In 1956, with the support of the official talent exchange program promoted by Japan and the United States, Japanese scholars returned to Harvard University, where they had studied, and conducted research and lectures at Harvard as visiting scholars. He received his Ph.D. in economics from Harvard in 1940 and stayed on to teach, but soon after the war broke out between Japan and the United States, he and his wife were repatriated to Japan. During the year of his visit, Duliu collaborated with another famous economist (and later the first Nobel laureate in economics) Tinbergen to develop a course called "Socialism and Planning". It seemed like a bland academic exchange program, but in the spring of 1957 he unexpectedly received a summons from the U.S. Senate, ordering him to testify before Congress on the issue of alleged collusion.
They all thought it was about his Harvard friend, the Canadian historian and diplomat Herbert Norman. Since the beginning of the Cold War, the Canadian and U.S. governments have suspected Norman of being a communist, and Norman's name was included in the list of Communist Party associations provided by Wei Zhao, a former member of the German Communist Party who was famous for his research on China, in 1951. At that time, there was a "big news" in the society, saying that after Toryu was repatriated, Norman had tried to obtain some secret documents from Toru's original apartment. In this context, Duliu felt that he could go to the US Congress to clarify the problem and help his friend get rid of the crime. However, when he arrived at the scene, he learned that Norman's problem was only secondary, and that the Americans wanted to investigate himself, and wanted to dig up information on the American Communist Party and fellow travelers from him.
Such a move is extraordinary. After all, Du Liuzheng is not an American citizen, but a famous scholar who served in Japan's postwar government, and he came to the United States as part of the official friendship exchange program, so to be examined as a suspect is really tearing his face. In fact, not only Japanese public opinion is in an uproar, but there are also many dissatisfaction in American intellectual circles. Four prominent Harvard scholars, including Fairbank and Galbraith, jointly spoke in The New York Times and denounced the unfavorable diplomatic event.
So how can a Japanese economist get the top of the United States to pay so much attention and be willing to cause trouble?
He received his B.S. and Ph.D. in economics from Harvard University, and held a series of important positions in Japan after the war, including responsible for economic reconstruction, especially leading the drafting of Japan's first economic white paper, and later president of Ichihashi University, and president of the International Economic Association. But it is unique in that his field spans Marxist economics and Western economics. This eclectic style comes from its unique academic training and political involvement, especially in Japan and the United States before the Cold War. This is also the focus of the US Senate's review and cross-examination.
All leave the beginning of the interrogation
This torturous two-day interrogation not only left interrogations and testimony, but also completely preserved a number of letters and materials as evidence. Through this public case, we can vaguely see what the American intellectual community looked like before the Cold War.
They were born in 1912 and have a solid family. His later wife was of aristocratic descent and was the niece of Koichi Kido, a Japanese politician and war criminal. In the late 20s, he entered high school, and the situation in Japan and the world was changing dramatically. On the one hand, the Wall Street crash of 1929 swept the entire capitalist world with the Great Depression; On the other hand, Japan's militaristic forces became more and more powerful, and its ambitions to invade China became more and more obvious, such as the famous Tanaka twist and the assassination of Zhang Zuolin in 1928. The anti-imperialist movement in Japan was once on the rise, and Duliu was undoubtedly deeply influenced by Marxism, became the organizer of the "anti-imperialist league", and was arrested and imprisoned for three months. Although the court decided not to prosecute him because he was underage, his school directly found an excuse to expel him. Duliu, who did not have high Chinese, could not go to college in Japan for the time being, and with the advice and sponsorship of his father, he stayed and transferred to Lawrence College in the Midwest of the United States.
When he arrived in San Francisco, the American friends who received Duliu were very warm, they knew the political background of Duliu, and specially said: There were two foreign young people who came to the United States, one of them was well received, and the other was coldly received. The first was the famous priest and social reformist Toyohiko Kagawa, while the latter was the Russian revolutionary Trotsky. We should not make you the second Trotsky.
