Forum on Barbara D. Savage’s Merze Tate: The Global Odyssey of a Black Woman Scholar

Abstract

Merze Tate (1905–1996) was a prolific academic who taught in the fields of diplomatic history and International Relations (IR) at Howard University in Washington D.C. After training as a teacher, Tate acquired graduate degrees from Oxford (1935) and Harvard (1941) and became one of the few African American female professors of her generation. She published widely, not only on disarmament, but also on IR as a field and discipline, and the history of imperialism in the Pacific region. Her ideas and interests were as wide-ranging as the influences that shaped her thought, including but not limited to the long tradition of Black political thought on race, war, and empire. In this forum, we discuss Barbara D. Savage’s recently published intellectual biography of Tate and what her thought, properly contextualized, has to offer to IR scholars invested in a “Howard School” of international thought, as well as to scholars of African American intellectual history.

Introduction by Katharina Rietzler

The greats of International Relations (IR) knew Merze Tate. When Tate published her first book, The Disarmament Illusion, in 1942, Hans Morgenthau and Pitman Potter picked up their reviewers’ pens. For the realist Morgenthau (1943: 104–105), it was “a particular pleasure to review the intelligent, sound and erudite volume,” and he expressed his hope that Tate would go on to produce more scholarly work, “[f]or systematic analysis of political problems seems to be the author’s peculiar gift.” Potter (1942: 973), an exponent of liberal IR in the United States and author of a bestselling textbook, was less impressed but conceded that Tate’s book contained “fascinating” material. Prickly in tone, Potter’s review concluded with a cry of despair about the public’s “generally backward state of intelligence and feeling” when it came to disarmament. Not only did Tate craft a deeply researched study, her work also touched much raw nerve in what would become an American social science, IR (Hoffmann, 1977). But if Tate’s work engaged IR debates during the discipline’s formative years, why was it subsequently forgotten?

Barbara Savage’s (2023) new intellectual biography of Merze Tate, the subject of this roundtable review, offers readers potential cues in a deeply researched account of an exceptional scholar’s life. Born in 1905 in Michigan, Tate was a prolific academic who taught in the fields of diplomatic history and IR at Howard University in Washington D.C. from 1942 to 1977. After training as a teacher, Tate acquired graduate degrees from Oxford (1935) and Harvard (1941); these degrees as well as African American and female networks of support, for instance from her sorority, enabled Tate to secure a much-coveted professorship. Tate was one of the few African American women academics of her generation. She published widely, not only on disarmament, but also on IR as a field and discipline, and the history of empire in the Pacific region. Her ideas and interests were capacious and wide-ranging, as were the influences that shaped her thought, including but not limited to the long tradition of African American political thought on race, war, and empire.

But, as Savage makes clear, Tate’s scholarly achievements were not produced in isolation. Tate was deeply enmeshed in networks of kinship and friendship, and played an active part in the African American public sphere. Tate came of age in the era of Jim Crow, and the realities of racial segregation and discrimination shaped her life worlds in a way that would not have been the case for a white American scholar. She understood the importance of nurturing African American civic culture in an era when full citizenship rights remained elusive. She was committed to educating “ordinary citizens,” for example, black soldiers who went off to fight in World War II. But she also enthusiastically participated in cosmopolitan pedagogical experiments, not least Rabindranath Tagore’s World University in Shantiniketan, India. Savage’s book is the first full account of Tate’s long and productive life.

The reviewers in this roundtable have approached Merze Tate from multiple theoretical and methodological perspectives, including political, cultural, intellectual, and disciplinary history as well as political theory. Lucian Ashworth, a specialist on the disciplinary history of IR, reflects on the recognition of Tate as an “IR great” that is currently unfolding in the discipline, and engages with the question of what Tate’s epistemological horizons offer IR scholars today. Chad Williams and Adriane Lentz-Smith, both of whom are historians of African American thought and politics in the era of World War I, analyze Tate in the context that arguably mattered to her most, African American intellectual culture. To probe the nature of Tate’s political radicalism, Williams reads Tate together with W.E.B. DuBois, a towering figure in US intellectual history but only belatedly and more recently recognized within the discipline of IR. Lentz-Smith explores the merits of biography and highlights the politics of community: it matters that Tate led a full and rich life, enmeshed in African American sociability. Tamson Pietsch, an expert on scholarly mobilities and imperial geographies, engages with Tate’s status as a citizen—if not a full citizen—of the US empire. Adom Getachew, a political theorist, reflects on methodological questions in histories of political thought, including questions of genre, sites of knowledge production and the embeddedness of ideas in collective life worlds. Getachew compares Tate’s geopolitical thought to that of thinkers of the Black Atlantic. Ultimately, Getachew concludes, Tate was concerned with the rise of US imperial power, and the contours of an empire that crystallized not in the Atlantic but in the Pacific region with its multiple and overlapping layers of empire, colonialism, and semi-sovereignty.

What emerges from these reviews as well as Savage’s author’s response are several common themes but also areas of contestation. All reviewers recognize the crucial importance of African American intellectual sites and networks as well as the rich seams of African American political thought Tate drew on and contributed to. The material conditions of intellectual production, the ways in which financial resources decide who can become a scholar and who cannot, form another recurrent theme. Overall, Tate emerges as a significant thinker, distinctive due to her methodological pluralism, her development of Black international thought, her attention to the Pacific region, and her profound and occasionally polemic critique of empire.

The reviews also highlight that different disciplines eagerly claim Tate as one of their own. The historians are keen to have her but so are IR scholars, and Savage’s rich analysis of Tate’s life clearly speaks to scholars in African American Studies. This raises questions about the book’s potential impact on teaching practices in several disciplines. Tate’s writings have already been excerpted in widely-used IR textbooks, thus ensuring that students encounter Tate as an original thinker who advanced a distinct analysis of geopolitics in realist international theory (Rosenboim, 2023: 140). Savage’s study offers much deeper contextualization and biographical analysis than is the norm in undergraduate IR courses but for those students seeking to specialize in the study of African American international thought, it serves as a vital resource. It should be noted here that Tate was a generous philanthropist who, via gifts to institutions of Higher Education, made sure that the next generation of scholars would indeed be able to make claims on her and develop new curricula as a result (Savage, 2023: 191–193, 226, 229).

