Jim - Before We Met
by Tom McDermottMost of us who worked in UNICEF in the 1980s and early 1990s know - or at least claim we know - a fair amount about Jim Grant. Less well known is his history before coming to UNICEF. What follows has been gleaned from a variety of books about Grant and his parents, and in particular about his famous father, Dr. John B. Grant. I am grateful to the authors of the various books on Jim Grant, in particular Maggie Black, Peter Adamson, and Adam Fifield. Even with those sources at hand, many gaps remain in what we know about Jim and his life before UNICEF. If you can help fill those gaps, I will be grateful.
Jim was born in May 1922 at the Peking Union Medical College Hospital. For the Chinese, it was the year of the Dog, who in mythology was the loyal partner of the invincible God Erlang who helps him capture monsters.
Indeed, Jim went on to capture monsters - at least the kind that threaten children.
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| Peking Union Medical College Hospital |
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| Staff Housing at the College |
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| John Grant - age 22 |
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| John Grant - age 68 |
To understand the son, perhaps it often helps to know a little about his family. Jim’s father was Dr. John Black Grant and his mother was Charlotte Hill Grant. John and Charlotte apparently met while John was studying at University of Michigan. She came from a small town in central Michigan. They married in 1917 and John brought Charlotte back to China in 1919. Their first child, Elizabeth (Betty), was born in 1920.
Like Jim, John was born (1890) and raised in China. Also like Jim, John Grant was a Canadian born to a missionary family. John had gone through his schooling in China but then came to the US for his university education. In doing so, John was following the path of his own father - Jim’s grandfather - Dr. John Skiffington Grant, who studied medicine at the University of Michigan and then traveled with his wife to China in 1889. They settled at a Baptist mission station in Ningbo, south of Shanghai. There John S. helped found a hospital. Over time the hospital grew to become today’s Ningbo Women’s Hospital. Little is recorded about John S. beyond the fact that he was so dedicated to his work that when beds were unavailable at the hospital, he would care for them in his home.
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| Ningbo Women’s Hospital in 1906 |
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| Children at the Ningbo Boarding School |
After earning his medical degree at the University of Michigan, John Grant went on to study public health and was in the first graduating class of the School of Public Health at Johns Hopkins. At Hopkins, one of his professors wrote of him, “He has ability, enthusiasm, industry, but a little too cock-sure in his judgments.”
Less has been written about Jim’s mother, Charlotte Hill Grant. She was an American born in Michigan in 1894. We know that she was an ardent collector of royal robes from the Qing dynasty. After her death Jim and his sister Betty in 1977 donated her collection of over 600 pieces of exquisite Qing fabrics to the US - China Institute at the University of Southern California. The exhibition book is available here and here.
John Grant returned to China in 1919 as part of a study on hookworm eradication financed by the newly-established Rockefeller Foundation. Two years later the Foundation appointed him as their representative in China. A year later Jim was born.
While John Grant was studying in Michigan a close friend had gone off to war as part of a Canadian contingent in World War I. His friend was killed in action. In memory of his friend, John Grant gave the middle name ‘Pineo’ to his son James. Thus Jim Grant became ‘James P. Grant’.
In Beijing John Grant was quickly labelled ‘a medical Bolshevik’ by launching quickly into talks with Chinese leaders about socialized medicine, including formation of comprehensive government-managed health care. The British / Canadian / American medical establishment of the time were very upset by such ideas, and expressed their concerns to the Rockefeller Foundation.
John Grant wrote in 1922, the same year Jim was born:
“The foreigner in China is everlastingly thinking in terms of foreigners as being the only worthwhile thing in China, and the foreigner in China has done practically nothing in being able to get the Chinese to adopt his methods. It would be better, he thought, to support indigenous health campaigns that are “60 percent efficient than Western ones that are 100 percent.”
At a time when few foreigners in China fraternized with Chinese, the Grant family had a steady stream of Chinese friends at home. Jim’s sister, Betty, later wrote, “They used to call my father “Da Beeza (big nose)”.
In 1925 John Grant opened a demonstration health station serving an urban population of 100,000 residents. The priority was slowing the spread of communicable disease through better reporting and tracking, but also through health education in factories and schools. They established a chlorination plant for water, did street inspections of sewers and garbage. Perhaps most importantly they established a midwifery training program for the 30 traditional midwives of the area. The death rate in the demonstration area soon dropped by nearly 20 percent.
