Post-war Social Engineering Projects in the United States

Introduction

In the immediate aftermath of the Second World War, a range of institutions in and beyond the United States embraced the conviction that scientific knowledge could be deliberately applied to reshape public attitudes, dismantle prejudice, and secure democratic social relations. This report examines two intertwined instances of this post-war "social engineering" impulse: the Commission on Community Interrelations (CCI), a social action research organization launched by the American Jewish Congress in 1945 with Kurt Lewin as its chief consultant, and the campaign by UNESCO to redefine the concept of race through authoritative scientific statements between 1945 and 1967 ¹². The collection consists of two scholarly articles: a 1998 study by Frances Cherry and Catherine Borshuk of CCI's rise and decline as an action research unit, and Poul Duedahl's 2020 account of UNESCO's race project as an exercise in cultural internationalism and "mental engineering" ¹². Read together, the sources document how post-war reformers sought to engineer social change at two scales—the local American community and the international arena—and how both projects encountered institutional, political, and disciplinary constraints.

The Post-war Context: From Nazi Violence to Domestic Reform

Both sources locate the origins of their respective projects in the shock of Nazi persecution and the Holocaust. Duedahl notes that the extent of Nazi violence produced widespread recognition of the need for global political leadership, leading to the founding of the United Nations in 1945 and, shortly thereafter, UNESCO, whose constitution declared that "since wars begin in the minds of men, it is in the minds of men that the defences of peace must be constructed" ¹. UNESCO's preamble explicitly identified "the doctrine of the inequality of men and races" as a problem the organization was obliged to combat ¹.

Cherry and Borshuk trace a parallel domestic dynamic in the United States. During the war, civil rights became a fundamental concern of American liberals as the Nazi persecution of European Jews was translated into fear of domestic fascism ². The American Jewish Congress, originally organized to defend Jewish rights specifically, broadened its mission after witnessing the failure of Western democracies to intervene against Nazi expansion, concluding that infringement of anyone's rights—Jew or non-Jew—was cause for concern ². Gunnar Myrdal's 1944 study of racial inequality profoundly shaped this environment: the number of American organizations countering ethnic tension grew from roughly 300 in 1945 to more than 1,350 by the 1950s ². Myrdal himself appears in both narratives, serving as one of the external readers of UNESCO's draft race statement, illustrating the overlapping personnel of the domestic and international reform efforts ¹².

Social Engineering as Science and Ideology

The sources converge on the explicit self-understanding of these projects as forms of engineering. Duedahl characterizes UNESCO's race work as the core of the organization's "many post-war mental engineering initiatives" and as a "conceptual standardization" effort—essentially a dispute over whether the natural sciences or the social sciences should determine the origins of human difference and the attribution of value ¹. UNESCO's first Director-General, biologist Julian Huxley, articulated a "scientific world humanism" that prioritized disciplines most likely to dismantle ideas of inequality, placing the social sciences at the forefront; the organization's 1950 program formally declared that UNESCO "must therefore place social sciences in the foreground of its field of study" ¹.

Kurt Lewin's vision for CCI was similarly framed. Lewin regarded social engineering as a new science that could make a viable contribution to liberal democracies, arguing that "we do not want group manipulation, but we do need that amount of management of groups which is necessary for a harmonious living together," managed "by the people, for the people" ². CCI's distinguishing claim was scientific: where other organizations relied on goodwill meetings and lectures, CCI proposed "knowledge of facts" and action based upon those facts ². Its staff spoke in military, engineering, and medical metaphors—"combating" prejudice, "testing" techniques for reducing discrimination as one would test a consumer product, and "writing prescriptions" for the disease of prejudice—and Goodwin Watson went so far as to rank the "social power of self-directed, cooperative fact-finding" above the discovery of atomic energy ².

Institutional Design and Personnel

Both projects depended on the recruitment of committed scientific personnel. UNESCO's race statement of 1950 was designed by Arthur Ramos, the Brazilian ethnographer who headed the Department of Social Sciences, and drafted by a panel of ten scientists drawn deliberately from the then-marginal group of anthropologists, psychologists, sociologists, and ethnographers who viewed race primarily as a social construct—many of them students of Franz Boas at Columbia or scholars with South American research experience, including Claude Lévi-Strauss, Edward Franklin Frazier, Ashley Montagu, and Juan Comas ¹. After Ramos's sudden death in 1949, Montagu took control of the drafting, with the consequence, Duedahl argues, that immediate control of the content "slid out of the hands of UNESCO" ¹.

