Chapter 7

The First but Not Last Crisis of a Cold War Profession

Chicago’s Quincy Wright was elected the forty-fourth president of the American Political Science Association in 1948 and the inaugural president of the UNESCO-sponsored International Political Science Association in 1949, not least in recognition of his efforts to “bring political science” (back) to U.S.-occupied Germany.¹ The 58-year-old Wright was the most influential of those who began their teaching careers after World War I, although some of his students and his new colleague Hans Morgenthau had fomented the postwar realist “revolution” against Wright’s generation of internationalists. With the passage of time, the dulling of memory, and the irresistible tendency to view the Cold War and the expansion of U.S. commitments as a proxy for growth of the profession, Wright’s election might appear as if the field of international relations was flourishing.

Princeton’s Harold Sprout, an early convert to the cause of geopolitics, didn’t think so. Wright was the first international relations specialist in a quarter-century to head the APSA. Sprout identified with a younger cohort of political scientists in “incipient revolt” against the leadership of aging insiders, predominantly American politics specialists, who were seemingly intent on blocking rather than promoting “scholarly talent ‘on the make.’”² During the war, Bernard Brodie, another rising star of international relations, also complained about being shunted aside in favor of those with no real knowledge; in this case, of military affairs.³ It was then that the new and outgoing directors of the Yale’s Institute of International Studies Arnold Wolfers and Nicholas Spykman, first began discussing plans to found a separate society exclusively for specialists.⁴

However, the International Studies Association was not created until 1958, and for many years it maintained a precarious existence as a regional grouping of mainly West Coast professors and “practitioners,” for example, from the United States Air Force Academy in Colorado Springs. The collective action problem depended on systems theorist Charles McClelland at San Francisco State, who kept the International Studies Association going singlehandedly, for its resolution. A small grant from the New World Foundation, which was started from the same fortune that had been used to rescue The New Republic a few years earlier, allowed McClelland to take over Background, a digest of research findings across the social sciences for teachers of international relations, and make it over as the association’s journal.⁵ Whatever initial enthusiasm may have existed, the membership had dropped from 200 to 60 by1963, and it took support from the Carnegie Foundation to turn the trend around.⁶

The location of international relations on the “periphery” aside, the problem is that sharp disagreements existed from the start about the reality of, as McClelland put it, an “interdisciplinary emerging discipline” (either ignoring or unaware of the many times in the past half-century the same claim about “emerging” had been made) that could be clearly distinguished from political science. There was also dissension about what constituted the appropriate object of study. McClelland reported to Wright that for dissenters, the view of international relations as “relations among separate entities is now reactionary and obsolete. The preference was expressed for the idea of ‘world affairs’ in order to recognize the ‘unity’ of developments and events.”⁷ Perhaps Wright appreciated the irony that he had joined the same debate about the identity of international relations in the 1920s and, as we have seen, the dissidents’ perspective is the one Buell led with in his 1925 textbook, where he described the “complex interdependence of the world.”

The irony is deeper still, since Wright, the association’s president, doubted that even political science met a strict definition of a discipline that was distinguishable “from other disciplines in the social science field either by its methods or by its objectives.” Rather, he offered up what we now call a “constructivist” (and. not least, tautological) understanding in roughly the same way that Du Bois had come to define a Negro as “someone who was made to ride the Jim Crow car,” except that political scientists weren’t branded or cursed (much) as such by others. “It perhaps has a unity because of a somewhat distinctive bibliography, a history of association and organization, and a group who call themselves political scientists.”⁸

Understandably, he finessed the issue a little in his December 1949 presidential address to the APSA: he substituted “science” for “discipline” in the formula.

Wright’s reference to “thousands of members” should be qualified in two respects. The first is that less than half of those members were university faculty and the second is that the total did not reflect the large number on the books who had failed to pay their membership dues. Why this matters is that by the time Ralph Bunche agreed to serve as president five years later, the APSA faced a serious fiscal crisis due to the decision to staff a new headquarters in Washington, D.C. He spent much of that year seeking additional members from government and the new national security industry, building links to the Eisenhower administration, and searching for an executive director to take the APSA into the new Cold War world.

