The SSRC and the founding movement of area studies in America, 1943–1953

Abstract

Area studies, as characterized by “complete world coverage” and “interdisciplinary integration”, constitutes a major branch of academic research. As an institutional framework embedded in the American social sciences, higher education, and intellectual life, area studies developed during the decade from 1943 to 1953. These founding years, during which the basic intellectual components and institutional patterns of postwar area studies were laid down, saw a transformative process involving not only knowledge-building, but also institutional reformation and intellectual/cultural reorientation. The Social Science Research Council (SSRC), with its strategically pivotal position in the American social science community, played the role of leading and bolstering the area studies movement, functioning as a central body for area studies planning. The committees the SSRC organized solely or jointly with other learned councils, the meetings and conferences it held and convened, and the reports it released, reveal the reflections and expectations of the founders of area studies related to social scientific epistemology, the composition of American social knowledge, general education and American culture, the public relevance of professionalized scholarship, and the relationship between the U.S. and the world. The story may be reasonably considered an integral phase of evolution in American cosmopolitanism/internationalism and cultural relativism/multiculturalism. This historical episode, therefore, has rich, significant intellectual and cultural implications that we cannot afford to overlook or distort with “Cold War Knowledge” or “Cold War Social Sciences” explanations.

1 Wartime roots of area studies

During the Second World War, the U.S. war operations that stormed across Europe, Asia, Africa and the Pacific often led to territorial occupation and military government by U.S. armed forces over vast foreign lands. By the end of the war, more than 300 million people around the globe—more than one-tenth of the world’s population—were under the administration of the U.S. military (Holborn 1947). The military government and civil administration, as well as combat and intelligence activities, (all unprecedented in American history) engendered a huge demand for knowledge about foreign languages, peoples, and cultures. The U.S., however, was largely devoid of such knowledge production and accumulation, a practice common among the old European powers, which were intrinsically associated with traditions of colonial governmentality. Neither the military nor civilian sectors had sufficient intelligence agencies. The world war quickly highlighted this serious shortage of knowledge about the outside world.

The U.S. Army and Navy, having long been conscious of all sorts of necessities of the modern “total war” since the First World War, set out to fill this gap of knowledge immediately after the war broke out. As part of the war effort, starting in early 1942, the armed forces initiated large-scale training programs designed to expand and spread the knowledge of “foreign areas and languages”. The Foreign Area and Language Study Curriculum, started in the spring of 1943 as a part of the Army Specialized Training Program (ASTP-FAL), involved 55 American universities and colleges, and enrolled more than 13,000 servicemen at its peak in December 1943. The Civil Affair Training Schools (CATS), also established by the U.S. Army in the summer of 1943, opened at 10 selected universities, their curricula dominated by the study of foreign nations and languages. The U.S. Navy established a “School of Military Government and Administration” at Columbia University, giving faculty scholars even more freedom than the Army did to develop a curriculum for intensive training in foreign languages and “area knowledge”, in addition to the curriculum on policy and administrative issues (Fenton 1946, 1947; Hyneman 1945; Willey 1944; Hayes and Cahnman 1944; Matthew 1947).

Based on the contracts between the armed services and the universities, these wartime training programs mobilized a significant segment of American higher education, recruiting those faculty members who were thought to have any satisfying degree of expertise in foreign languages, cultures, and societies to design the curriculum and teach. In return, the partnership with the military in the wartime training programs allowed the higher education institutions involved to expand their courses and related academic activities in foreign studies at a historically unprecedented scale. These wartime programs provided an extraordinary opportunity for American foreign studies at the time, and a significant inheritance for area studies in the ensuing years.

American learned societies and large philanthropic foundations also joined the wartime efforts to expand foreign studies. In June 1942, the American Council of Learned Societies (ACLS), the Social Science Research Council (SSRC), the National Research Council (NRC), and the Smithsonian Institution jointly created the Ethnogeographic Board (EB), with funding and facilities from the Smithsonian and financial support from the Rockefeller and Carnegie foundations. The EB provided necessary assistance to the armed services’ training programs. It also acted as a clearinghouse for ongoing programs and activities on foreign area studies, both by liaising and coordinating between the military, governmental, and nongovernmental agencies and organizations, and by surveying, evaluating, and reviewing the status of knowledge and scholarship related to foreign areas. The SSRC and the ACLS in particular took the EB as its foremost surrogate for carrying out their interests in area studies for a short time during the war (SSRC 1942,19; 1943, 17; Rockefeller Foundation 1943, 182; Farish 2005).¹ The ACLS, especially its administrative secretary Mortimer Graves, deeply engaged in the ASTP-FAL, and worked together with the American Linguistic Society to create an Intensive Language Program within the FAL. As will be discussed later, it was through this wartime experience that the SSRC, which had been functioning as the “flagship” of the American social sciences since its founding in the early 1920s (Kuhlman 1928; Sibley 1974; Worcester and Sibley 2001; Fisher 1993; Worcester 2001), germinated its intentions to lead, bolster, and conduct central planning for postwar area studies.

Another aspect of area studies’ wartime roots can arguably be traced back to the burgeoning American intelligence community. William J. Donovan, while singlehandedly establishing the Office of Strategic Service (OSS), asked the SSRC and ACLS to prepare a list of academic advisors with expertise on foreign areas. The Research and Analysis Branch (R&A) of the OSS was led by William Langer, a Harvard professor and expert on diplomatic and German history, who organized its functions based on world geographical areas. It recruited social scientists, often with expertise on foreign languages and areas, from universities and built up a team of around 900 strong at its peak. The R&A’s wartime intelligence research and analysis network bore a remarkable resemblance to area studies of the coming years, with its emphasis on cooperation and integration among scholars from various academic disciplines (Langer 1975; Dessants 1995; Winks 1987; Katz 1989. For the nexus of wartime intelligence activities on Japan and the postwar Japanese studies, see Dignman 2009). For these first-generation postwar area studies practitioners, the wartime intelligence activities represented unique opportunities for “conversion” from the “conventional disciplines” of the social sciences and humanities to the newly created field of area studies. In addition, the miscellanies of research materials and documents left behind by government branches during the war provided a useful resource which could be exploited by the postwar area studies, especially in the initial stage (Greenwood 1946).²

2 “Cannot and should not the Council play a leading role…?”

