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Chapter 11: India, 1911-1945 [Excerpt]
The Anglo-American Establishment: From Rhodes to Cliveden
by Carroll Quigley

Chapter 11: India, 1911-1945

India was one of the primary concerns of both the Cecil Bloc and Milner Group. The latter probably devoted more time and attention to India than to any other subject. This situation reached its peak in 1919, and the Government of India Act of that year is very largely a Milner Group measure in conception, formation, and execution. The influence of the two groups is not readily apparent from the lists of Governors-general (Viceroys) and Secretaries of State for India in the twentieth century:

Viceroys

Lord Curzon, 1898-1905
Lord Minto, 1905-1910
Lord Hardinge of Penshurst, 1910-1916
Lord Chelmsford, 1916-1921
Lord Reading, 1921-1926
Lord Irwin, 1926-1931
Lord Willingdon, 1931-1936
Lord Linlithgow, 1936-1943

Secretaries of State

Lord George Hamilton, 1895-1903
St. John Brodrick, 1903-1908
John Morley, 1908-1910
Lord Crewe, 1910-1915
Austen Chamberlain, 1915-1917
Edward Montagu, 1917-1922
Lord Peel, 1922-1924
Lord Olivier, 1924
Lord Birkenhead, 1924-1928
Lord Peel, 1928-1929
Wedgwood Benn, 1929-1931
Samuel Hoare, 1931-1935
Lord Zetland, 1935-1940
Leopold Amery, 1940-1945

Of the Viceroys only one (Reading) is clearly of neither the Cecil Bloc nor the Milner Group; two were members of the Milner Group (Irwin and Willingdon); another was a member of both groups (Chelmsford); the rest were of the Cecil Bloc, although in two cases (Minto and Linlithgow) in a rather peripheral fashion. Three of the eight were members of All Souls. According to Lord Esher, the appointment of Lord Hardinge in 1910 was made at his suggestion, by John Morley. At the time, Esher's son, the present Viscount Esher, was acting as unpaid private secretary to Morley, a position he held for five years (1905-1910). From the same source we learn that the Viceroyship was offered to Selborne in 1903 and to Esher himself in 1908. The former failed of appointment because Curzon refused to retire, while the latter rejected the post as of too limited influence.

Of the thirteen Secretaries of State, two were Labour and two Liberals. One of these latter (Morley) was close to the Milner Group. Of the other nine, three were of the Cecil Bloc (St. John Brodrick, Austen Chamberlain, and Lord Zetland), two were of the Milner Group (Hoare and Amery), and four were of neither group.

The political and constitutional history of India in the twentieth century consists largely of a series of investigations by various committees and commissions, and a second, and shorter, series of legislative enactments. The influence of the Milner Group can be discerned in both of these, especially in regard to the former.

Of the important commissions that investigated Indian constitutional questions in the twentieth century, every one has had a member of the inner circle of the Milner Group. The following list gives the name of the commission, the dates of its existence, the number of British members (in distinction from Indian members), the names of representatives from the Cecil Bloc and Milner Group (with the latter italicized), and the command number of its report:

1. The Royal Commission on Decentralization in India, 1907-1909, five members including W. L. Hichens (Cmd. 4360- of 1908).

2. The Royal Commission on Public Services in India, 1912-1915, nine members including Baron Islington, the Earl of Ronaldshay (later Marquess of Zetland), Sir Valentine Chirol, and H. A. L. Fisher. The chairman of this commission, Lord Islington, was later father-in-law to Sir Edward Grigg (Lord Altrincham) (Cmd. 8382 of 1916).

3. The Government of India Constitutional Reform Committee on Franchise, 1919, four members, including Malcolm Hailey.

4. The Government of India Constitutional Reform Committee on Functions, 1919, four members, including Richard Feetham as chairman.

5. The Joint Select Committee on the Government of India Bill, 1919, fourteen members, including Lord Selborne (chairman), Lord Midleton (St. John Brodrick), Lord Islington, Sir Henry Craik (whose son was in Milner's Kindergarten), and W. G. A. Ormsby-Gore (now Lord Harlech) (Cmd. 97 of 1919).

6. The Committee on Home Administration of Indian Affairs, 1919, eight members, including W. G A. Ormsby-Gore (Lord Harlech) (Cmd. 207 of 1919).

7. The Royal Commission on Superior Civil Services in India, 1923-1924, five members, including Lord Lee of Fareham as chairman and Reginald Coupland (Cmd. 2128 of 1924).

8. The Indian Statutory Commission, 1927-1930, seven members, with Sir John Simon as chairman (Cmd. 3568 and 3569 of 1930).

9. The Indian Franchise Committee, 1931-1932, eight members, including Lord Lothian as chairman and Lord Dufferin (whose brother, Lord Basil Blackwood, had been in Milner's Kindergarten) (Cmd. 4086 of 1932).

10. The three Indian Round Table Conferences of 1930-1932 contained a number of members of the Milner Croup. The first session (November 1930-January 1931) had eighty-nine delegates, sixteen from Britain, sixteen from the Indian States, and fifty- seven from British India. Formed as they were by a Labour government, the first two sessions had eight Labour members among the sixteen from Britain. The other eight were Earl Peel, the Marquess of Zetland, Sir Samuel Hoare, Oliver Stanley, the Marquess of Reading, the Marquess of Lothian, Sir Robert Hamilton, and Isaac Foot. Of these eight, two were of the Milner Croup (Hoare and Lothian) and two of the Cecil Bloc (Zetland and Stanley). The chief adviser to the Indian States Delegation was L. F. Rushbrook Williams of the Milner Group, who was named to his position by the Chamber of Princes Special Organization. Among the five officials called in for consultation by the conference, we find the name of Malcolm Hailey (Cmd. 3778).

The membership of delegations at the second session (September-December 1931) was practically the same, except that thirty-one additional members were added and Rushbrook Williams became a delegate as the representative of the Maharaja of Nawanagar (Cmd. 3997).

At the third session (November-December 1932) there were no Labour Party representatives. The British delegation was reduced to twelve. Four of these were of the Milner Group (Hoare, Simon, Lothian, and Irwin, now Halifax). Rushbrook Williams continued as a delegate of the Indian States (Cmd. 4238).

11. The Joint Select Committee on Indian Constitutional Reform, appointed in April 1933, had sixteen members from the House of Commons and an equal number of Lords. Among these were such members of the Milner Group as Sir Samuel Hoare, Sir John Simon, Lord Lothian, and Lord Irwin (Halifax). The Cecil Bloc was also well represented by Archbishop Lang of Canterbury, Austen Chamberlain, Lord Eustace Percy, Lord Salisbury, Lord Zetland, Lord Lytton, and Lord Hardinge of Penshurst.

12. The Cripps Mission, 1942, four members, including Reginald Coupland, who wrote an unofficial but authoritative book on the mission as soon as it returned to England (Cmd. 6350).

The chief legislative events in this period were five in number: the two Indian Councils Acts of 1892 and 1909, the two Government of India Acts of 1919 and 1935, and the achievement of self-government in 1947.

The Indian Councils Act of 1892 was put through the House of Commons by George Curzon, at that time Under Secretary in the India Office as the protege of Lord Salisbury, who had discovered him in All Souls nine years earlier. This act was important for two reasons: (1) it introduced a representative principle into the Indian government by empowering the Governor-General and Provincial Governors to seek nominations to the"unofficial" seats in their councils from particular Indian groups and associations; and (2) it accepted a "communal" basis for this representation by seeking these nominations separately from Hindus, Moslems, and others. From these two sources flowed ultimately self-government and partition, although it is perfectly evident that neither of these was anticipated or desired by the persons who supported the act.

The nominations for "unofficial" members of the councils provided in the Act of 1892 became elections in practice, because the Governor-General always accepted the suggested nominations as his nominees. This practice became law in the Act of 1909.

The Indian Councils Act of 1909 was passed under a Liberal government and was only remotely influenced by the Cecil Bloc or Milner Group. The Prime Minister, Asquith, was practically a member of the Cecil Bloc, being an intimate friend of Balfour and Rosebery. This relationship had been tightened when he married Margot Tennant, a member of "the Souls," in 1894. Margot Tennant's sister, Laura, had previously married Alfred Lyttelton, and both sisters had been intimate friends of Curzon and other members of "the Souls." Asquith had also been, as we have stated, a close associate of Milner's. Asquith, however, was never a member of the Milner Group. After 1890, and especially after 1915, he increasingly became a member of the Cecil Bloc. It was Balfour who persuaded Asquith to write his Memories and Reflections after he (Balfour) had discussed the matter with Margot Asquith over a tete-a-tete dinner. These dinners were a not infrequent occurrence on the evenings when Asquith himself dined at his club, Asquith usually stopping by later in the evening to get his wife and escort her home. Another indication of Asquith's feeling toward the Cecil Bloc can be found in his autobiography under the date 22 December 1919. On that occasion Asquith told Lady Hartington, daughter of Lord Salisbury, that he "had not expected to live to see the day when the best safeguard for true liberalism would be found in an unreformed House of Lords and the Cecil family."

In 1908-1909, however, the situation was somewhat different, and Asquith could hardly be called a member of the Cecil Bloc. In a somewhat similar situation, although much closer to the Milner Group (through H. A. L. Fisher and All Souls), was John Morley, the Secretary of State for India. Lord Minto, the Governor-General in India, was also a member of the Cecil Bloc in a peripheral fashion but held his appointment through a family claim on the Governor-Generalship rather than by favor of the Cecils.

The Act of 1909, however, while not a product of the groups with which we are concerned, was formed in the same social tradition, drawn up from the same intellectual and social outlook, and put into effect in the same fashion. It legalized the principle of election (rather than nomination) to Indian councils, enlarged their membership to provide majorities of non-officials in the provincial councils, and gave them the power to discuss affairs and pass resolutions. The seats were allotted to communal groups, with the minorities (like Moslems and Sikhs) receiving more than their proportionate share and the Moslems having, in addition, a separate electorate for the incumbents of Moslem seats. This served to encourage extremism among the Moslems and, while a logical development of 1892, was a long step on the road to Pakistan. This Act of 1909 was, as we have mentioned, put through the House of Commons by Sir Thomas Buchanan, a Fellow of All Souls and an associate of the Cecil Bloc.

The Government of India Act of 1919 is outstanding in many ways. It is the most drastic and most important reform made in Indian government in the whole period from 1861 to the achievement of self-government. Its provisions for the central government of India remained in force, with only slight changes, from 1919 to 1946. It is the only one of these acts whose "secret" legislative background is no longer a secret. And it is the only one which indicated a desire on the part of the British government to establish in India a responsible government patterned on that in Britain.

The legislative history of the Act of 1919 as generally known is simple enough. It runs as follows. In August 1917 the Secretary of State for India, Edwin S. Montagu, issued a statement which read: "The policy of H.M. Government, with which the Government of India are in complete accord, is that of the increasing association of Indians in every branch of the administration and the gradual development of self-government institutions with a view to the progressive realization of responsible government in India as an integral part of the British Empire." The critical word here is responsible government, since the prospect of eventual self-government had been held out to India for years. In accordance with this promise, Montagu visited India and, in cooperation with the Viceroy, Lord Chelmsford, issued the Montagu-Chelmsford Report, indicating the direction of future policy. This report became the basis for the bill of 1918, which, after a certain amount of amendment by Lord Selborne's Joint Select Committee, came into force as the Government of India Act of 1919.

The secret history of this Act is somewhat different, and begins in Canada in 1909, when Lionel Curtis accepted from his friend William Marris the idea that responsible government on the British pattern should be extended to India. Two years later, Curtis formed a study group of six or eight persons within the London Round Table Group. We do not know for certain who were the members of the study group, but apparently it included Curtis, Kerr, Fisher, and probably Brand. To these were added three officials of the India Office. These included Malcolm Seton (Sir Malcolm after 1919), who was secretary to the Judicial Department of the India Office and joined Curtis's group about 1913; and Sir William Duke, who was Lieutenant Governor of Bengal in 1911-1912, senior member of the council of the Governor of Bengal in 1912-1914, and a member of the Council of India in London after 1914. At this last date he joined the Curtis group. Both of these men were important figures in the India Office later, Sir William as Permanent Under Secretary from 1920 to his death in 1924, and Sir Malcolm as Assistant Under Secretary (1919-1924) and Deputy Under Secretary (1924-1933). Sir Malcolm wrote the biographical sketch of Sir William in the Dictionary of National Biography, and also wrote the volume on The India Office in the Whitehall Series (1926). The third member from this same source was Sir Lionel Abrahams, Assistant Under Secretary in the India Office.

The Curtis study group was not an official committee, although some persons (both at the time and since) have believed it was. Among these persons would appear to be Lord Chelmsford, for in debate in the House of Lords in November 1927 he said:

"I came home from India in January 1916 for six weeks before I went out again as Viceroy, and, when I got home, I found that there was a Committee in existence at the India Office, which was considering on what lines future constitutional development might take place. That Committee, before my return in the middle of March gave me a pamphlet containing in broad outline the views which were held with regard to future constitutional development. When I reached India I showed this pamphlet to my Council and also to my noble friend, Lord Meston, who was then Lieutenant Governor of the United Provinces. It contained, what is now known as the diarchic principle.... Both the Council and Lord Meston, who was then Sir James Meston, reported adversely on the proposals for constitutional development contained in that pamphlet."

Lord Chelmsford then goes on to say that Austen Chamberlain combated their objections with the argument that the Indians must acquire experience in self- government, so, after the announcement to this effect was made publicly in August 1917, the officials in India accepted dyarchy.

If Lord Chelmsford believed that the pamphlet was an official document from a committee in the India Office, he was in error. The other side of the story was revealed by Lionel Curtis in 1920 in his book Dyarchy. According to Curtis, the study group was originally formed to help him write the chapter on India in the planned second volume of The Commonwealth of Nations. It set as its task "to enquire how self-government could be introduced and peacefully extended to India." The group met once a fortnight in London and soon decided on the dyarchy principle. This principle, as any reader of Curtis's writings knows, was basic in Curtis's political thought and was the foundation on which he hoped to build a federated Empire. According to Curtis, the study group asked itself: "Could not provincial electorates through legislatures and ministers of their own be made clearly responsible for certain functions of government to begin with, leaving all others in the hands of executives responsible as at present to the Government of India and the Secretary of State? Indian electorates, legislatures, and executives would thus be given a field for the exercise of genuine responsibility. From time to time fresh powers could be transferred from the old governments as the new elective authorities developed and proved their capacity for assuming them." From this point of view, Curtis asked Duke to draw up such "a plan of Devolution" for Bengal. This plan was printed by the group, circulated, and criticized in typical Milner Group fashion. Then the whole group went to Oxford for three days and met to discuss it in the old Bursary of Trinity College. It was then rewritten. "No one was satisfied." It was decided to circulate it for further criticism among the Round Table Groups throughout the world, but Lord Chelmsford wrote from New South Wales and asked for a copy. Apparently realizing that he was to be the next Viceroy of India, the group sent a copy to him and none to the Round Table Groups, "lest the public get hold of it and embarrass him." It is clear that Chelmsford was committed to a program of reform along these or similar lines before he went out as Viceroy. This was revealed in debate in the House of Lords by Lord Crewe on 12 December 1919.

After Chelmsford went to India in March 1916, a new, revised version of the study group's plan was drawn up and sent to him in May 1916. Another copy was sent to Canada to catch up with Curtis, who had already left for India by way of Canada, Australia, and New Zealand. This itinerary was undoubtedly followed by Curtis in order to consult with members of the Group in various countries, especially with Brand in Canada. On his arrival in India, Curtis wrote back to Kerr in London:

"The factor which impressed me most in Canada, New Zealand, and Australia was the rooted aversion these peoples have to any scheme which meant their sharing in the Government of India.... To these young democratic communities the principle of self- government is the breath of their nostrils. It is almost a religion. They feel as if there were something inherently wrong in one people ruling another. It is the same feeling as that which makes the Americans dislike governing the Philippines and decline to restore order in Mexico. My first impressions on this subject were strongly confirmed on my recent visit to these Dominions. I scarcely recall one of the numerous meetings I addressed at which I was not asked why India was not given self-government and what steps were being taken in that direction."

Apparently this experience strengthened Curtis's idea that India must be given responsible government. He probably felt that by giving India what it and the Dominions wanted for India, both would be bound in loyalty more closely to Britain. In this same letter to Kerr, Curtis said, in obvious reference to the Round Table Group:

"Our task then is to bring home to the public in the United Kingdom and the Dominions how India differs from a country like Great Britain on the one hand and from Central Africa on the other, and how that difference is now reflected in the character of its government. We must outline clearly the problems which arise from the contact of East and West and the disaster which awaits a failure to supply their adequate solution by realizing and expressing the principle of Government for which we stand. We must then go on to suggest a treatment of India in the general work of Imperial reconstruction in harmony with the facts adduced in the foregoing chapters. And all this must be done with the closest attention to its effects upon educated opinion here. We must do our best to make Indian Nationalists realize the truth that like South Africa all their hopes and aspirations are dependent on the maintenance of the British Commonwealth and their permanent membership therein."

This letter, written on 13 November 1916, was addressed to Philip Kerr but was intended for all the members of the Group. Sir Valentine Chirol corrected the draft, and copies were made available for Meston and Marris. Then Curtis had a thousand copies printed and sent to Kerr for distribution. In some way, the extremist Indian nationalists obtained a copy of the letter and published a distorted version of it. They claimed that a powerful and secret group organized about The Round Table had sent Curtis to India to spy out the nationalist plans in order to obstruct them. Certain sentences from the letter were torn from their context to prove this argument. Among these was the reference to Central Africa, which was presented to the Indian people as a statement that they were as uncivilized and as incapable of self-government as Central Africans. As a result of the fears created by this rumor, the Indian National Congress and the Moslem League formed their one and only formal alliance in the shape of the famous Lucknow Compact of 29 December 1916. The Curtis letter was not the only factor behind the Lucknow agreement, but it was certainly very influential. Curtis was present at the Congress meeting and was horrified at the version of his letter which was circulating. Accordingly, he published the correct version with an extensive commentary, under the title Letters to the People of India (1917). In this he said categorically that he believed: "(1) That it is the duty of those who govern the whole British Commonwealth to do anything in their power to enable Indians to govern themselves as soon as possible. (2) That Indians must also come to share in the government of the British Commonwealth as a whole." There can be no doubt that Curtis was sincere in this and that his view reflected, perhaps in an extreme form, the views of a large and influential group in Great Britain. The failure of this group to persuade the Indian nationalists that they were sincere is one of the great disasters of the century, although the fault is not entirely theirs and must be shared by others, including Gandhi.

In the first few months of 1917, Curtis consulted groups of Indians and individual British (chiefly of the Milner Group) regarding the form which the new constitution would take. The first public use of the word "dyarchy" was in an open letter of 6 April 1917, which he wrote to Bhupendra Nath Basu, one of the authors of the Lucknow Compact, to demonstrate how dyarchy would function in the United Provinces. In writing this letter, Curtis consulted with Valentine Chirol and Malcolm Hailey. He then wrote an outline, "The Structure of Indian Government," which was revised by Meston and printed. This was submitted to many persons for comment. He then organized a meeting of Indians and British at Lord Sinha's house in Darjeeling and, after considerable discussion, drew up a twelve-point program, which was signed by sixty-four Europeans and ninety Indians. This was sent to Chelmsford and to Montagu.