Keep in mind that Bunche is probably the only APSA president chosen on grounds other than scholarship and likely the only president never to have published in the association’s journal, the American Political Science Review, or have his work reviewed or cited in it during his lifetime. While the reasons should be clear by now, they went unmentioned in his presidential address at the fiftieth annual meeting. The Supreme Court had decided Brown v. Board just a few months earlier, yet Bunche chose to ignore the issue of civil rights entirely. No doubt he had been beaten down by a second, more intense loyalty investigation. He addressed this obliquely toward the end of his talk when discussing three issues that his “personal experiences” suggest should be of concern to the profession. “Thirdly, the striking evidence of fear, suspicion, intolerance, and confusion in the society, providing fertile soil for demagoguery, imperil our traditional freedom, and pose a stern challenge to the political scientist. These are phenomena which surely demand our most urgent concern, on behalf of the nation at large as well as our own professional and personal interest.”¹⁰ Eban Miller is right: “The anti-Communist fervor of the postwar years muted—if not entirely silenced—a singular legacy.”¹¹

Consider in this light Bunche’s advice to political scientists to tackle “the problem of colonialism, and more particularly of colonial Africa.” He argued, correctly, that the postwar “colleges and universities…have been regrettably slow in grasping fully the world significance of this problem. American political science, I fear, has not yet come to grips with it.” Then his argument took a remarkably revisionist turn. Political science allegedly had never shown much interest in colonial problems.¹² Bunche’s revisionism extended to his own teachers and training and to his longest published work, A World View of Race. After the world learned that Bunche would be receiving the Nobel Prize, the national YWCA wrote to him seeking copies, but Bunche sought to dissuade them. “It was a hastily written manuscript and I am not at all proud of it; nor do I recommend it.”¹³ By coincidence, his longtime colleague Alan Locke had thought to locate and inscribe one of the old Bronze Booklets to commemorate the award. “Dear Ralph: It’s a long…unforeseen path from this in 1936 to the Nobel Prize award in 1950 but the capacity, the will and the vision was there in 1936, as some of us felt and now know.”¹⁴ He never mailed it.

Bunche returned exceptionally good value to the profession during his presidential year when he hired University of Minnesota political scientist and fellow former Office of Strategic Services officer Evron Kirkpatrick as executive director. Kirkpatrick had returned to the intelligence world after the Research and Analysis Branch of the Office of Strategic Services was absorbed by the State Department. He rose to head the CIA’s Office of External Research, which was charged with mobilizing academic talent for contract research. He did yeoman’s work in turning around the fortunes of the American Political Science Association. Yet as executive director, his continuing relationship with the CIA via the private consulting firm he started and the contracts it obtained from some of the agency’s favorite foundations was exposed by young radicals in the late 1960s. These were years of ferment across the U.S. academy and its professional associations. Insurgents in the APSA challenged leadership on multiple fronts, from the ethics of supporting the national security state to the all-but-invisible role of women and blacks in the profession. No group, though, had invested more in its identification with American interventionism than those same young international relations professors on the make, and the only leader to defect was, ironically enough, the 66-year-old crusader for realism, Hans Morgenthau, whom the radical caucus supported in a close contest for the presidency of the APSA in 1970. UN ambassador Jeane Kirkpatrick remembered the defeat of the insurgency as “my husband’s finest hour.”¹⁵

The 1950s Ascent of Area Studies

For the postwar professors who had dreams of steering the American Century with their emphasis on national security and theorizing in the new realist style, the increased support of public agencies and private foundations would be crucial, but in the 1950s and 1960s the bulk of private funding went instead to support area and development studies centers. The losers, who increasingly identified themselves against the winners, the newly rechristened “area specialists,” as the true “discipline oriented” researchers or “discipline generalists” under the banner of international relations were explicit about it. Columbia’s Bill Fox cautioned against assuming that high levels of Cold War funding had meant real “intellectual progress” because “international relations consume only a modest fraction of the resources” compared to area studies.¹⁶ Similarly, in a study conducted under the auspices of the Department of Education, James Rosenau at the University of Southern California calculated the extent of the “disparity”: “for every dollar invested in the work of discipline generalists, some five to ten are allocated to other activities in the field of international studies.”¹⁷ In the aftermath of serious funding cuts around 1970, the losers pressed the case for the higher valued added from general theorizing and the strengthening of disciplinary identities.

