Chapter 5 “These Young Persian Friends of Mine” Associationalism in US-Iran Relations

Cultural Internationalism and World Order

The early history of American-Iranian associationalism was an organic affair that involved two separate yet related transnational communities. The first was “religious,” consisting of American and Iranian Protestants in Tehran. The second was “binational” and included Presbyterian administrators in the United States, American academics, and their Iranian friends of power and influence in the late Qajar and early Pahlavi periods. Through the 1920s, both forms of associationalism were private efforts rather than affairs of state. That changed in the 1940s when Allied armies occupied Iran during the Second World War. The US government’s strategic interest in binational associationalism introduced uncomfortable and unresolved points of overlap between “cultural internationalism” and “world order.”¹⁶

American Protestants introduced the YMCA model of associationalism to Tehran between the Constitutional Revolution and the First World War. During the early twentieth century, Iranian anjoman culture took off, and Tehran had a YMCA by the 1910s. Christian associationalism mixed the old and new missions because it offered the evangelists an opportunity to expand their flock and it gave the friendship gospelers a chance to live out their modern witness. However, Christian associationalism often involved a tug-of-war between the old and new missions. For example, in 1917 missionaries reported that “the YMCA has had a place in the Evangelistic report for several years” but “it can scarcely claim such a place this year.” The reason was because “officers were elected who maintain that evangelism is the province of the church, and that the work of the YMCA should be more distinctly social.” Despite debates over the Tehran YMCA’s mission in the late 1910s, Christian associationalism flourished in Tehran as the Americans ran “Brotherhoo[d]s for boys” and Iranian Christians hosted “parlor meetings” at their homes.¹⁷ In the early 1920s, Presbyterian associationalism resembled a house church movement and was a masculine counterpoint to the early women’s work in South Tehran, as “small groups of Christian men … met regularly in three separate neighborhoods of the city for Bible study and for interesting non-Christians in Christianity.” In the 1920s, the Presbyterian Mission restored its standing with what was known as the “Persian Young Men’s Association.”¹⁸

During the interwar years, the Presbyterians were involved with multiple YMCAs in Tehran. One was at Alborz College, where President Samuel Martin Jordan hired Elgin Sherk to run the YMCA program based on the model of the college’s stateside sponsor, Lafayette’s Brainerd Society.¹⁹ There was also the “senior” or “city” YMCA. This was the original association, and it included members of the Evangelical Church and its social network. In 1930, there were more than sixty members, and the officers were all Iranians from the polyglot Christian community. There was a missionary administrator, but by the beginning of the 1930s “his advice is becoming less and less needed.” The group hosted discussions and lectures, and its facilities included a library and game room that were open to members. The city YMCA also offered English classes for nonmembers, organized athletic events, and introduced new forms of “fellowship” to generate revenue and grow the association. Through these and other activities, “warm friendships are growing” and “a Christian social life is being developed.” According to the missionary and church leader William Wysham, “It would be hard to overestimate the value of the YMCA.”²⁰

Presbyterian evangelicals were also involved in the creation of the first American-Iranian friendship society that was understood in “binational” instead of “religious” terms. The Board of Foreign Missions of the Presbyterian Church in the United States of America (PCUSA) was, from 1891 to 1937, headed by Robert Elliot Speer, a lay administrator and modernist on interwar religious questions.²¹ Speer and the Presbyterian Board of Foreign Missions in New York enjoyed friendly relations with the Iranian diplomats of the late Qajar and early Pahlavi eras. The Imperial Legation of Iran was at 1513 Sixteenth Street, Northwest, in Washington, DC, and the consulate in New York City at 225 Fifth Avenue was just blocks from the Presbyterian Board of Foreign Missions at 156 Fifth Avenue. From these places, Iranian diplomats moved freely between the seat of the US government and the capital of American finance and culture.²² While the job of a diplomat is to advance the raison d’état, the atmosphere of goodwill that prevailed internationally during the interwar years enabled activity below the level of the state and, in 1925, facilitated the establishment of binational sister societies in New York and Tehran.

Hossein Ala was the central figure in both societies. He was a Qajar aristocrat and “renaissance man” who dutifully served the Pahlavis and held so many positions that he was, prior to his retirement and death in the 1960s, “a family heirloom” at the Royal Court. In addition to the security that royal protection gave him in Iran’s rough-and-tumble political scene, and the respect he earned from peers for his manner and sophistication, Ala was a decades-long advocate of Iran’s tilt toward the United States in foreign policy. He may have been “pro-American,” or perhaps he was simply an Iranian nationalist who understood Washington as a potential balancer in international politics. Whatever the case, he was the Iranian driver of binational associationalism with the United States.²³

In the early 1920s, Ala was the senior diplomat in Iran’s US legation. Ala defined his mission as a “humble endeavor to draw closer the ties between the United States and Persia.”²⁴ That mission had tangible objectives, mainly the acquisition of American economic assistance. In 1923, the Iranian minister organized a banquet to honor an American member of Arthur Millspaugh’s first economic mission, the most significant achievement of Ala’s first diplomatic stint in the United States.²⁵ Another major event came in April 1926, when Iranian diplomats invited their American supporters to a celebration of Reza Shah’s coronation and the establishment of the Pahlavi Dynasty.²⁶ Much of Ala’s mission dealt with soft power and public relations because, at the time, Iran did not control its own image in the United States. “Hitherto the picture has, unfortunately, been painted in too gloomy colors,” Ala wrote to Speer in the early 1920s. “It is time to brighten it up a bit and let Americans know more of Persia.” This should be done “through direct channels” between Americans and Iranians, “instead of allowing the British press to have the monopoly of spreading rumors calculated to damp American feelings for my country.” Ala found allies among Presbyterian evangelicals, those “friends and well wishers of Persia” whose international lives of service “manifested warm feelings for my country,” and among other Persophiles in the United States.²⁷

In 1925, they established the “Persia Society.” Based in New York, its charter members saw commercial, educational, intellectual, and artistic exchanges as means “to promote the sympathy existing between the United States and Persia and to make them better known to each other.” The Iranian minister in Washington, Hossein Ala, was the honorary president, but most of the officers were Americans. They included Orientalist scholars such as Henry Pratt Judson of the University of Chicago and A. V. Williams Jackson of Columbia University, and others such as Morgan Shuster who all, for their own reasons, had stellar reputations in Iran.²⁸ The PCUSA’s Board of Foreign Missions endorsed the society, with Speer expressing “good will toward anything that is seeking to be of service to Persia” as he labored to find Pahlavi Iran “new friends and sympathisers.”²⁹ The New York society did not last long, but it created lasting friendships between people. “Foremost among those friends is yourself,” Ala confided in Speer, for having “consistently shown goodwill towards Persia and exercised your great influence in her favor.” If Ala had friends among the American colony in Tehran, in the United States he found the “people so warm-hearted and sympathetic.” Consequently, Ala told Speer in the mid-1920s before departing the United States, “I shall certainly carry away with me the very pleasantest recollection of my sojourn in a country so hospitable and friendly.”³⁰ This was an important experience that the young Hossein Ala carried with him into his long career as palace prince of the Pahlavi shahs.