The convergence of academic knowledge and the war-making state during World War II paved the way for the creation of area studies, which was at the same time an enterprise of knowledge-building, a project of academic institutional reconstruction, and an intellectual movement of advocating and spreading some specific ideas concerning American social sciences, American intellectual life and America’s role in the world. The foundation for modern area studies was laid during the decade from 1943 through 1953, when a group of leaders from the American social scientific community, with the SSRC as their main organizational platform or headquarters, launched, promoted, and fostered the social sciences-based, multidisciplinary scholarly studies of the world outside the U.S. They did so through advocacy, survey, review, evaluation, deliberation, discussion, criticism, planning, policymaking, coordination among institutions and societies, and public communication and education. This chapter in the history of American intellectual life is not a story of gradual, incremental change or the result of “natural” evolution, but rather a series of consequences arising from a “long-standing intellectual agenda” (Bender 1997). It was a large-scale intellectual enterprise motivated by an anxious intention for transformative change, and was made possible by leadership, planning and organization. The SSRC-centered story of area studies’ development remains largely untold or at least understudied and, therefore, deserves a rediscovery and a more detailed recounting. That is what the author tries to do in the following sections.

The imperatives of the war effort concerning the knowledge of foreign lands engendered, on the one hand, the wartime training programs, alongside a widespread awareness of the shortage of foreign knowledge, and a strong sense of urgency pertaining to this shortage among many Americans from different backgrounds. On the other hand, in some sectors of the American intellectual community, the war aroused an awareness of the need to go beyond the immediate, urgent war-related demands to build its foreign studies. The founders of area studies intended to transform the American social sciences, American higher education, and American cultural life on a long-term basis. The SSRC, ACLS, and a handful of American academics and philanthropists became catalysts for the nascent foreign area studies, which would become an integral, permanent part of the American higher education and American intellectual life.

The EB, and the SSRC, the ACLS, and the Rockefeller Foundation collaboratively embarked on surveys of existing personnel and facilities and launched a battery of discussions and reviews. In December 1943, led by EB Director William Duncan Strong, the EB began surveying the condition of area studies programs in American universities and colleges. In May 1944, a conference on area and language programs in American universities was convened by the Rockefeller Foundation at the American Philosophical Society at Philadelphia, to address the general nature and significance of area studies, as well as the ongoing survey. By December, William Fenton drafted a series of survey reports, of which six were mimeographed and circulated among the interested groups. The final version of the survey reports, titled “Area Studies in America Universities” (known as the Fenton Report) did not appear until 1947 (Fenton 1947; Bennett 1947).³ It is fair, then, to say that the EB, which was to a great extent a byproduct of wartime training programs, was the first formal leadership group for area studies. Board members Robert Hall and Wendell Bennett later moved on to join the SSRC and became the most prominent figures in the postwar area studies movement.

Another development, of which the repercussions proved to be more significant and long-lasting, took place in the SSRC. If the wartime area studies centered on military training programs, with the EB as the main accessory clearinghouse, the postwar area studies switched to the SSRC as its center of planning and organization. With the understanding that great transformation requires coordination and planning, the SSRC, in January 1943, unilaterally assigned a Committee on World Regions, “to scrutinize the implications for social science of the government’s training programs for service in foreign regions” (SSRC 1943, 49). This committee immediately charged economist Earl J. Hamilton, the committee staffer, with drafting a “statement”, which was supposed to “(define) principles and policies and (lay) down conditions to guide universities and government with respect to regional training”. At the end of February, the completed draft was proposed to the World Regions Committee for reviewing and discussing (Hamilton 1943). In June 1943, the final, revised version of the Hamilton Report, formally titled, “World Regions in the Social Science: Report of a Committee of the Social Science Research Council”, was completed and distributed to government officials and university administrators. The Hamilton Report, a short, forcefully written document, warned that the “(failure) to consider our permanent needs in the formulation of plans for the emergency will distort the pattern of distribution and diminish the service rendered future generations by our institutions of higher learning”. Placing the question into broad intellectual and historical contexts, while diagnosing the present defects and drawbacks, the Hamilton Report laid down some guidelines and an intellectual framework for building area studies in the coming years. The report also invokes major European countries’ experience on foreign studies as references, but it concludes that none of them could provide a model for American area studies to follow.⁴ The Hamilton Report also expressed and reinforced the SSRC’s commitment to leading the area studies enterprise. In the September Council Meeting (the top mechanism of the SSRC), A.T. Poffenberger, chairman of the SSRC Committee on Problem and Policy (P&P), quoted at length from the Hamilton Report in his oral report before the Council members, then asked rhetorically, “Cannot and should not the Council play a leading role in this program?”⁵

After the release of the Hamilton Report, the Committee on World Regions was dissolved. The Hamilton Report, however, proved to be just a start for the SSRC in its role of leading and planning area studies. In the SSRC’s Council and P&P meetings, discussions on area studies were ongoing. Consultations were arranged with the Rockefeller and Carnegie Foundations. The P&P assigned a special working team to follow up on recent developments and to consider the possible policies on the SSRC side. With this as a starting point, the SSRC tried to work out a comprehensive, long-term approach to area studies, in a much more systematic, deliberative way than the EB did. In May 1944, Paul Webbink and Donald Young, both members of the SSRC staff, drafted a memorandum, entitled “Social Science Considerations in the Planning of Regional Specialization in Higher Education and Research”. Following the intellectual agenda set out in the Hamilton Report, the document tries to clarify the purpose and functions of area studies from the perspective of the relationship between area studies and the social sciences, thus expounding the standards and requirements of area studies as a specialized academic field, as well as “the necessary content(s) of regional specialization”. This memo also discusses the foundations for area studies in the established disciplines, arguing that the social sciences, rather than the humanities and linguistic disciplines, must play a primary role in area studies, and stressing that transdisciplinary integration is essential.⁶ The Webbink–Young Report was another important statement, following the Hamilton Report, that outlined the SSRC’s intention and thoughts concerning area studies. Later in April, Robert Redfield, member of the SSRC Corporation and a leading sociologist from the University of Chicago, wrote a paper titled, “Area Programs in Education and Research”, which was presented at a conference for representatives of university social science research organizations, and distributed to all who received the Hamilton Report⁷ (Redfield 1944; see also Davis 1985, 31).

Simultaneously, as the SSRC was becoming more active in area studies, the EB saw a decline in its importance, with the closing of the wartime training programs. In September 1945, after the war was over, the Conference Board of Associated Research Councils, which served as the liaison between the SSRC, ACLS, and NRC, decided that the EB would be terminated by the end of the year. The three councils agreed on the creation of an Exploratory Committee on World Area Research, which would take over the work of the EB. The new Exploratory Committee consisted of five members. Robert Hall, the committee’s chairman, and Wendell C. Bennett were the most active and influential members of the committee, which was charged with exploring issues related to area studies and drawing up guidelines for actions with the joint authorization of all three councils. The SSRC, however, emphasized its own considerations when explaining its purposes for the Joint Committee: “Problems connected with the organization of research and instruction by world areas first required the attention of the Council (SSRC) soon after the outbreak of World War II”, and after the war ended it “recognized the Council’s responsibility in this situation and guided by Mr. Hall’s knowledge of the need and opportunities for action by the Council favored establishment of a committee concerned with research on foreign areas and cultures”⁸ (see also SSRC 1946).

