Post-war Social Engineering Projects in the United States

Introduction

This collection assembles primary documents, organizational records, and scholarly analyses bearing on a set of coordinated efforts, launched during and immediately after the Second World War, to alter the attitudes and beliefs of large populations through institutional means. The materials fall into three overlapping clusters. The first concerns the American Jewish Committee's Department of Scientific Research, established in 1944 under Max Horkheimer and continued under Samuel Flowerman, whose Studies in Prejudice series culminated in the publication of *The Authoritarian Personality* in 1950. The second concerns UNESCO's programme to reconstruct the concept of race through expert statements and educational campaigns from 1950 onward. The third concerns the mid-century American intercultural education movement, the community-based action research of the American Jewish Congress's Commission on Community Interrelations, and the migration of social scientific findings into legal and policy settings, most notably the *Brown v. Board of Education* decision of 1954.

What links these otherwise disparate materials is a shared conviction, articulated with unusual candour in the internal documents, that prejudice is a technical problem susceptible to scientific diagnosis and deliberate correction. The collection includes conference proceedings, budget disputes, private correspondence between researchers and their sponsors, press releases, poster-testing interview transcripts, a memorandum to the Vatican, and later scholarly reassessments of these same undertakings. Because the collection combines the projects' own self-descriptions with retrospective critique, it permits examination both of what the reformers intended and of how their concepts were received, resisted, and repurposed.

The Diagnostic Turn: Anti-Semitism as Object of Scientific Inquiry

A 1945 conference convened by the American Jewish Committee, bringing together some twenty-five psychologists, sociologists, psychiatrists and economists, marks an early formalisation of the ambition to place defence work on a scientific footing.¹ The stated motivation was practical: recent anti-Semitic manifestations in several communities had persuaded the Committee that "defense agencies could ill afford to continue programs whose appeal is not continuously checked with the aid of psychologists and sociologists."¹ The participants included Gordon Allport, John Dollard, Max Horkheimer, Charles S. Johnson, Paul Lazarsfeld, Kurt Lewin, Rensis Likert, Talcott Parsons and Goodwin Watson.

The conference summary sets out a psychological account of prejudice that would prove durable. Hate was framed as compensatory aggression arising from individual frustration and conflict, with the Jew serving as "a readily available object" and anti-Semitism as "a convenient channel through which aggression may be exercised."¹ The document emphasises projection—the anti-Semite attributing his own aggressive designs to his victim—and the role of guilt: because "the mores of our society demand homage to ethical behavior," persecution generates shame, which the bigot manages by depicting the Jew as unworthy of moral consideration.¹ Notably, the participants concluded that "latent anti-Semitism and subconscious prejudice are thus as important, if not more so, than overt manifestations," a proposition with substantial methodological consequences.¹

Several programmatic recommendations followed. The conference urged that defence programmes not be limited to rational appeals, that they stress the "intrinsic relationship between anti-Semitism and anti-democratic attitudes," and that they present Jews as strong rather than victimised, since "subconsciously, weakness is regarded with contempt and is provocative of aggression."¹ Appeals to sympathy for the suffering Jew were deemed potentially counterproductive; humour and ridicule directed at the anti-Semite were recommended as reaching "far more potent influence upon the subconscious mind than appeals to reason, justice or mercy."¹ The participants also called for measuring instruments that would "reveal the total psychological pattern of the interviewee, remove the restraint present in the normal interview situation and permit the investigator to distinguish between anti-Semitism in its conscious and in its subconscious manifestations."¹

That instrument arrived five years later. The press release announcing *The Authoritarian Personality*, dated for release 15 March 1950, describes the volume as completing the five-part Studies in Prejudice series and as scientifically exploring "for the first time" a personality type "peculiarly susceptible to undemocratic ideologies because he has a deep inner need to submit to power or to align himself with it."² The authors—T. W. Adorno, Else Frenkel-Brunswik, Daniel J. Levinson and R. Nevitt Sanford—drew on questionnaires administered to over two thousand individuals, supplemented by interviews and specialised psychological tests.²

The introductory chapter of the study articulates its guiding hypothesis: "that the political, economic, and social convictions of an individual often form a broad and coherent pattern, as if bound together by a 'mentality' or 'spirit,' and that this pattern is an expression of deep-lying trends in his personality."³ The authors are explicit that their subjects were not avowed fascists—"at the time when most of our data were collected fascism had just been defeated in war"—but individuals "whose outlook was such as to indicate that they would readily accept fascism if it should become a strong or respectable social movement."³ The concept of ideological readiness is central: "It seems necessary to study ideology at this 'readiness level' in order to gauge the potential for fascism in this country."³

The methodological apparatus is described with some care. Scales measured surface ideological trends—anti-Semitism, ethnocentrism, politico-economic conservatism—while a further scale sought "potentially antidemocratic trends in the personality itself," assembling items that "by hypothesis and by clinical experience, could be regarded as 'giveaways' of trends which lay relatively deep within the personality."³ Two illustrative items are quoted: one concerning protection against infection and disease given population mixing, another describing homosexuality as "an especially rotten form of delinquency."³ The authors observe that agreement between these apparently unrelated propositions, and their correlation with open anti-democratic statements, "is hardly to be explained on the basis of any obvious logical relation among the statements."³

Indirection was a deliberate feature. Subjects "were never told what was the particular concern of the questionnaire, but only that they were taking part in a 'survey of opinions about various issues of the day.'"³ Items from different scales were interspersed. Where prejudicial statements were unavoidable, "care was taken in each case to allow the subject 'a way out'"—to permit agreement while maintaining self-conception as unprejudiced.³ The instructions given to groups completing the questionnaire, reproduced in the text, describe the exercise as working "just like a Gallup Poll or an election."³

