October 8, 2024 • 47 mins
Norman Holmes Pearson actually did what a great many professors dream about doing. He was an expert in his field, but he also worked as an Intelligence Officer for the US military during World War II and the Cold War. And he wasn’t a desk jockey, but an active spy. Despite a major physical disability, he parachuted into Europe during the height of World War II for espionage reasons. Oh, and he was a literature professor too, by the way. So, as a spy, recruiter, and cultural diplomat, he connected the academy, the State Department, and even the CIA, all at the same time! Episode 568.
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Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:12):
Hello, where everyone is Professor Buzzkill, your favorite internet history professor.
You know, not very often a book comes along that
has all kinds of great stuff, and not only intellectual
stuff and important historical stuff, important cultural stuff, but sometimes
juicy World War two stuff and juicy Cold War stuff.
And a great new book entitled Code Name Puritan Norman
(00:36):
Holmes Pearson at the Nexus of Poetry, Espionage and American
Power has just been written and just been out and
is out today. Today's in mid Real Estate by Professor
Greg Barneheisl, who's on the line all the way from
Pittsburgh in to Pennsylvania. Doctor Barneheiseel, thanks so much for
coming on the show.
Speaker 2 (00:53):
Thank you so much, Professor Buzzkill. It is such a
pleasure to be back on your show.
Speaker 1 (00:57):
We should remind buzz Killers that Professor Barnheisel was here
year on the show back when when the Buzzkill Mucker
was in Pittsburgh. Now it's out on the West coast
in California, trying to learn how to surf, talking about
his first his first book on literature in the Cold
War and things like that. So we'll put a link
to that on the on the blog post for this episode.
(01:17):
I find this book so fascinating for a thousand reasons.
First of all, it taught me a lot about well,
I don't know, I don't know any other way to
say it. The change is in what is known as
or what is understood as Puritanism over the American centuries.
But also all kinds of things about professors being involved
(01:39):
in the War, professors being involved in the Cold War,
professors being involved in the building of the CIA. It's
just it's just fascinating. I just wonder it could only
have been better if he had been a pirate, well
as a side gig something like that.
Speaker 2 (01:53):
He may not have been a pirate, but he was
a pornography collector, so he had a little bit of
a spicy side to him as well. He was a
a kind of obsessive collector of many things, including pornography.
Speaker 1 (02:03):
Well, there you go, we won't we're pg but we
won't put that on the buzzkill bookshelf. Well, first of all,
starts off by telling everyone who Norman Holmes Pearson was.
Speaker 2 (02:15):
He's best known as a Yale professor, and he taught
American literature at Yale for about about forty years. He
was at Yale. He went to college there, and then
he went to graduate school there, and then he taught
there until his death in nineteen seventy five. He looked
a lot like a Yale professor. He was a s
tweedy small man who always wore a nice, well cut
(02:35):
three piece suit. And he taught Nathaniel Hawthorne, and he
taught other courses in American literature. But what makes him
interesting to me, and I hoped to many other people,
was that when the Second World War started, he was
recruited into the OSS, which your readers may or may
not know, was the Civilian Intelligence service that eventually morphed
(02:55):
into the CIA. And he was brought into the OSS
and became a very high rate spy. And we'll talk
about that, I assume later on in the program. But
he became a very high ranking spy there, and so
after the war, what makes it particularly interesting is, as
you had pointed out, he becomes one of the few
men who makes the actual connections between elite academia and
(03:18):
the national security state that is emerging. He definitely worked
for the CIA on a kind of freelance basis for
a few years, but even after he was actively with
the CIA. He also worked for the American Culture Diplomacy,
even at the same time that he's teaching literature. So
I find him really interesting because of the way that
he embodies something about the American fifties, which is many
(03:41):
of our elite and powerful institutions, the military, academia, the
business community, government, and also foundations. They were kind of
working in concert with each other to pursue American Cold
War goals, and certainly throughout the fifties and sixties they
really had the confidence of the American people in a
way that kind of fell apart because of the Vietnam War.
(04:03):
But I call this a kind of new cultural consensus,
and I think Pearson was really one of the architects
of that. And he's very little known, so I was
really gratified to be able to tell his story.
Speaker 1 (04:14):
Well, he's a little known outside Yale and maybe even
outside the libraries of Yale, because he donated a billion
types of literary collections to Yale. That was a fascinating
thing I read in the book. But can we start
with puritan and Puritanism? Was he himself raised as a
Puritan or did he come from Puritan stock or something
like that.
Speaker 2 (04:34):
Yes, And so this is one of the ways in
which and we'll talk about this later in his academic work,
but he brought American Puritanism back into the center of
the way we think about what this country is about.
And when we think of Puritanism, right, we think of
censorious people. We think of like people who are trying
(04:55):
to shame you, people who don't talk about sex, people
who are religious fanatics. We often think about the pill Grims,
who weren't exactly Puritans, but it was similar enough, and
Pearson did. He came from Puritan stock. His family, the
Pearson's side of his family, came to Massachusetts. They immigrated
from Yorkshire to Massachusetts in the sixteen forties and they
(05:15):
lived there and they were prominent business people, and they
worked in government as well. They were in the I
guess I would call it the Governor General's Office for
the Massachusetts Bay Colony. And so they really were those
people who we think of when we think of Puritans
living in these small agricultural communities, these English settlers. And
this is one of the things that drew Pearson to
(05:38):
the literature of Nathaniel Hawthorne, who tended to write about
the Puritans, and so Pearson really liked Hawthorne because he
felt he was writing about his ancestors. So Pearson has
a personal connection with them, and he is linked to
them not just through the Pearson line, but also the
Holmes line. And if you're familiar with Oliver Wendell Holmes,
he's related to that family. He's related to the Kittridge family,
(05:58):
who is another important Puritan names. So these are all
of these old families based in eastern Massachusetts who were
really some of the earliest builders of the New England
portion of this country. And for various reasons, including the
popularity of writers like Nathaniel Hawthorne, including the dominance of
(06:20):
the publishing industry that was based in Boston. Even as
America grew, even as the United States grew and grew
quite diverse, not just in terms of ethnicities, but in
terms of where people were living. The story of America
in the nineteenth century really was the story of the
Puritans and the New England settlers. And so Pearson grew
up at a time where he was told that your
ancestors are the truest of all true Americans, the Puritan settlers,
(06:44):
those are the most American of all Americans, and so
Pearson grew up thinking that, and so he grew very
curious about who his ancestors were and what they meant.
Speaker 1 (06:52):
I find it one of the things interesting about that
because that sort of group, Puritans, and really the group
of New England, is very tight knit. And Pearson throughout
his entire career has offered all kinds of jobs in
different places and doesn't take them sometimes because he'd rather
stay Yale. But you mentioned a few times in the
book that he just doesn't seem to want to leave
(07:14):
that community.
Speaker 2 (07:15):
No, he wasn't in a gorophobe. He loved traveling, and
he traveled all over in the United States, and he
traveled all over the world, but New England was his home.
And he used to joke about the fact that when
he grew up in a town called Gardner, Massachusetts, which
is about an hour west of Boston near the New
Hampshire border, so it's very very New England up there.
And when he moved down to New Haven, Connecticut, which
(07:37):
is also part of New England, he joked that he
had gone west because it was about twenty miles west.
So that was him becoming a Westerner. So yes, he
was always very comfortable there and he never he didn't
really stray very far from there, although, as you say,
he was offered many job opportunities, including one really attractive
job opportunity after the war at the Huntington Library in Zadena,
(07:59):
which would be hard to turn anyone who do the
Huntingdond Library. That's about the prettiest place you could imagine.
Speaker 1 (08:03):
Yeah, it certainly is. Well, then tell us about him
growing up and going to college. We need to first
of all, probably tell Buzzkillers that he suffered from a
number of health problems and a physical what in many
parts of the book when you're quoting original sources is
referred to as a deformity, what we would now call
a disability.
Speaker 2 (08:20):
Of course, Yes, so when he was very small his
parents his parents owned and ran the major department store
in Gardner, Massachusetts, which is a small New England city,
and like many smaller New England cities at the time,
it was an industrial city.
Speaker 1 (08:32):
It made chairs.
Speaker 2 (08:34):
They ran the department store, so they were an affluent family.
They were one of the leading citizens. And one day,
when he was about seven years old, he was playing
with a friend of his and he fell off a
barn roof, and he broke his pelvis and he broke
his femur, and it was a compound fracture, so the
bone came through the skin. And this would have been
in about nineteen fifteen, nineteen sixteen, something like that, and
(08:54):
the hospitals weren't particularly good. They didn't have antibiotics back then,
and so the bone was set poorly, and he was
as you say that, many people called him deformed or crippled.
But his leg wouldn't work right. It jutted out at
a strange angle. And he developed something which I had
never heard of before writing this book, which was he
had tuberculosis of the hip. So the tuberculosis bacteria what
(09:17):
that was, I didn't either, But the tuberculosis bacteria can
colonize bones as well.
Speaker 1 (09:22):
Oh oh, okay.
Speaker 2 (09:23):
So he had tuberculosis of the hip from the time
he was about seven years old, and it didn't clear
up until after World War two.
Speaker 1 (09:30):
So this was a yeah, you said that until they
injected him with the new quote new penicillin after World
War two. It didn't heal.
Speaker 2 (09:38):
Up, yeah, exactly, And so he would spend his time
as a kid on crutches and he had I don't
want me to be gross, but an open seeping wound
at all times and occasionally would flare up. So yeah,
and he was, yes, visibly disabled, and he could not
take part in sports because the leg wouldn't work right,
and he was skinny. He was always fighting off infections,
(09:58):
and he because they didn't have antibiotics, he often would
get these very life threatening infections. When he was younger,
he had a lot of physical hardship, even though economically
and socially his family were in quite good shape.
Speaker 1 (10:10):
But then he goes off to Yale for college.
Speaker 2 (10:12):
He does. He goes to Yale for college, and he's
expected that he's going to go into the family business
and he is going to run the department store, but
his family has some concerns about this because of his
physical health. But while he's at Yale, turns out that
he's really smart and a couple of his professors spot
him as somebody who could actually go into academia. And
Pearson also gets really excited when he's working on a
(10:34):
senior project about Nathaniel Hawthorne. So when he's a senior,
he writes his mom a letter and he's like, Mom,
I know that I said I was going to go
into the family business, but I just really want to
be a professor, and so I'd like to do this.
He manages to land himself a fellowship at Oxford. Now
this wasn't a Rhodes scholarship or anything, but it did
pay for two years at Oxford. So he went over
there and he didn't have to pay for it, so
(10:55):
it was on the fellowship's dime and studied and as
you know better than anyone else, was Professor Buzzkill. At Oxford,
you work individually with tutors professors, and his tutor, oddly enough,
was C. S. Lewis, who would later go on to
write the Narnia series. This was before C. S. Lewis
had written any of these books, and C. S. Lewis
was a crotchety, stuffy britt who absolutely detested Americans and
(11:19):
hated any modern literature. So Pearson had a real tough
time with him.
