Chapter 3 “Spiritual Lend Lease” Literacy, Social Work, and the New Mission for Development

Laubach in Iran

Frank Laubach was “the twentieth century’s most illustrious promoter of literacy.” He was a social gospeler and Congregationalist Protestant who, in the colonial Philippines, strove to modernize mission through the medium of the printed word. According to David Hollinger, “Laubach always regarded the advancement of literacy as the doing of Christ’s work, and thus a direct extension of his missionary calling, even if literacy itself was without particularistic religious meaning.” Laubach’s method was designed for adults and placed the pedagogical emphasis on phonics and image association to produce quick results. In 1955, two decades after introducing language courses in the Philippines, he established Laubach Literacy. The nongovernmental organization eventually published literacy readers in more than three hundred languages.¹⁹ Persian was one of the languages, and Laubach partnered with the Presbyterian Mission to publish the first introductory readers. In the late 1940s, the Presbyterian Mission partnered with another nongovernmental organization—the Near East Foundation—to demonstrate the viability of a universally literate community with a latticework of “literacy sponsors” in Tehran.²⁰

While Christian missionaries had promoted literacy in the Americas for centuries, the printed word was integral to the American evangelical encounter with the world since the nineteenth century. Indeed, the predecessor to the Presbyterian Church in the United States of America (PCUSA) in Iran—the American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions—started literacy work in Iran. In Urmia, its missionaries produced neo-Aramaic/modern Syriac literature for Assyrian Christians. The religious scholar Adam Becker argued that these literary interventions contributed to new understandings of Christianity and the growth of Assyrian nationalism along the Persian-Ottoman-Russian borderlands.²¹ The missionary work of this era aimed, through the establishment of schools, to cultivate future generations of Christian readers, writers, and thinkers; an Assyrian version of the “Readerly and Writerly Indians.”²² By the twentieth century, with the transformation of the American missionary endeavor from a regional one in Iran’s northwest into a national one based in Tehran, the Presbyterian Mission worked predominantly in Persian and in a slightly less sectarian milieu. Unlike most American sojourners in Iran, the missionaries believed that “a knowledge of English can scarcely be considered a fundamental need of the country.”²³ Operating from that assumption, the Presbyterian Mission created a Persian literacy program.

Iranians promoted basic literacy in schools since the early twentieth century, but the Frank Laubachs of Iran were Arthur and Annie Boyce.²⁴ The Wellesley-educated Annie Woodman Stocking was a third-generation Iran hand who, “though born in Maine would seem to naturally belong to Persia.” She did a range of work, but “was first, last and always a teacher.” Boyce taught at the American girls’ school in Tehran, and with alumnae she edited one of the first women’s publications in Iran: Alam-e Nesvan, or Women’s World. Arthur was from Illinois and as a young man went east to Lafayette College. Like other Lafayette graduates, Boyce joined Samuel Martin Jordan at Alborz College in Tehran. Arthur earned graduate degrees in education in his home state of Illinois, and in Tehran he taught education and psychology while serving as Jordan’s lieutenant. Arthur and Annie were born in the 1880s, arrived in Iran in 1906, married in 1914, and were of the generation that believed in the imminent conversion of the non-Christian world. They were also the only Alborz faculty members to remain with the Presbyterian Mission in Tehran after the college closed in 1940. In the 1940s, the couple expanded their portfolio to include everything from literacy work to youth programming.²⁵

Arthur Boyce was a pioneering educator and literacy advocate in Tehran. Among other duties, he served on the joint Anglo-American church literature committee and on the Iranian government committees that dealt with textbooks and education.²⁶ With Alborz College closed and the Second World War nearing an end, Boyce reported that “new work is in prospect along lines which I have long considered but at which I have only begun to work.” He was referring to a Persian-language literacy program. The Presbyterian Mission was aware that “literacy work is being taken up in many mission fields, much of it under the stimulus of Dr. Laubach in the Philippines.” Boyce, in particular, admired these programs but rued that “no work has been done” in Iran. Upon this realization, he raised funds to undertake “two major tasks.” The first was to identify essential vocabulary, and the second was “to work out a method of teaching adults to read and write which must be easier and faster than the present painful and very wasteful alphabetic method.”²⁷ It was claimed that one could become literate in just eight lessons, and for that reason the missionaries considered the Laubach method “a delightfully simple method of learning to read.”²⁸ As was the case in previous centuries, new pedagogies replaced old ones. What the industrial “Lancastrian system” was to the nineteenth century push for mass education, the Laubach method was to missionaries, educators, and developmentalists seeking to reach hearts and minds in the mid-twentieth century.²⁹

In 1947 Arthur Boyce and John Elder met with Frank Laubach to integrate their materials into his organizational effort. Elder predicted that, “We shall long look back on Easter 1947 as one of the high points in our missionary life in Iran” because this was “when Dr. Laubach the world famous literacy expert was here.” As a result of the collaboration between Laubach and the Presbyterian Mission, “life took on a new interest and new vistas of service were opened.” The missionaries respected Laubach, not just because of his expertise, but because they saw themselves in him as “one of the outstanding modern mystics.” The development of literacy material for Laubach required front-end labor, and Boyce received the credit for having “done the spadework before he arrived.” This meant that, in spring 1947, Laubach “went right to work preparing his streamlined lessons for adults.”³⁰ Laubach’s stay in Iran lasted for over a month and, in addition to working with Boyce and Elder, he met with members of the Royal Court.³¹ It was reported that the meetings went well, and the Del Be Del network buzzed with excitement upon learning that the literacy project “captured the interest of the Shah.”³²

To generate additional interest, Arthur and Annie Boyce took the literacy readers on tour. The Boyces were “literacy sponsors,” or what the scholar Deborah Brandt defined as “agents, local or distant, concrete or abstract, who enable, support, teach, and model, as well as recruit, regulate, suppress, or withhold, literacy—and gain advantage by it in some way.”³³ In summer 1947, when the “First Book” was hot off the press, the Boyces traveled two thousand miles around the country to talk to Christian churches about how to use the books in their communities. By the end of the year, with the “Second Book” near completion, Annie penned additional publications for the “newly literate.”³⁴ The books aimed to strengthen Iran’s small community of evangelical Protestants and to otherwise promote Christianity, but as the couple spoke to new audiences, their horizons broadened. The Boyces expressed “great satisfaction to see the work of teaching adults with the Laubach Method really making progress” and considered it “a great pleasure to speak to groups interested in teaching others to read.” To their mind, literacy programs taught in a “loving way” made an impact, and “such personal service cannot be forgotten.” Whatever the appeal, the Boyces found that “this individual method of teaching is a wonderful opportunity to serve.” Arthur Boyce was for decades associated with Alborz College. But in 1948 he informed his friends and colleagues that, “When people ask me what I do now that we do not have schools I explain that … I consider my main job the work of promoting the Mission’s Literacy Campaign.”³⁵