The sample was drawn principally from the San Francisco Bay area and consisted overwhelmingly of middle-class subjects; the authors acknowledge that findings "may be expected to hold fairly well for non-Jewish, white, native-born, middle-class Americans."³ Groups included university students, prison inmates at San Quentin, psychiatric patients, service club members, veterans and merchant marine officers.³ Subjects selected for intensive clinical study were drawn from the highest and lowest quartiles on the Ethnocentrism scale and were paid three dollars, an inducement that "was a considerable aid to securing suitable subjects: most of those who scored low on the Ethnocentrism scale would have cooperated anyway... but many of the high scorers made it plain that the money was the determining consideration."³

Institutional Friction: The Machinery of Sponsored Research

The collection includes an unusually rich internal record of the American Jewish Committee's research operation, and these documents complicate any account of the Studies in Prejudice as a smoothly executed scientific programme.

A January 1948 memorandum from Samuel Flowerman to Ira Younker recounts the reorganisation that followed Max Horkheimer's return to California in mid-October 1945.⁴ The memorandum records Horkheimer's dissatisfaction with a proposed study of prejudice in children, to be conducted at Berkeley under Harold Jones, Adorno and Else Frenkel-Brunswik, and notes that the New York office agreed to withhold funds "until we had received a satisfactory memorandum," the existing one being "inadequate on methodological and theoretical grounds."⁴ Subsequent correspondence reveals that Adorno transferred two thousand dollars from the adult study to the children's project without authorisation, prompting instructions that no further transfers be made.⁴ When a memorandum eventually arrived, it "was carefully studied by the staff of the Scientific Research Department and found to be seriously deficient in regard to methodology, plan, scope, objectives."⁴ Friedrich Pollock, acting for Horkheimer, reported that Horkheimer regarded the project as already approved and that "should the A.J.C. 'disavow' Mr. Horkheimer with regard to this project, Dr. Horkheimer would find it necessary to sever his connection with the Committee."⁴

A March 1946 letter from Flowerman to Horkheimer describes a severe budget contraction. A request of $242,000 had been reduced through successive negotiations to roughly $154,000, with Younker warning that "if we did not effect such a budget reduction our whole program of scientific research might be placed in jeopardy," and even suggesting that the Committee "abandon all research activities except evaluation."⁵ Flowerman replied that this "would be a sterile program and would yield no ultimate good, and that if this was what was intended there was no point in having a scientific department."⁵ The letter notes that a lay committee member praised Younker's success in reducing the budget while remarking that research costs could easily reach "astronomical" figures.⁵ The consequence was a decision to terminate the operational phase of the Berkeley adult study and devote remaining funds to analysis and publication.⁵

A March 1946 frame-of-reference document attempts to systematise the department's programme. It concedes that "the available body of scientific knowledge about anti-Semitism is still too limited to allow for more than a lucky guess in the establishment of methods of counter-action," and that "such guesses are furthermore more effectively made by the practitioner in community relations than by a social scientist."⁶ The document proposes a matrix of coordinates—psychological versus sociological approaches, individual versus group units of analysis—and notes with candour that existing work "has been concentrated on the study of the anti-Semite with only occasional excursions into two other fields. Nothing has yet been done on the study of the Jew."⁶ The underlying theoretical commitment is stated plainly: "Anti-Semitism is not a 'natural' response to certain qualities of Jews but it is an irrational attitude of the anti-Semitic person."⁶

An April 1946 internal review of the Evaluation Unit's testing work exhibits comparable self-criticism.⁷ The unit had been operating on four axioms: that a single propaganda item is unlikely to change attitudes; that understanding is a prerequisite of effectiveness; that effectiveness is proportional to comprehension; and that studying misunderstanding is more productive than studying understanding. The review interrogates each. On the third, it acknowledges the objection that "a cartoon that is understood by 70% of the respondents will have an effect on, say, 2% while a cartoon that is understood by 30% of the respondents might be effective for 25%," and admits that "consideration of this possibility has been absent in our studies up to date."⁷ On the fourth, it concedes that "from a public relations point of view, it proved unfortunate that our studies appeared to be negative and critical in character."⁷ The document also confronts the artificiality of the interview situation, noting "numerous examples of interviews in our studies where the attitude of the respondent changed... as a consequence of the prolonged interview," and proposes disguised procedures in which respondents are told the subject is typographical preference.⁷

The practical texture of this testing work is visible in a 1946 study of one Mr. Biggott cartoon, in which the bigot asks a minister whether it was necessary "to emphasize the Lord's — er — Jewish background in your sermon."⁸ Based on twenty-six interviews with union members, churchgoers and clergy, the report concluded that the cartoon was probably unsuitable for working-class audiences, that "the minister is not a successful hero figure," and that "the caption is ambiguous," causing many respondents to identify the minister rather than Biggott as the prejudiced party.⁸ Some prejudiced respondents defended Biggott's opinion while disliking him personally; one described the minister as "like all ministers — they stick up for 'em. They don't believe half what they're preaching about."⁸ The report notes a correlation—consistent with the department's general findings—that "understanding of the message went hand-in-hand with approval of posting the cartoon and with no expression of anti-Semitic feeling."⁸

