Samuel Harper, the son of William Rainey Harper, the President of the University of Chicago, shared the dominant notions of Russian national character, which for him included deep emotions, irregular work habits, apathy, lethargy, pessimism, and lack of “backbone.”23 Harper was a witness to Bloody Sunday in 1905 and, like his friend Pares, a fervent defender of Russian liberals who eventually succumbed to the romance of communism. Russians may have been governed more by emotion and passion than reason, he argued, but they possessed an instinct for democracy. In 1926, he accepted an assignment from his colleague, chairman of the political science department at Chicago, Charles E. Merriam (1874–1953), arguably the most influential figure in American political science between the wars, to study methods of indoctrinating children with the love of the state. Russia, along with fascist Italy, was to be the principal laboratory for this research. Merriam was fascinated with the successes of civic education in Mussolini’s Italy, while other political scientists saw virtues in Hitler’s Germany.24 For Merriam, creating patriotic loyalty to the state was a technical problem, not a matter of culture, and the Soviet Union, which had rejected nationalism and the traditional ties to old Russia, was a “striking experiment” to create “de novo a type of political loyalty to, and interest in a new order of things.”25 In The Making of Citizens (1931), he concluded that the revolution had employed the emotions generated by festivals, the Red Flag, the Internationale, and mass meetings and demonstrations effectively to establish “a form of democratic nationalism.”26
To study what they called “civic education,” something akin to what later would be known as “nation-building,” Harper and Merriam traveled to Russia together in 1926. Guided by Maurice Hindus, an influential journalist sympathetic to the Soviet experiment, Harper visited villages where he became enthusiastic about the Bolshevik educational program. Impressed by Soviet efforts to modernize the peasantry, he supported their industrialization drive.27 This led eventually to estrangement from the State Department specialists on Russia with whom Harper had worked for over a decade. In the mid-1930s, he wrote positively about constitutional developments in the USSR, and his 1937 book, The Government of the Soviet Union, made the case for democratic, participatory institutions in the Soviet system. His book appeared the very same year that Stalin’s show trials reached their zenith, carrying away the Communist elite whom the dictator saw as potential political threats. Harper rationalized the Moscow trials and never publicly criticized Stalin. When Harper defended the Nazi–Soviet Pact of 1939 as a shrewd maneuver, students abandoned his classes and faculty colleagues shunned him. Only after the Soviets became allies of the United States in 1941 did he enjoy a few twilight years of public recognition, even appearing with Charlie Chaplin and the poet Carl Sandburg at a mass “Salute to our Russian Ally.”28
Seeing the Future Work
Through the interwar years, the Soviet Union offered many intellectuals a vision of a preferred future outside and beyond capitalism. Contained within the hope and faith in the USSR and communism, however, were the seeds of disillusionment and despair. Writers made ritualistic visits to Moscow and formed friendships with other political pilgrims. In November 1927, novelist Theodore Dreiser accepted an invitation to tour the USSR, and his secretary remembered an evening at the Grand Hotel with Dorothy Thomas, Sinclair Lewis, Scott Nearing, and Louis Fischer, followed by a visit to New York Times correspondent Walter Duranty.29 By the early 1930s, many “Russianists” had moved decisively to the left. The sociologist Jerome Davis, who taught at Dartmouth and Yale, advocated recognition of the USSR and was ultimately fired from Yale for condemning capitalism.30 Paul Douglas, a distinguished University of Chicago labor economist, enthusiastically but mistakenly predicted that Soviet trade unions would soon overtake the Communist Party as the most powerful institution in the country.31 Robert Kerner, a Russian historian at the University of Missouri, gave up what he had called “racial metaphysics” (he said he had studied the Slavs as the “largest white group in the world”) to investigate environmental and historical factors, work that culminated in his The Urge to the Sea (1942). The epitome of professional Russian history in the interwar period, Geroid Tanquary Robinson of Columbia University, was attracted to radical thought early in his life and dedicated his scholarship to a re-evaluation of the much-maligned Russian peasantry. His magnum opus, Rural Russia Under the Old Regime (1932), the first substantial historical work by an American scholar that was based on extensive work in the Soviet archives, challenged the prevalent notion of peasant lethargy and passivity. Influenced by the “New Historians” who turned to the study of everyday life and borrowed insights from the other social sciences, he worked to distinguish professional historical writing, which looked to the past to explain the present (or other pasts), from journalism or punditry, which used the past and present to project into and predict the future.
“Collectively,” writes David C. Engerman, these new professional experts on Russia—Harper, Kerner, Davis, Douglas, Robinson, Vera Micheles Dean, and Leo Pasvolsky—“offered more reasons to support Soviet rule than to challenge it.”32 They played down ideology as they elevated national, geographic, or even racial characteristics. Russia, they believed, had affected communism much more than communism Russia. The small cohort of American diplomats (George Kennan, Charles “Chip” Bohlen, Loy Henderson, and the first ambassador to the USSR, William Bullitt) who manned the new US embassy in Moscow after recognition of the Soviet Union in 1933 shared similar attitudes. Kennan reported that in order to understand Russia he “had to weigh the effects of climate on character, the results of century-long conflict with the Asiatic hordes, the influence of medieval Byzantium, the national origins of the people, and the geographic characteristics of the country.”33 Influenced by the German sociologist Klaus Mehnert’s study of Soviet youth, Kennan noted how young people were carried away by the “romance of economic development” to the point that they were relieved “to a large extent of the curses of egotism, romanticism, daydreaming, introspection, and perplexity which befall the young of bourgeois countries.”34 To demonstrate the continuity and consistency of the Russian character of life, Kennan sent home an 1850 diplomatic dispatch, passing it off as if it were current!35
In the years of the First Five-Year Plan, Western writing reached a crescendo of praise for the Soviets’ energy and sacrifice, their idealism and attendant suffering endured in the drive for modernization. The post–World War I cultural critique of unbridled capitalism developed by American thinkers like John Dewey and Thorstein Veblen encouraged many intellectuals to consider the lessons that capitalist democracies might learn from the Soviets. Western leftists and liberals hoped that engineers, planners, and technocrats would be inspired by Soviet planning to discipline the anarchy of capitalism. In “An Appeal to Progressives,” contrasting the economic breakdown in the West with the successes of Soviet planned development, the critic Edmund Wilson (1895–1972) proclaimed that American radicals and progressives “must take Communism away from the Communists … asserting emphatically that their ultimate goal is the ownership of the means of production by the government and an industrial rather than a regional representation.”36 The educator George Counts (1889–1974) waxed rhapsodic about the brave experiment in the USSR and its challenge to America, though within a few years he turned into a leading anti-Communist. As economist Stuart Chase put it in 1932, “Why should the Russians have all the fun of remaking