With a level of bureaucratic might mirroring that of large American philanthropic organizations, the SSRC had a rich history of operating within academia since its founding in the early 1920s. As an outgrowth of the Progressive Movement, the SSRC had nourished a sort of organizational sub-culture affinitive with “technocracy” and “social engineering”, taking a strong interest in surveying, statistics, and planning as effective means of promoting social science. It is understandable, then, that the SSRC inherently possessed both a stronger will and larger capacity to lead the planning of area studies than did its partner organizations. Coordinating three councils in order to achieve its goals, as it did during the war, became cumbersome. The SSRC and ACLS disagreed about how to promote area studies, which reinforced the SSRC’s desire to act unilaterally and to assume leadership, an idea that had taken root during the Committee on World Regions of 1943. Because of this evolving situation, the Exploratory Committee halted its work after only two meetings were held in February and April 1946. It was officially dissolved December 18.

The SSRC, however, spared no efforts. Failing to reach an accord with the ACLS, the SSRC, in March 1946, unilaterally appropriated a special fund for a survey of area studies programs in American higher education, with Robert Hall given full responsibility. The survey, carried out from early April to September, targeted 24 major American universities, and as well a number of research institutes and foundations and three undergraduate colleges. Altogether 114 area studies ventures were surveyed, including 52 undergraduate program, 37 graduate programs, and 25 area-specific group projects. The aim of the survey was not to compile an inventory or roster of the nation’s area studies programs, but to explore and evaluate the role of area research in the social sciences in general. Although the survey also deeply concerned the relationship between area studies and general education at the undergraduate level, it attached lesser importance to this issue on the grounds that the ACLS had been working on it. Six geographic divisions were drawn for the survey: Northeast, Middle Atlantic, Northern Mid-West, West Coast, Southwest, and Southern Mid-West, with an eye to providing a basis for future area studies planning⁹ (see also Hall 1947).

3 The Hall Report, the CWAR, and the first national conference

In September 1946, Hall, having returned to New York City with the survey results, reported before the SSRC’s Council Meeting that area programs and related organizational activities were far more vigorous and widespread in the visited institutions than was previously known. “(There) is”, Hall observed, “a widespread belief that American universities must assume the responsibility for establishing a world coverage at a high echelon—they must serve as centers of materials, research, and training of specialists in all areas”. At the same time, many area studies programs were in experimental or “blueprint” stages, and “there is no unanimity of opinions on the future role of areal programs”. Hall urged the SSRC not to overlook the importance of recent developments. He recommended that the SSRC form a committee to “watch the trends in areal organization and make plans for its future development” (Hall 1947).

A new committee, solely responsible to the SSRC, was quickly established. By the end of October, the P&P meeting decided that the SSRC should unilaterally promulgate Hall’s survey report, and that a “Committee on World Area Research in the Social Sciences” was to be set up. Soon afterwards, with its new name officially endorsed, the Committee on World Area Research (CWAR) was assigned. Compared with the previous three organizations, all four members of the CWAR were social scientists, exhibiting an ascription of the committee to the social sciences. The word “research” was added to emphasize its academic orientation.¹⁰ With CWAR, the SSCR now had its own organizational instrument at its disposal, paving the way for quicker adoption and implementation of new policies and actions. The creation of the CWAR marked a definite break with wartime area studies experience, signaling the SSRC’s major commitment to developing an academic and intellectual movement.

The Hall Report made clear that advocates for area studies programs must address two issues. First, the SSRC, and the leaders of American social sciences, higher education, and philanthropic organizations with which the SSRC had been keeping in constant contact, reached some important consensus on basic principles. Secondly, with stimulation by the wartime training programs, American higher education institutions significantly increased their interest and activity in area studies programs over a short period of time. But chaos, disorder and disorganization became visible byproducts. Moreover, the hostile attitudes and resistance against area studies, and “provincialism” and “parochialism” in various forms and on different fronts, were still widespread enough to constitute real or potential handicaps against area studies within academia. For the SSRC at the time, spreading the full-fledged, academically sound concept of area studies, establishing some basic organizational principles, and gaining widespread acceptance became crucial for its overall goal of making area studies a fixture of American higher education.

The CWAR held 17 meetings during its existence from then end of 1946 to the spring of 1952. The “long-standing intellectual agenda”, in Thomas Bender’s words, loomed large in these meetings. The topics and themes the CWAR repeatedly discussed included:

• content, standards and criteria of area specialization, the relationships between area studies and conventional disciplines, the relative role and weights of social sciences and humanities, the role of language teaching in area studies;

• the suitable organizational forms for area studies, the comparative advantages and disadvantages of the research center, institute, program and the disciplinary department; cooperation between area organizations and disciplinary departments;

• how to achieve “complete world coverage”; reasonable, feasible forms of geographical divisions; the comparative status and stages of various branches of area studies; whether and how to apply priorities to certain areas; the position of American studies in area programs;

• the role of area studies in general education; the comparative role of undergraduate and graduate education for area studies; the role of the disciplinary department and area organization for training area specialists; the necessities of studying abroad, field work, and undergraduate-stage training;

• declassification of wartime government documents for area studies; research materials and libraries; central office for information exchanges, bulletin or newsletter for publishing area studies information, rosters of excellent area-studies organizations; the cooperation between area programs and other American scholarship programs (particularly Fulbright);

• exchanges and cooperation with government, business and learning associations, promotion of government support to area studies; various channels for personnel recruiting, mobilization and utilization of foreign scholars in the country; means of promoting career opportunities and professional expectations; and so on.

The discussions and deliberations, ranging from epistemological issues to organization principles to action guidelines, had implications far beyond area studies per se and touched on many aspects of the overall pattern of American social sciences and higher education. Conceivably, through the SSRC’s wide, intensive interactions with administrators and educators, these deliberations engendered broad repercussions in the American intellectual community.

During its first year (from November 1946 to November 1947), the CWAR met six times. Three themes emerged from these discussions. First, the members of the CWAR continued to deliberate on the epistemological, organizational, and operational issues. Second, the committee entertained a proposal for a national conference on area studies. Finally, the CWAR called for the creation of a nationwide fellowship program for area studies training.¹¹ Additionally, the CWAR established a Pacific Coast Subcommittee on World Area Research, in order to develop area studies in a geographically balanced way.¹² In January 1947, the second meeting of the CWAR reviewed Hall’s report. The committee’s members were reminded that the report was still temporarily intended “for the strict confidential use of the committee”, and further decisions about its revision and release would need to be made. Being aware of the unusual importance of the report and expressing “high approval” of it in general, the committee agreed to upgrade it from a document expressing Hall’s personal opinions to an official report of the SSRC.¹³ Five months later, in May 1947, the revised version of the Hall Report was published as an SSRC Bulletin, titled “Area Studies: with Special Reference to their Implications for Research in the Social Sciences” (Hall 1947). On the basis of surveying and analyzing the existing conditions, the report summed up the agreed upon points and conveyed a fully developed conceptualization of area studies and guidelines for future actions. The Hall Report could arguably be considered the “Charter” or “Constitution” of the area studies movement, or at least its most important founding document.

