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Abstract
In the early 1950s, the American Geographical Society, in collaboration with the United States Armed Forces and international pharmaceutical corporations, instituted a Medical Geography program whose main initiative was the Atlas of Disease, a map series that documented the global spread of various afflictions such as polio, malaria, even starvation. The Atlas of Disease, through the stewardship of its director, Jacques May, a French-American physician trained in colonial Hanoi, evidenced the ways in which cartography was rhetorically appropriated in the Cold War as a powerful visual discourse of development and modernization, wherein both the data content of the maps and their stylistic forms collaborated to produce a compelling division between the so-called First and Third Worlds. In addition, the atlas' connections between the academic knowledge production of the American Geographical Society, the national security interests of the US government, and the market building of the medical industry displayed the ways in which development was a multilayered and essentially spatialized discourse of American power and ideology.
The author would like to thank Trevor Parry-Giles for his important advice on this essay, Jovanka Ristic and the staff of the American Geographical Society Library for their kind help, Peter Lewis at the American Geographical Society in NY for his permission to reproduce the maps, and Barbara Biesecker and her QJS reviewers, as well as Jeremy Grossman, for their excellent editing and support.
The author would like to thank Trevor Parry-Giles for his important advice on this essay, Jovanka Ristic and the staff of the American Geographical Society Library for their kind help, Peter Lewis at the American Geographical Society in NY for his permission to reproduce the maps, and Barbara Biesecker and her QJS reviewers, as well as Jeremy Grossman, for their excellent editing and support.
Supplemental material
Supplemental material for this article can be accessed here: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/00335630.2014.887215
Notes
[1] “The Map Doctor,” Newsweek, May 3, 1954, 84–6.
[2] “The Map Doctor,” 86.
[3] A good example of how the State Department synthesized and published facts about these “new” nations can be found in the Department's internal publication from that era called Geographic Notes, which published a new update on the demographics and political situation, as well as an official map, every time a new country declared independence. See Records of the Office of the Geographer, Department of State, RG59, Cartographic and Architectural Records Division, National Archives II, College Park, MD.
[4] For an excellent early critical study of the origins and implications of the “Third World” label, see Carl E. Pletsch, “The Three Worlds, or the Division of Social Scientific Labor, Circa 1950–1975,” Comparative Studies in Society and History 23, no. 4 (1981): 565–90.
[5] David Slater, Geopolitics and the Post-Colonial: Rethinking North-South Relations (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2004), 63.
[6] Bruno Latour, “Drawing Things Together,” in Representation in Scientific Practice, eds. Michael Lynch and Steve Woolgar (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1990), 26.
[7] David Campbell, Writing Security: United States Foreign Policy and the Politics of Identity, Revised Edition (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota, 1998), 88.
[8] Michael Shapiro, The Politics of Representation: Writing Practices in Biography, Photography and Policy Analysis (Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press, 1988), 106.
[9] Kirsten Ostherr, Cinematic Prophylaxis: Globalization and Contagion in the Discourse of World Health (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2005), 129.
[10] Lawrence J. Prelli, “Rhetorics of Display: An Introduction,” in Rhetorics of Display, ed. Lawrence J. Prelli (Columbia, SC: University of South Carolina Press, 2006), 1–38; Lawrence J. Prelli, “Visualizing a Bounded Sea: A Case Study in Rhetorical Taxis,” in Rhetorics of Display, 90–120.
[11] See especially Amy D. Propen, Locating Visual-Material Rhetorics: The Map, the Mill, and the GPS (Anderson, SC: Parlor Press, 2012).
[12] These strategic and ideological approaches to the study of Cold War rhetoric are best outlined in the classic collection: Martin J. Medhurst, Robert L. Ivie, Philip Wander, and Robert L. Scott, eds., Cold War Rhetoric: Strategy, Metaphor, and Ideology (New York: Greenwood, 1990). Important to consider, though, is the expansion of this “genre” of Cold War rhetorical studies through engagement with work by scholars working at the intersection between rhetorical studies and cultural studies; see especially Bryan C. Taylor and Stephen J. Hartnett, “‘National Security, and All That It Implies … ’: Communication and (Post-) Cold War Culture,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 86, no. 4 (2000): 465–91.
