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

During this whole period of over two decades, Corliss Lamont, with the full support of his parents, was one of the chief figures in “fellow traveler” circles and one of the chief spokesmen for the Soviet point of view both in these organizations and also in connections which came to him either as son of the most influential man in Wall Street or as professor of philosophy at Columbia University. His relationship with his parents may be reflected in a few events of this period.

In January 1946, Corliss Lamont was called before HUAC to give testimony on the National Council of American-Soviet Friendship. He refused to produce records, was subpoenaed, refused, was charged with contempt of Congress, and was so cited by the House of Representatives on June 26, 1946. In the midst of this controversy, in May, Corliss Lamont and his mother, Mrs. Thomas Lamont, presented their valuable collection of the works of Spinoza to Columbia University. The adverse publicity continued, yet when Thomas Lamont rewrote his will, on January 6, 1948, Corliss Lamont remained in it as co-heir to his father’s fortune of scores of millions of dollars.

In 1951 the Subcommittee on Internal Security of the Senate Judiciary Committee, the so-called McCarran Committee, sought to show that China had been lost to the Communists by the deliberate actions of a group of academic experts on the Far East and Communist fellow travelers whose work in that direction was controlled and coordinated by the Institute of Pacific Relations (IPR). The influence of the Communists in IPR is well established, but the patronage of Wall Street is less well known.

The IPR was a private association of ten independent national councils in ten countries concerned with affairs in the Pacific. The headquarters of the IPR and of the American Council of IPR were both in New York and were closely associated on an interlocking basis. Each spent about $2.5 million dollars over the quarter-century from 1925 to 1950, of which about half, in each case, came from the Carnegie Foundation and the Rockefeller Foundation (which were themselves interlocking groups controlled by an alliance of Morgan and Rockefeller interests in Wall Street). Much of the rest, especially of the American Council, came from firms closely allied to these two Wall Street interests, such as Standard Oil, International Telephone and Telegraph, International General Electric, the National City Bank, and the Chase National Bank. In each case, about 10 percent of income came from sales of publications and, of course, a certain amount came from ordinary members who paid $15 a year and received the periodicals of the IPR and its American Council, Pacific Affairs and Far Eastern Survey .

The financial deficits which occurred each year were picked up by financial angels, almost all with close Wall Street connections. The chief identifiable contributions here were about $60,000 from Frederick Vanderbilt Field over eighteen years, $14,700 from Thomas Lamont over fourteen years, $800 from Corliss Lamont (only after 1947), and $18,000 from a member of Lee, Higginson in Boston who seems to have been Jerome D. Greene. In addition, large sums of money each year were directed to private individuals for research and travel expenses from similar sources, chiefly the great financial foundations.

Most of these awards for work in the Far Eastern area required approval or recommendation from members of IPR. Moreover, access to publication and recommendations to academic positions in the handful of great American universities concerned with the Far East required similar sponsorship. And, finally, there can be little doubt that consultant jobs on Far Eastern matters in the State Department or other government agencies were largely restricted to IPR-approved people. The individuals who published, who had money, found jobs, were consulted, and who were appointed intermittently to government missions were those who were tolerant of the IPR line. The fact that all these lines of communication passed through the Ivy League universities or their scattered equivalents west of the Appalachians, such as Chicago, Stanford, or California, unquestionably went back to Morgan’s influence in handling large academic endowments.

There can be little doubt that the more active academic members of IPR, the professors and publicists who became members of its governing board (such as Owen Lattimore, Joseph P. Chamberlain, and Philip C. Jessup of Columbia, William W. Lockwood of Princeton, John K. Fairbank of Harvard, and others) and the administrative staff (which became, in time, the most significant influence in its policies) developed an IPR party line. It is, furthermore, fairly clear that this IPR line had many points in common both with the Kremlin’s party line on the Far East and with the State Department’s policy line in the same area. The interrelations among these, or the influence of one on another, is highly disputed. Certainly no final conclusions can be drawn. Clearly there were some Communists, even party members, involved (such as Frederick Vanderbilt Field), but it is much less clear that there was any disloyalty to the United States. Furthermore, there was a great deal of intrigue both to help those who agreed with the IPR line and to influence United States government policy in this direction, but there is no evidence of which I am aware of any explicit plot or conspiracy to direct American policy in a direction favorable either to the Soviet Union or to international Communism. Efforts of the radical Right to support their convictions about these last points undoubtedly did great, lasting, and unfair damage to the reputations and interests of many people.

The true explanation of what happened is not yet completely known and, as far as it is known, is too complicated to elucidate here. It is, however, clear that many persons who were born in the period 1900-1920 and came to maturity in the period 1928-1940 were so influenced by their experiences of war, depression, and insecurity that they adopted, more or less unconsciously, certain aspects of the Communist ideology (such as the economic interpretation of history, the role of a dualistic class struggle in human events, or the exploitative interpretation of the role of capital in the productive system and of the possessing groups in any society). Many of these ideas were nonsense, even in terms of their own experiences, but they were facile interpretative guides for people who, whatever their expert knowledge of their special areas, were lacking in total perspective on society as a whole or human experience as a whole. Moreover, many of these people felt an unconscious obligation to “help the underdog.” This favorable attitude toward the downtrodden and the oppressed was rooted in our Western Christian heritage, especially in nineteenth-century humanitarianism, and in the older Christian idea that all persons are redeemable and will prove trustworthy if they are but trusted. This outlook was, for example, prevalent in that ubiquitous intriguer, Lionel Curtis, who was the original guide and parent of the IPR and of many similar organizations. As children of missionaries, many of the organizers and members of the IPR obtained this spirit from their family background along with their knowledge of the Far Eastern languages which made them “experts.”

It must be confessed that the IPR had many of the marks of a fellow-traveler or Communist “captive” organization. But this does not, in any way, mean that the radical Right or the professional ex-Communist version of these events is accurate. For example, Elizabeth Bentley and, above all, Louis Budenz testified before the McCarran Committee on the IPR. The latter identified almost every person associated with the organization as a Communist or “under Communist discipline” by his personal knowledge. In the most famous case, that of Owen Lattimore, Budenz’s emphatic testimony that Lattimore was a Communist and that his orders were issued by small Communist Party conclaves of Earl Browder, Budenz, F. V. Field, and others was totally refuted, not only by the direct contradictory testimony of Browder and Field, but by subsequent evidence from more reliable witnesses and from Budenz himself. Questioning eventually made it clear that Budenz did not know Lattimore or his work or any of his books (including one which he quoted as proof of Lattimore’s adherence to the party line). Moreover, Budenz gave direct testimony that the 1944 mission to China of Vice-President Henry Wallace, accompanied by Lattimore and John Carter Vincent (a State Department expert on the Far East who has been accused of Communism), drew up recommendations which were pro-Communist. This was shown to be the exact contrary of the truth and a mere figment of Budenz’s active imagination. Budenz testified that the replacement of General Stilwell (who was anti-Chiang and relatively favorable to Mao) by General Wedemeyer was the consequence of the influence of Lattimore and Vincent on Wallace. Joseph Alsop, who was present at all the discussions in question and drafted the recommendations, later testified that he himself was the author of all the “pro-Communist” passages which Budenz attributed to Lattimore and that he himself had suggested the relatively pro-Chiang General Wedemeyer as Stilwell’s successor in order to block Wallace’s suggestion of General Chennault for the position.