Owen Lattimore

Who was Owen Lattimore?

Owen Lattimore was an American author, educator, and influential scholar of China and Central Asia, especially Mongolia. Although he did not have an advanced academic degree, in the 1930s, he was editor of Pacific Affairs, a journal published by the Institute of Pacific Relations, and then taught at Johns Hopkins University from 1938 to 1963. During World War II, he was an advisor to Chiang Kai-shek and the American government and contributed extensively to the public debate. From 1963 to 1970, Lattimore was the first Professor of Chinese Studies at the University of Leeds in England, where he taught Chinese History, richly flavored with personal reminiscences. He died in 1989 in Providence, Rhode Island.

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. The hearings did document Lattimore's sympathetic statements about Stalin and the Soviet Union, however. Although charges of perjury were dismissed, the controversy put an end to Lattimore's role as a consultant of the United States State Department and eventually to his career in American academic life.