36 Facts About Owen Lattimore

1.

Owen Lattimore was an American Orientalist and writer.

2.

Owen Lattimore was an influential scholar of China and Central Asia, especially Mongolia.

3.

Owen Lattimore was director of the Walter Hines Page School of International Relations there from 1939 to 1953.

4.

From 1963 to 1970, Lattimore was the first Professor of Chinese Studies at the University of Leeds in England.

5.

Owen Lattimore died in 1989 in Providence, Rhode Island, having resided in his later years in Pawtucket.

6.

Owen Lattimore pursued literary interests, especially poetry, and briefly converted to Catholicism.

7.

Owen Lattimore did well on the entrance exams for Oxford University, but returned to China in 1919 when it turned out that he would not have enough funds for attending university.

8.

Owen Lattimore described her journey in Turkestan Reunion, he in The Desert Road to Turkestan and High Tartary.

9.

Owen Lattimore was awarded the Patron's Medal by the British Royal Geographical Society in 1942 for his travels in Central Asia.

10.

Woodhead, Owen Lattimore was appointed editor of Pacific Affairs, published by the Institute of Pacific Relations, which he edited from Beijing.

11.

Owen Lattimore sought articles from a wide range of perspectives and made the journal a forum for new ideas, especially from the social sciences and social philosophy.

12.

IPR secretary Edward Carter was eager to solicit the participation of Soviet scholars, and insisted that Owen Lattimore meet him in Moscow on his way back to the States.

13.

Owen Lattimore had never been to the Soviet Union, having been denied a visa, and felt eager to obtain contributions from Soviet scholars, who had a distinguished tradition in Central Asian studies.

14.

Owen Lattimore responded that Pacific Affairs had the obligation to serve all the national councils, even the Japanese, and could not take political sides.

15.

Owen Lattimore was impressed with their candor, but had a less favorable experience on his visit to the party school for national minorities.

16.

Owen Lattimore spent six months in Berkeley, California, writing a draft of the Inner Asian Frontiers of China and continuing as editor of Pacific Affairs.

17.

Owen Lattimore famously stated that the show trials "sound to me like democracy".

18.

Owen Lattimore soon wrote prominently against allowing Soviet expansion into China.

19.

The Middlesboro Daily News ran an article by Owen Lattimore which reported on Japan's planned offensive into a Hui Muslim region of China in 1938, which predicted that the Japanese would suffer a massive crushing defeat at the hands of the Muslims.

20.

In 1944, Owen Lattimore was placed in charge of the Pacific area for the Office of War Information.

21.

Owen Lattimore accused Lattimore of being hostile to Chiang and too sympathetic towards the Chinese Communist Party.

22.

In 1944, relations between Kohlberg and Owen Lattimore became so bad that Kohlberg left the IPR and founded a new journal, Plain Talk, in which he attempted to rebut the claims made in Pacific Affairs.

23.

On 14 December 1948, Alexander Barmine, former charge d'affaires at the Soviet Embassy in Athens, Greece, advised Federal Bureau of Investigation agents that Soviet GRU Director Yan Karlovich Berzin had informed him prior to Barmine's 1937 defection that Owen Lattimore was a Soviet agent, an allegation Barmine would repeat under oath before the Senate McCarran Committee in 1951.

24.

In March 1950, in executive session of the Tydings Committee, Senator Joseph McCarthy accused Owen Lattimore of being the top Soviet agent, either in the US, in the State Department, or both.

25.

Owen Lattimore dismissed the charges against him as "moonshine" and hurried back to the United States to testify before the Tydings Committee.

26.

McCarthy, who had no evidence of specific acts of espionage and only weak evidence that Lattimore was a concealed Communist, in April 1950 persuaded Louis F Budenz, the now-anticommunist former editor of the Communist Party organ Daily Worker, to testify.

27.

Now Budenz testified that Owen Lattimore was a secret Communist but not a Soviet agent; he was a person of influence who often assisted Soviet foreign policy.

28.

In February 1952, Owen Lattimore was called to testify before the Senate Internal Security Subcommittee, headed by McCarthy's ally, Senator Pat McCarran.

29.

Owen Lattimore took three days to deliver his opening statement: the delays were caused by frequent interruptions as McCarran challenged Owen Lattimore point by point.

30.

Budenz again testified, but this time claimed that Owen Lattimore was both a Communist and a Soviet agent.

31.

Owen Lattimore acknowledged that Wittfogel's thought had been tremendously influential but said that if there had been a smile, it was a "non-Communist smile".

32.

Wittfogel and Taylor charged that Owen Lattimore had done "great harm to the free world" in disregarding the need to defeat world Communism as a first priority.

33.

On February 16,1952, Owen Lattimore was indicted for perjury on seven counts.

34.

Owen Lattimore remained at Leeds until he retired as Emeritus Professor in 1970.

35.

Owen Lattimore had a lifelong dedication to establishing research centres to further the study of Mongolian history and culture.

36.

All of the themes addressed by Owen Lattimore continue to inspire world historians today.