Foundations of the American Century
Page 14
Yet, the realpolitik favored by the state, philanthropy, and university IR leaders still represented only a partial aspect of the overall globalist project. The United States, as a democracy, featured a powerful Congress that all too frequently swayed to the winds of public opinion. State elites and their allies feared the power of American public opinion and sought better to understand its laws of motion and, thereby, to intervene in public debates and mould elite, attentive and, indirectly, mass opinion. The Princeton public-opinion studies project, the CFR’s regional committees, and the FPA’s and IPR’s meetings and conferences for college and high school students more than adequately demonstrate the seriousness of elite efforts to engineer the consent of the American people behind the globalist project. It is no coincidence that belief in the veracity of state power in academic IR should develop at the same time as key elites came to believe that the United States was ready to assume the moral and political leadership of the world, hence justifying support of an increasingly dense national and international network of foundation-sponsored organizations and activities.
The next section of the book—chapters 4 to 7—considers in greater depth the influence of postwar area studies programs, which were used not only to encourage organized learning about the world that United States elites wished to lead but also better to intervene in that world in order to promote American power and combat its enemies. Chapter 4 explores the foundations’ roles in promoting Americanism and combating anti-Americanism during the Cold War.
4
PROMOTING AMERICANISM, COMBATING ANTI-AMERICANISM, AND DEVELOPING A COLD WAR AMERICAN STUDIES NETWORK
American private enterprise… may strike out and save its position all over the world, or sit by and witness its own funeral. That responsibility is positive and vigorous leadership in the affairs of the world—political, social and economic…. As the largest producer, the largest source of capital, and the biggest contributors to the global mechanism, we must set the pace and assume the responsibility of the majority stockholder in this corporation known as the world…. Nor is this for a given term of office. This is a permanent responsibility.
—Leo D. Welch, Standard Oil (1946)
We have about 50 percent of the world’s wealth but only 6.3 percent of its population…. In this situation, we cannot fail to be the object of envy and resentment. Our real task… is to devise a pattern of relationships which will permit us to maintain this position of disparity without positive detriment to our national security.
—George Kennan, Policy Planning Staff, State Department (1948)
There are indeed ideologies which Americans cannot tolerate… and there are political devices and points of view to which Americans must declare themselves eternally hostile.
—John W. Gardner, vice president, Carnegie Corporation (1948)
The United States emerged from World War II as the world’s premier power.1 It was militarily victorious, almost unscathed by a war fought thousands of miles from the mainland, and now enjoyed a massively expanded industrial capacity. It also possessed “pent up” capital looking for suitable investment outlets.2 The United States had, as we have seen, also been developing the domestic infrastructure for globalism—greater knowledge of the world’s most strategically important regions and countries. There was bipartisan support for a greater role for the United States in the world, especially through new international organizations such as the United Nations, International Monetary Fund, and the World Bank. The conditions were ripe for American hegemony.
Yet there were anxieties among U.S. elites. A reemergence of isolationist opinion, the lack of public commitment to permanent American global leadership, and the rising influence of communism and nationalism/neutralism, especially in Europe but also in Asia, threatened to take even greater portions of the world out of the circuits of the global capitalist system. It would be difficult to “sell” American global hegemony as a positive good despite the ability and willingness of American elites to take up the “responsibilities of power” to create a “healthy international environment” of market economies, which they believed to be the only way to thwart postwar political and economic crises of the kind that had scarred the 1930s.3
It was under such conditions that American elites sought to develop strategies for global hegemony. The construction of the “Soviet threat” as an existential struggle between freedom and slavery, civilization and barbarism4—effectively conflated in the public mind with communist and other leftist-nationalist movements with little linkage with the Soviet Union—became the principal justification for American and Western rearmament and expansion, under a “defensive” rhetoric.5 Opposition to American hegemonic policies was attributed to communist influence or anti-Americanism, and combating both was seen as essential to a “healthy international environment” of open economies and societies.
Therefore, the ideologies that John W. Gardner in the epigraph claims are intolerable to “Americans” are frequently labeled “anti-Americanism” or “un-Americanism.” American philanthropic foundations played key roles in combating “anti-Americanism.”6 On the positive front, the foundations promoted the most attractive aspects of American life, values, and institutions. More problematically, however, and especially during the Cold War, American foundations fought “anti-Americanism,” as they defined it, by challenging those tendencies within the United States and globally that opposed “Americanism,” for example, Third World anticolonial and European nationalist movements. In both sets of activities, the foundations were acting in accord with the expansionist objectives of the American state and the East Coast foreign policy Establishment.
