Earle dismissed the “divide” between domestic and international affairs, recommending social, economic, industrial, and educational reform in order better to prepare for military conflict. Earle suggested that the American people also needed to develop a “war mind.” He recommended that the United States form a national security council to assess national strategic and security needs. Earle’s definition of “national security” extended well beyond America’s borders: “security” meant intervening overseas to prevent the emergence of threats—with the form of intervention varying with each specific circumstance.45
The mental preparation for war that Earle recommended was a significant element of the work of the Princeton seminar’s participants. Alfred Vagts, for example, demanded that America’s college students be properly “educated” to understand the “violence of the world” and be prepared for the “unremitting strain… of consistent military effort” demanded by the struggle against “totalitarianism.” He insisted that colleges be transformed from “Ivory Towers into Watch Towers.”46
Earle’s aim, specifically in relation to the ACIS, was the conduct of “basic research” on the “interests, obligations, and opportunities of the United States” with regard to the postwar settlement. The term “basic research” was expansive enough to permit examination of how and on which terms the United States might participate in peacemaking and use its experience of federalism for global ends. As the war progressed, ACIS decided to conduct policy-oriented research, with a focus on four areas: the U.S. military position, the economic and social aspects of war preparation, U.S.–Western hemisphere relations, and studies of the “basic tendencies in present [sic] Germany, Japan and the U.S.S.R. and their implications for future United States relations.”47 The study of such global regions emphasizes the implicit and explicit belief that world affairs were American affairs and that the new technologies of warfare precluded an isolationist stance in foreign policy. The key issue to Earle and his collaborators was to construct a viable “grand strategy” that would maintain a balance of power, defend “vital interests,” be supported by an appropriate military capability, and, significantly, retain the long-term support of the American taxpayer.48
Earle solicited the State Department as early as 1937 in regard to establishing a policy-oriented academic seminar aiming to produce “a grand strategy for the United States.”49 With a CC grant in February 1940 (of $86,500), Earle’s research seminar established the relatively novel view (in America) that “military affairs are a legitimate and vital [academic] concern.” Such studies, he argued, were “An Obligation of Scholarship.” In a later memorandum, Earle argued that “national defence has always been a motive in American history and that war must be regarded as a fundamental social phenomenon.” He urged, therefore, the study of “the role of military service in a democracy, the concept of hemispheric defence, our [military] position in the Far East… and military policy as a problem of legislation and administration.” In late 1940 and in the spring of 1941, the CC provided $38,000 to Earle and the institute for his study of “United States Military Problems and Policy.”50
Earle’s seminar published reports ranging from isolationism (Historical Origins of American Isolation) to the promotion of Realism (Geo-political Doctrines and Elements of Seapower and Balance of Power in Europe and the Far East). Up to 1942, the seminar produced major studies on American naval power and was in the process of producing Albert K. Weinberg’s The Doctrine of Isolation in American History. Such was the European (i.e., Realist) outlook and ethnic composition of Earle’s seminar that one CC trustee, Arthur W. Page, referred to it as a “refugee colony.”51 To Earle, however, scholars from the more statist European tradition were an essential part of the reformation of American attitudes to international relations. Indeed, one of the seminar’s most enduring products, The Makers of Modern Strategy, resulted from the synergy of American and European experts. As Earle’s work gained academic recognition, the military services called him for consultation in Washington and also to make overseas inspection visits, specifically to military and naval bases associated with the “Destroyers-Bases Agreement” of 1940 between Britain and the United States.52 Furthermore, Earle assisted Archibald MacLeish and William Donovan in the Office of the Coordinator of Information and simultaneously coordinated a program of fourteen lectures on the background to the European war for the U.S. Army’s Training Division.53
Earle’s seminar also had a significant influence on other universities’ approach to military studies and IR, partly through an increased demand for lectures by seminar members and partly through provision of advice on establishing new courses. Albert Weinberg, for example, lectured on isolationism at Johns Hopkins University, Earle lectured at the University of California and at Princeton, and Herbert Rosinski gave the Lowell Lectures at Harvard.54 An article by Earle, “National Defense and Political Science,” inspired several leading universities to establish their own courses on war, power, and politics. Time magazine published Earle’s “model syllabus” in military studies, spreading its reach.55 In addition, the seminar distributed to universities and military academies two bibliographies—Sea Power in the Pacific (1942) and Modern War—Its Social and Economic Aspects. In 1942, seminar members published a book of lectures, The Background of Our War, for the War Department’s army-orientation courses.56 The academic and military significance of the seminar was acknowledged by the relocation of the American Military Institute to Princeton and the appointment of the seminar member Harvey de Weerd as editor of the AMI’s journal, Military Affairs. The War Department also considered appointing the seminar to the position of liaison between its “geopolitical” section and American universities.57
