MCLC: Stuart Schram dies

[Denton, Kirk]

MCLC LIST
From: kirk (denton.2 at osu.edu)
Subject: Stuart Schram dies
***********************************************************

Source: NYT (7/21/12):
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/07/22/world/asia/stuart-r-schram-physicist-and-
mao-scholar-dies-at-88.html

Stuart R. Schram, Nuclear Physicist and Mao Scholar, Dies at 88
By WILLIAM YARDLEY 

Stuart R. Schram was a Minnesotan who made his way to Paris, an Army
nuclear physicist who became an expert in French political history, and a
mind wide awake in a world remade by war and its cold aftermath.

By the late 1950s, having already worked on the Manhattan Project,
published scholarly works in French and German, and taught himself Russian
and Japanese, he turned his considerable intellect to a divisive and
mysterious subject far across the globe and accessible to the West almost
solely through written works and transcripts: Mao Zedong.

It was an ambitious and rewarding move. Over the next 50 years, Mr.
Schram, who died on July 8 in France at 88, completed a seminal biography
of Mao just before the disasters of the Cultural Revolution, and spent
much of the rest of his life translating into English exhaustive volumes
of Mao’s words, in the process shedding critical light on a rapidly
changing China.

To other China scholars, Mr. Schram provided cleareyed analysis of Mao at
a time when many people were eager to reduce him to either an evil
dictator or a visionary hero. Mr. Schram’s works, they say, are
touchstones in the study of how Mao adapted Marxism for consumption by one
of the world’s oldest cultures.
“He struck a middle ground between cold war anti-Communism and armchair
revolutionary paeans and praise,” said Timothy Cheek, a China historian at
the University of British Columbia. “He had this monster textual capacity
where you just had read more than anyone else and on any given question
you can cite a bunch of stuff.”

Mr. Schram was working at the Institut d’Études Politiques de Paris, or
Sciences Po, when he began learning Chinese. He soon became an authority
on China and Mao by using the principal source available: the written
record. He completed “The Political Thought of Mao Tse-tung” in 1963.
Three years later, he produced the biography “Mao Tse-tung.”

“Now you can go to the grass roots and talk to real Chinese,” said
Roderick MacFarquhar, an expert on China at Harvard who knew Mr. Schram.
“In those days, none of us could get into China. You couldn’t talk to
people in China, but what you could do was try to analyze what the leaders
were thinking and doing.”
Rendering a level assessment was not made any easier by McCarthyism and
the volatile politics of postwar America. Several former colleagues
suggested that Mr. Schram found more freedom to work in Europe, where he
would not be suspected of being an apologist for Communism.

Lord Wilson of Tillyorn, the penultimate governor of Hong Kong before
Britain ceded control and a former colleague of Mr. Schram’s, noted in an
interview that China Quarterly, which was edited at different times by
Lord Wilson and Mr. MacFarquhar (Mr. Schram was on the board), was founded
in London even though much of the best work on China was being done by
Americans, often underwritten by philanthropies like the Ford Foundation.

“It made more sense to establish a journal that was trying to be totally
objective in Britain than in the United States,” Lord Wilson said.

Mr. Cheek said Mr. Schram’s earliest works still stand up to scrutiny.

“The questions he was addressing were not the questions readers come to
today,” he said. “The difference is time and place. People were not
worried about the Taliban or global financial collapse or would China take
over the world.

“In the 1960s, people were trying to explain, how the heck did the
Communists win and Chiang Kai-shek fail?”
Even as Mr. Schram delved into Mao’s early failures — he suggested that he
agreed with estimates that nearly 40 million people died from starvation
resulting from Mao’s Great Leap Forward of 1958 — he was surprised by the
damage done by Mao’s 1966-76 Cultural Revolution, colleagues said.

“Stuart had noted over the years that Mao was very proud of Chinese
history,” Mr. MacFarquhar said. “He was surprised Mao was willing to
countenance this kind of destruction.”

Mr. Schram enjoyed applying his research skills to French wine and food
and sometimes read a book a day, including detective novels, said his
wife, Marie-Annick Schram. He eventually traveled to China every year and
was in Beijing during the protests in Tiananmen Square.

“I think he had very mixed feelings about Mao,” Ms. Schram said. “I would
not use the word admiration, but of course he was very intrigued.”

In the late 1980s, Mr. MacFarquhar enlisted Mr. Schram to translate and
edit a comprehensive 10-volume series of known Mao writings and speeches
from before Mao took control of China in 1949. Seven volumes in the
series, “Mao’s Road to Power,” have been published and three more are
essentially complete, said Mr. Cheek, who worked on the eighth volume.

“It leaves us something that will endure when another generation’s
questions change,” Mr. Cheek said of the series.

Stuart Reynolds Schram was born in Excelsior, Minn., on Feb. 27, 1924, the
son of a dentist and the grandson of a railroad engineer. He received an
undergraduate degree in physics in less than three years from the
University of Minnesota and was drafted into the Army, where he worked in
Chicago on developing an atomic bomb as part of the Manhattan Project. He
received his doctorate from Columbia in the political behavior of French
Protestants, completing his research in France. He also spent time in
Japan.

“Having worked on the bomb, he wanted to study more of human beings,” Ms.
Schram said.

In 1967, he took a position at the University of London’s School of
Oriental and African Studies, where he was the first director of the
Contemporary China Institute.

The Schrams began splitting their time between the Brittany region of
France and Cambridge, Mass., after Mr. Schram began work on “Mao’s Road to
Power.”

Mr. Schram died of complications from a stroke, his wife said. A son,
Arthur, also survives him.

In 2003, Harvard held a conference honoring Mr. Schram called “Mao
Re-evaluated.” At the conference, Mr. Schram criticized Mao but also
explained why he thought many historians do not place Mao in the same
global rogue’s gallery as Stalin, Hitler and Pol Pot.

“In many ways his political instincts were sound,” Mr. Schram said. “He
tried to invest in the Chinese people. But in his personal feelings he was
emotional, wrongheaded and hysterical, and these qualities increasingly
took over in the 1950s.

“But despite enormous blunders and crimes, he was a great leader who was
trying to do the best for China. I think he’ll be remembered for that.”