Captive minds: Race, war, and the education of Korean War POWs in U.S. custody, 1950--1953

This dissertation examines the U.S. Army's reeducation of Korean and Chinese prisoners of war during the Korean War. This was an exceptional moment when POWs were no longer merely sources of enemy intelligence but a vital component of psychological warfare against the Communist threat. However, my project moves beyond the existing scholarship on this subject, which has centered on the diplomatic and psychological warfare confrontations over POW detainment and repatriation. I study how American racial ideologies regarding Asian passivity played a key role in compelling military personnel and social scientists to regard reeducation as a means of reforming culturally backward prisoners into rationally "fit" subjectivities. I argue that racial thinking was inextricably linked to how the U.S. military-intellectual complex designed and implemented intensive social engineering programs to cultivate "filial" Korean and Chinese prisoners presumed to be sociologically limited by Confucian traditions into rationally independent, anti-Communist subjects. Drawing on extensive research conducted in both U.S. and Korean archives, this project explores the theoretical and practical intersections between American liberalism and racial thinking in the context of the U.S. military's first modernist project of recreating subjectivities during the Cold War, a process that I call "liberal assimilation." This is an important and unique case study to consider how the U.S. military, for the first time, emerged as a fast-forward modernizing agent of individual behaviors, a role constituted by the effects of expansive defense spending, cutting edge social science research, and changing racial ideologies that together marked an important shift in American foreign policy and history.