In the meantime, in London, preparations were being made to issue the historic declaration of 20 August 1917, which promised "responsible" government to India. There can be no doubt that the Milner Group was the chief factor in issuing that declaration. Curtis, in Dyarchy, says: "For the purpose of the private enquiry above described the principle of that pronouncement was assumed in 1915." It is perfectly clear that Montagu (Secretary of State in succession to Austen Chamberlain from June 1917) did not draw up the declaration. He drew up a statement, but the India Office substituted for it one which had been drawn up much earlier, when Chamberlain was still Secretary of State. Lord Ronaldshay (Lord Zetland), in the third volume of his Life of Curzon, prints both drafts and claims that the one which was finally issued was drawn up by Curzon. Sir Stanley Reed, who was editor of The Times of India from 1907 to 1923, declared at a meeting of the Royal Institute of International Affairs in 1926 that the declaration was drawn up by Milner and Curzon. It is clear that someone other than Curzon had a hand in it, and the strongest probability would be Milner, who was with Curzon in the War Cabinet at the time. The fact is that Curzon could not have drawn it up alone unless he was unbelievably careless, because, after it was published, he was horrified when the promise of "progressive realization of responsible government in India" was pointed out to him.

Montagu went to India in November 1917, taking Sir William Duke with him. Curtis, who had been moving about India as the guest of Stanley Reed, Chirol, Chelmsford, Meston, Marris, and others, was invited to participate in the Montagu-Chelmsford conferences on several occasions. Others who were frequently consulted were Hailey, Meston, Duke, and Chirol. The Montagu-Chelmsford Report was written by Sir William Marris of Milner's Kindergarten after Curtis had returned to England. Curtis wrote in Dyarchy in 1920: "It was afterwards suggested in the press that I had actually drafted the report. My prompt denial has not prevented a further complaint from many quarters that Lord Chelmsford and Mr. Montagu were unduly influenced by an irresponsible tourist.... With the exception of Lord Chelmsford himself I was possibly the only person in India with firsthand knowledge of responsible government as applied in the Dominions to the institutions of provinces. Whether my knowledge of India entitled me to advance my views is more open to question. Of this the reader can judge for himself. But in any case the interviews were unsought by me." Thus Curtis does not deny the accusation that he was chiefly responsible for dyarchy. It was believed at the time by persons in a position to know that he was, and these persons were both for and against the plan. On the latter side, we might quote Lord Ampthill, who, as a former acting Viceroy, as private secretary to Joseph Chamberlain, as Governor of Madras, and as brother-in-law of Samuel Hoare, was in a position to know what was going on. Lord Ampthill declared in the House of Lords in 1919: "The incredible fact is that, but for the chance visit to India of a globe- trotting doctrinaire, with a positive mania for constitution-mongering, nobody in the world would ever have thought of so peculiar a notion as Dyarchy. And yet the Joint Committee tells us in an airy manner that no better plan can be conceived."

The Joint Committee's favorable report on the Dyarchy Bill was probably not unconnected with the fact that five out of fourteen members were from the Cecil Bloc or Milner Group, that the chairman had in his day presided over meetings of the Round Table Groups and was regarded by them as their second leader, and that the Joint Committee spent most of its time hearing witnesses who were close to the Milner Group. The committee heard Lord Meston longer than any other witness (almost four days), spent a day with Curtis on the stand, and questioned, among others, Feetham, Duke, Thomas Holland (Fellow of All Souls from 1875 to his death in 1926), Michael Sadler (a close friend of Milner's and practically a member of the Group), and Stanley Reed. In the House of Commons the burden of debate on the bill was supported by Montagu, Sir Henry Craik, H. A. L. Fisher, W. G. A. Ormsby-Gore, and Thomas J. Bennett (an old journalist colleague of Lord Salisbury and principal owner of The Times of India from 1892). Montagu and Craik both referred to Lionel Curtis. The former said: "It is suggested in some quarters that this bill arose spontaneously in the minds of the Viceroy and myself without previous inquiry or consideration, under the influence of Mr. Lionel Curtis. I have never yet been able to understand that you approach the merits of any discussion by vain efforts to approximate to its authorship. I do not even now understand that India or the Empire owes anything more or less than a great debt of gratitude to the patriotic and devoted services Mr. Curtis has given to the consideration of this problem."

Sir Henry Craik later said: "I am glad to join in the compliment paid to our mutual friend, Mr. Lionel Curtis, who belongs to a very active, and a very important body of young men, whom I should be the last to criticize. I am proud to know him, and to pay that respect to him due from age to youth. He and others of the company of the Round Table have been doing good work, and part of that good work has been done in India."

Mr. Fisher had nothing to say about Lionel Curtis but had considerable to say about the bill and the Montagu-Chelmsford Report. He said: "There is nothing in this Bill which is not contained in that Report. That Report is not only a very able and eloquent State Paper, but it is also one of the greatest State Papers which have been produced in Anglo-Indian history, and it is an open-minded candid State Paper, a State Paper which does not ignore or gloss over the points of criticism which have since been elaborated in the voluminous documents which have been submitted to us." He added, a moment later: "This is a great Bill." (2) The Round Table, which also approved of the bill, as might be imagined, referred to Fisher's speech in its issue of September 1919 and called him "so high an authority." The editor of that issue was Lionel Curtis.

In the House of Lords there was less enthusiasm. Chief criticism centered on two basic points, both of which originated with Curtis: (1) the principle of dyarchy — that is, that government could be separated into two classes of activities under different regimes; and (2) the effort to give India "responsible" government rather than merely "self- government" — that is, the effort to extend to India a form of government patterned on Britain's. Both of these principles were criticized vigorously, especially by members of the Cecil Bloc, including Lord Midleton, Lord Lansdowne, Lord Selborne, Lord Salisbury, and others. Support for the bill came chiefly from Lord Curzon (Leader in the Upper House) and Lord Islington (Under Secretary in the India Office).

As a result of this extensive criticism, the bill was revised considerably in the Joint Committee but emerged with its main outlines unchanged and became law in December 1919. These main outlines, especially the two principles of "dyarchy" and "responsibility," were, as we have said, highly charged with Curtis's own connotations. These became fainter as time passed, both because of developments in India and because Curtis from 1919 on became increasingly remote from Indian affairs. The refusal of the Indian National Congress under Gandhi's leadership to cooperate in carrying on the government under the Act of 1919 persuaded the other members of the Group (and perhaps Curtis himself) that it was not possible to apply responsible government on the British model to India. This point of view, which had been stated so emphatically by members of the Cecil Bloc even before 1900, and which formed the chief argument against the Act of 1919 in the debates in the House of Lords, was accepted by the Milner Group as their own after 1919. Halifax, Grigg, Amery, Coupland, Fisher, and others stated this most emphatically from the early 1920s to the middle 1940s. In 1943 Grigg stated this as a principle in his book The British Commonwealth and quoted with approval Amery's statement of 30 March 1943 to the House of Commons, rejecting the British parliamentary system as suitable for India. Amery, at that time Secretary of State for India, had said: "Like wasps buzzing angrily up and down against a window pane when an adjoining window may be wide open, we are all held up, frustrated and irritated by the unrealized and unsuperable barrier of our constitutional prepossessions." Grigg went even further, indeed, so far that we might suspect that he was deprecating the use of parliamentary government in general rather than merely in India. He said:

"It is entirely devoid of flexibility and quite incapable of engendering the essential spirit of compromise in countries where racial and communal divisions present the principal political difficulty. The idea that freedom to be genuine must be accommodated to this pattern is deeply rooted in us, and we must not allow our statesmanship to be imprisoned behind the bars of our own experience. Our insistence in particular on the principle of a common roll of electors voting as one homogeneous electorate has caused reaction in South Africa, rebellion or something much too like it in Kenya, and deadlock in India, because in the different conditions of those countries it must involve the complete and perpetual dominance of a single race or creed."

Unfortunately, as Reginald Coupland has pointed out in his book, India, a Re- statement (1945), all agreed that the British system of government was unsuited to India, but none made any effort to find an indigenous system that would be suitable. The result was that the Milner Group and their associates relaxed in their efforts to prepare Indians to live under a parliamentary system and finally cut India loose without an indigenous system and only partially prepared to manage a parliamentary system.

This decline in enthusiasm for a parliamentary system in India was well under way by 1921. In the two year-interval from 1919 to 1921, the Group continued as the most important British factor in Indian affairs. Curtis was editor of The Round Table in this period and continued to agitate the cause of the Act of 1919. Lord Chelmsford remained a Viceroy in this period. Meston and Hailey were raised to the Viceroy's Executive Council. Sir William Duke became Permanent Under Secretary, and Sir Malcolm Seton became Assistant Under Secretary in the India Office. Sir William Marris was made Home Secretary of the Government of India and Special Reforms Commissioner in charge of setting up the new system. L. F. Rushbrook Williams was given special duty at the Home Department, Government of India, in connection with the reforms. Thus the Milner Group was well placed to put the new law into effect. The effort was largely frustrated by Gandhi's boycott of the elections under the new system. By 1921 the Milner Group had left Indian affairs and shifted its chief interest to other fields. Curtis became one of the chief factors in Irish affairs in 1921; Lord Chelmsford returned home and was raised to a Viscounty in the same year; Meston retired in 1919; Marris became Governor of Assam in 1921; Hailey became Governor of the Punjab in 1924; Duke died in 1924; and Rushbrook Williams became director of the Central Bureau of Information, Government of India, in 1920.

This does not indicate that the Milner Group abandoned all interest in India by 1924 or earlier, but the Group never showed such concentrated interest in the problem of India again. Indeed, the Group never displayed such concentrated interest in any problem either earlier or later, with the single exception of the effort to form the Union of South Africa in 1908-1909.

The decade 1919-1929 was chiefly occupied with efforts to get Gandhi to permit the Indian National Congress to cooperate in the affairs of government, so that its members and other Indians could acquire the necessary experience to allow the progressive realization of self-government. The Congress Party, as we have said, boycotted the elections of 1920 and cooperated in those of 1924 only for the purpose of wrecking them. Nonetheless, the system worked, with the support of moderate groups, and the British extended one right after another in steady succession. Fiscal autonomy was granted to India in 1921, and that country at once adopted a protective tariff, to the considerable injury of British textile manufacturing. The superior Civil Services were opened to Indians in 1924. Indians were admitted to Woolwich and Sandhurst in the same year, and commissions in the Indian Army were made available to them.

The appointment of Baron Irwin of the Milner Group to be Viceroy in 1926 — an appointment in which, according to A. C. Johnson's biography Viscount Halifax (1941), "the influence of Geoffrey Dawson and other members of The Times' editorial staff" may have played a decisive role — was the chief step in the effort to achieve some real progress under the Act of 1919 before that Act came under the critical examination of another Royal Commission, scheduled for 1929. The new Viceroy's statement of policy, made in India, 17 July 1926, was, according to the same source, embraced by The Times in an editorial "which showed in no uncertain terms that Irwin's policy was appreciated and underwritten by Printing House Square."

Unfortunately, in the period 1924-1931 the India Office was not in control of either the Milner Group or Cecil Bloc. For various reasons, of which this would seem to be the most important, coordination between the Secretary of State and the Viceroy and between Britain and the Indian nationalists broke down at the most crucial moments. The Milner Group, chiefly through The Times, participated in this situation in the period 1926-1929 by praising their man, Lord Irwin, and adversely criticizing the Secretary of State, Lord Birkenhead. Relationships between Birkenhead and the Milner (and Cecil) Group had not been cordial for a long time, and there are various indications of feuding from at least 1925. We may recall that in April 1925 a secret, or at least unofficial, "committee" of Milner Group and Cecil Bloc members had nominated Lord Milner for the post of Chancellor of Oxford University. Lord Birkenhead had objected both to the candidate and to the procedure. In regard to the candidate, he would have preferred Asquith. In regard to the procedure, he demanded to know by what authority this "committee" took upon itself the task of naming a chancellor to a university of which he (Lord Birkenhead) had been High Steward since 1922. This protest, as usual when Englishmen of this social level are deeply moved, took the form of a letter to The Times. It received a tart answer in a letter, written in the third person, in which he was informed that this committee had existed before the World War, and that, when it was reconstituted at the end of the war, Mr. F. E. Smith had been invited to be a member of it but had not seen fit even to acknowledge the invitation.

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Part 2 of 2

The bad relationship between the Milner Group and Lord Birkenhead was not the result of such episodes as this but rather, it would seem, based on a personal antipathy engendered by the character of Lord Birkenhead and especially by his indiscreet and undiplomatic social life and political activity. Nonetheless, Lord Birkenhead was a man of unquestioned vigor and ability and a man of considerable political influence from the day in 1906 when he had won a parliamentary seat for the Conservatives in the face of a great Liberal tidal wave. As a result, he had obtained the post of Secretary of State for India in November 1924 at the same time that Leopold Amery went to the Colonial Office. The episode regarding the Milner candidacy to the Oxford Chancellorship occurred six months later and was practically a direct challenge from Birkenhead to Amery, since at that time the latter was Milner's active political lieutenant and one of the chief movers in the effort to make him Chancellor.

Thus, in the period 1926-1929, the Milner Group held the Viceroy's post but did not hold the post of Secretary of State. The relationship between these two posts was such that good government could not be obtained without close cooperation between them. Such cooperation did not exist in this period. As far as the constitutional development was concerned, this lack of cooperation appeared in a tendency on the part of the Secretary of State to continue to seek a solution of the problem along the road marked by the use of a unilateral British investigatory commission, and a tendency on the part of Irwin (and the Milner Group) to seek a solution along the newer road of cooperative discussion with the Indians. These tendencies did not appear as divergent routes until after the Simon Commission had begun its labors, with the result that accumulating evidence that the latter road would be used left that unilateral commission in an unenviable position.

The Government of India Act of 1919 had provided that an investigation should be made of the functioning of the Act after it had been in effect for ten years. The growing unrest of the Indians and their failure to utilize the opportunities of the Act of 1919 persuaded many Englishmen (including most of the Milner Group) that the promised Statutory Commission should begin its work earlier than anticipated and should direct its efforts rather at finding the basis for a new constitutional system than at examining the obvious failure of the system provided in 1919.

The first official hint that the date of the Statutory Commission would be moved up was given by Birkenhead on 30 March 1927, in combination with some rather "arrogant and patronizing" remarks about Indian politics. The Times, while criticizing Birkenhead for his additional remarks, took up the suggestion regarding the commission and suggested in its turn "that the ideal body would consist of judicially minded men who were able to agree." This is, of course, exactly what was obtained. The authorized biography Viscount Halifax, whence these quotations have been taken, adds at this point: "It is interesting to speculate how far Geoffrey Dawson, the Editor, was again expressing Irwin's thoughts and whether a deliberate ballon d'essai was being put up in favor of Sir John Simon."

The Simon Commission was exactly what The Times had wanted, a body of "judicially minded men who were able to agree." Its chairman was the most expensive lawyer in England, a member of the Cecil Bloc since he was elected to All Souls in 1897, and in addition a member of the two extraordinary clubs already mentioned, Grillion's and The Club. Although he was technically a Liberal, his associations and inclinations were rather on the Conservative side, and it was no surprise in 1931 when he became a National Liberal and occupied one of the most important seats in the Cabinet, the Foreign Office. From this time on, he was closely associated with the policies of the Milner Group and, in view of his personal association with the leaders of the Group in All Souls, may well be regarded as a member of the Group. As chairman of the Statutory Commission, he used his legal talents to the full to draw up a report on which all members of the commission could agree, and it is no small example of his abilities that he was able to get an unanimous agreement on a program which in outline, if not in all its details, was just what the Milner Group wanted.

Of the six other members of the Commission, two were Labourite (Clement Attlee and Vernon Hartshorn). The others were Unionist or Conservative. Viscount Burnham of Eton and Balliol (1884) had been a Unionist supporter of the Cecil Bloc in Commons from 1885 to 1906, and his father had been made baronet and baron by Lord Salisbury. His own title of Viscount came from Lloyd George in 1919.

The fifth member of the Commission, Donald Palmer Howard, Baron Strathcona and Mount Royal, of Eton and Trinity College, Cambridge, had no special claim to fame except that he had been a Unionist M.P. in 1922-1926.

The sixth member, Edward Cecil Cadogan of Eton and Balliol (1904), was the sixth son of Earl Cadogan and thus the older brother of Sir Alexander Cadogan, British delegate to the United Nations. Their father, Earl Cadogan, grandnephew of the first Duke of Wellington, had been Lord Privy Seal in Lord Salisbury's second government and Lord Lieutenant of Ireland in Salisbury's third government. Edward, who was knighted in 1939, had no special claim to fame except that he was a Unionist M.P. from 1922 to 1935 and was Chairman of the House of Commons under the National Government of 1931-1935.

The seventh member, George R. Lane-Fox (Baron Bingley since 1933) of Eton and New College, was a Unionist M.P. from 1906 to 1931 and Secretary of Mines from 1922 to 1928. He is a brother-in-law and lifelong friend of Lord Halifax, having married the Honourable Mary Wood in 1903.

The most extraordinary fact about the Simon Commission was the lack of qualification possessed by its members. Except for the undoubted advantages of education at Eton and Oxford, the members had no obvious claims to membership on any committee considering Indian affairs. Indeed, not one of the eight members had had any previous contact with this subject. Nevertheless, the commission produced an enormous two-volume report which stands as a monumental source book for the study of Indian problems in this period. When, to the lack of qualifications of its members, we add the fact that the commission was almost completely boycotted by Indians and obtained its chief contact with the natives by listening to their monotonous chants of "Simon, go back," it seems more than a miracle that such a valuable report could have emerged from their investigations. The explanation is to be found in the fact that they received full cooperation from the staff of the Government of India, including members of the Milner Group.

It is clear that by the end of 1928 the Milner Group, as a result of the strong Indian opposition to the Simon Commission, the internal struggle within that commission between Simon and Burnham (because of the latter's refusal to go as far as the former desired in the direction of concessions to the Indians), and their inability to obtain cooperation from the Secretary of State (as revealed in the steady criticism of Birkenhead in The Times), had decided to abandon the commission method of procedure in favor of a round-table method of procedure. It is not surprising that the Round Table Groups should prefer a roundtable method of procedure even in regard to Indian affairs, where many of the participants would have relatively little experience in the typical British procedure of agreement through conference. To the Milner Group, the round-table method was not only preferable in itself but was made absolutely necessary by the widespread Indian criticism of the Simon Commission for its exclusively British personnel. This restriction had been adopted originally on the grounds that only a purely British and purely parliamentary commission could commit Parliament in some degree to acceptance of the recommendations of the commission — at least, this was the defense of the restricted membership made to the Indians by the Viceroy on 8 November 1927. In place of this argument, the Milner Group now advanced a somewhat more typical idea, namely, that only Indian participation on a direct and equal basis could commit Indians to any plans for the future of India. By customary Milner Group reasoning, they decided that the responsibility placed on Indians by making them participate in the formulation of plans would moderate the extremism of their demands and bind them to participate in the execution of these plans after they were enacted into law. This basic idea — that if you have faith in people, they will prove worthy of that faith, or, expressed in somewhat more concrete terms, that if you give dissatisfied people voluntarily more than they expect and, above all, before they really expect to get it, they will not abuse the gift but will be sobered simultaneously by the weight of responsibility and the sweetness of gratitude — was an underlying assumption of the Milner Group's activities from 1901 to the present. Its validity was defended (when proof was demanded) by a historical example — that is, by contrasting the lack of generosity in Britain's treatment of the American Colonies in 1774 with the generosity in her treatment of the Canadian Colonies in 1839. The contrast between the "Intolerable Acts" and the Durham Report was one of the basic ideas at the back of the minds of all the important members of the Milner Group. In many of those minds, however, this assumption was not based on political history at all but had a more profound and largely unconscious basis in the teachings of Christ and the Sermon on the Mount. This was especially true of Lionel Curtis, John Dove, Lord Lothian, and Lord Halifax. Unless this idea is recognized, it is not possible to see the underlying unity behind the actions of the Group toward the Boers in 1901-1910, toward India in 1919 and 1935, and toward Hitler in 1934-1939.