The impact of Earle’s The Makers of Modern Strategy was also far reaching. William T. R. Fox declared it a classic in 1949, and Olson and Groom argue it pioneered “strategic studies.” In the 1970s, when interest in pre-nuclear strategy increased, it was Earle’s volume that scholars turned to; the book was reissued in 1986.58 Earle noted that the book had “put military studies on a respectable academic footing… [awakening] students of politics to the fact that military strategy is an inherent part of statecraft and can be ignored only at our dire peril.”59 Bernard Brodie was probably the best-known individual product of the Princeton seminar. His Sea Power in the Machine Age (1941) was widely adopted on university courses, his Layman’s Guide to Naval Strategy (1942) sold over twenty thousand copies in its first year, and his The Absolute Weapon (1946) effectively pioneered nuclear-deterrence theory.60
Earle’s work at the Institute for Advanced Study and ACIS represented policy-oriented, hard-headed Realism. This is illustrated by its seminar program, its publications, and by the North Atlantic Conference. The work was dubbed “indispensable” by Columbia University’s Nathaniel Peffer in his report to the CC. The research program of ACIS was having an effect right across the academic discipline of international studies, as scholars who participated in the Princeton seminar returned to their own institutions, exercising “a certain invigorating influence in their own milieu.”61 Earle’s Princeton seminar placed at center stage national security orientations to academic IR in the United States. According to Fox, by the late 1940s the majority of American IR treatises and college course syllabi stressed “the nature and operation of the state system… basic power factors… policies of the great powers,” an important shift from the prewar position.62
ENHANCING THE STATE’S RESEARCH AND ELITE THINK TANKS’ ADVISORY CAPACITIES
If Realism in theory and practice is focused on state power, then the Realists/globalists in the United States in the 1930s and 1940s did their utmost to enhance their state’s capacities in various ways. Leading the effort was the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR), a think tank at the heart of the American foreign policy establishment.63 Established in 1921 as an expert internationalist organization, by World War II the CFR had become the most authoritative American institution in its field, iss
uing the journal Foreign Affairs.64 Its principal contribution to building the State Department was through the War-Peace Studies Project, which aimed at nothing less than the definition of American national interests, the development of blueprints for policy makers, and the provision of expert guidance on the nature of the postwar world and America’s leadership role within it. The CFR suggested the War-Peace Studies Project to the State Department, as the former wanted to seize the historic opportunity to elevate America to “the premier power in the world.” Given its politically sensitive character, the State Department recommended that the Rockefeller Foundation finance the effort.65
Between 1927 and 1945, the Rockefeller Foundation gave over $443,000 to the CFR for research that used the “study-group method,” whereby group-based study among experts and practitioners resulted in authoritative publications. This method produced numerous books, including Allen W. Dulles and H. F. Armstrong’s Can We Be Neutral? (1936).66 The council’s War-Peace Studies Project was funded from beginning (1939) to end (1945) by the Rockefeller Foundation, constituting a massive research effort that involved almost one hundred leading academics.67 The project was divided into five study groups: economic and financial; political; armaments; territorial; and peace aims. Each group had a designated leader and a research secretary, and an overall steering committee allocated topics to each group, a member of which produced an initial statement of the problem, which, after protracted discussion, was written up and forwarded to President Roosevelt and the State Department. The project was connected with five cabinet-level departments and other official agencies. They held 362 meetings and issued almost seven hundred separate papers for official consumption.68
Given the scale of funding—$300,000 between 1939 and 1945—the foundation kept a very close eye on the CFR’s value to foreign policy. Although the CFR easily rejected its most extravagant critics, even a cautious assessment must recognize its extraordinary closeness with the State Department. According to William P. Bundy, a CFR insider since the 1950s, the relationship between the council and the state was, during the war, the closest “any private organization [has enjoyed] at any time in American history.”69
If its precise influence is difficult to determine, it is clear that the CFR’s Economic and Financial Group developed the imperialistic “Grand Area” concept, which declared the whole world an “American national interest,” a characterization shared by the State Department. In addition, the Territorial Group recommended that FDR declare Greenland a part of the Americas and therefore under the “protection” of the Monroe Doctrine. Finally, the CFR’s groups were instrumental in drawing up memoranda that constituted the Moscow Agreement of 1943.70 Isaiah Bowman argued that the CFR’s work had filled vital gaps in thinking with regard to the Moscow Agreement. Council memoranda, he wrote, had “a blend of philosophy and action” that were most useful and without which the State Department would have been greatly impoverished during its preparations for Moscow.71 Another referee endorsed this appreciation of the CFR. CFR groups, he suggested, had originated the agreement and had “made it possible for intellectual breezes from outside to blow through the State Department.”72 Finally, Leo Pasvolsky (special assistant to Secretary of State Cordell Hull) said that the CFR had not only initiated the Moscow process but had also played a vital role in “training and conditioning” people for official service more generally.73
