American Officials Research Articles

Quote counts as a success metric: quantifying a criticism of Voice of America

ABSTRACTA leading criticism of American international broadcasting is that the flagship US external service Voice of America (VOA) does not consistently include quotes from US officials, or descriptions of US policy, in its foreign affairs reporting. That claim, however, has never been tested. In this study, a sample of VOA news reports filed during three recent periods of international conflict was analysed to determine the quantity that included quotes from American officials or descriptions of official US policy. Similar analyses were also run on Germany’s Deutsche Welle and Russia’s RT to determine the quantity of stories originating from those outlets which included official quotes and policy descriptions of the German and Russian governments, respectively. The study found that VOA did not include official quotes or policy descriptions in the majority of its news reports. However, when compared to Deutsche Welle and RT, VOA was found to have included official quotes and policy descriptions at a level consistent with those of these two peer brands. The results of this study may call into question the utility of using quote counts as a success metric in assessing the value of US government sponsored international broadcasting.

Health Planning in 1960s Africa: International Health Organisations and the Post-Colonial State.

This article explores the programme of national health planning carried out in the 1960s in West and Central Africa by the World Health Organization (WHO), in collaboration with the United States Agency for International Development (USAID). Health plans were intended as integral aspects of economic development planning in five newly independent countries: Gabon, Liberia, Mali, Niger and Sierra Leone. We begin by showing that this episode is treated only superficially in the existing WHO historiography, then introduce some relevant critical literature on the history of development planning. Next we outline the context for health planning, noting: the opportunities which independence from colonial control offered to international development agencies; the WHO's limited capacity in Africa; and its preliminary efforts to avoid imposing Western values or partisan views of health system organisation. Our analysis of the plans themselves suggests they lacked the necessary administrative and statistical capacity properly to gauge local needs, while the absence of significant financial resources meant that they proposed little more than augmentation of existing structures. By the late 1960s optimism gave way to disappointment as it became apparent that implementation had been minimal. We describe the ensuing conflict within WHO over programme evaluation and ongoing expenditure, which exposed differences of opinion between African and American officials over approaches to international health aid. We conclude with a discussion of how the plans set in train longer processes of development planning, and, perhaps less desirably, gave bureaucratic shape to the post-colonial state.

Imperial ambiguities

This article examines relations between American imperial personnel and indigenous Muslims in the southern Philippines from the colonial advent to the post-colonial present. American officials initially established imperial linkages with Muslims that bypassed emerging political arrangements in core Christian areas. In ruling different Filipinos disparately, Christian and non-Christian zones of the archipelago assumed separate developmental trajectories. Muslims were racialized and forcibly modernized, but stood apart as a peripheral minority. Although sub-national imperial connections were severed after 1913, Muslims retained a memory of a distinct relationship with the United States that benefited local interests and contained government violence when the Americans returned to fight a war on terror at the beginning of the 21st century.

Principles for Post-War International Economic Cooperation

At the close of the Second World War, American officials, in concert with their allies in the United Kingdom and elsewhere, set out to remake the machinery of international commerce. They did so not as naive globalists, but as desperate realists – realists who had survived the Great Depression and the second great war of the century. In designing the framework that would govern post-war international economic policy, American leaders and technocrats adhered to a set of essential principles. These principles had emerged from their hard-earned experience during the breakdown of global cooperation in the interwar years and the staggering bloodshed of the war itself. A careful review of the substance of negotiations over the formation of the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT), and political communications by US officials in support of those institutions – including essays, speeches, and testimony before Congress – suggests a set of vital and, perhaps, enduring principles that won the day: multilateral coordination, liberalization, mutual benefit-mutual responsibility, and economy = security. To American leaders these principles were abundantly evident. Their task was to persuade their domestic and international peers of the necessity of these principles and to put them into action. Ultimately they created a set of interlocking multilateral institutions to facilitate global commerce and global peace.

