Chapter 9

The Fate of the Howard School

For those like Stefan Possony, who obsessed about the globally linked Communist and colored conspiracy against Caucasoid civilization, the decade between the Brown v. Board of Education decision in 1954 and the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom in August 1963 was a nightmare. The United States appeared to be headed down the same disastrous road as the European metropoles, Australasia, and the “Third Africa” (the white redoubts and their peripheries arrayed against the Arab north and sub-Saharan black zones), and things would only get worse. They were also unlikely to notice, let alone celebrate, the waning influence of the internationalism that the Howard school theorists had advanced in the 1930s and 1940s. As Penny Von Eschen’s pioneering account portrays, intellectuals in the Cold War–era civil rights movement instead increasingly accepted the legitimacy of U.S. hegemony. They argued for desegregation and decolonization on the grounds of meeting the communist challenge. The critique of racism shifted grounds too, from the Du Boisian historical-structural analysis of capitalist slavery and colonialism to a Myrdalian “psychological problem and an aberration in American life,” and thus “from an international to a “domestic” problem.”¹

Rayford Logan traded in his pan-Africanist identity to become the Howard school’s model Cold War anticommunist liberal. He wrote frequently as a “foreign affairs advisor” to the head of the Pittsburgh Courier’s editorial page, George Schuyler, an even more outspoken black anticommunist. Logan’s views were now close to those of his friend, Harold Isaacs. The convergence of perspectives also probably helped reduce the wariness between him and Ralph Bunche, who, like E. Franklin Frazier and Abram Harris, once considered him a race man and, as Logan himself believed, “a lightweight.” Through all the years of red-baiting and persecution by the U.S. government, Logan remained loyal to Du Bois, the critic Bunche had grown to detest and Isaacs dismissed (together with his “half-digested Marxism”) as a failure.²

McCarthyism struck the Howard campus hard in 1953–1954. The FBI investigated President Mordecai Johnson and two dozen faculty members for suspected communist ties as a consequence of their entanglements in the postwar civil rights and national liberation struggles. Logan, one of those caught in the dragnet, wrote about his interrogation and the impact of McCarthyism on the campus in his journal and retrospectively in an unpublished autobiography and in his Howard University: The First Hundred Years (1969). He called it a blatant effort to sow suspicion and silence him and other “moderate” and “liberal” leaders at Howard, such as Locke and Frazier, in his case because of his outspoken views on the crisis of colonialism in Africa.³ Logan believed McCarthyist tactics worked, and as proof he pointed to Merze Tate, “the most abjectly intimidated” of all his colleagues. At a tense faculty meeting in May 1953 to discuss the FBI’s hunt for communists on campus, she allegedly warned others to steer clear of the NAACP or other suspect organizations.⁴ Two years later, he judged her a “craven coward” for her decision to use the term “American interest in the Pacific” to describe her emerging research focus “rather than American imperialism because of the danger of criticism.”⁵ She eventually shook herself free of such fears, but it hardly mattered to Logan. His cordial albeit patronizing relationship with his colleague had turned poisonous. The problem was not simply one of personalities, however; it was a problem of institutional decay and its caustic effects on Logan, Frazier, and many others.

Brown v. Board and its promise of an end—however slow, grudging, and piecemeal—to America’s academic apartheid dealt a deathblow to the Howard school. Bunche and Eric Williams were long gone by 1950. Alain Locke died in 1955. Frazier and his colleagues who had been hired just before or during the war carried on in an atmosphere of increasing acrimony and bitterness over the lack of resources and research support. Depending on their age, discipline, and professional networks, they might harbor the “almost impossible” dream of joining a white department as its token minority.⁶ The alienation that Harold Isaacs had found in his interviews with black intellectuals was real and was attributable to the precarious positions they occupied in what historian and Logan protégé Michael Winston called an “intellectual periphery” of “isolated Negro colleges and universities which were themselves marginal financially and intellectually.” The “token desegregation” of those years proved “sufficient to…erode the small but productive clusters of research scholars” and the journals and departments they had built.⁷

