by Adam Fifield
This analogy resonated over several generations. John Black Grant and, later, his son Jim both resolved that they would try to turn off that tap.
For the elder Grant, this meant rethinking the way medicine was practiced and organized in the developing world. Exactly how to do this became clear through his social and medical experimentations in China and, later, India and Puerto Rico. But China was where most of this thinking crystallized. One of the first lessons was simple: Curative care and preventive care must be tied together. Doctors had to do more than simply treat disease; they needed to block it before it could strike. This sort of comprehensive health care should take place not just in urban hospitals, but also at health centers in remote rural villages. Grant believed that the government bore a responsibility to provide health care for all, but that the only way this could happen and be sustained was if members of local communities were trained and educated in basic health and hygiene techniques. Some doctors invariably felt threatened by this grassroots credo—it would take power away from the medical establishment and put it in the hands of the people. As he learned and evolved over the years, Grant came to the conclusion that public health was intrinsically linked to social and economic development—you could not pursue one without the other. These views earned him the moniker “Medical Bolshevik.”
To begin putting his theories to the test, Grant teamed up with Peking’s police force in 1923 to create a “demonstration health station” in an area of the city near the hospital; it was designed to give students experience outside the classroom and to offer police, midwives, and public health professionals basic health training. The center also provided medical care to area residents. Grant later took the demonstration model into the countryside, where he and his student C. C. Chen established a health station in a rural county more than 120 miles southwest of Peking; it would eventually serve four hundred thousand people and offer training courses and supplies for village health workers. This program was developed in concert with the Mass Education Movement, started by the Chinese literacy champion and John Grant’s friend, Jimmy Yen; with better education comes better health, and vice versa. These novel approaches to extend medical care beyond the realm of urban and Western influence—and to equip local communities with the tools to stave off disease and malnutrition—inspired China’s barefoot doctor movement several decades later.
According to an extensive article about John Grant by former World Health Organization scientist Socrates Litsios in the medical journal Perspectives in Biology and Medicine, the dogmatic doctor often struggled to persuade others to accept his ideas. Some at the Peking Union Medical College believed that the institution should be imparting “the best of Western science” to Chinese students; what the Chinese themselves thought was not so important. This directly contradicted Grant’s underlying approach and likely fed the resistance against him—he felt that medical programs should ultimately be owned, conceived, and run by Chinese doctors, Chinese health experts, and Chinese political leaders.
Grant’s growing clout and collaborative spirit ushered him into the corridors of power throughout the vast country, where he helped create health departments in Shanghai and Canton and the national Ministry of Health in Nanking. His breakneck pace prompted some reservations at the Rockefeller Foundation, according to Dr. Mary Brown Bullock’s account of the foundation’s work in China, An American Transplant: The Rockefeller Foundation and Peking Union Medical College. She cited a letter from Rockefeller Foundation president George Vincent to a Johns Hopkins official, in which he wrote: “We are a little disturbed at the eagerness with which Doctor Grant is undertaking his duties … and is going ahead more rapidly than we are prepared to follow.” This sentiment would be echoed decades later by officials at UNICEF, when John Grant’s son moved too quickly for their taste.
Many foreigners in Peking fraternized mostly with each other. In this, and in many other ways, John Grant was an anomaly: his close friends were almost entirely Chinese. As a boy in school in Ningpo, he had been forbidden to interact with his Chinese peers; the punishment for doing so was caning. But this cruel reprimand elicited the opposite result in John Grant. Jim Grant recalled that his father’s Chinese “bosom buddies” were always visiting the house, and that “he traveled with them, drank with them, worked with them.”
One notable non-Chinese visitor to the Grant household in Peking was a Jewish doctor from Poland named Ludwik Rajchman. A revered, outspoken international public health expert, Rajchman ran the League of Nations Health Organization and shared many of John Grant’s views on social medicine, preventive care, and local collaboration. Like Grant, he was a left-leaning visionary whose sway over health policy and sometimes brusque demeanor stirred jealousies and stoked political suspicions; he was often accused of being a Communist. With a high forehead, thick mustache, and a deep, discerning gaze, he was said to have a captivating presence. John Grant had encouraged Rajchman to visit China to share his technical and medical expertise with the government.
The young Jim Grant listened in on “scintillating” conversations between his father and Rajchman. He did not know it then, of course, but his father’s Polish friend—this intriguing houseguest from Europe—would go on to chart an astounding trajectory in the years ahead that would alter the course of global health, humanitarian activities, and Jim’s own life and career. The League of Nations, created after World War I, would fail spectacularly in its primary goal: to prevent the next global conflict (though the league’s health agency, thanks to Rajchman, was effective in promoting public health and containing disease epidemics). Even at the end of World War II, during which his own brother was believed to have been murdered in a Nazi concentration camp—according to a biography of Rajchman by his great-granddaughter, Marta Balinska—the indomitable Polish crusader did not relinquish his belief in the capacity of mankind to create a better world for everyone. A supporter of the Allies’ nominal fledgling effort to do just that—the United Nations—he became the Polish representative of the United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration (which was founded in 1943 and predated the actual UN). UNRRA, as it became known, provided food, medical care, and succor to survivors of an inferno of staggering violence and cruelty. Many of them were children. Jim Grant would later join UNRRA himself, after fighting for the American army in the Pacific theater of the war.
