Cornell University Press History Sampler 2019 by Cornell University Press

This sampler contains short excerpts from the following forthcoming books from Cornell University Press. Full details about each book are available on our website, cornellpress.cornell.edu Richard M. Gamble, A Fiery Gospel: The Battle Hymn of the Republic and the Road to Righteous War, available May Emma Kuby, Political Survivors: The Resistance, the Cold War, and the Fight against Concentration Camps after 1945, available March

Timothy Andrews Sayle, Enduring Alliance: A History of NATO and the Postwar Global Order, available April Andrew Byers, The Sexual Economy of War: Discipline and Desire in the US Army, available May

Ethan Schrum, The Instrumental University: Education in Service of the National Agenda after World War II, available June

| history sampler 2019

Wen-Qing Ngoei, Arc of Containment: Britain, the United States, and Anticommunism in Southeast Asia, available May

cornell university press

Jay Howard Geller, The Scholems: A Story of the German-Jewish Bourgeoisie from Emancipation to Destruction, available March

HISTORY sampler

2019

[ free ]

CORNELL UNIVERSITY PRESS CORNELLPRESS.CORNELL.EDU

A Fiery Gospel The Battle Hymn of the Republic and the Road to Righteous War

Richard M. Gamble

Cornell University Press Ithaca and London

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Copyright ÂŠ 2019 by Cornell University All rights reserved. Except for brief quotations in a review, this book, or parts thereof, must not be reproduced in any form without permission in writing from the publisher. For information, address Cornell University Press, Sage House, 512 East State Street, Ithaca, New York 14850. Visit our website at cornellpress.cornell.edu. First published 2019 by Cornell University Press Printed in the United States of America Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data [CIP to come]

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Contents

The Battle Hymn of the Republic

vii

Prologue 1 1. The Besieged City

2. A Rich Crimson

3. “The Glorious Freedom of His Gospel”

4. Righteous War and Holy Peace

5. The Anglo-American “Battle Hymn”

121

6. The Valor of Righteousness

140

7. The Sacred Inheritance of Mankind

165

8. Exotic Medley

192

9. A Severed Nation

216

Epilogue 239

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v i Conte nts Acknowledgments 249 Notes 251 Index 273

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The Battle Hymn of the Republic

As published in the New-York Tribune, January 14, 1862 Mine eyes have seen the glory of the coming of the Lord: He is trampling out the vintage where the grapes of wrath are stored; He hath loosed the fateful lightning of His terrible swift sword: His truth is marching on. I have seen him in the watch-fires of a hundred circling camps; They have builded Him an altar in the evening dews and damps; I have read his righteous sentence by the dim and flaring lamps: His day is marching on. I have read a fiery gospel writ in burnished rows of steel: “As ye deal with my contemners, so with you my grace shall deal; Let the Hero, born of woman, crush the serpent with his heel, Since God is marching on.” He has sounded forth the trumpet that shall never call retreat; He is sifting out the hearts of men before His judgment-seat: Oh, be swift, my soul, to answer Him! be jubilant, my feet! Our God is marching on. In the beauty of the lilies Christ was born across the sea, With a glory in his bosom that transfigures you and me: As he died to make men holy, let us die to make men free, While God is marching on.

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Prologue

President Lincoln arrived late. By the time he and the First Lady took their seats in the House chamber, they had missed the evening’s convening prayer and Vice President Hannibal Hamlin’s opening remarks. The Philadelphia merchant George Stuart was well into his speech when the audience spotted the Lincolns and greeted them with “a tempest of applause” followed by a standing ovation that brought the proceedings to a temporary halt.1 This was a rare public appearance for the president in 1864. He found it hard to take time away from his duties as commander in chief nearly three years into civil war. But he accepted Stuart’s telegraphed invitation to join the other dignitaries that evening in early February. The celebration in the House of Representatives marked the second anniversary of the United States Christian Commission. The order of events differed little from a worship service. One DC newspaper described the crowd as “composed, in great part, of the religious element of the city.”2 They had come to reaffirm their faith in the Union war effort and renew their commitment

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2 P rol ogue to serve soldiers and their families. The wartime mix of state, church, and military was on full display. The audience heard not only from preachers and laymen active in founding and running the commission but also from the Speaker of the House Schuyler Colfax of Indiana, Senator John Sherman of Ohio, and Major General John Henry Martindale, the military governor of Washington, DC.3 The Christian Commission had been founded on November 16, 1861, by the Young Men’s Christian Association (YMCA) at a convention in New York City. The commission’s publicized aim was “to promote the spiritual and temporal welfare of the officers and men of the United States army and navy, in co-operation with chaplains and others”—in a way that “would be pleasing to the Master.” For the sake of that high calling, the commission solicited donations of goods and money, distributed Bibles, books, and tracts by the tens of thousands, promoted temperance in the encampments, and recruited volunteer workers and ministers of the gospel from all Protestant denominations to care for the souls of men in uniform. Along with the parallel United States Sanitary Commission, it tended to the sick, wounded, and dying. Its tireless chairman was the successful entrepreneur Stuart, founder of the Philadelphia YMCA. Testimonials poured in praising the work of the commission.4 The highlight of the evening for Lincoln, and certainly for others in the House chamber, was a rendition of the “Battle Hymn of the Republic” by Chaplain Charles C. McCabe, a frequent speaker and fund-raiser for the Christian Commission. In 1862, while chaplain of the 122nd Ohio Infantry, McCabe had been captured by Confederate forces and taken to Libby Prison in Richmond. He was there on July 6, 1863, when news reached the inmates of the Union victory at Gettysburg. The soldiers burst into song—everything from “Yankee Doodle” to the “Doxology.” But then McCabe led them in singing the words of a poem he had clipped from the Atlantic Monthly and memorized. He knew Julia Ward Howe’s poem matched the cadences of “John Brown’s Body,” a favorite Union marching song, and the prisoners joined him in the chorus, singing, “Glory, glory, hallelujah!” McCabe told this moving story of his prison experience, and then sang the “Battle Hymn” as a duet with an army colonel just released from Libby, asking the audience to join him in the chorus accompanied by a regimental brass band. According to the Sunday School Times, McCabe

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Pr o lo gu e 3 sang “with much sweetness and power.” Swept up by the refrain, the audience’s “enthusiasm was aroused to such a pitch, so that few scenes like it have ever been witnessed in a public gathering.” “Applause greeted the ending of nearly every stanza,” the account continued, “and in the last, before reaching the chorus, the pent up enthusiasm could be restrained no longer, but burst forth in a torrent of exultant shouts and cheers that made the Hall ring to the roof.”5 Soon, Lincoln shouted, “Sing it again!” and Vice President Hamlin announced that McCabe would repeat his performance. Before he did so, McCabe delivered a charge to the president from a fellow Libby prisoner “in the name of the martyrs of Liberty”: “Tell the President not to back down an inch.” Lincoln replied, “I won’t back down.” Shouts of “Amen!” came from the crowd. The uproar and the whole evening were unlike any spectacle most had ever witnessed.6 For the twenty-seven-year-old McCabe, this had been a thrilling commemoration at the Capitol. He was seated right in front of the Lincolns. He wrote to his wife before going to bed that night that during the speeches of two pastors he had seen “tears [roll] down the rugged cheeks” of those assembled. The press agreed that “there were few dry eyes in the hall” as the first pastor told gruesome and sentimental stories of caring for the wounded after Antietam and Gettysburg. The second said he repented of his pharisaical indifference at the outset of the war and now, conscience-stricken, rejoiced that he had come to understand that in order to be of real service “he had only [to] follow Christ’s example, whose hands were as busy as his sympathies were unbounded.” According to McCabe’s diary, when the president saw him again at a White House reception two weeks later, “Mr. Lincoln recognized me as the man who sang the ‘Battle Hymn of the Republic’ at the Capitol and was kind enough to compliment both the song and the singing. My vanity was considerably delighted. Sure, and how could I help it?”7 From this point on, McCabe helped make the “Battle Hymn of the Republic” inseparable from the Union cause. At fund-raising events across the country for the duration of the war and for years afterward, the Methodist chaplain and later bishop would center Howe’s poem in a decidedly evangelical setting—closer to the childhood she had left behind than to the world of liberal religion she promoted as an adult. He sang the anthem and told the story of Libby Prison for decades. As it spread, the “Battle Hymn” seemed unimpeded by any denominational boundaries

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4 P rol ogue or theological affirmations. Soon it was freed from historical and theological contexts altogether and was with ease turned to the purposes of other wars and reform causes at home and around the world—not only by Americans, but by the British Empire, other nation builders, and idealists everywhere. Over the past century and a half, Americans of all sorts have used the “Battle Hymn of the Republic” to understand their nation’s meaning, to define their enemies, to justify their wars, and to reaffirm God’s special plan for the United States in world history. Howe’s anthem seems ubiquitous on Memorial Day, the Fourth of July, at political conventions and funerals, and in Sunday morning worship. With the “Battle Hymn,” Americans who glide easily among religion, politics, and war are able to honor their God and their nation at the same time. Or so it would seem. In one sense, the story of the “Battle Hymn of the Republic” falls under the rubric of “civil religion.” If we define civil religion, in Ronald Beiner’s handy formulation, as “the appropriation of religion by politics for its own purposes,” then the “Battle Hymn” easily qualifies as part of this process and endures as one of the national faith’s most successful products.8 But it does so only indirectly, since Howe’s poem itself appropriated Christianity (at least an abstract Christianity of philosophical idealism), followed by politicians who used its allusions to the Old and New Testaments to define a nation, promote domestic reform, and justify foreign wars. Howe’s mobilized “Bible” became itself an American scripture ready to be appropriated for further service to the savior-nation. In its origin and many of its subsequent uses, the “Battle Hymn” was not strictly a piece of civil religion along the lines of Beiner’s definition. Terms like “civil religion” can obscure as much as they illuminate. When Howe appropriated scripture for a war poem in 1861, she did so as a private citizen who voluntarily devoted her religion to the Union cause, and beyond that to the redemption of humanity. When preachers and journalists and innumerable ordinary citizens and churchgoers quoted and sang the “Battle Hymn” to affirm their patriotism, mobilize the economy, explain why the South must be defeated, or simply support the Union troops, they too engaged in a voluntary act that knowingly or otherwise spiritualized America for the sake of winning the war and the peace to

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Pr o lo gu e 5 follow. What resulted was not necessarily the political appropriation of religion. Something larger was at work. To be sure, there is a looser meaning for “civil religion” that might better capture the complex story of the “Battle Hymn” and its role in making America sacred. In his landmark essay in 1967, the sociologist Robert Bellah launched a whole field of scholarship when he looked at the way civil religion functioned in America, taking his cue from John F. Kennedy’s use of religion in his inaugural address.9 Kennedy’s God-talk was generically theistic rather than recognizably Christian or doctrinally Roman Catholic. Bellah placed Kennedy within what he argued was an authentic American tradition of mixing religion in general with politics. Some of what counted as “religion”—what served, that is, to bind the nation together with a common affirmation of faith—was in fact not originally religious at all but rather a host of heroes, battles, founding myths, documents, and principles raised to the level of creed and ritual. A nation honors these memories and ideals, passes them on to younger generations, and elevates them into the unquestionable realm of a sacred deliverance to a people for their safekeeping. Memories can be faulty, ideals can be reinvented over time, and political propositions can become armed doctrines animated with missionary zeal—but civil religion continues to prove its durability in politics and war. For some, “civil religion” has served as a fairly benign way of speaking of America’s founding documents and principles as if they were religion and never goes beyond being like a religion to substitute for Christianity or another historic faith. But this tendency seems to be the exception rather than the rule. The civil religion on display at national holidays and presidential inaugurations looks and sounds like a national liturgy for a national worship service, as was clearly the case in the House chamber in 1864. The temptation to make something transcendent and metaphysical out of America’s documents, ideals, and history has proven irresistible for many. This has been the case especially with the Declaration of Independence, or fragments of it. Even the sociologists, political theorists, and literature professors who write about American civil religion seem more often than not to be engaged in an act of reaffirmation of civil religion or even, in Bellah’s case, to be adding another “I believe” to the nation’s creed. The effort to make nations sacred was most evident in the romantic

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6 P rol ogue nationalism that shaped Europe and North and South America in the nineteenth century. Altar, saint, apostle, martyr, temple, ark, creed—all of these words were used to speak of the nation-state in wars for independence and wars for national consolidation. Greece, Poland, Hungary, Italy, Germany, Latin American republics, and the United States all spoke this way at midcentury and used this language to define themselves, their enemies, and their cause. The “Battle Hymn of the Republic,” its durability and success, makes the most sense in the context of romantic nationalism and the philosophical idealism that accompanied it. Julia Ward Howe brought these two worlds together as effectively as anyone of her generation. The way the poem was formulated, how it was put to work, how it was in turn appropriated for wars and reform crusades of all kinds is better described as religious nationalism—or nationalism as religion—than simply “civil religion,” with its narrow concern with politics. The story of a “sacramental” poem as potent as the “Battle Hymn,” its success as a means of grace to make and keep America holy and righteous, its use even by other nations to inspire America to take up its duty to the world—this whole story shows the analytical power available to students of the past when they think in terms of religious nationalism rather than merely civil religion. At the very least, “religious nationalism” more accurately names one aspect of the experience of religion in American life. Americans take pride in their institutional separation of church and state, no matter how much they might disagree about a “wall of separation” or whether the church is more a danger to the state or the state to the church. Innumerable books attempt to understand church and state in America. If, instead of church and state, officially separated for the sake of religious and civil liberty, we think of the relationship between religion and nation, a wider world of inquiry opens up before us. If Americans have honored and even strengthened the legal separation of church and state, they have rarely separated religion from nation. Americans on the whole have proven eager, on the one hand, to bring nationalism into their churches (witness flags at the front, the national anthem sung in worship, political sermons, and even the Pledge of Allegiance in the weekly order of service) and, on the other hand, to bring religion into their celebrations of the sacred nation called to do God’s will in the world. Perhaps it is telling that academics publish

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Pr o lo gu e 7 a Journal of Church and State but not a Journal of Religion and Nation. The combination of religion and nation in American history might be more important than the ostensible separation of church and state. An examination of the role the “Battle Hymn of the Republic” played in making America sacred offers an opportunity to broaden, deepen, and enrich our understanding of the phenomenon of religious nationalism. It may help us to see religious nationalism in unexpected places, being invoked by unlikely people, and happening early and in circumstances other than what we expected. Religious nationalism uses the language of metaphysics, transcendence, and redemption to extol the nation and its history and people. But Americans’ tendency to speak in transcendent terms about their nation has been anything but otherworldly; it has instead been an exercise in radical immanence. Sacred nations drag the divine down to earth. America’s homegrown and imported romantic nationalism put God in nature, God in history, and God in America. Since the United States stood as the highest embodiment yet of God’s will in the world, America was the instrument of his plan. Other nations and people could either join in that common cause or be treated as an obstacle to God’s truth. In 1858, a German immigrant who popularized Hegelianism in the United States called America the “savior nation”—nothing less than the fulfillment of Jesus’s call to his disciples to be a “city on a hill.”10 In the Civil War that soon followed, Julia Ward Howe wrote a poem that placed God inside the war, inside the American nation, and inside the progress of humanity. Whether Howe’s song of divine immanence was used to announce God’s wrath, justice, redemption, or calling to future service—it always made America sacred. When Julia Ward Howe stayed in New York, she often attended the Unitarian All Souls Church to hear her friend Henry Whitney Bellows preach. Bellows was Stuart’s counterpart at the United States Sanitary Commission, a civilian agency founded in 1861 and authorized by the War Department to provide medical care and other relief to Union soldiers and sailors and their families. The Crimean War in the 1850s had shown what modern mechanized warfare would demand of support services charged with preventing and treating disease in the camps, tending to the sick and wounded, and caring for the dead. The Civil War soon outstripped

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8 P rol ogue anything the Crimean War had prepared Americans to imagine happening on their own soil to their own sons.11 In many ways, the Sanitary Commission and the Christian Commission complemented each other, and they often joined forces in fund-raising campaigns. The two worlds of the more Unitarian and liberal Sanitary Commission and the more evangelical Christian Commission met personally in Julia Ward Howe’s extended family. Her physician husband, Samuel Gridley Howe, worked closely with Bellows on the Sanitary Commission, and her uncle, a leading evangelical Protestant Episcopal rector in Brooklyn, was one of the original commissioners tapped by Stuart to organize the Christian Commission. In a sense, though, both benevolent organizations were evangelical. Both promoted an active Christian faith that spoke to the most pressing ethical, political, and economic troubles of the day. Both mobilized their churches for a nation at war. Both absorbed the sacred into the secular and the secular into the sacred. Reviewing the Sanitary Commission’s singular service to the nation in 1879, Bellows boasted that one of the organization’s purposes had been to “help make America sacred in the eyes of the living children of her scattered States.”12 The “Battle Hymn of the Republic” was drawn into that effort. Each stanza united God’s judgment and his highest purposes with the Union army and America’s historic mission. From the moment of its composition, Howe’s “Battle Hymn” has been used to sustain that effort to make America sacred—whether rallying troops, mobilizing the home front, reassuring doubters, or turning in judgment against a nation that has failed to live up to its meaning and aspirations. The “Battle Hymn of the Republic” proved to be an effective tool for making the nation and its wars holy and righteous. Politicians, diplomats, preachers, novelists, journalists, and others have kept the “Battle Hymn of the Republic” securely at the nexus between nationalism and religion. Indeed, following Bellows’s lead, they have used it ever since the Civil War to preach nationalism as religion in times of crisis. Abraham Lincoln did not forget the work of the Christian Commission and the Sanitary Commission in the months following the celebration in the House chamber with its tent-revival enthusiasm and personal rededication to the cause. Union victory seemed certain by the summer of 1864 but still slow in coming, and care for soldiers’ bodies and souls

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Pr o lo gu e 9 would have to carry on to the end. At a joint fair held in Philadelphia, the president praised the efforts of both benevolent organizations for “giving proof that the national resources are not at all exhausted, and that the national patriotism will sustain us through all.”13 When Christian Commission chairman Stuart thanked the president for his kind remarks, he still had McCabe and the “Battle Hymn” on his mind. He reminded Lincoln that the “Battle Hymn” had been sung a second time that night at the president’s request.14 The Army of the Potomac under Ulysses S. Grant now bore down on Richmond, and Stuart pledged the unstinting efforts of his commission as the North pressed on to a decisive victory. That army, under the prior command of George McClellan in 1861, had inspired Julia Ward Howe to write her religious-nationalist anthem. When the war ended in 1865, the role the “Battle Hymn” would play in national and world affairs had hardly begun. Howe’s song quickly became a way to celebrate victory, honor Union veterans, memorialize the war dead, and mobilize Americans for new battles on the domestic front and in the Caribbean, the Pacific, Europe, Southeast Asia, and the Middle East. While many Americans sang the “Battle Hymn” ignorant of its author, origin, and meaning, they nevertheless sang words that summoned their nation to an apocalyptic holy war infused with divine wrath and a spirit of conquest aimed at remaking their nation and their world in everwidening gyres. The “Battle Hymn” began in 1861 as a song of judgment, as Howe’s contribution to a beleaguered righteous nation fighting for unification and faced with troubling setbacks and confusion. With Union victory in 1865, the “Battle Hymn” rang out from pulpits and platforms as a song of triumph, and from black schoolchildren in Richmond, Virginia, as a song of deliverance. Thereafter, it helped sustain a culture of victory in the North while the South nursed a culture of defeat.15 In America’s subsequent wars, from the Spanish-American War in 1898 to the War on Terror after September 11, the “Battle Hymn” has served the nation as its song of destiny, a theme song to accompany American exceptionalism and the nation’s benevolent global mission. Meanwhile, for an increasing number of Americans, the “Battle Hymn” reappeared as a song of judgment, calling the nation to repentance for sins past and present. That call went out in crusades as different as Billy Graham’s and Martin Luther King Jr.’s. Upon

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1 0 P rol ogue John F. Kennedy’s assassination in 1963, the “Battle Hymn” began to take hold as the nation’s song of mourning. It became an American requiem. Democrats and Republicans, famous and obscure, found in the “Battle Hymn” a way to honor the fallen. Only the “Battle Hymn” among the nation’s anthems has had the power to combine religion, nationalism, and war in a way that has seemed as fitting for slain presidents as for victims of international terrorism.

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POLITICAL SURVIVORS The Resistance, the Cold War, and the Fight against Concentration Camps after 1945 Emma Kuby

CORNELL UNIVERSITY PRESS

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Copyright © 2019 by Cornell University All rights reserved. Except for brief quotations in a review, this book, or parts thereof, must not be reproduced in any form without permission in writing from the publisher. For information, address Cornell University Press, Sage House, 512 East State Street, Ithaca, New York 14850. Visit our website at cornellpress.cornell.edu. First published 2019 by Cornell University Press Printed in the United States of America Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Kuby, Emma, 1981– author. Title: Political survivors : the resistance, the Cold War, and the fight against concentration camps after 1945 / Emma Kuby. Description: Ithaca : Cornell University Press, 2019. | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2018029856 (print) | LCCN 2018032294 (ebook) | ISBN 9781501732805 (pdf) | ISBN 9781501732812 (epub/mobi) | ISBN 9781501732799 (cloth : alk. paper) Subjects: LCSH: Commission internationale contre le régime concentrationnaire—History. | Concentration camps—History—20th century. | Holocaust survivors—Political activity. | Human rights workers—Europe— History—20th century. | Holocaust, Jewish (1939–1945)—Influence. | Cold War—History. Classification: LCC HV8963 (ebook) | LCC HV8963. K83 2019 (print) | DDC 365/.4509409045—dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2018029856

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Contents

Acknowledgments Acronyms and Abbreviations

vii xi

Introduction

1. Survivors as Witnesses in Postwar France

David Roussetâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s Cold War Call to Arms

Forging the International Commission

4. Nuremberg Restaged: The Soviet Univers Concentrationnaire

on Trial

109

Into the Labyrinth of Francoâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s Prisons

135

Triumphs and Tensions on the Global Stage

165

From Auschwitz to Algeria: The Limits of Memory

193

Epilogue

223

Notes Index

231 284

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INTRODUCTION

In late 1949, with tensions running high in Cold War France, former Nazi concentration camp inmate David Rousset issued a manifesto on the front page of the weekly cultural review Le Figaro littéraire calling on his fellow survivors to denounce the Soviet gulag. Stalin’s prisoners, he charged, were suffering a “hallucinatory repetition” of the German camp experience, similar in every respect.1 Rousset made this “Appeal”—at once an indictment and a call to arms—from a position of hard-won authority: his renowned postwar testimonies on Buchenwald and Neuengamme had earned him widespread recognition as France’s “witness among witnesses.”2 Now he ignited the most significant public debate on Soviet repression that would take place in the country before the 1970s. Controversy over his appeal swept up everyone from Jean-Paul Sartre, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, and Albert Camus to members of the National Assembly, peaking in a 1950–1951 libel trial in Paris that pitted Rousset against another camp survivor, Communist Party intellectual Pierre Daix. The case generated an international media frenzy and ended with a judgment that Rousset had not, as Daix charged, fabricated his evidence about the gulag’s horrors. Most observers interpreted the outcome as a public relations blow against Stalinism; American philosopher and intelligence liaison James Burnham rejoiced at “the best anti-Communist job he had yet seen.”3 The “David Rousset Affair” is often invoked as a set piece in accounts of Cold War French history, since it dramatically illustrates the extent to which intellectual life in this era was dominated by controversy over communism.4 But Rousset’s publication did not only produce a momentary blaze of scandal. It also gave 1

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2 INTRODUCTION

birth to an international collective of Nazi camp survivors who made it their mission to fight against the continued existence of “concentration camps” in the post-1945 world. Over the course of a decade, this organization, the International Commission against the Concentration Camp Regime (Commission Internationale contre le Régime Concentrationnaire, or CICRC), targeted not only the gulag but also political internment systems around the globe, from Francoist Spain to the People’s Republic of China to Greece, French Tunisia, and even, in 1957, war-torn French Algeria. Claiming to speak on behalf of more than one hundred thousand former camp inmates from seven different Western European countries, the CICRC’s core delegates conducted heavily publicized mock trials and pioneering on-site inquiries. They responded to petitions from all over the world for international oversight of prison conditions, published a constant stream of literature on political incarceration and forced labor, gained coverage in Le Monde, Le Figaro, the New York Times, and the Times of London, and testified at the United Nations. In an era of toothless enforcement for the principles articulated in the 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights, and in the absence of any hope for a permanent peacetime successor to the International Military Tribunal at Nuremberg, the commission improvised novel and creative mechanisms by which to take governments to task for political violence against their own subjects. No contemporaneous European entity so visibly promoted the principle that states on both sides of the Iron Curtain should be held internationally accountable for criminalizing dissent. The CICRC’s influence flowed in large part from the intellectual and political prominence of its leading participants. Since publishing a prizewinning 1946 analysis of life and death in the Nazi camps, Rousset had moved in lofty circles: he was a friend to Sartre, an “indispensable” guide to Hannah Arendt, and a constant presence in Paris lecture halls and at activist rallies.5 Many of the French survivors who answered his call were likewise authors of landmark works of testimonial literature, and nearly all were esteemed public figures. They included ethnographer and Ravensbrück survivor Germaine Tillion, who was an authority on kinship in Algeria, and Catholic writer and editor Louis Martin-Chauffier, a former inmate of Neuengamme and Bergen-Belsen with a long history in antifascist politics. Central to the group as well were Pasteur Institute entomologist Alfred-Serge Balachowsky (Buchenwald), Gaullist politician Edmond Michelet (Dachau), lawyers Paul Arrighi and Léon Mazeaud (Mauthausen, Buchenwald), Le Monde journalist Rémy Roure (Buchenwald and Auschwitz), medical researcher Charles Richet (Buchenwald), and Catherine Goetschel (Ravensbrück), a heroine of the Resistance struggle in Normandy. They were joined by international counterparts such as José Ester Borrás, an anarcho-syndicalist militant who fled Spain in 1939 and eventually landed in Mauthausen; Father Damien (Henri) Reumont, a

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INTRODUCTION 3

key figure in the Belgian worker-priest movement following his imprisonment in Esterwegen; and Lise Børsum, a dynamic Oslo-based journalist and Ravensbrück memoirist. According to Tzvetan Todorov, one of the rare scholars to have recognized the commission’s historical significance, “The political, religious, and philosophical convictions of [these men and women] could not have been more varied. The only things that united them were the shared experience of having been imprisoned in the Nazi camps and the shared conviction that, in the world they inhabited, the greatest urgency was to make other camps disappear.”6 Rousset and his followers certainly presented their work as the embodiment of a universalizing ethos born of great suffering, undertaken in the service of a global humanity under continued threat. They claimed to speak for “those who are what we were yesterday,” enacting an affirmation of mankind’s essential solidarity that transcended politics and erased borders.7 In reality, though, such expansive ideals papered over the group’s more particularist identities and agendas. These render its deployment of memory on behalf of new victims more complex and troubling than Todorov imagined—but also far more interesting. For one thing, despite the eventual geographic scope of its investigations, the CICRC remained true to its origins in Rousset’s 1949 “Appeal”—it was above all opposed to Stalin’s camps. The project therefore became enmeshed in the era’s cultural Cold War pitting pro-American actors against pro-Soviet ones in a contest for the hearts and minds of the world’s peoples. In 1951, the CICRC began receiving monetary backing from the US Central Intelligence Agency (CIA). The survivors’ organization was not the creation or the puppet of its financial supporters; Rousset, though a willing and witting party to the relationship, reacted with scorn on the few occasions when his beneficent “friends” offered counsel. Most other CICRC members, oblivious to the source of their organization’s funding, proceeded without fretting over American opinion at all. Nevertheless, their self-styled identity as independent voices of conscience representing only the victims of state violence, not states, was based on a falsehood. The commission’s claims to cosmopolitan universalism were also belied by its exclusionary membership policies. Jewish Holocaust survivors were not permitted to join as such; only men and women who had been deported to the Nazi camps for acts of wartime resistance could do so. This policy was not a consequence of antisemitism in any straightforward sense—Jews who had been imprisoned as resisters were welcome, and other Jews were involved in the CICRC in all manner of ways. The group’s legal counselor Théo Bernard was a former Drancy inmate, its American supporters were mainly Jewish, and—astonishingly—its secretary was Léon Poliakov, perhaps the most important Holocaust historian of his generation. But in a postwar France where deported resisters were venerated as patriotic, republican heroes, while Jewish “racial” survivors were, generally

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4 INTRODUCTION

speaking, still only the objects of hazy pity, restricting formal membership to those in the former category permitted Rousset to legitimize his endeavor in culturally potent terms.8 The prohibition also helped sustain the CICRC’s mobilization of the recent past for a struggle against ongoing persecution of dissidents, resisters, and rebels, a project that depended on viewing Hitler’s camps, first and foremost, as institutions of political repression. For CICRC members, World War II’s paradigmatic victims were those, like themselves, who “became slaves of the SS uniquely because of their convictions and their commitment to them.”9 This understanding of Nazi atrocity raised few eyebrows in the Western Europe of the early 1950s, where “the Holocaust” did not yet register as a conceptual category. Nevertheless, the CICRC could not afford to admit voices that might contest its interpretation of the camps. The group’s project depended upon drawing historical parallels, and, as Rousset quietly acknowledged, “Birkenau remains beyond comparison.”10 The CICRC, then, was not simply a mobilization of “memory,” as such, on behalf of “humanity,” writ large. It was an effort to leverage a specific way of remembering the violence of the Second World War for specific ends, in an intellectual and political context of high-stakes conflict unique to the postwar era in Western Europe—especially France. This book explores why a movement of non-Jewish, noncommunist Nazi camp survivors dedicated to bearing “expert witness” against political repression and incarceration was so successful in demanding the world’s attention in the 1950s, thereby advancing norms of international obligation toward states’ internal victims. But it also considers why this remarkable organization disintegrated before the decade was out, riven by conflict over many issues—including Jewish membership—but definitively destroyed by its confrontation with decolonization. Ultimately, the CICRC’s attempt to address the dynamics of internment, terror, and torture during France’s Algerian War (1954–1962) shattered members’ fragile antitotalitarian consensus about the meaning of Hitler’s camps. This book explains why. In so doing, it offers a new account of how the memory of Nazi atrocity both spurred and distorted Europeans’ efforts to make sense of the persistent violence of the post-1945 world.