In Tehran, Ala channeled the emergent Pahlavi mission into the Iran-America Relations Society. The founders traced its genesis to May 1925, when the American art historian Arthur Upham Pope delivered a lecture at Tehran’s Society of National Heritage, a group that saw Iran’s pre-Islamic past as a template for the twentieth-century nation-state. The writings of Pope and other American Orientalists on the splendor of ancient Persia provided them with a usable past.³¹ Pahlavi historiographers noted that the future Reza Shah was at the lecture, just a year before he founded the new dynasty, and that Pope’s message “stimulated interest in the creation of the Iran-America Relations Society, whose founding fathers included some of the most respected personalities of that day.”³² After Pope concluded his lecture, Ala gave “an eloquent speech of thanks in which he proposed that a society be created in Iran to promote friendly relations with America.”³³ In this mission, Ala was joined by Iranians who understood the creation of the Pahlavi Dynasty and the first Millspaugh mission of 1922–27 to be events of major historical import. Some of the charter members, such as Isa Sadiq, a graduate of Teachers College at Columbia University and one of the most influential Iranian educationalists of the twentieth century, remained active in binational associationalist efforts during the Second World War and beyond.³⁴ When associationalism was revived during the Second World War, there were separate yet overlapping communities—one Christian and the other binational—united in the belief that friendship between the United States and Iran would behoove the people of both nations.

The Christian associationalists in wartime Tehran consisted of the alumni of Alborz College, which closed in 1940, and their mentors. In 1941, Arthur and Annie Boyce were involved with “all sorts of organizations and groups,” and they began “to work systematically” with the alumni of Alborz College and other Presbyterian Mission schools.³⁵ In 1942, the Boyces hosted seventeen class reunions, where the alumni “got a huge kick recalling high school [and college] days” and had conversations about how “to live out the fundamental truths they learned at the American School.”³⁶ While not all alumni attended the reunions, the Boyces counted nearly one thousand graduates of the Presbyterian education network. Whatever their vocation, the Boyces were pleased to stay in touch with former students and see that many were “touching Iranian life at a multitude of points” and “doing their part in raising it to a higher level.” At one point, this group was holding “weekly meetings and monthly parties,” and was otherwise “keeping alive the American school spirit and renewing their youth.”³⁷

Presbyterian Mission school graduates, such as the men of the Saleh family, were also active in national and international conversations. Allahyar Saleh was born in 1897 and moved to Tehran to attend Samuel Martin Jordan’s school. So did his brothers—Ali Pasha and Jahanshah—all of whom remained “very friendly toward the United States.” Because Allahyar was fluent in English, he worked as an interpreter for US diplomats in Tehran in the 1910s and 1920s. During the Second World War, Saleh headed the Ministries of Finance, Interior, and Justice in multiple governments. He was also among the Iranian delegates at the San Francisco conference on the United Nations in April 1945. To Americans, Saleh was “an incorruptible patriot, and a good friend of the United States.”³⁸ The US State Department reported that Saleh was “well known to the Division of Near Eastern Affairs” because “he was educated in American mission schools … and is favorably disposed toward the United States.” Indeed, US officials were struck by Saleh’s “pro-American attitude.”³⁹ While he was never afraid to criticize US policies, he was an “erstwhile friend of America.”⁴⁰

Saleh and other Iranian friends of the United States were, in the 1940s as in the 1920s, associated with Arthur Millspaugh, then in Iran on a second mission to reform Iran’s financial system.⁴¹ Millspaugh did not represent the Presbyterians or Pahlavis, but the US government. While the Allies were united in the war effort, “The three powers were not united in the carrying on of war publicity work in Persia.” According to Millspaugh, “There were in appearance three wars going on,” and when compared to those of the Soviets and British, the American propaganda war was “rather vaguely outlined.” Moscow established the Iran-Soviet Cultural Relations Society and London had the British Council. The Allied occupation made associationalism strategically significant for Washington, too, and US government men in Tehran searched for ways to make “gestures calculated to cultivate Persian friendship” that were actually “competitive and emphasized national rather than international purposes.” Millspaugh recalled that, in 1943, “the American Minister and a group of Persians revived the … Society, which had been organized during my previous service.”⁴²

Arthur Boyce reported on the same scene in summer 1943: “The increasing number of Americans in the country has brought about the revival of a society in which I was interested years ago.” Boyce was proud to report that “the Iran-America Relations Society has been revived.” He was secretary of the executive committee, which included Iranian elites who, despite the wartime occupation, continued to express friendship toward the United States. The group met for two years at Iran’s National Bank until March 1945, when they moved to a property on Manouchehri Avenue near the British embassy. Rather than identify the Iranian members by name, Boyce thought it best in the wartime context to relay their positions in government to his superiors. They were statesmen who served at various points in the Iranian parliament and as ministers of education, finance, and justice; the head of Iran’s National Bank—Abolhassan Ebtehaj—was the society’s treasurer and initial host. During the war, some members organized cultural events for American soldiers in Tehran, and others worked concurrently with a humanitarian group known as the Iran-America Relief Committee. “It is altogether,” Boyce wrote of his associationalist activity during the war, “a project in the promotion of international relations which seems especially worthwhile.”⁴³

The Iran-America Relations Society was just that: a state project in international relations. Donald Wilber—then in Iran with US wartime intelligence and later an architect of the 1953 coup—identified himself as one of five Americans involved in the society’s reestablishment in 1943. He recognized Boyce as “secretary of the original Society” and the only missionary formally involved. Boyce and Wilber cooperated with two US diplomats and Norman Schwarzkopf Sr., leader of an advisory mission to Iran’s gendarmerie who was, like Wilber, later involved in Cold War intelligence. With the exception of Boyce, these Americans were a decidedly different bunch than the associationalists of the 1920s. However, there were sources of continuity between the 1920s and 1940s. For example, Iranians such as Hossein Ala and Isa Sadiq remained involved over the decades. To Wilber, Sadiq was “a good friend of mine” and Ala was “the most perfect gentleman I have ever known.” The mission of the Iran-America Relations Society in the 1940s also remained the same, namely “to inform Americans about Iran, and Persians about the United States.” Finally, Wilber, Boyce, and their Iranian friends knew they were building on an earlier precedent, with their anjoman “envisaged along the lines of an organization founded … in 1925.”⁴⁴

Whatever the sources of continuity, the Iran-America Relations Society was reborn, not in the context of interwar internationalism, but during the US occupation of Iran. Prior to the Second World War, Presbyterians, professors, and museum curators in New York were more interested in Persia than were politicians and diplomats in Washington. Then, during the war, Americans such as Donald Wilber crossed the public-private line and “made a calculated effort to intrude upon the stratification of Persian society.”⁴⁵ Moving forward, power politics informed American-Iranian associationalism. One of the Iran-America Relations Society’s first diplomatic acts was to present a gift to President Franklin Roosevelt, in Tehran for a wartime summit in late 1943. Roosevelt thanked the Iranian associationalists for “welcoming me to your country and extending the wishes of your Society for the success of the work which we are undertaking within the warm hospitality of Iran.” Roosevelt professed that “the atmosphere of friendliness and good will … has contributed materially to the success of our efforts.”⁴⁶

Alborz Foundation

The Del Be Del network reimagined its associationalist mission after the Second World War. In July 1945, an American missionary cited the Gospel of Matthew in an exposition on “friendship evangelism.” The missionary differentiated associationalism from proselytizing, which they considered “a kind of religious imperialism.” To be sure, Christian associationalism fused the old and new missions, with the aim of creating space for evangelicals to live a “Christlike life” among friends. However, the discourse of friendship’s savoir faire in Tehran pushed Presbyterian associationalism toward a distinctly new mission. Whatever its form, if “its chief instrument is friendship,” at least to the missionary writing in 1945, “it might well be called FRIENDSHIP EVANGELISM.”⁴⁷ After the Second World War, the Presbyterian Mission’s instrument for promoting friendship was the Alborz Foundation.