When Howard’s administration responded to desegregation in 1954 by proposing to begin granting PhD degrees, Logan, Frazier, and other faculty fought against the plan, at great cost to themselves, for nearly a year. They believed it would come at the expense of the struggling undergraduate and masters programs, which were suffering from a reduction in faculty and couldn’t possibly succeed when the small pool of talented black PhD applicants in the social and natural sciences gained entry into white private and public universities. Merze Tate renewed her opposition to a doctoral program in 1960 in a way that (consciously or not) was guaranteed to outrage Logan, the department’s longtime, increasingly autocratic head. She viewed herself as the one outlier in a post–John Hope Franklin department of narrow (“racially slanted”) thinkers who couldn’t hope to produce students of equal intellectual capacity other research universities. Yet Logan himself would soon cynically describe Howard’s PhD, the first of which was awarded in 1964, as “not the Ph.D. of the type you get from Amherst and Harvard. This is a black Ph.D.”⁸

Michael Winston’s more measured 1971 assessment states the problem succinctly. There were few if any “recognized scholars” in place to carry on the institution and theory building at Howard after the era of Bunche, Locke, and Frazier, and the most promising young thinkers were “being recruited to white institutions.”⁹ German Jewish émigré John Herz, Bunche’s replacement as chair, left for City College in 1951, the year his Political Realism and Political Idealism (1951) won the American Political Science Association’s Woodrow Wilson Award.¹⁰ Howard’s political science department made one great new hire in international relations in 1957. French national Bernard Fall was on the cusp of recognition as the country’s most knowledgeable specialist on Vietnam. He wrote brutal dissections of the failures of the French and later U.S. wars and thus was a target for FBI surveillance. His senior colleague in history, Merze Tate, had helped him secure Rockefeller Foundation support in 1962, which bought him time to finish his Two Viet-Nams while living in Phnom Penh (he was persona non grata in South Vietnam by then) and file the first of his many devastating portraits of the Kennedy administration’s deceptions.¹¹ However, Fall died tragically in 1967 when he set off a land mine while accompanying a battalion of marines in South Vietnam.

Tate was easily Herz’s and Fall’s rival for most accomplished international relations scholar at Howard. She turned her Radcliffe PhD in government into two books published by Harvard University Press: The Disarmament Illusion (1942) and the United States and Armaments (1948). Hans Morgenthau, the leading realist theorist in international relations in the United States, was one of her early champions. Another was the realist whom Morgenthau had eclipsed, Fred Schuman, who had served on her committee. In the 1950s, Tate launched an entirely new research project on imperialism in the Pacific that resulted in two more highly regarded books on U.S.-Hawaiian relations and dozens of articles, many of which appeared in journals that remained out of bounds to her seniors. Sadly, her papers at Howard’s Moorland-Spingarn Research Center contain five unpublished books: another on Hawaii, two on the expansionism of Australia and New Zealand, and two on imperialism in Africa. Like the rest of the Howard school thinkers, she is not recognized in the conventional histories of Anglo-American international theory. The real tragedy is her marginalization at Howard, the discrimination she endured as one of the few women teaching in the social sciences (and one of the only women in the United States teaching international relations in the 1940s, 1950s, and 1960s), and her disappearance from virtually all retrospective accounts of African American intellectual life and internationalist thought.

Missing in Action

Merze Tate began teaching history at Howard in 1942 on a one-year contract, the year her first book, The Disarmament Illusion, appeared. A young Eric Williams took over the leadership of the tiny government department when the chair, Bunche, and a second faculty member, Harold Lewis, joined the Office of Strategic Services, and a third, Vincent Browne, entered the U.S. Army officer corps. Even when the department was shorthanded, Williams couldn’t bear the thought of hiring Tate or any other woman. “I am exposed, apparently, to a choice between Caroline Ware and Merze Tate. What have I done to deserve that?” he wrote to Locke.¹² Ware, an activist scholar and New Dealer who had written two influential histories, one of New England textile workers and the other of immigrant life in Greenwich Village, had just come out with her call for a new cultural approach to history “from the bottom up,” as a later generation of professors referred to it. Logan, the chair of the history department, who was teaching less while serving as interim graduate school dean, considered which of the two to hire in his place. “Tate is colored but a personality problem. Ware is white, lives in Vienna, Virginia, but a more mature scholar and probably less than a personality problem. I incline toward Tate.” Tate taught year to year for different programs during the war (for example, the Army Specialized Training Program on campus), but Bunche, who was running his department “by telephone” while relying on Williams and buddy Sam Dorsey, rejected her reapplication, and she contemplated having to leave Howard before she was offered a permanent position in the history department in 1945 or 1946.¹³

