d kinshi) stems pcial san
testing, e testing
qoujtiy
Al
əs jeuuo
enercl) Y, enviro id inven
reation
COLD WAR ANTHROPOLOGY
lege or porary ed
bodalitie [populat olity, et
THE CIA, THE PENTAGON, AND THE GROWTH OF DUAL USE
ANTHROPOLOGY
COLD WAR ANTHROPOLOGY
This page intentionally left blank
David H. Price
COLD WAR ANTHROPOLOGY
THE CIA,
THE PENTAGON, AND THE GROWTH OF DUAL USE
ANTHROPOLOGY
Duke University Press | Durham and London | 2016
© 2016 Duke University Press All rights reserved Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper oo Text designed by Mindy Basinger Hill Typeset in Minion and Futura by Westchester Publishing Services
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Price, David H., [date] author. Title: Cold War anthropology : the CIA, the Pentagon, and the growth of dual use anthropology / David H. Price. Description: Durham : Duke University Press, 2016. | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2015037300| ISBN 9780822361060 (hardcover : alk. paper) |
ISBN 9780822361251 (pbk. : alk. paper) | ISBN 9780822374381 (e-book)
Subjects: LcsH: Anthropology—Political aspects— United States—History—2oth century. | Anthropologists—Political activity—United States—History—zoth century. | Military intelligence—United States—History—zoth century. | Science and state— United States—History—2oth century. | Cold War. | United States. Central Intelligence Agency. | United States—History—1945-
Classification: LCC GN17.3.U5 P75 2016 | DDC 301.097309/04—dc23
LC record available at http://lccn.loc.gov/2015037300
FOR MIDGE WITH LOVE, SQUALOR,
AND THANKS FOR HAVING THE STAMINA TO SO
OFTEN APPEAR INTERESTED ENOUGH THROUGHOUT
THE YEARS OF ONGOING UPDATES ON THIS
SEEMINGLY ENDLESS PROJECT.
This page intentionally left blank
Anthropology since its inception has contained a dual but contradictory heritage. On the one hand, it derives from a humanistic tradition of concern with people. On the other hand, anthropology is a discipline developed alongside and within the growth of the colonial and imperial powers. By what they have studied (and what they have not studied) anthropologists have assisted in,
or at least acquiesced to, the goals of imperialist policy.
RADICAL CAUCUS OF THE AMERICAN ANTHROPOLOGICAL ASSOCIATION | 1969
*
Anthropologists who study South Pacific cargo cults have come to expect and receive research grants as much
as Melanesians expect to receive cargo.
TERRENCE BELL | 1989
This page intentionally left blank
xi XXV
XXİX
PART I
109
137
PART II
143
165
195
221 248 276
301
CONTENTS
Preface Acknowledgments
Abbreviations
COLD WAR POLITICAL-ECONOMIC DISCIPLINARY FORMATIONS
ONE Political Economy and History of American Cold War Intelligence
two World War II’s Long Shadow THREE Rebooting Professional Anthropology in the Postwar World
Four After the Shooting War: Centers, Committees, Seminars, and Other Cold War Projects
Five Anthropologists and State: Aid, Debt, and Other Cold War Weapons of the Strong
Intermezzo
ANTHROPOLOGISTS’ ARTICULATIONS WITH THE NATIONAL SECURITY STATE
six Cold War Anthropologists at the CIA: Careers Confirmed and Suspected
seven How CIA Funding Fronts Shaped Anthropological Research
EIGHT Unwitting CIA Anthropologist Collaborators: MK-Ultra, Human Ecology, and Buying a Piece of Anthropology
NINE Cold War Fieldwork within the Intelligence Universe TEN Cold War Anthropological Counterinsurgency Dreams
ELEVEN The AAA Confronts Military and Intelligence Uses of Disciplinary Knowledge
twetve Anthropologically Informed Counterinsurgency in Southeast Asia
323 THIRTEEN Anthropologists for Radical Political Action and Revolution within the AAA
349 FOURTEEN Untangling Open Secrets, Hidden Histories, Outrage Denied, and Recurrent Dual Use Themes
371 Notes 397 References
433 Index
xX | CONTENTS
The analytic branch of the cra is given to tweedy, pipe-smoking intellectuals who work much as if they were doing research back in the universities whence many of them came. It probably has more Ph.Ds than any other area of government and more than many colleges. Their expertise ranges from
anthropology to zoology. Yet, for all that, they can be wrong.
STANSFIELD TURNER | former director of Central Intelligence, 1985
*
PREFACE
This book considers some of the ways that military and intelligence agencies quietly shaped the development of anthropology in the United States during the first three decades of the Cold War. Whether hidden or open secrets, these interactions transformed anthropology’s development in ways that continue to influence the discipline today. This is an anthropological consideration of an- thropology; studying up in ways I hope help the discipline reconsider its inevi- table engagements with the world it studies (Nader 1972).
In many of the early Cold War interfaces connecting anthropology and military-intelligence agencies documented here, the anthropologists produc- ing research of interest to governmental agencies pursued questions of genuine interest to themselves and their discipline. Sometimes gentle nudges of available funding opportunities helped anthropologists choose one particular element of a larger topic over another; in other instances anthropologists indepen- dently pursued their own intellectual interests, producing work that was only later of interest or of use to military or intelligence agencies. In some instances anthropologists recurrently produced work of no value to, or opposing poli- cies of, these agencies. Anthropological research was sometimes directly com- missioned to meet the needs of, or answer specific questions of, military and intelligence agencies, while other times sponsorship occurred without funded anthropologists’ knowledge.
Laura Nader argues that one of anthropology’s fundamental jobs is to pro- vide context: to enlarge the scope of study beyond particular instances and en- compass larger contexts of power, mapping power’s influence on the creation
and uses of social meanings. Understanding power involves studying the eco- nomic and social systems from which power relations arise. Given the military- industrial complex’s dominance in postwar America, anthropologists might well expect to find the explanatory systems of our culture to be embedded in and reflecting these larger elements of militarization in ways that do not appear obvious to participants. Cultures frequently integrate, generally without criti- cal reflection, core features of their base economic systems into widely shared ideological features of a society. Most generally these are seen as naturally oc- curring features of a culture, often ethnocentrically assumed to be views shared by any society. Among pastoral peoples this may mean that religious systems integrate metaphors of gods as shepherds (who shall not want), pristine des- potic hydraulic states worshipping their chief bureaucratic administrators as god-kings, or capitalists constructing versions of a Jesus whose Sermon on the Mount somehow supports the cruelties of laissez-faire capitalism. Such ideo- logical integrations of a society’s economic foundations are common subjects of anthropological inquiry, though the disciplinary histories of the last half century have seldom consistently focused on political economy as a primary force shap- ing the theory and practice of anthropology.
Anthropologists, sociologists, and some disciplinary historians study the interplay between political economy and the production and consumption of anthropological knowledge. Since Karl Mannheim’s (1936) observations on the sociology of knowledge systems, there has been broad acceptance of such links. Thomas Patterson's Social History of Anthropology in the United States (2003) connects political and economic impacts on the development of the discipline. Anthropologists like June Nash, Eric Wolf, Gerald Berreman, Kathleen Gough, or Sidney Mintz direct attention to the political and economic forces shaping field research or the selection of research topics (whether peasants or geopoliti- cal regions) (Berreman 1981; Gough 1968; Mintz 1985; Nash 2007: 3; Jorgensen and Wolf 1970). Eric Ross’s Malthus Factor (1998b) brilliantly shows how the development of demographic theory from the age of Malthus to the Cold War was inherently linked to the political economy of the age. In different ways, William Roseberry’s essay “The Unbearable Lightness of Anthropology” (1996) and Marvin Harris's Theories of Culture in Postmodern Times (1998) challenged anthropologists to connect postmodernism’s explicit neglect of the importance of political economy with broader disciplinary political disengagements. Critiques of colonialism’s impact on anthropology by Asad (1973), Gough (1968), and others dominated discourse in the 1970s and significantly shaped anthropol- ogy’s understanding of its role in political and economic-colonial formations.
xii | PREFACE
Yet, while the Central Intelligence Agency (c1A), the Pentagon, and facets of American militarism marked political crises from Project Camelot to the Thai Affair, anthropologists’ scholarly attempts to put the agency back in the Central Intelligence Agency have been episodic and fleeting. Joseph Jorgensen and Eric Wolf’s (1970) essay, “Anthropology on the Warpath in Thailand,” provided a framework and sketched enough details to launch the serious academic pursuit of such questions, yet the academic pursuit of documenting such disciplinary interactions remained largely ignored.
Ihave gone to great lengths to base this narrative and analysis on documents that meet standards of academic research, striving to provide citations for each piece of this puzzle—which both limits and strengthens what can be said of these relationships; in several instances I have excluded discussion of appar- ent connections with intelligence agencies because of the limited availability of supporting documents. This book is not an exhaustive study of these relation- ships; it provides a framework for further work and a sample of these pervasive mutually beneficial interactions. I made extensive use of the Freedom of Infor- mation Act (FOIA) to file hundreds of requests with the c1A, the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), the Department of Defense, and other agencies, request- ing documents on anthropologists and organizations where anthropologists worked during the Cold War. I have also drawn heavily on governmental and private archival sources, as well as previously published materials. While Fora allowed me to access tens of thousands of remarkable documents from the c1a and other agencies, the cIa continues to guard much of its history and usually complies with FOIA requests in the most limited way, resisting intrusions into its institutional history. Yet even with this resistance, it is possible to docu- ment specific incidents and infer general patterns from the sample of available documents.'
While portions of my research for this book began during the early post- Cold War years, the emergence of the post-9/11 security state significantly and inevitably shaped my analysis of past and present interactions between anthro- pologists and military-intelligence organizations, just as my historical analy- sis of post-9/11 developments was influenced by my historical research on past intelligence agency abuses (see, e.g., Price 2004a). In struggling to add political context to our historical consideration of the development of Cold War an- thropology, I hope to have sufficiently complicated the narrative by stressing the dual use nature of this history: showing that anthropologists often pursued questions of their own design, for their own reasons, while operating in specific historical contexts where the overarching military-industrial university complex
PREFACE | xiii
had its own interest in the knowledge generated from these inquiries. The dual use dynamics of these relationships are of central interest to this book.
For some readers, writing about the cra raises questions of conspiracies, but I find no hidden forces at work here any larger than those directing capitalism itself. As social forces of significant breadth and power, and playing important roles in supporting America’s militarized economy, the Pentagon and the cra can be difficult to write about in ways that do not make them out to be totaliz- ing forces that explain everything, and thereby nothing, at the same time. While some may misinterpret my focus on the importance of these military and intel- ligence elements, exaggerating their significance to the exclusion of other social features, my focus on these militarized elements of midcentury American po- litical economy is as central to this work as Richard Lee’s (1979) focus on !Kung San hunting and collecting, June Nash's (1979b) focus on Bolivian mining labor relations, or Roy Rappaport’s (1984) focus on Tsembaga Maring horticulture and feasting cycles. Anthropological analysis of systems of knowledge produc- tion (even its own) needs to contextualize the worlds in which this knowledge exists. As Steve Fuller argues in his intellectual biography of Thomas Kuhn, “Part of the critical mission of the sociology of knowledge . . . is to get people to realize that their thought stands in some systemic relationship to taken-for- granted social conditions” (2000: 232). And while the Cold War's national secu- rity state was not the only force acting on anthropology during this period, it is the subject of this book—and a force with significant power in midcentury America—and it thus receives a lot of attention here.
Dual Use Anthropology
The phrase “dual use” appearing in the book’s title is borrowed from the physical sciences, which have long worried about the symbiotic relationships between the “pure” and “applied” sciences, relationships in which academic theoretical developments are transformed into commercial products or military applica- tions. Dual use science became a central feature of experimental natural sci- ences during the twentieth century. This transformation shaped branches of physics, chemistry, biology, and medicine, and scientists from these and other fields increasingly came to surrender concerns about the applied uses of the knowl- edge they produced as being part of the natural order of things if they were to be able to do their work. As physics moved from answering questions with mathematics, pen and paper, and simple apparatus, to requiring the manufacture of massive, expensive machinery built not by a dozen scientists but by hundreds or
xiv | PREFACE
thousands of scientists, to plumb secrets of the subatomic realm, it needed spon- sors whose uses of such knowledge were fundamentally different from those of pure knowledge and discovery. With the increased weaponization of physics, such funds came to flow from militarized sources with such frequency that the silence surrounding such occurrences became a common feature of the disci- pline’s milieu.
The dynamics of these processes and the outcomes of this dual use nature of scientific advancements are well known, and the general understanding that “pure science” has both “nonpractical” and “applied” uses has widespread accep- tance in American society. During the second half of the twentieth century, this dynamic became a thematic element of Americans’ shared beliefs in scientific progress. The tragedy of Robert Oppenheimer’s slow comprehension that he and his colleagues would be excluded from decision-making processes concerning how their weapons would be used became part of the American dual use narra- tive. Most scientists understand that the knowledge they produce enters a uni- verse in which they likely have no control over how this knowledge is used; some of this awareness comes from the legal conditions governing the labs where they work, conditions in which employers often own the intellectual rights to the fruits of their labors, but these dynamics go far beyond such legal concerns.
For decades the phrase “dual use research” has described the militarized ap- plications of basic science research, at times describing scientific breakthroughs that have both commercial and military applications, such as developments in global positioning satellites that led to both precision weapons targeting sys- tems and commercial dashboard navigation systems for family cars. Debates over dual use science often focus on biomedical breakthroughs that simulta- neously hold the potential both for cures and for the development of devastat- ing weapons. Such potential applications often mix “pure science” research with commercial or military dual uses in ways that confound or mix understandings of “defensive” and “offensive” uses of biomedical knowledge (Miller and Selge- lid 2008). Approaches to such biological research are far from uniform. Some groups of scientists, like the Cambridge Working Group, raise public concerns posed by research into viruses and other transmittable diseases; others, like members of Scientists for Science, advocate for the right to continue such re- search (Greenfieldboyce 2014).”? But even with these disputes, this awareness of the dual use potential of such work helps focus and clarify the fundamental issues of these debates.
Dual use research programs significantly altered the trajectories of twentieth-century physics, and the payouts for commercial interests and the
PREFACE | xv
weapons- industrial complex have been so sizable that the U.S. government supports massive funding programs for supercolliders and other large expen- ditures that appear to have no direct applications to weapons work. But if past performance is any predictor of future uses, either applications or new fron- tiers of adaptable useful knowledge will follow. David Kaiser (2002) argues that many of the expensive large physics projects with no apparent military applica- tions, such as supercolliders, functionally create a surplus of physicists who can assist military projects as needed.
The dynamics governing the direction of the knowledge flow of dual use research appear to often favor transfers of knowledge from pure to applied re- search projects, but a close examination of interplays between theory and appli- cation finds any determinative statements far too simplistic to account for the feedback between theory and application. Notions of “applied” and “pure” science are constructions that, although useful, have limitations. In 1976, Stewart Brand asked Gregory Bateson about the roots of his cybernetic research. Bateson ex- plained that his initial interest in developing cybernetic theories of cultural sys- tems came not out of abstract, nonapplied theoretical musings but from applied military research. Bateson’s interest in cybernetic feedback in cultural systems was, ironically, itself propagated by an instance of reverse feedback insofar as his abstract theoretical interest came from concrete problems arising from de- signing self-guiding missile systems. In a move reversing what might appear to be general trends of dual use information flow, Bateson took applied military knowledge and transferred it into the basis of a theoretical abstraction analyzing biological and cultural systems.
Distinctions between “applied” and “pure” research shift over time. Some- times the abstractions of theoretical or pure research follow from applied prob- lems; other times theoretical developments lead to applied innovations in ways that diminish the utility of these distinctions. The physical sciences long ago acknowledged the dual use nature of their discoveries: assuming that discover- ies or inventions made with one intention necessarily were open to other, at times often militarized, uses. Some scientific developments like radar, the Internet, GPs navigation systems, walkie-talkies, jet propulsion engines, night vision, and digital photography were initially introduced as military applications and later took on dual civilian uses; in other cases, what were initially either com- mercial or “pure research” scientific discoveries took on military applications, such as the discovery that altimeters could become detonation triggers, or the chain of theoretical physics discoveries that led to the design and use of atomic weapons.
xvi | PREFACE
Field research projects in other disciplines have also brought dual uses linked to the Cold War's national security state. Michael Lewis’s analysis of the Pacific Ocean Biological Survey (poss), a U.S.-financed ornithological study in India in the 1960s involving ornithologist, Office of Strategic Services (oss) alumnus, and Smithsonian director S. Dillon Ripley, shows a project that provided scien- tists and American intelligence agencies with the data they separately sought: the ornithologists gained important data on migratory bird patterns, and the De- fense Department gained vital knowledge it sought for a biological weapons pro- gram. Lewis found the survey was not simply a “cover” operation but instead “exactly what it was purported to be—an attempt to determine what diseases birds of the central Pacific naturally carried, and to determine bird migration patterns in that region. And it is also clear that poss was connected to the US biological warfare programme” (Lewis 2002: 2326). The project was directed from the army’s Biological Warfare Center at Fort Detrick, with plans (appar- ently never enacted) to test biological agents to monitor disbursement patterns. As Lewis observed, “Studying the transmission of biological pathogens by birds for defensive purposes is only a hair’s-breadth from turning that information to an offensive purpose” (2326).
American anthropology has been slow to acknowledge the extent to which it is embedded in dual use processes, preferring to imagine itself as somehow independent not only from the militarized political economy in which it is embedded but also from the traceable uses to which American academic geo- graphic knowledge has been put. The Second World War and the Cold War years that followed were an unacknowledged watershed for dual use anthropo- logical developments. During the war, cultural anthropologists worked as spies, educators, cultural liaison officers, language and culture instructors, and strate- gic analysts. Not only did anthropological linguists prove their worth in learn- ing and teaching the languages needed for waging the war, but their research into language training made fundamental breakthroughs in language teaching techniques; one dual use of these developments was that pocket foreign lan- guage phrase books, based on model sentences with inserted vocabulary words, became the basis of Berlitz’s commercial foreign language pocketbook series (D. H. Price 2008a: 76-77). Physical anthropologists contributed forensic skills to body identifications and were in demand to assist in anthropometric designs of uniforms and new war-fighting machines. Diverse technological innovations (from developments of isotope-based absolute dating techniques to adapta- tions of radar and new forms of aerial stenographic photography) derived from advancements pushed forward during the Second World War.
PREFACE | xvii
While it is seldom acknowledged, many anthropological projects during the Cold War occurred within political contexts in which the American govern- ment had counterinsurgent (or, occasionally, insurgent) desires for studied populations. Counterinsurgency encompasses various practices designed to sub- due uprisings or other challenges to governments. Some forms of counterinsur- gency rely on what political scientist Joseph Nye (2005) termed “hard power”; others draw on soft power. Hard power uses military or paramilitary force and other forms of violence to attack insurgents; soft power uses co-option and cor- rosion to win favor among insurgents. Whether anthropologists provided cul- tural information to military or intelligence agencies or assisted in the imple- mentation of international aid programs to stabilize foreign regimes, this book finds that they played many roles linked to counterinsurgency operations—at times undertaking these roles while pursuing their own research projects.
In part, cultural anthropology’s self-conception as a discipline generally removed from the processes of dual use science arose from how so many of its practitioners appeared to remain in control of their disciplinary means of production. While grants or other funds that allow anthropologists to spend months or years in the field make life easier, self-financed ethnography or the production of social theory still occurred with relatively meager funds. Most anthropologists do not need to work in expensive teams and do not rely on cyclotrons or particle accelerators; at its most basic, ethnography needs time, people, libraries, theory, reflection, and colleagues.
Although archaeologists routinely work on large, multiyear, coordinated, expen- sive research projects, relatively few cultural anthropological research projects during the postwar period had high-budget needs similar to those spawning the expansion of dual use trends in chemistry or physics. Few cultural anthropo- logical research designs required significant material support beyond the basic essentials of travel funds, pencils, paper, pith helmet, mosquito nettings, and portable typewriters. Early Cold War anthropology projects rarely required expensive equipment or brought together numerous scholars working on a single project.
Government-financed language programs, like the Army Special Training Language Program or Title VI-funded basic language acquisition, gave schol- ars the academic skills needed for field research, but these programs lacked mechanisms of coercive focus that could automatically capture funded scholars for some sort of later state purpose. Some postwar projects hired unprecedented large teams of anthropologists to undertake forms of coordinated fieldwork proj- ects. Some of these were governmental programs like the Coordinated Investi-
xviii | PREFACE
gation of Micronesian Anthropology (CIMA, funded by the U.S. Navy); others were largely funded by private foundations with ties to U.S. political policy like the Ford Foundation’s Modjokuto Project—run out of m1t’s c1A-linked Center for International Studies.
Because so much of anthropology’s postcolonial history all but ignores in- teractions between anthropologists and military and intelligence agencies, I worry that my focus on these direct and indirect relationships risks creating its own distortions by creating the impression that an overwhelming majority of anthropological research directly fed military and intelligence apparatus. This was not the case. I assume that the majority of anthropological research had no direct military or intelligence applications, though the indirect ways these pro- grams informed military and civilian agencies about regional knowledge were often significant, and the desires of these agencies routinely shaped the funding of anthropologists’ research.
These dual use relationships also nurtured dual personalities among some anthropologists who attempted to balance disciplinary and state interests.? The postwar years leave records of anthropologists seeking funding opportunities directly and indirectly linked to Cold War projects through patterns reminis- cent of Talal Asad’s depiction of Bronislaw Malinowski as a “reluctant imperialist” (1973: 41-69). Although Malinowski at least partially understood the potential negative impacts of such funding relationships, beyond the rare dissent of soon- to-be-disciplinary outsider Jerome Rauch (1955), there was little public consid- eration of such impacts until the mid-1960s. These silences birthed schisms within anthropologists, like Julian Steward, who developed stripped-down Marxian materialist ecological models while campaigning for Cold War area study funds, even while training a new generation of scholars whose work more directly drew on Marx. There were schisms within archaeologists and cultural anthropologists exploring the rise of pristine state formations using theories of Karl Wittfogel, a Red-baiting anticommunist, whose own dual personality openly quoted and used Marx’s writings with impunity while he informed on Marxist colleges and students to the FB1 and the tribunals of McCarthyism (D. H. Price 2008c). Other dual personality traits developed as anthropologists like Clyde Kluckhohn and Clifford Geertz worked on projects with direct or indirect connections to the cIa or the Pentagon, even as they omitted such links from the textual descriptions they thinly constructed.
Even during the early days of the Cold War, some anthropologists were critical of encroachments of American Cold War politics into anthropological practice. Elizabeth Bacon, John Embree, and Jerome Rauch voiced insightful critiques
PREFACE | xix
of the sort familiar to contemporary anthropologists. Their work and other examples of early critical analysis can inform contemporary anthropologists seeking alternatives to military-linked anthropological prospects in a world increasingly seeking to draw on anthropological analysis for post-9/11 military, intelligence, and security projects.
One lesson I learned by studying the work of Cold War anthropologists is that individual anthropologists’ beliefs that they were engaged in apolitical or politically neutral work had little bearing on the political context or nature of their work. Instead, these scientists’ claims of neutrality often meant they had unexamined alignments with the predominating political forces, which went unnoted because they occurred without friction. But as Marvin Harris argued in The Rise of Anthropological Theory almost half a century ago, “Ethical and political neutrality in the realm of social-science research is a limiting condi- tion which cannot be approached by a posture of indifference. Neither the re- searcher who preaches the partisanship of science, nor [he or she] who professes complete political apathy, is to be trusted. Naturally, we demand that the scien- tific ethic—fidelity to data—must be the foundation of all research. But we must also demand that scientific research be oriented by explicit hypotheses, whose po- litical and moral consequences in both an active and passive sense are understood and rendered explicit by the researcher” (1968: 222). Extending this observation to this project, I find that my own political and ethical orientations align with my academic critiques of the cIa and the Pentagon as organizations threaten- ing rather than protecting democratic movements at home and abroad, though during the two decades of this research, my political and ethical views them- selves have been transformed by the act of historical research. But, as Harris argues, regardless of declared or undeclared ethical or political positions, it is the fidelity to the data by which research is judged, as should the moral and po- litical consequences (both active and passive) derived from the seeds we sow.
