A Life in and Out of Anthropology Jack Sargent Harris

Article
A Life In and Out of Anthropology

An Interview with Jack Sargent Harris
Kevin A. Yelvington
University of South Florida, Tampa
Abstract ■ This article presents an interview with Jack Sargent Harris
(1912–2008), an anthropologist who earned his PhD at Columbia University in
1940 and was one of the first US anthropologists to do fieldwork in Africa,
showing an interest in materialistic theoretical approaches. As a merchant
seaman before becoming an anthropologist he traveled the globe, including
trips to the Soviet Union, Africa, Asia, the Caribbean, and Latin America. During
the Second World War, Harris became a clandestine operative engaged in
counter-espionage for the United States’ Office of Strategic Services in West
Africa and in South Africa. Returning to the United States, he was hired by the
fledgling United Nations as part of its decolonization efforts. However, Harris
fell victim to the McCarthy-era witch hunt and was purged from the United
Nations. He moved to Costa Rica in 1954 where he became a successful
entrepreneur.
Keywords ■ anthropology of Africa ■ anthropologists and the Cold War ■ anthro-
pology and colonialism ■ anthropology and the Second World War ■ history of
anthropology ■ history of the United Nations ■ Marx and anthropology ■
McCarthyism
Jack Sargent Harris’s career in anthropology in a strict sense might have

been short. After his PhD at Columbia University, he taught for only a
couple of years at Ohio State University, in 1940–41, and at the University
of Chicago, in 1946–47, a period punctuated by his role as a clandestine
operative in the United States’ OSS (Office of Strategic Services) during
the Second World War. But his place in the history of anthropology is an
important one because of his interest in materialistic and historical
approaches (Harris, 1940a, 1942a), his focus on economic anthropology
(Harris, 1942b, 1943, 1944), as well as a concern with the anthropology of
women and the gendered division of labor (Harris, 1940b); because he was
one of the early US anthropologists to do fieldwork in Africa; and because
as an activist United Nations (UN) official engaged in anti-colonial politics
he was persecuted and purged from the UN during the McCarthy-era
pogroms – an episode which forced him to leave the United States and,
somewhat ironically, start a number of very successful business ventures in
Costa Rica. Harris, who traveled a good part of the globe as a merchant
seaman before starting in on anthropology, had a varied and exciting life,
the outlines of which are captured in the title of a previously published
Vol 28(4) 446–476 [DOI:10.1177/0308275X08099092]
Copyright 2008 © SAGE Publications (London, Los Angeles,
New Delhi and Singapore) www.sagepublications.com
447
Yelvington: A Life In and Out of Anthropology
interview: ‘Anthropologist, Secret Agent, Witch-hunt Victim, Entre-

preneur’ (Edelman, 1997).
Harris was born in Chicago on 13 July 1912 as Jacob Herscovitz, the son
of Max and Mollie Herscovici, Jewish immigrants from Romania. After
graduating high school he started work as an office boy and then as
assistant production manager for a publishing company, a subsidiary of
McGraw-Hill. When the Depression hit in 1929, he went to New York where
he became a merchant seaman. His travels took him to Europe, Africa, Asia,
South America and the Caribbean. On a trip back to Chicago to visit his
parents, a high school classmate who was attending Northwestern University
suggested that Harris might like to study there. Harris enrolled, and
became interested in anthropology after taking a class with Melville J.
Herskovits. He and Herskovits became close, and, as Harris would continue
his life as a sailor in between terms at Northwestern, he wrote many evoca-
tively descriptive letters to Herskovits about his travels and experiences as
a seaman.1 With Herskovits’s urging and support, Harris went to Columbia
University in 1936 to pursue his doctorate. In addition to his course work,
Harris worked three jobs and became active in radical politics, participat-
ing in seamen’s strikes and raising funds for unionization efforts (Madden,
1999). With his travels to Africa as a sailor, Herskovits’s courses, and a
course at Columbia given by the Belgian Africanist Frans M. Olbrechts,
Harris developed an ethnographic interest in Africa. However, given
Depression-era financial constraints on fieldwork funding, Harris did his
PhD fieldwork on the acculturation of the White Knife Shoshoni of Nevada
(Harris, 1938, 1940a), conducting fieldwork on the Western Shoshoni
Reservation at Owyhee, Nevada in the summer of 1937. Meanwhile, Harris
received a fellowship from the Social Science Research Council (SSRC) for
research among the Ibo in Nigeria – a people suggested by Herskovits
(Herskovits to Harris, 27 October 1937, Melville J. Herskovits Papers,
Northwestern University [HPN]). Harris conducted a year’s fieldwork in
1938–9 in Ozuitem, near Bende in southeastern Nigeria, with a focus on
economic anthropology and the agricultural cycle (Harris, 1942b, 1943,
1944), publishing on the history of slavery (Harris, 1942a), and the role of
women in the society (Harris, 1940b).
Upon his return to the United States, Harris joined the sociology
department at Ohio State University. He taught there from 1940 until the
outbreak of the Second World War. Shortly after Pearl Harbor, Harris
and anthropologist William Bascom of Northwestern University went to
Washington, DC to seek out Ralph Bunche, whom he had met when
Bunche was at Northwestern on sabbatical and who was working in the
Office of Coordinator of Information (COI), forerunner to the OSS and,
later, the Central Intelligence Agency. Harris and Bascom volunteered their
specialized knowledge as Africanist anthropologists in the war effort. Harris
was engaged in counter-espionage in the Gold Coast and Nigeria from
January 1942 until January 1943. He was invalided out with malaria and,
448
Critique of Anthropology 28(4)
when he recovered, he returned to OSS headquarters in Washington, DC

for more training. He was then sent as a covert operative to South Africa.
There he met with anthropologists, including Isaac Schapera (Harris,
1947). It was in South Africa that Harris met Shirley Oates McGregor, the
woman who was to become his second wife. They were married for 57 years,
and had two children: Michael, born in the United States, and Jonathan,
who was born in Costa Rica. Shirley Harris died in 2002.
After the war, Harris joined the faculty in the College at the University
of Chicago, where he taught until 1946 when Bunche, now director of
the UN’s Department of Trusteeship and Information from Non-
Self-Governing Territories, and future Nobel Prize winner with the UN,
invited him to become part of his staff. Starting at the UN in early 1947,
Harris worked as a social affairs officer in the Trusteeship Division within
Bunche’s department. Co-workers included anthropologists George D.
Howard and, briefly, John V. Murra. For Bunche, the trusteeship system was
a path toward decolonization. Harris’s anti-colonial politics were at work
when he helped the Rev. Michael Scott, the indefatigable opponent of
apartheid and advocate for a number of native peoples of South West Africa
(now Namibia), speak before the UN’s Fourth Committee in 1949. Harris
was part of a UN Trusteeship Council mission to East Africa in 1948 to
Ruanda-Urundi, administered by Belgium, and Tanganyika, administered
by Great Britain, to observe socio-economic and political conditions in the
territories and their progress toward self-government or independence
(United Nations, 1948a). Harris helped write a report on Tanganyika
that condemned Britain for its colonial policies (United Nations, 1948b).
The report caused an angry and alarmed reaction in the United States’
foremost ally, with Britain’s Colonial Office disputing the report’s findings
(see e.g. The Times, 12 May 1949: 3) and the Foreign Office protesting
loudly (see e.g. Melvern, 1995: 52). The report was also cause for debates
in the House of Lords.
In 1952, Harris arrived home one day to find a subpoena demanding
that he appear before a federal grand jury for the southern district of
New York called to investigate the existence of communists or communist
sympathizers among the US staff at the UN. He was questioned by Roy
Cohn, who later became chief counsel to Wisconsin Senator Joseph
McCarthy on McCarthy’s US Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investi-
gations. When Harris refused to answer questions on his own political
affiliations and those of colleagues he knew at Columbia and at the UN, he
was later called to testify before the investigative committee headed by
notorious anti-communist witch hunter Nevada Senator Patrick McCarran.
While McCarthy is more well known, it was McCarran, as the head of the
Senate Judiciary Subcommittee on Internal Security, whose investigations
pre-dated McCarthy’s theatrics. Harris was defended by the leftist civil rights
lawyer Leonard Boudin. To the key question posed by the subcommittee,
‘Are you or have you ever been a member of the Communist Party?’
449
(Edelman, 1997: 12), Harris repeatedly invoked the Fifth Amendment, the
Constitutional guarantee against self-incrimination, to protect his associ-
ates (see Harris’s testimony in United States Congress, 1952, 1954; cf.
Ranzal, 1953). In the following 2005 interview Harris addressed these
issues.
Trygve Lie, the first elected UN Secretary-General, had already bowed
to US pressure and enthusiastically agreed to go along with secret investi-
gations of the US staff. The Norwegian Lie, himself the subject of US
investigations for his Labour Party background, trade unionism and close-
ness with the Soviet Union, fired Harris and others in December 1952, after
urging them not to use the privilege of the Fifth Amendment in their
testimony before the committee (Barros, 1989; Hazzard, 1973, 1990: 6–36;
Melvern, 1995: 48–79; Price, 2004: 154–63; Urquhart, 1993: 243–56). Harris
and others appealed their dismissal to the UN’s Administrative Tribunal.
The appeal was upheld, it was ruled that Lie had wrongly fired Harris, and
Harris was awarded $40,000 in compensation. This ruling was later upheld
Figure 1 Jack Sargent Harris