In 1947, the Presbyterian Mission opened the “Alborz Foundation for Iranian Students.” The constitution described it as “a center for wholesome and creative social and recreational activities” and “informal Christian education for Iran.”⁴⁸ Its mandate, as the flag-bearer of the “Alborz” name and beneficiary of its trust, was “to carry on … in the tradition and spirit of the former Alborz College.” The foundation had different homes until the late 1950s, when it moved to the corner of Shah Reza and Farvardin Avenues, “with a view to greater service to the University of Teheran.”⁴⁹ The Alborz Foundation’s most popular draws were its study abroad counseling program and English-language classes, and it carried the YMCA tradition into the postwar years to reach the men and women in the marketplaces and squares of postwar Tehran.

It was Arthur Boyce who, during the early 1940s, first found demand for a student-oriented center that was not a school. In January 1941, when most missionaries of his generation were departing Iran, Arthur and Annie Boyce returned from furlough. They had started their careers in Iran decades earlier, and, as longtime educators at Alborz College and contemporaries of Samuel Martin Jordan, the Boyces lamented the school’s closure the previous summer, writing that “the work of most of our life time” was “taken from our hands, never to be returned.” In this new environment, however, they were surprised to find “new openings on every side.”⁵⁰ Annie Boyce’s letters reveal the nature of her husband’s work during the 1940s. She saw that “the matter of reopening schools has not progressed,” but she also saw that there was “an epidemic of young men wanting to go to the USA.” Arthur spent two busy mornings a week with such students. According to Annie, “My husband is continually pounding his typewriter” writing letters “to some college or university.” Despite expectations to the contrary, “the stream of students who went to study in the USA and come to Arthur for counsel keeps up amazingly.”⁵¹ In 1947–48, he assisted six hundred students. That year, Arthur Boyce decided it was time for a changing of the guard. “I am turning this part of my work over to Mr. Hulac,” Boyce informed the board, “with the belief that his contacts with YMCA and other Christian groups in American colleges will make this help to these students more and more effective.”⁵²

In the place of the Jordans and the Boyces was Hulac’s generation, which would define the mission of postwar associationalism. Charles Hulac was a Nebraskan with a divinity degree who was active in the American YMCA. Hulac had a long career, and his time with the Presbyterian Mission did not last more than three years.⁵³ But they were significant years, during which time the Alborz Foundation director in Tehran received funding and instruction from the Alborz board of trustees in New York. In December 1946, Hulac met with the board chair, Ralph Cooper Hutchison, and board members Walter Groves and Herrick Young, all of whom were former faculty at Alborz College who transitioned to professional life in the postwar United States. With the old college closed, but with money to spend and a mission to pursue, they gave Hulac marching orders to reboot the Alborz experiment in Tehran.⁵⁴ Rather than a college, Alborz was now a foundation, with a mission to reach the youth of Iran, and from 1947 to 1950 it was under the direction of Charles Hulac.⁵⁵

The Alborz Foundation was coeducational, and Hulac’s first Iranian contacts were male and female students of the pre-1940 Presbyterian education system. Cyrus Samii and Houchang Pirnazar were among Hulac’s first Iranian friends. They were at Alborz College when it closed and were, in the late 1940s, at Tehran’s Teacher Training College. A third teacher-in-training, Samine Baghcheban, ensured that “from the first day the group has been co-educational.” Some of the Presbyterian Mission’s senior members were reluctant to bring together young Iranian men and women in Tehran’s public sphere. Baghcheban warned the old men that “the girls who have been participating in the activities thus far are very much interested …, and that it would not be wise at this point to separate the men from the women.” The argument was that, because Presbyterian Mission schools had alumni and alumnae, many of whom were at the Teacher Training College, which was coeducational, the Alborz Foundation’s clientele would necessarily include men and women. It was an important conversation for American evangelicals and three non-Christian Iranians to have in spring 1947, and the Alborz Foundation would—like Community School—remain a coeducational institution throughout its existence.⁵⁶

The Alborz Foundation’s modus vivendi changed in 1948. This was when Hulac began “getting under the load of helping the Iranian Students who are interested in studying in America.” He was convinced that he could, like Boyce, help “prepare the way for a cordial reception for these Iranian Students and also for a wholesome time of it while they go to an American College.”⁵⁷ So it was that Hulac “fell heir to the job of counselling with students who desire to study in the United States.”⁵⁸ However, while Boyce’s approach had been relatively effective but informal, Hulac’s was a professional operation with a structured program.⁵⁹ For the first time in Tehran, a Presbyterian Mission institution—as opposed to an individual missionary—was advising students interested in studying abroad. Upon taking up this work, Hulac “learned that all was not moonshine and honeysuckles on the mission field.”⁶⁰ He was, compared to missionary careerists, “young and inexperienced,” but Hulac and his backers in New York believed that he had the fresh thinking that was needed but missing in the “old-guard.”⁶¹

Maybe so, but Hulac’s interpretation of mission, which was decidedly new and conspicuously American, was a problem for some of the old-guard members of the Presbyterian Mission. In addition to thinking that the Alborz Foundation was too secular, they were suspicious of Hulac for attempting to “gear in a high powered YM-YW [Young Men’s and Young Women’s Christian Association] social and recreational program to the new and untried modern social situation and life of this land.” According to one longtime missionary, “We are hardly out here … just to highly finance a very fine club for older atheistic and agnostically inclined university students.” For this reason, he thought “Hulac made some serious mistakes.”⁶² Another line of critique related to the Alborz Foundation’s focus on shipping young people out of Iran. William Miller thought it was misguided to focus on the English language and study abroad because both encouraged young Iranians to go to the United States. “Would it not be better to put less emphasis in the Alborz program on the English language, and more on Persian?” On the point of study abroad, Miller asked, “Would it not be more worth while to spend this time and effort in giving counsel as to how to live usefully and happily in Iran?”⁶³

In addition to these critiques, many American evangelicals embraced the discourse of Christian friendship but not friendship institutions because, during the Cold War, such work pitted religious and national identities uncomfortably against the other. Hulac had no such qualms. Behind the pulpit, Reverend Hulac offended traditionalists when he painted “scenes in American history” that “brought out how democracy and Christianity go hand in hand.”⁶⁴ Hulac also found “satisfaction” in “making a host of friends amongst the Americans who are stationed in Teheran for Diplomatic and Military work.”⁶⁵ US consular officials happily relied on the Alborz Foundation to administer the English-language examination to students who sought to go abroad, but such forms of public-private partnership led Hulac’s colleagues in the Presbyterian Mission to charge him with being “a functionary of the American Consulate.”⁶⁶

William Miller was particularly concerned. “Great care should be exercised that the [Alborz] Foundation does not become the tool for political propaganda,” and Miller thought Hulac crossed a line. “There was [a] time when … our Mission was trusted by the Iranians because they felt we were not connected with a country that wanted to dominate Iran. That time has passed.” Miller felt the “political breeze” shifting, and, even before Mohammad Mosaddeq’s premiership, “most of the Americans in Iran are suspected of being related to the program of the American government.” In the most basic sense, Hulac’s line of work made it difficult for evangelicals “to conduct our work in such a way that fair-minded Iranians will be convinced that our purpose is not political but spiritual.” Embracing the US government could be a liability, and Miller thought it best, and possible, to separate nationality from evangelicalism.⁶⁷

That was not possible, but the Alborz Foundation underwent important changes in the early 1950s that clarified its mission for subsequent decades. Hulac departed Iran in 1950, and when his resignation was accepted that April, the Alborz board of trustees in New York began the process of dissolving itself.⁶⁸ In July 1951, the US government’s Iran-America Society took over the Alborz Foundation’s counseling program for US-bound students. During the last half of 1951 alone, nearly two thousand students visited the Iran-America Society.⁶⁹ With Hulac’s departure and the transference of the student counseling services to the US government’s public diplomacy apparatus, the Presbyterian Mission embraced the Alborz Foundation as one of its major institutions in Tehran. Consequently, the 1950s and 1960s brought new vistas for the Alborz Foundation as a Christian association that, in Tehran, was understood to be American.