Situating This Book
This is the final book in a trilogy chronicling interactions between American anthropologists and military and intelligence agencies. The first volume (chron- ologically, though not published in this order), Anthropological Intelligence (2008a), detailed how American anthropologists contributed their disciplinary knowledge to meet the military and intelligence needs of the Second World War. The second volume, Threatening Anthropology (2004b), explored how loy- alty hearings and the FBi’s surveillance of American anthropologists during
xx | PREFACE
the McCarthy period limited the discipline’s theory and practice—deadening what might have been critical theoretical developments and discouraging applied forms of activist anthropology tied to issues of social justice and equality.
This final volume connects elements of these earlier books; whereas Threat- ening Anthropology told the story of victims of the national security states persecu- tion of anthropologists who questioned the justice or rationality of America’s Cold War era political economy, this volume analyzes how Cold War anthro- pologists’ work at times aligned with the interests of rich and powerful agencies, such as the cia or the Pentagon. This volume connects with the exploration in Anthropological Intelligence of how the needs of World War II transformed an- thropology in ways that would later take on new meanings during the Cold War. Few Americans who came to see anthropological contributions to military or intelligence agencies while fighting fascism and totalitarianism during the Sec- ond World War critically stopped to reconsider the impacts of extending such relationships into the Cold War.
This book traces a historical arc connecting transformations in anthropolo- gists support for military and intelligence activities during the Second World War to the widespread condemnation of anthropological contributions to American military and intelligence campaigns in the American wars in South- east Asia. This spans a complex historical period marked by cultural revolu- tions, startling revelations of FB1 and c1a illegal activities, secret wars, cynical neocolonial governmental programs, and increasing awareness of anthropol- ogy’s historical connections to colonialism. In less than three decades the discipline shifted from a near-total alignment supporting global militarization efforts, to widespread radical or liberal opposition to American foreign policy and resis- tance to anthropological collaborations with military and intelligence agencies. This was a profound realignment of intellectual orientations to the state.
Cold War Anthropology focuses on how shifts in the Cold War's political econ- omy provided anthropology with rich opportunities to undertake well-funded research of interest to anthropologists, while providing this new national secu- rity state with general and specific knowledge. Once-secret documents now show funding programs and strategies that were used to shape the work of scholars conducting international research. Many Americans continued to interpret early Cold War political developments with views linked closely to the world of the previous war. Occupations and other postwar programs found anthro- pologists continuing to use many of the skills developed during the last war, now in a world pursuing new political goals. The postwar reorganization of the Ameri- can Anthropological Association (AAA) anticipated new funding opportunities.
PREFACE | xxi
Area study centers and other postwar regroupings of social scientists studying questions of interest to the Department of State, the Department of Defense, and intelligence organizations broadly impacted postwar anthropologists.
Anthropologists and military or intelligence agencies interacted through four distinct types of relationships: as witting-direct, witting-indirect, unwitting- direct, and unwitting-indirect participants (D. H. Price 2002: 17). After the war, many anthropologists transformed elements of their wartime service into governmental research, policy, development, or intelligence work. Some devel- oped careers at the Department of State or the c1a. Some of the work involved seamless applications of wartime work, adapted to shifts in the postwar world.
Investigative reporting and congressional hearings identified several CIA- linked social science research projects financed by cia funding fronts. Press reports from 1967 revealed the Asia Foundation as a c1a funding front, and the Asia Foundation’s relationship with the AAA is examined. The Human Ecology Fund is also examined as a c1A front that financed and harvested anthropologi- cal research of interest to the cra.
One way that anthropologists’ fieldwork intersected with intelligence agen- cies was through their writings being accessed without their knowledge; in other instances, cultural anthropologists and archaeologists used fieldwork as a cover for espionage. I examine one instance in which a cra agent received an- thropological funding and was sent to the field under the guise of conducting anthropological research.
In several cases, anthropologists or research groups used military-linked funds for basic research, producing knowledge that had national security uses. During the 1950s and 1960s, the Human Relations Area Files (HRAF) subcon- tracted army area handbooks and used the funds from this work to finance basic theoretical research of interest to HRAF anthropologists. American University’s Special Operations Research Office (soro) and Counterinsurgency Informa- tion and Analysis Center (CINFAC) wrote counterinsurgency reports drawing on anthropological writings. One soRO program, Project Camelot, significantly impacted the aaa, and records from Ralph Beals’s post-Camelot inquiries into military and intelligence interactions with anthropologists provide significant new information detailing how the cra sought assistance and information from anthropologists during the early Cold War.
After leaked documents revealed that American anthropologists were undertaking counterinsurgency work in Thailand, several anthropologists be- came embroiled in public clashes within the aaa over the political and ethical propriety of such work. Anthropological research for the RAND Corporation
xxii | PREFACE
on Vietnam and anthropologists’ contributions to USAID, ARPA, and AACT counterinsurgency projects in Thailand show increased uses of anthropological knowledge for counterinsurgency. The fallout from the Thai Affair pressed the AAA to adopt its first ethics code, prohibiting secret research, orienting anthro- pological research toward the interests of research subjects, and requiring new levels of disclosure. The 4A4’s focus on ethical issues raised by anthropological contributions to military and intelligence projects identified some of the disci- plinary problems with military uses of anthropology, yet many of the core ques- tions about the dual use nature of anthropological research remain unanswered
within the discipline today.
PREFACE | xxiii
This page intentionally left blank
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
When I began publishing work on anthropologists and the Cold War and was not sure whether to do a single book spanning the materials covered in this volume, Threatening Anthropology, and Anthropological Intelligence, three wise women (Nina Glick-Schiller, Janice Harper, and Laura Nader) independently told me to break the stories up into separate volumes and to lead with the Mc- Carthy story. Janice Harper explicitly told me that anthropologists love stories in which we are victims (McCarthyism) but won't like being shown as “collabo- rators.” I had no idea it would take me two decades of largely unfunded, but highly rewarding, research to document this story.
The influences for this project are broad, but the seeds for these volumes were planted three decades ago when I was an undergraduate reading the work of June Nash, Laura Nader, Delmos Jones, Joseph Jorgenson, Gerry Berreman, Eric Wolf, and others on how powerful forces and organizations like the cxa and the Pentagon have directed anthropological inquiries. My graduate work with Marvin Harris strengthened my writing and focused my attention on political-economic forces shaping the worlds in which anthropological knowl- edge was produced and consumed. My years as a pre-Internet human-Google working as Marvin's research assistant in his largely abandoned campus office found me surrounded by his old 1960s and early 1970s issues of the American Anthropological Association Fellows Newsletter, reading accounts of some of the history recorded here. Though Marvin Harris and Marshall Sahlins famously clashed over significant epistemological differences, and even with my clear links to Harris, Sahlins has encouraged me and supported my efforts to docu- ment these past connections between anthropologists and military and intel- ligence agencies.
My friendship and work with Alexander Cockburn and Jeffrey St. Clair and writing for CounterPunch strengthened my writing voice, and helped me connect what are often misunderstood as separate academic and political worlds. Nina Glick-Schiller was the first editor to take my political historical work seriously enough to get me into print without dampening my critique; her encourage- ment and support helped me continue to work on a topic that most editors found intriguing but were hesitant to publish (see Price 1998). Iam deeply grateful for the editorial guidance and friendship provided by Gustaaf Houtman, who
helped me publish post-9/11 critiques of militarized social science in the Royal Anthropological Institutes Anthropology Today during a period when it was difficult to publish such work in the U.S. When I experienced difficulties pub- lishing a report documenting the AAA’s 1951 covert relationship with the cIa described in chapter 3 in the American Anthropologist (after three split reviews questioning the wisdom of exploring such matters in public), AAA president Louise Lamphere convened a panel at the association’s 2000 business meeting (late in the evening, after the infamous Darkness in El Dorado public airing of grievances) to discuss these findings. Without Louise’s support and Laura Nader’s encouragement, I might have chosen to abandon a topic that was im- possible to find research grants to sponsor, and nearly impossible to publish on when I started and returned to working in the Middle East. Roberto Gonzalez’s detailed comments on the manuscript helped me better focus elements of my argument. Karen Jaskar’s librarian sensitivities wisely convinced me to not hy- phenate “dual use” in the title, or elsewhere, to avert future searching and cata- loging catastrophes. I am indebted to Jack Stauder for generously giving me a treasure trove of documents and artifacts from his years in the aaa’s Radical Caucus and Anthropologists for Radical Political Action.
This book was not funded by traditional research grants. The failures to secure research grants early on in this project led me, without regrets, to finance this research by other means. Many of the archival trips were added on to invited speaking engagements at universities (American University, Berkeley, Brown, Chicago, Columbia, uc Irvine, George Mason, University of New Mexico, Syr- acuse, Yale, etc.) or academic conferences, or I used small funds from Saint Martins University: a teaching excellence award cash prize, two one-semester sabbaticals (in the last twenty years), and some sparse faculty development funds. Funds for some FOIA processing were provided by the Institute for the Advancement of Journalistic Clarity. My dear friends Cathy Wilson and David Patton hosted me at their home during many archival trips to Washington, DC. Ken Wissoker’s guidance and support at Duke University Press have been invaluable in helping all three of these volumes come into print. I am deeply grateful to all the scholars who hosted my campus talks or helped publish my work, at times weathering criticisms and setbacks for bringing these critiques directly to the environments where they work.
I have been researching this book for two decades. Earlier versions of some of the historical episodes recounted here have appeared in different forms: An- thropology Today published earlier analyses of the Human Ecology Fund (D. H. Price 2007b, 2007c) and the M-vico System (D. H. Price 2012b). I published
xxvi | ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
a chapter exploring anthropological responses to American military actions in Southeast Asia as part of a School for Advanced Research seminar volume (D. H. Price 2011b). I also published an early analysis of c1a-AAA interac- tions (D. H. Price 2003a), although documents I discovered later reshaped sig- nificant portions of that analysis.
Among the many other colleagues and friends who played important roles in shaping the production and form of this work during the past decades are David Aberle, Philip Agee, John Allison, David Altheide, Thomas Anson, Olivia Archibald, Julian Assange, Alan Bain, Sindre Bangstad, Russ Bernard, Gerry Berreman, Bjorn Enge Bertelsen, Catherine Besteman, Andy Bickford, Jeff Birkenstein, Father Bix, Karen Brodkin, Brenda Chalfin, Noam Chomsky, Harold Conklin, Lorraine Copeland, Dalia Corkrum, Jonathan Dentler, Dale Depweg, Sigmund Diamond, Jim Faris, Greg Feldman, Brian Ferguson, Les Field, Sverker Finnstrém, Carolyn Fluehr-Lobban, Maximilian Forte, Kerry Fos- her, Andre Gunder Frank, Charles Frantz, Irina Gendelman, Deborah Gewertz, McGuire Gibson, Aaron Goings, Jonathan Graubart, Linda Green, Hugh Gusterson, Erik Harms, Chris Hebdon, Alan Howard, Jean Jackson, Bea Jaure- gui, Barbara Rose Johnston, Adrian Resa Jones, Linda Jones, John Kelly, Chun Kyung-soo, Roger Lancaster, Robert Lawless, Richard Lee, Sara Leone, Robert Leopold, Kanhong Lin, Thomas Love, Catherine Lutz, Andrew Lyons, Har- riet Lyons, Jon Marks, Ray McGovern, Brian McKenna, Father Kilian Malvey, Erika Manthey, Stephen X. Mead, David Miller, Sidney Mintz, Bill Mitchell, Sean Mitchell, John Moore, Laura Nader, Steve Niva, Greg Orvis, Mark Pap- worth, Bill Peace, Glenn Petersen, Jack Price, Milo Price, Nora Price, Steve Reyna, Eric Ross, Mike Salovesh, Schuyler Schild, Robert Scott, Daniel Segal, Michael Seltzer, Gerry Sider, Duane Smith, Molly Smith, Roger Snider, Lawrence Guy Straus, George Stocking, Ida Susser, David Vine, Eric Wakin, Jeremy Walton, and Teresa Winstead.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS | xxvii
This page intentionally left blank
ABBREVIATIONS
AAA American Anthropological Association
AACT Academic Advisory Council for Thailand
ACLS American Council of Learned Societies
AFME American Friends of the Middle East
AFOSR Air Force Office of Scientific Research
AID Agency for International Development (see also USAID)
AIFLD American Institute for Free Labor Development
AIR American Institute for Research
ALS Army Language School
APRA Angkatan Perang Ratu Adil
ARD Accelerated Rural Development (Thai government project)
ARO Army Research Office
ARPA Advanced Research Projects Administration
ARVN Army of the Republic of [South] Vietnam
AsA Afghan Student Association
CENIS Center for International Studies, Massachusetts Institute of Technology
CFA Committee for Free Asia (later became Asia Foundation)
cIa Central Intelligence Agency
cIMA Coordinated Investigation of Micronesian Anthropology
CINFAC Counterinsurgency Information and Analysis Center (part of soro)
COINTELPRO Counter Intelligence Program (FB1 domestic counterinsurgency program, 1956-1971)
corps Civil Operations and Revolutionary Development Support
CRESS Center for Research in Social Systems
DCI Director of Central Intelligence (cra)
pop Department of Defense
DSB Defense Science Board
ECA Economic Cooperation Administration (Marshall Plan)
ERP European Recovery Plan (Marshall Plan)
FARGC Foreign Area Research Coordinating Group (also called FAR)
FASD Foreign Area Studies Division (a division of soRo)
FBI Federal Bureau of Investigation
FISEE Fund for International Social and Economic Education FMAD Foreign Morale Analysis Division
FOA Foreign Operations Administration
FOIA Freedom of Information Act
FSI Foreign Service Institute
FULRO Front Unifie de Lutte des Races Opprimees GVN Government of [South] Vietnam
HEF Human Ecology Fund
HRAF Human Relations Area Files
HRIP Harvard Refugee Interview Project
Ica International Cooperation Agency
IDA Institute for Defense Analysis
IAA Institute of Inter-American Affairs
1FIS Institute for Intercultural Studies
IHR Institute of Human Relations
IPR Institute of Pacific Relations
MSA Mutual Security Agency
MSUG Michigan State University Group
NACA National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics NAS National Academy of Sciences
nFss National Foundation on Social Science
NIMH National Institute of Mental Health
NLF National Liberation Front (Vietnam)
nrc National Research Council
NSA National Security Agency
nsc National Security Council
NsF National Science Foundation
ONI Office of Naval Intelligence
ONR Office of Naval Research
orc Office of Policy Coordination
ops Office of Public Safety
osrp Office of Scientific Research and Development oss Office of Strategic Services
owl! Office of War Information
Poss Pacific Ocean Biological Survey
PPR Principles of Professional Responsibility
PSB Psychological Strategy Board
RACP Remote Area Conflict Program (an ARPA program)
xxx | ABBREVIATIONS
RAND Research ANd Development (RAND Corporation)
RCC Research in Contemporary Cultures
RRC Russian Research Center (Harvard University)
SEADAG Southeast Asia Development Advisory Group
st Secret Intelligence Branch, Office of Strategic Services
SIHE Society for the Investigation of Human Ecology
sıL Summer Institute of Linguistics
smc Student Mobilization Committee to End the War in Vietnam SORO Special Operations Research Office, American University SPARE Statement on Problems of Anthropological Research and Ethics SRI Stanford Research Institute
ssrc Social Science Research Council
ssu Strategic Services Unit
STEM U.S. Special Technical and Economic Mission
TCA Technical Cooperation Administration
UNESCO United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization URPE Union of Radical Political Economy
usaip U.S. Agency for International Development
usia U.S. Information Agency
usis U.S. Information Service
usom U.S. Operation Mission
WAHRAF Washington Area Human Relations Area Files
ABBREVIATIONS xxxi
This page intentionally left blank
PART | COLD WAR POLITICAL-ECONOMIC DISCIPLINARY FORMATIONS
This page intentionally left blank
The cra, after all, is nothing more than the secret police of American capitalism, plugging up leaks in the political dam night and day so that shareholders of US companies operating in poor
countries can continue enjoying the rip-off.
PHILIP AGEE | ex-CIA agent, 1975
*
ONE POLITICAL ECONOMY AND HISTORY OF AMERICAN COLD WAR INTELLIGENCE
The end of the Second World War left the United States in a unique position among the victors. Not only was it the only nation on earth possessing a new weapon capable of instantly leveling entire cities, but the lack of damage to its industrial home front gave America the exclusive economic opportunities be- fitting a global conqueror.
The United States entered an era of economic prosperity the likes of which the world had never seen. With an expanding global economic system, and much of the world slowly recovering from the war, America found itself with what George Kennan secretly described as a nation holding “about 50% of the world’s wealth but only 6.3% of its population. . . . In this situation, we cannot fail to be the object of envy and resentment. Our real task in the coming period is to devise a pattern of relationships which will permit us to maintain this posi- tion of disparity. ... To do so, we will have to dispense with all sentimentality and day-dreaming; and our attention will have to be concentrated everywhere on our immediate national objectives. ... We should cease to talk about vague and... unreal objectives such as human rights, the raising of living standards and democratizations” (1948: 121-22). Kennan understood that U.S. foreign policy could not seriously support efforts to improve human rights, raising standards of living and introducing democratic reforms, though he underesti- mated the importance of the need to “talk about” these vague and unreal objec- tives as tools of domestic and international propaganda. Kennan’s cynicism was
matched by the inability of many U.S. social scientists of the era to acknowledge that such self-serving motivations lay at the base of many Cold War American foreign policies and programs linked to American academics.
The war's end brought uncertainty for American intelligence agencies. Under President Truman’s Executive Order 9621, the oss disbanded on October 1, 1945, and the agency’s functions were reassigned to the Department of State and the War Department. Had President Roosevelt lived to the postwar period, the oss may have remained a permanent agency, but oss director William Dono- van lacked Truman’s support. Truman’s fiscal approach to government envi- sioned a smaller postwar military and intelligence apparatus, and he initially opposed expanded postwar intelligence functions.'
Before the war, the United States had no permanent agency devoted to in- ternational intelligence. When Truman disbanded the oss, 1,362 of its Research and Analysis Branch personnel were reassigned to the Department of State's Interim Research and Intelligence Service, and another 9,028 of oss Opera- tions personnel (such as covert action) were transferred to the War Department (Troy 1981: 303; 313-14). The oss’s Research and Analysis Branch was renamed the Interim Research and Intelligence Service and placed under the leadership of Alfred McCormack.” When oss’s Secret Intelligence (s1) Branch and Coun- terespionage (X2) Branch were relocated to the War Department, they became the new Strategic Services Unit (ssu). Three months later, in January 1946, President Truman created the Central Intelligence Group which took over the responsibilities, and many of the personnel, of the War Department’s ssu. All of this shifting, realigning, and relocating of intelligence personnel was short- lived. The permanent restructuring and relocation of both the analysis and the covert action functions of American international intelligence shifted to a new centralized agency in the summer of 1947, when Truman signed the National Security Act on July 26, establishing the Central Intelligence Agency.
During the 664 days between the dissolution of the oss and the creation of the cra, American intelligence personnel continued many of the types of tasks undertaken by oss during the war, though there was greater institutional disar- ray, with less intense focus than had existed under a culture of total warfare.’ Had Truman stuck with his initial decision to divide intelligence analysis and operations into two separate governmental agencies (analysis at State, opera- tions at the War Department), the practices and uses of American intelligence might have developed in profoundly different ways than occurred during the Cold War. Combining analysis with operations structurally fated the cra to a
4 | CHAPTER ONE
history of covert action and episodes of cooking analysis to meet the desires of operations and presidents.
When the National Security Act of 1947 established the cra, the American military and intelligence apparatus was reorganized with the establishment of the National Security Council (Nsc), and the June 12, 1948, Nsc Directive of Special Projects (Nsc 10/2) authorized the cra to undertake covert action and intelligence operations. The Central Intelligence Agency Act of 1949 later provided budgetary authority to the agency and authorization to undertake domestic and international activities.
During the c1a’s early years, its employees’ work was divided between the In- telligence Division (Office of Collection and Dissemination; Office of Reports and Estimates) and the Operations Division (Office of Operations; Office of Special Operations). The cIa sought to become the eyes, ears, and mind of America. It envisioned itself as an elite body harnessing the intellectual power of its citizens to gather information. The c1a’s charter authorized no domestic or international law enforcement authority; instead, the agency was charged with the collection and analysis of intelligence relating to national security. The CIA was administered by the executive branch, with a bureaucracy providing oversight by a group known as the Forty Committee, which could authorize CIA covert operations in consultation with the executive branch. The looseness of its charge allowed the agency to undertake a wide range of operations with no oversight outside of the executive branch.
From the c1’s earliest days, its analysts monitored postwar, postcolonial shifts in global power. As postwar independence movements reshaped global rela- tions, CIA analysts considered how these shifts would pit American anticolo- nialist historical values against America’s emerging role as a global superpower.
“The Break-Up of the Colonial Empires and Its Implications for US Security”
The cra’s confidential report The Break-Up of the Colonial Empires and Its Im- plications for US Security (1948) described the global setting in which the an- thropological field research of the second half of the twentieth century would transpire (cIa 1948). Most anthropologists undertook this fieldwork without reference to the dynamics described in this report, yet these dynamics shaped the funding of particular research questions and geographic areas. The report stated the agency’s understanding of the problems facing the postwar world,
POLITICAL ECONOMY AND INTELLIGENCE | 5
where shifting power relations presented threats and opportunities to the new American superpower:
The growth of nationalism in colonial areas, which has already succeeded in break- ing up a large part of the European colonial system and in creating a series of new, nationalistic states in the Near and Far East, has major implications for US security, particularly in terms of possible world conflict with the USSR. This shift of the dependent areas from the orbit of the colonial powers not only weakens the prob- able European allies of the US but deprives the US itself of assured access to vital bases and raw materials in these areas in event of war. Should the recently liberated and current emergent states become oriented toward the USSR, US military and
economic security would be seriously threatened. (CIA 1948: 1)
The report identified upcoming dominant Cold War dynamics, as the United States and the Soviet Union would spend trillions of dollars in the next four decades struggling over postcolonial loyalties around the globe. The key ele- ments to future strategies were the collapse of European colonialism, growing native nationalism, the likelihood of Soviet efforts to capture clients in these new states, the presence of (cheap) raw materials needed for U.S. economic growth, and envisioned conflicts with the Soviet Union over control of these nations and resources.
The cra observed that the postwar collapse of existing European and Japa- nese colonialism in Asia and Africa fueled “the release of bottled-up national- ist activities, and it conceded the “further disintegration” of global European colonial holdings was “inevitable” (CIA 1948: 1). It stressed the economic impact of anticolonial movements, lamenting that “no longer can the Western Pow- ers rely on large areas of Asia and Africa as assured sources of raw materials, markets, and military bases” (2). Capturing the “good will” of nations achieving their independence was vital, and a failure to do so would result in antagonism toward the United States and a loss of vital clients (3).
At this moment in history, the cra could have positioned itself to side with the liberation of people of the world who were ruled and taxed without direct representation, but agency analysts instead framed this primarily as a proxy struggle between the United States and the Soviet Union, noting that “the grav- est danger to the US is that friction engendered by these issues may drive the so-called colonial bloc into alignment with the USSR” (CIA 1948: 2). The cra explained native nationalist liberation movements as deriving from a mixture of historical, social, political, and economic forces, and it identified the five pri- mary causes as increased awareness of stratification, colonial powers’ discrimi-
6 | CHAPTER ONE
natory treatment of subject populations, the “deep-seated racial hostility of native populations,’ the global spread of Western values favoring independence and nationalism, and “the meteoric rise of Japan, whose defeats of the European powers in the Russo-Japanese War and especially World War II punctured the myth of white superiority” (5).
The cra noted the neocolonial control of the British in Egypt, the French in Algeria, Morocco, and Tunisia, and the Italians in Libya and mentioned bur- geoning independence movements in Indonesia, Madagascar, and Nigeria. It understood that “states like India and Egypt have already brought colonial is- sues into the uN and may be expected increasingly to take the leadership in attempting to hasten in this and other ways the liberation of remaining colonial areas” (CIA 1948: 7).
Even in 1948, the c1a recognized the role that foreign aid and promises of technical assistance and modernization could play in courting would-be in- dependent nations. As explained in its report, “The economic nationalism of the underdeveloped nations conflicts sharply with US trade objectives and these countries tend to resent US economic dominance. On the other hand, they urgently need external assistance in their economic development, and the US is at present the only nation able to supply it. The desire for US loans and private investment will have some effect in tempering the antagonism of these states toward US policies” (c1a 1948: 8). Under the direction of Cold War economists and strategists like Walt Rostow, Max Millikan, and Allen Dulles, aid later be- came a powerful soft power component of American international policy.