Speaker 1 (11:24):
Now, ordinarily I'd say, okay, now he's sort of on
an academic trajectory. He's going to finish up at Yale.
He'll probably go on for a doctorate or something like that.
Even though doctors weren't as necessary back in those days,
as they are now to become a professor. But then
the war intervenes, and it's surprising to me that this person,
(11:45):
granted he's going, he goes into intelligence, but still having
this disability. It's sort of surprising to me that he
snapped up by the OSS when there are other in theory,
hail and hardy people they could have chosen. Were they
going for his brain?
Speaker 2 (11:59):
Yeah, it was very interesting because, as you say, he's
a grad, he's doing his ordinary graduate student stuff throughout
the thirties, and he's trying to write his dissertation, and
he is and we may talk about this later, but
he was a kind of obsessive networker and collector of
people and contacts. So he spends a lot of his
time in the thirties like meeting everybody in the literature
field and all these famous writers as a way of
(12:21):
making connections for his future career. So the war breaks
out and he, as you say, he was disabled, he
was not eligible to serve in the armed services, and
he figured that he was going to spend the war
teaching freshman comp to the various people who also couldn't serve,
who are going to Yale, and Yale itself had turned
into kind of a military outpost and became the barracks
for the Army Air Corps, and he figured he was
(12:41):
going to do that, and he was disappointed because he
was really pro American. He had become very very pro
British during the nineteen thirties at a time which, as
I'm sure you've talked about in previous shows, at a
time when there was a very strong strain of isolationism
in the country and a great deal of sympathy for
the Germans. And if you have had previous conversations here
on their show about the America First Movement, it actually
(13:04):
started at Aale University.
Speaker 1 (13:05):
Yeah, that's always been amazing.
Speaker 2 (13:06):
The America First Movement started Aale University and Pearson was
watching that, and Pearson by that time was very pro
British and he was outspoken against that and wanted the
US to get into the conflict earlier. So he was
disappointed he couldn't serve and he mucked about for Yale
for a couple of years and didn't know what he
was going to do and felt sorry for himself. But
then he got a call and they said, we'd like
(13:27):
to see you in Washington. I think we may have
a job for you. So he goes down to Washington
and they want him to serve in the Research and
Analysis branch of the OSS, which is exactly what it
sounds like. It's a bunch of tweety smart educated people
reading intercepts of communications and filing them and it's boring
work sitting in a chair. And in fact, they called it,
(13:50):
they jokingly called there was a lot of There was
a lot of Ivy League professors, there were a lot
of heavy, heavy brain power in this. They called it
the chair born division, which I always find that amazing.
Speaker 1 (14:00):
It's not airport.
Speaker 2 (14:01):
So yeah, he's there, he's doing his thing. He's not
really liking it, but he's doing his part to serve
the country. And then somebody comes up to him and says,
you know, I think that you have some talents. Even
though you're a cripple, which is the term that they used,
we think you've got some talents, and they tag him
and three or four other men to form the counter
(14:22):
intelligence branch of the OSS. OSS was the Civilian Intelligence Service,
so they were Its job was to analyze information and
try to figure out who's a spy and what's the
United States the army' is supposed to do when we
go over there. But at the time, and I'm sure
you've talked about this at some point in one of
your shows, the Brits had intercepted the German Enigma codes
(14:45):
and so the Brits knew everything the Germans were saying
and were intercepting all of their communications, and the Germans
didn't know that they were doing that. The Brits did
not want the Americans to have this information because they
thought the Americans would shoot their mouths off and let
the Germans know that the codes had been broken. So
the British would not share this information. The high ranking
(15:05):
people at the OSS, and it was run by a
man named General wild Bill Donovan. Donovan knew the British
had something, and they knew they wouldn't share it, so
he gets it in negotiations with the high ranking British intelligence
officers and he says, we know you have something, and
we really want to be able to share it so
we can contribute to this war effort. And they say,
the only way we will do this is if you
create a special dedicated branch of a civilian intelligence service,
(15:29):
not the military intelligence service. And only they can look
at this stuff. So that's when they created the OSS,
created a branch called it eventually was called X two,
and this was the counterintelligence and counter espionage branch of
the OSS. Pearson and three other men are flown over
in April of nineteen forty three to England to figure
(15:50):
out how to set this thing up. They set it up.
They're living in this strange little village and eating Brussels
sprouts and enjoying playing he's trying to learn how to
play cricket. And ironically it's the village where the playwright
George Bernard Shaw is living in his dotage, so they're
always trying to catch glimpses of George Bernard Shaw. So
they do end up setting up the OSS as an
X two counter intelligence service. It moves to London in
(16:13):
July of nineteen forty three and Pearson is put in
charge of it. So we have this little disabled tweety
Hawthorne scholar now in charge of seeing all of the
Enigma decrypts that the British Army is guarding so jealously
because they don't want us clumsy Americans to spill the
beans about it. And Pearson is the only one trusted
(16:35):
with this information.
Speaker 1 (16:36):
Now, is this where he starts to can't remember exactly,
but develop or maybe invent his index card system, his
note card system that he used for both information and
then use for people, which was then cross indexed fifty
million ways from Sunday and became the sort of I
don't know, mother load of information that the Allies fell
(16:59):
in love with. The Allied intelligence fell in love with.
Speaker 2 (17:02):
It was it was the British had an astounding database
and we would call it today a database, but right
then it was literally a card file of note cards.
They had a database on quite literally millions of people,
and they would cross index their contacts with each other
and all that and was the envy of everybody. And
so the Americans, with the Research and Intelligence Service that
(17:23):
Pearson had served with back in Washington d C was
trying to develop its own American version of this. Pearson
learns from that, and then he goes over to England
and then he's working with the masters of this who
actually have put this architecture together, and he says, I
really have to learn how to do this. So yes,
that's exactly when he institutes a British style we would
call it today almost a big data approach to counter espionage,
(17:47):
collect every last possible piece of data and information and
cross reference everything, and by doing that, patterns will show
up that we can see. And ultimately the goal was
the goal of count intelligence and the goal of counter
espionage is to figure out who in our territory is
spying for the enemy and how and what do we
do with them?
Speaker 1 (18:07):
And mainly what and in his case, in the case
of his media colleagues, how do we turn them? Yes,
how do we get them to be double agents? That
was you know, you read this part of the book
and you know, the heartbeat quickens. It's just fascinating thinking
that this guy, you know, who's been in a sort
of kind of enclosed world in Yale all this time,
(18:27):
is now going to be thinking about how to go
out and find German spies and turn them.
Speaker 2 (18:33):
Yeah, And this was an innovation of the Brits. Once
they had these Enigma decrypts, they identified every German spy
in Allied territory. And as I say in the book,
and as I'll remind people here in nineteen forty two,
Allied territory was basically Great Britain. The entirety of Europe
was either Nazi occupied or neutral, So Allied territory was
(18:54):
the British.
Speaker 1 (18:54):
Eyde and even Spain, which is technically neutral as fascist.
Speaker 2 (18:57):
So and they knew every German agent who was operating
in that territory. And so the question was what do
we do with him? And the traditional answer to that,
of course, is you find them.
Speaker 1 (19:07):
To kill him, right right, right, But.
Speaker 2 (19:08):
The British Intelligence Service we're experimenting with this new technique
of flipping them, turning them into unwilling double agents, and
so Pearson got deeply involved in that. And so yes,
he's finding these German agents in Britain. And then eventually,
because he's not really in charge of what's happening in Britain,
in the territories that the United States Army has liberated
from Nanci occupation, it's Pearson's job to identify German spies,
(19:33):
German stay behinds in that territory and figure out what
to do with them and how to turn them.
Speaker 1 (19:37):
Yeah, but you know, seeing him in his young life,
you could very quickly establish a stereotype of what could
be his trajectory. He's disabled, he's an ivy leaguer, he's
probably going to be a loaner, probably going to be
just a bookworm, etcetera, etcetera, etcetera. Yet in London and
then elsewhere he uses these personal connections that he's made constantly.
(19:58):
I don't know. I don't want to say social because
not necessarily the right word, but some of it is
socializing with all the right people in order to get
to all the right people exactly. He's incredibly outgoing in
that regard. It's just amazing.
Speaker 2 (20:10):
And that's one of the things that I tried to
do in this biography is give the reader a bit
of a sense of what kind of a person he was,
because he was, as you very accurately point out, he
was a socializer, and he socialized because he liked it,
but he also socialized instrumentally, like he wanted to get
things out of it. And my hypothesis is that this
(20:31):
was part of the product of being a young boy
who was sickly, who couldn't take part in sports, who
was smart, who wanted to socialize, and so he develops
this kind of adult maturity and ability to and I
don't mean manipulate people, but engage with people in a
(20:52):
way that makes them want to be around him, and
he learns that from a very young age, and so
reading his correspondence and one of the night things about
writing this biography was that Pearson was an obsessive collector
and kept everything. And so his archive, which is held
at the Binding Key Library Yale, has everything, including get
well cards from his third grade class, which is sort
(21:13):
of fun that you know, a third grade class back
in nineteen eighteen or whenever it was wrote get well
cards to their classmates, just as I did back in
the seventies. So some things don't change.
Speaker 1 (21:22):
But sometimes there's too much material and you think, oh, no,
I don't have to go through another box of his
mother's discard recipes.
Speaker 2 (21:29):
Oh yes, I have many experiences of that. But yes,
and so through. And as I said earlier, he does
this when he's a child to kind of substitute for
all the stuff he can't do as a teenager. He
does it when he becomes a graduate student as a
way to get a leg up in the profession. He
makes a point of making friends with important writers and
also important fellow academics who are going to be helpful
in his career. And then, as you say, during the war,
(21:51):
he used it as a way to ingratiate himself with
the British intelligence services. He was very clever because, as
I said, he'd been he'd done a couple of years
at Oxford, and so he was very smart person, and
so he knew what British intelligence agents liked. And British
intelligence agents tended to come from the upper crust. They
tended to be aristocrats, and they tended to disdain Americans,
(22:12):
and so Pearson knew how to suck up to them
in a way that didn't seem obsequious. But he never
seemed like he didn't know his place, and because of
that he was able to achieve things for the American
Intelligence Service and get himself embedded with the British Intelligence
Service in the way that a more all Americans sort
of type might not have been able to. The one
(22:32):
person who saw right through that, who knew what Pearson's
game was and didn't like it, was Kim Philby, the
famous British intelligence agent who was working for the Soviets
at the time. Because Kim Philby was equally good at that,
and a game recognizes game, as they say.
