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 of 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. (His brother was the classics translator Richmond Lattimore.) 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 on the subject, one of the few Westerners to have both visited the Silk Road 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 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 Walter Page School of International Relations at Johns Hopkins University. He continued to be a lecturer there until 1963. During the 1930s, Lattimore sat on the board of the Institute of Pacific Relations (I.P.R) and edited the I.P.R.’s journal Pacific Affairs. As editor of Pacific Affairs, Lattimore sought articles from a wide range of perspectives. He was later accused of encouraging contributors with a pro-communist point of view. During the 1940s, Lattimore came into increasing conflict with another member of the I.P.R's board, Alfred Kohlberg, who accused Lattimore of being hostile to and biased against Chiang Kai-Shek (who was Kohlberg's hero) and in addition, too left-wing and 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 an object of intense hatred by Kohlberg and other members of the China Lobby. Kohlberg was later to became an advisor to Senator Joseph McCarthy, and it is quite possible that McCarthy first learned of Lattimore through Kohlberg.

At President Roosevelt's request, he accompanied US Vice-President Henry Wallace on a mission to China in 1944, for the US Office of War Information.[1]. During this visit, which overlapped the D-Day landings, Wallace and his delegation stopped over in Siberia and were given a sanitized tour of a gulag labor camp. Lattimore's naive account of this visit in the National Geographic magazine was later attacked as communist propaganda.

[edit] Accusations

In March 1950, he was accused by McCarthy of being a spy for the Soviet Union; the charge was subsequently repeated by McCarthy before the committee chaired by Senator Millard Tydingsthat was investigating McCarthy's claims of widespread Soviet infiltration of the State Department. 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. Through Lattimore was well respected as a scholar of Asia, he was totally unknown to the general public before 1950. It was McCarthy's charges that first brought widespread fame to Lattimore.

At the Tydings Committee, Lattimore was a combative witness, and his testimony was noted for his verbal duels with McCarthy. In April 1950, McCarthy introduced as a surprise witness against Lattimore Louis F. Budenz, the former editor of the Daily Worker newspaper, who testified that Lattimore was a secret Communist, but not a Soviet agent per se. Rather, Budenz claimed that Lattimore was a person of influence who often assisted Soviet foreign policy without actually being a Soviet agent. The majority report for 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 (S.I.S.S), headed by McCarthy's ally, Senator Pat McCarran. Before Lattimore was called as witness, investigators for the S.I.S.S. had seized all of the records of the Institute of Pacific Relations (I.P.R). Lattimore's twelve days of testimony were very stormy, marked by frequent shouting matches and verbal joustings between McCarran and McCarthy (who attended the S.I.S.S. hearings for nine of the twelve days of Lattimore's testimony) on one hand and Lattimore on the other. The degree of antagonism between McCarran and Lattimore can be gauged by the fact that it took three days for Lattimore to deliver his opening statement; the delays were caused by frequent interruptions as McCarran chellenged various claims made by Lattimore in his opening statement. During the hearings, McCarran used the records from the I.P.R. to ask questions that often taxed Lattimore's memory. During the hearings, Budenz again testifed against Lattimore, but this time claimed that Lattimore was both a Communist and a Soviet agent. Also testifying before the S.I.S.S. was Nikolai Poppe, a Russian émigré and a scholar of Mongolia and Tibet, who stated that Lattimore’s writings reflected Communist influence; Poppe, who had helped the Nazis set up a puppet regime in the Caucasusin 1942 and later worked at the infamous SS Wannsee Institute in Berlin, had borne a great grudge against Lattimore for refusing to help him immigrate to the United States in 1949. The Senate McCarran Committee investigation claimed that:

"Owen Lattimore was, from some time beginning in the 1930s, a conscious articulate instrument of the Soviet conspiracy".

In 1952, Lattimore was indicted for perjury on seven counts. Six of the counts related to various discrepancies between Lattimore's testimony and the I.P.R. records; the seventh accused Lattimore of seeking to deliberately deceive the S.I.S.S. 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 out of the hope that Lattimore would not be able to recall them properly, thereby giving grounds for a perjury indictment. 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)
  • The Mongols of Manchuria(1934)
  • 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] References

  • Fried, Richard Nightmare In Red : the McCarthy Era in Perspective, New York ; Toronto : Oxford University Press, 1990 ISBN 019504360X.
  • 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, David A Conspiracy So Immense : the World of Joe McCarthy, New York : Free Press ; London : Collier Macmillan, 1983 ISBN 0029234905.
  • Schrecker, Ellen 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.

[edit] External links

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