Talk:Frederick L. Schuman

((Request Edit))

Hi Jimmy Wales et al! Your appearance on BBC Newsnight this morning inspires me to correct Wikipedia’s inaccurate and one-sided portrayal of my father, Frederick Lewis Schuman.

1. He was not a “professor of history” but Woodrow Wilson Professor of Government at Williams College. He generally described himself as a professor of political science. After he retired from Williams in 1969, he taught for two years at Portland (Oregon) State University, until he was laid low by an embolism that knocked out his left lung. Over the years he also taught summer sessions at Harvard, Cornell, Berkeley, Central Washington University, and I don’t remember where else.

2. He was not “attacked by the House Un-American Activities Committee in 1943 as having a record of Communist affiliations.” He was invited to testify before the Martin Dies Committee before it became HUAC. His job for the State Dept was to analyze Nazi propaganda. In Nov 1942 he predicted in his biweekly report that the Nazis would lose at Stalingrad. The State Dept and the Pentagon both came down on him because he was not supposed to make predictions and he was dead wrong. The following February he stated in his report, “As predicted ...” The govt concluded that he must have had secret Soviet intelligence to make such a prediction, but no such thing! He had simply noticed that Goebbels was preparing the German people for a defeat. He presented a very detailed defense of all allegations and was exonerated by the committee.

3. It might be more precise instead of referring to “President Johnson's foreign policies,” if you said he was opposed to the Viet Nam War.

4. My father did not write in “turgid surges of clotted prose.” My father was an eloquent writer and speaker. When the critic disagrees but knows the position cannot be assailed, he attacks the writing style. Nor can I imagine that in any sense my father was a “neo-Stalinist.”

5. The article is very short on my father’s contribution. He wrote the first text book in international relations, titled International Politics, in 1933. It underwent 7 editions, the last in 1968. Seems to me this might be mentioned in your article. The list of publications is quite confused about this. In 1933 he started to advise Jews to get out of Germany as fast as possible. In 1935 he started to predict WW2, stated so in The Nazi Dictatorship, published in 1936 and dedicated to me. In the fall of 1937, Prof Schuman kept telling his students that war was coming. They asked him precisely when was this war going to begin. He thought probably by March 12, 1938. To the isolationist students, this was a big joke. They retained the largest hall on campus, Chapin Hall, for that date so Prof Schuman could explain why his prediction did not come true. The morning of March 12 we learned that Nazi troops had marched into Austria. That night over 2000 people tried to cram into the hall. He had a pretty good crystal ball. After WW2 you fought valiently against those who would drag us into WW3, lecturing in liberal churches and other venues around the country. He considered The Commonwealth of Man to be his most significant book. I suspect you could find positive reviews of his books to match the negative ones the article chooses to quote.

Incidental information: My father changed his middle name from Louis, which was his grandfather’s name, to Lewis, because he was a great admirer of Lewis Carroll and sometimes quoted Alice in his books.

By separate email I am sending a photo of my father if you should wish to publish it to Photosubmission.

Thank you for your consideration about this. I totally appreciate what Wikipedia is doing, and I understand you always have to be on your guard against vilification of honorable people by people who do not appreciate the search for truth.

Best regards! Don Schuman ---- — Preceding unsigned comment added by 68.67.108.4 (talk) 01:25, 11 August 2014 (UTC)

I have five books your father wrote, including Soviet Politics at Home and Abroad. Calling him a "Neo-Stalinist" is silly; he criticized Marxism and was no fan of Stalin. His writings are relatively sympathetic to Soviet complaints about the foreign policy of Western countries, but at no point was he a Marxist or, for that matter, much of a radical. I may fix up the article at a later date. --Ismail (talk) 22:24, 8 April 2015 (UTC)

I'm going to change the "Criticism" section to a "Reception" section and expand it considerably. Academic reviews of Schuman's books, from what I can see, very largely praised them for the information thus contained and the way in which he presented said information, even if they at times took issue with his arguments. I'm sure the negative views of a cultural critic and a Trotskyist activist can be included too, but not to the exclusion of the others. --Ismail (talk) 12:07, 15 July 2017 (UTC)

Well, it took four years, but I finally made changes to the article. I could have added more (such as his activity with regard to the Progressive Party in the 1948 election), but I do think I made the article a bit better. --Ismail (talk) 16:33, 9 November 2021 (UTC)

Category: Members of the Communist Party USA

I am in favor of removing this category from the article. Louis Budenz asserting that Schuman was (or had been) a member of the CPUSA does not necessarily mean he was, and I can find no other source of note that describes Schuman as having belonged to the party. The editor's edit summary brings up Lyons' The Red Decade. Lyons does note that Schuman supported Communist candidate William Z. Foster in the 1932 Presidential election, but Lyons himself does not describe Schuman as a party member, and the hundred thousand voters who chose the Communist ticket that year significantly exceeded the number of members the party is known to have had. --Ismail (talk) 01:49, 6 May 2023 (UTC)

Yes, and thanks for the work on the article. When his son wrote here, it became an interesting example whose talk page was better and more encyclopedic than the main article, which I recall as just chaos and pointless nastiness that made National Enquirer journalism look encyclopedic.John Z (talk) 03:11, 13 August 2024 (UTC)

Article could do with reference to the two part obituary (Chicago & Williams years) written by several major US historians. They noted his knack of accurately predicting events 5 years in advance. For criticism, there's a 1970s book from the pro-Cold War standpoint that devotes a chapter to its critics like Denna Fleming and I think Schuman too, treating both with more respect (IMHO deserved) than now much better known and imho more simplistic people like William Appleman Williams. Been meaning to do it for 10 years. :-)John Z (talk) 03:15, 13 August 2024 (UTC)