Speaker 1 (22:49):
Well, Pearson was Oxford and Philby was Cambridge, so there's
that too.
Speaker 2 (22:53):
But Pearson was middle class.
Speaker 1 (22:57):
But also you know when he goes into the occupied territories,
he is you know, he's and this is amazing to
It was amazing to listeners, especially when they read the book. Remember,
this is a man who has a non functioning hip,
really badly healed, broken femur, he doesn't walk very well.
But he is literally parachuted in Yes, it almost dropped
(23:20):
the book when I read those.
Speaker 2 (23:21):
Yes, And just to make this clear and vivid to
your listeners, eventually, to ameliorate the problems he was having
with his hip, the doctors literally fused the top of
the femur to the pelvis. So if you're sitting here
and you're trying to lift your leg up right from
the pelvis, he couldn't do that. It didn't move. Yeah,
(23:42):
so he is parachuted in the day after Norway is liberated,
he's parachuted in there. He's parachuted into Denmark because he
was always jealous of the people who were working for him,
who got to go work in the field, and he
always wanted to do that, and so eventually he was
able to do it. And yes, he was a very
physically careerous person and very physically especially for a man
(24:02):
with a very significant disability. He was very physically active.
He loved hiking to the degree he could do that.
He loved camping. He ended up making several trips, very
sort of roughing at trips to places like Greenland and
northern Quebec and the Arctic. He was very physically vital
and that was important to him.
Speaker 1 (24:22):
And by the way, while he's in occupied territory, or
i should say while he's in liberated territory, he uses
a lot of these same skills. I mean he's not
able to haul his cabinets and candidates of index cards
with him, but he's able to use the social skills
and other skills to try to turn people and get
people on the allied side as well.
Speaker 2 (24:39):
Yeah, one of my favorite stories comes from before the
liberation where soon after he was setting up the office
in London, they said, we need to have a branch
office in Madrid. Right, because as you said before, Madrid
was technically neutral, but it was run by fascist Frank
was a fascist, and it was, if not formally allied
with the Nazis, it was definitely sympathetic and lean towards
(25:00):
the Nazis, but it was a place. Madrid was a
place that was a kind of marketplace of secrets, and
so a lot of spies from all of the nations
operated there, just trying to get information for each other.
And so there's a funny story that Pearson liked to tell.
Soon after he was sent there to open the OSS's
Iberian office in Madrid, he was checked into and I
(25:20):
forget the name of the hotel. It was one of
the nice hotels in Madrid at the time, one of
the better hotels in Madrid, And as a joke, the hotelier,
the hotel keeper put him in a room that was
directly across from the room in which the head of
Nazi counterintelligence was staying. And the two they, of course,
they couldn't do anything to each other. They were on
(25:42):
neutral territory. They weren't going to do that. And Pearson
just said hello, hello, hair whoever it was, and he
would say, you know, Guden Togg. Pearson and his daughters
asked him he came home. So then at one point
he goes home for a little bit of R and
R and he's meeting he's talking with a stepdaughter and
telling him this story. And they were like, Pop, why
(26:03):
didn't you Why didn't you kill him? Why didn't you
shoot him? And he's like, no, we knew him. He's
a man we could work with. If I killed him,
they probably bring in someone even worse. So we knew
what he was doing because we intercepted all this communications.
I knew everything about it.
Speaker 1 (26:18):
Yeah, exactly, better to let him well in that case,
better live and let live. But then after the war,
after he's back, you know, you think, okay, he might
want to just say, okay, because he is so committed
to literature, so committed to Hawthorne and everything else. Great,
I get to go back to Yale. I can resume
my studies and then become a professor. YadA, YadA, YadA.
(26:39):
But they're all these competing well, if not demands, certainly
requests for him to do all this stuff. On the side.
Speaker 2 (26:46):
Yes, and he really did want to go back and
be an academic. He was, as I've said before, he
really did feel that he had a even more than
most Americans. He had a special obligation to serve the
country because of coming from this New England Puritan heritage,
and they felt this extraordinary sense of civic responsibility, but
he also wanted to be a professor. So he comes
(27:07):
back and he's like, Oh, I'm so excited. I can
go back to my career. But they dismantle the OSS
in nineteen forty six and they wind it down, but
very quickly the United States starts realizing it's in a
Cold war and needs civilian intelligence service. There is some
hostility to that again from isolationists, particularly Republicans in Congress,
(27:27):
who feel that it's going to be a kind of
big brother situation that's anachronistic. There was nineteen eight four
and written yet, but you get the idea. But they
ended up in nineteen forty seven setting up the Central
Intelligence Agency as a civilian intelligence agent, and they asked
Pearson to be the director of counterintelligence and he turned
him down. He turned him down. He wanted to be Yale.
He wanted to live this life that he had dreamt
(27:47):
of for himself. But he kept his hand in. And
this is one of the interesting things about him because
when he came back to Yale, he had taught there
for a number of years before, and he was a
very popular professor. He was a very theatrical person, and
his disability had given him a kind of sympathy and
empathy that I think a lot of the very nostodgy
professors at Yale lacked, and so a lot of the
(28:08):
young men at Yale. And again, as your listeners probably know,
Yale was all male until nineteen seventy one, I believe
it was. So these young men really liked Pearson, especially
if they were kind of like troubled or wandering. He
was a compassionate and sympathetic person. So he gets a reputation.
He's already kind of known, but he gets a reputation
as somebody. They know he'd been in the spy services.
We couldn't talk about it. So he was the very mysterious,
(28:31):
crippled professor who had some sort of spy thing about him,
but nobody knew what it was. And so he was
very notorious, and he loved that. He just enjoyed that
people were always cost something about him. But in reality,
he was working for the CIA. He wasn't going on
missions for them, but he was their primary recruiter at
Yale University. And for your readers that know something about
(28:53):
the early history of the CIA, its staff was populated,
not exclusively, but heavily by young Ivy League men, very
very much had a reputation as a bunch of intellectuals
from the Ivy League, And oddly enough, for those of
us who grew up in the Cold War like you
and me, it had a reputation of being full of lefties.
That's right, but Pinko's The CIA was full of Pinkos,
(29:15):
which was a music to those of us grew up
in the Reagan era. But Pearson was the primary recruiter
at Yale for the CIA, and he would spot promising
young men who he thought could do it, and he
had there was a there was a dead drop mailbox
in Washington, and he would send a letter there and
they would get this person's name, and then the CIA
(29:36):
contact would get in touch with that person, and many
of them ended up serving, including and some of your
writers may be familiar with the famed travel writer Peter Matheson,
who was also one of the founders of the Paris Review.
He was one of the people that Pearson brought into
the CIA.
Speaker 1 (29:51):
Well, now, the other thing he does is help create,
or very a very minimum, one of the founders of
some thing called what becomes officially American Studies. As I
was reading about how that was developed. I came up
to chapter eleven and buzz Killers. This is an Indiana
Jones moment for something for someone like me and someone
(30:14):
like doctor Barneheisel. I'm going to start this story off,
and you're going to finish it, okay. Professor Barnheisel, as
he's looking through the archives, runs across some copies of
some midterm exams of Pearson's from nineteen fifteen nineteen fifty one,
and one of the questions is describe and compare the
final dinner parties of the Age of Innocence and The
(30:35):
Lost Lady, two important novels in terms of the symbolic
value of each to the novel in which it appears.
So these things are in his collection, and like you said,
he saved everything, So we saved all his old exam originals.
But then there's something on the back that's just fascinating.
Speaker 2 (30:55):
So this was my favorite find in his archive, because,
as you would imagine, with the man who's a pack
rat and who taught at Yale for thirty five to
forty years, there's a lot of old exams and a
lot of old teaching files. And I got an office
full of teaching files, and I can his teaching files
are much more voluminous than mine. But because I'm a
(31:16):
good and dutiful researcher, I look through everything. And as
I'm looking through this, and I flip over this one
exam it's midterm exam. That's that was on Edith Wharton novels.
I see on the back this memo and it's written
to somebody named mister Jackson. And it's a memo about
if one wanted to recruit into the intelligence services, here's
(31:36):
what one might do. And it's all in the conditional tense.
It's all the plausible deniability of like, if perhaps one
wanted to recruit a bunch of Yalemen into CIA, here's
the kind of things we would look for, and here's
how we would go about it, so that nobody would
know what we were doing. Again, entirely theoretical, but of
(31:56):
course he was doing precisely that at the time. And
then ye, far as I understand, this memo was circulated
among and several of his colleagues from the OSS who
were also had studied with him as graduate students at
Yale had ended up being professors at other universities places
You know likely and Wesleyan and all that, and this
memo gets circulated to them, and you can almost imagine
(32:18):
with a sort of like nudge nudge, if you might
want to do this, here's how you might go about it.
Speaker 1 (32:24):
But as you say also in the book, he was
very careful about technically keeping it all quiet, and there
aren't a lot of personal papers or diaries where he says, well, gee,
this is you know, I'm helping start up the CIA counterintelligence.
So this is what I'm doing. This is what I
did today. So it's kind of funny that these midterm
exams with the spy stuff on the back. I presume
(32:47):
that was handwritten right on the back.
Speaker 2 (32:49):
No, it was typed.
Speaker 1 (32:49):
It was typed. Oh wow. So but but you would think,
if I'm gonna throw some old midterm exams away, those
should be the ones I should throw away because they've
got actual secrets on them.
Speaker 2 (32:59):
So he died in nic seventy five height to the
Cold War, nothing's been declassified yet, and donated all of
his papers to the Binding Kid Library Yale. For those
of you or those of your listeners who don't know,
the Bindingkeeed Libraryale is really one of the great rare
book and archive libraries in the world in fact, And
I don't know if we'll get a chance to talk
about this later, but Pearson, you did mention earlier his
(33:19):
book collections, but he donated it in up becoming the
core of some of the most important collections. So he
donated all of his stuff to Yale, and certainly the
CIA scrubbed it. Certainly the CIA went through every and
he was a smart person. He would not have kept
anything in his possession that would have been in any
way compromising. And so when you're reading just a step
(33:40):
back a little bit during the war, his correspondence of
course is censored. But he was cagey enough that he
knew what he couldn't put into his to his letters home,
and you know, he can never identify what he's doing
or names of people or places that he's going, and
perhaps it comes out later. So I mean, he knows
better than to put this kind of stuff down in writing.
And then whatever he might have had and have kept
(34:01):
when CIA, because when the collection was donated to Yale,
CIA had scrubbed it because they didn't want any the
stuff to get out. So the only thing that I
can imagine is that he wanted people to see that.
I don't think this was inadvertent. I think this was
a I want to make sure you know what I
did sort of bread crumb. There's no way somebody that
(34:24):
careful and that meticulous leaves that document in there not
wanting people to see it.
Speaker 1 (34:29):
Well, as I say, it must have been Indian John's
worm for you. So I was very, very, very jealous.
