Norman Holmes Pearson, who in the middle years of the twentieth century was a professor of English and American Studies at Yale University, is now a largely forgotten figure — and someone who was never that well known during his lifetime. But Duquesne University professor Greg Barnhisel, in his intriguing new biography of Pearson, sees him as a critical figure in several important areas of American life and culture. Code Name Puritan: Norman Holmes Pearson at the Nexus of Poetry, Espionage, and American Power, demonstrates how Pearson was an important force in legitimizing American modernism (particularly in literature) as a significant cultural enterprise and subject of academic study. During World War II, Pearson was a prominent agent working for the Office of Strategic Services (the predecessor of the Central Intelligence Agency) as head of Anglo-British counterintelligence operations. And Pearson also was a key player in establishing American Studies as an academic discipline and helping to promulgate its study overseas as part of a larger effort to promote American interests abroad during the Cold War.
In this podcast discussion, Barnhisel discusses how Pearson’s physical disability — what was then called a defect or deformity — may have given him greater receptivity toward the cultural dissidents of the modernist movement, certainly compared to other members of his Puritan-descended WASP class. Barnhisel focuses on Pearson’s close relationships with authors including W. H. Auden and especially H.D., one of the handful of women poets who were important in pre-World War I avant-garde circles and who has come to be recognized as a central figure in the history of modernist literature.
Pearson forged a relationship with H.D. and her partner, the English novelist Bryher, when he was stationed in London during World War II as head of the X-2 counterintelligence agency. Barnhisel analyzes what made humanist academics like Pearson effective as intelligence agents and how their influence carried over to academia after the war. Barnhisel also discusses the creation of the American Studies discipline, its relationship to the Cold War, and how Pearson’s view of the importance of institutions would become increasingly marginalized within the discipline as it moved leftward following the 1960s. Ultimately, Barnhisel feels that Pearson’s experiences and consideration of his Puritan background marked him as a man of the Vital Center: “As a neo-Puritan, Pearson felt that the stability and meaning provided by institutions had to be balanced with the dynamism and fertility of the creative individual mind. He was wary of the conformity that an organization-dominated society engendered.”
Transcript
Greg Barnhisel: One of the ways that Pearson made himself comfortable in the world as a small, physically weak, and often sickly boy was to join institutions and become part of institutions — and therefore take on some of their cultural capital.
Geoff Kabaservice: Hello! I’m Geoff Kabaservice for the Niskanen Center. Welcome to the Vital Center Podcast, where we try to sort through the problems of the muddled, moderate majority of Americans, drawing upon history, biography, and current events. I’m delighted to be joined today by Greg Barnhisel. He is a professor of English at Duquesne University in Pittsburgh and is the author of several books on literary modernism and the Cold War. And he is most recently the author of a terrific new biography published this summer by the University of Chicago Press entitled Code Name Puritan: Norman Holmes Pearson at the Nexus of Poetry, Espionage, and American Power. Welcome, Greg!
Greg Barnhisel: Thanks, Geoff. It’s a pleasure to be here.
Geoff Kabaservice: It’s a pleasure to have you here. Congratulations again on Code Name Puritan. I’m not perhaps the most objective reader of your book since the subjects that you’re interested in are to an unhealthy degree so very closely aligned with my own. But I think there’s a wide audience of non-Cold War- and non-Yale-obsessed readers who would greatly enjoy your book.
Greg Barnhisel: I’m glad to hear that. I do know that we share many interests because your book, The Guardians, was one of the books that had more of an influence on this than any other.
Geoff Kabaservice: Well, thanks. So let me set this up… Norman Holmes Pearson, who’s the subject of your biography, was a professor of English and American Studies at Yale University. He spent virtually his entire professional life and nearly all of his adult life at Yale. He matriculated at the college in 1928. He earned his undergraduate degree in 1932, his Ph.D. degree from Yale in 1941, and taught at Yale from then until his death in 1975 at age 66. He did of course spend time away from New Haven during World War II, for reasons that we’ll discuss.
He was an extraordinarily popular teacher and lecturer at Yale, but not well known outside of it. As you note, he wrote no enduring scholarly studies and didn’t receive even the usual posthumous academic honorific of having a room in the library named for him. In a series of several hundred oral history interviews that I did back in the 1990s with people who had been students, faculty, and administrators at Yale during the ‘50s and ‘60s, his name rarely came up.
In fact, as I think I told you, the only time I can remember Norman Holmes Pearson coming up in one of those interviews was when the Yale sociologist Leonard Doob told me about the time in the 1960s when he was doing fieldwork in the Tyrol in Northern Italy. He visited the castle where the American poet Ezra Pound was living in exile and disgrace after having been put on trial for his treasonous actions during World War II; this was after his eventual discharge from St. Elizabeth’s Psychiatric Hospital in Washington. Pound’s daughter, who was suspicious of American academics who had come to raid her father’s archives, asked Doob if he knew a Professor Pearson at Yale. He replied that he did, thinking that she was referring to the history professor George Wilson Pierson. Actually, it was this mix-up that convinced Pound that he was for real, Pound having had extensive dealings with Norman Holmes Pearson in the pre-war era.
In any case, I’m personally very fond of the genre of academic studies, academic memoirs, biographies of academics — but it’s a comparatively small subfield. And Norman Holmes Pearson would seem to be one of the less likely candidates for a study of this depth and detail. So can you tell me what interested you about Pearson to the extent of dedicating years of your life to researching and writing this study of him?
Greg Barnhisel: Well, I’ll just start by saying that as I tried to sell this book and get agents and editors interested in it, I got much the same response. In the introduction to the book, I tell the story of when I was interviewing Alan Trachtenberg, the very eminent American Studies professor at Yale, about his memories of Pearson. He said, “Why would you want to write a book about that guy?” So I did hear that from quite a few people, and I was fortunate that the University of Chicago Press was interested enough in doing this. But I had my doubts for quite a while, over the course of actually performing the work of this project, as to whether or not it was worth doing.
What got me interested in it was that Pearson had hidden in the margins or in the background of both of my two previous monographs. The first one actually was on Ezra Pound, and in the course of research for that, I also went to the castle and met his daughter Mary. But Pearson, yes, he sculked around the background of that book. Then in the second book that I wrote, which is about the use of modernist art in American cultural diplomacy during the Cold War, Pearson comes in and out as well of that book, for reasons that we’ll talk about later. So I just got very interested in him.
I was also interested in the number of academics, particularly from the humanities (and especially from literary studies) in the 1950s and 1960s, who had rather improbably involved themselves in the American Cold War, either cultural diplomacy or actual Cold War espionage. I’d heard some stories about that from my older professors, who had suggested, “Oh, so-and-so was in CIA, and you should look into this.” But I knew that Pearson had actually been an intelligence agent as well as an American Studies professor and literature professor. So he seemed worth looking into.
