[S5.5 E3] Anti-Capitalist Chronicles: The Return of McCarthyism (Part 1)

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Professor Harvey discusses the persecution of the scholar Owen Lattimore at the hands of Joseph McCarthy. Owen Lattimore was editor of Pacific Affairs, a journal published by the Institute of Pacific Relations. Lattimore taught at John’s Hopkins University from 1938 to 1963 and then from 1963 to 1970, he was the first Professor of Chinese Studies at the University of Leeds in England. Professor Harvey had the opportunity to visit Lattimore in London.

While doing ethnographic research in Afghanistan in 1950, Lattimore was met by the US consular official who said, you'd better rush back to the United States because Senator McCarthy has fingered you as one of "the top Russian espionage agent in the United States." He was called up in front of the House Un-American Activities Committee and subjected to years of interrogation based on false charges. The Senate Internal Security Subcommittee (the Senate version of HUAC), headed by Pat McCarran, came to the absurd conclusion that China was “lost” not because of Mao or because of the Chinese masses, but China was “lost” because of a small group of academics and intellectuals and State Department officials.

Lattimore was red-baited and persecuted for many years. It is important to understand this history, because what we are seeing right now is a return to that paranoid style of American politics.

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#politics #mccarthyism #redscare

Welcome to the Anti-Capitalist Chronicles, produced by Politics in Motion. Now this week I want to talk about the case of somebody called Owen Lattimore, who many people will not probably recognize, but was a very important figure back in the 1950s.

Now, Owen Lattimore was born in United States, but he was raised in China because his father became a teacher in China. And so most of his life was spent in that country. He had some education in Europe, but eventually ended up working in a store in Shanghai and in other Chinese cities as a commodity trader and the like. In the process, he got very bored with his situation. So he decided, as he said to me when I went to talk to him, he decided he would go and find out where commodities came from. And looking at me rather slightly, he said, you see, I found out about commodities, not by reading Marx, but by actually tracking them on the ground where they came from. And that took me back from seaports of China way back inland, into Mongolia, out of Mongolia, Central Asia and all the rest of it.

And he spent about two years just traveling from China to the other side coming out in Pakistan. After two years of traveling and talking and thinking and observing, and out of this, he wrote a book and he did this sort of journeying around in Central Asia quite a lot. And a whole stream of books came out, and I'll just read you some of the titles to give you an idea of how prolific he was. And his books were High Tartary. It was published in 1930, Manchuria: Cradle of Conflict, 1932, the Mongols of Manchuria published in 1934 Inner Asian Frontiers of China in 1940 and Mongol Journeys in 1941. Now, all of this body of work from this very remote and not very well understood part of the world, it got him to the attention of a geographer called Isaiah Bowman. Now, Isaiah Bowman was in charge of the map collection at the American Geographical Society.

And during the settlement of Versailles, Isaiah Bowman went to Europe with Woodrow Wilson because they were drawing the boundaries of the new countries in Europe, and they need maps to do that. So Isaiah Bowman was a very influential geographer, intellectually, academically, but also with the State Department. And Bowman was extremely impressed with the work that Lattimore was doing and got him some funding from the Social Science Research Council. And later on fellowships from Harvard and other universities. But at a certain point, Lattimore needed to actually end up with some income of his own, and he got that by being offered to be the publisher and editor of a journal called Pacific Affairs, which was something associated with the Institute of Pacific Relations, which has been set up in the 1930s. Now, the Institute of Pacific Relations brought together all the countries of the area, particularly Japan, China, Russia, and Kazakhstan and so on. And so Lattimore was in the midst of a very conflictual situation because Japan was at a certain point at war with China.

The Russians and the Soviets were of course at Semi and Cold War already against the rest of the world. So it was a very technically very demanding, but also a very difficult situation that Latimore had taken. Now, after that, he, in World War ii, he worked in the Office of Security Services, which was the predecessor of the C I A. And in 1942, Roosevelt requested Chiang Kai-shek in China to accept Latin Moore as his special correspondent as it were. So Latimore spent a lot of time with Chen Kai Shak. In my interview with him, he suggested that he much admired him intellectual academically and politically, but that he was surrounded by some pretty rough and difficult people. But during that period, Latimore also got the possibility to speak with Macho la, many of the leaders of the rebellion that was gradually brewing in the rural areas of China during this time.

