Owen Lattimore

Provided by Wikipedia
Owen Lattimore (July 29, 1900 – May 31, 1989) was an American Orientalist and writer. He was an influential scholar of China and Central Asia, especially Mongolia. Although he never earned a college degree, in the 1930s he was editor of ''Pacific Affairs'', a journal published by the Institute of Pacific Relations, and taught at Johns Hopkins University from 1938 to 1963. He was director of the Walter Hines Page School of International Relations from 1939 to 1953. During World War II, he was an advisor to Chiang Kai-shek and the American government and contributed extensively to the public debate on U.S. policy toward Asia. From 1963 to 1970, Lattimore was the first Professor of Chinese Studies at the University of Leeds in England.

In the early post-war period of McCarthyism and the Red Scare, American wartime "China Hands" were accused of being agents of the Soviet Union or under the influence of Marxism. In 1950, Senator Joseph McCarthy accused Lattimore in particular of being "the top Russian espionage agent in the United States." The accusations led to years of Congressional hearings that did not substantiate the charge that Lattimore had been a spy. Soviet Venona cables, decoded during WWII and declassified decades later, did not refer to Lattimore as one of the Soviet agents active in the US. The hearings did document Lattimore's sympathetic statements about Stalin and the Soviet Union, however. In 1988 Chen Han-shen, a member of the Sorge spy ring, mentioned in his memoirs that Lattimore placed a request for a Chinese assistant through Comintern channels. Chen’s superiors dispatched him to the United States in 1936 to serve as Lattimore’s coeditor at Pacific Affairs, a position Chen used to carry out espionage activities in New York, with the help of another agent, Rao Shu-shi. The controversy put an end to Lattimore's role as a consultant of the U.S. State Department and eventually to his academic career. He died in 1989 in Providence, Rhode Island, having resided in his later years in Pawtucket.

Lattimore's "lifetime intellectual project", notes one recent scholar, was to "develop a 'scientific' model of the way human societies form, evolve, grow, decline, mutate and interact with one another along 'frontiers'." He eclectically absorbed and often abandoned influential theories of his day that dealt with the great themes of history. These included the ecological determinism of Ellsworth Huntington; biological racism, though only to the extent of seeing characteristics which grew out of ecology; the economic geography and location theory; and some aspects of Marxist modes of production and stages of history, especially through the influence of Karl August Wittfogel. The most important and lasting influence, however, was Arnold J. Toynbee and his treatment of the great civilizations as organic wholes which were born, matured, grew old, and died. Lattimore's most influential book, ''The Inner Asian Frontiers of China'' (1940), used these theories to explain the history of East Asia not as the history of China and its influence on its neighbors, but as the interaction between two types of civilizations, settled farming and pastoral, each of which had its role in changing the other.