In the late 1940s, the Boyce-Laubach readers found diverse and eager audiences throughout Iran. Initially, the Presbyterian Mission’s literacy goals remained functional and defined narrowly in terms of Christian literacy. Readers of Del Be Del learned that “Church people in all cities are making use of the books, and many individual copies have been sold in Teheran.”³⁶ However, there was more interest in the literacy readers outside of the Christian community than there was in the Evangelical Church. For example, the Iranian army and gendarmerie expressed interest to Boyce “in the possibilities of teaching illiterate soldiers by the Laubach method.”³⁷ In 1948, after meeting with Boyce, the military and rural police began using literacy primers.³⁸

While individual literacy sponsors such as the Boyces could reach pockets of Iranian society, it took greater resources to demonstrate how literacy could impact entire communities. To amplify their efforts, the Presbyterian Mission partnered with the Near East Foundation (NEF). The New York–based nongovernmental organization was established during the First World War by Presbyterian evangelicals who channeled their religious beliefs into a worldly relief effort. According to one scholar, it “embodied the coexistence of religious and secular interests and the eventual transition from a religious American missionarism … to a more secular sense of mission.”³⁹ NEF officials coordinated with the Presbyterian Mission about how, where, and when they would begin work in Iran. Foundation officials had “no particular hobby or program it wishes to put over,” and they told the missionaries that “you men who know Persia will have to decide on the best point of approach.”⁴⁰

Really, it was the women of the Presbyterian Mission who paved the way for NEF to work in a particular place: the Varamin plain, southeast of Tehran. In Iran, more women than men served as Presbyterian missionaries.⁴¹ Prior to the Second World War, some female missionaries left the city to evangelize in the village networks of greater Tehran. “Some April day is sure to find me jogging along on a donkey,” Annie Boyce wrote of her itineration in the countryside.⁴² A friend, Leree Chase, often accompanied her. Chase was from Juniata, Pennsylvania, had a graduate degree from Columbia University, went to Iran as a missionary in the 1920s, and remained there into the 1960s. Her most lasting project was a clinic in South Tehran, but in the 1930s she evangelized with Annie Boyce in the villages outside of the capital.⁴³ The Presbyterian Mission had evangelistic centers all around Tehran’s perimeter, but most relevant to its collaboration with NEF was its work on the Varamin plain. “Everywhere we went throughout the section of Varam[i]n,” Chase wrote, “the people were very kind to us.” They stayed with friends in the evenings and, by day, visited villages where Chase spoke to women and sometimes men, “a new experience” for a female missionary in the 1930s.⁴⁴ Chase professed that, each time she returned to Varamin and engaged with the people, “I was conscious of the Spirit of God working in their hearts and also directing me.”⁴⁵ Evangelism was not the same as rural development, but the women of the Presbyterian Mission established American inroads to Varamin and set the stage for the Near East Foundation’s later effort.

During the Second World War, when the US government had multiple advisory missions in Iran, the Pahlavi government asked Harold Allen of NEF to survey the rural life of the country. In 1943, Allen conducted the survey and recommended a development program for the Iranian countryside that started in 1946. Many decades later, when NEF marked its centennial, the nongovernmental organization celebrated its Iran program, not only because “it operated at a scale unlike any of NEF’s other work,” but because it “helped solidify an approach that had far-reaching influence on the global practice of international development.”⁴⁶ In 1946, when NEF launched a pilot project in Iran, it was a newsworthy item in the Del Be Del newsletter.⁴⁷ The Presbyterian Mission had found its own literacy sponsor.

NEF’s pilot project concentrated on the Varamin plain, located approximately twenty-five miles southeast of Tehran in the capital province. After coming to terms with the Iranian Ministries of Agriculture, Education, and Health, NEF put down stakes in thirty-two villages where they introduced livestock and poultry breeding techniques, dug wells, laid piping, built schools, and combatted malaria.⁴⁸ As an early example of “community development,” Americans and Iranians launched “a simultaneous attack on hunger, disease, and illiteracy in the villages through improvement of agriculture, health, and education.”⁴⁹ The scope of the “demonstration project” was comprehensive, but literacy was “the entering wedge for the entire program.”⁵⁰ For that reason, the Near East Foundation turned to Arthur Boyce and the Presbyterian Mission. In 1948, Boyce reported that adult evening classes in Varamin were “using our books with good success.”⁵¹ In 1954, NEF was still “using quantities of our literacy books devised after the Laubach method” to teach Iranians Persian, with literacy readers and other volumes from the Presbyterian Mission’s library in Varamin and “scattered … all over Iran.”⁵²

In addition to the genealogical ties between literacy sponsors were the affectual bonds and shared emotional worlds of Presbyterian missionaries and American aid workers. The director of the Varamin project, Lyle Hayden, was a doctor from Illinois who worked in Iran from 1945 to 1948 and eventually became executive director of the entire Near East Foundation.⁵³ In later years, Hayden noted that, when he returned to Iran, “It is with a sense of home coming.” He cherished the “valuable friendships” that he forged with Iranians and was “very proud” of the work they did together. In their promotion of low-level development, NEF and the Presbyterian Mission were similar in “following a few basic principles.” Hayden emphasized that project-based work “must be a truly cooperative venture,” and both groups understood that it required a flexible response to local conditions. “Simply because this is the way it is done in Utah, or even Azerbaijan,” Hayden knew that the same practices might not be applicable to the Iranian plateau. Hayden compared the program in Varamin to a “weak young infant” that, initially, enjoyed the support of only a few Iranians “plus one or two American friends of Iran,” presumably the missionaries. However, “I can definitely say that as soon as we had any results to show government officials we found them keenly interested and cooperative.” By doing “small, inconspicuous” labor in a particular locality, NEF earned the confidence “of those in the high place and those in the humble place.”⁵⁴ In 1949, Arthur Boyce wrote that, “Outside of the mission the most promising effort has been that of the Near East Foundation.”⁵⁵

Literacy was soon on the agendas of people in high places, as NEF won the confidence of the Pahlavi government and the administration of President Harry Truman. In 1950, after NEF’s first four years in Iran, US government officials reported that “there has been considerable pressure by the Royal Family for the Near East Foundation to expand its sphere of activities.”⁵⁶ When Truman launched Point Four—the first US government aid program in the extra-European world—aid officials acknowledged that their work “was to a very large extent inspired by and is based upon the work already being done by the Near East Foundation.”⁵⁷ After the Presbyterian Mission and Near East Foundation demonstrated that literacy was essential to any community development effort, the US government’s aid program and the Pahlavi state integrated literacy objectives into their respective foreign and domestic policies. If the Varamin project was to be replicated on a national scale, the literacy sponsors would be national governments.

Foreign Aid, White Revolution

The history of literacy advocacy in Iran often ignores the latticework of sponsors that made universal literacy a national goal for Iran in the 1960s. The scholar Farian Sabahi has written extensively on the Iranian context of the Literacy Corps, or Army of Knowledge [sepah-e danesh], which was part of the shah’s White Revolution.⁵⁸ In contrast to Sabahi, Charles Dorn and Kristen Ghodsee placed Iran’s literacy campaign within the context of the global Cold War. They argued that the Iranian government championed “mass literacy” as modernization theorists in the United States and international organizations favored the limited goal of functional literacy to train laborers for the capitalist world system.⁵⁹ These national and international frameworks are mutually reinforcing, as was evident in the genealogies of the US aid mission’s Education Division and the Iranian government’s Literacy Corps.