Here again we need to stop and note the irony. A half-century earlier, concern with race development in the tropical zones of the world economy had propelled the identification of the new field of international relations. The postwar realists might have hijacked the brand (or drawn a narrower line around it or obsessed mainly about the “great powers” while leaving the dependencies to others) and “race” would be dropped from all further references to development, but there was nothing less international about the study of “the political cultures of developing areas” and not much that was new either.

For proof, consider U.S. president Eisenhower’s lament to Charles de Gaulle in 1959 as the two leaders discussed decolonization one night at the latter’s summer home, Chateau de Rambouillet. “Many of these people were attempting to make the leap from savagery to the degree of civilization of a country like France in perhaps ten years, without realizing that it took thousands of years to develop the civilization which we know.”¹⁹

In 1947, the Social Science Research Council laid down two putatively scientific ordering principles for building postwar area studies: the “relative power” of a region and its “level of culture.” As geographer Robert Hall, chair of the council’s Committee on World Regions and founder of Michigan’s Center for Japan Studies, put it, “we have more to gain from the study of China or India than we have from, say, the Congo Basin or New Guinea.”²⁰ Not surprisingly, at the Social Science Research Council’s Carnegie-funded conference on the study of world areas in November, which brought together over 100 scholars (“the key men,” Ruth Benedict and Pearl Buck notwithstanding) on Latin America, the Soviet Union, Southeast Asia, the Near East, Europe, and Far East.²¹ Africa was left off the analytical map. The explanation differed just a bit from the one Ed Earle and William Lockwood (who was there, in fact) had used during the war. It was “not through oversight but simply because the study of these areas is so inadequately developed in the United States that it would have been difficult to recruit specialists on them from various disciplines.” This was especially true if one left Howard’s or other African American specialists off the list of invitees.

Melville Herskovits, the would-be king of African studies, nonetheless protested the omission, arguing that the Social Science Research Council ought to commit to expanding the pool of experts instead of accepting the status quo. Then, having heard that the Carnegie Corporation had begun discussions with the University of Pennsylvania, which had hosted the Army Specialist Training Program, to strengthen its resources in African Studies, Herskovits began a two-year lobbying campaign for his own program at Northwestern as the better bet.²² The initial modest funding he eventually received in 1948 and the larger grant in 1951 when the African Studies Center was officially founded with Herskovits as director, improved Northwestern’s funding position in the 1950s. The Ford Foundation, in its first international initiative, began investing serious money in area studies and Herskovits became a client, although he first had to agree to abandon his decade-long dream of combining African and Negro studies in one center.²³

Rayford Logan’s well-honed instincts about the Truman era, when he served as consultant on UN, Africa, and colonial affairs for NAACP head Walter White, proved correct.²⁴ The default assumption for white policymakers, foundation heads, and scholars was that reconsolidated colonial rule would continue in Africa even in the wake of independence for India, Pakistan, Lebanon, and Indonesia. Logan once pressed Deputy Undersecretary of State Dean Rusk in a discussion of the implications of decolonization on the states that were likely to emerge in “Black Africa,” and Rusk guessed that Libya (“not black,” said Logan), the Rhodesias (“not black either”), and, after prompting, “Nigeria was a possibility.”²⁵ Thus Logan’s stock line at the time was “Stop using the expression ‘free world.’”²⁶ Logan also knew that prospects for developing Africa studies were poor as long as such views of and deference to colonial authorities persisted. When the Ford Foundation launched its International Training and Research Program in 1951 (quickly eclipsing Carnegie’s area studies investments), Africa was excluded precisely because colonialism still appeared to be a going concern.²⁷ Finally, Herskovits simply could not be trusted.

