William Henry Chamberlin (February 17, 1897 – September 12, 1969) was an American historian and journalist. He was the author of several books about the Cold War, communism, and foreign policy, including The Russian Revolution 1917-1921 (1935), which was written in Russia between 1922 and 1934 while he was the Moscow correspondent of The Christian Science Monitor. An opponent of communism from the early 1930s, Chamberlin predicted that intervention in World War II would help communism in Europe and in Asia, which led him to be a non-interventionist.
Biography
Early life and education Chamberlin was born in Brooklyn on February 17, 1897. He was an only child, the son of Ernest Chamberlin, a newspaperman of modest means. His ethnicity was an amalgam of English and Scottish, with lesser genealogical connection to Germany and France, with a paternal grandfather who had fought as a volunteer in the 81st Ohio Infantry Regiment of the Union Army in the American Civil War. Chamberlin attended Camden High School in Camden, New Jersey (a suburb of Philadelphia) for two years, a miserable period which he later recalled as a "heterogeneous mass of badly taught subjects" with "complete indiscipline among the students." He was a baseball fan during his boyhood years, regularly attending games of both the Philadelphia Phillies and Philadelphia Athletics, but found his chief source of diversion in books, including both the fiction of Mark Twain and heavier historical fare. He described his father, a regular Socialist voter, as an important left-wing influence on his political views. Chamberlin remained decidedly mild in his progressive tendencies, strongly supporting Theodore Roosevelt and his Bull Moose campaign in 1912 rather than the substantially more radical politics of Eugene V. Debs. Horace Traubel, a socialist and biographer of Walt Whitman, was a family friend. As a junior in high school, Chamberlin transferred to the Penn Charter School in Philadelphia, which he recalled in 1940 as being one of the two "most fortunate accidents in his life." This event "extricated me from an educational blind alley and opened the way for six years of congenial study along classical lines, accompanied by unsystematic but extensive outside reading," Chamberlin recalled. Chamberlin's attendance at Penn Charter, a Quaker-affiliated school, "led up naturally" to enrollment at Haverford College, another Quaker institution, located "in a pleasant suburban district of Philadelphia," he indicated. Chamberlin found the small liberal arts college with its ivy-clad dormatories and student body of 200 to be highly suited for his tastes, and he spent four happy years there, graduating in 1917.
Journalistic career Upon graduating, Chamberlin found himself well educated but with "uncommonly poor preparation for making a living" — well versed in Greek and Latin, German philosophy, and French and Russian literature, but with no readily marketable skills other than the ability to operate a typewriter and to construct sentences in coherent English. New York City, with its well-stocked libraries and rich cultural possibilities, "loomed up as a sort of Mecca of my hopes," Chamberlin later recalled. His mother, May McClintock Chamberlin, the daughter of a lawyer, hoped he would continue his education to pursue that career, but "law had never impressed my imagination," Chamberlin wrote, and so he, after a process of elimination, "drifted into newspaper work." He landed his first job in the summer of 1917, earning $15 a week as a reporter for the Philadelphia Public Ledger, but quickly found the job and its endless loop of police stations, war rallies, and banquets to be "extremely boring." From there he moved to the Philadelphia Press for a more interesting stint as the assistant editor of the paper's weekly magazine section.
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