Max Yergan by Anthony David Henry III;

Author:Anthony, David Henry, III;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: New York University Press
Published: 2006-12-08T16:00:00+00:00

The ICAA on the Move

Buoyed by the momentum of recent transatlantic successes, Yergan concentrated on building his new coalition. Among luminaries cultivated for ICAA membership and a leading light on the masthead of the group’s fresh stationery was Raymond Leslie Buell, a popular, prolific political scientist who had written extensively on a range of territorial and international administrative subjects. Buell published monographs and analyses for the Foreign Policy Association and a Boston-centered pacifist collective, the World Peace Foundation. Africa scholars knew Buell for his 1928 work, The Native Problem in Africa.

Three years before The Native Problem Buell had compiled Problems of the Pacific: A Brief Bibliography Prepared for the American Group of the Institute of Pacific Relations. The IPR was launched precisely the same year by a zealous board, most of whom were ex-YMCA officials. Its first director, Edward C. (“Ned”) Carter, supervised Max in India. A building later housing the ICAA was owned by Frederick Field, the second director of the Institute of Pacific Relations and a close Carter associate who was later active in both the ICAA and its 1941 successor, the Council on African Affairs. Carter, Buell, and Field were each internationalist in outlook. Carter had also built a following from The Inquiry, an anti-isolation journal. Previously called the “National Conference on the Christian Way of Life,” the Inquiry circle was a liberal, social gospel–influenced collective. Much like the IPR, it was rooted in the YMCA, even using Y print facilities. Thus the ICAA sprang from both the YMCA and the Institute of Pacific Relations.

Like Carter and Yergan, Field had overseas experience, in Asia. Field was a first cousin of itinerant recording producer and jazz impresario John Hammond (who later joined the Council on African Affairs). Field and Hammond were left-leaning heirs of the Vanderbilt family. Throughout Yergan’s term, Field corresponded regularly with John Davis and George P. Murphy of the National Negro Congress, directing the American Peace Mobilization while IPR American Council head Carter presided over Russian War Relief.

From the start the ICAA was interracial in its composition. At least half of the membership was Black, the other half White. Males predominated, but there was rarely a time during which women did not occupy visible and prominent roles, wielding considerable influence. One such woman was Frieda Neugebauer, he previously mentioned activist secretary. At one juncture, Mary van Kleeck, director of Russell Sage Foundation’s Industrial Studies Department, held sway. In its heyday, the ICAA represented a cross-section of the interwar intellectual Left. Neugebauer and van Kleeck had IPR ties, the former as a stenographer, allegedly from 1934 to 1949,85 the latter intermittently contributing to Pacific Affairs. At its inception key board members were situated in colonial capitals, notably London and Paris. Although little else beyond surviving memoranda, press releases, letters, and news articles points to their effectiveness, the members maintained regular contact for two decades and were able to mount and sustain a powerful sequence of well-publicized actions and campaigns.

Pioneer ICAA members were, besides Buell, Robeson, Bunche, Howard University president Mordecai W.

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