When the Ford Foundation tapped him as a consultant in 1952 to organize a small conference on Africa, Herskovits turned primarily to his own former students and friends. He included only one African American, Howard’s Rayford Logan, incredibly, leaving Ralph Bunche off the list of invitees in favor of Bunche’s staffer (and Herskovits protégé) Jack Harris to represent the UN. At the time, Bunche actually sat on the foundation’s board of directors. The black press condemned the “tokenism,” and Herskovits did some well-practiced backpedaling. It also turns out that he and two Africa specialists at the state department, William Brown in the Office of Intelligence and Research and Vernon McKay in the Office of Dependent Affairs, had worked out in advance a proposal to fund Northwestern and a second as-yet-unnamed program on the eastern seaboard. Logan lobbied hard for Howard but got nowhere. Meanwhile, Ford officials tried to interest Harvard in building an African Studies Center to be headed by Brown but Harvard declined and Brown instead negotiated with Boston University to start an African Studies Center there. Brown also replaced Herskovits as Ford’s primary consultant, and he promised to do what he could to secure funding for the African Studies Program that his friend Frazier had launched at Howard.²⁸ Ford announced its first grants for universities in African Studies in 1954: five-year commitments to Northwestern ($235,000) and Boston University ($200,000) and a three-year grant—“a pittance,” Logan called it—to Howard ($29,000) that was earmarked for the library.²⁹ The latter figure represents a decrease from the $50,000 that Frazier, after discussions with Ford, determined was the most he might expect.

A reader familiar with the behemoths that the dozens of U.S. area studies centers had become by the 1960s and 1970s, which gave rise to the carping of the less-well-funded international relations theorists, might assume that Northwestern, Boston University, and other early entrants in the competition for foundation and, after 1958, federal dollars had faculty or other assets in place that Howard lacked. Ford, however, commissioned a study in 1958 to assess the strengths and weaknesses of the first batch of African studies programs, and the findings suggest otherwise. For instance, the consultants noted that after receiving grants from Carnegie and Ford, Herskovits’s would-be flagship program did not train its students in the political science, history, or economics of Africa. They gave a failing grade to Boston University’s graduate program and rejected the pretense that any kind of program really existed at the University of California.³⁰ This weakness led to their controversial proposal that the United States follow the British (late colonial) model and create a single national center along the lines of London’s International African Institute.

Members of the newly founded African Studies Association held a special session on Ford’s “State of African Studies” report at its first meeting in August 1958 in Evanston, Illinois, where the consultants defended their call to reverse course.³¹ The text of the report, which had been circulated before the conference, included brief surveys of the existing national centers. Unfortunately, the report omitted any negative evaluations, along with any reference to Howard’s program.³²

Logan, who went to Evanston along with Frank Frazier, questioned the omission from the floor. The chairman of the committee, the South Africa–raised president of the University of Rochester, Cornelis W. de Kiewiet, “regretted the omission” as another one of those oversights that had seemed to plague the Howard school over the years. Then why, Logan wondered, had the report also specified that Boston, Chicago, or San Francisco-Los Angeles were appropriate locations for the new center but not Washington? Logan recorded the exchanges from the floor and among conferees after the session in his diary. Frank Frazier believed the writers, he said, but then Frazier was the program’s director, the single black insider, and a newly appointed member of the board of the African Studies Association; these factors may have dulled his critical edge a bit. No, another member shot back at him, “Howard would not become part of a national center for the simple reason that it is primarily a Negro institution.” Frazier later conceded the point, privately, to Logan.³³