So this is just sketching in some of the things about Owen Lattimore that make him such an intriguing and interesting person. And to this day, a fact, only a couple of years ago, I was talking to a historian who is knowledgeable about Central Asia, and he said that the body of work, which Latimore constructed during that period was an invaluable starting point for a better understanding of Inia and what was going on in that part of the world. So this was if you like, LATI Moore's life. But in 1950, he was on a long trip from, again, from China to Afghanistan, again collecting ethnographic data and all the rest of it. But when he got there into Afghanistan and Kabul, it was met by the US consular official there who said, St Latimore, you better rush back to the United States because Senator McCarthy has fingered you as one of the top three espionage agents, Soviet espionage agents working within the State Department on China policy.

Now, this was of course quite a shock to Latimore and he didn't quite know how to handle it, but McCarthy at that time had originally said that he had the list of 200 names in the State Department that were actually members of the Communist Party or connected to the Communist Party when he was asked to actually say who and give direct evidence he couldn't do it and he couldn't do it, and he couldn't do it. So he came down in the end to three, one of whom was Owen Lattimore. Now, in Lati Moore's case, it turned out that the reason he was fingered was because somebody had to, Johns Hopkins University had fingered him as a suspect character. And that person was the professor of geography there, a man called George Carter. And according to Latimore and others, what happened was this, that Latimore was having a sort of a picnic cookout at his house in Luxton outside of Baltimore.

And Carter was a new character on the faculty, and he had been invited to this picnic and he went, and during the picnic, Carter's wife went upstairs to go to the bathroom and then curious about what was going on, what the house looked like. She went into Lati Moore's bedroom, and there upon the bed she saw all these documents which were marked as classified. And now at this point, she'll say hello. I've heard something of that sort before about classified documents. But at that time, there were no rules about classified documents. There was no reason why Latimore should not have them. In fact, in many ways, he would've been author of many of those documents given his privileged position with Han Kai-shek and his very close relationship with Roosevelt. And Latimore really thought that at that time, in the middle of the war, it might be possible for the United States to negotiate with Mao, because in many ways what Mao was leading was not a communist uprising of a working class, but a rather traditional peasant rebellion of the sort that had often occurred in China, and that it might be possible for the United States to negotiate with Mao in such a way as to draw him away from an alliance with the Soviet Union, which was of course roughly where Mao was positioned politically during those years.

So what Carter did was to actually tell McCarthy that Latimore obviously had all of these classified documents. He was obviously doing some shady business there made copying them or something or giving them to somebody. And so the suspicion immediately fell then that this was what Latimore was doing. Initially, the Democrats were in power in Congress, and in 1950 there was a hearing of the Senate relevant committee, which basically was a whitewash and just said it was nice to Latimore and said, well, you didn't raise anything about these documents, but was really about in what degree are you a member caught up with being associated with the Communist Party? And in particular with the Communist party politics and the China question. But of course, in 1949, Mao had taken over and the big inquisition occurred in the United States over who had lost China, which Latimore himself thought was very peculiar because as he said to me, I took the position that China belongs to the Chinese, and what the Chinese do is whatever the Chinese want to do.

So this idea that somehow other we lost China was to him a rather ridiculous notion. But however, there was then a change in Congress of power, and the Republicans came into power and the Republicans decided that they were going to actually interrogate Ladi Moore at sufficient length. And in doing so, they did a great deal of research. And one of the things they did was that illegally, because they had no order to do it illegally, they actually got all of the records of the Institute of Pacific Relations, and therefore they had a very strong record of all the things that Latimore had been doing from about 1932 or 33, right the way through to 1941. So they knew where he'd, what he'd been doing, all of his correspondence, they had a lot of information and they took the view that some of the things that Latimore had done with Pacific Affairs was rather favorable to the Soviets and rather especially targeted in relationship to China.

Now, this was therefore one of those things where again, what he said to me about that was, well, I felt it was my duty as editor of Pacific Affairs to get every perspective that I could, and I therefore needed the Soviet perspective. And if the Soviets were going to publish something which was ideologically rather at odds with what the rest of us might think, I thought I should publish it simply so that everybody could see where the Soviet's heads were at in terms of scholarship and in terms of political evolution of this very, very sensitive area of the world. So this was the sort of information however, that the committee had against Latimore. And in the end, they brought him in under a subpoena and forced him to testify. And he testified for eight days continuously. He was not allowed to consult a lawyer during this testimony.

