Chapter 8

Hands of Ethiopia

This chapter focuses on the writing and reception of The New World of Negro Americans (1963) by Harold Isaacs, then a research associate at MIT’s Center for International Studies. He was appointed professor of political science soon after, that is, after MIT administrators and trustees sought to end the center’s relationship with the Central Intelligence Agency and build a political science department that would provide a recognizable academic home for its faculty.

Isaacs’s background, which I discuss below, goes far to explain the unconventional style, research strategy, and concerns of a book that ought to be better known today. The New World is the only analysis of the breakdown of the global norm of white supremacy by a white scholar at a leading center, in this case one recognized for its international communications research (the umbrella under which Isaacs did his work) and studies of economic and political development in the new states of Asia. Put slightly differently, he was the sole analyst to register and seek to allay the rising anxieties of leading U.S. officials (among other western elites), about the likelihood of future conflict expressed in the highly charged terms of race war. One of the key conclusions of the book and his subsequent articles on race and international relations is that although decolonization in Africa would not lead African Americans to launch a war of liberation of their own, decolonization was hastening the end of the Jim Crow era and whites should cease the fruitless and destructive opposition to enormous changes under way around the globe.

No professional political science (let alone international relations) journal in the United States reviewed the book, which is remarkable for several reasons. First, Isaacs shared the Ainsfield-Wolf Award in 1964 with Nathan Glazier and Daniel Patrick Moynihan’s Beyond the Melting Pot for The New World’s contribution to the understanding of racism. Second, his previous book, Scratches on Our Minds: American Views of China and India (1958) was reviewed in political science, area studies, history journals, and the popular press. In it he explored how negative perceptions of Indians and Chinese mattered to constructions of national identity and, much more tentatively, to foreign policy-making. That is, he admitted the difficulty of weighing these more intangible factors alongside the material considerations that guided the “leadership types” he interviewed.¹ Third, in The New World even more than in Scratches on Our Minds, Isaacs relied on a model—although he would never have used such a term himself—of the uniquely liberal national character of the United States that political scientists would affirm countless times in the years ahead.

It’s not possible to say why American political science and international relations journals ignored The New World of Negro Americans. The journal International Affairs in London took notice. Staughton Lynd praised it in the standard bearer of the anti-Stalinist left, Commentary, which was edited by intellectuals who were close to Isaacs and dreamt of the same pluralist and tolerant America to come. However, Isaacs’s study ignited controversy among African American intellectuals even before he finished it, as we will see, and it is only historians of black internationalism who seem to know the book now. His harshest critics were found on the political right; William F. Buckley’s review in the National Review is a good example. The revelation, however, is the response in the new “scientific” journal, Mankind Quarterly, founded in 1960, a place where biological racists in political science, national security studies, anthropology, and kindred quarters kept alive hope that the white Atlantic world order would be restored. The chapter concludes with a discussion of The Geography of Intellect (1963), by Isaacs’s critic, Nathaniel Weyl, and civilian strategist Stefan Possony, director of the Hoover Institution’s research program and a principal of the University of Pennsylvania’s new and overtly conservative Foreign Policy Research Institute. Cadres of the institute pressed the case for preserving colonialism intact in Africa, and as events moved in ways contrary to their realist prescriptions, they blamed the Eisenhower administration’s alleged anti-colonial biases.²

Subsequent generations of scholarship have affirmed Isaacs’s reading of the 1950s.³ His forthright support for African independence; his criticism of the Eisenhower administration’s role in aiding colonial and, in the settler colonies, racist orders; and, not least, his withering account in The New World of those who quit the United States out of some misplaced identification with (or blindness to) to the various dictatorships emerging in Ghana, Nigeria, and elsewhere all were consistent with his background and enduring political commitments. What requires some explanation is how a comrade of Leon Trotsky and onetime accomplice of the Chinese Communist Party’s struggle in Hankow turned up at the Center for International Studies and ultimately became an early member of MIT’s political science department.

