Frank Tannenbaum once remarked that each of us is like a mule moving across a plowed field leaving his mark for others to see and judge. The homely comparison appears particularly apt for one with a sense of attachment to the land and deep affection for its inhabitants, and one who during the course of a long and productive career left his mark on a variety of fields. A distinguished scholar-teacher of Latin American history and politics, he was also a specialist in such diverse fields as prison reform, labor, and race relations.
Austrian born, Tannenbaum came to the United States in 1905. In New York he became involved with the Industrial Workers of the World and in 1914 was convicted of disturbing the peace (although the offense was once described as that of questioning the omniscience of the government) by leading homeless and hungry men into fashionable churches. He spent some time in prison on Blackwells (now Welfare) Island. On the recommendation of his friend Thomas M. Osborne, the warden of Sing Sing, he entered Columbia College, from which he graduated Phi Beta Kappa in 1921. Six years later he earned his doctorate in economics from the Brookings Institution in Washington with a study of Mexican land reform.
In between and subsequently he traveled extensively, obtaining a first-hand knowledge of the regions he visited and the problems which beset them. The experiences gave direction and substance to his writings and enriched his teaching with a wealth of stories and personal experiences which gave to his students an incomparable means of understanding people, institutions, and the social issues which preoccupied them. After graduation from Columbia he traveled for three years in rural Mexico as a correspondent for Survey magazine. Previously he had driven across the United States, visiting and studying state penal institutions, and as a sergeant in the United States cavalry he had been stationed in the South where he became absorbed with the section’s traditions and the impact of slavery.
Between 1927 and 1930 he engaged in an economic and social survey of Puerto Rico for the Brookings Institution. In 1931 the government of Mexico invited him to undertake a survey of rural education, which was followed by two years of travel throughout Latin America on a Guggenheim Fellowship. Included was a trip down the Amazon River by dugout and canoe, starting on the Napo River in Ecuador.
His writings reflect his far-ranging interests. Not content with the simple chronicling of past events, Frank Tannenbaum evidenced a predilection for the analytical examination of social institutions and their historical evolution. His efforts were always stimulating and often provocative. And his ideas had repercussions both in the academic world and outside of it. A mover for prison reform, he wrote (1934) the report which resulted in the establishment of the Prison Industries Reorganization Administration. For years his text was the standard adoption for Criminology courses across the nation. He proposed the legislation which created the Farm Security Administration. Branch Rickey credited Tannenbaum’s Slave and Citizen, the Negro in the Americas with having influenced him to hire Jackie Robinson as the first Negro in organized baseball. And that same work is the point of departure for the current significant attention to the historical experience of the Negro in Latin America. His critical examination of the course of Mexican industrialism and its cost provoked first a polemical response and indignant defense, but together with Sanford Mosk’s volume it led to serious consideration of a more balanced pattern of development.
Tannenbaum’s teaching career was largely centered at Columbia University where he also made innovative contributions with his “Problems of the Western Hemisphere” Seminar and the program of University Seminars. After teaching briefly at Cornell and Yale, he joined the faculty at Columbia as a lecturer in 1935. Rising to Professor of Latin American History a decade later, he held that title until his retirement in 1961.
Graduate students, faculty, and visiting Latin American dignitaries attended his Thursday afternoon seminar to drink yerba mate and discuss the major problems of Latin America. Visiting writers, professors, and politicos came to regard the meeting place on the sixth floor of Fayerweather Hall as a place where they could feel at home in New York. At one memorable session twelve countries were represented, six of them by former presidents.
More than any other single individual Frank Tannenbaum was the moving force behind the establishment and development of the University Seminar Program at Columbia University. Begun in 1945 with five seminars, the program now includes fifty with 1,700 participants from Columbia, other colleges and universities, and nonacademic institutions. Tannenbaum aimed to bring the university into the practical world and the practical world into the university. Physicist I. I. Rabi described the program as “an attempt to make the concept of a community of scholars come alive amidst the distractions and centrifugal forces of a metropolitan and cosmopolitan university.” Seeking through the seminars both an interdisciplinary approach and the focusing of knowledge on some specific issue, Frank Tannenbaum as director of the University Seminars during the past ten years, in the words of Paul Goodman, “protected the seminar movement from interference,” while it “developed according to its own logic and in response to a modern cultural need.”
Margaret Mead, speaking of Tannenbaum’s interest in developing an interdisciplinary approach, observed that it is “expressed in the diversity of his chosen forms of involvement, for he has acted sometimes as historian-spectator (as in his many years of work in Mexico) ; sometimes as prophet (as in his early work on the labor movement) ; sometimes as reformer of old and bad institutions (as in his work with the National Commission on Law Observance and Law Enforcement) ; and sometimes as a builder of new institutions, a kind of innovative activity that ... has found its fullest expression in the University Seminars.”
While it is true that diversity is reflected in Frank Tannenbaum’s writings, no fewer than three of his books and many of his articles were the product of his long association with and continuing interest in Mexico and her revolution. He established a close relationship with many of the revolutionary leaders of the twenties and thirties. He knew and appreciated the vitality of the rural community and produced the earliest detailed examination of the agrarian revolution, an analytical study of the key facets of the revolution and its results. Subsequently he examined the replacement of agrarian by industrial revolution against the broad background of Mexican history. With justice he was viewed on both sides of the border as the dean of North American Mexicanists.
The Mexican government recognized his contributions with the award of the National Order of the Águila Azteca. From Bolivia he received the Orden del Cóndor de los Andes. In 1961 he was the first recipient of the Mark Van Doren Award for excellence in teaching and, two years later, the Bolton Prize of the Conference on Latin American History for his volume Ten Keys to Latin America.
During his last years, marred by a near fatal mugging attack, the loss of his wife, and prolonged illness, Frank Tannenbaum was still busily at work on multiple projects. Among these he planned two volumes of his principal essays: one, The Balance of Power in Society, appeared during the final year of his life; a second, consisting of selected writings on Latin American subjects, will require posthumous publication. It is interesting to note that the manuscript includes four unpublished papers in first draft: The Future of Democracy in Latin America; Reflections on the Mexican Student Revolt; The Spanish Tradition and the Search for National Identity; and The United States and Latin America. His many books and articles and several generations of students whom he trained are the rich legacy he leaves to us.
