The Great American Mission

Modernization and the Construction of an American World Order

David Ekbladh

• Publisher: Princeton University Press
• Year: 2011
• ISBN:
  9781400833740
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: North American History
• Index: History

The Great American Mission traces how America's global modernization efforts during the twentieth century were a means to remake the world in its own image. David Ekbladh shows that the emerging concept of modernization combined existing development ideas from the Depression. He describes how ambitious New Deal programs like the Tennessee Valley Authority became symbols of American liberalism's ability to marshal the social sciences, state planning, civil society, and technology to produce extensive social and economic change. For proponents, it became a valuable weapon to check the influence of menacing ideologies such as Fascism and Communism.
Modernization took on profound geopolitical importance as the United States grappled with these threats. After World War II, modernization remained a means to contain the growing influence of the Soviet Union. Ekbladh demonstrates how U.S.-led nation-building efforts in global hot spots, enlisting an array of nongovernmental groups and international organizations, were a basic part of American strategy in the Cold War.
However, a close connection to the Vietnam War and the upheavals of the 1960s would discredit modernization. The end of the Cold War further obscured modernization's mission, but many of its assumptions regained prominence after September 11 as the United States moved to contain new threats. Using new sources and perspectives, The Great American Mission offers new and challenging interpretations of America's ideological motivations and humanitarian responsibilities abroad.

Chapter 1

THE RISE OF AN AMERICAN STYLE OF DEVELOPMENT, 1914-1937

We [the United States] are doing this for your own good.
—Victor Heiser, 1936

THE IDEAS AND PRACTICES that would comprise modernization were extant well before the term earned its common currency in the years following World War II. New approaches were emerging from the social sciences and the institutions that were their incubators that would transform how reformers conceptualized the needs of societies they saw demanding their intervention. These attitudes were a departure from what had come before, but that is not to say they did not have a history. No matter how new the methods, the impulse to development had a long heritage in international life and in an American self-concept that embraced a mission to serve as an example for the world. In the United States, the new development was connected historically to projects to “reconstruct” societies at home and abroad to respond to the modern world. This legacy set the stage for the changes that would course into development activity in the years following World War I. Much of the initiative for these changes came from nongovernmental groups, and their largest and most visible testing grounds would be China. Americans, as part of a community of international progressives, increasingly saw the need for large-scale programs moved by the social sciences and utilizing imposing technologies to promote widespread social and political change. As the world sank into crisis during the 1930s, they had a set of concepts buttressing a liberal approach to development; all they required was something that embodied their agenda in a single example.

ROOTS OF MODERNIZATION

The development concepts that predominated in the mid-twentieth century can find roots in European thought contending with the difficulties of industrialization and demographic shifts in the early nineteenth century. Henri Saint-Simon and his disciples are considered crucial to the formulation of a doctrine of development. Seeing the disorder and waste of early European industrialization, the Saint-Simonians did not ask whether advancement was necessary or possible but whether it could have been achieved more rapidly and effectively than under the prevailing laissezfaire system. The most prominent member of the Saint-Simonians, Auguste Comte, believed that order must be brought to the disjointed industrial progress of his time. Development, for Comte, was the basis by which order could be infused into progress. However, development required the intervention of those freed from material labor. He envisioned an elite of capitalists and technologists who could act as “trustees” for society (and eventually comprise a new ruling class) who, through their knowledge, could effectively channel economic and social change for the benefit of society at large. Comte believed, “It is only when we have determined what belongs to the elite of humanity that we can regulate our intervention in the development of more or less backwards peoples, by reason of the necessary universality of the fundamental evolution, with due application of the characteristic circumstances of each case.”¹ Comte certainly cannot be credited with the creation of the idea of development. Nevertheless, the positivism and the concept of trusteeship he and other Saint-Simonians championed informed much. In their formula development become a force invested with agency. The present could be modified into something entirely new by the actions of “those entrusted with the future of society.”²