But let's round up the show by talking then about
how he helps develop this field of American studies.
Speaker 2 (34:42):
American studies, and maybe some of your listeners to classes
in American studies or perhaps at a major in American studies.
But American studies was an academic field that came about.
It really was born in the nineteen thirties for people
who wanted to think about the American experience, that the
United States had a civilization that was worth thinking in
tipalking about as a civilization separate from Britain or Europe.
(35:03):
And it wasn't just the junior member of the Western
Nations Club. And so there was a lot of self
justification of like, here's why we have a culture that's
worth studying. And so in the nineteen thirties and nineteen forties.
That's really what people who were involved in American studies
were doing. And Pearson was one of the first people
in the country to receive a PhD in American studies
(35:25):
at Yale. It was called at that time History Art Literature.
It was not called American Studies. Would only receive that
name later, but he was one of the first people
in the world to receive a PhD in this, which
was tough for him because there were no jobs in it.
So that's what a divisor said when he said, I
want to get my PhD in this and as advisor said,
you got two strikes against you. Love, there's no jobs
in this and you are and this was the term
(35:47):
he used, defective and they referring to his disability.
Speaker 1 (35:50):
Yeah physically. Yeah, it's amazing that the words were that
were used.
Speaker 2 (35:54):
But then after the war, American studies stops becoming a
kind of like justification of like, here's why we're a
country that's worthy of studying, and it becomes more of
a here's a way we could train Americans in thinking
about this nation and what our mission is in the world,
especially at a Cold War context. So American studies, particularly
at Yale University becomes very much allied with the United
(36:19):
States Cold War, the Cold War project of confronting the Soviets,
of defending freedom, free enterprise, all of these terms that
I try to unpack a little bit in the book.
And there's a number of schools that have American studies
and American civilization programs at this time, Minnesota and Penn
and Harvard, places like that. But Yale gets a ton
(36:39):
of money from a very conservative businessman named William Robertson
Coe who says, I can give you this very large
bequest with a half a million dollars, which is which
is that's stock in real money in nineteen forty seven.
And I want this program not just to be a
bunch of egghead studying America, but for training people to
advocate for the value use of freedom and free enterprise
(37:02):
in a Cold war context. And so Yale says, thank you,
mister Cole, thank you for that donation.
Speaker 1 (37:07):
We're on it now. How closely do they stick to that,
because you talk as as these chapters go on, you
talk about, you know, of course, the original definite, one
of the original definitions of culture. Matthew Arnold's The Best
of the things that have been thought and said and
painted and everything else, and then going on to Franz
Boas and the cultural anthropology and things like that. How
did Yale deal with things like that donation and not
(37:30):
wanting to be dictated to by a rich donator. Now, granted,
a lot of these people believe a lot of these
concepts already, but they don't want to turn into Hillsdale College.
Speaker 2 (37:40):
No, And that was exactly the type ripe that they
had to walk, because, as you say, most of them
agreed with it. There's a stereotype that maybe has some
truth to it that today academia is populated by a
bunch of screaming lefty commies.
Speaker 1 (37:54):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (37:54):
I wouldn't say it's that there's no truth to that,
but it sure wasn't true in the fifties and particular
a place like Yale. These were conservative Republican men all entirely,
and they believed these things, so they didn't have to
be convinced. What they didn't like, as you said, is
being dictated to by some yehoo billionaire, well millionaire at
the time, So they really did have to walk this
(38:16):
tightrope of yes, we all agree on these fundamental principles.
But we're only going to do up to this point,
and we are going to train people and lead them
to the conclusion that free enterprise is good and collectivism
is terrible, but we're not going to actually make them
say that. And then the donor co would often say, well,
then you can't have all the money. And just as
(38:37):
a side note, when Yale refused to give him right
of approval over faculty hiring and firing, Yale would not
do that, he said, Okay, I'm taking up my money
and I'm going elsewhere, and he ended up giving even
more money to the University of Wyoming, where he did
found the American Studies program there and did maintain that authority.
Speaker 1 (38:55):
Yeah, and it's amazing that all you know, again, there's
this stream of sort of accepted to them, accepted realities
that capitalism is a good thing, American capitalism is a
good thing, or at least the best of all the
available things. And then American culture is a good thing.
And then even people within Yale were complaining that they
weren't doing it enough or weren't doing it well enough.
(39:17):
So William F. Buckley then turns on Yale in God
and Men at Yale and starts complaining, I think, well,
you know, that's the wrong place to turn.
Speaker 2 (39:26):
Yeah, he specifically names the American Studies. But that's weird,
something that doesn't deliver on what it promised to do.
Speaker 1 (39:32):
And it's well anyway, it's just weird. There are a
thousand things wrong with that book. We should do a
show just on that. And it was very, very baleful
in its influence on American history.
Speaker 2 (39:43):
Well, and just as a side note, Pearson, who knew everybody,
of course, had a brief run in with Buckley while
Buckley was an undergraduate of Yale and Buckley and he
was the editor of the Yale Daily News, which is
which the very important big man on campus kind of position,
and wrote an editorial Buckley did criticizing Lafayette College because
Lafayette College in Pennsylvania would not accept a donation from
(40:04):
someone who says, I want this money to go to
scholarships but not to negro their Jews. And Lafayette College said, Okay,
we don't want your money, and Buckley says, well, Yale
should jump on that, and Pearson writes a letter to
the editor the Yale Daily News saying like this is
a terrible opinion I did. This is absolutely not what
a Yale person should think, and so they get it
(40:24):
a little conturetante about that, but that was really their
only direct run in. Buckley ends up writing one of you.
Buckley was sort of a graphemaniac, and he wrote a
ton of stuff, and he wrote a novel called spy Time.
Some of your readers may know his novel Spy Time,
in which Norman Holmes Pearson is a character.
Speaker 1 (40:40):
Well, then, how if we take this trajectory of American
studies being built up at Yale and in other places,
But Yale is sort of the most important or the
summit of the mountain, how you want to describe it,
and Pearson has a great deal of influence in how
it is constructed. How does the Puritanism fit in? And
maybe how have ideas about what Puritanism is changed by
(41:03):
that stage?
Speaker 2 (41:04):
Before I answer that, which is a really good question
to conclude on, But before I answer that, I just
want to point out to your listeners that American studies
isn't in the fifties just something in American students take
Pearson ends up exporting it. So one of his jobs
in the nineteen sixties, he gets hired by the Department
of State to go abroad and help foreign universities, particularly
(41:28):
in Japan and Taiwan and South Korea and Australia set
up American studies programs.
Speaker 1 (41:34):
Yeah, there's even a picture of him at one of
these Japanese universities.
Speaker 2 (41:37):
Yeah, as a way a to train foreign students who
are curious about American culture and about an American civilization.
But as we know, the American studies pedagogy at this
point was all about how American values were really the
values that the world should be following. So Pierson is
deeply involved in that. But to return to the Puritan idea,
as I mentioned, as we started out with, the stereotypical
(41:59):
view appearance is very negative. We think of them as
just these kind of like prudish hill Joy religious fanatics,
And that was very much the opinion of the general
public and even of intellectuals and historians well into the
early part of the twentieth century, and Peterson's favorite writer,
Nathaniel Hawker, had a lot to do with that. They
don't come across so great in the Scarlet Letter's you see,
(42:21):
pretty hypocritical in their morality, but Pearson tries to rewrite
the story of the Puritans and explain that, yes, they
were all of this, but what they were is actually
sort of searchingly self critical. And there what we think
of is this really simplistic, condemnatory Calvinist theology. It's actually
(42:44):
an incredibly intricate intellectual system that we may not like
the conclusions that draw it, that it comes to, but
it has to be respected for its architectonics. Pearson believes.
Pearson is not a Puritan. He's definitely not a Puritan
and not really a believer. He respects them greatly in
a way that most historians and intellectuals didn't, and so
(43:05):
he tries to bring them back in as a kind
of positive force as people who were we almost might
think of them, in his view, almost as new age
spiritual seekers, like they were really searching for the divine.
They were searching for what was pure and true in
the world, and they did it through this Calvinist theology,
which was very unforgiving, and it led them, through its
relentless logic, to these conclusions that we really don't like,
(43:27):
such as predestination and all of that. But Pearson says,
you know, you gotta respect that they meant it and
they walk the walk. Now, I will say that Pearson
was of the many things he did and was well
respected for, he was never a hugely influential or well
respected scholar or theoretician. And so a lot of the
(43:49):
American studies scholars and historians who knew a lot more
about it or dismissed Pearson's ideas. The scholars who were
much more serious and were professional scholars of the Puritans
dismiss Pearson and someone didn't know what he was talking about.
But Pearson had a power that he was one of
the one of the leaders of the American studies field.
(44:10):
And so even though he wasn't as influential as a scholar,
because as a teacher and an administrator, as someone who
was setting policy for academic fields, he could get his
ideas in there just as well as the other people could.
Speaker 1 (44:22):
Yes, and you call that in the book. You say
he's an institutional man in the time of institutional man.
Speaker 2 (44:28):
Yes. And one of the books that people often think
really embodies the nineteen fifties is a book called The
Organization Man, and the Organization Man is that basically makes
the argument that in the nineteen fifties, Americans had lost
their individuality, their individualism, and their individual drive, and we
(44:49):
all just wanted to be part of the big collective,
which was business.
Speaker 1 (44:53):
Right right.
Speaker 2 (44:54):
You think about mad men, right, that's what the organization
man is criticizing. Body just wants to be part of
the big you know, the man in the grave final suit.
And Pearson he was never that. He was never an
organization man, but he was a man who believed in
the value and the importance of institutions in creating America,
(45:17):
and that we had to believe in these institutions, whether
they be Byale University, the United States government, the United
States military, the business community, the congregational church, whatever it was,
that we had to subsue our individualism to these institutions
because ultimately they were working for the better, for the
in the best interests of all of us. This is
(45:37):
really one of my thesis in the book is this
was a widespread belief and ethos of the American nineteen
fifties and nineteen sixties until and I think it's cliche
to say that Vietnam did this, but when Vietnam was
such a disaster and all of these institutions had told
us that this was the right thing to do, and
they were so deeply wrong that we lost our faith
(45:59):
in these institutions and we became this and we see
this sort of the cynicism and disillusionment of the nineteen
sixties and the nineteen seventy.
Speaker 1 (46:07):
Well, that's a great way to wrap up the show.
And Buzzkillers, please trust me on this. There is so
much more in the book than we've talked about. The
war stuff is not only interesting, the Cold War stuff
is interesting, but also his influence as mentoring of a
great number of American literary figures is so so important.
So please go to professor Buzzkill dot com. Do everything
(46:29):
you need to do there, get the book. It's on
the Buzzkill bookshelf ready for you to snag, and it
is out today. Today is the release day. And so
I just want to say thank you professor for coming
on the show.
