New Cold War History

American Social Science and "Nation Building" in the Kennedy Era

Michael E. Latham

• Publisher: The University of North Carolina Press
• Year: 2003
• ISBN:
  9780807860793
• Topic: Histoire
• Subtopic: Histoire de l'Amérique du Nord

Providing new insight on the intellectual and cultural dimensions of the Cold War, Michael Latham reveals how social science theory helped shape American foreign policy during the Kennedy administration. He shows how, in the midst of America's protracted struggle to contain communism in the developing world, the concept of global modernization moved beyond its beginnings in academia to become a motivating ideology behind policy decisions. After tracing the rise of modernization theory in American social science, Latham analyzes the way its core assumptions influenced the Kennedy administration's Alliance for Progress with Latin America, the creation of the Peace Corps, and the strategic hamlet program in Vietnam. But as he demonstrates, modernizers went beyond insisting on the relevance of America's experience to the dilemmas faced by impoverished countries. Seeking to accelerate the movement of foreign societies toward a liberal, democratic, and capitalist modernity, Kennedy and his advisers also reiterated a much deeper sense of their own nation's vital strengths and essential benevolence. At the height of the Cold War, Latham argues, modernization recast older ideologies of Manifest Destiny and imperialism.

CHAPTER 1

Modernization as Ideology

Approaching the Problem

In June 1961, as colleges and universities across the United States conferred degrees and charged their graduates to go out and improve the world they lived in, Walt Whitman Rostow delivered his own unique commencement address. The ceremony, held at Fort Bragg, North Carolina, must have looked very different from the ones the economist had participated in back at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Staring out at the crowd assembled before him, the newly appointed White House deputy national security adviser did not see students, faculty, administrators, and trustees dressed in academic regalia. In their place were eighty military officers wearing the uniforms of twenty different national armed forces, all of them graduates of the U.S. Army Special Warfare Center course in counterguerrilla strategy.

As different as the setting may have been, however, Rostow probably found himself at home. His social scientific model, he believed, had even more relevance for this audience than the ones he had taught at MIT. Dispensing with the usual greetings and congratulations, Rostow cut right to the point. The world, he warned, had become a most dangerous place. In Cuba, the Congo, Laos, and Vietnam, the Kennedy administration faced crises. Each of them “represented a successful Communist breaching—over previous years—of the Cold War truce lines which had emerged from the Second World War and its aftermath. In different ways each had arisen from the efforts of the international Communist movement to exploit the inherent instabilities of the underdeveloped areas.” The United States and its allies now had to meet that challenge in ways that went well beyond the limited foreign aid programs and military assistance of the past. They had to find the means to win a battle “fought not merely with weapons but fought in the minds of the men who live in the villages and the hills; fought by the spirit and policy of those who run the local government.” They had to intervene directly and engage themselves actively in “the whole creative process of modernization.”¹

For Rostow, his intellectual cohort, and the policymakers they advised, the concept of modernization was much more than an academic model. It was also a means of understanding the process of global change and identifying ways the United States could accelerate, channel, and direct it. The unprecedented power America had enjoyed at the end of World War II, they feared, had eroded. The collapse of European empire and the formation of “new states” posed dire challenges for a nation determined to contain the spread of Soviet communism. Within five years after the Second World War, India, Pakistan, Ceylon, Burma, the Philippines, Indonesia, Jordan, Syria, Lebanon, and Israel all gained independence. Following the Geneva Accords of 1954, Cambodia, Laos, and Vietnam left France’s empire. Within a few more years, Malaya, Libya, Sudan, Morocco, and Tunisia gained official freedom from imperial control, and Ghana, Togoland, the Cameroons, and Guinea soon followed. By 1960, there were approximately forty newly independent states with a population of about 800 million.² As these “emerging” countries combined with older nations of Latin America, Africa, and Asia to call for international assistance in meeting their economic and social needs, the Cold War became a global confrontation. Unstable regimes and impoverished, discontented populations, many American policymakers argued, could only provide fertile ground for Marxist revolutionaries. As Truman administration strategist Paul Nitze and his associates put it in the striking document known as NSC-68, “the defeat of Germany and Japan and the decline of the British and French Empires” had led to a dangerous contest between the United States and a relentless Soviet adversary determined “to impose its absolute authority over the rest of the world.” Amid the instability produced by decolonization, the potential for revolutionary advance only seemed to grow.³

Though most American strategists did not believe that the Soviets would risk a direct military confrontation during the 1950s, they were certain that the Kremlin was determined to chip away at the “underdeveloped periphery,” destroy America’s international credibility, and steadily undermine the system of political and economic alliances the United States had attempted to construct. In the aftermath of the Soviet Union’s successful detonation of an atomic bomb, the stunning Communist revolution in China, and the shock and sacrifice of the Korean War, American officials became increasingly concerned with the course of global social change. In the Philippines and South Vietnam, the United States intervened in attempts to defeat armed challenges to its allies. In Guatemala and Iran, the Eisenhower administration used covert operations to support coups against left-leaning governments and tried to do so in Indonesia. Troubled by Middle Eastern instability and worried about Russian links to Egypt and Syria, Eisenhower also deployed the U.S. Marines to defend a pro-American elite in Lebanon. Around the world, the United States channeled large quantities of military aid to foreign leaders promising an unyielding anti-Communist stance.

