A Righteous Smokescreen
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A Righteous Smokescreen

Postwar America and the Politics of Cultural Globalization

Sam Lebovic

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A Righteous Smokescreen

Postwar America and the Politics of Cultural Globalization

Sam Lebovic

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About This Book

An examination of how the postwar United States twisted its ideal of "the free flow of information" into a one-sided export of values and a tool with global consequences. When the dust settled after World War II, the United States stood as the world's unquestionably pre-eminent military and economic power. In the decades that followed, the country exerted its dominant force in less visible but equally powerful ways, too, spreading its trade protocols, its media, and—perhaps most importantly—its alleged values. In A Righteous Smokescreen, Sam Lebovic homes in on one of the most prominent, yet ethereal, of those professed values: the free flow of information. This trope was seen as capturing what was most liberal about America's self-declared leadership of the free world. But as Lebovic makes clear, even though diplomats and public figures trumpeted the importance of widespread cultural exchange, these transmissions flowed in only one direction: outward from the United States. Though other countries did try to promote their own cultural visions, Lebovic shows that the US moved to marginalize or block those visions outright, highlighting the shallowness of American commitments to multilateral institutions, the depth of its unstated devotion to cultural and economic supremacy, and its surprising hostility to importing foreign cultures. His book uncovers the unexpectedly profound global consequences buried in such ostensibly mundane matters as visa and passport policy, international educational funding, and land purchases for embassies. Even more crucially, A Righteous Smokescreen does nothing less than reveal that globalization was not the inevitable consequence of cultural convergence or the natural outcome of putatively free flows of information—it was always political to its core.

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Year
2022
ISBN
9780226816098