Witnesses to the “Concentrationary Universe” Rousset and his followers came together at a moment when human rights had yet to crystallize as a singularly privileged international discourse for stigmatizing state violence.11 Instead of drawing upon a language of rights, therefore, CICRC participants put forward a framework for activism grounded in visceral,

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INTRODUCTION 5

bodily invocations of World War II’s atrocities.12 It was reliant on two concepts. The first was captured by the phrase “the concentrationary universe,” Rousset’s own celebrated coinage and the title of his slim, searing 1946 meditation on the Nazi camps. L’Univers concentrationnaire proposed that Buchenwald, Sachsenhausen, Ravensbrück, Neuengamme, and their counterparts formed a singular, coherent, and fully articulated sphere of suffering that was “closed off ” from the planet inhabited by “normal men.”13 Taken as a whole, this “universe” of absolute degradation possessed no meaningful parallels with other institutions in human history: Rousset understood “the concentration camp” as a monster born in National Socialist Germany circa 1933 and did not seek out precedents in turn-of-the-century European imperial practices, in World War I–era detention facilities, or in Joseph Stalin’s interwar USSR.14 The Nazis, he wrote, had “introduce[d] into modern history a new procedure of dehumanization.”15 But this did not mean that he viewed their project as inimitable, a singular anomaly. On the contrary, he insisted that it constituted a “warning”—a reproducible archetype of radical evil. “Other peoples” might undertake an “analogous experiment” at any point if humanity was not vigilant.16 Rousset’s transformation of concentration into an adjective, concentrationnaire, was intended to signal this perpetual menace. (Despite French readers’ embrace of the term, no English equivalent developed; telling the CICRC’s story demands making do with “concentrationary.”) From Rousset’s assertion that mankind’s concentrationary age was ongoing arose a second conceptual pillar: the figure of the Nazi camp survivor as an expert witness.17 According to Rousset, as the only men and women alive who knew in their “muscles” what Hitler’s camps had been, former deportees were “the professionals, the specialists” in recognizing the mechanisms of human abjection.18 “Others,” he wrote, “those who were never concentrationnaires, can plead poverty of imagination, incompetence. . . . But us—we lived this tragedy.”19 Their experience allowed them—and them alone—to comprehend the danger that the camps posed to the human condition. Thus when Rousset issued his 1949 appeal to fellow survivors, he stressed that “I am not asking you to request an inquiry” into the gulag, “but to take it in hand yourselves.”20 No one else was “technically and morally qualified” to do so.21 This would become the CICRC’s defining tenet. In truth—as evidenced by the exclusion of Holocaust victims—the organization’s claim to “specialist” authority was not anchored in traumatic experience alone. It also relied on members’ status as former resisters and, implicitly, on their professional credentials. Nevertheless, as the commission entered a well-populated postwar field of international NGOs claiming expertise in various human problems, it stood apart in its members’ embrace of a collective identity as “witnesses before other men.”22

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6 INTRODUCTION

Thanks to the immediate postwar labors of the individuals who would form the CICRC, the “concentrationary universe” and the experientially expert witness were already widely embraced concepts by the time the anti–concentration camp movement came into being. Rousset’s own publications, including not only L’Univers concentrationnaire but also a sprawling 1947 novel, Les Jours de notre mort, were particularly important in this regard.23 “Sadly neglected” by scholars today, in his own time the ex-Trotskyist Rousset was, as Samuel Moyn argues, “the single most important interpreter of the camps” for readers on both sides of the Atlantic.24 His acts of literary testimony shaped the moral imagination of his era, providing contemporaries with a descriptive and normative vocabulary for voicing comment on otherwise unspeakable sites. What is more, until it was displaced by memory of the Jewish genocide in later decades, the univers concentrationnaire functioned for many Western Europeans as, in Moyn’s terms, a “powerful synecdoche” for all Nazi evil.25 Shoah survivors themselves were among those who embraced the concept in the late 1940s—as were admirers of the USSR, since Rousset’s language of potential reproducibility was not originally intended as a crude means of equating Nazi and Soviet “totalitarianism” but as an effort to recuperate meaning from an otherwise senseless experience of agony. Thus, as writer François Bondy observed in 1952, the univers concentrationnaire quickly became “a keyword of our conscience, and even that of the Communists.”26 The “universe” it referenced appeared genuinely universal. As a result, Rousset joined other members of the Resistance deportation in assuming an exalted status in postwar France as prophetic envoys with an urgent message to convey to “normal men.” Such recognition was not yet available to Jewish Holocaust victims; as Annette Wieviorka has argued, although genocide survivors offered copious testimony from the start, widespread acknowledgment of their status as “witnesses” arrived only years later.27 But the situation of Resistance deportees in the immediate postwar moment was different. In a battered France shamed by military defeat, foreign occupation, and the Vichy government’s collaboration with the Third Reich, their suffering in the camps was honored as the highest possible expression of courageous, redemptive national self-sacrifice. Hence their words of testimony to that suffering were greeted with respect bordering on reverence. They were “the only elect that He has marked with his stigmata / The only priests that the Dove has visited,” wrote Catholic poet Pierre Emmanuel in a 1945 “Hymn of the Witnesses” dedicated to future CICRC member Louis Martin-Chauffier. “We call down upon these martyrs the gift of tongues: / May they prophesy into the empty hearts.”28 Four years later, David Rousset drew on this legacy of prestige and pathos in founding the CICRC. Disenchanted with revolutionary politics following a short-lived attempt to launch a new leftist party with Sartre, Rousset cast his

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INTRODUCTION 7

1949 proposal to investigate the Soviet gulag as a solemn enactment of survivors’ duty to bear witness rather than a calculating act of Cold War combat. As communists now discovered, to their dismay, France’s most celebrated author on the Nazi camps occupied a commanding position from which to condemn the Soviet ones. The idiom of the univers concentrationnaire, moreover, was readily transformed into a weapon for that purpose. Though in reality most gulag inmates (like most Nazi camp internees) had not actually been arrested for individual political offenses, Rousset’s indictment of the Soviet forced labor system as an apparatus for punishing resistance proved galvanizing in France and other recently occupied countries.29 Meanwhile, because his famous 1946 and 1947 acts of testimony had depicted the Nazis as “inventing” concentration camps, Rousset could now position the gulag, whose existence had long been known, as a new problem for Europeans, an alarming repetition of Hitler’s unprecedented crimes.30 Still more useful for anti-Soviet purposes was the fact that his discourse of concentrationary suffering operated in binary terms. For Rousset, “true concentration camps” existed in dichotomous opposition to all other detention facilities and sites of unfree labor, however foreboding, from Vichy France’s internment centers to postwar European camps for displaced persons to the penal work gangs of the Jim Crow American South.31 There was “no relation” between concentrationary and non-concentrationary carceral institutions, he averred, no gray zone connecting them.32 To condemn the USSR by means of this black-and-white vision was to declare the capitalist West the moral champion in the Cold War regardless of any other human rights violations on its part. It was, as the eminent Catholic writer and resister François Mauriac marveled, a “brilliant shortcut.”33 Brilliant it may have been, but had Rousset and his followers done nothing more than draw an embarrassing connection between German and Soviet sites of captivity, their story would be a footnote in the history of Cold War antitotalitarianism.34 The real significance of the campaign emerged out of members’ efforts to frame their activism as a means of mobilizing memory of the Nazi camps to articulate universal norms for responding to state violence. These efforts infuriated leftist critics, who insisted that ends-oriented political judgment had to trump affective processes of memory and identification. “The truth is that even the experience of an absolute like the concentrationary horror cannot determine a political position,” Rousset’s former friends Sartre and Merleau-Ponty admonished him.35 They electrified anticommunists, however, and thereby set in motion a dynamic by which the commission—not despite its Cold War partisanship but because of it—succeeded in furthering acceptance of what might now be called human rights ideals.36 For instance, the commission’s heavily publicized 1951 restaging of Nuremberg as a trial of the USSR led multiple commentators

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8 INTRODUCTION

to endorse the still-controversial idea that a government could commit “crimes against humanity” in peacetime, against its own subjects, and ought to be held accountable by international actors for doing so. Rousset and his followers also helped to establish a point left undecided by the International Military Tribunal: that the concentration camp was, as the Economist put it, “in itself a crime against humanity.”37 It was only the third time that the magazine had used the term since Nuremberg—and the first to describe a state’s violence toward its own citizens. The CICRC’s investigations in the West were even more important than its anti-Soviet actions in giving substance to the principle that, after the catastrophes of recent history, repression of domestic dissent and colonial rebellion demanded supranational oversight. Conducting inquiries in Spain, Greece, and French North Africa may originally have been a way for the commission to vaunt its evenhandedness. But members—many of whom had identified as antifascists since the Spanish Civil War, and some of whom were anti-imperialist militants as well—took up the work with gusto. The results were impressive. In an era of intense anxiety over sovereignty, Western governments nevertheless authorized the commission to conduct unprecedented on-the-ground prison inspections because they did not wish to join the USSR in refusing—or to snub a group of heroic Resistance deportees. In 1952, Rousset’s group became the only international nongovernmental organization ever to access the interior of Francisco Franco’s carceral system, interviewing detainees and openly publishing its critical findings on Spanish wrongdoing. Five years later, it accomplished a similar feat in the wartime internment centers of French Algeria. In such efforts, and in a 1956 off-site investigation of Chinese labor camps, members offered a deliberate enactment of the internationalist values of what Rousset once called the univers solidaire, a utopic counter to the univers concentrationnaire.38 The CICRC expressed its commitment to human solidarity by demanding that the world community heed the voices of sufferers, wherever they were. In fact it oriented its entire activist program, East and West, around the dissemination of victim testimony. A reliance on first-person accounts of anguish to “name and shame” purveyors of atrocity was, in itself, nothing new in the 1950s: victim narratives had been tools of nineteenth-century abolitionist campaigns, interwar efforts to condemn atrocity, and so on.39 The CICRC, though, was able to invest testimony with heightened evidentiary significance for post-1945 audiences as a result of members’ own stature as patriotic heroes and expert witnesses. By performatively transferring their personal moral authority to fellow victims, participants insisted that Europeans pay as much heed to imprisoned Chinese peasants, say, or persecuted Algerian nationalists, as to the martyrs of Dachau and Buchenwald. In a sharp break from Nuremberg’s precedent of “trial by document,” the group also offered a new vision of international justice centered on a universal

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INTRODUCTION 9

“duty” to provide victims of state violence with “a chance to speak about their lives and their misfortune.” Its 1951 mock trial of the USSR, for example, constituted a procession of gulag survivors relating “what they have suffered . . . in accordance with the truth of their experience” before a court composed exclusively of former Nazi camp inmates, who ultimately offered their own verdict as yet another act of testimony.40 Despite such bravura performances, however, over time the CICRC’s claims regarding the universal import of concentrationary memory came under increasing strain. As a project premised on a rigid equation between past and present—as members had conceived of both circa 1949—the commission was ill-prepared to respond to new forms of state violence, or to absorb gradual changes in the ways that other Europeans remembered Nazi atrocities. For example, while many antitotalitarian commentators responded to a 1952–1953 wave of antisemitic persecution in the Eastern bloc by placing fresh commemorative emphasis on Hitler’s Jewish genocide, CICRC members were compelled to remain silent: invoking Treblinka and Sobibór would have imperiled their non-racialized construction of the meaning of the Nazi camp system. As the decade progressed and the Soviet gulag contracted, Rousset and his followers also found themselves employing increasingly tortuous logic in order to maintain that “the concentrationary universe” was an appropriate way to describe the current global landscape of repression. The conceit of expertise born from experience broke down, too, as the organization addressed camps in parts of the world about which participants possessed little knowledge, such as China. And in the wake of the 1956 Hungarian Revolution, crushed by Soviet-backed forces as the West looked on, some CICRC participants—including Rousset—began to question whether “bearing witness” was an adequate response to the agony of distant victims or merely voyeurism masquerading as action. Ultimately, however, it was not in Hungary but in Algeria that Rousset’s commission met its end, largely because the fraught politics of decolonization scrambled the Cold War alliances upon which the group was built. The CICRC’s internal unity was shattered by its leaders’ differing positions on France’s terrible struggle to retain its Algerian territory, giving the lie to their earlier claims that experience, not ideology, naturally determined survivors’ responses to post-1945 acts of state violence. At the same time, the transatlantic partnership with the CIA broke down as the commission focused increasing energy on Western imperial abuses; the group’s funding was cut off after Rousset defiantly insisted on investigating French Algerian prison camps in 1957. The consequences were devastating. But an even more important cause of the CICRC’s demise than its loss of funds was a “loss of interest” in “these concentrationary questions” among French members consumed by the tragedy unfolding across the Mediterranean.41

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10 INTRODUCTION

As Germaine Tillion explained to fellow Ravensbrück survivor Lise Børsum in 1960, the commission’s backward-glancing activist framework, designed for continental purposes, now revealed itself as an impediment rather than an aid to clear-eyed confrontation with the historically specific violence of a declining colonial power. The CICRC’s failure to pass through the Algerian crucible suggests a need to rethink existing models of past sufferers’ potential to engage in acts of “moral witnessing” or “exemplary memory” through drawing general lessons from their experiences.42 According to literary scholar Michael Rothberg’s influential theory of multidirectional memory, for instance, remembrance of Nazi atrocity during the Algerian War set in motion a “productive, intercultural dynamic” of identification among victim groups that “served to catalyze” deeper French awareness of the Holocaust while also stimulating demands for justice on behalf of Algerians.43 In defending the notion that “solidarity, in other words, is a frequent—if not guaranteed—outcome of the remembrance of suffering,” Rothberg highlights the case of camp survivors, who, he argues, “immediately experienced” French torture and internment practices in Algeria “as unwelcome echoes of the past.”44 The CICRC’s story unfortunately does not bear out this assertion. On the contrary, the principle that ethical action should arise through processes of identification constrained commission members from expressing solidarity with Muslim Algerians. This was in part a result of cultural distance, but it was also because France’s abusive practices in the Algerian War—which had their own genealogy in the longue durée of colonial repressive policy and their own political logic in a brutal decolonizing struggle—failed to map neatly onto those once employed in the Nazi SS camps. The comparative framework that the commission had long championed thus permitted pro-colonialist participants to dismiss French acts of colonial violence as “sentimental children’s stories” compared to the horrors of Dachau and Buchenwald.45 Meanwhile, it led the group’s anticolonialists to conclude that a meaningful response to the crisis in North Africa could not derive from remembrance of earlier German crimes at all. The CICRC’s story, then, suggests that the relationship between memory and morality is never fixed but, rather, exists as a question that must continually be answered in historical terms. More specifically, it illuminates both the power and limits of remembrance deployed for putatively universalist ends in the aftermath of the Second World War. Despite the absence of Holocaust consciousness and the frailty of human rights discourse in the 1950s, this was a period rich in efforts to draw lessons from the recent past to bear witness for a still-suffering humanity. But those particular lessons were contingent, politicized Cold War constructions that broke down in the encounter with the fresh atrocities that accompanied the collapse of European empires. “Never again!”—however

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INTRODUCTION 11

powerful a rallying cry after the world war’s catastrophic violence—proved a problematic dictate for the era of decolonization. Beyond assuming a fixed and partial understanding of what, exactly, the recent catastrophe had entailed, it also demanded a static reading of the present as a site of potentially endless traumatic repetition. History, however, does not actually repeat itself—a fact CICRC members came to realize, painfully, in the course of the Algerian War. Of course, some forms of knowledge are indeed gained through experience, and the process of drawing analogies, comparisons, and correspondences between past and present forms of injustice is often both enlightening and motivating. But the history of the CICRC’s final years suggests that as a basis for human solidarity, memory of modernity’s worst atrocities is not as robust, productive, or “universal” as we might wish.

From French Intellectual History to Global Politics and Back Again I first encountered the untold story of the anti–concentration camp movement as a French intellectual historian interested in David Rousset’s 1949–1950 conflict with Sartre over memory, political judgment, and morality. When I began to wonder whether his “Appeal” had generated consequences beyond the rarefied pages of Les Temps modernes, I discovered a history that was institutional in nature, international in scope, and entangled with the ambitions and endeavors of multiple state actors. The CICRC’s rise and fall could not be traced by examining French sources alone, nor could I restrict myself to the kinds of materials that intellectual historians traditionally study. Ultimately, my effort to do justice to the organization’s complicated story led me into archives across continental Western Europe, Britain, and the United States. Although, regrettably, nearly all CIA files relevant to the story told here remain closed, documents in other American archives proved indispensable in reconstructing, to the extent possible, the web of external support that helped sustain the commission.46 Despite this “grubbing in the archives,” however, ideas retain primacy in the account that follows—not, certainly, as free-floating causal forces but as constituents of the postwar social imaginary that cannot be reduced to Cold War “positions” or stratagems.47 For the CICRC’s survivor-members, concepts such as “the concentrationary universe” and “the witness” were not simply rhetorical hammers with which to bludgeon Stalin. They were structuring components of their world and identity—and I insist that it is possible to analyze them as such without minimizing the calculated political uses to which they were put. The book is thus not only a history of the activities, agendas, and alliances of an

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12 INTRODUCTION

organization that, as it happened, was largely populated by intellectuals. It is also an intellectual history. French history, too, remains at the heart of the study despite the European and transatlantic dimensions my research has assumed. There are three reasons for this. First, most of the CICRC’s leaders were French men and women. Second, though the commission functioned as an international collective for the majority of its existence, both its birth and death were predominantly French affairs. Indeed, they are inexplicable outside the contexts of France’s confrontation with the Second World War and later the Algerian War. Third, the CICRC’s practice of internationalism was francocentric. Of course, to write about a European-run, American-funded, world-oriented entity demands practicing transnational history. But this is different from uncritically reproducing past actors’ claims to have transcended the bounds of the nation-state—and, for the purposes of this book, I have found it more illuminating to treat international nongovernmental organizing as a rhetoric and vehicle for people still deeply invested in intra-national disputes than to consider it evidence of expanding “global community.”48 Indeed, I have sought to highlight directly the unquestioned assumptions about (imperial) national sovereignty and identity that both animated and undermined CICRC leaders’ efforts to enact a universalist ethics. To tell the commission’s story as a French intellectual history is, in part, to restore its founder to his forgotten place in the postwar intellectual landscape. Sartre, Merleau-Ponty, Camus, Simone de Beauvoir, Pierre Naville, Edgar Morin, Jean-Marie Domenach, fellow survivors Jean Cayrol and Robert Antelme, and many other thinkers in this period approached Nazi evil, Soviet violence, and global human suffering in explicit or implicit dialogue with the author of L’Univers concentrationnaire. Bringing to light Rousset’s half of the conversation—which, crucially, was expressed not only in his writing but in his activist performance of “witnessing” through the CICRC—helps reveal the true nature and stakes of their arguments. Specifically, it shows the limitations of the still-influential post–Cold War interpretive paradigm that characterizes disputes among leading Fourth Republic French intellectuals as contests between reckless defenders of communist revolutionary terror and lonely, brave bearers of what Tony Judt called “the burden of responsibility.”49 My goal is not to reverse familiar binaries of enlightenment versus blindness, purity versus partisanship, and ethics versus politics by “unmasking” one of Stalin’s fiercest detractors as a tainted beneficiary of CIA largesse. It is, rather, to suggest that key aspects of postwar French intellectual history cannot be captured in such terms at all. That Rousset’s anti-gulag intervention was reliant on the erasure of Birkenau’s crematoria, for example, and that Sartre and communist critics pointed this out at the time, obviously does not mean that the latter were “right” to dismiss or downplay Soviet crimes.

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INTRODUCTION 13

Instead, it suggests that historians must resist the reductive logic of the morality play if we are to grapple with intellectual complexity in the past—and especially during the Cold War. Thus, rather than “looking for heroes in postwar France,” this book aims to understand the operative categories of analysis and judgment that were available to the era’s writers as they responded to ongoing terror and injustice, from Kolyma to Algiers, and to demonstrate how thoroughly their debates were shadowed by the dark legacies of World War II.50 This approach yields a picture of the period between 1945 and 1962 that looks different from that painted by many scholars of postwar French intellectual life and collective memory. Historians interested in the seismic shifts that followed the 1961 Adolf Eichmann trial in Jerusalem, the events of May 1968, and the rise of US-Soviet détente have tended to treat the decades immediately following the Second World War as the “before” to a later explosion of popular and intellectual interest in ethics, testimony, remembrance, victimhood, empathy, and suffering. By analytically decoupling the rise of witnessing, as such, from the emergence of the Jewish Holocaust victim as a paradigmatic voice of memory, this book demonstrates that French intellectuals’ self-conscious turn to an ethics of testimony (témoignage) had roots in the early Cold War. In effect, through offering up the mediating figure of the (prominent, non-Jewish, noncommunist) Nazi camp survivor as a stand-in for humanity writ large, Rousset and his fellow CICRC members insisted decades ahead of the so-called “era of the witness” that témoignage was the correct response of Western subjects to both their own past suffering and the current pain of distant others.51 Their influential adoption of this position did not only predate the emergence of Holocaust consciousness in France but was predicated on its absence, since it relied directly upon the cultural authority of the Resistance deportation. Through “concentrationary” discourses of remembrance, these political survivors–turned–Cold War activists fostered norms of secular testimony that were only later naturalized as constituting a post-Holocaust, apolitical defense of universal human dignity. Of course, the CICRC was distinct from later projects of témoignage. David Rousset’s self-proclaimed vocation as a “spokesman . . . interpret[ing] the speech of the victims” may have anticipated what anthropologist Didier Fassin calls a “new configuration of testimony” in the humanitarian world beginning in the 1970s, as aid workers became “spokespeople for the oppressed,” but he and other commission participants had a relationship to victim testimony different from that of activists who joined post-1968 NGOs.52 This is because they explicitly understood themselves as fellow victims of the “same” atrocities. The survivor-witnesses of the CICRC were not compassionate, professionally competent outsiders offering relief, nor were they “moral spectators” moved to pity in the sense Luc Boltanski has described.53 Rather, they were haunted past sufferers

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14 INTRODUCTION

who now claimed to recognize, with horror, that there remained “in my block, in my box, on my plank, with the same vermin and the same dread, a man, a brother.”54 Rousset’s group, then, cannot be conceived of as a clear-cut forerunner to later organizations devoted to third-party witnessing. It can, however, be viewed as a heretofore overlooked element in the intricate, highly contingent genealogy of postwar global moral sentiment, a genealogy from which the 1950s has too often been excluded. Thus I approach the CICRC’s rise and fall not as a story of hidden origins but as a lens onto the role and meaning of “witnessing” in the organization’s own troubled and violent historical moment. The book begins with the end of the Second World War in Europe. Its first chapter tells the story of how the commission’s future leaders made their way home to France after the Nazi camps were liberated and took up the lifelong work of testimony. The chapter explores the process by which, years before the CICRC formed, figures such as Rousset, Tillion, and Martin-Chauffier established their public identities as expert witnesses by laying claim to an exclusive form of knowledge born of suffering. Chapter 2 relates how Rousset drew on this identity in crafting his bombshell 1949 “Appeal.” By analyzing the evocative language of his open letter as well as the astonishing wave of responses that the text provoked in France, I demonstrate that the uproar was fueled not merely by Cold War side-taking but also by deep disagreement over how the country’s wartime suffering should be remembered—and what bearing such memories ought to have on present-day political choices. From the story of the “Appeal,” the book moves beyond French borders to chart what was ultimately the key consequence of its publication: the creation of a European survivors’ movement to combat the univers concentrationnaire. Chapter 3 recounts the internal debates that accompanied the organization’s founding, one over what counted as a “concentration camp,” and the other, closely related, over which wartime experiences made individuals eligible for membership. Along the way, new characters appear. The first of these are the Belgian, “Spanish republican,” Dutch, West German, Norwegian, and Danish survivors who now joined Rousset’s endeavor through a complex process of adapting his vision to non-French national modes of memorializing the Nazi camps. The second are a set of American labor leaders and intellectuals whose enthusiasm for the anti-concentrationary project eventually helped Rousset receive CIA funding. Finally, the chapter introduces Poliakov and Bernard, using their insider-outsider status in the CICRC to explicate the group’s troubled relationship to Jewish suffering. The figure of the Holocaust victim, I argue, cannot be viewed as simply absent from an initiative that, behind the scenes, was largely run by a historian and a survivor of the Final Solution. Rather, it constituted a haunting “other” against which the organization defined itself.

