Brendan Goff
The Heartland Abroad: The Rotary Club's Mission of Civic Internationalism.
Dissertation Abstract:
While many historians have come to recognize the central role played by international non-governmental organizations, such as Rotary International (RI), in the rise of a global community in the twentieth century, we still lack a clear understanding of the nature and impact of these organizations as points of U.S./non-U.S. contact and exchange. Nor have we begun to interrogate the full spectrum of relationships between these organizations, the state, and the marketplace from the perspective of the United States as an imperial power in its own right. This dissertation explores the worldwide expansion of RI from the Progressive Era to the early cold war as a case study in the emergence of this global community and contends that RI's interwar project of "girdling the globe" with networks of clubs in urban centers contributed to the cultural work of legitimating an international system increasingly defined by corporate and state interests based in the United States.
Though a mainstay of small town America by the 1930s, the "local" Rotary club began developing a cultural and business internationalism after 1910 that paralleled the Wilsonian vision of America's mission to the world as the preeminent agent of reform and modernity. How RI envisioned and then fostered its rapid international growth reflected broader challenges of a nation struggling to reconfigure its own national narrative and identity in accordance with its emerging role as a world power after 1898 and a global hegemon after 1945. U.S. Rotarians saw themselves reaching out to their presumed counterparts in many other cities of the world in order to forge an international "fellowship" of business and professional peers bound together by a commitment to ethical business practices and community service – a project I have labeled RI's "civic internationalism." While the U.S. Rotarians imagined a world of like-minded peers with whom they could forge a harmony of interests through increased trade relations and cultural exchange, non-U.S. members often hoped as well that participation in RI would lead to a greater voice in U.S. and world affairs. "The Heartland Abroad," as a result, details the contrasting experiences of cities like Chicago, Wichita, Tokyo, Havana, Shanghai, and London within RI's "world fellowship" and provides insight into how everyday interactions among U.S. and non-U.S. business and civic leaders over time advanced the interests of the U.S. in all but name. This approach challenges scholars to rethink not only the legacies of prewar U.S. business internationalism in postwar America; but, more significantly, the contributions of America's heartland to the construction and projection of U.S. hegemonic power during the first half of the twentieth century.
Chapter 1: "Cooperation Among Gentlemen": Boosterism, the Service Ideology, and the Distant Intimacies of Empire
The first chapter lays out the origins of Rotary in Chicago in 1905 and its emergence as an international service club steeped in the boosterism and business progressivism of the period. Tracing the club's rapid evolution from a Chicago-based businessmen's dining club to an international network of clubs by the 1920s, the chapter argues, recapitulates broader trends in U.S. society during the period. In particular, the organization defined itself and its membership in terms of professionalism and ethical practices that also served to stabilize the uncertain status of business and especially salesmanship and advertising before World War I. The organization's non-profit status and masculinized language of philanthropic activities on behalf of "the community" became a critical strategy not only for its members' own legitimacy within the U.S. but also for their overall project of international expansion. In effect, the legitimation of business in the language of the new middle classes in the U.S. went hand in hand with the growing sense of the U.S. as a nation with a mission to the world – one that enabled empire precisely through its denial. The experiences and transformations of RI's many clubs inside and outside the U.S. simply bring greater historical specificity to this overall process. But they also shed light on how the Rotarians' construction of an international "fellowship" that promised a future of equal participation in a global marketplace dovetailed with the interests of both corporate and official America.
The second chapter explores the embedded nature of the Rotarians' project of civic internationalism within the political trends and power structures of the United States. The chapter focuses on the Wichita Rotary club as a case study of an ambitious city in America's heartland seeking to take its boosterism to a whole new level of international engagement and exchange. The club members' activities in this direction were very deliberate at the local level, but also effective in adapting Rotary's language of cultural and business internationalism to suit their own purposes and designs for a more prosperous tomorrow. As massive wartime production of the B-29 bomber supplanted Wichita's private aviation industry, so did the lofty dreams of their imagined tomorrows shift dramatically from the boosters' paradise of the 1920s to the Dust Bowl of the 1930s and finally to a city reconstructed as a centerpiece in the permanent war economy of the United States by the early cold war. The shape-shifting of the Wichita club's rosy vision of progress and international cooperation over the interwar years, the chapter argues, illustrates broader cultural, political, and economic transformations experienced by many cities like Wichita as the U.S. moved closer and closer to becoming a de facto imperial system of global proportions.
