Abstract
The World War II experience cast a large shadow over American social science in the early days of the Cold War. Hundreds if not thousands of scholars left their ivory tower perches to serve in the rapidly expanding national security apparatus, studying everything from allies to enemies, from cultures to economies, from soldiers to statesmen. With breathless enthusiasm about their contributions to the victory over the Axis powers—contributions that turn out to be greatly exaggerated and perhaps even fictional—they drew upon their World War II experiences to transform American social science in the early years of the Cold War. An influential contingent of social scientists modeled their postwar work on their World War II experience; they abandoned disciplinary questions in favor of policy concerns; they rejected longstanding traditions of solitary work in favor of collective research enterprises; and they worked closely with the national security organs that sponsored their work.1 All of these marked a major departure from previous practice: single scholars working within disciplinary conversations and conventions, with limited extramural sponsorship coming from philanthropies and foundation-supported entities like the Social Science Research Council (SSRC) and the American Council of Learned Societies (ACLS).2
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Notes
Some useful works on the effect of World War II on social science include: Peter Buck, “Adjusting to military life: The social sciences go to war, 1941–1950,” in Military Enterprise and Technological Change: Perspectives on the American Experience, ed. Merritt Roe Smith (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1985);
Rebecca S. Lowen, Creating the Cold War University: The Transformation of Stanford (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997);
Ellen Herman, The Romance of American Psychology: Political Culture in the Age of Experts (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995);
James H. Capshew, Psychologists on the March: Science, Practice and Professional Identity in America, 1929–1969 (Cambridge; Cambridge University Press, 1999); and
Philip Mirowski, Machine Dreams: Economics Becomes a Cyborg Science (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002).
For a broad overview of institutional infrastructure, see Roger L. Geiger, To Advance Knowledge: The Growth of American Research Universities, 1900–1940 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1986) and
Donald Fisher, Fundamental Development of the Social Sciences: Rockefeller Philanthropy and the United States Social Science Research Council (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1993). See also disciplinary histories such as Charles Camic, “On edge: Sociology during the Great Depression and the New Deal,” in Sociology in America: A History, ed. Craig Calhoun (Chicago: University of Chicago Press);
David M. Ricci, The Tragedy of Political Science: Politics, Scholarship and Democracy (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1984); and
Michael A. Bernstein, Perilous Progress: Economists and Public Purpose in Twentieth-Century America (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2001), chap. 3.
Osborn, Voyage to a New World, 1889–1979: A Personal Narrative (New York: n.p., 1979).
Larry Gerber, “The Baruch Plan and the origins of the Cold War,” Diplomatic History 6 (Autumn 1982), 69–95;
David Holloway, Stalin and the Bomb (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1994), 161–166.
See Ron Robin, The Making of the Cold War Enemy: Culture and Politics in the Military-Intellectual Complex (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2001), chaps. 1–3; Herman, The Romance of American Psychology, chap. 5.
On Parsons, see Howard Brick, Transcending Capitalism: Visions of a New Society in Modern American Thought (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2006), chap. 4.
Nils Gilman, Mandarins of the Future: Modernization Theory in Cold War America (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2003), chap. 3;
Jamie Nace Cohen-Cole, “Thinking about thinking in Cold War America” (Ph.D. diss., Princeton University, 2003), 154–160.
Samuel Stouffer, et al., Studies in Social Psychology in World War II, 4 vols. (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1949–1950)—volumes 1–2 are The American Soldier. Herman, Romance of American Psychology, 66–74.
Willow Roberts Powers, “The Harvard study of values: Mirror for postwar anthropology,” Journal of the History of the Behavioral Sciences 36:1 (Winter 2000), 15–29; and
Joel Isaac, “Theorist at work: Talcott Parsons and the Carnegie Project on Theory, 1949–1951,” Journal of the History of Ideas 71:2 (April 2010), 287–311.
Geertz, After the Fact: Two Countries, Four Decades, One Anthropologist (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1996), 102.
