Wikipedia

Winthrop Pickard Bell

Winthrop Pickard Bell (May 12, 1884 – April 4, 1965) was a Canadian academic who taught philosophy at the University of Toronto and Harvard.[1][2][3] He is however perhaps best known for his work as a historian of Nova Scotia.[4]

Biography

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He was born in Halifax, Nova Scotia and educated at Mount Allison University, McGill University, Harvard University (where he studied under Josiah Royce, about whose theory of knowledge he was later to write his doctoral dissertation),[5][6][7] the University of Leipzig, and finally at the University of Göttingen (where he completed his doctoral studies under Edmund Husserl).[8][9]

 
Engraving by Winthorp P. Bell on a cell-door in the Karzer of Göttingen University

Edith Stein was among his friends during his Göttingen period.[10][11]

During the First World War he was held in the civilian internment camp at Ruhleben, near Berlin, for more than three years.[8][12][13] After the war he became a secret agent for MI6 in Berlin,[14][13] and also taught philosophy at the University of Toronto and at Harvard University,[15] which he left in 1927 to pursue a career in business.[8][16]

In his latter years he focused his energies on historical research, much of which concerned the group of mid-18th-Century immigrants to Nova Scotia known as the "Foreign Protestants".[8] His most notable publication was The "Foreign Protestants" and the Settlement of Nova Scotia, which was published by the University of Toronto Press in 1961; his Register of the Foreign Protestants of Nova Scotia was published some years after his death.[17]

Spy Career

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While researching his philosophy dissertation in 2008, Jason Bell (no relation)[14] consulted Winston Bell's archive at Mount Allison University. He was shocked to find the archive full of Winston's dispatches from his years as a spy. Jason wrote a biography of Winston's career called Cracking the Nazi Code.[18]: 308–10 

Winston Bell was instrumental in helping the Allies of World War I understand how desperate the situation was in Germany in 1919, when he was returned to the country by MI6 as a spy. Bell's professional cover was as a Reuters reporter, and he filed many news stories that were syndicated in English media. At the same time, he was filing reports to MI6 and penetrating deeply into post-war Germany's complicated political factions. He witnessed the military fighting between them and noted how dangerous the Freikorps were to stability. He pleaded with his superiors to ameliorate the Treaty of Versailles knowing how volatile the German state was.

He was able to warn the United Kingdom about the October 1919 attack on Riga. The Freikorps allied with the Russians in the assault. Bell worked to insure that the UK could win the battle and not overreact to the labyrinthian scheme of German reactionaries.

MI6 refused to let him publish a book warning about the threat from the German right. He had seen how dangerous they were and how obsessed they were with Jews. He retired as a spy and taught philosophy at Harvard before going into the private sector.

When Bell read Mein Kampf in 1939, he realized that Hitler meant exactly what he said in the book. He wrote an article saying the Nazis were bent on exterminating non-Aryans around the world. No one would publish it. When Hitler invaded Poland, six months after Bell wrote his warning, Saturday Night finally published it.[18]

References

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  1. ^ "Winthrop Bell Archives".
  2. ^ Cairns, Dorion (October 2, 2012). The Philosophy of Edmund Husserl. Springer. p. v. ISBN 9789400750432.
  3. ^ Cairns, Dorion (October 2, 2012). The Philosophy of Edmund Husserl. ISBN 978-94-007-5043-2.
  4. ^ "Search - Directory of Special Collections of Research Value in Canadian Libraries".
  5. ^ Bell, Jason (February 2014). "On Four Originators of Transatlantic Phenomenology". Josiah Royce, Edmund Husserl, William Hocking, Winthrop Bell. pp. 47–68. doi:10.5422/fordham/9780823255283.003.0005. ISBN 978-0-8232-5528-3.
  6. ^ Ward, Roger (January 25, 2015). "Review of The Relevance of Royce".
  7. ^ Bell, Jason M. (2011). "The German Translation of Royce's Epistemology by Husserl's Student Winthrop Bell: A Neglected Bridge of Pragmatic-Phenomenological Interpretation?". The Pluralist. 6 (1): 46–62. doi:10.5406/pluralist.6.1.0046. JSTOR 10.5406/pluralist.6.1.0046. S2CID 144317418.
  8. ^ a b c d "Winthrop Pickard Bell: Man of the Maritimes, Citizen of the World".
  9. ^ "Winthrop Pickard Bell".
  10. ^ MacIntyre, Alasdair (2007). Edith Stein: A Philosophical Prologue. Rowman & Littlefield. p. 16. ISBN 978-0-7425-5953-0.
  11. ^ Stein, Edith (2014). Letters to Roman Ingarden. Washington, D.C.: ICS Publications. ISBN 978-1-939272-25-6.
  12. ^ Bell, Winthrop Pickard; Angus, Ian (2012). "The Idea of a Nation". Symposium. 16 (2): 34–46. doi:10.5840/symposium201216226. ISSN 1480-2333.
  13. ^ a b Fraser, Elizabeth (June 4, 2019). "Canada's unsung hero: Academic turned spy foresaw WW II, says UNB scholar". CBC News.
  14. ^ a b Bell, Jason (April 29, 2023). "The history of espionage shows how spying contributes to a free society". The Globe and Mail. Retrieved April 15, 2024.
  15. ^ Cairns, Dorion (1973). "My Own Life". In Kersten, Frederick; Zaner, Richard M. (eds.). Phenomenology:Continuation and Criticism. The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff. pp. 5–6. ISBN 978-94-010-2379-5.
  16. ^ Spiegelberg, Herbert (March 9, 2013). The Context of the Phenomenological Movement. p. 229. ISBN 9789401732703.
  17. ^ "Bibliography". preserve.lib.unb.ca. Retrieved May 19, 2022.
  18. ^ a b Bell, Jason. Cracking the Nazi Code: The Untold Story of Agent A12 and the Solving of the Holocaust Code. Pegasus Books, 2024.
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