The publication of the Hall Report laid the foundation for the National Conference on the Study of World Areas. After preparing for a year, with funds from the Carnegie Foundation, the National Conference on area studies convened at the Men’s Faculty Club of Columbia University on November 29–30, 1947. As the SSRC prepared the list of invitees, in addition to considering representation from various disciplines, institutions, and domestic regions, “the chief hope was to bring together at the conference calibre men of mature scholarship, ideas, and perspicacity who have a strong interest in area studies, and who can either make a real contribution to thinking about area studies or need to learn something about them”.

In the end, 109 invitations were issued, not counting participants from within the SSRC. Each participant received a copy of the Hall Report. It turned out that there were 105 attendees, including 74 professors, 17 federal government officials, five foundation staff members, and nine staff members of other scholarly institutions. The participants were asked to speak on behalf of themselves, rather than their organizations, thus allowing the participants to fully express their views. Among the participants were advocates and leaders of area studies, who had been deeply involved in the deliberation and planning activities in the SSRC and other organizations; there were also first-generation area specialists who had been pioneering the area programs at their own institutions. In the field of China and East Asian, for example, the well-known names of Owen Lattimore, John King Fairbank, C. Martin Wilbur, and Edwin O. Reischauer were among the attendees. In addition, there were also some important social scientists who were not area specialists in the strict sense, but who cherished intellectual understanding and were sympathetic toward area studies in various social science disciplines. In addition to plenary and dinner meetings, panel meetings were held respectively for six area divisions, namely USSR, Europe, Latin America, Near East, Far East, and Southeast Asia and India¹⁴ (see also Wagley 1948a, b).

Immediately after the conference, Columbia anthropologist and Latin American specialist Charles Wagley was assigned to record and summarize the conference, giving birth to the “Wagley Report”, which was published as an SSRC pamphlet. “A chapter in the development of area research and area training in the United States”, Robert Hall observed in his preface to the Wagley Report, “has ended with this report on the national conference of the study of world areas” (Wagley 1948a).

4 The CARTF, the Pilot Project, and the second national conference

One of the CWAR’s declared tasks was to establish a nationwide training fellowship for area research, and to create some guidelines for it prior to the national conference. The purpose of the program was to accelerate talent-building by recruiting a competent and diverse group of people to engage in area studies, which was still suffering from a serious manpower shortage. Based on the previous surveys and discussions, the CWAR recommended three types of fellowships with specified targets: “reconversion fellowships”, designed to recruit competent students and scholars from conventional disciplines; “refresher fellowships”, for established scholars to strengthen their field experience and language facility; and training fellowships to fund field training for graduate-level students. At the same time, through consultations with the Carnegie Foundation, CWAR secured a special fund of $100,000 from the foundation to support fellowship program. Finally, at its seventh meeting in January 1948, the CWAR decided to establish the Area Research Training Fellowship (ARTP) and the Travel Grants for Research in World Areas, and to create a Committee on Area Research Training Fellowships (CARTF), which was responsible for running the two programs¹⁵ (see also SSRC 1947, 1948).

The CARTF, a supplementary organization to the CWAR, functioned in a closely coordinated way and shared some members with the latter. Therefore, in addition to the SSRC’s overall mechanism for social science personnel-building, which centered on the Committee of Social Science Personnel, a special channel was created to lend particular support to a newly born, strategically targeted field. In 1949, the Carnegie Foundation once again provided a grant of $130,000 to the fellowship program.¹⁶ By 1953, the CARTF made 216 awards of fellowships and travel grants, totaling more than $700,000, and “scholars were enabled to travel to almost every accessible part of the world in order to carry forward their research” (SSRC 1954).

The CWAR intended to promote area specialization by exploring and defining methodologies specifically for area studies and establishing viable examples for future area research. With this approach in mind, it had been considering directly organizing research practice with names like “demonstration” research project, “pilot research project” and “appraisal project”. Since Latin American studies had long occupied a certain kind of leading position in American foreign studies,¹⁷ and the research works of anthropologists were supposed to have important methodological implications for area studies, the CWAR chose as its pilot program a research project on the culture of Puerto Rico, led by Columbia University anthropologist Julian Steward.¹⁸ One of the few at the time who had a systematic, in-depth way of thinking about area studies, Steward tried to lay out some general references that would be useful for constructing the methodology of area studies. Although it was widely thought questionable whether a set of common work rules could be applied to a field as varied and dispersed as areas studies, the CWAR insisted on pushing forward the Steward project on the grounds that, at the present stage, explorations of the theories and methodologies common to all area studies work were highly desirable. The CWAR later arranged for Steward to expand his research during 1948 and 1949, subject to review and criticism by CAWR members and other scholars. In 1950, Steward published his final report as SSRC bulletin No. 63 (Steward 1950).

In October 1949, the CWAR launched preparations for a second national conference on area studies planned for the following year. Once again, the Carnegie Foundation provided financial support for the meeting. The conference, with 97 participants representing a wide range of disciplines and area interests, convene at Columbia University on May 5–7, 1950. Panel meetings and roundtable meetings were arranged to discuss topics such as “area research—methods and achievements”, “the role of area studies in the university”, “the future role of area studies”, and “The Relationship of Area studies to world affairs”. “The changes in the attitudes of students and faculty and university administrations”, observed George E. Taylor, a CWAR member and the conference chairman, “when we compare 1950 with 1945, have been such as to justify all our expenditures of time, money, and energy. It is largely because of the area programs that the curricula of the universities today are better adjusted to the facts of the modern world”. Accordingly, “more attention was directed toward what the social sciences could do for area research than what area research could do for the social sciences”. As the CWAR later noted, “the 1950 conference essentially reaffirmed, on the basis of more experience, the conclusions of the 1947 conference which stressed the importance of developing competent personnel, the availability of training fellowships, provision for field work, better organization of area research, and development of more precise theory and techniques” (Taylor 1950; SSRC 1950).¹⁹ Naturally, with the general academic legitimacy of area studies now on firmer footing, the second national conference called for a reexamination, and paid more attention to overcoming the unevenness of area research, by strengthening programs on certain areas which had not yet been adequately exposed to the area approach, such as South Asia, Africa, and the Middle East. The 1950 conference was also recorded and synthesized by the CWAR staff officer, Richard H. Heindel, and thus became the Heindel Report (Heindel 1950).