The locus of American literacy work in Iran shifted in the 1950s from the Presbyterian Mission to the US government’s foreign aid program. Educational assistance from Washington began in 1950–51, when the Truman administration sent Hoyt Turner to advise Iran’s Ministry of Education. While the missionaries had meddled in Iranian education for more than a century, Turner’s arrival marked a first for the US government.⁶⁰ It was reportedly a missionary “intervention” that “paved the way” for Turner to establish the Education Division within the aid mission.⁶¹ Prior to the creation of the US Agency for International Development in the 1960s, the Point Four program’s on-the-ground body was the US Operations Mission to Iran (USOM/Iran).⁶² Its Education Division “expanded rapidly” during the 1950s, boasted a handsome budget, and operated in all of Iran’s provinces. The division had programs in general education, teacher and business training, physical education, home economics, industry and agriculture, and, finally, fundamental education, which managed the literacy campaign.⁶³

The advent of a major aid operation after the 1953 coup sent a stream of professionals and their families from the United States to Iran and, in turn, transformed the American colony in Tehran. A map prepared for Vice President Richard Nixon in late 1953 marked over a dozen buildings in downtown Tehran that hosted the various arms of the US aid mission, along with additional military, cultural, and diplomatic installations. The US embassy was a block away from the headquarters of the Near East Foundation. In addition to the sites of official US business and offices of nongovernmental organizations, the American colony had social centers. One was the Non Commissioned Officers (NCO) Club, which, in the early 1950s, was located between the US embassy and the University of Tehran.⁶⁴ People affiliated with the Presbyterian Mission had their own social orbit, but many of their compatriots frequented the “open mess” at the NCO Club, the US embassy cafeteria and commissary, and the American Club on Pahlavi Avenue.⁶⁵ The American Club was across from the Royal Hilton Hotel, and many US nationals considered it “the smartest spot in town” and “the gayest place around.”⁶⁶ After 1953, the US aid mission contributed to the growth of the American colony and the transformation of the built and human environments of Iran’s capital city.

In contrast to the solidarity between missionaries and soldiers during the Second World War, members of the Presbyterian Mission had mixed feelings about the influx of Americans during the Cold War. On the one hand, they lamented that there was “a group of people here, especially around the Embassy, who love to run down Iran and the Iranians” and “seem to think that because the Iranians like different things than the Americans there is something very wrong with them.” From the perspective of the young missionary Clement Scott, these new American arrivals “live a strange sort of insulated existence.” Moreover, “There seems to be a great deal of keeping up with the Joneses” and a desire “to do things in a lavish way.” Scott and his colleagues felt that “the missionaries should keep out of the fashionable whirl and live very simply.”⁶⁷ On the other hand, Scott contrasted the US embassy and business crowd with the developmentalists in the American colony. He was “glad to see the fine group of agriculture experts who are coming in now” because “these people have a very different outlook” and were “much more regular at church attendance than the military or the diplomats.” Even the most skeptical evangelicals conceded that Point Four projects were “splendid if they are only carried out effectively.”⁶⁸ These sentiments were reciprocated by some aid workers as the Presbyterians cooperated with other Americans in Tehran. William Warne—a former New Dealer and first Point Four director in Iran—knew that “quite beyond” his official efforts “were activities and institutions that preceded us and helped create an atmosphere receptive to United States aid.” The most important were those of the Presbyterians, “kindly and devoted people” whose work “has changed from time to time” but “has been continuous for several decades.”⁶⁹

While theirs was a different sort of witness, the US government’s literacy sponsors were on a mission for development. One literacy worker who supervised two hundred “fundamental education centers” came to the same conclusion as did the Presbyterian Mission and Near East Foundation, namely that “the smaller, grassroots, village-level programs are and will continue to make their quiet, undramatic impacts upon the thinking and the living of the Iranian villager.”⁷⁰ American aid workers also underwent individual transformations in Iran as they had “the experience of a life-time.” International collaboration was “a great source of pleasure,” and some Americans and Iranians “readily developed a kindred feeling” toward each other. While working with their “exceptionally kind, hospitable, and helpful” Iranian colleagues, Americans reported that “one catches something of the inner driving force which moves each individual to action in his own behalf” to “unshackle themselves from the chains of illiteracy.”⁷¹

These Americans were foot soldiers in “a new attack on illiteracy” via the US aid mission’s Fundamental Education Program.⁷² The nationwide program began in 1953, and Luanna Bowles, a professional educator and literacy specialist with experiences around the world, was the first director.⁷³ She acknowledged that, prior to 1953, “Many people had devised ‘new methods’ of teaching Farsi and had books already written,” but they were—like Boyce’s—general readers that were not tailored to specific target audiences.⁷⁴ These early experiments were soon buried under the “next movement” in literacy promotion between 1954 and 1956, which targeted two groups. The first was the same Iranian gendarmerie with which Boyce had met years earlier. In the securitized environment of the Cold War, the Iranian government expected its rank and file to be able to “prepare written reports on their assignments.” The second was rural Iran, where the goal was to expand the NEF model from Varamin on a national scale to achieve universal literacy and “to enable those under-privileged persons to raise the standard of their daily living.”⁷⁵ In the mid-1950s, the literacy sponsors of the previous decade saw their goals adopted by the US government’s aid mission.

Empowered by aid dollars from and security pacts with Washington, the shah leaned on his own citizens, some of whom had been educated in the schools of the Presbyterian Mission, to incorporate literacy into the White Revolution. Like most planks of the White Revolution, the push for literacy had origins in the mid-1950s. In 1956 the shah issued a decree that set new goals for improving literacy rates and related social problems. Soon thereafter, and in a tone similar to Nikita Khrushchev’s promise to create true socialism in the Soviet Union, the shah declared “universal education at the earliest possible date” as a national priority, which he expected to come within two decades. In September 1961, the Royal Court sponsored an “Anti-Illiteracy Crusade Week.” In a national address about literacy, the shah announced “the first chapter of an all-out crusade to restore the ancient might and grandeur of Iran.”⁷⁶

In 1963, that “crusade” became manifest in the Literacy Corps. It had various sources of inspiration, and some credit Amir Birjandi. Either way, the shah tasked the mission-educated developmentalist with directing the royal initiative.⁷⁷ Birjandi was one of the postwar “pioneers” of using literacy to promote community development. After studying at the schools of the Presbyterian Mission, supporting the Near East Foundation in Varamin, and serving on the Point Four commission, Birjandi conceived of literacy programming on a continuum of “such work done by Americans in my country for the last 119 years.” Through the Literacy Corps, he nationalized “the system of ‘each one teach one’ which had been originated by the American educator, Frank Laubach.”⁷⁸ In Birjandi, whose professional accomplishments in Iran and family friendships with Americans were evident in the Del Be Del newsletter, the ties between Iranian reformers and the Presbyterian Mission emerged in bold relief.⁷⁹