The Border Difference: The Anishinaabeg, Benevolence, and State Indigenous Policy in the Nineteenth-Century Great Lakes Basin

After the War of 1812, British and American authorities attempted to sequester the Anishinaabeg—the Three Fires of the Ojibwes (Chippewas), Odawas (Ottawas), and Boodewadamiis (Potawatomis)—on one side of the Canada-US border or the other. The politics of the international border thus intersected with evolving federal/state and imperial/provincial Native American/First Nations policies and practices. American officials pursued land cessions through treaties followed by removals of Indigenous peoples west of the Mississippi. Their British counterparts also strove to clear Upper Canada (Ontario) of Indigenous title, but instead of removal from the province attempted to concentrate the Anishinaabeg on Manitoulin and other smaller islands in northern Lake Huron. Most affected by these policies were the Odawas, whose homeland was bisected by the international border. Their responses included two colonies underwritten by missionary and government support, one in Michigan and the other on Manitoulin Island, led by members of the same family intent on providing land and educational opportunities for their people. There were real, if subtle, differences, however, in the languages of resistance and networks of potential white allies then available to Indigenous people in Canada and the US. The career trajectories and writings of two cousins, sons of the brothers who helped to craft the Odawa cross-border undertaking exemplify these cross-border differences.

Citizens of Convenience: The Imperial Origins of American Nationhood on the U.S.–Canadian Border by Lawrence B. A. Hatter

Reviewed by: Citizens of Convenience: The Imperial Origins of American Nationhood on the U.S.–Canadian Border by Lawrence B. A. Hatter David A. Nichols (bio) KEY WORDS Canada, Borders, Jay’s Treaty, Trade, Native Americans Citizens of Convenience: The Imperial Origins of American Nationhood on the U.S.–Canadian Border. By Lawrence B. A. Hatter. (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2017. Pp. xi, 267. Cloth, $39.50.) Thirty years ago John Murrin opined that the Federalists, in 1787, had created a national government unsupported by any general spirit of nationalism. Subsequent scholarship has not disproven Murrin’s argument, but it has discerned, among those who supported the federal Constitution, an idealistic yearning for a particular kind of nation–state. Members of the early Federalist movement saw the United States as something more than an alliance-of-convenience between former colonies. They wanted to make the American nation respectable in the eyes of other sovereigns, to create a government that would honor its debts and protect its citizens from harm. The new government’s protective duty depended ultimately on its armed forces, but most of the time it rested on the state’s power to draw defensible political lines: borders between nations, protective perimeters around state-flagged ships, and lines of division between citizens and noncitizens. A nation–state that could not draw those lines lacked one of the core features of sovereignty, and thus a respectable place within “the Westphalian system” of nations.1 [End Page 722] As Lawrence Hatter observes in Citizens of Convenience, political realism dampened the Federalists’ aspirations soon after they took power. In their first major diplomatic accord, Jay’s Treaty, the Washington administration and the Senate blurred their nation–state’s lines of sovereignty. The treaty allowed British merchants in the lower Great Lakes region to choose their own citizenship, without reference to Congress’s naturalization power, and allowed those same men, irrespective of citizenship, to cross the international border at will. In an international context, this represented an extraordinary concession. British traders like Robert Dickson had much more freedom of movement and self-definition in the northwestern United States than they would have enjoyed in other parts of the Anglophone commercial sphere, like the Mughal or Ottoman empires, where European trading diasporas enjoyed only limited autonomy. Jay’s Treaty also reversed the process of territorial integration that the Federalists had begun in the Northwest with their war against the region’s Indian confederacy. The accord turned most of the region back into a borderland, a region where states exerted limited authority, indigenous peoples retained autonomy, and liminal figures like traders enjoyed considerable influence. Soon after Jay’s Treaty went into effect, American officials in the Lakes country and points west began to curtail Britons’ unique local privileges. James Wilkinson, unable to raise enough militia to keep order in Detroit, imposed martial law on the settlement instead. He later closed the Missouri River to private trading, quashing Britons’ hopes that Jay’s Treaty might apply to the Louisiana Purchase. As Anglo–American tensions rose in the early 1800s, Army officers seized or even fired on British boats lawfully carrying freight. By the eve of the War of 1812, travel had become hazardous enough for British traders that many had to partner with another liminal figure, the German American merchant John Jacob Astor. Astor limited his associates’ independence but provided them with his own right of unmolested passage through American territory. The war itself left smoldering ruins and fresh graves throughout the Lakes borderland, and left the Americans all the more determined to run a tightly defined border. At Ghent, American peace commissioners [End Page 723] defeated a British proposal to establish an independent Native American homeland in the Old Northwest, and a new Anglo–American commercial treaty and an 1816 act of Congress terminated British traders’ right of free passage. Indian agents vigorously enforced the new ban, arresting those they considered interlopers. As far as British Canadians were concerned, the Lakes borderland had become a “bordered land.”2 The United States had consolidated its sovereignty, but this did not mean a loss of autonomy for everyone in the region. The Great Lakes Indians certainly...