Despite this sincere persuasion, Duliujin retained his distinctly left-wing political background in the United States, and he replied years later when questioned by U.S. senators that he thought, acted and spoke like a communist in the 1930s. Duliu had planned to study in the United States for a year or two before transferring to Germany, at a time when German higher education was the world's leader. But it was during this time that Hitler came to power, and the situation in Germany changed rapidly. Duru decided to transfer to Harvard to continue his undergraduate studies, and completed his graduation thesis on the theme of Marx's critique of commodity fetishism, which earned him the title of outstanding graduate.
Duliu began his doctoral program in the Faculty of Economics in 1935. Harvard during this period showed a pluralistic boom, including figures like Leontief who pioneered input-output analysis, Chamberlain who developed the theory of monopolistic competition, encyclopedic conservative economists like Schumpeter, and Paul Sweezy, a young economist who had just stayed on to teach and gradually turned to Marxism. Although Schumpeter was a conservative, he valued Marx very much, and Schumpeter and Sweezy had a close personal relationship. Among Duliu's classmates was Paul Samuelson, who would become a great famous. After winning the Nobel Prize, Samuelson vividly recalled a debate between Schumpeter and Sweezy about the future of capitalism in the 30s, calling it one of the greatest events of his life. He said that Sweezy was not only one of the best economists of his generation, but that God had unfairly given him a beautiful face and a sense of humor, in addition to giving him a smart mind, and if Sweezy had been struck by lightning that night, then everyone would say that he must have caused the envy of the gods.
If Sweezy was the founder of Marxist economics in the United States, Samuelson is a well-deserved general teacher of postwar Western economics. Interestingly, Duliu had a good relationship with both Pauls, but in his later evaluations, he explicitly praised Sweezy as the leader of Harvard's golden age before the Cold War. In the 1940s, Harvard scholars published three later influential works, the first being Schumpeter's masterpiece Capitalism, Socialism, and Democracy, published in 1942; The second is Sweezy's "Theory of Capitalist Development" published in 1942, which is still the standard reading for American students to learn Marxist economics, in which he wrote an appendix to Marx's reproduction illustration for Sweezy's work; The third, Samuelson's Foundations of Economic Analysis, published in 1947, pointed the way to the development of postwar Western economics. It can be said that this is the manifestation of the pluralistic academic atmosphere before the Cold War.
However, as Marxists, we are not only interested in academics, but also about how to change the world. In the process, Du Liuzhi established contacts with many left-wing intellectuals in North America. These letters were left in his apartment when Duliu's family left the United States in a hurry. Norman, who was a Ph.D. student at Harvard at the time, specialized in Japanese history, knew Toru, and later worked in Japan as a diplomatic service for Canada. At the time of Duliu's repatriation to Japan, Norman was also repatriated from Japan to Canada, and the ships on both sides "exchanged hostages" at the Mozambique port, and at this time, Duliu recalled that he found an opportunity to talk to Norman so that he could go to Duliu's residence in Massachusetts to get some Japanese history books. What happened after that was a bit bizarre. According to American intelligence officers, when Norman came to Duliu's residence, he said that he was a representative of the Canadian government to carry out a secret mission and needed to obtain the materials left by Duliu, and then changed his words to say that he did not represent the government, but had a little personal interest in the collection of Duliu, and finally Norman could not get the books and documents left by Duliu.
It is conceivable that Norman's strong interest in the material of all the people left a record here in the US intelligence service. It is puzzling why Norman, as an experienced diplomat, would be caught in this handle. A Norman biographer believes that one possibility is that Norman was worried that if the materials were leaked to the Japanese wartime government, he would be arrested again, so he took the risk to get the materials, and because of his status as a diplomat, he was afraid that he would need to cover up his friendship with the citizens of the enemy country. But anyway, Norman couldn't get his hands on these materials, and I'm afraid Norman didn't expect that there were things related to him in these materials. The FBI found a 1937 letter in it, recording a Marxist reading group on American capitalism promoted by Duliuzheng at Harvard at that time, and one of the materials read was the article "American Imperialism", signed by Norman himself.