A more contentious area of claim-making concerns the question of whether Tate can be placed in the so-called Howard School, a term coined by IR scholar Robert Vitalis (2015). As Lucian Ashworth notes, for IR scholars, the term retains purchase and utility. For intellectual historians, however, the term may impose too many limitations. To build a school of thought—such as the “Cambridge School” in intellectual history or the “Copenhagen School” in IR—one not only needs an identifiable method and thematic concern but also a hospitable location, infrastructure, institutional prestige and secure academic jobs. Anti-imperialist and anti-racist thought was central to African American political thought before the material conditions at Howard as an intellectual and social institution were such that they would allow the creation of a “school.” There is a certain anachronism in retrospectively conferring a label on thinkers who may not have seen themselves in this way. This brings us back to the question of why the discipline of IR, whose practitioners were familiar with Merze Tate long ago, has now found it useful to rediscover her and other African American intellectuals. The idea of a “Howard School” may say more about a discipline’s desire to account for its past, serving present needs rather than giving past scholars their due, than about its individual thinkers, as Savage concludes in her response. In a biography that eschews myth-making, Savage has not only recovered Merze Tate but also the contexts that made her, IR being only one of many.

Review by Lucian Ashworth

The formation of historical canons in a field of study is not a smooth and linear path. Figures fall in and out of favor in response to current trends, while “rediscoveries” of past thinkers often lead to retroactive rewritings of disciplinary history. Yet, the power of remembering is often matched by an equal and opposite power of forgetting. These, of course, are not unconnected. The act of rediscovery often comes as changes in disciplinary foci actively encourage the remembering of those who were subject to forgetting. On top of this, certain groups are more easily forgotten.

The reason why the history of IR appears so male and centered on the North Atlantic is that those outside this category and location tend to be ignored after the end of their IR career. This has been historically true of women and people of color because, facing overt discrimination, they tended to be on the borderlines of the cultural center of a field of study. The disappearance of Merze Tate, as well as the recent rediscovery of her work in studies such as Barbara Savage’s fascinating intellectual biography, is part of this disappearance/rediscovery process of those perceived to be at the margins. Tate’s disappearance comes despite her well-received books on disarmament, and her wider scholarship which was focused on imperialism and the Global South during the key decades of the Cold War. Unlike many of those whose contributions to Cold War IR was more abstract, Tate’s scholarship was based on her experience as a traveler. Travel, alongside her standing as an African American scholar, defined her work.

There is an abundance of quotes about how travel is not about discovering the world, but more about discovering yourself. Merze Tate had her own version of this philosophy, seeing travel as a way to, in Barbara Savage’s (2023) words, “relieve provincialism, inspire and transform” (p. 49). She was an enthusiastic traveler, a predilection Savage (2023: 3) tells us came from a childhood love of maps and geography, as well as tales from relatives caught up in the First World War. Indeed, Tate received her first scholarly accolade in 1921 at 16, when she won an oratorical contest with a speech on “The Negro in the World War.” Her first trip to Europe in 1931 was life changing. On board a Canadian liner to Cherbourg she noted that “I am the only Negro Woman. The travelers are very pleasant” (Savage, 2023: 38). After a summer that had included meeting Lucie and Alfred Zimmern in Geneva, she was set on a path that would see her attend first Oxford University, then Harvard, and become the author of two books on disarmament that would make her reputation as a scholar in IR.

Yet, reading just Tate’s work on disarmament gives a distorting picture of her concerns and interests. She continued to travel during her scholarly career, visiting every continent except Antarctica and South America and during her early days of travel—like on that liner in 1931—she got used to being often the only black person among her fellow travelers. While her IR scholarship was clearly inspired by her travels, her writing that drew on her identity as an African American also benefited from them. Like the African American veterans she encountered after the First World War, travel relieved her provincialism, and helped her to see the world with fresh eyes. It is too easy, when reading her work on disarmament, to integrate Tate into a classical realist IR tradition broadly unconcerned with gender and race. (For further discussion of Tate’s distinct realism see Adom Getachew’s contribution to this roundtable). We have to go to her wider scholarly output to see her directly address these issues. Rereading her books with the knowledge of her other works reveals a criticism of imperialism that was often missed by her white reviewers. According to Savage (2023: 94), it was African American studies scholars who reviewed Tate’s first book that made the connections between disarmament and imperialism.

The discussion of Tate’s travels, and the influence these had on her scholarship, is one of many strengths of Savage’s excellent intellectual biography. While laid out chronologically, it is the reoccurrence of themes that allows the reader to build up a picture of Tate and her scholarship in the stream of time. Yes, she was a traveler, and this informed her world view. She was also simultaneously at the margins and the center of intellectual and academic life. The majority of her scholarly life was spent at Howard University, one of the Historically Black Colleges and Universities (HBCUs) that pre-dated the civil rights movement. Here she was a central figure in academic life. Her life of travel during her time as an established academic, especially throughout Eurasia and Oceania, was a mark of privilege. Yet, her ease with travel spoke of her sense that “home” was also a place where she and other African American women could never truly feel at home. This extended to the trajectory of her scholarly career, where both her research and teaching interests remained interdisciplinary. While she graduated from Harvard in political science with a speciality in IR, her obituary in the Washington Post would describe her as a diplomatic historian (Savage, 2023: 235). Across her academic career her work engaged with a range of subjects, including geography and political economy.