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INTRODUCTION 15

The following two chapters serve as a paired examination of what the CICRC’s work looked like in practice. Chapter 4 is centered on the commission’s 1951 mock trial of the USSR; it treats the event not only as a creative attempt to mobilize Nuremberg’s legacy for Cold War ends but as an effort to advance and expand that legacy through placing victim testimony at the heart of its symbolic enactment of international justice. By considering the group’s 1952 investigation in Spain, chapter 5 illuminates how the anti-concentrationary model functioned when survivors targeted a right-wing dictatorship with historic ties to Nazi Germany, rather than a communist state. The inquiry, crowned with dramatic testimony before the Ad Hoc Committee on Forced Labor at the United Nations, was a milestone of international “witnessing” in the name of Spanish political prisoners. But, as the chapter demonstrates, it also exposed the inflexible nature of the commission’s memory-based criteria for evaluating detention regimes and the fragility of Nazi camp survivors’ claims to authority derived from experience. Chapter 6 moves forward in time to span the commission’s busiest years, from a 1953 inquiry in French Tunisia to large-scale protests against the Soviet repression in Hungary in 1956. It first highlights internal debates over members’ cultural competence to investigate in Africa and China, which hinged on whether the Nazi camps could really be understood as universal archetypes of inhumanity. It then explores how the commission struggled to continue asserting the “concentrationary” nature of the Soviet repressive apparatus as the gulag shrank and, at the same time, as genocide slowly became less marginal to Western European conceptions of the Nazi camps. Finally, it considers the commission’s engagement with the Hungarian Revolution—including its failed lobbying efforts through the United Nations—and explains why the episode left some members disillusioned with the politics of witnessing. Chapter 7 explores how all these tensions came to a head during the CICRC’s 1957 Algerian investigation. While stressing Rousset’s accomplishment in shedding light on France’s shadowy prison camp regime, the chapter focuses primarily on how the project destroyed his organization—not only by severing its funding relationship with the Central Intelligence Agency but also by compelling members to conclude, regretfully, that the violence of decolonization could not be addressed through direct comparison to World War II’s atrocities. Before launching readers back to the spring of 1945, one further prefatory comment is necessary. I admire the commitment of the individuals who took part in the Commission Internationale contre le Régime Concentrationnaire, and I have tried to write about their ideas and experiences with empathy and respect. As French president François Hollande noted on the 2015 occasion of Germaine Tillion’s symbolic reburial in the Panthéon, the courage of Resistance deportees was profound—and was not confined to their wartime acts. But

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16 INTRODUCTION

respecting the commission’s members is a different matter from limiting critical inquiry into their ideals and allegiances, their priorities and exclusions. The historian, for better or for worse, cannot join Hollande in accepting at face value the moral authority that Rousset and his followers assigned themselves—and, in turn, denied to others—as witnesses for a suffering humanity. To the contrary, the task of illuminating the movement’s meaning and significance in its own time demands a reckoning with the limits of its universalism. My goal has thus been to treat my protagonists, despite all of their losses, as flesh-and-blood, fallible human beings who continued to make new choices after 1945. I hope that, in its own way, this approach pays tribute to CICRC members’ passage through catastrophe. By taking seriously their fierce determination to fight on—publicly, politically, and polemically—I aim to do justice to their own understanding of what it meant to survive.

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THE SCHOLEMS A S to r y o f th e G er ma n - J ewis h Bo urge o isi e from E ma n ci pa t i on to Dest r u c t i on

Jay Howard Geller

CORNELL UNIVERSITYÂ PRESS Ithaca and London

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Copyright © 2019 by Cornell University All rights reserved. Except for brief quotations in a review, this book, or parts thereof, must not be reproduced in any form without permission in writing from the publisher. For information, address Cornell University Press, Sage House, 512 East State Street, Ithaca, New York 14850. Visit our website at cornellpress.cornell.edu. First published 2019 by Cornell University Press Printed in the United States of America Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Geller, Jay Howard, author. Title: The Scholems : a story of the German-Jewish bourgeoisie from emancipation to destruction / Jay Howard Geller. Description: Ithaca : Cornell University Press, 2019. | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2018029901 (print) | LCCN 2018033456 (ebook) | ISBN 9781501731570 (pdf ) | ISBN 9781501731587 (epub/mobi) | ISBN 9781501731563 | ISBN 9781501731563 (cloth ; alk. paper) Subjects: LCSH: Scholem, Gershom, 1897–1982. | Scholem, Gershom, 1897–1982—Family. | Jewish scholars—Germany—Biography. | Jews—Germany— Biography. | Jews—Germany—History—20th century. | Middle class—Germany—History—20th century. Classification: LCC BM755.S295 (ebook) | LCC BM755. S295 G45 2018 (print) | DDC 305.892/40430922 [B]—dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2018029901

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Contents

Map of the Scholems’ Berlin in the 1920s vii Members of the Scholem Family ix

Introduction 1 1. Origins: From Glogau to Berlin

2. Berlin Childhood around 1900: Growing Up in the Growing Metropolis

3. Things Fall Apart: The First World War

4. Life in the Time of Revolutions: The Early Weimar Republic

5. The Gold-Plated Twenties and Beyond: Promise, Prosperity, and Depression in Interwar Germany

6. In the Promised Land: A New Home in Jerusalem

127

7. The Maelstrom: Jewish Life in Nazi Germany 142 8. Cresting of the Fifth Wave: Gershom Scholem’s Palestine in the 1930s

172

9. Afterlives: Sydney and Jerusalem

193

Conclusion 209

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vi CO N T E N TS

Acknowledgments 219 Notes 223 Bibliography 291 Index 321

Gallery begins on page 000.

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Introduction

Monday, 21 FebruaryÂ 1938. It is a cold, clear morning as the RMS Queen Mary sails up the Hudson River at the end of its five-day journey from Cherbourg, France. Among the passengers waiting to disembark at the West 50th Street pier in New York City is a lanky man in a suit and tie, outwardly unremarkable, save for his exceptionally prominent ears. The Immigration and Naturalization Service notes that he is a Palestinian citizen of the Hebrew race, born in Berlin, Germany, and he has come to the United States to give lectures. His name is Gershom Scholem. It is his first trip to America, a country that he regards with curiosity and some degree of suspicion. Over the next few weeks, he will speak to large crowds, visit research libraries, and rekindle old acquaintances among the emigrated German-born Jewish intelligentsia. His lectures will form the basis of a book that will fundamentally change the way the public thinks about Jewish mysticism and will help create an entirely new field of study. He will become the most important academic scholar of Judaism in his era and arguably Israelâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s preeminent public intellectual. But as Gershom Scholem descends the gangway on that winter morning, he is primarily excited about the prospect of studying rare manuscripts in New York and exploring the strange world that is America. * 1

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2 I N T R O D U C T I O N

Friday, 1 July 1938. While Gershom savors his time in New York and basks in the glow of his successful lectures, a different ship brings his brothers Reinhold and Erich to their new life. The Aorangi sails into Sydney harbor, having crossed the Pacific Ocean from Canada. Reinhold, an unapologetic German patriot, and Erich, a disaffected liberal democrat, have completed a flight from Nazism that has taken them from Berlin to Southampton, Montreal, Vancouver, and Sydney. After six weeks of traveling, they are exhausted, but safe. In contrast to Gershom’s arrival in New York, they are not greeted by members of the local Jewish intelligentsia, and there is no large honorarium reserved for them. In fact, they have no jobs or apartments waiting for them. They plan to lodge in a residential hotel until they get established. Without relatives or friends in Australia, they report to the Australian immigration inspector that their only contact is the Jewish Welfare Society. For decades, they were prosperous printshop owners, until they were deprived of their livelihood by the Nazis. They were lifelong Berliners, but they can no longer remain in Germany, and soon, the Nazi government will strip them of their German citizenship, rendering them officially stateless. They will spend years struggling to reestablish the affluence and sense of belonging they once had. And now, as Reinhold and Erich Scholem glimpse the iconic Sydney Harbour Bridge for the first time, they are immigrants in a strange land. Saturday, 17 September 1938. While Reinhold settles into a new apartment in Sydney and fills out Australian immigration papers for his mother, a consignment of prisoners arrives at the Buchenwald concentration camp: Jews, Communists, and others considered enemies of the Nazi state. They sign forms and confirm the handover of their personal effects. Perhaps the most infamous among the inmates is Werner Scholem, a former representative in the German Reichstag, member of the Communist Party central committee, and editor of the Communist Party’s official newspaper. He is also the brother of Gershom, Reinhold, and Erich. He is already familiar with the world of the concentration camps, having been imprisoned since April 1933, shortly after the Nazis came to power. Over the last five years, he has been in Columbia-Haus, Lichtenberg, and Dachau. In each camp, his notoriety has exacerbated his situation, with both the guards and his fellow prisoners. Meanwhile, the Nazis have accused him of subverting the German army, singled him out as a mastermind of the Communist press, and exhibited him as a paragon of stereotypical Jewish physical features.

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I N T R O D U C T I O N 3

Though his health has suffered and he exudes unremitting pessimism, he yearns to join his family abroad. They have appealed to welfare boards, non-Jewish religious organizations, and political activists on his behalf. Some of his acquaintances inside the camps have been released to emigrate, giving his family hope. However, as Werner Scholem steps off the transport vehicle in Buchenwald, he does not know that this has been his last journey. Wednesday, 9 November 1938. While Werner sits in Buchenwald, a storm of antisemitism erupts in cities and towns across Germany. It is Kristallnacht. In a sudden escalation in the violence against the Jews, Nazi storm troopers and their helpers smash the windows of thousands of Jewish-owned businesses. Tens of thousands of Jewish men are arrested and sent to jails and concentration camps. Hundreds of synagogues are burned down or partially destroyed, including the interior of the Berlin Lindenstrasse synagogue, where Betty Scholem occasionally worships with her family. As the massive extent of the damage becomes clear, Betty Scholem is in a panic. She had wanted to stay in Germany to advocate for Werner’s release, but Werner’s wife, safe in London, urges Betty to flee immediately. She would leave that day if she could, but she is still waiting on an exit permit and her passport. From Australia, Reinhold sends his mother an Australian entry permit via air mail. There is no time to lose. It is clear that every Jew who can leave Germany must do so without delay. Facing this dire situation and ensnared in a bureaucratic tangle, she has a nervous breakdown. It is unclear if she will be able to travel, and if so, where she can go. Four brothers, whose vastly different fates stem from choices made decades before, and their mother, in the middle of this disintegrating family. What led them to this point? It would seem natural that siblings, raised in the same house under identical circumstances, would have the same or similar political views.1 Moreover, political convictions frequently reflect a set of cultural and social practices: how people live, how they socialize, how they view the world, and what values they hold. Therefore, it is all the more unusual that the members of one family illustrate the diversity of political opinion and social choices among middle-class German Jews in the early twentieth century. Yet the Scholems, encompassing so many trends, were broadly representative of German Jewry in this era. Looking back on his youth, Gershom commented, “Perhaps one can say that the very different directions in which we four brothers developed in the ensuing years were typical of the world of the Jewish bourgeoisie and demonstrated what little influence a seemingly common

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4 I N T R O D U C T I O N

environment has on the path taken by an individual young person.”2 The historian Shulamit Volkov has written, “Jews reacted to the waves of antisemitism in the last quarter of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries in four major ways.” They were: a re-avowal of their faith in liberalism, usually accompanied by allegiance to the dominant nationalism of their country; a rejection of any nationalism and an embrace of socialist internationalism; an attempt to assert Jewish particularity while remaining Europeans; and Zionism.3 Though she does not mention the Scholems as exemplars, they largely fit her paradigm. Werner Scholem—who became a leader of the German Communist Party, member of the Reichstag, and rival of Joseph Stalin—made stark choices in response to the inequity of German society and the perceived hypocrisy of the German-Jewish bourgeoisie. Gershom Scholem was an extraordinary figure as an academic scholar of Judaism and Israeli public intellectual with an international reputation, yet his life course was shaped by the choices he made as a young man as he observed the situation of German Jewry and personally reacted to it. Additionally, they were not alone in identifying as Communists or Zionists, and they remained embedded in a circle of like-minded Jews. In the radical, internationalist workers’ movement, Werner’s circle consisted largely of Communist intellectuals from Jewish backgrounds. After Gershom moved to Palestine, he circulated disproportionately among central European–born, German-speaking Jewish intellectuals, and even as a youth in Germany, he sought out other Jews who primarily emphasized their Jewish identity. But that group remained exceptional. As Reinhold recalled during an exchange with Gershom, “It seems to me that your feelings and views do not coincide with the majority of German Jews. . . . Conversely, you walked away [from Germanness] for Jewishness or Israeliness, and the Jews did not follow in the desired mass.”4 Politically, culturally, professionally, and even religiously, the brothers Reinhold and Erich were more typical of German Jewry, and they, too, made conscious choices as Jews and Germans as they reacted to the environment of Wilhelmine Germany, World War I, and the Weimar Republic. Their choices were indicative of how most members of the German-Jewish middle class viewed their world during these years of transition and, ultimately, peril. Moreover, the Scholem family consisted of more than the four brothers. There were parents, aunts and uncles, cousins, grandparents, and others who navigated the same shoals. In following the Scholem family’s story, it is possible to learn much about the experience of the German-Jewish bourgeoisie and German-Jewish identities in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.

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I N T R O D U C T I O N 5

In fact, long before its dispersion throughout the world or destruction inside Hitler’s Europe, the Jewish middle class in Germany formed a unique subculture. What were the characteristics of the German-Jewish bourgeoisie? As religious observance diminished over time, what elective affinities bound Jews together in Germany, and particularly in Berlin? In looking at this specific group through the lens of a single family, the Scholems, this book indicates the variety of Jewish involvement in German politics and the diversity of the internal life of the German-Jewish community. Generally speaking, the progress and success of liberalism in Germany widened the avenues for Jewish participation in German politics, but liberalism and Jewish involvement remained highly contested. Within the Jewish community, Zionists clashed with acculturists for the devotion and the electoral support of German Jews. Advocacy groups sought to define the place of Jews in German society, while protofeminist groups sought to redefine the place of women in the organized Jewish community.5 Notably, these battles were fought not only at the communal level, but also within families, such as the Scholems. Additionally, German Jews frequently followed a certain set of educational and professional trajectories that differentiated them from other Germans.6 Even more striking were patterns of socialization, identity formation, and cultural preferences, forged in the course of the nineteenth century and refined during the years of the Weimar Republic.7 In so many ways, the acculturated German-Jewish bourgeoisie had its own specific way of being German and being Jewish and contributing to both worlds.8 The Scholems were exemplars of this micro society within German society and within European Jewry. Studying German-Jewish society before 1933 illuminates the world that the Nazis destroyed. Not only did they compel Albert Einstein, Erich Mendelsohn, and Kurt Weill into exile, but also hundreds of thousands of less famous German Jews, many of whose families had lived in the German lands for centuries. Indeed, the Jews were an important part of the German bourgeoisie before 1933. Despite their relatively small proportion of the total German population, they had a special place in urban life in Germany before the Second World War. They were among the chief producers and consumers of modern culture in Germany. The Jewish middle class was central to journalism, the business community, and the professions of law and medicine in German cities before the Nazi era. Going beyond a review of their contributions to German society, this book elucidates the experiences of Jewish individuals and families within their own milieu and then the place of the German-Jewish microsociety in German society as a whole, and ultimately the world of the German-Jewish bourgeoisie in exile.

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6 I N T R O D U C T I O N

In this book I ask readers to re-approach the history of the Jews in Germany. While some writers, including Amos Elon, have thought of the German-Jewish epoch as commencing with Moses Mendelssohn’s arrival in Berlin in 1743 or the Haskalah ( Jewish Enlightenment) in the late eighteenth century, it is only with Jewish emancipation that the door to modernity and Germanness truly opened for Jews living under Prussian rule.9 In 1812 King Frederick William III issued his “Edict Concerning the Civil Status of the Jews in the Prussian State,” which granted rights to ordinary Jews, fostered their adoption of German culture, and permitted their eventual integration into German society. Furthermore, were it not for Frederick William’s decree, which was largely a reaction to Napoleon, the Scholems and thousands of Jews like them would not have traveled from the eastern provinces to Berlin and other sites of modernity—a fact that young Gershom Scholem emphasized in his own diary.10 Thus, it is necessary to commence the discussion of modern German Jewry with emancipation. In considering the parameters of the modern German-Jewish epoch, it is equally important to reconsider when the curtain descended on the history of German Jewry. It is natural to posit that German Jewry’s existence ceased during the Nazi era, and most studies of the topic conclude either with the rise of the Nazi state in 1933 or with the end of the Holocaust in 1945.11 However, the de-emancipation of the Jews was neither complete nor inevitable in 1933, and, with a few small exceptions, Jewish life in Germany had ended long before 1945. The Nazis disenfranchised the Jews, expunged Jewish contributions from German culture, and placed the Jews in a metaphorical ghetto even before embarking on their genocidal campaign. As Saul Friedländer has noted, by January 1939, there was no longer “any remaining possibility for Jewish life in Germany or for the life of Jews in Germany.”12 Their epoch had ended. Historians of modern Europe speak of a long nineteenth century, which began with the French Revolution and ended 125 years later with the First World War. Similarly, it is possible to speak of a long German-Jewish century that began with Prussia’s emancipation of the Jews in 1812 and ended with the de-emancipation that presaged the Holocaust. By legislating civil rights for the Jews, the Prussian government encouraged the transformation and, ultimately, the integration of German Jewry. By legislating the abolition of civil rights for the Jews, the Nazis removed the Jews from German society. This long century provides the framework for a longitudinal study of German-Jewish history. However, the situation is more complex, and there was a coda to the German-Jewish epoch. While Nazis did extinguish Jewish life in Germany,

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I N T R O D U C T I O N 7

German-Jewish civilization had an afterlife in emigration. The social and cultural history of the German Jews continued as refugees such as the Scholems took their interpersonal connections, cultural practices, and religious traditions with them to new homes. It was an extraordinary transnational development. The situation of German Jews in Palestine (later Israel) has gained scholarly attention in recent decades,13 but the German Jews’ cultural preservation and their contributions to life in other lands, where they were again part of a minority, have only begun to receive greater attention.14 German Jews, including the Scholems, established themselves in Australia, Brazil, Britain, South Africa, and the United States, among other destinations. This study follows Betty, Reinhold, and Erich to Australia and Gershom to Palestine, where their habits and predilections reveal how they continued to live as Jews and Germans and how they variously defined both identities. There are many ways to explore the history of German Jewry, particularly when focusing on transformations over the long term. Studies of institutions or select themes illustrate the structures of communal life and specific aspects of German Jewry, but they are frequently depersonalized and say little about the lived experience of individuals.15 By contrast, Marion Kaplan has helped pioneer fine-grained social history of the Jews in Germany. In examining both the imperial era and the Nazi era, she has explicated the changes wrought on Jewish families, gender dynamics, and interpersonal relations with non-Jewish Germans.16 Rather than assemble a comprehensive picture from a myriad of unconnected witnesses, I invite readers to follow one family’s story, embedded in the broader narrative of the rise, development, and decline of the Jewish bourgeoisie in modern Germany. Considering a single family over the course of several generations provides narrative continuity, and there are many such studies of German-Jewish families.17 As compelling as the collective biographies of the Cassirer, Mosse, Warburg, and Wertheim families are, they speak to the experience of the wealthy and powerful elites. This exposition focuses on the German-Jewish middle class. The Scholems were not grandees of the community or uncommonly famous, but neither were most Jewish families in Germany. Deborah Hertz has written a history of conversion and assimilation in Berlin, entitled How Jews Became Germans. Her study, however, focuses on the years 1770 to 1833, before migrant Jews from Prussian Silesia and Posen, or their descendants, fully engaged with Germanness and Liberal Judaism. Thus, she largely elides the notion of becoming German while staying Jewish, something achieved by generations of Scholems and hundreds of thousands of other Jews. Through their adoption and adaptation of German

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8 I N T R O D U C T I O N

culture, they became Germans on their own terms and without converting to Protestantism—though true acceptance by their Christian, German neighbors was another matter. Bourgeois German Jews, such as the Scholems, were anchored in a constellation of common practices and assumptions regarding religion, politics, and culture, though there were also many outliers. However, even outliers such as the Communist Werner Scholem and the Zionist Gershom Scholem still bore the marks of the German-Jewish bourgeoisie whence they came. Additionally, the Jewish bourgeoisie’s communal sensibility changed under the impact of external circumstances. Yet, as Marion Kaplan has noted, members of the established Jewish middle class in Germany, and particularly Berlin, were very interconnected. Ties of kinship facilitated business connections, socializing, and marriage brokering. Shared cultural practices, political views, and prejudices regarding the outside world, to say nothing of external antisemitism, helped perpetuate the nature of this milieu. However, not all scholars share this view of the German-Jewish past. Till van Rahden posits that rather than forming a specific German-Jewish subculture, “a kind of civil society parallel to the society of the ‘majority culture,’ ” Jews in Germany exhibited “situational ethnicity.” They felt particularly Jewish “in specific situations, such as family life or participation in ethnic associations” and less Jewish in other situations, where “other feelings of belonging” took priority.18 While it is true that the Jewish identity of bourgeois German Jews mattered less at some times than others, in many of the patterns of their domestic lives and public habits, they were clearly distinct from other Germans. The Scholems and their circle seem to have socialized little with non-Jews, but in a history of his own family, who lived in Breslau, the historian Fritz Stern writes, “Whatever silent prejudices they harbored, Christians and Jews intermingled socially,” even in the 1920s.19 The disparity between the Sterns’ experience and the Scholems’ experience might be attributable to nuanced differences within the bourgeoisie. For three generations, the Sterns had been prominent physicians and medical researchers and, thus, belonged to a higher social stratum than the Scholems, who were merely printshop owners and only a few generations removed from poverty. Indeed, in Berlin, where Jews made up a considerable part of the wealthiest stratum of society, the Jewish haute bourgeoisie had numerous ties to the aristocracy and even the officer corps, though almost never to the royal court. Nonetheless, members of the Jewish haute bourgeoisie retained their sense of identity. Their closest ties were with each other as friends, relatives, and business associates.20

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I N T R O D U C T I O N 9

This is more than a social history of German Jewry. It is also a biography of specific individuals, most notably Gershom Scholem, possibly the greatest Judaic studies scholar of the twentieth century and a public intellectual with an international reputation. The prefame lives of famous people are often objects of curiosity, but what differentiates Gershom Scholem from most other renowned German-born Jews is that he, too, had a preoccupation with his early life, which deeply affected his intellectual formation and political proclivities. This fascination with his own biography was matched by his obsession with the historical experience of the Jews in Germany. In the 1960s, he spoke publicly about these topics, and by the 1970s, he had begun publishing reminiscences of his youth, which culminated in the book From Berlin to Jerusalem, which Scholem revised and expanded as it appeared in translated editions.21 Gershom Scholem’s compelling memoir chronicles his family’s history and recounts events in his own life from his earliest years until he became a university lecturer in Jerusalem at the age of twenty-seven. Beyond that, it explores and critiques the nature of the German-Jewish bourgeoisie. Cynthia Ozick claimed, “And it is these Jews—this pitiable phenomenon of a passionately loyal citizenry only longing to be good and peaceable Germans—who comprise the furious hidden text of From Berlin to Jerusalem.”22 One cannot help but think that this memoir, written after the Holocaust extinguished the German Jews’ world, was intended to settle scores with those who did not share Gershom’s sentiments on Jewish life in Germany and perhaps even to gloat about his prescience at having left Germany long before the Nazi era. The Jewish community of Germany, and the extended Scholem family itself, was diverse and complicated, but so long as German Jews sought an enduring place in German society—whether they were liberals, like Gershom’s parents, or Socialists, like his brother Werner—he regarded them with a combination of condescension, disdain, and some degree of pity. Indeed, Ozick commented, “It is more than an irony, it is an ongoing wound, that From Berlin to Jerusalem, incontestably a Zionist book, continues the fraternal drama.”23 The Scholem family and their peers have entered history in an account marked by a framework of post-Holocaust hindsight and a Zionist agenda.24 Nonetheless, From Berlin to Jerusalem has achieved enormous influence. Nearly every examination of Gershom Scholem’s life and work references it, and some studies lean heavily on it. Incidentally, scholars first turned their attention to Scholem’s life and its relation to his work right about the time that he was writing From Berlin to Jerusalem.25 Since his death, the scholarly literature on Gershom Scholem has grown large and continues to grow as new

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10 I N T R O D U C T I O N

generations of scholars encounter him as a historian of religion, philosopher and theologian, literary figure, or eyewitness to German-Jewish history.26 Additionally, the enduring fascination with the pre-Holocaust German-Jewish intelligentsia, including Walter Benjamin and Hannah Arendt, has also brought attention to Gershom Scholem.27 In the past few years alone, Gershom Scholem has been the subject of several biographies.28 Noam Zadoff ’s study focuses largely on Gershom’s intellectual development and inner life, and his family has almost no presence in the narrative. Biographies by Amir Engel and David Biale link Gershom’s scholarly work and thought with his life experiences, including his political activism, and provide a context for some of his most important works. Biale, in particular, explores the familial background and milieu that was so important to Gershom Scholem’s intellectual, cultural, and social development, but ultimately they remain mainly background for Gershom’s life. Here, his family and their world are the story. While Gershom is a critical part of that narrative, the story is not his alone. In fact, Gershom Scholem remained tied to the German-Jewish bourgeoisie, or some aspects of it, long after his emigration, if not for the rest of his life. He was not just from the German-Jewish bourgeoisie; he was of the German-Jewish bourgeoisie. While many scholars have researched the life and work of Gershom Scholem, only a few scholars have undertaken examinations of his Communist brother Werner.29 Mirjam Zadoff looks at Werner, taking his family and his German-Jewish background into consideration. While Ralf Hoffrogge has also contextualized Werner’s life and work, his examination largely centers on Werner’s experience as a left-wing Socialist and Communist. Additionally, Hoffrogge has a far more judgmental perspective on the past, including the democracy of the Weimar Republic and the comportment of other Scholems, than does my study. Gershom Scholem lived for most of the twentieth century. He was born in Berlin in 1897 and died in Jerusalem in 1982. However, the thread of his family’s story extends much further back, through the Berlin of Kaisers Wilhelm I and Wilhelm II and the founding years of the German Reich, through the Revolution of 1848 in the Prussian capital and the Era of Reaction that preceded it. Before the Napoleonic era and well into the eighteenth century, it stretched to the Prussian province of Silesia, where the Scholems had lived for generations. Gershom was deeply conscious of the Scholems’ position as an old Berlin Jewish family and intrigued by their roots in the East. A few weeks after his fifteenth birthday, he wrote the opening lines of his diary: “I am descended from Glogau Jews.” Sixty years later, on the first page of his memoir, he noted, “I am descended from a Berlin Jewish family

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I N T R O D U C T I O N 11

that resided in Glogau in Lower Silesia (‘Greater Glogau’) until the second decade of the previous century.”30 His story—and their story—was one of long-established Berlin Jewry and migration. For him, the tale ended in Jerusalem, but it did not truly commence in Berlin. It started in the Silesian city of Glogau. And it is there that my narrative begins. Shortly after gaining basic civil rights, Gershom Scholem’s direct ancestor left Glogau for Berlin, where he joined a growing community of religiously traditional Jewish migrants living just steps away from the city’s sole synagogue. Life in Berlin, particularly after the emancipation edict of 1812, could not compare to life in provincial Glogau under the old regime. Broader horizons and new opportunities presented themselves. How did decisions about where to live, what occupation to have, and how to raise children denote the development of a German identity and the transformation of a Jewish identity? By the end of the century, after eighty years and three generations in the German capital, the Scholems were unqualifiedly part of the German-Jewish bourgeoisie. It was into this milieu that Gershom Scholem and his brothers were born. What did their schooling and preprofessional trajectories, religious life, military service, political awakening, and confrontation with antisemitism indicate about how they viewed their world and its opportunities? In answering these questions, it is significant that they were Berliners. They grew up in a city that was expanding in size, wealth, power, and prestige, and not just in terms of general affairs, but also for the Jewish community. Berlin dominated German Jewry, and Berlin Jews were central in shaping the contours of modern Jewish life.31 New forms of urban life and new possibilities for the Jewish bourgeoisie accompanied the dawn of a new century. Reinhold, Erich, Werner, and Gershom, the sons of Arthur and Betty Scholem, truly had a “Berlin Childhood around 1900,” in the words of Walter Benjamin. Despite the external stability of their world, life in the Scholem household was trying. Arthur, quick-tempered, self-righteous, and domineering, clashed with both his own father and his children. The eldest two sons, Reinhold and Erich, shared many, though not all, of their father’s views on politics, society, and religion and would follow in his professional footsteps. By contrast, the youngest two sons, Werner and Gershom, shared their father’s temperament, but disdained his politics and views on religion. As they grew to maturity, they did not refrain from sharing their opinions, heightening the tensions at home. How did this experience of opposition and conflict shape them? Though Betty and other relatives tried to maintain peace in the family, the Scholems had a tumultuous domestic life while inhabiting a bourgeois world of security.