The tutelary nature of what Comte discussed meshed with an important segment of American republicanism. Even before the revolution, technology was perceived as a defining element of colonial life in Great Britain’s North American colonies. There was great pride among the colonials in their cultivation of “useful knowledge” in the technical arts.³ It was after the revolution, however, that the useful art of technology came to the fore in theorizing about the social, political, and economic health of the new republic. Threatened by the ever-present lure of luxury that deadened civic virtue and could cause the decline of the fragile nation, leaders looked to expansion, trade, and industry as means to keep the people, prone to indolence, diligent and industrious.⁴ Tench Coxe, a Philadelphia merchant, explained in 1787 that manufactures, dependent on technology and integrated in a republican political system, would forestall decline by cultivating frugality and industry. While he envisioned the factory as a school for republicans, Coxe’s contemporary, Benjamin Rush, saw the school itself as a means for instilling the values to transform raw students into “republican machines.” John Kasson has described an early alliance between technology and republican ideals where the former served as means of achieving the promise of republican society, and republicanism a means for controlling and containing the dangers of the mechanical world.⁵

This theme reappeared through American history. Persons had to be tutored not only in the technologies themselves but also in the social and cultural values that encased them. In part, this education was necessary because danger always lurked in technology. Ralph Waldo Emerson saw a threat from technology that was no longer driven by society but instead drove it. Although he often lauded particular technologies, he was a critic of the tendency to equate technical accomplishments with progress. Emerson saw an important place for mechanical advancement in achieving a better life, although this was a qualified assertion. Technology also had a tendency to inspire materialism and other morally questionable behavior. The employment of technology required a firm commitment to republican ethics. While there was great confidence in technology as a means to fulfill the promise of the republic, there were always concerns that this powerful force in human affairs could get out of control or fall into the wrong hands.⁶

As industrialization picked up pace in the second half of the nineteenth century, technology assumed a new position in the republic. For a polity nearly destroyed in a fratricidal civil war, mastery of technology became an important means to reestablish a national sense of purpose and accomplishment. It was in this period that technologists, particularly engineers, became great symbols of America’s capability to wield technology to effectively solve social and political problems.⁷ They were particularly popular with those seeking reform in contrast to calls for revolutionary change. These efforts might now be called “development” but at the time they were often referred to as “reconstruction.”

RECONSTRUCTION AS DEVELOPMENT

Reconstruction, as a label for reform, is often linked to a specific era in the American mind. The “Reconstruction” marks the period following the country’s civil war, roughly 1865 to 1877. A remarkable period of change and upheaval, it included attempts to integrate African Americans, only recently freed from slavery, into the political system. Dramatic social and political reforms were coupled with attempts by Reconstruction governments to promote economic development. Such development was undertaken to repair the damage of war as well as to move away from the old slave system that influenced all aspects of society. Modern technology, in the form of railroads, was the great hope for regional growth. It would bring economic growth and with it feed transformational social and political change. In this all-embracing formula, sketches of nation-building projects attempted later by the United States have been perceived. However, these ambitions largely failed. The reaction that followed left the region mired in segregation and poverty well into the twentieth century.⁸

After its abrupt conclusion in 1877, the much-maligned Reconstruction was largely forgotten as a model of social transformation, and the term “reconstruction” was given new meanings in an international conversation on progressive reform. By the early years of the twentieth century it was used to describe diverse efforts to effect change within societies through reform based on “scientific” and “rational” methods. This broader type of reconstruction demanded considerable social change and was closely tied to Progressive Era reform, which itself was part of an interconnected international movement of social politics. Within it progressives were preoccupied with the impact of modern industrial life on societies globally. Indeed, the pragmatic philosophy that underlay the urge for tempered change has been seen as premised on reconciling society to the modern world.⁹

Generally, progressives internationally saw the application of reform ideas, guided by the new and increasingly influential social sciences, as the efficient way to reconstruct inefficient social, political, and economic relationships into systems that ran on modern lines. In the 1920s, one advocate in the United States noted:

[In] the American mind that word still retains some of the flavor given it by the events following the Civil War, and in one sense it may not seem inaccurate to caution, “Beware of reconstruction!” … If then, this is to be reconstruction in the true sense, it must be founded not upon passion but reason … it must “look to the sciences for its view of the facts and to the happiness of men on earth for its ideal.”¹⁰