Under Birjandi’s leadership, the Literacy Corps hit the ground running. The first corpsmen included 2,500 high school graduates, with thousands more having gone through training courses and into the field by the end of 1963. If evangelicals such as Arthur and Annie Boyce jumpstarted the push toward literacy, Pahlavi “army camps” trained the next generation of literacy workers and provided young men with an opportunity to fulfill their two years of mandatory military service at a chalkboard rather than with a rifle.⁸⁰ That same year, Iranian women started a literacy program that, in two years’ time, attracted hundreds of volunteers. In 1965, the government established the Women’s Literacy Corps. The future education minister, Farrokhru Parsa, was an early supporter, as was Ashraf Pahlavi. The shah’s twin sister conveyed the message to four thousand people at a sports stadium in Tehran that Iranian women intended to “march shoulder to shoulder with our brothers in this holy campaign.”⁸¹ From the perspective of the Presbyterian Mission, the two arms of the Literacy Corps were “modern armies of peaceful progress.”⁸² In September 1965, the World Literacy Congress gathered in Tehran.⁸³ The missionaries considered the congress more significant than the shah’s silver jubilee, which was celebrated the same month.⁸⁴

The Literacy Corps did not produce miracles, but literacy rates made gradual gains in Iran during the peak aid years from the mid-1950s to the mid-1960s. Iran’s 1956 census found that 22 percent of men and 7 percent of women over the age of ten could read and write. The 1966 census found that 40 percent of men and 18 percent of women were literate.⁸⁵ There was a lot of room to grow, but, during the 1960s, Americans recognized that the Iranian government was now doing work that was once done by foreigners. The Presbyterian Mission had long published health pamphlets, children’s books and, most significant, literacy readers. “In all of these respects,” John Elder noted, “the [Iranian] government is now taking over and printing new materials.”⁸⁶ In the early 1960s, American aid workers made the same observation, namely that “the philosophy of the Ministry of Education now fully accepts responsibility in these areas and understands that continuous and well-planned programs need to be further developed and carried out.”⁸⁷

In the 1960s, people in Iran and around the world prioritized literacy and understood literate societies within the context of development.⁸⁸ In Iran, there was a latticework of literacy sponsors that included nongovernmental organizations and government programs. Regardless of the sponsor, the history of literacy in Iran confirms that, to borrow again from the scholarship of Deborah Brandt, “people throughout history have acquired literacy pragmatically under the banner of others’ causes.”⁸⁹ This was true for the Presbyterian Mission, Near East Foundation, US foreign aid program, and the White Revolution, whose Literacy Corps had an international genealogy with origins at the intersection of place and mission in Tehran.

After the start of the White Revolution and launch of the Literacy Corps in 1963, the Presbyterian Mission closed in 1965 and the US government aid mission did the same in 1967. The Presbyterians who remained in Iran after 1965 wrote glowingly of the shah and his reform program because it dovetailed with their missions, both old and new. To them, the White Revolution was “a revolution unprecedentedly engineered from the throne,” through which the shah “actively superintended his country’s rapid surge into the modern world.” The US government’s decision, in 1967, to declare Iran a “developed country” and terminate its in-country aid mission, seemed to confirm such optimistic views of late Pahlavi Iran. In this context, the Del Be Del network celebrated the “glorious occasion” of the shah’s coronation, held in October 1967. “The Shah of Iran has waited until he could hold his head up with pride in his country before being willing to don a crown,” a Presbyterian missionary wrote. “This time, as all would agree who have observed the conspicuous economic and social progress of Iran in recent years, has now come.”⁹⁰ The shah agreed, and he published an updated articulation of his White Revolution the same year.⁹¹

Clinic of Hope

The Presbyterian Mission’s place in the history of Iranian social work stems from its clinics. Clinics were the original form of medical outreach in most mission fields prior to the hospital boom of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.⁹² While the Presbyterian Mission ran hospitals in the postwar years, its hospital in Tehran closed in 1942 and never reopened. For that reason, the Clinic of Hope and Social Service Center was at once the flagbearer of missionary medicine and a site of experimental social work in Tehran. Located in the southern part of the city, the Clinic of Hope was a multifaceted institution that practiced a “semi-colonial version of biopower,” or the scientific management of bodies and populations within local contexts.⁹³ At the Presbyterian Mission’s clinic in South Tehran, the new mission became manifest in a set of “maternalist” discourses and practices relating to the socioeconomic and medical standing of Iranian women and their families.⁹⁴

South Tehran was the poorest part of the city. It had, in previous decades, consisted of uninhabited industrial space, but in the twentieth century there developed “a goodly sized city there.” The residents were not well-off, and each day the Clinic of Hope’s director saw “the acids of poverty and hunger.”⁹⁵ His Iranian friends agreed, describing the area as “reminiscent of a Charles Dickens novel.”⁹⁶ In a city whose spatial orientation aligned with its socioeconomic stratification, there was a stark contrast between the foothills of the Alborz Mountains and “the very bottom” of the city.⁹⁷ The Clinic of Hope was located south of the Tehran bazaar in Darvazeh Ghar, a neighborhood that “was once a sizable canyon, carved out by the ravenous brick kilns and their search for clay.” As Tehran’s population grew, the area was “filled in with earth and refuse and the discard from the other and more well-to-do parts of the city” to create what was, in essence, “a filled-in clay pit.”⁹⁸ The living quarters were, in some cases, “abandoned brick kilns,” and in others “burrows in the ground.” These gowds provided shelter for recent migrants to the city. Analysts from the period understood that Iran, like the United States and Great Britain, “developed new patterns of social welfare service to aid migrants in the rural-to-urban transition” and in response to demographic calculations and material expectations.⁹⁹

The Clinic of Hope, as it came to be known, was a conglomeration of projects in South Tehran that the women of the Evangelical Church and the Presbyterian Mission started in the early Pahlavi period. Historically, South Tehran “was a closed door to the gospel.” That changed in 1929, when Fatemeh Behaeddin, an Iranian woman from the Evangelical Church of Tehran and a member of the Del Be Del network, organized a reading group for women that included discussion of the Bible. This was a small group, but, after the introduction of sewing classes in 1931, “attendance greatly increased.” In 1938, after a decade of activity, additional Iranian Christians opened their homes to the missionaries and to their neighbors, in a pattern that repeated throughout neighborhoods in South Tehran.¹⁰⁰ These informal affairs evolved into organized efforts under the Presbyterian Mission. For example, the sewing classes in South Tehran were, between the 1930s and 1960s, led by Leree Chase.¹⁰¹ Missionary women such as Ruth Elder helped Chase “carry on her bazaar groups” and assemble additional groups of “little sewers” throughout South Tehran.¹⁰²

In their reports, evangelicals used a socioeconomic rationale to describe this branch of the new mission as “industrial evangelism,” or “home industries.”¹⁰³ As with other manifestations of the new mission, industrial evangelism was an extension of American practices that were repurposed in Pahlavi Iran. The idea for sewing circles originated in the private sphere of American churchwomen and social reformers in the nineteenth century. It then extended into the public sphere through socioeconomic initiatives for women during the so-called progressive period of US history.¹⁰⁴ In the early twentieth century, this was just the sort of work abroad that groups of evangelical women in the United States wanted to support. Chase’s original sponsor was a group of Presbyterian women in Pennsylvania called the “Leree Chase Mission Band.”¹⁰⁵

The Clinic of Hope’s medical work followed a different track. When open, the Presbyterian Mission Hospital in Tehran had an impressive maternity ward. Sarah McDowell and Ruth Elder managed this work, as did Grace Visher Payne. She was from the great plains of the United States, and, in Tehran, Payne opened a children’s health center and, in 1942, a prenatal clinic.¹⁰⁶ McDowell temporarily retired to the United States when the hospital, where her husband, Philip, was the lead doctor, closed. But in 1946 “a gift from the Shah” sustained the “constant gradual growth” of Payne’s clinic in South Tehran.¹⁰⁷ In the late 1940s, Payne was spending most of her working hours at the health center, which was beginning to attract the attention of Iranian social reformers and American aid workers.¹⁰⁸ The shift, from large hospitals to small clinics, kept the Presbyterians’ medical mission in Tehran relevant in the postwar years. These two streams of the new mission—medicine and industrial evangelism—converged in the Clinic of Hope.