450
by the World Court in The Hague. Harris received the largest amount of
compensation because, as the tribunal noted of the circumstances of his
firing, he had displayed ‘outstanding professional competence’ as con-
sistently reported in his annual employee reviews, and because he would
be unable to find work as an anthropologist or as a diplomat (United
Nations, 1958).
With a wife and young son, Harris was able to settle in Costa Rica in
1954 and became a successful entrepreneur, starting as a partner in a small
taxi business and going on to start or become involved with several large
business and financial ventures, while Shirley Harris became a founder and
staff writer for the Tico Times English-language newspaper. Harris retired
from the business world in 1999. As this article was going to press, Jack
Sargent Harris died on 2 August 2008, in his home in the Escazú neighbor-
hood of San José, Costa Rica. He was 96.
The interview
KAY: Historians of anthropology have looked at family backgrounds, class
origins and early experiences to look for clues as to what led someone
into anthropology. With this in mind, I was wondering where you might
place your own family upbringing and early experiences in an anthropo-
logical analysis.2
JSH: I’m a first-generation American. My parents were immigrants from
Romania. My father had been trained, after military service, as a metal
worker. In the United States his first job was at the Pullman works where
he became involved in a labor dispute and was beaten up. Thereafter he
hated unions, he hated strikes. He resolved to become his own boss and
never again work for an employer. He owned a small grocery store in
Chicago. We were neither poor nor well-off. With our grocery store there
was enough to eat. My father was hard-working. Seven days a week he’d
open the store at 6:30 in the morning, and close it at about 9 p.m. My
mother also worked in the store. We lived in two rooms behind the store.
At night, after work, my father read The Forward, the Jewish newspaper,
to my illiterate mother. The rapt face of my mother listening to her
husband is an endearing memory.
During the great wave of immigration to the United States from
Europe in the early 20th century, many families found their names had
been altered when passing through Ellis Island. Ours suffered little
change from Herscovici in Romania to Herscovitz in the United States. I
never told Mel Herskovits of our family name; I didn’t want him to think
I was currying favor. In the early 1930s, at a time of strong anti-Semitism,
my older brother Irving said ‘Why should we continue with a name that’s
so foreign and stops us from getting a decent job?’ With thousands of
other families during this period we anglicized our surname. A literal
translation of Herscovitz was Harrison, but we felt that was too WASPish
and pretentious. We shortened it to Harris, which had its roots in our past
but was neutral and could pass and be accepted on both sides of the
fence. And so Harris has been our surname since then.
451
KAY: What effect did the nativism and anti-Semitism of the 1920s have on your
decision to become interested in anthropology?
JSH: I grew up in an immigrant neighborhood. There were not many Jews,
mostly Italian, Irish and Polish Catholics. We were the despised minority,
the Christ-killers, sought out and stoned. And we hated them. The blacks
were ‘niggers’, considered brutes or comic sub-humans. I never doubted
that other peoples were inferior to us. So I grew up in an environment
rife with racism. From this background you can appreciate the almost
blinding effect on me of the lectures of Herskovits on race.
In my family there was no tradition of higher education. High school
ended our formal education. After high school I worked for a subsidiary
of McGraw-Hill that published trade journals in the fields of electrical
and mill supplies. I was an office boy, later an assistant to the production
manager. When the Depression became severe in 1930 the office cut
back. I was told that I could remain, but only as office boy. I didn’t like
that. I was too proud. Obviously I was a cocky smart-ass kid, a type I now
find insufferable. I can’t recall why I decided to go to New York to ship
out. This is completely foreign to family tradition. Certainly an element
of romanticism was involved. I was lucky. My life as a sailor was a great
liberating experience, a tremendous contrast to the narrow confines of
life in Chicago.
After being at sea for almost three years, the Depression worsened
and I couldn’t find a berth on a ship. I returned to Chicago. One of my
high school classmates, Arthur Behrstock, now a junior at Northwestern,
said ‘Why don’t you go to Northwestern?’ I said ‘How? That’s a rich man’s
school.’ And he said ‘No, no. Let’s see what we can do.’ He brought me
to the admissions office. And I was admitted! At that time, there were no
entrance exams. There were no SATs. I think if you were in the top half
or quarter of your high school graduating class you were eligible. I
worked at three or four jobs. I became the Chicago correspondent for a
candy trade journal. I became an assistant bookkeeper at the Evanston
Packard auto agency. At the Alpha Epsilon Phi sorority house I washed
dishes for my meals. I was the first of our extended family to go to a
university, and this was only because I couldn’t get a berth on a ship.
Chance! Some years later my brother Alvin enrolled at the University of
Illinois and became a distinguished orthopedic surgeon.
Nothing in my background led me into anthropology. When I was at
Northwestern I often was bored. After puberty I slimmed down and lost
fat and with this new body I did stupid reckless things as a sailor, going
over the side or climbing a mast in a rough sea. I led the life of a sailor.
In comparison, Northwestern was tame. A few times I left Northwestern
on long weekends to hop freight trains, to ride on Illinois Central’s
reefers, the refrigerated cars, down to New Orleans.
KAY: In terms of the beginnings of your interest in anthropology, going to sea
had to be another factor.
JSH: Of course, because for the first time I saw new countries and different
peoples in various contexts. I was very lucky because on my second trip
to sea on a converted Hog Island freighter, The City of Fairbury, going up
the Baltic to Russia, two reporters from the New York Herald-Tribune, Joe
Mitchell and Ben Robertson, who later died in a Pan Am plane crash off
452
Lisbon, Portugal, signed on as deck boys for a summer’s experience. They

saw I was an atypical sailor even though remarkably ignorant. I didn’t
know there had been a revolution in Russia even after we arrived there!
They had books with them. They talked to me. One had a King James
version of the Bible and read to me. I had never read the Bible before.
And they talked to me about books. Each time I’d return to New York I
would see them. Joe Mitchell became a well-known author and editor of
the New Yorker. Years later when I arrived at Columbia I phoned him and
he was astonished that this former sailor was now a graduate student in
anthropology. I got Joe interested in anthropology. I took him to
interview Boas. He wrote a series of six articles about anthropology and
the department that appeared in the New York World-Telegram.3
I first became interested in Africa as a sailor. I missed a ship in West
Africa, the Zarembo, in late 1931 and saw it steaming off. The company
agent, an African, said ‘There’s nothing I can do now. You’ll have to stay
overnight.’ That night we saw village dancing and I was intrigued by the
demanding and intoxicating rhythms. I saw exotic wooden masks come
to life, worn by the dancers.
Figure 2 Harris at age 19 aboard the Zarembo of the American West

African Line off West Africa in October, 1931
453
KAY: You have said (Edelman, 1997: 8) that you took an introductory anthro-
pology course with Herskovits and you were then ‘hooked.’
JSH: Herskovits was a great influence on my life. You can see from the corre-
spondence how close we were and my respect for him. He was an
excellent lecturer. I looked forward to his classes and Northwestern
became less boring. I took every course he offered and he permitted me
to sit in on his graduate seminars. They attracted participants like Ralph
Bunche on a sabbatical from Howard University, Katherine Dunham, the
famous dancer, Jack Trevor, an anthropologist from Cambridge. When I
became fed up with the university and returned to the sea, he brought
me back. He sent money once when I missed my ship in Alexandria.
Herskovits gave me a job proofreading the galleys of his book Rebel Destiny
(Herskovits and Herskovits, 1934).
I began to understand the integrity of other cultures. That other
peoples had their dignity and a root belief in their own superiority. I
understood that I was a child of my own culture and because of the
immigrant background I wanted desperately to be considered a full
American, and so, like millions of others in my early years, I was a super-
patriot, a super-American. To examine these beliefs with a new under-
standing of the meaning of culture was a great intellectual experience.
There was a magnificent lecture Herskovits gave about the definition of
a Jew (Herskovits, 1927: 117; see Frank, 2001; Yelvington, 2000). You can
imagine the impression it made on me.
KAY: What kind of person was Herskovits?
JSH: He was very generous and kind. In my last year he took me to lunches at
the Faculty Club, an invitation not usually extended to undergraduates.
I know that I was rash, abrupt and quick to retort. But I was eager to learn
and I think that appealed to him. I read everything he suggested and
discussed my thinking with him. I’ve not had a better professor. I founded
a campus magazine, with two others, called The Gadfly. It had articles
critical of professors, lampooned some of them. I showed it to Mel. He
enjoyed it as much as the students. He had a tremendous ego. I felt this
was a characteristic to be generously and amusingly tolerated. I did not
think less of him for it. I was three or four years older than other under-
graduates. I had been a sailor, had led a much different life and had a
certain maturity. Willard Park and I would go to clubs on Chicago’s South
Side to hear the exciting Chicago jazz and sometimes we’d be the only
whites there.
KAY: Who were your fellow undergrad anthropology students at North-