Speaker 2 (46:40):
Thank you, Professor Buzzkill. It was an enormous pleasure.
Speaker 1 (46:42):
As always, Buzzkill is out there. We will talk to
all of you next week.
Hello, where everyone is Professor Buzzkill, your favorite internet history professor.
You know, not very often a book comes along that
has all kinds of great stuff, and not only intellectual
stuff and important historical stuff, important cultural stuff, but sometimes
juicy World War two stuff and juicy Cold War stuff.
And a great new book entitled Code Name Puritan Norman
(00:36):
Holmes Pearson at the Nexus of Poetry, Espionage and American
Power has just been written and just been out and
is out today. Today's in mid Real Estate by Professor
Greg Barneheisl, who's on the line all the way from
Pittsburgh in to Pennsylvania. Doctor Barneheiseel, thanks so much for
coming on the show.
Speaker 2 (00:53):
Thank you so much, Professor Buzzkill. It is such a
pleasure to be back on your show.
Speaker 1 (00:57):
We should remind buzz Killers that Professor Barnheisel was here
year on the show back when when the Buzzkill Mucker
was in Pittsburgh. Now it's out on the West coast
in California, trying to learn how to surf, talking about
his first his first book on literature in the Cold
War and things like that. So we'll put a link
to that on the on the blog post for this episode.
(01:17):
I find this book so fascinating for a thousand reasons.
First of all, it taught me a lot about well,
I don't know, I don't know any other way to
say it. The change is in what is known as
or what is understood as Puritanism over the American centuries.
But also all kinds of things about professors being involved
(01:39):
in the War, professors being involved in the Cold War,
professors being involved in the building of the CIA. It's
just it's just fascinating. I just wonder it could only
have been better if he had been a pirate, well
as a side gig something like that.
Speaker 2 (01:53):
He may not have been a pirate, but he was
a pornography collector, so he had a little bit of
a spicy side to him as well. He was a
a kind of obsessive collector of many things, including pornography.
Speaker 1 (02:03):
Well, there you go, we won't we're pg but we
won't put that on the buzzkill bookshelf. Well, first of all,
starts off by telling everyone who Norman Holmes Pearson was.
Speaker 2 (02:15):
He's best known as a Yale professor, and he taught
American literature at Yale for about about forty years. He
was at Yale. He went to college there, and then
he went to graduate school there, and then he taught
there until his death in nineteen seventy five. He looked
a lot like a Yale professor. He was a s
tweedy small man who always wore a nice, well cut
(02:35):
three piece suit. And he taught Nathaniel Hawthorne, and he
taught other courses in American literature. But what makes him
interesting to me, and I hoped to many other people,
was that when the Second World War started, he was
recruited into the OSS, which your readers may or may
not know, was the Civilian Intelligence service that eventually morphed
(02:55):
into the CIA. And he was brought into the OSS
and became a very high rate spy. And we'll talk
about that, I assume later on in the program. But
he became a very high ranking spy there, and so
after the war, what makes it particularly interesting is, as
you had pointed out, he becomes one of the few
men who makes the actual connections between elite academia and
(03:18):
the national security state that is emerging. He definitely worked
for the CIA on a kind of freelance basis for
a few years, but even after he was actively with
the CIA. He also worked for the American Culture Diplomacy,
even at the same time that he's teaching literature. So
I find him really interesting because of the way that
he embodies something about the American fifties, which is many
(03:41):
of our elite and powerful institutions, the military, academia, the
business community, government, and also foundations. They were kind of
working in concert with each other to pursue American Cold
War goals, and certainly throughout the fifties and sixties they
really had the confidence of the American people in a
way that kind of fell apart because of the Vietnam War.
(04:03):
But I call this a kind of new cultural consensus,
and I think Pearson was really one of the architects
of that. And he's very little known, so I was
really gratified to be able to tell his story.
Speaker 1 (04:14):
Well, he's a little known outside Yale and maybe even
outside the libraries of Yale, because he donated a billion
types of literary collections to Yale. That was a fascinating
thing I read in the book. But can we start
with puritan and Puritanism? Was he himself raised as a
Puritan or did he come from Puritan stock or something
like that.
Speaker 2 (04:34):
Yes, And so this is one of the ways in
which and we'll talk about this later in his academic work,
but he brought American Puritanism back into the center of
the way we think about what this country is about.
And when we think of Puritanism, right, we think of
censorious people. We think of like people who are trying
(04:55):
to shame you, people who don't talk about sex, people
who are religious fanatics. We often think about the pill Grims,
who weren't exactly Puritans, but it was similar enough, and
Pearson did. He came from Puritan stock. His family, the
Pearson's side of his family, came to Massachusetts. They immigrated
from Yorkshire to Massachusetts in the sixteen forties and they
(05:15):
lived there and they were prominent business people, and they
worked in government as well. They were in the I
guess I would call it the Governor General's Office for
the Massachusetts Bay Colony. And so they really were those
people who we think of when we think of Puritans
living in these small agricultural communities, these English settlers. And
this is one of the things that drew Pearson to
(05:38):
the literature of Nathaniel Hawthorne, who tended to write about
the Puritans, and so Pearson really liked Hawthorne because he
felt he was writing about his ancestors. So Pearson has
a personal connection with them, and he is linked to
them not just through the Pearson line, but also the
Holmes line. And if you're familiar with Oliver Wendell Holmes,
he's related to that family. He's related to the Kittridge family,
(05:58):
who is another important Puritan names. So these are all
of these old families based in eastern Massachusetts who were
really some of the earliest builders of the New England
portion of this country. And for various reasons, including the
popularity of writers like Nathaniel Hawthorne, including the dominance of
(06:20):
the publishing industry that was based in Boston. Even as
America grew, even as the United States grew and grew
quite diverse, not just in terms of ethnicities, but in
terms of where people were living. The story of America
in the nineteenth century really was the story of the
Puritans and the New England settlers. And so Pearson grew
up at a time where he was told that your
ancestors are the truest of all true Americans, the Puritan settlers,
(06:44):
those are the most American of all Americans, and so
Pearson grew up thinking that, and so he grew very
curious about who his ancestors were and what they meant.
Speaker 1 (06:52):
I find it one of the things interesting about that
because that sort of group, Puritans, and really the group
of New England, is very tight knit. And Pearson throughout
his entire career has offered all kinds of jobs in
different places and doesn't take them sometimes because he'd rather
stay Yale. But you mentioned a few times in the
book that he just doesn't seem to want to leave
(07:14):
that community.
Speaker 2 (07:15):
No, he wasn't in a gorophobe. He loved traveling, and
he traveled all over in the United States, and he
traveled all over the world, but New England was his home.
And he used to joke about the fact that when
he grew up in a town called Gardner, Massachusetts, which
is about an hour west of Boston near the New
Hampshire border, so it's very very New England up there.
And when he moved down to New Haven, Connecticut, which
(07:37):
is also part of New England, he joked that he
had gone west because it was about twenty miles west.
So that was him becoming a Westerner. So yes, he
was always very comfortable there and he never he didn't
really stray very far from there, although, as you say,
he was offered many job opportunities, including one really attractive
job opportunity after the war at the Huntington Library in Zadena,
(07:59):
which would be hard to turn anyone who do the
Huntingdond Library. That's about the prettiest place you could imagine.
Speaker 1 (08:03):
Yeah, it certainly is. Well, then tell us about him
growing up and going to college. We need to first
of all, probably tell Buzzkillers that he suffered from a
number of health problems and a physical what in many
parts of the book when you're quoting original sources is
referred to as a deformity, what we would now call
a disability.
Speaker 2 (08:20):
Of course, Yes, so when he was very small his
parents his parents owned and ran the major department store
in Gardner, Massachusetts, which is a small New England city,
and like many smaller New England cities at the time,
it was an industrial city.
Speaker 1 (08:32):
It made chairs.
Speaker 2 (08:34):
They ran the department store, so they were an affluent family.
They were one of the leading citizens. And one day,
when he was about seven years old, he was playing
with a friend of his and he fell off a
barn roof, and he broke his pelvis and he broke
his femur, and it was a compound fracture, so the
bone came through the skin. And this would have been
in about nineteen fifteen, nineteen sixteen, something like that, and
(08:54):
the hospitals weren't particularly good. They didn't have antibiotics back then,
and so the bone was set poorly, and he was
as you say that, many people called him deformed or crippled.
But his leg wouldn't work right. It jutted out at
a strange angle. And he developed something which I had
never heard of before writing this book, which was he
had tuberculosis of the hip. So the tuberculosis bacteria what
(09:17):
that was, I didn't either, But the tuberculosis bacteria can
colonize bones as well.
Speaker 1 (09:22):
Oh oh, okay.
Speaker 2 (09:23):
So he had tuberculosis of the hip from the time
he was about seven years old, and it didn't clear
up until after World War two.
Speaker 1 (09:30):
So this was a yeah, you said that until they
injected him with the new quote new penicillin after World
War two. It didn't heal.
Speaker 2 (09:38):
Up, yeah, exactly, And so he would spend his time
as a kid on crutches and he had I don't
want me to be gross, but an open seeping wound
at all times and occasionally would flare up. So yeah,
and he was, yes, visibly disabled, and he could not
take part in sports because the leg wouldn't work right,
and he was skinny. He was always fighting off infections,
(09:58):
and he because they didn't have antibiotics, he often would
get these very life threatening infections. When he was younger,
he had a lot of physical hardship, even though economically
and socially his family were in quite good shape.
Speaker 1 (10:10):
But then he goes off to Yale for college.
Speaker 2 (10:12):
He does. He goes to Yale for college, and he's
expected that he's going to go into the family business
and he is going to run the department store, but
his family has some concerns about this because of his
physical health. But while he's at Yale, turns out that
he's really smart and a couple of his professors spot
him as somebody who could actually go into academia. And
Pearson also gets really excited when he's working on a
(10:34):
senior project about Nathaniel Hawthorne. So when he's a senior,
he writes his mom a letter and he's like, Mom,
I know that I said I was going to go
into the family business, but I just really want to
be a professor, and so I'd like to do this.
He manages to land himself a fellowship at Oxford. Now
this wasn't a Rhodes scholarship or anything, but it did
pay for two years at Oxford. So he went over
there and he didn't have to pay for it, so
(10:55):
it was on the fellowship's dime and studied and as
you know better than anyone else, was Professor Buzzkill. At Oxford,
you work individually with tutors professors, and his tutor, oddly enough,
was C. S. Lewis, who would later go on to
write the Narnia series. This was before C. S. Lewis
had written any of these books, and C. S. Lewis
was a crotchety, stuffy britt who absolutely detested Americans and
(11:19):
hated any modern literature. So Pearson had a real tough
time with him.
