The American Political Science Association (APSA) was established at the dawn of a century that Time Magazine publisher Henry Luce would proclaim “the American Century.” The 20th century, Luce famously declared in 1941, “is America's first century as a dominant power in world affairs.” Luce stressed that America's dominance was not only material but “intellectual, scientific and artistic.” He urged Americans to envision a “picture of an America which will send out throughout the world its technical and artistic skills. Engineers, scientists, doctors, movie men, makers of entertainment, developers of airlines, builders of roads, teachers, educators” (Luce 1941, 27, 34, 47). And political scientists, he might have added.

Although Luce used the future tense, the picture of American scientists and educators being “sent out throughout the world” was hardly futuristic by 1941, certainly not as far as American political science was concerned. From the early days of the profession, American political scientists have been traveling around the world in the service of the American government, advising the U.S. government on world affairs, or lending their expertise to foreign nations and organizations which were of interest to the U.S. government. Just consider the following items from the “News and Notes” section of the inaugural issue of the American Political Science Review (APSR), which began publication in November 1906 (Vol. 1, No. 1, 100–107; hereafter, I cite this source by indicating “APSR News and Notes,” followed by the volume/issue numbers, publication date and page numbers):

• “Chester Lloyd Jones, Harrison Research Fellow in Political Science in the University of Pennsylvania, has recently published … a study of the American consular system, based largely on personal observations of American consulates in Europe.”
• “Paul S. Reinsch, professor of political science in the University of Wisconsin, and Leo S. Rowe, professor of political science in the University of Pennsylvania, were appointed delegates to the Pan American Congress which was in session at Rio Janeiro [sic] during the summer and early autumn…. by Professor Rowe will spend the ensuing year in South America studying Latin American politics….”
• “Dr. Edwin Kemmerer has been appointed assistant professor of economics in Cornell University. He received his doctor's degree at Cornell in 1903, after which he went to the Philippines as chief of the division of currency and had charge of the organization of the new monetary system in the islands. In that connection he made a study of the monetary system of the Straits Settlements and of other oriental countries. He was, in the main, the author of the bill establishing the currency division of the insular government and the bill creating the new postal savings bank system for the islands. He has made reports to the government on the question of establishing an agricultural bank in the Philippines and on the agricultural bank system of Egypt.”
• “Dr. E.H. Strobel, professor of international law at Harvard University, who for the last three years has been confidential adviser to the King of Siam and who has exerted great influence in organizing the legal and economic system of the kingdom, was recently stung by a venomous fly while returning from the East. After an illness which came near proving fatal he is now recovering.”

Who were the men mentioned in these notes? Poor Edward Strobel served as an American diplomat in Spain, Chile, and Ecuador before becoming the first incumbent of Harvard's Bemis professorship of international law in 1898. In 1903, before he was able to produce a substantial body of scholarship, Secretary of State John Hay recommended him for the position of general adviser to the government of Siam. He resigned from Harvard in 1906 to stay in Bangkok, where he died in 1908, probably from the lingering effects of that airborne venom (“Editorial Comment: Edward Henry Strobel,” American Journal of International Law 2/1 [Jan. 1908], 178–179). Edwin Kemmerer went on to become a distinguished scholar; he taught political economy at Princeton from 1912 to 1943 and at the same time undertook numerous missions to underdeveloped countries as an adviser on financial matters (Kemmerer Biographical Sketch; hereafter abbreviated as “Bio”).

If Strobel did not live to be an important political scientist, and if Kemmerer's career, though distinguished, was mostly in economics, the other three men mentioned in these early APSR notes all achieved distinction in the political science profession. And their careers, like those of Kemmerer and Strobel, all straddled the line between scholarship and government work.

Chester Lloyd Jones (1881–1941) joined the University of Wisconsin in 1910 after a stint as instructor at the University of Pennsylvania, where he also served as assistant editor of the Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science. From 1914–1917 he was secretary-general of the APSA. Jones not only studied American foreign legations, he served in them. After serving on the War Trade Board between 1917–1919, he served successively as a U.S. commercial attaché in Madrid and Paris from 1919 to 1928. He then returned to the University of Wisconsin's department of political science and later directed the University's school of commerce (APSR News and Notes, 35/1, 1941, 111–112).