Idol of the Tribe

In 1930, at age 20, the self-described politically naïve New Yorker set out for Hawaii, Manila, and ultimately Shanghai (“the farthest that it was possible to get away from where I was”) to try his hand at journalism. In China, Isaacs soon became friends with a revolutionary named Frank Glass, a Birmingham-born Trotskyist who had helped found and split with the South African Communist Party. Isaacs soon joined the side of the communists in their “struggle against the Kuomintang and the imperialists” by starting an English-language newspaper in Hankow, the China Forum. The 1930s was a decade of violent repression of Stalinists and Trotskyists, and Isaacs became a target of Chiang Kai-shek’s government, the British authorities, U.S. military intelligence, and the American consul general, although the extraterritoriality provisions then in force afforded him protection that was denied his Chinese comrades. In 1934, he split with his party backers, turned the press over to Glass and the other Trotskyists, and moved to Beijing to research his explosive history of the Stalinist betrayal of the revolutionary forces in the 1920s, The Tragedy of the Chinese Revolution, which came out in 1938, with an introduction by Trotsky himself.⁴

Isaacs and his wife Viola returned to the United States in 1935, where he remained active in Trotskyist circles (the U.S. Workers Party, later the Socialist Workers Party), while working in New York for Havas, the French news agency that had employed him in Shanghai. His extracurricular activities included running the party paper, Socialist Appeal, and writing for it and other venues using an expanded set of pseudonyms. Perhaps unaware of these details, his longtime MIT colleague Lucian Pye later mischaracterized Isaacs’s years in the sectarian trenches as a “period of withdrawal from activism.” Then again, having once helped Vietnamese Communist Ho Chi Minh escape from Shanghai, Isaacs’s battles with Brooklyn socialists and his assessment of the prospects of proletarian revolution might seem tame by comparison. He told the FBI that he quit the party in 1940. U.S. cultural historian Alan Wald says that until then, Isaacs remained loyal to the Cannon faction, that is, those who followed Trotsky’s line on support for the German-allied Soviet Union in wartime in a moment that had split the party.⁵

Isaacs stumbled a bit in his new and presumably unblinkered persona of a writer for CBS radio and, briefly, Lockheed before he joined Newsweek in 1943. He headed back to the Pacific in 1944 as a war correspondent and after the war continued to write on Southeast Asia among other assignments, until he resigned from the magazine in December 1949. Although he had passed a wartime U.S. army counterintelligence investigation, his reporting had won him a host of new official enemies. The Kuomintang banned him from China in 1945. And Isaacs got it right (or spoke from experience) about General Patrick Hurley (“a strange old man”), FDR’s envoy to the alleged democrat Chiang Kai-shek (a “racketeer, extortionist, and executioner”), in his 1947 book No Peace in Asia, where he wrote “All who questioned or criticized his acts were automatically Communists or traitors or, obviously, both.”⁶

As Cornell Law School professor and peace activist Harrop Freeman underscored, No Peace in Asia stood out both for its unflinching reportage of the brutality through which colonial rule was being reimposed with the aid of the United States and for its “political theorizing.”⁷ That is—and these are my words not Harrop’s—Isaacs sought to expose what was hidden in the turn to “power politics” and “security.” So in his discussion of the United States, he challenged the myth of American difference even before postwar academics (e.g., Daniel Bell, Louis Hartz) took Stalin’s old idea of “American exceptionalism” and ran with it. Likewise, his spare account of the United States as one more imperial power in Asia undercut much of the tortured logic in émigré Hans Morgenthau’s alternative to exceptionalism, namely the even more abstract, internally contradictory idea of the United States as not an imperialist (except when it was) but a “status quo power,” which he would unveil in his Politics among Nations the next year.