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12 I N T R O D U C T I O N

And then came the First World War. As Germans rejoiced in the streets in August 1914, Jewish leaders hoped that the atmosphere of national unity would eradicate vestigial prejudices. In the liberal Jewish newspapers that Betty read and even in the Zionists newspapers that Gershom read, there were calls for Germany’s Jews to rush to the colors. In fact, Reinhold and Erich were among the young men marching off to war, while Werner, already a Socialist, and Gershom, an incipient Zionist, openly resisted calls for patriotic sacrifice. Eventually, the spirit of 1914 could no longer withstand the experience of prolonged bloody warfare and deprivations on the home front. How did this war against France and Russia end up pitting non-Jewish German against Jewish German and Scholem against Scholem? The Scholems survived the trenches, trials, food shortages, and influenza pandemic. As the war came to an end, they and so many other Germans looked forward to a return to order. Instead, they experienced five years of disorder: civil war, insurrection from Left and Right, punitive reparations, hyperinflation, and the first stirrings of fascism. However, they also experienced the birth of Germany’s first egalitarian democracy. Jews like the Scholems enjoyed unprecedented freedoms and encountered more overt antisemitism than ever before. Under these circumstances, coming on the heels of a devastating and futile war, how did German Jews cope and what choices did they make? Indeed, it is here that the political paths of the four Scholem brothers definitively diverged. Eventually, those political choices, accompanied by social and professional choices, sealed their fates in ways that no one could have imagined in 1920. Yet quotidian life continued, and while there was no return to the halcyon days of the prewar era, a new equilibrium was established in the mid-1920s. What did Germany’s political and economic situation mean for the Jewish middle class? In this era of freedom, did bourgeois Jews opt for true assimilation or seek new ways of identifying as Jews and Germans? Among the Scholems, Reinhold, Erich, Werner, and Gershom came into their own, embarking on careers that would define their lives. Two sons stepped into their parents’ shoes, taking over the family printing business and continuing the cultural practices that had long characterized the German-Jewish bourgeoisie, particularly in Berlin. By contrast, another son looked to Communist universalism in Germany and saw his future in politics, and yet another son devoted himself to an idiosyncratic form of Jewish particularism, built a home in Palestine, and sought a life of the mind. However, it was by no means clear which path was the surest in 1925, and by the 1930s, the Great Depression and political conflicts—between the German Left and Right, between Stalinist Communists and anti-Stalinist Communists, between

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I N T R O D U C T I O N 13

Arabs and Jews—threatened the achievements of the Scholem family and the Jewish middle class. The looming storm finally broke in 1933 as the Nazis came to power. A reign of terror endangered the livelihoods and the lives of the Jews in Germany, and the Scholems were not spared. What options did they see open to them as the walls closed in around them politically, economically, and socially? More than ever, their long-established paths determined who would live and who would die, who would rest and who would wander. By 1940, as war raged across Europe and around the world, neither the Scholem family in Berlin nor the established Jewish bourgeoisie of Germany would exist any longer. With limited capacity to help, Gershom Scholem watched his family’s plight from afar and the influx of German-Jewish refugees to Palestine up close. As a young man, he had left behind the world of the German-Jewish bourgeoisie and spent the following ten years building a new Jewish home in Palestine. However, in the 1930s, thousands of middle-class German Jews came to Jerusalem, Tel Aviv, and Haifa. They directly transformed the Yishuv (the Jewish settlement in Palestine) and indirectly changed the dynamic of Arab-Jewish relations in Palestine. Moreover, as the Scholems of Berlin were brought low by persecution, Gershom Scholem was exalted, winning accolades in academia and notoriety in Zionist political circles. The Scholems’ old world, that of the Jewish bourgeoisie in Germany, dissipated, and in time, they became Israelis and Australians, but with an unmistakable trace of Germanness. Moreover, as the past receded farther away, it became a concern, if not an obsession, for the surviving family members. Reinhold, Erich, and, above all, Gershom Scholem critically engaged with their history, which they variously viewed with nostalgia, bitterness, or even contempt. This book examines one family and revisits the German-Jewish bourgeoisie on their own terms, within the context of their era, without postHolocaust hindsight, but it is also an exploration of choices that later had significant consequences. While this story ultimately took its central figures from Berlin to Jerusalem and destinations around the world, as well as to concentration camps within Europe, the heart of this tale is a journey from Glogau, Breslau, and other cities to Berlin, as well as movement within the modernizing metropolis of Berlin. It is a journey of acculturation, class advancement, and refinement. It is about the apogee of the German-Jewish bourgeoisie’s unique subculture and the forces that challenged it and occasioned its demise, ending the German-Jewish century.

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ENDURING ALLIANCE A History of NATO and the Postwar Global Order Timothy Andrews Sayle

CORNELL UNIVERSITY PRESS

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Contents

Introduction: The Dangers of Democracy

The Specter of Appeasement

The Apple Cart

Tied Together by History

A Profound Bitterness

The Limits of Integration

100

The New Tripartitism

119

An Alliance for Peace

147

Busting Europe

167

Leaderless Men

191

Promises Are Never Enough

216

Conclusion: Looking Forward, Looking Back

241

Acknowledgments A Note on Sources Notes Index

251

10.

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Introduction

THE DANGERS OF DEMOCRACY

NATO Command Post Exercise 5: The first day of the war devastated Central Europe. The Soviet Union detonated eight hundred atomic bombs, while bombers of the United States Strategic Air Command dropped fifteen hundred. After one day of fighting, the Soviet Union had no atomic bombs left, but the war continued. Forces of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) clashed with troops of the Red Army and their Warsaw Pact allies. The American bombers continued to pummel Central Europe, then Eastern Europe, then the Soviet Union itself. Day after day, they dropped hundreds of atomic bombs. At the end of the week, the SAC bombers “flew into shattered Moscow.” The war was won. The weeklong simulated war played out in 1955 at the Supreme Headquarters Allied Powers Europe (SHAPE), the seat of NATO’s military command. Basil Liddell Hart, a British military historian and strategist visiting SHAPE that same year, thought NATO’s military power as demonstrated by the paper exercise was impressive. Nonetheless, he also found the whole process “very disturbing.” For the by the end of the war, “the great cities of the West”—with their cathedrals, their parliaments, their museums, let alone their bakeries, their markets, their plumbing and wiring—were destroyed. “Victory,” he wrote, had “lost its point.”1 Liddell Hart was not alone in describing the strategy of the Atlantic Pact as akin to a suicide pact.2 And yet, allied leaders, speaking through the historical record scattered over more than a dozen archives in Europe and North America, 1

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INTRODUCTION

make clear that they built and maintained this pact to keep peace. As NATO’s first secretary-general, Lord Ismay, put it, “the business—the paramount, the permanent, the all-absorbing business of NATO is to avoid war.”3 To ask if NATO deterred the Red Army from marching down the ChampsÉlysées or occupying the Channel ports, however, is to ignore just what allied leaders thought the NATO organization and its military force achieved.4 According to Robert A. Ford, a distinguished Canadian diplomat who served as the dean of ambassadors in Moscow and as an adviser to NATO on Soviet affairs, it was a “myth” that what “NATO had actually done was prevent a military invasion.” The real threat to Europe had been the political disintegration of the allies, and this is what NATO had prevented.5 Ford’s analysis was not unique; it was shared widely in the alliance from the 1940s through to the early 1990s. Even the State Department’s champions of an Atlantic Pact, men like Theodore Achilles, recalled: “I don’t think there has ever been any serious danger of an all out Soviet armed attack west of the East German–West German frontier. The danger has been, and still is, that the Russians can resort to . . . subversion and political blackmail backed by the threat of force.”6 The great fear of NATO’s leaders throughout the Cold War and beyond was not that the Soviet Union or Russia would launch an invasion of Europe. Instead, they feared that Moscow might threaten—even imply—the use of force. The very hint of war might drive citizens in Europe to press their leaders to concede to the Kremlin’s demands rather than risk another cataclysm on the continent. Thus what American officials called the “inadequacies and anomalies of NATO, the relative unrealism of the military plans, and the slightly fictional aspects of NATO,” were understood on both sides of the Atlantic to be essential components for providing Europeans with an intangible sense of security.7 This was much more difficult than it might sound, for a constant theme of this book is the nagging worry of NATO leaders that their citizens rejected the very notion of power politics upon which the concept of NATO rested. The allies believed that by signing the North Atlantic Treaty and maintaining NATO—a growing and unruly hodgepodge of councils, commands, and committees—they were insulating themselves, and their citizens, from appeasement and ultimately a war that no one, on either side of the Iron Curtain, wanted. The democratic nature of allied governments, or some democratic styling of the alliance itself, has long been assumed as the glue that kept NATO together. But the historical records reveal a darker, deeper, and more complex relationship between democracy and NATO. The allies did not maintain NATO because it was an alliance of democracies, but because it offered the best insurance against the dangers of democracy—a fickle electorate that, in seeking peace, might pave the way for war.

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THE DANGERS OF DEMOCRACY

Allied leaders built and maintained NATO not simply to deter Soviet military adventures, but to establish what Ismay called a “Pax Atlantica.” Like the Pax Romana, the Pax Atlantica was to establish “a period of peace . . . enforced by arms.”8 The North Atlantic Treaty, the NATO institution, and the integrated military commands established a new system of international relations correcting the errors and omissions of the past, and it all rested on a logic that both predated and outlasted the Cold War. To understand the Pax Atlantica, then, is not to focus solely on the internal workings of NATO councils, committees, and military commands, but to think about the broader pattern of international affairs they lay and preserved. Lord Ismay is said to have quipped that NATO existed “to keep the Russians out, the Americans in, and the Germans down.” Many have quoted this explanation for NATO’s existence, even if there is no record of Ismay having made the comment. No matter: it is the best explanation of NATO’s function. Indeed, we do not have to take Ismay’s word for it, for his dictum was repackaged in countless policy documents over the alliance’s long history as an explanation of NATO’s purpose. In 1966, American analysts noted that NATO served, first, to ensure that the Soviet Union did not achieve “domination of German and other European resources”—that is, to keep the Russians out of Western Europe. NATO also served to provide “a politically acceptable receptacle for resurgent German military strength” without independence that might see Germany “again run amok”—that is, to keep Germany down. The “principal check” on both German policy and Soviet efforts to dominate Europe was the “U.S. presence”—even if the “particular form of that U.S. presence is secondary, so long as it is assured.” America had to be in. Americans and Europeans knew that keeping America in Europe was essential to the other two goals, and that the alliance structure and integrated command helped protect the US commitment from isolationists at home.9 Ismay’s line, like NATO, survived the fall of the Berlin Wall. In 1990, National Security Council staffers translated the quip into bullet-point bureaucratese, writing that NATO existed 1. to ensure the collective defense of its members against the Soviet threat; 2. to reconcile Germany’s legitimate aspirations to regain its sovereignty with Europe’s legitimate desires to retain its security; 3. to forge a transatlantic link binding the US to Europe in a durable partnership.10 While specific points received varying emphasis over the decades, the allies were consistent in believing that NATO was essential to ensuring these triangular goals.

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INTRODUCTION

The Ismay dictum is, fundamentally, an argument about the maintenance of the balance of power in Europe. Buried within the seemingly straightforward sentence, however, is the fact that the most direct threat to any of the three goals lay at the ballot box: a European populace bullied by the threat of war; a resurgent German chancellor; or an isolationist Congress or president. The public rhetoric of NATO leaders, along with scholars’ search for explanations of the alliance’s endurance, has obscured the sources of both the gloom within NATO about its future, and the alliance’s endurance. The North Atlantic Treaty itself proclaimed the allies’ “common heritage and civilisation of their peoples.” One need only recall the story told by Lester Pearson upon receiving the Nobel Peace Prize in 1957 to discount this claim. One Christmas Eve during the Second World War, Pearson had tried to drown out the explosions of the London blitz by listening to the radio. Haphazardly turning the dial, he found a station that filled his room “with the beauty and peace of Christmas carols,” recalling for him the traditions of the festive season of years gone by. When the carols came to a stop and the announcer’s voice came over the radio, the host spoke in German; the carols were being broadcast from the Nazi state dropping bombs on London. Common heritage and civilization, if they exist, are certainly no guarantee of cooperation.11 Nor did NATO endure and survive because the alliance or the allies were, in one way or another, democratic either in their membership or operation.12 There is little to the suggestion that NATO itself operated like a democracy. NATO’s top political body, the North Atlantic Council (NAC), was not a parliament and did not have majority voting rules, and there was no executive power.13 As the following chapters make clear, the largest allied states often made their policy in private before bringing it to the other allies in the NAC. Nor can there be the suggestion that NATO was simply an alliance made up of democratic states. Despite the treaty language and grand speeches about NATO as an alliance of democracies, many officials, like those in the British Foreign Office, believed NATO’s “democratic ideology” was “tarnished by autocracy in Portugal and the somewhat authoritarian government in Turkey.”14 Canadian officials negotiating the treaty in 1948 warned the whole idea was “ideologically messy” and that the future alliance would be open to “charges of hypocrisy.”15 Again and again, readers will see that policy makers knew the flowery language of public NATO communiqués to be misleading and often false. If anything, the practices of democratic government, especially electioneering, ruling minority or coalition governments, and the uncertain longevity of administrations, presented special problems for the alliance. Election campaigns slowed down agreement in the North Atlantic Council and in other forums

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because politicians were not willing to take strong stands on policy while also on the hustings. The idea that new elections always turned up fresh and talented leaders is far too optimistic. As Dean Acheson remarked, it was a “damned shame that the right ‘people’ don’t turn up in the sheer gamble of politics.”16 The uncertainty of the democratic harvest led to very careful election watching in NATO capitals. The Americans worried that Europeans would elect neutralist, antinuclear, or anti-American governments, while Europeans worried that the people of the United States would find a president on the fringe of the extreme right or left. Some scholars have suggested the transatlantic relationship rested on a “transnational élite” or an “Atlantic political culture.” The idea is that a group of influential individuals, either members of government or those with influence over governments, served as a bridge connecting the allies’ values and interests. These scholars point to private social gatherings and meetings where influential officials from the NATO countries met and developed a “basic consensus on transatlantic cooperation and the need for Western unity.”17 Certainly some, but not all, of the most important officials charged with NATO files met regularly at meetings and conferences of organizations like the EnglishSpeaking Union, Bilderberg, the Council on Foreign Relations, Atlantik-Brücke, and parallel unofficial and sometimes informal clubs. Historians and scholars of these organizations, however, have not been able to identify a direct link between these organizations and policy, and even scholars that study Bilderberg’s connections to NATO warn against overestimating the importance of these organizations.18 Attendance at Bilderberg summits, of course, is no sign of a belief in their effectiveness; McGeorge Bundy, national security adviser to both Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson, sitting in on one such gathering, scribbled a proposed title for future meetings: “Uncle Dean Acheson’s Scribble Seminar for Delinquent Youths.”19 Other organizations and lobby groups, like Clarence Streit’s “Union Now” and the Atlantic Council, were “just ‘pie in the sky’” that officials believed caused “extensive” problems for policy making and “gratuitously create[d] confusion” about policy in NATO.20 But an examination of NATO’s history from the 1940s through the early 1990s does reveal a critical connection between champions of NATO from both sides of the Atlantic. The great commonality between the individuals involved in the maintenance of NATO—including elected politicians, military officers, and civilian officials—was their understanding of, and often direct experience with, the wars of the first half of the twentieth century. Nearly every individual identified in the chapters that follow suffered the blast of war. And as readers will discover, references to recent wars—and especially the Second World War—were the coin of the realm in argument over NATO policy.

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INTRODUCTION

During the Second World War, Dwight Eisenhower had served as supreme allied commander of the Allied Expeditionary Force, and planned for D-Day alongside his British counterpart, Bernard Montgomery. These two men would again work side by side in 1951 as, respectively, supreme commander and deputy supreme commander of NATO forces. “The only real difference,” said one retired British officer who saw them working together in 1951, “is that the shooting war in Normandy has been replaced by the cold war in the East.”21 Throughout the Second World War, Eisenhower also worked closely, if not easily, with General Charles de Gaulle, the leader of Free French forces. Their complicated relationship would be reprised in the late 1950s when they were both presidents of NATO powers. D-Day serves as a touchstone for other, more complicated relationships. On June 6, 1944, General Maxwell Taylor parachuted into Normandy on the instructions of the plane’s jumpmaster, Lawrence Legere. General Hans Spiedel, chief of staff to the absent Erwin Rommel, led the Nazi defenses that day. Less than two decades later, in the early 1960s, Taylor was John F. Kennedy’s military adviser, and then the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, with Legere his assistant, studying, among other things, NATO nuclear issues. Spiedel was the commander-in-chief of all NATO troops in Central Europe. The enmity from the Second World War hardly disappeared in 1945. After the fall of the Berlin Wall, Margaret Thatcher would shudder when informed that Germans were again singing nationalist songs, just as Harold Macmillan had shivered when, at Konrad Adenauer’s funeral in 1967, he saw pallbearers wearing the distinctive coal-scuttle helmets of both Imperial and Nazi Germany.22 West German politicians and officials were well aware of the fear and resentment felt toward them by their continental allies. “Scratch a European and you will find dislike of the Germans,” Chancellor Helmut Schmidt told a British colleague. When the Brit demurred, Schmidt, a Wehrmacht conscript who had served on both the Eastern and Western fronts, replied grimly: “You were never occupied.”23 It is common, and indeed easy, for historians of the post-1945 world to see a firebreak between the postwar world and that which came before. But the men and women of NATO saw no such division. For men like Macmillan, war was not history but their life—or at least a critical part of it. In the First World War, Macmillan had gone “over the top” at Loos and the Somme with the Grenadier Guards. He had his pelvis smashed in one battle, and lay for ten hours in a shell crater, reading a copy of Aeschylus in the original Greek that he kept in his uniform pocket. During the Second World War, Macmillan had a civilian role as political counselor to Eisenhower in the Mediterranean, but this hardly meant he was free from the dangers of war. After a plane crash, Macmillan raced back into the fiery wreckage to rescue a companion. He was burned in the effort,

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his trademark mustache reportedly blazing with a blue flame.24 For the whole of NATO’s Cold War, under the mufti of the politicians and diplomats sitting around the table of the North Atlantic Council at NATO Headquarters were memories of war, and real scar tissue. The point of this abridged list of connections between Cold War–era officials and the wars that came before is not to create a theory of historical memory. It is to remind readers that the references to war made in these leaders’ claims for NATO’s value were not glib analogies. For these men and few women, the experience of war was not abstract, and it fundamentally shaped their understanding of the need for NATO. To understand the allied commitment to NATO, leaders looked less to their contemporary present or future to make their policy, but to the past—their past—to understand the riddles of world affairs and guide their policy.25 All of the experiences of NATO officials were different, and some officials came to similar conclusions about the need for NATO based on their study or reading of history, rather than their active participation. But the overarching lesson these officials seem to have taken from their war experience was a belief that peace, however desirable, was not the default human condition. If they were to choose an axiom from the ancients, it would not be Isaiah’s suggestion to beat swords to plowshares and spears into pruning hooks, but Vegetius’s “Let him who desires peace prepare for war.” Indeed, as Ismay would write, “if we are prepared for battle, we will not be called upon to engage in it.”26 Montgomery summed up the unflinching views of allied officials best when he wrote that in the postwar world, the NATO states all “wanted peace above all.” But “peace in the modern world cannot be assured without military power, and this costs money. That fact might be sad, but it is true. Peace was, in fact, a by-product.”27 We know a lot about the origins of NATO and the North Atlantic Treaty. Participants in the early exploratory talks have written excellent, detailed accounts. Other scholars have pored over the historical record: the telegrams, the memorandums of conversation, and the records of the exploratory talks.28 Indeed, we even know the alcoholic lubricants that helped generate ideas and break mental logjams, be it—on the American side—the Cosmos Club’s fishhouse punch, or for British foreign secretary Ernest Bevin, Harveys Bristol Cream. The chapters that follow reveal the continuity of the earliest thinking about NATO through to the debates over NATO’s role and purpose at the end of the Cold War. The history of NATO is a kaleidoscope of domestic politics and national foreign policies, and so no one book could offer a total history of the alliance. Instead, these chapters capture critical episodes that reveal why the allies maintained NATO and why they worried it might disintegrate. Taken together, they

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INTRODUCTION

point to a remarkable continuity in officials’ understanding of NATO’s purpose. It was an understanding that crossed the political spectrum and indeed crossed the Atlantic Ocean, but the allies feared it would not cross generations. NATO’s early years were a period of tremendous diplomatic innovation. Like all good creative thought, it was inspired, and the muse was the recent war in Europe. After 1955, however, innovation came to a halt. For allied leaders, it was time for the inglorious but no less essential task of keeping the alliance together. The task would go on, and grow heavier, as hopes for a self-propelling “spirit” of NATO dried up. NATO’s unity was threatened in the 1950s as, outside the North Atlantic area, the allies’ interests diverged. The post–Suez crisis Anglo-American rapprochement was Eisenhower’s solution to the troubles plaguing NATO: he hoped that close cooperation between London and Washington might serve as a model to the alliance as a whole. The rapprochement, however, created its own problems for the alliance, as de Gaulle launched a lengthy but unsuccessful campaign to reorganize NATO as an instrument of the global Cold War. In the midst of the struggles with de Gaulle, NATO’s attention turned to the simmering crisis over Berlin. In the early 1960s, the John F. Kennedy administration pushed the alliance to develop its own grand strategy, and to use the allies’ collective military, diplomatic, and economic strength to deter the Soviet Union from doing anything rash in Berlin. NATO developed a grand strategy—at least on paper. Ultimately, however, the bitterness engendered by America strongarming ended any hopes that NATO could be transformed into an active instrument of world politics. As the Cold War crises over Berlin and Cuba cooled, and détente with the Soviet Union seemed possible, NATO’s future seemed to be in jeopardy. Allied leaders, however, never doubted the value of retaining NATO: relaxed tensions with the Soviet Union only emphasized the importance of the alliance for containing Germany. The alliance also came to describe itself as a tool for managing the evolving relationship with the states of the Warsaw Pact. The thaw in the Cold War, however, undercut public support for NATO defense spending. The late 1960s mark the beginning of a concern that would haunt NATO for the rest of the Cold War: Would allied governments be willing to pay for NATO’s defenses, or would the alliance collapse? This question haunted the allies until the end of the Cold War. Fears of diminishing public support for the alliance became only more acute as the states of Europe sought a unified voice in international affairs. In the 1970s, Richard Nixon and Henry Kissinger worried that the generation of postwar European leaders who had built NATO were being replaced by craven men who would continue to cut defense spending to appease voters. A seeming imbalance

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in the burdens of defense, plus increasing economic friction between the United States and Europe, threatened an Atlantic rupture. Worried that the emerging European community would take Europe out of harness with American foreign policy, Kissinger threatened—and did—“use NATO to bust Europe” and seriously retard the evolution of a common European foreign policy. The last long decade of the Cold War emphasized the growing tensions between European domestic opinion and NATO’s reliance on nuclear weapons. From the late 1970s through to 1989, debates over the so-called enhanced radiation weapon, long-range theater nuclear forces, and short-range nuclear forces made clear that the domestic consensus over NATO’s Cold War strategy was breaking down. Only the second of these three major nuclear modernization programs was successful, leading allied leaders to fear that antinuclear sentiment in Europe might bring NATO to the brink of collapse. NATO’s ability to endure longer than the Soviet Union was not as obvious as it might appear in retrospect. When, in 1989, George H. W. Bush took office, he and his administration believed the alliance was essential. They left office thinking the same thing—even if during that time the Berlin Wall fell, Germany was unified, and the Soviet Union collapsed. For Bush and his advisers, the logic of NATO both as a bulwark against Moscow’s influence and as a means of preventing the establishment of a shaky system of alliances in Central Europe continued to apply after the end of the Cold War. The need to salt the earth against a potential reconstitution of Soviet power, and the desire to ensure that the former members of the Warsaw Pact did not seek destabilizing alliances of their own, led to early thinking about the expansion of NATO to the east, and the maintenance of a permanent Pax Atlantica. What follows, then, is not a bureaucratic history of NATO organs in Paris or Brussels, nor one meant to hive off the history of NATO from the larger Cold War era. Too often, historians reserve NATO as a specialized subject of study, ancillary to some supposed broader relationship between the United States and Europe or bilateral relations between the United States and one ally. This book seeks to turn that styling on its head and to argue that allied leaders on both sides of the Atlantic viewed NATO as the issue of primary importance in both their transatlantic and even global affairs. NATO and the Pax Atlantica, the allies believed, provided the stability and peace that allowed for myriad other complicated non-security relationships between and among NATO allies, and also allowed for the allies to engage with the broader world. When, on occasion, allied leaders had to choose between preserving the Pax Atlantica or pursuing other national interests, they chose NATO. That is why NATO endures.

