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Download PDF Datastream “A DIFFERENT KIND OF PEOPLE”: THE POOR AT HOME AND ABROAD, 1935-1968 BY SHEYDA F.A. JAHANBANI B.S.F.S., GEORGETOWN UNIVERSITY, 1999 A.M., BROWN UNIVERSITY, 2001 A DISSERTATION SUBMITTED IN PARTIAL FULFILLMENT OF THE REQUIREMENTS FOR THE DEGREE OF DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY IN THE DEPARTMENT OF HISTORY AT BROWN UNIVERSITY PROVIDENCE, RHODE ISLAND MAY 2009 © Copyright 2009 by Sheyda F.A. Jahanbani This dissertation by Sheyda F.A. Jahanbani is accepted in its present form by the Department of History as satisfying the dissertation requirement for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy. Date ___________ ________________________________ Mari Jo Buhle, Advisor Recommended to the Graduate Council Date ___________ ________________________________ James T. Campbell, Reader Date ___________ ________________________________ David C. Engerman Approved by the Graduate Council Date ___________ ________________________________ Sheila Bond iii Curriculum Vitae Sheyda Jahanbani was born in Charlotte, North Carolina on September 3, 1976. She attended the Edmund G. Walsh School of Foreign Service at Georgetown University, earning the degree of Bachelor of Science in Foreign Service with honors in International Politics. In 2000, she entered the graduate program in Modern American History at Brown University, where she served as a teaching assistant in courses on the history of the United States. In 2007, she began a tenure-track position in the Department of History at the University of Kansas. iv Preface & Acknowledgments As I have only come to understand by placing this work in a context much broader than the span of my graduate career, I have been working on this project for much longer than even my ever-patient advisors could possibly know. Indeed, this project, which reflects an interest in the contemporary mechanics of inequality, has been with me for my entire life. For, in a way that I could not have grasped when I began researching and writing it, A Different Kind of People represents the intellectual manifestation of deeply personal influences. In fact, to the extent that this project is about the confluence of struggles for social and economic justice at home and abroad, I need only have ever looked at the lives of my own parents to find the font of my curiosity and passion. My mother grew up as the only daughter of a mill worker in one of the hundreds of mill towns that dotted the red clay of the Carolina Piedmont. Unlike many of their contemporaries, her family did not benefit from the educational opportunities provided by the G.I. Bill of Rights or the loans of the Federal Housing Administration. And, despite repeated attempts, the Textile Workers Union failed to organize the mill for which my grandfather worked. Thus, in an era of abundance, my mother’s family was among the thousands who never bridged the yawning gap that separated the working class from the middle-class. My mother, then, was raised by people long-accustomed to hard work and little reward, and the stories of her childhood and, indeed, much of her adulthood, are the kinds of bittersweet tales of a life spent struggling to get by. What sustained my mother’s family through these hardships, however, was a devout and durable faith in the basic American creed of fairness. Nelle Brown Deese and her husband Jim were earnest supporters of the movements for social justice and civil rights that exploded in the 1950s and ‘60s. Rejecting the conspiratorial, anti-government v sentiment of many of their fellow working-class southern whites, my mother and her family saw their own liberation in the realization of the Great Society about which I write in this book. My mother was raised to be an American liberal. Despite injustice felt through bitter experience, she believes in the existence of a path to social progress that does not require, regardless of the lessons of the past, violence or revolution. In retrospect, it is this mysterious faith of hers, one that I partly share and partly mistrust, that drew me to study American liberalism and its relationship to inequality. My father came from a very different time and place but his belief in the American creed ran no less deep. He was the eldest son of an eldest son of the Qajar family, a bloodline that ruled Iran for almost two centuries. Born in 1922 and educated in some of the world’s foremost centers of higher learning, my father enjoyed a birthright to wealth, privilege, and easy power. All of these, he poured into the nationalist movement that erupted in Iran in the early 1950s. A consciously modernizing project, the nationalization of Iranian oil was believed by its supporters to represent the first step down a path to self- determination and political and economic equality. Revolting against the imperialist machinations of Europe, Iranians like my father looked to the United States for support and guidance on this route towards democracy. However, this admiration turned to stinging disappointment when, in 1953, the Eisenhower Administration actively supported the overthrow of Prime Minister Mohammed Mossadegh and the return to power of a potentate. Yet, despite this betrayal and to my enduring mystification, my father continued to believe in the integrity of America and the potential of a just and generous American foreign policy. To offer me a vision of such a policy, he spoke lovingly about the enormous meals he had cooked with and for Peace Corps volunteers in Iran, about the American doctors and nurses who had left the comforts of home to treat sick children in the remote vi villages of his homeland. He even disassociated the engineers and toolmakers that came to work in Iran’s oil fields from the avaricious intentions of their employers. These representatives of what I see as a deeply flawed development project exported by the United States were, to my father, emissaries of the basic decency and innate goodness of American democracy. Through no lack of intellectual ability or critical thinking—indeed his was a far, far greater mind than mine—my father still believed that American foreign policy was, at its core, motivated more by a love of justice than by narrow national interest. He survived the Nixon, Reagan, and ten of the twelve Bush years with this faith intact. Indeed, I can think of no one who loved the ideals of this country quite so much and who believed so forcefully in the potential of the American people to live up to those ideals as he did. His devotion to this country—my country—and his belief in the integrity of America's global mission (which, like my mother’s liberalism, I partly share and partly mistrust) seem to have led directly to the questions I raise in this dissertation about the conflicted nature of the development project that the United States government exported to the Third World. These two people, who drew on such vastly different experiences, shaped my interest in issues of wealth and poverty, and whatever is useful or illuminating about this project came to be so because of them. One of them will be able to read these pages for herself. I dearly hope that, wherever he is, the other one forgives me for not finishing this work soon enough for him to do the same. I can only take comfort in the knowledge that, throughout my life, his impatience with my pace at finishing things was always exceeded by his pride in my ultimate achievements. There are, of course, other debts to pay than the ones I owe to my remarkable parents. In graduate school, I have benefited from the tutelage of three historians whose brilliance is matched only by their intellectual generosity. Mari Jo Buhle, Jim Campbell, vii and David Engerman have encouraged me to push on without fail over the past six years. Of these, Mari Jo has undoubtedly suffered with this project the most, giving each revision the same level of care and attention as the last and guiding me around the kinds of intellectual and emotional obstacles that are endemic to the process of writing a dissertation. One could not have wished for a better guide. Of course, as anyone who has experienced graduate school knows, the brunt of the emotional highs and lows of getting through it is borne disproportionately by the friends with whom one shares the suffering. Caroline Boswell and Tom Jundt have quietly absorbed many long years of strum und drang. Despite that, two of the most treasured friendships in my life have only deepened. Elliott Gorn, though not a fellow grunt, has eaten enough Mexican food with me to earn this honorable mention. Finally, my deepest gratitude goes to my most stalwart companions on this journey. G.T.C. was always there and he always helped. And, I can only say that while J.C.H. couldn’t carry it, he could and did carry me. viii Table of Contents CURRICULUM VITAE ................................................................................................... IV PREFACE & ACKNOWLEDGMENTS .............................................................................. V TABLE OF CONTENTS .................................................................................................. IX INTRODUCTION ............................................................................................................ 1 CHAPTER 1 ................................................................................................................... 30 CHAPTER 2 ................................................................................................................... 81 CHAPTER 3 ................................................................................................................
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