This position of Tate, as both rooted and itinerant, extended beyond space to time. By the late sixties, with student activism on the rise on US campuses, she saw herself as part of a middle generation, torn between the militancy of youth and the conservatism of its elders. Her siding with students over changes to the curriculum that favored anti-imperialism (“I concluded: ‘if you can’t beat them, join them’”), was matched by her deploring of the shutdowns and disruptions caused by what she saw as a militant minority (Savage, 2023: 198). Her role as an interpreter and mediator between generations was part of her wider stated goal of teaching black audiences about international affairs, which was the flip side of her bringing African American and anti-imperialist perspectives to a broader white and male-dominated scholarly world (Savage, 2023: 139). Here, despite her perceived commitment to interdisciplinarity, Tate remained an IR scholar, albeit one that lived on the margins of IR.

Susan Strange (2020), in her intellectual memoir, famously said that the reason she found herself in IR was because there was such a low bar to membership. Of course, there are gatekeepers in every field of study, but IR has maintained an openness to new approaches nonetheless. Tate’s importance to the study of IR lies in her pioneering scholarship on so many questions that are now recognized as important. Her anti-imperialism and emphasis on the Global South make her an early adopter of ideas that have become central to the study of Global IR (Acharya, 2014). Yet, her IR roots were laid down in her interactions with scholars in the major interwar IR centers of Geneva and Oxford, such as the Zimmerns, J. L. Brierly, and Agnes Headlam-Morley, and the cutting-edge debates around the opening of the 1932–4 Geneva Disarmament Conference (Landauer, 1993; Owens, 2019; Owens and Rietzler, 2023). Just as in 1968, Tate remains in that “middle generation” between old and new.

It is time in IR that we fully recognized Merze Tate as part of the IR story. In a way, this has already happened. Since 2022, the Historical IR section (HIST) of the International Studies Association (ISA) has awarded a prize named after Tate for the best article in historical IR, and in 2024, this same section sponsored a round-table on Barbara Savage’s book that brought a broad range of scholars into conversation on Tate’s legacy. Yet IR scholars need to do more to recognize Tate as a key innovator in our field. The HIST ISA prize is a good start, but is not enough. Much has been made of the American dominance of IR scholarship since the Second World War, but we have to temper that narrative with the understanding that this was always a white male American IR whose nod to diversity was its inclusion of émigré scholars from Europe. The work of Tate not only enriches our understanding of the place of disarmament in the history of international thought, she also stands as an exemplar of both the varieties of women’s international thought (Owens and Rietzler, 2021) and the African American Howard School of IR explored by Bob Vitalis (2015). Indeed, Vitalis is one of a select few IR scholars who has engaged with Tate’s work. Tate may be from the margins, but it is on the margins of a discipline that some of the most interesting and innovative work is often done.

Review by Adom Getachew

I first learned about Barbara Savage’s important new biography of the understudied and relatively unknown IR scholar Merze Tate ten years ago at the annual meeting of the American Political Science Association in Washington, D.C. During that year’s meeting a special session was held at Howard University, organized by Howard Professor Krista Johnson, where Savage was joined by her University of Pennsylvania colleague Robert Vitalis to discuss the “Howard School of International Affairs.” I was then finishing my dissertation on the international politics of decolonization focused on African and Caribbean intellectuals, and attending the session at Howard that afternoon in August felt like a homecoming of sorts. While a high school student in nearby Arlington, VA, I took part in the Ralph Bunche Summer Institute on International Affairs at Howard where I first imagined various careers from international diplomacy to scholarship. With other Black high school students, primarily from the DC area, I participated in debates about pathways for the political and economic reconstruction of Iraq after the war, visited the United Nations in New York, and, most importantly, learned about the important role Howard had played in educating anticolonial and civil rights leaders.

Sitting now with the completed product of the research Savage had just begun in 2014, as a historian of political thought and as a political theorist of empire and decolonization I would like to highlight three contributions this book makes to the study of international political thought: (1) implementing a social history approach to intellectual history; (2) an expansion of the genres of international political thought; and (3) a reconsideration of the substantive contours of Black international thought.

First, as a project of intellectual history, Savage’s biography of Tate moves beyond the standard approaches to the field which emphasize a dialogical relationship between an author and her immediate and preceding context. The aim in this regard is to highlight the sources on which an author draws so as to better situate her interventions. We do walk away with some sense of Tate’s intellectual debts and departures within the field of IR. But above all we are treated to what Michele Mitchell (2004) describes as “social history of thought” (p. 13) in her book Righteous Propagation. For Mitchell, the aim is to think through the collective processes in which ideas are constructed and circulated, attending to informal sites of knowledge production and circulation alongside formal spaces.

Savage takes a similar approach from the very opening scene of the book. We are introduced to Tate as she participates in a student oratorical contest at a high school in Battle Creek, Michigan where she delivers a winning speech on “The Negro in the World War.” This early episode foreshadows Tate’s (1943) later preoccupations and especially her 1943 essay “The War Aims of World War I and World War II and their Relation to the Darker Peoples of the World,” discussed in more detail by Chad Williams in this roundtable. But beginning with this moment in 1921 foregrounds the centrality of civic organizations in the formation of Tate as a scholar. In these contexts and through lectures, debates Tate would be initially exposed to new ideas and would herself practice voicing her interpretations and arguments. Moreover, Black civic organizations such as the Alpha Kappa Alpha Sorority materially contributed to Tate’s ability to pursue her scholarly career.

In her attention to the social institutions in which Tate was embedded, Savage’s biography simultaneously captures the singularity of Tate but recognizes the social and collective institutions that nurtured and facilitated that singularity. This approach also helps to nest Howard University within wider networks of Black civic and political life. The ways in which Howard incubated a critical approach to questions of race, empire and IR has been documented by Robert Vitalis (2015) and was the subject of the panel I attended 10 years ago (Johnson and Brown, 2020). Yet for Savage, Howard is one node (no doubt a central one) in a wider set of institutions that constitute a Black civic sphere. Tate spends time in a number of HBCUs. She also continues to participate in lectures; programs hosted by social and political organizations sustained her scholarly career.