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THE SEXUAL ECONOMY OF WAR: DISCIPLINE AND DESIRE IN THE U.S. ARMY

Andrew Byers

CORNELL UNIVERSITY PRESS Ithaca and London

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Copyright © 2019 by Cornell University All rights reserved. Except for brief quotations in a review, this book, or parts thereof, must not be reproduced in any form without permission in writing from the publisher. For information, address Cornell University Press, Sage House, 512 East State Street, Ithaca, New York 14850. Visit our website at cornellpress.cornell.edu. First published 2019 by Cornell University Press Printed in the United States of America Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Byers, Andrew, author. Title: The sexual economy of war : discipline and desire in the U.S. Army / Andrew Byers. Description: Ithaca : Cornell University Press, 2019. | Series: Battlegrounds : Cornell studies in military history | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2018040385 (print) | LCCN 2018040974 (ebook) | ISBN 9781501736452 (pdf ) | ISBN 9781501736469 (epub/mobi) | ISBN 9781501736445 | ISBN 9781501736445 (cloth ; alk. paper) Subjects: LCSH: Soldiers—Sexual behavior—United States—History—20th century. | Military discipline— United States—History—20th century. | United States. Army—History—20th century. | War and society— United States—History—20th century. Classification: LCC UH630 (ebook) | LCC UH630 .B94 2019 (print) | DDC 355.1/334—dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2018040385

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Acknowledgments

Introduction: Society, Sexuality, and the U.S. Army in the Early Twentieth Century

1. “Conduct of a Nature to Bring Discredit upon the Military Service”: Fort Riley, Kansas, 1898–1940

2. “Benevolent Assimilation” and the Dangers of the Tropics: The American Occupation of the Philippines, 1898–1918

3. “Come Back Clean”: Camp Beauregard and the Commission on Training Camp Activities in Louisiana, 1917–1919

4. “Complete Continence Is Wholly Possible”: The U.S. Army in France and Germany, 1917–1923

128

5. The “Racial (and Sexual) Maelstrom” in Hawaii, 1909–1940

163

Conclusion: Ongoing Concerns with Soldiers’ Sexualities and Sexual Cultures

200

Notes 213 Bibliography 255

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Index 000

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Introduction Society, Sexuality, and the U.S. Army in the Early Twentieth C entury

General Pershing is filled with anxiety about the sexual morale of troops. —Future Supreme Court Justice Felix Frankf urter to Secretary of War Newton D. Baker, August 15, 1917, on the condition of American troops in France during World War I

In June 1900, William B. Johnson published a sensational exposé, entitled “The Administration’s Brothels in the Philippines,” that alleged the U.S. Army had established a network of brothels in the Philippines for the exclusive use of American soldiers. The American League of Philadelphia, a group that opposed U.S. overseas expansion, soon republished Johnson’s piece as a pamphlet entitled The Crowning Infamy of Imperialism, which garnered national attention, blasting the army for its immorality and urging the McKinley administration to withdraw its forces from the islands.1 Three months later, American newspapers and moral reform organizations began publishing the “Custer Henderson Letter,” a letter allegedly written by a young American soldier to his parents that detailed widespread sexual promiscuity and other vices among soldiers in the Philippines, seemingly offering corroboration for Johnson’s allegations of official corruption and the pervasive moral hazards faced by American soldiers as they ventured abroad.2 In response, outraged citizens began sending letters and teleg rams to William McKinley and the War Department urging withdrawal from the Philippines and an end to the army’s regulation of prostitution. Letter writers used the issue to discuss their views on anti-imperialism, antimilitarism, miscegenation, temperance, morality, and venereal disease. As one U.S. anti-imperialist physician described it, the army had established “a system of nasty weekly medical inspections of hundreds of women by our army surgeons” so that

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“our officers and soldiers and sailors, and men and boys generally, might safely commit fornication and adultery, saving their bodies but destroying their souls.”3 Other doctors, such as U.S. Army Major Charles Lynch, advocated continuing the regulation regime, for without it, Lynch suggested, “venereal disease [would be] carried to innocent w omen and children in the United States, evil consequences which would follow unregulated prostitution h ere,” presumably after American soldiers who contracted venereal diseases in the islands returned home and resumed sexual relations with their wives.4 Lynch’s view reflected the army’s prevailing notion that men had irrepressible sex drives that made it impossible for them to remain sexually abstinent. It also highlighted the army’s desire to mitigate the effects of venereal infections contracted by soldiers by intervening in the health of their civilian sexual partners. What the American press and public failed to realize was that the U.S. Army had been regulating—and implicitly endorsing—prostitution in the Philippines since November 1898, when American troops first arrived in the islands and assumed control from the Spanish. Local prostitutes w ere required to regularly report to army physicians, who inspected the women for venereal infections and either issued them a certificate indicating a clean bill of health or ordered the women to be confined until their symptoms subsided. Army officials had understood that their actions would face a backlash if the American public learned of them, so they attempted to regulate prostitution with as little publicity as possible. The public debates over prostitution and moral degeneracy in the Philippines triggered a congressional investigation. Governor-General of the Philippines (and future president) William Howard Taft was called to testify. He stated that while medical inspections had begun under military auspices and continued u nder colonial government authority, they had been discontinued by the time of his testimony in February 1902.5 Taft failed to note that the formal inspection program had ended the day before his testimony, when the Secretary of War ordered the army to stop charging prostitutes inspection fees and issuing health certificates. Though army doctors were no longer allowed to charge prostitutes for their inspections or keep records on the w omen, the U.S. Army quietly continued to inspect the bodies of prostitutes in the Philippines until 1917, when a new federal law pushed through by moral reformers finally mandated that the army no longer permit prostitution near U.S. military bases. Despite the host of problems that the army’s interventions in public sexual health caused, army officials believed that they needed to continue to be involved in the sex lives of soldiers and their partners, not just in the Philippines but everywhere the army deployed in the early twentieth c entury.

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As with many other militaries, the U.S. Army believed that soldiers’ sexual activities had the potential to cause a variety of problems. Most obviously, and perhaps most important from an institutional perspective, soldiers’ sexual activities could lead to combat ineffectiveness because they might contract venereal diseases that rendered them unable to perform their military duties. Venereally infected soldiers would also consume sometimes scarce medical resources during treatment, and it might take days or weeks before the diseases’ symptoms abated or—after the introduction of penicillin—were cured. Second, soldiers’ sexual activities could get out of hand and generate considerable ill w ill and even active resistance in communities surrounding military bases.6 Rapes by servicemen of local women in friendly or occupied areas could cause significant resentment by local civilian populations, as could unacknowledged or unwanted pregnancies, making placid civil-military relations extremely difficult. Vulgar displays by soldiers, especially when such behaviors were publicly exhibited by officers, could prove embarrassing to militaries. Last, soldiers’ sexual partners could serve as sources of intelligence for enemies, especially during wartime. The U.S. Army sought to address each of these perceived problems as it was called on to expand its reach across the Caribbean and into the Pacific and Europe in the early twentieth century. One of the army’s key operational and logistical concerns—and one that hitherto has not been investigated comprehensively—was the effect of soldiers’ sexuality on the establishment and maintenance of long-term military outposts and bases as part of the expanding overseas American military presence. Military planners, army leaders, War Department officials, and civilian observers of the military w ere intensely concerned about issues related to sexuality because they tended to believe that soldiers had irrepressible sexual needs that, when inevitably indulged, could cause harm to the army. They also believed that by instituting a series of legal regulations and medical interventions, the army could mitigate the damages to the institution arising from sex, while also shaping soldiers’ sexuality in ways the army and interested civilian parties might find more acceptable. This book explores how the U.S. Army of the early twentieth century, on institutional and individual levels, perceived and intervened in a host of issues related to sexuality: marriage and family life, prostitution and venereal disease, rape and sexual violence, same-sex sexuality, and masculinity, among others. It examines how the army sought to regulate and shape the sexual behaviors of soldiers and the civilians with whom they came into sexual contact. The sexual cultures, practices, and behaviors of soldiers and their partners, along

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with the U.S. Army’s efforts to regulate their sexuality, constitute what I will describe as the “sexual economy of war.” Temporally, this study begins with 1898, as the Spanish-American War ushered in a new role on the world stage for the United States and the U.S. Army. Previously, the United States had steadily expanded its continental borders at the expense of its neighbors, but the war in 1898 represented a sharp break from what had gone before, catapulting the United States into its Caribbean backyard, as well as halfway around the world in Asia. With this expansion into global politics came imperialist foreign and military policies, as well as increasing efforts to manage and shape sexuality in far-fl ung locales. The narrative will trace the changing conditions brought about by t hese new military commitments and, later, involvement in World War I, when the American experience in Europe and the massive wartime conscription effort brought new challenges to preexisting notions of sexuality and increased concern with surveilling and regulating soldiers’ sexuality. Following the war, the army’s and, more broadly, American conceptions and categorizations of sexuality became more rigidly codified. The book ends on the cusp of American involvement in World War II and the tremendous changes triggered by the war. Geographically, the book covers the complete breadth of the army’s deployments throughout the period: within the United States itself, both at well- established bases and in new domestic training camps created for World War I; throughout the Pacific; and, beginning with World War I, in Europe. While American overseas deployments in the Caribbean and across the Pacific w ere particularly important formative experiences for the army as an institution, in the early twentieth century, the United States became a world power with a modernized, professional army. As such, the army’s experiences both at home and in different overseas contexts—in the outposts of empire and in Europe—are vitally important to understanding the sexual economy of war. One of the key objectives of this research is to situate the United States’ military policies from the early twentieth c entury within a larger framework of gender, racial, class, national, and sexual politics, as well as Progressive Era medical and social-purity discourses. The book investigates the competing ideas of empire and masculinity of U.S. social purity activists7 and anti- imperialists on the one hand, and U.S. civilian and military leaders who pursued imperial policies on the other. The soldiers charged with carrying out U.S. foreign and military policies and the people with whom they had sexual relations further complicated the debates between policymakers and critics because they highlighted competing conceptions of acceptable sexual behav ior and demonstrated the difficulties in implementing and enforcing sexual

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Introduction

regulations. T hese debates reveal conflicting conceptions of American masculinity and provide insights into the conceptions of race, class, and nation that were expressed and contested in the early twentieth century.

Transformation of the U.S. Army Beginning in 1898 with the Spanish-American War and subsequent Philippine- American War, the United States began to look beyond its continental bound aries and acquire a new, far-fl ung empire, with territorial acquisitions in Hawaii, Samoa, Guam, the Philippines, Puerto Rico, and Cuba.8 It staffed each of these new acquisitions with permanent military garrisons, necessitating the construction of a network of military bases throughout the Pacific and Caribbean. The nation’s growing empire required the deployment of tens of thousands of U.S. soldiers at a time through the years leading up to World War II. The United States also engaged in other military interventions in Asia and Latin America, including China, Panama, Mexico, the Dominican Republic, Nicaragua, and Haiti, not to mention the massive mobilization required by American intervention in World War I and the subsequent occupation of Germany. Along with significant new overseas commitments, the U.S. Army underwent several major changes in the first four decades of the twentieth century, including massive growth in the army’s forces, changes in the demographics of soldiers and an associated attempt to “Americanize” the army, and increased professionalization and internal reform as the army sought to improve its performance and increase its standing in the nation.9 These changes all played significant roles in how the army came to perceive and regulate sexuality. When it became clear that the United States would go to war with Spain in 1898, the McKinley administration rapidly realized that the small standing army would be inadequate to defeat the Spanish forces lodged in Cuba, so it raised a large body of temporary volunteers to bolster its forces; by war’s end, the volunteer force numbered 216,000 and the Regular Army 59,000. Over the next four decades, the U.S. Army’s strength continued to grow.10 In 1890, there had been fewer than 28,000 soldiers in the army; by 1900, there were nearly 102,000. The National Defense Act of 1916 increased this number further, calling for an army of 175,000 men. The drafts of 1917–1918 brought unprece dented numbers of new soldiers into the army: over 4.7 million men served during World War I. Ultimately, the experiences of the war proved transformative for both the army as an institution and the men who served in it,

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6 Int roduct ion

particularly for the men deployed as part of the American Expeditionary Force to Europe.11 The army rapidly demobilized a fter the war; the total number of men in the army fell to fewer than 140,000 in the 1920s and 1930s. Only in 1940, with fears of a new war involving the United States, did the army’s strength begin to increase again. It was not only the numbers of men in the U.S. Army that changed over time; the demographics of American soldiers likewise reflected the changes of the American population in the early twentieth c entury. A considerable number of immigrants—many nonnative English speakers—entered the army during this period. The War Department, often in close cooperation with civilian reformers, attempted to employ principles of social engineering to inculcate a sense of American national identity and pride in t hese men in an effort to Americanize the army, just as it would use the opportunity provided by wartime indoctrination of draftees to instill middle-class morality and sexual mores.12 Racial differences also began to emerge as African Americans were admitted into the army in greater numbers.13 With the increase in sheer numbers of soldiers came an emphasis on internal reform, institution building, and enhanced professionalism. Following the army’s poor performance in the Spanish-American War,14 Secretary of War Elihu Root initiated a series of reforms amid calls for increased professionalization, interservice coordination, and new international responsibilities. Root’s reforms included the Army Reorganization Act, which provided for an enlarged standing army and attempted to limit the power of army bureaus, as well as the General Staff Act, which marked the beginning of the modern command structure for the army. While Root’s vision for the army was not completely achieved by the start of World War I, the army’s expanded staff and planning capabilities significantly aided in the American war effort. Throughout this era, the army sought to remake itself into a highly professionalized force that would perform better militarily and have an improved standing in the nation as a w hole. The army’s efforts at professionalization were part of a broader trend in late nineteenth and early twentieth-century America involving the creation of increasingly specialized technical experts, such as doctors and lawyers; the army’s officer corps was little different in its desire to become respected, professional, and technically expert.15

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The U.S. Army exhibited concerns about soldiers’ sexual behavior everywhere it went, though it sought to deal with the host of issues surrounding sex very

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Introduction

differently in each setting. Outward-facing U.S. foreign policy, the growth in both the size of the army and the scope of its operations across the globe, and the nation’s renewed investment and interest in the soldiers who served in the U.S. Army as a result of the national mobilization of World War I all resulted in increased public scrutiny of and interest in life inside the army. Domestic reformers attempted to reshape the army’s policies on sexuality in order to reform an increasingly important American social and cultural institution. The army was thus not an institution autonomously choosing the proper way to consider and regulate soldier sexuality; instead, it was buffeted by domestic influences and constituencies that would significantly shape how the army would handle sexual matters. The U.S. Army sought to create a series of policies to address the problems it perceived as stemming from soldiers’ sexual relationships. Rates of venereal infection varied tremendously among U.S. Army units in the early twentieth century, but they became a particularly acute problem in the Philippines before World War I, where venereal infection rates climbed to 20–35 percent in some units.16 Though no massive venereal epidemics appeared in American troops during World War I, fears that venereal infection rates would increase dramatically once American soldiers landed in France inspired major army sexual education and venereal treatment efforts. To combat this threat, the army chose to adopt a series of policies that in some ways mimicked t hose of other militaries.17 These policies established regimes of medical surveillance and regulation of prostitutes to limit the transmission of venereal diseases to soldiers who frequently came into contact with these women. The U.S. Army instituted medical inspection and segregation regimes of prostitutes first in the Philippines and then later along the Mexican border, and it cooperated with civilian officials who maintained similar policies in Hawaii, France, and Germany. In contrast with more permissive regimes abroad—at least u ntil negative publicity forced changes in places like the Philippines—in the continental United States the army cooperated with domestic moral reformers who sought to eliminate all traces of prostitution and other “vices” surrounding military bases within the continental United States. The U.S. Army never allowed its soldiers to rape indiscriminately, and there are certainly no indications that it ever pursued rape as a military strategy. Alleged rapes and sexual violence perpetrated by American soldiers in the Philippines, Hawaii, France, and Germany before World War II did, however, significantly complicate the army’s relationships with local civilians. Furthermore, the army encouraged homosocial bonds between soldiers as a means of fostering unit cohesion, but it never endorsed homosexual activities between soldiers, increasingly condemning these kinds of behaviors after World War I.18

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The U.S. Army attempted to control—via official policy, legal enforcement, indoctrination, and military culture—particular sexual behaviors that it found problematic for the institution as a w hole and its overall military effectiveness. Allowing soldiers the opportunity to indulge some sexual desires but not others, while guarding against the problems that sex could cause for unit readiness and morale, became one of the key balancing acts that U.S. Army planners had to perform throughout the early decades of the twentieth century. The sexual behaviors the army found particularly troublesome included sexual encounters that resulted in venereal infections, marriage, or pregnancy, as well as those that created public embarrassment for the army as a whole or difficulties in relations between the army and local civilians. Over time, the army increasingly came to view sexual relationships between soldiers as undesirable b ecause of changes in the way that most Americans, led by medical and psychoanalytic experts, viewed such same-sex relationships. In regulating these sexual behaviors, the army also indirectly (and unintentionally, in some cases) influenced particular views of sexual morality and sexual identities among soldiers. For example, in emphasizing sexual abstinence as a policy during World War I, the army publicly intervened in wider debates about sexual morality, helping to promote a particular brand of traditional, middle-class sexual morality favored by many influential moral reformers. It also implicitly endorsed the perceived linkage—especially from the early 1920s onward—between same-sex sexual activities and pathologized homosexuality, which came to be equated with both effeminacy and psychological degeneracy. The U.S. Army seems to have embraced what scholars of masculinity have described as a changing conception of American manhood that emerged in the late nineteenth century as a result of larger cultural responses by white men to the disappearance of the American “frontier”; the increasing urbanization, bureaucratization, and industrialization of American society; and the slow but steady rise in the social and political rights of women, minorities, and other groups most white American men had previously dominated.19 White men’s increasing interest in martial virtues, physicality, strength, a robust male body, athleticism, competition, “primitive” warriors, and virility created what might be called militant masculinity. Hand in hand with this new kind of masculinity went a respect for fighting and an eagerness to engage in personal combat to test and assert one’s manhood.20 Theodore Roosevelt, colonel of the Rough Riders during the Spanish-American War and later president, embodied this new sense of manhood most explicitly in his “doctrine of the strenuous life,” a regimen of physical training to enhance strength, vigor, and

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Introduction

toughness that promoted struggle as a virtue.21 Advocates of this conception of masculinity were profoundly concerned that modern civilization, with all its comforts, was making white American men decadent and effeminate by forcibly suppressing their “natural” masculine drive for independence, courage, and mastery. American soldiers, who routinely engaged in intense physical labor and held a virtual monopoly on the legal use of violence, were able to embrace this new conception of masculinity to a greater degree than most civilian men. These constructed images of gender became central to soldiers’ identities and highly charged with meaning, shaping the way that soldiers conceived of themselves as men and as soldiers. The army adopted and enlarged the concept of militant masculinity, using it to shape soldiers’ sexual identities—particularly enlisted soldiers, some of whom were considered sexually problematic by army officials—by socializing them to generate that specific kind of masculinity in their public and private lives, behaving in particular “masculine” ways. Army officers, considered “gentlemen” in military culture and law, were required to exhibit different traits of masculinity and different standards of nder them. The models sexual behavior from the enlisted soldiers who served u of masculinity promoted by the U.S. Army during this period were examples of what psychologists have since described as “hypermasculinity,” which can include callous sexual attitudes toward women, a conception of violence as a manly activity, and a view of danger as exciting.22 The army required increasingly heteronormative sexual expression of soldiers, as the institution and American society became more aware of same-sex attraction. Soldiers were expected to conform to these specific gender and sexual norms and public per formances, while also being forbidden from engaging in sexual practices and behaviors deemed effeminate. The resulting set of acceptable hypermasculinized sexual behaviors constituted part of a new sexual identity for soldiers, one that army leaders believed was the most effective for promoting aggressive, militant, and therefore martial behaviors in the new century. The U.S. Army intervened in another important way in the personal lives of its members: it forbade most enlisted men—sergeants excepted, because of their age and seniority—and junior officers from marrying.23 As the old saying about life in the U.S. Army goes, “If the army had wanted you to have a wife, it would have issued you one.” Though some enlisted soldiers did marry while in military service, with or without their commanding officer’s permission, they were forbidden from reenlisting once married and would be court- martialed if they attempted to conceal the fact that they w ere married at enlistment or reenlistment. The army ostensibly created this policy b ecause

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large numbers of civilian dependents would have created a burden on the army to provide housing and support for the wives and children of soldiers. Maintaining large numbers of army families would have been especially difficult in the army’s austere basing conditions in early twentieth-century Hawaii and the Philippines. Most middle-class Americans perceived enlisted military service as socially undesirable, and enlisted soldiers were also generally paid less than civilian blue-collar workers; t hese f actors would have made supporting a family financially and socially problematic, even had the army permitted marriage. The army’s antimarriage policy thus created a military culture in which most soldiers who desired romantic or sexual partnerships were forced to choose between consorting with prostitutes, thus risking venereal infection; violating army regulations by having illicit sexual relationships or marrying in secret, thus risking being court-martialed when the marriage or relationship came to the official attention of the army; and marrying and then being forced to leave military service when the current term of service had ended.

The United States in the Progressive Era

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The U.S. Army was not alone in undergoing transition in the early twentieth century: unprecedented, sweeping changes w ere taking place across Ameri hese changes included tremendous can society and culture at the same time. T growth in immigration, especially from southern and eastern Europe, which began transforming the once-dominant Anglo-Saxon demographic makeup of the United States; urbanization and industrialization, especially in the Northeast; and the rise of more outward-looking foreign policies requiring new overseas military commitments. By the dawn of the twentieth century, many Americans, mostly members of the middle class, felt the need to increase the role of government in American society in order to address what they perceived as a host of growing social problems. Like the populists of the late nineteenth c entury who came before them, t hese middle-class reformers— most of whom have been described as progressives—believed that unregula ted capitalism, the urban boom and its attendant problems, and the growing immigrant population, among other perceived social and cultural ills, required sweeping reforms that only stronger government supervision and intervention could bring. As the historian William Leuchtenburg describes it, “The Progressives believed in the Hamiltonian concept of positive government, of a national government directing the destinies of the nation at home and abroad. They had little but contempt for the strict construction of the Constitution

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Introduction

by conservative judges, who would restrict the power of the national government to act against social evils and to extend the blessings of democracy to less favored lands. The real e nemy was particularism, state rights, limited government.”24 The Progressive movement was not a unitary movement, and the groups that can be reasonably described as “progressive” were extremely diverse, though they shared a commitment to reforming American government and society. Progressives tended to have g reat faith in the power and ability of a reformed American state to impose sweeping changes across all aspects of American society, reflecting beliefs that public and private life could not be disentangled and that the state should do more to ensure the moral and social welfare of its citizens. These reformers came from across the traditional American political spectrum—with leaders as disparate as Republicans Theodore Roosevelt, Robert M. La Follette Sr., Charles Evans Hughes, and Herbert Hoover, and Democrats William Jennings Bryan, Woodrow Wilson, and Al Smith— making progressivism one of the most widespread and influential American political movements of the twentieth c entury. By the onset of American intervention in World War I, the Progressive movement had reached its height of influence in the United States. As the United States formally entered the war and began a massive military mobilization, some progressives began to express their anxieties regarding the threats American soldiers would, they believed, inevitably encounter, not on the battlefield but in the training camps and red-light districts of American cities before they even deployed to Europe. Fears about the social and moral dangers of prostitution and venereal disease that newly conscripted American ser vicemen would face were also intertwined with anxie ties about urbanization and immigration, as well as the rise of a new commercial leisure culture that featured increasingly visible working-class w omen in public spaces. Many of these women w ere first-or second-generation immigrants who behaved in ways that ran counter to traditional middle-class values, which reserved sexuality for monogamous marriage; forbade other kinds of sexual expressions, including same-sex sexuality and masturbation; emphasized sexual purity in thought as well as behavior, especially in public and in male-female interactions; and stereotyped moral women as relatively asexual beings. These conceptions of sexuality would define and prescribe the kinds of sexual expression that many moral reformers advocated, as well as shape the ways in which they sought to legally mandate and regularize American sexuality in the decades before World War II.25 Though Prohibition was the reformers’ most visib le antivice success in social engineering, it was but one among many similar efforts to reshape

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American society and morality through legal efforts to prohibit “immoral” activities. In 1910, in response to the “white slave panic” that swept the nation and instilled a fear of widespread enslavement of white w omen into prostitution, the U.S. Congress passed the Mann Act, which prohibited the transportation of w omen across state lines “for immoral purposes.”26 The Mann Act prevented very little coercive human trafficking, but for decades it was used to prosecute thousands of cases of consensual, noncommercial travel by unmarried adults. The Harrison Narcotic Drug Act of 1914’s regulation and taxation of opiates represented the first federal involvement in what came to be the century-long War on Drugs.27 In 1915 and again in 1918, the Comstock Act, which made it illegal to send any “obscene, lewd, and/or lascivious” materials through the mail, was also used to restrict the ability of sex educators and birth control advocates, like Margaret and William Sanger, to send information on contraceptive devices through the U.S. mail. A new federal agency, the Commission on Training Camp Activities (CTCA), was formed soon after the United States entered World War I to regulate soldiers’ sexual morality. The CTCA succeeded in shutting down dozens of red-light districts throughout the United States and imprisoning thousands of w omen in work camps because they were alleged to be either prostitutes or promiscuous women who might lead soldiers astray. Previously, the use or abuse of alcohol and narcotics, along with sex between unmarried persons, had been perceived as social conditions, which, while objectionable, were present throughout society. During the Progressive Era, reformers considered these issues to be social problems, which could be identified by experts and solved through increased activism by reformers and legal action by the newly empowered federal government. While social and moral reformers of all sorts enjoyed tremendous success in affecting sexual mores and the laws governing sexual and other personal activities in United States in the first decades of the twentieth c entury, their influence crested during World War I and the years immediately following. During the Roaring Twenties, America’s sexual landscape began to change, and new sexual freedoms emerged.28 Birth rates declined and divorce rates increased, as did the rate of premarital sex.29 Popular images from the era, including those of flappers, speakeasies, F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The G reat Gatsby, petting parties, and the emergence of Hollywood sex symbols, only served to reinforce perceptions of increased sexual license. By the 1930s, reliable artificial birth control measures became increasingly available and socially (and legally) acceptable, further encouraging extra-and premarital sexual expressions. Sexual imagery, too, became more prevalent in many films and advertisements saturating American society. These factors all steadily eroded

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support for moral reformers’ efforts to impose or maintain middle-class ideas about sexual morality and practices. This era also witnessed the rise of psychoanalysis and the influence of Sigmund Freud’s work in the United States, which ushered in new perspectives on human sexuality, including homosexuality, beginning in the 1920s.30 As the American medical and psychoanalytical communities became professionalized in the early twentieth century, their monopoly over expertise in matters psychological and sexual grew. World War I only served to give them a new sense of mission in treating an increasingly pathologized populace and expand their role in society. By war’s end, psychological and medical professionals, many of whom deemed themselves “sexologists”—experts in diagnosing and treating sexual dysfunctions—were regularly consulted in m atters of public health and sexuality. By the 1920s there was growing awareness of same-sex sexual attraction, which elicited considerable interest among psychoanalysts and sexologists, who increasingly viewed such behavior as pathological. Homosexuality came to be considered as more than just a set of behaviors, gestures, or demeanors and was instead perceived as a central feature of the identity of those who engaged in same-sex sexual activity. Michel Foucault later noted that “homo sexuality appeared as one of the forms of sexuality when it was transposed from the practice of sodomy onto a kind of interior androgyny, a hermaphroditism of the soul. The sodomite had been a temporary aberration; the homosexual was now a species.”31 Freud called into question the idea that homosexuality was inborn and inherited, as previous sexologists like Magnus thers, had believed. Hirschfeld and Richard von Krafft-Ebing, among many o Freud instead asserted that it was the result of early childhood experiences and ultimately concluded that homosexuality, like other sexual conditions he regarded as perverse, was generally the result of interrupted sexual development.32 To Freud, heterosexuality was the normal state of mature, adult psychosexual development: “One of the tasks implicit in object choice is ater psychoanalytic clinithat it should find its way to the opposite sex.”33 L cians in the United States and elsewhere—including many employed by the U.S. Army—came to perceive homosexuality as a profound, psychopathic disturbance. The stigmatization of homosexuality as a pathological, even psychotic, condition, as well as its conceptual linkage with effeminacy, strongly influenced the ways in which the U.S. Army dealt with homosexuality within the ranks. Before World War I, the army occasionally prosecuted soldiers for committing acts of sodomy, though sodomy had never been included as an explicit offense u nder the Articles of War. The 1917 revision to the army’s Manual for

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Courts-Martial—which first introduced sodomy as an explicit offense—ushered in a series of new sodomy-related charges. The 1917 Ninety-Third Article of War defined sodomy as anal penetration of a man or woman by a man. In these regulations, penetration of the mouth did not initially constitute sodomy. In the regulations that accompanied the revision of the Articles of War in 1920, however, The Manual for Courts-Martial redefined sodomy as anal or oral copulation between men or between a man and a w oman.34 After World War I, the U.S. Army, reflecting changing common understandings and perceptions of same-sex sexual activity among men, began to perceive acts of sodomy as indicating a homosexual sexual identity, which the psychoanalytic profession had condemned as a form of psychopathy.