CCI assembled a comparably distinguished roster. Headquartered in New York with generous initial funding, it began with Lewin as chief consultant, recruited Stuart Cook as director of research, Isidor Chein as associate director, and John Harding as assistant director, with an advisory council including Gordon Allport, Rensis Likert, Margaret Mead, and Edward Tolman; over the years it engaged Kenneth Clark, Claire Selltiz, Marie Jahoda, and Goodwin Watson ². Its methodological signature was nonreductionist: the community was its laboratory, the group its level of analysis, and the solution of social problems its purpose, with signature projects in incident control, community self-surveys, and multiple group membership ². Chein warned of the "danger of sterility" in research whose sole consequence was that findings "come to occupy a place on the well known library shelf" ².

Contested Claims and Internal Disputes

Neither project proceeded without friction. Within UNESCO, Montagu's draft asserted that mankind belonged to a single species and attempted a universal rejection of the race concept as scientifically indefensible; its conclusion that race was entirely a social myth made "shocking reading" for some external reviewers ¹. Huxley in particular objected that passages were too dogmatic or provocative and warned that a statement dismissing racial differences as merely "pseudo-racial" would not last and could damage UNESCO's reputation; Montagu promised to make the revised statement "bomb proof" ¹. The dispute reflected the deeper contest between natural-science and social-science authority over human difference that Duedahl places at the heart of the enterprise ¹.

CCI faced pressures of a different kind. Not long after its founding, its researchers found themselves defending the action orientation of their work to their sponsor, the AJC, and were increasingly gaining employment and research opportunities elsewhere ². Cherry and Borshuk identify a confluence of destabilizing forces by the early 1950s: changes within the AJC, shifts in local communities, the rise of legal and mass protest strategies for racial justice, and transformations within social psychology itself, which turned toward laboratory methods and individual cognitive functioning, allowing culture and community to recede and basic research to grow disconnected from application ². They also note, following Jackson, a structural critique: Myrdal's framing of American racial inequality as a conflict in the minds of white Americans focused post-war research on psychological issues "at the expense of social structural and economic analyses" ².

Impact and Reception

The sources offer contrasting assessments of impact. Duedahl documents concrete political resonance for UNESCO's race statements, most vividly in the recollection of Jesse Jackson, who described how civil rights activists carried the UNESCO study across the American South as proof, endorsed by "a world body," that Black Americans were not inferior and that differences were determined by social conditions ¹. Duedahl argues that UNESCO played a major part in imposing a new post-war view of humanity, though its impact varied by country, concentrated initially on the United States and South Africa, and only after 1960 acquired a more genuinely global reach ¹. He also situates the project within Akira Iriye's framework of cultural internationalism, noting that Iriye identified UNESCO as the single most important post-war organization promoting cultural internationalism yet overlooked its work on race ¹.

CCI's record is one of recognized productivity followed by decline. The organization operated as an active research unit for roughly eight years from 1944, was highly regarded among social scientists, and received SPSSI's Edward L. Bernays Intergroup Relations Award in 1949 ². Yet by 1952 the viability of its action research program had been challenged from multiple directions, and Cherry and Borshuk present its trajectory as one of the earliest case histories of the difficulties liberal social scientists face in balancing scientific credibility against social utility within action agencies ².

Conclusion

Taken together, the two sources portray post-war social engineering as a coherent transnational project pursued through distinct institutional vehicles: community-level action research in American cities and conceptual standardization at the level of international scientific consensus. Both were animated by the conviction that prejudice was a problem of minds that science could remedy; both drew on overlapping networks of social scientists; and both encountered limits—UNESCO in the contested science of race and uneven national reception, CCI in sponsor politics and the disciplinary drift of social psychology away from community-based work ¹². The collection thus documents both the ambition and the fragility of the post-war attempt to construct, in UNESCO's phrase, the defences of peace in the minds of men.

Sources

1. Duedahl2020-RaceConceptUNESCO.pdf — Analyzes UNESCO's post-war campaign to redefine the concept of race through scientific statements from 1950 to 1967, including its drafting disputes, personnel, and political impact in the United States and beyond.
2. cherry1998.pdf — Examines the founding, action research program, and decline of the Commission on Community Interrelations of the American Jewish Congress, framing Kurt Lewin's democratic social engineering as an early case of applied antiracist social psychology.