Optimizing the State of the Prepared Nation

For exponents of early Rockefeller philanthropy, the outbreak of war in Europe seemed a suitable laboratory to pursue their managerial, progressive visions for optimizing the state of American affairs. Similar to many progressives at the time, officials of the Rockefeller philanthropies were committed early on in the war to preparedness and mobilization.Footnote ¹⁰ The career of Beardsley Ruml provides an ideal example of this process.Footnote ¹¹ Educated in Applied Psychology at the University of Chicago, Ruml became a member of the military Committee for Classification and Personnel (CCP) at the Adjutant's Office of the War Department starting in 1916, where he would work on psychological testing modes for U.S. soldiers.Footnote ¹² Ruml embodied the interests of numerous Rockefeller progressives participating in the “scientific” war effort. Many of these men were part of a new generation of social scientists trained in the emerging disciplines of psychology, statistics, and social welfare.Footnote ¹³ When the preparedness movement advanced the idea that the United States needed a large national army, these progressives volunteered to organize the effort. They were anxious to implement efficiently managed conscription modes to recruit and sort conscriptees in positions best suited to their abilities. As civilian experts on the Committee on the Classification of Personnel, U.S. psychologists led by American Psychological Association president Robert M. Yerkes carried out 1.7 million intelligence tests.Footnote ¹⁴ This was reflective of the widely held but largely unspoken claim that psychologists would ultimately be able to optimize military strength and thus share in winning the war.Footnote ¹⁵

Ruml's career does not only reify the scientific self-mobilization and engineering visions of ambitious philanthropic officials spurred by war, it also illustrates their controversial postwar survival and application in peacetime. American psychologists of the “Ruml type” went from measuring military strength to diagnosing the civic potential of U.S. society after the end of war. They tried to popularize the testing concept in postwar public education and industry alike as a way to recategorize postwar American society according to individual potential and merit.Footnote ¹⁶

Despite contemporary objections against the undemocratic effects of such classifications, the testing movement won out. Aptitude testing was, at least until the mid-1920s, quickly integrated into contemporary discussions in government, schools, and industry. In an attempt to counter their critics, Rockefeller proponents entrenched themselves into a wider group of managerial experts and professionals who argued that ranking society along the lines of intelligence actually provided a scientific safeguard against ethnic or other biased classifications. They promoted intelligence testing as an efficient method for recruiting personnel for a functional political and economic postwar order.Footnote ¹⁷

Taking Sides: Preparedness Philanthropy and War Relief in Europe until 1917

In addition to arguing for the use of scientific social engineering to strengthen domestic society, Rockefeller philanthropists also pursued a preparedness agenda for intervention abroad. Before the United States officially joined the war, American civilian relief in Europe had already begun to take shape. The RF was present at the creation of this rising American humanitarian cloud. In doing so, it was among the most central players in the shaping of the American war experience prior to 1917. They helped raise American public awareness of the horrors of industrial warfare abroad. And they transformed this awareness into a ready-made agenda for activism overseas.Footnote ¹⁸

Early relief shortly after the beginning of the war in Europe was restricted to medical aid to wounded soldiers in accord with the Geneva Convention. However, noncombatant civilian relief, even if privately administered, was perceived as compromising the official neutrality of the United States.Footnote ¹⁹ RF representatives entered this scene with a highly effective agenda. At a time when the U.S. government shied away from funding American civilian relief, the RF saw an opportunity for action by working together with the semi-public, semi-private American Red Cross (ARC), already the main player in the field of privately administered foreign relief.Footnote ²⁰ Chaired by the then Director of the International Health Commission Wickliffe Rose, the RF established its own War Relief Commission in October 1914. Headquartered in Bern, Switzerland, under Warwick Greene, it included renowned members of the ARC's Division for Civilian Relief such as most notably Ernest P. Bicknell.Footnote ²¹ The official collaboration with the ARC was announced by the RF in November 1915. This, and other relationships like that with the CRB, were driven by the opportunity to connect the RF with medical and social scientific relief experts and progressive health and welfare professionals of all sorts in the first ranks of the ARC.Footnote ²² With these experienced and professionalized relief actors close at hand and backed by government support, the RF launched a series of aid initiatives. Some $145,000 were invested in an anti-typhus campaign in Serbia in 1914–15, which in turn enabled the ARC to send a sanitary commission to the Balkans in March 1915. They organized food provisions and oversaw the outfitting of epidemic areas with equipment for disinfection stations and mobile sanitary trains, in addition to initiating special hospitals for women and children. Although the RF strategies were relatively efficacious, conditions on the ground severely limited the scope for possible intervention. The logistics of war and the Central Powers’ intolerance of American relief workers became an almost insurmountable obstacle to the RF's implementation of civilian foreign aid. Meanwhile, the Foundation not only aimed to support the official humanitarian relief actions of the ARC but also eagerly worked to launch specific programs using approximately $6.5 million for the transfer of Belgian children to Switzerland. Over $19 million went into war-related aid programs since 1918.Footnote ²³