Paul S. Reinsch (1869–1923) became full professor of political science at the University of Wisconsin in 1901, just three years after completing his Ph.D. there. He pioneered the study and teaching of world politics in the United States, was a leading scholar of colonial administration, and produced several influential books. He was among the organizers of the APSA and served as the Association's vice president in its first year. Reinsch was a member of the U.S. delegation to the third and fourth Pan-American conferences in 1906 and 1910, and to the first Pan-American Scientific Congress held in Santiago in 1909. In 1913, he was appointed U.S. minister to China where, in the words of his biographer, he “brought his specialized training as a political scientist to bear upon the many difficulties that beset the republican experiment.” After resigning his post in 1919, Reinsch was retained by the Chinese government as a legal adviser. Although he left the political science department at Wisconsin when he accepted the appointment to Peking, Reinsch remained a member of the APSR's editorial board through 1917 and was subsequently elected the 15th president of the APSA (Reinsch Bio; see also APSR News and Notes, 17/2, 1923, 272–273, and Schmidt 1998, 70–71).

Leo Stanton Rowe (1871–1946)—described in his biography as a “political scientist and diplomat”—was Reinsch's immediate successor as president of the APSA (1921). Rowe began teaching political science at the University of Pennsylvania in 1894 and rose to full professor in 1904. He helped found the American Society of International Law in 1900 and served as president of the American Academy of Political and Social Sciences from 1902 to 1930. He was a pioneering scholar of the government and the international relations of Latin America, producing numerous books and articles on the subject. Beginning with his appointment in 1900 as a member of the Commission to Revise and Compile the laws of Puerto Rico, Rowe represented the U.S. government on many occasions, on national and international commissions, and at international conferences. For example, in 1907 Secretary of State Elihu Root named him chairman of the executive committee of the Pan American Committee and in 1915 Rowe was appointed secretary general of the First Pan American Financial Conference in Washington. In 1917, he resigned his professorship to go to Washington as assistant secretary of the treasury. In 1919–1920, Rowe headed the Latin American Division of the State Department and from 1920 through his death he served as director-general of the Pan American Union (Rowe Bio).

Now the careers of APSA presidents Reinsch and Rowe, inasmuch as they simultaneously involved the study of politics and participation in the politics of U.S. foreign policy, were by no means atypical. During the American Century the careers of many American political scientists—including a substantial portion of the distinguished scholars who served as presidents of the APSA—included significant stints as officials of or advisers to the foreign policy agencies of the U.S. government and/or to foreign governments. The Association's first president, Frank Goodnow, was a member of the permanent international commission under the treaty between the United States and China; from 1913 to 1915 he served as legal adviser to the government of China (Goodnow Bio; APSR News and Notes, 34/1, 1940, 114–117). Westel W. Willoughby, the Association's ninth president, also traveled to Peking in 1916 to advise the Chinese government on constitutional matters. In the 1920s and early 1930s, he advised Chinese delegations to a number of important international conferences (Willoughby Bio). The twentieth president of the Association, Charles Merriam, worked in 1917–1918, along with many other social and political scientists, for the Wilson administration's wartime propaganda organ, the Committee on Public Information. Merriam was put in charge of American “publicity” in Italy, where he used films, leaflets, and public speakers to win the hearts and minds of the Italian people (Oren 2003, 59). William F. Willoughby, the APSA's twenty-seventh president, served successively as treasurer of Puerto Rico and as secretary and president of Puerto Rico's executive council during the first decade of the twentieth century; he later served as adviser to the Chinese government, a post in which his twin brother, Westel, succeeded him (W. F. Willoughby 1933).

The Association's forty-fifth president, James K. Pollock of the University of Michigan, served in 1945–1946 as special adviser to General Lucius Clay, governor of the U.S. occupation zone in Germany, and he later returned to Germany several times on advisory missions to U.S. occupation authorities (Anderson 1972). The forty-ninth president, Ralph Bunche, who established the department of political science at Howard University, served in the Office of Strategic Services (OSS, the predecessor of the CIA) during World War II and then worked as a diplomat for the State Department and, subsequently, the United Nations (Bunche Bio). Harold Lasswell, the fifty-first president, established the Experimental Division for the Study of War-Time Communication at the Library of Congress and a propaganda analysis unit at the Justice Department, both of which became important components of the government's intelligence apparatus during World War II. Lasswell also extensively consulted to several national security agencies such as the OSS and the army's psychological warfare branch. He maintained an intimate relationship with the government during the Cold War, spending much of his time in Washington and at the RAND Corporation in California, where he served as a “permanent consultant” for over twenty-five years (Oren 2003, 138–139). From 1943 to 1945 the Association's fiftyeighth president, Carl J. Friedrich, directed the School for Overseas Administration at Harvard, which provided training in military government in anticipation of the occupation of the former axis countries. From 1946 to 1949, he served as an adviser to General Clay in Germany. And in the 1950s Friedrich helped formulate the constitutions of Puerto Rico and the Virgin Islands (Friedrich Bio).

