Part III
The North versus the Black Atlantic
Early in November 1936, Raymond Fosdick, the new president of the Rockefeller Foundation, met for lunch with John Foster Dulles, the managing partner in Sullivan and Cromwell and a foundation trustee. Dulles had recently argued in his article “The Road to Peace” that German rearmament was a positive step toward world order.1 Fosdick wanted his views on the value of the foundation’s current investment in international relations in light of current “chaotic conditions.” As we have seen, it would be hard to imagine the advance of the discipline in the United States and elsewhere in the interwar years in the absence of Rockefeller funds, which were then bankrolling the Institute of Pacific Relations, the Council on Foreign Relations, the Foreign Policy Association, the Royal Institute of International Affairs in London, and the International Studies Conference run out of Geneva. Much of this support dated back to the end of World War I, although the foundation had also just agreed to back the creation of a new Institute of International Studies at Yale.2 Now the foundation’s president was asking Dulles to imagine what more practicable course it might take in the future.
Dulles’s View of the Discipline
Dulles began by drawing Fosdick out about the foundation’s views. Had support for “popular education” on foreign affairs “yielded satisfactory returns?” When Fosdick hesitated, Dulles jumped in. Although he belonged to both the Foreign Policy Association and the Council on Foreign Relations, neither represented “the fundamental type of program which the Foundation was best suited to develop.” Dulles thought that “the laboratory approach” would be a better way to go, although he clarified that he did not mean “work carried on in the universities by academic men,” since academics did not have a realistic and well-informed view of the “practical aspects of problems” or “the results to be desired from taking practical action.”
Dulles said that Chatham House, as the Royal Institute of International Affairs in London was informally referred to, came closest to what he had in mind, but the real problem was that key issues were not being dealt with anywhere. Fosdick agreed and said that the foundation had hoped that the Council on Foreign Relations would evolve in a similar direction and have as much of an impact, but that so far “we have been rather disappointed.” He also pushed Dulles for concrete suggestions about the kind of work that needed to be done. The millionaire lawyer answered that while permanent boundaries were key to a peaceful world order, the problem was that, in terms of tariffs and market access, they needed to be “low” so as not to impede “the flow of trade, culture, population” and so forth. And for those who were trying to come up with solutions, the “most profitable point of attack is the colonial possessions.” As Dulles’s biographer notes about his views more generally in this period, this was an argument that the “great powers” should have access to the colonial possessions, which would still be “locked…into a fundamentally exploitative relationship.”3
This is about as stark a confirmation as exists of the continuing validity of the argument about imperial ambition and the colonial roots of conflict in the twentieth century, two decades after Du Bois first made it. The argument had become a mainstay of theorizing. The transcript of Fosdick’s interview with Dulles does more, though, reminding us of the vast gulf between what appeared to matter in the professional study of international relations in 1936—a mere three years before the outbreak of the European war—and the imaginary world that a Cold War cohort of realists would begin to conjure a decade or so later. First and foremost, imperialism remained the central problem for scholars seeking to grasp the nature of and threats to the existing world order. Italy had launched a war of occupation in Ethiopia in 1935, the significance of which Du Bois analyzed in “Inter-Racial Implications of the Ethiopian Crisis: A Negro View” in Foreign Affairs.4 The resurgence of imperialism in Asia—Japan’s creation of a puppet state in Manchuria in 1931, its withdrawal from the League of Nations in 1933 following further territorial conquest, and ultimately its full-scale war with China in 1937—made the Institute of Pacific Relations, which had relocated its headquarters to New York, an indispensable information resource as the crisis in Asia unfolded. The Rockefeller Foundation paid for the new research program of the Institute of Pacific Relations on the Sino-Japanese war, and on the eve of that war, the National Broadcasting Company (NBC) covered its 1936 Yosemite conference on the radio.5