These ideas as a justification of concessions to India are to be found in Milner Group discussions of the Indian problem at all periods, especially just before the Act of 1919. A decade later they were still exerting their influence. They will be found, for example, in The Round Table articles on India in September 1930 and March 1931. The earlier advocated the use of the round-table method but warned that it must be based on complete equality for the Indian members. It continued: "Indians should share equally with Great Britain the responsibility for reaching or failing to reach an agreement as to what the next step in Indian constitutional development should be. It is no longer a question, as we see it, of Great Britain listening to Indian representatives and then deciding for herself what the next Indian constitution should be.... The core of the round table idea is that representative Britons and representative Indians should endeavour to reach an agreement, on the understanding that if they can reach an agreement, each will loyally carry it through to completion, as was the case with Ireland in 1922." As seen by the Milner Group, Britain's responsibility was

"her obligation to help Indians to take maximum responsibility for India's government on their own shoulders, and to insist on their doing so, not only because it is the right thing in itself, but because it is the most certain antidote to the real danger of anarchy which threatens India unless Indians do learn to carry responsibility for government at a very early date There is less risk in going too fast in agreement and cooperation with political India than in going at a more moderate pace without its agreement and cooperation. Indeed, in our view, the most successful foundation for the Round Table Conference would be that Great Britain should ask the Indian delegates to table agreed proposals and then do her utmost to accept them and place on Indian shoulders the responsibility for carrying them into effect."

It is very doubtful if the Milner Group could have substituted the round-table method for the commission method in quite so abrupt a fashion as it did, had not a Labour government come to office early in 1929. As a result, the difficult Lord Birkenhead was replaced as Secretary of State by the much more cooperative Mr. Wedgewood Benn (Viscount Stansgate since 1941). The greater degree of cooperation which the Milner Group received from Benn than from Birkenhead may be explained by the fact that their hopes for India were not far distant from those held in certain circles of the Labour Party. It may also be explained by the fact that Wedgewood Benn was considerably closer, in a social sense, to the Milner Group than was Birkenhead. Benn had been a Liberal M.P. from 1906 to 1927; his brother Sir Ernest Benn, the publisher, had been close to the Milner Group in the Ministry of Munitions in 1916-1917 and in the Ministry of Reconstruction in 1917-1918; and his nephew John, oldest son of Sir Ernest, married the oldest daughter of Maurice Hankey in 1929. Whatever the cause, or combination of causes, Lord Irwin's suggestion that the round-table method be adopted was accepted by the Labour government. The suggestion was made when the Viceroy returned to London in June 1929, months before the Simon Report was drafted and a year before it was published. With this suggestion Lord Irwin combined another, that the government formally announce that its goal for India was "Dominion status." The plan leaked out, probably because the Labour government had to consult with the Liberal Party, on which its majority depended. The Liberals (Lord Reading and Lloyd George) advised against the announcement, but Irwin was instructed to make it on his return to India in October. Lord Birkenhead heard of the plan and wrote a vigorous letter of protest to The Times. When Geoffrey Dawson refused to publish it, it appeared in the Daily Telegraph, thus repeating the experience of Lord Lansdowne's even more famous letter of 1917.

Lord Irwin's announcement of the Round Table Conference and of the goal of Dominion status, made in India on 31 October 1929, brought a storm of protest in England. It was rejected by Lord Reading and Lloyd George for the Liberals and by Lord Birkenhead and Stanley Baldwin for the Conservatives. It is highly unlikely that the Milner Group were much disturbed by this storm. The reason is that the members of the Croup had already decided that "Dominion status" had two meanings — one meaning for Englishmen, and a second, rather different, meaning for Indians. As Lord Irwin wrote in a private memorandum in November 1929:

"To the English conception, Dominion Status now connotes, as indeed the word itself implies, an achieved constitutional position of complete freedom and immunity from interference by His Majesty's Government in London.... The Indian seems generally to mean something different. . . . The underlying element in much of Indian political thought seems to have been the desire that, by free conference between Great Britain and India, a constitution should be fashioned which may contain within itself the seed of full Dominion Status, growing naturally to its full development in accordance with the particular circumstances of India, without the necessity — the implications of which the Indian mind resents — of further periodic enquiries by way of Commission. What is to the Englishman an accomplished process is to the Indian rather a declaration of right, from which future and complete enjoyment of Dominion privilege will spring." (3)

This distinction, without any reference to Lord Irwin (whose memorandum was not published until 1941), was also made in the September 1930 issue of The Round Table. On this basis, for the sake of appeasement of India, the Milner Group was willing to promise India "Dominion status" in the Indian meaning of the expression and allow the English who misunderstood to cool off gradually as they saw that the development was not the one they had feared. Indeed, to the Milner Group, it probably appeared that the greater the rage in Britain, the greater the appeasement in India.

Accordingly, the first session of the Round Table Conference was called for November 1930. It marked an innovation not only because of the status of equality and responsibility which it placed on the Indians, but also because, for the first time, it tried to settle the problem of the Indian States within the same framework as it settled the constitutional problem of British India. This was a revolutionary effort, and its degree of success was very largely due to the preparatory work of Lord Irwin, acting on the advice of Malcolm Hailey.

The Indian States had remained as backward, feudalistic, and absolutist enclaves, within the territorial extent of British India and bound to the British Raj by individual treaties and agreements. As might be expected from the Milner Group, the solution which they proposed was federation. They hoped that devolution in British India would secure a degree of provincial autonomy that would make it possible to bind the provinces and the Indian States within the same federal structure and with similar local autonomy. However, the Group knew that the Indian States could not easily be federated with British India until their systems of government were raised to some approximation of the same level. For this reason, and to win the Princes over to federation, Lord Irwin had a large number of personal consultations with the Princes in 1927 and 1928. At some of these he lectured the Princes on the principles of good government in a fashion which came straight from the basic ideology of the Milner Group. The memorandum which he presented to them, dated 14 June 1927 and published in Johnson's biography, Viscount Halifax, could have been written by the Kindergarten. This can be seen in its definitions of the function of government, its emphasis on the reign of law, its advocacy of devolution, its homily on the duty of princes, its separation of responsibility in government from democracy in government, and its treatment of democracy as an accidental rather than an essential characteristic of good government.

The value of this preparatory work appeared at the first Round Table Conference, where, contrary to all expectations, the Indian Princes accepted federation. The optimism resulting from this agreement was, to a considerable degree, dissipated, however, by the refusal of Gandhi's party to participate in the conference unless India were granted full and immediate Dominion status. Refusal of these terms resulted in an outburst of political activity which made it necessary for Irwin to find jails capable of holding sixty thousand Indian agitators at one time.

The view that the Round Table Conference represented a complete repudiation of the Simon Commission's approach to the Indian problem was assiduously propagated by the Milner Group in order to prevent Indian animosity against the latter from being carried over against the former. But the differences were in detail, since in main outline both reflected the Group's faith in federation, devolution, responsibility, and minority rights. The chief recommendations of the Simon Commission were three in number: (1) to create a federation of British India and the Indian States by using the provinces of the former as federative units with the latter; (2) to modify the central government by making the Legislative Assembly a federal organization but otherwise leave the center unchanged; (3) to end dyarchy in the provinces by making Indians responsible for all provincial activities. It also advocated separation of Burma from India.

These were also the chief conclusions of the various Round Table Conferences and of the government's White Papers of December 1931 (Cmd. 3972) and of March 1933 (Cmd. 4268). The former was presented to Parliament and resulted in a debate and vote of confidence on the government's policy in India as stated in it. The attack was led by Winston Churchill in the Commons and by Lords Lloyd, Salisbury, Midleton, and Sumner in the House of Lords. None of these except Churchill openly attacked the government's policy, the others contenting themselves with advising delay in its execution. The government was defended by Samuel Hoare, John Simon, and Stanley Baldwin in the Commons and by Lords Lothian, Irwin, Zetland, Dufferin, and Hailsham, as well as Archbishop Lang, in the Lords. Lord Lothian, in opening the debate, said that while visiting in India in 1912 he had written an article for an English review saying that the Indian Nationalist movement "was essentially healthy, for it was a movement for political virtue and self-respect," although the Indian Civil Servant with whom he was staying said that Indian Nationalism was sedition. Lord Lothian implied that he had not changed his opinion twenty years later. In the Lower House the question came to a vote, which the government easily carried by 369 to 43. In the majority were Leopold Amery, John J. Astor, John Buchan, Austen Chamberlain, Viscount Cranborne, Samuel Hoare, W. G. A. Ormsby-Gore, Lord Eustace Percy, John Simon, and D. B. Somervell. In the minority were Churchill, George Balfour, and Viscount Wolmer.

Practically the same persons appeared on the same sides in the discussion regarding the White Paper of 1933. This document, which embodied the government's suggestions for a bill on Indian constitutional reform, was defended by various members of the Milner Group outside of Parliament, and anonymously in The Round Table. John Buchan wrote a preface to John Thompson's India: The White Paper (1933), in which he defended the extension of responsible government to India, saying, "We cannot exclude her from sharing in what we ourselves regard as the best." Samuel Hoare defended it in a letter to his constituents at Chelsea. Malcolm Hailey defended it before the Royal Empire Society Summer School at Oxford, in a speech afterwards published in The Asiatic Review. Hailey had resigned as Governor of the United Provinces in India in order to return to England to help the government put through its bill. During the long period required to accomplish this, Samuel Hoare, who as Secretary of State for India was the official government spokesman on the subject, had Hailey constantly with him as his chief adviser and support. It was this support that permitted Hoare, whose knowledge of India was definitely limited, to conduct his astounding campaign for the Act of 1935.

The White Paper of 1933 was presented to a Joint Select Committee of both Houses. It was publicly stated as a natural action on the part of the government that this committee be packed with supporters of the bill. For this reason Churchill, George Balfour, and Lord Wolmer refused to serve on it, although Josiah Wedgwood, a Labour Member who opposed the bill, asked to be put on the committee because it was packed.

The Joint Select Committee, as we have seen, had thirty-two members, of whom at least twelve were from the Cecil Bloc and Milner Group and supported the bill. Four were from the inner circles of the Milner Group. The chief witnesses were Sir Samuel Hoare; who gave testimony for twenty days; Sir Michael O'Dwyer, who gave testimony for four days; and Winston Churchill, who gave testimony for three days. The chief witness was thus Hoare, who answered 5594 questions from the committee. At all times Hoare had Malcolm Hailey at his side for advice. The fashion in which the government conducted the Joint Select Committee aroused a good deal of unfavorable comment. Lord Rankeillour in the House of Lords criticized this, especially the fashion in which Hoare used his position to push his point of view and to influence the evidence which the committee received from other witnesses. He concluded: "This Committee was not a judicial body, and its conclusions are vitiated thereby. You may say that on their merits they have produced a good or a bad Report, but what you cannot say is that the Report is the judicial finding of unbiased or impartial minds." As a result of such complaints, the House of Commons Committee on Privilege investigated the conduct of the Joint Select Committee. It found that Hoare's actions toward witnesses and in regard to documentary evidence could be brought within the scope of the Standing Orders of the House if a distinction were made between judicial committees and non-judicial committees and between witnesses giving facts and giving opinions. These distinctions made it possible to acquit Sir Samuel of any violation of privilege, but aroused such criticism that a Select Committee on Witnesses was formed to examine the rules for dealing with witnesses. In its report, on 4 June 1935, this Select Committee rejected the validity of the distinctions between judicial and non-judicial and between fact and opinion made by the Committee on Privilege, and recommended that the Standing Rules be amended to forbid any tampering with documents that had been received by a committee. The final result was a formal acquittal, but a moral condemnation, of Hoare's actions in regard to the Joint Select Committee on the Government of India.

The report of the Joint Select Committee was accepted by nineteen out of its thirty- two members. Nine voted against it (five Conservative and four Labour Members). A motion to accept the report and ask the government to proceed to draw up a bill based on it was introduced in the House of Lords by the President of the Board of Education, Lord Halifax (Lord Irwin), on 12 December 1934, in a typical Milner Group speech. He said: "As I read it, the whole of our British and Imperial experience shouts at us the warning that representative government without responsibility, once political consciousness has been aroused, is apt to be a source of great weakness and, not impossibly, great danger. We had not learned that lesson, let me remind the House, in the eighteenth century, and we paid very dearly for it. We learned it some sixty years later and, by having learned it, we transformed the face and history of Canada." Lord Salisbury once again advised delay, and attacked the idea that parliamentary government could work in India or indeed had worked anywhere outside the British Commonwealth. Lord Snell, speaking for the Labour opposition, objected to the lack of protection against economic exploitation for the Indian masses, the omission of any promise of Dominion status for India, the weighing of the franchise too heavily on the side of the landlords and too lightly on the side of women or of laborers, the provisions for a second chamber, and the use of indirect election for the first chamber. Lord Lothian answered both speakers, supporting only one criticism, that against indirect election to the central assembly. He made the significant statement that he did not fear to turn India over to the Congress Party of Gandhi because (1) "though I disagree with almost everything that they say in public and most of their political programme, I have a sneaking sympathy with the emotion which lies underneath them . . . the aspiration of young impetuous India anxious to take responsibility on its own shoulders"; and (2) "because I believe that the one political lesson, which has more often been realized in the British Commonwealth of Nations than anywhere else in the world, is that the one corrective of political extremism is to put responsibility upon the extremists, and, by these proposals, that is exactly what we are doing." These are typical Milner Group reasons.

In the debate, Halifax was supported by Archbishop Lang and Lords Zetland, Linlithgow, Midleton, Hardinge of Penshurst, Lytton, and Reading. Lord Salisbury was supported by Lords Phillimore, Rankeillour, Ampthill, and Lloyd. In the division, Salisbury's motion for delay was beaten by 239 to 62. In addition to the lords mentioned, the majority included Lords Dufferin, Linlithgow, Cranbrook, Cobham, Cecil of Chelwood, Goschen, Hampden, Elton, Lugard, Meston, and Wemyss, while the minority included Lords Birkenhead, Westminster, Carnock, Islington, and Leconfield. It is clear that the Milner Group voted completely with the majority, while the Cecil Bloc was split.

The bill was introduced in the House of Commons on 6 February 1935 by Sir Samuel Hoare. As was to be expected, his argument was based on the lessons to be derived from the error of 1774 and the success of 1839 in North America. The government's actions, he declared, were based on "plain, good intentions." He was mildly criticized from the left by Attlee and Sir Herbert Samuel; supported by Sir Arthur Steel-Maitland, Sir Edward Grigg, and others; and then subjected to a long-sustained barrage from Winston Churchill. Churchill had already revealed his opinion of the bill over the BBC when he said, on 29 January 1935, that it was "a monstrous monument of sham built by the pygmies." He continued his attack in a similar vein, with the result that almost every government speaker felt the need to caution him that his intemperance was hurting his own cause. From our point of view, his most interesting statement, and one which was not contradicted, said: "I have watched this story from its very unfolding, and what has struck me more than anything else about it has been the amazingly small number of people who have managed to carry matters to their present lamentable pitch. You could almost count them on the fingers of one hand. I have also been struck by the prodigious power which this group of individuals have been able to exert and relay, to use a mechanical term, through the vast machinery of party, of Parliament, and of patronage, both here and in the East. It is tragical that they should have been able to mislead the loyalties and use the assets of the Empire to its own undoing. I compliment them on their skill, and I compliment them also on their disciples. Their chorus is exceedingly well drilled." This statement was answered by Lord Eustace Percy, who quoted Lord Hugh Cecil on "profitable mendacity." This led to an argument, in which both sides appealed to the Speaker. Order was restored when Lord Eustace said of Churchill, "I would never impute to him . . . any intention of making a charge which he did not believe himself."

It is quite clear that Churchill believed his charge and was referring to what we have called the Milner Group, although he would not have known it under that name, nor would he have realized its extreme ramifications. He was merely referring to the extensive influence of that close group of associates which included Hoare, Hailey, Curtis, Lothian, Dawson, Amery, Grigg, and Halifax.

After four days of debate on the second reading, the opposition amendment was rejected by 404-133, and the bill passed to the committee stage. In the majority were Amery, Buchan, Grigg, Hoare, Ormsby-Gore, Simon, Sir Donald Somervell, and Steel- Maitland. The minority consisted of three ill-assorted groups: the followers of Churchill, the leaders of the Labour Party, and a fragment of the Cecil Bloc with a few others.

The Government of India Act of 1935 was the longest bill ever submitted to Parliament, and it underwent the longest debate in history (over forty days in Commons). In general, the government let the opposition talk itself out and then crushed it on each division. In the third reading, Churchill made his final speech in a tone of baneful warning regarding the future of India. He criticized the methods of pressure used by Hoare and said that in ten years' time the Secretary of State would be haunted by what had been done, and it could be said of him,

"God save thee, ancient Mariner,
From the fiends that plague thee thus.
Why look'st thou so?' With my cross-bow,
I shot the Albatross."

These somber warnings were answered by Leopold Amery, who opened his rejoinder with the words, "Here endeth the last chapter of the Book of the Prophet Jeremiah."

In the House of Lords the bill was taken through its various stages by Lord Zetland (who replaced Hoare as Secretary of State for India in June 1935), and the final speech for the government was from Halifax (recently made Secretary of State for War). The Act received the Royal Assent on 1 August 1935.

The Act never went into effect completely, and by 1939 the Milner Group was considering abandoning it in favor of complete self-government for India. The portions of the Act of 1935 dealing with the central government fell to the ground when the refusal of the Princes of the Indian States to accept the Act made a federal solution impossible. The provincial portion began to function in 1937, but with great difficulty because of the extremist agitation from the Congress Party. This party obtained almost half of the seats in the eleven provinces and had a clear majority in six provinces. The provincial governments, started in 1937, worked fairly well, and the emergency powers of the central governments, which continued on the 1919 model, were used only twice in over two years. When the war began, the Congress Party ordered its ministries to resign. Since the Congress Party members in the legislatures would not support non-Congress ministries, the decree powers of the Provincial Governors had to be used in those provinces with a Congress majority. In 1945 six out of the eleven provinces had responsible government.

From 1939 on, constitutional progress in India was blocked by a double stalemate: (1) the refusal of the Congress Party to cooperate in government unless the British abandoned India completely, something which could not be done while the Japanese were invading Burma; and (2) the growing refusal of the Moslem League to cooperate with the Congress Party on any basis except partition of India and complete autonomy for the areas with Moslem majorities. The Milner Group, and the British government generally, by 1940 had given up all hope of any successful settlement except complete self-government for India, but it could not give up to untried hands complete control of defense policy during the war. At the same time, the Milner Group generally supported Moslem demands because of its usual emphasis on minority rights.