Another important event in 1925 was the first visit to Beijing of Dr. Ludwik Rajchman. Like John Grant, Rajchman’s work was largely funded by the Rockefeller Foundation. Rajchman was on an official visit to Japan on behalf of the League of Nations in 1925. Learning of the visit, John Grant arranged for government authorities to invite Rajchman to visit China. It was the first of many visits for Rajchman and a life-long relationship with John Grant and with China. The visit also firmly established the interest of the League of Nations Health Organization (the forerunner of WHO) in medicine in China.
In 1929 Grant took up a second project, this time in Ding Xian, a rural area 200 miles from Beijing. There, one of Grant’s students, CC Chen, partnered with Jimmy Yen’s Mass Education Movement to develop a cadre of village health workers. By 1934 they had 80 village health workers. This program led Grant to start similar programs in 12 other provinces by 1936. Another of Grant’s students, Mariam Yang, went on to establish the National Midwifery School.
As Carl Taylor wrote, “Some of us consider him the father of primary health care. It was Grant who really developed the foundations for health systems of many developing countries.”
Through countless travels and meetings, whenever possible, John Grant kept his son, Jim, at his side, encouraging him to enter into the discussions. Adam Fiflield mentions how Jim’s father would give him articles on the New Deal and a book on the Bolshevik Revolution. He quotes Jim as saying, “He treated me as a boy well beyond his years. Wherever we went, whoever we were talking to..., I sat in and joined the conversation. That's where I got my first sense that the world could change and was really going through a very historic change, and that there was a role to participate in this.”
In the 1930s the world was changing quickly, and not just in the field of public health. Jim was 9 years old in 1931 when the Japanese seized Manchuria. By 1937 Japanese forces pushed into other areas of China and had forces on the north, eastern and southern edges of Beijing. Completing its control of Beijing, however, depended on capturing the Lugou Bridge, known popularly as ‘the Marco Polo Bridge’, and the Wanping Fortress 15 km southeast of the city and originally built in 1192. The main rail line connecting Beijing and its port of Tianjin passed nearby.
Here let me turn over to Adam Fifield in “A Mighty Purpose”.
“On the evening of July 7th, 1937, Grant and his fellow scouts went camping in the outskirts of Peking near the Marco Polo Bridge….The boys had set up their pup tents about a half-mile from the bridge. Around midnight, a series of loud Rumblings and explosions started the scouts awake. They got out of their tents and saw flashes of light blue mean on the horizon. It was, Graham said, ‘like a giant thunderstorm was hitting us but without any rain.’ As they fled in the dark...shells crashed down within a half mile of them.“
This skirmish between Japanese and Chinese forces is considered the first battle of the Second Sino- Japanese War and soon led to the massacre at Nanjing and Japan’s occupation of most of eastern China.
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| The Lugao (Marco Polo) Bridge today |
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| 1937 - Boy Scouts carry a chain of rice baskets for needy residents while Beijing was under blockade. |
Like most of the foreign population of Beijing, the Grant family knew that they needed to leave, and quickly. Jim’s sister was already in the US, studying at UC Berkeley. Jim, however, needed a visa. Although only 15, Jim was sent on the train to obtain a visa in Tianjin. When he got back to Beijing, he and his mother packed quickly and took the train back again to Tianjin and from there a ship to California.
“They boarded the last train out of Peking. As the train crossed the bridge south of the city, Grant glanced back at the only home he had ever known. He was watching when, moments after they had cleared the bridge it exploded and collapsed. It had been detonated.”
John Grant stayed on in Beijing for a short while, and then with Japanese occupation imminent, had no choice but to leave. He went on to India and there became the first head of the All India Institute of Hygiene and Public Health. He served in this position until 1945. In 1948 would later work briefly for UNICEF conducting a survey of public health needs in Vietnam.
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| 1940 Jim In YMCA and High School |
Jim spent 1938 with family friends in Worcester Massachusetts, and then joined his mother and sister in Berkeley, California. There he finished his two remaining years of high school and went on to study as an undergraduate at Berkeley. Throughout his studies he was known as a ‘B average’ student, good, but never at the top of his class. Part of the reason perhaps was that he enrolled in every extra-curricular activity on campus.
One of those extra-curricular activities was the ROTC, the army reserve officer training program.
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| 1943 Berkeley - described as “genial with 6 track mind” - Army ROTC |
In 1941 Jim was in his junior year at Berkeley. A friend introduced him to a freshman at Berkeley who was the younger sister of a girl he was dating. Her name was Ethel Henck. The relationship developed quickly, although they would only marry at the end of 1943.