He was not allowed to consult his notes, he wasn't allowed to do anything. At the same time, all the people in there had all this information about him from the documents from the Pacific Affairs. And at certain point he complained about this. He said, I'm supposed to remember who I talked to on some point in 1934 and 1936. And very often I have not been able to remember everybody I talked to, but you then turn up and say that I did talk to 'em. When I say I can't remember and you think this is, so anyway, this was the kind of harassment he was getting. There was also some difficulties in the hearings because he had a very important academic figures who testified against him. The most important one was a man called Carl Whitt Fogle. Now, Carl Whitt Fogle had been in the German Communist Party in the 1920s, 1930s, but Whitt Fogle was an environmental determinist, and he thought that there was a certain determinism which connected irrigation works with centralized government, and that therefore China was always destined to have an autocratic, centralized imperial regime, and that this was therefore what you had to negotiate with.

And Fogle was emphasizing the fact that there was a grand debate in the Soviet Union led by Stalin as to how to characterize China. Should it be called an imperial system which needed to be confronted or should it be considered a feudal situation in which land ownership preempted. And there was a big debate within the commenter on these questions. Staling settled it by saying that China was futile. Fogal believed it was despotic. And so Whit Fogel was actually expelled from the communist party because he didn't accept the China line. Now, Latimore was in the habit of referring to China as futile and thought that it was futile and worked with it in those terms. And for that reason, what Whitford said to the committee was that you could tell that Latimore was a communist because he had taken the Communist party line that China was futile, and there was no question that only people who were favorable to the Communist Party would take that position.

Now, this was news to Latimore and he was saying, well, look, lots of people call it futile, and there's no reason why I should be considered a communist because of that. But this was the main means of interrogation of leftists at that time. And I want to make this very, very important point, Jay Edgar Hoover took the view that it was very difficult to correct to actually identify a communist directly, but you could do it indirectly by understanding what the Communist party line was on a bunch of issues. And when you heard somebody's quoting that line or using that line or referring to that line, then they should automatically be placed under suspicion. So if the Communist party line was China as feudal, if Latimore used it, then he was obviously connected somehow or other to the Communist party apparatus. So this went on for this interrogation under subpoena in Congress, went on for eight days, and at the end of it, Lamore was criticized heartedly for his disrespect.

He had had sometimes joked with, he couldn't believe, I think the nature of the questioning he was getting, and he joked sometimes about things. So it was recommended from the committee that the Justice Department try him for perjury. So a grand jury was set up and there was all the things that you've been hearing about recently, the grand juries and so on took matter. And at the end of it, the grand jury nominated that he should be actually tried for perjury. And one of the big perjury questions was this question of feudalism and that he was adopting the Communist party line and that he'd lied when he said he was not a communist Party member because he had of clearly adopted the communist party line. So this was where he was out, and he was therefore put under suspicion the university put him on paid leave and he was therefore going to have to fight this legal case.

And he'd already been with all of these interrogations under a cloud, if you like, for two or three years. And now he had to face a trial. And it went before the judge and the judge looked at this and said he didn't really think these charges merited trial. And the only two that did were so minor there to be immaterial. The government appealed this and it went to an appeals court, and the appeals court reinstated some of the charges and it came back in down. And again, the judge Junior below kind of said, well, there was a real difficulty with some of these charges. And the defense had great fun with the term feudal because it turned out that President Eisenhower had used the term feudal. Winston Churchill, he used the term futile Time Magazine, had used the term futile. And so they came to all of these people who had used the term futile about China and said, well, if you use the word futile as an indicator of you are traitor to the United States and that you're a member of the Communist conspiracy, this was just not on.

So again, this was dismissed. It went back to the appeals court again, but this time the appeals court wasn't constituted in a different kind of way, and the appeals court didn't have a majority to vote against Latimore. So he was, then they withdrew the charges, and after five and a half years of harassment, Latimore was let go. So I was kind of very curious about this whole kind of thing because Latimore held a position, which was five years before I came to Johns Hopkins, and I was beginning to read Marks, and I was thinking, I should understand how this kind of thing goes on. The McCarran committee report went on for something like 6,000 pages. I didn't read all of it, but I read all those bits that had to do with Latimore, and it was a damning of him as a person and damning of him as a traitor to the United States.