During this period the Milner Group remained predominant in Indian affairs, although the Viceroy (Lord Linlithgow) was not a member of the Group. The Secretary of State for India, however, was Leopold Amery for the whole period 1940-1945. A number of efforts were made to reach agreement with the Congress Party, but the completely unrealistic attitude of the party's leaders, especially Gandhi, made this impossible. In 1941, H. V. Hodson, by that time one of the most important members of the Milner Group, was made Reforms Commissioner for India. The following year the most important effort to break the Indian stalemate was made. This was the Cripps Mission, whose chief adviser was Sir Reginald Coupland, another member of the inner circle of the Milner Group. As a result of the failure of this mission and of the refusal of the Indians to believe in the sincerity of the British (a skepticism that was completely without basis), the situation dragged on until after the War. The election of 1945, which drove the Conservative Party from office, also removed the Milner Group from its positions of influence. The subsequent events, including complete freedom for India and the division of the country into two Dominions within the British Commonwealth, were controlled by new hands, but the previous actions of the Milner Group had so committed the situation that these new hands had no possibility (nor, indeed, desire) to turn the Indian problem into new paths. There can be little doubt that with the Milner Group still in control the events of 1945-1948 in respect to India would have differed only in details.

The history of British relations with India in the twentieth century was disastrous. In this history the Milner Group played a major role. To be sure, the materials with which they had to work were intractable and they had inconvenient obstacles at home (like the diehards within the Conservative Party), but these problems were made worse by the misconceptions about India and about human beings held by the Milner Group. The bases on which they built their policy were fine — indeed, too fine. These bases were idealistic, almost Utopian, to a degree which made it impossible for them to grow and function and made it highly likely that forces of ignorance and barbarism would be released, with results exactly contrary to the desires of the Milner Group. On the basis of love of liberty, human rights, minority guarantees, and self- responsibility, the Milner Group took actions that broke down the lines of external authority in Indian society faster than any lines of internal self-discipline were being created. It is said that the road to perdition is paved with good intentions. The road to the Indian tragedy of 1947-1948 was also paved with good intentions, and those paving blocks were manufactured and laid down by the Milner Group. The same good intentions contributed largely to the dissolution of the British Empire, the race wars of South Africa, and the unleashing of the horrors of 1939-1945 on the world.

To be sure, in India as elsewhere, the Milner Group ran into bad luck for which they were not responsible. The chief case of this in India was the Amritsar Massacre of 1919, which was probably the chief reason for Gandhi's refusal to cooperate in carrying out the constitutional reforms of that same year. But the Milner Group's policies were self-inconsistent and were unrealistic. For example, they continually insisted that the parliamentary system was not fitted to Indian conditions, yet they made no real effort to find a more adaptive political system, and every time they gave India a further dose of self-government, it was always another dose of the parliamentary system. But, clinging to their beliefs, they loaded down this system with special devices which hampered it from functioning as a parliamentary system should. The irony of this whole procedure rests in the fact that the minority of agitators in India who wanted self- government wanted it on the parliamentary pattern and regarded every special device and every statement from Britain that it was not adapted to Indian conditions as an indication of the insincerity in the British desire to grant self-government to India.

A second error arises from the Milner Group's lack of enthusiasm for democracy. Democracy, as a form of government, involves two parts: (1) majority rule and (2) minority rights. Because of the Group's lack of faith in democracy, they held no brief for the first of these but devoted all their efforts toward achieving the second. The result was to make the minority uncompromising, at the same time that they diminished the majority's faith in their own sincerity. In India the result was to make the Moslem League almost completely obstructionist and make the Congress Party almost completely suspicious. The whole policy encouraged extremists and discouraged moderates. This appears at its worst in the systems of communal representation and communal electorates established in India by Britain. The Milner Group knew these were bad, but felt that they were a practical necessity in order to preserve minority rights. In this they were not only wrong, as proved by history, but were sacrificing principle to expediency in a way that can never be permitted by a group whose actions claim to be so largely dictated by principle. To do this weakens the faith of others in the group's principles.

The Group made another error in their constant tendency to accept the outcry of a small minority of Europeanized agitators as the voice of India. The masses of the Indian people were probably in favor of British rule, for very practical reasons. The British gave these masses good government through the Indian Civil Service and other services, but they made little effort to reach them on any human, intellectual, or ideological level. The "color line" was drawn — not between British and Indians but between British and the masses, for the educated upperclass Indians were treated as equals in the majority of cases. The existence of the color line did not bother the masses of the people, but when it hit one of the educated minority, he forgot the more numerous group of cases where it had not been applied to him, became anti-British and began to flood the uneducated masses with a deluge of anti-British propaganda. This could have been avoided to a great extent by training the British Civil Servants to practice racial toleration toward all classes, by increasing the proportion of financial expenditure on elementary education while reducing that on higher education, by using the increased literacy of the masses of the people to impress on them the good they derived from British rule and to remove those grosser superstitions and social customs which justified the color line to so many English. All of these except the last were in accordance with Milner Group ideas. The members of the Group objected to the personal intolerance of the British in India, and regretted the disproportionate share of educational expenditure which went to higher education (see the speech in Parliament of Ormsby-Gore, 11 December 1934), but they continued to educate a small minority, most of whom became anti-British agitators, and left the masses of the people exposed to the agitations of that minority. On principle, the Group would not interfere with the superstitions and grosser social customs of the masses of the people, on the grounds that to do so would be to interfere with religious freedom. Yet Britain had abolished suttee, child marriage, and thuggery, which were also religious in foundation. If the British could have reduced cow-worship, and especially the number of cows, to moderate proportions, they would have conferred on India a blessing greater than the abolition of suttee, child marriage, and thuggery together, would have removed the chief source of animosity between Hindu and Moslem, and would have raised the standard of living of the Indian people to a degree that would have more than paid for a system of elementary education.

If all of these things had been done, the agitation for independence could have been delayed long enough to build up an electorate capable of working a parliamentary system. Then the parliamentary system, which educated Indians wanted, could have been extended to them without the undemocratic devices and animadversions against it which usually accompanied any effort to introduce it on the part of the British.  

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Pacifica History
by KPFK, Los Angeles
Accessed: 6/21/19

NOTICE: THIS WORK MAY BE PROTECTED BY COPYRIGHT

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Overview

The Pacifica Foundation (now known as Pacifica Foundation Radio) was born in the late 1940's out of the (now nearly forgotten) peace movement surrounding World War Two. Lewis Hill, a conscientious objector and Washington, D.C. newsman, was fired from his mainstream reporting job when he refused to misrepresent the facts.

This was a time when the idea of a listener-sponsored radio station was a new one which had never been implemented. Many people doubted the viability of a broadcast model which didn't rely on some kind of corporate or government funding. But the idea was too compelling for Hill and others who agreed with him. Pacifica was born and in 1949 KPFA went on the air from Berkeley, California.

KPFK, in Los Angeles, was the second of what would eventually become five Pacifica Stations to go on the air. It was 1959 and Terry Drinkwater was the first General Manager. Blessed with an enormous transmitter in a prime location, KPFK is the most powerful of the Pacifica stations and indeed is the most powerful public radio station in the Western United States.

1946 Lewis Hill moves from Washington DC to the San Francisco Bay Area and begins work toward creating an alternative radio station.

1949 Pacifica first goes on the air April 15 as KPFA-FM in Berkeley CA.

1950 Opponents to the Korean war are among the many minority viewpoints given freedom of speech on Pacifica during the McCarthy era.

1951 Pacifica receives the first major foundation grant (Ford Founda- tion) for the support of a non-commercial broadcast operation.

1952 Jazz aficionado Phil Elwood debuts on KPFA, making him today the longest-running jazz programmer in the country.

1953 Philosopher/author Alan Watts begins a regular program on KPFA that continues until his death in 1973.

1954 An on-the-air discussion of the effects of marijuana results in the California Attorney General impounding the program tape.

1955 Poets Allen Ginsberg and Lawrence Ferlinghetti bring the Beat Generation to the airwaves. A few years later the FCC questions Pacifica's broadcast of some of their works as "vulgar, obscene and in bad taste."

1956 Pacifica wins its first broadcast awards for a program on the First Amendment by Alexander Meiklejohn and a children's series of _Robin Hood_ by Chuck Levy and Virginia Maynard.

1957 Pacifica/KPFA wins its first George Foster Peabody Award for "distinguished service and meritorious public service" for programming that takes strong issue with McCarthyism.

1958 Nuclear war and the arms race are debated on the air by Nobel Prize winner Linus Pauling and Edward Teller, the "Father of the H-Bomb."

1959 Pacifica begins its second station--KPFK-FM in Los Angeles--with Terry Drinkwater as General Manager.

1960-1963 The House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC) and the Senate Internal Security Subcommittee (SISS) investigate Pacifica programming for "subversion." Suspected writers include Bertolt Brecht, Norman Cousins, Carey McWilliams, Dorothy Healey, and W.E.B. DuBois.

1960 The Federal Communications Commission (FCC) requests a tape of a Pacifica broadcast of poet Lawrence Ferlinghetti that it found "in bad taste" with "strong implications against religion, government, the president, law-enforcement and racial groups"-- and demands full information on Pacifica finances and governance.

1960 Commercial station WBAI in New York is given to Pacifica by philanthropist Louis Schweitzer. Then- Governor Nelson Rockefeller, Mayor Robert Wagner, Jr. and Attorney General Louis Lefkowitz are among the speakers honoring the first day of Pacifica Radio in New York. Early programs include a documentary on George Lincoln Rockwell and a speech by Herbert Aptheker. The SISS requests files of WBAI programs and program guides.

1961 KPFK wins Pacifica's second George Foster Peabody Award for excellence in broadcasting.

1962 KPFK broadcasts women's history profiles of Dorothy healey and Elizabeth Gurley Flynn--programs that are later used in SISS Hearings charging Pacifica is communist infiltrated.

1962 WBAI is the first station to publicly broadcast former FBI agent Jack Levine's expose of J. Edgar Hoover and the FBI. The program is followed by threats of arrests and bombings, as well as pressure from the FBI, the Justice Department, and major broadcast networks.

1962 The FCC withholds the license renewals of KPFA, KPFB, and KPFK pending its investigation into "communist affiliations." Pacifica was never ultimately cited in any of these or subsequent investi- gations.

1963 I. F. Stone and Bertrand Russell take to the Pacifica airwaves, leading a long list of luminaries to oppose the war in Vietnam at this early stage of direct U.S. involvement.

1964 Pacifica trains volunteers to travel to the South for coverage of the awakening civil rights movement. Andrew Goodman, son of the Pacifica president, is murdered in Mississippi with Michael Schwerner and James Cheney.

1964 The Federal Communications Commission (FCC) renews the licenses of all three Pacifica stations after a three-year delay.

1965 WBAI reporter Chris Koch is the first American to cover the war from North Vietnam.

1966 Leaders of organizations such as the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), Congress Of Racial Equality (CORE), Students for a Democratic Society (SDS), and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) discuss the future of civil rights over Pacifica stations.

1967 Pacifica broadcasts a live interview with Latin American leader Che Guevara months before he is killed in Bolivia.

1968 Pacifica Radio News (originally the Washington News Bureau of WBAI/New York) is established in Washington DC.

1969 Pacifica is the only news organization willing to break Seymour Hersh's story of the My Lai massacre. Hersh later wins the Pulitzer Prize for exposing the atrocities committed by U.S. troops in Vietnam.

1970 KPFT in Houston goes on the air and is bombed off twice during its first year by Ku Klux Klan attacks on its transmitter tower. After months of inactivity by federal agents and Houston police, Pacifica mounts a media campaign. Federal agents ultimately arrest a Klansman and charge him with plotting to blow up KPFA and KPFK, as well as the actual KPFT bombing.

1971 WBAI station manager Ed Goodman is jailed for refusing to turn over taped statements by rebelling prisoners at the "Tombs," the New York City jail.

1972 The Pacifica Radio Archive and Pacifica Program Service are established in Los Angeles to preserve and distribute Pacifica programming to schools, libraries, individuals, and other community radio stations across the country.

1973 Pacifica provides gavel-to-gavel coverage of the Senate Watergate hearings.

1973 Third World programmers at KPFA organize to demand a programming department with paid staff and control over some airtime. The station management opposes this effort and obtains a court order banning Third World project coordinator Jeff Echeverria from the KPFA premises. The Third World programmers file a challenge to KPFA's license on grounds of discrimination in hiring practices. The lawyer representing them is David Salniker, later to become KPFA manager and Executive Director of Pacifica.

1974 The Symbionese Liberation Army delivers the Patty hearts tapes to KPFA/Berkeley and KPFK/Los Angeles. KPFK manager Will Lewis is jailed for refusing to turn the tapes over to the FBI.

1974 In the summer, KPFA staff and programmers go on strike to demand more democratic decision-making process, the reinstatement of the fired Third World staff, and the firing of station management. After KPFA is off the air for one month, Pacifica agrees to most of the strikers' demands. In the fall, KPFA formally creates the Third World programming department with a paid department head and control over some airtime.

1975 Joel Kugelmass becomes the first Executive Director of the Pacifica Foundation.

1975 Comedian George Carlin's "dirty words you can't say on television" routine, broadcast by WBAI/New York in 1973, leads to several years of First Amendment litigation and a hearing by the U.S. Supreme Court. No sanctions are imposed, but the Carlin Case sets the limits of broadcasting for over a decade.

1976 The Pacfica documentary on the assassination of Chilean diplomat Orlando Letelier is instrumental in piecing together evidence that later convicts the murderers.

1976 In September, KPFA station manager Larry Bensky lays off two-thirds of the station's paid staff in one of the many financial crises perpetually plaguing Pacifica stations.

1977 WPFW/Washington DC goes on the air, after winning a six-year competitive process for the last available frequency in the nation's capital.

1977 Jack O'Dell becomes Chair of the Pacifica Foundation.

1978 The Pacifica Radio News begins to distribute news services to 20 non-Pacifica stations across the U.S. and Canada and expands international coverage by establishing correspondents in a number of foreign capitals.

1979 Pacifica, the League of Women Voters, and congressman Henry Waxman (D, CA) challenge the constitutionality of the prohibition on editorializing by non-commercial broadcasters.

1980 Pacifica interviews Sister Ita Ford a few days before she is murdered in El Salvador.

1980 Sharon Maeda becomes Executive Director of Pacifica.

1981 KPFT/Houston becomes the first public radio station to broadcast special programs in 11 different languages, serving the multi- ethnic Texas Gulf Coast communities.

1981 KPFA/Berkeley creates a Women's Department with a paid director and control over some airtime. Ginny Z. Berson (a member of the collective that created Olivia Records) becomes the first director of the Women's Dept. (Women's programming had been done on KPFA since the early 1970s by a collective called Unlearning To Not Speak.)

1982 Pacifica provides the only continuous live national coverage of one million people demonstrating for jobs, peace, and freedom in New York's Central Park during the U.N. special session on disarmament.

1982 After years of development by women and people of color, the KPFA Apprentice Program is formally established as an intensive training program in broadcast skills. It is now the most comprehensive program of its kind in the country.

1983 WPFW heads up the all-Pacifica team which covers the 20th anniversary of the March on Washington with Julian Bond and Justine Rector as hosts/commentators.

1984 The U.S. Supreme Court rules in Pacifica's favor that non- commercial broadcasters have a constitutional right to editorialize.

1985 Pacifica broadcasts its first editorial, condemning the apartheid South African government. Pacifica Chair Jack O'Dell calls upon U.S. citizens to bring pressure on the White House to cut all ties with South Africa on the 10th anniversary of the Soweto uprising.

1985 WPFW helps launch the Capital City Jazz Festival in Washington DC.

1985 WBAI/New York organizes the now-annual Listener Action for the Homeless project to mobilize aid for New York's homeless.

1986 The National Federation of Community Broadcasters (NFCB) radio archives are consolidated with Pacifica's, making the Pacifica Radio Archive 30,000 tapes strong.

1986 David Salniker becomes Executive Director of Pacifica.

1987 Pacifica's coverage of the Iran-Contra affair is carried by 33 stations and wins two national journalism awards.

1987 Pacifica provides the only national live radio coverage of the complete confirmation hearings for U.S. Supreme Court nominee Robert Bork, beginning a traditon that has continued to the present day of broadcasting important congressional hearings.

1987 Lady Smith Black Mambazo makes their first live U.S. radio appearance, on KPFK/Los Angeles.

1988 Pacifica stringers provide on-the-spot coverage of the Intifada, the Palestinian uprising, despite great personal danger.

1989 The Pacifica Radio Archive completes restoration of 7,000 one-of- a-kind recordings from the early 1950s and 1960s in conjunction with Pacifica's 40th anniversary.

1990 Pacifica's ongoing coverage of the preparations for and conduct of war in the Persian Gulf reaches listeners on dozens of public stations throughout the country.

1990 Pacifica declines two NEA grants because of content restrictions attached to the funds.

1991 Pacificia leads a coalition with PEN, Allen Ginsberg and broad- casters opposing Senator Jesse Helms' (R-NC) and the FCC's 24-hour ban against "indecency" on radio. The Court of Appeals agrees with Pacifica and sets the ban aside as unconstitutional.

1991 KPFA/Berkeley moves into its newly constructed building in September.

1992 KPFA's Flashpoints program, headed by Dennis Bernstein, becomes the third-most-popular program on the station (after the Morning Show and the Evening News). Flashpoints evolved from the daily Persian Gulf War update program.

1992 Senate Republicans put a hold on funding for the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, claiming "liberal bias" on a host of issues, including environmental coverage. A bill is passed imposing "objectivity and balance" conditions on CPB funding. Almost alone among broadcasters, Pacifica protests any content-conditional funding, pressing CPB to shield all news programming and editorial integrity of individual producers--which CPB agrees to in its implementation protocols. Pacifica observes that no other broadcasters, commercial or religious, are any longer subject to access and balance requirements of the now-repealed Fairness Doctrine--making public broadcasters alone subject to editorial restrictions. Immediately after passage of the content restrictions, CPB Board member Victor Gold targets KPFK for strident African American programming and controversial speech aired during Black History month, by filing an FCC complaint.

1993 CPB Board member Victor Gold calls for de-funding Pacifica, echoing lobyying campaign orchestrated by right-wing media critics. In a unanimous vote, CPB reaffirms Pacifica's funding irrespective of program content. Senate Minority Leader Robert Dole (R-KS) threatens public broadcasting with Congressional revenge, his aide explaining: "The First Amendment, freedom of speech, doesn't apply, because we are able to put conditions on the grants of federal money. The same as we do for farmers." Pacifica launches a campaign for unconditional funding and self-defense, led by a tremendous outpouring of "fightback donations" from listeners nationwide. CPB funding narrowly escapes cuts in the House of Representatives, with program content the driving issue. A lobbying effort keeps Pacifica funding off the Senate agenda. This is the second year in which Pacifica has received no discretionary funding from CPB (only the matching funding based upon listener contributions).

1993 Pacifica wins its third Court of Appeals ruling in six years, overturning the FCC restrictions on "indecent" programming as unconstitutional restrictions of the First Amendment rights of the radio audience.

