Academics Ignore Obama Mentor

The latest thesis circulating in academia lends further credence to the observation that academics may only rival journalists in their tendency to miss the obvious, whether by accident or design.

Harvard historian, James T. Kloppenberg, for example, theorizes that the famous Harvard Law grad is a true intellectual guided more by the Founding Fathers than by ideological fads. “Those who heard Mr. Kloppenberg present his argument at a conference on intellectual history at the City University of New York’s Graduate Center responded with prolonged applause,” Patricia Cohen reported in The New York Times on October 27, 2010.

“The way he traced Obama’s intellectual influences was fascinating for us, given that Obama’s academic background seems so similar to ours,” Illinois State University historian Andrew Hartman told Cohen.

Yet and still, “There seemed to be skepticism regarding whether Obama’s intellectual background actually translated into policies that the mostly left-leaning audience could get behind,” Hartman said. “Several audience members, myself included, probably view Obama the president as a centrist like Clinton rather than a progressive intellectual as painted by Kloppenberg.”

“Conservatives who argue that Mr. Obama is a socialist or an anti-colonialist (as Dinesh D’Souza does in his book The Roots of Obama’s Rage) are far off the mark,” Kloppenberg asserts, according to Cohen.

“Adams and Jefferson were the only anti-colonialists whom Obama has been affected by,” Kloppenberg told the audience at CUNY. “He has a profound love of America.”

Kloppenberg is the author of the recently published Reading Obama: Dreams, Hopes and the American Political Tradition. In researching his book, Cohen claims that Kloppenberg “interviewed the president’s former professors and classmates, combed through his books, essays, and speeches, and even read every article published during the three years Mr. Obama was involved with the Harvard Law Review.”

If so, he may have missed one of the primary influences in Obama’s youth in Hawaii, the poet named Frank who the future president wrote about in Dreams From My Father. Accuracy in Media’s Cliff Kincaid and New Zealand blogger Trevor Loudon proved pretty definitively that this poetic mentor was radical writer Frank Marshall Davis.

Even the Obama camp has acknowledged that the identification was accurate. By all accounts, Obama’s white grandfather thought that the African-American scribe would be a good role model for Barack in the absence of his African father.

Although Grandpa’s own politics are still an open question, he should have checked with the local branch of the NAACP on Davis. “Soon after Frank Marshall Davis appeared in Hawaii, members of the local branch of the NAACP grew weary of him,” historian Paul Kengor writes in Dupes: How America’s Adversaries Have Manipulated Progressives for a Century. “Some NAACP members called him ‘Comrade Davis’ and were irritated at how he ‘sneaked’ into their meetings ‘with the avowed purpose of converting it into a front for the Stalinist line.’”

Kengor, a professor at Grove City College, drew on Davis’s FBI file, which Kincaid had requested, in his research. Professor Kengor also unearthed columns that Davis filed for the Honolulu Record.

“Russia continues to point to the fact that discrimination and segregation based on race does not exist there,” Davis wrote in one of them, while Stalin was still the man-in-charge of the USSR. It should be noted that while Stalin was in power, he was responsible for between 40 to 70 million deaths.

The former figure comes from the Black Book of Communism, first published in France in 1997. The latter, higher, figure comes from information made available from Soviet archives since the Black Book’s publication.

The extent of this genocide might have been unknown to the West during Stalin’s rule but the forced famine in the Ukraine and the Moscow show trials were fairly widely covered. Their coverage turned many, such as John Dewey, into critics of Stalin but Davis remained supportive.

Malcolm A. Kline is the Executive Director of Accuracy in Academia.

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