The RF's commitments to European relief work bore witness to a typically U.S.-progressive answer to the war. These commitments rested on a strategic affinity with the U.S. government based upon utilizing foreign aid as a stabilizing tool for intervention in the soon-to-be (or so it was assumed in 1915) postwar world. Yet, the philanthropy-politics nexus was also a matter of discreteness. RF officers shied away from outright political statements and avoided creating any impression that sponsoring American relief work could lead to U.S. belligerency. In their reports and communiques, the ongoing war was portrayed not as a result of conflicts between rival great powers but rather in a more neutral tone focusing on the root causes of human suffering and plight. The geographic distance to the European front and to European aid recipients seemed to guarantee the RF's impartiality as a mere sponsor of relief work. In contrast to the practice of day-to-day relief in non-occupied Belgium, such apolitical rhetoric was distant from the reality of the often close symbiosis between civilian and military personnel on the ground. It was also quite different from the experience of relief workers in Europe, especially those who were closely associated with military operations and who were sometimes exposed to hardships similar to those faced by the members of the military.Footnote ²⁴ As a result of total war, U.S. noncombatant relief could never be of an exclusively civilian nature because boundaries were blurred between the home front and the frontline in the European theater. Nevertheless, the RF insisted upon upholding the illusion of disinterestedness in the politics of war.

Rockefeller Men Make the Military Moral

As the United States entered the war, Rockefeller progressives left no doubt about their outspoken national loyalty. They were thrilled by the opportunity to advise U.S. political and military leaders and share their scientific planning expertise. Most exemplary of this cohort of RF personnel was lawyer, public servant, and Princeton graduate Raymond Blaine Fosdick. He would become one of the most central figures in the Foundation before serving as its long-time president from 1936 to 1948. Fosdick, who had investigated and fought municipal corruption in New York City before 1914,Footnote ²⁵ seemed congenial to the Rockefeller cloud in 1917, and was practically absorbed organically into their ranks. The organization consented that social problems required scientific analysis and diagnoses, which could only be cured with reformist therapy in order to remedy the defects threatening the stock of American society. With the beginning of the war, their concerns had shifted from civil society to the nation gripped by war. Fosdick was appointed chair of the Commission in Training Camp Activities (CTCA), which represented an emblematic progressive federal agency and had been founded just a few weeks before the American declaration of war. He acted on behalf of the U.S. government working both directly with President Wilson, but also as an individual and in close contact with volunteer social welfare organizations such as the YMCA, the Jewish Welfare Board, and the Salvation Army.Footnote ²⁶ Due to the fact that approximately two million Americans were deployed abroad, military training camps were regarded as the ideal opportunity for transmitting “morally correct” recreational activities, middle-class social values, hygiene provisions, and rules for sexual health.Footnote ²⁷ Fosdick's progressive record came, however, with an inherent racial bias: when CTCA reports reiterated allegations against the alleged immorality and vice in African American camps in particular, Fosdick made no effort to refute the claim.Footnote ²⁸ Wartime philanthropic policy and moral reforms were not intended to defy, but rather to insist on the prevalent racial and social order of U.S. society. Fosdick ultimately stood pars pro toto for the evangelical and correspondingly conservative moral concerns of the philanthropic elites.Footnote ²⁹ At the same time, redressing disease in the army was a matter of bolstering the Wilsonian effort to fight autocracies overseas. It represented the wider effort to garner moral superiority in his “war to end all wars” both within the American public and on a more global scale. Thus, Fosdick and the U.S. government were a perfect match for each other in 1917. While the War Department honored Fosdick in his role as the “Rockefeller man” and progressive reformer, they also trusted his social engineering approach, patriotic loyalty, and expertise as an advisor.