The Alborz Foundation’s directors and employees were evangelicals committed to promoting American culture in a cosmopolitan Christian environment. This was true for Hulac’s immediate successor, a West Virginian named Thomas McNair. He found that students came to the Alborz Foundation, “not because we are Christian but because we are Americans.” Amid the superpower competition, he continued, “America is a great utopia to them.”⁷⁰ While skepticism predominated within the Presbyterian Mission, McNair believed that the Alborz Foundation might as well “make hay while the sun shines.”⁷¹ Sherman Fung, one of the longest-serving Americans at the Alborz Foundation, shared McNair’s understanding of mission. Born in San Francisco’s Chinatown, Fung was a religious worker whose witness in Tehran reflected his education at two very different institutions: the University of California Berkeley and Wheaton College.⁷² His letters paint a portrait of a missionary keenly aware of the church’s worldly mission. He wrote home about “the sleek looking Pepsi Cola bottling plant” near the Tehran airport, new double-decker buses from London, the introduction of television, and the construction of a mosque at the University of Tehran.⁷³ He also listened to and learned from the people around him, which included a much larger cast of characters than most Americans encountered in the city. Associationalists such as Fung were missionaries, but they were “jet worlds removed from the common conception of an evangelist whose travelling equipment was limited to Bible and hymn book.” The new mission required evangelicals to study other religions and understand theories on communism and development “because no individual can exist in isolation.” At the height of the Cold War, the associationalists at the Alborz Foundation understood that “this ‘one-world’ approach is necessary.”⁷⁴

With this mission, Christian associationalists continued their program of friendship evangelism in Tehran through the entirety of the Pahlavi period. An important development came in the late 1950s, when the Alborz Foundation moved to a property across from the University of Tehran. According to Frank Woodward, the director at the time, the move marked “the biggest forward step in its history.” This was important because it meant that “the Foundation will be able to concentrate on serving and winning those for whom the former Alborz College existed and for whose sake this present venture was begun.” The new building was spacious and, so its Presbyterian sponsors believed, fostered “an atmosphere of friendly exchange and of mutual respect for individual differences of opinion.” The directors of the 1960s led cultural initiatives designed to expand the reach of the Del Be Del network into the university neighborhood.⁷⁵

The Alborz Foundation’s first three years in the late 1940s under Charles Hulac marked “years of tentative, uncertain, experimental existence.”⁷⁶ However, in the 1950s and 1960s, Alborz Foundation directors used his associational model to offer a wide and steady palette of cultural programming. It included everything from chapel services and religious study groups to recreational activities and film screenings. But it was the English classes that sustained the foundation’s “involvement in the ongoing life of this metropolitan center.”⁷⁷ The foundation’s per-term capacity was 200 in 1956, but that number grew to 375 in 1961 and 500 in 1966. With four terms per year, Alborz serviced two thousand young Iranians annually in the mid-1960s. At this point, most students were under the age of twenty-four; 37 percent were enrolled in an institution of higher education and 71 percent were women. A cross-section of Tehran came through the doors. One director recalled working with “mostly students but also cooks of the royal family, a consul general of one of the embassies, [and] an atomic research scientist.”⁷⁸

As with the other institutions of the Presbyterian Mission, the Alborz Foundation evaded integration and remained nominally independent from the Evangelical Church of Iran after 1965. However, and as with the other institutions, the Alborz Foundation became increasingly Iranian after the closure of the Presbyterian Mission. The first move in that direction occurred in 1967, twenty years after Charles Hulac established the experimental student center, when the Alborz Foundation was renamed the Armaghan Institute. Its English-language section continued to offer courses, but under the purview of Iran’s Ministry of Education. Meanwhile, the student center facilitated outreach in the university community.⁷⁹ Paul Seto, a Presbyterian missionary, directed the institute during the transitional years between 1967 and 1972.⁸⁰ The second round of changes came in 1972, when the United Presbyterian Church in the United States of America (UPCUSA) disbanded the Commission on Ecumenical Mission and Relations (COEMAR) in New York. In Tehran, the Presbyterians leased Armaghan to two longtime employees who were leaders of the Evangelical Church of Tehran—Victor Odeh and Farshid Hakim—to run as an English-language institute and Christian resource center.⁸¹ For the rest of the 1970s, Iranian and American Christians cooperated in downtown Tehran to carry on the mission of Christian associationalism.⁸² When compared to the Clinic of Hope, Community School, and Iran Bethel, the Alborz Foundation was unique in that, in the 1970s, it was the only former Presbyterian Mission institution that acquired a direct association with the Evangelical Church.

Iran-America Society

Associationalism that was American but also Iranian became manifest in postwar Tehran at the Iran-America Society (IAS). Richard Arndt, a cultural diplomat there, recalled that IAS began as “an idea” about having “a room somewhere, where a club of friends came to meet.”⁸³ IAS, which closed when its employees were taken hostage in November 1979, was founded in April 1951. But it shared a genealogy with the Iran-America Relations Society, which had, since the Second World War, been meeting on Manouchehri Avenue.⁸⁴ Those involved in 1951 knew that, with the incorporation of IAS as an official binational association, “Iran has the distinction of having the first such society outside Latin America.”⁸⁵ Thereafter, the headquarters moved to the corner of Pahlavi and Shah Avenues, just a stone’s throw away from Central Compound and a block from Mohammad Mosaddeq’s precoup home.⁸⁶ Indeed, the original IAS compound was located in downtown Tehran.⁸⁷ The binational society became a hydra-headed monster with multiple locations in the 1960s and 1970s and eventually moved “up the hill.” But in the 1950s, as another cultural diplomat, Isabel Cumming, remembered, IAS was “really right down in the heart of [Tehran].”⁸⁸ Despite the Cold War superstructure, or perhaps because of it, Americans and Iranians channeled their associationalist traditions into the Anjoman-e Iran-Amrika.

Often called “The Anjoman,” IAS did not emerge out of the Cold War ether, but instead interfaced with the dowreh culture of postwar Iran. As described by the scholar-diplomat William Green Miller (not to be confused with the missionary William McElwee Miller), the size of a dowreh “is limited to those who can stand beside a buffet dinner table or sit along the walls of a living room.” One needed to be of “gracious manner” to participate in what was “an upper class social habit,” like a “social circle, salon or clique.” While the anjoman was a national pastime, the dowreh was for “those who have been educated abroad or who have lived for considerable periods in the West.” This was a popular form of association that linked one’s familial and professional networks with social circles that overlapped, as individuals explored interests from politics to economics and the arts with different sets of friends. While an anjoman had a calling card and a governance structure, a dowreh simply met regularly in private homes. The “dowreh system” was a means by which information circulated throughout neighborhoods and social groups in Tehran. It was also a means by which, in an authoritarian society absent of meaningful political parties, individuals organized to express themselves in the public sphere.⁸⁹ In the early Cold War, the dowreh system fed into the associationalist efforts of US diplomats who wielded state power to unite their different groups of Iranian friends into IAS.