In 1946, as the Iron Curtain—so dubbed by Winston Churchill—began its icy descent, there was talk of disbanding UNRRA. Several leaders argued forcefully for a continuation of relief for the millions of people in Europe and Asia who were still gravely in need of help. Among them were former US president (and renowned World Wars I and II humanitarian) Herbert Hoover, former New York City mayor Fiorello La Guardia (who was tapped to run UNRRA), and, perhaps most effectively, Ludwik Rajchman. At UNRRA’s final meeting in August 1946, plans were being made to close down operations and transfer some of its responsibilities to several nascent United Nations agencies. An UNRRA staff memo had recommended prolonging the agency’s child-feeding programs; Rajchman argued that UNRRA’s remaining funds be used to create an entirely new organization—an “international children’s fund.” Philip Noel-Baker, UNRRA’s British representative, immediately seconded the idea. La Guardia voiced his approval. After a forceful speech by Rajchman in Polish, according to a UNICEF interview with Noel-Baker, the vote was unanimous. A new international humanitarian effort was born.
Whether it would grow beyond a well-intentioned idea was not guaranteed. During several months of political wrangling, Rajchman lobbied for the children’s agency and marshaled vital support. “In all these tortuous and bureaucratic procedures, Rajchman was the leading player,” wrote Maggie Black in The Children and the Nations: The Story of Unicef. On December 11, 1946, the UN General Assembly adopted a resolution establishing UNICEF. Rajchman was elected as the first board chair and would use his authority to urge UN secretary general Trygve Lie to appoint Hoover’s former protégé—a self-effacing
Nebraskan and relief veteran named Maurice Pate—to run the new organization. Pate’s quiet resolve would prove crucial in the years ahead in shaping UNICEF’s programs and ensuring its survival. Considered by many to be the “founder of UNICEF,” Rajchman is also credited with helping spawn the World Health Organization; it grew out of the League of Nations Health Organization he had built. In the expanding sphere of public health after World War II, it is hard to imagine any area or issue not somehow influenced by either Ludwik Rajchman or John Grant.
Jim Grant’s father often included his preadolescent son in adult conversations and “treated me as a boy well beyond his years.” He would bring Jim on cross-country train trips. “Wherever we went,” Jim Grant recalled, “whoever we were talking to within a railroad car, I sat in and joined the conversation.”
They were often talking of momentous things—of life and death on a grand scale; of so much happening all at once, in China and everywhere else; of the possibilities unleashed by new technologies and capabilities; of a global revolution under way that could make the fruits of progress available to everyone. Jim was transfixed. His father also gave Jim reading material well beyond his age level—a book on the Bolshevik revolution and articles on the New Deal—that seemed to carry the message that the world was a grossly unjust place, but that now, as never before, there was an opportunity to change that. From all of this, Jim gleaned a palpable sense of the great, vertiginous whorl of history—and of his own potential place in it. “This was where I got my first sense that the world could change, was really going through a very historic change, thanks to the Industrial Revolution,” he said. “And that there was a major role to participate in this.”
If Jim was to succeed in life, if he was to play a meaningful part in all that was going on, his father said, he had to go to graduate school. A bachelor’s degree would not suffice. He did not tell him to become a doctor or suggest what line of study he should pursue. But he did advise that if he went into public service, he needed to secure his “economic independence,” create a career fallback, in case he had to stand up to his boss or walk out. “So I always knew I would go to graduate school, but I never quite knew for what.”
Aside from Chinese, there was no particular subject in grammar school that enthralled him; one he outright hated was Latin. He earned above-average grades but was never at the top of his class. “I never had the compulsion to be first in the class,” Grant said. Every three years or so, he would leave China to visit his maternal grandparents in Michigan. Once, in 1933, he went to Princeton, New Jersey, for orthodontic work. Each trip was taken on an ocean liner.
On the evening of July 7, 1937, Grant and his fellow Boy Scouts went camping on the outskirts of Peking, near the Marco Polo Bridge. Built in 1192, the long, low stone bridge over the Yongding River featured eleven large arches and several hundred carved lions. The ancient structure, which had apparently earned the admiration of Venetian traveler Marco Polo, was a major point of connection between Peking and the rest of China. The boys had set up their pup tents about a half mile from the bridge.
Around midnight, a series of loud rumblings and explosions startled the Scouts awake. They got out of their tents and saw flashes of light blooming on the horizon. It was, Grant said, “like a giant thunderstorm was hitting us but without any rain.”
Earlier that evening, unbeknownst to the Scouts, Japanese troops had been conducting maneuvers not far from the bridge. They claimed one of their soldiers had gone missing and had asked permission from Chinese authorities to search for him in the nearby town of Wanping. The Chinese refused, and fighting ensued. It quickly escalated from gunshots to shelling.
When the Scouts realized it was not a thunderstorm but a military clash, they quickly packed up the pup tents and rushed back to Peking. As they fled in the dark, Grant recalled, shells crashed down within a half mile of them.