Minutes of the Scientific Research Committee during 1948 record continued tension over the balance between basic research, evaluation of grants, and programme development.⁹ A February meeting debated a proposed study of *Gentleman's Agreement* and *Crossfire*, with committee members raising questions about cost, generalisability, and "the use of such studies in view of the deep-seated nature of anti-Semitic prejudice revealed by the Berkeley study."⁹ Later meetings record the suggestion that the film industry be approached to defray research costs, and a proposal from a Fiscal Committee member that the department's name be changed to something "less esoteric than Scientific Research."⁹ The committee also approved a Palestine study examining domestic American reaction, initially considering participation in a joint election panel but abandoning this when confidentiality could not be assured.⁹

The Survey Instrument and Its Discontents

The collection documents an extended methodological dispute over how attitudes toward Jews might be measured. A January 1948 memorandum from the department describes the shortcomings of prior nationwide polling: samples were inadequate, "fluctuations from year to year couldn't be explained," and "the nationwide sample was so thinly scattered that an attempt to analyze the meaning of parts of the sample according to geography or other classifications resulted in sub-groups too small to have statistical reliability."⁹

The proposed remedy was intensive community polling in a small number of localities, investigating three areas: "images or stereotypes which people hold regarding Jews," "the social distance they wish to keep between themselves and Jews," and "the action which people are willing to take or have taken against Jews."⁹ A Baltimore study served as the pilot. Committee discussion noted that a reliable nationwide poll would require over fifteen thousand respondents and a polling organisation "which apparently doesn't exist in this country," since most firms communicated with interviewers only by mail.⁹

Critique of survey instruments recurs in the collection's later materials. A 2005 monograph on hate studies observes that when the David Duke campaigns of the 1990s were polled, "many people who told pollsters that they would not vote for him did indeed do so," and suggests doubling his numbers as a corrective.¹⁰ The same source questions surveys purporting to measure attitudes toward Jews: a 2002 survey reporting seventeen per cent of Americans and only three per cent of college students as anti-Semitic coincided with a period in which Jewish organisations were devoting substantial effort to anti-Semitism on campus. The explanation offered is that the instrument measured "classically" anti-Semitic attitudes—stereotypes of Jewish clannishness, dishonesty, excessive power—whereas campus hostility took the form of collective political anti-Semitism directed at Israel.¹⁰ The author argues that "to single out only one people on the globe as not having the right to self-determination... is a form of bigotry that doesn't get picked up in the classic measuring instruments."¹⁰

A separate line of evidence assembled in a 1950 survey of intercultural education agencies bears on whether attitude change occurs at all.¹¹ Drawing on Lazarsfeld, Berelson and Gaudet's *The People's Choice*, the survey notes that "exposure is always selective; in other words, a positive relationship exists between people's opinions and what they choose to listen to or read," and that "voters somehow contrive to select out of the passing stream of stimuli those by which they are more inclined to be persuaded."¹¹ A study by Levine and Murphy found that pro-Communist and anti-Communist students each excelled at learning and retaining material congenial to their existing views, with the divergence widening over nine weeks.¹¹ Cooper and Jahoda's work on the evasion of propaganda concluded that "many people are unwilling to do either" fight or accept anti-prejudice messages, "but prefer not to face the implications of ideas opposed to their own. They evade the issue psychologically by not understanding the message."¹¹

The Hovland studies of wartime orientation films, cited in the same survey, found that the films "had no effects on items prepared for the purpose of measuring effects on the men's motivation to serve as soldiers, which was considered the ultimate objective of the orientation program," and speculated that an information programme relying on "letting the facts speak for themselves" might prove effective "with only a small segment of the population, whose attitudes are primarily determined by rational considerations."¹¹ Bolton's study of Georgia students found that "neither intelligence nor knowledge of the social problems of the race has been an important factor in determining the attitudes of these students towards the social rights of the Negro."¹¹

UNESCO and the Reconstruction of Race

Parallel to the American work, UNESCO undertook a project to redefine race itself. The 1952 publication *The Race Concept: Results of an Inquiry* reproduces the 1951 Statement on the Nature of Race and Race Differences, the 1950 statement it superseded, and extensive correspondence from anthropologists and geneticists invited to comment.¹²

The institutional origin lies in a resolution of the United Nations Economic and Social Council asking UNESCO "to consider the desirability of initiating and recommending the general adoption of a programme of disseminating scientific facts designed to remove what is generally known as racial prejudice."¹² UNESCO's Fourth General Conference instructed the Director-General "to study and collect scientific materials concerning questions of race; to give wide diffusion to the scientific information collected; to prepare an educational campaign based on this information."¹² The introduction frames the enterprise in terms drawn from the organisation's constitution, which declared that the recent war "was a war made possible by the denial of the democratic principles of the dignity, equality and mutual respect of men, and by the propagation, in their place, through ignorance and prejudice, of the doctrine of the inequality of men and races."¹²

The first statement, drafted in December 1949 by a committee in which sociologists formed the majority, was published in July 1950 and, by UNESCO's account, "extremely well received by the general public," printed in newspapers in over eighteen countries.¹² The Assembly of the French Union adopted a proposal for its inclusion in school syllabuses.¹² But criticism from physical anthropologists and geneticists compelled revision. Critics "did not reject its general spirit nor its main conclusions" but held that "the document tended to confuse race as a biological fact and the concept of race as a social phenomenon," and declined to accept as proven that no mental differences exist between racial groups.¹² The claim that "biological studies lend support to the ethic of universal brotherhood, for man is born with drives towards co-operation" attracted the most frequent criticism.¹²

