Library of Congress Interview with Mr. Thomas L. Hughes Association for Diplomatic Studies and Training Foreign Affairs Oral History Project THOMAS L. HUGHES Interviewed by: Charles Stuart Kennedy Initial interview date: July 7, 1999 Copyright 2011 ADST Q: When and where were you born? HUGHES: I was born in December, 1925, and grew up in Mankato, a small town in southern Minnesota. Q: Can you tell me a little about your parents and your family? HUGHES: My grandfather Thomas Hughes was a successful lawyer, judge, and civic leader. He was also a prominent local historian. We lived with him in his house until his death in 1934 when I was eight. He wrote several well-regarded books—on the Welsh in Minnesota, on Blue Earth County history, and on Minnesota Indian themes. He was in fact the major frontier historian of Southern Minnesota. For instance, he interviewed Indian chiefs after they lost what we used to call the “Sioux Uprising” of 1862. So I grew up in a house full of his library books and local historical objects. Many years later I edited the second editions of two of his Indian books. Dr. Thomas Lowe, my other grandfather, was a well-known prairie physician in Pipestone, an even smaller town located in southwestern Minnesota. He also served as the town mayor, and in his last years he was elected to the state legislature in St. Paul. I spent Interview with Mr. Thomas L. Hughes http://www.loc.gov/item/mfdipbib001565 Library of Congress some memorable times with both grandfathers in my youth, and I suppose my interest in history, international affairs, and public service derives from both of them. My parents also played active roles in our small town community life. I had one sister, five years younger than I. Q: When you say a small town in Minnesota? HUGHES: Mankato was a then a town of some 15,000, located sixty miles south of the Twin Cities. Mankato meant “Blue Earth” in Sioux for the local blue clay deposits. Q: What was life like growing up in Mankato? HUGHES: I had all my early schooling there, through public high school. It was a privileged, middle-class, atmosphere. I was surrounded by encouraging parents, teachers, and friends. Even though these were the years of the Great Depression, my youth was more or less problem free—lots of good schooling, lots of devoted attention, and lots of opportunity. In the fourth grade my teacher said, “You're wasting your time taking an hour at lunch. Give it a half hour, come back here, and I'll teach you Norwegian for the rest of the lunch period.” Such attention is rare these days. In school in the eighth grade we all composed autobiographies. Mine touches all my then interests—family trips with my parents and sister to Canada and Mexico, school sports, youthful neighborhood clubs, foreign correspondence, stamp collecting, piano lessons, the family genealogy, and already the writing of small historical sketches. Q: How about at home - the dinner table conversation, that sort of thing? HUGHES: My forebears were very much interested in their own family connections who happened to include several luminaries from early in the century. Grandfather was a cousin of Charles Evans Hughes. Grandmother was related to Grover Cleveland and more distantly to Elihu Root and William Howard Taft. That meant that history and politics had a family setting. My Hughes grandparents were stalwart Republicans while my Lowe Interview with Mr. Thomas L. Hughes http://www.loc.gov/item/mfdipbib001565 Library of Congress grandparents were Democrats. So that spurred lively discussions and gave me some early lessons in diversity and relativism. Q: Was the grange movement established by the time you came along? HUGHES: The grange flourished in the previous century. By the time I was growing up, the plight of Minnesota farmers was a serious one and the Farm Bureau and the Farmers' Union were contesting for political strength. In the middle 1930s Minnesota's Farmer- Labor Party was in power and the flamboyant Floyd B. Olson was governor. By the time I graduated from high school in 1943, Hubert Humphrey had just arrived on the scene and was busy merging the Farmer-Labor party with the Democrats. By then, of course, we were in World War II. It had a major effect on politics. Minnesota had been one of the most isolationist of states with its heavy Scandinavian-German-Irish population. The war transformed state politics, with internationalist Republicans like Harold Stassen and Joseph Ball competing with internationalist Democrats like Hubert Humphrey and Orville Freeman. The Cowles newspapers also played a big role in the isolationist-to- internationalist conversion in Minnesota. In 1942 the issue of postwar world organization was of growing national interest. By then I was already deeply involved in high school debating circles, and world federal government