Speaker 1 (11:24):
Now, ordinarily I'd say, okay, now he's sort of on
an academic trajectory. He's going to finish up at Yale.
He'll probably go on for a doctorate or something like that.
Even though doctors weren't as necessary back in those days,
as they are now to become a professor. But then
the war intervenes, and it's surprising to me that this person,
(11:45):
granted he's going, he goes into intelligence, but still having
this disability. It's sort of surprising to me that he
snapped up by the OSS when there are other in theory,
hail and hardy people they could have chosen. Were they
going for his brain?
Speaker 2 (11:59):
Yeah, it was very interesting because, as you say, he's
a grad, he's doing his ordinary graduate student stuff throughout
the thirties, and he's trying to write his dissertation, and
he is and we may talk about this later, but
he was a kind of obsessive networker and collector of
people and contacts. So he spends a lot of his
time in the thirties like meeting everybody in the literature
field and all these famous writers as a way of
(12:21):
making connections for his future career. So the war breaks
out and he, as you say, he was disabled, he
was not eligible to serve in the armed services, and
he figured that he was going to spend the war
teaching freshman comp to the various people who also couldn't serve,
who are going to Yale, and Yale itself had turned
into kind of a military outpost and became the barracks
for the Army Air Corps, and he figured he was
(12:41):
going to do that, and he was disappointed because he
was really pro American. He had become very very pro
British during the nineteen thirties at a time which, as
I'm sure you've talked about in previous shows, at a
time when there was a very strong strain of isolationism
in the country and a great deal of sympathy for
the Germans. And if you have had previous conversations here
on their show about the America First Movement, it actually
(13:04):
started at Aale University.
Speaker 1 (13:05):
Yeah, that's always been amazing.
Speaker 2 (13:06):
The America First Movement started Aale University and Pearson was
watching that, and Pearson by that time was very pro
British and he was outspoken against that and wanted the
US to get into the conflict earlier. So he was
disappointed he couldn't serve and he mucked about for Yale
for a couple of years and didn't know what he
was going to do and felt sorry for himself. But
then he got a call and they said, we'd like
(13:27):
to see you in Washington. I think we may have
a job for you. So he goes down to Washington
and they want him to serve in the Research and
Analysis branch of the OSS, which is exactly what it
sounds like. It's a bunch of tweety smart educated people
reading intercepts of communications and filing them and it's boring
work sitting in a chair. And in fact, they called it,
(13:50):
they jokingly called there was a lot of There was
a lot of Ivy League professors, there were a lot
of heavy, heavy brain power in this. They called it
the chair born division, which I always find that amazing.
Speaker 1 (14:00):
It's not airport.
Speaker 2 (14:01):
So yeah, he's there, he's doing his thing. He's not
really liking it, but he's doing his part to serve
the country. And then somebody comes up to him and says,
you know, I think that you have some talents. Even
though you're a cripple, which is the term that they used,
we think you've got some talents, and they tag him
and three or four other men to form the counter
(14:22):
intelligence branch of the OSS. OSS was the Civilian Intelligence Service,
so they were Its job was to analyze information and
try to figure out who's a spy and what's the
United States the army' is supposed to do when we
go over there. But at the time, and I'm sure
you've talked about this at some point in one of
your shows, the Brits had intercepted the German Enigma codes
(14:45):
and so the Brits knew everything the Germans were saying
and were intercepting all of their communications, and the Germans
didn't know that they were doing that. The Brits did
not want the Americans to have this information because they
thought the Americans would shoot their mouths off and let
the Germans know that the codes had been broken. So
the British would not share this information. The high ranking
(15:05):
people at the OSS, and it was run by a
man named General wild Bill Donovan. Donovan knew the British
had something, and they knew they wouldn't share it, so
he gets it in negotiations with the high ranking British intelligence
officers and he says, we know you have something, and
we really want to be able to share it so
we can contribute to this war effort. And they say,
the only way we will do this is if you
create a special dedicated branch of a civilian intelligence service,
(15:29):
not the military intelligence service. And only they can look
at this stuff. So that's when they created the OSS,
created a branch called it eventually was called X two,
and this was the counterintelligence and counter espionage branch of
the OSS. Pearson and three other men are flown over
in April of nineteen forty three to England to figure
(15:50):
out how to set this thing up. They set it up.
They're living in this strange little village and eating Brussels
sprouts and enjoying playing he's trying to learn how to
play cricket. And ironically it's the village where the playwright
George Bernard Shaw is living in his dotage, so they're
always trying to catch glimpses of George Bernard Shaw. So
they do end up setting up the OSS as an
X two counter intelligence service. It moves to London in
(16:13):
July of nineteen forty three and Pearson is put in
charge of it. So we have this little disabled tweety
Hawthorne scholar now in charge of seeing all of the
Enigma decrypts that the British Army is guarding so jealously
because they don't want us clumsy Americans to spill the
beans about it. And Pearson is the only one trusted
(16:35):
with this information.
Speaker 1 (16:36):
Now, is this where he starts to can't remember exactly,
but develop or maybe invent his index card system, his
note card system that he used for both information and
then use for people, which was then cross indexed fifty
million ways from Sunday and became the sort of I
don't know, mother load of information that the Allies fell
(16:59):
in love with. The Allied intelligence fell in love with.
Speaker 2 (17:02):
It was it was the British had an astounding database
and we would call it today a database, but right
then it was literally a card file of note cards.
They had a database on quite literally millions of people,
and they would cross index their contacts with each other
and all that and was the envy of everybody. And
so the Americans, with the Research and Intelligence Service that
(17:23):
Pearson had served with back in Washington d C was
trying to develop its own American version of this. Pearson
learns from that, and then he goes over to England
and then he's working with the masters of this who
actually have put this architecture together, and he says, I
really have to learn how to do this. So yes,
that's exactly when he institutes a British style we would
call it today almost a big data approach to counter espionage,
(17:47):
collect every last possible piece of data and information and
cross reference everything, and by doing that, patterns will show
up that we can see. And ultimately the goal was
the goal of count intelligence and the goal of counter
espionage is to figure out who in our territory is
spying for the enemy and how and what do we
do with them?
Speaker 1 (18:07):
And mainly what and in his case, in the case
of his media colleagues, how do we turn them? Yes,
how do we get them to be double agents? That
was you know, you read this part of the book
and you know, the heartbeat quickens. It's just fascinating thinking
that this guy, you know, who's been in a sort
of kind of enclosed world in Yale all this time,
(18:27):
is now going to be thinking about how to go
out and find German spies and turn them.
Speaker 2 (18:33):
Yeah, And this was an innovation of the Brits. Once
they had these Enigma decrypts, they identified every German spy
in Allied territory. And as I say in the book,
and as I'll remind people here in nineteen forty two,
Allied territory was basically Great Britain. The entirety of Europe
was either Nazi occupied or neutral, So Allied territory was
(18:54):
the British.
Speaker 1 (18:54):
Eyde and even Spain, which is technically neutral as fascist.
Speaker 2 (18:57):
So and they knew every German agent who was operating
in that territory. And so the question was what do
we do with him? And the traditional answer to that,
of course, is you find them.
Speaker 1 (19:07):
To kill him, right right, right, But.
Speaker 2 (19:08):
The British Intelligence Service we're experimenting with this new technique
of flipping them, turning them into unwilling double agents, and
so Pearson got deeply involved in that. And so yes,
he's finding these German agents in Britain. And then eventually,
because he's not really in charge of what's happening in Britain,
in the territories that the United States Army has liberated
from Nanci occupation, it's Pearson's job to identify German spies,
(19:33):
German stay behinds in that territory and figure out what
to do with them and how to turn them.
Speaker 1 (19:37):
Yeah, but you know, seeing him in his young life,
you could very quickly establish a stereotype of what could
be his trajectory. He's disabled, he's an ivy leaguer, he's
probably going to be a loaner, probably going to be
just a bookworm, etcetera, etcetera, etcetera. Yet in London and
then elsewhere he uses these personal connections that he's made constantly.
(19:58):
I don't know. I don't want to say social because
not necessarily the right word, but some of it is
socializing with all the right people in order to get
to all the right people exactly. He's incredibly outgoing in
that regard. It's just amazing.
Speaker 2 (20:10):
And that's one of the things that I tried to
do in this biography is give the reader a bit
of a sense of what kind of a person he was,
because he was, as you very accurately point out, he
was a socializer, and he socialized because he liked it,
but he also socialized instrumentally, like he wanted to get
things out of it. And my hypothesis is that this
(20:31):
was part of the product of being a young boy
who was sickly, who couldn't take part in sports, who
was smart, who wanted to socialize, and so he develops
this kind of adult maturity and ability to and I
don't mean manipulate people, but engage with people in a
(20:52):
way that makes them want to be around him, and
he learns that from a very young age, and so
reading his correspondence and one of the night things about
writing this biography was that Pearson was an obsessive collector
and kept everything. And so his archive, which is held
at the Binding Key Library Yale, has everything, including get
well cards from his third grade class, which is sort
(21:13):
of fun that you know, a third grade class back
in nineteen eighteen or whenever it was wrote get well
cards to their classmates, just as I did back in
the seventies. So some things don't change.
Speaker 1 (21:22):
But sometimes there's too much material and you think, oh, no,
I don't have to go through another box of his
mother's discard recipes.
Speaker 2 (21:29):
Oh yes, I have many experiences of that. But yes,
and so through. And as I said earlier, he does
this when he's a child to kind of substitute for
all the stuff he can't do as a teenager. He
does it when he becomes a graduate student as a
way to get a leg up in the profession. He
makes a point of making friends with important writers and
also important fellow academics who are going to be helpful
in his career. And then, as you say, during the war,
(21:51):
he used it as a way to ingratiate himself with
the British intelligence services. He was very clever because, as
I said, he'd been he'd done a couple of years
at Oxford, and so he was very smart person, and
so he knew what British intelligence agents liked. And British
intelligence agents tended to come from the upper crust. They
tended to be aristocrats, and they tended to disdain Americans,
(22:12):
and so Pearson knew how to suck up to them
in a way that didn't seem obsequious. But he never
seemed like he didn't know his place, and because of
that he was able to achieve things for the American
Intelligence Service and get himself embedded with the British Intelligence
Service in the way that a more all Americans sort
of type might not have been able to. The one
(22:32):
person who saw right through that, who knew what Pearson's
game was and didn't like it, was Kim Philby, the
famous British intelligence agent who was working for the Soviets
at the time. Because Kim Philby was equally good at that,
and a game recognizes game, as they say.
Speaker 1 (22:49):
Well, Pearson was Oxford and Philby was Cambridge, so there's
that too.
Speaker 2 (22:53):
But Pearson was middle class.
Speaker 1 (22:57):
But also you know when he goes into the occupied territories,
he is you know, he's and this is amazing to
It was amazing to listeners, especially when they read the book. Remember,
this is a man who has a non functioning hip,
really badly healed, broken femur, he doesn't walk very well.