The U.S. Army and the Sexual Economy of War

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War Department and army officials frequently described their concerns about soldiers’ sexualities using the language of “military necessity.”35 They frequently argued that army interventions in sexuality were based on pragmatic, utilitarian concerns, with the army allegedly striving to balance health and morale, as well as managing the effects that m atters of sexuality could have on military missions and broader U.S. geopolitical and diplomatic affairs. However, individual army officials also frequently shared the moral concerns of civilian commentators and reformers, and the army’s policies w ere significantly affected by domestic discourses about public health and morality. These policies were not created in an ideological vacuum; while the army’s military necessity approach sometimes involved different priorities and ends from t hose advocated by many moral reformers, it also represented an ideological approach to solving the army’s problems related to sexuality. Because of its concerns about the effects of sex on soldiers and the army as an institution, the army therefore strove to regulate sexuality in such a way that the inevitable meeting of soldiers’ sexual needs would have the least deleterious effect on army operations. It is these collective attempts (and their effects) to regulate almost all aspects of soldiers’ sexual lives, along with the regulated aspects of sexuality themselves, that I describe as a “sexual economy of war” in order to capture the complexity of the interactions between and among individuals, institutions, and legal, medical, and moral frameworks surrounding issues of sexuality. Just as conducting military operations and deployments required a political economy, the United States’ projection of military force abroad as part of its expanded overseas mission incorporated a sexual economy of war, with exchanges taking place both inside and outside

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the sphere of military conflict, encompassing all aspects of soldiers’ intimate lives: prostitution, venereal disease, same-sex attraction and later homo sexuality, sexual violence and rape, sexual morality, military families, and ideas about masculinity, among others. The nature of the sexual economy and how it operated within the context of the nascent American state both at home and abroad are the central focus of the book. As conceived h ere, the sexual economy includes both t hose aspects of h uman sexuality that the army attempted to control and its means for d oing so. Without considering and intervening in these aspects of the sexual economy, the army did not believe that it could sustain the military deployments brought about by the United States’ new role on the world stage. The sexual economy of war was a highly negotiated and contested exercise of power. The army’s hegemonic discourses and institutional control competed directly with the agency, experiences, willful action, resistance strategies, and sexual and gender performances of the individuals affected. It involved a multitude of actors, both military—senior leaders, officers, and enlisted men—and civilian, including governmental officials and policymakers, moralists, sexual and medical “experts,” and the local populations surrounding army bases and garrisons, whose members sometimes became the sexual partners of soldiers. The sexual economy of war depended heavily on the asymmetries of power present throughout society, which ranged from the individual to the institutional. Individual soldiers, as men and male sexual partners, often had greater power than their female sexual partners because of inherent physical differences, the social privileges that men enjoyed over women, and, in the case of patronage of prostitutes, the socioeconomic and legal advantages that customers had over sex workers. Significant asymmetries of power existed among commissioned officers, noncommissioned officers, and enlisted men because of the hierarchical nature of the military institution to which they belonged. Different classes of military men experienced life in the army very differently because of separate military cultures and legal and disciplinary structures within the army, as well as differences in ages (young conscripts versus older veterans of military service, for example) and other personal characteristics. These differences resulted in tremendous disparities in how, for example, officers’ and soldiers’ sex lives were surveilled and regulated by the army and how they experienced military justice for sexual transgressions, and they sometimes allowed men of higher rank to use their military status to sexually ex here were also clear asymmetries of power in ploit men of lower rank. T evidence regarding the treatment and status of nonwhite civilian sexual partners of soldiers due to prevailing ideas and theories about race and racial hi-

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erarchies.36 Last, the U.S. Army as an institution clearly used its power over individual soldiers and their sexual partners to attempt to impose surveillance and regulatory regimes on their sex lives. The sexual economy of war encompassed not a single national discourse but rather a series of discourses taking place in particular locations and at par ticular times. It took radically different forms depending on its geographic and temporal contexts, with sexuality being policed in very different ways in domestic settings from how it was treated abroad. Different overseas contexts mattered too: prostitutes w ere perceived and regulated very differently in the Philippines, for example, from how they w ere treated in wartime France or in postwar Germany. This has a g reat deal to do with the racial discourses surrounding the inhabitants of each of those locales, as well as American conceptions of whiteness.37 Temporality is also important, as 1917–1918 represented a particul ar break from the periods that preceded and followed it. The American experience in World War I involved unprecedented levels of mass mobilization and conscription that brought with them massive civilian interest in army life and new ideas about the “citizen-soldier,” all of which had profound implications for how the army, and American society more broadly, thought about and acted on the sexuality of soldiers. Many civilian moral reformers imagined the newly conscripted doughboys as a source of manpower that would help reinvigorate the nation’s morality after the war. Thus, the military could be put to civilian purposes: the war represented an opportunity to reach out to millions of American men and inculcate in them new virtues, sexual and otherwise. This new mass army, once demobilized, could then become a tool for socially and morally reshaping the nation after the war. Ultimately, the U.S. Army had a variety of goals for its many legal and medical interventions that played out in varying ways across time and space; these interventions, along with continuities and change in different settings and at different times, are highlighted across the case studies that are examined in this book. One of the army’s major goals was to prevent the spread of venereal disease from making significant numbers of soldiers ineffective for duty and thereby causing a serious manpower problem. Because the army tended to perceive soldiers’ sexual desires as irrepressible and female prostitutes as the most common sexual outlet for soldiers, where and when it could, the army sought to venereally inspect and regulate prostitutes as a means of meeting this goal. The army also consistently sought to maintain good order, morale, and military discipline inside the institution; it perceived a wide variety of sexual behaviors as being disruptive to military discipline, and it sought to prevent sexual expressions—especially public ones—from causing disciplinary

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Introduction

problems. Once the United States decided to intervene in World War I, and consequently draft more than four million Americans into the army, both the army and civilian moral reformers attempted to enhance the public image of the United States and the U.S. Army by making soldiers models of virtue and sexual abstention, which required even more extensive interventions in the sexuality of soldiers and their partners. This effort also sought to instill par ticular ideas about morality that w ere intended to craft a generation of young men who would morally rejuvenate the nation when they returned to civilian life at war’s end. After World War I, as the psychoanalytic community and American society at large became increasingly concerned about the perceived dangers of homosexuality, the U.S. Army sought to root out same-sex sexual activities within the army, which Army leaders linked with “deviant” homosexual identities, effeminacy, and psychologically maladjusted personalities, creating a “straight” army.38

Research Methodology This project examines two main areas: the regulation of sexuality by the U.S. Army, often through the army’s medicolegal interventions in sexuality; and the experiences of those whose sexuality was regulated by the army, including both soldiers and t hose civilians with whom they interacted sexually. Accordingly, this study has required extensive archival research in primary documents, both institutional and personal. The project has been undertaken along two lines of research. The first, and primary, avenue required delving into the official records of the U.S. government, including the U.S. Army, the War Department, and other federal agencies, such as the World War I–era CTCA. By taking this approach, I have sought to uncover how military and civilian officials and the institution of the army conceived of and discussed sexuality, what these individuals and organizations were attempting to accomplish by regulating and manipulating sexuality, and how they went about d oing so. Through my second research avenue, I have attempted to uncover how individuals inside the institution or otherwise affected by it (that is, soldiers and their sexual partners) perceived, received, and sometimes resisted the army’s efforts to control and use sexuality. I have done this by investigating personal documents that describe t hese individuals’ firsthand experiences of the army’s legal apparatus for prosecuting alleged sexual transgressions. Neither approach would have provided a comprehensive picture in isolation, but by integrating the two, I can shed light on research questions that have not yet been explored

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by either military historians or historians of gender and sexuality, and provide answers that will offer broad insights to scholars in both fields. A key set of sources for this research w ere the disciplinary records (primarily courts-martial) for the period, b ecause t hese help reveal how the army maintained sexual discipline and punished soldiers who v iolated army regulations. Because court-martial cases form such an important body of sources for my research, it is important to consider how they might best be used and what we might expect to learn from them, as well as their limitations.39 First, it is important, if obvious, to note that courts-martial do not tell us w hether someone actually committed a particular act, nor can they tell us the prevalence of certain kinds of activities. We also do not know what kind of informal policing went on within army units (below the level of court-martial through nonjudicial punishments) and what it took for an act to become sufficiently scandalous that a court-martial would be necessitated. However, close reading of these court transcripts is crucial to help reveal the exact language and categorization that the various historical actors—army prosecutors, witnesses, medical “experts,” and the accused themselves—used to discuss transgressions and activities.40 The historian William M. Reddy has described the concept of “emotives,” which he defines as expressions of feelings through the use of language, specifically through verbal constructions that explicitly describe emotional states or attitudes.41 By thinking of courts-martial as sources of language and categorization and seeking these emotives in court-martial transcripts as a means of uncovering attitudes t oward sexuality, and by reading these transcripts and other legal documents “against the grain”—that is, considering what is not said, as well as what is; consciously considering the author or institution’s perspective and how that affected what was recorded, or silenced, and how acts are discussed; and seeking alternative interpretations and explanations—we may be able to use them as sources for a kind of cultural history rather than a simple social or legal history.42 We must be somewhat cautious in reading and extrapolating from these judicial records because of their relatively small number and idiosyncratic nature. It is certainly possible to generalize as to the ways in which the army thought about certain kinds of sexual behavior by examining how they w ere discussed in these courts-martial, but we must acknowledge that some degree of speculation is required in order to draw broader conclusions. It is also important to note that the army did not always function as a unitary institution, and the disagreements within the army among various army leaders, policymakers, medical experts, and others remind us that we need to “unpack” the army in any study of the institution. The U.S. Army of the early twentieth century was divided by rank, race, class, investment in medical and

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Introduction

psychoanalytic “expertise,” and varying levels of interest in the army’s role as an agent of moral reform and related concerns. Institutional regulators were not all of one mind and did not always function as though they were. The sexual regulations the army created and enforced w ere likewise not all applied or experienced in the same way by all those touched by the army as an institution.

Organization of the Book The rest of this book aims to examine the U.S. Army’s regulation of sexuality and responses to these regulations by soldiers and civilians alike. Chapter 1 covers the army’s regulation of sexuality at Fort Riley in Kansas from the end of the nineteenth century, as the United States sought to find a place on the world stage as a g reat power, through the end of the 1930s. The domestic setting of a large, permanent garrison that existed throughout the period provides an opportunity to discuss the U.S. Army’s military justice system and set of policies on sexuality as a w hole throughout the first four decades of the twentieth century. Chapter 2 examines the experiences of the army in the Philippines, beginning with the U.S. occupation of the Philippines following the Spanish-American War through World War I. The racial mixture of the soldiers sent to the Philippines and the Filipinos with whom they interacted sexually created an environment that complicated the army’s efforts to manage soldiers’ sexuality, particularly once U.S. domestic reformers learned of the U.S. Army’s sexual regulation overseas. Chapter 3 looks at the U.S. Army at Camp Beauregard, a training camp built in Louisiana during World War I, as it sought to regulate sexuality in civilian communities near the camp, including both Alexandria and New Orleans, Louisiana. Social reformers promoted and encouraged the army’s goal of creating the “world’s cleanest army” during the war because they viewed the war as a tremendous opportunity to train millions of American men along moral lines. This effort was greatly complicated by the “vice conditions” the army and federal officials encountered in the American South, as well as resistance to antivice efforts by local civilians. Chapter 4 explores the army’s attempts to regulate sexuality in both France and Germany during and immediately after World War I. Along with the American war effort came massive numbers of conscripted soldiers from all walks of life and renewed public interest in the conditions of military service and life inside the army. Foreign and diplomatic relations between the United States, its ally France, and its defeated foe Germany also significantly complicated the army’s efforts to regulate sexuality overseas. Here, racial politics once

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Arc of Containment: Britain, the United States, and Anticommunism in Southeast Asia

Wen-Qing Ngoei

Cornell University Press Ithaca and London

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Contents

List of Abbreviations

Introduction: Recovering the Regional Dimensions of U.S. Policy toward Southeast Asia

1. Darkest Moment: The Fall of Singapore, “Chinese Penetration,” and the Domino Theory

2. Patriot Games: How British Nation-Building Colonialism Inspired the United States

3. Manifest Fantasies: British-Malayan Counterinsurgency and Nation Building in U.S. Strategy

4. The Best Hope: Malaysia in the “Wide Anti-Communist Arc” of Southeast Asia

114

5. The Friendly Kings: Southeast Asia’s Transition from Anglo-American Predominance to U.S. Hegemony

149

Coda: The “Reverse Domino Effect”

177

Acknowledgments

183

Notes 187 Bibliography 233

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Index 000

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Introduction

Recovering the Regional Dimensions of U.S. Policy toward Southeast Asia

The war in the Pacific was finally over. Now, the western powers—battered, licking their wounds—entered the colossal wreck of Japan’s Co-Prosperity Sphere to reclaim their Southeast Asian territories. Some of these campaigns went badly. France’s recolonization dream in Indochina, sustained almost entirely by U.S. aid, became a nightmare. The Viet Minh had the French reeling by early 1954. And just a week into that new year, U.S. president Dwight Eisenhower met with senior officials of the National Security Council (NSC) to discuss France’s flagging military efforts. Director of Central Intelligence Allen Dulles was the first to speak. He informed Eisenhower that the French garrison was “locked up” at Dien Bien Phu, “surrounded by approximately ere en route.” three Viet Minh divisions” as “fresh Viet Minh battalions w Admiral Arthur Radford, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, thought— wrongly, as it turned out—that the Viet Minh would “avoid an all-out assault on Dien Bien Phu.” Dulles was less sure. He believed that the Viet Minh might attack this French “fortress” and accept severe military losses if only to inflict “psychological damage” on the French “will to continue” the war. As talk lurched toward how the United States might respond to the prospect of a French withdrawal, Eisenhower became agitated. Though none in the NSC dared say it, he could sense that they waited on his answer to one question above all: would he commit U.S. troops to Indochina? On record, he declared “with great force” that he “could not imagine the United States putting ground troops anywhere in Southeast Asia, except possibly in Malaya.”1

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At the time, Britain and its local allies in Malaya as well as Singapore were six years into counterinsurgency operations and political campaigns against the mostly Chinese Malayan Communist Party (MCP). Like the Viet Minh, the MCP had been the backbone of a popular anti-Japanese resistance army in occupied Malaya during World War II. In 1948, MCP guerrillas launched an armed revolt against British authorities, attempting to leverage support from the hundreds and thousands of ethnic Chinese who constituted nearly 40 percent of Malaya’s population. In Singapore, affiliates of the MCP infiltrated workers’ unions and middle schools, mounting frequent labor strikes and student protests that paralyzed the country. British leaders had named these troubles an “Emergency.” But Eisenhower considered them critical Cold War contests with wider regional ramifications. Throughout his first year in office, he had agonized over communist aggression in Malaya and Indochina. In his inaugural speech of 1953 and others that year, he held that Malaya was “indefensible” if Indochina went to the Viet Minh, that should Malaya fall, then Indonesia would also quickly succumb to communism. In April 1954, he envisioned the states of Southeast Asia as a row of dominoes, their fates all interconnected in the Cold War struggle.2 Little wonder, then, that the Singapore domino also preoccupied Eisenhower’s officials. Singapore Island was host to Britain’s most important naval and air installations in Asia and vital to the U.S.-led Southeast Asia Treaty Organ ization (SEATO) military alliance. In March 1955, Kenneth Young of the State Department returned from Southeast Asia to report not only that Malaya would soon become a “Chinese state” but also that Singapore faced “real danger of communist subversion.” He explained: “80% of Singapore was Chinese” and more than half of them under the age of twenty-one—the communists had already made such “headway” in the country’s middle schools that in the coming years most of Singapore’s labor force would be “oriented toward and under the control of Peking.”3 Months later, U.S. strategists still grappling with Young’s assessment warned that in the interconnected region, losing Singapore ensured “the power of the West to influence events in Burma, Thailand, Indonesia, Laos, Cambodia and Vietnam would be greatly reduced.”4 Recently declassified documents show, furthermore, that until 1959 NSC officials so feared an “internal takeover by the Communists or the extreme leftists” in Singapore that they resolved to “take all feasible measures to thwart the attempt, including even military action.”5 It did not come to this. Britain and Singapore’s anticommunist nationalists managed in the early 1960s to suppress the country’s socialist movement. Yet it was never a remote prospect given

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I n t r o du c t i o n 3

Eisenhower’s track record of covert maneuvers against the left-leaning governments of Iran, Guatemala, and Indonesia. These Cold War anxieties explain why Eisenhower was relieved when Malayan and British efforts ultimately sent a tattered MCP fleeing north to the Malayan-Thai border in the late 1950s.6 He was cheered also that Britain had cultivated anticommunist Malayan nationalists who won popular legitimacy at the ballot box in the mid-1950s, led their country to independence in 1957, and continued thereafter to align their nation with the West. In 1960, Eisenhower would hail the end of the Malayan Emergency as a “victory” against communism “in all its forms.”7 U.S. officials entertaining the possibility of Southeast Asia’s dominoes falling for the West sought to adapt Britain and Malaya’s example for the United States’ Cold War playbook. The Kennedy and Johnson administrations, too, invested high stakes in the smooth decolonization, stability, and avowed anticommunism of Malaya and Singapore.8 In 1962, Roger Hilsman, adviser to President John F. Kennedy, judged that the creation of Malaysia—the merger of Malaya, Singapore, and Britain’s Borneo territories scheduled for 1963—would complete a “wide anticommunist arc” that linked Thailand, Malaya, Singapore, and the Philippines, encircling China and its Vietnamese allies.9 Kennedy, with the entire region in view, soon acclaimed Malaysia as “the best hope for security in that very vital part of the world.”10 In September 1964, with President Lyndon Johnson poised to send U.S. troops to Vietnam, RAND Corporation delivered (per the State Department’s commission) five detailed studies of British-Malayan counterinsurgency and jungle warfare tactics.11 As U.S. involvement in Southeast Asia deepened, U.S. leaders clutched at those older hands, the British, from which world power was slipping, as if to seize some cache of imperial knowledge that might be brought to bear on the once heavily colonized region. Britain’s empire would cast a long shadow on U.S. relations with Southeast Asia, dissolving only in the 1970s when the British finally vacated their military bases in Singapore. So what? Of course British decolonization, the progress of Malaya and Singapore toward independence, and their victories over communism shaped U.S. Cold War policy. E very domino in Southeast Asia was critical to the United States—by the domino logic their destinies were all intertwined. For good or ill, Eisenhower’s idiosyncratic depiction of Southeast Asian security had flattened the distinctions between the countries of the region. As dominoes of identical dimensions, all must have appeared equally important to U.S. strategy.

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Yet most studies of the United States’ involvement in Southeast Asia have focused on the U.S. war in Vietnam. Indeed, historian Robert McMahon’s decades-old remonstrance about the literature concerned with U.S.-Vietnam relations could easily have been penned today—it is still “dauntingly voluminous” and liable to “overwhelm virtually all other regional issues.”12 There are far more histories of the Vietnam War than of U.S. relations with the rest of Southeast Asia combined. And as long as Vietnam’s fraught decolonization dominates our perspective, the history of U.S. intervention in Southeast Asia traces familiar narratives of the United States’ best and brightest feeding their hubris and meeting ultimate failure, or the irony of U.S. leaders’ reluctant, pessimistic, and irrevocable slide into an unwinnable conflict in Vietnam. Fixation with Vietnam also burrows into the psychological wounds of U.S. defeat, the “Vietnam Syndrome” that for decades haunted the U.S. citizens’ perceptions of their armed forces as well as shook their confidence in their leaders and the nation. Consequently, the views and responses of Southeast Asian actors closest to the war itself, besides those of the Vietnamese, have curiously escaped detailed study. A number of historians have responded to this imbalance by delving into the United States’ other bilateral relations within the region. The work they do is invaluable. But these studies also tip the scales in the opposite direction, claiming the primacy of another Southeast Asian domino instead of Vietnam. One scholar has called Indonesia the “largest domino” in postwar U.S. foreign policy because of its “demographic weight . . . geographical expanse . . . [and] abundance of natural resources.”13 Another reminds us that Eisenhower voiced exceptional concern about Laos when he handed the reins of government to Kennedy in 1961; that U.S. officials thought Laotians more susceptible to communism than all other Southeast Asians, making Laos the domino that teetered at the head of the line, its position not “interchangeab[le]” with any other.14 One other historian has suggested that U.S. leaders actually viewed Burma and Vietnam as Southeast Asia’s “two most threatened” states, and that at certain junctures in the early Cold War, Burma seemed like it “might well be the first domino to fall.”15 This creates a paradox. Designating any single domino as the most impor tant to U.S. policy relies on as well as repudiates the domino theory. The regional dynamic that so captured the strategic imagination of U.S. leaders—the interconnectedness of the Southeast Asian states—is lost. Furthermore, using a bilateral relationship as one’s basic unit of analysis risks descending into a kind of intellectual silo, obscuring the proper (and larger) dimensions of the U.S. Cold War project within and beyond Southeast Asia. Perhaps this explains why

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I n t r o du c t i o n 5

studies of U.S.–Southeast Asian relations with a “broad, regional focus” remain, as McMahon once observed, “surprisingly rare.”16 Would our understanding of the U.S. encounter with Southeast Asia change if we pivoted from Vietnam to U.S. relations with Britain, Malaya, and Singapore (one, a declining empire; the other two, dominoes that historians have left at the margins of U.S. foreign relations)? Does a new international history come to light when we examine how the fortunes of these four nations became entangled with each other and that of the wider region? These general questions underpin the particulars of this study: How did the presence of Chinese communities in Malaya, in Singapore, and throughout Southeast Asia figure in U.S. and British Cold War policies? What impact did the persistence of British imperial power in Malaya and Singapore exert on U.S. involvement in the region? In what ways did the heartening trajectories of Malaya and Singapore (to the United States, at least) influence U.S. strategies and prospects in and outside Vietnam? Indeed, how did all the regional dominoes that never fell affect Vietnam, each other, and the broader patterns of decolonization and the Cold War in Southeast Asia? In answering these, my book recasts the history of U.S. empire in Southeast and East Asia from World War II through the end of U.S. intervention in Vietnam. Arc of Containment argues that anticommunist nationalism in Southeast Asia intersected with preexisting local antipathy toward China and its diaspora to usher the region from European-dominated colonialism to U.S. hegemony. Between the late 1940s and the 1960s, Britain and its indigenous collaborators in Malaya and Singapore overcame the mostly Chinese communist parties of both countries by crafting a pro-West nationalism that was anticommunist by virtue of its anti-Chinese bent. London’s neocolonial schemes in Malaya and Singapore would prolong its influence in the region. But as British power waned, Malaya and Singapore’s anticommunist leaders cast their lot with the United States, mirroring developments in the Philippines, Thailand, and (in the late 1960s) Indonesia. This pro-U.S. trajectory was more characteristic of Southeast Asian history after World War II than Indochina’s temporary embrace of communism. By the early 1970s, these five anticommunist nations had quashed Chinese- influenced socialist movements at home and established, with U.S. support, a geostrategic arc of states that contained the Vietnamese revolution and encircled China. In the process, the Euro-American colonial order of Southeast Asia passed through Anglo-American predominance into a condition of U.S. hegemony.