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| Ethel Henck’s Yearbook Photo at Berkeley |
Meanwhile, other events took center stage. In December 1941 Japan attacked the US at Pearl Harbor and suddenly the US was at war. As a member of ROTC, Jim knew he would soon be part of it. He graduated from Berkeley at the end of 1942, but stayed on for a few more months of intensive study of Chinese. By August 1943 he was in the army and enrolled in the Officers Candidate School. In December, soon after his graduation and commission Jim and Ethel married.
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| 1941 - Jim Grant’s draft card |
Back in Asia US General Stillwell had managed to push construction of a road from Ledo in the Indian state of Assam behind Japanese lines into northern Burma. Stillwell’s objective was to build the road right across the northern tip of Burma and from there across the mountains into western China. It became known as the Ledo Burma Road and ultimately changed the course of the war against Japan in China and Burma.
Stillwell’s deputy was Major General Haydon Boatner (other sources give his name as Boltner). Like Stillwell himself, Boltner had been stationed for many years in China, spoke Chinese, and knew John Grant and his family. Most importantly, he knew that Jim also spoke Chinese fluently. When Boltner heard that Jim Grant was in training as an officer, he immediately arranged for his assignment to the units working on the Ledo Road campaign.
Thus in February 1944 2nd Lieutenant James Grant found himself headed across the Atlantic, through the Suez Canal to Bombay. From there to Calcutta he traveled by train and arrived on his birthday, May 12th. He had just turned 22. His father, John, was working in Calcutta at the time as the Director of the All India Institute of Public Health. There is no mention that father and son met, though surely they must have found time for a reunion.
Calcutta left Jim with one deeply-ingrained impression - a famine clearly caused by British war policy and yet one in which the British were doing nothing. Adam Fifield quotes Jim as saying that in Calcutta the British, “barely lifted a finger to help” and showed “a strong indifference to what happened to people.” Clearly, his brief time there left memories he would carry into his future life of insisting that political leaders understand the consequences of public policy on ordinary people.
Little has been written about Jim’s army period. He told me once of a time when he was flying alone with a pilot in a small aircraft which had engine problems and was forced to land on a small island in the Irrawaddy River. While the pilot worked on the engine, small groups of Japanese troops approached the island. He and the pilot hid, though it is not at all clear how they could have hidden the aircraft. Perhaps the Japanese force thought the aircraft had crashed. In any event, Jim and the pilot soon found themselves far behind Japanese lines. At night the pilot managed to fix the engine and they took off before dawn and made their way safely to an allied airfield.
In another of Jim’s stories, he described himself as the biggest manager of Chinese restaurants in Burma. It seems that most of the drivers heading along the road were Chinese and they could not stomach Burmese food. So one of Jim’s assignments was to set up small restaurants with Chinese cooks all along the way from Ledo in Assam to Kunming in China.
Records are not clear but it appears that Jim became quite ill in November 1944 (perhaps malaria?), and was shipped back to a US military hospital for treatment. His discharge from the military hospital came just as the war ended, first in China and a month later throughout the world. He was discharged in September 1945 and returned not long afterwards to China.
UNRRA started its operations in China in November 1945. Jim spent two years working with UNRRA. He was working for UNRRA in November 1946 when to his surprise Ethel arrived in Beijing and also went to work also for UNRRA.
At some point that year Ethel was assigned to accompany a set of barges carrying relief supplies from the port of Tianjin. Something went wrong and she was left stranded far from any contacts. She ended up walking 150 miles over several days in order to reach the office at Tianjin. She was pregnant at the time and as a result of the grueling journey, lost their first baby. The toil seems to have led to Ethel later losing their second child, as well. Fortunately, Ethel’s health later improved and she eventually gave birth to their three sons.
Jim and Ethel returned to the US in 1949 and Jim studied law at Harvard, graduating with an L.L.B degree in 1951. He worked at a law firm for three years and in 1955 joined the predecessor organization of today’s USAID, the International Cooperation Administration (ICA) as the mission chief in Sri Lanka.
I have found no written evidence that Jim met Tarzie Vittachi in that period, though it seems quite likely. At the time Tarzie was the editor of the very popular Ceylon Observer and authored the book, ‘Emergency 58’ which was sharply critical of the government’s role in the anti-Tamil race riots. With publication of the book Tarzie won the Magsaysay Prize in 1959.