Aided by a subvention from Harvard/Radcliffe’s Bureau of International Research, Tate published The Disarmament Illusion, a project she launched at Oxford under Lord Zimmern, who was routinely if loosely identified as the world’s first professor of international relations, and completed at Harvard under Payson Wild. It received strong reviews in both African American and white journals. Elton Atwater, a specialist in arms exports who taught international relations at American University before moving to Penn State in 1950, judged it the “definitive study” of arms control efforts up to the Hague conference of 1907, and others agreed. Logan called the book Tate’s passport to “a permanent place among American historians regardless of her color.”¹⁴ She combined an exhaustive review of state papers that had never been used before with a pathbreaking, equally detailed (some reviewers maintained it was overdetailed) study of the myriad organizations that constituted “public opinion” on disarmament and the factors that limited the peace movement’s influence. Its failure reflects the reality that disarmament was a political and not a moral problem that was driven by the efforts of stronger states to impose and maintain what revisionists later viewed as an unacceptable international status quo.

Little wonder, therefore, that Hans Morgenthau, then still at the University of Kansas, praised it as the definitive history of the movement, written by an author with a “rare gift” for “systematic analysis of political problems.” Its main argument was one he said he had tried to make “for almost fifteen years.” He was presumably referring to his 1929 Munich PhD thesis and possibly his unpublished “On the Origins of the Political in the Nature of Man,” which he wrote the next year in Geneva.¹⁵ Her most thoughtful critic, William Arnold-Forster, a British progressive and advocate of disarmament, said she had failed to analyze sufficiently the underlying forces that fueled increasing arms production in the 1890s, notably the rise of imperialism. Du Bois also criticized her for failing to adopt his own view of economic imperialism as the real cause of the peace movement’s failure.¹⁶ Tate was finishing a draft of the highly praised follow-up study, The United States and Armaments (1948), which extended her analysis through World War II, when Bunche turned her down for a position in political science.

Her work took a dramatic turn following a 1950–1951 Fulbright year in India, where she taught geopolitics at Nobel Prize winner Rabindranath Tagore’s Visva-Bharati (“World”) College in West Bengal. The U.S. soft power offensive in Cold War Asia opened up lecture opportunities for her across Southeast Asia, and as Tate would later recall, she “got interested in the Pacific, American imperialism in the Pacific you see, [a] huge topic.” Nonetheless the first manuscript she drafted during her 1957 sabbatical year dealt with the expansionism of Australia and New Zealand, especially its legacy of abduction and enslavement of Melanesians. She reworked the study multiple times over the next decade, ultimately turning the one volume into two, but failed to secure a contract from an academic press. C. E. Carrington, the world’s leading expert on commonwealth relations at the Royal Institute of International Affairs, who vetted her 1961 Rockefeller Foundation proposal, argued that Tate had identified a question—the partition of the Pacific—of fundamental importance, not least because the consequences were still with us, “comparable with…the much more familiar partition of Africa.” Her analytical lens was wider than that employed by most experts in Australia and New Zealand. Likewise the anonymous New Zealand specialist who reviewed a late version of the manuscript emphasized the “prodigious amount of work” that Tate had done and her unique conceptualization of the topic. However, her own thesis advisor, Payson Wild, who had moved from Harvard to become the vice-president of Northwestern, thought a historical work on imperialism in the Pacific had little value for the field of international relations in the United States in the 1960s.¹⁷

