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Interview with Henry Precht Library of Congress Interview with Henry Precht The Association for Diplomatic Studies and Training Foreign Affairs Oral History Project HENRY PRECHT Interviewed by: Charles Stuart Kennedy Initial interview date: March 8, 2000 Copyright 2001 ADST Q: Today is March 8, 2000. This is an interview with Henry Precht being done by the Association for Diplomatic Studies and Training and I am Charles Stuart Kennedy. Henry, could you tell me when and where you were born and a little about your parents? PRECHT: I was born June 15, 1932 in Savannah, Georgia. My father was a clerk in a local fertilizer factory and my mother was a former school teacher and secretary in a bank. Nobody in my family, except my mother for two years, had any college education. I went to Armstrong Junior College in Savannah and then to Emory University where I had a major in history. Q: Let's go back. What was the background of your mother? Was sha native Georgian? PRECHT: My mother's mother was a native Georgian. Her roots in this country go back, we think, to before Oglethorpe came to Savannah in 1733. Her family was Middleton from South Carolina. My grandfather was a Welshman who had come over with his parents to farm in Kansas and when that went bust and he got tired of school, he ran away and became an itinerant printer, eventually came to Savannah and worked in the print room of Interview with Henry Precht http://www.loc.gov/item/mfdipbib000947 Library of Congress the Savannah Morning News where my grandmother's father was the foreman. He married my grandmother and produced the family. Q: And on your father's side? PRECHT: My father's parents were German immigrants. My grandfather came over to escape Bismarck's draft and had various ups and downs. At one time he and some other Germans owned Santa Belle Island. They lost it. Another time they started a soft drink factory in Savannah. Had people preferred raspberry soda to Coca Cola, I wouldn't be sitting here today. Instead, the business failed. When my grandfather died, my father had to go to work to support his mother, as there was no money by that time. So, he never went to college. But, both my mother and father were deeply interested in education and made sure that the 38th Street School worked for us, as well as for the kids in the neighborhood. Q: Did you have brothers and sisters? PRECHT: I had one younger brother who became an engineer, buildinpower plants. Q: How did you become interested in international affairs? PRECHT: My father was interested in history and I had an excellent history teacher in high school. Of course, there was World War II which absorbed us all and we learned a lot about geography and world affairs at that time. The curriculum of Armstrong Junior College was the Great Books. We had plenty of discussion and little emphasis on traditional fact-filled studies. The classics opened up my mind to a lot of things that a standard English and history curriculum wouldn't have found. Q: How heavily did the War Between the States rest on you during thitime? PRECHT: Not very. The Civil War was virtually forgotten. My grandmother was born a few years after it and she had stories about it from her mother. But, our family was half Interview with Henry Precht http://www.loc.gov/item/mfdipbib000947 Library of Congress German and was removed from that history. Savannah was a city in which most all of the 100,000 of us were born there. Only with World War II did Yankees move in. Only then did I fully realize that there was a different world beyond our city limits. Q: I have to add that my grandfather was a major in the German regiment that came through the troubles in 1864-65 from Wisconsin. But, that German influence left rather quickly. What about the race situation from your point of view? PRECHT: We grew up in a neighborhood that was roughly one block from the white/ black line which was a jagged line running on the western side of Savannah. The people who lived beyond that line, the Negroes, we didn't know at all. We knew them when they worked for us as maids or came to us to sell shrimp and crab with baskets on their heads or pushing carts. Otherwise we didn't have any real contact with them. They rarely even walked down our street. They didn't dare walk across the little park where we played ball. It was an isolated community. My parents had the same attitudes everyone else did in the neighborhood. Today they would be called racist. I grew out of that, I think, perhaps because of the influence of Time magazine and a general radicalization of my political thinking that crept over me beginning in high school but mainly in college. Q: What about Roosevelt at that time? I think people were much moraware of the New Deal because of the depression. PRECHT: Roosevelt was enormously popular with the Crackers iGeorgia. My family weren't Crackers. Q: You might explain “Crackers.” PRECHT: A Cracker is rural Georgian. They controlled the state. It was pretty much a rural-based Democratic party machine-run state. My family and most of their friends and relatives, were a repressed minority of Republicans. My father had a “Win with Hoover” tag in back of his Model A until he sold it in 1947. I think most Georgians, who were having Interview with Henry Precht http://www.loc.gov/item/mfdipbib000947 Library of Congress a hard time during the depression, and had had a hard time before, were enthusiastic supporters of what Roosevelt was doing. They were not enthusiastic about Eleanor Roosevelt because she was what they would call a “nigger lover” and that was anathema to them. When Harry Truman integrated the armed services, it was the beginning of the end of Democratic control of the South. Q: What was the elementary school like that you went to? PRECHT: The 38th Street School was an excellent school. It was an old sandstone building with separate yards for girls and boys. The teachers were quite determined and tolerated no nonsense. My mother was president of the PTA [Parent-Teacher Association]. She raised money for a movie projector for the school which was a modern innovation at that time. She also got a federal lunch program started which meant free lunch for a lot of the kids. She found money from one project or another to buy shoes so some kids could come to school. We got well founded in the basics at 38th. I still read rather slowly but that was not the school's fault, probably my own deficiency. I can't say that we learned much about the world beyond the school, but we were firmly drilled in basic education. Q: Part of this time the war was on. PRECHT: Yes, I think I was in the fourth grade when World War Ibegan. Q: For a lot of us World War II was a great geography lesson. Yolearned where Guadalcanal was and Tobruk and Berlin and Moscow, etc. PRECHT: Even before that, I can remember when we would play war games we were Finns versus Russians. Because the Finns had neat white uniforms and fought on skis, they were our heroes. Q: Was there a library there? Interview with Henry Precht http://www.loc.gov/item/mfdipbib000947 Library of Congress PRECHT: There was a good public library, a Carnegie library. My father had a fair number of books and when I was in high school I wrote a paper on early Germanic tribes with lots of footnotes from the six volume set of [Edward] Gibbon's The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empirehe had. I wrote another paper based on encyclopedias on Indochina before Ho Chi Minh and company got started. There was no mention of anybody there being unhappy with their French masters. So, I had a slow introduction to the real world. That changed completely when I went to college. Q: Where did you go to high school? PRECHT: I went to Savannah High School which was the only white public high school. There was a Catholic high school for boys and another for girls and, I believe, one for African-Americans. When I was in junior high school a wealthy ex-Savannahian, who had made money in Philadelphia, gave $50,000 to the school system so that poor but bright kids could go through high school in three rather than four years and thereby get out and start earning money earlier. I was a member of Accelerated Group One, which compressed these four years into three allowing me to graduate a year earlier than otherwise I might have. Q: What were your favorite subjects? PRECHT: History and English. The English teacher was a friend of muncle so I did fairly well in that. Q: I keep coming back to what in those days was the heart of Dixie,was there a heavy Southern hand in history class? PRECHT: No, I can't remember much emphasis on the Civil War being taught although we had a fair dose of Georgia history starting with Oglethorpe, etc. By the time I was in high Interview with Henry Precht http://www.loc.gov/item/mfdipbib000947 Library of Congress school, of course, the Second World War was over and the Cold War was beginning.
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