A Moment in the Sun : Robert William Says His Dentist-Dad Played a Role in Chinese History and He Wants the World to Know It

Sometimes the dreams of the father are visited upon the son. Such is the burden of Robert William, who this spring--in the blood of Beijing’s Tian An Men Square--saw the chance to bring his father’s vision back to life.

For William--former press agent, helicopter photographer, macaroni mogul and lifelong golf enthusiast--the essence of his obscure father’s dream rests in orderly rows on the long dining room table of his big house in Hancock Park.

The stacks of books, magazines, newspaper clippings and photographs, most at least half a century old, detail the brief, improbable brush with history of Dr. Maurice William--a New York City dentist and political idealist who believed that a book he wrote arguing against Marxism influenced the revolutionary Sun Yat-sen, a man who moved China and, thus, the world. It was the kind of fame that was never widespread, and it did not last. William died in 1973 at age 93, a largely forgotten bit player in the events of his time.

‘A Great Influence’

Looking across his trove of preserved ephemera the other day, the younger William, 75, explained his mission, saying that he wants “to gain for my father a final resting place in the intellectual archives of our own nation. He deserves to be recognized as a great influence on a great nation, China.”

More ambitiously--and perhaps impossibly--William said he wants to link his father, however indirectly, with the pro-democracy movement that flowered briefly in China earlier this year.

”. . . I want to establish in the eyes of the American public that they can be proud, and feel the importance of, the fact that it was an American who started this slide toward democracy, evidence of which we have been witnessing in the last few months in China,” he said.

William’s hoard of documents--ranging from profiles in the New Yorker, Harper’s magazine and the Christian Science Monitor to mentions in the New York Times--portray the elder William as a man torn by the political currents in the United States and Europe just after World War I. He was especially upset that his fellow socialists had so readily joined in the recent global conflict, in contradiction to Marxist doctrine. To work out his nagging political ambivalence, William wrote a book, “The Social Interpretation of History: A Refutation of the Marxian Economic Interpretation of History.”

Published Book Himself

Published at Dr. William’s expense in 1921 in an edition of 2,000, a copy of the 397-page book somehow found its way into the hands of Sun Yat-sen, the early 20th-Century revolutionary who helped lead the overthrow of the last of the Chinese dynasties and to this day is honored by both Chinese Communists and the Chinese Nationalists of Taiwan.

In this day of glasnost and triumphant free markets, the blue- and gray-jacketed volume seems quaint, an intellectual artifact from an old battle about ideas. A note on the cover explains that it “is a criticism of the Marxian ‘economic interpretation of history’ and of all socialistic arguments that base their hopes of social progress on the antisocial doctrine of the class struggle.”

There are two plausible ways that the book found its way to Sun, according to accounts of the time: Sun was either given a copy by a Chinese student who had discussed the book in a Union Theological Seminary class. Or it was part of a mysterious order through a news agent for 40 copies to be sent to somewhere in China. No one could learn afterward exactly where this largest order for the book went, since records of the sale had been destroyed by the time anyone was curious enough to ask.

At any rate, Sun, more open to Western ideas than many of his peers, acquired the book at a time when he was delivering a series of lectures called “The Three Principles of the People” that would become his political testament. The accounts also agree that Sun cited the dentist’s book in his last lectures, when he supposedly showed a marked swing away from Communism and Soviet influence to Western-style democracy.

However, Sun died shortly afterward, leaving behind the divisions that would ultimately lead to the civil war in which the Communists led by Mao Zedong triumphed.

Even at the time, the tale of Dr. William was so far-fetched that it left people speechless. In a 1942 profile in the New Yorker magazine, writer John Kirkpatrick reported that when people were told, “Oh, he’s the New York dentist who changed the course of Chinese history,” that it “nearly always shuts them up.” Kirkpatrick added: “They nod their heads, look stunned and drop the subject. Dr. William seemingly remains less celebrated than he might be for the odd reason that his claim to fame is so dumbfounding it tends to go in one ear and out the other.”