The SSRC, the Carnegie Foundation, and some university administrators conducted another large-scale survey of area studies programs in American higher education. As early as February 1949, in a conference of the leaders of major universities sponsored by Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching, the idea for such a survey was raised and supported. The survey’s objective would be to acquire a precise picture of area studies, emphasizing the university research centers, which had already been established. CWAR member Wendell Bennett authored the final report on the survey, which was published by the SSRC in 1951 (Bennett 1951). In addition to a detailed inventory and analysis of area studies programs at 19 major universities, which revealed the rapid achievements of the area studies movement since the war, the Bennett Report was now in a position of “arguing for more in the face of much”, (McCaughey 1984) calling for more to be done on various fronts. More responsive to government policy needs than many previous reports and documents, the Bennett Report created the expectation that area studies would contribute to the “Point Four” programs proposed by the Truman administration in 1949, and in turn asked for more government support. But it made the case mainly on academic grounds, maintaining that “the task of building and maintaining facilities to meet academic needs, as well as basic research needs, is in the hands of the university” (Bennett 1951, 41).

As both the second national conference and the Bennett Report indicated, a nationwide pattern of postwar area studies had been solidly established. The time had come for the CWAR to reduce its role in overall planning and advocacy, except in promoting government support for area studies. Using the Joint Committee on Latin American Studies in 1942 as a model, but meeting the needs of a different situation, in 1948 and 1949 the SSRC and the ACLS established successively the joint committees on Slavic studies, Near and Middle East, and South Asia. In February 1953, the CWAR held a conference on public health, in order to provide an opportunity for public health specialists and area specialists to work together to address the contemporary issues in underdeveloped countries, and to urge area specialists to attend more to the practical issues beyond their purely academic concerns²⁰ (see also SSRC 1953). This was the final activity of the CWAR, which, along with the Committee on Area Research Training Fellowships, terminated in an inconspicuous way. Hereafter the interests in, and the efforts on behalf of area studies shifted to the joint committees on specific areas, and as well to the Committee on Comparative Politics newly created by the SSRC²¹ (Ward and Wood 1974).

5 Historical dynamics: the prehistory of the area studies

Thus far we have sketched the contours of the history of the founding of areas studies. This is a chapter that was largely ignored or even untold in previous scholarship (Lambert 1973, 1980, 1990; Lambert et al. 1984; McCaughey 1984; Szanton 2004; Wallerstein and Young 1996, 36–48; Bender 1997; Katzenstein 2001; Wallerstein 1997; Cummings 1997).

Running through this process, the Ethnogeographic Board (1943–1945), the Committee on World Regions (1943), the Exploratory Committee on World Area Research (1945–1946), the Committee on World Area Research (1946–1953), Committee on Area Research Training Fellowships (1948–1953), successively functioned as institutional instruments and organizational platforms for leading and planning area studies. In particular, the CWAR, unilaterally set up by the SSRC, played a powerful role of centralized planning, coordinating, and organizing. Numerous discussions, meetings, and conferences, especially two national conferences, were held, to support a process of thinking, deliberating, communicating, and collective endeavors. The process also engendered numerous reports and memorandums, like the Hamilton Report (1943), Fenton Report (1944, 1947), Webbink–Young Report (1944), Hall Report (1947), Wagley Report (1948), Stuart Report (1950), Heindel Report (1950), and Bennett Report (1951), which expressed the thoughts, ambitions, and blueprints of the area studies founders. If we consider the academic planning centered at the SSRC to be the backbone of the historical chapter of creating area studies, then the committees, the meetings/conferences, and the reports should be deemed the main components of the SSRC’s planning practice. In other words, those committees, meetings, and reports are embodiments of the nature of academic planning in the early stage of the area studies movement.

What took place at the SSRC, however, cannot be thought of as the whole story of area studies. Long before the postwar type of area studies existed, there had been an everlasting intellectual lineage of American cosmopolitanism, in which interests and ambitions about knowledge on the foreign world evolved and augmented, usually connected not only with the scholarly pursuits of “gentlemen amateurs”, but also with the Christian overseas missionaries, international businesses, and international travelers (see, e.g., Curti 1951; Rennella 2008; Ninkovich 2009; Hollinger 2017). During the whole 19th century and early 20th century, academic knowledge about the foreign world, often in the form of classic and oriental studies, was entering the colleges and universities in a slow and piecemeal way. The scholarly activities of international studies before World War II scattered themselves in the broad realm of humanities—often focusing on ancient classics, ancient languages, and taking the form of “philology”—and constituted a partial but necessary basis for postwar area studies. In addition, since the 1930s, there were some spectacular cases of efforts to expand foreign studies in certain social science disciplines, particularly with West Europe and East Asia in history, and Latin America in anthropology, engendering some early academic components which had close affinities with the area studies of later years (Arum 1975; Cahnman 1948; Bender 1997; Carter 1930; McCaughey 1979, 1980, 1984). During roughly the same period of time, the large philanthropic foundations, Rockefeller and Carnegie in particular, started to carry out their own efforts to encourage foreign studies. Therefore, it is safe to say that there were indeed some historical legacies for the postwar area studies to inherit.

At the same time the SSRC was pushing forward its planning and organizing activities, efforts to build area studies were also taking place at various levels among individual scholars and higher education institutions, as well as scholarly organizations of all sorts, including the Institute of Pacific Relations, the Harvard-Yenching Institute, the ACLS, the Far Eastern Society, and the Library of Congress, etc. (e.g., Suleski 2005). And there were also the stories about the birth and growth of such specific fields as Slavic studies, Far Eastern studies, Near and Middle East studies, South Asian studies, Southeast Asian studies, or Chinese studies and Japanese studies, which are integral parts of the history of area studies (e.g., Szanton 2004). But a collection of all these stories does not amount to an overall history of the American tradition of area studies. These could be thought of as branches of the big tree of American area studies, and the tree trunk is the story of planning and organizing taking place at the SSRC as explained above.

