American naturalist, U.S. State Department official, author, and academic (1910– 1998)
Louis Joseph Halle Jr. (17 November 1910, New York City – 13 August 1998, Geneva, Switzerland) was an American naturalist, author, U.S. State Department official, and professor of international studies in Geneva.[1]
As a young man, he worked for a railway company in Central America and later with a publishing house in New York. For a year, he did graduate study in anthropology at Harvard, then explored boundary rivers between Guatemala and Mexico by mule and dugout canoe.[1]
He served in the US Army before World War II and in the Coast Guard during World War II. He was a Latin American specialist employed by the US State Department Policy Planning Staff from the mid 1940s to 1954. From 1954 to 1956 at the University of Virginia, he was a researcher on American foreign policy. He became in 1956 a professor at the Graduate Institute of International Studies in Geneva. He retired there as professor emeritus in 1973 but remained in Geneva.[1]
He was the author of 22 books.[1] In 1941 he received the John Burroughs Medal for Birds Against Men.[2]
Family
Louis J. Halle Jr. married Barbara Mark in 1946 and was the father of five children.[1] The famous inventor and philanthropist Hiram Halle was a brother of Louis J. Halle, Sr.[3] and an uncle of Louis J. Halle Jr.
Selected publications
Transcaribbean: A Travel Book of Guatemala, El Salvador, British Honduras. NY; Toronto: Longmans, Green & Co. 1936; 311 pages{{cite book}}: CS1 maint: postscript (link)
Birds Against Men. NY: Viking Press. 1938; drawings by Lynd Ward, 228 pages{{cite book}}: CS1 maint: postscript (link)[4]
The Ideological Imagination: The Rise of Mass Bigotry in Our Time, and Its Roots in the Thought of Hobbes, Rousseau, and Marx. Chicago: Quadrangle Books. 1972.
The Sea and the Ice: A Naturalist in Antarctica. Audubon Library. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, in cooperation with the National Audubon Society. 1973.[7]