Jim returned to Washington with ICA in 1959 as their director of programs. When USAID was established in 1961 he moved into the new agency and became the Assistant Secretary of State for Near East and South Asia. From 1964 to 1967 he served as the Director of USAID in Turkey. He seems to have first met Richard Reid in Istanbul, who from 1963 to 1970 was the director at Robert College (now Bogazici University). Likely, one or more of the sons of Jim and Ethel attended school at Robert. I would be grateful if Richard Reid or others could say more about this period.
Jim was reassigned to Washington in 1967 as Assistant Administrator of USAID responsible for Vietnam in the midst of the US involvement in the war there. These must have been difficult years for a humanitarian to serve in such a government post.
During his final year with USAID Jim had been approached by several influential thinkers concerned by waning US interest in international development. Jim approached Lester Brown, a well-known environmentalist and agricultural economist, with whom Jim had worked in Turkey. Jim suggested that they co-found the new research group to be called the Overseas Development Council (ODC). In the end Jim became the group’s CEO and President and continued in that post until he joined UNICEF in 1980. Brown decided that he preferred to serve only as a research fellow.
Leaving government in 1969 to head an influential research body on international development was likely a welcome change from the bureaucracy of the US government and the constraints on Jim’s advocacy. Jim already had a vision of the better world he wanted to create, but he had no platform from which he could sell his vision to others. Perhaps the missionary heritage of his grandfather John Skiffington Grant and his father John Black Grant was pressing Jim to find a pulpit. He found that pulpit first at ODC - a pulpit he would later exchange for UNICEF’s.
During its brief existence (1969 to 2000) the ODC oversaw the issuing of 341 influential books and reports by senior economists, statisticians and researchers. The best known of these was the work of Morris David Morris on the Physical Quality of Life Index (PQLI). Morris developed the index out of frustration with the more common indices of international development, such as Gross National Product (GNP). The PQLI index considered a country’s development in terms of three simple measures - literacy, infant mortality, and life expectancy.
Jim Grant strongly supported the work of Morris on PQLI and advocated its adoption by aid agencies as an alternative to GNP. A later paper by Jim in the name of the ODC also championed the use of a Disparity Reduction rate (DRR) to measure how development was or was not progressing.
PQLI later came under criticism by statisticians who noted that measures such as infant mortality and life expectancy heavily overlapped. In time PQLI would be replaced by better measures like the Human Development Index, but at the time it was revolutionary. Was a country really developed merely because its GNP or even its per capita GNP was high? How should aid agencies look at differences in the respective needs of countries? How should they measure change and the impacts of their work or the work of the governments concerned?
ODC provided Jim a first public platform from which to promote his vision, but a small research group was not the best of pulpits from which to be heard. It took ten years but eventually the pulpit found him.
In 1979 President Jimmy Carter wrote to the Secretary-General, Kurt Waldheim, nominating Jim Grant as the next Executive Director of UNICEF.
Stillwell’s deputy was Major General Haydon Boatner (other sources give his name as Boltner). Like Stillwell himself, Boltner had been stationed for many years in China, spoke Chinese, and knew John Grant and his family. Most importantly, he knew that Jim also spoke Chinese fluently. When Boltner heard that Jim Grant was in training as an officer, he immediately arranged for his assignment to the units working on the Ledo Road campaign.
Thus in February 1944 2nd Lieutenant James Grant found himself headed across the Atlantic, through the Suez Canal to Bombay. From there to Calcutta he traveled by train and arrived on his birthday, May 12th. He had just turned 22. His father, John, was working in Calcutta at the time as the Director of the All India Institute of Public Health. There is no mention that father and son met, though surely they must have found time for a reunion.
Calcutta left Jim with one deeply-ingrained impression - a famine clearly caused by British war policy and yet one in which the British were doing nothing. Adam Fifield quotes Jim as saying that in Calcutta the British, “barely lifted a finger to help” and showed “a strong indifference to what happened to people.” Clearly, his brief time there left memories he would carry into his future life of insisting that political leaders understand the consequences of public policy on ordinary people.
Little has been written about Jim’s army period. He told me once of a time when he was flying alone with a pilot in a small aircraft which had engine problems and was forced to land on a small island in the Irrawaddy River. While the pilot worked on the engine, small groups of Japanese troops approached the island. He and the pilot hid, though it is not at all clear how they could have hidden the aircraft. Perhaps the Japanese force thought the aircraft had crashed. In any event, Jim and the pilot soon found themselves far behind Japanese lines. At night the pilot managed to fix the engine and they took off before dawn and made their way safely to an allied airfield.