From the testimony left in Congress, it can be seen that he tried to clear Norman of "collusion" suspicions. But on the other side, Norman, as Canada's ambassador to Egypt and Lebanon, may have come to a different impression. According to his biography, hearing that his old Japanese friend volunteered to go to the U.S. Congress to testify about him was perhaps the greatest betrayal in itself. Although Duliu's testimony did not disadvantage Norman, Norman ended his life by jumping off a building in Cairo a week after Duliu's testimony. This incident caused a sensation, and the self-blame left can be imagined.
Information on authors of science and society magazines collated by the U.S. government presented during the interrogation (partial)
What the Americans wanted to learn about was a pre-Cold War network of American communism that spread throughout the country. Among the materials left behind are many of his correspondence with the editors of the Marxist magazine Science and Society. Founded in 1936, Science and Society is by far the oldest and most prestigious Marxist publication, mainly founded by scholars from New York and Boston, a considerable number of whom are members of the US Communist Party, and has long been a dangerous publication of great concern to the US government. At that time, Duliu not only showed great enthusiasm for the start-up magazine, but also discussed with the editorial board several times how to turn this Marxist magazine into a revolutionary propaganda tool. In a 1936 letter to the editor of the magazine, Duliu said, "We already have organizations for educational purposes, such as workers' schools. The existing forms are mainly aimed at the working class and the lower middle class, or for the party and the Komsomol League. However, for a considerable number of specialists and a large part of the middle class, we either have not yet developed the organization or have not succeeded in developing it. Duliu continued to analyze, "In my opinion, free-form reading groups are the most appropriate way to deal with this situation." ...... A group reading Plato can become a group reading Marx, as we did in Madison this summer. ...... Either way, the magazine is a weapon to promote, organize, and nurture such groups. In the letter, Duliu listed some of the organizational actions at the University of Chicago and the University of Wisconsin, mentioned several names, and said that he would undertake the promotion of the magazine in the Chicago area. In reply, one of the editors-in-chief, William T Parry (Ph.D. at Harvard and a member of the Communist Party), provided the names of several "trusted" professors around Chicago, as well as several scholars who were "very likely to be sympathetic."
Verbal exchange during interrogation
Naturally, during the questioning, Congressman Jean Duliu explained who "we" were, what the "workers' school" was, and what the "organization" was. Duliu said that "we" only informally referred to some friends he knew in various places at that time, and it was not clear who they were, he said that he did not know much about the "workers' school", and on the issue of "organization", Duliu repeatedly stressed that he had never joined the Communist Party or the Communist Youth League. Such an answer is naturally not satisfactory to US congressmen. We can take a look at this conversation and get a feel for the atmosphere of this questioning:
Senator Jenner: When you mention "we," what communists are there here? Say name.
Duru: Sorry, when I say "we," I don't mean the Communist Party.
Jenner: Okay, leftists?
Duliu: It was someone I knew at the time.
Jenner: You call them the left, the Communist Party. Who are they? Say name?
Duliu: I just saw this letter this morning, and I'll try— (interrupt)
Jenner: You've got it, and you've studied the letter. Now you're explaining what "we" means, and we want to know who "we" is.
Duliu: Actually, I may have mentioned some names in the letter, you know - (interrupts)
Jenner: So let's talk about the letter now. You are trying to explain what "we" means in the letter, and let's talk about the letter.
Duliu: Since you asked for the name, so that I can recall a little better, if I can read through these letters, maybe I can answer a little better.
Morris: Are you saying that you can't now think of the people you called the Communist Party just a few years ago for the senator?
Jenner: In Wisconsin, in Chicago, at Harvard? You can't remember a single name?
The intelligence department undoubtedly conducted a detailed investigation of Duliu, not only knowing his relationship with scholars such as Sweezy and Oscar Lange, but also inquiring about his dealings with Ji Chaoding and other underground Communist Party members at that time, but Duliu basically coped with the past. Also in the material was a lengthy memorandum to the editorial board of Science and Society with three signatures: Constance Kyle, Department of Psychiatry, University of Illinois; Karl Niebyl, Department of Economics, Carleton College; Alfred Lowe. And this Luo Wei is admitted by people to be his pseudonym. This memorandum not only provides a detailed account of the Marxist study groups in the Midwest, especially in the Chicago area, but also puts forward a series of specific work proposals, including the question of the Marxist study syllabus raised by all the important people.