US intelligence and communist plots in postwar France

In 1946, as the cold war deepened and American officials grew alarmed by the prospect of a communist-dominated France, US intelligence analysts began to report rumors of mysterious ‘parachutages’ of unidentified containers over the French countryside. Alongside equally sensational stories about the resurrection of international brigades and discoveries of hidden arms caches, these reports seemed to provide definitive evidence for widely held beliefs about communist intentions to seize power. This article investigates these claims and reveals the influence of a transnational network of informants hoping to stoke fears of revolutionary activity in order to encourage US involvement in postwar France.

TTIP negotiations, policy convergence, and the transatlantic digital economy

AbstractThe Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP) has the potential to be a landmark treaty on many grounds. According to European and American officials, one of the main features that should differentiate the TTIP from other bilateral free trade agreements is, beyond its unprecedented scale, the ambition of its regulatory dimension. On both sides of the Atlantic there is a strong incentive to mitigate the impacts of “behind-the-border” obstacles that mostly stem from existing divergences between laws and regulations applied in Europe and in the United States. To do this, trade negotiators, together with policymakers and regulators, attempt, when possible and desirable, to facilitate the convergence of the policies that frame the European and the American markets. This paper analyzes how convergence may be reached with regards to the regulation of the digital economy, a relatively new area of interest in the field of trade law and policy studies, that seems to deserve a specific attention considering the growing importance it has taken at the domestic level and in the context of trade negotiations.

Can Europe Run Greece? Lessons from U.S. Fiscal Receiverships in Latin America, 1904-31

In 2012 and again in 2015, the German government proposed sending German administrators to manage Greece’s tax and privatization authorities. The idea was that shared governance would reduce corruption and root out inefficient practices. (In 2017 the Boston Globe proposed a similar arrangement for Haiti.) We test a version of shared governance using eight U.S. interventions between 1904 and 1931, under which American officials took over management of Latin American fiscal institutions. We develop a stylized model in which better monitoring by incorruptible managers does not lead to higher government revenues. Using a new panel of data on fiscal revenues and the volume and terms of trade, we find that revenue fell under receiverships. Our results hold under instrumental variables estimation and with counterfactual specifications using synthetic controls.

Land Too Good for Indians: Northern Indian Removal

In U.S. history textbooks, Indian removal often comes across as an episode in southern rather than national history. Authors focus on the expanding cotton economy, Andrew Jackson's Indian hatred, the doomed resistance of the Five “Civilized” Tribes (Cherokees in particular), and the long, slow bleed of the Second Seminole War (1835–1842). In his new study of removal in the Old Northwest, John P. Bowes argues that this southern focus distorts our view of American history. Indian removals occurred in nearly every region of North America, and they took place not during a narrow period but throughout the entire first century of American independence. Removals of one kind or another occupied the agendas of most of the first twenty U.S. presidents. Indian emigrants sometimes moved voluntarily, which led American officials to conclude they could “persuade” others to emigrate with minimal coercion. And removal did not always result in ethnic clean sweeps; Native American families found ways to remain in their old homelands, in many cases to the present day.