The RF's Anti-tuberculosis Campaign in France 1917: Governmentalized Combat Philanthropy and Its Limits

If World War I gave birth to Rockefeller philanthropy, the anti-tuberculosis campaign in France was one of its most intense natal hours. As tuberculosis ravaged throughout Europe, cases of disease and reported deaths were particularly high in war-torn France. The French administration provided little-to-no effective redress either for the exhausted and thus highly susceptible French military or for the approximately 100,000 ill-kept French civilians.Footnote ³⁰ Via inquiries from French activists and reports coming through their existing relief networks starting with the American entry into the war, the RF was quick to set aside roughly $8 million for the anti-tuberculosis program in France. Its actual implementation rested mainly with the ARC and its Civilian Relief in France division, which was run by the progressive reformer Homer Folks.Footnote ³¹ The Rockefeller Commission for the Prevention of Tuberculosis in France arrived on the ground with the American military in July 1917. The ARC and RF worked closely with French physicians, nurses, and other health experts on the frontlines of the program.Footnote ³² The ensuing RF campaign in France had many of the same characteristics of previous Foundation projects. In its preliminary emergency stage, it was about providing immediate treatment and systematically educating the French public through a broad range of pamphlets, posters, and motion pictures as well as touring hygiene caravans. The long-term strategy was to augment medical infrastructures by setting up committees, clinics, and laboratories throughout the country and offering training courses and lectures for French health workers together with exhaustive medical screening of patients and their social environments.Footnote ³³

Rockefeller representatives were not particularly outspoken about their underlying motives. It was not put on record that the campaign was first and foremost driven by the desire to invigorate their French ally in war. Beyond this unspoken objective, the program had been conceived as an exercise for a shared preventive and educational mission between two western, metropolitan civilizations. Yet the tuberculosis campaign was largely unsuccessful. Targeting more than 1.25 million adults and some 1.5 million children, it did not lead to a secure control of the disease as creating the conditions for prevention proved more difficult than expected.Footnote ³⁴

The 1917 anti-tuberculosis campaign in France was in fact not a product of the exceptional circumstances of war. Rather, the systematic fighting of disease had already been deeply engrained in Rockefeller philanthropic projects and experiences of previous years. Both Rockefeller health campaigns at home in the American South since 1909–10 and the Foundation's international health programs since 1913–14 provided valuable insight into the development of the French campaign. These domestic and international undertakings were simultaneously formative and diverse. Since 1909, Wickliffe Rose's Rockefeller Sanitary Commission had been promoting the professionalization of medical experts and was focused on optimizing campaigns against hookworm, and since 1915 also malaria, tuberculosis, and yellow fever.Footnote ³⁵ Early anti-hookworm campaigns were launched in eleven highly infected southern states starting with Virginia in 1910.Footnote ³⁶ The southern campaign reflected the elitist philanthropic agenda and demonstrated a lack of reformist ambition within the Rockefeller Commission's planning. For example, while reports on the anti-hookworm campaign identified soil and climate conditions as the main elicitors of infection, additional social triggers such as unsatisfactory living and sanitary conditions in southern industrial towns or the rigors of seasonal mill and mine labor migration did not motivate the RF to promote social reforms, even if only to eradicate the disease.Footnote ³⁷ Southern hookworm campaigns had a further legacy. Disease control could be considered an exercise in practicing and professionalizing the technological medical skills of planning and control. This “by-product” of the program opened up the field by way of mapping territory, data, and record-keeping measures, tracking local populations and pinpointing accurate sanitation measures, and disseminating knowledge about contagion prevention.Footnote ³⁸

From this public health activism in the American South, Rose's Rockefeller Commission, renamed the International Health Board in 1913, decided to expand its “modernization” interventions beyond the U.S. border. Board operations against diseases and epidemics started in Latin America (Cuba and Panama) and the British Caribbean before expanding further into the tropical sphere.Footnote ³⁹ U.S.-led, pan-American empire building and its accompanying “civilizing mission” provided ideal circumstances to seize as an opportunity for philanthropic intervention.Footnote ⁴⁰ To say the least, philanthropists were skilled at utilizing the sites of American occupation as laboratories for implanting racialized medicine and health concepts. Yet early in the twentieth century, late colonial elites in Latin America had already begun to employ science and medicine as a—if often European style—resource of national self-modernization or had been discreetly interfering with and transforming American projects already in place. The extent that Rockefeller health interventions were straightforward exercises in domination placing the Foundation in the middle of an inter-imperial public health network with European powers is still in need of further historical scrutiny.Footnote ⁴¹

