Foundations of the American Century

by Inderjeet Parmar

  95. Simpson, Science of Coercion, 23.

  96. Mark L. Chadwin, The Hawks of World War II (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1968).

  97. Inderjeet Parmar, “‘Another important group that needs more cultivation… ’: The CFR and the Mobilisation of Black Americans for Interventionism, 1939–1941,” Ethnic and Racial Studies 27, no. 5 (2004): 710–731.

  98. A. S. Layton, International Politics and Civil Rights Policies in the United States, 1941–1960 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 39.

  99. H. Agar, A Time for Greatness (New York: Little, Brown, 1942), 42.

  100. Sulzberger was the publisher of the New York Times and a Rockefeller Foundation trustee and executive committee member. Markel later became a public-opinion expert, publishing a book on the subject, Public Opinion and Foreign Policy (New York: Harper, 1949).

  101. See Walter Lippmann, Public Opinion (New York: Macmillan, 1941); and Edward Bernays, “The Engineering of Consent,” Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science 250 (March 1947).

  102. Peffer, “Memorandum on Carnegie Grants in the Field of International Relations,” 12.

  103. “Memorandum for Counsel: Foreign Policy Association,” June 27, 1952; in CC Grant Files, box 147, 2.

  104. Peffer, “Memorandum on Carnegie Grants in the Field of International Relations,” 12. By 1945, membership had increased to almost 28,000; see “Report on Work of the Foreign Policy Association,” July 1944–1945, CC Grant Files, box 147.

  105. “Memorandum for Counsel: Foreign Policy Association,” 3.

  106. Peffer, “Memorandum on Carnegie Grants in the Field of International Relations,” 12. The resulting “Foreign Policy Reports” were sent by the CFR to its regional committees. The FPA’s “Report on Japan as an Economic Power” was used by the State Department in its courses for foreign-service officers specializing on the Far East; see letter, Carnegie Corporation to McCoy, 18 January 1943, CC Grant Files, box 147.

  107. Letter, CC to McCoy, 18 January 1943, CC Grant Files, box 147.

  108. Peffer, “Memorandum on Carnegie Grants in the Field of International Relations,” 14. The International Ladies Garments Workers’ Union also distributed one hundred copies of each Headline book to its educational committee; see FPA Report to the CC, October 1, 1940–April 30, 1941, 2.

  109. “FPA Education Program” report, 21 May 1943, box 147.

  110. Ibid.

  111. FPA Report, October 1, 1940–April 30, 1941, 2.

  112. See reports of FPA work for 1940–1941; 1941–1942 in CC files.

  113. See FPA report to CC, September 1, 1943–July 1, 1944, 4.

  114. “Memorandum on the Work of the Foreign Policy Association,” attached to 1941–1942 FPA report to CC, 3–4.

  115. FPA report on work, September 1, 1941–July 1, 1942; and “memorandum on the Work of the Foreign Policy Association,” attached to that report.

  116. “Memorandum for Counsel,” 12–13.

  117. Ibid., 11.

  118. “Memorandum on the Work of the Foreign Policy Association,” 1, for a favorable opinion from Undersecretary of State Summer Welles; and letter, quoting former Secretary of State Edward Stettinius Jr., 28 October 1946, from the FPA to the CC, box 147.

  119. Lawrence T. Woods, Asia-Pacific Diplomacy: Nongovernmental Organizations and International Relations (Vancouver, B.C.: UBC Press, 1993), 7.

  120. John N. Thomas, The Institute of Pacific Relations, Asian Scholars, and American Politics (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1974), 4.

  121. Woods, Asia-Pacific Diplomacy, 8.

  122. Thomas, The Institute of Pacific Relations, Asian Scholars, and American Politics, 4.

  123. Thomas, The Institute of Pacific Relations, Asian Scholars, and American Politics, 30, 5; see also Woods, Asia-Pacific Diplomacy, 33, 35.

  124. Owen Lattimore, China Memoirs. Chiang Kai-shek and the War Against Japan (Tokyo: University of Tokyo Press, 1990), 35.

  125. Lattimore was appointed wartime political adviser to Chiang Kaishek by President Roosevelt and also joined the Office of War Information as head of its Asia-Pacific bureau. It was not “a bad thing,” Lattimore wrote, “to have a person who knew China well to be engaged in propaganda work for the Pacific areas directed against the Japanese.” China Memoirs, 167–168. The AIPR also received grants from the Rockefeller Foundation.

