Idealism and Liberal Education

Ordinary Backgrounds, Extraordinary Men

Ordinary Backgrounds, Extraordinary Men Ralph J. Bunche and Harry S. Truman were two very different individuals who had much in common. They both came from ordinary backgrounds but developed into extraordinary persons ofextraordinary achievement. There was little indication in the outward circumstances of their early lives that either would achieve greatness. Yet each helped to shape the postwar world and guide the United States and the United Nations into an era of vast and unprecedented responsibilities. Ralph Bunche and Harry Truman each had an unwavering sense of who he was and a rare ability to be guided by that knowledge, even in the face of such obstacles as early personal failure, tight economic circumstances, and racial discrimination. Ralph Bunche was one of this nation's most significant figures during the middle decades of the twentieth century: an international civil servant of great distinction and the recipient of the Nobel Prize for Peace. Yet his reputation has been in eclipse in recent years, his achievements in danger of being less appreciated by history than they ought to be. He was born in Detroit in 1903, the son of an itinerant barber, and reared in Albuquerque and Los Angeles. Years later, Bunche would write of his family, "We bowed to no one, we worked hard and never felt any shame about having little money." Bunche was graduated from the University of California, Los Angeles, in 1927, as valedictorian of his class. From that auspicious intellectual beginning, he followed the example of his boyhood hero, W. E. B. Du Bois, and went to Harvard to pursue both his master's and his Ph.D. degrees. There he demonstrated the remarkable capacity for concentration and work that characterized his entire life. Bunche began his career as a professor of political science at Howard University, but he was never happy there. He abhorred the racial segregation that then existed in Washington. He chafed under what he regarded as Howard's parochial nature and was especially frustrated by the university 's failure to acknowledge that the interests of African-AmericansBunche himself always used the word Negro-were linked to those of oppressed peoples around the world. To Ralph Bunche, the rise offascism in Europe, for example, was a clear threat to the security and status of African-Americans. 161 162 Idealism and Liberal Education Therefore, when opportunities presented themselves to get away from Howard and from Washington, Bunche seized them. In 1939, Gunnar Myrdal, the Swedish social economist, was enlisted by the Carnegie Corporation of New York to direct "a comprehensive study of the Negro in the United States, to be undertaken in a wholly objective and dispassionate way as a social phenomenon." Myrdal engaged Bunche as one of his top staff members, and for several traumatic months, they traveled together throughout the South, observing firsthand the deplorable conditions in which the American Negro was forced to live. Eventually, Bunche wrote four supporting monographs for Myrdal, the most important of which was sixteen hundred pages long. Myrdal's study, published in 1944 as An American Dilemma, was acclaimed as a seminal work. Indeed, it played an influential role, a decade later, in the Supreme Court's decision in Brown v. Board of Education (1954), which held segregation in public schools unconstitutional . From this triumph of scholarship came opportunities for Bunche to move into the field of diplomacy. Within several years, his stature enabled him to playa major role in the San Francisco conference that established the United Nations. In the process, he came to appreciate that his talents would find their most valuable use in international service. From 1946, when he served as a member of the United States delegation to the first session of the United Nations General Assembly, until his death in 1971, Dr. Bunche's career as undersecretary of the United Nations was devoted to peacemaking. He undertook diplomatic efforts around the world, from Palestine to the Suez, from Yemen to the Congo, from Cyprus to Kashmir, and finally in Vietnam. In 1950 he was awarded the Nobel Prize for Peace for his work in negotiating an armistice agreement between Israel and its Arab adversaries. In his recent biography, Ralph Bunche-An American Life, Brian Urquhart describes the sources of Bunche's professional success: "His stamina , his charm, his capacity for inspiring personal confidence and respect, his unwavering honesty, his ability to keep things going in critical situations, his understanding of the preoccupations and fears of the negotiators , his unique knowledge of the...