Foundations of the American Century

by Inderjeet Parmar

94. Robison, Indonesia, 110.

  95. Ransom, “The Berkeley Mafia,” 42.

  96. The article was published in California Management Review 1 (Fall 1958): 20–29; it tried to “make a reasonable case for the western system as opposed to the Russian and Chinese systems” (21).

  97. G. McT. Kahin and Audrey Kahin, Subversion as Foreign Policy (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1995).

  98. Ransom, “The Berkeley Mafia,” 41.

  99. Richard W. Dye, The Jakarta Faculty of Economics, January 1965; 4; 000374.

  100. Ford did, however, contact several other scholars and Ford officials; The Ford Foundation in Indonesia: Ford Foundation Staff Comments on Ramparts Article, October 1970; 012243.

  101. Letter, Michael Harris (Ford rep. in Jakarta) to F. F. Hill (FF, New York), 23 January 1958; reel 0679; PA58–309. As Ford’s John Howard noted in 1957, “The Department of State has encouraged us and organizations like your own to proceed with our activities in cooperation with the Indonesian institutions concerned”; letter to Paul S. Taylor (chairman, Institute of International Studies, UCB-erkeley), December 18, 1957; reel 0697; PA58–309.

  102. The Ford Foundation in Indonesia: Ford Foundation Staff Comments on Ramparts Article, October 1970; 012243.

  103. John Bresnan (Managing Indonesia, 281) himself argues that without the Western-oriented Ford-funded economists, Indonesia would probably have become much more aligned with “Marxism-Leninist” regimes.

  104. Bresnan, At Home Abroad, 121.

  105. F. Miller (FF representative, Jakarta), “The Ford Foundation and Indonesia: 1953–1969. Retrospect and Prospect”, 4; 6; 11; 006567. Emphasis added.

  106. Bresnan, Managing Indonesia, 83. Emphasis added.

  107. Memorandum by John Bresnan (FF), “The Ford Foundation and Education in Indonesia,” (for internal circulation), August 6, 1970; 005509.

  108. Peter Dale Scott, “The United States and the Overthrow of Sukarno, 1965–1967,” Pacific Affairs 58, no. 2 (Summer 1985): 239–264.

  109. Ibid., 246.

  110. Ibid., 247.

  111. Pauker’s “personal ties with Indonesia’s economic elite—the so-called ‘Berkeley mafia’” were confirmed at his funeral in September 2002; Michael D. Rich, “Guy Pauker: A Eulogy,” September 21, 2002. http://www.rand.org/pubs/papers/2006/P8073.pdf.

  112. Guy J. Pauker, “Toward a New Order in Indonesia,” Foreign Affairs (April 1967): 503, 505. In a previous article, Pauker had sounded the alarm over the imminent Soviet takeover of Indonesia; Pauker, “The Soviet Challenge in Indonesia,” Foreign Affairs (July 1962): 612–626.

  113. Ransom, “Ford Country,” 101–102.

  114. Scott, “The United States and the Overthrow of Sukarno, 1965–1967,” 249. PSI and Masjumi student groups had been involved, in collaboration with the Army, in anti-Chinese riots in 1963, “in the very shadow of SESKOAD” (249).

  115. Memorandum by John Bresnan (FF), “The Ford Foundation and Education in Indonesia,” (for internal circulation), August 6, 1970; 005509. For challenges to the notion of a communist coup, see George McT. Kahin and Audrey Kahin, Subversion as Foreign Policy (1995); R. Cribb and C. Brown, Modern Indonesia: A History Since 1945 (New York: Longman, 1995).

  116. F. Miller (FF representative, Jakarta), “The Ford Foundation and Indonesia: 1953–1969. Retrospect and Prospect”, 5, 15, 16, 17, 20, 22; 006567.

  117. Ibid., 7; 006567.

  118. F. Miller, “Development Experience During Periods of Social and Political Change: Indonesia,” March 1970, 1; 006568.

  119. Letter, Miller to George Gant, April 10, 1966; in 01224.

  120. In an article in 1990, the journalist Kathy Kadane demonstrated that CIA and State Department officials in Indonesia had supplied the Indonesian army with lists of names of up to five thousand communist leaders, “from top echelons down to village cadres,” to ensure the annihilation of the PKI; Kathy Kadane, “Ex-Agents Say CIA Compiled Death Lists for Indonesians,” Washington Post (May 21, 1990). The CIA director in the Far East, William Colby, suggested that the program was the Indonesian equivalent of the Phoenix Program he pioneered in Vietnam to try to destroy communist organization there.

  121. Letter, Miller to Gant, April 10, 1966; 01224.

  122. Kahin, Subversion as Foreign Policy, 230. Kahin shows that the United States supplied weapons “to arm Moslem and nationalist youth in Central Java for use against the PKI,” as part of the Indonesian army’s policy “to eliminate the PKI” (230).

