Edmund A. Walsh

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Walsh with General Douglas MacArthur in Tokyo, 1948

Edmund Aloysius Walsh, SJ (October 10, 1885 – October 31, 1956)[1] was an American Jesuit Catholic priest from South Boston, Massachusetts. He was also an author, professor of geopolitics and founder of the Georgetown University School of Foreign Service, the first school for international affairs ever founded in the United States. He founded the school in 1919–six years before the U.S. Foreign Service itself even existed–and served as its first regent.[2]

In addition to his role as an assistant to Robert H. Jackson during the Nuremberg Trials, Walsh played a major role in raising public awareness of human rights abuses under Far Left and Far Right police states. In his later life, Walsh also became widely known as a public intellectual and vocal critic of Marxist-Leninist atheism, the Gulag, Soviet war crimes and other human rights abuses, as well as a rhetorician in favor of religious freedom and the rule of law.

So great was his reputation that Walsh was a confidant of Presidents and other senior members of America's traditional White Anglo-Saxon Protestant elite, at a time when both Catholics and Americans of White ethnic ancestry were still being denied social acceptance in the United States.

More than a decade after his death, Walsh became famous once again, when he was alleged by Roy Cohn to have been the man whose opinion Wisconsin Senator Joseph McCarthy had first sought before going public with allegations provided by U.S. counterintelligence that the Soviet KGB and the GRU had recruited moles throughout the U.S. Federal Government and propagandists throughout the entertainment industry.[3] Some historians have claimed that Walsh, rather than Senator McCarthy, deserves to be remembered as the greatest American Catholic anti-communist of the 20th-century.[citation needed]

Early life[edit]

Edmund Aloysius Walsh was born on October 10, 1885, as the last of six children. His father, John Walsh, was a second generation Irish-American and career officer in the Boston Police Department. His mother, Catherine (née Noonan) Walsh, had emigrated with her family from Ireland as a young girl.[4] He had a brother[2] and grew up in South Boston, Massachusetts, where his childhood friends included his future Jesuit colleague, Louis J. Gallagher.[5]

Walsh first attended public high school, before receiving a scholarship to attend Boston College High School in 1898. After his graduation in 1902, he began his Jesuit formation at seminaries in Frederick, Maryland,[6] and Poughkeepsie, New York. He was ordained to the priesthood in 1916.

He studied thereafter in London, Dublin, and Innsbruck. He received an AB, a Ph.D., and a D.Litt. from Georgetown University, as well as an LL.D. from the University of Delaware and an MA from Woodstock.[2]

Career[edit]

During that time, he taught literature at Georgetown University. On May 5, 1918, Walsh became dean of Georgetown's College of Arts & Sciences. During World War I he served special duties as assistant educational director to the "Students' Army Training Corps."[2]

1921 American Relief Administration poster saying "The Gift of the American People" in Russian

After the Armistice of November 11, 1918, Georgetown University established a School of Foreign Service and appointed Walsh to lead it.[2] The school, which was the first of its kind, was intended to advance international peace by training diplomats, businessmen, bankers, and merchants with an education focused on international relations.[7] University president John B. Creeden employed Walsh as the school's first Regent.[citation needed] Classes began in October 1919.[8] and the first class graduated in 1921.[9] After founding the school, Walsh continued to lead the school for several decades.[10] It was named for him in 1958, shortly after his death.[11]

In 1922, while studying political science, Walsh received appointment as Catholic representative to the American Relief Administration, also known as the "Hoover Mission", during the Russian famine of 1921. Walsh arrived in Moscow in March 1922 to serve the mission. In June 1922, however, Pope Pius XI also appointed Walsh as director general of the Papal Relief Mission, during which time he "conducted extensive negotiations with the Soviet leaders of that time on behalf of Catholic interests in Russia."[2]

In 1922, while director general of the Papal Famine Relief Mission to Russia, Archbishop Jan Cieplak and Walsh succeeded in securing the return of the Relics of St. Andrew Bobola, which had been confiscated from their shrine at Polotsk and placed in an anti-religious museum by the Soviet Government. The relics were then transported to the Church of the Gesù in Rome by Walsh's childhood friend and Assistant Director, Louis J. Gallagher, who later published biographies of both Walsh and St. Andrew Bobola.[12][13]