A tenacious researcher and indefatigable writer, by 1960, Tate had produced large parts of another massive draft manuscript on America’s imperial turn in Hawaii, together with a score of articles on great power diplomacy in the Pacific, missionaries and their role in the U.S. eclipse of Great Britain in Hawaii, the relationship between slavery and the debate on U.S. annexation, and the effects of nuclear weapons testing in the South Pacific. She relied on the research assistance of her graduate student Fadela Foy and grants from Howard’s president, the Rockefeller Foundation, the American Council of Learned Societies, and the Washington Evening Star. By 1959, she had broken out of the confines of Howard’s Journal of Negro Education to place the first of a number of articles in Political Science Quarterly and (in 1960) the Pacific Historical Review. She was also asked to join the programming committee for the 1963 meeting of the American Historical Association; at the annual meeting that year, she chaired a session on diplomatic history. Tate’s editor worked with her to pare down her manuscript, which was published as The United States and the Hawaiian Kingdom, a surprise best-selling book of 1965–1966 for Yale University Press (along with The Papers of Benjamin Franklin, she liked to brag). She reworked the excised chapters for Hawaii: Reciprocity or Annexation (1968), in which she engaged critically with economic determinist explanations of the crisis leading to 1893 “revolution.”¹⁸

Considering Tate’s outpouring of scholarship from the mid-1950s through the 1960s as a whole, we see her working simultaneously in two analytical styles that scholars today treat as successive, somewhat antagonistic historiographical movements (or moments). First, her accounts of the clash of rival great and subimperial powers in the Pacific places her among the few scholars of the 1950s who studied empire and the United States as an imperial power (Wisconsin’s William Appleman Williams is the most famous example). Tate drew on her training at Oxford and at Harvard, where she studied international relations with Fred Schuman. As we have seen, imperialism remained the central problem of world order for her colleagues at Howard too, and for the Indian and other South Asian intellectuals she engaged with in the 1950s.

Second, Tate’s work presaged what a later generation offered up as a corrective, under the rubrics of “internationalism” or “transculturalism” or “cosmopolitanism,” to histories of great power rivalries over one or another region.¹⁹ Those calling for studies of missionaries and mining firms in the 1980s had no idea that Tate had worked this vein decades earlier. She produced two more manuscripts on railways and the mining sector (what she called “the sinews and arteries of empire”) in Africa based on research trips in the 1970s. She drafted them during her last years at Howard and after her retirement in 1977. They were never published.

Tate’s time in India influenced her research program, obviously, but it also reshaped her understanding of race as a universally valid analytical category. Her work thus departed from the essentialism that substituted for knowledge of (let alone empathy with) diverse peoples and regions. This shift can be gauged, for example, by her critique in the Journal of Negro Education of Richard Wright’s exaggerated color consciousness in his reports of the Asian African conference at Bandung, although, as we have seen, he was hardly alone in imagining that Egyptians, Iranians, Indians, and Chinese identified themselves as fellow “colored” or “darker” races. The difference can also be gauged by comparing her work in the late 1950s and 1960s with her early 1942 essay on the war’s impact on the “darker peoples of the world,” which predicted a future world race war; the book she proposed to write on the “white man’s blunders”; or her first review in the Journal of Negro Education of Krishnalal Shridharani’s Warning to the West (1943), which Shridharani wrote to shatter the illusion of white supremacy. Decades later Tate recalled her time in Santiniketan the way Locke remembered Paris: “That period that I spent in India, I felt more like a human being, valued for my worth than any time in my life.”²⁰

After reading her papers and, more crucially, those of her longtime department chair, Rayford Logan, one can’t help but think that Tate was reflecting not only on her experiences as a black person living in the United States and England but also as a woman teaching at Howard. Her outspokenness about gender discrimination at the university helped earn her a reputation as a “personality problem.”²¹ As one of Howard’s most productive scholars in the arts and sciences and a recipient of honorary degrees from Western Michigan (1952), Morgan State (1968), Bowie State (1977), and Lincoln University (1978), she never believed that she was paid what she deserved.