The cra viewed coming colonial collapses as “inevitable” and predicted these developments would favor the Soviet Union (cIa 1948: 9). The agency was concerned about the Soviet alignment with international liberation move- ments. Without addressing Leninist critiques of imperialism, the c1a observed the Soviets were “giving active support through agitators, propaganda, and local Communist parties to the nationalist movements throughout the colo- nial world” (9). The agency acknowledged the USSR held advantages over the United States because
as a non-colonial power, the USSR is in the fortunate position of being able to champion the colonial cause unreservedly and thereby bid for the good will of co- lonial and former colonial areas. Its condemnation of racial discrimination pleases native nationalists and tends to exclude the USSR from the racial animosity of East toward West. The Communists have sought to infiltrate the nationalist par-
ties in the dependent and formerly dependent areas and have been, as in Burma,
POLITICAL ECONOMY AND INTELLIGENCE | 7
Indonesia, and Indochina, among the most vocal agitators for independence. The Soviet Union has found the World Federation of Trade Unions an effective weapon for penetrating the growing labor movements in Asia and Africa and for turning
them against the colonial powers. (9)
Nationalism was expected to have increasing importance for poor nations un- dergoing rapid transformations, and the cIa believed that cultural differences between colonizers and the colonized would increase antagonism in historic colonial regions like Indochina, Indonesia, and North Africa (10).
The cr identified opportunities for American interests given that newly in- dependent nations would need help from “the great powers for protection and assistance” in the new “power vacuum” (CIA 1948: 11). Establishing the “good will” of the leaders and peoples of these countries would be key, and the report noted that American racial segregationist policies allowed the Soviets to por- tray the United States as a bigoted nation.
The report identified five impacts that the collapse of the global colonial system would have on U.S. security. First, colonial liberation would economically weaken Americas European allies, which would diminish access to cheap minerals and other natural resources and strategic military outposts. Second, political upheaval could leave the United States with reduced access to these same resources. Because of this threat, the cra insisted that “the growing US list of strategic and critical materials — many of which like tin and rubber are available largely in colonial and former colonial areas — illustrates the dependence of the US upon these areas. The US has heretofore been able to count upon the availability of such bases and materials in the colonial dependencies of friendly powers; but the new nations arising in these areas, jealous of their sovereignty, may well be reluctant to lend such assistance to the US” (CIA 1948: 12). Third, if the Soviet Union established close relationships with new nations in Asia, such relation- ships would undermine U.S. interests. Fourth, the c1a recognized dangers for American interests if the United States was identified as supporting colonial powers. Finally, the Soviet Union was expected to create unrest in colonial re- gions and to exploit any resulting upheaval to its political advantage (12-13).
The agency concluded it was vital for the United States to generate goodwill in these new nations. It recommended that the United States temper its support for European allies engaged in colonial control of foreign lands in order to not be identified with colonialism. The cra predicted colonialism would become a losing venture for Europe and that “attempts at forcible retention of critical
8 | CHAPTER ONE
colonial areas in the face of growing nationalist pressure may actually weaken rather than strengthen the colonial powers” (CIA 1948: 13).4
It is worth speculating on what lost strands of U.S. intelligence analysis favor- ing postcolonial independence might have developed in an alternate universe where Truman left the oss’s former intelligence and operations branches dis- articulated into the State Department and War Department, but in a world where intelligence and operations were conjoined, and Kennan’s Cold War game plan aggressively guided American policy, such developments were not to be. As a result, c1A reports questioning the wisdom of aligning American interests with colonial powers were destined to be ignored and overwritten by emerging hegemonic Cold War desires.
Seeing Like a CIA
From its beginnings, the cra established links with academia. These earliest links exploited connections with academics with wartime oss service who returned to university positions after the war. An article in the cra’s journal Studies in Intelligence noted that “close ties between the Central Intelligence Agency and American colleges and universities have existed since the birth of the Agency in 1947” (Cook 1983: 33). Given the connections of oss personnel to Harvard, Yale, Columbia, and other elite universities, it was natural that “a disproportionate number of the new recruits came from the same schools. Similarly, professors who had joined the Agency often turned to their former colleagues still on campuses for consultation and assistance. This ‘old boy’ system was quite pro- ductive in providing new employees in the professional ranks. Thus, there was an early linkage between the Agency and the Ivy League, or similar schools” (Cook, 34; Jeffreys-Jones 1985).
In 1951, the cra launched its University Associates Program, which secretly connected the agency with university professors on fifty U.S. campuses. Select universities became “consultant-contacts who would receive a nominal fee for spotting promising students, steering them into studies and activities of inter- est to the Agency, and eventually nominating them for recruitment” (Cook 1983: 34). But the c1a’s recruitment techniques narrowed rather than expanded its views. In 1954, the Doolittle Commission Report found the c1a’s close link to World War II networks hampered its development, and that the heavy use of elite universities for recruitment limited the agency’s potential. It recom- mended that the c1a fire some of its oss-era employees and expand its campus
POLITICAL ECONOMY AND INTELLIGENCE | 9
recruitment efforts to a broader variety of university campuses (Doolittle et al. 1954: 25).°
The cia secretly groomed campus contacts, known within the agency as “P- Sources” (professor sources) (Cook 1983; Price 2011f). P-Sources, who had high value within the agency, sometimes provided debriefings after travel to foreign nations and at other times wrote papers relating to their academic expertise. The number of these P-Sources is unknown, but William Corson, a historian and a Marine Corps lieutenant colonel, estimated that by the mid-1970s as many as five thousand academics were cooperating with the c1a on at least a part-time basis (Corson 1977: 312). During the early 1950s, professional orga- nizations like the American Anthropological Association at times secretly, or unwittingly, worked with the cra, providing it with membership lists and lists of area specialists (see chapters 3 and 7).
The agency sometimes secretly drew on groups of academics possessing de- sired knowledge to supplement its understanding of issues. One such group, known as the Princeton Consultants, was established in early 1951 and was tasked with complementing the work of the cra’s newly established Office of National Estimates. The original group consisted of eight scholars who were paid a modest stipend and met in Princeton with c1a personnel four times a year to discuss specific problems of interest to the agency, bringing outside views and broader approaches to problems (Steury 1994: 111; see CIA 1959b: 2). The group, which grew in size, continued to meet in Princeton for decades (c1A 1959a; see table 1.1).
When the existence of the Princeton Consultants became public in the 1970s, members Cyril Black and Klaus Knorr “denied any relationship between the National Intelligence Estimates and the c1a’s covert activities” (Cavanagh 1980). Black’s and Knorr’s denials were in one sense true given that most of their work was aligned with making projections for the Office of National Estimates and the improbability that they had access to details about covert actions. However, as Cavanagh (1980) noted, Calvin Hoover’s memoirs suggest some of the work provided by the Princeton Consultants was consistent with the preparatory work undertaken in plotting the c1a’s 1953 Iranian coup.
In 1963, the c1A’s 100 Universities Program sought to improve the agency’s public image and to boost campus recruitments by expanding its presence on American campuses (see CIA 1963c). Former cIa case officer John Stock- well described the agency's Foreign Resources Division as its “domestic covert operations division,” linking c1a case officers with professors and students at “every major campus in the nation. They work with professors, using aliases on
10 | CHAPTER ONE
TaBLe 1.1. Listing of the c1a’s Princeton Consultants
NAME
INSTITUTIONAL AFFILIATION
CITATION
Norman Armour Hamilton Fish
Armstrong Samuel Bemis James Billington Richard Bissell Cyril Black
Robert Bowie Vannevar Bush
Burton Fahs
Gordon Gray
Joseph Grew Caryl P. Haskins Barklie Henry
Calvin Hoover
William H. Jackson George Kennan
Klaus Knorr
William Langer George A. Lincoln Harold F. Linder
Max Millikan Philip Mosely
Lucian Pye Raymond Sontag Alexander Standing Joseph Strayer
T. Cuyler Young Sr.
Former ambassador
Foreign Affairs
Yale University Princeton University, History cia, Deputy Director of Plans Princeton University, Soviet Studies Harvard, International Studies OSRD, NACA Director of Humanities, Rockefeller Foundation Secretary of the Army/ national security adviser Former ambassador Carnegie Inst., director
New York businessman
Duke, Soviet Economics
c1A, Deputy Director Career, Foreign Service etc. Princeton University,
Strategic Studies Harvard, History
Chair, Export-Import Bank, Asst. Sec of State MIT, International Studies, Econ
Columbia University
MIT, Political Science
uc Berkeley, European History
Princeton, Medieval history
Princeton, Near East studies
(Steury 1994: 110) (Montague 1992: 135; CIA 1959b) (Steury 1994: 110) (Cavanagh 1980) (Steury 1994: 110) (Cavanagh 1980; CIA 1959b) (Cavanagh 1980) (Montague 1992: 135) (Steury 1994: 110; Montague 1992: 136) (Steury 1994: 110)
(Steury 1994: 110) (Cavanagh 1980) (Montague 1992: 136;
Steury 1994: 110) (Cavanagh 1980;
CIA 1959b) (Steury 1994: 110) (Montague 1992: 135) (Cavanagh 1980;
CIA 1959b) (Steury 1994: 110) (cra 1959b) (Cavanagh 1980)
(Steury 1994: 110) (Steury 1994: 110; CIA 1959b) (Cavanagh 1980) (Steury 1994: 110) (Montague 1992: 136) (Steury 1994: 110; CIA 1959b) (Steury 1994: 110)
various programs. Their activities include building files on students whom the professors help them target” (Stockwell 1991: 102-3).
Curating Knowledge and Intelligence at the CIA
As part of its effort to monitor and control international developments, the early cIa collected and curated global knowledge. The agency envisioned that even the almost random collection of knowledge could eventually, if organized and retrievable, later be used in intelligence capacities. The scope of its approach to collecting disarticulated bits of knowledge is shown in Jane Schnell’s classified article “Snapshots at Random” (1961), which described a cia collection known as the “Graphic Register” This was the agency archive of photographs collected from all over the world showing routine features and elements of physical cul- ture. These photographs were cataloged and analyzed for use at some unknown date in cIa operations.
Schnell encouraged c1a employees planning future trips to “some less well frequented place” to contact agency personnel maintaining the Register to see if it was interested in providing them with film and a camera (Schnell 1961: 17). The cra wanted almost any image from abroad. Schnell wrote, “The fact that an object may have been photographed previously by no means disqualifies it: changes, or the absence of changes, in it over a period of years or of weeks may be important. And changes aside, it is amazing how many pictures of the same object can be taken without telling the whole story” (18).
The scale of Schnell’s project revealed core c1A conceits from this period, as if the unguided particularist collection of at-the-time meaningless informa- tion could inevitably lead to useful breakthroughs later. The cra believed that if enough information was collected from enough angles, American intelligence could develop a comprehensive view of the world it sought to control. No mun- dane event or artifact was too insignificant for collection. According to Schnell:
If a new gas storage tank is being built in the city where you are stationed and you drive past it going to work every day, why not photograph it once a week or once a month? The photos will tell how long it takes to build it, what types of materials and methods of construction are used, and how much gas storage capacity is being added. Maybe you don’t know what a gas storage tank looks like, and all you see is a big tank being built. Take a picture of it anyway; obviously it is built to store something. What you don’t know about it the analyst will. That is what he is an analyst for, but he can’t analyze it if you don’t get him the pictures. (1961: 18-19)
12 CHAPTER ONE
This project was an emblematic representation of the c1a’s midcentury proj- ect: it was well funded, global, brash, panoptical, without borders or limits. It was funded despite the unlikelihood that it would ever produce much useful intelligence, and working under conditions of secrecy removed normal general expectations of outcomes or accountability.
Other Cold War intelligence agencies also established massive collections they imagined could be of use at some hypothetical future date. While enrolled in a spycraft lock-picking class, former British m15 counterintelligence agent Peter Wright encountered a massive cellar room with thousands of keys, me- ticulously cataloged and arranged on walls. His instructor told the class that MI5 made it a practice to secretly collect key imprints “of offices, hotels, or pri- vate houses ... all over Britain” The instructor’s explanation for the collection was simply that “you never know when you might need a key again” (Wright 1988: 51). In The File (1998), Timothy Garton Ash described the East German intelligence agency, Stassi’s, massive collection of personal items (including un- derwear and other articles of clothing) that might be of use at some unknown future date if Stassi needed to use tracking dogs to locate the owner of the stolen item. These items were processed and placed in plastic bags, then sorted and stored in Stassi’s immense, efficient archival filing system for unknown future uses. Edward Snowden’s more recent disclosures of rampant National Security Agency (Nsa) electronic monitoring establish that the agency collected previ- ously unfathomable amounts of data on billions of people on the assumption the information might be of use at some future date (Greenwald 2014; Price 2013C).
Intelligence agencies’ vast collections of (immediately) useless objects illus- trate institutional commitments to establishing stores of intangibly useful re- sources that might have intelligence uses at unforeseen future times. A powerful national security state collecting unlimited numbers of obscure, useless snap- shots with no conceivable direct applications thought nothing of supporting area study centers (teaching a spectrum of languages, which ranged from hav- ing obvious to nonexistent security applications), and a broad range of nonap- plied anthropological research grants without direct applications to intelligence work. Academics might well collect needed bits of unconnected knowledge that cra analysts could later use for tasks yet to be determined.
But this rapid growth in intelligence activities also brought unease as Presi- dent Eisenhower (1961) raised awareness of the “danger that public policy could itself become the captive of a scientific-technological elite? The secret report, titled “Conclusions and Recommendations of the President's Committee on
POLITICAL ECONOMY AND INTELLIGENCE | 13
Information Activities Abroad” (CIAA 1960), more commonly known as “The Sprague Report; captured the unease, philosophical position, and growing reli- ance on academics as the cra embarked on a new phase of the Cold War. The report described the agency’s use of U.S. labor unions to establish relationships with labor union movements in communist countries and noted political gains from open academic exchange programs funded by public or private means (CIAA 1960: 53-54, 65). Academic exchanges were acknowledged as important Cold War weapons that needed funding because “in our exchange programs we must outdo the Sino-Soviet Bloc in selection of leaders and students with leader- ship potential, quality of programs offered, and treatment accorded visitors” (78).
George Ecklund’s secret article “Guns or Butter Problems of the Cold War” unapologetically noted that “the world now spends about $135 billion annually on the war industry, roughly as much as the entire income of the poorer half of mankind. The United States spends a little more than a third of the total, the USSR about a third, and the rest of the world a little less than a third” (1965: 1-2). Ecklund described the negative impacts of such high levels of military spending on the Soviet economy and the problems this presented for the Sovi- ets’ ability to spend funds on human needs at home and on those they hoped to influence in international technical assistance programs. He projected that such continued levels of military spending would be devastating to economic growth for the Soviet Union.
Ecklund did not consider whether American runaway military spending would establish domestic crippling economic deficits or direct federal spend- ing priorities away from national health care, mass transit infrastructure, edu- cation, and other programs. Instead, Ecklund asked and answered questions in ways that ignored what these developments meant for the homeland while stressing the anticipated devastating impact on the Soviet system.
The Fourth Estate Reveals Ongoing Patterns of CIA Lawlessness
The decade between 1966 and 1976 brought numerous journalistic exposés that revealed cIa involvement in widespread covert and illegal activities. White House and congressional investigations followed, as did startling revelations by disillusioned former c1a agents. Both mainstream and alternative newspapers and magazines played crucial roles in uncovering these activities. Many Ameri- cans viewed these secret programs as undermining the possibility of American democracy. These revelations shocked the public and pushed Congress to pass
14 | CHAPTER ONE
legislation limiting specific practices and establishing increased congressional oversight of the c1a through the Hughes-Ryan Act of 1974.
The cia used dummy foundations known as funding fronts to provide the appearance of neutral funds for scholars conducting research of interest to the agency. Early public revelations about these fronts financing academic re- search and travel were made by Sol Stern in Ramparts magazine in 1967. Stern discovered this c1A connection as a result of Representative Wright Patman’s 1964 congressional hearings investigating the impacts of nonprofits on Ameri- can political processes (U.S. Congress 1964). Patman’s subcommittee investigated Internal Revenue Service (IRs) documents of various groups and uncovered anomalies in the records of several foundations. When Patman inquired about irregularities in the Kaplan Fund’s records, Mitchell Rogovin, assistant to the IRS commissioner, privately told him that the fund was a cra front, used to finance programs of interest to the agency, an arrangement that was confirmed by the cra representative Patman contacted. Patman identified eight nonprofits that had financially supported the Kaplan Fund while it was operating as a CIA conduit: the Gotham Foundation, the Michigan Fund, the Andrew Hamilton Fund, the Borden Trust, the Price Fund, the Edsel Fund, the Beacon Fund, and the Kentfield Fund (U.S. Congress 1964: 191; Hailey 1964). Patman publicly re- vealed these c1a-Kaplan connections after the c1a refused to comply with his requests for information about these relationships (U.S. Congress 1964: 191).
After Patman’s revelations, several newspapers condemned these practices. The New York Times called for the end of cra funding fronts, arguing that they allowed “the Communists and the cynical everywhere to charge that Ameri- can scholars, scientists, and writers going abroad on grants from foundations are cover agents or spies for C.I.A. All scholars — especially those involved in East-West exchanges — will suffer if the integrity of their research is thus made suspect” (NYT 1964: 28). On September 7, 1964, the Pittsburgh Post Gazette & Sun wrote that “the c1a’s intrusion into policy-making, its reported defiance of higher executive authority on occasion and its secret operations in the do- mestic field are enough to make citizens wary of its role in a democracy” (re- produced in U.S. Congress 1964: Exhibit 48). Because Patman did not further pursue CIA wrongdoing (Pearson 1967), even with such concerns over unlawful interference in domestic activities, there were no further investigations into the agency's use of these fronts until three years later, when Sol Stern published his exposé in Ramparts. Stern’s article established that the cra secretly had pro- vided the National Student Association with $1.6 million since 1959, during a period in which the association was experiencing funding difficulties.
POLITICAL ECONOMY AND INTELLIGENCE | 15
Starting with information from 1964 news reports on Wright Patman’s hearings, Stern used Patman’s discoveries and identified more c1a funding fronts, con- duits, and recipients. Stern determined that the c1a had used fronts identified by Patman to fund the National Student Association and to manipulate poli- cies within the association. He learned that, in 1965, the cra had approached the president of a “prominent New England foundation” requesting access to the foundation’s list of funded organizations. After viewing the list, cra agents explained that they would like to use the foundation to support some already funded and new organizations of interest to the cra, so that they could “chan- nel cra money into the foundation without it ever being traced back to the cia. They said they were very skilled at these manipulations” (Stern 1967: 31). This foundation’s board rejected the c1a’s proposal, but other foundations accepted CIA funds and passed them along to unwitting individuals and programs.
One Ramparts reporter found that when he tracked down cra front founda- tion addresses, he “usually found himself in a law office where no one was will- ing to talk about the Funds” (Stern 1967: 31). Stern traced cra funds passing through several intermediary foundations (e.g., the J. Frederick Brown Foun- dation and the Independence Foundation) that were themselves funded by ci fronts (31), with other money coming from the c1a-linked Rabb, Kaplan, Farfield, San Jacinto Foundation, Independence, Tower, and Price Funds and eventually reaching the National Student Association with no visible links to the cIA (32).
Stern’s report had a significant impact on the public. Ramparts purchased large ads in the New York Times announcing the piece, and there were wide- spread reactions to the story. Art Buchwald (1967) wrote a humorous piece, spin- ning ridiculous cra cover stories, including one in which the c1a had acciden- tally funded the National Student Association, thinking it was giving money to the National Security Agency. While numerous editorials on these fronts criticized the c1a, Thomas Braden published “I’m Glad the cra Is ‘Immoral’” (1967) in the Saturday Evening Post, describing his role in passing cra funds to the American Federation of Labor to bolster anticommunist unions in Eu- rope. Braden disclosed that c1a funding had helped the Boston Symphony Or- chestra, the International Committee of Women, and the Congress for Cultural Freedom advance against the forces of international communism. He bragged about the cra secretly using Jay Lovestone, the former leader of the Communist Party usa and an anticommunist, to subvert communist advances in French labor struggles. Carl Rowan, former director of the U.S. Information Service (usis), claimed in his syndicated column that the National Student Associa-
16 | CHAPTER ONE
tion exposé in Ramparts was part of a communist plot (Richardson 2009: 78). Stern’s investigation did not need communist agents passing on CIA front identities: his information was in the congressional record, and Rowan’s usis background suggests his attack was nothing more than “disinformation from the cra propaganda machine” (Richardson 2009: 78).°
Stern’s revelations led mainstream media outlets to investigate the c1A’s use of funding fronts to infiltrate domestic organizations (see Newsweek 1967). Pub- lic concerns led President Johnson to appoint Under Secretary of State Nicho- las Katzenbach to lead a commission investigating CIA programs that stood to “endanger the integrity and independence of the educational community.’ But with Director of Central Intelligence (pc1) Richard Helms on the committee, there was little chance of uncovering anything that the agency did not want made public, and even less chance that the committee would recommend crim- inal trials for c1A employees violating the agency’s charter limiting its domestic activities. President Johnson later received political payback for appointing a committee supporting the status quo; “having ‘saved’ the Agency, he demanded its loyalty on the Vietnam issue. His demand produced further cosmetic exer- cises, including an attempt to discredit political protest against the war and the suppression of dissent within the c1a” (Jeffreys-Jones 1989: 156). But even as the Katzenbach Commission downplayed cia criminal wrongdoing, it confirmed widespread cra infiltration of domestic political organizations and revealed that the agency covertly funded the publication of more than a thousand books for academic and general audiences, as well as magazines like Encounter and Partisan Review (Wilford 2008; U.S. Senate 1976: 189).
Movements to keep the c1a off American campuses began in 1966; with time this campaign spread and focused on keeping both cra recruiters and sponsored research off campus (Mills 1991; Price 2011e). A confidential 1968 CIA report titled “Student Reaction to c1a Recruitment Activities on Campus” summarized the stages of the movement’s growth and credited Ramparts with spawning antirecruitment campaigns at Grinnell College, the City College of New York, San Jose State, and Harvard in 1966 (CIA 1968b: 1). The cra found that while these protests brought unfavorable publicity to the agency, a “New York Times series of articles on the Agency’s world-wide activities did much good and no perceptible harm. On the whole, the publicity and free advertising did more good than harm for the recruitment effort — inspiring a great many write-in candidates of whom we might never have heard otherwise — and em- phasized the fact that the press and the reading public will take a special inter- est in what the Agency does” (1).’ The following year brought more anti-c1a
POLITICAL ECONOMY AND INTELLIGENCE | 17
campus campaigns, with an increase from four campus incidents in 1966 to twenty-seven in 1967, including “a physical incarceration of two recruiters at Columbia University” (2). By 1968, there were seventy-seven anti-c1a campus protests, with the agency identifying the [Students for a Democratic Society] as the “primary instigators” (2).
In 1968, Julius Mader published Whos Who in the cra, claiming to iden- tify hundreds of individuals with c1a connections. Mader’s methodology was crude, drawing mostly on published biographical details of Americans working in diplomatic and other capacities, focusing particularly on individuals with wartime intelligence links, but also on those in roles traditionally fulfilled by CIA agents at foreign embassies. Mader’s scattershot approach led to several errors, and his work was rumored to have been produced with KGB and Stassi assistance.’ This book and a growing number of nonscholarly works making un- true claims about the c1a fed growing public concerns about the agency’s unchecked powers.
President Johnson's efforts at damage control and at managing public opin- ions about the cra had limited results. The period from 1967 until the mid- 1970s brought ongoing revelations about cra, the FBI, and military intelligence engaging in widespread illegal activities, including unlawful use of these agen- cies to monitor and manipulate domestic political developments. These activi- ties affected American college campuses, with the FBI not only monitoring anthropologists and other students on campus but at times also using young future anthropologist agent provocateurs to infiltrate, disrupt, and spy on cam- pus political movements (see Divale 1970). In 1970, Christopher Pyle, a former army employee, revealed that the army had a secret intelligence network de- voted to spying on U.S. citizens protesting the Vietnam War. Pyle disclosed that “The Army employed more than 1,500 plainclothes agents, coast to coast, to watch every demonstration of 20 people or more” (2002). Investigations led by Senator Sam Ervin and the Judiciary Subcommittee on Constitutional Rights substantiated Pyle’s revelations.