The Presbyterian Mission asked Robert and Carolyn Bucher to administer the Clinic of Hope. Like many missionaries, they were “children of the manse” from the mid-Atlantic region. Carolyn grew up in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, and Robert in neighboring New Jersey. She studied at Columbia University’s Teachers College, and he was ordained at Princeton. Their first appointment as foreign missionaries was in the Caspian Sea city of Rasht, where Carolyn taught and Robert did “tea-shop evangelism.”¹⁰⁹ After the Second World War, they relocated to institutionalize a program of “social evangelism” in South Tehran. Robert Bucher knew “how deep and thoroughly the foundations for this work have been laid.” With Payne nearing retirement, the Buchers took over her work and took the name “Clinic of Hope.” Carolyn Bucher used the Boyce-Laubach readers to add literacy classes to the clinic’s menu of services. In 1949, with the clinic evolving and Chase’s sewing classes in need of a home, the Presbyterian Mission put them under one roof.¹¹⁰ For a few years the roof was rented, and “the two pieces of work” were “stumbling over each other in the narrow quarters and under the nose of an unfriendly landlord.”¹¹¹ In such quarters, Bucher realized that the clinic attracted “more patients than we can possibly care for.”¹¹²

Therefore, the Presbyterian Mission found a new building in South Tehran that could comfortably house the clinic and social service center. In Iran, financial support came from American missionaries, Iranian church-goers, “and many people who for years had actively participated in the work.” More broadly, the Board of Foreign Missions in New York financed the project, as did “hundreds of people in American churches.”¹¹³ As was the case with many mission properties, Iranian members of the Evangelical Church acted as “trustees” on behalf of their American friends.¹¹⁴ In 1956, with the property secured on a street named Khiaban-e Ghar, Robert Bucher “decided it was the time to show our faces and our intentions to the public eye rather boldly” by holding a groundbreaking ceremony.¹¹⁵ In 1957, the Clinic of Hope opened the doors of its new, modern facility. The first floor housed the medical clinic; the second floor was for Leree Chase’s industrial evangelism and Carolyn Bucher’s literacy classes.¹¹⁶

First and foremost, the Clinic of Hope offered medical care to the residents of South Tehran. Robert Bucher was not a doctor. He was “an upstart in the medical world of Tehran” who was fortunate to draw on the “Goodly Heritage” of “the medical work of the Americans in the past.”¹¹⁷ Bucher also drew on the expertise of Iranian medical professionals. Despite the fact that the Clinic of Hope was a Christian institution, most of his Iranian associates were Muslims. Bucher had long ago learned “to come to grips with Islam” and “to live in the Moslem environment as a buoy floats on the waves.”¹¹⁸ He therefore found it “heartening” to work with people of different faiths in South Tehran who “found so much pleasure in serving and loving his people.”¹¹⁹ In contrast to the doctors, the lead nurse had connections to the evangelical network. She was “trained in our hospital” and “raised in a Christian home.”¹²⁰ In addition to the “staff of faithful doctors” and nurses were approximately three dozen “public-spirited doctors” in the city who shared the goal of alleviating “the great and ubiquitous problem of suffering and need.”¹²¹ Iranian government hospitals and private clinics received patients from the Clinic of Hope, and individual Iranians and charitable organizations “give time and counsel.” As Bucher saw it, all involved knew that “work like this calls for love.”¹²²

Together, American evangelicals worked with Iranian doctors and nurses to administer five to six clinics per week. Patients received care from doctors who specialized in obstetrics and genecology; ears, noses, and throats; and ophthalmology. A general practitioner was in residence on Friday, Islam’s holy day and the clinic’s “biggest day.” The Friday clinic was open to the entire community, but at least two days per week were reserved for women and children. On one of those days, nursing mothers could receive milk for their babies. This was the service most associated with the clinic.¹²³ The Clinic of Hope’s priorities were women and children, or the provision of “better care and knowledge on the part of pregnant women, improved conditions of childbirth, and, in general, better infant care.”¹²⁴

The Clinic of Hope was able to support mothers and children in South Tehran because of the Presbyterian Mission’s relationship with nongovernmental and voluntary organizations. While US government guidelines restricted eligibility for tax-funded aid contracts, in voluntary work “no distinction is drawn between organizations which have a religious backing and those which do not.”¹²⁵ In some types of voluntary work, the US government preferred religious organizations to secular ones.¹²⁶ The Presbyterian Mission registered with the Council of Volunteer Agencies in Iran, which made it eligible to receive and distribute “a very large amount” of donated items on a monthly basis.¹²⁷ The donations that flowed through the Council of Volunteer Agencies came from many sources, but the most important was the Cooperative for American Relief Everywhere, or “CARE.” As described by one author, the cooperative was established in 1945 “to distribute individualized person-to-person relief” to postwar Europe and, eventually, the world. Vital goods were donated in the United States and signed, sealed, and delivered “on behalf of private American donors to designated individuals overseas.” It took many organizations to form “a complete transactional circle.”¹²⁸ As the Shah of Iran described it: “CARE has been assisting us mainly by making available flour, milk powder, and sometimes other foods to our low-income groups,” and these supplies were distributed “mostly through other existing charitable agencies.”¹²⁹ The Presbyterian Mission in Tehran was one such agency.

In the 1950s and 1960s, the US government’s “food for peace” program, along with international nongovernmental and voluntary organizations, also sustained private clinics around the world and amplified their local impact.¹³⁰ The Presbyterian Mission in Tehran reported a boost in its milk distribution program, in particular, and in the donated medicines that were “literal life savers.”¹³¹ The internationalist networks of the Cold War era increased the scale of the evangelical enterprise in Tehran and made the distribution of foodstuffs “a chapter all its own.” By the end of the 1950s, the missionaries had “steady supplies” of milk and medicines for their clients, along with additional items as “a gift from the American People.”¹³² At the Clinic of Hope, in the late 1950s, nearly three hundred women regularly received milk for their babies, and in one year alone the daily clinics served 7,707 individuals.¹³³ More broadly, in 1960 Ruth Elder delivered flour and rice to three thousand people in South Tehran.¹³⁴ Cooperation between evangelicals and nongovernmental and voluntary organizations continued into the 1960s, and the Del Be Del network considered the partnership “a great blessing.”¹³⁵

In addition to the medical field, the Clinic of Hope contributed to maternalist discourses and practices related to socioeconomic welfare. Chase’s industrial evangelism was a form of biopower that, to borrow from one historian, “helped to redefine human beings as social reproductive bodies.” If a traditional “biological-reproductive” understanding of womanhood informed the medical mission on the first floor, the second floor of the clinic introduced social services that prioritized the “economic-productive” potential of Iranian women.¹³⁶ The scholar Pamela Karimi made this point about Point Four’s “home economics” program. Karimi found that American aid workers and evangelicals “introduced Western ideas of domesticity to Iranian women” and, somewhat counterintuitively, “disrupted the polarized fixity of ‘public’ and ‘private’ and ‘self’ and ‘other.’ ” The US government aid program was similar to the postwar social gospel in creating sites of binational exchange that generated economized understandings of the “home.” Karimi demonstrated how these practices related to an international “market transformation” that opened the private sphere to consumer goods.¹³⁷ From the Clinic of Hope, Leree Chase’s model of industrial evangelism integrated parts of the home with the public sphere in Tehran.