During his time in Russia, Walsh became militantly and vocally anti-Communist, in large part through his friendship and close collaboration in famine relief work with Archbishop Cieplak, Monsignor Konstanty Budkiewicz, and Exarch Leonid Feodorov and having been a horrified eye-witness to their 1923 show trial prosecution by Nikolai Krylenko for anti-Soviet agitation during the First Soviet anti-religious campaign.[2][14] To raise global awareness of anti-Catholicism in the Soviet Union, Walsh and his aides translated into English the trial transcripts they had recorded in shorthand and sent them abroad, where they were published by the New York Herald and La Civiltà Cattolica.[15]

In a 16 November 1923 letter to the British Foreign Office, Walsh described the recent joint GPU and Red Army nighttime raid upon the Moscow Byzantine Rite Dominican convent and illegal Catholic school led by Mother Catherine Abrikosova, followed in the early morning by the arrest of the mother prioress and the sisters. Walsh also described the simultaneous raids and mass arrests of the priests and laity of the Russian Greek Catholic Church throughout Moscow. A copy of Walsh's letter was acquired by the U.S. State Department and landed across the desk of U.S. Secretary of State Charles Evans Hughes, who was keeping a very close watch over religious persecution in the Soviet Union. Therefore, Walsh's letter very likely played a role in Hughes' decision to refuse to grant diplomatic recognition to the U.S.S.R.[16]

Following his return to the United States, Walsh commissioned a painting of Exarch Leonid Feodorov based on a photograph taken of the latter as a political prisoner at Solovki concentration camp. The painting hung in Walsh's office for the rest of his life and he always spoke of the first Exarch of the Russian Greek Catholic Church with a deep sense of reverence.

His experiences during the Soviet anti-religious campaign represented a turning point in his life and Walsh continued to vigorously promote anti-Communism throughout the rest of his life and career.[17]

During the Cristero War, Walsh worked as a diplomat on behalf of the Vatican to resolve the persecution of the Catholic Church in Mexico by the similarly Far Left single party state that Plutarco Elías Calles had imposed upon the Mexican Government. Walsh also negotiated with the Kingdom of Iraq to establish a Baghdad College, a Jesuit-run Catholic High School in Baghdad in 1931.[citation needed]

In October 1941, Walsh publicly criticized U.S. President Franklin Delano Roosevelt for claiming that the Soviet Government was following it's Constitution's guarantees against religious persecution.[2]

After the Allies' victory in World War II, Walsh served as Consultant to the U.S. Chief of Counsel Robert H. Jackson at the Nuremberg Trials. Walsh particularly worked in helping Jackson gather evidence of Nazi religious persecution of German, Austrian, and Polish Christians.[18] One of his duties was to interrogate the German General Karl Haushofer to determine whether he should be prosecuted for complicity in Nazi war crimes. Haushofer's theory of Geopolitik was suspected to have helped justify the Holocaust. Walsh ultimately reported to Jackson that Haushofer was both legally and morally guilty of war crimes. Citing, "the role of geopolitics in corrupting education into a preparation for war", Walsh considered Haushofer and his associates, "basically as guilty as the better-known war criminals."[19] In his later memoir of the Nuremberg Trials, Walsh further alleged that, "The tragedy of Karl Haushofer", was his participation in the, "nationalizing", of academic scholarship and of turning Geopolitik into a weapon supplying, "an allegedly scientific basis and justification for international brigandage."[20]

After Haushofer and his wife committed suicide in March 1946, Walsh visited their graves and wrote in his diary, "I could not help but think of the deep tragedy of this death by night, alone, in a lonely gulley, of the last of the geopoliticians! What an inscrutable destiny, that after 19 [years of] teaching and warning [the] U.S.A. about the teachings of Haushofer, I should today be kneeling over his suicide's body in one of the loneliest spots in Bavaria!"[21]

In Total Power: A Footnote to History, Walsh's 1948 account of his role in the Nuremberg Trials, Walsh accused the single party states in Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union of embodying the concept of, "power without law." Therefore, the prosecution of those responsible for Nazi war crimes raised a much deeper issue about the roots of totalitarianism in all forms, "What one really beheld in the prisoners' dock at Nuremberg was a logical devolution in the despiritualizing of modern culture and the ultimate expression of an unbalanced and perverted humanism."[22]

Death[edit]

Walsh died of a cerebral hemorrhage at the age of 71 on October 31, 1956, at Georgetown University Hospital.[2]

Legacy[edit]

The Edmund A. Walsh Building houses the Walsh School of Foreign Service.