But he is literally parachuted in Yes, it almost dropped
(23:20):
the book when I read those.
Speaker 2 (23:21):
Yes, And just to make this clear and vivid to
your listeners, eventually, to ameliorate the problems he was having
with his hip, the doctors literally fused the top of
the femur to the pelvis. So if you're sitting here
and you're trying to lift your leg up right from
the pelvis, he couldn't do that. It didn't move. Yeah,
(23:42):
so he is parachuted in the day after Norway is liberated,
he's parachuted in there. He's parachuted into Denmark because he
was always jealous of the people who were working for him,
who got to go work in the field, and he
always wanted to do that, and so eventually he was
able to do it. And yes, he was a very
physically careerous person and very physically especially for a man
(24:02):
with a very significant disability. He was very physically active.
He loved hiking to the degree he could do that.
He loved camping. He ended up making several trips, very
sort of roughing at trips to places like Greenland and
northern Quebec and the Arctic. He was very physically vital
and that was important to him.
Speaker 1 (24:22):
And by the way, while he's in occupied territory, or
i should say while he's in liberated territory, he uses
a lot of these same skills. I mean he's not
able to haul his cabinets and candidates of index cards
with him, but he's able to use the social skills
and other skills to try to turn people and get
people on the allied side as well.
Speaker 2 (24:39):
Yeah, one of my favorite stories comes from before the
liberation where soon after he was setting up the office
in London, they said, we need to have a branch
office in Madrid. Right, because as you said before, Madrid
was technically neutral, but it was run by fascist Frank
was a fascist, and it was, if not formally allied
with the Nazis, it was definitely sympathetic and lean towards
(25:00):
the Nazis, but it was a place. Madrid was a
place that was a kind of marketplace of secrets, and
so a lot of spies from all of the nations
operated there, just trying to get information for each other.
And so there's a funny story that Pearson liked to tell.
Soon after he was sent there to open the OSS's
Iberian office in Madrid, he was checked into and I
(25:20):
forget the name of the hotel. It was one of
the nice hotels in Madrid at the time, one of
the better hotels in Madrid, And as a joke, the hotelier,
the hotel keeper put him in a room that was
directly across from the room in which the head of
Nazi counterintelligence was staying. And the two they, of course,
they couldn't do anything to each other. They were on
(25:42):
neutral territory. They weren't going to do that. And Pearson
just said hello, hello, hair whoever it was, and he
would say, you know, Guden Togg. Pearson and his daughters
asked him he came home. So then at one point
he goes home for a little bit of R and
R and he's meeting he's talking with a stepdaughter and
telling him this story. And they were like, Pop, why
(26:03):
didn't you Why didn't you kill him? Why didn't you
shoot him? And he's like, no, we knew him. He's
a man we could work with. If I killed him,
they probably bring in someone even worse. So we knew
what he was doing because we intercepted all this communications.
I knew everything about it.
Speaker 1 (26:18):
Yeah, exactly, better to let him well in that case,
better live and let live. But then after the war,
after he's back, you know, you think, okay, he might
want to just say, okay, because he is so committed
to literature, so committed to Hawthorne and everything else. Great,
I get to go back to Yale. I can resume
my studies and then become a professor. YadA, YadA, YadA.
(26:39):
But they're all these competing well, if not demands, certainly
requests for him to do all this stuff. On the side.
Speaker 2 (26:46):
Yes, and he really did want to go back and
be an academic. He was, as I've said before, he
really did feel that he had a even more than
most Americans. He had a special obligation to serve the
country because of coming from this New England Puritan heritage,
and they felt this extraordinary sense of civic responsibility, but
he also wanted to be a professor. So he comes
(27:07):
back and he's like, Oh, I'm so excited. I can
go back to my career. But they dismantle the OSS
in nineteen forty six and they wind it down, but
very quickly the United States starts realizing it's in a
Cold war and needs civilian intelligence service. There is some
hostility to that again from isolationists, particularly Republicans in Congress,
(27:27):
who feel that it's going to be a kind of
big brother situation that's anachronistic. There was nineteen eight four
and written yet, but you get the idea. But they
ended up in nineteen forty seven setting up the Central
Intelligence Agency as a civilian intelligence agent, and they asked
Pearson to be the director of counterintelligence and he turned
him down. He turned him down. He wanted to be Yale.
He wanted to live this life that he had dreamt
(27:47):
of for himself. But he kept his hand in. And
this is one of the interesting things about him because
when he came back to Yale, he had taught there
for a number of years before, and he was a
very popular professor. He was a very theatrical person, and
his disability had given him a kind of sympathy and
empathy that I think a lot of the very nostodgy
professors at Yale lacked, and so a lot of the
(28:08):
young men at Yale. And again, as your listeners probably know,
Yale was all male until nineteen seventy one, I believe
it was. So these young men really liked Pearson, especially
if they were kind of like troubled or wandering. He
was a compassionate and sympathetic person. So he gets a reputation.
He's already kind of known, but he gets a reputation
as somebody. They know he'd been in the spy services.
We couldn't talk about it. So he was the very mysterious,
(28:31):
crippled professor who had some sort of spy thing about him,
but nobody knew what it was. And so he was
very notorious, and he loved that. He just enjoyed that
people were always cost something about him. But in reality,
he was working for the CIA. He wasn't going on
missions for them, but he was their primary recruiter at
Yale University. And for your readers that know something about
(28:53):
the early history of the CIA, its staff was populated,
not exclusively, but heavily by young Ivy League men, very
very much had a reputation as a bunch of intellectuals
from the Ivy League, And oddly enough, for those of
us who grew up in the Cold War like you
and me, it had a reputation of being full of lefties.
That's right, but Pinko's The CIA was full of Pinkos,
(29:15):
which was a music to those of us grew up
in the Reagan era. But Pearson was the primary recruiter
at Yale for the CIA, and he would spot promising
young men who he thought could do it, and he
had there was a there was a dead drop mailbox
in Washington, and he would send a letter there and
they would get this person's name, and then the CIA
(29:36):
contact would get in touch with that person, and many
of them ended up serving, including and some of your
writers may be familiar with the famed travel writer Peter Matheson,
who was also one of the founders of the Paris Review.
He was one of the people that Pearson brought into
the CIA.
Speaker 1 (29:51):
Well, now, the other thing he does is help create,
or very a very minimum, one of the founders of
some thing called what becomes officially American Studies. As I
was reading about how that was developed. I came up
to chapter eleven and buzz Killers. This is an Indiana
Jones moment for something for someone like me and someone
(30:14):
like doctor Barneheisel. I'm going to start this story off,
and you're going to finish it, okay. Professor Barnheisel, as
he's looking through the archives, runs across some copies of
some midterm exams of Pearson's from nineteen fifteen nineteen fifty one,
and one of the questions is describe and compare the
final dinner parties of the Age of Innocence and The
(30:35):
Lost Lady, two important novels in terms of the symbolic
value of each to the novel in which it appears.
So these things are in his collection, and like you said,
he saved everything, So we saved all his old exam originals.
But then there's something on the back that's just fascinating.
Speaker 2 (30:55):
So this was my favorite find in his archive, because,
as you would imagine, with the man who's a pack
rat and who taught at Yale for thirty five to
forty years, there's a lot of old exams and a
lot of old teaching files. And I got an office
full of teaching files, and I can his teaching files
are much more voluminous than mine. But because I'm a
(31:16):
good and dutiful researcher, I look through everything. And as
I'm looking through this, and I flip over this one
exam it's midterm exam. That's that was on Edith Wharton novels.
I see on the back this memo and it's written
to somebody named mister Jackson. And it's a memo about
if one wanted to recruit into the intelligence services, here's
(31:36):
what one might do. And it's all in the conditional tense.
It's all the plausible deniability of like, if perhaps one
wanted to recruit a bunch of Yalemen into CIA, here's
the kind of things we would look for, and here's
how we would go about it, so that nobody would
know what we were doing. Again, entirely theoretical, but of
(31:56):
course he was doing precisely that at the time. And
then ye, far as I understand, this memo was circulated
among and several of his colleagues from the OSS who
were also had studied with him as graduate students at
Yale had ended up being professors at other universities places
You know likely and Wesleyan and all that, and this
memo gets circulated to them, and you can almost imagine
(32:18):
with a sort of like nudge nudge, if you might
want to do this, here's how you might go about it.
Speaker 1 (32:24):
But as you say also in the book, he was
very careful about technically keeping it all quiet, and there
aren't a lot of personal papers or diaries where he says, well, gee,
this is you know, I'm helping start up the CIA counterintelligence.
So this is what I'm doing. This is what I
did today. So it's kind of funny that these midterm
exams with the spy stuff on the back. I presume
(32:47):
that was handwritten right on the back.
Speaker 2 (32:49):
No, it was typed.
Speaker 1 (32:49):
It was typed. Oh wow. So but but you would think,
if I'm gonna throw some old midterm exams away, those
should be the ones I should throw away because they've
got actual secrets on them.
Speaker 2 (32:59):
So he died in nic seventy five height to the
Cold War, nothing's been declassified yet, and donated all of
his papers to the Binding Kid Library Yale. For those
of you or those of your listeners who don't know,
the Bindingkeeed Libraryale is really one of the great rare
book and archive libraries in the world in fact, And
I don't know if we'll get a chance to talk
about this later, but Pearson, you did mention earlier his
(33:19):
book collections, but he donated it in up becoming the
core of some of the most important collections. So he
donated all of his stuff to Yale, and certainly the
CIA scrubbed it. Certainly the CIA went through every and
he was a smart person. He would not have kept
anything in his possession that would have been in any
way compromising. And so when you're reading just a step
(33:40):
back a little bit during the war, his correspondence of
course is censored. But he was cagey enough that he
knew what he couldn't put into his to his letters home,
and you know, he can never identify what he's doing
or names of people or places that he's going, and
perhaps it comes out later. So I mean, he knows
better than to put this kind of stuff down in writing.
And then whatever he might have had and have kept
(34:01):
when CIA, because when the collection was donated to Yale,
CIA had scrubbed it because they didn't want any the
stuff to get out. So the only thing that I
can imagine is that he wanted people to see that.
I don't think this was inadvertent. I think this was
a I want to make sure you know what I
did sort of bread crumb. There's no way somebody that
(34:24):
careful and that meticulous leaves that document in there not
wanting people to see it.
Speaker 1 (34:29):
Well, as I say, it must have been Indian John's
worm for you. So I was very, very, very jealous.
But let's round up the show by talking then about
how he helps develop this field of American studies.
Speaker 2 (34:42):
American studies, and maybe some of your listeners to classes
in American studies or perhaps at a major in American studies.
But American studies was an academic field that came about.
