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ABSTRACT
This paper scrutinises the Ford Foundation’s Fund for Adult Education from the perspective of Cold War social science. Its massive Experimental Discussion Project was an attempt at scientifically grounded social engineering in American communities in the field of liberal humanistic education. This civilisation-saving mission to foster critical democratic citizenship and world-understanding ran into aparadox of scientific social engineering and organic community growth, expertise, and planning versus lay leadership. Discussion groups opened up space for discussing politics during the McCarthy era, while its scientific evaluation was characteristic of the 1950s Culture Wars in its value neutrality and race-blindness.
Acknowledgments
I thank Harm Kaal of Radboud University Nijmegen for reviewing an earlier version of this contribution and the Special Collections of Syracuse University.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.
Notes
1 Report of the Study for the Ford Foundation on Policy and Program [prepared by the Study Committee] (Detroit: Ford Foundation, 1949), 65.
2 Mark Solovey, Shaky Foundations: The Politics-Patronage-Social Science Nexus in Cold War (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2013), 1–20.
3 Lutz Raphael, “Embedding the Human and Social Sciences in Western Societies, 1880–1980: Reflections on Trends and Methods of Current Research,” in Engineering Society: The Role of the Human and Social Sciences in Modern Societies, 1880–1980, ed. Kerstin Brückweh, Richard F. Wetzell, Dirk Schumann and Benjamin Ziemann (New York: Palgrave, 2012), 47–8; Hunter Crowther‐Heyck, “Patrons of the Revolution: Ideals and Institutions in Postwar Behavioral Science,” Isis 97, no. 3 (2006): 430.
4 Fabian Link, “Sozialwissenschaften im Kalten Krieg: Mathematisierung, Demokratisierung und Politikberatung,” in H-Soz-Kult, www.hsozkult.de/literaturereview/id/forschungsberichte-3095(accessed 15 May 2018); Federico Romero, “Cold War Historiography at the Crossroads,” Cold War History 14, no. 4 (2014): 689.
5 Karen Ferguson, Top Down: The Ford Foundation, Black Power, and the Reinvention of Racial Liberalism (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2013) is a recent example of the first; Chay Brooks, “‘The Ignorance of the Uneducated’: Ford Foundation Philanthropy, the IIE, and the Geographies of Educational Exchange,” Journal of Historical Geography 48 (2015): 36; Interjeet Parmar, Foundations of the American Century: The Ford, Carnegie, and Rockefeller Foundations in the Rise of American Power (New York: Columbia University Press, 2012), 60.
6 Dwight MacDonald, The Ford Foundation: The Men and the Millions (London: Routledge, 1989/1956), 50; Paul J. Edelson, “Socrates on the Assembly Line: The Ford Foundation’s Mass Marketing of Liberal Adult Education,” Paper presented at the Annual Conference of the Midwest History of Education Society (Chicago, IL, 18–19 October 1991): 24; Tim Lacy, The Dream of a Democratic Culture: Mortimer J. Adler and the Great Books Idea (New York: Palgrave, 2013), 78.
7 Sonja M. Amadae, Rationalising Capitalist Democracy (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003), 31, 37; Joan Roelofs, Foundations and Public Policy: The Mask of Pluralism (Albany, NY: SUNY Press, 2003), xi.
8 Romero, “Cold War Historiography at the Crossroads,” 690.
9 Charles R. Acland, “Screen Technology, Mobilization and Adult Education in the 1950s,” in Patronising the Public: American Philanthropy’s Transformation of Culture, Communication, and the Humanities, ed. W. J. Buxton (Plymouth: Lexington Books, 2009), 273.
10 Mark Solovey, “Cold War Social Science: Specter, Reality, or Useful Concept?” in Cold War Social Science. Knowledge Production, Liberal Democracy, and Human Nature, ed. Mark Solovey and Hamilton Cravens (New York: Palgrave, 2012), 2.