The Politics of Diplomacy: How the United States Builds Multilateral Military Coalitions

How does the United States build multilateral military coalitions? Conventional wisdom focuses on the role of formal alliance structures. Allies band together because they share threat perceptions, political ideology, norms, and values. I argue instead that US-led coalition-building efforts are influenced by the entirety of bilateral and multilateral ties that connects the United States with a third party. The breadth of institutions matters because it allows officials to gather information on the potential coalition partner’s deployment preferences beyond straightforward security considerations—such as what kind of economic and political considerations affect its willingness to join the coalition. Diplomatic embeddedness also helps American officials identify linkages between military and non-military interests. This facilitates the construction of side-payments. I find evidence for my argument by using an original dataset including all US-led multilateral coalitions in the pre– and post–Cold War era. I complement the quantitative analysis with a case study on US coalition-building efforts for the Korean War.

Faces of Bias in Politics: Evidence from Elite and Voter Conjoint Experiments on Gender

This paper theorizes three forms of bias that might limit women’s representation: outright hostility, double standards, and a double bind whereby desired traits present bigger burdens for women than men. We examine these forms of bias using conjoint experiments derived from several original surveys – a population survey of American voters and two rounds of surveys of American public officials. We find no evidence of outright discrimination, or double standards. All else equal, most groups of respondents prefer female candidates, and evaluate men and women with identical profiles similarly. But on closer inspection, all is not equal. Across the board, elites and voters prefer candidates with traditional household profiles such as being married and having children, resulting in a double bind for many women. So long as social expectations about women’s familial commitments cut against the demands of a full time political career, women are likely to remain underrepresented in politics.

Remittances as diplomatic leverage?: The precedent for Trump’s threat to restrict remittances to Mexico

As a presidential candidate, Donald J. Trump argued that he could compel Mexico to pay for a border wall by threatening to restrict the flow of remittances sent by Mexicans living in the United States. The proposal was largely dismissed by the press and the political establishment. American officials, however, have used threats to restrict remittances as leverage before. Some experts believe, in fact, that a threat from three House Republicans to restrict remittance flows to El Salvador changed the outcome of El Salvador’s 2004 presidential election in favor of the pro-trade, US-friendly candidate favored by the Bush administration. The objectives of this article are to demonstrate that Trump’s proposal to use remittances as leverage has precedent and to use survey data to attempt to evaluate the claim that a threat to restrict remittances influenced the outcome of the 2004 Salvadoran presidential election. Statistical tests suggest that remittance recipients were indeed more likely to vote for the Bush administration’s preferred candidate in the 2004 election; however, it does not appear that remittance recipients changed the outcome, nor is it clear from the available data whether the remittances threat or some other factor caused remittance recipients to vote differently than non-recipients.

The Colonial Roots of Criminal Procedure in the Philippines

Centuries of colonial rule profoundly influenced Filipino social, political, and legal institutions. Filipino law, in particular, evolved as a synthesis of indigenous, Spanish (Roman), and American common laws, each building on its forerunner to create a system unique to the Philippines. As a succession of alien powers colonized the Philippines, they preserved some of the existing laws, altering only those in conflict with their own and adding a few to encompass new commercial, political, or religious conditions. When the Spanish established a colonial government in 1565, they initially permitted the native inhabitants to continue with many of their indigenous customs instead of imposing their own traditions derived from the Roman legal code. As they became more entrenched, however, the Spanish attempted to subvert many of the customary laws. American officials, who displaced the Spanish in 1898, generally adopted the same policy by incorporating certain features of Roman law while simultaneously tolerating some of the remaining native legal traditions. The Americans thus drew on much of the existing substantive law but also found that the Spanish had failed to introduce laws of procedure to the archipelago. Moreover, the few procedural measures that the Spanish brought with them appeared to be inconsistent with American concepts of justice. Within two years of their arrival, U.S. colonial officials issued General Orders No. 58, which instituted a code of criminal procedure that was more consonant With American legal ideals. The code of criminal procedure the American colonials introduced in 1900, remains virtually unchanged in 1997 and governs present-day criminal procedure in the Philippines. Thus procedural reforms of the colonial past had a tremendous impact on the current Filipino legal system.

