American Empire: Roosevelt's Geographer and the Prelude to Globalization

AMERICAN EMPIRE

california studies in critical human geography Editorial Board: Professor Michael Watts, University of California • Berkeley Professor Allan Pred, University of California • Berkeley Professor Richard Walker, University of California • Berkeley Professor Gillian Hart, University of California • Berkeley Professor AnnaLee Saxenian, University of California • Berkeley Professor Mary Beth Pudup, University of California • Santa Cruz 1. Changing Fortunes: Biodiversity and Peasant Livelihood in the Peruvian Andes by Karl S. Zimmerer 2. Making the Invisible Visible: A Multicultural Planning History edited by Leonie Sandercock 3. Imperial San Francisco: Urban Power, Earthly Ruin by Gray Brechin 4. Imposing Wilderness: Struggles over Livelihood and Nature Preservation in Africa by Roderick P. Neumann 5. Shady Practices: Agroforestry and Gender Politics in the Gambia by Richard A. Schroeder 6. On Holiday: A History of Vacationing by Orvar Löfgren 7. Spaces of Hope by David Harvey 8. Even in Sweden: Racisms, Racialized Spaces, and the Popular Geographical Imagination by Allan Pred 9. American Empire: Roosevelt’s Geographer and the Prelude to Globalization by Neil Smith

Isaiah Bowman on the cover of Time, 1936 (TimePix).

AMERICAN EMPIRE ROOSEVELT’S GEOGRAPHER AND THE PRELUDE TO GLOBALIZATION

neil smith

university of california press

BERKELEY

LOS ANGELES

LONDON

Earlier versions of three chapters appeared as prior publications: “The Lost Geography of the American Century,” Scottish Geographical Journal 115 (1999): 1–18 (Chapter 1); “Bowman’s New World and the Council on Foreign Relations,” Geographical Review 76 (1986): 438–60 (Chapter 7); “Shaking Loose the Colonies: Isaiah Bowman and the ‘Decolonization’ of the British Empire,” in Geography and Empire, ed. Anne Godlewska and Neil Smith (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1994), 270–99 (Chapter 13). University of California Press Berkeley and Los Angeles, California University of California Press, Ltd. London, England © 2003 by the Regents of the University of California

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Smith, Neil. American empire : Roosevelt’s geographer and the prelude to globalization / Neil Smith. p. cm. — (California studies in critical human geography ; 9) Includes bibliographical references and index. isbn 0–520-23027-2 (acid-free paper). 1. Bowman, Isaiah, 1878–1950. 2. Geographers—United States— Biography. 3. Geography—United States—History—20th century. 4. Globalization—History—2oth century. I. Title. II. Title: Roosevelt’s geographer and the prelude to globalization. III. Series. g69.b75s65 2003 910
.92—dc21 2002011192

Manufactured in the United States of America 12

11

10

9

10 8

7

09

08

6

5

07 4

3

06

05

2

1

04

03

The paper used in this publication is both acid-free and totally chlorinefree (tcf). It meets the minimum requirements of ansi/niso z39.48–1992 (r 1997) (Permanence of Paper).

CONTENTS

List of Maps Prologue Acknowledgments 1.

PART I.

The Lost Geography of the American Century

ix xi xxiii 1

FROM EXPLORATION TO ENTERPRISE: GEOGRAPHY ON THE CUSP OF EMPIRE

2.

1898 and the Making of a Practical Man

3. “Conditional Conquest”: Geography, Labor, and Exploration in South America 4.

PART II.

The Search for Geographical Order: The American Geographical Society

31 53 83

THE RISE OF FOREIGN POLICY LIBERALISM: THE GREAT WAR AND THE NEW WORLD

5. 6.

The Inquiry: Geography and a “Scientific Peace”

113

A Last Hurrah for Old World Geographies: Fixing Space at the Paris Peace Conference

139

7. “Revolutionarily Yours”: The New World, the Council on Foreign Relations, and the Making of Liberal Foreign Policy

181

viii

/

PART III.

contents

THE EMPIRE AT HOME: SCIENCE AND POLITICS

8. “The Geography of Internal Affairs”: Pioneer Settlement as National Economic Development 9.

PART IV.

235

THE AMERICAN LEBENSRAUM

10. 11. 12. 13. 14.

PART V.

The Kantian University: Science and Nation Building at Johns Hopkins

211

Geopolitics: The Reassertion of Old World Geographies

273

Silence and Refusal: Refugees, Race, and Economic Development

293

Settling Affairs with the Old World: Dismembering Germany?

317

Toward Development: Shaking Loose the Colonies

347

Frustrated Globalism, Compromise Geographies: Designing the United Nations

374

THE BITTER END

15.

Defeat from the Jaws of Victory

419

16.

Geographical Solicitude, Vital Anomaly

454

Collections Consulted Notes Index

463 465 539

MAPS

1. Bowman’s Latin American expeditions, 1907, 1911, 1913

58

2. The Urubamba River, 1911 expedition

63

3. Bowman’s map of the Urubamba River

65

4. Part of Bowman’s 1911 topographic map down the seventy-third meridian

68

5. Europe in 1914

144

6. Poland after 1922

154

7. Fiume/Rijeka crisis with prewar boundaries

159

8. Europe after 1922

175

9. Global pioneer belts, 1931

227

10. George Renner’s “Maps for a New World,” 1942

286

PROLOGUE

In November 2001, U.S. forces seized a rural part of southern Afghanistan near Kandahar, and in a staged display jubilant marines hoisted an American flag on the highest point of the terrain. The reference to Teddy Roosevelt’s Rough Riders on San Juan Hill at the dawn of the first moment of U.S. global ambition or to U.S. marines on Iwo Jima during the second moment was deliberate and as revealing as it was precise. Officially this was a “war on terrorism” fought by an “international coalition,” but the marines were under no illusion as to where the nexus of global power lay or who the ultimate victors would be. At the zenith of the third moment of U.S. global ambition, this conflation of national self-interest with global universalism has become starkly evident around the world. This manuscript was effectively completed before the so-called war on terrorism began, but the historical geography of American globalism has everything to do with understanding the causes of the first major war of the twenty-first century. Just as the earlier two moments of U.S. global ambition were punctuated by war, so too after 7 October 2001 is the third moment. Earlier conflicts such as the 1991 war against Iraq were limited and, conceived as such, compared with the declared global scope of this new war. Initiated four weeks after hijacked commercial airliners sliced into the Pentagon and the World Trade Center, the new war began with the U.S. military targeting an already devastated Afghanistan. It continued with an escalation of “antiterrorist” assaults from Chechnya to the Philippines, In-

xii

/

prologue

donesia to Colombia, and with a brutal Israeli onslaught against Palestinians in the Occupied Territories. Labeled a war on terrorism, the new war represents an unprecedented quickening of the American Empire, a third chance at global power. The conflation of narrow national self-interest with global good has been more acute since 11 September 2001 than at any time in the American Century. Ominous enough were the post-9/11 calls by President George W. Bush for a “new American crusade” in the Middle East and his repeated declaration that “either you are with us or you are with the terrorists.” Most sharply redolent of the new American globalism, however, was the challenge to the rest of the world that if you don’t share “our values” you can expect only retribution. For those living outside the nationalized U.S. boundaries of “our values,” there were few beneficent ways of interpreting that statement. Franklin Roosevelt aspired to have the world run by “Four Policemen,” among whom he calculated the United States would have the superior power. The new global landscape after 2001 posits a much more ambitious unilateralism as the U.S. ruling class acts in the confidence that it can be the solitary global police force. This is the real meaning of the claims that the United States won the cold war and that, as a result, it stands as the only remaining superpower. Just as the scale of capital accumulation has increasingly outgrown the nation-state, giving the global state institutions of the second moment (UN, IMF, World Bank, GATT/World Trade Organization) a heightened relevance, part of U.S. global ambition has involved the reinvention of the national (U.S.) state at the global scale. The attacks of 11 September 2001 provided the moral and military opportunity to solidify that agenda. Prior to 2001 the seemingly isolationist-leaning George W. Bush would surely have seemed an unlikely leader for such a global campaign. A multimillionaire with all the means, his geographical curiosity about the rest of the world was so limited that upon assuming the presidency at the age of fifty-four, apart from vacations in Mexico, he had been out of the United States only twice. He did not even have a valid passport. Even so, some historical events are predictable, within limits. As I write in mid-2002, the U.S. government obviously seeks to expand the war. While not yet comparable in any way to the global conflagrations of the twentieth century, the limits to this war’s expansion are by no means clear. Also, it is far from clear, except perhaps in the cases of Iraq and the Palestinians, which states and cities, governments and mountain hamlets, will find themselves in the cross-hairs of global revenge and ambition. One other very important

prologue

/

xiii

thing is predictable, too: this projection of U.S. global command will ultimately fail. I will return to this point momentarily. The continuity among the first, second, and third moments of U.S. global ambition—from 1898 through 1945 and up to 2002—is more in view today than ever it was in the late twentieth century, but there are also vital discontinuities. Global unilateralism has never before been the rule, and although it is much too early to announce the completion of some kind of U.S. global hegemony, that is the trajectory of change. The extent of American unilateralism after 2001 is certainly unprecedented. There are really two discontinuities here. First, the guiding vision involves the establishment of what we might think of as the first truly global empire. From China to Greece, Rome to Britain, empires were national and/or international but never totally global in scope. The American Empire strives to be planetary, just as U.S. historian Brooks Adams anticipated a century earlier; by the same token, British geographer Halford Mackinder’s “Empire of the World” is more sharply in view now than at any previous time. Second, whereas the third moment is also now punctuated by war, the difference this time ‘round is that while the United States participated in the world wars of the twentieth century, it initiated neither. This time by contrast the United States stands as the original belligerent state. The contradictory spatiality of the American Empire is thrown into sharp relief, expressing a new disjuncture between an assumed geographical privilege and exceptionalism on the one hand and the peculiarly antigeographical ideology of post-nineteenth-century Americanism on the other. That the assumptions of geographical exceptionalism embody and express this antigeographical ideology does nothing to lessen the contradiction. Somehow, throughout the so-called American Century, U.S. territory has barely been touched by the succession of brutal wars—an estimated ten million dead in World War I, more than thirty million in World War II, and many more millions in other wars on all continents. Not since the War of 1812 was there a significant foreign incursion on the U.S. mainland. No other nation has been so immune to and yet so implicated in the terror that made the twentieth century the most deadly in history; nowhere else has a populace had the luxury of deluding themselves that geography is salvation, that geography protects power. With that illusion punctured after 2001, national exceptionalism is reinventing itself as the elixir of a putatively postnational globalism. The geography of empire and in particular its scale—simultaneously national and global—therefore becomes more, not less, pivotal. The Defense Department understands the contradiction precisely. Several days after sol-

xiv

/

prologue

diers restaged San Juan Hill and Iwo Jima in southern Afghanistan, marine colonels quietly conveyed to their troops that the Stars and Stripes was no longer to be hoisted as a victory symbol for the international coalition. This particular sign of the conflation between national and global interests gave too much away. For some this insistence on the geography of empire might lead to a focus on oil, and indeed numerous socialists have argued that beneath the rhetorical veneer of the war on terrorism lies a war for oil. Oil is certainly a significant part of the equation, but it would be a mistake to convert the new war into the old language of resource-driven geopolitics. It is not that geopolitics is irrelevant, but if the argument I make here about the evolving historical geography of the American Empire makes sense, then the priority of geo-economic over geopolitical concerns has to be recognized. What characterizes the American Empire is precisely that power is exercised in the first place through the world market and only secondarily, when and if necessary, in geopolitical terms. War forces geopolitics to the fore, but it should not blind us to the wider geoeconomic aspiration for global control. Viewed this way, we can see the “war on terrorism” as something less than, yet also more than, simply a war for oil. It is a war to fill in the interstices of globalization. These interstices may be cast as entire nation-states (Afghanistan, Iraq) but also as smaller regions (the occupied West Bank), neighborhoods, households, individuals; they are constituted as nodes or fields in a network of terror that is said to span the globe. They can be anywhere (even in the United States) that terrorists, real or imagined, organize, congregate, plot. Viewed from the White House or from Wall Street, the war against terrorism is a war to eliminate these interstices in an otherwise globalizing world in which the alchemy of “our values” has achieved a perfect fusion of freedom, democracy, and capitalist profit. Only the interstices of “terror” threaten the triumph of that achievement at a global scale. The apparent normality of capitalist globalism is the unspoken backdrop against which all alternatives, from al Qaeda to antiglobalization protestors, are treated as spores of terror. It only takes a minor adjustment of vision, a gestalt shift that brings globalization rather than terror into critical focus, to see in this picture the endgame of globalization, war as a means of securing the remnants of a supposedly preglobalized world. Masquerading as a war on terrorism, it is actually a war devoted to the completion of the geoeconomic globalism of the American Empire. The geographical focus on the Middle East is crucial, not simply because of oil but also because of the fundamental challenges emanating from this region toward the American Empire. During its second moment of global

prologue

/

xv

ambition around World War II, the United States took over from Britain and France as the major world power in the Middle East, but its power eroded almost before it was fully established. Especially in the decade after 1973, U.S. power diffused significantly: OPEC asserted its leverage over oil resources in ways that enriched the multinationals but marginalized the U.S. state; the 1978–79 siege of the embassy in Tehran and the accompanying revolution that ousted the shah represented an ignominious defeat for U.S. policy; this was compounded by the bombing of the U.S. Embassy and marine compound in Beirut several years later. At the same time, however, various strands of Islamic fundamentalism were challenging pan-Arab or Arab nationalist models of state making that were influenced to a greater or lesser degree by Western models of development. In an effort to reassert control and in the context of the cold war, the U.S. government opportunistically supported a wide variety of governments and movements. Against Iran they armed and subsidized the Iraqi government of Saddam Hussein; against the Soviet Union they likewise supported fundamentalist movements such as the Taliban and Osama bin Laden’s al Qaeda. For the latter, the major targets were not only foreign intruders but also the “capitulationist,” Westernized governments of various states in the region, including Saudi Arabia. In the process, the United States fueled rather than blunted the crystallization of Islamic alternatives to the vision of globalization being promulgated from Washington and New York, London, Tokyo, and Frankfurt. The attacks of 11 September 2001 provided the opportunity for the United States to challenge and eliminate the threat of that alternative globalism. As the enormity of ambition for an American Empire comes more fully into view again after 2001, so does the impossibility of its fruition. A good war on terror would be one that reduced rather than increased the terror people feel around the world, but that has not happened. If anything, for ordinary people, the opposite is true. These are neoliberal times, we are told, and the central contradiction of neoliberalism pits the state against the private market. There is no reason to think that terror would not accommodate itself to the same practical and ideological grooves. This raises the prospect of a neoliberal global economy cross-cut and always potentially disrupted by a contest between the private-market terror of the al Qaeda sort on one side and state-sponsored terror of the U.S., British, Israeli, or Iraqi sort on the other. Yet at the same time, even as expanded conflict looms, the United States finds itself more isolated on the global stage than at any previous moment. From the start the U.S. war has been transparent to the masses of Latin America, Africa, and much of Asia, and by early 2002 popular opposition had also spread in Europe and even North America. As with the earlier

xvi

/

prologue

moments of U.S. globalism, the internal contradictions are glaring and the planetary projection of power is increasingly hollow. Today’s nationalist globalism has evolved from the days when Isaiah Bowman, the geographer, foreign-policy adviser, and protagonist of this book, advanced as a U.S.-centered internationalism. As in prior moments of U.S. global assertion, however, the nationalism at whose behest the global reach is sought eventually ceases to be capable of carrying that ambition. There is a dramatic, political mismatch of geographical scales. Much as with the denouement of the second moment of U.S. globalism in the tawdry nationalism that surrounded the struggles to set up the United Nations, the national scale is no longer a sufficiently sturdy vehicle for the payload of globalism. It is not, as some would have it, that the national is being crushed under the weight of the global. Rather, the burden of the global simply overflows the capabilities of any national container. On 11 September itself, airports were closed, the borders with Canada and Mexico were closed, currency markets and stock markets were all closed. The ensuing “war on terrorism,” pursued to make the world safe for “our values,” brought with it a whole architecture of “homeland security” that seriously hinders, prevents, or delays the movement of goods, people, capital, and ideas into and out of the United States. Not just air travelers but also Wall Street financial transactions, truckers on the Mexican and Canadian borders, senior citizens crossing to Windsor, Ontario, for a day’s gambling or to Nogales for cheap prescriptions are all disrupted. The imposition of steep tariffs on steel imports, unprecedented subsidies for U.S. farm exports, U.S. rejection of the Kyoto environmental accords, sabotage of the Durban world conference on racism, refusal to sign the International Declaration on the Rights of the Child, and withdrawal from the International Criminal Court in the first years of the twenty-first century all intensify the increased isolation of the national state that has done most to champion globalization. Just as an isolationist U.S. Senate rejected Woodrow Wilson’s global Monroe Doctrine, and as the clumsy effort a quarter century later to make the United Nations an instrument of U.S. policy hobbled that institution, U.S. nationalism is again the Achilles’ heel of American globalism. After 2001, the American right increasingly celebrates the rise to empire, taking back the triumphant language of the first moment of global ambition a century earlier. History may indeed be repeating itself as farce. The 11th of September 2001 may well come to symbolize not the final flowering of the American Empire but the first intimation of its defeat. The real issue, of course, is the level of destruction that will be visited on the

prologue

/

xvii

world in this contest of terrors before the disintegration of empire becomes a reality and a more just and more humane internationalism can be put in its place.

This book is about a period, a place, and a person. The period is the American Century, which I take to have been announced in 1898, even if it was not recognized and named until decades later. The place is the United States, where the government, corporate institutions, and ruling class sought a twentieth-century globalism best conceived as an American Empire. The person is the geographer Isaiah Bowman. The central argument is that the American Century, understood as a specific historical period, was built with an equally specific but largely unseen geography and that revealing the historical geography of the American Empire tells us much about its politics. Isaiah Bowman was not only a son of the American Century; he was also a primary architect of its geography, and re-visioning the place and the period through his work provides an incomparable window on that historical, political, and economic geography. This book is a history of geography, but even more a geography of history. By the end of the nineteenth century, U.S. economic expansion was outstripping its European rivals; yet, the amateur adventurism of 1898 notwithstanding, the United States had no significant territorial empire beyond its national boundaries, and this put the country in a precarious and highly contradictory position. The opportunities for economic expansion were dramatically circumscribed precisely when expansion was most urgent. The need for economic expansion was increasingly out of sync with the very limited possibilities for direct territorial expansion. Short of a global challenge to European colonialism and a direct confrontation with anti-colonial movements, it was increasingly clear that a wholly different geographical strategy would have to underlie continued American expansionism; economic stagnation and depression loomed as the fateful price for geographical inertia. Fin-de-siècle America had many vocal advocates for colonialism, but this was not the strategy that won out. Rather than following the European model, the United States fostered its own geography of economic expansion.1 This argument about the synchrony and dislocation of geographical and economic expansion in the twentieth century lies at the heart of this book. The American Empire, which grasped for global power at the beginning, middle, and end of the twentieth century, was built on a strategic recalibration of geography with economics, a new

xviii

/

prologue

orchestration of world geography in the pursuit of economic accumulation. It is commonly assumed that the closure of not only continental but global frontiers in the last two decades of the nineteenth century, together with rapid innovations in transportation and communications, implied the declining importance of geography in the pace and pattern of political and economic development. Indeed, the idea of the American Century portends a quintessentially liberal victory over geography, as distinct from the nineteenth-century European empires, whose conservatism was integral to geographical conquest: the American Century would seem to take us “beyond geography.” Histories of American expansionism and of U.S. foreign relations written after the 1910s have generally expressed quite anemic geographies. The discipline of economics, which rose to prominence among the social sciences after World War II, operates on the broad assumption of an aspatial world, in which spatial difference (in contrast with temporal) is of trivial importance. The institutional weakness of academic geography itself in U.S. universities through the middle six or seven decades of the twentieth century provides further evidence of this “beyond geography” presumption. This book challenges that presumption. In its success as much as its failure, the American Century was an inherently geographical project whose contours are largely disguised by the self-justifying loss of geographical vision that dominated U.S. intellectual and popular conceptions of the world throughout most of the century. This “lost geography” is no mere oversight, and its redress is of much more than academic interest. The deracination of geography in the liberal globalist vision associated with the United States in the twentieth century abetted a broad ideological selfjustification for the American Empire insofar as the submergence of geographical difference effected an elision of political difference both at home and around the globe. A flattened geography enabled a politics flattened to the lowest common denominator of American globalism. A central goal of this book is therefore to begin to reconstruct the broad contours of the geography of the American Empire. The use of the language of “empire” to describe U.S. globalism may seem strange or strained. After all, did the United States not oppose European colonialism as part of its own global ambition? The rationale for treating U.S. power as imperial is bound up with my central arguments and will, I hope, emerge more fully as the book unfolds, but an initial clarification is probably in order here. In the wake of globalization, talk of empire has again become fashionable, but in a way that pictures empire as

prologue

/

xix

total, spaceless, devoid of any significant geography.2 But power always resides in place, and as the events of 11 September 2001, and the subsequent war, made clear the geography of global power can be incisive. For all that it also traverses old boundaries with increasing ease, power always expresses spatiality. The assumption of a deterritorialized globalism is a symptom of the lost geography, captured by the pretensions of globalization, rather than an antidote to them. While fully recognizing that contemporary global power is not rooted exclusively in one nation and that the structure and importance of the national state system is transforming rapidly, I want to insist on the “American Empire” to emphasize the fact that global power is disproportionately wielded by a ruling class that remains tied to the national interests of the United States. Although this work is largely historical, I hope its contemporary relevance will be clear. The book begins in the 1890s, a period that has remarkable similarities to our current period, more than a century later. The increased power of finance capital, the international expansion of foreign direct investment, and the political importance of trade were as much hallmarks of the late nineteenth century as they are of the early twenty-first. By unearthing the constitutive geography of the American Century, we can bring into sharp relief the formative moments of the American Empire under the contemporary banner of globalization. The period leading up to World War I and the crucible of political-economic change following World War II represent two earlier moments in the assertion of U.S. globalism, preludes to contemporary globalization. I began work on this much-interrupted but always-riveting research while still a graduate student, and its initial focus was comparatively narrow. In the late 1970s and into the 1980s several geography departments were closed at prominent U.S. universities, and the discipline I was preparing to enter seemed to be drowning in self-pity. No one, it was bemoaned, understood the vital mission of this “queen of the sciences,” as an older generation liked to conceive their vocation. In Scotland, where I grew up and attended a university, the geography tradition was staid yet respected, so I found the pretension of the “queen of the sciences” view as alien as the self-pity. These contradictory self-conceptions seemed to bear an uncanny resemblance to Kant’s dualistic treatment of geography. Geography for Kant commanded the study of space and therefore a half of all knowledge, sharing with history (the study of time) a hegemony over scholarship. Yet it was also merely a propaedeutic—an exercise preparatory to more serious study. Neither Kant’s contradictory treatment of geography nor the latterday mix of pretension and pathos rang true for me. It was all too obvious

xx

/

prologue

that geographical knowledges played a very powerful political role in many societies; geography had always been a handmaiden to the state, often in quite insalubrious ways. I wanted to expose the social power of U.S. geography in the twentieth century, yet I also wanted to offer a critique of the geographical tradition that would strip away the sense of inferiority that obscured the discipline’s genuine intellectual and practical power for many geographers. I was working through these ideas at Johns Hopkins University, where I was vaguely aware that the geographer Isaiah Bowman had served as president in the 1930s and 1940s and had played a prominent role in U.S. foreign policy. His “nineteenth-century liberalism,” as the student newspaper put it, lived on as campus myth more than three decades after his retirement. I was delighted to find that the library across the quadrangle held the largest collection of his papers, and these quickly revealed the reach and extent of his influence, not just in foreign policy but also in education and science policy. Here was a geographer whose entire life and work were dedicated to the unapologetic application of geographical ideas to global politics and who became such a prominent public figure that he was virtually a household name over several decades, treated in the press first as “Woodrow Wilson’s geographer,” then as Roosevelt’s. One of the first documents I came across included a statement from cold war secretary of state Dean Acheson calling Bowman one of the principal architects of the United Nations. I was hooked. Could there be a better figure for peeling away the power of geographical ideas in practice? Fascination alternated with puzzlement: Why was Bowman’s story not better known? Even geographers had little, if any, sense of his doings beyond a summary recitation of his heroic status in the discipline. Where was the deeper analysis and assessment? No one more than Isaiah Bowman applied the ideas of twentieth-century U.S. geography to public ends. Across an extraordinary range of foundational events, he was “present at the creation” of the American Century. The obscure geography of the American Empire is therefore uniquely revealed in his career. Bowman was above all else an academic entrepreneur. Personally, he could be charming when the context called for it but stringent, even ruthless, during his habitual fourteen- or sixteen-hour work days; as one of his few friends conceded, he was hardly the kind of man to choose as a fishing partner. Insistently practical, he embraced the transition to the American Century as a matter of evolutionary destiny. From Paris in 1919 to the San Francisco United Nations conference in 1945, he understood both the necessity and the limitations of geographical solutions to the obstacles facing American globalism. His geography changed with the century.

prologue

/

xxi

The Bloomsbury biographer Lytton Strachey famously held that “discretion is not the better part of biography.” Another popular dictum has it that one cannot spend the time and effort involved in writing a biography without coming to admire one’s subject. However, this book is not a biography in any traditional sense; although I use the career of Isaiah Bowman to reveal the geography of the American Century, I am less interested in what motivated Bowman than in how he and his colleagues applied geographical ideas to the construction of empire and how that empire, in turn, fashioned certain kinds of geographical ideas. By playing the chords of Bowman’s life, I am trying to suggest the larger historical, geographical, and political symphony that both nurtured and employed him. Along the way I have found myself forced to make some concessions to biography, for better or worse, and in so doing I have found Strachey’s insistence on candor reassuring. I hope it will be clear that there is little danger of my converting Bowman into any kind of a hero. My intention to avoid biography notwithstanding, I am acutely aware of the danger of producing a “great man” history in which the geography of the American Century is rendered the product of a few privileged men making history behind closed doors. As much as the ruling classes in the twentieth-century United States amassed extraordinary global power in relatively few hands and tried hard to operate in such a fashion, the whole point of this book is that the geography of the American Century, scrupulously if at times chaotically planned, did not come to fruition in anything like its intended shape. American globalism was frustrated in part by other “great men,” of course, but it also ran up against political, economic, and cultural realities that national leaders and governments could not wave away, and it came up against ordinary women and men who in various ways and at specific times confronted or ignored the ruling powers so as to write history and geography their own way. Therefore, it became increasingly clear to me as I continued my research that the present book, even though not conceived this way in the beginning, was in many ways a companion volume to an earlier work. In my book Uneven Development, I attempted to derive a theory of uneven geographical development. The central argument was that the specific logics of capital accumulation embody equally specific geographies of economic expansion and that the unevenness of geographical development—between developed and underdeveloped areas on different spatial scales—owes not to geography in the old sense (differences in geographical endowment) but to the inherent logic of economic expansion per se. It was a book of heavy abstractions and theory, economic logics, and grand geographical processes, with little human touch

xxii

/

prologue

inspiring the uneven geographies it sought to explain. The present book is very much the other side of the same coin. It is light on logics and abstractions, and theory is generally unobtrusive; in contrast, after the first chapter it is heavy on historical detail and human drama. The story told here looks strikingly different from that of Uneven Development, but I hope readers will agree that it is sympathetic with that earlier argument. Since the 1980s there has been a gathering public and intellectual awareness that geographical knowledge is more complicated, more sophisticated, and more important than the widespread impression conveyed by map quizzes and appeals to geographical “influences.” From Congress to the media to the universities, people are beginning to catch up with Bowman’s sense that geography is continually and profoundly reinvented. The old field of diplomatic history and the history of foreign relations has also begun to revive, breaking out of its habitual role as a “ ‘hallelujah choir’ for empire,” aiming instead at a “global American history,”3 and this seems to provide an opening for a judicious respatialization of history. Rather than echoing the triumphalism of the American Century, therefore, this book attempts a critical if modest reconstruction of one aspect of the connection between geography and history so intently breached in the early years of the twentieth century. One overriding question has nagged at me throughout work on this book. If Bowman was such a prominent figure—a household name whose obituary graced the front page of the New York Times and drew a banner headline from the Baltimore Sun—why within a couple of decades did he fade into comparative obscurity? He figures in various histories of twentieth-century science and foreign policy but is curiously absent from others. Part of the explanation may be that geographers themselves have been very bad at writing their own history,4 but there is much more to it than that. It was only when I began to explore the connections between Bowman and the emerging American Empire that this personal puzzle concerning Bowman’s legacy began to make sense in a wider frame. He is comparatively invisible today precisely because of the sharpness with which he expressed the contradictions of liberalism from inside, yet in one respect against, the vortex of power, a subject positioning that makes him a unique witness to the politics and history of the American Century.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

So deeply did the conundrum of a lost geography churn inside me that “I either had to write the book,” as Hermann Hesse once said, “or be reduced to despair.” It took a long time, and the work has left me in massive intellectual debt. At Johns Hopkins, where the research began, I was lucky to have Reds Wolman and the late Abel Wolman, both of whom knew Bowman, to help guide my initial forays and give life to the archival detail. Historians Bob Kargon, John Higham, and Kathy Ogren helped orient me to a vast U.S. history literature that was foreign to me, John Boland talked extensively with me about the project, and many other teachers and friends enthusiastically discussed the project with me. But I also needed institutional help. Bowman placed a peculiar condition on his papers, housed at the M. S. Eisenhower Library, closing them entirely until 1975 and thereafter designating a large portion as “restricted.” Only scholars over the age of forty and with established “international reputations,” he stipulated, would be granted access. Since I began this work as a twenty-five-year-old graduate student I was precisely the kind of scholar Bowman sought to keep away from his legacy. I was therefore dependent on David Harvey— himself only a few years over forty at the time—to represent me as his research assistant. From the start David was enthusiastic and always supportive of this inquiry into geographical knowledge and its uses. The last laugh, of course, goes to Bowman himself insofar as the book comes to fruition somewhat after my own fortieth birthday.

xxiv

/

acknowledgments

I am very grateful to Robert G. Bowman of Lincoln, Nebraska. Bob invited me into his home, gave me access to the extensive materials he held from his father’s papers, let me work long days and nights in his basement, and housed me while I did this work. He was extremely generous with his time and reflections, and although there is much in my interpretation with which he has disagreed—and he will surely find more here to debate—I can only thank him for his wonderful openness, warmth, hospitality, and encouragement. I would also like to express my gratitude to all of the people, many of them no longer with us, who selflessly granted me interviews or wrote me their reflections about the people and events covered here. I should also register my debt to Allan Werrity, whose St. Andrews course first gave me a glimpse of the intellectual excitement that could inhere in the history of geography, despite the deadening ways in which this subject is usually taught. I have consulted numerous archival collections and would like to thank Carol Beecheno, Judy Gardner-Flint, Joan Gratton, Anne Gwyn, Lisa Minklei, Judy Morgan, Margaret Burri, and James Stimpert at the Archives and Special Collections in the Eisenhower Library in Baltimore. Doug MacManus helped guide me through the collections at the American Geographical Society and engaged me on many of the issues, and Peter Lewis and Mary Lynne Byrd have been equally welcoming. Thanks also to Janice Goldblum at the National Academy of Sciences archives, to Clark Elliot at Harvard, Barbara Narenda at the Peabody Museum at Yale, and to many other overworked but very helpful archivists and librarians, who did not always find the answers I needed but who made the work more fascinating anyway. Thanks too to Michael Watts and Alan Pred, who welcomed the book into their series, and to Stan Holwitz, Mary Severance, and Robin Whitaker at the University of California Press. My work has been supported by several grants and fellowships. A Mellon Foundation summer grant got me started at Hopkins, and a Spencer Foundation grant allowed me to expand the work and visit various manuscript collections; summer stipends from the Council for Research in the Social Sciences at Columbia University and from the Rutgers University Research Council helped continue the momentum. I am especially grateful for a Simon Guggenheim Fellowship in 1994–95, which allowed me to frame the entire work and complete a first draft. These grants and a research assistantship also allowed me to hire several graduate students— many now well on with their own careers—who have helped with the research: Karen DeBres, John Kasbarian, Peggy Newfield, Olivia Mitchell, Annie Zeidman, Tamar Rothenberg, James DeFillippis, Ruthie Gilmore,

acknowledgments

/

xxv

Paige West, and Cheryl Gowar. My thanks also to Michael Siegel for compiling the maps in chapter 3 and to Jason Hackworth for those in chapter 6. In addition, in the late 1980s and the 1990s I learned from and enjoyed the intellectual comradeship and support of many wonderful scholars: Pedro Caban, Susan Fainstein, Sue Gal, Lloyd Gardiner, Jason Hackworth Andy Herod, Dorothy Hodgson, Link Larson, Jim Livingston, John McClure, Marc Manganero, Don Mitchell, Fritz Nelson, Diane Neumaier, Rick Schroeder, Carolyn Williams, and Elvin Wyly. John Gillis afforded me a crucial year at the Center for Historical Analysis. Bruce Robbins invariably saw this project in strictly disciplinary terms, which helped me to frame it in such a way that defied this reading as best I could. More than anyone at Rutgers, George Levine, director of the Center for the Critical Analysis of Critical Culture, provided an extraordinary multidisciplinary home, without which this book would have been much poorer, and through thick and thin he has always been a generous and forthright supporter. Many friends and colleagues have contributed to this work with specific suggestions and have in very different ways lent support while I pursued it: Itty Abraham, John Agnew, Bob Beauregard, Liz Bondi, Eric Clark, Sue Cobble, Caroline Desbiens, Joe Doherty, Keya Ganguly, Anne Godlewska, Mike Heffernan, Briavel Holcomb, Paul Knox, David Lowenthal, Arthur Maass, Peter Marcuse, Sallie Marston, Janice Monk, Sheila Moore, Robert Newman, Gearóid Ó Tuathail, Gerry Pratt, Alan Pred, Ed Soja, and Marv Waterstone. John Paul Jones is a special gift on this earth, and I never stop learning from him. Tim Brennan’s rampaging intelligence periodically introduced new, critical arguments into the way I approached this project. At a crucial moment Julian Wolpert invited me to give a seminar at Princeton, which helped quicken my thinking about European geopolitics after World War I. Luca Muscarà shared some of his work on Jean Gottmann with me. Jorge Marconi suggested some excellent contextual readings and updates for the Andes chapter, and Briavel Holcomb also gave me comments on it. I am especially grateful to David Harvey and Derek Gregory, who very kindly agreed to read the manuscript in its entirety, gave me very helpful suggestions, and encouraged me about its worth as I struggled to see the forest for the trees. Several people have shown me parts of the world that figure into this story. I would like to thank Carmen Medeiros for Cochabamba and the Chapare, Claudio Minca for Rijeka, and Kirsten Johnson for La Paz. Some of the book was written in the woods of Lake Waubeeka in Connecticut— thanks Phyllis, thanks Marshall—where discussions with Jack Karan and Benjie and Edna Feldman gave a personal flavor to the cold war years. I was

xxvi

/

acknowledgments

able to spend part of the autumn of 1995 in the fishing village of Puerto Angel, Oaxaca, where the Buena Vista became not just home but also a place for concentrated writing. Adrian, Lourdes, Miguel, Rosa, Reina, Gladys, Gloria, and Carey all helped make it a wonderful and relaxed place to write, as did Sade, the lack of phone, fax, and e-mail, the gliding caciques announcing sundown, and the other aerial and aqueous wildlife that make the place a delight. Having come to the Graduate Center at the City University of New York in 2000, I feel lucky to have entered an extraordinary scholarly environment and have accumulated intellectual debts even faster than in the past. The opportunity to join the anthropology program there has provided the wonderful gift of a new career entwined in all sorts of challenging ways with my existing interests. Ida Susser is a long-time friend who always offers unselfish support and whose efforts, along with those of Louise Lennihan, made all the difference for me coming to the Grad Center. Talal Asad, Michael Blim, Tom McGovern, Shirley Lindenbaum, Don Robotham, Sunita Reddy, Jane Schneider, Stanley Aronowitz, David Chapin, Omar Dahbour, Peter Hitchcock, Setha Low, David Nasaw, Joan Richardson, Frances Fox Piven, Joe Glick, Ella Shohat, and Sharon Zukin have all welcomed me with ideas, support, and humor. At the Center for Place Culture and Politics I was lucky to have an extraordinary group of doctoral and faculty fellows to play with and to have Megan Schauer, April Burns, Mike Lamb, Laura Kaehler, Melis Ece, Denise Geraci, Kym Neck, Gerard Weber, and Jimmy Weir help me launch the center’s work. Julian Brash, Eliza Darling, Jeff Derksen, Kim Engber, Molly Doane, and David Vine are always intellectually challenging. The coming of David, Haydee, and Delfina to New York only multiplies the joy of this new community. As a scholar and a friend, whether on the eighth floor or at O’Reilly’s Bar, Bill Kelly is one of a kind, and as a university provost even more so. His vision energizes the Graduate Center. I owe Bill profound thanks for his confidence that something interesting can be built at the Center for Place Culture and Politics and only hope I can live up to the expectations. And talking of O’Reilly’s, thanks Owen, thanks John, thanks Sandra. My own life in the belly of the beast has now spanned a quarter of the American Century, has taken me from my original family in Dalkeith (Nancy and Ron), BlythBridge (Sheila, Andrew, Douglas, and Donald), and West Saltoun (Derek, Rona, Catriona, Debbie, and Euan). They give this book a perspective they probably can’t realize. Some very special people have also adopted me here: Arthur and Susan Katz, Phyllis Katz and Marshall Feigin, Gary Katz and Maggie Magee. Actually, the adoption was

acknowledgments

/

xxvii

forced on them by Cindi Katz, to whom I dedicate this book. She has lived with it in the form of my messy study for more than half its life. Late dinners, missed movies, dances dodged, parties missed, walks not taken, and trips postponed only begin to tell the toll. As with everything else we do, however, we suffered the toll together as Cindi messed up her study while striving to finish her own book, an inverse topography, in its way, of the American Empire. What I have learned from her would take another book, but I doubt I have the words to express what I hope she already knows. New York, August 2002

1 THE LOST GEOGRAPHY OF THE AMERICAN CENTURY

The story is told, perhaps apocryphally, that in May 1898 when William McKinley received the news that Commodore George Dewey had sailed into Manila Bay, routed the Spanish navy, and claimed the Philippines, the president was immediately jubilant—but also quickly puzzled. Although McKinley had authorized Dewey’s mission, he now fumbled with a map and eventually admitted to a friend that he “could not have told where those darned islands were within two thousand miles.”1 No such geographical uncertainty haunted Oliver North, the U.S. Army colonel who, in the closing days of the cold war, masterminded the Iran-Contra conspiracy. North’s surreptitious Iranian arms sales underwrote the terrorist campaign by anticommunist Contras against Nicaragua’s Sandinista government. In a related fund-raising gambit, North presented slide shows to horrified upper-class matrons, designed to convince them that Nicaragua was a deadly threat to American democracy. His opening slide was a map: A foreshortened United States bled off the top edge of the screen while a large, dark Nicaragua loomed from the map’s base into the Gulf of Mexico, menacing the Texas coast. The United States was overprinted with a paternal bald eagle while Nicaragua was emblazoned with a large red hammer and sickle. North’s imaginative political cartography conveniently suppressed the fact that Nicaragua is actually smaller than Florida, had a lower population than Alabama, and could have seated its entire army in the University of Michigan’s football stadium with a bevy of seats left over.

2

/

lost geography of the american century

These two events may be seen as bookends of an American Century that began, in political if not strictly calendrical terms, with the ill-founded colonial adventurism of 1898. They highlight two central themes of this book. The first theme concerns the development of American globalism through the twentieth century. While “globalization” came to overwhelm all other ways of thinking about the future after the 1980s, U.S. globalism was actually hatched over many decades and bore an American imprimatur from the start. Coining the expression “the American Century” in 1941, millionaire magazine publisher Henry Luce already recognized U.S. hegemony as an accomplished fact, but as his choice of historical periodization suggests, American globalism was even then decades old.2 In fact, its origins in traditional colonial conquest notwithstanding, the globalism that has captured economic strategies and world visions today, and simultaneously come under fervent attack, represents a long-term strategic rebuttal of European colonialism and anticolonial movements alike. Simultaneously a precursor and a successor to Soviet socialism, American globalism also supersedes the two-hundred-year-old nexus of world power connecting European states and their colonies. The strategies and failures, accidents and discontinuities of emerging U.S. power in the first half of the twentieth century authored an indispensable prelude to post-1980s globalization and laid out an early blueprint for today’s global ambition. The second theme concerns the equivocal role of geography in this emerging American Empire. Where McKinley struggled with the world map, North deployed it with rapier ideological efficiency. This should not be taken as symbolic of some historical shift from a broad American ignorance of geography in 1898 to an apparent enlightenment a century later. If anything, the opposite may be true: pollsters at the beginning of the twentyfirst century routinely record the geographical ignorance of the American populace at an all-time high. Rather, the journey from casual global assumption to intense geographic paranoia, from imperial fumbling to a reallife Dr. Strangelove, expresses a central shift in the political and economic meaning of geography in the American Empire. Even as U.S. globalism was gathering power in the early decades of the twentieth century, a certain way of understanding the world geographically was being submerged. Indeed, one of the definitive presumptions of the American Century, a presumption that built to a crescendo by the 1990s, is that this new globalism leads to “the end of geography.” “The end of geography,” explains the erstwhile chief economist of the American Express Bank, “refers to a state of economic development where geographical location no longer matters in finance.”3 In broader terms, the replacement of European by American

lost geography of the american century

/

3

global power in the twentieth century presented itself simultaneously as a victory over geography and a replacement of Old World territorial inheritances by the New World rule of moral and economic principle. These two themes, the concerted rise of U.S. globalism and a lost geographical sensibility, are intricately interwoven; their connections are neither simple nor linear. For example, a good case could be made that on the cusp of American globalism in 1898, the heavily immigrant American populace knew as much as, if not more than, its leaders knew about geography. Had they been inclined, early Philippine migrants to California could have helped McKinley with his map. But today, even amid unprecedented global migration, the opposite may be true. Popular geographical illiteracy in the United States contrasts starkly with the immense governmental resources devoted to geographical intelligence. In the 1980s the Defense Mapping Agency alone employed a reported nine thousand people, far outstripping any civilian counterpart, and was the major single employer of graduating geography majors. Periodic incidents of official cartographic ignorance are the exceptions that prove the rule: the 1999 bombing of the Chinese Embassy in Belgrade by U.S. warplanes was explained away in Washington as a mapping error, whereas skeptics around the world refused to believe that such a powerful geographical intelligence apparatus could be so cartographically incompetent. This presents us with an acute contradiction. The advent of the American Century made management of global geography an increasingly vital endeavor, and over many decades the U.S. government built an elaborate if inchoate bureaucracy for the task. The State Department and the Central Intelligence Agency, the Department of Defense and the National Security Administration (as well as U.S.-inspired international agencies such as the United Nations, the World Bank, and the International Monetary Fund) all maintain well-staffed geographical sections or their equivalent. The National Imagery and Mapping Agency (NIMA), which absorbed the Defense Mapping Agency in the early 1990s, represents a kind of central geographical nervous system for U.S. global strategy.4 Yet the very success of this American globalism, built in no small part upon powerful geographical intelligence, has spawned a quite contradictory public reality, namely the eclipse of geography as a discourse of global power. Economic and cultural globalization, it is widely held, transcends old constraints of geography, locational difference, and national boundaries. Geography here survives as nostalgia. How are we to account for this contradiction: the institutional power of geographical intelligence amid its broader cultural eclipse at the apex of the

4

/

lost geography of the american century

American Century? Conspiracy theorists during the Vietnam War surmised that the geographical ignorance of the American people was deliberate government strategy designed to give national rulers maximum freedom in military and economic policy: when people are clueless about other places, they rarely object to their exploitation or bombing. Conversely, it has been argued that with the face of the earth largely mapped by the early years of the twentieth century, questions of imperial geography gravitated from the conceptual, exploratory, and imaginative to the descriptive, technocratic, and routine; scientific discovery gave way to mundane management. There is some truth in each of these explanations, but neither captures what I hope to demonstrate here, namely that far from being irrelevant, geography was profoundly important to the methodical construction of an American Empire that did indeed see itself as beyond geography. As the territoriality of power, geography is as important to American hegemony today as it was to European hegemony, but in a radically different way. The absolute geography of territorial possession and control that anchored eighteenth- and nineteenth-century European expansionism is certainly of less central importance now, but such a narrow conception hardly exhausts our sense of geography. In the American Century, as we shall see, a far more fluid and relational geometry has been thoroughly constitutive of global power. Marx and Engels famously wrote in 1848 that a specter was haunting Europe, and that specter was communism. A century and a half later, a new specter haunts the entire world: globalization. This expanded geography is not accidental insofar as the capital accumulation that undergirds so-called globalization can no longer be contained or even organized on the national scale. Globalization is less a new specter, therefore, than an old one reinvented on a higher scale. As its name suggests, globalization is a quintessentially geographical issue, although of course it is many other things as well. To the extent that the geography of the American Century remains obscure, the origins, outlines, possibilities, and limits of what today is called globalization will also remain obscure. There is no way to understand where the global shifts of the last twenty years came from or where they will lead without understanding how, throughout the twentieth century, U.S. corporate, political, and military power mapped an emerging empire. If this book is primarily historical, its main purpose is to provide a missing perspective on the geography of contemporary global power. First and foremost, though by no means exclusively, “globalization” was made in America and was built around U.S. interests and ideologies, but it was also established from the beginning of the twentieth century rather than simply at its end.

lost geography of the american century

/

5

the end of geography, or geographical parallax+ The rise of the American Empire was the most commanding event in the political and cultural economy of the twentieth century, and as the 11 September catastrophe demonstrates, it casts a long shadow over the twentyfirst. In retrospect we can identify three formative moments in the U.S. rise to globalism. A barely formed nation at the end of the nineteenth century with a dramatically expanding industrial economy, the United States flexed military-geographical muscle and supranational ambition in the acquisitive, classically colonial wars of 1898, but with entry into World War I and the promise of Woodrow Wilson’s League of Nations, a different and more ambitious global amplitude was announced. This was the first formative moment, connecting 1898 with Wilson’s dream of a global Monroe Doctrine. But it was a dream deferred. The second moment came with the next world war. Luce’s announcement of the American Century may have seemed ambitious, even brazen, in 1941, but by war’s end the ascendancy of U.S. capital and culture seemed assured. However truncated and transformed by anticolonial struggles and the cold war, it was this American globalism that flowered after 1945. But that era too was short-lived. After the 1970s, with U.S. power facing stringent global competition (political as well as economic), scholars began to perceive the closure or at least a shortening of the American Century. Outmaneuvered in Vietnam and Nicaragua and held hostage in Iran, the United States also suffered serious economic decline. The Japanese and German economies threatened U.S. control of finance and markets, deep domestic deindustrialization followed stiff competition from the low-wage economies in Asia and Latin America, and U.S. city centers were devastated as capital was sucked to the suburbs.5 Much of the global competition was actually U.S.-financed and funneled profits back to the United States, but this was beside the point. The postwar period of U.S. superiority waned; uneven development now seemed to work increasingly against the United States rather than in its favor. No sooner did that U.S. decline seem assured, however, than the picture changed again. The partial internationalization of many production systems and labor markets; the emergence of secondary and tertiary financial markets around the world since the 1970s; the greater integration and deregulation of previously national financial markets; the wilting of the Japanese economic challenge in the 1990s; the aggressive restructuring of the U.S. economy; and the implosion of official communism after 1989: all these developments made the mounting death notices for the American

6

/

lost geography of the american century

Century conspicuously premature. The smashing of the Berlin Wall and the modern-day sacking of Baghdad two years later were heralded in Washington in the very same language used by both Woodrow Wilson and Franklin Roosevelt: it was, said the elder George Bush, the advent of a “new world order.” “Make no mistake,” announced an ex–assistant secretary of the treasury in 1994: “a capitalist revolution is sweeping the world,” and the United States is comfortably in its vanguard.6 This is the third formative moment in the U.S. rise to globalism. It encouraged Bill Clinton, in his 1999 State of the Union address, to envisage a “next American Century,” and it undergirded the so-called war on terrorism after 2001. The self-congratulatory geography of this capitalist revolution was global, and its language, utopian. Francis Fukuyama proclaimed the “end of history,” while Margaret Thatcher insisted “there is no alternative” to global capitalism. Capitalism, Western democracy, and Hollywood had won. Not just the end of history but also the end of geography seemed to follow from the new world order. In business schools throughout the United States and East Asia and in financial board rooms around the world, the new message for the 1990s held that a borderless world now prevailed, and nation-states were fatally weakened by new global flows of capital, information, people, and ideas.7 The rise of new financial markets and their virtually instantaneous technological accessibility rendered space, place, and borders superfluous. In the symptomatically Americanized tones of a 1997 British telecom advertisement, “Geography is history.” Hatched from the rarified personal experiences of a small coterie of financial executives, traders, and cybersleuths and nurtured by a more widespread revolution in electrical, computer, and televisual communications, this assumption of a borderless world is quite literally utopian in the sense that it assumes or anticipates a spaceless world, and it has migrated well beyond the borders of its own significance. It has more progressive variants, as in Manuel Castells’s powerful claim that the world now comprises a space of flows, a network society, rather than a space of places. And it has become a leitmotiv of globalized culture as well as finance. For French postmodernist Jean Baudrillard, the “end of geography” is the apogee of dialectical critique, a utopia already achieved in and as America. Even the cultural critic Paul Virilio finds himself in the surprising position of mirroring finance capital when he too declares “the death of geography.”8 The puzzling thing is that this powerful “end of geography” rhetoric is emerging alongside quite antithetical trends. Since the early twentieth century, geography as an academic discipline in the United States has declined consonant with the fortunes of geography as a discourse of power.

lost geography of the american century

/

7

Since the 1980s, however, a forceful reassertion of geographical consciousness has been ringing through political, cultural, and especially academic institutions. Even at the hearth of the American Empire, the U.S. Congress in 1987 established an annual “Geography Awareness Week” in response to polls demonstrating lamentable popular ignorance of geography. Two years later the ex–secretary of defense Caspar Weinberger appealed to Harvard University to initiate a widespread reintroduction of geography in schools and universities. (Harvard did not immediately oblige but symptomatically, perhaps, has reintroduced geography teaching in the curriculum of its Business School and School of Government.) Historians, economists, and other scientists have begun to rediscover geography too, albeit often in quite determinist tones.9 Even more powerfully, the so-called cultural turn in the humanities and social sciences, from Michel Foucault to feminism, from post-structuralism to postmodernism, has been underwritten by a broad deployment of spatial metaphors, making the turn simultaneously cultural and spatial. Oxford literary critic Terry Eagleton has captured this shift, announcing that geography, “which used to be about maps and chaps, now looks set to become the sexiest discipline of all.”10 National Geographic Magazine went further: it sponsored millennium-ending radio, television, and Internet programs proclaiming the twentieth century to have been “the geographic century.” By one account, then, the American Century took us beyond geography; by another, it was the geographic century. This contradiction between a spaceless and a spatially constituted American globalism is latent in the global history of the twentieth century. It rose to the surface at crucial points, was strongest during the formative moments of the American Empire, and points to the powerful necessity of understanding the preludes to globalization in a geographical register. Claims concerning the “end of geography” express less the realities of a new world order than a certain ideological apprehension about how the future will turn out. They issue during periods of particularly intense spatial transformation (such as “globalization”) accompanied by wide public interest in the connections between economic and political change, and they obscure rather than illuminate the very real geographical shifts that have framed the history and the politics of the American Empire. The pretense of an end to geography is symptomatic of a certain self-flattery of the American Century and provides a distorted, one-dimensional perspective on the origins of U.S. globalism, its trajectory, and its politics. If, as two historians assert, there has been a “long and debilitating separation of geography from history,”11 twentieth-century U.S. diplomatic

8

/

lost geography of the american century

and foreign relations histories exemplify this shortcoming. These histories have generally expressed rather than countered assumptions about the end of geography, reading the aspatiality of history back into the past.12 Until recently, the great debates in this field involved a contest between idealist and realist interpretations of U.S. global history. For the so-called idealists, U.S. foreign policy can be understood as an expression of the ideals of Americanism and the exercise of U.S. power in the name of liberal ideals and political democracy. “Realists,” on the other hand, were more inclined to emphasize naked power and national self-interest as the salient forces in global change, seeing the world as a chessboard of strategic national actions. If the idealist position is explicitly nongeographical, the realist position engages only the most trivial sense of geographical space. Geopolitical calculation is integral to the realist purview, but here global space is treated with a simplicity and absolutism that is continuous with nineteenthcentury Europe or indeed McKinley’s colonialism. This vision is appropriate for the period of nation-state building, when states across the world scrambled to claim and map out the squares they could call their own on the global chessboard, but it has only periodic and superficial applicability to the geography of the American Century. Much as they persevere in many quarters, both realist and idealist visions are antiquated and inadequate for the history of twentieth-century global power, not least because they are blind to the geography of that power or present it in highly deracinated form. U.S. global power is rooted in a much more complicated reconfiguration of geography, economy, and politics. Of course the idealist-realist paradigm has been challenged by historians, and it is symptomatic that when more progressive “revisionist” histories of U.S. foreign relations began to appear in the latter decades of the twentieth century, they brought a tentative respatialization of the language of foreign relations that abridged the triumphalism of Luce’s “American Century.”13 The revisionist insistence on a twentieth-century American “empire” was subversive insofar as it threatened a cherished fiction of American innocence. Various “anticonquest” ideologies of twentieth-century Americanism—Luce’s among them—worked hard to make “America” and the political geographical implications of “empire” seem mutually incompatible.14 But the revisionist respatialization of foreign relations history has itself been partial and largely implicit.15 The American rise to globalism is still viewed almost exclusively from the single axis of historical change without benefit of the parallel axis of geographical change. It is axiomatic in physics that an object cannot be located precisely if viewed along only a single axis;

lost geography of the american century

/

9

precise location requires at least one other axis of observation. Applied to astronomy, this principle of parallax holds that an object viewed along one axis is displaced, changes position as an additional axis of observation is added. My goal here is something analogous. Existing economic histories of global transformation habitually lack the vital parallax that a geographical sensibility brings. In many ways this book is about establishing that missing geographical parallax. It not only redresses the lost geographical perspectives of the era, but, more important, it also reveals the powerful continuity that connects globalization after the 1980s with the frustrated globalism of Yalta and the United Nations more than four decades earlier and with Wilson’s 1919 ambition for a new world order premised on a global Monroe Doctrine. The continuity of these events still overshadows the discontinuities.16 Further, just as in astronomy, the addition of geographical parallax does not simply add a missing dimension or introduce a new “factor” in an already received history; it displaces the object of study and thereby transforms it. The point here is not simply to spatialize history, to write a “spatial history.” Reconceiving the geography inherent in the history but hidden in the historical narrative irrevocably transforms the history itself. Let me offer some broad strokes of this argument via an examination of the contradictory geographies of each of the three moments American imperial assertion.

the first moment: “ the geographical pivot of history ” The lost geography of the American Century is all the more puzzling because it contrasts sharply with what came before. A little intellectual and political history helps put the issue in perspective. For European settlers in North America from the seventeenth into the nineteenth century, the seeming emptiness of the continent was the “crucial founding fiction.” To them, “America did not connote society, or history,” argues Myra Jehlen, so much as geography.17 It was a cruel fiction of course, dependent on the violent, continent-wide erasure and spatial ghettoization of the Native American population, but this bloody social geography of frontier expansion was the substance on which ideals of American democracy and destiny were built. History was not irrelevant in this social movement, but it was circumscribed by the strict temporality (and geography) of the past. History was the old country while the future was inscribed in the furrows, vistas, and struggles of the worked American landscape. Thus for Jefferson and many other intellectuals of the time, thrilling to the success of the Revolutionary War, histor-

10

/

lost geography of the american century

ical change was quickly seen as a malady; progress beyond Europe was already achieved via migration, and further historical change could be inimical to the eighteenth-century liberal absolutism on which the new republic was founded. Change was conceived more in terms of geographical expansion than social transformation. For Jefferson as for Jedediah Morse, author of the new nation’s first geographical and historical compendium, The Universal American Geography (1797), history was geography.18 As U.S. national and eventually international power began to crystallize toward the end of the nineteenth century, much of this experience would be rewritten as a quintessentially historical story evolving over a fixed and therefore diminished geographical space, but the historicism of manifest destiny ideologies notwithstanding, geographical discourse remained powerful in the United States. One historian of science has argued that the discipline of geography “dominated the sciences in America” through “the first six or seven decades of the nineteenth century.”19 Whatever the exaggeration of this assessment, a broadly defined study of geography—including geology, geophysics, and agricultural science—surely was the appropriate science of spatial expansion in the new nation. Geography, America, and the nation-state were triplets born of the eighteenth-century Enlightenment, coming of age in the nineteenth century. From Jefferson’s own intensely geographical expansionism to the militarism of 1898, the discipline of geography should have been and partly was the American science par excellence. Highly historicized and largely inseparable from geology throughout most of the nineteenth century, it was socially in tune with its times. On the cusp of the twentieth century, during the first formative moment of the American Century, this tradition survived. The renowned historian Brooks Adams famously championed a “New Empire” on behalf of the United States. Adams perceived that the United States was poised to supplant Britain as the leading global power, and he saw the imminent transition quite starkly. His laconic enthusiasm of 1902 is worth quoting at length: In 1789 the United States was a wilderness lying upon the outskirts of Christendom; she is now the heart of civilization and the focus of energy. The Union forms a gigantic and growing empire which stretches half round the globe, an empire possessing the greatest mass of accumulated wealth, the most perfect means of transportation, and the most delicate yet powerful industrial system which has ever been developed. By the products of that system she must be brought into competition with rivals at the ends of the earth. The nation, in its corporate capacity,

lost geography of the american century

/

11

has to deal with problems domestic and foreign, more vast and more complicated than were ever before presented for solution. In a word, the conditions of the twentieth century are almost precisely the reverse of those of the eighteenth and yet the national organization not only remains unaltered, but is prevented from automatic adjustment by the provisions of a written document, which, in practice, cannot be amended.20

Apart from his disdain for the rigidity of an archaic constitution, two things stand out about this argument. In the first place, Adams understands the future of U.S. power in terms that weave history, economy, and geography into an integral global if nationally centered vision. Second, and indicative, it is an American “empire” to which this scion of a major aristocratic family aspires (his grandfather and great-grandfather had both been presidents). Writing only two years after Adams and from the opposite shore of the Atlantic, Halford Mackinder, the geographer, educator, and member of Parliament made an even more epochal connection among geography, economics, and history. In an article famous as much for its triumphant title as for the argument it presaged, Mackinder greeted the advent of the twentieth century as “the end of a great historic epoch.” Opened by the unprecedented European expansionism following Columbus’s transatlantic voyage, the four-centuries-long “Columbian epoch” now waned as the American, African, and Pacific frontiers dissipated, the last polar discoveries seemed imminent, and “the map of the world [had] been completed with approximate accuracy.” Indeed, less than one-seventh of the land and water surface of the earth remained unmapped, and claims to have reached both South and North Poles (however fraudulent in the case of the latter) were made within a decade.21 But as befitted Mackinder’s liberal Christianity, this ending was also a beginning: From the present time forth in the post-Columbian age, we shall again have to deal with a closed political system, and none the less that it will be one of world-wide scope. Every explosion of social forces, instead of being dissipated in a surrounding circuit of unknown space and barbaric chaos, will be sharply re-echoed from the far side of the globe, and weak elements in the political and economic organism of the world will be shattered in consequence. . . . Probably some half-consciousness of this fact is at last diverting much of the attention of statesmen in all parts of the world from territorial expansion to the struggle for relative efficiency.22

12

/

lost geography of the american century

For all its frequent quotation, the profundity of this passage is largely passed over. “The Geographical Pivot of History” certainly betrays a “triumphalism blind to its own precariousness,” in Gearóid Ó Tuathail’s felicitous phrase, and indulges a parallel if alternative ethnocentrism to that of Adams.23 But something more significant also inheres in Mackinder’s geographical pivot. To comprehend adequately the largely unremarked source of his originality, we need to take a brief excursion into philosophical conceptions of space. “Absolute space” refers to space conceived as a given field of action; natural and social events and processes happen “in space,” and their location can be measured according to some kind of coordinate system. Philosophically, absolute space derives from Descartes and Kant among others; in practical terms it can be thought of as the space of private property, national territoriality. It is the space of Newtonian physics and of national state making alike, the space of nineteenth-century European expansion and colonization as well as Euclidean geometry. Absolute space has become, in Western societies, the space of common sense. But there are other ways of conceptualizing space. Newton’s contemporary Leibniz, for example, proposed a “relational” conception of space according to which natural and social processes, objects, and events take ontological precedence over space. Accordingly, it is not that things happen in space but rather that space is the product of these processes and events. Resoundingly defeated in the Enlightenment, some elements of this notion of relational space reappear forcefully in the mathematics and physics of Ernst Mach and Albert Einstein at the turn of the twentieth century, and in highly modified form they became axiomatic to twentieth-century physical, mathematical, and cosmological sciences. Mackinder of course was a contemporary of Einstein, whose special theory of relativity was published the year after the “geographical pivot.” The entire period from the 1880s to the early 1920s, in fact, was an era not just of economic and political turmoil but also of profound and unprecedented creativity and transformation in scientific and cultural concepts, giving rise to “modern” art, music, literature, and architecture. Old conceptions of space and time were overthrown in many intellectual and artistic fields, and new ones installed. As Henri Lefebvre once put it, cribbing the ostentatiously exaggerated precision of Virginia Woolf, “Around 1910 a certain space was shattered.” The space of modern common sense and classical perspective, “a space thitherto enshrined in everyday discourse, just as in abstract thought,” was irrevocably altered.24 Geographer Gerry Kearns has made an explicit connection between the “closed space

lost geography of the american century

/

13

narratives” of this period and transformed conceptions of space and time.25 In political economic terms, this period marks a shift from what Michel Aglietta describes as an “extensive” mode of capital accumulation, in which economic expansion was dependent on extending the absolute social and spatial sway of capital, to an “intensive” mode of accumulation, in which the intensification of economic exploitation, in part via technological innovation, now held the key to economic growth.26 Returning to Mackinder, we see that the “geographical pivot” argument is certainly laden with predictable historical determinisms about geography in social and political affairs, reaching back to Rome and classical Greece. Among geographers, this 1904 article is typically identified as the first intimation of his famous heartland thesis, which helped form emerging twentieth-century political geography and geopolitics as a discourse of land power rather than sea power. Accordingly, Mackinder’s argument is thoroughly steeped in a traditional absolute conception of space. But just as certainly he was struggling toward something more profoundly significant than merely reproducing a “Cartesian absolutism” of global space. The progressive Mackinder extols the momentous implications of a shift from absolute “territorial expansion” to a “struggle for relative efficiency.” Irrevocable change heralded a new epoch. However ominously for his own liberal nationalism, the heartland thesis placed Germany and Russia at the geographical core of imminent world history, and this represented a cautious relativizing of spatial relations among different nations even as it reaffirmed the fixity of nation-states’ structures per se. But Mackinder’s true brilliance lay in glimpsing the broader relationality of geographical space in the coming twentieth century, the evolution from an absolute to a relational conception of space as foundational for global affairs. For “the first time,” he anticipated, this would allow a certain “correlation between the larger geographical and the larger historical generalizations.”27 Geography and history were becoming more, not less, entwined. He was quite explicit. The political economic system was now essentially closed, he reasoned; absolute geographical expansion was ending, and any “explosion of social forces” would not simply dissipate into distant space but would sharply re-echo around the globe. Social, political, and economic change increasingly inscribed a relational rather than an absolute global space. What Mackinder glimpsed in 1904 exploded in 1914. German socialist Rosa Luxemburg was only the most explicit to argue that when capitalist enterprises ran out of noncapitalist space to conquer and in which to invest surplus value, then capitalism itself would necessarily collapse.28 The limits to capital are ultimately geographical, and World War I brought the de-

14

/

lost geography of the american century

nouement, for Luxemburg. There were others at the time, however, who recognized that the decoupling of economic growth from absolute geographical expansion did not automatically mean the collapse of capitalism. Among these was a prescient Vladimir Lenin, who, drawing on the German geographer Alexander Supan and challenging Luxemburg directly, argued that while the colonial powers had “completed the seizure of the unoccupied territories on our planet,” so that “for the first time the world is completely divided up,” this implied no inevitability of capitalist collapse. Rather, Lenin argued, “in the future only redivision is possible.”29 An arch-anticommunist, Mackinder would have been horrified by the parallels between Lenin’s relational geography of capitalist expansion and his own. But Mackinder too was prescient. His notions of an “explosion of social forces” reverberating around the world and the “shattering” of weak elements in the global system anticipate not just World War I but also Lenin’s own revolution in Russia. The grammar of global power in this period was indisputably geographical, but the relevance of geography to social, economic, and political change was changing fundamentally. In the United States, 1898 effectively marked the end of national spatial expansion, even as the production of unabsorbed economic surplus continued. The intense coupling of history and geography so redolent of the period following the Revolutionary War began to disintegrate, and Frederick Jackson Turner’s famous declaration of the end of the frontier line was a symptom as much as a cause. Geography could no longer contain history, and while history as a social and political discourse was thus liberated to explore the social rather than natural origins of societal change, geography was relegated to the realm of the fixed. Much as history was identified with Europe, geography was reduced to the stage upon which the emergent American history happened. To phrase it in all starkness, the political economic, historical, and symbolic expansion of the United States outstripped its geography by the end of the nineteenth century, and the boundaries of European states were largely fixed. Whereas in the past, economic expansion was closely associated with and in large part accomplished through expansion in absolute geographical space, henceforth economic expansion would bear a much more complicated relationship to geographical change. Alongside the progressive triumphalism of the “geographical pivot of history,” therefore, a diametrically opposed sentiment also lurked. Then, too, there were fears of the “end of geography,” as the closure of absolute space provoked powerful ideological effects. It was to this period that Foucault gestured, citing Henri Bergson, when he asked famously how and

lost geography of the american century

/

15

when geography was banished to the realm of “the dead, the fixed, the undialectical, the immobile.”30 Nowhere was the ideological crisis more severe than in the United States, and the U.S. lawyer and diplomat J. H. Choate said it most bluntly. Mr. Choate was “troubled in regard to the future of the two great Geographical Societies in England and America, because it was perfectly clear,” he fretted, “that in a very short time all these [worldwide] boundary questions would be definitely and finally settled. . . . What would the London Geographical Society do when that end had been realized?”31 So powerfully mourned in the whole subsequent edifice of Turnerian history and replicated in myriad forms up to and including the contemporary nostalgia for old places in a globalizing world, this loss of vacant, conquerable space has provided an enduring wellspring for the antispatial imagination of the American Century. The contradiction between a spaceless and spatially constituted globalism took a very specific form in this period. Geography was either a pivot of history or its dregs. The dilemma facing the U.S. ruling classes in the 1890s was not primarily one of space, however, for all that it came to be expressed that way. The real dilemma lay in the overaccumulation of capital and surplus value by a rapidly industrializing national economy and the shrinking opportunities for its reinvestment domestically. This was not a uniquely American dilemma and had already been confronted in Europe, where economic expansion had run up against the boundaries of nationstates even as these states themselves were still in formation. The solution lay in expansion of national sovereignty over imperial possessions. Nascent English imperialism as early as the sixteenth century represented an almost seamless extension of the concurrent struggle to establish and delineate the still weak nation-state.32 The 1880s “scramble for Africa,” by contrast, represented a final territorial and economic aggrandizement in an already well-delineated global system of absolute national spaces. If the consummation of colonialism fueled European expansionism after the 1870s, it was hardly an available option for the United States two decades later. In the first place, the conferences of Brussels and Berlin in the mid-1880s had largely carved up the remaining sizable tracts of colonizable land in Africa and allocated virtually the entire continent to several European powers. In the second place, the territories of southern and central America, although certainly available to the United States under the Monroe Doctrine, were mostly, at least on paper, independent republics. Although this rarely hampered inveterate U.S. interference, up to and including the invention of a new country (Panama) in order to facilitate construction of a U.S.-controlled transisthmus canal, official colonization of

16

/

lost geography of the american century

independent republics was difficult to square with U.S. republicanism. Asian adventurism was tentative and expensive, and the colonial adventurism of 1898 garnered only the geographical crumbs of an already disintegrating Spanish Empire. The continued resort to economic expansion through geographical expansion was hardly available in the 1890s as a solution to the overaccumulation of capital. The outlines of globalism were achieved, in most respects, by the beginning, not the end, of the twentieth century. The resulting dislocation between economic growth and absolute geographies, appearing with the infancy of the American Century, created quite contradictory ambitions for geography and fears about its fate. When Woodrow Wilson sailed to Europe in December 1918, armed with a moralism that was distinctly American yet simultaneously universal, he optimistically expected that the Paris Peace Conference would be a geographical mopping-up exercise. In contrast with what he saw as the petty, avaricious geographical squabbles of the European nations, Wilson expected the conference to tidy up the world map in preparation for a new and higher stage of international society—a beneficent brotherhood of capitalist nations competing economically but peacefully while advancing the global good. More than anything, it was these high expectations for the 1919 Paris Peace Conference that seemed to promise a future beyond the closed frontier and a cemented connection between an emerging American Empire and the escape from geography. But the conference failed this antigeographical ambition, and the U.S. Senate recoiled at an apparently weakened national sovereignty implied by membership in the League of Nations. An explosion of bitter geopolitical claims followed, and eventually fascism and World War II. Be that as it may, this first moment of the American Century bears the distinct historical and geographical stamp of the contradiction between a world beyond geography, as Wilson dreamed of, and one in which geography was entrenched as a “pivot of history.” Partly as a result of efforts to resolve this contradiction in the process of managing capital accumulation, the twentieth century came to be marked by the systematic pursuit of geographically uneven development in a way that was wholly new. Although previous differences in levels and conditions of development obviously existed, they were less than systematic: for myriad reasons, economic development occurred in one place rather than another. Development in one place was not necessarily connected to development or lack of development somewhere else, even if such connections often obtained. After the crucial period from the 1890s to 1919, in the period that began Mackinder’s “closed global system,” this was no longer true, and the spatiality of eco-

lost geography of the american century

/

17

nomic development and decline became an increasingly direct expression of the social, economic, and political logics of capitalist expansion. Development and underdevelopment were no longer sporadically related but now functionally related. It is in this sense that uneven development as a systematic rather than a somewhat haphazard process became installed as the hallmark of twentieth-century economic expansion.33 Having posed the problem of a “new geography” in the post-Columbian era, Mackinder was unable to develop it. He did recognize the advent of a new “Empire of the World”—his term for globalization—but could not countenance, as Adams clearly foresaw, the United States’ laying claim to this global empire. That would take relationality much too far for this imperial geographer. Nor did Mackinder’s revelation of a new geography fare any better in the United States, where defeat in Paris and the Senate, the rise of fascism, and a powerful isolationism vis-à-vis non–Monroe Doctrine territories stripped any spatial imagination about new global geographies from the discourses of spatial closure. The new geographies that Mackinder glimpsed remained stubbornly hidden for decades in the self-understanding of the American Century.

the second moment: from american empire to american century: henry luce revisited Ideologies of a spaceless American Century did not prevail by accident, and this is nowhere clearer than in the spectacular announcement of the American Century itself. The Republican publisher Henry Luce had been a vocal isolationist, opposed to U.S. intervention in the war raging in Asia and Europe, which is why his 1941 cover article in Life made such a splash.34 A clarion call written ten months prior to Pearl Harbor, Luce’s “The American Century” may read as disarmingly diaphanous today but actually embodied a pithy appeal for Americans to accept their duty and responsibility, join the war, and throw off any remnants of isolationist self-delusion. Its allure lay in its modern repackaging of the most cherished myths of national superiority addressed to global claims. Only the United States can win the war and adequately define war aims, Luce claimed. History bore the United States into a position of global leadership, and it should be unselfconsciously grasped. U.S. rulers should seize global power for the simple reason that they can: by virtue of their superior economic prowess, it was already de facto theirs. Manifest destiny breaks all bounds of national space. For all the retrospective attention to Luce’s influential article at the end of the twentieth century, no one seems to have picked up one of its most re-

18

/

lost geography of the american century

markable features. What is striking about Luce’s appeal, certainly in comparison with the earlier texts of manifest destiny, is the abstractness, even vacuity, of its geography. This was no oversight. Writing in 1941, Luce did not yet have the luxury of casual geographical ignorance, and his vision is as antigeographical as it is global. “Are we going to fight for dear old Danzig or dear old Dong Dang?” Luce mocked. “Are we going to decide the boundaries of Uritania?” Such forced derisory references to stereotyped Asian and European place-names are usually glossed over as the expression of a resilient isolationism, but they have a much deeper significance. Luce was not simply indulging the extraordinarily insular national culture of post-Wilsonian America, nor was he merely arrogant in his dismissiveness. By unabashedly announcing U.S. victory in the grandest geographical conquest of all—global political-economic and cultural power—and simultaneously disavowing the relevance of global geography, he forged a selective wedding of isolationism with internationalism that would have been quite foreign to Mackinder or Brooks Adams or, for that matter, to Woodrow Wilson, but that came to epitomize an American global vision in which foreign geography and foreign places were incidental to U.S. world power. Luce is crucial for helping to crystallize a distinctly midcentury version of the central geographical contradiction of the American Century, and this, as much as his passionate patriotism, accounts for the appeal of his argument. The replacement of European power by U.S. hegemony is simultaneously a victory over geography—Dong Dang, Danzig, wherever. Luce was telling Americans that they could put themselves back into the world without necessarily learning much about it. The triviality of geography that Luce labored to convey in 1941 successive generations took for granted, and he hammered the point home: “If we cannot state war aims in terms of vastly distant geography, . . . shall we use some big words like Democracy and Freedom and Justice?” Triumphant enough to name an entire century after his country, he thought such “majestic words” were fine as long as they did not cloud the hard-headed recognition of newfound U.S. power. Possessing this new global power, he sensed, meant not having to care about the world’s geography. Precisely because geography was everything—the American Century was global—it was simultaneously nothing. The American Century, therefore, was premised on a quite opposite connection between geography and political economy vis-à-vis that which drove the European empires and fueled European geographical traditions. European attention to local and global geographies was integral to strategies of territorial expansion in a way that no longer applied to the United States

lost geography of the american century

/

19

in the mid-twentieth century. The emerging American Empire defined its power in the first place through the more abstract geography of the world market rather than through direct political control of territory. Whereas Europeans had accompanied the British East India Company, Dutch East Indies Company, and the Massachusetts Bay Company with settlers, state and civil institutions, and military control, multinational corporations in the twentieth century led with trade, financial, and direct investment agreements while governmental involvement increasingly focused on establishing broad legal and policy conditions rather than direct intervention. This pivotal shift in the relationship between geography and economic expansion facilitated a combination of global power with popular geographical ignorance in the United States that represented something quite new and became an abiding ideological trademark of the American Century, at least into the 1980s. Harvard would close its geography program seven years after Luce’s article, replacing it with a range of more instrumental area studies programs intended to generate direct geostrategic intelligence for fighting the cold war.35 By the same token, the public and academic concern with cold war geopolitics represented a step backward to binary, absolutist geographies, which effectively stifled any more-sophisticated geographical discourse. American geographers, pursuing scientific respectability and recoiling from the tarnish of Nazi geopolitics, were broadly allergic to anything that whiffed of social theory or political analysis, and in their growing obscurity helped to perpetuate geographical ignorance as much as to counter it. The same year that Luce published his “American Century,” the renowned Berkeley geographer Carl Sauer complained in his presidential address to the Association of American Geographers that the discipline had embarked on a “great retreat.” By midcentury, according to one historian, the discipline of geography in the United States was “Middle Western . . . middle class . . . and middlebrow.”36 The institutional weakness of geography as an academic discipline in the postwar period was therefore calibrated closely with the national self-flattery that U.S. global power rendered geography irrelevant except in narrow instrumental terms. Luce’s American Century marked a continuity of U.S. ambition from 1919, the Paris Peace Conference and Woodrow Wilson, but it also signaled a discontinuity. There was nothing anemic about the geographies on the butcher block at Paris. The transition from visceral to vacuous geographies is symbolized in the very language Luce chose to highlight the new American globalism—the American “Century.” Resorting to a historical rather than geographical language, he not only evoked a national sense of destiny, placing the United States at the pinnacle of history, but also sought to elide

20

/

lost geography of the american century

the politics of U.S. hegemony. If his article “The American Century” voiced an unwarranted historicism, the real issue is what that historicism suppressed. The shift to “century” from an older, expectant language of an American “Empire,” so instinctive to Brooks Adams and his generation, did not simply mark a displacement of geography by history but confessed an integral political shift. Whereas the geographical language of empires suggests a malleable politics—empires rise and fall and are open to challenge—the “American Century” suggests an inevitable destiny. In Luce’s language, any political quibble about American dominance was precluded. How does one challenge a century? U.S. global dominance was presented as the natural result of historical progress, implicitly the pinnacle of European civilization, rather than the competitive outcome of politicaleconomic power. It followed as surely as one century after another. Insofar as it was beyond geography, the American Century was beyond empire and beyond reproof. The disavowal of geography in Luce’s “American Century” is simultaneously an occlusion of political possibilities, a depoliticization of history. The end of geography intimated by Luce and others was a rhetorical spacelessness more than any real escape from geography. In the first place, the 1930s and 1940s followed a period of unprecedented immigration to the United States, and the working classes retained a very intimate sense of European geography and competing colonialisms. At home, Luce’s anemic global geography conspired with a domestic strategy of class and race assimilation, highlighted earlier by the optimistic invention of “ethnicity” as a refraction and domestication of national differences and foreignness onto the domestic landscape. To become American was to forget the geographies and cultures of the Old World or else to bleach them into categorical nationalisms, which themselves, somehow, reflected and reaffirmed U.S. exceptionalism. In the second place, the wartime Roosevelt administration was anything but ignorant of geography. A councillor of the American Geographical Society prior to his presidency and ex–assistant secretary of the navy, Roosevelt relished the study of geography, and during World War II he famously encouraged Americans to get out their family atlases and follow along as he updated the military action. Long before Luce announced the American Century—almost two years before the United States was even in the war—the State Department and the Rockefeller Foundation joined with the Council on Foreign Relations to carry out an elaborate study of postwar planning, which gradually, throughout the war years, crystallized a very precise geographical vision of what postwar American globalism

lost geography of the american century

/

21

would look like. A new political and economic geography was very much the point in the State Department, if not in the pages of Life, and Roosevelt’s version of a new world order was an intensely geographical affair. As war wore on, these private and public officials wrestled with the precise architecture of a postwar global political economy that simultaneously fixed postwar political geography and constructed the requisite institutions to regulate the transborder fluidity of goods and raw materials, capital and people, ideas and technology. As our protagonist, top State Department geographer Isaiah Bowman, expressed it, “Empire builders must think in terms of space as well as time”; “to a revolutionary degree man changes his geography as he goes along.”37

the third moment: late-century globalization Montesquieu once proposed that most imperial states “have made commercial interests give way to political interests,” whereas England “has always made its political interests give way to the interests of commerce.”38 However that may be looking back from the eighteenth century, any dominance of economic over political interests in Britain now pales in comparison with the American Empire. Postwar U.S. dominance was organized first and foremost through the world market. This is not to say that political interests wilted after 1945, that military power languished, or that exceptions did not exist. The war in Vietnam was certainly a political battle (and defeat), but it was premised on a cold war that itself was provoked amid a 1940s battle by U.S. capital and the U.S. government for global economic access to labor and commodity markets. The binary geographies of the cold war frustrated U.S. global ambitions. The ideology of the American Century survived only by ignoring the fact that a good half of the world was distinctly un-American or at least strove to be uncapitalist. At one level the geographical contradiction in this period lay between the national scale of political and economic organization and the increasingly global scale of capital accumulation. The international bodies established at the end of World War II, such as the United Nations, the International Monetary Fund, the World Bank, and the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT, later renamed the World Trade Organization), were intended to regulate these contradictions between national and global interests in a way that entwined specifically American interests with global management. From Roosevelt to Kennedy, claims to an American globalism floated forward, contradicted on a daily basis by the binary geographies of cold war militarism that filled media headlines. For more than two decades the geo-

22

/

lost geography of the american century

graphical mosaic of global power was relatively stable among a first world (the capitalist West), a second (USSR, China, North Korea, Cuba), and a third world (the underdeveloped countries), but the economic, political, and cultural crises and challenges after the 1960s (on the streets of the United States as much as abroad) and the implosion of Soviet communism two decades later detonated this geography. No sooner, it seems, was the postwar global system fixed in a terrestrial space of discrete national pieces and blocs than the entire global jigsaw puzzle was thrown into the air. As the pieces began to come down, they were not the same pieces that went up. The first, second, and third worlds have effectively disappeared; new blocs have emerged, from the European Union and the Association of Southeast Asian Nations to the North American Free Trade Agreement; international protostate bodies such as the IMF, the World Bank, the WTO, and even the UN have dramatically increased in power; national economies generally play a more subordinate role while metropolitan economies contribute more directly to global capital accumulation. From the 1980s into the twenty-first century, a crisis-induced frenzy has sought to fit these pieces back together again and remake the map of the world both conceptually and in practice. Viewed this way, “globalization” after 1989 can be seen as a contemporary remapping strategy and as a fervent attempt to redress the geographical divisions established after 1945—a second chance at Yalta, the wartime conference where the global geographical carve-up among the three most powerful allies was consummated and the cold war took an increasingly spatial identity. The deep sighs of epochal relief from the Western ruling classes after 1989 were mixed with unconstrained glee as the “capitalist revolution” engulfing the erstwhile second world reverberated globally in ever-intensifying reaffirmations of neoliberalism. Capitalism was strategically conflated with democracy. The failures of the second moment of the American Century were swept away as if by a magic wand, and so too were the failures and frustrations of the first moment, not just in Paris and Washington, but also and most crucially in the Russian Revolution of 1917. “Globalization” therefore represents a third attempt at Wilson’s new world order. The global universality of capital seems again within reach; the end of history as well as of geography, centrally on the agenda. The language of globalization refers to real processes in the worldwide fabrication and circulation of commodities and cultures, information and ideas, but the value of the term “globalization” lies just as much in its ideological power. It conceptually dissolves the stubborn contradictions of the first two moments of the American Century, eclipsing national and local prerogatives within the global and promoting a new geography that is ac-

lost geography of the american century

/

23

tually spaceless. It offers a new cartography in the struggle to remake the global map in very particular ways and in support of very specific class and locational interests. But the inherited contradiction between a spaceless and a spatially constituted globalism is not so much resolved by globalization as simply recast in a new form. With a parallel triumphalism, the reworking of European geography since 1989—from Ireland and Britain to Germany to the Balkans— bears considerable formal resemblance to the geographical reconfiguration of 1917–23, presumably because it is redrawing the maps of precisely that era. Globalization reiterates the scenario of Mackinder’s “new geography”— a “world empire,” struggles over specific absolute spaces, and intense relationalities in a closed global sphere. Far from marking the end of geography, a good case could be made that globalization heralds a new and even more intense “geographical pivot of history,” which has only intensified since 2001. The “correlation between the larger geographical and the larger historical generalizations” that Mackinder perceived in 1904 may pertain more today than at any point in the American Century. The opposite contention of a spaceless globalization works today, as in 1919 or 1941, to occlude alternative political futures, to depoliticize history, albeit the history of the present and near future. It is hardly surprising, therefore, that laments about national geographical ignorance should have emerged so powerfully in the United States in the 1980s. The country’s geographical sensibility and educational discourse were not underdeveloped by accident. To make sense of today’s global shifts, a certain conceptual retooling of the century’s aspatial imagination became vital. The ideological marginalization of geography through most of the century had served its purpose, but at a huge cost, and was ultimately unsustainable. Luce’s disavowal of geography was politically driven, and the resurrection of geography curricula today is no less so. But what kind of geography is to be studied? Establishment geography since the 1980s has busily tried to reinvent itself as a handmaiden to corporate and state power, placing most of its bets on the technical acumen of geographical information systems, “business geography,” and policy studies or on the fleshing out of liberal multicultural reforms. By contrast, other academic geographies emerging after the 1960s have rediscovered and developed the suggestion, sprouting first with Mackinder and Lenin, that postnineteenth-century geographies are the product of an intense relationality between places connected by social and cultural, economic and political processes. The politics of geography—who gets what, where, and why and who loses where?—is explicitly recognized.39 Thus differences within aca-

24

/

lost geography of the american century

demic geography refract the long-standing geographical contradictions of the American Century: while an established tradition feeds into the bureaucratic stream necessary for the management of local as well as global geographies, a new critical tradition questions the social contours of the power that continually makes and remakes these world geographies. There is more than one way to redraw the map of a “global” world. The American Century represented a solution and successor to the economic geographic limits of European expansionism. Constitutive geographies lurked in the history of development and underdevelopment, urban structure and suburban growth, regional expansion and decline. To the extent that these geographies have remained hidden—history and social analysis seen as only incidentally or trivially geographical—the founding fiction of the American Century that we inhabit a postgeographical world was perpetuated. It is the recuperation of this geography, broadly conceived, that informs John Berger’s brilliant insight that “prophesy now involves a geographical rather than historical projection; it is space not time that hides consequences from us.”40 We are only beginning to open up that archive of created geographies, but as we do it becomes increasingly evident that reintroducing the largely hidden geography of the American Empire invites a fundamental rethinking of the history itself. There is nothing inevitable about the global geographies that accompanied and facilitated U.S. hegemony. Despite Luce’s and others’ sense of American destiny, the cartography of post–World War II global power remained quite opaque through most of the war. For all that U.S. leaders contributed to its onset, the cold war that followed was a momentous defeat for U.S. global ambition, severely circumscribing the amplitude of the new empire. U.S. dominance has not grown linearly and was an open question at particular junctures during the century: more apparent than real prior to World War I, barely evident in the 1930s, and declining precipitously in the 1970s. Uneven geographical development on all scales in the global landscape is certainly an expression of the structured social relations of capitalist societies and the multifaceted logic of capital accumulation, but it is simultaneously authored by everyday individuals and classes, groups and governments. The geography of the American Century, therefore, is neither wholly planned nor entirely voluntaristic. It represents not a one-dimensional devaluation of space but a restructuring of the spatial grammar of economic expansion. This new geography was mapped and continues to be mapped in the halls of world power. But as the anti-globalization movement also demonstrates— with its focus on some of the most coveted global institutions of the Ameri-

lost geography of the american century

/

25

can Century—the new geography is also made in the streets, where alternative visions of society and democracy flourish. In American Empire, I piece together the historical geography of U.S. global ambition through the career of a geographer who orbited the vortex of political power in the United States during the first two formative moments of the American Century. That he was, throughout most of the period, America’s most famous geographer provides a uniquely privileged parallax on the spatially constituted yet simultaneously spaceless American Century. Through the eyes and deeds of Isaiah Bowman, we can begin to make sense of this exquisite contradiction and in the process excavate the singular geographical architecture that has come to define the American Empire, from the forays of William McKinley to the utopianism of twenty-first-century globalization.

“all geography is always new ” : isaiah bowman Halford Mackinder may have proposed the notion of “the geographical pivot of history,” but he was born in the wrong empire to live his prediction into practice; the geography of the British Empire in the twentieth century is a story of decline and contraction. Isaiah Bowman was also born a British subject—in Canada in 1878—but grew up in rural Michigan and eventually become the most geographically articulate among the official architects of the American Empire. After the Paris Peace Conference he was feted in the press as “Wilson’s geographer” and a quarter century later as “Roosevelt’s geographer.” He shared with Franklin Roosevelt a strong sense that American destiny pivoted on how Americans changed the geography of the world as they went along. Unlike Mackinder, he was raised in the bowels of an expanding empire, where he lived through, and quickly became an agent of, the rise to global power. The unsophisticated Michigan farm boy survived a Harvard undergraduate degree and between 1907 and 1913 pursued research on remote, highaltitude Andean geomorphology and settlement geography. One of the last explorers opening up the region’s absolute space in the old tradition, he readily recognized his and others’ pioneering scientific research as a precursor to economic conquest. After a professorial stint at Yale, where he received his Ph.D., Isaiah Bowman became the new young director of a struggling American Geographical Society, which afforded a valuable entrée into the New York ruling classes. He quickly found himself administering Woodrow Wilson’s “Inquiry,” the think tank for postwar recon-

26

/

lost geography of the american century

struction, and in Paris in 1919, he slouched on the floor with Wilson as they pored over innumerable maps or huddled in the diplomatic clinches. It was here that Bowman’s approach to the study of geography changed irrevocably. Deeply disappointed by the outcome in Paris and the U.S. Senate and hardened by his own personal encounters, he returned to New York and published the first major American political geography text, a world geographical survey entitled The New World. It reads now as a handbook for the budding American Century. Determined to build a liberal internationalism despite the isolationist recoil, he was a founding director of the Council on Foreign Relations and many years later coaxed Mackinder to write an article for its journal, Foreign Affairs. Bowman understood that Mackinder’s geographical pivot of history was not simply a global reality but operated on other scales too, and he focused his interests during the isolationist doldrums of the 1920s and early 1930s on internal geographical frontiers and national science policy. Bowman’s politics shuttled between conservative Democrat and liberal Republican. He loathed the New Deal but Hitler more so, although he stayed unaccountably mute about the rise of geopolitics until 1942. As with so many others, his Wilsonian idealism was rekindled, this time with a hard edge of self-satisfied realism, when the State Department began to plan the postwar world. Now president of Johns Hopkins University, he became a central figure in State Department plans for postwar reconstruction and special adviser to Roosevelt. He was especially involved in three campaigns: settling affairs with the Old World (deciding the boundaries of Germany); shaking loose the European colonies for American commercial exploitation; and establishing a global political body (the United Nations) designed to ensure political and military quietude for “business as usual.” Disappointed in 1945 to be revisiting many of the same issues as in 1919, he was also flushed with simultaneously nationalist and internationalist excitement about a second chance at global design. He negotiated with Churchill and Molotov, but became increasingly embittered by what he saw as Stalin’s intransigence and Roosevelt’s appeasement, and he marched enthusiastically into the cold war while never endorsing the binary geographies in which that contest was widely expressed. It is often commented that war is good for geography, and Bowman’s career, like those of so many others, was made from the opportunities presented by two world wars—the first two formative moments of the American Century—as well as by the mobilizations for postwar reconstruction. The hidden geography of the American Empire is therefore uniquely revealed in his career. His personal contradictions often mirrored those of the

lost geography of the american century

/

27

period’s geography: a devout internationalist, he was an equally staunch nationalist; a proselytizing geographer, he was rigorously interdisciplinary. Personally charming or downright gruff, he was liberal in theory and authoritarian in practice. Insistently practical, he embraced the transition to the American Century as part opportunity, part evolutionary destiny. His talent most valued in Washington over more than three decades was his sharp perception of geographic relations among places and the decisive distillation of any complex global situation into discrete policy proposals. More than anything he was a policy entrepreneur, unique in those circles for his geographical sensibility. He understood the necessity and limitations of specific geographical solutions to the hurdles of American globalism as well as the shifting importance of geography. Unlike pundits with a different training, he never had the luxury or inclination simply to move “beyond geography,” and yet he had an appropriately twentieth-century sense of the evident limits to the geographic determination of social events. It was this combination of a geographical training and sensibility with rarefied political access that makes him so influential and his story so valuable. “To a revolutionary degree man changes geography as he goes along,” Bowman once claimed. “All geography is always new.”41 If this placed Bowman ahead of his time (Mackinder notwithstanding, a broad disciplinary insistence on inherently mutable geographies had to wait until after the 1960s—and was actually carried by an emerging social theory tradition in geography that Bowman would have abhorred), it also marks his debt to Mackinder. His prescience was undoubtedly inspired by a lifetime spent witnessing and participating in the invention of new geographies. The mutability of geography was no mere academic observation for Bowman, and in the 1940s, when he and liberals of his generation again dared to imagine an American globalism following the political closure of the 1920s and 1930s, Bowman gave that vision its most vivid geographical expression. “No line can be established anywhere in the world,” he asserted amid frenzied State Department planning for postwar reconstruction, “that confines the interests of the United States because no line can prevent the remote from becoming the near danger.” This assertion of a geographical globalism, tinged with military paranoia as much as economic expectation, reached a crescendo almost two decades later in the atomic age, when Kennedy could declare, “Our frontiers today are on every continent.”42 The year before Henry Luce proclaimed the American Century, a defiant Bowman announced to his elite Council on Foreign Relations colleagues that if Hitler was demanding “Lebensraum” (living space), then Lebensraum he should get—except that the postwar world would be a global

28

/

lost geography of the american century

Lebensraum, it would be an economic Lebensraum, and it would be an American Lebensraum. Bowman’s globalism, quite unlike Luce’s, came sweated with geographical implications and differences. Bowman was present at the creation of the geography of the American Century. Many others were too, but few if any had the geographical sensibility of Bowman. He became the U.S. inheritor and global practitioner of Mackinder’s “geographical pivot of history,” and as the son of an expanding empire he could see much further into the future than his British counterpart could. Whereas Mackinder recognized the new international amalgams of geography, economics, and power with a certain nostalgia for the “Columbian epoch” and a nationalist apprehension for the future, Bowman fused nationalism and internationalism into optimistic expectation. He understood as very few did that the American Empire both constructed and was constructed through a melange of geographies every bit as distinctive as those of the European empires it succeeded. As Bowman’s approach to geography and his public career demonstrate, the American Empire constructed an uneven global landscape very much in its own image. This was a source of perpetual and often acute frustration to its architects, who were never able to manage that construction under conditions of their own choosing.

PART I FROM EXPLORATION TO ENTERPRISE: GEOGRAPHY ON THE CUSP OF EMPIRE

2 1898 AND THE MAKING OF A PRACTICAL MAN

The Spanish-American War of 1898 was a watershed in the historical geography of U.S. expansionism. The national and state boundaries of the United States were effectively in place, even though several territories had yet to consummate statehood, and the geographical claims that resulted from the war were less about national consolidation than international colonization. These were, of course, closely intertwined pursuits, but their geographical consequences were very different. Unlike earlier territorial acquisitions, such as northern Mexico, Alaska, and the Louisiana Purchase, all of the territories wrested from Spain after 1898 were held in some form of colonial possession, never to be incorporated fully into the nation-state. This marked the first and last serious foray by the United States into extraterritorial colonization. Thereafter, U.S. expansionism took an increasingly geoeconomic rather than colonial form. The Spanish-American War therefore represents an anomaly, but it also marks the cusp of a radically different globalism. The symbolic dawn of the American Century, it just as vitally gave way to the first contours of a new global geography. The year 1898 was also a watershed for the nineteen-year-old schoolteacher Isaiah Bowman. He made two important decisions. In the autumn he took his first independent political initiative. Enthused by the war frenzy, Bowman organized young men from three rural Michigan school districts, including his own, into a militia company of one hundred. He was promptly elected captain and arranged for a local carpenter to make “wooden guns,

32

/

1898 and the making of a practical man

real rifles not being available from the National Guard.” For two years, Bowman’s militia carried out military training, studied the manual of arms, and performed simple maneuvers and field exercises. They attracted a lot of local interest, but as the fervor for “the splendid little war” receded, he transferred his interest from the militia to the organization of a debating club.1 Now as later, Bowman’s life was led at the intersection of geography and politics; intellectual and political initiatives were always closely connected. No doubt influenced by adventurous reports from the war’s various outposts, Bowman also made his “first definite plan to follow geography” as a career,2 his second decision, which ultimately freed him from the spartan, isolated, harsh, often oppressive rural upbringing of his early years and introduced him to a more worldly life of science and academia, politics and foreign policy. A child of the recently settled frontier, geography for Bowman represented freedom, and rewriting this equation of geography and freedom on a global scale became his life’s work.

brown city Isaiah Bowman was born on 26 December 1878 in Berlin, Ontario.3 His paternal ancestors were Swiss Mennonites, his grandfather was a teacher turned preacher, and his great-grandmother inspired his biblical name. Both sets of Canadian grandparents were “well-to-do,” but their legacies were divided “rather finely” among large families. His father, Samuel Cressman Bowman, turned from teaching to farming in order to make a better living for his own growing family. In the depths of a particularly inclement winter but spurred by the needs of a spring sowing, the elder Bowman moved an eight-week-old Isaiah and his two sisters, aged two and four, by horsedrawn sleigh, along with all the family belongings, to a 140-acre farm and log cabin in Brown City, sixty miles north of Detroit.4 Isaiah spent the next seventeen years of his life on and around the farm, where the daily rhythm was determined by the seasonality of work. The family grew to eight children, and the living was rough. The “downright necessity of infinite and incessant toil was a condition of even mean living,” he later recalled of his boyhood. “There were cows to milk, and fields to tend,” and by the age of ten he was fully capable of plowing the stony drift soil with a horse-drawn steel plow and helping to raise barns. The family “had almost no money,” and eggs, which usually went to town to pay for groceries, were a luxury eaten only once a year—at Easter—when the family allowed themselves all they wanted. He collected fruit and berries in the surrounding woods and thickets, caught eels in the creek, built a raft with

1898 and the making of a practical man

/

33

the earnest intention of exploring the distant Mississippi, and went on winter sledging trips. There was some interaction with neighboring farms, especially at Sunday church picnics, but this too varied with the seasons. On one occasion, a friend unearthed an “Indian skeleton,” and this provided them days and weeks of fantasy play. Evenings were often spent huddled in blankets by the stove, eating apples, and listening to the father’s sonorous stories of his own youth or reading “Indian stories” or the frontier exploits of Daniel Boone.5 Hard work and religion were formative impulses in Bowman’s life, and both were sternly administered. Having come from a family that was “strongly endowed with religious feeling and a sense of duty and responsibility,” Samuel Bowman was an “exceedingly strict disciplinarian,” not the kind of person one got close to. His son responded with a mixture of resentment and distant respect. The merrier temperament of Isaiah’s mother, Emily (Shantz) Bowman, provided some respite, and they shared a special empathy. He accumulated an ordinary farm boy’s intricate knowledge of the environment and its workings, and his mother encouraged an early passion for book learning. At the one-room country school a mile and a half from the farm, he revered the intellectual discipline, though the education was basic. When he suffered from “nervousness and frequent nightmares” at the age of seven, he was temporarily taken out of school on the doctor’s advice (he “read too much”). However, the availability of books from his older sisters and their excited after-school talk about “the settlement of America and the Indian battles, massacres and ways of life” only encouraged more reading. He hid books under the front doorsteps and would take them to read behind the lumber pile. He was thrilled by a biography of Alexander of Macedonia and by Stanley’s In Darkest Africa; in Captain Cook’s Voyages he read the dry abstractions of reported latitudes and longitudes as a boy’s dreamy world of unbounded travel and adventure.6 Gender roles were clearly allocated. Bowman always considered himself to be a Son of the Middle Border, to use the title of the Hamlin Garland book that impressed him in later life. Beyond the social and geographical triangle of farm, school, and Brown City, he barely traveled as a child or an adolescent, although his forced sabbatical from school allowed a single trip with his father back to the Ontario grandparents. His grandfather’s “heavy eyebrows, high forehead, and deep voice”—physical traits the grandson would inherit in softer form—made a strong impression; his “ ‘Bowman voice’ . . . shook the rafters.” Even when he was pulled out of school to work on the family farm, with the onset of the 1893 economic crisis, and after embarking on his own teaching career in 1896, Bowman remained in neigh-

34

/

1898 and the making of a practical man

boring St. Clair County, only a few miles to the south, where he passed the teachers’ exam.7 Teaching gave him access to books, but otherwise the experience seared him with a harsh sense of discouragement, even failure, and crystallized in him a cautious conservatism that became a lifelong trait. Weighing 125 pounds, measuring five feet three inches tall, and awkwardly adolescent at seventeen, he was hardly distinguishable from many of his students. He seems to have had unrealistic expectations and, in compensation for his slight stature, carried an inherited sternness into the classroom. He ran afoul of parents he antagonized. The job “produced too great a sense of responsibility” in one so young, he lamented bitterly to Eleanor Roosevelt half a century later.8 His early teaching was also discouraging in a second, more immediate sense. Even for the period the salary was low—$19.50 per month rising in four years to $35. The family was caught in the precipitous recession of 1893–97, and he gave his father anything left over from his meager living expenses. After four years of teaching, “when most boys are finishing college,” he anguished, his country school training had not given him a systematic preparation in many subjects, and he had no savings to further his education.9 There were bright spots, however. He did have time to study, and a retired sea captain who owned a local grocery store took him under his wing, teaching him geometry and navigation several nights a week. Bowman had no way of knowing that this training would be instrumental years later when he was called on to evaluate Robert Peary’s claim to have reached the North Pole. But it was his mother’s encouragement that he remembered with uncharacteristic fondness, especially the occasion when she picked up a couple of stray metamorphic rocks on the farm and puzzled aloud how they were made and how they got there. Perhaps her son might get an education and explain such mysteries to her, she mused. Bowman never forgot his mother’s prompting. Nor did he forget the glow of pride he felt when, having received an A for drawing his first school map, his mother’s approval came with the prediction that geography would be his favorite subject.10 Whether dutifully or independently, Bowman came to follow his mother’s wish for his education, but she had to push him one more time to make a college career happen: One day my mother came out into the yard where I was chopping wood and the look of concern on her face was so marked that I asked her what the trouble was. She answered me by saying, “Son, I am worried about you. What are you going to make of your life?” I replied that I did not know, because I was nearly twenty-two years old and

1898 and the making of a practical man

/

35

without any means for continuing my education. She asked me what it was I wanted to do, and I told her I wanted to go to college but that such a plan was out of the question. Her comment was, “If I were a young man of your age and had your strength and interest in intellectual work, I would go to college!”11

from ypsilanti to harvard yard As soon as the snows cleared after his twenty-first birthday, Isaiah Bowman took himself off to the county seat, Port Huron, and became a U.S. citizen. In the autumn of 1900, having saved some money for expenses and with a loan of several hundred dollars from an inheritance his mother had received, Bowman registered at the Ferris Institute in Big Rapids. He had attended Ferris summer school the year before, but this time he returned for a full year of college preparatory training. He had seven dollars in his pocket when he arrived, sustaining himself in part by additional teaching. The institute had long wanted to teach military drill, but not until Bowman turned up, fresh from the Brown City militia, was a qualified instructor on hand. Although he was a good four years behind his contemporaries, he felt that at least his teaching experiences had taught him the habits of disciplined study, and for the first time he felt free to devote himself to a frenzied pursuit of knowledge. He took eighteen courses that year, including Latin, German, political economy, rhetoric, geology, botany, algebra, geometry, physics, and chemistry, but he specialized more fully in history and geography. He graduated with a record average of 96 percent.12 Among his teachers was a young Harlan H. Barrows, whose introduction of “human ecology” to geography in the early 1920s would help build a stronger human geography in a U.S. tradition dominated by physical geography. Bowman was even more impressed with one of Barrows’s own teachers, Charles T. MacFarlane, who presented a guest lecture at Ferris, motivating him to further his studies with MacFarlane at Michigan State Normal College, in Ypsilanti.13 The most enduring influence at Ferris was the broad philosophical ambience of the institute. Transcendentalism was undergoing something of a turn-of-the-century revival, and Bowman, influenced by his Ferris teachers, many of whom were keen dabblers, felt that it “opened great windows upon vast possibilities of self-improvement.” Traces of this early brush with transcendentalism survived into his old age.14 He arrived at Michigan State Normal in the autumn of 1901 and rented rooms with a friend and fellow student at 123 Summit Street for $1.75 a week.15 MacFarlane had left in the interim, so Bowman began work with

36

/

1898 and the making of a practical man

his successor, Mark Jefferson. Fifteen years Bowman’s senior and born into a literary family in Massachusetts (his father had met Emerson), Jefferson had specialized in land colonization and settlement patterns, having spent six years doing fieldwork and overseeing a sugar hacienda in Argentina. He had taken his first degree at Boston University and his M.A. at Harvard with the best-known U.S. geographer of the day, William Morris Davis. The most widely educated of Bowman’s teachers so far, Jefferson, like Barrows, became a major force in developing a human side of the discipline. Bowman worked closely with Jefferson, focusing on physical geography, but he also picked up a grounding in physiography, glacial geology, and mineralogy as well as field, mapping, and teaching techniques. Toward the end of the year, Jefferson recommended that he work with Davis at Harvard if, the year after, Bowman would return as an instructor at Michigan State Normal.16 Bowman grabbed the chance. Barely even out of Michigan, he now embarked on the biggest journey of his life, going east at the age of twentythree. A geographic departure from home, it was equally an intellectual and social sojourn into a dramatically different world. The ambition of becoming a geographer was itself daring. In the college system as much as in the country school of his boyhood, geography was less an intellectual pursuit in most places than a preparatory amalgam of factual information and related studies in physical sciences and social studies. The academic division of labor was still poorly developed, and although medicine, law, history, some of the humanities, and the basic sciences of geology, physics, chemistry, and biology now entered many academic curricula, the same could not be said of the so-called human sciences. “Political economy” still encompassed the majority of what would become the narrower disciplines of political science, sociology, economics, and demography. Psychology was in its infancy, more a clinical European pursuit than an American university subject, and anthropology was yet fairly amorphous; Franz Boas, widely seen as the founder of anthropology in the United States, actually received his 1881 Ph.D. in geography. It was within this larger structuring of academic disciplines in the decades around the turn of the century that geography struggled for a discrete identity as the science of the earth’s surface. It moved aggressively to distinguish itself from astronomy on one side and geology on the other. Like most emerging disciplines in the United States, it owed its intellectual roots to various European traditions, imported to the States largely through the older East Coast colleges and universities. The physical and anthropogeographical traditions of Germanic geography were especially influential. In 1848 the Swiss geographer Louis Agassiz, the first to propose a universal ice age and

1898 and the making of a practical man

/

37

to argue for the importance of glaciers in sculpting the face of the earth, had come to Harvard. There he influenced a large number of students, including Nathaniel Southgate Shaler, whose interests in what today would be called geomorphology and biogeography encouraged the development of Harvard geography toward the end of the century. At about the same time, Agassiz’s colleague Arnold Guyot, a student of the famous German geographer Carl Ritter and author of Earth and Man (1849), brought an almost mystical and teleological physical geography (including a human component) to the College of New Jersey, later Princeton University.17 Nineteenth-century U.S. geography was heavily physical in its roots but already distinguished itself from geology in its concern with human interactions in the physical environment. It was an intellectual import with the highest European pedigree, which, when called upon, could quite readily footnote classical scholarship to demonstrate its origins in and centrality to Greek thought, which was generally presumed to provide the basis of the Western intellectual tradition. In this, geography resembled most nineteenth-century sciences, exhibiting its own strain of what science historian Daniel Kevles has dubbed “best science elitism” or what George Santayana at the time called “the genteel tradition in American philosophy.”18 Because it was still less a subject than an inchoate set of intellectual veins contributing to and drawing from various studies, geography was widely infused throughout the sciences, from geology and physics, mathematics and astronomy, to statistical and economic research. But there was another, more practical and home-grown thread to U.S. geography: a grittier tradition paralleled the European pedigree of scientific elitism and philosophical gentility. Late-nineteenth-century American geography was also the tradition of John Wesley Powell, explorer and mapper of the arid West, one-armed veteran of the Battle of Shiloh, ambitious director of the U.S. Geological Survey in the 1880s, and a scrappy political fighter in Washington. Earlier there was the exploration geography of Lewis and Clark, inspired by the deeply geographical vision of Thomas Jefferson, and there was Matthew Fontaine Maury, who directed the U.S. Naval Observatory and whose Physical Geography of the Sea (1855) was widely lauded, not least by the aging Alexander von Humboldt, as a founding statement of oceanography. This practical tradition was primarily rooted in the land grant colleges in the country’s interior, such as Michigan State Normal, where questions of climate and agriculture, soils and resource use, settlement and vegetation were the pragmatic currency of a geography education etched in the ruts and furrows of the westward European arrogation of the continent.

38

/

1898 and the making of a practical man

This uneasy mix of intellectual elitism and spunky pragmatism was a hallmark of the larger intellectual scene in the United States at the end of the nineteenth century, and it formed the scholarly milieu that an expectant but somewhat timid Bowman walked into when he enrolled in the Lawrence Scientific School at Harvard in the fall of 1902. His Michigan life disposed him toward the practical tradition, while his voracity for knowledge and ideas and a driving ambition drew him to the genteel. Harvard was the acme of that elite tradition, a central conduit for the importation of European ideas, and his teachers, especially Shaler and Davis, were steeped in it. They saw themselves in the tradition of scientists devoted to unlocking the secrets of the earth’s history, imprinted in its surface forms and processes. Bowman blossomed instantly, taking energetically to the work. He was overjoyed when assigned to assist the great German geomorphologist Albrecht Penck, who came to lecture at Harvard. At Davis’s behest, he had been reading Die Erde und das Leben, by Friedrich Ratzel, the old German geographer and father of anthropogeography, a field that straddled the still murky boundaries of geography and anthropology. With all the fresh näiveté of a young scholar whose learning almost keeps pace with his confidence, the Harvard senior enthused to his Ypsilanti teacher that those “old German boys make me realize that not all the geography is west of the Atlantic.”19 Bowman’s relations with German geographers would eventually become highly combative, but there is no doubt that they were a primary influence on him in these formative years. Where Penck complemented the Davisian physical geography Bowman was imbibing, Ratzel gave him a way to think about humanized landscapes. Ratzel’s vision of national economy and population was largely agrarian, rooted in the assumption that an expanding national population inevitably implied colonization of the land and pursuit of agriculture. Bowman Americanized the vision, finding a means of connecting his visceral boyhood life with an American exceptionalism bound up in Frederick Jackson Turner’s lost frontier thesis. But Ratzel was also the author of Politische Geographie, which in 1898 effectively crystallized a new subfield in the discipline. A complementary strand of his argument, drawing on an analogy from plant ecology, held that all human groups and institutions—nations, states, peoples (Völker)—were intimately tied to the land they occupied and had to grow to survive. Or, as Ratzel put it, they needed “Lebensraum”—living space.20 Ratzel’s theories were highly influential throughout the academy, and his concept of Lebensraum came to play a dubious but very public role several decades later. His geography was umbilically tied to the mission of nation-state building in imperial Germany after 1871. Bowman constantly

1898 and the making of a practical man

/

39

translated Ratzel’s view of geography into the U.S. context and was sufficiently influenced by this conservative German theorist that a Ratzel biographer many years later named Bowman as the only geographer who shared with Ratzel such a comprehensive grasp of political geography.21 But all this lay well in the future. In addition to the rarified heights of European intellectual thought, the Lawrence Scientific School and the geography tradition at Harvard were equally a product of the more homegrown, applied scientific tradition. Now dean of Lawrence, Shaler had become a renowned patriarchal presence in Harvard Yard; his lectures were always crammed, his reputation mythical. Precisely because of their more practical bent, both the Lawrence School and geography were habitually viewed with suspicion by the stuffy elite of Harvard’s senior professoriate and administration. William Morris Davis was especially targeted for his sometimes lowly concerns: he had cut his teeth in western fieldwork; took the lead in founding a professional association (the Association of American Geographers) in opposition to the increasingly popular focus of Alexander Graham Bell’s National Geographic Society; led the crusade for a discipline of geography independent of geology; and spent a lot of time promoting geographical teaching in secondary schools as well as in colleges and universities.22 The zoologist Alexander Aggasiz, son of the glacial geologist and arch-defender of the elite scientific tradition, was generally scandalized by Davis’s commitment to such activities, and the last straw, which provoked a bitter complaint to the president of this all-male university, came when he stumbled into a room where Davis was “instructing a class of women!”23 This combination of practical and more theoretical concerns is evident in Bowman’s coursework at Harvard; he took “Research Physiography and Paleontology” and “Astronomy” alongside “Mechanical Drawing” and “Advanced Geology Fieldwork.”24 Arriving with Jefferson’s recommendation, Bowman was made to feel very much at home by Davis, but it was an alienating and “frigid” environment otherwise. Anything but a Harvard gentleman, he experienced class difference as viscerally real for the first time. Intellectually sparked, he was socially overawed, acutely conscious of being a complete outsider. Harvard’s stuffy upper-class presumptions were as alien as they were oppressive, not “a community where a poor boy” could participate in the social trappings of an elite education. Outside his work he never loosened up. He fueled furnaces, shoveled snow, and cut grass to get by and participated hardly at all in student life: “shyness and poverty” prevented him “from even joining the Union”; he never attended class meetings; and he refused social invitations because he lacked anything formal to wear except for the

40

/

1898 and the making of a practical man

one worn suit he used daily. Virtually a teetotaler for much of his life (in later years he admitted to having an occasional “thumbful of sherry”),25 he was clean living to a fault, a stranger to the frivolity of the party and tavern scene of undergraduate life, and rued the lack of college fun in later years. Franklin Roosevelt, with whom he later worked closely, was in the class ahead of him; the much exalted class including T. S. Eliot, John Reed, and Walter Lippmann, a little behind him. Often dour, periodically lonely, and subject to “deep and dark moods,” Bowman found he was as alienated from the socialist politics of John Reed and the social liberalism of Lippmann or Roosevelt as he was from the class privilege they all seemed to share and which weighed so heavily on him.26 The disjuncture between Harvard Yard and Brown City was surely made even more real when he returned to a familiar Michigan in 1903, as agreed, to teach for Jefferson. He saw his family during this year, of course, but gives little sense of having gone home or of seeing his future in Michigan. While making notes for an autobiography four decades later, he toyed with the title “Free and Twenty One,” indicating the depth with which geographical and intellectual freedom were intertwined; going east was a lifealtering escape. He never again spent much time in Brown City or indeed with his family. Whether no letters existed or he expunged them, his voluminous correspondence reveals none to or from his parents. He was never tempted to do anything else but return to Harvard, which, for all its social frigidity, was an intellectual cornucopia. Not even a lucrative job offer from the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS), with whom he had worked on a Long Island groundwater study in the summer of 1903, could lure him. After leading Jefferson’s summer field courses around Lake Huron, he returned to Cambridge on a $150 scholarship for normal school students, less than a third of his Ypsilanti income.27 Bowman came alive in the Lawrence Scientific School and in his long absorbed hours in the library. He soaked up the intense atmosphere of the relatively informal Harvard Geological Club, which met most Friday evenings at the home of a faculty member and where the idea for the Association of American Geographers, founded in 1904, was first floated by Davis. The few friendships he developed all involved students in geology or geography: J. Walter Goldthwaite, Ellsworth Huntington, Henri Baulig. Only when animated did his “million-dollar smile” break out.28 He wrote Jefferson constantly during his Harvard years, treating him very much as an intellectual father, but it was Davis’s influence that would be decisive. “Never before, in so short a time,” he reported at the beginning of his first Harvard year, “have

1898 and the making of a practical man

/

41

I grown so much or in so many directions. . . . I find the work exactly suited to my needs. It is encouragingly difficult.”29

evolutionary theory and practical idealism One Harvard course in particular was crucial for Bowman’s future work. As an undergraduate he joined Davis’s graduate seminar, which he found “the most critical and stimulating exercise” he had ever had “next to Geometry.” He was dispatched to investigate a range of physical geographical problems, from glacial lakes to the effect of the earth’s rotation on the deflection of river courses. His first published paper, in Science, grew out of this work. “Deflection of the Mississippi” compared maps of the river course, made thirteen years apart, and sought empirical evidence of the widely accepted theoretical argument that the earth’s rotation leads to asymmetrical bank erosion.30 The results were inconclusive, and the paper a minor contribution at best, but it already displayed the Davisian impulse to connect theory and measurable empirical change in the landscape. It was also untypical in the sense that it was not based on fieldwork, although it did conclude with a record of Bowman’s Michigan research with Jefferson and his summer on Long Island. Over the next few years he published several other fieldwork reports on river dynamics and preglacial coastal deposits, also emanating from the broad survey of physical processes Davis demanded, and they demonstrate a methodical respect for physical processes, if no special intellectual verve. The direction of Bowman’s own research interests in physical geography was not yet clear. He was learning more than method from Davis, and the focus on rivers was not accidental. Davis is best known for the theoretical innovation marked by his 1899 “geographical cycle,” which became the central theoretical edifice of physical geographic theory for the next half century. He posited water as the central geomorphological agent. On the basis of earlier research by Powell and his own fieldwork in Montana and the Appalachians, Davis argued that all landforms could be understood as the function of three variables: structure, process, and time. Structural uplift and the processes of fluvial erosion and deposition combine over time to produce an “ideal geographical cycle”: as a result of uplift, river gradient is steep and erosion is intense, but across geological time, erosion reduces the gradient until eventually deposition becomes the pivotal process of geographical change. Rivers and landforms evolve through a sequence of stages—youth, maturity, and old age—and rugged mountain ranges are ground down to

42

/

1898 and the making of a practical man

level peneplains, awaiting renewed uplift and the recommencement of the whole cycle. Historical and geographical change are closely correlated, as Mackinder might have put it. Davis recognized variations in this ideal cycle: wind and glaciers were also powerful geomorphological agents, and structural irregularities and climatic change might interrupt or otherwise affect the cycle.31 In his assistantship connected to Davis’s course “Physiography of the United States,” Bowman explored this theoretical material in the context of a regional survey. Davis was a grandson of the abolitionist Lucretia Mott and inherited his Quakerism from her. But he is more widely remembered as the progenitor of a “scientific” geography in the United States as well as the teacher of an unprecedented group of early-twentieth-century geographers. His insistence on the need for theory and a simultaneous dependence on empirically observable “facts” was central to the broad ambition for a scientific geography. What distinguishes Davis, in retrospect, is more the combination of these empirical and theoretical strictures with a secularization of physical geography. The tradition he inherited drew directly from eighteenthcentury natural theology, carried forward by Ritter in Germany and Guyot at Princeton, among others, in which natural and cultural changes are mediated by religious teleology. Nature, culture, and god represented mutual expressions of each other. Ratzel among others had attempted to displace the religious teleology in physical geography, but his organic vision retained a teleological spiritualism of its own. Davis deftly substituted “the Darwinian theory of evolution for the teleological interpretation of German natural philosophy,”32 opening the way for a twentieth-century scientific geomorphology. The sureties of Darwinian evolutionary theory brought their own whiff of teleology, but this was deemed compatible with, rather than antagonistic to, science. “Physiography” increasingly became Davis’s notion of physical geography. This was a late-nineteenth-century notion, dressing physical geography in scientific garb at a time when “physical geography” still carried connotations of theistic agency. When Bowman arrived at Harvard, Davis’s enthusiasm for physiography was at its peak. He emphasized process over form, the specific geographical processes producing landforms and landscapes, thereby also decentering the descriptive, mathematical abstractions of astronomy that had undergirded the elite tradition of East Coast geography to that point. With Davis’s influence, “geomorphology became more the study of the origins of landforms than of landforms themselves,” and physiography came to represent an Americanization of physical geography, the early efforts of Thomas Huxley notwithstanding.33

1898 and the making of a practical man

/

43

So completely did Bowman learn Davis’s thinking in this period that some of his writings of the time “read almost as though Davis himself were the author.”34 Thus it is hardly surprising that he also imbibed from Davis a pervasive if largely implicit evolutionism. Indeed, the philosophy of science he learned with Davis might reasonably be thought of as an evolutionary idealism—a belief in the hard-won, progressive development of ideas verifiable through a strict positivism. Bowman believed that evolutionary theory itself had evolved to maturity. There was a continuum from Greek and Roman thought to the present, he came to argue, but “only as late as our time could the principle of evolution be so variously documented that the idea became accessible and interesting to all men, not the vision of a few.” Science too is ancient and has likewise evolved to the point where today we can recognize it as science, and in that sense it provides universal access to nature. Science involves “empirical observation, limited analysis and generalization, confrontation of theory (idea) with fact, as well as revision or modification (with much myth and nonsense built in too).” The methods of science may not always have been clear or systematic, cause and effect might be wrongly ascribed, but science provides privileged access to truth and yields a progressive increase in knowledge.35 Half a century earlier, this combination of ideas might well have been prohibitively incompatible with prevailing religious beliefs. But the mature Bowman was a secular Christian, a believer in god in the abstract. Any antagonism between religion and science (including evolutionary theory) seemed increasingly arcane, and quite unlike Shaler’s science, for example, Bowman’s was thoroughly abstracted from his religious inclinations. Whereas Shaler’s evolution “became a kind of teleological tool for reconciling nature, humanity, and God,”36 Bowman inherited the evolutionism without any need of displacing an already displaced god. Shaler’s influence on Bowman was nonetheless crucial, although often underestimated compared with Davis’s. He attended lectures by Shaler as well as Davis, and when he received the first offer of a U.S. Geological Survey (USGS) summer job in 1903, it was Shaler who advised him: “I can save you words, Bowman, I can save you words. You go—go to that larger school of earth science—the Survey, and good luck to you.”37 Shaler had been Davis’s teacher ever since the latter arrived at Harvard in 1876, and he had personally gone through the evolution wars. Bowman’s evolutionism was largely assumed and rarely doctrinaire, more a binding glue for his political and physical geography than a driving passion. It was much weaker than that of his intellectual ancestors, and its provenance, now filtered through at least two generations of post-Darwinian geographers, was vaguer. A stu-

44

/

1898 and the making of a practical man

dent of Louis Aggasiz, who strongly opposed Darwin in the 1860s, Shaler had become increasingly convinced that his own teacher was wrong and that Darwinian evolution made a lot of sense. At the beginning of the new century Bowman’s was a more emulsified evolutionism.38 Bowman was proud to have attended lectures by some of the star Harvard professors of the day, including pragmatists Henry James and Jossiah Royce, and in English, George Kittredge and Charles Copeland, and Shaler’s broader intellectual interests complemented these influences. Bowman became involved in many of the same social and political aspects of geography that preoccupied Shaler’s later years. A “geologist by profession, but a geographer by inclination,” Shaler was a crucial bridge between the physical and human aspects of late-nineteenth-century geography. He became outspoken and quite xenophobic on questions of immigration, race, and resources.39 Davis was far from unaware of the social aspects of geography, having early on admonished an as yet uncomprehending Mark Jefferson to go and “find out what a City is. . . . No one seems to know.”40 But in suffusing his human geography with an evolutionary ethos, Bowman was following Shaler as much as Davis. From his Ferris Institute days, Bowman was primed to absorb another influence of Shaler’s. A poet as well as a geologist, Shaler lived on the margins of both pragmatism and late-century New England transcendentalism. With various of his Harvard colleagues, he shared the pragmatist’s conviction that “observation and hypothesis formulation” combined with “experimentation and individualism” taught a body of knowledge appropriate for addressing real-life problems. The multiple strands of American pragmatism evolved in close dialogue with evolutionary theory and less obviously if more contentiously with transcendentalism.41 The scientist Shaler was equally “fired” by the metaphysics of the latter. Transcendentalism was inspired largely by nineteenth-century German literature and philosophy, most notably Kant and Goethe. Kant’s “transcendental idealism” in particular revolved around forms of knowledge derived not from empirical experience but from a priori conception.42 In the United States, and especially in early-nineteenth-century New England, transcendentalism took many forms, from the nature romanticism of Emerson to the “systematic subjectivism” of George Santayana (at Harvard during Bowman’s undergraduate years) and the broad-based spiritual challenge aimed at established Protestantism. Transcendentalists shared the belief that the emerging materialism associated with American capitalism was insufficient to lead a rounded life and that a higher spiritual reality pervaded nature and human knowledge.43

1898 and the making of a practical man

/

45

Although pragmatism and transcendentalism may sound mutually contradictory to a later sensibility, Shaler, the scientist of earth history, saw no conflict. To find a spiritualism in the earth itself was not at all inconsistent with science; it was the whole point: materialism and spirituality could indeed be held together as if to offset each other. The intellectual dance between them marked demonstrative progress beyond the empirical-transcendental dialectic that had preoccupied Kant.44 From all this Bowman imbibed a more casual, modern, and airy philosophical constellation that was habitually translated into a more-activist contrast of realism and idealism: The world of men consists of two parts: first, realities of custom, property, social relationships, partial adjustments to the resources and layouts of the regions in which we live, and a knowledge of these and many other things; second, ideals toward which we strive. Ideals are ideas not yet realized. They may denote the practical, material, and unsentimental things of life as well as the visions that yield spiritual nourishment.45

The more contemplative spiritualism of Shaler is here transformed and updated into something much more practical. The spiritual is galvanized toward practical ends, placing Bowman firmly in the center of a reinvented American liberalism with direct roots in the eighteenth century. Idealism is useful; pragmatism is laced with transcendentalism. Nowhere was the pragmatist tradition stronger than at Harvard, where Charles Peirce, arguably the most influential of nineteenth-century pragmatists, once bemoaned the “horrid” contradictions that inhabited him: “Realist, Materialist, Transcendentalist, Idealist.”46 Like Shaler, Bowman read poetry throughout his life and wrote it too, although none seems to have survived. He was keenly appreciative of the “Emersonian” style he detected in his earliest mentor, Jefferson; and he was sufficiently taken by the syrupy populism of his contemporary Joyce Kilmer that in later years he kept a copy of the nature-idolatrous “Trees” in a place of honor in his desk. Transcendentalism indeed. A harder-headed Bowman also insisted that the ideas of science, like those of democracy, were based on experimentation. Of all the patriotic American figures, he revered Thomas Jefferson above all, who was, he said, a “practical idealist”: “It was the combination of the practical and the ideal that gave an individual stamp to the thought and practice of Jefferson.” Indeed, Jefferson “coupled ‘freedom and science’ as conditions of progress.”47

46

/

1898 and the making of a practical man

It is tempting to elevate this struggle between pragmatism and idealism as the subtext of Bowman’s later life, and there is much evidence for doing so. But it is too simple a dichotomy and provides too superficial a portrait. The mature Bowman’s idealism was deployed pragmatically, and his pragmatism equally rose to an ideal that he strained to find in others. What he absorbed at Harvard was an evolved transcendentalism and pragmatism that provided him with a flexible array of intellectual options in the service of political strategy. His description of Jefferson as a practical idealist could therefore be applied perfectly to Bowman himself. As Henry May has argued, given “the large, vague limits of practical idealism it was possible to be mostly practical or mostly idealistic as long as one maintained some touch with both qualities.”48

yale and the “ forest physiography ” Still quite unsure about what future he would pursue, Bowman secured a schoolteacher’s certificate for Michigan public schools during his interim year at Ypsilanti. Warned by Davis that there were no jobs for geographers, he took the civil service hydrology exam in the spring of 1905 before completing his Harvard degree and finished at the head of the list. After graduating from Harvard, he went straight to work for the USGS. For the first time in his life, he had the chance to travel—to the South (Charleston Harbor, South Carolina) and the West (Dallas). He wanted to visit the Grand Canyon, which played such an important role in nineteenth-century physical geography, but was unable to do so. He had been offered five hundred dollars in scholarships to continue at Harvard on graduate work, but feeling the need to make more of a living if he was going to do a doctorate, he took a summer school assistantship at Yale. With a faculty member ill, he was soon offered a full-time instructorship,49 and Yale became his home for the next ten years. In contrast with Harvard, he found Yale “friendly in a warm and personal sense.” Though still young looking and hardly over five feet six inches, he was now unambiguously part of the faculty and responsible for his own courses. Davis took the time to pen him a letter, sending him on his way as he embarked on a geography career and offering advice about teaching, research, the importance of contacts, and the niceties of polite society. He took a singularly paternal tone unimaginable from Bowman’s father: You “must not neglect either healthful exercise or social relations,” Davis felt impelled to advise. And “be sure to make your ‘duty call,’ after any invitation to dinner or the like, promptly,” he continued. “Dress up proper, stay a little while . . . and thus show your proper appreciation of the

1898 and the making of a practical man

/

47

acquaintance that you are forming.” And when, in the future, he concluded, “some bright young girl should become Mrs. Bowman, you must have a good acquaintance waiting to receive her in New Haven.”50 In fact, during a Thanksgiving trip to Lynn, Massachusetts, in 1902, at the invitation of a classmate and friend, he met Cora Olive Goldthwaite. The Goldthwaites were a financially comfortable, rather stiff middle-class New England family, and Cora had graduated from Radcliffe in English literature. After a sixyear relationship, feeling established and financially secure on a twelvehundred-dollar salary, Bowman proposed to Cora in March 1908, and they were married in June of the following year. Yale was building a geography curriculum, largely because of the plans of another Davis student, Herbert E. Gregory, and Bowman taught an impressive range of courses in physiography (general as well as regional) and physical geography. But he focused increasingly on the human dimensions of geography, especially in North America, and added several courses (many cotaught with Ellsworth Huntington) on “geographical controls” in history, anthropogeography, and the like.51 He wanted to understand and explain the geographical diversity of human activities. Two major preoccupations guided his Yale teaching. First, he dabbled with a resurgent and fashionable environmental determinism, which is a theoretical tradition positing that geographical differences in social behaviors, cultures, and economies are the results of different physical and environmental conditions; the environment determines the society; geography “controls” history. Environmental determinism appealed to an absolutist conception of space, had a long and distinguished history dating most recently to the eighteenth century, and had an obvious appeal as a kind of royal shortcut to human science. Bowman’s colleague Huntington would make a career out of the more extreme environmentalist explanations of human geographical variation, as did their older contemporary Ellen Semple. Still, in his early days at Yale, Bowman’s own teaching and research were organized around the contention that “the character of the physical features” of the earth “has been a prominent factor in the life of a race,” a position he later acknowledged as including “a lot of determinism.”52 He was more swept along in the current, however, than he was a coxswain of this determinism, and by 1910, the same year that Virginia Woolf (and later Henri Lefebvre) identified as ushering in a new conception of space (see the section “The First Moment” in chapter 1), he registered his own dissatisfaction with the theory. He was troubled by the “bald generalizations” behind arguments extolling “geographical controls in history,” seeing them as “ghosts . . . of an idea often asserted in the past and as often denied” for want of solid research.53 Societies were much more plas-

48

/

1898 and the making of a practical man

tic, and collective social action could easily supersede most environmental controls, he reasoned. A habitual admonition to his later Yale classes catches the complex relationality of space and nature that he now glimpsed: I used to say to my classes . . . that one could build a city of a hundred thousand at the South Pole and provide electric lights and opera. Civilization could stand the cost. But what would be the use of it if there were no resources to sustain it? I used to put opposite this the statement that we could also build a mountain range in the Sahara high enough to provoke rainfall. But again, what is the use of it. . . . 54

His second and interconnected preoccupation was with what came to be called regional geography, a geographical inquiry that took regions as its basic spatial unit and investigated their differences. Nineteenth-century physical geography always had a regional dimension, as Bowman certainly learned with Davis, and the regional approach came to dominate human geography in the United States from the 1930s to the 1950s. Bowman was in at the ground floor. The regional survey of the world by H. R. Mill, The International Geography, had a “decisive influence” on him, and his first paper to the Association of American Geographers (1905) was an extended book review concerning the regional geography of the “Near East,” as it was then called. He consistently claimed that his South America course of 1906 was “among the first,” if not the first, regional course “offered in any American institution,” and he was the first AAG member at that time to identify himself as a regional geographer.55 The regional approach to geographical knowledge was not inherently antagonistic to environmental determinism; indeed, Yale geography took the “natural region” as the central unit of study and generally built a human geographical portrait of a region on top of a firm physical foundation. In 1908 Bowman tried what he called “the ‘man-first’ idea” in his South America course, reversing the priority of physical and human components. By the end of his Yale stint, he also taught commercial geography and political geography, which, while retaining a significant environmental element, were increasingly emancipated from questions of environmental control.56 They also signaled the ways in which Bowman’s interests would change in coming decades. Yale was a new world for Bowman. He had a significant social life beyond work, devoted most days to preparing and teaching large classes, spent most summers in field research, and as an ambitious young faculty member threw himself into building Yale geography. He encouraged “explorations” in the less well-known parts of the world. For all of its problems,

1898 and the making of a practical man

/

49

the study of “environmental controls” offered explanation over simple description, and when coupled with innovative work in human and regional geography and the insistence on fieldwork, it formed a lively and new geography curriculum at Yale by 1908, attracting more and better students. A more intellectually and socially secure Bowman actually livened up the department, and his teaching was challenging, encyclopedic, and well received. He was elected to the new Association of American Geographers in 1906 and developed a sufficient reputation that he was courted for a position at the University of Chicago, then the hearth of American geography. He taught summer school there and occupied a floor in the house of the department chair, Rollin Salisbury, but balked at a permanent job. He had formed life-long friendships in New Haven, including one with the political scientist Charles Seymour, who later became president of Yale and judged that Bowman helped transform “the softest of the so-called snap courses” at Yale into “a stimulating discipline on a permanent basis.”57 Bowman alone was not responsible for the shift, but after his colleague Herbert Gregory retired and Bowman moved on, geography at Yale declined. At the end of his first semester teaching there, Bowman declared himself a doctoral candidate at Yale. Four years later at the age of thirty, he filed his dissertation. He continued to publish material derived from earlier fieldwork, including a piece on the disposal of oil-well wastes and an obscure but influential manual, Well-Drilling Methods, which engineers still consulted in the 1960s. But the dissertation marked the beginning of a new direction. Entitled “The Geography of the Central Andes” and based partly on fieldwork from a 1907 expedition to Peru and Bolivia, it exhibited more of his Harvard background than the still-emerging innovations of Yale. He began with two regional physiography chapters on the western and eastern watersheds of the Andes, followed by two on the populations of the Atacama and highland Bolivia. He offered an “anthropogeographic” interpretation of these regions, elaborated their trade routes and economic connections, and concluded with an evaluation of “man and climatic change” across the whole continent. The dissertation was more a collection of papers than a coherent regional geography, and indeed all but one chapter appeared in various journals over the next couple of years. He also published his first book in his Yale years, Forest Physiography. It is a peculiar book in several ways. While it could no longer be confused for a Davis product, it is clearly rooted in his Harvard training, yet he did not acknowledge Davis and made only desultory reference to a couple of his works. Instead, it is dedicated to a California agrogeologist whose work on soils had recently grabbed Bowman. Was Bowman asserting indepen-

50

/

1898 and the making of a practical man

dence from an old mentor, or was he just caught up in the enthusiasm of new ideas? The book’s immediate provenance lay in a course on physiography, lithology, and soils that he taught in Yale’s forestry school, and its outline follows the material covered there. The lumber industry was a major economic force in the country at the time, with parts of the Midwest, including Bowman’s native Michigan, still yielding first-cut timber, and this provided a very practical rationale for the book. “The forester,” Bowman explained, “requires a scientific knowledge of soils and climate.”58 The book had very little to do with forests, despite its title. Puzzled reviewers generally treated it as a rather quirky regional physiography with a long introductory treatise on soils grafted on—the “best detailed description” of the physiographic regions of the United States, praised A. J. Herbertson at London’s Royal Geographical Society.59 It did have some notable features. A “genetic classification of geographical forms is, in effect, an explanation of them,” wrote Davis in his classic paper on “the geographical cycle.”60 It was classic Kantian hubris and a lesson that Bowman, a sometimes pedantic classifier, took very much to heart; process, classification, and the regionalization of different biophysical complexes are the anchors of Forest Physiography. On the question of regions, Bowman had grasped a clear sense of the procedures of regionalization—the necessity of judging the distinction between similar and dissimilar features within and among places—that would come to undergird a whole tradition of regional geography as areal differentiation.61 And, perhaps less remarkable given the topic and his training, he shows a keen, early sensibility concerning the connection between lumbering, soil destruction, and erosion. Bowman’s evolutionary idealism washes through the introductory passages on the agency of soils and the historical destiny of plants. Soil is important for plant evolution, he says, but competition among trees can doom some species regardless of the soil. Plants have their own innate tendencies: Plants possess a peculiar inherent force by the exercise of which they directly adapt themselves to new conditions and become fitted for existence in accordance with new surroundings. Thus plants are thought to have certain physiologic plasticity or power of self-regulation that tends to adjust them to a new environment, a feature that goes far in explaining the absence of a rigid control of physiographic conditions over forest distributions although an approximate control is often manifested.62

This weak version of determinism, allied with the implied teleological agency of specific botanical species, affirms Shaler’s as much as Davis’s influence on Bowman and suggests the depth to which he was at this point

1898 and the making of a practical man

/

51

a product of the post-Darwinian nineteenth century.63 In fact, a gendered and thoroughly suggestive transcendentalism framed his entire vision of nature. The book’s first words are: Men whose work brings them into touch with the soil and its relation to life do not use the phrase “mother earth” in a casual sense. The great hosts of plant and animal life that people the lands . . . are, directly or indirectly, the dependent children of the earth. Viewed from such a standpoint the soil is not mere dirt, a substance to be despised, a synonym for filth, but a great storehouse of energy, a great home, a bountiful mother. Countless billions of micro-organisms—the bacterial flora—throng its dark passageways while the roots of countless higher plants ramify through it in eager quest for food and water.64

“Those who go up by the help of transcendentalism, do not always come back in safety,” it has been said,65 and this may be a case in point. Bowman’s publisher clearly did not include any budding Freudians on its editorial staff, or this passage, written barely a year after he married, would surely have been excised. Or perhaps they simply assumed that physical geography was immune to unscientific ramifications. No such arbitrary separation of science and spirituality affected Bowman, however. Just as science and religion, god and evolution, represented no contradiction for the physical geography of Shaler, a transcendental infusion of meaning into nature never seemed incompatible with the strictest positivism and the rigorous identification of facts and objective truths for Bowman.

the practical man The life of the mind was Bowman’s escape from hard work, hard religion, and hard paternal authority, but these influences carried forward into his own mature demeanor. The personal confidence that ripened during the Yale years displaced all trace of shyness. He would not always match the intellectual flair and originality of Davis or Shaler but was far more adept at translating the new geographical ideas into action: science was nothing if not wedded to a larger social purpose. For all its oddities, Forest Physiography prefigured a lot about Bowman’s career, his strengths, and his limitations. It was a manual for foresters struggling to break free from an intellectual treatise. “Practical men must choose constantly between principle and expediency,” suggested an older and wiser Bowman, translating the philosophical tension between pragmatism and transcendentalism into more modern and more useful terms. “Principle is the long-term interest; expediency is the

52

/

1898 and the making of a practical man

present advantage.” As two colleagues would later say of him, “The scholar and the man of action were combined in about equal measure.”66 The practice of expediency and espousal of principle would become a way of life. But how specifically would this penchant for the practical mobilize his scientific geography for a wider application? In Bowman’s last year at Yale, the U.S. government was lurching toward conflict with another remnant of the Spanish Empire. The Mexican Revolution had begun in 1910, and four years later Woodrow Wilson dispatched troops to the Gulf port of Veracruz to safeguard U.S. oil investments. As the uprising increasingly focused on the north, Wilson now claimed the pretext of cross-border incursions was to combat the revolutionaries, especially Pancho Villa. Bowman quickly responded with a military geography of northern Mexico, applying his geographical training to contemporary political events for the first time. He explicitly sought answers to “a number of the questions which the military man raises on looking over the possibilities of such a region.” It offered a topographical survey, highlighting the availability of resources such as water and the different forms of ground cover, but it especially focused on transportation routes: “a military campaign directed against a revolution in that region, either by a central Mexican authority or by American forces, must always confront the problem of reaching in force those remote sections that are the haunts of guerilla bands and small fugitive detachments.”67 The principle in question here, Bowman would have said, was U.S.-style democracy; the expediency, his casting of geographical science as a military tool. From the Michigan militia in 1898 to Mexican geography a decade and a half later was a long journey for Bowman, but its start and end were marked by a consistent braiding of geographical and political concerns, scholarly and practical interests. Despite flashes of insight associated with his disavowal of environmental determinism and a clear sense that new geographical realities offered opportunities, he still generally thought of American expansionism in absolutist, territorial terms. He had moved only cautiously beyond the geographies affirmed by the colonial adventurism of 1898. He read Brooks Adams’s New Empire and Halford Mackinder’s “Geographical Pivot of History” in this period, and he watched the Open Door evolve from a “China policy” into a global ambition with Woodrow Wilson, but as yet he neither grasped these as his own vision nor embraced the shifting articulation of global economies, histories, and geographies that was becoming visible. His Andean field research partly reaffirmed this traditional vision, but it also opened up new veins of social transformation that in turn helped to open Bowman to the greater fluidity of global geographies.

3 “CONDITIONAL CONQUEST”: GEOGRAPHY, LABOR, AND EXPLORATION IN SOUTH AMERICA

As the conquests of 1898 suggest, the first mappings of the American Century represented a continuity with the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries more than a harbinger of new geographies. To be a geographer in the passing era was to be an explorer, an adventurer into the “unknown space and barbaric chaos,” as Mackinder described it, beyond the “civilized” world.1 It was to be David Livingstone or Henry Stanley in the depths of what Europeans called darkest Africa; Lord Franklin and Fridtjof Nansen against the Arctic; or John Wesley Powell cavalcading by raft down the Grand Canyon. All were boyhood heroes of Bowman’s. Insofar as most of the world’s places were integrated into the world map by the beginning of the twentieth century, the frenzy for planetary exploration began to subside, yet the tradition of exploring faraway places survived. When Bowman set off for South America in 1907, he saw himself as a “geographical explorer.”2 This was no simple refusal of the end of an era but an assertion that there remained unexplored or barely explored worlds to conquer, an attempted redefinition of exploration in a changing world. In the early twentieth century “the geographical explorer seeks not merely new or wonderful things” as in the past; “real exploration can also be done in one’s own garden,” Bowman observed. If this was an allusion to Darwin and his study of earthworms, it also anticipated the transformation of the leading edge of geographical research from an extensive territorial quest at the edges of the known world into a social and scientific investigation of the gaps in the known. It was a

54

/

“conditional conquest”

ready corollary to Mackinder’s observation that new social irruptions now reverberated to transform the world they came from: the way of studying the world changed in tandem with the world being studied. Bowman readily dismissed idle prattling about the “end of geography”: “It has become the fashion to say that major exploration is at an end because the North Pole and the South Pole have been attained and the general design of the mountains, deserts, and drainage systems of the earth has become known.” Rather, he claimed, geography is reinvented: “The map is still crowded with scientific mysteries though its great historic mysteries have been swept away. . . . It is undoubtedly an achievement to fill in a blank space on the map; but discovery has not ended when the blank spaces are filled.”3 Modern geographical research strives to make sense of what the new replete mapping of the world means. Written as a concluding reflection on his Andean fieldwork, Bowman’s observation captures the changing purpose and role of geography in the first formative moment of the American Century. Geography had not passed from the scene but adopted a new and more intricate identity. In the throes of the fieldwork, of course, Bowman was not always so lucid. His rationale for going to South America had less to do with any prescience about a Wilsonian new world order that was still years away than with doing the done thing. Grueling fieldwork was still a rite of passage for any selfrespecting geographer, and Bowman’s was about as grueling as could be, barring tragic consequences. Having lived under the shadow of the Monroe Doctrine for nearly a century, South America was the earliest proving ground of the American Century. In the early years of the twentieth century, it was the leading destination for U.S. direct investment and a playground for U.S. explorers and archaeologists. First-order European conquest was almost four hundred years old, but after nearly a century of independence the European links remained strong. Large urban centers, especially on the Atlantic coast, were areas of well-incorporated world commerce, and the same turn-of-thecentury migrations that brought Europeans to the United States also populated the cities and farms of South America. Even on the riverine frontiers thousands of miles up the Amazon during the turn-of-the-century rubber and timber booms, some engineers, entrepreneurs, and gentlemen adventurers sent their shirt collars to Lisbon for washing and starching; in 1896 the Italian tenor Enrico Caruso was brought up the jungle waterway to inaugurate the Manaus Opera House. But the continent also included large stretches that were still marginally integrated into the larger world, and these were the areas that attracted

“conditional conquest”

/

55

Bowman. He went not to the Amazon but to the high Andes, the “land of the Incas,” stretching from Peru and Bolivia to northern Chile. After a century of independence and nation building, hundreds of miles of national frontiers remained contested, and the authority of the central states was weak in outlying districts.4 Bowman mounted three separate expeditions, in 1907, 1911, and 1913. His interest in the region had been sparked by his Ypsilanti teacher Mark Jefferson, and he knew from teaching South America at Yale that good physical research on the area was limited. Several German geographers had done fieldwork there in recent decades, as had Peruvian geographers, but the coverage was sparse and the quality uneven. So little was known, in fact, that Bowman used as a baseline the classic works of Humboldt and Darwin, who had visited the region in the 1800s and 1830s, respectively. The contemporary human geography of the region (unlike the archaeology) was even more underdeveloped, although British geographer Sir Clements Markham had begun intensive research in the 1870s.5 Three distinct environments dominated the region: the mountain chains of the Andes; the extensive intermontane plateau, or puna; and the Atacama Desert. Although a few outside intrepids had reconnoitered the area, it was still a significant blank spot on the world map for most geographers and for the publics of Europe and North America. It was one of the last extant frontiers on the “rim of the known world,” Bowman observed, quoting Teddy Roosevelt.6 If he conceived himself solidly within a new scientific geography for the new century, he also relished the romance and heroism of exploration in the old style. It was here that Bowman did his most trenchant and original geographical research. Several papers and two books were the result: The Andes of Southern Peru (1916) and Desert Trails of Atacama (1924). Traversing some ten thousand miles by mule, canoe, train, and stagecoach, as well as on foot, and enduring extraordinarily difficult conditions of climate, altitude, physical environment, and personal danger, his expeditions recorded, mapped, and interpreted various facets of the region’s geography: geomorphological analyses of structural uplift and climatic change, regional physiographies and settlement geographies, economic and commercial inventories, and cultural archaeologies of relict Indian communities. His earliest results were at times speculative and overgeneralized and on at least one occasion quickly proven wrong, but some of his analyses of different regional landscapes, landforms, and processes had enduring scientific value. The scientific work, however, was overshadowed by one momentous event. The 1911 venture was organized with his Yale colleague Hiram Bingham, and it was on this

56

/

“conditional conquest”

expedition that the mythical lost city of the Incas, Machu Picchu, was “discovered.” Bowman appreciated the larger context of his work. On the one hand, with prospectors and rubber planters already well established in the Amazon, the Andes, long a barrier to trade between the coast and the interior, had become the last great frontier of the continent. On the other hand, the conquistadores had initiated a period of “sheer human conquest,” in Bowman’s words, opening up uncharted territory often by brutal means. But the new conquest was different. Led by commerce and capital rather than muskets, it was a “conditional conquest”: “Even if railroads are run across the mountains, the desert reclaimed by scientific methods of irrigation, and rubber in enormous quantities gathered on all the highways and byways of a once impenetrable forest, all these are done by such methods and at such expense of human energy and capital, even of life, as to make them examples not of sheer human conquest, but a conditional conquest.”7 The conquest was conditional in two ways for Bowman. First, although modern societies were easily capable of grand modifications of nature, and therefore no outright environmental determinism was tenable, geographical forces nonetheless “strongly and persistently molded the will and the deeds” of South America’s people and will continue to do so. Geography always conditions economic conquest. But conquest is conditional in a second sense, namely, it requires an imposition of knowledge and capital from outside to break the nature-imposed torpidity of indigenous society. It is conditional, therefore, on the attention and resources “of the sterner races, whose tastes have led them to exploitation of many precious substances that have long held the original races in a thralldom practically complete.”8 We will examine the connection between Bowman’s evolutionary idealism and his conceptions of race in due course. The point here is that geographical knowledge is itself a condition of conquest. Its explications of people and place, landscape and environment, delineate the conditions and possibilities of conquest. It transforms immediate practical questions of environment and resources into manageable scientific and technical problems. Primary exploration—“sheer” conquest, for Bowman—opens up and formally maps the outlines of uncharted spaces; later waves of exploration— conditional conquest—offer a replete remapping as a prelude to integration into the circuits of global economy and culture. If exploration establishes the initial means of penetrating unexplored regions, scientific geography serves up newly pioneered areas for economic exploitation and “development.” The stuff of geography—descriptions and explanations of physical conditions and processes, mapped landscapes and their features, resource in-

“conditional conquest”

/

57

ventories, catalogs and portraits of social conditions vis-à-vis the environment, mapped trade routes—provided a kind of anatomical diagram, a physiology of the region being opened up.

physiographic conquest i: the davisian andes With a semester’s leave of absence from Yale and a thousand-dollar grant from the industrialist Archer M. Huntington, an inheritor of the Huntington railroad fortune and habitual benefactor of the American Geographical Society, Bowman launched the “Yale South American Expedition of 1907.” In April he set out on his biggest adventure yet aboard a United Fruit Company steamer bound for Jamaica, then Panama. Fully aware of his journey’s significance, he kept a detailed diary. Crossing the isthmus by land, he was deeply impressed by the cut being dug for the canal. As he sailed south down the northern coast of Peru, he began to make field observations of coastal disturbances, terraces, deposits, and other signs of changed sea level all the way down to Iquique in northern Chile. On a mule’s back, he carried out a topographic mapping from Lagunas in northern Chile, eastward over the coastal range, up the Andes slope, through a high pass and onto the Bolivian puna, a high plateau ranging between twelve thousand and fourteen thousand feet above sea level (map 1). Returning to the Chilean coast, he detoured south to the dusty seaport of Antofagasta before returning to the Bolivian puna farther north. A stagecoach took him to the old colonial city of Cochabamba, then down the steep slope of the Cordillera Oriental (the eastern range of the Andes) into the Chapare district of eastern Bolivia and the Amazon basin. He returned home via La Paz, Lake Titicaca, and the Peruvian coast.9 The 1907 expedition was driven largely by physiographic concerns. Bowman believed that William Morris Davis’s theory of erosion cycles was likely to provide the best explanation of many Andean landscapes. Uplift was pivotal to the Davisian theory and might occur in various ways, and erosion was just as vital because it wore down uplifted terrain into peneplains, relatively flat plains perched significantly above sea level. From the deck of the Beagle, observing the coastal cliffs of Peru, Darwin first proposed that massive uplift had occurred throughout the entire area, but this was eventually challenged by researchers who insisted that the region’s geomorphology owed more to volcanic forces and events. It was generally accepted that some mix of volcanic action and structural uplift had operated in the region, but advocates of uplift and vulcanism differed radically on the extent, intensity, and significance of these different geological agents. The controversy revolved around contradictory structural and fossil evidence, but Bowman now

58

/

“conditional conquest”

Map 1. Bowman’s Latin American expeditions, 1907, 1911, 1913.

came in search of physiographical clues: what did landscape form tell about landscape origins? His initial coastal observations verified many of Darwin’s descriptions, and he pieced together a more detailed picture of coastal forms and processes. He measured relict wave-cut terraces, raised beaches, and comparatively recent shell deposits between eight hundred and fifteen hundred feet above the current sea level, all of which suggested rapid changes of sea levels. He quickly attributed this to dramatic uplift throughout the area, much as Darwin had done and in line with the Davisian theory.10 On the inland stretch of the expedition, he carried out more detailed physiographic analysis in search of a broad chronology of the cycles of geo-

“conditional conquest”

/

59

morphological change. From conglomerate, dissected alluvial fans and other deposited sediments embedded in lower rock layers, he identified eroded relict flood-plain surfaces and piedmont river deposits, both suggesting uplift. And by a rudimentary mapping of river profiles and cross-sections, he located stream forms that he took as mature, even aged, in the Davisian cycle, except that they were currently the agents of “vigorous stream dissection” rather than deposition. Here was a remarkable South American parallel to the Colorado River’s dissection of the Great Basin, most marked in Arizona’s Grand Canyon, which had played a central role in the development of nineteenth-century geography, from Powell to Davis. Again, Bowman had little trouble conceiving this landscape in classical Davisian terms of uplift and erosion. But the chronology was not straightforward. From detailed analysis of the Cochabamba, Cliza, and upper Urubamba river basins of northwestern Bolivia and southern Peru, he concluded that the area had undergone not one but three sequential cycles of uplift, dissection, and peneplain formation, followed by renewed uplift. In some places earlier cycles appear not to have reached maturity before a new cycle of uplift commenced; in the Cordillera Occidental (the western range of the Andes), where uplift remained intense in recent times, the landscape profile was most youthful; on the edge of the Cordillera Oriental, by contrast—in the Yungas, the Chapare River, the slopes east of Cochabamba—the dissection of this latest uplift was already well underway.11 Bowman came away from the 1907 expedition convinced that Davis’s schema for the erosion cycle was the central explanatory tool for the physiography of the Central Andes. “Peneplanation,” he declared, “is the dominating fact in the physiography of the region.”12 Detailed empirical analysis would reveal the particular contours of peneplanation in specific places and the extent to which other forces—structural interruption by faulting or by volcanic eruption, for example, or the effects of resurgent glaciation— modified the Davisian template. But this affirmation and complication of Davis’s theory were hard won. Bowman “became thoroughly acquainted with a mule’s back” and endured the worst of a high Andes winter. The feudal bondage of the peonage system established in the sixteenth century was loosening, but in the mountains and on the puna, far from the more modern influences of the coast, it survived in various forms. Still called peons, Indian day laborers received only token wages, were often coerced into work, and were subject to constant, often life-threatening beatings. Slave traders still openly worked the Amazon basin, kidnaping Indians for work in the plantations. In May in La-

60

/

“conditional conquest”

gunas, preparing for the most arduous phase of the expedition, Bowman acquired mules and hired a peon as porter and two guides (“half-breed”) from the local nitrate plant. Including an American companion called Rogers, this party headed northeast into the mountains, through the pass of Lillillita and into Bolivia. Bowman was mapping, sketching, and taking elaborate notes throughout. But at fourteen thousand feet above sea level he was stricken by severe soroche (altitude sickness) and could only sit miserably as his mule trudged on. After two days of hard riding from the desolate border hamlet of Llica, their food and water were exhausted, and their night camp was snowed in by intermittent blizzards. The men were cold, “hollow eyed” with hunger and sleep deprivation, and their lips and faces were cracked by the dry, cold wind. The mules were “absolutely dejected, great snow masses on their backs.”13 A second night in the snow was helped only by some whiskey and hot tea. The guide’s “crazy wanderings” had led them in circles, Bowman records, so that they recrossed their tracks into and out of Bolivia until they found a gorge they could follow down from the puna. But head guide Luidor resented the implication he was lost and quickly abandoned the descending party, heading back up to the puna with the pack animals. When the weather cleared and Bowman caught up with him, he exploded in rage. “Who was guide and who was traveler?” Bowman bellowed. Luidor drew a knife from his boot leg and threatened to kill the gringo geographer. Bowman loaded his “six-shooter,” swung his bandolier across his chest, invoked the provincial governor’s name for insurance, and spent the night “ready for business.”14 The remainder of the 1907 expedition was less harrowing but certainly eventful. They left the land of the highland Aymara for the forest Machiguenga of the Chapare region northeast of Cochabamba, descending into the Amazon basin by dugout canoe—“one half breed at stern and three painted savages at bow.”15 Bowman analyzed the region south of Lake Titicaca to Oruro, concluding that at least two uplift surfaces could be identified there. Overall he had covered nearly four thousand miles and was bringing back conclusive physiographical evidence, he felt, that the erosion cycle operated in the Central Andes.

physiographic conquest ii: cartography When he next returned to the region, it was a more elaborate affair altogether, a more intense research experience and eventually a very famous expedition. Financed to the tune of $11,825 and with seven “scientific mem-

“conditional conquest”

/

61

bers,” the 1911 “Yale Expedition to Peru” was led by Hiram Bingham, an ambitious man who had married into the wealth of the Connecticut upper classes. Bingham, who had graduated with a geology Ph.D. from Harvard the same year that Bowman earned his baccalaureate, came to Yale as an instructor in Latin American history and geography in 1907. He would go on to become governor of Connecticut and a U.S. senator before a romantic scandal ended his public career. Bingham was an old-school explorer, more acquisitive than inquisitive, a man who sought out “firsts” and harbored a proprietary attitude toward South America. Explorer Annie Peck, who claimed to have reached the “apex of America” after ascending the north peak of Huascarán (22,205 ft., 6,768 m) in northern Peru, was a particular thorn in his side. “Any unexplored country” would do, barked a livid Bingham on hearing her claim: he had to get back to the Andes to “answer” Peck. Being beaten by a woman was bad enough, but Peck was a sixty-one-year-old grandmother. He fastened on Coropuna, a multipeak volcanic mountain in southern Peru, whose height was only vaguely known but was estimated to be as high as 23,000 feet (7,010 m)—higher than Aconcagua, then estimated at 22,763 feet (6,938 m). If so, Coropuna would be the highest peak in the Americas. Peck was already planning an ascent, and Bingham vowed to beat her to the top, having failed to browbeat her into stepping aside on the grounds that Coropuna was somehow his.16 Archaeological interest in South America was at fever pitch, and as a second objective he decided to “discover” the ruins of an old Inca capital that was rumored to perch on a high mountain saddle above the Urubamba River. This part of the plan was not revealed to the rest of the party. To lure Yale sponsorship, the expedition required a demonstrably scholarly purpose, hence Bowman’s inclusion. He was to lead a cartographic survey of the Urubamba River valley and map a topographic section from the province of Cuzco south across the Andes to the coast.17 They would go to the Urubamba first to get acclimatized, and Bowman’s party would complete the cartographic work. Bingham, traversing the plateau and ridges, would join up with them later, and they would jointly tackle Coropuna. The 1911 voyage to Peru occupied them with Spanish lessons and other preparations but became less relaxing for Bingham when Annie Peck boarded the same steamer in Jamaica. Following a three-day stopover at Lima, the Bingham-Bowman party arrived at Mollendo in early July, then proceeded by train to the highland city of Cuzco. They were briefly detained there by analysis of human remains in glacial deposits and by the need to secure sufficient mules and arrieros (muleteers),18 but in the third week of

62

/

“conditional conquest”

July, they headed north to the Urubamba. Bingham was insistent that his and Bowman’s parties should separate at the river, and if Bowman was quite happy to get away from an overbearing Bingham, only later did he understand his colleague’s motive. As Bingham struck up the mountain slopes in search of the Inca capital, accompanied by an escort of soldiers provided by the president of Peru, Bowman took to the valley bottom to explore and map the Urubamba (map 2). The north-flowing Urubamba dissects the eastern rim of the Andes, flowing into the Amazon via the Ucayali River, and its middle and lower canyon represented a “scientifically unexplored region” that Bowman found alluring. In Davis’s terms, it was a very young stream cutting quickly and violently through the edge of a recently raised peneplain. Only fragments of the valley—most of it a deep gorge—had been mapped, mostly by Peruvian geographers from the Geographical Society of Lima. Here was Bowman’s blank space to map. Few settlers had ever ventured down the most rugged hundred-mile stretch from Rosalina to the Pongo Manique, a foreboding series of rapids. In 1897 a Major Kerbey descended the last twenty miles of this section and declared it more hazardous than Powell’s descent of the Grand Canyon three decades prior. Kerbey lost his canoe, and the handful of others who succeeded him—a Peruvian engineer, four Italian traders, would-be rubber merchants, even slave traders for the rubber plantations farther down the river—all lost at least a canoe, some their lives. There is “no record of a single descent without the loss of at least one canoe,” Bowman reported grimly, knowing that a dangerous river descent was the only way to map the Urubamba.19 The imminent adventure clearly thrilled Bowman as a piece of oldfashioned exploring, but he meant to accomplish more than that. The Urubamba map would provide a cartographic baseline for research on the geomorphological processes now operating in the region. The cut made by the canyon lay open tens of millions of years of geological processes as well as the most aggressive geomorphological agency of the Urubamba itself. It would be hard to find a more dynamic example of Davis’s erosion cycle in action. Accompanied by their own soldier, the Bowman party left Cuzco and descended the upper reaches of the Urubamba, outfitting themselves at Santa Ana. Progress was initially slow: a drunk official, a mule bitten by a “vampire bat,” and the inexperience of the cartographer and his assistant all frustrated Bowman.20 They eventually reached Rosalina, where the river trip began. In addition to Bowman, the party included three Machiguenga guides, the expedition surgeon W. G. Erving, who was compiling a photographic record of “Indian racial physiognomy,”21 and a local planter, Señor

“conditional conquest”

/

63

Map 2. The Urubamba River, 1911 expedition.