Both because of these wide intellectual networks and because Tate had a difficult time securing publishers for her books, she frequently turned to the essay form to express her ideas. To be sure, Tate (1942b, 1965, 1968) wrote a significant number of books—including The Disarmament Illusion; The United States and the Hawaiian Kingdom and Hawaii: Reciprocity or Annexation, to name a few. But as Savage’s study shows throughout, she had a very difficult time getting her books out. As she waited for news from publishers and worked through the lessons of her own research and writing, she wrote a range of review essays for journals such as the Journal of Negro History and the Journal of Negro Education. The importance of these journals as an outlet for scholars like Tate speaks once more to the need to engage much more deeply with Black institutions of knowledge production in intellectual histories of international thought.

Tate’s continuous recourse to the review essay also raises the question of how we might understand this form as a genre of international political thought. The large volume of essays Tate wrote might be compared to that of W. E. B. Du Bois whose most penetrating insights into empire and international politics also emerged in this form (Getachew and Pitts, 2022: xvii–xviii). The essay affords Tate and others an improvisational and provisional form. To essay is to try. And in her various essays Tate tries out new arguments, refines and revises older ones, and engages material as well as audiences far beyond the community of IR scholars. The review essay in particular becomes an occasion to engage interdisciplinary sources as she takes up novels and travel narratives in addition to scholarly monographs. By documenting Tate’s rich output in journals, magazines, and newspapers, Savage offers historians and IR scholars an important resource. If the field has sought over the last years to expand its ambit by including neglected figures and subject matters, Savage demonstrates that this project requires looking beyond traditional sources.

The varied forums and formats through which Tate worked out her international political thought are connected to the ways in which she sits awkwardly within a canon of Black international thought. Tate offers a model for an alternative Black internationalism that is not routed through the familiar African diasporic geographies of the Caribbean (e.g. Rayford Logan) or Africa (e.g. Ralph Bunche and many others). To be sure, Tate has a deep interest in Africa, but for various reasons, much of which had to do with resources and funding, her most extensive work on Africa does not come until later in her career. If racial solidarity has been understood as a central catalyst and aspiration of Black internationalist thought, Tate is less motivated by its call. Instead, she is preoccupied with giving an account of the United States’ rise to global hegemony. As a result, she is an early chronicler of the rise of an Anglo-American union and resituates that emerging alliance in the Pacific. Other than with Japan, there are few engagements with the Pacific by Black thinkers of this period. This region has only recently gained greater prominence in studies of Black internationalism thanks to work by Quito Swan (2022) and others.

An analysis of race does enter Tate’s work on the Pacific. Her singular contribution here is to link the settlement and eventual annexation of Hawaii to the dynamics of slavery and emancipation in the continental United States. But these preoccupations do not stem from what Tate describes in relation to Richard Wright as a “deeply imbedded race consciousness.” Savage (2023: 153) draws on Tate’s critical distance from race consciousness to distinguish between the “anti-racist geopolitics” that Tate advanced and a recourse to “politicized racial identity,” which she largely eschewed. The former was grounded in an analytic that centered racial and imperial hierarchies and advanced a commitment to international equality, but did not base this vision on the prospects of global solidarity predicated on racial identification. Emphasizing the formation of international power struggles and inter-imperial rivalries, Tate was critical of the dream of a “Union of Color” advanced by figures like Du Bois (2022: 150–154) and Wright. Here Tate resembles a small “r” realist who recognizes the fault lines and roadblocks to coalition building and to challenging institutionalized power.

Such an orientation leads Tate, for instance, to be more circumspect about the Bandung Conference and the idea of Afro-Asian solidarity, a view that Savage notes Tate shared with Ethel Payne, an African American journalist. The marginalization of these women’s voices is indicative of the marginalization of Black women in international thought. But we have reason to read this as a double marginalization grounded in the gendered politics of the field, but also one that stems from the ways their ideas disrupted the romances of racial/colonial solidarity.

In addressing this marginalization Savage’s Merze Tate corrects the silences and exclusions in histories of Black international political thought, but also outlines a new research agenda, by reimagining the methods, the genres and the substantive preoccupations of the field.

Review by Adriane Lentz-Smith

In her rich and layered biography of the diplomatic historian Merze Tate, Barbara Savage gives us a portrait of a women of good friends, great ambition, and even greater accomplishment. Throughout a life lived in the midst of historic events . . . Actually, the passive voice is inadequate here. To rephrase: throughout a life in which she continually marched toward eventfulness, Savage (2023) writes, Tate always “persisted in doing what professors do—she taught, she researched, and she wrote—and she spent time enjoying her life with her friends” (p. 179). One of the striking things about Merze Tate is how abundantly she did all these things, even as she traveled the world with a commitment and curiosity that made Wendell Willkie’s 1942 One World tour look like a day trip to Epcot (Lewis, 2018; Zipp, 2020).

Like David Levering Lewis who gave us, in W. E. B. Du Bois, a Biography of a Race, Savage gives us, in Tate, a Geography of a World. As Tate spanned disciplines, borders, and epochs, I could take several paths to explore where the book leads us. Other contributors to this roundtable will start rich conversations about her scholarship, specifically, so I will discuss other matters that emerge from her biography. I will start with Victor Daly, who I know from recent work on World War I, and who appears in Chad Williams’s (2010) Torchbearers of Democracy primarily as a veteran officer of the 367th Infantry and author of the lynching narrative/novel, Not Only War. Daly enters the Tate biography as a fellow Washingtonian and bridge enthusiast. Indeed, he was the president of the all-Black American Bridge Association (ABA) and a force—with Tate—for desegregating the national tournament of the segregated American Contract Bridge League (ACBL).

