Cold War landscapes: towards an environmental history of US development programmes in the 1950s and 1960s

Abstract

This essay examines the environmental history of US development programs during the early Cold War. The first part of the essay revisits Point Four programs, arguing that resource development was an essential, but now frequently overlooked component. The rest of the article reviews several recent scholarly works about development to examine changes in three crucial parts of the global environment: river systems, agriculture, and human health. These recent works show how central environmental manipulations were to American development programs. I stress the importance of looking not just at the ideas behind a project, but also what happens ‘on the ground,’ especially the meanings local residents attach to environmental changes.

Notes

¹ US Embassy, New Delhi, to Secretary of State, “Proposals for US Technical Assistance to Nepal FY 1953”, 26 May 1952, “500 Nepal” Folder, Box 2, Classified General Records Pertaining to Nepal, 1950–1955, File 890C.00 TA/5-2652, RG 84, National Archives II (College Park, Maryland).

² “Fiscal Year 1954—Technical Cooperation Program, Nepal”, 29 September 1952, Folder 493, Box 111, Chester Bowles Papers, Yale University Archives, (New Haven, Connecticut).

³ Paul Rose, First Years, Unpublished Memoirs, 1963 (USAID Library, Washington, D.C.), Chapter 10, 159.

⁴ William Cronon, “Landscapes of Abundance and Scarcity”, in The Oxford History of the American West, ed. Carol A. O'Connor, Martha A. Sandweiss, and Clyde A. Milner (New York: Oxford University Press, 1994), 633.

⁵ Eugene Mihaly, Foreign Aid and Politics in Nepal: A Case Study (New York: Oxford University Press, 1965), 91.

⁶ On the origins of US technical assistance, see Merle Curti, American Philanthropy Abroad (New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Books, 1988); Michael Adas, Dominance by Design: Technological Imperatives and America's Civilizing Mission (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2006); David Ekbladh, The Great American Mission: Modernization and the Construction of an American World Order (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2010); Amanda Kay McVety, Enlightened Aid: US Development as Foreign Policy in Ethiopia (New York: Oxford University Press, 2012); Stephen Macekura, “The Point Four Program and U.S. International Development Policy”, Political Science Quarterly 128, no. 1 (2013): 127–160.

⁷ Adas, Dominance by Design, 250.

⁸ Robert E. Rhoades, Listening to the Mountains (Dubuque, IA: Kendall/Hunt, 2007), 11.

⁹ See Nick Cullather, “Development? It's History”, Diplomatic History Diplomatic History 24, no. 4 (2000): 641–653; Michael E. Latham, Modernization as Ideology: American Social Science and “Nation Building” in the Kennedy Era (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2000); David C. Engerman, Staging Growth: Modernization, Development, and the Global Cold War (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2003).

¹⁰ Other historians, writing about American diplomatic history more broadly, have pointed out a similar gap. See Kurk Dorsey, “Dealing with the Dinosaur (and Its Swamp): Putting the Environment in Diplomatic History”, Diplomatic History 29, no. 4 (2005): 573–87.

¹¹ Linda Nash, “Furthering the Environmental Turn”, Journal of American History, 100 (June 2013): 131–35, esp. 133. For an overview of environmental history, see Paul Sutter, “The World with Us: The State of American Environmental History”, Journal of American History, 100 (June 2013): 94–119.

¹² William Cronon, Changes in the Land: Indians, Colonists, and the Ecology of New England (New York: Hill and Wang, 1983).

¹³ Alfred W. Crosby, Ecological Imperialism: The Biological Expansion of Europe, 900–1900 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986); Richard Grove, Green Imperialism: Colonial Expansion, Tropical Island Edens, and the Origins of Environmentalism, 1600–1860 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995).