On March 8, 1971, a small group of activists broke in to the FBI Field Station in Media, Pennsylvania, and stole records documenting the FBr’s illegal Counter Intelligence Program (COINTELPRO), which harassed and spied on leftist po- litical groups (see Medsger 2014). These records established how groups rang- ing from the American Indian Movement to the Black Panthers were infil- trated, harassed, and at times encouraged to engage in illegal activities by the FBI. With each revelation, the American public came to understand that open democratic processes had been covertly subverted by a hidden network of in-
18 | CHAPTER ONE
telligence agencies; with further leaks documenting ci and FB1 lawlessness, pressures built for congressional investigations.
The C1A’s Family Jewels
Richard Helms resigned as the director of the cra in February 1973 and was replaced by James R. Schlesinger.’ In May 1973, Schlesinger directed the agency to conduct a classified secret in-house study identifying all past and present CIA operations that were likely outside of its operational charter. By the time the report was completed, William Colby had replaced Schlesinger as pct. The report, known as “The Family Jewels,” was a 693-page compilation of por- tions of memos and files that provided a detailed account of the c1a’s illegal activities. “The Family Jewels” described the agency’s involvement in extensive illegal domestic intelligence operations including broad surveillance of U.S. news reporters and American political dissidents (including compiling almost 10,000 pages of files on anti-Vietnam War protesters); break-ins at homes of defectors, former cIa employees, and cia critics; forging of 1p documents; and kidnappings and assassination plots against state leaders (Fidel Castro, Patrice Lumumba, and Rafael Trujillo). News reporting on this document caused a po- litical eruption that the executive and legislative branches could not ignore.
On December 22, 1974, Seymour Hersh published a New York Times story, titled “Huge c1a Operation Reported in US against Anti-war Forces, Other Dissidents in Nixon Years,’ that drew on leaked portions of “The Family Jewels” (Hersh 1974b); President Ford and members of Congress first learned of this program from Hersh’s article. After Hersh revealed Operation caos’ illegal monitoring of more than one hundred thousand U.S. citizens, Ford asked pc Colby for a background report on cHAos. Colby briefed the president on a range of illegal activities revealed in the report, including the Inspector Gen- eral’s 1967 report on the c1a’s program for assassinating foreign leaders. A few weeks later, in an “off-the-record” meeting with the New York Times editorial board, President Ford raised concerns that congressional investigations could unearth the existence of c1A’s assassination programs.
The Times did not report on the cia’s assassination program. But when CBS newsman Daniel Schorr, who had no ties to the Times, learned that Ford had acknowledged cia involvement in assassinations, Schorr (incorrectly) assumed these were domestic assassinations, and when Colby responded to Schorr’s ef- forts to get more information on the program, Colby inadvertently redirected Schorr’s focus to international assassinations. With this information Schorr
POLITICAL ECONOMY AND INTELLIGENCE | 19
broadcast the news of an international c1A assassination program on cBs tele- vision on February 28, 1975 (see Schorr 1977: 144-49). The Church Committee hearings later examined cia efforts to assassinate a number of foreign lead- ers, including Fidel Castro of Cuba, Ngao Dinh Diem of Vietnam, Patrice Lu- mumba of the Congo, General René Schneider of Chile, and Rafael Trujillo of the Dominican Republic.
Wishing to preempt a disruptive congressional investigation, President Ford appointed Vice President Nelson Rockefeller to chair the eight-member fact- finding commission." The Rockefeller Commission report (Report to the Presi- dent by the Commission on cra Activities within the United States, June 1975) identified several illegal cra activities and issued recommendations for CIA reform, including that a c1a database on hundreds of thousands of Ameri- cans be destroyed (N. Rockefeller 1975). The commission provided descriptive summaries rather than specific accounts of a range of illegal activities, and its weak recommendations reduced its impact and indicated Ford’s desire to limit Americans’ knowledge of cra activities.
The Rockefeller Commission established that the c1a had read more than 2.3 million pieces of American mail in its Soviet mail monitoring program; indexed 7 million individual names (under Operation cHaos) (Rockefeller 1975: 24-34, 41); and used the Agency for International Development and an un- named American university to run a CIA counterinsurgency “training school for foreign police and security officers” in the United States, which also “sold small amounts of licensed firearms and police equipment to the foreign offi- cers and their departments” (39). Despite the reports admonitions that the cIa should not repeat these illegal and inadvisable acts, no one at the agency was arrested, and no concrete forms of oversight were forthcoming as a result of the Rockefeller report.
In 1975, former cIa agent Philip Agee published Inside the Company: CIA Diary, providing detailed accounts of his activities as a CIA operative in Ecua- dor, Uruguay, and Mexico. Agee identified 250 c1 agents or officers, as well as Latin American presidents who collaborated with the cra, and he recounted bugging operations and cia torture and described how he had recruited and managed cIa spy networks abroad. Inside the Company publicized how the agency undermined foreign democratic movements aligned with socialism, depicting it as a cynical organization supporting authoritarian governments aligned with U.S. business interests." Agee’s later work with Louis Wolf on the book Dirty Work and in the magazines CounterSpy and Covert Action Informa- tion Bulletin led to the publication of hundreds of other c1a employee names.
20 | CHAPTER ONE
The Church Committee
In response to the revelations of ongoing press reports on “The Family Jew- els” Watergate, and COINTELPRO and growing suspicions of illegal activities undertaken by the FB1 and the c1A, in 1975 the U.S. Senate Select Committee to Study Governmental Operations with Respect to Intelligence Activities held hearings investigating the c1a’s illegal activities. The committee, which came to be known simply as the Church Committee (after its chair, Senator Frank Church, D-ID), produced fourteen volumes of reports documenting hundreds of illegal activities ranging from kidnapping, murder, and drugging of unsus- pecting civilians to the widespread infiltration and subversion of domestic aca- demic institutions.
Book 1, section 10, of the Church Committee’s report summarized the com- mittee’s findings on the c1a’s ability to covertly influence the production of academic knowledge. The committee found that the c1a’s Domestic Collection Division routinely contacted American academics traveling abroad, and that the Foreign Resources Division was “the purely operational arm of the cra in dealing with American academics.’ Between these two divisions, the cra had contacts “with many thousands of United States academics at hundreds of U.S. academic institutions” (U.S. Senate 1976: 189).
The c1a’s Office of Personnel secretly worked with university administrators to facilitate the recruitment of students. The cia’s operational use of academ- ics raised “troubling questions as to preservation of the integrity of American academic institutions” (U.S. Senate 1976: 189). The report described extensive covert contacts with American academics, yet the committee chose not to iden- tify specific individuals or institutions compromised by the cia.
The Church Committee's investigations into the use of funding fronts for international research projects had significance for anthropology, as the com- mittee determined the following:
The c1a’s intrusion into the foundation field in the 1960s can only be described as massive. Excluding grants from the “Big Three’— Ford, Rockefeller, and Car- negie — of the 700 grants over $10,000 given by 164 other foundations during the period 1963-1966, at least 108 involved partial or complete c1a funding. More im- portantly, cra funding was involved in nearly half the grants the non-“Big Three” foundations made during this period in the field of international activities.” In the same period more than one-third of the grants awarded by non-“Big Three” in
the physical, life and social sciences also involved cra funds. ... A 1966 CIA study
POLITICAL ECONOMY AND INTELLIGENCE 21
explained the use of legitimate foundations was the most effective way of conceal- ing the c1a’s hand as well as reassuring members of funding organizations that the organization was in fact supported by private funds. The Agency study contended that this technique was “particularly effective for democratically-run membership organizations, which need to assure their own unwitting members and collabora- tors, as well as their hostile critics, that they have genuine, respectable, private
sources of income. (U.S. Senate 1976: 182-83, emphasis added)
In most instances the academics receiving these funds were unaware that the CIA funded their work. The committee identified “several hundred” instances in which the cra had established covert relationships with academics at more than a hundred university campuses performing c1a-backed jobs, including “making introductions for intelligence purposes” and writing books or “mate- rial to be used for propaganda purposes abroad” (U.S. Senate 1976: 190). At most universities no one outside of the c1a contact knew of these relationships, and all such contacts were guarded by the agency, which considered “these op- erational relationships with the United States academic community as perhaps its most sensitive domestic area and [imposed] strict controls governing these operations” (190).
One of the ways that the cra shaped the funding of international research was by planting agency employees in key positions on foundations. In 1955, DCI Dulles responded to a request by Don K. Price, acting president of the Ford Foundation, to loan a c1a employee to serve on the Ford Foundation staff, writ- ing that he would make a c1a employee (female, identity redacted) available to the foundation for two years, adding that “we consider her competency such that, with a period of service with you, she and this Agency will gain significantly” (FOIA CIA-RDP80B01676R004000140015-9, AD to DKP, 8/13/55). The strategic placement of one such c1a employee within Ford or other Foundations could influence untold numbers of funding decisions; though the record is incom- plete (due to the c1a’s refusal to publicly release its own records), we can as- sume that this relationship at Ford was replicated at other key foundations.”
Recently declassified c1a reports have shed light on some of the ways that the cra, the Pentagon, and other governmental agencies working on counter- insurgency projects or other intelligence matters influenced and benefited from government-funded social science research during the Cold War. Henry Loomis (of the Psychological Strategy Board [psB]) produced “Report on Social Science Research in Cold War Operations” (1952), a CIA report outlining strategies for using American social science research to further the agency’s knowledge and
22 CHAPTER ONE
goals (FOIA CIA-CIA-RDP80R01731R001700230005-8, 4/11/52). Loomis worked with Max Millikan (FOIA CIA-RDP80R01731R003300090002-9, 5/5/52) where he advocated letting the psB oversee this c1a-linked research within and out- side the agency (FOIA CIA-RDP80R01731R003300090003-8, 5/19/52). The articu- lations of such relationships were described in some detail in a 1962 CIA report:
The External Research Division maintains an index of government sponsored con- tractual research on foreign areas, obtaining the pertinent data from the sponsor- ing agencies. Each calendar quarter it publishes an inventory of contracts. (The publication is classified “Secret.”) A tabulation of some 400 contracts reported in the publication over a period of several quarters reveals that the Agency for Inter- national Development reported roughly 155 contracts, Air Force reported 125 and CIA reported 56. Other agencies varied from a low of one (Nsa and Arms Control, one each) to a high of 22 for Army. The information on these contracts is usually gathered and published after the research contracts have been let. Advance coor- dination through the External Research Division is not required and, therefore, there is not a uniform method of coordination. Some offices (os1 for example) conduct a search of the quarterly published inventory prior to entering into new contracts. ORR, in addition to searching the published inventory, coordinates its external research requirements through the Economic Intelligence Committee (us1B) and the EIc, in turn, requests the External Research Division to conduct a search of its records. The offices do, however, make consistent use of the inventory. The value of a central record such as that maintained by the External Research Division was demonstrated recently when the Division, in response to a request from Senator Fulbright, was able to supply the Senator with a consolidated report of government sponsored external research on the USSR and Communist China. ... In addition to the records maintained and published on government spon- sored research, the Division maintains a private research catalogue of social science research conducted in the United States on foreign areas and international affairs. Information for the catalogue is obtained through annual surveys of universities, foundations, research centers, etc. The catalogue is unclassified and is open to the public. External Research lists of current private research on foreign areas and international affairs are published and distributed throughout the government and to university libraries, department heads, individual scholars, and foreign aca-
demic institutions. (FOIA CIA-RDP80B01676R002400030004-1, 7/26/62)
During 1962 discussions on how the cra, the U.S. Agency for International Devel- opment (UsA1D), Air Force Intelligence, and other governmental agencies might
POLITICAL ECONOMY AND INTELLIGENCE | 23
best coordinate the use of the social and behavioral science research being produced, the cra suggested the formation of a “working group” with “a num- ber of coordinating specialists thoroughly familiar with the literature in the rel- evant fields whose duty it would be to maintain liaisons with all government agencies and research scholars” (FOIA CIA-RDP80B01676R002400030004-1, 7/26/62).
Between 1952 and 1967, the cra covertly funded U.S. scholars to write more than a thousand books representing views the agency wished to propagate. Of these books, the Church Committee determined that “approximately 25 percent of them were written in English. Many of them were published by cultural or- ganizations which the cra backed, and more often than not the author was unaware of CIA subsidization. Some books, however, involved direct collabora- tion between the cra and the writer” (U.S. Senate 1976: 193). Former CIA agent E. Howard Hunt's testimony confirmed c1a books were distributed in the U.S., and the Church Committee concluded “that such fallout may not have been unintentional,” adding that U.S. citizens were “a likely audience” when this pro- paganda was published in English (U.S. Senate 1976: 198-99). When asked by the committee (which was concerned that the cra had illegally engaged in do- mestic propaganda) if the agency took steps to limit domestic exposure to the cia books published by Praeger or others, Hunt replied:
It was impossible because Praeger was a commercial U.S. publisher. His books had to be seen, had to be reviewed, had to be bought here, had to be read... . If your targets are foreign, then where are they? They don't all necessarily read English, and we had a bilateral agreement with the British that we wouldn't pro- pagandize their people. So unless the book goes into a lot of languages or it is pub- lished in India, for example, where English is a lingua franca, then you have some basic problems. And I think the way this was rationalized by the project review board . . . was that the ultimate target was foreign, which was true, but how much of the Praeger output actually got abroad for any impact I think is highly arguable. (U.S. Senate 1976: 198-99)
In response to Hunt’s revelations that Praeger had published c1a propaganda in the United States, the committee concluded that, “given the paucity of infor- mation and the inaccessibility of China in the 1960s, the c1a may have helped shape American attitudes toward the emerging China. The cra considers such ‘fallout’ inevitable” (U.S. Senate 1976: 199).
24 | CHAPTER ONE
Pike Commission
The House investigations of the cra were more aggressive than the Senate's, and unlike the Senate’s Church Committee, the House proceeded largely without the c1a’s cooperation. The House Select Committee on Intelligence began its investigation in February 1975 under the leadership of Congressman Lucien N. Nedzi. The initial selection of Nedzi as chair raised concerns that his previous role as chair of the House Armed Services Subcommittee on Intelligence had compromised his ability to conduct an independent investigation. When a New York Times story revealed that pc1 Colby had privately briefed Nedzi about the c1a’s “Family Jewels” in 1973, Nedzi was replaced as chair by Congressman Otis Pike.
Conflicts between Pike and pcr Colby began before the hearings were con- vened. Pike interpreted congressional oversight of c1A to include the right to declassify documents and information as Congress saw fit. The cra maintained it had control of what information would be given to Congress (see Haines 1989: 84). Colby was contemptuous of the Pike Committee and refused to dis- close the c1a’s budget in public session, while within the agency, Colby was despised by many cia loyalists who resented him allowing any critical public scrutiny of the agency.
In an effort to understand the range of cia actions and the oversight that the Forty Committee had exercised over cra activities, the committee reviewed all CIA covert actions between 1965 and 1975 (Pike Report 1977: 187). The commit- tee devised six historical tests to measure the effectiveness of the c1a’s analytical abilities to correctly foresee significant political events: the 1968 Tet Offensive in Vietnam, the August 1968 Soviet action in Czechoslovakia, the 1973 war be- tween Israel and Syria and Egypt, the April 1974 coup in Portugal, the c1a’s monitoring of India’s nuclear arms program, and the 1974 Cyprus crisis. The committee found that the cIa failed to meaningfully anticipate any of these developments, and that these failures left America in a weakened position.
The Pike Committee found that even after President Johnson wrote direc- tives prohibiting the cIa from covertly funding U.S. educational institutions (after the 1967 National Student Association revelations in Ramparts), the cIa “unilaterally reserved the right to, and does, depart from the Presidential order when it has the need to do so” (Pike Report 1977: 117). The committee determined that between 1965 and 1975 about one-third of the covert actions approved by the Forty Committee involved cra efforts to influence the out- comes of foreign elections (190). Another third (29 percent) of the cr1a’s Forty
POLITICAL ECONOMY AND INTELLIGENCE | 25
Committee-approved covert activities during this period involved “media and propaganda projects” (190). These projects included covert c1a control of the publication of books and magazines within the U.S. and abroad, though “by far the largest single recipient has been a European publishing house funded since 1951, with a “number of similar operations in the region” (190). About a quarter of the funds (23 percent) for the c1a’s operations during this period went to the procurement and distribution of arms and covert paramilitary training, and “at times, CIA has been used as a conduit for arms transfers in order to bypass Congressional scrutiny” (191).
The report evaluated three types of c1A covert operations: “election support” (e.g., subverting democratic movements abroad), arms support, and the back- ing of independence movements of the National Front for the Independence of Angola (FNLA) and the National Union for the Total Independence of Angola (UNITA) in Angola. Investigation into the c1A’s use of usaID “foreign police training” programs on American university campuses found these programs were also used by the cra to monitor campus activities (Pike Report 1977: 228-29).
Whereas the Church Committee found the cia to at times be a “rogue” agency engaging in unauthorized illegal activities, the Pike Committee found that the c1a bypassed congressional oversight and operated under executive branch control. This finding of consistent executive branch cra oversight was the crucial finding of the Pike Report. It showed how presidents, through the NSC, the Forty Committee, and at times directly through pcis, used the cIa as a covert tool of executive branch policy. As former career c1A agent Ralph McGehee later wrote, “My view backed by 25 years of experience is, quite sim- ply, that the cra is the covert action arm of the Presidency” (1983: xi). The Pike Report concluded that “all evidence in hand suggests that the cia, far from being out of control, has been utterly responsive to the instructions of the Presi- dent and the Assistant to the President for National Security Affairs. It must be remembered, however that the c1a director determines which c1A-initiated co- vert action projects are sufficiently ‘politically sensitive’ to require Presidential attention” (Pike Report 1977: 189). While the executive branch exercised control of the c1a’s covert actions, proposed c1a covert actions also came from others, including “a foreign head of state, the Department of Defense, the Department of State, an Ambassador, cra, the Assistant to the President for National Se- curity Affairs, a cabinet member or the President himself” (Pike Report 1977: 187).'* As Pike put it, “The cia never did anything the White House didn't want. Sometimes they didn’t want to do what they did” (Pike qtd. in Haines 1998: 88). House Republicans blocked publication of the final report, but Daniel Schorr
26 | CHAPTER ONE
leaked an early draft to the Village Voice, which published it in its entirety (Schorr 1976; Pike Report 1977; Benson 1976).
One short-term outcome of press revelations and of the findings of the Rocke- feller, Pike, and Church committees was the establishment of new congressional oversight of cra activities. President Ford signed Executive Order 11905, ban- ning political assassinations, creating the new National Security Committee on Foreign Intelligence, replacing the Forty Committee with the Operations Ad- visory Group, and clarifying the necessity of reporting illegal activities to the executive branch. In 1978, President Carter signed Executive Order 12036, re- structuring oversight groups, a change that was widely interpreted as providing more CIA oversight, yet the executive branch retained oversight control over the agency. The Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (1978) established new congressional and judicial oversight of the c1a’s domestic surveillance abilities.
Although the cra appeared publicly complacent with presidential and con- gressional reform efforts, it resisted efforts to curtail its covert relationships with universities. When pressed by Senator Edward Kennedy to contact individuals and universities that had unwittingly received c1a funding through MK-Ultra projects (discussed in chapter 8), the cra refused to undertake these most basic of reparations (U.S. Senate 1977: 36, 45).
Writing the CIA into Disciplinary Histories
The United States’ postwar global political stance shifted American orienta- tions toward the peoples anthropologists studied. As the United States and the Soviet Union competed for the hearts, minds, debts, and arms contracts of the world’s nonaligned nations, there were tangible uses for the forms of in- tangible knowledge that anthropologists brought home from the remote areas where they worked; whether their work involved esoteric symbolic studies or radical Marxist analysis, the c1A saw prospects of useful knowledge. Anthropology departments grew with the postwar wealth that flowed from GI Bill tuition, and this growth was nurtured by the dual use dynamics of Cold War research needs. Anthropologists sought training funds, opportunities for field research, linguistic training, and travel funds so that they could pursue research questions of interest to them and their discipline. Postwar govern- mental agencies needed knowledge about the peoples of the world where the new American superpower developed relationships favoring American domi- nance. These were often symbiotic relationships allowing academics to research topics of their choosing or to pursue theoretical questions of interest; in other
POLITICAL ECONOMY AND INTELLIGENCE | 27
instances, the questions or geographic regions of inquiry were more closely shaped by the availability of funds. Either way, fields of knowledge were funded that benefited individual anthropologists and generated knowledge for a brain trust.
Rarely was this brain trust a concrete conglomeration of scholars, of the type exemplified by the Princeton Consultants; generally the knowledge was far more diffuse and participants pursued knowledge in what appeared to be a mostly free-range manner. Yet the revelations, first from a wave of journalis- tic investigations, then from a wave of presidential and congressional commit- tees disclosing the c1a’s influence on international scholarship during the early Cold War, were “massive.”
What is easily lost on readers in later years marked by increased surveillance is the level of shock and outrage that these initial revelations of cra lawlessness unleashed in America in the 1960s and 1970s. The c1a’s reliance on assassi- nations, lying, cheating, death squads, destabilizing foreign democratic move- ments, torture, bribery, kidnapping, or cooking intelligence reports to fit the needs of the executive branch directly undermined American ideals of democ- racy and openness. The American public’s lessening ability to be shocked by revelations of c1A lawlessness and domestic programs is remarkable, but anthro- pologists recognize how the numbing tendencies of enculturation can normal- ize atrocities. Sustaining shock is always difficult, outrage’s half-life is short, and the toll of cognitive dissonance weighs heavy. With time the outrageous and of- fensive can be seen as the “unfortunately necessary,” and the currency of shock is short-lived as once current events become historicized.
Revelations of the c1a’s lawlessness, its role in covert actions, its use of fund- ing fronts, and its self-serving use of unwitting citizens have now become staples of the American imagination. In the milieu of these press and congressional revelations were films like Sydney Pollack’s Three Days of the Condor (1975), Costa-Gavras’s State of Siege (1972), Francis Ford Coppolas The Conversation (1974), and Alan Pakula’s Parallax View (1974), or even Pakula’s Watergate jour- nalistic detective story based on Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein's book All the Presidents Men (1976). America’s popular imagination comfortably incor- porated Condor’s c1a funding fronts, The Parallax View’s assassinations, The Conversation’s borderless surveillance panopticon, and All the Presidents Men’s all-encompassing lawless cancer on the presidency.
There remained lasting visible and invisible fallout from the Church and Pike investigations throughout American culture. Initially, a general distrust of the CIA and FBI spread, but the cultural incorporation of this new knowledge of
28 | CHAPTER ONE
CIA practices took many forms, some based on fact, others on fantasies or de- lusions. Revelations of cra practices spawned a range of paranoid conspiracy theories that often began with facts or partial facts about actual cla programs unearthed by the press or congressional hearings, but these facts were mixed with a range of delusional fantasies involving supposed successful mind control programs with imagined “monarch slaves” and a host of international conspira- cies involving bankers and agents of the Illuminati. While the c1a’s MK-Ultra program funded a bizarre range of scientific research exploring the possibility of “mind control? other than some new techniques for “enhanced interroga- tions,” the cra did not develop any effective “mind control” program (beyond its covert use of newspapers and academic presses to influence public discourse). With time, the mixing of fact and fiction in popular accounts of cra activities contributed to the American public’s confusion about the agency’s history, as documented ci atrocities became indistinguishable in the public memory from absurd claims. This haziness of Americans’ shared cra memory mixed with the popularized paranoid fantasies about this history, along with post-9/11 Hollywood fantasies of c1a saviors operating beyond the law, diminished the likelihood of the American public demanding new levels of cra accountability.
While the leaked Pike Report and released Church Committee Report ex- panded public knowledge about c1a wrongdoing and ongoing lawlessness, the findings of these committees brought little long-term change in the way the agency did business, or how Congress exercised due oversight of the agency. Congressional and journalistic revelations increased the American public’s distrust of the cra and the FB1. These disclosures weakened the confidence of many educated Americans in the cra and strengthened growing movements to keep the cia off of American university campuses.