Placed in a broader context, the area studies movement was far more than the wartime reaction to a need for knowledge about the foreign world. Nor could the area studies movement be seen as an element in the natural evolution of American intellectual life. The area studies movement reflected longstanding trends in American social sciences. Two distinct phases in this process can be discerned. The first is a dual process of higher education expansion and professionalization, in which the conventional disciplines of social sciences institutionalize themselves as departments in research universities. Since the 1920s, the critical, reflective thinking towards rigid disciplinary boundaries, or what was described as the “disciplinary parochialism”, emerged and became more and more influential. Some prominent social scientists emphasized the “communal nature of social research” and advocated the “new synthesis of knowledge”. During this second phase, which extended straight into the postwar years when the new wave of higher education expansion was going on, the idea of “interdisciplinarity”, under a revised, more flexible version of scientific positivism, and the organizational building (of research centers, bureaus, and institutes, etc.) outside the “disciplinary departments”, become a noticeable trend. A concomitant idea was that scientific enterprises require more organizing and more planning. It was the SSRC, which was founded in 1923, that led and represented this trend. Only with this big picture in mind can the area studies movement, and the SSRC’s role in this movement, be understood.

The distinctive characteristics of postwar American area studies are its highly professionalized status, its social scientific orientation, its interdisciplinary cooperation and integration, and its “complete world coverage”, all of which were inherently embedded in the academic planning activities in the early stages of area studies. It seems reasonable to say that the general pattern and nature of postwar area studies owes much more to the overall planning from top down than the efforts of individual scholars and teams in certain areas.

6 Planning matters, planned by academics

The creation of area studies involves and reveals many facets of American intellectual life and public life. One issue worthy of more attention is the prominent role of planning in an academic enterprise, which needs to be put into historical context. Since the revolution of higher education and the Progressive Era throughout the late 19th century, the relationship between social knowledge and public life was enriched and extended in unprecedented ways. American ideas of “social intelligence” and “technocracy” were established and widely applauded. The civic organizations and interest groups committed to utilizing social knowledge for public purposes were booming, and large philanthropic organizations embarked on “scientific philanthropy” and began heavily supporting social sciences. Simultaneously, with the expansion and institutionalization of the social sciences in higher education, positivism, with its relentless pursuit of objectivity, precision, and certainty, came to dominate the academic culture of American social sciences, seemingly fostering a pro-planning mentality among social scientists. This trend is also understandable on the grounds that a more specialized, institutionalized system of knowledge production necessitates more organization and planning. The SSRC evolved at the center of this general pattern, establishing itself as one of the strategic platforms of practicing and advocating planning, both for public affairs and for social scientific enterprises (Zunz 1998, 3–45; Akin 1977; Smith 1991; Alchon 1985; Fisher 1993). “Science is a great cooperative enterprise in which many intelligences must labor together”, observed Charles Merriam, one of the founders and long-term leader of the SSRC. “There must always be wide scope for the spontaneous and unregimented activity of the individual, but the success of the expedition is conditioned upon some general plan of organization” (Merriam 1970, 83). The deep imprints of the SSRC on the area studies movement are first and foremost connected to the idea and practice of planning. Since its founding in 1923, the SSRC had performed the planning function, usually for a limited research agenda and on a comparatively smaller scale. The difference area studies made for the SSRC and for American social science as a whole was the unprecedented scale of planning. Because it involved and affected so many people and institutions, the area studies movement should perhaps be considered an early example of “big social science”, just like the Manhattan Project is the prototype of “big science” in the realm of the natural and engineering sciences.

The SSRC’s efforts to build area studies highlighted three components of academic planning, all of which would also loom large in other fields of American history. The first is the task-oriented committee (also called “commission”, “task force”, or “board”), which was to various extents engaged in research, persuasion, consultation, and decision-making. Membership in this type of body is always based on expertise and authority in a given specialized area and representation of the various related specialized areas. Members are sometimes also recruited for their ability to conduct broader public relations. The second component involves the reports generated by the numerous commissions and other working bodies. Typically, these reports targeted specific problems while bringing to bear specialized knowledge of the problem area. These reports were usually based on surveys, quantitative measurement, and data analysis, leading to specific recommendations for decision-makers. These reports gained importance as a means of reaching wider audiences. The reports, especially the large-scale ones, were the most commonly used intellectual instrument of planning in highly professional, specialized areas of American society. The reports usually transcended the conventional boundaries of the specialized knowledge, bridging the gap between ideas and actions, objectives and realities, past and present, principles and schemes, as the SSRC reports on area studies show. Finally, the SSRC relied on a series of meetings and conferences, either held within committees or sponsored by committees, with various levels of scope and participation. These meetings served as platforms for collective deliberation, communication, education, and for launching initiatives and building consensus. These are the byproducts of a happy combination of the American technocratic tradition and the American tradition of civic organization. To paraphrase the term “repertory (repertoire)” (of contentious politics) coined by Tilly (2006), may we take committees, reports, and meetings as three components of the “repertory of American-styled planning”? Twentieth century American history is bestrewed with a vast miscellany of committees, reports and meetings, many of which sparked important historical episodes and trends.

In light of the story of area studies and the historical context in which it was set, it is hard to agree with Richard Lambert that American area studies experienced a kind of “laissez-faire growth” (Lambert 1990). At least for its first decade, which we have discussed, it was planning rather than “laissez-faire” that dominated its evolution.

It may not be so farfetched to draw a parallel between the area studies movement and the Gerschenkron thesis that explains the dynamics of “late industrialization”. Based on his extensive studies on the industrialization processes of European countries, economic historian Alexander Gerschenkron found that the higher the degree of “relative backwardness” in the initial stage of industrialization, the more likely a country would be to stress high-speed, large-scale, and all-around “big spurt” style industrialization, the more it would tend to deviate from the previous historical path of “natural” economic revolution and pursue a “catch-up” approach, and the bigger the role centralized planning would play in the overall development of its industrialization (Gerschenkron 1962; Senghaas 1985). Gerschenkron’s thesis is instrumental for understanding a critical mechanism of the area studies movement in its initial stage: the big gap between the meager situation of foreign studies and the expectations of an elite group of social scientists is the primary motivation for “big spurt” and centralized planning in developing area studies. There is of course a critical difference between the two cases: for the builders of area studies, the diagnosis of American foreign studies as “backward” or meager or unsatisfactory to a large extent reflected their thoughts on the American social sciences, public intellectual life and the world role of their country, rather than direct comparisons with other countries.

From the Hamilton Report on, the sense of crisis concerning American foreign studies was repeatedly expressed, and sometimes the experiences of European countries was referred to, but the builders of American area studies never cited Great Britain or Germany as models to be followed and imitated.²² Indeed, American area studies, as a “late-comer”, differentiated itself from European foreign studies in two important ways. First, intellectually American area studies break away from the European style heritages of humanities and oriental studies. Second, American area studies was based at the universities, rather than being housed in government research facilities or dominated by government demands related to policymaking, as usually was the case in European countries. Importantly, the American area studies movement was led and planned by a non-government organization, the SSRC, although it was really a “national” organization. Its status was grounded in its place and role in the academic community. Richard Lambert was wrong in saying that American area studies followed a pattern of “laissez-faire growth”, but correct and insightful to point out “that area studies in the United States is so firmly rooted in the university setting” and to expose some important implications of this fact (Lambert 1990, 713).

