Owen Lattimore
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Owen Lattimore (July 29, 1900 – May 31, 1989) was a U.S. author and educator, the most influential American scholar of Central Asia in the 20th Century.
He was accused by U.S. Senator Joseph McCarthy as being "a top Russian spy." Some people credit Lattimore with coining the term McCarthyism, but Herbert Block was first to use the term, in a cartoon in the Washington Post.
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[edit] Early life
Although born in America, Lattimore was raised in Tianjin, China, where his parents, David and Margaret Lattimore, were teachers of English at a Chinese university. After doing research at Harvard University from 1928 to 1929, Lattimore returned to China to participate in business and newspaper work. He eventually began working in insurance, a job which led him to travel across the Silk Road. He became an expert in the area, one of the few Westerners to have both visited the area and read the Chinese language accounts of it—for his honeymoon he traveled overland from Beijing to Delhi, a mammoth feat in the first half of the 20th century. He spoke fluent Chinese and was deeply familiar with the country — he was the United States political adviser to Chiang Kai Shek during the World War II and later became acquainted with Zhou Enlai.
[edit] World War II period, and after
From 1938 to 1950, Lattimore was the director of the Page School of International Relations at Johns Hopkins University. He continued to be a lecturer there until 1963.
At President Roosevelt's request, he accompanied US Vice-President Henry Wallace to the USSR in 1944, for the US Office of War Information.[1]. Lattimore's account of this visit, which overlapped the D-Day landings, in the National Geographic magazine, has been criticised as pro-Soviet propaganda, and thoroughly misleading about the gulag, leading to a label as Soviet apologist; Wallace has also been called very naive about what he was allowed to see.
[edit] Accusations
In 1950, he was accused by McCarthy of being a spy for the Soviet Union. The Senate McCarran Committee investigation claimed that:
- Owen Lattimore was, from some time beginning in the 1930s, a conscious articulate instrument of the Soviet
In 1952, Lattimore was indicted for perjury on seven counts. Within three years, the charges against him were dismissed."1 His book Ordeal by Slander is his own account of this episode.
[edit] Later life
From 1963 to 1970, Lattimore was the first professor of Chinese studies at Leeds University in England, where he taught Chinese History, strongly illustrated with personal reminiscences. 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 receive recognition from the Mongolian state. The State Museum in Ulan Bator named a newly discovered dinosaur after him.
[edit] 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 environment and is changed by it, and concluded that civilization is molded by its own impact on the environment. He lists the following pattern:
- 1. A primitive society pursues some agricultural activities, but is aware that it has many limitations.
- 2. 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.
- 3. The environment changes, offering new opportunities. For example, it becomes grasslands.
- 4. 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-gatherer mentality to a farming society culture.
- 5. The reciprocal process continues, offering new variations.
[edit] Books
- The Desert Road to Turkestan (1929)
- Manchuria Cradle of Conflict (1932)
- Inner Asian Frontiers of China (1940)
- Mongol Journeys [1941]
- America and Asia (1943)
- The Situation in Asia (1949)
- Pivot of Asia (1950)
- Ordeal by Slander (1950)
- Studies in Asian Frontier History (1962)
[edit] Notes
- [1] US Senate, 82nd Congress, 2nd Session, Committee on the Judiciary, Institute of Pacific Relations, Report No. 2050, p. 224.
[edit] External links
- FBI reports from the espionage investigation of Lattimore 5161 pages
- United States vs. Lattimore
- full-text - Robert P. Newman's Owen Lattimore and the "Loss" of China