Several years after the fact, in the pages of the c1a’s in-house classified jour- nal, Studies in Intelligence, Timothy S. Hardy gloated that, while Seymour Hersh and other journalists had successfully spawned White House and congressional investigations of CIA activities, “yet Hersh may not even merit a historical foot- note, perhaps, because the ball he started rolling never really knocked down all, or even any of the pins. . . . The cra is thriving in Langley, its constituent parts all strung together, its basic mission unchanged. The Defense Department still spends more than 80 percent of the billions of national intelligence dollars in ways only vaguely known to the American public” (1976: 1). Given the depth of anti-c1A feelings at the time Hardy wrote this, his remarks may seem like a form of dismissive denial, but if one takes the long view, Hardy’s focus on the speed at which Americans came to adjust to and accept news of the c1a’s
POLITICAL ECONOMY AND INTELLIGENCE | 29
lawlessness proved to be profoundly accurate. Americans were enculturated to learn to accept cra death squads, wiretaps, kidnappings, covert arms dealing, support for foreign dictators, and even massive NSA metadata surveillance as necessary details of the modern world. In post-9/11 America, the acceptance of cia torture, invasions of domestic privacy, assassinations, and attacks on inter- national democratic movements updated this enculturation process to a point where increasing numbers of Americans accept these practices as necessary and just, while the agency’s history and the public’s outrage over past revela- tions disappear from public memory.
While this overview of Cold War strategies, revelations of c1a lawlessness, and interactions with academics during the Cold War is crucial for our consid- eration of how American anthropology interacted with military and intelligence agencies during the period, it is important to keep in mind that most anthropol- ogists were then unaware of the secret shifts in American policy and practices during the earliest days of the Cold War, as fighting of the Second World War subsided and the postwar era began. Although this lack of awareness shaped anthropologists’ motivations, innocence did not mitigate harm; as Thomas Fowler argued in The Quiet American, “Innocence is like a dumb leper who has lost his bell, wandering the world, meaning no harm” (Greene 1955: 36).
30 | CHAPTER ONE
The end of the war brought the anthropologists back to the campuses but with empty notebooks, and the American Anthropologist reflected this lack of a research backlog for the first few years of our period.
ROBERT MURPHY | 1976
*
TWO WORLD WAR II'S LONG SHADOW
Due to wartime publishing interruptions, Cora Du Bois’s prewar ethnography of eastern Indonesian culture, The People of the Alor, was not published until 1944. A decade and a half after the war’s end, she wrote an appendix to the original preface that briefly broke disciplinary standards muting discussions of ways that anthropology had intersected with the war. The years between writ- ing People of Alor and its 1960 republication had been active ones for Du Bois. She began the war in Washington at oss headquarters, using her 1930s eth- nographic fieldwork experiences to inform her war knowledge of Indonesia; she later relocated to Ceylon, at an oss base where she directed operations in Malaysia, southern China, Siam, and Burma (Seymour 2015).
Du Bois’s updated appendix acknowledged that the people of Alor described in her book were forever changed by the war and by their prewar contact with her. She wrote that after the war’s end she received a “jovial, almost flippant letter” from “a young controleur who was sent to Alor during the Dutch in- terregnum before Indonesia achieved independence.” This young man asked for a copy of her ethnography and passed along news of the island, with some details of the Japanese occupation during the war (Du Bois 1960: xiv). He de- scribed how the Japanese had established a station and run patrols near the village, Atimelang, where Du Bois had lived and conducted her fieldwork in 1937-39. He wrote to Du Bois that one day, the Japanese command learned that the leaders of Atimelang “were claiming that Hamerika would win the war” — Hamerika being how they pronounced the name of the strange, distant land from which Du Bois had traveled to live among them. Du Bois added that the notion that the great house of Hamerika would win the war
could have been nothing but the most innocent fantasy to my friends in Atimelang since they had never even heard of the United States prior to my arrival. But to the Japanese, suffering from all the nervous apprehensions of any occupying power in a strange and therefore threatening environment, such talk could mean only rebel- lion. . . . so the Japanese sent troops to arrest five of my friends in Atimelang. I am not sure who all of them were from the young controleur’s letter, but apparently Thomas Malelaka, and the Chief of Dikimpe were among them. In Kalabahi they were publicly decapitated as a warning to the populace.
There is no end to the intricate chain of responsibility and guilt that the pursuit
of even the most arcane social research involves. (1960: iv—v)
The personal responsibility Du Bois assumed for her indirect involvement in the execution of these five people was remarkable and arguably beyond a rea- sonable interpretation of individual guilt; but in acknowledging the rampant killing unleashed in the Second World War, Du Bois broke a fourth wall of postwar ethnographic writing in ways that were unusual for her time. This wall supported the standard narrative contrivance in which not only the ethnog- rapher as a person but also the geopolitical events impacting fieldwork were removed from the focus of the text. Ethnographies adopted tones presenting objective accounts of a natural world where the scientist-ethnographers were neutral observers. Du Bois’s blunt acknowledgment that anthropology was part of “the intricate chain of responsibility and guilt” linked to even the “most ar- cane social research,” with generally unacknowledged atrocities and lesser con- sequences, was reminiscent of Kipling’s lama warning Kim that he had “loosed an act upon the world, and as a stone thrown into a pool so spread the conse- quences thou canst not tell how far” (1922: 334). Many postwar ethnographic works all but erased the war and its wake of slaughter from their narratives. The consistency of the ways that post-World War II ethnographers glossed over the war's transformative impacts informs us about the world in which they wrote.
The Postwar Ethnographic World
Postwar anthropological works recorded and ignored the war's impacts in vary- ing ways. Some efforts, like Joseph Tenenbaum’s interviews with survivors and others linked to Nazi concentration camps, appearing in the book In Search of a Lost People (1946), were works of tragic salvage ethnography, while other works moved the war’s impacts beyond the horizon of the ethnographic present. Some ethnographers studied impacts of the war in New Guinea and elsewhere. Ian
32 | CHAPTER TWO
Hogbin’s Transformation Scene: The Changing Culture of a New Guinea Village (1951) described how the war and the postwar period shaped the villages of New Guinea. Cyril Belshaw’s book The Great Village (1957) chronicled New Guinea villagers’ efforts to rebuild and reestablish their village after it was destroyed dur- ing the war. Anthropological studies of cargo cults connected these millennial movements with villagers’ experiences with G1 culture during the war.
Kenneth Read described how the Japanese, British, and Australian wartime occupations impacted the peoples of New Guinea’s Markham Valley, noting that the Japanese, who also “possessed the white man’s weapons,” were initially viewed much as the European occupiers had been (Read 1947: 98). Read was reproached for the Europeans’ hypocrisy that forbade locals to fight, yet “Eu- ropeans were engaged in a war with another people” (Read 1947: 99). Anthro- pologists studied how the war disrupted traditional New Guinea subsistence and altered local foodways (Read 1947; Hogbin 1951).
The Australian government had worried that native loyalties could easily shift during the war. One government report on Japanese interactions with Ab- origines noted that aboriginals “openly stated that the Japs told them that the country belonged to the blacks, had been stolen from them by the whites and that ‘bye bye’ they (the Japs) would give it back to them (the blacks). In fact, the writer suggested that whoever supplied ‘food and tobacco’ would have the sup- port of the Aborigines” (Gray 2005: 19).
Micronesians first endured Japanese occupations, then an American lib- eration that became an occupation. In regions where indigenous populations prior to the war had been pacified under the forces of colonialism, the war sometimes found old and new colonial managers rolling back otherwise strictly enforced prohibitions against traditional forms of warfare and other forms of violence (D. H. Price 2008a: 71-72). For those living in the war’s path, the end of the war did not bring peace or freedom as much as it brought new relationships of control and domination.
The war transformed the settings of postwar ethnographies around the world. Cultures of Melanesia, Indonesia, and the Philippines experienced combat and occupations, while North African cultures from Morocco to Egypt were caught in the middle of American and European battles. Cornelius Osgood’s book The Koreans and Their Culture mixed war zone ethnography with lengthy discus- sions of the Japanese, Russian, and American occupations of the twentieth century, along with sympathetic narratives explaining why villagers would be drawn to align with communism. With acknowledgments thanking Dean Ache- son and Edgar Furniss, Osgood noted that attempts “to undertake independent
WORLD WAR II'S LONG SHADOW | 33
research under the aegis of a military occupation should be avoided if possible for, though cooperation is generous and sincere, it can be even more confusing than the complications of operating as an alien in a country at war” (1951: 9).
Bringing the War Back Home
After the armistice, American soldiers returned home and resumed civilian life. Most anthropologists who had served the war in an alphabet soup of military and intelligence agencies returned to universities, museums, and other civilian workplaces. Classrooms were soon packed with students entering college under the Gi Bill. Many anthropologists returned to teaching, and large universities and small colleges expanded curriculum to meet the demands for the growing postwar interest in anthropology courses. A 1947 article in the News Bulletin of the American Anthropological Association described how even small colleges expanded their anthropology course offerings and required anthropological faculty to meet the growing demand for courses (NBAAA 1947 1[3]: 45).
Not all anthropologists returned to the classrooms they had left for the war. After the war’s end, some continued working in military or civilian positions like those they held during the war. Others applied anthropology to the mana- gerial problems the American victors faced in managing lands they now oc- cupied. Some anthropologists worked on postwar projects in Europe, Asia, or the Pacific. Some continued the work they had done for military intelligence agencies, at times extending questionable methodologies forged in the heat of wartime.
Some scholars repurposed wartime data for peacetime academic research. At Harvard, E. A. Hooton and (future cra anthropologist) J. M. Andrews ana- lyzed fifty thousand somatotype photographs of military inductees, hopelessly searching for correlations between body type and “education, occupation, mili- tary service and achievement” (NBAAA 1947, 1[4]: 49). In 1948, Weston La Barre received a Guggenheim Fellowship to write a book “on oriental character struc- ture based on materials gathered during the war as an officer in [the Office of Naval Intelligence; on1] and oss (CBI and sEAc), in China, India and Ceylon” (NBAAA 1948 2[3]: 43).? La Barre published two papers from this oss and oxı work in Psychiatry, on Japanese and Chinese personality types (La Barre 1945, 1946a, 1946b).
La Barres study of Chinese personality reduced the complexity of Chinese culture to brief caricatures. Such overly simplified cultural representations cir-
34 | CHAPTER TWO
culated widely as classified memos during the war and helped inform or rein- force the views of military and intelligence personnel, but the publication of such an amateurish work in the peer-reviewed pages of Psychiatry after the war indicates the militarist milieu that remained in postwar academia. La Barre’s later work studying culture and personality among the Aymara showed levels of nuance and moderation of analysis distinct from the sort of army surplus analy- sis that he published after the war in Psychiatry.
The National Research Council (NRC) and the Social Science Research Coun- cil (ssrc) funded the Library of Congress's Document Expediting Project, which salvaged and declassified two thousand army, navy, and oss civil affairs reports, which were distributed to American universities interested in using these materials for research (NBAAA 1947 1[3]: 34). In 1949, the army’s Histori- cal Division sought anthropologists interested in analyzing a cache of military documents collected from overseas military outposts during the war (NBAAA 1949 3[1]: 13).
Alexander Leighton’s work bridged the Second World War and the Cold War in ways that illustrate how American social science remained connected to war- time themes. During the war, Leighton managed interned Japanese Americans at Poston, Arizona, and his published writings on his work at the Poston Deten- tion Camp conveyed a detached, observational narrative tone. As described in his book The Governing of Men, Leighton strove to study human interactions as a neutral scientific observer measuring the variables of human culture, an effect designed to present this political act with a façade of scientific neutrality as if he were but a passive observer, not an inflictor, of “natural” processes (Leighton 1945; D. H. Price 2008a: 149-51).
Leighton’s Human Relations in a Changing World: Observations on the Use of the Social Sciences (1949) opened with an account of his December 1945 visit to Hiroshima, four months after its bombing. He described the remarks of the people he encountered, but his narrative was far from the sort of thick description that later anthropological writing would strive to achieve; instead, Leighton’s postwar Hiroshima was a world where tragic stories mixed with col- lections of information on human data points. Leighton approached the Japa- nese people as variables to be understood so that they could be altered to suit the needs of American interests, in the name of peace in a “changing world” His ethnographic frame was carefully chosen, opening with a skeptical G1 Jeep driver assuring him that Hiroshima was no different from any other bombed Japanese city, followed by descriptions of a nuclear bomb-decimated landscape,
WORLD WAR II'S LONG SHADOW | 35
children playing among ruins, the ways and means of his local Japanese hosts, and his own insistence that the bombing was no more of a crime against hu- manity than any other wartime bombardment.
Leighton visited Hiroshima while on assignment for the U.S. Strategic Bomb- ing Survey, which continued collecting information on local populations after the war. Leighton’s encounters with survivors provided a composite ethno- graphic narrative of the experiences of the people of Hiroshima. He compiled shared memories of the calm morning before the attack, followed by the flash, the burning air, vaporized people, the shock, dying children, dying parents, and dead bodies everywhere. The vice mayor of a neighboring town told him how, after the bombing, “everybody looked alike. The eyes appeared to be a mass of melted flesh. The lips were split up and also looked like a mass of molten flesh. Only the nose appeared the same as before. The death scene was awful. The color of the patient would turn to blue and when we touched the body the skin would stick to our hands” (Leighton 1949: 29). The Strategic Bombing Survey’s sponsorship and anticipated consumption of Leighton’s report altered it from a neutral collection of stories into a sociocultural ballistics report detailing the outcomes of a calculated, intentional use of a new weapon. This transformation occurred not because Leighton’s narrative lacked human compassion (it had no such deficit) but because the context in which this agency consumed his narra- tive repurposed it as a part of dual use processes regardless of his compassion, sympathies, or intentions.
Leighton described the routinized processes for using data collected from Japanese prisoners of war: “Interrogation reports were coded and data deal- ing with morale factors and background information were reduced to punch cards which could be sorted and tabulated by machines. In addition to this, however, extracts were made from the reports and filed in two systems, one dealing with the morale of the fighting forces and the other with the home front” (1949: 83). Postarmistice Foreign Morale Analysis Division (FMAD) reports in- cluded attitudinal data measuring Japanese dissatisfaction as FMAD switched from attempting to spawn wartime insurgent movements to fearing postwar counterinsurgencies (e.g., Leighton 1949: 68).
Human Relations in a Changing World argued that a fundamental lesson learned at FMAD was that science could measure, explain, and control human behavior. Leighton took for granted that such social science control over soci- ety would be used for “the prevention of war and the promotion of workable relationships between nations” instead of for one nation or class to exploit the weaknesses of others, or for leaders to manipulate their own populations to sup-
36 | CHAPTER TWO
port wars serving the interests of elites but not the populous manipulated into supporting and fighting them (Leighton 1949: 101). He advocated that the same sort of analytical techniques developed by FMaAD be used by the US. govern- ment to solve domestic and international social problems.’ This work betrayed little awareness of the political dimensions of scientific research. Leighton did not acknowledge that individuals and groups used knowledge both for the greater good of all and for themselves; in the book’s conclusion, he conceded the existence of a “fear that social scientists will sell their skills to ‘conscienceless manipulators,” and while not dismissing this as a possibility, he diluted such concerns, arguing that these dangers face all branches of science (207).
The Marshall Plan and Postwar Occupations
The Soviet’s Molotov Plan of 1947 brought postwar aid to Eastern Europes So- viet bloc, extending Soviet influence in ways similar to the relationships se- cured for the United States the following year under the Marshall Plan. The Marshall Plan launched the United States on a new soft power international interventionist trajectory linked to the Truman Doctrine. Named after Secre- tary of State George Marshall, a retired army general, and designed primarily by William Clayton and George Kennan at the State Department, the Marshall Plan’s European Recovery Program (ERP) funneled $13 billion to programs for rebuilding Western European economies and infrastructure. From 1947 to 1951, the ERP spent 3 percent of the U.S. GDP on Cold War European recovery proj- ects (contrast this with the 0.19 percent of Gpp the United States spends on all foreign aid; Keating 2014).*
The Marshall Plan had general domestic bipartisan support, but on the po- litical right, Senator Robert A. Taft, a Republican, opposed all forms of interna- tional aid; on the left, Henry Wallace criticized the plan as a Cold War tactic weak- ening labor movements, propping up private business interests, and increasing schisms between the United States and the Soviet Union. Michael Hogan, his- torian of the Marshall Plan wrote that Wallace viewed “the ERP as the work of American monopolists and imperialists who were seeking to promote their interests at home and overseas at the expense of social justice and world peace. Wallace denounced what he saw as the invasion of government by private busi- ness and financial leaders who had turned the State Department and other public agencies into servants of monopoly capital” (Hogan 1987: 94).
Wallace found cynical motives behind American plans to rebuild Europe, arguing that “Western European countries can no longer count on colonial loot
WORLD WAR II'S LONG SHADOW | 37
to sustain their customary standards of living. They must now earn their own way through reconstruction and expansion of their economies” (1948: 6). Wallace believed the Marshall Plan would “underwrite the military budgets of reaction- ary governments which will do the bidding of American private capital” (18). He criticized the ways the plan undermined European efforts to nationalize industries while empowering private trusts benefiting from the particulars of reconstruction and economic reforms as the plan pressed European nations toward adopting regionally integrated economic relations. Foreseeing critiques of Reaganomics, he argued, “We can draw a just parallel between the [European Recovery Plan] and the [Herbert] Hoover plans for combating depression here at home in the early 30’s. Both plans were based on the thoroughly discredited notion that you bolster the wealthy and entrenched interests, and benefits will automatically trickle down to the people” (17). Combined with coming NATO formations, the Marshall Plan entwined American global power and European economic reorganization in ways that sharply divided the world into the Cold War's dichotomous camps of East and West.
The Marshall Plan brought stability to Western Europe, but it also re-formed Europe in a Cold War context adopting specific anticommunist, antisocialist political economic positions. The vision of the Marshall Plan would remain an attractive nuisance for various Cold War development schemes claiming to liberate the underdeveloped world from poverty.°
Some European anthropologists, like Pierre Bessaignet of France, worked for the Marshall Plan in their home countries, but anthropologists’ involvement with European reconstruction was not as widespread or centrally coordinated as were their involvements in the postwar Japanese occupation, or the Microne- sian ethnographic explorations of the Coordinated Investigation of Micronesian Anthropology group (cima) (Gaillard 2004: 188). These regional differences in anthropological contributions likely occurred for a combination of reasons, including larger numbers of available State Department personnel who were already familiar with the languages and cultures of Europe.
Occupations starkly demonstrate power relations, and anthropologists’ con- tributions to occupations reveal disciplinary alignments to power. Occupa- tions during and after the war betrayed structural imbalances whose internal logics often suggested retribution could settle scores as wartime collabora- tors faced their countrymen and countrywomen, and postwar occupiers had to resist temptations to make losers pay for the personal losses the occupiers experienced.°
38 | CHAPTER TWO
The American military leadership realized that the successful postwar oc- cupation of Japan required significant knowledge about Japanese culture. With the passing of decades, many Americans came to view the occupation as a peace- ful, smooth transition. As American strategists contemplated occupations in Iraq and Afghanistan in the early twenty-first century, public discourse often nostalgically referred to the ease and success of the GHQ’s postwar occupation of Japan. Japan has been presented as a model occupation that brought peace to a war-torn nation by installing American-style democracy. Notions of a peaceful Japanese occupation were regularly contrasted with the clashing factions using improvised explosive devices to kill and maim American occupiers in Afghani- stan and Iraq. Typical of these claims about the Japanese occupation is this pas- sage from a New York Times essay from 2003, lamenting the absence of anthro- pologists to help guide the American occupation of Iraq: “As the occupation of Iraq appears more complex by the day, where are the new Ruth Benedicts, authoritative voices who will carry weight with both Iraqis and Americans?” (Stille 2003).”? While the occupation of postwar Japan brought relatively low levels of interpersonal or organizational violence directed against occupiers, there were other difficulties and forms of structural violence that such ebullient narratives conveniently neglect.
Many anthropologists have come to believe that Ruth Benedict and other anthropologists influenced decisions to allow the Japanese emperor to retain ceremonial power at the wars end, and that The Chrysanthemum and the Sword, Benedict’s study of Japan, guided General Douglas MacArthur’s post- war occupation. While Benedict's book has been read by millions of Japanese in the postwar period, there is no evidence that Benedict’s recommendations to spare the mikado had any direct impact on his fate— MacArthur and others al- ready understood that the emperor should remain (D. H. Price 2008a: 171-99). Likewise, The Chrysanthemum and the Sword was not a central text influencing the Japanese occupation in the ways characterized by Stille and others. Like other anthropological counterinsurgency-linked texts, Chrysanthemums great- est impact was on the home front, as it helped frame American understandings of the conquered Japanese.
As John W. Dower’s Embracing Defeat: Japan in the Wake of World War IT shows, the postwar occupation of Japan was far more complicated than as de- picted in popular American retcon narratives. Dower documents a remarkably compliant occupied Japanese population that aligns with popular renderings, but he also reveals the incredible hardships and severe cultural annihilation that lay
WORLD WAR II’S LONG SHADOW | 39
behind this layer of “nonviolent” compliance, a compliance enforced by GHQ’s totalitarian control of traditional Japanese cultural and political processes.
Dower contrasted the sort of nuanced American academic approach to Japa- nese culture that emerged during the war as a new generation of “American and British anthropologists, sociologists, psychologists, and psychiatrists [entered] into the general areas of intelligence analysis and psychological warfare” (1999: 219) with that of the war’s elder generation of Asia experts, who concluded that the Japanese would be incapable of adopting democracy after the war. A cohort of American social scientists who recognized the malleability of enculturation processes and the innate forces of cultural relativism advocated for an occupa- tion based on aggressive social engineering.* An older generation of Asia ex- perts with ties to the United Kingdom’s Royal Institute of International Affairs judged the Japanese as not being able to adopt democracy because they were an “obedient herd.” According to Dower, if this generation of “Asia experts had their way, the very notion of inducing a democratic revolution would have died of ridicule at an early stage. As happened instead, the ridicule was deflected by the views of experts of a different ilk — behavioral scientists who chose to em- phasize the ‘malleability’ of the Japanese ‘national character; along with planners and policy makers of liberal and left-wing persuasions who sincerely believed that democratic values were universal in their nature and appeal” (1999: 218). Dower speculated that had the emperor followed his advisers’ counsel and sur- rendered at the beginning of 1945, Japan not only would have avoided conven- tional, jellied gasoline, and atomic bombing campaigns but also might have avoided “the occupation’s revolution from above. As of early 1945, there was no plan to induce a democratic revolution in the defeated nation. The old Japan hands [e.g., British analysts] who still controlled post surrender planning an- ticipated a mild reform agenda at best” (220).
Dower reveals an American occupation full of brutalities and degradations, as the Japanese public were denigrated through programs like a government- organized prostitution operation supervised by the local police (1999: 124-26) and a collapse of the production and distribution of basic foodstuffs that was still so severe in October 1947 that a young, honest municipal judge died of starvation after refusing to purchase food on the black market (99). The United States’ refusal to shoulder the costs of occupation exacerbated Japanese hard- ships. In contrast to those living under the Marshall Plan in Europe, many Japa- nese starved as they were required to pay the costs of the American occupation, a burden that “amounted to a staggering one-third of the regular budget at the beginning of the occupation” (115).
40 | CHAPTER TWO
In 1950, anthropologist George Foster was appointed to be the American Anthropological Association (AAA) delegate to the Commission on the Occu- pied Areas’ Second National Conference on the Occupied Countries (AA 1951 5313]:456). Foster reported on conference presentations describing the state of American occupations of Austria, Germany, Japan, and the Ryukyus, in which he criticized American military officials’ grasp of the realities and problems of an occupation, and broad beliefs in faulty cultural engineering assumptions. Foster described a series of upbeat military-linked occupation reports making unrealistic claims of transformed occupied populations that fit Americans’ ex- pectations. According to Foster:
The report of Col. Nugent on Japan was very discouraging because of the atti- tude and point of view. He painted a glowing picture in which everything is going beautifully in Japan and there are no problems. As a result of the U.S. program, Japanese character, personality and culture have been entirely changed during the past five years and they are well on the road to American democracy. The ethno- centric approach on the part of most delegates and officials toward all of the oc- cupied countries was almost unbelievable. Nearly every discussion and comment was predicated on the assumption that American institutions are perfect and that success in the occupied countries consists only in recasting them more nearly in our own image. It was implied that what is wrong with Japanese culture is that it is so unlike American culture. . . . Japanese universities were thoroughly excori- ated because they were copied after the European pattern and not the American pattern. Unquestionably, foreign nationals representing the occupied areas must have felt that most of the discussion was an unvarnished insult to their national
cultures. (AA 1951 53[3]: 456-57)
Foster’s bitter assessment was ignored not only by American policy makers but also by some in the generation of coming applied anthropologists who avoided such assessments that directly countered American policy positions, instead adopting managerial views that better aligned with American policy.