In the late 1950s and early 1960s, Chase’s sewing classes attracted between two hundred and three hundred women per week.¹³⁸ A minority of these women made the classes part of their weekly routines, but some were “friends” of the Del Be Del network who frequented the clinic for years.¹³⁹ When the new facilities opened, Chase brought on eight Muslim women to help teach sewing classes on an expanded scale.¹⁴⁰ The finished handicrafts, which included items such as baby bibs and table cloths, were sold at Central Compound, and the profits served two purposes. Most cycled back to the individual women in South Tehran “to provide the frugal fare, to keep soul and body together, to buy the much needed medicine for a member of the family,” or otherwise care for their children.¹⁴¹ In some cases, the sales meant that “some are now able to support their families with their income from this work.”¹⁴² Additional proceeds were used to fund so-called women’s work in Tehran.¹⁴³ The sale of hand-stitched goods at Central Compound also raised the profile of the Clinic of Hope and the Presbyterian Mission more generally. As one missionary wrote, “One of the indirect results of the sales of the linens is the contact which it brings with the foreign community,” especially “the large American community here.”¹⁴⁴ Chase and her colleagues took pride in the fact that many of the textiles that originated in South Tehran ultimately made their way “to many parts of Iran, Europe, England and America.”¹⁴⁵ In these ways the sale of handicrafts became part of the mission for development.

While, in some cases, new skills proved economically beneficial to women and their families, the missionaries conceived of this work within the gendered context of the Cold War competition and Christian understandings about “the self-reliant personality.”¹⁴⁶ In an age when national leaders in the United States and the Soviet Union engaged in “kitchen debates,” the Presbyterians considered their approach to industrial evangelism at once a complement and an alternative to the consumerist model of American development.¹⁴⁷ Chase’s goal was to provide “work for individuals, not for ‘the poor’ en masse.”¹⁴⁸ A colleague explained it similarly, placing “the accent on ‘Individuals’ ” to reach each “eager soul who comes” to the Clinic of Hope.¹⁴⁹ In this way, American evangelicals attempted to transfer their understandings of labor to Iranian clinic-goers. As Robert Bucher understood it, the sewing classes and sale of handicrafts on the marketplace would lead individuals to become “self-respecting” as “they begin to earn a little money by the work of their own hands.”¹⁵⁰ Recognizing that religious conversions were few and far between, the internal transformations wrought by the vocationalization of skills and monetization of goods would, in the official mind of the Presbyterian Mission, lead individuals to be “rescued from the depths of despair and hopelessness, and some from begging.”¹⁵¹ In these mutually reinforcing yet contradictory ways, the missionaries injected their gendered ethnocentrism into Iran’s maternalist discourse on socioeconomic welfare.

In South Tehran, the institutional and human dimensions of place met at the Clinic of Hope, whose services collectively offered a model for community-based social work in Iran. Robert and Carolyn Bucher administered the clinic for nearly two decades, and the new mission kept them enmeshed in the local community. In South Tehran, Robert Bucher understood “community” to be “something more than the total of all the individuals who find their way to the Center.” Rather, “It is a social fabric that grows out of common needs.” That included the needs of the missionaries, Iranian nurses and doctors, and their patients. It also included people from the block. In the late 1950s, a “local citizens’ committee” of politicians, police officers, mullahs, and other local leaders met at the center. On one occasion, Bucher reported that the committee “spent two hours with me and with an Iranian representative of the Church” engaging in conversation while “indulging in pepsi colas.” Bucher was especially impressed when, during an interreligious debate, the mullah “was outspoken in pointing out that we were all in the same community, facing the same problems and serving the same God.”¹⁵² At the Clinic of Hope, Presbyterian Christians and Shia Muslims cooperated with each other because “both Christ and Ali … have given commands that men should serve one another and not neglect the poor.”¹⁵³

The Maternal Welfare State

While the Presbyterian Mission’s literacy sponsor was the Near East Foundation, the Clinic of Hope’s amplifier was a person: Sattareh Farmanfarmaian. Scholars found that, during Iran’s “Lady Bountiful” period that preceded the White Revolution and the development of a national welfare state, “Able individuals with money, friends, social positions, or other avenues to power came forward to take the first steps.”¹⁵⁴ Farmanfarmaian was one of those individuals, and she was inseparable from the Tehran School of Social Work, from its founding in 1958 until the revolution of 1979. Educated in the Presbyterian Mission’s schools and ensconced in the Del Be Del family, Farmanfarmaian drew on her friendships and the facilities at the Clinic of Hope as she secured a place for social work on the Iranian government agenda.¹⁵⁵ Consequently, the maternalist discourses and practices of the Presbyterian Mission’s Clinic of Hope and, to a much greater extent, Farmanfarmaian’s School of Social Work, contributed to the growth of the Iranian welfare state.¹⁵⁶ While the early American welfare state was, as the social scientist Theda Skocpol demonstrated, designed for “protecting soldiers and mothers,” the early Iranian welfare state prioritized women and children within local communities.¹⁵⁷

Born in 1921, Sattareh Farmanfarmaian hailed from an aristocratic Qajar family and was an alumna of the Presbyterian Mission’s education system that existed in Iran prior to 1940. “In those days,” she wrote in her memoir, Daughter of Persia, “there were no more than a few dozen Americans in Tehran, mostly missionaries.” These “Americans were regarded with nearly universal affection and admiration.” Her father was a benefactor of the prewar Presbyterian Mission Hospital, and he thought that the Americans “offered the best education available to women in Iran.” In addition to coursework, students of her generation did extracurricular work at “a medical dispensary that served the sprawling neighborhoods south of the old bazaar.” As a member of an aristocratic household, Farmanfarmaian recalled, “Not until now had I encountered … people for whom constant, unrelieved poverty was their whole life.” She was “overwhelmed” but also “filled with admiration for the Americans’ little dispensary.”¹⁵⁸ “They knew what they were doing,” Farmanfarmaian recalled. “I just imitated them” and, after a time, “I had become good friends with these missionaries.”¹⁵⁹ She later wrote about how “working at the dispensary made me long to find out how to do something about the way common people lived.”¹⁶⁰ During her student days, Farmanfarmaian did what would later be called service learning at one of the Presbyterian Mission’s forerunners to the Clinic of Hope in South Tehran.