La Sama. The staunch twenty-five-foot dugout canoe also carried “200 pounds of baggage, a dog, and supplies of yucca and sugar cane.” But the guides refused to run the river, not so much because of the rapids but because many had only recently found refuge up the Urubamba from downstream slave traders and plantation owners, and they were anything but eager to return. Bowman set off anyway, hiring five replacement boatmen downriver and a “boy interpreter.” For the entire trip of two hundred miles, Bowman made geomorphological observations, stopping at regular intervals to map backward and forward along the canyon.22 The first major rapids were so hazardous that they walked the riverbanks and used ropes to maneuver the canoe through the rapids, but all the party received some injury—Bowman a bad ankle sprain. When they rounded the

64

/

“conditional conquest”

big bend of the Urubamba, the canyon walls grew higher and more sheer, announcing the next major obstacle, the confluence with the Pomareni, which plunges into the Urubamba at a right angle, creating “a confusing mass and conflicting currents rendered still more difficult by the whirlpool just below the junction,” where “the water is hollowed out like a great bowl.” In this maelstrom, a canoe that goes “a little too far to the right” would be “thrown over against the cliff-face; a little too far to the left and we should be caught in the whirlpool.” The heavy canoe “became as helpless as a chip . . . turned this way and that . . . heading . . . apparently straight for destruction.” But the guides “judged their position well,” and they finally “skimmed the edge of the whirlpool” coming gently to rest on the shore.23 But the worst, they assumed, was still ahead. The Pongo Manique is the final succession of rapids, cut four thousand feet into the eastern edge of the Andes, and it was no more forgiving to travelers than it was to the rock. The rapids stretch fifteen miles, and at one point the river rages between sheer walls no more than fifty feet apart. Occasionally they managed to clamber down the bank or maneuver the canoe by ropes, but mostly they had to take their chances with the cauldrons of rushing water. “The effect in some places is extraordinary. A floating object is carried across stream like a feather and driven at express-train speed against a solid cliff.”24 They survived the Pongo, however, and as the water smoothed out, Bowman became positively lyrical about the “swift succession of natural wonders” announcing a new climatic zone: Fern-clad cliffs . . . and the banks are heavily clad with mosses. . . . Cascades tumble from the cliff summits or go rippling down the long inclines. . . . Finally appear the white pinnacles of limestone that hem in the narrow lower entrance or outlet of the Pongo. . . . One suddenly comes out upon the edge of a rolling forest-clad region, the rubber territory, the country of the great woods. Here the Andean realm ends and Amazonia begins. . . . The break . . . is almost as sharp as a shoreline.25

It was here that the most serious accident occurred. They had hired the Machiguenga chief Domingo to explore downriver. The chief’s son, maneuvering by boat pole, hit the trigger of Bowman’s loaded shotgun, blowing off several of his own fingers and badly wounding the chief. The surgeon tended to their wounds, and the party limped back upstream to the chief’s settlement, where they left the casualties, never to learn of the chief’s fate. Bowman’s 1911 research was more focused than that of 1907. His map of the Urubamba represented an original and definitive piece of exploration and cartography (map 3). The journey had also offered up numerous geo-

“conditional conquest”

/

65

Map 3. Bowman’s map of the Urubamba River (reprinted from Isaiah Bowman, The Andes of Southern Peru [New York: published for the American Geographical Society by Henry Holt, 1916]).

morphological observations, but between the rigors of canoeing the river and the demands of mapping, there was scant opportunity for concerted physiographic work. That changed with the second phase of the expedition, the planned topographic reconnaissance and mapping of a north-south transect following east of the seventy-third meridian, from the edge of the

66

/

“conditional conquest”

Cordillera Occidental, past Coropuna to the coast. They marched out of the river valley, recouped back upstream, and headed for the plateau, picking up the cartographer Kai Hendriksen on the way.26 Bingham had not rendezvoused as planned at Santa Anna, and Bowman did not know whether to be suspicious. From the start it was intended that Bowman would break from the transect to accompany Bingham up Coropuna, but the geographer and his party reached the starting point for the mapping, the provincial town of Abancay, behind schedule. They had supplies for an immediate start, but both men and mules were exhausted, and new mules were not immediately available. It was an agonizing choice. Bingham’s “Plan of Campaign” specified mid-October to begin the Coropuna ascent, but the peak was 150 miles directly south over perilous terrain, and the topographic mapping of the route would never progress quickly enough for Bowman to arrive at the foot of Coropuna on time. Should he abandon the mapping to Hendriksen for sake of the climb? Abandon science for the explorer’s glory of “gaining” what might be the highest peak in the hemisphere? Yes, he decided, but with mules suddenly available and Hendriksen adamant about the priority of the mapping, he relented.27 Mapping the transect south from Abancay was the most fraught part of the whole expedition, a complete contrast to the Urubamba voyage. Under the best of circumstances, topographic mapping is not designed for rapid progress. An observer at a spot of known location and altitude sets up a sextant while another carries a pole to some easily identified landscape feature in the direction of the transect—a mountain peak, river feature, change of slope. They may be separated by hundreds of yards or by miles, as long as the position of the pole carrier can be read precisely and the location and altitude accurately calculated. The pole carrier then proceeds to another point while the observer moves to the location just mapped and sights forward again to the next point. Fewer points and more distance between them makes for faster mapping but a less accurate map. Fighting blizzard conditions, temperatures down to 6˚ Fahrenheit, impossible terrain, soroche, howling wind, and other predations, they climbed back into the high Andes, managing barely six miles per day. Some days were better than others: the weather was clear though cold, the terrain unremarkable, and their feet dry. Other days were worse: the guides and “peon” porters mutinied, heading for the valleys and leaving the crazy gringos with their heavy instruments in the snowy clouds. This meant more delays while new mules, guides, and porters were procured. The transect took Bowman up over seventeen thousand feet. He later claimed to have discovered the highest permanent human settlement in the

“conditional conquest”

/

67

world at 17,400 feet.28 After three and a half weeks, with the job more than half completed and the worst of the Cordillera traversed, he left completion of the map to Hendricksen (map 4). Exhausted, Bowman went ahead to check on Bingham’s progress on Coropuna. It was with mixed emotions that Bowman, having spent almost all of the last six weeks above twelve thousand feet, eventually picked out with his binoculars the flag that Bingham had planted on the summit. He continued down out of the Cordillera, intent on a physiographic study along the coast and desperate to get back to sea level, having endured, in addition to altitude sickness, ten days of diarrhea that left him weak and wobbly.29 When he met up with Bingham he got the story of the Coropuna ascent. It seems that Annie Peck had reached the top of Coropuna first but had climbed the north peak of the massif, which was estimated at some 282 feet (86 m) lower than that climbed by a gloating Bingham. The joke, however, was on Bingham: even the higher peak of Coropuna (21,079 ft., 6,425 m) was eventually measured as 1,126 feet (343 m) lower than Huascarán, which Peck had already climbed. Where Bingham planted the Stars and Stripes and Yale University’s colors on his peak, the indomitable Peck raised “the yellow banner of the Joan of Arc Suffrage League, inscribed ‘votes for women.’”30 The 1911 expedition reaffirmed Bowman’s earlier conclusions about the extent of uplift, which he estimated as perhaps five thousand feet in its most recent phase. At the same time, he moderated his insistence on “peneplanation” as the region’s dominant physiographic motif, conceding that in the zone of most intense volcanic activity in the Cordillera Occidental, the immense volume of lava, as much as eight thousand feet thick, overwhelmed the earlier physiography. He was also much more concerned with glaciation than in the past, amassing considerable evidence against the contemporary doctrine that Southern Hemisphere glaciation was insignificant. He offered an innovative explanation for the geomorphological features known as bergschrunds and produced evidence that snow itself was an erosional agent.31 His 1913 expedition approached the continent from the east rather than the west, from Buenos Aires by train to Salta in northwest Argentina (map 1). Following and mapping historically important trade routes, he crossed into central Chile, explored the coast, then retraced some of his earlier route to Oruro, La Paz, and Lake Titicaca. It was a less significant trip than his first two expeditions in terms of his physiographic research, although he did investigate a large relict lake predating Titicaca.32 Influenced by Oxford geographer A. J. Herbertson’s work on “natural regions” (his 1913 trip involved a Southampton stop and a visit to Herbertson), Bowman began to de-

68

/

“conditional conquest”

Map 4. A part of Bowman’s 1911 topographic mapping down the seventy-third meridian (from Isaiah Bowman, The Andes of Southern Peru).

velop the notion of idealized natural regions and derived a series of regional “diagrams” for the various Andean subregions. Such empirical generalizations of geography well symbolize Bowman’s penchant for confident synthesis over innovative theory, fitting easily with a wider, evolutionary idealism: the “landscape of today is like the human race—inheriting much of its character from past generations.”33 If he was fascinated by the region’s physiography for its own sake, he never doubted the practical connection between physiographic exploration and conquest. If a region was to be opened up for commerce, he argued, it was necessary to know what was there to exploit and the geographical con-

“conditional conquest”

/

69

ditions that would help or hinder conquest. He was awed by the Atacama in northern Chile, where he saw the intimate connection between spatial vastness and sparse water availability as the pivotal geographical relationship affecting the region’s future development. “Between the oases there is little to be gained and much to be lost in applying energy to the conquest of sheer space.”34 Bowman’s social, political, and economic geography of the region represented a second facet of the conditional conquest.

economic geography: the shock of modernity No one in Bowman’s account of the region lived far from the physical geography he or she occupied. There was, as he once put it, a “natural conspiracy of conditions” that crafted and differentiated the patterns of life and geography in these sparsely occupied lands, “so many and such clear cases of environmental control within short distances” that it was a fascinating geographical laboratory.35 Much as he generalized about idealized physiographic regions, he generalized about “typical cultures” of different geographic subregions. In the Amazon basin east of the Cordillera there was the “forest dweller,” including the Machiguenga, whose life was dominated by the river. Rubber was the main commercial crop, but Indian labor was scarce. Although he empathized with the conquest of the forest, led by the rubber merchants, he was rightly skeptical of Humboldt’s expectation a century earlier that the forests would be replaced by teeming cities, Manaus notwithstanding. The physical, climatic, medical, and social conditions were just too hard. Second came the planters who lived up in the eastern valleys, like the Urubamba, carving a path from Andes to Amazon. They eked out a living in sugar, cacao, and coca plantations and exhibited the purest “optimism of the pioneer.” The forest Indians of this region practiced slashand-burn agriculture, grew coca as well as subsistence crops, and were much more independent and self-reliant than the Quechua of the plateau edge, a characteristic earning Bowman’s praise.36 Farther up the mountain came the highland shepherds, mostly Aymara Indians, who raised llamas, goats, sheep, and alpacas on the edge of the puna and grew corn and potatoes. The shepherd may have been deeply impoverished, but his was a noble struggle, Bowman felt. By contrast, he berated the Quechua employed by the shepherds as poor, ignorant, drunken, and devious. Finally, down the western slopes, there was the coastal planter who grew cotton and sugar (and in the north, rice) and raised cattle on the edge of the Atacama. He was a major local force of economic development, with one foot in the local and one in the continental economy. There was, Bow-

70

/

“conditional conquest”

man concluded, a “vertical stratification of society corresponding to the superimposed strata of climate and land.”37 These idealized subregional diagrams of race and class differences were calibrated with environmental differences, for Bowman. His stratified social and environmental profile from the Amazon over the Andes to the ocean was equally an evolutionary progression. The poorest Indians of the river, forest, and puna were prisoners of their environment, maintaining only a “primitive” relationship to culture and geographical conditions. The white settlers on the Pacific slope, by contrast, had managed to emancipate themselves significantly from natural constraints, even if water availability, usable soil, and labor supply remained powerful controls.38 In the 1913 expedition, Bowman spent more time in the Atacama of northwestern Argentina and northern Chile, the most developed part of the region, where commercial geography was uppermost in his mind. The 1907 trip first raised the issue of trade routes and the “economic geography” of Bolivia, and he now expanded this work farther south. He mapped trade routes, existing and potential, which he recognized as vital for successful colonization, and in northern Chile he became fascinated with the desert as a physiographic type and with pioneers’ methods for turning it to commerce. The nitrate industry had dominated the coastal economy since the middle of the nineteenth century, when it overtook guano as the leading export, but other minerals were mined, too.39 At Copiapó, a major mining center for gold, silver, and most recently copper, he studied in detail an estate overseer’s diary, which provided a record of the Copiapó Mining Company, its workings, exports, and imports. It also included meticulous records of rainfall, from which Bowman predicted for the company manager a rainy 1914.40 Copiapó was a thriving frontier town in the coastal desert, a staging post for trans-Andean trade, and it had a unique “city geography.” Urban geography did not yet exist as a field of study, although Jefferson was beginning work on the subject, and here, if not in his adopted home of New Haven, Bowman found a way to become interested in the geography of urban development. Like other frontier towns, Copiapó was changing quickly with the burgeoning agricultural and extraction economy. A “reorganization of the commercial life” of the region was under way, transforming economic and social relations that had, Bowman assumed, persisted “from the time of the Conquest.” Trade routes were dramatically altered, new economic opportunities arose, and new social relations jolted every community. “That shock the modern railroad has supplied,” Bowman concluded. But more important than even the railway, the large commercial companies they facilitated were a “new instrument for . . . development.”41

“conditional conquest”

/

71

All over, Bowman witnessed and recorded the social and economic evidence of this “shock of modernity”—the “revolutionary economic changes by new contacts with distant people.”42 Modernity meant progress, and progress brought food and tools, capital and trade. If, seeing a quick snapshot of a new region, he often read an ahistorical stasis into its social landscapes, here he was deeply impressed by the dynamism of the region’s economic transformation and its equally dramatic geographic transformation.

the moral economy of geography: the ratzelian andes “What a story it could tell if a ball of smoke-cured rubber on a New York dock were endowed with speech—of the wet jungle path, of enslaved peons, of vile abuses by immoral agents, of all the toil and sickness that make the tropical lowland a reproach!” As Marx would have put it, the “fetishism of commodities” does indeed hide a world of social relations,43 but we can safely assume that Bowman’s critical recognition of economic exploitation did not stretch to a comprehensive disavowal of capitalism. Not Marx but the German geographer Friedrich Ratzel provided the core inspiration for Bowman’s human geography of the Central Andes. Ratzel posits an organic connection linking a people, the land, and the geography of states—their formation, growth, and relations with other states—as an expression of their spatial and environmental predicament.44 Bowman’s account of national origins is similarly simple and organic: “obstructions and impediments of nature” threw communities into “natural groups whence arose regional consciousness, and, almost of necessity, a name, a capital, a flag, international boundaries” and all the trappings of nationalism, he reasoned. As for South America, geographical isolation intensified nationalism; the “physical geography was unfavorable to that broad and sweeping occupation of the continent” such as the United States had achieved.45 Thus armed, Bowman actually paid surprisingly little attention to the political geography of the region. In one descriptive study of the “military geography of Atacama,” he did try to explain the current national boundaries of the coastal region, dating to the war of 1879–84. This was primarily a war between Chile and Peru that Bolivia lost: Chile annexed not only the guano and nitrate fields of southern coastal Peru but also Bolivia’s coastal slope, leaving that country landlocked.46 In addition to the ruthlessness of local officials, the fragmented physical geography and isolation of the region encouraged revolution, he supposed, and at the same time handicapped any effective central government response. The opening up of trans-

72

/

“conditional conquest”

portation routes to provincial centers was the best antidote, corroding provincialism and facilitating rapid troop movement to put down any uprising. This was the primary difference, he noted, between intermontane Bolivia, where Cochabamba, Sucre, Oruro, and many other provincial centers were connected by railway or coach, and Peru, where isolation persisted over a wide area.47 Treating national states as organic and largely unhistorical, he missed the chance to compare the political with the economic transformation of the region’s geography. He knew that the considerable power of provincial governors vis-à-vis national centers dated to the 1530s division of territory among Francisco Pizarro’s lieutenants and their descendants, but he was less aware that this division of power between the capitol and the provinces was being reworked. The decentralized political mosaic inherited at independence survived largely intact during the Republica Aristocratica, as it is known in Peru. But intensified central efforts at nation building on behalf of an emerging middle class, increased integration of provinces under national authority, and the widening shock of economic modernity all challenged not just provincial power but also the power of sheer space in favor of a more integrated national geography. Although he would later become a political geographer, Bowman’s political geography of this region is rudimentary and fairly deterministic, but as his imaginary journey of the smoke-cured ball of rubber suggests, his sense of economic geography is far more acute. However, he faced a dilemma. Not least because of his Michigan background, his spontaneous allegiances lay with the planters, settlers, and industrialists, who were investing capital in the land and making something out of a spartan nature. At the same time he could not fail to recognize the ruthless exploitation this involved. At the heart of the dilemma were issues of class and race, and as he struggled to make sense of what he saw, Bowman proved again his debt to Ratzel. Yet at the same time, his recognition of the centrality of labor to the region’s human geography filled in Ratzel’s symptomatic silence on work.48 The 1913 expedition produced “an anthropogeography of the region,” and Bowman well understood that labor is ever a pivotal issue in frontier regions. From the Amazonian rubber plantations, up the eastern valleys, and over to the cattle pampas farther south and to the coastal plains, the main lament of planters and farmers, mining capitalists and estate managers, was the scarcity of labor. Reporting on this malady in detail, Bowman feared that scarcity and the consequent expense of labor dramatically dampened enterprise, even in the nitrate industry of northern Chile, which operated

“conditional conquest”

/

73

a strict monopoly and enjoyed “amazing profits.” He interviewed numerous managers and farmers and was sympathetic to their plight. The scarcity was so severe that they could no longer “dismiss workmen at will” and had instead to “humor” them. The workers were slow, lazy, and overpaid, they complained, and in the case of Indians, “treacherous” and “base.” For Bowman, “natural selection and the inertia of the natives” distort the economic geography of the region.49 The peonage system survived as the residue of a genocidal European conquest in which millions of Indian lives were destroyed. Along with title to the land, estate owners enjoyed the right to the labor of the Indians who lived on it. Peons, known to owners and managers as “free Indians,” worked six days a week, had their room and board paid, and as Bowman witnessed on one estate, were paid a token sum (one sol, less than fifty cents) for a week’s work. Nonpeon wage laborers, usually mestizos, received five sol. “Peonage is slavery,” he recognized, and life remained dangerous for Indians.50 On one occasion Bowman’s mule party approached an Indian group coming toward them on a precipitous mountain trail. As they met, the Indian party cringed to the rock face, “afraid of being pushed over the edge” by the white man’s mule train—a not-irregular occurrence, apparently.51 “The hardships they had endured, their final escape, the cruelty of the rubber men” explained a lot, he said of the Machiguengas. “It is appalling to what extent this great region has been depopulated by the slave raiders and those arch enemies of the savage, smallpox and malaria.” And he recognized too that in a pioneer region, the cost of low-class birth is “unrequited toil.” The threat of brutal repression was constant. “Peonage has left frightful scars on the country.”52 But there were also limits to Bowman’s empathy. He was often patronizing toward “childlike” Indians or those debased by modernity, and whatever his condemnation of the brutalization of peons, he was quite agreeable to capitalists’ complaints about lazy and treacherous workers. Not unremarkably for the period, he held that different classes exhibited inherently different social and behavioral characteristics, and he proposed a classificatory system of “types.” “The savage” holds to fetishes and taboos, acting in no really rational manner, whereas the educated European classes “act from motives often wholly unrelated to economic conditions or results.” Between them, “the masses”—mestizos and working-class people of European origin—are “deeply influenced by whatever affects their material welfare.”53 This class typology generalizes Bowman’s empirical observations in the region and is lubricated by a moral reckoning imported from North America and from nineteenth-century ethnology. His personalization of class posi-

74

/

“conditional conquest”

tions—planter, Indian, half-breed—offsets his division of the “human character” into ideal types, which themselves presume a geographical basis. A certain suppleness attaches to this dialectic of geography and human character, and the result is a thoroughgoing “moral economy of geography.”54 This is nowhere more vividly expressed than in a striking ethnographic vista presented in The Andes of Southern Peru. It is worth quoting at length: In the most remote places of all one may find mountain groups of a high order of morality unaffected by the white man or actually shunning him. Clear-eyed, thick-limbed, independent, a fine sturdy type of man this highland shepherd may be. But in the town he succumbs to the temptation of drink. . . . The well-regulated groups of the lower elevations are far superior intellectually and morally in spite of the fact that the poorly regulated groups may fall below the highland dweller in morality. The coca-chewing highlander is a clod. Surely, as a whole, the mixed breed of the coastal valleys is a far worthier type, save in a few cases where a Chinese or negroid element or both have led to local inferiority. And surely, also, that is the worst combination which results in adding the viciousness of the inferior or debased white to the stupidity of the highland Indian. It is here that the effects of geography are most apparent.55

Even by the standards of the time, this was a fairly blunt environmentally inspired racism. Environments, classes, and races are broken down into types, which can be classed hierarchically, and the “human condition” of a people in any particular place can be gauged by locating their position in the resulting geography-race-class matrix. Even Teddy Roosevelt, hardly himself an enlightened thinker on race, substantially softened Bowman’s equation of race and environment in reviewing The Andes of Southern Peru.56 But what can we learn from this vista of class and race difference that Bowman constructs? First, in his own mind there may have been no real contradiction between sympathy for the Indians and for the managers. His universalism of different human “types” is superintended by empirical generalizations from the field, but its juxtaposition with a thorough condemnation of brutal precapitalist social relations harks back to eighteenthcentury liberalism. Sympathy for maltreated Indian workers and support for capitalist employers simply derive from different empirical facts, and, however regrettably, facts rarely match ideals. Yet his condemnation of the settler capitalists is not so thorough. The “unjust and frightfully cruel floggings” are isolated events—the exception not the rule, he suggests—usually

“conditional conquest”

/

75

resulting from “a lack of official restraint” by “drunken owners.”57 And even where he concedes that peonage is slavery, the payment of even meager wages seems to dissolve that objection. Second, the severity of his condemnation of the highland Quechua is highly suggestive. Living on the edge of the puna, they are neither incorporated into the increasingly capitalist economies of the lowlands nor entirely left to their traditional means. When Bowman calls them debased, he means that the Quechua no longer remain true to their proper geographical place and environment. Whatever the culpability of the white planters, it is the Quechua who have denied their essential character in the confrontation with modern means and mores. The planter classes are quite naturally trying to procure labor power, but what happens to the Quechua in lowland employ is their own responsibility. The victim is to blame for “debasement” at the intersection with modernity. The politics of the frontier only reaffirmed Bowman’s liberal pragmatism. Frontiers are violent places, uprisings are numerous, and the Central Andes in the first years of the twentieth century were no exception. Bowman’s diaries raise the specter of periodic “revolutions” as peons and wage workers fought back against repressive working conditions and the ubiquitous corruption of judges, governors, and other officials in league with the planters and industrialists. Yet whatever the provocation of institutionalized violence, revolution is a scourge, Bowman insisted, recording that peons had long memories and bided their time for revenge: “when a revolution begins and lawlessness reigns they even up scores.” They “go about very submissive and tame even in the face of wrong,” he concluded, but in revolt they are “capable of great cruelty.” If the capitalists’ cruelty to peons is acknowledged in general terms, he meticulously reproduces the most gruesome accounts recorded by the owners themselves. In the 1904 uprising in Bolivia, a vicious owner from Oruro Province was caught, whereupon they “skinned his face before killing him.” With another, local Indians cut off his arm and showed it to him; “then his leg etc.” In a third case, murderous revenge was taken on an official who had badly beaten an Indian and then stolen his property. They may be “cheated and beaten at every turn,” such that “it is a wonder they even retain spirit enough to keep alive revenge,” but revolution against economic progress is futile, he insisted.58 He stops short of suggesting that social revolution contradicts environmental conditioning, but he does comment that the geographically inspired provincialism of the region held a hidden blessing by frustrating the spread of revolution. Bowman’s moral economy of the Central Andes is a broad human geography already infused with political sentiment, albeit a sentiment he

76

/

“conditional conquest”

would not have recognized as political. If some of its elements, such as the unabashed moral racism, harken from an earlier day, his geography is not simply nostalgic. By 1913 he is most fascinated with the coastal zone of northern Chile, where the “shock of modernity” is most intense and has led not only to rapid geographic change but also to an unprecedented mixing of race and class types. The dislocation of people and place, “type” and environment, increases rather than decreases the importance of geography in the new modernity.

the conspiracy of discovery: machu picchu Bowman always resented Hiram Bingham for squeezing him out of the “discovery” of Machu Picchu in 1911. Although second in command of the expedition, he knew nothing of Bingham’s intentions until bumping into him after the Coropuna ascent. It was there he learned that on the third day after the two parties had separated outside Cuzco, Bingham scrambled into Machu Picchu. Standing a towering six feet four inches, the picture of the intrepid upper-class explorer (and one of the figures from whom seven decades later the movie Raiders of the Lost Ark would take inspiration), Bingham drew Bowman’s most competitive ire. He was “petty,” Bowman complained to his mentor Davis, and years later he still bridled at having put himself “under the leadership of another man.”59 Bingham, in turn, was deeply covetous of his “discoveries,” keeping everyone at bay. His son judged him “envious” of Bowman, and one can only guess the tenor of his and Bowman’s interactions from Bingham’s comment to his wife that the geographer was “rather crude but well meaning.”60 Machu Picchu—“Great Peak” in Quechua—was the fabled “lost city” to which the Incas had fled from Pizarro and his army in the sixteenth century. In Cuzco in 1907, Bowman recorded word of “Inca ruins” in his diary and felt later that, despite Bingham’s deeply guarded intentions, reaching Machu Picchu might be his true goal. With Bingham’s plans and schedule revealed only piece by piece, Bowman grew suspicious that Bingham might even abandon the seventy-third transect, and he took to recording Bingham’s doings in his diary in deliberately scrawled Spanish.61 In fact Bingham talked with several people in Cuzco who freely told him about Machu Picchu, and when Bowman again heard about the ruins from local people down the Urubamba, he was sure that Bingham had deliberately maneuvered him out of the way. “I then knew why Bingham wanted me to go to Santa Ana as far as I could and wait for him there,” Bowman recorded.62 Bingham, of

“conditional conquest”

/

77

course, never had any intention of meeting in Santa Anna and having Bowman share in any discovery. Obviously, many people knew of Machu Picchu before Bingham “discovered” it. Apart from the Quechua who lived in and about its ruins and who had cleared some of the grounds, there was Señor Melchor Artega, who guided Bingham to the place. Bowman’s informants from the village of Huadquina in the valley below had been there, and so had a Pedro Duque and his son Alberto, of Cuzco, who later communicated with Bowman about the city, which, to local people, was manifestly not lost. A host of others, from German geographers to Scottish missionaries, either did make or could have made the same claim. Also the Peruvian explorers Ugarte and Lizarraga, direct descendants of Pizarro’s conquest, had visited in 1894 and 1904, respectively, but had placed less global significance on their “find.” Bingham was able to read Lizarraga’s name inscribed in graffiti on the ruins.63 Melchor Artega’s testimony is especially telling. As reported at the time, he had “long known of the ruins” but considered them insignificant. Indeed, he had a distinctly low opinion of them as “‘cosas de Gentiles’ [pagan things] not to be compared with the Cathedral of Cuzco, with its tin saints and plaster virgins.”64 It was, of course, Artega’s ancestors who sacked and pillaged Machu Picchu, and his disdain in favor of the Catholic cathedral echoes that history. Perhaps the intriguing question is how vanquishment— condemnation to the dustbin of history and the jungle vines of nature— becomes transformed four centuries later into “discovery.” This romantic discovery narrative actually has a very narrow historical currency. Finding Machu Picchu would have carried much less significance in Lima or New York a half century earlier, when Artega’s sentiments would have been more general. First, it took considerable time and a successful “pacification” of the Indians before this romance of discovery was viable. Second, it would be inconsequential where the modern belief in a single “human race” did not pertain. But most important, all exploration in the earlier period was expected to involve discovery along the entire “rim of the known world,” and Machu Picchu would not have seemed so exceptional. This particular discovery narrative presumed global conquest. Decades later Machu Picchu would have been “discovered” by a laboratory scientist poring over areal or satellite photographs. The value attached in Europe and North America to Bingham’s 1911 find is therefore a direct expression of the angst that accompanied claims that the global frontiers were closing. “Discoveries” such as Machu Picchu were increasingly scarce events, valued all the more because they seemed to con-

78

/

“conditional conquest”

firm that there remained geographical mysteries, still a few frontiers to conquer. It was Bingham of Connecticut who felt the need to discover Machu Picchu, not Señor Artega or the local Indians who wandered in and out of the ruins, and it was a European and North American audience, and some local elites, who ratified the claim. Bowman would have dearly liked to have collaborated in the discovery of Machu Picchu and to have climbed Coropuna, even if it was later measured to be 1,762 feet (537 m) lower than Aconcagua. To have stuck with the “scientific” agenda, however, was to put himself in the future rather than the past, and he remained circumspect about the value of such discoveries. “Discovery can hardly be said to be ended until we have studied every people in the world in its peculiar physical setting” and have “made nations known to one another.”65 Yet he also lived in the present, and when Bingham’s claim was challenged, as so often happened with the high stakes surrounding exploration, Bowman found himself on the spot. Hearing about Bingham’s claims, a German mining engineer, Carl Haenel, wrote to the New York Times that he himself had been at Machu Picchu in 1910, a year before Bingham, and had followed the directions of another German engineer named Hassel, the real discoverer of the place in 1900. The results of the 1900 expedition were published in a 1910 monograph that Bingham used, Haenel charged, and he went on to vilify the American as “a violent anti-German” and a “worthy compatriot” of “Cook, Roosevelt & Co.” (Frederick Cook faked a discovery of the North Pole that same year, and Teddy Roosevelt was accused of false claims in South America.)66 These were fighting words. The world war was raging, the United States was an unacknowledged ally of Britain and France, and patriotic pride was on the line. Not just in Peru but in the United States and Germany, such discoveries are intimately bound up with nation building, and an indignant Bingham insisted that he had been the first to discover Machu Picchu. Contacted by the press for comment, Bowman first told the New York Evening Post that response to the German accusations was unwise because it was likely to “mix politics and science,” then proceeded to rally behind Bingham and the heroic explorer mythology: “Professor Bingham’s discoveries are sound—of that you may be quite sure.”67

geography, labor, and conquest Bowman’s ambition went beyond mere discovery. His geography was intended not simply to describe old worlds or old wonders newly found, but to make the world. His excitement in South America was the excitement

“conditional conquest”

/

79

of a frontier, where the abstract fact of discovery is adorned by a passion to transform the landscape. For all their brutality, the men who organized this economic conquest of space fascinated him: the prospector, the rubber merchant, the nitrate entrepreneur. If his own purpose was different, he was well aware that his geographic research was joined to this larger “conditional conquest.” He was the scientist-entrepreneur. His expeditions were intended to feed “the wide current interest” in the new phase of South America’s “civilization” and increase U.S. business interests in the region. Much as geography was the handmaiden of empire for earlier European colonization, it aspired to a similar role vis-à-vis U.S. expansionism, “legitimating the projection of . . . power,” as Tom Bassett has said of cartography.68 The costs of the 1911 expedition were in part underwritten by the Winchester Arms Company, Eastman Kodak, and W. R. Grace, and the expedition was outfitted by Abercrombie and Fitch. A New Haven rubber merchant, keenly interested in Bowman’s lower Urubamba work, also contributed, although there is no record that the research was directly used for commercial purposes.69 South America changed Isaiah Bowman. It has been argued that after the 1890s, U.S. “imperial expansion overseas” offered not only a replacement frontier for capitalist investment but also a frontier “where the essential American man could be reconstituted.” The dialectic of nation building and manhood, a staple of Western mythology, was “exported and reproduced at the turn of the century in the confrontation with the new ‘Indians’ abroad.”70 This was Bowman’s experience precisely. He returned from South America a man remade, a puny farm boy turned rugged explorer, confident almost to a fault. His brushes with danger, the authority he enjoyed, even the miserable treatment by Bingham matured him considerably. His presence now exuded power. He also matured politically, a transformation catalyzed in part by the brutality he encountered. He went to South America an uncertain conservative with sufficient liberal sympathies to be attracted to Teddy Roosevelt, but his politics were still ill-defined. He was not seriously affected by the new middle-class liberalism that grew out of the Progressive Era, carried Woodrow Wilson to power, and pervaded places like Harvard. But in the Central Andes he had to find a way of reconciling his support for conquest and his embarrassment at the brutality it involved; there as in the United States, and for him personally as for the larger society, the issue of labor was the anvil on which his new liberalism was forged. Mary Louise Pratt has suggested that Euro-American rationalizations of conquest often include what she calls “anti-conquest” narratives. These

80

/

“conditional conquest”

represent ideological strategies whereby the agents of conquest “seek to secure their innocence in the same moment as they assert . . . hegemony.”71 Antipathy for conquest is woven into a wider apology for its achievements. Bowman’s condemnation of the ruthless treatment of the laboring classes in the Central Andes was real enough, yet he equally believed that the conditional conquest of his day represented a natural extension of “the heroic work of the first explorers and founders like Pizarro.”72 Pizarro’s brutality was legendary. The scourge of the indigenous people, he personally strangled the Inca leader Atahuallpa and had him decapitated, and he ransacked Bowman’s beloved Cuzco in search of gold and silver. When Bowman came four centuries later, it was geographic data rather than gold he sought, but the road to data led no less surely through the need for labor, and the practical man had on occasion to devise his own solutions to an environmentally induced labor shortage. The 225-mile transect down the seventy-third meridian was the most harrowing of all his journeys, involving moments of greater danger than he had faced before or would after, and the story of this scientific episode lends ironic support to the connection Bowman draws between the sheer conquest of yesteryear and its conditionality in the twentieth century. In the following account, Bowman provides one of the more honest if desolate anticonquest narratives in twentieth-century science. In Abancay in 1911, several dozen antigovernment rebels, many partwhite, were killed by conscripted Indian troops during an explosive revolt. North of Abancay, Bowman, escorted by a soldier whose life was now threatened because he had shot one of the rebel leaders, was obliged to sneak out of town in the darkness of the wee hours. Well-endowed white travelers accompanied by soldiers in this remote region were invariably government officials, and advance news of Bowman’s approach elicited an armed deputation of Abancay leaders. His letters of introduction from the provincial governor somewhat mollified them.73 In case of trouble, a reluctant “teniente” (lieutenant governor) of Antabamba Province was assigned, in addition to several soldiers, to escort the party’s mapping expedition south of Abancay. For laborers, the party had four Indian peons “taken from the village jail”—“the scum of the town.” The first day went smoothly but the weather was dangerously cold (around 6˚ Fahrenheit, or -14˚ Celsius), and they camped at sixteen thousand feet. Ice covered the brooks, and “all night long the wind blew down from the lofty Cordillera. . . . It seemed to me doubtful if our Indians would remain. I discussed with the other members of the party the desirability of chaining the

“conditional conquest”

/

81

peons to the tent pole.” Judging that this might appear extreme, Bowman merely warned the teniente—“stupid” with “only a slight strain of white blood”—that he was responsible for preventing their escape. But escape they did; even the mules had wandered off for the lower slopes. Bowman was furious. He hauled the sleeping teniente out of the tent and onto his feet and upbraided him, demanding to know the whereabouts of the Indians. After breakfast he forced the teniente to carry mapping instruments that two men had carried the previous day and directed him to a seventeenthousand-foot peak, where the day’s mapping would commence. The teniente wandered off, dumping the instruments, and he too fled. The party was now stranded, and Bowman was desperate. He had already given up Coropuna and had no intention of losing the scientific work too. Two Indians appeared in the pass above the camp, and after edging suspiciously away with their corn-laden llama train, they “came timidly along” and Bowman “intercepted” them. “They pretended not to understand Spanish and protested vigorously” at being shanghaied. “I thought from the belligerent attitude of the older, which grew rapidly more threatening as he saw that I was alone, that I was in for trouble, but when I drew my revolver he quickly obeyed.” With gun drawn, he plied them with food and drink, coca and cigarettes—“the two most desirable gifts one can give to a plateau Indian”—until a compromise was reached. The older man would continue with the llama train, leaving his son as Bowman’s peon. With the muleteer now returned with the mules, they struck camp, but Bowman was apprehensive. “The plateau Indian of South America is usually so stupid and docile that the unexpectedly venomous look of the man after our friendly conversation and good treatment alarmed me. He too escaped.” Next came a half-grown boy, too small for heavy work, so he was mustered instead to carry a note to the governor. “Your Indians have escaped, likewise the Lieutenant Governor,” Bowman wrote with anything but humor, demanding a “fresh supply of men and animals.”74 The party limped on for several days through driving snow and wind, struggling to map the meridian without porters and laid up by soroche. Bolstered by a squad of soldiers, the teniente returned to arrest Bowman “on the charge of maltreating an official of Peru.” A bribe of cigarettes, raisins, and biscuits turned the situation around, and although the teniente quickly departed, he left four men and four fresh mules. Still, provisions were low, and promised llama meat for the peons never arrived, so a disgruntled Bowman had to feed them from his own dwindling supplies. The next morning the new Indians were gone, the mules with them, and Bowman set off to

82

/

“conditional conquest”

kidnap a fresh supply. A llama was hijacked from one unfortunate traveler, and two young girls “fled screaming in abject fear” and “terror” upon sighting the party. Eventually the party made it to lower ground, the altitude sickness and cold receded, and they were able to reequip for the second half of the transect map.75 In the most harrowing incident, an unfortunate Indian who passed nearby was caught by a pursuing Bowman, but he too refused to be dragooned. “All my threatening was useless and I had to force myself to beat him into submission with my quirt [riding whip]. Several repetitions on the way, when he stubbornly refused to go further, kept our guide with us until we reached a camp site.”76 Bowman’s cruelty in the furtherance of science gives added meaning to his own claim that the modern conditional conquest is the natural extension of its precursor. Just as appalling is the self-satisfied “anticonquest” rationalization that he mobilizes to justify kidnapping and exploiting Indians: I had offered him a week’s pay for two hours work, and had put coca and cigarettes into his hands. When these failed I had to resort to force. Now that he was about to leave I gave him double the amount I had promised him. He could scarcely believe his eyes. He rushed up to the side of my mule, and reaching around my waist embraced me and thanked me again and again. The plateau Indian is so often waylaid in the mountains and impressed for service, then turned loose without pay or actually robbed, that a promise to pay holds no attraction for him. I had up to the last moment resembled this class of white. He was astonished to find that I really meant to pay him well.77

4 THE SEARCH FOR GEOGRAPHICAL ORDER: THE AMERICAN GEOGRAPHICAL SOCIETY

The United States at the turn of the twentieth century was gripped by a “search for order,” according to historian Robert Wiebe in the classic book of that title. Through most of the nineteenth century, the country encompassed a society without a core, a highly decentralized agglomeration of communities and towns with equally dispersed political and economic powers. Nationhood may have been formalized with independence and the ratification of the Constitution, but only at the end of the nineteenth century was the formality filled in as a fact of daily life. This ratification of nationhood was a response to crisis at home as well as the flexing of muscle abroad. Depression in the 1890s and a financial panic in 1907 demanded a more coordinated economic response; farm and village communities were being broken down by the corrosive effects of economic expansion; unprecedented numbers of immigrants forever altered the social life of cities; urban governments were assaulted by demands for social and political reform; blacks remained on the social and political margins despite formal emancipation; labor groups from the Knights of Labor to the International Workers of the World responded forcefully and at times effectively to the brutal proletarianization of large sections of the populace. Organized electoral politics fell into a shambles, with every presidential election seeming to generate new party challenges to Democrats and Republicans: the Populists in the 1890s, the Bull Moose Progressives in 1912, the Socialist Party in 1916. Generally, Wiebe observes, the first years of the twentieth century

84

/

the search for geographical order

produced a “conscious sense of individual helplessness” and confusion.1 The global finale of European colonization and rising demands for independence began to close the book on an old order and raised the prospect of something new. Exactly what that would be was unclear, but as Brooks Adams’s New Empire signified, there was a bouncy confidence that the United States had an expanding claim to the global future. The search for order took place in many different ways. Economic panics fostered new, more integrated financial and industrial systems—“the first phase in the corporate reconstruction of American capitalism.”2 Law-andorder panics occurred in the country’s large cities; labor disputes increasingly erupted on a national scale; as black workers were more integrated into the industrial economy, black leaders rose to “national significance”;3 Teddy Roosevelt’s Progressive presidency initiated a much more activist role for government in defining and tackling “national” problems; a new middle class of professionals dislodged crusty nineteenth-century individualism with a reform-oriented liberalism. This new middle class comprised the managers and experts who operated the burgeoning corporate and public bureaucracies, invented and oversaw the new production technologies, and satisfied the rapidly rising demand for societal knowledge in the service of social control and engineering. Knowledge in general, but science in particular, was increasingly the domain of professional rather than amateur researchers and scholars, and universities and scholarly societies played a crucial role both in providing the professional personnel and in legitimizing the new professions that emerged during this period. The advent of the American graduate school in 1876, when Johns Hopkins University grafted the German model onto a U.S. liberal arts education, was quickly followed by the formation of distinct disciplinary associations institutionalizing geology, economics, and history (in the 1880s), psychology (1892), physics (1901), anthropology (1902), political science (1903), and sociology (1905) as distinct professional and academic specialties. The search for order was inherently geographical. Railroads and telegraphs connected the country, automobiles even more so; residential suburbs provided the middle class with an alternative to the perceived disorder of the city; successive administrations sent marines and gunboats throughout the Caribbean and Central America to enforce a pro-U.S. political order sympathetic to marauding corporations and bankers, in one instance even establishing a whole new country for the purpose, Panama. A powerful demarcation of a national core culture was the corollary of international political and military involvement. If the search for order was accompanied by a “revolution of identity,”4 this equally implied a geographical restructuring. Suburban bab-

the search for geographical order

/

85

bittry and nationalism increasingly supplanted community allegiance; nationalism and masculinism, class and race privilege, were all recast whether in war or in the escapades of Arctic explorers, in Teddy Roosevelt’s charge up San Juan Hill, or more tamely in the pages of National Geographic Magazine. The American Geographical Society was caught up in these shifts. Founded in 1851, the AGS was a prestigious New York society whose professional geographers were largely outnumbered by merchants and lawyers, bankers and publishers, industrialists and politicians. Its crusty ways were charted by self-styled “men of consequence” from New York’s ruling society. Many were also gentleman explorers, or wished they were, avidly following the exploits of adventurers from Alaska to Zanzibar, Africa to the Arctic. The AGS sponsored expeditions, hosted lectures by scientists and returning explorers, and published maps, expedition results, notices, and other geographical inquiries in its Bulletin. By the end of the century, however, its elite clubbiness had passed over to stodginess. Its old ordering of a dramatically changing world was no longer sufficient, and its preeminence among U.S. geographical societies was increasingly challenged by newer bodies. Recognizing their predicament, a few younger AGS councillors cautiously began to redirect the society’s work toward greater professionalization. AGS leaders were acutely aware that the closing of global frontiers deprived them of many of their favorite objects of exploration. But two major prizes remained, and as other destinations receded, the excitement around polar exploration intensified. The Arctic, among all the society’s interests, was its specialty. When he succeeded to the presidency of the AGS in 1903, following New York mayor Seth Low, the Arctic explorer Robert E. Peary made an impassioned plea for the society to continue a “large and vigorous policy” of polar conquest: Of late years exploration has of necessity become a work of details, opening the hearts of continents and pushing northward and southward, till today only the northern and southern apices of the earth still hide in the mists and gloom of the polar nights. If we wish to keep in the lead and be in at the death of the final geographical conquest of the world, our first efforts must be in those two directions, north and south.5

Feted with two medals by the AGS (in 1896 and 1902) for his Arctic achievements, Peary was the epitome of the society’s explorer-hero. But by the early years of the twentieth century, fewer of the AGS councillors shared Peary’s single-mindedness about polar conquest. Where Peary anticipated the “death of geographical conquest,” they struggled to perceive a new

86

/

the search for geographical order

agenda. They went along with Peary only so far, and when his explorations led to longer and longer absences, and his overwhelming obsession with the North Pole threatened to engulf the AGS itself, a number of disagreements led to his resignation. Geography in the United States at the turn of the century was closely imbricated with geology but was increasingly developing an independent professional identity at the hands of scholars who felt that their focus on landscapes and surface features along with human agency merited a distinct disciplinary identity. In the 1880s, geographers’ traditional power base still lay in a host of local geographical societies including those of Chicago, Baltimore, Philadelphia, and San Francisco as well as New York, but in response to the nation-building impulses of the period, the search for a national association representing geographers led to the 1888 establishment of the National Geographical Society. When the National Geographic Magazine turned from scholarly to popular subject matter, professional geographers were left without effective national representation or organization,6 leading to the establishment of the Association of American Geographers (AAG) in 1904. An aged aristocracy of AGS councillors who lacked a clear sense of alternative purpose still dominated the society after Peary’s departure, and it was hardly a magnet of opportunity for a new generation of professional geographers on the make. But it did undertake to sponsor and publish the Annals for the fledgling AAG, and just as significantly Archer Huntington was named AGS president. Huntington was the inheritor of Collis P. Huntington’s railroad and shipbuilding fortune and, at thirty-six years old, was less than half the age of many of the council’s old order.7 He was no less committed to the elitism of the AGS than were its stalwarts, but he recognized that in changed times the society needed a fuller professional legitimacy and a more activist research agenda. He sought cooperative meetings with the AAG, and having become a professional philanthropist with the fortune he inherited, he personally funded the momentous and highly publicized 1912 Transcontinental Excursion, which for the first time brought dozens of European geographers to the United States for an extended field trip (Bowman was a marshal on the trip).8 He underwrote the construction of a new classical revival building at 155th Street and Broadway for the AGS offices (1911) and hired the society’s first professional geographer, W. L. G. Joerg, but knew that if they were to pursue a serious research program and compete nationally, they needed not a figurehead president so much as a an energetic director. Bowman’s years at Harvard and Yale provided an apprenticeship in social class. Without it he would never have been considered seriously by the

the search for geographical order

/

87

AGS. But Huntington had underwritten Bowman’s 1907 and 1913 expeditions to South America and was impressed by the results. Here was an academic who was also an explorer; he had the energy and experience to run a research program, and his Harvard and Yale background yielded the appropriate pedigree. Bowman was called to interview in December 1914, offered the job, and after first turning it down, eventually accepted an enhanced offer. His annual salary of seven thousand dollars far outstripped what Yale had countered with, and he had additional support for an assistant and for a publication program. The position was guaranteed for five years.9 The directorship was Bowman’s ticket to the higher ranks of the professional classes and simultaneously his entrée into New York’s ruling class. The AGS directorship was in many ways a negotiation between these two class positions. It brought him an entry into Who’s Who in America, and at the age of thirty-six, he celebrated the new job and the financial security it afforded by purchasing Turtle Island in Wentworth Lake, New Hampshire, which he set about making into a summer home for his family, which now included two young children.10

institutional entrepreneur The institution that Bowman inherited bore little resemblance to the kind of modern scientific society that Huntington thought possible and that Bowman was determined to build. Financially, the AGS faced a debt of forty-six hundred dollars for 1915; the staff of twenty-two had not been replenished with younger talent, and the society operated according to antiquated procedures. The membership had languished at around eleven hundred for nearly four decades. Despite the spacious new building, the library was disorganized, its unique collection of forty-seven thousand books and thirty-six thousand maps in dire need of cataloging, and it was severely underutilized by geographers and the public. Bowman felt that the society’s major publication, its Bulletin, was filled with too many dry and narrowly technical descriptions, often poorer renditions of livelier articles published in more popular outlets yet emanating from AGSsponsored expeditions. The AGS should throw its weight behind the excitement currently generated by regional geography he thought, as well as mapping, and with a war already raging in Europe, he suspected that European cartographers and geographers might soon be available. He understood very well that in the AGS he had just been handed an extraordinary opportunity for steering a new epoch of geographical research.

88

/

the search for geographical order

Whatever the problems, the society’s international reputation, size of the existing operation, space for expansion, and potential financial resources were enormous. “No other geographer in the country had such material resources at his disposal or such an opportunity for increasing and improving them and making them ‘dynamic.’ ”11 Bowman did not waste much time determining the problems. In his first few months he prepared a series of plans designed to reorient the society, increase its efficiency, and boost its reputation, and he began presenting these for council approval. The Bulletin was the society’s most emblematic product, and he immediately renamed it the Geographical Review. Its content was also changed, leading off where possible with a more popular article accessible to the lay public interested in geography and minimizing the narrow technical reports and arcane announcements. More scholarly and less clubby, it eventually became quarterly rather than monthly. The encouragement of more accessible and topical articles was linked to a membership drive in which addresses were culled from various sources, especially the Social Register, college and university alumni lists, and membership records of other scholarly societies and clubs. Members would also receive annually a book and a map published by the AGS. By the end of 1916 the number of AGS fellows had more than doubled, to 2,787. In that same year Bowman overhauled the staff, firing six workers three weeks before Christmas. A supportive council stanched the resulting outcry and accusations of ruthlessness with claims that such drastic action was necessary.12 Having quickly gained the councillors’ confidence, Bowman moved to suggest younger, more vibrant additions to the council. Bowman did not disparage the importance of geographical education but never shared Davis’s passion for it, and after briefly rescuing the floundering Journal of Geography, a teacher’s geography journal, he relinquished it to the National Council of Geography Teachers. He tolerated the School of Surveying, organized and funded by Alexander Hamilton Rice under the society’s auspices. From Yale he had brought with him a doctoral student, Gladys Wrigley, and she and Joerg were quickly entrusted with greater responsibilities. With membership nearing four thousand in 1920, he entrusted Gladys Wrigley with the editorship of the Geographical Review, and Joerg was placed in charge of a new series of research monographs. Rather abruptly, following a joint AGS-AAG annual conference in 1922, Bowman ended AGS sponsorship of the Annals, the journal of the AAG, presumably to concentrate on the society’s own research activities.13 Some of the society’s more popular activities continued as services to the broader membership—its high-profile and affable lecture series, for example, fea-

the search for geographical order

/

89

turing returning explorers, European dignitaries, and prominent geographers, and the vastly popular New York Walk Book, which was periodically updated. Except in polar research and exploration, the society’s concern with current affairs was rather desultory, and Bowman set out to remedy this. He ensured that the AGS was routinely in the press. Emboldened by the council’s enthusiastic support for Woodrow Wilson’s think tank called the Inquiry, which virtually took over the AGS building in late 1917, and by the council’s support for Bowman’s work at the Paris Peace Conference, Bowman increasingly saw himself as an entrepreneurial institution builder in search of niches where geography could be muscled in, its indispensability vaunted. Where opportunities presented themselves, he invariably grabbed them; where they didn’t, he aggressively made them. His entrepreneurship under the banner of geography was nothing if not promiscuous. He used his appointment to the Executive Committee of the Division of Geology and Geography of the newly formed National Research Council in 1918 to forge a three-way coalition among the NRC, the AGS, and the War Department. After unsuccessfully urging the NRC to organize a geography curriculum in the country’s colleges and universities (turned by the war into de facto military schools), he pressed both the War Department and the NRC to include geography in the military curricula at land grant colleges. The War Department’s collection of topographic maps and geographical data on the “almost dark countries” of South and Central America was sorely lacking, and the Military Intelligence chief wanted officers sent to South and Central America to gather information. Bowman keenly volunteered to attach officers to “exploring expeditions or field parties sent out by the Society or working under its auspices.” Further, citing the “growing influence of geography among military men,” he even urged the War Department to send some officers to the AGS to advance their studies in “the field of geography as applied to military operations.” He hedged about whether the Latin American governments ought to be informed.14 What became of these plans tendering geography for the purpose of government spying is not clear. There have always been social scientists who have collaborated with governmental intelligence organizations, and from the time of the Roman geographer Strabo to the current CIA, geography as a scholarly pursuit has traditionally operated as handmaiden of the state. But the great majority of scholars have traditionally frowned on collusion with military intelligence operations, and scholarly associations often carry explicit prohibitions against spying. The reason is as pragmatic as it is political: if scientific expeditions and field trips are known to include spies, they

90

/

the search for geographical order

can expect no cooperation from the country of their destination, their results are compromised, and, worse, the lives of the researchers may be endangered. What is remarkable about Bowman’s injudicious peddling of geography and the services of the AGS is the lack of any sense that his eager cooperation with Military Intelligence, the government’s premier spy agency in this period, in any way compromises his scientific integrity or endangers scientists. Even more extraordinary is the sycophantic offer of the AGS to provide spy training. Spying presumably contributed to the imposition of geographical order. Bowman never tired of opportunistic intervention in powerful government and corporate circles. More public and certainly more colorful than his dalliances with Military Intelligence was his role in the boundary dispute that flared up in 1921 between Oklahoma and Texas. It is a case study in the geographical search for order. Boundary disputes were continually in the news following World War I as the last of Europe’s emerging nationstates jostled for territorial position, and long-standing boundary battles erupted in the Americas—most notably between Guatemala and Honduras in 1919. In North America, however, the many straight lines of state, provincial, and national boundaries betray the geometric imposition of frontiers from above, lacking any organic origin in historical or cultural patterns of life. Not since the unilateral seizure of northern Mexico in the 1840s had the discrete establishment of national territorial claims been advanced primarily by means of military incursion and local uprisings. Economic claims, legal history, and a dynamic geomorphology all contributed to the quarrel between Texas and Oklahoma. It was the most complicated boundary dispute Bowman knew, and some very modern issues were at stake. Following the Louisiana Purchase in 1803, the southern bank of the Red River was agreed as the boundary between the United States and Spanish Mexico, giving Oklahoma the entire river basin, but with the later dispossession of Mexico, Texas entered the Union, claiming the terrain up to the medial course of the river. In practice the 539-mile river boundary made little difference to local farmers, who freely used the river from both banks for irrigation and stock watering; its dramatic change in course following periodic flooding and the erosion and accretion of land on opposing banks was an annoyance but little more. In 1918, however, oil was discovered around and in the riverbed, and the question of who owned the land provoked a crisis between competing economic claims. It was further complicated by the U.S. government’s assertion of claim to part of the riverbed. The case reached the Supreme Court, and Bowman was contracted by the Department of Justice to carry out a field survey, report on the physio-

the search for geographical order

/

91

graphic character and history of this highly dynamic fluvial landscape, and testify to an investigative commission. Apart from access to water and oil resources and the permanently shifting riverbed, there were questions of river navigability, ownership of riverbed deposits, the definition of the floodplain vis-à-vis “stable” land, and so on. Bowman’s testimony coincided with the U.S. government’s position, namely, that the only sensible (as well as legally consistent and sustainable) resolution from a geographic point of view was for the medial point of the river’s normal flow to mark the boundary of Oklahoma and for the southern portion of the riverbed claimed by Texas to belong to the United States. In three rulings between 1921 and 1923, the Court broadly concurred, began defining a precise boundary, and specified conditions under which changes in the channel and floodplain could alter those boundaries.15 But the dispute did not end there, and Bowman eventually became angry with the outcome. Following the Supreme Court decision, Congress countered that opportunistic oil wildcatters who had rushed to the disputed southern strip of the floodplain, gambling on a favorable legislative outcome, should retain illegally sunk wells and the profits thereof. The Teapot Dome scandal had already broken, and Bowman was furious to learn that the attorney general, apparently subject to “strong political influence,” encouraged Congress in its neutralization of the commission’s work. Bowman relayed the events to his friend John Finley, senior editor at the New York Times, and within a couple of days a stern editorial appeared admonishing the Harding administration to impose exacting conditions on oil leases in the riverbed, but to no avail.16 An incident during the Red River dispute suggests the extent to which the man who had survived Harvard as a short and unsophisticated outsider now confidently exuded his new class privilege. Having reported his findings in commission testimony, Bowman was cross-examined and asked whether he might predict the future course of the river. Cautiously he did, whereupon the cross-examining lawyer retorted sardonically, “May I ask, then, whether you regard yourself as a major, or merely a minor, prophet?” “I am called a major prophet,” Bowman shot back. Sensing a successful ambush of this expert witness, the lawyer rushed to ask before a hushed court precisely why “an alleged man of science” was so ready to prophesy the future. “I am called a major prophet,” Bowman calmly explained, “because my name is Isaiah.”17 In his twenty years at the American Geographical Society, Bowman fostered the metamorphosis of an organization that had begun to atrophy. Taking it beyond exploration, he built a powerful and energetic research insti-

92

/

the search for geographical order

tution. He more than doubled the size of the staff, increased the membership to almost six thousand by 1930, dramatically expanded the society’s publications, and stabilized and multiplied its revenues. On a daily basis, the AGS building was a whirl of activity. Visiting geographers from overseas— the famous as well as the unknown—were always presenting themselves, as young U.S. geographers did when preparing for their own expeditions. Prominent figures in U.S. foreign relations consulted the AGS staff and its library and maps, and all the famous explorers of the day, from Vilhjalmur Stefansson (whom Bowman had known at Harvard) and Louise Boyd to Knud Rasmussen and Charles Lindbergh, came and went in search of maps and information for upcoming expeditions. He was especially close to Richard Byrd. Many explorers presented lectures or were honored with one of the society’s medals: Robert Scott, Ernest Shackleton and Roald Amundsen, Sir Halford Mackinder and French geographer Vidal de la Blache, Albert I (prince of Monaco) and Theodore Roosevelt. Amid this clamor, Bowman built what he referred to as “a sort of faculty,” which included as many as six researchers with doctorates and others with graduate and undergraduate training. As an institution builder, he was the consummate entrepreneur, always willing to court influential men, but jealously guarding the AGS when he felt it in danger of unreasonable exploitation. At the beginning of the 1920s Bowman set his sights on building the AGS as a research institution and eventually boasted that it was “the only research institution in the world devoted to geography.”18 He initiated two major projects and numerous smaller research efforts that ran in the interstices of these larger projects and the society’s routine work. One of the major projects concerned “pioneer settlement” and the associated questions of land use, which grew out of his South American research but, in its U.S. focus, increasingly connected with his Michigan roots. The second also evolved from research, absorbed a huge portion of the society’s resources, and became a centerpiece of its work in the 1920s and 1930s.19 Reorienting the AGS from a polar to a Latin American focus, Bowman commenced an ambitious compilation of the first ever map of “Hispanic America” at the scale 1:1,000,000.

the millionth map of south america The dream of the millionth map, as it was known, is difficult to appreciate today. It was a truly extraordinary undertaking. Costing half a million dollars, requiring an average of seven workers per day over a quarter century, and requiring 107 separate sheets, it represented the largest single geographical research project in the United States between the two world wars. Covering all

the search for geographical order

/

93

of the Americas below the U.S.-Mexico border, more than twenty million square kilometers—modern metric units were applied throughout—it provided the first definitive mapping of the absolute space of the United States’ “back yard” at such a fine and versatile scale (one centimeter equals ten kilometers). The first inkling of the map came in 1913 when Bowman rode the train down from New Haven to appeal for funds at the AGS for his impending Atacama expedition. He scoured the magnificent AGS collection for maps of the region but was frustrated by the disorder he encountered. There was no integrated map of the entire region at a usable scale, only a scattering of maps drawn at different scales using different styles and with very uneven coverage, often outdated and error-ridden. Yet good base maps were obviously a desideratum of serious geographical research. Their practical value was sharply reaffirmed in 1919 after the threatened boundary war between Guatemala and Honduras, and the AGS, contracted to survey the disputed region, was embarrassingly bereft of adequate base maps. The millionth map imposed cartographic order on the “dark countries” of South and Central America. It was less an original topographic mapping—the only remaining uncharted lands were isolated pockets in Amazonia and the Andes—than a rounding out of what Bowman called conditional conquest. It was compiled from myriad sources: existing national and regional maps at various scales; archival sources in numerous governmental and scholarly offices throughout the Americas; corporate exploration and survey data (especially from oil and rubber companies, railroads, and construction and development companies); and the results and reports of many exploratory expeditions up, down, and across a continent and a half. In only one case—a 1927–28 expedition to the Andean sources of the Amazon—was an original survey commissioned. The requisite work was equally multifaceted: research of sources, compilation of information, drafting, editing, and the final cartography, all carried out by a squad of geographers, cartographers, and other specialists. The first sheet, La Paz, was completed in 1922 under the supervision of Scottish geographer Alan Ogilvie, who after three years at the AGS returned to Edinburgh and was replaced by Raye R. Platt. Five Americans and four Scots were among the early team of cartographers, but otherwise, the map was a virtual employment program for White Russians, mostly high-ranking naval officers vanquished by the revolution, who compiled seventy-two of its sheets.20 The work was meticulous, as only Bowman could have demanded, and the cartographic artistry spectacular, especially in the diversely colored sheets of the high Andes. The final product is a breathtaking 34.4-by-29.5-foot composition, one of the most beautiful achievements of American cartography.

94

/

the search for geographical order

Funding for the project was a constant concern. Huntington, who shared Bowman’s passion for the region and who preceded the AGS building with an adjacent home for the Hispanic Society of America, kicked off with twenty-five thousand dollars, and Bowman raised a further fifteen thousand by appeal. But the map ate money very quickly. The National Research Council refused to contribute, and Bowman was desperate enough to offer cosponsorship to his large, wealthy, and popular competitor, the National Geographic Society, but after conferring with the AGS Council, coolly withdrew the invitation.21 The council apparently preferred to retain exclusive control, and over the rest of the decade, the council, in the person of James B. Ford, paid for the work. Along with Huntington, Ford was the society’s major benefactor in the first half of the twentieth century and, after underwriting Bowman’s first membership campaign, became a strong supporter of the new director. He had made a fortune in the rubber industry but now contented himself as commodore of the elite Larchmont Yacht Club in Westchester County. Before his death in 1929, Ford contributed a total of $192,000 to the map. Dependent on mortgage and stock investments and philanthropic support,AGS finances were pummeled by the depression, and another two hundred thousand dollars from Huntington had to be followed by a grant of $85,000 from the Rockefeller Foundation to help finish the map. Making the millionth map was also politically tricky. The German geographer Albrecht Penck had first proposed in 1891 the cooperative construction of a world map at the scale of 1:1,000,000, but progress was slow. The British balked at use of the metric system while the French insisted that Paris, not Greenwich, should be the map’s base meridian. Conferences in 1909 and 1913 ironed out the cartographic parameters of the international map and planned its production, and, as if to confirm that war is good for geographers, the ensuing conflict actually speeded up assembly of the European portion. The AGS always proclaimed its Latin American map as independent from yet cooperative with the larger project. They adopted the world map’s conventions of style, color, contour spacing, and so forth, but the overriding ambiguity encouraged a competitive turf war. Britain’s Royal Geographical Society, claiming much of the international project for its own, saw the AGS effort as either an arrogation of continental authority by an upstart AGS or else useless duplication. More serious was the reception in Latin America itself. The wartime withdrawal of European (especially British) capital provoked a rush of U.S. corporations into the resulting economic vacuum there. They invested in traditional resource extraction—nitrates (Chile), petroleum (Peru), tin (Bolivia), and rubber (Brazil), and increasingly, after the war spurred an unprecedented

the search for geographical order

/

95

industrialization, in the manufacture of cars and agricultural and industrial machinery and the refinement of petroleum. The 1890s slogan “Trade follows the flag” was superseded by the more direct recognition that “trade follows capital,” although gunboat diplomacy still persisted with periodic U.S. military interventions during the 1910s and 1920s (mainly in Central America and the Caribbean). In order to blunt anti-American opposition, U.S. policymakers explicitly sought political, social, cultural, and civic connections with Latin American elites, culminating in the pan-American movement, but powerful nationalist and anti-imperialist movements emerged throughout South and Central America nonetheless, even among the middle classes. The mapping of the region by gringos was a delicate matter.22 Eight of the thirty-five countries represented at the 1913 international millionth map conference were from Latin America, and so the AGS had to be careful “lest the Hispanic American countries should feel that the Society was presuming to take upon itself an enterprise which was the prerogative of their governments.” Bowman appreciated the power inherent in the prerogative to map oneself, but it never deflected his resolve. The AGS tiptoed round South American proprietorship by inscribing each sheet with “Provisional Edition,” the implication being that the maps would serve the international project “only until the official definitive edition [had] been produced by the proper Hispanic American government.”23 In practice, few such “definitive editions” were produced, for as Bowman well knew, few South American governments or geographical societies combined the resources and the priorities to map themselves according to the international map standards, and with many sheets involving two or more nations, Bowman knew he could afford to be solicitously diplomatic with little fear of serious competition. Only Argentina and Brazil eventually produced their own 1:1,000,000 maps prior to World War II, and these the AGS dismissed as either obscure or inferior.24 Most governments were content to cooperate with the AGS in providing materials and access to archives, the more so when they felt that the provision of information would enhance their position regarding outstanding boundary disputes, such as occurred between Peru and Ecuador. In this case a reverse bidding war ensued. Ecuador not only provided the whole collection of unpublished surveys and maps held by its Department of Works, along with two thousand dollars to boot, but also assigned an assistant secretary of war, General Luis Telmo Paz y Miño, as consultant to the AGS, where he remained for six months. The millionth map was in steady demand from the start. Construction engineers, industrialists, prospectors, traders, government officials, geologists, and other scientists all consulted it. Various sheets were used as the

96

/

the search for geographical order

base maps or otherwise contributed to the resolution of boundary disputes between Chile and Peru (1925), Bolivia and Paraguay (1929), Colombia and Peru (1932), Colombia and Venezuela (1933), and Peru and Ecuador (1941). When the latest Peru-Ecuador dispute flared again in 1995, deputations from both countries journeyed to New York to consult the pertinent sheets and AGS archives of the original project.25 They became base maps for air navigation charts of the region, and the Panama sheet was the official chart for U.S. Army Air Corps pilots in the Canal Zone. The onset of war again in 1939 and the growing fear of an Axis invasion of South America or the West Indies led to a run on the sheets when numerous government agencies placed orders. This brought considerable publicity, including a full-page photograph in Life and acknowledgment that the map played “a crucial role in the political and economic life of the Western Hemisphere, adjusting national boundaries, and guiding technological progress into the wilderness.”26 To scholars, Bowman advertised the map in scholarly terms while to government and corporation officials he spoke of commerce and national welfare. At the same time that he urged U.S. Military Intelligence officers to join AGSsponsored expeditions in Latin America and to second themselves to the AGS, he swore to the Mexican secretary of agriculture that “we have no connection whatever with the Government” and that the map and the society are “entirely an independent enterprise, free from all political consideration.”27 Comparing it with earlier conquest efforts, Raye Platt, director of the millionth map project, was more forthright about what the map meant. The landmark 1775 continental map by Spanish cartographer Juan de la Cruz Cano y Omedilla, he enthused, was a three-century “digest” of European measurement and discovery on a continent “which, to judge from the fortunes it had already yielded, was filled with treasure to be had only for the taking.” The millionth map was undertaken insofar as the “same need arose in our own time.”28 Pearl Harbor was bombed the same week that Life publicized the map, and the U.S. government immediately requested that public distribution of it be halted. It was now considered a potential war weapon. Bowman unhesitatingly complied. At the same time, the State Department began financing emergency work on unfinished sheets covering areas of projected strategic importance. It also funded a plethora of spin-off mapping projects. If the war threw up numerous emergency diversions, it also provoked the stimulus and finances to finish; “sudden and large demand” for the map resulted in four years of profitable operation at the postdepression AGS, an unprecedented event.29 More generally the society threw itself into war work. Bundles of maps, books, and other sources were constantly shuttled back and forth between the AGS and different government offices in Washington,

the search for geographical order

/

97

D.C. The Office of Strategic Services (OSS), precursor of the CIA, had no patience for such a piecemeal approach. OSS officers arrived one day to examine the AGS collection of maps and books and left only after microfilming 31,676 “selected modern maps,” for a haul of eighty-five reels.30 The millionth map represented the completion of nineteenth-century geographical business, as much in tune with the exploratory and imperial vision of the AGS in the 1890s as with the realities of modern commerce and politics a half century later. It was a mopping-up exercise after the chaotic flurry of “sheer” conquest. It imposed geographical order of a very practical sort. After the war, the society hosted a dinner at the Rainbow Room in Rockefeller Center to celebrate the map’s completion, and the platitudes of Assistant Secretary of State Spruille Braden, a mining engineer who had previously roamed from the Andes to the Amazon, captured the aging agenda the map addressed. Its makers had “gone out into the unknown and vanquished and charted it,” he concluded, and the resulting map represents not only the “indomitable determination of men to know and to master the world” but also “the forces of civilization advancing in spite of high barriers.” In his own speech that night, Bowman’s anticlimactic relief took a different tack: he felt compelled to apologize for the map’s apparent conventionality by saying that it merely took “a continent and a half out of a state of cartographic disorder into one of order.”31 Yet the map’s symbolic power was thoroughly contemporary and may have been just as consequential as its strategic, economic, and political uses. It was inspired by a thoroughly modern blend of scientific technique and competition entwined with national ambition, a point reinforced by eventual State Department sponsorship. It comprised a powerful projection of U.S. science as well as political and economic power in the hemisphere. A new generation of AGS councillors recognized its contemporary value when they awarded Bowman the society’s David Livingstone Centenary Medal for his work.32 The millionth map epitomizes Bowman’s personal shift from explorer to geographical entrepreneur. No less a product of an older geographical order, it was an indispensable premise of the new.

“ what the hell difference does it make+ ” peary and the pole Until the late 1980s the polar establishment in the United States successfully protected Peary’s anointment as discoverer of the North Pole. But then a cautiously skeptical report published in the National Geographic Magazine, a sponsor of the original expedition and heretofore one of the staunchest de-

98

/

the search for geographical order

fenders of Peary’s claim, flushed long-standing suspicion onto the front pages. Wally Herbert, a British explorer, concluded that Peary had erred in some navigational calculations and was no closer than thirty to sixty miles from the Pole. The news was quickly reported in the New York Times and was followed there the next day by a tongue-in-cheek “Correction” of the Times’ own 1909 editorial hailing Peary’s feat. The newspaper had exclusive rights to the original 1909 story in exchange for expedition sponsorship, and as the correction suggested, both it and the NGS were highly interested parties who “may have failed to scrutinize adequately what they yearned to believe.”33 The sense of relief at laying this ghost to rest was palpable, although many still refuse to believe it. That the correction took until the 1980s is the consequence of various factors but none more crucial than the actions of Isaiah Bowman. Anyone who might have imagined that this historic volte-face by two of Peary’s stalwart institutional supporters might close the issue would have badly misjudged the personal and nationalist vehemence with which such spats over polar discoveries are fought. Six weeks after the National Geographic article, Dennis Rawlins, a Baltimore astronomer with a long interest in polar claims, bumped Mikhail Gorbachev and Dan Quayle to side columns on the front page of the Washington Post with what seemed like conclusive proof—a newly discovered document recording Peary’s solar observations at the Pole. These observations proved, Rawlins reported, not only that Peary turned back at approximately 88°15
north latitude, 121 miles short of the Pole, but also, most damning, that he knew he had stopped short and therefore deliberately faked his claim. The newly revealed document was the key to this account. It was in Peary’s handwriting and held by Peary’s wife since prior to her husband’s death in 1920. Only Bowman and his assistants had analyzed it since.34 Many commentators believed that the “attainment” of both North and South Poles by 1911 hastened the end of geography as an intellectual pursuit, but Bowman had a contrary sense of polar exploration. Clearing the clutter of discovery from the world map was not the end of geography but its beginning, opening the way for a much more profound scientific exploration of the earth’s surface. “The old Arctic is good for many another expedition before we have whittled down its problems to ordinary dimensions,” Bowman enthused in 1928, when airplane technology was rekindling the frenzy for polar exploration. His attraction to the heroics of exploration and discovery was personal as much as professional. His Andean expeditions earned a nomination to New York’s prestigious Explorer’s Club, and he was elevated to its vice presidency in 1922. He had personally helped to clear up the cluttered map of discoveries. In an 1891–92 voyage, explorer

the search for geographical order

/

99

Robert Peary claimed to have discovered a new channel separating Greenland from ice-free land to the north, but later expeditions confirmed Greenland’s insularity, with no such northern land. In the first volume of the new Geographical Review in 1916, Bowman, having reviewed the accumulated evidence, declared the nonexistence of the Peary Channel.35 As geographic corrections go, this was a desultory footnote, but it stands in ironic contrast to his later opportunity vis-à-vis Peary. Bowman was shrewd enough to know that much of the heroic exploration in the period was long on individual glory and short on science, regardless of the exculpatory rhetoric of scientific achievement increasingly used in discussing such adventures. His experiences with Hiram Bingham made this knowledge deeply personal, but so did his close association with various polar aficionados. Among many who visited Bowman was Richard Byrd, whose flights to the Poles in 1926 and 1929 and whose Antarctic encampment at “Little America” (1933–35) kept polar exploration in the popular imagination and a popular aspiration of many in the United States. During his frequent visits, he sought Bowman’s advice and confided his secret plans, and Bowman provided him with charts and suggestions. For the New York Times, which sponsored several of Byrd’s exploits and maintained a radio link to Little America, Bowman was the stock “expert” for quotes on polar expeditions and their significance. He also conveyed telegrams from Byrd’s Antarctic expeditions to other media centers for publication. Pilots traditionally carried symbolic objects on such trips, giving them to friends and benefactors afterward; Bowman sent a book with Byrd on his transatlantic flight in 1927 and received a U.S. flag carried on the 1929 transAntarctic flight. At the height of the depression, Byrd offered to approach the Rockefeller Foundation on behalf of the AGS and to introduce Bowman to John D. Rockefeller, but nothing seems to have come of this.36 With the apparent conquest of both Poles, the emphasis on scientific research in such expeditions intensified. Bowman contributed sonorously to the high marriage of science and exploration, but given the expense of exploration it was a marriage in which business increasingly dominated. When Australian Hubert Wilkins was planning his 1928 transpolar flight from Alaska to Spitsbergen, during which he took soundings for ocean depth, Bowman helped him raise funds. He approached a wealthy, hard-headed Detroit businessman, who insisted only on knowing “a business answer” to the scientific question “What is a single sounding out there worth?” “The price of an airplane,” Bowman retorted, and the money was committed.37 A symbiotic relationship prevailed among explorers, scholarly societies, wealthy benefactors, corporate donors, and the national news media. Concrete

100

/

the search for geographical order

rewards came in many forms: national claims could be lodged for new territory or resources; society publications and events reporting a discovery would sell out, further enhancing the discovery’s prestige; corporate sponsors could advertise the contribution of their products in making the discovery; and many in the geographic and scientific establishment staked their reputations, careers, and financial futures on specific expeditions. These various interests mingled in a “motley but polite exploring milieu.” For critic Dennis Rawlins, it was “especially polite with regard to the taboo topic of possible exploring fraud, which, if openly entertained, would (and did) upset those innocent sources of fiscal munificence that represented the lifeblood of the entire arrangement. . . . One must keep in mind that the same cozy group of societies not only promoted expeditions, but also certified their stories of success and bestowed gold medals.”38 Another reward came in the form of naming newly discovered landscape features after benefactors and supporters. Richard Byrd named the Bowman Glacier, and Finn Ronne named the Bowman Coast, both in Antarctica. A bay in Baffin Island also bears Bowman’s name. A huddle of large egos were intensely in play, and as director of the AGS Bowman navigated various squabbles. Sometimes he was a participant, as in his feud with the National Geographic Society over rights to publish results; at other times he was an arbitrator.39 It was in this latter role that he was invited to revisit the controversy surrounding Peary’s claim to have reached the North Pole on 6 April 1909. Bowman became involved in the Peary case in 1935 at the request of Marie Peary Stafford, the old admiral’s daughter. This was no small responsibility; heroic polar narratives were the paradigm of manly achievement, superhuman endurance, man against nature, and national destiny. They were also bound together by assumptions of gentlemanly honor, which have tolerated little scrutiny. Byrd failed to reach the North Pole in his 1926 flight, despite his claim to the contrary, and was reputedly “dead drunk” during his trans-Antarctic flight of 1929, requiring a bottle of brandy to allay a fear of flying induced by too many crashes. Britain’s Sir Clements Markham used his expeditions to escape hostile, Victorian antihomosexual morality (and legality) at home. And Peary’s rival, Frederick Cook, who claimed to have reached the Pole nearly a year earlier than Peary, had already submitted fraudulent claims of climbing Mt. McKinley and was eventually incarcerated in the federal penitentiary at Leavenworth for mail fraud in connection with oil stock sales.40 The point here is not to condemn morally but simply to reveal the widespread hypocrisy of explorer mythmaking. These were all more or less open secrets among the explorer brotherhood at the time, but the cultural puis-

the search for geographical order

/

101

sance of polar mythology and its pivotal role in the redefinition of identities—national and gender, class and racial—weighed heavily toward the protection of public myth from private truth. That it has taken so long to air “corrections” and the seamier side of this history suggests that polar heroism remained, in its hermetically protected bubble, a vital ideological fiction of the American Century. There were national crimps, real and imagined, in the different styles of polar explorers—the Norwegians quietly familiar with the extreme climatic conditions, the British laden with tea sets and accoutrements of empire and thinking only of the queen—but Peary was one of a kind. For U.S. explorers generally, the North Pole was some kind of last frontier where the behavioral norms of the Wild West could still be vented, and Peary was no exception. At a young age he upbraided his doubting mother that whatever he did he had to become famous, and by the time he was in his twenties and had fastened on a way, he began to see himself as the Christopher Columbus of the North Pole. He became so obsessed with being the first to stand “with 360 degrees of longitude beneath his motionless feet” that the loss of eight toes to frostbite did not stop him;41 he raided Inuit sacred sites, shown to him in trust; he fathered at least one child during one of his eight expeditions to the Arctic, abandoning his “Eskimo wife,” Allakasingwah, and a bitter child. He brought six other Inuits to New York as “scientific” exhibits. They were housed in the dank basement of the Natural History Museum, and when four died of pneumonia their skeletons were simply added to the permanent collection. Racism went to the core of Peary’s organizational assumptions; when he made the final “dash for the pole,” he was accompanied by Matthew Henson, a young black explorer who has only now begun to receive recognition, and four Inuits, Egingwah, Oohtah, Ooquah, and Seegloo, who are yet barely recognized even in revisionist narratives.42 The individual prestige of “gaining the Pole” was inestimable. On his return, Peary embarked on an illustrated lecture tour, receiving a thousand dollars per show. The nationalist prestige following three centuries of the keenest international rivalry was even greater. Tales of Peary’s heroics provided a mantra of national superiority, much as Scott’s ignominious death did on the other side of the Atlantic, and hints of the darker side of Peary’s doings only added to the romanticism of this wild man in upper-crust company. Too much was riding on Peary’s claim to make it vulnerable to contrary evidence, and a perfunctory congressional hearing went through the motions of ratification, promoting him to rear admiral. President Taft, a frequent contributor to National Geographic Magazine, puffed up his own chest at the “complete success of our country in Arctic Exploration.”43

102

/

the search for geographical order

Relations between Peary and the American Geographical Society were not uncomplicated. Bad blood leading to his 1906 resignation as president and his sponsorship by the rival National Geographic Society kept things cool, even after Peary returned triumphant, and with the embroglio over Cook’s parallel claim in full swing, the AGS declined to take any public position or to award Peary a further medal. This was the entrée exercised by the forty-one-year-old Marie Peary Stafford in 1935 when she invited Bowman to her Washington, D.C., home to discuss her father’s “scientific legacy.” Peary’s claim had been submitted and endorsed not simply by the NGS, the New York Times, and Congress, but also by geographical societies across the world, despite the inexplicable holes and inconsistencies that Peary’s presentation of proof suffered. Now a quarter century later, a flurry of retrospectives by Peary acolytes and Cook enthusiasts alike revived the controversy of whether Peary’s claim was fraudulent or whether Cook arrived at the North Pole first.44 Marie Stafford thought that decisive action by the AGS might help cement her father’s claim. Bowman was initially put off by Stafford’s “emotionalism” and her mix of sense and sentiment. Why should the AGS now suddenly present a posthumous medal to a man who already had two? The society had no special access to Peary’s records, and retroactive confirmation now was out of the question. He carefully laid out the society’s proposition: if the family would turn over all the evidence, including Peary’s records, which had been closed after the congressional hearing in 1911 and never opened after Peary’s death, the AGS would perform a detailed examination “and issue a statement, provided that the Society should be free to publish its findings, regardless of their nature.” Peary’s daughter secured the permission of her mother, Josephine, and that summer, spurred on by the knowledge that another Peary defender was pressing Stafford for access to the records, Bowman combined a short summer retreat to New Hampshire with a perusal of the papers at the Peary home on remote Eagle Island, Maine. Bowman spent the last two days of July 1935 poring over the records of the 1908–9 expedition. In meticulous detail, he copied the records from Peary’s diary, his positional observations and calculations on the approach to and retreat from the Pole, and observations by Robert Bartlett and Ross Marvin, who traveled on part of the journey. He recorded Peary’s temperatures (-10° to -25° Fahrenheit), ice movements, wind and ice conditions, and observations on the stamina of the dog teams (“Am feeding 4 teams . . . 5th team of poorest dogs are consuming each other”) as well as his own increasing need to have the dogs carry him by sledge. He calculated Peary’s return pace at an extraordinary thirty-three miles per day over an eight-day

the search for geographical order

/

103

period. And he recorded the last pre-Pole positional entry as 89°25
north, noted the blank diary pages around 6 April (the day he supposedly reached the Pole) and the subsequent loose-leaf diary insertion with “The Pole at last!!!” “Mine at last.”45 It was a fifty-three-year-old and congenitally incautious Peary who claimed to have reached the Pole in 1909 and a slightly older Bowman in the comfort of Peary’s own home who excitedly delved into the puzzle he dearly wanted to solve. No one had previously examined the Peary records in anything like this detail. Bowman also paraphrased the explorer’s competitive and megalomaniacal ambitions, recorded on the reverse sides of his diary pages immediately preceding 6 April: suggested improvements in equipment for an Antarctic expedition, furs to be bought for Mrs. Peary in Canada, patent and exhibition possibilities of his equipment after his return, and his own qualifications for homors [sic] and rewards. In this last item he mentions the rank of Admiral (retired on full pay? . . . ) and refers to honors given British Antarctic explorers who had accomplished less than he had. He refers also on the same page to his presidency of the American Geographical Society and the International Congress of 1904. . . . On another page he mentions Nansen’s receipt of 50,000 for his story and someone else 75,000 and suggests that he confer with Harper’s for 100,000.46

If Bowman was revolted by such tawdry egotism, it was barely evident. Concerning the claim to the Pole, the diary itself was inconclusive, but Bowman’s excitement was quickly heightened by what promised to be the most valuable clue of all. While he was on Eagle Island, Marie had told him of a piece of paper with calculations written on it, given to Josephine Peary by her husband. Marie recovered the paper from a safety deposit box in Portland the day after Bowman finished reading the records, and seeing the name of the star Betelgeuse in the corner, she concluded that the calculations were “a check on star observations where Mother said he was up ‘most of the night.’ ” (Star observations are used to calibrate the chronometers explorers carry; they are temporal rather than locational checks but vital for establishing the accuracy of location.) She gave the calculations to Bowman, telling him that when Peary had handed the paper over to his wife, he had told her to “treasure it as her most precious possession and never let it out of her hands unless it was to silence ‘that G– d– s– of a b– Cook.’ ”47 Josephine had put this Betelgeuse paper in an envelope and scribbled on the outside that these were Peary’s observations at the Pole on “April 5 & 6 1909.” Bowman was hooked. He was uncharacteristically ebullient, thinking the star observations were just what was needed. Whether out of conviction for

104

/

the search for geographical order

the record or the indulgence of his own explorer fantasies, whether from Marie’s insistent charm and his affection for her family (he later sent a box of candies to Peary’s grandsons), or whether simply the result of his heady two-day immersion in the story, Bowman returned from Eagle Island with little if any residue of caution concerning Peary’s claims. Feeling himself on the edge of definitive proof of a geographical detective puzzle vital to “the history of Exploration and of science,” an uncharacteristically giddy Bowman scribbled back to Marie from the Cosmos Club in Washington, D.C., that “if accepted as real, not faked,” the diary observations “indicate a position at the pole.” This “disposes of the criticism that he didn’t know where he was,” Bowman continued; “he did, because his final observations put him at the Pole.” As if to convince himself beyond such a patently apologetic tautology, the straight-laced Bowman invoked an anathema that appears neither before nor since in his correspondence: “He was on cracking ice & what the h__ diff. did it make?”48 Looking for anything that would shore up this fabricated defense, Bowman turned to one of his AGS geographers, O. M. Miller, for an opinion. “Mait” Miller was a Scottish-born mathematical geographer with Arctic experience who suffered severe injury in the trenches of World War I before emigrating. He soon responded to Bowman that the observations themselves were consistent with a position at the Pole but that they “could have been easily faked.” The “individual observations . . . look too good to be true” under the severe conditions, and other obvious readings, such as a temporal “series of photographs of the shadow cast by an upright staff,” would have been more convincing. In addition to Peary’s unprecedented pace (thirty-three miles per day on severely faulted ice was unheard of then or since), other concerns troubled Miller. He thought it “incredible” that with so few astronomical checks, no determination of compass error, and the ice in permanent motion under his feet, Peary’s dead reckoning could have “hit the position off so precisely.” Not to mention the loose diary sheet recording the arrival at the Pole. The congressional investigation was a farcical rubber stamp that answered none of the outstanding questions.49 “The pure products of America go crazy,” poet William Carlos Williams once observed.50 He might have been reflecting on explorers; certainly something about polar exploration makes grown men lose their heads, and Bowman was no exception. The shrill frenzy with which he scavenged for clues in defense of Peary’s case suggests that he was fighting a deep, unutterable recognition that his hero was a faker. He was past hearing Miller’s skepticism. He knew the consistent charge that Peary had sent back all the men considered reputable attestants to his claim, a category defined at the

the search for geographical order

/

105

time more by race than by scientific competence.51 But Bowman brushed aside all misgivings. He could no longer even countenance the possibility that Peary’s record was false. The myth was the thing. What the hell difference did it make, indeed. The defense of Peary moved into high gear. The precious star sightings were surely the clue, but Bowman was stuck on their interpretation. Engaging his friend Harry Raymond, an Albany astronomer, Bowman prefaced his request to Raymond by steering him to the expected answer: “The sincerity and truth of [Peary’s] statements one can hardly question after looking at the whole record.”52 Straightjacketed, Raymond responded reluctantly, having taken months to make anything of the Betelgeuse paper. He doubted that the observations fit any location on Peary’s 1909 trip. So what were they? Could they be observations from Cook’s voyage that Peary had secretly obtained from a Cook associate and that would prove the falseness of Cook’s claim? Josephine Peary had admitted that she might have been confused when she annotated the sightings as from the Pole, and Bowman drew the scent away from Peary with the hunch that the observations were Cook’s.53 From Raymond he eventually learned that the observations could indicate a latitude of 87o north, consistent with Cook’s claimed itinerary.54 Bowman’s examination of the Peary records was a closely guarded secret, but some among the polar fraternity suspected it was going on, and Cook renewed his appeal to the AGS in 1936 for an examination of his records and verification of his claim. The AGS did not oblige. But nor did they officially anoint Peary. Bowman’s unacknowledged fears seem to have overcome his angst about the Peary mythology. To Marie Peary Stafford, Bowman simply declared that definitive evidence was lacking and that whatever the challenges to Peary, he had been crowned and there was no gain in reopening the issue. “The case is drawing to a close,” he advised in 1937.55 As much as he remained intrigued by the scientific puzzle of the case, he was also coldly calculating about its political ramifications, and behind the scenes Bowman took further steps to ensure that the proper geographical order of the past was not disturbed. In the autumn of 1935, a couple of months after returning from Eagle Island, Bowman systematically deployed his influence to suppress a manuscript contesting Peary’s claim. After H. Henslow Ward had visited the AGS, making it known that his manuscript, The Peary Myth, was being submitted to Yale University Press for publication, Bowman manipulated an old colleague at Yale into interceding at the press to suggest that he, Bowman, be consulted as an “independent” authority regarding the manuscript’s worthiness. He triumphantly boasted to Marie that he was getting “the manuscript for an opinion!” and that his

106

/

the search for geographical order

Yale colleague knew nothing of his involvement. The manuscript was delivered to Bowman the week before Christmas, and he put everything aside to tackle it. It was a devastating indictment of Peary’s false claim to the North Pole, and had it been published, the Peary myth would have died in the 1930s. Instead Bowman closed ranks. Unable to deny any of the facts and clearly finding it difficult to gain a critical toehold against the author’s story, he embarked on a long and generally dissembling hatchet job. Bowman attacked Ward’s manuscript as “unjudicial” for even questioning the “myth” of Peary’s attainment of the Pole. Ignoring all of Ward’s assembled proof of fakery, he dismissed the book’s claims as “unconfirmed,” concluding that Yale “cannot afford” to publish it. “By this I do not mean that the story is untrue,” Bowman added, simply that it ought not to be published. He presented no counterevidence whatsoever, but took instead to imagining other random possible versions of events supportive of Peary. After wedging in these blatant red herrings, he concluded that the book was “a piece of dialectic, not a piece of analysis.” Ward’s “repeated references to the National [Geographic Society] as a commercial company” would provide “a firm basis for legal action,” he postured, and the NGS, he presumed, “would fight to the last ditch to prevent the publication of the book.” Most insidiously, Bowman, now a Peary family friend, concluded that Ward “is absolutely prejudiced and one-sided while pretending to be judicial.”56 However transparent, Bowman’s assassination of the manuscript worked. Yale rejected it, as a New York press did some months later, with Bowman’s opinion again a factor.57 Henslow Ward died in the meantime, and the manuscript, which still languishes in the National Archives, was never published. The suppression of scientific evidence in defense of proper geographical order was coupled with active and deliberate mythmaking. And not for the first time. Bowman knew that Richard Byrd did not get within 150 miles of the North Pole in his 1926 flight, having winkled the truth out of Byrd in a four-hour, rain-drenched walk round and round the AGS building in 1930, but he perpetuated that myth too.58 He remained very friendly with Marie Peary Stafford, prodding the postmaster general at her behest to issue a Peary commemorative stamp. Marie, for her part, refused to be awed by the austere Bowman, fawning on him as no one else would have dared: “You are a peach,” she once wrote. Later she expressed her gratitude that Bowman could so adroitly keep his “finger on the pulse of Dad’s affairs and unnervingly pick out the important points for ‘our side.’ ”59 Quite charmed by Marie after an inauspicious beginning, Bowman let himself become her stable expert. When a memorial to Peary was placed on Jockey Cap, overlooking Fryburg, Maine, he wrote a short appreciation summoning the clichés

the search for geographical order

/

107

of the Greek classics, eagerly redirecting the fawning toward Peary himself. To Peary he applied Pericles’ panegyric following the Peloponnesian War: “The heroic dead have the whole earth for their home.” Citing his “great march to the North Pole,” the “force of a noble example,” his “superhuman goal,” strength, determination, discipline, and sacrifice, Bowman concluded that “Admiral Peary had in himself the ‘heroic stuff’ that Carlyle praised: he was a man with qualities ‘over and above.’ ”60 What the hell difference does it make, Bowman had written to Marie in an unsteady moment teetering between the ecstasy of discovery and the revelation of fakery. In a quite unintended way, he was probably correct. What difference, indeed, if Peary actually stood “with 360 degrees of longitude beneath his motionless feet,” whether he was within 120 yards or 120 miles? The spurious empiricism of old-fashioned “attainment” exploration expresses a geographical angst about the absoluteness of space—or rather the precise locations of places and final delimitation of their absoluteness—which was quite specific to the latter decades of the nineteenth century and the earliest of the twentieth. If Bowman glimpsed this, he did so only for a moment. He was more its agent than its critic. He knew the age of attainment exploration was over, but he remained a prisoner of its myths. Not until that age was well past, by the later decades of the twentieth century when a whole new geography had been constructed, could the myths be quietly dismantled. In 1975 mainstream geographer William Warntz could conclude that polar exploration was a “professional sport waged at the expense of science and serious geography.”61 However much Bowman enlisted the rhetoric of science, his cover-up of Peary exemplifies this assessment. Staunchly moralistic and just as staunchly a defender of science, he had no qualms about lying in support of Peary’s fakery and suppressing others who threatened to speak the truth. If, as has been argued, Peary represents “nightmare American imperialism incarnate,”62 Bowman constructed an energetic oblivion of the traits, deeds, and demeanor of a man he would have otherwise found repulsive. The extraordinary thing is that in 1935 Bowman could see no reasonable alternative to the myth. When he first received Mait Miller’s warning that Peary’s record simply would not stand up, Bowman was jolted. The very old-school Miller suggested that it was their responsibility, indeed duty, to announce these findings publicly, but Bowman recoiled in horror. “What would the Boy Scouts of America think!” he sputtered.63

An old workers’ joke about Stalinist Russia has it that the history of the future is fixed; it is the history of the past that keeps changing. At the old-

108

/

the search for geographical order

est and most revered geographical institution in the United States, Bowman saw himself at the helm of a search for order that also consumed the past as much as it made the future. His deliberate cover-up on behalf of Peary and the Peary myth was an uncharacteristically clumsy and desperate effort to prevent the past from being changed, protecting a version of geography written by the winners of history. It succeeded for more than half a century. It highlights what the scientist in him could never admit, namely, that the search for geographical order was equally and intrinsically a search for political and ideological order. The appeal to the moral order of the Boy Scouts might seem farcical— Miller himself was staggered—if it were not so precisely apt. He took the Scouts very seriously, at one point even admitting he “would rather have thought up the idea of scouting than any other idea in the world.” The Boy Scout “has a degree of manhood built into his character,” and “it means a great deal to America to have an organization that cuts across all so-called classes of societies and all religious faiths.”64 For Bowman the Boy Scouts expressed the same ideological amalgam of class and gender, race and nation as polar exploration, a balm for the angst and disorder of the day, and the connections between scouting and polar exploration were practical as much as ideal. The Boy Scouts mobilized on behalf of Richard Byrd’s expeditions, and one of their number accompanied him on the 1928–30 Antarctic trip. When Bowman convinced the New York Times to kill the story of Byrd’s inebriation on the 1929 South Pole flight, he again argued that such a revelation of the truth would devastate the country’s youth.65 Nationalism was and remains a central text of exploration. Robert Bartlett, Peary’s second in command, always believed that his British citizenship—he was from Newfoundland—was a key factor in Peary’s decision to send him back short of the Pole for fear that his presence would complicate any resulting national claims.66 Bowman habitually advised Byrd about which Antarctic flight routes would result in maximum claimable territory for the United States, and in 1929 he estimated that his advice bagged thirty-five thousand square miles of Antarctic coast for the country. As late as 1947, with the continuing promise of vast resources prior to the international treaty on Antarctica, he gave similar advice to navy chief Admiral Nimitz, warning that in light of “Russian discoveries” in the region, the United States would need to be vigilant in asserting national territorial rights.67 Race was equally entwined in the politics of establishing geographical order. Several years after his departure from the AGS, it was proposed by Theodore Roosevelt Jr. that the society should award a medal to Peary’s

the search for geographical order

/

109

black companion, Matt Henson. Bowman shot the idea down, complaining of attempts by the “large movement of Negroes to get a place in the sun.”68 Teddy Roosevelt’s impeccably Republican son envisaged a more liberal racial order than Bowman did. For two decades, the American Geographical Society provided an unprecedented platform from which Bowman could become involved in mapping, making, and defending the world’s geography. If the AGS was good for Bowman, Bowman was just as good for the AGS. When he moved in 1935, he left a vibrant research and mapping operation with considerable momentum but depression-sized financial problems. His decades there were indeed “halcyon years” for the AGS.69 Curiously, however, no clear vision replaced the vacuum left by the withdrawal of his frenetic energy. Bowman oversaw a renovation by modernization and energy more than a renovation of the society’s deeply structured vision of the world and its mission. Much as he talked up and actually built scientific research at the AGS and personally recognized the advent of a new geographical order, the projects he pursued there were actually quite cautious. None of his AGS accomplishments matches the progressiveness of global vision expressed in his book The New World, published after only six years at the society. By contrast, the millionth map certainly provided a bridge between the old geography and the new and was of inestimable practical value, but it was conceptually rooted in a past paradigm. Even more so, his fascination with polar exploration: however much he extolled polar science, he protected some of the worst excesses of a tradition that others around him began to recognize as morally bankrupt. Why? Why can his AGS research projects just as easily be seen as conservative efforts to “impose the known upon the unknown,” as Wiebe has put it, to reimpose an old order on and against the new?70 Powerful institutional inertia is part of the answer. Bowman’s intellectual ventilation of the AGS did not unduly upset its habitual elitism but rather reaffirmed and reinvigorated its genteel mission even as it modernized the place. His energetic injection of contemporary research priorities was entirely compatible with the fine “conservative spirit of our organization” commended by John Greenough, the retired merchant, banker, and philanthropist who succeeded Huntington as president. Or, as Huntington himself put it during Bowman’s directorship, it was important that the AGS rise above “the great maelstrom of secondary mentality with which we are surrounded”: “It is only by unyielding defense of an unpopular and what is commonly called ‘highbrow’ attitude, that the work of geography can be forwarded. This is an old and dignified body. It has one peculiarity which is lacking in many others—it is alive.”71

110

/

the search for geographical order

At the AGS Bowman found a way of translating his best science elitism learned at Harvard into a personal conservatism and a wider social elitism that in no way contradicted but, in the AGS at least, kept in check an emerging liberalism in other spheres. He was comfortable moving in and out of the old mold. Therefore, at the same time that he was mapping the absolute spaces of Latin America and orchestrating a cover-up to defend the U.S. conquest of the North Pole, he readily understood the new relationality of global space glimpsed by Mackinder and Lenin: as sharply as they did, he recognized that even the few remaining “empty spaces of the world are no longer non-political.”72

PART II THE RISE OF FOREIGN POLICY LIBERALISM: THE GREAT WAR AND THE NEW WORLD

5 THE INQUIRY: GEOGRAPHY AND A “SCIENTIFIC PEACE”

Shortly after the “lovely little war” of 1898, the Treaty of Paris was signed between a vanquished Spain, finally stripped of its colonies, and a victorious United States only beginning to descry world power. Whatever the treaty’s profound implications, the peace negotiations that produced it were a decidedly low-key affair. The United States was represented by only seven men; the Spanish, by six.1 Only two decades later, following World War I, the next Paris Peace Conference attracted thousands of delegates, advisers, “experts,” reporters, influence peddlers, aggrieved parties, and hangers-on for an extended merry-go-round of deliberations, dinners, and decisions. Even by European standards this was an extravagant affair. The last major European treaty negotiation in 1871 between France and the new Germany was, by comparison, a minor affair, and the obscene aristocratic lavishness of the Congress of Vienna (1815), which picked over Europe in Napoleon’s wake, was no match for Paris in 1919. For the U.S. government the event was utterly unprecedented. Unlike Britain, France, and Germany, the United States had no globally flung empire, except the small territories wrenched two decades earlier from Spain. Throughout the nineteenth century, successive U.S. administrations had defined their international interests in hemispheric rather than global terms, or as Bowman himself put it, “Until 1898 we were an isolated Power.”2 But the delegation that arrived in Paris twenty years later came imbued not with hemispheric but with global ambitions.

114

/

the inquiry

The late-nineteenth-century coalescence of the United States into a coherent nation-state in economic, political, and social as well as territorial terms simultaneously altered the country’s international profile. The corollary of national cohesion was international identity. This is precisely the dialectic of national boundary construction: successful national enclosure provokes international ambition. For all their apparent opposition, nationalism and internationalism are two sides of the same coin; the “age of empire” was the age of nationalism. The search for geographical order in the United States at the beginning of the twentieth century was not to be contained within the territorial ambitions of the Monroe Doctrine and certainly not within the narrower confines of the United States itself. The “dominant fact in American life has been expansion,” Frederick Jackson Turner told the people, and the “end of the frontier” would rightfully be supplemented by expansion abroad.3 The resulting shift in the expression of U.S. national interests and power, from the national to the international scale, came quickly in the years between 1898 and 1914. It is not that the United States lacked an international profile in the nineteenth century—the country was far from isolationist— but now its internationalism was no longer taken for granted as the servant of nation building. The reverse was true: the nation was now taken for granted in its pursuit of international interests. Global ambition came in a variety of forms. It was in this period that the iconic National Geographic Magazine began to picture the world for the geographical imaginations of the emerging middle classes. Buffalo Bill’s Wild West Show traveled the world and infused the romance, rapacity, and race destiny of the American frontier into the embryonic arteries of twentieth-century global culture; Christian missionaries fanned out to Asia and Africa; the Singer Company led the rush of budding U.S. multinational firms—railroads and oil companies, electrical, steel, and car companies—whose exported capital was threaded with cultural assumption. It was in this period too that Alfred Mahan pictured the United States as the natural successor to British sea power and that Brooks Adams announced the “American Empire.” In the rhetoric of the day, the “imperative for expansion” was a leitmotif of American exceptionalism passed off as a natural trait of the “new” nationstate. But the language of expansion conveniently glossed the connection between economic and geographical imperatives. Capital accumulation and the commensurate expansion of trade and markets, political interests, and cultural entanglements underlay the expansionist political geography of the last two decades of the nineteenth century. The clamor for global expansion and the opening of new markets came most sharply from American farmers and

the inquiry

/

115

industrialists, who were now threatened by their own success, the specter of overproduction. Between 1898 and 1914, annual U.S. exports nearly tripled to an annual level of $2.3 billion. Surplus commodities, capacity, and capital flooded the economy, and the expansion of trade and markets offered a geographical solution to the economic problem. “American factories are making more than the American people can use,” extolled Senator Albert Beveridge, and “American soil is producing more than they can consume. Fate has written our policy for us; the trade of the world must and shall be ours.” Together, “capitalists, christians and cowboys” led the turn-of-the-century transition of U.S. ambitions from a national and hemispheric to a global scale.4 Political expression of this scalar shift in U.S. interests was at first narrowly tied to economic expansion, as with the Open Door policy (1899–1900), which sought open access to markets and trade while protecting U.S. privilege in the Americas. As it matured, however, the connection between U.S. economic and political interests thickened. The government became more deliberate in its promotion of national economic interests, and a much closer affiliation between corporate and public leaders quickly evolved.5 At the same time the government grew more sophisticated in weaving such clear-cut class collaboration between private and public interests into a seemingly honorable account of national self-interest. By the time of Woodrow Wilson’s presidency, the frenzied pursuit of U.S. economic interests across the world was generally clothed in the more medicinal rhetoric of moral global advancement. U.S. entry into World War I was closely bound up with this global ambition and moral renditions of it. Never before had the United States intervened in a European war, although there had been several military forays into Asia, and when Woodrow Wilson finally made the decision to intervene in April 1917, the immediate justification was a series of German naval attacks on U.S. trading ships. Commerce on the high seas, he argued, was a global and inviolable right. But U.S. neutrality had been merely formal. The sunken ships were hauling part of the U.S. surplus—war materiel and related goods—to the European Allies, and by 1917 U.S. financiers had lent the Allies a staggering $2.3 billion, almost a hundred times what they had released to Germany. These bankers had so much at stake in an Allied success that the Treasury Department and the Federal Reserve Board were “alarmed.” The success of U.S. economic expansion had become inextricably bound up with the necessity of an Allied victory, and the possible effects of a German victory raised geopolitical fears concerning Latin America. Moral authority to design the resulting peace would belong to those who had fought on the battlefield,6 and these very practical considerations were recycled into a moral rationale for war against a militaristic and autocratic aggressor. Heightened nationalism at

116

/

the inquiry

home targeted socialists and pacifists who broadcast the less noble economic grounds for U.S. involvement. World War I was widely if inaccurately perceived in the United States as a European war emanating from long-standing squabbles in the Old World: the “young nation” of the United States was far removed and had transcended those shackles of history. Such an account bolstered U.S. narratives of national innocence, a fat disavowal of the political geographical truth behind the intervention. U.S. nationhood may or may not have been young in social and cultural terms, but geographically and politically its revolutionary eighteenth-century origins made it already old. Most European nation-states, whatever the galvanization of antecedent cultural and national traditions, are actually a territorial product of the nineteenth century. Even Italy and Germany materialized as nation-states only in the last third of the nineteenth century. As late as the 1870s, there were just seventeen sovereign European states, whereas the figure almost doubled in the aftermath of World War I. Spurred by dramatic industrialization, rapid accumulation of capital, and the consequent search for fresh markets, resources, and labor, nation building intensified in the last decades of the nineteenth century, spurring in turn intense international claims, which, in the context of Europe, meant first and foremost colonization. Far from a stable accomplishment of capitalist democracy, the political geography of the Old World was molten. The war of 1914–19 was the pivotal event that cooled these dynamic economic, political, and cultural forces into a recognizably twentieth-century map of European states. If the United States shared with European powers the imperative of economic expansion, the territorial dimension of this imperative was very different in North America, at least after the 1840s. European nation building still involved intense territorial competition along many borders and even more intense issues of sovereignty and statehood, but by the 1880s colonialism led the quest for economic expansion. In North America, by contrast, with the expansion of the western frontier dimming, national expansionism surely shared Europe’s broad economic goals, but colonialism was not the only or even the most favored means of its achievement. The United States was not even represented at the Berlin Conference of 1884–85, when the European powers performed the final colonial surgery on Africa.7 Post1898 U.S. expansion was market-centered rather than colonial in form, as the Open Door policy exemplifies. These differences between European and U.S. styles of economic expansion wove neatly into an American exceptionalism that reached its apotheosis in the liberal moralism of Woodrow

the inquiry

/

117

Wilson. For Wilson as for most Americans, the United States, founded in political revolt against European autocracy, was forever distinguished from the European powers as a superior alloy of capitalist enterprise and democratic faith. However self-interested in economic terms, U.S. entry into World War I could be cast as an act of high-minded democratic destiny, antithetical to, rather than identical with, the autarky of European power. This quintessentially Wilsonian fusion of global liberal ideals with U.S. economic self-interest facilitated Wilson’s heartfelt declaration in favor of peace even as he took the country into war, and it refracted the most pragmatic prosecution of war and postwar settlement as instances of that ideal. It allowed Wilson to defend unprecedented international adventurism in Europe and the Pacific, not as narrow national self-interest, but as progressive moral universalism of precisely the sort expressed in America’s eighteenthcentury birth. Bowman recalled Wilson’s counsel during the trip to the peace conference: “The desires of the people of the world for a new order . . . must be made to work.” Or as the historian N. Gordon Levin has put it, Wilson “saw no necessary contradiction between his desire on the one hand for a liberal war against German imperialism and his hope on the other for a compromise peace to form the basis of a new commercial and political world harmony.” Only Wilson’s “supreme faith in the universal righteousness” of his “conception of American self-interests” abated any contradiction between “traditional forms of national power” and his moral crusade for “a new world order.”8 By the beginning of 1917 Isaiah Bowman was convinced that the United States had to be on the battlefield. He remained sufficiently influenced by German geographer Friedrich Ratzel to believe that the war had resulted from the preponderance of small states in Europe with nowhere to expand and the resulting imperial rivalries. Born Canadian and a life-long Anglophile despite his Germanic Swiss ancestry, Bowman was convinced that moral and pragmatic considerations demanded U.S. involvement. He scorned Wilson’s 1916 campaign slogan that he had kept the country out of war. “It is the hope of the majority of Americans,” Bowman told the French geographer Emmanuel de Margerie, “that we shall get into the war” and “make as great an effort to help the Allies as the administration has made to keep out of the war.” He thrilled to the war when it came. He rejoiced that the country had been “born again. . . . No such patriotic enthusiasm has been awakened before in this generation. It was a far keener and deeper emotion than that aroused by the Spanish war.”9 With his experiences in Latin America, where he saw firsthand the potential bounty of U.S. expansion abroad, and his adherence to the geog-

118

/

the inquiry

rapher’s maxim that all the world’s places are interconnected, Bowman was opposed to any kind of isolationist politics. He was already a convinced internationalist. But by the same token, he was still too conservative in 1917 to be a convinced Wilsonian Democrat. In response to Wilson’s shrewd co-option of conservative moralism and the patriotism evoked by war, many, including Bowman, eventually came to see Wilson not just as the most palatable political option but as the visionary of a new world order. World War I was many things. From the Somme to the Dardanelles, South Africa to Vladivostok, it was a war exhibiting unprecedented military technology and carnage. It was certainly an interimperialist struggle, and here, paradoxically, Lenin and American conservatives found uncomfortable agreement. But it was also a watershed in the development of geoeconomic power. It achieved a kind of final geopolitical shakeout, establishing a discrete system of national territories throughout Europe. It was final not in the sense that no further geopolitical change occurred; clearly it did. Rather, the form of the territorial system of nation-states—decades, even centuries, in evolution—truly came to fruition only after World War I. Neither the cold war after 1945, nor African and Asian decolonization, nor the implosion of Soviet communism after 1989 shattered the system established in 1919. Quite the opposite. The breakup of the Soviet Union completed a projection of geopolitical nationalism that the Bolshevik revolution had tried to bypass.

toward a scientific peace In the lead-up to war, Wilson’s speeches focused on the peace that would follow, and preparations for the peace conference began quickly after U.S. entry into the war. British foreign secretary Arthur Balfour led a mission to Washington in which various secret Allied treaties, largely territorial in nature, were revealed to government officials. Not a party to such treaties, Wilson’s government was taken by surprise, and they insisted to Balfour that no public discussion of postwar preparations should occur lest it jeopardize the public embrace of the war effort. But with the issue already in the press, Wilson’s real concern was that the U.S. vision of peace ought to take precedence over mere territorial concerns. Within the government, proposals for peace preparations popped up like mushrooms. From the U.S. Embassy in London, the brother of seasoned conservative diplomat Henry White began one scheme. Lawyer Felix Frankfurter, stationed in Paris with

the inquiry

/

119

the War Department, reported that French committees were well into peace preparations, and he-too-urged action. The veteran apparatus of the British Foreign Office was well along. From inside the State Department other proposals flowed, and by August 1917 Secretary of State Lansing had managed to put a cursory effort into motion. But Wilson evidently had other plans. He had not normally trusted the lumbering, old-fashioned Lansing with foreign policy, thought him surrounded by “reactionaries,” and but for the war might have fired him. Thus in early September, Wilson gave his close confidant Edward House the job of “quietly gathering . . . a group of men” to prepare a portrait of what the other parties to war would be demanding for a peace agreement and to prepare the U.S. position.10 If bypassing the State Department seems strange, it was still the tradition that the president take the reins of foreign policy himself. There was, in fact, little consistent foreign policy to speak of. The State Department was weak and ineffectual, no match for the British Foreign or Colonial Offices, and possessed few and comparatively inexperienced officials. The “isolation of the United States” and lack of interest in other countries or contact with them, wrote one observer, left the government with little information and “too small and scattered a personnel to deal with such information as might be gathered.”11 Stated more pithily, entry into the war brought “almost panicky demands in Washington for basic data.” Despite “measures designed to increase the professional and organizational strength of the State Department, the American network of international communications” was sparse compared with those of European powers.12 The specialized organization Wilson established came to be known as the Inquiry. Assembled in advance of any peace conference, the Inquiry marked a significant innovation in the conduct of foreign policy. It was in effect the first U.S. “think tank” on foreign policy, albeit with a very specific agenda, and was overseen outside normal channels by “Colonel” House. Edward H. House was a kind of professional political broker. A Texan, he inherited a British accent from a boyhood year in England and a large fortune from his parents’ sugar and cotton plantation interests, Confederate shipping activities, and bank holdings. He dallied with political power and in 1911 sought out and aggressively boosted New Jersey’s governor, Woodrow Wilson, as a presidential hopeful. Following Wilson’s election, House became Wilson’s right-hand man. Wilson was an ex–political science professor and Princeton president, and in 1917 he supported House’s assemblage of academic “experts” rather than government officials to staff the Inquiry. These men and a few women were the shock troops of the administration’s “new diplomacy,” the front line of

120

/

the inquiry

Wilson’s stated intention of putting diplomatic peacemaking on a “rational” footing.13 To direct the organization, House chose Sydney E. Mezes, whose qualifications as philosopher of religion and president of the City College of New York were less important than the unquestioned loyalty he would bring as House’s brother-in-law. In hiring the young muckraking journalist and ex-socialist Walter Lippmann (then an assistant for the secretary of war), House was responding directly to Wilson’s own desire to include the liberal opposition establishment. House also engaged Archibald Cary Coolidge, the well-known professor of eastern European history at Harvard, and James T. Shotwell. Shotwell was an energetic, Canadian-born Columbia University historian who would go on to edit the massive 150-volume Economic and Social History of the World War. It was he who coined the name “Inquiry,”14 a deliberately bland name designed to attract little attention to the highly secret outfit. In late October 1917, as the organization was coming together, Coolidge, supported by Shotwell, suggested that Isaiah Bowman be drafted for the Inquiry. They apparently felt it was vital that a geographer—and preferably also the resources of a geographical society—be enlisted, given the kinds of problems that would have to be resolved at the end of the war. Widely known now for his research and Latin American expeditions but especially for his directorship of the American Geographical Society, Bowman was an obvious choice for the New York–based Inquiry. Inquiry director Mezes considered him “one of the leading if not the leading geographer of the country.” House also clearly eyed the valuable assets of the society’s extensive map collection, library and journal materials, and cartographic and geographical staff. Bowman enthusiastically agreed to put himself and the AGS at their disposal, and within a fortnight the personnel had moved from cramped desks in a corner of the New York Public Library to the spacious third floor of the AGS building. The Inquiry was shrouded in secrecy. The Wilson administration was anxious about possible attacks from the large and vocal antiwar movement, but it was also apprehensive that news of peace preparations might suggest that Wilson (and especially his secretary of war, Newton Baker, derisively labeled a pacifist by conservative nationalists) was not serious about waging war. To the AGS Council, therefore, Bowman explained the Inquiry’s presence with only the most general and minimal official statement. At first, only four of the council’s inner circle, including Archer Huntington and James Ford, were given a full statement of the Inquiry’s business, but the addition of guards, nightwatchmen, and other security measures must have alerted anyone who cared to know that something was afoot.15

the inquiry

/

121

Many things came together with the involvement of Bowman and the AGS in the Inquiry. “Long before the great war closed,” remarked Woodrow Wilson’s chronicler, “it was recognized by all the great nations that scientific knowledge would play an unprecedented part” in any peace conference. “A peace of the old kind could be patched up by the diplomats, but a peace of the new kind required immense and accurate knowledge.” It was vital, suggested one diplomat, that the United States not “act as mere conciliators” but that they actively “frame a ‘scientific peace.’ ”16 More than anyone Bowman took this mission of a scientific peace seriously. If he and the AGS were initially seen as vital ingredients, within a few months they became its lynchpins. The conclusion of the war would require an unprecedented reordering of the inherited territorial order of a Europe-centered world, and geographical information would be at a premium. By 1917, geographical information at the AGS meant “scientific data,” but the emphasis on a scientific peace had a broader resonance. The emergence of a politically coherent nation-state, progressivism, government planning, the institutionalization of foreign policy, and the rise of a new professional stratum of the middle classes—scientists and engineers, managers and all hue of experts—were all connected. The professional classes shared a broad belief in the possibility of precise solutions, scientific answers to specific problems, and the Inquiry extended this faith to postwar territorial, political, and economic arrangements based on the requisite data. Academics had advised peace delegations before, of course, but the deliberate preparation of such a commission so far in advance was unprecedented in the history of U.S. foreign relations. The Inquiry’s personnel were casually referred to with the reverent appellation “experts,” and press accounts revealing their existence at the end of the war played up their scientific elitism: “ ‘Fact Students’ Join Wilson’s Peace Party; Highbrows Laden with Secrets of Foreign Lands,” blared one front-page headline. Bowman was their primary geographical “expert” and quickly became more. He personally embraced the Inquiry as a “fact study, conducted in a scientific spirit” and devoted to the preparation of data, but equally he found it a powerful extension of his own hitherto scholarly search for geographical order.17 The Inquiry would ferret out from the data the proper geographical order, and the peace conference would be responsible for implementing it. Historian Robert Wiebe has concluded that Wilson “underwent the intellectual migration of his generation” and aspired to offer “the most detailed plan of a new world under careful government supervision.”18 The Inquiry’s crew of experts, most in their thirties and forties, were wholly of this generational intellectual migration, and by the end of 1917 they had

122

/

the inquiry

nestled into the top floor of the AGS building and the job of gathering the data they optimistically believed would undergird U.S. authorship of this “new world.” Bowman, now thirty-eight years old, had high ambitions for the Inquiry he now housed. He had vaulted suddenly if somewhat serendipitously into the formative cauldron of liberal foreign policy and found himself in a position to use his scientific acumen and credentials toward national policy goals. The search for geographical order, begun practically in South America, was now extended to the global scale and drawn into the halls of political power, where the new order would be battled out.

order and disorder Numbering 51 researchers and other staff at the beginning of 1918, the Inquiry grew to three times that size by the end of the war, including 126 researchers and executives.19 Geographers, historians, and cartographers dominated, but the group also included economists and psychologists, classicists and geologists. Among the geographers were Bowman’s old Ypsilanti teacher, Mark Jefferson, Ellen Semple (Clark), Douglas Johnson (Columbia University), Nevin Fenneman (University of Cincinnati), and George McBride (librarian at the AGS). Their research and compilation efforts spanned the globe and were roughly categorized around geographical subareas (Russia and eastern Europe, Latin America, Africa, the Balkans, and so forth) but also included thematic topics (cartography, diplomatic history, reference and archives). Their work was initially orchestrated by the four-person Executive Committee. In addition to Sydney Mezes as director, it comprised historian James Shotwell (research), New York lawyer David Hunter Miller (law partner of House’s son-in-law) as treasurer, and the twenty-eight-year-old Walter Lippmann as secretary. Lippmann went on to become a nationally famous journalist and political critic and already had a national reputation writing for the liberal New Republic.20 For the first three months the Inquiry focused on widespread data collection, culling information and materials from many sources. They worked in the closest contact with various government departments (State, Commerce, Interior, Agriculture) as well as the War Trade Board and the National Research Council, but the closest contact was with the Military Intelligence Division, the government’s primary organ of foreign espionage. From July 1918, Bowman acted as liaison between the Inquiry and Military Intelligence. There was also continual liaison with their French and British counterparts. Six subdivisions were established covering government and politics, geography, social science and

the inquiry

/

123

history, economics and business, international law, and strategy. Suspending all but the most vital AGS work, Bowman began as Inquiry division chief for geography. In addition to earmarking and researching contentious areas within its global survey, the Inquiry set out to compile a profile of the interests and expected demands of the various interested powers, divided between “friends” (United States, British Empire), “enemies,” and “neutrals” (“Denmark, Holland, etc.”). By February 1918, with war drawing to an end and the preparatory work barely begun, the emphasis shifted toward analysis rather than simply data collection and the production of surveys.21 Still, not all of the Inquiry’s work in the first few months involved data collection. Almost before they had begun and before the first reports were completed, they had a resounding political success, albeit one they could not share publicly. In late 1917 the revolutionary Soviet government was threatening a quick withdrawal from an imperialist war, the British and French squabbled, and the antiwar opposition at home flared up again with Leon Trotsky’s revelation of the secret territorial treaties made earlier in the war among the European powers: copies were discovered among hastily abandoned tsarist documents. When the British and French governments demurred from any joint statement of war aims, Wilson, embarrassed by the treaties and seeking to put the discussion of peace on a footing more favorable to U.S. global interests rather than the apparent territorial acquisitiveness of the European powers, organized his own declaration. Through House he asked the Inquiry for an initial draft, and this became the basis for the famous “Fourteen Points” delivered by Wilson on 8 January 1918. Preparation of the Fourteen Points involved an intense effort. Four Inquiry personnel began work during the second week of December. Using physical maps, statistics on national, ethnic, and linguistic groups, and information on trade, economics, and political movements, they began mapping the contentious regions of Europe and matched these to the details of the secret treaties. Bowman participated in this early work, helping especially (and for no obvious reason) to draft the group’s position on Poland, but was less involved in the later stages. Other Inquiry members contributed materials, especially Shotwell and the African historian George Louis Beer. Miller’s judgment guided the form of the report, Mezes was of little use, and Lippmann took responsibility for drafting the resulting memorandum. “The War Aims and Peace Terms It Suggests” was conveyed to House before Christmas. It contained a series of recommendations concerning the establishment of national territorial units and new national boundaries and included maps and explanatory notes. Wilson returned the draft for amendments, and House took the Inquiry’s second draft to Wash-

124

/

the inquiry

ington on 4 January 1918, together with “voluminous” Inquiry materials, and the next day set to work on it with Wilson. They crystallized the territorial recommendations and added a preamble and five general points. After two hours, House later boasted, he and Wilson had “finished remaking the map of the world, as we would have it.”22 The Fourteen Points were concerned with territory as much as principle. The Russian Revolution had upset all the assumptions about the war’s progress and outcome, and this was of primary concern. A wary Inquiry team wove the new “menace” of Bolshevism throughout their draft, yet they did not want to unduly alienate Lenin, who remained technically an Ally. They insisted on German evacuation from all Russian territory and tried to reassure the Bolsheviks that the United States had no intentions of supporting the counterrevolutionary White Army. Wilson already anticipated a “clean slate on which to write” following the defeat of tsarism,23 which he assumed imminent, and in pulling the Inquiry’s scattered points together into Point VI, he offered Allied assistance to the Bolshevik government, volunteering there that “the treatment accorded Russia by her sister nations in the months to come will be the acid test of their good will.”24 The evacuation of Belgium and restoration of sovereignty were comparatively unproblematic (Point VII), but France (Point VIII) was more complicated. Northern France should similarly be reinstated, but Wilson softened the Inquiry implication that Alsace-Lorraine, grabbed by Germany in 1871, be restored to France. Italy was even more complicated (Point IX), because its claims to the alpine Trentino and to the eastern Adriatic from Trieste down the Dalmatian coast had been a central object of the secret treaties, the booty offered by Britain and France to coax Italy into the war in 1915. The Inquiry readily conceded the Trentino on grounds of political geography, advised that Trieste be made an international city, but strongly rejected Italian claims to the eastern Adriatic coast south of Trieste. Wilson sidestepped the Adriatic question in his Fourteen Points, however, knowing full well that it would become a volatile issue. He talked only about the “readjustment of the frontiers . . . along clearly recognizable lines of nationality.” His expectations of volatility were not to be disappointed. The proposal that Austria-Hungary be dealt with in terms of the “selfdetermination” of different ethnic groups (Point X) was a fairly transparent move to dilute the Hapsburg Empire, given that for strategic reasons its breakup was still rejected by the Inquiry. Even more vague was the statement about the Balkans (Point XI). The Inquiry vacillated here: “The ultimate relationship of the different Balkan nations must be based upon a fair balance

the inquiry

/

125

of nationalistic and economic considerations, applied in a generous and inventive spirit after impartial and scientific inquiry.” Wilson adopted the more specific requirements of a German evacuation and the restoration of Serbia, Romania, and Montenegro; the contours of the new Yugoslavia were not yet readily apparent. More explicitly than with the Austrian Empire, the Inquiry proposed that the Ottoman Empire be split up (Point XII), a strong if circumscribed Turkey retained, and an independent Armenia established, more to prevent economic monopolization of Turkey by Germany than from any sense of “justice and humanity.” There was also a vaguely defined recognition of Syria, Palestine, and Arabia, with which Wilson concurred. Poland (Point XIII) was a different matter, however. Although the Inquiry initially insisted on an independent and democratic Poland, largely at Bowman’s behest, the difficulties here proved to be as great as any. The complicated ethnic geography involving Germans and Russians as well as Poles, the awkward detachment of East Prussia from Germany, and the thorny issue of Danzig/Gdansk—the obvious port for an independent Poland— convinced Lippmann, Mezes, and Miller to reverse themselves and propose a Polish state federated inside Russia. But Wilson stuck with Bowman’s choice, an independent Poland. Point XIV simplified the inexplicably tangled proposal sent up by the Inquiry, concluding with a ringing rhetorical appeal for a League of Nations. “No economic peace until the peoples are freed”—Lippmann’s words, presumably, not Bowman’s—was how the Inquiry ended its draft, offering an astute recognition of where U.S. power would lie following the war.25 For better or worse, Wilson’s Fourteen Points became a foundational document in the settlement of the war, and its effect was immediately obvious from press reactions around the world. More than any previous statement, except the declaration of U.S. involvement in the war, it gave Wilson a pedestal on the world stage. The inner circle of the Inquiry were elated at this quick sign of their importance, but work only intensified. They may have “put words into the mouth of the President,” as Lippmann crowed, but a mountain of mundane work lay ahead.26 There was as yet little discernable organization, and whatever the emphasis on coherent planning, the definition of specialized projects was less than systematic. Germany was not the direct focus of any of the research groups, and only one worker was assigned to cover Italy while twelve researchers worked on diplomatic history and fifteen on Latin America. Eastern Europe was stressed at the neglect of western Europe. Further, the allocation of personnel to research foci often bore little if any relation to any actual area of expertise.

126

/

the inquiry

In part this happened because the United States possessed so few bona fide experts on many areas of the world, but in part it was also a question of whom House, Mezes, and the others would trust, regardless of expertise. Preoccupied with secrecy, House insisted that Mezes apply a standard of “absolute discretion, ability and patriotism” in recruiting Inquiry personnel.27 His own demand for total loyalty filtered through his brother-in-law to the organization as a whole, with the practical effect that House’s stamp on the Inquiry encouraged the induction of a narrowly defined group; it was larger than a clique but a more restricted group of interconnected colleagues and friends than if genuine expertise had dominated the selection process. More than half of the personnel of the Inquiry came from five institutions: Harvard, Yale, Columbia, Princeton, and the AGS, while twothirds of the most active members had received their terminal degrees from only four universities. In part too, the mismatch of area and expertise resulted from the kind of work required and a certain indecisiveness, even ambivalence, about the importance of “expert” knowledge in the first place. The Inquiry carried out virtually no original research but spent most of its effort compiling accounts of the geographical, historical, social, and political aspects of those areas they felt might be contentious following the war. The Inquiry’s leadership valued quick and efficient synthesis of existing results as much as a scholar’s regional expertise.28 The more that researchers got into the work, the more they realized the extent of the job and the more the job outgrew their ability to encompass it. The Inquiry expanded its personnel steadily in early 1918, but there was less and less conviction about what they were doing and why. Several members—including Coolidge, in a letter to research director Shotwell—questioned the need for specialist scholars at all if compilation was the major work at hand; a host of cross-cutting needs were never adequately conceptualized; and projects once begun might be abruptly curtailed for the sake of new ventures. House for his part left the Inquiry largely to its own direction or lack thereof. By spring, Bowman was utterly frustrated. Here was an unparalleled innovation in U.S. foreign relations housed in his own AGS building, yet the group was increasingly disorganized, rudderless, and threatened to fragment. He prized himself precisely on his ability to organize major research endeavors but was largely excluded from control. He was especially frustrated by the lack of data synthesis, the inappropriate allocation of Inquiry personnel to assignments, and the ambivalence with which map preparation was viewed by Mezes and Lippmann. On the one hand, the cartographic resources of the American Geographical Society were being absorbed away

the inquiry

/

127

from society work, and Bowman wanted either new cartographers or compensation to the AGS for the use of its staff. On the other, the mapmaking was inadequate in scope and followed no particular plan. He submitted numerous programs for cartographic work only to have them returned on the grounds that “the money was not available to carry them out.” On one occasion, when the need to hire outside cartographers began to be recognized, Lippmann urged, over Bowman’s objection, the hiring of a man (referred by House) whom Bowman believed to be insane. Bowman thought he knew how things should be run and was burned by his exclusion from the Executive Committee.29 Reorganized into twenty-nine divisions, twelve geographical and seventeen synthetic, the Inquiry was still chaotic and lurched out of control. As the focus turned to the presentation of data rather than its gathering, and rapid mapmaking became vital, journalist Lippmann was given control of cartography. Ambitious and impatient, Bowman now took aim at Mezes, who was perceived throughout the Inquiry as an incompetent leader. Shotwell and Lippmann diplomatically cajoled the director into action, but Bowman had no such patience. Mezes may have been but two whispers away from the president, but Bowman openly considered him “a very stupid director,” “ignorant and guileful.” Mezes for his part thought Bowman young, brash, conspicuously ambitious, and threatening.30 In fact no one was happy. Half the key people were ready to quit. A disgusted Miller, also tied to House by personal connections, kept his distance from the whole business, and Lippmann lost patience with leading Mezes through his work while his own projects were blocked. Stimulated by House’s favoritism and lack of direct oversight and quickened by various heightened ambitions resulting from early success with the Fourteen Points, personal jealousies infected the whole operation. A power struggle ensued. Despite having been named the director of a revamped research agenda, Bowman still found himself powerless at the end of May 1918. In the vacuum of Mezes’s incompetence, Lippmann threatened to take control of the Inquiry. “Bowman would then have to take orders from Lippmann,” Shotwell later recalled, “and Bowman was a man who took orders from no one.” He resolved to act, but first a canny Bowman decided on a three-week vacation to allow the chaos “to come to a head.”31 Bowman’s complaints about bureaucratic disorder were legitimate enough, but his own “well-nigh authoritarian personality” was quite evident to members of the Inquiry as he “came to arrogate more and more of the responsibilities from the less competent Mezes.”32 Springtime discussions between Bowman and Lippmann raised the possibility of plotting against Mezes, but

128

/

the inquiry

nothing came of it. Lippmann wouldn’t move alone, and Bowman, distrusting Lippmann, had already decided that only alone would he move.33 Bowman and Mezes were both relieved when Lippmann abruptly left for a propagandist job as captain in Military Intelligence in France, but at the same time, in Bowman’s absence, the Inquiry abruptly halted its work on a 1:3,000,000 base map of Europe. An incensed Bowman wrote Mezes indicting the general disorganization of the Inquiry, and when he returned from vacation he confronted Mezes, calling him “a weak director.” Days later, accusing Mezes of gross mismanagement, he tendered his resignation.34 It was a calculated move. The Inquiry’s operation was housed by the good graces of the AGS director, and his resignation could prove sticky. A cool Mezes had surely considered this possibility and simply asked Bowman to postpone a decision for a couple of days while he consulted House. Bowman is a “fine fellow,” he reported to House, but only “academic and unpractical results” could be expected from him, and he can’t do things “any way but his own.” He “has to be given his head to work well, or at all,” but, concluded Mezes, this price was not too high “for his fine house and exceptional geographical competence.”35 It was now Mezes’s turn for vacation, and he left without responding to Bowman, who now consulted House directly at his estate in Magnolia, Massachusetts. Following lunch he and House took chairs out under a tree, and the colonel asked him point blank: “What’s the matter with Lippmann?” He was a “bad influence” and disorganized, Bowman responded, and administration bored him, whereupon House quickly confided the political circumstances of his appointment: “The Administration had to cooperate with the extreme liberals of the country.” “What’s the matter with Mezes?” House continued. “We both laughed,” Bowman recorded. “It wouldn’t do to criticize his brother-in-law,” and the question was discreetly dropped. The upshot of all this, by Bowman’s account, was that he was asked whether, if he had “complete charge of men, money, and plans,” he would “take charge of the Inquiry”? It was no modest Bowman who replied that since “these three terms included everything,” he would agree to serve.36 At the age of thirty-nine Bowman was playing a delicate game of political poker with the president’s right-hand man. Supremely self-confident, he had deliberately provoked House’s intervention, and the gamble paid off with his appointment as executive officer of the Inquiry. If this was the earliest example of a calculated political gamesmanship, it would not be his last, as House himself would find out. Bowman made the most of the chance, feeling his oats after a year of frustration, and immediately suggested an expansion of the Inquiry’s work to focus on the peace confer-

the inquiry

/

129

ence.37 He established the Research Committee, which, along with Bowman and Shotwell, comprised Allyn Young, a Cornell economist, and Charles Haskins, historian and dean of the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences at Harvard. Haskins chaired the committee. Bowman’s self-congratulatory report that “for the first time in the history of the Inquiry the work became orderly and efficient and consecutive” is probably accurate and deserved. Shotwell certainly credited Bowman with averting imminent disaster, and progress was rapid. Despite a desultory attempt by Mezes to retain control, the Research Committee resumed on the 1:3,000,000 map series, a series of block maps was developed covering especially contentious boundary regions, and they purchased large numbers of 1:1,000,000 sheets, a move previously blocked by Mezes and Lippmann.38 Bowman was flying high. House now visited the Inquiry on a weekly basis, and with the war grinding to a close and a Paris peace conference now under active discussion, Woodrow Wilson visited the AGS and the Inquiry offices on 8 October 1918. Secretary of State Lansing had already visited, and at Bowman’s insistence he and House had scrawled their signatures on the wall of the AGS director’s office. It took little prompting to convince Wilson to clamber onto a filing cabinet and do likewise. But trouble was not far off. Mezes had been largely bypassed for more than two months, and although he generally suffered this indignance calmly, he had not in his own mind relinquished control. The Research Committee now ran the work, with Mezes declining to attend, but the Executive Committee, on which Bowman now sat, was headed by Mezes, whose title remained director. There was, in effect, dual governance. House continued to funnel his communications with the Inquiry largely through Mezes and seems by the end of September to have begun quietly rehabilitating him. And Mezes was not always so retiring. At one stormy Executive Committee meeting he lost his temper and accused Bowman of seeking to abolish the Executive Committee, and House in turn seems to have become concerned that Bowman had overstepped his authority. Bowman’s position was further weakened when House dispatched David Miller, usually an ally on the Executive Committee, to other duties in Washington, and after embarking for Europe in late October, House radioed Mezes from sea instructing that the work of Bowman’s Research Committee be terminated and that final recommendations were now to be prepared. Shown the cable, Bowman was “bewildered” at the sudden change of course, and his erstwhile confidence in House was shaken. Acting only on “the colored stories that Mezes told him,” Bowman complained, House had “jettisoned the old organization and put stupid brother-in-law in charge again.”39

130

/

the inquiry

Throughout the government there was intense personal jostling for appointments to the peace conference delegation. As early as June, Mezes had considered the question and come up with a list of six, but in late October, presumably at House’s suggestion, he prepared a longer list for personal transmission to Wilson. “In lofty style,” he showed the list to Bowman, explaining that there was no room for the geographer except perhaps as “clerk” to Mezes. He later relented from such churlishness, proposing that Bowman could substitute himself for any of the specialists on the list, but a disgusted Bowman was having none of it. Along with House’s suggestion that the Inquiry would need seventy-five to eighty people in Paris, the list was sent to Secretary of State Lansing, who looked set to head the delegation. Lansing had little respect for Mezes and had not forgotten that the Inquiry was set up independently to do a job that he felt his own department was best equipped to do, and with Wilson’s backing, he requested a pareddown Inquiry list. It “is so unlikely that anything but the main territorial, political and racial questions” would be resolved at the peace conference, Wilson wrote Lansing, that only “the men and materials” necessary for “settling the main questions” should be taken. Specifically, Wilson suspected that “detailed discussion of financial and commercial” arrangements would be delegated to special conferences or commissions.40 Lansing wanted Mezes in Washington to work out a revised list; Mezes, having been rebuffed by both Wilson and Lansing, having no ammunition in Washington, and expecting only humble pie, was trapped. He asked Bowman to go instead. After Bowman’s discussions with Lansing and Assistant Secretary Leland Harrison and consultation with Mezes, a much shorter list of seventeen was submitted. Many Inquiry researchers were angry and resentful at being omitted, and Bowman was still not on the list. But Mezes must have known that from the start House had assumed Bowman’s presence in Paris and had recommended it to the president; with his own pettiness exposed at the highest levels, Mezes had little choice but to include him. Bowman was subsequently named chief territorial specialist.41

the inquiry ’ s geography Although it aimed at a scientific peace “entirely independent of any political hypotheses,” as Bowman liked to think, the Inquiry’s preparation was considerably less systematic than this would imply. Overall, Inquiry personnel produced approximately two thousand reports and twelve hundred maps and expended $241,200, all drawn from Wilson’s discretionary budget for National Security and Defense. The reports varied from several

the inquiry

/

131

pages to five-hundred-page monographs, and although copies were distributed to House, Wilson, the State and War Departments, as well as elsewhere in the administration, it is doubtful that this raw output was read to any great extent. Researchers were in many ways working in the dark. They knew that certain issues were likely to emerge at a peace conference and usually managed to focus on these, if unevenly, but by far the majority of reports followed hunches about what might come up and, if it did, what form it would take. Many of the reports were little more than general surveys of places, people, and politics. The yield was unwieldy and defied neat classification. The Inquiry certainly failed to meet Wilson’s highest expectation, namely, systematic planning of the U.S. position at the peace conference.42 The academic focus on detail and preoccupation with facts embraced most strongly by Bowman left little room for the next step of discerning policy positions. If Lippmann, in Bowman’s estimation, had the cart of policy generalization before the horse of fact gathering, the Inquiry under Bowman barely got to the cart. The Fourteen Points were a grand but unique exception. The Inquiry was nonetheless charting new ground in American diplomatic preparation, and its success or failure could not really be foretold ahead of the peace conference itself. Certainly Bowman’s assessment of the Department of State—they “had a limited view of peace conference organization” and no “real conception of effective organization for so comprehensive a program”43—might well be applied to the Inquiry too. But the Inquiry’s mapmaking activities do stand out as more fruitful overall than the reports, the maps being the most valuable aspect of the group’s work. Using the latest and best sources, the Inquiry made maps to visualize territorial boundaries, settlements, population distribution and density, linguistic distributions, religion, economic activities, resources, trade routes, strategic points, and much more. The base maps would prove the most valuable of all at a peace conference intent on drawing new patterns and boundaries on the world map.44 Bowman could grow quite excited about a base map. It “is a designedly neutral map,” he declared, inert, “mapa muda” in Spanish, or “dumb map.” New “state lines, ethnic boundaries, a rectified frontier, or a distribution of any sort” could be superimposed at short notice at a conference where the most controversial activity would be the geographical rearrangement of nations and boundaries.45 The base maps, produced by the Inquiry in several scales, provided virtually complete world coverage. The 1:3,000,000 series in particular, which Bowman had to reinstate, would become a kind of cartographic currency of political deliberation at the conference. Not surprisingly, the AGS cartog-

132

/

the inquiry

raphers played the leading role in their preparation, but an entire cartographic force, directed latterly by Mark Jefferson, was mobilized. For historian Lawrence Gelfand, the AGS contribution “proved decisive for the Inquiry’s entire program.” Or as Bowman put it more generally, “Every development of the art of war calls for the more extended use of maps.”46 Two aspects of the geographic work of the Inquiry are worth highlighting. The first is the question of geographical coverage. The Inquiry stressed Russia and eastern Europe over western Europe. Although there was no doubt that specific problems would emerge in western Europe, the feeling was that these would be contained (geographically discrete), or else they would and should be resolved with the strong Allied European powers taking the lead. It was otherwise with Russia and eastern Europe, where much larger geographical issues were at stake. Already when the United States entered the war, it was clear that entire nation-states were to be established and others broken up: the map of “Mittel Europa” would be unrecognizable with the defeat of Germany and the anticipated fall of the AustroHungarian and Ottoman Empires. Extraordinary resources—physical and human—were on the geographical block. As the Inquiry leadership saw it in a draft of the Fourteen Points, the United States had a strong “interest in the disestablishment of a system by which adventurous and imperialistic groups in Berlin, Vienna and Budapest could use the resources of this area in the interests of a fiercely selfish foreign policy directed against their neighbors and the rest of the world.”47 The Russian Revolution, and acerbic reactions to it, only heightened U.S. interest in political geographic “disestablishment” and reconstruction. The second aspect is another apparent anomaly that has attracted commentary. It has been suggested that the Inquiry focused inordinately on Latin America at the expense of more important areas. Defined by Bowman in Monroe Doctrine terms as everything south of the Rio Grande, including the Caribbean, this region usurped more of the budget (thirty-five thousand dollars) than all other regional research combined, with “barely a trickle” going to such vital regions as the Far East, Italy, and the remainder of western Europe; about 15 percent of the Inquiry’s reports were devoted to Latin America. This emphasis reflected Bowman’s “special professional interest . . . in Latin American geography,” suggests Gelfand, and was “personally inspired” by him.48 There is little doubt that Bowman influenced the significant focus on Latin America, that his personal interests played a part, that the Latin American work was largely staffed by his own recruits, and that he was quite capable of bending the agenda to his own interests. Nor is there any doubt that

the inquiry

/

133

Mezes made a belated if desultory proposal to divert resources from this work. But a narrowly personal explanation for the substantial Latin American focus misses the political and economic geographies that dominated Washington at the time. In the first place, it was not simply a war in and about Europe, however much European battles and issues dominated. Long before the United States entered the war, the Wilson government fretted about strong, officially voiced pro-German sentiment in Latin America, and the prospect that several Latin American nations would become official belligerents was taken very seriously. In part, then, the Inquiry focus simply perpetuated a Monroe Doctrine paternalism, whereby the U.S. government claimed a special prerogative in the region. Thus Latin America was on the Inquiry’s agenda from the earliest days, when Bowman had little say over the group’s work. After all, in early 1917 an alarming telegram from Berlin to the German ambassador in Mexico City was intercepted by British Naval Intelligence and relayed to the U.S. government. Not only did it announce the fateful resumption of unrestricted German submarine warfare in the Atlantic, which led directly to the U.S. declaration of war, but it instructed the German ambassador that in the case of U.S. entry into the war, his assignment was to spearhead the building of a Mexican-German alliance with the promise of taking back “New Mexico, Texas, and Arizona” (the Japanese government was also to be approached).49 Wilson, of course, had long since sent troops to Mexican soil for the purpose of protecting U.S. capital and putting down the revolution. Pro-German sentiment was greater farther south, especially in Argentina, Chile, and Brazil, where recent German colonization was most rapid. Indeed, at the same time as he worked for the Inquiry, David Hunter Miller’s law firm worked for the State Department to investigate financial and trade deals that might contravene the “trading with the enemy act”: South America, especially Argentina, was a major focus.50 A range of disputes threatened sporadic volatility in the region, and when the Inquiry commenced its initial work, it was Mezes who commissioned a report on “the dangerous issues that may possibly involve war among the South American countries.” With national boundaries still unsettled in many places, frontier disputes brought a dangerous threat of war, which absorbed much of the Latin American effort. Still optimistic about achieving systematic regional coverage of the globe, the early Inquiry leadership initially postponed the South and Central American work, but it was Secretary of State Lansing, not Bowman, who reversed these priorities. In April 1918 with Latin American work lagging, Lansing secured a further twenty thousand dollars to beef it up.51

134

/

the inquiry

But it was not just a backward-looking embrace of the Monroe Doctrine that made Latin America a strategic focus for the Inquiry. Latin America was strategic in both Old World political terms and New World economic terms. Wilson was nothing if not an economic Progressive who more aggressively and widely than any of his predecessors unshackled U.S. financial institutions from traditional constraints on foreign investment. Even the crusty old Lansing readily anticipated a massive expansion of trade and capital investment after the cessation of hostilities, and Latin America would be a prime target. Bowman too ventured that war’s end “will surely bring worldly development to their door,” and it should be led by the United States. Three weeks before joining the Inquiry, he had proposed an AGSsponsored Latin American field trip to Mark Jefferson. “After the war,” he wrote Jefferson in explanation, “the South American colonist will be a big factor in the fresh advances of the merchant,” and it will be vital to know the conditions on the ground. In preparation for the resulting trip to Argentina, Brazil, and Chile—the three major destinations of U.S. capital exports and trade—Jefferson wrote the secretary of commerce for assistance, noting that he had “especial interest” in “the trade possibilities they may offer to the United States.”52 To the extent that war erupted in South America—German inspired or otherwise—the continent would be fully on the agenda of any peace conference, and U.S. commercial expansion would be jeopardized. Postwar boundary disputes flavored by imported European national and ethnic feuds would be especially inimical to economic expansion in the region. This was indeed the larger picture: rapid postwar economic expansion into South and Central America was needed to stave off economic depression. And the picture was widely shared. As Bailey Willis, director of the Inquiry’s Latin American Division, put it, albeit with some exaggeration: “The Latin American Division is regarded by the Directors of the Inquiry and also by those officials of the State Department who are familiar with its work as an essential research auxiliary of the State Department.”53 As it turned out, when war held off in Latin America, no one expected the region to be very important at the peace conference. But even if the region played a minor role, as it eventually did, U.S. proprietary claims there were so great that it would have been surprising had the Inquiry not gone to Paris fully conversant with the economic and political geography of their own “backyard.” At a more personal level, it would have been equally surprising if an entrepreneurial Bowman had not exploited the overlap between the Inquiry’s work and his own at the AGS. The Inquiry’s Latin American work became a springboard for the AGS’s Hispanic American Research pro-

the inquiry

/

135

gram, which began after 1920 (and was crowned by the millionth map), but Bowman actually began formulating the research program as early as 1915, so its dovetailing with Inquiry work is not surprising.

The Inquiry carries great significance in the history of U.S. foreign relations. For the first time, rather than simply responding to events, the government attempted to provide a systematic worldview ahead of time. A “scientific” approach was combined with a global purview. Institutionally, it was also the first think tank of any significance in U.S. foreign relations.54 That its results fell short of systematic global coverage, with huge geographical and topical holes remaining, was perhaps inevitable. Conceptually, the Inquiry inaugurated a connection between economic expansion and global (not just international) geography that would become a staple of the American Century. In Europe such a connection had been mediated through the territorial search for and control over colonies, but members of the Inquiry began to glimpse that the market itself could inscribe a global geography. Mezes’s complaint that Bowman was “academic and unpractical” was not without substance, whatever Bowman’s smugness about his own practicality. As Martin Sklar has argued, an emerging corporate liberal consensus in this period revolved round an “evolutionary positivist outlook,”55 and this describes Bowman to a tee. He would not, could not, recommend specific policies until all the facts were in, and he nurtured a certain pedantry about empirical knowledge. If he had a weakness in this new political arena in which he found himself, it lay not in a hesitance to jump from data to policy but in his insistence that policy emerge from the most exhaustive consideration of data. Rigid as that might appear, empiricism and liberalism were for Bowman the same thing. The salubrious knit of interests between the American Geographical Society and the State Department was vital to the Inquiry’s progress in sketching such a worldview. It combined the economic globalism sprouting in the Wilson administration with the encyclopedic geographical purview of the AGS—the books, the expertise, and above all the map collection. The global geographical concerns of the society took on a sharp political and economic rationale while the emerging post–Open Door globalism of the Wilson administration received a grounding in world geography. Such a combination would have been impossible at any date much earlier. Neither would the coverage of world geography have been sufficiently complete or sufficiently valued, nor would the economic ambition have been global. In this very specific way, the inherently geographical work of the Inquiry pointed not to

136

/

the inquiry

the end of geography but to the complete recalibration of geography as the product of uneven economic and political change. It was the relationality of geography that mattered now, not its absoluteness. The Inquiry produced anything but a complete or coherent statement on this crucial transition in the making of global geography, but it was a beginning. Its thousands upon thousands of pages of reports make for woefully boring reading and a thoroughly fragmented picture of the world. U.S. global ambition itself was still in its infancy in 1917 and 1918, the vision would be worked out only piecemeal, and it would not be without significant opposition or damaging retreats. But in one respect the Inquiry’s work pointed strongly to the future, namely, the issue of the so-called backward nations. Even before the war, Wilson had expressed the national need “to find our way out into the great international exchanges of the world,” but with the advent of war, aspirations for political and economic expansion crystallized rapidly, and existing political arrangements in “backward” countries and the economic obstacles of European colonial empires came quickly into focus. This issue had already been broached both within the government and in the press, and it came under active discussion in the Inquiry at the end of December 1917. The group focused on efforts to secure “freedom of economic intercourse among self-governing nations.” “Fit” nations would move toward self-government; those considered “unfit,” Mezes suggested, should be governed by “international commissions for backward areas.”56 Colonial territories never were a major focus for the Inquiry. But they did receive close attention from the African historian George Louis Beer, seconded to the Inquiry, who was well ahead of any government thinking at the time. Beer sought to establish a rather patronizing quid pro quo between the international administration of certain territories and the question of free trade from the U.S. perspective. He had considered the possibility of direct international government of such areas, but deciding that was infeasible, he began to think about the possibility of “international mandates,” suggesting that Western nations administer territories not yet designated for national statehood. Focusing on Africa, he envisaged an arrangement whereby the state exercising sovereignty in Africa is proceeding under an international mandate and must act as trustee primarily for the nations and secondarily for the outside world as a whole. [Required, would be a] code of native rights, prohibiting forced labor in all its forms, assuring to the native his legitimate rights to the soil, and protecting him from

the inquiry

/

137

the evils of western civilization, such as intoxicants. At the same time the existing free trade area in Africa could be extended and the existing provisions for free trade under the Berlin Act of 1885 and the specific treaties should be made more definite and more comprehensive so as to secure “the open-door” in the fullest sense possible.57

Mezes and Beer had even thought in terms of the “internationalization” of all of Central Africa, with a view to accessing its valuable forest resources, but they decided this would not be practical. No less original, the idea of international mandates entwined a liberal moral rectitude toward the “natives” with U.S. economic opportunism. Only a prescient Lippmann seems to have objected, warning that such arrangements transparently perpetuated asymmetries of global power and that “explosive class struggle” would surely result.58 Meanwhile another event had occurred that would eventually lead to the most dramatic alteration of global geography in the twentieth century and radically circumscribe America’s own global ambition. Initial U.S. response to the Russian Revolution was muted in the stunned assumption that Bolshevik power could not last. The first troops of the U.S. force committed to Siberia arrived at Archangel /Arkhangel’sk in September 1918, where, under the excuse of protecting a stranded Czecho-Slovak army unit, they took up positions in defense of the counterrevolutionary White Army. Although the U.S. force was small, its symbolic importance was immense. The United States had already imposed an embargo on socialist Russia, even as the Fourteen Points were being written, and they had begun to funnel massive financial aid to the anti-Bolshevik forces, despite the promise in Point VI that the country had no intention of supporting the White Army. Any trace of the liberal magnanimity the Inquiry and Wilson had been willing to afford to the Soviet republic had vanished. The United States had already failed its own “acid test” of “good will,” as Wilson had put it in the Fourteen Points, and the consequences would be drastic. The worldwide intensification of nationalism on the eve of the peace conference was exacerbated by U.S. intervention in the Soviet republic. New geopolitical lines began to be drawn in Europe, and socialist revolts broke out all over. Social democrats and “liberals” around the world, looking for an alternative to Bolshevism, became disillusioned that Wilson’s liberal rhetoric offered little significant departure from imperialist business as usual. The Soviet’s nonnegotiable demand that Russian soil be immediately evacuated by German forces was reversed when the initial armistice agreement left room for a lingering German military presence in Russian borderlands for the sole purpose of warring with the Bolsheviks. Wilson’s aban-

138

/

the inquiry

donment of goodwill vis-à-vis the Soviet republic made increasingly transparent the self-interest behind claims to a moral internationalism.59 Lippmann understood very well how bad a mistake this was and stood against the intervention. “Our behavior at Archangel and in Siberia,” he later wrote Secretary of War Baker, “is one of the least gratifying episodes in our history.”60 Bowman shared none of Lippmann’s misgivings, nor was he yet entirely abreast of Wilson’s international expansionist vision. Within a couple of months, however, his attention would be riveted on precisely the borderlands between Germany and Russia that drew Lippmann’s cynicism—the “Polish question.” At the same time, his own economic and political internationalism would expand to fit and help guide Wilson’s global agenda.