  123. Bresnan, At Home Abroad, 116.

  124. F. Miller to Eugene Black, “April Visit to Indonesia,” May 19, 1966; copied to McGeorge Bundy and F. Champion Ward; 012244.

  125. Cribb and Brown, Modern Indonesia, 115n1.

  126. Bruce R. Glassburner, ed. The Economy of Indonesia. (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1971).

  127. “Background and Justification,” Ford Foundation, Request number ID-1284; PA68–737; reel 4996.

  128. Memorandum, David E. Bell (FF International Division) to McGeorge Bundy, June 18, 1968; 3; PA68–737; reel 4996.

  129. Walter P. Falcon, “Conversation with Professor Widjojo, Saturday, December 1, 1973 (Gillis and Falcon),” December 5, 1973; PA68; reel 4996.

  130. Memorandum, Theodore M. Smith, “Economics: Discussions with Adriennus Mooy,” September 6, 1978; PA68–737; reel 4996.

  131. Gustav F. Papanek (Harvard Development Advisory Service), “Indonesia,” October 22, 1968; PA 68–737; reel 4996. Papanek noted that economic failures had resulted in “increasing criticism of the government and particularly of the economists who had dominated its policies” (1).

  132. Chalmers and Hadiz, The Politics of Economic Development in Indonesia, 18.

  133. Bell, “The Ford Foundation as a Transnational Actor,” 116. As Bell argues, the Ford Foundation often operates as “an opening wedge for the United States Agency of International Development.”

  6. FORD, ROCKEFELLER, AND CARNEGIE IN NIGERIA AND THE AFRICAN STUDIES NETWORK

  1. The source of the first epigraph to this chapter is from Arnold Rivkin, “Nigeria’s National Development Plan,” Current History 43 (December 1962), 323–324. Rivkin was the epitome of the state-private network in action, moving easily from the International Cooperation Administration (administering Marshall aid in Europe), to MIT’s Ford and Carnegie-funded Center for International Studies (CENIS, as founding head of its African Economic and Political Development Project), to adviser and negotiator on Nigerian aid and development in the Kennedy administration, to the World Bank’s main Africa expert; see L. Grubbs, “Bringing ‘The Gospel of Modernization’ to Nigeria: American Nation Builders and Development Planning in the 1960s,” Peace and Change 31, no. 3 (July 2006): 279–308. Rivkin had also served on the Africa Area Group of President Eisenhower’s Committee to Study the Military Assistance Program, better known as the Draper Committee. The second epigraph to this chapter is from L. Gray Cowan, “A Summary History of the African Studies Association 1957–1969,” in PA61–47; reel 1887; Ford Foundation archives. Cowan was a Columbia University Africanist, founder, fellow, and executive secretary and president of the ASA.

  2. Memoranda by USAID officials to State Department and President Kennedy, in 1961, cited by Grubbs, “Bringing ‘The Gospel of Modernization’ to Nigeria,” 306n24.

  3. W. W. Rostow’s The Stages of Economic Growth: A Non-Communist Manifesto (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1960) was written during a year at the University of Cambridge and funded by a grant by the Carnegie Corporation. Rostow’s book became the bible of American development and modernization thinking; see David Milne, America’s Rasputin (New York: Hill and Wang, 2008), for details.

  4. Grubbs, “Bringing ‘The Gospel of Modernization’ to Nigeria,” 297.

  5. Rupert Emerson, “The Character of American Interests in Africa,” in Walter Goldschmidt, ed., The United States and Africa (1958; New York: Praeger, 1963), 5.

  6. Ibid., 29.

  7. Ibid.,
12–13; Bowles cited in ibid., 13.

  8. Ibid., 6, 13.

  9. Ibid., 19. James Coleman notes the British missionaries’ complete monopolization of Nigerian education, the content of which effectively alienated Nigerians from their own history, languages, and cultural practices; James Coleman, Nigeria: Background to Nationalism (Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1958), 114–115.

  10. Emerson, “The Character of American Interests in Africa,” 31.

  11. Ali A. Mazrui, “The African University as a Multinational Corporation: Problems of Penetration and Dependency,” Harvard Educational Review 45, no. 2 (May 1975): 191–210.

  12. Cited in Emerson, “The Character of American Interests in Africa,” 32.

  13. Mary L. Dudziak, Cold War Civil Rights (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2000).

  14. In 1963, one hundred years after emancipation, the United States was still two years away from congressional legislation outlawing practices such as literacy tests, poll tax requirements, and grandfather clauses that denied Southern blacks the franchise.