  126. Edward H. Berman, The Ideology of Philanthropy: The Influence of the Carnegie, Rockefeller, and Ford Foundations on American Foreign Policy (Albany, N.Y.: SUNY Press, 1983), 46.

  127. The AIPR even opened a Washington, D.C., office upon the outbreak of World War II, forging stronger government links “to facilitate cooperation in the war effort.” See Thomas, The Institute of Pacific Relations, Asian Scholars, and American Politics, 34. According to Woods, Asia-Pacific Diplomacy, 35, the AIPR was “a very useful sounding board” for governmental officials’ ideas.

  128. Figures calculated from CC Annual Reports for the entire period.

  129. Compiled from Rockefeller Foundation annual reports.

  130. W. Harold Dalgliesh, Community Education in Foreign Affairs: A Report on Nineteen American Cities (New York: CFR, 1946), 4. The AIPR also ran a study group in Cleveland, Ohio, and a small program in Detroit.

  131. Ibid., 16.

  132. Ibid.

  133. Peffer, “Memorandum on Carnegie Grants in the Field of International Relations,” 16. The AIPR was an institutional member of the ACIS whose work at the Institute of Advanced Study at Princeton led to the North Atlantic Relations conferences, in an attempt to create an Atlantic version of the IPR. See also Paul F. Hooper, “The Institute of Pacific Relations and the Origins of Asian and Pacific Studies,” Pacific Affairs 61 (Spring 1988): 98–121.

  134. See FPA reports in CC Grant Files, for 1940–1941, 1942–1942, and 1943–1944.

  135. CEIP, Division of Intercourse and Education Annual Reports, 1937 and 1939.

  136. CEIP Annual Reports, 1943, 1944, 1945.

  137. Peffer, “Memorandum on Carnegie Grants in the Field of International Relations,” 16.

  138. Produced jointly with the FPA, 1941–1942.

  139. Peffer, “Memorandum on Carnegie Grants in the Field of International Relations,” 17.

  140. Record of interview, Dollard to Wm. W. Lockwood and W. L. Holland, 6 March 1942; CC Grant Files, box 182 (AIPR).

  141. Letter, Henry James to W. A. Jessup (both CC), 7 April 1942; and letter, Lockwood to Robert M. Lester (CC), 21 January 1943; CC Grant Files, box 182.

  142. See CC annual reports. Peffer again understates the funding levels severely, with his figure of $309,000 (up to 1942).

  143. Office of the President, Record of Interview, September 3, 1937; letter, Page to Keppel, October 15, 1937; box 126, Carnegie Corporation Grant Files: Council on Foreign Relations: Committees on Foreign Relations 1937–1940. The CC initiative was officially known as the “Cooperative Adult Education Scheme,” although, in its annual reports, the CC referred to the plan as a “demonstration program in Adult Education.” Up to 1942 alone, the CC donated $100,000 to this program; by 1945, a further $70,000 had been granted.

  144. Memorandum by Walter H. Mallory, executive director of the CFR: “Project for Popular Education in International Affairs Proposed by the Carnegie Corporation,” November 1, 1937, 2.

  145. Memorandum by Phillips Bradley (associate professor of political science, Amherst College) to F. W. Keppel, 21 September 1937, 8.

  146. The Council on Foreign Relations: A Record of Twenty-Five Years, 1921–1946 (New York: CFR, 1947), 48. The original seven Committees were in Cleveland, Denver, Des Moines, Detroit, Houston, Louisville, and Portland (Oregon).

  147. Percy Bidwell (director of studies), “A Seven-Year Survey of An Educational Project in International Relations, 1938–1945,” CFR, in CC Grant Files, box 127.

  148. Percy Bidwell’s introduction to W. Harold Dagliesh, Community Education in Foreign Affairs
(New York: CFR, 1946), iii–viii.

  149. Bidwell, “A Seven-Year Survey,” 3; “Report to the Carnegie Corporation on the Work of the Foreign Relations Committees of the CFR During the 1942–43 Season,” box 127.

  150. Percy Bidwell, “Report on the Work of the Foreign Relations Committees, Season 1941–42,” box 127.

  151. Bidwell, “A Seven-Year Survey,” 5.

  152. CFR Annual Report, Report of the Executive Director (1944–1945), 14.

  153. Bidwell, “A Seven-Year Survey,” 6–7.

  154. Quotation is from “Memorandum for Counsel of Carnegie Corporation,” 1–15, June 30, 1952. CC Grant Files, 1946–55; Dulles, letter to Miller, n.d. CC Grant Files, box 127; Bidwell, 1941–42, 8; Herbert Heaton, A Scholar in Action: Edwin F. Gay (New York: Greenwood Press, 1968), 237–241.