6 A LAST HURRAH FOR OLD WORLD GEOGRAPHIES: FIXING SPACE AT THE PARIS PEACE CONFERENCE

On a cold December day in 1918, three army trucks arrived at pierside in Hoboken, New Jersey, where the SS George Washington was being prepared to transport the American delegation to the Paris Peace Conference. The “war to end all wars” was being followed by the conference to end all conferences, and the delegates at Paris would resolve the territorial, diplomatic, and economic issues that prompted war. A fiesta of egos and intrigue, laborious meetings and ponderous ceremonies, momentous decisions and interminable bureaucratic squabbling, it was attended by delegations from fifty-five countries and an army of hangers-on. It sported the national leaders of many of the world powers: Clemenceau of France, Lloyd George of Britain, Orlando of Italy, and Wilson of the United States shared the power. A vanquished Germany was made to lick its wounds while awaiting the outcome, and the new Russian government was not invited. With troops from more than a dozen national armies, including combatants from both sides of the war, still fighting on Russian soil, they had more immediate concerns than this imperialist convocation. They instead were hosting the Second Communist International. The army trucks had carried Inquiry materials from the American Geographical Society building in upper Manhattan, and when workers began unloading the hundreds of boxes filled with maps, bibliographies, books, reports, and statistics, reporters began to laugh and jeer. They did the same when the boxes were unloaded in Paris,1 just as skeptical that so many tons

140

/

last hurrah for old world geographies

of dry, scientific material could have any use in what promised to be emotionally charged and politically driven peace negotiations. A “scientific peace” it surely would not be. The “liberal ideals” with which Wilson armed himself for the political clinches in Paris attracted similar opprobrium. From Lloyd George to hardnosed Republicans at home, he was ridiculed for believing that ideals and principles could compete with Machiavellian intrigue and backroom deals. But in large measure these indictments miss the point. Wilson’s rhetorical idealism was itself a ruthless political weapon applied in the most “realist” and partisan of causes. As William Appleman Williams and a generation of historians after him have argued, Wilson’s central aspiration was no less than the construction of a liberal capitalist world order providing free economic access. The primary architect of corporate liberalism at home, he enthusiastically inherited the Progressive campaign for tariff and banking reform that would free U.S. capital for overseas investment.2 For Wilson the Paris Peace Conference was a seamless continuation of that domestic posture. He well understood that as much as Britain had benefited from socalled free trade while it dominated the trade routes and markets, now the United States, by dint of its emerging economic superiority, would be the prime beneficiary of such apparent magnanimity. At the Paris Peace Conference, the first moment in the making of the American Century came to a head. Aboard the George Washington en route to Paris, Wilson offered a clear vision of the moral and nationalist exceptionalism that structured his liberal internationalism. He admonished a gathering of Inquiry personnel that the U.S. delegation would represent the “only disinterested people” at the conference, which involved both responsibilities and opportunities.3 The moral rhetoric of a liberal peace, therefore, functioned to give Wilson and the U.S. delegation the ammunition with which thoroughly “interested” solutions could be proposed in the language of moral magnanimity. In short, a kind of gestalt described Wilson’s continuous back-and-forth interpolation of the practical and the ideal. If, as Henry May has argued, Teddy Roosevelt was the “greatest spokesman of practical idealism” at the end of the first decade of the twentieth century,4 it was a mantle enthusiastically donned in the next decade by Wilson. At Paris, this constant interpolation of moral universality and national self-interest pivoted on questions of geography. The Paris Peace Conference was about many things—reparations, the League of Nations, economic settlements, international labor arrangements—but first and foremost it was about territory. Territorial settlements, especially in Europe, were the centerpiece of the conference. A continent

last hurrah for old world geographies

/

141

that had eight thousand miles of national boundaries on the eve of war had ten thousand after the peace conference and its attendant treaties. An astounding three thousand miles of new boundaries were drawn.5 On one level, Wilson and his delegation were disinterested, because the arbitration of very few territorial disputes affected U.S. interests directly. Yet establishing a stable geography in Europe was of paramount concern to U.S. leaders, because political geographical stability was seen as a precondition of world trade and investment. The Paris Peace Conference of 1919 was actually the last such major international conference in which “Old World” questions of absolute territorial possession predominated. “Old World” in this sense is less a geographical description than a strategic one. The Spanish-American War, President McKinley, and Teddy Roosevelt, all devoted to territorial expansion and aggrandizement, were as much examples of Old World geographical concerns as European colonization was. World War I may have represented the culmination of the nineteenth century—the zenith of the British Empire and British industrial supremacy—but it also marked a more profound though less noticed shift. Where nineteenth-century European expansion was premised on a tight weave between economic power and territorial possession, U.S. entry into the war and the country’s much heralded participation in the peace conference exposed a different weave of geography and economics in the folds of Wilsonian rhetoric. Fueled by the unprecedented success of U.S. capital accumulation at the end of the nineteenth century but largely blocked from territorial expansion, successive U.S. governments and ruling classes faced a sharp dilemma. The world economy may not have been closed, but its geography increasingly was, and Wilson’s anticipation that Paris would be a harbinger of a “new diplomacy” responded optimistically to the newly emerging articulation of geography and economic expansion.6 As eight of the Fourteen Points bear out, however, territory remained vital in Wilson’s vision, the sine qua non of peace, but territorial settlements were vehicles for, rather than the destination of, that peace. The brilliance of liberal U.S. internationalists in this period, with Woodrow Wilson as their flagbearer, lay not in the idealist rhetoric of peace and international organization refitted from the nineteenth century or even in the fashioning of a liberal corporatism within which continued economic expansionism could be recast as reform. Rather, it lay in the implicit realization that the wedding of geography and economics undergirding European capital accumulation was not inevitable; that the coming era could be organized differently; and that economic expansion divorced from territorial aggrandizement dovetailed superbly with U.S. national interests. These presumptions

142

/

last hurrah for old world geographies

marked a “gradual revolution,” as Bowman would later put it. Since national economic interests and a crusading internationalism were in no way inconsistent, the appeal for a new world order could be folded neatly into the inherited nineteenth-century rhetoric of world organization and peace. Progressivism was liberalized rather than denied.7 U.S. economic ascendancy not only threatened to displace Europe; it also reworked the leading geo-economic edge of capitalist expansion in the early twentieth century. The genesis of national states as a system for organizing the world’s political economy provided an eighteenth-century “spatial fix” for specific economic dilemmas of emergent capitalism. Rooted in Europe, it provided a geographical means for regulating global competition and cooperation.8 If nineteenth-century colonialism represented a continuation of that system, Wilsonian internationalism in the early twentieth marked a cautious break from it. With capital accumulation increasingly outstripping the scale of national boundaries and markets, and new colonialisms no longer feasible or practical, U.S. internationalism pioneered a historic unhinging of economic expansion from direct political and military control over the new markets. In these earliest incarnations, therefore, U.S. internationalism was national interest exemplified. It was not a renunciation of a territorially defined system of nation-states; even less did it assume the “end of geography.” But it did anticipate a world economy in which territorial differences among states were of diminished economic significance and in which political squabbles could be regulated to prevent the disruption of trade. Before the nettle of political geographical difference could be assuaged, however, it had to be stabilized. To get beyond political geography, as it were, the political geography of the globe had to be fixed, taken out of the equation. This was the larger prospect of the Paris Peace Conference, at least insofar as Wilson and the U.S. delegation were concerned. Geography on the cusp of the American Century was nowhere more formidable than in Central, eastern, and southeastern Europe. The weightiest problems of nation construction and boundary drawing in Paris all involved this region. Two empires were dissolved into nation-states (AustroHungarian and Ottoman), while proud precapitalist domains passed into apparent obsolescence (Prussia, Serbia); existing nation-states were pared down (Germany, Bulgaria) or expanded (Italy, Romania), new nation-states were established or their boundaries ratified (Yugoslavia, Czechoslovakia), and others were restored (Poland). All of this was negotiated as war continued in Russia and along its borderlands, from the Baltic Sea to the Balkans and the Black Sea. Intense military skirmishes threatened to revert to full-scale war as every nation-state, new or old, sought to establish its

last hurrah for old world geographies

/

143

territorial claims vis-à-vis both neighboring states and temporary armistice lines established by Allied troops in late 1918. Socialist revolutions threatened throughout Europe, coming to tumultuous if short-lived fruition in Germany and Hungary in the spring of 1919. It was this combustible geography of Central and eastern Europe that the peace conference especially sought to settle (map 5). The Paris Peace Conference was therefore about fixing geography in a double sense. In the first, the job of the conference was to adjust the map of territorial possession among nation-states—“the rectification of frontiers,” in Wilson’s phrase—in the wake of crumbling monarchical empires and states. But in the second sense, it was meant to bring about a fix among the intricate local and precapitalist geographies of disparate cultures, language groups, and nationalities and to help complete the jigsaw puzzle of nationstates. Thus Paris was also about the rationalization of global space according to discrete national interests, economies, and states. It was about fixing the global geography of modernity. For Wilson this was simply a means to an end, whereas for many of his European counterparts it was the objective of the conference; however, they could agree that without fixing the modern space of Europe, Paris would be a failure.

a geographer in paris As chief territorial specialist to the American delegation, Isaiah Bowman occupied a decisive position. As a geographer he was much invested in the “Old World” view and not yet entirely convinced of Wilson’s liberalism. He retained a certain conservatism, springing not from Wall Street, where a corporate internationalism warmed to Wilson, but from Michigan. His insistence on data-driven solutions and base maps rather than imaginative policy recommendations during Inquiry preparations mixed a progressive trust in empirical science with a more traditional caution about the authority of invariant geographical relations. Had he remained simply chief territorial specialist in Paris, the New World vision that soon awakened in him might have languished. But that is not what transpired. Wilson’s Fourteen Points, with their all-encompassing appeal to fairness and justice in the name of peace, struck an optimistic chord in war-weary Europe, and when the SS George Washington arrived in Brest harbor on 13 December, it received a tumultuous welcome: a huge fleet of battleships and destroyers saluted the American flotilla with “airplanes and a dirigible overhead.” The U.S. delegation arrived in Paris with hope bursting from their maps and data as much as from their rhetoric, and they took up quarters at

Map 5. Europe in 1914.

last hurrah for old world geographies

/

145

the famous Hotel Crillon in the Place de la Concorde. Delirious crowds jammed the streets and doorways looking for a glimpse of Wilson and the other Americans, and the first weeks were a heady swirl of power, Paris, and politics. Bowman wandered bright-eyed around the city, to the Opera House, the Louvre, and Notre Dame, and attended the theater several times, once as the guest of General Tasker Bliss: “It was thrilling to walk in with a four-star or real general, past lines of khaki and the crowd and to come out” with “President Wilson leading.” He dined with dignitaries such as T. E. Lawrence and the Arabian emir Faisal, who would soon become king of newly established Iraq, the maharaja of Bikaner and Aga Khan of India, as well as geographers from around the world (Romer from Poland, de Martonne of France) and other intellectuals (the famous French philosopher Henri Bergson). He toured some of the battlefields of Northern France, paying a visit to the grave of a personal favorite, the poet Joyce Kilmer. Bowman was not the kind to exult freely about the fare at the Crillon, but others did: “oysters, lobster, turkey, plum pudding, pumpkin pie, ice cream, cheese, nuts and fruit, coffee, cigars—and French wine.” On Christmas Day he went with other commission members to the working-class outskirts of Paris to distribute gifts to children and was horrified at the “wretched quarters,” the filth, and misery of families decimated by war and poverty.9 Only briefly did the gaiety keep chaos at bay. The U.S. delegation was headed by five commissioners, or plenipotentiaries. In addition to Wilson and his confidant Colonel Edward House, these were Secretary of State Robert Lansing, top military man General Tasker Bliss, and the veteran Republican diplomat Henry White. Despite the opportunity afforded by the long sea voyage, Wilson, still in the tradition of nineteenth-century foreign “policy,” gave the commissioners little guidance about their work at the conference—positions, policy, strategy—and the first days in Paris brought anything but clarity. The delegation was massive, 1,248 persons in all. There were “advisers” everywhere, including twenty-one from the Inquiry, and lines of authority were haphazard at best. The State Department had been placed in charge of the overall commission and brought its own group of advisers. The inferior quarters allotted Inquiry personnel on the George Washington foreshadowed their discovery upon arriving in Paris that Military and Naval Intelligence personnel were equally intent on running the advisory work. A young John Foster Dulles headed a team from the Central Bureau of Statistics, also jockeying for position. It was initially stipulated that the Inquiry and Military Intelligence were to work through the State Department bureaucracy, headed by Joseph Grew, secretary to the U.S. delegation. But this would have marginalized the In-

146

/

last hurrah for old world geographies

quiry group to menial support work, and Bowman immediately protested that the commissioners needed direct access to this best-prepared group of “experts.” After only three days in Paris, at the behest of Colonel House and with Wilson’s approval, Bowman succeeded in having the chain of command reversed, so that the Inquiry personnel were placed in the pivotal role, with State Department, Military Intelligence, and Dulles’s statistical specialists all reporting through them. Mezes retained his directorship in little more than title, while Bowman, now the executive officer of the renamed “Section of Territorial, Economic, and Political Intelligence,” set about the task of organizing personnel and work schedules for all the commission’s advisers.10 This Intelligence Section provided the factual and cartographic fodder for the American commissioners. It had a staff of nearly one hundred divided among eighteen divisions. Eleven of these were “territorial” divisions, seven of which focused on different regions of Europe and four of which focused on other regions. Among the remaining seven divisions, whose focus was “economic and political,” were “geography and cartography,” headed by Mark Jefferson, and “boundary topography,” headed by Columbia University geographer Douglas Johnson. But the new chain of command did not immediately resolve the confusion, since military advisers still occupied the delegation’s main offices and headquarters at 4 Place de la Concorde, adjacent to the Hotel Crillon. The old Inquiry members were stuffed into corners and corridors if they had space at all. A frustrated Bowman consolidated his power. He gathered several doughboys and worked throughout the night to evict the military and reassign offices to the Inquiry personnel. Bowman as it turned out usurped the desk of one of his former students at Yale.11 The period between Christmas and New Year’s Day was relatively calm. The library was set up, and some specific requests from Wilson were attended to. A briefly bedridden Bowman was sought out by Walter Lippmann, whom he had not seen since the journalist left the Inquiry, but with Military Intelligence now sidelined, Lippmann’s position at Paris was tenuous. He came rather meekly with flattery on his lips, begging Bowman for a job: “It is clear to me who has the authority around here,” and “Bowman is the man who is going to be most influential in the American delegation,” Lippmann inveigled. Bowman lapped up the flattery but suggested only a mission to Berlin.12 Real work began on New Year’s Day 1919. If the Inquiry stopped well short of specific recommendations, the need was now pressing, and Wilson reiterated the request for “ideal solutions to every problem” that might

last hurrah for old world geographies

/

147

arise in the days and weeks ahead, and he wanted them in ten days. Bowman immediately parceled the work out to the division chiefs, whose reports he edited into sets of recommendations, assembling them, with maps, into a single document. But the promised draftsmen had not materialized— only one had appeared after a week, and he was not a draftsman, Bowman complained, but a man “learning to draw”—and the assignment stretched three weeks beyond the deadline.13 Bowman’s collated report, dubbed the Black Book for the color of its binder, proposed solutions for territorial problems in twenty-seven areas of Europe and also included an economic and labor report. It was a skeletal statement of U.S. positions, initially distributed only to the U.S. commissioners, with Bowman holding extra copies under lock and key. Only much later was it released to other delegations, who feverishly requested it as soon as its existence became known.14 Several weeks later a “Red Book” was also produced, somewhat as an afterthought, comprising recommendations on the colonies, non-European territories, and a number of other issues omitted from the Black Book. If drawing base maps preoccupied Bowman at the Inquiry, filling them in was the job of the conference. However disinterested he conceived himself, Wilson was clear that “the truth [could] not be told by a dispassionate annalist [sic]” and that maps were choice devices for displaying not just facts but also “the subtle and else invisible forces that lurk in the events and in the minds of men.”15 Bowman wholeheartedly concurred. If cartography and geography were sciences, objective and disinterested in their methods and results, they were nevertheless powerful tools toward specific, often highly political purposes. He saw his job in Paris as not simply supplying advice to Wilson but also corralling the factual and graphic support for Wilson’s positions. When it came to filling in the base maps, Bowman and the cartographers faced many choices: a map could be made to highlight topographical features or cultural boundaries while deemphasizing religious boundaries; or it could be made to emphasize the integral function of a city within a regional economy rather than contrasting linguistic regions. Alternatively, the graphic depiction of linguistic divisions might be made to submerge the distinctiveness of economic regions or urban areas. Bowman well understood this inevitable politics of cartography in Paris. “It would take a huge monograph to contain an analysis of all the types of map forgeries that the war and peace conference called forth,” he later commented. “A new instrument was discovered—the map language. A map was as good as a brilliant poster, and just being a map made it respectable, authentic. A perverted map was a life-belt to many a foundering argument.”16

148

/

last hurrah for old world geographies

Such accusations of map perversion were hurled at others, especially Central European delegations struggling for national recognition and identity, who, Bowman felt, came armed with their “own bagful of statistical and cartographic tricks.” But Bowman’s own cartographic responsibilities were barely less compromised, inasmuch as his Intelligence Section sought to translate what they saw as Wilson’s preferred political solutions into lines on a map. Maps were routinely deployed in tense negotiations where statistics failed. The power of the cartography program lay precisely in Bowman’s recognition that cartographic choices in Paris were political choices. He was extremely possessive of the cartographic division, which worked under great pressure and was prohibited from producing maps for other delegations without his explicit consent. It was Bowman’s astute understanding of the power of maps, from the Inquiry through the peace conference, that ensured the necessary cartographic ammunition, making the U.S. delegation the envy of other delegations. Whereas the U.S. was often criticized for its diplomatic inexperience, its cartographic operation drew praise, often grudging, from the Europeans.17 In this regard, while Bowman was responsible for a number of appointments in the delegation—including the historian James Truslow Adams and geographer Lawrence Martin (who later became chief librarian of the Library of Congress)—none was more important than his insistence that Mark Jefferson, his old Ypsilanti teacher and a seasoned geographer, be made chief cartographer. There were few other men to whom Bowman would have entrusted that job. Jefferson supervised anywhere from five to twenty-five draftsmen and cartographers at any one time, and by late January, immediately following work for the Black Book, they were making more than three hundred maps per week. They were bombarded by requests for maps, and so the hours were long and conditions arduous. As Jefferson recalled, they spent considerable time “deriving ways of showing up ideas on maps.”18 If Bowman was an energetic, ambitious, stern, and at times a headstrong presence at the conference, Jefferson cut a gruffer and more lonely figure. He was first into the cartography rooms in the morning and last to leave, worried intensely about the work, but was insufficiently senior to enjoy some of the social merry-go-round there. His conference diary presents a rather unflattering picture of his old student, noting that Bowman was not very accessible and that he “never invites us to meet any friends he gets hold of.” At one lunch with Jefferson in the Crillon dining room, Bowman spent the time “looking to see where he might better go!” On another occasion, Bowman presided at a formal dinner, when without warning he an-

last hurrah for old world geographies

/

149

nounced to the company that he was going to “call upon Professor Jefferson to speak.” A surprised Jefferson jumped to his feet and snapped at Bowman: “He’s Mister Jefferson, please, and he has nothing to say, so he’s not going to speak,” then sat down.19

the territorial settlements: remaking poland In questions concerning reparations, the League of Nations, or international economic and labor policies, Bowman was only marginally involved, but in territorial questions his influence on U.S. positions and overall outcomes was at times decisive. The territorial focus was squarely on Europe, and, in their minds, Wilson and House had already remapped the continent, however vaguely, before arriving in Paris. But so had the other delegations, many with much more immediate interests at stake. These widely conflicting visions and claims had to be arbitrated definitively into fixed geographical arrangements so that every region and river valley, forest and field, hamlet and coal mine in Europe was assigned a discrete national place. New boundaries were to create a new political geography that would in turn provide the terra firma for enduring peace and economic expansion. Bowman was involved with the political geography of virtually every corner of the continent, but he was most deeply involved in the Polish and Italian-Yugoslav settlements. In the first, he lined up forcefully with the emerging Polish government of Joseph Pilsudski against the Bolsheviks and became something of a national hero in Poland. In the second, he just as forcefully opposed the claims of right-wing Italian nationalists in the Balkans, but with more ambivalent results. By the time the Black Book was prepared, the conference had already convened at the Quai d’Orsay and established basic procedures. The socalled Council of Ten was taking shape as the top decision-making body. It comprised the leaders and deputies—two commissioners each—from the United States, Britain, France, Italy, and Japan. Without any semblance of democratic procedure, the other delegations were simply excluded, left to plead their own cases. But it was a formal, stuffy, and cumbersome body that readily settled into a maximum of speech giving and a minimum of decision making. They shrank to the Council of Five, shedding the deputies, but, more important, began to establish commissions to do the spade work on specific territorial questions. On European questions, these commissions comprised top advisers of just four countries, with the Japanese summarily dropped. By March, all territorial claims were effectively filtered through the commissions, the intensity of informal negotiations and secret huddles

150

/

last hurrah for old world geographies

notwithstanding. Fifty-two commissions were operational before the treaty with Germany was signed. The central role of the commissions was a largely unforeseen development, and the chief advisers to these four delegations—the U.S., British, French, and Italian—soon found themselves making direct territorial proposals rather than simply advising. The commissions considered the evidence, distilled multitudinous national recommendations and appeals, and proposed specific territorial arrangements. Commission recommendations to the “Big Four” (Lloyd George, Clemenceau, Wilson, and Orlando) were the fulcrum around which solutions were forged. According to one observer, the Big Four increasingly “ruled the Conference,” but in practice “most of the articles in the treaties were taken bodily without change from the reports of the commissions.”20 As chief of the U.S. advisers, Bowman markedly increased his power. Along with colleagues from Britain, France, and Italy, he heard, processed, and ultimately arbitrated the lengthy deputations and nationalist pleas of many delegations, groups, and representatives with a mixture of genuine and patronizing concern and also boredom: “When Dmowski related the claims of Poland, he began at eleven o’clock in the morning and in the fourteenth century, and could reach the year 1919 and the pressing problems of the moment only as late as four o’clock in the afternoon. Benesˇ followed immediately with the counter claims of Czecho-Slovakia, and, if I remember correctly, he began a century earlier and finished an hour later.”21 Bowman had worked on Poland at the Inquiry, and it was his primary territorial concern by February 1919, when the Polish commission, one of the first, was established. He served on it until early April, working closely with Robert Lord, a Harvard historian, who unlike Bowman had prior scholarly expertise on Poland. For the combined reasons of righting historical wrongs and reestablishing a territorial buffer between Germany and the Soviet Union, the Big Four all supported some measure of Polish claims against German territory to the west and Russia to the east. But there agreement ended. Wilson insisted strongly upon an “independent Polish State” and sought a larger Poland than envisaged by the British and French delegations. Bowman strongly agreed, and as the commission’s work turned to specific territorial claims, borders, and compromises, he amassed data justifying an expansive Poland. On paper, his procedure was straightforward. The first step was to map the geography of ethnic Polish settlement, identifying the regions in which they constituted a majority. The second, more complicated step was to fit boundaries to this distribution. The boundaries should make strategic sense while minimizing the allocation of Poles to

last hurrah for old world geographies

/

151

neighboring countries and the inclusion of large non-Polish populations. Although the two most powerful and most interested neighbors, Germany and Russia, were absent, no one expected a quick and simple remapping of Poland. In fact, the question of Poland precipitated a major turning point at Paris, when Wilson and Lloyd George took their decision making further behind closed doors. This region’s western frontier with Germany was obviously complicated. The boundary had been eliminated after Prussian annexation in 1795, and since 1871, the Prussian government had spent the equivalent of a hundred million dollars to colonize the area with belts of German immigrants, resulting in a majority German population in much previously Polish territory. At a fine geographical scale, the region was a complicated ethnic and linguistic mosaic, where once the line of national division had been much sharper. The Polish commission quickly agreed with Bowman that they had little choice but to delineate the frontier according to the contemporary ethnic geography.22 But how to draw a line through a mosaic? Membership in this four-man commission included at different times General LeRond of France, Sir James Hedlam-Morley and Sir William Tyrell of Britain, and Marquis della Torretta of Italy, among others, but it was Bowman and Jules Cambon (committee chair and former French ambassador to Berlin) who largely guided its work. The commission often met in Bowman’s room, and he alone saw the first report through from a subcommittee version, which he drafted, to the final submission. Given that the region was ethnically complex and that setting the western boundary of Poland ipso facto set the eastern boundary of a pruned Germany, and therefore would be incorporated in the treaty with Germany, the work of this commission was especially charged.23 When on 19 March the line proposed by the commission came to the Council of Five, a heated debate ensued among the national leaders resulting in “one of the most dramatic huddles” Bowman witnessed at Paris.24 The commission recommendations represented a compromise, of course, but Bowman’s more expansive allotment of territory to Poland had predominated, and Lloyd George objected vigorously on two points. First, the commission recommended a boundary giving most of Upper Silesia, with its massive coal and iron ore resources, to the new Poland, but this included too many Germans in Lloyd George’s opinion. He insisted on a more liberal recognition of recent German settlement. Second, they recommended that part of West Prussia also be transferred to Poland in such a way as to provide a northern Polish corridor to the Baltic. This reflected Wilson’s thirteenth point: that an independent Polish state necessitated “a free and se-

152

/

last hurrah for old world geographies

cure access to the sea.” In the countryside traversed by this corridor, which included the navigable Vistula / Wisla River, a long-settled Polish population had recently been outnumbered by German colonization, likewise the port city of Danzig/Gdansk, which was now heavily German. Lloyd George accepted the argument for a geographical buffer between Germany and Russia, but he worried more than Wilson about the effect on Germany of such an apparently punitive territorial confiscation. With eyes alert and “face flushed,” he erupted. “Gentlemen, if we give Danzig to the Poles the Germans will not sign the treaty, and if they do not sign our work here is a failure. I assure you that Germany will not sign such a treaty.” A long, tense debate ensued, with Bowman huddled between Wilson and Lansing, providing rapid-fire “facts and arguments” to support the U.S. insistence on a Polish Upper Silesia and a Polish corridor to the Baltic. But both leaders had dug in their heels, and with no obvious sign of movement, Wilson dispatched Bowman after the meeting to “get after” Lloyd George’s advisers and convince them of the U.S. position.25 At first Lloyd George seemed to relent a little, and Bowman did convince one of the British advisers about the advisability of the Polish corridor. He conferred closely with Wilson too, sometimes getting down “on all fours” with him and other commissioners and advisers, “kneeling on a gigantic map spread upon the floor” to mull over the specifics of a proposed boundary.26 But doubts and blunders in the U.S. delegation eroded any gain. In the first place, two Intelligence Section advisers so strongly objected to the position that Bowman had placed in Wilson’s hands that, unbeknownst to Bowman, they expressed their dissent in detail to Philip Kerr, marquess of Lothian. Getting word of it, an emboldened Lloyd George dug in his heels again. In the second place, Bowman himself seems to have undercut Wilson by giving away too much to his British counterparts, for a few days later, in the context of deteriorating Italian-Yugoslav negotiations, Wilson upbraided Bowman as chief of the Intelligence Section. Lloyd George, he said, was able to quote the various opinions of the U.S. advisers, while he, Wilson, was in the dark. They even seemed to have a copy of the Black Book!27 An increasingly frustrated Lloyd George and Wilson, soured by the council’s inefficiency and the advisers’ lack of progress, made more and more decisions behind closed doors “without the bother of territorial experts,” as a miffed Bowman put it. Eventually the Polish impasse broke. With Clemenceau concurring, Lloyd George and Wilson resolved that Danzig/Gdansk would be made a free city under the protection of the League of Nations. The corridor lands and part of Upper Silesia would be subject to a plebiscite. Bowman strongly disagreed with the consequent pos-

last hurrah for old world geographies

/

153

sibility of a Polish Danzig cut off from the main body of Poland, and even more strongly than Wilson he felt that Poland should receive further territorial concessions from Germany. But he had to acquiesce and quickly became occupied with identifying precise lines for implementing the agreement. With minor changes, the commission’s revised report was incorporated into the terms presented to Germany on 7 May (map 6). Two million Germans would be transferred to Polish administration. This aspect of the Polish settlement represented a significant victory for Lloyd George insofar as the initial proposal was pared back and greater concession made to recent German colonization. If Poland was thereby weaker, this was regrettable, but if the compromise led to stability the larger goal would be won. Tougher battles loomed, especially over Fiume/Rijeka in the northeast Adriatic. The Germans did sign the treaty, of course, but as later events would prove, British insistence on a less punitive eastern border did nothing to lessen German resentment and disaffection. This settlement lasted only until World War II, after which Danzig and its surrounding region was transferred to Poland, and the Polish-German border was moved as much as two hundred miles west in Poland’s favor. Poland’s southern and eastern boundaries may have been less controversial at the Paris Peace Conference, but they were no less complicated. Bowman completed a first commission report proposing a generous line for Poland’s eastern boundary, but it was draped in an air of detached unreality. Here the military rather than ethnic geography was the crucial mosaic. War still raged. Local socialist uprisings, White Army assaults, nationalist revolts, and the international campaign against the Red Army pocked the landscape, defying any territorial settlements. The only Russians in Paris were a few vanquished tsarists and functionaries, and as the Allies continued the glib assumption that the revolution would soon fail, the Red Army in 1919 largely held its own or was beating back all comers. Having been forced to compromise on the western boundary, Bowman mounted a broad campaign to ensure maximum territory in the east, and this drew him inevitably into questions of military strategy. With local uprisings and intensified fighting in eastern Galicia, he recommended direct Allied intervention to Wilson. The central goal was a large buffer state between German and Soviet territories and the halt at any cost of Bolshevism. This region was subject to claims not just by Poland and Russia but also by the Ukraine, and Bowman prodded Wilson to force a Ukrainian withdrawal in favor of the Poles. He also recommended the rapid repatriation of Polish troops from British and French units to Lemberg/Lwow, where Ukrainian and socialist revolts threatened the local administration of Polish nationalists. Only

154

/

last hurrah for old world geographies

Baltic Sea

Brest-Litovsk

Lemberg/ Lwow

Map 6. Poland after 1922.

France’s Marshal Foch spoke for a stronger military response than Bowman proposed—Foch wanted ten to twelve divisions of Romanian troops to occupy Lemberg. The Council of Ten officially hastened Polish troops back to Galicia on the strict understanding that they were to be used not against Ukrainians or Germans, but only, as Bowman recorded it, “for order and against the Bolsheviks.”28 But as old General Tasker Bliss anticipated, this military license to Poland would backfire. The general was disgusted that the United States was now selling arms to Poland, even when they knew “that Poland is eagerly preparing a campaign against the Ukraine, the success of which will overthrow a government that is friendly to us and which will make that country Bolshevik.” Bliss was right. The Polish army marched straight to Galicia and engaged with Ukrainian as well as Bolshevik forces and refused a subsequent Allied Supreme Council order to retreat.29

last hurrah for old world geographies

/

155

French troops had already been fighting Bolshevik uprisings farther east in the Ukraine proper but with little success. A French-British agreement had divided the Ukraine and the Caucasus into separate spheres of influence, and when the right-wing Ukrainian nationalists refused to meet severe and acquisitive demands from France in return for support, the French army withdrew.30 By April the Allies hurriedly established the Polish-Ukrainian Armistice Commission in an attempt to make a quick territorial settlement while the weak Ukrainian nationalists retained control. Relinquishing his position on the Polish commission to Robert Lord, Bowman became the American representative and only civilian on the Armistice Commission, which no doubt felt an additional sense of urgency from the outbreak of revolution in nearby Hungary and the declaration of the Bavarian Soviet Republic. The Armistice Commission held meetings, sent telegrams, prepared reports, and following the siege of Lemberg /Lwow organized an armistice, but it had little real power to suppress the uprising. Following Bolshevik victory in the Ukraine, peace conference plans for the area became irrelevant. All down the eastern frontier of Poland, it was military considerations buttressed by political ones that set the new borders. Intense fighting prevented any possibility of a settlement in time for the Versailles Treaty, and only after complex and heated negotiations, which consistently excluded the Soviets, did the Peace Conference claim at the end of 1919 that the Curzon line, earlier proposed by Lord Curzon of the British Foreign Office, should be the frontier between Poland and the Soviet Union. In reality, this was a desperate move to stem the westward advance of a victorious Red Army. Months later, with Red Army troops severely battered and in massive retreat, an opportunistic expansion of Polish-controlled territory was ratified by the eventual October 1920 treaty, establishing the so-called Riga line, deep in Russian territory, as the frontier between Poland and the Soviet Union (map 6). Poland took much of Latvia and Lithuania. When the tables turned later in 1920, with Russian troops driving Polish army units back almost to Warsaw, the Allies refused to entertain any retraction of Poland’s eastern boundary. In the end, Bowman was one of a small handful of men in 1919 who were most responsible for establishing the postwar boundaries of Poland,31 and for the rest of his life, he was feted by many Poles—geographers, dignitaries, and others—as a champion of Polish statehood, a national hero. But Bowman’s efforts for a new Poland were very much in line with his attitude toward other regions bordering the USSR. He supported independent

156

/

last hurrah for old world geographies

republics around Russia “in as much as the manganese of Georgia and the oil of Azerbaijan” could be used to blackmail the Soviets into establishing “a stable government” and “proper trade relations.”32 His antipathy toward Bolshevism was even stronger than Wilson’s, and his ethnic etching of Poland’s western borders was overridden in the east by baldly political and military concerns. His enthusiastic patronage of a vibrant Polish state was premised less on questions of idealism and independence, national rights and historical justice, than on the enforced geopolitical abeyance of Germany and a budding Soviet Union. He adamantly supported the 1920 Polish drive eastward to Riga and defended the extreme and punitive Riga line as primarily intended to prevent the “extension of Bolshevism into western Europe.”33

the fiume/rijeka crisis and the house affair The territorial fixing of Poland’s boundaries provoked a private crisis among the Big Four at Paris, but the deliberations over the northern Adriatic and the disposition of Fiume/Rijeka were altogether more catastrophic for Allied unity. Long and drawn out in its details, the conflict was relatively simple in outline. The Austro-Hungarian Empire had bounded northern Italy from the slopes of the Alps down to the head of the Adriatic and also extended through the Balkan States of Slovenia and Croatia. In exchange for entering the war in 1915, Italy demanded compensatory territory from the decaying empire: the Trentino in the southern Tyrol, a pocket of land around Valona in Albania, and parts of the Dalmatian coast of Croatia, including the Istrian peninsula and the city of Trieste. These areas had long been settled for purposes of Italian commerce, it was claimed. Britain and France had secretly agreed in the infamous Treaty of London, but at war’s end the Hapsburg possessions of Slovenia and Croatia switched sides and joined allied Serbia. Italy and the nascent state of Yugoslavia were now pressing claims to overlapping remnants of empire. Before ever reaching Paris, the Americans knew that the Adriatic settlement would be one of the most contentious. What no one could have anticipated was that the intense negotiations over Italian and Yugoslavian claims would spark an irrevocable personal split between the president and his closest adviser, nor could it be anticipated that the Adriatic negotiations would significantly affect Wilson’s political fate at home. Bowman was a key figure in the resulting intrigue, his own career hung in the balance, and he was again faced with the dilemma of weighing cultural and geographic principle against political expedience.34

last hurrah for old world geographies

/

157

The ninth of Wilson’s Fourteen Points was intended to reject the territorial extension of Italy laid out in the Treaty of London, but its language was deliberately and carefully general, promising only a “rectification of frontiers” along “clearly recognizable lines of nationality.” Sensing U.S. opposition, the Italian government escalated its claims on the eve of the conference. On various political, military, and nationalist grounds, Italy now sought to extend its territory well beyond the limits of Italian ethnic inhabitation, and the British and French, whose hands had been tied by the Treaty of London, were now more sympathetic to the Yugoslavs.35 In particular, the Italians now wanted to include the port city they called Fiume (Rijeka in Croatian), and possession of this city became the central prize in the Italian negotiations. After Trieste, Rijeka/Fiume was the largest port in the northern Adriatic and the only port in all of the newly envisioned Yugoslavia with good transport connections inland. From his first day at Paris, Bowman was involved with the Italian settlement, but it was not until early February, when the conference settled down to specific territorial matters, that the issue arose in earnest. Concerning the northern Trentino region, the Council of Ten had readily agreed on a generous settlement toward the Italians. There, despite the existence of a Germanspeaking majority in the northernmost communities, the council decided to establish a line between Italy and Austria that largely followed the Alpine watershed. Concern about Italy’s military defensibility overrode the geographic distribution of different ethnicities. In any case, Wilson, on a triumphant visit to Italy in January, had already conceded this part of the Tyrol.36 The Adriatic situation was more fraught. The Balkans had for centuries been squeezed between the Ottoman Empire to the east and the Hapsburgs to the north and west. The entire peninsula was an intricate patchwork quilt of different languages (predominantly Slavic), religions (Greek Orthodox, Catholic, Muslim, and Protestant), and nationalities (existing and nascent) that had never jelled into a stable configuration of nation-states. It was the site of the most internecine warfare in recent years, stretching back before 1914. War by several Balkan states to push Turkey out of Europe (1911–12) was followed by a Serb and Greek war on Bulgaria (1913) and an expanded Balkan war involving several states. The Russian tilt of Slavic allegiances also complicated relations with the Germanic Austro-Hungarian Empire. And of course it was in Sarajevo that the assassination of Archduke Ferdinand eventually sparked World War I. Romania, Bulgaria, Greece, Albania, Serbia, and Montenegro all stood as independent states on the eve of war, while on Italy’s eastern flank, Croatia, Slovenia, and Bosnia-Herzegovina all remained under the Austro-

158

/

last hurrah for old world geographies

Hungarian Empire. An independent kingdom since 1878, Serbia swallowed much of Macedonia in the 1913 war against Bulgaria, fought later with the Allies, and as war ended began to press the long-standing ambition for a Greater Serbia in the Balkans, an ambition perennially frustrated by Viennese power in the region. Alternatively, the Croatians had proposed a South Slav federation in the region, which would include the Slovenians. From these proposals and ambitions, an awkwardly conceived “Jugo” (South) Slavia was born in 1918, which combined in a single national entity five unattached Slavic republics of the Balkans: Slovenia, Croatia, Serbia, BosniaHerzegovina, and Montenegro.37 In Paris, recognition of the new state, in which Serbia and Croatia dominated, was a foregone conclusion. Locating its boundaries was not. The advantages all lay with the Italians, who, unlike the Yugoslavs, were represented on the Council of Ten. The Yugoslav case was initially presented by Nicola Pasˇic´, the old full-bearded Serbian premier,38 while the Italians were led by Prime Minister V. E. Orlando and his even more hard-line foreign minister, Baron Sonnino. Yugoslavia had never functioned as a united nation-state and was inveterately divided internally. Serb leaders saw the new state in terms of a Greater Serbia, but the other four constituents stiffly resisted. Italy was riding a wave of unifying if narrow nationalism, but Woodrow Wilson knew that Italian unity was not complete, having met during his January visit with socialists and social democrats who rejected territorial expansion. But Orlando and his aristocratic foreign minister hailed from much further right in Italian politics, sharing much with nationalists if not the irredentists, for whom the Adriatic claims simply represented the unfinished business of Italian nation building begun barely five decades earlier. They took a very tough line against an adversary in disarray. They refused to repatriate Croatian and Slovenian prisoners of war, continued a naval blockade along the Dalmatian coast, even as the conference met, and their army harassed local forces in Montenegro. In general, the Italian government sought to destabilize the entire Balkan region as a way of breaking up the newly forming trans-Adriatic neighbor (map 7).39 The Italians were adamant about possession of Fiume/Rijeka, an outpost of Italian commerce in which Italians constituted nearly half of the population of fifty-two thousand. While some preliminary aspects of the Italian settlement were resolved in February and other sections of Yugoslavia’s new boundaries began to coalesce, positions on this city steadily hardened. Orlando pressed his demand on several grounds. The city had an Italian majority, he insisted, although this was contested. An October 1918 plebiscite held immediately after the withdrawal of Hungarian troops registered a

last hurrah for old world geographies

/

159

Map 7. Fiume/Rijeka crisis with prewar boundaries.

majority of Fiume’s citizens for unity with Italy, but the Yugoslavs and the U.S. delegation discounted this result as orchestrated by an unrepresentative group of Italian sympathizers who excluded and suppressed the Croatian half of the population.40 The issue came to a head in March after Wilson rejoined the conference following a brief return to Washington. The British, French, and U.S. delegations were not entirely united in their approach to the Adriatic settlement but were sufficiently agreed to reject Italy’s escalated demands. Faced with strong opposition, Orlando nevertheless pressed the Italian demand, threatening to withdraw from the conference on 21 March if Italy did not get Fiume/Rijeka. In Wilson’s absence, House had led the U.S. delegation and proved more willing than the president to compromise on a number of issues, and Orlando sensed this. According to Edith Wilson’s testimony, Wilson was shocked by how much House had “given away.”41 On Fiume/Rijeka especially, House was now convinced that some compromise with Orlando would have to be made. He felt that Wilson was “becoming stubborn and angry” in the Italian negotiations and went so far as to confide to his diary

160

/

last hurrah for old world geographies

that the president “never was a good negotiator.” He had the support of his brother-in-law Sydney Mezes for concessions to Italy on the grounds that less than 10 percent of its existing trade was with the new Yugoslavia. When on 3 April the Big Four finally agreed to hear the Yugoslav case concerning Fiume/Rijeka, Orlando refused to be present, spending the afternoon with House instead.42 Wilson had consistently taken his stand on the so-called American line, first drawn by Douglas Johnson in January for the Black Book. But he was beginning to entertain other possibilities. The Italians were perceptibly softening their claims down the Dalmatian coast, and the Yugoslavs were less insistent about Trieste. Fiume/Rijeka became the crux of the regional settlement, but given Italy’s position in the Big Four it also took on much greater significance for the conference as a whole. Wilson began to take seriously proposals for a plebiscite in Fiume/Rijeka or for declaring it a “free city” akin to Danzig/Gdansk. But a Yugoslav-Italian meeting led away from any compromise. The president had been getting periodic advice from Douglas Johnson, William Lunt, who headed the Italian Division of the U.S. delegation, and Bowman, but pressed by Orlando he agreed to a more systematic poll of the top “experts.” As he normally would, Wilson turned to House, and just as characteristically he kept at the question himself. While House kept at his own attempts to break the impasse, he had Mezes collate the experts’ opinions. Mezes had few friends in the U.S. delegation and was not taken very seriously. Bowman had already locked horns with him in a power struggle at the Inquiry, but as House’s brother-in-law Mezes was impossible to sideline entirely. With African historian Louis Beer, Mezes had become a steady conduit for distinguished Italian visitors seeking access to the influential American advisers.43 When Mezes consulted the specialists, Shotwell was swayed, but the remaining six, including Bowman, Johnson, and Lunt, were unalterably opposed to granting the Italian demands. Mezes reported to his brother-in-law, and both of them reported to the president on 16 April. They prevaricated. Instead of representing the views of these six, House and Mezes conveyed the impression to Wilson that the experts supported the granting of Italian claims in Dalmatia. This must have surprised Wilson, who, after an earlier protestation that he was “in the dark” about his advisers’ positions, was now fairly well informed. He had in any case received barely ten days earlier a letter from five of these men giving precisely the opposite advice.44 He inquired further. Later that night, Tasker Bliss called Bowman to his room, where the general and Wilson’s private secretary sat at a large table. They told the geographer about House’s

last hurrah for old world geographies

/

161

advice to Wilson and asked whether “Beer and Shotwell were experts on the Adriatic.” Bowman describes the ensuing discussion: I replied “no.” He asked me for the names of the experts and I replied: “Day, Seymour, Lunt, Young, Haskins, Westermann, Johnson, and myself.” He asked if Beer and Shotwell had done any special work on Italy in preparation for the Peace Conference and I replied that they had not. He asked if the real experts had been consulted and I said they had and that they were opposed to a man, to the House-Mezes conclusions and recommendations and had so stated in writing. Very briefly I sketched for him our position and our reasons.

Bliss was “violently stirred up,” Bowman recalled, and he “then said he was going up to the ‘White House,’” as they called Wilson’s Paris residence, to “inform the President if I had no objection.”45 House’s subterfuge was clumsy and very costly. Johnson too had caught wind of a Mezes memo to Wilson claiming to represent all the advisers, and he went immediately to Bowman. Bowman compiled a two-page appeal to the president, which five of the Intelligence Section chiefs—Johnson, Lunt, Seymour, Day, and Young—also signed. The famous “experts’ letter” began in high moral tone, invoking Wilson’s own rhetorical flourishes aboard the George Washington, and pleaded against Italian commandeering of Fiume. It was a dramatic moment, and Bowman pulled all the right emotional and political strings. First, he repeated the words that Wilson had said en route to Europe: “Tell me what’s right and I’ll fight for it. Give me a guaranteed position.” Then Bowman pointed out that Italy had entered the war “with a demand for loot,” which is all that Fiume/Rijeka represented to the country, whereas for Yugoslavia the loss of Rijeka/Fiume would irreparably damage its territorial integrity. If the Big Four were to grant even nominal Italian sovereignty over Fiume “as the price of supporting the League of Nations,” it would bring “the League down to her [Italy’s] level.” If “JugoSlavia loses Fiume, war will follow.” This was the “guaranteed position,” and having stated it, Bowman ended with an appeal to “what’s right” and the opportunity Wilson had of dispensing with “old world diplomacy.”46 Wilson’s swift reply thanked Bowman for reinforcing his judgment visà-vis Italian claims: “I need not tell you that my own instinct responds to it.”47 However, the experts’ letter had done much more than affirm Wilson’s beliefs. Although Wilson often operated quite independently of his four commissioners—Bliss, House, Lansing, and White—House had always been his right hand and was far more trusted than even Secretary of State Lansing. Relations between Wilson and House were already strained over

162

/

last hurrah for old world geographies

House’s increasingly independent diplomacy and the contrasting portrayals of House and Wilson filtering into the press at home. At about this same time, Wilson also walked in on a secret meeting that House was holding with Lloyd George and Clemenceau and was “clearly upset.” Mrs. Wilson and House had their own bitter confrontation, after which House abruptly stopped visiting the Wilson’s Paris home.48 Now, through Bowman’s letter, an increasingly suspicious Wilson learned definitively that House, with Mezes in tow, had lied to him. Mezes was furious about the “experts’ letter” and sought immediate revenge. A direct attack on the signatories would be difficult, since they enjoyed Wilson’s support, but suddenly rumors circulated that Mezes or House or Wilson or somebody was about to order the experts home. When word of this eventually reached Bliss and Lansing, they angrily protested to Wilson. Wilson responded that as “chairman of the Commission,” Lansing alone determined who stayed and who went, and a mollified Lansing went straight to Bowman declaring that no one was going home until Bowman, as chief of the Intelligence Section, declared their services no longer necessary.49 As for House, he felt he had brokered a compromise with the Italians in which they would indeed get Fiume/Rijeka; he only had to convince Wilson. But with his own duplicity revealed by the so-called experts’ letter, this possibility was wrecked. He considered the letter disloyal to himself and, in a confrontation with Bowman, came closer than ever to losing his temper. In a virtual admission of guilt, House’s meticulous diary entirely glosses over these events.50 House’s deeply trusting relationship with Wilson was irrevocably severed, and after Wilson left Paris two months later to take on the Senate on behalf of the League of Nations, these erstwhile confidants never saw each other again.51 This crisis within the American delegation contributed to the Fiume crisis, the fate of the conference as a whole, and indeed prospects for peace in Europe. House’s acquiescence to Italian pressure was unlikely to succeed with Wilson, false advice or no, but it did create expectations among the Italians. When Wilson earlier resisted transferring Danzig/Gdansk to Poland, insisting it become a “free city” instead, he wanted to avoid handing the Italians a precedent for Fiume.52 Although it is unlikely that he would have changed his mind, his resolve was strengthened by Bowman’s letter. The Italians, on the other hand, were deflated by news that House was defeated, and in the face of socialist unrest at home, Orlando threatened that “if president Wilson’s opinion prevailed without doubt there would be revolution in Italy.” Wilson sloughed the threat off and dug in his own heels. With the agreement of all of his commissioners except House, he

last hurrah for old world geographies

/

163

lectured the Italians on why Fiume/Rijeka must go to Yugoslavia. It was a stirring if relentless recapitulation about the evil of secret treaties, the need for “principles” of peace, and the defense of a Yugoslav Fiume, a classic, strategic Wilsonian call to idealism, and its worldwide publication was intended by Wilson to “go over the head” of Orlando to the Italian people. Orlando’s angry reply brought no compromise and, humiliatingly boxed into a corner, the Italian prime minister marched his delegation home to Rome for discussion in the Italian parliament.53 They returned only upon invitation on 7 May, the day the Germans were handed a treaty in Versailles that included no agreement on the Italian-Yugoslav boundary. The Italian delegation had been encouraged by the support exhibited in large, excited public and parliamentary demonstrations, but in the delegation’s absence from the negotiations, the African treaties were decided, recognizing no Italian claims. Immediately upon his return to the negotiations, Orlando granted some concessions, fearing all the while that he was thereby committing political suicide at home. Wilson remained intransigent, reiterating to House among others that there would be no compromise. Not only did the Versailles treaty shrink Germany’s territory at its eastern border and isolate East Prussia, but also in the south the Sudetenland was incorporated into the new Czechoslovakia. In the west the treaty transferred the resource-rich Alsace-Lorraine to France. Germany itself was placed under Allied military and economic control, charged a fifteen-milliondollar indemnity and additional financial reparations, and forced to admit exclusive responsibility for the war. Its African and Pacific colonies were confiscated. Bowman attended the historic ceremony with his wife, Cora, but his time in Paris was nearing an end. Cora had arrived in February, ailing from the great flu epidemic of 1918–19, and Bowman claimed officially that the burden of the three children on an aged aunt and uncle at home now required their return. Lansing exhorted him to stay lest it appear in the press, after the business of the “experts’ letter,” that there was a serious rift in the delegation and that House had won, but Bowman insisted on leaving and did so on 13 May. Privately, he was bitter at House’s obstruction, sickened that although both he and principle had prevailed, as he saw it, the U.S. delegation was in disarray, and the conference effectively stalled. There was little use in staying longer.54 Bowman’s return to New York was indeed greeted by twittering in the press that all was not well in the U.S. delegation; while Bowman was at sea, the young diplomat William C. Bullitt had made a highly public resignation from the Paris delegation, citing injustices and injudicious compromises contained in the Treaty of Versailles, and Bowman’s return aggravated the

164

/

last hurrah for old world geographies

malaise. Reports in the London press suggested that a total of nine U.S. delegation members had resigned and named Bowman specifically,55 but the specifics of the “experts’ letter” and House’s chastening were not publicly known. Bowman remained abreast of conference events throughout the summer, consulting periodically with Lansing and Assistant Secretary Frank Polk, but mostly he launched himself into picking up American Geographical Society affairs.

back to paris With almost daily press reports of conference intrigue over this or that patch of Europe, coal, a port, or a boundary, many liberals in the United States were outraged that Wilson’s high ideals now apparently lay in shreds. As Walter Lippmann’s biographer has put it, the “old order had been shattered by the Bolshevik revolution, the destruction of German power, and the disintegration of the Austro-Hungarian Empire,” yet the territorial deals and compromises of Paris prevented the coming of a new order. Reactionaries everywhere—Wilson among them, many felt—were obstructing its birth.56 Wilson’s claim to be sticking to principle on the ItalianYugoslav settlement only intensified this disillusionment, indicating the extent to which the whole tawdry scene at Paris convinced many people of the old order’s bankruptcy. Yet no purity of liberal ideals could get round the inexorable geographical absolutism of territorial settlement. Boundaries had to be placed somewhere, however much this fixation of political geography facilitated a more fluid economic geography. For Wilson, compromise with Italy was dangerous, not just because of local political repercussions in the Balkans and Italy, but, more important, as Bowman anticipated, for the blow it would deliver to the League of Nations. Moral rectitude was the gold standard of Wilson’s league, and a tarnished birth devalued its coin. The powerful suasion of Wilson’s idealism was already deflated and could be killed by a cynical concession. Yet a lack of compromise was also dangerous, because it kept a stable geography out of reach in this strategic region. It was with an eye to U.S. global interests and the anticipated placatory role of the League of Nations that Wilson stuck to his guns. After Bowman’s departure and with House held at arm’s length, Wilson came to depend most heavily on the Columbia University geographer Douglas Johnson, chief of the boundary topography division in the Intelligence Section, who was also adamantly against Italian claims. But the U.S. delegation remained irrevocably split. Although House took a more discreet

last hurrah for old world geographies

/

165

role, two others took up the Italian case—George Louis Beer and David Miller, both Inquiry veterans. “It is almost incredible,” Shotwell observed, “but this world-incident has narrowed down to an internal dispute in the Inquiry. The Premier of Italy turns to Beer and Miller for support, while Trumbic [the Croatian delegate] relies on Johnson.” Shotwell too weighed in on the Italian side but felt that Johnson was taking positivist science too far: he “upholds the honor of the exact sciences by refusing to budge the Yugoslav frontiers one inch from where he traced his own suggested frontier on the map.” Such was Johnson’s influence, Beer thought, that “the world is really waiting for a solution until Johnson can be brought to make some compromise between geography and politics.”57 The Italians made some concessions, great enough in the context of rising right-wing nationalism to force Orlando’s political fall. Even an exasperated Bowman was beginning to relent. He believed the Italians played “a crooked game” from the start, a kind of diplomatic bait and switch. “The moment we conceded something they asked for more.” But he was also increasingly enamored of Wilson and felt that given the initial hard U.S. stance and Orlando’s departure, they could not back down now: the “American solution” was vital “on moral grounds.”58 However, something would have to give. Certainly no convert to the Italian line, Bowman disguised his subtle shift in emphasis by criticizing the rigidity of others. “Johnson attached a moral value to the boundary line,” thinking it “immoral” to alter a scientifically derived solution, he complained, blaming the geographer for hampering the Adriatic negotiations.59 Faster than he wanted, Bowman got another chance at diplomacy. In August 1919, Lansing asked him to return to Paris, but with the conference broadly mired and AGS obligations pressing—an endowment plan required rapid attention and the Geographical Review had fallen two months behind—he stalled. In early September, Wilson personally reiterated the request—it is “absolutely essential that a man of knowledge and experience in the negotiations should go and there is no one so well equipped for that service as you”—and with the concurrence of AGS president James Greenough, he resolved to go.60 He arrived in Paris on 4 October, the same day that House finally left. As recently as the Inquiry, in his battles with Mezes and Lippmann, Bowman had shared much of Johnson’s faith in a “scientific peace,” but the 1919 Adriatic dispute tempered his science with a respect for diplomacy. He returned to Paris a convert to Wilson’s new diplomacy, believing that the United States “had no right to become impatient with the Italians no matter how many lies they told or however long the negotiations dragged on:

166

/

last hurrah for old world geographies

that it is easier to be patient than it is to have a war; that the Italians may be grasping and may make us yield here and there on trivial points, but that if we win on our main program, that is the big thing.”61 He sat again on the Polish commission, where the main concern was the treaty between the new Polish government and the free city of Danzig/ Gdansk. He sat on the new Central Territorial Committee, where he concerned himself with the Balkans and the disposition of Constantinople, which of course controlled sea access through the Bosporus. The Treaty of London promised control of Constantinople to Russia, but the revolution dissolved that commitment, so the city was left as part of a weakened Turkey. West of Constantinople, Turkey was stripped of most of its remaining European territory. “Effectively the Turk is no longer in Europe,” rejoiced Bowman, echoing long-standing European anti-Muslim prejudices with a contemporary echo: a “centuries-old hope of the Western powers has been realized.” If this action revived “the rivalry of the Balkan states,” it was, he felt, a necessary risk to ensure European mercantile oversight of the strategic straits.62 Not surprisingly, Fiume/Rijeka dominated Bowman’s second stint in Paris. The conference had largely dissipated, with Wilson long back in the United States and Lloyd George making only periodic appearances. Orlando lost the June election and was replaced by Francesco Saverio Nitti, who stayed in Rome. With House’s departure, all of the original U.S. commissioners were gone, and Assistant Secretary of State Frank Polk headed the U.S. delegation. Impressed by the jovial Polk as an easy man to work with, Bowman agreed to take charge of the Adriatic question. With the postelection Italian economy still in shambles, workers orchestrated a growing wave of strikes, while the Italian Socialist Party threatened to join with the revolts breaking out all over the continent. Benito Mussolini too began to organize, and after periodic skirmishes, Fiume Italians attacked peace-keeping French troops in the city, killing nine. In September the poet and protofascist Gabriele d’Annunzio led a band of 150 men into Fiume/Rijeka, holding it in the name of Italy until long after the conference ended. Polk immediately cried piracy, and Clemenceau burst out at an Italian delegate that he should cease talking of the Italian “government” as if they had one.63 The situation was even more grave and further from resolution than when Bowman had left in May. With Wilson back in Washington, the French and British slowly began to relent to Italian pressure, and Bowman immediately began to press for movement in the U.S. position. Through Polk, he advised that the Italians be allowed to have a line granting them most of the Istrian peninsula. This was “the only concession” Bowman “personally felt willing to make to the

last hurrah for old world geographies

/

167

Italians,” and he would have been wholly opposed even to this had a “big mistake” not already been made in running the so-called Wilson line over Mount Maggiore/Vojak. Bowman was “horrified” to find not only that this line had been the same “American line” since Johnson wrote it into the Black Book but also that it effectively allowed Italian guns atop mountains only ten or fifteen miles from a potentially Yugoslavian Rijeka. At Polk’s behest, Commissioners White and Bliss approved of Bowman’s proposal, but with Wilson incapacitated by a stroke, Secretary Lansing had Johnson reply against Bowman’s advice.64 With settlements imminent on Yugoslavia’s other borders—with Austria, Hungary, Romania, Bulgaria, Greece, and Albania—the Allies, apparently at Clemenceau’s behest, made another foray. On 9 December, France, the United Kingdom, and the United States issued a joint memorandum drafted by Bowman and a British counterpart. It included three further concessions to which Wilson had previously agreed but insisted on moving the Istria line back to the west of Mount Maggiore/Vojak, strategically out of range of Rijeka.65 The proposal was presented to the Italian government but not to the Yugoslavs. Bowman’s second stint in Paris was much shorter than his first, and he sailed for home the day after the joint memo was completed, optimistic because it represented the first time that the three Allies were able to present a formal, written united front to Italy. It put considerable pressure on the Italians, and there was guarded hope that it would be accepted. But by the new year the Italians had rejected the proposal. With Wilson engrossed in his own political campaigns at home on behalf of the Versailles treaty, the British and French governments negotiated intensely with Italy, effectively squeezing Yugoslavia into submission. A revised set of concessions, drafted by France and the United Kingdom with Italian cooperation, was again rejected by Wilson. Bowman continued to advise on the issue, but the predictable denouement came in November 1920 with the Treaty of Rapallo.66 The work of Italy and Yugoslavia more than France, the United Kingdom, or the United States, the Rapallo treaty concluded the boundaries of Yugoslavia. Italy received a string of islands off the Dalmatian coast and sovereignty over the Croatian port of Zara, as well as all of Istria and of course Trieste. Fiume/Rijeka was made a free state—all eleven square miles of it— connected by a four-mile Italian corridor to Istria. For Yugoslavia it was a bitter way to consummate nationhood. For Wilson, whose reelection was resoundingly defeated two weeks prior to Rapallo, it was surely symbolic. The old diplomacy had triumphed. In Fiume itself, d’Annunzio was finally rousted by a show of Italian military force, but

168

/

last hurrah for old world geographies

not before the poet-fascist declared war on Italy itself for having the temerity to leave the city-state independent. Bowman was quite prescient in concluding that the Yugoslav settlement contained the “gravest elements of future trouble,”67 needing only a short time to see his prediction fulfilled. A fascist uprising in Fiume/Rijeka in 1922 laid the groundwork for a 1924 “ammendment” to the treaty, by which the new Italian leader, Benito Mussolini, claimed Fiume for Italy. In World War II the Croatians collaborated with the Nazis; only after Mussolini’s defeat and the end of war was Fiume and the surrounding Istrian coastal strip returned to Yugoslavia and the city restored as Rijeka. But it did not stop there, of course. After 1991, with Yugoslavia breaking up and the threat of a Greater Serbia again mobilized, the horrors of ethnic cleansing, aimed especially at Bosnian and Kosovar Muslims, and an equally deadly struggle between Serbs and Croats claimed tens of thousands of lives. Bowman was prophetic indeed when he wrote in 1920 that Yugoslavia represented the most difficult new creation following the war and “the most likely to lead to future war.”68

the geographer transformed Paris changed Isaiah Bowman. A scientist with a bent for the political when he left New York, he returned a political animal whose science was one of his major assets. He went to Paris in search of world order, but with a vague and still-narrow sense of what that order might look like or even why it was desirable, and returned with a world vision. The charged political disorder of Paris was a shock, and if at times it rudely affronted his sense of a scientific peace, he did not let this hinder an adventure whose outcome was profoundly unknown. More than most at Paris, Bowman thrilled to the power that came with fixing the world map, regardless of how incomplete or illusionary the solutions were. He had gone to Paris still dissatisfied by a president who even in 1918 seemed to have little taste for what Bowman thought was such an obvious war. His nationalism had not yet fully blossomed into an embrace of Wilson’s new world order. But in Paris he respected Wilson’s resoluteness and the principled stands he took. Whatever compromises he made, good or bad, they were honestly come by; there was nothing crooked about the man, he felt. Bowman’s conservatism might well have taken him in radically different directions, but from Wilson he learned a language of expansive internationalism to temper his unquestioned nationalism. The “old Presbyterian,” as John Maynard Keynes called Wilson, was a man Bowman could relate to. Bowman rejected entirely Lloyd George’s and Keynes’s characterization of Wilson as

last hurrah for old world geographies

/

169

naive, the preemptive concession of the Tyrol to Italy notwithstanding. Even in defeat, he comprehended the practical power of Wilson’s idealism, and whatever his misgivings about specific compromises, he could never accept, as at least one author has suggested, that the failure to secure Fiume/Rijeka for Yugoslavia was a momentous error of diplomacy.69 When Wilson met with the Inquiry group en route to Paris in 1918, he concluded his talk with a phrase that struck Bowman as deserving of immortality and that, through the record Bowman kept of the meeting, has indeed passed into the lore of Wilsonian liberalism. As we’ve seen, Bowman quoted it in the “experts’ letter”: “Tell me what’s right and I’ll fight for it. Give me a guaranteed position.”70 For Bowman, leaving Paris a year to the day after hearing and recording this phrase for posterity, the emphasis had changed. He understood that “making the world safe for democracy” required bridging the abyss between a guaranteed political position and a fixed geographical line on a map. But there were few, if any, guaranteed positions at the Paris Peace Conference, diplomatic or territorial, even though lines had to be fixed anyway, and the fallback position translated “what’s right” into “what could be made to stick.” On his knees with Wilson over maps, Bowman learned the pragmatics of idealism. Well into the 1930s, he remained loyal to this “new diplomacy.” Freed from the obligation to map a new world and with temporal distance from Paris, he could effuse that “instead of being a call to arms” the new diplomacy is a “call to the conference table. . . . Few are the difficulties that can not be solved by men pledged in advance to approach consultation in a spirit of good will.” For his whole life, Bowman recalled with pride his relations with Wilson and his liberal idealism.71 Having ingested his Republicanism with the air and water of his rural Michigan childhood, he knew what Wilson was up against at home in 1920 and was immediately skeptical about the Versailles treaty and the Covenant of the League of Nations passing the Congress. Yet he remained hopeful. He defended the treaty and the administration throughout the political roller-coaster ride of 1920, refusing to join conservatives in the howl of nationalist condemnation aimed at Wilson and the league. Secretive about his registered political affiliations and with the Paris work on the line, Bowman deployed his Republicanism to boost Wilson. He had no use whatsoever for the “Republican isolationism” of Henry Cabot Lodge and was very apprehensive about the rejection of an explicitly global posture should the Republicans win the 1920 election. He cast an unprecedented if forlorn Democratic vote in the 1920 presidential election. To a French colleague he explained not only his despair at Wilson’s loss but the dramatic reversal it

170

/

last hurrah for old world geographies

implied: “Every sort of discordant element came into the camp of the opposition party. When you consider that this is normally a Republican and not a Democratic country, that the Democrats form a party of protest, it is astounding that the pro-Germans, pro-Italians, pro-everything but America and America’s ultimate interests should have joined the rank and file of the party that has always favored American expansion.”72 He was just as forthright to Wilson’s victorious opponent: “I should deeply deplore the scrapping of the Treaty of Peace with Germany and the emasculation of the League of Nations,” he entreated Warren Harding: “The harm that would come from such a course would be incalculable.” The defeat of the League of Nations in the Senate, despite a U.S.-imposed article exempting Monroe Doctrine nations from some of its provisions, was equally a “calamity.” Comforting himself as much as the French geographer Demangeon, he could only explain that the “majority of our people have never seen the ocean,” and events in Europe were “remote and unimportant.”73 But he was not uncritical of the Treaty of Versailles himself. He sensed, as many did, that the reparations were too severe, and he worried that trouble would follow. He thought the territorial settlements were generally good: “Never before in the history of Europe has there been so close approach on the part of the international boundaries to the ethnic boundaries.” But there were exceptions: he continued to believe that Poland deserved more in the north and in Upper Silesia than the plebiscites eventually gave them, and he thought the Trentino settlement in the Tyrol “extremely bad.”74 But he felt that Italy’s land grab in Croatia was the most shameful episode of the conference, and personally he had to endure stiff public condemnation for his role. When news of the abortive 9 December memorandum was made public, it hit like a bombshell, not just in Italy, but also in the United States, where Italian Americans were outraged. After Wilson’s electoral defeat, outgoing Secretary of State Frank Polk replied to a Bowman request with the greeting: “I appreciated hearing from my side partner who helped me put the skids on the Italian vote.”75 One aspect of the treaty that Bowman unequivocally opposed was the minority treaties. Strewn across Europe after 1919 were many millions of people who found themselves in minority pockets of larger national territories: Hungarians in Romania, Russians in Poland, Bulgarians in Greece, Yugoslavs in Italy, Germans everywhere. The Big Four insisted on minority treaties, especially for the smaller nations of Central Europe, in an effort to safeguard the rights of such minority populations and to provide for education in the minority languages. Bowman was part of a vociferous chorus in the United States that opposed minority treaties. The small nations had been clubbed

last hurrah for old world geographies

/

171

into signing, he felt. The treaties were framed not in the general interest but on behalf of “a special class,” he advised Harding. They would not lead to “national solidarity” and unification in the new national territories, but rather “racial, religious and other differences would be increased,” and the “chance of disorder . . . augmented.” Were such treaties applied to the United States, he argued, they would be expensive and destructive; in Europe they would create a “legacy of bitter quarrels.”76 Forced assimilation and ethnic dilution were Bowman’s proposals precisely at a time when the United States struggled with domestic racial violence and large numbers of European immigrants from the very lands carved up in Paris. If anything, Paris and his association with Wilson strengthened Bowman’s Jeffersonian leanings. Wilson’s own Jeffersonian roots may have represented a “return to the past” for more critical liberal supporters, such as Lippmann, but that heritage equally made Wilson safe for conservatism: he “projected his thought about Jeffersonian Democracy out into the world,” Bowman believed.77 He changed in a different direction too. The political bartering that had taken place behind closed doors at Paris impressed him greatly as the real substance of world politics. He developed a taste for political power at Paris, and his failures as well as successes instilled a deep-seated belief that political intrigue was not only inevitable in human affairs, as he would have generalized it, but even justifiable in pursuit of honorable ends. Though most immediately attached to Wilson, he was just as fascinated by Clemenceau, whom he saw as a wily Old World politician, to be sure, but one who uncannily got what he wanted when it counted. When Bowman and Polk went with British and French advisers to coax Clemenceau to sign a draft of the fateful 9 December joint memo, Clemenceau spotted Bowman’s influence in the document and turned to him as he signed: “Whenever we take a step that affects Italy we have to remember how many divisions of troops it would take to protect our south-eastern frontier. The Americans are charming, but they are far away, and after you have gone we are left to deal with the Italians.”78 Bowman never forgot the remark. It was in the Italian negotiations, indeed, that the lessons of a hardened pragmatism came to the fore. If Wilson erred, Bowman felt, it was in his impatience. It “is precisely the function of diplomacy to continue to discuss and to modify as long as there is the slightest hope for an agreement,” the geographer concluded. “Continued dictation to one nation by another leads to war,” he cautioned Wilson’s chronicler. In 1920 this did not separate him significantly from Wilson. Clemenceau’s estimate of Wilson—that he settled “the destiny of nations by mixtures of empiricism and idealism”—succinctly describes Bowman’s own mature approach to diplomacy.79

172

/

last hurrah for old world geographies

Bowman was proud and quite possessive about what the Inquiry and his peace conference Intelligence Section achieved, ever vigilant in correcting others about the true history. On one occasion he chided a former undersecretary of state for omitting “the Inquiry” in the index of a 1946 book, and on another he offered a frosty defense of the U.S. delegation’s honor to novelist Upton Sinclair, for whom the events at Paris provided grist for his novel World’s End.80 Bowman’s copies of books about these events bristle with corrective marginalia. With some justification, Paris also enhanced Bowman’s sense of selfimportance. Many men’s careers were built on the events of those few months. He had to become used to a new level of public scrutiny of his utterances. In the early 1920s he gave numerous addresses concerning Europe, the peace conference, the League of Nations, and the geography of the peace, and these were now routinely covered in the press. His reputation as “Wilson’s influential geographer” at Paris continued to grow to the point where a 1945 Life portrait could conclude that Bowman “had more to do than probably any other American with revising Europe’s map.”81 But even before Bowman left for Paris, his fascination with power took some extreme forms. Many participants kept peace conference diaries, but the manicured tone of Bowman’s diary and of his conference scrapbook, especially his deliberate omissions, reflect more than the usual sense by participants that they were involved in a historic event. To cite only the most extreme example, at Wilson’s famous meeting with the Inquiry team on the SS George Washington, Bowman took extensive notes and later compiled these as a memo. This in itself was not so odd, but in a later accompanying memo Bowman reveals that he deliberately mistitled this set of notes and that his handwriting “was intentionally made bad in order to be illegible should the notes fall into other hands”: all to “prevent the notes from being understood by unauthorized persons.”82 This sense of intrigue and obsessive concern for secrecy in situations that did not warrant such rigor were reflexive habits of Bowman’s for the rest of his life. Finding himself thrust toward the white heat of political power, he slipped back and forward between self-importance and self-conscious awe. By coating many of his dealings with the formality of unnecessary secrecy, he shielded himself from the personal arbitrariness of the history he sensed he was living. The personal dimensions of power affected Bowman directly in regard to the House affair. On 13 April 1919, with the Italian crisis coming to a boil, Colonel House called Bowman to his room in the Hotel Crillon. House told Bowman of the plans, already well advanced, for the League of Nations. It would be located in Geneva, and House wanted to know whether Bowman

last hurrah for old world geographies

/

173

would accept the position of executive secretary of the league. In the immediate future the position would involve a prompt return to New York, three summer months in London, and a White House League of Nations meeting in October. If Bowman was surprised or excited at such an offer, he in no way conveyed it in his diary. If it puzzled him that an American official would have the power simply to name the executive director of a supposedly global organization, he made no mention of it. He was to have a salary of “10–12 thousand a year and rank of Minister,” he recorded.83 Bowman’s response—he wanted the top salary, “the same as U.S. Minister to Cuba, China, Holland,” and “free transport for family to London”— came after the “experts’ letter,” and House was not amused. With his private disgrace in full swing and Bowman’s prints on the poison pen, House’s slippery reply took advantage of this list of demands, in lieu of a clear acceptance, to say that since Bowman was not yet “in a position to proceed” and that since “the situation is so nebulous,” he should stay in Paris until the situation clarified.84 Aggravated at such a clearly scornful reply and after witnessing two detachments of cavalry in a riotous May Day confrontation with thousands of workers and socialists in the Place de la Concorde, he broached the issue with House. The colonel was “evasive” and “crooked,” and an angry Bowman curtly terminated the meeting. To his diary Bowman explained House’s change of mind as doubtless a “result of the Fiume letter,” and he was surely right. He understood the league offer as “a bribe” to get him to go along “on the Adriatic questions,” but after the experts’ letter there was no longer any need to court him. House, for his part, let it be known that Bowman had written a “stupid letter making conditions” and had fomented a “bad social break.”85 The offer seems to have been real enough, although Wilson never mentions it. “I plan such matters as if the entire business was in my hands,” House boasted to his diary the day he offered Bowman leadership of the League of Nations.86 Bowman seems to have had second thoughts about the tone of his response. A copy of his demanding letter to House is nowhere in his correspondence. But then the United States Senate was not ready for the League of Nations anyway.

the cartography of ethnicity “The whole world had fallen into disorder,” observed Wilson’s geographer in his appeal to president-elect Harding to right the wrongs of the prewar world and fight for the League of Nations. If Wilson was the great white hope for a new order, the first shattering realization of possible failure came

174

/

last hurrah for old world geographies

early in Paris. “The illusion of a new world order is vanishing,” wrote a despondent Beer as early as March 1919, amidst the Polish and Italian crises. “How sick the world is,” Bowman echoed days later. Through the ups and downs, however, he remained confident that “the world has struck one of the turning points in its career,” and though progress was difficult, there was no turning back.87 A turning point indeed, but when a complete turn proved impossible, the resulting wreckage was considerable. No one was happy with the outcome of the Paris conference. In Central and eastern Europe especially, the new map of Europe summarily changed the identities of tens of millions of people (map 8). The interests of those outside Europe were rarely heard. U.S. conservatives crowed about the predictable results of ill-advised meddling in Europe while the new liberals howled that Wilson, his hands bloodied by compromise with territorial butchery, had betrayed his own ideals. Wilson, too late and too little, forced out the old fogy Lansing, who saw not at all the profundity of the shift Wilson intended. Lansing, according to one historian, “persisted in trying to cramp the new world-order into the formulae of an obsolescent conception of the world as a constellation of absolutely independent, equal and indivisible sovereignties.”88 Such an absolute geography of political and economic relations was precisely what Wilson eschewed, but without the new order clearly in view, a tremendous ambiguity of power reigned. Wilson dominated Paris but could not get his way; the peace conference participants acted as if they could remake the map of the world while socialist and anticolonial revolts all around them threatened to erase any such power; the United States stood as the pinnacle of democratic achievement while antiracist riots, socialist revolts, and vicious government repression dominated American streets. The old geographies that were to be fixed as a harbinger of the new proved stubborn to change. In geographical terms, the failure of Paris is fairly clear. The exclusion of Russia and concerted efforts to ensure its military and economic defeat provoked a cold war long before 1945. The trimming of Germany nurtured immediate demands for Lebensraum (national living space), leading straight to a new world war, whose aftermath brought a whole new reshuffling of Eastern and Central European space. And the United States recoiled into an isolationism vis-à-vis Europe (but manifestly not South and Central America). Wilson’s defeat in the Senate and the 1920 election corroborated the failure of the European settlements to express the new diplomacy, but it was a lesson already well understood in Asia, Africa, and South America. From India and Ireland, Egypt and Indochina—even from the United

Map 8. Europe after 1922.

176

/

last hurrah for old world geographies

States—hopeful representatives of oppressed peoples trekked to Paris, eager that the promised new world order should wash over them too. Spurned by the proceedings, a young Ho Chi Minh helped found the French Communist Party in 1920 before reappearing decades later to haunt the American Empire. Colonial “settlements” were a sideshow at Paris. German colonies in Africa and the Pacific were confiscated and placed under the “mandate” of European powers, but the result was hardly what Beer had in mind when, working at the Inquiry, he coined the word. In some cases, such as German Southwest Africa and Togoland, the territories had already been taken by Britain and France during the war. Mandate status changed little—except the uniform and language of the colonizer.89 German East Africa became Britain’s Tanganyika, and the idea of international oversight by the League of Nations was never seriously implemented. The cavalier geography of colonial “marginalia” sometimes took bizarre and humorous forms. Amid peace conference chaos, historian Shotwell once glibly requested that cartographers provide maps that might illustrate the exchange of part of the Alaskan panhandle (to Canada) for British Honduras (to the United States)!90 Outside Europe, some of the most dramatic changes came in the “Near East” (now called the Middle East), where a number of separate national entities were established out of the remnants of the Ottoman Empire: Iraq and Kuwait, Iran and Syria, Transjordan and the British-mandated Palestine, all came into existence under the shadow of known oil reserves and more or less at the convenience of competing British and French (and to a lesser extent American) interests. In contrast with the European settlements, the straightline borders in much of this region suggest the abstraction from local geography that guided the imposition of these states, and continuing conflicts there date in part to the arbitrariness of the created geographies in contrast with the social and natural bases of local power. As for South America, the United States employed the shield of the Monroe Doctrine, with ambivalent support from Argentina, to keep serious consideration of that continent off the Paris docket. A gaudy festival of power, Paris relegated countries without claims to global power to the political margins. And yet a turn did occur. U.S. isolationism, economic depression, and the rise of fascism focused later judgments of the Paris Peace Conference on its failures, but these were not as total as the preponderance of liberal and conservative commentaries assume. Even while critics and participants alike scoffed at the possibility, the Paris Peace Conference did significantly see off the old diplomacy. The contradictions were simply too glaring. Never again would power over the world map be arrogated so summarily by a

last hurrah for old world geographies

/

177

Council of Ten, or of Five, or by a “Big Four.” In 1919 not even a pretense of democracy existed, a UN-style General Assembly, for example, checking, however fitfully, on the machinations of a Security Council. Nor was territorial ownership ever again the currency of such a massive peace. Amid the shards of war and a bickering peace, the new order seemed more opaque to many in 1920 than it had in 1917, and yet a new U.S.-centered internationalism had irrevocably asserted itself on the global stage. The conference ushered in another crucial, potentially progressive innovation. A new assertion of global rights was filtered into the lexicon of territorial settlements. Largely unremarked in American foreign policy histories of the twentieth century, ethnic difference became the crucial political language of the conference. “It is patent to all,” concluded Scottish geographer George Chisholm, “that the ethnic considerations were generally regarded as the most important.” Bowman measured the conference’s limited success in ethnic terms: “At no time in the history of Europe have political boundaries more closely expressed the lines of ethnic division.”91 More than religious differences, military considerations, resources, and economics, ethnicity was the fulcrum of territorial conflicts and settlements at Paris. If this seems unremarkable today, insofar as “ethnic” difference became a lexical norm of the twentieth century, it was a stunning innovation then. Ethnicity was a new idea, and it was an American idea. Whereas previous geographical settlements following war in Europe were unashamedly about resources, territory, and military advantage—land grabs for absolute space and what it contained—Paris combatants were obliged, however much they sought territory, to fight their disputes in terms of competing national and ethnic justice. The very fact that the Italians refused this new etiquette is what made the Italian struggle so bitter. We might credit Wilson’s rhetorical idealism about national self-determination for this, but idealism was a symptom as much as a cause. The idealist rhetoric included the widespread if tacit understanding that expansion in absolute geographical space was at an end and that the final settling of national spaces in the capitalist world economy made national identity—even more than military or narrowly territorial concerns—the vital currency of postwar geographical and political stability. The language of ethnicity was invented in the United States during this period to rationalize immigrant nationalities deemed inferior to AngloSaxon racial norms yet superior to African Americans. In relation to European immigrants, ethnicity supplanted “race” and flattened intra-European differences into a safe Americanism. The translation of this liberal paternalism to the global scale in Paris was dramatic and nowhere so well ex-

178

/

last hurrah for old world geographies

pressed as in Bowman’s ideal homology of ethnicity and national territory. Yet the transposition of political and economic conflicts into “ethnic” squabbles was two-sided. On the one hand, it wrenched deep-seated political struggles out of their constitutive European geographies and into a universalized historical narrative. On the other, the language of ethnicity was definitely progressive, a harbinger of the new order, whatever that might look like. It was a historically expressive language: until the absolute space of the globe was parceled into discrete nationalities (and colonies), ethnicity was difficult to specify. In later years, with this national parceling increasingly complete, ethnicity became a cliché. Bowman more than anyone translated the U.S. map of Europe on ethnic terms. When a Central European delegate regaled one of the commissions with a tale about “his ancestor who died in the 16th Century,” defending established boundaries, “and the tears ran down his face,” Bowman was incredulous. He struggled for comprehension through the lenses of his own nationalism: “If my grandfather had been killed by Indians, I’d be bragging about it. Imagine. Crying! Over a man he never knew.”92 The contrast between a spatially rooted and spatially universalized national identity could hardly be more stark. The importance of national differences was of course well understood by Europeans at Paris, but they tended to make an awkward translation from this strange American language of ethnicity to nationality. As Bowman’s paternalistic confusion of race and nationality suggests, the American innovation was to reduce most nationalities—Britain and the United States were exempt—to ethnicity and thereby provide a language and perspective by which a global racial and ethnic hierarchy overrode national interest. Capitalist nation building had reached its limits, Americans and Europeans alike understood, but by deploying the domestic language of ethnicity, the United States made a subtle and largely uncontested claim to global superiority. The diffusion of the language of ethnicity has kept pace with the U.S. rise to globalism. Bowman at Paris was America’s global cartographer of ethnicity.

Thus did the first moment of U.S. global ambition quickly disintegrate even as it sowed the seeds of its own future. It was defeated in Paris by the impossibility of transcending geography in the way Wilson’s “global Monroe Doctrine” anticipated. It was defeated in Europe and Asia by the survival of the Soviet Union in the face of all odds. It was defeated in American streets by internationalists of various political stripe who rejected the tawdriness

last hurrah for old world geographies

/

179

of Paris. The defeat was driven home by the onset of the depression and the rise of fascism. Most ironic, however, it was also defeated in Washington, D.C., where nineteenth-century American nationalists associated with the traditional party of expansionism failed to grasp the possibilities for recalibrating the global connection between geography and economic expansionism in ways supremely favorable to the national interest. Resounding as the defeat was, it was not fatal, as we shall see, to U.S. global ambition. The global realities articulated by Wilson’s idealism could not be denied by a mere vote of the U.S. Senate and would eventually have to be confronted again. Campaigning for the presidency in 1912, Wilson extolled Americans that “we must broaden our borders and make conquest of the markets of the world.”93 Very quickly he came to understand that he did not have to do the former in order to accomplish the latter. Bowman realized the same in Paris. Wilson’s “new diplomacy” has been critiqued from the right and the left as either unrealistic or simply failed. But folded into Wilson’s rhetoric of the new diplomacy, his opposition to the “militarism” of old Europe as much as the Bolshevism of the new Russia, his antiwar rhetoric and rejection of territorial aggrandizement, was a dramatic shift in the constellation of geography and economics in world politics. A world built on the “new diplomacy,” where national or colonial territory no longer measured economic power and where war was largely banished, was also a world in which U.S. economic power surpassed that of Europe and its colonial reach. If the new diplomacy was defeated in Paris and Washington, the geo-economic shift on which it was based was relentless, and Bowman now understood this. The old Europeans whom he admired and even emulated had not won so much at Paris either: “If everybody in the world had been willing to accept the old order of things social and economic,” he wrote to geographer Ellen Semple in support of Wilson’s stubbornness, “the conference would have been much easier.”94 Even in defeat, the Paris Peace Conference heralded a last hurrah for Old World geographies. If the experts’ letter is critical for understanding the role of the U.S. delegation in the Italian negotiations and the break between House and Wilson, it is actually more important for intimating the advent of a new political geography of economic expansion. In its final paragraph, presumably the one House found “lecturing,” Bowman writes: “Never in his career did the President have presented to him such an opportunity to strike a death blow to the discredited methods of old-world diplomacy. . . . To the President is given the rare privilege of going down in history as the statesman who destroyed, by a clean-cut decision against an infamous

180

/

last hurrah for old world geographies

arrangement, the last vestige of the old order.”95 Paris was the breeding ground for Franklin Roosevelt’s own “new world order,” which in turn inspired the post-1989 new world order of the senior George Bush that would cap the American Century. Back in 1920 Bowman was one of only a handful of people who could glimpse the outlines of such a possibility. Leaving Paris, he understood that if a new world order, centered on U.S. economic power rather than European geopolitical prerogative, was slouching to be born, it came with a wholly new way of calculating world geography. He was yet vaguely aware of what that world geography would look like, but he was politically and personally committed to its birth. More even than Wilson, he understood that this new world necessarily involved a profound change in the relationship between territorial and economic possession in the constitution of global power, but he also sensed that territoriality would be a stubborn obstacle in the American ambition to get beyond geography.

7 “REVOLUTIONARILY YOURS”: THE NEW WORLD, THE COUNCIL ON FOREIGN RELATIONS, AND THE MAKING OF LIBERAL FOREIGN POLICY

“Even the empty spaces of the world are no longer non-political,” Bowman announced after the war.1 This could well have been adopted as the anthem for the new liberal foreign policy that developed in the interstices of 1920s isolationist ideologies in the United States. Wilson had brought to Paris a liberalism that evolved out of the Progressive movement. It combined the effort to deregulate U.S. trade and financial relations with a passion for social reform at home and abroad. Its roots lay in the eighteenthcentury heritage of Jefferson and the Enlightenment, to be sure, but the period from 1898 to 1919 witnessed a remarkable political ferment and the emergence of a twentieth-century American liberalism that was both the recognizable offspring of its eighteenth-century Enlightenment universalism and yet distinctly different from those roots. Unlike the rest of Europe and North America, where liberalism was now habitually conservative, U.S. liberalism reinvented itself as the antithesis of both communism and conservatism. It retained an energetic commitment to a capitalist market modulated by government-sponsored social reform advocating social regulation geared to the smooth working of the market. The country’s first true systematic foreign policy grew out of this ferment. In making its peace with the nineteenth century, twentieth-century liberalism had to construct its own global expansionist vision almost from scratch. As late as 1898, the United States had nothing that could be recognized as a foreign policy. The government pursued “foreign relations much as it did the

182

/

“revolutionarily yours”

rest of its business,” in an ad hoc fashion. Taft and Teddy Roosevelt made some inroads toward a more systematic foreign policy, but the Presbyterian Wilson “was the first President in charge of these young policies to incline toward the international ideals of the new middle class.”2 Before World War I, U.S. foreign affairs were narrowly hemispheric and increasingly arcane, defined by episodic, often clumsy, capitalist interventionism in Central and South America and buttressed by a relict Monroe Doctrine; even Bowman’s nemesis, Hiram Bingham, declared that doctrine “an obsolete shibboleth . . . a display of insolence and conceit.”3 Wilson certainly continued the old ways, committing troops at various times to Nicaragua, Haiti, the Dominican Republic, Cuba, Panama, and the ports of Honduras, not to mention Mexico, largely in defense of Open Door diplomacy. But entry into World War I marked a whole new step in the global rather than hemispheric assertion of U.S. political interests. Wilson may have failed to “win the world” at Paris, but the peace conference nonetheless promised a new global role for the United States. He may have failed to win Senate ratification of the League of Nations, but his nascent liberal foreign policy continued to develop anyway. At least in the beginning, New York, not Washington, was its hearth. The Council on Foreign Relations (CFR) emerged directly out of the Paris deliberations, and as a founding director Bowman played a central role from the start. Although there were other similar organizations devoted to an internationalist foreign policy, none came close to the influence of the council, an influence that spanned the American Century. It was the major arena in which Bowman’s newly crystallized liberal internationalism matured, and an examination of his involvement in the council sheds considerable light not just on the council’s origins but also on the evolution of liberal American foreign policy in the first half of the twentieth century. At exactly the same time, he was also completing a book that portrayed an expansive vision of the world with which this new foreign policy would have to deal. The book provided much of the political and intellectual agenda that guided Bowman’s work and indeed the council’s. Aptly named The New World, it made a forceful case that a revolutionized configuration of global relations now determined social, economic, and territorial change. In many ways it was an American reprise of Mill’s International Geography, which had so influenced Bowman earlier. The book represented a complete break from the style and orientation of his previous research, and in its timeliness was widely read, a minor best-seller. If The New World encapsulates the development of Bowman’s liberal internationalism following the war, the Council on Foreign Relations best exemplifies how that internationalism was applied in the name of American self-interest.

“revolutionarily yours”

/

183

new world, new geography World War I forever transformed U.S. geographical research, and no one sensed this more acutely than the chief territorial specialist of the U.S. delegation at Paris. The new world that confronted everyone after 1919, Bowman understood, required a new geography. There were several dimensions to this new geography, all represented to a greater or lesser extent in The New World. First, human rather than physical fashioning of the world’s landscapes was now preeminent. For a U.S. geographical tradition heavily modeled on German geography and umbilically connected to geology, this was a dramatic paradigm shift. It was not his physical but his political geography that was most exploited in Paris. Although he remained an ardent intellectual advocate of physical geography throughout the rest of his life, insisting on its foundational importance in geographical education, political geography was now his forte. The New World was the inaugural text of a modern American political geography, offering a vision appropriate for a world in which “even the empty spaces of the world are no longer nonpolitical.” It was quickly joined by similarly foundational texts in the fields of human ecology and cultural geography.4 Second, the political cauldron of Paris further eroded the crusty inheritance of environmental determinism that Bowman had imbibed with his physical geography at Harvard. In the clinches at Paris, he saw the world made in highly personal ways. “As for the question of determinism,” he related to friend and historian James Truslow Adams, “the last shreds of that influence, if I may so put it, were completely removed from the fabric of my own integral life by experience with personalities at the Peace Conference and by watching international events since that time.”5 It was inconceivable to him after Paris to think that precepts from physical geography and the biological sciences could be recruited to explain political and cultural geographies. Third, the new geography was necessarily international, not simply in the cursory way that all geography is international, but as a political commitment. With Woodrow Wilson, Bowman believed that the United States was already thoroughly implicated in world affairs. Whether this was a happy turn of events was beside the point, and after Paris, he felt, the task was not simply to analyze and interpret the world, as he had previously done, but to manage it from the perspective of U.S. interests. “Whether we wish to do so or not,” he wrote in the first sentence of The New World, “we are obliged to take hold of the present world situation in one way or another.”6 The “we” was certainly the “we” of white ruling-class men, among

184

/

“revolutionarily yours”

whom Bowman felt increasingly comfortable, but of course it was also an American “we,” newly, if not yet comfortably, at home in the world. Isolationism, he felt, was self-defeating and unrealistic. Further, international obligation was twinned with methodological dictate: the new geography was resolutely positivist and aimed at marshaling the objective facts about places, regions, and countries in order to facilitate efficient policies of resource development, social and economic change, foreign policy, and the like. Facts are the building blocks of science, Bowman held, but they work in the service of ideas. The fourth significant element of Bowman’s new geography, the most theoretical and arguably the most important, was the dramatically altered role of territory in the world system after 1919. “The world has now been parceled out nearly to the limit of vacant ‘political space,’ ” he observed in The New World, and while economic expansion of individual nation-states may have been vital, it could no longer be accomplished by expanding control of “political space”; it would involve expansion in economic space. “Territorial expansion,” he summarized later, is “succeeded by economic expansion.”7 This decoupling of economic expansion from territorial expansion, strategically perfected by U.S. capital and the state in the middle decades of the twentieth century, was, with political space increasingly closed, a matter of economic necessity as much as choice. Better than Wilson, Bowman came to articulate the implications of this vision for the conjuncture of politics and geography, and much as he was optimistic about the flowering of economic geography, he recognized that the transformation to this new world was not instantaneous and that political geography remained, for the duration of the transition, the fulcrum of world power. Prominent figures such as Brooks Adams, Archibald Coolidge, and Paul Reinsch had long recognized the U.S. rise to global dominance and embraced this assumption of empire quite unselfconsciously. For them the seat of empire simply progressed westward over a fixed geography.8 By the end of the war Bowman shared this clear recognition of American global ascendancy, but with Wilson he was intent on forging a more liberal internationalism and was more circumspect about declaring “a new empire.” The dissociation of economic from territorial expansion was expedient. It provided a defense against accusations that American expansionism in the new world was simply imperialism in sheep’s clothing. No longer marked by a central defining characteristic of European imperialism—aggressive territorial acquisition—the expansion of American capitalism could be cast as beneficent rather than exploitative. Bowman was no revolutionary, but he understood

“revolutionarily yours”

/

185

and championed the profound historical significance of this decoupling of economic from territorial expansion. In the opening lines of The New World he laid out the liberal political presumptions that guided the entire project. “In a democracy like ours,” he declared, the voters commit the government to certain policies, unlike in an “autocracy” where “the people are asked to accept unquestioningly the judgments of officials reputed to be wiser than they.” The book’s first purpose was to provide a “scholarly consideration” of international affairs, the economic and political issues facing those nations with which the United States enjoyed commercial and diplomatic intercourse. Thus enlightened, the voting public would be able to make more-informed choices, and American democracy would be strengthened. Above all else it is a descriptive survey of the radically changed geographical, economic, and political conditions around the world, organized by nation-state and empire, region and continent. Political-territorial entities are accorded space and position in the book according to their perceived power in the world: it begins with a very long chapter on “the problems of imperial Britain,” the waning world power, and ends with chapters on Africa’s and Latin America’s trade and socioeconomic relationships with the United States. The historical focus is on the reorganization of peoples and national boundaries following World War I, the identification of salient political and economic forces responsible for the new global jigsaw puzzle, and problems that remained. Very well illustrated with maps and photographs (the latter omitted in later editions), the book, as Bowman once described it, was simply “a new atlas” on which were “strung along some historical, economic, and geographical observations on the maps.” He aspired to present “the two sides of a given question” throughout and professed to be “leaving the facts . . . to speak for themselves.”9 This description catches the positivism of the project, and Bowman reiterated his aspiration to neutrality in numerous ways. To Nicholas Roosevelt, he described the book as “free from prejudice.” To the French geographer Jean Brunhes, who translated The New World for the French edition, he complained that the German geopoliticians were “lacking in objectivity”: they followed a “preconceived ‘system’ of political geography” to which they made the facts conform. By contrast, he wanted The New World “to be objective and not to let systems trouble the reader. The world is not made according to a system.” Its systems “vary from region to region. . . . “10 But as he himself recognized, such a pragmatic positivism deployed its apparent disinterestedness in the service of a highly practical purpose. In Paris, Bowman and others in the U.S. delegation, who came face to face with

186

/

“revolutionarily yours”

British and French delegations replete with permanent specialists and experienced administrators, lamented the lack of their own “trained and permanent foreign-office staff.” The New World, accordingly, was aimed at the leaders of U.S. foreign policy in the hope that it would provide a “political education” and generate a coterie of permanent specialists; liberalism was apparently no hindrance to elitism. “The high motive” behind the book, he once told historian James Shotwell, “was to supply a means for the education of people who count in this country.”11 Later he would describe the combined political and positivist intent of the book in terms that guided much of his work between the wars. The New World was meant to deal realistically with the political problems of the postwar world. Its philosophy was one of gradualness of change by rational means. It interposed no ideological preconceived “system” between a problem and its solution in a practical world in which historical accident, not design only, had played so large a part. It sought to analyze real situations rather than justify any one of several conflicting nationalistic policies. Its morality was a responsive and responsible world association based on justice.12

Shortly after the book’s publication, Bowman tried unsuccessfully to have it distributed to each of the nearly six hundred congressional representatives in Washington. But the book’s overall reception and distribution could hardly have disappointed him. In English, it was revised and expanded in 1923 and 1924 with a final (fourth) edition in 1928, and it sold approximately eighteen thousand copies. He saw four hundred copies distributed through the Department of State to U.S. consular offices around the world. It was translated into French and Braille, pirated in Chinese. Widely and usually favorably reviewed in academic journals, it was also featured in popular magazines and newspapers from the Economist to the New York Times. Emerging so soon after the Paris Peace Conference, which largely made his public reputation, it established Bowman as the leading public voice of geography in the country and a foremost authority on international affairs. As late as the onset of World War II, the U.S. Army placed two thousand copies of the book in its camp libraries as the standard global geography text.13 If Bowman’s immediate approach is, as he reflected, pragmatic and largely ad hoc, the book’s success lay in the fact that the underlying vision of The New World was anything but neutral, exhibiting a clear and quintessentially American perspective on international affairs. Without this slant it would have been a rather boring global recitation. He threads his way sequentially through each state, empire, or region, treated in its own

“revolutionarily yours”

/

187

context, and is quite amenable to adopting seemingly contrasting positions vis-à-vis different states. Yet the book was guided by a far more systematic and coherent worldview than its author would have us believe. His essential question was deceptively simple: What are the features, problems, dangers, but above all the opportunities that the United States faces in a new world it inherits from the retrenching European empires? His principled rejection of imperialism, a nascent developmental paternalism concerning colonies and “backward” areas, and a visceral revulsion at the Russian Revolution all marked this as a modern, liberal, American geography of the world. But the most symptomatic evidence of the book’s slant lay not in what was included but in what was excluded. For all that Africa is treated very partially through the perspective of colonization and Latin America through the perspective of the Monroe Doctrine, and even his native Canada is covered under the British Empire, his survey is nevertheless exhaustively global—with one very telling omission. There is no chapter devoted to the United States. This radical severance and protection of domestic from foreign politics was itself emblematic of the emerging liberalism. Assumed unproblematic in the international arena, the United States was treated as the fulcrum of democratic normality according to which global problems were weighed. In substance as well as intent, the book provides the view from America outward. Bowman became well aware that the book was partial, given its national perspective, agreeing with French translator Brunhes that the subtitle of the French edition should be made to “convey a sense of the American point of view which the book represents.” Symptomatic again of the emerging foreign policy liberalism, however, this response included no recognition that an American slant on international relations somehow politicized that global vision, compromised objectivity, or amounted to an “ideological system.” Objectivity and American exceptionalism were complementary, not contradictory. Disinterestedness and neutrality were the ideology of a liberal Americanism; seemingly objective, global survey was its method. Insofar as it got beyond territorial claims in the world system, Americanism was beyond politics. Again, the dissociation of economic from territorial expansion in the U.S. “model” facilitated this global alibi. Claiming to present the two sides of a given question also signified the equanimity of a liberal positivism—why just two sides?—and indeed Bowman allowed that some questions, because of the “gravest of existing dangers” did not even have two sides.14 One such issue was imperialism. Bowman’s attitude toward empire captures the new mix of geography and politics that defined these formative years of the American Century. Imperialism to

188

/

“revolutionarily yours”

Bowman was a system of direct political coercion and control over a people and had no place in the modern world. Its rationale was economic exploitation—of labor, raw materials, crops, and commodities—and political and cultural domination. The principle of self-determination was absolute, except, he suggested, where the population was too “low-grade” or the government too “primitive” to determine its own affairs. In these cases, following the mandate argument developed in the Inquiry, he proposed that administration be apportioned to the “strong” nations. But different countries practiced different kinds of imperialism. A lifelong Anglophile, Bowman was almost apologetic about British imperialism, which, he felt, “marked devotion to high political ideals” and was in any case necessitated by the requirements of expanded trade. By contrast, he excoriated the “naked imperialism” of Italy and the autocratic, military rather than mercantile imperialism of a Germany despicably bent on spreading its national culture.15 The contradictions of this position bubbled just beneath the surface. He quietly justified U.S. colonial possessions in the Philippines and the Caribbean in much the same terms as those used by European powers: it was necessary in the interests of the “natives,” either to avoid “anarchy” (Philippines) or to protect the powerless nations from other, more ruthless colonizers.16 If, in the moral hierarchy of imperialism, the economic motives of the British were more acceptable than the authoritarian or cultural motives of their rivals, U.S. expansionism was also viewed as a purely economic and therefore beneficent force. He was well aware of the “emphatic” and unrivaled expansion of U.S. “influence and control” since 1898 but insisted that such overseas expansion was a natural step in the evolution of the U.S. economy and that it was a mistake to treat this experience, as Latin Americans were wont to do, as imperialism. As a “democracy,” the United States has “in recent years disavowed imperialist designs.” It is “impelled to expand commercially . . . by the necessities of modern civilization,” he allowed. Whereas “imperialistic leaders demand access to new resources or to increased territory,” U.S. expansionism was entirely justified because it followed economic law. It also differed from imperialism, he believed, in that it sprang from no single overriding interest but resulted from a number of ad hoc and accidental circumstances. A “universal land-hunger of the peoples of the world”; the American “pioneering instinct”; the “superiority of American institutions” over “some Latin American countries that are too weak and backward to manage themselves”; “commercial advantage”; and the modern requirement of “tropical products in increasing quantities”: all conspired to fuel U.S. expansionism.17

“revolutionarily yours”

/

189

This justification for the nascent U.S. empire was transparently weak and in many respects mirrored the apologies offered for the European empires, but it filled out an emerging twentieth-century liberal embrace of the United States as the new world leader. According to more-tortured logic that also mirrored European self-justification, U.S. expansionism was occasionally passed off as a moral obligation not only expected by rivals but also necessary to allay heightened military tension: If the United States allows financial operations to be carried out and obligations to be incurred in Latin America by its commercial rivals, protectorates and naval stations of its own will be the natural outcome; for these rivals look to the United States to guarantee the integrity of Latin-American states included under the general protection of the Monroe Doctrine.18

Europeans, we might translate, are really the parties responsible for U.S. imperialism. If not Europeans, then Latin Americans. Bowman recognized that relations with Latin America were troubled and unstable, acknowledged fears of gringo imperialism, but blamed the victim anyway: Were tropical America occupied by more progressive peoples than those which race, history and climate have conspired to develop there, economic relations might be built upon a basis of ordinary exchange, as between France and America. Instead there is a population locally incapable of protecting itself or of managing its affairs. . . . Only under the stimulus of necessity and through the influx of the agents and capital of temperate lands are the tropical products of weak countries made available. With the importation of aggressive men and capital into the tropics goes the importation first of economic then of political systems.19

To his credit, Bowman did not evade the central colonial issue of labor. While most economists in Europe and especially North America continued to treat the colonial and “backward” countries as vital for trade, Bowman early recognized a crucial element of uneven global development in the twentieth century. Such poor countries would not make significant markets for North American overproduction but would, rather, be sources of cheap labor. “Ultimately someone has to do the world’s manual labor,” he observed sharply, and while he anticipated that capital investment would flow toward the “tropical” and “frontier” lands, he was noncommittal about how much and how intensely. Anticipating too that U.S. capital would in all likelihood dominate, he also understood very early that the colonial system was drawing to an end,

190

/

“revolutionarily yours”

too unstable to prevail. Exploited “natives” would not remain quiescent, especially in the face of coercive exploitation, and the potential for interimperialist rivalry was constant. The “strong nations” indulged in a “struggle for trade privileges, raw materials, and strategic zones, with the prospect of war between them if they [could] not realize their commercial and political ambitions otherwise.” Radically different political arrangements and “international policies” were inevitable, and the relationship between “the capital of industrial states” and “the ultimate labor” of the tropics would have to be transformed.20 These were remarkably prescient conclusions in 1921. It was otherwise with the Russian Revolution. Socialism was a second issue that allowed only one opinion, and Bowman was nowhere more intemperate than as a critic of the revolution. He had nothing but vitriol for “the disease of Bolshevism,” thinking the revolution a “step backward to the barbarism of earlier times.” Like many in the Western ruling classes, he earnestly thought that a new Russian dark age was imminent: the “poison of Bolshevism” rendered Russian artists “spiritually dead,” he declared, and “for years to come” Russian artists and writers “will not produce a great play, a great novel, a great newspaper, a great university.” This prediction was, of course, spectacularly wrong, given the extraordinary cultural and artistic ferment in the Soviet Union in the early 1920s, and it was dropped from the 1928 edition, ironically just as Stalin’s clampdown foreclosed the artistic creativity.21 He was especially indignant about the aggressive internationalism of the revolution and the deliberate attempt by the new Soviet government to foment international working-class revolt. He may have shared with Lenin a sense of profound break in the historical geography of capitalist development, although he would hardly have put it that way, but rather than demolishing capitalism, an aghast Bowman sought its gradual liberalization. Mixed with Bowman’s vision of the world as a reorganized jigsaw puzzle of nation-states were other prejudices of his time and place. They were so intuitive to Bowman that the possibility of other perspectives never crossed his mind. With the Ratzelian influence on his geography increasingly applied to social concerns, a thread of social Darwinism mixed with a more American racial prejudice continues in The New World. The “white race” was in most respects, by virtue of its demonstrated achievements, superior to other peoples, he believed: this was simply a historical fact. His Paris experiences notwithstanding, strands of environmental determinism survived: The evolutionary struggle that marked the rise of mankind from the primitive to the present state will long continue. . . . This is a competitive world, and to the costs of ordinary competition must be added the cost of the supreme competition of war. . . .

“revolutionarily yours”

/

191

In South Africa, the problem is to keep the black within the limits of the broad coastal zone where the climatic conditions are more favorable to him than to the whites. . . . The black . . . is acclimated to low, hot countries with a high level of productiveness and need not feel cramped if he is kept in them.22

The New World did draw criticism abroad. Bowman’s Anglophilia notwithstanding, there was quiet grumbling in Britain that the book was “unduly pro-French,” while the French had no difficulty in recognizing it as proBritish. This delighted Bowman, who, in protesting that he had tried “not to be ‘pro’-anything,” took such contradictory complaints as proof of a successful liberalism. But it may have been the geographers in the vanquished states who had a more accurate sense of the book. Heartened by Bowman’s rapid departure from Paris after the House affair and by widely circulated rumors of his discontent with an “unjust peace,” German and Austrian geographers were bitterly disappointed that he nevertheless closed national ranks and, with the publication of The New World, provided a virtual geographical manifesto of and for the victors of World War I. If the League of Nations represented Wilson’s “attempt to apply the principles of the Monroe Doctrine to the world at large,”23 such a description applies even more forcefully to the entire project of constructing a liberal foreign policy that Wilson bequeathed. The New World provides one of the most comprehensive texts embodying this aspiration to a global Monroe Doctrine. Programmatic in places and political throughout, it lacks any explicitly elaborated body of political theory that Wilson, the ex–political science professor, might have provided, or that John Dewey, pragmatist and advocate of a trenchant political gradualism, would have offered. In its simple, affirmative accessibility, however, it was an influential marker of the rapidly developing liberal American foreign policy in the 1920s. The lack of any systematic discussion of the United States did not mean that the topic was completely ignored. In a remarkable passage, uncommonly self-reflective amid the almost messianic surety of Wilsonian liberalism, Bowman was pensive, even apprehensive, about the role the United States might come to play in international relations: United States . . . expansion has in recent years evoked a certain hostility among the Latin-American states, a hostility based on the assumption that their economic and political liberties were at stake; and the United States is therefore confronted with direct and powerful political opposition for the first time since it embarked upon its policy of expansion overseas. Here we have a problem of the first rank. For the people of the United States are as unknown to themselves as they are to the

192

/

“revolutionarily yours”

rest of the world. They do not know how they will take interference in their policy of expansion, for in that expansion they have not had, so far, a single misadventure. While such an experience has left them in an amiable attitude toward others and has given them a generous appreciation of the point of view of others, there is danger in that they do not know what fires of passion may be lighted by active opposition.24

It is difficult to read this passage today, in the light of the so-called American misadventure in Vietnam, without recognizing that Bowman’s insight about the historical situation of the United States was simultaneously a penetrating diagnosis of the dilemma of American liberalism on the cusp of empire. If ever there was a war in which a “moral” if violent imperialism contradicted the shibboleths of a self-justificatory liberalism, it was surely Vietnam. As this 1921 passage only insinuates, the contradiction between global power and the quest for economic empire on the one hand and on the other the moral universalisms that buttressed twentieth-century American liberalism from Wilson forward would eventually burst to the surface. But we are getting ahead of the story. Despite, or perhaps because of, socalled isolationism, Bowman’s own liberalism evolved throughout the 1920s, as did the institutions of a more and more recognizable liberal foreign policy. Largely marginal to the governmental power structure until 1933 and thereafter only haphazardly applied by Roosevelt until World War II, this liberal American foreign policy reached its zenith in the decades after 1940. Through the Council on Foreign Relations, Bowman was one of its a central architects.

liberal gradualism: the origins of the council on foreign relations Enthusiastic contacts with other delegations at Paris and disillusionment with the resulting peace as well as with American shortsightedness inspired the establishment of the Council on Foreign Relations. From the start it was restricted “to influential figures who shared an internationalist perspective.” Over eight decades it has undergone many transformations but remains a unique nongovernmental seedbed of U.S. foreign policy. The council represents the apex of liberal internationalism, famous for nurturing such leaders as Henry Kissinger and Cyrus Vance, Jimmy Carter and George Kennan, Zbignew Brzezinski and Nelson and David Rockefeller. Now as then, for all its devotion to democracy, “the mass of humanity is unwelcome at Council gatherings,” and its internationalism effortlessly meshes national with

“revolutionarily yours”

/

193

ruling-class interests. Described by Newsweek as the country’s “foreignpolicy establishment” and by an impassioned if modest defender simply as “an incubator of men and ideas,” the CFR “counts among its members probably more important names in American life than any other private group in the country.” In its first quarter century, Bowman was one of its most commanding figures, one of “the Council’s biggest fish,” according to chroniclers Leonard and Mark Silk.25 Bowman’s “philosophy of gradual change” was a trademark of the new liberal foreign policy espoused by the council. It sought to break with the stodgy, nineteenth-century conservative nationalism that retreated into an ideological isolationism in the 1920s but was even more opposed to the rising clamor for revolutionary change. More than anything else, twentiethcentury American liberalism developed as a prophylactic against revolutionary socialism, bending traditional eighteenth-century liberalism to the absorption of new calls for social egalitarianism. As one wealthy, conservative sponsor told the CFR’s first president, he was contributing only because it was his most earnest hope that the organization would stem the apparent slide into socialism.26 The new liberal internationalism combined a commitment to rational policy planning with an ad hoc, case-by-case approach to political geographic problems. “The Council on Foreign Relations aims to provide a continuous conference on the international aspects of American political, economic and financial problems,” it declared in its founding handbook. “It simply is a group of men interested in spreading a knowledge of international relations, and, in particular, in developing a reasoned American foreign policy.” As well as informing public leaders of the results of their ruminations, the council members aspired to act as something of a “contact bazaar,” where prominent men (and occasional women) in various walks of life could meet with each other as well as with worthy foreign dignitaries and experts when they visited New York.27 It was the perfect vehicle for Bowman’s foreign policy aspirations. The council’s organization dates back to Paris, where the U.S. advisers, however influential on some issues, were often frustrated by what they saw as Wilson’s periodic vigilante decision making. Without consulting his advisers, he would abruptly change course in the middle of negotiations, abandoning previous principles and his advisers with them. In other delegations, too, the advisers felt that their knowledge of world affairs was not effectively used, in part because their political leaders felt constrained by the dictates of public opinion at home. Out of this frustration grew a series of in-

194

/

“revolutionarily yours”

formal meetings between U.S. and British advisers from which the idea of an Anglo-American international affairs organization was hatched. On the U.S. side, the principals included Whitney Shepardson, a lawyer, George Louis Beer, the African historian on the Inquiry, General Tasker Bliss, one of the U.S. delegates at the conference, Harvard scholar Archibald Coolidge, Columbia historian James Shotwell, and Thomas W. Lamont, a Morgan banking partner. Along with an informal group of their British counterparts, these men arranged to have a more formal dinner for members of both delegations when the conference began to dissipate. On 30 May 1919 at the Majestic Hotel, where the British delegation was housed, the fifty guests listened as Lord Robert Cecil summarized the widespread frustration. “There is no single person in this room,” he intoned, “who is not disappointed with the terms we have drafted. Yet England and America have got all that they want, and more: far more.” The Oxford historian Lionel Curtis argued that public opinion had inhibited the conditions of the peace treaty, and therefore it was the group’s job to set about changing that opinion: “public opinion must be led along the right path,” and this was “the job of a few men in real contact with the facts.” To orchestrate this operation, Curtis proposed an international research body “like the Royal Geographic Society.” The British Saturday Review announced the formation of this novel venture by labeling it “the revolt of the Peace makers against the Peace.”28 Having sailed for New York earlier in May, Bowman missed the Majestic dinner but became involved again at home. The original plan did not fare well. While the Royal Institute of International Affairs, the British branch, was launched with much pomp and considerable ceremony, the American branch “languished for a year from the fall of 1919.” No one took responsibility for the fledgling group, and political conditions in the United States made an international institute with national branches untenable. With the virulent campaign against the treaty, the League of Nations, and Wilson himself, the internationalist agenda faced an uphill battle, a losing one, felt a despondent Bowman in 1920. Certainly a strong internationalist sentiment remained, but it was a question of finding the appropriate political vehicle—one with some distance from the events of Paris, Wilson, and an exclusive association with the Democrats—for advancing the plan for international cooperation. In the end, the council’s founders settled for internationalism in substance if not in form. A distinguished group of internationalist lawyers and bankers led by the unimpeachable Elihu Root had been meeting as a dinner club since 1918 for the purpose of discussing international affairs. Root had

“revolutionarily yours”

/

195

been McKinley’s secretary of war and Teddy Roosevelt’s secretary of state, and in 1912 he won the Nobel Peace Prize in recognition of both his negotiated peace with Japan and his inspiration for that cornerstone of the Monroe Doctrine, the Platt Amendment.29 Root’s dinner club represented the vanguard of enlightened liberal internationalism on Wall Street. Bowman and Shepardson proposed a merger with the more academic veterans from Paris, and after July 1921 the new group, now an auspicious combination of academics, journalists, politicians, bankers, capitalists, and lawyers, all “men of influence,” adopted the name of Root’s dinner club and incorporated as the Council on Foreign Relations. “The preponderance of its members . . . came from the New York business community,” according to the Silks, “but the academics and government officials provided enough of a counterbalance to prevent its being just a Wall Street gentlemen’s club.” It was a “fruitful association,” Bowman felt. The council retained close connections with its British counterpart, the Royal Institute of International Affairs, popularly known by the name of the building it inhabited— Chatham House—but was from the start a wholly American organization.30 Whatever its modest self-description, the council’s ambition was to establish the fulcrum of ideas around which “reasonable” and informed public opinion would revolve. Although differences of opinion on specific points were commonplace—indeed within the bounds of reasonableness they were genuinely welcomed—there was general agreement that peace and international stability were the primary desiderata of the new world. The council was not against change, seeing certain kinds of change as its raison d’être, but council members treated nonpeaceful and cataclysmic change as horrifyingly worse than no change at all. They constantly had to counter the rising clamor of isolationism that gripped political debate on foreign policy for the next two decades. “We have to have international relations,” Bowman explained to a French colleague, “and all this silly talk about our staying out of leagues, alliances, etc., etc., with its plain implication that we are going to tell the rest of the world to go to thunder whenever we want to has got to be checked or we will be in the same situation in which Germany found herself at the beginning of the war.” He was more measured to the British geographer Sir John Scott Keltie. “When we were small and undeveloped we could pursue a policy of isolation, now we can no longer pursue such a policy.” The problem lay in the fact that the United States did not yet know how to “frame a suitable substitute.” Framing a substitute was precisely the task that Bowman and the rest of the council set for themselves, and in so doing they would eventually realize their most fundamental goal—to “change the opinion of our government.”31

196

/

“revolutionarily yours”

The council’s first major question was how to convey its perspective to other “men of influence,” given that only a select few would be privy to closed council gatherings. In early 1922 Bowman conferred with Edwin F. Gay, also a founding director of the council, Harvard economic historian, and later dean of the Business School. A journal of world affairs, they decided, was the most appropriate vehicle for their purpose. It would be “the best in the world,” a scholarly yet accessible review of world events. Its authors would not be academics alone but would come from a range of professions and would include statesmen. They approached Near East historian Archibald Coolidge, already associated with the council, and asked him to edit the journal. Coolidge was in the Inquiry, worked with Gay and Bowman in Paris, and had attended the 1919 Majestic dinner. But he was reluctant to sign up. After pressure from his Harvard colleague Gay, currently on leave to revamp Thomas Lamont’s New York Evening Post, Coolidge agreed to serve until a younger man based in New York could be found. At about the same time, they hired Hamilton Fish Armstrong, also a veteran of Paris, now working as a reporter on Gay’s Post, as executive secretary of the council. Bowman and Gay presented their plan to the board of directors of the council and quickly secured sufficient funds to guarantee publication of Foreign Affairs for five years. With Bowman on the editorial advisory board, the first issue appeared in September 1922, and, unlike its Chatham House counterpart, which concentrated on the British Empire, it was more truly global in scope and actively sought articles from prominent foreigners. While the editors of Foreign Affairs “saw themselves as the models of impartiality,” in the words of historian Robert Schulzinger, “no reader could be fooled into thinking that the journal was anything other than a plea for a forward United States foreign policy, interested in exploiting the world’s natural resources and putting affairs in Washington in the hands of serene, dispassionate experts who, unlike the public at large, knew what they were doing.” The journal “advocated a ferocious form of Wilson’s missionary diplomacy,” Schulzinger added, and it was applied around the globe. Mackinder had already predicted that “every explosion of social forces, instead of being dissipated” in local “unknown space” would now be “sharply re-echoed from the far side of the globe,” and in the pages of Foreign Affairs, consideration of world powers was mixed with discussion of the most obscure regions if there was even the mildest threat that political instability would re-echo anywhere. In its appeal to a narrow cognoscenti, the journal’s attention to enigmatic places in the far corners of the earth made it unique but also “one of the dullest magazines in the world.”32 As in Bowman’s New World, scant attention to domestic events in the United States

“revolutionarily yours”

/

197

contrasted with the global coverage. The gulf between domestic and foreign affairs was protected in an emerging liberal foreign policy, which in this respect simply inverted the isolationist worldview. In the 1920s and 1930s, even after Roosevelt’s election, foreign affairs were dominated by isolationist concerns and continued demands for international retrenchment. In reality, of course, the U.S. military was heavily involved abroad during this period; isolationism may have been an actuality regarding military involvement in Europe, but it hardly pertained in the Americas. The last U.S. combat troops had left Europe in late 1919 after their final assignment in Russia, but major involvement throughout Central America continued apace. Troops were deployed in Nicaragua (1912–15 and 1926–33), Haiti (1914–34), the Dominican Republic (1916–24), Cuba (1917–23), Panama (1918), Honduras (1919, 1924), and El Salvador (1932). Council cofounder Elihu Root, first as secretary of war, then as secretary of state, had actively pursued earlier U.S. military interventions in the Caribbean, and the council was not irrevocably opposed, but this kind of mopping up on the coattails of the Monroe Doctrine was not the kind of international intervention it had in mind. For most CFR members, the marines represented a last resort and, not unlike their isolationist opponents, they skirted these skirmishes and invasions in comparative silence while focusing on the larger issues of economic development in Latin America. Bowman made light of these military interventions as not only justified to maintain order but necessary to protect U.S. and even European economic interests. The council’s distinguished profile guaranteed that it would attract equally prominent speakers, participants, and allies. Foreign Affairs quickly became the emblem of a thoughtful foreign policy for elite internationalists and a powerful advertisement for the council. But its original plan had a second goal. In addition to providing a forum for discussion and debate with well-placed outsiders, the council embarked on a program of selfeducation, restricted to members only, aimed at developing sustainable foreign policy positions. Meeting in study groups, the members’ deliberations, memoranda, and reports were confidential. The intention behind the research groups and their modus operandi emanated from their Paris roots. The thinking was that the United States should never again be so unprepared in confronting a situation like the peace conference. Bowman’s 1921 exhortation to the new Republican secretary of state that a vibrant “Division of Intelligence” be established in the State Department went unheeded,33 and so the council fashioned itself as a private surrogate of such a division—a “continuous foreign policy conference” hinged around the study groups.

198

/

“revolutionarily yours”

The study groups quickly became the backbone of the council. They began in January 1923 with ten to twenty members each but soon grew. Since most of these New York gentlemen were in the habit of retreating to their New England homes for the summer, they followed an academic schedule, holding regular (no more than monthly) meetings between September and May. Before the council obtained its first building, on East 65th Street, most of the meetings were held at the Harvard Club in Manhattan, where, over dinner, participants would discuss specific thematic or regional issues relevant to American foreign policy. Transcripts of the discussions would be circulated and final reports prepared for the membership. With an exaggerated sense of secrecy, the first three groups were labeled simply by letter. Group A considered postwar financial problems, including debt and reparations; group B addressed the situation in Russia and assessed the dangers of Bolshevism; group C undertook a more general investigation of the “traditions and recent practice of American diplomacy” in light of the New World status of the United States. In the first ten years, Bowman was one of the most active participants in council study groups. He and Coolidge chaired group B on Russia and Bolshevism. Bowman chaired the inaugural meeting, whose invited speaker brought an Old World rather than a New World feel. Full mustachioed and with a chest of medals, Bowman’s compatriot in Paris, the austere General Tasker Bliss, informed the assembled members that, as a whole, Russia “was uncivilized.” The “higher types” were “destroyed” in the revolution, and the proper aims of American policy toward Russia were the “reconstruction of economic life” and the “restoration of exchange.” The tone was decidedly illiberal, but the message invoked a recurring concern in the council, namely, that the entire globe should, by right, be open for economic intercourse. Bliss’s comments struck enough of a chord that they were faithfully reiterated in the group B annual report. Also summarized there were Bowman’s somewhat tangential ideas on the “Mohammedan” world and its relationship to events in Russia and Central Europe, the topic of the group’s third meeting. But not all the members were as ideologically obdurate as old Bliss or even Bowman, and the final report that Bowman helped compile recognized the causes of the revolution, conceded that the Bolsheviks were in firm control, and endorsed current U.S. policy as “stated in the formula of moral trusteeship to see that the patrimony of the Russian people is preserved.” In a geopolitical echo from The New World, it was also concluded that the “new free nations of eastern central Europe” would “form the best barrier against Bolshevism.” But not all council members were so

“revolutionarily yours”

/

199

resigned that Russia was lost to capitalist exploitation. An executive of International General Electric listed a number of European and U.S. firms that were pursuing or had concluded agreements with the new government to operate in or trade with the USSR, and he seemed much more sanguine about future foreign capital investment there.34 The next season saw a new and more ambitious menu of study groups. Bowman proposed and chaired a study group investigating the relations between the United States and the Caribbean countries. But with the Monroe Doctrine still hanging over discussions of the region, this group’s conclusions were pedestrian, and for a subsequent season (1925–26), Bowman suggested the group focus on a broader study of relations with Latin America, paralleling the focus of the final chapter of The New World. Also chaired initially by Bowman, this revised group shifted toward an economic focus on “investment policy in Central America and its bearing on our relations with Central and South America.”35 Other groups in which Bowman participated directly included the Near Eastern study group (which also included Hamilton Fish Armstrong and Allen Dulles, who in the 1950s graduated from the council to the directorship of the CIA), the group on Canadian-American relations, one on Philippine independence, another on the pros and cons of national self-sufficiency (the council’s answer to colonialism), and the mineral group, which Bowman convinced to examine U.S. mineral interests in Latin America. Every year until 1935, Bowman participated in at least one group every season, sometimes as many as three. Few other members had such a pervasive presence in the early years. One other group is of special interest. The group studying AngloAmerican relations clearly exemplified the council’s pro-British prejudice. As early as the Paris discussions, participants in the proposed international institute were defensive about the council’s exclusivity as a British-American affair. With a “common language and political tradition,” the United States and Britain were thought to be “spontaneous” allies. Participants in the Majestic dinner especially lamented the unfortunate but necessary omission of France (particularly since they were meeting on French soil), but the BritishAmerican link was just too strong to be diluted by the presence of others. It ratified powerfully the strategy of many U.S. capitalists who, since the 1890s, had broadly allied themselves with British expansionism. Now in 1928, the aim of the council’s Anglo-American study group was “to see how the attitudes of the two countries could be harmonized” in military, economic, and political affairs. In their founding vision for the council, “Gay, Bowman and Shepardson pursued a goal” that had long “excited upper-class Anglophiles in the United States,” comments Schulzinger, namely, “an informal entente with

200

/

“revolutionarily yours”

Great Britain,” and the Anglo-American study group attracted a disproportionate share of council bigwigs: Armstrong, Allen Dulles, Colonel House, Whitney Shepardson, Walter Lippmann, and James Shotwell, as well as Bowman. Whereas in The New World Bowman’s anglophilia was somewhat tempered by an effort to seem “prejudice-free,” in the council’s deliberations it achieved full voice. The Anglo-American group continued through several seasons, and its 1929 report focusing on cooperation between the British and American navies had significant diplomatic influence, swaying the 1930 naval negotiations in London between Britain and the United States.36 With Foreign Affairs firmly established and the study groups enthusiastically churning out American intelligence, the council was ready to expand its activities further in 1927. It began to sponsor and publish larger research studies, some but not all emanating from the study groups. Among the works published was Bowman’s own collection Limits of Land Settlement. More representative, perhaps, were Can We Be Neutral? (by Allen Dulles and Hamilton Fish Armstrong), Raw Materials in Peace and War (by Eugene Staley), and International Security (by Philip Jessup). Intriguing and quite revealing of the council’s approach was The Foreign Policy of the Powers, with articles by authors from seven powerful nations, including Germany. Karl Radek, a Polish revolutionary–turned–Bolshevik leader, appeared alongside John W. Davis, alumnus of Paris, founding member and first president of the CFR, Democratic presidential candidate in 1924, and chief counsel to J. P. Morgan and Company. Despite its elite membership and patronage, the Council on Foreign Relations did not immediately walk into the favored circles of foreign policy arbiters. Although there were early instances of council influence, the 1920s and early 1930s were largely spent preparing the foundations for success. Council members were not yet brought into the State Department in any meaningful way, but that did not stop them from bringing the State Department to New York once in a while. According to their own boast, every secretary of state holding office from 1921 to 1944 made an address “of historic significance” before the council. Bowman was appointed vice president of the council in the late 1940s.

liberalism achieved: “ gradual revolutionism ” Despite its impeccable establishment pedigree, the Council on Foreign Relations became by the 1970s such a bastion of liberal foreign policy that among right-wing extremists, who know no difference between liberal capitalists and socialist revolutionaries, it was targeted as the vanguard of the

“revolutionarily yours”

/

201

“communist conspiracy.” The very willingness to engage in conversation with Karl Radek or American union leaders was conceived as a symptomatic betrayal. Such a visceral, paranoid nationalism was not a product of the nineteenth century, when America’s limited international involvements begged no such reaction, but a direct response to the emergence of a wholly new foreign policy liberalism in the United States after World War I. This is not to embrace the self-justification of Bowman and other early liberal internationalists that the United States in the nineteenth century truly was isolationist; the Monroe Doctrine is only the most forceful repudiation of that self-justifying claim. Nor is it to suggest that the lines between liberal internationalists and conservative nationalists were generically clear and fully demarcated. Such different figures as Wilson and Bliss shared much more than a violent antipathy to Bolshevism in the early 1920s. As the council evolved in the 1920s and 1930s, its liberal vision crystallized as a central inspiration behind a demonstrably new force in U.S. foreign policy. Bowman began as one of the more conservative members of the CFR, but his personal liberalism also crystallized in conjunction with that of the council. Some of the hard political edge of Paris seems to have been worn down, and by the end of the 1920s he was distinctly more sanguine about the possibilities for peaceful and fruitful international relations. If, as we have seen, his South American experiences provided a first language for his liberalism, the Council on Foreign Relations was the vehicle for maturing that vision and injecting it into U.S. foreign policy. A comparison of the first edition of The New World in 1921 and the fourth edition seven years later highlights this evolving liberalism. Response to the Russian Revolution was a lightning rod of the new liberal foreign policy, and it is hardly surprising that Bowman’s attitude toward Russia should have changed in the 1920s. In Russia itself the initial revolutionary impulse faded in the late 1920s at the hands of an increasingly conservative bureaucracy; the brief flowering of extravagantly democratic institutions and methods was over; the artistic and creative ferment of the early 1920s ran out of raw material; Trotsky was expelled, and the remainder of the Left Opposition faced show trials that augured badly; Stalin had consolidated control. The year 1929 brought the first five-year plan and forced collectivization of the peasants. A new tone of magnanimity now replaced Bowman’s harsh words of 1921. The Russian people remained “terrorized,” he believed, but in 1928 he took pains to emphasize the earlier terror of the tsar as a precursor of and in part explanation for the revolution. Where he talks of a “Red Terror,” he is quick to compare it with the terror of the French Revolution, the outcome of which, if not its details, he broadly supported, his preference for gradual-

202

/

“revolutionarily yours”

ism notwithstanding. Especially laudable, “the Russian leaders have learned to make concessions.” He acknowledges explicitly that whatever the rhetoric of the Russian government about a communist international and the internationalization of revolution, this is unrealistic. Stalin was at least a “realist,” unlike the harmful and hopeless Left Opposition. Two developments, therefore, recommended the USSR for a more relaxed liberal magnanimity by the late 1920s: it was no longer conceived as a threat to the United States, which had in the meantime suppressed its own socialist movements, and if it was not exactly a mecca for capital investment, it was at least stable. Equally noteworthy, Bowman’s treatment of colonized and dependent territories is more sympathetic in the fourth edition. He stresses that the colonies are “not only a market place but also a field for the exploitation of labor”—a reservoir of cheap labor—and that although there may be some mutual benefit, the laborer remains “a good piece of property.” So long, he says, as the laborer “does not see his real economic relationships he will not complain.” But when “he sees his true economic position he wishes to lighten political control, in order to secure a still greater share of the economic benefits which his labor helps to create.” Economic investment is no guarantor of real development, Bowman concedes, and he frets over the adverse effects of increased U.S. capital investment in Latin America. This economic invasion “set up all sorts of complex reactions. . . . If the people own less and less of the land it is only a question of time until they take it back by force. . . . In the resulting revolution the foreigner loses like the native.” The “American ‘invasion’ of Mexico by capital” brought some sad results for the Mexican people, he declares, and should not be repeated in the same fashion in other countries. International competition must lead either to “war or to a pooling and rationing system” with respect to vital resources; the “need of international cooperation” is ever more acute.37 This was a forward-looking liberalism indeed. And although he never flinched in his support of American expansionism, one can appreciate that his concessions to the deleterious effects of American capital investment might have threatened a narrowly conceived identification of capital and nationalism. Bowman’s confidential comments to the council’s mineral group offer a candid class analysis of conditions: Mineral development in Chile means a division of benefits between Chileans and the investing capitalist. It may be a 50–50 division, but it will be a division; and the division will not be between the lower social classes and the foreigner but between the small controlling class at the top and the foreigner. I would lay this down as a general proposition that is essentially sound, in spite of the fact that the 50-50 division re-

“revolutionarily yours”

/

203

ferred to above is measured in part in terms of wages paid to workmen. It is not the wages paid to him but who gets the wages in the end and what will the wages buy. I can see in Chile no relative economic change between the classes as the result of mineral development.38

This was scathing stuff about class exploitation, suggesting that the notorious conditions Bowman witnessed in Latin America two decades earlier had an enduring, if delayed, effect. Even at the apex of his liberalism, however, he resolutely avoided any kind of generalization about capital and class in the larger world. It was precisely in the spirit of CFR liberalism that such difficult admissions could, indeed should, be delivered behind closed doors, if the council elite were truly to understand the world they wished to guide. The same revelations publicly espoused suddenly turned into dangerous weapons of a very different sort. The acme of Bowman’s foreign policy liberalism came in the late 1920s and the early 1930s and received its most sustained written form in the short monograph International Relations, published in 1930. The bitter defeats of a decade earlier were now well digested, and, flush with hope about peaceful international relations in the future, he reviews the record of the past decade. He applauds the international pacts of the 1920s (from the Four Powers Treaty on the Pacific of 1922 to the 1928 Kellogg-Briand Pact), strikes an optimistic note about the League of Nations, and rehabilitates Wilson. He enthuses that these are all portents of a new diplomacy, which “instead of being a call to arms” are a “call to the conference table.” “Few are the difficulties that cannot be solved by men pledged in advance to approach consultation in a spirit of good will.” Nor are these narrow or merely personal hopes. They are ideas “born on the battlefields,” where millions saw the stupidity of war, “ideas that moved men on a vast scale to attempt to make an end to the causes of war.” There has been “a great clearing out of the diplomatic docket,” he concluded. Diplomacy was no longer a “continuation in another form of the struggle at arms,” and although the “new diplomacy does not mean that human nature has been fundamentally altered” nor war definitively banished, the world war sobered people into “a new willingness” to seek peaceful solutions to international problems: It is now the general policy to be on the lookout for danger spots and diplomats are asked to inform their governments, not for the purpose of secret advantage but for the purpose of friendly consultation. Men of faith will see that such consultation leads to a better state of things no matter what the cynics may say and no matter how often men stray from the path of idealism.39

204

/

“revolutionarily yours”

In this proclamatory form, Bowman’s mature liberalism was wrapped in a fondant of idealism that oozed through the sentences of his numerous lectures and addresses of the period. With increasing distance from the war, yet with continued military involvement in Central America and the Caribbean, the United States, it seemed, could achieve anything with its good intentions—and little prevented Bowman’s idealism from devolving into wishful thinking. In a moment of supreme optimism of the sort that prompted European dismissals of twentieth-century American liberalism as naive, Bowman even seemed to believe that the world war between the “merchant empires” of Germany and Britain could have been averted “by peaceful trade agreements sincerely made.”40 If on the eve of the Great Depression and with Hitler’s accession to power less than three years away, these hopes seem lachrymose, it should be remembered that the isolationist domination of public debate took a heavy ideological toll and that Herbert Hoover’s assumption of the presidency in 1929 unleashed an extraordinary wave of pent-up expectation among the emerging liberal middle class. It would be a mistake to write off Bowman’s optimism in this period as an untrammeled idealism overriding a hard-learned realism. This misses the point. It is not clear to what extent he believed his own more unqualified rhetorical flights of fancy; he certainly enjoyed the expedience of shuttling between idealist and realist orations in justifying a comfortable range of political positions. But likewise it would be a mistake to conflate his liberalism and idealism. Perhaps encouraged by the congenital optimism of the Roaring Twenties—although too staid to have participated in much if any of the revelry—Bowman carried his idealism profoundly beyond the liberal trajectory that he had embarked on at Paris. It was about to take a sound beating in the 1930s, but it was precisely his refusal to generalize about the causes and connections of events (as opposed to their solutions) that propelled his idealism to such shrill, even desperate, extents. Given the council’s global design and concern with detail, it is hardly surprising that a geographer such as Bowman played such a crucial role. He brought a propensity to guide careful geographical surveys of political conditions around the world, directing the work of the CFR’s pivotal research committee long before formally assuming its chairmanship in 1933.41 More surprising than his inclusion in the council is the lack of other geographers. Roland Redmond, a New York lawyer and a councillor and president of the AGS from the 1920s to the 1940s, contributed peripherally, and Columbia University geographer John Orchard as well as Johns Hopkins’s Owen Lattimore were active at the margins. But Bowman seems to have made no ef-

“revolutionarily yours”

/

205

fort to recruit geographers to the council, preferring to keep it largely his own terrain. And he got a lot out of it. The council was his primary political bridge from World War I to World War II; it did not simply convey him from one point to another but elevated him, and for all of his proselytizing about the indispensability of geography, he did not care to share the ride with others of his profession. By the 1920s, Bowman was given to “pure expressions of the establishment mind”42—albeit an emerging liberal establishment quite opposed to the crusty conservatism of the patrician class. He was in every sense an activist for a new foreign policy. Evolutionism was fine, but there were times when it was not enough and definitive change had to be orchestrated, and this was one of them. He was no mere stooge for the capitalist class, either. The most definitive moment of his emerging liberalism, and an equally definitive moment for the council, may have come in 1923 when he grasped the reins of an internal dispute in the still tender council, a dispute that threatened to split Wall Street bankers from academics and wreck the entire enterprise. The issue went to the heart of the council’s political conception of itself, involving free speech and political difference. In late 1922, a young Hamilton Fish Armstrong, recently appointed the CFR’s executive director and the apprentice editor working with Coolidge on Foreign Affairs, invited the Republican senator from Iowa, Smith Wildman Brookhart, to address the council. Armstrong went on to become a council stalwart, editing the journal into the 1970s, but the Brookhart invite almost derailed his CFR career at the start. An isolationist, Brookhart had little use for the federal government or for internationalism, and to “men of substance,” he was crude. These “farmer radicals” may have begun to grasp an understanding of foreign policy, having realized the importance of foreign markets and figured out “which side their bread is buttered on,” argued CFR director and Morgan banking partner Russell Leffingwell, but he vehemently rejected Armstrong’s invitation to give them a forum at the council. Armstrong’s, Bowman’s, and Shepardson’s internationalism was too activist and too heartfelt to jettison interested farmers or to let Wall Street snobbery prevail. The purpose of inviting Brookhart was not only to air his indecorously loud views, they claimed, but also to permit a good giveand-take on the issue of farming and foreign policy: “It is important to take this opportunity to educate him and refute some of his views,” Armstrong responded to Leffingwell. Other Wall Streeters on the council lined up to support Leffingwell, often in quite undiplomatic terms. Particularly aggressive was Paul Warburg, an investment banker, founding director of the council, and perhaps the most influential remaining member of the initial

206

/

“revolutionarily yours”

group organized by Elihu Root. He admitted to “cold ‘shivers’” at the idea of the council providing a platform for a demagogue such as Brookhart. Another member, corresponding with Warburg, threatened to resign if such an “un-American” invitation were carried through.43 But Armstrong also received strong support, and the Brookhart meeting was held as scheduled. Bowman was the most combative opponent of the Wall Street “asses,” as he put it, and while the incident eventually passed without significant organizational damage—Warburg remained a director for another decade, and Leffingwell became CFR president in the 1940s— Bowman’s defense of the invitation to Brookhart provides an extraordinary statement of the vision that came to guide the council. It was an ineffable expression of the new liberal establishment. Serious change, Bowman now recognized, was a matter of survival, but to combat international socialism, that change had to be controlled, wholly internal to a strengthened capitalist social system. Even as he still distanced himself from domestic “liberals,” he came to express a central feature of liberal American foreign policy in the mid-twentieth century. “What has Wall Street to gain from refusing to hear even a demagogue?” Bowman fumed. “Certainly if he is a dangerous demagogue we ought all the more to hear him in order to discover why he is dangerous and just how dangerous he is.” These Wall Streeters’ views are just the sort that the Liberals everywhere are so terribly anxious to obtain for exploitation. It is the way they think conservative capitalists behave. Well, here we see that they do behave that way! . . . In a sense the whole world is in revolt all the time. All that we care about is that it shall be a thoughtful revolt and a gradual one. In that sense, I am Always revolutionarily yours, Isaiah Bowman44

Gradual revolutionism precisely expresses the goal of the new liberal internationalism, and Bowman was one of its most formative influences. If the Council on Foreign Relations had to wait until the crucible of the next war before its liberal foreign policy moved to Washington, the reward justified the wait. In the meantime, U.S. foreign policy was being hatched as a quintessentially liberal idea. In its genesis, twentieth-century U.S. liberalism was not fundamentally opposed to the inherited conservatism it superseded. It sought many of the same results, albeit by different methods. Liberalism’s opposition to socialism and the working class was clear from the start, for

“revolutionarily yours”

/

207

example, and Wilson’s viciously repressive Palmer raids and the Red Scare of 1919–20—coming only months after U.S. troops landed in Russia—suggest it was a liberalism pregnant with international intent, displaying considerable continuity between domestic and international politics. Thereafter, however, U.S. liberalism diverged from that of Europe and the British Commonwealth. The latter traditions remained conservative in deference to their eighteenth-century roots, whereas the liberalism of the American Century grew to fill a more modern purpose. If in Europe socialist movements emerged in the first years of the century as clear alternatives to liberalism, in the United States a revitalized domestic liberalism evolved as the primary rhetorical bulwark against socialism. Twentieth-century U.S. liberalism, unlike its European counterparts, bent significantly to the left, especially on domestic questions. It countered socialism by co-opting and absorbing many of its social concerns. Bowman’s gradual revolutionism, his softening on the Soviet Union in the 1920s, and recognition of exploitation are precise expressions of this distinctively American liberalism of and for the twentieth century.