A second committee, composed of physical anthropologists and geneticists "chosen, for preference, from among those who had expressed disagreement," produced the 1951 text.¹² The revised statement retains the unity of the species and rejects racial hierarchy, but hedges considerably: "It is possible, though not proved, that some types of innate capacity for intellectual and emotional responses are commoner in one human group than in another, but it is certain that, within a single group, innate capacities vary as much as, if not more than, they do between different groups."¹² Crucially, the statement separates the ethical from the empirical: "equality of opportunity and equality in law in no way depend, as ethical principles, upon the assertion that human beings are in fact equal in endowment."¹²

The published commentary is remarkable for the range of objection it preserves. Penrose argued that "use of the term 'race' must be discontinued altogether," that "the concept of the races of man is inexact and archaic," and that support for the term "by scientists is likely to encourage superstition and prejudice."¹² Mather objected that the statement "at times... was bending over backwards to deny the existence of race," and insisted that "the case against it is not strengthened by playing down the possibility of statistical differences in, for example, the mental capacities of different human groups."¹² Muller wrote at length arguing that "it would be a tragic mistake to suppose that the above realistic, scientific view leads to the conclusion that race prejudices are justified," while maintaining that genetic differences in psychological traits between populations were probable and that the argument for equal treatment should not rest "upon the spurious notion that they are identical in the genetic basis of psychological traits."¹²

Others were flatly opposed. Darlington held that the exercise was "partly meaningless and partly negative" and additionally "partly untrue."¹² Fisher believed human groups differ profoundly "in their innate capacity for intellectual and emotional development."¹² German respondents raised a distinct objection: Fischer, while endorsing the condemnation of racial defamation, registered "fundamental opposition to the advancing of scientific theses as such," recalling National Socialist and Soviet precedents and holding that "freedom of scientific enquiry is imperilled when any scientific findings or opinions are elevated, by an authoritative body, into the position of doctrines."¹² Scheidt made the same point more acidly, describing the statement as repeating National Socialist errors "in reverse."¹² Summers, writing from Southern Rhodesia, found the document "in obscure language," "illogical," and reeking of "special pleading."¹² Stern offered the most measured reservation: "If Science wants to destroy prejudice it can only hope to accomplish this if its position is as relatively unassailable as its very best founded facts. Our knowledge... has not yet reached that position."¹²

A historical reassessment of the UNESCO programme situates it within what the author calls cultural internationalism.¹³ The account traces the project to Ignaz Zollschan's interwar efforts to enlist the League of Nations' International Institute of Intellectual Cooperation in a scientific refutation of Aryan theory, and notes that Zollschan in 1943 called for preparing instruments "to make the peoples concerned desire re-education."¹³ The analysis identifies three practical aspects: recruitment of experts, dissemination, and political and social impact. It observes that the initial drafting committee was recruited largely from scholars who understood race primarily as a social construct, many associated with Franz Boas's students at Columbia or with South American research.¹³ Ashley Montagu, who assumed the drafting after Arthur Ramos's sudden death, sought "to create a single, universal rejection of the concept of race," and Julian Huxley intervened to soften the text, warning that a purely negative statement "would not last for long and at worst would damage the reputation of UNESCO."¹³

The reassessment documents both reach and limits. Some five hundred news stories followed the first statement, and the pamphlet series—including Lévi-Strauss's *Race and History*—had by the late 1950s been translated into thirteen languages and printed in over three hundred thousand copies.¹³ Yet a New York University study found the pamphlets required at least a high school education to comprehend, and the material reached mainly Western and English-speaking audiences.¹³ South Africa, which had accused UNESCO in 1948 of interference in domestic matters, withdrew in 1956.¹³ The account argues that only after a wave of anti-Semitic incidents beginning with swastikas painted on a Cologne synagogue on Christmas Eve 1959, and pressure from newly independent member states, did UNESCO's race work take on genuinely global scope.¹³ A 1967 meeting in Paris was the first at which a statement was signed by experts "from literally all over the world," including representatives of former colonies.¹³

Postcolonial Readings: Plasticity, Educability, and the Limits of Antiracism

A recent monograph offers a sustained critical reading of the UNESCO project, arguing that its central conceptual innovation was the redefinition of race as plastic.¹⁴ The book's organising claim is that the 1950 statement's most consequential sentence declares that "the one trait which above all others has been at a premium in the evolution of men's mental characters has been educability, plasticity. This is a trait which all human beings possess."¹⁴

The genealogy offered traces plasticity to Boas's studies of immigrant schoolchildren for the United States Immigration Commission beginning in 1908, which appeared to show that cranial measurements changed within a single generation, prompting Boas to conclude that one "must speak of a plasticity (as opposed to permanence) of types."¹⁴ The analysis stresses three features. First, the discovery had a social purpose: plasticity "promised the assimilability of raced bodies" and functioned as "a technology of inclusion, assimilation, and social management."¹⁴ Second, plasticity required cultivation—hence its coupling with education, and hence the significance of Boas conducting his study in schools. Third, Boas concluded that racism was *less* malleable than race. Writing in 1921, he held that there was "no great hope that the negro problem will find even a half-way satisfactory solution in our day," and proposed miscegenation as the only plausible strategy, so that "in the face of racism's intransigence, race's changeability was both a promise of an escape from race and an imperative that this responsibility be borne by the racialized themselves."¹⁴

The book argues that at UNESCO plasticity was elevated to an unmarked universal, shorn of explicit racial reference. Drawing on early drafts, it contends that equality was initially intended as the statement's central value and was displaced by "educability, plasticity"—"an aspirational equality to come, contingent on the formation and reformation of some human beings."¹⁴ The author notes the biographies of the drafting committee: three of eight social scientists—Montagu, Lévi-Strauss, and Morris Ginsberg—were of Jewish background, and each had complicated relations to Jewishness.¹⁴ Montagu, born Israel Ehrenberg, changed his name after experiencing anti-Semitism; Lévi-Strauss fled France in 1941 recognising himself "to be potential fodder for the concentration camp"; Ginsberg founded the *Jewish Journal of Sociology*.¹⁴