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In effect, the Cold War in Southeast Asia represented but one violent chapter in the continuous history of western imperialism in the twentieth century. Tracing this relatively seamless imperial transition, my book draws inspiration from Mark Bradley’s attempt to “reconceptualize the international history of the twentieth c entury in ways that more fully transcend the traditional Cold War narrative.”17 It elaborates Anne Foster’s insightful study of pre-1941 Southeast Asia, which has revealed how easily and often U.S. colonial officials cooperated with their Dutch, French, and British counterparts to preserve the colonial order, from capturing Southeast Asian communists to blunting the anticolonial edge of nationalist movements, to containing the burgeoning Japanese empire.18 I show that these imperial tendencies recurred a fter 1945, challenging notions of World War II as a decisive watershed in world affairs. Indeed, Britain’s neocolonial ambitions were mutually constitutive with U.S. empire; Southeast Asian collaborators upheld them both. To borrow from Charles Maier’s analyses of the U.S. empire and its predecessors, Southeast Asia’s anticommunist nationalists chose to “acquiesce” to Anglo-American predominance first and, later on, the U.S. empire alone. And it was an empire, one “built on a congeries of client states (or ‘friendly kings’) . . . [rather than] direct rule.” In practical terms, the “friendly kings” of the anticommunist arc “enlist[ed] against common enemies” they shared with the U.S. hegemon, solicited U.S. support for their regimes (with conspicuo us success), linked their economies to that of the United States, and, where possible, tried to influence U.S. policy.19 The anticommunist arc offered the United States an “international empire” in Asia, one to succeed formal colonialism, a new “order produced through the coordination of multiple, ‘legitimate’ nation-states.”20 Southeast Asian developments by the late 1960s actually shared striking parallels with Western Europe’s political and economic tendencies in the de cade immediately following World War II. As Geir Lundestad argues, Western Europe sought to ward off Soviet aggression and reconstruct its economies after 1945 by drawing a willing United States into an “empire by invitation.”21 On the other side of the world, Southeast Asia’s anticommunist elites made analogous choices to forestall the potential of Chinese hegemony with corresponding results. This invitation to international empire, extended by Southeast Asia’s anticommunist nationalists and accepted by U.S. cold warriors, proved effective because of their shared concerns about the region’s Chinese diaspora. My book examines Anglo-American views of the Chinese communities in Malaya, in Singapore, and across Southeast Asia to reveal how these regional concerns drove Allied thinking, thereby illuminating yet more important continuities

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in U.S.–Southeast Asian relations through the global wars of the m iddle to late twentieth c entury. Indeed, the domino logic of U.S. policy toward Southeast Asia arose from apocalyptic visions of China and its diaspora repeating Imperial Japan’s shocking wartime victories over the colonial powers, the most notable of these Britain’s humiliating surrender of Singapore, its “impregnable fortress.” At base, U.S. and British leaders feared that the Chinese communities throughout the region would collectively serve as Beijing’s fifth column. For once the communist revolution swept China in 1949, Anglo-American leaders began worrying about “Chinese penetration” of the resuscitated colonial order; they pondered with dread the transnational threat of some ten million ethnic Chinese in Southeast Asia, linked by diasporic networks, mobilized for China’s expansionist designs.22 Scholars have long studied the Chinese diaspora of Southeast Asia in cases of individual countries and colonies, though some have examined the hese works consider Chinese migration diaspora through a regional lens. T to Southeast Asia over the duration of centuries, underscore the heterogeneous nature of the region’s Chinese, and trace their “Southeast-Asianization,” the process by which their attenuated affiliations toward China faded against growing attachments to their adopted country.23 Nevertheless, the misguided presumption that Southeast Asia’s Chinese would naturally support Beijing’s ambitions for regional dominance was real for U.S. and British cold warriors and shaped their policymaking. This presumption also featured prominently in the nation-building policies of anticommunist leaders in Malaya, Singapore, and other Southeast Asian states, for they amassed political power by intertwining nationalist fervor with popular anti-Chinese prejudice seething within their indigenous communities, prejudices that dated back to the colonial era (and in some countries, before). Southeast Asia’s “long-settled creolized” Chinese “elites” had been the targets of local resentment through the centuries, for they had visibly prospered from their effective service as “intermediaries” between colonial authorities, western capital, Chinese labor, and businesses. The anti-Chinese pogroms that now and again flared up in colonial Southeast Asia, the anti-Chinese themes that permeated early-twentieth-century nationalist movements, and the colonial policies that designated “foreign Asians” as “scapegoat[s] for the economic woes” of the G reat Depression all returned in spades when anticommunist nationalists unleashed coercive and violent campaigns against their Chinese communities, rich and poor alike.24 Put simply, anti-Chinese prejudice rallied under new flags. Disciplining the Chinese diaspora, a corollary of resisting China, provided the connective tissue between Southeast Asia’s anticommunist

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nationalism, U.S. containment policy, and British neocolonialism in Malaya and Singapore. Thus, a chief concern of this book is also the intimate U.S.-British connection in Southeast Asia, the lasting regional impact of Britain’s imperial presence being intertwined with the nascent U.S. empire well into the 1970s. There is certainly a wealth of scholarship broadly concerned with Anglo-American relations. Historians have already compared the structure and institutions of British and U.S. empires; considered the worldviews of, and relationship between, their ruling elites; mulled the future of contemporary U.S. power in Britain’s shadow; and picked apart popular U.S. denials of its imperial legacy.25 But they have not considered how the years of Anglo-American predominance in Southeast Asia produced different and more consequential patterns in post-1945 Southeast Asia than the United States’ mishandling of France’s former colonies. Among other distortions to our analysis, concentrating on U.S.-Vietnam relations overstates the continuity between French colonialism and U.S. policy in Southeast Asia. In Fredrik Logevall’s acclaimed Embers of War, for example, France’s defeat at Dien Bien Phu supposedly “straddles” the “midpoint of the twentieth c entury,” a hinge between the colonial order and the “emergence of the United States as the predominant power in Asian and world affairs.”26 The existence of such a midpoint is doubtful. The colonial order outlived the French Empire. Indeed, Britain’s deep political and military ties to Malaya and Singapore saw its influence endure in the region for some two decades following France’s withdrawal from Indochina, for almost thirty years a fter the end of World War II. Britain and its Southeast Asian partners, their rivalry with Indonesia, and diplomatic efforts to forge a regional grouping with other anticommunist states in the wider region w ere surely more crucial to U.S. policies and prospects in Southeast Asia than the long-departed colonial powers. To be sure, a few scholars have conducted fine-grained studies of U.S.-British relations in Cold War Southeast Asia. However, these remain limited in scope, tightly focused on the British advisory mission in Vietnam (1961–1965) or the Indonesia-Malaysia rivalry known as the Confrontation (1963–1966).27 Furthermore, major works on the Malayan Emergency (1948–1960), which U.S. leaders watched closely, have kept the United States at a distance or absent altogether, u nless the U.S. experience in Vietnam appears as an object lesson in failed counterinsurgency and nation building.28 In contrast, Arc of Containment examines U.S.-British relations in Southeast Asia over the longer term, from the Pacific War through the Emergency, the war in Vietnam, the Confrontation (or Konfrontasi, as the Indonesian leaders called it), and Britain’s final military

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withdrawal from its Singapore bases just as the United States was extricating itself from Indochina. In so d oing, this book sheds light on the significant continuities between the British and U.S. empires that s haped the fortunes of the region, among these the woefully under-studied decisions of Malaya and Singapore, as Britain retreated, to shelter under and extend the wing of the United States further into Southeast Asia. The U.S. war in Vietnam, important without being central, unfolded within this larger regional context. Viewed through this wide-angle lens, the story of U.S. empire in Southeast Asia is different from the one often told by historians of U.S. intervention in Indochina. For, if U.S. leaders were often downcast about Indochina, they w ere also buoyed by the successful anticommunism of Malaya and Singapore, and the pro-U.S. tilt of Thailand and the Philippines. This did not prevent President Johnson from committing U.S. forces to Vietnam and may have even given him confidence (fragile and false) that he might rescue the tottering Saigon government. More to the point, the region had largely turned in Washington’s favor when Johnson Americanized the Vietnam conflict in 1965, ordering U.S. military leaders to take control of the campaign against the Viet Cong. By the m iddle of that year, virtually all the Southeast Asian allies of Britain and the United States had already triumphed against their socialist rivals at home. U.S. troops deploying to Vietnam therefore entered the embrace of a “wide anti-communist arc,” its grip deadly to so many. Tens of thousands of U.S. soldiers, and many more Vietnamese fighters and civilians on either side of the war, would perish while the authoritarian regimes of the arc consolidated their power and tied their fates to U.S. hegemony. The tragedy was that t hese deaths, numbering in the millions, occurred when the United States had already achieved broad success in the region. The geostrategic arc of containment would become even more robust at the end of 1965 with the addition of the fifth most populous country in the world: Indonesia. Again, events that transpired outside Vietnam proved more critical to Southeast Asia’s rightward course. From the early to mid-1960s, Britain, Malaya, and Singapore mounted diplomatic and covert military offensives against Sukarno, Indonesia’s left-leaning leader, making him increasingly vulnerable to right-wing rivals. Indonesia’s anticommunist military, led by General Suharto, executed a bloody purge of the Indonesian Communist Party (PKI), ousted Sukarno (who had depended on the PKI’s support), broke relations with China (that Sukarno had nurtured), and drove Indonesia deep into the U.S. orbit. U.S. leaders, alert to these developments, moved to consolidate their gains. They did not acquire their empire in a “fit of absence of mind.”29

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While mired in Vietnam, the United States vigorously cultivated politico- military and economic ties with Indonesia as well as the other Southeast Asian nations that constituted the arc of containment. For their part, the five nations of the anticommunist arc returned the f avor. In 1967, they founded the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN), and claimed to be nonaligned but fully supported the U.S. military intervention in Vietnam. Some fueled the conflict by volunteering their troops and bases; others took to international forums and broadcast apologetics for U.S. containment policy and the war in Vietnam; yet o thers provided maintenance services, supplied oil to U.S. military machines, took on military procurements contracts, and more yet (all of which brought generous U.S. support for their regimes). As stable bulwarks open for business to the capit alist world, they also welcomed the U.S. investments that seeded the region’s purported economic miracle of the 1980s. Despite all this, historians have presupposed that the U.S. debacle in Vietnam represents the end of the “short-lived American empire” in Southeast Asia.30 In fact, Vietnam was anomalous. ASEAN’s pro-U.S. diplomacy meant that the United States’ failures in Vietnam had by the 1970s become less significant to its Cold War objectives for the region. Scholars have typically downplayed the agency of ASEAN statesmen: one historian of U.S. foreign relations contends that ASEAN’s “diplomatic gyrations” affected neither the U.S. war in Indochina nor Sino-U.S. relations.31 Yet, the United States, standing strong in the arc that overlay the ASEAN states, had prevailed in the larger struggle for the region. Indeed, this book reveals that Beijing and Moscow felt the U.S. strategic advantage acutely—the leaders of both communist g iants w ere thus eager for détente with the United States. This facilitated the end of another arc—the story of U.S. military intervention in Southeast Asia, codified in the Nixon Doctrine announced in July 1969 in Guam. From a position of de facto hegemony in Southeast Asia, President Richard Nixon successfully pursued triangular diplomacy with China and the USSR, withdrew U.S. troops from Vietnam, and ended the confrontational phase of containment policy in that country. Southeast Asian actors—the dominoes that never fell—had been vital to welding the arc of containment together, not least the Malayans and Singaporeans who have rarely appeared in histories of U.S. foreign policy. In this book, anticommunist nationalists like Malayan prime minister Tunku Abdul Rahman and Singapore’s leader Lee Kuan Yew share center stage with the likes of Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson. T hese “friendly kings” exerted a surprising impact on the worldviews of Eisenhower and Nixon, the policies of Zhou

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Enlai and Leonid Brezhnev, and even the opinions of nonaligned leaders such as Gamal Abdel Nasser and Josef Tito. In the vein of Arne Westad’s Global Cold War, this book explores how Third World elites like the Tunku and Lee intertwined their nation-building aims with the superpower ambitions of the United States, the neocolonial designs of Britain, and the goals of other Southeast Asian anticommunist nationalists (even those with whom they had serious differences).32 It is in the machinations of t hese Southeast Asian actors that the Cold War intersected so fatefully with decolonization, “illuminat[ing] historical linkages in the international system running horizontally from East to West, vertically from North to South, [and] transversally across the South itself.”33 The Tunku and Lee waged the global Cold War at home and abroad, the results of which affected the United States, its allies, and antagonists and reverberated back to Malaya, Singapore, and the region as a w hole. Highlighting the agency of Malaya and Singapore’s pioneer generation of leaders also decenters the United States. It parallels recent works such as Pierre Asselin’s Hanoi’s Road to the Vietnam War, Jessica Chapman’s Cauldron of Resis tance, Edward Miller’s Misalliance, and Lien-Hang Nguyen’s Hanoi’s War, all rich and compelling studies of how Vietnamese leaders directly influenced the actions and agendas of the superpowers and, by extension, international history.34 There is little doubt that Southeast Asian leaders shaped the struggle for the region, since the Cold War powers vied so avidly for collaborators in the decolonizing world.35 But whereas the careers of Vietnamese leaders in Saigon and Hanoi are increasingly well documented, there is still a poor understanding of how anticommunist nationalists in Malaya and Singapore and their left-wing opponents affected U.S. policy and the global Cold War. Arc of Containment is in part an act of archival recovery. Along with U.S. diplomatic archives, it draws on records in Malaysia and Singapore largely untouched by scholars of U.S. foreign relations, and on recently declassified British documents concerned with the empire’s cooperation with conservative Southeast Asian allies during its waning years in the region. This multiarchival survey does not aim to recount e very detail of Malaya and Singapore’s nationalist struggles—its focus remains key moments in the relationships of U.S., British, Malayan, and Singaporean decision makers who from the 1940s through the 1970s shaped imperial transition in Southeast Asia. The first chapter of this book treats Japan’s conquest of Southeast Asia as a window to the longer history of Anglo-American perceptions of Southeast Asia’s interconnectedness. Japanese victories fueled what would become the domino logic, entwining race with the struggle for ascendancy in the region

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and preparing the way for U.S. Cold War fixations with the perceived threat from China and its diaspora to Southeast Asia. Despite the domino theory’s significance in U.S. foreign relations, historical studies of its origins remain few and dated. Without exception, these studies maintain that geopolitical lessons far removed from Southeast Asia inspired the domino principle; that Nazi and Soviet aggrandizement in Europe taught U.S. leaders to contain such aggressors rather than appease them; and that failing that, the United States would lose all credibility in the eyes of its allies and, thereafter, see them capitulate to the United States’ rivals like falling dominoes.36 In fact, U.S. policymakers’ Cold War visions of Southeast Asia emerged from the Euro- American colonial experience in that region, from the war against Japan for that same region, and from long-standing anxieties about Chinese diasporic links to mainland China. These, far more than the precedents of Nazi and Soviet aggrandizement, underpinned the domino logic of U.S. strategy toward Southeast Asia well into the 1970s. The next two chapters examine how Britain’s apparent success with thwarting the MCP influenced U.S. leaders’ views on, and strategy for, the Cold War in Southeast Asia. Chapter 2 shows that as U.S. policymakers cast about for how to deal with the challenges of decolonization and the Cold War in the region, they drew special inspiration from the British nation-building proj ect in Malaya. Britain had cultivated Malaya’s anticommunist nationalists, and together they forged a popular multiracial political alliance that undermined the MCP’s appeal to several hundred thousands of ethnic Chinese in Malaya. When Malaya gained independence in 1957, its relative stability and leaders’ determination to side with the West w ere received by U.S. leaders as a notch on the b elt. Chapter 3 examines the other half of Britain and Malaya’s success story, their counterinsurgency campaign against the MCP guerrillas. It recovers the outsize U.S. fascination with British counterinsurgency, tracing how U.S. policy makers’ attempts to cherry-pick lessons from the British campaign in Malaya shaped the United States’ regional and global strategies from the 1950s through the 1960s. Certainly, scholars have long discussed the usefulness of British- Malayan counterinsurgency methods to the U.S. effort in Vietnam, or lack thereof.37 A few lament the British-Malayan tactics (and triumphs) forsaken in Vietnam, while o thers enumerate the disparities between Malaya and Vietnam to decry the applicability of British-Malayan strategies.38 But these lines of inquiry, anchored to the U.S. war in Vietnam, remain limited; the value of British-Malayan counterinsurgency to Vietnam is quite beside the point. As this chapter shows, the U.S. preoccupation with British-Malayan counterinsurgency

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tactics, as well as British and Malayan leaders’ attempts to exploit this preoccupation and thereby strengthen their Cold War partnership with the United States, illuminates the larger reality of Britain’s critical and enduring influence on U.S. empire building across the global South in the 1960s. The fourth chapter examines how the creation of Malaysia in 1963 completed a geostrategic arc of anticommunist states in Southeast Asia and undermined Sukarno’s left-leaning regime in Indonesia, providing a powerf ul fillip to U.S. Cold War aims. Malayan leader Tunku Abdul Rahman’s efforts to create an indigenous anticommunist alliance with Thailand and the Philippines bore fruit in the early 1960s. Soon after came the formation of Malaysia, which was smoothed by the application of Singapore’s internal security apparatus toward the repression of its socialist movement. To date, scholars concerned with the emergence of Malaysia have focused only on the agendas and actions of Britain, Malaya, and Singapore.39 They pay little heed to U.S. Cold War suspicions that Singapore’s Chinese might enable Beijing to expand its power and, consequently, overlook the broader implications of how Malaysia figured in U.S. visions of anticommunist Southeast Asia. This chapter demonstrates that, with Singapore nestled inside pro–West Malaysia and the island’s critical naval and air bases still run by British forces in service of Anglo-American interests, the arc of containment began to solidify. Also, Britain and Malaysia’s anticommunist offensives against Sukarno would by the mid-1960s severely destabilize the Indonesian government, paving the way for Sukarno’s ouster and Indonesia’s alignment with the United States against China and the USSR. The final chapter examines Southeast Asia’s passage from Anglo-American predominance to U.S. hegemony between the late 1960s and mid-1970s, a product of British decolonization strategies in Singapore and the growing stability of the arc of containment. As Britain’s military pulled out of Singapore, it established the Five Power Defense Arrangement (FPDA), a security framework for Malaysia, Singapore, Australia, and New Zealand. And heretofore, scholars have ignored the FPDA’s impact on Soviet policy in Southeast Asia and the broader Cold War rivalry for the region.40 Indeed, through the FPDA, British neocolonialism’s final burst of fire thwarted Soviet hopes of expanding the USSR’s regional influence beyond Indochina, persuading Moscow to accommodate to U.S. hegemony in Southeast Asia. At the same time, Southeast Asia’s anticommunist-nationalists, five of whom founded ASEAN in 1967, forged increasingly intimate political, economic, and military ties with the United States, stabilizing their regimes as well as effectively containing Vietnam and China. When the United States pulled its troops from Vietnam, neither China nor the USSR possessed political and military

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links with the Philippines, Thailand, or Indonesia to the degree that the United States did. Neither communist giant could claim more than trading links with, or embassies in, Malaysia and Singapore. With a substantial strategic advantage over the communist powers in the region, Nixon could retool U.S. containment policy as triangular diplomacy, finding both Beijing and Moscow keen to thaw relations with the predominant superpower. Even the fall of Saigon in 1975 would not shake the arc of containment.

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But stare long enough into the fiery ruin of South Vietnam, and the conflagration may be blinding. It can consume our sight with what seems like the failure of U.S. imperial pretensions, a catastrophe borne disproportionately by the peoples of Indochina. Yet ringing the South China Sea, there are other emblems of the United States’ grandiose and ignoble endeavor. The “friendly kings” of Southeast Asia rose to power as Indochina teetered toward disaster; they presided over the majority of the region’s peoples and resources and stood from year to year as proof that the domino theory was actually r unning in reverse. In charting the emergence of Malaya’s and Singapore’s “friendly kings,” this book brings us back to the earliest iterations of the domino principle in the Pacific War, iterations bound tightly to Japan’s onslaught against both British- controlled territories and the security guarantees they afforded the other western powers in Southeast Asia. Into this logic of regional interconnectedness, Washington and London would later pour their fears of China’s communists and the Chinese diaspora. H ere, the domino theory materialized, profoundly shaping the United States’ fateful Cold War encounter with Southeast Asia. But the Cold War crisis also offered the United States opportunities. For while Eisenhower conjured the domino imagery to describe Southeast Asia’s vulnerability, he also advocated “build[ing] that row of dominoes so they can stand the fall of one.”41 With British or U.S. assistance (and sometimes both), the “friendly kings” did just that. They won, seized, or clung to power by whipping up a deadly cocktail of anti-Chinese prejudice and anticommunism at home. By right-wing coups, crackdowns, and massacres, they cemented their authority. Many more across Southeast Asia would perish violently like the millions in the Indochina conflicts. And then Malaysia and Singapore, together with their ASEAN counterparts, transformed their row of dominoes into the arc of containment. Regardless of what Beijing or Moscow could claim to have done for their Vietnamese allies against the U.S. war machine, the prospects for communist expansion beyond Indochina were paltry. The arc had coursed through war and strife, across nations and time, and it marked out the formidable shape of U.S. empire.

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THE INSTRUMENTAL UNIVERSITY

ED UC AT I O N I N SE RV I CE O F T H E N AT I O N A L A G E N DA A FT E R WO R L D WA R I I

Ethan Schrum

CORNELL UNIVERSITY PRESS Ithaca and London

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[CIP to come]

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Co nte nts

Introduction: The Instrumental University and American Modernity

1. The Progressive Roots of the Instrumental University: Public Administration, City Planning, and Industrial Relations

2. Clark Kerr: Leading Proponent of the Instrumental University

3. The Urban University as Community Service Institution: Pennsylvania in the Era of Gaylord P. Harnwell

4. “Instruments of Technical Cooperation”: American Universities’ Institution Building Abroad

126

5. A Use of the University of Michigan: Samuel P. Hayes, Jr. and Economic Development 164 6. Founding the University of California at Irvine: High Modern Social Science and Technocratic Public Policy

183

Epilogue: Critics of the Instrumental University 215 Acknowledgments

229

Notes 233 Index 000

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Introduction The Instrumental University and American Modernity

When Clark Kerr, president of the University of California, stepped to a Harvard University podium in April 1963 to present his analysis of American higher education, he emphasized the dramatic and rapid change in the sector. “The modern American university,” he declared, “is a new type of institution in the world.” It held a “novel position in society” because knowledge had become “the most important f actor in economic and social growth.” In t hese Godkin Lectures, published l ater that year as The Uses of the University, Kerr dubbed this new institution “the multiversity” because it engaged in a spectacular array of activities with little cohesion and no unifying philosophy. He did not deplore the multiversity, and in fact gave it a largely optimistic gloss. He joked that the multiversity could be described as “a series of individual faculty entrepreneurs held together by a common grievance over parking.” He noted that “so many of the hopes and fears of the American people are now related to our educational system [that] the university has become a prime instrument of national purpose. This is new. This is the essence of the transformation now engulfing our universities.”1 While “multiversity” is an apt term, it does not tell the whole story—or even the main story—of the postwar university. Kerr’s commentary suggests a better conceptualization. According to Kerr, external constituencies such as government, industry, and foundations used the university as an instrument to achieve their own purposes—hence the title The Uses of the University.

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2 INT RODUCT ION

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A related feature of the postwar university was the proliferation of academic enterprise that prioritized instrumental rationality to shape the social order, from business and engineering schools to fields like city planning, industrial relations, and public administration.2 Public expectations for university-based solutions to social problems increased accordingly. Kerr did not simply notice, assess, and announce this change in American universities. He played an essential role in enacting it during twenty-two years in progressively higher leadership positions at the University of California, doing work that often influenced practices across American higher education.3 Kerr stood at the forefront of this trend, but he was hardly alone in such activity. This book spotlights Kerr’s thought and impact as part of a broader portrait of academic institution builders, including heretofore neglected figures such as Gaylord P. Harnwell, E. T. Grether, James G. March, Samuel P. Hayes Jr., G. Holmes Perkins, and Joseph Willits. T hese academic leaders and their like-minded contemporaries in politics and civil society attained professional standing during the Depression and World War II. The triumph of or ganized war research conducted in university labs convinced them that such efforts, if expanded to focus on social problems as well as military concerns, could remake American society and perhaps even the world. As they discussed goals for their institutions, these leaders increasingly spoke a mechanistic, technocratic language aimed at training managers and technicians to operate society. Kerr exemplified this sensibility when he stated that the university “not only preserves the past and prepares the future but it also increasingly helps administer the present.”4 Politicians expressed similar views. John F. Kennedy stated, “Most of the problems . . . that we now face, are technical problems, are administrative problems.”5 Since powerful postwar figures believed that the present was witnessing the realization of American modernity, it followed that for them a major purpose of the university was to administer American modernity. In this book, I argue that Kerr and other elite Americans of his generation, inside and outside of the academy, set the American research university on a new course. They did so by creating the instrumental university. (Kerr did not use the term “instrumental university,” but his ideas inspired this concept, which I employ to interpret the university’s role in twentieth-century US history.)6 With its emphasis on procedural rationality, organized research, and project-based funding by external patrons, the instrumental university would provide technical and managerial knowledge to shape the social order. Its leaders hoped that by solving the nation’s pressing social problems and stimulating economic growth, the research university would become the essential institution of postwar America. Kerr and his fellows, under the spell

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The Instrumental U niver sity and Am e ric an Mod e rnity

of a postwar vision of American modernity, saw the university as an instrument that could administer society at home and abroad in order to realize that vision. This vision of American modernity was itself a historical product, growing out of the tradition of technocratic progressivism that arose in the United States in the 1910s. Four modern ideals connected to technocratic progressivism—involving industrial relations, city planning, economic development, and administration—particularly motivated the leaders who created the instrumental university. T hese ideals gained traction between the 1910s and 1930s, but the belief that the United States had won World War II due to its economic might and organized research enhanced their appeal and facilitated their incorporation into the broader vision of American modernity that coalesced a fter the war. This transformation brought a new understanding of the research university’s mission and its role in society. On this view, the university’s leading purposes included promoting economic development and coordinating research ere from many fields in order to attack social problems. Harnwell and Kerr w among the early presidents to cite an emerging knowledge economy to justify a new strategic direction for their universities. By the late 1950s and early 1960s, they and their colleagues observed that business and universities were drawing closer together, and began to describe the university as an economic engine responsible for “innovation.” Reorienting institutions to prioritize these activities had numerous consequences. One was to inject more capitalistic and managerial tendencies into universities. Another was to marginalize some founding ideals of the American research university, such as the pursuit of knowledge in academic disciplines and the freedom of individual investigators, not to mention even older ideals of liberal education. The result is that the university lost some of what made it special. It became more like other large institutions, caught up in the economics and politics of the day, rather than a place intentionally set apart from those currents so that scholars could pursue truth. This change undermined the rationale for practices that were originally tied to that special character and sapped their public support. It also weakened the landscape of American institutions by making that landscape less diverse. No other entity filled the space once occupied by the university. Consequently, Americans have fewer opportunities to consider the highest intellectual goods apart from immediate economic or social utility. Today, those who decry universities’ corporatizing and market-driven tendencies often trace them to the rise of neoliberalism in the 1970s. This book suggests that a fuller explanation of these tendencies—particularly organizational changes within universities from the 1940s onward—must highlight their deeper roots in the technocratic progressive tradition.

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4 INT RODUCT ION

The Instrumental University

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The instrumental university’s mission to promote economic development and coordinate research to solve social problems produced a proliferation of organized research units (ORUs).7 This trend marked a break with prewar university research, which was, in the words of a 1938 National Resources Committee report, “Independent and unorganized, controlled and directed chiefly by the interests of the individual professor.”8 In that era, according to historian Rebecca Lowen, “America’s universities were peripheral to the nation’s political economy. They were committed to promoting the scientific method, to allowing academic scientists and scholars to discover and study ‘truths’ . . . the concept of autonomy from private industry and, more broadly, the world of commerce, distinguished the university from the mere technical institute.”9 But a fter World War II, the ethos of detachment waned as elite institutions pursued organized research on specific problems to meet the desires of patrons and perceived national needs. This research increasingly occurred in ORUs, most of which were called a “center” or “institute.” A typical ORU included regular tenure-track professors (often from different academic departments but sometimes just from one), researchers appointed to the ORU rather than a department, and support staff. The term “orga nized” meant that these researchers worked together (under the direction of a leader) on specific problems, often funded by corporations, foundations, and government agencies. The ORU was an instrument that these patrons could use to pursue problems of interest. Although relationships between patrons and researchers were complex, the net effect of the spread of orga nized research was to increase the influence of patrons over the direction of university research, thus instrumentalizing the university.10 The new orga nized research was often autonomous—that is, disconnected from departments and teaching, the university’s academic core.11 While autonomy was important, organization was the more salient characteristic of the postwar vision for university research. The increasing prestige of organization as a social ideal since the 1910s and the emphasis that technocratic progressives placed on organizational solutions to social problems both fed the postwar rise of organized research. One indicator that the instrumental university model had become power ful was that leading research universities and land-g rant colleges converged toward that model in the postwar era.12 In the early twentieth century, the major genres of American higher education had been liberal arts colleges, normal schools (devoted to teacher training), technical institutes, land-g rant colleges, and research universities. The latter, prominent though few in num-

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ber, had made pure research—pursuing knowledge for its own sake—a central mission in the late nineteenth century. In 1900, the most formidable among them formed the Association of American Universities: older private institutions Columbia, Harvard, Pennsylvania, Princeton, and Yale; newer privates Catholic, Chicago, Clark, Cornell, Johns Hopkins, and Stanford; and state universities California (Berkeley), Michigan, and Wisconsin. These institutions were devoted to advancing specialized knowledge in professional academic disciplines. By contrast, the land-g rant colleges focused on practical knowledge, particularly in agriculture and engineering. Prior to World War II, land-g rant institutions like Texas A&M and Penn State conducted little research outside of those fields. They prioritized teaching, as well as public service through extension programs. After the war, they pursued research more vigorously as many changed their names from “college” to “university” and dropped the “A&M” moniker. Three of the original AAU members—California, Cornell, and Wisconsin—contained a land-grant component in addition to functioning as a research university. Each helped to drive the transition to the instrumental university among their AAU peers. Land-g rant institutions retained some distinctive qualities after World War II, but the boundary dividing them from elite research universities blurred as each took on characteristics of the other. This book describes how the elite research university transformed into the instrumental university.13 Most of the original AAU members figure in this account, though its main archival research focuses on three, each from a dif ferent subgenre: Pennsylvania (private), Michigan (public, non–land grant), and California (public, land grant). California is a special case, b ecause it became a system of research-intensive campuses, not all of which gained AAU membership.14 I focus on Berkeley, the original and flagship campus, and Irvine, opened in 1965. The technocratic progressivism that grounded the instrumental university was an intellectual disposition that portrayed technical knowledge as the key to social prog ress.15 Other historians have focused—and helpfully so—on the effects of the Cold War and the federal research economy to explain why American universities changed a fter World War II.16 Yet as close attention to prewar sources suggests, the federal research economy and the Cold War merely nourished an instrumental bent initially built on a decades-long quest for rational ordering of the modern world. In this interpretation, postwar universities partook of a “high modern” impulse in American thought that sprang from technocratic progressivism in the 1910s and accelerated in the 1930s with the advent of the New Deal.17 This quest reached its apogee in the two decades after World War II as the outgrowth

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of a distinctly American intellectual tradition. Hence, the postwar university was not primarily a reaction to geopolitics or immediate events. It was a product of long-germinating worldviews and visions for society. This realization demands greater attention to the intellectual history that shaped the development of the modern American university.