PART III THE EMPIRE AT HOME: SCIENCE AND POLITICS

8 “THE GEOGRAPHY OF INTERNAL AFFAIRS”: PIONEER SETTLEMENT AS NATIONAL ECONOMIC DEVELOPMENT

Frederick Jackson Turner’s famous deployment of 1890 census data enshrined the belief that the frontier in the United States was gone. More important, it crystallized a national myth that the western frontier involved the defining experience in “American” history. This was ominous. If democracy and national spirit could no longer be forged anew in the combined geography, economics, history, and idealism of western expansion, Turner worried, where and how could continued expansion and renewal be accomplished? This sense of national angst that found expression in Turner’s historical geography was equally evident in the national economy of the 1890s. The success of late-nineteenth-century industrial capitalism in the United States had produced an unprecedented economic surplus for which profitable outlets were increasingly scarce. Industrial profits were declining, and unemployment was rising, and the 1893 financial collapse and economic crisis coincided with the publication of Turner’s frontier thesis. The urban working classes were angrier, more organized, and more militant than at any time throughout the fading century, and declining agricultural prices led to heightened agitation and organization on farms as well, especially in the recently settled lands of the upper Midwest and the plains. If in some quarters the crisis of the urban social economy only sharpened the sense of closure of and nostalgia for a lost frontier, the agricultural crisis of the 1890s thwarted any easy appeal to rural redemption. Even as it glorified the past, Turner’s thesis deeply questioned the future. The implications were seri-

212

/

“the geography of internal affairs”

ous: the United States was experiencing not simply the end of national geographical expansion but a circumscribed national destiny. Turner understood that the internalized spaces of the republic, especially the cities, had become new sites of Americanization and international “assimilation,” but the frontier thesis also embodied a more geographical solution to the uncertain future. Why would or should American expansionism obey the constraints imposed by national territorial boundaries? He predicted instead that “American energy will continually demand a wider field of exercise.” Five years after Turner’s dramatic announcement, the U.S. gunboats sailing into the harbors of Manila and Havana seemed to consummate his solution and a new era of political internationalism. Little wonder that such desperate ambition was attached to the “lovely little war.” To the extent that Turner’s ostensibly domestic thesis provided a vital rationale for U.S. foreign involvements from the 1890s until at least the 1920s, it posited a continued reverberation not simply between the eastern cities and the western plains but also between the international and intranational geographies of commerce pursued by the solidifying nation-state.1 Isaiah Bowman’s early career mirrored the expansionist momentum of the turn of the century. When Turner announced the end of the frontier, Bowman was a fourteen-year-old working the land in a region separated from frontier life by little more than a generation. Much of Michigan’s Upper Peninsula, a mere two hundred miles north of Brown City, still comprised original forest, yet to be clear-cut. If his organization of a local militia in 1898 was the first palpable sign of his own international concerns, these were reaffirmed by his subsequent career: conditional scientific conquest in South America, the international ambition of the Inquiry, the heady politics of Paris, and the liberal American globalism of the Council on Foreign Relations. The expanding scale of his personal involvements interwove neatly with the expansion of American global ambition. In the 1920s and 1930s, however, he also turned his attention to domestic matters. This was unquestionably a retreat. Like all Wilsonian internationalists in this period, he would much rather have been running a powerful League of Nations in Geneva or organizing foreign intelligence in Washington. With foreign affairs largely blocked to his ambition after 1921, he turned to the intersection of science and politics. He rose to the presidency of the Association of American Geographers (AAG), the directorship of the Science Advisory Board, and chairmanship of the National Academy of Science’s research wing, the National Research Council. Juggling the American Geographical Society, the Council on Foreign Relations, and national leadership in science, Bowman also turned back toward geographical

“the geography of internal affairs”

/

213

research. His focus was the same frontier that Turner, three decades earlier, had so eloquently pronounced to be gone, the empire at home. Bowman’s interest in “pioneering” belts and frontier settlement was certainly personal. Piqued by a hard farming childhood, it was sharpened by his 1905 summer fieldwork in Kansas and Oklahoma for the U.S. Geological Survey.2 Having reported conditions of land settlement in northern Chile in 1913, he was deeply impressed by the stubborn retention of frontier conditions in regions that were no longer strictly on the margins of new settlement.3 But it was not until the early 1920s that he framed these questions of frontier settlement and pioneer life as discrete subjects of scientific research. His focus remained international, but his research vision was largely derived from the North American experience, especially that of the United States. In contrast with Turner, who was obviously an influence, Bowman sought not to reveal some large historical experience in relation to a “national spirit” but to explicate the relationship between human settlement and the land under extreme environmental conditions. He came to challenge Turner directly, became involved in a terse correspondence with the aging historian, and eventually proposed a corollary to the frontier thesis. But the true significance of Bowman’s research on frontiers and pioneer belts goes much deeper. Pioneering, the fading frontier, and marginal land settlement were, by any measure, unlikely subjects of geographical research in an age of rapid urban and suburban growth, industrial expansion, and the zeitgeist of the Roaring Twenties. Hollywood filled the movie screens; midwesterners were far more concerned with the gangsters tearing up Chicago than with frontier living; and flappers and jazz singers owned the streets and clubs of Harlem across Broadway from Bowman’s AGS office. The end of frontier was such gospel that the question of the frontier had faded from view. Federal reclamation projects aimed at settling vast tracts of marginal land in the West were failing, losing population. Social science colleagues puzzled over Bowman’s focus on the frontier, and although this work connected to an emerging focus on “settlement geography,” it was tangential to most geographers’ concerns.4 It was just as unlikely a project for Bowman personally, having very little immediate connection to his existing expertise in physical and political geography. And yet there was a contemporary rationale for this work that he himself expressed with tantalizing if cryptic incompleteness. As he put it in a 1934 radio address on “applied geography,” his attention had turned from the largely dormant foreign policy field to the vital “geography of internal affairs.”5 However vaguely, Bowman was anticipating that as the political geography of global affairs would be reworked at the behest of a rising Ameri-

214

/

“the geography of internal affairs”

can globalism, the “geography of internal affairs” would experience a commensurate reworking. The implied contrast between metropolitan centers and still-developing frontiers anticipates a concern with uneven geographical development, a concern that did not gain the attention of the social sciences until four or five decades later but that has everything to do with the closure of frontiers.6 Bowman’s frontier-pioneer research does little more than gesture in that direction. Needless to say, a worked-out theory of the geography of capitalist expansion and crisis across different scales was the furthest thing from his mind; nor did he offer a vista of the dense connections across these international and subnational scales. Still, in casting his frontier and pioneer research in this way, he did tie the geography of internal affairs to U.S. foreign policy. To be sure, he saw this connection in terms personally familiar to him—pioneering and frontier settlement rather than industrial regionalism—but in the context of 1920s geography the identification of even this narrow cross-scale nexus was rare.

human geographies of the frontier The significance of the frontier-pioneer studies project also had to do with the trajectory of geography as a discipline. As he declared to his AAG colleagues in his presidential address, if geography was going to “influence political and social policies,” it would have to “deal with ideas that seem to be of critical importance to government and society,”7 and Bowman was cocksure that frontier-pioneer research represented one of these ideas. American geography in the 1920s was changing dramatically. The physiography on which Bowman had cut his scientific teeth had largely passed into a recognizably modern physical geography devoted to the scientific explanation of landscape forms—“geomorphology.” But the accompanying ambition of an independent disciplinary identity was not always welcomed by geologists, who traditionally focused on long-term subsurface structural transformation but were reluctant to relinquish to geographers the intellectual authority for explaining the earth’s surface. For better or worse, human geography could claim no such roots. Yet the human causes and devastation of World War I, the consequent remaking of the world map, and the resumption of powerful economic and urban transformations cried out for human geographical explanation. A late bloomer after the false start of environmental determinism, post–World War I human geography in the United States was even more hemmed in than geomorphology by academic competition. It found itself with very few conceptual tools and very little substance it could call its own. The major competitors in the social sci-

“the geography of internal affairs”

/

215

ences—especially anthropology and sociology, but also economics and political science—had recently carved out disciplinary spaces for themselves, and in contrast with its European development, a rebounding U.S. human geography was left to construct itself largely in the interstices of already conquered academic turf. The costs of environmental determinism as a scientific cul de sac were now painfully obvious, and more and more geographers after World War I turned toward social, economic, political, and cultural themes. Along with a general expansion in higher education, geography became more widely established as a university discipline in the 1920s. Political geography, given fresh stimulus by World War I and Bowman’s New World, attracted a number of young scholars, but the excitement of this new work remained somewhat diffuse. Human ecology provided a sharper, more direct response to environmental determinism, attempting to explain the internal geography of cities and regions and human “interactions” with the environment very much on the basis of an organic, environmental model, except that the causality was reversed: human forces now guided the ecology rather than the other way about. Bowman’s old teacher Mark Jefferson wrote a couple of papers that introduced “city geography” to a curious but rather skeptical audience of human geographers, and although the Chicago School of urban sociology was just beginning to explain urban process and form on the basis of human ecological theory, geographers proved more cautious.8 Environmental determinism had one clear merit. It carried into modern geography the intellectual heritage of the Enlightenment—the ideas of Montesquieu and Herder as much as Kant and Humboldt. Geographers’ early-twentieth-century recoil threw this intellectual baby out with the bathwater of determinism. Many geographers felt that the problem with environmental determinism lay not in any false causality but in theoretical abstraction per se, and suspicion of theory became a disciplinary trait. U.S. human geography in the 1920s and 1930s was rigorously empirical, especially in its most emblematic pursuit, “regional geography,” which specialized in descriptive accounts of regionally differentiated landscapes and was devoid of explicit theoretical discussion. Methodology substituted for theory. One major innovation of the period did buck this trend, namely, Carl Sauer’s “cultural geography.”9 Borrowing from physical geography, where theory was still nurtured, and from the early cultural anthropology of his Berkeley colleague Alfred Kroeber, Sauer posited specific cultures as the agents of historical and geographical change. The intellectual thrust of this cultural geography all too often dissolved within the descriptive im-

216

/

“the geography of internal affairs”

pulse of regional geography, yet the cultural turn Sauer led was sufficiently successful that in the United States, unlike in Europe, human geography became synonymous with cultural geography. “The great epic of America is the conquest of the land,”10 Bowman held, and he felt no reason to think that would end. Quite against the ethos of the 1920s, when rural issues were fading from the national agenda, he argued that intensive plowing and cultivation of western grasslands coupled with unprecedented urban demand for food would amplify the issue of frontier zones and pioneering on more marginal lands. His fervor for frontier and pioneer studies in advance of the disastrous dust bowl proved prescient. The study of pioneer settlement should not be a backwater academic field but a frontier of directly usable knowledge. His primary goal was to systematize the knowledge of frontier zones first in North America then globally in preparation for new waves of colonization that would inevitably come as population growth mushroomed. For Bowman, Turner was simply wrong, and historians of the Turner school had taken a great wrong turn. This was a deep, personal, and unassuageable belief. If the 1890 census recorded that, for the first time in the United States, the frontier had been “so broken into isolated bodies of settlement that there [could] hardly be said to be a frontier line,” Bowman responded that the elimination of the frontier line was not at all tantamount to the elimination of the frontier itself and that the “frontier type of living is still the rule” in many pioneering communities. The world boasted a series of “pioneer belts” in which frontier conditions still prevailed. He never tired of repeating this argument against the Turnerian frontier: “From time to time it is announced that the pioneer has vanished, that the world has filled up with humanity. This is like saying that the age of exploration is over because man has reached the two poles.”11 The first incarnation of the frontier-pioneer studies project appeared in the National Research Council. In early 1925 the geologist David White, chair of the NRC Division of Geology and Geography, was exasperated that geographers had not come up with feasible research projects the NRC could promote, and he turned to Bowman, recently elected vice president of the division. Bowman told White of an embryonic project on “pioneer belts” currently under discussion at the AGS, and an enthusiastic White encouraged its development through the NRC. The NRC Committee on Pioneer Zones was established.12 The initial project proposal was vague and its tone windy, exhibiting less of the measured analytical rationale typical of research proposals than the pontifical style Bowman increasingly adopted in public statements and ad-

“the geography of internal affairs”

/

217

dresses. Nonetheless, containing many rudiments of the project that would follow, it also stated a clear disciplinary claim: “It is on the margins of the habitable lands that we find man fighting the forces of nature,” Bowman began, and it is “one of the aims of human geography that man should be aided through geographical science in his attempt . . . to command the earth instead of being commanded by her . . . , extend his dominion over nature.” If geography was the study of “man in relation to his environment,” then the discipline was uniquely positioned to undertake the study of pioneer belts. Mankind was “biologically crowding the planet,” he explained, and pioneer belts provided an obvious safety valve. He proposed to map the world’s pioneer belts, identify their distinctive characteristics and conditions, document the different modes of advance into marginal lands, and calculate the limits of feasible settlement. A “scientific” index might be devised to measure the natural, cultural, economic, and technological conditions of a particular frontier zone, thus allowing easy quantitative comparison of settlement potential.13 White personally took the idea to the Rockefeller Foundation, which in turn referred it to the Social Science Research Council (SSRC). The SSRC had been established in 1923 with funding from the Rockefeller Foundation, to stimulate social scientific research. There were as yet only minimal sources of social science research funding—virtually all from private foundations—and the founding of the SSRC was a highly significant event. The SSRC appointed its own committee of historians, sociologists, and geographers to examine pioneer belts. While quickly conceding that it would have to be an interdisciplinary study, Bowman kept tight control and fended off any effort to sharpen the project’s objectives.14 Competition for scarce SSRC funds was fierce, Bowman wanted a lot, and several years of bureaucratic wrangling ensued: a “lot of hungry people sat around the table.”15 Bowman’s stubbornness was also part of the problem. A young organization attracting the best of a new generation of often brash and brilliant social scientists, the SSRC was alive with intellectual debate. The veteran of the Paris Peace Conference was hardly intimidated by the intellectual caliber of this fledgling group, although perhaps he should have been. He never seems to have taken the social science professors seriously. Nor did he follow through on the concession to interdisciplinarity, playing instead on the SSRC’s unfamiliarity with geography.16 This was an aggressive and potentially dangerous gambit, placing the reputation of the entire discipline on the table as leverage for a vague and marginal proposal. The SSRC had begun to hold its annual meetings in Hanover, New Hampshire, and it was there that Bowman presented the project to the 1926

218

/

“the geography of internal affairs”

meeting, which he attended as an interlude in the family’s Turtle Island vacation. He met the anthropologist Bronislaw Malinowski on his first visit to the United States and heard his exposition of a functionalist anthropology, but the pursuit of funding rather than ideas occupied Bowman’s time in Hanover. Historians carried a lot of clout in the early SSRC, and Bowman anticipated their skepticism inasmuch as his concentration on the contemporary frontier clearly disputed Turner’s thesis.17 Turner himself was appointed by the SSRC to liaise on the proposal with the National Research Council, but he did little. Opposition to Bowman’s proposal came from elsewhere, most notably from the prominent Chicago urban sociologist Robert E. Park, who saw little value in pioneer studies. The very definition of “pioneer belts” he thought either self-evident, or already well discussed, or else without conceptual status in the social sciences. Park’s attack picked up the disciplinary gauntlet Bowman had laid down. Troubled by a strictly “geographical conception of a pioneer belt,” which he felt did not accord with the looser, more Turnerian, language of historians and sociologists, Park sought a redefinition that would wrest considerable control from Bowman. It was the committee chair, Harvard historian Frederick Merck, although himself deeply influenced by Turner, who rescued the pioneer belt proposal from Park’s attack.18 Park’s skepticism was shared by others, and the status of geography as a discipline more than the rejection of the Turnerian thesis was the fulcrum of their misgivings. The emergence of a distinctly social science at the turn of the century had been closely allied with progressivism, and as the Rockefeller Foundation clearly understood, a vibrant social science could provide the raw knowledge for urgently needed social policy. Many in the SSRC saw themselves as inheritors of a scientific tradition that had exhausted any narrowly natural rationale and that now had to mature into a more social pursuit. The natural order was largely, if not completely, explored; it was the social order that now required explanation. The new intellectual frontiers lay with the “human sciences.”19 Geography, with a physical heritage and social ambitions, fitted very awkwardly across this evolving institutional division between natural and social sciences. To the extent that social scientists granted it any authority at all, it was as a natural science. Park’s understanding of the discipline was trivial, according little credence to its claims to explicate social and cultural landscapes. The closure of frontiers did, indeed, imply the end of geography for an opportunistic Park. It rankled Bowman, as it did other geographers, that they always had to prove the discipline’s worth against such self-serving denial by colleagues in neighboring disciplines, and he faced an arduous battle in the SSRC.20

“the geography of internal affairs”

/

219

Two years of debate, editing, refinement, and politicking—a veritable campaign—eventually led to success. Bowman’s close friendship with E. E. Day, who headed Rockefeller’s work in the social sciences, surely helped. Concerns about geography were never entirely resolved but rather deflected, and the practical importance of the research in terms of western settlement and development was always highlighted by committee chair Merck. Approval was given in 1927, and the pioneer belts project began in 1928. The SSRC committed one hundred twenty thousand dollars over four years with the proviso that the AGS would raise a further forty thousand. These were unprecedented sums for social science research. Opposition did not cease, however, and only after a tense battle was funding renewed in 1929. As the financial crash and economic depression cut into Rockefeller resources—and ironically, the worth of the project became clearer—the final grant was reduced by twenty thousand dollars. The longer it took to approve the project, the more Bowman enthused about it, and the more he thought it would accomplish. An initial plan for a “little book” presenting the arguments about contemporary pioneering was quickly augmented by a large volume of essays and then by a plan for a book series.21 The first two books appeared as The Pioneer Fringe (1931) and Limits of Land Settlement (1937), authored and edited, respectively, by Bowman. International cooperation with the Canadian Pioneer Problems Committee resulted in the eight-volume series Canadian Frontiers of Settlement, edited by W. A. Mackintosh of Queens University and W. L. G. Joerg of the AGS. If Bowman was eventually forced to cast the pioneer project in interdisciplinary terms to ensure SSRC funding, he never tired of touting it as disciplinary propaganda. The Hanover conferences from 1925 to 1930 were not large, with no more than seventy participants, but they were intense intellectual affairs and highly formative for U.S. social science as a whole. Bowman attended all but the first. Even after funding was assured, he ventured to Hanover on a mission for disciplinary acceptance and respectability. If some in the SSRC, especially historians, grudgingly admitted that Bowman’s disciplinary claims held some merit, many from younger disciplines remained dubious. None was more skeptical than the young anthropologist Robert Redfield, who had just published his classic study of folk culture in Mexico, Tepoztlán (1930), but at the star-studded 1930 Hanover conference he too was intimidated by proximity to the “skirts of the Olympians” of American social science. Rubbing elbows with older and more respected social scientists, such as linguist Edward Sapir and the legal scholar Benjamin Cordozo as well as the younger rising stars Robert Lynd,

220

/

“the geography of internal affairs”

Harold Laswell, and the droll psychologist Harry Stacks Sullivan, Redfield also attended an evening lecture by Bowman, who was eighteen years his senior. The result and aftermath Redfield duly reported in an agitated letter to his wife. Bowman’s “talk on geography as a social science” was “pretty awful claptrap,” according to Redfield, “and as Bowman is an aggressive, not very tactful person,” a number of attendees attacked him directly. The resulting arguments dragged on until after eleven o’clock and were “not too well clothed in the subtleties of academic etiquette.” After the lecture a number of the younger scholars “wanted to work off their excitement and sense of ridicule, which they did . . . with the help of some gin and ginger ale, and the racket kept up till late.”22

“ geography and the social sciences ” This was the era in which the social sciences came to be recognized as such, largely at the behest of a second generation of scholars solidifying earlier foundations. Clark University’s cognitive specialist G. Stanley Hall helped establish U.S. psychology as a quite different field from that bequeathed by Freud. Malinowski and Radcliffe Brown, Ruth Benedict and Sapir himself, helped systematize anthropological research as the investigation of cultures conceived as structured wholes. Durkheim adopted Comte’s earlier affinity to positivism in proposing the “rules of sociological method,” while Max Weber crafted a more palatable comprehension of social structure and bureaucratic power than Marx’s revolutionary socialism. By 1930, the disciplinary structure of the modern social sciences was largely in place, replete with revered founders, classic works, and distinctive methodologies for each discipline. Bowman records little of his reaction to the intellectual drubbing he received at the hands of younger social scientists in Hanover, but it shook him up enough that he embarked on a whole new project of disciplinary defense, distracting him only momentarily from the pioneer studies. As he knew well, a laggard geography had a weaker intellectual and institutional foundation than competing social sciences, but the mantle of William Morris Davis had not clearly passed to anyone, however much Bowman felt himself to be in line. With almost messianic fervor he set out to force respect by hitching geography’s reputation to the rising star of the social sciences. Geography in Relation to the Social Sciences was intended to demonstrate that the discipline of geography had its own objects of study and methods and, above all, usefulness. With no competitors, this 1934 book quickly became a stock text in graduate geography programs, and for much the same

“the geography of internal affairs”

/

221

reason was periodically placed in the hands of deans and college presidents to explain the discipline’s mission. Much like Bowman’s first book, Forest Physiography, or indeed the entire pioneer belt project, Geography in Relation to the Social Sciences comes across as slightly off-kilter. It begins defensively, with Bowman acknowledging the “pointed and resourceful attacks” by SSRC members at Hanover in 1930, lamenting that he found himself alone “under fire.”23 But rather than addressing the up-and-coming social science elite of the SSRC, he jolts sideways to address social studies teachers in high schools about the ways in which geography belonged. It is a strangely cavalier and insecure book. Whether this expresses his own disciplinary location or a dredged-up insecurity about Harvard—several SSRC committee members, including Merck, the chair, were at Harvard—is unclear. In any case he vaults over the “social” to take the high road of science. He surveys in arduous detail questions of data and methods in geography, means of measurement, mapping, and techniques. “The first requirement of science,” he elaborates, “is accurate observation and a careful record” followed by “explanation,” the mobilization of “law,” and if possible “prediction.” Geography applies these procedures to places and regions, uses experimentation, hypothesis testing, statistics, and “inductive and deductive methods” to identify and compare specific “regional characteristics.”24 This was one of the first and most precise statements of a positivist scientific method in geography, as accurate as it was dry. Although Bowman focused on the hypothetico-deductive and inductive methods, he nonetheless had reservations. In a language that predated geographical information systems (GIS) by half a century, he lamented what he saw as the “greatest danger” to geographical research, namely, “the substitution of purely technical procedure for creative thinking.” He also recognized that the universality of scientific law was at best a convenient fiction: “Mankind has not yet discovered any law of universal application.” But his deepest ambivalence was reserved for the social sciences themselves. He insisted on a fundamental distinction between physical and human geography and between natural and social science. Where physical geography could claim objectivity and the accumulation of proven facts and theories as scientific “law,” human geographical knowledge, for all its scientific procedure, could not. “Geography is only in part ‘objective science,’ ” therefore. Human beings are “unpredictable variables” and do not pursue lawful behavior; knowledge of human societies was “entangled” with human sentiment and therefore incapable of objectivity.25 The book worked for nobody really. It could not rally geographers to social science, because it rejected the possibility of science in the social realm;

222

/

“the geography of internal affairs”

it glanced off the concerns of practicing geographers rather than corralling them in support of a disciplinary project. It left social scientists cold for the same reason; his Hanover antagonists would see only vindication in its superficiality. Natural scientists simply wondered why he bothered. He nowhere tackled his titular issue as directly as he once had with German geographer Albrecht Penck: “I am not in favor of calling geography a social science.” The book was only sporadically reviewed in geography journals, and then often in only lukewarm tones.26 Pitched to a popular audience, it aimed to convince the reading public that geography was more than maps, much more sophisticated than the school geography of popular memories, and indispensable to modern social scientific education. It was usually reviewed alongside the companion title by the same publisher, Geography in the Schools of Europe, by Rose Clark, which must hardly have pleased Bowman. Unlike Davis or indeed Wallace Atwood, geographer and president of Clark University, Bowman had little time for school geography and was content to leave it as a lesser pursuit, largely populated by women who were widely barred from full-time academic employment.27 If this was the best geography could offer, Redfield’s scorn could not all be put down to ignorance. Social scientists were not fooled by the rehearsal of scientific method followed by an abrupt denial of objectivity in any science dealing with people. Geography in Relation to the Social Sciences was too easily read as a traditional prescientific humanism rather than the foundational disciplinary statement that Bowman intended.28 Many of the book’s concrete examples referred to the pioneer belt project but rarely moved beyond nationalist clichés of a redemptive European mission in the promised land. Neither here nor anywhere else did Bowman really engage the social scientists who confronted him at Hanover, and a crucial disciplinary opportunity was missed. Whatever disciplinary jealousies Bowman harbored, Robert Park’s urban research in Chicago envisaged a competitive equilibrium among different class, racial, and ethnic groups mediated through urban geography. But Bowman did not have the intellectual imagination to engage this new work.29 Or there is Bowman’s ally, Frederick Merck. His scholastic concern for Western history was markedly geographical, but Bowman had little influence on him, and Merck, an erstwhile supporter, found the book lightweight and “diffuse.”30

modern pioneering: settlement as development Bowman lost the intellectual argument, but he still got the money. Now he had the chance to prove his point in practice. Conquest of the land may have

“the geography of internal affairs”

/

223

been the true American epic for him, as for many, but it was also the drama that eclipsed from view the brutal European suppression of Native Americans. It would have been surprising if a man of Bowman’s class and background had not reiterated the Turnerian exaltation of the pioneers at the expense of a broader truth, but the ardor of his identification with pioneering as destiny perhaps might be seen to affirm his own argument about the impossibility of objective detachment in the social sciences. The pioneers were his heroes, “the salt of the earth,” models of bravery and fortitude, resourcefulness and perseverance, paragons of practical idealism. Their mission, he once suggested in a lead article in Science, was positively biblical.31 Some individual in every successful pioneer community, he insisted, always exemplifies the “Emersonian principle” that the wisdom of one visionary envelops the group. Pioneering is a means for the social conveyance of ideals that become etched into national and racial identity: “The whole of America is a land of pioneering tradition,” he wrote at the beginning of The Pioneer Fringe, and “in a large sense, pioneers reflect the whole history of the race. Man could not have possessed this earth of his if he had not been willing to experiment region by region endlessly.”32 Bowman is spartan with acknowledgments to Turner, although Turner’s influence is unmistakable, and the two men also had many common inspirations. Turner was introduced to geography in the 1880s at Johns Hopkins University, presided over by geographer and historian Daniel Coit Gilman, and later at Wisconsin. He was a delegate to the 1893 International Geographical Congress, held in association with the Chicago Exhibition, where his “end of frontier” hypothesis was first fully unveiled. Among the scholars who influenced him, John Wesley Powell and Nathaniel Shaler were significant along with the biologist Lamarck and the German geographer Friedrich Ratzel, and he owed a broad debt to an “evolutionary human geography.” Turner’s “uncommon fascination” with the forest derived not just from his childhood in Portage, Wisconsin, where, a generation earlier than Bowman and several hundred miles farther west, the forest edge was still at hand. He also held a deep-seated sense of the symbolic importance of forests before their conversion to cultivated land. Turner’s frontier thesis, according to one historian of science, exposes “the culmination of America’s self-image as the ‘garden of the world,’ an idea descended from eighteenth-century agrarianism and Jeffersonian ideals.”33 Bowman’s own Jeffersonian idealism easily complemented Turner’s. Where Turner argued that the frontier was the source of continual and reverberating spiritual and national renewal, Bowman abstracted the argument to a more distilled idealism. “The world is as new as its newest idea,”

224

/

“the geography of internal affairs”

he blushed: “Every new idea recreates the earth,” and a “new thought is as new as newly discovered territory.”34 The parallel between Bowman and Turner was also quite practical. Turner had studied with a young Woodrow Wilson at Johns Hopkins, strongly supported the Fourteen Points, which Bowman had helped to draft, and like Bowman felt that Wilson had erred only in being too patient with Germany before declaring war.35 For his part, Bowman had already applied the justificatory Turnerian vocabulary of savagery and civilization in his “conditional conquest” of the Andes. Bowman solicited Turner’s 1914 membership in the Association of American Geographers, and the historian presented papers at AAG meetings thereafter.36 But Bowman’s vision of the frontier, formed two or three decades later than Turner’s and focusing on what he referred to as “modern pioneering,” is also different from Turner’s in several respects. First, twentieth-century pioneering may have many outward similarities to the more basic traditions of the late-nineteenth-century frontier, but it represents a definite evolution, especially regarding the quality of life. Readier access to medical treatment was a central achievement of technological advances in communication and transportation, he argued, yet “excessive city growth” still drew many pioneers to areas like the Jordan Country of Montana, where such means and results of communication were unavailable. Bowman drove around this region of east-central Montana in 1930 during a six-week summer field trip to the western plains with his eighteen-year-old son, Robert. Sitting at the center of Garfield County, which then boasted less than one person per square mile, Jordan easily qualified as the frontier by Turner’s definition. Even by 1930 there was not a mile of railway, telegraph, or telephone line within the county’s five thousand square miles, and a radio transmitter enjoyed only intermittent operation. Jordan (population 250) was the largest town, and it was ninety miles to the nearest railway. Under these conditions, Bowman argued, “it requires courage to leave the telephone behind. . . . To leave a modern physician behind is to incur risks as great as those of an earlier settler in Indian country.”37 Still, modern pioneering was different. Motorized cars and trucks allowed pioneers to drive over graded prairie roads or “pell-mell across sage brush flats.” Everywhere the demand for a higher quality of life was evident among contemporary pioneers, and women now represented the cutting edge of modern pioneering. “What pioneering does to family life and education,” he observed, with his mother’s hard life undoubtedly in mind, “is largely written in terms of what it does to women.” But Bowman’s was no protofeminist account of women on the frontier. It was the “unwillingness of the women to stand the hardships and primitive life” of the frontier that

“the geography of internal affairs”

/

225

forced increased demands for services and civilization; they were “responsible for the flow of culture into the pioneering lands of the world,” a result to be lamented as much as applauded: “We no longer look upon pioneering as a mere outward thrust of a virile stock, for all stocks have lost their oldtime pioneering virility. Or, if the virility is still there, to exercise it in the old way would be foolish and even suicidal.”38 A certain dependence on government, which Bowman accepted only with regret, was the logical result. The modern pioneer now wanted to know what the government was going to do for him. High taxes and rising land costs hindered further expansion, while governments everywhere benefited from the pioneer. Pioneering represented no “mere expansion of farm population” but a “thrust of an entire civilization . . . a new form of nation building.” The government had a duty to aid pioneers as part of an economic “equalizing process,” helping to compensate for the extraordinary conditions they confronted. Yet at the same time, too much “spoonfeeding” by government was wasteful, as witness the false hopes and massive expenditure devoted to settling the Australian Outback. Attempts to install three thousand “white settlers” in the Northern Territories were courageous but wrong in the face of climatic conditions unsuited to white settlement and a frontier that would remain incorrigible. Yet ignorance of “scientific” judgments—“Patriotism and rainfall are here confused”—led to “paralyzing public debt” in pursuit of a doomed idea.39 Thus, Bowman differed from Turner in a second respect. Not only was pioneering still alive for Bowman, but it called out for a scientific approach. Science “blazed a trail of knowledge” vital to modern pioneering.40 He was a firm advocate of “wise use” environmental ideologies, and this flavored his vision of surviving frontiers, but it was only one part of what he proposed to call a “science of settlement.” The Pioneer Fringe was intended to sketch the outlines of just such a science of settlement, dealing with the climatological, environmental, and social conditions of modern pioneering. Following the dust bowl and drawing on his recent fieldwork, he produced several interesting papers on climatic change and desert expansion in the West in which he readily identified human sources of environmental change, was rightly skeptical about the efficacy of the much heralded “shelterbelt” of trees from the Canadian border to the Texas Gulf shore, and cautioned against drawing too-easy long-term conclusions from short-term catastrophic events:41 natural change is more cyclical than linear. As Bowman saw it, governments across the world had no choice but to engage with pioneering: how to encourage or discourage it as appropriate, what kind of pioneer settlement and where, and what kinds of policies to

226

/

“the geography of internal affairs”

implement. A science of settlement would address these issues and provide a fundamental knowledge available to pioneers and governments alike. Such a science called for an “exact study of the advances and retreats of population” in different parts of the world, aiding rational settlement practices.42 Yet this appeal to a science of settlement was never well detailed, remaining almost as diaphanous in his later work as it had been in the original 1925 proposal. He made much of the apparent parallel between science and pioneering. Pioneer belts are “regions of experiment” in much the same way as science is necessarily experimental.43 Both yield only provisional truths, truths that had to be revised periodically in the light of new conditions and technologies, ideas and facts. Bowman differed from Turner in a third respect. Where Turner’s frontier vision was rooted in and developed from the experience of the United States, Bowman’s became explicitly international, representing the culmination of Turner’s expansionism as much as a break from it. Pioneer Fringe included chapters on Canada, Australia, southern Africa, Siberia, Manchuria, and South America, all regions where closure of the frontier was not yet at hand. And he produced a world map of pioneer belts (map 9). As if to accentuate the point, his best-developed programmatic statement of “the pioneer fringe,” prior to the book, was published in Foreign Affairs, the journal of the Council on Foreign Relations. And it was the CFR that Bowman enlisted after Rockefeller Foundation support tapered off; the council also published his book Limits of Land Settlement. Reviewers of this follow-up work saw little new, but it did emphasize the internationalism of the processes, and, more crucially, it shifted the focus away from a Turnerian frontier toward a more direct concern with economic development. Many scholars now followed the Turnerian argument to its logical conclusion. Berkeley geographer Carl Sauer, for example, concluded that there was no more “room for colonization” and that by implication Bowman pursued an obsolete dream. A British reviewer, lamenting the “necessarily . . . capitalist framework” of the issues, also assumed that the “days of great migrations are over.”44 But Bowman was trying to argue something else. He refused to see the so-called closure of the frontier in Turner’s terms, and while certainly clinging to frontier nostalgia as an antidote to the crises of the late 1920s and 1930s, he recognized that “closure” was too pessimistic, too final, and too crude an appraisal. Geographical closure was a false issue. It was overridden by questions of economic development, and for Bowman, land settlement still represented the cutting edge of such development. But there was a contradiction here that Bowman recognized. Sauer and others were reacting to real shifts in settlement patterns as people flocked

Map 9. Global pioneer belts, 1931.

228

/

“the geography of internal affairs”

to the cities, often abandoning marginal agricultural land, and yet new lands, Bowman observed, were also being settled with unprecedented intensity: At the moment when there has been a complete abandonment of the old colonial idea that landed wealth implies stability of capital value, at the moment when the unused land of every region is creating emergencies for local government, there is the keenest interest in the pioneering lands where virgin soil must be cleared or broken. An equally keen interest is felt in land as a social and political problem.45

Far from gone, “land hunger,” Bowman felt, was much on the rise again, as indicated by events as disparate as the Mexican and Russian revolutions, the break-up of the landed estates of Central Europe, and even in the budget priorities of a struggling British Labour government, which in 1931 introduced a land tax. “All the world has become interested in the land question,” he suggested, and “the masses,” he warned darkly, “have not yet done with the question.”46 Bowman’s emphasis on “modern pioneering,” his insistence on a science of settlement, an international scale of analysis, and a focus on land hunger, all point to a concern with what we might now think of as development through settlement. Through the 1920s and most of the 1930s, he believed that pioneer belts represented practical alternative regions of development that could absorb widespread population increases and capital surpluses. If the equation of settlement with development represented a continuance of the pre-twentieth-century connection between economic and geopolitical expansion—a significant step backward from the heightened insights about international economics and territory that emerged from the Open Door policy and from Paris in 1919—it also marked an evolution. Bowman was clear that the “old colonial idea” connecting land control and economic progress was obsolete, but especially following the economic depression that had begun in the late 1920s, he also stressed the imperative of economic expansion through settlement. Insofar as Bowman could not yet conceive of development that was not led by settlement, he believed that economic development would necessarily face limits. In the first place, all sorts of technological miracles might now be possible, but economics increasingly mediated the form and likelihood of development. As he once put it with uncharacteristic pithiness, man cannot “move mountains”—not, that is, without first “floating a bond issue.”47 In marginal lands, environmental constraints still weighed heavily, and nature still had “a way of taking a heavy toll for man’s conditional conquests.”48

“the geography of internal affairs”

/

229

The temperate lands would be the immediate focus of continued settlement. “Tropical” development was certainly likely, but as his 1931 world map of pioneer belts (map 9) makes clear, this would not be in the immediate future. He remained enough of a determinist to believe that white settlement was climatically unlikely in much of the tropics and simply assumed, in line with the racial assumptions of the pioneering motif, that development required white capital. As he wrote to a Costa Rican correspondent: “I am thinking . . . of permanent homes for white people.”49 No universal laws of science indeed: the “science of settlement” was very much a white science. In global perspective, Bowman’s vision of modern pioneering came at a time when the European colonial model of economic expansionism was in crisis but before the language and paradigm of economic development was fully in place. That would not occur until after World War II. Accordingly, for all his insistence on an international perspective and his recognition of the priority of economic progress, Bowman struggled but was never fully able to translate the frontier-pioneering rubric into the liberal developmental internationalism championed by the Council on Foreign Relations. He was not yet able to resolve what he called the “anomaly in human behavior,” such that intense “land hunger” and frontier settlement coincided with the “human flood” of urbanization.

the bowman corollary When The Pioneer Fringe was published in 1931, Bowman sent a copy to Turner. In the last year of his life, Turner replied and picked up on Bowman’s criticism indicting the erroneous idea of a vanished frontier. He reiterated the original intent of his frontier thesis. “I tried to suggest that this continuous progress of the nation into vast areas of unoccupied land had been more fundamental in the shaping of our history” than historians perceived, Turner wrote. The advance of the frontier had “profound influences,” not just in the West, but also “in the reactive effects in the more eastern regions.” He agreed with Bowman that it was the frontier line more than the frontier itself that had gone, and he conceded that it was an “inadvertence” to have concluded, way back in 1893, that “the frontier has gone.” Still, he argued, it remains true that whatever local frontier survives now, it is no longer a “fundamental factor” in American history: “The period around 1890, marked by the end of the frontier line, was a real turning point.”50 If Bowman was undoubtedly correct to emphasize the survival of frontier conditions in the United States, Turner sensed the historical shift that had taken place more acutely than Bowman did. Yet it was a historical shift

230

/

“the geography of internal affairs”

that Bowman’s own work expressed more fully than Turner’s. By the 1890s, Turner had become convinced that it was not state lines but “natural physiographic regions” on which U.S. history now had to be based.51 This was certainly a suggestion that the author of Forest Physiography could heartily embrace and, at the time, did. But by the 1920s, Bowman was moving in a different direction. He renounced the use of “forest” in the title of his book, an act of no little significance given the symbolic power of forests for Turner, but was also drawn away from the physiography, convinced that economic rather than physiographic differences now shaped the most profound demarcation of regional identity. Agricultural sources of production, questions of availability of capital and labor, the absence of railways and telegraphs, and so on—these were the issues that characterized Jordan Country and other remaining pockets of pioneering land. “The emphasis I put upon economic forces that form the background of pioneering is the result of a study in the first instance of the geography of the pioneering process,” Bowman claimed. “The geographical factors prove to be of limited consequence,” he added, referring narrowly to physical geography.52 This was precisely the connection that linked Bowman’s international perspective on settlement and development with his work at the Council on Foreign Relations. Turner’s frontier reading of U.S. history was not simply a domestic concern but came to inform in the deepest ways U.S. foreign policy. From Teddy Roosevelt through Woodrow Wilson to Franklin Roosevelt and Harry Truman, the frontier thesis provided a vocabulary of national expansion. This thesis became a powerful ingredient in the ideological weaponry of an emerging American empire.53 Bowman’s work on the pioneer fringe deepened these connections. He insisted on the recognition of international frontiers ready and available for settlement, even if the full developmentalist vision of the 1950s was not yet in view. Bowman did not simply leave the Turnerian frontier behind, therefore. However nostalgic, his continued passionate pursuit of knowledge about the stubborn pockets of the frontier stemmed also from a vague recognition that the corollary of the expansionist argument was true as well. That is, frontiers did not survive just as relicts, as Turner seemed to suggest, but were intimately bound up with intense urbanization and the contemporary expansion of U.S. economic interests on the global scale. If the juxtaposition of urban growth and pioneer development posed this connection obliquely, Bowman’s solution vaulted over a precise definition of the problem and posed pioneering directly as a means of economic development. He intuited that “the end of the colonial idea” and the closure of the frontier

“the geography of internal affairs”

/

231

line, at least in the United States, refracted attention back to the belts and pockets of land where pioneering was still possible. These regions were more, not less, important, Bowman insisted, because economic development was again necessarily “internal” vis-à-vis an otherwise closed world geography of economic expansion. Bowman’s corollary to Turner, that large pockets of frontier living still remained, recognized in ways that few others expressed that the geographical pivot of history after the 1890s operated on regional (i.e., subnational) as well as global scales. Karl Marx ended volume 1 of Capital with an intriguing if widely misunderstood section on the colonies and colonial economics. His message was that social and economic relations that appeared complicated and obscure in the familiarity of daily life are often refracted in astonishing detail and accuracy from the colonial fringe. The truth of the metropole is seen in the mirror offered by the colonial margin. Marx—a socialist, urbanite, and Jew—was the antithesis of Bowman’s heroic pioneer, but had the geographer read Marx, he might nonetheless have appreciated this role Marx gave to the margins of capitalist expansion. It was in the formative crucible of the frontier, after all, that, as Bowman recognized, “pioneers make their own facts,” or where, as he once said of white South African farmers on the rim of white settlement, “the dreamers are the doers.”54 Bowman perfectly exemplified Marx’s message. In the effort to disentangle himself from the “anomaly” of urban expansion simultaneous with intense pioneering, he explained economic expansion in naively voluntarist terms: “There is the feeling that a growing enterprise is a healthy enterprise,” he remarked in the Foreign Affairs article, apparently quite innocent of Marx’s demonstration that capital accumulation is a sine qua non of capitalist survival. On the margins, by contrast, Bowman provided a precise description of primitive accumulation—the process by which surplus capital is first created as a basis for the accumulation of capital. The context is pioneer development and the “settlement” of nomads in Mongolia: It is a combination of farmer and trader that has turned the trick, with government aiding and abiding. The farmer builds the permanent home; the trader widens the field of view. When the Mongol nomads become sufficiently indebted to the traders, the Chinese officials and the traders combine to negotiate for the “sale” of a part of the Mongol land; and this is at once thrown open to settlement. Bit by bit the edge of the grasslands is thus eroded away from the domain of the Mongols, who already have a deficiency of winter pasture, and whole herds, without shelter, are decimated. . . . The process reminds us of the land bought from the American Indian. . . . But the trader does this also—he

232

/

“the geography of internal affairs”

provides a direct incentive to the farmer to produce a little more than is required to keep his family from starvation. By this means there is created a surplus that enters the currents of trade flowing between old China and the pioneer zone of Inner Mongolia.55

Bowman’s pioneer research occupies an odd place in twentieth-century geography. It was energetically boosted but did not catch on. The issues of Geographical Review in the decade after 1925 (and especially after 1932) were liberally sprinkled with articles by numerous authors about pioneer belts and frontier environments across the world, and the science of settlement had a recognizable influence in Canada, but elsewhere it fizzled.56 Turner and Sauer may have been correct, if for all the wrong reasons. Part of the project’s failure may lie in Bowman’s own personality. In the late 1920s he was giving an increasing number of public addresses, and he used these more and more as opportunities to expound on pioneering. They were well reported in the press.57 Many were hastily written and often platitudinous. “Men always strive to find a way,” he breezed, in one such address. As anthropologist Robert Redfield sensed, Bowman now came over as arrogant, a little pathetic, and hardly a good advertisement for the discipline. He strove without success to clarify precisely the originality and importance of the pioneer project. The response to his work sometimes mirrored this: sent a copy of Pioneer Fringe, Rudyard Kipling was blasé, replying simply that the book provided testimony of “the universal trek-instinct of mankind.”58 Geographers could be excused a more personal alienation from Bowman on the issue of pioneering—at least those in Ypsilanti on the evening of 31 December 1931, on hand to hear him deliver his presidential address to the AAG. Pioneering was the subject. Amply laden with slides, he began at nine o’clock and droned on and on. When midnight arrived he paused to wish the audience a happy new year then continued lecturing.59 The clichéd banality of much of his language contrasted sharply with the enthusiasm with which he carried out the research. The fieldwork especially “set him on fire.”60 The 1930 trip took him to Kansas and Nebraska and on to Bend, Oregon, where he spent a week reading through back issues of the local newspaper, the Bend Bulletin, in order to ascertain the region’s settlement history. Even the ubiquitous and unavoidable evidence of a “lack of community spirit” in Jordan Country, Montana, did nothing to ameliorate his idolatry for pioneering.61 On a second trip two summers later, he witnessed the onset of what would become the dust bowl. He carried out widespread interviews on the pattern of community settlement in Colorado, Nevada, and Utah, and then struck north for the Peace River country of

“the geography of internal affairs”

/

233

British Columbia, where one of the most lively pioneer farming experiments in Canadian history was well under way. In the intervening year, following a trip to the International Geographical Congress in Paris, he was scheduled to travel to Moscow and on to Manchuria, but the increasingly grave financial predicament of the AGS two years after the stock market crash, in combination with the eruption of the Sino-Japanese War, forced him to turn back at Berlin.62 Bowman’s romance with the frontier was in part just that. His concern with pioneering and the geography of the frontier represented the purest practical expression of an agrarian idealism instilled in him from the earliest years. The Pioneer Fringe is dedicated to the memory of his mother and father, who both died in the early 1920s. By the 1930s the pioneering belts of the world may have been shrinking, but they were also places of hope, antidotes to crisis, in Bowman’s eyes. The pioneer settlement research helped buoy him through the Great Depression despite loss of his life savings—as much as seventy-six thousand dollars invested, ironically, in failed farm mortgages—and the frustration of his research dreams for the AGS. Although no enthusiast for the New Deal, Bowman seemed to understand that a restructured “geography of internal affairs” might lead a domestic economic revival.63 One might argue that the depression after 1929 reaffirmed Bowman’s conclusion that physiographic regions were supplanted by economic regionalization, but rather than highlighting the importance of frontier settlement, the depth of economic crisis actually crowded out any concern with pioneering. In the United States, the depression and the dust bowl killed any easy optimism girding the frontier hypothesis, and while New Deal programs designed to offset the socio-ecological effects of depression, such as the Civil Conservation Corps, fully recognized the quickening of issues of pioneer settlement rather than their disappearance, technological and financial restructuring on the farms after World War II prevented this from translating into a long-term focus on pioneering lands. The environmental realities that Bowman thought guaranteed the pioneer lands a prominent place in history were fundamentally altered by technology and capital. And yet Bowman was excited all over again in 1942 that “no subject” is “more ‘hot’ “ than modern pioneering, and “it will be hotter still at the close of the war.”64 War brought his Council on Foreign Relations and pioneering agendas together. As if to affirm his internationalist instincts, his pioneering work had caught Franklin Roosevelt’s eye and was applied to the task of wartime and postwar refugee resettlement. Bowman had adroitly discerned a crucial practical dilemma that few others saw so sharply, and al-

234

/

“the geography of internal affairs”

though unable to foment a science of settlement, he nonetheless found himself in the State Department, energetically applying what he had learned along the way. Historian William Appleman Williams has argued that the cold war put an end to the Turnerian frontier as an effective map for a global U.S. empire.65 The cold war certainly withdrew large parts of the world from global ambition, but the obsolescence of the Turner thesis is more complicated than this simple appeal to postwar binary geographies. A better explanation may come in terms of Bowman’s own vision: Bowman’s corollary to Turnerian expansion, that internal regional expansion on the pioneering fringe remained a necessity—that the internationalization of pioneering involved a “reactive effect” in domestic space—was written largely in terms of settlement. In the 1930s Bowman believed that it was settlement that would induce economic development. But by the 1940s, although questions of resettlement certainly loomed large after World War II, settlement no longer defined a central dynamic of economic development. The centrality of territory per se was significantly diminished. The exemption of most of Asia and Eastern Europe—the Soviet bloc and China—from capital investment was not irrelevant to the fate of capitalist economic expansion after World War II, but it simply was not as pivotal an issue as it would have been half a century earlier. The international capitalist system reconstructed in the ashes of that war, from Bretton Woods and the World Bank to the United Nations, implied a much more directly economic approach to development. “Close economic calculations,” Bowman eventually recognized, “take the place of risk.” Thus, independently of the cold war, the geography of economic expansion and the importance of geography per se were transformed. “Tropical development” and the winning of pioneer belts “to civilization,” as Bowman put it, were certainly on the postwar agenda, but first and foremost as economic, not territorial, issues.66 As the model of development was fundamentally reconstructed, the very language of winning marginal land “to civilization” passed irrevocably into history. The Bowman corollary and the “geography of internal affairs” provided a bridge between old and new.

9 THE KANTIAN UNIVERSITY: SCIENCE AND NATION BUILDING AT JOHNS HOPKINS

The idea of the modern university dates to the German idealists, especially to Kant. The university for Kant is devoted to reason, internally ordered by the logical division of knowledge into faculties and “disciplines” that express the conceptual divisions of the world, and the individual thinker is its central figure. Distanced from state influence, the Kantian university nonetheless responds to the state’s need for specialists trained in diverse forms of statecraft and conversely depends on the state to protect and defend its autonomy. An awkward and potentially contradictory discrepancy therefore defines the core of the modern university at its inception: it is wholly separate from the state yet dependent on the state and implicated in its mission. This dialectic that Kant philosophized is easily recognizable in practice in the educational systems built in Europe and North America after the eighteenth century. For Wilhelm von Humboldt, whose University of Berlin is widely credited as the founding model of the modern university, the institution’s purpose could be understood less in terms of reason than as the hearth of a national culture, but this understanding accentuates rather than resolves the contradiction of the university vis-à-vis the state.1 The pursuit of modern science and the growth of modern universities have embodied precisely this contradiction. However they rationalized it, universities have had no choice but to negotiate some kind of relationship with the state. While continuing to proclaim autonomy from the state, they have been integral to the project of nation building. The knowledge such institutions

236

/

the kantian university

produce and reproduce contributes variously to economic expansion, the making and transformation of national cultures, provision of national leaders and managers, and generation of technologies and ideologies of social reproduction and control. Hence, the strictly modern cliché that the higher purpose of science and the university is social and/or national progress. If Isaiah Bowman’s research on remnant frontiers and modern pioneering represented one creative alternative to 1920s and 1930s isolationist ideologies, his involvement in national science and education provided another avenue into the geography—and politics—of “internal affairs.” Like his pioneer research, his work in science and education was not a direct expression of the ambition for an American globalism, but it was intimately connected with that ambition and integral to it. The empire at home had its own architecture, and to the extent that this domestic empire was disordered, the United States could hardly expect to command an ordered globalism abroad. Science was simultaneously vital to this domestic construction and emblematic of its results. Science was a new frontier, as Bowman was fond of saying, and he meant this concretely as much as metaphorically. It filled many of the social and economic lacunae left by the circumscription of the western frontier. Building various scientific institutions and presiding over Johns Hopkins University in the 1930s and 1940s, he continually confronted the contradiction emanating from Kant between state and university, state and science—all the more so that Johns Hopkins, where he moved in 1935, was established on Humboldt’s Berlin model. Bowman, in fact, became a pure expression of the Kantian contradiction.

failures of new deal science: the saga of the science advisory board Bowman had confronted the paradox of an autonomous yet useful science before, for example, when he volunteered the American Geographical Society for military intelligence purposes in Latin America, but even before he took a position at Johns Hopkins, he came face to face with the dilemma while working for the nation’s science establishment in Washington, D.C. He had risen through the ranks of the National Research Council and in 1930 was the first geographer since his mentor, W. M. Davis, to be elected to the National Academy of Sciences (NAS). Three years later he was tapped by academy leaders to chair the NRC, the second most powerful job in U.S. science after the presidency of the academy, and he began splitting his time between Washington and the financially strapped AGS in New York. “You can create a new epoch in the relations of scientific men to Government,”

the kantian university

/

237

the physicist and Nobel laureate Robert Millikan solicited Bowman. “I do not know of any one else at present who is in the key position to do it.”2 The obstacles he faced were huge. The institutional structure of science was archaic, university science remained highly individualistic with meager funding, most of it from private foundations, and modern science was being pioneered by industrial laboratories that could weave scientific talent with economic interest much more directly than the universities could. There was very little governmental sponsorship of science—the Department of Agriculture marked a significant exception—and no coordinated national science agenda whatsoever. The Great Depression was in full gear and science, widely praised for its contribution to 1920s prosperity, was now publicly implicated in the misery and mass unemployment that lay everywhere. The National Academy’s impotence in the face of the depression was stark, and science budgets everywhere were being slashed. The intimate connections between industry and the military, between government and the universities, that would so perplex President Eisenhower only two decades later were barely imaginable in the disjoint voluntarism of 1930s science.3 The NRC had been formed in an earlier period of science activism when the distinguished California astrophysicist and NAS leader George Ellery Hale convinced Woodrow Wilson to mobilize the academy in preparation for World War I: “War should mean research,” Hale maintained, and Wilson agreed. Hale and Millikan were impeccably conservative, Hale apparently believing that “aristocracy and patronage are favorable to science,”4 but in seeking a more activist relationship between science and government, they felt themselves bowing to the inevitable, and the 1933 inauguration of Franklin Roosevelt offered an opportunity. The appointment of a geographer to the NRC chairmanship was unprecedented for an academy, dominated by physicists, chemists, and engineers, but the fact that Bowman was a physical scientist who could talk across the divide to social scientists was part of his appeal as the FDR administration loaded itself up with social scientists. Some academy stalwarts were distinctly nervous about the appointment of a man so closely connected to Woodrow Wilson, but Bowman was every bit an elitist about science. He merely added an updated utilitarianism. “Science has flowered,” he argued, “because of its obvious social use,” offering his own version of the modern cliché linking science and social progress: “If you want your society to improve and advance, then support the scholar.” Future research would depend on far more systematic connections “between discovery and use than we have cared to advocate in the past,” he thought, but “the uses are so urgent” that this should give no cause for fear.5

238

/

the kantian university

Bowman was much more comfortable with this pragmatism than Hale or Millikan. The latter tried to resolve the contradiction between state and science by digging a deep moat between the two and heavily guarding the drawbridge over to government, whereas Bowman allowed a much looser engagement. In true liberal spirit, he distinguished between the ideal of pure science and the messy realities necessitated by science’s relationship to government, thus giving himself a wide field of maneuver. This was the antimony of real and ideal that matured with Wilson in Paris and became a critical conceptual hinge of Bowman’s philosophical liberalism.6 And he saw no necessary contradiction between the pursuit of scientific universalism and the specific national interest. Even Millikan, a devout scientific internationalist who believed that science could prevent war and avert many social problems, was adamant that science should be supported as a vehicle of economic nationalism. The science elite of the day, “although scientific internationalists,” were “also scientific nationalists.”7 Bowman’s concern with science was therefore not divorced from his international and foreign policy visions. Contrary to Hale’s whiff of aristocracy, Bowman insisted on a homology between science and democracy. In fact modern science, especially the experimental method, is the “nemesis” of authority: Scientific method, within the social field as well as the natural field, is the foundation of the most liberal philosophy which the world has ever known. Its elements are freedom, experiment, self-criticism, revision, and rationality. Instead of storming the citadel of truth, scientific method calls for time-consuming siege methods of experimentation. An experimental habit of mind does not permit the uncritical adoption of simple utopian schemes or of dogmas about the physical world and social life, or of authoritarian utterances.8

Science here is the intellectual face of democracy, much as democracy is the political face of scientific method. This ideal coincidence of science and democracy should take place at some remove from government, Bowman insisted, and he excoriated scientists “who yield to pressure from on high and shape a policy that will suit an Administration”: they “are degrading their science.”9 The main difference between Bowman and the old guard, therefore, was that in breaking with the strictly privatist mold of scientific sponsorship, he understood the pragmatic necessity of sleeping with the enemy, was not intimidated by the prospect, indeed relished it, and was convinced he could prevail with the purity of his science intact.

the kantian university

/

239

As at the Council on Foreign Relations, Bowman was delighted to be able to play the role of “establishment revolutionary” at the National Research Council. He found the organization bureaucratic, “bloated,” and “generally adrift,” having apparently replicated the institutional sclerosis it was originally meant to combat.10 His major initiative was to propose the Science Advisory Board, which would mobilize science for governmental ends, systematically integrating scientific advice into government policy. What actually transpired was one of the most contentious and disruptive episodes in the history of the National Academy and U.S. science, at times farcical and tragic. It played out the fundamental threads of the contradiction between an autonomous science and a powerful state. Within two months of his appointment in June 1933, a highly resourceful Bowman enlisted Secretary of Agriculture Henry Wallace to convince FDR to sign an executive order establishing the Science Advisory Board (SAB) under the authority of the academy. What should have been a cause for celebration quickly turned into an imbroglio when it was discovered that Roosevelt, rushing to vacation, had already signed a premature version of the executive order that made SAB appointments presidential rather than academy appointments. How the confusion occurred is a dramatic tale of missed telephone calls, tardy telegrams, crossed communications, and intrigue among Bowman, the White House, Secretary of Agriculture Henry Wallace, and academy president W. W. Campbell. What it wrought was havoc. Campbell, an aging astronomer who summered in California, was furious at the “illegal” executive order, demanded its retraction, and fumed at this precedent for wholesale government intrusion into academy matters. And indeed Roosevelt’s executive order actually named the SAB members—eminent scientists and industrialists headed by MIT president and physicist Karl Compton. Bowman tried to explain the confusion and mollify Campbell but worked under the suspicion of some older academy members that he had “pulled a fast one” for the sake of expediency.11 Campbell never exhausted himself trying to get the order rescinded or redrafted, pestering government officers from the attorney general to Roosevelt himself, but he failed. He relented briefly when the academy agreed to appoint the Science Advisory Committee (SAC) comprising the same personnel as the SAB, but this only created dual administration. The cost of establishing the SAB was an ongoing constitutional crisis between the academy and the NRC, with both claiming authority over the SAB/SAC. Bowman’s patience for the academy president, whom he thought an old duffer, quickly wore thin. The struggle simmered and flared when Campbell be-

240

/

the kantian university

came “apoplectic” about a new executive order continuing the SAB in 1934. Such was the atmosphere among the country’s science leadership that Bowman at one point dictated a “highly confidential” letter to SAB chair Compton and then cut the stenographic notes from his secretary’s notebook.12 Bowman and Compton eventually won the fight when the FDR administration became more and more frustrated with Campbell, but it was a pyrrhic victory. The SAB had some minor accomplishments, involving the Weather Bureau, the Bureau of Mines, and mapping and surveying, but it never came close to its ambitious plan for a science recovery program. The fight in the academy effectively killed it. The second executive order rubbed Campbell’s nose in his own irrelevance, and his sabotage only intensified. Government departments gave the bickering scientists a wide berth, but academy leaders, always skeptical of the New Deal and increasingly disaffected by the emphasis on economic planning and state intervention, began to speak out. Compton and Millikan publicly attacked these “false priorities” of New Deal planning over the interests of science, aligning themselves openly with the capitalist opposition to Roosevelt. The administration easily responded to the elite self-interestedness of natural scientists, far removed from the realities of depression suffering. Even Henry Wallace took aim at “complacent after-dinner speeches” by “well-fed scientists.” Compton rationalized the SAB’s failure in a despondent letter to Bowman: “No Science Advisory agency would really receive sympathetic support of the present administration.”13 Bowman’s own anger was aimed squarely at Campbell. After fourteen years in the wilderness of government affairs, Bowman pushed the Science Advisory Board as his brainchild and his ticket to a newfound influence, and an inordinate amount of his energy as NRC chair was taken up with fending off Campbell. Despite its potential, the board died quietly in 1935, and Bowman refused all implorations to remain as chair of the NRC. With an offer from Johns Hopkins beckoning, he was only too glad to go. “Scientists killing off science” was his own bitter judgment of the SAB’s fate. Campbell he dismissed as a “senile president,” adding that he was protected by an academy that had become a “mausoleum.”14 Whatever his own predilections, he was hardly wrong. Campbell did not rebound so well. He never overcame his bitterness and sank into despair. By the time he retired from the academy in 1935, he was seventy-three years old, and the loss of sight in one eye was particularly tragic for a man whose astronomy had been everything to him. Never reconciled to the New Deal, with the sight in his other eye deteriorating along with his general health, he committed suicide in June 1938.15

the kantian university

/

241

Historian Daniel Kevles has said of SAB chair Karl Compton that he “may have aspired to produce a disinterested, apolitical policy, but his program was irreducibly political.”16 The same applies to the whole history of the Science Advisory Board and to Bowman in particular. However grand his idealistic bluster about scientists not bending to the winds of political influence, he had spent two years in Washington doing little else but. Any ideals of independent science were dramatically contradicted by his daily agenda. He had no real defense to Campbell’s aristocratic disavowal of government “entanglement” in favor of corporate patronage except the pragmatic response that it had to be done and their ideals would protect them in the clinches with a highly activist national state. The philosophical conundrum expressed in Kant’s vision a century and a half earlier lost much of its subtlety in the rough and tumble of political application—Bowman would have had no patience for Kant’s obscure dialectic—but it still broadly pertained. It would resurface even more intensely after World War II, when a closer mesh of science policy with the state was again proposed, with Bowman playing a central, if ironic, role.

liberal order and authority at johns hopkins When Isaiah Bowman became the fifth president of Johns Hopkins University in 1935, comparisons were inevitably drawn with the university’s first president, Daniel Coit Gilman, also a Yale-trained geographer. With the bequest of plantation-born Maryland railroad magnate Johns Hopkins— once described as a “God-fearing, champagne-loving money-grubber”17— Gilman had established the university on the German model. In the late nineteenth century, a crusty classicism dominated East Coast colleges while a much more practical tradition prevailed inland, yet everywhere the lack of emphasis on research meant that the United States badly trailed Europe in the training of scientists. Gilman set out to remedy this by building the first graduate school in the country. He had traveled in Europe, attending lectures at the University of Berlin and elsewhere, and returned convinced of the need to attract the best minds to an avowedly elitist science. Since 1876 “Gilman’s university” had set the standard in graduate education but its prestige was slipping. Its finances were in crisis, an uncomfortable proportion of its scholars inbred, and Time diagnosed “a slow, humiliating decline into lackluster mediocrity,” yet the school still boasted the highest number of Ph.D.’s awarded in the country. Even more than Gilman, the New York Times exuded, Bowman demonstrated a “planetary consciousness,” and his geographical education encouraged an understanding of the

242

/

the kantian university

“physical and social ties” among people and their interconnections with and dependencies on the earth. Bowman’s unprecedented fundraising campaign catapulted him onto the front pages of Time: “Bowman: He wants $10,750,000 for a Ladder between Earth and Sky.”18 The New York Times was correct: if the goal was to preserve a liberal devotion to scholarly research while updating it for a new era, a better fit for “the Hopkins” could hardly have been imagined. Personally, Bowman was at his most liberal when he took the reins at Hopkins. Never other than a staunch opponent of the Soviet Union, he now allowed that the reasons for the revolution had at least to be taken seriously; he had tried but failed to liberalize the crusty science establishment; and although he was never a supporter of the New Deal, here too he accepted that vigorous government aid for farmers was necessary to combat the environmental disasters of the depression (but urban unemployment benefits and welfare checks to combat the social disasters went entirely too far). There was no contradiction between this liberalism and the fact that, like Gilman, he was a scientific elitist now presiding over the font of “best science elitism.”19 Over and over in his new job he stressed that “the highest product we are aiming at is men.” The role of Hopkins was to attract the most gifted students and to instruct, cultivate, and incubate their ideas. “Ideas are elemental and revolutionary forces,” and “scholars are idealists,” because besides “learning and curiosity they have hope and faith.”20 He bemoaned the lowering of standards he perceived in public universities, brought on by a misplaced appeal to democracy in education; education was a privilege, not a right. Mincing no words with a Hopkins trustee who wanted to bring in more scholarship students, Bowman embraced science’s participation in the nation-building project: “I have no worry over the large middle group of men in training. Our responsibility at Hopkins is to see that the top group is maintained, for it is this group that supplies the drive that the country requires.”21 For some earlier proponents of best science elitism, such as Hopkins physicist Henry Rowland, any reference to the practicality of scientific results was anathema to “pure” science. Bowman, by contrast, believed that practicality was the very point of science. “‘Pure’ scholarship, in an absolute sense is unattainable,” and applications now inevitably follow discovery, he argued. “Science and industry had a vague relation in the past,” whereas today “their relation is intimate. . . . Science has flowered because of its obvious social use.”22 The graduate school was both the place where that research was fostered and the intellectual engine of the university. Bowman’s 1939 pamphlet, The Graduate School in American Democracy, written for the U.S. Office of Education, gives a paradigmatic exposi-

the kantian university

/

243

tion of this twentieth-century liberal resolution of the Kantian contradiction. Social and economic life are increasingly underwritten by the results, assumptions, and possibilities of scientific research, and the graduate school enhances democracy and is enhanced by it. No “coercive government” tells researchers what to do or think, yet at the same time graduate schools inevitably develop their programs “in relation to powerful social forces.” If the scholar fuels democracy, democracy offers freedom to the scholar as long as he speaks the truth. The graduate school, he argued, is primary among the social gatekeepers of truth.23 Precisely such freewheeling interpellation of science and politics was what scared the National Academy old guard, but at Hopkins Bowman could give it full reign. Alfred North Whitehead and others had begun to argue that a deliberate development of the arts, humanities, and philosophy may be necessary to guide scientific progress and temper its excesses, but for Bowman science was its own gatekeeper. He appreciated the arts, classics, history, and philosophy, to be sure, and found them a useful reservoir of idealist sentiment for dressing up his practical concerns, but his heart lay with science as the pinnacle of human intellectual achievement. And science was what Hopkins had been built on; three of its four previous presidents were scientists. This was precisely Johns Hopkins University’s progressivism: it made a clean break from the stifling hegemony of eighteenth-century classicism. One elitism was therefore replaced by another, and Bowman’s homology of science and democracy was a precise expression of this liberal optimism. Bowman inherited a university with an accumulated deficit of nearly a million dollars. He calculated that if he resolved this problem for the trustees he would earn himself a free hand in the university’s affairs, and he set himself to fundraising. He refused an inauguration ceremony, embarked on a frenzied schedule of public addresses about the university’s role in science, democracy, and international relations, and raised a half million dollars in the first six weeks.24 His appeal to the powerful National Association of Manufacturers (NAM), representing small and medium-sized capitalist firms in the United States, is unusually direct. The “two prime sources of industrial energy,” he lectured them, were “trained men and new ideas,” but they involved social costs. Manufacturers were now “the biggest part in the social whole in influence and in wealth-creating enterprise,” and so the responsibility for covering social costs “must be mainly” theirs. Adapting his SAB rationale to private industry, he observed that the “best material investment in the United States is science in our universities; its value to society is far ahead of that of any revenue-producing agency known to us.” He took the punch line right to his audience:

244

/

the kantian university

The time has come for a clear definition if not a thoroughgoing renovation of the relations between industry and the universities with respect to research. Industry is not now paying for what it gets. The returns to our universities through industrial profits upon discoveries made in the laboratories of educational institutions are remote, accidental, and feeble under a policy that is demonstrably short-sighted. . . . It may be industry’s last chance to provide on its own initiative a broadly social underpinning to its profit policy.25

One has to admire Bowman for such a direct, if uncharacteristic, challenge; NAM entrepreneurs might be forgiven for concluding they had invited a socialist to dinner. But there was nothing inconsistent in this appeal, nor did the tone of his challenge interfere at all with the class alliances he sought in his new position. He was soon appointed to the Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve Bank of Richmond and later the Board of Directors of AT&T.26 He fully understood that he had ascended into the professional echelons of the ruling class but was never entirely comfortable there, maintaining a discreet scorn for those among the moneyed classes for whom elitism was a hereditary rather than a scholarly assumption. He fell far short of his goal of $10.75 million, but he did erase the current account deficit in two years.27 However, it came at a cost. The first years at Hopkins were also years of sometimes intense conflict with faculty. Those who inhabited the Hopkins campus in the 1930s saw little glimmer of liberalism in the administration of the university. There was in fact precious little democracy at the country’s original graduate school during his tenure. He was strikingly aloof—“a starchy reactionary”—recalls journalist Russell Baker of his undergraduate years there. “Student relations with the top man” were “largely confined to the position of an audience,” the student newspaper reported. Students, Bowman believed, were there to learn, and he was there to run the university, and there would be no confusion of these roles. On at least one occasion, with student protests threatening, he telephoned J. Edgar Hoover, requesting that the FBI investigate the source of student organization. Two agents duly appeared on campus. On other occasions he volunteered himself as an FBI informant.28 The maintenance of national order apparently superseded the rights of free speech. His attitude toward the faculty was barely different, but there he knew he had to be more careful. Twenty years earlier at the AGS he quickly fired employees, and thereafter the staff was devoted to him—one part loyalty, one part intimidation. But Hopkins was different. Here, the faculty was used to thinking they ran the university, and the president’s job was to carry out their agendas; all three presidents after Gilman had been ap-

the kantian university

/

245

pointed from among the faculty. Bowman threw that mold away. After asserting control over a medical school accustomed to significant autonomy,29 he aggressively cut costs on the main Homewood campus. He waded into the chemistry department, which he thought was of dubious quality, trimming the faculty and halved the number of graduate students. On another occasion, a young economist was interviewing for an associate professorship, and Bowman was so impressed that without consulting the department, he offered him a full professorship on the spot. Several faculty left as a result of Bowman’s high-handedness: Knight Dunlap, the renowned psychologist; philosopher Arthur Lovejoy, who retired rather than endure Bowman; and French professor Gilbert Chinard. A well-known case involved James Franck, Nobel Prize–winning particle physicist. Franck considered Bowman “anti-intellectual, anti-everything,” and he decamped to the University of Chicago, where he played a role in the Manhattan Project. Echoing broad campus sentiment, a long-time Hopkins dean found Bowman “a very arrogant man.”30 A very public case involved the young scholar Eric Goldman, who went on to become one of the most distinguished figures in twentieth-century U.S. history. A working-class native of Baltimore who stormed to a Hopkins Ph.D. in 1938 at only twenty-two years of age, Goldman should have gratified Bowman’s yen for scholarly elitism. The history department had been riding high on an extraordinary million-dollar bequest from a retired professor who had invested early and often in Dow Chemical, and this allowed the department to hire several distinguished historians, including Goldman when he finished his Ph.D., Samuel Eliot Morrison, who had worked with Bowman in Paris, and liberal patrician Charles Beard. Bowman, without ever meeting Goldman, brushed aside a unanimous department vote and refused his reappointment. A university-wide campaign on Goldman’s behalf failed to dislodge Bowman, and the fallout damaged the department severely. An irate Beard stormed into Bowman’s office, gave him a “good telling off,” then packed his bags for his Connecticut estate.31 Bowman’s scorn for the faculty was fierce. They “are unsophisticated persons,” he told the president of Hopkins trustees, “not infrequently naive.”32 They scorned him back. He was so detested that he found himself unable to convince a single senior faculty member to work with him as dean of students. One incident readily captures his authoritarian style. Following the campus retooling for wartime conditions, the reconversion to peacetime education in the fall of 1945 was disorganized. New students and faculty mingled with returning staff, students, and faculty; old courses had gone, new ones were on the books; requirements had changed; interrupted de-

246

/

the kantian university

grees lay in limbo. New procedures further churned the mix, registration for classes was chaotic, and students were upset. A young untenured chemistry professor offered the apparently reasonable motion to the faculty governing body, the Academic Council, that the registration period be extended so that students could get into the classes they needed. An imperious Bowman, chairing the meeting, responded: “Sir, your motion is a disparagement of the university administration. I am president of this university, therefore I am the administration, and you are an assistant professor. Your withdrawal of the motion will be willingly entertained.”33 In the Kantian university, order is imposed by the rational application of ideas, and Bowman had very definite ideas about what that order looked like. Much as the divisions among disciplines expressed conceptual divisions of the world for Kant, the division of labor among students, faculty, staff, and administration was a given for Bowman. In the president resided the unquestionable authority to implement the necessary order. “I am often accused of being authoritarian,” he would tell his son, “and I plead guilty if, by that you mean that I have the authority.”34 Science may have been a new frontier bound up with democracy for Bowman, but a university presidency gave him the joint entitlement and responsibility to impose order. Hopkins was, in the nature of things, his empire. Again this was more than metaphor. As university president he was making this patch of the world in his preferred image, and if his stated cartography was intellectually liberal, it was equally authoritarian in practice. His heartfelt tension between the ideal and the practical could well stretch to accommodate such an apparent contradiction; indeed, this was precisely the ideological value of seeing the world in terms of the real and ideal. That was nowhere clearer than in his imposition of race and class order at Hopkins. For Bowman the social divisions of race and class carried the authority of natural divisions, and the prejudices he exercised at Hopkins repeated vividly and in personal microcosm many of the abstract assumptions that guided his hand in redrawing the map of Europe. Bowman’s reputation as virulently anti-Jewish remains legendary at Johns Hopkins to this day, and there is ample evidence of it. Whether it was directly at issue in regard to Franck is not clear, but in the case of Goldman, Bowman was explicit. He told the history department chair that “there are already too many Jews at Hopkins” and that this was the reason for Goldman’s firing.35 On another occasion, seeking potential new faculty for the geography department, Bowman solicited advice from his son, Robert, a Berkeley Ph.D. in geography, about a possible candidate. “I understood you to say that [Henry] Bruman is not a Jew,” Bowman responded to his son’s recommendation. “One

the kantian university

/

247

of the new men could be, . . . but I do not want two of them in the same department.” Regarding students, Bowman believed that “Jews don’t come to Hopkins to make the world better or anything like that. They came for two things: to make money and to marry non-Jewish women.” Sometimes himself confused for Jewish given his biblical and German names, a compensatory defensiveness may have intensified his anti-Semitism.36 Bowman also instituted a Jewish quota at Hopkins in 1942. “We’re becoming a practically Jewish organization,” he complained to G. Wilson Shaffer, a junior psychology professor and director of sports, who reluctantly took the deanship of students. The Jewish upper classes of Baltimore traditionally sent their sons to Hopkins, but a new influx of students in the late 1930s included a growing number of nonlocal working-class and lower-middleclass Jews. Bowman was alarmed, and knowing a quota would be politically delicate, he dispatched Shaffer to assure the Jewish elite—lawyers, department store owners, political figures—that the quota was not aimed at them. It was an awkward assignment for the new young dean, and afterward Leon Sachs, director of the Baltimore Jewish Council, invited Shaffer out for a beer. Sachs reassured Shaffer: “We know what you mean, Wilson. You’re not against Jews. You just don’t want kikes from New Jersey.”37 The adroit mobilization of class prejudice in the service of racial and religious exclusion was a hallmark of the WASP ascendancy and hardly less than expected from a Hopkins president at the time. The resigned class complicity of some of Baltimore’s Jewish upper classes is just as malicious, allowing Bowman to claim that Jews themselves agreed to the quota. Not until the 1950s was Bowman’s quota abolished, when department store owner Albert D. Hutzler threatened to refuse an invitation to join the board of trustees.38 Bowman’s bigotry was even more virulent regarding black applicants to Hopkins; one of the most notorious episodes of his presidency derived from this issue.39 The university maintained a long-standing “color bar,” which was challenged in the late 1930s by Edward S. Lewis, a social worker who on becoming secretary of the Baltimore Urban League wanted to transfer from University of Pennsylvania, where he was enrolled as a graduate student in economics. Hopkins political economy professor Broadus Mitchell, dedicated to ending the color bar at Hopkins, agreed to support Lewis’s case. Mitchell had run on the socialist ticket for governor of Maryland in 1932 with none other than Elisabeth Gilman, Daniel Coit Gilman’s daughter, as his running mate, the two of them using the electoral bid to raise the issues of class and race in response to the explosion of labor activism and several recent lynchings on Maryland’s Eastern Shore.

248

/

the kantian university

Gilman himself had admitted one black student to Hopkins: Kelly Miller, who became an accomplished mathematician and eventually dean of Howard University.40 And when Lewis’s application was diverted to the Academic Council, Mitchell presented this precedent. A cowed Academic Council refused to act on the application, well aware that it would not be under Bowman that Hopkins opened its classrooms to black students, and Mitchell and Lewis accepted defeat rather than go to the press. In a later case, Bowman’s own son, Robert, campaigning to erode his father’s racism, recommended a black undergraduate to Hopkins. The application was discreetly passed from the registrar to the president, and the younger Bowman received a terse reply revealing the depth of paternal bigotry as well as a traditional rationalization: While a few colored persons have been admitted to the Graduate School in times past, there has never been a Negro undergraduate. Moreover, there is no need for such admission in view of the existence of Morgan College for Negroes. . . . The State of Maryland has recently taken over Morgan College and will improve it greatly. It would therefore be advisable to let us know if the boy is prominently “colored.”41

The Lewis case set a pattern of confrontation between Mitchell and Bowman. Mitchell was the enfant terrible of the campus and had been a thorn in Bowman’s side from the start. Bowman lost his temper with Mitchell when the socialist publicly criticized him for accepting a donation of books from the fascist government of Italy. Amid the misery of the depression, Mitchell took aim at the annual Baltimore cotillion ball. Refused a request to bring a class on poverty and economy to observe the ball, Mitchell had his students bring two debutantes to class the day after the refusal. As an exercise the debutantes estimated the cost to the Baltimore upper classes of their daughters’ “coming out” (approximately a thousand dollars per debutante). They then calculated, using current welfare levels, how many residential blocks in working-class west Baltimore could have been supported by the wealth devoted to the ball.42 Bowman was furious at the ensuing newspaper coverage, and the next year’s cotillion ball was canceled. Not until after the war did the debutantes’ ball resume. Mitchell was an associate professor in his forties, and he suffered that most fatal of academic ailments, immense popularity among students. The Baltimore Sun was often a target of his biting political criticism, but it patronized him as proof that academic freedom was alive and well at Hopkins. Bowman was especially galled at having to defend publicly a man he considered a communist. “No mother hen is more solicitous of her chicks than

the kantian university

/

249

I am of Broadus,” he once prevaricated with students. “Why, there are men downtown who would like to see his head on a platter.”43 Those men were not alone, however, and the denouement between Bowman and Mitchell became a celebrated incident. The Supreme Court had begun ruling against various planks of Roosevelt’s New Deal, and a constitutional tussle between the executive and judicial branches of government provoked FDR in 1937 to threaten a constitutional amendment that would let him stack the court. The country was polarized, with many liberals and socialists siding with Roosevelt. Bowman sided with the conservative opposition. In this context, a student complained to Bowman that Broadus Mitchell had referred to the Supreme Court in class as those “nine old bastards.” Bowman had the lever he wanted. Without informing Mitchell or providing him any chance for self-defense, Bowman secured a motion of censure from the Academic Council. Mitchell erupted at the lack of “due process,” and the situation eventually attracted national attention.44 Mitchell’s father, himself a South Carolina college president, journeyed north after having been alerted by Theodore Marburg, a wealthy lawyer, university trustee, and principal donor of the newly constructed Faculty Club at Hopkins, that his son’s socialism was an increasing embarrassment. Unbeknownst to his son, he consulted with Bowman, who handed over a copy of the motion of censure from the Academic Council, and after a polite discussion the elder Mitchell marched over to his son’s office. “You’re through here now. You’ve destroyed your usefulness,” he announced, dragging his son out. An angry Broadus Mitchell quickly confronted Bowman in his office, and Bowman’s notorious temper erupted. He “flew into a rage. He really was beside himself. It was like a child having a tantrum. He worked himself into such a fury at me . . . and couldn’t have been more abusive.” Never exactly meek himself, Mitchell argued back until at one point, also in a rage, he yelled at Bowman that rather than take such abuse, he was resigning. “ ‘Very well,’ replied Bowman, ‘I accept!’ “ ” The president of Johns Hopkins University is no gentleman!” spluttered a furious Mitchell as he stormed out of Gilman Hall to pack his belongings.45 Bowman’s liberalism was economic rather than social and, as we have seen, never seriously challenged an inherited nineteenth-century sense of received racial order, which younger liberals were coming to see as an embarrassment. In the 1930s and 1940s his obdurate hierarchical racism was more vocally entwined with a conservationist eugenics. “Our civilization will decline unless we improve our human breed,” he warned in 1941. “To support the genetically unfit and also allow them to breed is to degrade our

250

/

the kantian university

society.” Eugenics was very much a science in the service of nation building: “A people having staked out a territory as we have done in America certainly has the right to look after itself from the eugenic standpoint.” He resented the social mores of polite company that, perverted by a misplaced sense of equality, forbade the open statement of racial differences that he took as self-evident scientific fact. He disparaged a particular author as “himself a Jew and a minority man who loves the brown and black brothers” and who therefore could not “speak freely about the real causes of reluctance to work.” The Protestant work ethic was racially based for Bowman, and a strange confusion of “scientific” fieldwork and his experiences at home, where he had three servants, provided the requisite evidence: In 1907 when I first went to the Caribbean and Panama it was common talk that if you engaged a colored man to work he lasted for only the few days required to earn $5.00. With that sum he could sit in the shade and eat rice and dried fish and beans for a week without doing anything. It is not insecurity and low income that makes for low morale. It is a combination which also includes a very great desire to sit in the shade. When Della was sick this past winter I fed her $5.00 worth of vitamins and she picked up right away and was as well as ever in a month but she still insists on sitting in the shade for about three hours while I work to supply the living of herself and two other loafers at 108 West 39th Street. . . . A person who receives unemployment pay of $20 a week has no taxes to pay, no social security payments to make. . . . We pay $25 a week to each of our three servants. They know that if they stop working they would be just as well off and so they work as little as they please.46

A similarly tawdry scene was played out at the university. The Hopkins president had an “attendant,” a gofer in today’s parlance. Matthew Butler, black and Baltimore born and bred, had the job in the late 1940s, and he recalled Bowman’s demeanor before entering a trustees meeting: He would comb his hair and adjust his tie—he was always very neat— and then he would turn to me and say, “Matt, don’t you think I am a very distinguished-looking gentleman?” He never smiled. You could never tell how he was. He just walked along the corridor with me carrying his books. And when we got to the sliding doors, he said, “Matt, you open the doors.” There inside were the trustees all sitting around the table, and he would say, “Good morning, gentlemen.” And then he introduced me, “This is Matt, my gun-bearer.”47

The empire at home indeed. For all his racism, there is nothing inconsistent in Bowman’s cordially agreeing to become a sponsor of the United

the kantian university

/

251

Negro College Fund, at the personal invitation of John D. Rockefeller, or in his appointment to its national council.48 Even a black mind is a terrible thing to waste, Bowman would surely have said, as long as it knows its place. Especially after the Mitchell incident in 1939, there was considerable discontent around the city with Bowman’s high-handed ways. The local press was less concerned about exposing the institutional racism that Hopkins shared with many universities, largely embracing their class elitism, but it was concerned at the persistent reports of faculty flight and disaffection and internal disorder at Hopkins. Bowman smarted from the criticism, especially when the city’s leading newspaper, the Baltimore Sun, broke class ranks and published its misgivings. Were it not for the war, which turned Hopkins along with the rest of the world on its head and displaced all criticism, Bowman’s tenure may well have turned out quite differently.49

hopkins at war: prelude to the military industrial complex Declarations of war, as opposed to wars themselves, are about pretexts, and while the attack on Pearl Harbor may have been a shocking surprise to the American public, U.S. entry into the war was not. Bowman, like many Americans, was only glad that despite the terrible cost in lives at Pearl Harbor, at least the country had a clear moral pretext for joining the war, and he fell in behind Roosevelt, who worried that any lesser pretext might not have sustained a united nation through the war. It is “clear to all our people how dangerous our enemies are,” Bowman concluded. “We all see it now as a life and death struggle.”50 Roosevelt had been making war preparations since at least 1938; Johns Hopkins, since 1940. It was no longer possible to “consider education in detached terms,” Bowman reported; what “colleges and universities now supply need not be called education at all. It is rather the fullest possible use of plant and funds, knowledge and ideas, student and faculty, to meet the requirements of a war of inhuman proportions.”51 Johns Hopkins was traditionally in the vanguard of military organization for war: Gilman encouraged an 1898 “company of volunteers” on the campus, and the first Reserve Officer Training Corp (ROTC) battalion was organized there in World War I.52 Bowman now mobilized the campus for a far larger, more sustained, and more technological war, throwing the entire energy, personnel, and facilities of the university into the war effort. Kant’s dialectic had come full circle. While the university devoted itself entirely to the military and industrial goals of the state, any distinction between science and state appeared a remote abstraction.

252

/

the kantian university

Personnel training was a top priority. To meet demands for new kinds of military and industrial training, the School of Engineering began intensive sixteen-week courses and night courses “aimed at the particular needs of industrial plants.” Industrial scientists were recruited to augment the faculty, and the school’s laboratories were idle only on Sundays. By 1941–42 the engineering school instructed twenty-five hundred students, including for the first time a significant number of women, who moved into jobs in industry, the military, or government. The normal undergraduate degree schedule was reduced to three years. Budgets declined, teaching loads increased, and many students and professors were displaced by special wartime projects. Answering a 1940 request from the surgeon general, the hospital and medical school organized teams for large field hospitals, and when the United States joined the Pacific war, two hospitals of five hundred beds each were shipped out to Australia and Fiji and eventually relocated to the Philippines and Burma.53 The centerpiece of wartime personnel training at Hopkins and around the country was the Army Specialized Training Program (ASTP). Early military projections of necessary personnel varied wildly from 3.6 million to 10 million (all undercounts, compared with the 15 million who eventually donned uniforms), and colleges and universities were seen as a major source for officer training. For university administrators this helped compensate for plummeting student enrollments (from a million in 1941 to six hundred thousand in 1942). Promising temporary deferment from active service, the initial Officer Reserve Corp was widely criticized as an escape hatch for men from the upper classes. As McGeorge Bundy later put it, the program “dealt kindly with men whose presence in the college was the result largely of their happy choice of parents.”54 The corps was curtailed, deferrers were conscripted, and the War Department, which had minimal respect for sending soldiers to college instead of the battlefield, resisted political pressure from Congress until late 1942, when, without a single study demonstrating the importance of college training for winning the war, they announced a massive ASTP program.55 The curriculum took nine months, guaranteed no commission at the end, and focused on technical material: courses ranged among the sciences, engineering, and medicine as well as geography and languages. The geography courses were especially vital for recruits, who had been immunized from global intelligence by two decades of isolationism. ASTP was intended to speed up the provision of trained personnel but was overtaken by events. The problems were tremendous. Suitable teaching texts were available only sporadically and in small numbers, and so the first task

the kantian university

/

253

was to write and produce the necessary manuals. Bowman sat on the War Department committee organizing curricula and texts, drawing on a reluctant group of younger geographers to write the ASTP manuals on geography.56 But progress was slow, and who would do the teaching? With geography such a central part of the ASTP, yet with few trained geographers available, many universities scrambled “to make geographers on short notice out of professors of this and that,” as Bowman put it. One hundred fifty thousand recruits were expected through the colleges in quick succession, and the first large contingent of five hundred arrived at Hopkins in June 1943, when the program was still being organized. ASTP lasted almost a year and probably changed the country’s campuses more profoundly than it changed the country’s army. In 1944, when battlefield needs engulfed all other concerns, the army drafted most ASTP recruits in midcourse, speeding up and short-circuiting the training for those who remained.57 Bowman was personally embroiled in numerous aspects of war work in Washington. As chair of the Military Affairs Committee of the congressionally appointed National Committee on Education and Defense, he insisted that military conscription had to be sensitive to industrial needs. He advocated a wide array of deferments for college education as long as these were targeted at “training for industrial and professional skills” deemed “necessary for total defense.”58 It was a waste to send “the best men” into combat. “This is an industrial war,” he told Hopkins undergraduates, and if industry lay “back of an expanded Army and Navy,” science lay back of an expanded industry. This rationale presumably also motivated his use of powerful Washington connections to have his son, Robert, newly commissioned as a captain, posted to a Washington intelligence job.59 Most of Bowman’s war work, however, was with the State Department, and it was so demanding that he split his weekly schedule between Washington and Baltimore, cramming the university work into the first part of the week (Monday through Wednesday). The “marriage of science and the military” was consummated in this war, and Hopkins science departments converted to wartime research.60 The university’s laboratories produced prototype instruments and compounds for industrial production and military application. The chemistry department housed more projects than any other, including an early effort to develop infrared detection devices that enabled night vision. One chemist was hired out to MIT for work on a radio-controlled bomb and another to a Baltimore chemical corporation. With quinine supplies cut off by the Japanese blockade in the Pacific, alternative sources of antimalarial drugs had to be developed, and medical school physicians organized this work through the

254

/

the kantian university

National Research Council. Secretary of War Henry Stimson got Roosevelt’s support for an official biological weapons program—anthrax and botulism seemed most promising—and Hopkins’s slice of this work was quartered in the campus “Greenhouse,” for the sake of easy emergency egress should things go wrong, according to surviving campus lore. However, Bowman declined an offer to head up the government’s biological warfare research project. In all, Hopkins hosted more than a hundred wartime research and industrial projects between 1940 and 1945, spending more than sixteen million dollars and employing as many as two thousand people at the height.61 For a campus with fewer than two thousand students and around seven hundred faculty at the outbreak of war, this is a significant measure of war mobilization. All of these projects were carried out under the utmost secrecy, creating further personnel headaches: security guards, systems of identification, secure transportation of materials. All this occurred in a context where students and soldiers, administrators and professors, industry scientists and secretaries—new faces every day—scurried with unprecedented busyness around the campus. However much they blended into the daily frenzy, two research projects were of particular historical importance. Hopkins played a minor role in the Manhattan Project. Chemist Robert D. Fowler had been experimenting with atomic fission since 1939, and three years later his team of several dozen scientists developed an industrial process for making a vital liquid component of the atomic bomb. The second project began with the short-term problem of developing more effective antiaircraft artillery and blossomed into a permanent institution. To hit even one plane at the start of the war, navy gunners had to shoot off hundreds of rounds. But what if a shell could be developed that did not have to hit its target but instead could be timed to go off only when the target was sensed nearby? This required both a variable-time fuse and a mechanism that could judge the proximity of shell to target. Swedish, German, and British scientists had begun work on versions of such a device prior to the war but with little success. As an added complication, the fuse would have to withstand the force required to launch it (twenty thousand times the force of gravity). Building on work shared by British scientists, Merle Tuve, a 1926 Hopkins Ph.D. whose dissertation addressed ionospheric motion and radio waves, took up the challenge in 1940. An accomplished nuclear physicist, Tuve would rather have given up pure research than have its results fall into Hitler’s hands, and so he threw himself into the “technology of modern war.” He pursued development of a “proximity fuse,” finding ready sponsorship from the National Defense Research Committee (NDRC).62

the kantian university

/

255

A prototype passed a first experimental hurdle in early 1942, and the Office of Scientific Research and Development (OSRD), funded by the navy, offered Johns Hopkins a contract of eight hundred thousand dollars to house the work. Bowman demanded a navy payment for “overhead” costs that the university would inevitably incur—building rent, heat, secretarial support, and the like— and in one of the first such arrangements, the navy agreed to pay 1 percent of the total grant, ushering in the whole system of overhead payment for governmental grants to universities.63 The secrecy around the work was extreme, however, and when the trustees balked at providing a facility about which they were given no information, Bowman secured an informal request for the facility from Roosevelt. In spring 1942 the Applied Physics Laboratory of Johns Hopkins University set up shop in an old garage in Silver Spring, Maryland. After sea trials in August, the fuse was rushed into production. Five companies shared the manufacturing, and five APL scientists, including James A. Van Allen (later the discoverer of the eponymous circumplanetary radiation belts), were commissioned into the navy to demonstrate the use of the fuses.64 “No larger than a pint milk bottle,” the fuse was fitted into the nose of the shell. It emitted electromagnetic waves at the speed of light, which, when reflected by close objects, activated a switch and detonated the charge. Naval commanders were skeptical until the fuses were used in the Pacific in early January 1945, against Japanese dive-bombers at Guadalcanal, and then during the siege of Okinawa. Their initial effectiveness was approximately three times that of conventional shells, and APL scientists worked throughout the war to improve the design. Their main use remained in the Pacific theater, in part because this was the scene of some of the most violent U.S. naval battles, but also in part because the Combined Chiefs of Staff were reluctant to use the proximity fuse over land, where unexploded shells might be copied by enemy scientists. But they were deployed in Europe, contributing to an ostensible 79 percent shoot-down rate against German V-1 “buzz bombs” during the London blitz of the summer of 1944 and in the post-Normandy counteroffensive, including the Battle of the Bulge.65 Industrial production of the fuses reached forty thousand daily. From research to deployment the project cost eight hundred million dollars overall and involved more than eighty thousand people. A thousand of them worked in and with the APL on design. Eighty-five percent of the total number, it was eagerly pointed out at the time, were women, the vast majority of them in armaments factories. The fuse, Bowman crowed to a trustee, was rated by the army and navy as “the greatest life-saver” of the war’s secret weapons. Indeed, when news of the “radio shell” was released, the New York

256

/

the kantian university

Times dubbed it “second only to the atomic bomb” among wartime technological inventions. An editorial was even more enthusiastic: congratulating Johns Hopkins, it asserted that “American science has to its credit an achievement comparable with that of the atomic bomb.”66 Always with an eye across the Atlantic rather than the Pacific, Bowman boasted that the work was accomplished “in time to help smash von Rundstedt’s drive and to pile up a score of casualties that appalled the Germans,” and he tied the invention to the “extraordinary surrenders” of three hundred thousand German troops on four successive days in 1944. “It is dreadful to think of such results in terms of triumph and satisfaction,” he allowed.67 Any pretense of a separation between science and the national state was unsustainable under conditions of modern war. It was, indeed, an industrial war, and the whole point was to merge scientific and state interests into a patriotic whole. Scientists not only yielded “to pressure from on high” to “shape a policy that [suited] an Administration,” but they did so without hesitation, drawing no Bowmanian complaint that they were “degrading their science.”68 Confronting the contradiction, Bowman struggled to keep the Kantian rationale alive. At an APL dinner addressed by Rear Admiral Albert Noble, Bowman praised the lab’s wartime science as even more “noble” than peacetime science insofar as “through strengthening national defense, it protects all the nobilities,” especially the nobility of pure science. Science arms the state, and the state protects science. The point here is less to tilt at the role of science in war, a Sisyphean undertaking if ever there was one, but to suggest that if science and war are as intimately connected as all the historical signs suggest, then the Kantian rationale for an autonomous science conceals more than it explains.

“ by the short and curlies ” : the isaiah bowman school of geography When he arrived at Hopkins in 1935, Bowman was met by a deputation of faculty. On their minds was not the university finances, general university policy, racial quotas, or even the curriculum, but geography.69 Despite the interests and reputation of its founding president, the university had no department of geography and no organized instruction in the subject. The Walter Hines Page School of International Affairs was opened at Hopkins in 1930, but its coverage was partial and the depression stunted its growth. The faculty feared that Bowman, an ardent proselytizer for geography, would strip resources from other disciplines to establish his own. It was not an idle fear. His commitment to geography was emotional as much as in-

the kantian university

/

257

tellectual, and he had a habit of getting his way. There was also the precedent at Clark University, where geographer Wallace Atwood was appointed president in 1920 and proceeded to starve the mathematics department and a world-class psychology program (the only one where Freud lectured in the United States) to establish a graduate school of geography.70 The faculty were determined to preempt any similar fiasco at Hopkins. Geography faired badly in the scramble for disciplinary turf in the U.S. academy, leading in some quarters to a defensive concern with the discipline’s essential character and an effort to police its borders against wouldbe intruders. Bowman’s practical instincts kept him from following this Kantian scholasticism so far. “Damn these boundary fellows who think the Lord created ‘subjects,’ “ he once vented. “Simon-pure geography is a blind man feeling the elephant’s tail.”71 Still, he deeply desired a Hopkins geography department but knew he would have to bide his time. “I long for support” to develop geography, he agonized after four years in the job, and as late as mid-1942 he saw “no opportunities such as . . . at the AGS.” After the war, research funding would carry “the yoke of Government” or require the arduous pursuit of private donations, he lamented.72 But as war preparation progressed, a very simple means for establishing a geography program presented itself. On the War Department committee responsible for the ASTP curriculum, Bowman ensured that geography received a prominent place in that curriculum, and this allowed him to cast a Hopkins geography program as a patriotic duty and absolute requirement if the university was to share in the glory as well as the financial bounty that the ASTP promised. This time the faculty could not oppose him, and he gloated over his victory in the pages of Science: the ASTP requires “the sudden expansion of instruction” in geography, he wrote, adding his personal gratitude that “the faculty enthusiastically favors the development of a permanent department.” To Karl Pelzer, a young Bonn geographer hired in 1936, Bowman’s verbal glee was cruder. Returning to campus from the War Department, Bowman triumphantly told his young research assistant, “Now we have them by the short and curlies.”73 The war only quickened Bowman’s sense of the opportunities for geography. He wanted a practical program that would provide data and information for effective political decision making. Two wars had proven the value of geography, he would say, and it was on this ground of “national interest” that he staked his case.Announcing the Hopkins campaign for geography, he reasoned: War and its related problems of peace-time organization for equity and freedom have at last taught the American people that geography is not

258

/

the kantian university

children’s geography to be finished in the seventh grade. That “imaginative grasp of space” which science shares with poetry seemed somehow to be impossible to attain until our Army, Navy and Air forces had taken their stations and begun their operations in almost every part of the world. For a full generation we seemed unable in our thinking to synchronize time and space in a spreading network of technology, trade and international relations.74

The geography department at Hopkins was therefore part of Bowman’s effort to combat the “lost geography” that, as he astutely observed, had now lasted a generation. The Cambridge geography department was his model. In a 1944 prospectus circulated to university presidents, trustees, corporate executives, and other individuals who might be convinced to help fund the new department, he highlighted the fact that Cambridge geography had “rendered altogether extraordinary services in the training of specialists serving British interests. Both it and the nearby Scott Polar Research Institute are filled with staffs in the service of the Admiralty and the War Office.”75 With the United States now superseding Britain as the leading global power, it was imperative, he argued, that the country have the intellectual resources necessary for the role. Hopkins would do for the United States what Cambridge had done for Britain. His obsession with Cambridge entwined his avid anglophilia with a pragmatic appropriation of Cambridge’s academic luster; while visiting the Cambridge department in the spring of 1944 while on a diplomatic mission, he resolved to copy even its architecture and went so far as to have detailed plans of the Cambridge building drawn. The key to the best department, for Bowman, was first and foremost to get the “best men”: the best specialists in their field, scholars with an intense curiosity, and an aptitude for related disciplines. Their actual fields were a question of secondary importance. Intensifying the Hopkins tradition, it would be “a department of geography of a new type” with little or no classroom instruction, where students would work under the individual guidance of scholars and spend considerable time in the field.76 Pelzer, a specialist in population and settlement and in East and Southeast Asia, was already at Hopkins, as was the noted Mongolia and China scholar Owen Lattimore, hired personally by Bowman in 1938 to build up the Page School,77 and in 1943 with ASTP instruction imminent, he began making new appointments. First hired was the young Jean Gottmann, an outstanding Sorbonne regional geographer, who had impressed Bowman at the International Geographical Congress in Amsterdam in 1938. After he escaped France in 1941, Gottmann came to the United States and may have been the only geographer with as

the kantian university

/

259

frenetic a war schedule as Bowman’s. Resident at the Institute for Advanced Studies at Princeton by early 1943, he also consulted for various agencies and departments in Washington, taught for the ASTP program at Princeton, and rounded out his familiarity with the Pennsylvania Railroad with a fellowship at New York’s Rockefeller Foundation. He was charged with training those Hopkins faculty from other disciplines who, given the dearth of geographers, would have to teach ASTP geography. Gottmann, not incidentally to his frantic East Coast commuting, later became famous for his book Megalopolis, which pioneered the idea that the eastern seaboard from Boston to Washington comprised a single interrelated metropolitan unit and a crucible for a “new order in the organization of inhabited space.” The idea for the book was actually hatched in Bowman’s car. As the Hopkins president drove the young Frenchman to the train station after a visit to the university in 1942, he asked Gottmann what he saw in the American landscape after only six weeks in the country. The answer Gottmann gave driving down Charles Street was the first formulation of Megalopolis.78 Also hired in this period were George Carter and Andrew Clark, both historical geographers from Berkeley, where they had worked with Carl Sauer. Carter focused on the earliest human settlements in North America and had spent a year in Washington working for Richard Hartshorne at the Office of Strategic Services. Unhappy with the tedium of that work, he jumped at the chance of a Hopkins position.79 Andrew Clark also worked for the OSS, focused more on post-Columbian geographies of North America, and would spend most of his career at Wisconsin, becoming the most prominent historical geographer of his generation. This core group of Pelzer, Gottmann, Clark, and Carter were all recent graduates, and Bowman soon went looking for a more seasoned scholar— “an elder brother” for them—to chair the department. He set his sights on Carl Sauer, whom Bowman thought “without rival in range and creative power.” Missouri-born (1889) and Chicago-educated (Ph.D., 1915), Sauer taught at the University of Michigan before moving to the University of California at Berkeley in 1923. There he established what many, including Bowman, felt to be the most rigorous and at the same time innovative graduate instruction in geography, and he was now at the top of the profession. His historical approach resonated with Bowman—both shared a soft evolutionism—and his Latin American regional focus, a penchant for cultural landscapes, and a passion for the Pleistocene also recommended him, as did his insistence on a strong physical foundation in geographical training. Bowman paved the way by first trying to have Sauer nominated to the Na-

260

/

the kantian university

tional Academy of Sciences through both the anthropology and geology sections, but the geologists balked.80 Anyway, Sauer would not leave Berkeley. Next Bowman tried the young Gilbert White, a specialist in land use, water, and resources, who also turned him down, becoming president of Haverford College while still in his thirties. Another Californian was rejected as “platitudinous” and “pontifical”;81 other names were entertained and scholars approached, but again there was a broad reluctance to work with Bowman. He would be a stern and meddlesome boss, it was widely perceived, unable to give a senior scholar the requisite autonomy to build Hopkins geography. With the post still unfilled in the months following the war, Bowman eventually gave the chair’s job to one of his younger recruits, George Carter. Several other scholars were hired after the war with a view to consolidating geography: Robert L. Pendleton, a U.S. Department of Agriculture soil scientist who also split his time with the State Department; Douglas H. K. Lee, a tropical biogeographer; and the highly respected E. Francis Penrose, a student of John Maynard Keynes and a specialist in economic theory and international relations. Penrose saw his primary goal as “training men for specific jobs in the State Department or in the United Nations.” Finally, there was C. W. Thornthwaite, widely acclaimed for his modern classification of climates. He came to Hopkins cheaply, since the army and air force sponsored his research on the dynamics and behavior of groundlevel moisture with a special interest in dust and poison gas.82 Bowman was always disappointed that one or two political geographers did not grace the faculty, but he saw no one who impressed him sufficiently. This assemblage of highly diverse specialists became the basis for the School of Geography at Hopkins. It remained for Bowman to organize funding. Disavowing the “yoke of government funding,” he solicited private sources, casting a wide net among his wealthy acquaintances, Baltimore businessmen and financiers, and especially the trustees. He implored the trustees that in preparation for the postwar world, we “must know more about the rest of the world and we must learn it quickly,”83 and one trustee in particular was energized by this connection of geographical knowledge and national power. John Lee Pratt was a publicity-shy industrialist, a former vice president and director of General Motors, scion of an old-money Virginia family, once listed as the seventeenth richest man in America.84 Following his 1939 appointment to the board of trustees, he became one of Bowman’s most enthusiastic supporters. He was also on the 1944 diplomatic mission to Britain, accompanied Bowman to Cambridge and was likewise impressed, and fell enthusiastically behind Bowman’s plan.

the kantian university

/

261

Together with Donaldson Brown, another wealthy trustee, Pratt and Bowman began corporate fundraising for geography in 1944. The goal was $1.25 million. Brown, Pratt, and a third donor each contributed fifty thousand dollars, and by the end of 1945 a half million dollars was committed. But private industry still represented a huge and largely untapped source. By 1945, General Motors, with an eye toward postwar resource extraction, prepared a series of regional studies of Brazil, and Bowman now offered the expertise of his fledgling Hopkins department to extend such work to include every country in the world.85 Companies like DuPont, Gulf, and General Motors were approached (GM became a major contributor), as were the Alfred Sloan Foundation and the Refugee Economic Corporation, with whom Bowman had worked on refugee resettlement at the end of the 1930s. If the GM-inspired global coverage of analytical surveys sounded like a large-scale cooperative proposal to update The New World one war later, the comparison was intended. “As the world’s most powerful nation,” Bowman declared, “America has far too little geographical sense for its suddenly expanded responsibilities.” Resources and population, “land development,” trade, transportation, and food all posed critical problems for U.S. interests after the war, but nowhere more so than in the “tropical” regions, whence it was assumed more and more resources would emanate. An increasingly vocal advocate of the conservative environmental managerialism associated with “wise use,” he stressed that resource use and conservation go hand in hand with an understanding of environmental processes and international relations. Indeed, the hiring of Pendleton, Penrose, Lee, and Thornthwaite, with expertise in the soils, economies, biota, and climates of tropical regions, reflected Bowman’s anticipation that the development of those regions would be a central plank of U.S. global economic policy. World War II not only caused Britain to “revise her Empire strategy throughout” but also “completely changed our ideas of the role of Africa,” he observed in one fundraising document. The United States had little real strategy in European colonial territories, and Hopkins geography was the place where much of this could be worked out. “Johns Hopkins must be the geopolitical service station for the State Department,” suggested one White House aide in 1945. But Bowman wanted more: he also wanted the Hopkins department to be a geo-economic service station for the State Department.86 Industrialist John Lee Pratt was the dominant financial force behind the establishment of geography at Hopkins. Pratt echoed Bowman’s sense of the neglect of geography and of the urgency about geographical training for the postwar world, and he endorsed the idea of Hopkins’s geography as a handmaiden to the State Department. Geography “will be useful” in

262

/

the kantian university

fulfilling the place “that destiny seems to have carved out for us.”87 By early 1947, $704,000 had been raised, and Bowman upped the goal to $2 million. Accommodations were found in Rogers House, a recently renovated building on the northeast edge of the campus, and in early 1948, the Isaiah Bowman School of Geography was officially founded and the first class of graduate students enrolled. Clarence Glacken, the intellectual historian of geography, later author of Traces on the Rhodian Shore and professor of geography with Sauer at Berkeley, was in the first class, but for the most part the students had a more practical bent. The first Ph.D. was Edward C. Higbee, who graduated in 1949 with the dissertation “Guatamala’s Agrarian Problem,” and the early classes included several climatology students working with Thornthwaite.88 The Army Specialized Training Program and related war-training programs stimulated the genesis of postwar area studies in universities around the country. In many ways filling the vacuum left by the lost geography that Bowman and Pratt perceived, area studies also set out to provide global coverage of the world’s economies, societies, and cultures. If they remained a prisoner of the Kantian dilemma, attempting to render independent knowledge that also fed directly into the state apparatus, area studies departed from the Kantian mold insofar as the organization of knowledge no longer expressed the conceptual division of the world but rather its geographical division. With the presence of the Page School and the Bowman School of Geography, Johns Hopkins could reasonably consider itself to be in the vanguard of this work in the late 1940s, but it eschewed the area studies model. Bowman would have scoffed at area studies as unimaginative and a reincarnation of “simon-pure” divisions of knowledge, albeit in geographical rather than disciplinary terms. Bowman’s own divergence from the Kantian model lay in his erection of what might be called an interdisciplinary disciplinarity, in which the practical connections across intellectual boundaries were already largely contained within the School of Geography. In that respect the Bowman School was more forward-looking than area studies. And yet the postwar world proved less and less forgiving of a best-science elitism that assembled accomplished specialists regardless of how they fitted together.

contradictions of the liberal university When Bowman retired from Hopkins, a terse student editorial slighted him as “pre-eminently a product of the liberal 19th century.”89 To be a nineteenthcentury liberal, the students astutely understood, was to be conservative in

the kantian university

/

263

many things. They understood why Bowman was the successor to Hale and Millikan at the NRC and why his closest ally among the Hopkins trustees was one of the richest men in the country. But such a linear appeal to historical change captures only a sliver of the truth. The students did not comprehend why he was both Woodrow Wilson’s geographer and Franklin Roosevelt’s. For Bowman’s nineteenth-century liberalism was updated via his formative role in twentieth-century liberal foreign policy, and his tenure at Hopkins played out a series of acute contradictions, which, however much connected to his personality, also expressed the dilemma of the modern liberal university. Much as it lingered, Kant’s delicate dialectic of a university independent of the state yet dependent on it was glaringly inadequate for grasping the dilemmas of twentieth-century higher education during and after the war, and yet no alternative vision was on the table. Without ever understanding it in such terms, Bowman consequently struggled to make modern sense of the Kantian impasse, constantly experimenting with new language for rendering order out of irreconcilable opposites. It was a hallmark of nineteenth-century liberalism to establish universal principles and to steer the course of one’s intellectual and practical decisions accordingly. Where principles collided, a contest of greater and lesser moral rights, responsibilities and goods, ensued. In this sense, nineteenthcentury liberalism was the essence of Kantianism, self-consciously about method more than substance; there were and are many liberalisms. Whatever the result, this permanent tension between principles and practice has the singular advantage that principle is always at hand to justify a range of often contradictory actions. The powerful language of idealism versus practicality evolved as a more nimble twentieth-century refinement of this intellectual purview. In the deepest sense, Bowman’s learned language at Paris guided his hand in Baltimore. The first contradiction Bowman navigated, then, was that between science and the university on the one side and the state on the other. When on 6 August 1945 he received the news about the atomic bombing of Hiroshima, the protection of Johns Hopkins was uppermost in his mind. He immediately tightened security for the science laboratories and other facilities, fearing attacks by pacifists and antiwar activists. But his second response was just as telling. When newspapers the following day carried news of the bomb, giving the first public details of its invention and manufacture, an incensed Bowman called a key War Department general to complain that Hopkins was not mentioned in the press release. Like many who were privately aghast at the destructive force unleashed by atomic weaponry, he remained publicly reticent. Rejecting a later offer to serve on the new Atomic

264

/

the kantian university

Energy Commission, he told President Truman that he thought the peaceful use of atomic science a better project than its military deployment.90 Peace changed the priority of principle and practice. Having spent four years throwing Johns Hopkins into the war with never a thought about government “entanglement” in science, Bowman now apparently believed that in peacetime the principle of an autonomous science subordinates the principled commitment to nation building. The postwar years only intensified this contradiction. Wartime military research forever swept away haphazard prewar funding arrangements for scientific research and effected instead an extensive three-way interpolation of university, corporate, and military interests. With a funding crisis threatening to return after the war, universities scrambled to develop these connections into a stable system of heightened scientific investment. Industrial corporations just as sorely wanted access to university scientists and resources, not least to garner favorable tax treatment, and the government sensed that a potential cold war would be every bit as industrially driven as the hot war that had just ended. Hopkins joined Associated Universities, Inc., a consortium devoted to atomic research contracted by the U.S. Army,91 but the more pressing concern was the disposition of the Applied Physics Lab. The APL had become a scientific-industrial behemoth, beholden to the lavish navy funding of two million dollars per year, compared with a million dollars in corporate funding (mostly pharmaceuticals such as Upjohn, Johnson and Johnson, and Squibb) for the rest of the university, and the APL’s management intruded relentlessly and unproductively on board of trustees meetings. There was no model for managing cooperative or contract research on the peacetime campus. The APL seemed too large for Hopkins to digest successfully if moved wholly into the university structure, yet Bowman wanted to coax it back to more basic research. Some kind of association with corporate capital provided one means of triangulating state invasiveness, he felt, and so fending off apprehensive trustees, he entered the APL into a joint agreement with the Kellex Corporation, a petroleum engineering subsidiary of the Kellogg Company active in the Manhattan Project. In hopes of insulating scientists themselves, Bowman established the Institute for Cooperative Research, through which all contract research at Hopkins was to be funneled. But corporate interests can be as invasive as those of the state, Bowman quickly found out, and when Kellex began throwing its weight around and APL scientists grew disaffected, he severed connections with the engineering firm, taking the APL directly under the wing of the university.92 For better or worse, the APL is a vital part of Bowman’s legacy

the kantian university

/

265

at Hopkins: half a century later, Johns Hopkins remained the top university recipient of federal funding, most of it APL defense spending. There was nothing nineteenth-century in the way Bowman reluctantly embraced the postwar military-industrial-university complex as a necessity. Especially recalcitrant about government meddling in academic science, he was cautious too about corporate sponsorship. Trustee Donaldson Brown became an outspoken proponent of all-out corporate sponsorship at Hopkins, leading to a protracted debate on the issue. Although Brown had contributed to the geography campaign and he held out the promise of more, Bowman balked at such a dramatic corporate underwriting of the university. He was not anticorporate, he assured Brown: “Private universities have common cause with industry in that both are striving to remain private and free.” But “how far can we enlarge the scale of such operations without changing the character of the University?”93 Brown had no such qualms and later cast up a Princeton proposal for a program in Near East studies to be underwritten by the Gulf Oil Company. Gulf executives would sit on the program’s advisory board. Bowman held firm, and Brown’s eventual defection to Princeton made him defensive. The university should “not be tied directly to company interests,” he believed, and were he “to propose to any faculty of Johns Hopkins that the services of our staff were available through consultantships they would throw me out of the room.” It was a matter of principle that corporate officers should not “sit, as such, on the advisory council of a department of the university designed to serve their commercial interests.” As for the repeated charge that he was anticorporate, that was ridiculous, he said, since he was a director “of the largest of them, A.T.&T.”94 The collision of principles here—the second contradiction—confronted the pursuit of business as the legitimate basis for democracy, which Bowman avidly supported, with the academic freedom so vital to the unleashing of the intellectual imagination and creativeness of the “uncommon man.” In this collision it was academic freedom that won out. But academic freedom itself was the fulcrum of a further contradiction. Academic freedom was everything for the Hopkins president—“My theory of a university is that politics and religion should have no place on the campus,”95—and sometimes nothing. In 1948 students invited Henry Wallace, previously secretary of agriculture, then vice president, to speak on campus during his presidential campaign for the Progressive Party, a leftward split from the Democratic Party that opposed U.S. complicity in making the cold war. Where Henry Luce had called it the American Century, Wallace responded that it was or should be the “century of the common man.” Bowman

266

/

the kantian university

thought Wallace a communist and denied him a venue. Undeterred, Wallace delivered a rousing harangue from Charles Street in front of the campus, addressing a swelled audience on the sloping grassy “beach,” and, in earshot of the president in Homewood House, included a denunciation of Bowman’s trampling of free speech.96 It was now presumably a principle that freedom of speech did not stretch to communists. In a more complex way, the design and fate of the Isaiah Bowman School of Geography exemplifies a third contradiction of the liberal worldview counterposing the practical and the ideal. The Bowman School of Geography was utterly true to the founding Hopkins tradition—the best minds given maximum freedom—and yet with its goal of becoming a geopolitical and geo-economic think tank for the State Department and for corporate capital, aimed at self-interested “tropical” development, it was equally wedded to the nation-building project. The only difference between Brown’s proposal for a Gulf Oil program in Near East studies at Princeton and Bowman’s School of Geography lay in whether corporate (and state) representatives would sit on the advisory boards. Bowman was surely right to resist this precipitous move, but at the same time, his justification evoking ideals of independent scholarship functioned to deny an “entanglement” of the university with corporate and government interests that was already an established fact. The real issue concerned where the power lay in this entanglement, and Bowman deployed his liberal idealism to ensure that he retained the upper hand. In fact the Isaiah Bowman School of Geography was stillborn. Never having secured a senior scholar to run the department, Bowman chose George Carter by default, which turned out to be a bad mistake. Carter was only thirty years old when he first came to Hopkins and was seen by even his own adviser as immature. By some new colleagues, he was perceived as petty and jealous; by others, as “Bowman’s office boy.”97 Bowman, who wanted to be fawned over, was, at the same time, annoyed at Carter for being too fawning, and the Hopkins president was eventually forced to apologize for Carter’s immaturity to John Lee Pratt. Pratt had warned that Carter “should be watched carefully for the next three to five years,” and when he stopped underwriting the Bowman School in 1949, Pratt gave Carter’s immaturity as a central reason.98 But there was a larger issue. The “best men” that Bowman was able to attract, even though he could not attract a leader, never cohered into an effective school or even a department. In 1948 the best men were not necessarily chained to their books or laboratories but had already made their own pacts with state and corporate funding. Precisely the practical bent that Bowman valued, the presence of these pacts meant that virtually all of the pro-

the kantian university

/

267

gram’s faculty had diverse and multiple loyalties. This was a systemic problem. As a matter of survival, these younger-generation scientists were more entrepreneurial, and building a School of Geography was Bowman’s ambition, not theirs. The soil scientist, international trade specialist, and climatologist sought their own funding and wanted only to get on with their research in soil, trade, and climate. Some drifted away almost as soon as they arrived (Clark, Thornthwaite), while others were fired by Bowman. Karl Pelzer was first fired; he was “too Prussian” in the classroom, and Bowman also resented a series of articles by his wife, Betty Pelzer, in the Baltimore Sun, decrying the unequal social treatment of “Negroes” and calling for an end to the “color line.” Jean Gottmann was second. Carter implored Bowman to fire Gottmann, who, he said, treated Hopkins as simply a “stopover between trains,” and Bowman agreed, saying that since Carter “was a young man,” he, Bowman, would do the dirty deed. The school “floundered around a lot,” recalled Abel Wolman, the prominent Hopkins engineer: “it didn’t quite crystalize.”99 The delicacy of the Kantian dialectic could not be reinstated after its utter implosion in the white heat of war, and young faculty members did not bother to try. They were, in fact, far more pragmatic than Bowman himself. Two other events were decisive in the failure of Bowman’s vision. The first was the highly publicized “academic war” at Harvard, leading to the elimination of geography at Bowman’s alma mater. This also occurred in 1948, and it cast a pall over the Bowman School at Hopkins. The second event followed soon after when, amidst the cold war hysteria of McCarthyism, Owen Lattimore found himself accused of being one of the top Soviet spies in the State Department. Bowman was centrally implicated in the first event and although absent for the second, the witch hunt against Lattimore also scarred Bowman’s Hopkins legacy insofar as George Carter played a central and destructive role in the Lattimore affair. Both events sealed the fate of Bowman’s misbegotten vision for geography at Hopkins. Only in 1957, when M. Gordon (Reds) Wolman, son of Abel Wolman, was hired to rebuild something along different lines was geography revived, at least for a few decades. If Hopkins was Bowman’s empire for nearly a decade and a half, he was nothing if not thorough in its administration. Having solved the university’s fiscal crisis in the late 1930s, he began to treat the trustees much as he treated students and faculty. Their “democracy,” too, was to be circumscribed if it collided with his. They could be uppity, he thought, and so he made a habit of asking as the first order of business: “ ‘Does anyone have any complaint about the way Dr. Bowman has been running the university?’ And of course, nobody had anything to say. ‘If you have, this is the

268

/

the kantian university

time to say it.’ When they don’t, I say: ‘Now the next order of business is my program.’”100 This was a boast, of course, but there was nothing idle about it. To trustee president Carlyle Barton, Bowman complained that trustees only “came to the Board meetings to make speeches,” whereas in Bowman’s view “only one speech should be made at a Board meeting and that by the president of the university.”101 The trustees of Johns Hopkins— capitalists, lawyers, gentlemen of leisure, and big egos in their own right— were not accustomed to being addressed in this manner, and by 1948 many of them eagerly awaited Bowman’s retirement. Even his staunchest allies, such as John Lee Pratt, now distanced themselves. After Bowman retired at the end of 1948, the School of Geography was eventually downgraded to a department, and trustees reallocated their donations to other causes. Introducing The Conflict of the Faculties, Kant lays out the purely rational grounds for the division between different university faculties, then notes the fortuitous homology between this arrangement and the empirically and historically derived divisions of the Prussian state. Although Hegel famously used this coincidence to suggest that reason inhered in history itself and the state represented the end of history, Kant could never accede to such a collapse between history and the idea. For Kant, history and reason are intimately connected yet remain distinct. For this dialectic to stabilize as a coherent argument, Kant needed to find a simultaneously social and ideational entity in which, as Bill Readings puts it, “reason can combine institution and autonomy, while holding pure reason and empirical history apart.” Kant’s solution lies in “the figure of the republican subject,” who embodies this contradiction. Kant’s “republican subject” is “rational in matters of knowledge, republican in matters of power.”102 Bowman was Kant’s “republican subject” par excellence. He lived the contradictions of institution and autonomy, history and reason—sometimes ahead of his time, sometimes behind it, but always in the shadow of Kant’s problematic. His arrogance at Hopkins was premised on precisely this selfperception. He saw himself standing astride a university whose coherence depended crucially and only on him and on his willingness to exercise authority in the name of that vision. His lowercase republicanism expresses the nation-building project in the microcosm of the university, while his liberalism expresses that project in a global context. He reinvented the Kantian dilemma globally in and through twentieth-century American liberalism. That this liberalism was swayed more by its nineteenth-century roots than by any accommodation with socialism is only to say that he was a conservative liberal.

the kantian university

/

269

Bowman always insisted that the power of ideas is written into empirical geographies, and his own legacy at Hopkins exemplifies this. Trustee revenge against this simultaneously liberal and republican subject joined with student and faculty antipathy to snuff the trace of Bowman from the university’s collective memory. While his predecessors Gilman, Remsen, and Ames all had large buildings named after them, the only commemoration of the fifth Hopkins president is Isaiah Bowman Drive, the road out of town on the back side of the campus. Even that was renamed in the 1990s, leaving no trace of his presence in the Hopkins landscape.103

PART IV THE AMERICAN LEBENSRAUM

10 GEOPOLITICS: THE REASSERTION OF OLD WORLD GEOGRAPHIES

The end of World War I closed the curtains on the first formative moment of the American Century. It intimated a new calibration of geography with economic expansion and was for many a time of optimism. Woodrow Wilson’s new diplomacy and his aspirations for a tidied map of Europe were meant to take international political and diplomatic relations beyond a concern for geography. From a different direction, the German socialist Rosa Luxemburg believed that the geographical closure of economic expansion made socialist internationalism inevitable. Whether liberal or socialist, such expectations were not entirely naive but expressed a certain political trajectory in international affairs: World War I certainly challenged any simple geographical determinism, with air power, modern battlefield methods, and international commerce all eroding the significance of simple geographical distance and location in calculations of global power. The internationalism of the Russian Revolution was outdone only by that of its opponents. Vladimir Lenin and British geographer Halford Mackinder, from very different perspectives, realized that with the world completely divided up among capitalist nation-states, only redivision was now possible. Geography, Mackinder sensed, was poised to become the pivot of history in a thoroughly new way.1 But much as Mackinder could only hark back to classical times to articulate what might be new, the geography on which world history pivoted over the next two decades reverted to the trenchant Old World territorial-

274

/

geopolitics

ities that Wilson had promised to vanquish. The vastly different internationalisms of Wilson and Luxemburg were both defeated—the USSR under Stalin reverted to “socialism in one country”—and with them the misbegotten optimism of a world beyond geography. Already before the Paris conference ended, any last hurrah for absolutist Old World geographies seemed like a cruel joke, and in its place came a vicious resuturing of politics with geography. The largely U.S. aspiration to get beyond geography seriously underestimated the extent to which the nation-state system remained rooted in a territorial definition of power (although Luxemburg at least sensed that the detachment of political from territorial power required an assault on capital). New boundaries and territorial shuffles in Europe meant a transfer of citizenship for millions, with deep disruptions between old identities and new territories. European nations still maintained widespread empires, augmented after the war by territories confiscated from Germany. For colonized peoples, who by the 1930s increasingly organized for self-determination, territorial control was the whole point of political struggle. Most crucially, the vanquished German state, which lost territory at home and experienced the bitter ignominy of Versailles, was in no mood to dismiss territorial claims as the basis of political-economic power. On the contrary, nationalist territorial claims provided an opportunistic rallying cry for successive Weimar governments. The year in which geopolitics burst from obscurity into the global imaginary of most Americans was 1942. U.S. newspapers had faithfully reported the darkening political and military clouds in late-1930s Europe, and debate raged about intervention versus isolationism, but after two decades of isolationist ideology in the United States, the public remained astonishingly unfamiliar with the political geography of Europe, not to mention the rest of the world. Within days of the bombing of Pearl Harbor and U.S. entry into World War II, however, political geography became the object of blistering media attention. Public sales of atlases exploded when Roosevelt, in his weekly fireside radio chats, encouraged listeners to follow along with the war action on the map. On the front pages of usually sober magazines and newspapers, the most lurid conspiracy theories centered on German geopolitics. Nonplussed by the sudden realization that a half-educated painter-turned-failed-and-jailed-corporal was a formidable global adversary, the American public struggled to understand the origins of a war they were suddenly fighting. Every magazine in the country featured competing exposés of geopolitics: Business Week and Fortune, Harper’s and Life, Collier’s and Time—even the dryly empirical Foreign Commerce Weekly published by the U.S. Department of Commerce. Dozens of books on geopoli-

geopolitics

/

275

tics were rushed to print. The spotlight quickly identified German geographer and general Karl Haushofer, together with his Munich Institut für Geopolitik, as the power behind the throne. An astonishingly exaggerated Reader’s Digest report reveals more about the effects of isolationism in the United States than about politics in Germany. Haushofer’s institute, it reported, employed the “1,000 scientists behind Hitler.” Their “ideas, . . . charts, maps, statistics, information, and plans have dictated Hitler’s moves from the beginning. . . . Haushofer’s Institute is no mere instrument which Hitler uses. It is the other way round. Dr. Haushofer and his men dominate Hitler’s thinking.”2 Especially in the United States, World War II brought the populace face to face again with geography. There, the two decades from the end of the Paris Peace Conference to World War II represented a period of unprecedented geographical amnesia, and the 1942 hysteria about geopolitics reflected a public ignorance of world geography that would have been unthinkable two decades earlier while also earnestly trying to compensate for it. A resounding irony marks this precipitous loss of geographical sensibility. Woodrow Wilson’s U.S. globalism envisaged a world beyond geography, but Wilson was soundly defeated, and Europe in the 1920s and 1930s moved viciously in the opposite direction, toward a brittle and fissured political geography. Yet a version of Wilson’s desired postgeographic sensibility not only materialized anyway in the United States—albeit as geographical ignorance of a spatially fractured world—but also was actually nurtured as a virtue of the isolationist ideology that defeated him. German geopolitics did not develop in isolation from other political and academic currents. The period was marked by tense and intense communication between German and U.S. geographers, and the geopolitics that burst into U.S. consciousness in 1942 had a long history entwining academics with politics. In the United States no one was more centrally positioned in this history than Bowman, veteran of Paris, cofounder of the Council on Foreign Relations, and a political geographer in constant contact with German geographers.

of geopolitics and academic geography The word geopolitics was coined by the Swedish political scientist Rudolf Kjellén in an 1899 polemic defending Swedish boundaries against impending Norwegian independence. For Kjellén geopolitics was the science of the state, treated as a territorial organism, which exercises power in competition with other states. A state’s geography—its location vis-à-vis other states

276

/

geopolitics

and physical features, the resources it controls, its land and population— was felt to influence, sometimes decisively, its political fate, and, conversely, geographical knowledge could be applied in a state’s competitive relations with other territories—the art of geopolitics.3 The Leipzig geographer Friedrich Ratzel was the most influential figure in the emergence of geopolitics. Trained initially as a zoologist in the flush of scientific excitement after Darwin’s announcement of natural selection, Ratzel imported a naturalistic framework to geography and ethnology in the 1870s. Not only does a “spatial unity of life” connect the land to the cultural history of a people (Volk), he argued, but the state too is organically rooted in the territory it commands. It was this connection between state and space that especially excited Ratzel. State power flows from the control of space, and a series of laws account for the success or failure of states. Larger states are more powerful, facilitating growing cultures, he proposed, and territorial expansion is as natural a feature of the state as of biological organisms. Successful states increase their populations, expand their economies, develop their cultures; territorial expansion is a prerequisite of success; geopolitical competition, the means.4 Every state, Ratzel argued, has a natural right to a requisite living space— its “Lebensraum”—and, conversely, a state’s struggle for existence is defined through the quest for Lebensraum. More powerful states and those with growing populations have a right to greater Lebensraum, whereas weaker states unable to master the space they possess are the rightful target of stronger states. Ratzel’s political geography therefore gave “an aura of scientific respectability” to European colonialism, most pointedly the German expansion after 1884, telling the story of imperialism as a legitimate struggle for existence by the state. As Ratzel’s student Ellen Churchill Semple once put it, man’s “big spacial [sic] ideas, born of that ceaseless regular wandering, outgrow the land that bred them and bear their legitimate fruit in wide imperial conquests.” Geopolitics also therefore endowed Darwinian natural selection with “a spatial and environmental dimension,” according to Woodruff Smith.5 If the intellectual inspiration for German geopolitics in the 1920s was primarily domestic, Mackinder was also part of the mix. The British geographer made the argument in 1904 that sea power was fading in the face of land power and eventually announced his “heartland theory,” whereby the borderlands between Central Europe and Russia held the key to world power. This resonated with the Ratzelian imperative of territorial expansion, the economic and military expansionism of Wilhelmian Germany, and the long-standing aggression between Germany and Russia.6 These intel-

geopolitics

/

277

lectual influences—Ratzel, Kjellén, and Mackinder—all came together in 1924 when a group of German geographers headed by Karl Haushofer founded the journal Zeitschrift für Geopolitik, which over the next two decades became the organizing focus for German geopolitical claims and ideas, specifically demands for German Lebensraum. German geopolitics exhibited a fairly naked nationalism, but it would be a mistake to assume that this was the only way in which different national interests filtered into academic geography. In the United States, too, “the scientific enterprise of geography was . . . bound up with national concerns,” according to historian Susan Schulten.7 In fact, in this period there were quite distinct national schools of geography, which had different histories and styles, different foci of research, and different methods, and the emergence of geopolitics in response to Versailles also issued through a complicated set of debates premised on this national organization of geographical knowledge. Geopolitics therefore emerged in the context of intense academic debates across, as much as within, national boundaries. Three episodes are especially important: first, a furious debate in physical geography between German and U.S. geographers in the 1920s, the so-called Penck-Davis debates; second, the question of Germany’s readmission to the International Geographical Union, the discipline’s international body, in the early 1930s; and third, German and Austrian response to Bowman’s role at Paris. The Penck-Davis debates of the early 1920s were a way station en route to geopolitics, a harbinger of the nationalist divisions that split U.S. and German geographers by the late 1930s. The issue was William Morris Davis’s theory of the “geographical cycle,” the emblem of his claim to leadership in geomorphology, which was broadly if not completely accepted in the United States, France, and Britain. The centerpiece of the theory posited an ideal cycle of geological uplift, erosion, and deposition, which wore down uplifted landscapes into what he called peneplains and produced a sequence of young, mature, and old landscape forms.8 The German school indisputably led geomorphological research at the turn of the twentieth century, and Davis’s deductive cycle, a clear challenge to German dominance, was itself challenged by more inductively inclined German scholars. Before 1914 Davis locked horns with two of the most prominent geographers of the day, Siegfried Passarge and Alfred Hettner, who argued that the Davisian cycle was only one of many possibilities, omitted much, and was of limited use for explaining multiple empirical variations in landform.9 When truncated academic contacts across war lines gingerly resumed, Albrecht Penck, professor of geography and rector at University of Berlin, arguably the world’s leading geomorphologist and the originator of the

278

/

geopolitics

world millionth map project, sent a series of papers to his old friend Davis. These and other delayed wartime publications from Germany brought new critiques of the geographical cycle, and Davis’s already energetic selfdefense became unforgiving. Penck’s papers included insinuations that Russia and Britain were responsible for the war, and in subsequent scholarly correspondence with Penck and his son Walther, also a geomorphologist, Davis replied in kind placing war blame on Germany.10 Most galling to Davis was that the elder Penck now rejected the geographical cycle, and the American retaliated with a petty review of a Festschrift honoring Penck, a review that even Davis’s chroniclers find “derogatory” and “more than ruthless.” Davis and Penck traded niceties that the painful memories of the war be put aside, but the battle escalated. Davis tried to absorb the critiques as refinements of his arguments and empirical variants of the more general theory, but he publicly flayed Penck’s alpine research for ignoring his cycle. The Pencks argued that the empirical variations overwhelmed the theory: Davis’s evolutionary scheme of landform development was merely one empirical scenario among many. Walther Penck saw Davis’s cycle as an “American doctrine,” and Davis complained that the Germans would never adopt “an American scheme.”11 Intense personal passions were involved, large egos, high professional stakes (global leadership in geomorphology), and more. An inveterate pipe smoker, thirty-five-year-old Walther Penck died of throat cancer in September 1923. Two months earlier Davis’s second wife had also died, and he sank into depression. The letter to his prize student Bowman, announcing her death, began with six paragraphs of diatribe against German geomorphology before reporting quite matter-of-factly his wife’s sudden death.12 Both deaths encouraged a sentimental closing of ranks. Becoming a cheerleader for Davis, Bowman exchanged protests with Albrecht Penck that the fight should “not fall into a narrowly nationalistic attitude.” Although he had been imprisoned first in Australia, then in London, with the outbreak of World War I, Penck had no trouble reciprocating that the controversy “was a matter of purely objective reflection” and that they would “not think of injecting any nationalistic moment” into the dispute.13 The fiction of nationless science was anxiously maintained on both sides, even as aggressively competing patriotisms played themselves out through scientific debate. Bowman certainly believed that the controversy over Davis’s cycle resulted from German “unwillingness . . . to accept the theory because it was made in another land, by another school.” It “was simply a Germanic system” that the Pencks “were trying to create.”14

geopolitics

/

279

The Penck-Davis debates marked a decisive moment in twentiethcentury geographical research, announcing a U.S. challenge to long-standing German supremacy that was eventually successful. German defensiveness after 1920 mobilized the bitterness of defeat in war (and just as bitter defeat in a highly geographical peace) compounded by the threat of academic eclipse. The arrogance of Davis, Bowman, and other U.S. geographers in these debates expressed a certain national ambition of global dominance that did not respect any line between science and politics, much as they piously asserted that line’s inviolability. Geopolitics was never an explicit issue between the Pencks and Davis, but it was nascent in the entire debate. The opposite was true in the second episode, Germany’s reinvolvement in the International Geographical Union. Since 1871 geographers had held the regular International Geographical Congress (IGC) for sharing geographical research across international boundaries. They were very European and very aristocratic affairs—nine of the first ten were held in Europe, and the first three presidents of the International Geographical Union (IGU), formed in 1922, were Prince Roland Bonaparte (grandnephew of Napoleon), an Italian general, and General Robert Bourgeois, also French. The only non-European founding member was Japan. The first postwar congress was to have been held in Russia, but the socialist revolution offended the tastes of the organizers, and King Faud of Egypt was enlisted instead.15 International academic exchanges abruptly froze in 1914 and thawed only in the 1920s, but the question of German involvement in the IGU was critical to its success. In this context, Bowman’s internationalism, frustrated in terms of his country’s foreign policy, went to work within the discipline. The French, Italian, and British geographers, who dominated the union, prohibited German membership of the IGU or attendance at the 1925 Cairo conference, and German geographers for their part declared the IGU off limits. Meanwhile in a depressing victory for ideological isolationism, U.S. geographers also abstained en masse. Paris physical geographer and IGU secretary general Emmanuel de Martonne worked harder than anyone to unite the IGU at this most vulnerable moment, and he wrote Isaiah Bowman, his old friend from the Paris Peace Conference, to help ensure U.S. membership. The earlier Penck-Davis debates notwithstanding, U.S. geographers begrudged the exclusion of German geographers, with whom they had such close ties, and so Bowman immediately raised the issue of German membership. Sensing little enthusiasm and even outright opposition to IGU membership among U.S. geographers as long as the French remained stiffly anti-German,

280

/

geopolitics

Bowman delayed enrolling the United States in the union. But in 1927 three things changed: Germany was invited, albeit largely symbolically, to join the League of Nations; Albrecht Penck was cordially received during a visit to New York; and German geographers were officially invited to the next congress. Bowman decided the time was propitious to steer U.S. membership to the IGU through the National Research Council.16 He was proud of this scientific diplomacy, but he was in a paradoxical spot. Because of the debates with the Pencks as well as the U.S. bent of The New World, many German geographers thought him anti-German. French geographers meanwhile thought him pro-German and pro-British, certainly anti-French! In fact he relished picking among the national identities of old Europe as a kind of Wilsonian arbiter, patriotic yet objective, detached yet American, resolver of international struggle within the discipline. The IGU was his disciplinary League of Nations. But German, Austrian, Hungarian, and Bulgarian geographers still boycotted the IGU. Offered the presidency of the IGU in 1931 as someone who could maneuver Germany back into the union, Bowman first secured support from several German geographers, including Penck, before accepting. German entry into the union now seemed likely.17 But it was not to be. The Nazi Party grew rapidly after the 1929 economic collapse, and Nazi geographers bullied their colleagues into officially boycotting the 1931 Paris congress, where Bowman took over the presidency. In Berlin after the conference, he lobbied German geographers and again received assurances from Penck and others that they would participate. The location of the 1934 IGU congress in Warsaw was a matter of no small irony or difficulty, and while the Polish hosts, especially Eugen Romer from the University of Lwow, sought the introduction of Soviet geographers, Bowman was consumed by the quest for German reinclusion. The obvious delicacy was that Bowman was internationally identified as a hero of Polish nationalism for his 1919 role in establishing a western Polish boundary that cut deep into prewar German territory, as well as in establishing the “Danzig corridor,” which connected the free city of Gdansk/Danzig to Poland, isolating East Prussia from the rest of Germany. To be in Poland, for German geographers, was to confront directly the ignominy of lost Lebensraum. Hamburg marine geographer Gerhardt Schott was presumably not alone in feeling that he could “under no conditions visit Warsaw so long as the ‘Corridor’ and eastern upper Silesia, two regions robbed of the Germans, are in Polish possession. This senseless corridor,” he continued, “which was created at Versailles in 1919, is particularly for geographers an eternal provocation.”18

geopolitics

/

281

The eventual attendance of forty German geographers, along with delegations from Austria, Hungary, and Bulgaria, was very much the result of the opening afforded by de Martonne and of Bowman’s perseverance in the name of internationalism in his own discipline. But it was not all plain sailing. Although he could count on his friend John Finley at the New York Times to give editorial coverage of his presidential address to the congress, not all of the press coverage was beneficial. The Polish press dogged Bowman for quotes about Poland: “what a fine country it was, how did I like the Corridor? Did I find Warsaw interesting?” Polish newspaper stories recounting his 1919 role in peace conference boundary decisions incensed the German delegation, whose chairman confronted Bowman, and the press interviews abruptly ceased.19 Although he had secured the first official presence of German and other Central Power geographers at an International Geographical Congress after World War I, Bowman also felt the reality of Versailles more vividly in Warsaw than at any time since departing Paris. He toured the city streets and was clearly affected by the poverty and destruction that still marked the city’s landscape sixteen years after the war. The third episode goes back to 1919 and is more central than the PenckDavis debates or Bowman’s conciliatory role in the IGU to the academic origins of geopolitics. When he left Paris after the signing of the Versailles treaty in May 1919, it was not just U.S., British, and French newspapers that speculated about splits in the U.S. delegation. German and Austrian geographers were gleeful. “Bowman hat protestiert!” (Bowman has protested), exuded Viennese glacial geomorphologist Eduard Brückner, expressing the fervent hope of many Central Power geographers that Bowman had taken the side of the vanquished and protested their punitive treatment at Versailles.20 How long that misconception lingered is not clear, but the publication of The New World hit them hard, disabusing them of any sense that Bowman harbored pro-German sympathies. To German and Austrian geographers, the book cemented a winner’s-eye global vision and identified him as a collaborator in the shameful Versailles treaty. Bowman in fact became the principal academic nemesis against which theories and ideas of German geopolitics were fashioned.21 Shortly after Walther Penck’s death in 1923, Hitler carried out his failed beer-hall putsch in Munich, and Rudolf Hess escaped briefly to the Bavarian estate of his teacher Karl Haushofer. A few months later, with Hess and Hitler in Landsberg prison, Haushofer founded the Zeitschrift für Geopolitik, which became the primary academic font of geopolitical knowledge for the next two decades. A small group around Haushofer began a threevolume work entitled Macht und Erde (Power and Earth) presenting Ger-

282

/

geopolitics

man geographers’ perspectives on the post-Versailles world. The New World had crystallized German nationalist resentment, and editor Otto Maull explained Macht und Erde as a “practical analysis of global power . . . culminating in a geopolitical overview of the earth . . . as a German counterweight to I. Bowman’s ‘The New World.’”22 German geopolitics reverberated between the academic and public realms throughout the rest of the 1920s. After 1919 the country was on the verge of revolution. The socialist uprisings in Munich and Berlin that year were brutally suppressed, and socialist leader Rosa Luxemburg was murdered by the army. Financial reparations were demanded by the Allies in 1921, and French and Belgian troops occupied the Ruhr two years later to force their payment. Hitler’s beer-hall counterrevolt followed. Albrecht Penck’s letter to Bowman informing him of Walther’s death vividly documents the economic ruin of late 1923: “An American dollar is today worth 60 billion marks.”23 Academic in its origins, geopolitics had trenchant public appeal because of its supposedly scientific guarantee that a wounded national pride could and would be assuaged. Stung by military and political defeat, humiliated by the loss of empire abroad and amputation of Lebensraum at home, and now wracked by economic chaos, many Germans felt that the nation’s destiny was first and foremost a question of territory. Geopolitics galvanized the authority of science as an intellectual crutch for an exploding reactionary nationalism. Geopolitics observed little or no critical distance between academic political geography and national policy, the point being to develop and apply the “science” of political geography to the needs of national statecraft. It was a nationalism that galvanized many geographers, not just geopoliticians. Immediately after Versailles, revered German geographer Alexander Supan, for example, proposed a distinction between genuine nationalism and “pseudo-nationalism” to denote the inferior national sentiments of less worthy or newly created states, such as Czechoslovakia. In his Leitlinien der aligemeinen politischen Geographie (Geometries of German Political Geography), he devised a “colonial quotient,” which measured the ratio between the area and population of a country’s colonial possessions with that of its homeland. Such a supposedly scientific index obviously embodied the normative Ratzelian assumption that larger states deserve greater colonial territory. In Supan’s analysis, not surprisingly, Britain, with a quotient of 8.4, was the most overendowed with colonial possessions, while Germany scored a meager 0.2.24 Adherence to the concept of Lebensraum was a logical corollary of the argument. To take another example, geographer Ewald Banse published Raum und Volk im Weltkriege (Space and People in the World War) in 1932, for which

geopolitics

/

283

the Third Reich rewarded him with a Braunschweig professorship in military science. War for Banse was, before anything else, “a geographical phenomenon,” and geography was a “science of national defense.” He detected in all of Germany’s neighbors a Nietzschian “will to power” and, connecting German philosophical idealism with the country’s geographical traditions, issued an outright call to patriotic war in defense of Lebensraum. The text is replete with maps delineating the appropriate military strategy for invading Britain. “The pen is good” for helping write the wrongs against Germany, Banse concluded, “and the sword is good. But the sword is the older weapon, and it is the final, the ultimately decisive one—therefore let it have first place.”25 Shortly after Hitler’s rise to power in 1933, Siegfried Passarge, one of Davis’s original adversaries, was named Reichsobmann für Geographie (national chief for geography). An unreconstructed fascist who bemoaned the “disastrous effects of Christian missionaries” in Africa, especially their “soft treatment of negroes,” Passarge ingratiated himself to the Nazis by making it his business in the Weimar years to purge the Hamburg Geographical Institute of its “Jewish-Marxist atmosphere.” Too much even for the Nazis, Passarge was fired the following year after his insults to French geographer and IGU official de Martonne threatened an international incident.26

strange silence and the “american haushofer ” Bowman sat at the intersection of the public and academic discussions from which geopolitics evolved. His American global vision made him public enemy number one for the academic progenitors of German geopolitics, and he had a high personal stake because his New World was their declared target. He devoured every text on the topic coming out of Germany. This makes it all the more strange that for nearly two decades such a well-placed and self-interested geographer, simultaneously nationalist and internationalist, was virtually mute about the emerging threat. He read Supan’s book, for example, and in a 1924 review condemned it as a prejudicial “search for a ‘system,’” a “political theory devised to aggrandize the state.” He did concede some “virtue” to Ratzel’s notion of organic state boundaries and to “the philosophy of Lebensraum,” only lamenting that these concepts “are open to abuse.”27 But such public statements were very much the exception. He read Banse’s book too, prior to its translation, and followed the heated correspondence in the London Times but chose not to intervene. From his German sojourns in the 1930s, he heard about Haushofer’s weekly jail visits to Hitler a decade earlier and Hess’s intermediary role, and he assessed the geographer’s influence on Mein Kampf. What Bowman knew pri-

284

/

geopolitics

vately, he began to reveal only in 1939, including evidence of Haushofer’s “long-standing and deep friendship” with the führer and his “extraordinary influence upon Hitler’s broad strategical concepts.”28 But in general, Bowman spent more time in this period responding to German attacks on Davis’s geographical cycle than to the rise of geopolitics fueling Nazi political ambitions. This silence is puzzling. Like many, Bowman first dismissed Hitler as a windbag and even entertained the hope that he might be a moderating force who could “hold the lid down” on socialist revolutionary fervor. He was aware of the Nazi roundups in early 1933, when political opponents, mostly communists, socialists, social democrats, were consigned to concentration camps; in one case he was even asked to intercede with Gestapo leader Hermann Göring on behalf of an interned geographer. Hitler’s Nuremberg speech of 1936, which pressed the ambitions of a reexpanding Germany in directly economic and territorial terms, spoke Bowman’s language, however, and he began to recognize the warning signs. Yet even as Hitler appropriated Ratzel’s language of Lebensraum, Bowman did not speak publicly about geopolitics.29 Not the 1938 Anschluss when Hitler’s troops invaded Austria and Czechoslovakia or even the declaration of war in 1939 provoked Bowman into any direct public challenge to German geopolitics. As the leading U.S. geographer, a political geographer, and a widely quoted “expert,” he published nothing on geopolitics throughout the 1930s. By contrast he did find time for a petty squabble with his close friend, the geographer Jean Brunhes, over trivial errors in the French translation of The New World.30 Geopolitics was an acute disciplinary embarrassment for many geographers but nowhere more so than in the United States, where the national school was inspired by and built on German ideas. The rise of German geopolitics shattered the Wilsonian promise of a postterritorial politics and was a profound defeat for Bowman: his Paris efforts lay in ruins. He seems to have calculated in the mid-1920s that no good would come of public debate or of trying to educate the U.S. public or even the government about geopolitics and that damage to the discipline could be avoided by remaining quiet. He sensed he could not lead the public critique of German geopolitics in the United States, simultaneously lead the effort to pull German geographers into the IGU, and champion the discipline of geography at home. One can perhaps understand the decision to place the discipline’s fate above political concerns during the Weimar period, but after Hitler’s takeover in 1933 it was surely a bad political miscalculation to choose geography and the IGU over a better public understanding of the threat of geopolitics and fascism. His 1934 visit to Berlin gave him a first-hand taste of the early Nazi

geopolitics

/

285

regime, and by the 1938 geographical congress in Amsterdam, most German delegates were Nazi Party members sporting swastikas. He privately resented them as “probing” and “very devoted to the aggressive principles of Der Führer,” and these and other observations figured in the report he submitted afterward to the U.S. State Department,31 but in a Washington Post interview on his return he deliberately discussed 1918, not 1938. Ironically, Bowman’s silence about the specter of German geopolitics colluded with the geographical amnesia that accompanied isolationist ideologies, boomeranging on the discipline after 1942. Had he raised his authoritative voice, the discipline would certainly have been placed on the defensive, but significant debate on geopolitics would also have enhanced public knowledge of global geographies and geopolitics. Bowman might have taken advice from Oscar Wilde, a man he surely despised. Wilde famously wrote in The Picture of Dorian Gray, “There is only one thing in the world worse than being talked about, and that is not being talked about.” In the 1920s and 1930s it was far worse for geography—and for Bowman’s conservative liberalism—that geography was not talked about in the United States. Bowman’s fantasy that he could protect geography while playing down geopolitics was dramatically unhinged by Pearl Harbor. In the end, he was spurred to action less by the egregious claims of Germans on behalf of geopolitics than by American invocations of geopolitics. In the first place, there was a certain Professor George Renner of Columbia University, who in June 1942 published a set of maps in Collier’s Weekly proposing a plausible postwar realignment of Europe. Maps were an increasingly prevalent means of propaganda for geopoliticians, and the Zeitschrift für Geopolitik produced numerous coarse-grain maps depicting German interests and strategies, but it was Renner’s, not Haushofer’s, maps that finally ignited Bowman’s political anger. Entitled “Maps for a New World,” Renner’s article began from the quasi-Ratzelian assumption, distilled into a liberal American shibboleth, that war in Europe resulted from the proliferation of small states amongst larger more powerful ones.32 Gross discrepancies in size and power made territorial clashes and boundary disputes inevitable, and geopolitical necessity called for consolidation into several superstates. In Renner’s “brave new world redesigned for lasting peace,” a pan-Germany, spanning from Denmark and the Netherlands to Switzerland and east through Hungary, Poland, and Romania, dominated Europe (map 10). That the map looked like a German geopolitician’s wildest dream was immediately recognizable, and Renner faced a withering storm of public protest. Dorothy Thompson and Walter Lippmann were among the national columnists who weighed in,

Map 10. George Renner’s “Maps for a New World,” 1942 (from Collier’s Weekly).

geopolitics

/

287

with Lippmann, Bowman’s nemesis from the Inquiry, condemning geopolitics outright. “Politicians are bad enough when it comes to settling world problems, but geographers!” wrote another correspondent to Time.33 Bowman was aghast, his gravest fears unfolding before his eyes, the virtue of his eighteen-year silence reduced to naught. Worst of all, Renner cited him as dean of America’s “geopoliticians.” This was no compliment as far as the scientifically minded Bowman was concerned. While some geographers bristled that Renner was a “disgrace” and compared him to Haushofer, a legalistic Bowman, along with two other colleagues who felt themselves similarly slandered, demanded a disclaimer from Collier’s.34 But the damage was already done. Desperate for some kind of response to German geopolitics, the press and the public anxiously grasped at Bowman as “the American Haushofer.” Eager to wrest the national mantle of this ideology from Germany, others even suggested that Bowman’s New World, not Haushofer’s Zeitung, was the founding text of geopolitics: geopolitics was really American, not German! The flood of European émigré scholars to the United States only affirmed this hard-headed approach. German geopolitics was malevolent, they believed, but geopolitics per se represented the lingua franca of modern diplomacy, state competition taken to the geographical limit, and the United States had no choice but to fashion its own. Exiled German geographer Hans Weigert put it bluntly: The lack of centers where the American student and soldier can, like the German youth in Munich, be trained to understand the facts and to think in terms of political geography and geopolitics seems to me a regrettable flaw in the endeavor to organize democracies against the totalitarian onslaught. In view of the vast scientific resources possessed by this country it would be inexcusable if the American General Staff cannot be supplied with as many enthusiastic experts on geopolitics as Haushofer was able to offer to the German General Staff.

In the 1942 hysteria the Department of Commerce claimed to have a geopolitical institute already.35 Bowman now knew that he had to break his silence, and in his bid to start a geography department at Johns Hopkins he traded on this wide public sentiment. But he deeply resented being described as a geopolitician, even by wellintentioned enemies of Nazism. He was even more horrified by the broad public ignorance that could so utterly mistake the science of political geography for the twisted nationalist ideology of geopolitics. While he could happily see himself as America’s answer to Haushofer, he wanted altogether to avoid being cast as the “American Haushofer.” He was not, he insisted to Undersecretary

288

/

geopolitics

of State Sumner Welles, “the American precursor of Haushofer.” His first published response came in a review of American Strategy in World Politics, by Dutch émigré Nicholas Spykman, and in a longer piece written, he told Walter Lippmann,“in self-protection” and titled “Geography versus Geopolitics.”36 Attempting to divert the blame from his own discipline, he called geopolitics an abuse of political science and mounted a defense of a scientific political geography. As if to affirm that geography more than democracy was still the issue, the man whose face had graced the cover of Time six years earlier chose the curiously academic and comparatively low-circulation venue of the Geographical Review, published by his old friends at the American Geographical Society, to vent twenty years of self-imposed censorship. Both pieces added to the geopolitical clamor of 1942. Numerous erstwhile Wilsonians responded to events in Germany— intellectual as well as political—by refashioning themselves as hard-headed geopolitical realists. Nicholas Spykman was among the most prominent with his advocacy of “power politics.” “Balance of power” comprised the principles according to which world politics was transacted, and “power politics” was the means. “A sound foreign policy for the United States must accept this basic reality of international society,” he asserted, and it must “develop a grand strategy for both war and peace based on the implications of its geographic location in the world.”37 Privately Bowman complained that Spykman too confused geopolitics and geography, and the geographer was unwilling to go quite so far along the road to a power politics, but he nonetheless praised the book as “a much-needed warning to the American people that it would not do to go on saying ‘nice kitty’” to Hitler. Indeed, he added his own uncharacteristically impassioned realism: We say that we are fighting to defend a way of life, but each draws his own picture of the way he prefers. We never put the sword in the picture. Germany and Japan do. And if it is their way and they are powerful, then it must be included in our way of life. Defense is a part of our way no matter through what seas of blood it leads—or we shall lose the way of life we cherish. The soldier on a Greek vase of the fifth century B.C. carries a sword without apology: to the Greeks war was one of the arts.38

Even in the context of the times, this was an extraordinary argument in a self-avowedly scientific journal, and Bowman’s rhetoric only escalates with his second, more considered, piece. More defensive than ever, he begins with the blunt admission that the “reputation of certain American geographers, my own included,” is at stake in the debates about geopolitics and, subtly

geopolitics

/

289

separating himself from Spykman, condemns the “Nazi philosophy” that “might alone shall decide” international conflicts. Versailles was no longer an excuse but a “pretext for reasserting an old philosophy” dominating German political thinking and ambition for two centuries: “The Nazi political program has its roots in something very deep in German life and history: a way of rationalizing greed and violence.” Nazism here provoked Bowman to disavow Ratzel’s geographical determinism of political power, while his national essentialism revealed the debt he still owed to Ratzel’s cultural determinism. He still wanted to salvage Ratzel’s Lebensraum, however, “a concept that has been expanded from its earlier purely descriptive economic meaning,” while he bricked a high wall between geopolitics and political geography: “There is no sure ‘science’ to bring us out of these new deeps of international difficulty,” he was forced to conclude. “Geopolitics . . . as disclosed in German writings and policy . . . is . . . illusion, mummery, an apology for theft,” whereas “scientific geography deepens the understanding” of the new planetary world.39 “Depraved,” “crooked,” “evil,” “dishonest,” “perversion of fact to philosophy”—Bowman’s descriptions of geopolitics employed words not customarily appearing in the Geographical Review, certainly not when Bowman himself was editor, and it is difficult to avoid the conclusion that he undercut his own pretense to science with the intensity of his animosity and xenophobic denunciation of the German people in toto. Geographical Review editor J. K. Wright clearly recognized the contradiction Bowman’s tirade exposed, doubting “the wisdom” of using a scientific journal to discuss “the essential primitiveness of the German spirit,” but a barely edited version was published anyway. Marcella Ver Hoef, a student from Northwestern University, was less forgiving. You “condone the use of force— war—by the United States to preserve our democratic way of life,” she accused Bowman, “yet this is one of your criticisms of the German use of geopolitics. Perhaps the end to which geopolitics is to be used has some bearing on its validity.” Bowman’s response is thin but revealing. He repeated that geopolitics “as a so-called science is bunk,” adding that his own condonation of force was “the kind of condoning that George Washington indulged in.”40

geopolitics as modern geography In 1927, the German geographer Arthur Dix remarked that “geopolitics is the product and requirement of a new age.”41 What marked this new age was precisely the circumscription of the global geography available for fu-

290

/

geopolitics

eling economic expansion and the necessity of remolding that closed planetary space for any further expansion in the foreseeable future. Not surprisingly, this closure of space was most acutely felt within the boundaries of a nation-state whose bid for global power in the twilight of the British Empire was so strong yet so unceremoniously slapped down at Versailles. Friedrich Ratzel, the primary intellectual inspiration for twentieth-century geopolitics did not live to witness World War I, but in a language that Mackinder and Lenin both echoed he recognized the predicament: “The political situation of the present time is determined primarily by the abnormal repartitioning of the political areas and of the forces conferred with those spaces.”42 Ratzel’s nineteenth-century abnormality was about to become the twentieth-century norm. If Bowman’s Wilsonian New World represented one response to this emerging reality, anticipating a world geography in which the sway of territorial arrangements over global political economy was loosened in favor of a U.S.-centered economic globalism, German geopolitics after World War I provided a different vision of global control. Both globalisms were expressions of the national traditions that spawned them. The German reassertion of an emphatic connection between power and territory—Macht und Erde—certainly mobilized a foundational connection in the history of nation making and short-circuited any “last hurrah” for Old World geographies anticipated during the first moment of the American Century. But by the same token, there was nothing inevitable about the rise of geopolitics in Germany or even about the form that it took. Geopoliticians had to muscle aside a more liberal geography of Weltpolitik, which, while still nationalist, anticipated German global power in more economic terms but was unable to capture the geopolitical revanchism that consumed Germany after Versailles.43 Nor was Germany the only place where geopolitics took hold. Italian fascism predated any significant Nazi power, but Haushofer’s writings became influential there in the 1930s. Closely tied to imperial ambitions in Africa, Italian geopolitics came to a head in Trieste, where a virulent fascist tradition had established itself after World War I. Together with Ernesto Massi, a graduate student who had discovered Haushofer, Giorgio Roletto, chair of geography at the University of Trieste, established the journal Geopolitica in 1939.44 There is, of course, an intense irony in Trieste’s becoming the crucible of Italian geopolitics: not only is the town a symbolic place for rightwing Italian nationalism, but also it was over this region that some of the decisive squabbles at Versailles took place, and so it is equally a symbol of the revenge of Old World geographies over New World globalism.

geopolitics

/

291

There is another, more global sense of the novelty of geopolitics between the 1920s and the 1940s. Insofar as the division of the global economy into a patchwork of separate national territories is an achievement of modern bourgeois politics, geopolitics represents a culmination of the modern equation of power with political control of territory. Whatever its precursors, geopolitics provides a quintessentially modern blend of geography and politics whose pertinence is correlated with the rise of national states. It is neither inevitable nor entirely accidental that geopolitics rose to prominence in the same period that scholars and politicians alike lamented geographical closure on a world scale, envisaging only redivision of an apparently given global space. Geopolitics is the premier discourse of competitive power in such a space. It presumes a natural division of global geography into discrete nation-states, a division that is historically specific; methodologically it assumes a scientific universalism and in most forms conceives interstate competition and territorial expansion as laws of nature. Geopolitics represents the apogee of one strand of geographical modernism, a logical geographical outcome of competition among competing capitalist states. Viewed through the lenses of Wilson’s global ambition, geopolitics appears retrograde, backward, a return to the past, precisely because it insists on pinning national political fates to territory. But one tilt of this kaleidoscopic lens—a gestalt switch—makes it possible to understand the perverse logic of Hitler’s boast that he was establishing a “thousand-year Reich.” Thus the liberal realist Nicholas Spykman once asserted, in the article “Geography and Foreign Policy,” that “geography does not argue. It simply is.”45 Then as today, 99 percent of the U.S. public would agree with him, but the consequences of that argument are dire. If geography is both powerful and fixed, as Spykman (and Hitler) assumed, then indeed a successful conquest of global power that manages to inscribe itself on the world’s landscapes would be extraordinarily formidable. Somewhat pathetically, Haushofer too glimpsed the gestalt. Trying to avoid testifying at the Nuremberg trial, he pleaded with the Allies to dispense with their young officers in favor of more seasoned interrogators: “Why could not your government send some experienced American, such as Isaiah Bowman or Owen Lattimore? . . . Any of these men would understand what I had meant and what I endeavored to achieve by my geopolitics.”46 Bowman may have been less than clear about the self-interested nationalism of his own Wilsonian rhetoric, but he astutely sensed the dangers of any appeal to a fixed political geography, even as his own work in Paris established such a fix. His greatest frustration between the wars, apart from the collapse of U.S. internationalism, sprang from the lack of sophistication

292

/

geopolitics

among politicians and geographers themselves concerning the fluidity of world geographies. His struggle to differentiate geography from geopolitics may have been premised on a false sense of the sanctity of science, but it also insisted on distinguishing between a malleable geography and the spatial absolutism of geopolitics. But it was too little, too late, and too diffuse. Awakening to geopolitics after 1942, the naive public in the United States only compounded the weakness of geography as a discourse of political—or social—power. The discourse of geopolitics that had to be captured in 1942 had to be abandoned in 1945 or else turned against a different enemy, and Bowman’s long silence contributed to the ease with which this happened. The doctrinaire defense of “scientific” political geography against geopolitics not only begged the question of the identity of political geography but also left geographers in the intellectually crippling position of rejecting rather than engaging a spatial absolutism that for many made perfect common sense. Against the odds, Bowman’s far more supple sense of the fluidity of geographical relations survived anyway. It did so largely because he absorbed himself in Washington during World War II and was again preoccupied by the practical dilemmas of fixing a geography that, it was well understood in the State Department, was thoroughly plastic and open for molding. The world’s geography, it was sensed in Washington, was theirs for the making. If nationalist geopolitics at home and abroad blunted the fist moment of the American Century, the second moment crystallized a new geographical order slouching toward birth.