Several American anthropologists conducted fieldwork in occupied Japan. Douglas Haring took a leave of absence from Syracuse University during 1951 and 1952 to serve on the Nrc’s Pacific Science Board in the Ryukyus, where he worked on an army program documenting local culture. The Wenner-Gren Foundation later funded Haring’s research evaluating U.S.-backed reforms after the American occupation of Japan ended (J. W. Hall 1952: 293-94). Some Amer- icans conducted community studies: Arthur Raper surveyed rural fishing com- munities, gathering information on the impacts of postoccupation land reform
WORLD WAR II'S LONG SHADOW | 41
programs (see Raper et. al. 1950); John Bennett modeled his research on Walter Goldschmidt’s ethnographic field research on California agricultural commu- nities, as he studied neighborhood associations, the “labor boss” system, and “problems of ‘freedom and control’” in a rural forestry community in the Toch- igi Prefecture (Bennett 1951: 1-2).? These community studies gathered data used for planning and to integrate translated background material gathered by re- search staff. Japanese staff helped design effective surveys, questionnaires, and other data-gathering methods and collected attitudinal surveys, interviews, and local archival materials (Bennett 1951: 2).
Bennett’s analysis adopted a “Weber-Parsons scheme of analysis for institu- tional economics” to account for studying variations in social integration (1951: 3), while other research was more descriptive and less theory oriented. Bennett’s study analyzed how market conditions determined wages and prices, while cul- tural traditions and intricate systems of obligations, rituals, and values shaped Japanese business relationships. Bennett found that Japanese cultural traditions cultivated “a strong local democratic respect for individual and family rights, [which also led to the] exploitation of workers by ‘bosses; who manipulate the traditionalistic structure and demand loyalty in return for protection” (4).
Occasionally, data and analysis from these community studies impacted occu- pation policy decisions. In one instance, data from Bennett’s fishery rights study were integrated by the Natural Resources Section when it wrote new fisheries laws (Bennett 1951: 4). While some research impacted policy decisions, it is unclear to what extent the social science programs of occupied Japan described by Bennett and others influenced shifts in Japanese cultural policy. Such questions are high- lighted by the work of Iwao Ishino, an anthropologist formerly employed by the Japan Occupation’s Public Opinion and Sociological Research Division work- ing alongside Bennett, who published an analysis of the shifts in the traditional Matsui labor supply system in which “labor bosses” controlled hiring in certain Japanese job sectors (dockworkers, carpenters, cooks, etc.). Ishino (1956) ar- gued that traditional economic forces, rather than nuanced understanding of cultural meanings, likely accounted for the collapse of the labor boss system.
Many of these occupation studies sought to understand how traditional Japanese cultural systems of obligation interfered with claimed efficiencies of capitalism-unfettered markets. One of Bennett’s occupation studies, titled “Eco- nomic Aspects of a Boss-Henchman System in the Japanese Forestry Indus- try” (1958), described his attempts to understand how traditional systems using local networks of employment obligations led to inefficiencies and incurred unnecessary costs.
42 | CHAPTER TWO
Bennett detailed the importance of customary loyalties and showed how expectations were embedded in traditional logging and wood-processing occu- pations. Bennett described this “informal social system, with its web-like fab- ric, extending via kinship, ritual or simulated kinship, and chains of obligations through the whole nation, [which] can be efficiently mobilized for national purposes,’ while conceding that to American outsiders this traditional system would appear “incompatible” and irrational (1958: 28). He observed that plans to modernize underdeveloped nations generally sought to discard traditional obligation-bound systems, and he conceded that in many instances, such as those involving heavy industry, such changes were appropriate; but Bennett advo- cated that small Japanese industries, with unskilled, migrant labor, be allowed to continue using these cumbersome (to outsiders and occupiers) systems of obligation. He argued that “in these contexts, the Japanese economy contin- ues to display familistic and traditionalistic social patterns and is able to blend them with standard commercial and business methods” (28-29). He found that the forest industry’s boss-henchman system met these criteria and that Western models of development needed to be more flexible and to integrate local cul- tural practices before assuming that conforming to external top-down manage- rial changes would increase productivity, profits, or efficiency.
The Japanese Village in Transition
In November 1950, GHQ published The Japanese Village in Transition, a mono- graph based on the research of Arthur E Raper, Tami Tsuchiyama, Herbert Passin, and David Sills.’ Raper was a consultant for GHQ’s Natural Resources Section, and the other contributors were staff at GHQ’s Public Opinion and So- ciological Research Division (Raper et al. 1950). Transition showcased a level of interdisciplinary collaborative research that was rare in the prewar period. This interdisciplinary team approach grew from the experiences of social sci- entists who worked on similar interdisciplinary projects at oss, Office of War Information (ow1), ONI, and other agencies. Transition drew on ethnographic research and survey data gathered in thirteen Japanese villages between 1947 and 1948; Raper evaluated agricultural developments, Tsuchiyama summarized social and cultural issues, and a rich collection of photographs and brief de- scriptions illustrated the layout of villages and farmland, and daily life in post- war rural Japan.
Transition analyzed political participation by women, changes in the form and function of the extended family, marriage, inheritance practices, kinship
WORLD WAR II’S LONG SHADOW | 43
solidarity, retirement, child rearing, the financial collapse of shrines, schools, youth associations, the black market, land reclamation programs, and the im- pact of agricultural cooperatives installed by American occupation forces to undermine the power of the traditional agricultural associations. It evaluated impacts of new democratic institutions and land reformation programs man- dated by GHQ to undermine the traditional grip of powerful Japanese families and royalty (Lu 1996: 491).
The monograph’s ethnographic descriptions of land reform and imposed de- mocracy in Yokogoshi illustrated larger trends in occupied Japan, and its nar- rative highlighted the counterinsurgency goals at the heart of these policies. An account of a village meeting reported the following:
A meeting was held in the village hall assembly room. Looking up at the large por- traits of six of the former headmen, the present officials stated that not one of the officers in the village hall at that time could have held office under conditions pre- vailing when these earlier mayors were in authority. ... The present mayor owns no land. He had been a clerk in the village office for more than 30 years until he became deputy mayor; in 1947, he was elected mayor. He has long been identified with the farmers’ union. His background is generally similar to that of the major- ity of the present assemblymen, nearly all of whom are new owner-operators who were tenants a couple of years ago. Under the previous seven mayors, practically all of the assemblymen had been landowners despite the fact that just before the land reform program was launched, 46 percent of all farmers rented 90 percent or more of the land they cultivated, and 72 percent rented half or more of their land.
(Raper et al. 1950: 166)
Replacing leaders with new individuals from outside traditional circles of power was a counterinsurgency technique to establish new power relations that broke with the past. Raper and colleagues stressed themes of increased representa- tion and equality, while seldom examining how the democratic installation of occupation-ready local leaders undermined the old cultural order.
American social scientists studied farmers’ complaints, learning about their worries over increased taxes, inflation, a decline in the black market, increased agricultural production quotas, shortages of consumable goods, limited avail- able farmlands, and a lack of adequate technical assistance (Raper et al. 1950: 182-91). Transition contrasted the new democratically controlled agricultural cooperatives with the traditional “feudal” system.
This new imposed counterinsurgent democratic system eroded traditional relationships and obligations in ways that incentivized allegiances to occupiers.
44 | CHAPTER TWO
For many farmers, this shift brought opportunities, as Raper and colleagues reported: “The new agricultural cooperatives are generally reported by farmers to be a real improvement over the earlier agricultural associations. Various con- crete improvements are mentioned, particularly the fact that the delivery quo- tas need not be turned in at the new agricultural cooperatives unless the farmer elected to do so. Under the present system, any dealer who has been designated as an official handler can receive quota deliveries, and almost any dealer can be designated as such if enough farmers certify their desire to deliver to him” (1950: 180).
Perhaps the anthropologically riskiest engineered changes in the cultural practices of postwar rural Japan were the postsurrender Civil Code’s revisions of traditional inheritance laws. Article 900 of the Civil Code nullified the tra- ditional system of primogeniture and replaced it with rules stating that a sur- viving spouse would inherit one-third of the property, and surviving children would inherit two-thirds of the property, to be divided equally among them (see Raper et al. 1950: 211). When Raper’s team asked locals about the impact of these inheritance changes, they found that “the consensus of most of the farmers interviewed was that if the inheritance provision of the revised Civil Code were carried out, the family as an economic unit would encounter great difficulty” (211). The American occupiers who were designing these changes seemed unconcerned about accelerating the forces of devolution of landhold- ings, focusing instead on how these laws provided greater equity. Young people uniformly favored the traditional inheritance system, arguing that the respon- sibilities of care for elderly parents required a greater level of inheritance (212).
The occupations enforcement of Articles 14 and 24 of the new constitution undermined the traditional “house” system and democratized family arrange- ments in ways that transformed property relations and intergenerational obli- gations. Article 24, section II stated, “With regard to choice of spouse, property rights, inheritance, choice of domicile, divorce and other matters pertaining to marriage and the family, laws shall be enacted from the standpoint of individual dignity and the essential equality of the sexes” (Schmidt 2005: 323n165). After 1952, conservative Japanese politicians tried to restore the traditional “house” system, citing the rapid fragmentation of landholdings in rural communities, but these efforts failed “because of the determined opposition mainly from youth and women’s organizations, but also due to the fact that the conservatives were losing their rural strongholds in the wake of the effects of industrializa- tion and urbanization” (Schmidt 2005: 328). Petra Schmidt noted that from the postwar occupation until the 1960s, several failed attempts were made to allow
WORLD WAR II'S LONG SHADOW | 45
a single child to inherit agricultural holdings, with compensation to siblings, and while these efforts failed, other agricultural legislation accomplished these goals (2005: 328-29).
Drawing on fieldwork in the village of Futomi funded by the Rockefeller Foundation and the Office of Naval Research (ONR), John Bennett later ex- panded some of the work that had appeared in Transition (Bennett and Ishino 1955: 41n1). Bennett and Ishino’s later publications drew on unpublished data collected by occupation forces, later integrating this research into an anthro- pological narrative examining how Japanese culture coped with the extreme environmental and economic limitations of this “land-hungry village” (42-43).
Bennett and Ishino examined the impact of ecological limitations on the development of specific cultural formations. Describing Futomi as a village limited by “land scarcity,’ where economic limitations shaped postwar devel- opments, theirs was an ecological argument in which farmers maximized good soils with high-yield crops, and poor soils were planted with low-yield crops. The local carrying capacities limited population growth (Bennett and Ishino 1955: 43).
Their account of villagers’ cultural adaptation to living in such circumscribed environments relied on mechanical structural functionalist metaphors, pre- senting the village as having “devised elaborate and sensitive machinery to fight the problems brought about by land scarcity and poverty of natural resources” (Bennett and Ishino 1955: 43). This was an innovative ecological analysis, yet the lack of analysis of the political economy of the occupation stunted their explanations of a world occupied and partially restructured by American force, which was acknowledged but not an active force worthy of analysis itself.
The Coordinated Investigation of Micronesian Anthropology
Former theaters of war soon became training grounds for a new generation of anthropologists. Postwar occupations provided funding opportunities for graduate students looking for fieldwork research possibilities, increasingly mov- ing American anthropologists to dissertation fieldwork outside of the United States. William Lessa, Thomas Gladwin, and Ward Goodenough were part of a new generation of American anthropologists whose Micronesian fieldwork was sponsored by postwar funding sources like the onr (through the NRc Council's Pacific Science Board’s) and CIMA (see table 2.1) (Falgout 1995; Fischer 1979).
46 | CHAPTER TWO
TABLE 2.1. Postwar CIMA Anthropologists (Source: Spoehr 1957)
PROJECT INVESTIGATOR AREA INSTITUTION
CIMA Homer G. Barnett Carolines University of Oregon
CIMA C. Bentzen Carolines University of Southern California
CIMA N. M. Bowers Marianas University of Michigan
CIMA Mrs. N. M. Bowers Marianas University of Michigan
CIMA P. H. Buck Carolines Bishop Museum
CIMA E. G. Burrows Carolines University of Connecticut
CIMA A. Capell Carolines University of Sydney
CIMA M. Chave Marshalls University of Hawaii
CIMA I. Dyen Carolines Yale
CIMA S. H. Elbert Carolines Bishop Museum
CIMA K. Emory Carolines Bishop Museum
CIMA P. L. Garvin Carolines University of Indiana
CIMA T. Gladwin Carolines Yale
CIMA Ward Goodenough Carolines Yale
CIMA E. E. Hunt Carolines Harvard
CIMA A. Joseph Marianas Institute of Ethnic Affairs
CIMA N. R. Kidder Carolines Harvard
CIMA C. Lathrop Carolines Bishop Museum
CIMA F. M. LeBar Carolines Yale
CIMA W. A. Lessa Carolines University of Chicago
CIMA J. L. Lewis Carolines University of Pennsylvania
CIMA F. Mahoney Carolines University of Wisconsin
CIMA George P. Murdock Carolines Yale
CIMA A. Murphy Carolines University of Oregon
CIMA R. E. Murphy Carolines Clark University
CIMA V. Murray Marianas Inst. of Ethnic Affairs
CIMA R. I. Murrill Carolines AMNH
CIMA J. Rauch Carolines Columbia University
CIMA S. H. Riesenberg Carolines University of California
CIMA R. S. Rizenthaler Carolines Milwaukee Public Museum
CIMA David M. Carolines Harvard
Schneider
CIMA M. Spiro Carolines Northwestern University
CIMA Alexander Spoehr Marshalls Chicago, Natural History Museum
CIMA W. D. Stevens Carolines Harvard
(continued)
TABLE 2.1 (continued)
PROJECT INVESTIGATOR AREA INSTITUTION CIMA B. Tolerton Carolines Columbia University CIMA J. Useem Carolines University of Wisconsin CIMA H. Uyehara Carolines University of Wisconsin CIMA A. Vidich Carolines University of Wisconsin CIMA J. E. Weckleter Carolines University of Southern California CIMA C. Wong Carolines Yale, Harvard SIM Project Isidor Dyen Yap, Ponape, Yale Truk SIM Project A. M. Fischer Truk Radcliffe College SIM Project Ward Goodenough Gilberts University of Pennsylvania SIM Project Leonard E. Mason Marshalls University of Hawaii SIM Project Alexander Spoehr Marianas Chicago Natural History Museum SIM Project John E. Tobin Marshalls University of Hawaii SIM Project H. Uyehara Marshalls University of Hawaii uscc Survey William R. Bascom Ponape Northwestern University uscc Survey Edwin H. Bryan Bishop Museum uscc Survey E. E. Gallahue Marianas U.S. Department of Agriculture uscc Survey E. T. Hall Truk University of Denver uscc Survey Leonard E. Mason Marshalls U.S. Department of State uscc Survey Douglas L. Oliver Director of ussc Survey uscc Survey Karl J. Pelzer Truk U.S. Department of Agriculture uscc Survey John Useem Palau University of Wisconsin
In 1946, CIMA directed a project sponsored by the U.S. Commercial Com- pany Economic Survey, sending twenty-two social scientists to field settings throughout Micronesia to gather economic, political, and social data on post- war conditions (see Oliver 1951). Between 1947 and 1948, CIMA hired forty- two field researchers, twenty-five of whom were cultural anthropologists, to gather primary data on the state of Micronesian society. The approach used by cima was modeled after previous projects for the U.S. Bureau of American Ethnology and the Philippines Ethnology Survey — an early episode of applied anthropology described by Roberto Gonzalez as one in which “colonial adminis- tration was reduced to a problem of rational scientific management” (2010: 141;
48 | CHAPTER TWO
Kiste and Marshall 2000: 267). The crma ethnographic research was primarily funded by the onr, with supplemental funding from the Wenner-Gren Founda- tion (Spoehr 1951: 2). In 1949 the Nrc’s Pacific Science Board began sponsoring the Scientific Investigations in Micronesia’s ecological studies of island envi- ronments and cultural research, including traditional diets and archaeologi- cal inventories (Mason 1953). Felix Keesing developed a training program for Micronesian administrators from 1946 to 1949 (Keesing 1947; Mason 1953: 1; NBAAA 1947 1[2]: 15).
Ward Goodenough did fieldwork in the Gilberts on the Onotoa Atoll in 1951 and Bengt Danielsson worked on the Raroia Atoll in 1952 (Mason 1953: 2). As a graduate student at Harvard, David Schneider originally planned on conducting fieldwork in Africa, but after learning of cima-funded fieldwork opportunities on Yap, he later wrote, “The jingle of coins attracted my attention” (Schneider and Handler 1995: 85).
The Handbook on the Trust Territory of the Pacific Islands drew on the work of CIMA anthropologists, focusing on managerial outcomes that mirrored war- time Pacific handbooks that Murdock and others had produced a few years earlier (OCNO 1948). The Handbook was a neocolonial administrative guide describing local property relations, work habits, land tenure systems, exchange systems, land disputes, settlement patterns, the primacy of kinship, and so on.
The Handbook described managerial strategies of direct and indirect rule, arguing that adopting an indirect approach “clears the way for normal evolution of the familial local system toward political forms more in keeping with mod- ern world conditions.” Notions of “normal evolution” reinforced neocolonial policies within cultural evolutionary frameworks that helped justify changes in local governmental structures that would help local cultures progress, rather than explanations focusing on American geopolitical interests (OCNO 1948: 124). The Handbook identified problems for indirect rule, including local cor- ruption, nepotistic tendencies, and the abuse of authority, at times referring to local leaders as “kings” and using other terms that drew on historical European notions of social structure. The Handbook advocated for a special “double type of leadership” such as was installed in the Marshall Islands, or Ponape, where “the paramount chiefs of the districts hold the top official positions, but district secretaries are held mainly responsible for carrying the load of practi- cal affairs. In the Marshalls, too, the kings are given fullest ceremonial honors, but local administrative responsibilities are in the hands of magistrates” (125). It suggested capturing the loyalties of local youth and recommended creating ceremonial roles for traditional chiefs, with an understanding that, with time,
WORLD WAR II’S LONG SHADOW | 49
these traditional leaders “will be called upon less for practical leadership” (125). The Handbook supported c1ma anthropologist Saul Riesenberg’s suggestion that potential heirs to traditional leadership titles be shipped out for Western school- ing in Hawaii and the U.S. mainland (125).
The Handbook warned that external management of native populations could lead to a “growth of political consciousness” and advised administrators to not stir up nativist or nationalist feelings, which can “arise primarily out of the social unrest which comes from disintegration of the old cultures, and from the pressures of alien domination and discrimination” (OCNO 1948: 126). Administrators were cautioned that past uprisings caused foreign administra- tors to react in ways that strengthened local support, and they were advised to maintain local input on some administrative decisions in order to reduce the possibility of revolts. The Handbook theorized that coming independence efforts would likely be island group-specific, and given the existing linguistic and geographic separation, it was unlikely that separate island groups would develop a sense of “common identity,” so threats to American rule would be localized, not pan-Micronesian (126).
Anthropologists at cima frequently acknowledged the recent war in their narratives, and in some instances vestiges of the war may have been represented as core cultural features of these societies. As Lin Poyer shows, Thomas Glad- win and Seymour Sarason’s work in postwar Truk used psychological inventory tests indicating “food anxiety,’ a cultural trait they connected to the near starvation faced by islanders during the war (Poyer 2004: 161-62). Some anthropologists characterized the impacts of the war on Micronesian cultures as devastating. Douglas Oliver concluded that the “conquest of the islands by combat and the defeat of Japan destroyed completely the prewar economic structure,” and that the war destroyed the islanders’ income sources (1951: 32). Oliver described “the presence of [U.S.] armed forces is unduly blocking the economic development of Micronesians” (1951: 11). He recommended that the United States support the restoration of native economies, and that the U.S. military restore some lands taken from natives for U.S. military installations. Oliver advocated developing support programs to supply pigs and chickens for every family.
Alexander Spoehr’s 1951 report for the Naval Civil Administration Unit in the Marianas described the ongoing transfer of administration from the U.S. Navy to the U.S. Department of the Interior. Spoehr argued that anthropological insights into Micronesian customs were needed if Americans were to under- take an “enlightened administration” of the islands (Spoehr 1951: 1). Anthropolo- gists provided instructional materials to the School of Naval Administration,
50 | CHAPTER TWO
anthropologist Lieutenant Commander Phillip Drucker oversaw applied pro- grams in Micronesia, and Homer Barnett took up these duties when the ad- ministration was transferred from the navy to the Department of the Interior (Spoehr 1951: 2-3).
Research projects at cima provided a broad range of fieldwork opportuni- ties for fledgling and midcareer American anthropologists, fieldwork that was a gateway for the careers of a new generation and led to the production of classic anthropological texts and important theoretical works on kinship and other topics, while simultaneously generating knowledge that was at least conceived of as having managerial uses. With a confluence of naval intelligence needs and anthropological theoretical desires, George Murdock’s work for both cima and the Institute of Human Relations (IHR) made 1HR’s project “the largest re- search effort in the history of American anthropology and a major program in applied anthropology” (Kiste and Marshall 2000: 265). Many crma ethno- graphic reports read as fractured, hurried works, in part because Murdock pro- vided financial bonuses that encouraged this sort of work, but also because the fractured theoretical approach and functional uses of the work reinforced such approaches. David Schneider recalled Murdock offering “a $500 bonus if you wrote up your report real quickly” (Schneider and Handler 1995: 21).
From Fighting Fascism to Supporting Occupations
Many who took part in transforming the postwar world did so while continu- ing to use the previous war as an ideological reference point. Most anthropolo- gists working on occupations or aid programs conceived of their role as that of a stabilizer or liberator, not an active agent of a new American empire." The Second World War brought a unity of purpose for many Americans, most of whom were impacted by notions of fighting totalitarianism and making the world safe for democracy. The threats of Nazi ideologies championing racial superiority, postwar news of the extent of the horrors of the Holocaust, and Japanese atrocities during Japan’s occupation of the Philippines, China, Burma, and elsewhere in Asia helped some justify American war losses and attacks on civilian populations abroad. These postwar residues helped nurture ideological justifications for a new era’s conceptions of American exceptionalism. Anthropology has long been ambivalent about how to cope with the political processes in which it is enveloped. This ambivalence is found in the discipline’s contradictory early articulation of the innate equality of all cultures, while simultaneously assisting in the colonial subjugation of those recognized as
WORLD WAR II’'S LONG SHADOW | 51
theoretically equal. Some contradictions can be reduced to differences in indi- vidual anthropologists’ political perspectives, but the collective positions of dis- ciplinary professional associations have been as inconsistent as these individual positions. Anthropologists, like others of their time and place, internalize the political views of their times in ways that generally coalesce the political pro- cesses of their society.
The milieu of the Second World War and shadows of anthropologists’ war- time contributions lay draped over the discipline after the war in ways that were not always obvious at the time. American anthropologists’ responses to World War II helped them misinterpret and support their nation’s Cold War interna- tional policies in the late 1940s and throughout the 1950s. This interpretive lag is a crucial element for understanding how American anthropology came to so easily align its orientation with policy agendas supporting American expan- sion. The normalcy of anthropology’s military links is seen in the pages of post- war issues of the News Bulletin of the AAA. The front page of the April 1950 issue included two job announcements marking this milieu: one for naval operations field consultants on Yap and Ponape, the second seeking anthropologists for a classified research project at Air University’s Arctic, Desert, and Tropic Infor- mation Center (NBAAA 1950 4[2]: 1).
As Bruce Cumings observed, during the early postwar period, “scholars caught up in one historical system and one discourse that defined discipline, depart- ment, area, and subject suddenly found themselves in another emerging field of inquiry, well in advance of imagining or discovering the subject themselves. To put a subtle relationship all too crudely, power and money had found their subject first, and shaped fields of inquiry accordingly” (Cumings 1999: 179). This historical shift can be easily discerned with hindsight, but for those living through these transformations, the preexisting lens of interpretation anchored in past practices was most often used to explain political developments. The range of critiques of American policies developing at the time is impressive. It is not that some anthropologists or political writers did not understand the political transformations of the Cold War as they were occurring. Some clearly did, but these were minority views, outside the mainstream consciousness of the time. Most notable among those Americans who understood the transfor- mations of the Cold War to be fundamentally different than America’s political purpose during the Second World War were those of the radical left. Publica- tions like the Nation, the Progressive, and I. F. Stone’s Weekly provided timely analysis that interpreted American postwar foreign policy as serving fundamen- tally different ends than those advanced in the war years and before.