Walter Lippmann shared such views in his earlier summation of the reformist spirit, Drift and Mastery. It was an early statement in a lifetime dialogue on the impact of modern forces on society globally. Lippmann believed “mastery” of these forces was best achieved through the embrace of science and the rationality it demanded. However, science could not operate in a social vacuum, as “democracy in politics is the twin-brother of scientific thinking. They had to come together.” Science and its products could not be divorced from their social surroundings. This not only meant politics, where liberal democracy nourished science and science fed democracy, but also the impact of science at a personal level. A scientific bearing within individuals was necessary for the benefits of a technological and rational society to effectively take hold around them. Cultivation of this “scientific spirit” within a political framework amenable to it was a crucial part of any larger enterprise to reshape societies for the demands of modern life.¹¹

The daunting task of rebuilding a Europe savaged by World War I shows the developmental nature of what was labeled reconstruction. It retained its reformist content even as the process contended with immediate war relief. In Britain and France, advocates of reconstruction agitated for revised industrial, social, and imperial relationships as much as they sought to repair the damage of war. The term was also employed to describe the necessity of carving out from the Austro-Hungarian Empire a collection of new and viable smaller states in Central Europe on the basis of modern principles.¹² Countries beyond Europe were seen to require a more intense reconstruction. As early as 1910, Western commentators lauded Japan’s attempts to reconstruct the “backwards” society of newly annexed Korea into a modern colonial dependency. During the interwar years, the U.S. military occupation of Haiti was extolled as an opportunity for the “pragmatic” employment of modern ideas and technology to reconstruct that country. Elsewhere in the Caribbean, various reforms sponsored by its American trustee during the Depression to “reorganize Puerto Rico on a large scale” were also packaged under the reconstruction label.¹³

This talk of reconstruction lay among hopes about modern industrial society’s ability to deliver global progress. In the United States this faith was exhibited in a series of expositions in the late nineteenth century. One of the most influential was the Chicago World’s Columbian Exposition of 1893. Burnham designed it to be a living “illustrated encyclopedia of civilization” to instruct visitors “to formulate the Modern” (emphasis original). Science and its application were accepted as the basis of civilization as defined at Chicago. The effects would be lasting, and commentators have since seen the continuing influence of the fair on urban planning, ethnology, and architecture, as well as reformers. Chicago and the other expositions like it were part of a period where Americans felt technical and scientific accomplishments could produce a sort of paradise on earth. Edward Bellamy’s Looking Backward shared this vision. While the fiction of Bellamy betrayed anxieties about the state of republican values in the United States, it was also an unmistakable expression of the faith in technology to achieve a better world.¹⁴

The late nineteenth century also witnessed a transformation of religion in the United States. Within American Protestantism there was an embrace of the “social gospel” and its strong desire to attack social ills both at home and abroad. Such a view had a succinct expression in the Reverend Josiah Strong. His tremendously popular 1885 book, Our Country, had a profound influence on the direction of American Christian activism. Strong’s belief was that, among the “Anglo-Saxon” peoples, the United States had been ordained by God to lead. With the world headed toward a “final competition of the races, for which the Anglo-Saxon is being schooled,” the United States found itself with the divine task of Christianizing and civilizing the world or facing the Lord’s wrath (emphasis original). The United States was therefore impelled to engage the world with the goal of “extinction of the inferior races.” This was not to be annihilation but the alteration of these peoples through America’s “vitality and civilization.” Christianity leavened the mix, which would “dispossess the many weaker races, assimilate others, and mold the remainder, until … it has Anglo-Saxonized mankind.” The international mission Strong defined for the United States would underlie much evangelical activity in the coming decades and was a precursor of elements of Progressive Era reform in the United States itself.¹⁵