11 SILENCE AND REFUSAL: REFUGEES, RACE, AND ECONOMIC DEVELOPMENT

In late June 1933, the president of the American Geographical Society, Dr. John Finley, received an unusual letter from Berlin. It came from Hubert R. Knickerbocker, a journalist with the Philadelphia Public Ledger and the New York Evening Post, and it concerned the young German geographer Karl A. Wittfogel. Wittfogel had become a member of the AGS in January 1933, the month Hitler came to power, and Knickerbocker’s June letter now contained a plea on Wittfogel’s behalf. “Wittfogel is a member of the Communist Party of Germany,” the journalist wrote, but “he is not a functionary,” his interests are “purely scholarly,” yet since March he had been interned in the Dachau concentration camp, one of the first victims of Hitler’s regime. His wife has fought desperately but unsuccessfully for his freedom, Knickerbocker reported, and her “last straw of hope” is an appeal to the American Geographical Society: her husband “should enjoy at least the sympathy of scholars, whether they agree with his leaning toward communism or not,” she pleaded. Knickerbocker “would usually refuse to do anything for imprisoned communists,” he admitted, but he was taken with Frau Wittfogel. “Like all communists,” the geographer is “being held without charges, and with no prospect of release,” but “if the Society were to write a letter” of concern that “one of its members . . . is being held in a concentration camp,” he might win release. The “most effective thing to do would be to write to Ministerpraesident Hermann Goering,” Knickerbocker advised.1

294

/

silence and refusal

Karl Wittfogel did gain release that summer, and after a clash with Stalin several years later he became an internationally renowned anticommunist intellectual, author of the influential book Oriental Despotism. But his release from Dachau owed nothing to the American Geographical Society. Finley, who was also editor of the New York Times, did nothing to publicize the case, simply passing the letter on to the AGS director. Also newly appointed as chair of the National Research Council, Bowman had other things on his mind. He curtly acknowledged receipt of Knickerbocker’s letter, adding only that “the Society is unable to act upon it.”2 This silence and refusal concerning a colleague’s predicament, at a time when intervention might have made a difference, foretold a wider response to the plight of refugees ten years later. If the horrors of Nazi genocide still lay in the future, the concentration camps and the mass displacement of people made it clear by 1939 that the world would face unprecedented refugee resettlement problems at the end of the war. As a result of his work on the pioneer fringe and his pursuit of a “science of settlement,” Bowman was tapped to help formulate U.S. refugee policy. An estimated 225 geographers were drawn to Washington to work on behalf of the war effort. They populated the Office of Strategic Services, where Wisconsin political geographer Richard Hartshorne headed up the Research and Analysis Branch; the War Department; the Office of Economic Warfare; the U.S. Board on Geographic Names; and the State Department. Although most geographers churned out intelligence that fed directly into military strategy, the State Department was more concerned with postwar reconstruction,3 and it was there that Bowman spent much of World War II. Although he would go on to play major roles in fashioning policy toward postwar Germany, decolonization in the third world, and the establishment of the United Nations, his World War II government work began with the question of refugee resettlement. His entrée to this work came in two stages, beginning with a request by Roosevelt in 1938. This first project was funded privately and paved the way for a much more ambitious government undertaking pursued in top secrecy. This second project was known by its code name, the “M Project” (M for migration), constituted a major long-term examination of refugee resettlement possibilities, and was directed by Bowman. It was declassified only in 1960.

after kristallnacht: refugee resettlement possibilities, 1938–1942 Toward the end of 1938, a young Jewish student who had fled Germany for France, only to learn that his parents had been forcibly deported to Poland,

silence and refusal

/

295

murdered Ernst vom Rath, third secretary of the German Embassy in Paris. On the pretext of retaliation, Nazi storm troopers rampaged through German cities on 9 and 10 November, attacking mostly Jews, destroying and burning Jewish businesses, ransacking homes, and smashing synagogues. The death toll was ninety-one, and thirty thousand German Jews were arrested.4 Dubbed Kristallnacht, after the crystal- and glass-strewn streets, this escalation of state terror aimed mainly at Jews came eight months after the Anschluss (the invasion and annexation of Austria), and it created a new wave of refugees desperate to escape from central Europe. Franklin Roosevelt had responded to the Anschluss by calling an emergency conference at Evian, on Lake Geneva, resulting in the Intergovernmental Committee on Refugees for coordinating refugee relief, and by establishing the President’s Advisory Committee on Political Refugees in Washington. Now, after Kristallnacht, he felt a greater urgency for resettlement and turned to Bowman. Bowman was an obvious resource for Roosevelt. Academically he was an authority on frontier settlement, and his recently published Limits of Land Settlement had already caught Roosevelt’s eye. His presidency of Hopkins, leadership in national science and the Council on Foreign Relations, not to mention his Paris experience, made him an obvious adviser. Roosevelt had also been a councillor of the American Geographical Society from 1921 to 1932 and, although not very active, was therefore already familiar with Bowman. His first request concerning refugee settlement possibilities actually predated Kristallnacht and focused on the Orinoco region of Venezuela. Bowman responded eagerly to the presidential request—“a request from the President is an order.”5 Pausing only to send inscribed copies of Limits of Land Settlement to FDR, he mobilized AGS resources and fashioned an answer. He believed that most pioneer fringes around the world would be able to “accommodate only a trickle, not a river of humanity,” from Europe or elsewhere, and his report to Roosevelt on Orinoco possibilities was accordingly cautious. Roosevelt persevered: “Frankly, what I am looking for is the possibility of uninhabited or sparsely inhabited good agricultural lands to which Jewish colonies might be sent.” They need not be large, but any given area should be capable of sustaining “fifty to one hundred thousand people.” Was there any possibility elsewhere in Venezuela, especially at higher altitudes? What about Colombia? No “specific plans” were underway, Roosevelt admonished, but he wanted to be prepared.6 An expansive Roosevelt already acted as if he had the world at his fingertips. For his part, Bowman was energized by his return to the swirl of Washington and intimacy with world events, and he quickly compiled the summary of South American resettlement possibilities that FDR wanted. His

296

/

silence and refusal

response was couched in a scientific language that simultaneously expressed determinist prejudices about culture, race, and climate. He restricted his search to a middle altitudinal band on the grounds that lowland tropical settlement (below three thousand feet) was “difficult for European colonists” on account of health and labor problems, and “pulmonary and heart troubles increase rapidly” above eight thousand feet. Between these extremes, the Guiana Highlands would require massive and expensive land modification, while only scattered alluvial plains would suffice in Venezuela or Colombia. “Northern South America offers no place for colonization, on a large scale,” he concluded, but there are possibilities elsewhere. In Brazil, he suggested, a pioneer zone is already developing rapidly—especially in the northeast—but the government may be reluctant. Bolivia might be interested in development along the mountain zone overlooking the Gran Chaco; lesser possibilities pertained in Chile and Paraguay, but in the latter “the cultural level is low,” he opined, and “the colonists would have to bring their culture with them.” The best possibility in Central and South America was Costa Rica, where there was a “fairly immediate capacity for 50,000 people,” possibly 100,000. Settlement would be concentrated west of the Cordillera, where “the white race has established itself on an important scale.”7 If Bowman’s caution disappointed FDR, he did not say so, and following Kristallnacht, Bowman was asked to initiate a more systematic study of resettlement possibilities. With funds for a full-time researcher, he hired Karl Pelzer, who had recently completed his Ph.D. in geography at UCLA.8 Himself a refugee from Germany specializing in migration and settlement in Southeast Asia and the Pacific, Pelzer first completed an already promised survey of resettlement possibilities in Africa. He concluded that about five hundred thousand settlers could be absorbed in Africa (excepting South Africa and Ethiopia), but that settlers would require significant amounts of basic capital, “an absolute minimum of $5,000” per family. The overall cost might be “of the order of $500,000,000”—an astronomical figure for the time.9 Across Europe several millions were already displaced in their attempts to evade advancing German armies, and although the majority were not Jewish, Kristallnacht quickened attention to the dangers faced by Jews in German-occupied Europe as well as to the refugee issue more broadly.10 The largest concentration of displaced Jews, an estimated five hundred thousand to seven hundred thousand, was still in Germany at the end of 1938, and the British government, actively considering resettlement possibilities in British Guiana, offered to admit as many as one hundred thousand, as-

silence and refusal

/

297

suming the costs could be met. But the sharpened sense of urgency led less to action than to a scholastic inflation of what a viable settlement plan might comprise. Bowman took care to give Roosevelt a comprehensive statement: The refugee problem must be solved by settlement planning on a world scale with absorption of settlers in limited numbers here, there, and elsewhere . . . so as to produce no shock to the economic structure of the receiving country. . . . The absorption must be on such a limited scale in any one area that the people already established in the area will welcome the new settlers. That welcome will be greater in proportion as the new settlers are economically well founded, backed up by capital, and able to supply new skills that are desired in the area. All of this means special study of many areas, wise selection of groups to fit particular areas, and economic backing that will make each settlement project a sound business undertaking.11

The Rockefeller Foundation refused funding, but a grant of twenty-five thousand dollars was quickly arranged from the Refugee Economic Corporation. Established in 1934, the REC was one of various refugee-aid organizations that sprang up in the 1930s, and its mission was the identification of possible sites for refugee colonization. Its best project involved the purchase of fifty thousand acres in Costa Rica, but progress was slow because of adverse local publicity.12 Bowman’s study was nominally housed in the Walter Hines Page School at Johns Hopkins, under the direction of Owen Lattimore, and in addition to Pelzer it employed Leo Waibel, a very conservative German exile and Central America specialist. Others were hired on a contract basis. The press lauded it as “the first scientific study of land settlement problems to be made since the refugee crisis arose in Germany,” with the Baltimore Sun reporting that the world was watching.13 Bowman oversaw the project, established its agenda, and liaised with the Refugee Economic Corporation. If the world was watching, it did not see much. With an eye to the REC’s Jewish leadership, Bowman at first conveyed to his new sponsor that “the situation is desperate” and proposed Angola as “a second Jewish homeland if it could be acquired from Portugal.” There is “room for a sufficient number of people; and there are a sufficient number of natives to justify very substantial outlays on railroads and motor roads” by the state.14 It was the first and last time he would publicly voice any such sense of crisis. When he detected the REC’s own conservatism, claims of urgency were readily replaced by an insistence on the patient accumulation of scientific research appropriate for postwar resettlement planning. The goal, in Bowman’s eyes, was not so much the solution of immediate refugee problems as an attempt

298

/

silence and refusal

to establish the scientific basis that would guide later solutions. He was as much excited by the scientific opportunity as by any practical humanitarian implications; resettlement under these conditions represented a unique scientific “experiment,” he told his sponsor. He worked hard to depoliticize the work and to deflate any public optimism about large-scale resettlement. “New land will accommodate too slow and small a stream of population to be of real social importance to the countries of origin,”15 he had originally concluded in Limits of Land Settlement, and he now worked as if to prove himself correct: The whole enterprise ought to be conceived not as an emergency measure for population in flight but as a broad scientific undertaking, humanitarian in purpose, orderly in its functioning, hopeful in its outlook, and essentially serving the self-interest of those who receive populations. If the procedures are orderly and the plans wisely drawn so that population and resources are given a linkage that is rational, there is no reason to expect opposition.16

Orderliness and science came to stand in the way of virtually every proposal that came his way. The sense of crisis was deliberately dampened, even as war engulfed Europe, and any prospect of practical action was displaced into the postwar era. The extent of the eventual crisis could not yet be known, of course, but as early as 1939 FDR announced publicly—over State Department objections and to Bowman’s horror—that between ten million and twenty million refugees would be homeless after the war. The financier Bernard Baruch immediately offered to fund a large-scale study of postwar reconstruction, which would include a component for refugee resettlement. After intense discussion with Baruch and Secretary of State Cordell Hull and a visit to Baruch’s South Carolina estate, and with a figure of a hundred thousand dollars on the table, Bowman was pressured directly by FDR to undertake the work. The Hopkins trustees were lobbied to release his time. But not all presidential requests were orders, apparently, and with a greater concern for scientific independence than for the urgency of the situation, Bowman demurred. He feared that Baruch would not be able to “keep his hands off the work.”17 The first Hopkins resettlement project produced a total of ninety-three reports, some first hand owing to a stint by Karl Pelzer in East Asia, some previously published, and they covered settlement possibilities on five continents (Europe was not considered). In the United States, only Alaska was seriously entertained as a refugee destination.18 The reports amassed considerable descriptive material and fed into the activities of the Refugee Eco-

silence and refusal

/

299

nomic Corporation and the President’s Advisory Committee on Political Refugees but had little practical effect for refugees. The first European refugees to be resettled in the Americas, a desultory thirty-seven Jews, arrived in the Dominican Republic in May 1940 to colonize waiting agricultural land, but this resettlement was organized by two other Jewish relief groups, although the REC had a hand in it. Forty-three hundred refugees from Germany had gone to Australia in 1939. The President’s Advisory Committee faired little better than the REC. Like many in the administration, the committee had little access to Roosevelt, and it members beat their heads instead against an obstructive State Department. In the face of opposition, the British dropped the proposal for British Guiana, and a parallel offer by the occupied Netherlands to open Dutch Guiana was rejected by the REC because it was felt “inadvisable to send Europeans to that region.” The one project Bowman approved that came to fruition was an RECsponsored textile manufacturing scheme involving eighty refugee families in British Honduras.19 Whether Bowman was ever serious about Angola, he quickly backed away from his earlier optimism when it was judged an “adverse” option by the REC. Why is not clear, although it may have had something to do with the Nazis’ having already raised the possibility of shipping Germany’s Jews to the region.

“a gigantic plan ”+ the m project In the early spring of 1940, U.S. government policies on refugee settlement were a shambles but not for want of interested organizations. The Intergovernmental Committee on Refugees (ICR) had Roosevelt’s blessing but not his attention, and it held meetings but little else. In the State Department only two middle-level bureaucrats were assigned to the work, had little interest in it, and were resigned to their own impotence. Higher State Department officials spent more time insisting on their prerogative over refugee work than actually doing it. Like Bowman, they worried more that loud public declarations of humanitarian intent would only “arouse false hopes.” The dedicated if uninspired chair of the President’s Advisory Committee felt their work was so useless that he offered to resign and dissolve the committee.20 So languished U.S. refugee policy for nearly two years. The first news stories indicating that the Nazis had commenced mass civilian killings began to appear in June 1942, but the scale and abhorrence of the reports seemed beyond belief: anywhere from two hundred thousand to seven hundred thousand Soviet citizens from the German-occupied sectors of Belorus and the Ukraine, mainly but not entirely Jews, had been ex-

300

/

silence and refusal

terminated. News of the forced evacuation of the Warsaw ghetto also filtered out. The State Department began receiving independent reports of the atrocities in August, but only four months later, and then only privately, did the department confirm the systematic exterminations. Frustrated by the department’s silence and inactivity, prominent Jewish leader and Zionist Rabbi Stephen Wise held a press conference on 24 November announcing that an estimated two million Jews had already been exterminated at the hands of Nazi genocide.21 Bowman knew by early November 1942 that the genocide was underway. His first recorded acknowledgment of the unfolding horror came on 12 November, nearly two weeks earlier than Wise’s public announcement. The “inhuman Nazi policy has been stepped up to the point where we see new and terrible effects upon the population of Europe,” he wrote to himself in an innocuously titled memo “Population and Territorial Questions”: The German leaders have carried through with thoroughness a policy of devitalization by more barbarous methods than man has ever devised or history recorded. . . . When history analyzes our present acts it will set against the new assignment of East Prussia to Poland the hundreds of thousands of willfully murdered and emasculated Poles for which Germany is responsible during the last two years. It will take account of the millions who have died of exposure and disease.22

Outrage, stunned confusion, and disbelief followed the public announcements by Wise and others. Roosevelt met with Jewish leaders and issued grave warnings about war crimes as the public clamor rose, but even relief organizations were sufficiently stunned that galvanized demands for rescue, rather than sympathy, emerged only after several weeks. Distracted indifference soon took over, however, as the issue dissipated amid continuing war reportage, and the State Department only expended more energy in its refusal to confirm publicly Nazi genocide. The department also tried to cut off the European news sources that, in the view of some middle-level bureaucrats, were unnecessarily feeding the public outcry. The hindrance of rescue and resettlement schemes now moved into high gear.23 Roosevelt too retreated, referring all refugee matters to a rudderless State Department. When Roosevelt publicly announced the ten million to twenty million figure for postwar refugees, the State Department was panicked about the possibility that the president had “a gigantic plan in mind, something world-wide in scope” and equally panicked about his apparent receipt of refugee advice from somewhere else.24 No such gigantic plan appeared in 1940 or in 1941, but under heightened pressure as news of civilian exter-

silence and refusal

/

301

minations began to leak out, he did eventually act in the autumn of 1942. The top secret M Project was initiated on 1 November 1942 under Bowman’s leadership with the express purpose of surveying the possibilities of large-scale refugee resettlement. The M Project was conceived by Bowman as an updated and more focused Inquiry. The Inquiry, as we have seen, was Woodrow Wilson’s think tank for the Paris Peace Conference, and when Bowman looked at Europe in 1942, he saw an exaggerated version of Europe in 1919. Intensified displacement and brutality kept unresolved territorial questions on the agenda, but questions of population and migration, settlement and development, were now even more vital than before. Like Roosevelt, Bowman was increasingly convinced that resettlement had to be conceived in terms of broader questions of population growth. In addition to questions of land and sovereignty, boundaries and trade, security and the territorial separation of antagonistic ethnic groups, the settlement after World War II would have to “go a step further and consider populations themselves; their structure and growth, their standards of living, their freedom (or the lack of it) to expand territorially, the possibility of increasing the development of undeveloped land.”25 Eugenic arguments looked increasingly attractive to Bowman, and he connected population growth to questions of national security as well as development. “Every argument for security in the future leads to the exercise of wider influence and power on the part of the United States,” he believed, and the undervalued study of populations would be central to an informed and appropriate exercise of that power.26 This put the question of colonial settlement more squarely on the U.S. agenda than it had been in 1919. Then it was simply a question of how colonies ought to be administered, but by the 1940s it was a question of how the colonial territories could be settled, developed, and brought into commercial intercourse with the United States. The idea of a new Inquiry was initially unpopular, but the atrocities and mass displacement in Europe eventually swayed Roosevelt, and the M Project gave Bowman the chance to resurvey the world, this time through the lenses of population and settlement. The 1938–42 refugee resettlement project at Hopkins was haphazard in its geographical coverage, but the M Project was to be systematic and comprehensive. Roosevelt wanted to know: Who will be in need of resettlement at war’s end? Where are they? Where could they be settled? And what would it take to resettle them permanently and successfully? The mass of work was divided geographically—the Far East, Russia, the Near East, Central America, South America, Africa, and Europe—and it provided extensive reportage on everything from climatic

302

/

silence and refusal

and hydrological conditions to estimates of “surplus population,” national immigration legislation, previous and existing resettlement projects, population “absorption capacities,” and so on. Never as gigantic as the State Department feared it might be, the M Project comprised eight to ten permanent staff at any one time and a further twenty to thirty research associates and consultants. Anthropologist Henry Field was the project’s full-time administrator; John Franklin Carter was the White House liaison. Among the consultants were Owen Lattimore, Karl Pelzer, and Robert Bowman, who had all worked on the earlier project along with Leo Waibel on the staff. Among staff assembled anew were an earlier émigré, the Austrian geographer Robert Strausz-Hupé, whose 1942 book, Geopolitics, first brought him to Bowman’s attention.27 A Library of Congress historian also joined the staff, and geographers Wellington Jones, Glenn T. Trewartha, Warren S. Thompson, Griffith Taylor, and Robert Pendleton, and the Johns Hopkins sanitary engineer Abel Wolman became consultants.28 The M Project was housed in three adjacent study rooms in the Library of Congress. It was a heterogeneous group of enthusiastic young men, but Bowman never really trusted them. He was suspicious of Austrian StrauszHupé’s ambition to bore into the core of the OSS or State Department and of the “foreigners” more generally: U.S. “citizenship does not mean much to these men.” They were “zealots,” an embarrassment. Now involved in more exciting work in the State Department, his direction of the project was uncharacteristically light-handed.29 Eventually frustrated by their inability to accomplish anything useful, many M Project staff drifted away for sterner challenges. In nearly three years, beginning in November 1942, and at a cost of $180,000, the M Project compiled almost 650 documents: 152 new reports, 328 smaller memoranda, 103 translations of material from other languages, 47 lectures, and 17 administrative documents. Thirty copies of each document were generally prepared and distributed to key figures in different departments of the administration, including the War Department, the army and navy, and the White House. They covered the major refugee sources in Europe (with Germany, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Italy, and Greece receiving the most attention) and anticipated that refugees would also be coming from Japan, Korea, and Manchuria. High on the list of possible destinations were Argentina, Brazil, Bolivia, Venezuela, Australia’s Northern Territories, Canada, and Manchuria.30 The reports generally followed Bowman’s earlier insistence that resettlement should be dispersed, rural, and backed up by significant capital.

silence and refusal

/

303

In March 1943 Bowman insisted on a joint steering committee to coordinate M Project and State Department work on refugees. It comprised Myron Taylor, Adolf Berle, and of course Bowman himself. Berle, the assistant secretary with responsibility for the department’s work in this field, was seemingly sympathetic but made little effective effort. Taylor, with whom Bowman shared a State Department office, was the retired chairman of U.S. Steel and Roosevelt’s representative to the ICR, established at Evian, and he was already utterly frustrated by both Roosevelt and the State Department for their inertia concerning the rescue of Jews and other refugees. The steering committee did little to kick start refugee resettlement policy; rather, it permitted Bowman to focus his efforts in the State Department without appearing to abandon the M Project or refugees. The M Project reports fed “into an important stream of information and policy,”31 Bowman contended. That they had much effect is less clear. Like most in the State Department, Bowman was happy to leave emergency rescue and relief efforts in the hands of the particularly obstructionist European desk at the State Department, where Breckenridge Long engaged in paper shuffling, evasion, and outright deception to ensure inaction.32 Nor is there much evidence for the project’s longer-term influence. It eventually recommended that a ridiculous undercount of one million families would need to be resettled after the war, each at an average cost of twenty-five thousand dollars. This would be administered by a special agency of the United Nations, the International Settlement Authority, which ought to have an annual budget of one billion dollars. Even this recommendation therefore assumed a twenty-five-year resettlement plan. Something like the proposed authority did emerge by 1947 as the International Refugee Organization, but it would be difficult to argue that it had roots in the M Project. The M Project itself was terminated on 30 November 1945, when Truman refused to continue its appropriation. Its legacy was a truckload of documents and two thousand pages of unpublished reports, which were, by one account, “filed and forgotten.”33 The scientific will to study refugee resettlement was severed from the will to do anything about it. There are surely many reasons that, with the exception of the War Refugee Board, refugee resettlement initiatives accomplished nothing during the war. The central failure lies with Roosevelt and the State Department. The former had the inclination to act but not as a priority. The latter was quite unprepared for the job “psychologically or administratively,” according to Treasury secretary Morgenthau: their “conservative political sympathies made them indifferent to the fate of the wretched refugees of

304

/

silence and refusal

Central Europe.”34 Bowman was part of this group. It is stunning that throughout the seven years of his involvement in resettlement planning, he expresses no urgency about the issue, save his first gambit to the Refugee Economic Corporation. If the situation was ever again “desperate,” as he put it in 1938, he never said so. The more news that emerged about Nazi genocide, the more he insulated the M Project from demands for action. He too was deliberately obstructive, even of presidential requests. In October 1943, for instance, with Roosevelt increasingly anxious for results he could use at his upcoming Tehran summit with Stalin and Churchill, Henry Field fired up the M Project staff for round-the-clock work. Roosevelt’s liaison John Carter had begun turning up at Bowman’s weekly meetings with the M Project staff, and Bowman worried that Carter would now “represent to the President that [Bowman] was stalling.” He diverted Field’s presidentially inspired initiatives into the development of a vague and rambling “nine-point program.” A year into the M Project, this amounted to a massive time-wasting recapitulation of the project’s original rationale, deliberately diverting attention from practical policies or recommendations.35 Bowman was indeed stalling, trying to block any significant action aimed at emergency refugee resettlement that might circumscribe his scientific “experiment.” The M Project was a “scholarly investigation of land settlement,” recalled a like-minded Strausz-Hupé, not a refugee resettlement program.36 Not even the horrors of systematic extermination and mass slaughter could sway Bowman from that course, disrupt the scientific logic. Nor is there any record of post facto doubt, no sense after more was known in 1945 that their own scientific “experiment” with refugees’ lives should have been abandoned for sake of short-term rescue efforts. The unprecedented Morgenthau indictment of the State Department—that it merely organized a “runaround” on refugees—appears in Bowman’s papers without comment. The radical separation of refugee rescue from postwar refugee resettlement—the one a matter of politics, the other of science—was not unique; indeed a parallel debate even flared among Jewish refugee organizations.37 But the insistence on science to the exclusion of politics, from a man who was now “special advisor to the president,” surely represents a cruel categorical excuse for silence and inaction.

settlement, race, and the palestine question In 1944 the population of Palestine was 1.7 million. The Muslim population of more than a million people accounted for 61.1 percent, while emi-

silence and refusal

/

305

gration from Europe and elsewhere made Jews the fastest-growing group, rising from 27.7 percent of the population in 1936 to 30 percent, or about half a million, in 1944.38 Zionist demands to confiscate Palestine as a Jewish homeland had failed at the Paris Peace Conference after World War I, despite stated British support in the form of the 1917 Balfour Declaration, but the desperation of Jewish refugees fleeing Nazi-occupied Europe strengthened the argument. Although the U.S. government had firmly resisted endorsing this demand, pressure was intense in early 1943 as Zionist terrorism intensified in Palestine. Roosevelt plumbed for advice. Bowman rejected the transformation of a majority Arab Palestine into a Jewish homeland, not to mention the more audacious Zionist proposal to usurp the Transjordan as part of this new Jewish state: “This would only increase the size of the Arab majority . . . under a Jewish minority.”39 When Roosevelt first solicited Bowman’s advice on this question, the immediate issue was the fate of some four thousand mainly Jewish refugees who had escaped to Spain and the Balkans, and Churchill wanted to ferry them to Lybia. Bowman’s caution was geographical as much as political. He advised that “the limits to any move of this sort should be announced” from the start so as to still Arab fears that massive migration to Palestine might ensue. Just as important, eventual resettlement to Palestine would be limited by social and physical conditions, and large-scale financial and military support would be necessary in an arid land with limited “absorptive capacity.” “My advice is to keep the Palestine question . . . in abeyance, so far as possible, until the end of the war. If we must make promises, promise both Arabs and Jews that there will be deliberate consultation on the questions involved after the war.”40 In government circles Bowman’s position on Palestine was authoritative, and FDR followed his advice. Flattering the geographer, the president even reminded him on subsequent occasions that U.S. policy on Palestine followed his lead.41 FDR understood as well as Bowman the high risk of conflict if the Palestinians were to be dispossessed, and while he responded to the urgency of refugee rescue, he too was ambivalent about Palestine as a solution. But the pressure continued, not least from his wife, Eleanor, who was more inclined toward parceling out Palestine as a Jewish homeland and who quickly confronted Zionist proponents with Bowman’s argument about the area’s limited absorptive capacity. When she received a contrary and optimistic evaluation of Palestine’s environmental ability to absorb further population, she showed it to FDR, who referred her back to Bowman.42 Bowman was in a tight spot. Eleanor Roosevelt had periodically intervened in the State Department to secure visas for refugees and was treated

306

/

silence and refusal

there as a meddling pest. A patronizing Bowman had only scorn for a woman he thought “mischievous” for interfering in “questions beyond her understanding.” He sensed a trap: she may be “trying to get my ideas” and to “disseminate them in Jewish quarters,” thus fomenting embarrassing political attacks.43 But he also knew he could not refuse her summons to the White House for tea and a talk, and having sought advice from Secretary of State Cordell Hull and others and having stalled as long as he could, he sat down with Eleanor Roosevelt for their Palestine discussion. He had resolved with Hull that he should not get into alternative solutions to the refugee “problem”; instead, he engaged her on the question of Palestine’s absorptive capacity, before asking the more pointed political question whether there was much difference between Nazi ambitions for Lebensraum and Zionist determination to dispossess Palestine’s Arabs. Of all his arguments, however, Eleanor Roosevelt was most sensitive to Bowman’s conviction that mass Jewish settlement on Arab land would have to be backed up by British and U.S. force, at great cost in blood and money: the “political consequences of a large influx of population will be far-reaching,” and any resulting Jewish state “would become the creature of Great Britain . . . and the United States.”44 Diplomatic with the first lady, he was emphatic to New York Times editor Arthur Hays Sulzberger: If American power . . . is placed behind the demand for an independent Zionist state in opposition to the Arabs, and if the demand includes larger and larger territory, we must be prepared to take on 90,000,000 Arabs! It seems to me that this is a ghastly alternative. It will be said by enemies of the Jews that they have drawn us into a distinct quarrel on a basis that is difficult to distinguish from Hitler’s Lebensraum. This may seem like a harsh characterization. But is it not true? Is it not putting power behind a nationalist program in such a way as to take away land occupied by one people and give it to another.45

Eleanor Roosevelt “accepted Bowman’s reasoning,” repeating to friends and correspondents his strategic opposition to a Jewish homeland in Palestine.46 But a new report by a senior scientist in the U.S. Soil Conservation Service advocated extensive colonization, and public debate soon flared anew. In Palestine: Land of Promise, Walter Clay Lowdermilk extolled the agricultural efficiency, productiveness, and deserving virtues of recent Jewish settlers vis-à-vis indolent Arabs, and he proposed that desert reclamation could “solve this age-old problem” of Jewish “persecution and homelessness.” Proposing a massive dispossession of Arabs, Lowdermilk’s program was modeled on the Tennessee Valley Authority, encapsulated the Jordan

silence and refusal

/

307

River and large parts of the Transjordan, and speculated that the country’s absorptive capacity was “20 to 30 million people.”47 Lowdermilk shared Bowman’s quasi-scientific language of “absorptive capacity,” expressing the causal Malthusian equation between population and environment, but came to diametrically opposite conclusions. His book shook Eleanor Roosevelt’s faith in Bowman.48 The president was also having doubts, and with a very closely contested presidential election at hand he eventually “broke training” from Bowman’s advice and announced in October 1944 that he favored a Jewish homeland in Palestine. En route back from Yalta in early 1945, he stopped off to see Ibn Saud in Egypt, but failed to convince him of the necessity of making Palestine a Jewish homeland. Bowman was bitterly disappointed by what he saw as FDR’s political cowardice, his refusal to stand up not just for a principle but against a guaranteed disaster. He aimed just as much indignation at Lowdermilk, whose estimates were ridiculous; he was a scientist gone bad who had “made his science suit the popular Zionist program.”49 Bowman’s staunch opposition to Zionist claims in Palestine were well founded. He predicted the conflict that would ensue if Palestinians were forcibly displaced. But his prescience was inseparably interlaced with prejudice, and Lowdermilk’s was not the only science to bend with certain popular predilections. Questions of race were omnipresent in the discussions, actions, and inactions surrounding refugee resettlement, and Bowman’s own racial attitudes significantly affected this work. Roosevelt did not always match his own proclamations with deeds concerning refugee resettlement, but he was interested enough to have given Bowman the opportunity to make something of it if he wanted to. In mid-November 1938, after Bowman suggested that Costa Rica might meet the requirements for large-scale settlement, Roosevelt was keenly interested. But Bowman backpedaled. No longer the “can-do” adviser, he became the pompous defender of abstract principle, raising the question of “political difficulties which a large foreign immigrant group would create if planted in this small Latin American country.”50 But his deeper concern was geopolitics. By sponsoring such a resettlement, would the United States not be accused of interference in European affairs? Bowman stood on the Monroe Doctrine as both a defensive shield and a vital U.S. interest: My own feeling is that we keep our position uncompromised in the Western Hemisphere only so long as we do not interest ourselves directly in the importation of European population elements. The moment we do so we are likely to be charged with the importation of a Eu-

308

/

silence and refusal

ropean quarrel into America. Even if we are right about such importation from the humanitarian standpoint, we thereby give the other fellow a chance to claim that we are wrong.51

Whether he feared that Roosevelt might actually carry the plan forward or had second thoughts after Kristallnacht about the size of the mainly Jewish migration that might result, Bowman’s scientific refusal here aligned neatly with a narrow expression of national self-interest. His opposition to Nazism in no way inclined him to alliance with Hitler’s victims—communists or Jews—and a certain racial categorization endemic to his science remained operative throughout. He was emphatic that white (including Jewish) settlement is differentially restricted by climate and just as emphatic that different peoples, defined by nationality, race, or ethnicity, carried different “cultures” that made them more or less suitable for settlement in any given environment.52 Race was a central axis of cultural differentiation for Bowman. Angola’s 3.7 million black African inhabitants (98.1 percent of the 1940 population) were invisible, except perhaps as labor, in his early proposal that the country be considered for a Jewish homeland. In Latin America his clear assumptions about the different geographies, social conditions, work, and prospects for landownership that are appropriate for whites or for Indians continue undisturbed the “scientific” racism of his fieldwork in the Andes three decades earlier. By corollary, with the half-hearted exception of Alaska, North America represented the most glaring omission from the various resettlement plans—it was the only continent not given a separate geographical focus in the M Project—and this was explicitly about nation as well as race. “A people having staked out a territory as we have done in America certainly has the right to look at itself from the eugenic standpoint,” he believed. “If it decides that its character will be improved by excluding certain populations” and by further advocating “birth control,” it has these rights too.53 Bowman shared the broad conservative resistance to further U.S. immigration that had emerged in the 1920s. Too much an internationalist to become a demagogic nativist or xenophobe, he nonetheless held that the United States had already reached its absorptive capacity and was threatened by “overpopulation.” Yet in a different context, he was quite willing to argue that “not enough children are being born to maintain the existing level of the population of the United States.”54 Eugenics represented the common denominator of these seemingly contradictory stances. Economic “success and its social rewards,” he lamented, “have become linked with diminished fertility” among the white middle

silence and refusal

/

309

class, and the fear of overpopulation pertained to the unwashed masses— black, white, and immigrant.55 Bowman provided his own geographical and “scientific” slant to this argument. That “fatal ‘glance at the map’” by Europeans may have implied to the untrained eye that a lot of pioneering land was still available in the “empty” American West, he once suggested, but a careful study of the possibilities proved that to be a fallacy. The United States was no longer in the position to accept immigrants as it had prior to the 1920s, and he railed against advocates of refugee rescue who thought the problem simply one of “subconscious fears” among the U.S. population: The United States has ten to twelve million unemployed, nothing unconscious about that! It is not a sense of “moral superiority” that bars the refugees from America: it is rather a combination of labor conditions, unemployment, a widely discussed set of attitudes . . . respecting immigration and birth control, added to crop surpluses, national, state and city relief debts already incurred, and a general unwillingness to assume fresh burdens arrogantly thrust at us by totalitarian states.56

This whole logic he applied rather perversely to Jewish exclusion from the United States: “The domestic political situation is now perilous for the Jews,” he observed. “Prejudices and hates are being transferred to America. Absorption of new arrivals will have to be kept to a small scale or resistance will develop and spread rapidly, thus inviting attacks on the position of Jews already established.”57 The great circle of this scientific logic is as hermetic as it was indomitable. It provided a transparent rationalization that Jewish quotas, whether applied by the United States or by Johns Hopkins University, actually functioned for the good of Jews themselves. Anti-Semitism is traced to Europe, appearing in the United States only by unfortunate transfer; the victims are made to bear the blame through exclusion while the bigot washes his hands of the bigotry. Bowman would have resented strongly any implication that he was anti-Semitic—wasn’t he simply being realistic?—yet such sentiments played a direct role in his refugee resettlement work, as one colleague discovered. Owen Lattimore came to realize in the context of the first resettlement project at Hopkins what he had “not even suspected before,” namely, “that Bowman was profoundly anti-Semitic.”58 Bowman’s son encountered the same sentiments. As he prepared to leave for a teaching position in Christchurch in New Zealand in 1939, where he would also carry out some work for the Hopkins resettlement project, Robert Bowman questioned the assignment: How does one introduce the question of large-scale Jewish refugee migration into the monocultural

310

/

silence and refusal

Anglo-Celticism of Australian society? The elder Bowman followed his official letter outlining the desired work with a personal letter answering his son’s concerns. You “need not be embarrassed by the refugee (chiefly Jewish) aspect of the studies,” he admonished; that could simply be kept “confidential.”59 The son later insisted that the expulsion of Jews from Spain in the fifteenth century was actually detrimental to that country—he cited his father’s own words from The New World—so why all the fuss now about accepting Jewish refugees? Bowman answered, in a passage marked “confidential,” that “everything depends upon the conditions of the country and the times.” Regarding Australia now, he said, “the economic organization is already completed,” and “the danger lies in Jewish control of that organization if too many are allowed into the country and particularly the cities.”60 Bowman’s prejudices abetted and contributed to the broad failure of the United States and the Allied governments even to attempt a rescue of Jews and millions of other refugees from Europe. Approached by the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee (AJJDC), a well-heeled, active, and conservative organization, for an opinion about whether “the settlement of the victims of the fascist regimes” would be viable in British Guiana—could an advance group of technicians make a speedy assessment (rather than “a voluminous report on an investigational survey”)?—Bowman’s response was dissembling, nasty, and deliberately obstructive. Actually, the “Joint,” as the AJJDC was known, spent in excess of fifteen million dollars in relief efforts throughout the war and probably “provided more aid to European Jews than all the world’s governments combined.” Why not, Bowman advised FDR in 1938, “keep the European elements within the framework of the Old World,”61 and even after the extent of Nazi genocide became known, he never wavered from that position. Such a deep racism took mighty work to maintain. Again to his son he bemoaned the impossibility of speaking about “the Jews and their problems with complete freedom.” Racial differences were facts of nature for Bowman, and no social liberalism could alter that scientifically derived conclusion—science again as political alibi. He sought nervous reassurance from his conservative Jewish acquaintances too. “Until Jews themselves make up their minds on a unified program, every Gentile feels that he is suspected in expressing himself on one or the other side of this acute controversy,” he told Charles Liebman of the Refugee Economic Corporation. Quite why Jews should have been expected to develop a single voice while Gentiles could think what they liked was never stated, but it does suggest the asymmetric cultural essentialism through which Bowman conceived “race.” Not unreasonably, he opposed

silence and refusal

/

311

the racial elitism of some Zionists, but inasmuch as he was unable to distinguish political Zionism from social Judaism, he was a mouthpiece of the same elitism. Liebman’s reply surely reassured him: “Jewish nationalism has never had my sympathy. . . . Palestine is not a solution for the present plight of European Jews. . . . They must be allowed to spread and enter many countries on the globe and such movements will certainly be impeded by what you aptly characterize as lack of restraint on the part of intransigent Zionists.”62 Here, for Bowman, was a Jew who had presumably, and admirably, succeeded in transcending his culture. On another occasion Bowman commended New York Times editor Arthur Hays Sulzberger for standing against a Zionist homeland and proposing that U.S. Jews look more to the welfare of Jews at home. “To several of my friends among Jews of prominence in Washington,” Bowman wrote, “I have made similar statements during the past month” but have found them unwilling to agree. “In fact, I have thought that I noticed a distinct cooling of their attitude toward me, but this may be imagination only, and we can forget about it.”63 The naked class and race pain here, submerged in oblivious self-deception, is excruciating. One can only imagine what Sulzberger thought. He never responded.

Bowman’s racism was often crude, but it was not wildly divergent from that sanctioned by “polite society.” Neither was it narrowly focused. His antiSemitism was quite ecumenical, and his prejudices covered Arabs every bit as much as Jews. In the State Department during the same period he was happy to portion out Bahrain oil rights to multinational companies over the interests of the ninety thousand “lousy Arabs” who occupied the island.64 His callous disinterest in the fate of Jewish refugees was therefore more and less than anti-Semitism. He was horrified by the carnage of war, of course, but he scarcely registered more emotion over any other aspect of the slaughter that was World War II: 2.5 million Russian prisoners of war summarily executed by the Nazis, 20 million Russian soldiers and civilians dead, millions of Chinese, millions more in Europe, Asia, and the Pacific, in addition to 6 million murdered Jews. And it has been said, in light of the history since, that his opposition to the confiscation of Palestine for a Jewish homeland was nothing if not prescient. His prediction to Roosevelt was absolutely correct that “American bayonets and American lives” were the price if “we touched the Palestine question.”65 That such insight had its own price, namely, obstructive collusion in the abandonment of Jewish and other victims of the Holocaust, is unconscionable.

312

/

silence and refusal

What began in 1933 with the persecution, incarceration, and murder of communists, trotskyists, socialists, and social democratic opponents of the new Nazi regime broadened throughout the 1930s to include “social” enemies such as Jews, Gypsies, traveling people, and gays. All were caught up in the “final solution” to the “Jewish problem,” which began systematically in the summer of 1941. For more than two years the Allies did virtually nothing. Only in early 1944, when Secretary of the Treasury Henry Morgenthau took the whole miserable record of the State Department to Roosevelt, was responsibility for emergency refugee resettlement transferred to the newly established War Refugee Board. The board eventually did a creditable job helping to save perhaps two hundred thousand Jews from the Holocaust.66 But before and after 1944, many options were dismissed or ignored: negotiating with the German high command or other Axis governments for the release of concentration camp prisoners; the establishment of refugee “pipelines” out of different parts of occupied Europe to neutral territory; provision of food and medical supplies to trapped populations; transportation to North Africa, North and South America, and Palestine; bombing the camps and their rail connections; and of course the opening of national borders worldwide to mass refugee migration. If Bowman deployed his “science of settlement” as an alibi for moral and political abstention, his approaches to refugee resettlement first at Hopkins, then in the M Project, and finally with the Palestinian question all point to some other peculiar assumptions that precluded effective rescue or resettlement from the start. Why was Bowman so insistent that resettled refugees perform manual, preferably agricultural, work? Why was free land apparently such a sine qua non of resettlement, when other forms of work were never discussed? And why was it so vital that refugees have such large quantities of capital? Why was Bowman so obsessed with the possibility that rescued victims of World War II might quickly “escape to the cities”? These assumptions undergird not just Bowman’s resettlement discussions but also those of the United States and the United Kingdom more broadly. In the first place, Bowman’s scientific interest lay more with the social and physical environment of the receiving country than with any concern for the refugees individually or collectively. They were faceless, and considerable effort was made to keep them so, while the places to which they would be resettled brimmed with personality. Claims to scientific objectivity enabled and reinforced an extraordinary alienation from the horrors of war. Thus on one occasion when Bowman repeated his habitual caution that this or that land would accommodate only a slow trickle of refugees, a defensive newspaper editor felt obliged to explain in an exculpatory editor’s note that “Dr. Bowman

silence and refusal

/

313

does not intend this to mean that migration may not be a solution to the emigres, however.”67 Actually he meant exactly that. For Bowman, if not necessarily for Roosevelt, the M Project began from the assumption that wartime refugee rescue was impossible and that only an end to the war would solve the crisis. Where concern was registered about the refugees themselves, it was not their plight as war victims or potential Holocaust victims that concerned him, but their effect on whatever places they were sent to, and here he influenced Roosevelt considerably. Above all they should be deconcentrated. At a White House lunch with Churchill in May 1943, also attended by Harry Hopkins and Henry Wallace, FDR raised the M Project work as probing the “best way to settle the Jewish question.” “Bowman’s plan essentially is to spread the Jews thin all over the world.” Roosevelt approved, even reporting his personal success in “adding four or five Jewish families” to Hyde Park, New York, and Marietta County, Georgia. The “local population would have no problem if there were no more than that,” concluded the president.68 The common denominator of his wartime resettlement work suggests that Bowman was driven by a quite coherent global vision. Along with others in the Council on Foreign Relations and the Roosevelt government, Bowman envisaged a global supervisory role for the United States in postwar resettlement planning. The resettlement of different populations in different places around the world could become an economic weapon in a trade scramble after the war, he warned.69 While it cynically cashed in on popular concern for the victims of Nazi terror, especially after 1942, the entire rationale for the M Project and its Hopkins predecessor was a direct and practical application of Bowman’s 1930s pioneering and settlement research on a world scale and in U.S. interests. The United States would confront less a frontier line after the war than an accumulation of pockets that could still be colonized, developed, and brought into trade relations with the country: the “possibility of increasing the development of undeveloped land” became crucial. “The whole earth is occupied and there is no such thing as unused land,” only underdeveloped land, uneconomic use, inefficient distribution of populations, unrealized resources of human strength, aptitude and skill.”70 This developmental vision goes partway toward explaining the exclusive focus on agricultural land in the wartime resettlement studies. Nowhere in the M Project reports is the possibility even entertained that refugees might be accommodated in cities rather than on the land or that they might contribute to urban industry rather than agricultural production and processing. Although Bowman lived in cities himself ever since escaping rural Michigan for Harvard, he came out of a long tradition of intellectual antiurbanism in the United States.71 Cities for him were a necessary evil, al-

314

/

silence and refusal

ready “overpopulated,” made all the worse by the concentration of immigrant, working-class, and black populations. They were the stark opposite of rural virtue, and it was unthinkable to Bowman that refugee resettlement, especially of poor Jews, should further feed the social decay that cities represented. Here arise some of the sharpest ironies of the wartime resettlement fiasco, because its intellectual anti-urbanism stemmed not only from U.S. roots in Jeffersonianism but also from German roots in the philosophies of those such as Friedrich Ratzel. “Colonization,” for Ratzel, “meant agriculture,” writes historian Woodruff Smith of the German geographer who coined the term Lebensraum, which, after 1933, was made to carry the central weight of Nazi territorial ambition.72 The oddly resilient agrarianism of U.S. resettlement ideologies of the 1940s, therefore, recapitulates Turnerian, but especially Ratzelian, assumptions about geography, politics, and economy amid a war that Bowman easily recognized as the most industrial conflict in history. Where these agrarian sympathies brushed against cultural stereotypes, the results were unsettling: “In general the Jew is not considered a good farmer,” confessed a State Department functionary to Bowman, but there is plenty of “expert opinion . . . that Jewish refugees can be colonized in areas where the possibilities of drifting to urban communities are limited.” Indeed, for Bowman the greatest danger was that “the best men” in their resettlement colonies would be “constantly looking around for escape to the cities and particularly to the United States,” resulting in grave difficulties for the settlements.73 If this unrelenting anti-urbanism today seems oddly backward-looking, it would be a mistake to leave the matter there. The resettlement work of Bowman and others during World War II was aimed resolutely at the future, more precisely at an American future. Its Ratzelian influences notwithstanding, it expressed U.S. geo-economic ambition precisely. However untapped, the M Project’s massive compilation of data differed from the avaricious data collection associated with nineteenth-century explorations of absolute space, wherein a Humboldt or a Livingstone would go boldly forth where no (white) man had ever gone before. Rather, the twentieth century represented the cautious and unglamorous documentation of social, economic, political, and environmental conditions in the remaining interstices of a largely colonized globe and an emphasis on relations with other parts of the world through trade or otherwise. From the start the M Project was a global survey of potential investment opportunities. Hence Bowman’s constant refrain that the new conditions were different from those of the frontier and that refugees could not simply be dumped and left to their own

silence and refusal

/

315

devices: they had to possess capital, he repeated over and over again, and have access to land, labor, and resources, and be able to forge trade connections to national and international markets. The “geography of internal affairs” that he had sketched from the pockets of western frontier land in the 1930s was thoroughly internationalized in the resettlement work of the 1940s, and pioneer settlement was again the leading edge of economic development. The resettlement projects were not at all about rescuing the victims of Nazism but about marshaling refugees for the economic development of underdeveloped areas. Refugee resettlement was a means to that end. It sought to fill in the economic interstices of an already occupied world and take advantage of the gross geographic unevenness of capitalist development to engage all corners of the planet in the web of the world market. This precisely describes Bowman’s experiment. The interstices of developed space were simultaneously a laboratory for science and for capital. Land, labor, and capital were the crucial ingredients: the M Project was about identifying the location and condition of “undeveloped” land and about galvanizing government capital subsidies for their development. Refugees— “excess population”74—were the motive force, the labor in the form of yeoman entrepreneurs. How to organize the conquest of the interstices was the crucial question, and the combination of labor and capital had everything to do with class and race differences: “When new people come” to alreadysettled areas, they “must work with their hands, they are paid at low wages and sink to the level of the Indian or half-breed laborer. Capital is necessary if the immigrants are to own land and employ Indian labor.”75 Bowman’s most enthusiastic response to any resettlement proposal came when the classic ingredients of economic accumulation—land, labor, and capital—seemed to be in place. Charles Liebman of the Refugee Economic Corporation wanted to underwrite a Hungarian embroidery entrepreneur, a Mr. K. I. Weisz of Budapest, who would bring his own capital, supplemented by the REC, and, most important, the skilled labor of eighty families to the hill country of Punta Gorda, in British Honduras (now Belize). He proposed a garment factory using local resources. Leo Waibel was skeptical about “any kind of white settlement” in this area—an environmental rationale that Bowman endorsed widely elsewhere—but Bowman overrode him, enthusing that the project would be “experimental” in regard to the “adaptability of the immigrants.” Most important, the land was identified and available. Bringing capital and labor to the land identified by Bowman, Mr. Weisz and his eighty families of workers duly arrived.76 If Bowman’s optimism concerning “pioneering belts” never materialized in practice, he was proven correct in his prediction that refugee resettlement

316

/

silence and refusal

would be but a trickle.77 That this was to no small extent a self-fulfilling prophecy is as troubling as it is ironic. In the end it was not so much “the Palestine question” that displaced any humanitarian concern for Jews and other refugees as it was the larger aims of postwar U.S. political and economic interests. The contradictions were intense. We “may need the full support of Latin-American countries in the settlement of postwar problems,” Bowman once warned a State Department official, and this may “make it undesirable to water down their enthusiasm by insisting that they admit into their countries people that they may not desire to have.”78 If Bowman’s own multifaceted racism stood in the way of his larger geoeconomic ambitions for a U.S. globalism, he was right that the United States would need Latin America, especially in the attempt to establish a pro-U.S. United Nations. And yet, despite the impotence of the governmentsponsored resettlement projects, many refugees did find their way to Latin America after the war. Many were fleeing the Nazis; others were Nazis.

12 SETTLING AFFAIRS WITH THE OLD WORLD: DISMEMBERING GERMANY?

When on 17 March 1944 Bowman was summoned to the White House to consult with Roosevelt over his impending State Department mission to London, it was a familiar routine for him. But this time the press corps at the White House gates buzzed with excitement. Since U.S. entry into the war, Roosevelt had fastidiously avoided public comment on the question of postwar territorial arrangements, trying to keep public attention firmly on the military dimensions of war. He feared that public reaction to such arrangements, real or imagined, might tie his hands or compromise his dealings with Churchill and Stalin. But with a highly publicized White House visit by this renowned geographer and veteran of the Paris Peace Conference, here seemed to be incontrovertible evidence that, whatever the president might be saying publicly, discussions of territorial plans were indeed afoot. At a press conference after the meeting, FDR was bombarded with questions about the significance of Bowman’s inclusion in the State Department’s London team. Resplendent in a green St. Patrick’s Day suit, the president toyed with the huddle of reporters. Now boys, he replied, just because Dr. Bowman was here does not mean that we are talking about postwar territorial arrangements or that the mission’s purpose is to raise such questions with Churchill. “They might,” the president added, “talk about bananas and if they did Dr. Bowman would know where they grew.”1 The global reach and nationalist internationalism of The New World ratified a U.S. globalism, but it was mute on the blunter question of how such

318

/

settling affairs with the old world

expansive interests might be pursued. If the Wilsonian presumption of a detached moral geography took a beating in the 1930s, it still shrouded the more practical ambitions of Roosevelt’s wartime State Department. Apart from Roosevelt himself, the senior members of the State Department had largely cut their diplomatic teeth at Paris or in its shadow: as a senator from Tennessee, FDR’s secretary of state, Cordell Hull, had watched balefully the Senate rejection of Wilson. The vision of a global Monroe Doctrine was therefore alive and well, if far from uncontested, and it was the Wilsonian in Hull who addressed the Pan American Union in 1943: the liberty that is today the “right of every American nation, great and small, is the same liberty which we believe should be established throughout the earth.”2 Formulating postwar plans after 1939, State Department leaders thought themselves to be making Wilson’s vision practical under sterner circumstances. Wilson was the baseline from which they departed. Bowman congratulated Hull on his “reenforcement of the foundations” of U.S. foreign policy in the Pan American address while clarifying his divergence from Wilson: “I had great admiration for Woodrow Wilson. But he couldn’t translate his idealism and perfectionism into an effective program because, for him, the deed was performed when the word was spoken.”3 For this practical idealist, World War II became a kind of political crucible in which a revised Wilsonianism was recast as flint rather than chalk. A “new world order” was glimpsed again in Washington in 1939, opening a second formative moment of the American Century. But the vision had evolved significantly from that of the Paris conference. In the first place, the geography of this order would be negotiated on the basis of overwhelmingly economic, more than geopolitical, considerations as the United States outreached its European competitors. This new economic geography was established only via intense political struggles pitting ruling-class global ambitions against a gamut of opponents: the rulers of declining European empires, the expansionism of Soviet state-centered capital accumulation, insurgent working-class, populist, and anticolonial movements from Greece to Indochina, and at home a feisty working class. Yet ambitions for an effective global political structure, dashed after the failure of the League of Nations, were rekindled in the slouch toward war. If ideas and demands for a new world order emerged differently in diverse locations, the crucible of the new global political and economic geography lay in Washington, D.C., and especially in the nexus connecting the State Department, the Treasury Department, and the White House. The idea of a “Pax Americana”—a successor to the nineteenth-century Pax Britannica, which had dimmed with World War I—attracted wide cur-

settling affairs with the old world

/

319

rency in this period.4 A year earlier, Henry Luce, publisher of Life magazine, announced the “American Century”: “Tyrannies may require a large amount of living space,” he concluded dryly, but “Freedom requires and will require far greater living space than Tyranny.”5 Bowman anticipated these visions with even greater geographical pithiness about the postwar American world. With the German military closing in on Britain in early 1940, the Anglophile Bowman railed against Hitler’s geopolitical quest for Lebensraum. To the inaugural meeting of the Council on Foreign Relations’ Territorial Committee, he retorted that if Hitler wanted Lebensraum he could have it: “Lebensraum for all is the answer to Lebensraum for one”: “it is an economic question.”6 An economic question, he might have added in mixed Wilsonian and Orwellian terms, in which all may be equal, but the United States would be more equal than others. An “American economic Lebensraum” was exactly what Bowman, the State Department, and Roosevelt struggled to realize. Bowman’s adoption of Lebensraum from the German political geographer Ratzel was a stroke of brilliance. According to Ratzel, a state’s political control of territory is vital for its economic and cultural survival, whereas for Bowman economic control of resources, workforces, and markets is the much more direct key to national economic survival and growth. Better than the American Century or the Pax Americana, the notion of an American Lebensraum captures the specific and global historical geography of U.S. ascension to power. After World War II, global power would no longer be measured in terms of colonized land or power over territory. Rather, global power was measured in directly economic terms. Trade and markets now figured as the economic nexuses of global power, a shift confirmed in the 1944 Bretton Woods agreement, which not only inaugurated an international currency system but also established two central banking institutions—the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank—to oversee the global economy. These represented the first planks of the economic infrastructure of the postwar American Lebensraum. Even as World War II raged, geo-economics supplanted geopolitics: “it is an economic question.” For nearly five years Bowman juggled the demands of the Hopkins presidency with an arduous schedule in Washington, where he helped this American Lebensraum to fruition. He rarely articulated the goal of five years of State Department work and top-secret governmental advising in any comprehensive way, but his major efforts in these years were devoted to three separate but interconnected campaigns. The jewel of the work was undoubtedly the establishment of the United Nations, broadly seen as a second

320

/

settling affairs with the old world

chance at international political organization following the scuttling of the League of Nations both in Europe and in the U.S. Senate. But it also involved two other major efforts. An American Lebensraum would itself need space to expand, albeit economic space, and Bowman became a major figure in U.S. efforts to shake loose the colonies of the European powers and open them up for U.S. commerce. This work involved a diplomatic mission to London and negotiations with Churchill, and if bananas did not quite work their way onto the agenda, the tropical territories where they grew certainly did. But affairs still had to be settled in Europe, especially with Germany. The geopolitical rationales for war returned Old World geographies to the center of the international agenda, and they would have to be dealt with. Boundaries were not the primary issue after World War II in the way they had been in Paris in 1919, but in several instances they remained important. What to do with Germany was the central question here, and this inevitably raised boundary issues. It was widely sensed in the Roosevelt government that settling accounts with and in the Old World was a sine qua non of an American Lebensraum; only then would the agenda be clear for a “new world order,” as Roosevelt put it. Yet for many, a powerful German economy would be key to European economic recovery after World War II. Throughout State Department deliberations on Germany, therefore, questions of territorial and economic settlement continually flowed through each other, but as the war progressed the narrowly territorial issues took a back seat to both immediate military questions and economic considerations. Unlike his work on decolonization and the establishment of the United Nations, Bowman’s 1940s work on the German question for the State Department began almost two years before the United States was even officially in the war. While beginning to immerse himself in the complexities of a future German settlement in the spring of 1940, a more urgent geographical task intruded, however. It represented a transitional moment from the territorial to the economic. Bowman was not usually involved directly in military decisions, his bailiwick being postwar settlement, but early in the war he found himself offering technical geographical advice with rapid military results. The issue was Greenland, Iceland, and the proper definition of the Western Hemisphere, and it had a direct bearing on whether and how the United States went to war.

“a limited war ” and the bowman line— defining the western hemisphere It was perhaps appropriate that the Anglophile Bowman found himself in Britain when World War II broke out in 1939. Traveling to Dundee for an

settling affairs with the old world

/

321

address to the British Association—his second visit to Scotland, having also visited in 1928 to receive the Livingstone Medal from the Royal Scottish Geographical Society—he received word that the meeting was canceled. Citing the injustices of the 1919 confiscation of Gdansk/Danzig, Hitler had invaded Poland. Bowman was back in London in time to hear Chamberlain’s 3 September radio announcement that Britain was at war with Germany. He was impressed by the frenzy of war preparations. He experienced a blackout in Glasgow, saw gas masks distributed everywhere, and witnessed the speedy construction of air raid shelters. London streets were transformed: sand bags were piled everywhere, but people were scarce, except when the sirens blew. Particularly evident to an American visitor, the theaters were closed. A life-long lover of children, he was most impressed with the evacuation of kids from the capital: The most spectacular move was the evacuation of city children from the largest centers. Over a half-million children were moved out of London in one day. Some of the suburban railway stations, a block long, were crowded with children in the care of a few grown-ups. One saw many a weeping adult touched by the pity of it, the separation for an indefinite time of children and parents, and the possibility that war meant the death and oftentimes the horrible death of infants. But the children themselves laughed and chatted as if the whole thing were a picnic. For many of them it was an unexpected vacation in the country and no doubt some of them had never been in the country.7

Before returning to the United States aboard the Aquitania, protected by a British destroyer for its first day and a half out of Southampton, Bowman visited his friend Lionel Curtis in Oxford. Curtis and Bowman’s association went back to the Paris Peace Conference, and while Bowman built the Council on Foreign Relations, Curtis inspired its British counterpart, the Royal Institute of International Affairs (Chatham House). They retained ties and pondered together the implications and possible outcomes of the war. At least for now it was and should be a European war, Bowman felt, but he was less inclined than in the earlier war to label it a struggle between imperial rivals. German expansionism was the central cause, to be sure, but he also cautiously invoked the complicated interstate relations of postVersailles Europe. As for the United States, “the mass of the people are not going to go into another war in an emotional storm,” nor would they “fight to maintain the integrity of the British empire.” Still, he felt sure that the United States would find itself drawn inexorably toward the war if for no other reason than to protect its transatlantic trade. A German victory at sea would threaten “ten percent of our total commerce which is foreign and

322

/

settling affairs with the old world

which gives stimulus and underpinning to our internal economy.” Until the economic threat materialized, however, it would be for the United States a “limited war.” The first task for the country is “to make sure that the war will not spread to the western hemisphere.”8 Roosevelt was thinking along similar lines. But how were the limits to be determined? Following the declaration of war in Europe, he moved with considerable caution to appease both internationalists and isolationists en route to possible U.S. involvement. He harbored an eastern establishment sympathy for Britain and the Allies, and while on the lookout for pretexts by which to inch the United States toward greater partisanship, he was reluctant to become too involved too quickly: shades of Woodrow Wilson more than his granduncle Theodore. The German invasion of Denmark and Norway in the spring of 1940 placed the status of Iceland and Greenland (the latter, an administrative possession of Denmark) in question. Were these northern outposts taken, German forces, with far better technology than in World War I, would have land bases dangerously close to the United States. Submarine warfare was now a reality, and as the unprecedented evacuation of children from London signified, air power would play a much more crucial role in this war.9 Advances in military technology made territorial definition more, not less, urgent to the U.S. government. Early on, therefore, Roosevelt sought to define the limits of involvement and noninvolvement in geographical terms: Where did Europe end and the Western Hemisphere begin? How far could a German advance proceed before it became a North American affair? What were the exact boundaries of the Western Hemisphere? Three days after the invasion of Denmark, Roosevelt held a press conference at which he declared Greenland to be a part of the North American continent, a claim quickly if strategically ratified by the Danish minister. As it turned out, the Council on Foreign Relations had just completed a report, “The Strategic Importance of Greenland,” commissioned by Bowman’s territorial group. The CFR report anticipated the possibility of a German invasion of Denmark and recommended that the official extension of the Monroe Doctrine to cover Greenland might act as a deterrent to further German advance across the Atlantic. Roosevelt studied the report and in late March asked Bowman to the White House, where, CFR report in hand, FDR talked through a Greenland strategy with him.10 The dilemma of precise hemispheric definition was intensified in early 1941 when, under the lend-lease program, the United States began sending ships bearing American factory goods across the Atlantic, where they were already targets for German U-boats. While seeking to give the convoys as

settling affairs with the old world

/

323

much “American sea” as possible, the former navy secretary–turnedpresident also had to tiptoe around the Neutrality Act invoked by Congress at the onset of war. The latter forbade the president from participating on either side of the conflict, but it did allow—in language evocative of the Monroe Doctrine—for hemispheric defense. So what were the limits of the hemisphere within which such a defense could legitimately be mounted? More important, what line could be identified across which German aggression could justify U.S. belligerence? Roosevelt was more and more reconciled to the inevitability of U.S. participation in the war, but as he told his cabinet, “I am not willing to fire the first shot.” He was “waiting to be pushed” into war.11 He actively sought pretexts, and defining the geography of the Western Hemisphere offered one possibility; in April 1941 he called Bowman to a highly secret meeting at the White House, along with Admiral Harold R. Stark, chief of Naval Operations. He told them that “within twenty-four or possibly forty-eight hours,” he might declare a “neutral zone in the Western hemisphere,” within which shipping would be immune from German attack, but he needed to know where the precise line should lie. Various possibilities were discussed, and it was quickly clear that FDR leaned toward the twenty-fifth meridian.12 The question was not entirely resolved, but an emboldened Roosevelt, in middiscussion, decided to order the transfer of several warships from the Pacific to the Atlantic for purposes of providing a convoy escort for U.S. shipping. “Isaiah,” chortled Roosevelt as Bowman left, “that’s how history is made.”13 The meeting was followed up by a presidential request to provide a formal geographical definition of the Western Hemisphere, specifically a line to the west of which the United States could justify attacks on German warships deemed to have crossed into the “neutral” Americas. For all the apparent mathematical precision, the definition of hemispheres is a social convention, the result of historical geographical power relations, much like the definition of continents.14 Bowman’s response masks this power with a nationalist appeal. “The American people are firmly united in their conviction and their resolution that they will not now improvise a craven policy of withdrawal from hemisphere responsibilities,” he wrote, trying to put words into any presidential announcement. Basing himself on “critical military and political” criteria and purporting “to make no claim to other peoples’ territories,” he rejected the thirtieth meridian as too confining and conservative. He recommended instead the twenty-fifth with three minor deviations, which excluded the Cape Verde Islands from the Western Hemisphere, included the Azores, and left the continental shelf off the northwest tip of Iceland in the Eastern Hemisphere with the rest of

324

/

settling affairs with the old world

the island. He accompanied his memo with a map of the Atlantic onto which the proposed line was traced in red. “We take our stand on the meridian of 25 degrees west longitude,” he urged Roosevelt, adding the geographical justification that “this meridian approximately divides into equal parts the ocean space between the westernmost point of Africa and the easternmost point of South America.”15 If Bowman’s precision about the definition of the Western Hemisphere was hastened by the technical and political conditions of modern war, his intent expressed a long U.S. tradition: in 1867 Secretary of State William Henry Seward had explicitly linked an “adequate defense for the United States” to ownership not only of Alaska but also of Greenland and Iceland in order to dominate the North Atlantic.16 Bowman, too, invoked an awkward mix of geographical, political, and military rationales. Of Greenland he believed that “next to the rights of the free Danish government stand the rights of the United States,” since, as he later put it, Greenland is “part of the frontyard of the hemisphere.” No serious scholar, he blustered, disputes the “paramount concern” or “New World character” of Greenland, and he even cited Robert Peary’s Greenland voyages east of the twenty-fifth meridian as support. That the United States had waived all rights to Greenland in the Virgin Island purchase of 1916 was dismissed as irrelevant given the German invasion of Denmark.About Iceland, a sovereign state, he was almost as brash, allowing that while Iceland could hardly be claimed for the Western Hemisphere on geographical grounds, “this was not a matter of geography, but of political interest.” In his next radio address, Roosevelt felt emboldened to claim that both the Azores and Cape Verde Islands were “island outposts of the New World.”17 The situation was volatile. When in early June the Robin Moor, an American freighter, was sunk by a German submarine in a nonwar zone of the South Atlantic, Roosevelt decided against using the Bowman line as a pretext for military escalation. News of the German invasion of the USSR provided some distraction, but by July, with an Iceland invasion seemingly imminent, Roosevelt himself modified the Bowman line, moving it a degree west to the twenty-sixth meridian but bending it east to include Iceland as well as Greenland in the Western Hemisphere. This modified Bowman line lasted for several months, and according to a despondent Churchill was sufficiently conservative that any serious incident serving FDR as a pretext was unlikely. But pretexts did arise. A failed German attack in September 1941 provoked the president to command the navy to “shoot on sight” west of the twenty-sixth meridian, but subsequent attacks in October brought little further response.18 Pearl Harbor finally dissolved the short-lived Bowman line when regional defense turned to global offense.

settling affairs with the old world

/

325

the council goes to washington Bowman, too, was accosted by eager reporters when he left the White House that St. Patrick’s Day in 1944, and in response to one question about the aftermath of the 1919 Paris conference, he replied: “Yes, and what a mess we made of it.”19 This, of course, was an abiding threnody of the erstwhile Wilsonians in the Roosevelt administration. The “Carthaginian peace,” as Keynes put it, was the harbinger of Hitler and eventually war. While Bowman consistently defended the territorial settlements with which he was so closely concerned, he did admit to later readers of Foreign Affairs that “the economic arrangements were bad and the subsequent failure was inevitable.” With the onset of World War II, a flood of retrospectives on the first war appeared, and like many he intently occupied himself with them. Along with a whole generation of statesmen and foreign policy professionals, he now set about the job of constructing a second peace. Then as before, the territorial settlements were not so easily separable from the economic: “If we had the map to draw over again,” Bowman asked privately to a fellow member of the Council on Foreign Relations at the onset of World War II, “what mistakes do we recognize in the map of 1919?”20 “We are unprepared for peace,” Bowman lamented to Lionel Curtis two years before the United States was even in the war! He had urged the new secretary of state in 1921 to build up a research wing of the department’s intelligence section to be ready for the next war, but to no avail.21 The Council on Foreign Relations sought to fill the void, but this was no substitute for State Department readiness at the outbreak of World War II. The council’s initial Greenland report was part of a larger series of reports entitled the War and Peace Studies, initiated at the end of 1939; these secret intelligence reports became a central source of information and personnel for the wartime State Department. Four days before Bowman’s 1939 return to New York harbor from Britain, Hamilton Fish Armstrong, editor of Foreign Affairs, and Walter H. Mallory, executive director of the CFR, made a trip to the State Department, where they volunteered council resources for a “continuous study of the course of the war and its effects on the United States politically, economically, geographically, and in matters of security and armament.” The conflict, they advised, would involve the United States, and prior preparation was vital, not only militarily, but also in terms of broader foreign policy objectives. The war presented a “grand opportunity” in fact for the United States to emerge as “the premier power in the world.”22 Assistant Secretary of State George Messersmith, himself a council member, was predictably enthusiastic and gained approval for the plan the same day.

326

/

settling affairs with the old world

The State Department operated by crisis management and was illprepared to organize such detailed, long-range studies. “The daily routine,” Bowman argued, “the fever of excitement that arises from the hectic and dramatic developments of war, the general rush and hurry of the Department of State are not conducive to the calm survey, the deliberate judgment, the wise, if moderate forecast.”23 Believing that the council’s studies would be impossible if its connection to the State Department were known, the War and Peace Studies (WPS) program was initiated under conditions of extreme secrecy, with the Rockefeller Foundation providing $44,500 for the first year of the program.24 Numerous other postwar initiatives emerged in this period, including a proposal by Julian Huxley for a “reconstituted Holy Roman Empire,” but Bowman stayed with the council and the State Department. The CFR aimed to produce “concrete proposals designed to safeguard American interests” and enhance the ability of the United States to “contribute to the future organization of the world.” Whereas the Inquiry had been organized geographically, the council organized its WPS work thematically under four headings: political, security and armaments, economic and financial, and territorial. A “peace aims group” was added later. Bowman headed the territorial group, which included council stalwarts Philip Mosely and Hamilton Fish Armstrong as well as Far East specialist Owen Lattimore. Orchestrating the entire effort was a steering committee, on which Bowman also sat with Norman H. Davis, a businessman who now headed the American Red Cross and served as president of the CFR; Armstrong; Walter Mallory; Jacob Viner, a Chicago economist; Alvin Hansen, a Harvard political economist; Whitney Shepardson, a founding director of the council; and Allen Dulles, then an international corporate lawyer. In the WPS’s first twelve months, the council compiled and transmitted to the State Department and the president some seventy confidential reports, among them Bowman’s Greenland recommendations. The purpose of the reports was to explore the relevant issues and survey their political, economic, and geographical background, leading to a menu of policy options.25 The War and Peace Studies project adopted a much more ambitious global presentiment than its forerunner. The council’s political and armaments groups began by simply assuming an Allied victory, but as the German military overran France in May 1940 and stared across the Channel to Britain, they backtracked, and a serious dissection and reformulation of American interests and global scenarios became more urgent. The economic and financial group was both less sanguine and braver: it initiated a rapid survey of world trade and proposed a combination of the Pacific and the Western Hemisphere into a single U.S.-led economic bloc. Initially referred

settling affairs with the old world

/

327

to as the Western Hemisphere, British Empire, and Far East, this bloc detached Britain from an assumed German-controlled Europe (for others, including Bowman, the thought of a Hitler-dominated Britain was simply inconceivable) and sought a maximum degree of economic self-sufficiency for the United States. The economic and financial group of the CFR called this bloc the Grand Area, and it dominated their ambition for the United States into 1941. Any smaller bloc under U.S. hegemony would risk inordinate economic dependence, it was felt. Were the United States to achieve this realignment of international relations, it would have to curtail Japanese expansion in the Pacific and simultaneously fight off German encroachment, especially in vulnerable corners of the British Empire. This vision of postwar geography implied the necessity of “military and economic supremacy for the United States” and “the rapid fulfillment of a program of complete re-armament.”26 Roosevelt got the summarized report in October 1940. If the image of an Americas-centered bi-oceanic Grand Area vying with a Japanese Asia across the Pacific and a German Eurasia to the east seems post facto a little fantastic, it must be remembered that at the time, it represented only a certain logical extension of what already existed. The British Empire already comprised a trading bloc, which, to U.S. observers, was not just politically dubious but fragmenting, geopolitically disordered, inefficient, and morally indefensible. The CFR’s new U.S.-centered bloc was a radical neatening of global economic and political geographies. Yet this proposal went nowhere, not because it was too fantastic, but because it was insufficiently ambitious. It clung to traditional geopolitical assumptions that economic power followed territorial control. Bowman’s vision of an American Lebensraum was much more ambitious and already hinted at the possibility of an economic globalism detached from territorial control: Inevitably it will be asked by the public, by the Government, by donors: if we are not in the war, why project ourselves into the peace making? . . . It seems to me that it is sufficient to answer that the United States Government is interested in any solution anywhere in the world that affects American trade. In a wide sense, commerce is the mother of all wars.27

From the beginning, therefore, there was no council agreement about the geographical extent of postwar U.S. ambition. Should the United States seek economic hegemony of only a designated bloc, or was the whole world its rightful oyster? Would regional military supremacy be sufficient, or was world hegemony the only realistic course? Did the United States want or did it need a global Monroe Doctrine, or would an expanded regional sphere

328

/

settling affairs with the old world

of influence provide a sufficient economic platform? This question of regional versus global interests would arise in the State Department throughout the war and figured most prominently in negotiations over the establishment of the United Nations and throughout wartime deliberations with Britain and the Soviet Union. Although he periodically equivocated, Bowman moved more and more away from seeing a U.S. global future in terms of territorial blocs and regional trading spheres and toward a global vision. The division of labor between WPS study groups was definitive but loose. Bowman’s territorial group generally investigated areas hosting specific territorial conflicts, extant or anticipated, and defined the limits of plausible solutions. It was global in coverage, not usually systematic, but tended instead to respond to immediate issues, as with Greenland. The territorial group was thematic as well as geographically specific: it covered refugees, the problem of small states (European), interpretations of the Monroe Doctrine, air sovereignty, the colonial question, American interests in minerals and other resources, and potential territorial claims by Germany and the USSR were all discussed. If there was a clear sense of American opportunity and embrace of global hegemony, it was a far more pragmatic and self-assuredly deliberate politics that dominated the territorial discussions than was evidenced in the uneasy moralism of 1919. Yet it retained its own ambiguities. The key question they faced and did not completely resolve until 1942 was whether the territorial committee should “set itself up as an arbiter among rival groups and claims,” much as Wilson had directed the Inquiry and the Paris delegation, or should it, as Bowman put it, “function merely to indicate where American interests were involved and to analyze those interests?” Open for debate in 1940, when the United States remained officially a neutral, was whether “the United States should have nothing to do, or else more to do, with the peace than in 1919.”28 The internal bureaucracy in the State Department underwent periodic permutations in the war years, but initial arrangements were surprisingly rudimentary. The Advisory Committee on Problems of Foreign Relations was established in January 1940 to coordinate with the council, and it comprised sixteen “top officials,” but it quickly became unwieldy, and even as WPS work intensified, postwar planning never achieved serious direction in the prewar years. Some of the transmitted council reports, such as that on Greenland, hit their mark, while others simply gathered dust.29 The project was somewhat revivified in the spring of 1941 following a strategic dinner organized by Vice President Henry Wallace, where council members and others reviewed postwar reconstruction policy. All now accepted that the United States would enter the war, assumed an American-British victory,

settling affairs with the old world

/

329

and anticipated that a postwar new world order would be ridden with “chaos and hunger”: the United States would have to “police the world.”30 The council’s perspective continued to coalesce throughout 1941, and when the Pearl Harbor attack in December finally provided the pretext for the inevitable, there was a strange sense of relief—finally, a real target. “The unanimity of our people—the object of President Roosevelt’s long sustained effort—is at last assured,” Bowman wrote Scottish geographer Alan Ogilvie. Americans, too, now saw the war “as a life and death struggle.”31 Its internationalist program vindicated, the council’s work seemed more relevant than ever: “The importance of our studies has been doubled or trebled.” More clearly than ever before, Bowman connected wartime military victory with postwar economic hegemony: If we are expected to build a vast Navy and operate merchant ships on an unheard-of scale, we are not going to toss those things away at the end of the war on any theory of peace. We are going to keep them and make them work in the interests of the way that we set up. . . . To the degree that the United States is the arsenal of the Democracies it will be the final arsenal at the moment of victory. It cannot throw the contents of that arsenal away. . . . We have no desire to dominate the world. Events have now forced us to dominate the war situation. The measure of our victory will be the measure of our domination after victory.32

Entry into the war prompted State Department reorganization and the formation of a new secret committee to oversee postwar planning. Essentially, the Council on Foreign Relations’ structure was transplanted into the government. The Advisory Committee on Postwar Foreign Policy began functioning in February 1942. Eight of its members were from the State Department: Secretary of State Cordell Hull (chair); Undersecretary Sumner Welles; Leo Pasvolsky; Assistant Secretaries Dean Acheson and Adolf Berle; Herbert Feis and Green Hackworth, economic and legal advisers, respectively; and Harry Hawkins, chief of the commercial policy division. From the council were Bowman, Armstrong, Norman Davis, Myron Taylor (former chairman of U.S. Steel), Benjamin Cohen, a New York corporate lawyer and Roosevelt adviser, and Anne O’Hare McCormick, a member of the editorial board of the New York Times, who had won a Pulitzer Prize for her prewar European reporting. With Welles, Pasvolsky, and Feis also CFR members (Berle and Acheson joined following the war), the council dominated. Heads of CFR subcommittees were slated to shift into the analogous State Department committees, but the political power attached to these appointments led to intense political jockeying. Sumner Welles initially wanted his-

330

/

settling affairs with the old world

torian James Shotwell to chair the State Department’s territorial subcommittee, but Bowman prevailed. With Allen Dulles now in Europe as an OSS agent, Davis took the security subcommittee, Taylor took economic problems, and Welles headed the political subcommittee. The research secretaries of the council study groups also moved into parallel department roles. The resulting subcommittees survived until the end of 1944, far outliving the parent Advisory Committee.33 Absorbed and reinvented inside the State Department, the War and Peace Studies project effectively ended by February 1942. It contributed some 670 reports on geographical, political, and economic issues, held 361 meetings, involved over 100 individuals, and spent almost $300,000 of Rockefeller Foundation funds in the process. The CFR’s early dream of power and influence now came to fruition, and in the following years several council members including Bowman moved toward the crown of State Department power.34 With the German invasion of the USSR and the Japanese assault on China, Indochina, and Malaya, the Advisory Committee expanded the geographical range of its deliberations from its early focus on Europe. The work was increasingly done in the territorial and political committees.35 The political committee took the overall leadership role, but the territorial committee’s role was deemed so important that all of its personnel were also named to the political committee. Given the explosiveness of territorial changes and Bowman’s penchant for secrecy, the work of the territorial committee was more confidential than any other. Unlike 1919, when territorial questions spilled through all the preparatory work, these questions were largely corralled into a single committee in the World War II State Department. Also unlike 1919, Bowman’s committee was aware that territorial solutions this time would be less free-standing than interwoven with and framed by economic and political objectives. As State Department staffer Harley Notter put it, territorial solutions “should not open up new problems through the use of such devices as minority treaties and plebiscites, as had been done in 1919, but rather should be determined in relation to international economic, political and security decisions, with which all territorial solutions always interlocked.”36 Bowman’s tight leadership marked the procedures and results of the territorial committee throughout. Its members began with a survey and quick assessment of what they took to be the most serious territorial problems in Europe, namely, the belt of states and regions on Russia’s western flank, from Finland to the Aegean. Detailed reports ensued in April 1942, covering population issues, resources, economic infrastructure, transportation routes, and boundary histories as well as physical features, territorial claims,

settling affairs with the old world

/

331

and analyses of official governmental positions and those of subnational groups. “Polish Population” was the first substantive report, but nonEuropean topics were gradually interspersed: dependent areas, Syria and Lebanon, the Peru-Ecuador boundary dispute, which had flared again. By June, the committee was examining the pros and cons of World War I’s unimplemented Curzon line dividing Poland and the USSR (map 6), then the various boundaries and territories in Central Europe: sovereignty changes in Bukovina, the western Ukraine, Galicia, Ruthenia, and Poland, then the old question of Gdansk/Danzig, followed by Slovakia-Hungary, then Germany itself. The purpose throughout was to identify where territorial problems might arise after the war and to prepare policy alternatives. In the summer of 1942 the focus shifted to the “dependent areas,” beginning with Thailand and Indochina. Different territories had different statuses, from independence to colonial rule, and their capacities for self-rule were judged just as variable. By September the territorial committee turned to a detailed analysis of Africa, producing thirty-eight consecutive documents in five weeks. Thereafter, European and colonial questions were thoroughly intermixed on their agenda, reflecting the needs of the political committee more than an effort at systematic coverage. The territorial committee also often initiated the discussion of problem areas in the Saturday morning political committee meetings. Bowman’s role thereby became pivotal— the man who not only knew where the bananas grew, as it were, but whose geographical knowledge was treated as central to any political decision. Maps pinned to the wall played a crucial role in this committee. In addition to eliciting the aid of S. W. Boggs’s Office of the Geographer, located in the State Department, Bowman also periodically drew on the services of cartographers at the American Geographical Society for rush map jobs. Over almost four years, the territorial committee released 590 map-studded reports, which went directly to the political committee, the secretary of state, and often Roosevelt. The United States was not covered at all, Britain and France were treated only in passing, and some South American republics assumed under Monroe Doctrine rubric received scanty attention, but otherwise the coverage was global.37 In retrospect it is extraordinary that U.S. planning for the postwar world was so clearly underway in early 1940, almost two years before the country was even an official combatant. If the War and Peace Studies project was often unfocused, even leisurely compared with what was about to come, it established a vital foundation for State Department postwar planning. As Bowman recorded at the first meeting of the political committee in February 1942, their job was to investigate the various ways in which the “tidy-

332

/

settling affairs with the old world

ing up of the world map” might be accomplished.38 No place on the map, they all agreed, was in greater need of tidying up than Germany.

the disposition of germany: round 1 The disposition of Germany loomed over the Advisory Committee’s proceedings from the start and, by April 1942, was taken up directly in the political committee. The early meetings were remarkable for their fluidity and free-ranging discussion as opinions ebbed and flowed, but they soon hardened, and a terse standoff ensued between Bowman and Undersecretary Welles. A lot more was on the table than Germany, and Bowman led a group who felt it was impossible to discuss Germany in isolation from the Soviet Union. These debates established a framework for U.S. policy on the geography of postwar Germany but also highlighted the political divisions inherent in different geographical solutions. It was Bowman who first broached the “basic question whether we should recognize a union of the German people.” Welles felt that the optimum solution to “the German problem” was the creation of a “confederation of autonomous republics,” perhaps held together by a customs union, and he was supported by several members of the committee, including Cohen and Davis, with only Anne McCormick clearly advocating a unified Germany. Bowman was less sure. In CFR territorial group meetings two years earlier, with the German army rampaging through the Low Countries and bearing down on Paris, he thought long-term military and political control of Germany a necessity because there was “nothing in Germany today upon which to build a new order.”39 Now he still thought the breakup of Germany a plausible option but was more tentative. The political committee decided to devote the next few meetings to the German question. The following week Bowman initiated the discussion with an exploratory survey of the issues, stressing that whether Germany was to be divided or not, the United States “should support the liberal, moral elements whom we wish to have in political power.” But he now raised an alternative consideration: “At a later turn of the wheel of fortune,” he ventured, “a counterpoise to Russia might be necessary, and we might want Germany as a unit for that purpose.” But the Russian issue elicited little response; far more pressing for committee members was the prospect of a workers’ revolution in a defeated Germany, much as had threatened in 1919. Anne McCormick argued that they would have little choice but to support such an anti-Nazi government, especially if it had the blessing of a large constituency of the German people, but Bowman objected strongly, again in-

settling affairs with the old world

/

333

jecting the specter of “Russia to the east”: under no circumstances should a German socialist revolution be recognized.40 At the third meeting devoted to Germany, Bowman was again invited by Welles to initiate the discussion, and he chose to highlight the emerging disagreement. On the one hand, he conceded, popular “enthusiasm for Bismark’s empire” expressed a visceral desire for German national unity, which ought not to be underestimated. On the other hand, a long-term view recognized that “Russia” posed “as great a danger as Germany.” While supporting a confederation, as Welles had put it, Bowman stressed that Germany should not be destroyed or fragmented. “If we disunite Germany we may be on our knees to her in five, ten, or fifteen years to ask her to unite and help us to hold Russia in place.”41 This was a heady discussion in the bowels of the State Department, and it bore directly on the issues that would lie at the bottom of cold war divisions. Committee members were beginning to choose sides. Some were leery of opposing Welles directly, but Pasvolsky took up Bowman’s historical points as a means of attacking the idea of a customs union as unworkable. Bowman was increasingly vocal about the strategic argument for a united Germany but sensed a Welles-inspired slide toward German partition. When they next examined maps portraying various divisions of Germany into two, three, five, or seven parts, he emphasized that while he was reconciled to such a fragmentation in the short term, the committee ought to be clear that this was merely a transitional arrangement. Welles, confident that the discussion was going his way, knew Bowman was an important ally and, whatever his idiosyncrasies about Russia, tried to win him over. Welles asked each member of the committee to write a short justification for a specific position on the German question and bring it to the next meeting.42 The results of this exercise must have surprised Welles, for the diversity of opinion far outweighed any agreement, and there was no clear majority for German dismemberment. Bowman remained insistent that a united Germany was desirable: the “object of a division of Germany is not to destroy the Germans or to enslave them” but “to rebuild” the country. Division was necessary only “until the aims of reeducation and cooperation of Germany in the international field are assured.” In response to Welles’s request for maps, Bowman proposed a three-part division: a South Germany comprising Bavaria, Württemberg, Saxony, Thuringia, and Baden; an East Germany of Brandenburg, Pomerania, Grenzmark, and parts of Lower and Upper Silesia; and a West Germany centered on the Rhineland but incorporating the whole territory from Alsace to Schleswig. Austria was to re-

334

/

settling affairs with the old world

main separate, possibly as part of a Danubian federation, although a later union with Germany was not ruled out. Generous in its assumption of German territory to the east, Bowman’s map of a new Germany reflected his antagonism to the USSR as well as the early military success of the Reich forces. If military developments eventually rendered this map obsolete, the geopolitical intent of Bowman’s western German state of 1942 is nonetheless clear. He was alone in the State Department at the time in proposing a western zone that spanned the entire north-south longitude of prewar Germany, thus constructing the western reaches of Germany as a last ditch buffer zone against westward Soviet encroachment through Germany. This was reminiscent of Bowman’s Central European buffer zone proposed twenty-one years earlier, only several hundred miles farther west.43 Pressing for a consensual solution, Welles referred the question of postwar German boundaries to the territorial committee, where an increasingly impatient Bowman, insistent that the United States had no choice but “to assume a large responsibility for European affairs,” led a hardening of opinion for German unity. The tide now shifted against Welles, and a showdown threatened for the meeting of 20 June, when the political committee took up the question of territories contiguous to Germany. Bowman declared firmly in favor of an independent Austria as a counterweight to Germany and against a Central European federation, since such a body would be drawn eastward to the power of Russia rather than westward to an emasculated Germany. These considerations, he concluded, had “driven him from the earlier conception of a fragmented Germany to that of a unified Germany.” If the issue was military control of Germany to prevent a resurgent German nationalism, that could be achieved in ways other than absolute economic and political dismemberment of the German state: “We have only to control guns, airplanes, armor plate,” which could be done at specific “points and in small areas. Put a ring around these and make control real.” The “control of Germany as a whole” would be “easier than its control by parts.” Further, if “Germans run Germany,” then “Germans will blame Germans.” The Allies ought not to divide the country but should see their main task after the war as “the effort to put Germany on her feet.”44 Evolving clearly here was the notion that the economic and military strategies for postwar Germany might be quite divergent, and that zones of military occupation were a quite separate issue from that of political and economic dismemberment. Bowman and Welles might have been fighting on the same side of the war, but their respective enemies were on different sides. Welles had as deep-seated an antagonism for Germany as Bowman

settling affairs with the old world

/

335

had for the Soviet Union, and he was not about to concede. One can sense the ghost of Ratzel throughout the argument. Directly influenced by the German geographer, Bowman’s map of military zones for Germany was aimed squarely against Soviet state expansion, whereas Welles was more concerned to extirpate any further mobilization of Ratzelian geopolitics by the German state. Welles was, in a sense, the truer Ratzelian. He disparaged Bismark’s “centralization of authority over all the widely divergent peoples of the German race” and the national penchant to see “German militarism as the supreme glory of the race.” German unity, he insisted, “means a continuing threat to the peace of the entire world,” and “partition is the only way of offsetting the German menace in the future.” More than Welles, Bowman was also powerfully motivated by the economic centrality of Germany after the war.45 By late June, Bowman had played many committee members into his corner, and sensing victory, he now pressed for a concrete decision about the long-term geographical fate of Germany. The time for discussion was over, he said, and in an obvious cut at Welles suggested that committee members “were using the discussion to quicken their own thought rather than to try to fix any definite solution at this time.” He left the 20 June meeting gleeful that “the group, one by one, fell in with [his] views.” He was not without reservations, however, and in line with his geo-economic concerns for the postwar world, he recognized the risks of economic competition from a Germany under Allied military control. Anticipating the unevenness of postwar development, he predicted that if cheap steel were to result from control of German iron ore, coal, and manufacturing after the war, U.S. steel and manufacturing would be hurt. This raised “the spectacle” of a German “standard of living” far higher than that of “nations that control her industrial output.”46 A more personal element now also encroached on the deliberations. The political committee members had been discussing Germany for nearly three months, and there was rising concern that their sentiments were not being accurately reported to Roosevelt or even to Hull. Welles was a long-time friend of the president. They shared the same social set, their families had long known each other, and the young Welles had even been a page at the FranklinEleanor nuptials nearly four decades earlier.47 Even Hull was jealous of his subordinate’s access to the president. With a majority of the committee now advocating a unified postwar Germany, but with Welles willing neither to concede nor to call the question to a vote, frustration and suspicion mounted. In a corner, Welles changed tactics, and at the next meeting, recognizing Bowman as the leader of the majority, he tried flattery as a catalyst for acquies-

336

/

settling affairs with the old world

cence. The undersecretary introduced the next meeting himself by quoting Woodrow Wilson’s famous admonition to the Inquiry en route to Paris: “Give me a guaranteed position. Tell me what’s right and I’ll fight for it.” Welles knew Bowman’s pride in having recorded this statement for posterity and hoped by such an appeal to curb the geographer’s opposition, but Bowman did not fall for it. As the undersecretary waxed eloquently about fighting for the right position, Bowman politely cut him off and reminded the committee instead that at the moment of peace, “it was of tremendous importance that the head of State be given accurate information.”48 Stymied, Welles eventually invoked security concerns to insist that the question of Germany could not be resolved without consultation with the War Department and in July effectively buried the issue. It resurfaced in November 1942, when the territorial, economic, and security committees all came out for German unity, and Bowman upped the ante with the possibility that “Germany will go Communist,” but Welles again refused a decision. Bowman had won the political battle positing Germany as a lesser postwar threat than the USSR, but with the undersecretary losing the argument there would be no resolution into 1943.49

round 2: disorganization, dismemberment, and de facto decisions Given its power, the Advisory Committee had become a focus for departmental squabbles and jealousies, and at the end of 1942 another organizational shake-up loomed. The droll, reminiscing Hull distrusted the flashy Welles and periodically appointed his own allies, including congressional representatives, to the committee. Welles replied in kind, and the parent committee swelled to an unworkable forty-five members. If he had initially sided with Hull against Welles, Bowman increasingly blamed the lack of direction on a cautious, dithering Hull, whose leadership he found weak. Subcommittees, too, became bloated, and Bowman ruthlessly pared down the territorial committee, even dropping the State Department’s official geographer. Persistent leaks of the secret proceedings heightened the malaise, with the congressional representatives generally assumed the culprits. Meanwhile Bowman tried, with limited success, to deflect attention “from boundaries and territory and resources” toward broader policy questions, arguing that such territorial issues, though far from irrelevant, were no longer the primary issues, even in regard to Germany. Hull, too, worried about the lack of progress and, at the beginning of 1943, reasserted control by bypassing the elephantine Advisory Committee

settling affairs with the old world

/

337

and establishing a small steering committee, eventually known as the Informal Agenda Group. Drawn from the original political committee, its personnel comprised Welles, Pasvolsky, Bowman, Davis, and Taylor as well as Hull (the only non-CFR member).50 This small, high-powered group was to coordinate the entire agenda for postwar foreign policy planning and sought to generate “semi-final conclusions” on U.S. postwar policy. But the old differences persisted, and Hull’s chairmanship of the new committee did little to kick start its work. “Everyone is in a sense dissatisfied because no one has pulled the parts together and indicated a clear line of procedure or policy,” Bowman complained. Pasvolsky followed Hull, who favored a unified Germany, but Welles had privileged access to Roosevelt, leading to a power vacuum and a widening rift between the secretary and undersecretary. Roosevelt also had a penchant for making his own foreign policy decisions without consulting the State Department. As he drew closer to Hull, Bowman was increasingly dismayed that the secretary delayed important decisions, spoke in generalities, hedged with an elusive Roosevelt, and tailored his actions inordinately toward their reception in Congress. The disorganization and disillusionment directly affected the State Department’s handling of the German question. Astonishingly, only in January 1943 did the political committee learn that FDR leaned strongly toward partitioning Germany. Bowman was shocked.51 Welles must have known the president’s position, and Hull too, but during a year of earnest if frustrating deliberations the committee was never informed. The political committee’s emerging balance of opinion not only displeased Welles but also contradicted the president, and this put a whole new complexion on the question. The disagreement intensified when British foreign secretary Anthony Eden visited Washington two months later. Overruling Hull and the majority of his State Department committee, if he even knew their position, Roosevelt secured Eden’s agreement that some kind of division of Germany into several states was imperative.52 By necessity more than design, the discussion stumbled toward specifics. The postwar was no longer in the future, having already arrived in North Africa and southern Italy, and in August FDR met Churchill in Quebec. Hull flew to Moscow to meet with Foreign Ministers Molotov and Eden in October, then in November the three heads of state met at Tehran. During the same trip, Roosevelt met at Cairo with Chiang Kai-shek and Churchill. A certain bifurcation emerged in the State Department approach to Germany. On the one hand, State Department staff took over from the stalemated committee and began synthesizing the inconclusive discussions into policy documents; on the other hand, with the Quebec, Moscow, and Tehran

338

/

settling affairs with the old world

conferences imminent, FDR became more centrally involved. The members of the Informal Agenda Group had many other concerns, but when they met with Roosevelt the day before he left for Quebec, they provided him with a requested draft of a “Four Power declaration” as well as some background papers on the boundaries of Germany and the partition question. To suggestions that a divided Germany might be unworkable and possibly even undesirable, Roosevelt repeated Welles’s idea that a “customs union” might keep the German economy whole and functioning despite administrative division. At Quebec in August 1943, Roosevelt and Churchill met, and with little discussion and no consultation with Hull, the U.S. president agreed with Churchill about a contingent three-part division of Germany for postwar military occupation. There would be an eastern, northwestern, and southwestern zone.53 A month later, with Hull preparing for Moscow, a dismayed Bowman felt the secretary “was still ignorant of territorial problems,” especially on the “S[oviet] west front.”54 He was more troubled than ever about Soviet ambitions, his alarm sharpened by the Soviet defeat of the siege of Stalingrad earlier that year and the subsequent westward advance of Soviet troops beating the German army back through Poland. Every day without territorial agreement enhanced the Soviet advantage, and he strongly urged Hull that postwar agreement on new boundaries in Eastern Europe ought not to await a military solution. Hull also received from his staff a new summary of conclusions on Germany, which advocated ruthless de-Nazification and demilitarization of the country and a moderate decentralization of political power, but emphatically ruled out partition. The Moscow conference was a much-needed public triumph for Hull, placing him briefly in the center of postwar diplomacy, but it brought little comfort on the question of postwar German boundaries. The issue did surface, but there was as much disagreement within as among national delegations. Eden had now changed his mind, and so in Moscow “the three chiefs of state all favored partition, while the three foreign ministers and their experts were against it.”55 But Molotov adamantly refused to discuss postwar arrangements while the war was still being fought, and the longpromised second front by the United States and Britain, relieving the Soviet army from the most brutal punishment of the war, had not yet materialized. The question of postwar German boundaries was thrown back into a Washington bureaucracy dominated by “unbelievable . . . administrative disorder,” where “everyone [was] quarreling with everyone else.” In the State Department, “sabotage, policy obstruction, understaffing, rival ambitions, etc., play a part far in excess of that of any other department in the

settling affairs with the old world

/

339

government.” With no decisions at Moscow but with military zones agreed on at Quebec, the War Department increasingly played a central role in the German question.56 With Roosevelt nominally endorsing the partition of Germany and the discussion moving more toward military considerations, with State Department proposals still technically on the table, and with Welles now departed following a personal scandal, the State Department “had reason to leave the issue of dismemberment as dead as possible after the beginning of 1944.”57 Yet it would not stay dead, and Roosevelt soon confused the situation by linking the three-zone military occupation of Germany with longer-term territorial partition. En route to Tehran, either forgetting or ignoring the earlier division agreed to at Quebec, he drew his preferred threepart division on a handy National Geographic map, but this time he included a “buffer state” between Germany and France.” In Tehran, where Roosevelt met Stalin for the first time, the British and U.S. leaders finally agreed to a 1944 second front in France, and this opened the possibility of tripartite discussions of postwar political arrangements. Stalin insisted on a harsh settlement vis-à-vis Germany, and FDR readily altered his proposal from a three-part to a five-part division, which included, strangely, a discontiguous Prussian state. Churchill now objected, fearing a divided and weak Europe on Russia’s western boundaries, and with little progress made, the issue was tabled to the European Advisory Commission, established as a result of the Moscow and Tehran meetings. In Cairo while en route home from Tehran, Roosevelt and Churchill resumed discussion of a three-part division, taking little regard of Stalin’s position or FDR’s concession to a five-part partition. The disagreement here merely concerned who should get the ports and industrial might of the northwestern zone of Germany, Britain or the United States, and who would be left with the landlocked southwestern sector.58 Roosevelt’s swithering and confusion did not end with Tehran. Two months after returning home, he received a proposal in which the Soviets conceded to the three-zone division of Germany, with the USSR in the eastern zone. By February 1944, therefore, the Soviet zone was essentially fixed. The USSR also accepted a U.S. proposal for the joint occupation of Berlin. But Roosevelt still found himself having to ask the State Department later in 1944: “What are the zones in the British and Russian drafts and what is the zone we are proposing? I must know this in order that it conform with what I decided on months ago.”59 Bowman’s frustration reached a fever pitch, and he began to question the president’s grasp of the question as well as to relive the mistakes of Versailles: “By sticking to his dismemberment

340

/

settling affairs with the old world

idea, [FDR] wishes to produce according to his own words, a deep psychological effect in the German people. He thinks it will teach them a lesson. This seems to me to be utterly foolish doctrine. No one can teach another nation a lesson except the lesson of hate or mutual self interest. . . . ”60 With the success of the Normandy landing and an end to war in sight, several government departments began edging toward similar conclusions, broadly in line with the earlier State Department proposals. Possibly in response to Roosevelt’s increasingly hard line, the European Advisory Commission, the army’s Civil Affairs Division, and a joint defense committee entitled the Working Security Committee (Bowman had refused the offer of its chairmanship) coalesced in a “soft policy” on Germany. Or so thought Secretary of the Treasury Henry Morgenthau. Morgenthau had become increasingly frustrated with the lack of punitive retribution envisaged for Germany, especially as the horrific news of Nazi genocide filtered out. An affluent German Jew who mixed New Deal social liberalism with fiscal conservatism, Morgenthau was a landowner in Dutchess County and a neighbor and friend of FDR. He chose the publication of the army’s Handbook of Military Government in August 1944 for a direct confrontation with the gathering sentiment for German unity. Morgenthau favored nothing short of wholesale deindustrialization: “We have to be tough with Germany,” he said, “castrate the German people . . . ,” and convert them back to “an agricultural population of small land-owners.”61 Beyond revenge, this plan had the diplomatic advantage of mollifying Stalin, and Roosevelt was intrigued. He convened a special “cabinet Committee” of Morgenthau, Hull, and Secretary of War Henry L. Stimson to consider the idea. Stimson led the fight against the Morgenthau plan. The conservative old man of the administration, Stimson was a Wall Street lawyer and Republican, had been a protégé of Elihu Root, was secretary of war under Taft (1911–13) and governor-general to the Philippines. On a 1927 mission to Nicaragua for Coolidge, with five hundred marines behind him, he blunted a threatened overthrow of the corrupt U.S.-supported government. He became secretary of state for Hoover before coming full circle to Roosevelt’s War Department. Self-assured and imposing, he was, unlike Hull, not afraid to stand up to a president fifteen years his younger. “The sermon preached by Keynes after Versailles had acquired deep and poignant meaning for Stimson when as Secretary of State he had wrestled with the results of that economically impossible treaty.”62 The secretary of war faced the consequences of the Morgenthau plan directly. With several divisions bearing down on the old German border along the Rhine, Allied occupation seemed imminent, and there was no clear pol-

settling affairs with the old world

/

341

icy to guide it. He knew the depth of feeling among Hull’s advisers, had long been impressed by Bowman from Council on Foreign Relations events, and got Hull’s consent for a briefing by Bowman on the political, economic, and territorial objections to a divided Germany. Bowman did not share Stimson’s Wall Street savoir faire, but he admired Stimson, who was just as appalled at the “drastic, punitive and half-baked idea” of making Germany “go agricultural,” and in an intense ninety-minute meeting between the two Stimson recited his own well-rehearsed reasons for the postwar unity of Germany. In the next day’s cabinet meeting, Stimson voiced Bowman’s arguments, emphasizing that the natural resources of Germany were a potential benefit to the Allies and to postwar Europe and that their obliteration was at the very least shortsighted. Morgenthau countered that the destruction of industry in the Ruhr and Saar would actually benefit the British economy by removing the major European competitor in coal and steel.63 Roosevelt remained predisposed to Morgenthau but was characteristically resistant to declaring this or any other plan as official policy. Later that night he left for a second Quebec meeting with Churchill and soon summoned Morgenthau to lay the plan out directly for Churchill. The British prime minister scoffed: it was hardly cricket to kick Germany when it was down, he felt, but more to the point, it was dangerous. Again the specter of socialist revolution threatened: “There are bonds between the working classes of all countries,” he observed, “and the English people will not stand for the policy you are advocating.” He bluntly opposed the pastoralizing of Germany. But FDR insisted that he spend time with Morgenthau, and within two days a reluctant approval was squeezed from Churchill, perhaps as a quid pro quo for further lend-lease assistance.64 Roosevelt, too, made some rapid policy reversals, especially concerning the zonation of Germany. Despite having declared “conclusively” in February that the United States should have the northwest zone, he acceded to the British position here and accepted the southwest. Although legal finality was yet lacking, the postwar map of German occupation zones was, with one major exception, established by September 1944 and ratified five months later at Yalta. After learning of the Quebec agreements and Morgenthau’s presence there, Hull, who rarely confronted Roosevelt, pressed him for precise clarification of policy toward Germany: What does dismemberment mean? An outraged Stimson was more direct and capitalized on the howl sent up by the press. At a White House lunch Stimson reproved Roosevelt, even “wagged his finger at him,” and Roosevelt, already backing away fast, soon abandoned the Morgenthau plan. Whether he began to recoil from the military effort it would involve or to realize the social cost on Germany;

342

/

settling affairs with the old world

whether he was satisfied by the imminent Allied push into Germany from the west, even if resigned that the war would now last into 1945; whether he simply had his eye on the upcoming election; or whether he began to worry about postwar Soviet power is unclear. But in nice time before he squeaked home against Republican contender Dewey—who did, indeed, exploit the fiasco over the Morgenthau plan in his November electioneering— the president dissociated himself from Morgenthau, whom he now considered to have “pulled a boner.” “The agrarian thing was absurd,” he conceded offhandedly to Edward Stettinius, who had taken over as secretary of state from an ailing Hull in late 1944.65 Things now moved very fast. As the second front bogged down before getting to the Rhine, the Red Army pushed through Poland, and Stalin recognized the Lublin Committee, made up of resistance leaders, as the provisional Polish government in liberated territory.66 Bowing to the obvious and hoping to limit Soviet territorial gains, Churchill dropped his opposition to Soviet demands for a return to the World War I Curzon line as the PolishSoviet boundary. The fate of Germany was now pivotal, and Churchill eagerly insisted on a U.S. commitment. The new secretary of state Edward Stettinius called Bowman for advice. Bowman was horrified at the wholesale westward transplanting of Poland, to the benefit of the USSR, implied in the Churchill concession. He urged Stettinius to take a strong stand against this “blank check” to the USSR, fearing that Poland might be made to stretch to the Elbe or even the Rhine. What would it mean, insisted the erstwhile hero of Polish independence, if Poland “went communist”? Stettinius in turn got Roosevelt to have Churchill delay agreement until Yalta, but the resulting public statement, while reiterating U.S. hopes for “a strong, free, and independent Polish state,” was essentially conciliatory.67 With the military zones of occupation increasingly set, the focus at Yalta turned to the long-term geographical disposition of Germany. Roosevelt now had little appetite to partition Germany, but Churchill and Stalin still sought retribution, and so he backtracked, agreeing to some vague principle of “dismemberment” with any details postponed. In fact, the most substantive decision taken at Yalta regarding the division of Germany concerned the zones of military occupation. Acceding to pressure, the three Allies invited France to join them in administering a zone of southwestern Germany, carved out of the British and U.S. sectors, and a sector of Berlin. The USSR also pressed for recognition of the Oder-Neisse line, west of the Curzon line (map 6), as the new western border of Poland, thereby ceding to Poland much of Prussia and the previously German regions of Pomerania and Silesia.

settling affairs with the old world

/

343

The eventual boundaries of a divided postwar Germany were a composite result. The proposals that emerged from the State Department set the framework for debate even after 1943, when they became mired in bureaucratic confrontations, presidential equivocation, political differences, and military expediency. The early State Department vision, crafted primarily by Bowman and Pasvolsky, with Hull’s more passive support, managed to fall through the bureaucratic process molested yet recognizable. The principles of zonal division for purposes of postwar military occupation, demilitarization, economic control, and limited reconstruction formed the centerpiece of President Truman’s proposals at Potsdam. There, in July 1945, “the thinking of all three governments had veered away from dismemberment and the issue did not arise.” By a curious turn of fate, the death of Roosevelt and his replacement by Truman led to an even greater dependence on “conventional State Department channels for the formulation of foreign policy.”68 The compromise between a militarily divided and yet politically and economically unified Germany, pushed hard by Bowman in 1942 but rejected by Welles, looked for a while as if it might win out. But within a year the zones of occupation represented “air-tight territories with almost no free exchange of commodities, persons and ideas,” according to General Lucius Clay, U.S. deputy commander. “Germany now consists of four small economic units which can deal with each other only through treaties.”69 By 1948 these zones were increasingly transformed into a cold war division between an East and West Germany. This division of Germany had nothing to do with circumscribing resurgent German nationalism or fascism, of course, but expressed in one strategic national space a very simple global geography of cold war competition. Again, the State Department, joined by the War Department, had won the argument, beating back Morgenthau’s demands for dismemberment, and yet partition resulted anyway. This paradoxical result had many causes, but the paradox was already present in the State Department’s deliberation, most vividly in the contradictions of Bowman’s approach to the relationship between territorial and economic power.

the significance of the territorial Boundary settlements and territorial claims were the universal currency in Paris in 1919, and with the failure of Versailles hanging in the wings, discussions of postwar plans in 1942 inevitably involved territorial questions. The immediate causes of the war, after all, were seen to lie in German and Japanese expansionism, and 1942 was the “year of geopolitics,” when an

344

/

settling affairs with the old world

American public awoke to a reasserted connection between politics and geography. But the connection was not straightforward, and the first territorial committee meetings in the State Department displayed a range of opinions concerning the significance of territory. Some argued that air power and other advances in transport, communications, and military technology made questions of boundaries and territories obsolete. Others felt the opposite, namely, that the peace as much as the war was defined in terms of territorial control and demarcation: there were indeed geographical solutions to political and economic conflicts. Congressional representatives’ frustration with the State Department at the end of 1942 sprang from their outmoded belief that the boundaries were everything—boundaries were the peace, whereas the State Department knew them as a means to an end. Behind the closed doors of the State Department, government officials therefore revisited, albeit in different form, the same debates that had marked the first formative moment of the American Century. Then, the closing of continental and global frontiers was adduced as evidence either that economic growth now surpassed geography, rendering the latter irrelevant, or, on the contrary, that the new closure of global space made internal geographies even more relevant. In the second formative moment, it was technological innovation in air power and means of destruction that was reputed to render geography irrelevant. In Washington, Bowman consistently fought this sentiment. Whatever the technological advances, “boundaries are an absolute necessity,” he believed. An acerbic critic of the one-worldism associated with Wendell Willkie, the liberal Republican who had challenged FDR for the presidency in 1940, Bowman adhered to a resolutely state-centered internationalism; stable national boundaries represented a certain evolutionary achievement of Western civilization. He thought he saw beyond Ratzel’s assumption of perpetual geopolitical conflict among states. Air power may have made travel and warfare more fluid and more global, but it in no way subverted the land-based power of nation-states or the depth of cultural, historical, and economic claims to place. By the same token, he disdained the easy belief that boundaries were the peace. The alteration of boundaries was a last resort; it inevitably disrupted people’s lives and identities and engendered great bitterness, and so “a minimum change of boundaries and minimum displacement” would be a good principle at war’s end.70 There “never was a time when territory, land, was of as much importance as today,” he stressed in an address to officers and cadets at the National War College, but he now had in mind questions of population, settlement, and resources. The crucial questions no longer involved the demarcation of absolute

settling affairs with the old world

/

345

geographical space implied in the fixing of national boundaries or the expansion of empires but rather involved the social and economic conditions under which territories were developed. This intensified interrelationship “between political and territorial problems” meant that issues of boundaries and land could no longer be considered in isolation, if that ever was feasible.71 Bowman here sensed that the importance of geography vis-à-vis politics and economics had changed in substantive ways. Therefore two main differences developed between his political geography in Paris and the perspective he brought to the State Department two decades later. In the first place, while always sensitive to the broadly social composition of territorial questions, he was much less concerned in the 1940s with questions of ethnic and linguistic differences than he was in 1919. This is symptomatic. Whereas the Paris conference ratified a last gasp of European nation-state creation, inevitably raising issues of national definition and identity, the territorial issues after 1942 concerned the reapportionment of space, largely among established nationalities. Second, Bowman therefore focused more directly on the political and economic arrangements of postwar reconstruction, which may or may not have involved specifically territorial issues. More succinctly: “Boundary making is secondary in importance to economic and political arrangements in the high strategy of peace.”72 It is not that the American economic Lebensraum he envisaged rendered geography and territory obsolete but that, in the global map of the postwar world, different territories were now linked more by economic and political relations than by strictly physical territorial relations of distance, size, and location. A relational geography mediated by politics and economics superseded the absolute geography of the nation-building and colonial eras. Redrawing postwar boundaries was a vital territorial task intended to fix the absolute geography of the new global map so that economic circulation and fluidity could proceed on stable ground, unhampered by geopolitical struggles. All the more ironic, therefore, that, as Carolyn Eisenberg shows, the 1948 division of Germany was “fundamentally an American decision.”73 We can see its roots in the FDR State Department, where with the exception of Welles the consensus argued for a unified Germany. But Bowman’s appeal to German national unity was premised on the assumption of international competition and in particular competition between U.S. and Soviet economic and political interests after the war. National boundaries were a necessary evil for Bowman, and a strong, reconstructed German economy was vital for a Europe-wide, even global, economic recovery. This argument was perfectly aligned with his vision of an emerging American Lebensraum. But it

346

/

settling affairs with the old world

also sat awkwardly with his other rationale for a unified Germany, namely, that it provided a vital bulwark against communism. The appeal here is to territorial fixity; a backward-looking geopolitical argument coils around the more progressive geo-economic vision. The division of Germany, therefore, was a major defeat for the FDR State Department and for Bowman personally. It augured a divided world that radically circumscribed the postwar American economic Lebensraum. Ironically it was a defeat solicited from within.

13 TOWARD DEVELOPMENT: SHAKING LOOSE THE COLONIES

On the eve of World War II, more than 60 percent of foreign direct investment from the developed capitalist world was targeted at the developing world. As anomalous as this was historically, it fostered the assumption that postwar economic expansion would focus on what came to be known as the third world. Indeed, with the Marshall Plan not yet dreamed of, it was an article of faith among American economic and political leaders in 1941 that European economies would maintain considerable barriers against U.S. foreign direct investment and that opportunities for the country’s economic expansion after the war would emphasize “dependent territories,” predominantly in Africa and Asia. These territories were deemed dependent politically, as in the case of colonies, or economically, as in the case of “backward” countries (the term still used at that time), and they were referred to as territories in recognition of their lack of independent status as nationstates. But the nomenclature “territories” also disguised a real shift in U.S. ambitions. In 1919 the issue at the Paris Peace Conference concerned who would have territorial control over “dependent” areas and under what kinds of administrative arrangements and, therefore, who would have access to their resources, whereas by 1941 the question was expressed more in terms of investments and markets. Where the colonial system was taken for granted in 1919, albeit often critically, U.S. policy by the 1940s aimed at dissolving as far as possible the territorial claims implied by colonialism. This had the paradoxical result that the dependent territories were more on the

348

/

toward development

agenda in 1940s postwar planning than in 1919, but less so as territories per se, at least from the U.S. perspective. The American Lebensraum was a resolutely global vision, and the “dependent territories” were increasingly integrated into it. Franklin Roosevelt’s avoidance of public territorial pronouncements—the banter about Bowman and bananas notwithstanding—applied as much to Asia and Africa as to Europe, but here, too, highly secret territorial discussions were underway almost before the first shells were fired. Especially in the U.S. State Department but also in British and to a lesser extent Soviet Foreign Offices, personnel eagerly anticipated the postwar map of the world. A tangled web of colonial preferences, tariffs, quotas, subsidies, and tax agreements governed economic access to these areas, often to the detriment of the United States, and so the State Department sought to sweep these away in the name of “free trade.” Undersecretary of State Edward Stettinius, the former chairman of General Motors, voiced the expansive U.S. vision succinctly: The question of greatest importance before us at this time is . . . the negotiation of an International Commercial Policy Convention which all the countries of the world would be invited to join. . . . The convention would deal with all important aspects of trade relations such as the reduction of tariffs, the abolition of preferences (those between the British Empire countries, for example), the abolition of quantitative restrictions, the prohibition of export subsidies, and the principles to govern relations between state-trade and free-enterprise countries.1

The International Monetary Fund and the World Bank were established in this period to regulate postwar financial flows and direct capital investment into the dependent territories. These organizations were the brainchildren of the U.S. Treasury Department, but it was the State Department’s job to winkle loose as wide an array of colonial and other dependent territories as possible and to establish the most expansive conditions for their integration into the postwar economic order. While Roosevelt was as ever his own maverick in foreign policy affairs, the State Department had a more decisive control over the campaign for decolonization than it did over the disposition of Germany. Shaking loose the colonies and opening economic access to the entire underdeveloped world was a central pillar of the new global economic geography of the American Lebensraum. At root it was not only trade and the export of U.S. goods that were at stake but also the economic engagement of these territories in a U.S.-dominated global capitalism. National economic expansion and survival were widely believed to depend on it. But the U.S.

toward development

/

349

allies Britain and the USSR had their own ambitions, which provoked periodic clashes in negotiations over postwar planning—indeed, some of the sharpest inter-Allied exchanges outside the contest over the United Nations. The fate of the dependent states went to the heart of the Allies’ competing political aspirations for the postwar world: for historian William Roger Louis, it “was a touchstone of the post-war world.”2 The United States, undoubtedly the most vocal and persistent of the major powers, argued for some means of trusteeship and international accountability for the dependent states, with a view to their self-determination. Britain opposed this vigorously, preferring instead a system that kept specific dependent territories under the wing of individual major powers, thereby guaranteeing the survival of the British Empire. The Soviet Union, by contrast, stood fairly consistently for national independence. Negotiations among these three powers began in earnest late in 1943. Initially, the fate of dependent territories was largely decided without any input from these territories themselves. The ruling U.S. vision of a new global order represented an intense colloid of seemingly selfless global altruism and extreme self-interest. Roosevelt and his top State Department people shared an aversion to what they saw as the moral injustice of European colonialism, and this nourished their self-perception as champions of the rights of subjected peoples. The prevailing perspective involved a commitment to moral reform in the colonies and the rightful “progress” of “native peoples,” but the paternalist threads of an expanded Monroe Doctrine were interwoven with its materialist threads. Opening up the colonies was in the first instance an economic project: war may have displaced depression-era concerns about economic expansion, yet they remained uppermost in the minds of postwar planners. “As I see it,” observed Undersecretary Stettinius, “the United States will need the greatest international trade our country has ever had following the war. The State Department must be prepared to establish by international agreements and otherwise conditions under which private industry can develop it.”3 This vision could be summarized as “global economic access without colonies” and was matched by a strategic vision of necessary military bases around the globe both to protect global economic interests and to restrain any future military belligerence. Bowman shared this global vision as much as he shared responsibility for implementing it. Whereas the British Empire “was far-flung and British material interests were everywhere,” he observed, the United States “had no such experience. We have been tentative, timid, doubtful,” he added with all feign of innocence. “Now the time has come when we have to make a sudden shift into a new world order.” The Wilsonian origins of this vision

350

/

toward development

are obvious, but it did not come fully fledged on the morn of war. It had to be nurtured by two decades of ideological isolationism, widespread public condemnation of capitalism, and a dimming of geographical ambition. Indeed, like that of his colleagues at the Council of Foreign Relations, Bowman’s first view of U.S. postwar interests was regional rather than global in scope. In early 1940 his primary fear was “an invasion of the South American trade area by foreign powers after the war,” and he warned Henry Wallace that this could be “almost as disastrous” as an “armed invasion”: rapid U.S.-sponsored industrial development of Latin America was the solution. (Gone here was his glimmering of two decades earlier that vicious exploitation marked U.S. investment in Mexico and in Chilean copper mines.) As the war proceeded, however, the scope of his national ambition expanded from regional protection of Monroe Doctrine preferences to the incorporation of dependent territories worldwide. As Council on Foreign Relations leader Norman Davis put it, “The British Empire as it existed in the past will never reappear and . . . the United States may have to take its place.”4 If the disposition of Germany was a sine qua non of postwar stabilization, the anticolonial conquest of colonial and dependent markets was a second crucial plank in the construction of the American Lebensraum. “From the first to the last,” according to one historian, Bowman “figured prominently” in shaking loose dependent territories for American commerce. When he came to London in 1944 to negotiate with Churchill, British Foreign Office ministers assumed that on the American side, Bowman was “the key-man on this particular question.”5

from territory and resources to trusteeship Before the State Department mission got to London, a lot of work went into defining the U.S. position.The world map the department confronted displayed a complex mosaic of small and large dependent territories dotted around the postwar globe. The political status of approximately 40 percent of the world’s land surface (excluding Antarctica) was in question and in one way or another “dependent.” Half of this area was in Africa. Even excluding the British Commonwealth possessions of Canada and Australia, the territories in question amounted to more than a quarter of the world’s land surface. The legal, political, and economic status of these territories was as internally varied as it was uncertain, with at least six recognizable categories of dependent territories: 1.

mandates (largely British and French) confiscated from Germany under the Versailles treaty

toward development

/

351

2.

Japanese colonies and mandates in the Pacific, including Korea

3.

Italian colonies (Libya, Eritrea, and Somaliland)

4.

colonies of defeated Allies (especially France and the Netherlands), including Indochina and Indonesia

5.

British Empire possessions, including colonies and dominions

6.

politically and legally independent yet economically “backward” states such as Liberia6

The Atlantic Charter, signed off the coast of Quebec in 1941, provided a baseline for negotiations over dependent territories. Months before the United States was even officially in the war, Churchill and Roosevelt agreed as a first principle of postwar reconstruction that “their countries seek no aggrandizement, territorial or other,” as a result of the war. They affirmed the “right of all peoples to choose the form of government under which they will live” and expressed their “wish to see sovereign rights and selfgovernment restored to those who have been forcibly deprived of them.” But it was soon evident that these rhetorical agreements were subject to widely disparate interpretation. Roosevelt, for instance, saw no contradiction between such declarations of sovereignty and self-government on the one side and a paternalistic appeal that the “minor children among the peoples of the world” be placed under the “trusteeship” of the “adult nations” on the other.7 This notion of trusteeship, first proposed at Paris, and Roosevelt’s nascent conception of the “Four Policemen” framed early State Department deliberations on dependent territories. The State Department territorial committee took up dependent territories in April 1942, and the foundation Bowman laid was an early if crisp statement of evolutionary modernization theory. The “colonies are backward and we must do something about them,” he began, but we should also assume “that they are ‘coming up to something such as we are.’ “ The “people of backward areas” may not complete the journey but will “arrive at some stage of development to the limit of their competence.” It would doubtless be a messy process, makeshift and military as much as market driven, yet the most powerful nations had no choice but to take control of development if “the hope of a brighter future” was to be realized in dependent territories. Change would be slow rather than dramatic, he counseled, there would be objections, and charges of hypocrisy could be expected. Yet “it is no service to dependent areas to let our desire to improve their condition override” U.S. interests themselves. “Small peoples are onlookers in a world struggle like that of the present. . . . Their place in the world will be secondary. . . . ” De-

352

/

toward development

velopment could be secured only through “international economic agreements” for the purpose of advancing world trade in such a way that the dependent countries would become efficient and “produce wanted products instead of an excess of some products and a deficiency of others.”8 This initial survey of State Department strategy vis-à-vis dependent areas is remarkable not so much for any specific details or proposals but for the tenor and breadth of its vista and the extent to which it anticipates postwar development theory. It is easy to see why Bowman was defensive about accusations of hypocrisy: the white man’s burden lives on here in what we might think of as a postcolonial paternalism. Bowman’s statement therefore provides the consummate bridge not just forward from Wilsonianism but from late-nineteenth-century European apologies for colonialism to the development paradigm that dominated from the 1950s to the 1970s.9 By August 1942 the territorial committee began to pay systematic attention to specific dependent territories, focusing first on Indochina, then the Near East, and then Africa. Most significant in these discussions are the issues downplayed rather than those addressed. Specifically, by 1942 the State Department was giving only diluted attention to the previously central question of resources and minerals and little at all to boundaries. A vital evolution was taking place, one that expressed the historical distinctiveness of the emerging American Empire as much as the shift from Wilson’s to Roosevelt’s new world order, and it was best evidenced in Bowman’s territorial committee. Territorial issues had dominated much of the Paris deliberations; the early Council on Foreign Relations had initiated a major “mineral inquiry,” organized jointly with the American Geographical Society, and in its War and Peace Studies of 1940 and 1941, the CFR territorial committee—precursor to the State Department committee of the same name—had initiated detailed, place-by-place mineral and resource studies and surveys and other territorial investigations as a backbone of its work. For the geologist C. K. Leith, a member of the CFR mineral inquiry, the competitive struggle for raw materials still figured as a primary cause of the war. Yet by 1942, when this set of issues came to the territorial committee, they had a different significance. It is not that the significance of minerals and resources was directly disputed, rather that the territorial committee was decisively shifting its focus away from such traditional geopolitical concerns. Resources remained important, but there was never an energetic translation of resource discussions into core policy after 1942. A mineral committee had a brief but undistinguished existence as part of the postwar planning bureaucracy, and a newly created petroleum division played an important role in the Office of Economic Affairs after 1944. With colonialism no longer an option for U.S.

toward development

/

353

economic expansion, the question of resource ownership took a back seat to the question of access.10 More broadly, and in a clear departure from the procedure in Paris, the committee was explicitly not trying, as Bowman put it, “to blueprint an ideal territorial settlement.” Specific geopolitical concerns were increasingly subordinated to efforts at a more integrated global policy aimed at opening up the dependent territories en masse and establishing principles of economic entry. The territorial committee did discuss tin and rubber in Indochina and the Dutch East Indies, oil in the Near East, and so forth, but the dominant assumptions had changed. The Atlantic Charter put it precisely: all nations should have “access, on equal terms, to the trade and to the raw materials of the world which are needed for their economic prosperity.”11 For many in Washington and certainly for FDR, this meant nothing short of dismantling the entire system of European colonialism. Sumner Welles went further, announcing in his Memorial Day address for 1942 that “the age of imperialism is dead.” Bowman and the territorial committee were more circumspect. All nonetheless struggled with the basic problem of how to conceptualize a U.S. economic expansion that was significantly decoupled from direct territorial control. The larger vision came only slowly, and given how vital it would be to have a series of consistent international agreements, Bowman remained anxious that a more liberal penchant for establishing some “ideal system” of dependent administration might distract State Department deliberations. In the political committee, controlled by Welles, he therefore tacked toward the conservative, convincing committee members to begin with an inductive rather than a deductive approach and to focus first on specific territories and generalize only later. Geographical difference is ineluctable, he stressed: Angola might offer the most suitable destination for large numbers of European refugees; the diversity of peoples in Burma may not allow any unified settlement; the South-West Africa mandate should be ended and that territory donated to South Africa; and so forth. Applying a single set of international trusteeship principles to such a diverse range of territories, peoples, and conditions would be difficult, he thought and so suggested an alternative. Citing the example of the Monroe Doctrine and American stewardship over the Western Hemisphere under the Good Neighbor policy, he argued that the diversity of people and places as well as the geographically diverse interests of the major powers could be better accommodated through a system of “regional associations.” This was the course the committee took. It sought to restrict the number of territories taken under direct international administration in favor of representative bodies of regional trusteeship comprising the major powers with

354

/

toward development

significant interests in a given area. A regional federation for Southeast Asia and the South Pacific would be administered by the Soviet Union, China, Australia, New Zealand, and the United States. In sub-Saharan Africa the situation was more complex, and the committee finally approved a twopronged solution, taking some territories under direct international control and allotting the remainder (except South-West Africa) to a regional body including Britain among others. Northern Africa was considered in the discussions of the Middle East, and here the committee moved much more gingerly. Not only were French and British claims paramount here, where oil further complicated the picture, but the various nations of the region were far more advanced, the committee felt, and trusteeship might not be the appropriate answer. The fate of Palestine also shadowed any postwar plans for the region and would require much more detailed consideration.12 American security interests remained uppermost for many on the committee, and it was here that potential contradictions in the American position became evident. If joint trusteeship of nations and subcontinental regions was to be a solution, what did this mean for the Monroe Doctrine? More specifically, although several European powers had possessions in the Caribbean, certain territories, such as Puerto Rico and some of the Virgin Islands, were now held exclusively by the United States, as was the Philippines. Would Hawaii, Alaska, Puerto Rico, or the Philippines suddenly be subject to joint administration? What of the Pacific mandates, currently under Japanese control, that U.S. leaders increasingly saw as vital to a western security belt? How could the United States justify control of the latter for so-called security purposes while preaching the moral imperative of the “end of imperialism?” In Bowman, the contradiction found a particularly extreme form. An ardent moralist about the rights of native peoples, he was a stoney pragmatist with an intensely geographical vision of American security, and for him the defense of America had no geographical limits. Not only was he concerned about the Caribbean and the Pacific; his concern also stretched to the British dominions of Canada and Australia, which he saw as grossly underpopulated and appallingly vulnerable to attack. Canada was especially crucial, being contiguous to the United States. “We cannot allow Canada to be taken,” he warned the political committee. “The pressure of the yellow race upon these two great blocks of territory is as much a part of our problem as that of the British Empire.”13 By November 1942 the political committee agreed on a general document, “International Trusteeship,” which defined a core perspective for postwar United Nations organization. The committee also offered specific regional recommendations in the attempt to find a “mid course . . . between

toward development

/

355

pure idealism and [the] pre-war scheme of national responsibility for dependent peoples.” The mandate system following the Great War had been very weak, since “rights and properties were intermingled” to the clear benefit of the European powers, the “so-called foreign exploiter,” as Bowman put it. A system of regional and international administration would ensure international access and encourage the timely self-development of dependent territories, free from domination. Such expanded trusteeship could even lead to independence. Yet a Tocquevillean contradiction remained deeply embedded here. The universalist morality concerning independence and trusteeship and the earnest desire to unyoke the “natives” from European imperialism came with a barb attached. Advance to sovereignty was highly contingent: “equality of treatment of peoples that are not equal” is patently absurd, Bowman explained in the political committee. For tens of millions of “primitive” people “that we rule,” civilized government “is not within their range.”14 Bowman went back to an evolutionary reading of Jefferson’s defense of slavery to explain away this contradiction of equal unequals. “Though he had made the Declaration of Independence say that all men are born free and equal,” Jefferson “later pointed out that some people are still children and ‘should not be granted at once the full enjoyment of their natural rights.’” Selfgovernment may be “an established fact in the United States,” Bowman averred, but in Jefferson’s view it remained “for other peoples a reward to be obtained after a long and painful process of education.”15 Vaguely defined in this way, trusteeship could be seen as all things for all people. The rhetoric of the State Department document could be taken at face value as an airtight promise of independence, but with Bowman’s Jeffersonian coding the trusteeship proposal could also be embraced not only as a defense of “natural” inequality but as a nature-authorized rationale for intensified exploitation of “backward” peoples for their own good. Geography, diluted through the front door of global political and economic calculation in the American Lebensraum, recurs through the back door of racial evolutionism.

defining trusteeship Who among the dependent territories is equal to self-determination and who is unequal to it was, of course, the crucial question for the State Department advisory personnel. As they moved to tie down the concreteness of their proposals, they had to consider the inclinations of Secretary of State Hull and Roosevelt. From the beginning, Roosevelt’s dim view of European colonial-

356

/

toward development

ism dovetailed neatly with U.S. economic expansionism. To Soviet foreign secretary Molotov he confided that “there were all over the world, many islands and colonial possessions which ought, for our own safety, to be taken away from the weak nations.” He chided Queen Wilhelmina of the Netherlands: “Don’t be too sure you will get the Dutch East Indies back unless you do something more for the natives.” And about Indochina he declared that the French had no automatic right after the war simply to walk back in. About the fate of the British Empire, however, he was much more cautious. He believed, as many Anglophiles did, that the British had been more attentive colonizers, but he still confronted an angry Churchill about the colonial question at their first meeting in Quebec. Roosevelt’s attitude only hardened as war proceeded: nothing short of universal trusteeship for all dependent territories, overseen by the world’s “Four Policemen” (Britain, China, the United States, and the USSR), became his aim. It was on this question more than any other that Roosevelt and Churchill clashed during the war.16 But Roosevelt was not always so definitive, and neither his foreign allies nor his own State Department always had a clear sense of where he stood, and this led to considerable frustration as the State Department intensified its quest for concrete solutions. The “great enigma in the international political world at the present time is the United States,” Bowman perceived in early 1943. It was a jab at Roosevelt more than any humble self-criticism: we can be “more sure of the course of Great Britain and Russia than . . . of our own course. If we remain an enigma it would be disastrous to our international relationship and position in the post-war world.”17 The political committee now intended no such extreme stripping away of the colonies that Roosevelt seemed to have in mind, and Bowman thought FDR impractical and stubborn concerning dependent territories. The age of imperialism may be dead, he could agree with Welles, but what substitute is there for European colonialism? Withdrawal from the colonies is not enough, since Germany could simply move in, and the notion of the “Four Policemen” smacks too much of a new imperialism.18 By April 1943, Hull began attending to quicken the political committee’s deliberations. It began probing the temporal and geographical limits of trusteeship—who would be covered and for how long? Welles quickly played the Monroe Doctrine card, ruling the entire Western Hemisphere outside the scope of trusteeship, but when the discussion turned to Africa and Southeast Asia, it occasionally became surreal. When a congressman puzzled how long independence would take, Welles keenly suggested more than a hundred years before the Congo was fit to govern itself, but “in the case of Portuguese Timor it would certainly take a thousand years.” What

toward development

/

357

a “wonderful” vision, came the sarcastic congressional riposte, whereupon Welles, recuperating, insisted that “everything” in the trusteeship proposal “is designed to promote world security. The project is motivated not by altruism or idealism but solely by considerations of security.”19 As the discussion progressed Bowman made a key distinction that guided State Department deliberations for several months. Opposing Roosevelt, he admitted “little desire to force Britain” to relinquish its colonies, and proposed that allied European colonies be placed in a separate category from the “detached territories.”20 Hull clearly took notice, and after encountering Bowman in the elevator the following week, he ushered the geographer into his office. Bowman confided his misgivings about Roosevelt’s approach and his hope that the political committee would now focus on the mandated and Axis territories, leaving Allied colonies and protectorates to the side. “The colonies of other nations are none of our business,” Bowman suggested. “If we try to tell Churchill or Wilhelmina how to rule their subjects ethically they and their peoples will be incensed. We can’t rule in their stead,” and we “cannot buy up the world” either. “The Pres. has gone as far as anyone can or should go in setting up very general moral statements,” but the focus now must be to “see what is practicable.” Hull agreed and suggested a more prominent role for Bowman, but there was other trouble on the horizon, and the secretary quickly turned to his own bureaucratic frustrations. Bowman knew of the strife between Secretary Hull and Undersecretary Welles, the undersecretary having Roosevelt’s ear while the secretary was held at bay, but now he got it first hand. A weary Hull was bitter that “these brilliant fellows like the Pres. & Sumner” are “always going off on a tangent,” making speeches and giving interviews that confuse public opinion and congressional debate.21 Bowman’s sympathies still lay with the cautious Hull, so when asked to lead the next meeting, he was emboldened to deliver a far-reaching disavowal of developmental idealism, which he likened to the Sermon on the Mount. Concrete solutions would never live up to the sermon, he believed, and the U.S. public would feel betrayed when the ideal became unrealizable: The practical details of oil and other resources and of government of tribal groups put the white man into a condition of superiority and power. The fuzzy-wuzzies of the world do not understand Jeffersonian democracy and are accustomed to authority, not to the Australian ballot system. How to bridge the gap between the broad declarations of policy of the United Nations and practical details of rule in a thousand places throughout the world, constituted the gravest political problem ahead of the American people.22

358

/

toward development

It was a defining moment for Bowman when he took an increasingly vocal role in the State Department Advisory Committee. His concerns clearly lay not with the world’s dependent populations—“fuzzy-wuzzies”—but with feasible U.S. policy. The moral generalizations of the Atlantic Charter were a mistake, he now believed, since they handcuffed the committee and the administration in search of specific solutions. If he still shared with Roosevelt the underlying ambition that dependent territories be shaken loose as an expedient of U.S. global expansion, he was less sanguine that the colonies of Allied powers could be included in the strategy. Regarding the “detached territories” that were not colonies of European allies, Bowman took a hard line. Paternalism mixed with wise-use imperialism left little room for self-determination. To the political committee he raised the case of Nauru, a tiny Pacific atoll (population three thousand) mandated to Britain, which mined 1.3 tons of phosphates annually, most of it exported to New Zealand. “The phosphate is of no use to the natives,” Bowman declared, but very useful as fertilizer to advanced economies. The question of landownership therefore was irrelevant: “What could the natives do with royalties on that amount of phosphate?” The wholesale extraction of resources at the lowest price was not a case of “imperialism” or “exploitation,” he excused, but simply wise use. And did advanced countries not have a responsibility to “leave people in their old ways of life” after extracting the resources? Why should we “attempt to modernize” them with the influx of capital? He added a second example, namely, the ninety thousand “lousy Arabs” on the Persian Gulf island of Bahrain, who exported several million gallons of oil per year. Just because we used their oil, “we had no right,” Bowman extolled, “to assume that people everywhere around the world wanted to be like ourselves. . . . We ought to preserve native customs, for the binding cement of native society lies in such customs and institutions . . . rather than in the tin-can borrowings and the acquisitions of the white man’s outlook.” All such peoples, he concluded, enjoy an undervalued freedom, the “freedom to be left alone!” The “improvement of the status of such peoples must be at their own expense and not at ours,” and the “United States was not going to revise the living standards and raise the status of all the fuzzy-wuzzies in the world at its own expense.”23 The colonies, it seems, were to be shaken loose for an international-scale amalgam of total exploitation and benign neglect. Such paternalism in the name of empire did raise eyebrows in the State Department’s political committee, but little more. State Department staffer Stanley Hornbeck, who earlier conceded that “there are some things to be said in favor of imperialism,” now volunteered that the exploiting nations, after the drying up of

toward development

/

359

phosphate resources, should only ensure that the lot of the Nauru people “was not worse than at the beginning.” Bowman’s CFR colleague Hamilton Fish Armstrong did worry over a retreat from moral commitment on the colonies. Only Republican New Jersey congressman Charles Eaton entertained the blunt possibility that the United States may be substituting its own “dictatorship” for that of European powers. In the future, he predicted, “it will be necessary to meet the charge that the trusteeship plan is merely a disguised form of imperialism.”24 Despite these misgivings, Bowman now carried the momentum in the political committee. According to one historian, he “crystallized the ideas of important figures not intimately concerned with trusteeship but occupying important policy-making positions,” including Adolf Berle and Leo Pasvolsky.25 Hull used Bowman to sharpen the question: “How backward must the people be to be excluded from the discussion of their own rights; and how advanced must they be to become participants on some declared level?” But Roosevelt proceeded undeterred by State Department distinctions. To Foreign Minister Anthony Eden of Great Britain he revealed his indignation about colonialism and threw off a blueprint for the Pacific. The Japanese islands together with Korea and Indochina would pass into international trusteeship, and the remaining islands would retain their national (largely British or French) sovereignty but under a common economic policy akin to that for the Caribbean. Two French mandates, the Marquesas Islands and Tuamotu Archipelago, were to be internationalized as necessary stepping stones for civil and military air travel between the Americas and Australasia, a matter of key importance to the geographically minded Roosevelt. In Africa, the United States should take responsibility for Dakar, for security reasons, while the United Kingdom would take Bizerte (in Tunisia). The British Empire per se was not discussed, but to Eden FDR’s direction was clear. FDR did propose that the British relinquish Hong Kong to the Chinese as a gesture of goodwill, but Eden “dryly remarked that he had not heard the President suggest any similar gestures.”26 Eden sensed the difference between Roosevelt’s hard line and the State Department’s more flexible, less predaceous vision for postwar dependent territories and thought a meeting of the minds would eventually be possible. Still the Colonial and Foreign Offices saw themselves as protecting British interests from the raw ambition of a youthful and still-stretching American Empire, and they persistently treated the moral pretensions of the State Department and the White House as precisely that—pretensions, designed to cover an aggressive policy of global expansionism. Accordingly, Eden thought the State Department draft on trusteeship nothing less than an assault on the British Empire. When Hull gave a copy of the same trustee-

360

/

toward development

ship draft to Foreign Secretary Molotov of the USSR in Moscow in late 1943, Eden became incensed that the United States and the USSR were ganging up against the British Empire. If he was right about the direction of U.S. policy, Eden was wrong to think it very systematic, because when the Cairo Declaration was released on 1 December 1943, specifying certain postwar territorial arrangements between Roosevelt and Churchill, the State Department was largely in the dark. Together with Chinese leader Chiang Kai-shek, the U.S. and British leaders declared that Japan would be stripped of its mandates after the war, China would regain Manchuria, Formosa (now Taiwan), and the Pescadores/P’eng-hu Islands, and Korea would be made “free and independent.” Roosevelt also took it upon himself at Cairo to offer Indochina to Chiang Kai-shek, who declined, and so the three leaders decided that it should pass from French control to international trusteeship.27 If the British were correct about the symbiosis between State Department colonial policy and U.S. economic expansionism, they were wrong insofar as they conceived the connection in narrowly territorial terms. U.S. foreign policy had moved decisively beyond this linkage of territorial control and economic access. As Bowman’s examples of Nauru and Bahrain seemed to imply, the best-preferred strategy was to organize resource and commodity extraction through the market rather than through military or political occupation. Roosevelt shared this vision, and a brief episode at the Tehran conference in late 1943 reveals the contrasting British and U.S. attitudes to territorial possession and the contrasting significance of territory in the fading British and the rising American empires. When Chiang Kai-shek repeated his disinterest in possessing Indochina, Churchill predictably scoffed that no one turns down territory. FDR instantly took him to task. The British made their empire by successive acquisitions, he said, and “you have 400 years of acquisitive blood in your veins,” he told the prime minister. In words reminiscent of Mackinder or Brooks Adams, he lectured that a “new period has opened in the world’s history. You have to adjust yourself to it.” The British would take land anywhere, FDR believed, “even if it were only a rock and a sand bar.”28 Roosevelt was absolutely right about British territorial avarice, but he was wrong to conceive of the difference between U.S. and British imperialisms in terms of national traits rather than alternative strategies of global accumulation in which geography now figured quite differently.

“ dr. isaiah ” goes to london Eden’s anticipated meeting of the minds proved chimerical, and in early 1944, despite the Cairo declaration, the British and American governments

toward development

/

361

were further apart than ever on trusteeship and dependent territories. Many other issues of postwar reconstruction also still lacked Anglo-American agreement. To help ease the log jam of unresolved issues, it was decided to send a U.S. mission to London. It would be led by Undersecretary of State Edward Stettinius. Prematurely white-haired, Stettinius looked older than his forty-three years but was lively and energetic. As chairman of U.S. Steel, he had earned a reputation as a good organizational man, and this recommended him to Roosevelt as the one to direct industrial mobilization for war and then the lend-lease program in the early 1940s. A boon for Bowman, Stettinius was also an intimate friend of John Lee Pratt, the General Motors vice president and Bowman’s strongest supporter on the board of trustees at Johns Hopkins. Pratt had secured Stettinius his first job, at General Motors, after he flunked out of the University of Virginia.29 It was a compact team that went to London. In addition to Bowman and John Lee Pratt, it included only a few other State Department officials. Bowman’s responsibilities were broad ranging, but he was there especially to consult on questions of postwar international organization and trusteeship. Before leaving, the mission met in the Oval Office with Roosevelt, whose vision of a postwar American Lebensraum had matured considerably. The president immediately cautioned that, as far as the public or even Congress was concerned, the London discussions were informal and that, short of formal signed agreements, he wanted the members of the Stettinius mission to elicit as much common ground and agreement as possible with their British counterparts across a range of issues. Stettinius noted that Bowman “had an almost limitless sphere of topics which he might discuss,” whereupon the geographer took the cue to ask for instructions on trusteeship and dependent territories. Impatient with the resulting tirade against European colonialism, eager for an expansive mandate, yet reluctant to press the British too far, Bowman asked Roosevelt directly whether the whole colonial issue should even be raised. Roosevelt admitted he had not got far with the British on this issue and promptly resumed the tirade, this time against the French. They “had made a complete mess of colonial administration,” leaving people “worse off than they were 100 years ago. The white man’s rule was nothing to be proud of.” In West Africa, he claimed, “the British and the French have taken $10 worth of goods out for every $1 that they have put in.” In the Caribbean, by contrast, the British found colonial possession a losing proposition.30 Where colonialism was economical, he implied, it was immoral; where it was more moral, it was uneconomical. Roosevelt then divulged the Tehran debate over French colonial Indochina, in which the Russians, Americans, and Chinese had all supported

362

/

toward development

independence, whereas Churchill, presumably seeing his own colonies next in line, had vigorously but unsuccessfully objected. Roosevelt next stressed to the delegation that the question of dependent territories was an issue of security as much as economics. New U.S. bases were already established in the Caribbean following the destroyers-for-bases deal with Britain earlier in the war,31 but the United States needed bases in West Africa and New Caledonia. Returning to Bowman’s question, he exhorted that they press the colonial question persistently but cautioned that there would be no need to raise the question of colonial sovereignty per se as it pertained to the Allied powers. Retreating substantially from his earlier position that nothing short of stripping the colonies would be sufficient, Roosevelt now argued that full internationalization of all colonies—still a huge red flag to the British—would not be necessary: “ultimate sovereignty” might still lie with the present owners so long as some form of international inspection commission were established. The best control over colonial powers was to “tell the world” about their administration. This White House meeting sharpened Bowman’s growing disagreement with Roosevelt. Making his way through the press corps on the way out, Bowman was gratified by Roosevelt’s newfound moderation on colonies, by his expansive mandate to explore virtually any topic with the British, and by the crucial role he, Bowman, had on colonies. But Roosevelt “fundamentally misunderstands trade,” he concluded. The disproportion between value extracted from a colony and value left behind was irrelevant as long as “the native himself” receives some benefit. “Mutual gain” eradicated any suggestion of exploitation, Bowman now argued. Colonialism may not be the ideal system of economic development, but the United States had no need to tackle European and especially British colonialism directly. Where Roosevelt felt the dismantling of colonies vital to U.S. interests, Bowman thought the American Lebensraum could be constructed around the encumbrances of a previous age.32 Bowman left Baltimore on 28 March 1944 and after two evenings at the University Club in New York, ensconced in Churchill’s biography, Marlborough, he boarded the modern liner, the Queen Mary, and with other mission members and thirteen thousand troops sailed to Glasgow, where he had witnessed the start of war in 1939. He flew to London on 7 April and checked in at Claridges. German surrender terms, reparations, territorial arrangements, postwar international organization, postwar economic recovery, among other things, were on the agenda with their British counterparts. The high diplomatic level of the discussions combined with the lack of formal goals encouraged both governments, but especially the United

toward development

/

363

States, to feel optimistic about results. On the colonial question, a continuum of plausible postwar arrangements set the agenda: sovereignty, independence, self-government, international administration. The most thorough overhaul of international relations would come from a reversion of sovereignty to the dependent territories themselves, and even though FDR had backed away from it in his St. Patrick’s Day briefing, this was clearly his preference. Short of this, various means for self-government and independence might be arranged that still left ultimate sovereignty in European hands. The mildest alternative envisaged the establishment of international condominia, regional or global in scope, that would be responsible for administering the dependent territories. While retaining a desire for limited self-government and independence in some instances, Bowman now gravitated to this weakest alternative. To the British, even this represented an unconscionable threat to empire. The British were ready for “Dr. Isaiah,” as they called him. They had done far more extensive homework than the Americans. They knew of Bowman’s softer line on the colonies and his fervent anti-Soviet views and believed both could be mobilized to disrupt any effort by FDR to gang up with Stalin against the empire. But they too were confused. The minister of state at the Foreign Office, Richard Law, somehow speculated that Bowman was included in the mission, because, with a November election looming, FDR would want to distance himself from any accusations of imperial ambition. Even though he could not get Bowman’s politics straight, it was Law who concluded to his colleagues that Bowman was the key man on colonies.33 During the first several days, Bowman met with Law, U.S. ambassador to Britain John Winant, his adviser E. F. Penrose, who briefed Bowman on British postwar planning proposals, and Sirs George Gater and Alexander Cadogan, permanent undersecretaries for the Colonial and Foreign Offices, respectively. He pressed Cadogan at the soft end of the colonial continuum, namely, to agree to regular reports submitted by metropolitan powers to an international supervisory body, but he was quickly rebuffed. Next the mission went to Chequers, the prime minister’s country home, where they negotiated with the khaki-clad prime minister. Bowman introduced the subject of colonies and dependent territories “tentatively and mildly.” The American position was to combine the issues of colonialism and world organization—the idea of a United Nations organization—but Churchill readily understood this as a means of prizing control from the imperial European states and demurred. He refused even to discuss the question of “self-government for peoples who are without history or traditions”: “we propose to continue to deal with colonial peoples from the standpoint of

364

/

toward development

their interest and world requirements.” In the case of French colonies in the Pacific, Churchill conceded the American right to demand military bases so long as the conquered lands (Indochina, New Caledonia, the Marquesas Islands) were restored as French possessions. Turning to British possessions, he straightened up, stuck his chest and belly out and with a wide forward sweep of both hands he retracted them as if embracing every square mile of the British Empire and drew them there toward his belly and pressed them there, saying, “Now, our own territory, our possessions overseas—that is quite a different matter! We will not give up one acre of ground; we haven’t the least intention of breaking up the Empire or of letting it fall into ruin.”34

Churchill especially focused on India, which, he insisted, would be “defenseless, disunited, and in a state of chaos if Great Britain withdrew. We have a responsibility there and mean to stand by it.” Certainly, something would have to be done to improve the situation there, he conceded, but by no means would he even contemplate relinquishing government to the “ignorant folk”: The Indian is a small fellow. They are less well equipped for selfgovernment than the Chinese. They marry young, they are immature mentally, they breed far in excess of reason seeming to think that to stretch their limbs out in the sun and let the light of Heaven shine on them is the chief aim of existence. How can you expect government from such people. . . . I would rather have one hundred squadrons of airplanes than all India.”35

Bowman was smitten with Churchill. “We got on well when we talked about colonies.” Churchill was “restrained, though emphatic,” and at times impatient, but Bowman could identify with the prime minister’s paternalism, national self-interest, and his naked expression of “the white man’s burden.” Bowman had after all come to parallel conclusions. He clearly disagreed with Churchill on India, although he chose not to press the claim for self-government or the need to open India up to international trade. Nor did he push for an extension of the mandate system as an option for the dependent territories. Churchill allowed that the United States would take the leading role in the postwar world, but he was reluctant to include the Chinese among the “Great Powers,” as FDR did with his “Four Policemen.” Churchill openly disparaged the Chinese as “the pigtails,” a racist epithet that even Bowman found shockingly distasteful. Having presumably heard rumors about Churchill’s voluminous drinking, the puritanical Bowman also took it upon himself to record the number of brandies and

toward development

/

365

glasses of wine the prime minister consumed during their extended afternoon session. Bowman walked a very narrow path. If he lacked the authority to challenge Churchill on the question of empire, he also lacked the political inclination and even the heart. A more meaningful negotiation took place with Colonial and Foreign Office leaders. Bowman wanted to explore the possibility of common ground on a policy for dependent territories, leaving colonies aside for the moment, and he even gave Foreign Minister Law to believe that the high sounding moral proclamations for which U.S. diplomats were famous might be left aside. Law was encouraged and used the overture to arrange a direct discussion between Bowman and a reluctant colonial secretary, Colonel Oliver Stanley. This was good and bad. Bowman, of course, knew that Stanley was the top minister with responsibility for colonial administration, but he was also the man whom Sumner Welles had once characterized as the “most narrow, bigoted, reactionary Tory that he had ever met in his official career.”36 When they met, the colonial secretary was predictably frosty. Anticipating Stanley’s hard line, Bowman reversed his overture to Law and began with the moral desiderata that marked Roosevelt’s public stance on dependent territories and colonies, and he lectured Stanley about the depth of anticolonial feeling among liberal and church elements of the American electorate. The colonial secretary bristled. He complained that the State Department had not responded to British comments on the American Declaration on National Independence, simply handing them a second copy of the document, and that this had “been like a dash of cold water” on earlier British enthusiasm. He rejected any further generalities, noted that the British position should be quite clear, and then reiterated it: “Our main plank is regional council and no supervision” by any “outside authority.”37 Such a regional rather than global administration of colonies and dependent territories would obviously protect British prerogatives and minimize American encroachment. The meeting was a disaster. Mixing projection with genuine insight, Stanley scoffed that Bowman’s position was “wrapped up in a rather diaphanous cover of the usual idealism,” beneath which Bowman sought to rationalize the postwar retention by the United States of Japanese mandates in the Pacific. “Dr. Bowman, who shifts his ground continually, is not easy to pin down,” he added.38 Bowman’s retreat to “diaphanous idealism” was indeed an inexplicable diplomatic blunder. Not only was he arguing a position he did not believe in, but also it was a position that Roosevelt had relinquished, however reluctantly. As Roosevelt had intimated at the White House, he no longer raised the demand that the colonies be fully interna-

366

/

toward development

tionalized, settling instead for regional organization and an international inspection commission. He also understood that Stanley’s agreement to regional associations and even to an international body, toothless as they might be, marked a perceptible compromise on the British side. If Bowman thought that the old moral shibboleths would somehow blunt Stanley, he gravely miscalculated, and the possibility of finding common ground now seemed more remote than ever. Further, Stanley’s reference to U.S. territorial ambitions in the Pacific as the nation’s real agenda must have frustrated Bowman greatly, not just because Churchill had already conceded this issue, but because it showed that the British still interpreted U.S. policies as signifying narrow territorial interests. Bowman was in the soup, facing an impasse far deeper than he could have imagined. In lecturing Stanley, he had apparently decided that it was better to incur British wrath than Roosevelt’s, but now he had nothing to take back to Washington. Neither he nor any of his colleagues had seen the British reply to the Declaration on National Independence, because the U.S. ambassador never sent it on to Washington, so he could not engage Stanley on its substance. Further, among the arguments marshaled to deflect Bowman’s diaphanous idealism, Stanley urged that different colonial possessions had very different circumstances and problems and therefore required divergent approaches. There were cross-cutting economic versus strategic considerations that varied by country and region, he added, further undercutting any general proclamation. This, of course, was precisely Bowman’s objection to Roosevelt’s position. To make matters worse, while Bowman envisaged a much more powerful suite of regional and international organizations than Stanley did, he also still shared the British emphasis on regional associations. If Bowman would never register his desperation in his memo of the meeting, it came over loud and clear to the British. Much as the White House and the State Department saw this issue differently, the British administration was also divided. In particular, while the Colonial Office took a very hard line in defense of empire, the Foreign Office, with a much wider purview, could treat colonies as one among a number of important issues, so it was to Sir Alexander Cadogan, permanent undersecretary at the Foreign Office, and to two other Foreign Office strategists that Bowman “poured out his woes about the interview with Stanley.” So ardent was his lament that he conveyed to his British confessors the quite erroneous impression that FDR had put considerable pressure on him to achieve an agreement on colonial policy.39 But the British were overestimating the cohesion of the U.S. administration, and the reality was much simpler; it was

toward development

/

367

Bowman himself who needed something to take home. Whether for reasons of politics or pity is not clear, but Cadogan agreed that the Foreign Office, which outranked the Colonial Office, should intercede, and so it was arranged that with Cadogan present this time Bowman would have another shot with the colonial secretary. When he met again with Stanley and a largely silent Cadogan for lunch at the Dorchester Hotel, the atmosphere was very different. In a much more convivial meeting, Bowman skipped the diaphanous idealism, and Stanley took him much more seriously. They immediately moved to specific colonies, specific needs and problems. Although forced to play on British ground, Bowman was also more adroit this time. He used the case of Tanganyika, the British East African colony confiscated from Germany in 1919 (now Tanzania), to try to impress on Stanley that a strictly national policy toward the colonies was unrealistic. In effect, he argued, an internationally condoned colonial policy already existed, and he cited the prewar Tea Restriction scheme and the Tea Marketing Board as examples, but the policy needed to be generalized. He pushed for a more systematic international collaboration on colonial economic policies, where all colonial powers would confer on quotas and prices, thus stabilizing a capricious international market. He added the Caribbean Commission as an additional precedent. The “British Government could not keep Tanganyika out of world discussion and call it an interest reserved for the British Government’s consideration alone,” he felt.40 Stanley began to consider the specific regional councils that might be set up. Southeast Asia and the Japanese mandated islands were not particularly controversial, and he was prepared to envisage a third regional council for East Africa. For West Africa, this would not be a desirable solution, he argued, or at least if one were established it ought not to include the United States, which, he poked at Bowman, was quite unpopular in that part of the world. He then reemphasized the need to maintain “authority in the rule of British possessions scattered over the world.” But the cost of raising the standard of living of the colonial peoples must be borne by the local people themselves, he insisted. As Bowman recorded Stanley: “The Metropole will keep order, it will secure the means of justice, it will increase production, it will provide technical assistance, it will teach native peoples to improve their sanitation and health. It cannot give native peoples a blank check.”41 Stanley could hardly have known how closely he again mirrored Bowman’s own sentiments, expressed in the Saturday morning State Department meetings. Bowman avoided any reference to national independence, or even self government, while angling his responses in favor of American interests. Both agreed that the first priority of national government, world organiza-

368

/

toward development

tion, and colonial administration was to maintain order, and Stanley did not object to Bowman’s version of the “white man’s burden,” heavily accented toward American economic expansion.42 If this discussion reestablished a modicum of common ground between the Colonial Office and the State Department, it did not really mark much progress. Bowman had succeeded in having any statement on colonial policy linked to the emerging world organization, but only at the expense of disavowing any effort at an independent colonial declaration by Britain and the United States. And while Stanley agreed in principle to regional commissions and even entered a more specific discussion about which these might be, he forced the stipulation that they would not be executive in character but simply receive, publish, and collect annual reports “available for inspection.” In the end, however, as Louis has concluded, Stanley “had conceded virtually nothing except the possible creation of a library,” barely exceeding “what he had already said in parliament.”43 Bowman nonetheless left the Dorchester Hotel a much happier man. In his report to Ambassador Winant he expressed “the hope that a new start could be made on the discussion of colonial policy.” It was an optimism provoked by the congeniality of the lunchtime discussion as much as by its substance, and it buoyed him and others over the coming weeks. Stanley also relished the outcome, especially since Bowman was placated, and the British therefore assumed that Roosevelt would be, too. Indeed, the British sense of victory was evident before the Dorchester lunch ended. After Cadogan had departed, Stanley asked Bowman to alert Cordell Hull about the predicament of Barbados. A British colony dependent mostly on agricultural production, Barbados was experiencing large-scale unemployment, and Stanley fretted that “violence will ensue.” Could the United States absorb as many as thirty thousand Barbadian laborers to work in the American economy? The request was as cheeky as it was haughty—that the U.S. economy support faltering British colonial policy, when this was precisely the bone of contention. Bowman had no comeback, and whether or not he took the request at face value, he did duly report it in his memo of the meeting and assented to deliver it to Hull.44 Nonetheless, on his return to Washington, Bowman was enthusiastically congratulated by Secretary Hull, who was apparently impressed by a renewed British openness on the colonial question, and Bowman reentered the State Department shrouded in the warm glow of apparent success. “We found ourselves much closer in our thinking at the end of our several talks than we could have hoped,” Bowman exuded in his draft report to the secretary of state. To the California geographer Carl Sauer he boasted, “We

toward development

/

369

got back with good plunder.” He was all the more puffed up at being feted by the Royal Institute of International Affairs (British counterpart of the Council on Foreign Relations) at a Claridges dinner in his honor, hosted by Lord Astor.45 But the approbation did not last long. A Churchill speech during May included a short paragraph on postwar arrangements that betrayed a closer knowledge of American thinking than Hull and Roosevelt would have liked, and the “question was raised whether some of the members of the mission had “talked too much.”46 Suspicion focused on Bowman. Stettinius vigorously defended the mission, insisting that it was they, its members, who were embarrassed by British references to State Department documents that the members had never seen, and that, if anything, they talked too little. But this rain on Bowman’s parade was enough to draw out his annoyance at both FDR and Hull, whose disorganization, he felt, followed from their personal and political rivalry over their respective places in history. An efficient foreign policy was the inevitable cost. Overall the mission made much less progress than Bowman wanted to believe. Along the State Department’s own continuum from sovereignty to international administration, Bowman had been able to secure only the most watery acknowledgment of the weakest option. Far from managing to “draw out British officials with respect to colonial policy after the war,” as FDR had requested, Bowman was instead drawn out by them. His lurch from diaphanous idealism to pragmatic accommodation produced less a compromise than his own concession; his views in any case coincided more closely with those of the British than with Roosevelt’s. Bowman was deeply influenced by the London negotiations and the accusations of diaphanous idealism and was further frustrated by his return to the State Department, where discussion of dependent and colonial territories had moved on in his absence. He offered extended and sonorous reports on his deliberations: “Forget the general principles,” he now pleaded, and “pass on to what you can do about them.” The problem with Americans, he insisted, is that we talk “words instead of figuring out how to deal with things.” Our approach has been akin to devising “the Ten Commandments to fit all dependent areas,” he warned before explicitly supporting as merely realistic the Colonial Office’s demand that British sovereignty be retained in the colonies. Repeating the charge he had made a year earlier in the State Department but this time explicitly taking the British side, he asserted that “everything we produced on colonial subjects sounded like the Sermon on the Mount, and everything we said was just as good as Jesus. Our papers were always awfully good but awfully unrealistic.”47 But his State Department colleagues were more politely indif-

370

/

toward development

ferent than ever to these implorations, which, they sensed, undercut the moral ground of the U.S. position. Under other circumstances, Bowman’s acquiescence to the British might have had more deleterious results, but the State Department was undergoing further internal upheaval. If historian William Roger Louis is correct, the main significance of his mission may well have been that it lulled the Colonial and Foreign Offices into “a momentary sense of false security.” They must have been heartily disappointed when FDR and the State Department did not noticeably ease their pressure as a result of the London talks. If Bowman can be credited with one thing, his agreements with Stanley on regional councils probably ensured that, henceforth, the colonial question was folded under the larger question of an international organization (eventually to become the United Nations). This transition was already underway, especially in the State Department,48 and the British followed when Churchill’s opposition softened. Two weeks after the mission’s return, the State Department learned that the prime minister had altered his position on world organization. Hitherto a staunch believer in the priority of a fragmented regional structure, the prime minister now seemed to concede the necessity of building a world organization first. This did at least seem to represent a little movement on the British side, and Bowman was quick to turn events to his own credit: the mission “permitted me to disclose our positions all along the line,” he admitted, whereupon “the Foreign Office and Eden took heart and were able to oppose the PM. . . . This alone is worth the trip to London.”49

toward development In 1919 “the colonies” were a footnote to the Paris Peace Conference. Specific colonies were dispensed with, but there was no overriding concern with the dependent territories per se. Self-determination was certainly raised, but even Woodrow Wilson in his Fourteen Points confined himself to the vague insistence that competing colonial claims among European colonizers be arbitrated fairly and with an equal view to the welfare of the colonized. The 1919 confiscation of colonies from one set of European powers and their mandate to another seemed a quarter century later to hail from a different vision of global possibilities. Bowman’s experiences in Paris and thereafter taught him that, in and of themselves, neither boundary changes nor territorial switches prevented wars or guaranteed international stability. This negative lesson about the geographical conceits of the old world order were foundational in his vision of the new world order. If he now balked at ex-

toward development

/

371

propriating British colonies for American trade, this was in no way because he remained wedded to an obsolete geography of empire or was himself a secret colonialist. Rather, he felt much more strongly than Roosevelt that whatever their colonial transgressions, the British were forever allies and would have to be absorbed gradually into the American Lebensraum. Butting heads with Britain, he felt, was a potentially dangerous diversion. If they were dispossessed, who would substitute for them in the developing world? How would American economic interests be protected in such a vacuum? Roosevelt, by contrast, held fast to an ardent anticolonialism, even when his bargaining position eased in 1944. Far more than Bowman, Roosevelt heard the rumblings of decolonization movements and sought to appropriate such widespread sentiments to the cause of a larger American Century, which both men shared. Roosevelt shrewdly “aimed at stabilizing, not undermining the colonial world.” The insistence on timetables for decolonization, surreal as the early State Department discussion may have been, represented a specifically U.S. contribution to decolonization.50 Whatever their differences on the British Empire, Bowman and Roosevelt retained a broadly similar perspective on the future American world. Both perceived that political power in the future would be more and more divorced from direct territorial control; the new world order meant that the significance of territorial control had begun to wane. The British, by contrast, consistently believed that the United States was “after territory” in a traditional sense. Precisely this threat led Churchill in late 1942 to make his famous declaration that he had “not become the King’s First Minister in order to preside over the liquidation of the British Empire.” Roosevelt’s animus toward British colonialism was itself quite pragmatic. He was himself a patrician Anglophile, after all, who understood the tenacity of British colonial defense as a major obstacle to postwar U.S. economic expansionism. Even as the American forces prepared to fight in Europe, Roosevelt had complained, “We will have more trouble with Great Britain after the war than we are having with Germany now.”51 Bowman shared the ambition but differed on the source of postwar obstacles and, therefore, on strategy. He certainly worried that a reconstructed Germany might succeed a dispossessed Britain in the dependent territories, but his larger concern lay farther to the east. By the end of 1944 Bowman’s antipathy for the Soviet Union stretched well beyond the boundaries of Europe and the question of a German settlement. As the war drew to an end, he was increasingly alarmed at the effect of “Soviet propaganda in trusteed areas,” which he thought would be “wide open for Soviet agents—to indoctrinate, to unify, to lead. Thus one after the other the trusteed areas would or might go com-

372

/

toward development

munist.”52 Bowman’s instinct was to fight such threatening independence movements rather than, with Roosevelt, try to coopt and outmaneuver them. This issue would arise directly in the head-to-head confrontations with the Soviet Union around the United Nations. Far more important than the differences between Roosevelt and many in the State Department, however, was the ground on which they largely agreed. It has been claimed that “the grand design of the United States in the postwar era of decolonization” could already be found within the State Department in late 1942,53 and that is indeed true in regard to the political vision of self-government. But the economic vision took a couple more years to pupate and has attracted much less critical commentary. In May and June 1944, after the Stettinius mission, discussion of dependent territories shifted to the International Organization committee, on which Bowman also sat. There, trusteeship was definitively tied to the question of “development,” and the postwar vision of third world development came increasingly into view. A single short document, the “draft declaration” of trusteeship principles produced by this IO committee, exhibited the profundity of the shift envisaged under the American Lebensraum. Its two main sections covered political and economic development and followed up on the distinction Bowman had made a year earlier between colonies and detached territories. The first section, on political development, recommended the earliest and fullest possible self-government for those peoples who have “demonstrated sufficient capacity” for that responsibility. The second section, on principles of economic development, elaborated rules of economic investment and trade—a new global economic architecture—which was to replace direct political control over dependent territories. “Economic development and stability in dependent territories are vitally related to the welfare of the world community and to the preservation of peace,” the committee began. To that end, the “resources of dependent territories” should undergo “the most rational development,” both in the interests of “the inhabitants” and to “benefit the peoples of other nations.” In return for access to resources, dependent territories would be given access “to the capital and technical assistance necessary for economic development.” Vestiges of slavery were to be abolished, labor markets regularized and supervised, and working conditions improved. The “resources, products and economic opportunities of dependent territories should be made available to all peoples without discrimination.”54 If the British were absolutely correct in their suspicion of U.S. motives, their own narrowly territorial blinkers prevented them from seeing the full vista of transformation envisaged in the State Department. Shaking loose the colonies was not about simply transferring political power to the United

toward development

/

373

States but about reestablishing the basis of exploitation as primarily marketdriven without the mediation of territorial control. Whether Bowman’s soft anticolonialism or Roosevelt’s harder version, the United States’ antipathy to colonialism in this period expressed at root a self-interested drive to open new markets. As Bowman had said of the American Lebensraum, it was now “an economic question”: a structurally unequal economic encounter between poor and wealthy economies was now to be organized through the seeming equanimity of economic exchange. The market became simultaneously camouflage of and mechanism for continued imperialism, albeit without colonization, a vision that underwrote much of the postwar ideology of development. As for Bowman himself, his shift to the more conservative wing of the State Department in 1944 meant that he may have traveled further than any of his colleagues from the diaphanous idealism of their Wilsonian heritage, but more than ever he fundamentally believed in some kind of global Monroe Doctrine. Earlier than most, he was forced by World War II and especially the colonial question to confront the central contradiction in that vision, namely, that its internationalism was simultaneously and fervently nationalist. Pushed to the political wall by the strength of the Soviet comeback against Germany and by British colonialist obstinacy, which he quietly admired, his Wilsonian moralism became an ideological runt to an increasingly overnourished nationalism. Americanness increasingly dominated his postwar vision of global Lebensraum. In general, as the war moved to a close, the cracks between New Deal liberals—”the lunatic fringe of social progress,” Bowman now called them55—and the more conservative liberals of the old school grew wider, and with the stakes of postwar arrangements manifestly in sight, conservative nationalism redirected American internationalism toward intense self-interest. This was, of course, implicit in the Wilsonian vision from the beginning, but the unfolding of this contradiction on the global stage now threatened to frustrate the very mechanism of global economic power to which it had given rise. Imperialism without colonies would have no instantaneous birth.