In another of Jim’s stories, he described himself as the biggest manager of Chinese restaurants in Burma. It seems that most of the drivers heading along the road were Chinese and they could not stomach Burmese food. So one of Jim’s assignments was to set up small restaurants with Chinese cooks all along the way from Ledo in Assam to Kunming in China.
Records are not clear but it appears that Jim became quite ill in November 1944 (perhaps malaria?), and was shipped back to a US military hospital for treatment. His discharge from the military hospital came just as the war ended, first in China and a month later throughout the world. He was discharged in September 1945 and returned not long afterwards to China.
UNRRA started its operations in China in November 1945. Jim spent two years working with UNRRA. He was working for UNRRA in November 1946 when to his surprise Ethel arrived in Beijing and also went to work also for UNRRA.
At some point that year Ethel was assigned to accompany a set of barges carrying relief supplies from the port of Tianjin. Something went wrong and she was left stranded far from any contacts. She ended up walking 150 miles over several days in order to reach the office at Tianjin. She was pregnant at the time and as a result of the grueling journey, lost their first baby. The toil seems to have led to Ethel later losing their second child, as well. Fortunately, Ethel’s health later improved and she eventually gave birth to their three sons.
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| 1951 Harvard Law |
I have found no written evidence that Jim met Tarzie Vittachi in that period, though it seems quite likely. At the time Tarzie was the editor of the very popular Ceylon Observer and authored the book, ‘Emergency 58’ which was sharply critical of the government’s role in the anti-Tamil race riots. With publication of the book Tarzie won the Magsaysay Prize in 1959.
Jim returned to Washington with ICA in 1959 as their director of programs. When USAID was established in 1961 he moved into the new agency and became the Assistant Secretary of State for Near East and South Asia. From 1964 to 1967 he served as the Director of USAID in Turkey. He seems to have first met Richard Reid in Istanbul, who from 1963 to 1970 was the director at Robert College (now Bogazici University). Likely, one or more of the sons of Jim and Ethel attended school at Robert. I would be grateful if Richard Reid or others could say more about this period.
Jim was reassigned to Washington in 1967 as Assistant Administrator of USAID responsible for Vietnam in the midst of the US involvement in the war there. These must have been difficult years for a humanitarian to serve in such a government post.
During his final year with USAID Jim had been approached by several influential thinkers concerned by waning US interest in international development. Jim approached Lester Brown, a well-known environmentalist and agricultural economist, with whom Jim had worked in Turkey. Jim suggested that they co-found the new research group to be called the Overseas Development Council (ODC). In the end Jim became the group’s CEO and President and continued in that post until he joined UNICEF in 1980. Brown decided that he preferred to serve only as a research fellow.
Leaving government in 1969 to head an influential research body on international development was likely a welcome change from the bureaucracy of the US government and the constraints on Jim’s advocacy. Jim already had a vision of the better world he wanted to create, but he had no platform from which he could sell his vision to others. Perhaps the missionary heritage of his grandfather John Skiffington Grant and his father John Black Grant was pressing Jim to find a pulpit. He found that pulpit first at ODC - a pulpit he would later exchange for UNICEF’s.
During its brief existence (1969 to 2000) the ODC oversaw the issuing of 341 influential books and reports by senior economists, statisticians and researchers. The best known of these was the work of Morris David Morris on the Physical Quality of Life Index (PQLI). Morris developed the index out of frustration with the more common indices of international development, such as Gross National Product (GNP). The PQLI index considered a country’s development in terms of three simple measures - literacy, infant mortality, and life expectancy.
Jim Grant strongly supported the work of Morris on PQLI and advocated its adoption by aid agencies as an alternative to GNP. A later paper by Jim in the name of the ODC also championed the use of a Disparity Reduction rate (DRR) to measure how development was or was not progressing.
PQLI later came under criticism by statisticians who noted that measures such as infant mortality and life expectancy heavily overlapped. In time PQLI would be replaced by better measures like the Human Development Index, but at the time it was revolutionary. Was a country really developed merely because its GNP or even its per capita GNP was high? How should aid agencies look at differences in the respective needs of countries? How should they measure change and the impacts of their work or the work of the governments concerned?
ODC provided Jim a first public platform from which to promote his vision, but a small research group was not the best of pulpits from which to be heard. It took ten years but eventually the pulpit found him.
In 1979 President Jimmy Carter wrote to the Secretary-General, Kurt Waldheim, nominating Jim Grant as the next Executive Director of UNICEF.
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| 1989 - President Carter presents award to Jim Grant |
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| Photo by his son, William |
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