Fittingly, Dr. William’s discovery that he was considered an important philosopher half a world away was haphazard. It was 1928 and the dentist had all but given up hoping that his book “would yet make a noise in the world,” as Maurice Zolotow put it in Harper’s magazine. But that year, Zolotow reported, Dr. William had a chance encounter with a cousin, who happened to have seen a year-old copy of Asia magazine “and had noticed therein an article that stated Dr. Sun Yat-sen had been influenced by a book called ‘The Social Interpretation of History’ by a Dr. William.” The dentist immediately went out in search of a copy and began his own run at making the history books.

Like his father, Robert William seems to be an unlikely sort to be consumed with the course of world history. He relishes tales from the world of golf, including his encounters with Ben Hogan and Jack Nicklaus, and of his episodic business career, which culminated in the acquisition of a big macaroni firm, Globe-”A1” at the corner of Venice and Robertson boulevards, that was sold in 1986 “for cash.”

Life has been a lot less complicated since the sale, he said. “We have a big mortgage company in Brentwood now but it’s a lot simpler than macaroni.”

William even admits that his father’s preoccupation with politics caused him to neglect his dental practice, which in turn thwarted his son’s planned dental career.

“My father used to walk away from patients and leave them in the chair for an hour,” he recalled.

Unresolved Issues

But no matter what the unresolved issues between dead father and living son, William became passionate--and didactic--as he walked around the big dining room table, recounting with ease the complicated tale of his father’s venture into political theory and, briefly, into powerful American-Chinese circles.

Dr. William’s book probably was never destined to be a best seller. It is addressed to Marxists in an effort to persuade them that regulated capitalism and democracy are more likely to be in the best interest of workers than communism. It is a dry work. A typical sentence, on page 149, warns: “We must never lose sight of the fact so strongly emphasized by Marx that, in modern nations, wealth production is a social process--that the total national income is the product of the combined efforts of every useful member of the national family.”

But in Dr. William’s heyday--the 1920s, 1930s and most of the 1940s--the Nationalists ruled China, albeit in a shaky fashion and while fighting a long war with Japan. For some, it was Dr. William’s book with its influence on China’s leading revolutionary that made this period--during which the United States and China were allies--possible.

For example, the New Yorker profile, titled “The Man who Changed the Course of Chinese History,” listed a number of experts who had commented on the “colossal fluke” of the influence of Dr. William’s book. The article quoted one history professor as writing that Sun Yat-sen’s reading of “The Social Interpretation of History” could “turn out to have been one of the most important single incidents in the history of modern Asia. . . .”

Claims Disputed

In hindsight the statement, written before the Communists took over China in 1949, suffers from the huge problem that China did not become a democracy. But even while the fate of China was unknown, another contemporary of Dr. William disputed his claim to crucial influence on the Chinese revolutionary.

In a 1934 biography, “Sun Yat-sen: His Life and Its Meaning,” Lyon Sharman agrees that Sun made “characteristic and liberal use” of the New York dentist’s book. But Sharman disputed Dr. William’s contention--published in a later book, “Sun Yat-sen Versus Communism”--that Sun had ever “accepted Marxism without reservation.” Sharman wrote, “Sun Yat-sen was nothing if not eclectic; he was nobody’s exclusive disciple; he picked over foreign ideas, chose what appealed to him and conglomerated what he had selected.”

Historical Lightning

William conceded that his father “had his adversaries and his critics” but he maintains stoutly that his dad was indeed struck by historical lightning.

Moreover, he believes that someday, somehow, China really will be different. And that his father will have been a small but vital link in the great chain of change.

“I think the whole world is disappointed that the campaign for democracy didn’t end in a clear-cut victory,” he said of the recent turmoil in China. “I knew it wouldn’t but it will never be forgotten. . . . I think the people of China will eventually drag the country to democracy.”