The influence of the CFR’s War-Peace Project also proved significant when the State Department established committees parallel to ones set up by the council and then gradually absorbed the latter into its own machinery. It was only in 1947 that the State Department established its own policy planning staff, a development prefigured by the War-Peace Studies Project. Reports on the role of the CFR’s groups were uniformly upbeat.74 State Department officials believed that the CFR men were to be trusted as expert, responsible, and discreet. It was on the basis of such reports that the foundation’s president, Raymond Fosdick, wrote to the CFR that “the Rockefeller Foundation is very proud to have had a part in this significant project.”75
In this way, the Rockefeller Foundation funded research that had far-reaching consequences for the United States. CFR men entered the State Department, helped define America’s national interest, wrote memoranda, and exercised considerable influence, notably in the realm of contingency planning.76 RF continued funding CFR because the State Department had neither the money nor machinery for long-term planning of its own. In so doing, RF violated one of its self-declared objects: to steer clear of policy making and politics in general. But the War-Peace Project was welcomed as a great experiment, “an exceptional opportunity to relate knowledge and action,” according to one RF official.77
The three programs reviewed above were focused on state power: its centrality to international affairs and to war and peace making, as well as to its need for greater international knowledge-construction infrastructure, academically trained graduates, and university and think tank foreign policy expertise. In effect, the programs were organized, funded, and led by state intellectuals from the foundations, elite think tanks, and universities. Their approach, however, to the overall requirements of a new interventionist and anti-isolationist foreign policy was much broader than this. State intellectuals did not view state power in narrow terms or ignore the fact that “the state” operated within and was inextricably bound up with a specific social and political system with a history, myths, and culture rooted in popular sovereignty. On the contrary, state intellectuals viewed the U.S. state’s global role and mission as founded upon shifting the main political parties, Congress, public opinion, and the press away from isolationism. There was no divide in their minds between promoting Realism, building state capacities, and mobilizing Americans for globalism. The next section of this chapter places the state-building programs discussed above into a broader context of mobilizing America behind globalism and against isolationism and pacifism. It begins with a program for the study of public opinion at Princeton and then examines the opinion-mobilizing activities of the Foreign Policy Association, the Institute of Pacific Relations, and the CFR’s Regional Committees.
THE PRINCETON PUBLIC-OPINION STUDIES PROGRAM
Public opinion was, of course, of fundamental concern to those most interested in the construction of a new globalist consensus. The Rockefeller Foundation acted strategically to foster lines of study, teaching, research, and other activities that touched public opinion. Most significant was RF’s funding of Princeton’s Office of Public Opinion Research, led by Hadley Cantril. RF’s president, Raymond B. Fosdick, argued that “nations fight not only on military, economic, and diplomatic fronts: they fight with words and pictures.” It was with the impact of “words” that Cantril was principally concerned, particularly those used by American leaders regarding the war and the postwar world.78 The foundation gave the office $90,000 over four years (1940–1943) to study public opinion and opinion trends; to experiment with new, research techniques; and to train a new generation of researchers. Of the total, $15,000 was allocated for the tabulation and analysis of poll data collected over the previous five years by the American Institute of Public Opinion, the organization led by George Gallup.79 A further $5,000 was used to pay Gallup to ask questions about war issues on Cantril’s behalf.80 Cantril, with his desire to discover “who believes what, how intensely, and why,” was at the cutting edge of public-opinion research in the United States. If his research could reveal, as he claimed, “basic [American] values and attitudes,” then he would be in a position to influence their “specific war attitudes.”
Cantril studied opinion as influenced by “objective” characteristics such as income, education, ethnicity, religion, region, and age to “learn why opinion changes, [and] predict opinion trends.”81 Cantril passed a great deal of information to President Roosevelt’s office, to the Council of National Defense, and military intelligence. “The practical leader,” Cantril suggested, “when confronted with a real prob
lem, could avail himself of this information.” He further commented that such information could be used to “guide education” and to help government “predict the resistances they would meet in formulating peace proposals; it would show what education and propaganda is necessary… to get people to accept a ‘just peace.’”82 Indeed, government officials suggested that Cantril regard some of his findings as ‘“military secrets” to be kept out of the public domain.
Cantril studied public attitudes toward Latin America, the impact of presidential radio addresses, the popularity of a “Keep-Out-of-War” Party, and the socioeconomic characteristics of isolationists and interventionists. Briefly, the research showed that Americans interested in Latin America were more likely to be anti-Nazi and pro-English. From this, Cantril extrapolated how an hypothetical propagandist might use that knowledge by building up a general anti-Nazi frame of reference that could then be mobilized “to create specific opinions for specific action against Germany in South America” or anywhere else. Finally, he added, to transform an attitude into an action required propaganda that would increase the “personal significance, [the]… ‘felt intensity’” of the Nazi threat.83
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