The report’s confidential supplement, which does indeed discuss Howard, confirmed all of Logan’s fears. Howard University was an atavism destined to disappear, the supplement said. Its key members, including in this case a future vice-president of both the African Studies Association (Frazier died just before his presidential year would begin) and the American Sociological Association, “did not appear to us to have any very strong drive nor were any particularly concerned with new fields, such as African History.” Howard also stood for all “Negro Universities,” the report claimed in an attempt to find a work-around for the fact that independent black scholars and faculty at black colleges had pioneered the field, and whites such as Herskovits and Brown had found their first positions at Howard. Blacks had no “prior claims” to the field of African studies, and whatever good work had been done “could equally be done at any other university.”³⁴ In the eyes of the Ford Foundation officials who earlier had approved Frazier’s modest funding request, Howard’s program would at least exert a moderating influence on “American Negro and native African students who sometimes approach the field with a strong emotional or political bias.”³⁵ Keep in mind too that the reality of segregation meant that Howard still enrolled more African students than any other university in the country in the early 1960s.³⁶

The irony in this case did not emerge until a decade or so later. The Eisenhower administration had thrown what amounted to a lifeline to Howard’s African Studies Program when it passed the National Defense Education Act in 1958. Among its other provisions, Title VI provided grants to support teaching and research in critical languages and area studies. Howard received its first award in 1959 for its African Language and Area Center. Ten years later, a revolt against its closed, white leadership with their links to the government and the foundations broke out on the floor and shut down the annual meeting of the African Studies Association in Montreal. In the aftermath, Ford did some handwringing that led, among other initiatives, to injecting massive funds into the first U.S. black studies programs.³⁷ After twenty years of scholarship that was driven by the Cold War and focused on U.S. policy, a post-Herskovits generation of white “Africanist” political scientists, sociologists, and historians could barely comprehend, let alone meet the “demand for an African component in Afro-American studies.”³⁸ Wilbert LeMelle, a Ford Foundation program officer for West Africa who went on to become a U.S. ambassador to Kenya, noted in particular Ford’s failure to consider African Americans when developing its programming and its failure to support “a single major African Studies Program among the black colleges.”³⁹

The highly contested view of the white academy in the 1950s and 1960s by two young leaders of the Montreal insurgency, James Turner and Rukudzo Murapa, seems beyond dispute by now. That is, “black scholars have been continually consigned to a marginal position, and have been forced to languish in the underground of the academic world. This is largely due to a process of white racism that relegates the legitimacy and validity of black scholarship by not providing adequate professional recognition and financial and institutional support.”⁴⁰

Fronting

Not only had Rayford Logan seen through the prevarications of his white colleagues (a skill he had perfected through long experience), early on he had also come to suspect that both the intelligence community and U.S. business interests had a role in the emerging African solidarity industry (for lack of a better term), one that seemed resistant to confronting white supremacy in South Africa. These groups entered the field at the same time that the U.S. state indicted the leadership of the older, outspokenly liberation-oriented Council on African Affairs (Du Bois, Robeson, and Alphaeus Hunton, who went to prison for “subversion”). A decade later, revelations would began to appear in Ramparts, the Washington Post, and the New York Times about covert CIA involvement in groups such as the Institute of African American Relations and the American Society for African Culture that helped spur upheavals at the African Studies Association, the APSA, and many other professional associations. Critics then began to construct what they called power-structure analyses of interlocking association directorships and the like. Logan had done the same, although by the 1960s he had become an outspoken critic of student radicalism and especially of the black power movement.

William Leo Hansberry, the historian Frazier sought to exclude from Howard’s African Studies Program and who has since come to be recognized as a pioneer in precolonial African and especially Ethiopian history, founded the Institute of African American Relations in 1953 as a way to encourage and support African students in the United States.⁴¹ He brought Lincoln’s president, Horace Mann Bond, on board. Its main success in its first years was the opening of a student hostel, Africa House. As Logan later recounted, Hansberry said he had raised the initial funds from Harold Hochschild, the millionaire mining executive (and the father of Adam Hochschild, who wrote for Ramparts and later started Mother Jones). It is hard to know for sure, since Bond by had already become a thriving middleman for all sorts of U.S. firms seeking concessions in the Gold Coast, Liberia, and Nigeria.⁴² As virtually all accounts attest (and unfortunately, these are still fragmentary), control of the Institute of African American Relations, renamed the African American Institute as a condition of support from Carnegie’s Alan Pifer, the same official who organized the African Studies Association, slipped away from the founders. Hochschild took over as chair around 1957 and Pifer arranged for the appointment of his clients at the African Studies Association to the board of directors. Logan watched as it happened.

