Andrew Grajdanzev and the McCarran IPR hearings

A few thoughts about Grajdanzev's "virtual" presence in the IPR hearings and comments on his scholarly abilities that came out of those hearings. Grad himself wasn't a witness at the hearings, but his name came up quite a few times, and some exhibits were entered that refer to his research and writing skills. But there are mixed impressions of his research abilities--some people praise them, while one other is quite critical of them.

I mentioned a while back that Andrew Grajdanzev's name came up along with George H. Kerr's during the 1951-52 Senate subcommittee hearings on the Institute of Pacific Relations (the "McCarran Committee" or the McCarran hearings). On April 2, 1942, Kerr (at the time, a military intelligence analyst in the War Department in D.C.) wrote to William Holland of the IPR regarding some galley sheets he had received of Grajdanzev's "extraordinarily good work"--Grad's Formosa Today (1942). Kerr calls the book "excellent" and comments that "[t]hat there are only a few very minor suggestions I might make, none of first importance." Holland replied on April 3 (from New York City! How did mail travel so fast back then!?). He sent along an advance copy of the book and again asked for any feedback from Kerr.

So here we have Kerr's words that show he was impressed by the quality of Grajdanzev's work. There's also an exchange between Edward Carter and Lt. Col. Frederick D. Sharp of Military Intelligence (plus an unknown "Mr. Thurber"). The first letter, from Carter to Sharp, is dated July 10, 1941 and concerns a request Sharp had made about the Siberian railways. Carter is sending along a "very tentative memorandum" based on some quick research. (Oddly, in Exhibit 89, the sentence reads, "With sources he has drafted the enclosed very tentative memorandum, a copy of which I enclose." But a few pages earlier in the testimony section, the sentence is written, "Without sources he has drafted the enclosed very tentative memorandum, a copy of which I enclose." So was the memorandum written with or without sources? Perhaps we'll never know...)

Later on (July 23), Carter sends to a Mr. Thurber (a colleague of Sharp's, it seems) a first draft of notes on the Tran-Siberian Railway. Lt. Col. Sharp writes back on the 24th (at least they're both in NYC), praising the report that was "drawn up so ably by your colleague, Mr. Andrew Grajdanzev." He goes on to write,

To thank both you and him in proportion to its value would be difficult. May it suffice to say that our own researches are at an end with such a reference source, and that Mr. Thurber, of my office, will be sorely tempted to draw on your knowledge of industries and raw materials east of the Urals, which is the next goal.

So here is another example of praise of Grad's work. Grajdanzev's work is even used in an IPR letter asking for donations, as shown in Exhibit 88, a letter of November 26, 1941. The letter says that

Mr. Grajdanzev prepared a monograph [about the Trans-Siberian Railway] which has been hailed in three Government departments as far more accurate than anything which they themselves could have prepared. This is just a sample of the kind of work which the institute is able to do and explains why the governments in this and other countries are so eager to get the services of members of the institute staff.

All of the above exhibits were presented during the testimony of Major General Charles Willoughby, Chief of Intelligence, Far Eastern Command and United Nations Command, on August 9, 1951 (beginning on page 353 in this volume).

However, later testimony by Professor David Rowe of Yale University (from March 27, 1952) casts Grajdanzev's research abilities in a different light. When asked about Grad's time at Yale in 1947, Rowe states that Grad had come on a grant from the Ford Foundation that had been obtained for him by William Holland. Holland mentions this in his memoirs, too. Rowe states that Grad was originally supposed to work there for two years under supervision by several faculty members. However, Rowe says that Grad was asked to leave because "we disapproved of his work." As he puts it,

We considered his work not to have sound scholarly method in it. It was so bad from that point of view that we finally reported adversely to Mr. Holland in a letter signed by myself and at least four of my colleagues, everyone of whom, including an economist, a sociologist who specialized on Japan, the late John Embree, who was my colleague there at Yale; a geographer, Karl Pelzer, who is a great expert on Asiatic geography; Prof. Chitoshi Yanaga, who was associate professor of political science at Yale. And the general agreement was that the work simply did not stand up from a scholarly point of view.

Rowe stresses that while the work had a "left wing" bias, "that wasn't the fundamental basis of our objection to it. ... We raised objections from a methodology aspect, and we simply came to the conclusion that this man was not a sound scholar in the field." Rowe goes on to express displeasure with how Holland handled their advice--he says that Holland "proceeded to act as though our objections didn't cut any ice" and "went right back and got more money to keep on supporting him, and sent him up to Columbia and had him affiliated there."

It should be noted here that Rowe appeared as a "friendly" witness at the McCarran hearings. He had clear problems with the IPR and had actually quit the organization in 1950 because he was critical of its left-wing political stance. At one point he said of Owen Lattimore, "my subjective opinion for what it is worth, in light of my knowledge of the subject matter, my 20 years of study in the far eastern field, is that as of today among far eastern specialists in the United States Lattimore is probably the principal agent of Stalinism." (He sort of backtracks later on by (re)defining "agent": "When I said that he was an agent of Stalinism, I am talking about ideologies and ideas and that he is promoting these ideas and ideologies." As he admits, "I have no positive knowledge by which I could identify this man as a formal Communist affiliate. In other words, I can't prove one way or another whether he was ever an agent of the Russians.") But his primary criticism of Grajdanzev's work has to do with methodology, he says. It would be interesting to see the original letter he mentions--perhaps it's at Columbia University (there's correspondence between Rowe and Holland from 1947; there's also, by the way, correspondence between Grajdanzev and Holland from 1947, 1948, 1949, 1950, and 1951). Maybe I need to get down there sometime...

No conclusion here yet, though I am curious about how some people could consider Grad's work to be of such high caliber and others could consider it unsound scholarship. It could very well be that Grajdanzev was better at researching and writing for some audiences (government organizations) than others (academics). I found a review of Grad's Land and Peasant in Japan (1952), which I previously (mis)understood to be an unpublished manuscript. The author of the review criticizes the book for being too ambitious in scope and not living up to that ambition, but at the same time praises the book for "the wealth of new information and pertinent insights they [Grad's efforts] afford in the agrarian scene in prewar, wartime, and postwar Japan at national and local levels" (187). The reviewer calls the book "a compendium of Japanese agriculture," which isn't exactly a compliment if Grad was expected to write a carefully argued academic discussion, but could be seen as a compliment if he meant to cover a lot of ground in a more general overview. Updated: I see that in another part of the McCarran hearing testimony, a witness named William W. Lockwood describes Grajdanzev's Formosa Today as "mainly a compilation of factual material." That description sounds a bit similar to the description of Land and Peasant in Japan that's in the review.