Every Citizen a Statesman Building a Democracy for Foreign Policy in the American Century David John Allen Submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY 2019 © 2019 David Allen All rights reserved Abstract Every Citizen a Statesman Building a Democracy for Foreign Policy in the American Century David Allen This dissertation asks how far Americans in the twentieth century reconciled the demands of global supremacy with the claims and realities of democracy. As an answer, it offers the first history of the movement for citizen education in world affairs. This movement, loose but coherent, acted on the belief that since the United States was a mass democracy, the creation of an interested, informed public for foreign policy was essential to its peace and security. After World War I, members of the foreign policy elite resolved to teach Americans to lead the world, and they created a network of new institutions to do so. The most important and visible of these institutions was the Foreign Policy Association, a non-profit, non-partisan group founded by New York progressives in 1918 to support Woodrow Wilson in the fight over the Treaty of Versailles. By 1925, it had morphed into the first true foreign policy think tank in the nation, with a research staff creating new, public-facing knowledge and disseminating it to a broadening public. The research staff’s Foreign Policy Reports and Foreign Policy Bulletin gave information to diplomats, scholars, editors, businessmen, lawyers, and teachers, information that was otherwise inaccessible. As democracy was threatened at home and abroad during the Great Depression, the Association became more ambitious, founding branches in twenty cities to circulate foreign diplomats and a new breed of experts in international politics around the country. It pioneered broadcasts over the nascent national radio network, and tapped into a broader movement for adult education. With the encouragement of Franklin Roosevelt, a former member, the Association promoted intervention in World War II, and became a key partner of the State Department in the selling of the United Nations. Many members of the foreign policy elite believed that the rise of the United States to world leadership entailed new responsibilities for its citizens. As the prewar functions of the Association had been rendered obsolete, it resolved after 1947 to promote community education in world affairs, to make world leadership a part of daily life. Under the rallying cry of “World Affairs Are Your Affairs,” the Association partnered with the Ford Foundation to help create dozens of World Affairs Councils, most of them patterned on the success of the Cleveland Council on World Affairs. These Councils became a stage for international politics, bringing the world to cities across America, and those cities to the world. But by its own measurements, let alone the results of surveys or the intuition of officials, this movement to make every citizen a statesman failed. The Association and its subsidiary Councils remained weak, short on cash and beset by rivalries. Increasingly, they took refuge in an ever-smaller, educated, white elite, and, informed by social science, they wrote off ever more of the American electorate as uninterested or incapable when it came to world affairs. Very few Americans, it became clear by the early 1960s, were willing to dedicate themselves to world affairs on the model of citizenship that their leaders hoped, and to those leaders, the public therefore seemed fundamentally apathetic. The infrastructure that the foreign policy elite had spent decades building calcified, even before the traumas of the Vietnam War. A chasm developed between policymakers and the public, one that has proven impossible to bridge since. Table of Contents List of Abbreviations ii List of Figures iii Acknowledgements iv Introduction 1 Chapter 1 Trickle-Down Diplomacy 21 Chapter 2 How to Teach a City to Lead the World 96 Chapter 3 The War for a Democratic Foreign Policy 173 Chapter 4 World Affairs Are Your Affairs 248 Chapter 5 Who, Me? 305 Chapter 6 The Diplomatic 1% 388 Epilogue 468 Bibliography 487 i List of Abbreviations CC Carnegie Corporation Records CCFR Chicago Council on Foreign Relations Records CCWA Cleveland Council on World Affairs Records CEIP Carnegie Endowment for International Peace Records CFR Council on Foreign Relations Records FAE Fund for Adult Education FF Ford Foundation Records FPA Foreign Policy Association Records IPR Institute of Pacific Relations Records IPRSF Institute of Pacific Relations, San Francisco Bay Region, Records RBF Rockefeller Brothers Fund Records RF Rockefeller Foundation Records RG 59 Record Group 59, National Archives and Records Administration ii List of Figures Figure 1 James G. McDonald, Alfred Zimmern, and Raymond Leslie Buell, 1938 69 Figure 