Gabriel Almond, the Association's sixty-first president, worked during World War II successively for the Office of War Information and the U.S. Strategic Bombing Survey. After the war, he joined the Institute for International Studies at Yale University, which enjoyed a close relationship with the State Department. During the 1950s and early 1960s, Almond consulted to the Air University, the State Department, the Office of Naval Research, the RAND Corporation, and the Psychological Strategy Board. He was also a member of the Science Advisory Board of the U.S. Air Force and the Working Committee on Attitudes Toward Unconventional Weapons (Oren 2003, 140–145). The sixty-third president, Merle Fainsod, was a leading figure in Soviet Studies, a field that enjoyed a very intimate, partly secret, relationship with the government. In his capacity as director of Harvard's Russian Research Center, Fainsod was involved in establishing close ties between the center and the U.S. military (Oren 2003, 92–93). Karl Deutsch, the sixty-fifth president of the APSA, worked for the OSS and, after the war, for the intelligence unit of the State Department. Later, Deutsch continued to work occasionally for the State Department, traveling abroad as a Department “specialist” (Oren 2000, 567). The eighty-second president, Samuel Huntington, has consulted to numerous government agencies, including the CIA, the State Department, and the Defense Department. He was a member of several presidential commissions, and in 1977–1978 served as coordinator of planning at the National Security Council, then headed by another political scientist, Zbigniew Brzezinski (Huntington Bio; Huntington 1991, 319; Johnson 1989, 159). President eighty four, Lucian Pye, was a principal member of the CIA-supported Center for International Studies (CENIS) at MIT. He “was a frequent consultant to government agencies concerning psychological warfare aimed at Asians” (Simpson 1994, 190). Finally, the Association's ninety-seventh president, Robert Jervis, acknowledged that he consulted to national security agencies on numerous occasions (Mooney 2000, 39; Clayton 2003).

Thus, throughout the American Century many (though by no means all) prominent members of the APSA have been involved—as government consultants, advisers, or officials—in the politics of American foreign policy. Even when the client that formally retained them was a foreign country, it was often done with the blessing of the U.S. government.

But how much influence did these political scientists exercise over the policies adopted by their patrons? If the case of the Association's first president is any indication, the answer is: not much. Frank Goodnow's experience in China was, in the words of his biographer,

Goodnow's experience was probably typical. Internal histories of the field of public administration note the frustration felt by many members of the field as a result of their personal encounter with the realities of wartime Washington, where they flocked to staff the government's rapidly expanding agencies (Kettl 1993, 411). Now, undoubtedly in other cases political scientists enjoyed greater success in shaping policy and sometimes won prestigious awards for their work. Carl Friedrich was recognized by the Federal Republic of Germany for his contributions to its constitution and Ralph Bunche won the Nobel Peace prize for negotiating armistice agreements between Israel and four Arab states (Friedrich and Bunche Bios). Still, it is not at all clear that the contributions made by individual political scientists were significantly informed by their knowledge qua political scientists. Condolleeza Rice, President George W. Bush's current national security advisor, obviously exercises significant influence over U.S. foreign policy, but this does not necessarily mean that current U.S. foreign policy is significantly shaped by political science knowledge.

Without discounting the particular contributions of individual scholars, it seems that the overall impact of political science scholarship on the development of U.S. foreign policy or world affairs has been rather limited. Far more substantial has been the impact that the politics of U.S. foreign policy has had on the development of political science scholarship. Stated differently, the impact of the politics of foreign policy on the content of the APSR (and other outlets for political science scholarship) has been greater and more direct than the impact of the APSR on foreign policy. To illustrate, if not prove, this point it may be instructive to revisit some of the careers I discussed earlier.

Frank Goodnow did not leave a mark on Chinese politics, but his involvement in Chinese politics clearly left a mark on his publication record. His last book was titled China: A Civilization and, given that all of his earlier books dealt with American and European politics, it is hard to believe that he would have turned his attention to China had he not been invited to advise its government (Goodnow 1926). William F. Willoughby parlayed his service in the colonies into a book and several articles on colonial administration (W. F. Willoughby 1905; 1907; 1909; 1910). Westel W. Willoughby was a prominent theorist of “the state” and U.S. constitutional law, but following his mission to Peking “he turned his attention largely to international affairs, principally in the far east,” and “several books grew from these experiences” (W. W. Willoughby Bio; W. W. Willoughby 1920; 1922a; 1922b; 1935).