He first encountered principals of the Institute of African American Relations in 1955 in his role as an advisor to the American Friends Service Committee as its new Africa subcommittee considered prospects for its first field sites. The committee held a meeting at Haverford in May out of which emerged plans for what became the United States–South Africa Leaders Exchange Program, which would bring white South Africans to the United States, to be followed, Logan underscored, by comparable opportunities for “Bantus and coloreds.” Logan fought but lost battles at follow-up meetings at the Carnegie Endowment to hold on to the idea of supporting black as well as white South Africans and to keep the project under the umbrella of the Quakers rather than giving it to Institute of African American Relations to operate. When he found that institute board members Edwin “Ned” Munger, a political geographer who had helped establish the American Universities Field Staff, and Hochschild had been brought in, he concluded correctly that the Carnegie and Ford factions had fixed the deal in advance. He was appalled by Munger’s repeated tasteless jokes about Ghanaians (“Gonorrheans,” “Ghanacologists”), his insistence that Afrikaners were slowly shedding their commitment to white supremacy, and his questionable choice of a South African partner for the leadership exchange project.⁴³

The leaders of a second new African solidarity association, the American Society for African Culture, founded in 1957, intended to prevent the white Africanist establishment-in-the-making from adding to its trophy collection by limiting full membership to those of “African descent.”⁴⁴ The society represented the U.S. support wing (and, it hoped, provided a counter to the left-leaning members) of the anticolonialist Société Africane de Culture of Aime Cesaire, Alioune Diop, and other writers associated with the ten-year-old Paris-based journal Présence Africane. U.S. exile Richard Wright, by then another convert to the side of Cold War anticommunism, was also a member. When the editors began planning the First World Congress of Negro Writers and Artists in Paris in 1956 and assigned Wright the task of getting some African Americans to the meeting, Wright contacted, among others, the U.S. embassy in Paris with the intention of putting together a strong U.S. group that could counter the “leftist tendencies” of the organizers and the opening that might provide the Communists.⁴⁵ The CIA paid for the five-person U.S. delegation, led by John Aubrey Davis, a CUNY political scientist and civil rights activist, to attend the congress. The funds passed through Davis’s American Information Committee on Race and Caste, a group that lobbied for more foreign affairs positions for African Americans. Its main funders to that point had been banking heir Orin Lehman and Walter McCloskey, a Philadelphia-based builder and Democratic Party fund-raiser who was later indicted for corruption.⁴⁶

Following Alioune Diop’s opening speech, with Richard Wright sitting on the stage beside him, a message was read to the packed hall from W. E. B. Du Bois. “I am not present at your meeting because the U.S. government will not give me a passport. Any American Negro traveling abroad today must either not care about Negroes or say what the State Department wishes him to say.” Du Bois then went on to warn the assembly not to be “betrayed backward by the U.S. into colonialism.” As James Baldwin, who was in the packed hall that evening, later wrote, Du Bois had “neatly compromised whatever effectiveness the five-man American delegation then sitting in the hall might have hoped to have.”⁴⁷ That same American group, which later founded the American Society for African Culture with CIA backing, channeled funds to the Paris group, published its own journal, rented high-end office space and a guest apartment, and ran annual conferences and cultural exchange tours. It attained the height of its influence in the early 1960s when it opened its own cultural center in Lagos.