was one of the national debate topics. This prepared me for an early interest in the Student Federalist movement. One thing led to another and, at age 17, I organized the second Student Federalist chapter in the nation. Mankato high school followed right after Scarsdale, New York, high school, where Harris Wofford, also then 17, started the movement. He became the first national president of SF (1943-44) and I became the second (1944-45). (Note: Wofford later was president of Bryn Mawr College and then US senator from Pennsylvania. We have been lifelong friends.) The consequent coast-to-coast travel, public appearances, contacts and networks gave me unusual national opportunities before I was twenty. In that sense I left Minnesota by Interview with Mr. Thomas L. Hughes http://www.loc.gov/item/mfdipbib001565 Library of Congress exposure and experience much earlier than I actually left it physically. For some reason even as a child in Mankato I had always been very much on public display. I played the piano when I was very young and frequently performed in public recitals. As a high school debater I traveled widely on weekends to debate tournaments all over the Midwest, and we won a lot of trophies including the state high school championship. I placed second in the national oratorical contest. Then at age 18 I became the national president of the Student Federalists, and that meant speaking tours all over the US and Canada, testifying at both national political conventions in 1944, broadcasting on national radio programs, and attending the United Nations founding conference in San Francisco in 1945. All of this gave me a big jump-start for a career. Q: Well who were the Student Federalists? What was their outlook? HUGHES: We started in 1943 as the high school offshoot of Clarence Streit's “Union Now” organization which worked for a postwar federal government of western democracies. At the time this was a proposition that was taken quite seriously by a good many prominent people, not only by students. Within a year or two, Student Federalist groups had sprung up at many high schools and colleges across the country. The movement eventually was a casualty of the Cold War, and by the late 1940s my own interest in federalism had also dwindled. The experience had been stimulating, however. It is hard now to recreate the atmosphere of those years. Students were idealistic, and many of the adult generation, feeling guilty in retrospect about their inactivity between the world wars, were supportive. Indeed we were almost mainstream at the time. Federalism, after all, was an American idea. Former isolationists and nationalists were able to make an easy transfer to internationalism partly because federalism was a kind of bridge. In 1944-45 everything seemed possible. In retrospect it is easy to dismiss the Student Federalists as hopelessly na#ve. But it was a different world then. The atom bomb and the Cold War were yet to come. Both of Interview with Mr. Thomas L. Hughes http://www.loc.gov/item/mfdipbib001565 Library of Congress those developments later helped splinter the federalist movement. But before all that, we offered a kind of preview of coming attractions. We debated whether democracy or universalism was the right approach to organizing the peace. The democracy side of that argument later moved into the Marshall Plan, Point Four, the European Union, and NATO. The Universalist side moved into the United Nations, the Peace Corps, the Alliance for Progress, and arms control. Those big ideas were already in tension in our early student organization. Student Federalists helped provide the groundwork culturally in this country for America's active international roles in the 1950s and 1960s. In 1944-5 we were on stage at a period of maximum interplay between American exceptionalism and international opportunity. Our stress on both internationalism and an institutional approach to world order foreshadowed much that was to follow, albeit along different projectories. Q: Well were you feeling any of the conflict with the homegrown Communists—you know, in colleges, appeals to an idealistic group are rather disciplined. HUGHES: When I was still at Carleton in 1946-47, the war had ended but the open conflict with the Russians had yet to emerge. This was the time of Churchill's “Iron Curtain” speech and I remember how divisive that was on the Carleton campus. I delivered two lectures at a Student Federalist conference in Chicago in 1946 on “Marxism and Federalism,” trying somehow to reconcile them. The lectures were printed in the Yale Political Journal the following year. (Note: These lectures have also been reprinted recently in a useful history of the Student Federalists. For this and other extensive treatment of my role in that organization see One Shining Moment by Gilbert Jonas.