The American circle of friends consisted of old-world sophisticates such as Amir Saham al-Din Ghaffari. Prior to the Cold War era, he was a preeminent scholar-diplomat.⁹⁰ He held various government posts in the 1940s, but Americans understood Ghaffari’s life as “a biography of a friend,” an “honorable man” long involved in binational associationalism and “very much interested in the Iran-America Society.” He died in 1951, shortly after its formation and his election as vice president. Upon his death, American friends credited Ghaffari for making the “cultural services” of IAS “famous throughout the country.” He was “fully adapted to European civilization,” having done graduate work in the social sciences and diplomatic service on the continent. Whether as a diplomat, a minister with a government portfolio, or in unofficial capacities with binational associations, Ghaffari “always tried to introduce other nations to Iran and Iranian culture.” Most significant, “His house was a social center for all his friends” where he “enchanted” Americans with his grace and sophistication and, in effect, ran a private dowreh “to acquaint the Two Nations better and better with each other.”⁹¹

IAS also drew support from Iranian women. Badr Bamdad was one of “Iran’s pioneer feminists.” Born during Iran’s Constitutional Revolution into a family supportive of it, she was a teacher, journalist, and organizer. In 1918, she was a student at the Teacher Training College writing columns for “liberal-minded periodicals and newspapers then appearing in Tehran.” One of the early interventions of “the indomitable young authoress” was to petition the government to publish a textbook on “domestic science” that, thereafter, went through numerous editions. This textbook earned the respect of Iran’s leading educationalists, most notably Isa Sadiq. In 1936, she was among the first twelve women to attend the University of Tehran. She earned a degree in education and later attended graduate school at Columbia University. In Iran, she became the principal of the Teacher Training College, was a longtime employee of the Ministry of Education, and eventually opened her own school. In Tehran, she was an activist for women’s rights and an anchor in the city’s associationalist life. According to a colleague, the “driving force” in her life was “intense love of her country” and “passionate conviction that Iranian women must be set free.”⁹²

More than most of America’s Iranian friends, Sultan Mahmoud Amerie and Torab Mehra spent formative years in the yengeh donya, or “new world.”⁹³ Amerie graduated from a Presbyterian high school in Tehran and, after the First World War, moved to the United States to attend school and work in Iran’s diplomatic corps. In the early 1920s, Amerie was admitted to Georgetown University’s School of Foreign Service. According to institutional records, he was the first international student admitted to the school, and after leaving Georgetown he helped strengthen US-Iran relations.⁹⁴ Equally an Americanophile, Mehra was known in the United States as a member of the 1943 class of the New York State University Downstate Medical Center in Brooklyn. In Iran, he was known to have “a picture of the Shah … on the wall of his office, and one of Abraham Lincoln on his desk.”⁹⁵ Prior to 1951, Amerie and Mehra were associated with various binational projects.⁹⁶

In Tehran, Amerie and Mehra were involved with a short-lived but important dowreh that, from 1949 to 1951, went by the name “Am-Iran Club.” This was an upstart group of young Iranians that, after attending some meetings of the Iran-America Relations Society, complained of its “domination by a few older members.” In a show of dissatisfaction, they “splintered off” to form the Am-Iran Club.⁹⁷ Like a Pan Am jet, the young “group of Iranians, who had just returned from the States,” had a fast takeoff. “They had new plans and started their activities with such zeal” that they pulled in many new members “who had the same hopes for the improvement of relations between Iran and America.”⁹⁸ The movers and shakers were Amerie and Mehra, among other new-world cosmopolitans who studied in the United States and, during the reign of the second Pahlavi shah, were part of Iran’s jet-set class.

The Americans with this dowreh included diplomats at the US embassy in Tehran. Marcia Morse (later Airis) was a Wellesley-educated musician who played in the USO (United Service Organizations) orchestra and, in 1951, was with a State Department delegation in Iran.⁹⁹ Mary Routh Buchanan was an attaché at the embassy alongside the former missionaries Robert Steiner and Frederic Taylor Gurney.¹⁰⁰ Steiner was born in Tehran and his father, Robert Sr., taught at Alborz College. Robert Jr. was in Naval aviation during the war and, thereafter, joined the Foreign Service. He held a graduate degree in international relations and was a diplomat in his birth country in the early 1950s.¹⁰¹ The most consequential American was Gurney. He was a teacher in the Presbyterian Mission’s schools during the 1920s, and in the 1930s, after earning a doctorate in chemistry from the University of Chicago, taught science at Alborz College. After working for the State Department during the Second World War, he spent fifteen years as a foreign service officer in the Iranian capital. He and his wife, Henrietta, were remembered decades later as being “instrumental” in bringing about the creation of IAS.¹⁰² That was because, in April 1951, these embassy attachés with cultural cachet in Tehran streamlined binational associational life under the auspices of the US government’s Iran-America Society, or IAS.

The spring of 1951 was a tempestuous time in US-Iran relations. In Tehran, the Majles passed the oil nationalization bill and made Mohammad Mosaddeq the Iranian prime minister.¹⁰³ In Washington, after years of confusion about if or how the United States should promote cultural relations with the world, President Harry Truman empowered the program for US Information and Educational Exchange (USIE) to step up American propaganda efforts abroad during the early 1950s.¹⁰⁴ In spring 1951, US diplomats and policy makers watched nervously as the Tudeh Party and National Front organized. In response, the State Department “agreed to furnish aid” to the associations in Tehran, but with one string attached: “that the two organizations combine.”¹⁰⁵ The specific reference was to the Am-Iran Club and the Iran-America Relations Society. More broadly, Washington agreed to infuse money into cultural programming because policy makers wanted to channel Tehran’s dowreh culture into a US-directed anjoman.

“The happy day at last arrived,” US diplomats reported from Tehran about the creation of IAS in April 1951. First came “the official amalgamation” on April 11, to which each group sent eight delegates. Ghaffari of the Iran-America Relations Society presided over the meeting in its “clubrooms” on Manouchehri Avenue, where Bamdad and the other delegates felt at home. The newcomers from the younger dowreh included such individuals as Amerie and Mehra. Most curious was the assortment of Americans at the founding ceremonies. Half of the delegates with Amerie and Mehra were Americans. They included Buchanan, Morse, Steiner, and Henrietta Gurney; her partner, Frederic Taylor, was the only American with the Iran-America Relations Society. The reception on April 12 attracted the who’s who of Tehran’s social circuit, including Del Be Del regulars with names such as Elder, Fisher, and Payne.¹⁰⁶

April 11, 1951 was not a happy day for everyone. To some, the US government’s attempt to coopt what was, up to this point, a relatively organic manifestation of binational friendship, signaled an inappropriate intervention in Iran’s internal affairs. Mohsen Raafat was a member of the Iran-America Relations Society who took offense at how the US government, through the Am-Iran Club, “muscled in” to the associational life of Tehran. A newspaper editor, he told readers of Raafat that his former association “has become a center of the secret activities of the American Embassy.” Raafat was so incensed that he called on the local police to “strictly control such a ‘cultural’ society and … not allow foreigners to function and expand their activities in this country under such deceptive names.”¹⁰⁷ These views were not uncommon because the capital city was abuzz with talk of oil nationalization and the nationalist agenda of Mosaddeq’s government. The convergence of, and tensions between, American and Iranian understandings of friendship was apparent to all in Tehran in spring 1951.

