamiment Library at NYU....
No Ivory Tower : McCarthyism and the Universities, New York : Oxford University Press, 1986 ISBN 0195035577. - Schrecker, Ellen Many Are The Crimes : McCarthyism In America, Boston ; London : Little, Brown, 1998 ISBN 0316774707.