1993 WBAI wins the Roger N. Baldwin Award for Oustanding Contributions to Civil Liberties, presented by the American Civil Liberties Union of New Jersey, who state: "In the winter of 1991...a war hysteria seemed to engulf the United States and its mainstream media.... In this overheated, thought-muddling atmosphere, one of the few cool, on-target voices of rational discussion and dissent was a small FM radio station beaming steadily out of New York City.... From the armies converging on Iraq to the march for women's lives in Washington, from the killing field of East Timor to the mean streets of Manhattan's homeless, WBAI covers the local, national and international scene with a depth and integrity not even conceived of by commerical broadcasting."

1993 Amy Goodman, WBAI News Director and co-anchor of WBAI's Morning Show, wins the following awards for the program "Massacre: The Story of East Timor": Robert F. Kennedy Memorial Award for International Reporting; Unda-Gabriel Award for Nationally Distributed News and Information; Radio & Television News Directors Award; and the Unity in Media Award from Lincoln University.

1993 The CPB Silver Award for Children's and Youth Programming goes to "Youth in Control," the two-hour live radio magazine of Executive Producer Ellin O'Leary's Youth Radio Project, produced weekly in KPFB-FM studios. This two-time CPB Award-winning program is a show produced by teens for teens, a project recruiting low income and minority youth, providing training in all aspects of news and music programming, and featuring live weekly Pacifica broadcasts and special pieces on KQED-FM, NPR, Monitor Radio and Inner City Broadcasting.

1993 San Francisco Foundation Executive Director Robert Fisher selects KPFA/Pacifica for the San Francisco Chronicle's feature, "How To Spot a Charity That Deserves Support: Pros Pick Notable Nonprofits" (November 22).

1994 Amy Goodman wins another award for her programs on East Timor: the Alfred I Dupont-Columbia University Journalism Award.

March, 1994 Pacifica Radio wins a Commendation Award from the American Women in Radio and Television for "Audre Lorde: A Burst of Light", a documentary about the African American poet, essayist, and feminist Audre Lorde, produced by Jude Thilman, Ginny Berson and Melanie Berzon.

1994 Pacifica broadcasts live from the 25th anniversary of the Stonewall march and rally in New York, commemorating the birth of the modern lesbian and gay liberation movement.

May, 1994 Pacifica Radio broadcasts commentaries by Pennsylvania death row inmate and African American journalist Mumia Abu Jamal after National Public Radio decided not to air a series of audio essays it commissioned by him. While NPR caved in to political pressure and a vigorous campaign by the Fraternal Order of Police to silence Abu-Jamal, Pacifica took a strong first amendment stand against censorship by broadcasting the views and experiences of a man living on death row.

December, 1994 Pacifica Covers the Zapatista Uprising In Mexico.

1995 Pacifica Network News correspondents file daily reports from Haiti and document in detail the return to power of popularly elected president Jean Bertrand Aristide.

September, 1995 Pacifica Network News Director Julie Drizin travels to China to cover the United Nations' Fourth World Conference on Women in Beijing, where she files daily audio reports via computer, bypassing any potential censorship by Chinese authorities. Pacifica was the first public radio network in the U.S. to send international reports via the internet.

October, 1995 Pacifica covers the Million Man March on Washington.

February, 1996 Pacifica launches Democracy Now!: a daily grassroots election program focusing on the state of democracy in the U.S. and around the world. Hosted by Amy Goodman, with Larry Bensky, Juan Gonzalez and Salim Muwakkil and produced by Julie Drizin, this program garnered unprecedented listener and foundation support and stimulated dialogue and action for social change.

March, 1996 Pacifica Executive Director Patricia Scott, News Bureau Chief Julie Drizin and the Pacifica Radio Network are named one of the "Top Ten Media Heroes of 1996" by the Institute for Alternative Journalism "for tough, creative and unrelenting efforts in a time when alternative viewpoints and independent voices in the media have never been more vital.

October, 1996 Pacifica Network News carries live coverage of the Latino March On Washington.

1997 Pacifica names its new national board chair, Mary Francis Berry, and says farewell to long-time chair, Jack O'Dell.

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WBAI
by Wikipedia
Accessed: 6/21/19

NOTICE: THIS WORK MAY BE PROTECTED BY COPYRIGHT

YOU ARE REQUIRED TO READ THE COPYRIGHT NOTICE AT THIS LINK BEFORE YOU READ THE FOLLOWING WORK, THAT IS AVAILABLE SOLELY FOR PRIVATE STUDY, SCHOLARSHIP OR RESEARCH PURSUANT TO 17 U.S.C. SECTION 107 AND 108. IN THE EVENT THAT THE LIBRARY DETERMINES THAT UNLAWFUL COPYING OF THIS WORK HAS OCCURRED, THE LIBRARY HAS THE RIGHT TO BLOCK THE I.P. ADDRESS AT WHICH THE UNLAWFUL COPYING APPEARED TO HAVE OCCURRED. THANK YOU FOR RESPECTING THE RIGHTS OF COPYRIGHT OWNERS.

WBAI
City New York, New York
Broadcast area New York metropolitan area
Branding WBAI
Slogan Your peace and justice community radio station
Frequency 99.5 MHz
First air date January 8, 1960 (59 years ago)
Format Public Radio
ERP 10,000 watts
HAAT 282.3 meters (926 ft)
Class B
Facility ID 51249
Callsign meaning Broadcast Associates, Incorporated (former owner)
Affiliations Pacifica Radio
Owner Pacifica Foundation
Webcast Listen Live
Website wbai.org

WBAI (99.5 MHz), is a non-commercial, listener-supported radio station licensed to New York City. WBAI is a Freeform radio station, staffed mostly by volunteers. Its programming is a mixture of progressive political news, talk and opinion from a left-leaning, liberal or progressive viewpoint, music programming featuring a variety of music genres and programs that serve New York City's minority communities. The station is owned by the Pacifica Foundation with studios located in Brooklyn and transmitter located at 4 Times Square.

History

Origins


The former WBAI studios on the 10th floor of 120 Wall Street, Manhattan

The station began as WABF, which first went on the air in 1941 as W75NY, of Metropolitan Television, Inc. (W75NY indicating an eastern station at 47.5 MHz in New York), and moved to the 99.5 frequency in 1948.[1] In 1955, after two years off the air, it was reborn as WBAI (whose calls were named after then-owners Broadcast Associates, Inc.).[2]

1960s

WBAI was purchased by philanthropist Louis Schweitzer, who donated it to the Pacifica Foundation in 1960.[3] The station, which had been a commercial enterprise, became non-commercial and listener-supported under Pacifica ownership.[4]

The history of WBAI during this period is iconoclastic and contentious.[5] Referred to in a New York Times Magazine piece as "an anarchist's circus," one station manager was jailed in protest, and the staff, in protest at sweeping proposed changes of another station manager, seized the studio facilities, then located in a deconsecrated church, as well as the transmitter, located at the Empire State Building.[6] During the 1960s, the station hosted innumerable anti-establishment causes, including anti-Vietnam war activists, feminists (and live coverage of purported bra-burning demonstrations), kids lib, early Firesign Theater comedy, and complete-album music overnight. It refused to stop playing Janis Ian's song about interracial relationships "Society's Child".[citation needed] Extensive daily coverage of the Vietnam war included the ongoing body count and innumerable anti-war protests.[citation needed]

WBAI played a major role in the evolution and development of the counterculture of the 1960s and early 1970s.[7] Arlo Guthrie's "Alice's Restaurant" was first broadcast on Radio Unnameable, Bob Fass' freeform radio program on WBAI, a program which itself in many ways created, explored, and defined the possibilities of the form.[8] The station covered the 1968 seizure of the Columbia University campus live and uninterrupted.[citation needed] With its signal reaching nearly 70 miles beyond New York City, its reach and influence, both direct and indirect, were significant.[citation needed] Among the station's weekly commentators in the 1960s were author Ayn Rand, British politician/playwright Sir Stephen King-Hall, and author Dennis Wholey.[citation needed] The 1964 Political conventions were "covered" satirically on WBAI by Severn Darden, Elaine May, Burns and Schreiber, David Amram, Julie Harris, Taylor Mead, and members of The Second City improvisational group.[citation needed] The station, under Music Directors John Corigliano, Ann McMillan and, later Eric Salzman, aired an annual 23-hour nonstop presentation of Richard Wagner's Ring Cycle, as recorded at the Bayreuth Festival the year before, and produced live studio performances of emerging artists in its studios.[citation needed] Interviews with prominent figures in literature and the arts, as well as original dramatic productions and radio adaptations were also regular program offerings.[citation needed]

1970s

In 1970, Kathy Dobkin, Milton Hoffman, and Francie Camper produced an unprecedented, critically acclaimed 4 1/2 day round-the-clock reading of Tolstoy's War And Peace.[citation needed] The epic novel was read cover to cover by more than 200 people—including a large number of international celebrities from various fields.[citation needed] Newsweek called this broadcast "one of the more mind-blowing 'firsts' in the history of the media". The complete reading (over 200 audio tapes) was the first Pacifica program to be selected for inclusion in the permanent collection of the Museum of Broadcasting in NYC.[citation needed]


A poster in a WBAI broadcast booth warns radio broadcasters against using the seven dirty words.

In 1973, the station broadcast comedian George Carlin's iconic Filthy Words routine uncensored. WBAI's broadcast of Filthy Words became a landmark moment in the history of free speech. In a 1978 milestone in the station's contentious and unruly history, WBAI lost a 5-to-4 U.S. Supreme Court decision (FCC v. Pacifica Foundation) that to this day has defined the power of the government over broadcast material it calls indecent.[9]

In 1974 WBAI program director Marnie Mueller asked Charles Ruas to become director of arts programming.[citation needed] Thus the station, already at the forefront of the counterculture and anti-war protest, also became a platform for New York’s avant-garde in theater, music, performance, art, and poetry.[citation needed] When the downtown avant-garde opera A Letter to Queen Victoria by Philip Glass and Robert Wilson opened at the Metropolitan Opera, the station was right there to tape excerpts in rehearsals for broadcast.[citation needed]

Ruas initiated a year-long series on Marguerite Young’s epic novel Miss MacIntosh, My Darling. These readings were transformed into performances by Rob Wynne, who scored them with a complex collage of sound effects, music, and opera. The participants included Anaïs Nin, Marian Seldes, Alice Playten, H.M. Koutoukas, Leo Lerman, Michael Wager, Novella Nelson, Osceola Macarthy Adams, Owen Dodson, Wyatt Emory Cooper, Michael Higgins, Anne Fremantle, Peggy Cass, Ruth Ford, Earle Hyman and Daisy Alden.[10]

When William Burroughs returned to the United States from Tangier, Ruas invited him to present a retrospective of all his works.[citation needed] The series consisted of four programs, beginning with Junkie and followed by The Yage Letters, read by Burroughs and Allen Ginsburg, The Last Words of Dutch Schultz, and, finally, Naked Lunch.[citation needed] Bill Kortum oversaw this series as well as retrospectives of the works of Jerzy Kosinski and Donald Barthelme, co-produced with Judith Sherman, the station's music director.[citation needed]

A semester of Allen Ginsberg's poetry seminar held at the Naropa Institute in Colorado was presented by Ruas, and for many years the station covered the annual New Year’s Eve celebratory poetry marathon at St. Mark’s Church.[citation needed] The day the Vietnam War ended, poet Muriel Rukeyser came to the station to read her poem on peace.[citation needed]

Ruas inaugurated the Audio Experimental Theater, a series presenting the works of avant-garde artists: Meredith Monk, Yvonne Rainer, Ed Bowes, Michael Newman, Joan Schwartz, Benjamin Folkman, Vito Acconci, Charles Ludlum, Jacques Levy, Willoughby Sharp, John Cage, Robert Wilson, Philip Glass, Richard Foreman, and Joan Jonas.[citation needed]

In drama, the station defended Tennessee Williams against his critics during the last years of his life by covering his Memoirs and broadcasting a production of Two-Character Play.[citation needed] Other dramatists whose works were featured included Jean-Claude van Itallie, Richard Scheckner, Andrei Serban, and Elizabeth Swados.[citation needed]

Ruas initiated interview programs featuring nonfiction writers discussing their fields of expertise—Buckminster Fuller, Thor Heyerdahl, Ed Sanders, Jonathan Kozol and Nigel Nicholson.[citation needed]

Each of the arts had weekly coverage.[citation needed] Courtney Callender’s Getting Around covered the cultural scene.[citation needed] Moira Hudson was the dance critic.[citation needed] The visual arts critics were John Perreault, Cindy Nemser, Liza Baer, Joe Giordano, Judith Vivell, Kenneth Koch, and Les Levine.[citation needed]

Susan Howe produced a weekly poetry program presenting the works of John Ashbery, W.S. Merwin, Maureen Owen, Charles Reznikoff, Rebecca Wright, Ron Padgett, Carter Ratcliff, John Hollander, Anne Waldman, Helen Adam, Audre Lorde, Michael Brownstein, Mary Ferrari, and Muriel Rukeyser.[citation needed] She also produced specials featuring William Carlos Williams, V. R. Lang, Jack Spicer, Louise Bogan, Paul Metcalf, Jonathan Williams, Harry Mathews, and James Laughlin.[citation needed] John Giorno presented his 5-part series Dial-a-Poem Poets.[citation needed]

For a few years WBAI became a cultural force as these programs were disseminated nationally through the Pacifica Network.[citation needed]

In 1977, there was a major internal crisis at WBAI which resulted in the loss of the physical space of the station. WBAI was located in a former church on the Upper East Side of Manhattan. For many years WBAI had believed it was exempt from New York City real estate taxes as an "educational" institution, but in March 1977 the City Tax Commission denied that status[11] and WBAI eventually sold the church (which it owned) to pay the back taxes. WBAI signed a new lease for the 19th floor (the former Caedmon Records office/studio) plus one office on another floor of an office building at 505 8th Avenue on the West Side of Manhattan.

Turmoil and change

After the events in 1977, the station began a shift to a more profound international direction. In 1980, Caribbean immigrant and Marxist activist Samori Marksman was hired as WBAI Program Director and with his ascension, there was more of a focus on international issues and the promotion of people of color to the WBAI staff which caused grumbling among long time white and Jewish progressives who felt they were being pushed out of the station. In 1983, Marksman abruptly left for the Caribbean island of Grenada to participate in a new government - a government that was thwarted by the US invasion of Grenada in October 1983.

In 1986, gay activist John Scagliotti became program director and he initiated many program changes and still more long-time programmers left the station. Scagliotti tried to professionalize the programming and smooth out the rougher edges of existing shows. During his tenure, several producers received accolades for their efforts including Robert Knight who won a Polk Award for his show "Contragate", future program director and Station Manager Valerie Van Isler won awards for her role in the film, "The Panama Deception" and award-winning producer and host Amy Goodman began her career under Scagliotti. Samori Marksman returned to WBAI in the early 90's and in 1994, he was hired again as WBAI's Program Director and during his five-year tenure, WBAI achieved significant progress in listenership and fundraising. Marksman founded "Democracy Now" in 1996, the award-winning program now helmed by Amy Goodman. Marksman was deeply-connected to the Caribbean and African diaspora and his own program "Behind The News" focused on international and national issues from a black nationalist and Marxist perspective. Marksman was profoundly loved by a broad cross section of the WBAI audience and staff and his shocking and sudden death from a massive heart attack on March 23, 1999 was a wound to the station that lasted for years. Over 3,000 people attended his funeral at the Cathedral of St. John the Divine in Manhattan.

Shortly before the death of Samori Marksman and following years of complaints about the outdated and filthy studios at 505 Eighth Avenue in New York, WBAI moved to new studios at 120 Wall Street in the Financial District in Manhattan in June 1998. After the death of Marksman, there was profound uncertainty and an explosion of pent-up feelings and resentments that was suppressed by Marksman and Mario Murillo, the Public Affairs director. Utrice Leid, a popular Caribbean radio host and producer had expected to succeed Marksman but was denied the post by then General Manager Valerie Van Isler. This led to an intense battle between various factions inside and outside the station and with The Pacifica Foundation, the parent company of WBAI. The culmination of this conflict was the "Christmas Coup" in December 2000 when a faction led by Leid, padlocked the station and took control of the airwaves and started an on-air and off-air war that lasted for several years. Some senior WBAI staffers, including General Manager Van Isler, were fired immediately. Van Isler, in particular, was blamed for the early death of Marksman. In 1994, Van Isler initially refused to hire Marksman, claiming Marksman had a mediocre credit report, then later in his tenure, refused to give him a salary increase. The autocratic and unpopular Van Isler also vigorously fought former staffers from obtaining unemployment benefits, including Bill Wells, the former WBAI Chief Engineer, who had a disability.

In late 2012 WBAI suffered extensive damages to their offices following the events of Hurricane Sandy.[12] The Manhattan offices saw flooding reach the second floor, trapping seven staffers inside, and the telephone systems being disabled. The devastation by Sandy occurred in the midst of fundraising efforts, which ultimately prevented WBAI from acquiring the necessary funds to remain operational. As a result of funding and operational difficulties, WBAI announced in 2013 it would be moving out of those studios to temporary studios of WHCR-FM located in Harlem, a station operated by City College of New York (CUNY).[13][12]

Lynne Rosen and John Littig, co-hosts of the monthly show The Pursuit of Happiness, were found dead on June 3, 2013, after committing suicide in their Park Slope home.[14]

In June 2013 the Corporation for Public Broadcasting suspended payments to WBAI citing accounting irregularities and a failure by the station to meet its financial obligations.[15] Layoff notices effective July 15 were subsequently issued to the station's staff and management.[16][17]

On August 9, 2013, Pacifica management announced that due to financial problems, WBAI was laying off about two-thirds of its staff, effective August 12, 2013. The entire news department was laid off.[18] Summer Reese, the interim executive director of the Pacifica Foundation, which owns WBAI, said that after talks with SAG-AFTRA, the union that represents broadcasting talent, "we will be laying off virtually everyone whose voice you recognize on the air," effective Monday. She corrected that and announced the final number was 19 out of the station's 29 employees, about 66 percent. Andrew Phillips, the former general manager of another of Pacifica's five stations, KPFA in Berkeley, California, was appointed WBAI's interim program director. The New York Times reported[19] that the station owes $2 million in broadcast fees to Democracy Now! alone, while cash on hand was just $23,000.

In March 2014 there were assorted rumors that the station will be sold or leased or moved, in whole or in part (including their equipment and antenna at the Empire State Building[20]) after contentions and firings both at WBAI and at Pacifica headquarters.[21]

On December 17, 2014 the California State Attorney General opened a full and formal investigation into the Pacifica Radio Foundation, owner of WBAI, with respect to its alleged irregularities as to its finances, violations of California law with respect to nonprofit organizations, and violations of its own bylaws.

In 2015 WBAI moved to new studios and offices at 388 Atlantic Avenue in the Boerum Hill section of Brooklyn.

