User:CWH/Mortimer Graves

Frederic Mortimer Graves (b. 26 January 1893 Philadephia, Pennsylvania d.27 February 1987 Newburyport, Massachusetts) Graves was known for his leadership in the American Council of Learned Societies from the 1920s, especially in developing the study of Asia, the Middle East, and Latin America at the college level. In honor of his decades of work to create the institutions and scholars, has been called one of the "Grand Old Men of Asian Studies".

The University of Michigan conferred an Honorary Doctor of Humane Letters on Graves in June, 1960.

Early life
Graves was born in Philadelphia to Frederick Graves and Mary Ann Baldwin onn 26 January 1893. , During World War One, Graves served in the United States Navy. He graduated from Harvard University, where he was elected to Phi Beta Kappa, then also earned a Master's Degree in mathematics.

His wife was Jane Hamlin Everett; they had a daughter, Catherine Prince.

American Council of Learned Societies
Graves was ACLS executive director 1953-1957, supervising the move from Washington, D.C. to New York City.

As secretary of ACLS in the 1940s, he coordinated an Intensive Language Program with the Linguistic Society of America to write foreign language teaching materials for the military. He arranged funding from the Rockefeller Foundation for the Spoken Language Series. The series innovatively used audio tapes along with written material, which put the emphasis on spoken over written language. The seris included Russian, German, Dutch, Spanish, Italian, Japanese, Chinese, Thai, and Burmese, among others, which were distributed in the armed forces during World War II.

Developing Area Studies
After World War I American Chinese In the 1920s Graves used his position to coordinate the societies, culminating in a meeting in New York in 1929 that brought together leaders from the major scholarly societies.

Graves strongly believed in the importance of library and bibliography, and was among the contributors to the bibliography the first issue of the Far Eastern Quarterly.

The Rockefeller Foundation gave money for these programs in interdisciplinary scholarship in Latin America and East Asia. ‘indefatigable’ (p. 24) Graves supported Lebanese-born Arabist Philip Hitti’s Ptn N Eastern stud // summer seminars courses various disciplines teaching Arabic, Turkish Persian. Wartime Research and Analysis branch (OSS),  Bundy call ‘the first great center of area studies in the United States’ (p. 27). Persianist T. Cuyler Young, were OSS veterans. Lavish foundation funding, scholars struggled to define a coherent area studies agenda. geographer Robert B. Hall and anthropologist Julian Steward, failed to transcend academic disciplines. SSRC Committee on the Near and Middle East  ‘presentist thrust’ (p. 106) focus on advanced research, eclipsed ACLS emphasis on undergraduate, humanistic education. SSRC welcomed humanists Wilfred C. Smith British Orientalist H.A.R. Gibb only after Graves’ departure ACLS it consented to form a joint committee

After the war Graves turned to Middle Eastern studies. The Rockefeller Foundation sent him on a tour of the Middle East in 1948 and 1949. He remained frustrated, however. In the early 1950s he declared that even at leading American universities “the academic structure is almost as West European centered as it was when Mecca was practically as far away as the moon.” He called for the federal government to take responsibility, reasoning there was “no reason why there should not be government fellowships in Near Eastern studies precisely as there are government fellowships in atomic science. The one is just as important to the national security as the other.”

Selected publications

 * ACLS Humanities ebook. The issue includes Proceedings and Memoranda relating to the Promotion of Chinese Studies Proceedings of the First Conference
 * Mortimer Graves, "The American School of Indic and Iranian Studies," The American Scholar 5.2 (1936): 244-250. JSTOR
 * ---, “Intensive Language Study,” Far Eastern Survey (22 March 1943): 63–64.
 * ---, J. Milton Cowan, “A Statement of Intensive Language Instruction.” The German Quarterly 17.4 (1944): 165–66. https://doi.org/10.2307/400950.
 * ---, “Wartime Instruction in Far Eastern Languages,” Far Eastern Survey (27 March 1946): 92–93.
 * ---, “A Cultural Relations Policy in the Near East,” in The Near East and the Great Powers, ed. Richard N. Frye (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1951), pp. 76– 77.
 * ---, “A Cultural Relations Policy in the Near East,” in The Near East and the Great Powers, ed. Richard N. Frye (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1951), pp. 76– 77.