¹⁴ Kurkpatrick Dorsey, The Dawn of Conservation Diplomacy: US-Canadian Wildlife Protection Treaties in the Progressive Era (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1998); Richard P. Tucker, Insatiable Appetite: The United States and the Ecological Degradation of the Tropical World (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000); John Soluri, Banana Cultures: Agriculture, Consumption, and Environmental Change in Honduras and the United States (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2006); Matthew Evenden, “Aluminum, Commodity Chains, and the Environmental History of the Second World War”, Environmental History 16, no. 1 (January 1, 2011): 69–93; Mark R. Finlay, Growing American Rubber: Strategic Plants and the Politics of National Security (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2009); John R. McNeill and Corinna R. Unger, eds., Environmental Histories of the Cold War (New York, N.Y.: Cambridge University Press, 2010). Also see Kurkpatrick Dorsey, Whales and Nations: Environmental Diplomacy on the High Seas (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2014).

¹⁵ Two syntheses of development history give an overview of the field. See Adas, Dominance by Design, chapter 5, “Imposing Modernity”, and Michael E. Latham, The Right Kind of Revolution: Modernization, Development, and U.S. Foreign Policy from the Cold War to the Present (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2011).

¹⁶ For a recent discussion of the role of nation-states in global environmental change, see the introduction of Erika Marie Bsumek, David Kinkela, and Mark Atwood Lawrence, eds., Nation-States and the Global Environment New Approaches to International Environmental History (New York: Oxford University Press, 2013).

¹⁷ For a comparison of American, Soviet, and Chinese development programmes that includes environmental analysis, see Adas, Dominance by Design, 247–256. Also see James C. Scott, Seeing like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1998).

¹⁸ Nick Cullather, “Damming Afghanistan: Modernization in a Buffer State”, The Journal of American History 89, no. 2 (September 1, 2002): 515.

¹⁹ Richard Tucker, “Containing Communism by Impounding Rivers: American Strategic Interests and the Global Spread of High Dams in the Early Cold War”, in McNeill and Unger, Environmental Histories of the Cold War.

²⁰ Harry S. Truman, “Address on Mutual Security Program”, 6 March 1952, in Dennis Merrill, Documentary History of the Truman Presidency; Vol. 27: The Point Four Program (Bethesda, MD: University Publications of America, 1999), 774–778.

²¹ For connections between total war and ideas of “total” environment, see Thomas Robertson, “Total War and the Total Environment: Fairfield Osborn, William Vogt, and the Birth of Global Ecology”, Environmental History 17, no. 2 (2012): 336–364.

²² Harry S. Truman, “Statement by the President”, 18 April 1951, “Technical Cooperation Administration” folder, Box 169, Official File, Truman Papers, Harry S. Truman Library [Hereafter HSTL].

²³ Harry S. Truman, “Mutual Security Program”.

²⁴ Historians of the “Wisconsin School” of foreign relations history have certainly not forgotten the role of raw materials in foreign relations but have tended to focus on the intent of programmes not their environmental consequences. For example, see Thomas J. McCormick, America's Half-Century: United States Foreign Policy in the Cold War (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1989).

²⁵ Adas, Dominance by Design. Also see Michael Adas, Machines as the Measure of Men: Science, Technology, and Ideologies of Western Dominance (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1989).

²⁶ Adam Rome, “What Really Matters in History: Environmental Perspectives on Modern America”, Environmental History, 7 (April 2002): 303–18, esp. 304. For discussion, see Paul Sutter, “The World with Us: The State of American Environmental History”, 100.

²⁷ Thomas Robertson, “Conservation after World War II: The Truman Administration, Foreign Aid, and the ‘Greatest Good’”, in The Environmental Legacy of Harry S. Truman, ed. Karl Brooks (Kirksville, MO: Truman State University Press, 2009).

²⁸ Harry Truman to John G. Winant, 4 September 1946, Official File 85DD, HSTL.

²⁹ Gifford Pinchot, The Fight for Conservation. (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1967), 42.

³⁰ Robertson, “Total War and the Total Environment”.