The question I had was how did they see these two streams of their lives intersecting: the defense of America and the advocacy of America during the Cold War, and their study of literature? This also led me to really consider the approach to literary study that was so very dominant in the 1950s and 1960s, which is called the New Criticism. It was a heavily textual-based way of looking at literature, telling people you shouldn’t pay attention to politics, to the history of the book, to the author’s biography. As many people have observed, there’s a great deal of overlap between New Critical methods and espionage methods. We see this particularly in the person of James Angleton, about whom we may speak later.
But it really was seeing this person come in and out of these other stories I had researched, and just wondering, “Is there more to this guy?” And then poking into it and eventually deciding that I was going to commit — which really did end up being about nine years of my life to researching him.
Geoff Kabaservice: So you point out that Norman Holmes Pearson was somebody who had a real, important behind-the-scenes impact on how Americans came to perceive the literary modernist canon, partly through putting together anthologies that then were adopted by university courses. I was actually reminded in that sense of A. Scott Berg’s 1978 biography of Maxwell Perkins, who was another one of these behind-the-scenes persons who had a big impact on American literary life in his role as an editor at Charles Scribner’s Sons, where he basically discovered authors like Ernest Hemingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald, and Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings.
In a different way, I was also reminded of Alvin Kernan’s memoir from, I think, 2000, called In Plato’s Cave, which was about his experiences as a professor at Yale and Princeton and his work in establishing the Comparative Literature major at Yale in the early 1970s. Can you tell me something about Norman Holmes Pearson as a person in terms of his origin, personality, his distinguishing characteristics?
Greg Barnhisel: Well, we’ll talk about how he appeared to people initially. He looked like precisely what he was: he looked like a Yale literature professor. He was a small, thin man with a little mustache. He wore nicely tailored suits, but he also had a significant and quite visible disability.
When he was a small boy, he had fallen off a barn roof in his hometown of Gardner, Massachusetts, where his parents ran the local department store. Gardner was a thriving industrial town at the time — made chairs primarily; the Heywood Wakefield plant was there. They ran the town’s department store and they were among the leading citizens of the town. When Pearson was about seven years old, he fell off a barn roof and suffered a broken femur and a broken pelvis that was also a compound fracture. Medical care wasn’t particularly great in — this would have been about 1915, 1916. So when he was sent to the hospital, the bone was set poorly and his hip never healed correctly. But more seriously, he developed, at that initial hospital stay, tuberculosis of the hip; the tubercular bacteria had colonized his hip. So for the next thirty years of his life, he had an open sore and a tuberculosis infection on his hip.
As he grew up, he grew up lopsided. His leg did not develop correctly, and so he was a kind of bent-over man. He eventually developed a pretty severe hunchback. So he was visibly disabled and limped around over the course of his life and his youth. The infection would come and go; it would get much more serious at times, and he was at risk of dying several times. At other times, he could participate in life pretty much as the other boys and girls did. So he was a very distinctive-looking man.
In terms of his background, he was very proud of the fact that he came from old Puritan stock, the Pearson family. He was descended from a number of important and well-known early New England families. The Pearsons had come to the North Shore of New England, the North Shore of Massachusetts, in Rowley, in I believe it was 1639, and they had run the fulling mill there. He was also descended from the Holmes family (Oliver Wendell Holmes), the Kittridge family, and others. But he really considered himself a modern-day Puritan. His family, after they had left the North Shore, had moved up to Vermont and became farmers there. They eventually migrated down to Gardner, Massachusetts, which is in north-central Massachusetts. And he came from middle-class stock.
What I find particularly interesting about him — and this is the first biography I’ve written, so I had never really tried to get to know a person the way that I tried to get to know him through reading his correspondence and talking to people who knew him and all that — is that partially because of this early disability and this inability to be like a normal child participating in activities and sports and all that thing, he became a preternatural adult even when he was a prepubescent. So he had these uncanny social skills. He was very good at networking and cultivating people from the time he was a child. That became the way he navigated the world: to try to find people who could help him, to try to find networks of people that could help him get ahead, could help him achieve what he wanted to do, but also to help them achieve what they wanted to do. It’s my hypothesis that I’m arguing in this biography that this made him what he was able to become: successful, a bit under the radar, both as an academic, a cultural diplomat, and for a short period of time a spy-executive.
Geoff Kabaservice: Just in terms of his interest in literary modernism… Pearson’s disability would have been called a “deformity” back in that day. This made him both an insider and an outsider, I think. Do you suppose that that disability in any way made him more accepting, less judgmental than other members of his class, and that this in some way might have disposed him toward the role he played in the literary modernist world?
Greg Barnhisel: I think that’s absolutely true. That’s absolutely true. He was very much a member of a very privileged class. He was an affluent, Puritan-descended WASP in Massachusetts, but at the same time he was visibly disabled; as you say, the term they would also use was “defective.” They referred to him as defective. So he did have a great deal of sympathy for people who didn’t look like or didn’t act like or couldn’t be accepted by society. He gravitated towards those people, and he liked them.
He also was very comfortable with very mainstream people and people of his class. But yes, he ends up becoming quite close friends with many people who members of his class and, frankly, members of his peer group at Yale would have had nothing to do with: lesbians like Gertrude Stein, like H.D., like the writer Bryher, even as later on in the 1960s and 1970s, he became very close friends with Robert Duncan, who was a very out gay poet active in San Francisco.
He and W.H. Auden were very close friends, and those who would know much about Auden know that Auden was very out and very gay. There’s a well-known underground Auden poem called “The Platonic Blow,” which is a poem that is an ode to fellatio that he wrote specifically for Pearson — not because he was trying to get Pearson in bed, but he said, “If you and I are going to work together, I want you to know what kind of guy I am.” So he wrote the poem “The Platonic Blow” for Pearson, who loved it. Pearson also collected pornography, so that may have been sort of part of his kink as well.
Geoff Kabaservice: You’ve referred to Pearson’s Puritan heritage. Probably when most people think of the Puritans, H. L. Mencken’s quote comes to mind: that Puritanism is “The haunting fear that someone, somewhere, may be happy.” Of course it’s associated with prudery and narrow social intolerance and all the rest of it. But what were the more positive values that Pearson saw from his Puritan background?
Greg Barnhisel: Pearson, interestingly enough, came up at a time when Puritanism was very much on the outs. As you say, Mencken’s quote is fantastic. When Pearson was learning about Puritanism, it was in the ‘20s, and he was learning from people like Mencken who really looked down on it. Pearson, though, as he studied American culture and American literature while he was in graduate school at Yale, and also looking into his own heritage, saw in the Puritans something that few others had seen: this relentlessly self-critical drive for self-improvement, but also a questing for the true and the divine come what may, even if it brings you to very dark, dangerous places — which really mirrored what a lot of the modernist poets were doing.