western?
JSH: There were few of us – George Foster, Mickie LeCron, Julie Tanner and
Carl Butts. Butts became enchanted with Nazi ideology (see Harris to
Herskovits, 6 February 1937, HPN).
KAY: You take time off to go to back to sea, between your junior and senior
year, using the name ‘Russell Sumner’, a sailor from whom you bought
discharge papers. And that’s where you write from Leningrad that you
missed your ship.
454
JSH: Yes, I missed it. There were many Americans living in Leningrad at that
time. Ford and other American manufacturers had opened factories so
there were technicians and management people around. There were a
number of young intellectuals. One of my friends from high school,
Arthur Behrstock, was there with his wife. He was an editor of the trans-
lation of Lenin’s works into English. The night before the ship sailed
there was a party and we were drinking a mixture of 120-proof vodka and
cherry brandy. By the time I got to the dock the next morning the ship
was on its way to Finland. The United States hadn’t recognized Russia at
that time and so there was no American consulate. I reported to the
Harbor Police. They didn’t place me in prison but in a sort of detention.
It wasn’t bad. I slept where they slept. I ate with them. Finally they
arranged to put me into a seamen’s home. That’s when I met Roy Barton
and Archie Phinney, Waldemar Bogoras also. I met Bogoras at the
Institute of Anthropology and Ethnography, and he took me on a tour
of the Museum of the History of Religions.4
KAY: I wanted to ask you about your early theoretical formation as an anthro-
pologist, in terms of the theoretical orientation to your work. What were
you reading at this point? What kinds of things got you interested in
theory?
JSH: You mean other than anthropology?
Figure 3 Institute of Anthropology and Ethnography, State Academy of

Sciences, Leningrad
(Source: V.O.K.S., Ethnography, Folklore and Archaeology in the U.S.S.R. 4 (1933))
455
KAY: Right. What got you interested in historical materialism?

JSH: I don’t know if I know very much about historical materialism. I never
thought of myself as a Marxist. The first Marx I ever read in my life was
when I was teaching at the College of the University of Chicago. I was the
anthropologist in a Social Science faculty that included an economist,
political scientist, sociologist, etc. We taught a general course in Social
Orientation or whatever it was called. We lectured on Freud, on Malthus,
Marx, Veblen and others. So I read Marx for the first time. However, I
had read popular summaries of Marxist ideas and perhaps I absorbed
some of his ideas from others, but did that superficial understanding
make me a Marxist?
KAY: You were reading Lewis Henry Morgan, in terms of a materialist
approach, and also Friedrich Engels’s Anti-Dühring. In a letter to
Herskovits, you said ‘I am still horribly confused as to the Marxian and
the so-called “American” viewpoint. I had always experienced a sullen
rebellion against your teachings that culture, arising from a complex of
conditions, is its own justification because it exists, and is capable of any
of an almost infinite number of forms. Specifically, that it follows no set
of evolutionary process. On the other hand, I rebel more against the
“orthodox” Marxian evolutionary pattern of society’ (Harris to
Herskovits, 25 October 1934, HPN). In terms of your theory, you really
emphasize the economic issues. Later you say, ‘I still think that anthro-
pology from the viewpoint of dialectical materialism would be a fruitful
thing’ (Harris to Herskovits, 29 October 1936, HPN).
JSH: I understood labor problems at first hand from my life as a seaman. Later,
when I was at Columbia, I saw strikes as an effective means to achieve
better conditions for labor. I did understand at least this labor movement.
KAY: You graduated Phi Beta Kappa from Northwestern.
JSH: Which surprised the hell out of me. I must have been at the bottom of
that list.
KAY: So you move on to Columbia in 1936, where you had a work-study
arrangement with the National Youth Administration (NYA). You worked
three jobs. You lived in John Jay hall. You talk about Columbia as being
the best intellectual experience you had, that ‘The years at Columbia
were certainly among the best years of my life, the most intellectually
exciting years, and in terms of the relationships with faculty and students’
(Edelman, 1997: 9).
JSH: The transition from Northwestern, an easy, relaxed and pleasant school,
to Columbia was stark and sharp. At Columbia one was expected to study
and to participate, and if you didn’t it was your own ass. There were no
threats nor cosseting nor cajoling. Most students were mature and articu-
late. I recall my first presentation of an oral report. It was at Benedict’s
seminar on Culture and Personality and based on Bogoras’s study of the
Chukchi (Bogoras, 1904–9). When I finished there was an outpouring of
comments, some contradicting my conclusions and challenging my
interpretations. Morris Siegel, I recall, disputed one of my statements
basing his view on a footnote in the Bogoras text. Imagine – a lousy
footnote!
456
KAY: Some of the graduate students you knew were Irving Goldman, Charles
Wagley, Oscar Lewis, Jane Richardson . . .
JSH: . . . Natalie Joffe, Marvin Opler, Joe Jablow, David Aberle, Buell Quain . . .
KAY: . . . could you describe the graduate student culture? And these students’
social origins? And their political orientation? Murphy (1991: 71) writes
of you and your cohort that you had established in the student tradition
of the department ‘a bedrock, generalized brand of materialism that
befitted their class and/or ethnic origins, as well as their politics’ (see
also McMillan, 1986).
JSH: I don’t know Murphy nor his article, but if he refers to the years when I
was at Columbia my recollection of the students and their views is that
they were more diverse and heterogeneous than he indicates. After
classes several of us would go to a lunch place on Amsterdam Avenue or
Broadway, drink coffee and talk and talk. Not all of us, some of us. We
talked about anthropological problems and trends. About the merits of
our professors. We’d talk about how we could get a grant. Money was
always on our minds. I remember long talks with Chuck Wagley. We’d talk
about our future, perhaps we’d go into business together. There were
relatively few departments of anthropology in the country at that time
and so the opportunities for a faculty appointment were few. One of our
heroes, an anthropologist whose name I can’t recall, was the vice-
president of the Abraham and Straus department store in Brooklyn. He
was an anthropologist who had made it! Perhaps the best that we could
hope for was a civil service job, and we’d tell each other how best to reply
to questions on the Civil Service exams. That’s how limited our horizons
were. Of course we talked politics too. The feeling was politically liberal
or left-liberal. Radical by a few, and I cannot recall a truly conservative
opinion being expressed, but if there was a generalized bedrock feeling
of anything I didn’t sense it, rather the discussions were marked by strong
and loud divergent opinions. The communists that I knew at Columbia,
although firm in their points of view, were not insistent. They were
involved in American issues of the time. They were concerned with better
working conditions and salaries, labor organization, questions of racial
discrimination, women’s rights. Their views were not far different than
mine. The talks were lively. They were invigorating. There was an intel-
lectual ferment. Few students had money. Mickie LeCron and Julie
Tanner were both from wealthy families. They were within the smaller
WASP group. Jane Richardson, a California WASP, had the appearance
of a patrician but she was not one. We still correspond and recall our
student days. Buell Quain was a loner, not part of any group. The largest
group – but not by much – was the New York Jews. But this was not a
homogeneous group. It ranged from tight-lipped tough-talking Morris
Siegel, who drove a taxi at night, to Joe Jablow, who was diffident and
offered his opinions tentatively. Oscar Lewis and Irving Goldman were
more definite in their views. I was an oddball to all of them because of
my sailor background and occasional rough speech.
KAY: Ruth Benedict was your professor. She seemed favorably disposed to you.
JSH: Ruth Benedict was a wonderful woman. I don’t know anyone who disliked
her except Linton, who was jealous of her popularity and appeal to the
457
students. She was a poet. She was elegant. She was beautiful. Her lectures
were classics. She was warm-hearted and generous. One of the most extra-
ordinary women I’ve known.
KAY: Alexander Lesser was the most influential for you?
JSH: Certainly influential but not the most influential. Al was an anthro-
pologist’s anthropologist. His lectures were dense and well-organized.
Theoretical often and abstract. A superb intellectual. We became friends.
Al was badly treated by Ralph Linton, who saw him as an intellectual
threat. Lesser was the epitome of what Linton despised – a smart Jew with
a tart tongue.
KAY: So you also worked with Boas, and helped work up some of his materials.
Boas wanted you to look at some Tsimshian material, and to analyze some
of the material bases for the potlatch.
JSH: Actually my assignment was to derive aspects of Tsimshian culture from
the mythology written on hundreds of sheets of typescript. A difficult
and somewhat boring task. Another job Boas gave me was much more
interesting – to work with David Efron. As you know, Boas had a prime
interest in race. This was at a time when Nazi theories of race had taken
hold in the United States and some academicians wrote pseudo-scientific
articles and books promoting similar nonsense. Boas worked on various
fronts. One was to demonstrate that, contrary to what the racists believed,
gestures were not racially determined. An Argentine student, David
Efron, worked on studies of gestures. I was on the NYA (National Youth
Administration) payroll assigned to Boas and he sent me to work with
Efron and an artist, Stuyvesant Van Veen. We worked in Van Veen’s
studio. Although my work was essentially clerical, David patiently
explained to me what he was doing and why he was doing it. We’d go to
Union Square and sit on one of the benches. I’d hold a newspaper and
poke the lens of a movie camera through a hole in it and take footage of
old Jews speaking, old Italians speaking, and capturing their gestures on
film. We’d project the developed film at Van Veen’s studio onto a large
graph. Efron gave a quantitative expression to gestures, tabulating the
rapidity of the movement of the arm, the relationship of the elbow to the
shoulder and to the side, the elbow to the hand and so on. My task was
to mark the frames as they were projected on the graph. One of the most
interesting illustrations of the relationship of gesture and speech was in
the analysis of footage obtained from newsreels of the speeches of Mayor
Fiorello La Guardia. La Guardia was a colorful and popular mayor. He
spoke Yiddish. He spoke Italian. And English of course. Our footage
showed six sets of his gestures. Each was different from the others.
Speaking conversational Yiddish he used one set of gestures, in a Yiddish
speech to a Jewish audience he used different oratorical gestures. This
was also the case with conversational and oratorical Italian and similarly
for English. The thesis was that gestures were based on culture, not race.
We also showed generational differences. The gestures of immigrants
were different from those of their sons. We went to Saratoga Race Track
to clock the gestures of first-generation Italians and Jews which demon-
strated that although they were reminiscent of those of their fathers they
had become modified, restricted and subdued, closer to American
gestures (Efron, 1941).
458
KAY: The opportunity arises through Benedict for you to go do fieldwork in