The analysis then argues that anticolonial writers registered and recast this discourse. Aimé Césaire's *Discourse on Colonialism*, in its 1955 revision, addresses UNESCO's race project directly, and the author reads this as a "counterpedagogical critique" of racial repair.¹⁴ Fanon's insistence that the Jew "is a white man" is reinterpreted as engagement with Jewish plasticity rather than a claim about phenotype: as race was recast as plastic, its meanings divided between the genetic population and the ethnic group, producing what the author calls "the racial residuum"—the persistence of racial common sense regarding Blackness.¹⁴ The book also examines Caryl Phillips and Ama Ata Aidoo on cultural racism and the resistance to developmental repair.

The monograph is careful about what its argument does not establish. It notes that the conceptions of Jewishness central to the UNESCO project belonged to a "Diasporist" rather than "Zionist" strand of Jewish social science, and that Zionists regarded paradigms of Jewish plasticity "as a threat to Jewish survival and national integrity."¹⁴ It records that Boas rejected Zollschan in the 1930s "because of his overly zealous Jewish nationalism," and that despite Alfred Métraux honouring Zollschan as the project's progenitor, it was Boas's conception that was installed in the statement.¹⁴ The author explicitly cautions that this "should in no way be taken as a triumphalist claim about the righteous victory of an antiessentialist definition of race," since such a conception "could nonetheless function to reinscribe racial inequality between Jews and Blacks."¹⁴

Action Research and the Community as Laboratory

A distinct methodological tradition is documented in the history of the Commission on Community Interrelations, established by the American Jewish Congress in 1945 with Kurt Lewin as chief consultant.¹⁵ The Congress had shifted after the war from concern with "issues that affected Jews as Jews" toward the position that "infringement of anyone's rights—Jews or non-Jews—was cause for concern."¹⁵

The Commission's approach was explicitly framed against existing practice. An internal document described its purpose as taking "the struggle against prejudice out of the realm of hope, faith, opinion and guesswork and place it within the scope of scientific measurement and scientific fact."¹⁵ Lewin wrote of "the infra-red rays of social science" and argued that "there is hardly anything more essential for the survival and the progress of democracy than that every citizen understand more clearly how the 'right to be different' and the 'cooperation for the common good' can and should be integrated."¹⁵ Goodwin Watson claimed that "the social power of self-directed, cooperative fact-finding in its potential contribution to strengthening democracy, ranks higher than the discovery of atomic energy."¹⁵

Promotional material deployed consumer analogies: "A good doctor does not prescribe a drug until its effects have been carefully studied. A successful manufacturer does not buy a machine until he has seen test production figures. A careful housewife does not buy a washing machine or pressure cooker until she has seen the seal of approval by a testing laboratory."¹⁵ Isidor Chein warned of "the danger of sterility" in research whose "sole consequence... is that the findings come to occupy a place on the well known library shelf."¹⁵

Three projects illustrate the method. The community self-survey, refined from a Fisk University technique, enlisted hundreds of residents in documenting discrimination in housing, employment and schooling. The pilot in "Northtown" involved subcommittees drawn from social agencies, church groups, labour councils and business organisations.¹⁵ The published account records friction: the employers' association objected to certain questionnaires and threatened withdrawal, and the project director noted that "rumors began to reach me that the survey was being called a Communist survey."¹⁵

The Incident Control Project trained citizens to respond to public expressions of bigotry, on the theory that "a bigoted remark, unanswered, can and does spread prejudice to the people who hear it."¹⁵ Socio-dramas were pretested on over a thousand subjects to identify the most effective rejoinder. Findings indicated that veterans and union members responded better to appeals to American tradition, whereas people approached on the street preferred appeals to individual difference.¹⁵

The third strand concerned Jewish self-identification. Lewin held that "parents should not be afraid of so-called 'double allegiance'... The real danger lies in standing nowhere."¹⁵ Chein advocated participation in integrated institutions while maintaining religious distinctiveness, aiming for "a feeling of Jewish identification which is integrated with the best values of American culture and which opposes both assimilation and ghettoism."¹⁵

The Commission depended heavily on volunteers from the American Jewish Congress's National Women's Division, whose members conducted interviews, ran study groups and led training institutes. Recruitment materials rendered social engineering in domestic metaphor, with one story featuring a Mrs. Greenberg who advises her friends, arguing about vacuum cleaners, to "look up reliable laboratory tests."¹⁵ One Division president reported that members had come to see the Commission not as "an ivory tower" but as "a source of specific usable techniques."¹⁵

The Commission's decline is attributed to several convergent pressures. Civil rights work moved increasingly to the courts; Jewish communal support for integration weakened as suburban flight and Black nationalism strained earlier alliances; funding contracted; and academic social psychology turned toward laboratory studies of attitudes and personality. A 1952 evaluation by Marie Jahoda defended the unit while acknowledging that its function "was never particularly well defined."¹⁵ Gardner Murphy asked pointedly whether skilled practitioners were practising "benevolent despotism": "If a few people can get stores to hire Negroes and those who don't like it have to accept it, we liberals will all applaud. The game can be played exactly in reverse, and we will all groan."¹⁵ By the mid-1950s a new research director expressed disenchantment with the intergroup relations approach and its "studied avoidance of the relation between economic and political power structures and the fact of prejudice."¹⁵