It really was born in the nineteen thirties for people
who wanted to think about the American experience, that the
United States had a civilization that was worth thinking in
tipalking about as a civilization separate from Britain or Europe.
(35:03):
And it wasn't just the junior member of the Western
Nations Club. And so there was a lot of self
justification of like, here's why we have a culture that's
worth studying. And so in the nineteen thirties and nineteen forties.
That's really what people who were involved in American studies
were doing. And Pearson was one of the first people
in the country to receive a PhD in American studies
(35:25):
at Yale. It was called at that time History Art Literature.
It was not called American Studies. Would only receive that
name later, but he was one of the first people
in the world to receive a PhD in this, which
was tough for him because there were no jobs in it.
So that's what a divisor said when he said, I
want to get my PhD in this and as advisor said,
you got two strikes against you. Love, there's no jobs
in this and you are and this was the term
(35:47):
he used, defective and they referring to his disability.
Speaker 1 (35:50):
Yeah physically. Yeah, it's amazing that the words were that
were used.
Speaker 2 (35:54):
But then after the war, American studies stops becoming a
kind of like justification of like, here's why we're a
country that's worthy of studying, and it becomes more of
a here's a way we could train Americans in thinking
about this nation and what our mission is in the world,
especially at a Cold War context. So American studies, particularly
at Yale University becomes very much allied with the United
(36:19):
States Cold War, the Cold War project of confronting the Soviets,
of defending freedom, free enterprise, all of these terms that
I try to unpack a little bit in the book.
And there's a number of schools that have American studies
and American civilization programs at this time, Minnesota and Penn
and Harvard, places like that. But Yale gets a ton
(36:39):
of money from a very conservative businessman named William Robertson
Coe who says, I can give you this very large
bequest with a half a million dollars, which is which
is that's stock in real money in nineteen forty seven.
And I want this program not just to be a
bunch of egghead studying America, but for training people to
advocate for the value use of freedom and free enterprise
(37:02):
in a Cold war context. And so Yale says, thank you,
mister Cole, thank you for that donation.
Speaker 1 (37:07):
We're on it now. How closely do they stick to that,
because you talk as as these chapters go on, you
talk about, you know, of course, the original definite, one
of the original definitions of culture. Matthew Arnold's The Best
of the things that have been thought and said and
painted and everything else, and then going on to Franz
Boas and the cultural anthropology and things like that. How
did Yale deal with things like that donation and not
(37:30):
wanting to be dictated to by a rich donator. Now, granted,
a lot of these people believe a lot of these
concepts already, but they don't want to turn into Hillsdale College.
Speaker 2 (37:40):
No, And that was exactly the type ripe that they
had to walk, because, as you say, most of them
agreed with it. There's a stereotype that maybe has some
truth to it that today academia is populated by a
bunch of screaming lefty commies.
Speaker 1 (37:54):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (37:54):
I wouldn't say it's that there's no truth to that,
but it sure wasn't true in the fifties and particular
a place like Yale. These were conservative Republican men all entirely,
and they believed these things, so they didn't have to
be convinced. What they didn't like, as you said, is
being dictated to by some yehoo billionaire, well millionaire at
the time, So they really did have to walk this
(38:16):
tightrope of yes, we all agree on these fundamental principles.
But we're only going to do up to this point,
and we are going to train people and lead them
to the conclusion that free enterprise is good and collectivism
is terrible, but we're not going to actually make them
say that. And then the donor co would often say, well,
then you can't have all the money. And just as
(38:37):
a side note, when Yale refused to give him right
of approval over faculty hiring and firing, Yale would not
do that, he said, Okay, I'm taking up my money
and I'm going elsewhere, and he ended up giving even
more money to the University of Wyoming, where he did
found the American Studies program there and did maintain that authority.
Speaker 1 (38:55):
Yeah, and it's amazing that all you know, again, there's
this stream of sort of accepted to them, accepted realities
that capitalism is a good thing, American capitalism is a
good thing, or at least the best of all the
available things. And then American culture is a good thing.
And then even people within Yale were complaining that they
weren't doing it enough or weren't doing it well enough.
(39:17):
So William F. Buckley then turns on Yale in God
and Men at Yale and starts complaining, I think, well,
you know, that's the wrong place to turn.
Speaker 2 (39:26):
Yeah, he specifically names the American Studies. But that's weird,
something that doesn't deliver on what it promised to do.
Speaker 1 (39:32):
And it's well anyway, it's just weird. There are a
thousand things wrong with that book. We should do a
show just on that. And it was very, very baleful
in its influence on American history.
Speaker 2 (39:43):
Well, and just as a side note, Pearson, who knew everybody,
of course, had a brief run in with Buckley while
Buckley was an undergraduate of Yale and Buckley and he
was the editor of the Yale Daily News, which is
which the very important big man on campus kind of position,
and wrote an editorial Buckley did criticizing Lafayette College because
Lafayette College in Pennsylvania would not accept a donation from
(40:04):
someone who says, I want this money to go to
scholarships but not to negro their Jews. And Lafayette College said, Okay,
we don't want your money, and Buckley says, well, Yale
should jump on that, and Pearson writes a letter to
the editor the Yale Daily News saying like this is
a terrible opinion I did. This is absolutely not what
a Yale person should think, and so they get it
(40:24):
a little conturetante about that, but that was really their
only direct run in. Buckley ends up writing one of you.
Buckley was sort of a graphemaniac, and he wrote a
ton of stuff, and he wrote a novel called spy Time.
Some of your readers may know his novel Spy Time,
in which Norman Holmes Pearson is a character.
Speaker 1 (40:40):
Well, then, how if we take this trajectory of American
studies being built up at Yale and in other places,
But Yale is sort of the most important or the
summit of the mountain, how you want to describe it,
and Pearson has a great deal of influence in how
it is constructed. How does the Puritanism fit in? And
maybe how have ideas about what Puritanism is changed by
(41:03):
that stage?
Speaker 2 (41:04):
Before I answer that, which is a really good question
to conclude on, But before I answer that, I just
want to point out to your listeners that American studies
isn't in the fifties just something in American students take
Pearson ends up exporting it. So one of his jobs
in the nineteen sixties, he gets hired by the Department
of State to go abroad and help foreign universities, particularly
(41:28):
in Japan and Taiwan and South Korea and Australia set
up American studies programs.
Speaker 1 (41:34):
Yeah, there's even a picture of him at one of
these Japanese universities.
Speaker 2 (41:37):
Yeah, as a way a to train foreign students who
are curious about American culture and about an American civilization.
But as we know, the American studies pedagogy at this
point was all about how American values were really the
values that the world should be following. So Pierson is
deeply involved in that. But to return to the Puritan idea,
as I mentioned, as we started out with, the stereotypical
(41:59):
view appearance is very negative. We think of them as
just these kind of like prudish hill Joy religious fanatics,
And that was very much the opinion of the general
public and even of intellectuals and historians well into the
early part of the twentieth century, and Peterson's favorite writer,
Nathaniel Hawker, had a lot to do with that. They
don't come across so great in the Scarlet Letter's you see,
(42:21):
pretty hypocritical in their morality, but Pearson tries to rewrite
the story of the Puritans and explain that, yes, they
were all of this, but what they were is actually
sort of searchingly self critical. And there what we think
of is this really simplistic, condemnatory Calvinist theology. It's actually
(42:44):
an incredibly intricate intellectual system that we may not like
the conclusions that draw it, that it comes to, but
it has to be respected for its architectonics. Pearson believes.
Pearson is not a Puritan. He's definitely not a Puritan
and not really a believer. He respects them greatly in
a way that most historians and intellectuals didn't, and so
(43:05):
he tries to bring them back in as a kind
of positive force as people who were we almost might
think of them, in his view, almost as new age
spiritual seekers, like they were really searching for the divine.
They were searching for what was pure and true in
the world, and they did it through this Calvinist theology,
which was very unforgiving, and it led them, through its
relentless logic, to these conclusions that we really don't like,
(43:27):
such as predestination and all of that. But Pearson says,
you know, you gotta respect that they meant it and
they walk the walk. Now, I will say that Pearson
was of the many things he did and was well
respected for, he was never a hugely influential or well
respected scholar or theoretician. And so a lot of the
(43:49):
American studies scholars and historians who knew a lot more
about it or dismissed Pearson's ideas. The scholars who were
much more serious and were professional scholars of the Puritans
dismiss Pearson and someone didn't know what he was talking about.
But Pearson had a power that he was one of
the one of the leaders of the American studies field.
(44:10):
And so even though he wasn't as influential as a scholar,
because as a teacher and an administrator, as someone who
was setting policy for academic fields, he could get his
ideas in there just as well as the other people could.
Speaker 1 (44:22):
Yes, and you call that in the book. You say
he's an institutional man in the time of institutional man.
Speaker 2 (44:28):
Yes. And one of the books that people often think
really embodies the nineteen fifties is a book called The
Organization Man, and the Organization Man is that basically makes
the argument that in the nineteen fifties, Americans had lost
their individuality, their individualism, and their individual drive, and we
(44:49):
all just wanted to be part of the big collective,
which was business.
Speaker 1 (44:53):
Right right.
Speaker 2 (44:54):
You think about mad men, right, that's what the organization
man is criticizing. Body just wants to be part of
the big you know, the man in the grave final suit.
And Pearson he was never that. He was never an
organization man, but he was a man who believed in
the value and the importance of institutions in creating America,
(45:17):
and that we had to believe in these institutions, whether
they be Byale University, the United States government, the United
States military, the business community, the congregational church, whatever it was,
that we had to subsue our individualism to these institutions
because ultimately they were working for the better, for the
in the best interests of all of us. This is
(45:37):
really one of my thesis in the book is this
was a widespread belief and ethos of the American nineteen
fifties and nineteen sixties until and I think it's cliche
to say that Vietnam did this, but when Vietnam was
such a disaster and all of these institutions had told
us that this was the right thing to do, and
they were so deeply wrong that we lost our faith
(45:59):
in these institutions and we became this and we see
this sort of the cynicism and disillusionment of the nineteen
sixties and the nineteen seventy.
Speaker 1 (46:07):
Well, that's a great way to wrap up the show.
And Buzzkillers, please trust me on this. There is so
much more in the book than we've talked about. The
war stuff is not only interesting, the Cold War stuff
is interesting, but also his influence as mentoring of a
great number of American literary figures is so so important.
So please go to professor Buzzkill dot com. Do everything
(46:29):
you need to do there, get the book. It's on
the Buzzkill bookshelf ready for you to snag, and it
is out today. Today is the release day. And so
I just want to say thank you professor for coming
on the show.
Speaker 2 (46:40):
Thank you, Professor Buzzkill. It was an enormous pleasure.
Speaker 1 (46:42):
As always, Buzzkill is out there. We will talk to
all of you next week.
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