The politics of self-help: The Rockefeller Foundation, philanthropy and the ‘long’ Green Revolution

Abstract

While scholars of contemporary philanthropy have observed a concerted interest in the promotion of 'self-help,' little has been said about the political history of this investment and its significance in determining both domestic and international development priorities. We locate this modern conceptualisation of self-help in early twentieth-century philanthropic practice that sought to 'gift' to individuals and communities the precious habit of self-reliance and social autonomy. The Rockefeller Foundation promoted rural development projects that deliberately sought to 'emancipate' the tradition-bound peasant, transforming him or her into a productive, enterprising subject. We begin by documenting their early agricultural extension work, which attempted to spark agrarian change in the US South through the inculcation of modern habits and aspirations among farmers and their families. These agrarian schemes illustrate the newfound faith that 'rural up-lift' could only be sustained if farming communities were trained to 'help themselves' by investing physically and psychologically in the process of modernisation. We then locate subsequent attempts to incentivise and accelerate international agricultural development within the broader geopolitical imperatives of the Green Revolution and the Cold War. While US technical assistance undoubtedly sought to prevent political upheaval in the Third World, we argue that Rockefeller-led modernisation projects, based on insights gleaned from behavioural economics, championed a model of human capital -and the idea of 'revolution within' -in order to contain the threat of 'revolution without'. Approaching agricultural development through this problematisation of the farmer reveals the 'long history' of the Green Revolution -unfolding from the domestic to the international and from the late nineteenth century to the present -as well as the continuing role of philanthropy in forging a new global order. Dear PhilipPlease find our freshly revised paper! It may help to briefly outline the main changes we have made to the MS:1. We have removed the concluding paragraph that summarised the paper's findings and which you felt (and we agree) was largely superfluous. 2. We have added a small amount of text to the abstract, the 'cultivating global citizens' section and the conclusion -basically the sections where you felt additions might be happily made -to ensure that the theme of internationalism is explicit. 3. We have removed several citations from the bibliography -sources that were not directly cited in the text -in an effort to reduce the word count further (against that we now include a reference to Mono Domosh's paper). 4. As requested we now indicate roughly where the images should be placed and provide appropriate captions for each one.We hope you approve the revisions we've made, but do please get in touch if you have any further concerns.

Education, race and empire: a genealogy of humanitarian governance in the United States

“…For example, from 1900 to 1910 he gave $741,000 to the industrial‐model colleges, Tuskegee and Hampton, but nothing to liberal arts colleges such as Fisk and Lincoln (Peeps , 264). Rockefeller, who was also interested in setting the conditions for human improvement, was a great proponent of the Efficiency Movement, believing strongly that government was inefficient and characterised by wasteful practices (Nally and Taylor ). The Efficiency Movement was an important part of the Progressive era in the US, a period also known for its espousal of the ideas of Social Darwinism.…”

Aid Reduction and NGDOs’ Quest for Sustainability in Ghana: Can Philanthropic Institutions Serve as Alternative Resource Mobilisation Routes?

“…For example, the Ford Foundation was instrumental in the Green Revolution in agriculture while the Rockefeller Foundation helped in the establishment of the League of Nations Health Organisation and the World Health Organisation (Youde 2013;Nally and Taylor 2015). For this reason, organised philanthropic funding has been a major source of development finance over the years especially for the non-profit industry of which NGDOs are major constituents.…”

Toward a Geography of Black Internationalism: Bayard Rustin, Nonviolence, and the Promise of Africa

“…In the twentieth century, however, black activists negotiated these exchanges against a backdrop of globally expanding U.S. power, the economic, political, and cultural foundations of which geographers have been particularly instructive at tracing and critiquing (e.g., Smith 2003Smith , 2005Farish 2010;Domosh 2013;Nally and Taylor 2015). Drawing on their insights, this article shows the complex and contradictory role that black activists played in this story-operating in ways that neither blindly reproduced "American values" nor were wholly subversive of them.…”

“…Calls for liberalization mirrored a developmental discourse toward Africa that, as geographers have recently identified, by the early 1950s increasingly shaped many Americans' sense of their international duty (Domosh 2015;Nally and Taylor 2015). Rustin's visit closely followed President Truman's 1949 inaugural address, the socalled Four Point Speech, which mapped out what Mazower (2012) called a "breathtaking redefinition of the U.S. national interest" (275).…”