And Duliu was able to get out of this review in the end, I am afraid it also has something to do with the details of this memorandum. Duliu said that the memorandum was written by Nebil (who was the head of the economics department at Tulane University at the time) and had little to do with him. When Lowe is mentioned in the memorandum, the prefix "friend" is used. Duliu pointed out that this is different from comrades in the party, but a term for fellow travelers outside the party. This, in turn, seems to confirm Duliu's previous denial of his party membership. It is clear that the United States cannot get more valuable information from the people who are left behind. The U.S. Congress interrogated Nebir a few days later. The economist, who fled Nazi Germany, refused to answer all substantive questions on the grounds of the Fifth Amendment, and the trial ended hastily. However, if they could return to Japan as professors, Nabil and a group of other named intellectuals in the United States later lost their jobs and had to earn a living from various jobs for a long time.
Another old friend, Sweezy, lost his job at Harvard early because of his Marxist stance. In the 1950s, after being summoned to state court for teaching Marxism at the University of New Hampshire, Sweezy refused to answer questions about the content of his teaching, leading the New Hampshire Attorney General to accuse Sweezy of contempt of court. After an unsuccessful appeal in the state Supreme Court, Sweezy appealed further to the Federal Supreme Court. The trial (Sweezy vs New Hampshire) took place months after a congressional interrogation by the Supreme Court, which ended in a Supreme Court ruling in Sweezy's favor. Duliu was still in the United States at this time, and he was with Sweezy, and he recalled in his later years when he and Sweezy drank in New York to celebrate the victory after the verdict. This was probably one of the few bright moments of the American left in that era.
In fact, both the official and Duliu people in the United States know but do not highlight that after the Great Depression, the influence of Marxism in the United States was unprecedentedly high, and a large number of party members appeared, as well as scholars such as Duliu, who may have never joined the party, but in fact actively participated in the party's cause, and some even held quite high government positions. In the context of the Cold War, how to identify such a person who may be in Cao Ying's heart in Han is an urgent request of the US government. In the late '50s, when there was probably not much new intelligence available on the American side, and the heavily connected figure returned to the United States, where the significance of extracting information from him seemed to overshadow diplomatic relations and other decent issues in the political trade-offs of the time.
In short, from the experience of Japanese scholars who have both an outsider and an insider identity, we can see a little bit of the pre-Cold War tolerance of the American intelligentsia, especially Marxist scholars. Unfortunately, this situation was undoubtedly undermined by the US authorities in the early days of the Cold War, which came to be known as the McCarthy era. By the time American intellectual circles bloomed, it would have been after the rise of the New Left, civil rights, and anti-war movements in the 1960s.
Resources:
Alarcon, Ricardo, Samir Amin, Nicholas Baran, and Anne Braden. "Happy birthday, Paul!." Monthly Review 51, no. 11 (2000): 42.
Bowen, Roger W., ed. EH Norman: His Life and Scholarship. University of Toronto Press, 1984.
Foster, J. B Memorial Service for Paul Marlor Sweezy. Monthly Review. (2004).
Foster, J. B. "The commitment of an intellectual: Paul M. Sweezy (1910-2004)." Monthly Review 56, no. 5 (2004)。
Suzumura, Kotaro. "Shigeto Tsuru (1912–2006): Life, work and legacy." The European Journal of the History of Economic Thought 13, no. 4 (2006): 613-620.
Samuelson, Paul Anthony. "Reminiscences of Shigeto Tsuru." The collected scientific papers of Paul A. Samuelson 4 (1977): 897-902.
Tsuru, Shigeto. "Reminiscences of our “Sacred Decade of Twenties”." The American Economist 51, no. 2 (2007): 33-38.
Scope Of Soviet Activity In The United States, Hearing before the US Congress, Part 57. (1957).