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The vision of American modernity that influenced the postwar elites who transformed the research university into an instrument for administering society became so widely assumed that advocates rarely articulated it precisely. It held that the future of liberal-democratic capitalism at home and abroad depended on universities to do three things—drive economic development, provide organized social research on critical issues identified by external patrons, and expand administrative capacity in the public and private sectors. Each of these three pillars of this vision of American modernity had some traction before World War II but gained much more after 1945. Since the early twentieth century, expectations had grown that universities would produce knowledge and experts that would help to administer organizations. A fter 1945, new intellectual frameworks accelerated such expectations and even promoted belief that universities themselves should administer modern society. Organized research had its roots in the technocratic progressivism of the 1920s but did not really take off until after the success of government-f unded orga nized research during the war. Of the three pillars, belief that the research university was central for economic development was the least established before the war. To the extent that such ideas had force, they w ere mainly limited to the land-g rant colleges—and even then not really stated in terms of economic development, a concept that only gained traction in the 1930s. The technocratic progressive vision of American modernity also had an international dimension with a missionary impulse. It depicted the United States as the quintessential modern nation, charged with modernizing the world. The overall American modernity vision was widespread during the twenty years after the war, before coming under fire in the mid-1960s by challenges ranging from the Vietnam War to worries that European technological achievements were threatening American superiority in that realm.18 Several factors contributed to this framework’s postwar influence. President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s administration, through its New Deal programs and its conduct of World War II, gave new prestige to technocratic management, as many postwar leaders believed that such practices had sustained liberal

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democracy in the United States through depression and war. In particular, the widespread perception that the nation had won the war due to its economic might and its prowess in organized scientific research placed those attributes at the center of postwar American self-consciousness. That belief also made American modernity a bipartisan vision. Many of its key adherents— such as wartime science directors Gaylord Harnwell and Vannevar Bush, and promoters of universities’ international role like John Hannah and Harold Stassen—were staunch Republicans. In addition, the United States’ emergence as the preeminent global power by the end of World War II encouraged belief in American modernity. Finally, the onset of the Cold War strengthened the framework—particularly in contrast to the Soviet Union’s illiberal, command economy notion of modernity—but did not create it. In fact, the vision of American modernity, by highlighting the importance of universities, shaped how Americans approached the Cold War. University and other societal leaders working to advance American modernity in the postwar period believed in American exceptionalism. Consistent with their notion of Americ a being uniquely modern, they often pointed to economic and especially technological superiority, rather than distinctive traditions of liberty or constitutional government, as the basis for exceptionalism. Indeed, they believed that this technological prowess was an essential guarantor of liberal-democratic capitalism. Rather than seeing technological excellence as the product of some particularly American ingenuity or experience, these leaders insisted on the transferability of technology to other nations, if only the relevant administrative and organizational conditions that had created American modernity could be duplicated elsewhere. The concept of American modernity helps to explain how Americans could think of themselves as exceptional and yet want to spread their way of life, believing that doing so would not diminish their own exceptionality. For t hose motivated by ere exceptional b ecause they were at the forefront of this vision, Americans w a universal process of modernization. Like Henry Luce in his famous call for entury” (1941), t hese leaders held that US internationalism, “The American C American values w ere universal rather than particular and thus transferable to other peoples. Americans exemplified these values and had an exceptional duty to spread them to the world. Perhaps the prime example of this mindset was “Point Four” of President Truman’s 1949 inaugural address, which extolled American technology and its ability to remake the world. University leaders and faculty involved in overseas technical assistance projects subsequently launched under Point Four auspices consistently noted or assumed American superiority, in contrast to many American school teachers working abroad during this time who questioned the United States’ uniqueness, its claim to

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represent universal values, and its alleged special mission to transform the world into its image.19 These overseas projects became characteristic endeavors for the postwar research university. It is well known that postwar universities expanded their study of the non-Western world and enrolled increasing numbers of international students.20 But they also created, augmented, and staffed overseas institutions of higher learning—particularly in newly independent countries such as Indonesia and Pakistan—under the rubric of technical assistance toward these countries’ economic development. Much of this work occurred via contracts with the US government u nder Point Four and its successors, while foundations and the UN funded similar endeavors. Many of America’s elite research universities participated in such projects, which contributed to instrumentalizing the universities. A distinct vocabulary—which portrayed the university as an instrument and emphasized “using” the university—arose by the mid-1950s in elite discussions about American universities’ international institution building. Kerr thus did not invent this vocabulary, but rather gave new force and broader application to ideas circulating among the elites with whom he interacted. The American modernity vision included four modern ideals connected to technocratic progressivism—industrial relations, city planning, administration, and economic development—that propelled the rise of the instrumental university.21 The four ideals were all related to applied social science and to Kerr’s notion of administering the present. They arose prior to and independently of the Cold War, in the Progressive Era (except for economic development). The political culture and institutions of the New Deal strengthened them, but they became more fully institutionalized in the academy only after 1945. In this process, university-based applied social science motivated by a New Deal vision for domestic social change expanded in prestige and scope from the end of World War II through the mid-1960s.22 Each modern ideal spawned a semi-coherent body of concepts and practices that exerted influence at varying levels of the university. Industrial relations and city planning translated to inherently problem-oriented academic fields under those names, but they also had some force at a university-wide level. Economic development and administration were more protean in their institutional implications but also s haped disciplines, as the former generated the subfield of development economics and the latter acted through business administration and public administration.23 These kinds of applied social science fields that emphasized instrumental rationality spread widely in the postwar American research university.24 They also featured disproportionately in universities’ overseas ventures, more prominently than natural science disci-

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plines (though medicine-and agriculture-related fields were important) and certainly more than humanities. When American universities sought to transmit the American way of life to other lands, they did so through business and public administration rather than literature, philosophy, and religion. American elites believed that the former disciplines had superior capacity to promote liberal-democratic capitalism. The New Deal state particularly influenced universities in connection with industrial relations and city planning, which have strikingly parallel histories. Each discipline corresponded to a major element in the understanding of history articulated by the most prominent postwar university presidents, such as Kerr and Harnwell, which emphasized that industrialism and urbanism steadily expanded over time to become the predominant modes of social organization. Industrial relations and city planning would provide experts to apply rational guidance to this supposedly inexorable historical process. New Deal and wartime government programs created a demand for credentialed experts in these fields, which contributed to the proliferation of university units dedicated to them in the immediate postwar years. The New Deal’s abor National Labor Relations Act (1935) and the wartime National War L Board bolstered the demand for industrial relations specialists, while the National Resources Planning Board, the Public Works Administration, and the National Housing Agency and its successors propelled city planning. Members of the two nascent academic fields regularly worked for t hese govern ere heavily instrumental in that they w ere ment agencies. The fields w oriented t oward particular social problems, and their new prominence in the postwar university contributed to its increasingly instrumental character. The postwar era thus witnessed a burst of university activity aimed at institutionalizing instrumental knowledge that had little to do with the Cold War, although the two fields later interacted with Cold War concerns.25 Of the four ideals, economic development exerted the strongest and broadest influence on the university.26 After 1945, American elites promoted continuous economic development at home and abroad. A belief that universities must join this project motivated much organized research. Several factors spurred this project: New Deal political culture and Keynesianism, residual fears from the Depression, the role of American economic might in winning World War II, the United States’ new position as global hegemon in a war- devastated and decolonizing world, and the onset of the Cold War. Keynesian ideas and the rise of systems thinking (described below), combined with the experience of wartime economic management, convinced people that there was an entity called “the economy” (a newly popular term in the 1930s) that could be developed and administered, and that the university might be an

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instrument for d oing so.27 Patrons—especially the Ford Foundation, the most important foundation patron of the instrumental university—encouraged universities to adopt the economic development ideal. The economic development ideal inspired postwar university leaders to trumpet the arrival of what they believed was a new phase of industrial capitalism in which their institutions were central—a nascent “knowledge economy.” Scholars have given scant attention to the origins of this idea.28 Although the term “knowledge economy” did not become popular until Peter Drucker made it the title of a chapter in his 1969 book The Age of Discontinuity, Kerr articulated its fundamental tenet by 1957: knowledge, considered as a form of capital, had replaced physical raw materials as the essential input for industrial production. In this view, the university became the key institution for economic development, a belief that led in later years to the expectation that the university should be “an engine of economic development.” Kerr helped to formulate this idea in conjunction with other economic thinkers such as Drucker, Fritz Machlup, Theodore Schultz, and Gary Becker. University presidents such as Harnwell, although not theorists of the knowledge economy, shaped their institutions in accordance with its precepts. The notion of a knowledge economy motivated federal and state government attempts to mobilize universities for economic development by the early 1960s. Recovering the fact that universities saw themselves as central to a knowledge economy ree Speech Movement by the late 1950s suggests the prescience of Berkeley F (FSM) leader Mario Savio’s famous 1964 speech depicting students as raw materials. This recovery also provides a fresh angle on student movements such as the FSM by enriching our knowledge of how the universities they criticized were situated in the larger economic order. Universities did not create the knowledge economy, at least directly or intentionally, although commentators have suggested that university-based knowledge helped create the knowledge economy. Universities did, however, craft a rhetoric centered on the knowledge economy to promote their importance for society. In the process, they instrumentalized themselves in various ways. The knowledge economy concept that Kerr and o thers articulated from the mid-1950s to the mid-1960s assumed that industrial production was the definitive practice for economic and social life. Kerr’s knowledge economy did not constitute a vision of a postindustrial society—a concept that thinkers such as Daniel Bell and David Riesman began to discuss in the late 1950s, in which services became more economically important than the production of goods.29 Nor was Kerr’s knowledge economy a variety of postcapitalism—a mode of thought popular from the 1940s to 1970s whose proponents, mainly on the political left, saw capitalism giving way to alternative frameworks of social and

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economic order.30 Kerr was committed to industrial capitalism and saw it as triumphant, not teetering on the brink of collapse. The knowledge economy was the new reality of the industrial economy, not something that eclipsed it. Kerr did espouse elements that would later be associated with a post-industrial vision—increased leisure time, reduced labor strife, business becoming more like universities with shared governance—but he saw t hese trends as fruits of mature industrialism rather than of a new order. More important for the long- term implications of the instrumental university, however, is that Kerr also realized that university research was increasingly adopting practices characteristic of business. The rise of the knowledge economy concept and belief in universities’ centrality for economic development suggests that historians of capitalism must pay closer attention to universities. Another characteristically modern intellectual framework—the behavioral science paradigm that broke into public view shortly a fter World War II— shaped the instrumental university in a different way than the four modern ideals did.31 Behavioral science provided new conceptual tools that allowed some applied academic fields to build more robust research programs. Behavioral science can be described as an effort to integrate the insights of anthropology, political science, psychology, sociology, and sometimes economics and biological sciences to gain a deeper, theory-grounded understanding of h uman behavior with which to engage in social engineering. Interdisciplinarity and ere hallmarks of behavioral science. Its proponents aimed to quantification w break down barriers between existing social science disciplines and to make social inquiry more rigorously scientific, which meant describing the social world with statistics and mathematics. Like the four modern ideals, behavioral science had roots prior to World War II. By 1939, when Harvard University officials appointed sociologist Talcott Parsons as chair of the Committee on Concentration in the Area of Social Science, his group was essentially promoting what would later become known as behavioral science. The committee’s 1941 report, “Toward a Common Language for the Area of Social Science,” called for “a single model of human behavior in societies.” During World War II, team-based social science projects “gave rise to the belief that a new ‘behavioral science’ had taken shape, which, like the physical and biological sciences, could be a source of both fundamental laws and technological control.” These problem-oriented interdisciplinary projects facilitated the postwar creation of Harvard’s Department of Social Relations under Parsons’s leadership. As part of this process, Parsons acknowledged the importance of organized research.32 Another figure from this Harvard milieu, James G. Miller, helped to institutionalize behavioral science a fter the war. As an undergraduate at Harvard

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in the early 1930s, Miller participated in a faculty discussion group centered on the writings of Italian sociological theorist Vifredo Pareto. Parsons was a member of this group, which provided ideas and networks that facilitated Parsons’s vision of behavioral science. The group sought “a unified theory of human behavior” and espoused “systems theory.”33 At Chicago, Miller chaired the Department of Psychology and gathered several other faculty members in fields including medicine and statistics into the Committee on the Behavioral Sciences in 1949. Its goal was to create a unified, scientific theory of human behavior on the model of general theory in the physical sciences, as suggested by Miller’s faculty club conversations with physicist Enrico Fermi.34 Miller’s committee incorporated faculty from the biological sciences, which echoed the Pareto group at Harvard, led by biochemist Lawrence Joseph Henderson.35 The most important step for popularizing the notion of “behavioral science” was the Ford Foundation’s use of the term. It dubbed its program on individual behavior and human relations the Behavioral Science Program in 1951 under the influence of Miller’s friend Donald Marquis, a psychologist at the University of Michigan. Miller and his group later moved to Michigan and established the journal Behavioral Science, which provided further institutional legitimation. The Ford program funded numerous projects by academics of many backgrounds. The behavioral science paradigm fed three related movements— administrative science, the new organization theory, and systems analysis— that raised expectations for university research to solve social problems.36 All three emphasized mathematical formalization. A key thinker behind each was Herbert Simon, a renowned social scientist who imbibed the behavioral approach to political science from his doctoral studies in that field at the University of Chicago. Simon’s Administrative Behavior (1945) “created a new theoretical structure for administrative science” and became “arguably one of the twentieth century’s ten most influential works in political science, public administration, and management.”37 The book examined how organizations influenced the behavior of their members. Simon believed that organizations, far from having the stultifying effect often associated with bureaucracies, were actually essential instruments for the extension of rationality b ecause they transcended the limitations on the rationality of any individual.38 Simon’s work suggested the possibility of a universally valid science of h uman decision making. Other postwar academics embraced this ideal of a “decision science” and made it the basis for their attempt to create a general theory of administration that would transcend the settings—government, business, and educa-

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tional institutions—for which universities often taught discrete types of administration. Simon established himself at Carneg ie Institute of Technology’s Graduate School of Industrial Administration, where he and colleague James March became key exponents of the new organization theory through their landmark Organizations (1958). They applied recent findings of psychol ogy and economics to highlight h uman behavior and its motivation in organ izations. Like Simon’s earlier work, the new organization theory focused on scientific analysis of human decision making.39 It was holistic in that it drew on mathematical biology and physiology to portray the organization as an organism, a rationally interconnected w hole, a “system” that attempted to maintain equilibrium. This model suggested behavioral-functional analysis of the organizational properties that enabled the maintenance of equilibrium.40 This “systems” approach led to yet a third influential offshoot of behavioral science in the postwar university, systems analysis, which researchers applied to all sorts of social problems from nuclear defense to urban planning. These new modes of thinking provided a set of policy tools infused with the trappings of science and mathematics, which helped policy-oriented work in many fields gain legitimacy as a university activity. For instance, schools of business administration embraced t hese tools as the foundation for a new, more “scientific” curriculum and research program that raised their status within universities. As inherently instrumental units such as schools of business administration gained size and prestige, they changed the tenor of universities.

Service to Society A leading tenet of the instrumental university was that it must solve the prob lems of its constituencies, whether the local community, the state, the nation, or the world. This commitment fell under the rubric of the university’s “service” to society. The idea that the university should serve its various publics was nothing new; it had been a dominant theme in American higher education since the founders of Harvard in 1636 charged the college to prepare learned Christian ministers for its community. The feature that distinguished the instrumental university was not the idea of service but the kind of service that academic and social elites pushed it to provide. They wanted universities as institutions to provide what many of them called “direct ser vice” by engaging public problems, often through organized research. The direct service idea formed part of Gaylord Harnwell’s rhetoric portraying the

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urban university as a community service institution, motivated American universities’ programs of overseas institution building, and helped to legitimate plans for a large-scale Public Policy Research Organization at UC Irvine. By contrast, an older model articulated by Woodrow Wilson held that a university served society primarily by educating wise and virtuous leaders with intellectual breadth and vision. Wilson, one of his era’s most influential academic leaders, became president of Princeton University in 1902. He elaborated this model in two high-profile, similarly titled speeches: “Princeton in the Nation’s Service,” delivered at the institution’s sesquicentennial in 1896, and “Princeton for the Nation’s Service,” his inaugural address as its president.41 Princeton graduates, he said, should be able to distinguish “permanent [tendencies] from [those] which are of the moment merely, [and] promises from threats, knowing the life men have lived, the hopes they have tested, and the principles they have proved.” His concept thus had more in common with the nineteenth-century college and its moral philosophy framework than with the postwar instrumental university. To be sure, some resonance existed between Wilson’s idea of Princeton in the nation’s service and Kerr’s later notion of the university as an instrument of national purpose. Wilson said that “there is laid upon us the compulsion of the national life. We dare not keep aloof and closet ourselves while a nation comes to its maturity.”42 Yet Wilson’s vision for how the university would serve the nation differed from the later emphasis on organized research. Wilson valued scholarship and helped to start Princeton’s Graduate School, which he believed should concentrate on “pure studies” rather than research on particular social problems.43 Research, however, had a low profile in his speeches on Princeton and the nation’s ser vice. Instead, he focused on broad undergraduate education in liberal arts and sciences as the university’s chief contribution to the nation’s service. Even when he said that the university should be “directly serviceable to the nation,” he believed the path to that goal was “to make our men reading and thinking men.”44 Wilson criticized nascent scientific approaches to social change that would later dominate the instrumental university. He argued that “the scientific spirit of the age” was “doing us a great disservice, working in us a certain great degeneracy” with its ethos of experiment, “contempt for the past,” and confidence in “quick improvement” and “panaceas.” Wilson’s problem was not with the scientist, but rather “the noxious, intoxicating gas which has somehow got into the lungs of the rest of us from out the crevices of his workshop.” Wilson reflected, “I should tremble to see social reform led by men who had breathed [the gas]: I should fear nothing better than utter destruction from a revolution conceived and led in the scientific spirit.” Speaking in a religious lan-

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guage of human sinfulness that would be foreign to the instrumental university, Wilson argued that science had not made “human nature a whit easier to reform.” In light of what he viewed as the pretensions of the scientific approach to social change, Wilson concluded, “Do you wonder, then, that I ask for the old drill, the old memory of times gone by, the old schooling in precedent and tradition, the old keeping of faith with the past, as a preparation for leadership in the days of social change?”45 For Wilson, Princeton would be in the nation’s service by providing its students with a robust liberal education, not by organizing research around social problems. Another institution making waves at that time, the University of Wisconsin, more closely prefigured the later instrumental university in its understanding of service, in part because of Wisconsin’s unusual status of being both an elite research university and a land-grant institution. Charles Van Hise ascended from the geology faculty to Wisconsin’s presidency in 1903, just a year a fter Wilson took Princeton’s helm. In his 1904 inaugural address and other venues, Van Hise stated that the university should solve practical problems faced by the state’s government and citizens.46 This concept soon became known as “the Wisconsin Idea” and gained national attention. The major outworking was that professors consulted with state government agencies, which were con veniently located just a few blocks away near the other end of State Street.47 The renowned economics professor Richard T. Ely, however, plowed a more innovative path that involved a structural change in the university when he founded the Institute for Research in Land Economics and Public Utilities.48 Ely’s biographer recognized him as “a captain of organized and cooperative research,” and cited a contemporary who claimed that Ely was “the first scholar in America to surround himself with staffs of secretaries . . . the first scholar in Americ a to be organized like a business man.” Part of his pioneering work in organized research was seeking “funds from wealthy patrons.”49 After several years of unsuccessful fundraising, Ely founded the Institute for Research in Land Economics in 1920 with assistance from the Interchurch World Movement, the Farm Mortgage Bankers Association, and a wealthy former student. By 1922 he had gifts from thirteen railroads, $10,000 from the Carneg ie Corporation, and (most notably) institutional support from the university in the form of office space, a full-time secretary, and a $1,000 annual research budget. Ely retitled the unit to include utilities in 1923, and soon had several allocations of more than $20,000 each from utility organizations. During the 1920s, the institute generally employed between ten and forty people.50 Ely had created a significant organized research unit, and one that claimed to produce neutral research on public problems rather than advocating any particular interest. The institute nevertheless became a lightning rod

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for criticism, including a nearly 200-page book styled as an “expose” of Ely and his institute.51 Political forces in Wisconsin began to attack corporate and foundation support of university research. In 1925, a fearful Ely moved the institute to Northwestern University, where it flourished for several years before the Depression devastated it and Ely retired to Connecticut. The institute’s move prefigured a postwar trend wherein entrepreneurial professors moved entire ORUs from one university to another. Shortly after Ely moved the institute, the University of Wisconsin briefly barred gifts from philanthropic foundations, a policy that would become unthinkable after World War II.52 Wisconsin’s ambivalence about organized research in the 1920s showed that the instrumental university had not yet taken hold. Ely’s institute was the kind of instrumental ORU that later characterized the postwar university, but it was an outlier in its own time, as the criticism of it suggests. Organized research units, though essential for the rise of the instrumental university, were not quite steamrollers. Some ORUs struggled to maintain their affiliated faculty members, while others faced an uphill battle for establishment in the face of departmental and disciplinary concerns. The structure of orga nized research units was one of the most discussed topics in the postwar university. Many universities developed elaborate schema of what constituted a “center” as opposed to an “institute.” Faculty spent so much time discussing these issues that they became a topic for joking and sarcasm. For example, during a 1960 meeting at the University of Michigan, Professor Wilcox read an “Explanatory Ode, or How to Tell a Center from an Institute.”53 Postwar academics placed enormous expectations on organized research projects and the university units that h oused them, but results w ere often meager. The history of t hese endeavors shows both the unswerving faith that postwar academics had in university-based organized research to solve every kind of social problem and the difficulties that such efforts faced. Chapter 1 introduces the godfather of the instrumental university, Charles Merriam, and traces the remarkably parallel rise of public administration, city planning, and industrial relations as inherently instrumental academic fields. It delineates contributions to that rise from several sources: progressivism and the New Deal milieu in general, early twentieth c entury associational movements for planning and government reform, and the nexus of Rockefeller philanthropy and the Social Science Research Council. Chapter 2 explores the work of Clark Kerr as a thinker and university leader. It examines the Inter-University Study of Labor Problems in Economic Development directed by Kerr, one of the largest organized research projects in American social science during the postwar years. This study proposed a new theory of industrialism that informed Kerr’s thinking about universities.

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The Inter-University Study provides a window into its most important institutional contexts: the Institute of Industrial Relations (IIR) at UC Berkeley and the Ford Foundation’s Program in Economic Development and Administration. The chapter describes Kerr’s promotion of ORUs—first at IIR, which he directed for seven years, and then across the Berkeley campus once he became chancellor. It also shows how his immersion in the administrative science movement s haped his view of the university’s mission. Throughout the chapter, I uncover the sources of key ideas Kerr set forth in The Uses of the University. Chapter 3 portrays Harnwell’s effort to make the University of Pennsylvania (Penn) a “community service institution,” in part by stimulating Philadelphia’s economic development. Penn’s unfolding understanding of its identity as an “urban university” and its almost overnight creation of the intellectual center of American city planning suggest the impact that both the legacy of the New Deal state and the increasingly urban setting of higher education in the postwar years had on American universities’ instrumental turn. This chapter also illustrates how both Kerr’s ideas about universities and the nascent concept of a knowledge economy began to play out in places around the country, such as in Harnwell’s work with the University City Science Center and the Governor’s Council of Science and Technology. Chapters 4 and 5 respectively explore the international and domestic institutional arrangements that American universities created to promote economic development around the world. Chapter 4 explains the US government’s university contracts abroad program, created in 1951 as part of the effort to implement Point Four. It also provides two case studies of university activities in Pakistan under government contracts: Penn’s attempt to create the Institute of Public and Business Administration at the University of Karachi, and the University of Southern California’s subsequent public administration program at several Pakistani institutions. The USC program self- consciously reflected on its “institution building.” This case study traces the rise of that concept in the nationwide discussion of universities’ overseas activities among academic, foundation, and government officials that began in the mid-1950s. Chapter 5 examines how Samuel P. Hayes Jr., an early Point Four official who later helped design the Peace Corps, tried to “use” the University of Michigan to establish a program of multidisciplinary organized research on economic development, the Center for Research on Economic Development (CRED). The resistance he encountered from university administrators and economics department colleagues suggests that traditional academic norms did not always yield completely to interdisciplinary organized research. Yet the establishment of CRED, which had parallels at the University of Chicago,

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Vanderbilt, and Yale, suggests the importance of economic development as a focus for organized research in the instrumental university. This chapter also provides an account of the new subfield of development economics and of the relationship between the economics discipline and the behavioral science paradigm. Chapter 6 shows how the University of California at Irvine, planned u nder Kerr’s guidance, exemplified the instrumental university in its attempt to install perhaps the most pervasive high modern social science program ever attempted on an American campus. UC Irvine’s planners designed it to be a new kind of land-g rant institution, in which social sciences replaced the agricultural sciences. Kerr and his colleagues placed tremendous expectations on interdisciplinary social science for leading humanity to a brighter f uture. This chapter tells how three related UC Irvine units—the Division of Social Sciences, the Graduate School of Administration, and the Public Policy Research Organization—attempted and failed to realize these expectations. The epilogue treats critics of American modernity and the instrumental university, especially the sociologist Robert Nisbet, a University of California faculty member (and sometime administrator) at Berkeley and Riverside from 1939 to 1972 who knew Kerr. Nisbet lashed out at organized research in his 1971 book The Degradation of the Academic Dogma, where he coined the term “academic capitalism.”54 The most unfortunate consequence of the ORU’s rise to prominence, Nisbet believed, was that it separated research from teaching, thus tearing asunder what he conceived as a coherent fabric of academic practice. Nisbet’s thought provides a helpful framework for assessing the instrumental university’s legacy for higher education and American society today.

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