The business of managing IAS in this delicate international environment fell to US diplomats. The first IAS directors were James and Kathryn Passarelli. Unlike the Gurneys and other Persianists, the Passarellis were English teachers who bounced around the Spanish-speaking countries of the Western Hemisphere developing language institutes on behalf of the US government before landing in Tehran for two years to direct IAS. “We set up the whole center from scratch,” the Passarellis remembered of their time in Tehran in 1951–52. “We organized classes and did everything from writing textbooks to setting up kerosene stoves.” In contrast to the quiet and careful missionaries, James was “voluble and excitable” and the Passarellis were known to their hosts as “those crazy Americans.”¹⁰⁸ The Passarellis were employees of the State Department’s Division of Libraries and Institutes, and they reported to the IAS board members and elected officers. American employees were sent by the State Department to teach English, and Iranians taught Persian and ran the library. Members paid dues, students were charged tuition for language classes, and an annual “cash grant” came from Washington to support the operating budget and augment gifts from American and Iranian donors.¹⁰⁹

Though a creature of the Cold War, IAS was a binational society. The first leaders included, among others, Bamdad, Mehra, Sadiq, and Ali Pasha Saleh. The only American in the initial governance structure was Steiner, the English-language secretary who kept the US government abreast of plans.¹¹⁰ In 1952–53, there were 640 members, 591 of whom were Iranians.¹¹¹ After getting started, elections became formal and contested affairs. The IAS constitution was quite Presbyterian in calling for “a General Assembly of the membership” to meet annually to discuss committee reports and elect new officers. Of the twenty-one board members, no more than ten could be Americans. During the early years, the Americans were a mixed bunch that ranged from Foreign Service officers such as Gurney, to ambassadors, military advisers, and educational missionaries such as Richard Irvine. The executive board and IAS committees were exclusively Iranian affairs. Sadiq was a two-term president before turning over the reins in 1953 to Hossein Ala; Bamdad, Saleh, and Mehra stayed on as his lieutenants.¹¹²

IAS was elitist in the 1950s, but it had more than two thousand members in Tehran by 1959, and it reached many more Iranians in the subsequent decades.¹¹³ The diplomat Bruce Laingen, in Tehran shortly after the opening of IAS, recalled that “the binational center that was beginning to grow at that time … would eventually … become one of the largest in the world.”¹¹⁴ By 1964, the original location was the administrative center, with most work taking place elsewhere at one of three points of entry. The “cultural center” was in the Abbasabad neighborhood, and this was where one could view films, hear concerts, attend lectures, see exhibits, and enjoy other cultural activities. The building was constructed with US aid funds, and it was the first to split from the original location when it opened in 1960. The “academic center” was at 79 Shah Reza Avenue, in the so-called Aluminum Building. This location was primarily for English-language classes. Finally, there was the “student center,” with an impressive library and breakout study rooms, near the Alborz Foundation and with a view of the University of Tehran’s front gates.¹¹⁵ As remembered by the diplomat Isabel Cumming: “We had a building, a very small building and it was like a storefront, but it was maybe three or four stories high across from the university.”¹¹⁶ As IAS expanded, and as a new generation of Americans and Iranians went through the doors of the binational center, the discourse on friendship changed drastically, and not for the better.¹¹⁷

During the early Cold War, the American and Iranian associationalist traditions merged into the Iran-America Society. David Nalle heard many opinions about the United States as IAS director in the 1960s, but, whatever happened elsewhere in Tehran, he continued to have positive encounters “with the older people in the Iran-America Society downtown.”¹¹⁸ Through IAS, the US government attempted, as it did during the Second World War, to link friendship institutions with national security objectives during the Cold War. Yet, because of the Iran-America Society’s multiple genealogies, including the Del Be Del network and Tehran’s dowreh culture, it was a manifestation of a shared associationalist mission.

Remembering Howard Baskerville

While the previous three sections examined the institutions of Presbyterian and American associationalists and their Iranian friends, this section explores the meaning and feeling of the Del Be Del network’s professed friendship with Iran. In April 1959, Americans and Iranians invoked the memory of Howard Baskerville—a missionary who died fifty years earlier in 1909—to express their friendship during the Cold War. Baskerville was a Princeton alumnus and short-term missionary at a Presbyterian school in Tabriz. He is remembered because he fought and died fighting for the reinstatement of Iran’s constitution during a period of civil war.¹¹⁹ Fifty years later, in 1959, Presbyterian evangelicals, US diplomats, and Iranians who knew Baskerville collectively resurrected his ghost to transpose the allegedly friendly mission of an earlier generation of evangelicals onto the United States during the Cold War. Because of the relationship between mission and place, the meaning of Christian and American “friendship” was shaped within the Iranian discourse of doost, or “friend.”¹²⁰ There were, however, different meanings of Baskervillian friendship.

Three tropes informed the meaning of Baskerville’s memory in 1959. One was the Baskerville-idealist trope. He might have been a naïve American who did not understand his Iranian surroundings and acted on the impulses of youth or sincere convictions about being a citizen of the world. This Twainesque interpretation has merit, though the “innocents abroad” trope denudes the Baskerville drama of its political fundamentals.¹²¹ That leads to the Baskerville-militant trope. Some people speculated that he was an American “Lafayette.” But George Washington’s confidant had a strategic mind and was a successful professional soldier. Baskerville was a moralizing missionary teacher remembered for his death.¹²² As a militant, he might have been a “liberal hawk” pursuing a kind of “political humanitarianism,” or a “neoconservative” pushing a “freedom agenda” at all costs.¹²³ But the Iranian context mattered, and it produced the Baskerville-martyr trope. The historian Firoozeh Kashani-Sabet noted that, “in the midst of the civil war, the ‘missionary’ aim of American Presbyterians assumed secondary importance” to “the struggle between liberalism and despotism and the aspirations of Iranian nationalists.” Baskerville resonated with Iranians and was remembered among generations as the “devoted one,” an American “martyr” in Iran.¹²⁴ In 1959, these three tropes informed the meaning of Baskervillian friendship.

American memories of Baskerville changed at the height of the Cold War to conform to the discourse of friendship. In 1909, the Presbyterian leadership forced Baskerville to resign for taking up arms.¹²⁵ In 1959, however, members of the Del Be Del network took pride in their “young idealist” and “firebrand.” As one evangelical described it: “Former Iranian missionaries, saddened fifty years ago when Baskerville ‘threw his life away’ to aid people with whom he closely identified himself, ponder gladly each echo down the decades by Iranians who remember their friend.”¹²⁶ Even more striking was the view of the US diplomatic corps. In 1909, the consul in Tabriz, William Doty, told Baskerville that he had “no right to interfere with the internal politics of this country” and reminded him “to act as a teacher and not as a revolutionary.”¹²⁷ In 1959, another American consul in Tabriz, Harold Josif, along with a political officer at the US embassy in Tehran, initiated the fiftieth anniversary commemoration.¹²⁸ The reason for the change between 1909 and 1959 was that, during the Cold War, the discourse of friendship was embedded in binational associational life, but also because the Baskerville tale provided a usable past that buttressed US power in Iran. US diplomats considered commemorating many Americans “as a symbol of friendship and of a common struggle against tyranny and foreign aggression,” but the others “don’t have the same sex appeal as … Howard Baskerville.”¹²⁹

