Carroll Quigley - Tragedy and Hope - A History of the World in Our Time

The Republicans were as scared as the Democrats, and with good reason, for party lines, like all other distinctions, meant nothing to McCarthy, and he continued his charges in 1953-1954 with his own party in control of both houses of Congress and Eisenhower in the White House. The chief change was that he stopped talking of “twenty years of treason” in the White House and talked of “twenty-one years of treason.” The new President, in an effort to divert these attacks, continued to yield to him, as he had yielded to him during the campaign. The Administration was soon boasting that 1,456 Federal workers had been “separated” in the first four months of the “Eisenhower security program.” At the end of the first year the President raised this total to 2,200. It took some weeks for the Democrats to discover that these figures did not apply to subversives or even to security risks, but to anyone who left the government service. By the end of its first year, the new Administration adopted completely McCarthy’s refusal to be hampered by categories. Vice-President Nixon said, “We’re kicking the Communists and fellow travelers and security risks out of the Government ... by the thousands.” It was soon clear that no known Communists were kicked out and that “security risks” included all kinds of persons, such as those who imbibed too freely at Washington’s endless cocktail parties. A Communist in the State Department would have been a prize among this motley group, but none was announced.

For a while, the new Administration tried to outdo McCarthy, chiefly by demonstrating in committee hearings that China had been “lost” to the Communists because of the careful planning and intrigue of Communists in the State Department. The chief effort in this direction was done by a well-organized and well-financed “China Lobby” radiating from the activities of Alfred Kohlberg, a wealthy exporter who had had business interests in China. This group, with its allies, such as McCarthy, mobilized a good deal of evidence that Communists had infiltrated into various academic, journalistic, and research groups concerned with the Far East. But they failed to prove their contention that a conspiracy of these Communists and fellow travelers, acting through the State Department, had given China to Mao. Mao won out in China because of the incompetence and corruption of the Chiang Kai-shek regime, and he won out in spite of any aid the United States gave, or could give, to Chiang, because the latter’s regime was incapable of holding out against Mao, without drastic reforms, whatever the scale of American aid (without American military intervention to make war on Mao, which very few desired). The China Lobby’s version was based on two contentions: (1) that there were Communists in significant positions close to the agencies which helped to form American academic and public opinion on the Far East and (2) that there were frequent agreements between known Communists and known formulators of American policy and opinion on China. This whole subject is too complex for adequate discussion here, but the situation must be outlined.

There is considerable truth in the China Lobby’s contention that the American experts on China were organized into a single interlocking group which had a general consensus of a Leftish character. It is also true that this group, from its control of funds, academic recommendations, and research or publication opportunities, could favor persons who accepted the established consensus and could injure, financially or in professional advancement, persons who did not accept it. It is also true that the established group, by its influence on book reviewing in The New York Times , the Herald Tribune , the Saturday Review , a few magazines, including the “liberal weeklies,” and in the professional journals, could advance or hamper any specialist’s career. It is also true that these things were done in the United States in regard to the Far East by the Institute of Pacific Relations, that this organization had been infiltrated by Communists, and by Communist sympathizers, and that much of this group’s influence arose from its access to and control over the flow of funds from financial foundations to scholarly activities. All these things were true, but they would have been true of many other areas of American scholarly research and academic administration in the United States, such as Near East studies or anthropology or educational theory or political science. They were more obvious in regard to the Far East because of the few persons and the bigger issues involved in that area.

On the other hand, the charges of the China Lobby, accepted and proliferated by the neo-isolationists in the 1950’s and by the radical Right in the 1960’s, that China was “lost” because of this group, or that the members of this group were disloyal to the United States, or engaged in espionage, or were participants in a conscious plot, or that the whole group was controlled by Soviet agents or even by Communists, is not true. Yet the whole subject is of major importance in understanding the twentieth century.

In the first place, because of language barriers, the number of people who could be “experts” on the Far East was limited. Most of these, like Pearl Buck, Professor Fairbank of Harvard, or Professors Latourette and Rowe of Yale, and many others, were children or relatives of people who originally became concerned with China as missionaries. This gave them a double character: they learned the language and they had a feeling of spiritual mission about China. When we add to this that they were, until after 1950, few in numbers and had access, because of the commercial importance of the Far East, to relatively large amounts of research, travel, and publication funds on Far East matters, they almost inevitably came to form a small group who knew each other personally, met fairly regularly, had a fairly established consensus (based on conversations and reading each other’s books) on Far East questions, and generally had certain characteristics of a clique.

Lattimore, for example, because he knew Mongolian and the others did not, tended to become everybody’s expert on Mongolia, was rarely challenged on Mongolia or northwest interior China, and inevitably became rather opinionated, if not conceited, on the subject. Moreover, many of these experts, and those the ones which were favored by the Far East “establishment” in the Institute of Pacific Relations, were captured by Communist ideology. Under its influence they propagandized, as experts, erroneous ideas and sought to influence policy in mistaken directions. For example, they sought to establish, in 1943-1950, that the Chinese Communists were simple agrarian reformers, rather like the third-party groups of the American Mid-west; or that Japan was evil and must be totally crushed, the monarchy removed, and (later) that American policy in Japan, under General MacArthur, was a failure; they even accepted, on occasion, the Stalinist line that Communist regimes were “democratic and peace-loving,” while capitalist ones were “warlike and aggressive.” For example, as late as 1951 the John Day Company (Richard J. Walsh, president) published an indictment of MacArthur’s policies in Japan by Robert Textor. The book, called Failure in Japan, had an introduction by Lattimore and sought to show that our occupation policy led to “failure for democratic values in Japan and a situation of strategic weakness for the West.” This childish libel was propagated by the IPR, which mailed out 2,300 postcards advertising the book.

Behind this unfortunate situation lies another, more profound, relationship, which influences matters much broader than Far Eastern policy. It involves the organization of tax-exempt fortunes of international financiers into foundations to be used for educational, scientific, “and other public purposes.” Sixty or more years ago, public life in the West was dominated by the influence of “Wall Street.” This term has nothing to do with its use by the Communists to mean monopolistic industrialism, but, on the contrary, refers to international financial capitalism deeply involved in the gold standard, foreign-exchange fluctuations, floating of fixed-interest securities and, to a lesser extent, flotation of industrial shares for stock-exchange markets. This group, which in the United States, was completely dominated by J. P. Morgan and Company from the 1880’s to the 1930’s was cosmopolitan, Anglophile, internationalist, Ivy League, eastern seaboard, high Episcopalian, and European-culture conscious. Their connection with the Ivy League colleges rested on the fact that the large endowments of these institutions required constant consultation with the financiers of Wall Street (or its lesser branches on State Street, Boston, and elsewhere) and was reflected in the fact that these endowments, even in 1930, were largely in bonds rather than in real estate or common stocks. As a consequence of these influences, as late as the 1930’s, J. P. Morgan and his associates were the most significant figures in policy making at Harvard, Columbia, and to a lesser extent Yale, while the Whitneys were significant at Yale, and the Prudential Insurance Company (through Edward D. Duffield) dominated Princeton.