7 Postwar area studies: a divorce from the wartime area programs

The second point mentioned above has some important implications. In many countries, the size and pattern of foreign studies were made possible through the governments’ financial support and infrastructure. It often seems difficult or unrealistic for the non-governmental academic sector to support a large cohort of scholars who study foreign peoples and cultures, especially those peoples and cultures far away from their own. That was, by and large, the pre-1940s situation in the United States. The pursuit of “advanced research”, which is inherently embedded in professionalized scholarship, may favor domestic as opposed to foreign studies, because it is easier for the former to meet academic standards than the latter, due to the greater difficulty in accessing materials, language training, and field work. It was fortunate for American foreign studies that the large-scale wartime training programs interrupted the “natural” process of an already professionalized academic life in the U.S., and area studies, therefore, got an opportunity it might not have otherwise had in the “natural process”.

Indeed, many continuities and connections could be found between the wartime military training programs under the title of “foreign areas and languages” and postwar area studies. In light of the fact that area studies entered many institutions for the first time because of the wartime programs, and that many institutions strengthened their area studies and adapted them in conceptualization, administration, and organization for the wartime programs, it is safe to say that the wartime programs left behind a substantial legacy for the postwar area studies movement to inherit. The wartime training programs gave some universities new experience in large-scale interdisciplinary cooperation and integration, preparing them for their postwar curricular and research reorganization. Based on its survey in 1944, the Fenton Report observed that a few academic administrators welcomed military training programs on the grounds that they provided for the first time “the instrument for cutting through departmental barriers to the organization of a unified program on the culture of a region”. “They could bring into the faculty a kind of personnel that academic processes had not produced”. Those educators in charge of the university training programs realized that these programs were “unprecedented in college and university education” and could not be “met by courses or by sections of courses now being offered in the social science curricula of the colleges”. Therefore, coordinated measures had to be taken across the boundaries of existing departments, and interdepartmental committees were set up to explore and plan area studies programs. As the result of the wartime programs, “if we define integrated area study as the combining of the methods of the social sciences and the subject matters of the humanities for working out the total culture or civilization of a region, it’s conceivable that we have here an approach and a content that exceeds any discipline or subject-matters field heretofore comprised by the college or university curriculum. At many institutions, integration commenced with ASTP-FAL” (Fenton 1947, 2–22; Conant 1947). Indeed, again, it was because of the wartime programs that the SSRC, ACLS, and the large philanthropies embarked on area studies planning, and leadership emerged in this process.

The connections and continuities between the wartime programs and the postwar area studies, and accordingly the role of government and military demands on the postwar area studies movement, however, should not be overestimated or exaggerated. It is oversimplified and misleading to take postwar area studies as merely an expanded replica of the wartime programs. As we have seen, during the decade from the wartime year of 1943, the area studies movement evolved in conceptualization, deliberation, planning, and spreading; the wartime program was only the starting point of this process. Importantly, it was academics who dominated this process, rather than government and military officials; the builders of area studies cherished both traditions and expectations of the American social sciences and American culture, and were not motivated solely by serving government policy needs. The Hamilton Report makes it clear: “Our need for comprehensive knowledge”, the report declared,

will not end with the armistice or reconstruction. No matter what shape international organization may assume, the United States will enjoy unexampled opportunities and face heavy responsibilities. The ease, speed, and cheapness of communication and transportation will tend to promote economic, political and cultural relations among nations. Trade, shipping, air lines, the press, mining, the production and distribution of petroleum, banking, government service, industry, and communications will require thousands of Americans who combine thorough professional or technical training with knowledge of the languages, economics, politics, history, geography, peoples, customs, and religions of foreign countries. In order that we may fulfill our postwar role as a member of the United Nations our citizens must know other lands and appreciate their people, cultures, and institutions. Research, graduate teaching, undergraduate instruction, and elementary education in world regions will be desirable as far as one can see into the future (CWR 1943, 2).

In a widely influential article by Immanuel Wallerstein that addresses “Cold War area studies”, the opening paragraphs of the Hamilton Report, including the one that appears above, are cited to expose the “geopolitical considerations” (Wallerstein 1997, 195–196). Can the thoughts in the report be reduced to “geopolitical considerations”? At the very least it is an oversimplification to do so. This author would prefer to label the theme of the Hamilton Report with the word “internationalism”, and more precisely the mid-20th century American “liberal internationalism”, which embraces a broader awareness of the varied content within the realm of international relations, a more in-depth, holistic perception of culture and civilization, and a more deliberate intention to nurture “cross-cultural understanding” and even “cultural relativism” (see, e.g., Ninkovich 2009). In his citations, Wallerstein snipped off a few passages, without marking them. Those passages speak to the limitations of the wartime military training programs: “…the plans for regional training during the emergency may diverge widely from the pattern dictated by the long-term needs of the country…Failure to consider permanent needs in the formation of plans for the emergency will distort and diminish the service rendered future generations by our institutions of higher learning” (CWR 1943, 1–2).

The SSRC, while involving itself in the wartime training programs by joining the Ethnogeographic Board, was mainly an observer, and its attitudes toward them were highly reserved and critical, if not antagonistic. It viewed the wartime programs as a kind of useful experiment, but not the model to be followed by postwar area studies. As a matter of fact, the discussions concerning the detrimental influences of the wartime programs appeared repeatedly in the SSRC meetings and documents, and a major concern was how to avoid the “lock-in” of path-dependence on the wartime programs. When the draft Hamilton Report was reviewed in meetings of the Committee on World Regions and the Council, it was voiced and agreed that the wartime programs were necessarily shallow and crude, short on long-term purpose and academic rigor, and that the planning and organization for area studies must shift from serving the immediate war effort to laying the foundation for the long-term development of area specialization.²³ In March 1944, the Young–Webbink Report pointed out that the wartime programs, because their approach overly emphasized linguistic training, and was “too superficial on the social science side”, were “unavoidably unsatisfactory”.²⁴ The Redfield Report in April 1944 also remarked that the military area programs may be a “sword…sharp and bright”, designed to give people “particular competencies to do particular kinds of things”, but cannot be used to meet the needs of university general education, the purpose of which should be “to make intelligent citizens, or to train the mind for intelligent action” (Redfield 1944). In July 1944, a memorandum sent from the SSRC to the Rockefeller Foundation stated that “area studies should not be undertaken as a means of activity for unemployed resources that the military establishment has cast aside. They were created to serve a limited end. It will seldom happen that means so devised can be the most appropriate ones for new non-military ends. Search should be made for appropriate means to reach new ends once the objectives are fully defined”.²⁵

