Franklin Pierce Huddle Interview: Conversations with History; Institute of International Studies, UC Berkeley
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Dr. Huddle, welcome to Berkeley.
Thank you very much, and welcome to you, and thanks for the kind words.
Where were you born and raised?
I was born in Providence, Rhode Island. At about age one, I went down to Washington D.C. during the war to accompany my father, who was working, of course. I grew up there, and then went back to Brown in Rhode Island, and then went off to overseas in a variety of jobs.
Looking back, how do you think your parents shaped your thinking about the world?
They were internationalists, and even from about the age of eight or nine, I remember meeting somebody who was in the Foreign Service and thinking to myself, "This is an interesting job." So somehow they had primed me to think globally.
Your father was an academic, but also somebody who crossed over into government?
My father had been a teacher of English at Brown, and then he worked for Congress sort of as a chief science advisor, if you will. He went back and also taught at the graduate school at American University, and had a doctorate degree in Political Science.
A very prolific author of books about science policy, among other things.
It was with some pride at Harvard that I looked up that long rack of sixteen books, or something like that, and said, "That's a tough act to follow." So I joined the Foreign Service instead.
Tell us a little about your education. Do you have any teachers who were especially influential besides, obviously, your father?
I had many influential teachers, but when I was a graduate student, I had Joe Fletcher, who was a specialist in Mongolian studies and Inner Asia, the out-of-the-way places. He was able to look at these places and find paradigms, or subjects, or points of interest, or references that were applicable to the world at large. They were more interesting for this, because they were so abstracted from our day-to-day knowledge and consciousness, you could almost make the philosophical point more accurately.
As an undergraduate at Brown, you majored in ...?
Linguistics.
Linguistics. Then, that's what you went on in to get a [graduate degree]?
No, I went to Columbia for a year as a Special Fellow in Linguistics. Then I was in the Peace Corps, and I came back to Harvard, and I took an M.A. in Middle Eastern Studies, and a doctorate degree in Near Eastern Studies/Central Asian Studies -- history and languages.
In the interim between your undergraduate degree and your Ph.D., what was an exploration for you that actually pinpointed what you wanted to study as a doctoral student?
I was in Saudi Arabia, sitting there counting the sand dunes, teaching English, and I started reading about Central Asia and found it fascinating, both for the fact that it was this faraway, oh, dream-like world, but also that there were practical lessons that could be applied to the world in terms of economic development. For example, my doctor's degree is on cotton in Central Asia. Why [do they grow] cotton? Answer: You had to find something that was highly valued by weight, that wouldn't perish as it was being shipped, in order to send it long distances to earn money for these very isolated farmers.
So what is the story of cotton in that region, just as an aside here? Was cotton grown throughout the region or only in what is now Tajikistan?
Cotton came to Central Asia right after the U.S. Civil War, when cotton was short world-round, and many places turned to cotton. By 1914 it was the third largest producer in the world. In the fifties and sixties, at times, that part of the Soviet Union -- mostly in what today is Uzbekistan, but also Tajikistan -- would be the world's leading producer. They developed fast-ripening varieties that would ripen in less than a normal 210 days required for cotton.
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