Chapter 3: "The Rotary Spirit Lives and Shines Through Earthquake and Fire": Tokyo Meets Main Street
The third chapter follows the second in its purpose, as it opens up the world of the Tokyo Rotary club and treats the club's members and activities as a case study in the grafting of the service club into a cultural setting very distinct from cities like Chicago and Wichita. In a time of heightened nativism in the U.S., we find a countervailing trend operating within a significant portion of Rotary as the organization moved into cities like Tokyo in 1920, where it experienced significant growth throughout Japan until the eve of World War II. The Tokyo Rotarians were typically of a very high status in Japan, in parallel with the earliest Rotary clubs in the U.S. before World War I and in contrast with the realities of the smaller town clubs in the U.S. by the 1930s. The fractures within Rotary's imagined world of global solidarity, however, were obvious from the start – at least to most members of the Tokyo club. Nevertheless, the Japanese Rotarians made important contributions to the development of the organization and were often touted as Rotary's greatest success story. Tolerance of racial and cultural differences in the U.S., when directed to a far off nation like Japan, had its advantages for both U.S. and non-U.S. audiences. Meanwhile, parallels in civic boosterism, club activities, and publications with U.S. clubs like Wichita's demonstrated the growing convergence of the two nation's economic and political spheres of interest at the international level. After 1930, however, convergence gave way to a collision course as the Tokyo club spent the 1930s staving off state control while the city of Wichita pursued state investment in its own industries. Re-establishment of Rotary clubs in Japan under postwar U.S. occupation, the chapter concludes, revealed just how much the service club had helped lay the cultural and economic groundwork for that occupation. Despite its insistence on independence from the state through its non-profit status and creed of civic internationalism, Rotary had, in effect, become one of the earliest and most effective means of "normalizing" U.S.-Japanese postwar relations.
Chapter 4: "The False Legend of Expansion and Imperialism": Friendship, Disillusion, and "the abuse of Cuba."
The fourth chapter recounts the experiences of the Havana Rotary club mostly during the interwar years and characterizes them as variations on Cuba's "illusion of standing" with the United States during the same period. Like the other chapters, the Havana Rotarians' dealings with their U.S. counterparts, and especially with the head office in Chicago, serve as a case study in U.S. hegemonic expansion at the ground level. Given that the degree of intimacy and intensity of U.S. – Cuban relations differed substantially from those with Japan, this chapter demonstrates not so much how the U.S. clubs were struggling to understand theirs and their nation's role IN the world, but how the U.S. clubs and their nation were redefining the de facto occupation of Cuba under the Platt Amendment as an uplifting project FOR Cuba and, by extension, Latin America and the world. From the start, the chapter argues, there was a disconnect between the very real consequences of growing U.S. hegemony in Cuba experienced by the Cuban Rotarians and the image of the U.S. as a fair and honest trading partner so cherished by the U.S. Rotarians. That Rotarians in both Cuba and the U.S. shared in the Cubans' "illusion of standing" was necessary to reworking the presence of the U.S. in Cuba into a mythical relationship equally beneficial to both nations. The Cuban Rotarians' frustrations, limits, and dead ends within Rotary over time, however, belied the supposed equality between the Havana Rotarians and their counterparts in the U.S. just as the Platt Amendment underscored the inequality central to U.S. – Cuban relations and to U.S. imperial projections of power in general.
Chapter 5: "Making New Friends": Jim and Lillian Davidson and the Mediations of Empire in the "new world of business"
Chapter five follows Jim and Lillian Davidson through central, southern and east Asia from 1928 to 1931 as he established Rotary clubs in every major commercial center he could reach and she wrote up their experiences for Rotary's widely read magazine, The Rotarian. The chapter questions the meaning and consequences of Jim's "missionary" activity on behalf of Rotary in those cities and analyzes the content and context of Lillian's writings for her audience, most (but not all) of whom lived in North America. The strategies and innovations Davidson developed as he established clubs in Cairo, Bombay, Kuala Lumpur, Singapore, Hong Kong, and other cities reveal much about his and Rotary's understanding of the possibilities of a transnational identity in an international marketplace increasingly regulated by U.S. cultural norms, business practices, and corporate interests. The presumed mutuality of the U.S. and non-U.S. members of Rotary's fellowship had meaningful repercussions in many Asian and U.S. cities and towns for generations to come thanks to the successes of both Lillian and Jim in their "mission" to Asia. The chapter concludes that the Davidsons contributed significantly to the construction and reification of the "exotic peer," Rotary's imagined counterpart to Main Street in cities outside the U.S. Making tangible and tolerable the "exotic peer" of Rotary's international fellowship was a necessary step in the redefinition of the U.S. as an inclusive, benevolent nation on a secular mission of economic reform and civic uplift – a nation FOR the world rather than an imperial presence throughout the world.
Conclusion: "In the Minds of Men":
The conclusion briefly returns to the U.S. and examines the service club's anticipation of the postwar world. Competing visions of the role of the U.S. in the world were available at the time and they emerge from various debates, events, and publications within Rotary, revealing a brief period of openness to a conception of the United States in partnership with all other nations rather than a global hegemon. The organization's function as an INGO takes center stage as its relations with the League of Nations and its contributions to the formation of the UN and UNESCO receive particular attention. In many towns and cities within the U.S. in the late 1930s, the local Rotary club was sponsoring "international institutes" meant to educate local communities on the nature and direction of international relations and they continued during and shortly after the war. As in other times and places, the Rotary club ended up doing some of the cultural work of the state, despite its official status as an independent non-profit within the community and the world at large.