the summer of 1937 in Nevada, with the White Knives.
JSH: Ruth had gotten enough money for eight studies. I received a modest
sum. I think it was $500. It was to pay informants and to buy a car. I spent
three months with my wife at the reservation in Owyhee, Nevada. We
worked very hard and recorded a lot of material.
When we returned, Linton announced that he had signed a contract
for a book on acculturation (Linton, 1940). The format was that he would
comment on each chapter, write the Introduction and Conclusion. We
would receive reprints for ourselves as well as the necessary amount for
the library to satisfy the requirement for a doctorate. The cost of having
copies printed independently was prohibitive for most of us and to have
them at no cost was a compelling reason for us to write the chapters for
Linton’s book.
KAY: Your first wife Martha Harris helped you doing fieldwork. She did a lot
of research with the women.
JSH: Yes. She was very good. She recorded valuable material. She also made
life livable. It was pretty grim out there, with the biting cold even during
the summer and the desolate landscape.
KAY: The White Knives material, the material that comes out in your chapter
(Harris, 1940a) in the book that was edited by Linton, is really different
from the standard acculturation studies in that you are very concerned
to document at every step of the way the economic base for other kinds
of cultural forms, all the way from family form and family size and style
to religion and other things.
JSH: I don’t see that as unusual.
KAY: You talk about how food was procured, about how they existed at bare
subsistence level. How women as gatherers were economically important.
Even the name of these folks. They were called the White Knives. But at
other times, outsiders called them Squirrel Eaters, the Pine Nut Eaters,
the Rabbit Eaters, depending on the season.
JSH: Listen, Kevin, do you think one had to be a Marxist to write this? This
was common sense!
KAY: Well . . .
JSH: Of course I had to understand anthropological theories, but in my
fieldwork it made sense to me to record the basic facts of how people
lived, how they got their food, how this was related to familial structure,
to their religion and so on. I rejected trying to fit these facts into some
anthropological theory.
KAY: After the summer of 1937, you go back to New York to write up the field
notes and to write up the dissertation. At the same time, you’re writing
to the Social Science Research Council to try to do research in Africa.
You had thought that you’d do your doctoral research in Africa.
Herskovits suggested that you study the Ibo as a way to contribute to the
idea of Africa as the cultural baseline for the Afro-Americas (Herskovits
459
to Harris, 27 October 1937, HPN). You tell Herskovits that you are
interested in studying Africa first, and then you want to do research on
Afro-America somewhere. Maybe in South America somewhere, or
maybe in the Caribbean (Harris to Herskovits, 6 April 1937, 19 October
1937, HPN). That becomes Herskovits’s way to encourage you along
these lines, suggesting that in your application to the SSRC you propose
to study a West African group ‘because it will give us more information
concerning the background of the New World Negroes, and permit you
to go on with related field studies in the New World in the attempt to
obtain a better grasp on the process of cultural dynamics and other
problems that can be studied under historical control’ (Herskovits to
Harris, 23 December 1937, HPN).
JSH: That’s right. From the historical records we know that most of the slaves
were from West Africa. So if we knew that area, Herskovits’s thesis
was that then we could better understand what happened to African
descendants in the New World. But when I was actually in the field in
Nigeria, I ignored that. I immersed myself in that living, vibrant Ibo
culture going on under my nose. Such an enormous difference living in
an Ibo village compared to the sad Shoshoni Reservation where I had to
extract information from the minds of tired old men. The Ibo village
was tremendously exciting for me, full of all the things I had read about.
Religious figures, native doctors actually working cures, spirit possession
that you could see, work parties, lively meetings of village elders. And
the dancing! The night drumming and the singing with leader and
chorus. Well, I needn’t go on. Once Herskovits suggested the Ibo, it
seemed to work out well. He wrote introductions for me. I was greatly
helped by G.I. Jones, then a District Officer, who later taught at
Cambridge. He facilitated my research. Jack Trevor at Cambridge intro-
duced me to Jones then finishing his home leave. I had been invited
there to talk about the Shoshoni. I sailed on a Dutch freighter from
Amsterdam to Lagos and then a coastal steamer to Port Harcourt. I went
with Jones to various villages trying to locate a suitable one for my work.
At each village he held court in his capacity as District Officer and desig-
nated judge. I’d sit with him as he heard cases and thus received a mild
introduction to Ibo life and was able to appreciate some of the cultural
variations. Jones thought that Ozuitem was a good village for study
because it was relatively small. We talked with some of the elders and
asked if it would be all right if I worked there. They agreed and said they
could build a house for me. As I recall, it would cost £30. Jones asked
them to build it and sketched a plan of the house. A verandah where I
would eat and work. Behind it a bedroom and behind that a kitchen. A
separate building for the servant’s quarters. The latrine was about fifteen
yards away, a small outhouse with a hole in the ground. I had outfitted
myself in London at a shop specializing in tropical gear. Mosquito
netting, mosquito boots, sun helmet, shorts, bush jacket, etc. With
Jones’s recommendation I hired an interpreter who had learned English
at a mission school and spoke it fairly well. Sometimes I would have to
remonstrate with him when, after a long speech by an informant, he
would relate in a few words what was said.
460
Figure 4 Harris with Ibo girl in fancy dress shortly after his arrival in late
1938 at Bende in Southeastern Nigeria
461
KAY: You describe to Herskovits (Harris to Herskovits, 20 February 1939, HPN)