14 FRUSTRATED GLOBALISM, COMPROMISE GEOGRAPHIES: DESIGNING THE UNITED NATIONS

With war drawing to a close, attention in the U.S. State Department increasingly turned toward the design of the United Nations, the jewel in the crown of the postwar American Lebensraum and the fulcrum on which the second moment of the American Century balanced. Disabling Germany and shaking loose the colonies for U.S. trade inevitably involved compromise with the larger goal of immunizing the global economy from local, geographically rooted squabbles; territorial considerations were a necessary evil if geography was to be taken out of the postwar political equation. It was otherwise with the United Nations. As Roosevelt and the State Department contemplated its design, they could give full vent to their ambition for a global organization devoted to securing a “permanent peace.” They knew they had a second chance at Woodrow Wilson’s “global Monroe Doctrine” and a more realistic version of the League of Nations, and they were determined to avoid Wilson’s mistakes. This is not at all to say that the UN was designed out of pure altruism. Hastened on the one hand by war and by the fear that the 1930s depression would return after the war, when no longer staved off by military mobilization, and on the other hand by a recognition of the expanded scale of economic production and the proliferation of U.S. multinational interests, Roosevelt in the early 1940s voiced the ambition of global power more clearly than any U.S. president ever had. This vision only became sharper as the war continued and the unprecedented scale of U.S. postwar political

frustrated globalism, compromise geographies

/

375

and economic power came into view. Therefore, although Roosevelt and the State Department sometimes disagreed on the details, they clearly understood the United Nations’ role as a pivotal institution for postwar U.S. globalism. High-sounding rhetoric about global peace simultaneously conveyed a more self-interested ambition for global political and military stability so that economic growth could continue unhampered. The UN was to be the organization that successfully absorbed and displaced local territorial and political conflicts, decoupled them from the free operation of a world market in which the United States inevitably dominated. Unlike any of its predecessors, the American Empire was to be market based. That Secretary of State Dean Acheson should have exalted Bowman as one of the “architects of the United Nations” has a certain irony1—not because the praise was unworthy, but because as Bowman’s own amalgam of nationalism and conservatism grew more brittle after 1944, he remained thoroughly committed to building an institution that became a lightning rod for reactionary American nationalists. While he barked at the New Deal for attracting “the lunatic fringe of social progress,”2 pilloried the U.S. government as the major threat to freedom in domestic social affairs, and excoriated any whiff of federal intrusion into free-enterprise science, he remained an internationalist and devoted his deepest political hopes and energies to the establishment of the UN, which, to many Americans in this period, was akin to world government, the emasculation of the nation, the ultimate political evil. It is tempting to see Bowman’s unswerving commitment to the UN as simply the residue of a lost liberalism, the remnants of a Wilsonianism otherwise cuckolded by the fervent conservative nationalism unleashed toward war’s end. But that misreads Bowman and Wilson both, insofar as Bowman, like many aging Wilsonians, easily donned much of the same conservative nationalism. It was a nationalism that in no way denied his internationalism but lay coiled within it. Thus the story of the UN’s origins is generally told as a distillation, liberally or conservatively inflected, of just such political dichotomies—nationalism versus internationalism, liberalism versus conservatism, idealism versus pragmatism—slipping toward cold war conflict.3 This orthodoxy already expresses a distinctly American postgeographic ambition, whereas if the origins of the UN are reread through the lenses of a contested global geography, a very different vision emerges. The central dilemma faced by U.S. postwar planners was how to design a global organization that followed broadly democratic principles and recognized certain universal rights, regardless of geography, while ensuring as best they could that this organization would work for their own nationally

376

/

frustrated globalism, compromise geographies

defined interests. To be sure, the same dilemma was faced by all other national governments, but insofar as the United Nations was designed first and foremost within the State Department, the question of U.S. power is paramount. In the end, the abstraction from geography proved unsustainable, and the contradiction between universality (a world beyond geography) and particularity could be resolved or at least rationalized only by a resort to partisan political geographies. Far from escaping geography, the UN became its prisoner. The geographies built into the structure of the postwar United Nations are alive and multidimensional, mutable and partial, and the story of these constitutive geographies provides a sharp etching of the central contradictions not so much of globalism per se but of twentiethcentury U.S. globalism in particular, as it evolved from Wilson to Roosevelt and beyond. It is not that particularism won out over universalism, nationalism over internationalism, but rather that a nationally specific and quite prejudicial internationalism defined the core of what the UN became. In the United Nations the second moment of American globalism came face to face with its own contradictions.

“ the unhappy past ” : beyond geography+ The postgeographic ambition of Roosevelt’s new world order embodied in the UN did not spring onto the global diplomatic stage full-grown. As late as August 1941, Roosevelt was reticent even in private about anything smacking of a revived League of Nations, arguing to Churchill that such an organization would be futile and that the United States and the United Kingdom would simply have to run the world themselves. He rebuffed more-ambitious appeals from his advisers and eliminated from the Atlantic Charter the original British call for an “effective international organization” in favor of weaker, noncommittal language. Still, it was Roosevelt at the end of 1941 who coined the name “United Nations” in the final edit of the United Nations Declaration,4 although at this point the label referred not to an organization but to the “associated powers” opposing Germany, Japan, and their allies. But his aspirations evolved quickly. Many in the State Department assumed by 1942 that international administration would comprise some kind of regional power-sharing arrangements, and FDR’s early notion of the Four Policemen—the United States, Britain, the USSR, and China—was at first conceived in regional terms. Each of the four powers would have primary responsibility for peace and security in its own ward. No exact continental and intercontinental divisions among the Four Policemen were ever enun-

frustrated globalism, compromise geographies

/

377

ciated, however, and by the time a more precise political cartography would have been necessary, Roosevelt had something more ambitious in mind. By 1943 regional security divisions among the Four Policemen were subordinated to a more global organization. Secretary of State Cordell Hull’s triumph in Moscow in October of that year was principally that he convinced the British and Soviet leaders to sign on to such an overarching world organization, however vaguely its structure and functions were yet conceived. There “will no longer be need for spheres of influence, for alliances, for balance of power, or any other of the special arrangements through which, in the unhappy past, the nations strove to safeguard their security or to promote their interests,” Hull enthused.5 There could hardly be a clearer statement of the way in which the UN, as the administrative and political centerpiece of the American Lebensraum, was intended to spirit international diplomacy beyond national differences, beyond geography. Glimpsed here is not simply an internationalism but a globalism in which the significance of geographical boundaries and territorial sovereignty exclusions are circumscribed by a world organization. The intent was nothing less than the unhitching of specific geographical claims and territorial struggles from the central dynamics of the global economic intercourse. The UN would mediate geographically rooted struggles, conflicts, and skirmishes while global commerce proceeded apace. If this reactive vision stopped short of Wendell Willkie’s “world government,” it nonetheless articulated the implicit claim that geography—more accurately, political, cultural, and economic differences written into world geography—had been the major impediment in the past to global peace and prosperity, the cause of Hull’s “unhappy past.” “America’s rise to globalism” was ipso facto an escape from geography.6 This was a quintessentially American panorama of global prospects. British and Soviet postwar aspirations pointed toward very different kinds of international organization, more rooted in geographical calculations. Britain had been an enthusiastic member of the failed League of Nations and remained dedicated to some kind of international security organization, but the country’s keenest interest lay in the defense of a widespread empire and a peaceful Europe, and the expansiveness of U.S. ambitions for such an organization was deeply threatening. As Roosevelt’s vision evolved away from a regional toward a global structure, Churchill conceded as little as possible, preferring the establishment of several continent-scale regional bodies. Despite the anticommunist paranoia harbored by Churchill and many U.S. conservatives, Stalin’s postwar territorial ambitions were more regionally constrained than those of either of the other leaders. His 1920s slogan, “So-

378

/

frustrated globalism, compromise geographies

cialism in one country,” more accurately described Soviet aspirations in the early 1940s than any lingering rhetoric about world communism. Surrounded by capitalist nations, many sustaining an economic embargo, and with Hitler’s army having encroached to within artillery range of Moscow, Soviet interests were sharply focused on securing their postwar borders, and this strongly disposed Stalin toward a regional structure for global security. Stalin’s ambivalence about a world organization therefore sprang from several sources in addition to his geographical disinterest in many parts of the world. He sensed the utility of such an organization for American expansionism, understood that capitalist rules of global economic intercourse would surely govern, and saw that the Soviet Union as the only “socialist” state could easily constitute a permanent minority of one. Yet at the same time, with the USSR having sustained by far the worst losses of the war and with the German military in full retreat by 1943, he could expect a prominent place in any such world organization. The United Nations Charter was hatched in the wartime State Department. Serious deliberations commenced in 1942, but it remained a secondary concern until the Moscow summit. By 1944, anticipation of some kind of postwar world organization whipped the American public into a Woodrow Wilson revival, resulting in loud calls for a new and better League of Nations and the demand that the peace not be botched this time. For some, that meant not repeating the league experiment at all, while for others it meant a far more replete globalism than even Wilson had envisaged. Still others warned against such pie in the sky, insisting that only naked force after the war would ensure peace. A near-moribund Woodrow Wilson Foundation sprang back to life.7 By August 1944, on the eve of the four-power Dumbarton Oaks conference on postwar arrangements, the United Nations Organization became the central public concern except for the progress of war itself. It was the issue on which Roosevelt campaigned for a fourth term that November, and the Yalta negotiations three months later sharpened expectations for the climactic “United Nations Conference” in San Francisco in April 1945. Roosevelt’s ambition for a globalism unhinged from specific geographical interests was as heady as it was optimistic, but squabbles over the founding of the United Nations from 1942 to 1945 seriously circumscribed that ambition. It is often held that power politics and the slide toward “spheres of influence” dashed the American idealism of a world organization. The trivial, binary geographies of cold war ideology were for nearly a half century premised on precisely this originary myth. “The Western statesmen failed . . .

frustrated globalism, compromise geographies

/

379

to face up to the ruthlessness of the emerging postwar Soviet might,” insists Zbigniew Brzezinski, “and in the ensuing clash between Stalinist power and Western naiveté, power prevailed.” If the clarity of this diagnosis is enhanced by temporal distance from the events of the day, it nonetheless reflects a conservative pattern of response to Roosevelt after 1944. Bowman himself advanced the naïveté thesis: FDR’s profoundest blunder, he came to believe, lay in “saying ‘nice kitty’ to Stalin” in the erroneous belief that he could charm and flatter “Uncle Joe” into compliance with American aims.8 But this innocence narrative concerning the postwar United States and the portrayal of the USSR as global predator is unconvincing in several respects. First, the political contest was not railroaded into a one-dimensional struggle between Stalin and a combined “West” until at least after 1945, much as naïveté theorists believe it perhaps ought to have been. Second, Roosevelt understood Churchill’s defense of empire as an equal if not greater threat to U.S. globalism than the USSR, and the British prime minister was not above siding with Stalin on territorial questions if it restricted U.S. expansionism. Likewise, third, even after the 1945 UN conference, Stalin may have been “the least inclined . . . to insist on the partition of Europe.”9 More important, this conservative shibboleth takes the liberal postgeographic rhetoric at face value and, in accepting Roosevelt’s global ambition as legitimate, is blind to its constitutive geography. The evolution of a global vision in postwar planning after 1942 grew out of a resilient regionalism in U.S. foreign policy that can be traced back to the Monroe Doctrine and to isolationist ideologies of the 1920s and 1930s. Postwar regional and global visions were not inherently opposed at first but rather evolved in symbiotic connection. Roosevelt, Bowman, and others happily embraced a combination of regional and global ambitions. But as preparations moved toward a climax, the contradiction between regional and global strategies erupted within the U.S. administration, and the appropriate geographical scale of postwar power became the focus of a major crisis in U.S. strategy regarding the UN.10 Bowman sat at the fulcrum of this debate. He was too shrewd to entertain the vanity that U.S. power led in any way beyond geography and understood that U.S. globalism was itself a geographical strategy. The contest for power in the UN was asymmetric, he sensed. By setting the UN up as a clearinghouse for territorial disputes, U.S. globalism recognized a divestment of the country’s power directly into the world market. Bowman’s coining of “the American Lebensraum” therefore represented an appropriately spatial lexicon for this ambitious new globalism, and the UN was its political arm.

380

/

frustrated globalism, compromise geographies

globalism versus regionalism: a federalist un+ The question of a replacement organization for the League of Nations arose almost immediately in the State Department’s Advisory Committee on Postwar Foreign Policy. Undersecretary Sumner Welles proposed the initial scheme. A “United Nations Authority” would be led by the four major powers (the United States, the United Kingdom, the USSR, and China) and would include a broad membership ensuring good regional representation. It was a rudimentary scheme by later standards, but from the start the State Department planners envisaged an organization that went well beyond simply questions of security.11 A separate subcommittee on International Organization (IO) was establish in June 1942 to begin drafting protocols for the parent organization, and while it was the most focused of the postwar subcommittees, the issues it dealt with were no less complex.12 Organization membership was crucial: Who would be included and who excluded? In the first place it was simply assumed that nation-states were the exclusive representatives of the world’s citizenry and therefore only they could attain membership in what was now called the United Nations Organization. Members of the IO subcommittee never seriously entertained the possibility of membership by social, political, or economic organizations or other nongovernmental bodies that did not enjoy territorial state authority. But who then constituted a sovereign state? Established republics were obviously included, and so the IO subcommittee quickly turned its attention to dependent territories. But how was the line to be drawn between eligible and ineligible states and peoples? The subcommittee excluded British Empire possessions from consideration, assuming them under the British flag, but was otherwise very inclusive. Hull thought them too inclusive, too ambitious on behalf of peoples not yet “worthy and ready” for self-government. Numerous other protocols on all aspects of the organization were drafted and redrafted, and by March 1943 a draft charter was produced. Washington visits by Foreign Secretary Anthony Eden and Prime Minister Winston Churchill of Britain flushed out not only British thinking—they agreed on strong police powers and the need to revive international economic trade after the war, but disagreed about trusteeship and therefore membership— but also Roosevelt’s. The “tragedy of Wilson” was always somewhere “within the rim” of Roosevelt’s consciousness,13 and he knew that Wilson’s fatal mistake lay in not explicitly protecting the Monroe Doctrine in the League of Nations charter. FDR therefore sought to juggle both a global and a regional scale of international administration in the new world organization. As for the State De-

frustrated globalism, compromise geographies

/

381

partment, Wilson’s internationalism survived there, too, but was much weakened. While the conservative Hull remained largely unreconstructed in his emphasis on a global organization, a range of other views also occurred. Early on, Bowman shared surprising ground with isolationists: “We can stand on the Monroe Doctrine as a moral principle,” he warranted even as Hitler drove toward the English Channel, “only so long as we do not militarily occupy Latin American countries and do not join in military control in Europe.” (Since World War I, of course, U.S. military incursions had been made into seven Latin American republics, but that was not on the rim of Bowman’s consciousness.) The scale of Bowman’s Wilsonian ambition had shrunk, and he now echoed Madison in the eighteenth-century Federalist debates, albeit at a global scale, in averring that the “world is too large for its affairs to be run from a central place and by a central authority.” Rather than Wilson’s global Monroe Doctrine, he envisaged a series of regional “Monroes.” Postwar “regional associations” would be the backbone of peace; the “rebuilding process” would be on a “continental” rather than a global scale, he advised Herbert Hoover.14 Such a limited territorial scope for postwar political and economic expansion directly reflected earlier discussions in the Council on Foreign Relations, where the 1941 War and Peace Studies discussions began to conceive of U.S. power spanning a “Grand Area.” Conceived at the height of German military success in the early part of the war, the Grand Area assumed a divided world after the war even if the Allies won. The Grand Area included the Western Hemisphere, the Atlantic and Pacific economies, and explicitly included China, Japan, and Southeast Asia. It was in effect a nonGerman bloc that deliberately split Europe and was intended as a subglobal base for postwar U.S. economic prosperity.15 Even before the council became integrated into the State Department, the notion of the Grand Area influenced early thinking about the geography of postwar reconstruction. Although the regional assumption lingered well into the war, the definition of the Grand Area and U.S. regional interests evolved considerably when the U.S. became a belligerent. This prospective geography of U.S. economic influence bore directly on the political question of the geographical scope and scale of the proposed international organization. At first the issue was not contentious. When Churchill came to Washington in 1943, he was increasingly defensive about postwar plans, sensing that not only the empire but also Britain’s status as the leading world power was now in question. He was no more keen than Roosevelt to rush into highly publicized proclamations about a new world organization, but he did propose regional councils for Europe and Asia fol-

382

/

frustrated globalism, compromise geographies

lowing the war.16 He made no mention of councils for Africa or the Americas, but if this model were generalized, Britain could be expected to use its empire possessions to assume a leading role in most such councils. British regionalist proposals therefore represented a thinly veiled defense of worldwide empire against U.S. globalism—divide and conquer. State Department officials recognized the politics of this geographical strategy, but given Churchill’s adamance, they did not address it directly, preferring to fashion their own counterproposal. Roosevelt now had a broader organization in mind with a stronger centralized administration, and although he balked at U.S. membership in a European council, he endorsed British regionalism as long as it was clear that regional councils were subordinate to the “big four.” Welles remained wedded to a strong regional presence in the world organization, and he had the IO subcommittee weave Roosevelt’s and Churchill’s proposals into a “draft constitution,” submitted to the president on 26 March 1943. The subcommittee now proposed three levels of administration: an executive body of the four big powers, concerned with security and committed to unanimity; a council of eleven, including seven regional representatives from Europe, Latin America, the Far East, the Middle East, and the British Empire, as well as the big four; and an international conference of all member nations.17 The eventual structure of the UN can be traced to this document. Bowman began to renounce a regional approach by early 1943. A “geographical extension of responsibility” was inevitable for the United States after the war, he now conceded, but the real “question was where it would stop.” He now grasped the need “to make a sudden shift into a new world order” and became more centrally involved in the UN discussions. He was sufficiently committed to a powerful executive committee to be heartened by Eden’s ambivalence about a regional rather than a global security structure, but he worried with conservatives that the “Four Policemen” smacked too much of big-power domination. He went so far as to propose that the national model of the United States and its relationship to component states should be the explicit model for a world organization, and evoked U.S. history from the Federalist debates to the Civil War to remind committee members that even with a common language, securing unity and a common document was difficult.18 Bowman was not the only subcommittee member who envisaged a United Nations charter modeled on the U.S. Constitution, but he was the most ardent by far. When Hull now presided over a redraft of the UN constitution—he felt it conceded too much to Churchill’s regionalism—Bowman launched the discussion with a lengthy and extraordinary speech, as

frustrated globalism, compromise geographies

/

383

significant for its waywardness as for its crystallization of State Department thinking. They should surely start, he claimed, by establishing “certain selfevident truths” universal to all nations and peoples. “Nearly a fourth of the text of the Declaration of Independence,” he pointed out, “is devoted to an examination of this question.” Where Jefferson could identify only four such truths, Bowman happily amassed eighteen. These ranged from clichés about “the love of peace” and his vapid personal fixation on “experiment and principle” to assorted negative truths. If neither justice nor democratic government nor sovereign equality was a universal, the sanctity of nationhood, “national identity,” and national “individuality” were. And one can only imagine the response when he wandered into a discussion of overpopulation and raised U.S. xenophobia and anti-immigration hysteria to the status of self-evident global truth: “We cannot receive millions of Chinese into the United States who will lower our standard of living and introduce a non-assimilable element that goes contrary to the self-evident truths that a strong nation requires. . . . The responsibility for the Chinese birth rate or the Indian birth rate and for their related social theories or values does not rest upon the United States.”19 This speech was remarkable not just for exhibiting the instability of the State Department vision for the United Nations Organization as late as June 1943 but also for exposing, in dramatic fashion, the nationalist assumptions, interests, and phobias that undergirded the internationalist vision. Nonetheless, two other salient features loitered amid the windbaggery, and they were more lasting. First, his opening self-evident truth was not about security at all but about commerce, “the principle of our reciprocal trade agreements”: “Trade,” he averred, “is a bigger prize than ever before in world history.” But second, having made the U.S. Constitution the model for the UN, he had to confront directly the geographical dilemma of the Federalist debates, namely, the balance of power between the Union as a whole and its members, and he now made a decisive shift. No Madisonian doubts remained. His seventeenth self-evident truth led to the inference that the desired universality “seems to drive us farther and farther away from regionalism as a basis for international organization” insofar as “the regional is the distinctively local.”20 This connection between economic interests and the global scale of political organization had always guided free-trader Cordell Hull, and Bowman was now enlisted to flesh the vision out. He was now adamant that U.S. economic self-interest take priority over the political; the crucial economic question was: “What would our trader people gain or lose by any proposed economic combination” in Europe? What kind of economic con-

384

/

frustrated globalism, compromise geographies

federation should the United States encourage? Only after the economic questions were clarified should the State Department consider security issues, and only after that should it consider specific regional proposals: “Mr. Churchill’s ‘Council of Europe’ “ should be examined when the department was in a position to judge “whether it is dangerous for the United States with respect to both trade and policy in Europe and the world generally after the war.”21 On this question at least, the State Department now found itself in broad agreement with the Treasury Department, which was already preparing for the Bretton Woods conference, responsible for establishing international financial machinery that included the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund, and eventually the GATT trade agreements. The work of the treasury planners perhaps expressed in purest form the aspirations that America’s postwar economic Lebensraum get beyond geography,22 whereas the State Department, concerned with more direct political matters and in no small part influenced by Bowman, always had to balance economic priority against the need to fix the geography of postwar reconstruction. Bowman now hammered the point home. In a subsequent meeting of the streamlined Informal Agenda Group, when the conversation threatened to reprise yet again (at Hull’s guiding) the structure of the League of Nations and U.S. responses to it, a frustrated and animated Bowman led the subcommittee to what Hull consented was the “core” question: “The British Empire had of necessity to interest itself in world politics because it was territorially and commercially universal in its trading interests,” Bowman stated. “It is easy to see why Great Britain would join a world league. But what are the United States interests that correspond?” The United States trades everywhere, he pointed out, but under what conditions?23 The core question, then, was this: How should the political geography of the new organization be designed to enhance global U.S. economic interests in the postwar world? Churchill’s regionalism had brought U.S. globalism into focus at precisely the time when Britain was beginning to take “the role of junior partner in the Anglo-American alliance,”24 and in the design of the United Nations the question of regional scales of organization vis-à-vis a global scale would never again be far from the surface.

“ here, again, world organization on a new basis ” : moscow While Britain’s outlook on international organization was well understood by 1943, the State Department lacked serious knowledge about Soviet

frustrated globalism, compromise geographies

/

385

thinking. Efforts to fill that lacuna were hampered by the personal and organizational turmoil that increasingly paralyzed the State Department in mid-1943. The causes were various. Only haphazardly did Roosevelt involve his secretary of state in foreign policy, and this demoralized and frustrated many in the department. Hull’s inveterate caution in turn frustrated Roosevelt, but Hull was kept on largely because of his skill at building bridges with congressional Republicans and the Senate. Hull also clashed openly with his undersecretary. A dashing patrician with Roosevelt’s ear, Welles’s occasional public depictions of postwar schemes gave Hull apoplexy. Meetings involving the department’s two top officials were tense, and the friction reverberated when lower-level officials and staffers took sides. “Sabotage . . . obstruction, understaffing and rival ambitions” permeated a dysfunctional department, Bowman concluded, in a set of secret memos that tracked the rising departmental discord in 1943. Bowman’s natural inclination was to side with the more-conservative and unassuming Hull, but he was also frustrated by Hull’s lack of leadership, and whatever his patrician arrogance, Welles at least wanted to get things done.25 Bowman did not stay above the fray. Emerging as one of two or three leading advisers in the department, he found himself increasingly pitted against the top technical specialist on the full-time staff, the research director Leo Pasvolsky, to whom he had taken an instant dislike. The simmering feud revealed Bowman’s most distasteful side. Pasvolsky was “Hull’s man,” he sniffed at their first meeting, a “foreign-born Polish or Russian Jew who . . . made himself useful to Hull” and played “a cautious, cat-like game.” Bowman saw Pasvolsky as “dangerous,” given his “foreign racial origin,” and he may even “have communistic ideas,” Bowman recorded, however ludicrously. Although he grudgingly came to appreciate Pasvolsky’s “prodigious energy and colossal memory” and intellect, this only accentuated Bowman’s resentment. A “struggle for power” emerged among Bowman, Welles, and Pasvolsky by late 1942 over the role and direction of the Advisory Committee.26 Despite Hull’s failing health and alertness, Bowman always treated him respectfully, and as Bowman drew closer to the secretary in the spring of 1943, Hull confided his bitterness with Welles and Roosevelt. The denouement came in the summer, with Hull angry at his undersecretary’s obdurate insistence on regional rather than global postwar organization. He suspected that Roosevelt was not getting a representative picture of the State Department’s growing global focus and was outraged by Welles’s continued public divulgences. After consulting Bowman and Myron Taylor, a friend of Roosevelt’s who had made his first fortune in cotton milling be-

386

/

frustrated globalism, compromise geographies

fore moving on to the chairmanship of U.S. Steel and eventually the U.S. ambassadorship to the Vatican, the secretary succeeded in having Roosevelt curb Welles directly. Hull quickly dissolved the Advisory Committee, Welles’s power base, and Bowman now distanced himself from Welles, whom he suspected of “going off the deep end.”27 Press accounts began to report rumors of a factional State Department. Welles was personally and politically vulnerable. He was now the target of a Washington whispering campaign insinuating “immorality” and “indiscretion.” The source was William Bullitt, a miscreant upper-crust Philadelphian who had served as ambassador to Moscow and Paris in the 1930s and who thought himself better suited to State Department leadership than Welles and said so to Roosevelt. By August 1943 the feud between Welles and Hull was an open secret, and scandal surrounding Welles threatened to come out in the press. It seems that a drunken Welles, who had periodic sexual liaisons with men for much of his life, had propositioned a sleeping-car porter several years earlier on a presidential train.28 Discreet homosexuality among the patrician classes was one thing in the ruling morality of the day; propositioning “Negro” sleeping-car porters, quite another. Roosevelt eventually accepted Welles’s resignation. “Welles forgot Machiavelli’s advice regarding the favor of princes,” Bowman concluded when he saw his own star rising in direct consequence. Horrified by Welles’s homosexuality, Bowman had survived a close association with the undersecretary and backed the right horse in the end. As Hull reorganized the department, Bowman’s loyalty was rewarded by inclusion in the small, influential inner group of postwar advisers, which became markedly more conservative in Welles’s absence, Pasvolsky notwithstanding. Bowman’s position was further enhanced with the appointment of Edward Stettinius as the new undersecretary, reaffirming Roosevelt’s reliance on prominent figures from the capitalist classes. A manager more than a policy leader, Stettinius set about a departmental reorganization and chose Bowman and John Lee Pratt as his chief advisers. Bowman found Stettinius congenial if naive politically, a judgment shared by press cartoonists across the country.29 With the personnel crisis relaxing, the administration was under increasing public pressure to show more of its hand on postwar international organization. Roosevelt had supported the United Nations Food and Agriculture Conference in 1943 and aligned the United States with the UN Relief and Rehabilitation Administration, but these were easily seen as sideshows to the main event. As the clamor rose to a fever pitch, Walter Lippmann published U.S. Foreign Policy, which vied with Willkie’s One

frustrated globalism, compromise geographies

/

387

World for the top of the best-seller list. Against Willkie’s ambitious globalism, Lippmann offered a cold if equally internationalist “realism” about world power. By one reviewer he was praised for having “tossed overboard the last vestige of well-meaning but essentially futile Wilsonianism.” Hull and Roosevelt knew they had to stem the tide of this rising conservative “realism” and used a Moscow foreign ministers’ meeting in October 1943 to include the Soviet Union in the discussion.30 The Moscow summit was a big deal, promising the first wartime agreement among the United States, the USSR, Britain, and China and raising the possibility of a four-way agreement on building a United Nations organization. Hull knew that a successful meeting would open a new phase of postwar planning, and he eagerly anticipated the chance to crown his own diplomatic career, seeing an opportunity to step out from Roosevelt’s shadow. He took a revised copy of the State Department’s draft constitution for the UN organization to the summit, but before embarking for Moscow, he held a last-minute briefing with Stettinius, Bowman, and Pasvolsky. Pasvolsky advised that economic reconstruction, especially in the USSR, should be a priority, while Bowman insisted that territorial agreements should be made now with Molotov and Stalin to minimize Soviet territorial gains in Eastern Europe resulting from Red Army victories over retreating German armies. Yet Hull knew that Soviet foreign secretary Molotov was in a mood to talk only about the war and especially about the long-promised but always delayed second front that would take the murderous pressure off Soviet forces and civilians. Hull had also never flown before, largely out of fear.31 The public Four Nations Declaration, drafted in the State Department and issued at Moscow, was relatively innocuous. The fourth of seven points specified a principle of membership in the postwar international organization, namely, “the sovereign equality of all states,” a phrase Bowman claimed to have put in final form.32 The most controversial issue was not the wording at all but U.S. insistence that it be a four-power rather than a three-power agreement. The USSR had never declared war on Japan, and a joint declaration with China raised the risk that Japan would target the USSR in the east, where it was wide open. The United States wanted Chinese inclusion, because, short of revolution, the country would oppose the interests of the huge socialist state along its northwestern frontier, yet also oppose European colonialism. Churchill was indignant that the Chinese—“the pigtails,” in his racist disparagement—be included on anything like equal footing with Britain, but he had already reluctantly acquiesced, so when Molotov refused to sign alongside China, citing the absence of its representatives from the

388

/

frustrated globalism, compromise geographies

conference, Hull revealed that he had already gained Chinese consent for the document, and Molotov, too, relented. The Chinese ambassador in Moscow was called in to cosign. Roosevelt shared Churchill’s evaluation of Chinese backwardness if not his overt racism, but he calculated that in the event of major postwar tension between the United States and the USSR, tripartite power would leave Britain as a potential power broker. China’s inclusion killed not just two but several birds with a single stone: Roosevelt added what he smugly assumed would be a reliable ally; diminished potential British power; prevented an Old World alliance between the USSR and Britain against U.S. globalism; and blunted liberal criticism at home aimed at big-power domination of the postwar world.33 Magnanimity toward the “lesser” powers and peoples of the world doubled as strict self-interest. Public support in the United States for the postwar organization was widespread, and it built to a crescendo with quick Senate approval. It was especially gratifying to Hull that the Senate measure was engineered by the young Texan and chair of the Foreign Relations Committee, Tom Connally, whom Hull had cultivated in the State Department Advisory Committee. The folly of nearly a quarter century might yet be righted. Bowman, too, was delighted. “Here again,” he breathed, with a great sigh of historical relief, “we have the very beginnings of a world organization on a new basis.” Having not abandoned Wilsonianism with the same drama as Lippmann but having mined and hardened the pure pragmatism of Wilson’s idealism, he remained captivated by the prospect of international political organization. He heard news of the Moscow agreement directly from Roosevelt, days ahead of its announcement to the Senate, and was thrilled to have the arduous State Department work come to some sort of palpable, public result. But he was also irked that Hull’s well-deserved success eclipsed the work of Welles, and therefore of the IO subcommittee. It was “our documents” that Hull took to Moscow, because “he had nothing else to take,” Bowman complained.34 Four-power adherence to “world organization on a new basis” was bought at a price, however. U.S. insistence on Chinese inclusion signaled the willingness of the most globally inclined of the powers to resort to regional self-interest in designing the world organization when it was strategically advantageous. Playing the China card was the most explicit expression thus far of the contradiction between regionalism and globalism in U.S. strategy. Its significance was not missed by the Allies, and a precedent was set.

frustrated globalism, compromise geographies

/

389

the triumph of “ conservative nationalism ” At the end of 1942 the impatient editors of the liberal New Republic complained that the State Department was, as Robert Divine has put it, “honeycombed with conservatives intent on preserving the status quo,” and that the president should more actively guide foreign policy himself.35 This conservatism was reaffirmed in the following year, but what the New Republic editors failed to grasp, and what many liberal historians have likewise missed ever since, is that this conservatism itself embraced an evolving Wilsonian activism, most evident perhaps in Bowman and Hull, and had no intention of maintaining any kind of status quo. It was an activist conservatism—more properly a conservative liberalism—whose self-interested globalism was simultaneously progressive and nationalist. Bowman remained the “gradual revolutionary” in the early 1940s, but with a clearer reconciliation of the fit rather than the contradiction between national selfinterest and globalism. Further, it was a conservatism that lurked just below the surface of Roosevelt’s own liberal rhetoric on foreign policy. This activist, conservative nationalism developed nowhere more clearly than in the context of the embryonic United Nations in late 1943 and 1944. The Moscow agreement was a good start, but Roosevelt now wanted Stalin brought into direct negotiations. Although Roosevelt had met Churchill five times in the previous two years, he would not meet Stalin until Tehran in November 1943. The main business there was naturally military—the second front was now promised for spring 1944, Soviet involvement in the Pacific war was discussed, and much more—but postwar arrangements in Indochina and Europe, especially Poland, also occupied them. Roosevelt, pushing a more global agenda, urged the confiscation of Indochina from France, while Stalin, attendant to affairs on his own borders, pushed for a realignment of Polish frontiers at the expense of Germany. Churchill opposed the former as a bad anticolonial precedent but could offer little resistance to the latter in light of massive Soviet losses in the war and the confiscation of Soviet territory sanctioned by the 1919 Paris Peace Conference, to which the USSR was not even invited. Roosevelt protested too, but ducked a showdown on Poland. The only significant discussion of international organization at Tehran came in private talks between Stalin and Roosevelt, where Roosevelt attempted to divide and conquer. He presented Stalin with the State Department’s UN draft constitution for a tripartite organization comprising an assembly, an executive council, and the Four Policemen, but Stalin responded that he preferred a regional model of the sort he knew Churchill favored,

390

/

frustrated globalism, compromise geographies

whereupon Roosevelt invoked guaranteed congressional opposition to potential U.S. military responsibility in Europe. Why, Stalin came back, would that objection apply to the regional scheme alone when a global organization would also imply such responsibility? Roosevelt dissembled that he envisaged the commitment of only U.S. naval and air forces, not ground forces, in Europe, but Stalin also insisted that the Four Policemen proposal would draw the ire of the small nations, especially in Europe, where there would be additional resentment over the superior role given the Chinese. This, too, inclined him toward a regional scheme. This was a setback for Roosevelt, but not for long. Whether the Soviet leader was sufficiently impressed by Roosevelt’s entreaties and the genuine differences he stressed between the U.S. and British positions, or whether Stalin softened with the promise of the second front, on the last day of the conference he, again privately, informed Roosevelt that he was becoming convinced about the necessity of global rather than regional organization. Not only had a delighted Roosevelt separated Churchill and Stalin on an issue central to U.S. postwar interests, but also he was now in a position to further clarify his vision to the U.S. public without fear of alienating Stalin. Seeking to preserve his advantage, he cautioned Stalin quite dishonestly that it was too early to discuss this issue with Churchill, when of course it had been an evolving topic between the British and U.S. leaders for nearly two years.36 In his refusal to back prewar Polish boundaries against Stalin, Roosevelt was quite calculating. Only the most naive had much doubt that the Soviets intended to retake territory lost after 1918 and probably more, and this is why Roosevelt fought so hard to get Stalin’s assent to the Atlantic Charter. But did he really want to side with the old codger of the British Empire to oppose Stalin’s claims on his own borders? The Atlantic Charter disavowed such territorial transfers prior to the end of war, until a United Nations organization could arbitrate such claims, but a realistic Roosevelt knew better, seeking only to keep such transfers to a minimum. The westward realignment of Soviet borders into territory given Poland after World War I was inevitable in any Allied victory. It is not that Roosevelt was above resorting to geographical resolutions himself but that the greater priority for an American globalism lay in establishing a world organization. It made little sense to sacrifice that goal by wading into a messy and presumably unwinnable territorial dispute approached according to Old World rules. Stalin’s concession on world rather than regional organization may even have been a quid pro quo for Roosevelt’s refusal to dig his heels in on Poland.

frustrated globalism, compromise geographies

/

391

With Stalin broadly onboard after Tehran, the next step was to tack back against British recalcitrance—Churchill’s in particular—and fill in the details of what the UN organization would look like. While in London with the Stettinius mission in April 1944, Bowman had a chance to negotiate directly with Churchill about his plan for a “Council of Europe.” Churchill at first stuck doggedly to a regional rather than a global scheme for world organization, but pushed by Bowman to explain what authority would bind his different regional councils, the prime minister eventually sketched on a piece of paper a “tripod of world peace.” It comprised three regional security councils—the Western Hemisphere, Europe, and Asia—and a “Supreme Council,” under the authority of the three major powers (China was excluded), acting as a largely independent umbrella. He handed the paper to Bowman, then grabbed it back to append a “world court.” He did not oppose a world organization as such, he insisted, only the vague plans that had accompanied such proposals, and he concluded with a carefully worded appeal to the “diaphanous idealism” for which Bowman was known. They had to try, he said, quoting Tennyson’s poetic longing for a parliament of man, to “faintly trust the larger hope.”37 Churchill’s willingness to talk about a global organization and even to sketch a design marked a significant step forward, even if his “tripod” remained narrowly concerned with security and left the regional councils in an ambiguous relationship to the global. It was more than the U.S. government had managed to elicit from him before. His plan for the Council of Europe was a different story. In addition to the United States, the USSR, and Britain, the council would include “eight continental nations”: France, Italy, Iberia, a federated Scandinavia, the Low Countries, a Balkan federation, a Danubian federation, and Poland. The resemblance to the Renner plan, which had caused such a political firestorm in the United States in 1942, was striking, and Churchill’s proposal was not taken seriously in the State Department. Bowman noted only that the plan was not well thought out.38 Whether Churchill even meant to push this proposal earnestly is unclear, for he knew he was fighting a losing battle. He strove to ensure British hegemony in any European council, but his own officials in the Foreign and Colonial Offices increasingly followed Eden in recognizing the lost cause of a defensive regionalism. Churchill’s Council of Europe looked transparently like a European bulwark against the USSR and would prove unsupportable. As one Foreign Office official conceded, the regional councils “could only be put into practical effect inside the framework of a World Organisation embracing all states great and small.” When a meeting of dominion prime ministers the following month also reaffirmed the global ap-

392

/

frustrated globalism, compromise geographies

proach, presumably anticipating looser British control, Churchill’s regionalism seemed doomed. After Tehran a jubilant Roosevelt began mulling over appropriate locations for his United Nations Organization (he mused about the Azores) and requested for the first time an organizational plan from the State Department’s Informal Agenda Group. Senators and congressmen now clamored for details of postwar plans, and Walter Lippmann even appeared at Bowman’s State Department office, desperate for information. But few details were forthcoming, and conservative commentators began to surmise, correctly as it turned out, that secret deals had been made at Tehran. Not even Hull knew the details of Tehran, and he grew suspicious. The naïveté myth began to fill in the resulting vacuum. The government had reached an “extreme low point in the confidence of the country,” Bowman reflected in March 1944, and “the good effect of Moscow has been lost.” In Tehran, “Stalin was master of the party,” he concluded.39 State Department refinements of the draft UN charter continued after the Stettinius mission to London. Department members had envisioned not a standing military but a force seconded from member nations, and they specified for the first time that the four “permanent members” would enjoy the right of veto. Showing it to lawyers (who approved) and senators (who were cagey), Hull took Stettinius, Bowman, and Pasvolsky to present this next iteration to the president in June. A Milquetoast press release revealed little, but newspapers got this point: “State Department experts on international geography and economics” are hard at work, reported the San Francisco Chronicle, and the United States is “the first major nation to present a blueprint for post-war world peace.”40 Copies of the “tentative proposals” were sent to the British, Soviet, and Chinese governments in advance of the next step in UN negotiations: a four-power conference in Washington, D.C., in August 1944. Dumbarton Oaks, a walled and gardened Georgian mansion in the Georgetown section of the capital, named for the Scottish ancestral home of its original owner, was to be the venue. For three years—from Quebec to Casablanca, Moscow to Tehran—Americans had watched summits unfold elsewhere, but now the new world show was coming home. So well had the State Department integrated nationalist interests with global ambition that when the proposals for international organization were shown to the powerful Arthur Vandenberg, a conservative Republican senator and prewar isolationist, he was overjoyed. “The striking thing about it,” he recorded in his diary, “is that it is so conservative from a nationalist standpoint.”41

frustrated globalism, compromise geographies

/

393

the resort to geography: dumbarton oaks The goal of the Dumbarton Oaks conference was to thrash out a draft UN charter. The State Department began final preparations in July 1944, resulting in two working books of compiled materials. Headed by Stettinius, the U.S. delegation included seven senior State Department officials, six generals and admirals, and in bipartisan spirit a lawyer from the Republican National Committee. With the work passing more and more to career officials in the department, only two departmental advisers were included, among them Bowman, who was also reappointed “special adviser” to the secretary of state and president. The British delegation was led by Sir Alexander Cadogan, undersecretary at the Foreign Office, and included Charles Webster and Gladwyn Jebb, with whom Bowman had conferred months earlier in London. The Soviet delegation was headed by the young Andrei Gromyko, freshly appointed to the U.S. ambassadorship. Public anticipation was intense. A potentially damaging broadside by Thomas Dewey, the Republican candidate in the upcoming presidential elections, who felt the conference ratified big four “coercive power,” was headed off, and the Soviet insistence on not meeting with the Chinese was eventually resolved by an agreement to meet in two shifts. When the first phase of the conference, involving the Soviet Union, officially opened on 21 August 1944, the siege of Leningrad had broken, German forces were in broad retreat, and at least in Europe an end loomed to one of the most terrible wars ever waged.42 Rome was in Allied hands, the perennially delayed second front had at last begun in Normandy, and news of the liberation of Paris reached Dumbarton Oaks in midsession. If this now fed British and U.S. urgency about finalizing a postwar agreement, the Soviet Union was enjoying sweeping battlefield success, and every passing day increased their moral and political high ground. The U.S. delegation knew the conference would be arduous but expected success for their broad design of a world organization and did not anticipate the ferocity of debate that quickly ensued. The conference began smoothly enough. The British and Soviet delegations had prepared their own draft proposals, but with British support the State Department draft was adopted as the base document. Less controversial provisions for an international air force and a human rights protocol were easily passed, and the name “United Nations Organization” was also agreed on. But there were thornier issues. In the first place there was a question of purpose that centered on whether the organization would have a purely security func-

394

/

frustrated globalism, compromise geographies

tion or broader functions. Second, the composition of the executive council, now called the Security Council, had to be fixed. Third, the precise nature of the voting procedures, and especially the extent of veto power in the Security Council, became a major issue. But the question of membership became the most explosive of all. Differences over the organization’s purpose emerged immediately. All were agreed, in light of the failure of the League of Nations and its minimal enforcement capacity, that security functions should be central, but the State Department proposals envisaged a major “social and economic” function for the UN. Security questions were inextricably connected to economic issues, the U.S. delegation argued, and Britain concurred, but for the Soviets, negotiating on the heels of the Bretton Woods agreement, the linking of security and economic issues potentially entwined capitalist economic assumptions with security arrangements. Gromyko eventually conceded, and the Economic and Social Council originally advanced by the State Department was approved.43 The question of Security Council membership would not be resolved so easily. At Tehran, the United States had wedged China into the council, and Britain now used the indeterminate status of occupied France to propose a fifth seat. This issue had arisen at London, where Stettinius responded coolly. Publicly, the uncertain complexion of the French government succeeding the Vichy was raised as an objection; Hull especially disdained the Committee of Liberation, led by a mercurial Charles de Gaulle. But the unspoken geopolitical calculation was more important: a fifth seat to France tilted the weight of the council back to Europe and specifically strengthened Britain’s position, whereas the China card made their position weak; despite the dilution of its power the United States acceded to the British proposal, calculating it was a minor retreat. The Soviet government had the most to lose and had consistently rejected a permanent seat for France on the grounds of its powerlessness and defeat in the war, but it, too, eventually acquiesced. A Security Council seat was earmarked for France. The addition of a fifth “policeman” opened the door for more, and Roosevelt had already planned to counteract any French seat with the insistence on a sixth seat, for Latin American. He had Brazil in mind, but it was a transparent move and was quickly shot down.44 The third major issue concerned the proposed Great Power veto that would operate in the Security Council. Actually, it was the whole voting formula that was in question. State Department drafts had assumed that the Security Council would work on a principle of unanimity: whatever the council voted would be carried out unanimously by the Great Powers. But

frustrated globalism, compromise geographies

/

395

this would be difficult to square with the congressional prerogative to declare war, and the State Department, out of clear self-interest, was the first to propose a Great Power veto. But the same veto power could enable other powers to block otherwise unanimous action, and prior to Dumbarton Oaks State Department officials began to have doubts. What if the veto was made nonabsolute? If unanimity of action were still retained, the Great Powers might find themselves obliged to contribute to an enforcement operation they had voted against, potentially even an operation against their own national governments.45 Yet an absolute veto would also virtually guarantee that only the smaller nations would become the targets of UN peacekeeping, and the role of the UN as cover for big power coercion would be transparent. There was a lot of hand wringing in the State Department precisely because there was no clear resolution that best advantaged U.S. interests. In effect, the department wanted the argument both ways: it wanted the prerogative of vetoing proposals antagonistic to U.S. interests yet the ability to prevent vetoes of U.S. global prerogatives. The best compromise the United States delegation could produce, echoing a British suggestion, was that a Great Power’s vote should not be counted when it itself was party to a dispute. This still raised the danger that the United States would have to adhere to a policy it opposed, but given the composition of the Security Council, it was a reasonable calculation that such a formula would more often favor than oppose U.S. interests. Roosevelt eventually accepted this position in his preconference meeting with several delegation members.46 But the veto proposal ran into immediate trouble. The British and Soviet delegates could make much the same calculation, and while Cadogan gave initial support, Gromyko refused. The U.S. formula would retain UN power in the face of Great Power aggression, but it also held out the possibility that four of the Security Council powers could gang up on the fifth, and the Soviet delegation, not unreasonably, now felt vulnerable. Instead, the Soviet delegates resolutely supported the State Department’s initial proposal, an absolute veto in the Security Council, and this led to the most convoluted wrangling at Dumbarton Oaks. The British and U.S. representatives shifted their positions during several weeks of intense jockeying, as much because they were genuinely undecided and even muddled about the implications of different veto arrangements because they were opposed to them. The Soviets had no such uncertainties: they consistently and adamantly argued for absolute veto power despite Roosevelt’s personal appeal to Stalin. After three weeks, the conference deadlocked on the issue, and it was set aside.47

396

/

frustrated globalism, compromise geographies

The final and most delicate issue involved overall UN membership. After only several days of discussion, Gromyko alerted the other delegations that he intended to push for the admission of all sixteen Soviet republics as separate members. Stettinius was so panicked about this request that after consultation with Roosevelt, he pleaded with Gromyko not to publicize this demand lest the whole conference grind to a halt. The conference was subject to disturbingly accurate and systematic press leaks, and Stettinius referred to this request only as “the X matter.” He ordered the small U.S. group who had been present at the meeting not to reveal it even to other members of the delegation and tried to expunge it from the minutes too, but Gromyko’s protest prevailed. Roosevelt sent another telegram to Stalin, but to little avail. Gromyko argued that the Soviet socialist republics were free to pursue their own foreign policy, and technically this was true. But the larger intent was obviously to offset the very real threat of Soviet isolation in the emerging organization.48 In holding themselves blind to Soviet concerns, Britain and the United States, having already stacked the all-important Security Council with their own allies, acted in naked national self-interest. Whatever their disagreements over colonies, these two governments acted more and more in unison at Dumbarton Oaks, and both already represented de facto regional blocs. Of the base membership for the new organization, the twenty-six signatories of the UN Declaration in 1942, there were three quite distinct groups in addition to the Great Powers. There were eight European nations, all of which had been wholly or partly overrun by Axis forces, five members of the British Commonwealth, and nine “Monroe Doctrine” republics from Latin America. Seven of the last group had experienced U.S. military intervention since the last war, and many were still run by puppet dictatorships installed or shored up by the United States. Britain and the United States therefore had their own inbuilt regional blocs in the new organization, and they worked hard to keep it that way. In “accord with customary practice,” the British delegation had consulted with the dominion governments in preparation for the conference and provided periodic briefings throughout; the United States in the person of Cordell Hull likewise “made every effort” to keep the Latin American republics informed, insisting that the new organization “sought to preserve Western Hemispheric principles on a global basis.”49 Contrary to the tack eventually taken in the U.S. press, it was not paranoia but unsentimental realism that led Gromyko and Stalin to insist on membership for the Soviet republics. Stalin would have been a fool not to have recognized the way the United Nations was stacking up, and Stalin was a dictator, not a fool. Gromyko warned that the issue would

frustrated globalism, compromise geographies

/

397

not go away but agreed not to force a definitive solution at Dumbarton Oaks. He was true to his word, raising it again only as a reminder of unfinished business at the end of the conference. The business of the conference was conducted by three main subcommittees responsible for general, legal, and security aspects of the organization and reporting to a joint steering committee. Bowman was assigned to the first subcommittee, which was covering “General Questions of International Organization,” and which included seven Americans (Stettinius, Pasvolsky, and army general Stanley Embick among them), four British delegates including Cadogan, Jebb, and Webster, and three Soviet representatives led by Andrei Gromyko. Bowman also chaired several meetings of the U.S. delegation in the absence of Stettinius or Assistant Secretary Breckenridge Long and helped explore locations for the organization. In addition to the Azores, Roosevelt had tossed out the Pentagon or the Empire State Building as possibilities, but he also felt that the assembly ought to move among continents. Bowman advised against a U.S. location for the United Nations, fearing it would lead to a “Hollywood fiasco,” given the “uncontrolled press and radio” that would crowd around, but no decision was made.50 Bowman’s most substantive contribution came in regard to an issue with which he was closely tied. He chaired the U.S. committee that adjusted the design of the Economic and Social Council, which he pioneered in the State Department and which facilitated the Soviet concession that the UN’s prerogative might go beyond strict security concerns. Less predictably, he also helped draft the human rights provision that had drawn a prickly response from both Britain and the Soviet Union, and even less likely, he first proposed the inclusion of a statement about “sexual equality.” Reduced to a purely internal organizational proposal—employment in the UN would not be barred “because of race, nationality, creed or sex”—this remarkable innovation was quietly dropped by the joint steering committee. On the Brazil question, Bowman thought Roosevelt’s insistence ill-advised and was part of a group that talked him away from it. Tense debate over its inclusion might well rekindle regionalist aspirations elsewhere, he realized, and in any case Brazil had not assuredly matured into a Great Power; jealousies would be raised among the Spanish-speaking republics, especially Argentina. On the veto issue, he accepted the principle of unanimity on the Security Council but agreed with the provision that parties to a dispute not vote, and he worked to smooth over confusions in the U.S. group about the evolution of their own position. When the veto dispute climaxed in the second week of September, he not only opposed acquiescence to the Soviet

398

/

frustrated globalism, compromise geographies

Union but was one of only two members of the U.S. delegation who advocated no compromise whatsoever. Several military delegates felt that they may have to accept the Soviet insistence on an absolute veto if the conference was to be saved and short-term military objectives not jeopardized, but Roosevelt was reluctant.51 The United States did not acquiesce, and the deadlock, along with the unresolved question of Soviet republic membership, hung like a pall over the closing of the first phase of the conference in late September. The second phase of the conference, involving the Chinese, was largely pro forma and treated as a sideshow. Confronted by a shabby mix of polite paternalism and impatience by the United States and Britain, the Chinese delegation had been kept in the wings for more than five weeks and had little leverage. The second shift produced nothing novel. Kept abreast of the first phase of the conference on a daily basis, the Chinese delegation had already expended their major weapon by making routine leaks to James Reston of the New York Times, who, to the horror of Roosevelt and the U.S. delegation, published authoritative updates during first-phase negotiations.52 The conference produced a draft charter that was agreed on among the four powers and could be taken to an inaugural UN convention. It was a compromise with fewer and blunter teeth than first envisaged under Roosevelt’s Four Policemen: there were now five permanent seats diluted by six rotating seats on the Security Council and no provision for a standing military, but the economic and social provisions survived. The two loose ends of membership and veto power loomed large. Nevertheless, the U.S. group embarked on a wide and energetic propaganda campaign, “Operation Soapbox,” to sell what they had achieved to the American public, and Bowman, too, hit the lecture circuit.53 Immediate responses to Dumbarton Oaks among the U.S. public ranged from relief to skepticism, from outrage to enthusiasm: relief for some that the extremes of world government seemed to have been laid well aside; outrage among conservative Americans when Soviet positions on the veto and republic membership became known (all transpiring against the backdrop of a premature Warsaw uprising and Soviet failure to intervene); skepticism by a few that anything new would come of a UN organization; enthusiasm by many that a United Nations might just work. Jaded rationalization was more the mood of British representative Gladwyn Jebb, who lamented that in such “a wicked world” the original hopes for a pacifist globalism may have aimed too high.54 But it was nothing so enigmatic as Jebb’s wicked world that deflated the promise of Dumbarton Oaks. If the conference watered down the grandest aspirations of U.S. globalism, the blame lay as much with the U.S. adminis-

frustrated globalism, compromise geographies

/

399

tration itself as with other participants of the conference. “Although Russian intransigence is often blamed for almost scuttling the United Nations at birth,” concludes one UN historian, “Gromyko, in fact, accommodated the Americans on almost all issues” at the conference.55 In fact, Dumbarton Oaks represented a significant resort to geography, initiated not by traditional defenders of the old world order but by would-be inheritors of the new. If the United States had come to the conference on a carriage of Roosevelt’s most assertive globalism, activated by the dream of power beyond geography, the delegation had also opened the door widest to a United Nations of implicit regional blocs when it played the China card. The other delegations well understood that U.S. economic and military ambition was best placed to exploit the political globalism of the UN, but the transparent attempt to install Brazil on the Security Council, the retreat from an absolute veto, and the inclusion of ten American republics among the original membership of twenty-six, all demonstrated the constitutive regionalism of the U.S. design for a sympathetic UN. The emerging Anglo-American alliance and perfunctory negotiations with the Chinese simply confirmed the status that the USSR could expect in the coming organization. As an astute Charles de Gaulle concluded concerning American strategy for the UN, “Roosevelt . . . intended to lure the Soviets into a group that would contain their ambitions and in which America could unite its dependents.”56 As Robert Hilderbrand has concluded in his excellent historical analysis of the conference, “traditional nationalism” came to replace “the prevention of the next war as the dominant force in postwar policy-making.” All of the Great Powers “feared the effect that such a strong body might have on their own national objectives for the postwar era.”57 The dilution of central-power authority ratified at Dumbarton Oaks sprang directly from this defensive resort to existing state-centered political geographies. Once again “states’ rights” prevailed over federal unity, except this time on the global scale. Put this way, the prospects for the UN were perhaps more ominous than even the Dumbarton Oaks participants could yet see. From the Monroe Doctrine to Eastern Europe to the British Empire, regionalism was premised on a wider geographical fortification of competitive national interests. The slippage from regional associations to “security zones” to “spheres of influence,” driven by a resurgence not just of nationalist interests but also of a traditional geographical calculus of political and economic power, would therefore prove difficult to halt. Hull’s “unhappy past” reappeared as a gloomy future. This was not an inevitable result or a simple retreat. Dumbarton Oaks was a resort to geography, but it was more than simply a retreat to an outmoded nationalism. The strategy that de Gaulle detected also

400

/

frustrated globalism, compromise geographies

began to unravel at Dumbarton Oaks, and the frustration of a placeless globalism nonetheless presaged a new compromise global geography that no one especially desired. Yalta in February 1945 was the next stop en route to a postwar United Nations. For many, Yalta has become a brittle and lasting symbol of the naïveté myth in U.S. foreign policy, whereby a wily Stalin apparently outfoxed a naive Roosevelt, successfully frustrated U.S. global hegemony, and won the first round of the cold war with a sucker punch. But there are several problems with this conservative orthodoxy. It is, first, a classic if updated example of an anticonquest narrative that reaffirms the essential innocence of U.S. strategy while ascribing the lowest motives to its opponents.58 Second, it wants the argument both ways: a virtuous United States stood above the fray of tawdry territorial politics but deserved to win it anyway. Third, the naïveté myth expresses a naïveté of its own insofar as it takes Roosevelt’s idealistic public relations rhetoric seriously. Finally, the myth is historically suspect, since it was at Tehran fifteen months earlier that the geographical carve-up of the postwar world began in earnest, and the diplomatic resort to geography at Dumbarton Oaks was part of the process. The liberal orthodoxy is only the opposite side of this coin and is equally self-serving. It too accepts uncritically Roosevelt’s “idealism,” which is defended as necessary in the face of the alternative, a geographically acquisitive power politics. But Roosevelt surely wanted it both ways himself. He knew he had to fight the territorial fights, tried to concede as little as possible, but wanted above all to protect the larger goal of a United Nations from the collateral diplomatic damage of specific territorial clashes. Yalta does not represent a break in Great Power negotiations so much as a quickening of existing policies. That the naïveté myth still dominates interpretations of Yalta is testimony not just to conservative nationalism in American politics after 1945 but also to the nexus of agreement between conservative and liberal visions. By all accounts Yalta was a tawdry scene, and the tawdriness was nothing if not multilateral. Politically inspired deals came thick and fast. Quite apart from negotiating a friendly Polish government, Stalin committed to enter the war against Japan in exchange for territory taken by the Japanese in 1905 (southern Sakhalin), the Kuril Islands, and rights to the Manchurian section of the trans-Siberian railway to Vladivostok. Stalin and Churchill carved up much of eastern and southern Europe, and Indochina was earmarked for independence from French colonial control. Any U.S. objection to Soviet prerogative in territory reconquered from German control was quickly countered by the argument that when U.S. and British troops moved into Italy, before opening the second front, they cited urgent mili-

frustrated globalism, compromise geographies

/

401

tary exigency for failing to consult with Stalin when they set up a provisional Italian government that excluded partisans and communists. Stalin had protested but relented in the face of the inevitable, and an Anglo-American alliance could have little complaint if the Red Army invoked the same courtesy after beating back the Germans along a wide front from the Balkans to the Baltic. Bowman was to have been at Yalta if not for laryngitis and flu, and one can only imagine his response had he been there.59 Certainly none of the principals seemed too pained about the outcome as they toasted each other with vodka and caviar on the last night and decided on San Francisco for the founding UN conference. Roosevelt wanted a postwar world open for business, and the “American delegation at Yalta considered the United Nations to be the crucial issue of the conference.” The geographical contradictions of Dumbarton Oaks were accentuated at Yalta, and the emerging regional blocs sat awkwardly alongside Roosevelt’s continued rhetorical internationalism. But there was also real progress toward a global organization, and Roosevelt left Yalta “with his two allies firmly committed to the UN policy, largely on American terms.”60 But by April, Roosevelt was suddenly dead, and the contradictions were further accentuated, not just because the “dead are peering through the windows,” as Bowman put it, but also because some of the so-called lesser nations were now invited to the party.61 The touch of democracy occasioned by congressional representation and the presence of forty-three other nations augured against Roosevelt’s dire hope that the solidification of national interests into regional blocs could be minimized. Quite contradictory positions among the U.S. delegates exposed the dilemma at its most extreme. Although the immediate issue was the status of the Monroe Doctrine, the larger predicament was the issue that had dogged them from the first State Department deliberations: how to accommodate new and existing regional and national claims without abrogating a robust political and economic globalism.

the “ regionalism crisis ” : geographical contradictions of political globalism The United Nations Conference on International Organization opened in San Francisco on 25 April 1945, the same day the Red Army and the U.S. First Army first greeted each other face to face on the banks of the Elbe.62 The soldiers were euphoric and the public too, and German unconditional surrender soon followed. After years of war, optimism filled the air. The U.S. delegation took over the Fairmont Hotel, and although the conference officially met in

402

/

frustrated globalism, compromise geographies

the Beaux Arts Opera House, the real action was centered on the “big four” meetings, which invariably occurred in the hotel penthouse, occupied by Stettinius, now secretary of state following the resignation of a seriously ill Hull. Stettinius headed the delegation, which included Senators Arthur Vandenberg and Tom Connally, Congressmen Charles Eaton and Sol Bloom (all veterans of the State Department’s postwar advisory committees), Harold Stassen (ex-governor of Minnesota and a naval commander), and Virginia Gildersleeve (dean of Barnard College). In addition to a technical staff headed by Pasvolsky, the delegation had three “principal advisers”: Hamilton Fish Armstrong, John Foster Dulles, nephew of Robert Lansing and an activist Presbyterian and Republican who was emerging as a foreign policy broker after advising the 1944 Dewey campaign, and Isaiah Bowman. The loose ends of Dumbarton Oaks—UN membership and the Security Council veto—were the flashpoints in San Francisco. The membership issue erupted as soon as delegates were seated, making Eastern Europe an early and consistent focus of the conference. Molotov, leading the Soviet delegation, insisted that the Polish government be seated at the conference, but Stettinius objected that the Lublin government had not added representation from the “London Poles” in accord with the Yalta agreement. The question of the Soviet republics quickly followed, and although President Truman was indignant about the Yalta compromise he inherited, he had the U.S. delegation support admission for the Ukraine and Belorussia. The Latin American nations now balked, insisting that Argentina also merited immediate membership. Stettinius brokered a compromise in which Argentina would be admitted in exchange for a positive Latin American vote on Belorussia and the Ukraine, but Molotov was incensed. Something was wrong, he rasped, if the country over which the European war began and which was subsequently devastated was excluded while Argentina, which had continued to provide the Nazis with valuable resources until recent months, was admitted. Many newspapers in the United States agreed. “I saw Stettinius and Nelson Rockefeller marshal the twenty Latin American republics in one solid block,” witnessed Walter Lippmann, and “steamroller” the trade-off of Argentina and Ukraine-Belorussia “through the United Nations.”63 The veto issue prompted an even greater crisis. At Yalta a compromise was agreed whereby the veto would be operable in “enforcement” decisions but not in the case of peaceful settlement. This was a very nebulous distinction, however, and while the United States assumed a narrowly applicable veto, Gromyko, heading the Soviet delegation after Molotov’s departure, took an expansive view. An impasse was reached by the end of May, with Truman instructing Stettinius not to budge and Gromyko acting on

frustrated globalism, compromise geographies

/

403

similar instructions. Outmaneuvered on Argentina and Poland, Stalin dug in on the veto. The Soviets were pilloried in the U.S. press as selfishly obstructing world peace, and few displayed the sympathy of Sumner Welles: “Russia’s veto right is her only assurance that the United Nations will not endanger Russian security.”64 The drama dragged on, with significant swings in the positions of the main delegations but without resolution. Only after Stettinius telegraphed the U.S. Embassy in Moscow to intercede with the Soviet leader did Stalin appease U.S. and British demands. The difference in the positions, he said, was “insignificant.” Whether simply cutting his losses with British and American blocs stacked against him in the emerging organization is not clear. But for those nations excluded from the Security Council, with no access to the veto, this unseemly struggle was a bitter pill, and the USSR’s insistence on a strong veto dissolved much of the moral high ground they had gained in the fight over Argentina. Bowman gravitated toward Texas senator Tom Connally, who tried to obtain the geographer as a personal adviser, and to Arthur Vandenberg from his native Michigan, and his positions on the major questions mirrored their conservatism. On seats for the Ukraine and Belorussia he was largely resigned. On the veto and voting questions, he stopped short of the hardliners’ refusal to negotiate concessions with the broad Soviet interpretation, agreeing with Stassen that the real issue was the lack of “an agreed American position.” At the height of the veto impasse, he advised a chagrined Vandenberg against threatening to “go home,” suggesting instead that the United States could score major public relations points by continuing to “suffer in silence.” Most of Bowman’s work on the veto question came in a subcommittee with Dulles and Pasvolsky aimed at wording successive U.S. proposals.65 His major contribution may have been his role in drafting Article 55, on social and economic cooperation, and his insertion of language about “cultural and educational cooperation”— a not uncontroversial issue amid multilateral fears of ideological indoctrination in the resulting council. He grumbled a lot too about the preamble to the charter, opposing Gildersleeve’s proposal on sexual equality in the job market on the grounds that the “corollary issue relating to race, color or creed” would surely follow. Sexual equality was an issue for Woodrow Wilson, he conceded, but it was forced on Wilson in Paris by “organized Women’s groups,” and “the progress which women have made since Versailles makes this issue a completely dead one.” He also ridiculed a Russian proposal on “respect for human rights in particular the right to work and the right to education and also for fundamental freedoms for all without distinction as to race, language, religion or sex.”66

404

/

frustrated globalism, compromise geographies

It was in San Francisco that Bowman’s long-simmering feud with Pasvolsky erupted. Thinking Pasvolsky “dangerous to American interests,” temperamentally un-American, and involved in murky “relations with the Russians,” he concluded that it was “a mistake to put one man with his background into a key position.”67 Here, at least, Bowman and the Soviets agreed, because the latter also deeply distrusted Pasvolsky, a White Russian émigré who had fled the revolution. Pasvolsky resented Bowman quite as much, especially for his public acclaim following the London mission, and unceremoniously wrote the geographer out of subsequent historical accounts of the origins of the UN.68 But there were far more momentous clashes in San Francisco. Lost in the cold war scripting of this history is a telling story about the geography of postwar globalism. The salience of the UN conference emerges as much from debates that surfed through the dominant U.S. delegation as from the actual ink of the charter and from the ways these debates were refracted onto the world map. It was here that the geographical contradictions of American globalism, from Wilson to Roosevelt, came most forcefully to the surface. It was the State Department blueprint via Dumbarton Oaks that occupied the conference, and this had lasting consequences for the UN, but just as important, the U.S. delegation itself was deeply ambivalent about what it had produced. Roosevelt’s geographer found himself stretched to the limits of his ability to reconcile the conflicting geographical requirements that lay at the heart of American globalism. The vision of an open political and economic world of the sort Roosevelt envisaged awkwardly contradicted the hemispheric privilege and exceptionalism enshrined in the Monroe Doctrine. U.S. internationalists had always had to tiptoe carefully around the Monroe Doctrine, but never before, not even in the Senate in 1919, was the Monroe Doctrine so fully confronted by a U.S. globalism. If any vestige of the Monroe Doctrine was to be retained, how could the United States object to regional claims in Eastern or Western Europe or to British Empire exceptionalism? Others were rarely slow to raise this contradiction—it had been a smug British favorite since at least 1942—but at San Francisco the majority of states represented at the conference now bristled at such big-power prerogatives. For them the birth of the United Nations should signal the demise of such regional hegemonies of powerful over weak nations. International expectations were high, as were internationalist aspirations in the United States itself, and Roosevelt’s death multiplied the expectations for a conference that was now emotionally attached to his legacy. But such aspirations also provoked the ire of wary conservatives in Congress and even some in the State Depart-

frustrated globalism, compromise geographies

/

405

ment who balked at any weakening of the Monroe Doctrine. This was not a contest of nationalism versus internationalism so much as a contest between regional and global visions of a nationalist internationalism. It led to an outright “regionalism crisis” over the constitutive geography of UN globalism and a crisis of U.S. globalism overall.69 The discussion of regionalism and the Monroe Doctrine in the U.S. delegation was first provoked not by Latin American concerns but by Soviet interests in Eastern Europe. It had been agreed informally at Dumbarton Oaks that no regional organization could take “enforcement action” without Security Council authorization, but acceptance of the veto provision at Yalta meant that a single Security Council member could block regional enforcement, thereby gutting effective regional prerogatives. Early in the conference Molotov introduced a series of bilateral treaties that the USSR had concluded with various European states—Britain, Czechoslovakia, France, Poland, and Yugoslavia—to prevent any resurgence of German militarism in the borderlands of Eastern Europe. France had made similar treaties. Insofar as they were a local preemption of a not-yet-ratified UN framework and were vital for immediate security purposes, Molotov sought exemption from Security Council authority. The Italian precedent again lurked in the background, and Pasvolsky, drafting the initial U.S. response, treaded lightly. Recognizing the increased regional prerogative it gave the USSR, but recognizing too that this exception to UN control did not itself harden an Eastern European bloc, Pasvolsky tried to finesse the amendment through both the U.S. delegation and the conference, but he failed. The immediate concern in the U.S. delegation was less with Europe than with the Americas. Arthur Vandenberg was the U.S. delegate responsible for “regional arrangements,” and he quickly objected that if the general principle of Security Council authority over regional arrangements were maintained, it would “spell the end of the Monroe Doctrine.” The U.S. could be vetoed in its own backyard, and the Senate would never agree to that. Pasvolsky responded that Vandenberg’s fears were unfounded. On the one hand, if a Security Council member vetoed any proposed U.S. action in the Americas, the United States could always invoke the right of selfdefense. On the other hand, the United States was protected against unwelcome interference in the Western Hemisphere by dint of its own veto power on the Security Council. Did self-defense include U.S. defense of Argentina? asked the banker and assistant secretary of war John McCloy. Did not Vandenberg risk jettisoning a worldwide system for the sake of an old regionalism? asked Harold Stassen. Bowman was in a tricky spot. He still embraced the Monroe Doctrine but was unwilling to promote its regional-

406

/

frustrated globalism, compromise geographies

ism so outspokenly at the expense of international organization, as Vandenberg now seemed to do. Yet he also distrusted the vague language of Pasvolsky’s defense—a “weak and vacillating” solution, as Stassen called it—which left the USSR with a power in Europe that now seemed exempt from veto. In deference to Vandenberg the delegation eventually included a minor strengthening of regional prerogatives. Stassen and Bowman continued to object, arguing for further curbs on regional power (Stassen) and Soviet power in particular (Bowman), but Bowman’s attempt to derail U.S. support for the amendment was rebuffed.70 The geographical contradiction that Roosevelt had always skated over now writhed on the table. It was felt sharply by Bowman but by Vandenberg even more acutely. After the Soviet amendment, which exempted preexisting treaties, was accepted by the big four, he dolefully recorded that he “could not object” because he was already on record advocating immediate military alliances to prevent Axis rearmament. The corollary, he concluded, was that the Monroe Doctrine, not covered in the Europe-specific language of the amendment, was evacuated. How, he brooded, could “legitimate” regional arrangements be protected “without inviting the formation of a lot of dangerous new ‘regional spheres of interest?’”71 How, in other words, could they retain Monroe Doctrine privileges without diluting the power of a U.S.-disposed United Nations? Just as much as Roosevelt or Bowman, Vandenberg wanted it both ways. They fought for a U.S. globalism that kept the regional prerogatives of the Monroe Doctrine intact—a global Monroe Doctrine indeed. Informed by Nelson Rockefeller, assistant secretary of state for Latin America, that the South American republics were also up in arms, Vandenberg resolved to act. Latin American leaders feared the effects of communism on their own working and peasant classes even more than the indignities of the Monroe Doctrine, and they erupted at the possibility that Latin American security might be subject to British, French, Chinese, or Soviet veto. Vandenberg therefore sought to insert the Act of Chapultepec in the Russian amendment. Agreed on only two months earlier between the United States and the Latin American republics, this act was “merely the modern name for the Monroe Doctrine,” the senator believed, although he did not put it quite so bluntly to Latin American leaders. In any case, it reiterated joint hemispheric defense, and he felt its inclusion provided a deft means of smuggling protection for the Monroe Doctrine into the UN Charter. Receiving enthusiastic support from Cuban and Colombian delegates, with whom Rockefeller tested the waters, the senator went public with this proposal.

frustrated globalism, compromise geographies

/

407

Its intent was so transparent, however, that “ ‘Hell’ broke loose.” The Soviet delegation sensed the subterfuge to weaken their security in Eastern Europe, while many Latin American leaders were utterly disaffected by the position they now seemed to occupy between the twin threats of communism and an arrogant Monroe Doctrine. Vandenberg recoiled from what he had unleashed as new regional claims proliferated: Australia weighed in for its own regional protection, Britain and France perceived the need for a more explicit Western European union, and other regional groups organized. Most horrifying for the senator was the “Arabian bloc.” Furious at this can of worms, Stettinius upbraided Rockefeller, and on the day of German surrender, made the senator defend his proposal to the entire U.S. delegation. It was an “acrimonious” meeting. Vandenberg got some support from the military, who had long chafed at the openness of global security arrangements but who were muzzled by Roosevelt, and more explicit support from his fellow Republicans Bloom and Eaton. But most in the State Department feared, as Roosevelt had, that such an explicit embrace of a self-serving regionalism would gut the global organization. Pasvolsky and Stassen led the fight. The staunchest proponent of a jeopardized globalism, Pasvolsky was explicit that the greatest American good would come from keeping regional blocs as powerless as possible. Vandenberg in turn was stunned at Pasvolsky’s casual avowal that the United States would take unilateral action, regardless of the UN, when it suited U.S. interests, thinking this a much greater threat to UN unity than regionalism.72 If Bowman detested Pasvolsky’s initial proposal, he also knew that Vandenberg’s suggestion, in its present form, could be fatal to any serious UN organization, although he did favor some kind of reaffirmation of the Monroe Doctrine. Armstrong agreed, and Vandenberg, who at first dug in his heels, suggesting they should retract their vote for the Russian proposal, now had to reassert his own internationalism: “We do not propose to give regional arrangements any such supremacy as will destroy the unity of the world organization, and invite a general break-up of the world into regional groups,” he conceded.73 But many from the State Department now recognized that it might already be too late. The conference was in turmoil, Molotov was leaving, and the press had the story. A badly split U.S. delegation had no solution or any obvious means of arriving at one in regard to the regional crisis. Intense discussion of regionalism and globalism engulfed the U.S. delegation in the second week of May 1945. Consistent stances were a rarity as delegation members genuinely struggled to fix their own reconciliations of globalism and Monroe. They had struck the hard-core contradiction of a

408

/

frustrated globalism, compromise geographies

nationalist internationalism. A State Department official volunteered that mention of the Monroe Doctrine in the League of Nations Covenant had always been an “embarrassment,” and Vandenberg allowed that any mention of the Monroe Doctrine in the absence of world organization was surely “outdated.” They looked to the Truman White House for guidance but none was forthcoming. Stettinius, present for the Act of Chapultepec in order to secure Latin American registration for the San Francisco conference and thereby ensure the U.S. bloc, now secured testy approval from Alberto Lleras Camargo, the Colombian foreign minister and spokesperson for the Latin American delegations, to include mention of the act in the charter. He had Bowman, Dulles, Pasvolsky, and James Dunn draft the wording of the new formula, which expanded the concept of self-defense from the national to the regional scale in cases where nonaggression “arrangements” existed. A skittish consensus seemed in sight whereby inclusion of the Act of Chapultepec would finger “the historical chain . . . of events” from Monroe, as Bowman put it. They knew this would create a lightning rod and would require Truman’s approval, which it received despite opposition from the retired Cordell Hull and more surprisingly from the War Department, where even Stimson, a traditional regionalist, felt it gave too much authority to regional arrangements.74 Should Britain or the USSR balk at this delicate wording, Bowman understood, the blunt question would be “whether the United States would wish to give up its hemispheric organization in order to preserve the world organization.” Neither he nor anyone else in the delegation was willing to entertain such an all-or-nothing predicament, and their work in the first half of May was largely focused on devising a text that would let the United States have it both ways. The crucial language read: “The right to take measures of self-defense against armed attack shall apply to arrangements, like those embodied in the Act of Chapultepec, under which all members of a group of states agree to consider an attack against any one of them as an attack against all of them.” Gromyko responded that he would have to study it, but Eden, in his most angry outburst of the conference, exploded at such a naked American exceptionalism, momentarily rupturing the harmony that had prevailed between the United States and Britain at San Francisco. It “would result in regionalism of the worst kind,” and he objected that “if such a provision as this were included in the Charter he would not be able to sign it.” “Either we have a world organization or we don’t.”75 The geographical flip-flop on regionalism was now complete. Here was Stettinius, backed by the entire U.S. delegation, defending regional exceptions to the world organization while the British publicly insisted on globalism! But

frustrated globalism, compromise geographies

/

409

the impasse did not last long, and a private huddle between Eden and Stettinius quickly restored Anglo-American harmony. With the USSR and the United States writing their own regional blocs into the charter, Britain wanted the same privilege in Western Europe, where, Eden said, he was worried about Soviet expansionism in the Mediterranean. Thus the regional provision was subsequently generalized, and the specific reference to the Act of Chapultepec was omitted. Stettinius conferred again with Truman, and with Vandenberg he confronted the Latin American leaders, who acquiesced only when Stettinius agreed to hold a hemispheric conference to implement the Act of Chapultepec, and Vandenberg promised that the Senate would make explicit that this delicately worded article of the charter covered regional defense arrangements in the Americas. The irony of Stettinius’s appeal to the Latin American leaders—that they eschew a “small hemispheric view” and embrace “world leadership,” when of course it was stubborn U.S. calculation about regional blocs that caused the crisis in the first place—is matched only by the cynicism of Vandenberg’s appeal that the Latin Americans trust his “well known sympathy” for their regional interests while he was simultaneously advising Stettinius to stop the Latin Americans from “pushing us around.”76 In the United Nations Charter, one’s eyes can easily glaze over the dry language of Articles 51 and 52. The seemingly innocuous wording conveys little of the intense political battle that went on in San Francisco or the stakes that were in play, especially within the U.S. delegation, over the appropriate political geography of the United Nations. A second issue at San Francisco, that of trusteeship, only confirmed the extent to which an American globalism was premised on specific nationalist and regional interests, and again bared the contradictions of regionalism. Bowman’s personal flip-flop on this issue was dramatic. Trusteeship was omitted from the Dumbarton Oaks agenda, not in deference to British colonial sensibilities, but because the U.S. military was vehement about the need to occupy an array of Pacific Islands as strategic bases. U.S. possession of these bases had to be unambiguous, the military argued, not subject to the political smog of UN trusteeship and the whim of a body the United States did not control. Roosevelt went along, calculating that the bases could double as airports for commercial airline companies such as Pan Am.77 Having shepherded trusteeship questions through the State Department since 1942, Bowman felt proprietary, and his advice was carefully solicited. He respected Stassen, who favored a wide-ranging plank on trusteeship, but thought the military had a good argument on bases. It is easy to “appeal to the patriotism of the people” in support of Stimson’s demand that the United States simply take what it needs in the Pacific, Bowman argued prior

410

/

frustrated globalism, compromise geographies

to the conference, but such unilateral action would “destroy what we are going to San Francisco to achieve.” He understood the importance of the bases, but the priority surely was to finesse the bases without establishing a precedent for others or closing off economic intercourse, and this could be achieved only if the United States first set up “a principle of trusteeship in the interests of the natives.”78 It was the regionalism dilemma in a different form. The discussion of trusteeship hit a rock when the Chinese and Soviet delegations took explicitly anticolonial positions, proposing that “independence” be written in as the eventual goal of trusteeship. In so doing, they sided strongly with the so-called small nations. The prospect of a globally ordained goal of independence was too much for Britain and France, and the State Department too had long since backed away from such a position. Bowman was pivotal in shifting the fulcrum of debate toward the vaguer goal of “selfgovernment.”79 Stassen, Dulles, and most of the delegation thought they could finesse the issue by referring to “progressive development toward selfgovernment,” but Bowman, whose position had evolved considerably in a month, insisted on confronting the contradiction squarely. In a turbulent delegation meeting on 18 May, he was invited by Stettinius to address the trusteeship issue. We are “face to face with a real problem,” he announced grimly and immediately blamed their predicament on the Soviets for having the audacity even to raise the question of independence. After sarcastically commenting that the peoples surrounding the USSR could themselves do with a little independence, Bowman argued that the real motive here was Soviet expansionism into ex-colonies, and he launched a proto–cold war tirade that reached a new level of anti-Sovietism in the U.S. delegation. “When perhaps the inevitable struggle came between Russia and ourselves,” he predicted, “the question would be who are our friends.”80 The regionalism pot he had helped stir two weeks earlier was now fully cooked, and his remarks set off another polarization of the U.S. delegation. Deft consensus was blown apart again. One official defended independence for dependent territories as the dying wish of the late President Roosevelt, and Adlai Stevenson insisted that anything short of independence would draw blaring newspaper headlines that the United States opposed colonial liberty. Others thought the language of self-determination was sufficient. Still others picked up Bowman’s invitation and ran with it. For New Jersey congressman Charles Eaton, the predicament was clear and simple: “who was going to be masters of the world.”81 The implication of Bowman’s position was also clear: with bigger fish to fry, any principled imperatives concerning dependent peoples could wait.

frustrated globalism, compromise geographies

/

411

Erstwhile champion of trusteeship principles “in the interests of the natives,” Bowman now threw the people and the principles to the wind for the sake of a nationalist contest with the USSR, which he now saw as the central threat to an American Lebensraum. The conference did eventually establish a Trusteeship Council that had narrowly circumscribed powers, fell short of requiring British, French, and Dutch decolonization, and sanctioned U.S. control of several Pacific islands confiscated from the Japanese. The crisis of regionalism at San Francisco has traditionally been seen as an outgrowth of the hardening bipolar confrontation between U.S. and Soviet leaders and to a lesser extent as a contest between regionalism and globalism within the U.S. delegation. Although it was certainly provoked in response to Soviet attempts to exempt preexisting European treaties from UN control, it is important to recall that Vandenberg’s earlier consternation was raised not directly in competition for global control but in regard to hemispheric defense for the United States. The regionalism crisis was not so much a by-product of emerging cold war tensions as a preexisting condition that became entwined with that confrontation. It predated San Francisco, was born from the contradictory geography inherent in U.S. internationalism, and flourished when that vision blossomed into an American globalism. That incipient cold war tension became braided with the struggle over regionalism is hardly surprising, but it was stubborn defense of the Monroe Doctrine that made it so. Thus the regionalism crisis encompassed globalism; it did not intrude from the outside. Regionalism was not alien to, but inherent within, the specific vision of twentieth-century U.S. globalism. A U.S. globalism that was prepared to jettison such regional prerogatives and cede a modicum of power to a global organization it did not entirely control could easily have avoided the coming denouement. But no such risky magnanimity governed Vandenberg’s or Bowman’s or even Pasvolsky’s vision for the UN. Nor did it rule Roosevelt’s vision. Nor is it plausible to argue that regionalism is inherently contradictory to any global vision. For Churchill particularly, regionalism was a strategy for maintaining global power, an effort to divide and conquer, and it was Roosevelt’s brilliance to comprehend that U.S. global power no longer depended on such a strategy. The ambivalence of Churchill and Stalin concerning United Nations globalism reflected an understanding that the UN was inflected by a specifically American globalism emanating from the State Department, and the resort to regionalism by the British and Soviet leaders was defensive from the beginning. The United Nations was to be the political embodiment of the American Lebensraum, a new federalism at the global scale that opened the world to ordered political-economic expansion.

412

/

frustrated globalism, compromise geographies

But some were more equal than others at San Francisco, as the veto provision ensured, and in the postwar global market it was well understood, echoing a contemporaneous George Orwell, that one would be more equal than the rest. In 1945, globalism, by definition, spoke with an American accent.

the rest is geography “Behind the scenes in Washington, a new world is being planned for you,” began an extraordinary 1942 article in H. L. Mencken’s periodical American Mercury. Clearly written with State Department approval but without direct attribution to State Department sources, it went on to give an authoritative summary of the highly secret work of the Postwar Advisory Committee: If the plans materialize, you are going to be given a try at running the world. . . . If you think that defeating the Axis is the chief aim of the Government’s foreign policy, you are going to get a surprise. American leadership in world affairs, looking toward a pacific and prosperous epoch, is the ultimate goal of those in Washington who are endeavoring to design the shape of things to come.82

Such candor and clarity in the press was unprecedented and presumably reflected an attempt by frustrated officials to convey their nationally focused larger vision to the American people. Certainly by the time of the San Francisco conference, no one on the delegation disagreed with Congressman Eaton that they were seeking to be “masters of the world,” although they may have been embarrassed at the brusqueness with which he stated the shared goal. Three years of State Department work culminated in San Francisco, and for Bowman the conference represented the pinnacle of his career in foreign policy. He was a lead architect of the articles dealing with economic and social cooperation, the Economic and Social Council, and the trusteeship provisions, especially the linkage between trusteeship and economic development. While conservatives in the United States railed at any concessions to the Soviets, Roosevelt liberals, such as Commerce Department adviser Frank Waring, found the delegation too “timid and legalistic” and the three principal advisers pedantic.83 It was probably Bowman’s legalism and pedantic attention to detail that got him his last job of the conference, coordinating and compiling the delegation’s final report to Truman. After many days of round-the-clock editing, Bowman gave the 266-page report to Truman prior to his 26 June closing speech at the conference; two weeks later it was

frustrated globalism, compromise geographies

/

413

released to the public. Mindful of Wilson’s fate, Bowman took the U.S. Senate as his target audience.84 In a long walk around Union Square, as the conference wound down, Stettinius offered Bowman the job as U.S. delegate to the Interim United Nations Commission, which would now take over, but he demurred, suggesting instead Alger Hiss, State Department organizer of the Dumbarton Oaks and San Francisco conferences.85 Ironically, Bowman soon found himself assisting Stettinius with his career. The secretary was widely believed to have fumbled negotiations in Yalta, allowing the Soviet Union to add the Belorussia and Ukraine seats to the General Assembly,86 and Truman wanted James Byrnes as secretary of state. But the resignation of a secretary of state has to be choreographed. The San Francisco conference delayed any public action, and Stettinius did not receive definitive word of Truman’s intent until 21 June. Having lived with rumors of his demise throughout the conference, he was deeply resentful and called Bowman to the penthouse. Stettinius knew he had been appointed as “a pair of legs for FDR” and thought he deserved better,87 but Bowman advised against any impetuous rejection of the U.S. ambassadorship to the UN, which Truman dangled in front of Stettinius. From secretary of state to U.S. ambassador was an ignominious demotion, Stettinius felt. But Truman was “in a jam,” Bowman advised, having promised the job to Byrnes, and he convinced Stettinius that he could carry off the UN ambassadorship as a logical next step in his public service. They met with Truman’s emissary to hammer out details. First was the extraordinary calculation that went into the timing. With the Senate due to take up ratification of the UN Charter on 28 and 29 June, they agreed to have Stettinius’s resignation announced the day before so that, in the press, the 28th would be “Ed’s day,” as Bowman put it. Byrnes’s name would be sent to the Senate the day after, giving him his own day in the headlines. They then organized the mutual letters of resignation and the UN appointment, with Bowman drafting the secretary’s letter of resignation. Both letters were edited by shuttling them back and forth between San Francisco and Washington, and on the day of Truman’s closing address, Bowman had a brief meeting with the president to confirm the details. Earlier, en route to the airport with Stettinius for Truman’s arrival, Bowman even found himself interceding by telephone with Virginia Stettinius, the secretary’s wife, who was livid at Truman for shunting her husband aside and even madder at her husband for not consulting her in the whole matter.88 From Wilson and the Council on Foreign Relations to Roosevelt and beyond, twentieth-century American internationalism was an economic strategy as much as a political commitment. It provided an acceptable rationale

414

/

frustrated globalism, compromise geographies

for postwar planning that was oriented strictly toward national self-interest. As the struggle over the UN vividly indicates, Roosevelt’s internationalism in particular was less a departure from previous foreign policy than a global extension of an already existing internationalism. The Monroe Doctrine embodied an older, more limited internationalism focused on Latin America, but by 1943 this weapon aimed at European economic prerogative was expanded from the continental to the global scale and inverted from a defensive to an offensive strategy. Globalism, not internationalism, was the crucial issue. As Bowman put it, “In the economic field we shall want to be in on everything the world around.”89 But the failure of the second moment of the American Century paralleled the failure of the first. The halcyon antigeography of the American Lebensraum nurtured the seeds of its own impossibility. Initially conceived to prevent the balance of economic and political power from reverting to competing geographical localisms, the UN was the bastard child of a locationally and politically specific universalism emanating from Washington, D.C. Long before the San Francisco conference, the self-interest involved in conceiving the world as unhinged from its geography—Hull’s adieu to the “unhappy past”—was clearly visible. As Bowman conceded about arrangements for the UN, “Down to the time of the Yalta conference, we could not find a generally satisfactory formula for having our cake and eating it too”—for designing a world body in which all were equal but some more equal than others.90 The relapse into regionalism certainly involved compromises with Britain and the USSR in particular, but it also provided the means for accessing most of the cake in hopes of eating it too. Yet the UN can be considered stillborn, as is sometimes claimed, only if one accepts the postgeographical fantasies for an American Lebensraum. Britain, the USSR, and especially the United States ultimately failed to create a global policing mechanism that would do their bidding. Rather, its subsequent functionality and dysfunctionality continued to express the contradiction of its own founding assumption, namely, that territorial sovereignty as enshrined in the system of discrete and exclusive territorial states is the basis for a globalism beyond territorial power. It was an internationalism of nationalisms, a geographically defined abstraction from geography. There was no “being able to get away from the nation,” Bowman lamented, much as he helped to make it so. For the UN’s founders, nations were the naturally evolved geographical expression of a people, one of the self-evident truths in Bowman’s early draft of a UN constitution. The suppleness of Bowman’s earlier claim, that “to a revolutionary extent man makes his own geography,” was now replaced by the brittle inevitability of nationalism coiled

frustrated globalism, compromise geographies

/

415

in the rhetoric of internationalism. The success of the international organization “for which we strive today,” he once declared, “turns largely on the wide recognition of national interest in an international undertaking for peace.”91 Frank Waring was prophetic in his assessment of the U.S. performance in San Francisco: “This country, for the first time, has a pre-eminent position in world affairs and is acting very much like a tired liberal who, when he is finally given responsibility for government, becomes as conservative as his predecessor.”92 It was a profound observation. The seamless geography of global intercourse envisaged in a supranational UN was frustrated by contradictions at the heart of the vision itself. Yet the postwar world was no simple reversion to prewar nationalisms. Lloyd Gardner traces the origins of postwar spheres of influence to the fateful British-Nazi pact at Munich in 1938 and the Nazi-Soviet pact a year later.93 Prior to the conferences at Dumbarton Oaks and Tehran, however, there was no certainty that such regional spheres would materialize. That took a further ingredient: the regionalism at the core of U.S. planning for postwar globalism—the assumption that the global economy and polity should be Americanism writ large. This was the major catalyst hardening regional blocs into spheres of influence by the middle of 1945. In the interstices of that frustrated globalism, a compromise world geography emerged, organized on the transnational more than the national scale. The scale of political and economic organization was indeed enlarged but stopped short of the global by the impending cold war. It was a compromise geography and a compromised geography, a truncated fruit of U.S. globalism, which as late as San Francisco could have ripened with different results. At least until the 1990s, the UN never did work as the instrument of U.S. foreign policy—the global political manager of the American Empire—intended by its State Department architects. On the one hand, postwar independence movements fought for and won decolonization, and from China to Cuba, Guatemala to Vietnam, they threatened to circumscribe U.S. globalism on the ground while confronting it in the UN General Assembly. On the other hand, the spurious if self-serving ambition of a globalism beyond geography gave rise to its mocking opposite: the trivial binary geographies of the cold war, containment, and the domino effect. Endemic to the architecture of the American Lebensraum in the early 1940s, this frustrated globalism could have turned out quite differently.

PART V THE BITTER END

15 DEFEAT FROM THE JAWS OF VICTORY

The end of World War II should have been Isaiah Bowman’s crowning moment. The United Nations Charter was ratified in October 1945, and to his initial relief a more conservative, farm-raised midwesterner now occupied the White House. “We can look forward to the greatest age in mankind,” Harry Truman had announced at Potsdam in July 1945 as the American Century seemed again within grasp. The coming era would be more conservative, which only augured well for the post-Roosevelt Bowman. Generally reluctant to reveal much to the media, he was more forthcoming with the easing of wartime secrecy, and his every movement and utterance— concerning science or education, immigration or resource conservation, and especially U.S. foreign policy—were eager newspaper fodder. The “leading geographer in the U.S. and probably in the whole world,” commented Henry Luce’s Life in a lengthy 1945 feature on Bowman, his geographical abilities are “an important asset” to the country.1 Bowman naturally assumed that important personages would beat their way to his door after the war, and they did, but not always with the results he wanted or expected. Rather than capping a distinguished career in geography, science, and government, the late 1940s brought a comprehensive array of defeats for the “dean of American geographers.” He refocused his attention on Johns Hopkins University in the autumn of 1945 but found a new generation of faculty and students more alienated from his imperious administration than ever before. Worse, his burning ambition to build a

420

/

defeat from the jaws of victory

school of geography did not gel into a coherent faculty. Now sixty-six years old and still turning up at the office before seven in the morning, his furious work schedule took its toll, and his illnesses grew more frequent. He saw his chosen discipline further damaged by the closure of the geography program at Harvard, a very personal defeat, not just because of his own Harvard associations, but also, as we shall see, because of the tragic role he himself played in its demise. The founding of the National Science Foundation, in which he played a central role, should have vindicated his 1930s ambitions for the Science Advisory Board and consummated a long career in the leadership of U.S. science, but this too turned into a bitter defeat. A top-secret dalliance with atomic policy only provided further vent for his bitterness. In all three of these roles—at Harvard, with the NSF, and in atomic policy—Bowman invariably found himself in an awkward minuet with James B. Conant, president of Harvard University. Harvard hung gloomily over the last years of his life, much as it had during his student days. If there was a bright spot, it may have been in the continuation of his work on dependent territories under Truman’s Point IV Program. But any solace there was little and late. Overshadowing all of this was the biggest defeat of all: the cold war. Every facet of Bowman’s work after 1945 was colored by the gathering cold war, and he came to lead his own high-profile crusade against a Soviet Union that he felt threatened the American Lebensraum. His bitter frustrations in this period, with geography, science, and U.S. foreign policy, mirrored the geographical circumscription of American hegemony, for which, in his eyes, the war was fought. He experienced this array of personal defeats as a larger withering of the second moment of U.S. global ambition.

bowman ’ s “ virtual war ” Two months after the outbreak of World War II, Bowman wrote an extraordinary letter to his old Paris friend Lionel Curtis, master of Oxford’s Balliol College. Alarmed about the geopolitical implications of the 1939 Stalin-Hitler accord and repeating Halford Mackinder’s insistence on a divided heartland, Bowman exhorted that Germany and Russia must at all costs be played off against each other and a chain of buffer states maintained between them. Hitler understood this from Haushofer, he argued, but the “weakness of Mackinder’s argument” and the fly in Hitler’s ointment was the newfound strength of the USSR, now of “menacing size” and a budding world power. Hitler’s pact was a fatal mistake that only strengthened the Stalin regime. Then came a startling prediction: “The strengthening of

defeat from the jaws of victory

/

421

Russia may produce such disastrous effects upon Hitler’s plans that it is neither idiotic nor fanciful to say that within ten years France and England may be fighting side by side with Germany in order to hold Russia in check. When the rest of Europe is exhausted economically and spiritually then will it be seed-time for Stalin and for Communist doctrine.”2 As Antonio Gramsci once put it, one can predict the future only to the extent that one is involved in making it happen,3 and the clarity of Bowman’s anticipation of a pending anti-Soviet conflict warrants that for him the cold war was already well under way. He changed his mind on many things during the war, but not about the Soviet Union. He gave Secretary of State Cordell Hull quite unrestrained advice prior to the 1943 Moscow conference, warning that if “Russia arrives in Berlin in advance of Great Britain and the United States,” its delegates will foment a pro-Moscow rebellion, and “two German revolutions may be in being . . . at the same time, one in the East, the other in the West.” Likewise, in southeast Europe: There is no visible combination of statesmanship and strength in any of the Balkan states sufficient to withstand the subversive work of Russia unless the United States supply arms and also political and military leadership. This would mean taking sides against Russia. It is impossible to believe that the unfolding of such a policy can take place without military clashes followed by growing support on both sides, followed by virtual war between Russia and the West. . . . A deGaullist government in France might then complete the work of Russia and establish Bolshevism throughout the length and breadth of Europe.4

The prescience of a State Department insider about “virtual war” in 1939 cannot be separated from the paranoid misreading of de Gaulle. Both predictions sprang from the same world vision, which, by any standards, was extreme. The USSR was already an enemy nation for Bowman, who callously rejoiced at the German slaughter of Russians, which reached its peak in 1942: “Unless Russia is chewed to bits by war she will be the same uncommunicating, enigmatical, sullen and treacherous force after this war that she was from 1918 to 1941.” Even more viciously: “The only hope . . . is that [Russia] will be greatly weakened herself and the present struggle is taking a terrific toll of Russia’s lives and substances. . . . But the bloodletting in Russia must be so great that it may be expected to count in the final stages of the war.”5 Such brutal contempt for the Russian people, twenty million of whom perished in the war, was never declared policy in Roosevelt’s State Department, but it was a common undercurrent. Bowman sent a copy of his Cur-

422

/

defeat from the jaws of victory

tis letter to Roosevelt, who, while not about to embark on an ideological campaign against a potential future ally, nonetheless took Bowman’s warnings seriously enough to repeat them to the Senate Military Affairs Committee.6 The “virtual war” was on long before the term cold war was coined, before Churchill railed about the iron curtain in 1946, before Yalta, even before Roosevelt and Churchill vacillated on the second front. Bowman was certainly among the earliest and most vituperative of anti-Soviet fanatics among a State Department staff that later fanatics thought riddled by communists. But even the bumbling Cordell Hull, a postwar Nobel Peace Prize winner, once uttered the hope that the war should cause the Russian people to be “bled white.” And Bowman’s cynical military geography pitting Germany against the USSR was fully consonant with Senator Truman’s: “If we see that Germany is winning we should help Russia and if Russia is winning we ought to help Germany and that way let them kill as many as possible. . . . “7 For Bowman, as for many others, the cold war began nearer 1917 than 1945. Such cruel and obsessive anticommunism had a capitalist point. The delay of the second front involved more than just the issue of intensified military, political, and human destruction in the USSR. Bowman anticipated that the resulting “colossal losses” would “come close to paralyzing the economic life” of Russia and cripple its chances for independent economic reconstruction, opening the door to a new phase of “dollar diplomacy.”8 Truman’s secretary of the treasury, Fred Vinson, expressed the economic need more broadly: the “capitalistic system is essentially an international system. . . . If it cannot function internationally, it will break down completely.” James Byrnes, the new hawkish secretary of state, filled in the political implications: a “durable peace cannot be built on an economic foundation of exclusive blocs . . . and economic warfare.” Vinson concurred: “Two rival blocs would mean economic warfare. Probably we would win, but it would be a pyrrhic victory. World trade would be destroyed and all countries would suffer.”9 As Bowman had argued since 1943, the premises of the emerging American Empire embodied an international geography that was now global. Bowman was deeply disappointed but hardly surprised that the United Nations did not emerge as a smooth conveyance for U.S. interests. He blamed the unrealistic ambitions of the “smaller nations” but mostly the intransigence of a Soviet delegation that was generally isolated in the Security Council. He was just as frustrated that the visceral anticommunism he had long harbored in silence was being reinvented in the Truman State Department as bold new thinking. A saber-rattling speech by Stalin in Feb-

defeat from the jaws of victory

/

423

ruary 1946, warning that war was as inevitable as the uneven development of capitalism, provoked a stormy response from Churchill, and as the virtual war threatened to become real, the USSR declined a huge billiondollar IMF and World Bank reconstruction loan because of the capitalist strings attached. The following month, Churchill made his “iron curtain” speech in Missouri.10 Stalin’s speech “clinched the matter” for Bowman, who now grumbled that Stalin offered “not one word of gratitude for our help in the war.” He used the opportunity of the Princeton University Bicentennial Celebration to speak out. Innocuously entitled “Is an International Society Possible?” Bowman’s Princeton address was a headline-grabber despite the yawning reprise of idealism in international affairs with which it began. He set up foundational ruling-class American values—individualism, freedom, the pursuit of private property, the sanctity of the nation-state, and the naturalness of social inequality—as universal human traits intermingled with the core of the UN idea. The confusion of Americanism and global universalism was here invisible yet in full view. Communism stood in opposition to all this, he said, for while the United States sought world unity by including the USSR, the Soviets wanted a United Nations that worked only “as a means to Soviet ends.” They repress rather than celebrate individualism and freedom, “extol no humanitarian god,” and worship industry only for the sake of “material things,” he projected. “Soviet ends involve world communism. It is time to say this frankly,” and the fundamental question now is: “Whose social system is to prevail?” The world already lives with “a form of war,” he lectured, lamenting that the United States was incapable of the kind of “single-minded and sustained national effort” that characterized the Soviet Union.11 This was roiling stuff, and if some in the audience found it tedious and long-winded, it played to a country in which “knowledgeable Americans who were usually calm began to sound shrill and desperate.”12 The Princeton address established Bowman as a leading anti-Soviet propagandist for the cold war; any quibbles with Spykman’s power politics were now merely academic. The response was immediate, with headlines blaring: “UN as Communism Sounding Board” (Trenton Times); “Only Russia Blocks Path” (Omaha Morning World Herald); “Geopolitical Expert Says Russ Block ‘One World’ “ (San Francisco Chronicle); “Communist Aims Bar World Union” (St. Louis Star-Times). It was also reported in Canada and Europe, with the Ottawa Citizen vainly if inaccurately resisting the inflammatory message: “Keep trying for co-operation with Soviet.” A column and a half appeared in Time, and Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist Arthur Krock

424

/

defeat from the jaws of victory

praised the address to New York Times readers as “very remarkable” and “timely.”13 Over four thousand copies of the Princeton address were circulated at the Air University, on whose board Bowman now sat. Among the hundreds of felicitations arriving in the mail, one exhorted Bowman to combat “fifth columnists, reds, and pinks” and to get in touch immediately with J. Edgar Hoover, who was similarly bent on an “authoritative exposé of communists.” Bowman, of course, was already well acquainted with Hoover, having been an occasional FBI informant since at least 1941.14 Not everyone was so laudatory, however. Several letters were highly unfavorable, but these were “from New York’s East Side,” Bowman sneered, in a nasty disparagement of Jews or communists or both. Students at Colgate University, where he gave a similar address several days later, accused him of succumbing to “the dangerous confusion of slogans, stereotypes and emotional shortcuts.” “How much democracy and free enterprise” does Dr. Bowman think “can survive a third world war?”15 In March 1947, Truman intervened to support British-backed forces against communists in Greece and announced that henceforth the United States would fight communist movements wherever they appeared. This “Truman Doctrine” was quickly followed by the Marshall Plan, which aimed unabashedly at the political-economic reconstruction of a capitalist Europe. “Peace, freedom and world trade are indivisible,” Truman proclaimed. Bowman chose his address to incoming Johns Hopkins students that autumn to escalate his attack on the “evils” of communism: “Reds Plotting to Rule Globe,” screamed the Milwaukee Journal, reporting the speech on 23 September. He now warned about subversion on college campuses but more pointedly claimed that communism was an “absolutism designed to be more ruthless and complete than Czarism”: “Reds Worse Than Czars,” blared the Des Moines Tribune that same day. This speech decisively articulated the theme of an evil empire that would become a staple of right-wing cold war American geopolitics, revived decades later by Ronald Reagan. “Nothing in the regimes of the czars, bad as some of them were, had such a high degree of organization for evil, such vicious use of power, as the regime of the Soviets.” Postwar Soviet expansionism from the Baltic to the Bosporus was only a prelude to the imposition of an “evil system on the whole world.”16 The response to the “Red Czar” speech again mixed ecstasy and condemnation. Congratulations this time came from Dwight D. Eisenhower, the increasingly phlegmatic secretary of defense James Forrestal, even former secretary of state Stettinius. “Your attack on the Soviet Union is unquestionably the most devastating one I have ever read,” exuded a prominent Cornell historian. “No one has succeeded as you have in picturing the

defeat from the jaws of victory

/

425

present government of Russia as evil incarnate.” But the protests were also more intense: “At a time when all intelligent and Christian people should be working to promote understanding and peace, it seems incredible that incoming students in an American university should be greeted by its president with words calculated to inflame their distrust of another country, in support of militarism in this country and a distorted picture of what is happening in the world.”17 Stalin’s regime certainly provided grist for this cold war propaganda mill. The political purges of the 1930s solidified his ruthless control at the cost of many thousands of lives, from Leon Trotsky and Nikolai Bukharin to myriad small-time apparatchiks; the Gulags enslaved and killed thousands more; and the unprecedented industrial expansion of the 1930s and 1940s was carried out on the backs of workers and peasants. But was there really much new evidence of Soviet repressiveness after the war to justify this escalation of cold war rhetoric? Already by 1941 the “prevailing view” in the United States was that “the Soviet Union was a cruel and rapacious dictatorship, only slightly less repulsive than Nazi Germany.”18 Were the Eastern European states somehow less democratic in 1947 than before the war? And why did the threat of Soviet control of Eastern Europe create such an outcry, when fascist conquest in the same region after 1938 did not decisively move the United States to action? Postwar anticommunism in the United States certainly perpetuated preexisting ideological antipathies, but it was also fueled by discontinuities with the prewar world. Something was different after 1945. It was not simply the existence of the atom bomb, because the first Soviet tests were not known until 1949. Rather, it was the overwhelming power of the Soviet military against Germany, despite the delayed second front, and their ability to prevail after the most devastating losses of modern warfare that stunned many Americans into the realization that Soviet prerogatives in parts of Europe and Asia threatened the global free hand that American leaders felt their country had, by right, inherited. They now chose to see Soviet interests in Eastern Europe as confirmation of that challenge rather than the logical corollary of Mackinder’s geopolitics, or indeed Bowman’s. Why would the USSR have less need than Germany of the buffer states that Bowman had advocated between East and West? Domestic class fears confirmed the international threat: a surge of strikes and workers’ protests suggested to conservatives that national boundaries were no barrier to communism and that the threat would only intensify with economic depression. As late as 1944, Bowman in fact understood that Stalin no longer seriously aspired to world revolution, the hollow rhetoric of the now-dissolved Com-

426

/

defeat from the jaws of victory

intern notwithstanding. “It is not Marxism any longer,” he comprehended. Stalin’s dealings with communist parties outside the USSR were more geared to the enhancement of national foreign policy than to sparking revolutions that might evade his control.19 Yet within two years Bowman was warning about the peril of communist-inspired world revolution. The USSR as an ideological enemy was one thing for Bowman, but as a political threat to American economic globalism, it was quite another. With Germany and Japan defeated and the American Lebensraum suddenly within grasp, Soviet refusal to cooperate in the construction of a U.S.-led global capitalism was interpreted as an instinctive threat to U.S. economic survival—a survival now conceived as dependent on global economic intercourse. It was less a defensive political geography or geopolitics on the U.S. side that fanned the flames of the cold war, however much the conflict came to be translated into such simplistic terms, than an offensive economic geography. For the first time, despite the clear preponderance of U.S. military power after 1945, the USSR could mount a credible challenge to U.S. hegemony. If the struggle at this point seeded a renewed “realist” geopolitics in the United States itself under the pall of the mushroom cloud, Bowman was surely right that by 1946 it was a struggle between different social and economic systems—Truman would make the same point several months later—even if postwar Soviet and Eastern European societies had none of the workers’ control that was supposed to be the basis of communism. In the end, an American Lebensraum that dominated 75 percent of the global economy simply was not enough. A do-or-die competitive nationalism now drove the quest for globalism. There was nothing casual in Bowman’s cold war politics, and the Princeton address marked a decisive turning point. The two parts of the address— the first an embarrassingly vapid recitation of clichés, the second an aggressive realpolitik—replicated in extreme form the contradictions of his earlier liberalism. His pugilistic conservatism after 1945 may have marked a significant political migration from his earlier Wilsonian optimism but was equally an intellectual continuity. The liberal balance was not defeated but tilted decisively away from idealism; realpolitik actually affirmed the rectitude of his liberalism. The binary cold war geographies he now promoted eschewed the subtle and powerful unity of vision that coined “American Lebensraum.” Bowman had no means of regaining that vision so long as capitalism, Americanism, and democracy remained for him fused and confused. More than ever his geography now tailed his politics. The internationalist dream still gasped for oxygen in the interstices of his acerbic denunciations of communism and was nourished largely by the past, but his

defeat from the jaws of victory

/

427

increasing bitterness was a tacit recognition that the cold war was a massive defeat for the same liberal foreign policy—from Woodrow Wilson, through the Council on Foreign Relations, to Franklin Roosevelt—that he had devoted himself to building.

class, science, and “ the endless frontier ” : the national science foundation and “ free enterprise in our laboratories ” The “geography of internal affairs” that had preoccupied Bowman in the 1920s and 1930s concerned pioneer settlement in the American West, but it also involved the organization of American science in the name of national development. Science after all was experimental, much like frontier settlement, and after the atomic bomb, science appeared to many as a new frontier writ large. If the war was first and foremost scientific and industrial, the postwar future would be even more scientific, chromium bright. Chagrined over the failure of the Science Advisory Board in 1935, Bowman nonetheless retained a high profile in national science circles, becoming vice president of the National Academy of Sciences and president of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) while neck deep in the wartime State Department. What he and Compton were unable to do in 1935 with the Science Advisory Board, war accomplished in a flash, and science was very different a decade later. The hurriedly organized National Defense Research Committee (NDRC) mutated into the Office of Scientific Research and Development (OSRD) via a 1941 executive order that was quite uncontroversial,20 and its top-secret work was contracted out to scientists in universities, industry, and government, establishing the precedent of massive federal funding for private research. As the war ended, the only question for most of those involved was how best to galvanize this new alliance for peacetime purposes.21 The OSRD was headed by Vannevar Bush, an electrical engineer who had been dean of engineering at MIT and president of the Carnegie Institution as well as founder of the Raytheon Corporation, and he took the lead in organizing postwar government sponsorship of science. The first step was the preparation of a 1945 report, Science—the Endless Frontier, which became the springboard for the National Science Foundation.22 Commissioned by Roosevelt, the report amalgamated the ideas of four separate committees, the most important of which, Science and Public Welfare, Bowman chaired. His committee included MIT physicist I. I. Rabi, businessmen from Polaroid and

428

/

defeat from the jaws of victory

Bell Labs, Robert E. Wilson, chairman of Standard Oil of Indiana, and representatives from the Rockefeller Foundation and the Brookings Institution. “Since . . . private sources cannot assume the whole burden” of science funding, the Bowman committee concluded, “an increased measure of direct federal aid is necessary.” Their central recommendation envisaged a “national research foundation,” providing grants and student fellowships for basic scientific research. There would be different divisions for physical sciences, biological sciences, engineering, agriculture, and so forth, and the foundation would take over responsibility for military scientific research. Wartime centralization would be relaxed, and the foundation would be run by a board, appointed by the president on recommendation from the National Academy. The NDRC and OSRD had spent almost five hundred million dollars during the war, and the committee suggested the same figure as an initial capitalization. This blueprint by the Bowman committee became the core proposal of Science—the Endless Frontier.23 The title itself was significant. Much less of a cliché than it is now, the notion of science as an endless frontier both mobilized and inverted the Turnerian angst of geographical closure that had marked earlier decades. The appeal to a modern scientific future exuded the optimism of a new American globalism. The frontier was now mapped not by intrepid explorers, ax and gun in hand, but by the abstractions of mathematical physicists and chemists, astronomers and biologists, for whom the whole world was visible from the laboratory. Bowman inspired the title of this influential report: “Even if the nation’s manpower declines in relative numbers, even if its geographical frontiers become fixed,” began the Bowman report, “there always remains one inexhaustible national resource—creative scientific research.” Science was the new frontier of social pioneering.24 Wartime research experienced an unprecedented centralization. Only ten corporations claimed 40 percent of federal expenditure, and eight universities (including Hopkins) claimed 90 percent of research funds disbursed to universities: Vannevar Bush’s old Radiation Laboratory at MIT received 35 percent. Smaller colleges and public universities were locked out of the wartime bonanza of federal science support, and 90 percent of military and OSRD contracts left patents in corporate hands. Against this backdrop, Science—the Endless Frontier was ceremoniously presented to President Truman in July 1945 and became the basis for Senate legislation introduced by Washington Democrat Warren Magnuson. But Magnuson hereby upstaged Senator Harley M. Kilgore, a New Deal Democrat from West Virginia, who had been introducing similar legislation since 1942. Bush, Bowman, and the National Academy elite had deliberately gone behind Kilgore’s back, but then

defeat from the jaws of victory

/

429

the double-crossed senator introduced his own bill. It differed from the scientists’ bill in several respects. First, patents resulting from governmentsponsored research would revert to the U.S. government and be available for nonexclusive use, whereas the National Academy scientists argued for private retention of patents. Second, National Science Foundation support would not be concentrated in a few elite universities but widely distributed. Third, the New Dealer’s bill included the social sciences in an explicit recognition that the purpose of the foundation would be to stimulate research with societal applications. Fourth and most contentious, Kilgore’s foundation director would be appointed directly by the president. For the populist Kilgore—a “small-town lawyer, National Guardsman, Legionnaire, Mason, and past Exalted Ruler of the Elks Lodge”—science was no more the possession of a social elite than culture was,25 whereas for Bush, Bowman, and the National Academy, this was taking democracy too far: science was an elite achievement of the “best minds,” and any attempt at government interference or tampering was sure to be fatal. The resulting battle over National Science Foundation legislation represents one of the clearest episodes of class antagonism in twentieth-century American science. Bush and Bowman were especially adamant about removing the foundation from direct presidential control. Bowman, now sitting on the board of directors of AT&T, argued that public retention of patents from publicly sponsored research eroded incentives for private research, and his best science elitism was affronted by any proposal to rationalize the distribution of research funds geographically. On the third contentious issue, the inclusion of the social sciences in science foundation legislation, the author of Geography in Relation to the Social Sciences had to maneuver a narrower path. If in 1934 he had contemplated a cautious engagement between geography and social science, a decade later he was defensive and much more politically motivated. He dissembled with Truman: the social scientists ought not to be included because their concerns were different, and the membership of the foundation would not be “the appropriate group to allocate funds to the social sciences.” This tautology masked little of his increasingly visceral antipathy to the social sciences, which were too infiltrated by mere opinion, he thought; all could express themselves capably or otherwise on social questions, whereas scientific facts were available to only the few with the ingenuity and patience to seek them out. Worse, the social sciences were dominated by those with left-wing opinions, and their mission was social reform. The inclusion of the social sciences in proposed legislation would “endanger if not wreck the whole business” and threatened to make science “a political and propagandist football.”26 Bowman had always held that a supple ho-

430

/

defeat from the jaws of victory

mology of science and democracy comprised twin pillars of social and political freedom, and Americanism was its rightful cultural expression: science was a weapon in the fight against communism, he now believed, but social science was the Trojan horse of Americanism. More than on any other issue, Bowman and Bush were uncompromising about who would control any new science foundation. The board should include businessmen and scientists nominated by the National Academy of Sciences but on no account government officials, and it should be the board, not the president, that appoints its own chair. Bowman organized scientists against Kilgore’s bill, threatening Truman with “a tidal wave of protest by American scientists” if it prevailed.27 The future of federally funded science was the prize for which these divergent interests organized in the summer of 1945. On the one side was a group of conservative scientists and engineers, largely from elite universities and large industrial corporations, led by Bush and Bowman, who supported the Magnuson bill. They were joined by the military, who objected to civilian control over military science implied in the Kilgore bill (S. 1850), and by the National Association of Manufacturers, eager for access to patents. On the other side were reformminded New Dealers in the Senate and, it transpired, Truman himself. Bowman highlighted the class contours of the fight: “Kilgore’s connection with labor and his inclinations with respect to it are well known,” he warned one university president, as are his “well-known relations with the CIO.”28 With two bills in the Senate and the atomic bombing of Japan lending urgency to the question of science, congressional testimony began in October with Bowman strategically placed as the lead witness. After some solemn, predictable bluster about science and “the common baseline of all American life, our liberties,” he made the case for a national science foundation in terms of national defense. There must be a “maintenance of our military strength until we see what the world is going to be like,” he warned grimly, and “scientific power” represented the front line of defense. “Free enterprise in our laboratories” was what had readied the nation’s science for war, and free enterprise in our laboratories is how it should continue. The “war is not over, only the military phase of it.” He summarized his objections to the Kilgore bill, agreed that scientists now had to involve themselves in politics, and politicians should support science, but he warned gravely that what scientists fear most is “government control.” “Do not put the proposed National Research Foundation in the category of just another Government bureau,” he lectured, where politicians tell scientists how to do their job.29

defeat from the jaws of victory

/

431

If some of the assembled senators, staffers, and audience were left sifting through the inanities for the grist, at least one politician thought he got the message clearly, and he didn’t like being talked down to by a university president. E. Maury Maverick, the Texas New Dealer whose name became synonymous with roguish independence and who popularized the word gobbledygook, took direct aim. Disavowing “any tinge of sarcasm” he went on to say that Bowman may be “a gentleman and a scholar,” but he, Maverick, was tired of “bulldozing scientists, piously abrogating [sic] to themselves all the patriotism” while lecturing politicians. Likening Bowman to “these hired hands of the monopolies,” he decided to lecture back. Was it not a politician who originally enacted the National Academy of Sciences? he asked rhetorically. And “who, for instance, was smart enough, and honest enough, to appoint Dr. Bowman to numerous scientific missions? A politician—and I might add, a statesman—named Franklin D. Roosevelt.” A scientist, “because he receives $50,000 a year working for a monopoly, or a big business,” Maverick concluded tersely, “must remember that this does not necessarily make him pure except that he may be a pure scientist.”30 The hearings were rarely as exciting and droned on for nearly four weeks, but not before the president of Notre Dame, previously a member of Bowman’s Science and Public Welfare Committee, distilled the issue of science support down to one of “American freedom versus communism.” Only Frank Jewett, chairman of the board of AT&T and now president of the National Academy, opposed the science legislation, claiming that the proposed NSF was “an entering wedge for some form of socialistic state.” Robert Millikan, now the old man of the academy, largely agreed. Bush and Bowman shared every sniff of Jewett’s and Millikan’s class instincts about labor, the New Deal, and socialism, differing only in their confidence that they could tame the beast of a government-sponsored science. When the Truman administration finally signaled its support for Kilgore over the scientific elite, Bowman convened a meeting of top scientists in his Johns Hopkins office to try to sway the president. Comprising forty-three signatories, the Committee Supporting the Bush Report urged Truman to support the Magnuson bill, but Truman was unimpressed, and this second “end run” around Kilgore fizzled. They negotiated and Kilgore eventually compromised, softening the geographical dispersal provision and, more important, the insistence on presidential appointment of an NSF director.31 But they worked under considerable time pressure. The Senate was about to enact the separate Atomic Energy Commission, and worries about military dominance of atomic research began to surface. A very prestigious

432

/

defeat from the jaws of victory

group of scientists, alarmed that Bush’s and Bowman’s stubborn elitism would jeopardize eventual legislation, formed the Committee for the National Science Foundation. Led by Harlow Shapley, the Harvard astronomer, and Harold C. Urey, Nobel Prize–winning Columbia atomic scientist, this group was politically more liberal, included many prominent scientists— Robert Oppenheimer and Enrico Fermi, even socialists such as Einstein. This group was less dogmatic about government control, favored the retention of patents in the public sphere, and sought inclusion of the social sciences. This group was more concerned by military and industrial control of science, for which federal funding was a solution rather than a danger. The increasingly public division between the two groups of scientists was explained in stark terms in the White House. There is “a small ‘inner’ group closely allied with a few powerful institutions and large corporations . . . and on the other hand, a larger group of scientists with interests widely spread throughout the nation and with a desire to avoid the concentration of research and the power to control it.”32 The scientists, Kilgore, and Magnuson eventually united around a compromise bill that contained the possibility of a social science division and retained a board-nominated director. But concerned that the resulting bill would die before Congress recessed in July 1946, Bush and Bowman broke ranks and organized yet another end run around Kilgore, inspiring an alternative bill in the House rather than the Senate. It reflected few of the hard-fought compromises, and Bush and Bowman now denounced the compromise bill.33 When Bowman came to testify for the House bill, he must have been shocked at the response: Clarence J. Brown, of Ohio, not comprehending the Hopkins president as an ally against the social sciences, retorted that the “average American just does not want some expert running around prying into his life and his personal affairs.” If Congress gets the impression that this legislation would establish “an organization in which there would be a lot of short-haired women and long-haired men messing into everybody’s personal affairs and lives, inquiring whether they love their wives or do not love them and so forth, you are not going to get your legislation.”34 The House bill quickly cleared a stacked committee, but Bush and Bowman had badly miscalculated. When the compromise bill reached the Senate floor, Bowman’s testimony for the renegade House bill was gleefully exploited by opponents of a science foundation. Bowman had not been as adept as Bush at covering his tracks and was forced to rush to Washington with his tail between his legs, insisting to anyone who would listen that he did actually support the Senate bill—any bill.35 But the damage was done. The Senate bill

defeat from the jaws of victory

/

433

passed on 3 July, and the next step would have been relatively simple if not for the existence of a quite different House bill. With no time to rationalize two competing bills, science legislation died before reaching the House floor. “By failing to present a united front scientists themselves caused the legislators to doubt the wisdom of any of the competing measures,” legislative observers noted.36 Scientists were outraged. The sardonic obituary was written in Science, with Bush and Bowman fingered as the culprits: At noon, 19 July 1946, The National Science Foundation was pronounced dead by the surgical staff of the House committee on Interstate and Foreign Commerce. The death was a homicide! Readers of Science are familiar with the promising career of the deceased, and many will mourn this untimely and unnatural passing, for the killing was done, not by politicians but by scientists.37

Ten years earlier Bowman had complained bitterly that the death of the Science Advisory Board was a case of “scientists killing off science,” but now incensed scientists bitterly turned the accusation against him. Geologist Howard Meyerhoff followed his “obituary” in Science with the observation that the House bill was a “political blunder which has cost science at least a year of life for the National Science Foundation.” Actually, it cost four years of life for the NSF. A year later, a similar bill, including the BushBowman provision for a board-nominated chair, passed the Congress, and Truman vetoed it, lecturing that its framers lacked faith in the democratic process. The following year, the famous “Do-nothing Congress,” as Truman dubbed it, did nothing. The year after, successful legislation had the one feature upon which Truman insisted: presidential appointment (after consultation) of the NSF director. Bowman and Bush conceded this compromise but won most of the other points: the bill had little provision for government retention of patents, only an advisory suggestion about the geographical dispersal of grants, and the social sciences were excluded, although their future inclusion was raised as a possibility. On 10 May 1950, five years and a day after the submission of the original Bowman committee report, Truman signed the NSF into life. Whatever the compromises, it was, concludes historian of science Daniel Kevles, “a victory for elitism.”38 The NSF fight was one of the hardest for Bowman, and he bitterly retreated after the first year. He lost a lifetime friendship with astronomer Harlow Shapley, who had nominated Bowman for the Harvard presidency in 1933, when Conant was appointed. The contradiction in Bowman’s position—an insistent separation of science from politics yet an ideologically driven refusal of the social sciences—was evident to many. As with his ear-

434

/

defeat from the jaws of victory

lier Wilsonian idealism, the conceptual divorce of science and politics was a convenient fiction, a powerful if conservative political weapon. It left the political direction of science policy in the hands of science elites, who could reject any challenge as politically motivated. As one Chicago scientist put it at the beginning of 1946, “Science is in politics now and it is in to stay. . . . True laissez-faire research is almost unknown even now.” When Bowman and Shapley parted ways, the astronomer tried to explain the sentiments of many scientists: the “domination of freedom in American science by the great industries” and “domination by the military,” not the federal government, were now the primary dangers.39 While NSF legislation languished in the late 1940s, an array of other bodies filled the vacuum. The Atomic Energy Commission (AEC) was quickly established to direct that slice of research, and the Office of Naval Research (ONR) cornered military sponsorship of science after August 1946. ONR was highly aggressive, swarming over the country’s campuses in search of scientists to fund, and by one estimate 80 percent of papers delivered at the 1948 American Physical Society meeting were supported by ONR. The military dominated campus sponsorship of basic research by 1949, and the AEC and Department of Defense spent 96 percent of campus research dollars in the physical sciences. These three agencies, together with the Public Health Service, spent $63 million that year. The National Institutes for Health, with a 1951 budget of $30 million, claimed the medical niche.40 This interweaving of corporate and military interests, of course, led Truman’s Republican successor to decry the “military-industrial complex.” By comparison, the NSF appropriation for 1952 was only $3.5 million, less than 1 percent of the capitalization Bowman initially envisaged for the NSF and less than 3 percent of the annual budget anticipated in Science—the Endless Frontier. Bowman bears a special responsibility for the exclusion of the social sciences from the NSF legislation. Since World War I if not earlier, his geographical career was devoted to transgressing the boundary between physical and social sciences, a boundary that he felt geography was especially lucky to inhabit. “An ambassador from physical geography to the social sciences,” the New York Times once described him. Well-accepted by the Social Science Research Council hierarchy (if not always its young turks), on whose board he sat for most of the 1930s, he was entrusted by the National Academy elite with the chairmanship of the NRC precisely because his ability to speak the language of social science would have a salutary effect in New Deal Washington.41 Social scientists lobbied hard for inclusion in the NSF, and Bowman was in a unique position to secure their inclusion. But as

defeat from the jaws of victory

/

435

he soured on Roosevelt, the New Deal, and social liberalism, his political convictions eclipsed even his passion for an expansive geography, and social science was the victim. A poor relation in the NSF to this day, the inclusion of the social sciences remained under political attack as recently as 1995 in ways that echo Bowman and the 1945–46 hearings.42

cold war science: the fishing party Bowman was not finished with science, however. The nuclear attacks on Hiroshima and Nagasaki revealed a new and terrible technology that had to be managed, both domestically and as an ever-present instrument of U.S. foreign policy.43 The Atomic Energy Commission, with sweeping powers to direct atomic research and development, was quickly established, and although the commission retained elite scientific control, the military hierarchy was fully empowered within its wall of secrecy—another clearcut victory for elitism. Bowman was summoned from his Turtle Island vacation home in early September 1946 and invited by Truman to serve on the five-person AEC. Proud of Johns Hopkins’s modest role in atomic research and a patriotic mouthpiece for the administration’s myth-making exaggeration that the atom bomb had saved the lives of five hundred thousand U.S. soldiers, Bowman was privately very alarmed by the use of such a hideous weapon.44 But he took the offer seriously. He had enthusiastic support from the army, the navy, and the State Department, and an FBI check found him squeaky clean. Truman and Bowman danced around each other at the White House meeting. The geographer was careful to assure Truman that he was a Democrat, and the president dangled the still unassigned chairmanship of the AEC before Bowman. But Truman was clearly having difficulty recruiting top scientists for the AEC and prevaricated on why James Conant and MIT president Karl Compton had declined appointments.45 Bowman was lobbied hard by Navy Secretary James Forrestal, Vannevar Bush weighed in, and White House aide Clark Clifford enlisted the Hopkins Board of Trustees. But Bowman would have to leave Hopkins, and the AEC annual salary of fifteen thousand dollars would mean a 40 percent pay cut, he told Truman; to avoid conflicts of interest he would have to sell his stocks at deeply depressed postwar prices. Pledges from the Carnegie Corporation and the Hopkins trustees to make up his salary and pension differentials did not persuade him.46 Bowman also declined the chairmanship of the board coordinating postwar military research between the Departments of Army and Navy, and during the war, he refused Henry Stimson’s request that he head up the Bi-

436

/

defeat from the jaws of victory

ological Warfare Unit of the War Department, which was every bit as secret as the Manhattan Project. Whatever his attitude toward Russian civilians, he retained an abstract queasiness about the use of science for the destruction of human life, and said so to Truman.47 One position, however, he did take firmly. Despite a 1947 account by retired secretary of war Stimson that solidified the Truman government’s self-justification for dropping the bomb, the public knew little about its chemistry and capabilities. The atomic bomb remained shrouded in the highest secrecy, and public fears, suspicions, and vocal opposition were on the rise, not least from scientists themselves.48 The atomic tests on the Bikini atoll raised public fears of a “superbomb,” and the Joint Chiefs of Staff reported the gruesome power of the next generation of nuclear weapons. They recommended that the U.S. president have “first strike authority,” because if other governments gained such weapons, there would be no time to consult Congress in the event of surprise attack. This recommendation, of course, was political dynamite, giving the president de facto authority to declare war. Truman and the State Department wanted to bury the military report, fearing that public debate about the morality of atomic warfare would only galvanize political opposition, yet they also knew that the broadening web of government and military secrecy presented an obvious political target and was increasingly vulnerable to leaks. Promilitary hysteria aimed at Russia was matched by fears of a nuclearinspired “end of civilization.” Many businessmen, seeking profitable inroads to the new technology, also favored public release of atomic information. Under mounting pressure, Truman referred the matter to a committee.49 The “Fishing Party”—the highly classified committee’s code name—was charged with “the first major high-level reconsideration of nuclear secrecy” in the United States.50 It was deliberately small and could hardly have been more elite. It was chaired by Harvard president James Conant, who had advised the government from the start on the development of the bomb and who, at the final moment, gave decisive advice on Japanese targets. Committee members included two university presidents besides Bowman— James Morrill (Minnesota) and Dwight D. Eisenhower, who occupied the Columbia presidency en route between military and political careers; industrialists Crawford H. Greenewalt (DuPont) and Charles A. Thomas (Monsanto); Christian Science Monitor editor Erwin D. Canham; and John Foster Dulles, New York lawyer and Republican, future secretary of state, and author of the doctrine of “massive nuclear retaliation.” Their charge was broad and simple. “Without any publicity whatsoever as to its formation or purpose,” the committee would assess: “The information which should be released to the public concerning the capabilities of, and defense

defeat from the jaws of victory

/

437

against, the atomic bomb and weapons of biological, chemical and radiological warfare.”51 The Fishing Party met at the Pentagon in April 1949 for a detailed briefing by scientists and military personnel on two subjects: the precise capabilities of the various weapons of mass destruction, and the current “offensivedefensive balance” regarding aerial warfare. At the second meeting, following an assessment of U.S. military capabilities, the committee split with a one-vote majority arguing that “no official public statement should be made at this time.” Their reasoning was terse: any release of information would establish a precedent, potentially threatening national security, and was “illadvised” in light of the Soviet threat. Public debates among “experts” would enhance “confusion” and bolster extremism, and there was no real “public demand for additional official information” in any case. Certain “well-known and probably well-meaning pressure groups” as well as extremists “should be ignored.” The public actually feared that too much rather than too little information would be released, the majority concluded.52 The minority was aghast at this contorted and authoritarian paternalism and the implied perpetuation of a haphazard status quo whereby the American people received their atomic information via “a process of osmosis” and “leaks.” For them, the public release of reliable information would calm rather than inflame irrational fears. If the majority prevailed, they concluded, not only would the positive intent of their mandate be annulled— to decide what information should be released—but a vital precedent would be lost. “What appears to be needed,” the minority concluded, is not the siege mentality of the majority but “a bold, new philosophy.”53 Bowman sided unhesitatingly with the majority. He had railed for much of his life against government paternalism but at this vital juncture chose to believe that the people did not want or need to know anything. He was joined by Dulles and Eisenhower as well as the Monsanto and DuPont industrialists. Conant led the four-person minority. Even Morrill, president of the University of Minnesota, who would distinguish himself three years later by banning Paul Robeson from performing an on-campus concert, could not stomach the reactionary bent of the majority. The intended final report included a minor compromise, recommending the release of information about biological weapons, but a disappointed Conant was left to pad his transmittal letter with weak platitudes about “representational government” and the importance of freely available information for making “sound judgments.” In practice, however, the Fishing Party endorsed a government-industry-military monopoly over chemical and atomic knowledge and technology.

438

/

defeat from the jaws of victory

Then a dramatic event changed things. On 23 September 1949, before the final report was submitted, news of the first Soviet atomic test was released, and Conant repolled the committee. Eisenhower switched sides, now voting for the release of atomic information. Although Conant now had his majority, he got cold feet, and rather than opening up the issue again, the group agreed that the public should be told only that accurate assessment of the destructiveness of atomic bombs was still not possible and that no “superbomb” was in the works. Neither statement was true, but in the cold war hysteria following the news that the USSR was now an atomic power, the Fishing Party report drew scant attention. They had “brought forth a mouse.”54 For Bowman any questions about scientific secrecy and weaponry were now entirely overridden by the specter of the Soviet Union. “The 64dollar question” was how to balance the “need to inform the public” and Western European allies and the “need to keep enemy from countering our plans.” It was no contest. “Release of information only aids enemy.” He may have rued the invention of the atomic bomb, but long before the Fishing Party was convened he had come to the conclusion that it was a handy weapon and ought to be used not just against Stalin and his government but “against Russia’s millions if Moscow decides to march across starving Europe.”55 The Danish nuclear physicist Niels Bohr had warned Roosevelt and Churchill that Soviet physicists knew a nuclear bomb was possible and that the Soviet Union should be informed about U.S. research lest the Soviets conclude that their allies were double-crossing them. Bohr’s advice was rejected, but he was right: Soviet physicists had been working on an atomic bomb since at least 1942. Now five years later, the Fishing Party decisively compounded the mistake. Their refusal to make a powerful statement concerning the freedom of information was a crucial way station in the rapidly developing military-academic-industrial complex and the building paranoia on all sides of the nuclear arms race.56 The Fishing Party’s own deliberations were not declassified until 1971.

“ vice, nepotism, and pederasty ” : academic war over geography at harvard “The Second World War was a lesson in world geography,” Eric Hobsbawm has written,57 and nowhere was the lesson more needed or engaged than in the United States. Roosevelt’s invitation to the American people to take out their atlases and follow along with his fireside radio chats as he charted the war’s progress represented a dramatic corrective to the “lost geographies”

defeat from the jaws of victory

/

439

of America’s post–World War I ideological isolationism. War is traditionally good for geography, and U.S. geographers were optimistic that the postwar period would deliver the discipline onto its rightful academic pedestal. All the evidence was on their side; an American globalism would need geographical knowledge of unprecedented accuracy and extent, and geographers were poised to fill the need. As Bowman had put it in the wartime State Department, anything happening anywhere around the world potentially involved U.S. interests. The geography program at Harvard in the late 1940s was very different from that of the Shaler-Davis days, when Bowman was an undergraduate.58 In the 1920s a serious attempt was made to launch an independent geography program within geology. The geomorphologist Kirk Bryan had been hired in 1926, followed by the Chicago-trained human geographer Derwent Whittlesey and several part-time instructors. Whittlesey was a political and settlement geographer of some note. He had been elected president of the Association of American Geographers in 1944 and also editor of one of the discipline’s leading journals, the Annals of the AAG, and it was he who led the Harvard crusade for geography in the 1940s. Much as at Hopkins, World War II had stimulated new interest in geography, and the Harvard administration now decided to hire several new permanent faculty. Edward Ackerman, a Harvard Ph.D. who had worked for the Office of Strategic Services and the Combined Chiefs of Staff during the war, was hired, as was Edward Ullman, a Chicago Ph.D. also from the OSS. Ackerman and Ullman were beginning to explore the application of systems theory and mathematics to locational analysis, conceiving human geography in formal positivist terms. Their wartime work quickened this process, and they were widely seen as among the most innovative young researchers of a new generation, on the cutting edge of a more sophisticated human geography.59 But Harvard also faced a serious postwar financial crisis, and by 1947 the administration was clearly on the lookout for cost savings. Ackerman was up for promotion, and Harvard procedure called for the formation of an ad hoc committee on geography to consider the case. After an affirmative vote in the Division of Geological Sciences in May 1947, the ad hoc committee ratified the Ackerman promotion. The division also unanimously concluded that the time had come for an independent department of geography. But because some of the geologists were jealous about the resources to be funneled toward geography, Marland Billings, the chair of the Division of Geological Sciences, went behind the faculty’s back to the Harvard provost, Paul Buck, insisting that geology needed the resources instead and would make better use of them and that human geography was of du-

440

/

defeat from the jaws of victory

bious intellectual worth anyway. Rumors began circulating that geography would be cut, not built, and at the end of February 1948, with the backing of Harvard president Conant, Buck overturned the ad hoc committee recommendation, refused to promote Ackerman, fired one of the geography instructors, and made it clear that a “tapering off in Geography” would take place. Despite warning signs, a despondent Whittlesey was apparently taken by complete surprise. “We seemed to be just at the point of consolidating the slow gains of the last 20 years,” he wrote. “To have it all knocked out from under us is hard to take.”60 A highly publicized “academic war over the field of geography” quickly ensued. Ackerman already had prestigious support: Richard Hartshorne (his old OSS boss), J. K. Wright (director of the American Geographical Society), and Colonel Hubert Schenck (of the Allied General Headquarters) had all previously written glowing recommendations, and although Whittlesey was shell-shocked, others now mobilized a protest. Kirk Bryan and geology colleague Kirtley Mather were appalled and said so publicly, and the Harvard Crimson, calling the decision “anachronous,” denounced “a minority of the professors of geology” for selling geography out to the administration. The student council angrily decried the decision, and a flood of letters from prominent geographers worldwide inundated Buck and Conant. A chorus of condemnation might alter the decision, concluded student organizer Peter Roll, “if I can get Bowman and a couple of others to open their mouths.”61 But there were skeletons in geography’s closet that had a bearing on the decision. In 1931 the Amazonian explorer Alexander Hamilton Rice had effectively bought himself a professorship at Harvard, or so many felt. He was married to Eleanor Widener, a wealthy society woman who in 1915 had donated the Widener Library to Harvard in memory of her son, a Titanic victim. Rice had been elected to the AGS Council in 1917, was its vice president through the 1920s, and sponsored an AGS School of Surveying. But the council took a dim view of his wife’s attempt to donate a million dollars to the depression-strapped AGS in exchange for Bowman’s ouster and her husband’s ascendancy to the AGS presidency. Rebuffed, the Rices decamped to Harvard, where a soon-to-retire president Lowell accepted their gift, aimed at establishing the “Institute of Geographical Exploration” with Alexander Hamilton Rice as its professor.62 But Rice was a showman and entrepreneur, not a scholar. He commuted to Harvard from Newport, Rhode Island, in a chauffeur-driven Rolls Royce and plagued Conant constantly. Persona non grata with the other Harvard geographers, who had no hand in his appointment, he was an embarrassment for the discipline.

defeat from the jaws of victory

/

441

The second “embarrassment” for Harvard and geography was that, amid the powerful ideological reassertion of a narrow familial conventionalism after the war, Derwent Whittlesey was gay. He lived with Harold Kemp, a mediocre scholar at best, for whom he had secured a Harvard lectureship. Had it not been that Whittlesey brashly promoted Kemp, little public notice might have been paid to his sexuality. But it was an open secret in Cambridge, and the verbal mythology within the discipline mixed prurience and homophobia, lasting for decades: “Whittlesey was the man, Kemp the woman,” reported one senior geographer in the 1980s. “They always had pink-faced undergraduates over there. They took them to the opera.”63 Other whispers had it that a third geography faculty member was involved with Kemp and Whittlesey in a homosexual “cell.” Bowman was pivotal to the fate of geography at Harvard. He was on the 1947 ad hoc committee recommending Ackerman’s promotion, soon thereafter was elected to the Harvard Board of Overseers, and was a personal friend of Conant. Himself a “Harvard man” who relentlessly proselytized for geography, the president of Johns Hopkins would have to be reckoned with in any move against the discipline. But Bowman had his doubts about the Harvard department. In the first place, he was deeply opposed to its intellectual direction. Whittlesey, Ackerman, and Ullman were all human geographers with little training in the physical side of the discipline, and the graduate students increasingly followed this mold. Bowman insisted that physical geography was the only conduit to science and that a separate human geography would inevitably be “descriptive, fragmentary and ‘easy.’” The “trouble with modern geographers is that they are ‘human’ geographers” with “no established body of principles, scientific in character.” Knowing that Buck and Conant wanted a broader evaluation of Harvard geography, Bowman made this attack forcefully against human geography at the 1947 ad hoc committee and reiterated it to Conant afterward in a stiff note accompanying a copy of his Geography in Relation to the Social Sciences.64 This was more than mere nostalgia for the physical geography of his Harvard youth. Dogged by a defensive sense of their own marginalization in the academy, American geographers after the 1930s were obsessed with defining the discipline into a position of prominence, and the view that came to prevail, especially after the publication of Hartshorne’s The Nature of Geography, was that geography did not claim its own discrete object of study the way sociology or chemistry might but rather synthesized in a spatial and environmental framework the results of other disciplines.65 There was considerable precedent for this view, but in the context of twentieth-century science, the resulting claim that geography was therefore the “queen of the sci-

442

/

defeat from the jaws of victory

ences” was as messianic and pretentious as it was popular among geographers. In the Harvard battle it was to this view of the discipline that Bowman resorted: the geographer “has to handle physics, chemistry, biology, meteorology, climatology and geology. Why not?” he wrote to Gladys Wrigley. With the “incessant splintering of fields of specialized knowledge,” the geographer is “the one professional synthesizer.”66 Bowman also despised Whittlesey. He disrespected Whittlesey’s scholarship, once calling his Earth and the State an “ignorant” and “truly appalling” book, but was repulsed by his homosexuality. In Cambridge for the ad hoc meeting, Bowman was quietly informed that although Kemp was no longer a geography instructor, Whittlesey’s relationship with him remained embarrassing.67 The depth of Bowman’s homophobia rarely came out in public, but he was once quite explicit to Jean Gottmann. “The subject naturally got around to the Harvard department,” Gottmann recalled of their 1948 meeting, and before Bowman could even indict the department’s scholarship— their “PhDs were worthless” and “their program was an intellectual kindergarten”—he made scathing “accusations of ‘vice, nepotism, and pederasty.’”68 Amid the gathering cold war hysteria, sexual and political mores mirrored each other intensely. Homosexuality was deemed by many to be as un-American as communism, both unnatural and dangerous threats to a manly capitalism. They were linked at Harvard insofar as Whittlesey’s work pegged itself to the social more than the natural sciences, and Bowman did not shrink from raising the specter of politics in social science at later Harvard deliberations. An embarrassed Ullman even had to apologize once for Bowman’s implication that “geography is . . . the most important bulwark to communism and brutality in the world.” “Just because this article may ramble,” Ullman pleaded, “does not mean that Bowman is stupid.”69 In fact, from the time of the 1947 ad hoc meeting, Bowman was already collaborating with Buck and Conant against Harvard geography. Far from “opening his mouth,” as student organizer Peter Roll had hoped, he actively encouraged others to keep theirs shut. On news of Ackerman’s dismissal, he immediately pressed AGS director J. K. Wright, who had also been on the ad hoc committee, to do nothing. Citing the “background” about Whittlesey, he warned against the concerted disciplinary protest suggested by Haverford president Gilbert White. And he deflected a flurry of implorations to galvanize a defense of Harvard geography, effectively stemming any revolt. In the most quisling tones he also wrote to the Harvard provost: “From time to time I am in receipt of a letter from hither and yon to the effect that Harvard has dropped geography and why don’t I do something

defeat from the jaws of victory

/

443

about it. Let me say that my general reply is to the effect that I propose to mind my own business.”70 Bowman seems to have believed that he could help disband the current geography personnel and guide its rebuilding. As he served up Whittlesey on a plate, he cautioned over and over to perturbed geographers that “things can be worked out quietly.” But Bowman’s homophobia and anticommunism were abetted by self delusion and tragic miscalculation. If, as he charged, Whittlesey had been unable to get Harvard to see anything useful in the discipline, this was a disciplinary as much as a personal indictment. Intellectually, Whittlesey was among geography’s top scholars, and Bowman’s own work received no rave reviews. The prominent historian Frederick Merck, reporting to a 1949 Harvard committee charged with evaluating the whole geography situation, disparaged Bowman’s Geography in Relation to the Social Sciences as “digressive and diffuse and disjointed” and generally lacking substance. The Nature of Geography fared no better. It was not just Whittlesey but all of geography’s best who failed to sell the discipline. And to a chemist like Conant, the presumption of Bowman’s Pollyannaish claims for geography as queen of the sciences must have seemed pathetic. Conant was a formidable opponent, who by one account “saw no difference between poisoning a soldier and blowing him to bits,” and Buck was just as indomitable. Intimidated by Harvard as an undergraduate, Bowman may have jousted with Colonel House, Roosevelt, and Churchill, but he was still intimidated by Harvard at the end of the 1940s.71 It got worse. Defending his decision, Conant eventually issued a directive that sent shock waves through the discipline: “Geography is not a university subject,” he declared. Closing a program was one thing but denouncing an entire discipline was another, and given Harvard’s educational leadership this announcement echoed throughout American higher education. Bowman was angry, and he had a point: “I do not see how Conant can say that this is not a university subject of study while at the same time harboring the Harvard School of Business Administration.” Seeking to undo the damage in which he was now implicated, he concluded to J. K. Wright that he had “one more job to do, which is to attempt a defense of geography as a university subject and see that it is scattered widely throughout the country as an offset to the action at Harvard.”72 It is doubtful that Bowman ever understood how gravely he miscalculated. He never did confront Conant; in fact, the pandering continued. When he sat in his first board of overseers meeting in October 1948, the highly publicized question of closing geography arose. Bowman remained silent, and Conant

444

/

defeat from the jaws of victory

gushed with gratitude.73 In June 1948 Bowman sailed for Britain, where he was to receive an honorary doctorate of science from Oxford University and the Patron’s Medal of the Royal Geographical Society (RGS). Aboard the Queen Mary he bumped into Jean Gottmann, whom he had fired from the Hopkins geography department several months earlier. Bowman was a lonely figure, Gottmann recalled, and insisted several times that the Frenchman should come up to his luxury cabin on the sundeck to talk about “geography and old times.” An ambivalent Gottmann eventually went, and Bowman admitted candidly that he had been “decisive” in making the initial decision to drop geography at Harvard. They were “a bad advertisement for the discipline,” he told Gottmann, and “a bad bunch of men.” When Gottmann protested that this was “a terrible blow . . . to American geography,” Bowman brushed him aside, pulling from his briefcase a copy of his address to the RGS, which, he insisted, included a paragraph that would convince Conant and all other doubters of the merits of geography. Gottmann was struck not just by the vacuity of Bowman’s bravado but by how pathetic a figure he now cut.74 Geographers were correct that postwar U.S. globalism would require extensive geographical knowledge, but what they could not foresee was that the weakness of the discipline, compounded by the closure of the Harvard program, would diminish the ability of the discipline to respond. Even as Harvard was axing geography, plans were being laid there, at Columbia University, and elsewhere for a new field that came to be known as area studies. Led by institutes for Russian and East European studies, which responded to demands for instrumental knowledge to fuel the cold war, but broadening out into a much wider pursuit, area studies provided much of the geographical knowledge for the new American globalism. As for Harvard geography, the 1949 committee admitted to being baffled about what geography actually was but concluded that they probably ought to have a department of it at Harvard anyway. Pleading financial exigency, the administration never implemented the decision. “When there is enough money,” suggested David Bailey, secretary of the Harvard Corporation in 1960, and “when Harvard can find the right man,” geography will again be on the Harvard curriculum. Formally, the question of Harvard geography remains unresolved, and periodic flurries of activity raise the possibility that geography might again be found appropriate.75

“ dollars and democratic phraseology ” : point iv imperialism “With President Roosevelt’s death my status in relation to the Government changed substantially,” Bowman once volunteered, “and now I feel as much

defeat from the jaws of victory

/

445

out of it as if I were a Republican!”76 This may have been the greatest irony of Bowman’s Washington career. The abrupt cold war acidity of Truman’s State Department should have represented a homecoming for him, but at Foggy Bottom as much as at Harvard he was the paradoxical victim of his own cautious conservatism. Behind State Department walls, he had been an early and extreme voice against the USSR but never explicitly allied himself with the younger, more agile anti-Soviets, a group that eventually included future secretaries of state James Byrnes and Dean Acheson as well as Adolf Berle. Bowman found himself passed over when a new generation of right-wing Democrats stole the anticommunist thunder he had boomed to Lionel Curtis as war began. He was tainted by his close association with Hull and even more so with Stettinius, whom Truman blamed for U.S. concessions at Yalta, and the new generation in the State Department distrusted him as either suspiciously liberal, given his history with Woodrow Wilson, or else too stodgy and rigid a conservative. In one major Truman foreign policy initiative, however, he did play a central if brief role. Henry Wallace had written Bowman in 1942 that with “an International Bank and a practical form of International TVA [Tennessee Valley Authority] it might be possible to develop certain backward areas of the world and in such a way postpone serious post-war depression.”77 Bretton Woods established the International Monetary Fund and World Bank, but at the end of the 1940s direct capital investment by U.S. capitalists was still lacking. Late-nineteenth-century European prosperity was based on capital export, and U.S. corporations had begun to expand their foreign direct investment in the first decades of the twentieth century. The depression ended this trend, however, and by 1938 U.S. investment abroad had fallen from eight billion dollars (in 1929) to three billion. A decade later, private investment abroad stood at only nine hundred million dollars, a mere 2 percent of domestic investment, and was highly concentrated in Latin America and Middle Eastern oil. Petroleum companies accounted for almost 80 percent of direct foreign investment in the three years after the war.78 Wallace’s fear of a deep postwar depression was now widespread, and Vinson’s warning that capitalism was inherently international was more urgent. In the fourth major point of his January 1949 inaugural address, Truman announced a new program. It was sold publicly as an antidote to misery, hunger, and disease, but its larger goal was to spark stagnant economies and the economic “growth of underdeveloped areas.” Point IV, as it came to be known, was an adjunct of the Marshall Plan devoted to investment and “development” outside Europe. It was a logical outcome of Roosevelt’s commercial ambitions in erstwhile colonies and at the same time unprecedented.

