MAPACA

Mid-Atlantic Popular &
American Culture Association

After World War II, America witnessed a surge of enthusiasm for human engineering in the name of world peace. While international laws, treaties, and tribunals offered imperfect solutions to geopolitical conflict, an actual change in human psychology, attitude, and behavior held out the possibility of scientifically informed salvation. Drawing from behaviorist psychology, cultural anthropology, and psychiatry, Americans launched a far-reaching effort to cultivate peaceful international relations through experiments in social engineering focused on adjusting the psychologies of young Americans – those most malleable members of society. What was declared a “Manhattan Project of the Mind” took root in parenting magazines, religious and secular youth groups, and primary, secondary, and higher education. Quickly, however, as the contours of the Cold War emerged, State Department officials and other Cold Warriors employed these same techniques as a means of preparing U.S. students for global supremacy and for winning the Cold War. This paper examines how social scientifically informed educational techniques cultivated in the name of world peace were appropriated and mobilized as methods of Cold War education and, especially, Cold War public diplomacy.
I question the postwar impulse to turn inward and retreat into depoliticized and often sentimental solutions to geopolitical conflict that privilege individual psychological transformation over systemic reform. Drawing from archival research that bridges twentieth century intellectual and cultural history, the history of social science, and the history of U.S. foreign relations, this research refocuses the story of postwar America on childhood socialization schemes. The postwar education of young people reveals both profound political disillusionment and anxiety over human psychology. It also, however, exposes a pervasive spirit of utopian idealism in which the scientifically informed emotional engineering of children promised to deliver a world redeemed – either in the name of peace, or in the name of U.S. global hegemony.