11 Solovey, Shaky Foundations, 8.
12 Christian Dayé, “‘A Fiction of Long Standing’: Techniques of Prospection and the Role of Positivism in US Cold War Social Science, 1950–65,” History of the Human Sciences 29, no. 4–5 (2016): 35–58; Jamie Cohen-Cole, The Open Mind: Cold War Politics and the Sciences of Human Nature (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2014); Paul Erickson, “The Ford Foundation and the Measurement of Values,” in Cold War Science and the Transatlantic Circulation of Knowledge, ed. Jeroen van Dongen (Leiden: Brill, 2015), 272–88.
13 Solovey, Shaky Foundations, 8.
14 Theodore Porter, “Foreword: Positioning Social Science in Cold War America,” in Cold War Social Science, xii.
15 Link, “Forschungsbericht,” 47–8.
16 Porter, “Foreword,” x.
17 David C. Engerman, “Social Science in the Cold War,” Isis 101 (2010): 393–400.
18 Nils Gilman, “The Cold War as Intellectual Force Field,” Modern Intellectual History 13, no. 2 (2016): 514. See e.g. David H. Price, Cold War Anthropology: The CIA, the Pentagon, and the Growth of Dual Use Anthropology (Durham: Duke University Press, 2016).
19 Report of the Study for the Ford Foundation, 18.
20 Greg Barnhisel, Cold War Modernists: Art, Literature, and American Cultural Diplomacy (New York: Columbia University Press, 2015), 185.
21 Adam R. Nelson, Education and Democracy: The Meaning of Alexander Meiklejohn, 1872–1964 (Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press, 2001), 249.
22 William H. McNeill, Hutchins’ University: A Memoir of the University of Chicago, 1929–1950 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991), 28–32, 128.
23 Lacy, The Dream of a Democratic Culture, 72.
24 Joseph F. Kett, The Pursuit of Knowledge Under Difficulties. From Self-Improvement to Adult Education in America, 1750–1990 (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1994), 424.
25 James Davis, A Study of Participants in the Great Books Program 1957 (National Opinion Research Centre, Chicago, 1957) [National O.], 3.
26 Lacy, The Dream, 67.
27 Ibid., 6.
28 Cohen-Cole, The Open Mind, 91.
29 Nelson, Education and Democracy, 301.
30 Milton Mayer, Robert Maynard Hutchins: A Memoir (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993), 371, 373.
31 Lacy, The Dream, 67.
32 Richard H. Pells, The Liberal Mind in a Conservative Age: American Intellectuals in the 1940s & 1950s (New York: Harper & Row, 1985), 71.
33 MacDonald, The Ford Foundation, 19, 98.
34 Lacy, The Dream, 5.
35 Zunz, Philanthropy in America, 186.
36 Thomas Reeves, Freedom and the Foundation: The Fund for the Republic in the Era of McCarthyism (New York: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, 1969).
37 Mary Ann Dzubac, Robert M. Hutchins: Portrait of an Educator (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991), 235.
38 Acland, “Screen Technology,” 267; Patricia Rosenfield and Rachel Wimpee, The Ford Foundation: Themes, 1936–2001 (Sleepy Hollow, NY: Rockefeller Archive Centre, 2015), 6; Cyril Scott Fletcher, “The Program of the Fund for Adult Education,” Adult Education Quarterly 2, no. 2 (1951): 59.
39 Glen Burch, Accent on Learning: An Analytical-History of the Fund for Adult Education Project, 1951–1961 (White Plains, NY: Fund for Adult Education, 1960), vii.
40 Report of the Study for the Ford Foundation, 68.
41 William M. Keith, Democracy as Discussion: Civic Education and the American Forum Movement (New York: Lexington, 2007), 103.
42 Burch, Accent on Learning, xiv.
43 A Ten-Year Report of The Fund for Adult Education, 1951–1961 (White Plains, NY: Fund for Adult Education, 1962), 29.
44 L.O. Baker to session leaders, 29 September 1953, box 15, Fund for Adult Education.
45 Dumas Malone, ed., The Jeffersonian Heritage (Boston: Beacon Press, 1953), 18.
46 Walter Goldschmidt (ed. and commentary), Ways of Mankind: Thirteen Dramas of Peoples of the World and How They Live, by Lister Sinclair (And Others) (1954).