Committed to halting what they perceived as Soviet-promoted aggression, determined to display resolution and determination, and worried that revolutionaries might capture the force of nationalist aspirations, Kennedy planners inherited the containment framework and searched for more effective ways to implement it. The Cuban revolution, Ngo Dinh Diem’s increasingly fragile regime in South Vietnam, and an escalating civil war in the newly independent Congo only intensified their concerns. When Soviet premier Nikita Khrushchev used a January 1961 speech to pledge support for the “sacred” struggles of colonial peoples and promised to defend “wars of national liberation,” the new administration’s worst fears seemed confirmed. From the Senate floor, Kennedy himself had previously warned of the vulnerability of the developing countries. Now, as he moved into the Oval Office, he urged his advisers to study Khrushchev’s address and mark his words. “You’ve got to understand it,” he told them; “this is our clue to the Soviet Union.”⁴

In that context of heightened anxiety, theories of “modernization” proved particularly appealing to policymakers hoping to contain revolutionary expansion.⁵ Products of the early Cold War, they were built on a set of fundamental assumptions about the nature of global change and America’s relationship to it. By the time the Kennedy administration came to power, a broad range of scholars working across disciplines at many different academic centers had started to translate their ideas into policy recommendations. Armed with the tools of social science and confident in their rational, analytical powers, representative thinkers such as Rostow, Lucian Pye, Daniel Lerner, Gabriel Almond, and James Coleman called for a comparative evaluation of the differences between what they termed “traditional” and “modern” societies and made use of a dramatic increase in federal government funding to define the requirements for movement from one condition to another.⁶ In their emerging synthesis, “modernization” involved a series of integrally related changes in economic organization, political structures, and systems of social values. The research problem at hand was nothing less than creating a set of universal, empirical benchmarks to describe the overall patterns of global transformation. As Princeton University’s C. E. Black broadly defined it, “modernization” was the “process by which historically evolved institutions are adapted to the rapidly changing functions that reflect the unprecedented increase in man’s knowledge, permitting control over his environment.”⁷

By the early 1960s, studies of the modernization process had come to dominate scholarship on the problem of international social change. As intellectuals debated, refined, and applied their ideas to a complex array of regions and societies, their definitions and models often varied. Beneath the dense academic jargon, however, the concepts at the core of modernization theory centered on several overlapping assumptions: (1) “traditional” and “modern” societies are separated by a sharp dichotomy; (2) economic, political, and social changes are integrated and interdependent; (3) development tends to proceed toward the modern state along a common, linear path; and (4) the progress of developing societies can be dramatically accelerated through contact with developed ones.⁸ Theorists placed Western, industrial, capitalist democracies, and the United States in particular, at the apex of their historical scale and then set about marking off the distance of less modern societies from that point. Convinced that the lessons of America’s past demonstrated the route to genuine modernity, they stressed the ways the United States could drive “stagnant” societies through the transitional process.

By the late 1960s, arguments over the validity of the modernization model had started to generate their own massive literature. Scholars attacked the idea of an identifiable, sharp break between “traditional” and “modern” conditions by noting that older types of social organization were not always swept away by the modernization process. “New forms,” a critic argued, “may only increase the range of alternatives. Both magic and medicine can exist side by side, used alternatively by the same people.”⁹ Dissenters also challenged the idea of an integrated process of change. Case studies demonstrated that social structures often remained unaffected by changes of national government and that, rather than stable democracies, increases in political participation produced volatile situations that frequently ended in military regimes, oligarchies, ethnic conflict, or civil war. When the Vietnam War brought a renewed focus to the problem of imperialism, critics questioned the idea that contact with Western institutions and culture could accelerate movement through the “transitional stages.” Rejecting the ethnocentric assumption that those living in “traditional” societies could only absorb techniques and not innovate on their own, dissenters argued that, far from producing a beneficial “demonstration effect,” contact with the industrialized world often left a legacy of destruction and violence.¹⁰

Before long, systematic challenges emerged from both ends of the political spectrum. On the left, dependency theorists drew on Marxist thought to argue that the past of today’s industrial countries did not at all resemble the present of nations such as those in Latin America. Western Europe and the United States, they claimed, might once have been “undeveloped,” but not as the result of impoverishing relationships with other parts of the world. Directly challenging claims to a universal path of progress, world systems theorists stressed the long, historical course by which transnational economic relations had enriched industrial metropoles and kept peripheral satellites locked in subservience to an exploitative, global capitalism. From the opposite side of the spectrum, conservative thinkers of the mid-1970s mounted a “counterrevolution” by rejecting evidence of a widening per capita income gap between poor and rich nations and insisting that foreign aid, like domestic forms of welfare assistance, only hindered local entrepreneurial incentive. Most recently, modernization has even been resurrected in post-Cold War analyses celebrating the collapse of state socialism and the transformative power of capitalist markets.¹¹