  15. Donald Fisher, “Rockefeller Philanthropy and the British Empire,” History of Education 7 (1978): 129–143; E. Richard Brown, “Public Health in Imperialism: Early Rockefeller Programs at Home and Abroad,” American Journal of Public Health 66, no. 9 (September 1976): 897–903.

  16. A Survey of Sources at the Rockefeller Archive Center for the Study of Twentieth-Century Africa (Sleepy Hollow, N.Y.: RAC, 2003), 1–10.

  17. Such networks also created communities of Western-oriented consumers, strengthening those networks; Mazrui, “The African University as a Multinational Corporation,” 199.

  18. Alan Pifer, Speech to Trustees, “The African Setting,” 19 March 1959, 2; CCNY Policy and Program—Commonwealth Program (Africa) 1956–1975, folder 2; CC Archives, Columbia University, New York.

  19. Arnold Rivkin, The African Presence in World Affairs (New York: Free Press, 1963), x.

  20. Ibid., ix.

  21. Ibid., ix–x.

  22. Memorandum, Pifer to Gardner, “Possible African Program,” 14 June 1957; attached to CCNY Policy and Program—Commonwealth Program (Africa) 1956–1975, folder 2.

  23. Memorandum to CC by Alan Pifer, “State Department Conference on Africa South of the Sahara, At Washington, DC—Attended by AP,” 28 October 1955; CC Grant Files Series 1, U.S. Department of State, 1939–1955.

  24. Pifer, “Some Notes on Carnegie Grants in Africa,” 5.

  25. E. J. Murphy, Creative Philanthropy: The Carnegie Corporation and Africa, 1953–1973 (New York: Teachers’ College Press, 1976), 34.

  26. Ibid.

  27. Ibid.

  28. Jane I. Guyer, African Studies in the United States: A Perspective (Atlanta, Ga.: African Studies Association Press, 1996), 63.

  29. Edward H. Berman, “The Foundations’ Role in American Foreign Policy: The Case of Africa, Post 1945,” in Robert F. Arnove, ed., Philanthropy and Cultural Imperialism (Boston: G. K. Hall, 1980), 213; D. Court, “The Idea of Social Science in East Africa,” Minerva 17 (1979): 250.

  30. Wilbert J. LeMelle (Ford Foundation deputy representative in Eastern and Southern Africa), “The Development of African Studies: A Survey Report,” 13; 10 September 1970; report number 003622.

  31. Carol A. Dressel, “The Development of African Studies in the United States,” African Studies Bulletin 9, no. 3 (December 1966): 69–70.

  32. Guyer, African Studies in the United States, 52. Boston, Columbia, Indiana, Michigan State, Stanford, UCLA, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, and Yale were also listed as resource centers.

  33. L. Gray Cowan, Carl Rosberg, Lloyd Fallers, and Cornelis W. de Kiewiet, “Confidential Supplement to Report on the State of African Studies,” prepared for the Ford Foundation, 8 August 1958, acc. 000625; FF archives. For example, a grant of $50,000 for five years to Howard was justified thus: “It is in a particularly good position to provide a broad objective view of African problems to American Negro and native African students who sometimes approach the field with a strong emotional or political bias”; Executive Committee Meeting Excerpt, “Howard University Program in African Studies,” ITR, 21 March 1957, PA54–49, reel 0420; FF archives.

  34. LeMelle, “The Development of African Studies,” 14.

  35. Ibid., 2, 7, 9, 10.

  36. Ibid., 3, 7.

  37. Ibid., 15.

  38. Ibid., 13.

  39. Gwendolen M. Carter, “The Founding of the African Studies Association,” African Studies Review 26, nos. 3/4 (September–December 1983): 5.

  40. Record of interview between JP and Dean Rusk (RF), Kenneth Thompson (RF), Don Price (Ford), and Howard Johnson, 22 October 1953; CC Grant Files series 1, U.S. Department of State, 1939–1955.

  41. R. A. Hill, The FBI’s RACON: Racial Conditions in America During World War II (Boston: Northeastern University Press, 1995).

  42. Carter, “The Founding of the African Studies Association,” 6.

  43. Jerry Gershenhorn, “‘Not an Academic Affair’: African American Scholars and the Development of African Studies Programs in the United States, 1942–1960,” Journal of African American History 94, no. 1 (Winter 2009): 44–68.

  44. Ibid., 51–52.

  45. Memorandum by Pearl T. Robinson to David R. Smock, “Evaluation of General Support Grant to the African Studies Association,” 18 September 1974, p. 1; PA61–47, reel 1887, Ford Foundation Archives. Ford later invested further amounts in excess of $350,000 for oral data archives, development of research materials, and the work of the Research Liaison Committee (1).

  46. Summary Report of the Conference on the Position of Problems of the American Scholar in Africa, 18–19 November 1966; CC file, African Studies Association, 1957–1976.

