| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 109.4

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| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 109.4 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Comparative/World

David C. Engermanet al., editors. Staging Growth: Modernization, Development, and the Global Cold War. (Culture, Politics, and the Cold War.) Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press. 2003. Pp. xiii, 283. $19.95.
This admirable collection of essays confronts the issue of modernization: the cherished ideal of U.S. intellectuals and policy makers that all peoples and nations sought the kind of economic, political, and thereby moral progress that they felt the United States had secured. Although the subtitle of the book suggests a Cold War focus, several of these essays show that the American faith in modernization, or its sometime synonyms "development" and "Westernization," both antedated the Cold War and have persisted since its end. While lengthening the temporal axis of modernization, the volume also stretches the geographical scope of analysis, taking seriously, as it does, the impact of U.S. foreign policy on other peoples and nations, and even demonstrating, in several cases, that other societies had their own versions of modernization that were not always consonant with their American counterpart.	1
It is commonly said that edited volumes are "uneven" in quality, but in fact these essays are all quite good. Michael Latham's introduction is a model of economy and clarity, highlighting several themes that connect the essays to each other while also giving each essay its due. Michael Adas makes an argument familiar to readers of his superb book, Machines as the Measure of Men: Science, Technology, and Ideologies of Western Dominance (1990): following the Great War, while Europeans grew disillusioned with the technology that had wrought disaster on their homelands, Americans became more confident that technological innovation would prove the leading edge of a "civilizing mission" in places like China, the Philippines, and Latin America. Their affection for machines, and their scorn for those who lacked them, persisted even through the Depression and World War II. After the war, modernization superseded the "civilizing mission," while retaining its faith in science and technology as apt "measures of human worth and achievement" (p. 37). Nils Gilman jousts spiritedly with the intellectual fathers of modernization theory in the 1950s. Gilman's enthusiasm for the combat seems several times to run over the top—his use of words like "colligated" and "eurhythmy" are either pompous or misprints—but his piece is wide ranging and provocative in its location of modernization at the confluence of social science discourses. Mark Haefele examines the contribution of Walt Rostow's thinking to the Kennedy administration's economic diplomacy. Haefele argues that Rostow had influence on the New Frontiersmen because he made his ideas about modernization readily accessible, and because he organized his thinking around practical problems foreign policy makers faced. Ironically, even as Rostow's ideas were incorporated by John F. Kennedy, Rostow himself lost favor with the president, only, and once more ironically, to emerge as an adviser with clout to Lyndon B. Johnson by the mid-1960s.	2
Two of the essays analyze the marketing of modernization at home and abroad. Laura Belmonte describes propaganda efforts by those she calls, variously, "information strategists," "authorities," or "leaders," to persuade people overseas that the U.S. version of modernization was far better than the communist one. The Americans battled particularly against the communist claim that capitalism was heartless, and either ignored racial and gender equality in the United States or insisted that such injustices were disappearing. Christina Klein offers a wonderfully imaginative interpretation of the Rodgers and Hammerstein musical The King and I as a study in modernization. While the show made clear its distaste for communism and the desirability of containing it, it also endorsed "international integration" in the hope that differences between people could be "transcended rather than policed" (p. 131). The American governess, who was based on Anna Leonowens, an Englishwoman who taught in the royal court of Siam during the 1860s, became in the Rodgers and Hammerstein version of the story an agent of the West, seeking to drag the noble but reactionary king of Siam into the twentieth century. In this she reflected the work of U.S. policy makers who sought similar progress for Thailand, a strategic asset of growing importance through the 1950s and 1960s.	. . .

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