Rocking the Boat: The Paracels, the Spratlys, and the South China Sea Arbitration

On July 12, 2016, an Arbitral Tribunal constituted under Annex VII to the 1982 UN Convention on the Law of the Sea found overwhelmingly in favor of the Philippines in its dispute with the People’s Republic of China over maritime zones and other issues in the South China Sea. This piece appraises the decision in light of the events leading up to the current controversy. To investigate the source of the conflict, one does not have to go back very far. In January 1974, during the final stages of the Vietnam War, China ejected South Vietnam from the Paracel Islands—a group of tiny maritime features in the South China Sea claimed by both nations. After a classic “weekend war,” China tried to dampen down the affair by swiftly releasing the prisoners and refusing to be drawn into an international debate. Within days, though, there was more activity, when South Vietnam dispatched forces to occupy five features in the Spratly Islands, a larger group further to the south of the South China Sea. During this period, South Vietnam, the Philippines, and Taiwan engaged in the fortification of their respective features—bolstering garrisons, installing military hardware, building runways, and shooting at interlopers. The militarization of the Spratlys had begun; and well before China, the focus of the current arbitration, established a physical presence on the reefs in the vicinity. This piece examines the unfolding of the Paracels and Spratlys disputes through the lens of the United States’ diplomatic correspondence between the State Department and its missions in Asia.When the controversy ignited in 1974, the U.S. was still trying to disentangle itself from Vietnam, and had no intention of being inveigled by its Asian allies into commitments in the South China Sea. Consequently, it struck a determinedly neutral stance, stating that it took no position; a stance to which it formally adhered until 2016. But declared disinterest did not mean lack of interest, and behind the scenes, Washington played an active though little known role in trying to contain the conflict, by discouraging Saigon from pressing its Paracels claims in the Security Council, and trying to deter American oil companies from exploring Reed Bank. This diplomatic correspondence, which the Arbitral Tribunal does not appear to have examined, casts a strong light on the interests and legal positions of the players in the South China Sea—interests which continue to govern the actions of China, the Philippines, Taiwan and Vietnam today. When chronicling the initial phases of the current disputes, American officials not only set out the parties’ legal justifications for their actions, but also provided assessments of the merits of some of these positions. In the process, they also offered early insights into a central jurisdictional question addressed by the Tribunal: whether the Spratlys features should be defined as “islands” or “rocks” under Article 121 of the U.N. Convention on the Law of the Sea—the matter on which we shall conclude.

Sacred Interests: The United States and the Islamic World, 1821–1921Karine V.Walther. University of North Carolina Press, 2015.

Sacred Interests: The United States and the Islamic World, 1821-1921 Karine V. Walther. University of North Carolina Press, 2015.In Sacred Interests, Karine V. Walther, assistant professor of history at the Georgetown School of Foreign Service in Qatar, provides a well-documented investigation of relations between the United States and the Islamic world during the nineteenth century, and she convincingly argues that this period set the stage for contemporary American attitudes toward Islam. Walther asserts that popular perceptions of Islam were to a great extent shaped by American Protestant missionaries and denominations who combined religious and racial characteristics to depict Muslims as violent barbarians intent upon the destruction or conversion of all unbelieving infidels such as Jews and Christians. However, the conversion of Muslims to Christianity might provide a civilizing influence that would negate the Muslim tendency toward violence. The missionaries who were well connected to key figures within the American government viewed Muslims around the world as monolithic, although most contact with Islam in the nineteenth century concerned the Ottoman Empire. There were considerable lobbying efforts for American intervention in the Middle East to protect Jews and Christians, but, for most of the nineteenth century, American diplomats maintained a policy of nonintervention. However, this policy was altered by the Spanish-American War and the annexation of the Philippines. Walther devotes considerable attention to the Islamic Moros whose resistance to annexation provoked a brutal repression by the United States, although this brutality was rationalized as part of a necessary civilizing mission. Sacred Interests concludes with the post-World War One agreements that ignored Arab nationalism in favor of European mandates that continue to cast a shadow over the turbulent Middle East. Her book suggests that need to break away from nineteenth-century stereotypes and assumptions if they expect to understand the complexity of the Islamic world. The clash of civilizations concept continues to exercise considerable sway over American attitudes toward Islam.Walther begins her account with an examination of American support for the Greek rebellion against the Ottoman Empire. The Greeks were Christians and Greece the birthplace of American democracy, and, thus, the Greek rebels deserved the assistance of the United States against the barbaric Ottoman Islamists. In seeking the intervention of the American government, religious lobbyists emphasized the atrocities of the Ottomans while the massacres committed by the Greek forces were ignored. American officials, such as James Monroe and John Quincy Adams, expressed sympathy with the Greek cause, but an official policy of nonintervention was maintained. A similar pattern was evident in the American response to the struggle of Bulgarian Christians and nationalists to achieve independence from the Ottoman Empire in the 1870s. Walther writes, Americans depicted Bulgarians as politically and religiously advanced Christians at the religious mercy of fanatical, violent, and despotic Muslim rulers (68). The focal point for American agitation in the region was the Christian missionaries and professors at Robert College, which was established in Istanbul as a bastion of American civilization within the barbaric Ottoman capital. Again, Bulgarian atrocities were ignored in favor of depicting Muslim savagery.Support for Bulgarian independence also came from the Russians who were intent upon spreading their influence into the Balkans. The Russians, despite pogroms against Jews, were considered part of Christian civilization and thus exempt from much of the missionary criticism leveled toward Muslim leaders. In fact, Walther argues that Ottoman officials were quite aware of the racial inconsistencies within American and European Christendom, pointing out European anti-Semitism as well as the suppression of Native and the lynching of blacks in the American South. …