Certainly, nobody could call Ezra Pound “Puritan.” Certainly nobody could call H.D. and Bryher Puritans. T. S. Eliot may have had some fascination with Puritans, but he was definitely a High Church Anglican, so you couldn’t have really called him a Puritan. But Pearson does see in what they are doing some interesting overlap with what the Puritans in America are doing. He writes about this a lot.
His academic specialty, the author that he really worked on the most, was Nathaniel Hawthorne. He knew Hawthorne’s work extremely well. And his life’s project, which he never actually completed, was a complete edition of all of Hawthorne’s correspondence. He left it incomplete at his death, and it was finally finished at some point in the early 1980s.
But Pearson saw these modernist writers as continuing the project of what Hawthorne was doing. I would say, as a person who specializes in modernism, that nobody really thinks that. This was a very heterodox idea about what the modernists were doing, and I don’t think the modernists would’ve seen it. Many of the modernists that he worked with, with the exception of William Carlos Williams, didn’t want to have much to do with the United States. They got out as quick as they could and they stayed away. But Pearson would say, “You’re actually doing what the Puritan Americans were doing.” He was able to convince H.D., who came from the Moravian tradition in Eastern Pennsylvania, that she was also a kind of Puritan.
So it was very interesting what he did with that. I will say that his very heterodox idea of what the Puritans were about didn’t receive much academic credence. People who were actually serious scholars of the Puritans, people like Perry Miller, who was a colleague of his, and a bit older, a bit more established — he was also one of the founders of American Studies — thought Pearson didn’t know what he was talking about when it came to the Puritans.
Geoff Kabaservice: I have for my own reasons been rereading sociologist E. Digby Baltzell’s classic 1979 study Puritan Boston and Quaker Philadelphia. And Baltzell, like Pearson, is actually a proponent of the kind of the Boston Puritanism that Pearson described. Baltzell’s conclusion, to somewhat simplify it, is that a normative culture like that of Puritan Boston, which stresses the desirability of hierarchy, authority, and leadership, will end up instilling in its members a far stronger desire and capacity to take the lead in both community-building and community reform than a normative culture like that of Quaker Philadelphia which emphasizes equality and brotherly love and explicitly rejects the need for hierarchy, class, and authority.
Greg Barnhisel: Yes, Baltzell… I can’t remember if it was you who turned me onto that — because sociology is not my field — or if somebody else did. He was very important in my thinking about Pearson, because although I don’t think he read Baltzell or would have known about Baltzell — in fact, he may have been dead before Baltzell was writing — but their ideas about that are similar. They rhyme. They’re not precisely the same. Pearson was less enamored of hierarchy for its own sake. But he definitely comes away with a lot of similar conclusions as Baltzell does.
So his work really helped me think through what Pearson drew from his Puritan heritage and the kinds of things he was talking about, because that is an entirely foreign tradition to me. My family doesn’t come from that. That wasn’t really a presence either in my upbringing or, frankly, in my education.
Geoff Kabaservice: So Pearson, in the classic upper-bourgeois, WASP tradition, went for his education to Phillips Academy in Andover and then to Yale University. There he became one of the early students in what was then known as History, the Arts, and Letters, which was a forerunner to American Studies. He did take that course, as you mentioned, with Ralph Gabriel and Professor Stanley Williams in the early 1930s. He also read English. You point out that American students, prior to 1940, didn’t typically read Nathaniel Hawthorne or many other American writers — who were thought to be imitative, I suppose, of the English models. You referenced the classic quote from 1820 from the Reverend…
Greg Barnhisel: Sydney Smith.
Geoff Kabaservice: …Sydney Smith, who was one of the founders of the Edinburgh Review. Sydney Smith said, “During the thirty or forty years of Americans’ independence, they have done absolutely nothing for the sciences, for the arts, for literature. In the four quarters of the globe, who reads an American book or goes to an American play or looks at an American picture or statue?” American scholars prior to the time when Pearson was at the university seemed to have internalized that critique and didn’t think much of the American tradition in literature or other areas.
Greg Barnhisel: That’s absolutely true. That is another one of the themes of the book. [Pearson] arrives at Yale just at the time that the study of American literature is becoming legitimized in academia. His English professor, who becomes really his mentor — Stanley Williams, who’s teaching in the Yale English Department — is really central to that acceptance of American literature as a legitimate subject of study in academia. Now, people obviously still read American literature. It wasn’t forgotten. People were reading Hawthorne all the time. We also had these professor-critics like Henry Seidel Canby, who was also teaching at Yale, and also William Lyon Phelps, who spoke not just in the academy and published in academic journals that were just starting at that point, but also spoke to wider publics. They talked about American literature.
But the structure we have for looking at American literature, professionally and almost philologically — that didn’t really exist until the 1920s. It was the work of people like Stanley Williams and Ralph Gabriel who started to bring that into being. Pearson arrives at Yale just as that’s happening. He’s watching that and learning from that and deciding that he wants to go into that.
When he arrived at Yale, the plan was that he was going to go into the family business. He’s not going to run the store, because they felt that it was too taxing for a person with his disability. His brother was eventually tapped to run the store, which he resented. But that was the plan. But then in his senior year, he worked on a project about Hawthorne’s college reading list — what he read when he was at Bowdoin — with Stanley Williams. And he just loved it and ended up finding some original texts and finding an actual lost Hawthorne story, getting a scholarly publication out of it when he was just an undergraduate. And he fell in love with it and decided that’s what he wanted to do with his life. So it comes from a genuine love of the act of scholarship and of finding things that no one had seen for many years — but also a desire to… not legitimize, but to really make a case for why American literature is important, is valuable in its own right, and is not merely a regional offshoot of the English tradition. His patriotism and his Puritan heritage really come into this and really drive him.
After he graduates from Yale, he takes a second bachelor’s degree at Oxford. He gets what he calls a minor scholarship: not a Rhodes scholarship, but a minor scholarship. He studies at Magdalen College and he’s assigned to… As those people who know about the Oxford system, he’s not taking classes per se. He’s assigned to a tutor and he reads and meets with the tutor. This tutor is C.S. Lewis. C.S. Lewis is not yet the author of the Narnia series. He is an academic and a specialist in Old English and Middle English literature. Lewis doesn’t like Americans, and he doesn’t like anything written after about 1600, so the two are not a great match. Pearson has to suffer through learning Anglo-Saxon and writing about Anglo-Saxon. All that does is strengthen his desire to get back and write about modern and American literature.