The anti-tuberculosis campaign of the RF in France, while first and foremost induced by the American entry into war, also owed much to these earlier and ongoing endeavors of the Rockefeller public health campaigns at home and abroad. These earlier campaigns shared important tropes of philanthropic legitimacy with the anti-tuberculosis intervention. The spread of disease allowed, justified, and compelled involvement in regions that either represented potential for American colonial expansion or had gained immediate geostrategic attention as a result of the First World War. Moreover, modes of operation were similar. RF interventions were scientific missions, aimed at pioneering and standardizing laboratory-based biomedical prevention expertise on the ground.Footnote ⁴² Implementation strategies always came with a lofty participatory effect. Yet inclusion of the locals was an offensive strategy not simply to optimize therapy but rather to prevent resistance and discontent.Footnote ⁴³

By the same token, anti-tuberculosis operations in France did not simply mimic the available patterns for action but were distinctly shaped by the immediate war context. First, whereas RF campaigns in the southern United States and Latin America were not only intertwined with contemporary American foreign policy, but also to a larger extent about restoring the local labor force and economic productivity,Footnote ⁴⁴ fighting tuberculosis in France sought to restore the combat power of the French. There was ample reason to do so, beyond the obvious need to preserve the allied powers’ military potential generally,Footnote ⁴⁵ but also the growing war fatigue und internal disquiet in the French military specifically.Footnote ⁴⁶ Ultimately, Americans hoped that fighting tuberculosis in France would protect the American military from infection when they entered the European theater of war. Not least, their work would provide empirical findings for the Office of Tuberculosis in the U.S. Army's Medical Department, which could then be utilized to screen American soldiers back home.Footnote ⁴⁷ Second, other than in the nonindustrialized regions of Rockefeller commitment, allusions to alleged backwardness were discreetly avoided in France. Instead, Rockefeller personnel took great pains to specify the subsidiary character of their engagement which would, so they suggested, only add managerial efficiency to the already qualified French system of medical supply.Footnote ⁴⁸ Thus Rockefeller officers not only payed tribute to the preeminent state of medical expertise of Pasteur-informed French medical science and established transatlantic hygiene movement networks.Footnote ⁴⁹ They also followed the well-meant advice of French collaborators on the ground, who warned of the potential to stir anti-American reactions among the French populace when faced with American medical experts and foundation representatives.Footnote ⁵⁰ Even if only for the sake of sweeping efficiency, the RF did pay attention to such French sensitivities. Yet internal communications were less diplomatic. That the anti-tuberculosis campaign in France had been built on existing campaign models applied in the American South seemed to be taken for granted.Footnote ⁵¹ Thus pretending that the French program had been conceived locally when it was actually replicating (quasi-)colonial tactics went unproblematically hand in hand in the philanthropists’ minds.

The anti-tuberculosis campaign in France, then, was both a highly distinct variant of earlier Rockefeller interventions elsewhere and a conspicuous case of combat philanthropy. It was also the last of its kind during the war. Existing only briefly, the Rockefeller War Relief Commission would, as in France, support private relief organizations and operate under the umbrella of the ARC.Footnote ⁵² With the entry of the United States into the war in early April 1917, RF tactics slowly began to change. When the ARC became the official civilian relief agent of the broader U.S. war effort to the Entente nations and on unoccupied territory in April 1917, the RF eschewed the ever-increasing governmental control of international relief. Foundation leaders called the commission members back to New York and determined to restrict further financing to the remaining big American actors such as the ARC.Footnote ⁵³ The Foundation still shared basic political and strategic assumptions about U.S. foreign aid as a new mode of legitimate and patriotic internationalism. But it also now emphasized to appear as a visible, autonomous humanitarian actor in its own right. At war's end, the ARC-RF connection was not completely dissolved. The RF remained in France helping to respond to a growing tuberculosis epidemic that had worsened as sick soldiers returned from the trenches. The Commission for the Prevention of Tuberculosis in France remained until 1942, though French authority and leadership of the campaign had been reinstated by the late 1920s.Footnote ⁵⁴

Legacies: War-Steeled Postwar Philanthropy

For Rockefeller philanthropists, war experiences ultimately endorsed, even reemphasized the value of their agenda as crusaders for health. Wartime experiments with scientific philanthropy were understood as successful litmus tests for the social engineering forces of science-led policies. War inspired their creed that the RF possessed the unique combination of capital, scientific expertise, and technical skills to provide both ad hoc emergency relief and long-term reconstruction aid. Ruml's enthusiasm for psychological research and what were conceived of as fact-based, rational methods of social analysis together with Fosdick's experiences with social hygiene reform programs would become the central yardstick for measuring prospective grantees who applied to the RF for research funds after the war.