A contemporaneous survey of intercultural education agencies, prepared by the American Jewish Committee's research department in 1950, catalogues the field and identifies four common features.¹¹ The agencies aimed to change young people; they assumed that "facts change values; ideas shape conduct" and that "changes in attitudes come much more easily to people who are doing things together"; they used the term "group" arithmetically rather than dynamically; and evaluation relied on verbal assertion rather than measurement of underlying motivation.¹¹ The survey covers the Bureau for Intercultural Education, projects of the American Council on Education, the Pacific Coast Council, Youthbuilders, and the Workshop for Cultural Democracy, together with the multi-functional agencies—the National Conference of Christians and Jews, the American Jewish Committee, the Anti-Defamation League, and the Commission on American Citizenship.¹¹

The survey's concluding sections are unusually sceptical about educational efficacy. It notes that no long-term study had been conducted of "Hands Across the Campus," "A World of Difference," or "Teaching Tolerance," and that a Carnegie-funded study of Facing History found improvement among female students and "nonfighters" but no effect for boys, with those classified as "fighters" becoming *more* racist during the programme.¹¹ Drawing an analogy to smoking and drug education, the survey observes that a fifteen-year study of 8,400 students found anti-smoking programme participants just as likely to smoke, and that DARE participants were just as likely to use drugs: "what felt good didn't do good."¹¹ The survey concludes that "fighting hate is a zero-sum game" and that long-term testing is a priority.¹¹

Transmission into Law and Policy

The collection includes documentation of the passage of research findings into legal argument. A May 1954 letter from Melvin Glasser to John Slawson observes that "by this time you doubtless have seen the full text of the U.S. Supreme Court decision in the school segregation case, with its heavy emphasis on the social and psychological effects of segregation," and notes that footnote eleven cites Kenneth Clark's White House Conference study.¹⁶ Glasser recalls that Clark and Otto Klineberg had testified in the South Carolina case, and remarks that he understood "very indirectly" that Justice Jackson said informally afterwards "that he was well-impressed with some of the Clark material."¹⁶ The letter acknowledges the American Jewish Committee's financial assistance and staff advice in making the work possible, and concludes: "It is not often that we can show such a direct relationship between good research and desirable social action, but when we can it is certainly heartening."¹⁶

The UNESCO reassessment corroborates and extends this account, noting that a 1953 social science statement signed by thirty-two American social scientists—several involved with UNESCO, including Klineberg, then head of UNESCO's Division of Applied Social Sciences—was presented to the Supreme Court.¹³ It records that UNESCO's work was cited by the defence as newest available evidence, and that the Chief Justice mentioned the first UNESCO statement and several pamphlets, observing that "educability, and absorption and adoption of cultural values, has nothing to do with race."¹³ The account further documents the 1964 Moscow proposals' role in the 1967 *Loving v. Virginia* decision, noting that these proposals stated there was no biological reason to ban interracial marriage and that "it was emphasized that even Carleton S. Coon had approved them."¹³

Coon's participation is described with some ambivalence. The account records that Francisco Benet visited Coon at home in Massachusetts in October 1963 and decided to involve him despite other scholars' concerns.¹³ Coon's own recollection is that the agenda shifted mid-meeting to "vote about who was brighter than whom," that everyone but he raised a hand, and that "when two Africans and one Hindu, both highly intelligent and friendly scientists, looked at me, I may have wiggled a finger or two involuntarily."¹³ He reports learning on his return that newspapers had listed him among the signers.¹³

American reception of UNESCO material was not uniformly favourable. Wesley C. George, professor of anatomy at North Carolina, alleged that "the real purpose is to indoctrinate people, somewhat clandestinely."¹³ Under the Eisenhower administration, some Americans viewed the United Nations and UNESCO as brainwashing instruments; UNESCO publications were banished from Los Angeles public schools in 1953, prompting broader apprehension among school administrators regardless of content.¹³

The collection also contains an instance of the transmission of research-derived critique into religious institutions. A 1961 memorandum from the American Jewish Committee to the Vatican's Secretariat for Christian Unity, submitted in advance of the Second Vatican Council, catalogues passages in approved Catholic teaching materials.¹⁷ The memorandum groups its findings into five categories: "slanderous interpretations" such as collective Jewish responsibility for the Crucifixion; "oversimplifications and sweeping statements," including partiality in the use of the term "Jews"; "unjust or inaccurate comparisons"; "invidious use of language"; and "omissions."¹⁷ It quotes textbooks describing "the bloodthirsty Jews" and asserting that "the Jews as a nation refused to accept Christ, and since his time they have been wandering on the earth without a temple."¹⁷ It documents the practice of naming Jesus's enemies as Jews while leaving his followers unmarked, and the use of "Hebrews" in favourable Old Testament contexts against "Jews" in unfavourable New Testament ones.¹⁷

The memorandum is careful to note that these representations contradict the Council of Trent, which held that "Gentiles and Jews were the advisers, the authors, the ministers of His Passion" and that guilt "seems more enormous in us than in the Jews."¹⁷ It records recent liturgical changes—the reintroduction of the *Flectamus genua* in 1955, removal of "perfidi Judaei" in 1958, and the dropping in 1960 of "Horresce Judaicam perfidiam"—and cites the work of Paul Demann, Jules Isaac, and others.¹⁷ The request is explicitly framed as being made "in private and without publicity," asking that directives be issued "through proper channels and according to established methods."¹⁷