Geoff Kabaservice: Although I did like the detail that when he was a student at Magdalen College, he lived in Oscar Wilde’s old rooms.
Greg Barnhisel: He did. Actually, if you don’t mind a little anecdote, I was in England a few weeks ago this summer for a conference, so I went over to Oxford. I’d been at Oxford, but I’d never toured Magdalen College, which is absolutely beautiful. I asked the tour guides if I could go look at Oscar Wilde’s rooms, which are now turned into a conference room where local businesses can rent it, to have a little meeting there in Oscar Wilde’s room. So I did. I was able to convince the porter to let me up there and take some pictures.
I wanted to see the ghost, because Pearson said that in his last few weeks there they used to see Wilde’s ghost poking around and knocking around the room. But I didn’t see Wilde’s ghost. And the room didn’t look anything like it did when Pearson was there, because now it’s got a PowerPoint setup and all that.
Geoff Kabaservice: I’ve also spent a fair amount of time in the hotel in Paris where Wilde died, but I myself have never seen his ghost there either. So to rush fairly quickly through Pearson’s subsequent career, he returned to Yale for graduate school. While still a graduate student, he edited an anthology of American literature with poet and editor William Rose Benét, who was the brother of the well-known poet Stephen Vincent Benét. Through his work on the anthology, Pearson became acquainted with — and in some cases close, lifelong friends with — many of the modernist poets. Two of the most interesting examples of this latter category, the people he became really deeply involved with, are the poet H.D. and the patroness and impresario Bryher. Can you tell me about them?
Greg Barnhisel: They’re fairly well known in literary circles, but not as well known outside of them. Most people, when they think about American modernist poets, would think about T. S. Eliot and Ezra Pound and maybe William Carlos Williams. But H.D. — her birth name was Hilda Doolittle — as I said earlier, she came from a Pennsylvania-Moravian community. But she went over, like many of the “lost generation” did, to Paris in the ‘20s as part of that Bohemian scene and wrote poetry. And she also had been — as a younger woman, as a fifteen-year-old — part of this circle of writers around the University of Pennsylvania, right around the year 1915, that included Pound, Williams, herself, and Marianne Moore, who was a friend of hers from Bryn Mawr. H.D. was actually engaged to be married to Ezra Pound. That did fall apart, partly because she was fifteen at the time.
So eventually she goes over to Europe and becomes part of this coterie of Bohemian avant-garde poets who get roped into a group that Ezra Pound dubs “The Imagists” — H.D. is always associated with this group — who write very short, lapidary poems. That’s what she became known for by the public: a set of poems that she wrote in about 1916. And then she was forgotten.
But during the subsequent years, she continued to write poetry. She became lifelong partners with a woman named Bryher, who was an Englishwoman who was an impresario, as you said, an heiress to the second largest fortune in Britain at the time, a filmmaker, a novelist. The two of them lived this… Well, we might even call it a gender-queer relationship. Bryher didn’t identify as any gender, H.D. had relationships with men and with women, and they were pretty much the ultimate bohemians living in Paris and then London for a while.
Pearson finds a connection with them in the ‘30s when he’s editing this anthology with Benét, which is a very significant American literature anthology, really the first one to include a great deal of modernism. And they clicked. The two women are a generation older than him, but there’s something about their personalities that just clicked together. He becomes extremely close friends with them soon after that, during the war, while he… We’ll get into this, I assume, in a few minutes, but during the war when he is stationed in Britain, they are living in London during the Blitz. He visits them every week, brings them things from the PX that they can’t get, and becomes their kind of lifeline to the outside world.
Then for the rest of their lives, they are, as H.D.’s daughter called them, an intellectual ménage à trois. He became H.D.’s literary agent, editor, promotions manager, and eventually literary executor after she passes away. Then he stays very close friends with Bryher for the rest of his life. He predeceases her, but the two of them write each other daily letters across the Atlantic until his death.
Geoff Kabaservice: I think you said that the correspondence adds up to something like a million words.
Greg Barnhisel: It’s astonishing. I can’t swear that I read every last word of every last letter, let’s just say that. I will say to your listeners that almost all of it is available in the digital collections through the Beinecke Library that are freely accessible. So, if you want to spend the next several months reading the correspondence of Bryher and Norman Holmes Pearson, you’re in luck.
Geoff Kabaservice: I’m curious about your own interest in the field of literary modernism. Can you tell me about where you grew up, where you went to school, how you came by your scholarly focus?
Greg Barnhisel: As I think I mentioned earlier, I grew up in the West. My family are from Oregon. I’m about a fourth-generation Oregonian, so we’re very much focused on the West. I was always very interested in literature and poetry and novels and such as a child. I went to college in Portland, at a little college called Reed College, and decided that I wanted to study literature. Much like Pearson, I decided very quickly, “I want to study literature and I want to go into this profession.”
Modernism was not initially what I was interested in. This was in the late ‘80s when the dearly departed critical school of deconstruction was really holding sway. In that era, if you wanted to do deconstruction, you studied romantic literature. So I followed the trend and I was studying romantic literature. I went to New York University to get a master’s degree and wrote a thesis on Shelley. I thought I was going to go into that.
But then, because New York City is an expensive place to live, I needed to get a job while I was in school. I ended up working in trade publishing while I was going to school, which was an even more profound intellectual and personal influence than my studies at NYU. Because while I was there, I started learning about how books are made, how books reach their publics, how books operate in the world. Deconstruction had nothing to say about that. But I was really interested in how books operated in the world.
At the same time, I started to become very interested in twentieth-century history and twentieth-century literature. So the intellectual questions that started to really fascinate me when I eventually went down to the University of Texas to do my doctorate were: How is this avant-garde, confusing, difficult, and often quite politically unsavory literature — how is it operating in the world? How are people making sense of it? What political and social work does it do? How does it gain prestige? How do the actual mechanisms of publishing, publicity, the law, copyright, universities — how do they affect the way we understand this and how this kind of literature has obtained the prestige that it has? That became really my focus when I was studying for my doctorate at the University of Texas.
I ended up writing my thesis on… I’m sure your readers know (and you mentioned earlier) that the poet Ezra Pound had done propaganda broadcasts from Mussolini’s government during the Second World War. When the government fell, he fled. He was arrested by the United States Army, put in a detention camp, indicted for treason, brought back to the United States, and spent thirteen years at St. Elizabeth’s Hospital. At the same time he was doing this, and at the same time that many of the leading writers in the United States were calling for his execution, he was becoming (at least through reputation) one of the most prominent and well-respected poets in the United States. I wondered: how hell did that happen? How could that happen? That inspired me to look into that.