[13] The best critical/rhetorical collection of essays on the discourses of foreign policy realism remains: Francis A. Beer and Robert Hariman, eds., Post-Realism: The Rhetorical Turn in International Relations (East Lansing, MI: Michigan State University Press, 1996).
[14] Odd Arne Westad, The Global Cold War: Third World Interventions and the Making of Our Times (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 5.
[15] For a collection of essays from a geographic standpoint exploring this sense of “mission” in American ideology, see David Slater and Peter J. Taylor, eds., The American Century: Consensus and Coercion in the Projection of American Power (Oxford, UK: Blackwell, 1999).
[16] “Background of Point-4,” Congressional Digest, January 1952, 4.
[17] Harry S. Truman, “Inaugural Address: January 20, 1949,” Public Papers of the President: Harry S. Truman, 1949 (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1964), 114.
[18] The Technical Cooperation Administration also put out its own map series promoting its work; see Technical Cooperation Administration, United States Department of State, “Point 4 Around the World,” Map, January 1953, World-International Relations Folder, Title Collection, Geography and Map Division, Library of Congress, Washington, DC.
[19] A comprehensive source on Cold War area studies can be found (particularly in Chapter 3) in Matthew Farish, The Contours of America's Cold War (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 2010). See also Immanuel Wallerstein, “The Unintended Consequences of Cold War Area Studies,” in The Cold War & The University: Toward an Intellectual History of the Postwar Years, ed. Noam Chomsky (New York: W. W. Norton, 1997), 195–231.
[20] W. W. Rostow, The Stages of Economic Growth: A Non-Communist Manifesto (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1960).
[21] Kimber Charles Pearce, “Narrative Reason and Cold War Economic Diplomacy in W. W. Rostow's Stages of Economic Growth,” Rhetoric & Public Affairs 2, no. 3 (1999): 399.
[22] An excellent source on this phenomenon can be found in David Slater, “Geopolitical Imaginations across the North-South Divide: Issues of Difference, Development and Power,” Political Geography 16, no. 8 (1997): 631–53.
[23] Pearce, “Narrative Reason,” 399.
[24] Simon Dalby, Creating the Second Cold War: The Discourse of Politics (London: Pinter, 1990), 10–1.
[25] Arturo Escobar, “Culture, Economics, and Politics in Latin American Social Movements Theory and Research,” in The Making of Social Movements in Latin America: Identity, Strategy, and Democracy, eds. Arturo Escobar and Sonia E. Alvarez (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1992), 62.
[26] See especially Richard Saull, “Locating the Global South in the Theorisation of the Cold War: Capitalist Development, Social Revolution and Geopolitical Conflict,” Third World Quarterly 26, no. 2 (2005): 253–80.
[27] Westad, The Global Cold War, 396.
[28] Bryan S. Turner, The Body and Society: Explorations in Social Theory, Third Edition (London: Sage, 2008), 174.
[29] Paul A. Chilton, “The Meaning of Security,” in Post-Realism: The Rhetorical Turn in International Relations, edited by Francis A. Beer and Robert Hariman (East Lansing, MI: Michigan State University Press, 1996), 197.
[30] Ostherr, Cinematic Prophylaxis, 121.
[31] Ostherr, Cinematic Prophylaxis, 121.
[32] Mary Manjikian, “Diagnosis, Intervention, and Cure: The Illness Narrative in the Discourse of the Failed State,” Alternatives: Global, Local, Political 33, no. 3 (2008): 341.
[33] Donna Haraway, “The Biopolitics of Postmodern Bodies,” differences 1 (1989): 28–9.
[34] Ned O'Gorman, Spirits of the Cold War: Contesting Worldviews in the Classical Age of American Security Strategy (East Lansing, MI: Michigan State University Press, 2012), 161.
[35] Robert McMaster and Susan McMaster, “A History of Twentieth-Century American Academic Cartography,” Cartography and Geographic Information Science 29, no. 3 (2002): 305–21.