Isaacs’s criticism of U.S. policy cost him. The State Department refused him a passport in 1947 on the grounds that he was a “Communist-Defender of Leon Trotsky.” He obtained a new passport the following year, and in 1949, on his last trip to Asia for Newsweek, Isaacs interviewed Ho Chi Minh via clandestine radio. (He also smuggled funds from a supporter in Singapore to the families of Indonesia’s jailed nationalist leaders.) The French refused to allow him to enter to Indochina, but the interview also outraged the U.S. consulate at Hanoi. The State Department subsequently held up his passport again for six months in 1950, upending his planned research for a new book on south Asia that the Guggenheim Foundation had agreed to support.⁸ Then, in 1951–1952, as his name repeatedly surfaced in House Un-American Activities Committee hearings on the Institute of Pacific Relations and a Russian spy ring that purportedly was operating in wartime Japan, the FBI launched a new investigation of Isaacs that remained active until 1954.⁹

This background provides much-needed and heretofore missing context for key moments in Isaacs’s transition, as he put it, “out of the world of journalism…and into…a more permissive academic environment.”¹⁰ He had resigned from Newsweek but didn’t write the book for which he had a contract and a Guggenheim grant because it required him to be able to travel abroad. Instead he radically recast his 1938 Tragedy of the Chinese Revolution for the Hoover Institution, removing Trotsky’s introduction, excising his detailed analysis of the struggles of the “left opposition,” and appending a new conclusion titled “The Blind Alley of Totalitarianism” that was thoroughly out of step with the rest of the book. He published the latter as a stand-alone piece in The Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science for good measure. Was it an act of expediency in the face of McCarthyism? All we know is that he took it out of the 1961 edition and put one of the suppressed chapters back in as an appendix.¹¹

A fellow journalist told the FBI that Isaacs had not been able to find much work during his years as a freelancer.¹² An old friend, Edward Morrow, threw him a little business (“it did not amount to much”). So did MIT’s new Center for International Studies, which hired him to support the $1 million dollar grant by the Ford Foundation in 1952 that established the international communications program (and provided seed money for the center’s better-known turn to economic development), the first of its work that wasn’t sponsored by the CIA.¹³ Ithiel de Sola Pool, a Chicago-trained political scientist who, like Isaacs, was an ex-Trotskyist, was brought from the Hoover Institution to head the program.¹⁴ Isaacs joined Pool’s staff in 1953 where he began his research into the views of American elites about India and China and a second project on African Americans’ views of Africa, originally titled “Hands of Ethiopia.”

The story Isaacs later told in print of abandoning his work on decolonization in Asia and taking up the study of the “evolution of American society itself” emphasizes his internal intellectual development and renewed commitment to realizing the world promise of America’s “open society” at a critical moment. He said that he wrote “copiously” about U.S. policy in China and Korea and about the “McCarthyist spasm,” although I have been unable to find any example of the latter.¹⁵ There is plenty of evidence in his archive that he feared the new Eisenhower administration would make the same mistakes in Africa that Truman had in Asia due to its “European-centered myopia.” These were studies that Isaacs could do without a passport, and he did not leave the country again until 1957, when he went to Europe, and 1960, when he went to Africa long after the “spasm” had subsided. His views continued to evolve through this period, particularly as colonialism retreated and the Kennedy administration emerged as a champion of development aid to the Third World, for which the MIT center provided much of the brainpower. In 1965, the year he was officially made a member of the new political science department, he signed on to the campaign against “opponents of U.S. policy on the campuses.” They failed to grasp what those who were allegedly best positioned at the university—the political scientists, Asian studies scholars, and professors of international relations that Noam Chomsky called the “new mandarins”—knew to be right and necessary, namely launching the ground war and escalating the bombing campaign against the Vietminh and North Vietnam.¹⁶

Flawed Method, Bad Faith

In June 1961 at the fourth annual conference of the American Friends of African Culture in New York, Roosevelt University’s St. Clair Drake and the American Society for African Culture’s Harold Mann Bond declared war on Harold Isaacs and a second white reporter, Warren Russell Howe. Isaacs’s criticisms of American policy in support of the racist-colonial order went back almost a decade (he wrote that “the most dangerous threat of totalitarianism in Africa is not of Communist but of white European origin” in 1953), but he had just published the results of his meetings with African American expatriates and exiles in Accra and elsewhere in West Africa in a long New Yorker essay, “Back to Africa,” the month before. It focused on the shattered illusions of practically all the professionals, teachers, and “seekers” he met, many of whom left to escape racism in the United States only to discover “that he is much more alien in Africa. Whether he likes or not, he is American, and in Africa he becomes an American-in-exile.”¹⁷ Even an old friend, the lawyer Pauli Murray, one of the expatriates in Ghana and a key source for his reporting, thought he had gone too far. “You left the picture almost hopeless.”¹⁸