Most crucial of all, in 1938, the Third Reich launched a project of imperial expansion, not for the recovery of its lost African colonies but for mastery over the territories Hitler deemed vital to a greater Germany, those where hundreds of thousands of German minorities—“racial comrades”—resided. Germany’s many foreign policy theorists, specialists in geopolitik, and the like, saw “international relations as racial struggle,” to quote historian Mark Mazower, although he might as well have been discussing the discipline and its popularizers in the United States.6 The Nazi campaign confirmed a second key argument of the Howard school about the elective affinity between a by then scientifically unmoored concept of race and empire. For example, a German official wrote from the Ukraine in 1942 that “we are here in the midst of the negroes.”7
Howard University’s Ralph Bunche updated the argument about racism and imperialism in A World View of Race, a study of the exploitative economic arrangements around the world that racism helped disguise. Foreign Affairs found the time ripe for an extended critique of economic explanations for expansion in the guise of a review by its in-house specialist of John Hobson’s 34-year-old Imperialism: A Study. Yet it also published Izvestia editor Nikolai Bukharin’s “Imperialism and Communism,” which attacked the pseudosciences of race and geopolitik that provided the excuse for fascist expansionism and misled those in the West whose responses to the crisis drew on the same false ideas, for example about the “need” for land or raw materials.8
For one more example of what turns out to have been the autumn of imperialism, at least as a critical analytic frame, consider the books that topped leading young international relations scholar Frederick Schuman’s list of the field’s most vital works in 1937: Grover Clark’s twin studies, The Balance Sheet of Imperialism and A Place in the Sun, for their careful accounting of “the fallacies of imperialist logic.”9 Arguably, the increasing discussions of the reasons for and consequences of imperialism even in Foreign Affairs reflected the belief—for the first but not for the last time—that the United States was turning the corner on 1898 and its own decades of crude imperialistic policies, as the new “Good Neighbor Policy” in Latin America and the 1935 declaration of (future) independence for the Philippines demonstrated.10
The Shape of Things to Come
Chicago-trained Fred Schuman was the discipline’s next Raymond Leslie Buell in terms of his public visibility and prodigious accomplishments.11 He wrote a dissertation, “American Policy toward Russia since 1917,” which appeared in print one year later, in 1928; completed a highly praised follow-up, War and Diplomacy in the French Republic, in 1931; and wrote a 750-page textbook, International Politics: An Introduction to the Western State System, in 1933 that knocked Buell’s International Relations off some reading lists. Research in Berlin led to his remarkable Nazi Dictatorship: A Study in Social Pathology and the Politics of Fascism, in 1936, which some political scientists criticized for its one-sided negative assessment of Hitler’s new order.12
Schuman said that what made his international relations textbook different from the traditional approaches—“staggering in volume and overwhelming in complexity”—was his turn to the “new political science.” The adjective is key, because Buell made the same claim about political science in his own textbook, International Relations. What Schuman was bringing to the table was the turn in Chicago political science toward emphasizing the “relations of power in society.” In the preface to the second edition, with its now iconic cover of chess pieces arrayed on a board, he says that he based his approach “on the principles of Realpolitik” and calls international relations “the game of power politics” played by “members of the Western State System.” This is why Schuman sometimes earns a footnote as an example of “classical realism” or a precocious realist thinker. But this way of thinking depended on ignoring a great deal, as is evidenced in his final chapter on “The Passing of Power Politics.”13
There are two things to note about the change, compared to most of the 1920s, to discussions of or identifications with “realism” and more frequently “power politics” by academics in the mid- to late 1930s. The first is that more often than not these amount to descriptions, using the relevant individuals’ own terms, of resurgent tendencies in world politics after Japan and Germany’s withdrawal from the League of Nations than to an author’s ideological conversion.14 However, discussions of power politics and realpolitik appear in the journals only a handful of times, at least until the start of World War II.
