A/P/A Graduate Student Working Group Meeting: Dang Weiyu

Weaponized Understanding: Foreign Study, National Security, and the Philanthropic Foundations of a Humanistic Empire

As Allied victory beckoned in 1943, the Rockefeller Foundation (RF) avidly promoted multilingualism and international understanding as hallmarks of US postwar leadership. “Oriental languages” were indispensable for conventional and psychological warfare in the Pacific, but perhaps more importantly for the occupation and “liberation” of Japanese and European colonies into a US-led global order. Alongside the American Council of Learned Societies (ACLS), Social Science Research Council (SSRC), and elite universities, the RF created centers devoted to international understanding through language and cultural study. While Cold War area studies has been amply critiqued, the transformation of foreign study into intellectual ammunition for US national security remains understudied. As these programs have been disemboweled and demonized over the past year, their origins illuminate how international understanding has become so contentious for contemporary national security and self-understanding.

“Weaponized Understanding: Foreign Study, National Security, and the Philanthropic Foundations of a Humanistic Empire” locates the origins of foreign study in the interwar invention of the humanities. This dissertation chapter shows how the RF articulated a “humanistic empire” by deputizing the ACLS and SSRC along racial and geopolitical lines to reorganize US knowledge production between the wars. While its newly formed Division of Social Sciences investigated domestic social ills through the SSRC’s supposedly race-neutral methods, a companion Division of Humanities deployed the ACLS to remedy international racial prejudice through foreign study. Crucially, this managerial remit secularized a Protestant missionary pursuit of foreign souls into a domestic project of redemption by cultivating a moral public capable of sympathizing with foreign peoples and cultures. In weaponizing international understanding for geopolitical ends, philanthropic–academic partnerships laid the ideological and institutional groundwork of the Cold War battle for hearts and minds. Yet, framing intolerance as national security risks also positioned the United States as an imperfect society to be civilized through humanistic education in foreign ideas—a show of humility that catalyzed a McCarthyist backlash now hardened into an enduring suspicion toward foreign sympathy as an anti-American menace from within.