CHAPTER ONE

The Birth of UNESCO and the Limits of Postwar Cultural Reconstruction

World War II devastated schools and universities. Across the conflict’s many fronts, teachers were killed and books were burned. Buildings were bombed, occupied, and stripped of resources. In Greece alone, occupying soldiers burned 320,000 school desks for firewood. The University of Naples in Italy was devastated by Allied troops who looted educational material with cavalier abandon: from optical instruments, they took the lenses so they could more easily read the tiny print on wartime airgraph letters; and from the “extensive zoological collection,” they took “valuable specimens” that they attached to the hoods of trucks as garish mascots. Meanwhile, entire educational systems were disrupted: the Nazis closed two-thirds of the schools in Czechoslovakia; and in China, whole universities were uprooted and moved inland to avoid Japanese attacks, with students and professors carrying books and equipment on foot.1
By the time peace came, the scale of the destruction was overwhelming. In Greece, some 91 percent of the nation’s 8,390 schools had been seriously damaged or destroyed. One international observer thought it was “impossible to exaggerate the educational losses.” In the Philippines, the losses were larger still, with 8,380 schools totally destroyed and another 3,900 “partially destroyed.” Ninety-five percent of the educational infrastructure had disappeared; and damages to schools were estimated to be $113 million (which excluded the forty-eight universities that were destroyed and the eradication of almost all the nation’s library holdings). Elsewhere, the same grim statistics piled up: Poland had lost 60 percent of its educational resources; China had suffered damages estimated at $966 million; four out of every five schools in Yugoslavia were damaged or destroyed; Burma had suffered “an almost total loss of books and equipment.”2
Reconstructing the world’s schools was a pressing social problem in the aftermath of the war—one pedagogical pamphlet from the period was entitled, heartbreakingly, “Physical Exercises for Undernourished Children in Cold Classrooms.” But it was also a political problem; and the reconstruction of the world’s schools could not be disentangled from the reconstruction of the international order. Those concerned with rebuilding bombed-out university buildings or providing students with pencils and paper soon found themselves arguing about much more abstract issues: international governance, global inequality, North-South relations, the future of liberalism. The problem of educational reconstruction thus laid the groundwork for the creation of a new international body dedicated to educational and cultural affairs.3
Ultimately this body would be known as the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO). In earlier drafts, however, it had been dubbed the United Nations Educational and Cultural Reconstruction Organization and it had been expected to play a central role in funding and administering the rebuilding and restocking of the world’s classrooms. Under US influence, the scope and ambition of the organization changed, and UNESCO emerged as heir to the long-standing efforts to promote the international exchange of culture and information—efforts that had been given new urgency by the traumas of the 1940s. “Since wars begin in the minds of men,” declared the new organization’s constitution, “it is in the minds of men that the defenses of peace must be constructed.” UNESCO thus sought to advance “the mutual knowledge and understanding of peoples,” to “promote the free flow of ideas,” and to “give fresh impulse to popular education and . . . the spread of culture.”4 For this reason, the birth of UNESCO is normally treated as an expression of the rising tide of global consciousness. And the central role that the United States played in its creation is seen as evidence of its quintessentially liberal and benevolent streak.5
However, recalling the origins of UNESCO in the problems of educational reconstruction reveals a more complicated story. As the ambitions of the new organization expanded, the United States insisted that the commitment to a practical program of educational reconstruction should be dropped. This development captured a deeper truth: despite its global ambitions, UNESCO was a weak and resource-poor institution with little capacity to deal with practical problems like war devastation. UNESCO’s efforts to promote international understanding thus tended toward abstract idealism.
The establishment of UNESCO in 1945 could have been a significant moment in the history of cultural globalization. Many nations, particularly those devastated by war and colonialism, wanted to create a robust organization with considerable capacity for handling problems like educational rebuilding as well as for engaging in a more fundamental reconstruction of postwar global culture. But the US, in particular, opposed the creation of an organization with the capacity and financial means to redistribute resources. Its attitudes toward UNESCO were ambivalent and parsimonious and led to a weak organization that had to rely on preexisting institutions and networks to promote the flow of information around the world. As a result, UNESCO could not meaningfully challenge the inequalities of global culture. What it produced instead was an uneasy and contradictory form of international order: expressed in powerful, liberal rhetoric but instantiated by thin institutions with limited resources; idealist and universalist in theory but uneven and partial in practice; and multilateral in conception but disproportionately shaped by unilateral American power.
The political history of educational reconstruction and the institutional history of UNESCO began at the same moment. In October 1942, Richard Butler, president of the British Board of Education, and Malcolm Robertson, chairman of the British Council, proposed a meeting of educational ministers from France, Greece, Netherlands, Norway, Poland, and Yugoslavia, all of whom were living in exile in England. In November, they gathered informally to discuss common problems and to make plans for postwar educational programs. Very quickly, the meetings took on a surprisingly formal nature. By the time of their second meeting in January 1943, they were calling themselves the Conference of Allied Ministers of Education (CAME). By the middle of 1943, Australia, Canada, India, Luxembourg, New Zealand, and South Africa had joined the conference, and the United States, China, and the USSR had sent observers.6