[36] Arthur H. Robinson, Joel L. Morrison, and Phillip C. Muehrcke, “Cartography 1950–2000,” Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers 2, no. 1 (1977): 3–18.
[37] John K. Wright, Geography in the Making: The American Geographical Society 1851–1951 (New York: American Geographical Society of New York, 1952), 265.
[38] Tim Brown and Graham Moon, “From Siam to New York: Jacques May and the ‘Foundation’ of Medical Geography,” Journal of Historical Geography 30, no. 4 (2004): 747–8.
[39] See, for example, Michael L. Dorn, “(In)temperate Zones: Daniel Drake's Medico-moral Geographies of Urban Life in the Trans-Appalachian American West,” Journal of the History of Medicine and Allied Science 55, no. 3 (2000): 256–91; Wright, Geography in the Making, 265. See also Melinda S. Meade and Michael Emch, Medical Geography, Third Edition (New York: Guilford, 2010).
[40] See Folder 10: Clippings 1937–44, Box 1 Medical Geography Department Archives, American Geographical Society Library, University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee. Hereafter, the Library will be referred to as AGSL.
[41] Hiram Blauvelt, “World Health Vital With Plane as Germ ‘Carrier,’” New York Herald Tribune, April 11, 1943.
[42] “Physicians Warn of Disease Spread: War is Creating Vast Health Problems That Must Be Met Now, Conference Agrees,” New York Times, March 16, 1943.
[43] Folder 5: Atlas of Disease, Proposal, 1943–44, Box 1 Medical Geography Department Archives, AGSL. See also Wright, Geography in the Making, 267.
[44] Conference Minutes, 20 May 1944, p. 2, Folder 6: Atlas of Disease, Report on Proposal, 1944, Box 1 Medical Geography Department Archives, AGSL.
[45] Conference Minutes, 20 May 1944, New York City, p. 2, Folder 6: Atlas of Disease, Report on Proposal, 1944, Box 1 Medical Geography Department Archives, AGSL.
[46] Conference Minutes, 20 May 1944, New York City, p. 3, Folder 6: Atlas of Disease, Report on Proposal, 1944, Box 1 Medical Geography Department Archives, AGSL.
[47] Grant Application to Office of Naval Research, 2 April 1952, Folder 1: Atlas of Disease Correspondence, Box 1 Medical Geography Department Archives, AGSL.
[48] “Map Doctor,” 86.
[49] Memorandum, Charles B. Hitchcock to Jacques May, 30 Sep 1953, Folder 1: Atlas of Disease Correspondence, Box 1 Medical Geography Department Archives, AGSL.
[50] Minutes, 10 May 1946, Folder 9: Atlas of Disease Steering Committee Minutes, Box 1; Grant Application, Federal Security Agency, 26 February 1952, Folder 1: Atlas of Disease Correspondence, 1948–54, Box 1, Medical Geography Department Archives, AGSL.
[51] “The Health Problem,” Report by Jacques May to the Council on Foreign Relations, Study Group on Climate and Economic Development in the Tropics, 18 March 1954, Folder 8: Council on Foreign Relations Study Group, Box 5, Series 1: Professional Records, 1943–1960, Jacques May Papers, AGSL.
[52] Brown and Moon, “From Siam to New York,” 752.
[53] See especially Minutes of 10 May 1946, Atlas of Disease Steering Committee, Folder 9: Atlas of Disease Steering Committee Minutes 1944–46, Box 1 Medical Geography Department Archives, AGSL.
[54] Jacques M. May, “Medical Geography: Its Methods and Objectives,” Geographical Review 40, no. 1 (1950): 40–1.
[55] Speech Notes, “A Map of the World Distribution of Poliomyelitis,” 31 Oct 1950, Folder 12: Atlas of Disease, Plate 1, Reports, 1950, Box 1, Series 1: Professional Records, 1943–1960, Jacques May Papers, AGSL.
[56] Jacques M. May, “Map of the World Distribution of Poliomyelitis, 1900–50,” Geographical Review 40, no. 4 (1950): 646–8.