52 | CHAPTER TWO
Henry Wallace's reasons for rejecting the Marshall Plan highlight the limita- tions presented by strictly historicist analysis. The presence of Wallace's sophis- ticated, marginalized critique of 1947 (or the analysis of Jerome Rauch, discussed in chapter 4) demonstrates how strictly “historicist” positions necessarily cham- pion and hegemonically elevate past voices from a dominant majority, most frequently aligned with power, over those from a marginalized minority. It is difficult to imagine who might have funded such marginal critiques during this period so marked by the rise of McCarthyism.
A range of forces align to support the rise of one research project or interpre- tive school over another. The coming availability of government and private foundation funds to finance postwar academic research helped transform uni- versities and professional associations, like the American Anthropological Associ- ation and the Society for Applied Anthropology, as these and other organizations sought to best align themselves with new funding opportunities — alignments that mutually served the funders and recipients of these funds.
WORLD WAR II’S LONG SHADOW | 53
The mighty edifice of government science dominated the scene in the middle of the twentieth-century as a Gothic
cathedral dominated a thirteenth-century landscape.
A. HUNTER DUPREE | 1957
*
THREE REBOOTING PROFESSIONAL ANTHROPOLOGY IN THE POSTWAR WORLD
During the last months of the Second World War, the American Anthropologi- cal Association formed the Temporary Organizing Committee to prepare the association for anticipated academic and financial opportunities that appeared to be coming to the postwar world (Frantz 1974: 9).! Two weeks after ve Day, future AAA executive secretary Frederick Johnson wrote Julian Steward a letter recapping their recent discussions concerning the desirability of establishing a large, centralized organization of American anthropologists positioned to take advantage of emerging opportunities. With clear enthusiasm, and joking about a drinking session with a colonel described as an “erstwhile “Wall Street Mer-
2»
chant; ” Johnson wrote:
As the alcoholic mists cleared during the ride north on the train I had a dream. I pass it on to you for what it is worth. As I thought about your suggestion that there be organized a society of professional anthropologists I had much difficulty in finding a common denominator for the whole field. There is one, of course, but it may be so broad that it is useless. I wondered if it might not be possible to rec- ognize the division of the field into several professional bodies, such as archaeol- ogy, ethnography, and social anthropology. This could be done for the purpose of developing criteria for professional status and would have no reference to scientific problems or ambitions. Professionals chosen in this way would be anthropolo-
gists and thus be eligible for a general professional body. At the outset this appears
as a complicated thing fraught with all kinds of difficulties. However it might be shaken down to become something of use.
The need for such a body, no matter how it originates, is great and it is urgent. My past experience is sufficient reason to convince me. Sudden developments in the Committee make it even more imperative. Confidentially I can say that even now the status of the Committee is being questioned. I do not know whether this is a real dif- ficulty or a desire to develop the most complicated arrangement possible. I doubt if this is serious because I have just fired off a big gun, if this does not work we might as well quit. I have a couple of more shots but these must be saved to further
the work of the Committee rather than simply to form it. (Isa 7, FJ to JS 5/22/45)
Steward replied that Ruth Benedict, Margaret Mead, John Cooper, and Clyde Kluckhohn supported this plan, adding that “if this fine collection of prima donnas is so unanimously for it, I am positive the thing is sure fire” (1sa 7, JS to FJ 5/29/45).
In the month following Japan’s surrender, Steward wrote Johnson about “the battle of Washington” over a coming struggle either within the aaa or with the formation of a new central anthropological association “scrambling for status and permanency comparable to the days of the depression and again of the first part of the war” A tentative constitution was drafted, and Steward described the status of generational factions among anthropologists in which “the venerable generation is not interested but won't oppose it. Those of a slightly younger gen- eration who have achieved fame are suspicious of it as a means either of trapping them or of building up their rivals. The younger generation is 100% for it” (Isa 7, JS to FJ 9/20/45). Steward anticipated that new governmental sources of social science funding were coming, and a well-organized professional association could position itself to take advantage of these opportunities. He saw a “great furor about getting social science into some sort of a national research founda- tion to implement the [Vannevar] Bush plan for the physical sciences. Several bills of the Bush plan are now before Congress and there is a mad scramble to get the social science plan ready before the hearings start in a few weeks” (Isa 7, JS to FJ 9/20/45). Steward initially considered creating a new anthropologi- cal association, a “proposed Society for Professional Anthropologists” (RB, JS to RB 10/25/45), but by early 1946, he realized that a reorganization of the AAA would be preferable to splintering off a new organization.
In the fall of 1945, Steward urged the AAA to publish a monograph detail- ing American anthropologists’ contributions to the war. The National Research Council had sponsored a monograph chronicling psychology’s contributions to
REBOOTING PROFESSIONAL ANTHROPOLOGY | 55
the war, and Steward envisioned producing a larger work detailing anthropol- ogy’s war years (RB, JS to RB 10/25/45), but this history was never published.’ In late 1945 Steward drafted a statement titled “Anthropology’s Justification of Federal Support for Social Science Research” for congressional hearings con- sidering postwar national science policies. He argued that anthropological knowledge could help explain the root causes of human violence, and that in a nation devoting federal funding to the physical sciences at unprecedented levels, “knowledge of human forces must parallel knowledge of physical forces if World Organization is to discharge its trust” (AA AP 37, Sec. Memos, 9/29/45; see also AA 1946 48[2]: 309). Steward pitched anthropology almost as a form of Comtian social physics, claiming that “as an analyst and source of information, the social scientist has a function comparable to that of the research physicist or biologist” (AAAP 37, Sec. Memos, 9/29/45). He argued that like other sci- entists, anthropologists produced neutral data that would be used by policy makers because “a scientist as such has no political objectives” (AAAP 37, Sec. Memos, 9/29/45). Steward cited anthropologists’ valuable contributions to the war, stressed anthropologists’ roles facilitating “Indian Administration, and saluted anthropologists’ roles supporting “colonial affairs of Great Britain, Hol- land, and France” (AAAP 37, Sec. Memos, 9/29/45).
Steward envisioned anthropological knowledge supporting the implementa- tion of American foreign policy on projects ranging from the economic devel- opment of China to problems of postwar occupations and the “reeducation” of “backward peoples.’ He argued:
In our efforts to aid Japan, Germany, or any other nation to achieve a government acceptable to the family of nations we must understand the native institutions we are dealing with lest our efforts have unexpected results or, at best, amount to nothing more than political imperialism. Reeducation of masses of people to alter their basic values and habits of thinking will succeed only as the values and habits are properly comprehended. Again, if we are to participate in or sanction trusteeship for backward peoples, we are morally obligated to make every effort to ascertain the probable consequences of the policies we underwrite. (AAAP 37, Sec. Memos,
9/29/45)
As other disciplines organized themselves in anticipation of coming funding opportunities, anthropologists settled subfield differences within the aaa and worked to reorganize the associations members to more effectively compete for funding. In December 1945, at the first postwar annual meeting of the AAA, a committee was appointed to collect information from the membership and
56 | CHAPTER THREE
from “allied societies, and other local groups” concerning their views on reor- ganizing the structure of the aa, establishing a permanent secretary, “and other means of furthering professional interests.” The committee was in part selected to represent anthropology’s four field divisions, with a membership of Julian Steward (chair), Elliot D. Chapple, A. I. Hallowell, Frederick Johnson, George Peter Murdock, William Duncan Strong, C. F Voegelin, S. Washburn, and Les- lie White (sT 177, 3).
At a 1946 meeting of the aaa Reorganization Committee, Steward extolled the benefits of a more centralized association lobbying for new federal funds. When Hallowell and others argued that the nrc and other existing bodies could best achieve these ends, Steward countered that “it will be better in the final pay-off when the money is allotted if anthropology has made a case for it- self” (AAAP 131, AAA Reorganization Materials, 3). This small group of men ne- gotiated the basic features of the coming reorganization, determining qualifica- tions for membership; proposing the structure and election of the association’s board, president, and liaisons; and arguing for a new structure that could meet more than once or twice a year and best represent members in the anticipated new age of funding opportunities.
New Postwar Funding Horizons
During the 1950s and 1960s, several governmental bodies considered establish- ing a federally funded social science research agency. Some efforts sought con- nections with national security-related agencies; others tried creating more in- dependent funding bodies. In 1950, after three years of legislative struggles, the National Science Foundation (NsF) was founded as the primary federal institu- tion responsible for funding scientific research aligned with national science policies, but at its founding the nsF did not fund social science research.
The struggle to establish permanent federal funding of social science had been ongoing since the war’s end. On May 20, 1947, Senator William Fulbright failed in his attempts to amend the provisional National Science Foundation Act to include NSF social scientific research funding. Fulbright negotiated Public Law 53A, in the Seventy-Ninth Congress, allowing surplus overseas funds to be used for the train- ing of citizens from these countries for academic study and other related activities in the United States. Later revisions of the Fulbright Act expanded academic op- portunities for Americans to travel abroad as scholars. In 1947, the News Bulletin of the AAA announced that Fulbright funds were available in countries such as Indo- nesia, the Philippines, and French Indochina, and that anthropological fieldwork
REBOOTING PROFESSIONAL ANTHROPOLOGY | 57
projects could be funded under the Fulbright Acts guidelines (NBAAA 1947 1[2]: 1). Within a few years’ time, other countries became available for research: Burma, Jamaica, Gold Coast, Nigeria, the Netherlands, Norway, Greece, Italy, Australia, Iran, Egypt, Malta, Hong Kong, and the Federation of Malaya.
Many in Congress rejected the prospect of large-scale federal funding of academics. American anti-intellectualism in the late 1940s and 1950s fueled skepticism over the contributions that academics could make to relevant Cold War issues. Typical of these views were the remarks of Senator John McClellan (Arkansas) at a 1953 hearing on academics (like Walt Rostow and Max Millikan) receiving funds to “determine how to carry on psychological warfare against the Soviet [Union] and satellites? in which Senator McClel- lan complained that such research was “simply throwing money away” and that all the taxpayers received from such projects was “just a lot of profes- sor theories and all that stuff” (U.S. House 1952: 345). Such anti-intellectual grandstanding played well with segments of the American public, but it failed to feed the incipient national security state’s growing hunger for social sci- ence informed intelligence.
Cold War concerns so deeply influenced the establishment of the NsF that the House version of the bill establishing the NsF required all grant recipients to undergo FBI background investigations — though this requirement was cut from the final reconciliation bill (H.R. 4846, March 1950; NBAAA 1950 4[2]: 3).
Anthropology received little federal science funding during the early 1950s (Solovey 2013: 167), and in 1954 the NsF began funding a limited number of anthropological projects under its Biological and Medical Sciences Division (Solovey 2013: 157). In 1958, the NsF recognized anthropology (along with eco- nomics, sociology, history, and philosophy of science) as a discipline with its own NSF funding status, under its new Social Science Programs (Larsen 1992: 40-52). Anthropology initially received “more than half (52.9 percent) of the resources allocated to social science” at the NsF (Larsen 1992: 64).
Two months after the launch of Sputnik, Julian Steward sent a telegram to AAA president E. Adamson Hoebel expressing concerns that America’s new space race would undermine AAA struggles for federal funds to study anthro- pology. Steward wrote that the government’s “increased support for education in the physical and hard sciences while ignoring social science implies a race for the ultimate weapon is the only deterrent to war[;] I hope that anthropolo- gists and our fellow social scientists see behavioral understandings as better solutions to international tensions than threats of total destruction” (AAAP 48, JS to EAH 12/28/57).
58 | CHAPTER THREE
While federal funding sources for anthropological research during the 1950s did not emerge at rates anticipated by Steward and others, the rapid growth of area study centers and private foundations funded significant growth in an- thropological research. But military and intelligence agencies would eventually identify gaps in the sort of social science research for which they had uses.
In 1963, the Office of Naval Research funded a study, overseen by Ithiel de Sola Pool of the Center for International Studies (CENIs) at MIT, that resulted in a 270-page report titled Social Science Research and National Security (Pool 1963).° The study sought to answer the question “How can a branch of social sci- ence be produced which takes upon itself a responsible concern for national security matters, and how can talented individuals from within social science be drawn into this area?” (Pool 1963: 10). The report discussed a broad range of social science applications: usis polls of foreign populations, military ap- plications of game theory, assisting counterinsurgency operations, theories of strategy and alliance, nuclear strategy, psychological warfare, “problems of in- ternational tensions related to military postures” (56), the production of intelli- gence information, efforts to anticipate the behaviors of other nations, military developments in new nations, and demographic impacts on national military policies. Pool argued that “social science needs a kind of engineering to go with it” (17). The report identified a need for standardized forms of accessing or or- ganizing cultural data. Human Relations Area Files (HRAF) research was cited as having “contributed substantially” to the strategic collection of global atti- tudinal information that could be of strategic use to national security sectors (Wilbur Schramm in Pool 1963: 52).
Pool’s report informed a congressional revival attempting to establish a fed- eral social science funding agency. In 1966, Senator Fred Harris (Oklahoma) proposed a bill to establish a National Foundation on Social Science (NFss) to address gaps in federal social science funding at nsr, but it also linked Penta- gon and intelligence needs with the production of social science research while maintaining some independence (Larsen 1992). The New York Times reported that the proposed NEss would “be independent of all other Federal agencies, and it would be forbidden to allow interference with its personnel or policies from any other Federal official or department” (Eder 1966a:5).
In response to the academic freedom problems raised by Project Camelot and other military-linked programs (see chapter 10), Harris wanted a federal agency that would steer clear of military, intelligence, or secret research (Solovey 2012: 64). Harris proposed creating a twenty-five-person oversight board to review re- search proposals. Harris would have allowed c1a- or Pentagon-related research,
REBOOTING PROFESSIONAL ANTHROPOLOGY | 59
but “all research would be made available to the public” (Eder 1966a). Harris's proposed ness died in 1969 (AAAFN 1970 11[1]: 7), but a House amendment proposed by Congressman Emilio Daddario and adopted in 1968 amended the Nsr’s charter, expanding the funding of social science research (Solovey 2012).
Private Interests Linked to State: Ford, Rockefeller, Carnegie
As the Pike and Church congressional committees would later discover, even without directive Camelot-like federal funding programs for social science re- search, the cra had secretly developed ways of directing private foundation funding. But more openly, the leadership of America’s most influential private foundations consisted of individuals rotating in and out of federal agencies with national security interests.
Public foundations worked with governmental agencies to prioritize research agendas. In 1949, John Gillin, Sol Tax, and Charles Wagley produced an NRC list titled “Research Needs in the Field of Modern Latin American Culture” (CLAANRC 1949). This was a broad list, including studies on enculturation, culture and personality, urbanization, gender roles, and the impact of culture on notions of “race” That same year, the AAA appointed the NRC Committee on Asian Anthropology, which generated a list of recommended projects that included a mixture of field-based and library research on topics such as com- munity studies, colonialism, national structure, population shifts, land use, and cultural values (CLAANRC 1949). The NRC’s Committee on Asian Anthropology at this time recommended that anthropologists could use classified documents to produce a “series of volumes on China, Japan, Indonesia and India would be feasible at the present time and should be encouraged by boards of competent scholars in these fields. Obviously such studies should be undertaken only after a thorough exploration of classified and unclassified materials of a comparable nature have been examined both in the U.S. and abroad” (44 51[3]:540).
Rockefeller, Ford, Carnegie, and other private foundations bearing the names of Rooseveltian malefactors of great wealth shaped the funding of an- thropological research during the Cold War. Functioning as intergenerational trusts, these foundations protected against the dissolution of the massive con- glomeration of wealth upon the death of the funds’ creators. With the estab- lishment of family members controlling boards (sometimes with significant
60 | CHAPTER THREE
compensation or with family use of trust properties) and following established policies aligned with the desires of the funds’ patrons, the interests of wealthy magnates could stretch beyond their corporal existence while estate taxes were evaded in ways that created intergenerational tax shelters. Joan Roelofs de- scribed these foundations as “examples of mortmain, the dead hand of past wealth controlling the future” (2003: 20).* These foundations funded not only research projects aligned with their intellectual, political, or class interests but also less-aligned projects (with some limitations), though they favored the coverage of specific geographic regions or specific social problems during given periods.
These private foundations funded social science in ways that nurtured the establishment of an academic elite that, as David Nugent observed,
was to be trained in the virtues of empirically grounded, practically oriented re- search within one of the philanthropies’ remade institutions of higher learning. In order to make it possible to train a new elite along these lines, the philanthropies provided their remade institutions of higher learning with large sums of money specifically for the training of students. The philanthropies made it possible for these institutions to offer scholarships to fund the entire graduate training of “promising” students. The philanthropies thus helped influence entire cohorts of graduate students, who were schooled in the scientific, empirically grounded, practically oriented concepts, methods, and techniques that the philanthropies believed would make a contribution to the pressing social problems of the day.
(2002: 11)
Carnegie, Ford, and Rockefeller were selectively predisposed to nurture ideas aligned with their founders’ political-economic interests, and funds were dis- bursed that supported causes ranging from spreading specific forms of Ameri- can democracy, to advancing the Green Revolution, to studies of foreign labor systems favoring management. These wealthy private foundations were often directed by elite men who moved between these positions and Cold War gov- ernmental roles. John Foster Dulles and Dean Rusk moved from Rockefeller Foundation presidencies to becoming secretary of state. When McGeorge Bundy left his White House national security post, where he liaisoned with the CIA, he replaced John McCloy as chair of the Ford Foundation. The Ford Foun- dation’s director of international affairs during the 1950s and 1960s, Shepard Stone, had served in army intelligence and the State Department. With such ties, it seemed natural for the Ford Foundation to provide replacement funds after the c1a’s secret funding of the Congress for Cultural Freedom was exposed,
REBOOTING PROFESSIONAL ANTHROPOLOGY | 61
providing needed financial support in the c1a’s embarrassed absence (Epstein 1967: 16-1711).
Bruce Cumings’s examination of how Philip Mosely linked the cra, the Ford Foundation, and area study centers at various universities clarifies how the CIA used private foundations, such as Ford, to shape academic research during the 1950s and 1960s. Cumings cited 1953 correspondence between Mosley and Paul Langer discussing how the Ford Foundation would consult with cra director Allen Dulles to establish how Ford-funded research projects could be selected in ways that coalesced with the c1a’s needs (Cumings 1999: 184). Cumings showed how “Mosley provided a working linkage among Ford, the c1a, and the ACLS/SSRC well into the 1960s,” with back-channel correspondence between Mosley and the cra working out who the cra should use as regional consul- tants (185). Cumings concluded that this
suggests that the Ford Foundation, in close consultation with the cra, helped to shape postwar area studies and important collaborative research in modernization studies and comparative politics that were later mediated through well-known Ford-funded ssrc projects (ones that were required reading when I was a graduate student in the late 1960s). According to Christopher Simpson's study of declassified materials, however, this interweaving of foundations, universities, and state agen- cies (mainly the intelligence and military agencies) extended to the social sciences as a whole: “For years, government money . . . not always publicly acknowledged as such — made up more than 75 percent of the annual budgets of institutions such as Paul Lazarsfeld’s Bureau of Applied Research at Columbia University, Hadley Cantril’s Institute for International Social Programs at Princeton, Ithiel de Sola Pool’s CENIS program at MIT and others”... My own work in postwar American archives over the past two decades has taught me how many books central to the political science profession in the 1950s and 1960s emerged first as internal, classi-
fied government studies. (Cumings 1999: 186)
The spread of these funds in postwar area study centers provided opportunities for anthropologists seeking fieldwork, while also shaping the questions they pursued.
The AAAS First Postwar Decade and Select Political Advocacy
The aaa membership grew rapidly during the postwar years, rising from 1,271 in 1946 to 3,000 in 1949 (NBAAA 1949 3[4]: 5). Increased membership funded a full-time professional staff, and in 1949 anthropologist Frederick Johnson was hired as the association's executive secretary. Johnson helped advance the asso-
62 | CHAPTER THREE
ciations standing with New York’s and Washington's newly emerging networks of public and private funding sources; as foundations were established, a new generation of funds emerged for overseas fieldwork with programs like the ssrc’s Training and Travel Fellowships (NBAAA 1949 3[1]: 7) and fellowships dedicated to studying problems of foreign nations (NBAAA 1948 2[1]: 5-6). The Depart- ment of State offered new programs like the Government Fellowship in Ameri- can Republics for graduate students, which funded six months of study and travel in Central and South America (NBAAA 1949 3[1]: 9). In 1952, the Ford Foundation had opportunities for one hundred Foreign Study and Research Fellowships (NBAAA 1952 6[2]: 8). There were also programs with more obvious governmental applications, with the aaa publishing requests for information from the State Departments Office of Intelligence Research seeking anthro- pologists’ dissertation abstracts for circulation within governmental agencies (NBAAA 1951 5[2]: 5).
During the decade following the war, the aaa struggled with how to address several political issues. At the first aaa meeting after the American bombing of Nagasaki and Hiroshima, the membership adopted a resolution proclaiming the associations dedication to studying atomic energy and to working to guard against the dangers of these new weapons (AA 1946 48[2]: 319). In 1946, the AAA Executive Board appointed Carleton Coon (Chair), Gregory Bateson, Earl Count, Melville Herskovits, and Alfred Métraux to the Committee to Inves- tigate the Possibility of Strengthening Non-Nazi Anthropologists in Enemy Countries (AA 1946 48[2]: 319). The wartime service of these five anthropolo- gists represented the range of activities undertaken by many AAA fellows: Coon and Bateson had both served in Office of Strategic Services (oss) field opera- tions, Count taught human anatomy to military surgeons in training, Hersko- vits worked at the Smithsonian’s Ethnogeographic Board, and Métraux worked for the U.S. Strategic Bombing Survey (D. H. Price 2008a; Sade 1997).
The committee was charged with determining which specific anthropolo- gists in “enemy or enemy-occupied countries had been on our side and which opposed us,’ but it soon abandoned this task, arguing that it was unqualified to delineate which anthropologists had been Nazi collaborators. The committee had difficulty evaluating conflicting reports about individual anthropologists and was concerned that some scholars might be settling personal vendettas against colleagues. It reported that the French were “having great sport accus- ing each other of being collaborators” (44 1947: 353).
In abandoning its charge, chair Carleton Coon explained that the committee “considered that if a German served in the armed forces of his country he was
REBOOTING PROFESSIONAL ANTHROPOLOGY | 63
no more guilty from our point of view than those of us who had done the same thing. At first glance, we considered blackballing those who had used their po- sitions for propaganda, but we soon realized that a great number of our own an- thropologists had done the same thing and if we had supported that course of action we would have had to condemn some of our own colleagues” (AA 1947: 353). This argument revealed an understanding of the complexities of duties of service during wartime, as well as lingering misgivings some anthropologists had about their war work, but it also revealed an unexamined argument of assumed political, ethical, and moral equivalence between Axis and Allied ap- plications of anthropology.
This decision by the AAA to ignore political differences between using an- thropology for campaigns of genocidal fascist tyranny and, arguably, for liberation from such forms of oppression had later consequences for American anthro- pology. These would include the associations proclivity to sidestep political concerns in favor of ethical considerations in ways that focused on professional “best practices” for fieldwork yet ignored political outcomes of projects using anthropology and anthropologists. Differentiating between ethical and politi- cal critiques is not without epistemological and practical difficulties. Yet mean- ingful distinctions can be made by recognizing that ethical critiques focus on best practices followed by professionals — often in a context of providing dis- closure, gaining consent, minimizing harm, maintaining informed autonomy, and so forth — whereas political critiques focus on power relations, including macro questions of empire, neocolonialism, and imperialism. This practice of focusing primarily on ethics while avoiding confronting political issues would become a significant feature of later anthropological critiques of disciplinary militarization (D. H. Price 2014b).
Perhaps the wartime experiences of these committee members influenced this decision. Gregory Bateson’s oss propaganda work in Burma included overseeing black propaganda broadcasts (in which his oss team pretended to be Japanese radio broadcasters while supplying disinformation) made from a clandestine radio station, work that Bateson later regretted for having been deceitful (Mandler 2013; D. H. Price 1998). While some committee members may have undertaken war work that paralleled some of the war work of German anthropologists, this did not mean their work was morally or politi- cally equivalent, given the differences in the larger Allied and Axis political projects.