47 Box 15, FAE.
48 Ten-Year Report, 28.
49 Abbott Kaplan, Study-Discussion in the Liberal Arts (White Plains, NY: Fund for Adult Education, 1960), 61.
50 Test City evaluation suggestions and proposed check sheet, by R.B. Pettengill, Syracuse University Special Collections, box 2, Archives Fund for Adult Education [FAE], White Plains, NY.
51 Robert Blakely, “Adult Education Needs a Philosophy and a Goal,” Adult Education: Theory and Method 1 (November 1952): 3.
52 Acland, “Screen Technology,” 269.
53 Ten-Year Report, 30.
54 Ten-Year Report, 43.
55 Ibid., 11.
56 Scott Fletcher/Blakely to Lord Strauss, 18 September 1952, box 2, FAE.
57 Test City evaluation suggestions and proposed check sheet, door R.B. Pettengill, box 2, FAE.
58 Osman to coordinators, 6 August 1952, box 2, FAE.
59 “600 in Little Rock are Engaged in New Adult Education Project,” Arkansas Gazette, 26 October 1952, 4 October 1953, box 15, FAE.
60 “Experiment in Adult Education may be Tried in Little Rock,” Little Rock Arkansas Democrat, 19 September 1951, box 15, FAE.
61 Report Osman to Blakely, 28 December 1952 on Test City Project June-December 1952, box 2, FAE.
62 Osman to Blakely, 25 April 1953; Report Osman to Blakely 1st year project, 13 June 1953, box 2, FAE.
63 Osman to C. Bailey, 12 February 1953, with excerpt from S. Alinsky, Reveille for Radicals (1946), box 2, FAE.
64 Osman to Blakely, 8 December 1952, box 2, FAE.
65 Report Osman to Blakely, 19 December 1952, 28 December 1952 on Test City Project June-December, Osman to Blakely on 1st year project, 13 June 1953, box 2, FAE.
66 Eugene Johnson to Blakely, 8 September 1953, (San Bernardino); Summary Reports on TC activities 1 January to 31 March 1954, box 2, FAE.
67 Kaplan, Study-Discussion in the Liberal Arts, 10; Report Osman to Blakely 1st year project 13 June 1953, box 2, FAE.
68 Mary Osman, Report on TC project 1951–1956, 15 May 1956, p. 13, box 2, FAE.
69 Report Osman to Blakely on Test City Project June-December, 28 December 1952, box 2, FAE.
70 Notes on Test Cities Project, May 1955, box 2, FAE.
71 Osman to Blakely, 15 June 1955, box 2, FAE.
72 Ten-Year Report, 42.
73 “New Ford Grant Revives Adult Education Project,” Arkansas Gazette, 26 August 1955, box 15, FAE; Ten-Year Report, 53.
74 Osman to Blakely, 15 June 1955.
75 Edelson, “Socrates on the Assembly Line,” 22–3.
76 Burch, Accent on Learning, 86.
77 Kett, The Pursuit of Knowledge, 425; Rakesh Khurana, From Higher Aims to Hired Hands: The Social Transformation of American Business Schools and the Unfulfilled Promise of Management as a Profession (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2007), 268.
78 Report to the Board of Directors of the FAE on the Test Cities project, by Blakely and John Osman, 12 September 1952, box 2, FAE.
79 Report to the Board of Directors of the FAE, 12 September 1952; Ten-Year Report, 45.
80 Osman to Blakely, 11 February 1953, 07-02-1953, box 2, FAE.
81 Report to the Board of Directors.
82 Osman to Blakely, 25 April 1953, box 2, FAE.
83 Drawing in box 1, FAE.
84 Burch, Accent on Learning, 46.
85 Ibid., 5.
86 Ibid., 87.
87 Edelson, “Socrates on the Assembly Line,” 11.
88 Statement Osman to Board of Directors on TC-project, 1954; box 2, FAE.
89 Burch, Accent on Learning, 66.
90 Edelson, “Socrates on the Assembly Line,” 16.
91 Crowther-Heyck, “Patrons of the Revolution,” 437; Solovey, Shaky Foundations, 114.
92 Ellen Herman, The Romance of American Psychology (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995), 133.
93 Crowther-Heyck, “Patrons of the Revolution,” 439.
94 Theodore Porter, Trust in Numbers: The Pursuit of Objectivity in Science and Public Life (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1995), 7–9.