In its lifetime, CAME focused primarily on the challenges posed by rehabilitating war-ravaged educational systems. Richard Butler, presiding over the first meeting, declared that it would be best to “concentrate on specific and perhaps modest practical issues, rather than to enter on wider discussion of nebulous and ambitious plans which might later prove impracticable”; and in the various commissions and subcommissions that it created, CAME followed through on that suggestion. Surveying foreign governments, it drew up detailed lists of the materials that would be required when peace came. The Basic Scholastic Equipment Commission, for example, developed an inventory of the “standard” requirements needed to educate twenty-five students: 150 pencils; 12 rulers; 5 erasers; 2 boxes of chalk; 100 packets of toilet paper; between 5,000 and 10,000 loose sheets of paper (on this there was disagreement); schools for boys needed a football and a softball; schools for girls could do without the balls but required 10 pairs of knitting needles. Similarly, in sixty-one painstakingly detailed pages, CAME outlined the “first re-equipment needs for one medical school in Czechoslovakia”: 25 pounds of asbestos cloth; 367 camel-hair brushes; 264 Bunsen burners; 177 teaching microscopes; 27 dissecting microscopes; 15 research microscopes; and 6,500 light bulbs. Later, some observers would question the accuracy of these catalogs; and there was no doubt that the process, dependent on self-reported “needs” by governments amid the confusion of war, was open to abuse, error, and manipulation. Still, CAME’s early inventories shaped expectations and provided the start for UNESCO’s postwar The Book of Needs, which documented educational shortages around the world. And most importantly, in the slightly surrealist specificity of its inventories, CAME displayed its interest in practical and material problems.7
CAME’s operational programs likewise revealed a preoccupation with problems of material relief. A Commission on Special Educational Problems in the Liberated Countries was concerned with improvising basic pedagogical strategies amid the shortages and with providing simple pedagogical aids. Maps, for instance, were in incredibly short supply—apparently, they had been a favored target of Axis occupiers—and CAME reached out to Dunlop Tyres to see if it could produce cheap rubber globes for classrooms. (Dunlop could not, perhaps due to rubber shortages.) In the absence of materials, plans were made to improvise: maps could be stitched onto stuffed cloth globes or traced into sandboxes; and lamp black, candle wax, and paraffin could be mixed into a chalk substitute that could be used on glass surfaces. Meanwhile, the Audiovisual Aids Commission screened educational films, negotiated with public broadcasters for rights to educational radio programs, and looked for cheap radios, film projectors, episcopes, and epidiascopes to donate to European classrooms. In September 1944, the Books and Periodicals Commission established the Inter-Allied Book Centre in London’s Salisbury Square, which would send donated volumes to liberated nations for restocking their libraries. In its first year, the Centre shipped some 36,395 volumes, received 345,000, and had been pledged many more (wartime transportation shortages were gumming up the works).8
In this context, CAME participants expressed repeated hopes that surplus war stock, ranging from surplus scientific equipment to more basic supplies, would provide material support for reconstruction. The politics of war surplus disposal would become a potent symbol of plans for the global reconstruction of culture in the 1940s. CAME’s plans were to use the surplus as a central fund for charitable donation, allocating material from a common pool to aid reconstruction on the basis of need.9
Despite the practical nature of this program, it was not motivated purely by altruism. CAME members argued explicitly that they were seeking to displace “German domination” of European educational and cultural life—an understandable impulse given the experience of Nazism. But something would have to fill the void, and therein lay an opportunity. British officials apparently imagined that London would become the center of continental culture. The first meeting of CAME saw the British Council extend offers of British aid to the Europeans, as well as access to British schools where they could find models for postwar schooling. This mingling of altruism, anti-Fascism, and opportunism was made most explicit in plans to dislodge German domination of the European market in basic scientific equipment, such as beakers, optical glass, and laboratory porcelain. “It is essential,” argued a British representative, “that the countries of Europe should be saved from dependence on German scientific supplies as a way of evading German and possibly Nazi ideas.” British manufacturers of scientific equipment agreed. They told CAME that blocking German exports of scientific apparatus was of the “utmost importance in the disarmament of Germany.” They were pleased when the British Ministry of Supply and the US State Department organized an Anglo-American Commission to tour the continent, surveying scientific needs and building contacts between European customers and manufacturers back home.10
CAME’s focus on material relief to the continent was also political and self-interested in another sense: the organization was resolutely Eurocentric in its planning, and the problems of reconstruction in Africa, Asia, and the Middle East went almost entirely undiscussed. On the rare occasion that the latter subject surfaced, CAME participants seem to have imagined that the colonial powers would be responsible for reconstructing the educational systems of their holdings. For example, it was expected that France would fulfill the need for printing machinery in Algiers and that Indonesia would be resupplied by the Dutch. In 1943, a request for assistance from the University of Rangoon, which the Japanese had dynamited and set on fire, was met with a consensus that Rangoon was outside CAME’s scope and that its problems should be taken up with the High Commissioner for India. In 1946, while the Anglo-American Commission was already busy reestablishing the European scientific equipment market, W. E. Dyer of Raffles College in Singapore asked CAME for assistance in restocking its “entirely vanished” physics and chemistry labs, but he only received an indifferent shrug. There were shortages, Dyer was informed, everywhere.11