In 1953, after the public diplomacy experiments of the Roosevelt and Truman years, President Dwight Eisenhower created the US Information Agency (USIA), with in-country branches known as the US Information Service (USIS).¹³⁰ Conceptually, the Eisenhower administration distinguished “cultural affairs” from “information,” which connotated propaganda. The USIS focused on information and, with branches around Iran, its workflow was managed by a public affairs officer in Tehran. Equally important was the State Department’s International Educational Exchange Programs and, after 1959, the programs of the Bureau of Educational and Cultural Affairs, which were managed in-country by a cultural affairs officer.¹³¹ Binational societies were part of this public diplomacy machinery, and the executive director of the Iran-America Society attended weekly meetings with USIS in Tehran, coordinated with cultural affairs, and reported to Washington via the public affairs officer.¹³² The American mission oscillated between “culture” and “information,” but in Iran during the 1950s there was “a great deal of emphasis on the cultural function.”¹³³ This meant conveying imagined understandings of Americanism to global audiences. In some parts of the world, the messaging was on the merits of democracy or capitalism, and in others it was on race relations.¹³⁴ In Iran, US diplomats held exhibitions and commemorative events to put their imagined America on display. They also hailed historic personalities such as Benjamin Franklin and Abraham Lincoln as (white male) national archetypes that represented “the miracle of America” and its “militant idealism.”¹³⁵ Like Lincoln, Baskerville was shot and killed too young. If “Lincoln occupies a special place in the hearts of free men everywhere,” a US diplomat declared at the dedication of USIS-Tehran’s Abraham Lincoln Library, and if “the image of a gangling backwoods boy educating himself is one of the most vivid we have,” Baskerville fit the mold.¹³⁶ Therefore, April 19, 1959, “the fiftieth anniversary of Baskerville’s martyrdom,” provided “a fine occasion” for American propagandists.¹³⁷

The physical site of the Baskerville commemoration was the city of Tabriz. The setting was the Parvin School, a former missionary facility turned public girls’ school whose auditorium was rebranded “Baskerville Hall.” The full house heard speeches, put up a portrait of the fallen missionary, and laid a wreath on his grave at a local cemetery. Iranians of national and local import attended, including a group of merchants from the bazaar that presented an elaborate rug featuring Baskerville’s face. Ambassador Edward Wailes delivered a speech and lauded Baskerville’s sacrifice for “the actual freedom of the people of Iran in his own place and time,” inferring that his fellow Americans were doing the same in their own place and time. He was also pleased that so many Iranians “felt so keenly the nobility of Baskerville’s act.” While Wailes spoke on behalf of the US embassy, Sarah McDowell, a “missionary kid” in Tabriz in Baskerville’s day and later the editor of the Del Be Del newsletter, represented the Presbyterian Mission. Much older in 1959 than when she knew Baskerville in 1909, McDowell gave a rousing speech at the ceremony, moving fluidly between English, Persian, and the local Turkish language, after which she “drew more applause than the top brass.”¹³⁸ This was a solemn yet proud moment for the Del Be Del network and its extended family. Observers watched as “eyes misted over,” old friends “gazed down those long fifty years in memory,” and “a few elderly missionaries held a dewy-eyed reunion.”¹³⁹

The Baskerville commemoration was more than an event in Tabriz on April 19, 1959, however. For all the people who could not attend, USIS ensured that there was “Iran-wide exploitation of the ceremonies” through radio, newsreels, press releases, and other forms of media, and at places such as the Alborz Foundation and Iran-America Society. Especially important to reconfiguring Baskerville’s memory for the Cold War were the “prime Iranian movers” of the commemoration project: Sadeq Rezazadeh Shafaq and Hassan Taqizadeh.¹⁴⁰

Shafaq and Taqizadeh knew Baskerville when he was alive, and in 1959 Shafaq was a professor at the University of Tehran and Taqizadeh was a member of the Iranian Senate.¹⁴¹ Both of them contributed to a twenty-seven-page pamphlet about Baskerville that invoked the discourse of friendship to canonize their fallen friend and, through his memory, portray the United States as a friendly country with benevolent intentions toward Iran. Shafaq authored the pamphlet’s feature, an essay titled “Howard Baskerville: The Story of an American Who Died in the Cause of Iranian Freedom and Independence.” The original publication was bound in color with a cover featuring Baskerville’s face, and with photographs throughout the text. It was a “field publication” of USIS-Tehran, published in English and Persian by Kayhan Press on April 23, 1959.¹⁴²

The USIS pamphlet contained the three tropes of Baskerville as idealist, militant, and martyr. The idealist trope emphasized Baskerville’s Christian and American identities. Shafaq knew Baskerville was “a convinced Christian.” He was “a man of faith” at daily chapel and with “the Bible … always on his desk.” Rather than channeling his religiosity through the church, Baskerville’s was a new mission for education. Yet, “his way of life was a sort of Divine message to those associated with him.” Shafaq emphasized Baskerville’s religiosity, and he included in the pamphlet voices from the Del Be Del network such as Sarah McDowell’s. To Presbyterian evangelicals, Baskerville “had high ideals and was deeply religious.”¹⁴³ The Baskerville-idealist trope could be understood in religious and national terms, however, as seen in Shafaq’s conclusion about “the self sacrifice of an American Young Man.”¹⁴⁴

The front matter of the USIS pamphlet highlighted Baskerville’s idealism and his militant interventionism. The US consul in Tabriz, Harold Josif, wrote in the dedication that Baskerville acted on “the dictates of his conscience,” in contrast to Josif’s predecessor, who “solemnly” warned against involvement. However, six years after the anti-Mosaddeq coup, Josif understood the danger in remembering Baskerville’s militant side: “My predecessor was correct in insisting on the impropriety of interfering in the internal political affairs of other countries.” Josif added the qualification that, in 1909, Baskerville “was morally right in following his own conscience when he saw the issues before him so clearly.” As Josif saw it in 1959, “self-sacrifice has honored his name” and “history has vindicated his choice.”¹⁴⁵ Another piece of front matter was the foreword by Taqizadeh. He made the original comparison to Lafayette. His Baskerville was “a most sincere man, truly attached to the cause of liberty with a deep emotion.” Despite pressures to do so, “he did not change his resolution to fight for democracy.” Because “he did not waver for a moment and fought gallantly” and, ultimately, “gave his life in the defense of our nation’s liberty,” Baskerville “deserves our homage and gratitude as much as Americans keep honored the memory of Lafayette.”¹⁴⁶ While Taqizadeh compared Baskerville to Lafayette, Shafaq began his text with the heading—“Baskerville our Teacher and Commander”—and he was introduced by Josif as “one of Howard Baskerville’s pupils and close companions at school and in arms.”¹⁴⁷ The pamphlet in these ways offered variations on the Baskerville-militant trope.