95 Porter, “Foreword,” x.
96 Dayé, “A Fiction of Long Standing,” 36.
97 Cohen-Cole, The Open Mind, 2.
98 Paul Erickson, “The Ford Foundation and the Measurement of Values,” 272.
99 Cyril Scott Fletcher, “The Program of the Fund for Adult Education,” Adult Education Quarterly 2, no. 2 (1951): 61.
100 Fletcher, “The Program of the Fund for Adult Education,” 64.
101 Ibid., 65–6.
102 Burch, Accent on Learning, 87.
103 Blakely “notes by R.J. Blakely on the Test-Cities-project,” ca. December 1952, box 2, FAE.
104 Glen Burch to Robert B. Pettengill, 29 February 1952, Test Cities, box 1, FAE.
105 “Surveys in Test Cities and orientation week for coordinators,” 15 April 1952, box 1, FAE.
106 Mary Osman to Scott Fletcher, 5 April 1956, box 2, FAE.
107 Scott Fletcher in Burch, Accent on Learning, iii.
108 Edelson, “Socrates on the Assembly Line,” 2.
109 Porter, “Foreword,” ix.
110 Gilman, “The Cold War as Intellectual Force Field,” 523.
111 Kaplan, Study-Discussion in the Liberal Arts, 4.
112 Kaplan, Study-Discussion in the Liberal Arts, 135.
113 Ibid., 135.
114 Ibid., xvi.
115 Ibid., 136–8.
116 Hill, A Comparative Study of Lecture and Discussion Methods (White Plains, NY: FAE, 1960) 86.
117 Edelson, “Socrates on the Assembly Line,” 12; Lacy, The Dream, 73.
118 Scott Fletcher in Burch, Accent on Learning, v.
119 Davis, A Study of Participants, 7.
120 Ibid., 13.
121 Richard J. Hill, A Comparative Study, 27, 63.
122 Kaplan, Study Discussion, 132.
123 Davis, A Study of Participants, 114.
124 The Saturday Review, 13 September 1952, 44.
125 “Education in Review: Progress Reports on Ford-sponsored Plan for Liberal training of Adults in Test Cities,” New York Times, 18 July 1954.
126 Lacy, The Dream, 70.
127 Harold Lord Varney, “The Ford Foundation,” The American Mercury, July 1959, 5.
128 Statement Osman to Board of Directors on TC-project, box 2, FAE.
129 Davis, A Study of Participants, 141.
130 Ibid., 52.
131 Burch, Accent on Learning, 60.
132 Ibid., 39, 64, 133.
133 Report Osman to Blakely, 28 December 1952 on Test City Project June-December; 15 March 1953 Osman to Blakely, 27 February-6 March, box 2, FAE.
134 Harry S. Ashmore, The Negro and the Schools (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1954), introduction.
135 Davis, A Study of Participants, 20.
136 Hill, A Comparative Study, 22.
137 Ferguson, Top Down, 48.
138 Christopher Endy, “Power and Culture in the West,” in The Oxford Handbook of the Cold War, ed. Richard H. Immerman and Petra Goedde (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), 329.
Additional information
Notes on contributors
Willem Pieter Theodoor (Wim) De Jong
Willem Pieter Theodoor (Wim) De Jong is a Dutch historian and political philosopher, who received his Ph.D. from Radboud University Nijmegen in 2014. He specialises in the history of democracy, notably the connection of democracy and citizenship education. His Ph.D. analysed contesting repertoires of democracy in the Netherlands between 1945 and 1985. In 2014 he held the Alexander Charters Fellowship at Syracuse University for research in adult education and in 2016 was a visiting fellow at the Special Collections of Columbia University New York. In 2017 he published a monograph on the history of Protestant education in the Netherlands, and now works as a lecturer at Utrecht University. He is currently working at Open University, Heerlen, The Netherlands. He studies the history of urban safety in connection with civic education. Email: [email protected]