The Walter Hines Page School of International Relations was formed through the actions of George L. Radcliffe (President of the Alumni Association) as a memorial to Walter Hines Page (Fellow in Greek, 1876-1878), one of the first Johns Hopkins Fellows and a successful career diplomat. A luncheon held in New York, in April 1924, launched plans to form the school and raise an endowment. Owen D. Young served as chairman of the fundraising board, and secured an initial gift from Edward W. Bok to allow the school to open immediately. Despite the poor performance of fundraising activities, John Van Antwerp MacMurray was selected as the first director and took office in February 1930, with the school officially opening in October of the same year. The school was established to support research in foreign relations and policy, granting degrees only in conjunction with the Social Sciences or Humanities groups of the Faculty of Philosophy.

Frederick Sherwood Dunn took over the directorship as executive secretary in 1933 when MacMurray took a leave of absence to re-enter the diplomatic corps. Dunn served in this capacity past 1936, when MacMurray resigned, to 1938, when Owen Lattimore was appointed director. Lattimore himself was on leave from 1941 to 1944 to serve as an advisor to Chiang-kai-Shek and the United States Government, again leaving Dunn to fill in. Lattimore returned to the School in 1944 and worked vigorously to develop its programs.

In 1947, John DeFrancis was appointed assistant professor, and in conjunction with the History, Geography, Political Science, and Political Economy departments, the school increased its activities, centering on Lattimore's area of specialty, the Far East, China and Mongolia. During the next few years the school was successful and productive, only to be cut short in 1951 by Senator Joseph McCarthy's accusation that Lattimore was the "top Soviet agent in this country," and by the investigations of Senator Tydings' Foreign Relations Subcommittee and Senator McCarran's Internal Security Subcommittee. When a federal grand jury indicted Lattimore on seven counts of perjury in December 1952, the Trustees granted him leave of absence with pay. Hopkins was severely criticized in some quarters for not firing Lattimore outright, prior to any guilty verdict; see the records of the Office of the President, series 1, file number 902, for correspondence on this matter.

While Lattimore was officially on leave of absence, the University acquired the School of Advanced International Studies, an independent institution located in Washington, DC. On April 16, 1953, President Detlev W. Bronk announced a reorganization of the University, "to simplify Johns Hopkins' academic structure;" this simplification included disbanding the Page School, which had suffered a decrease in contributions due to its close association with Lattimore.

The charges against him dropped, Owen Lattimore returned in 1955 to teach in the Department of History until 1963, when he left the University to set up a new Department of Chinese Studies at Leeds University in England.

Bibliography:
French, John C. A History of the University Founded by Johns Hopkins. Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins Press, 1946, pp. 240-243.
Rohr, Charles J. "The Walter Hines Page School of International Relations," The Johns Hopkins Alumni Magazine 20 (November 1931):23-31.