Alex Leighton, Human Relations in a Changing World: Observations on the Use of the Social Sciences (New York: E. P. Dutton, 1949).
Kluckhohn, Mirror for Man: The Relation of Anthropology to Modern Life (New York: Whittlesey House, 1949), 170–178.
Leighton, Human Relations, 43–44. Mead, “The study of national character,” in The Policy Sciences: Recent Developments in Scope and Method, ed. Daniel Lerner and Harold D. Lasswell (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1951), 85.
Parsons, “Clyde Kluckhohn and the integration of the social sciences,” in Culture and Life: Essays in Memory of Clyde Kluckhohn, ed. Walter W. Taylor, et al. (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1973), 35.
“People Involved in the Work of the Center” (May 20, 1952), Records of Chancellor Julius A. Stratton (MIT Institute Archives), Collection AC132, box 4. On TROY, see Allan A. Needell, “‘Truth is our weapon’: Project TROY, political warfare, and government-academic relations in the National Security State,” Diplomatic History 17:3 (Summer 1993), 399–420; and
Donald L. M. Blackmer, The MIT Center for International Studies: The Founding Years, 1951–1969 (Cambridge, MA: MIT Center for International Studies, 2002), chap. 1.
E. V. Kodin, “Garvardskii proekt” (Moscow: Rosspen, 2003), chap. 5.
George W. Croker, “Some principles regarding the utilization of social science research within the military,” in Case Studies in Bringing Behavioral Science into Use (Studies in the Utilization of Behavioral Science, vol. 1, 1961), 122–123. Kluckhohn to Bowers March 2, 1950, RRC Correspondence, Series UAV 759.10, box 7.
Clyde Kluckhohn, et al., “Strategic and psychological strengths and vulnerabilities of the Soviet social system,” Report to the Air Force, October 1954, in RIP Reports, Series UAV759.175.75, box 4. Reinhard Bendix, review of The Soviet Citizen by Alex Inkeles and Raymond Bauer, Public Opinion Quarterly 24:2 (Summer 1960), 372–377.
Bowers, “The military establishment,” in The Uses of Sociology, ed. Paul F. Lazarsfeld, et al. (New York: Basic, 1967), 238–240. Croker, “Some principles,” 123–125.
For a list of RIP publications, see Alex Inkeles and Raymond A. Bauer, The Soviet Citizen: Daily Life in a Totalitarian Society (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1959), Appendix 22.
Ferguson in Congressional Record, vol. 99, part 7 (July 22, 1953), 9467.
On McCarthyism and academic life, see Ellen Schrecker, No Ivory Tower: McCarthyism and the Universities (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1986).
Bauer to Kluckhohn, October 22, 1952, Bauer Papers, 8:34. The Air Force’s changing attitude towards social science research paralleled closely a similar change in the Navy; see Harvey M. Sapolsky, Science and the Navy: The History of the Office of Naval Research (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1990).
Gene M. Lyons, The Uneasy Partnership: Social Science and the Federal Government in the Twentieth Century (New York: Russell Sage Foundation, 1969), 143–145. Draft memorandum on “Organization of the HRRI,” n.d., AFHRA Microfilm A2573:1893.
Bruce Hevly, “Reflections on big science and big history,” in Big Science: The Growth of Large-Scale Research, ed. Peter Galison and Hevly (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1992).
This transformation is visible in a number of works: Hunter Crowther-Heyck, “Patrons of the Revolution: Ideals and Institutions in Postwar Behavioral Science,” Isis 97:3 (September 2006), 420–446;
Joel Isaac, “The human sciences in Cold War America,” Historical Journal 50 (September 2007), 725–746; Sapolsky, Science and the Navy.
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© 2012 Mark Solovey and Hamilton Cravens
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Engerman, D.C. (2012). The Rise and Fall of Wartime Social Science: Harvard’s Refugee Interview Project, 1950–1954. In: Solovey, M., Cravens, H. (eds) Cold War Social Science. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137013224_2
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