how you worked with the men in their farms: ‘I like to get out and work
with them, to take off my shirt and shorts and in a loincloth and towel
about my neck cut the thick bush on their farms with a matchet, for the
ants are murderous and clothes therefore impossible and with every
three strokes of the matchet goes a flick of the towel’.
JSH: After about three months I felt that I was getting along well with the
people. Or seemed to. With the good-natured cooperation of one of
the families I went through a mock marriage with one of their young
daughters. This was to experience not only the ceremony with its rituals
at first hand but also to follow the incorporation of the marriage partners
into the structure and functions of the family. I learned much from it,
including obscure pockets of information that otherwise might have
eluded me. I acquired a number of pseudo-relatives with whom I had an
informal, and in some cases approaching a joking relationship. From one
of the old aunts I learned the secrets of the Leopard Society, secrets that
were supposed to be known only to the male members. From these
wonderful older women I began to get a sense of women’s informal but
surprisingly strong influence in a patrilineal, patrilocal and patriarchal
society. I was so intrigued by this theme that I continued to study and to
analyze it and, on my return to the United States, I addressed the New
York Academy of Sciences on the position of women in Ibo society
(Harris, 1940b).
KAY: You were inducted into the Leopard Society?
JSH: Yes. I was invited to join. To do so one had to kill a leopard or a person
and I explained that I’d rather kill a leopard. Early one morning I was
escorted to a remote area of the bush, given an old front-loading musket
and shot the leopard. The poor beast had been trapped! They had
trapped it to avoid my getting hurt. At my last shot six or seven men
leaped out of the bush and hacked at the leopard with their machetes so
they too could meet the qualification of killing a leopard for entry to the
society. Ibo pragmatism!
KAY: You said you wanted to look at the economic activities of the Ezi, an
extended patrilineal family in Ozuitem, and an analysis of the Ezi itself.
JSH: In my readings of previous observers of Ibo society as in Meek (1937),
Talbot (1926) and others, the culture seemed to be free-floating. It
lacked grounding, a base. I tried to achieve this by a detailed description
of everyday life not only of the sexual division of labor but also at various
age levels. I also recorded the daily activities of 16 individuals over an
extended period (Harris, 1943, 1944). The material was fairly raw and
needed more analysis, which I was going to do later. But as you know I
was caught up in the war and its aftermath. During the war I sent a series
of papers on the economy of the village to Dr Ida Ward at the School of
Oriental and African Studies, University of London for safekeeping. She
sent some of them for publication in Africa before I could revise them
(Harris, 1943, 1944).
KAY: You get this opportunity to write something for the colonial adminis-
tration. How did this offer come about?
462
JSH: I got along well with the colonial officials. I was fortunate in that most of
those I met were personable and intelligent men. Many had intellectual
hobbies which they furthered at universities during their home leave in
England. Obviously the Colonial Office in London was informed of my
research. I was asked if I would complete the economic year and report
on it to them. Although there were agricultural officers in the Colonial
Service, and very good ones, they were technically oriented, not cultur-
ally aware. They also asked my opinion on native reaction if a village was
to be moved to another location. I reported that the Ibo had a strong and
close relationship to their land, especially through the spirit world of
their ancestors, who were often buried within their compounds or even
beneath the floors of their houses. Therefore a negative reaction might
be expected, but I refused to speculate on the form it might take. The
relation of the Ibo to their land was so interesting that I later expanded
this material into an article for Rural Sociology (Harris, 1942b).
KAY: You were really involved here. You were really involved in the lives of these
people.
JSH: And I liked them.
KAY: You didn’t feel compromised to do this kind of work for the colonial
government?
JSH: I was glad to be able to stay there a few more months. The money I had
gotten from the SSRC was quite modest – $3500 which had to cover travel
to England, then to Nigeria, and to defray all expenses of equipment and
fieldwork for the entire year. I had to live frugally. I did manage to
complete a field year with that money, but I could not complete the agri-
cultural cycle. So I was pleased to receive the added funds to pay my
household staff and buy food to keep going. I had not counted on
expenditures like tipping the servants. There were other costs that were
not budgeted. I fell in love with the magnificent and imaginative wooden
masks and I could not resist buying some. Did I feel compromised
because the Colonial Office wanted to see the results of some of my work?
Not at all. The material I gave them was straight ethnography, which in
any case was to be published by me and thus freely available. There was
nothing clandestine or sinister in it. Of course it was apparent that the
colonial service kept the Africans functioning more or less peacefully
while the trading companies and miners exploited the resources of the
country. And certainly Britain benefited from the stream of cheap
exports from Africa. But my concern at that time was to describe the Ibo
culture of a village, not the vices and virtues of the colonial system. Later
in my career, as you know, I became intensively involved in the function-
ing of the colonial system and its consequences.
KAY: You go back to the States, and that’s when the Ohio State job comes up.
You were going to be a replacement for John Gillin for a year.
JSH: I was the only anthropologist on the staff as part of the Department of
Sociology. I enjoyed teaching. What I didn’t enjoy was faculty politics –
the jockeying for power within the department – and I tried to steer clear
of that. The second year I was there, the anthropology classes had grown.
I was asked to suggest the name of an anthropologist for an additional
463
post. John Bennett was hired and he was excellent, a good teacher and
well liked.
KAY: What did you do when the war started?
JSH: Bill Bascom and I went to Washington days after Pearl Harbor. We saw
Ralph Bunche, who was involved in a new organization, and he promised
to see what he could do. We went to the Office of Naval Intelligence
(ONI), the Military Intelligence (MI) Division, or G2, and I’ve forgotten
where else. Both Bill and I had specific experience and qualifications as
anthropologists and field Africanists which we thought would make us
more useful to the war effort than as foot soldiers. The people at MI and
ONI said yes, they wanted people like us and that they’d contact us. They
never did. Ralph phoned a few days later asking us to return to Washing-
ton. Very quickly someone had the idea of setting up a phoney anthro-
pological mission as a cover to get Bill and me to West Africa.
KAY: Of what did the intelligence work consist? What was your assignment?
JSH: It wasn’t very clear. Just to send back anything that was interesting in
relation to the war effort. The office was in shambles. We received almost
no training. Those were the early days of our entry into the war. A year
or so later, before my second mission, I went through an elaborate
training. I did go to code classes with Bill. It was a simple code that we
were taught. We went to Accra, in the Gold Coast, a colony surrounded
by Vichy French Togo and Dahomey. We reported on troop movements
and general conditions in these French colonies. It would have been silly
for us to try to establish our own intelligence sources. For many years the
British had placed clandestine agents throughout the French territories.5
I got along well with the men of the British intelligence community; one
of them, Meyer Fortes, an anthropologist, later taught at Cambridge.
They opened their files and we began feeding Washington with the
British material.
After a few months we went to Lagos. At that time Rommel was
sweeping victoriously through North Africa. If North Africa fell the
lifeline from India would be cut off. Washington had contracted Pan
American Airways to fly Americans out of India and North Africa back to
the United States. Part of the route was through Nigeria: Cairo to
Khartoum to Lagos. From Lagos ships and planes continued the route to
the States. We were to report on the security of these flights. In Lagos we
were again surrounded by Vichy French, Togo on one side and Dahomey
on the other. Our anthropological mission cover was dropped for one as
special assistant to the American consul. After several months I was
invalided back to the States with malaria. After a hospital stay in Wash-
ington I was assigned office work at OSS headquarters until I recovered
and could take up my next assignment.
When I’d sufficiently recovered I was prepared for a new mission and
slated for a more important job, to head up the OSS mission in South
Africa. I went through intensive training involving more sophisticated
codes and transmission methods. I went through a course in unarmed
combat, which essentially meant how to subdue and kill a person without
using a weapon. This course was taught by a wiry British police officer
from Singapore. The OSS had taken over ‘the Farm’ in Maryland, and
464
other areas in Maryland and Virginia. We were taught several minor skills:
how to steal a car, how to seriously disable a car, how to pick a lock, etc.
And strenuous physical training. When I was cleared by a medical board
I left for South Africa. There were several reasons why South Africa was
important. There was substantial pro-Nazi feeling and support. South
Africa had entered the war as one of the Allies with only the slimmest
vote in favor in their parliament. Information about Allied ship sailings
was sent to Nazi submarines where the ships could be attacked in the
Mozambique Channel. Smuggling of industrial diamonds sent to
Germany maintained factory production of the Nazi war machine. And
information was needed on the pro-Nazi organizations within South
Africa.
KAY: What kinds of pro-Nazi organizations existed?
JSH: The Broderbund operated throughout South Africa with several
branches. Primarily a cultural organization, it spread pro-Nazi propa-
ganda throughout the country. The Ossewa Brandwag (OB), an
Afrikaner nationalist group, had units directly involved in sabotage –
blowing up bridges, cutting telephone lines, derailing trains and so forth.
At my request the head of the OB invited me to a farm where his men
were undergoing physical training and target practice. He teased me
about my job and then, surprisingly, enumerated specific acts of sabotage
that members of the OB had executed. Only rarely does a field agent
know how his dispatches are used and the effect, if any, they have had.
Recently David Price referred me to a confidential summary of OSS activi-
ties written by Kermit Roosevelt in 1947, declassified in 1970. It pointed
out that, because of the wide power of the Ossewa Brandwag throughout
South Africa, General Smuts was reluctant to take action against it, but
finally was persuaded to do so: ‘It was learned later that the report,
submitted by the OSS agent, on an interview with the OB leader, had
played an important part in the South African Cabinet decision to adopt
a firm policy against that organization’ (Roosevelt, 1976 [1947]: 43).
Clandestine radio stations reported on ship movements. We had to find
and destroy them. I obtained from Washington more sophisticated direc-
tional finding equipment to more accurately locate these transmitters. I
worked closely with the British Special Operations Executive, the SOE, as
an OSS liaison. I accompanied the British on some of the raids. We would
go in groups of four or five, silently surround the house at night and
suddenly crash in, seize the operators and demolish the radio equipment.
Sometimes there was resistance, but rarely were there casualties. We were
unsuccessful in attempts to stop the smuggling of industrial diamonds
during my time in South Africa. I learned that other agents had more
success in the Congo and the Gold Coast.
I had to set up my own sources of intelligence information. My pre-
decessor had left no organization. I went about it cautiously and carefully
in the atmosphere laden with Nazi sympathizers. My cover was a State
Department official, Special Assistant to the American Minister. I was
immediately involved in social activities. At a cocktail party in Cape Town
a group of young women was there, many of whose husbands were in the
army. One was Shirley Oates McGregor. We chatted and I asked about
her husband. He was a tank commander with the South African corps
465
attached to the British Eighth Army fighting in North Africa. That was
good news because then I knew what were her sympathies. At lunch a few
days later I told her in general terms what I was doing and asked if she
would like to work with me. She said yes, she was bored and wanted to be
active in the war effort. In a short time she was helping me to collate and
edit intelligence received from various sources. She also was my
informant on South African personalities and their importance in the
social structure, and she created social situations where I could meet
them. About three months after starting to work with me her husband
was killed in the Allied landings in Italy. Two years later I married Shirley.
She was completely supportive throughout the vicissitudes of our life. We
had a good and rewarding life together with two stalwart sons, fine men.
We were married for 57 years. She died in 2002.
In South Africa I fell ill toward the end of the war in Europe. I was
hospitalized for some time. I needed medical attention and I returned to
Washington. My illness wasn’t diagnosed for a long time. I was first sent
to a hospital in Washington and then to another one in Staten Island in
New York. Finally to the Marine Hospital in Baltimore with access to
Johns Hopkins. I kept losing weight and was completely exhausted.
Finally the diagnosis was bilharziasis. I remember being taken to a
medical theater, surrounded by doctors and researchers because soldiers
were beginning to return from the Pacific with the same illness and this
was the first case they had seen. I was finally discharged and I left the OSS.
Ralph helped me to obtain a fellowship, ostensibly to write up my
research but really to give me time to recover. In the meantime Shirley
had been admitted to the University of Chicago. She had taken pre-
medical courses at the University of Cape Town and had worked as an
assistant to a psychiatrist. When her husband died she wanted a break
from South Africa and to resume her education in the United States.
KAY: You later wrote a piece about anthropology during the war in South
Africa (Harris, 1947).
JSH: When I got to South Africa, I immediately looked up Isaac Schapera,
‘Saki’, the authority on the Bushmen and Hottentot, at the University of
Cape Town. We became friends. Also Julius Lewin, a professor at the
University of Witwatersrand who became godfather of my first son. Lewin
was a strong anti-racist who felt that apartheid was dangerous and said so
in books and articles. I met other anthropologists in Johannesburg and
Cape Town. They assumed that I was involved in some kind of undercover
activity which we never discussed. After the war, when the political system
became oppressive, both Schapera and Lewin moved to England and
taught at the University of London.
KAY: After the war, was your job at Ohio State waiting for you?
JSH: After the war I spent almost a year in Washington recovering from
bilharziasis. The people at Ohio State invited me to return. They offered
to make me head of a new and separate department of anthropology.
John Bennett would remain and a third anthropologist would be hired.
I said I would give them my answer after my return to Washington. I went
back to my small flat. A few days later I received a phone call from the
College at the University of Chicago, saying that they had a place for an
anthropologist and would I be interested. Yes and yes I’d be interested!
466
Chicago is where I grew up, where my family lived, and where Shirley was
a student! It couldn’t be better! I felt my luck was turning. All freshmen
at the College had to take the Social Orientation course, or whatever it
was called. The staff for that course included all the social scientists on
the College faculty. Each of us had to give a series of lectures in his field
to the entire class which was then split into a number of sections, each of
us in charge of some sections. I also gave talks during this period to some
of Herskovits’s students at Northwestern on my Ibo fieldwork and a
lecture to the anthropologists at Chicago on the British and French
colonial systems. I was going into my second year at Chicago when Ralph
Bunche phoned.
Ralph called in 1947. He said: ‘Jack, I’m now at the UN. We badly
need someone like you. I’m in the Trusteeship Division, for non-self-
governing territories. We’re responsible from the UN’s standpoint for the
administration of the African Territories. We need you as an Africanist’.
I went to Lake Success, New York, where the UN was located and Ralph
told me about the position. I felt this was perfect. It was true that I enjoyed
the return to academic life, reading the anthropological literature I had
missed during the war, returning to the analysis of my field material and
the intellectual stimulation of the university, the faculty and the very
bright students. It is also true that I missed the action. I felt that the UN
combined both – academic study and action. The UN was embarking on
an historic mission to bring better conditions and eventual indepen-
dence to Africans. Idealistic? Naïve? Of course, but it made for an
exciting time, an exhilarating time to be there. We were a small group in
Bunche’s Division. There was one other anthropologist, George Howard,
a Yale graduate, and he and I became friends. I hired John Murra for one
summer and he had a taste of how native life is affected by international
politics. It was an exciting time. I worked long hours and enjoyed it.
KAY: You worked to get the Rev. Michael Scott a hearing?
JSH: Michael Scott represented native peoples of South West Africa. He was a
striking figure, tall and thin, with a gaunt, handsome face. He was intense
and devoted in his mission. He strongly felt that the Africans were being
treated harshly and unjustly by the South African government entrusted
by the UN to administer this former German colony. He wanted his voice
heard at one of the UN sessions to place these injustices on record. He
asked me for help. It was difficult for an NGO representative, someone
not a member of a government, to obtain a hearing at that time. For one
year I was unsuccessful. In the second year I managed to make it possible
for him to speak before the Fourth Committee of the General Assembly.
I think he was the first non-government person to speak before an official
UN body.
KAY: What were your research duties? You headed a fact-finding mission to
East Africa (United Nations, 1948b). And you wrote position papers.
JSH: There was a calendar of meetings of committees and sub-committees to
consider the administration of these territories. The Trusteeship Council
consisted of an equal number of colonial powers and non-colonial
powers. The permanent members of the Security Council were members
whether they were colonial powers or not. The colonial powers were six:
467
Britain, France, Belgium, United States, Australia and New Zealand.