³¹ Remarks by Dr. Henry G. Bennett, 28 March 1951, “Point IV: 3 of 3” folder, Box 20, Presidential Speech and Message File, David D. Lloyd Files, Papers of Harry S. Truman, HSTL.

³² Stanley Andrews, “Address to the Southern Branch of the American Public Health Association Conference, Atlanta, Georgia”, 25 April 1953, Box 10, Stanley Andrews Papers, HSTL, 9.

³³ President's Materials Policy Commission, Resources for Freedom, Vol. 1 (Washington, D.C.: US Government Printing Office, 1952), 6. Also see Alfred E. Eckes, The United States and the Global Struggle for Minerals (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1979).

³⁴ President's Materials Policy Commission, Resources for Freedom, Vol. 1, chapter 4.

³⁵ Ibid., 59.

³⁶ Ibid., 62.

³⁷ International Development Advisory Board, Partners in Progress; Summary of a Report to the President. (New York, 1951).

³⁸ Ibid., 6.

³⁹ Ibid., 44.

⁴⁰ Ibid., 40.

⁴¹ TCA, “Summary of Point 4 Activities”, 14 July 1953, “Status of Point IV” folder, Box 10, Stanley Andrews Papers, HSTL.

⁴² Harry S. Truman, “Mutual Security Program”.

⁴³ Potter devotes a chapter to development in People of Plenty: Economic Abundance and the American Character (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1954), 136. See Thomas Robertson, Malthusian Moment: Global Population Growth and the Birth of American Environmentalism (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2012), 63–65.

⁴⁴ W. W Rostow, The Stages of Economic Growth, a Non-Communist Manifesto (London: Cambridge University Press, 1960), 22.

⁴⁵ Lyndon Johnson, Foreign Assistance Program: Annual Report to the Congress, Fiscal Year 1964, May 1965 (Washington DC), iii.

⁴⁶ Tucker, “Containing Communism”, 139.

⁴⁷ David Lilienthal, TVA: Democracy on the March (New York; London: Harper & Brothers, 1944), 198. For the TVA, see David Ekbladh, The Great American Mission: Modernization and the Construction of an American World Order (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2010).

⁴⁸ Tucker, “Containing Communism”, 156–157.

⁴⁹ Cullather, “Damming Afghanistan”, 525. Also see Linda Nash, “Traveling Technology?: American Water Engineers in the Columbia Basin and the Helmand Valley”, in Where Minds and Matters Meet: Technology in California and the West, ed. Volker Janssen (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2012).

⁵⁰ Cullather, “Damming Afghanistan”, 514.

⁵¹ Ibid., 515.

⁵² Ibid., 525.

⁵³ Ibid., 522–23, 532.

⁵⁴ Ibid., 523.

⁵⁵ Ibid.,535.

⁵⁶ David Biggs, Quagmire: Nation-Building and Nature in the Mekong Delta (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2011), 155.

⁵⁷ Biggs, Quagmire, 179.

⁵⁸ Ibid., 195.

⁵⁹ David Kinkela, DDT and the American Century: Global Health, Environmental Politics, and the Pesticide That Changed the World (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2011), 128.

⁶⁰ James Reston, “Washington: Fight ‘em or Feed ’em”, New York Times, 11 February 1966, 32.

⁶¹ For small-scale programmes, see Amanda McVety's excellent study of US development programmes in Ethiopia. Amanda Kay McVety, Enlightened Aid: US Development as Foreign Policy in Ethiopia (New York: Oxford University Press, 2012).

⁶² Paul Ehrlich, The Population Bomb (New York: Ballantine, 1968), 53. See Robertson, Malthusian Moment.

⁶³ John H. Perkins, Geopolitics and the Green Revolution: Wheat, Genes, and the Cold War (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997), 257. Also see important works by Angus Wright, The Death of Ramón González: The Modern Agricultural Dilemma (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1990); Jack Ralph Kloppenburg, First the Seed the Political Economy of Plant Biotechnology, 1492–2000 (Madison, Wis.: University of Wisconsin Press, 2004).