In its obituary, the New York Times remembered Walsh as founder of the School of Foreign Service. The Times added:

Father Walsh was a long-time leader in the fight against world communism. By the spoken and written word, and with every force at his command, he had uncompromisingly opposed it since the day in 1923 when he returned from Moscow after heading the Paper Relief Mission to the Soviet Union for more than a year.[2]

President Dwight D. Eisenhower sent a letter to Georgetown University when Walsh died in 1956, which read in part:

The death of Father Walsh is a grievous loss to the Society in which he served so many years, to the educational and religious life of the United States and to the free people of the Western world. For four decades, he was a vigorous and inspiring champion of freedom for mankind and independence for nations... at every call to duty, all his energy of leadership and wisdom of counsel were devoted to the service of the United States.[citation needed]

After his death in 1956, a new academic building constructed to house the School of Foreign Service was named the Edmund A. Walsh Memorial Building in his memory.

Walsh's most enduring legacy is the school he founded, which has become an incubator of leadership in the United States and internationally. Graduates of the School have included U.S. President Bill Clinton, U.S. President Barack Obama's Chief of Staff Denis McDonough, U.S. President Donald Trump's Chief of Staff Mick Mulvaney and the leaders of the U.S. intelligence community (George Tenet), the American labor movement (AFL-CIO President Lane Kirkland), and the American Catholic Church (New York Cardinal Archbishop John Joseph O'Connor). Heads of state educated at the School have included King Abdullah of Jordan, King Felipe VI of Spain, and Gloria Macapagal Arroyo of the Philippines.[citation needed]

The school has been home to several prominent faculty members including the historians Carroll Quigley, and Jules Davids, the political scientist, and World War II hero Jan Karski, and the first woman Secretary of State Madeleine Albright. On May 29, 2012, both Karski (posthumously) and Albright received the Presidential Medal of Freedom from U.S. President Barack Obama.[citation needed]

Works[edit]

Walsh work's include The Fall of the Russian Empire: The story of the last of the Romanovs and the coming of the Bolsheviki. (1928).[23]

Books
  • History and nature of international relations (1922)[24]
  • Fall of the Russian Empire (1928)[23]
  • Why Pope Pius XI Asked Prayers for Russia on March 19, 1930 (1930)[25]
  • Last Stand: An Interpretation of the Soviet Five-Year Plan (1931)[26]
  • Ships and national safety; the role of a merchant marine in balanced economy (1934)
  • Wood carver of Tyrol (1935)
  • Total Power: A Footnote to History (1949)[27]
  • Total empire; the roots and progress of world communism (1951)

See also[edit]

References[edit]