Hate Studies and the Interdisciplinary Problem

A 2005 monograph, adapted from a keynote address at a Gonzaga University conference, proposes hate studies as an interdisciplinary field.¹⁰ It opens by criticising a poster reading "No One Is Born Hating": "No one is born speaking either, but at a certain point we would think it odd if a youngster didn't develop that capacity. People may need help in figuring out whom to hate, but the instinct to hate is part of who we are."¹⁰

The argument is that existing disciplinary treatments are individually incomplete. "If hate is defined as an individual problem, we turn to psychology; if it is the individual in the context of the group, social psychology; if it is the group, sociology; if it is cultural, anthropology; if it is political, political science."¹⁰ The proposed definition of the new field: "Inquiries into the human capacity to define and then dehumanize or demonize an 'other,' and the processes that inform and give expression to, or curtail, control or combat that capacity."¹⁰

Several observations bear on the collection's earlier materials. On history as a discipline abused to promote hatred, the author cites Holocaust denial, white supremacist teaching, Afrocentric teaching, and fundamentalist Islamist teaching.¹⁰ On the funnel model of the militia movement, borrowed from Ken Toole, the author reconciles two apparently competing profiles by placing different types at different points along the funnel—but adds that "not all the space through which the funnel moves is the same," so that where "societal norms are more hateful" more people will be drawn in.¹⁰ On identity: "Most people who act on their hatred seem to have one single aspect of their identity that becomes supercharged and all-important."¹⁰

The monograph is critical of proposals to classify extreme racism as a mental disorder, noting that such a designation might supply a criminal defence and raising the case of Pakistan, where a survey a month after September 2001 found forty-eight per cent believing Israelis responsible: "Should nearly half a country be declared mentally diseased?"¹⁰ It observes that hate of the other is frequently expressed as love of self, citing David Duke and Louis Farrakhan.¹⁰ It notes the risks of legal remedies functioning as a "black hole" that "sucks away other, perhaps more important, initiatives," using campus speech codes as illustration.¹⁰ The proposals advanced include national service for high school seniors, FBI profiling of hate crime offenders, an annual computation of the economic cost of hate, and intergroup impact assessments for government policy.¹⁰

Points of Disagreement Across the Collection

Several persistent tensions run through these materials. The first concerns whether science can or should be enlisted in the service of a moral position. UNESCO's respondents divided sharply: Landauer wrote that "I do not believe that ethical values can ever be directly derived from scientific data" and that the declaration "all men are created equal was a fine one and remains so, even though and in the best sense because it is untrue in the biological sphere."¹² Coon objected that "I do not approve of slanting scientific data to support a social theory, since that is just what the Russians are doing, and what Hitler did."¹² Genna argued that "in order to oppose race prejudice there would not seem to be any need to prove that human races are equal as regards psychical attributes."¹² Against these, the drafters and their supporters held that scientific findings had a public role, though the 1951 statement's separation of ethical principle from empirical assertion registers the force of the objection.¹²

A second tension concerns the level at which change should be sought. The American Jewish Committee's Berkeley study located prejudice in personality structure, implying limited scope for informational remedy. The Commission on Community Interrelations located it in group process and community structure, implying that "if it is possible to discover what elements of a social structure make for unsatisfactory group relations, attempts could be made to change the structure accordingly with the possible result that the anti-Semitism of a whole group would be modified."¹⁵ The 1950 intercultural education survey criticised most agencies for using "group" arithmetically rather than dynamically and for insufficient attention to the group process.¹¹ These are not merely differences of emphasis but imply different programmes.

A third tension concerns evaluation. The internal record shows repeated acknowledgment that the effectiveness of interventions was unknown. The Bureau for Intercultural Education's director stated in 1946 that "there are no scientific methods or approaches either as to the intercultural education program or its evaluation. No one knows how you can evaluate the results in this field."¹¹ The Bureau's own quadrennial report conceded that "the directives of the Board, the pace of events, and the limitations of money have forced us to engage in practice at the same time as we sought to formulate our exploratory hypotheses."¹¹ Lloyd Allen Cook, evaluating the College Study, judged group process data "highly subjective."¹¹

A fourth tension concerns the relation between antiracism and colonial or developmental agendas. The postcolonial reading argues that UNESCO's antiracism had to reconcile itself with "the perpetuation of a colonial world order that the United Nations and its member states were in no hurry to dismantle," and that racial plasticity functioned as a "biopolitical and managerial concept at odds with a politics of antiracism that understood race and racism as questions of power and exploitation."¹⁴ The historical account of UNESCO is less accusatory but records that the project's early focus fell on the United States and South Africa, that its scholars were largely Western, and that it lacked "a truly global approach and impact" before 1960.¹³

A fifth concerns the definition of the object. UNESCO respondents disagreed over whether "race" should be retained, replaced with "ethnic group," or abandoned entirely.¹² The 1950 statement recommended dropping the term "altogether" in favour of "ethnic groups"; the 1951 statement retained it while restricting its application to physical characteristics.¹² Dobzhansky, whose comments are reproduced, argued that "human races are populations which differ from other populations in the incidence of certain genes" and that "'pure races' in man are a myth," while maintaining that "the existence of racial differences is an objectively ascertainable fact."¹² Dunn's reformulation described race as "a dynamic not a static idea, a stage in the slow progress of change which occurs in all living populations."¹²

Conclusion

Taken together, these materials document a period in which the correction of prejudice was treated as a technical undertaking amenable to expert management, and they preserve both the confidence of that undertaking and the doubts of its practitioners. The internal record is markedly less assured than the public output: budget memoranda, evaluation reviews and committee minutes show researchers uncertain whether their instruments measured what they claimed, whether their materials produced any effect, and whether their sponsors would continue funding work whose results were slow, qualified and sometimes unwelcome.