⁶⁴ Ibid., 260.

⁶⁵ Ibid., 258.

⁶⁶ Scott, Seeing like a State, 262.

⁶⁷ Nick Cullather, The Hungry World: America's Cold War Battle against Poverty in Asia (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2010), 14.

⁶⁸ Harry S. Truman, “Mutual Security Program”.

⁶⁹ Harry S. Truman, “Statement by the President”, 8 September 1950, “Point IV: 1 of 3” folder, Box 20, Presidential Speech and Message File, David D. Lloyd Files, Papers of Harry S. Truman, HSTL.

⁷⁰ Stanley Andrews, “Address to the Southern Branch of the American Public Health Association Conference, Atlanta, Georgia”, 25 April 1953, Box 10, Stanley Andrews Papers, HSTL, 6.

⁷¹ Marcos Cueto, Cold War, Deadly Fevers: Malaria Eradication in Mexico, 1955–1975 (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2007), 7.

⁷² TCA, “Summary of Point 4 Activities”, 14 July 1953, “Status of Point IV” folder, Box 10, Stanley Andrews Papers, HSTL.

⁷³ For the environmental logic of population programmes, see Robertson, Malthusian Moment. For a more general overview, see Matthew Connelly, Fatal Misconception: The Struggle to Control World Population (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2008).

⁷⁴ Kinkela, DDT and the American Century: Global Health, Environmental Politics, and the Pesticide that Changed the World (University of North Carolina Press, 2011). Other sources on malaria programmes include Javed Siddiqi, World Health and World Politics: The World Health Organization and the UN System (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1995); Socrates Litsios, “Malaria Control, the Cold War, and the Post-war Reorganization of International Assistance”, Medical Anthropology 17, no. 3 (1997): 255–78; Timothy Mitchell, Rule of Experts: Egypt, Techno-Politics, Modernity (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002); Amy L. Sayward, The Birth of Development: How the World Bank, Food and Agriculture Organization, and World Health Organization Changed the World, 1945–1965 (Kent, OH: Kent State University Press, 2006); Randall M. Packard, The Making of a Tropical Disease: A Short History of Malaria (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2007); James Webb, Humanity's Burden: A Global History of Malaria (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2009).

⁷⁵ Kinkela, DDT and the American Century.

⁷⁶ Ibid., 34.

⁷⁷ Ibid., 52.

⁷⁸ Ibid., 92.

⁷⁹ Ibid., 104.

⁸⁰ Ibid., 105.

⁸¹ Cueto, Cold War, Deadly Fevers, 8–10.

⁸² Maiya Devi Shrestha, interview with author, July 2007, Thamel, Nepal.

⁸³ Mihaly, Foreign Aid and Politics in Nepal: A Case Study, 90.

⁸⁴ Eric Dinerstein, The Return of the Unicorns: The Natural History and Conservation of the Greater One-Horned Rhinoceros (New York: Columbia University Press, 2003).

⁸⁵ For the Rapti Valley Tharu, see Arjun Guneratne, “The Tax-Man Cometh: The Impact of Revenue Collection on Subsistence Strategies in Chitwan Tharu Society”, Studies in Nepali History & Society 1, no. 1 (1996): 5–35; Ulrike Muller-Boker, The Chitwan Tharus in Southern Nepal: An Ethnoecological Approach (Stuttgart: Franz Steiner Verlag, 1999).

⁸⁶ Group Interview by author, Tadi, Chitwan, Nepal, 11 August 2007.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the National Science Foundation [grant number SES-0957901] and the Truman-Kauffman fellowship.

Notes on contributors

Thomas Robertson

Tom Robertson is an associate professor of history at Worcester Polytechnic Institute in Worcester, Massachusetts. He is author of The Malthusian Moment: Global Population Growth and the Birth of American Environmentalism (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2012). His new research uses archival and ethnographic data to examine the environmental history of US development projects in Nepal during the Cold War. Email: [email protected]