Bridge was not poker, but it nonetheless had stakes. Tate and Daly played their ACBL tournament game in 1956 amid broader desegregation struggles—the ongoing Montgomery Bus Boycott and coalescing student sit-in movement, for example. With the South poised for the next phase of the civil rights movement, their game set what the New York Times called “a first, though not necessarily acknowledged, precedent” (Morehead, 1956: xii). Tate, Daly, and other Black bridge players did not just stop with symbolic changes: the ABA used games and tournaments to raise funds for student protesters in the South. Their efforts and experiences remind us that Black sociability could serve political ends. In the era of Cold War civil rights, anything could be—and often was—mobilized in service to the struggle.

Savage’s focus on bridge highlights something I immensely appreciate about this biography: at no point does Savage present enjoying one’s life as secondary to political struggle. Living, leisure, and pleasure in its myriad forms, all formed part of the marrow of Black vitality. Playing bridge made Merze Tate happy. It scored her kisses in an early, flirtatious game; served as a “second language” and entry point of connection when she traveled to foreign countries; and formed and strengthened community around her when she laid her hat in new cities and had to make them home. There’s a politics to making community: as Tate herself was quick to point out in her work and commentary, it takes sustained effort to create a collective, never mind a shared sensibility. But as Paula Austin (2022) suggests in her recent photo-essay on Black women and golf, “recreation practices and leisure culture are serious aspects of Black interior life (p. 368)” and, in the case of bridge, of outward connection. Bridge built networks, and those networks served ends political, professional, and personal.

If Black recreation and sociability offers one way to think about key pieces in Tate’s mosaic, then Tate’s uncategorizability offers another. Aspects of Tate are recognizable in other prominent figures, but the totality of her seems sui generis. Savage writes about her engagement with roving Black writers of the decolonization era such as journalist and future USIA chief Carl Rowan, or novelist Richard Wright, but Tate is more fluid and perspicacious than either of them; despite the clarity of her ideas about anti-racist geopolitics, she shared neither Rowan’s personal attachment to US grand strategy nor Wright’s exiled blues (Lentz-Smith, 2021). She spent her career at Howard University alongside fellow diplomatic historian and colleague (and antagonist) Rayford Logan. However, she is less bilious than Logan and more adaptable.

In her restlessness and independence, Tate seems more akin to someone like Kathryn Johnson, one of the three Black women who go abroad with the YMCA before the armistice in World War I. Like Tate’s, Kathryn Johnson’s story of herself is contained in Radcliffe’s Schlesinger Library. Like Tate, she was a single woman who defended and refined her own notions of respectability. Like Tate, she had trained as a teacher, and like Tate, she yearned to reach horizons beyond the confines of the classroom. The two share a powerful, perhaps overwhelming, determination—the kind that might mow down obstacles as it propelled them into the world—and a certainty that their thoughts mattered. But Tate was more of an intellectual than Johnson. She was a trained academic with a daunting pedigree and an even more daunting number of publications. Where Johnson struggled under the financial stresses that dogged many unmarried Black women during Depression and War, Tate played the stock market like an undercover boss. She may have looked like a lot of folks on the surface, but Tate was not a type.

Savage’s biography ends with Tate doing her own biographical work. She captures through Schlesinger’s Black Women Oral History Project the complex lives Black women had created for themselves in a century of Jim Crow and segregation. The story of Merze Tate’s century-spanning global odyssey is the story of Tate creating a complex life to match, to enable, her rich and rigorous scholarship, discussed in detail by other contributors to this review. I read this book continually struck by how much I learned about my own fields of African American history and the history of the United States and the World, how often Merze Tate had started with the insights that I have worked so hard to reach.

But most of all, this book and its way of talking about working, living, thinking, and doing reminded me that I trained to be an historian by learning to look through the analytical lenses of Black women’s history. For that training, and this book, I am grateful.

Review by Tamson Pietsch

Barbara Savage’s valuable book finally brings the life and work of Merze Tate to a broader audience. I am particularly interested in the light it sheds on questions of scholarly mobility, and also Tate’s work in the Pacific. “Her travel informed her work and vice versa,” writes Savage (2023: 15) of Tate and in many respects this sums up Savage’s whole approach in this volume. Hers is not a book that sees Tate as a brain on a stick, but rather a book about the way intellectual work is produced in the context of scholars’ social, economic, and institutional lives, as several of the other reviews highlight.

Savage argues from the outset that Tate followed her “desire lines”: the alternative routes that circumvent more deliberately constructed or official paths. The classic illustration of a “desire line” is the path made by steps of countless people taking a short cut across a lawn, rather than walking the slightly longer route on the footpath. Desire lines, then, are the places paths should go. They are the routes made by practice; the paths created by people walking where they are told not to walk.

This struck me as especially relevant to Savage’s description of the places Tate visited on her first trip to England. The sites she maps are the classic places of American pilgrimage in the 1930s: Oxford, and Stratford, Shakespeare’s home and the cottage where his wife Anne Hathaway grew up (Savage, 2023: 71). They are places countless other Americans—mostly white, but also Black—visited in this period. Paris is also one of these places, and we get an intriguing glimpse of Tate’s sojourn there. “While lingering intentionally at the American Express offices on July 1,” Savage (2023) writes, “Tate met a large group of other ‘colored Americans’ including Sadie Warren, the owner of the Amsterdam News, Augusta Savage, the sculptor, and several other young women” (p. 65). This image offers a glimpse onto a whole world of interwar international sociability. Tate is here seeking out the American Express office—that embassy of US capital abroad—in order to bump into her fellow countrymen and women. The people she meets there are not only white Americans, but also African American women not unlike herself.

The image of Tate at the American Express office highlights the double infrastructure that Savage’s book analyses so clearly. On the one hand, it shows Tate’s reliance on the networks of the American imperial state, and alongside it the networks laid by European empires. On the other hand, the episode illustrates the global networks of African Americans who, from Washington to Paris to India, helped Tate navigate her time abroad. For historical IR, the African American infrastructures of sociability that enable global mobility in this period, and their complicated entanglement with the infrastructures of empire, may offer new scholarly perspectives.