As an explanatory schema, modernization theory has clearly had a volatile career. Beyond the long-running debate over the concept’s intellectual validity, however, stands another set of important and largely ignored questions about its historical context, political function, and cultural meaning. By returning to the era in which modernization dominated the field of inquiry and examining its relationship to the conduct of American foreign relations, I have sought to show that it was not merely a social scientific formulation. Modernization, I argue, was also an ideology, a conceptual framework that articulated a common collection of assumptions about the nature of American society and its ability to transform a world perceived as both materially and culturally deficient. Such an interpretation raises serious questions about the intellectual worth of the modernization model. It also illuminates the profound role of social science in the exercise of American power and the definition of a national sense of self at the height of the Cold War.¹²

Focusing on the Kennedy period, I have investigated the way modernization functioned as an ideology by addressing three fundamental, overlapping questions. First, I have considered how a community of social scientists established the political relevance of the knowledge it produced. Second, I have analyzed the relationship between social scientific theory and foreign policy through a study of three specific cases: the Alliance for Progress, the Peace Corps, and the Strategic Hamlet Program during the Vietnam War. Finally, I have investigated the way Cold War claims that the projection of American resources would modernize economically and culturally impoverished areas reformulated much older constructions of American national identity. As practiced in the early 1960s, modernization resonated strongly with earlier ideologies of Manifest Destiny and imperialism.

In exploring the first of these issues, the rise of modernization theory in American social science, 1 have found that many scholars closely identified their research with an effort to serve the state. Much like the Gilded Age social scientists analyzed by Dorothy Ross, modernization theorists of the 1950s and 1960s were deeply concerned with finding the means to ensure the health of their society. They, too, sought to chart “the fate of the American Republic in time.”¹³ But, in contrast to that earlier cohort, their overwhelming sense of national power and cultural superiority did not lead them to identify the problems they faced as coming from such internal factors as labor unrest, economic depression, or social radicalism. For a United States that had risen to become the world’s greatest economic and military force, the most severe threats now appeared to arise from a hostile, subversive, and alien ideology. As historians such as Elaine Tyler May have shown, Mc-Carthyist arguments of the early and mid-1950s reflected the degree to which a perceived foreign danger had blurred the boundaries between America’s domestic culture and its external role.¹⁴ The central challenge of the post-World War II era, according to many modernization theorists, was to find ways to rejuvenate and project abroad America’s liberal social values, capitalist economic organizations, and democratic political structures. Victory, they claimed, would depend on defeating the forces of monolithic communism by accelerating the natural process through which “traditional” societies would move toward the enlightened “modernity” most clearly represented by America itself.

In this Cold War context, “truth,” as one historian has observed, was far more than a desired intellectual product. It was also understood as “our weapon.”¹⁵ In the years following World War II, academic research was increasingly shaped by federal funding. Scholarly inquiry also became more policy-oriented as the wartime partnership between government and university scientists was extended and the state supported research projects specifically intended to produce knowledge useful for solving military and strategic problems. Though the bulk of this funding went into developing defense technology, by the early 1950s private organizations such as the Carnegie Corporation and the Ford Foundation were also supporting research in international relations. Following the launch of Sputnik, the National Defense Education Act of 1958 also poured vast federal resources into area studies programs, language training, and international relations institutes.¹⁶ National security, American officials argued, demanded that academia deliver politically relevant knowledge about the world and the ways in which the United States could directly promote and manage social change within it.

During the late 1950s and early 1960s, many modernization theorists endeavored to produce the kind of scholarship the U.S. government would find most useful. Meeting the Soviet challenge, they claimed, would require just the type of rigorous social research that they could undertake. Systematic inquiry, they promised, could identify the advantages that enabled America to emerge as the world’s most modern nation, explain the deficiencies that caused other societies to lag behind, and detail the conditions in which Marxist-led social revolutions might arise. Even more important, they argued, it could identify the essential levers of social change. The United States did not have to wait for “less advanced” peoples to emulate the nation’s achievements. Objective analysis and scientific research would show policymakers how to provide the material resources and moral tutelage needed to assist those struggling in the Ame...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Foreword
• Acknowledgments
• 1 Modernization as Ideology: Approaching the Problem
• 2 American Social Science, Modernization Theory, and the Cold War
• 3 Modernity, Anticommunism, and the Alliance for Progress
• 4 Modernization for Peace: The Peace Corps, Community Development, and America's Mission
• 5 Modernization at War: Counterinsurgency and the Strategic Hamlet Program in Vietnam
• Conclusion
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index