446

/

defeat from the jaws of victory

The U.S. government had sponsored specific aid programs in Latin America and provided disaster relief, and the exigencies of war had provoked the massive lend-lease program in Europe, but Point IV now promised a comprehensive funnel of capital into those areas deemed ripe for “development.” U.S. industrial and technological know-how, combined with international capital investment and democracy, was the solution to underdevelopment, Truman argued.79 The knock came at Bowman’s door even before the speech: Would he head up this “bold new program?” He would be working with Paul G. Hoffman, who directed the Economic Cooperation Administration (ECA), responsible for implementing the Marshall Plan, and with Averell Harriman, its roving European ambassador. But a newly retired Bowman had six books to write, was reluctant to move to Paris as the job required, and was worried about his health when a periodic thyroid illness flared again. A compromise was quickly reached whereby he would stay in Baltimore, with easy access to Washington, and work half-time overseeing ECA’s Point IV work. He was appointed special consultant to the ECA administrator and eventually chaired the Advisory Board on Overseas Territories, charged with implementing Point IV. An assistant would report to him from Paris, and he selected John E. Orchard, the Columbia economic geographer who had previously worked for the lend-lease program.80 Point IV for Bowman was about filling in the economic geography of U.S. globalism. It looked like a fitting cap to a career for one who cut his academic teeth with the “conditional” scientific conquest of the Andes, was concerned with the mandate territories at Paris in 1919, and helped devise U.S. strategy for “shaking loose the colonies” after World War II. The economic, ideological, and political aspects of third world development, as it now came to be known, all came together in Point IV. Having envisaged the postwar world as an American economic Lebensraum, he now cast himself in the image of that future. Whatever his NSF and Harvard scruples about social science, for Point IV he became an economic geographer. Truman had insisted that “greater production is the key to prosperity and peace,” and Bowman agreed. But “somebody must bring in capital.” Only in rare cases can “natives . . . accumulate capital in a primitive economy,” and American capitalists were proving reluctant: in 1948 only eight hundred thousand dollars was drawn from the initial Marshall Plan fund of a billion dollars for private capital investing in Europe.81 Investors would be even less keen outside Europe. Some held that a series of strong investment treaties with foreign countries would encourage investment, but Bowman was more ambitious. “Rigid bilateralism tends to protect high costs

defeat from the jaws of victory

/

447

and high prices,” he argued, and would unnecessarily constrain competition and production. Multilateralism, not bilateralism, was the appropriate framework for the American Lebensraum. Fully fledged globalism rather than mere internationalism was what they now strove for.82 “Guarantees to the investor” would be balanced by guarantees of local interests, Truman had proposed, and Bowman quickly identified such guarantees as the crucial missing element. What kinds of profitability guarantees could be made to U.S. businesses, and what would the corollary guarantees to local governments look like? This became a central conundrum for Point IV officials, who were nonetheless optimistic that if the correct mechanism could be devised, the sluice gates of U.S. capital investment would open. But that would bring its own dilemmas: if the United States were to “step up production in underdeveloped regions,” it risked exceeding “the limit of world demand.” Bowman argued candidly that “a market can be created through arousing desire” for goods and commodities, but only within limits, and he balked at the international price and wage controls on cartels and monopolies that such a dilemma seemed to call for, but had no other solution.83 Thus did the strident cold warrior unwittingly replicate some of the central contradictions identified in the marxist diagnosis of capitalism. How did so-called primitive accumulation take place? Where did the capital come from? What would happen if economic surpluses could not find markets? How would the tendency to overproduction be resolved? And how is it possible that the free play of competition can lead to its opposite, namely, monopoly control of prices and markets, even production. The “practical man,” seeking to understand how American capitalism could be generalized across the globe, had iterated his way empirically to some of the central dilemmas of Marx’s Capital, even as he spat vitriol at communism everywhere. But Bowman in 1949 was in no mood to recognize such intellectual niceties. To break the investment bottleneck he proposed a high-level U.S. diplomatic mission to European capitals to encourage U.S. and joint ventures in their colonies. Junior ECA officials were alarmed at such a transparent attempt to “apply the lash to European colonial powers,” but they were overruled, and a preparatory Paris summit was arranged. Bad health convinced Bowman against the trip, but in the meantime he sought to expand the propaganda front. Cognizant that the substantial geographical ignorance of U.S. businessmen concerning the rest of the world seriously circumscribed potential investment, he nonetheless chose to “educate” the residents of the underdeveloped world instead. Why not, he proposed in August 1949, “bring to the United States under the aegis of the ECA, a

448

/

defeat from the jaws of victory

group of qualified representatives from overseas colonial dependencies, to be indoctrinated with a first-hand understanding of American commerce and banking? With the help of such indoctrination . . . the scope [of U.S. investment] and standards of living might be advantageously expanded.”84 But congressional legislation enabling Point IV was still not in place, and the program had now attracted Stalin’s attention. A cautious Hoffman and Harriman overruled Bowman’s indoctrination initiative. Truman built a rhetorical defense against charges of U.S. imperialism into his inaugural announcement of Point IV. “The old imperialism—exploitation for foreign profit—has no place in our plans,” he claimed, emphasizing instead “democracy and fair-dealing.” But the Soviet government easily understood commercial multilateralism as the leading edge of global capitalism, and Stalin had already condemned the Marshall Plan as “dollar imperialism.” In July, the Soviet ambassador to the UN attacked Point IV directly as “just another colonial plot,” a judgment eagerly corroborated by various Asian delegations, and U.S. officials received mounting reports of “the fear of American capital everywhere.” It was not so much that Point IV was tainted by cold war tension, rather that cold war McCarthyism was dramatically intensified in ideological support of U.S. economic interests expressed in the Marshall Plan and Point IV.85 For Bowman, of course, imputations of imperialism were “preposterous,” and depictions of swaggering U.S. capital rubbing the natives’ noses in the dirt even more so. He was especially bitter at Indian ingratitude: “For them to suggest that we bear the principle burden for making them feel comfortable about receiving our money is indicative of the dream world in which so many people live who see our standard of living and deplore their own wretched condition, as if we were responsible for their condition or were able to remedy it at a stroke.”86 Point IV began modestly indeed. Bowman argued that geographical infrastructure such as ports and railways ought to be a first priority. This represented a decisive shift away from the wartime State Department’s concern with resources and agricultural products, reflecting the assumption that public leverage was most effective in fixed capital investments whose long amortization periods repelled private investors. A comprehensive African railway survey ($615,000) with a continental railway plan to follow and a preparatory visit to North Borneo by two road engineers ($10,000) were immediately considered, as was dredging on the Essequibo and Berbice Rivers in British Guiana, but the largest ticket items and the most specific came from private investors. Reynolds Metals Company requested $11.1 million for the development of Jamaican bauxite, and the

defeat from the jaws of victory

/

449

Aluminum Import Company sought $7.9 million for an aluminum plant, also in Jamaica. For geological and topographical surveying, $1.8 million was requested as well as smaller amounts for rice and cocoa development, the transfer of used machinery from the United States to various countries, and a sawmill in Trinidad.87 With Point IV Bowman finally left behind his most cherished assumption that development would be driven by settlement. Capital more than people now led the economic geography of development. But he was also running out of steam. Despite recognizing that the “political significance” of underdeveloped territories was as great in the postwar era as in the late nineteenth century, he was unable to summon up his enthusiasm of 1939 to 1943, when his vision of an American Lebensraum had unfolded. His cynicism was never far off: “All is Point Four here,” he wrote Aberystwyth geographer H. J. Fleure. “We are bustling around the world doing good, tripping over ourselves in the process. . . . Who knows but what 1949 may be remembered by the historians, when dollars and democratic phraseology walk hand in hand in the allegedly naive corners of the world.” His skepticism about the program’s results was even sharper. Sometimes still animated, he was now more usually cautious about what foreign aid could achieve, and he backed well away from any demand for immediate selfdetermination. Technology transfer was important but not a guarantee of development, he insisted, pointing to the environmental disaster wrought by FDR’s export of plows to West Africa and Nelson Rockefeller’s failed mechanization of Brazilian agriculture.88 In a Saturday Evening Post critique of Point IV, eugenicist William Vogt used Bowman’s authority to argue that “millions” might be saved “from tribal war, malaria and tsetse fly” only to face starvation due to overpopulation. But Bowman’s sharpest cynicism was reserved for the recipients of foreign aid. Once the capital is invested, the technology transferred, and the rice thresher and textile mill put in the hands of “the native,” what will he do? Bowman queried. Will past prejudices really be shorn? “Will he suddenly believe that the witch doctor has died and Allah has gone off for a nap?”89 Bowman’s stint with Point IV revealed another, more surprising if enduring aspect of his politics. Bankers and financiers quickly played a leading role in the ECA, and Bowman decried their influence at every opportunity. With the 1890s financial crisis and his family’s near loss of their farm to the bank seared into his memory, and having lost his savings in the Great Depression, he held an uncompromising distrust of the banking class. Quite comfortable in the company of industrialists and generals, he saw bankers as a species apart. He had clashed with them before in the 1920s over the di-

450

/

defeat from the jaws of victory

rection of the Council on Foreign Relations, but his antipathy two decades later was even more bitter. It may have been the only residue of class consciousness he retained from a dirt-hard adolescence, but bankers for Bowman were parasites. They only underwrote the world with cash, at a pretty percentage, he might have said, but did nothing to change it. Their philosophy was exploitation, and when bankers “put private money into overseas territories they will carry that philosophy with them,” he warned. Private investment overseas was vital, but no bankers. “Can we really team up and at the same time pretend that democracy follows the dollar?” Bankers’ control of foreign trade initiatives represented a worse fate than even government control.90 However heartfelt, such a conceptual firewall between capitalists and bankers—did capitalists not also carry their “philosophy” with them?—allowed Bowman to accommodate to his class success and aspirations without relinquishing his class roots at the same time. The bitter class lessons of his youth—from Brown City to Harvard—were crystallized against bankers. His anticommunism was as reflexive as his antagonism to bankers; its rawness flowed directly from his deep personal understanding of what made communism simultaneously attractive and dangerous. The Soviet criticism of “dollar imperialism”—“dollars and democratic phraseology,” in Bowman’s words—was surely correct. Truman, Acheson, Bowman, and Hoffman all saw Point IV as a policy in political economy. An economic development program providing outlets for U.S. capital, it doubled as a campaign against communism. Where Stalin was wrong was in the apparent belief that Point IV represented nothing new, a familiar colonial plot. Point IV was not a stars-and-stripes version of European colonialism, far from it. Followed by Kennedy’s Alliance for Progress, the Peace Corps, and innumerable other postwar foreign-aid initiatives, Point IV explicitly renounced colonialism while spinning a web of economic threads that inveigled underdeveloped nations into the world economy on U.S. terms. Point IV in and of itself was not very successful. It certainly did not live up to the bold new departure Truman had envisaged but tended instead to dissipate into myriad initiatives of the UN, the World Bank, and various U.S. government agencies. When it became a political football in Washington with the intensified cold war, independence movements in the colonies after 1945 kept many capitalists from investing. Proxy wars between the United States and the USSR from Korea to Cuba, Angola to Vietnam, enhanced economic instability on three continents while U.S. geographical ignorance ratified investor hesitancy. The continued availability of investment opportunities in “safe” Europe and later Japan following Marshall Plan re-

defeat from the jaws of victory

/

451

construction provided intervening opportunities. But Point IV did establish the groundwork for increased U.S. foreign direct investment in some parts of the “third world” by the late 1960s, especially in Latin America and East and Southeast Asia. Dramatic economic investment in Asia was eventually stimulated by the Vietnam War and took off after the war’s end. If Point IV was dollar imperialism, the flow of capital was much lighter, more sporadic, and more uneven than expected in the first quarter century after the war. Meanwhile, cold war hysteria in the United States had become so frenzied by the beginning of 1950 that, incredible as it might seem, Point IV found itself denounced, not as a capitalist, but as a Soviet, plot. Going well beyond the nativist howl that U.S. tax dollars did not belong abroad, Henry Hazlitt, a contributing editor of Newsweek, was only one among many vocal and well-connected right-wing ideologues who saw new “foreign aid” policies not as a lever for American globalism but a Trojan horse for communism. Point IV was inspired by Earl Browder, U.S. Communist Party leader, he charged, and was a vehicle for placing the U.S. government at the center of a larger “collectivist and statist” world government. This postwar spore of earlier isolationism would resurge at the end of the twentieth century in the form of right-wing militias and nativist (American) denunciations of the UN also as a communist plot.91

Quite how Bowman would have responded to this implication that, as ECA leader on Point IV, he was a communist stooge or “fellow traveler,” we shall never know. Incredible as it sounds, Bowman might well have been vulnerable to the scrutiny of building McCarthyism. Far stranger things happened. His reactionary politics and rabid anti-Sovietism would not necessarily have prevented him from accusations that he was a “communist sympathizer.” There was evidence after all, and his FBI file from the period reveals that agents explicitly tried to elicit whether in private he was as patriotic as his speeches implied. The same Bowman who delivered the “Red Czar” speech was also, it turned out, an acquaintance of Alger Hiss, had proposed Hiss for membership in the American Geographical Society, and had arranged to have him awarded an honorary degree at Johns Hopkins in 1947. The following year Hiss was publicly and sensationally accused of spying, in the highest-profile cold war case to date, and Bowman deposed himself as a character witness on Hiss’s behalf. Some sort of class allegiance kept him tied to Hiss, even though the Hopkins president had since the early 1940s quietly warned various people to steer clear of the “Hiss brothers.” If Bowman were ever under suspicion, these warnings might not have made a very

452

/

defeat from the jaws of victory

convincing defense, however, especially since one of those he warned was Owen Lattimore. Bowman personally brought Lattimore to the Page School at Hopkins in 1938, promoted him through the Council on Foreign Relations, the AAG, and the AGS as well as the Century Club, and was his entrée to the State Department. The Bowmans and Lattimores were social acquaintances. It was Lattimore who presented Bowman with his honorary Hopkins degree two years after Hiss’s was presented by Bowman. In February 1950, with Lattimore doing research in Afghanistan and with Joseph McCarthy under pressure to name the names of all the Soviet spies who, he claimed, riddled Washington, McCarthy named Lattimore.92 If McCarthy was to be believed, the two top Soviet spies in the country at the beginning of 1950 were Bowman’s friends! Bowman bore a special culpability in the Lattimore case, and it reverberated ironically and tragically on his own dreams and ambitions. While publicly on the best of terms with Lattimore, he began distancing himself in 1944 after a federal agent appeared at his door inquiring about Eleanor Lattimore, Owen’s wife. Four years later Bowman apparently advised his successor at Hopkins, Detlev Bronk, that one of his first jobs would be to get rid of Lattimore. Once Lattimore was publicly accused of spying by McCarthy, the chair of the Bowman School of Geography, George Carter, began waging his own vicious campaign. He accused several geography graduate students of being communists and campaigned sufficiently against one of E. F. Penrose’s graduates that he was hounded out of the profession. Carter also informed on Lattimore to the House Un-American Activities Committee, going so far as to file an affidavit including spurious accusations that his colleague was a spy. Under attack from witch-hunters nationwide, the president and trustees of Johns Hopkins offered little defense of Lattimore. Penrose and his wife, Edith, helped organize a faculty and student defense; Penrose and biogeographer Douglas Lee angrily but unsuccessfully demanded Carter’s resignation as department chair. But as faculty began to leave and students refused to come, the Isaiah Bowman Department of Geography lay in ruins.93 With his connections to Lattimore and Hiss apparently in mind, the FBI opened an investigation of Bowman in 1954, but as the bumbling agents soon discovered it was too late. The farce of McCarthyism was complete. In fact, Bowman did not live to see the unfolding of Point IV or the vicious accusations against his erstwhile friend Owen Lattimore. Although he saw the beginning of trouble in the department—indeed, sparked it by firing Pelzer and Gottmann, promoting Carter, and turning his successor against Lattimore— he would never know the mess that came of his most cherished dream.

defeat from the jaws of victory

/

453

When he retired from Johns Hopkins at the end of 1948, Bowman and his wife, Cora, moved into a large apartment close to the campus, where he retained an office, generously funded by John Lee Pratt, for all his writing projects. He warned his children and grandchildren that with less space now they would have to be more resourceful when visiting. The books he planned were historical, geographical, political, and autobiographical, and while he had scraps of already written material, his voluminous files beckoned him to fresh writing. But he had trouble settling down to retirement. A number of commitments kept him busy. Bowman was not the kind of man who would give presents to himself or even think of such a concept, but in addition to Point IV, continued Harvard consultations, and the Fishing Party, he agreed to sit on the executive council of the Baltimore Chapter of the Boy Scouts of America. In the first year of his retirement he did tap out nearly two hundred pages of material beginning to trace the evolution of foreign policy planning from the Inquiry to the World War II State Department. Politely put, it was a rough and often stiff first draft; his British Foreign Office counterparts would have called it diaphanous. He celebrated his seventy-first birthday the day after Christmas 1949, presumably swore off champagne for the coming of 1950, and was getting some holiday writing done. On the cusp of the second half of what was supposed to be the American Century, at around midnight on 5 January, he had a massive heart attack. He died at Johns Hopkins University Hospital eight hours later.

16 GEOGRAPHICAL SOLICITUDE, VITAL ANOMALY

The American Century is synonymous with globalization. The first formative moment, from 1898 to 1919, adumbrated the vision of a global political economy that would simultaneously surpass the regional parameters of the European empires and entwine a global political structure (the League of Nations) with an already accomplished world market. The Russian Revolution, labor and socialist revolts at home, and nationalist U.S. Senate rejection of the league, followed by the rise of fascism in Europe, brought a concerted retreat from this early effort at globalism—a deglobalization of sorts. World War II posited a flintier global design. But the cold war frustrated this second moment of American imperial ambition. At the beginning of the twenty-first century—the third moment of U.S. imperial assertion—a new global amalgam of political and economic ambition, summarized in the rhetoric of globalization, is again promised. The postwar institutions of global management—the United Nations, International Monetary Fund, World Bank, and General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT—superseded by the World Trade Organization)—have newfound power after decades of limited relevance, even dormancy. Twentieth-century globalism was stimulated first and foremost by the increasing geographical scale of economic production and circulation, in short, the increasing scale of capital accumulation. Among the many signs of this expansion, the unprecedented scale of the U.S. Steel works at Gary, Indiana, built in 1905 with a town of two hundred thousand to service it,

geographical solicitude, vital anomaly

/

455

was perhaps its most powerful landscape expression prior to World War I. But just as important were the proliferation of multinational corporations that began before the war and accelerated in the 1920s, the extraordinary innovations in transportation and communication, and the internationalization of cultural commodities from music to film to advertising. New York was challenging London as a center of global finance; the international power and range of the House of Morgan presaged the global sway of U.S. capital in coming decades, and the Wall Street crash of 1929 provoked an international, not simply a national, economic depression. The new globalism was also political in inspiration. American nationalism was the primary political vehicle for this globalism as well as its major enemy. This was especially evident in the failed first and second moments of American Empire and is vividly expressed by the nationalist internationalism of Isaiah Bowman as much as by Woodrow Wilson and Franklin Roosevelt, the midcentury State Department, and the Council on Foreign Relations. For the liberal foreign policy establishment of these decades, internationalism was the fruition of American nationalism, a global manifest destiny underpinned by growing economic dominance. This ambition has resurfaced at the end of the American Century with the question of whether globalization is synonymous with Americanization. Fears of Americanization appeared first in turn-of-the-century Europe and continued throughout the century, but with the consummation of postwar U.S. economic and cultural expansion by the 1970s, they impinged globally rather than regionally on people’s identities.1 Americanization and Wilson’s globalism have evolved in consort, but there is also a vital discontinuity between the early and the late decades of the so-called American Century. If we contrast the Americanized world that Bowman and his cohorts struggled to construct with the new American Lebensraum of the early twenty-first century, the relationship between nationalism and internationalism seems to have changed in subtle but fundamental ways. American globalism is no longer a liberal but a neoliberal project, the conservatism of which is manifest. It rejects the idiosyncratic “social” liberalism of mid-twentieth-century U.S. politics in favor of a return to the assumptions of market and individual self-interest emanating from the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. The mission of foreign policy liberalism from Wilson onward was the global establishment of capitalism, free trade, and bourgeois democracy within and among the mosaic of nation-states that constituted the world market. The intensity of the cold war and the resort to a binary geopolitics arose precisely from the fact that the abstention of the Soviet and Chinese

456

/

geographical solicitude, vital anomaly

blocs from international capitalism again frustrated the promise of a liberal globalism. One can therefore see how, to its American authors, there was no contradiction in the nationalism and internationalism that simultaneously drove liberal foreign policy and how also, regardless of the rhetorical scripting that pitted “liberal” doves against “conservative” hawks, the cold war was an outgrowth of liberal foreign policy and entirely consistent with it. The cold war embodied a resort to geography on all sides. It was Wilson, after all, the founder of that foreign policy liberalism, who deployed troops against the Bolsheviks, on Soviet soil, in 1919. Nation-states were therefore far from coincidental to this global vision accompanying the aspirations of the American Empire. On the contrary, they were axiomatic to it. It was an internationalism led by and premised on an American economic nationalism at the core. But the internationalization of U.S., European, and Japanese capitals by the 1960s, quickly followed by capitals from much of the rest of Asia (including China), changed this dynamic, even before the Soviet bloc collapsed. Since the 1970s and most intensely since the 1990s, the global scale of economic expansion has significantly eroded the economic prerogative—not necessarily the political or cultural rationale—of nation-states. In the language of Bowman or Wilson, economic internationalism has been so successful that it has begun to render its nationalist (American) carrier increasingly obsolete. The global geography of the American Empire, marked by the power of the IMF, World Bank, or World Trade Organization as well as the U.S. state, is therefore an inversion of the global geography envisaged through the League of Nations, even if the continuity is also greater than is generally assumed. Internationalism now predicates nationalism rather than the other way round. This is obviously a deeply uneven process, with some states retaining or even augmenting their power while others lose theirs. Across national boundaries, the increasingly neoliberal state apparatuses define themselves more and more as “partners” with capital while dismantling the systems of social service provision for domestic working classes, on which “national” capitals were built in the first place. To put this differently, the very success of a liberal American internationalism in the twentieth century produced a globalism that threatens narrowly nationalist interests even in the United States itself. However much the U.S. state wishes it, this is a globalism that cannot remain under the control of the United States and that presents highly crystallized targets for global opposition. The last is surely the message from the “Battle in Seattle” in the final weeks of the twentieth century, where as many as forty thousand demonstrators from many countries and various labor, environmental, and social movements closed down the

geographical solicitude, vital anomaly

/

457

World Trade Organization’s “millennium round” of trade meetings. It is also the message of dozens of similar protests that have followed around the world, from Prague to Quebec to Genoa. American globalism is tripped up again by geography as it scours the earth for a safe place to meet. This argument is glimpsed in Edward Luttwak’s 1990 announcement of “geo-economics,” which, in the era of globalization, supersedes an increasingly obsolescent geopolitics. Although he is not optimistic that the transition will be completed anytime soon, Luttwak envisages that the logic of global economic evolution leads to a hegemony of geo-economics in which the “free interaction of commerce” is “governed only by its own nonterritorial logic.” States, he continues, are now forced to “acquire a ‘geo-economic’ substitute for their decaying geopolitical role.”2 Luttwak’s argument has galvanized a conservative defense of the U.S. state in the era of globalization; his cherished if alarmist intent, as revealed in the subtitle of his book, is to “stop the United States from becoming a third world country.” But his insight discerning the shift from geopolitical to geo-economic power is undermined by two central flaws, one historical, the other geographical, both of which should be evident against the backdrop of my argument in this book. In the first place, the transition to a “geo-economic globalism” was not initiated at the end of the American Century but marks the crucial break with territorial expansionism at its beginning. In the second place, the geography of the American Empire is not simply an account of relict territorial divisions encased in nation-state structures, and future territorial differentiation is not simply a defensive resort to that evaporating geography, a resilience of the past defying the nonterritorial logic of the world market.3 Luttwak’s argument is a logical expression of the “lost geography” of the American Century with which I began this book. He repeats the same vainglorious pretensions about the end of geography that marked the first and second moments of U.S. global ambition. The inability entirely to overcome a relict geography becomes a matter for lament. But this defensive nationalism is already overwhelmed by the geo-economic relations it extols, and the political camouflage purchased with the loss of geographical parallax throughout most of the American Century became dramatically visible with the political and economic reshuffle of global relations after the 1970s. By the same token, Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri document the rise of a new empire, but insofar as this empire remains spatially unlocated—a “non-place”—an abstraction from its constitutive geographies, this recognition of empire remains clouded by the lost geography ideologies that should be its target.4 The political economy of the American Empire has had a vibrant geographical logic of its own and did all along, however

458

/

geographical solicitude, vital anomaly

energetically it was hidden. The powerful resurgence of a geographical grammar and attitude for understanding the world at the apex of the American Empire should perhaps encourage us to think less of a lost geography than of a certain geographical hiatus mimicking ruling American ambitions for an empire deemed spaceless in its global universality. During each of its formative moments, the American Empire was punctuated with an intensely geographical solicitude. The contemporary value of reconstructing the formative period of the American Century through the eyes of Isaiah Bowman should now be apparent. Although he did not use the language of the American Empire, Bowman understood very well that a U.S.-centered globalization did not lie in the future but was announced early in the American Century, and far from ushering in a world market ruled by a nonterritorial logic, the American Empire was its own geographical artifact. “Empire builders must think in terms of space as well as time,” he argued in his prospectus for establishing a school of geography at Johns Hopkins University. Geography is always changing, human societies change their geographies as they go, and it is especially vital to “think in terms of space” when “a spreading network of technicalities, trade and population differentials, and international rivalries are transforming the world. History as a record of experience is not enough. Geography conditions that experience.”5 His language of “conditioning” may bear the determinist traces of an earlier moment, but the supple spatiality of Bowman’s vision is unmistakably attuned with the end-ofcentury geographical sensibility. If Bowman’s career provides a central vista into the geographical hiatus of the American Century, why is his legacy so obscure at the end of a century he helped to build? A household name in the 1940s and described by Senator Arthur Vandenberg as “one of this country’s greatest scientists, administrators and patriots,” why did he virtually disappear from accounts of the period? For almost thirty years, the most elaborate treatment of Bowman remained the obituary appreciation in Geographical Review by his friend and ex-student Gladys Wrigley.6 Bowman himself seemed to have little doubt about his deserved place in history and not only manicured his voluminous files for biographers who would be queuing at the door to get in but also left strict instructions about access to this material. The problem, he felt, would be a surfeit of interest in his work and career, not a paucity. The answer is not straightforward and comes in parts. In the first place his defensiveness about his papers and files reveals a certain ambivalence about

geographical solicitude, vital anomaly

/

459

biographical interrogation and the place he would be assigned in history. He saved everything for a later exposé but never wrote the “big book” that cemented his connection to U.S. foreign affairs. Among his colleagues in the State Department and at the Council on Foreign Relations, he was virtually alone in not committing his experiences to book-length reflection. In the second place his relationships with many of the figures who would go on to write or dominate the definitive accounts of foreign policy events were terse. In addition to conflict with Colonel House in Paris, Bowman had a running feud with Harley Notter, who wrote the definitive text on postwar preparations in the State Department during the war; he despised Leo Pasvolsky, who started the definitive treatment of the United Nations Charter; and he was disaffected from Whitney Shepardson, who wrote the first history of the Council on Foreign Relations.7 Any who wanted to keep his memory alive were greatly outnumbered by those who didn’t. This certainly applied to geographers who knew his curt authoritarianism first hand: “Shall we say,” summarized Wisconsin geographer Richard Hartshorne, that Isaiah Bowman harbored “a fairly strong vanity generally kept well under control.” Even Bowman’s own mentor, William Morris Davis, thought him “an exceptionally able man, though more elated by his success than is necessary.” At the American Geographical Society, where the “Bowman years” represented the society’s heyday, a successor who wrote glowingly of Bowman’s legacy privately despised him, and another acquaintance was even more scathing. Bowman not only lied, she complained, but also cheated at cards with her children just to win.8 But it was more than a question of personality. Rather than using his entrée into Washington power to introduce other geographers into the inner circle, he was much more likely to guard his prerogative jealously, and the definitive account of geographers’ involvements in World War II Washington failed even to mention Bowman.9 He was largely estranged from his discipline by the 1930s. Baltimore and Washington, not geography, were increasingly Bowman’s life after 1935, but he fared little better there. He alienated almost everyone at Hopkins, and after his 1944 refusal of the assistant secretaryship of state became marginalized from a younger rump of right-wing dissenters who rose to power under Truman. The cruelest irony was that Bowman had much more in common with the Truman State Department of 1945, to whom he was dust, than with Roosevelt’s department a year earlier, where he was a consummate insider. Washington was a difficult place to work, an ideological whirlpool in which the currents of early-century liberalism, still fueled by Wilson, sloshed violently into cold war wrath claiming much the

460

/

geographical solicitude, vital anomaly

same source. As one eyewitness put it in all bluntness, Washington in the 1940s was a place where “the little people got their testicles torn off.”10 But none of these conditions makes Bowman unique. “Fame,” Jorge Luis Borges once wrote, “is a form of incomprehension, perhaps the worst.” The more I gnawed at the question of Bowman’s legacy, therefore, the more I became convinced that much as he fought the selfflattery that the American Century was “beyond geography,” Bowman himself became one of its victims. The discrepancy between his deeds and his fame between 1915 and 1950 and his obscurity today is difficult to explain otherwise. In an empire whose self-understanding perpetuates a lost geography, there is little incentive to keep alive a memory that cuts awkwardly across and in part exposes the grooves of history. Bowman’s career, from Latin American explorer to Wilsonian idealist to anticommunist firebrand, expressed perhaps too acutely the contradictory liberalism of twentiethcentury America; fame, indeed, passed over into a form of incomprehension. Isaiah Bowman was a vital anomaly. More than anything else, he just didn’t fit in. He went to Harvard but was never of it, however much he tried to be; he joined the ruling class but wasn’t of it, either; he was groomed by the National Academy of Sciences precisely because he was not one of its elite; he came to Washington and was eventually spurned; and although he reached the pinnacle of academic success, he was accepted neither by the Hopkins faculty nor, most ironically, by geographers themselves. In fact, his decision to become a geographer was itself a means of oblique engagement with a world he always wanted to change. In larger historical terms, he understood better than almost anyone the constitutive global geography of the American Empire and was cognizant enough of how that geography mattered to devote a life to its construction. In all of this there is a lot to admire, as many truly did, but his life and behavior also suggest that the riddle of his unfulfilled legacy lies in the tense demilitarized zone that he himself constructed between geography and politics. At times with airy arrogance, at times with sophistication, Bowman never stopped challenging the false geographical anemia of the American Century. His vitriolic anticommunism notwithstanding, he instantly understood cold war containment theory as a preposterous contradiction. He was too much of a Wilsonian to settle for only half the pie. Yet it was always his pragmatism that won out. In what was probably his last major advice to the Department of State, he prepared an extraordinary paper on American prospects in the “Far East” in the autumn of 1949. Knowing of the impending “devolution of French power in Indo-China” and eschewing accusations of imperialism, he urged an immediate “military decision on Saigon” as a means of

geographical solicitude, vital anomaly

/

461

asserting U.S. prerogatives in the region. He advocated the United States’ quick regional claim to Southeast Asia, in advance of assumed Soviet claims, and warned ominously that “we can lose our shirt in the swamps and canyons of the hinterlands” of that region.11 His prescience lay not simply in recognizing the quagmire that Vietnam would become for an American imperialism that he supported. Rather, he understood precisely the difference that geography would make and the toll it would take on a onedimensional (geographically ignorant) American globalism. The lost geography of the American Century was always a tragedy for Bowman. He would never know that he had also predicted one of the tragedies of the empire he helped build. Bowman was an extreme case. It may stretch traditional credibilities to claim that this autocrat who waged a one-man anticommunist scourge and who, according to his secretary, was not above burning “despicable” books in the Johns Hopkins presidential fireplace, somehow represents American foreign policy liberalism. But my point is precisely that the twentieth-century distinction in the United States between liberal and conservative, and the redefinition of liberalism in particular, was itself a narrowly conceived antidote to the threat of socialism and communism. Elsewhere around the world, the conservatism of the liberal tradition is axiomatic, and the case of Isaiah Bowman beautifully illustrates that this instance of American exceptionalism is at root ideological and should be renounced. Challenges to the universalization of American liberalism, and with it capitalist markets, were often met with quite illiberal responses in the name of liberalism. Bowman was the consummate geographical practitioner of the American Empire, but this put him in an impossible position. He was driven to succeed personally but fated to fail publicly. It is difficult to discount the importance of postwar geographical reconstruction in the world’s most wartorn century. The perverse irony for Bowman, indeed for the discipline of geography, is that this work had to be accomplished successfully in the State Department and the White House, whereas in public the geography of the political settlements had to be energetically lost so that the politics of the geography could stay hidden. Like a medieval executioner, the twentiethcentury practitioner of geography had to be deadly accurate but could never be unmasked. To practice geographical globalism and to mask it at the same time was Bowman’s fate. He was the perfect candidate for the job, up to and including his refusal to take the political route out of this dilemma and embrace State Department leadership. It was a choice, ultimately, to remain true to the geography rather than the politics. A lawyer or an economist would never have been faced with such a dilemma.

462

/

geographical solicitude, vital anomaly

This book was completed on the historical crest of a media-orchestrated hallelujah chorus for “globalization” and “neoliberalism,” the third moment of the American Century, but not before the aspatial globalism of the American Empire was radically challenged. The 1997–98 economic crisis was globalized with lightning speed, its most serious effects only barely contained in Asia, Russia, and Brazil. The 1999 uprising in Seattle and subsequent protests expressed a dramatic reassertion of geographical difference against the utopic unanimity of a Wilsonian globalism, which had triumphed again after 1989 but already looked to be fading. The “long twentieth century” began in the nineteenth and has lasted into the twenty-first, but it now looks vulnerable to powerful assertions of geographical difference. From the perspective of its end, the American Century’s lost geography itself looks like history. With empire flowering, it represented a brief hiatus rather than an ending. The end, as Hegel might have put it, is again geographical. Suddenly geography is the metaphor of choice in literary and academic discourse, with the U.S. Congress annually celebrating Geography Awareness Week since 1987. Even Harvard University has had to smuggle geography in through the back door of the J. F. Kennedy School of Government, where economists and international relations specialists have struggled to reconstruct a vision of global geography that remains for the moment uninformed by advances in geographical knowledge since the 1960s. Nonetheless, these are real responses to profoundly real reassertions of material geographies as the American Empire again struggles to arrange the backyard of its global Lebensraum. Bowman lived his life to put geography and political economy together, and the resulting geographical solicitude is again on the agenda. That many of us today share the same intellectual ambition combined with a quite different politics should not mean that we cannot learn from understanding why Bowman’s mapping of the American Empire made him such a vital anomaly, or why his successes and failures go to the heart of comprehending the fate of the third moment of U.S. imperial ambition.

COLLECTIONS CONSULTED

Note: Two of the major collections consulted, the Bowman Papers at Johns Hopkins University and the collection of Bowman Papers held by Robert G. Bowman in Lincoln, Nebraska, were combined and reorganized after most of the archival research for this book was completed. The combined collection is held at the Milton S. Eisenhower Library, Johns Hopkins University, in Baltimore. Except where I have used sources identified after this reorganization, in which case a full source reference is provided, I identify sources from these collections with simply the acronyms JHU and RGB. AGS: American Geographical Society, New York City AGS IB: Bowman archives and correspondence of the director (Bowman) AGS JKW: Correspondence of the director (J. K. Wright) AGS GR: Geographical Review archives APS: American Philosophical Society, Philadelphia APS AAG: Association of American Geographers Records (currently held at the University of Wisconsin) APS OEB: O. E. Baker Papers F. P. Rous Papers CFR: Council on Foreign Relations, New York City CFR RG: Records of Groups CFR WPS: War and Peace Studies (“Studies of American Interests in the War and the Peace”)

464

/

collections consulted

CU: Columbia University Manuscripts and Archives, New York City George Louis Beer diary CU MC: Sydney E. Mezes Collection CU OH: Oral Histories EMU: Eastern Michigan University, Ypsilanti, Michigan: Mark Jefferson Papers Explorer’s Club Archives: Peary Arctic Papers, New York City FRUS: Foreign Relations of the United States (Washington, D.C.: U.S. Government Printing Office), various years, multiple volumes FRUS PPC: Paris Peace Conference Papers HST: Harry S. Truman Library, Independence, Missouri HU: Harvard University Archives, Cambridge, Massachusetts HUG: Harvard Geography 1948 HUW: Derwent Whittlesey Papers, Widener Library JHU: Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore: Isaiah Bowman Papers, Series 58 Ferdinand Hamburger Jr. Archives LOC: Library of Congress, Washington, D.C. NA: National Archives, Washington, D.C. NA INQ: Inquiry Archives NA NF: Harley Notter Foreign Policy Files, 1939–45 NAS: National Academy of Sciences, Washington, D.C. PU: Princeton University, Princeton, New Jersey John Foster Dulles Papers RGB: Robert G. Bowman personal holdings, Lincoln, Nebraska: Bowman Papers (now integrated into the Bowman Papers at Johns Hopkins University) RGS: Royal Geographical Society, London YU: Yale University, New Haven, Connecticut Hiram Bingham Correspondence Isaiah Bowman Correspondence John W. Davis Papers (Group 170) Edward M. House Papers (Group 466) Inquiry Papers (Group 8) Walter Lippmann Papers (Group 326) Sydney E. Mezes Papers (Group 657) David Hunter Miller and Louis Auchincloss Papers (Group 825) Henry Stimson diaries (Group HM 51) YU 664: Yale Peruvian Expedition Papers (Group 664)

NOTES

prologue 1. Throughout this book I try as much as possible to talk about the United States rather than America, in recognition that “America” refers to two continents rather than a single country. At times however, especially with the adjectival form, “American” (as with the language of the American Century or the American Empire), alternatives are often awkward, and highly resonant meanings too established, and so I have retained this geographically incorrect usage. 2. See especially Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, Empire (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2000). 3. Robert Buzzanco, “What Happened to the New Left? Toward a Radical Reading of American Foreign Relations,” Diplomatic History 23 (1999): 582; Elizabeth Cobbs Hoffman, “Diplomatic History and the Meaning of Life: Toward a Global American History,” Diplomatic History 21 (1997): 500. 4. For the most sustained treatment of Bowman, see Geoffrey J. Martin, The Life and Thought of Isaiah Bowman (Hamden, Conn.: Shoe String Press, 1980). This work provides a useful annotated curriculum vitae for Bowman.

chapter 1 1. Walter F. LeFeber, The New Empire (Ithaca, N.Y.: American Historical Association and Cornell University Press, 1963), 361; Stanley Karnow, In Our Image: America’s Empire in the Philippines (New York: Random House, 1989). 2. Henry Luce, “The American Century,” Life, 17 February 1941.

466

/

notes to pages 2–7

3. Richard O’Brien, Global Financial Integration: The End of Geography (New York: Royal Institute of International Affairs and the Council on Foreign Relations, 1992), 1. 4. Including elements of the Defense Intelligence Agency and the CIA, the NIMA aims to provide a “comprehensive management of U.S. imaging and geospatial capabilities” in support of “national decision making and military operations.” Data on the current number of NIMA employees are classified. See http://164.214.2.59/org/backgrn.html and /publications/stand-up/mission .html. 5. Steven Schlossstein, The End of the American Century (New York: Congdon and Weed, 1989); Thomas J. McCormick, America’s Half-century: United States Foreign Policy in the Cold War and After (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1989); Walter Russell Mead, Mortal Splendor: The American Empire in Transition (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1987); Donald W. White, The American Century: The Rise and Decline of the United States as a World Power (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1996); Eric Hobsbawm, The Age of Extremes (New York: Random House, 1995). I should confess to having made similar arguments in “The Short American Century,” Studies in Contemporary International Development 23 (1988): 38–46. For an alternative perspective, see Giovanni Arrighi, The Long Twentieth Century (London: Verso, 1994); Robert Brenner, The Economics of Global Turbulence, New Left Review 229 (1998): 1–265; Tony Smith, America’s Mission: The United States and the Worldwide Struggle for Democracy in the Twentieth Century (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1994); David Slater and Peter J. Taylor, eds., The American Century (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1999); and Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, Empire (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2000). 6. Quoted in Paul Craig Roberts, “The GOP Contract Is Too Mild,” New York Times, 3 December 1994. 7. Francis Fukuyama, The End of History and the Last Man (New York: Free Press, 1992); O’Brien, Global Financial Integration; Kenichi Ohmae, The Borderless World: Power and Strategy in the Interlinked Economy (New York: Harper Business, 1990). See also Stephen Graham, “The End of Geography or the Explosion of Space? Conceptualizing Space, Place and Information Technology,” Progress in Human Geography 22 (1998): 165–85. 8. Richard G. Smith, “The End of Geography and Radical Politics in Baudrillard’s Philosophy,” Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 15 (1997): 311. However inadvertently, Baudrillard is true to himself insofar as he confuses Montana and Minnesota in his book-length riff on America. Paul Virilio, Open Sky (London: Verso, 1997), 65. See also Manuel Castells, The Information Age: Economy, Society and Culture, 3 vols. (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1996–98). 9. As Simon Dalby warns, increased geographical intelligence does not necessarily lead “to a more peaceful world. . . . The major collectors of such information are often ‘intelligence’ agencies and military organizations.” Dalby, “Critical Geopolitics: Discourse, Difference and Dissent,” Environment and

notes to pages 7–9

/

467

Planning D: Society and Space 9 (1991): 261–83, 277. Casper Weinberger, “Bring Back Geography,” Forbes, 25 December 1989, 31; Paul Krugman, Development, Geography, and Economic Theory (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1995); David S. Landes, The Wealth of Nations (New York: Norton, 1998); Jared Diamond, Guns, Germs and Steel (New York: Norton, 1997); Eugene D. Genovese and Leonard Hochberg, eds., Geographic Perspectives in History (Oxford: Blackwell, 1989). For a more general assessment, see Edward Soja, Postmodern Geographies: The Reassertion of Space in Critical Social Theory (London: Verso, 1989). See also the excellent study by Susan Schulten, The Geographical Imagination in America, 1880–1950 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001). 10. “International Books of the Year,” Times Literary Supplement, 5 December 1997, 11. For a critique of the metaphorical uses of space, see Neil Smith and Cindi Katz, “Grounding Metaphor: Towards a Spatialized Politics,” in Place and the Politics of Identity, ed. Michael Keith and Steve Pile (London: Routledge, 1993), 67–83. 11. Genovese and Hochberg, eds., Geographic Perspectives in History, vii. 12. For an extreme case, see Philip Pauly’s implication that geography is an accidental discipline with no real raison d’être: “The World and All That Is in It: The National Geographic Society, 1888–1918,” American Quarterly 31 (1979): 517–32. 13. The pathbreaking work was William Appleman Williams, The Tragedy of American Diplomacy (New York: Viking, 1955). See also LeFeber, The New Empire; Lloyd Gardner, Walter F. LeFeber, and Thomas J. McCormick, Creation of the American Empire: US Diplomatic History (Chicago: Rand McNally, 1973); Lloyd Gardner, Imperial America: American Foreign Policy since 1898 (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1976); Walter Russell Mead, Mortal Splendor: The American Empire in Transition (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1987); Emily Rosenberg, Spreading the American Dream: American Economic and Cultural Expansion, 1890–1945 (New York: Hill and Wang, 1982); David Traxel, 1898: The Birth of the American Century (New York: Knopf, 1998); Nicholas Guyatt, Another American Century: The United States and the World after 2000 (London: Zed Press, 2000). 14. On the anticonquest myth, see Mary Louise Pratt, Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing and Transculturation (London: Routledge, 1992). 15. More explicit efforts at respatializing history have often verged on the deterministic, positing that the fixed location and resource endowments of places have determined the trajectory of historical change. See, for example, Genovese and Hochberg, eds., Geographic Perspectives in History. 16. Cf. Hobsbawm, The Age of Extremes, who argues that the twentieth century effectively ends with the 1989 implosion of official Communist rule in the USSR and Eastern Europe. For an alternative chronology, highly sensitive to the constitutive geography of global political and economic power, see Arrighi, The Long Twentieth Century. 17. Myra Jehlen, American Incarnation (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1986), 5–6.

468

/

notes to pages 10–15

18. Jehlen, American Incarnation, 9. See also Richard Slotkin, Regeneration through Violence: The Mythology of the American Frontier, 1600–1860 (Middletown, Conn.: Wesleyan University Press, 1973); and Richard Slotkin, The Fatal Environment: The Myth of the Frontier in the Age of Industrialization, 1800–1890 (New York: Atheneum, 1985). 19. Nathan Reingold, Science in Nineteenth-Century America (London: Macmillan, 1966), 61. 20. Brooks Adams, The New Empire (New York: Macmillan, 1902), xv. For a related contemporary argument, more explicit about Americanization but less so about geography, see W. T. Stead, The Americanization of the World; or, the Trend of the Twentieth Century (New York: H. Markley, 1902). 21. Halford J. Mackinder, “The Geographical Pivot of History,” Geographical Journal 23 (1904): 421. For the estimate of unmapped land, see Edward A. Reeves, “The Mapping of the Earth, Past, Present and Future,” Geographical Journal 48 (1916): 340. 22. Mackinder, “The Geographical Pivot of History,” 422. For disciplinary biographies, see Brian Blouet, Halford Mackinder: A Biography (College Station: Texas A&M University Press, 1987); and W. H. Parker, Mackinder: Geography as an Aid to Statecraft (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1982). 23. Gearóid Ó Tuathail, Critical Geopolitics (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1996), 28. 24. Henri Lefebvre, The Production of Space (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1991), 25. In 1924 Woolf had speculated that “on or about December, 1910, human nature changed.” Virginia Woolf, “Mr. Bennett and Mrs. Brown,” in The Captain’s Bed and Other Essays (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1956), 96. 25. Gerry Kearns, “Closed Space and Political Practice,” Society and Space 2 (1984): 23–34. See also the more technological argument of Stephen Kern, The Culture of Time and Space 1880–1918 (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1983). Kern’s argument on time is stronger than his argument on space, which is actually quite compatible with the “end of geography” ideology. 26. Michel Aglietta, A Theory of Capitalist Regulation (London: New Left Books, 1979). 27. Mackinder, “The Geographical Pivot of History,” 422. 28. Rosa Luxemburg, The Accumulation of Capital (1917; New York: Monthly Review Press, 1968), 365–66. 29. Vladimir Lenin, Imperialism, the Highest Stage of Capitalism (Peking: Foreign Language Press, 1975 ed.), 90; Alexander Supan, Die territoriale Entwicklung der europäischen Kolonien (Gotha: J. Perthes, 1906), 254. 30. “Did it start with Bergson, or before?” Foucault asked, concerning the “devaluation of space” vis-à-vis the lionizing of time as “richness, fecundity, life, dialectic” (Michel Foucault, Power/Knowledge [New York: Pantheon, 1980], 70). Foucault astutely identifies the historical timing of this restructured relationship between time and space, but in looking to such an idealist philosopher as Bergson rather than to the altered structures of time and space that found ex-

notes to pages 15–32

/

469

pression in Bergson’s work, his “archaeology” of the privileging of time over space is literally groundless. 31. Cited in Bowman, “Memorandum on a proposal to delay boundary settlements until ‘the days after the peace,’” 30 December 1942, JHU. 32. Lesley B. Cormack, “The Fashioning of an Empire: Geography and the State in Elizabethan England,” in Geography and Empire, ed. Anne Godlewska and Neil Smith (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1994), 16–30. 33. For further theoretical elaboration of this argument, see Neil Smith, Uneven Development: Capital, Nature and the Production of Space (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1990). 34. Luce, “The American Century.” 35. See my “ ‘Academic War over the Field of Geography’: The Elimination of Geography at Harvard,” Annals of the Association of American Geographers 77 (1987): 155–72; Bruce Cumings, “Boundary Displacement: Area Studies and International Studies during and after the Cold War,” Bulletin of Concerned Asian Scholars 29, no. 1 (1997): 6–26. 36. Tom Glick, “In Search of Geography,” ISIS 74:1:271 (1983): 96; Carl Sauer, “Foreword to Historical Geography,” Annals of the Association of American Geographers 31 (1941): 1–24. 37. Bowman, “Geography as an Urgent University Need,” memo, 10 January 1947, JHU; Isaiah Bowman, “Geographical Interpretation,” Geographical Review 39 (1949): 364. 38. Montesquieu, Spirit of the Laws (Cambridge, 1989), 343; originally published as L’Esprit des lois, 1748. 39. For a recent assertion of the establishment attempt to reinvent geography, see National Research Council, Rediscovering Geography: New Relevance for Science and Society (Washington, D.C.: National Academy Press, 1997). 40. John Berger, The Look of Things (New York: Viking, 1974), 40; quoted in Soja, Postmodern Geographies, 22. 41. Isaiah Bowman, “The Strategy of Territorial Decisions,” Foreign Affairs 24 (January 1946): 187; Isaiah Bowman, “The New Geography,” Journal of Geography 44 (1945): 213. 42. Kennedy quoted in W. A. Williams, Empire as a Way of Life (New York: Oxford University Press, 1980), 198–99; Bowman quoted in New York Times, 7 January 1950.

chapter 2 1.Bowman to James Lee Love, 7 November 1939, JHU, Series II, Box 28, 2. 2. Bowman to A. C. Burnham, 1 March 1926, JHU. 3. Now Waterloo, Berlin was renamed amid the anti-German nationalism of World War I. 4. Bowman to A. C. Burnham, 1 March 1926; Bowman to John C. French, 5 January 1946, JHU I.1.; Bowman to Mary Day, 6 February 1942, JHU I.1. See

470

/

notes to pages 33–37

also John C. French, A History of the University Founded by Johns Hopkins (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1946), 456–57. 5. Interview with Robert Bowman, 2 June 1984, Lincoln, Nebraska; Bowman to Edward A. Filene, 8 May 1930, AGS IB; Bowman to Love, 7 November 1939, JHU; Bowman, undated and untitled autobiographical statement, JHU I.1. 6. Bowman to French, 5 January 1946. 7. Bowman to Love, 7 November 1939. 8. Bowman, untitled memo (conversation with Eleanor Roosevelt), 7 January 1944, JHU, 4; Bowman to Love, 7 November 1939. 9. Bowman to Love, 7 November 1939. 10. Bowman to French, 5 January 1946; Bowman to Love, 7 November 1939. 11. Bowman to Love, 7 November 1939. 12. Bowman to Love, 5 November 1939; Bowman to Burnham, 1 March 1926, JHU. 13. Harlan H. Barrows (1877–1960) was also from Michigan and also spent a year (as a teacher) at the Ferris Institute. He completed bachelor work in geology at Chicago and served as chair of that department for more than two decades after 1919. See especially his “Geography as Human Ecology,” Annals of the Association of American Geographers 13 (1923): 1–14. 14. Bowman to French, 5 January 1946; “No-one can overestimate the influence of the inspiring and devoted teachers” at the turn of the century who were “riding the wave of still surviving transcendentalism” (Isaiah Bowman, “The Faith We Celebrate,” Teachers College Record 46 [1944]: 152). 15. John Munson, “Isaiah Bowman: Obituary,” Eastern Michigan State College Newsletter, February 1950, 2, EMU, Bowman file. 16. Bowman to Love, 7 November 1939. On Mark Jefferson, see his publications: Recent Colonization in Chile (New York: American Geographical Research Series No. 6, 1921); Peopling the Argentine Pampa (New York: American Geographical Research Series No. 16, 1926); “The Law of the Primate City,” Geographical Review 29 (1939): 226–32. See also Geoffrey Martin, Mark Jefferson: Geographer (Ypsilanti: Eastern Michigan University Press, 1968). Ironically, Bowman’s roommate in Ypsilanti was John Munson, who went on to become president of Michigan State Normal and forced the retirement of Mark Jefferson (Jefferson to Bowman, 2 October 1937, EMU, Box 2). 17. On Louis Agassiz (1807–73), see E. Lurie, Louis Agassiz: A Life in Science (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1960). On Shaler (1841–1906), see David Livingstone, Nathaniel Southgate Shaler and the Culture of American Science (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 1987). For an intellectual history of geography in this period, including a discussion of Arnold Guyot (1807–84), see Livingstone, The Geographical Tradition (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1992), 139–215. 18. Daniel J. Kevles, The Physicists: The History of a Scientific Community in America (New York: Vintage, 1979). On claims of classical origins, see, inter alia, E. H. Bunbury, A History of Ancient Geography among the Greeks and Romans from the Earliest Ages till the Fall of the Roman Empire, 2nd ed. (Lon-

notes to pages 38–43

/

471

don: John Murray, 1883); H. F. Tozer, A History of Ancient Geography (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1897); George Santayana, “The Genteel Tradition in American Philosophy,” University of California Chronicle 13 (October 1911): 357–80. 19. Bowman to Jefferson, undated [probably fall, 1904], EMU, Box 1. 20. Friedrich Ratzel, Politische Geographie, oder die Geographie der Staaten, des Verkehrs, und der Krieges, 2nd ed. (1897; Munich: R. Oldenbourg, 1903). See also Woodruff D. Smith, “Friedrich Ratzel and the Origins of Lebensraum,” German Studies Review 3 (1980): 51–68. 21. Harriet Wanklyn, Friedrich Ratzel: A Biographical Memoir and Bibliography (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1961), 41. 22. On Davis (1850–1934), see Robert P. Beckinsale, “W. M. Davis and American Geography, 1880–1934,” in Origins of Academic Geography in the United States, ed. Brian Blouet (Hamden, Conn.: Archon Books, 1981), 107–22; R. J. Chorley, A. J. Dunn, and R. P. Beckinsale, The History of the Study of Landforms, or the Development of Geomorphology, vol. 2: The Life and Work of William Morris Davis (London: Methuen, 1973). 23. Quoted in Livingstone, The Geographical Tradition, 209–10. 24. G. Martin, The Life and Thought of Isaiah Bowman (Hamden, Conn.: Archon Books, 1980), 7–12. 25. Bowman to Arthur W. Page, 11 December 1948, JHU. 26. Bowman to Burnham, 1 March 1926, 2; Bowman to Love, 30 July 1946, JHU II.28; interview with Robert Bowman, 2 June 1984. 27. Bowman to Jefferson, 13 May, 13 June, 6 July, and 20 July 1903, EMU, Box 1; Jefferson to Bowman, 8 June, EMU, Box 1; Bowman to Burnham, 1 March 1926, 2; J. L. Love to Bowman, 26 July 1946, JHU II.28. 28. Bowman to Burnham, 1 March 1926; Martin, Life and Thought, 9. 29. Bowman to Jefferson, 9 November 1902, EMU, Box 1. 30. Isaiah Bowman, “Deflections of the Mississippi,” Science 20 (1904): 273–77; Bowman to Love, 7 November 1939. 31. W. M. Davis: “The Geographical Cycle,” Geographical Journal 14 (1899): 481–504; “Complications of the Geographical Cycle,” in Geographical Essays, ed. D. W. Johnson (n.p.: Dover Publications, 1954), 279–95; “The Geographical Cycle in an Arid Climate,” Journal of Geology 13 (1905): 381–407; and “The Sculpture of Mountains by Glaciers,” Scottish Geographical Magazine 22 (1906): 76–89. 32. J. Herbst, “Social Darwinism and the History of American Geography,” Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society 105 (1961): 540. See also the discussion in Livingstone, The Geographical Tradition, 202–5; and D. Stoddart, “Darwin’s Impact on Geography,” Annals of the Association of American Geographers 56 (1966): 683–98. 33. Thomas Huxley, Physiography: An Introduction to the Study of History (London: Macmillan, 1877); Stoddart, “Darwin’s Impact on Geography,” 685. 34. J. K. Wright and George C. Carter, “Isaiah Bowman, 1878–1950,” Biographical Memoirs 33 (1959): 42.

472

/

notes to pages 43–45

35. Isaiah Bowman, “Science and Social Pioneering,” Science 90 (1939): 309–19. 36. Livingstone, Shaler, 84–85. 37. Bowman to Jefferson, 13 May 1903, EMU, Box 1. 38. David Livingstone has made the point that among these earlier generations of U.S. geographers, the influence of Lamarck is generally dimmed in the glare of Darwin’s achievements. Certainly Shaler’s evolutionism came to be inflected by Lamarck’s emphasis on the environmental impetus for an organism’s evolutionary development, but any Lamarckian influence in Bowman is hard to detect. As a geographer, of course, he was intimately concerned with the relationship between human and biological organisms and their environment, so Lamarck’s influence might be intuited in Bowman’s recognition of responses to environment serving as a motor for evolution. But this was precisely the period when the Lamarckian and neo-Lamarckian insistence on the inheritance of acquired characteristics was being roundly denied, and this aspect of Lamarck’s work makes no coherent appearance in Bowman’s vision. Livingstone, The Geographical Tradition, 187–207; J. A. Campbell and D. Livingstone, “Neo-Lamarckism and the Development of Geography in the United States and Great Britain,” Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers 8 (1983): 267–94; George W. Stocking Jr., “Lamarckianism in American Social Science: 1890–1915,” Journal of the History of Ideas 23 (1962): 239–56. 39. Livingstone, Shaler, 55–85. 40. Jefferson to Chauncey Harris, 17 April 1940, EMU, Box 2. 41. See Philip P. Wiener, Evolution and the Founders of Pragmatism (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1949). 42. “I call all knowledge transcendental which is occupied not so much with objects, as with our a priori concepts of objects. A system of such concepts might be called Transcendental Philosophy” (Immanuel Kant, Critique of Pure Reason [London: Macmillan, 1919 ed.], 9). 43. Bowman to Love, 7 November 1939. Among the many works on the subject, see Perry Miller, The Transcendentalists (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1950); and Philip Gura and Joel Meyerson, Critical Essays on American Transcendentalism (Boston: G. K. Hall, 1982). 44. Manfred Büttner, “Kant and the Physico-Theological Consideration of the Geographical Facts,” Organon 11 (1975): 231–49. 45. Isaiah Bowman, Geography in Relation to the Social Sciences (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1935), 6. 46. Quoted in Wiener, Evolution and the Founders of Pragmatism, 73. In this period the “young intellectuals of America were still most widely influenced by pragmatism” (Henry F. May, “The Rebellion of the Intellectuals, 1912–1917,” American Quarterly 8 [1956]: 114–26, 116). 47. Isaiah Bowman, “Jeffersonian ‘Freedom of Speech’ from the Standpoint of Science,” Science (6 December 1935): 529–32; Bowman to Jefferson, 6 September 1936, EMU, Box 2.

notes to pages 46–51

/

473

48. Henry F. May, The End of American Innocence (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1959), 14. 49. Bowman to Love, 7 November 1939; Bowman to Jefferson, 30 November 1904, 5 May, 5 July, and 6 October 1905, EMU, Box 2. 50. Davis to Bowman, 18 March 1906, JHU; Bowman to Love, 30 July 1946, JHU. 51. Bowman to Jefferson, 6 October 1905, 2 February and 1 August 1906, EMU, Box 1. 52. Isaiah Bowman, “Geography at Yale University,” Journal of Geography 7 (1908): 59–61, 61. For a critique of determinism, see Richard Peet, “The Social Origins of Environmental Determinism,” Annals of the Association of American Geographers 75 (1985): 309–33. 53. Isaiah Bowman, “Review of ‘Geography of the Middle Illinois Valley,’” Bulletin of the American Geographical Society 42 (1910): 690–92; Bowman to James Truslow Adams, 2 August 1924, AGS IB. 54. Bowman to Hayden, 10 January 1944, RGB. 55. APS AAG, Box 24; Hugh Robert Mill, The International Geography, 2nd ed. (New York: D. Appleton, 1912); J. K. Wright to Derwent Whittlesey, 9 September 1950, AGS, JKW, file: Whittlesey, D., 1950–56. 56. Bowman to Jefferson, 2 February 1906, 28 February 1908, EMU, Box 1; Bowman, “Geography at Yale University,” 60. 57. Charles Seymour, Geography, Justice, and the Paris Peace Conference (New York: American Geographical Society, 1951), 1. 58. Isaiah Bowman, Forest Physiography (New York: John Wiley and Sons, 1911), 3. 59. “There is something about soils and Physiography of the United States in its 728 pages,” he wrote to Jefferson, “though why I ever had the temerity to put ‘Forest’ in the title stumps ‘me myself’” (Bowman to Jefferson, 22 June 1911, EMU, Box 1). See also A. J. Herbertson, “Review of ‘Forest Physiography,’ “ Geographical Journal 40 (1911): 208–9. 60. Davis, “The Geographical Cycle,” 484. 61. See, for example, Carl Sauer, “The Morphology of Landscape,” University of California Publications in Geography 2 (1925): 19–53; Richard Hartshorne, The Nature of Geography (Lancaster, Pa.: Association of American Geographers, 1939). 62. Bowman, Forest Physiography, 1–3. 63. Shaler himself had already published several closely related pieces: “Forests of North America,” Scribner’s Magazine 1 (1887): 561–80; “Physiography of North America,” in Narrative and Critical History of America, ed. J. Winser (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1884–89), 4: i–xxx. 64. Bowman, Forest Physiography, 1. 65. Theophilus Parsons quoted in Philip F. Gura and Joel Myerson, eds., Critical Essays on American Transcendentalism (Boston: G. K. Hall, 1982), 9.

474

/

notes to pages 52–61

66. J. K. Wright and G. F. Carter, “Isaiah Bowman, 1878–1950,” Biographical Memoirs 33 (1959): 42; Bowman to Charles Phelps Taft, 21 January 1948, JHU. 67. Isaiah Bowman, “The Frontier Region of Mexico,” Geographical Review 3 (1917): 16–17. See also Friedrich Katz, The Secret War in Mexico: Europe, the United States and the Mexican Revolution (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1981).

chapter 3 1. Halford J. Mackinder, “The Geographical Pivot of History,” Geographical Journal 23 (1904): 422. 2. Isaiah Bowman, Desert Trails of Atacama (New York: American Geographical Society Special Publication No. 5, 1924), 1. 3. Bowman, Desert Trails, 1–2. 4. Some contests still continue: a violent border war re-erupted in 1995 between Peru and Ecuador. 5. Clements Markham’s work culminated in his classic The Incas of Peru (London: Smith, Elders, 1910). See also Charles Darwin, A Naturalist’s Voyage, Journal of Researches into the Natural History and Geology of the Countries Visited during the Voyage of H.M.S. Beagle round the World (London: John Murray, 1890 ed.). See Isaiah Bowman: “Man and Climatic Change in South America,” Geographical Journal 33 (1909): 267–78; and “Regional Population Groups of Atacama, Part 1,” Bulletin of the American Geographical Society 41 (1909): 142–211. 6. Bowman, Desert Trails, 1. For Latin American writers responding in different ways to the conversion of their countries into frontiers, see David J. Weber and Jane M. Rausch, eds., Where Cultures Meet: Frontiers in Latin America (Wilmington: Jaguar Books, 1994). 7. Bowman, “Regional Population Groups of Atacama, Part 1,” 144. 8. Bowman, “Regional Population Groups of Atacama, Part 1,” 144. 9. Bowman, 1907 diary, AGS IB; Bowman to Jefferson, 9 June 1907, EMU; Isaiah Bowman, The Andes of Southern Peru (New York: Henry Holt, 1916), 34. 10. Isaiah Bowman, “The Physiography of the Central Andes: I. The Maritime Andes,” American Journal of Science 28 (1909): 197–217. 11. Bowman, “Physiography of the Central Andes: I”; Bowman, “The Physiography of the Central Andes: II. The Eastern Andes,” American Journal of Science 28 (1909): 373–402. 12. Bowman, “Physiography of the Central Andes: II,” 373. 13. Bowman, 1907 diary, 137, 179–80. 14. Bowman, 1907 diary, 176–94. 15. Bowman, 1907 diary, 296. 16. Bingham to President William H. Taft, 10 March 1911, YU, Yale Peruvian Expedition Papers, Series II, Box 5, file 4; Albert M. Bingham, Portrait of

notes to pages 61–67

/

475

an Explorer (Ames: Iowa State University Press, 1989), 10. See also Annie Smith Peck, A Search for the Apex of America (New York: Dodd, Mead, 1911). 17. The scientific work was for Bingham simply a “device to link the search for Inca ruins with the climbing of Coropuna,” according to Bingham’s son: A. Bingham, Portrait of an Explorer, 199. 18. Bingham diary, YU 664, Series II, Box 18–3. Bowman, after analyzing a series of sediments in which Bingham had found human bones, published several papers promoting the idea of an ancient “Cuzco Man” dated to between twenty thousand and forty thousand years before the present. Much to the ire of the local subprefect, Bingham ordered the remains excavated, and they were eventually presented to the Peabody Museum at Yale. On a subsequent expedition, however, with the help of Yale geologist Herbert Gregory, Bingham concluded that the bones were of much more recent origin, representing a postConquest ceremonial burial. “Cuzco Man” was a myth. See Isaiah Bowman: “Man and Climate Change in South America,” Geographical Journal 33 (1909): 267–78; “A Buried Wall at Cuzco and Its Relation to the Question of a Pre-Inca Race (Yale Peruvian Expedition, 1911),” American Journal of Science 34 (1912): 497–509; and “The Geologic Relations of the Cuzco Remains,” American Journal of Science 33 (1912): 307–25. For the refutation, see Hiram Bingham, “The Investigation of the Prehistoric Remains Found Near Cuzco, Peru, in 1911,” American Journal of Science 36 (July 1913): 1–2; George F. Eaton, “Vertebrate Remains in the Cuzco Gravels,” American Journal of Science 36 (July 1913): 3–14; and Herbert E. Gregory, “The Gravels at Cuzco,” American Journal of Science 36 (July 1913): 15–29. 19. Isaiah Bowman, “The Cañon of the Urubamba,” Bulletin of the American Geographical Society 44 (1912): 885; Bowman, Andes of Southern Peru, 8. 20. Bowman to Bingham, 1 August 1911, YU 664, II, 5–27. 21. A. Bingham, Portrait of an Explorer, 154. 22. Bowman, Andes of Southern Peru, 8–19. 23. Bowman, Andes of Southern Peru, 19; Bowman, “The Cañon of the Urubamba,” 891. 24. Bowman, Andes of Southern Peru, 20. 25. Bowman, Andes of Southern Peru, 20. 26. Hiram Bingham, “Preliminary Report of the Yale Peruvian Expedition,” Bulletin of the American Geographical Society 44 (1912): 20. Hendriksen was a Danish cartographer working for the Coast and Geodetic Survey, and he had been seconded to the expedition at the personal behest of President Taft: Bingham to Taft, 10 March 1911, YU 664, II, 5–4. 27. A. Bingham, Portrait of an Explorer, 235. 28. “Foreword,” in Carlos Monge, Acclimatization in the Andes (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1948), viii. 29. Bowman to Bingham, 22 November 1911, YU 664, II, 6–30; Hiram Bingham, Inca Land (Boston and New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1922), 46.

476

/

notes to pages 67–71

30. A. Bingham, Portrait of an Explorer, 249. Most recent height estimates are: Aconcagua (22,841 ft.; 6,962 m); Huascarán (22,205 ft.; 6,768 m); Coropuna (21,079 ft.; 6,425 m). 31. Bowman, Andes of Southern Peru, 190–93, 199–273, 285–310. See also Francois E. Matthes, “Glacial Sculpture of the Bighorn Mountains, Wyoming,” United States Geological Survey Annual Report (Washington D.C., 1900), vol. 21, part 2, 181. A corrie, or cirque, is a large bowl on a mountainside scooped out by a ball of ice; a bergschrund is a cravasse that forms where the corrie ice pulls away from the rock surface. 32. Isaiah Bowman, “First Report of Professor Bowman’s Expedition,” Bulletin of the American Geographical Society 45 (1913): 750–53; Isaiah Bowman, “Geographical Expedition of 1913 to the Central Andes,” Yale Alumni Weekly 8, no. 1 (1913): 407–8. 33. Isaiah Bowman, “Results of an Expedition to the Central Andes,” Bulletin of the American Geographical Society 46 (1914): 161; Bowman, Andes of Southern Peru, 235. See also A. J. Herbertson, “The Major Natural Regions: An Essay in Systematic Geography,” Geographical Journal 25 (1905): 300–312. 34. Bowman, “Regional Population Groups of Atacama, Part 1,” 146. 35. Bowman, Andes of Southern Peru, 62. 36. Bowman, Andes of Southern Peru, 1, 4, 34, and passim. 37. Bowman, Andes of Southern Peru, 55–56. See also Isaiah Bowman: “The Distribution of Population in Bolivia,” Bulletin of the Geographical Society of Philadelphia 7 (1909): 74–93; “The Highland Dweller of Bolivia: An Anthropogeographic Interpretation,” Bulletin of the Geographical Society of Philadelphia 7 (1909): 159–84; and “Regional Population Groups of Atacama, Part 1.” 38. Bowman, Andes of Southern Peru, vii; Bowman, Desert Trails, 319. 39. Guano for fertilizer was actually a major focus of early imperial interest by U.S. capital in the region. See Jimmy M. Skaggs, The Great Guano Rush: Entrepreneurs and American Overseas Expansionism (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1994). For an expanded argument about trade routes and colonization, see Thomas J. Bassett, “Cartography and Empire Building in NineteenthCentury West Africa,” Geographical Review 84 (1984): 321. 40. See “Copiapó Mining Co.,” AGS IB: “Miscellaneous Notes from South American Field Work”; Bowman, Desert Trails, 181–85. The diary was by a “James Sanderson,” overseer of the Ramadilla estate. The grateful manager wrote Bowman some months later that his prediction of a wet year was borne out and that “great benefits will ensue.” 41. Bowman, Desert Trails, 109, 162, 292–93. 42. Bowman, “Geographical Expedition of 1913 to the Central Andes,” 107. 43. Bowman, Andes of Southern Peru, 24; Karl Marx, Capital, 3 vols., trans. Samuel Moore and Edward Aveling (New York: International, 1967 ed.), 1: chap. 1. 44. Friedrich Ratzel, Anthropogeographie (original publication, 1882–91; Stuttgart: J. Engelhorn, 1912). 45. Bowman, Desert Trails, 344–45.

notes to pages 71–79

/

477

46. Isaiah Bowman, “The Military Geography of Atacama,” Educational Bimonthly (June 1911): 1–21. 47. Bowman, Andes of Southern Peru, 93. 48. For Ratzel’s symptomatic silence on labor, see Richard Peet, “The Social Origins of Environmental Determinism,” Annals of the Association of American Geographers 75 (1985): 309–33. 49. Bowman, 1907 diary, 233–39, 251–52, 374. 50. Bowman, Andes of Southern Peru, 25, 84–87. 51. Bowman, 1907 diary, 292. 52. Bowman, Andes of Southern Peru, 24–28. 53. Bowman, Andes of Southern Peru, 88. 54. See David Livingstone, “Climate’s Moral Economy: Science, Race and Place in Post-Darwinian British and American Geography,” in Geography and Empire, ed. A. Godlewska and N. Smith (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1994), 132–54. 55. Bowman, Andes of Southern Peru, 108–9. 56. Theodore Roosevelt, “The Andes of Southern Peru,” Geographical Review 3 (1917): 322. Reviewed in the Nation and the New York Times and the subject of a biting exchange in the London-based Geographical Journal, The Andes of Southern Peru was translated into Spanish twenty years after its initial publication and was still being cited as an authoritative text after World War II. Where Markham and Bingham opened up the Incas of this region to the wider British and North American public, Bowman opened up the region’s geography. That the book was not well received in Markham’s Britain was always a disappointment to Bowman. 57. Bowman, Andes of Southern Peru, 25. 58. Bowman, 1907 diary, 273–74. 59. Bowman to Davis, 27 April 1909, RGS: Bingham Correspondence; Bowman to A. C. Burnham, 1 March, 1926, JHU. 60. A. Bingham: Portrait of an Explorer, 134; “Raiders of the Lost City,” American Heritage, July/August 1987, 64. 61. Bowman, notebook “II”, 6–7, 9, AGS IB. 62. Bowman, notebook of 1941 trip, 47, 50, AGS IB. 63. Daniel Buck, “Fights of Machu Picchu,” South American Explorer 32 (1993): 22–32; A. Bingham, Portrait of an Explorer, 159–72. 64. From The Century, July 1916, 227, quoted in Buck, “Fights of Machu Picchu,” 32. 65. Bowman, Desert Trails, 2. 66. “Scoffs at Bingham’s Inca City Discovery,” New York Times, 8 September 1916. 67. Seligman to Bowman, 8 September 1916, AGS IB; Bowman to Seligman, 14 September 1916, AGS IB. 68. Bassett, “Cartography and Empire Building,” 316. 69. See correspondence by Bingham, YU 664, II, 5–4; Bowman, “Regional Population Groups of Atacama, Part 1,” 142; A. Bingham, Portrait of an Explorer, 106, 130.

478

/

notes to pages 79–86

70. Amy Kaplan, “Romancing the Empire: The Embodiment of American Masculinity in the Popular Historical Novel of the 1890s,” in Cultures of United States Imperialism, ed. Amy Kaplan and Donald E. Pease (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1993), 664, 661. See also Thomas D. Schoonover, The United States in Central America, 1860–1911: Episodes of Social Imperialism and Imperial Rivalry in the World System (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1991). 71. Mary Louise Pratt, Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing and Transculturation (New York: Routledge, 1992), 7. 72. Bowman, Desert Trails, 358. On Pizarro and the original conquest, see Eduardo Galeano, Open Veins of Latin America: Five Centuries of the Pillage of a Continent (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1973), 25–31. 73. Bowman, Andes of Southern Peru, 97. 74. Bowman, Andes of Southern Peru, 97–99. 75. Bowman, Andes of Southern Peru, 100. 76. Bowman, Andes of Southern Peru, 100. 77. Bowman, Andes of Southern Peru, 100.

chapter 4 1. Robert H. Wiebe, The Search for Order (New York: Hill and Wang, 1967), 187. 2. Martin J. Sklar, The Corporate Reconstruction of American Capitalism, 1890–1916 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988), 33. 3. Houston A. Baker Jr., Modernism and the Harlem Renaissance (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987), 15. 4. Wiebe, The Search for Order, 113. 5. Quoted in J. K. Wright, Geography in the Making: The American Geographical Society, 1851–1951 (New York: American Geographical Society, 1952), 138. 6. On the National Geographic Society in this period, see Philip J. Pauly, “The World and All That Is in It: The National Geographic Society, 1888–1918,” American Quarterly 31 (1979): 517–32. 7. He was born Archer Worsham; his mother married Collis P. Huntington in 1884. See James T. Maher, Twilight of Splendor (Boston: Little, Brown, 1975). 8. This extended field trip, organized by Davis, provided an unprecedented venue for the meeting of nearly 140 North American and European geographers. It proceeded by train from New York City on 22 August 1912 via Chicago and the northern plains to Yellowstone Park and Seattle (13 September). Next it went south to San Francisco, east to the Grand Canyon, Memphis, and Washington, D.C., and returned to New York City on 17 October. The group was welcomed by local dignitaries at most stops, and its progress was noted in the national press. Although its proceedings were usually rather formal (the lead-off dinner was at the Harvard Club, the closing dinner at the Waldorf-Astoria), the following acknowledgment by Davis suggests that some of these austere gents

notes to pages 87–93

/

479

could let their hair down: “Our members . . . will remember with pleasure the reduction of discomfort in a long journey, much of it across dry country, by the abundant provision of Budweiser Beer” courtesy of “the Anheuser-Busch Brewing Association” (Memorial Volume of the Transcontinental Excursion of 1912 of the American Geographical Society of New York [New York: American Geographical Society, 1915], 7). 9. Untitled agreement with Professor Bowman, 8 December 1914, AGS IB; Bowman to James Lee Love, 7 November 1939, JHU, 4. 10. Bowman to Mark Jefferson, 7 July 1915, AGS IB. 11. Wright, Geography in the Making, 190; untitled agreement with Professor Bowman, AGS. 12. Wright, Geography in the Making, 190–94; Bowman to N. M. Fenneman, 17 February 1917, AGS IB. 13. Bowman to Fenneman, 20 May 1920, JHU; Bowman to G. J. Miller, 24 March 1920, AGS IB; Bowman to Richard E. Dodge, 3 August 1922, AGS IB. Wrigley had been a student of H. J. Fleure at the University of Aberystwyth. On her largely overlooked role, see Douglas R. McManis, “The Editorial Legacy of Gladys M. Wrigley,” Geographical Review 80 (1990): 169–81. 14. Bowman to John C. Merriam, 5 June 1918; Edward B. Mathews to Bowman, 9 January 1920; Colonel W. S. McNair to Bowman, 2 April 1921; Bowman to McNair, 13 May 1921; all in AGS IB. Bowman also pled with the secretary of state for a permanent intelligence unit inside the State Department (Bowman to Charles E. Hughes, 6 May 1921, AGS IB). 15. Bowman to Robert H. Lord, 16 June 1921; Bowman to W. M. Davis, 28 July 1921; W. W. Dyer to Bowman, 3 May 1922, AGS IB. See also Bowman’s account: “An American Boundary Dispute,” Geographical Review 13 (1923): 161–89. 16. Bowman to Finley, 5 March 1923, AGS IB; “Home Boundaries,” New York Times, 9 March 1923. The Teapot Dome scandal in Wyoming and California erupted after 1921 when it became known that two U.S. government oil reserves had been leased to private oil magnates in exchange for financial favors. Bowman shared an affinity with John Huston Finley, born to an Illinois farm, who became president of the City College of New York and the State University of New York in Albany before moving to the Times. Finley was elected to the AGS Council in 1924 and in 1925 to the presidency, which he held for a decade. See Marvin E. Gettleman, An Elusive Presence: The Discovery of John H. Finley and his America (Chicago: Nelson-Hall, 1979). 17. Cited in Robert Cushman Murphy, “The New President of the American Association for the Advancement of Science,” Scientific Monthly 56 (1943): 572. 18. Bowman to Waldemar Lindgren, 1 November 1927, AGS IB; Bowman to de Martonne, 13 September 1934, AGS IB. 19. Bowman to Richard Pattee, 17 January 1941, JHU; Isaiah Bowman, “The Millionth Map of Hispanic America,” Science 103 (1946): 319–23. 20. Wright, Geography in the Making, 306. In addition to Ogilvie and Platt, the work was built around George McBride, a UCLA graduate and a South

480

/

notes to pages 94–97

America specialist hired in 1917, and around the Harvard geomorphologist Charles Hitchcock after 1929. Ray Platt was, like Bowman, a student of Mark Jefferson. See also Miklos Pinther, “The History of Cartography at the American Geographical Society,” Ubique 22, no. 1 (2002): 6–7. 21. Bowman to N. M. Fenneman, 9 December 1922, 5 January and 6 February 1923, AGS IB; Fenneman to Bowman, 22 December 1922, AGS IB. 22. J. F. Normano, The Struggle for South America (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1931), 66. See also Michael L. Krenn, U.S. Policy toward Economic Nationalism in Latin America, 1917–1929 (Wilmington, Del.: Scholarly Resources, 1990); Richard V. Salisbury, Anti-Imperialism and International Competition in Central America, 1920–1929 (Wilmington, Del.: Scholarly Resources, 1989); Robert N. Seidel, Progressive Pan Americanism: Development and United States Policy toward South America, 1906–1931 (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1971); Emily Rosenberg, Spreading the American Dream: American Economic and Cultural Expansion, 1890–1945 (New York: Hill and Wang, 1982); David Sheinin, “The ‘ism’ in Pan Americanism: State Department AntiCommunism and the Shaping of the Pan American Movement, 1926–1933,” paper presented at the annual meeting of the Society for Historians of American Foreign Relations, June 1996. 23. Appendix, “The Map of Hispanic America on the Scale of 1:1,000,000,” Geographical Review 36 (1946): 26–28; Bowman to Arthur Hinks, 28 September 1923, AGS IB; Hinks to Bowman, 8 October 1923, AGS IB. Following a review in the RGS journal, which belittled the millionth map as “mildly practical,” Bowman complained to Hinks, secretary of the RGS, about its “apparent hostility” toward the AGS (Bowman to Hinks, 28 September 1923). 24. “The Map of Hispanic America,” 28. 25. George McBride, an earlier employee of the AGS who worked on the millionth map, was U.S. commissioner appointed to help negotiate a settlement of the Peru-Ecuador boundary war, provisionally settled in 1941 (Bowman to Amos E. Taylor, 30 November 1948, JHU). 26. Life, 8 December 1941, 104. 27. Bowman to Manuel Gamio, 17 February 1922, AGS IB; Bowman, “The Millionth Map,” 322. 28. Raye Platt, “The Millionth Map of Hispanic America . . . ,” Geographical Review 36 (1946): 1–2. 29. Bowman to Archer Huntington, 31 January 1942, JHU; Bowman to George F. Carter, 20 October 1944, RGB; “Meeting of Technical Advisory SubCommittee, Baltimore, February 29, 1948,” RGB, 2. For more detail, see Platt, “The Millionth Map of Hispanic America,” 23–24. 30. Wright, Geography in the Making, 355. 31. Spruille Braden, “Congratulatory Address,” Science 103 (1946): 323–25; Bowman, “The Millionth Map,” 321. 32. The Livingstone Medal was actually Bowman’s second such honor. In 1928 he had been honored with the Livingstone Medal of the Royal Scottish Geographical Society, where Alan Ogilvie played a leading role.

notes to pages 98–100

/

481

33. Wally Herbert, National Geographic Magazine, September 1988. See also Wally Herbert, The Noose of Laurels: Robert E. Peary and the Race to the North Pole (New York: Atheneum, 1989); J. N. Wilford, “Doubts Cast on Peary’s Claim to the Pole,” New York Times, 22 August, 1988; “A Correction,” New York Times, 23 August 1988. 34. Boyce Rensberger, “Peary’s Notes Show He Faked Claim,” Washington Post, 12 October 1988; J. N. Wilford, “Peary Notes Said to Imply He Fell Short of Pole,” New York Times, 13 October 1988. Peary defenders could stomach some mistakes in Peary’s habitually sloppy calculations, but the direct challenge to his honor implied by accusations of fakery was too much, and the case for the defense geared up. The National Geographic Society commissioned retired real admiral Thomas D. Davies’s Navigational Foundation to provide an “independent” review. The Davies report concluded that Rawlins had misinterpreted the new data—it was not a solar observation at all—and that new forensic photography and depth soundings suggested that Peary did get to within “three to five miles” of the Pole and “certainly no more than 15 miles away.” But these claims too were contested—by scientists who were familiar with the new techniques and doubted the accuracy levels claimed by the NGS-sponsored study. See Thomas D. Davies, Robert E. Peary at the North Pole: A Report to the National Geographic Society (Rockville, Md.: Foundation for the Promotion of the Art of Navigation, 1989); W. E. Leary, “Peary Made It to the Pole after All, Study Concludes,” New York Times, 12 December 1989; Paul Wallich, “Polar Heat,” Scientific American, March 1990, 22–24. See also Eliot Marshal, “Peary’s North Pole Claim Reexamined,” Science 243 (3 March 1989): 1131–32. The Davies claim of fifteen miles is quoted in Paul Wallich, “Peary Redux,” Scientific American, June 1990, 25–26. A further modification is also recorded there: Davies states that the foundation had only “established Peary’s position (with 65 percent probability) within 20 miles of the pole . . . ” (25). 35. Isaiah Bowman, “Non-existence of the Peary Channel,” Geographical Review 1 (1916): 448–52. 36. Bowman to Robert A. Bartlett, 25 April 1928; Byrd to Bowman, 15 January 1927, and Bowman to Byrd, 4 March 1927, inter alia; Byrd to Raymond Fosdick, 1 April 1931; Byrd to Bowman, 17 July 1931; all in AGS IB. 37. Isaiah Bowman, “What’s the Use of Explorers?” Outlook, 21 August 1929, 659. 38. Dennis Rawlins, Peary at the North Pole (Washington, D.C.: Robert B. Luce, 1973), 60–61. 39. Bowman to Gilbert H. Grosvenor, 25 June 1921, AGS IB; Grosvenor to Bowman, 1 July 1921, AGS IB. 40. Rawlins, Peary at the North Pole, 64; Eugene Rodgers, Beyond the Barrier (Annapolis, Md.: United States Naval Institute, 1990); Roland Huntford, The Last Place on Earth (New York: Antheneum, 1986), 126; J. N. Wilford, “Did Byrd Reach Pole? His Diary Hints ‘No,’” New York Times, 9 May 1996.

482

/

notes to pages 101–103

41. From Peary’s diary while in Central America in the mid-1880s: “San Salvador, the land which first gladdened the eyes of Columbus. . . . Birthplace of the new world, purple against the yellow sunset, as it was almost four hundred years ago when it smiled a welcome to the man whose fame can be equalled only by him who shall one day stand with 360 degrees of longitude beneath his motionless feet and for whom East and West shall have vanished—the discoverer of the North Pole.” Quoted in Douglas Johnston, “A Biography of Peary,” Science 86 (1937): 288. 42. Minik, one of those brought to New York in 1896, later denounced museum officials as “scientific criminals.” Only in 1993 were the four sets of remains returned to Greenland (Michael T. Kaufman, “Eskimos Used as Human Specimens Will Finally Get Traditional Burial,” Atlanta Journal, 22 August 1993). Bowman did not meet “Peary’s eskimos,” but he did meet an Inuit woman brought later by his close friend Knud Rasmussen. Treating her, too, as a scientific specimen, Bowman requested that Rasmussen photograph her secretly so that her unique gait and posture and her “natural carriage” could be recorded. He added, “It would also be an interesting thing to take a photograph of her body from the waist up in profile and also looking straight at her back” (Bowman to Rasmussen, 17 November 1924, AGS IB). Henson’s account is given in Matthew Henson, A Black Explorer at the North Pole (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1989). See also Pierre Berton, The Arctic Grail: The Quest for the North West Passage and the North Pole (New York: Viking, 1988); S. Allen Counter, North Pole Legacy: Black, White and Eskimo (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1991); Roland Huntford, Scott and Amundsen (London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1979); Robert M. Bryce, Cook & Peary: The Polar Controversy Resolved (New York: Stackpole Books, 1997); Cindi Katz and Andrew Kirby, “In the Nature of Things,” Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers 16 (1991): 259–71; Lloyd Rose, “Ice Follies,” Voice Literary Supplement, May 1989, 16. 43. Taft quotation in William Herbert Hobbs, “Admiral Peary, the Discoverer of the North Pole,” Scientific Monthly, May 1935, 391; Rawlins, Peary at the North Pole, 9. 44. J. Gordon Hayes, The Conquest of the North Pole: Recent Arctic Exploration (London: Thornton Butterworth, 1934); W. Henry Lewin, The Great North Pole Fraud (London: C. W. Daniel, 1935); William Herbert Hobbs, Peary (New York: Macmillan, 1936). If the first two sources were harshly critical, the last was a paean to Peary. The Lewin volume included a monograph revealing that Ross Marvin, an engineer who died on the Peary expedition of 1909, did not actually fall into the sea as generally reported, but was murdered. Apparently he was killed by an Inuit member of the party responding to mistreatment. 45. Bowman, “Eagle Island, Maine” (Bowman’s eleven-page account and transcription of Peary expedition records), 30 July 1936, RGB. 46. Bowman, “Eagle Island,” 1. 47. Bowman, “Eagle Island,” 2; Marie Peary Stafford to Bowman, 3 August 1935, RGB. Bowman’s copy of this document was among the papers held by his son, Robert Bowman, and shipped from Lincoln, Nebraska, to Johns Hopkins

notes to pages 104–107

/

483

University library in 1984. It was Rawlins’s “discovery” of this copy that contributed to the 1988 revival of the case. 48. Bowman to Marie Peary Stafford, 8 August 1935, RGB. “I could have ‘yumped wit yoy’ as the Norwegian said,” Bowman responded to Stafford’s new document. 49. Memorandum, O. M. Miller to Dr. Bowman, “Astronomical Observations at Pole,” 12 August 1935, RGB. 50. “To Elsie,” in William Carlos Williams, Selected Poems (New York: New Directions, 1985), 53. 51. “He carried no white witnesses” (“Amundsen and Peary,” Times Literary Supplement, 21 December 1935). 52. Bowman to Harry Raymond, 5 November 1935, RGB; Bowman to Mrs. Edward Stafford, 12 November 1935, RGB. 53. Bowman to Marie Stafford, 31 August 1936, RGB; Marie Peary Stafford to Bowman, 8 September 1936, RGB. In 1988 Rawlins had begun from the assumption that they were solar observations, but they proved after all to be star observations. 54. Bowman to Marie Peary Stafford, 31 August 1936. Peary was obviously keenly interested in disproving Cook’s claim. Shortly after returning in 1909, he hired Hudson Hastings to write a report evaluating Cook’s claim (four-page, signed, undated report, Explorer’s Club Archives, Peary Arctic Papers, file 1.2.33). As for the controversy since 1988, Rawlins agrees that he wrongly assumed (in line with Mrs. Peary’s description on the envelope) that they were solar observations at the Pole rather than star sightings, but the report to the NGS, while pointing out Rawlins’s error, indicated equal bafflement about the Betelgeuse paper. Since it is now known that some of the numbers in the document refer to the registration numbers of Peary’s chronometers, the star sighting could not have been Cook’s, as Bowman had assumed. Peary’s farthest north point in his previous (1906) expedition was 87°06
, and the “Betelgeuse paper” might be a back-up documentation of that feat. 55. Bowman to Stafford, 22 November 1937, RGB. 56. Bowman to Norman V. Donaldson, 20 December 1935, RGB. See also the account in Rawlins, Peary at the North Pole, 289–94. 57. Bowman to Marie Stafford, 30 July 1936, RGB. 58. Bowman had relayed this to Finn Ronne, whom he swore to secrecy: Finn Ronne, Antarctica, My Destiny (New York: Hastings House, 1979), 182–83. 59. Bowman to Guy North, 22 November 1937, RGB; Stafford to Bowman, 8 March and 28 November 1937, RGB. Not until May 1986 was a Peary stamp issued, and when it was, Matthew Henson shared the honor (and the stamp) with Peary. 60. “If I were a woman I would be in tears! I mean that I am so deeply disappointed that I shall not be able to be in Maine this summer” (Bowman to Stafford, 1 April 1938, RGB); “The Peary Memorial at Jockey Cap, Fryburg, Maine, an Appreciation by Isaiah Bowman,” August 1938, RGB.

484

/

notes to pages 107–115

61. William Warntz, “Review of Dennis Rawlins, ‘Peary at the North Pole: Fact or Fiction?’ “ Annals of the Association of American Geographers 65 (1975): 81. 62. Lloyd Rose, “Ice Follies,” Voice Literary Supplement, May 1989, 16. 63. Harry Steward to author, 12 February 1996. 64. Untitled, undated memo: “One of the grandest things . . . ,” 2 pp., RGB. 65. Rawlins, Peary at the North Pole, 63–64. On Byrd and the Boy Scouts, see Rodgers, Beyond the Barrier, 27, 33. 66. Warntz, “Review of Dennis Rawlins,” 80. 67. Bowman to Chester W. Nimitz, 31 January 1947, RGB. “Byrd Flight Covers 35,000 Square Miles Open to U.S. Claim,” New York Times, 8 December 1929. For his continuing active interest in Antarctica, see also Isaiah Bowman, “Antarctica,” Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society 69 (1930): 19–43; and “Geographical Objectives in the Polar Regions,” Photogrammetric Engineering 15, no. 1 (March 1949): 6–12. 68. Bowman to Roland L. Redmond, 21 January 1939, JHU. 69. Wright, Geography in the Making, 189. 70. Wiebe, The Search for Order, 12. 71. John Greenough to W. M. Davis, 21 February 1919, AGS IB (Davis file); A. M. Huntington to W. Redmond Cross, 1924, quoted in Wright, Geography in the Making, 205. 72. Bowman, “Two Works on Political Geography,” Geographical Review 14 (1924): 666.

chapter 5 1. Documentos presentados a las cortes en la Legislatura de 1898 por el Ministro de Estado (Madrid: Tipolitografia de Raoul Peant, 1898), 300. 2. Bowman to Henry Wilson Harris, 30 June 1939, JHU. 3. F. J. Turner, “The Problem of the West,” Atlantic Monthly 78, no. 467 (September 1896): 289–97. See also Eric Hobsbawm, The Age of Empire (New York: Pantheon, 1987), 142–64. 4. Emily S. Rosenberg, Spreading the American Dream: American Economic and Cultural Expansion, 1890–1945 (New York: Hill and Wang, 1982). Beveridge quoted on page 22. 5. “Government is so closely affiliated now with the Bethlehem Steel Corporation,” claimed one of its executives (W. H. Hurley to E. M. House, 24 October 1917, CU MC, Box 1). 6. Rosenberg, Spreading the American Dream, 67. On Wilson’s fear of German victory, see Ernest R. May, The World War and American Isolation, 1914–1917 (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1959). On the consideration of political position vis-à-vis the peace, see Charles Seymour, Intimate Papers of Colonel House: From Neutrality to War, 1915–1917 (New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1926), 264–65.

notes to pages 116–124

/

485

7. John D. Hargreaves, Prelude to the Partition of West Africa (London: Macmillan, 1963), 334–38. 8. N. Gordon Levin, Woodrow Wilson and World Politics: America’s Response to War and Revolution (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1968), 43–44. Bowman, “Memorandum on Remarks by the President to Members of the Inquiry on December 10, 1918,” JHU. 9. Bowman to de Margerie, 28 March 1917, 22 June 1917, AGS IB. 10. Lawrence E. Gelfand, The Inquiry: American Preparations for Peace, 1917–1919 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1963), 1–31. 11. Sydney Edward Mezes, “Preparations for Peace,” in What Really Happened at Paris, ed. Edward Mandell House and Charles Seymour (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1921), 2. 12. Robert Wiebe, The Search for Order (New York: Hill and Wang, 1967), 254. 13. See especially Arno Mayer, Political Origins of the New Diplomacy (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1959). 14. Bowman had briefly shared a house with Shotwell during a summer sojourn in Washington in 1917 (James T. Shotwell, Oral History, CU OH, 79–80). 15. Bowman, “Notes on the Inquiry,” 30 November 1918, 11 pp., JHU; Bowman, “The Inquiry,” 8 March 1939, three-page memo (draft of entry for The Dictionary of American History, ed. James Truswell Adams [New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1940], 124), JHU; Sydney E. Mezes to Franklin K. Lane, 2 January 1918, CU MC, Box 1. 16. Ray Stannard Baker, Woodrow Wilson and World Settlement, 3 vols. (New York: Doubleday, Page, 1922), 1: 108; William H. Buckler to Walter Hines Page, 30 April 1917, cited in Gelfand, The Inquiry, 16. 17. “Confidential Information Released for Papers . . . ,” American Geographical Society, 3 December 1918, JHU, 3; Bowman, “Inquiry,” 28 August 1939, four-page memo, JHU, 1; “ ‘Fact Students’ Join Wilson’s Peace Party; Highbrows Laden with Secrets of Foreign Lands,” Kansas City Star, 6 December 1918. 18. Wiebe, The Search for Order, 217–18. 19. “Confidential Information Released for Papers . . . ”; Gelfand, The Inquiry, 45. 20. On Lippmann, see Ronald Steel, Walter Lippmann and the American Century (Boston: Atlantic Monthly Press, 1980). 21. Lippmann to division chiefs, 11 December 1917, CU MC, Box 1; “Activities of the Inquiry,” 27 November 1917, CU MC, Box 1; “Confidential Information Released for Papers . . . ”; Mezes to Colonel Marlborough Churchill, 16 July 1918, CU MC, Box 1. 22. House diary, 4 and 9 January 1918, YU, House Papers; Steel, Walter Lippmann and the American Century, 133–34; Lippmann to division chiefs, 11 December 1917, CU MC; Gelfand, The Inquiry, 135–37, fnn. 6, 8. Steel’s biography makes a heroic and unsustainable presentation of Lippmann as “entirely on his own” in his responsibility for the Inquiry draft (133). Shotwell, whom Lippmann marginalized in the Inquiry, once put it that Lippmann “regarded his own

486

/

notes to pages 124–129

place in the Inquiry as more important than any other,” and Steel seems to have replicated this presumption in his treatment of Lippmann (139–40). In fact, Lippmann himself recalled later that “Isaiah Bowman played a big part” in the Fourteen Points. “I would say that Isaiah Bowman and I did most of the work on it” (Lippmann, Oral History, CU OH, 110). See the same essential testimony of Charles Seymour in Letters from the Paris Peace Conference (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1965), xxiv. 23. Quoted in George Louis Beer diary, 1 January 1919, CU. 24. Baker, Woodrow Wilson and World Settlement, 3: 43. 25. Unless otherwise stated, the Inquiry draft referred to is the first one: “The War Aims and Peace Terms It Suggests,” 22 December 1917. This and the final text of the Fourteen Points can be found in Baker, Woodrow Wilson and World Settlement, 3: 23–46. The second draft is entitled “A Suggested Statement of Peace Terms,” 2 January 1918, FRUS PPC. 26. Bowman, “Peace Conference,” 5 October 1939, JHU, 4. 27. House to Mezes, 10 October 1917, CU MC, Box 1. 28. Regarding the concern with secrecy, on several occasions actual or prospective members of the Inquiry were terminated or refused employment on the basis of security reports that painted them as pro-German, insufficiently patriotic, or suspect for other reasons, such as foreign birth (Gelfand, The Inquiry, 32–78). 29. “Report on the Inquiry, Its Scope and Method,” 20 March 1918, FRUS PPC; Bowman, “Notes on the Inquiry,” 3. 30. Bowman, “Notes on the Inquiry,” 5; Bowman to Lawrence Martin, 11 March 1944, JHU. 31. Bowman, “Notes on the Inquiry,” 4; Bowman, “Peace Conference,” 5 October 1939, six-page memo, JHU; Shotwell, Oral History, 82–83. See also the account in Steel, Walter Lippmann and the American Century, 128–40. 32. Gelfand, The Inquiry, 50. 33. Bowman, “Notes on the Inquiry,” 5. 34. Bowman, “Notes on the Inquiry,” 6–7. 35. Mezes to House, 18 August 1918, YU, Inquiry Papers, Series I, Box 2, folder 127. 36. Bowman to House, 17 August 1918, YU, Inquiry Papers, Series I, Box 2, folder 116; Bowman, “Notes on the Inquiry,” 6–7; Bowman, “Inquiry,” JHU, 1; House diary, 29 July 1918. 37. Bowman to House, 30 August 1918, YU, Inquiry Papers, Series I, Box 2, folder 116. 38. “Bowman ushered in his regime of orderly efficiency” (Gelfand, The Inquiry, 102); Bowman, “Notes on the Inquiry,” 10; Bowman, “Inquiry,” 28 August 1939, 2; James T. Shotwell, At the Paris Peace Conference (New York: Macmillan, 1937), 6. 39. Bowman, “Notes on the Inquiry,” 10; Bowman, “Inquiry,” 28 August 1939, 2; “Confidential Information Released for Papers . . . ,” 8–9; Bowman to Gladys Wrigley, 9 October 1939, JHU; House diary, 20 and 29 September, and

notes to pages 130–138

/

487

1 October 1918; Bowman to Lippmann, 16 October 1918, YU, Lippmann Papers, Series I, Box 38. 40. Mezes to House, 14 June 1918, CU MC, Box 1; “Statement Made by Dr. Bowman Concerning the Reorganization of the Inquiry,” 14 March 1932, fivepage memo, JHU, 2–5; Bowman, “Inquiry,” JHU, 2. 41. Lansing to Mezes, 13 November 1928, CU MC, Box 1; “Statement Made by Dr. Bowman Concerning the Reorganization of the Inquiry,” 5; House to Wilson, 22 October 1918, in Papers of Woodrow Wilson, ed. Arthur Link, 69 vols. (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1975), 5: 406–8. 42. Gelfand, The Inquiry, x, 100, 313–14. 43. Bowman to W. L. G. Joerg, “American Commission to Negotiate Peace,” three-page memo, 16 February 1942, JHU, 1. 44. “Confidential Information Released for Papers . . . ,” 7–8. 45. Bowman, “The Geographical Program of the American Peace Delegation,” unpublished article, undated [1920], JHU. 46. Bowman to John C. Merriam, 5 June 1918, AGS IB; “Confidential Information Released for Papers . . . ,” 7–8; Gelfand, The Inquiry, 44. 47. “War Aims and Peace Terms,” 2 January 1918, in Baker, Woodrow Wilson and World Settlement, 3: 25. 48. Gelfand, The Inquiry, 102–3. 49. Bowman to George Smith, 6 June 1918, NA INQ; House diary, in Charles Seymour, The Intimate Papers of Colonel House: From Neutrality to War 1915–1917 (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1926), 451–52. 50. YU, Miller and Auchincloss Papers, Box 5. 51. Indeed, as the U.S. delegation steamed to Europe for the peace conference at the end of 1918, war threatened between Chile and Peru. Lansing to Mezes, 17 and 29 April 1918; Mezes to Lansing, 22 April 1918; Mezes to Young, 4 February 1918; all in CU MC, Box 1. 52. Bowman to Mark Jefferson, 8 October 1917, EMU; Jefferson to secretary of commerce, 5 February 1918, EMU; Isaiah Bowman, The Pioneer Fringe (New York: American Geographical Society, 1931), 5. 53. Bailey Willis to Ray Leyman Wilbur, 15 October 1918, NA INQ (quoted in Gelfand, The Inquiry, 283). 54. Although the Inquiry seems never to have been called a think tank at the time, the term did emerge when the prowess of tank warfare in World War I became evident. 55. Martin Sklar, The Corporate Reconstruction of American Capitalism, 1890–1916 (Cambridge: University of Cambridge Press, 1988), 38. 56. Mezes to Lippmann, 26 December 1917, CUM Box 1; Wilson quote from Levin, Woodrow Wilson and World Politics, 14. 57. Beer to Mezes, 31 December 1917, CU MC, Box 1. This seems to be the first application of mandate in such a context. 58. Lippmann to Mezes, 5 September 1918, CU MC, Box 1. 59. John M. Thompson, Russia, Bolshevism, and the Versailles Peace (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1966), 34–35. See also Lloyd Gardner, Wilson

488

/

notes to pages 138–145

and Revolutions: 1913–1921 (Philadelphia: J. B. Lippincott, 1976); William A. White, Woodrow Wilson: The Man, His Times and His Task (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1924), 427, 441. 60. Lippmann to Newton D. Baker, 19 July 1919, quoted in Steel, Walter Lippmann and the American Century, 164. For a more apologetic approach, see Betty Miller Unterberger, America’s Siberia Expedition, 1918–1920 (New York: Greenwood Press, 1969); Betty Miller Unterberger, “Woodrow Wilson and the Bolsheviks: The ‘Acid Test’ of Soviet-American Relations,” Diplomatic History 11, no. 2 (1987): 71–90. But see also John M. Thompson, Russia, Bolshevism, and the Versailles Peace (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1966).

chapter 6 1. “Tons of Data Go with Wilson Party,” New York Times, 4 December 1918, 2; James T. Shotwell, “The Paris Peace Conference,” in George Louis Beer: A Tribute to His Life and Work in the Making of History and the Moulding of Public Opinion (New York: Macmillan, 1924), 91. 2. Martin J. Sklar, The Corporate Reconstruction of American Capitalism, 1890–1916 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988); William Appleman Williams, The Tragedy of American Diplomacy (New York: Dell Publishing, 1962). See also Thomas J. Knock, To End All Wars: Woodrow Wilson and the Quest for a New World Order (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1992). 3. Bowman, “Memorandum on Remarks by the President to Members of the Inquiry on December 10, 1918,” unpublished memo, JHU, 1. 4. Henry F. May, The End of American Innocence (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1959), 17. 5. Isaiah Bowman, The New World, 4th ed. (Yonkers-on-Hudson: World Book Company, 1928), 31. 6. Arno Mayer, Political Origins of the New Diplomacy (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1959). 7. See Gabriel Kolko: The Triumph of Conservatism (New York: Free Press, 1963); “The End of Isolationism,” New Republic 1 (7 November 1914): 9–10. It has even been suggested that opposition to Wilson by conservatives such as Henry Cabot Lodge grew less from any significant differences than from the conservatives’ frustration over Wilson’s having betrayed them by being a member of the wrong party (Gary Wills, “The Presbyterian Nietzsche,” New York Review of Books, 16 January 1992, 3–7). 8. See Neil Smith, Uneven Development: Nature, Capital and the Production of Space (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1984), chapter 3; David Harvey, “The Spatial Fix—Hegel, Von Thunen and Marx,” Antipode 13, no. 3 (1981): 1–12; Michel Aglietta, A Theory of Capitalist Regulation: The US Experience (London: New Left Books, 1979). 9. Bowman’s peace conference diary, various entries, RGB (hereafter cited as “Bowman diary”). The culinary description is from James T. Shotwell, At the Paris Peace Conference (New York: Macmillan, 1937), 96, 237. See also Arno J.

notes to pages 146–152

/

489

Mayer, Politics and Diplomacy of Peacemaking (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1967). 10. Bowman, “Peace Conference,” eight-page memo, 7 October 1939, JHU, 2; Shotwell, At the Paris Peace Conference, 16–17, 90–91; also Lawrence Gelfand, The Inquiry (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1963), 176–79. 11. Bowman diary, 22 December 1918; Bowman, “Peace Conference,” memo, 3. 12. Bowman, “Peace Conference,” six-page memo, 5 October 1939, JHU, 2. 13. Bowman to Sydney E. Mezes, 6 January 1919, YU, Mezes Papers, Series I, Box 1, Folder 14. 14. The official title of the Black Book was “Outline of Tentative Report and Recommendations Prepared by the Intelligence Section, in Accordance with Instructions, for the President and the Plenipotentiaries, January 21, 1919,” JHU. See also Shotwell, At the Paris Peace Conference, 133–34; and Bowman to Francis Deak, 22 June 1940, JHU. 15. Bowman, “Memorandum on Remarks by the President. . . . ” 16. Isaiah Bowman, “Constantinople and the Balkans,” in What Really Happened at Paris, ed. Edward M. House and Charles Seymour (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1921), 142. 17. “Especially in geography and map-making,” reported one British author, the United States “stood first” at Paris (“Two Books on the Peace Conference,” Times Literary Supplement [London], 30 June 1921). For an inventory of the maps brought to Paris, not including the hundreds of maps made there, see Isaiah Bowman, “The American Geographical Society’s Contribution to the Peace Conference,” Geographical Review 7 (1919): 7–9. 18. Mark Jefferson to Phoebe Jefferson, 25 January 1919, EMU. 19. Anonymous one-page memo, EMU, Box 2; Jefferson, Paris Peace Conference diary, 28 January, 23 March 1919, EMU. 20. Clive Day, “The Atmosphere and Organization of the Peace Conference,” in What Really Happened at Paris, ed. House and Seymour, 33–34. The autocratic system of the Council of Five apparently lost any final semblance of democracy when “on one occasion they discovered that a question before them had already been acted on three times and each time had been settled in a different way” (marginalia in Bowman’s copy of E. J. Dillon, The Peace Conference [London: Hutchinson, n.d.]). 21. Bowman, “Constantinople and the Balkans,” 158–59. 22. Robert H. Lord, “Poland,” in What Really Happened at Paris, ed. House and Seymour, 73. 23. “Report No. 1 of the Commission on Polish Affairs,” 12 March 1919, JHU; Bowman diary, 9 March 1919; George Louis Beer diary, 21 March 1919, CU. 24. Bowman diary, 19 March 1919. 25. The “president accepted all [my] suggestions and ‘followed through’ magnificently” (Bowman diary, 19 March 1919). See also Bowman, “Constantinople and the Balkans,” 160–61; and Lord, “Poland,” 72–80. 26. Charles Seymour, “The End of an Empire: Remnants of AustriaHungary,” in What Really Happened at Paris, ed. House and Seymour, 101; see

490

/

notes to pages 152–158

also Bowman, “Constantinople and the Balkans,” 162. Bowman to Shotwell, 13 December 1937, JHU. 27. Beer diary, 31 March 1919. Even Beer, who held no great respect for Bowman, volunteered sardonically that “in view of his inaccessibility,” this reprimand by Wilson “is delightful.” The meeting with Wilson actually took place on 29 March, and Bowman registered nothing of the rebuke in his diary, preferring to note that the president “told three good darkey stories,” which Bowman proceeded to outline (Bowman diary, 29 March 1919). 28. Bowman diary, 10, 15, 18, 22 March 1919; Bowman to commissioners, 11 March 1919, JHU. 29. Bliss to Lansing, 19 April 1919, Bowman Papers, JHU; see David Lloyd George, Memoirs of the Peace Conference (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1939), 225. 30. Bowman, “Constantinople and the Balkans,” 151. 31. According to the historian James T. Shotwell, also in the American delegation and an early member of the Inquiry: “The restoration of Poland by the Paris Peace Conference owes much—if not, indeed, most—to the American Delegation; and its frontiers were largely determined by Dr. Bowman, who traced them with scrupulous care on the basis of exhaustive demographic surveys” (Shotwell, At the Paris Peace Conference, 305). Important though Bowman was, his part in this is probably exaggerated by Shotwell, whose habitual generosity toward other participants in the historical record may well have facilitated a certain generosity toward himself. “He has such nice things to say about me that I feel mean about criticizing,” Bowman once said of Shotwell. But “the distortions are incredible.” He makes “his own past important to a degree not warranted by any evidence whatever” (Bowman to Paul Birdsall, 17 June 1940, JHU). 32. Bowman to Charles R. Dryer, 11 February 1920, AGS IB. 33. Isaiah Bowman, The New World, Problems in Political Geography, 1st ed. (Yonkers-on-Hudson: World Book Company, 1921), 334. 34. “Dr. Bowman was in a peculiarly advantageous position to observe the hidden intrigues” (Parker T. Moon, “More Light on the Peace Conference,” Political Science Quarterly 36, no. 3 [1921]: 501–8). 35. See David Schmitz, “Woodrow Wilson and the Liberal Peace: The Problem of Italy and Imperialism,” paper delivered at the Society for Historians of American Foreign Relations Annual Convention, August 1984. 36. Douglas Wilson Johnson, “Fiume and the Adriatic Problem,” in What Really Happened at Paris, ed. House and Seymour, 113–18. 37. For a straightforward and still very useful account of this complicated historical geography, see Bowman, The New World, 1st ed., 249–53. 38. With Serb leader Pasˇic´ largely clueless about the geography of most of the disputed regions of Croatia, the Yugoslav delegation also relied on Jovan Cvijic, a well-known geographer and former rector of Belgrade University. See Ivo J. Lederer, Yugoslavia at the Paris Peace Conference: A Study in Frontiermaking (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1963), 93.

notes to pages 158–162

/

491

39. Lederer, Yugoslavia at the Paris Peace Conference, 167–69. 40. The population figures were anything but straightforward. The last official census registered twenty-four thousand Italians in Fiume/Rijeka, but at the conference the Italian government claimed thirty-three thousand. In addition, what counted as the city was not entirely clear. Bowman quite reasonably included the adjacent coastal suburb of Susˇak as “an integral part of the city of Fiume,” which resulted in the Slav population’s narrowly exceeding the Italian (26,600 to 25,800); without Susˇak, Fiume/Rijeka proper did have an Italian majority (Bowman, The New World, 1st ed., 264–65; Johnston, “Fiume and the Adriatic Problem,” 121). See also Ray Stannard Baker, “The Italian Crisis at Paris,” New York Times, 6 August 1922. 41. Edith Wilson, My Memoir (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1938), 245–46. 42. Lederer, Yugoslavia at the Paris Peace Conference, 185–86; Mezes to House, 16 March 1919, YU, House Papers, Box 80; Ray Stannard Baker, Woodrow Wilson and World Settlement, 3 vols. (New York: Doubleday, Page, 1922), 2: 186. 43. Shotwell to Bowman, 2 December 1919, JHU; Bowman diary, 16 April 1919; Beer diary, 15 March 1919. 44. Lunt et al. to President Wilson, 4 April 1919, in Baker, Woodrow Wilson and World Settlement, 2: 147. 45. Isaiah Bowman, “Account of Interview with General T. H. Bliss, Crillon Hotel, 1919,” memo, 27 August 1939, JHU; Bowman to Paul Birdsall, 14 August 1940, JHU. 46. Bowman, “Account of Interview with Bliss”; Bowman et al. to Woodrow Wilson, 17 April 1919, JHU. 47. Wilson to Bowman, 18 April 1919, JHU. 48. Edith Wilson suspected House of planting press stories that boosted House and criticized Wilson. Edith Wilson, My Memoir, 250–51. Much of this is reconstructed in detail in correspondence around the writing of Paul Birdsall’s Versailles Twenty Years After. See especially Charles Seymour to Paul Birdsall, 26 June and 18 July 1940, JHU; Paul Birdsall to Bowman, 18 August 1940, JHU; and Bowman diary, 4 May 1919. On House’s secret meeting, see Lloyd George, Memoirs of the Peace Conference, 159; Thomas A. Bailey, Woodrow Wilson and the Lost Peace (New York: Macmillan, 1944), 261. 49. Bowman, “Account of Interview with Bliss,” fn. 25; excerpt from Beer diary, 29 April 1919: Beer says: “All six are to go home on or about May 15, while Shotwell, Westermann, Hornbeck, I and the rest are to be asked to stay. So be it!” Also Bowman to Paul Birdsall, 14 August 1940, JHU; Bowman to W. H. Buckler, 10 March 1949, JHU. 50. House said to Bowman only that he thought the letter was “lecturing” the president, an impression, House added, that passed when Wilson “praised the letter warmly.” Bowman diary, 4 May 1919. Lansing seems not to have known the full story until months later. See “A Memorandum by Robert Lansing,” 21 August 1919, in The Papers of Woodrow Wilson, ed. Arthur Link, 69 vols. (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1990), 62: 454–55.

492

/

notes to pages 162–169

51. For a somewhat speculative version of “the break,” see Inga Floto, Colonel House in Paris (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1980). 52. Bowman, “Account of Interview with Bliss.” 53. Robert Lansing diary, 21 April 1919, excerpt in Bowman collection, JHU. Baker, Woodrow Wilson and World Settlement, 2: 155–80. Arthur S. Link, Wilson the Diplomatist (New York: New Viewpoints, 1974), 115. Orlando’s threat of revolution is cited in Lloyd George, Memoirs of the Peace Conference, 539. 54. Bowman, “Account of Interview with Bliss, 4; Birdsall to Bowman, 18 August 1940, JHU; “A Memorandum by Robert Lansing,” 21 August 1919, in Papers of Woodrow Wilson, 62: 454–55; Clive Day, “Confidential Memoranda,” 28 May 1919, YU, Inquiry Papers, Series 1, Box 1, folder 16. 55. New York Times, 22 May 1919. See the account by Robert Lansing, The Peace Negotiations: A Personal Narrative (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1921), 271–72; and Upton Sinclair to Bowman, 6 December 1939, JHU. 56. Ronald Steel, Walter Lippmann and the American Century (Boston: Atlantic Monthly Press, 1980), 157. 57. Shotwell, At the Paris Peace Conference, 322. 58. Bowman to Ray Stannard Baker, 9 May 1921, JHU; Bowman to Shotwell, 5 December 1919, JHU; Bowman to W. H. Buckler, 5 November 1919, JHU. 59. Bowman to Baker, 19 May 1921, JHU; see also Bowman to Birdsall, 21 October 1940, JHU; Bowman diary, 9 May 1919. 60. Woodrow Wilson to Bowman, 6 September 1919, JHU; Bowman to James Ford, 8 September 1919, AGS IB. 61. Bowman to Seymour, 6 January 1920, JHU. 62. Bowman, “Constantinople and the Balkans.” 63. Bowman to Seymour, 10 January 1920, JHU. 64. Bowman to Seymour, 6 and 30 January 1920, JHU. 65. Bowman to Seymour, 6 and 30 January 1920; Bowman to Johnson, 5 October 1921, JHU; Bowman to Seymour, 25 February 1920, AGS IB. 66. Lederer, Yugoslavia at the Paris Peace Conference, 276–308. 67. Bowman to Seymour, 6 January 1920, JHU; and 16 November 1920, AGS IB. See also Charles Seymour, “The Struggle for the Adriatic,” Yale Review 9 (1920): 462–81. 68. Bowman, The New World, 1st ed., 253–55. For the post–World War II history, see A. E. Moodie, “Some New Boundary Problems in the Julian March,” Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers 16 (1950): 81–93; and Richard S. Dinardo, “Glimpse of an Old World Order? Reconsidering the Trieste Crisis of 1945,” Diplomatic History 21 (1997): 365–81. For the recent destruction of Yugoslavia, see Warren Zimmermann, Origins of a Catastrophe: Yugoslavia and Its Destroyers (New York: Times Books, 1996). 69. Thomas A. Bailey argued that delays over Fiume/Rijeka encouraged the Germans to delay signature of the Treaty of Versailles, emboldened the Japanese to press for Shantung, and facilitated US. and French support for the British-inspired Greek landing in Smyrna, Turkey (Bailey, Woodrow Wilson and the Lost Peace, 263–66).

notes to pages 169–173

/

493

70. Bowman, “Memorandum on Remarks by the President . . . ,” 1. 71. Isaiah Bowman, International Relations (Chicago: American Library Association, 1930). Wilson accepted Bowman’s invitation to become a fellow of the AGS in October 1921 (Bowman to Wilson, no date, LOC; Wilson to Bowman, 5 October 1921; LOC). Interview with Robert G. Bowman, 2 June 1984, Lincoln, Nebraska. 72. Bowman to Louis Aubert, 11 November 1920; Bowman to Madison Grant, 9 June 1919; Bowman to Robert Lord, 5 June 1920; Bowman to de Martonne, 17 November 1919; all in AGS IB. 73. Bowman to A. Demangeon, 5 January 1922, JHU; Bowman to G. P. Auld, 29 October 1935, JHU; Bowman to Harding, 21 January 1921, JHU. 74. Bowman to Eduard Brückner, 25 February 1920, AGS IB. 75. Frank Polk to Bowman, 8 November 1920, JHU. 76. Bowman to Harding, 21 January 1921, AGS IB. Bowman also came to feel that the minority treaties were invented by the “more powerfully organized minority groups acting through representatives in Allied government.” Some years later he would be more explicit: “Powerful Jewish representatives from the U.S. made support of the minority provisions (in which they had the chief hand) a political must.” Bowman to Norris S. Lazaron, 31 August 1946, JHU. See also William Yale, “Ambassador Henry Morgenthau’s Special Mission of 1917,” World Politics 1 (1949): 308–20. 77. Bowman, “The Eight Points: Promise and Fulfillment,” four-page memo, 31 October 1941, RGB. Herbert Croly, editor of the New Republic and close associate of Lippmann, saw Wilson as a “return to the past”: see Kolko, The Triumph of Conservatism, 216. 78. Bowman to Shotwell, 13 December 1937, JHU; Bowman to Lansing, telegram, 29 October 1919, NA RG59, Subgroup M, Box 367. 79. Georges Clemenceau, Grandeur and Misery of Victory (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1930), 167. Bowman to Ray Stannard Baker, 19 May 1921, JHU; Bowman to Seymour, 6 January 1920, JHU. 80. Bowman to Sumner Welles, 25 September 1946, JHU; Bowman to Upton Sinclair, 2 October 1939, JHU; Upton Sinclair to Bowman, 27 September 1939, JHU. 81. Robert Coughlan, “Isaiah Bowman,” Life, 22 October 1945, 123. See also, for example, “Reveals Wilson Troubles in Paris,” New York Times, 24 December 1919. 82. Bowman, “Memorandum on Remarks by the President . . . ”; Bowman, “President Wilson’s viewpoint in approaching the work of the Peace Conference of Paris,” three-page memo, JHU. 83. Bowman diary, 13 April 1919; House diary, 13 April 1919. 84. Bowman to House, 18 April 1919; House to Bowman, 18 April 1919; both in YU, House Papers, Box 70. 85. Bowman diary, 1 May 1919; Beer diary, 9 May 1919 (also Bowman’s annotation of copy of Beer diary, JHU); Bowman, “Account of Interview with Bliss,” 27 August 1939; Bowman to John E. Lane, 28 May 1919, JHU.

494

/

notes to pages 173–184

86. House diary, 13 April 1919. 87. Bowman to Ellen Semple, 18 September 1920, AGS IB; Beer diary, 25 March, 1919; Bowman to Professor Chisholm, 4 April 1919, AGS IB; Bowman to Harding, 21 January 1921, AGS IB. 88. Moon, “More Light on the Peace Conference,” 503; Bowman to W. L. Westermann, 4 June 1920, JHU. 89. On French geographers’ involvement in this carve-up, see the excellent essay by Michael Heffernan, “The Spoils of War: The Société de Géographie de Paris and the French Empire, 1914–1919,” in Morag Bell, Robin Butlin, and Michael Heffernan, Geography and Imperialism (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1995), 221–64. 90. Jefferson diary, 7 March 1919, EMU. 91. Bowman, The New World, 4th ed., 32; George Chisholm, “Geography at the Congress of Paris, 1919,” Geographical Journal 55 (1920): 310. See also Klaus Schwabe, Woodrow Wilson, Revolutionary Germany and Peacemaking (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1985). 92. “Isaiah Bowman,” Life, 22 October 1945, 123. 93. Quoted in David Steigerwald, “The Reclamation of Woodrow Wilson?” Diplomatic History 23 (1999): 84. 94. Bowman to Ellen Semple, 18 September 1920, AGS IB. 95. Bowman et al. to Wilson, 17 April 1919.

chapter 7 1. Isaiah Bowman, “Two Works on Political Geography,” Geographical Review 14 (1924): 666. 2. Robert H. Wiebe, In Search of Order (New York: Hill and Wang, 1967), 225, 243. See also E. H. Carr, The Twenty Years’ Crisis, 1919–1939: An Introduction to the Study of International Relations (New York: Harper, 1945). 3. Thomas L. Karnes, “Hiram Bingham and His Obsolete Shibboleth,” Diplomatic History 3 (1979): 39–57. 4. See, for example, Harlan H. Barrows, “Geography as Human Ecology,” Annals of the Association of American Geographers 13 (1923): 1–14; and Carl Sauer, “The Morphology of Landscape,” University of California Publications in Geography 2 (1925): 19–53. 5. Bowman to James Truslow Adams, 2 August 1924, JHU. 6. Isaiah Bowman, The New World, 1st ed. (Yonkers-on-Hudson: World Book Company, 1921), v. 7. Bowman, The New World, 91; Isaiah Bowman, The New World: Problems in Political Geography, 4th ed. (Yonkers-on-Hudson: World Book Company, 1928), 714. (Unless otherwise stated, all further references to The New World are to the 1st edition.) 8. Brooks Adams, The New Empire (New York: Macmillan, 1902); Archibald Cary Coolidge, The United States as World Power (New York: Macmillan,

notes to pages 184–194

/

495

1908); Paul S. Reinsch, World Politics at the End of the Nineteenth Century (New York: Macmillan, 1916). 9. Bowman to Jean Brunhes, 21 September 1925, AGS IB; Bowman, The New World, v. 10. Bowman to Brunhes, 21 September 1925; Bowman to Nicholas Roosevelt, 2 February 1924, AGS IB. 11. Bowman to James Shotwell, 28 January 1922, JHU. 12. Isaiah Bowman, “Geography vs. Geopolitics,” Geographical Review 32 (1942): 653. 13. Bowman, “Memorandum,” 26 February 1944, JHU. 14. Bowman, The New World, v–vi. 15. Bowman, The New World, 28, 130. 16. Bowman, The New World, 548, 569. 17. Bowman, The New World, 561–64; Bowman, The New World, 4th ed., 13. 18. Bowman, The New World, 564. 19. Bowman, The New World, 564. 20. Bowman, The New World, 28, 203, 2, 541; Bowman, The New World, 4th ed., 3. 21. Bowman, The New World, 387–89, 7, 292. 22. Bowman, The New World, 11, 525. See also Robert Argenbright, “Bowman’s New World: World Power and Political Geography,” M.A. thesis, University of California, Berkeley, July 1984. 23. Arthur Link, Wilson the Diplomatist (New York: Franklin Watts, 1974), 142. See also Emily S. Rosenberg, Spreading the American Dream: American Economic and Cultural Expansion, 1890–1945 (New York: Hill and Wang, 1982); Ronald Steel, Pax Americana (Harmondsworth, Middlesex: Penguin, 1977); and Robert Dallek, The American Style of Foreign Policy (New York: New American Library, 1983). 24. Bowman, The New World, 562. 25. Leonard Silk and Mark Silk, The American Establishment (New York: Basic Books, 1980), 196, 198; Robert D. Schulzinger, The Wise Men of Foreign Affairs (New York: Columbia University Press, 1984), 7, 18; Newsweek, 6 September 1971, 74; Zygmunt Nagorski, “A Member of the CFR Talks Back,” National Review, 9 December 1977; Theodore White, The Making of the President (New York: Atheneum, 1965), 87. 26. John G. Milburn to John W. Davis, 3 January 1923, YU, John W. Davis Papers, Box 6. 27. Council on Foreign Relations: By-Laws with List of Officers and Members (New York: CFR, 1922), 1; Handbook of the Council on Foreign Relations (New York: CFR, 1920), 4. 28. Whitney H. Shepardson, Early History of the Council on Foreign Relations (Stamford, Conn.: Overbrook Press, 1960), 9; Schulzinger, The Wise Men of Foreign Affairs, 3–4; Council on Foreign Relations, A Record of Twenty-Five Years 1921–1946 (New York: CFR, 1947), 6. In his account of the origins of the council, Schulzinger makes Bowman and Shepardson the two earliest movers

496

/

notes to pages 195–212

on the U.S. side, whereas Shepardson’s account, written forty years later and after Bowman’s death, conspicuously omits Bowman. 29. The 1901 Platt Amendment, which Cuban leaders were bullied into signing, justified U.S. occupation of the island and provided for the establishment of the Guantánamo Bay naval base. 30. Bowman to R. H. Lord, 22 April 1920, AGS IB; Schulzinger, The Wise Men of Foreign Affairs, 5–6; Silk and Silk, American Establishment, 187; Bowman to Ben Cherrington, 23 September 1939, JHU. 31. Bowman to Stephen P. Duggan, 5 November 1921, AGS; Bowman to Keltie, 14 December 1920, AGS; Bowman to de Martonne, 27 January 1923, AGS IB. 32. Schulzinger, The Wise Men of Foreign Affairs, 11; Archibald Coolidge to Edwin Gay, 17 March 1922, AGS IB. 33. Bowman to C. F. Hughes, 6 May 1921, AGS IB. 34. Memo to members, 21 December 1922, CFR RG, vol. 1; “Soviet Russia: Government, Economic Conditions and International Relations,” Report to the Council on Foreign Relations on the Meetings of Study Group B, 23 March 1923, CFR RG, vol. 1; I. Trone, memo on report of study group B, CFR RG, vol. 1; Bowman, The New World, 294. 35. Malcolm Davis to Fred Fairchild, 17 March 1927, CFR RG, vol. 2. 36. Schulzinger, The Wise Men of Foreign Affairs, 14; CFR, Record of Fifteen Years, 1921–1936 (New York: CFR, 1937), 14; CFR, “Report of the Provisional Committee Appointed to Prepare a Constitution, and Select the Original Members of the British Branch of the Institute of International Affairs,” 17 June 1919, Paris. 37. Bowman, The New World, 4th ed., 454–60, 18–19, 713–16, 738. 38. Fourth meeting, mineral group, 12 May 1932, CFR RG, vol. 4. 39. Isaiah Bowman, International Relations (Chicago: American Library Association, 1930), 9–10, 29, 33. 40. Bowman, International Relations, 20–21. 41. Bowman to Shotwell, 16 May 1933, JHU; Bowman to Gay, 5 October 1932, AGS IB. 42. Silk and Silk, The American Establishment, 191. 43. Russell C. Leffingwell to Armstrong, 19 January 1923; Armstrong to Leffingwell, 18 January 1923; Paul Warburg to Armstrong, 19 January 1923; all in CFR Records of Meetings, vol. 1. 44. Bowman to Armstrong, 20 January 1923, in CFR Records of Meetings, vol. 1. No copy of the Bowman letter appears in Bowman’s files, either at the AGS or at Johns Hopkins, suggesting that Bowman may have had second thoughts about such an intemperate outburst.

chapter 8 1. Frederick Jackson Turner, “The Significance of the Frontier in American History,” in The Frontier in American History (New York: Henry Holt, 1920).

notes to pages 213–217

/

497

See also William Appleman Williams, “The Frontier Thesis and American Foreign Policy,” Pacific Historical Review 24 (1955): 379–95. 2. Bowman to Edward A. Filene, 8 May 1930, AGS IB; Bowman, “Pioneer Settlement,” memo, undated, 23 pp., RGB, 1. 3. Isaiah Bowman, “The Pioneering Process,” Science 75 (20 May 1932): 524. 4. Bowman, “Pioneer Settlement.” See also Derwent Whittlesey, “Sequent Occupance,” Annals of the Association of American Geographers 19 (1929): 162–65. 5. Isaiah Bowman, “Applied Geography,” Scientific Monthly 38 (1934): 176. 6. See, for example, my Uneven Development: Nature, Capital and the Production of Space (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1984). 7. Isaiah Bowman, “Planning in Pioneer Settlement,” Annals of the Association of American Geographers 22 (1932): 93. 8. Harlan H. Barrows, “Geography as Human Ecology,” Annals of the Association of American Geographers 13 (1923): 1–14. On the emergence of a city geography, see Mark Jefferson: “How American Cities Grow,” Bulletin of the American Geographical Society 47 (1915): 19–37; and “The Law of the Primate City,” Geographical Review 29 (1939): 226–32. For the Chicago School, the paradigmatic study came from Robert E. Park, E. W. Burgess, and R. MacKenzie: The City (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1925). 9. Carl Sauer, “The Morphology of Landscape,” University of California Publications in Geography 2, no. 2 (1925): 19–54. Sauer paid a heavy career price for his attempts to integrate theory and history into 1920s and 1930s geography, becoming the target of a bitter antiintellectual attack led by Wisconsin geographer Richard Hartshorne: The Nature of Geography (Lancaster, Pa.: Association of American Geographers, 1939). 10. Bowman, “Mr. Minister, Ladies and Gentlemen,” address to the International Geographical Congress, Paris, 1931, RGB, 3. 11. Isaiah Bowman, “The Scientific Study of Settlement,” Geographical Review 16 (1926): 647; Isaiah Bowman, The Pioneer Fringe, American Geographical Society Special Publication, No. 13 (New York: AGS, 1931), 111. See also Bowman to Arthur M. Schlesinger, 15 February 1932, JHU; Bowman to Henry Wallace, 6 May 1940, JHU. 12. David White to Bowman, 23 April and 4 May 1925; Bowman to Wellington Jones, 13 March 1931; Bowman to W. H. Twenhofel, 15 July 1931; all in AGS IB. The initial committee comprised all geographers: Bowman, O. E. Baker (U.S. Department of Agriculture), Charles Colby (University of Chicago), Nevin Fenneman (University of Cincinnati), Lawrence Martin (Library of Congress), and W. L. G. Joerg (AGS). 13. Bowman, “Appendix M: Memorandum on Pioneer Belts,” 25 April 1925, JHU. 14. Bowman to O. E. Baker, 23 August 1926, AGS IB; Bowman to Frederick Merck, 1 January and 21 February 1927, AGS IB. The initial SSRC committee, established in 1926, was chaired by the Harvard historian Merck and included R. E. Park (Chicago sociologist) as well as Bowman and Baker. Merck was cer-

498

/

notes to pages 217–222

tainly well aware of Bowman’s proprietary claims over the project: Frederick Merck to O. E. Baker, 4 February 1928, APS OEB, Merck 1. 15. Bowman to W. A. Mackintosh, 12 September 1929, AGS IB. 16. Bowman to Charles Colby, 30 November 1930, AGS IB. 17. Bowman to Baker, 18 May 1926, JHU. After the meeting, Bowman sent Malinowski a fawning letter. Recalling an incident from his 1911 canoe exploration of the Urubamba in Peru, he latched on to Malinowski’s insistence that a structured logic pertained in “primitive” societies as much as in Western ones. For a couple of pages, he lamented the barriers to cross-cultural research, barriers that reside “in the mind of the white investigator” as much as in “the mind of the native” (Bowman to Malinowski, 20 August 1926, AGS IB). There is no record of a reply. 18. Baker to Bowman, 28 August 1926, APS OEB; R. E. Park to Bowman, 19 August 1926, AGS IB; Bowman to Baker, 29 September 1926, AGS IB. 19. E. Richard Brown, Rockefeller Medicine Men (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1979). 20. See, for example, his plea to E. E. Day: Bowman to Day, 15 March 1930, AGS IB. 21. Bowman to Baker, 14 January 1927; Bowman to Merck, 2 March 1928; Bowman to Wellington Jones, 13 August 1931; “Regarding the Discontinuance of the Committee on Pioneer Belts,” NRC memo, 30 June 1928; all in AGS IB; Bowman to Preston James, 3 August 1928, JHU. 22. Quoted retrospectively in the SSRC’s own newsletter: “50th Anniversary of the 1930 Hanover Conference,” Items 34, no. 2 (June 1980): 35–37. 23. Isaiah Bowman, Geography in Relation to the Social Sciences (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1934), xv. 24. Bowman, Geography in Relation to the Social Sciences, 20, 145. 25. Bowman, Geography in Relation to the Social Sciences, 112, 24–25. 26. See, for example, the tepid response by Derwent Whittlesey, editor of the Annals of the AAG: “You have put together in a handy place information that every graduate student in geography should have at the outset of his study” (Whittlesey to Bowman, 25 May 1934, AGS IB); Bowman to Albrecht Penck, 26 August 1931, AGS IB. 27. “I do not agree . . . in placing first emphasis upon geographical education” (Bowman to Nevin Fenneman, 20 May 1920, JHU). Rose B. Clark, Geography in the Schools of Europe (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1934). On Atwood’s unique role in encouraging women to take geography degrees at Clark, see Janice Monk, “The Women Were Always Welcome at Clark,” Economic Geography 74, extra issue (March 1998): 14–30. 28. William MacDonald, “The World as Geography,” New York Times, 13 May 1934; J. Russell Smith, review in Social Studies 20 (1935): 62–64. A unifying text for geographers would not come until the end of the decade, when Richard Hartshorne published The Nature of Geography, a droll, highly conservative invention of disciplinary tradition that was widely cited if not so widely read (Lancaster, Pa.: Association of American Geographers, 1939).

notes to pages 222–226

/

499

29. Park, Burgess, and MacKenzie, The City. Bowman was not alone in this shortcoming. There is no record that University of Chicago geographers, including human ecologist Harlan Barrows, had any significant intellectual contact with Park and the other “Chicago School” sociologists. 30. Merck’s best-known work, Manifest Destiny and Mission in American History (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1963), came much later but built upon earlier work on the “Oregon problem” and nineteenth-century U.S. expansionism. See, for example, Albert Gallatin and the Oregon Problem: A Study in Anglo-American Diplomacy (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1950). See also Frederick Merck, Economic History of Wisconsin during the Civil War Decade (Madison: State Historical Society of Wisconsin, 1916). For Merck’s assessment of Bowman’s Geography in Relation to the Social Sciences, see “Minutes of the Fourth and Sixth Regular Meetings of the Subcommittee on Geography of the Committee on Educational Policy,” Harvard University, 10 October and 18 November 1949, cited by permission of Arthur Maass. 31. Isaiah Bowman, “The Land of Your Possession,” Science 82 (27 September 1935): 285–93. 32. Bowman, Pioneer Fringe, 4, 1, 29; Bowman to J. M. Keith, 28 March 1927, AGS IB. 33. William Coleman, “Science and Symbol in the Turner Frontier Hypothesis,” American History Review 72 (1966): 43. On the curiosity of Bowman’s lack of citation of Turner, see J. L. M. Gulley, “The Turnerian Frontier Thesis: A Study in the Migration of Ideas,” Tijdschrift voor Economissche en Sociale Geografie 4/5 (1959): 89. 34. Bowman, Pioneer Fringe, 34, 47. 35. Williams, “The Frontier Thesis and American Foreign Policy,” 388. 36. Bowman to Frederick Jackson Turner, 13 March 1914, APS AAG, Box 4. 37. Bowman, Pioneer Fringe, 123, 13–14; Isaiah Bowman, “Jordan Country,” Geographical Review 21 (1931): 22–55. 38. Bowman, Pioneer Fringe, 11–13, 80. From his fieldwork, Bowman knew that as much as the motor car brought benefits to pioneer belts, it also provided the means of escape from them, leading to rural depopulation (Pioneer Fringe, 29–30, 142). The full impact of this possibility was not entirely recognized in the United States until several decades later, with John F. Kennedy’s road-building program in Appalachia. 39. Bowman, Pioneer Fringe, 46, 140–41, 188; Isaiah Bowman, “The Scientific Study of Settlement,” Geographical Review 16 (1926): 650. 40. Isaiah Bowman, “Modern Pioneering,” Outlook 152, no. 14 (31 July 1929): 541. 41. Bowman, “The Land of Your Possession,” 285–93; Isaiah Bowman, “Our Expanding and Contracting Desert,” Geographical Review 25 (1935): 43–61. 42. Bowman, Pioneer Fringe, vi, 141. 43. Bowman, Pioneer Fringe, 1. 44. P. R. C., “Review of Limits of Land Settlement,” Scottish Geographical Magazine 54 (1938): 374; Isaiah Bowman, ed., Limits of Land Settlement: A Re-

500

/

notes to pages 228–233

port on Present-Day Possibilities (New York: Council on Foreign Relations, 1937); Carl Sauer, “The Prospect for Redistribution of Population,” in Limits of Land Settlement, ed. Bowman, 8; E. G. R. T., “Review of Limits of Land Settlement,” Geographical Journal 91 (1938): 286–88. 45. Bowman, Pioneer Fringe, 32. 46. Bowman, Pioneer Fringe, 32–33; Isaiah Bowman, “The Pioneer Fringe,” Foreign Affairs 6 (1927): 50. 47. Bowman, Geography in Relation to the Social Sciences, xiii, 3–4. 48. This was an argument he first developed while teaching at Yale: “A city could be built at the South Pole or an artificial rain-provoking mountain range constructed in the Sahara, but it wouldn’t pay to do either of these things. Between what is physically possible and what is commercially possible there may be a wide gulf” (Pioneer Fringe, 77). More enigmatically if less subtly: “Man’s culture may rise superior to his environment,” but man has also had to “rise superior to his culture” (“Pioneer Fringe,” 62). 49. Bowman to J. M. Keith, 28 March 1927, JHU. The only significant exception to Bowman’s white-only vision of pioneers involved the Mongol nomads in Manchuria, whose accomplishments accrued despite their representation of a “low-grade” population. As late as 1945 he believed that “white settlement in Australia is urgent” if mass migration from Asia is not to make it “an adjunct of India or China” (Isaiah Bowman, “Land Settlement and Resource Development,” Nature [6 January 1945]: 9). 50. Frederick Jackson Turner to Bowman, 24 December 1931, AGS IB. 51. Frederick Jackson Turner to Walter Hines Page, 30 August 1896, quoted in Coleman, “Science and Symbol in the Turner Frontier Hypothesis,” 42. 52. Bowman, “Planning in Pioneer Settlement,” 99. 53. Williams, “The Frontier Thesis and American Foreign Policy.” 54. Bowman, Pioneer Fringe, 200. 55. Bowman, Pioneer Fringe, 273–75. 56. George L. McDermott, “Frontiers of Settlement in the Great Clay Belt, Ontario and Quebec,” Annals of the Association of American Geographers 51 (1961): 261. 57. For press reports of his addresses, see: “Modern Pioneering Told by Bowman,” New York Times, 14 April 1931; “Pioneer Spirit of Our Forefathers by No Means Dead,” Portland Press Herald, 15 April 1931; “Out Where It’s ‘Christmas till Easter,’ “ New York Times, 9 January 1932; “Dr. Bowman Decries Aimless Use of Land,” New Hampshire Register, 20 March 1932; “Says Vast Land Area Still Awaits Pioneer,” New York Times, 20 March 1932; “New Field of Pioneering Cited at Yale,” New York Herald Tribune, 20 March 1932. 58. Rudyard Kipling to Bowman, 23 December 1931, AGS IB. 59. Interview with Preston James, April 1982, San Antonio, Texas; Bowman, “Planning in Pioneer Settlement.” 60. Gladys M. Wrigley, “Isaiah Bowman,” Geographical Review 41 (1951): 30. 61. Bowman, “Field Notebook: Far West, 1930,” AGS IB, 2. 62. Bowman to J. Mackintosh Bell, 28 December 1931, AGS IB.

notes to pages 233–240

/

501

63. Interview with Robert Bowman, 2 June 1984, Lincoln, Nebraska. For a homologous viewpoint on the frontier thesis and the New Deal, see the contemporaneous article by Curtis Nettels, “Frederick Jackson Turner and the New Deal,” Wisconsin Magazine of History 17 (March 1934): 257–65. 64. Bowman to Hamilton Fish Armstrong, 7 May 1942, JHU. 65. Williams, “The Frontier Thesis and American Foreign Policy.” 66. Bowman, “Pioneer Fringe,” 51; Bowman, “Pioneer Settlement,” 9.

chapter 9 1. See the discussion in Bill Readings, The University in Ruins (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1996), 54–69. 2. Robert Millikan to Bowman, 16 January 1935, RGB. 3. See Rexmond Canning Cochrane, The National Academy of Sciences: The First Hundred Years, 1863–1963 (Washington, D.C.: National Academy of Sciences, 1978); Carroll W. Pursell Jr., ed., The Military Industrial Complex (New York: Harper and Row, 1972). 4. See Daniel Kevles, The Physicists (New York: Vintage, 1979), 102–16; Helen Wright, Explorer of the Universe: A Biography of George Ellery Hale (New York: Dutton, 1966). The Hale description is by James McKeen Cattell, quoted in Robert Kargon, The Rise of Robert Millikan (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1982), 104. 5. Isaiah Bowman, “The Future of University Research in Relation to Financial Support,” Journal of the Proceedings and Addresses of the Association of American Universities (November 1937): 80; Isaiah Bowman, The Graduate School in American Democracy (Washington, D.C.: Office of Education, U.S. Department of the Interior, 1939), 32; Isaiah Bowman, A Design for Scholarship (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1936), 6. 6. Cf.: “The world of men consists of two parts: first, realities of custom, property, social relationships, partial adjustments . . . ; second, ideals toward which we strive. Ideals are ideas not yet realized” (Isaiah Bowman, Geography in Relation to the Social Sciences [New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1934], 6). 7. Ronald C. Toby, The American Ideology of National Science, 1919–1930 (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1971), 191. 8. Bowman, The Graduate School in American Democracy, 1–2. 9. Bowman to Carroll L. Wilson, 10 January 1935, JHU. 10. Bowman to Frank Lillie, 21 October 1935, JHU. 11. Much of the Science Advisory Board story is covered in Carroll W. Pursell Jr., “The Anatomy of a Failure: The Science Advisory Board, 1933–1935,” Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society 109 (1965): 342–51. It can also be reconstructed through the Bowman Papers at Johns Hopkins and the National Academy’s own files. See also Robert Kargon and Elizabeth Hodes, “Karl Compton, Isaiah Bowman, and the Politics of Science in the Great Depression,” ISIS 76 (1985): 301–18. 12. Bowman to Karl Compton, 22 May 1933, JHU.

502

/

notes to pages 240–246

13. Compton to Bowman, 4 April 1936, RGB. Wallace is quoted in Kevles, The Physicists, 261–64. Millikan may have been particularly callous and aloof regarding the social impact of the depression: “Call unemployment leisure,” he once remarked, “and one can at once see the possibilities” (quoted in Kargon and Hodes, “Karl Compton, Isaiah Bowman, and the Politics of Science,” 308). 14. Bowman, notes on reading Sherwood’s “Roosevelt and Hopkins,” RGB; Bowman to Lillie, 21 October 1935; Bowman to E. B. Wilson, 6 November 1935, JHU. 15. Cochrane, The National Academy of Sciences, 369. 16. Kevles, The Physicists, 266. 17. “Scholars without Money,” Time, 23 March 1936, 39. 18. “Scholars without Money,” Time; “President Bowman,” New York Times, 23 February 1935; W. Elmer Ekblaw, “Review of ‘Geography in Relation to the Social Sciences,’ “ Economic Geography (1935): 108. As a sign of Bowman’s prominence, even the sale of his New York house was noted in the press: “Educator Sells Yonkers Home,” New York Times, 4 August 1935. 19. Kevles, The Physicists, 44, 53. 20. Bowman, A Design for Scholarship, 9–10; Bowman to Donaldson Brown, 24 July 1946, JHU; Bowman, The Graduate School in American Democracy, 19. 21. Bowman to Donaldson Brown, 28 March 1946, JHU. 22. Bowman, The Graduate School in American Democracy, 15, 7, 31–32. 23. Bowman, The Graduate School in American Democracy, 22. 24. Bowman to John C. French, 26 January 1946, JHU, Series I, Box 1.1; French, A History of the University Founded by Johns Hopkins (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1946), 461. 25. Bowman, “Research in Private Institutions,” address to the National Association of Manufacturers, New York City, 8 December 1938, JHU. 26. Ronald Ransom to Bowman, 10 February 1939, JHU. 27. Bowman to F. P. Rous, 5 April 1939, APS F. P. Rous Papers, Bowman file. 28. Interview with Robert Bowman, 2 June 1984, Lincoln, Nebraska. On the FBI, see Bowman to J. Edgar Hoover, 1 October 1941, FBI case 100–46382, obtained under Freedom of Information Act request #415989; “President Bowman,” JHU Newsletter, 5 March 1948; Russell Baker to author, 26 March 1984. 29. Interview with Abel Wolman, 21 December 1981, Baltimore; Bowman to Carlyle Barton, 1 April 1948, JHU. 30. Interview with G. Wilson Shaffer, 28 March 1986, Baltimore; Bowman to Archer M. Huntington, 1 April 1940, JHU; interview with George Carter, 15 June 1982, Long Green, Maryland; Daniel J. Kevles to author, 30 December 1982 (reporting on an interview with Franck). 31. Interview with Eric Goldman, 7 February 1983, Princeton; Bowman to Robert G. Bowman, 16 October 1939, RGB. Lovejoy, a philosopher, was another who was forced out. Beard at the time was drawing the nominal salary of one dollar a year. 32. Bowman to Charles S. Garland, 4 June 1948, JHU. 33. Neil Bartlett, personal communication, 29 March 1996, Tucson, Arizona.

notes to pages 246–249

/

503

34. Interview with Robert Bowman, 2 June 1984. 35. Interview with Goldman, 7 February 1983. Goldman was initially so hurt that such discrimination could occur in academia that he took a broadcasting job before going to Princeton. The irony was that, since his father was Jewish but his mother Protestant, by Jewish tradition he wasn’t even Jewish! 36. Bowman to Robert G. Bowman, 24 February 1943, JHU; interview with Robert Bowman, 2 June 1984; Bowman to Louis Aubert, 17 January 1921, JHU. Henry Bruman went on to endow the Humboldt Chair of Geography at UCLA in the late 1990s. 37. Interview with Shaffer, 28 March 1986. The anti-Jewish sentiment in the tony neighborhoods north of the Homewood campus also cost the university a second Nobelist: the economist Simon Kuznets left the university when the administration refused to front the purchase of a home for him, in order to bypass extant covenants on the property. 38. Geographer George Carter, who came to the university after the quota was implemented, remembers Bowman’s rationalization this way: “Bowman said to Baltimore’s Jewish leaders: ‘Do you want this to become a Jewish University or do you want this to be a general university in which Jews are included? . . . If you want a balanced university, then we’re just going to have to put a quota system in. . . . ‘ They said, ‘Mr. Bowman, we think that makes very good sense. We will not object. . . . ’ He wasn’t being anti-Semitic; he was trying to maintain the nature of Hopkins” (interview with Carter, 15 June 1982). See also Jim Bready to author, 6 January 1989; Jim Bready, “Bowman Revisited,” Baltimore Evening Sun, 4 January 1989. 39. “Bigot” was the term used by students: “President Bowman,” JHU Newsletter. 40. Interview with Broadus Mitchell, 8 January 1982, New York City. 41. Bowman to Robert G. Bowman, 24 May 1939, RGB. 42. Interview with Mitchell, 8 January 1982. 43. Quoted in “Head on a Platter,” Time, 22 May 1939. 44. “Head on a Platter.” Geographer Richard Hartshorne, active in academic union politics, opposed this lack of “due process,” but he too refrained from challenging Bowman directly. Interview with Richard Hartshorne, 20 May 1989, Madison, Wisconsin. See Mark H. Ingraham, ed., The Academic Citizen: Selected Statements by Richard Hartshorne (Madison: Department of Geography, University of Wisconsin, 1970). About Roosevelt’s challenge to the Supreme Court, Bowman was so incensed that he did something he almost never did: he complained to several legislators, including U.S. senators Miller Tydings and George Radcliffe (Bowman to George Radcliffe, 21 July 1937, JHU; Bowman to Miller Tydings, 21 July 1937, JHU). 45. “Head on a Platter”; interview with Mitchell, 8 January 1982; Jim Bready to the author, 6 January 1989. Mitchell was a well-known historian of the U.S. South and went on to write several widely acclaimed books, among them the two-volume biography Alexander Hamilton (New York: Macmillan, 1962) and Depression Decade (New York: Rinehart, 1947).

