UBC Press Blog

John F. Howes

From left: John Howes and Bill Holland

In 1961 UBC became heir to one of the best English-language collections on contemporary Asia in the world, a collection that under differing circumstances might have become the core of UBC Press’ emphasis on Asia.  A good portion of the story had to do with the transfer to Vancouver from New York of a very special man, William (L)ancelot Holland.  He was born in New Zealand and grew up there, but had only two jobs in his life: with the Institute of Pacific Relations headquartered in New York city and then with the University of British Columbia.  Known simply as Bill,  these notes are based for the most part on his recollections told to me.

When Bill finished university in 1927, he was only twenty.  At that time, one of Bill’s professors was one of the planners for a Christian student conference to be held in China He entered Bill’s name onto the list of students from New Zealand who would attend the conference.  As the date for the conference approached, unstable political conditions led to its cancellation. Bill’s dismay brightened up when the professor then offered him a job with a new organization known as the Institute for Pacific Relations, or more familiarly, the ‘”IPR.’”

The IPR was formed by individuals worried about keeping peace between the nations whose lands bordered the Pacific Ocean.  Their major concern was what Japanese expansionism might do to destabilize the region.. The people who formed the IPR took care that it represented individual members and not their governments. They included leaders of Christian denominations and organizations like the YMCA and YWCA, who had regular contact with their followers in Asia.  Financial support came from Western businesses with interests in Asia.

Two elements characterized the program of the IPR.  One was regular biennial conferences and the other was research publications.  Five conferences were held before World War II: Hawaii (1925 & 1927), Kyoto (1929), Shanghai (1931) and Banff, Canada (1933).  Slow surface travel at the time limited the number of international conferences, but each one attracted attention from the media as concern about developments in the Pacific area increased.  After 1933 political pressures became so great that no further conferences were scheduled and the program didn’t start up again until after World War II. Bill was involved in planning and conducting each conference, but it was as director of research for the IPR that he contributed the most.

Prior to the formation of the IPR, there was practically no English-language research on contemporary Asia. The subject just did not fit into research programs of the time, as few individuals in the English-speaking world had much interest in Asia.  The few exceptions envisioned Asia as simply an area to which one dispatched missionaries or where one did business.  Yet the missionaries who formed the IPR and the businessmen who supported it recognized the implicit importance of peace in Asia to future peace in the Pacific basin.

Shortly after the turmoil of World War II in 1949, Asia made headlines again when the Chinese communists took power and established a new government.  This development would eventually lead to the end of the IPR.  The man most responsible for this turn of events was a young, ambitious, and unscrupulous senator from Wisconsin, Joseph McCarthy.

McCarthy claimed that organizations like the IPR had ’sold’ China to the communists.  On the face of it, the accusation seemed to make sense.  The IPR issued two periodicals and many volumes of research.  These rightly emphasized the tremendous political and economic problems that nullified attempts to develop an effective national Chinese government.  The few specialists with the training, experience, and desire to study China naturally gravitated toward the IPR and used it as a vehicle to publish the fruits of their research.  The IPR’s publications together formed a treasure trove of information about a huge land that had suddenly emerged onto the center stage of world development. The non-Asians who knew anything about China highly respected the IPR.

The problem was that so few people really did know anything about China but nonetheless feared the rise of a new Communist world power McCarthy used the mismatch of ignorance and concern to further his own ambitions.  That the authors of IPR publications should have somehow conjoined to ’sell’ China to the Communists made no sense, but to McCarthy these writers were obvious traitors who formed part of a vast conspiracy to further Communist world domination.  His strident claims intimidated leaders both in government and business.  The IPR lost its tax-exempt status and the corporations that had supported its activities could no longer claim tax deductions for their gifts.  These corporations, in turn, decided that their contributions underwriting the study of Asian politics and economy exposed them too much and they switched their charitable giving to organizations that offered an understanding of the less controversial elements in Asian culture, such as painting, music and dance. For the moment McCarthy seemed to have won the day.

He had not.  His fellow senators found the courage to censor him, and he died a few years later of liver ailments complicated by heavy drinking. One would have thought the problem would have ended at that point. It did not.

The Treasury Department still refused to grant tax-exempt status for donations to the IPR and hence it had to devote its rapidly declining funds to restore its good name. In a courtroom hearing, the IPR lawyer argued that the only way the allegations could be proved or disproved was to review the publications of the IPR.  The judge agreed, at which point two library carts filled with books and pamphlets were wheeled in and presented as constituting the evidence the judge required.  He, shocked at the huge number, asked whether he had to read them all.  Assured that that would be the only way he could come to a conclusion, the judge turned to Bill Holland and told him produce a summary of the contents of all the publications by the following morning.  Since Bill in his role as research director of the IPR had commissioned most of the research and so knew the results, he produced the list as requested.  The judge subsequently ruled all of McCarthy’s accusations to be groundless.  Still things did not change.  The businesses that had originally supported the IPR stayed instead with their new interest in culture.

At this point in 1960, the University of British Columbia invited Bill to join its faculty.  He arrived with his secretary and the journal Pacific Affairs (which would thenceforth be published by UBC), along with the many books that had so surprised the judge.  These were given to the university library and integrated into its collections. A recent search under the keyword “Institute of Pacific Relations” in tthe UBC library catalogue website produced 641 hits, which are all books produced before Bill arrived in Vancouver.  They would almost all have come with him. Bill’s donation gave UBC one of the best English-language collections on contemporary Asia in any library.

As head of the Department of Asian Studies, Bill also assisted in the preliminary work that led to the establishment of the UBC Press.  Now as the Press celebrates  Asian Heritage Month and features its many excellent books in the area, one wonders about all those IPR publications that were incorporated into the UBC library collection.  Perhaps they could have been taken over by the new UBC Press and incorporated into its list.  But no one could have forecast what would happen in the intervening years.  We can simply contemplate the irony that it was Joe McCarthy and his rantings that set UBC up so well, and so early, as a university with a great dedication to things Asian.