Then, just days before the American Society for African Culture meeting, the influential biweekly Reporter published a short hack job titled “Strangers in Africa” that one-upped Isaacs’s New Yorker article.¹⁹ It argued that because of the prejudices of Africans, posting African Americans to the newly independent states actually harmed U.S. national interests. The Reporter’s editor, Philip Horton, an ex-CIA Paris station chief and future professor of public diplomacy at the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy, had assembled the brief from the reporting of Russell Warren Howe, a longtime African correspondent who had covered the rise of Kwame Nkrumah from Accra (where he was declared persona non grata despite some early pieces in Nkrumah’s defense) and the downfall of Patrice Lumumba from Leopoldville. When Lumumba was murdered and demonstrators in New York had forced their way into a UN Security Council debate on February 15 and fought with police to protest the role of the UN and U.S. in the killing, Horton wanted a piece “as quickly as possible” that would show “the disillusion and setbacks experienced by many American Negroes working or traveling in Africa” and serve as “corrective to the quite vocal sectors of American opinion…which tend to romanticize and idealize African nationalism.”²⁰ The critique was overdetermined, given that American Society for African Culture founder St. Clair Drake, who had just returned to the United States after teaching in Ghana for three years, said that Horton had approached him for the same piece, for the same reason.

It wasn’t an accident, Drake said, that the pieces appeared when they did. Apparently many middle-class black and ruling-class white Americans feared the “identification of Negroes with Africans,” and black Marxists in Paris who denounced African Americans as “agents of imperialism” were just as confused. The history of pan-Africanism; its leading lights, Du Bois, Nkrumah, Garvey, and Padmore; and various phases and tendencies, including the founding of American Society for African Culture itself, in conjunction with the founding in Paris of the highly regarded Society of African Culture, demonstrated the irrationality the fear of an “Afro-American” identity easily enough. While Howe’s contemptible piece didn’t merit discussion, Isaacs’s various mistakes, methodological flaws, and overall artless reporting had the same effect of increasing “the fear in America of Negroes’ intense interest in Africa.” Drake added, “I am hoping that the author will do a Back to Africa Part II and make it very clear that he repudiates Russell Howe’s position and doesn’t like the use to which his article is being put,”²¹ For instance, the articles supplied fodder for the racists fighting to keep African Americans out of the United States Foreign Service.

His friend Rayford Logan, who attended the meeting, warned Isaacs about Drake’s paper. “The man is diseased. I had not noticed before the strange expression in his eye…. [He is] obsessed with a mania to attack you and Russell Howe.”²² Isaacs though took the high road in his response to Drake and two other critics, Bond, whose paper Isaacs had in hand, and New York state official Anna Hedgeman, whom Isaacs had met in Accra. “I don’t think I could quite undertake to meet people like Bond and Hedgeman and Drake at the levels of personalities. They are much too vulnerable. I have neither the interest nor the desire to add to their burdens…by indicating how sorry I feel for…them.” Their reactions confirmed his view of the “new kind of alienation…shared in varying ways by many, many others who do not share their particular sentimentalisms about Africa.”²³ One of his contacts, writer James Baldwin, made no secret of that despair over the lack of progress toward equality in the United States (“I expect nothing of this country”), neither had Frank Frazier and Kenneth Clark in private interviews. Frazier was considering exile in Africa and Clark was considering going to the West Indies (“You get awfully tired trying to save white folk’s souls,” Clark said).²⁴ However, Bond (“a sick old sentimentalist” according to Isaacs) said that blacks would have been primed to tell Isaacs “what that white man wishes to hear,” and, like Drake, he challenged Isaacs’s sample size. But no one really confronted the alienation argument head on.²⁵