[57] Jacques M. May, “Map of the World Distribution of Cholera,” Geographical Review 41, no. 2 (1951): 272–3.
[58] For more on color conventions in mapping, see Mark Monmonier, How to Lie with Maps, Second Edition (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1996), 170–1.
[59] The best source on the visual codes of maps in terms of their persuasive and ideological functions is arguably, Denis Wood, The Power of Maps (New York: The Guilford Press, 1992). For a handy historical resource on the history, specifically, of disease mapping, see Tom Koch, Cartographies of Disease: Maps, Mapping, and Medicine (Redlands, CA: ESRI Press, 2005).
[60] For a concise look at the political implications of map projections, see Alan K. Henrikson, “The Power and Politics of Maps,” in Reordering the World: Geopolitical Perspectives in the 21st Century, ed. George J. Demko and William B. Wood, Second Edition (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1994), 94–116.
[61] Wright, Geography in the Making, 268. See also William Briesemeister, “A New Oblique Equal-Area Projection,” Geographical Review 43, no. 2 (1953): 260–1.
[62] William Briesemeister, “A World Equal-Area Projection for the Future: The Selection of the Most Suitable Equal-Area Projection for the Purposes of Plotting World Wide Statistics in This Present Day of Super Speed, Jet Planes and Intercontinental Missiles,” Nachrichten aus dem Karten-und Vermessungswesen 2 (1959): 60–3.
[63] See Snyder's discussion of the Briesemeister in John P. Snyder, Flattening the Earth: Two Thousand Years of Map Projections (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1993), 239.
[64] Jacques M. May, “Map of the World Distribution of Helminthiases,” Geographical Review 42, no. 1 (1952): 98–101.
[65] Press Release, 1 April 1951, American Geographical Society, Folder 18: Plate 2 Reports, 1949–51, Box 1, Series 1: Professional Records, 1943–1960, Jacques May Papers, AGSL.
[66] Draft Text 1953, Folder 6: Plate 9, Information and Mapping Instructions, 1953, Box 3, Series 1: Professional Records, 1943–1960, Jacques May Papers, AGSL.
[67] I. M. Young, Justice and the Politics of Difference (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1990), 15.
[68] William R. Young, “Gulag—Slavery, Inc.: The Use of an Illustrated Map in Printed Propaganda,” in Psychological Warfare Casebook, ed. William E. Daugherty (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1958), 601.
[69] Letter From Jacques May to A. Larkin of the American Federation of Labor, 15 June 1953, Folder 1: Plates 8 and 9, Correspondence 1952–54, Box 3, Series 1: Professional Records, 1943–1960, Jacques May Papers, AGSL.
[70] See also Timothy Barney, “‘Gulag’—Slavery, Inc.: The Power of Place and the Rhetorical Life of a Cold War Map,” Rhetoric & Public Affairs 16, no. 2 (2013): 317–54.
[71] See Folder 2: Reviews, Plate 1, Box 1, Series 1: Professional Records, 1943–1960, Jacques May Papers, AGSL.
[72] The pathogen and geogen concept is most explicitly discussed in May, “Medical Geography,” 9–10.
[73] “Map Doctor,” 86.
[74] “Map Doctor,” 86. See also May's own descriptions of cultural factors in his articles accompanying the Atlas of Disease plates especially Jacques M. May, “Map of the World Distribution of Malaria Vectors,” Geographical Review 41 (1951): 638–9. See also Jacques M. May, The Ecology of Human Disease (New York: MD Publications, 1958), 29–35.
[75] “The Health Problem,” Report by Jacques May to the Council on Foreign Relations, Study Group on Climate and Economic Development in the Tropics, 18 March 1954, Folder 8: Council on Foreign Relations Study Group, Box 5, Series 1: Professional Records, 1943–1960, Jacques May Papers, AGSL.
[76] Felix Marti-Ibanez, “Foreword: Medical Geography and History,” in The Ecology of Human Disease by Jacques M. May (New York: MD Publications, 1958), xviii.