More than that, she also had to endure working under an increasingly hostile, vindictive, even paranoid Logan. From the time she was hired in the 1940s through her return from India in 1951, Logan had signaled his support and respect for her scholarship, organizing abilities, and “meticulous” fulfillment of obligations in many ways. He and his wife had even hosted her bon voyage party, but their cordial, first-name-basis relationship turned poisonous in 1955 (the reasons remain unclear). He began to catalogue her seemingly unreasonable requests for course relief, better teaching times, and the like in his diary. She might have hoarded office supplies or complained that the administration treated the history department worse than the physics department. This is all the routine business of an academic department and the source of headaches for department heads anywhere. Yet in Logan’s mind Tate had turned “insufferable.” She was a “damn bitch.”²²

The squabbling and Logan’s petty requitals continued for years. He interrogated graduate students about her behavior. The epithets grew uglier. Sympathy for Tate was unconscionable, he claimed. Didn’t those who considered him to be unjustly “persecuting” Tate (although doing little to stop him) realize that it reinforced her “behaving like a goddamn fool”?²³ This downward spiral in dignity reached its depressing nadir in 1964 when Tate was attacked and stabbed by a teenager in the yard of her Perry Street home. In his diary, Logan called Tate a “pathological liar,” believing she had made up the incident (the “alleged” and “miraculous” attack, the “fantastic” story) to grab the headlines. He ignored her letter for help in organizing Howard students for a blood drive. Instead, local Radcliffe alumnae stepped in. It was far from Logan’s shining hour, and he resigned as chair soon after (which at least rid him temporarily of the “monster.”).²⁴

Her relations inside the department doubtless improved during her last ten years, particularly after Lorraine A. Williams moved from head of the social sciences department to chair of history in 1970.²⁵ Williams committed some of the department’s resources to assembling a volume of Tate’s essays, which was published as Diplomacy in the Pacific (1973). Tate agreed to donate her papers to Howard in 1974 and created the Merze Tate Fund in history in 1977, having already endowed scholarships at Radcliffe and programs, including a center, at Western Michigan, where she had studied as an undergraduate.²⁶ She retired still believing that she had not gotten the recognition and the salary she deserved, and in 1990 she gave $1 million not to Howard but to Western Michigan. The effects of her outlier status there—a woman, decidedly not a radical, who joined the faculty as the era of Locke, Bunche, Logan, and Frazier was coming to an end, whose cosmopolitanism was out of step with developments in black thought, who did not write about her own “race,” and who played no role in “the movement”—linger. Accounts of pioneering black PhDs in the political science profession omit her name.²⁷ Forty years after the Moorland-Spingarn Research Center began to receive her papers and fifteen years after her death, her archive, including all her unpublished manuscripts, was still unprocessed when I consulted it, a jumble of papers in a mass of boxes stored off site. At least one scholar had been denied access to them shortly before I visited Howard in 2009. I was luckier.

Fables of the Reconstruction

In 1969, McGeorge Bundy, the head of the Ford Foundation who had served as John F. Kennedy’s national security advisor, announced the first of a total of $15 million in grants to support black studies in the United States, which he heralded as a means to diversify curricula, faculties, and students on the nation’s campuses. It was a response to a student movement that had gone beyond protests over the war and was demanding the transformation of the racist university order in the name of self-determination, or black power. Some departments, disciplines, and professional associations experienced tremendous change in the next decades, both in terms of the subjects worthy of investigation and the closely correlated rise in the numbers of African Americans entering the ranks of graduate students and faculty. Other disciplines, including international relations, remained largely insulated from the battle for black studies or successfully headed off the insurgency.