The second point is the protean nature of mid-1930s American realist discourse and the array of contradictory positions that a proper understanding of power politics somehow produced. There was the defensive (racial) realism of its earliest advocate, Lothrop Stoddard, as we have seen, and the realism of Charles Beard, president of the APSA in 1926 and of the AHA in 1933, who, in two volumes supported by the Social Science Research Council, laid out a blueprint for withdrawal from imperialist rivalries and concentration on national economic reconstruction.15 The realism of Arnold Wolfers, the Swiss émigré who ran the School of Politics in Berlin until the Nazi takeover, after which he began teaching at Yale, led to his advocacy in 1934 of “moral disarmament” in the face of imperialism, for example curbing the influence of arms makers at the “domestic level,” instead of making impossible demands of the League of Nations.16 Yet the realism of the radical theologian Reinhold Niebuhr led him down the road by late 1937 to “all aid to the allies short of war.” It also led him to quit before he could be thrown out of the Socialist Party in 1940 (“an end to illusions”), the year he published Christianity and Power Politics. Like a few others then and many others in the decades that followed, Niebuhr had to come up with a work-around, since on the U.S. left neutrality (or anti-interventionism) was the logical course in a conflict between rival imperialisms.17 This is the reason why some adopted the alternative and hardly hard-headed geopolitical conception of democracies battling dictatorships or totalitarianism or fascism.18
Considering Schuman closely in the year or two after he published International Politics can tell us more about the complexity of a moment and of a discipline whose history has been flattened by decades of accumulated, hasty, and ultimately unsupportable generalizations. For instance, Schuman was virtually alone in correctly predicting the course of Nazi aggression and by 1935 was arguing that war was inevitable.19 In his popular writing and frequent public lectures he took the extremely controversial position that the United States and the other great powers needed to combine to reverse the course of Nazi imperialism and check the likely prospect that Japan would join with Germany to force the United States out of the Pacific.20 Those who are now conventionally associated with the discipline’s turn toward interventionism and the promotion of U.S. “grand strategy”—Arnold Wolfers, Edward Mead Earle, Nicholas Spykman, Max Millikan, and many others21—were either still solidly in the “isolationist” camp or missing in action, at least in print, so some care is needed in tracing their conversions in 1937, 1938, or later to the cause of Anglo-American alliance or, increasingly, American ascendancy on its own.22
Buell’s private papers underscore the problem. In the summer of 1944, he wrote to one of the great forgotten analysts of the current scene, the Russian émigré Vera Micheles Dean, about the years before “Ed” Earle and other erstwhile isolationists in the Nation and New Republic “crowd” had “flopped [that is, “flip-flopped”].23 Buell’s internationalism, in contrast, like his opposition to power politics, never wavered, but as the world moved toward war he came to fear the potential for totalitarianism at home and the complicity of the liberals.24 He quit the Foreign Policy Association; joined the Republican Party, which he had once denounced for its “moral degeneracy”; and battled isolationism by signing on as a foreign affairs advisor to Roosevelt’s opponent, Wendell Willkie, and publisher (Time, Fortune, Life) and party stalwart Henry Luce.25 Like Niebuhr, he hoped to keep the United States out of the fighting while committing to a more resolute internationalism aimed at mediating the conflicts in Europe and the Pacific and reconstructing world organization.
Thus, if, as some believe, the Rockefeller Foundation agreed to fund the Yale Institute of International Relations in 1935 in order to “promote realism and globalism and undermine isolationism,” its principals clearly failed to do due diligence.26 The institute’s original proposals emphasized approaches to peace and, more innovatively, the study of U.S. foreign policy. The best-known and most widely read of the publications it subsidized, by Whitney Griswold, a future president of Yale, argued that the United States should pull out of the Pacific (The Far Eastern Policy of the United States, 1938). Edwin Borchard, author of the original proposal for the institute, a founding member, and Yale’s preeminent professor of international law, was also America’s best-known theorist and supporter of neutrality, while its in-house diplomatic historian, Samuel Flagg Bemis, used his new Diplomatic History of the United States (1936) to “thump…for neutrality and a ‘continental policy.’”27 Raymond Fosdick was impressed enough with institute director Nicholas Spykman to recommend him to Carnegie to head their proposed new project on “the Negro Problem” before Swedish economist Gunnar Myrdal got the job.28
Neither the Rockefeller Foundation nor the Carnegie Corporation had conceived (let alone pursued) a project to promote realism and globalism in the mid-1930s. Instead, when Edward Mead Earle sought funds to support a research seminar on U.S. military and defense policy to be run out of his new home at the Institute of Advanced Study in Princeton, Carnegie officials rejected it as tantamount to propaganda. If it were truly necessary, then it ought to be paid for by the government rather than by a private foundation, they argued.29 The problem is that our histories of the 1930s mostly look back (using documents that do so too) from Pearl Harbor and deftly or not reorder the world to conform to the new line of the day.