  155. Letter, Wilson to Assistant Secretary of State Breckinridge Long, July 13, 1940; memorandum by Charles W. Yost, division of special research, to Leo Pasvolsky, 14 April 1942, 1.

  156. Miller, Man from the Valley (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1971), 87.

  157. “Notes on the American Committee for International Studies,” 5 April 1941, 2; in CC Grant Files, box 18.

  158. Proposal received and filed in CC Papers, September 3, 1940, box 18.

  159. Report on Lynd Proposal (Summary), 22 October 1940, in CC Papers, box 18. Among the five who rejected the proposal were Charles E. Merriam and Quincy Wright, both of the University of Chicago, and Henry M. Wriston, the president of Brown University and a Carnegie trustee.

  160. Report by Savage, 13 November 1940, CC Papers, box 18.

  161. Lewis A. Coser, Men of Ideas (New York: The Free Press, 1965), 339.

  162. E. C. Luck, Mixed Messages (Washington, D.C.: Brookings Institution Press, 1999), especially chapter 2, the title of which is “A Special Nation, Peerless and Indispensable.”

  163. I. Parmar, “Resurgent Academic Interest in the Council on Foreign Relations,” Politics 21 (2001): 31–39; Butler, Across the Busy Years, vol. 2. Butler held the view that the United States was “the keeper of the conscience of democracy”; cited by Luck, Mixed Messages, 21.

  164. National Security Council-68, “United States Objectives and Programs for National Security,” the April 1950 seminal Cold War blueprint, the main author of which was Paul Nitze.

  165. Nicholas J. Spykman, America’s Strategy in World Politics: The United States and the Balance of Power (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1942).

  166. J. Ruggie, “Third Try at World Order?” Political Science Quarterly 109, no. 4 (1994): 553–571.

  167. C. N. Murphy, International Organization and Industrial Change (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1994); R.W. Cox, “Labor and Hegemony,” International Organization 31, no. 3 (1977): 385–424.

  168. J. T. Shotwell, “The ILO as an Alternative to Violent Revolution,” Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science 166 (March 1933): 18.

  169. D. Fisher, “Rockefeller Philanthropy and the British Empire,” History of Education 7 (1978): 129–143.

  170. Akira Iriye, Global Community: The Role of International Organizations in the Making of the Contemporary World (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002).

  171. G. J. Ikenberry, Liberal Order and Imperial Ambition (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2006), 53.

  172. Ibid., 56, 57.

  173. Akira Iriye, Global Community: The Role of International Organizations in the Making of the Contemporary World (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002), 28.

  174. A. Bosco and C. Navari, eds., Chatham House and British Foreign Policy (London: Lothian Foundation Press, 1994).

  175. Andrew Williams concludes that the CFR, Chatham House, and Carnegie philanthropy “were part… of a transatlantic opinion-forming community.” “Before the Special Relationship: The CFR, The Carnegie Foundation, and the Rumour of an Anglo-American War,” Journal of Transatlantic Studies 1, no. 2 (2003): 233–251.

  176. Parmar, Think Tanks and Power in Foreign Policy; Shoup and Minter, Imperial Brain Trust.

  177. Bowman, cited in Parmar, Think Tanks and Power in Foreign Policy, 123.

  178. Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, Institutes of International Affairs (New York: CEIP, 1953).

  179. Parmar, Think Tanks and Power in Foreign Policy. See also K. Rietzler, “Philanthropy, Peace Research, and Revisionist Politics: Rockefeller and Carnegie Support for the Study of International Relations in Weimar Germany,” GHI Bulletin Supplement 5 (2008): 61–79. Rockefeller enthusiasm for GAP waned when the latter felt that research at GAP had “taken the form of unsystematic, individual research by members of staff, according to their several interests and inclinations” (73).

  180. P. C. Dobell and R. Willmott, “John Holmes,” International Journal 33, no. 1 (1977–1978), 109–110.

  181. T. Carothers, “A League of Their Own,” Foreign Policy (July–August 2008); see also G. John Ikenberry and Anne-Marie Slaughter, Forging a World of Liberty Under Law (Princeton, N.J.: The Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs, Princeton University, 2006).

  182. J. Lloyd, “The Anglosphere Project,” New Statesman (March 13, 2000). Interestingly, this concept is supported by the historian Robert Conquest, the former critic of U.S. power Christopher Hitchens, and the former British prime minister Gordon Brown. The continuities between Anglosphere and Anglo-Saxonism are clear. The revival of such ideas is captured by Andrew Roberts, A History of the English-Speaking Peoples Since 1900 (London: Phoenix, 2007).