Logan, an early member of the invitation-only organization, questioned Davis about his exclusion of whites and the mysterious and possibly paradoxical sources of the funding that got him and other founders their junkets to Paris and beyond. “Who was pulling the strings of these organizations [the American Society for African Culture and African American Institute] that are interested in Africa?” He discussed his suspicions at greater length with his confidant Harold Isaacs, unaware that the latter worked at a center that was itself a creation of the CIA. “I asked: How did John A. Davis suddenly become interested in Africa?”⁴⁸ Coincidentally, it was around this time that Isaacs interviewed the writer Ralph Ellison, who refused to have anything to do with the American Society for African Culture because its “racial approach to culture” was a form of “fakery and a backward step.” Ellison guessed that it was “probably the State Department’s idea…because of the way they operate.”⁴⁹

Waldemar Nielsen, who moved from the Ford Foundation’s Overseas Affairs Division to the presidency of the African American Institute in 1961, when he claims that he ended covert funding, came clean after Ramparts broke the story of CIA involvement in 1967. Yes, he “was quite aware…that the CIA was subsidizing the Institute” and of “the inherent imprudence and impropriety” of it. But the institute was “like a drunk taking the first drink…. It is easy to overindulge.”⁵⁰ In contrast, John A. Davis always publicly denied that the government played any role in supporting the American Society for African Culture, although key staffers had to submit to security clearance investigations and, as one of them later told historian Hugh Wilford, staffers routinely met with CIA case officers.⁵¹

“In the dazzle of the moment,” to appropriate Louis Menand’s argument about historical novels set in the 1960s, “people are likely to seem pure reflexes of current conditions.” Look harder, however, and the “surface events” reveal themselves as

In the cascade of crises—Iran, Greece and Turkey, Indonesia, China, Vietnam, Guatemala, Hungary, Egypt, Lebanon, Cuba, the Congo, Berlin, the Dominican Republic—that propelled the American Century forward, social scientists were the volunteer first responders. With revived support from the foundations they began to reengineer some of the wartime institutions and best practices of the prewar era and build the national security and area studies centers, programs, institutes, schools, and so forth that student radicals would protest, picket, and occupy in the late 1960s and early 1970s. I am happy to acknowledge the debt owed the students because it is through the takeover of administration buildings in Columbia and elsewhere that we got the story, at least in part, of scholarship’s entanglements with the state and, from there, an understanding of the dubious value of these often-elaborate “feats of ventriloquy.”⁵³ There would even come some slight pushback for a while.

A steady flow of former progressives and communist fellow travelers of one stripe or another crowded to enlist as civilian strategists and would-be nation builders in a global war for freedom. However, McCarthyism also had a remarkable capacity to focus the mind on what really mattered. My colleague, Adolph Reed Jr., says that his father, then a professor of political science at the oldest historically black college in the country, today’s University of Arkansas at Pine Bluff, and a future founding member of the APSA’s Caucus for a New Political Science during that brief insurgent moment, wrote a blunt letter to Bunche asking what had happened to the onetime radical. Bunche answered as bluntly: he needed to put food on the table.

The unrepentant, like Du Bois, faced the loss of some of the key freedoms worth fighting for, such as the freedom to travel abroad. They went to jail or the state made it impossible for them to continue their research and advocacy work. This is the fate that befell the Institute of Pacific Relations. Others were subjected to ostracism and professional exile, which is what happened to Frederick L. Schuman, author of the book that brought the power politics perspective into international relations. His rehabilitation is long overdue. Alain Locke and Rayford Logan brought Schuman to the Howard campus in 1948 to address early on “The Tyranny of Fear.” Logan’s consistent opposition to the assault on academic freedom and efforts to expose the state’s efforts to influence the African and African American research and advocacy organizations represents his shining hour. There are plenty of other grounds for criticizing him, as we will soon see.

Logan was definitely not dazzled by the moment. Instead, his published analyses and private records from the time point to the ways hierarchy continued to shape the politics and theory about “the colored continents,” as Reinhold Niebuhr imagined them in one of the founding documents of the realist revolution in theory.⁵⁴ We are also indebted to Logan for showing us how zealous and at times ruthless academics could be in their efforts to exclude or marginalize African Americans scholars and institutions. They operated with an inchoate and entirely fanciful vision of the international sources of domestic politics in the case of so-called colored peoples. For many, the real threat of decolonization in Africa was the prospect of race war at home.