And one of the things this explained to me was, if ever I mentioned about Latimore to my colleagues at Johns Hopkins University, you would get two responses. One response was to regard him as a brilliant scholar who'd been effectively been wrongly martyred by the McCarthyite movement. And the other was that he was a downright traitor to the country and he'd got away with murder because he was really very much about furthering the communist conspiracy. The McCarran Committee came to the conclusion that China was lost not because of Mao or because of the China, the Chinese masses, but China was lost because of small group of academics and intellectuals and State Department officials had actually allowed all of the events to go on without reacting properly to what was that turned out to be a mainstream threat. So this then is what McCarthyism was about, and I want to emphasize the ill feeling there was the viciousness of a lot of the commentary.

And this was not only about intellectuals and academics and policy makers and all the rest of it, because Baltimore was an ethnic city and it was a very large Polish community in Baltimore. And of course Poland was annexed into the Soviet orbit in 1945 or 1944. And the Catholics in the Polish community were extremely angry and extremely flawed. And so there was a huge division amongst the Polish ethnic community between those who still supported the Polish government, even though it was communist and those who were kind of viciously opposed to it. And you couldn't go into that community and talk about this at all. And when I tried at a certain point to talk to his people there, they kind of said, well, no, they didn't want to talk about it. They refused to talk about it. And this was actually true of Latimore as well.

But when I went to see Latimore and when he had left Hopkins, he went to set up a China studies unit in Leeds University in Britain, and he then retired in 19 69, 19 70. And I went to see him around 19 72, 73, and just to talk to him and find out about how things had unfolded. But he made very clear to me that he didn't want to talk about the McCarthyism at all. He refused to talk about it, and he wanted to talk about in a Mongolia and what inner Mongolia was like and why he was so delighted that he was being honored as the gold medal of the Ulan Bour Academy of Sciences in Mongolia. So he was just very much full of that. But he did make clear to me that his sentiments were anti-imperialist, that he thought that the United States as an imperious flower had missed a clear opportunity to do something very positive in relationship to China during the years of 19 40, 42, and that China could have gone in a different kind of way if the United States had not isolated it and not attacked Mao and decided that Mao was communist, and therefore anybody who was sympathetic with what Mao was doing in those early years and even later, anybody who was sympathetic to that was clearly of a China, right?

A nurture and therefore treasonous to United States. And the viciousness of a lot of this, I think is something that people forget. And I think this is important in the President because we are seeing the same sort of thing going on now, and we see a much of the media saying, oh, this is not who we are as Americans. We are different to that. We've come off a period where we at least got along and America has always got along well, America has not always got along. If you go back to this period and the sort of violence that was attributable to the far right and some of the responses to it, these sorts of things were going on. And it wasn't only the McCarthyism, it was of course the beginnings of the Civil Rights movement and all the rest of it, which was roiling America.

So this was a very, very difficult time. And what you see is an academic who, anyway, just walked into the situation and of the conclusions I made was that Latimore understood inre far, far better than he understood the United States. He miscalculated really in terms of the virulence of the opposition, the violence that could be visited upon him by the MacLaren Commission and the way in which the society works in this rather brutal and brutalizing way. So Lamore was a figure of that sort. There were many others around in Baltimore at the time. There was a very famous science medicine history of science medicine who committed suicide because of the McCarthyism. Many of the academics who were McCarthyite who got hit by McCarthyite were actually expelled from universities. They set up in places like Mexico, and some went to Canada as well. So this was a very, very difficult era in the United States.

And what we are seeing right now is the sort of return of that kind of politics and the return of that era. And in a funny kind of way, I think there's a certain truth to an article that Richard Hofstadter wrote, which was called The Paranoid Style of American Politics, and this paranoid style is with us. It's always been there. If you go back to the 1920s and the red scares of that time, if you go back to the no nothing movement of the 19th century where you'll see it again and again and again, it erects its ugly face until somehow or other something so far has managed to rescue it. And so it's been able to recover. But right now we are in a situation where this kind of thing is going on and it's a very terrible situation to live through. And Lati Moore's terrible experience of five and a half years of interrogation and harassment and the kind of violence that went on around that.

The first House Un-American Activities Committee meetings were held also in Baltimore. And one of the participants who was called to testify and said, well, I went and I testified in the morning when I went back in the late afternoon, all the windows in my house were broken. And so again, this is testimony to the fact that this sort of right wing conspiratorial harassment is not new in the United States. It is in fact baked into the American psyche in lots of ways and in lots of moments it comes out and it is coming out right now even more closely to what Latimore was about than you can imagine.