  183. M. W. Doyle, “Liberalism and World Politics,” American Political Science Review 80 (1986): 1151–1169. The Princeton Project on National Security, headed by Ikenberry and Slaughter, is a champion of democratic peace theory (see chapter 8). Both Ikenberry and Doyle also acknowledge that Federal Union was an early expression of the underlying assumptions of democratic peace theory.

  184. Minutes, “World Order Preparatory Group,” first meeting, 17 July 1939; Lionel Curtis Papers, box 110–111; Bodleian Library, Oxford.

  185. Letter, Streit to Curtis, 13 May 1939; Curtis Papers, Correspondence, box 16; letter, Curtis to Captain Nugent Head, 6 December 1945, Curtis Papers, Correspondence, box 34.

  186. Parmar, Think Tanks and Power in Foreign Policy.

  187. Ibid.

  188. In particular, James T. Shotwell, the Columbia University historian and CEIP leader, was active in the formation of the ILO in 1919 and in the US labor movement; Inderjeet Parmar, “Engineering Consent: The Carnegie Endowment for International Peace and the Mobilisation of American Public Opinion, 1939–1945,” Review of International Studies 26, no. 1 (2000): 43.

  189. K. Rietzler, “Unbroken Bridges: Why the Rockefeller Foundation and the Carnegie Endowment Supported the International Studies Conference in the 1930s,” paper presented at the Transatlantic Studies Association conference (July 2008), 5. The American foundations were represented on the ISC’s executive committee and successfully changed the ISC into a version of the Institute of Pacific Relations, orienting its national councils to policy-related questions.

  190. G. Murray, “Intellectual Cooperation,” Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Sciences 235 (September 1944): 7. According to Murray, Carnegie and Rockefeller funding came second only to that of the French government.

  191. See, for example, E. Richard Brown, Rockefeller Medicine Men (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1979).

  192. E. J. Murphy, Creative Philanthropy (New York: Teachers’ College Press, 1976).

  4. PROMOTING AMERICANISM, COMBATING ANTI-AMERICANISM, AND DEVELOPING A COLD WAR AMERICAN STUDIES NETWORK

  1. The Welch quotation in the epigraph is cited by Richard Barnett, Roots of War (Baltimore, Md.: Penguin, 1973), 19. The Kennan quotation in the epigraph is cited by S. Lucas, “Introduction: Negotiating Freedom,” in Helen Laville and Hugh Wilford, eds., The U.S. Government, Citizen Groups, and the Cold War: The State-Private Network (London: Frank Cass, 2005), 9.

/>   2. Paul Kennedy, Rise and Fall of the Great Powers (London: Fontana Press, 1989), 461.

  3. To Ford Foundation trustees, a “healthy international environment” would only be produced if the “underdeveloped nations succeed in meeting the challenge before them” of defeating communist-inspired “revolutionary ferment”; Volker R. Berghahn, America and the Intellectual Cold Wars in Europe: Shepard Stone Between Philanthropy, Academy, and Diplomacy (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2001), 159.

  4. T. McDowell, American Studies (Minneapolis: Minnesota University Press, 1948), 26.

  5. David Campbell, Writing Security (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1992); Alan Wolfe, The Rise and Fall of the Soviet Threat (Boston: South End Press, 1984).

  6. Rockefeller, Carnegie, and Ford philanthropies were, of course, also subject to the charge of “un-Americanism” by various McCarthyite congressional committees during the 1950s. The Ford Foundation is generally understood to have been engaged in combating anti-Americanism and communism during the cold war; Oliver Schmidt, “Small Atlantic World: U.S. Philanthropy and the Expanding International Exchange of Scholars After 1945,” in J. C. E. Geinow-Hecht and F. Schumacher, eds., Culture and International History (Oxford: Berghahn Books, 2003), 121.

  7. Foundations’ annual reports.

  8. Ben Whitaker, The Foundations: An Anatomy of Philanthropy and Society (London: Eyre Methuen, 1974); Giles Scott-Smith, The Politics of Apolitical Culture: The Congress for Cultural Freedom, the CIA, and Postwar American Hegemony (London: Routledge, 2002); Frances Stonor Saunders, Who Paid the Piper? The CIA and the Cultural Cold War (London: Granta, 1999).

  9. Robert E. Spiller, “The Fulbright Program in American Studies Abroad: Retrospect and Prospect,” in Robert H. Walker, ed., American Studies Abroad (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1975), 8.