With large-scale financial resources deployed through national and global networks, the foundations’ struggles on behalf of their definition of anti-Americanism were highly influential. As this was an intensely political and ideological activity, it violated their oft-publicized nonpolitical and scientific mission.7 Their more or less open collaboration with American state agencies further highlighted their effective and enthusiastic incorporation into the machinery of successive administrations.8 State-private networks in American studies helped foster communities of scholars producing intellectual work and exchange; interpreters of U.S. culture, history, and values; and, ultimately, a positive environment for transatlantic diplomacy. Once a sustainable network of “native scholar-power” had been established, foundations and U.S. state agencies engaged in “partial withdrawal” and moved on to fresh territories.9 More negatively, foundation and U.S. state funding aimed to undermine opposition to American power and policies, especially pacifism or neutralism (as between the superpowers), particularly among allied nations. As Robert Spiller notes, despite their “differing” aims, state and foundation programs “tended to supplement rather than conflict with each other.”10
American philanthropy’s leaders saw numerous threats to their globalist aspirations: Europeans’ and others’ envy and resentment of American power and ignorance or misunderstanding of the new superpower’s society, culture, and politics. Opposition to U.S. foreign policy, therefore, was seen as based on emotion, ignorance, and nostalgia. The solution was cultural or public diplomacy targeted at strategic elites to persuade them that the United States was a force for good in the world, defending freedom and fighting tyranny; that its culture was deep and not shallow; that its material wealth was not the sole obsession of its culture; and that it had a serious interest in abstract ideas. In short, the aim was to show that U.S. power was not the naked expression of a dangerously superficial society, a volatile political system, or a hollow political elite.11 American leadership was cultured, educated, rational, sober, and thoughtful. It could be trusted to use its power wisely in the interests of the world system, not purely in its own narrow national interests. This was a “soft-power” strategy to complement the global reach of America’s postwar military might.12
This chapter considers the foundations’ programs in promoting Americanism—espec
ially through developing American studies programs at home—and combating anti-Americanism among European elites.13 It considers the role of the Carnegie Corporation in injecting fresh vigor into American studies programs at home, in the context of Cold War ideological competition; the role of the Ford Foundation in financing Henry Kissinger’s Harvard Summer Seminar and the Salzburg Seminar in American Studies, targeted at European elites’ anxieties about U.S. power; the role of the Rockefeller Foundation in developing American studies in Britain and the European Association for American Studies; and the role of Ford in furthering the clandestine anticommunist Congress for Cultural Freedom.
“Anti-Americanism” is a pejorative term; it is the anti-Semitism of the intellectuals to some, a psychological disorder to others, or a reaction to modernism sourced in envy and resentment of American wealth and power.14 State and foundation officials routinely viewed (and view today) critiques of America or American policies through such lenses. Criticism of the United States is seen as rooted in prejudice or anxieties or felt inferiorities of the “anti-American”—not in American policies. In effect, seeing anti-Americanism this way removes “America” from anti-Americanism. Consequently, U.S. policies can continue unchanged, although greater efforts are required to allay irrational fears and improve understanding of American motives. Even opposition to America’s war of aggression on Vietnam was characterized as “anti-Americanism” in foundation reports.15 Here, then, is tacit acceptance that some level or other of “anti-Americanism”—whether based on resentment and envy or on rational opposition—is inevitable and a cost worth bearing, because a change of policy would undermine or contradict a core U.S. interest or objective.
SELLING AMERICANISM AT HOME
This section considers some of the ways in which the Carnegie Corporation promoted American studies at home, in the context of America’s rise to globalism after 1945 and its increasingly conflictual relationship with the Soviet bloc.16 The evidence shows how deep were the concerns of foundation officials and trustees regarding the nature of the cultural, ideological, and value-based Cold War. They were particularly concerned that America’s students lacked conviction in America’s heritage, in what America stood for, and how that might hinder the rising superpower in aggressively facing down the challenges of European dissent, Third World nationalism, and Soviet power.17
CC actively promoted the teaching and study of “American Civilization” and values in colleges and universities across the country. A corporation report of 1950, written by Vice President John Gardner, noted that students were being educated in “a moral vacuum,” in which values were being learned in rote fashion, lacking the conviction needed to engage in superpower competition.18 Gardner aimed to use Carnegie funds to explore how college students could be made more conscious of their national values, as they “may have to defend [them] tenaciously… [given future] ideological, economic, and perhaps military conflict…. Wisdom of policy, economic vigor, and military might can carry us far, but no one doubts that in the ultimate test we shall have to seek our strength in the hearts and minds of the American people.”19 It is clear that because the corporation lamented inadequate levels of appreciation and felt intensity of American values, it chose to approve university American studies programs most likely to lead to an appreciation of U.S. civilization—arts and humanities—and shied away from the more critical social-scientific disciplines. One of the problems Gardner noted was the tendency in American education to promote overly rationalist and positivistic ways of understanding values; values were things to be learned through “value neutrality,” not lived. In fact, “non-rational considerations are much closer to the heart of the issue” than rational, reasoned, and knowledge-based ones.20 In this regard, Gardner overlooked the fact that Carnegie had championed the virtues of rational, positivistic social-science methods for decades.