Missing revolution: the American intelligence failure in Iraq, 1958

Why were American officials caught by surprise with the military coup and later revolution in Iraq on 14 July 1958? Drawing on American intelligence and diplomatic records as well as multilingual sources, this article argues that the US intelligence failure is the product of two factors: the collection of information from too few and too similar human sources of intelligence in Iraq’s ruling regime, and the unreceptivity of US officials to assessing new information and their unwillingness to update assessments of local Iraqi developments. It revisits America’s intelligence failure in Iraq and suggests important lessons for the study of intelligence.

ЗАКОРДОННИЙ ДОСВІД ЗАБЕЗПЕЧЕННЯ КАДРОВОЇ БЕЗПЕКИ В СИСТЕМІ ПУБЛІЧНОГО УПРАВЛІННЯ

The article analyzes the experience of foreign countries in ensuring personnel security in the public administration system. However, abroad, personnel security is not considered as the basis for the formation of an effective public service system. At the same time, there are personnel procedures and mechanisms that ensure the protection of the public administration system from unprofessional, dishonest employees, at the same time there is a whole set of procedures for personnel development and improvement. The institution that provides personnel security in the US public service is the Bureau of Civil Service Personnel Management, which is tasked with ensuring the centralization and coordination of personnel work in the administration of public administration. The competence of the Bureau includes the appointment of employees to positions and their promotion, evaluation of their work, training, promotion and punishment, development of recommendations for improving staffing. For most American officials, promotion is based on the principle of the merit system - the selection of the best candidates for promotion in competitive exams, as well as on the basis of an annual assessment of their performance. In the very center of personnel security of public administration in France is the principle of distinction between rank and type of work. For the development of professionalism, the civil service provides for the development of mobility among civil servants. In order to introduce elements of comparison between different tasks (different types of work) and help to organize a real career growth based on the capitalization of different professional experiences enriched with mobility, as well as continuous training, it is necessary to create a system of interconnection. This is what in France is called a "grid" of qualifications and awards. Personnel security of the Spanish public administration system is organized on the principle of the so-called career or closed system, the main feature of which is the recruitment of staff to public authorities (announcements and administrative processes) for a separate position at the basic level, within which career advancement is possible. promotion) and salary increase.