The hypothesis that I came up with was the work of his publisher, a man named James Laughlin, who was a very wealthy steel heir from Pittsburgh. Ironically enough, he grew up a mile and a half from where I’m sitting right now in my house. My hypothesis was that it was the tools of the publisher that brought Pound this respect and legitimacy. So I just took it off from there.
Geoff Kabaservice: I’m glad that we were able to make a Pittsburgh connection there.
Greg Barnhisel: I got what you need.
Geoff Kabaservice: Curiously, I believe the first American Ph.D. study of Pound was by Hugh Kenner, who was one of William F. Buckley Jr.’s best friends. I came across Kenner’s letters to Buckley long since, when I began my study of politics.
Greg Barnhisel: Yes, Kenner was very important. His was the first doctoral thesis on Pound. His was the first book publication on him. Just as a little personal side note, when Hugh Kenner died and his estate sold his papers to the Ransom Center at the University of Texas, I was working as an intern in the cataloging department. My job was to open and catalog all of Kenner’s papers, which was incredibly fascinating. I read those Buckley letters. Also, he was very good friends with Buckminster Fuller, among many other people.
Geoff Kabaservice: An interesting character. So let’s get into Pearson’s intelligence career. After the bombing of Pearl Harbor in December 1941, Pearson was recruited by his graduate school friend Donald Downs (among other people) to the Office of Strategic Services, which was the wartime predecessor of the postwar Central Intelligence Agency. And of course, Pearson’s code name when he was with OSS was “Puritan.” So what can you tell me about Pearson’s rise through the ranks in the OSS during World War II, and especially what made humanities scholars good at intelligence work?
Greg Barnhisel: When the war broke out, Pearson had long been… His time in England had made him very pro-British. As you know and as many of your listeners I’m sure know, the America First movement was in some ways based at Yale, was very strong at Yale. Many people, including people you write about in your fantastic book, were key in the America First movement. Pearson was a loud dissenter about that. He was saying as early as 1937, 1938, “There’s going to be a war. The United States needs to be getting into this. We need to be supporting Britain.” So when war broke out, he wanted to do what he could do. But because of his disability, he was not eligible for active service in the armed forces.
So for about a year and a half, he languished around the Yale campus, and he was given scut work to do for the English Department, which was trying to justify its own existence. Most of its students and many of its faculty members had been drafted and had gone overseas to serve, so Pearson needed to find something to do. As you say, yes, Donald Downs and a man named Wallace Notestein, who was also at Yale, were trying to find him some little intelligence work to do because they knew how clever he was. They knew how the social skills that he had developed from the time that he was a child would be so helpful in espionage work.
But none of that really worked out until he did receive a call and was asked to come to Washington to interview to be part of what’s called the Research and Analysis Branch. The Research and Analysis Branch would take intercepted cables — would take any information, both borrowed from the Brits and also that the United States had collected itself — and would analyze it to help with the war effort. It was the kind of thing that humanities scholars and social scientists were incredibly good at: looking at texts, analyzing texts, finding connections across things. One of the things that a whole office was devoted to was asking people to send in family photographs of European trips so they could get pictures of various buildings in various German and French cities, get a number of pictures of a particular building in a German city that obviously we couldn’t go to, and we didn’t have air surveillance there, to figure out what they were doing. Pearson did that for about three months, and he hated it. He didn’t like the work, and he didn’t like the lack of independence.
At a certain point, the United States had been given provisional access to the intercepts that were coming from the Enigma machine, and many of your listeners will be familiar with The Imitation Game movie about breaking the German codes. The Brits had the German codes broken. They were not willing to share with Americans the information that they received because they were afraid the Americans would act in such a way that would tip the Germans off to the fact that the codes were broken. They spoke to the head of the OSS, General William Donovan, and Donovan said, “We would like to start a dedicated counterintelligence branch of the OSS, and this would be the only group that would be given access to these decrypts. We will not share them with the Army. We will not share them with anybody who’s making any plans. Only these people will have access to them.” So at that point, the British intelligence agencies agreed to do this.
For whatever reason, Pearson, along with three or four others — and a couple of them were other Yale guys — was asked, “Would you be willing to start this counterintelligence branch?” He said, “Absolutely.” I think part of it was his skill at interpretation, part of it was his encyclopedic mind, and another part of it was his social skills, that he was extremely good at cultivating people. They sent them over in late 1942. They spent some time in a town halfway between Bletchley Park and London, setting up the structure for what eventually was called X-2, the counterintelligence branch.
Then for the duration of the war, Pearson oversaw American OSS counterintelligence — initially in Britain where the job was, of course, to find German spies and German agents and German assets that were operating in British territory, to find them and — well, we’ll talk in a second about what they would do with them — then eventually after D-Day to find German spies and stay behind and assets that were in Allied territory that had been liberated from the Germans. And that was Pearson’s job. He did not work in the field until the very end, which always ate him up. He really wanted to see action. But he was good at what he did, and he was a good manager. He was a disabled man and they didn’t think he could do it. But that’s what he ended up doing for the duration of the war.
Geoff Kabaservice: The X-2 collaboration with MI-6 did in fact succeed in ferreting out German spies, some of whom were turned, some of whom were detained, some of whom were executed. I believe there also was significant misinformation that the Allies were able to put across to the Germans through this operation.
Greg Barnhisel: Yes, this collaboration between what was called the British Council of 20 and American X-2, the people who were in charge of it claimed that they turned every last German spy in British and Allied territory, that there were no spies left. They started flipping them into double agents. There’s a book by John Masterman, who was the head of the British side of this, called The Double-Cross System. It was published by Yale in about 1972. If you readers are interested in the ins and outs of how this worked from the British side, it’s very interesting.
So, yes, they flipped and they turned the vast majority of them. The ones that didn’t want to flip, they executed or imprisoned. And they also did disinformation. Many of your listeners who are espionage fans are familiar with Operation Mincemeat, which was the planting of a British army corpse with some false information about invasion that had the Germans going…
Geoff Kabaservice: Of Sicily.
Greg Barnhisel: Sicily, yeah. So, they did that. There’s a funny story that Pearson liked to tell to his stepdaughters about one of the first things he was asked to do, once X-2 was set up, was to go and establish an Iberian office for X-2. I’m sure your listeners know that Spain and Portugal were technically neutral, although Spain was definitely much more sympathetic to the Axis side. But Madrid and Lisbon both (but especially Madrid) were fantastic places to go find secrets and to go find spies and people who were selling information. So Pearson was sent down there to establish the Iberian office of X-2. And he checked into his hotel, and he discovered that the man who was staying in the room across from him was the head of Nazi counterintelligence. I can’t remember his name off the top of my head, but…
Geoff Kabaservice: Walter Schellenberg.