while the RF's campaign results during wartime were not overwhelming, war relief and anti-tuberculosis activities would, in the war's wake, spur Foundation representatives to resume and intensify social medicine and public health commitments in the 1920s and 1930s.Footnote ⁵⁵ Prewar campaigns provided important strategic links: the European Office of the RF in Paris, created in the context of the anti-tuberculosis campaign in France, became the new hub of intense networking and interconnection between Europeans and international scientific experts.Footnote ⁵⁶ Postwar philanthropic efforts eventually drew not only on the experiences of the various Rockefeller philanthropies with wartime activities.Footnote ⁵⁷ They also occurred in the context of the United States’ unrivaled rise as the military and political victor, most potential creditor of the postwar world, bearer of hope for much of the late colonial countries of the non-Western world, and ultimately the power-conscious and expeditiously well-versed new global player.Footnote ⁵⁸

Thus, on the one hand the immediate postwar position of the United States furnished an appropriate occasion for the even more self-assured philanthropic internationalism of the RF. On the other hand, this was not an obvious strategic choice: With the Versailles Treaty rejected and the League of Nations snubbed for the moment, Republican administrations of the early 1920s got caught up in fierce debates about how to reposition the United States in the postwar world. As a result of the cataclysm of war and of a somewhat bumpy start into an official national war remembrance, U.S. foreign policy proved disjointed. Fundamental, anti-war non-interventionism in some corners would collide with calls for neutral, makeshift entanglements in others.Footnote ⁵⁹ Against this rather inhospitable backdrop, former wartime activists of the RF, most notably Fosdick and Ruml, remained staunch supporters of an interventionist creed. Alongside an ever-growing band of philanthropists, they combined vivid recollections of what was construed as their own favorable involvement level in wartime with a reinforced progressivist zeal colored with shades of a scaled-down Wilsonianism. They began to seek coalitionists for modernization, particularly in the ashes of a defeated Europe from where the world war had originated.

Former CTCA-reformer Fosdick became practically politicized. A civilian aide to General Pershing at the Paris Peace Conference in 1919, he served as a member of the American League of Nations Association and short term Under-Secretary General to the League of Nations in 1919–1920, moving quickly up the internal ladder after the 1920s, and becoming president of the RF in 1936. His affinity for League internationalism based on a close inter-European exchange of political and economic expertise was reflected in a $2 million Rockefeller grant to support the League of Nations’ Library as an information hub and study center for the League's Secretariat and the International Labour Organization. Both Fosdick's and his fellow philanthropists’ commitment also spurred funding for the League's Health Organization.Footnote ⁶⁰

Interacting with European public health experts overseas and supporting the modernization of medical education and research beyond ad hoc emergency relief was one obvious connection point.Footnote ⁶¹ An equally lasting corollary of wartime engagements was the dawn of Rockefeller philanthropy for European social sciences. This was brought about most notably by social science expert and wartime psychologist Ruml, who spearheaded and parlayed since 1918 the soon-to-be incorporated Laura Spelman Rockefeller Memorial with an endowment capital of approximately $70 million. Ruml and his likes would support a variety of social sciences from political science inspired by international law and international relations to economics and sociology or anthropology. They meticulously selected research institutions in Europe such as the London School of Economics and Political Science, which were often outside the sphere of traditional universities where knowledge production seemed outdated and exhausted when faced with postwar exigencies.Footnote ⁶² In doing so, RF officers jump-started a new, more assertive mode of particularly American scientific entanglement based on a sweeping net of academic and political interlocutors across the Atlantic. While the postwar European knowledge landscape was deeply marked by bellicist distortions among former enemies, science-based philanthropic internationalism in Europe included conciliatory overtones. Though these often remained at their best limited.

If postwar Rockefeller philanthropy became a matter of steady growth and spread, the war's legacy played a conspicuous role in this development. Throughout the 1920s and into the 1930s, the RF cherished the uncompromised progressive vision that propagating relief and disseminating expertise along the lines of American-led scientific missions could and would survive. Yet instabilities and crises did not simply force philanthropists into accelerated maturity but also imposed substantial limits on their great, postwar philanthropic project.Footnote ⁶³