These were administrators of Trust Territories. They were balanced by six
non-colonial powers. The Soviet Union and China were permanent non-
colonial members because of their seats on the Security Council. Four
non-colonial powers had to be elected every two years (see United
Nations, 1947). For our research we had the normal sources: the old
League of Nations reports, the journals, the reports of the administrat-
ing powers, research papers. We had to present information to the
committees as required. Once the UN Visiting Missions visited the terri-
tories, our work became more authoritative, based on first-hand reliable
material, our own. As the first years passed, the colonial powers, princi-
pally the United States, Britain, and Belgium, became displeased and
affronted by probing questions of the non-colonial members and their
impertinent observations on the quality of their administrations. They
decided that, at the next election of the non-colonial powers, the candi-
dates would be less offensive. One of the countries elected was Costa Rica.
This was before the revolution of 1948. We in the Secretariat went to
maps to locate Costa Rica!
The Costa Rican representative was Picado, the son of a former
president. He obviously had his instructions. He wouldn’t vote until he
saw how the United States voted. Then came the revolution in Costa Rica.
A young lawyer, Roberto Loria, was named by the new Costa Rican
government as its representative to the Trusteeship Council. He came to
my office and asked for help in orientation and information on the
procedures in the Trusteeship Council. I don’t know how he found me,
who directed him to my office. But I was pleased to help. A few months
later the first visiting mission to Trust Territories in Africa was created and
one of the members selected was Costa Rica. Edmond Woodbridge, 28
years old, had been named by President Figueres as Costa Rica’s repre-
sentative on the mission. Woodbridge had fought in the revolution. The
four members of the first Visiting Mission were selected. The two colonial
powers were France and Australia. The representative from France,
Henri Laurentie, a distinguished authority on colonial affairs, and later
the chief architect of the French Union, was named head of the Mission.
The Australian, E.W.P. Chinnery, an anthropologist, had worked in New
Guinea. The non-colonial powers were China and Costa Rica. The
Mission started its work in July 1948. Laurentie was a wise and delightful
person. As governor of a French colony one might expect him to be
authoritative and doctrinaire. On the contrary. During the war, together
with Felix Eboue, Governor of Chad, he resisted the pressure to join
Vichy and declared in favor of de Gaulle. Chinnery was a pleasant and
accommodating person and, since we were fellow anthropologists, we got
along well and enjoyed each other. Lin Mousheng was a young and bright
intellectual. And Edmond. Well, as you know we became firm life-long
friends (see Woodbridge, 1989). After we completed our tour in Ruanda-
Urundi and Tanganyika we were instructed to proceed to Paris, where
the General Assembly was meeting to write our reports. Laurentie
modified some of the observations and recommendations in my draft of
the report on Tanganyika. He was not displeased by the criticisms of the
British administration. He told me that the French governed their
colonies much better than the British.
468
KAY: Do you think this prompted a change in your thinking, from what you
described earlier about Nigeria and your experiences on the ground in
Nigeria, as opposed to what you saw in Tanganyika? Or is it just that
Nigeria was better managed than Tanganyika?
JSH: In Nigeria I was involved in research of life in a village community. My
mandate did not call for an assessment of conditions throughout the
country. In Tanganyika our terms of reference were much broader. We
were charged with judging whether the administering power was
adequately meeting its responsibilities under the United Nations Charter.
In Nigeria I had a personal relationship with very decent men working
under a system which gave them enormous power which they exercised
in a just and humane manner.
KAY: When you made the report – and it is presented in 1949, and the furor
begins afterwards6 – what was the feeling among the people in your
office?
JSH: They thought we had done a good job. Bunche praised it and congratu-
lated us. The head of the Non-Self-Governing Territories Division – the
colonies that were not under the trusteeship system – was an Englishman,
Wilfred Benson, an expert in his field. He felt that our reports showed
solid investigation and honest conclusions.
KAY: After the report, there was the fallout, and then what happened? What
was your next step within the Trusteeship Council?
JSH: I continued my normal work. A mission to West Africa was being planned.
That was my area. I was slated for that.
Figure 5 Harris in his days as a UN diplomat

