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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 24 July 2020
As someone whose training is in political science and who writes about the history of my own discipline, I admit to some hesitation in recommending future avenues of research for historians of education. For that reason, the following thoughts are directed toward disciplinary history broadly and social science history specifically. Moreover, the three articles that contributors to this forum were asked to use as inspiration suggest that any future I would recommend has been under way in one form or another for a while. For those reasons, I want to reframe my contribution as a reflection on a particular mode of analysis all three authors employed and how it may be particularly useful for exploring the questions of power, exclusion, and race- and gender-making in the academy that are present in all three articles and that explicitly animate two of them.
1 Anderson, James D., “Race, Meritocracy, and the American Academy during the Immediate Post-World War II Era,” History of Education Quarterly 33, no. 2 (Summer 1993), 151–75CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Dzuback, Mary Ann, “Gender and the Politics of Knowledge,” History of Education Quarterly 43, no. 2 (Summer 2003), 171–95CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Lagemann, Ellen Condliffe, “The Politics of Knowledge: The Carnegie Corporation and the Formulation of Public Policy,” History of Education Quarterly 27, no. 2 (Summer 1987), 205–20CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
2 Guilhot, Nicolas, ed., The Invention of International Relations Theory: Realism, the Rockefeller Foundation, and the 1954 Conference on Theory (New York: Columbia University Press, 2011), 14Google Scholar.
3 Toni Morrison, “Unspeakable Things Unspoken: The Afro-American Presence in American Literature” (Tanner Lecture on Human Values, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, MI, Oct. 7, 1988), http://hdl.handle.net/2027/spo.act2080.0028.001:01.
4 Lagemann, “The Politics of Knowledge,” 207.
5 Lagemann, “The Politics of Knowledge,” 215.
6 Lagemann, “The Politics of Knowledge,” 212.
7 Loss, Christopher, “’No Operation in an Academic Ivory Tower’: World War II and the Politics of Social Knowledge,” History of Education Quarterly 60, no. 2 (May 2020), 214–227Google Scholar.
8 Blatt, Jessica, Race and the Making of American Political Science (Philadelphia: Pennsylvania University Press, 2018), 3CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
9 Stocking, George W., Race, Culture, and Evolution: Essays in the History of Anthropology (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997), 114, 130Google Scholar. See also Giddings, Franklin Henry, The Principles of Sociology: An Analysis of the Phenomena of Association and of Social Organization, 3rd ed. (New York: MacMillan Company, 1896)Google Scholar.
10 Foner, Eric, “The Supreme Court and the History of Reconstruction—and Vice-Versa,” Columbia Law Review 112, no. 7 (Nov. 2012), 1585Google Scholar. See, for example, Dunning, William A., Essays on the Civil War and Reconstruction and Related Topics (New York: Macmillan Company, 1897)Google Scholar; and Dunning, William A., Reconstruction, Political and Economic, 1865–1877 (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1907)Google Scholar.
11 Frederick L. Hoffman, ”Race Traits and Tendencies of the American Negro,” Publications of the American Economic Association 11, no. 1–3 (New York: American Economic Association, 1896).
12 Of course, there were outliers as well as brilliant African American dissenters such as W. E. B. Du Bois, many of whom produced work that would become influential in their fields. However, these perspectives and scholars were largely excluded from the forefront of those early departments and professional associations. See, for example, Cedric Robinson, Black Marxism: The Making of the Black Radical Tradition (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1983); Aldon Morris, The Scholar Denied: W. E. B. Du Bois and the Birth of Modern Sociology (Oakland: University of California Press, 2015); and Robert Vitalis, White World Order, Black Power Politics (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2015). Nonetheless, these figures were the exception rather than the rule. It is also worth noting that many of that first generation of social scientists opposed American expansion in the wake of the Spanish-American War. But in general this was a matter of timing, not principle—the United States simply wasn't ready. As John W. Burgess put it, “So long as we remain in large measure a mixed population of Americans, Europeans and Africans; . . . so long as we have an Indian problem and a Mormon problem and a negro problem . . . we should more nearly follow the natural order of things, if we should remain at home. . .” Burgess, “How May the United States Govern Its Extra-Continental Territory?,” Political Science Quarterly 14, no. 1 (March 1899), 1–2.
13 “Statement on Race, Paris, July 1950,” in Four Statements on the Race Question (Paris: United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization, 1969), 30–35, https://unesdoc.unesco.org/ark:/48223/pf0000122962.
14 Steinberg, Stephen, Race Relations: A Critique (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2007), 6Google Scholar.
15 Stocking, Race, Culture, and Evolution, 232.
16 Park, Robert E. and Burgess, Ernest W., Introduction to the Science of Sociology (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1921)Google Scholar.
17 Allport, Gordon W., The Nature of Prejudice (Reading, MA: Addison-Wesley, 1954)Google Scholar; and Myrdal, Gunnar, An American Dilemma: The Negro Problem and Modern Democracy (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1944)Google Scholar. It is worth noting that Myrdal's study in fact contained a great wealth of information pointing squarely to the political economy of racial oppression in America. Yet the moral of the story, for most readers, was to be found in Myrdal's framing of the “dilemma” presented by the conflict between white Americans’ racial attitudes and their professed commitments to equality.
18 Steinberg, Race Relations, 14.
19 Hughes, Everett C., “Race Relations and the Sociological Imagination,” American Sociological Review 28, no. 6 (Dec. 1963), 879CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
20 Gordon, Leah N., From Power to Prejudice: The Rise of Racial Individualism in Midcentury America (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 2015)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and O'Connor, Alice, Poverty Knowledge: Social Science, Social Policy, and the Poor in Twentieth-Century U.S. History (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2001)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
21 Gordon, From Power to Prejudice, 3. Scholars working in this latter tradition largely followed the radical African American sociologist Oliver Cox in objecting to Myrdal's “mystical” interpretation of racial inequality in America. As Cox put it, An American Dilemma brought “to finest expression practically all the vacuous theories of race relations which are acceptable among the liberal intelligentsia and which explain race relations away from the social and political order.” To illustrate his objection of “mysticism,” Cox observed that, “if beliefs per se could subjugate a people, the beliefs which Negroes hold about whites should be as effective as those which whites hold against Negroes.” Cox, Oliver C., “An American Dilemma: A Mystical Approach to the Study of Race Relations,” Journal of Negro Education 14, no. 2 (April 1945), 132, 143CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
22 Porter, Theodore M., Trust in Numbers: The Pursuit of Objectivity in Science and Public Life (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1995), 7Google Scholar.
23 While social scientific research did receive some support beginning in the 1950s, it took eighteen years for the NSF charter to be amended to explicitly include support for the social sciences.
24 Gordon, From Power to Prejudice, 54, 23.
25 Gordon points out that Rockefeller funding directed at African American institutions was meant more often as support for the education of African American students, rather than as support for African American scholars’ research. Gordon, From Power to Prejudice, 13.
26 O'Conner, Poverty Knowledge.
27 O'Connor, Poverty Knowledge, 11.