Gardner conceded that promoting a narrow idea of “America” would play into the McCarthyites’ hands. “We must insist that the term ‘Americanism’ does not achieve its greatest utility as a cloak for one’s own prejudices. We must assert that irresponsible [i.e., McCarthyite] use of the term ‘un-American’ is intolerable,” as it divides Americans and “leaves them confused as to the identity of their true enemies.” Controversially, Gardner was convinced “there are indeed ideologies which Americans cannot tolerate, and that there are political devices and points of view to which Americans must declare themselves eternally hostile.”21 The only criticism Gardner received for this conclusion, as head of a “liberal” philanthropic organization, was from the preeminent student of attitude formation Gordon W. Allport, for whom “the red flag of danger” went up; he enquired whether there really are “thoughts that we can’t have as Americans?” Allport suggested to Gardner that he alter the wording, acknowledging that Gardner was indeed “on the side of the angels.”22 Gardner reformulated his conclusion thus: “There are indeed ideologies which are incompatible with the system of values we would like to think of as American.” Gardner claimed that he certainly had not meant that America “go in for some kind of thought control,”23 yet the implication is quite clear and was even so to a “friend” of the corporation.
Gardner’s report called for a renewed belief that, despite the complexities of the large-scale forces that seem to determine the lives of individuals, people could take control of their own destinies: “those societies which have in fact influenced or changed the course of history have been supported by the conviction that their own efforts were effective in bringing about a scheme of things in which they believed.”24 Carnegie wanted to ensure that, in America’s rise to global economic power and military reach, it would help in any way it could.
Between 1949 and 1958, the corporation invested over $900,000 in developing American studies in the United States, including courses in “American civilization” and a vibrant American Studies Association.25 The purpose was simple: to teach America to be more self-conscious, to “Know thyself ,” to understand its past achievements and glory in them, and, most importantly, to be prepared to make the ultimate sacrifice in their defense. This was, it was hoped, to be achieved by sponsoring the writing of popularly accessible histories of the United States by distinguished historians; the program was decidedly not for the promotion of “fundamental historical research” or for a broader understanding of the “mysteries of historical scholarship.” Rather, it “will always be to illuminate one or other facet of American Civilization.”26 At all times, however, it was the contribution to meeting the “present historical crisis” by the study and teaching of American studies that was the litmus test for funding by Carnegie.27 After a decade of the Cold War, the Carnegie Corporation concluded that its almost $1 million investment had created some excellent American studies programs at Brown University, Barnard College, the University of Pennsylvania, and Colgate and was supporting preexisting high-quality programs at Amherst and Princeton. Those universities also featured strong student governance, bringing to life the civic virtues associated with Americanism and its educational curriculum.28
Carnegie, therefore, was fighting un-Americanism at home as an effective part of the Truman anticommunist campaign; the fears of disloyalty in the nation and federal government had their counterpart in the academy, in the concern over the mental and emotional fitness of America’s youth to take up the struggle against enemies domestic and foreign.29 Far from being above the fray of ideological and political turmoil, Carnegie and the other foundations were completely immersed in the principal currents of Cold War politics.
This was further demonstrated once McCarthyites in Congress charged the foundations with un-Americanism. The foundations’ arguments in their defense are instructive: they denied being anti-American, un-American, or pro-Marxist, stating categorically that they never awarded grants to known communists. That is, they were of the same anticommunist mindset as most of America’s political elite in the 1950s—they just used more subtle methods. Dean Rusk, the president of
the Rockefeller Foundation, stated: “Our foundations refrain as a matter of policy from making grants to known Communists,” for two reasons. First, such grants violate “the clearly expressed public policies of the United States,” and second, because of “the increasing assaults by Communism upon science and scholarship.”30 These remarks were made without a hint of self-doubt or irony. In relation to “repentant Communists,” Rusk was more understanding though, naturally. “One questions… [their]… political naivete, and… willingness to submit their minds and spirits to totalitarian discipline.” Rusk also denied that any of the Rockefeller Foundation’s activities could be described as “political” or as “propaganda.”31 In denying their support for left-wing projects, the foundations were reaffirming their ideological commitments to Americanism, the U.S. government, and free enterprise—all objectively considered to be “good things.” Valuable enough, of course, to be worthy of export.