Despite the similarities between Farmanfarmaian and her mentors, there was a fundamental difference. None of the evangelicals at the Clinic of Hope were trained social workers. Instead of social work, they understood their mission as an “adventure in reclamation,” an “assignment in reparation,” and an exercise “in redemption.”¹⁶¹ Farmanfarmaian, by contrast, held a graduate degree from the United States in what midcentury Americans called “social work.” Because no such word existed in Persian, Farmanfarmaian invented one: madadkar, or “one who helps.”¹⁶² After completing her studies at the University of Southern California in the late 1940s, she went on to become “the architect of social work in Iran.”¹⁶³

Iranians have a history of offering social services to their fellow citizens that did not involve foreigners and that predated the Cold War era. The first social welfare efforts came from the mosque, and clerics and merchant families ran private foundations dedicated to the welfare of Iranians throughout the entirety of the Pahlavi period.¹⁶⁴ Increasingly, however, the Pahlavi shahs coopted philanthropic work under the purview of the state. The first Iranian social service organization was the Red Lion and Sun Society, established in 1923 as an affiliate of the International Red Cross. Others followed, including the Imperial Organization for Social Services, the Foundation for the Protection of Mothers and Children, and the Higher Council of Social Welfare. The Ministries of Labor, Social Welfare, Health, and Education were also active.¹⁶⁵ However, professional social work in Iran was a product of the Cold War era.

Iranian social work was part of a global history of welfare state-building in the twentieth century. Scholars of US history have shown that the “liberal hour,” which began with Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal and ended with Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society, had global extensions and influenced political, social, and economic development in countries around the world.¹⁶⁶ During the Second World War, the US government sent technical assistance teams to Iran, the most important of which was Arthur Millspaugh’s financial mission. This so-called new deal for Iran included social work, broadly defined, with advisers attached to Iran’s Ministry of Food and Health.¹⁶⁷ Bennett Avery, an American doctor, established a rapport with Pahlavi royals as he advised them on health-related issues and worked to eradicate typhus in Iran between 1944 and 1950. Likewise, American medical missionaries and Iranian doctors kept the US embassy abreast of developments that related to medicine and social work.¹⁶⁸ In the mid-1950s, as the shah began to contemplate a social safety net for the people of Iran, he turned to the United Nations and American experts, the most important of whom was Arthur Altmeyer. Best known as a father of the US Social Security system, Altmeyer was similar to David Lilienthal and other New Dealers who took their expertise to Iran during the Cold War. In 1955, Altmeyer advised various Middle Eastern governments and chaired a United Nations study group whose report recommended that Iran create a school to train the next generation of Iranian social workers.¹⁶⁹ Sattareh Farmanfarmaian was part of Altmeyer’s United Nations study group, but in the immediate aftermath of the 1953 coup, the shah’s government was paralyzed, and a bold program of social reform for Iran was temporarily infeasible.¹⁷⁰

In the late 1950s, matters had changed, and the developmentalist vision of the shah and some of his closest advisers aligned with that of Farmanfarmaian and her international supporters. Two events jolted the shah into action. The first was the Iraqi revolution, which in 1958 overthrew the Hashemite monarchy. Taken alongside the earlier overthrow of Egypt’s monarchy, free officers and republicans challenged the future of monarchies throughout the Middle East. Consequently, the “Arab Cold War” involved Iran.¹⁷¹ The missionaries reported that, “taking warning from what has happened in Iraq, the King is determined to put through some reforms” to create a safety net, not just for his subjects, but for his throne.¹⁷² The second impetus came after 1959, when the shah married Farah Pahlavi. The shah’s last of three wives was a Paris-educated art aficionado who, during the 1960s and 1970s, represented the humane side of the Pahlavis and patronized important initiatives in the creative arts and social welfare.¹⁷³ After becoming established in the Royal Court, she managed the endowment of the Farah Pahlavi Charitable Foundation. Everyone knew that “the patronage and interest of Queen Farah in social welfare has set the stage for a high degree of interest … in expanding social work education and developing the social services in Iran.”¹⁷⁴ One important example was the Farah Maternity Hospital, which was located close to the Clinic of Hope in South Tehran and was one of the largest such hospitals in the Middle East.¹⁷⁵ Another example was the Tehran School of Social Work, which Farmanfarmaian opened in 1958 with the support of a small circle of what she described as “twenty people who believe in something.”¹⁷⁶

The men and women of the Presbyterian Mission certainly believed in Farmanfarmaian, and Robert Bucher wrote an optimistic letter in late 1958 that explained the school’s creation and his evolving relationship with Iran’s social work professionals. Bucher’s letter, much like Farmanfarmaian’s memoir, emphasized the importance of Hossein Ala to the school’s creation. Ala was a relative of Farmanfarmaian, and he was also the Iranian prime minister from 1955 to 1957, after which time he used his position as minister of the Royal Court to support a range of social and cultural projects. He ushered Farmanfarmaian’s idea of a school for social work through the appropriate councils and, upon its creation as an independent yet government-accredited institution, he was the first chair of the board of trustees. Bucher understood this meant that the school enjoyed “very strong and insistent support of the court.” He was pleased that, from her new position, Farmanfarmaian supported the work of the Presbyterian Mission and asked her American friends to, on occasion, “act as a counsellor.” As the School of Social Work took shape in 1958, she visited the Clinic of Hope on at least two occasions and was “impressed with the ground work we have done.” According to Bucher, “she tells me that, though our work is small, it is … ahead of others.” As a result, Farmanfarmaian invited Bucher to attend at least one of the early meetings with Ala. In his letter to the Del Be Del network, Bucher reported that the School of Social Work’s faculty would include a few of “our special friends” and other Americans “who ought also to be friendly to our work.”¹⁷⁷

Bucher knew that, in the 1960s, the School of Social Work would transform the Clinic of Hope, and not the other way around. American evangelicals were aware that their mission would change, but they were delighted to be “in on the ground floor” of the professionalization of Iranian social work. Students from the School of Social Work would soon be doing their field work and completing training hours at the Clinic of Hope. Bucher knew that this would limit or end evangelism. However, “we cannot say ‘no,’ ” and Bucher thought that “this is a very definite ‘open door’ set before us” for pursuing the greater good of Tehran. Moreover, Iranian participation was vital to the future of the Clinic of Hope. As much as Farmanfarmaian drew inspiration from the Presbyterians, the Americans knew that “we need them, their classes, their scientific approach, their cooperation, and their guidance in this scientific field.”¹⁷⁸ The Presbyterian Mission thus joined the Peace Corps, Fulbright exchanges, and Cleveland International Program for Youth Leaders and Social Workers in wholeheartedly supporting the Tehran School of Social Work. They even “furnished part-time personnel from time to time.”¹⁷⁹

While the Tehran School of Social Work opened in 1958–59, its impact was limited until a natural disaster demonstrated its need and brought about the national acceptance of social work in Iran. Farmanfarmaian recalled that, in spring 1961, “a record-breaking snowmelt in the Alborz [Mountains] caused a flood that all but destroyed a shantytown called Javadieh.” The devastation of the South Tehran neighborhood, whose open-air jubes regularly flooded but on a less severe scale, displaced its residents and marked the first test for the School of Social Work. Students accompanied Farmanfarmaian to the area where they resettled displaced persons, opened a daycare for children, and provided services to mothers and their families.¹⁸⁰ “Operation Relief” was a collaborative effort that required many helping hands, including the nearby Clinic of Hope. The operation was “moving along nicely” by 1962, and the Clinic of Hope was, for a time in 1963, the center of the operation.¹⁸¹ In South Tehran during the early 1960s, the individual and institutional responses to a natural disaster moved social work beyond elite Iranian reformers and their American friends and onto the national radar.