On October 4, 2017 the court rejected WBAI’s pleadings as ill-founded and granted the Empire State Realty Trust (ESRT) a summary judgement, in the amount of $1.8m plus attorney’s fees, immediately, for the monies due through the initial filing date of late 2016. ESRT was awarded with an additional $600k for the lease through the date of the court’s ruling and obligations of approximately $50k+ per month through lease expiry in 2020, also remaining in place.[22][23] A further settlement was announced on April 6, 2018, releasing WBAI from the court judgment and its obligation to continuing leasing the Empire State tower into 2020, with tentative plans for a new transmitter at 4 Times Square.[24]

Notable alumni

• Margot Adler
• Chris Albertson
• LaShonda Katrice Barnett
• Elombe Brath
• Neal Conan
• John Corigliano
• Larry Cox
• Bob Fass
• John Fisk
• Joe Frank
• Ira Gitler
• Amy Goodman
• Joanne Grant
• Jeff Greenfield
• Nat Hentoff
• Doug Henwood
• Susan Howe
• Jimmy Howes
• Larry Josephson
• Citizen Kafka
• Alen Pol Kobryn
• Dave Lambert
• Julius Lester
• Al Lewis
• Tom Leykis
• John Lithgow
• Leonard Lopate
• Marian McPartland
• Henry Morgan
• Dan Morgenstern
• Steve Post
• Nanette Rainone
• Ayn Rand
• David Rapkin
• Charles Ruas
• Eric Salzman
• Lynn Samuels
• Baird Searles
• Gunther Schuller
• A. B. Spellman
• Dick Sudhalter
• Mickey Waldman
• Manoli Wetherell

References

1. WABF (FM) Broadcasting - Telecasting. October 27, 1947. pg. 48.
2. CALL LETTERS ASSIGNED Broadcasting - Telecasting. July 4, 1955. pg. 83.
3. "RADIO: WBAI in the Sky". Time Magazine. January 25, 1960. Retrieved January 12, 2016.
4. Christopher H. Sterling; Cary O'Dell (12 April 2010). The Concise Encyclopedia of American Radio. Routledge. pp. 551–. ISBN 978-1-135-17684-6.
5. Collins, Glenn (June 25, 2008). "The Station That Dared to Defend Carlin's "7 Words" Looks Back". The NYTimes. Retrieved September 14, 2018.
6. "Voice of the Cabal". Newyorker.com. 2006-12-04. Retrieved 2015-05-17.
7. Collins, Glenn (June 25, 2008). "The Station That Dared to Defend Carlin's "7 Words" Looks Back". The NYTimes. Retrieved January 12, 2016.
8. Active Radio: Pacifica's Brash Experiment. U of Minnesota Press. 1999. p. 116. ISBN 0-8166-3157-3. Retrieved 2012-02-23.
9. Collins, Glenn (June 25, 2008). "The Station That Dared to Defend Carlin's '7 Words' Looks Back". The New York Times. Retrieved February 23, 2012.
10. "Marguerite Young: Miss MacIntosh, My Darling". clocktower.org. Retrieved May 15, 2019.
11. "WBAI‐FM May Sell Its Studio". The New York Times. November 26, 1977. Retrieved December 30, 2016.
12. Matthew Lasar (11 February 2013). "Volunteers needed to help WBAI in NYC move to City College station". Radio Survivor. Retrieved 12 February 2015.
13. Matthew Lasar (11 July 2013). "CPB on WBAI: the good news is that we are talking, but . ." Radio Survivor. Retrieved 12 February 2015.
14. "Co-hosts of radio show 'The Pursuit of Happiness' committed suicide". NY Daily News. Retrieved 5 June 2013.
15. CPB Holds Back Funds From Pacifica As WBAI Is Late On Payroll And Antenna Payments All Access, June 20, 2013
16. WBAI Lays Off Entire Staff Lance Venta. Radio Insight, June 20, 2013
17. End Times for WBAI in New York City? Matthew Lasar, Radio Survivor, June 21, 2013
18. Ben Sisario (August 11, 2013). ""WBAI-FM Lays Off Most of Staff"". The New York Times. Retrieved 2015-05-17.
19. Ben Sisario (August 20, 2013). ""Democracy May Prove the Doom of WBAI"". The New York Times. Retrieved 2015-05-17.
20. "WBAI To Be Evicted From Empire State Building", Lance Venta, Radio Insight, 2014 June 24
21. "WBAI Actually Being Sold?", Radio Insight Forum, 2015-05-17
22. Real Estate Weekly
23. Current
24. Pacifica Settles NYC Tower Dispute, Radio World, 6 April 2018, Wikidata Q62625503

External links

• Official website
• Station History & Current Affairs
• Query the FCC's FM station database for WBAI
• Radio-Locator information on WBAI
• Query Nielsen Audio's FM station database for WBAI

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Louis J. Schweitzer Dead; Founder of Vera Institute
by Laurie Johnston
New York Times
September 21, 1971

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Louis J. Schweitzer, who as founder of the Vera Institute of Justice was instrumental in obtaining reforms of the bailbond system and other court procedures, died of a heart attack Sunday aboard the liner France while returning from Europe. He was 72 years old.

Mr. Schweitzer and his wife, Lucille Lortel, the Off Broadway theatrical producer, had spent several weeks off Antibes, France, aboard a boat owned by his brother, M. Peter Schweitzer of Lawrence, L.I.

The Russian‐born philanthropist was once described as having “a love affair with the Bill of Rights,” especially the Eighth Amendment, which prohibits excessive bail.

Backed by a family fortune made in the cigarette‐paper business, Mr. Schweitzer contributed some $2‐million to experiments designed to break bottlenecks and reduce case loads in the criminal courts. The emphasis was on avoiding long waits in jail for the accused, especially petty offenders, before their cases were brought to trial.

President Lyndon B. Johnson invited Mr. Schweitzer to witness his signing of the Bail Reform Act of 1966, calling the work of the Vera Institute an example of what “one man's outrage against injustice” could do.

Bought Theater in '54

Mr. Schweitzer bought the Theater de Lys in Greenwich Village in 1954 as a 24th wedding anniversary gift for his wife and with her created the White Barn Theater on their estate in Westport, Conn.

In 1957 he bought radio station WBAI in New York because he wanted to hear the kind of music he enjoyed and because he disapproved of commercials. He donated the station to the Pacific Foundation in 1959 but continued his financial support.

Along the way Mr. Schweitzer acquired a reputation for whimsical as well as significant giving.

He paid $17,000 for a New York City taxi medallion for a gray Mercedes‐Benz, splitting the daytime profits with a cab driver also named Louis Schweitzer, to guarantee his wife late‐night transportation from the theater. He also bought ner a gondola in Venice and a houseboat in Florida and purchased for his favorite barber the shop where he worked—so Mr. Schweitzer could have his fringe of hair trimmed after hours.

“Sure, I'm eccentric,” he once said, with a smile and a shrug. “If you're poor, you're only crazy.”

Mr. Schweitzer first set up the Vera Foundation, named for his mother, in 1961 after a friend told him there were “2,000 boys who had been in a Brooklyn, jail 10 months or more just waiting for trial.”

Mr. Schweitzer didn't believe it and went to see for himself. “When I saw that jail I was appalled,” he said later.

He wanted at first to lend bail money to those too poor to raise it. But with the help of the New York University Law School, and with Herbert Sturz as executive director, the Vera Foundation began the Manhattan Bail Project, supplying judges with facts about defendants and recommending for or against their release without bond.

Of the thousands released during a three‐year experiment, only a small number failed to appear for trial on schedule. In 1964 the city took over the procedure from Vera, extending to all five boroughs.

The foundation became the Vera Institute in 1966 when Burke Marshall, former assistant attorney general for civil rights, became chairman of the board to administer a $1.1 million grant from the Ford Foundation.

Since then Vera, with the help of a Federal grant, conducted another three‐year experiment, now taken over by the city, to delay prosecution of first and petty offenders who remain in a job program. It also conducts a $500,000 program to channel Bowery alcoholics and other derelicts into medical care.

Mr. Schweitzer was born in the Ukraine on Feb. 5, 1899, and was brought to this country at the age of 4.

Here, his father's company, Peter J. Schweitzer, Inc., manufactured paper for many of the leading cigarette brands. After buying a Subsidiary of the Brown & Williamson Tobacco Company, it operated 18 cigarette‐paper machines, the largest of which had a capacity for 48‐billion cigarettes a month The Schweitzer firm was merged with Kimberly‐Clark in 1955. The younger Schweitzer was president.

Mr. Schweitzer graduated from the University of Maine as a chemical engineer in 1919 and continued his studies at the University of Grenoble, France.

He established a $20,000 fund to endow the Meyer Berger Awards in journalism, honoring his friend who was a New York Times reporter and columnist until his death in 1959.

In New York Mr. and Mrs. Schweitzer lived in an apartment at the Sherry‐Netherland Hotel. They had no children.

In addition to his brother, he is survived by two sisters, Mrs. Herman Leffert of Palm Beach, Fla., and Mrs. Sidney Licht of Hartford.

Nicholas deB. Katzenbach, former United States Attorney General and an associate of the Vera Institute, and Rabbi Edward Sandrow will be speakers at a funeral service Thursday at 10 A.M. at Frank E. Campbell's, Madison Avenue at 81st Street.

A version of this archives appears in print on September 21, 1971, on Page 40 of the New York edition with the headline: Louis J. Schweitzer Dead; Founder of Vera Institute.

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Louis Schweitzer Dies on Ship Returning Home
Norwalk, Connecticut Obituaries
September 21, 1971

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Louis Schweitzer, a retired Industrialist, philanthropist, and husband of Lucille Lortel, founder of the White Barn theatre, died in his sleep aboard the liner SS France, according to word received here today.

Mr. Schweitzer resided on a large estate on Cranbury road, Westport, on the Norwalk town line, off Newtown Avenue, where the White Barn theatre is located.

He was returning home with his wife from a vacation in Europe, cruising the Mediterranean and visiting foreign capitals, when he died.

Born in Russia in 1809, Mr. Schweitzer was brought to the United States by his parents at the age of six. He was educated at the University of Maine and at the University of Grenoble, France, receiving a degree in paper engineering.

He and several brothers formed the Peter J. Schweitzer Company, makers of special papers, such as those used in the tobacco industry, and at one time it was reported that his firm had cornered the market for the supply of paper for all cigarettes. The company later became a division of Kimberly-Clark Inc., and he and his brothers sold their interest in 1964.

Philanthropist

His philanthropic activities included the founding of the Vera Foundation (named after his mother), which through the Manhattan Bail Project in conjunction with the NYU School of Law, provides bail for persons financialloy unable to obtain it.

He also sponsored the James Madison lectures on civil rights at the NYU School of Law, and was once honored by the State Bar association as Layman of the Year for his work in promotion of fair application of the law to all, regardless of financial or social standing.

Mr. Schweitzer also established the Meyer Berger award in journalism at the Columbia University School of Journalism, in memory of Meyer (Mike) Berger, veteran New York Times reporter.

In recent years, he and his wife, Lucille Lortel, made their fame in the theater. Founding the White Bar Theater in Westport, she made it a showcase of experimental showmanship. They also sponsored the Theatre deLys in Greenwich Village. Much which was then avantegarde theater was pioneered in these theaters and took root in theatrical practice.

Mr. and Mrs. Schweitzer had no children. He is survived by a brother, Peter Schweitzer of New York; and a sister, Mrs. Sarah Lefferts of New Haven, who moved recently from Westport. The Schweitzers in addition to their residence in Westport maintained also a residence in the Sherry Netherland hotel, New York city.

Funeral arrangements are incomplete, pending arrival of the body aboard the France, which is scheduled to dock in New York Wednesday.

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Louis Schweitzer (philanthropist)
by Wikipedia
Accessed: 6/21/19

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Louis Schweitzer (February 5, 1899 – September 20, 1971) was a Russian-born United States paper industrialist and philanthropist who purchased the U.S. radio station WBAI from Theodore Deglin for $34,000 in 1957. An idealist, eccentric, and long-time radio enthusiast, Schweitzer ran the station as a personal hobby and an artistic endeavour, broadcasting the latest in music, politics, and ideas.

Schweitzer viewed radio as an art form, but became increasingly disillusioned with commercial radio as WBAI became more successful. After reading about KPFA and Pacifica Radio in Los Angeles, Schweitzer decided to donate WBAI (which was then valued at around $200,000) to Pacifica, and proceeded to do so in January 1960. WBAI became the third Pacifica station.

Schweitzer's other philanthropic activities included the donation of 1% of his annual income to the United Nations, and the ex gratia purchase of a barber shop on behalf of the barber who had previously rented the premises. Schweitzer's only requirement was an entitlement to a free haircut after regular business hours upon request.

In 1961, he founded the Vera Foundation, later renamed the Vera Institute of Justice,[1] to reduce the numbers of poor people awaiting trial on New York City's Rikers Island. Under Schweitzer's leadership, Vera pioneered the use of controlled, experimental design research methods in state courts. When, in 1966, these experiments convinced the federal government to rewrite the laws governing bail in criminal cases, President Lyndon Johnson credited Schweitzer.

Schweitzer also proposed a "juvenile disarmament" resolution to the UN whereby toy guns and water pistols would be prohibited as an initial step towards effective disarmament and arms control. In response to criticism that this was a naive and quixotic proposal, Schweitzer stated, "The naive should inherit the earth because the realists have done such a lousy job".

In 1931 he married the actress Lucille Lortel.[2] In 1955, he bought her the Theater de Lys as an anniversary present.

References

1. Vera retrieved 16th Feb 2010
2. retrieved 16th Feb 2010

• WFHB Bloomington Community Radio, contains some historical Pacifica information.
• Louis J. Schweitzer Dead; Founder of Nera lnstitute [sic] By LAURIE JOHNSTON, New York Times, September 21, 1971, Page 40.
• Obituaries: Louis Schweitzer dies on ship returning home, The Hour (Norwalk, Connecticut), September 21, 1971

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A History of the Briarpatch
by Michael Phillips and Salli Rasberry
From the "Introduction" to The Briarpatch Book

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Dick Raymond is the father of the Briarpatch concept which emerged in early 1973. Dick also is founder of the Portola Institute, which has been the catalyst for several community-based groups and publisher of the revolutionary Whole Earth Catalog. interestingly, a book called The Brier-Patch Philosophy had been published in 1906; it presented a nineteenth-century naturalistic/religious view of the rabbit world in which everything worked out for the best in the long run. Dick did not know of that book, and ironically his idea grew out of a much different experience. He and many others in the early 1970s were disturbed with the endless Viet Nam War and high inflation rates. Many within Portola were predicting an apocalypse, with the economy falling in shambles around our feet. ln this milieu, Stewart Brand was examining the tools for post-apocalyptic survival and planning in his new Co-Evolution Quarterly.

Dick's Briarpatch idea grew out of his image of a dinosaur-like demise of existing large businesses. ln his first visions of the Briarpatch he saw the giant corporate dinosaurs unable to find food for their enormous profit appetites. He visualized a business apocalypse, using such terms as "living with joy in the cracks" to describe the new subsociety in which "the cracks" referred to his apocalyptic earthquake image. The Briarpatch was to be the social system for survival, with Briars using the tools of living on less, sharing with each other, and learning through new small businesses. To this, Dick added the positive value of doing it all with joy. ln his vision, Briars were to be doing what they loved most, secure from the ravages of the crumbling culture around them. Their lack of material possessions and small-scale living would appear to others like real briarpatches—thorny places so unappealing to the greedy people around them that, like rabbits, Briars would be safe.

Dick and I were close friends and worked together on various Portola projects. Although I personally didn't believe in an apocalypse, I loved his Briarpatch idea for its joy and wisdom and quoted Dick's definition of the Briarpatch in The Seven Laws of Money, which Rasberry and I were writing.

Dick lived south of San Francisco in suburban Menlo Park, where the Portola lnstitute is located and where the very first Briarpatch journal was compiled by Gurney Norman. Gurney edited and published this first journal called the Briarpatch Review and sent it free to a select mailing list of friends and users of the Whole Earth Truck Store. Gurney is one of our spiritual heroes and the author of "Divine Right's Trip," a novel first published in the Last Whole Earth Catalog. His Briarpatch Review described the new Briarpatch Auto Coop, which had started that summer in Menlo Park, the Zen Center in San Francisco, and various Portola projects. The journal had a subdued but glossy layout in tablet format and was published in November 1973. The Seven Laws of Money was nearly ready for the printer by that time, and we encouraged subscriptions to the new journal in the last page of the book. However, Gurney moved on, and there was no community in Menlo Park to put out a second issue.

A sustained Briarpatch Review needed a real Briarpatch network to nourish it, and San Francisco was the ideal community in which such a network could be created. The two principals in that venture were Andy Alpine, a former lawyer and researcher, and me. We both lived in San Francisco and had met while working on another project. We got along wonderfully, and I hired Andy to do some work for me in sex research and to search for a waterfront office where I could offer small-business counseling. Andy finished the research and found the office by May 1974, and I opened the office in June.

Three months later I found that I needed help. I had been giving free advice to small-business people and potential Briars once a week, helping many to start their own businesses. They would get their advice on Wednesday and start following it. By the next Monday they needed a truck, by Tuesday they wanted a bookkeeper, and I wasn't around to help them with the necessary follow-through. Andy was the perfect person to help out, and he was willing to do it. He needed $250 a month, which we initially raised with six-month pledges of support of $50 to $100 from Lew Durham; Dick Raymond; Elliot Buckdrucker, a CPA friend; Werner Hebenstreit, an insurance broker; Tom Silk, a lawyer; Ron Wilton, a film producer; and me. My free business consultation and Andy's follow-up grew into the Briarpatch Network, a community which agreed to support Andy after our six-month pledges had run out.

Lew Durham, who was a founder of Glide Memorial United Methodist Church's radical 1960s social-change programs, played a role twice in 1974. He was one of the founding contributors who supported Andy's work, and in July he helped put on a conference concerning right livelihood and business. The conference was held at a camp eighty miles south of San Francisco, with twenty-five to thirty people attending. We all had great fun, and many of those people became part of the Briarpatch Network.

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Dick Raymond Obituary Condolences
The Oregonian
Dec. 7 to Dec. 20, 2015

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Raymond, Dick 91 Nov. 30, 1923 Sept. 16, 2015 Dick Raymond, a publisher of the Whole Earth Catalogue, forward-thinking entrepr- eneur and consultant, early adopter of jogging, lover of rhubarb pie with ice cream, died at his home in Lake Oswego in the company of his family. Born in Newark, Ohio, Dick was raised throughout the Midwest, one of four siblings. His father served in the U.S. Department of Agriculture, working as an overseas attaché after WWII. Dick served in the U.S. Navy Air Corps in WWII, and after graduating from Miami University and earning an M.B.A. at Harvard, moved to Portland. In Portland, Dick met and married his first wife, the painter Ann Meilstrup. They had three children, TM, Megan and Kit. Dick worked on a series of start-ups, cofounding Rayturn Machine and developing the Irrigage soil-testing instrument, then joined the Stanford Research Institute. The job propelled the family's move to the Bay Area and placed Dick in the role of strategy consultant to clients such as the Hearst family and the Seattle World's Fair. Following a divorce from Ann, Dick worked on land conservation campaigns with the Dumbarton Research Council and founded the Portola Institute, a nonprofit focused on new approaches to education. Under the institute's umbrella, Dick worked with Stewart Brand to publish the countercultural touchstone the Whole Earth Catalogue. He became fascinated by non-Western theosophy and took up Zen Buddhist meditation and running. The latter inspired his next product invention, an adhesive for extending the life of athletic shoes. Dick married Carole Hughes, a schoolteacher, in 1970; they had two children, Jonathan and Camela. In 1979, Dick returned to Portland with his family to join a new solar energy venture. Reagan soon defunded it, and the '80s saw Dick establishing an absorbing consulting practice. His projects ranged from advising on economic development in Sri Lanka to doing large-scale leadership trainings, emphasizing the creation of participative workplaces, for corporations such as Hewlett-Packard and Pacific Bell. Dick kept pushing far-out ideas, pursuing projects in cold fusion and unmanned flight technology into his 70s. Throughout his life he remained engaged with life's big questions and enchanted with its small wonders, an admirer of cloud formations, proponent of libraries and daily exercise, and an exemplar of gratitude, humility, optimism and love. His motto became "Laugh A Lot." He passed to the sound of his meditation bell.