The skirmish at the Marco Polo Bridge spread across Peking and marked the beginning of the second Sino-Japanese War. Some believe that the story of the missing soldier was a ruse by the Japanese to give them a reason to attack (Japan had already invaded and occupied a northeastern region of China then known as Manchuria starting in 1931). The incident was a prelude to the Pacific theater of World War II and eight appallingly barbaric years of Japanese occupation, during which as many as twenty million Chinese were killed. The infamous “Rape of Nanking,” when Japanese troops attacked, sadistically tortured, and massacred hundreds of thousands of civilians and soldiers in China’s capital city, would take place a few months later. In its resistance against Japan, China, led by Generalissimo Chiang Kai-shek, would be joined by Britain and the United States in fighting World War II.
For Jim Grant and his family, it was time to leave. Everyone was in a frenzy, trying to evacuate Peking. But one immediate problem stood in the way: Jim lacked travel documents. He was a Canadian citizen at the time, and since Canada was part of the British Commonwealth of Nations and there was no Canadian legation in Peking, he had a British passport. But he needed a visa. Then fifteen years old, he took a train by himself to the port town of Tianjin, sixty-nine miles from Peking, to get one.
The trip was memorable because of a parade of switching troop trains, some carrying Chinese soldiers and some Japanese, all passing through a rail junction south of Peking within minutes of each other. He noticed that “you could see a Japanese troop train and within five minutes, you would see a Chinese troop train, and just at the [Fengtai] switching, the Chinese switched into Beijing, and the Japanese switched towards the Marco Polo Bridge.”
When he returned to the house, visa in hand, he and his mother packed “very quickly.” The city was now under martial law, and banks of sandbags blocked many streets. On July 15, they left. Betty was already gone; she was by then a student at the University of California at Berkeley. They boarded the last train out of Peking. As the train crossed a 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. He never knew if it was the Japanese or Chinese who did it. In Tianjin, he and his mother boarded a ship bound for Shanghai and thence to New York via the Panama Canal. His father stayed behind.
Once they reached the States, Jim did not remain with his mother. She moved to Berkeley to be near Betty and find a house and sent Jim to stay with the family of his friend Ned Green in Worcester, Massachusetts. Ned’s father had run the Peking Union Medical College. The Greens lived on the outskirts of town on a 170-acre farm with an apple orchard. Jim was given an attic suite and was, by his account, treated well by the Greens and welcomed into their family activities. A year later, after spending a summer with other family friends in Nova Scotia, he finally rejoined his mother in California.
She had bought a “New England style, white frame house” on the Oakland-Berkeley line. Jim had his own room. He attended an Oakland preparatory school, where an intellectually vigorous social studies teacher named Louis Swenson tapped into his appetite for history and sense of economic justice. Swenson taught his students about the New Deal, the idea of social responsibility, and the role of government in ensuring the well-being of its citizens. All of this echoed the musings of Jim’s father and further stirred in him a yearning to make his own mark somehow. Grant’s first paper tackled the Tennessee Valley Authority, the New Deal program to spur the revitalization of the Tennessee River Valley by dam and power production, electrification, farm revival, and reforestation. This sparked a debate among his fellow students. His classmates were intrigued by him, if only because of where he had come from and “the things I had seen.” Swenson’s class “opened up a whole new window” for Grant and nourished the conviction his father had seeded—the benefits of society must be made available to everyone.
Two years later, when he enrolled at the University of California at Berkeley, he quickly became one of those students who tried to do everything. In addition to his studies, he
pledged at the Alpha Delta Phi fraternity, joined the US Army Reserve Officers’ Training Corps (ROTC), headed the student association welfare council, ran a Coca-Cola franchise, joined the YMCA, and championed a minimum wage for student workers. During one final exam, he stumbled into the classroom, exhausted, and jotted in his exam booklet that he was too tired to write anything. Astonishingly, the professor handed the book back with a grade of B and thanked Grant for his honesty. A B average was his goal—that would get him to the next place he wanted to go. His report card from January 1940 is scattered with mostly B’s and C’s and an occasional A.
Earnest and polite, he did not blend in with his fraternity brothers. “I was different from most of the students who were much more rah-rah, beer drinking, women talking, and I was a different student.” After he became the fraternity’s business manager, someone suggested that he put Coca-Cola machines in the frat house and other buildings. He explored the idea and realized how profitable it could be. Each bottle of Coke cost five cents—Coca-Cola kept two cents and he would keep three. He bought and installed more than twelve machines, and they quickly paid for themselves. The proceeds covered a big portion of his tuition and expenses.
But the budding entrepreneur was also an activist. He became involved in the Fair Bear movement, which shamed local businesses into paying student workers a minimum wage and ensuring decent working conditions. The name of the campaign presumably alluded to California’s state flag, which features a bear; the official mascot of the University of California was also the Golden Bear. Those establishments who obliged could affix a “Fair Bear” placard to their storefronts; those who refused were hit with boycotts and protests. Grant’s involvement with Fair Bear earned him the nickname “Pinko.”