The image of Tate at the American Express office also raises questions about the role that legacies of empire played in her mobility and the extent to which she was conscious of them. Tate was perceptive on the persistence of empire, especially in her analyses of the British “Commonwealth of Nations” and the mandates as a “cloak for imperialism” (Savage, 2023: 290). She was astute when it came to analyzing the encroachment of US empire in Hawaii long before the Spanish-American war of 1898/99. Later in her scholarly career, of course, Tate was also attentive to the role that US experts played in the exploitative economic relations with Africa. However, it is not clear how conscious Tate was of her own entanglement and even reliance on the legacies of empire, and the extent to which it did or did not shape her analyses of IR. Savage’s book speaks explicitly about Rhodesia and Tate’s blindness to her own compromises. Yet during her travels in Ceylon, Burma, and so many other locations, advance news of Tate’s visits would shape the world she met and smooth her way with invitations, lunches, and dinners. These warm welcomes relied on the infrastructures of colonization, one of which was the existence of English-speaking elites and audiences. In Thailand “Tate attributed the vibrancy of [the country] and its people to the fact that it had not suffered the foreign subjugation or colonization that India and other countries had,” but Bangkok in this period was a place saturated with US expertise. It was not at all surprising to me to learn that, on arriving in the country, “an old friend whom she had studied with at Radcliffe, Ambhorn Japhani Meesook, instantly recognized [her]. Meesook had recently left her position in the Thai Ministry of Education to work with the new Fulbright program” (Savage, 2023: 188).

I am also beguiled by Tate’s analyses of Australia and New Zealand, and particularly her analysis of settler colonialism. Savage (2023) argues that “Tate detailed the role of race and the work of settler colonists not only in Hawaii but in Oceania more broadly, including Papua New Guinea, Fiji, Australia and New Zealand” (p. 20). Yet Savage (2023) also writes that

Tate was from the tough, hardworking people who cut pine trees to build log cabins, frame homes, churches, and schools. They cleared the land they claimed in hopes of making tillable soil in a place with a short growing season that limited the options for good farming. (p. 31)

Tate’s family were also settlers, and this was clearly part of her identity—she “usually” attended the Old Settler’s reunions in Michigan (Savage, 2023: 213–214). Savage (2023) argues that even as Tate acknowledged her family’s legacy, she “also seemed to deflect the responsibility for that on those white settlers who came first, and not on her ancestors who arrived later” (p. 53). As land is such a key category of analysis now for those interested in settler colonialism, it would be intriguing to know how Tate understood the notion in the 1950s and 60s. Does Tate have a concept of land and its expropriation? Does it form part of her analysis of race and colonization? What is in the manuscript Tate wrote on Australia and New Zealand, and has there been an effort to posthumously publish it?

These are just some of the questions that emerge from Savage’s immensely stimulating biography. The Merze Tate that emerges is a person embedded in and enabled by infrastructures and contexts that have too often been absent from historical analysis of IR. In Savage’s telling, Tate’s thinking grew out of her experiences of these worlds. This vision of Tate is an important contribution to rethinking the history of ideas about IR and opens rich seams for future scholars.

Review by Chad Williams

I want to congratulate Barbara Savage for writing such a wonderful book which brings Merze Tate to life in many illuminating ways. Every page I learned something new, about Tate, her work, her ideas, and the times she lived in. But I was particularly drawn to Savage’s discussion of Tate’s interrogation of the two World Wars. This is informed by recent work on W. E. B. Du Bois and his own interrogation of the history and legacy of the First World War (Williams, 2023).

On May 22, 1942, Tate wrote to Du Bois, asking him to review her soon to be published book The Disarmament Illusion. In her letter, the Radcliffe College alum noted their shared doctoral pedigree and Du Bois’s dissertation turned book, The Suppression of the African Slave Trade, as the first inclusion in the Harvard Historical Series. “I shall be very pleased if you decide to review my book,” Tate (1942a) politely requested. Du Bois (1942) responded six days later, writing, “I should be very glad to review your forthcoming book for any periodical you might like,” suggesting the American Historical Review as a possibility.

Du Bois’s review did not appear in the American Historical Review, but in the 1943 second quarter issue of Phylon, the journal he established at Atlanta University. The review can perhaps best be described as prickly. It carried the snarky title “Scholarly Delusion.” While Du Bois opened with praise of Tate’s book as “one of the best examples of thorough painstaking study of historical documents,” he then described it as “an extraordinary case of logical contradiction.” He critiqued her not going further in explaining why political will for peace did not exist and could not garner sufficient support. The political and the economic, as Tate herself acknowledged, went hand in hand, and the driving force of the economic competition that hindered any hopes for disarmament, Du Bois reminded readers, was imperialism. “It was the fact that the income of the leading nations depends upon their ownership of colonies, their exploitation of colonial labor and their monopoly of the raw produce of colonies,” he wrote (Du Bois, 1943a).

One can read in Du Bois’s review, written in the midst of the devastation of World War II, the pent-up frustration of his analyses and warning calls, dating back to his landmark 1915 article “The African Roots of War,” going unheeded (Du Bois, 1915). There is perhaps even regret that the book he had hoped to publish on the World War remained unfinished and would never see the light of day (Williams, 2023).

But it is fair to ask, why was a more explicit anti-colonial framework missing from The Disarmament Illusion? Tate was a prodigious and well-read scholar. It is safe to assume that she was indeed familiar with Du Bois’s writings on the World War. But, as Savage movingly chronicles, Tate endured an arduous journey in making her way to Harvard as a Black woman in the all-white field of IR, as discussed by Lucian Ashworth earlier. A radical economic analysis and critique of the Western imperialist system would have surely been deemed unacceptable for completion of the PhD considering the professors whom she had to gain approval from. Du Bois (1943a) said as much in his review, describing the book as, in his words, “characteristic of the Harvard school of social science.”