Greg Barnhisel: Schellenberg. He figured that the hotelier had done this as a joke. He knew exactly where they both were and had done this as a joke. When Pearson would tell his daughters this story, the daughters said, “Well, why didn’t you kill him? He was right there.” Pearson said, “Well, no. He was a guy we knew we could work with, and God knows who they would’ve put in if we’d killed him.”
Geoff Kabaservice: The subject of the intelligence game and the role of academics within it, particularly from Yale, is a subject that I’ve heard about for a long time because my late friend Robin Winks wrote about the Yale-and-OSS connection in his 1988 history Cloak and Gown: Scholars in the Secret War. And my very-much-alive friend Tim Naftali also wrote about this connection in his 1983 Yale undergraduate history senior essay. What do you think about the morality, the historical significance, of so many people from academic backgrounds going to work in intelligence work for the government in this way?
Greg Barnhisel: Well, I’ll just start by saying that both Winks’ book and Naftali’s book were the only two extended treatments of Pearson’s life that I had access to when I started this project. They’re both just fantastic. Eventually, a friend of mine, Annette Debo, did some research and wrote an extended piece about Pearson in her biography of H.D., but Winks and Naftali are fantastic. I had the privilege of meeting Tim Naftali when I gave a talk at NYU, and he was very curious about my book, so I hope he has a chance to read it. Maybe he’s listening. Tim, I hope you read it. I’ll send you a copy if you want.
In terms of the morality, I would say that Pearson saw this very much as in alignment with what he was trying to do. His job was to serve his country, and part of what he was doing as an academic was to establish the importance and legitimacy and validity of American culture and American civilization and the interests of the United States. Defending the United States, particularly against Nazism, was absolutely part of it. He would not have seen any contradiction, and frankly I don’t either. I think there are obviously places where it gets into a grayer area, but I wouldn’t see much, and certainly he would not have seen much contradiction, nor would many of the others who were spies at the time.
I think your listeners may be aware of some of the other boldface names who were working in the intelligence services. I was just looking at the papers of the anthropologist Gregory Bateson, who served in the OSS in the South Pacific. I was looking at that because he was in the same unit as my grandfather, oddly enough. Perry Miller as well was in the OSS, Perry Miller also was doing these things. I don’t think that they would’ve seen any contradiction in that. Perhaps we look at this too much from a presentist point view in which we assume that academia is full of woke anti-American leftists. And certainly American Studies, which is the field of study that Pearson helped establish, is very, very, very leftist in its institutions and in its type of scholarship right now. But it was certainly not when Pearson was involved with it.
Geoff Kabaservice: So let me jump ahead to this involvement of Norman Holmes Pearson with the creation of the American Studies major at Yale. Pearson returned to Yale after the war. I guess he was a talent scout for the CIA for a while, but not for very long. He became known among undergraduates as both a virtuoso lecturer and also somebody who was attuned to modernism, which was part of why, for example, the novelist Tom Wolfe was one of his graduate students. I like that you inserted the fact that it was Pearson who oversaw Wolfe’s writing of his 193-page term paper titled “Hemingway’s Oral-Narrative Use of the Word ‘And.’”
Greg Barnhisel: I’ve had to deal with a lot of student papers, and I’m glad I didn’t have to deal with that one.
Geoff Kabaservice: Oh yeah, I feel you. But Pearson became the first director of undergraduate studies of American Studies. And American Studies was actually conceived as a weapon in the Cold War. Can you tell me how that came about?
Greg Barnhisel: Yes. So when American Studies begins in the 1930s, it is certainly pre-Cold War. And there has been a bunch of scholarship about this and some of your listeners may be aware of this, but it starts out from this mission to justify that the United States, that America, has its own culture and its own civilization that deserves to be studied. But very quickly, as the Second World War becomes the Cold War, this becomes an important mission of the field of American Studies: not just to explain and justify but also to advocate for American culture. Part of this is as a counterargument to particularly European doubts that the United States culture has any seriousness or validity, or certainly wouldn’t be the culture that we would want to see as a model. So the United States wants to promote its model of its own culture as liberal-humanist, individualist, promoting freedom.
This happens in a number of places, but it becomes very instrumentalized and politicized at Yale University. I take my hat off here to the scholar and historian Michael Holzman, who wrote a very good article about how the Yale American Studies Program — which became named American Studies and was no longer called History, the Arts and Letters in I believe it was 1946, 1947, something like that, partially because of a mission called by the Yale president and the dean of Yale College who say, “We have this program in which we’re explaining American culture and teaching it to our students. We now need to leverage this as a Cold War weapon to help train Americans, these future leaders — who are the young men who are going to Yale and are going to be serving in diplomatic positions, important political positions — to explain what’s so important and what’s so valuable about American culture.”
They then start to export American Studies. The State Department, the United States Information Agency, the Fulbright Program, foundations (particularly Rockefeller and Ford Foundation and to some degree the Carnegie Corporation) start to help universities overseas develop American Studies programs and American Studies departments, starting with the Salzburg Seminar, which I believe was in 1947, and then moving over.
Pearson wasn’t really involved in exporting American Studies to Europe. He doesn’t really get embroiled in this until the early ’60s, as you say. When he comes back from the war, he really does have to focus on being a junior academic, getting tenure, writing his articles, doing all that stuff. But by the time the early ’60s rolled around, he gets himself involved in this, particularly in Japan, in South Korea, and in Australia. He is absolutely instrumental in promoting and seeding and fostering the study of American literature and American culture in those nations.
We look back at it now, and many people in the American Studies field look back at it now, as being kind of tainted. Pearson would not have seen it as tainted in any way. It certainly was politicized. It certainly crossed over at times into propaganda. I interviewed a couple of Australian academics who knew him at the time, had worked with him and they say, “Yes, he would definitely take the American line on the Cold War, particularly during the Vietnam conflict, but he would not have seen that as politicizing his work.” He wouldn’t have understood that as politicizing what he was talking about. His vision of what America was about was the vision of what the United States was promoting about itself, completely in alignment.
Geoff Kabaservice: As you know, I’ve looked into the Salzburg Seminar as a subject of interest to me, and it connects to Pearson in a few ways. First of all, his career got a significant boost when he was asked to review F.O. Matthiessen’s best-known book, which was American Renaissance: Art and Expression in the Age of Emerson and Whitman. F. O. Matthiessen was writing about the writers of what he called the American Renaissance, people like Herman Melville, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Thoreau, Whitman, Hawthorne, and connecting them to the American tradition more generally and America’s tradition of democracy as well.