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Part 1 of 2

Thomas Henry Huxley
by Wikipedia
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The Right Honourable
Thomas Henry Huxley
FRS FLS
Woodburytype print of Huxley (1880 or earlier)
Born 4 May 1825
Ealing, London, Middlesex, England
Died 29 June 1895 (aged 70)
Eastbourne, Sussex, England
Residence London
Nationality English
Citizenship United Kingdom
Education Sydenham College, London[1]
Charing Cross Hospital
Known for Evolution, science education, agnosticism
Awards Royal Medal (1852)
Wollaston Medal (1876)
Clarke Medal (1880)
Copley Medal (1888)
Linnean Medal (1890)
Hayden Memorial Geological Award (1893)
Scientific career
Fields Zoology; comparative anatomy
Institutions Royal Navy, Royal College of Surgeons, Royal School of Mines, Royal Institution University of London
Academic advisors Thomas Wharton Jones
Notable students Michael Foster
H. G. Wells
Influences Edward Forbes
Charles Darwin
Influenced Patrick Geddes
Henry Fairfield Osborn
H. G. Wells
E. Ray Lankester
William Henry Flower
Aldous Huxley
Julian Huxley

Thomas Henry Huxley PC FRS HonFRSE FLS (4 May 1825 – 29 June 1895) was an English biologist and anthropologist specialising in comparative anatomy. He is known as "Darwin's Bulldog" for his advocacy of Charles Darwin's theory of evolution.[2]

The stories regarding Huxley's famous debate in 1860 with Samuel Wilberforce were a key moment in the wider acceptance of evolution and in his own career, although historians think that the surviving story of the debate is a later fabrication.[3] Huxley had been planning to leave Oxford on the previous day, but, after an encounter with Robert Chambers, the author of Vestiges, he changed his mind and decided to join the debate. Wilberforce was coached by Richard Owen, against whom Huxley also debated about whether humans were closely related to apes.

Huxley was slow to accept some of Darwin's ideas, such as gradualism, and was undecided about natural selection, but despite this he was wholehearted in his public support of Darwin. Instrumental in developing scientific education in Britain, he fought against the more extreme versions of religious tradition.

Originally coining the term in 1869, Huxley elaborated on "agnosticism" in 1889 to frame the nature of claims in terms of what is knowable and what is not. Huxley states

Agnosticism, in fact, is not a creed, but a method, the essence of which lies in the rigorous application of a single principle... the fundamental axiom of modern science... In matters of the intellect, follow your reason as far as it will take you, without regard to any other consideration... In matters of the intellect, do not pretend that conclusions are certain which are not demonstrated or demonstrable.[4]

Use of that term has continued to the present day (see Thomas Henry Huxley and agnosticism).[5] Much of Huxley's agnosticism is influenced by Kantian views on human perception and the ability to rely on rational evidence rather than belief systems.[6]

Huxley had little formal schooling and was virtually self-taught. He became perhaps the finest comparative anatomist of the later 19th century.[7] He worked on invertebrates, clarifying relationships between groups previously little understood. Later, he worked on vertebrates, especially on the relationship between apes and humans. After comparing Archaeopteryx with Compsognathus, he concluded that birds evolved from small carnivorous dinosaurs, a theory widely accepted today.

The tendency has been for this fine anatomical work to be overshadowed by his energetic and controversial activity in favour of evolution, and by his extensive public work on scientific education, both of which had significant effects on society in Britain and elsewhere.[8][9] Huxley’s 1893 Romanes Lecture, “Evolution and Ethics” is exceedingly influential in China; the Chinese translation of Huxley’s lecture even transformed the Chinese translation of Darwin’s Origin of Species.[10]

Early life

Thomas Henry Huxley was born in Ealing, which was then a village in Middlesex. He was the second youngest of eight children of George Huxley and Rachel Withers. Like some other British scientists of the nineteenth century such as Alfred Russel Wallace, Huxley was brought up in a literate middle-class family which had fallen on hard times. His father was a mathematics teacher at Ealing School until it closed,[11] putting the family into financial difficulties. As a result, Thomas left school at age 10, after only two years of formal schooling. Huxley's parents were Anglicans, although it was against organized religion Huxley sympathized with the town's Nonconformist.[12][13]

Despite this unenviable start, Huxley was determined to educate himself. He became one of the great autodidacts of the nineteenth century. At first he read Thomas Carlyle, James Hutton's Geology, and Hamilton's Logic. In his teens he taught himself German, eventually becoming fluent and used by Charles Darwin as a translator of scientific material in German. He learned Latin, and enough Greek to read Aristotle in the original.


Huxley, aged 21

Later on, as a young adult, he made himself an expert, first on invertebrates, and later on vertebrates, all self-taught. He was skilled in drawing and did many of the illustrations for his publications on marine invertebrates. In his later debates and writing on science and religion his grasp of theology was better than most of his clerical opponents. Huxley, a boy who left school at ten, became one of the most knowledgeable men in Britain.[14][15]

He was apprenticed for short periods to several medical practitioners: at 13 to his brother-in-law John Cooke in Coventry, who passed him on to Thomas Chandler, notable for his experiments using mesmerism for medical purposes. Chandler's practice was in London's Rotherhithe amidst the squalor endured by the Dickensian poor. Here Thomas would have seen poverty, crime and rampant disease at its worst.[16] Next, another brother-in-law took him on: John Salt, his eldest sister's husband. Now 16, Huxley entered Sydenham College (behind University College Hospital), a cut-price anatomy school whose founder, Marshall Hall, discovered the reflex arc. All this time Huxley continued his programme of reading, which more than made up for his lack of formal schooling.

A year later, buoyed by excellent results and a silver medal prize in the Apothecaries' yearly competition, Huxley was admitted to study at Charing Cross Hospital, where he obtained a small scholarship. At Charing Cross, he was taught by Thomas Wharton Jones, Professor of Ophthalmic Medicine and Surgery at University College London. Jones had been Robert Knox's assistant when Knox bought cadavers from Burke and Hare.[17] The young Wharton Jones, who acted as go-between, was exonerated of crime, but thought it best to leave Scotland. He was a fine teacher, up-to-date in physiology and also an ophthalmic surgeon. In 1845, under Wharton Jones' guidance, Huxley published his first scientific paper demonstrating the existence of a hitherto unrecognised layer in the inner sheath of hairs, a layer that has been known since as Huxley's layer. No doubt remembering this, and of course knowing his merit, later in life Huxley organised a pension for his old tutor.

At twenty he passed his First M.B. examination at the University of London, winning the gold medal for anatomy and physiology. However, he did not present himself for the final (Second M.B.) exams and consequently did not qualify with a university degree. His apprenticeships and exam results formed a sufficient basis for his application to the Royal Navy.[14][15]

Voyage of the Rattlesnake

Aged 20, Huxley was too young to apply to the Royal College of Surgeons for a licence to practise, yet he was 'deep in debt'.[18] So, at a friend's suggestion, he applied for an appointment in the Royal Navy. He had references on character and certificates showing the time spent on his apprenticeship and on requirements such as dissection and pharmacy. Sir William Burnett, the Physician General of the Navy, interviewed him and arranged for the College of Surgeons to test his competence (by means of a viva voce).


HMS Rattlesnake by the ship's artist Oswald Brierly

Finally Huxley was made Assistant Surgeon ('surgeon's mate', but in practice marine naturalist) to HMS Rattlesnake, about to set sail on a voyage of discovery and surveying to New Guinea and Australia. The Rattlesnake left England on 3 December 1846 and, once they had arrived in the southern hemisphere, Huxley devoted his time to the study of marine invertebrates.[19] He began to send details of his discoveries back to England, where publication was arranged by Edward Forbes FRS (who had also been a pupil of Knox). Both before and after the voyage Forbes was something of a mentor to Huxley.

Huxley's paper "On the anatomy and the affinities of the family of Medusae" was published in 1849 by the Royal Society in its Philosophical Transactions. Huxley united the Hydroid and Sertularian polyps with the Medusae to form a class to which he subsequently gave the name of Hydrozoa. The connection he made was that all the members of the class consisted of two cell layers, enclosing a central cavity or stomach. This is characteristic of the phylum now called the Cnidaria. He compared this feature to the serous and mucous structures of embryos of higher animals. When at last he got a grant from the Royal Society for the printing of plates, Huxley was able to summarise this work in The Oceanic Hydrozoa, published by the Ray Society in 1859.[20][21]


Australian woman: Pencil drawing by Huxley

The value of Huxley's work was recognised and, on returning to England in 1850, he was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society. In the following year, at the age of twenty-six, he not only received the Royal Society Medal but was also elected to the Council. He met Joseph Dalton Hooker and John Tyndall,[22] who remained his lifelong friends. The Admiralty retained him as a nominal assistant-surgeon, so he might work on the specimens he collected and the observations he made during the voyage of the Rattlesnake. He solved the problem of Appendicularia, whose place in the animal kingdom Johannes Peter Müller had found himself wholly unable to assign. It and the Ascidians are both, as Huxley showed, tunicates, today regarded as a sister group to the vertebrates in the phylum Chordata.[23] Other papers on the morphology of the cephalopods and on brachiopods and rotifers are also noteworthy.[14][15][24] The Rattlesnake's official naturalist, John MacGillivray, did some work on botany, and proved surprisingly good at notating Australian aboriginal languages. He wrote up the voyage in the standard Victorian two volume format.[25]

Later life

Huxley effectively resigned from the navy (by refusing to return to active service) and, in July 1854, he became Professor of Natural History at the Royal School of Mines and naturalist to the British Geological Survey in the following year. In addition, he was Fullerian Professor at the Royal Institution 1855–58 and 1865–67; Hunterian Professor at the Royal College of Surgeons 1863–69; President of the British Association for the Advancement of Science 1869–1870; President of the Quekett Microscopical Club 1878; President of the Royal Society 1883–85; Inspector of Fisheries 1881–85; and President of the Marine Biological Association 1884–1890.[15]

The thirty-one years during which Huxley occupied the chair of natural history at the Royal School of Mines included work on vertebrate palaeontology and on many projects to advance the place of science in British life. Huxley retired in 1885, after a bout of depressive illness which started in 1884. He resigned the presidency of the Royal Society in mid-term, the Inspectorship of Fisheries, and his chair (as soon as he decently could) and took six months' leave. His pension was a fairly handsome £1200 a year.[26]


Huxley's grave

In 1890, he moved from London to Eastbourne where he edited the nine volumes of his Collected Essays. In 1894 he heard of Eugene Dubois' discovery in Java of the remains of Pithecanthropus erectus (now known as Homo erectus). Finally, in 1895, he died of a heart attack (after contracting influenza and pneumonia), and was buried in North London at St Marylebone. This small family plot had been purchased upon the death of his beloved youngest son Noel, who died of scarlet fever in 1860; Huxley's wife Henrietta Anne née Heathorn and son Noel are also buried there. No invitations were sent out, but two hundred people turned up for the ceremony; they included Joseph Dalton Hooker, William Henry Flower, Mulford B. Foster, Edwin Lankester, Joseph Lister and, apparently, Henry James.[27]

Huxley and his wife had five daughters and three sons:

Noel Huxley (1856–1860), died aged 4.
Jessie Oriana Huxley (1856–1927), married architect Fred Waller in 1877.
Marian Huxley (1859–1887), married artist John Collier in 1879.
Leonard Huxley (1860–1933), married Julia Arnold.
Rachel Huxley (1862–1934), married civil engineer Alfred Eckersley in 1884.
Henrietta (Nettie) Huxley (1863–1940), married Harold Roller, travelled Europe as a singer.
Henry Huxley (1865–1946), became a fashionable general practitioner in London.
Ethel Huxley (1866–1941) married artist John Collier (widower of sister) in 1889.

Public duties and awards

From 1870 onwards, Huxley was to some extent drawn away from scientific research by the claims of public duty. He served on eight Royal Commissions, from 1862 to 1884. From 1871 to 1880 he was a Secretary of the Royal Society and from 1883 to 1885 he was president. He was president of the Geological Society from 1868 to 1870. In 1870, he was president of the British Association at Liverpool and, in the same year was elected a member of the newly constituted London School Board. He was president of the Quekett Microscopical Club from 1877 to 1879. He was the leading person amongst those who reformed the Royal Society, persuaded government about science, and established scientific education in British schools and universities.[28] Before him, science was mostly a gentleman's occupation; after him, science was a profession.[29]

He was awarded the highest honours then open to British men of science. The Royal Society, who had elected him as Fellow when he was 25 (1851), awarded him the Royal Medal the next year (1852), a year before Charles Darwin got the same award. He was the youngest biologist to receive such recognition. Then later in life came the Copley Medal in 1888 and the Darwin Medal in 1894; the Geological Society awarded him the Wollaston Medal in 1876; the Linnean Society awarded him the Linnean Medal in 1890. There were many other elections and appointments to eminent scientific bodies; these and his many academic awards are listed in the Life and Letters. He turned down many other appointments, notably the Linacre chair in zoology at Oxford and the Mastership of University College, Oxford.[30]


Huxley by Bassano c. 1883

In 1873 the King of Sweden made Huxley, Hooker and Tyndall Knights of the Order of the Polar Star: they could wear the insignia but not use the title in Britain.[31] Huxley collected many honorary memberships of foreign societies, academic awards and honorary doctorates from Britain and Germany. He also became foreign member of the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1892.[32]

As recognition of his many public services he was given a pension by the state, and was appointed Privy Councillor in 1892.

Despite his many achievements he was given no award by the British state until late in life. In this he did better than Darwin, who got no award of any kind from the state. (Darwin's proposed knighthood was vetoed by ecclesiastical advisers, including Wilberforce)[33] Perhaps Huxley had commented too often on his dislike of honours, or perhaps his many assaults on the traditional beliefs of organised religion made enemies in the establishment—he had vigorous debates in print with Benjamin Disraeli, William Ewart Gladstone and Arthur Balfour, and his relationship with Lord Salisbury was less than tranquil.[15][34]

Huxley was for about thirty years evolution's most effective advocate, and for some Huxley was "the premier advocate of science in the nineteenth century [for] the whole English-speaking world".[35]

Though he had many admirers and disciples, his retirement and later death left British zoology somewhat bereft of leadership. He had, directly or indirectly, guided the careers and appointments of the next generation, but none were of his stature. The loss of Francis Balfour in 1882, climbing the Alps just after he was appointed to a chair at Cambridge, was a tragedy. Huxley thought he was "the only man who can carry out my work": the deaths of Balfour and W. K. Clifford were "the greatest losses to science in our time".[15]

Vertebrate palaeontology

The first half of Huxley's career as a palaeontologist is marked by a rather strange predilection for 'persistent types', in which he seemed to argue that evolutionary advancement (in the sense of major new groups of animals and plants) was rare or absent in the Phanerozoic. In the same vein, he tended to push the origin of major groups such as birds and mammals back into the Palaeozoic era, and to claim that no order of plants had ever gone extinct.[citation needed]

Much paper has been consumed by historians of science ruminating on this strange and somewhat unclear idea.[36] Huxley was wrong to pitch the loss of orders in the Phanerozoic as low as 7%, and he did not estimate the number of new orders which evolved. Persistent types sat rather uncomfortably next to Darwin's more fluid ideas; despite his intelligence, it took Huxley a surprisingly long time to appreciate some of the implications of evolution. However, gradually Huxley moved away from this conservative style of thinking as his understanding of palaeontology, and the discipline itself, developed.[citation needed]

Huxley's detailed anatomical work was, as always, first-rate and productive. His work on fossil fish shows his distinctive approach: whereas pre-Darwinian naturalists collected, identified and classified, Huxley worked mainly to reveal the evolutionary relationships between groups.[citation needed]


Huxley by Wirgman, a drawing in pencil, 1882

The lobed-finned fish (such as coelacanths and lung fish) have paired appendages whose internal skeleton is attached to the shoulder or pelvis by a single bone, the humerus or femur. His interest in these fish brought him close to the origin of tetrapods, one of the most important areas of vertebrate palaeontology.[37][38][39]

The study of fossil reptiles led to his demonstrating the fundamental affinity of birds and reptiles, which he united under the title of Sauropsida. His papers on Archaeopteryx and the origin of birds were of great interest then and still are.[24][40][41]

Apart from his interest in persuading the world that man was a primate, and had descended from the same stock as the apes, Huxley did little work on mammals, with one exception. On his tour of America Huxley was shown the remarkable series of fossil horses, discovered by O. C. Marsh, in Yale's Peabody Museum.[42][43] Marsh was part palaeontologist, part robber baron, a man who had hunted buffalo and met Red Cloud (in 1874). Funded by his uncle George Peabody, Marsh had made some remarkable discoveries: the huge Cretaceous aquatic bird Hesperornis, and the dinosaur footprints along the Connecticut River were worth the trip by themselves, but the horse fossils were really special.[according to whom?]


Huxley's sketch of then hypothetical five-toed Eohippus being ridden by "Eohomo"

The collection at that time went from the small four-toed forest-dwelling Orohippus from the Eocene through three-toed species such as Miohippus to species more like the modern horse. By looking at their teeth he could see that, as the size grew larger and the toes reduced, the teeth changed from those of a browser to those of a grazer. All such changes could be explained by a general alteration in habitat from forest to grassland.[citation needed] And, it is now known, that is what did happen over large areas of North America from the Eocene to the Pleistocene: the ultimate causative agent was global temperature reduction (see Paleocene–Eocene Thermal Maximum). The modern account of the evolution of the horse has many other members, and the overall appearance of the tree of descent is more like a bush than a straight line.

The horse series also strongly suggested that the process was gradual, and that the origin of the modern horse lay in North America, not in Eurasia. If so, then something must have happened to horses in North America, since none were there when Europeans arrived. The experience was enough for Huxley to give credence to Darwin's gradualism, and to introduce the story of the horse into his lecture series.[citation needed]

Darwin's bulldog

See also: Reaction to Darwin's theory


The frontispiece to Huxley's Evidence as to Man's Place in Nature (1863): the image compares the skeletons of apes to humans. The gibbon (left) is double size.

