5 THE POST-WAR DECLINE OF THE INTERNATIONAL STUDIES CONFERENCE 443Conference, it was ‘quite impossible’ for him to represent the Geneva
School of International Studies at the Chatham House meeting.^57
Davis was the only national of the United States present at the
meeting. In a letter to Mayoux, Edward Mead Earle, the head of the
American unit of the ISC, explained that the end of the Pacific war had
seen men returning from the armed forces to the universities in large
numbers. American academic personnel, he stated, felt under a ‘very
heavy obligation to give them...[their]...best efforts in the continua-
tion of their education’ that had been in very many instances ‘disrupted
by the war’ and this meant not taking leave from their posts. This was
not the only consideration Earle raised in his letter when explaining the
obstacles in the way of American participation in the London meeting.
Earle pointed out that the continuance of the American national com-
mittee hinged on its receipt of funding from the Rockefeller Foundation.
He then observed that the foundation was not ready to commit to pro-
jects such as the ISC and its national off-shoots until one of its repre-
sentatives had surveyed the overall situation in Europe.^58 In fact, what
Earle was hinting at was that the Rockefeller Foundation had a ‘negative
attitude towards any future development of the Conference,’ a consider-
ation that certainly would have given Davis pause.^59
In opening the London meeting, Davis solemnly observed that those
who had been present at Bergen during the last days of August 1939
would ‘recall that we had colleagues among us whom we shall not see
again,’ adding that those colleagues ‘never bowed their heads in the cir-
cumstances they had to face, nor lowered their standards.’ Davis then
called for a moment of silence in honour of their memory at the very
moment when the ISC had reunited for the first time after so many sad
years in order to deliberate on its future.^60 Recalling Bonnet’s scrupulous
respect for the autonomy of the ISC, Davis then introduced Bonnet’s
(^57) Alfred E. Zimmern to Jean-Jacques Mayoux, November 12, 1945, AG 1-IICI-K-I-2,
UA.
(^58) Edward Mead Earle to Jean-Jacques Mayoux, November 3, 1945, AG 1-IICI-K-I-24,
UA.
(^59) Jean-Jacques Mayoux to Malcolm W. Davis, September 30, 1946, AG 1-IICI-K-V-2.d,
UA.
(^60) International Studies Conference: Report on the Informal (14th) Meeting of the
Executive Committee and Members of the Conference, London, November 18, 1945, AG
1-IICI-K-I-2, UA.