Matthiessen was on that first faculty of what was then called the Harvard Student Council’s Salzburg Seminar in American Civilization. He wrote about it in a very interesting 1948 book called From the Heart of Europe. That was very much, I think, seen as a left-leaning program. Other faculty in that first year included Margaret Mead and the literary critic Alfred Kazin. But I find it interesting that the seminar originally would’ve focused on the concept of “American civilization,” and so too did Yale’s American Studies Program, even though it was perceived (and was I think in fact) coming from a more conservative standpoint, particularly after the 1950 gift from the conservative businessman William Robertson Coe.
Greg Barnhisel: Yes, yes, definitely. Again, as many of your readers will know, these cultural-diplomatic outreach efforts, and the CIA itself in the early years of the Cold War, were perceived as being from the left — which again, for a Cold War baby like myself, is incredibly ironic. But it was very much perceived as being leftist, which would’ve made Pearson himself uncomfortable because Pearson was a conservative, New England-businessman Republican. He certainly did not sympathize with Matthiessen’s political points of view.
He was asked to review Matthiessen’s book, which as you correctly say, was a big break for him at a time when Matthiessen was one of the up-and-coming stars of academia, one of the stars to be drafted. He was asked to write that for a very short-lived magazine called Accent by the poet and his friend Muriel Rukeyser, who was also a leftist activist. So another interesting theme that I found in writing this biography is how a very conventional, ordinary New England, small-town Republican guy ends up hanging out and really making his career along with a bunch of leftist Bohemian types.
Geoff Kabaservice: It’s true, it’s true. So you write that the American Studies program at Yale, with which Pearson was so deeply involved, “gave intellectual heft to the growing Vital Center understanding of American politics and society as adumbrated most clearly in Arthur Schlesinger Jr.’s 1949 book of that name.” Since this is the Vital Center Podcast, I think that’s entirely fitting to talk about. But you actually described this, I think, not quite in the terms that Schlesinger would use.
You say that this Vital Center is a political and social order that’s grounded in liberal democracy, that rejects extreme ideologies, that embraces pragmatism and realism. You say that it was also overseen by “an interlocking set of governmental, philanthropic, corporate, religious, and educational institutions led by disinterested technocrats disproportionately drawn from the elite levels of society.” You have there neatly encapsulated all the reasons why the left, and current American Studies programs, dislike this idea of the Vital Center.
Greg Barnhisel: Yes, precisely. I think this becomes so appealing to Pearson, not just because he shares the ideology about what America should be about, but he loves the way it’s arranged. One of the ways that he made himself comfortable in the world as a small, physically weak, and often sickly boy was to join institutions and become part of institutions, and therefore take on some of what we could call their cultural capital for himself. He would then use the cultural capital that he then possessed, by being a member of these institutions, to help link them together and to achieve what he wanted to achieve for himself and for the people that he was trying to advocate for.
But what I find… I make the perhaps unprovable claim that Pearson is the very epitome of this era in American society, of this Vital Center era, in that he links, in his life and in his work, many of these institutions personally. He links Yale University and elite academia. He links this growing academic field of American Studies and American literature. He links the national security services, eventually the State Department (where he is working for the State Department), foundations such as the Ford Foundation. He was involved with the Ford Foundation, and he helped evaluate grants for the Ford Foundation, professional societies, the ACLS (the American Council of Learned Societies), the American Studies Association.
He’s part of all of these institutions. He sees them as benevolent. He also sees them as a model for how to run a humane, free society, trusting in these kinds of institutions. And as you very correctly say, this is precisely why many on the left see this vision of America as toxic, because they don’t believe in these institutions. I share much of this opinion, that many of these institutions were not benevolent. So I conclude the book by saying he maintains his connection with these institutions even as public trust in them starts to crumble through the upheavals of the 1960s, through the Vietnam catastrophe, and even Yale University going co-ed. So a lot of the way these institutions had been governed and run changed, public faith in them starts to fail. But Pearson maintains his position as a man who spans them and brings them together.
Geoff Kabaservice: You point out that Pearson did at least outwardly accommodate to the changes that came to Yale and the broader society, and in some ways even welcomed them. I think that does stem from the way you present him as someone who has a foot in both worlds, in a sense. On the one hand, he’s very much an organization man, shaped by institutions and a great believer in the value of institutions. But on the other hand, he’s also open to the bohemians and the modernists and the ways in which they’re actually launching an attack of sorts on middle-class society.
I liked the quote you had here, which is that “As a neo-Puritan, Pearson felt that the stability and meaning provided by institutions had to be balanced with the dynamism and fertility of the creative individual mind. He was wary of the conformity that an organization-dominated society engendered.” He was very much a man of the middle in that sense.
Greg Barnhisel: Very much, yes, he was very much a man of the middle. He was very much a moderate in his political and social opinions. But he also very much saw the importance, from his perch in these institutions… He would never have been the bohemian who brought this energy; he knew that that wasn’t his place. But he wanted to be the person who helped that renewing energy come to these institutions. Again, we could simply go back to the Puritans. That was what the Puritans were attempting to do to the Church of England: bring a kind of purifying energy to a calcified institution.
Pearson does that. One of the claims that I make, and I think that I can substantiate this, is he brings modernism and an embrace of modernist literature to Yale — and thus to the Ivy Leagues, because Yale oddly enough was the pioneer there — more than any other figure on the faculty there, more than probably anybody else at Yale. He really helps Yale embrace this — and again, for him, it’s modernist literature — more than anyone else does. By embracing modernist literature, Yale gives modernist literature a cultural capital and cultural legitimacy. I think that Pearson was absolutely instrumental in that. So this is why I find him to be an enormously significant figure in American literary history, even though he wrote very little about modernist literature and certainly was not in any way known as a prominent critic of modernist literature.
Geoff Kabaservice: Just a somewhat technical question… The Bollingen Prize for Poetry initially was awarded essentially by the government, I believe.
Greg Barnhisel: Yeah, the Library of Congress.
Geoff Kabaservice: Yes. The bestowal of that award on Ezra Pound was a very controversial moment in America’s culture wars of the postwar era. However, the award of the Bollingen Prize came under Yale’s auspices. Was Pearson involved with the award of the Bollingen to many of the modernist poets whom he championed?
Greg Barnhisel: Not directly. He was not a Bollingen judge. He was part of the committee who oversaw the choosing of the Bollingen judges. I’m trying to remember the quote that people like Steve Bannon have been using recently: We want to be the people who choose the people who count the votes. So Pearson was one of the people who would choose the Bollingen judges. But yes, after the award in 1948 to Ezra Pound (who as we mentioned earlier was actually being held under a treason indictment) the Library of Congress no longer wanted have anything to do with this controversial prize, because there were a lot of other controversial poets that they didn’t want touch.