[77] Roxanne Lynn Doty, Imperial Encounters: The Politics of Representation in North-South Relations (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 1996), 131.
[78] American Geographical Society, “World Distribution of Spirochetal Diseases: 1. Yaws, Pinta, Bejel,” Map (New York, NY: AGS, 1955), Geography and Map Division, Library of Congress, Washington, DC.
[79] Folder 14: Professional, Photographs for Disease Studies, undated, Box 5, Series 1: Professional Records, 1943–1960, Jacques May Papers, AGSL.
[80] Haraway, “Postmodern Bodies,” 15.
[81] Haraway, “Postmodern Bodies,” 13.
[82] In particular, see Folders 3 through 10, which contain compilations of the data and statistics that fed the production of the maps, in Box 1, Series 1: Professional Records, 1943–1960, Jacques May Papers, AGSL.
[83] Campbell, Writing Security, 84.
[84] Letter, Jacques May to Roger Varin, 11 June 1954, Folder 1, Box 1 Medical Geography Department Archives, AGSL.
[85] For a history of the CFR, see Michael Wala, The Council on Foreign Relations and American Foreign Policy in the Early Cold War (Providence, RI: Berghahn Books, 1994).
[86] Policy Committee Report, 6th Session, 4 June 1954, Conference on Climate and Economic Development in the Tropics, Folder 6, Box 5, Series 1: Professional Records, 1943–1960, Jacques May Papers, AGSL.
[87] Folder 6, Box 5, Series 1: Professional Records, 1943–1960, Jacques May Papers, AGSL.
[88] Digest, Study Group on Climate and Economic Development in the Topics, 18 March 1954, 8, Folder 8, Box 5, Series 1: Professional Records, 1943–1960, Jacques May Papers, AGSL.
[89] See Folder 5: Personal Correspondence with Erwin Di Cyan, 1954–56, Box 5, Series 1: Professional Records, 1943–1960, Jacques May Papers, AGSL.
[90] Letter, Erwin Di Cyan to John McDonnell, 12 July 1955, Folder 5, Box 5, Series 1: Professional Records, 1943–1960, Jacques May Papers, AGSL.
[91] See Folder 5, Box 5, Series 1: Professional Records, 1943–1960, Jacques May Papers, AGSL.
[92] Letter, May to Di Cyan, 17 August 1955, Folder 5, Box 5, Series 1: Professional Records, 1943–1960, Jacques May Papers, AGSL.
[93] Letter, Di Cyan to May, 18 August 1955, Folder 5, Box 5, Series 1: Professional Records, 1943–1960, Jacques May Papers, AGSL.
[94] Jacques M. May, “American Stake in Foreign Diseases,” MD: Medical Journal for Residents, Interns, and Medical Students 11, no. 4 (1956): 75. Copy located in Folder 7: Related Articles and Publications, 1955–59, Box 2 Medical Geography Department Archives, AGSL. Emphasis in original.
[95] Emphasis in original. May, “American Stake in Foreign Diseases,” 75.
[96] For the important conception of cartographic “silences,” see J. B. Harley, The New Nature of Maps (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2001), 84–107.
[97] Committee on Foreign Relations, The Mutual Security Act of 1958: Report of the Committee on Foreign Relations on H. R. 12181, 85th Congress, 2nd sess., 1958, S. Rep. 1627, serial 12062, Chap. 3, Sec. 6, 67.
[98] United States Senate Committee on Government Operations, The Status of World Health in Outline Text and Chart: Report of the Committee on Government Operations, United States Senate and Its Subcommittee on Reorganization and International Organizations, 86th Congress, 1st sess., 1959, S. Rep. 161, serial 12149, v.
[99] “Life Expectancy at Birth: Map,” in Status of World Health, btw. 18 and 19; “Ratio of Population to Physicians: Map,” in Status of World Health, btw. 70 and 71.
[100] “Life Expectancy at Birth: Map”; “Smallpox Endemicity, 1954–1957,” in Status of World Health, btw. 54 and 55.
[101] Status of World Health, viii.
[102] Ibanez, “Foreword,” xix.