469
KAY: Then one day you come home to find a subpoena.

JSH: We had a beautiful new house at Kings Point in Great Neck, which Shirley
had helped design. At that time my annual income from the UN was
more than I had ever received – $11,000 net, free of income tax. At Ohio
State, it had been $2000. At Chicago, $4800. We were free of debt, we had
a wonderful 4-year-old son, Shirley was happy and I was tremendously
enjoying my work. Life was good.
KAY: What did you think when you got the subpoena?
JSH: I was flabbergasted. I thought ‘What the hell is this?’
KAY: You had no warning or any indication?
JSH: I knew that some others had been fired. The Trusteeship Division was
quite independent, apart from other departments. I had never met those
that had been fired, nor did I know why they had been fired. I didn’t
know why I had received the subpoena. I didn’t think it was necessary to
consult a lawyer. I appeared before the grand jury and was questioned by
that miserable bastard Roy Cohn. He started asking questions about
people. He asked about Al Lesser, Gene Weltfish, Herskovits, other
anthropologists and fellow students at Columbia, Goldman, Opler and
Lewis, among others. He asked about friends at Northwestern, especially
the Behrstock brothers. Arthur, my high school friend, who had taken
me to Northwestern to enrol and whom I later saw in Leningrad, was
head of a PR firm in New York. Julian, a senior official at UNESCO in
Paris, had been prominent in student activities at Northwestern. Then
Cohn turned to my years as a seaman and asked about Blackie Meyers,
the maritime union leader. I was bewildered and wondered about the
purpose behind these questions. I didn’t invoke the Fifth Amendment. I
didn’t know about the Fifth. I said ‘I don’t remember’ or ‘I can’t answer
that’. When Cohn was satisfied that I was a reluctant witness, he conferred
with some of the jurors, made some notes and dismissed me. I knew then
that I needed legal advice. But where to go? I asked Irving Goldman. I
knew that he had been the subject of an investigation. He gave me the
name of a lawyer that he said was the best in this kind of situation,
Leonard Boudin. Leonard was an outstanding civil rights lawyer. He had
argued cases before the Supreme Court. He had been a lecturer at
Harvard. I phoned and was given an appointment. He said ‘Sit down.
Why do you want to see me?’ When I started to tell him, he said ‘Just a
minute. Let’s walk away from here’. He nodded his head meaningfully
toward the telephone. It was clear that this man knew his way around. He
said ‘Let’s go out and walk’. I told him the story, and he was the first
person to tell me about the constitutional protection of the Fifth
Amendment. He said ‘That’s the only way to avoid naming your friends.’
He added, ‘You can name them. That’s something to decide with your
own conscience’. I said ‘I don’t want to name them, but I want to think
about it and discuss this with my wife’. He said that was wise and that my
decision should be carefully considered.
KAY: Why did all this come about?
JSH: I think what happened was the furor raised by the East African reports.
Because of my anti-colonialism, the colonial powers wanted me out of the
470
UN. Linda Melvern, the investigative journalist, found such indications

