Talk:Mansfield Freeman/Temp

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Mansfield Freeman M.A. Hon. J.D. (1895-1992) was a successful businessman, scholar of Chinese philosophy and dedicated philanthropist. He was born in Waltham, Massachusetts on September 16, 1895. After graduating from Wesleyan University, Middletown, Connecticut, he worked as a private tutor for a year in Massachusates. He then served a year in a base hospital in France in 1918. After seeing an advertisement on the New York Times, he went to Tsing Hua College, Peking, China to teach English and Philosophy from 1919-1924. He married Mary Houghton in 1919, shortly before going to China. One son, Houghton "Buck" Freeman, who was born on the campus of Tsing Hua College, was Wesleyan University's first Japanese major. A second son died in infancy.

In 1924, Freeman began what would be a distinguished career in the world of insurance, becoming the Peking Manager of the Asia Life Insurance Co., which later became AIG. Over the next seventeen years, he would move up the ranks to become President of the U.S. Life Insurance Co. from 1941-1947. Freeman returned to the U.S., serving as vice-chairman of C.V. Starr and Co., Inc., in New York from 1947 until his retirement in 1960.

As a philanthropist, he was chiefly involved in famine relief and development of Asian Studies in the United States. He also wrote two books on Chinese philosophy, and quite a few articles related to China.

Mansfield Freeman died at his farm in Greensboro, Vermont on November 17, 1992. In the two decades before his death, Freeman helped develop the study of East Asia through gifts that expanded the libraries and established the Mansfield Freeman East Asian Studies Center and the Mansfield Freeman professorship in East Asian Studies at Wesleyan.

After his father's death, Houghton Freeman established the Freeman Foundation for the purpose of strengthening the bonds of understanding between the United States and China. Most of the Foundation's annual giving of nearly $30 million goes to organizations that foster greater Asian-American appreciation and understanding. Notably, the Asian Freeman Scholarship which sponsors 22 students each year from East Asia to study in Wesleyan University is one of the most ambitious and prestigious scholarships in the United States.