'The hopes of man': The Cold War, modernization theory, and the issue of race in the 1960s.

摘要

This study examines the interplay between domestic and foreign policy during the cold war. It argues that modernization theory fused the domestic and foreign realms in the 1960s creating a new interpretation of the cold war. As a paradigm for resolving social and economic disparities, American policymakers saw modernization theory as a counteragent to Soviet socialism. Modernization theory universalized the western process of development, and projected it onto the rest of the world. It held that undeveloped communities could accelerate their growth by acquiring the skills and belief systems of the West. This study argues that John F. Kennedy and Lyndon B. Johnson used modernization theory to bring depressed communities, at home and abroad, into the global mainstream as their expression of the cold war.; The dissertation looks at four government programs that illustrate modernization in the 1960s: the Peace Corps, Volunteers in Service to America (VISTA), Model Cities, and Civil Operations and Revolutionary Development Support (CORDS). This study divides this modernization moment into two phases, progressive and authoritarian, each represented by a set of domestic and international agencies. The Peace Corps and VISTA demonstrate the progressive side by the effort to bring a visionary program of development to Third World nations, and America's poor, under the assumption that it would help them to participate more fully in the global economy. Model Cities and CORDS were supra-agencies that displayed the Johnson administration's desire to continue the modernization task, but place more emphasis on security as the foundation to improvement.; The dissertation contends that the modernization paradigm changes throughout the decade as it confronted legislative resistance, racial turmoil, weakening appropriations, and agency failures. In the transition, the modernization oscillates between progressive reform and authoritarian control. Finally, the "Hopes of Man" suggests that while modernization theory was quixotic, policymakers placed faith in it until the very end. It uses the story of David Lilienthal to illustrate the toll that the modernization had on the true believers when they pressed forward despite the social, intellectual, and personal obstacles they faced.