International understanding and world peace: The American Council of Learned Societies, 1919--1957

Established in 1919 by a small coterie of internationalists, the American Council of Learned Societies emerged as the nation's foremost humanities association, representing American academics at home and abroad. These interwar internationalists hoped to bring the collective wisdom of the humanities to bear on the contemporary problems of state-building, which involved making governmental policies more rational, and nation-building, which involved promoting civil society in order to develop the requisite knowledge to live in an increasingly complex world. To achieve these ambitious ends, the Council redefined the humanities along positivist and social scientific lines, cultivated a national network of forward-looking scholars, and established the broad intellectual framework for area studies and cultural diplomacy during the 1920s and 1930s. Global conflict, however, once again engulfed the nation, and the American government urgently faced both an intellectual crisis stemming from a lack of knowledge of the Far East, and a bureaucratic crisis arising as a consequence of a federalist tradition that had inhibited the growth of strong national institutions capable of wartime program operations. In response to these crises, the federal government turned to the Council to develop strategic academic knowledge and to implement wartime cultural operations. This dissertation analyzes how the organization of knowledge and the evolving relationship between the public and private spheres have shaped the development of national policies in the U.S. Using the Council as a case study, I examine the interplay between governmental functions and specialized knowledge from the period between the two world wars to the early years of the Cold War, focusing specifically on public-private initiatives in area studies and cultural diplomacy. I conclude that although nongovernmental organizations like the Council played a vital role in linking academics to the federal government, public-private partnerships were often divided by competing goals. For instance, whereas the public sector regularly sought to use area studies and cultural diplomacy to achieve political ends, the Council consistently retained academic and democratic aspirations for the use of such strategic knowledge. Today, many historians argue that nonstate actors either serve the interests of elites seeking to maintain sociopolitical hegemony, or reflect a logical response to specific problems or modernizing trends. The history of the Council demonstrates, however, that nongovernmental organizations are frequently at odds with other institutional actors, and that these differences contribute to a larger political culture characterized by the ineluctable tension between academic specialists and public policymakers.