Notes

  1. ^ Fr. Edmund Walsh Archived 2008-06-19 at the Wayback Machine
  2. ^ a b c d e f g h i j "Rev. E.A. Walsh of Georgetown U.; Founder of School of Foreign Service in 1919 Dies". New York Times. 1 November 1956. Retrieved 11 March 2023.
  3. ^ O'Neill, Paul R. and Paul K. Williams, "Georgetown University"
  4. ^ Patrick McNamara (2005), A Catholic Cold War: Edmund A. Walsh and the Politics of American Anti-Communism, Fordham University Press. Page 7.
  5. ^ Patrick McNamara (2005), A Catholic Cold War: Edmund A. Walsh and the Politics of American Anti-Communism, Fordham University Press. Page 8.
  6. ^ Patrick McNamara (2005), A Catholic Cold War: Edmund A. Walsh and the Politics of American Anti-Communism, Fordham University Press. Page 7.
  7. ^ https://www.library.georgetown.edu/exhibition/house-walsh-built-century-georgetowns-school-foreign-service The House That Walsh Built
  8. ^ https://www.library.georgetown.edu/exhibition/house-walsh-built-century-georgetowns-school-foreign-service The House That Walsh Built: Speeches from the Formal Commemoration of the Founding of the School of Foreign Service, November 25, 1919
  9. ^ https://www.library.georgetown.edu/exhibition/house-walsh-built-century-georgetowns-school-foreign-service The House That Walsh Built: Program from Dinner for the First Graduating Class, 1921
  10. ^ https://www.library.georgetown.edu/exhibition/house-walsh-built-century-georgetowns-school-foreign-service The House That Walsh Built: Fr. Frank L. Fadner, SFS Professor and Regent
  11. ^ McNamara, Patrick (2005). A Catholic Cold War: Edmund A. Walsh, S.J., and the Politics of American Anticommunism. New York: Fordham University Press. ISBN 9780823224593.
  12. ^ The Catholic Diplomat: Edmund A. Walsh, S.J.
  13. ^ The biographic note about Louis J. Gallagher in the back of: China in the Sixteenth Century: The Journals of Matteo Ricci (1942; reprint 1953) - an English translation, by Gallagher, of Matteo Ricci and Nicolas Trigault's De Christiana expeditione apud Sinas suscepta ab Societate Jesu
  14. ^ Patrick McNamara (2005), A Catholic Cold War: Edmund A. Walsh and the Politics of American Anti-Communism, Fordham University Press. Pages 23-61.
  15. ^ Paul Mailleux (2017), Blessed Leonid Feodorov: First Exarch of the Russian Catholic Church, Bridgebuilder between Rome and Moscow, Loreto Publications. Pages 207-207.
  16. ^ Boleslaw Szczesniak (1959), The Russian Revolution and Religion: A Collection of Documents Concerning the Suppression of Religion by the Communists, 1917-1925, University of Notre Dame Press. Pages 219-221.
  17. ^ "The House That Walsh Built: A Century of Georgetown's School of Foreign Service | Georgetown University Library".
  18. ^ Patrick McNamara (2005), A Catholic Cold War: Edmund A. Walsh and the Politics of American Anti-Communism, Fordham University Press. Pages 120-125.
  19. ^ Patrick McNamara (2005), A Catholic Cold War: Edmund A. Walsh and the Politics of American Anti-Communism, Fordham University Press. Pages 125-126.
  20. ^ Patrick McNamara (2005), A Catholic Cold War: Edmund A. Walsh and the Politics of American Anti-Communism, Fordham University Press. Pages 128.
  21. ^ Patrick McNamara (2005), A Catholic Cold War: Edmund A. Walsh and the Politics of American Anti-Communism, Fordham University Press. Pages 126.
  22. ^ Patrick McNamara (2005), A Catholic Cold War: Edmund A. Walsh and the Politics of American Anti-Communism, Fordham University Press. Pages 128.
  23. ^ a b Edmund A. Walsh (1928). Fall of the Russian Empire: The Story of the Last of the Romanovs and the Coming of the Bolsheviki. Little, Brown. Retrieved 11 March 2023.
  24. ^ Edmund A. Walsh (1922). History and nature of international relations. Macmillan. Retrieved 11 March 2023.
  25. ^ Edmund A. Walsh (1930). Why Pope Pius XI Asked Prayers for Russia on March 19, 1930: A Review of the Facts in the Case, Together with Proofs of the International Program of the Soviet Government. Catholic Near East Welfare Association. Retrieved 11 March 2023.
  26. ^ Edmund A. Walsh (1931). Last Stand: An Interpretation of the Soviet Five-Year Plan. Little, Brown. Retrieved 11 March 2023.
  27. ^ Edmund A. Walsh (1949). Total Power: A Footnote to History. Doubleday. Retrieved 11 March 2023.

Further reading[edit]

  • Footnotes to history: selected speeches and writing of Edmund A. Walsh, S.J., founder of the School of Foreign Service (1990), edited with commentary by Anna Watkins, introduced by Walter I. Giles
  • McNamara, Patrick. A Catholic Cold War: Edmund A. Walsh, S.J., and the Politics of American Anticommunism New York: Fordham University Press, 2005

External links[edit]

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