The fallout continued as defenders and critics lined up and did battle. Logan’s friend, the increasingly conservative red-baiting editor of the Pittsburgh Courier, George Schuyler, wrote three consecutive columns supporting Isaacs. Martin Kilson, a young scholar who had trained at Harvard and had just returned from Sierra Leone and Accra, wrote to Frank Frazier, blasting Isaacs’s bad faith (“the deepening of whatever differences there are”), distortions, and shoddy scholarship, even as he acknowledged that “all is far from rosy as regards their [the American Society for African Culture’s] relations with Africa and Africans.”²⁶ Ironically, Mel Fox, the Ford Foundation program officer who oversaw African studies, compared Isaacs to Frazier for his forthright approach to a subject “that is becoming increasingly enmeshed in a kind of mass self-deception.”²⁷ Isaacs agreed to attend a meeting with his critics organized by the American Society for African Culture. He wrote a withering private postmortem, dismissing as without merit all the charges leveled at him, save “that what I had written was ‘destructive of negritude.’”²⁸ He would spend the rest of his academic career condemning the mysticism and racism that nationalism (“a miserable, leaky, ugly, stinking vessel”) everywhere seemed to depend on.²⁹

Isaacs published The New World of Negro Americans three years later with the New Yorker material included without reigniting the controversy. Instead, what engaged most reviewers were the long excerpts (“voices”) from the dozens of interviews Isaacs did with Bunche and other “leaders and top achievers.” Isaacs’s attempt to substantiate the argument about the consequences of decolonization and the transformation under way in African American “group” identity included close readings of black writers (Wright, Baldwin, Hansberry, Hughes, and Ellison) and an eye-opening account of the transatlantic reach of what today is known as the “long civil rights movement.” He also included his critique of the aging Du Bois, the intellectual most frequently evoked as an influence by his interviewees even though Isaacs said his books had sat unread on MIT’s shelves for decades.

The New World of Negro Americans garnered glowing reviews in major newspapers and leading journals of opinion. The longest and most thoughtful by far was by Amitai Etzioni, who taught sociology at Columbia University. More important for our purposes, Etzioni also was a research associate at Columbia’s Institute of War and Peace Studies.³⁰ Thus, a professor of international relations at the dissident edge of the discipline—he would soon become a founder of the new peace studies movement—engaged Isaacs’s account of shifting African American identity in the pages of the New York Times. Unsurprisingly, Etzioni focused on Isaacs’s argument about the impact of the Cold War on desegregation. Etzioni underscored the problems with Isaacs’s underspecified structural account. Isaacs saw fear as the primary factor that was driving change that he understood primarily as a psychological process that would “more or less by itself suffice to undermine the walls of segregation,” Etzioni wrote.³¹

Fear was not enough, and factors other than international ones were at work, Etzioni insisted. The industrialization of the South, the migration of Negroes to the North, the reapportionment rule of the Supreme Court, and the actual and potential competition for the Negro vote were are factors that Isaacs underplayed. Obviously they needed to be enhanced before segregation could be weakened.³²

Racial Realism Redux

The harshest criticism of The New World of Negro Americans, in print at least, appeared not in any African American or Pan-African publication but instead in the new Mankind Quarterly. Launched in London in 1960, the journal mixed eugenics research and politics. According to its principal editors and writers, the western postwar scientific enterprise had come under the “political domination” of “liberals, Communists, and Jews,” who had conspired to suppress the truth about the biological bases of white supremacy.³³ Nathaniel Weyl, a frequent contributor in those years to both Mankind Quarterly and William F. Buckley’s National Review, panned The New World of Negro Americans in his characteristically tendentious style on grounds that were familiar from the era of the Journal of Race Development. He argued that the worst of Isaacs’s many failings was his incomprehension of the “biogenetic adaptation to specific habitats” (temperate/Caucasoid, hot/Negroid, cold/Mongoloid) that made any idea of nonwhites collectively opposing white domination impossible. On the plus side, it was probably the case that the kind of tensions between African Americans and Africans Isaacs described had developed because “the Negro intellectual is typically far more Caucasoid in his genetic makeup.”³⁴

