William Henry Chamberlin (February 17, 1897 – September 12, 1969) was an American historian and journalist. He was the author of several books about the Cold War, communism, and foreign policy, including The Russian Revolution 1917-1921 (1935), which was written in Russia between 1922 and 1934 while he was the Moscow correspondent of The Christian Science Monitor.
An opponent of communism from the early 1930s, Chamberlin predicted that intervention in World War II would help communism in Europe and in Asia, which led him to be a non-interventionist.
Biography Early life and education
Chamberlin was born in Brooklyn on February 17, 1897. He was an only child, the son of Ernest Chamberlin, a newspaperman of modest means.William Henry Chamberlin, The Confessions of an Individualist. New York: Macmillan, 1940; pp. ix–x. His ethnicity was an amalgam of English and Scottish, with lesser genealogical connection to Germany and France, with a paternal grandfather who had fought as a volunteer in the 81st Ohio Infantry Regiment of the Union Army in the American Civil War.Chamberlin, The Confessions of an Individualist, p. 2.
Chamberlin attended Camden High School in Camden, New Jersey (a suburb of Philadelphia) for two years, a miserable period which he later recalled as a "heterogeneous mass of badly taught subjects" with "complete indiscipline among the students."Chamberlin, The Confessions of an Individualist, p. 4. He was a baseball fan during his boyhood years, regularly attending games of both the Philadelphia Phillies and Philadelphia Athletics, but found his chief source of diversion in books, including both the fiction of Mark Twain and heavier historical fare.
He described his father, a regular Socialist voter, as an important left-wing influence on his political views.Chamberlin, The Confessions of an Individualist, p. 15. Chamberlin remained decidedly mild in his progressive tendencies, strongly supporting Theodore Roosevelt and his Bull Moose campaign in 1912 rather than the substantially more radical politics of Eugene V. Debs. Horace Traubel, a socialist and biographer of Walt Whitman, was a family friend.
As a junior in high school, Chamberlin transferred to the Penn Charter School in Philadelphia, which he recalled in 1940 as being one of the two "most fortunate accidents in his life."Chamberlin, The Confessions of an Individualist, pp. 16–17. This event "extricated me from an educational blind alley and opened the way for six years of congenial study along classical lines, accompanied by unsystematic but extensive outside reading," Chamberlin recalled.Chamberlin, The Confessions of an Individualist, p. 17.
Chamberlin's attendance at Penn Charter, a Quaker-affiliated school, "led up naturally" to enrollment at Haverford College, another Quaker institution, located "in a pleasant suburban district of Philadelphia," he indicated. Chamberlin found the small liberal arts college with its ivy-clad dormatories and student body of 200 to be highly suited for his tastes, and he spent four happy years there, graduating in 1917."William Henry Chamberlin," John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation, gf.org
Journalistic career
Upon graduating, Chamberlin found himself well educated but with "uncommonly poor preparation for making a living" — well versed in Greek and Latin, German philosophy, and French and Russian literature, but with no readily marketable skills other than the ability to operate a typewriter and to construct sentences in coherent English.Chamberlin, The Confessions of an Individualist, p. 27. New York City, with its well-stocked libraries and rich cultural possibilities, "loomed up as a sort of Mecca of my hopes," Chamberlin later recalled. His mother, May McClintock Chamberlin, the daughter of a lawyer, hoped he would continue his education to pursue that career, but "law had never impressed my imagination," Chamberlin wrote, and so he, after a process of elimination, "drifted into newspaper work."Chamberlin, The Confessions of an Individualist, p. 28.
He landed his first job in the summer of 1917, earning $15 a week as a reporter for the Philadelphia Public Ledger, but quickly found the job and its endless loop of police stations, war rallies, and banquets to be "extremely boring." From there he moved to the Philadelphia Press for a more interesting stint as the assistant editor of the paper's weekly magazine section.Chamberlin, The Confessions of an Individualist, p. 29.
Chamberlin had absorbed the pacifist message of Quakerism and was an unwavering opponent of World War I, which America had entered early in 1917 and he was in touch with other former students at Haverford to rally support for an anti-war group called the Collegiate Anti-Militarism League, as well as another, later revealed to have been started by a government agent, called The Young Democracy.Chamberlin, The Confessions of an Individualist, p. 30. His number was pulled in the second draft and Chamberlin later indicated that he had considered a demonstrative suicide rather than face induction, even obtaining a handgun for the purpose.Chamberlin, The Confessions of an Individualist, p. 36. Fortunately, the anticipated mid-1918 call up did not happen on schedule. By the time his induction notice came, it was clear to him that with the war coming to a close, the worst he would face was apt to be a couple months in training camps, so he sold his gun and packed his bags.Chamberlin, The Confessions of an Individualist, pp. 36-37.
The war came to a close while Chamberlin was at training camp and he was discharged. His newspaper job in Philadelphia having been filled, he made his way to his Mecca, New York City, to find work there.Chamberlin, The Confessions of an Individualist, pp. 42–43. He landed in Greenwich Village, where he beat the bushes without success trying to land a job at one of the many radical publications in the city, making a few dollars as a freelance book reviewer for the New York Tribune.Chamberlin, The Confessions of an Individualist, p. 44. He lived frugally, tapping savings squirreled away from his time at the Philadelphia Press.Chamberlin, The Confessions of an Individualist, p. 45.
