In Retrospect: Harold R. Isaacs's Scratches on Our Minds

Harold Isaacs’s Scratches on Our Minds: American Views of China and India is full of reminiscences about how Americans regarded Chinese and Indians in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. It contains, for example, the account of a man who grew up in a small town in New Jersey, where the Chinese ran laundries. The Chinese were the most peculiar of the ethnic groups in town, for they seemed to have no families, they wrote backwards and upside down, and they subsisted on a diet of chop suey, which was made, the boys felt sure, of rats, mice, cats, and puppies. The laundrymen were said to keep meat cleavers under their counters, and some of the braver boys would tempt fate by flinging open the laundry’s door, tossing in a dead cat, then running for it, just out of the cleaver’s range. Another story comes from a former State Department official who encountered Indians in Europe during the 1930s. “My wife’s a blonde and they are interested in blondes,” the diplomat recalled. “She thought them interesting and I thought them terrible. This intensified my prejudice against these buzzards” (pp. 358–59). These candid stories give Isaacs’s book its life and make it uncomfortably accessible even to modern readers. In exaggerated and socially unacceptable form, Isaacs’s subjects articulated our own prejudices, our secret and shameful ideas about what Chinese eat, how Indians lust, and so forth. The book, in the end, is about American identity; the images it catalogues were, and are, scratches on our minds.

Harold Isaacs was not a historian but a journalist who began his career as an undergraduate at Columbia covering church sermons for the New York Times. Following graduation in 1930, Isaacs made his way across the Pacific, working first in the engine room of a freighter, then as a bellhop on a luxury liner. He arrived in China and spent the next year traveling throughout the country, tracking the course of Chiang Kai-shek’s dubious revolution. In 1932 Isaacs settled in Shanghai, married Viola Robinson, and founded an English language weekly called The China Forum. The Forum criticized Chiang’s repression of his political opponents. In his first issue, Isaacs accused Chiang’s party, the Kuomintang (KMT), of having murdered five writers. Thereafter the Forum was forced underground, and in 1934, under threat of closure by the government, the journal succumbed. Isaacs moved to Peking and began work on his first book, The Tragedy of the Chinese Revolution. Subsequently Isaacs returned to the United States, took a job with Newsweek, and went out as a correspondent to cover the China-Burma-India theater during the Pacific War. After the war Isaacs was blacklisted by the KMT government. He stayed on in Asia, continuing to send stories to Newsweek and warning against the bankruptcy of supporting colonialism and its autocratic remnants in the region.

In the spring of 1950, Isaacs turned up in the office of the State Department’s public relations officer Charlton Ogburn. Isaacs urged that Ogburn and the department not support the French-backed Vietnam government of the former emperor Bao Dai. The United States had already given diplomatic recognition to the Bao Dai regime; it should not now compound its mistake by offering the French puppet economic or military assistance. The result of such a decision, Isaacs told Ogburn, would be U.S. military occupation of a “devastated” Indochina, full of “bitterly hostile and vengeful” people. (Isaacs knew the Vietnamese revolutionary Ho Chi Minh, whose bill at the Shanghai YMCA he had helped to pay in 1932.) Isaacs’s plea fell on deaf ears. In 1953, Isaacs became a research associate at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s Center for International Studies (CENIS). The Center, founded by economists Max Millikan and Walt W. Rostow, proved a congenial place for Isaacs, and he taught and wrote under its auspices until his retirement in 1976. Four years later, he and Viola returned to China, where they were reunited with many of the reformers they had know in the 1930s, a number of whom...