Du Bois and Tate would soon cross paths in the pages of the Journal of Negro Education’s summer 1943 issue. Tate’s Howard colleague Charles Thompson, the journal’s editor, convened a Who’s Who of Black scholars and activists for a special issue on “The American Negro in World War I and World War II.” W. E. B. Du Bois (1943b) contributed an article on “The Negro Soldier in Service Abroad during the First World War,” extracted from his never published book on the Black experience in the war.

Tate’s (1943) article, entitled, “The War Aims of World War I and World War II and their Relation to the Darker Peoples of the World,” was based on a talk she delivered at Morgan State. It is absolutely fire, strikingly different in both tone and substance from her just published book. It reveals Tate as a bold, original global thinker with a deep intellectual and political investment in the future of people of African descent throughout the diaspora and their intertwined fate with other people of color.

While World War I had been ostensibly fought for democracy and self-determination, the final outcome resulted in further entrenchment of the colonial order. However, Tate also argues, pulling from Oswald Spengler (1934), that for the darker races, the war had removed the veneer of white superiority and sparked a crisis of legitimacy in Western civilization. She carried this forward in her analysis of World War II, which, she declared, “is not fought for the Four Freedoms everywhere. It is a militarist and imperialist struggle for freedom and power—power for some at the expense of others.” Tate exhibits a mastery of African history and how European colonialism and imperial exploitation had impacted every corner of the continent, its people, and their relation to the current war. “To thinking Africans,” she writes, “no consistent democracy and no stable and fruitful peace can be realized so long as imperialism—so long as rivalry over political and economic spheres of influence—continues.”

Tate also goes beyond Africa to examine the implications of the war on Asia, specifically discussing India, Burma, and China. She then returns to the United States, which, in her words, practiced Nazism “long before Adolf Hitler celebrated his first birthday” and discusses the “private, intra-American war” that stood as the most important reason for African Americans to fight. Tate concludes that, “In the coming global order there must be freedom for all of freedom for none.” Her radicalism in fact surpasses that of Du Bois (1945) who, at the time, still held out hope that the liberal democratic international order could be redeemed and offer a pathway to self-determination for the darker races. Tate, dismissing the platitudes of “trusteeships” and “mandates,” saw the system as fundamentally flawed, with “long years of imperialism” depriving the West of vision and credibility. “Will the white man and the colored man now find a basis for cooperation as equals?” she asked. The answer to this question, Tate (1943) believed, “will determine whether this war will result in a just and durable peace or in only a truce in preparation for a race war”.

As Savage notes, the article is Tate’s first published articulation of what she describes as her anti-racist geopolitics. At first glance, Tate’s stinging critique of the West, shaming of the existing global diplomatic order, and striking anti-imperialist radicalism seems to come out of nowhere. But Professor Savage’s meticulous reconstruction of Tate’s family history and educational experiences allows us to understand how these seeds had been planted and quietly cultivated. Tate’s first public address, at 16 years old, was on “The Negro in the World War.” She later acquired firsthand knowledge about the relationship between race and empire while studying at Oxford, traveling through Europe as the continent lurched toward war and, especially, visiting Geneva in the summer of 1935 to witness an impotent League of Nations do nothing to stop Italy’s aggression and eventual invasion of Ethiopia. The publication of her book and the security of a position at Howard University allowed her to shed some of the restraint placed upon her as a young Black woman scholar. It is also interesting to think about how her interactions and correspondence with Black servicemen shaped her critical awareness of the relationship between race and war, and the incongruities of the democratic ideals of the war and realities facing African Americans, certainly, but the darker races of the world more broadly.

What Savage makes clear is that Tate occupies a rightful place as one of the most important Black radical scholars on war, peace, colonialism, and global struggles for self-determination among peoples of color, certainly next to W. E. B. Du Bois, but arguably even above him based on her singularly unique journey, stunning intellectual breadth, and moral commitments. This acknowledgment is long overdue.

Author’s response: Barbara D. Savage

My work on Merze Tate has taken me to faraway places both intellectually and literally. Her range and reach stretched me beyond my own field of African American history and required me to rely on the generosity of scholars across disciplines, regions of study, and places of residence. There is no better illustration of that than this roundtable. It is rare to see academics as varied as these engaged in conversation that spans history, social and political sciences, IR, and geopolitics.

Yet Tate’s multi-disciplinarity, her bold interpretative moves, her global travels, and her long 20th-century life provide us with much to discuss and critique. Influenced both by her inter-war Anglo-American training and her lived experiences as a black woman scholar, Tate’s large body of work demands this rich complexity of responses. I remain deeply grateful for the engagement by these scholars.

Adom Getachew astutely describes my approach as emphasizing the broad intellectual context which shaped Tate. The reminder of Mitchell’s work is apt although it was not front of mind as I struggled to capture that world of civic, educational, and social institutions. A black reading public welcomed Tate’s work, made easier through her deployment of the review essay as a key site for developing and showcasing her ideas on a vast range of topics and books. My decision to privilege them on equal ground with her books came frankly because there were too many of them to ignore.

I also credit the work of the late scholar Cheryl Wall (2018), whose final book brought overdue attention to the importance of the essay in African American literary studies. Tate used the form promiscuously, as Getachew notes, including popular and scholarly work in diplomatic history and international affairs, as well as novels, especially those concerned with post-partition India. It is also in the freer form of the essay where her voice assumed its boldest audibility. There she charted not only the rise of American colonialism but laid out her own critique of the limitation of romances of global racial solidarity whether in Asia, the Pacific, Africa, or the United States.

In her intellectual and academic life, as Lucian Ashworth observes, Tate was often at the margins of power and access. Her career depended upon alliances with other women who also occupied those spaces. But her life also taught me that there is power in the margins, including a kind of creative intellectual freedom that released her to engage bold questions and interpretations. Tate went her own way even while relying on the tools and methods of the disciplines in which she was trained, expanded by her reliance on the more easily available essay form.

Ashworth is correct to point out Tate’s obsessive travels, a defining aspect of her life and a vexing one for me as her biographer as it made contextualization an even greater challenge. That said, few Americans of her generation ventured as widely as she did. Tate’s work informed her travel and vice versa, but her impulse to see the world for herself also drove her peripatetic nature.

