Institute of Pacific Relations - Attack Over Communist Influences and Demise

Attack Over Communist Influences and Demise

Toward the end of the war, the Institute came under criticism for alleged communist sympathies. The first major criticism of the Institute was a wartime study by dissident IPR member Alfred Kohlberg, an American who had owned a textile firm in prewar China. After finding what he believed were Communist sympathies in IPR, in particular Frederick Field, Kohlberg first wrote to other members of the Board, published an 80-page report, then launched a publicity campaign against the Institute.

The IPR came under further suspicion by government authorities as a result of the Venona intercepts and its close association with Amerasia. Amerasia came under investigation when a classified government OSS report appeared as an article in the magazine.

IPR was closely allied with Amerasia. The two organizations shared the same building, and many members of the Editorial Board of Amerasia were officers or employees of IPR. An FBI review of Amerasia and IPR publications found that approximately 115 people contributed articles to both.

Among IPR staffers identified later as Communists or collaborators with Soviet intelligence agents were Kathleen Barnes, Hilda Austern, Elsie Fairfax-Cholmely, Chi Chao-ting, Guenter Stein, Harriet Levine, Talitha Gerlach, Chen Han-seng (a member of the Sorge spy ring), Michael Greenberg (named as a source in 1945 by defecting Soviet courier Elizabeth Bentley), and T.A. Bisson (Venona's "Arthur"), as well as Kate Mitchell and Andrew Roth, both of whom were arrested in the 1945 Amerasia case.

After the success of the Chinese Communist Revolution, criticism of the IPR increased. Its detractors accused it of having helped to "lose China" to Communism.

In the early fifties, the IPR came under a lengthy investigation by the Senate Internal Security Subcommittee. Critics charged that IPR scholars had been naïve in their statements regarding Communism, Chinese Communism and Stalinist Russia.

Senator Joseph McCarthy of Wisconsin repeatedly criticized IPR and its former chairman Philip Jessup. McCarthy observed that Frederick V. Field, T.A. Bisson, and Owen Lattimore were active in IPR and claimed that they had worked to turn American China policy in favor of the Communist Party of China.

In 1952, the Senate Internal Security Subcommittee (SISS), chaired by Senator Pat McCarran, spent over a year reviewing some 20,000 documents from the files of IPR and questioning IPR personnel. The committee found it suspicious that Marxists had published articles in the IPR journal and that Communists had attended an IPR conference in 1942. In its final report the SISS stated:

Elizabeth Bentley testified that NKVD spy chief Jacob Golos warned her to stay away from the IPR because it was "as red as a rose, and you shouldn't touch it with a 10-foot pole." Likewise, Louis Budenz, former editor of the Daily Worker, testified that Alexander Trachtenberg of the Communist Party-affiliated International Publishers told him that party leaders thought the IPR was "too much a concentration point for Communists; the control could be maintained without such a galaxy of Communists in it."

The IPR lost its tax-exempt status as an educational body in 1955, when the Internal Revenue Service alleged that the Institute had engaged in the dissemination of controversial and partisan propaganda, and had attempted to influence the policies or opinions of the government. Under the leadership of William L. Holland, the IPR pursued a long legal action to regain tax-exempt status lasted until 1959. The final court judgment rejected all allegations by the Internal Revenue Service.

By the mid-1950s, the IPR was facing other challenges – notably the development of well-funded centers for Asian Studies at major American Universities such as Harvard, Yale, Berkeley, Michigan and Columbia. The rise of these centers created an opinion that the IPR was no longer necessary. The large foundations which had previously supported the IPR shifted their financial resources to the University centers.

At the end of the IRS case, a degree of financial support that the Institute had attracted due to free speech issues and the IRS case was lost to other causes. The IPR also had been gradually losing academic contributors due in part to the rise of the Association for Asian Studies.

The Institute dissolved in 1960. Publication of the journal Pacific Affairs was transferred to University of British Columbia, in Vancouver, Canada.

A few years later two successor organizations were established, the Pacific Basin Economic Council, an organization of regional business leaders founded in 1967, and the more academic Pacific Trade and Development Conference (PAFTAD) in 1968.