  47. Pearl T. Robinson memorandum, 2–3; PA61–47, reel 1887.

  48. Memorandum by Lynn E. Baker, U.S. Army Chief Psychologist, Human Factors and Operations Research Division, to Colonel William G. Sullivan, “22 December 1964 Meeting with Members of the NAS Advisory Committee on Africa,” 23 December 1964; CC, African Studies Association file, 1957–1976. Advisory Committee members present were C. W. de Kiewiet (chair, and former president of Cornell University) and Wilton Dillon (National Research Council’s international division). In addition, the Rockefeller Foundation was represented by John McKelvey and Columbia University by Gray Cowan.

  49. Memorandum, distributed by Charles R. Nixon to all UCLA Faculty Africanists, Discussion of Proposal for an Army-Sponsored University Consortium for African Studies, n.d: “General Statement of the Problems to Be Dealt with and the Recommended Action to be Taken for the Further Development of Support for Research on Africa,” 4–5 February 1965; CC, African Studies Association file, 1957–1976.

  50. Letter, James Coleman to Lynn E. Baker, 25 January 1965; CC, African Studies Association file, 1957–1976.

  51. George E. Lowe, “The Camelot Affair,” Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists (May 1966), http://books.google.com/books?id=UggAAAAAMBAJ&pg=PA44&vq=Lowe&dq=Soviet+intelligence+sponsored+social+movements+Vietnam&lr=&as_brr=3&hl=pl&source=gbs_search_s&cad=0#v=onepage&q=Lowe&f=false.

  52. Memorandum, Wilton S. Dillon to Charles Wagley (Institute of Latin American Studies), Melvin J. Fox (Ford Foundation), John J. McKelvey (Rockefeller Foundation), and L. Gray Cowan (Columbia University), 16 December 1964; memorandum, Lynn E. Baker, attached to Dillon’s, of which there were just three pages in Ford archives—quotes taken from section entitled “Social Psychology, Sociology, and Ethnological and Humanistic Science: Special Program Plan B”, 32–34; both attached to Inter-Office Memorandum, Melvin Fox to John B. Howard and Cleon O. Swayzee, 2 March 1965; in PA61–47, reel 1887.

  53. Summary Report of the Conference on the Position and Problems of the American Scholar in Africa, 18–19 November 1966; 16–17; CC, African Studies Association file, 1957–1976.

  54. Ibid., 19.

  55. Letter, Frederic Mosher (of CC) on behalf of Alan Pifer, to Gwendolen Carter, 11 August 1965; letter, C
arter to Pifer, 25 June 1965; in CC Grant Files series 2, African Studies Association—Conference on African Nationalist Movements, 1964–1966. Mosher adjudged that Carter’s letter had been written before the fall of Project Camelot and replied, “I think the idea of channeling possible Army funds to projects through the Corporation is a genuinely bad one” and feared for the future conduct of oral history projects in Africa.

  56. Letter, Pierre L. van den Berghe (University of Washington, Seattle) to Cowan, 30 September 1966; PA61–47, reel 1887; FF archives.

  57. Inter-Office Memorandum by Pearl T. Robinson to David R. Smock (Ford Foundation), “Evaluation of General Support Grant to the African Studies Association,” 18 September 1974; PA61–47, reel 1887.

  58. Ibid., 2.

  59. Ibid., 3

  60. Ibid.

  61. Ibid., 4.

  62. Rupert Emerson, Joseph Nye, Robert Rotberg, and Martin Kilson of the Harvard Department of Government signed a letter protesting the behavior of Black Caucus members and denying any racism at anytime of the ASA’s leaders; letter, Emerson et al. to Cowan, 20 October 1969; CC, African Studies Association, box 386, folder 1.

  63. Cowan, “A Summary History of the African Studies Association 1957–1969,” PA61–47, reel 1887, 23.

  64. Ibid., 20; see also Melvin Fox, “Evaluation of Grants to African Studies Association Research Liaison Committee 1966–1975,” December 1979; PA61–47, reel 1887.

  65. Inter-Office Memorandum, Robinson, 8. Although Ford did change its own approach at least temporarily, there were some who preferred to place the blame entirely on the shoulders of the ASA. Robert Edwards, for example, suggested that the problem was both societal—“an accumulation of past oversights and injustices in the society at large”—and specific—“short-sightedness and insensitivity on the part of the A.S. A’s leadership,” implying a bystander role for Ford; Robert Edwards to David R. Smock, “Re-Evaluation of Grants to the African Studies Association,” 24 September 1974; PA61–47, reel 1887. Edwards had previously served in the State Department’s Office of UN Political Affairs.

  66. Memorandum, Stackpole to Pifer, 21 October 1969; CC, African Studies Association, box 386, folder 1.