A New England Professor

Almost extinct in these troubled times is the breed of college professors who, against the somber stereotype of their profession, are, nevertheless, capable of achieving the rare combination of a sense of humor with a sober pursuit of knowledge. One man who has discovered the recipe for just such a blending is Earl Latham, Visiting Professor of Government from Amherst, who regularly presides at the gathering of Government 135 where he dispenses his collected does of cynicism on party politics in America.

Perhaps some of that cynicism developed when Latham was himself an undergraduate at Harvard almost thirty years ago. "The sweater still fits," he admits, "but I would hesitate to display the numerals. (Class of 1930). Coming from Brockton High School, "where everybody knew everybody," Latham entered the cold, impersonal atmosphere of Harvard during the lingering days of the Gold Coast era.

When, in 1935, as a teaching assistant in the Government department, Latham was offered a grant from the Social Science Research Council, he accepted it because it provided him with an opportunity to travel. "I was born in Massachusetts (New Bedford) and at the time I had never been as far west as the Connecticut River." As for the grant itself, he explains, "You know, it was one of those grants where you travel around the United States and sort of study the rotundity of the earth."

Latham returned to Harvard as an instructor and tutor, received his doctorate, and left in 1940 to accept a teaching position at the University of Minnesota.

After the war years, during which Latham had spent most of his time working for the Bureau of the Budget, he had to make what he has called the "key decision" of his life, of whether to remain in government service or to return to teaching. He decided on an academic career and returned to the University of Minnesota, but retained his interest in politics.

"I've always had political interests," he admits, though he had never expressed them actively when he was in college and his party affiliation at that time was Republican. But, he explains, "in 1933 there were stirring events in those times, and that was what made me a Democrat. I voted for Franklin Roosevelt five times; four times when he was alive and once after he was dead."

Latham managed to combine academic and public service careers by remaining as a consultant to various bureaus in the Executive branch of the government until 1953, "when the new administration took over the government and all faculty returned to their colleges." For a brief time during the Eisenhower-Taft fight within the Republican Party, he sided with the Eisenhower faction, but for the last seven or eight years he has considered himself politically as an "independent."

One year after he came to Amherst, Latham became chairman of the political science department there, a position he has held for the last ten years. "I got the feeling when I went to Amherst that a Caucasian gets when he goes to China, that everyone looks alike." Latham talks about what he calls the "class homogeneity" of Amherst. "We don't really have a 'beatnik' element, or the extreme contrast of the very rich and the very poor."

Latham, who is married and the father of two children, a boy at Swarthmore, and a girl in high school, has settled contentedly in Amherst. Although his teaching duties require him to remain in Cambridge during most of the week, he returns home each weekend, because, as he explains, after living on the banks of four rivers, the Charles, the Potomac, the Mississippi, and the Connecticut, he has concluded with characteristic Yankee provincialism that he likes living near the Connecticut River the best "because it divides the United States into two parts, the East and the West."