They’ll Still Be Carding You

Benjamen Walker reviews Greg Barnhisel’s “Code Name Puritan.”

By Benjamen WalkerDecember 24, 2024

• History

• Politics

DURING THE 1950s and ’60s, Norman Holmes Pearson was one of Yale’s most successful and beloved professors. On the first day of each term, he would crab-walk to the front of the class, his misshapen body—the result of a childhood fall—on full display. Former students often remarked that the uneasy silence of that first day gave way to a dramatic crescendo of applause following Pearson’s lectures. One such student, journalist Thomas Wolfe, called Pearson “the most superbly theatrical teacher I have ever seen.”

Norman Pearson was also a secret agent, code name Puritan.

That’s the title Greg Barnhisel gives to his new intellectual biography of Pearson, a key figure behind the “Cold War alliance between higher education, the national-security state, and US propaganda operations.” For Barnhisel, whose previous book Cold War Modernists: Art, Literature, and American Cultural Diplomacy (2015) also examined this alliance, Pearson is one of its most important operatives.

Born into an upper middle-class family in Gardner, Massachusetts, in 1909, Norm followed his brother Alfred first to Phillips Andover Academy and then to Yale, but while Alfred returned home to work in the family’s dry goods business, Norm had no desire to leave academia. After acquiring a second bachelor’s and a master’s degree from Oxford, he was accepted into Yale’s graduate program in history, arts, and letters. While studying in Europe, he witnessed one of Hitler’s early rallies and noted the appeal of National Socialism. In one of his letters home, he wrote that he had witnessed a young child choose a swastika over Mickey Mouse.

Pearson himself opted for the latter symbol, choosing to study American literature and culture. In 1938, he co-edited the influential and best-selling Oxford Anthology of American Literature. This book established not only the reputations of Ezra Pound and William Carlos Williams but also his own. Pearson was one of the first big names in the emerging field of American studies, and he helped found Yale’s program in 1948. Pearson’s scholarship, Barnhisel writes, revealed both the uniqueness of American civilization and the need to defend it from the evils of Nazism.

Yale’s espionage pedigree can be traced all the way back to the United States’ very first secret agent, Nathan Hale, class of 1773, who was executed by the British in the Revolutionary War. The college played a central role in forming the Office of Strategic Services (OSS), the agency that would later become the CIA. Pearson was recruited by a classmate and helped create X-2, a counterespionage unit that hunted down German spies.

In his post-defection memoir, the turncoat Kim Philby wrote off “Normal” Pearson as one of the American amateurs who couldn’t even keep their file cabinets locked. But it turns out that it was future novelist Graham Greene who enjoyed liberating secret files from American cabinets. After reading them, he would leave them out on the duty officer’s desk.

Pearson stayed away from petty office politics, focusing his efforts on his work. By the war’s end, he was leading a team of 300, gathering and organizing information into a card system. His colleagues made fun of his diligence, and one wrote a song for him to the tune of “I’ll Be Seeing You”:

I’ll be carding you, in every single move you make
And all your friends get carded too
I'll get their numbers for your sake
I'll watch you when you spill the beans
And give the files their cue.
I may leave when this war’s through, but
They’ll still be carding you!

Pearson’s most important contribution, though, was the training curriculum that he developed for future counterintelligence agents. Many of the CIA’s first officers were trained by Pearson himself, including his former student James Jesus Angleton, the United States’ most infamous spy hunter and counterintelligence chief. Writer Peter Matthiessen recalls that his favorite professor personally advised him to join the CIA, which he did, and he founded The Paris Review as part of his cover story, allowing him to surveil Paris-based expats like Richard Wright.

“Once an agent, always an agent,” Pearson liked to joke with students who asked about his past. However, Barnhisel found only one incriminating document in Pearson’s papers at Yale—a memo titled “Intelligence Training in Service Schools,” written on the back of a 1951 American studies course syllabus. Barnhisel is unsure if this memo exists due to an oversight or if it was included intentionally. But he is certain that talent spotting was “the extent of [Pearson’s] involvement in the Central Intelligence Agency.”

We don’t need secret archives to gauge Pearson’s legacy or importance during the Cold War.  From his influential perch as the head of Yale’s American studies program, Pearson created and nurtured the reputations of American poets, writers, scholars, supporters, and students through journals and conferences. He traveled the world as an ambassador for American studies, advising both private foundations and foreign universities. When it came to the virtues and values of the American way of life, Pearson was a true believer.

And all this work, crucial to the success of the American century, was done in the background. “Even a spy,” Barnhisel notes, “can do his most important work out in the open.”