Then there was the Baskerville-martyr trope. The most emotional invocation of friendship in the USIS-Tehran pamphlet was the retelling, by Taqizadeh and Shafaq, of Baskerville’s death and funeral in 1909. Readers of the pamphlet were reminded that Taqizadeh “delivered a speech at his grave and lamented the loss of that true friend of Iran.”¹⁴⁸ Shafaq was most affected, having been with Baskerville at his death, “stained by the blood of my teacher, my commander and my friend.” According to his recollection, “The whole city was stunned by the news of the death of the ‘young American,’ ” including Shafaq’s own mother, who was “in a state of undescribable affliction.” Baskerville’s loss was personal; she not only grieved for the loss of her son’s teacher, but also “for the mother who had lost such a son in a foreign land far from home.” The funeral was at the Presbyterian Mission church in Tabriz, not far from the site of the 1959 commemoration, and locals gathered in the streets to witness the procession to the graveyard outside the city. According to the pamphlet, it was not just confidants such as Taqizadeh and Shafaq, or Baskerville’s other “soldier-students,” who mourned the loss of their American friend: “Men and women, young and old, seemed afflicted and grieved.”¹⁴⁹

When read together, the idealist, militant, and martyr tropes in the Baskerville pamphlet spelled binational friendship within the context of the socio-affective memory moment of 1959. Shafaq and other Iranians propagated the “romantic” narrative of the late missionary as “a hero having dedicated himself to the freedom of the Iranian nation” with “sincerity and devotion.” Shafaq’s Baskerville was a friend who, “during this emotional time” in 1909, “resolved to go to the people and share with them their destiny.” For that reason, “he is living and will be living in our hearts and in our history.”¹⁵⁰ Such praises reinforced the perception that, while many Iranians distrusted US intentions, some welcomed the American presence in their country. To Americans, the Iranian discourse of friendship signaled that “there was great curiosity, and even nostalgia among the US-educated, about the US.”¹⁵¹

The Shafaq-Taqizadeh narrative was a genuine eulogy for a friend, but it was resourced and promoted by the US government because of the Cold War. US officials jumped on the Baskerville bandwagon, as they established a global network of defense treaties and supported Pahlavi authoritarianism in Iran, because they thought that the missionary’s memory “highlights on a sentimental plane the traditional interest of the United States in just government.” In telegrams to Washington, diplomats in Tehran were explicit in linking Baskerville’s memory to Cold War strategy, with one noting that it would be “purposeful to recall that an American gave his life in the sturggle [sic] of Iranians for freedom, and that in 1909 as in 1959 the Russians were on the side of oppression.”¹⁵² The anticommunist imperatives that informed Baskervillian memory-making resonated in Cold War America and among the elites of Pahlavi Iran.

After April 1959, the ghost of Howard Baskerville continued its long, strange memory trip. Eight months later, Shafaq’s essay was reprinted in an English-language Iranian newspaper. Future reissues ignored the USIS-Tehran pamphlet from April and cited the Tehran Journal of December 14, 1959 as the original location of the essay.¹⁵³ Years later, in 1976, when Mohammad Reza Shah put Empress Farah Pahlavi in charge of a committee to commemorate the American bicentennial, essays on famous personalities and tropes about friendship reappeared in a book that was edited by another friend of America, Ali Pasha Saleh. One of the chapters was a reprinted version of Shafaq’s 1959 exposition on Baskerville. Another chapter in the 1976 volume was Arthur Boyce’s essay on Samuel Martin Jordan, which was originally written in 1954, shortly after Jordan’s death. More than two decades later, Paul Seto provided a copy of the essay, which was presumably archived at the Alborz Foundation, to the bicentennial committee to commemorate the history of Alborz College.¹⁵⁴ The 1976 printings of Boyce’s and Shafaq’s essays introduced multiple generations of Americans to Jordan and Baskerville as friends of Iran, and both have been republished in the twenty-first century.¹⁵⁵ After 1959, it was clear to all that Baskerville “has been honored in Iran more than any missionary since Dr. Samuel M. Jordan.”¹⁵⁶

The Baskerville commemoration was an exercise in binational myth-making that accompanied the reinvention of American power in Iran. The scholar Mansour Bonakdarian noted that, in 1909, “The altruistic image of the United States in the Iranian nationalist imagination … was buttressed by the death of … Howard Baskerville.” During the Constitutional Revolution, he “was grandly mourned and eulogized,” and he “came to embody the presumed national trait of Americans as champions of the rights of oppressed people.” This perception was “reinforced” by subsequent events, so much that memories of American friendship became “part-truth part-legend.”¹⁵⁷ Similar to Bonakdarian, the historian Matthew Mark Davis employed the framework of memory to explain “the rise of the Baskerville legend.” Davis identified two “wave[s] of myth-making,” in 1909 and in 1959, and explained their problematic relation to both the Constitutional Revolution and Pahlavi Iran. For American evangelicals in Iran, Davis wrote, Baskerville’s legacy “highlights one of the contradictions of their ideology of mission.”¹⁵⁸ Friendship memories lent moral clarity to otherwise complicated historical and contemporary phenomena, but they also securitized the legacy of the Del Be Del network within the context of the American global mission in Cold War Iran.

The Christian, American, and Iranian associationalist traditions intersected with the discourse on friendship, and sometimes they became manifest in one place. This happened at the Presbyterian Mission’s Alborz Foundation on April 28, 1959, at the dedication of its building near the University of Tehran. Members of the Del Be Del network were joined by US diplomats and other Americans from the colony in Tehran. Distinguished Iranian guests included the foreign minister, officials in the Ministry of Education, Alborz College alumni, and Evangelical Church leaders. The Alborz Foundation’s lodestar, the former Alborz College professor Arthur Boyce, had four months to live, and he and Annie could not attend. In absentia, the group dedicated a library in his name, and “the Ministry of Education presented medals to Dr. Boyce and his wife for their services in the field of higher education,” which the US ambassador accepted on their behalf. One of Boyce’s Iranian friends read a poem in Persian. The theme of the poem was that, “although those who were the leading spirits of Alborz College are dead, their spirit lives on.”¹⁵⁹ The Alborz Foundation dedication ceremony represented the convergence of the Christian, American, and Iranian associationalist missions and was wrapped in the discourse of friendship.

The speakers at the ceremony, which was held in Tehran nine days after the commemoration of Howard Baskerville’s death in Tabriz, explained what “friendship” meant to the Del Be Del network. At the dedication in Tehran, Walter Groves delivered a speech, and after waxing nostalgic about the former Alborz College, where he had served as dean, he reflected on Baskerville and his memory. “Only a few days ago in Tabriz,” Groves declared, “all Iran paid tribute to … Howard Baskerville.” Groves was “certain” that Baskerville acted “as a Christian” when he “gave his life for the freedom of the Iranian people.” But Groves was a modernist who left the Presbyterian Mission for a career in higher education, and he and his colleagues were “Christian and American through and through.”¹⁶⁰ The discourse of friendship was Iranian, too. “Any courageous nation can today find the stimulation that goes with perils jointly shared with friends,” the shah wrote in the 1960s. “Just as a man has some friends upon whom he would especially rely in any crisis, so too have we.”¹⁶¹

The Alborz Foundation and Iran-America Society pursued different versions of the same mission, but they occupied a similar place in mid-twentieth-century Tehran. “The U.S.-Iran friendship development is going nicely,” a missionary at Alborz wrote of the Iran-America Society. “They have a purpose: friendly relations between the United States and Iran. We have one too: service as a witness to the greatest friend of all, Christ, the one who gave his life for his friends.” The associations of the Presbyterian Mission and the US government catered to the same clientele in the university neighborhood, but “there is room for both of us.”¹⁶² But there were important differences. Whereas the Presbyterian Mission ran a Christian association based on the YMCA model, Washington ran its own program through the public diplomacy apparatus of the US government. People forged meaningful relationships at these associations, but friendship institutions and friendship discourse were manifestations of the “cultural cold war” and the pinnacle of US global management.¹⁶³ While the discourse of friendship flattened the meaning of “America” in Tehran, “Iran” was a mix of inspiration and abstraction to the Del Be Del network in the United States, the subject of the next chapter.