The collaborative relief effort propelled social work—as understood at the Presbyterian Mission’s Clinic of Hope and, more important, Sattareh Farmanfarmaian’s School of Social Work—into the Iranian government’s emergent welfare state. Impressed with the rehabilitation of South Tehran, local residents donated property to sustain the relief project on a permanent basis. And when Farah Pahlavi took an interest, royal patronage made it possible to open the first government-sponsored “Community Welfare Center.” It was located in Javadieh, which had been hit hard by the flooding five years earlier.¹⁸² The community center opened in October 1966 and was operated by Farmanfarmaian’s School of Social Work. The aim of the institution was “to train, encourage and emancipate the woman who wants to work,” and that required a “cluster of services.” But the “nucleus” was the daycare, and the “primary target” was mothers and children. The community center in Javadieh also had maternal and postnatal clinics, literacy and handicraft classes, youth programming and adult education and training, and in-house social workers. These services were nearly identical to those at the Clinic of Hope.¹⁸³

After the closure of the Presbyterian Mission in 1965, changes were afoot at the Clinic of Hope. The first change related to ownership of the clinic. As with all of the major Presbyterian institutions in Tehran, the Clinic of Hope evaded the so-called integration agreement with the Evangelical Church. In the late 1960s, the clinic was under the control of the Commission on Ecumenical Mission and Relations (COEMAR), the United Presbyterian Church in the United States of America’s (UPCUSA’s) ecumenical mission board in New York, and its representative in Tehran. The second change related to the leadership of the clinic. With the closure of the Presbyterian Mission and, more important, the Tehran School of Social Work’s rise to prominence, the American directors at the Clinic of Hope determined that it was time “to bring about a complete change of leadership.”¹⁸⁴ In 1966–67, Robert Bucher handed over his directorship to an Iranian social worker. In an age of increasing professionalization, missionaries who previously found virtue in being generalists came to understand that social work was “the task of one trained in this field.”¹⁸⁵ The Iranian directors were not interested in evangelism, but Bucher knew that they did “a much better job … than I did,” most notably “in terms of social science and organization.”¹⁸⁶ Whatever the religion of the lead administrator, the Del Be Del network knew that the clinic remained an example of “love in action.”¹⁸⁷

Rather than integrate with the Evangelical Church, the Clinic of Hope effectively integrated with the Tehran School of Social Work. In 1970, the Del Be Del network learned that the Clinic of Hope’s “premises may again be used, this time by the Tehran School of Social Work as a service to the people in that neighborhood,” of Darvazeh Ghar.¹⁸⁸ In December 1970, after a brief period of closure, the clinic reopened under the new administration and with a new name, the Hope Family Welfare Center. In addition to the Tehran School of Social Work, which ran the center, the Iranian government’s Ministry of Health and the International Foundation for Family Planning supported the attached clinic, its doctor, and the continued professionalization of services. An American evangelical and certified social worker named William Huskins was, at this moment of transition, the lead administrator, but he answered to Sattareh Farmanfarmaian, whose students staffed the center. It was a proud moment for the evangelical community, with Sarah McDowell writing in the Del Be Del newsletter: “God bless this revival of Bob Bucher’s dream!”¹⁸⁹

In the 1970s, during the last decade of the Pahlavi period, the Clinic of Hope was swallowed by the Iranian welfare state. Like the other major Presbyterian institutions in Tehran, the Presbyterian Historical Society’s documentary holdings on the clinic dry up after the UPCUSA closed COEMAR in 1972. While the closure of COEMAR had a decisive impact on other former mission institutions—especially the schools and student centers in Tehran—the Clinic of Hope’s conversion from an American institution into an Iranian one happened two years earlier.¹⁹⁰ In 1970, the clinic’s parent institution, Sattareh Farmanfarmaian’s School of Social Work, managed community centers like it in Tehran and around the country.¹⁹¹ In the mid-1970s, there were twenty-two community centers in Iran, thirteen of which were in the capital. As the School of Social Work’s academic portfolio continued to grow, the Iranian government eventually created a new ministry to take over responsibility for the national network of community centers.¹⁹² In this context, veterans of the Presbyterian Mission reflected on its history: “Social welfare service is a ‘late comer’ on the scene in Iran,” and “a small but significant early contribution in this field has been the … Clinic of Hope.”¹⁹³

In contrast to the “old mission” of the church, the “new mission” for development became manifest through literacy programming and social work that involved Presbyterian, American, and Iranian cooperation in the Cold War world. As with the old mission, the new one forced the men and women of the Presbyterian Mission to negotiate their tangled identities as Americans and Christians who were living in Iran and working with Iranians. If the Iranian side of the old mission consisted of a small group of evangelical Christians, the Iranian side of the new mission cast a wider net to include literacy activists, social workers, doctors, and, either directly or indirectly, the Pahlavis. Some of these Iranians were part of the Del Be Del network, including Amir Birjandi, the first director of the Iranian government’s Literacy Corps, and Sattareh Farmanfarmaian, the founding president of the Tehran School of Social Work. These individuals had their own personal missions and professional connections, but their lives overlapped in meaningful ways with the Del Be Del network.

American evangelicals displayed few qualms about spreading their truth through power during the developmentalist moment. Between the 1940s and the 1960s, the Presbyterian Mission’s literacy advocacy and social work helped some people and created situations wherein Americans and Iranians came to know each other. But the missionaries did not work alone, and their projects were in line with broader trends in Iran, the United States, and the world. International nongovernmental organizations such as the Near East Foundation, along with the US government’s foreign aid program, were instrumental partners of the Presbyterian Mission and important intermediaries between the Del Be Del network and development programs in Iran. In the 1960s, as developing states around the world took responsibility for social services that had previously been in the purview of foreigners and private networks, late Pahlavi Iran was no exception. Literacy was among the first six planks of Mohammad Reza Shah’s White Revolution in 1963, and the Presbyterian Mission’s Clinic of Hope was absorbed by the Tehran School of Social Work in 1970. Presbyterian evangelicals, American aid workers, and Iranian reformers had different understandings of development, but all believed in the rightness of their missions and supported the construction of the Pahlavi welfare state.

Because evangelical revival was not forthcoming in Iran, American Presbyterians contributed to a new mission for development. Whereas the old mission was hegemonically Christian, the Presbyterians’ new mission was pluralistic and included Americans and Iranians of different faith traditions. This chapter demonstrated that literacy and social work were integral to the new mission. The following chapters argue that the new mission became manifest in two additional forms: schools and associations. The Presbyterian Mission’s schools—Community School and Iran Bethel—and the binational associations that linked Americans, Iranians, and their respective missions, were meaningful outlets for the transnational sociality and collective belonging that the Del Be Del network sought in Tehran during the mid-twentieth century.