Gray Matters: Social Scientists, Military Patronage, and Democracy in the Cold War

Abstract

A renowned physicist told U.S. defense secretary Robert McNamara in 1961 that while World War I might have been considered the chemists' war, and World War II was con sidered the physicists' war, World War III . . . might well have to be considered the social scientists' war. As new states emerged from the wreckage of European empires, Penta gon officials enlisted social scientists in the battle to contain the spread of Communism in the so-called emerging nations of Asia, Africa, and Latin America. This fusion of social science and statecraft reached its acme at the Special Operations Research Office (soro), a multidisciplinary research institute created in 1956 by the U.S. Army and stationed on the campus of American University in Washington, DC At soro, political scientists, social psychologists, anthropologists, and sociologists joined forces with military experts to unearth the political and social causes of Communist revolution, identify the laws governing social change, and clarify the scientific principles of psychological warfare. soro researchers connected social knowledge and military affairs, creating a hybrid form of expertise intended to help the United States win the battle for hearts and minds.1 In the 1950s and early 1960s, when the defeat of Communism seemed a matter of national survival, most social scientists accepted military-funded research as legitimate social science. But as opposition to the Vietnam War and to American militarism intensi fied in the late 1960s, a growing number of academic social scientists, public intellectu als, and policy makers condemned Pentagon-funded social scientists as technocratic social engineers and partisan ideologues. They accused researchers of sacrificing their intellec tual integrity to a warmongering, imperialistic national security state. In 1969 American University's administration exiled soro from its campus and severed the university's ties to the military.2