Two Disciplines, Separate and Unequal
There is one final thing to consider about the Schuman textbook that introduced undergraduates at Chicago, Yale, Princeton, and elsewhere to the idea of power politics. Schuman was the only white scholar to consider the implications, in print at least, of “the retreat of scientific racism” for international relations theory, at a time when most other historians and political scientists still clung to their belief in the inferiority of black people. So when he analyzed the “dynamic forces” at work in the world, Schuman read remarkably like Buell on nationalism, neomercantilism, and the new and old imperialisms. He even borrowed Buell’s trope of an observer looking down “from Mars or the moon.” The key difference is that Schuman dismissed the significance of racial identification or racial alliances as somehow displacing nationalism and instead called the racialism that nationalists often deployed “pseudo-scientific rationalizations” and “biological myths.” However, the effects of these rationalizations and myths were all too real. Thus, he argued, in the United States, racial science was one element in the oppression of black people who “continued to constitute a degraded and outcast pariah community.” Yet the “minority problem” in this case was domestic and not an international one, first, because its resolution was not a matter of self-determination (or irredentism), and second, because the “Negro States of the world—Haiti, Liberia, and formerly Abyssinia—are such feeble midgets compared to the United States that they are in no position to act in a protective capacity, even were they inclined to do so.” Certainly no Western state or “international organization” demonstrated a concern for the fate of black people in the United States “save the Communist International.”30
He was mostly right, although one might have added the Pan-African Congress and even more convincingly the Universal Negro Improvement Society, a mass movement of tens of thousands. While Schuman identified himself as a “liberal,” others routinely identified him in the 1930s and 1940s as a “fellow traveler” who had defended Stalin’s show trials and, as such, would have considered Garvey’s Universal Negro Improvement Association a tragic turn in liberationist thought.31 He faced numerous campaigns from the Hearst press, wealthy university donors, and the state legislature to have him fired at Chicago and was subjected to multiple federal loyalty investigations after he moved to Williams in 1936, where he became Woodrow Wilson Professor of Government two years later.32 It appears that fellow travelers mattered—and would continue to matter—to efforts to advance the theory in the white academy and society about the role of racism in sustaining international hierarchy, the theory that Du Bois and Locke had first put forward in the years before World War I.
Twenty years later, on the eve of the next war, the network of professionals and institutions dedicated to teaching, advanced research, and public dissemination of knowledge about world affairs had both widened and deepened. With the foundations scrambling to make up for lost time and respond to the new national emergency, the network would grow denser still, as we will see. New funds flowed to the oldest organizations, the Council on Foreign Relations, the Foreign Policy Association, and the Institute of Pacific Relations. Buell would now have the resources of Time and Fortune backing him. Princeton’s sleepy School of International Affairs suddenly came to life. Many campuses hosted emergency schools of military government for preparing officers to administer foreign occupations and War Department army specialist training programs in, among other key technical fields, “foreign language and area study,” which ultimately transformed the organization of knowledge in the discipline.33 The one downside to the mobilization of academics for the war effort is that it stood in the way of the kind of unfettered “basic” research associated with the advance of knowledge in the social sciences, leading the Social Science Research Council for one to close down its international relations committee for the duration.
The Howard school theorists tried to gain access to this network but failed. They were excluded from the conferences and study groups and their wartime research and institution-building grant applications were turned down, not for what they believed but for who they were. Not even federal government appointments and consultancies made much of a difference. By the end of the war, Buell was virtually their only link to and advocate for them among the new notables in the international relations discipline.
At the same time, the Howard school theorists had become part of a wholly unique counternetwork of leading anti-colonial theorists, public intellectuals, and future prime ministers of Africa and the Caribbean, as we will see, men and women such as Dantes Bellegarde, Nancy Cunard, C. L. R. James, Jomo Kenyatta, Kwame Nkrumah, Nmandi Azikwe, George Padmore (whom Howard professors first knew as Malcolm Nurse), Paul and Essie Robeson, and Eric Williams.34 These intellectual activists and leaders are all extremely well known today, are read across the global academy, and are frequently the subject of multiple biographies, as are Bunche, Frazier, Locke, and Logan. In contrast, thinkers such as Buell, Earle, Dunn, and their colleagues are all but forgotten.