Three years later, Weyl collaborated with Austrian émigré strategic studies scholar Stefan Possony to analyze the implications of the biological inferiority of Africans and African Americans, or “Melanoids,” for the Cold War world order. The Geography of Intellect used the old arguments on interdependence (except that the terminology had changed to globalization) to ground a defense of eugenics. Intelligence had emerged as a vital strategic resource in short supply that required careful shepherding in accordance with iron laws of climate and mental endowments (lots of geniuses in the temperate zones, none in the tropics). Unfortunately, the policies that were currently in place and were informed by “academic sects,” that is, the disciplines of sociology and social psychology, which long ago had abandoned the disinterested search for scientific truth in a campaign to destroy basic American values and institutions, were producing dysgenic outcomes (favoring the “mentally inferior race, ethnic subgroup, class, caste or other division of the social structure” over “its betters”) locally and globally.³⁵

The attack on integration efforts in the United States was one he had made before, but Possony, doubtless unconsciously, had returned to the roots of American international relations in focusing on the catastrophes unfolding globally as a result of the misguided efforts of the United States to “destroy colonialism” and spend foreign aid dollars on those who were least well-endowed genetically. The “average African Negro functions as does the European after a leucotomy [prefrontal lobotomy] operation,” while “we” contribute to “genocide” of the white race there. As for “the Middle East, Latin America and Southeast Asia…these regions are genetically unpromising.” The key question was what was to be done with “ethnic, national or geographical groups” outside the temperate zone that “en masse lack the innate brain power-required for mastery and operation of the tools of modern civilization[.]…The accretion of lethal power in the hands of nation states dominated by populations incapable of rational thought could be a harbinger of total disaster.”³⁶

The same “eugenicists” Weyl and Possony championed in The Geography of Intellect hailed the book in Mankind Quarterly and the right’s two standard bearers, The National Review and Modern Age. However, the Political Science Quarterly assigned the review of the book to the world’s best-known scholar of and pioneer in developmental genetics, Leslie Clarence Dunn, who dismissed it as a rehash of the ideas of original Journal of Race Development editor Ellsworth Huntington and Gobineau and Galton, characterizing it as racist in its “dealing with African and Islamic peoples,” and dedicated not to “critical evaluation of evidence” but to “special pleading.” Psychologist Otto Klineberg, who made a career of debunking work of this kind, took it apart in the Harvard Educational Review. “The authors do not like the term ‘racist,’ so I shall refrain from using it…although their use of the term ‘race’ is broad enough to make many geneticists and physical anthropologists squirm.”³⁷

Fifty years on, there is no reason to be coy. Possony’s coming out in print as one of the last two biological racists in the discipline so far—Berkeley’s A. James Gregor was the other—deserves some discussion. Possony had traveled far since his wartime association with Edward Mead Earle and the national security seminar at Princeton (and his association with the Office of Naval Intelligence). He deepened his ties to the Pentagon in the early Cold War as a civilian consultant while teaching international relations at Georgetown and joined Robert Strausz-Hupé’s new Foreign Policy Research Institute at the University of Pennsylvania. He and Strausz-Hupé coauthored the 1950 textbook International Relations in the putatively “infant science” and worked together on virtually all of the institute’s early policy studies.³⁸ Strausz-Hupé praised Possony as a “meticulous scholar…Jack-of-all-academic-trades and a man-with-ideas, mostly new.” By 1961, Possony had joined Stanford’s Hoover Institution of as director of international political studies. He helped align the Hoover Institution with the Foreign Policy Research Institute and the new Center for Strategic and International Studies at Georgetown in stalwart opposition to the seeming accommodation with Third World nationalism by the Kennedy and Johnson administrations.³⁹