So the Bollingen Foundation, which was its own foundation — it had some had money, there was also money coming from a European foundation that I can’t remember off the top of my head right now — floundered about for a few years. And then it eventually found a home at Yale — in part because of Pearson’s intercession, but also because of the interest of some people in the Yale libraries who wanted to have such a prestigious prize housed there. So yes, for many years it was housed and was awarded from Yale. Pearson was not a judge, but he definitely helped choose the judges, and he knew how to choose judges who would give the prize to people he liked such as Wallace Stevens and Marianne Moore and such.
Geoff Kabaservice: I might be thinking about this because I recently read Louis Menand’s book The Free World: Art and Thought in the Cold War. But the Cold War was a period when America’s diplomatic services would, for example, use modern art, abstract art as a tool to win the hearts and minds of people around the world. Modern art was presented as an indication of Americans’ freedoms as opposed to the Soviet Union’s insistence on socialist realism from their artists.
You have several quotes from Pearson pointing out that this modernism in art and literature and poetry is accessible to the common man and woman; that this is, again, a kind of expression of middle-class culture — which it was in the sense that it was the middle class who were involved in the Book of the Month Club and who were actually fairly eager consumers of this modernism. It seems to me that the culture has lost something when modernism or contemporary art seem to be oppositional to the American society, seem to be completely opposed to middle-class values. And the middle-class and certainly the common men and women are not really consuming modernism in any way.
Greg Barnhisel: You mean today?
Geoff Kabaservice: Today, yes.
Greg Barnhisel: Yes. Oh, that’s absolutely true. Yes. It would be hard for me to try to analogize the two because the way… Again, here I step back to my training as a book historian. But the actual distribution channels and institutions, and the ways by which we access art, and the ways by which art comes to us and we consume it, have changed so dramatically since the 1950s. But one of the dynamics that Pearson is involved in is in fact convincing middle-class customers, middle-class consumers and readers, that modernism is something that they want to read, is something that they want to have in their houses. Because before then, it was really perceived as being anti-American, antinomian, anti-bourgeois.
This is the topic of my previous book, like Menand’s talking about, how this was used in the culture of diplomatic sense and the culture of diplomatic projects. But yes, Pearson sands a lot of the rough edges off of this because for instance, when he’s teaching Ezra Pound… Ezra Pound’s poetry is both difficult and in many places quite offensive, anti-Semitic, certainly anti-capitalist, really quite has as a very strange and conspiratorial understanding of American history. Pearson starts teaching Pound… We haven’t talked about this yet and we may not talk about this, but he starts collecting the archives and artifacts of all these writers, making them available. And he sands all this off and says, “This is not something you need to really pay attention to. When you read Ezra Pound, you need to read him as these other kinds of things as his search for truth and beauty and the hermetic energies of the divine and all of these things.”
So much like much contemporary art is so hostile to middle-class society today, it was the same way… Certainly, 1920-style modernist art was the same way in the ‘50s. Pearson and some of the other critics of the time, including Kenner, helped sand that down and say, “Oh, no, actually, it’s not. This is much more amenable to your beliefs than what you think.”
Geoff Kabaservice: In that sense, I think Pearson was deluding himself when he saw modernism as not an attack on middle-class society but proof of the triumph of middle-class society.
Greg Barnhisel: Yes, he was.
Geoff Kabaservice: Let me give you an opportunity to try to give Pearson a chance to respond, through you, to the charges that people might make against him today. You say that Pearson in the 1930s had learned from his studies that American civilization and the American character were unique and precious. In the 1940s, his experiences had showed him that the civilization was threatened by totalitarianism. After World War II, you write, “He saw how America’s institutions of soft power — universities, literature, foundations, publishers, societies, and trade organizations — could supplement our economic and military might in protecting our society, explaining its virtues, and stopping the spread of communism.”
What do you suppose Pearson might say if he was called upon the rug today to account for his complicity (or the complicity of higher education) with the national security state and even U.S. propaganda operations? How might he defend his perspective?
Greg Barnhisel: Oh, that’s an excellent question. It would be fascinating to hear what he would’ve thought of the Church Committee reports had he lived to hear about them. When it came to spying, he was a hard-edged realist. When people would complain about the deceitful and sometimes violent and sometimes unethical means by which spies operate, he would say, “Quit your crying. This is how the real world operates.”
But the larger question of the metastasis of the national security state, I think that he would have great regrets about that. I think that he was a small-government person, and I think that the way that the national security state had grown, particularly on the military side as a result of Vietnam and after Vietnam, would have dismayed him. Perhaps it was inevitable as the society got so much bigger, as there became so much more at stake across the American empire, it couldn’t have happened any other way. Perhaps I would envision him as being somewhat nostalgic for the simpler, small-town, smaller United States that he had grown up in. But I do think he would have been dismayed by how much those institutions had grown without the accountability that he had felt that he brought to them when he was navigating across them.
I think his favorite institution, which would’ve been Yale University, I think he largely would’ve been in favor of the changes. I think that he was very indulgent about what young people did and what young people do, and he saw the energy that they bring to their studies and to transforming places like Yale. He was always excited and happy and pleased about that.
The last lecture he ever gave… He had been invited to go to Seoul to give a lecture to an American Studies gathering, and the lecture was about changing concepts of American democracy. Coming from a person who I think many today would call a conservative white male operating in a very, very homogeneous set of institutions and environments, he praised what was not yet called the energy and fertility of diverse populations and just how much institutions like American Studies, the American cultural-diplomatic establishment, and Yale University were benefiting from different kinds of people coming into them, bringing new ideas and all that.
I mean, he was a liberal. We call him a conservative, but I think in that sense he was a classical liberal. The institutions are good, but we also need them to be continually renewed. America is about welcoming a broader and more diverse set of the population all the time to contribute to changing these institutions and building them. Maybe I’m just projecting because that’s where I am, but I really do get that sense that that’s what he would have felt.
Geoff Kabaservice: Well, thank you so much for today’s discussion, Greg Barnhisel, and congratulations again on your new book, Code Name Puritan: Norman Holmes Pearson at the Nexus of Poetry, Espionage, and American Power.
Greg Barnhisel: Thank you very much, Geoff. It’s been a great pleasure to talk to you, and you’re a wonderful interviewer. I’ve always loved listening to it, and so it’s just a privilege to now be interviewed by you.
Geoff Kabaservice: Thank you, Greg. And thank you all for listening to the Vital Center Podcast. Please subscribe and rate us on your preferred podcasting platform. If you have any questions, comments, or other responses, please include them along with your rating or send us an email at contact@niskanencenter.org. Thanks as always to our technical director, Kristie Eshelman, our sound engineer, Ray Ingenieri, and the Niskanen Center in Washington, D.C.