For a few years, George Shepherd Jr., the onetime executive secretary of the American Committee on Africa who founded Africa Today, headed a Ford-funded Center for International Race Relations at the University of Denver’s new Graduate School of International Studies. Founded in 1969, the center focused on “the role of race in comparative and international systems.” Race and ethnic conflicts were on the rise globally, while the handful of works addressing the issues, for example by Harold Isaacs, were by “scholarly observers of international relations” rather than by “the pacesetters in the field.” Shepherd partnered with a recent Denver PhD in international relations, Tilden LeMelle, one of the leaders of the insurgency in African studies, and the two men promised to “apply analytical tools to the study of race in world affairs” and thus bring it into a mainstream of “modelbuilders, theoreticians, and textbook writers” for the first time, a claim that could only be made out of ignorance of the history we have reconstructed at great length here. The highly praised, agenda-setting volume included essays by two of the discipline’s newest “standard bearers,” James Rosenau and Karl Deutsch. Deutsch’s essay was a tour de force. He outlined how racism might work to buttress monopoly privilege at local, national, and global scales. He chided his colleagues for failing to investigate the myriad dimensions of the problem and designing credible remedies—for example, by identifying and nurturing African American genius (instead of denying its possibility) and paying reparations to the victims of apartheid.²⁸ While producing a flurry of conference proceedings, working papers, and books between 1969 and 1973, the center served as a locus for Shepherd’s longtime, continuing work on apartheid in South Africa.²⁹ LeMelle, though, quit within two years and returned east as a professor of black and Puerto Rican studies at Hunter College. Shepherd stepped down as director of the center in 1972, after only three years. Jamaica-born Locksley Edmondson, a theorist of racism and world politics, who was teaching Africana studies at Cornell, took over for a year. He was followed by Denver sociologist John Grove, but the school’s dean closed the center in 1976. This was an unusually short life span for an institution of this kind.³⁰

Now imagine a young scholar two decades later trying to make sense of her discipline’s silence about race and racism. By the 1990s, black enrollments in PhD programs in all branches of political science had declined, African Americans were all but invisible in international relations, and they were missing entirely from “the literature” as it was taught at the leading East and West Coast institutions.³¹ Roxanne Lynn Doty turned to the work of Denver’s center, when the academic ancestors seemingly first considered the role of race in world politics, to ground her own analysis.³² Others have followed in her wake, seeking to bring racism and hierarchy back into focus, but their work isn’t taught in the graduate field seminars at Harvard, Princeton, Columbia, Stanford, Chicago, Yale, Berkeley, Michigan, and MIT.

In the early 2000s, in contrast, in the run up to and in the wake of the U.S. “unilateral intervention” in Iraq, many of the leading names in international relations at those very institutions began to consider the question of empire and imperialism once more, in the pages of Foreign Affairs, the successor to the Journal of Race Development and in Orbis, the journal that Strausz-Hupé founded, among other places. Two young and ambitious theorists, Daniel H. Nexon and Thomas Wright, seized the opportunity in “What’s at Stake in the Empire Debate” to elevate the discourse and think more generally about hierarchy in international relations. Surprisingly, “mainstream international relations analysts” had done little, they said, since Michael Doyle published Empires in 1986.³³ Doyle, a leader of the discipline, teaches at Columbia now, the school that Burgess built, where Parker Moon, who inspired the young Harold Isaacs, wrote Imperialism and World Politics, which was reprinted multiple times through the 1960s. Doyle trained at Harvard in a department that had pioneered in the study of colonial administration, the same one that trained Du Bois, Bunche, and Tate. He was at Princeton for years, where Buell finished the first of his many works on imperialism and tried to build the first center for interracial relations. Yet Doyle wrote as if he had stumbled upon a vast undeveloped land that was waiting for his theory building to begin.

He took his lead from Lord Hailey, the British colonial official whom Buell had known personally and whose ideas about preservation of empire were the foil for the Howard school theorists during World War II. “Imperialism is not a word for scholars,” Hailey said as one way of delegitimizing such critics as Ralph Bunche and George Padmore in the debate about the future of the colonies. Doyle repeated the claim uncritically, if not blindly: “Imperialism was not in the mainstream of scholarly literature on world politics” in 1940, he wrote.³⁴ He never said what precisely the mainstream was when Fred Schuman’s 1933 textbook was being read by undergraduates enrolling in ever larger numbers as the war began or when Klaus Knorr arrived at Princeton with others from Yale and took over the directorship of the transplanted Center for International Studies, which Doyle headed for a while in the 1990s. Knorr had completed his dissertation on comparative colonial policy at Chicago in 1941. A great deal of intellectual, cultural, and ideological work would have to be done to construct an identity for the discipline that Knorr’s successor and many others in American international relations take for granted now.