The committee stipulated that if “special cases” of Nazi anthropologist col- laborators came to its attention, it would investigate and determine the facts of
64 | CHAPTER THREE
specific alleged instances, but it did not look for any such “special cases.” Had the committee investigated, it would have easily found disturbing examples of anthropologists’ Nazi collaborations. As Gretchen Schafft’s research shows, the contributions of German anthropologists to the Nazi cause were widespread and apparent. Had these scholars investigated, they would have found records of anthropological collaborations ranging from research supporting the Nurem- berg Race Laws of 1935 to the cooking of fake scientific racial reports (Schafft 2004: 73, 17-27). The atrocities of professionally trained anthropologist Josef Mengele would have been easily identified examples had the committee chosen to undertaken even the most cursory of investigations (Schafft 2004: 183).
But the aaa found it easier to weigh in on other political issues. Anthro- pologists’ concerns about American racism led to policy changes within the association. In 1947, the Executive Board canceled plans to hold the associa- tion’s annual meeting in St. Louis because “all large hotels in St. Louis maintain discriminatory practices against some of our members” (NBAAA 1[3]: 1). The meeting was relocated to Albuquerque, where the University of New Mexico gra- ciously provided free accommodations in campus dormitories that were empty for the Christmas break. These progressive moves by the association were the sort of activities devoted to racial equality that would eventually garner the FBI's attention and harassment for activist anthropologists in the 1950s (D. H. Price 2004b).
The AAA joined the efforts of other professional organizations collecting aca- demic books to be sent to devastated academies around the world (AA 1946 48[3]: 490). The association adopted a political statement declaring that na- tive peoples should not suffer under the impacts of increased Western milita- rization. At the 1946 AAA annual meeting the membership passed a resolution deploring “the proposed action of the British Military Mission in Australia to fire destructive projectiles into an area of Western Australia occupied by many living aborigines, and calls upon the Mission to cancel all such action” (AA 1947 19[2]: 365).
In 1947, Melville Herskovits drafted a “Declaration of Human Rights” that was presented to the Department of State and the United Nations (NBAAA 1947 1[3]: 41). The declaration, which acknowledged the difficulties of identifying fundamental human rights in a context completely independent of cultural processes, stated three fundamental positions:
1. The individual realizes his personality through his culture, hence respect for
individual differences entails a respect for cultural differences.
REBOOTING PROFESSIONAL ANTHROPOLOGY | 65
2. Respect for differences between cultures is validated by the scientific fact that no technique of qualitatively evaluating cultures has been discovered.
3. Standards and values are relative to the culture from which they derive so that any attempt to formulate postulates that grow out of the beliefs or moral codes of one culture must to that extent detract from the applicability of any Declaration of
Human Rights to mankind as a whole. (AA 1947: 541-42)
Julian Steward criticized the statement, voicing doubts that
in urging that values be respected because “man is free only when he lives as his society defines freedom,’ we really mean to approve the social caste system of India, the racial caste system of the United States, or many of the other varieties of social discrimination in the world. I should question that we intend to con- done the exploitation of primitive peoples through the Euro-American system of economic imperialism, while merely asking for more understanding treatment of them: or, on the other hand, that we are prepared to take a stand against the values
in our own culture which [underlie] such imperialism. (1948: 351)
Steward identified problems that arise when anthropological associations use their scientific positions to advocate on political issues. He concluded:
We have gotten out of our scientific role and are struggling with contradictions. During the war, we gladly used our professional techniques and knowledge to ad- vance a cause, but I hope that no one believes that he had a scientific justification for doing so. As individual citizens, members of the Association have every right to pass value judgments, and there are some pretty obvious things that we would all agree on. As a scientific organization, the Association has no business dealing with the rights of man. I am sure that we shall serve science better, and I daresay we shall eventually serve humanity better, if we stick to our purpose. Even now, a declaration about human rights can come perilously close to advocacy of Ameri-
can ideological imperialism. (1948: 352)
Steward brought questions of scientific neutrality and advocacy, as well as is- sues of applying anthropological understandings of culture, power, and equal- ity, to the foreground, but most of the discipline remained silently disengaged from weighing in on these issues (see D. H. Price 2014b).°
In July 1950, Ashley Montagu (with the assistance of Claude Lévi-Strauss, Ernest Beaglehole, and others) drafted UNESco’s progressive statement re- jecting biological essentialist notions of race, known as “The Race Question” (A. Métraux 1951; UNESCO 1969: 30-35). Asserting that “scientists have reached
66 | CHAPTER THREE
general agreement in recognizing that mankind is one: that all men belong to the same species, Homo sapiens,” this UNESCO statement advanced Boasian no- tions of the social construction of race in an international sphere.
The statement declared that scientists had determined that all of humanity was a single species, and that while genetic differences between groups were evident, using the concept of “race” to describe different populations was sci- entifically arbitrary. Métraux deconstructed notions that nations or religious groups constituted “races.” He described a number of acquired characteristics,
>.
such as “personality and character, “temperament; and cultural differences, and rejected the possibility that biological processes were responsible for these differences, declaring that “‘race’ is not so much a biological phenomenon as a social myth. The myth of ‘race’ has created an enormous amount of human and social damage” (Métraux 1951: 144). The statement argued for human equality, pointing out that “the characteristics in which human groups differ from one another are often exaggerated and used as a basis for questioning the validity of equality in the ethical sense” (144).
As the AAA membership and the association's focus expanded after the war, some governmental agencies found opportunities to capitalize on this conver- gence of research opportunities, money, and anthropologists’ desires to con- tribute to building a better world.
A Secret Sharer and the AAA’s Membership Roster
During the Second World War, the aaa had helped the oss’s institutional pre- decessor, the Office of the Coordinator of Information , compile rosters identifying anthropologists’ geographic and linguistic expertise; later the Ethnogeographic Board compiled similar lists for military and intelligence agencies (D. H. Price 2008a: 97-101). These rosters were vital tools during the war, and as the Cold War progressed, the American government had renewed needs for such lists. The c1a’s interest in compiling rosters listing biographical information on specialists with skill sets of interest stretched back to the agency’s earliest days. A May 12, 1948, c1A memo to the future director of the cra-funded Asia Foun- dation, Robert Blum (then working in the office of the secretary of defense), records the cia already prioritizing the creation of databases containing such records (FOIA CIA-RDP80R01731R003400050047-3, 5/12/48).° In 1974, former AAA executive secretary Charles Frantz reported that in the 1950s the NRC, the NsF, and the cra had been the main agencies pushing the aaa to compile a membership roster (Frantz 1974: 7).’ Frantz observed that facilitating projects
REBOOTING PROFESSIONAL ANTHROPOLOGY | 67
that connected members with federal agencies and funding opportunities was a natural extension of the reorganized aaa’s goals. The new association bylaws “further specified that the officers were obligated to maintain records of profes- sional anthropologists, to serve as a clearinghouse for professional and scien- tific anthropological matters, to publish a bulletin for Fellows on activities of professional interest, to hold referenda on urgent matters, and to establish liai- sons with other scientific organizations and institutions” (Frantz 1974: 12).
In February 1951, the AAA’s executive secretary, Frederick Johnson, wrote President Howells and the Executive Board (John O. Brew, John Gillin, E. Adamson Hoebel, Morris Opler, Froelich G. Rainey, and Edward H. Spicer) that governmental agencies had contacted the association to request a cross- indexed roster of the AAA membership, noting that the “people who desire the roster are, somewhat justifiably impatient” (AAAP 6, FJ memo 4, 2/21/51). As the only nonrevolving member of the Executive Board, Johnson exerted significant influence on the board’s transient members. After exploring several options for agencies to oversee and support the compiling of the roster, Johnson de- termined that the c1a would do a superior job, though the agency insisted on secrecy. Johnson wrote, “In searching for the ways and means of setting up a roster of Anthropologists I have a general proposal from Central Intelligence Agency. This agency is reluctant to have its name connected with the proposal. It will do the work as generally and tentatively outlined below provided the Association will sponsor the project” (AAAP 6, FJ memo 4, 2/21/51, 2).°
Johnson asked board members to signify whether or not they wanted to pur- sue this offer from the cra; a second ballot item asked approval for Johnson to investigate how the association might maintain future versions of the roster. The ballot stated:
The Executive Secretary is empowered to continue negotiations with Central Intel- ligence Agency for the purpose of compiling a roster of Anthropological Personnel. The final agreement will be based on the idea that the Anthropological Association will sponsor the roster and the Agency will do the technical work connected with it. The [Central Intelligence] Agency will be allowed to keep one copy of the roster for its own use and it will deliver to the Association a duplicate copy the use of which will not be restricted. The final agreement between the Association and the agency shall be such that the Association shall be liable only for mailing charges and such incidental expenses as it may be able to afford. The final agreement shall
be approved by the Executive Board. (aa ap 6, memo 4, 2/21/51)
68 | CHAPTER THREE
The board approved these arrangements, with five members voting yes, one voting no, and two not voting; the board also authorized Johnson to investigate options for making the roster updatable.
President Howells wrote Johnson:
The cia proposal is ideal. We should go along with it, with the understanding that they give us duplicate 13m cards and duplicates of the questionnaires, which they can easily do; they are great at reproducing things. If a reasonable question- naire, suitable to both parties, can be worked out, we will both get what we want, and except for the mailing they will put the whole thing through from beginning to end, and the chances are we will get something that we want; if we don't, then the questionnaire method is no good anyhow, and we dont stand to lose. (AAAP 6, WH to FJ, 3/2/51)
Howells proposed to Johnson that the Aaa establish an anthropologist liaison committee that could link the association with government agencies. Respond- ing to a suggestion apparently already made by Johnson, Howells advocated designating an individual to act as a liaison between the cra and the aaa,
writing:
I think that we should appoint a committee along the lines you suggest, and it can work, and no fooling. We have anthropologists in the cra, of course and I should think we could get one appointed liaison member for the cIa, and go to work. I suggest: Newman, Fenton, Collins (bad health?), Foster, Flannery, Roberts, Stir- ling, all obvious as candidates for committee. What have we for a linguist? And yourself, ex-officio. For your information, we shall be in Washington April 6 and 7, and we can make time for some work, e.g. seeing Jim Andrews or somebody about
it, if necessary. (AAAP 6, WH to FJ 3/2/51)?
The AAA’s surviving correspondence provides no further information on what became of Howells’s suggestion that the aaa appoint a “liaison member for the cia?!
Johnson, who had his own ideas about which anthropologists should liaison with the cra, responded, “Of the group you suggested I am only enthusiastic about Foster and with some reservations Bud Newman” (AAP 6, FJ to WH 3/6/51). Johnson eliminated most of Howells’s nominees, complaining that “Stirling does not know what it is all about and usually does not care. Col- lins ideas concerning Anthropology are rather narrow. Fenton, on the basis of the record is greatly over-rated. Flannery is almost as restricted as Collins.
REBOOTING PROFESSIONAL ANTHROPOLOGY | 69
Roberts on the other hand might be of use especially since he has had some experience with similar things. However, I happen to know a lot about his situ- ation and what he has to do and I am fairly certain that if he took on the job he would not be able to do as much as he should” (Aaa 6, FJ to WH 3/7/51:2). Johnson wanted liaison members to be based in Washington, but he rejected several suggested Washington-based individuals. He wanted a certain type of DC-based anthropologist; as he explained to Howells, they should
select a group of Anthropologists representing all fields who in-so-far as possible are heads of departments. Ask these men to select from their advanced students people who will do the work under supervision. This accomplishes two things. It gets the work done without overloading the experienced man. It “trains” the younger men in committee work. The later is getting to be important. Now that our, at least my hair is getting gray we are losing touch with the new generation. If we can get some of these men started up the line in the Association it will be that much easier to get more representatives and active committees in the future. The gray-beards are nice and we know what they can do, but there comes a time when
they cannot or will not. (AAAP 6, FJ to WH 3/7/51, 2)
Johnson favored creating a closed structure of power, drawing on a young gen- eration of anthropologists, which would establish ongoing bonds between the association and the bureaucratic power structures of Washington.
Howells did not press the issue. He relinquished his authority to Johnson, writing that he could
keep after this as you like, as far as I am concerned. My suggestions of the Wash- ington people were only the names that occurred to me, and I will not stick to them. On the other hand I do not care much for the idea of advanced students taking the job at hand; they are apt to be too enthusiastic and overdo things, ac- cording to my experience. Actually, you on the one hand and the cia on the other are the key people, and could probably agree on the data wanted in a very short time. Certainly a committee which is representative should help, but too many cooks might spoil the broth. Why don’t you and Mr. Kelley draft something up? This might save a lot of time. What I am saying is rather random. I am inclined to suggest that Duncan Strong might come in on it, because of his past experience. (AAAP 6: WH to FJ 3/16/51)
Strong’s “past experience” was likely a reference to his war work on the Ethno- geographic Board’s roster (D. H. Price 2008a: 97-100). Howells and Johnson recognized that with aaa members’ information entered into the c1a’s com-
70 | CHAPTER THREE
puters, these data could be adapted and rearranged later, and future editions and updates to the roster could be easily adapted. Howells wrote the board a few days later to provide an update on Johnson’s progress with the c1a and suggestions for how cia anthropologists could assist this project, explaining that Johnson “would like to see a working committee set up to collaborate with the cia; I have suggested that this should be made up of Washington people, espe- cially since there are already anthropologists in the c1A, and the questionnaire could be set up more quickly, always of course under Fred’s eye; this is his baby” (AAAP 6: WH to Board 3/6/51). Howells wanted the c1a to produce duplicate computer punch cards so that the cia and the aaa could both have copies of the data, and he wrote Johnson, saying he wished to meet with anthropologist and cra employee James Madison Andrews IV to discuss details of the roster. Johnson responded that this sounded like a good idea:
By all means go and see Jim Andrews and others in the c1a when you are in Wash- ington. If the members of the Board would only return their “ballots” to me I could go ahead with this business. Mr. Francis Kelley who worked out the proposal with me is very anxious to get this started. I had hoped that the Association would act efficiently in this matter simply because we should do our job. In any case, I sus- pect that the ballots will be in before you get to Washington and that I will have taken the next step. I hope so for then there will be something for you and others
to put your teeth into. (AAAP 6, FJ to WH 3/7/51)"
As AAA executive secretary, a nonelected position, Johnson exerted extraordi- nary control over policy decisions. He drafted resolutions and later forwarded these to Howells, who sent them to the board for ratification as if he had written them. Howells facilitated this and even took steps to hide this practice, prohib- ited by the bylaws, of a non-board member introducing a motion by develop- ing their own “protocol.” Howells asked Johnson, “May I make a suggestion about protocol? That is, that if you send out proposals to the Board accompanied by ‘ballots; so marked, it looks like a motion being made and seconded by the Executive Secretary instead of from within the Board, which is unconstitu- tional, and we might get our lines tangled. E.g., it sometimes might embarrass me in trying to act on your behalf, as in the previous paragraph, when I think you ought to be put on the committee” (AAAP 6, WH to FJ 3/2/51). Johnson replied that this was “certainly food for thought,” admitting that he had in the past introduced several motions adopted by the board, a violation of associa- tion bylaws, and that on some issues he had skirted procedures, but he assured Howells this was in the interest of streamlining the process: “This was perhaps
REBOOTING PROFESSIONAL ANTHROPOLOGY | 71
a little legalistic but I found myself on the verge of tacitly committing the As- sociation to an activity. Theoretically I should have submitted the proposal to you. Members of the Board should move and second it and then vote on it. In my brash way I have short-circuited this and submitted the ‘motion for a vote. I have done this in the interest of saving time and correspondence” (AA AP 6, FJ to WH 3/7/51).” Johnson proposed that he and Howells set up an arrange- ment where Johnson could present proposals that Howells could then restate as a motion coming from him so that the board could vote (aaap 6, FJ to WH 3/7/51).
Johnson negotiated with the cia, and by mid-April 1951 an agreement for collaboration was reached. Johnson informed the board that under this agree- ment, “the C.I.A. will compile a preliminary questionnaire. The people who will do this have had experience with the rosters being made by the NsRB and they will be advised by anthropologists on the C.I.A. staff” (AAAP 6, FJ to EB 4/17/51).
The identities of the c1a anthropologists who assisted in this work were not disclosed in archived AAA correspondence. Johnson collaborated with c1a per- sonnel to produce the questionnaire sent to AAA members. The only appreciable cost for the association coming from this arrangements was the approximately two hundred dollars in postage for mailing questionnaires to members.
In September 1951, Johnson sent a “Memorandum to Committee on Roster” providing a “checklist” of information to be collected for the roster. Johnson supplied a page from the American Council of Learned Societies (ACLS) ques- tionnaire for its political science roster and suggested that the AAA separate out the subfields of social anthropology, applied anthropology, physical anthropol- ogy, linguistics, archaeology, and ethnography. Johnson recommended that the
»,
AAA collect information on the following “functions”: “research, development or field exploration,” “management or administration, teaching; “technical writ- ing and editing or library work; “consulting, clinical practice or evaluation,” and “student” (AAAP 36, FJ memo, 9/13/51). He wrote the board that “a volun- tary registration of specialized personnel is frequently viewed as closely related to recruitment and placement activities. While it is possible that the projected registration will be used in connection with recruitment and placement pro- grams, no definite plans for such use have yet been developed by the acts or the Office of Naval Research” (AAP 6, Johnson memo, 10/15/51).
Though I searched numerous archives and libraries and filed several Free- dom of Information Act (Fora) requests with the cra and other governmental agencies, I have not located a surviving copy of the AAA roster. In response to
J2 | CHAPTER THREE
a FOIA request, the FBI mailed me a 129-page file relating to the AAA’s activities with the acs, which included a copy of the final survey instrument that was mailed to AAA members in 1952. The FB1 stumbled across this roster question- naire while undertaking a mail intercept operation involving an (unidentified) anthropologist who received the roster survey.
The FBI recognized the usefulness of this instrument for itself and other in- telligence agencies. The FBI reported that “such a repository appears to be [of] great value to the Bureau from an investigative standpoint, and it is suggested that consideration be given to developing reliable sources in the organization and utilizing this material to the fullest advantage. The thought occurs that the questionnaires may have been initiated by some Governmental agency, such as CIA, for the express purpose of obtaining intelligence data’ (FBI 100-387756-8).'? While American anthropologists passed along a wealth of personal informa- tion with little apparent concern of how it might be used, the FB1 understood how such information would be invaluable to the cra as it set up covert opera- tions and contacts all over the underdeveloped world.
The FBI reproduced the AAA’s original six-page questionnaire, along with a sheet requesting “additional names” that might be included in the roster, and cover letters from AAA executive secretary Johnson, and Bernard V. Bothmer, general secretary of the Archaeological Institute of America. Figure 3.1 repro- duces the second page of the roster questionnaire, showing the detailed level of information that was gathered. The questionnaire asked aaa members to provide information on educational background, languages studied, countries visited, academic specialties, citizenship status, professional honors, professional membership, past military service and current military status, employment history, and income levels. The questionnaire did not divulge the c1a’s role in the project, only telling members that “the data compiled from this Roster will be used in the analysis of manpower problems and for possible placement and allocation purposes” (FBI 100-387756-2). The roster questionnaire was announced in the January 1952 issue of the News Bulletin of the AAA and in American Anthropologist (see NBAAA 1952 6[1]: 1; AA 1952 54[2]: 288-89). As- sociation members were told that the roster was being compiled because “the present lack of information concerning specialists in the humanities and social sciences is a serious stumbling block to a kind of planning which is urgently needed. Mobilization activities which will continue over a long period of time have strongly emphasized the basic need for apprising our defense program as related to the concept of national security. Analysis of the data from this registra- tion will throw considerable light on the potentialities of the various fields,
REBOOTING PROFESSIONAL ANTHROPOLOGY | 73
NATIONAL REGISTRATION “9 2 — 3f°7 7S 6-02 E HUMANITIES AND THE SOCIAL SCIENCES TOT RORI S A Re Checklist of Fields of Speciali< tion OF AMERICA ANTHROPOLOGY and ARCHAEOLOGY
This checklist as well as the list of functions below, is to be used as a work sheet for the completion of portions of the ques- tionnaire sheets, especially Question 16 on the four-page questionnaire. NOTE: Any entries written in under ono of the “Other, specify” headings should be transferred to the appropriate blanks on the questionnaires.
Indicate specialized rather than general fields of specialization as far as possible.
Developed by
AMERICAN ANTHROPOLOGICAL ASSOCIATION
Specialty Code Specialty Specialty Code ETHNOLOGY AND SOCIAL ANTHRO- Group morale Southern South America 9648 POLOGY (genercl) 9500 Nationalism ond nativism Other (specify) ———— 9649 Humoa ecology, environment ond culture 9501 Food habits and diet OLD WORLD (general) 9650 Technology end invention 9502 Survey techniques Northern Europe 9651 Folklore 9503 Theory Western Europe 9652 Art, music, recreation 9504 Other (specify) Central Europe 9653 Culturct ond social change, acculturation 9505 || ARCHAEOLOGY (general) Southern Europe 9654 Reproductive proctices and sexual life 9506 Old World Eastern Europe and Balkans 9655 Medici 9507 Palaeolithic ond mesolithic Egypt . 9656 Ethnobotany 9508 Neolithic Neor Eost . 9657 Ethnoroology 9511 Advanced civilizations North Africa 9658 Ethnolinguistics 9512 Gonicol Equotorial Africa 7661— Theory 9513 Greek Southern Africa 9662 Other (specify 9519 Roman Madagascar 9663 SOCIAL ORGANIZATION (general) 9520 Anatolion India and Pakistan 9664 Family ond kinship systems 9521 Mesopotamian Southeast Asla 9665 Politicol systems 9522 Irenion Australia 9666 Law and social sanctions 9523 Egyptian For Eost 9668 Economic systems 9524 Polestine-Syrion Control Asla 9671 Religious systems, ritval, belief, mogic, Indion Soviet Northern Asla 9672 witcheroft 9525 New World Pacific Islands 9673 Social stratification ond prestige systems 9526 Eorly Man Other (specify) 9679 City, town, village orgonizction (inclwd- Archeie end formotive ‘Other Competences ing contemporory communities) 9s Advonced civilizations Aerial photo Interpretation 8512 Worfore 9sz8 Ce eS Biometrics 1803 Astociotions (Sodalities) 9531 | PHYSICAL ANTHROPOLOGY (general) Botony 1310 Demography (population, fertility, mor Homes evolution Fleld mopping ond surveying 8480 bidity, mortolity, ete.) ssa? rochronology 9681 Theory $533 1400 Other (specify! esr jeology 3100 CULTURE AND PERSONALITY (genere) $342 Humon anatomy 9682 Socialization and edvcction out Humon physiology 9683 Life-cycle şu Hemon voriction Medicine and public health 2000 Group choracter, modal personelity sirwe- Boce Climatology 8412 ture, national cherecter, ete. esa Morphology Nutrition 1170 Deviant behavior ogae Genetics Palasobotany 3177 Personolity testing, cress-cvltre! vre esas Blood-grouping Field photography 8521 Intelligence testing, cross-celtwrel exe S45 Pcthology Vertebrate Palaeontology 3175 Lifeshistories sear Population biology Zoology 1230 Theory osar Human growth RELATED SPECIALIZATIONS (Indicate spe- Other (specify! Ssa? Fetal cialty within a field. Code numbers not APPLIED ANTHROPOLOGY (generc) 9550 Crenio-fociol required.) Business odministration 95st Post-cronial AESTHETICS (speci! Industrial relotions 9ssz Skeleto! ARCHITECTURE (specify) ic odministretion 9552 Tissve relations ECONOMICS (specify) 9554 Constitution FINE ARTS (specify) Medico! and psychictric fecilities 9555 Applied physical anthropology GEOGRAPHY (specify) __- Personnel selection | 9555 Other (specify}——__. —______ HISTORY (specify) o Administration ot nch-western peopiei = 9S57> 9? “Areas of Speciolization 4 LAW (specify). z va Intercultural problemr 9558 | NEW WORLD (general) UNGUISTICS AND LITERATURE (specify) Minority, ethnic ond racic! problems 9561 Arce MUSICOLOGY (specify) Relocation problems 9562 Eastern North America ond the Ploins PHILOSOPHY (specify) Technological change problems 9563 Western North America (general) POLITICAL SCIENCE (specify) Administ ‘end sociel chenge Western North America (Southwest) PSYCHIATRY (specify) proble: 9564 Middle America PSYCHOLOGY (specify) Industricl projects in non-industriclized Andean South Americo SOCIOLOGY (specify) recs 9565 Tropical Lowland South America ond STATISTICS (specify)
“Circun-Coribbeon
OTHER (speci
opoga nda -_ SS > — Ie —