Look Back in Anger

"Conformity and conformism are old and deeply ingrained characteristics of American Society," he said as he poured the loose pipe tobacco from a cellophane bag into his plastic tobacco pouch. "That's one thing that's not so obvious when you're in college as later."

Now in his late fifties, Owen Lattimore, without traces of retrospective bitterness and in a quietly cynical way, made this observation while recalling the temper of the times during which he was labelled by Senator McCarthy as "the top Soviet spy in this country."

In those days, according to Lattimore, the urge to conform was a motivated one, ascribing to itself certain goals. Today, he sees the conformist pattern of society as of a different nature. "The generation of the past four years has been more apathetic, lethargic, and non-causy." This leads people, as he says, "to become interested in hi-fis, instead of politics."

Conformity, as Lattimore means it, spans all ranges of human endeavor: economic, social, political, and religious. However, "the fear of being frank and outspoken is much greater among politicians; they have the feeling of a real need for conformity." And it is the political need to conform which Lattimore sees as the real threat to society. It is this need, he points out, which leads to "a paternalistic authoritarian attitude" on the part of a government which "rests on the assumption that a man will believe in communism if he is exposed to it. This seems to me an appalling lack of confidence in the virtues of democracy. A democracy that has to be shielded from opinions is to be pitied."

"You know," he said, as he leaned back in the soft chair, and glanced at the piles of melting snow outside the window, "I've always agreed with something that I think Professor Fairbank said in one of his books, and that was, 'You can't have someone else's disillusions for him.' A democratic government has to be based on that belief."

When Lattimore came under attack during the McCarthy era, few came to his defense--except his colleagues at Johns Hopkins, where he has lectured at sporadic intervals for the last 25 years, and it seemed very hard for him to say that "if the conditions are right, the critical factors of society always develop. In a democracy, eventually people face the facts and the critical factors come into play. This is the strength of America, that we do question dogma."

But in his words there is always the unmistakable feeling of the past, and one can't help feeling that here is a man viewing the tumult of the last decade as a man who looks upon his own funeral; a man whose life was swept away with a dead era.

Lattimore arrived last week unheralded, almost unnoticed, and spent four days in the Visiting Preacher's suite in Lowell House. Those who met him found him with a wealth of knowledge and an amazing store of personal anecdotes. Owen Lattimore was once a name of great political controversy in American life, but perhaps the one thing Harvard students will remember most about him is that he once rode a Mongolian horse for 18 days through 30 below temperatures.