Most significantly, this indifference meant that while CAME was developing its detailed accounting of needs and damages, it simply did not conduct surveys in much of the world. Not until 1947 and 1948 were the first surveys of war damage to schools in the Philippines, Burma, or China undertaken. And even then, they were shockingly brief; UNESCO sought to survey the vastness of China in six weeks. As a result, in its first publication of The Book of Needs in 1947, UNESCO called its knowledge of needs in the Far East “admittedly inadequate.” Although it devoted ten pages to problems in Czechoslovakia, five pages to France, and fifteen pages to Poland, it devoted only one page to the Philippines and two to Burma. And whereas the non-European entries were impressionistic and vague, the sections on Europe, building on earlier CAME studies, were impossibly precise: Yugoslavia needed 14 million pen nibs and 8 million pencils; Italy needed 20 million pieces of chalk; Poland needed 4 million pencils and 6.5 million exercise books.12
Despite its disinterest in reconstructing the war-ravaged schools in the Global South, CAME was interested in some broader programs of international cultural and educational cooperation. This was unsurprising, as CAME was the obvious heir to the various programs for international understanding that had emerged between the late nineteenth century and the interwar years, all of which had taken on increased urgency after the rise of Fascism and the outbreak of World War II. Like earlier cultural internationalists, individuals associated with CAME imagined creating global bibliographies and indexes; flirted with the idea of revising history textbooks (or writing new ones) to promote world peace; and hoped that programs to circulate liberal cinema (preferred films: Bambi and Goodbye, Mr. Chips) would “combat prejudice” in students who had been educated by the Nazis.13
Most significant was the proliferation of calls to create a robust successor to the International Bureau of Education, founded in Geneva in 1925 as a private institution, that had remained small, underfunded, and rather marginal even after its transformation into an intergovernmental organization in 1929. In early 1944, CAME appointed a subcommittee to analyze the various plans for a postwar international educational organization that had already been proposed, on both sides of the Atlantic, by a mushrooming of umbrella groups, such as the US Committee on Education Reconstruction; a joint commission of the London International Assembly and the Council on Education in World Citizenship; and an International Education Assembly. In its review, CAME concluded that their “striking resemblances manifest[ed] a remarkable conformity of opinions already formed on the problem under review.” The zeitgeist was clearly encouraging CAME to evolve into a permanent and far-reaching educational organization.14
Still, despite the increasingly universal and idealistic projects that CAME flirted with in its early years, it always imagined that the first order of business was the grubby problem of postwar reconstruction. Indeed, it is striking that even the most far-reaching proposals for a permanent international educational organization always anticipated that reconstruction would be, at least initially, its primary concern. In April and May 1943, the US Committee on Education Reconstruction, whose name alone revealed its priorities, held conferences to plan both the founding of an international organization to promote the exchange of ideas and teachers, and the provision of facilities, programs, and machinery for educational reconstruction. Also in April, Stanford education professor Grayson Kefauver wrote to Sumner Welles in the State Department to announce that his Liaison Committee for International Education had passed resolutions calling for the creation of an international agency for education, as well as to emphasize the “urgent importance of immediate aid and cooperation for the restoration of educational equipment, facilities and services” in occupied countries. Given the focus on material reconstruction, it was appropriate that in May 1944, after eighteen months of operations, CAME thought it was developing “into something parallel with UNRRA,” the United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration.15
It was in this context that, in April 1944, the United States came to CAME (the New York Times reported that this augured the “creation of UNRRA for Culture”). Throughout 1943, embassy observers had been keeping an eye on CAME’s developments, forwarding its minutes back to Washington; in May, the State Department had sent formal observers. By September, when Secretary of State Cordell Hull asked Ambassador John Gilbert Winant what CAME was all about, the response made it clear that to be involved in the organization was to be involved in reconstruction work. “American representation in the conference,” Winant reported, “would involve a moral commitment to assist financially in providing books, laboratory and other educational equipment in allied countries which have suffered from enemy action.”16
But American observers also sensed an important opportunity to make the new organization more globalist—and to wrest control from the Europeans. In October, Harry Gideonse, president of Brooklyn College, had been in London speaking with people interested in international education. “My impression,” he reported to the State Department upon his return to the United States, “was emphatically that our contribution in the formative stages was needed in a very urgent way. There was a continental parochialism in the atmosphere that was depressing.” A strong American presence, on the other hand, could “widen [the] perspective.” Other nations, such as China, Canada, and Australia, began approaching the United States to express dissatisfaction with British dominance ...

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