Numerous contemporaries in Western Europe agreed with Strong’s belief in the superiority of Western civilization. Validation of cultural chauvinism often lay in the capacity of Westerners to create and apply technology. Nineteenth-century European and American accomplishments in science and industry which included the railroad, modern medicine, the telegraph and the Maxim gun provided the means to extend their authority over much of the globe as well as the justification. Yet, these technological accomplishments were not the sum of the yardstick by which Westerners measured others. A crucial part of the perception of the “backwardness” was the way these societies and cultures were viewed. A perceived lack of thrift, discipline, and promptness as well as traditional beliefs, indolence, and superstition prevented people in places such as Africa, India, and China from mastering modern technology.¹⁶

This perception regularly manifested itself in a belief, held by many Westerners at the time, that these peoples were little more than children. Their inability to internalize the behaviors necessary for modern technologies to be effectively utilized made them appear to be lost in a state of arrested development. Although race was clearly part of the equation, this prejudice cannot be reduced to a racial schema. Many Americans and Europeans believed that Africans, Indians, and Chinese could be lifted out of their historical circumstance of immature “backwardness.” There was a belief in many quarters that if “traditional” customs, practices, and institutions could be removed, underdeveloped people could be taught to utilize the products of the modern world. Obviously only the most technologically advanced people could be expected to lead these backward peoples out of their historical condition. Americans believed that with their demonstrable accomplishments in science and technology, they should lead others to a similar state of advanced development. This belief was coupled with the expanding missionary activity of the later nineteenth century. By the early years of the twentieth century, the transfer of and education in technology was an inseparable part of American missionary enterprise.¹⁷

War with Spain in 1898 brought American military forces to the Philippines and abruptly brought a mission to reconstruct that society. The reasons the United States embarked upon a colonial experiment have been long and heatedly debated. How the United States justified that project is much more easily discerned. Members of the Philippine Commission, a group of men deputized by the U.S. government in 1900 to outline the policies to be implemented in the new possession, were in agreement on the lack of Filipino ability. President William McKinley articulated a common belief that they “were unfit for self-government,” and later asserted, “We hold the Philippines for the benefit of the Filipinos.”¹⁸

But it was not only the Filipinos that were responsible for the backward state of the islands in the eyes of the Americans. The previous imperial overlords were responsible for leaving the archipelago underdeveloped. The Americans believed that their technology, provided through a benevolent trusteeship, would redeem the Philippines from centuries of Spanish misrule. Americans pointed to the technical shortcomings of the Spanish Empire—their failure to fully exploit the resources of the islands, the lack of public works, crumbling bridges, poor roads, and public health conditions described as “mediaeval”—as proof that their trusteeship was a necessity.¹⁹

The vision for the American colony in the Philippines did have some differences from those of the Europeans and Japanese. It was conceptualized as a grand and progressive public works project. The American’s plans were always placed in a “tutelage” framework rather than the “peace, order, and justice” mantras of British and French imperialists. The tutorial was publicized as an attempt to prepare the Filipinos for eventual self-rule, not as a means to perform maintenance on an empire. The Philippines were to get schooling in politics as well as the creation of a new, modern society that would lead to a well-ordered democracy with commercial and social relationships opening it to a wider world while lashing it to the United States.²⁰

The early years of American rule were marked by a series of programs designed to fulfill this goal. Many infrastructural improvements (particularly roads) were connected to the military efforts against Filipino resistance; howeve...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• List of Illustrations
• Acknowledgments
• List of Abbreviations
• Introduction
• Chapter 1 The Rise of an American Style of Development, 1914–1937
• Chapter 2 The Only Road for Mankind: “Modernisation” to Meet the Challenge of Totalitarianism, 1933–1944
• Chapter 3 A Gospel of Liberalism: Point Four and Modernization as National Policy, 1943–1952
• Chapter 4 “The Proving Ground”: Modernization and U.S. Policy in Northeast Asia, 1945–1960
• Chapter 5 “The Great American Mission”: Modernization and the United States in the World, 1952–1960
• Chapter 6 A TVA on the Mekong: Modernization at War in Southeast Asia, 1960–1973
• Chapter 7 “Everything Is Going Wrong”: The Crisis of Development and the End of the Postwar Consensus
• Chapter 8 New Developments: From the Cold War to the “War on Terror”
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index