504

/

notes to pages 250–255

46. Bowman to Robert G. Bowman, 1 July 1946, RGB. 47. Isaac Rehert, “All the President’s Man,” Baltimore Sun, 29 December 1981. 48. John D. Rockefeller Jr. to Bowman, 1945, JHU. 49. Editorial, Baltimore Evening Sun, 25 April 1939; P. Stewart Macaulay to John W. Owens, 26 April 1939, JHU. 50. Bowman to Alan Ogilvie, 2 January 1942, JHU. 51. Johns Hopkins University, Annual Report, JHU, Ferdinand Hamburger Jr. Archives, 1943. 52. French, A History of the University . . . , 441. 53. French, A History of the University . . . , 455–56. 54. Louis E. Keefer, Scholars in Foxholes: The Story of the Army Specialized Training Program in World War II (Jefferson, N.C.: MacFarland, 1988); Henry Stimson and McGeorge Bundy, On Active Service in Peace and War (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1947), 457–61. 55. Keefer, Scholars in Foxholes, 31–37. 56. These included Chicago-trained Derwent Whittlesey, who taught at Harvard, and Richard Hartshorne, also a Chicago Ph.D., then at Wisconsin. See Andrew Kirby, “What Did You Do in the War, Daddy?” in Geography and Empire, ed. Anne Godlewska and Neil Smith (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1994), 300–314. 57. Colonel Herman Beukema to Gladys Wrigley, 4 February 1949, JHU; Bowman to J. Russell Smith, 22 March 1943, RGB. Little of the ASTP work had lasting value, but see Geographical Foundations of National Power (Washington, D.C.: Army Service Forces Manual, 1944), M-103–1. (See also the companion navy volume, eventually published as a book: Harold and Margaret Sprout, eds., Foundations of National Power [Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1945].) It did, however, help to spur the postwar U.S. Area Studies tradition that sought to overcome popular and strategic ignorance of the rest of the world. 58. Isaiah Bowman, “The Future of Education and Military Defense,” Educational Record 23 (1941): 428–35. 59. Interview with Robert Bowman, 2 June 1984; “Defense Stressed at Johns Hopkins,” New York Times, 4 June 1941. 60. On the marriage of science and the military, see Stimson and Bundy, On Active Service in Peace and War, 464–65. 61. French, A History of the University . . . , 454; Barton J. Bernstein, “The Birth of the U.S. Biological-Warfare Program,” Scientific American, June 1987, 116–21. 62. William K. Klingaman, APL—Fifty Years of Service to the Nation (Laurel, Md.: JHU Applied Physics Laboratory, 1993), 3. Waldemar Kaempffert, “Radio Shell That Beat the Buzz Bomb Helped to Win the War in Asia as Well as Europe,” New York Times, 23 September 1945. 63. By the late 1980s the overhead rate for Johns Hopkins had risen to almost 80 percent.

notes to pages 255–259

/

505

64. Klingaman, APL, 8–13. The five companies were Crosley Radio Corporation, Sylvania Electric Products, RCA, Eastman Kodak, and McQuay-Morris. 65. Winifred Mallon, “Navy Discloses Radio Shell Fuze,” New York Times, 21 September 1945; “The Radio Shell,” New York Times, 22 September 1945. 66. “The Radio Shell,” New York Times; Bowman to Brown, 28 March 1946. 67. Bowman to Robert W. Sawyer, 27 September 1945 and 8 December 1948, JHU. 68. Bowman to Carroll L. Wilson, 10 January 1935. 69. Interview with Robert Bowman, 2 June 1984. 70. Wallace Atwood received his Ph.D. from the University of Chicago in 1903, where he stayed to teach for a further ten years. He was professor of physiography at Harvard from 1913 to 1920. He founded the journal Economic Geography in 1925 but is notorious for an episode involving the socialist Scott Nearing. Leaving a badly attended geography lecture one evening at Clark, Atwood dropped in on a lecture being presented by Nearing on the ills of capitalism. The hall was packed and enthusiastic, Nearing was in full flow, but Atwood, whether ill-tempered for reasons of politics or disciplinary pride, was having none of it. He summarily interrupted, insisted that the proceedings were over, and ordered a startled janitor to turn out the lights. The episode became a cause célèbre for academic freedom of speech, and Atwood was widely roasted in, among other places, the Nation. 71. Bowman to Mark Jefferson, 6 September 1936, RGB. 72. Bowman to Robert Bowman, 9 November 1939, 23 July 1942, JHU. 73. Interview with Robert Bowman, 2 June 1984; Bowman to Gladys Wrigley, 4 February 1943, JHU; Isaiah Bowman, “A Department of Geography,” Science 98 (24 December 1943): 564–65. 74. Bowman, “A Department of Geography,” 564. 75. Bowman, “Geography as an Urgent University Need,” 1944, JHU, 2. 76. Bowman to Robert Bowman, 9 November 1939, JHU. 77. Lattimore later rationalized his move to Hopkins as resulting from the Japanese invasion of China: “They’d already taken Manchuria, now they were closing in on Peking. It was obvious that I wasn’t going to have much of a chance to do fieldwork. . . . So I wrote to Bowman and asked if he could recommend me for a teaching post at any university. I got a brisk note back from him: ‘I’m not going to recommend you anywhere; I’m going to appoint you director of the Page School here at Hopkins’” (interview with Owen Lattimore, 12 January 1983, Cambridge). 78. Interview with Jean Gottmann, 23 March 1982, Baltimore; Jean Gottmann to Bowman, 22 December 1942, RGB; Bowman to Robert Bowman, 24 February 1943, RGB; the initial contact came with Gottmann to Bowman, 17 December 1941, JHU. Jean Gottmann, Megalopolis (New York: Twentieth Century Fund, 1961). 79. “The way I was recruited was that Karl Pelzer had known me in Berkeley. He phoned up when they were going to set up this program [ASTP] and said: ‘George, I understand that you’re unhappy in Washington. Would you be

506

/

notes to pages 259–264

interested in doing this?’ I said, ‘Well, yes.’ He said: ‘Mr. Bowman is over at the State Department. If you were to go over there to room so-and-so, he would interview you.’ I went over and had an interview. Bowman lived under such high pressure, it was unbelievable. . . . I had talked to him for maybe an hour . . . over at the State Department, and he grabbed me by the elbow and he said, ‘I have to get to such-and-such train. Come on.’ We rushed out front, and, talking all the way, he rushed into the street with his umbrella and flagged down a taxi; just stopped him right dead in the street, stopped him cold. He said, ‘Bye, Doctor Carter. I’ll see you in Baltimore.’ He jumped into the taxi and was gone just like that. He had recommended me, he interviewed me, and I was hired! That was it, bang!” (interview with Carter, 15 June 1982). 80. Sauer’s classic works include: “The Morphology of Landscape,” University of California Publications in Geography 2, no. 2 (1925): 19–54; “The Geography of the Ozark Highland of Missouri,” Geographical Society of Chicago Bulletin No. 7, 1920; and “American Agricultural Origins: A Consideration of Nature and Culture,” in Essays in Anthropology Presented to A. L. Kroeber in Celebration of his Sixtieth Birthday, June 11, 1936 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1936), 279–97. See Carl Sauer to Bowman, 21 May 1944, Sauer Papers, Bancroft Library, UC Berkeley; Bowman to Sauer, 24 May 1944, JHU; and Bowman to A. L. Kroeber, 25 January 1944, JHU, Box 6, File 6.1. The praise for Sauer comes from Bowman, “Geography as an Urgent University Need,” memo, 10 January 1947, RGB. 81. The reference is to John Leighly: Bowman to Robert Bowman, 7 February 1946, RGB. 82. Bowman to John Lee Pratt, 8 November 1949, JHU. 83. Bowman, “Memo” to the trustees, 25 March 1940, JHU; Bowman to Donaldson Brown, 28 February 1947, JHU. 84. “John Lee Pratt Is Dead at 96,” New York Times, 22 December 1975. 85. Bowman, “A Proposal,” 29 January 1946, JHU; Bowman to Charles Lieberman, 16 March 1945, JHU. 86. John Franklin Carter to Bowman, 14 December 1945, RGB; Bowman, “Geography as an Urgent University Need” (revised), 10 January 1947, 1; Bowman, untitled memo, “Revised February 20, 1947,” RGB. 87. John Lee Pratt to Bowman, 3 January and 6 December 1949, JHU. 88. See John R. Mather and Marie Sanderson, The Genius of C. Warren Thornthwaite, Climatologist, Geographer (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1996). 89. “President Bowman,” JHU Newsletter; Bowman’s successor, chemist Detlev Bronk, galvanized a similar campus sentiment in the kindest possible terms when he noted that Bowman “did much to preserve Hopkins as a community of scholars against the distractions of a materialistic age.” Detlev Bronk, “Tribute to Bowman,” Johns Hopkins University Magazine, June 1950. 90. Bowman to Walter Bowman, 13 August 1945, JHU; Bowman to Harry Truman, 12 September 1946, HST. 91. “Hopkins Joins Atomic Plan,” Baltimore Sun, 20 July 1946.

notes to pages 264–275

/

507

92. Klingaman, APL, 47–56; Bowman to Barton, 1 April 1948. 93. Donaldson Brown to Bowman, 26 March 1946, JHU; Bowman to Brown, 28 March and 24 July 1946; Bowman to Brown, 27 February 1947, RGB; Bowman to Luke Hopkins, 4 June 1946, JHU. 94. Bowman to Brown, 24 July 1946. 95. Bowman to Brown, 24 July 1946. 96. Interview with Shaffer, 28 March 1986. 97. Carter was under orders to report weekly to Bowman’s office, ostensibly to help the busy president keep up with the field, and if he failed to show, he got a call: “Mr. Bowman wants to know why you haven’t appeared yet this week.” Interview with Carter, 15 June 1982; Bowman to Pratt, 8 November 1949; interview with Gottmann, 23 March 1982. 98. Pratt to Bowman, 9 November 1949, JHU. This letter was followed by another announcing that Pratt’s plans for charity that year “did not include” the Bowman School of Geography: Pratt to Bowman, 26 November 1949, JHU. See also interview with Owen Lattimore, 12 January 1983; Bowman to Pratt, 8 November 1949. 99. Interview with Abel Wolman, 21 December 1984, Baltimore; interviews with Carter, 15 June 1982; Gottmann, 23 March 1982; Robert Bowman, 2 June 1984. 100. Interview with Carter, 15 June 1982. See Bowman’s own version of his treatment of the trustees: Isaiah Bowman, “A Response,” Johns Hopkins Alumni Magazine 37, no. 2 (1949): 48. 101. Bowman to Barton, 1 April 1948. 102. Readings, The University in Ruins, 59. 103. Actually, there is also a bust of Bowman tucked away in a dark corner of the entrance to Schaffer Hall.

chapter 10 1. Halford Mackinder, “The Geographical Pivot of History,” Geographical Journal 23 (1904): 421–37; Vladimir Lenin, Imperialism, the Highest Stage of Capitalism (original publication in Russian, 1917; Bejing: Foreign Language Press, 1975), 90; Rosa Luxemburg, The Accumulation of Capital (original publication in German, 1913; New York: Monthly Review Press, 1968). 2. Frederic Sondern Jr., “1,000 Scientists behind Hitler,” Reader’s Digest, vol. 38, June 1941, 23–27. See also Hans Weigert, German Geopolitics (New York: Oxford University Press, 1941). Karl Haushofer (1869–1946) had retired as major general after World War I and took up the chair of geography and military science at Munich, where he had received his doctorate. He spent two years in Japan prior to the war and was a specialist in the geography of East Asia. After Hitler’s accession to power, Haushofer was appointed president of the German Academy (1934). His wife was Jewish, and despite his service to Hitler prior to 1941, he never joined the Nazi Party. His son, Albrecht Haushofer, a poet, was shot in 1945 by the SS for his part in the Staffenberg plot against

508

/

notes to pages 276–278

Hitler’s life. See, among others, Andreas Dorpalen, The World of General Haushofer (New York: Farrar and Rinehart, 1942). 3. Rudolf Kjellén, “Studier över Sveriges politiska gränser,” Ymer 9 (1899): 283–332. Kjellén (1864–1922) was professor of political science first at Göteborg, then at Uppsala. 4. Friedrich Ratzel, Politische Geographie, oder der Geographie der Staaten, des Verkhers, und der Krieges, 2nd ed. (1897; Munich: R. Oldenbourg, 1903); Friedrich Ratzel, “Die Gesetze des räumlichen Wachstums der Staaten,” Petermans Mitteilungen 42 (1896): 97–107. 5. Ellen Churchill Semple, Influences of Geographic Environment on the Basis of Ratzel’s System of Anthropo-geography (New York: Henry Holt, 1911), 1–2; Wodruff D. Smith, “Friedrich Ratzel and the Origins of Lebensraum,” German Studies Review 3 (1980): 51, 53. See also David N. Livingstone, The Geographical Tradition (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1992), 200. 6. Mackinder, “The Geographical Pivot of History.” The aphorism was revised and reprinted several times: Who rules East Europe commands the Heartland; Who rules the Heartland rules the World Island; Who rules the World Island commands the World.

See also Alfred Mahan’s The Influence of Seapower on History, 1660–1783 (Boston: Little, Brown, 1890). 7. Susan Schulten, The Geographical Imagination in America, 1880–1950 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001), 46. 8. W. M. Davis, “The Geographical Cycle,” Geographical Journal 14 (1899): 481–504; R. J. Chorley, Robert P. Beckinsale, and Anthony J. Dunn, The History of the Study of Landforms, or the Development of Geomorphology, 2 vols. (London: Methuen, 1973), 2: 498. See also chapter 3 in this volume for a longer discussion. 9. Siegfried Passarge (1867–1958) researched desert geomorphology and resources in the German colonies of the Cameroons and South-West Africa (now Namibia) prior to the war and was professor of geography at Hamburg from 1908 to 1936. See Gerhard Sandner, “The Germania triumphans Syndrome and Passarge’s Erdkundliche Weltanschaaung: The Roots and Effects of German Political Geography beyond Geopolitik,” Political Geography Quarterly 8 (1989): 341–51. Alfred Hettner (1859–1941) is best known in the United States for his methodological and philosophical work that so influenced the U.S. geographer Richard Hartshorne. A participant in the turn-of-the-century neo-Kantian revival in German intellectual circles, Hettner was professor of geography at Heidelberg from 1899 to 1926. 10. W. M. Davis to Bowman, 2 February 1920, AGS IB. The correspondence between Davis and the Pencks is extensively reprinted in Chorley, Beckinsale, and Dunn, The History of the Study of Landforms.

notes to pages 278–282

/

509

11. Davis to Bowman, 27 July 1923, AGS IB; W. M. Davis, “The Cycle of Erosion and the Summit Level of the Alps,” Journal of Geology 31 (1923): 1–41; W. M. Davis, “The Penck Festband: A Review,” Geographical Review 10 (1920): 249–61; Chorley, Beckinsale, and Dunn, A History of the Study of Landforms, 516, 537–54. See also W. M. Davis, “Passarge’s Principles of Landscape Description,” Geographical Review 8 (1919): 266–73; Walther Penck, Die morphologische Analyse: Ein Kapitel der physikalischen Geologie (Stuttgart: Geographische Abhandlungen, 1924; translated as Morphological Analysis of Land Forms: A Contribution to Physical Geology [London: Macmillan, 1953]). 12. Davis to Bowman, 27 July 1923. Davis may already have been “genuinely disturbed”: Chorley, Beckinsale, and Dunn, A History of the Study of Landforms, 527. 13. Bowman to A. Penck, 26 July 1923, AGS IB; Penck to Bowman, 22 August 1923, AGS IB. 14. Bowman to Penck, 25 September 1923, AGS IB; Bowman to Davis, 6 December 1925, AGS IB. 15. See Mechtild Rössler, “La géographie aux congrès internationaux: Échanges scientifique et conflits politiques,” Relations internationales 62 (1990): 183–99; also Geoffrey Martin, “One Hundred and Twenty Five Years of Geographical Congresses and the Formation of the International Geographical Union,” International Geographical Union Bulletin 46 (1996): 18. 16. Bowman to Emmanuel de Martonne, 12 March 1925; de Martonne to Bowman, 14 October 1927; Bowman to de Martonne, 16 November 1927; Bowman to Henry J. Cox, 10 October 1928; Bowman to H. J. Fleure, 15 February 1932; all in AGS IB. See also Isaiah Bowman, “The International Geographical Congress,” Geographical Review 18 (1928): 661–67. 17. Bowman to de Martonne, 30 January and 26 March 1931, AGS IB; de Martonne to Bowman, 3 March 1931, AGS IB. 18. Gerhardt Schott to Bowman, 5 October 1931, JHU, 2. 19. Bowman to John H. Finley, 11 September 1934, AGS IB. 20. Lawrence Martin to Bowman, 6 June 1919; Eduard Brückner to Bowman, 29 December 1919; Bowman to William Morris Davis, 7 February 1920; Bowman to Brückner, 25 February 1920; all in AGS IB. 21. See Michael Heffernan, “The Spoils of War: The Société de Géographie de Paris and the French Empire, 1914–1919,” in Geography and Imperialism 1820–1940, ed. Morag Bell, Robin Butlin, and Michael Heffernan (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1995), 253. 22. Otto Maull, Das Wesen der Geopolitik, 2nd ed. (Leipzig: B. G. Taubner, 1936), 23. See also Bowman to Charles Lee Lewis, 14 October 1948, RGB; and Robert Strausz-Hupé, Geopolitics: The Struggle for Space and Power (New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1942), 51–52. 23. Penck to Bowman, 30 October 1923, AGS IB. Bowman showed genuine concern for the aging Penck as well as for Walther’s family. The AGS would buy any manuscripts, maps, or other papers of Walther’s of lasting scholarly or

510

/

notes to pages 282–287

archival value, he offered, but nothing came of the offer (Bowman to Penck, 28 November 1923, AGS IB). 24. Alexander Supan, Leitlinien der aligemeinen politischen Geographie: Naturlehre des Staates, 2nd ed. (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 1922), 125. See also Walther Vogel, Politische Geographie (Leipzig: B. G. Teubner, 1922); and Otto Maull, Politische Geographie (Berlin: Gebrüder Borntraeger, 1925). 25. Ewald Banse, Germany Prepares for War (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1934), xix–xx. Banse stacks German philosophy against French rationalism and British materialism, arguing that “with Kant behind one, one naturally gets deeper into the heart of things and people than with Voltaire and Nelson” (77–78). 26. Sandner, “The Germania triumphans Syndrome”; Gerhard Sandner and Mechtild Rössler, “Geography and Empire in Germany, 1871–1945,” in Geography and Empire, ed. Anne Godlewska and Neil Smith (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1994), 120. 27. Isaiah Bowman, “Two Works on Political Geography,” Geographical Review 14 (1924): 665–66; Isaiah Bowman, “Some Recent Works on Political Geography,” Geographical Review 17 (1927): 511–13. 28. Bowman to Lionel Curtis, 2 November 1939, JHU. (Bowman subsequently sent a copy of this extraordinary letter to Franklin Roosevelt.) The extent of this influence has since been questioned, but there is no doubt that Bowman took it seriously. 29. Bowman to Carl Sauer, 1 August 1934, AGS IB; Bowman, “Population Outlets in Overseas Territories,” Harris Foundation lecture, Chicago, 21–22 June 1937, RGB. On Göring, see Hubert R. Knickerbocker to John H. Finley, 21 June 1933, AGS IB. 30. Bowman sent a nasty, accusatory letter to Brunhes, who had slaved over the translation through the 1920s. Brunhes never responded. He died three months later (Bowman to Jean Brunhes, 22 May 1930, AGS IB). 31. Bowman to Gladys Wrigley, 27 July 1938, AGS GR; Bowman to Daniel Willard, 7 August 1938, JHU. Richard Hartshorne, attending a geography conference in Bavaria in 1938, notes that of “about 300 geographers around 297 of them [were] wearing swastikas” (interview with Hartshorne, 20 May 1989, Madison, Wisconsin). 32. George T. Renner, “Maps for a New World,” Collier’s Weekly, vol. 109, 6 June 1942, 14–16. See Karen De Bres, “George Renner and the Great Map Scandal of 1942,” Political Geography Quarterly 5 (1986): 385–94; and Peter F. Coogan, “Geopolitics and the Intellectual Origins of Containment,” Ph.D. dissertation, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, Department of History, 1991, 181–84. 33. Cited in Coogan, “Geopolitics and the Intellectual Origins of Containment,” 183. 34. Isaiah Bowman, Richard Hartshorne, and Derwent Whittlesey to Editor, Collier’s Weekly, 27 June 1942; Bowman to Walter Lippmann, 9 September 1942, RGB.

notes to pages 287–291

/

511

35. Carter R. Bryan, “America’s Geo-Political Institute,” Foreign Commerce Weekly 7, no. 6 (1942): 3, 32–33; Weigert, German Geopolitics, 26. See also Colonel Herman Beukema, “School for Statesmen,” Fortune, vol. 27, January 1943, 108–29; Robert Strausz-Hupé, In My Time (New York: W. W. Norton, 1965); Hans Weigert, Generals and Geographers (London: Oxford University Press, 1942). 36. Bowman to Lippmann, 9 September 1942; Bowman to Nicholas Spykman, 29 October 1942; Bowman to Sumner Welles, 29 September 1942; all in RGB. Isaiah Bowman, “Political Geography of Power,” Geographical Review 32 (1942): 352; Isaiah Bowman, “Geography versus Geopolitics,” Geographical Review 32 (1942): 646–58. 37. Nicholas Spykman, American Strategy in World Politics (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1942), 7–8. 38. Bowman, “Political Geography of Power,” 352 (excerpted in the Baltimore Sun as “Power and Peace,” 4 March 1942); Bowman to Weigert, 10 November 1942, JHU. 39. Bowman, “Geography versus Geopolitics,” 646, 648, 656, 658. Geographer Alfred Hettner had made a similar attempt to separate geopolitics and political geography: “Die geopolitik und die politische Geographie,” Geographische Zeitschrift 35 (1929): 332–36. See also Reinhold Strauss, “Die Deutschen Geopolitik 1919–1945,” Diplom Thesis, Technische Universistät, München, 1984. 40. M. Ver Hoef to Bowman, 1 May 1947, RGB; Bowman to Ver Hoef, 5 May 1947, RGB; J. K. Wright to Bowman, 21 August 1942, AGS JKW. 41. Arthur Dix, Geopolitik, Lehrkurse über die geographischen Grundlagen der Weltpolitik und Weltwirtschaft (Füssen a. Lech: Atheneum, 1927), translated and quoted in David T. Murphy, “Space, Race and Geopolitical Necessity: Geopolitical Rhetoric in German Colonial Revanchism,” in Geography and Empire, ed. Godlewska and Smith, 181. 42. Friedrich Ratzel, “Flottenfrage und Weltfrage,” translated and quoted in Derwent Whittlesey, German Strategy of World Conquest (New York: Ferrar and Rinehart, 1942), 54. 43. Murphy, “Space, Race and Geopolitical Necessity.” On Weltpolitik, see also Woodruff D. Smith, The Ideological Origins of Nazi Imperialism (New York: Oxford University Press, 1986), 52–82. 44. David Atkinson, “Geopolitics, Cartography and Geographical Knowledge: Envisioning Africa from Fascist Italy,” in Geography and Imperialism 1820–1940, ed. Morag Bell, Robin Butlin, and Michael Heffernan (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1995), 265–97; Lucio Gambi, “Geography and Imperialism in Italy: From the ‘Unity’ of the Nation to the ‘New’ Roman Empire,” in Geography and Empire, ed. Godlewska and Smith, 74–91. 45. Nicholas Spykman, “Geography and Foreign Policy, II,” American Political Science Review 32 (1938): 236. See Gearóid Ó Tuathail’s use of this: Critical Geopolitics (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1996), 50–55.

512

/

notes to pages 291–296

46. Edmund Walsh, Total Power (New York: Doubleday, 1948), 10–11. Weakened by a heart attack, deeply depressed after his Nuremberg interrogation, distraught about the murder of his son by the Nazis, and adamant that the last had distorted and abused his ideas, Haushofer and his wife committed suicide a few months later.

chapter 11 1. Hubert R. Knickerbocker to John Finley, 21 June 1933, AGS IB. 2. Bowman to Knickerbocker, 6 July 1933, AGS IB. Karl Wittfogel (1896–1988) was, of course, already a well-known scholar in Europe and, contrary to Knickerbocker’s claim, was quite politically active in the Communist Pary of Germany (the KPD). See Wittfogel, Oriental Despotism: A Comparative Study of Total Power (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1957). There he explained the causes of “Eastern” authoritarian government, from China and the USSR to Egypt, as a result of environmental conditions. See also G. L. Ulmen, The Science of Society: For an Understanding of the Life and Work of Karl August Wittfogel (The Hague: Mouton, 1978); and Richard Peet, ed., The Geographical Ideas of Karl Wittfogel, Antipode 17, no. 1 (1985). 3. See Chauncy D. Harris, “Geographers in the US Government in Washington, DC, during World War II,” Professional Geographer 49 (1997): 245–56; Chauncy D. Harris, “Lessons from the War-time Experience for Improving Graduate Training for Geographic Research,” report of the Committee on Training and Standards in the Geographic Profession, National Research Council, Annals of the Association of American Geographers 36 (1946): 195–214; Barry M. Katz, Foreign Intelligence, Research and Analysis in the Office of Strategic Services 1942–1945 (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1989); Andrew Kirby, “What Did You Do in the War, Daddy?” in Geography and Empire, ed. Anne Godlewska and Neil Smith (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1994), 300–314. 4. Otto Tolischus, “Nazis Smash, Loot and Burn Jewish Shops and Temples until Goebbels Calls Halt,” New York Times, 11 November 1933; Peter Steinfels, “The Road to Extermination,” New York Times, 9 November 1988. 5. Bowman to Gladys Wrigley, 15 October 1938, RGB. 6. Bowman to F. D. Roosevelt, 15 October 1938; Bowman to Wrigley, 15 October 1938; Roosevelt to Bowman, 2 November 1938; Bowman, “Population Outlets in Overseas Territories,” Harris Foundation lecture, Chicago, 21–22 June 1937; all in RGB. 7. Bowman, untitled four-page memo, 4 November 1938, RGB. Bowman’s submission on Costa Rica was summarized from a report by George McBride, a UCLA geographer, who had recently returned from Central America. 8. Bowman, memorandum, 16 November 1938, RGB; Bowman to Karl Pelzer, 16 November 1938, RGB. See Karl Pelzer, Pioneer Settlement in the Asiatic Tropics (New York: American Geographical Society, 1945). 9. Bowman to Roosevelt, 10 December 1938, RGB.

notes to pages 296–302

/

513

10. Roosevelt to Bowman, 15 December 1938, RGB; Bowman to Charles Liebman, 27 December 1938, RGB. 11. Bowman to Roosevelt, 10 December 1938, RGB. 12. James McDonald to Bowman, 12 December 1938, JHU; McDonald to Charles Liebman, 13 December 1938, JHU. 13. “World Watches as Hopkins Starts Study of Land Settlement Problem,” Baltimore Evening Sun, 22 February 1939; “On the Record: Bowman Assays Migration Facts,” Baltimore Evening Sun, 22 February 1939. 14. Bowman to Charles J. Liebman, 3 January and 9 January 1939, RGB; Bowman to Sir Arthur Salter, 11 January 1939, RGB. 15. “World Watches as Hopkins Starts Study”; “On the Record: Bowman Assays”; Bowman to Liebman, 9 December 1942, RGB. 16. Bowman, “Memorandum on Refugee Settlement,” 15 May 1940, JHU. 17. Bowman to Edwin B. Wilson, 19 April 1941; Bowman to Bernard Baruch, 22 December 1939; Bowman, memo, 3 pp., 27 November 1939; Bowman, memo, 1 p., 15 December 1939; all in JHU. 18. Bowman, “Reports and Memoranda Relating to Settlement Requested for the Files of the Refugee Economic Corporation,” December 1942, RGB. 19. Kenneth Campbell, “First 37 for Sosua Settlement Reach Dominican Land of Refuge,” New York Times, 9 May 1940; Bowman to Liebman, 15 February 1940, RGB; Bowman, “Investigation and Activities of the Refugee Economic Corporation,” 21 March 1940, RGB; David S. Wyman, The Abandonment of the Jews (New York: Pantheon, 1986), 315. Bowman was also getting corroboratory advice from colleagues that caution was important. Geographer Carl Sauer especially stressed the problems of “security” for refugees: “You can’t send people into a situation where they might have the shirts taken off their backs” (Sauer to Bowman, 29 December 1938, RGB). 20. Bowman, “Memorandum of Visit . . . by Stephen V. C. Morris,” 25 March 1940, JHU, 1; Bowman, memorandum, 26 March 1940, JHU. 21. Wyman, The Abandonment of the Jews, 47, 51–52; Deborah E. Lipstadt, Beyond Belief: The American Press and the Coming of the Holocaust, 1933–1945 (New York: Free Press, 1985). 22. Bowman, “Population and Territorial Questions,” Territorial Committee, 12 November 1942, JHU. 23. Wyman, The Abandonment of the Jews, 75–78, 79–82. 24. Bowman, “Memorandum of Visit . . . by Morris.” 25. Bowman, “Population, Migration, Settlement,” memo, 10 November 1942, JHU. 26. Bowman, “The Permanent Study of Population,” 13 November 1944, RGB. 27. Robert Strausz-Hupé, Geopolitics: The Struggle for Space and Power (New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1942); interview with Robert Strausz-Hupé, 13 March 1996, Newtown Square, Pennsylvania. Strausz-Hupé went on to become a professor of geography at University of Pennsylvania and a renowned right-wing intellectual. He was also a diplomat, holding seven U.S. ambas-

514

/

notes to pages 302–308

sadorships during the Nixon and Reagan presidencies. See also Editors, “Robert Strausz-Hupé’s Worldview,” Orbis 17 (1973): 679–90. 28. Ladislas Farago, “Refugees: The Solution as FDR Saw It,” United Nations 1, no. 5 (1947): 14–15, 64; M Project monthly reports for 1 June–30 September 1945, 9 (attached to Henry Field to Bowman, 2 October 1945), RGB. See also Henry Field’s later compilation: ‘M’ Project for F. D. R. Studies on Migration and Settlement (Ann Arbor, Mich.: Edwards Brothers, 1962). 29. Bowman, “Memorandum of a Conference with John Carter, Henry Field, Strausz-Hupé, Jacobson and Anton deBalasy,” secret memo, 9 December 1943, JHU. 30. Field to Bowman, 1 November 1945, RGB. 31. Bowman to Robert G. Bowman, 30 March 1943, RGB; Bowman to Sumner Welles, 5 March 1943, JHU; Liebman to Bowman, 6 April 1943, RGB. 32. Wyman, The Abandonment of the Jews, 80, 153. 33. Farago, “Refugees,” 14, 64; Field to Bowman, 1 November 1945, RGB. 34. Henry Morgenthau Jr., “The Morgenthau Diaries, VI—The Refugee Run-Around,” Collier’s Weekly, 1 November 1947, 23. 35. Bowman, “Memorandum of a Conference. . . . ” 36. Interview with Strausz-Hupé, 13 March 1996. 37. Wyman, The Abandonment of the Jews, 78. 38. Esco Foundation for Palestine, Inc., Palestine: A Study of Jewish, Arab and British Policies (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1947), vol. 2. 39. Bowman to Gladys Wrigley, 8 September 1942, JHU. 40. Bowman, memorandum to the president, 22 May 1943, RGB; Bowman to Myron Taylor, 23 June 1947, JHU. 41. Bowman, untitled three-page memo, 28 October 1943, JHU; Bowman to William Langer, 2 January 1946, RGB. 42. Joseph P. Lash to the author, 3 May 1982; Joseph P. Lash, Eleanor: The Years Alone (New York: W. W. Norton, 1972), 111. 43. Bowman, “secret” two-page memo, untitled, 17 December 1943, JHU. 44. Bowman, untitled memo (conversation with Eleanor Roosevelt), 7 January 1944, RGB; Bowman, “Memorandum to Mrs. Roosevelt,” 24 January 1944, JHU. 45. Bowman to Alfred Hays Sulzberger, 9 November 1942, RGB. 46. Lash, Eleanor, 112. 47. Walter Clay Lowdermilk, Palestine: Land of Promise (London: Victor Gollancz, 1944), 17, 161. 48. Lash to author, 3 May 1982. 49. Bowman to Myron Taylor, 23 June 1947, JHU; Bowman to William L. Langer, 2 January 1946, JHU; Robert E. Sherwood, Roosevelt and Hopkins (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1948), 871–72. 50. Bowman to Roosevelt, 25 November 1938, RGB. 51. Bowman to Roosevelt, 25 November 1938. 52. See his foreword to Carlos Monge, Acclimatization in the Andes (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1948). For a critique of this superorganic

notes to pages 308–313

/

515

notion of culture in twentieth-century cultural geography, see James Duncan, “The Superorganic in American Cultural Geography,” Annals of the Association of American Geographers 70 (1980): 181–98. 53. Bowman to George P. Auld, 23 October 1935, RGB. 54. Isaiah Bowman, “Science and Social Pioneering,” Science 90 (6 October 1939): 315. 55. Bowman, “Science and Social Pioneering,” 316. 56. Bowman, “Comment upon the Memorandum of the Political and Economic Planning Organization in London,” 21 February 1939, 2, JHU; Isaiah Bowman, “Geography, Modern Style,” Outlook 12 (17 July 1929): 461. 57. Bowman, “Comment upon the Memorandum. . . . “ 58. Interview with Owen Lattimore, 12 January 1983, Cambridge. 59. Bowman to Robert Bowman, 20 November 1939 (two letters), RGB. Bowman made the first letter to his son sufficiently official to have penned his usual office salutation, “Sincerely yours,” before remembering to whom he was writing. 60. Bowman to Robert Bowman, 16 March 1942, RGB. 61. Bowman to Roosevelt, 25 November 1938, RGB; Joseph A. Rosen to Isaiah Bowman, 1 December 1938, 3 January 1939, RGB; Bowman to Rosen, 2 December 1938, RGB; Wyman, The Abandonment of the Jews, 214, 330. 62. Bowman to Liebman, 9 November 1942, JHU; Liebman to Bowman, 11 November 1942, RGB. See also the discussion of Chaim Weizman in Bowman, “MEMORANDUM of a Conversation with James G. McDonald . . . ,” 23 March 1940, RGB. 63. Bowman to Arthur Hays Sulzberger, 9 November 1942, RGB. 64. Minutes of political committee, P-52, 17 April 1943, NA NF 55; Bowman, “-P1-,” memo, 17 April 1943, JHU; minutes of political committee, P-21, 8 August 1942, 11, NA NF 55. 65. Bowman to William Yale, 9 December 1947, RGB. 66. Morgenthau, “The Refugee Run-Around,” 2, 65. As Morgenthau reports, even Secretary of State Cordell Hull freely admitted: “When you go through this record for the last year and a half, it is one of the most shocking matters.” In a meeting with Morgenthau and some of his deputies, Hull was unable to introduce some of his subordinates working on refugee matters and visa issuances because he did not know their names. Wyman, The Abandonment of the Jews, 285. 67. “On the Record: Bowman Assays. . . .” 68. Henry A. Wallace, The Price of Vision: The Diary of Henry A. Wallace (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1973), 210–11. 69. Bowman, “Memorandum on Refugee Resettlement,” 15 May 1940, JHU, 3. 70. Bowman, “Population, Migration, Settlement.” 71. Morton White and Lucia White, The Intellectual versus the City (New York: Oxford University Press, 1977).

516

/

notes to pages 314–323

72. Woodruff D. Smith, “Friedrich Ratzel and the Origins of Lebensraum,” German Studies Review 3 (1980): 54. 73. George L. Warren to Bowman, 15 December 1938, 2, 6; Bowman to Liebman, 9 January 1939. 74. Bowman, “Memorandum on Refugee Settlement,” 1. 75. Bowman, “Memorandum on the Report of the British Guiana Commission,” 28 April 1939; Bowman to Salter, 11 January 1939; Bowman to Liebman, 9 January 1939; all in RGB. 76. Leo Waibel to Bowman, 14 February 1940, RGB; Bowman to Liebman, 15 February 1940; “A Refugee Settlement,” Daily Clarion (British Honduras), 28 March 1940. 77. “World Watches as Hopkins Starts Study”; “On the Record: Bowman Assays. . . .” 78. Bowman to Mr. Achilles, 12 April 1945, RGB.

chapter 12 1. “History Repeats for Dr. Bowman,” Omaha Evening World-Herald, 19 March 1944. 2. Cordell Hull quoted in Department of State Bulletin 8 (1943): 323. 3. Bowman to Albert Thomas, 21 January 1943; Bowman to Hull, 15 April 1943; Bowman to Nicholas J. Spykman, 21 July 1937; all in JHU. 4. It is widely assumed that the term was coined by General George Strong in a 1942 meeting of the security subcommittee of the wartime State Department (see minutes of security subcommittee, S-3, 6 May 1942, NA NF 76). Actually the term seems to have been coined after Versailles by Woodrow Wilson’s adversary at Paris, Baron Sonnino. See J. F. Normano, The Struggle for South America (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1931), 157–58. 5. Henry Luce, “The American Century,” Life, 17 February 1941. 6. CFR, “Studies of American Interests in the War and the Peace” (WPS), Territorial Series, memoranda of discussions, T-A1, 16 February 1940. 7. Bowman, “England at War,” undated letter to Robert G. Bowman, RGB, 1. 8. Bowman to Lionel Curtis, 2 November 1939, RGB; Bowman, “England at War,” 6. 9. See, for example, Alexander P. De Seversky, Victory through Air Power (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1942). 10. CFR WPS, memo, 1 January 1946, JHU, 8; CFR WPS, Territorial Series, memoranda, T-B3, March 1940, CFR; Bowman to Joseph H. Willits, 8 August 1940, JHU. The CFR report was quickly published in the council’s journal: Philip Mosely, “Iceland and Greenland: An American Problem,” Foreign Affairs 18 (1940): 742–46. 11. Robert Dallek, Franklin D. Roosevelt and American Foreign Policy 1932–1945 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1979), 265. 12. Bowman, undated six-page memo, JHU. See, for example, the claims by the explorer Vilhjalmur Stefansson, Iceland: The First American Republic (New

notes to pages 323–326

/

517

York: Doubleday, Doran, 1939); Lawrence Martin, “The Geography of the Monroe Doctrine and the Limits of the Western Hemisphere,” Geographical Review 30 (1940): 525–28. 13. Bowman, undated six-page memo, JHU; Bowman, “Sequel—FDR,” 18 April 1941, JHU, Series XIV; Robert E. Sherwood, Roosevelt and Hopkins: An Intimate History (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1948), 291; Dallek, Franklin D. Roosevelt, 261; Bowman, undated memo of annotations on Sherwood’s Roosevelt and Hopkins, RGB. 14. Martin W. Lewis and Kären E. Wigen, The Myth of Continents: A Critique of Metageography (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997). 15. Bowman to FDR, 19 May 1941, JHU. 16. Benjamin Mills Pierce, A Report on the Resources of Iceland and Greenland (Washington, D.C.: U.S. State Department, 1868). 17. Peter Francis Coogan, “Geopolitics and the Intellectual Origins of Containment,” Ph.D. dissertation, University of North Carolina, 1991, 294; Bowman, memo accompanying letter to FDR, 19 May 1941, JHU, 1a; Bowman to FDR, 19 May 1941, JHU; Isaiah Bowman, “The Strategy of Territorial Decisions,” Foreign Affairs 24 (1946): 181; CFR WPS, Territorial Series, Meetings, T-A3, 18 April 1940, 7. 18. Sherwood, Roosevelt and Hopkins, 308–12, 373–74. 19. Newsweek, 3 April 1944, 41. 20. Bowman to Walter H. Mallory, 5 October 1939, JHU; Bowman, “The Strategy of Territorial Decisions,” 180; John Maynard Keynes, The Economic Consequences of the Peace (New York: Harcourt Brace and Howe, 1920). Among relevant retrospectives that emerged in this period and that Bowman read, see Paul Birdsall, Versailles Twenty Years After (New York: Reynal and Hitchcock, 1941); Thomas A. Bailey, Woodrow Wilson and the Lost Peace (New York: Macmillan, 1944); and David Lloyd George, Memoirs of the Peace Conference (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1939). Earlier works also read by Bowman include: Harold Nicholson, Peacemaking 1919 (London: Constable, 1933); G. Bernard Noble, Policies and Opinions at Paris (New York: Macmillan, 1935); and Rene Albrecht Carrie, Italy at the Paris Peace Conference (New York: Columbia University Press, 1938). 21. Bowman to Lionel Curtis, 2 November 1939, RGB; Bowman to Leland Harrison, 6 May 1921, JHU; Bowman to Secretary of State Charles F. Hughes, 6 May 1921, AGS IB. 22. CFR WPS, 1. 23. Bowman to Mallory, 5 October 1939. 24. George Messersmith, “Memorandum of Conversation,” 12 September 1939, State Department Decimal File 811.43 CFR /220, RG 59, NA; Bowman, three untitled memos, 27 November, 15 December, and 17 December 1939, JHU; Cordell Hull to Bernard Baruch, 10 January 1940, JHU; Bowman, “Memorandum,” 9 December 1939, JHU.

518

/

notes to pages 326–331

25. CFR, “Project for a Study of the Effects of the War on the United States and the American Interest in the Peace Settlement,” memo, December 1939, RGB; CFR WPS. 26. CFR WPS, economic and financial committee memoranda E-B18, E-B19, 6 September and 19 October 1940; Mallory to Bowman, 3 July 1940, JHU; Lawrence H. Shoup and William Minter, Imperial Brain Trust: The Council on Foreign Relations and United States Foreign Policy (New York: Monthly Review, 1977), 135–40. 27. Bowman to Mallory, 5 October 1939. 28. CFR WPS, memo T-A3, 18 April 1940. 29. Bowman, “Memorandum of Talks with Mr. Messersmith and Mr. Wilson by Mr. Mallory and Mr. Jones at Washington on January 11th, 1940,” 13 January 1940, JHU; Wilbur Edel, “The State Department, the Public and the United Nations Concept 1939–1945,” Ph.D. dissertation, Columbia University, 1951, 58–61. See also Regina Gramer, “The Contribution of the Council on Foreign Relations to the American Century, 1939–1949,” unpublished paper, Center for the Critical Analysis of Contemporary Culture, Rutgers University, 3 February 1993. 30. Bowman, “Notes on Conversations of May 3rd,” 3 May 1941, JHU. 31. Bowman to Alan Ogilvie, 2 January 1942, JHU. 32. Bowman to H. F. Armstrong, 15 December 1941, JHU. 33. Edel, “The State Department . . . ,” 93; Armstrong to Bowman, 12 December 1941, 16 and 23 November 1948, JHU; Bowman, memo, 12 February 1942, JHU. 34. Hull to Norman Davis, 12 November 1940, JHU; H. F. Armstrong, “Personal and Confidential Memo to Members of the War and Peace Studies Groups,” 8 May 1942, JHU; Mallory to Bowman, 28 September 1945, JHU; CFR, The War and Peace Studies of the Council on Foreign Relations, 1939–1945 (New York: Council on Foreign Relations, 1946). Cf. Bowman: “Again and again I was able to answer questions asked in subcommittee meetings in Washington because I had the facts derived from my previous participation in a group meeting in New York. . . . The group discussion was in effect an analysis in which objections as well as advantages had been aired, therefore my report to the advisory committee and its subcommittee represented the carefully weighed thinking of a group rather than of an individual” (War and Peace Studies, 5). 35. Although they were technically subcommittees of the overall Advisory Committee, the parent committee became so unwieldy so quickly that the subcommittees were soon referred to simply as committees. 36. Harley A. Notter, ed., Postwar Foreign Policy Preparation 1939–1945, Department of State Publication 3580 (Washington, D.C.: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1949), 86. See also Notter’s description of the territorial meetings (117–23). 37. Bowman, memo, 7 January 1943, JHU; Notter, Postwar Foreign Policy Preparation, 96–99, 117; Bowman to Charles B. Hitchcock, 12 November 1942, JHU; minutes of political committee, P-2, 14 March 1942, RG 59, NA NF 55,

notes to pages 332–338

/

519

1–2. Official minutes of these State Department meetings were deliberately rough and general according to Notter (Postwar Foreign Policy Preparation, 106), and so Bowman’s more detailed memos are a vital source. 38. Bowman, “Thursday, February 12, 1942,” memo, JHU. 39. Minutes of political committee, P-5, 4 April 1942, NA NF 55; memo for discussion, fourth meeting of the territorial committee, 20 May 1940, CFR. 40. Bowman, “-P-,” memo of Advisory Committee meeting, 18 April 1942, JHU; Bowman to Curtis, 2 November, RGB; minutes of political committee, P-6, 11 April 1942, NA NF 55, 2, 6, 11. 41. Minutes of political committee, P-7, 18 April 1942, NA NF 55; Bowman, “-P-,” 18 April 1942, JHU. 42. Minutes of political committee, P-8, 25 April 1942, 9, 13, NA NF 55. 43. Minutes of political committee, P-9, 2 May 1942, NA NF 55; Bowman, “Germany,” memo, 2 May 1942, JHU; Isaiah Bowman, The New World (Yonkerson-Hudson: World Book Company, 1921), 294; “IB’s remarks at P Committee, May 9, 1942,” memo, JHU. 44. Minutes of political committee, P-16, 20 June 1942, NA NF 55; Bowman, untitled memos, 19 and 20 June 1942, JHU. 45. Bowman, untitled memos, 19 and 20 June 1942; minutes of political committee, P-16, 20 June 1942, NA NF 55; Sumner Welles, The Time for Decision (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1944), 347, 349. 46. Bowman, untitled memo, 23 January 1943, JHU. 47. See the Welles biography by his son, Benjamin Welles, Sumner Welles: FDR’s Global Strategist (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1997). 48. Minutes of political committee: P-17, 27 June 1942, 1; P-18, 11 July 1942, 17; P-19, 18 July 1942, 12, 18–19; all in NA NF 55. 49. Bowman, memo, 28 November 1942, JHU. See also Philip Mosely, “Dismemberment of Germany: The Allied Negotiations from Yalta to Potsdam,” Foreign Affairs 28 (1950): 487–98; and Philip Mosely and Paul Y. Hammond, “Directives for the Occupation of Germany: The Washington Controversy,” in American Civil Military Decisions: A Book of Case Studies, ed. Harold Stein (Birmingham: University of Alabama Press, 1963), 317. Both of these sources credit Bowman and Armstrong with leading the fight over German policy. The archival record suggests that Pasvolsky, too, was Bowman’s ally more than Armstrong was. Mosley, on whom Hammond probably relies, was a CFR member, Bowman’s research secretary in both the council and State Department territorial committees. 50. Bowman, memo, 7 January 1943, JHU; Bowman, memo, 16 January 1943, JHU; Bowman, memo, 15 March 1943. 51. Bowman, memos, 15 January and 23 February 1943, JHU. 52. Sherwood, Roosevelt and Hopkins, 711–12. 53. State Department document, “Germany: Partition,” in Notter, Postwar Foreign Policy Preparation, 188, 554–57; Hammond, “Directives for the Occupation of Germany,” 322.

520

/

notes to pages 338–342

54. Bowman to Hull, 27 September 1943, JHU; “Supplement to Mr. Bowman’s letter of September 27,” JHU. 55. Hammond, “Directives for the Occupation of Germany,” 316; Bowman, annotations on Sherwood’s Roosevelt and Hopkins, RGB; Notter, “The Political Reorganization of Germany,” in Postwar Foreign Policy Preparation, 558–60. See also “Hull’s Welcome Home as Hero Cancels a Year of Vilification,” Newsweek, 22 November 1943, 34–39. 56. Bowman, secret memo, 7 October 1943, JHU. See also Philip Mosley, “The Occupation of Germany: New Light on How the Zones Were Drawn,” Foreign Affairs 28 (1950): 580–604. 57. Hammond, “Directives for the Occupation of Germany,” 336. 58. Hammond, “Directives for the Occupation of Germany,” 322–23; Dallek, Franklin D. Roosevelt and American Foreign Policy, 438–39. 59. Bowman, memo, 24 February 1944, JHU; Mosley, “The Occupation of Germany,” 590–91. 60. Bowman, “Memo,” 21 February 1944, JHU. 61. On the Morgenthau plan, see: John Morton Blum, From the Morgenthau Diaries: Years of War, 1941–1945 (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1967); Hammond, “Directives for the Occupation of Germany,” 348–88; Warren F. Kimball, Swords or Ploughshares? The Morgenthau Plan for Defeated Nazi Germany, 1943–1946 (Philadelphia: Lippincott, 1976); Fred Smith, “The Rise and Fall of the Morgenthau Plan,” United Nations World 1, no. 2 (1947): 32–37. The Morgenthau quotes are from Dallek, Franklin D. Roosevelt and American Foreign Policy, 472. 62. Henry L. Stimson and McGeorge Bundy, On Active Service in Peace and War (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1948), 567. See also Godfrey Hodgson, The Colonel: The Life and Wars of Henry Stimson 1867–1950 (Boston: Northeastern University Press, 1990); and Bowman, untitled three-page memorandum of visit to White House, 3 February 1944, JHU, 2. 63. Stimson and Bundy, On Active Service, 570–77; Bowman, memos, 11 and 15 September 1944, JHU; “Dr. Isaiah Bowman September 8 1944,” notes attached to Elizabeth Neary to Bowman, 11 September 1944, JHU, Series XIV. For Stimson on Bowman, see Stimson diaries, 27 October 1933, YU, Group HM 51. Cordell Hull may have been “opposed to dismemberment from the beginning,” as he later claimed (Hull, Memoirs, 2 vols. [New York: Macmillan, 1948], 2: 1287), but he seems not to have taken a strong stance during these meetings. 64. Lord Moran, Churchill (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1966), 190; Winston S. Churchill, Triumph and Tragedy (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1953), 156–57. 65. Sherwood, Roosevelt and Hopkins, 818–89; Godfrey Hodgson, The Colonel (Boston: Northeastern University Press, 1990), 264–65. 66. The “Lublin Committee,” named after the town where its members lived out the war, comprised mostly socialists. The United Kingdom and the United States sided with the “London Poles,” whose members drew more from the prewar ruling class and who abandoned Poland after the Nazi invasion. 67. Bowman, “Memo,” 18 December 1944, JHU; Bowman to Cordell Hull, 27 September 1943, JHU; Thomas M. Campbell and George C. Herring, The Di-

notes to pages 343–354

/

521

aries of Edward Stettinius, Jr., 1943–1946 (New York: New Viewpoints, 1975), 199–201. 68. Hammond, “Directives for the Occupation of Germany,” 431. 69. Lucius D. Clay, Decision in Germany (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1950), 73; “Supplement to Mr. Bowman’s Letter of September 27,” JHU. 70. Minutes of political committee, P-18, 11 July 1942, NA NF 55; Bowman, memo on Lippmann article, 9 July 1945, JHU. 71. Bowman, “Secret. ‘Impact of Geography on National Power,’ “ 30 September 1946, JHU, 7; minutes of political committee, P-2, 14 March 1942, NA NF 55. 72. Bowman, untitled four-page memo, “Good faith . . . ,” RGB. 73. Carolyn Eisenberg, Drawing the Line: The American Decision to Divide Germany, 1944–1949 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 9.

chapter 13 1. Edward Stettinius to John Lee Pratt, 10 March 1944, JHU. 2. William Roger Louis, Imperialism at Bay: The United States and the Decolonization of the British Empire, 1941–1945 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1978), 27. 3. Stettinius to Pratt, 10 March 1944. 4. Minutes of security subcommittee, S-3, Advisory Committee on Postwar Foreign Policy, 6 May 1942, NA NF 76; Bowman to Wallace, 27 March 1940, RGB. 5. Richard Law to Oliver Stanley, 11 April 1944, quoted in Louis, Imperialism at Bay, 329, 55. 6. A broadly similar list guided Council on Foreign Relations deliberations from 1940. Noninclusion of various Central and South American republics widely held to be “backward” (category 6) reflects continued adherence to the Monroe Doctrine. 7. Quoted in Robert E. Sherwood, Roosevelt and Hopkins: An Intimate History (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1948), 572; Ruth B. Russell, A History of the United Nations Charter (Washington, D.C.: Brookings Institution Press, 1958), 42–43. 8. Minutes of territorial committee, T-5, 11 April 1942, State Department, RG 59, NA NF 42; Bowman, “Dependent Areas,” memo, 10 April 1942, JHU. 9. Cf. Eric F. Goodman, Rendezvous with Destiny (New York: Vintage, 1955), 342. 10. Thomas R. Read to Bowman, 10 July 1942, JHU; C. K. Leith, Minerals in the Peace Settlement (New York: Geological Society of America, 1940). 11. CFR, “Progress Report, WPS,” 3 July 1940, RGB. 12. Minutes of political committee, P-22, 15 August 1942, NA NF 55. For a useful summary of the early discussions see Louis, Imperialism at Bay, 159–74. 13. Bowman, memo, 2 October 1942, JHU.

522

/

notes to pages 355–364

14. Minutes of political committee: P-33, 14 November 1942, 2; P-37, 12 December 1942; both in NA NF 55. 15. Isaiah Bowman, “Jeffersonian ‘Freedom of Speech’ from the Standpoint of Science,” Science (6 December 1935): 530. See also Gilbert Chinard, Thomas Jefferson, the Apostle of Americanism (Boston: Little, Brown, 1939), 501. 16. Sherwood, Roosevelt and Hopkins, 572; Louis, Imperialism at Bay, 121, 279; Robert A Divine, Second Chance (New York: Atheneum, 1971), 61. For the Roosevelt-Churchill correspondence, see Warren F. Kimball, Churchill and Roosevelt: The Complete Correspondence, 3 vols. (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1984). 17. Bowman, memo, 23–24 April 1943, JHU; minutes of political committee, P-36, 5 December 1942, NA NF 55, 7. 18. Bowman, memo, 23 February 1943, JHU. 19. Minutes of political committee, P-51, 10 April 1943, NA NF 55. 20. Minutes of political committee, P-51, 10 April 1943, 19. 21. Bowman, untitled memo, 14 April 1943, JHU. 22. Bowman, “-P1-,” memo, 17 April 1943, JHU. 23. Minutes of political committee, P-52, 17 April 1943, NA NF 55; Bowman, “-P1-,” 17 April 1943; minutes of political committee, P-21, 8 August 1942, NA NF 55, 11. Nauru finally gained independence in 1968. 24. Minutes, P-52, 17 April 1943; Bowman, “-P1-,” 17 April 1943. 25. Louis, Imperialism at Bay, 241. 26. Louis, Imperialism at Bay, 227–28, 354. 27. Sherwood, Roosevelt and Hopkins, 713, 719. The “Pescadores Islands” lie between Taiwan and the Chinese mainland and are now known as P’eng-hu Ch’üntao. 28. “Call Made on the President by Secretary Hull, Under Secretary Stettinius and the Members of the London Mission, Messrs. Bowman, Murray, Matthews, Pratt, Lynch and Hector, 17 March 1944,” JHU. 29. Bowman, untitled memo, 28 October 1943, JHU; Bowman, secret memo, 6 November 1943, JHU. In three and a half years at the University of Virginia, Stettinius had succeeded in earning precisely six credit hours toward a degree (Thomas M. Campbell, Masquerade Peace: America’s UN Policy, 1944–45 [Talahassee: Florida State University Press, 1973], 9n.). 30. Bowman, “Report of a Conversation with the President,” 17 March 1944, JHU. 31. In 1940 the United States exchanged fifty destroyers for eight bases in the British West Indies, Bermuda, and Newfoundland. 32. Bowman, untitled memo, 10 February 1944, JHU. 33. Louis, Imperialism at Bay, 326–36; Bowman diary, 28 March 1944, JHU; Bowman, memo, 11 April 1944, JHU. 34. “Report by Bowman on Chequers Conversation,” 15 April 1944, JHU. 35. “Report . . . on Chequers Conversation”; Bowman, “Colonial Policy,” undated, JHU.

notes to pages 365–373

/

523

36. Bowman, “Colonial Policy,” undated; Welles quoted in Robert Dallek, Franklin D. Roosevelt and American Foreign Policy, 1932–1945 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1979), 429. 37. Bowman, “Colonial Problems,” memo, 18 April 1944; Louis, Imperialism at Bay, 330–32. 38. Quoted in Louis, Imperialism at Bay, 330; Bowman, “Colonial Problems,” 18 April 1944. 39. Louis, Imperialism at Bay, 332. 40. Bowman, “Colonial Policy,” memo, 24 April 1944, JHU; Bowman to John Winant, 28 April 1944, JHU. In the letter to Winant, Bowman floats the selfprotective explanation that it was his (Bowman’s) intervention with Churchill that accounted for Stanley’s changed attitude, but Cadogan was the real intermediary (Louis, Imperialism at Bay, 332). 41. Bowman, “Colonial Policy,” 24 April 1944. 42. Bowman to Winant, 28 April 1944. 43. Louis, Imperialism at Bay, 333. 44. Bowman, “Colonial Policy,” 24 April 1944; Bowman to Winant, 24 April 1944, JHU. 45. Bowman to W. M. Mallory, 6 May 1945, JHU; Bowman to Carl Sauer, 27 May 1944, RGB; Bowman, “Colonial Policy,” draft report to the secretary of state, n.d., JHU. 46. Bowman, untitled memo, 12 June 1944, JHU. Bowman thought it was his impending nemesis, Leo Pasvolsky, who had raised the question of people talking too much (Bowman, “Jimmie,” memo, 18 June 1945, JHU). 47. Minutes of International Organization subcommittee, 10 May 1944, NA NF 142, 52; “Colonial Policy,” draft report; Bowman, untitled memo, 12 June 1944, JHU. 48. Minutes of International Organization subcommittee, 10 and 12 May 1944, NA NF 142; Louis, Imperialism at Bay, 334, 351–65. 49. Bucknell to secretary and undersecretary of state, secret telegram, 18 May 1944, JHU; Bowman, memo, 13 June 1944, JHU. 50. Louis, Imperialism at Bay, 9. 51. Dallek, Franklin D. Roosevelt and American Foreign Policy, 429. For Churchill, see “The Widening Prospect,” London Times, 11 November 1942. 52. Bowman, “Trusteeship,” memo, 12 December 1946, JHU. 53. Louis, Imperialism at Bay, 179. 54. “Draft Declaration of Principles relating to Dependent Territories,” secret memo, 17 May 1944, JHU. A blander and somewhat modified version of this draft declaration became the trusteeship section of the United Nations’ draft constitution, prepared in the State Department in July 1943. It is reprinted in Harley A. Notter, ed., Postwar Foreign Policy Preparation, 1939–1945, Department of State Publication 3580 (Washington, D.C.: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1949), 472–83. 55. Bowman, secret five-page memo (record of conversation with Eleanor Roosevelt), 7 January 1944, JHU, 5.

524

/

notes to pages 375–380

chapter 14 1. Dean Acheson, “Statement by Secretary of State Dean Acheson . . . ,” 6 January 1950, No. 17, Department of State, JHU. 2. Bowman, untitled memo, 7 January 1944, JHU. 3. See, for example, Ruth Russell and Jeanette E Muther, A History of the United Nations Charter (Washington, D.C.: Brookings Institution Press, 1958); Stanley Meisler, United Nations: The First Fifty Years (New York: Atlantic Monthly, 1995); and Townsend Hoopes and Douglas Brinkley, FDR and the Creation of the UN (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1997). 4. Robert E. Sherwood, Roosevelt and Hopkins: An Intimate History (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1948), 453. 5. Cordell Hull, Memoirs, 2 vols. (New York: Macmillan, 1948), 2: 1314–15. 6. Stephen E. Ambrose, Rise to Globalism, 3rd ed. (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1983). 7. Robert A. Divine, Second Chance: The Triumph of Internationalism in America during World War II (New York: Oxford University Press, 1967), 167–74. 8. Bowman, memo, marked “File: FDR,” undated, JHU; Zbigniew Brzezinski, “The Future of Yalta,” Foreign Affairs 63 (1984): 279. (Note that this article appears in the journal that Bowman helped to found more than six decades earlier.) 9. Lloyd Gardner, Spheres of Influence: The Great Powers Partition Europe, from Munich to Yalta (Chicago: Ivan R. Dee, 1993), 261; Warren F. Kimball, Churchill and Roosevelt: The Complete Correspondence, 3 vols. (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1984). On Roosevelt’s supposed naïveté, see William Appleman Williams, The Tragedy of American Diplomacy (New York: Delta, 1962), 223–24. 10. The UN’s origins, long ignored by historians as unimportant, have become the focus of more geographically prescient analyses appearing recently. See Thomas M. Campbell, Masquerade Peace: American UN Policy, 1944–45 (Talahassee: Florida State University Press, 1973); Robert C. Hilderbrand, Dumbarton Oaks: The Origins of the United Nations and the Search for Postwar Security (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1990); and Georg Schild, Bretton Woods and Dumbarton Oaks (Houndmills, England: Macmillan, 1995). See also Gardner, Spheres of Influence. 11. Sir Charles K. Webster, “The Making of the Charter of the United Nations,” History 32, no. 115 (March 1947): 21; Harley Notter, ed., Postwar Foreign Policy Preparation 1939–45, Department of State Publication 3580 (Washington, D.C.: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1949), 88–89. 12. In addition to Welles, Bowman, and research director Leo Pasvolsky, it included James Shotwell, a veteran of the Inquiry and the Paris conference and an energetic internationalist; Benjamin V. Cohen, a New York corporate lawyer and White House adviser; and Green H. Hackworth, a State Department legal adviser; and later, Clark Eichelberger, of the League of Nations Association. 13. Sherwood, Roosevelt and Hopkins, 227.

notes to pages 381–386

/

525

14. Bowman to Herbert Hoover, 4 December 1940, JHU; Bowman, untitled two-page memo, marked “Insert,” undated, JHU; Bowman, “Memorandum for Discussion: Refugee Settlement,” T-B10, 20 May 1940, CFR, 5. 15. For the best account, see Laurence H. Shoup and William Minter, Imperial Brain Trust (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1977), 135–40. For an argument connecting the Grand Area to eventual U.S. involvement in Southeast Asia, see G. William Domhoff, “The War-Peace Studies of the Council on Foreign Relations and the Rationale for U.S. Involvement in South-East Asia, 1939–1945,” paper presented at the annual conference of the Society for Historians of American Foreign Relations, June 1995. 16. Divine, Second Chance, 114. 17. Divine, Second Chance, 124; Sherwood, Roosevelt and Hopkins, 717. See also Wilbur Edel, “The State Department, the Public and the United Nations Concept,” Ph.D. dissertation, Columbia University, 1951, 101. 18. Bowman to Welles, 30 March 1943, JHU; Bowman, untitled two-page memo, “Insert,” undated. 19. “Mr. Bowman’s Remarks in the Political Committee, June 12, 1943,” JHU, 3. 20. “Bowman’s Remarks in the Political Committee, June 12, 1943,” 4, 5. 21. Bowman, “Memorandum for Mr. Armstrong,” 25 June 1943, RGB. 22. Cf. “The IMF and the World Bank were designed to be central institutions in a world free of war and destructive economic nationalism” (M. Moffitt, The World’s Money [New York: Simon and Schuster, 1983], 14). 23. Bowman, “St. Com.,” secret memo, 25 June 1943, JHU. For an explicit comparison of Treasury and State Department preparations, see Schild, Bretton Woods and Dumbarton Oaks. 24. Kimball, Churchill and Roosevelt, 1: 15. 25. Bowman, untitled memos, 7 January and 3 June 1943, JHU; Bowman, secret memo, 7 October 1943, JHU. At one point, Welles’s chauffeur even bet Hull’s chauffeur that Welles would be secretary of state within three months. 26. Harley Notter, “Notes,” 14–26 September, NA NF, RG 59; Bowman, “Thursday February 12, 1942,” memo, JHU: “LP’s limitations are of course his foreign appearance, his accent, his Russian origin. . . . Armstrong says he was a Jew but I doubt this. There is nothing in his appearance to indicate it. I have never heard him comment on the Jewish question in any form and this might indicate that he is a Jew.” Bowman, secret memo, 7 October 1943, JHU. 27. Bowman, “CH’s Office,” memo, 2 July 1943; Bowman, untitled memo, 23–24 April 1943; Bowman, “Steering Com.,” handwritten memo, 21 May 1943; Bowman, untitled memo, Friday, 4 June 1943; all in JHU. Cf.: “The chief mistake which Welles made was in his actuarial estimate of Mr. Hull’s length of life” (Bowman, secret memo, 1 July 1944, JHU). 28. Bowman, untitled memos, 3 and 4 June 1943, JHU; Ronald Steel, “The Strange Case of William Bullitt,” New York Review of Books, 29 September 1988, 15–24. See also the account by Welles’s son: Benjamin Welles, Sumner Welles: FDR’s Global Strategist (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1997).

526

/

notes to pages 386–391

29. “The place is covered in dust,” Stettinius complained to Bowman when he ordered a crew of cleaning women and painters to spruce up his dingy office. Organizationally, “too many people have access to the Secretary,” with no effective “channels of command,” and a messy organizational chart. “I want to reorganize this place from the top to bottom,” he announced, and I want “you and John Pratt” to help me. “No one else, just us three.” Bowman, “October 14, 1943, 2:45 p.m.: Under-Secretary Stettinius’ Office,” secret memo, JHU; Bowman, untitled memo, 10 February 1944, JHU. Stettinius’s father had worked with Myron Taylor at General Motors before going on to a partnership in J. P. Morgan, and the younger Stettinius followed Taylor into the chairmanship of U.S. Steel. 30. Divine, Second Chance, 126. 31. Bowman to Secretary Hull, 27 September 1943, JHU; “Supplement to Mr. Bowman’s letter of September 27” undated [probably 7 October 1943]), JHU; Bowman, secret memo, 7 October 1943, JHU (the last two memos never reached Hull, with Bowman blaming this on Pasvolsky’s “sabotage”: Bowman to Hamilton Fish Armstrong, 10 July 1946, JHU); Arthur Krock, “Pact a Product of U.S.,” New York Times, 10 November 1943; Bowman, “Krock, New York Times,” memo, (misdated) 10 October (presumably 10 November 1943), JHU. 32. The Four Powers Agreement is reprinted in Russell and Muther, A History of the United Nations Charter, 977. After Molotov’s and Eden’s suggestions in Moscow, the final wording read: “sovereign equality of all peace-loving nations.” Bowman claimed to have devised “sovereign equality” to be used in place of Welles’s “equality of all nations” on the grounds that sovereignty may be equal “but states never” (Bowman, “Krock, New York Times,” misdated memo, 10 October). 33. The most revealing source on these grander geopolitical calculations concerning China is Kimball, Churchill and Roosevelt, 1: 12, 293; 2: 222. On Churchill’s racism, see Bowman, “Report by Bowman on Chequers Conversation,” 15 April 1944, JHU; Hull, Memoirs, 2: 1277–83; Bowman, secret memo, 28 October 1943, JHU. 34. Bowman, secret memos: four-page, 3 November 1943; three-page, 28 October 1943; two-page, 3 November 1943; one-page, 6 November 1943; all in JHU. 35. Cited in Divine, Second Chance, 81–82. 36. Sherwood, Roosevelt and Hopkins, 785–86; Adam Ulam, The Rivals: America and Russia since World War II, reprint ed. (1971; Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1981), 14–15; Divine, Second Chance, 157–59. 37. “Report by Isaiah Bowman on Chequers Conversation,” 15 April 1943, JHU. 38. “Report by Isaiah Bowman on Chequers Conversation”; Bowman, “Colonial Policy,” draft submitted to secretary of state, April 1944, JHU; Bowman, “World Organization,” draft submitted to secretary of state, n.d., JHU. On the Renner maps, see the section “Strange Silence and the ‘American Haushofer’” in chapter 10. The London visit was precisely one of those State Department projects that drew the ire of the Treasury Department.

notes to pages 392–402

/

527

39. Bowman, memo, 24 March 1944, JHU; Bowman, secret memos, 13 and 17 December 1943, JHU; Bowman, “Plan for the Establishment of an International Organization for the Maintenance of International Peace and Security,” 23 December 1943, JHU; Cordell Hull, “Memorandum for the President,” 29 December 1943, JHU; Divine, Second Chance, 159–90. 40. “Blueprint,” San Francisco Chronicle, 18 June 1944; Bowman, memo, 23 September 1944, JHU; Notter, Postwar Foreign Policy Preparation, 269. 41. Arthur H. Vandenberg, The Private Papers of Senator Vandenberg (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1952), 95. 42. Peter Calvocoressi and Guy Wint, Total War (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1972), 487. 43. Hilderbrand, Dumbarton Oaks, 87–93. 44. Bowman, untitled five-page memo, 24 August 1944, 2–3; Hilderbrand, Dumbarton Oaks, 122–28. 45. Bowman, untitled five-page memo, 3 February 1944, JHU, 3. 46. Bowman, untitled five-page memo, 3 February 1944, 1–2. 47. The best account of the veto dispute is Hilderbrand, Dumbarton Oaks, 183–212. 48. Hilderbrand, Dumbarton Oaks, 95–101. 49. Russell and Muther, A History of the United Nations Charter, 551; Notter, Postwar Foreign Policy Preparation, 314; Hull, Memoirs, 2: 1709–10. 50. Bowman, untitled five-page memo, 24 August 1944, 4; Notter, Postwar Foreign Policy Preparation, 305–15; Bowman, memo, 23 September 1944. 51. FRUS (1944), 1: 814; Hilderbrand, Dumbarton Oaks, 92–93, 125–26, 220. 52. Divine, Second Chance, 221. 53. Isaiah Bowman, “The Dumbarton Oaks Proposals,” Association of American Colleges Bulletin 31 (1945): 32–43; Isaiah Bowman, “The Dumbarton Oaks Proposals,” Johns Hopkins Alumni Magazine 33 (1945): 37–43. 54. Divine, Second Chance, 257. 55. Meisler, United Nations, 9. 56. Quoted in Kimball, Churchill and Roosevelt, 3: 237. 57. Hilderbrand, Dumbarton Oaks, 246, 257. 58. See Mary Louise Pratt, Imperial Eyes (New York: Routledge, 1992). 59. Bowman to Charles Liebman, 16 March 1945, JHU; Robert W. Sawyer to Robert Bowman, 9 August 1950, RGB; FRUS (1943), 1: 759. 60. Diana Shaver Clemens, Yalta (New York: Oxford University Press, 1970), 216; Campbell, Masquerade Peace, 90. 61. Bowman to family, 21 May 1945, RGB. 62. See the accounts in Mark Scott and Semyon Krasilshchik, eds., Yanks Meet Reds: Recollections of U.S. and Soviet Vets from the Linkup in World War II (Santa Barbara: Capra Press, 1988); Carolyn Eisenberg, Drawing the Line: The American Decision to Divide Germany, 1944–1949 (Cambridge: University of Cambridge Press, 1996), 1–4. 63. Lippmann is quoted in Divine, Second Chance, 291. See also Campbell, Masquerade Peace, 163–64.

528

/

notes to pages 403–412

64. Sumner Welles, “Dear Friend,” letter to a group, 29 August 1947, JHU. 65. FRUS (1945), 1: 279, 390; Bowman, “Meeting of the Big Five,” 7 June 1945, three-page memo; Bowman, “Lunch in 666 Mayflower,” 5 October 1948, JHU; Vandenberg, Private Papers, 202; Bowman, untitled memo, 26 May 1945, 9:00 P.M., JHU; Bowman, “Tom Connally,” two-page memo, 3 April 1945; Bowman, “American Delegation Meeting,” 26 May 1945, JHU. 66. FRUS (1945), 1: 527, 546, 799–803, 1010. 67. Bowman, untitled memo, 26 May 1945, 9:00 P.M., 1–2; Bowman, untitled, undated memo [28 April?], “Cool since dressing down . . . ,” JHU. 68. Bowman, untitled three-page memo, 7 June 1945; FRUS (1945), 1: 500. 69. Vandenberg, Private Papers, 187. 70. FRUS (1945), 1: 591–92, 607–9. 71. Vandenberg, Private Papers, 187. 72. Vandenberg, Private Papers, 189; FRUS (1945), 1: 683. 73. FRUS (1945), 1: 617–25; Vandenberg, Private Papers, 188, 189–91. 74. FRUS (1945), 1: 680–83; Campbell, Masquerade Peace, 173–74. Bowman’s gloat at winning this round against Pasvolsky earned him a sharp public rebuke from Stettinius. 75. FRUS (1945), 1: 674, 692–94; Thomas M. Campbell and George C. Herring, eds., The Diaries of Edward R. Stettinius, Jr., 1943–1946 (New York: New Viewpoint, 1975), 362. 76. FRUS (1945), 1: 691–98; Campbell and Herring, eds., The Diaries of Stettinius, 361–72. The establishment of a British-French regional bloc in western and southern Europe was well known by the U.S. delegation and in the State Department. According to Assistant Secretary of State James Dunn, a close friend of Bowman’s: “The British and French [are] engaged in setting up a Western European bloc. The question of the establishment of this bloc [is] no longer in doubt” (FRUS [1945], 1: 649). 77. Gaddis Smith, The Last Years of the Monroe Doctrine, 1945–1993 (New York: Hill and Wang, 1994), 47–48; Notter, ed., Postwar Foreign Policy Preparation, 295; Russell and Muther, A History of the United Nations Charter, 224; FRUS (1944), 1: 699–703; Henry L. Stimson and McGeorge Bundy, On Active Service in Peace and War (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1948), 600–601. 78. FRUS (1945), 1: 318–19; Vandenberg, Private Papers, 169. 79. U.S. espousals of colonial “independence” came from an overexuberant young man in the State Department who openly called himself an “idealist,” Bowman once told the British, and he was chastised “never to use that word again” (Hilderbrand, Dumbarton Oaks, 173). 80. FRUS (1945), 1: 795. 81. FRUS (1945), 1: 795. 82. Kingsbury Smith, “The American Plan for a Reorganized World,” American Mercury 55 (November 1942): 536. 83. Frank Waring, reports to secretary of commerce, 26 May 1945, in Henry Wallace, Oral History, CU OH, 3828–31; Bowman to Charles Liebman, 19 January 1942, RGB.

notes to pages 413–422

/

529

84. Bowman to Robert and Walter Bowman, 6 July 1945, RGB; Bowman, “Memorandum of talk with Secretary Stettinius,” 16 June 1945, JHU. 85. Bowman, untitled one-page memo, 16 June 1945, JHU. 86. For Stettinius’s version of events, see his Roosevelt and the Russians (Garden City: Doubleday, 1949), 195–96. 87. Bowman, untitled three-page memo, 4 June 1946, JHU. 88. Bowman, untitled two-page memo, 29 June 1945, JHU; Bowman, “Memorandum of Conversations,” 24, 25, and 26 June 1945, JHU; Bowman, memo, 4 June 1946, JHU; George E. Allen, Presidents Who Have Known Me (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1950), 172–73. Virginia Stettinius had warned that not everyone in the United States felt as enthusiastic about the UN as the San Francisco revelers now felt and that things could come to a bad end for her husband. Bowman dismissed her concerns as hysterical and “parochial,” but of course she was right. Less than a year later Truman squeezed Stettinius out of the UN. 89. Bowman, untitled two-page memo, 4 May 1943, JHU. 90. Isaiah Bowman, Is an International Society Possible? (New York: National Industrial Conference Board, 1947), 10. 91. Isaiah Bowman, “The Dumbarton Oaks Proposals,” Association of American Colleges Bulletin 31 (March 1945): 33. 92. Frank Waring, 26 May 1945, cited in CU OH, Henry Wallace, 3828–31. 93. Gardner, Spheres of Influence.

chapter 15 1. Robert Coughlan, “Isaiah Bowman,” Life, 22 October 1945, 117. 2. Bowman to Lionel Curtis, 2 November 1939, RGB. 3. “Really one ‘foresees’ to the extent to which one acts, to which one makes a voluntary effort and so contributes concretely to creating the ‘foreseen’ result” (Antonio Gramsci, The Modern Prince [New York: International Publishers, 1957], 101). 4. “Supplement to Mr. Bowman’s Letter of September 27,” undated [probably 7 October 1943], emphasis added, JHU; Bowman to Hamilton Fish Armstrong, 10 July 1946, JHU. 5. Bowman, untitled memo, “I put into the record . . . ,” 28 November 1942, JHU; Bowman, untitled memo, “Lunched with Norman Davis . . . ,” 2 October 1942, JHU. 6. G. R. Sloan, Geopolitics in United States Strategic Policy, 1890–1987 (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1988), 112. 7. Turner Catledge, “Our Policy Stated,” New York Times, 24 June 1941. Hull is quoted in Newsweek, 22 November 1943. 8. “It is at this point that our help will make friends” (Bowman, untitled memo, “It may be argued . . . ,” 9 March 1943, JHU). 9. Quoted in Walter LeFeber, America, Russia, and the Cold War, 1945–1984 (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1985), 9, 26. The earlier Vinson quote is from John

530

/

notes to pages 423–427

H. Crider, “Vinson Calls Loan to Britain a ‘Must,’” New York Times, 6 March 1946. 10. LeFeber, America, Russia, and the Cold War, 39; Bowman to Robert G. Bowman, 13 February 1946, JHU. Contrary to popular belief, Churchill did not actually coin the term iron curtain in his March 1946 speech, but appropriated it from the Nazis. It was a stock phrase of Nazi anti-Soviet propaganda that came to prominence after German foreign minister Count Schwerin von Krosigk, on the eve of German defeat, broadcast to the German people that the invading Soviet army to the east brought with it an “iron curtain” excluding the eyes of the world. The speech was reported in “Kosigk’s Cry of Woe,” London Times, 3 May 1945. On Britain’s role in fomenting early cold war tension, see Peter J. Taylor, Britain and the Cold War (London: Pinter, 1990). 11. Bowman, “Is an International Society Possible?” typescript, JHU. Edited versions were later published as an American Affairs pamphlet by the National Industrial Conference Board, New York, in January 1947, and in the Explorer’s Journal. 12. LeFeber, America, Russia and the Cold War, 47–48; Richard Hartshorne to author, 15 April 1986. 13. Arthur Krock, “U.N. Bloc Voting is the Shadow of San Francisco,” New York Times, 21 November 1946; “Address to Beginners,” Time, 21 October 1946. 14. George Francis Kerr to Bowman, 18 October 1946, RGB; Bowman to Hoover, 1 October 1941, FBI file 100–46382. 15. Bowman to Colonel Herman Beukema, 22 October 1946, RGB; Bowman to Oscar Ruebhausen, 30 December 1946, JHU. 16. Bowman, “Discovering Your Place in This Complex World,” 22 September, 1947, JHU; Bowman to Lewis H. Brown, 15 May 1947, RGB. Bowman’s comparison of Stalin with the tsars paralleled the argument of his old nemesis Walter Lippmann the same year—except Lippmann opposed the Truman Doctrine. See Walter Lippmann, The Cold War (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1947). Truman is quoted in LeFeber, America, Russia and the Cold War, 54. 17. Olive Swezy to Bowman, 24 September 1947, JHU; Curtis P. Nettels to Bowman, 24 September 1947, JHU. 18. John Lewis Gaddis, The United States and the Origins of the Cold War 1941–1947 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1972), 4. As Gabriel Kolko has observed, “Neither the Americans, British, nor Russians were willing to permit democracy to run its course anywhere in Europe at the cost of damaging their vital strategic and economic interests” (Kolko, The Politics of War [New York: Random House, 1968]). 19. Bowman, untitled memo, “It may be argued . . . ,” 9 March 1943, JHU. See also the observation by George Kennan: “The cause of Socialism is the support and promotion of Soviet power, as defined in Moscow” (Kennan, “The Sources of Soviet Conduct,” Foreign Affairs 25 [1947]: 573). 20. Daniel Kevles, The Physicists (New York: Vintage, 1979), 297; Milton Lomask, A Minor Miracle: An Informal History of the National Science Foundation (Washington, D.C.: National Science Foundation, 1974), 37.

notes to pages 427–433

/

531

21. J. Merton England, A Patron for Pure Science: The National Science Foundation’s Formative Years, 1945–1957 (Washington, D.C.: National Science Foundation, 1982); James L. Penick Jr., Carroll W. Pursell Jr., Morgan B. Sherwood, and Donald C. Swain, The Politics of American Science (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1972); Kevles, The Physicists, 342–66; Lomask, A Minor Miracle, 33–59. 22. Vannevar Bush, Science—the Endless Frontier (Washington, D.C.: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1945). 23. “Report of the Bowman Committee on Government Aid to Science,” 9 May 1945, 6, RGB; Bush, Science—the Endless Frontier, 65–127. 24. “Report of the Bowman Committee . . . ,” vi (Science—the Endless Frontier, 68). See also Isaiah Bowman, “Science and Social Pioneering,” Science 90 (6 October 1939): 309–19; England, A Patron for Pure Science, 107–8. 25. Kevles, The Physicists, 344. 26. Bowman to Harlow Shapley, 9 November 1946, RGB; Bowman et al. to President Truman, 24 November 1945, RGB. 27. Bowman et al. to Truman, 24 November 1945; Bowman to Charles Ross, telegram, 23 November 1945, JHU. 28. Bowman to E. E. Day, 5 June 1946, JHU; Bowman to Homer W. Smith, 7 June 1946, JHU. The CIO is the Congress of Industrial Organizations, a grouping of trade unions. 29. “Statement Presented on October 8, 1945, by Isaiah Bowman of the Johns Hopkins University to a Joint Meeting of the Senate Subcommittees on Commerce and Military Affairs with Reference to Proposals for Federal Support of Scientific Research,” RGB (printed in U.S. Senate Subcommittee of the Committee on Military Affairs, Science Legislation: Hearings on S. 1297 and Related Bills, 79th Cong. 1st sess., 1945, 10–14); “Bowman’s Talk to Senators,” New York Herald Tribune, 9 October 1945. 30. U.S. Senate, Science Legislation, 368–69; Kevles, The Physicists, 348. 31. Bowman, “S. 1720,” memo, 17 January 1946, RGB; Bowman et al. to President Truman, 24 November 1945; Bowman to Charles Ross, telegram, 23 November 1945, JHU; Bowman to Carroll Wilson, 26 November 1945, JHU. Initial signatories of the Committee Supporting the Bush Report included James B. Conant, president of Harvard; Linus Pauling, of the California Institute of Technology; A. N. Richards, of University of Pennsylvania; and Robert E. Wilson, of Standard Oil of Indiana. 32. J. Donald Kingsley to John R. Steelman, 31 December 1946, reprinted in Penick Jr. et al., The Politics of American Science, 121; “The Committee for a National Science Foundation,” Science 103 (4 January 1946): 11. 33. England, A Patron for Pure Science, 45–59; Bowman to Day, 5 and 21 June 1946, RGB. 34. U.S. House of Representatives, Hearings before the Subcommittee of the Committee on Interstate and Foreign Commerce . . . H.R. 6448, 79th Cong. 2nd sess., 28–29 May 1946, 13. 35. Bowman to Day, 21 June 1946, RGB. 36. “House Action on Science Legislation,” Science 104 (26 July 1946): 79.

532

/

notes to pages 433–435

37. Howard A. Meyerhoff, “Obituary: National Science Foundation, 1946,” Science 104 (2 August 1946): 97–98. 38. Kevles, The Physicists, 365. See also Daniel Lee Kleinman and Mark Solovey, “Hot Science/Cold War: The National Science Foundation after World War II,” Radical History Review 63 (1995): 131. 39. R. W. Gerard, “A National Science Foundation and the Scientific Worker,” Science 103 (4 January 1946): 4; Shapley to Bowman, 6 November 1946, JHU. 40. Kevles, The Physicists, 363; Lomask, A Minor Miracle, 53. Cf.: The NSF legislative delay “cost the nation a program balanced between civilian and military patronage” (Kevles, The Physicisits, 361). 41. David Sills to author, 13 November 1986; “President Bowman,” New York Times, 23 February 1935. 42. Social science funding ranged between 5 and 6 percent of total NSF grants between the mid-1960s and mid-1980s before falling to 3.5 percent in the Reagan years (Otto N. Larsen, Milestones and Millstones: Social Science at the National Science Foundation, 1945–1991 [New Brunswick, N.J.: Transaction Books, 1992], 104, 175). 43. See, inter alia, Gar Alperovitz, Atomic Diplomacy, 2nd ed. (New York: Penguin, 1987); James S. Allen, Atomic Imperialism: The State, Monopoly, and the Bomb (New York: International Publishers, 1952); Martin J. Sherwin, A World Destroyed: The Atomic Bomb and the Grand Alliance (New York: Alfred Knopf, 1973); J. Samuel Walker, Prompt and Utter Destruction (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1997). 44. On Bowman’s ambivalence about the bomb, see his letter to his son, Robert Bowman, 13 August 1945, RGB; and Bowman to J. Russell Smith, 3 October 1947, JHU. For the meeting with Truman, see Bowman’s untitled four-page memo: “On Saturday, September 7 . . . ,” 25 September 1946, RGB. For the five hundred thousand estimate, see Bowman to Hamilton Fish Armstrong, 10 July 1946, JHU; and Vannevar Bush to Bowman, 16 August 1946, RGB. This figure was more than a tenfold exaggeration of pre-Hiroshima military estimates: see Rufus E. Miles Jr., “Hiroshima: The Strange Myth of Half a Million Lives Saved,” International Security 10, no. 2 (1985): 121–40; Barton Bernstein, “A Postwar Myth: 500,000 U.S. Lives Saved,” Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists 42, no. 6 (1986): 38–40. See also Gar Alperovitz, The Decision to Use the Atomic Bomb (New York: Alfred Knopf, 1995); Robert Jay Lifton and Greg Mitchell, Hiroshima in America: Fifty Years of Denial (New York: Grosset/Putnam, 1995). 45. Bowman, “On Saturday, September 7 . . . ,” RGB; untitled, undated memo on White House letterhead, “Bowman,” HST; J. Edgar Hoover to Clark Clifford, 5 September 1946, with two-page memo, HST. See also FBI file, 100–46382. Hoover’s report is a cold war classic, focusing on crime, credit, and politics, going back to Brown City, Michigan. It is extraordinary for the network of informants contacted, yet how little it reveals about Bowman. 46. Bowman to Harry S. Truman, 12 September 1946, JHU; Bowman to Robert W. Sawyer, 8 November 1946, JHU; Bowman, “On Saturday, September 7. . . . “ Three years later he found himself again proposed for the AEC, this

notes to pages 436–440

/

533

time by Michigan Republican Arthur Vandenberg, chair of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, whom he had come to know in San Francisco, but by 1949 Bowman had become much more outspoken, and Truman this time demurred, saying only that he preferred a younger man. See “Bowman for Atom Post,” New York Times, 6 January 1949; Truman to Arthur Vandenberg, 8 February 1949, HST. Interview with Robert G. Bowman, 2 June 1984, Lincoln, Nebraska. 47. Bowman to Truman, 12 September 1946. Barton Bernstein, “The Birth of the U.S. Biological-Warfare Program,” Scientific American, June 1987, 116–21. 48. Henry L. Stimson, “The Decision to Use the Atom Bomb,” Harper’s, vol. 194, February 1947, 97–107. See also Robert Jay Lifton and Greg Mitchell, Hiroshima in America: Fifty Years of Denial (New York: Grosset/Putnam, 1995), chapter 7. 49. V. Bush to James Forrestal, 20 December 1948, PU, John Foster Dulles Papers, Box 41. The article that finally spurred the committee’s formation was by Bradley Dewey, “High Policy and the Atomic Bomb,” Atlantic Monthly, December 1948. See also the account in James Hershberg, James B. Conant: Harvard to Hiroshima and the Making of the Nuclear Age (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1993), 374–75. 50. Hershberg, James B. Conant, 390. 51. “U.S. Policies Governing the Use of Certain New Weapons and Release of Information Regarding the Capabilities of, and Defense against, the Use of these Weapons,”three-page top-secret memorandum, attached to Karl Compton to Bowman, 14 March 1949, JHU. 52. Secret five-page “draft” attached to Conant to K. T. Compton [date blacked out]; James Conant to K. T. Compton, 2 May 1949, PU, John Foster Dulles Papers, Box 41. 53. Conant to Compton, 2 May 1949. 54. Hershberg, James B. Conant, 389. 55. Bowman to J. Russell Smith, 3 October 1947; Bowman, untitled memo, undated, marked “File: U.S. U.S.S.R.,” RGB. 56. David Holloway, Stalin and the Bomb (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1994). 57. Eric Hobsbawm, The Age of Extremes (New York: Vintage, 1994), 24. 58. For a more detailed version of the Harvard story, from which this discussion is taken, see Neil Smith, “‘Academic War over the Field of Geography’: The Elimination of Geography at Harvard, 1947–1951,” Annals of the Association of American Geographers 77 (1987): 155–72. 59. On geography in the war, see Edward Ackerman’s own “Geographic Training, Wartime Research, and Immediate Professional Objectives,” Annals of the Association of American Geographers 35 (1945): 121–43. See also Andrew Kirby, “What Did You Do in the War, Daddy?” in Geography and Empire, ed. Anne Godlewska and Neil Smith (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1994), 300–314. 60. Derwent Whittlesey to George Cressey, 16 April 1948, HUW; Marland P. Billings to Whittlesey, 21 February 1948, HUG 4877.412; Billings to Paul Buck, 6 June 1947, three letters, copies in JHU; “College Dooms Major in Geo-

534

/

notes to pages 440–444

graphical Field,” Harvard Crimson, 4 March 1948; “Geography off the Map,” Harvard Crimson, 6 March 1948. 61. Peter B. Roll to Whittlesey, 8 March 1948, HUG 4877.412; “Off the Map,” Harvard Crimson, 2 March 1951. 62. Bowman, untitled memo, 27 July 1937, RGB; O. M. Miller to Preston James, 4 October 1966, AGS. 63. Interview with Preston James, San Antonio, Texas, 27 April 1982. 64. Bowman to Conant, 26 November 1947, JHU; Bowman to Gladys Wrigley, 15 April, 1948, JHU. 65. Richard Hartshorne, The Nature of Geography (Lancaster, Pa.: AAG, 1939). Whatever Bowman shared with Hartshorne, the practical man was decidedly hostile to the pedantic philosophizing of The Nature of Geography. He thought it “silly business,” an “enormous compilation of nearly useless material” endlessly desquamating subjects “of inferior importance to begin with” (Bowman to Robert Bowman, 6 December 1939, RGB). 66. Bowman, “Geography as a University Discipline,” hand-corrected draft, sixth regular meeting of the Subcommittee on Geography of the Committee on Education Policy, Harvard University, 18 November 1949, JHU; Bowman to Wrigley, 15 April 1948, JHU. 67. “From what we heard at Cambridge last autumn [Whittlesey] did not help matters by insisting upon association with Kemp” (Bowman to J. K. Wright, 8 March 1948, JHU). See also Bowman to Wrigley, 11 March 1941, AGS GR. 68. Interview with Jean Gottmann, 23 March 1982, Baltimore. 69. Edward Ullman to Donald McKay, n.d. [1949], HU, Subcommittee on Geography of the Committee on Education Policy, HUG, UA 111.10.198.132. 70. Bowman to Buck, 12 May 1948, JHU. 71. Cf.: Together, Buck and Conant “must have made a terrifying combination, coming up on both the soft and hard side of Bowman and of the discipline of geography” (Gerard Piel to author, 15 April 1985). The description of Conant is from Kevles, The Physicists, 288. 72. Bowman to Wright, 22 March 1948, RGB; Kirk Bryan to Bowman, 16 March 1948, JHU. 73. Bowman recorded the conversation afterward with Conant: bowman:

But you must have noticed that I was silent, and guessed the reason why.

conant:

I shall be grateful to my dying day for that silence. I think it was a remarkable piece of self-restraint, and I shall never forget it.

(Bowman, “Brookhaven Laboratory Conference,” 13 October 1948, JHU). 74. Interview with Jean Gottmann, 23 March 1982. 75. Ed Tenner, “Harvard, Bring Back Geography!” Harvard Magazine, May–June 1988, 27–30; Casper Weinberger, “Bring Back Geography,” Forbes, 25 December 1989, 31; McGeorge Bundy to author, 4 May 1988. Bailey is quoted

notes to pages 445–449

/

535

in Rita Morris, “An Examination of Some Factors Related to the Rise and Decline of Geography as a Field of Study at Harvard, 1638–1948,” Ph.D. dissertation, Graduate School of Education, Harvard University, 1962, 239. 76. Bowman to Henry Field, 6 November 1945, RGB. 77. Henry Wallace to Bowman, 3 November 1942, JHU. 78. “Fourth Point at Work,” Economist (2 April 1949); Bowman to Paul G. Hoffman, “Encouraging Private Investment in the Dependent Overseas Territories,” 2 pp., undated, RGB. 79. Harry S. Truman, presidential inaugural address, 20 January 1949, HST. 80. Bowman to Hoffman, 26 January 1949; Bowman, untitled four-page memo, “I have just returned . . . ,” 24 January 1949; Bowman to John Lee Pratt, 11 February 1949; Bowman to Averell Harriman, 4 March 1949; all in RGB. Hoffman had been president of the Studebaker car company, and Harriman was a railroad, shipping, and banking magnate, wealthy aristocrat, and ex-ambassador to Russia and Britain, who had also done a stint as secretary of commerce. 81. “Fourth Point at Work”; Bowman to Pratt, 15 July 1948, JHU. 82. Bowman, untitled memo, “At our meeting of May 20, 1949 . . . ,” undated, RGB. 83. Bowman to Benjamin DeKalbe Wood, 26 February 1949, JHU; Bowman, “Memorandum of a Meeting on Thursday, February 3 1949, E.C.A.,” 3 February 1949, RGB; Bowman, “ECA: Rigid Bilateralism . . . ,” memo, undated, RGB. 84. “Memo, on talk between Dr. Isaiah Bowman and Nevett Bartow, August 17, 1949 at the Century Club, New York,” 17 August 1949, RGB. See also Bowman to Hoffman, 17 October 1949, RGB; Orchard to Bowman, 3 October 1949, RGB; Hoffman to American Embassy [Harriman], Paris, 9 June 1949, RGB; Harriman to Hoffman, 17 June 1949, RGB. 85. Richard M. Freeland, The Truman Doctrine and the Origins of McCarthyism (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1972), 5, 21; Bowman, “Memorandum on Conversation with Mr. Harriman,” 12 August 1949, RGB; Michael L. Hoffman, “Soviet Says Point 4 Is a Colonial Plot,” New York Times, 27 July 1949; Thomas Zeiler, “Managing Protectionism: American Trade Policy in the Early Cold War,” Diplomatic History 22 (1998): 337–60. 86. Bowman, “Memorandum on Point Four,” 12 August 1949, RGB; Hoffman to American Embassy, Paris, 1 September 1949, RGB. 87. “ECA, Status of Overseas Projects,” memo, TOECA R-10, 1 September 1949, JHU; Bowman to Mr. Cleveland, Mr. Woodbridge, memo, 4 April 1949, RGB; George Woodbridge to Bowman, 13 September 1949, RGB. 88. Bowman to H. J. Fleure, 12 December 1949, JHU; Bowman to Harriman, 10 February 1949, RGB; Bowman, “Memorandum on Point Four.” See also James Reston, “Treasury Wins Long Battle on Financing ‘Point Four’ Plan,” New York Times, 16 June 1949; Isaiah Bowman, “How Far Can United States Resources Go?” Listener, 6 July 1948. Anthropologist Paul Fejos remembered one of Bowman’s more enthusiastic moments about “the industrialization of the backward areas.” Observing a handcrafted “Siamese” ashtray, Bowman proudly proclaimed that such an artifact, having previously taken perhaps a half

536

/

notes to pages 449–457

year of work, would now be made in seconds, because Point IV was sending punch presses to do the job. fejos: bowman: fejos:

Ike, what makes you think that the Siamese will want to do this? Oh, it’s easier to do than what they’re doing now. What makes you think they will want to do what is easier to do? They don’t. They get a special pleasure out of it, to shape something, to get a form out of it, and get beauty. Now you want to give them punch presses.

(Paul Fejos, Oral History, CU OH, 1962, 14–15). Bowman defended a classical labor theory of value against a cultural use theory of value. 89. William Vogt, “Let’s Examine Our Santa Claus Complex,” Saturday Evening Post, 23 July 1949, 77. 90. Bowman to Harlan Cleveland, 9 and 15 December 1949, RGB. 91. Henry Hazlitt, Illusions of Point Four (Irvington-on-Hudson, N.Y.: Foundation for Economic Education, 1950). For an updated and equally misguided indictment, see Nicholas Eberstadt, Foreign Aid and American Purpose (Washington, D.C.: American Enterprise Institute, 1988). 92. Interview with Owen Lattimore, 1 December 1983, Cambridge; Bowman to Wright, 16 November 1939, JHU; Bowman to Whitney Shepardson, 20 February 1941, JHU; Bowman to Richard Light, September 1947, JHU; Allen Weinstein, Perjury (New York: Alfred Knopf, 1978), 376; Robert Newman, Owen Lattimore and the Loss of China (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992). 93. E. F. Penrose to author, 1 June 1983; Newman, Owen Lattimore and the Loss of China; Owen Lattimore, Ordeal by Slander (Boston: Little, Brown, 1950); interview with Owen Lattimore, 1 December 1983; Bowman, “Memorandum on Interview with two Investigators . . . ,” 9 September 1944, RGB.

chapter 16 1. See especially William T. Stead, The Americanization of the World, or the Trend of the Twentieth Century (1901; New York: Garland, 1972). For the current argument, see R. Pells, Not Like Us (New York: Basic Books, 1997); David Slater and Peter Taylor, eds., The American Century (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1999); Tony Smith, “Making the World Safe for Democracy in the American Century,” Diplomatic History 23 (1999): 173–88; and Geir Lundestad, “ ‘Empire by Invitation’ in the American Century,” Diplomatic History 23 (1999): 189–217. 2. Edward Luttwak, “From Geopolitics to Geo-Economics,” National Interest (summer 1990): 17; see also Edward Luttwak, The Endangered American Dream: How to Stop the United States from Becoming a Third World Country and How to Win the Geo-Economic Struggle for Industrial Supremacy (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1993).

notes to pages 457–461

/

537

3. By the same token, some of the most innovative work in political geography and diplomatic history is now moving away from state-centered analyses, and while this is entirely to the good, it is important to understand this shift in context. It would be a mistake to see this as a purely intellectual movement. The shift away from state-centered analyses makes sense precisely because of the circumscription of state power in a variety of contexts toward the end of the American Century, but it is a shift made possible only because internationalism has grown ineluctably out of its opposite, the fruition of nationalism. This makes attention to the state an intensely historical and geographical issue. 4. Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, Empire (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2000). 5. Bowman, “Geography as an Urgent University Need,” 10 January 1947, JHU, 2. 6. Gladys Wrigley, “Isaiah Bowman,” Geographical Review 41 (1951): 7–65. Vandenberg is quoted in “Dr. Bowman Dead; Noted Geographer,” New York Times, 7 January 1950. 7. Harley A. Notter, ed., Postwar Foreign Policy Preparation 1939–1945, Department of State Publication 3580 (Washington, D.C.: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1949); Ruth B. Russell with Jeanette E. Muther, A History of the United Nations Charter (Washington, D.C.: Brookings Institution Press, 1958); Whitney H. Shepardson, Early History of the Council on Foreign Relations (Stamford: Overbrook Press, 1960). 8. The comment comes from the daughter of J. K. Wright: interview with David Lowenthal, 31 March 1989, New Brunswick, New Jersey; J. K. Wright, Geography in the Making: The American Geographical Society 1851–1951 (New York: American Geographical Society, 1952); Richard Hartshorne to author, 15 April 1986; William M. Davis to George E. Hale, 13 January 1919, NAS. 9. Chauncy D. Harris, “Geographers in the U.S. Government in Washington, D.C., during World War II,” Professional Geographer 49 (1997): 245–56. 10. Interview with Robert Strausz-Hupé, 13 March 1996, Newtown Square, Pennsylvania. 11. Bowman, “the far east,” attached to Bowman to Philip Jessup, 23 September 1949, RGB.

INDEX

Abancay, 66, 80 Abercrombie and Fitch, 79 Acheson, Dean, xx, 329, 375, 445 Ackerman, Edward, 439, 440, 441, 442 Act of Chapultepec, 406, 408, 409 Adams, Brooks, xiii, xvi, 10–11, 12, 17, 20, 52, 84, 114, 184 Adams, James Truslow, 148 Advisory Board on Overseas Territories, 446 Advisory Committee on Postwar Foreign Policy, 329–30, 332–36, 380, 412 Advisory Committee on Problems of Foreign Relations, 328 Afghanistan, xi, xiii Africa, 261, 350, 367; partition of, 116; scramble for, 135 Agassiz, Alexander, 39 Agassiz, Louis, 36–37, 44 Aglietta, Michel, 13 Agriculture Department, 237 Alaska, 308 Albania, 157 Albert, Prince, 92 al Qaeda, xiv, xv

Amazon, 56 ambition, U.S. global, xi, xv, 113–16, 136, 378, 379, 454, 455; three moments of, xi–xx, 9–25 American Association for the Advancement of Science, 427 American Century, xii, xiii, xvi–xviii, xx, 2, 7–8, 16, 17–25, 26, 31, 54, 135, 180, 265, 292, 455; decline and revival of, 5–6; end of geography as presumption of, 2; as geographic century, 7; and globalization, 454; ideology of, 18–21; irrelevancy of geography to, 17–18 American Empire, xiii–xiv, xv–xix, 2, 4, 10–11, 19–21, 28, 114, 176, 184, 236, 456–58, 462; and dependent territories, 352; geo-economics over geopolitics in, xiv; geography of, 26, 457–58; and globalization, 21–25; world market and, 19, 21 American Geographical Society, 15, 57, 85–86, 165, 233, 293–94, 440, 478–79n8; Bowman as president of, 87–92, 109–10; Bulletin of, 85, 87, 88; “Hispanic America” (millionth map),

540

/

index

American Geographical Society (continued) 92–97, 109; the Inquiry and, 89, 120–22, 126–27, 128, 134–35; and Military Intelligence, 89–90, 96, 236; and polar exploration, 85–86; and State Department, 96, 122, 130, 131, 135, 331. See also Geographical Review Americanism, 430 Americanization, 455 American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee, 310 Amundsen, Roald, 92 Andes, 49; Bowman on economic geography of, 69–71; Bowman on political geography of, 71–76; Bowman’s 1907 fieldwork in, 54–56, 57–60; Bowman’s 1911 fieldwork in, 55–56, 58, 61–67, 68, 80–82; Bowman’s 1913 fieldwork in, 58, 67–69 Angola, 297, 308 d’Annunzio, Gabriele, 166, 167–68 anthrax, 254 anthropogeography, 49, 72 anthropology, 215, 220 anticommunism, 425; of Bowman, 153–56, 190, 293–94, 420–26, 450 anticonquest narrative, 79–80, 400 anti-globalization movement, 24–25, 456–57 anti-Semitism, 246–47, 309–11, 358, 503n38 area studies, 19, 262 Argentina, 402–3 Armstrong, Hamilton Fish, 196, 205, 206, 325, 326, 359, 402 Army Specialized Training Program (ASTP), 252–53, 257, 259, 262 Artega, Melchor, 77–78 ASEAN, 22 Association of American Geographers, 19, 40, 86, 88, 212, 439; Bowman and, 48, 49 Atacama, 69, 70 AT&T, 244, 265, 429

Atlantic Charter, 351, 353, 358, 376, 390 atomic bomb, 263, 436–38 Atomic Energy Commission, 431, 434; Bowman proposed for, 435, 532–33n46 atomic secrecy, 436–38 Atwood, Wallace, 222, 257, 505n70 Australia, 252, 357 Austria, 284 Austria-Hungary, 124, 132, 142, 156, 157–58 Bailey, David, 444 Baghdad, 6 Bahrain, 311 Baker, Newton, 120 Baker, Russell, 244 Balfour, Arthur, 118 Balkans, 124–25, 156 Banse, Ewald, 282–83, 510n25 Barbados, 368 Barrows, Harlan H., 35 Bartlett, Robert, 108 Baruch, Bernard, 298 Bassett, Tom, 79 Baudrillard, Jean, 6 Baulig, Henri, 40 Beard, Charles, 245 Beer, George Louis, 123, 136–37, 160, 165, 174, 176, 194 Belgium, 124 Bell Labs, 427–28 Belorussia, 402, 403 Berger, John, 24 Bergson, Henri-Louis, 14 Berle, Adolf, 303, 329, 359, 445 Berlin Conference, 116 Beveridge, Albert, 115 Billings, Marland, 439 Bingham, Hiram, 55, 61–62, 66, 67, 182, 475n18; “discovery” of Machu Picchu by, 76–78 biography, xx–xxi biological warfare research, 254, 436 Bliss, General Tasker, 145, 154, 160–61, 194, 198

index

Bloom, Sol, 402, 407 Bohr, Niels, 438 Bolivia, 55, 58–60, 71–72 Borges, Jorge Luis, 460 boundaries, 343–46; and ethnicity, 157; and military calculation, 153–56 boundary disputes: Bolivia and Paraguay, 96; Chile and Peru, 96; Colombia and Peru, 96; Colombia and Venezuela, 96; Guatemala and Honduras, 93; Oklahoma and Texas, 90–91; Peru and Ecuador, 95, 96 Bowman, Cora, 47, 163, 453 Bowman, Emily (Shantz), 33, 34–35 Bowman, Isaiah: as academic entrepreneur, xx; The Andes of Southern Peru, 55, 74, 477n56; anticonquest narrative of, 80–82; anti-Semitism of, 246–47, 309–11, 503n38; antiurbanism of, 313–14; authoritarian style of, 245–46; biographical synopsis of, 25–28; on boundaries, 344–45; as cartographer of ethnicity, 177–78; changed by Paris, 168–72, 183; changed by South America, 79; on colonies, 351–52, 358, 362, 370–71; comparative obscurity of, xxii, 458–61; on conditional conquest, 56, 69; conservative nationalism of, 375; contradictions of, 26–27; on corporate sponsorship, 265; “Cuzco Man,” 475n18; “Deflection of the Mississippi,” 41; Desert Trails of Atacama, 55; disavowal of developmental idealism by, 357–58, 359; distrust of bankers, 449–50; early college of, 35–36; early teaching of, 31–32, 34; economic globalism of, 327–28, 329; evolutionary idealism of, 50, 56; as FBI informant, 244, 424; FBI on, 435; fieldwork for pioneer belt study of, 232–33; Forest Physiology, 49–51, 230; “The Frontier Region of Mexico,” 52; on geographical controls of history, 47–48; as geographical explorer, 53; on geography as a science, 221; Geog-

/

541

raphy in Relation to the Social Sciences, 220–22, 429; “The Geography of the Central Andes” (dissertation), 49; on globalism, 414; global vision of U.S. economic interests, 349–50; as gradual revolutionary, 201–2, 205, 206–7, 389; The Graduate School in American Democracy, 242–43; at Harvard, 38–45; idealism of, 169, 203–4, 223; on idealism, 242, 369; International Relations, 203; “Is an International Society Possible?” 423–24; and Jeffersonianism, 171, 223; Latin American expeditions of, 56–82; liberalism of, 201–6, 242, 262–63, 268; life on farm of, 32–33; Limits of Land Settlement, 219, 226, 295, 298; Livingston medals awarded to, 97, 321, 480n32; marriage of, 47; in Michigan, 32–35; on nationalism of international organization, 415; The New World, 26, 109, 182–84, 185–92, 196, 198, 199, 201, 261, 280, 281, 282, 283, 284, 287, 290, 317; Paris diary of, 172, 173; and Peary affair, 97–107; The Pioneer Fringe, 219, 223, 225, 226, 229, 233; positivism of, 43, 51, 185–86; pragmatism and idealism of, 45–46, 185–86; Princeton speech, 423–24; racism of, 74, 108–9, 247–51, 308, 500n49; “Red Czar” speech of, 424–25; and refugees, 295–326; retirement and death of, 453; on science, 43, 237, 238, 242; Science— the Endless Frontier, 427–28; as scientific elitist, 237, 242; as scientistentrepreneur, 79; silence on German geopolitics of, 283–85; on Soviet Union, 190, 201–2, 371–72, 420–26; study of Red River by, 90–91; summary of career of, 25–28; transcendentalism of 51; treatment of AGS workers by, 88; and UN, 374–415; Well-Drilling Methods, 49; at Yale, 46–50; in Ypsilanti, 35–36

542

/

index

Bowman, Robert, 246, 248, 302, 309–10 Bowman, Samuel Cressman, 32, 33 Bowman corollary, the, 229–32 Bowman line, the, 322–23, 324 Boyd, Louise, 92 Boy Scouts of America, 107, 108, 453 Braden, Spruille, 97 Brazil, 394, 397 Bretton Woods agreement, 319, 384, 394, 445 Britain, xv; 261, 348, 387; Council on Foreign Relations study group on, 199–200; in World War II, 359–60, 362–71. See also Churchill, Winston British Empire, 123, 141, 185, 187, 196, 207, 290, 321, 326–27, 349, 350, 354, 360, 371, 380, 382, 384, 399 British Guiana, 296–97, 299, 310 British Honduras, 299, 315 Bronk, Detlev, 452, 506n89 Brookhart, Smith Wildman, 205–6 Brookings Institution, 428 Browder, Earl, 451 Brown, Clarence J., 432 Brown, Donaldson, 261, 265 Brückner, Eduard, 281 Bruman, Henry, 246–7 Brunhes, Jean, 185, 284 Bryan, Kirk, 439, 440 Brzezinski, Zbigniew, 192, 379 Buck, Paul, 439–40, 441, 442 Buffalo Bill, 114 Bukharin, Nikolai, 425 Bulgaria, 142, 157 Bullitt, William C., 163, 386 Bull Moose Party, 83 Bundy, McGeorge, 252 Burma, 252 Bush, George H. W., 6, 180 Bush, George W., xii Bush, Vannevar, 435; National Science Foundation and, 427, 428, 429, 430, 432, 433 Butler, Matthew, 250 Byrd, Richard E., 92, 99, 100, 106, 108 Byrnes, James, 413, 422, 445

Cadogan, Sir Alexander, 363, 366–67, 393, 395 Cairo summit, 339, 360 Cambon, Jules, 151 Cambridge, University of, 258, 260 Campbell, W. W., 239–40, 241 Canada, xvi, 199, 354 Canham, Erwin D., 436 Cano y Omedilla, Juan de la Cruz, 96 capital accumulation, 231; globalism and, 15–16, 114–16 capitalism, 6, 13–14, 22, 115, 116, 178, 206, 426 Cardozo, Benjamin, 219 Carlyle, Barton, 268 Carnegie Corporation, 435 Carter, George, 259, 505–6n79; on Bowman and Jews at Hopkins, 503n38; at Bowman School of Geography, 260, 266; Lattimore affair and, 267, 452 Carter, John Franklin, 302, 304 cartography, 87, 173–78; at AGS, 93–97; at the Inquiry, 122, 126, 127, 129, 131–32; at Paris Peace Conference, 147–48, 173–78 Caruso, Enrico, 54 Castells, Manuel, 6 Cecil, Lord Robert, 194 Chapare (Bolivia), 57, 59, 60 Chiang Kai-shek, 360 Chicago School, 215 Chile, 55, 57, 71–3, 76, 202–3, 296 China, 383, 387, 415; at Dumbarton Oaks, 398; in Four Powers, 387–88 Chinard, Gilbert, 245 Chisholm, George, 177 Choate, J. H., 15 Churchill, Winston, 304, 313, 324, 337, 338, 362, 369, 377, 387, 389–92; anti-Chinese prejudice of, 387; colonial question and, 351, 356, 360, 363–65, 370, 371; global organization and, 370, 380, 391; meeting with Bowman, 363–65; postwar Germany and, 337–39, 341, 342; regional councils proposal of,

index

381–82, 391–92; regionalism of, 391–92, 411; as threat to U.S. globalism, 379 CIA, 3, 89 Clark, Andrew, 259, 267 Clark University, 222 class, 202–3, 318, 425; at Harvard, 39, and nationalism, 192, 202; and science, 427–35 Clay, General Lucius, 343 Clemenceau, Georges, 139, 152, 162, 166, 171 Clifford, Clark, 435 Clinton, Bill, 6 Cochabamba, 59, 60 Cohen, Benjamin, 329, 332 cold war, 375, 426; academic geography and, 19; hysteria, 451; liberal globalism and, 455–56; and science, 435–38 Colombia, 406, 408 colonialism, xvii, 8, 15–16, 84, 134, 136–37, 176, 347–73, 387; effect of Paris Peace Conference on, 176; Roosevelt’s hard line against, 355–56, 357, 359, 360. See also territories, dependent Colonial Office (UK), 119, 363, 365–68 colonies, shaking loose of, 348–73 Columbus, Christopher, 11, 101 Commerce Department, 287 Committee for the National Science Foundation, 432 Committee Supporting the Bush Report, 431 communism, 4, 5, 22, 118 Compton, Karl, 239, 240, 241, 435 Conant, James B., 420, 434, 435, 441; elimination of geography at Harvard and, 440, 442, 443–44; “Fishing Party” and, 435–38 concentration camps, 284, 293–94 Congo, 356 Congress of Vienna, 113 Connally, Tom, 388, 402, 403 conquest, conditional, 56–57, 79, 93, 224

/

543

conservatism, xvii, 168, 375 Constantinople, 166 Cook, Frederick, 100, 102, 103, 105 Coolidge, Archibald Cary, 120, 126, 184, 194, 196 Copeland, Charles, 44 Copiapó, 70 Coropuna, 61, 66, 67, 78 Costa Rica, 296, 297, 307 “Council of Europe,” 391 Council on Foreign Relations (CFR), 20, 27, 182, 192–207, 322, 350; Bowman and, 182, 193, 196, 198–200, 204–7, 325, 326, 328, 329–30, 331; Brookhart incident, 205–6; establishment of, 182, 192–97; and Foreign Affairs 196–97, 200; frontier/pioneering studies of, 226, 229; liberalism of, 200–201; mineral studies of, 352; origins of, 182, 192–200; publications of, 200; report on Greenland of, 322; State Department and, 20, 200, 325–31; study groups of, 197–200; in Washington, 325–38. See also War and Peace Studies (WPS) Croatia, 156, 157, 158, 168 Cuba, 182, 197, 406, 415 Curtis, Lionel, 194, 321, 420 Curzon line, 154–55, 342 Cuzco, 61, 62, 76–77, 80, 475n18 Czechoslovakia, 142, 150, 163, 284 Dachau, 293–94. See also concentration camps Darwin, Charles, 42, 44, 53, 55, 57 Darwinian theory of evolution, 42, 190, 276 Davis, John W., 200 Davis, Norman H., 326, 329, 330, 332, 337, 350 Davis, William Morris, 36, 38, 39, 42, 220, 222; on Bowman, 459; influence on Bowman of, 39, 40–41, 46, 50; theory of erosion cycles of, 41–42, 55, 57–59, 277–79 Day, E. E., 161, 219

544

/

index

decolonization, 348, 349, 371, 372, 415 Defense Department, xiii Defense Mapping Agency, 3 de Gaulle, Charles, 394, 399, 421 democracy, and science, 242, 246 Democratic Party, 83, 169–70, 265 Denmark, 322 dependent territories, 136–37, 202, 331, 347–73, 445, 447; categories of, 350–51; development in, 372; and security, 362; State Department deliberations on, 351–60; in United Nations, 380. See also colonialism Depression, the, 204, 233 Descartes, René, 12 determinism, geographical, 27, 47–48, 50, 183, 190, 215, 228; development, 222–29, 230–32, 313–16, 352–73, 445–51; capital and, 449; in dependent territories, 372; economic approaches to, 234; land settlement and, 226, 228; pioneering and, 230–32; uneven, xxi, 16, 17, 24, 214, 234 Dewey, Commodore George, 1 Dewey, John, 191 Dewey, Thomas, 342, 393 diplomacy, new, 141, 169, 179, 203 Divine, Robert, 389 Dix, Arthur, 289 Dominican Republic, 182, 197, 299 Dulles, Allen, 199, 326, 330 Dulles, John Foster, 145, 146, 402, 410, 436, 437 Dumbarton Oaks conference, 378, 393–99, 415; geographical compromises at, 398–400; and Security Council membership, 394; and UN membership, 396–97; and veto power, 394–95 Dunlap, Knight, 245 DuPont, 436–37 Durkheim, Émile, 220 dust bowl, 225

Eaton, Charles, 359, 402, 407, 410, 412 Economic and Social Council, 412 Economic Cooperation Administration (ECA), 446, 447 economic expansion: U.S. vs. Europe, 116–17, 141–42 economics, 215; discipline of, xviii Eden, Anthony, 337, 338, 359–60, 370, 380, 391; at United Nations Conference, 408, 409 Einstein, Albert, 12, 432 Eisenberg, Carolyn, 345 Eisenhower, Dwight D., 424, 436, 437, 438 Eliot, T. S., 40 elitism, best science, 37, 110, 237, 242 El Salvador, 197 empire, xiii, xviii, 114, 204; evil, 424; “of the world,” xiii, 17, 23. See also American Empire; British Empire Engels, Friedrich, 4 Enlightenment, the, 12, 215 environmental determinism, 47, 48, 74–6, 183, 190–91, 215, 228–29 Erving, W. G., 62 ethnicity, 20, 177–78 eugenics, 249–50, 301, 308–9 Europe: map in 1914, 144; map after 1922, 175 European Advisory Commission, 339, 340 European Union, 22 evolution, 42–43, 44; and race, 355 evolutionism, 43, 135, 205, 355 exceptionalism, American, xiii, 38, 140, 187 expansion, 17; decoupling of economic and territorial, 135, 140–42; 184–85, 187; geography of, xvii expansionism, U.S., xviii, 114, 116, 184, 188–89 exploitation, 202–3, 358 exploration, 48, 53–54 Explorer’s Club, 98

Eagleton, Terry, 7 Eastman Kodak, 79

fascism, 17 FBI, 244, 424, 435

index

Federalist debates, 381–82 Feis, Herbert, 329 Fejos, Paul, 535–36n88 Fermi, Enrico, 432 Field, Henry, 302, 304 Fiji, 252 Finley, John H., 91, 293, 294, 479n16 “Fishing Party,” 435–38 Fiume/Rijeka, 491n40; at Paris Peace Conference 156–57, 160–63, 165–68, 170; “experts letter” regarding, 161, 173, 179 Foch, Marshal, 154 Ford, James B., 94, 120 Foreign Affairs, 196, 197 Foreign Office (UK), 119, 363, 365–68, 370 foreign policy, U.S., 193; development of, 181–82; innocence narrative of postwar, 379, 400; and liberalism, 181. See also Council on Foreign Relations (CFR); State Department Forrestal, James, 424, 435 Foucault, Michel, 14–15, 468–69n30 Four Nations Declaration, 387 “Four Policemen,” xii, 351, 356, 364, 376–77, 382, 389–90, 398 Fourteen Points, 123–25, 132, 137, 143, 151–52, 157, 370, 486n22 Fowler, Robert D., 254 France, 124, 167, 394 Franck, James, 245, 246 Frankfurter, Felix, 118–19 free trade, 115, 182, 348, 349, 383–84 frontier, science as, 427–35 frontiers, 38, 75: closure of, xvii, 114; and labor, 78–82. See also pioneering; Turner, Frederick Jackson Fukuyama, Francis, 6 Gardner, Lloyd, 415 Garland, Hamlin, 33 Gater, Sir George, 363 Gay, Edwin F., 196 Gdansk/Danzig, 125, 152–53, 162, 166, 280 Gelfand, Lawrence, 132

/

545

General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT), xii, 21, 384 General Motors, 260, 261, 348, 361 geo-economics, xiv, 457 geographical cycle, 277–78. See also Davis, William Morris geographical parallax, 9 Geographical Review, 88, 99, 165, 288, 289 geography: applied, 213; beyond, xviii, 274, 376–78; Bowman on, 21, 27; cultural, 215–16; discipline of, xviii, 10, 23, 39, 86, 183, 215, 218; economic (commercial), 70–71; end of, 2–3, 5–9, 20, 54, 135–36, 142; at Harvard, 439–44; human, 214–15, 216; ignorance of, 3–4; of internal affairs, 213–14, 233, 234; irrelevancy to U.S. power of, 18, 19; “lost,” xviii, 17–20; 258, 457; military, 52, 89; new, 183–84; in nineteenth-century America, 10; origins of U.S., 36–37; physical, 183; political, 71, 183, 213, 215; and power, xiii; rediscovery of, 7; regional, 48, 87, 215; resources in, 2–3; retreat of academic, 19; school, 222; as science, 221; social sciences and, 218, 220–22; spaceless, 22–23. See also geopolitics geology, 86, 214 geomorphology, 42, 214 geopolitics, xiv, 274–92; American discovery of, 274–75, 292; Bowman on, 288–89; competitive power and, 291; German, 19, 274–75, 276–77, 281–85, 287–90; Italian, 290; origin of term, 275–76; and political geography, 288–89, 290–92; Ratzel and, 276–77, 290 George, Lloyd, 139, 140, 151–53, 162 Germany, 13, 115, 116, 124, 125, 142, 276, 296; and Polish borders, 150–53; borders after World War I, 151– 53; borders of after World War II, 320, 332–37, 338–40, 341–43; geopolitics of, 274–75, 276–77, 281–85, 287–90; Morgenthau plan for,

546

/

index

Germany (continued) 340–42; and Soviet Union, 332–34 Gildersleeve, Virginia, 402, 403 Gilman, Daniel Coit, 223, 241–42, 247–48 Gilman, Elisabeth, 247 Glacken, Clarence, 262 globalism, U.S., xi–xii, xvi, 2–3, 8–25, 26, 28, 135–38, 178, 275, 290, 317, 327–28, 348–49, 374–75, 414–15, 420; American Century as synonymous with, 454; of Bowman, 327–28; capital accumulation and, 15–16; cold war and, 455–56; as escape from geography, 2–3, 135– 36; 377; formation of United Nations and, 404–9, 411–12, 414–15; geographical contradiction of, 404–5; materialist, xv; Monroe Doctrine as contradiction to, 349–50, 404–8, 414; as neoliberal project, 455; origins of, 2, 5, 377; spaceless vs. spatially constituted, 15; three formative moments of, 5–6, 9–25, 26, 420, 454, 455 globalization, xiv, xv, 21–25; as new specter, 4; spaceless geography and, 22–23 global power, U.S., 8, 17; irrelevancy of geography to, 18, 19; realist vs. idealist interpretation of, 8 Goldman, Eric, 245, 246 Goldthwaite, J. Walter, 40 Good Neighbor policy, 353 Göring, Herman, 284, 293 Gottmann, Jean, 258–59, 267, 442, 444 Grace, W. R., 79 gradualism, revolutionary, 142, 193, 201–2, 205, 206–7, 389 Gramsci, Antonio, 421 Grand Area, 327, 381 Great Depression, 233 Greece, 157, 424 Greenewalt, Crawford H., 436 Greenland, 322–24 Greenough, John, 109

Gregory, Herbert E., 47, 49, 475n18 Grew, Joseph, 145 Gromyko, Andrei, 393, 394, 395, 396–97, 399, 402, 408 Guatamala, 415 Gulf Oil Co., 261, 165, 266 Guyot, Arnold, 37, 42 Hackworth, Green, 329 Haenel, Carl, 78 Haiti, 182, 197 Hale, George Ellery, 237, 238, 262 Hall, G. Stanley, 220 Hansen, Alvin, 326 Harding, Warren, 91, 170 Hardt, Michael, 457 Harriman, Averell, 446, 448 Harrison, Leland, 130 Hartshorne, Richard, 259, 294, 440, 441, 459 Harvard University, 7, 87, 434; Bowman as student at, 38, 39–45; elimination of geography at, 19, 439–44, 462 Haskins, Charles, 129 Haushofer, Karl, 420, 507n2; Bowman as American, 287–88; connection to Hitler, 275, 281, 283–84; German geopolitics and, 277, 281–82, 291; influence in Italy, 290 Hawkins, Harry, 329 Hazlitt, Henry, 451 heartland thesis, 13, 276. See also Mackinder, Halford Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich, 268, 462 Hensen, Matt, 109 Hendricksen, Kai, 66, 67 Herbert, Wally, 98 Herbertson, A. J., 50, 67 Hess, Rudolf, 281, 283 Hettner, Alfred, 277 Higbee, Edward C., 262 Hilderbrand, Robert, 399 Hiroshima, 263

index

“Hispanic America,” millionth map of, 92–97, 109 Hiss, Alger, 413, 451 history: of foreign relations 7–9; geographical controls of, 47–48; geographical pivot of, 9–17, 26, 28, 273; idealist vs. realist interpretation of, 8; respatialization of, 8 Hitler, Adolf, 26, 204, 283–84, 291; Haushofer and, 275, 281, 283–84, 420 Hobsbawm, Eric, 438 Ho Chi Minh, 176 Hoffman, Paul G., 446, 448 homosexuality, 386, 442 Honduras, 197 Hoover, Herbert, 204 Hoover, J. Edgar, 244, 340, 424 Hornbeck, Stanley, 358–59 House, Edward H., 119–20, 145, 459; break with Wilson, 160–62, 179; and “experts’” letter 160–62, 164; Fiume/Rijeka crisis and, 159–62, 164–65; the Inquiry and, 119–20, 124–25, 126, 128, 129, 130; offers executive secretary of the League of Nations to Bowman, 172–73; at Paris peace conference, 149 Hull, Cordell, 298, 306, 318, 329, 414, 422; division of Germany and, 335, 336–38, 341, 343; Moscow summit of, 387–88; trusteeship and, 356–57, 359–60, 368; United Nations and, 377, 380, 382, 392, 408; and Sumner Welles, 335, 336, 385–86 human ecology, 215 Humboldt, Alexander von, 37, 55, 69, 215 Humboldt, Wilhelm von, 235 Huntington, Archer M., 57, 86, 94, 109, 120 Huntington, Ellsworth, 40, 47 Hussein, Saddam, xv Hutzler, Albert D., 247 Huxley, Julian, 326 Huxley, Thomas, 42

/

547

idealism, liberal, 8, 45, 115–18, 140–42, 203, 375, 400; Bowman on, 242, 373; contradictions of, 117, 140; German, 235; practical, 45–46, 140; pragmatism of, 117 ideology, xiii, 21; anticonquest, 8 imperialism, 15, 118, 185, 187–88, 192, 355, 358, 360, 445–51; without colonies, 373 Indochina, 359, 361–62; Bowman on, 460–61; offered to China, 360 industrialization, 94–95 Informal Agenda Group, 337–38, 384, 392 Inquiry, the, 89, 118–38, 301; cartography of, 131–32; disorganization within, 126–30; draft of “Fourteen Points” by, 123–25, 132; focus on Latin America of, 132–34; geography of, 130–35; organization of, 119–23; at Paris Peace Conference, 145–47; significance of, 135–36 Intergovernmental Committee on Refugees, 299 International Criminal Court, xvi International Geographical Union (IGU), 258, 279–81, 284 internationalism, xvi, 118, 141–42, 168, 182, 193, 201, 284, 291–92, 413–14; of Bowman, 140, 141, 142, 273–74; Council on Foreign Relations and, 194–95; and nationalism, 375, 456; nationalist, xv–xvi, 373; of Woodrow Wilson, 140, 141–42, 373 International Monetary Fund, 21, 348, 384, 445, 454 International Workers of the World, 83 Iran, xv Iraq, xii, xv iron curtain, 530n10 isolationism, 169, 176, 181, 183 Israel, xi, xv Italy, 116, 142, 170, 401; geopolitics in, 290; territorial claims at Paris, 156–63, 164–68 Iwo Jima, xi, xiii

548

/

index

James, Henry, 44 Japan, 149, 279, 288, 327, 330, 343, 351, 354, 359, 365, 367, 387; atomic bombing of, 263, 430 Jebb, Gladwyn, 393, 398 Jefferson, Mark, 36, 40, 55, 121, 132, 134, 146, 148–49, 215 Jefferson, Thomas, 9–10, 37, 45, 46, 181 Jeffersonianism, 355, 357 Jehlen, Myra, 9 Jewett, Frank, 431 Jews; 247–48; Palestine as homeland for, 305–7; proposals for resettlement of, 295–99, 307–11, 312– 16; reaction to mass killings of, 299–300, 304; and resettlement proposals for, 295–99. See also Palestine; anti-Semitism Joerg, W. L. G., 86, 88 Johns Hopkins University, 84, 236, 241–69, 420, 435; Applied Physics Laboratory at, 255–56, 264–65; Bowman as president of, 241–69; corporate funding of, 243–44, 261, 264–65; geography at, 256–62, 264–65, 266–67; faculty at, 244–46, 256–57; Page School at, 256, 258; race at, 246–48; students of, 244, 247; trustees of, 260–61, 267–68; at war, 251–60 Johnson, Douglas, 122, 146, 160, 161, 164–65, 167 Journal of Geography, 88 Kant, Immanuel, xix, 12, 44, 215; and modern university, 235–36, 241, 246, 262, 263, 268 Kearns, Gerry, 12 Kellogg Company, 264 Keltie, Sir John Scott, 195 Kemp, Harold, 441, 442 Kennan, George, 192 Kerbey, Major, 62 Kerr, Philip, 152 Kevles, Daniel, 37, 241, 433 Keynes, John Maynard, 168–69, 260, 325, 340

Kilgore, Harley M., 428–29, 430, 431, 432 Kilmer, Joyce, 45, 145 Kipling, Rudyard, 232 Kissinger, Henry, 192 Kittredge, George, 44 Kjellén, Rudolf, 275 Knickerbocker, Hubert R., 293, 294 Knights of Labor, 83 Kolko, Gabriel, 530n18 Korea, 359, 360 Kristallnacht, 294–96 Krock, Arthur, 423–24 Kroeber, Alfred, 215 labor, 21, 78–82, 202, 314–16; “backward” countries as source of, 189–90 Lamarck, Jean-Baptiste, 223, 472n38 Lamont, Thomas, W., 194 Lansing, Robert, 119, 129, 130, 133, 161, 162, 164, 174 Lasswell, Harold, 219 Latin America, 48, 53–82, 92–97, 115, Bowman on capital investment in, 202–3; Council on Foreign Relations study group on, 199; focus of the Inquiry on, 132–34; United Nations debates and, 402, 406–8; U.S. troops in, 197 Lattimore, Owen, 204, 258, 291, 297, 302, 326, 452, 505n77; accused of spying, 267, 452; on Bowman, 309 Latvia, 155 Law, Richard, 363, 365 League of Nations, 140, 149, 152, 164, 169–70, 172–73, 320, 374, 376, 378, 408; Bowman offered executive secretaryship of, 172–73 Lebanon, xv Lebensraum, 38, 276, 282, 283, 289; origins of concept, 38, 276–77, 314 Lebensraum, American, 27–28, 38, 276–77, 284, 319, 327–28, 345–46, 426, 447, 455; as antigeography, 414; Bowman on, 27–28, 327, 283–84, 319, 345–46, 362, 371, 373, 379, 411;

index

and colonies, 348, 362; as economic question, 373; Roosevelt and, 361; Soviet threat to, 420, 426; United Nations and, 374, 377, 379 Lee, Douglas H. K., 260, 261 452 Lefebvre, Henri, 12, 47 Leffingwell, Russell, 205, 206 Leibniz, Gottfried Wilhelm, 12 Leith, C. K., 352 Lenin, Vladimir, 14, 23, 110, 124, 273, 290 Leningrad, seige of, 393 LeRond, General, 151 Levin, N. Gordon, 117 Lewis, Edward S., 247–48 liberalism, U.S., 115–18, 135, 181, 187, 192, 426; of Bowman, 201–6, 242, 262–63, 268; contradictions of, xxii; in response to socialism, 181, 192, 193, 206–7; specificity in U.S., 181, 206–7; of Wilson, 116–17, 140, 169, 177, 192. See also idealism, Roosevelt, Franklin Delano Liebman, Charles, 310–11, 315 Lippman, Walter, 40, 138, 386–87, 392; condemnation of geopolitics, 285–87; the Inquiry and, 120, 122, 123, 125, 127–28, 129, 485n22; at Paris Peace Conference, 146; on United Nations Conference, 402 Lithuania, 155 Livingstone, David, 472n38 Lleras Camargo, Alberto, 408 Lodge, Henry Cabot, 169 London, 321; Bowman on mission to, 361, 362–70 Long, Breckenridge, 303 Lord, Robert, 150, 155 Louis, William Roger, 349, 370 Lovejoy, Arthur, 245 Low, Seth, 85 Lowdermilk, Walter Clay, 306–7 Luce, Henry, 2, 5, 8, 17–20, 23, 265, 319; and end of geography, 18–21 Lunt, William, 160, 161 Luttwak, Edward, 457 Luxemburg, Rosa, 13–14, 273–74, 282

/

549

Lynd, Robert, 219 MacFarlane, Charles T., 35 Mach, Ernst, 12 Machiguenga, 64, 69, 73 Machu Picchu, 76–78 Mackinder, Halford, xiii, 11–17, 23, 25, 28, 53, 54, 110, 273, 290, 420, 425; Bowman’s debt to, 27, 28; “closed global system” of, 16–17; “Geographical Pivot of History,” 11–12, 13, 14, 26, 28; new geography of, 17 Madison, James, 381 Magnuson, Warren, 428, 430, 432 Mahan, Alfred, 114 Malinowski, Bronislaw, 218 Mallory, Walter H., 325, 326 mandates, colonial: origins of, 136–37 Manhattan project, 263, 264 manifest destiny, 10, 17 map perversion, 147–48 Marburg, Theodore, 249 Markham, Sir Clements, 55, 100 Marshall Plan, 424, 445–46, 448 Martin, Lawrence, 148 Martonne, Emmanuel de, 279, 281, 283 Marx, Karl, 4, 71, 220, 231, 447 Massi, Ernesto, 290 Mather, Kirtley, 440 Maull, Otto, 282 Maury, Matthew Fontaine, 37 Maverick, E. Maury, 431 May, Henry, 46, 140 McBride, George, 122 McCarthy, Joseph, 452 McCloy, John, 405 McCormick, Anne O’Hare, 329, 332 McKinley, William, 1 Mencken, H. L., 412 Merck, Frederick, 218, 219, 221, 222, 443 Messersmith, George, 325 Mexico, xvi, 52, 90, 133, 202 Meyerhoff, Howard, 433 Mezes, Sydney E.: on “backward” areas, 136; Bowman and, 126–30; the

550

/

index

Mezes, Sydney E. (continued) Inquiry and, 120, 122, 123, 125, 126–30, 133, 146; internationalization of Central Africa and, 137; at Paris Peace Conference, 160, 162 Michigan State Normal College, 35–36, 37–38 Middle East, xiv–xv migration. See Jews; M Project Military Affairs Committee, 253 Military Intelligence, 89–90, 96, 122, 145–46 Mill, H. R., 48, 182 Miller, David Hunter, 122, 123, 125, 127, 129, 133, 165 Miller, Kelly, 248 Miller, O. M., 104, 107 Millikan, Robert, 237, 238, 240, 263, 431 millionth map. See “Hispanic America,” millionth map of minerals, 352 minority treaties, 170–71, 493n76 Mitchell, Broadus, 247–49 modernity, shock of, 71 Molotov, V. M., 337, 338, 387, 402, 405 Mongolia, 231–32 Monroe Doctrine, xvi, 15, 54, 114, 132–34, 170, 182, 197, 201, 307, 327, 328, 349, 353, 354; Bowman on, 381; contradictions of American globalism and, 404–8; global, 5, 9, 178, 191, 318, 373, 374, 414; and hemispheric definition, 322–24; at Paris Peace Conference, 176; in World War II, 323–24, 356 Monsanto, 436–37 Montana, 224 Montenegro, 125, 157 Montesquieu, Charles L., 21, 215 Morgenthau, Henry, 303–4, 312, 340–42 Morgenthau plan, 312–13 Morrill, James, 436, 437 Morrison, Samuel Eliot, 245 Morse, Jedediah, 10 Moscow summit, 338–39, 377, 387

Mosely, Philip, 326 M Project, 299–304, 308, 312–15; Bowman’s work on, 294, 301–4 multilateralism, 447 Munich Institut für Geopolitik, 275 Mussolini, Benito, 166, 168 NAFTA, 22 National Academy of Sciences, 236–37, 259, 427, 428–29, 430 National Association of Manufacturers, 243–44, 430 National Committee on Education and Defense, 253 National Defense Research Committee, 254, 427, 428 National Geographic Magazine, 7, 86, 97, 101, 114 National Geographic Society, 39, 106 National Imagery and Mapping Agency, 3 National Research Council, 94, 122; Bowman as chair of, 212, 236–37, 239, 240; Bowman excludes social sciences from, 429–30, 434–35; Committee on Pioneer Zones of, 216; Division of Geology and Geography of, 89, 216 National Science Foundation, 427, 429–35 nationalism, xvi, 114, 116; of Bowman, 168, 375; and class, 192; conservative, 389–92; exploration and, 108; founding of United Nations and, 383, 389–92, 399; German geopolitics and, 277, 282–83; intensification at end of World War I of, 137–38; international ambition and, 114; scientific, 238. See also internationalism, nationalist nation building, 83–84, 113–16, 178, 456; and the university, 235–36 natural region, 67–68 Nauru, 358, 359 Nazis, 280, 284, 289, 295; genocide by, 299–300, 304, 307, 312 Nearing, Scott, 505n70

index

Negri, Antonio, 457 neo-liberalism, xv Neutrality Act, 323 New Deal, 26, 233, 240, 242 Newsweek, 451 new world order, 6, 8–9, 180, 318, 352; end of territorial control and, 371. See also Roosevelt, Franklin Delano New York Times, 91, 98, 108 Nicaragua, 5, 182 Nimitz, Admiral Chester W., 108 nitrates, 70 Nitti, Francesco Saverio, 166 Noble, Albert, 256 North, Oliver, 1 Norway, 322 Notter, Harley, 330, 459 Office of Economic Affairs, 352 Office of Naval Research, 434 Office of Scientific Research and Development (OSRD), 255, 427, 428 Office of Strategic Services (OSS), 97, 259, 294, 439 Ogilvie, Alan, 93 oil, xiv, 91, 445 OPEC, xv Open Door policy, 52, 115, 116, 182, 228 Operation Soapbox, 398 Oppenheimer, Robert, 432 Orchard, John E., 204, 446 order: geographical, 83–85, 90, 108–9, 121; search for, 83–84. See also new world order Orlando, V. E., 139, 158, 159, 160, 162–63, 165, 166 Orwell, George, 412 Ottoman Empire, 132, 142, 157 Ó Tuathail, Gearóid, 12 overhead payment, origin of, 255 Pacific Islands, U.S. usurpation of, 365, 409–10 Palestine, xii, 304–7, 311, 312, 354 Panama, 15, 57, 84, 182, 197 parallax, geographical, 5–9

/

551

Paris Peace Conference, 19, 113, 139–80, 183, 305; Black Book at, 147, 148, 149, 152, 160; Bowman on, 173, 174, 325; changes initiated by, 176–77, 179–80, 182; and colonies, 176; and ethnicity, 177–78; “Experts’ letter,” 160–63, 179; failures of, 173–76, 178–79; fixing geography at, 140–53, 164, 173; House Affair at, 160–64, 172–74; the Inquiry at, 145–47; and Italy, organization of, 149–50; Red book at, 147; territorial issues at 149, 177–78; Wilson at, 16, 140–43, 159–63, 174. See also Fiume/Rijeka; Poland Park, Robert E., 218, 222 Pasˇic´, Nicola, 158 Passarge, Siegfried, 277, 283 Pasvolsky, Leo, 329, 333, 359, 392, 405; Bowman’s dislike of, 385, 404–7, 459, 525n26; postwar Germany and, 337, 343; United Nations and, 402, 403, 405, 407, 408 Pax Americana, 318–19 Paz y Miño, General Luis Telmo, 95 peace, scientific, 121, 165 Pearl Harbor, 96, 251, 285 Peary, Josephine, 103 Peary, Robert E., 34, 482n44, 483n54; American Geographical Society and, 85–86; Bowman examines records of, 98, 102–8; “channel” of, 98–99; controversy about reaching North Pole by, 97–107 Peck, Annie, 61, 67 Peirce, Charles, 45 Pelzer, Betty, 267 Pelzer, Karl, 257, 258, 267, 296, 298, 302 Penck, Albrecht, 38, 94, 277–78, 280, 282 Penck, Walter, 278 Penck–Davis debates, 277–79, 282 Pendleton, Robert L., 260, 261, 302 peneplanation, 59 Penrose, E. F., 260, 261, 363, 452 Pentagon, xi, 437

552

/

index

peonage, 73–4, 80–82 Peru, 55, 57, 60–68, 72, 76–78. See also Andes Philippines, 1, 188, 252 physiography, 42; Bowman, Turner and, 230; Bowman’s work in Andes on, 57–59, 62–68. See also geomorphology Pilsudski, Joseph, 149 pioneering: Bowman’s research on, 213–14, 216–19, 222–34; development and, 230–32; and idealism, 223–24; modern, 224–25, 228–29, 233; pioneer belts, 226, 227; and women, 225. See also Turner, Frederick Jackson Pizarro, Francisco, 72, 80 Platt, Raye R., 93, 96 Point IV, 445–51; as Soviet plot, 451 Poland, 123, 125, 138; 280–81, 338, 400, 402–3; as buffer state, 153–54; at Paris Peace Conference 149–56, 166, 170, 490n31; post–World War II, 342, 389, 391 polar exploration, 54, 85–86, 97–107; fakery in, 98, 100, 104–7. See also Byrd, Richard E.; Peary, Robert E. Polaroid Corp., 427 Polish-Ukrainian Armistice Commission, 155 political science, 215 Polk, Frank, 164, 166–67, 170 Potsdam, 343, 419 Powell, John Wesley, 37, 41, 223 power, territorial definition of, 274, 291 pragmatism, 44, 375 Pratt, John Lee, 260–61, 266, 268, 361, 386, 453 Pratt, Mary Louise, 79–80 President’s Advisory Committee on Political Refugees, 295, 299 Princeton University, 119, 258, 265, 266 Progressive Party, 265 progressivism, 79, 142, 181 proximity fuze, 255–56 Prussia, 142, 151 psychology, 220

Quebec summit, 338, 339, 341 Quechua, 69, 75 Rabi, I. I., 427 race: geographical order and, 108–9; and refugees, 308–11, 312–13; supplanted by ethnicity, 177 racism, 74–76, 101, 308–11. See also anti-Semitism Radek, Karl, 200, 201 Ratzel, Friedrich, 38–39, 71, 72, 117, 223, 283, 335; agrarianism of, 38, 314; concept of Lebensraum of, 38, 289; geopolitics and, 276–77, 285, 290; influence on Bowman of, 38–39, 71, 73, 190, 335 Rawlins, Dennis, 98, 100 Raymond, Harry, 105 Raytheon Corp., 427 Readings, Bill, 268 Reagan, Ronald, 424 Redfield, Robert, 219–20, 232 Redmond, Roland, 204 Red River boundary dispute, 90–91 Reed, John, 40 Refugee Economic Corporation, 297, 298–99, 304, 315 refugees, resettlement of, 293–316. See also M Project regionalism, 327, 350, 353–54, 365, 391, 399–400, 414; contradiction with globalism, 379, 380–84, 404–5, 411; crisis at United Nations Conference of, 404–9, 411 Reinsch, Paul, 18 religion, 43, 44, 403 Renner, George, 285–87, 391 republicanism, 169–70 Reserve Officer Training Corps (ROTC), 251 resources, 56, 94, 202–3, 261, 328, 335, 352–53, 357, 358 revolution: Russian, 22, 118, 123, 132, 137, 179, 190, 201, 273, 454; socialist, 143, 155 Rice, Alexander Hamilton, 88, 440 Riga line, 154–55

index

rights, global, 177 Robeson, Paul, 437 Rockefeller, John D., 99, 251 Rockefeller, Nelson, 192, 406–7, 449 Rockefeller Foundation, 20, 94, 99, 217, 218, 259, 297, 326, 330, 428 Roletto, Giorgio, 290 Roll, Peter, 440, 442 Romania, 125, 157 Roosevelt, Eleanor: meeting with Bowman, 305–6, 307 Roosevelt, Franklin Delano, xii, 20, 40, 251, 263, 389–92, 422; anticolonialism of, 355–56, 357, 359, 360, 361–62, 371; Bowman and, 26; criticized by Bowman, 356, 357; definition of Western Hemisphere and, 322–24; and dependent territories, 355–75, 359–60, 361–62, 365–66, 369; global ambitions of, 378, 379; and idealism, 400; inclusion of China in Four Nations Declaration, 388; Jewish question and, 313; meeting with Bowman, 361–62; Morgenthau plan and, 341–42; partition of Germany and, 337, 338, 339–40; refugees and, 294, 295–96, 300–301, 303–4; response to Kristallnacht of, 295–96, 298; Science Advisory Board and, 237, 239; study of geography and, 20; at Tehran, 339, 389–90; United Nations and, 374–75, and Wilsonianism, 318; and World War II origins, 322–24. See also “Four Policemen” Roosevelt, Theodore, 74, 79, 84, 92, 140, 181 Roosevelt, Theodore, Jr., 108–9 Root, Elihu, 194–95, 197 Rowland, Henry, 242 Royal Geographical Society, 15, 94, 444 Royal Institute of International Affairs, 194, 195, 321, 369 Royce, Jossiah, 44 rubber, 69, 71, 72 Russia. See Soviet Union

/

553

Sachs, Leon, 247 Salisbury, Rollin, 49 Santayana, George, 37, 44 Sapir, Edward, 219, 220 Sauer, Carl, 19, 215–16, 226–28, 259–60, 262 Schenck, Colonel Hubert, 440 Schott, Gerhardt, 280 Schulten, Susan, 277 Schulzinger, Robert, 196, 199 science, 43: Bowman on, 43, 237, 238, 242; elitism, 110, 237, 242; as frontier, 236; geography as, 221; and nationalism, 238, 277–79; of settlement, 225–26, 228, 229; and war, 251–56 Science Advisory Board (SAB), 212, 239–41, 427 Science Advisory Committee, 239 Scotland, 321 Scott, Robert, 92, 101 Semple, Ellen Churchill, 47, 179, 276 September 11, 2001, xii, xv, xvi, xviii Serbia, 125, 142, 157, 158, 168 settlement, science of, 92, 225–26, 228, 229, 294. See also pioneering Seward, William Henry, 324 sexual equality, 403 Seymour, Charles, 49, 161 Shackleton, Ernes, 92 Shaffer, G. Wilson, 247 Shaler, Nathaniel Southgate, 37, 39, 51 223; influence on Bowman of, 43–45, 50 Shapley, Harlow, 432, 433, 434 Shepardson, Whitney, 194, 195, 326, 459 Shotwell, James T., 330; Council on Foreign Relations and, 194; the Inquiry and, 120, 122, 123, 127, 129; at Paris Peace Conference, 160, 165, 176, 409n31 Silk, Leonard and Mark, 193, 195 Sinclair, Upton, 172 Singer Company, 114 Sklar, Martin, 135 slavery, 59, 72

554

/

index

Smith, Woodruff, 276, 314 social Darwinism, 190–91 socialism, 14, 190, 193, 220; in one country, 377–78; U.S. liberalism as response to, 193, 206–7 social science, 218, 220–22; geography and, 220–22 Social Science Research Council (SSRC), 217–20, 221 sociology, 215, 220 Sonnino, Baron, 158 Soviet Union, xv, 13, 123, 124, 137–38, 139, 348, 378; Bowman’s antipathy toward, 190, 201–2, 371–72, 420–26; Bowman on, 420–22; Council on Foreign Relations study group on, 198–99; postwar Germany and, 332–33, 334, 338; and UN, 387; U.S. troops in, 137–38 space: absolute vs. relational 12, 177; closure of, xvii, 12–13, 184–85 Spanish-American War, 31, 113, 117 spiritualism, 45 spying, 89–90 Spykman, Nicholas, 288, 291, 423 Stafford, Marie Peary, 100, 102, 103–4, 105, 106 Stalin, Joseph, 201, 202, 274, 294, 339, 342, 389–92, 400–401; Bowman on, 422–23, 425–26; on “dollar imperialism,” 448. 450; on German boundaries, 339, 342; postwar territorial ambitions of, 377–78; at Tehran, 389–90; and UN, 378, 379, 396 Standard Oil of Indiana, 428 Stanley, Colonel Oliver; meeting with Bowman, 365–66, 367–68, 370 Stark, Admiral Harold R., 323 Stassen, Harold, 402, 405, 406, 407, 409, 410 State Department, 96, 119, 131, 133, 134, 135, 145–46, 260, 261, 285, 294, 318; Council on Foreign Relations and, 197, 325–28, 328–30, 331; and dependent territories, 348, 352–60; design of United Nations by, 374, 376, 378, 380–87, 389, 391, 392–95,

397, 404; and Germany, 318–19, inactivity in face of genocide, 298, 299, 300, 303, 304; International Organization subcommittee of, 372, 380, 382; Office of Geographer, 331; political subcommittee of, 330, 331–36, 337; postwar reconstruction and, 330–38, 343; territorial subcommittee of, 330, 331. See also Advisory Committee on Postwar Foreign Policy; Informal Agenda Group Stettinius, Edward, 342, 348, 349, 392, 424; Bowman and, 386, 413, 526n29; at Dumbarton Oaks, 393, 396; on free trade, 348, 349; at London meeting, 361, 369, 394; resignation of, 413; at United Nations Conference, 402–7, 408–9 Stettinius, Virginia, 413, 529n88 Stevenson, Adlai, 410 Stimson, Henry L., 254, 340, 341, 408, 409, 435, 436; on German boundaries, 340–41 Strabo, 89 Strachey, Lytton, xx, xxi Strausz-Hupé, Robert, 302, 304 Sullivan, Harry S., 220 Sulzberger, Arthur Hays, 311 Supan, Alexander, 14, 282, 283 Taft, William H., 101, 181 Tanganyika, 367 Taylor, Myron, 303, 329, 330, 337, 385–86 Teapot Dome scandal, 91 Tehran conference, 360, 361, 389–90, 400, 415 terrorism: state, xv; “war on,” xi–xii, xiv–xv, xvi territories, detached, 357, 358 territory, significance of, 273–74, 343–45 Thatcher, Margaret, 6 Thomas, Charles A., 436 Thompson, Dorothy, 285 Thornthwaite, C. W., 260, 261, 262, 267

index

Timor, 356 Titicaca, Lake, 67 trade, 362; in discussions about United Nations, 383–84 transcendentalism, 35, 44–45, 51 Transcontinental Excursion, 86 Treasury Department, 115, 348 Treaty of London, 156, 157, 159, 166 Treaty of Paris, 113 Treaty of Rapallo, 167 Treaty of Versailles, 153, 163, 169, 170, 274, 281–82 Trentino, the, 124, 156, 157 Trieste, 124, 156, 157, 290 Trotsky, Leon, 123, 425 Truman, Harry S, 263, 343, 402, 412, 413, 419, 422, 424, 426, 433; Bowman and, 435–36; Point IV of, 445–46 Truman Doctrine, 424 trusteeship, 351, 353–60; at United Nations Conference, 409–11 Turkey, 166 Turner, Frederick Jackson, 14, 38, 114; Bowman’s corollary to, 229–31, 234; Bowman’s disagreement with, 216, 218, 224–26; frontier thesis of, 114, 211–12; influence on Bowman of, 38, 213, 223–24; response to Bowman’s work of, 229 Tuve, Merle, 254 Ukraine, 153–55, 402, 403 Ullman, Edward, 439, 441, 442 unilateralism, xii–xiii United Nations, xii, xvi, 9, 21, 26, 260, 374–415, 454; American Lebensraum and, 374, 377, 379, 414; Bowman and, 375, 379, 382–84; charter, 378, 383–84, 406, 409, 419; Churchill and, 391, 411; contradictions of, 379; at Dumbarton Oaks, 393–99; as expression of U.S. globalism, 374–75, 376, 379, 411, 412; four power proposal for, 380; issue of membership in, 380, 396–97, 402–3; location of, 397; at Moscow summit,

/

555

387; nationalist assumptions underlying, 383, 392, 399; organization of, 319–20; regionalism and, 379, 380–84, 404–9; Roosevelt and, 376–77; Security Council membership and, 394; at Tehran meeting, 389–90; U.S. Constitution as model for, 382–83; veto issue and, 394–95, 397–98, 402–3, 405–6; at Yalta, 400–401. See also United Nations Conference on International Organization United Nations Conference on International Organization, 401–4; Bowman at, 402–12; globalism vs. regionalism crisis at, 404–9, 411–12, 414–15; trusteeship issue at, 409–11 United Nations Declaration, 376 United Negro College Fund, 250–51 United States: anti-Soviet policies, 153–56; as enigma, 356; global ambitions in early twentieth century, 113–17; search for order in, 83–85; as world police force, 329. See also globalism, U.S. U.S. Army Civil Affairs Division, 340 U.S. Constitution, 382–83 U.S. Geological Survey, 40, 44, 46 U.S. Senate, 26, 174, 413, 430–32 U.S. Steel, 361 U.S. Supreme Court, 90–91, 249 USSR. See Soviet Union university, Kantian model of, 235–36, 241, 256, 262, 263 Upper Silesia, 151, 152 Urey, Harold C., 432 Urubamba River, 59, 61–65 Van Allen, James A., 255 Vandenberg, Arthur, 392, 403, 405–6, 407–8, 409, 411, 458 Venezuela, 295 Ver Hoef, Marcella, 289 Vidal de la Blache, 92 Vietnam, 5, 415 Vietnam War, 21, 192 Viner, Jacob, 326

556

/

index

Vinson, Fred, 422, 445 Virilio, Paul, 6 “Virtual War,” 420–27. See also cold war Vogt, William, 449 Waibel, Leo, 297, 302, 315 Wallace, Henry, 239, 240, 265–66, 313, 328, 445 Wall Street, 195, 205–6 war, 283; geography and, 26. See also terrorism, “war on” War, Balkan, 157 War, Peru–Chile, 71 War and Peace Studies (WPS), 325, 326–28, 330, 331, 381. See also Council on Foreign Relations Warburg, Paul, 205–6 Ward, H. Henslow, 105–6 War Department, 89, 131, 252–53, 257, 263, 294 Waring, Frank, 412, 415 Warntz, William, 107 War of 1812, xiii War Refugee Board, 303, 312 Washington, George, 289 Weber, Max, 20 Webster, Charles, 393 Weigert, Hans, 287 Weinberger, Caspar, 7 Weisz, K. I., 315 Welles, Sumner, 329, 339; clash with Hull, 385–86; Council on Foreign Relations and, 329–30; disagreement with Bowman, 332, 333, 334–36; on German borders, 332–36; on Russia’s veto, 403; trusteeship and, 353, 356–57; United Nations proposal of, 380, 382 Welles affair, 385–86 Western Hemisphere: definition of, 322–24 White, David, 216, 217 White, Gilbert, 260, 442 White, Henry, 118, 145 Whitehead, Alfred North, 243

Whittlesey, Derwent, 439, 440, 441, 442, 443 Widener, Eleanor, 440 Wiebe, Robert, 83–84, 109, 121 Wilde, Oscar, 285 Wilkins, Hubert, 99 Williams, William Appleman, 140, 234 Williams, William Carlos, 104 Willis, Bailey, 134 Willkie, Wendell, 344, 377, 386–87 Wilson, Robert E., 428 Wilson, Woodrow, xvi, 5, 16, 79, 115–21, 224, 238, 263, 273, 275, 378; Bowman and, 165, 171–2; Bowman on, 224, 318; Bowman’s respect for, 168–69, 171; conservative opposition to, 488n7; dispatches troops to Mexico, 52; Fiume/Rijeka crisis and, 157, 158, 167; and Inquiry, 115–21, 123–25, 130, 131; internationalism of, 140, 141, 142, 273–74, 413; liberal idealism/moralism of, 116–17, 140–42 169, 177; new diplomacy of, 141, 179; opposition to working class and socialism of, 207; at Paris Peace Conference, 16, 140, 145, 152–53, 159–63, 171–72; 174; and prelude to globalization, 22, 455–56; sexual equality and, 403; tragedy of, 380; Turner and, 224. See also Fourteen Points; Inquiry, the Winant, John, 363, 368 Winchester Arms Co., 79 Wise, Stephen, 300 Wittfogel, Karl A., 293–94 Wolman, Abel, 267, 302 Wolman, M. Gordon, 267 Woodrow Wilson Foundation, 378 Woolf, Virginia, 12, 47 Working Security Committee, 340 World Bank, xii, 21, 348, 384, 445, 454 World Trade Center, xi World Trade Organization, xii, 21, 456–57 World War I, xiii, 113, 273; Bowman on, 117–18; U.S. entry into, 115–17

index

World War II, xii; Bowman in, 294, effect on political geography of, 274; Johns Hopkins during, 251–60 Wright, J. K., 289, 440, 442 Wrigley, Gladys, 88, 442, 458 Yale Expedition to Peru, 61–67 Yale South American Expedition of 1907, 57–60

/

557

Yale University, 61, 67, 87, 105–6; Bowman at, 46–52 Yalta, 9, 22, 342, 400–401, 402, 413, 414 Young, Allyn, 129, 161 Yugoslavia, 156–63, 165–68 Zionists, 305, 307, 310–11

Compositor: Impressions Book and Journal Services, Inc. Text: Aldus Display: Latin MT / AT Sackers Heavy Gothic Printer and binder: Edwards Brothers

Isaiah Bowman in Michigan, approximately 1898 (John Baxter).

Bowman among the faculty at Yale (at the center back), approximately 1907 (courtesy of the Peabody Museum of Natural History, Yale University, New Haven, Connecticut).

Cotahuasi, Peru: Subprefect Viscarra (second from left), Bowman (third from right), and Bingham (second from right) with members of the party and local weavers, 1911 (Hiram Bingham Image Collection).

Bowman party on the Cordillera de Vilcabamba, 1911 (Hiram Bingham Image Collection).

Machiguenga Indians above the Pongo de Manique, 1911 (Hiram Bingham Image Collection).

Woodrow Wilson’s signature on the AGS wall, 1918 (American Geographical Society).

Bowman in Warsaw, 1934 (American Geographical Society).

Bowman on the Peru-Ecuador border, 1941 (American Geographical Society).

Bowman (third from right) with Churchill and the Stettinius party (Stettinius is on Churchill’s right), in London, April 1944 (Ferdinand Hamburger Jr. Archives, The Johns Hopkins University).

Churchill’s tripod of world organization, April 1944 (Ms. 58, Isaiah Bowman Papers, The Johns Hopkins University).