Dean Worcester's Fantasy Islands: Photography, Film, and the Colonial Philippines by Mark Rice

Reviewed by: Dean Worcester's Fantasy Islands: Photography, Film, and the Colonial Philippines by Mark Rice JPaul S. Manzanilla Mark Rice Dean Worcester's Fantasy Islands: Photography, Film, and the Colonial Philippines Quezon City: Ateneo de Manila University Press, 2015. 270 pages. Before Dean Worcester's Fantasy Islands was published, the only book-length study of American colonial photographs of the Philippines was Benito Vergara Jr.'s Displaying Filipinos: Photography and Colonialism in Early 20th-Century Philippines (University of the Philippines Press, 1995). Vergara showed how the country was "visually possessed" by means of travel pictures and made to represent the colonial narrative of progress through the use of before-and-after images in official photography of the state. While Displaying Filipinos tackled official and travel photography of the early years of American rule, Dean Worcester's Fantasy Islands focuses on a huge photographic collection of one of the most important personalities of US imperial rule: that of zoologist, ethnologist, public official, and entrepreneur Dean Conant Worcester. Worcester was an exceptional person of his time. He had visited the Philippines while it was still a Spanish territory, collecting specimens as part of a scientific expedition. When the question of the country's future was being debated and later on when it became a laboratory of colonial rule, he shared his knowledge with American officials, a knowledge he later fashioned as "expertise." Much of this expertise was derived from his prolific production—and strategic use—of photographs. Readers should note at the outset that not all photographs were taken by Worcester himself; the man, in fact, asserted authenticity of pictures from the "scientific and governmental credentials" of the photographers (42). "Establishing the Archive," the first chapter, leads us to the primary sources of the author's study. These voluminous documents are not innocent products of Worcester's documentary zeal; they are object lessons for understanding some of the prevailing technological, scientific, artistic, and political imperatives of the period. It is telling that Worcester did not submit to the camera's presumably truthful nature; he believed that it "can be made to tell the truth" (2), reminding us of the agency that lies outside the medium and debunking an idealist conception of truth as something [End Page 546] that only has to be told. He communicated the truth of and about his subjects—the Philippines and its people—through skillful utilization of the camera, its attendant photographic processes, and the subsequent ways and means of displaying the "objective" pictures to various peoples. His use of photographic technologies, developments of which he was so attentive to and which he maximized, buttressed the special knowledge of the Philippines that Worcester claimed. On this point, it is important to consider the epistemological implications of the ontological condition of photography, which here does not simply mean the physical snapshot but also the procedures of its production and most importantly the materiality of its exhibition, display, and circulation—indeed, its constitution as a "photography complex," according to historian James Hevia. The second chapter tackles what may be considered the most observable feature of Worcester's photographic subjects: the Filipinos' states of nakedness and nudity. Rice uses the descriptions "dressed" and "undressed" to highlight the "symbolic uses of clothing as markers of savagery and civilization" (48). Naked and partially covered bodies are dense images that reveal the photographer's dispositions to capture them and the eventual reader's prejudices in how to see them. We all know that they were not seen for "what they were," but according to certain assumptions of how human beings should appear and what "proper" citizens of a modern nation and state should look like. Because being photographed is being controlled, photographed bodies were posed according to the visual predilections of the photographer. The erotics of capture and display, the pedagogical mission to appraise Filipino natives as being closer to African Americans and even label some of them as the "missing link" to man's primate ancestor (52), and the close scrutiny of the human bodies and their parts to the point of scientific "exactitude" are practices that demonstrate that knowing the people of America's first colony entails subjugating others in the...

Not on the Mayflower: Dietrich W. Botstiber's Journey from Anschluss Vienna to Philadelphia, 1938

Abstract This selection from Dietrich W. Botstiber's memoir chronicles his final months working as an engineer in Vienna and his journey to the United States in 1938, after Germany annexed Austria. It comes from chapters 17–20 of his memoir, Not on the Mayflower (2007). Botstiber had already been preparing to emigrate to the United States since as early as 1931 to further his engineering career, facilitating his exit in 1938. In the passage below, Botstiber observes the growing presence of Nazis in Vienna in the spring before his departure. He explains the extensive network of American and British officials and personal contacts he called upon to help him emigrate and his travels across Europe and the Atlantic. Botstiber lived the rest of his life in Philadelphia, working in several industries before launching the Technical Development Company. He began the foundation that bears his name in 1995 and passed away in 2002.