Certain findings recur with some consistency. Understanding of anti-prejudice material correlated with absence of prejudice, which is to say that those most in need of persuasion were least likely to receive the message. Selective exposure and selective retention limited the reach of informational campaigns. Contact alone did not reduce social distance; contact incidental to shared purposeful activity appeared more promising. Long-term evaluation, where attempted, tended to find smaller effects than short-term measures suggested, and in at least one instance found effects in the wrong direction for some subgroups.

The concepts these projects introduced or consolidated—the authoritarian personality, racial plasticity, the ethnic group, educability, action research, the community self-survey—have had long careers, and the later scholarship in this collection traces their movement into courtrooms, curricula, and subsequent critique. Whether that movement constituted success is a question the collection leaves open. What the documents establish is that the reformers themselves regarded the question as unsettled, and said so more freely in memoranda to one another than in the materials they placed before the public.

Sources

1. AJCP12.CV01.pdfConference on Research in the Field of Anti-Semitism: Summary of Proceedings and Suggestions for a Program, 1945Records the May 1944 gathering of social scientists convened by the American Jewish Committee, setting out the psychological theory of prejudice and the programmatic recommendations that shaped subsequent defence work.
2. 5A52.PDF"The Authoritarian Personality," Peculiarly Susceptible to Undemocratic Ideologies, Described by Social Scientists for First Time in Volume Published Today, 15 March 1950American Jewish Committee press release announcing the final volume of the Studies in Prejudice series and summarising its account of the authoritarian character.
3. AP4.pdfT. W. Adorno et al., Introduction, The Authoritarian Personality, 1950The opening chapter setting out the study's hypotheses, its concept of ideological readiness, its scale construction and its sampling procedures.
4. Z479.CV.pdfSamuel H. Flowerman, Memorandum to Mr. Younker on the Relationship between Dr. Horkheimer and the Department of Scientific Research, 1948Internal American Jewish Committee memorandum documenting disputes over the Berkeley children's study, unauthorised fund transfers, and Horkheimer's threatened resignation.
5. Z605 FULL.CV01.pdfSamuel H. Flowerman and Max Horkheimer, Correspondence of the Department of Scientific Research, American Jewish Committee, 1946Letters and memoranda recording budget reductions, the termination of the Berkeley adult study's field phase, and the department's changing administrative arrangements.
6. Z605 FULL.CV01.pdfFrame of Reference for the Department of Scientific Research and Program Evaluation: Plan of Work for 1946, 1946Fourth draft of a planning document mapping the department's research programme and conceding the limits of existing knowledge about anti-Semitism.
7. Z605 FULL.CV01.pdfNew Lines of Testing: Summary of a Discussion on the Department's Testing Activities from Sept. '45 – March '46, 1946Internal review reassessing the four axioms guiding propaganda evaluation and proposing disguised interview procedures.
8. ORK15.pdfBiggott and the Minister: A Research Study of a Cartoon, 1946Evaluation Unit report on twenty-six interviews testing responses to an anti-prejudice cartoon, documenting widespread misinterpretation and the failure of the minister as a hero figure.
9. Z479.CV.pdfMinutes of the Scientific Research Committee, American Jewish Committee, 1948Committee records covering polling methodology, the proposed film effects study, the Palestine survey, publication negotiations and budget reductions.
10. Z25b.pdfKenneth S. Stern, Hate Matters: The Need for an Interdisciplinary Field of Hate Studies, 2005Argues for consolidating scattered disciplinary work on hatred into a single field and criticises existing survey instruments and legal remedies.
11. AJCP66.CV01.pdfA Brief Survey of the Major Agencies in the Field of Intercultural Education, 1950American Jewish Committee survey cataloguing intercultural education organisations and reviewing research evidence on the limited efficacy of factual instruction and casual intergroup contact.
12. 073351engo.pdfThe Race Concept: Results of an Inquiry, 1952UNESCO publication reproducing the 1950 and 1951 statements on race together with extensive critical commentary from anthropologists and geneticists.
13. Duedahl2020-RaceConceptUNESCO.pdfPoul Duedahl, Changing the Concept of Race: On UNESCO and Cultural Internationalism, 2020Historical study tracing UNESCO's race statements from Zollschan's interwar efforts through the 1967 Paris meeting, assessing recruitment, dissemination and legal impact.
14. The Reeducation of Race_ Introduction _ Stanford University Press.pdfSonali Thakkar, Introduction, The Reeducation of Race: Jewishness and the Politics of Antiracism in Postcolonial Thought, 2023Argues that UNESCO's redefinition of race as plastic drew on Boasian assimilationist concepts and was critically registered by anticolonial writers.
15. cherry1998.pdfFrances Cherry and Catherine Borshuk, Social Action Research and the Commission on Community Interrelations, 1998Traces the founding, projects and decline of the American Jewish Congress research unit that pioneered community self-surveys and incident control training under Kurt Lewin.
16. 526.PDFMelvin A. Glasser, Letter to Dr. John Slawson, 21 May 1954Notes the Supreme Court's citation of White House Conference research in the school segregation decision and acknowledges American Jewish Committee support for that work.
17. 6A3.PDFThe Image of the Jews in Catholic Teaching: A Memorandum to the Secretariat for Christian Unity, 1961American Jewish Committee submission cataloguing prejudicial passages in Catholic textbooks and requesting Vatican directives for their revision.