It is valid to assume that a divorce of the postwar area studies movement from the wartime military training programs was as intentional as this correspondence suggests. This is evidenced in the records of the SSRC’s committees for area studies. With the Ethnogeographic Board already in existence in 1943, the SSRC’s decision to set up a Committee on World Regions owed much to the fact that the Board, established to work mainly for the military training programs, was not able to meet the needs of long-term planning.²⁶ In 1945, immediately before its dissolution, the EB proposed that an “Ethnogeographic committee” be set up jointly by the three councils to replace it. But the SSRC Committee on Problem and Policy concluded that “a strictly Ethnogeographic committee as proposed would presumably be too narrow for this purpose (of giving advice on problems of research) and also too narrow to exercise the leadership needed to advance research on foreign affairs and cultures. A broad joint committee on world area might be able to encompass all these activities”.²⁷ In a SSRC meeting in October 1946, when Robert Hall tried to delineate and explain the activities of the proposed Committee on World Area Research, he spoke from an academic perspective, giving priority to “complete world coverage at a research and graduate training level” and “long-range planning and encouragement”, and said nothing about public policy or “geopolitical considerations”.²⁸ It is misleading for Robert McCaughey to talk about the CWAR as “an outgrowth of the wartime Ethnogeographic Board”, simply from the perspective of chronological sequence (McCaughey 1984, 128). On the contrary, it is much more arguable that the CWAR represents a divorce from, rather than an outgrowth of the Ethnogeographic Board, just as the postwar area studies movement is best regarded as divorced from the wartime area programs.

8 The academic and intellectual essence of area studies: against cold war reductionism

In the Hall Report, the “charter” of the postwar area studies movement, two clear-cut conclusions are outlined concerning the World War II roots of the postwar area studies movement. First, “World War II was not the mother of area studies”; and, second, “much of the effect of the war was harmful to a sound development of area studies, rather than beneficial” (Hall 1947, 12). Eight years later, another scholar reiterated that “World War II was not the mother of area studies” (Powers 1955, 82–113). The validity of this view lies in a fundamental difference between the war-motivated area programs and the postwar area studies movement, which was essentially an academic and intellectual enterprise. It is this very difference that previous Cold War-critical scholarship largely neglected intentionally or unintentionally. A scholar, for example, stated that the wartime “iteration of area studies…acted as the model for the academic version of area studies that consolidated during the Cold War”, thus the case of area studies would be conveniently utilized to serve his “knowledge and empire” theme (Nugent 2007, 8; 2010).

The impact of political power on academic life has been explored since the Vietnam War, and the nexus between the “national security state” and the American social sciences has been exposed forcefully. In this discourse of the “Cold War knowledge production” or “Cold War social science”, the political-academic relationship is always a kind of patron-client one, and academic trends are always assumed to be shaped, motivated, and restricted by state political power. This kind of “conventional wisdom” in a highly generalized form was more often than not applied to area studies (Wallerstein 1996, 1997, 45–65; Cummings 1997; Wang 2002.²⁹ See also Pletsch 1981, 565–590; Gendzier 1985; Diamond 1992; Gilman 2003; Engerman et al. 2003; Robin 2001; Novick 1988, 309–311). However, with the more detailed and careful investigation of area studies’ formative years attempted in this article, we can exclude area studies from this “Cold War reductionism” or “Cold War over-determinism” as it is deeply rooted in this conventional wisdom (Issac 2007; Engerman 2007, 2010). This article has illustrated in part that the “Cold War area studies” paradigm ignores or underestimates the deep-rooted and far-reaching cultural concerns and intellectual purposes that launched the area studies movement, well beyond the political–strategic logic. This position is further strengthened by a treatise on the intellectual history of the area studies movement, which this author has attempted elsewhere (Niu 2016).

Area studies was created in the historical context of mid-20th century America. As a response to repeated domestic and international crises, the American interventionist state and national security state emerged and expanded rapidly. The federal government deviated from a longstanding tradition of non-intervention and began to support, mobilize and employ specialized academic knowledge on a large scale, while the American academic community lent its general support to national purposes and international missions defined both by a national security state and a liberal political consensus. Therefore, a much closer relationship was established between power and knowledge, and the traditional boundaries between the spheres of political power and academic learning were blurred. In this new government–academic relationship, the big philanthropies and leading academic organizations, such as the SSRC, created a bridge between policymakers and scholars. They also acted as a kind of substitute for government in terms of supporting, organizing, and planning in the academic sphere.

Yet that is only one side of the coin. The other side is that the “scientific (academic) community” in Mertonian terms never vanished, and there was always a limit to the “politicization of the academics” in the United States, even in the heyday of the Cold War. In 1947, when the Cold War was already in full force, not even a whiff of the Cold War could be detected in the Hall Report, the national conference reports, or numerous other SSRC documents. We see that area studies was not motivated solely by “knowing your enemy” the activities of area studies were not found to follow lockstep the rhythms of the Cold War conflicts. Indeed, there are some parts in the history of area studies that overlap the history of the Cold War. As an academic conglomerate so vast and so diversified, there were some branches, organizations, and individuals who concerned themselves whole-heartedly with government policy needs and committed to fighting the Cold War the way the “Cold Warriors” from all backgrounds did (Dessants 1995; Bonnell and Breslauer 2004; Engerman 2009). But area studies as a whole cannot be assimilated into Cold War history.

Cold War and “national security” were not simply doctrines and gospel of the area studies movement. It was the loosely defined, enlightened versions of positivism and universalism of the mid-20th century that the area studies movement embraced. At its epistemological essence, area studies is an intellectual agenda in pursuit of the “fundamental totality of all knowledge”, in Charles Merriam’s words, designed to de-parochialize and de-naturalized the west-centric or America-centric social sciences, and to establish “complete world coverage” in the American system of social knowledge. Viewed and planned as an instrument to overcome the hyper-specialization and compartmentalization by its builders, the area studies movement as a new field merged into the mainstream of the transdisciplinary movement of American social sciences, which had been launched in the 1920s as a countervailing force toward the first long wave of academic professionalization in America. Some of the builder’s aims failed to materialize,³⁰ but by and large the story of the development of area studies qualifies as a remarkable and tremendous American success. A large body of specialized knowledge about the world, and the institutionalized mechanism through which such knowledge is produced and spread, was integrated into the American social sciences, American higher education, and American public intellectual life. Concerning the general education in American colleges and universities, area studies constitutes a decisive transformation of “internationalization” by systematically eroding and removing provincialism or parochialism of all sorts in the American mind, by strengthening and revitalizing the intellectual interests and ambitions about the world inherent in American cosmopolitanism, and by nurturing and promoting the spirit and values of cross-cultural understanding and “cultural relativism”.