many years later when she gained access to confidential files in the State
Department, the Colonial and Foreign Offices in England. It was not
difficult to learn my background. I had made no effort to hide it. In fact,
as a matter of administrative procedure, I had given a factual and detailed
autobiographical report to the OSS which remained in government files.
Any dossier of my life would have included information about my sailor
background, that I had participated in strikes, that I had sailed under
another name, that I had missed my ship in Russia, that I attended
meetings at the John Reed Club, etc. In the temper of that time, these
facts of my life could be manipulated so that I could be made to appear
as a dangerous radical, a potential threat.
For the McCarran Commission, there were private and public
meetings. The private ones, called Executive Sessions, were serious and
businesslike. My lawyer was with me. Boudin was treated with consider-
ation and respect. They asked questions in a businesslike manner and he
replied or I did. They took notes. Thus they knew the questions to which
I would invoke the Fifth Amendment. At the public meetings they called
me traitor, shouting at me, poking their finger in my face for the benefit
of the newspapers.
KAY: Was the chief counsel Robert J. Morris leading this?
JSH: Yes, but he wasn’t the one poking his finger in my face. That grandstand-
ing was reserved for the senators. At various times they would ask if I was
or had been a member of the Communist Party. I always refused to answer
that and invoked my constitutional right to remain silent. However, I
don’t mind telling you that I don’t know, but I don’t think that I was. That
is an honest reply. What happened was that people I knew at Columbia,
members of the Communist Party, would invite me to accompany them
to meetings. I went to three or four meetings of communist groups. I
don’t know whether I was then considered a member. I soon became
bored with the meetings. They were concerned with very local matters
like rental increases in rent-controlled buildings. Or how to prevent
landlords from cutting off facilities like heat and water to force tenants
out of such buildings. There were interminable discussions of how to
prepare for protest demonstrations etc. I was not only bored, but I didn’t
have time for such meetings. I was going to the docks most weekends to
participate in labor problems where I felt personally involved.
It was not an easy decision for me to invoke the Fifth. Shirley and I
discussed it at length. You were damned if you did and damned if you
didn’t. If you did, it was clear that you’d lose your job at the UN and the
consequent loss of income. I did not envisage the far more serious conse-
quences that would result in my own case. If you did not invoke the Fifth,
you legally opened the door to further questions about communism and
communists. If you were asked to name names and did so, there was no
problem except the moral one, that by so doing you were destroying
others. If, on the other hand, you refused to name names, you were open
to a citation of contempt which could lead to a prison sentence, as had
happened in other cases. Shirley and I continued to discuss this dilemma.
Michael was 4 years old.
KAY: What did Shirley say?
471
JSH: She was completely supportive. We agreed that we couldn’t maintain our
way of living by destroying others.
KAY: That was a courageous decision. You had everything. You look around,
you had a wife, a child, a house, prestige, and . . .
JSH: . . . a job I loved. And the house that Shirley had designed. There were
others who did name names and protected their jobs. I wrote an eloquent
letter to Secretary General Lie explaining that the US Constitution
protected my right to silence. Two days later I was fired.7
KAY: At that point you start proceedings where you ask to be reinstated, and
also you ask for compensation.
JSH: Our lawyers pleaded our case before the UN Administrative Tribunal.
The Tribunal concluded that I was unjustly terminated and set out
compensation. The UN administration rejected the Tribunal decision
and the case was brought to the UN General Assembly, which referred
the matter to the World Court at The Hague. Meanwhile, I received
termination pay and invested most of it in a manufacturing venture,
making furniture. It was a failure and I lost my investment. I still had some
of the money owed me for holidays, vacations and sick leave. The World
Court, a year later, endorsed the Tribunal’s recommendations and estab-
lished reparations payments. I received the highest sum awarded –
$40,000 – in view of the likelihood that I would find it difficult or imposs-
ible to obtain a job in my profession.
KAY: You sent letters to anthropologists asking for their support for your legal
fees?
JSH: I sent out about 65 letters. The anthropology establishment was small at
the time. Many of the anthropologists that I hadn’t known at Columbia,
Chicago or Northwestern I met at conferences and annual meetings.
John Murra also sent out an appeal. I had a sympathetic and supportive
response from several anthropologists. That was heartening. But there
were surprising silences from some former colleagues. Bill Bascom’s
silence surprised me. When he didn’t reply, I pressed him. He finally
wrote to say that he hadn’t replied because he was very busy and he really
had no money. There was no signature to his letter. Chuck Wagley never
replied, and we had been close friends. Others wrote with creative,
elaborate and contrived explanations why they couldn’t send con-
tributions. With the years my attitude toward them has become somewhat
more forgiving. It is difficult to appreciate now the widespread fear
among academics at that time. They were frightened of supporting me
lest their own jobs be jeopardized.
Well, Kevin, your questions are taking me back to a period of distaste-
ful events, and not only in academe. The Chicago Tribune referred to my
case in a lead story with the caption ‘Traitor’ referring to the fact that I,
a Chicagoan, had been so named by US senators. This in Chicago – where
my parents and family were living!
KAY: How did you end up in Costa Rica?
JSH: After I left the UN and after the manufacturing fiasco, and when I
realized that I couldn’t get a job in anthropology, I saw little future for
472
us in the United States. I went to the West Indies to see if there was some
opportunity there. When I returned there was a call from Alberto Cañas,
a leading literary figure in Costa Rica, at that time his country’s
permanent representative before the UN. He said that Edmond Wood-
bridge would like me to come to Costa Rica to see whether there might
be a future for us there. I did go, stayed with Edmond at his home and
discussed possibilities. I returned and Shirley agreed that we should move
to Costa Rica. Where else could we go? At the very least we had friends
there willing to help, I had not yet received the reparations from the UN.
We sold our house, automobiles, my collection of African masks,
furniture and most of our books. Shirley and Michael went to South
Africa to stay with her parents until I established myself here. At that time,
1954, Costa Rica had a population of less than a million people. The
economy was primarily agrarian with few minor industries. At first the
opportunities seemed limited. However, I immediately had a small group
of influential and politically well-placed friends in Costa Rica. These
were the young intellectuals who had appeared at the UN after the 1948
revolution whom I had counseled and advised. In Alberto Cañas’s auto-
biography, 80 años no es nada (Cañas, 2006), he generously expressed his
appreciation for the help that I had given him and his colleagues at the
UN. Edmond and his family and friends were warm and helpful. He gave
me a desk in his office, where he and his French partner, Daniel Ratton,
represented Air France and French manufacturers. They owned four or
five taxis. That’s when I got into the taxi business.
KAY: When you started in the taxi business and the company started to grow,
did you ever start thinking that this would be a temporary thing and that
you would get back to anthropology somehow?
JSH: Yes I did. I knew it would take some time because no one would hire me
immediately. I thought that when things simmered down, perhaps
Herskovits would find something for me. But it didn’t happen. At
intervals over the next five years Herskovits would report on his un-
successful efforts. I made one last attempt after I had been in Costa Rica
for about eight years. By then I had become financially independent and
could devote time to research. I went to New York to see Chuck Wagley,
who at that time was in charge of some foundation’s or organization’s
Latin American program. My proposal was based on a study of blacks,
former Jamaicans, in the Limón Province on Costa Rica’s Atlantic Coast.
Wagley said it was an interesting project and he thought he could get
funds and sponsorship for it. I never heard from him. Some years later
he told a friend of mine, an ex-ambassador to Costa Rica, that he had
made a severe misjudgment about me. Sometimes I felt that Herskovits
was disappointed in me. I think he thought that in the end I let him down.
KAY: Because of the UN situation?
JSH: Not because of that. Because I didn’t go on in anthropology. I’m not sure
what he thought I could do. I had to earn money for us to live. Of course,
I had extraordinary luck. I had never seen a balance sheet in my life. I’d
never examined a profit and loss statement. I was incredibly naïve those
first years. And incredibly lucky. I had found an honest and competent
Costa Rican partner, Mariano Vargas, who ran the taxi business with me.
473
The business went extraordinarily well and we expanded quickly, not only
with our own cabs, but we operated cabs for investors, so that at its height
I calculated we had more taxis per capita in San José than there were in
Manhattan. The funds from the taxis freed me to devote time to help
launch our first major project, the country’s first cement plant, and then
a series of other successful ventures. I’ve lived more years in Costa Rica
than anywhere else. The country and its people have been very good to
my family and to me. I found a career vastly different than the academic
and I’ve enjoyed it and prospered with it. But that’s another story.
Notes
Funding for travel to San José, Costa Rica to conduct this interview was provided by
a grant from the Humanities Institute at the University of South Florida for which
I am grateful. I would like to thank David L. Easterbrook of the Melville J. Herskovits
Library of African Studies, Northwestern University, André Elizée, Diana
Lachatañeré, and the staff at the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture
of the New York Public Library, Rodney A. Ross of the Center for Legislative
Archives, US National Archives, Lilace Hatayama and Aislinn Catherine Sotelo,
Special Collections, Charles E. Young Research Library, University of California, Los
Angeles, the interlibrary loan department at the University of South Florida library,
and Janet C. Olson, Allen J. Streicker, Kevin B. Leonard and Patrick M. Quinn at
the Northwestern University Archives for their invaluable help over the years. A
thank you, as well, to Hawa Knuckles and Ramona Kohrs, as well as members of the
UN Reference Team at the Dag Hammarskjöld Library, United Nations. I thank Jean
Herskovits for her kind permission to quote from her father’s correspondence.
Thank you to Sophie Richmond for her skilful copy editing. I would also like to
thank Shelly Belzer, Caroline H. Bledsoe, Marc Edelman, Jane I. Guyer, Jonathan
Harris, Michael Harris, Alice Howard, Thomas Kunkel, Frances E. Mascia-Lees,
Linda Melvern, Mindy J. Morgan, David H. Price, Sir Brian Urquhart, and Ernesto
Ruiz, and the Ruiz and Madrigal families in San José, Costa Rica for their advice and
support.
1 These are found in the Melville J. Herskovits Papers, Africana Manuscripts 6,
Northwestern University Archives.
2 This interview took place on 27 June 2005 in San José, Costa Rica.
3 This series of six articles was published in the New York World-Telegram from
Monday through Saturday, 1–6 November 1937, under the title ‘Man – With
Variations’ (Mitchell, 1937a, 1937b, 1937c, 1937d, 1937e, 1937f).
4 On Bogoras’s career and his waning fortunes under, and accommodation to,
Stalinism, as well as his involvement with Franz Boas and US anthropology, see
Kan (2006).
5 Harris said of the operation that ‘We were amateur bunglers in the field of intel-
ligence’, describing the well-established British sources of information that
could not be replicated, and the low level of awareness of the West Africa
situation in the United States, recalling ‘Ralph Bunch telling me at that time
the files at U.S. Army Intelligence on West Africa were composed almost
completely of clippings from the New York Times’ (quoted in Lawler, 2002: 35;
see also Edelman, 1997: 11). On US anthropologists during the Second World
War, see Price (1998, 2008).
474
6 Criticism of the report was heard in the House of Lords (e.g. The Times, 1
December 1949: 2), the Colonial Office issued a rebuttal (e.g. The Times, 12 May
1949: 3), and, locally, white settlers in Tanganyika reacted strongly. For
example, the following is from an article in East Africa and Rhodesia (17 February
1949): ‘The indignation which has been aroused among the European
community in East Africa by the recommendations of the mission from the
Trusteeship Council to Tanganyika is fully justified. . .. A study of the full report
confirms the blistering comments that have been evoked. The report betrays a
fantastically academic approach to the political development of Tanganyika.
The emphasis throughout is on self-government or independence, with little
consideration of the long and laborious steps which are necessary before self-
government can become a reality.’
7 Ralph Bunche was the subject of US government investigations, partially
because of his association with Harris (see Urquhart, 1993: 243–56). For more
on anthropology and the Cold War, see, for example, Price (2004) and
Patterson (2001). Cf. Lewis (2005).
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■ Kevin A. Yelvington teaches anthropology at the University of South Florida. His

research interests include ethnic, gender and class relations, with a focus on Latin
America, the Caribbean and the African diaspora in the Americas. He is the author
of Producing Power: Ethnicity, Gender, and Class in a Caribbean Workplace (1995), the
editor of Trinidad Ethnicity (1993) and Afro-Atlantic Dialogues: Anthropology in the
Diaspora (2006) and the co-editor of The Colonial Caribbean in Transition: Essays on
Postemancipation Social and Cultural History (1999). He was recently awarded a
Guggenheim Fellowship for research on Melville J. Herskovits and the history of
Afro-American anthropology. [email: yelvingt@cas.usf.edu]

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A Life In and Out of Anthropology

Jack Sargent Harris’s career in anthropology in a strict sense might have

interview: ‘Anthropologist, Secret Agent, Witch-hunt Victim, Entre-

when he recovered, he returned to OSS headquarters in Washington, DC

Figure 1 Jack Sargent Harris

Lisbon, Portugal, signed on as deck boys for a summer’s experience. They

Figure 2 Harris at age 19 aboard the Zarembo of the American West

KAY: Who were your fellow undergrad anthropology students at North-

Figure 3 Institute of Anthropology and Ethnography, State Academy of

KAY: Right. What got you interested in historical materialism?

KAY: The opportunity arises through Benedict for you to go do fieldwork in

KAY: You describe to Herskovits (Harris to Herskovits, 20 February 1939, HPN)

Britain, France, Belgium, United States, Australia and New Zealand.

Figure 5 Harris in his days as a UN diplomat

KAY: Then one day you come home to find a subpoena.

UN. Linda Melvern, the investigative journalist, found such indications

■ Kevin A. Yelvington teaches anthropology at the University of South Florida. His

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