James Claude Thomson and James C. Thomson Jr. papers

James Claude Thomson (Claude) was born in New York State in 1889. He studied to be both a scientist and a pastor, graduating from Rutgers University (1912) and New Brunswick Theological Seminary (1916) with advanced degrees in chemistry and divinity. In 1917, Claude married Margaret Seabury Cook, who then became Margaret Seabury Thomson, a graduate of Smith College. They moved to Nanjing (Nanking), China with the Presbyterian Board of Foreign Missions, where Claude taught chemistry and served as dean of the University of Nanjing, and Margaret taught Bible, religion, and literature at Ginling College. Together, they had four children: Nancy Thomson (Waller), John Seabury Thomson, Sydney Thomson (Brown), and James C. Thomson Jr.

The Thomson family’s tenure in Nanjing was interrupted by both routine missionary furloughs in the United States and flight from Nanjing in times of unrest and violence. During the Nanjing Incident of 1927, while the family took refuge in Shanghai, Claude oversaw the university buildings. On furlough in 1932, he completed his PhD at Columbia University. In 1937, after Japanese occupation, Claude relayed materials from Shanghai to the International Refugee Committee in Nanjing while Margaret and the children moved from Hong Kong, to Shanghai, to the East Coast of the United States, where she enrolled at Union Theological Seminary.

Following the bombing of Pearl Harbor in 1941, unable to return to China, Claude began a Master of Public Health at Johns Hopkins University. At the end of World War II in 1946, Claude traveled through North Africa and India carrying luggage filled with equipment, vaccines, and vitamins to West China Union Medical College in Chengdu (Chengtu). In his last years in China, he worked on nutritional health with orphans and individuals with leprosy before returning to Nanjing and left briefly before Communist occupation in 1949.

Humanitarian work in the field of nutrition, which Claude described as “the development of strong and healthy people who can give their very best powers to the work and thought of the world,” animated the second half of Claude’s career. In the 1950s, he taught nutrition as a Fulbright professor in Tehran and served as a consultant for the World Health Organization, conducting nutritional surveys of Iran, Pakistan, and Turkey.

Returning to university work and East Asia, the Thomsons taught at the International Christian University in Tokyo, Japan, from 1952 to 1955, and Yonsei University Medical College in Seoul, Korea from 1957 to 1959.

James Claude Thomson died in Swarthmore, Pennsylvania in 1974. Two years later, Margaret Seabury Thomson died in South Kent, Connecticut.

James C. Thomson Jr. was born in 1931 in Princeton, New Jersey while the Thomson family was on furlough from missionary work in Nanjing. After spending his early childhood in China—divided between Nanjing and Hong Kong and Shanghai during times of refuge—Thomson attended the Lawrenceville School in New Jersey. In 1948, amidst the progression of Communist forces towards the Yangtze, he returned to China, briefly attending the University of Nanjing as the city filled with soldiers.

As an undergraduate at Yale College from 1949 to 1953, Thomson worked as editor in chief of the Yale Daily News. At Yale, he rubbed shoulders with prominent figures in American politics, culture, and academia, including Dean Acheson, Thornton Wilder, Chester Bowles, and fellow student journalist Gaddis Smith.

Following Yale graduation, Thomson studied at Clare College, Cambridge before beginning a doctorate at Harvard University under the mentorship of China historian John K. Fairbank in 1955. Thomson’s time at Harvard was punctuated by political work: during the 1956 presidential election, Thomson worked on the Adlai Stevenson campaign (for which he coined the epithet “brinkmanship” to describe John Foster Dulles’ Cold War diplomacy), and during the 1958 midterm elections, Thomson campaigned for Chester Bowles. In 1958, amidst a move from Harvard to the State Department, Thomson observed to his parents, “I am by training a historian, by practice a politician, and by instinct a journalist.”

When Chester Bowles became Under Secretary of State in 1961, Thomson followed him to the State Department. By 1964, he was in his own words, “MacGeorge Bundy’s Far East man,” serving on the National Security Council at the White House. Though Thomson entered Washington politics with a missional drive, he left in 1966 to return to Harvard, disillusioned by attempts to change the system from the inside. His 1968 essay published in The Atlantic, “How Could Vietnam Happen? An Autopsy,” provided a searing view into the inertia characterizing American actions in Vietnam. Testifying at the defense of his friend Jonathan Mirsky, an antiwar activist and historian of China, Thomson stated under oath, “if there is ever a war crimes trial, I fully expect to be a defendant.”

At Harvard Thomson and his wife, the writer and teacher Diana Butler Thomson, lived at Leverett House, taught undergraduate courses, and mentored students including Richard Blumenthal and Gregory Craig. In 1972, Thomson assumed the curatorship of the Nieman Foundation at Harvard, a fellowship program for journalists. When Richard Nixon went to China in 1972, Thomson provided commentary on ABC, for which he received an Emmy Award. From 1984 until his retirement in 1997, Thomson taught journalism, history, and international relations at Boston University. While at Harvard and Boston University, he published widely in American newspapers and magazines on American East Asian policy and Chinese history and wrote two books, When China Faced West and Sentimental Imperialists: The American Experience in East Asia.

James C. Thomson Jr. died in 2002, two years after his wife Diana Butler Thomson.