2 Frank R. McCoy and Sumner Welles, 1943 186 Figure 3 Roger Mastrude, undated 346 Figure 4 Great Decisions billboard in New Orleans, 1958 368 Figure 5 Great Decisions participants testify to the House of Reps., 1974 375 Figure 6 Great Decisions group of the Mile High Senior Citizens, 1962 382 Figure 7 President John F. Kennedy and Association board members, 1962 417 Figure 8 Secretary of State Dean Rusk and Samuel P. Hayes, Jr., 1962 427 iii Acknowledgements Where to begin but at the beginning, with thanks to Matthew Connelly, for taking me on as his graduate student. A model as a mentor, Matt has been the most generous advisor imaginable; that has been true professionally, in inviting me to write and think with him, and it has been true personally, in talking honestly with me about growing as an academic and as a person at the same time. I owe my career in the United States, and rather more besides, to Andrew Preston. Andrew welcomed me back to Cambridge eight years ago by advising me, quite encouragingly, to leave. As ever, he was right; his example and his ideas have remained an enormous influence, and they pervade every page of this dissertation. For serving on my committee, I should also like to thank Ira Katznelson, whose questions confound me in the best of ways, and Lien-Hang Nguyen, whose enthusiasm gave me a welcome push to the finish line. All of this dissertation has been written at the Harvard Kennedy School, my academic home for three years and, happily, more to come. Teaching the rise and fall of the great powers with Odd Arne Westad was not only one of the most enthralling intellectual experiences I have had, but forced me to think hard about how the story told here fits into the broadest sweep of history; his faith in me has been humbling. Fredrik Logevall has heard as much about this project as anyone, and his confidence in it, particularly when it was most frustrating me, has been invaluable. For funding and much more at Harvard, I thank the staffs of the Ash Center for Democratic Governance and Innovation and the Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs, most importantly Susan Lynch, without whom nobody at Belfer could possibly get by. iv No historian gets anywhere without archivists, especially with a project as unwieldy as this. If this dissertation taught me anything, and viscerally at that, it is that there must be warmer months than January to spend in Madison, Wisconsin; for dusting off the snow, and for guiding me through the practically pristine records of the Foreign Policy Association, I thank Lee Grady. I also thank the Friends of the University of Wisconsin-Madison Libraries for their grant. Without Margaret H. Snyder I could not have made any sense of the treasures held at the Rockefeller Archives Center; there is surely no more pleasant place to do archival work than Sleepy Hollow. For other assistance, I thank Alexander Messman of the Los Angeles World Affairs Council, who sent me that Council’s early board minutes, and MacDara King of the Foreign Policy Association, who not only let me borrow the Association’s own edition of the Foreign Policy Bulletin, but turned out already to have placed vital FOIA requests with the FBI. In draft form, sections of this thesis have been presented to audiences — nay, publics —at the Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs at the Harvard Kennedy School, at the ISS-Brady Johnson Colloquium in Grand Strategy and International History at Yale, and at both the conference and the summer institute of the Society for Historians of American Foreign Relations. For conversations at those events, at a blissful retreat into the Colorado mountains for the summer seminar of the University of Texas at Austin’s Clements Center for National Security, and at other times and places real and virtual, I thank Tom Arnold-Forster, Betsy Beasley, Paul Behringer, Daniel Bessner, Malcolm Craig, Lindsay Dayton, Mario Del Pero, Mattias Fibiger, Stephanie Freeman, Julian Gewirtz, Gretchen Heefner, Eric Herschthal, Daniel Hummel, William Inboden, Elizabeth Ingleson, William James, Jason Kelly, Andrew Johnstone, Mookie Kideckel, Evan McCormick, Steven Miller, Katharina Rietzler, Ben Serby, Peter v Slezkine, Jan Stöckmann, Aileen Teague, John A. Thompson, Heidi Tworek, Stephen Walt, Calder Walton, and Stephen Wertheim. And if the prose in what follows is anything more than adequate, then that is yet another triumph of The New York Times; for their forbearance while this academic learned to write, I thank innumerable copy editors, Jim Oestreich, Anthony Tommasini, Dan Wakin, and above all Zachary Woolfe. I met Fr. Stephen M. Koeth, CSC, within hours of stepping foot on Columbia’s campus; that he has tolerated me for so long that he was there to greet me when I stepped off it, seven years later, has been a true blessing.