Huxley was originally not persuaded of "development theory", as evolution was once called. This can be seen in his savage review[44] of Robert Chambers' Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation, a book which contained some quite pertinent arguments in favour of evolution. Huxley had also rejected Lamarck's theory of transmutation, on the basis that there was insufficient evidence to support it. All this scepticism was brought together in a lecture to the Royal Institution,[45] which made Darwin anxious enough to set about an effort to change young Huxley's mind. It was the kind of thing Darwin did with his closest scientific friends, but he must have had some particular intuition about Huxley, who was from all accounts a most impressive person even as a young man.[46][47]

Huxley was therefore one of the small group who knew about Darwin's ideas before they were published (the group included Joseph Dalton Hooker and Charles Lyell). The first publication by Darwin of his ideas came when Wallace sent Darwin his famous paper on natural selection, which was presented by Lyell and Hooker to the Linnean Society in 1858 alongside excerpts from Darwin's notebook and a Darwin letter to Asa Gray.[48][49] Huxley's famous response to the idea of natural selection was "How extremely stupid not to have thought of that!"[50] However, he never conclusively made up his mind about whether natural selection was the main method for evolution, though he did admit it was a hypothesis which was a good working basis.

Logically speaking, the prior question was whether evolution had taken place at all. It is to this question that much of Darwin's On the Origin of Species was devoted. Its publication in 1859 completely convinced Huxley of evolution and it was this and no doubt his admiration of Darwin's way of amassing and using evidence that formed the basis of his support for Darwin in the debates that followed the book's publication.

Huxley's support started with his anonymous favourable review of the Origin in the Times for 26 December 1859,[51] and continued with articles in several periodicals, and in a lecture at the Royal Institution in February 1860.[52] At the same time, Richard Owen, whilst writing an extremely hostile anonymous review of the Origin in the Edinburgh Review,[53] also primed Samuel Wilberforce who wrote one in the Quarterly Review, running to 17,000 words.[54] The authorship of this latter review was not known for sure until Wilberforce's son wrote his biography. So it can be said that, just as Darwin groomed Huxley, so Owen groomed Wilberforce; and both the proxies fought public battles on behalf of their principals as much as themselves. Though we do not know the exact words of the Oxford debate, we do know what Huxley thought of the review in the Quarterly:


Caricature of Huxley by Carlo Pellegrini in Vanity Fair 1871

Since Lord Brougham assailed Dr Young, the world has seen no such specimen of the insolence of a shallow pretender to a Master in Science as this remarkable production, in which one of the most exact of observers, most cautious of reasoners, and most candid of expositors, of this or any other age, is held up to scorn as a "flighty" person, who endeavours "to prop up his utterly rotten fabric of guess and speculation," and whose "mode of dealing with nature" is reprobated as "utterly dishonourable to Natural Science."

If I confine my retrospect of the reception of the Origin of Species to a twelvemonth, or thereabouts, from the time of its publication, I do not recollect anything quite so foolish and unmannerly as the Quarterly Review article...[55][56]

Huxley said "I am Darwin's bulldog". While the second half of Darwin's life was lived mainly within his family, the younger combative Huxley operated mainly out in the world at large. A letter from Huxley to Ernst Haeckel (2 November 1871) states: "The dogs have been snapping at [Darwin's] heels too much of late." At Oxford and Cambridge Universities, "Bulldog" was and still is student slang for a university policeman, whose job was to corral errant students and maintain their moral rectitude.

Debate with Wilberforce

Main article: 1860 Oxford evolution debate

Famously, Huxley responded to Wilberforce in the debate at the British Association meeting, on Saturday 30 June 1860 at the Oxford University Museum. Huxley's presence there had been encouraged on the previous evening when he met Robert Chambers, the Scottish publisher and author of "Vestiges", who was walking the streets of Oxford in a dispirited state, and begged for assistance. The debate followed the presentation of a paper by John William Draper, and was chaired by Darwins's former botany tutor John Stevens Henslow. Darwin's theory was opposed by the Lord Bishop of Oxford, Samuel Wilberforce, and those supporting Darwin included Huxley and their mutual friends Hooker and Lubbock. The platform featured Brodie and Professor Beale, and Robert FitzRoy, who had been captain of HMS Beagle during Darwin's voyage, spoke against Darwin.[57]

Wilberforce had a track record against evolution as far back as the previous Oxford B.A. meeting in 1847 when he attacked Chambers' Vestiges. For the more challenging task of opposing the Origin, and the implication that man descended from apes, he had been assiduously coached by Richard Owen—Owen stayed with him the night before the debate.[58] On the day Wilberforce repeated some of the arguments from his Quarterly Review article (written but not yet published), then ventured onto slippery ground. His famous jibe at Huxley (as to whether Huxley was descended from an ape on his mother's side or his father's side) was probably unplanned, and certainly unwise. Huxley's reply to the effect that he would rather be descended from an ape than a man who misused his great talents to suppress debate—the exact wording is not certain—was widely recounted in pamphlets and a spoof play.

The letters of Alfred Newton include one to his brother giving an eyewitness account of the debate, and written less than a month afterwards.[59] Other eyewitnesses, with one or two exceptions (Hooker especially thought he had made the best points), give similar accounts, at varying dates after the event.[60] The general view was and still is that Huxley got much the better of the exchange though Wilberforce himself thought he had done quite well. In the absence of a verbatim report differing perceptions are difficult to judge fairly; Huxley wrote a detailed account for Darwin, a letter which does not survive; however, a letter to his friend Frederick Daniel Dyster does survive with an account just three months after the event.[61][62][63][64][65][66]

One effect of the debate was to increase hugely Huxley's visibility amongst educated people, through the accounts in newspapers and periodicals. Another consequence was to alert him to the importance of public debate: a lesson he never forgot. A third effect was to serve notice that Darwinian ideas could not be easily dismissed: on the contrary, they would be vigorously defended against orthodox authority.[67][68] A fourth effect was to promote professionalism in science, with its implied need for scientific education. A fifth consequence was indirect: as Wilberforce had feared, a defence of evolution did undermine literal belief in the Old Testament, especially the Book of Genesis. Many of the liberal clergy at the meeting were quite pleased with the outcome of the debate; they were supporters, perhaps, of the controversial Essays and Reviews. Thus both on the side of science, and on the side of religion, the debate was important, and its outcome significant.[69] (see also below)

That Huxley and Wilberforce remained on courteous terms after the debate (and able to work together on projects such as the Metropolitan Board of Education) says something about both men, whereas Huxley and Owen were never reconciled.

Man's place in nature

See also: Man's Place in Nature

For nearly a decade his work was directed mainly to the relationship of man to the apes. This led him directly into a clash with Richard Owen, a man widely disliked for his behaviour whilst also being admired for his capability. The struggle was to culminate in some severe defeats for Owen. Huxley's Croonian Lecture, delivered before the Royal Society in 1858 on The Theory of the Vertebrate Skull was the start. In this, he rejected Owen's theory that the bones of the skull and the spine were homologous, an opinion previously held by Goethe and Lorenz Oken.[70]


Huxley at 32

From 1860–63 Huxley developed his ideas, presenting them in lectures to working men, students and the general public, followed by publication. Also in 1862 a series of talks to working men was printed lecture by lecture as pamphlets, later bound up as a little green book; the first copies went on sale in December.[71] Other lectures grew into Huxley's most famous work Evidence as to Man's place in Nature (1863) where he addressed the key issues long before Charles Darwin published his Descent of Man in 1871.

Although Darwin did not publish his Descent of Man until 1871, the general debate on this topic had started years before (there was even a precursor debate in the 18th century between Monboddo and Buffon). Darwin had dropped a hint when, in the conclusion to the Origin, he wrote: "In the distant future... light will be thrown on the origin of man and his history".[72] Not so distant, as it turned out. A key event had already occurred in 1857 when Richard Owen presented (to the Linnean Society) his theory that man was marked off from all other mammals by possessing features of the brain peculiar to the genus Homo. Having reached this opinion, Owen separated man from all other mammals in a subclass of its own.[73] No other biologist held such an extreme view. Darwin reacted "Man...as distinct from a chimpanzee [as] an ape from a platypus... I cannot swallow that!"[74] Neither could Huxley, who was able to demonstrate that Owen's idea was completely wrong.


Huxley with sketch of a gorilla skull (c1870)

The subject was raised at the 1860 BA Oxford meeting, when Huxley flatly contradicted Owen, and promised a later demonstration of the facts. In fact, a number of demonstrations were held in London and the provinces. In 1862 at the Cambridge meeting of the B.A. Huxley's friend William Flower gave a public dissection to show that the same structures (the posterior horn of the lateral ventricle and hippocampus minor) were indeed present in apes. The debate was widely publicised, and parodied as the Great Hippocampus Question. It was seen as one of Owen's greatest blunders, revealing Huxley as not only dangerous in debate, but also a better anatomist.

Owen conceded that there was something that could be called a hippocampus minor in the apes, but stated that it was much less developed and that such a presence did not detract from the overall distinction of simple brain size.[75]

Huxley's ideas on this topic were summed up in January 1861 in the first issue (new series) of his own journal, the Natural History Review: "the most violent scientific paper he had ever composed".[48] This paper was reprinted in 1863 as chapter 2 of Man's Place in Nature, with an addendum giving his account of the Owen/Huxley controversy about the ape brain.[76] In his Collected Essays this addendum was removed.

The extended argument on the ape brain, partly in debate and partly in print, backed by dissections and demonstrations, was a landmark in Huxley's career. It was highly important in asserting his dominance of comparative anatomy, and in the long run more influential in establishing evolution amongst biologists than was the debate with Wilberforce. It also marked the start of Owen's decline in the esteem of his fellow biologists.

The following was written by Huxley to Rolleston before the BA meeting in 1861:

"My dear Rolleston... The obstinate reiteration of erroneous assertions can only be nullified by as persistent an appeal to facts; and I greatly regret that my engagements do not permit me to be present at the British Association in order to assist personally at what, I believe, will be the seventh public demonstration during the past twelve months of the untruth of the three assertions, that the posterior lobe of the cerebrum, the posterior cornu of the lateral ventricle, and the hippocampus minor, are peculiar to man and do not exist in the apes. I shall be obliged if you will read this letter to the Section" Yours faithfully, Thos. H. Huxley.[77]

During those years there was also work on human fossil anatomy and anthropology. In 1862 he examined the Neanderthal skull-cap, which had been discovered in 1857. It was the first pre-sapiens discovery of a fossil man, and it was immediately clear to him that the brain case was surprisingly large.[78]

Perhaps less productive was his work on physical anthropology, a topic which fascinated the Victorians. Huxley classified the human races into nine categories, and discussed them under four headings as: Australoid, Negroid, Xanthocroic and Mongoloid types. Such classifications depended mainly on appearance and anatomical characteristics.[79][80]

Natural selection

Huxley was certainly not slavish in his dealings with Darwin. As shown in every biography, they had quite different and rather complementary characters. Important also, Darwin was a field naturalist, but Huxley was an anatomist, so there was a difference in their experience of nature. Lastly, Darwin's views on science were different from Huxley's views. For Darwin, natural selection was the best way to explain evolution because it explained a huge range of natural history facts and observations: it solved problems. Huxley, on the other hand, was an empiricist who trusted what he could see, and some things are not easily seen. With this in mind, one can appreciate the debate between them, Darwin writing his letters, Huxley never going quite so far as to say he thought Darwin was right.

Huxley's reservations on natural selection were of the type "until selection and breeding can be seen to give rise to varieties which are infertile with each other, natural selection cannot be proved".[81][82] Huxley's position on selection was agnostic; yet he gave no credence to any other theory. Despite this concern about evidence, Huxley saw that if evolution came about through variation, reproduction and selection then other things would also be subject to the same pressures. This included ideas because they are invented, imitated and selected by humans: ‘The struggle for existence holds as much in the intellectual as in the physical world. A theory is a species of thinking, and its right to exist is coextensive with its power of resisting extinction by its rivals.’[83] This is the same idea as meme theory put forward by Richard Dawkins in 1976.[84]

Darwin's part in the discussion came mostly in letters, as was his wont, along the lines: "The empirical evidence you call for is both impossible in practical terms, and in any event unnecessary. It's the same as asking to see every step in the transformation (or the splitting) of one species into another. My way so many issues are clarified and problems solved; no other theory does nearly so well".[85]

Huxley's reservation, as Helena Cronin has so aptly remarked, was contagious: "it spread itself for years among all kinds of doubters of Darwinism".[86] One reason for this doubt was that comparative anatomy could address the question of descent, but not the question of mechanism.[87]

Pallbearer

Huxley was a pallbearer at the funeral of Charles Darwin on 26 April 1882.[88]

The X Club

Main article: X Club

In November 1864, Huxley succeeded in launching a dining club, the X Club, composed of like-minded people working to advance the cause of science; not surprisingly, the club consisted of most of his closest friends. There were nine members, who decided at their first meeting that there should be no more. The members were: Huxley, John Tyndall, J. D. Hooker, John Lubbock (banker, biologist and neighbour of Darwin), Herbert Spencer (social philosopher and sub-editor of the Economist), William Spottiswoode (mathematician and the Queen's Printer), Thomas Hirst (Professor of Physics at University College London), Edward Frankland (the new Professor of Chemistry at the Royal Institution) and George Busk, zoologist and palaeontologist (formerly surgeon for HMS Dreadnought). All except Spencer were Fellows of the Royal Society. Tyndall was a particularly close friend; for many years they met regularly and discussed issues of the day. On more than one occasion Huxley joined Tyndall in the latter's trips into the Alps and helped with his investigations in glaciology.[89][90][91]


From the portrait of A. Legros.

There were also some quite significant X-Club satellites such as William Flower and George Rolleston, (Huxley protegés), and liberal clergyman Arthur Stanley, the Dean of Westminster. Guests such as Charles Darwin and Hermann von Helmholtz were entertained from time to time.[92]

They would dine early on first Thursdays at a hotel, planning what to do; high on the agenda was to change the way the Royal Society Council did business. It was no coincidence that the Council met later that same evening. First item for the Xs was to get the Copley Medal for Darwin, which they managed after quite a struggle.

The next step was to acquire a journal to spread their ideas. This was the weekly Reader, which they bought, revamped and redirected. Huxley had already become part-owner of the Natural History Review[93] bolstered by the support of Lubbock, Rolleston, Busk and Carpenter (X-clubbers and satellites). The journal was switched to pro-Darwinian lines and relaunched in January 1861. After a stream of good articles the NHR failed after four years; but it had helped at a critical time for the establishment of evolution. The Reader also failed, despite its broader appeal which included art and literature as well as science. The periodical market was quite crowded at the time, but most probably the critical factor was Huxley's time; he was simply over-committed, and could not afford to hire full-time editors. This occurred often in his life: Huxley took on too many ventures, and was not so astute as Darwin at getting others to do work for him.

However, the experience gained with the Reader was put to good use when the X Club put their weight behind the founding of Nature in 1869. This time no mistakes were made: above all there was a permanent editor (though not full-time), Norman Lockyer, who served until 1919, a year before his death. In 1925, to celebrate his centenary, Nature issued a supplement devoted to Huxley.[94]

The peak of the X Club's influence was from 1873 to 1885 as Hooker, Spottiswoode and Huxley were Presidents of the Royal Society in succession. Spencer resigned in 1889 after a dispute with Huxley over state support for science.[95] After 1892 it was just an excuse for the surviving members to meet. Hooker died in 1911, and Lubbock (now Lord Avebury) was the last surviving member.

Huxley was also an active member of the Metaphysical Society, which ran from 1869 to 1880.[96] It was formed around a nucleus of clergy and expanded to include all kinds of opinions. Tyndall and Huxley later joined The Club (founded by Dr. Johnson) when they could be sure that Owen would not turn up.[97]

Educational influence

When Huxley himself was young there were virtually no degrees in British universities in the biological sciences and few courses. Most biologists of his day were either self-taught, or took medical degrees. When he retired there were established chairs in biological disciplines in most universities, and a broad consensus on the curricula to be followed. Huxley was the single most influential person in this transformation.

School of Mines and Zoology

In the early 1870s the Royal School of Mines moved to new quarters in South Kensington; ultimately it would become one of the constituent parts of Imperial College London. The move gave Huxley the chance to give more prominence to laboratory work in biology teaching, an idea suggested by practice in German universities.[28] In the main, the method was based on the use of carefully chosen types, and depended on the dissection of anatomy, supplemented by microscopy, museum specimens and some elementary physiology at the hands of Foster.

The typical day would start with Huxley lecturing at 9am, followed by a program of laboratory work supervised by his demonstrators.[98] Huxley's demonstrators were picked men—all became leaders of biology in Britain in later life, spreading Huxley's ideas as well as their own. Michael Foster became Professor of Physiology at Cambridge; E. Ray Lankester became Jodrell Professor of Zoology at University College London (1875–91), Professor of Comparative Anatomy at Oxford (1891–98) and Director of the Natural History Museum (1898–1907); S.H. Vines became Professor of Botany at Cambridge; W.T. Thiselton-Dyer became Hooker's successor at Kew (he was already Hooker's son-in-law!); T. Jeffery Parker became Professor of Zoology and Comparative Anatomy at University College, Cardiff; and William Rutherford[99] became the Professor of Physiology at Edinburgh. William Flower, Conservator to the Hunterian Museum, and THH's assistant in many dissections, became Sir William Flower, Hunterian Professor of Comparative Anatomy and, later, Director of the Natural History Museum.[34] It's a remarkable list of disciples, especially when contrasted with Owen who, in a longer professional life than Huxley, left no disciples at all. "No one fact tells so strongly against Owen... as that he has never reared one pupil or follower".[100]


Photograph of Huxley (c. 1890)

Huxley's courses for students were so much narrower than the man himself that many were bewildered by the contrast: "The teaching of zoology by use of selected animal types has come in for much criticism";[101] Looking back in 1914 to his time as a student, Sir Arthur Shipley said "Darwin's later works all dealt with living organisms, yet our obsession was with the dead, with bodies preserved, and cut into the most refined slices".[102] E.W MacBride said "Huxley... would persist in looking at animals as material structures and not as living, active beings; in a word... he was a necrologist.[103] To put it simply, Huxley preferred to teach what he had actually seen with his own eyes.

This largely morphological program of comparative anatomy remained at the core of most biological education for a hundred years until the advent of cell and molecular biology and interest in evolutionary ecology forced a fundamental rethink. It is an interesting fact that the methods of the field naturalists who led the way in developing the theory of evolution (Darwin, Wallace, Fritz Müller, Henry Bates) were scarcely represented at all in Huxley's program. Ecological investigation of life in its environment was virtually non-existent, and theory, evolutionary or otherwise, was at a discount. Michael Ruse finds no mention of evolution or Darwinism in any of the exams set by Huxley, and confirms the lecture content based on two complete sets of lecture notes.[104]

Since Darwin, Wallace and Bates did not hold teaching posts at any stage of their adult careers (and Műller never returned from Brazil) the imbalance in Huxley's program went uncorrected. It is surely strange that Huxley's courses did not contain an account of the evidence collected by those naturalists of life in the tropics; evidence which they had found so convincing, and which caused their views on evolution by natural selection to be so similar. Desmond suggests that "[biology] had to be simple, synthetic and assimilable [because] it was to train teachers and had no other heuristic function".[105] That must be part of the reason; indeed it does help to explain the stultifying nature of much school biology. But zoology as taught at all levels became far too much the product of one man.

Huxley was comfortable with comparative anatomy, at which he was the greatest master of the day. He was not an all-round naturalist like Darwin, who had shown clearly enough how to weave together detailed factual information and subtle arguments across the vast web of life. Huxley chose, in his teaching (and to some extent in his research) to take a more straightforward course, concentrating on his personal strengths.