Interview with Mr. Mark S. Pratt

Library of Congress Interview with Mr. Mark S. Pratt The Association for Diplomatic Studies and Training Foreign Affairs Oral History Project MARK S. PRATT Interviewed by: Charles Stuart Kennedy Initial interview date: October 21, 1999 Copyright 2008 ADST [Note: This interview was not edited by Mr. Pratt] Q: Today is the 1st of October, 1999. This is an interview with Mark S. Pratt. This is being done on behalf of the Association for Diplomatic Studies and Training, and I'm Charles Stuart Kennedy. Well, let's start at the beginning. Can you tell me when and where you were born and something about your family? PRATT: Yes, I was born January 29th, 1928 in Lynn, Massachusetts, but my family was resident in Salem, Massachusetts, and my father's family had been there for about 300 years. Q: So you were born in the Year of the Dragon. I was born on the 14th of February 1928. PRATT: Well, we're dragons then. We should be compatible. Q: Could you tell me something about your mother and father? PRATT: Yes, my father was from a rather old New England family, both his father and mother. My mother's family was originally from the Middle West, but both her father, whose family name was Schrumm, is from that little area in Virginia where this German deserter Interview with Mr. Mark S. Pratt http://www.loc.gov/item/mfdipbib001625 Library of Congress from George III's troops settled in the area of Scotch-Irish. And then my mother's mother came from farther south, the Carolinas, and they were both from the Middle West. And of course when they were born the Civil War was barely over, so it added to my father's side, which had one person who fought for the entire Civil War and another grandfather who had paid somebody else to go in his place while he made a great deal of money producing munitions and other things for the Union side. On my mother's side, one ran horses to the Confederacy, and the other side of the family had already left Virginia because of the opposition to slavery. So there was very much an awareness in our family, of course, of the importance of the Civil War. Q: Where did your parents meet? PRATT: They met in Salem. Lynn and Salem are, of course, contiguous. And my mother's father practiced medicine in Lynn, and my father's family was in various types of business in Salem. Q: What sort of education did your parents have? PRATT: My father graduated from Massachusetts Agricultural College—"Mass Aggie,” it was called—University of Massachusetts now. And he was sent there because his grandfather offered to pay for the education of all of his grandchildren, and some of them selected to go to Harvard and Harvard Medical School and he paid for that. But my father was very sensitive to the fact that he was getting it from his grandfather, so he went to the cheapest place there was, which was Mass Aggie. And that was what he had as his background, which then gave him . they made him a second lieutenant in the First World War and then subsequently got him to be the director of the Park Department in Salem. We can go on from there later, because later on, when he became director of the Salem Hospital, he got a master's degree in public health from Harvard. Q: Your mother? Interview with Mr. Mark S. Pratt http://www.loc.gov/item/mfdipbib001625 Library of Congress PRATT: My mother went to the University of Indiana because that's where her father had been. Her father had gotten his doctor's degree from the University of Indiana, and so she went back there, I guess out of filial feeling, but then got her final degree from Cornell, and she got it in modern languages, French and Spanish. She subsequently studied at Simmons, and she had herself worked for a time and then they got married. Q: So by the time you came along in 1928, what was your father doing? PRATT: My father was still the director of the Park Department. It was in 1931, I believe, that he moved to be director of the Salem Hospital. Q: Did you have other brothers or sisters? PRATT: Yes, I have two brothers and a sister, one older brother, one younger brother, and the youngest child is a sister. Q: Well, then, where did you go to elementary school, early schooling? PRATT: Early schooling was at the Bowditch School, named after Nathaniel Bowditch, the great navigator, and he was, of course, a Salem boy. And this is the same school that my father had gone to. In fact, some of the same teachers were still teaching there, so one had quite a sense of roots there in Salem. Q: Did the sea play a part? One always thinks of Salem and whaling and all that. PRATT: Very much so, because although none of my immediate family had been seafarers, nonetheless it was one of the strains there. One of my great-grandfathers, his wife's family were the Wards, and they of course had been sea captains, and one of them was Frederick Townsend Ward, who was in China as the precursor of the British “Chinese” Gordon as the head of the Ever Victorious Army during the Taip'ing Rebellion. But it meant Salem was very much there on the seacoast. We would go to Dirty Wharf. We would go Interview with Mr. Mark S. Pratt http://www.loc.gov/item/mfdipbib001625 Library of Congress aboard the ships, and we had our own little sailboat and so on, so that when I was growing up the sea, of course, was very, very much in our lives. After I was about eleven, I guess, when they moved from Salem to Marblehead, which, of course, is basically a very different type of society perhaps, but now of course very much just a suburb of Boston. Q: Then it was more sort of a yachting place, wasn't it? PRATT: It was a yachting place and very important for the summer people out on the Marblehead Neck and a very important yacht club, where many persons from Boston and elsewhere would have their yachts. So indeed it was very much a place for yachting and sailing, but then we had the old town, which were fisher people and drawn from the Channel Islands, where they had a very different accent and sort of a different speech from those of us from Salem, shall we say, just a mile or so away. Q: At the Bowditch school, did you find that there was any part of the sort of the educational curriculum that was beginning to particularly gain your interest—reading? PRATT: Well, the Orient, of course, was some place of considerable interest because of Salem's connection with China, and so China, indeed, was one part of this and also the fact that some of the members of my family had been there. In fact, we still had some there until 1923. Then also, of course, we had, as you can see, some of these things around here were from my grandmother, so on that side they had their gifts from people who came back from China, and so on. So I'd say that at that time, probably the China side of things was one of the extensions of general education that interested me the most. I think you know that the old East India Marine Hall, now called the Peabody Essex Museum in Salem was a place that my father used to take us to in order to have us get some sense of that sailing background and the Oriental connection of Salem. Interview with Mr. Mark S. Pratt http://www.loc.gov/item/mfdipbib001625 Library of Congress Q: At an early age were you starting to read about Asia? Did you find yourself sort of following news from China more than most other people? This was the time of, of course, the Japanese incursion into China and all that. PRATT: Yes, but I got a little more about Europe, when, say, in 1938 the storm clouds were more obviously striking there, because my grandfather, whose family had been here since the 18th century nonetheless was considered to be of Prussian-German background, somebody who could possibly have close connections with Europe, and at one point he'd been invited to go to the University of Berlin—I believe that was the university—to work on a special branch of medicine. This was before the First World War, but his wife said she didn't want to leave this country, so they didn't. But it meant that he retained a very, very great interest in world affairs and in Europe in particular. Q: How about sort of around the dining table in the evening. Were foreign affairs talked about much? PRATT: Not too much. Basically it would be on a Sunday when my grandfather was there, and my grandfather, as many doctors do, had a very pedagogical aptitude and interest, and so he would try to broaden our horizons—Asia as well, because he knew of the Asian side of my father's family—but the European side was one that he thought he could make a great contribution to, and did. Q: Where did you go to junior high, high school? PRATT: Well, in 1939, we moved to Marblehead.

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