It was at this time that he met Sonya Trostem, a native of Elizavetgrad (today's Kropyvnytskyi), a small city in central Ukraine. The pair would marry in 1920 and be partners for life. He was finally hired to a permanent position at the Tribune, initially writing headlines before becoming assistant book reviews editor unter the tutelage of book editor Heywood Broun.Chamberlin, The Confessions of an Individualist, p. 46. He also contributed to the liberal magazine The Dial and to the Sunday magazine section of the socialist weekly New York Call during this interval, making use of the pseudonym "A.C. Freeman."Chamberlin, The Confessions of an Individualist, p. 47. He also made the acquaintance of various pro-Bolshevik figures in the New York scene of that day, including journalist John Reed, pioneer Lenin biographer Albert Rhys Williams, novelist Floyd Dell, and Alexander Gumberg, secretary to Raymond Robins.Chamberlin, The Confessions of an Individualist, pp. 54–60.
Chamberlin's double life as Tribune book reviewer and radical writer "A.C. Freeman" came to a close in 1921, when his job at the Tribune was collateral damange of budget cuts associated with the post-war recession that swept the country.Chamberlin, The Confessions of an Individualist, p. 60. The job loss spurred the adventurous Chamberlin to attempt another change of venue. Chamberlin and his wife tapped into their meager savings to travel to Soviet Russia, financing their own passage with the promise from several under-financed left wing publications to accept stories from the revolutionary country, although the money promised was necessarily minor owing to the poverty of the radical press.Chamberlin, The Confessions of an Individualist, p. 61. Immediately prior to departure, however, The Christian Science Monitor put their own name in the hat, committing to accept occasional freelance articles from Moscow. This association would ultimately prove fruitful.
Moscow reporter
Chamberlin, "a newspaperman of academic temper,"Eugene Lyons, The Red Decade: The Stalinist Penetration of America. Indianapolis, IN: Bobbs–Merrill Co., 1941; p. 332. arrived in the Soviet Union in 1922 as a reporter for the Christian Science Monitor. Chamberlain's dispatches were always "exact and scholarly and passionless," Eugene Lyons of United Press later recalled, adding the high praise that Chamberlin was the "best-informed and least sensational of my American colleagues in Moscow."Eugene Lyons, Assignment in Utopia: An Autobiography. [dust jacket subtitle] New York: Harcourt, Brace & Co., 1937; pp. 96, 147. With the exception of a short period in 1927, when he reported for the Monitor on the scene in China, Chamberlin would remain in the Soviet Union and work for that publication until March 1934. He also acted as Moscow correspondent for the Manchester Guardian.
One of Chamberlin's most vivid memories of his experience as a newspaper reporter on the Moscow beat was sitting in the audience of the Hall of Trade Unions in the fall of 1922 where he heard V.I. Lenin address the 4th World Congress of the Communist International:William Henry Chamberlin, "Russian Recollections," Russian Review, vol. 21, no. 4 (Oct. 1962), pp. 333-334.
"He seemed positively ill at ease when the delegates greeted him with a tremendous ovation. He struck no poses, shuffled papers, clearly eager to get on with the business at hand. As a compliment to the audience, he delivered his address not in Russian but in German, in which he was fairly fluent, although he occasionally paused and asked help for a word that would convey his meaning more adequately. A stocky man of medium height and athletic build...he spoke without oratorical flourishes; the whole effect was that of a professor giving a lecture rather than of a fiery tribune trying to kindle the flame of world revolution."Chamberlin, "Russian Recollections," p. 334.
At the end of his Russian years, Chamberlin reminisced about his early opinion of the Soviet regime, which he characterized as "more than friendly; it was enthusiastic."William Henry Chamberlin, Russia's Iron Age. Boston, MA: Little, Brown & Co., 1934; p. 372. Proceeding from his belief that World War I had been "the supreme crime and folly of the century," Chamberlin recalled having "jumped to the conclusion, which I have long abandoned, that revolution on the Bolshevik model is a panacea for war and for all social injustice."
Books of the early 1930s
Chamberlin is best remembered in the 21st Century as a pioneer historian and interpreter of the Russian Revolution and the rapid and brutal economic and social changes taking place in the Soviet Union during the tumultuous decade of the 1930s.
His first book, Soviet Russia: A Living Record and a History, with an introduction datelined from Moscow on September 15, 1929, detailed the history of the country through the end of the New Economic Policy, on the eve of collectivization and the radical industrialization program of the Five-year plan. It was retrospectively reckoned to be "on the whole a fairly well-balanced account" of ongoing events in the controversial revolutionary country, "certainly more sober and objective than the contemporary accounts of his colleagues in Moscow."Dimitri von Mohrenschildt, "William Henry Chamberlin, 1897-1969," Russian Review, vol. 29, no. 1 (Jan. 1970), pp. 1-5.