For Possony and Strausz-Hupé, who wrote International Relations in 1950 and then revised it to catch up with the French defeat at Dien Bien Phieu in 1954, “the problem of colonialism” or the rule of “advanced over backward nations” posed the greatest challenge to the west after world communism, although it wasn’t really possible to distinguish the two, since Russia and China figured so prominently in and stood to reap the gains of the so-called national independence movements. Western “anti-imperialist groups” played their unwitting role, too, in the “great conflagration in the making” through their “fashionable” albeit tragically flawed arguments about rights of self-determination.⁴⁰

Reprising another of the key arguments of the 1920s, Possony and Strausz-Hupé wrote that colonies were a vital part of the world economy that would have to remain under the control of the west in order to guarantee living standards everywhere. They argued that critics failed in calculating colonialism’s costs since exploitation of labor occurs in all lands, not just dependencies, and political domination by the west had led to vast improvements in the lives of most natives through capital investments, infrastructure additions, and so forth. Finally, they wrote, critics evinced a callous disregard for the rights of those most threatened by decolonization, namely white minorities. Critics of colonialism were therefore more wrong than right even if it was true that imperial powers did not always do all they could to advance the welfare of their charges, in large part as a result of the “colonial mentality” of whites “imbued with a feeling of racial superiority.”⁴¹

Possony and Strausz-Hupé’s prescriptions followed from their pessimistic (and stunningly wrong) predictions of what would happen if “the old colonial system” gave way to a “system of weak, chaotic, nation-states.” Europeans and Jews faced “genocide” in Algeria, and elsewhere “native societies would ring in the grant of independence by resorting to the establishment of home-grown types of oppression such as slavery.” Violence against whites and/or alliances with communist countries (for example were the Congo to sell all its uranium to the Soviets) could lead to war with one or more of the erstwhile European colonial powers—so why pull out in the first place? Everywhere “the net result of emancipation would be regressive developments, including a dramatic reduction of health and education standards.” Thus, the only reasonable solution (lest “the West, succumbing to suicidal mania, deliberately hastens its own decline”) was to upgrade “techniques of colonial administration” while deepening trade with and investment in these sources of vital raw materials and markets for western manufactured goods.⁴²

Only the United States could do the heavy lifting in the project of renovating the colonial order along the lines Possony and Strausz-Hupé envisioned, and this increased their pessimism about the future. Successive postwar administrations had instead taken “childish delight” in sabotaging France and Great Britain’s imperial ties in such places as India, China, Sudan, and Nigeria. Americans generally believed that “all nations by nature [were] capable of self-government” although the evidence clearly showed that most colonial peoples did not “measure up.” Were Americans to overcome their naïveté and take the necessary steps “to forestall a revolutionary assault of unprecedented violence,” for instance by increasing foreign aid to “colored and colonial areas,” the UN system could play an important subsidiary role. They tasked the United Nations Education, Social, and Cultural Organization with “improving racial relationships” in the colonial domains, which is noteworthy since Possony would soon declare UNESCO’s actual anti-racism campaign a form of “thought control on a global scale.”⁴³

Possony and Strausz-Hupé stood their ground in the Foreign Policy Research Institute’s report The Idea of Colonialism (1958), even as Libya, Morocco, Tunisia, Sudan, Ghana, Guinea, and Malaya joined the ranks of “liberated” peoples; as France’s Fourth Republic collapsed due to the bloody war with the Algerian National Liberation Front; and as the UN General Assembly stood poised to issue a Declaration on the Granting of Independence to Colonial Countries and Peoples.⁴⁴ “A global anticolonial “revolution” would prove disastrous,” Possony argued in “Colonial Problems in Perspective.” The Soviets would gain immeasurably, while the many peoples who were “incapable of effective self-government” would become fodder for expansionist states. It was still not too late to reform “metropolitan-colonial relationships” in the interests of the free world, but to do so, the “flimsy ideology of extreme anticolonialism” that had gripped too many western thinkers had to be defeated along with “the more stubborn defenders of the status quo” in the French and British colonial administrations. If these things did not happen, then dependent peoples would likely continue to seek their freedom through “strategies of terrorism” since the colonial powers were neither “strong” nor “callous enough to rule by oppression, as do the Communist dictatorships and the racist Union of South Africa.”⁴⁵ Possony rethought this last point; a few years later he attacked those who “uncritically accept” the idea that the “much maligned” policy of South Africa was either racist or oppressive.⁴⁶