Similarly, Leo Rowe began his career as an instructor in municipal government, but after his 1900 appointment to the Commission on Puerto Rico his scholarly interest began shifting toward Latin American affairs. According to his obituary, “inter-American affairs absorbed Dr. Rowe's attention more and more” after he represented the United States at the Third Pan American Conference at Rio de Janeiro (1906). Seizing the opportunity afforded by the conference, he went on a lecture tour to South American universities and began research that led to a book on the government of Argentina (APSR News and Notes, 41/1, 1947, 98–99; Rowe Bio; Rowe 1920). Paul Reinsch, who traveled to Rio with Rowe, contributed an article on the conference to the APSR, and later continued the practice of publishing scholarly articles resulting from his diplomatic assignments. Reinsch wrote so extensively on the subject matter in which he was implicated as a diplomat and adviser—international diplomacy, international organization, and imperialism—that it becomes nearly impossible to draw a neat line separating scholarship from politics in his career (Reinsch 1907; 1909; 1910; see Schmidt 1998). Carl Friedrich's highly influential book on totalitarianism resulted in part from his work for the U.S. occupation authorities in Germany, where he observed that “the constitutional dictatorship of Western military government provided an interesting contrast to the totalitarian [Soviet] pattern” (Friedrich and Brzezinski 1956, vii–viii).

Charles Merriam contributed an article to the APSR on his experience as chief American propagandist in Rome. More importantly, as a result of this experience Merriam became convinced that “publicity” techniques could be used effectively for the purpose of nation-building, or “civic training,” as he preferred to call it. This realization resulted in a massive cross-national research project on techniques of civic training, which absorbed much of Merriam's energy from approximately 1925 to 1931 (Merriam 1919; 1931; see Oren 2003, 58–61). Merriam also encouraged Harold Lasswell, his prize student, to study propaganda, which became the topic of Lasswell's dissertation and arguably the central preoccupation of Lasswell's entire career. Lasswell pioneered quantitative content analysis under the government's auspices during World War II, and his propaganda analysis units at the Library of Congress and the Justice Department functioned as training centers where young social scientists learned advanced methodological skills. Many of these trainees went on to become academic stars, including Ithiel de Sola Pool, Nathan Leites, Heinz Eulau, Karl Deutsch, and Alexander George (Oren 2003, 138–139). Gabriel Almond, who studied with both Merriam and Lasswell, produced his major book The Appeals of Communism (1954) while serving as an external consultant to the then-secret Psychological Strategy Board; he urged the Board to “monitor this study … and appraise the usefulness of the work we are doing here at Princeton” (Simpson 1994, 166; see Oren 2000).

Although the vignettes presented above focus on the careers of individual scholars, they hint that since the beginning of the Cold War, if not earlier, the foreign policy agenda of the U.S. government impinged on the discipline at the institutional as much as the personal level. The field of Soviet Studies made major gains in membership and prestige during the early Cold War on account of heavy investments by government agencies such as the U.S. Air Force (Gleason 1995, 121). The Institute for International Studies at Yale University (which “defected” to Princeton in the early 1950s) became an important hub of International Relations scholarship partly on account of its ties to the State Department. MIT's CENIS was set up with CIA funds and access to its premises required security clearance. When MIT formally established a department of political science in 1965, its membership came mainly from CENIS. So distinguished was this group of scholars, assembled under the auspices of the national security establishment, that not long after its incorporation the department ranked among the profession's top 10 (Oren 2003, 148). The behavioral revolution in political science received a major stimulus from the inclusion of the discipline in the program of the National Science Foundation (created in 1950 as an outgrowth of the activities of the Office of Naval Research). In the 1960s, the institutional infrastructure of the behavioral revolution received an additional boost in the form of lavish financial support from the Defense Department, motivated by the expectation that behavioral social science would contribute to winning the Cold War. The Pentagon's Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA) supported the generation of cross-national data sets and the development of computer simulation techniques, as well as applied counterinsurgency research. Yale University, then at the revolution's forefront, was a significant beneficiary of ARPA funding (Oren 2003, 168–169).

In sum, during the American Century the science of politics has been significantly implicated in the politics of U.S. foreign policy. The national security concerns of the American state significantly impinged on the state of the discipline by giving it research questions that might not have been asked otherwise, by stimulating scholarly interest in regions of the world that might not have been studied otherwise, by favoring and funding the development of research methods that promised help in prosecuting America's wars, and by directly or indirectly disadvantaging scholarship of an oppositional or radical character.

Why is it important to unearth this neglected aspect of the discipline's history? Because it suggests that in actually existing political science the line between knower and known, between subject and object, between the study of politics and the politics being studied, has been far blurrier than the sharp separation presupposed by virtually all the discipline's methodological textbooks. The sub-field known as “political methodology” is, curiously enough, the most normative of all the fields of political science, save only for normative political theory. Its leading textbooks are rich in tips on how political research should be done and scarce in hard-nosed, empiricallygrounded descriptions of how political research had been done in practice. As professional American political science enters its second century (which may or may not turn out to be the “New American Century” as proclaimed by former political scientist William Kristol, among others) it is high time that it examine itself and attempt to bring its epistemological presuppositions into closer alignment with its actual practices.