It is true that all that travel raises the question of where “home” was for her. I asked myself the same question. Washington, D.C. was her chosen “homebase” for most of her adult life and the place where she was immersed in community, in friendship networks, in leisure, and in vocation. I came to understand not as Ashworth suggests that her own country was a place where she “could never truly feel at home,” but rather that for Tate “home” was something she carried deeply within herself.

That is what made her an excellent solo traveler. Her interior life and the life of her mind seemed a valued territory for her for all her life. And of course, for Tate and other African American women of her generation who lived in a country mired in Jim Crow, segregation, and discrimination, there is no denying the respite that international travel brought from the strictures and daily humiliations of that world.

Adriane Lentz-Smith reminds us that Black sociability was one way of responding to that world, a vitality she sees in Tate’s “living, leisure, pleasure.” Working in an archive that was cluttered with the evidence of those aspects of her life allowed me to narrate the lived experiences of a black person of Tate’s generation, class, race, gender, interests, and location. And neither she nor I felt any need to judge that as good or bad—it just was a part of the full life that biography can reveal. Tate’s self-determination extended to how she wanted her life to be remembered, a willfulness which I contested order to write my book about her life.

I often call this a pandemic book because I wrote the second half of it from 2020 to 2023. One odd consequence of that is that I was deprived of sharing aspects of it more broadly via talks and conferences; as a book in process, I presented far more of it in England, Ireland, and Germany than in the United States and in fora far removed from African American studies.

The foundational work by Lentz-Smith and Chad Williams on the World War I period helped me conclude how that era profoundly shaped Tate’s views of race and the world. A loss for me, however, was precisely the kind of insight that Williams offers here as he lays claim to a radicalism in Tate’s political thought I knew not how to name and especially in relation to Du Bois. His comments reassure me on that front even as Tate did not neatly fit into the usually prescribed political categories in other ways.

And he is right to note the evolution of Tate’s thought from what she expressed in her Oxford thesis on disarmament which was later updated to become her Harvard dissertation. The aspect of that work that was new and invigorating would come later in the wake of the deployment of nuclear weapons by the United States. For her, this was a powerful argument against what she saw as the military-industrial complex long before it was named as such. Her harshest critiques of US racism were reserved for the pages of journals intended for black readers, an audience she knew to be sympathetic to the full range of her ideas.

Tamson Pietsch returns us to Tate’s traveling ways, something she notes extended well beyond “the usual places of American pilgrimage.” It is worth remembering that it was only when traveling on a passport that Tate could experience certain privileges of being an American. Tate’s habit of checking into American Express offices to check for mail and to connect with other “colored American” travelers also tells us that they also knew that being abroad would not change their relationship with Americans who were not “colored.” Where Pietsch sees AMEX as part of the network of the American imperial expansion, for Tate it also brought comforts of “home.” It is sometimes difficult to express the complexities of the double consciousness that Du Bois described, but it is not shed at the shores of the United States.

Tate’s lesser attention to the growing international influence of US finance and expertise, which Pietsch questions, may result from her close encounter with the remnants of the infrastructure of British imperialism in India during her extensive travels there and the region in 1950–51. That was the stance from which she observed that Thailand felt different to her because it had not suffered the kind of colonization she associated with India or the aftermath of which she saw in Cambodia. Thailand’s preservation of its rich cultural and historical infrastructure is what prompted that observation from Tate, despite a growing foreign presence. Of course, when she turned to studying imperialism in Africa in the 1970s, by then her entire focus was on international corporate capital’s financing of railroads and deep-sea ports as a manifestation of neo-colonial re-occupation and control.

Settler colonialism as we have come to understand it manifests itself in myriad ways. It is fair to ask as Pietsch does what Tate made of her family’s status as settlers of lands in Michigan territory formerly occupied by Native Americans. That is a question sadly that can be asked of every American whether their ancestors arrived on the Mayflower or via the Middle Passage or Ellis Island. We all inhabit those lands day in and day out despite recent rituals of land acknowledgments which obviously do not include talk of return.

For Tate, the landowner status of her family distinguished them from the landless status of most African Americans as made most explicit in Southern sharecropping on lands formerly tilled by enslaved laborers. That was the distinction she was trying to draw, but American exceptionalist myths do not spare any, including those trained in and committed to anti-colonialism.

Finally, to conclude with Ashworth’s review, Tate’s international thought cannot be contained by the conceit of a Howard “School,” a concept imported from intellectual history, but which obscures far more than it illuminates. It neglects the fact that anti-colonialist ideas have long been at the core of African American political thought. As I said elsewhere, such an approach ignores the sustained presence of anti-racist and anti-imperialist critique among African Americans more widely—in and out of the academy, and in the larger black civic sphere mentioned by Getachew. But more than that, the imposition of this nomenclature highlights, ironically, how the power to discover and name can distort the intellectual history it lays claim to categorize (Savage, 2021).

The imagined “School” is a myth that works instead to advance predetermined arguments about racism in IR. Its presence there is not surprising because racism marked all the disciplines, including especially mine, history. Most importantly, as my work on Tate illustrates, Howard University and its extraordinary faculty deserve serious sustained study and not hasty, short-hand creations. If nothing else, I hope my work demonstrates the value of doing that and bringing wider attention to the significance of overlooked black scholars in the age of segregation in many fields in the humanities, the social sciences, and the natural sciences.

I also wrote this book with graduate and undergraduate students in mind. I am being told by those who have taught it that it works well in classrooms precisely because the complexity of Tate’s life and ideas remain relevant to so many fields, methodologies, and regions—as demonstrated by this forum as well. Among the courses for which it is useful are those in IR, diplomatic and intellectual history, African American, African and African diasporic studies, Asian and Pacific studies, women’s studies, as well as classes concerned with the links between biography and intellectual history, and travel and leisure studies.