Few were listening, however, and as another thirty new states prepared to take their seats at the UN’s General Assembly, the final chapters of Weyl and Possony’s Geography of Intellect lashed out at the “erroneous policies and self-defeating procedures” of the US in sabotaging the colonial order, deluded by the idea “that men, classes and races are equal in capacity.” A “savage race and class war” had already begun, and they prophesied the “subjugation or annihilation of the three millions whites” in South Africa, the rapid decline of the Middle East and Africa into “chaos and barbarism,” and the “genetic deterioration in human intelligence” globally. Their research also spoke directly to what we now call “democratization.” A decline in brain power corresponded closely with “growing lip service to democracy” or, more precisely, to the “democracy of the unfit,” evidence for which could be found everywhere from Kenya to all the misguided local efforts across the United States to “get out the vote.”⁴⁷

If we try to plot the Cold War realists and their critics on the hypothetical bell curve I sketched for the 1910s–1920s in the introduction, we run into some difficulties. The obvious one is the lack of data points. That is, very few self-identified professors of international relations wrote about decolonization and its consequences, in contrast to the easy self-identification of such academics when empire or imperialism constituted the primary and nameable object of inquiry. Interestingly, a young Joseph Nye Jr., who studied under Buell’s replacement at Harvard, Rupert Emerson, was one of them for a short while. He published his revised 1964 dissertation as Pan-Africanism and East African Integration (1967), which sought to explicate the role of ideology as a major policy variable, in this case, in the failed effort by Kenya, Uganda, and its neighbors to form a federation. The irony is just a few years later, after moving on from Africa, Nye’s career took off as he and a friend resurrected, doubtless unselfconsciously, the idea of “complex interdependence” that Buell had introduced in his 1925 textbook, International Relations. However, Nye’s early work positions him far from the tail that defenders of colonialism such as Possony and racist fellow travelers occupy. Nye sits much closer to Isaacs, nearer the middle of the curve, among those who had reconciled themselves to or supported independence and promoted projects of development (what was once “race development”) and modernization as the better strategy for securing the mutual if unequal interests of the free world’s emerging Third World clients.

Filling out the curve takes some work. One task entails teasing out analytical positions as decolonization unfolded and as many public intellectuals argued, like Possony and Strausz-Hupé, that a properly reformed colonial order remained the primary directive of the white-identified west or North Atlantic community. It also requires distinguishing between biological (that is, classically racist) understandings of the sources and significance of hierarchy and the centuries of “tradition” that explained, as Eisenhower put it, the impossibility of leaping from “savagery to civilization” any time soon. If we could do so, the tail and the right half of the curve would be a little more sharply defined. We would still have to sample outside of or at the edge of the new boundary that I traced in the last chapter between self-identified “discipline generalists” and those with area or regional expertise, leading the original generation of international relations scholars (Blakeslee, Buell, Leo Rowe, Bunche) and others to be posthumously rebaptized as Africanists, Latin Americanists, and so forth. The result would be a better-defined top of the bell and upper part of the left slope, which would be populated by many of Isaacs’s MIT colleagues and others in the Social Science Research Council’s new Committee on Comparative Politics.

However, the curve would still be missing its left slope and tail; that is, those who saw U.S. hegemony and Third World development efforts as hallmarks of an emerging neocolonial order. As we will see in the next chapter, the Cold War, McCarthyism, and the 1954 Supreme Court decision in Brown v. Board all took their toll on the Howard school, and no new theorists of the relationship between racism or other forms of ascriptive hierarchy and imperialism emerged until the end of the 1960s and 1970s, when members of the New Left entered the professoriate and black studies secured a toehold in the elite academy.