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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 07 May 2025
It was 1951 and Rozella Switzer, post-mistress of McPherson, Kansas, a prosperous, conservative, nearly all-white oil town of 9,000 people on the Eastern edge of the wheat belt, had not seen the Nigerians coming. That Fall, seven African students, all male, in their early- and mid-20's, had arrived in the area to attend McPherson College and Central College. The accomplished young men, who counted among themselves a one-time math teacher, a surveyor, an accountant, a pharmacist and a railway telegrapher, had come with high professional aspirations to acquire training in agriculture, engineering and medicine; within months, they were treated to a fairly typical round of Jim Crow hospitality, from half-wages at the local laundry to the segregated upper-balcony of the local movie house. While at least one of the men had been warned by his father that Christians “‘don't practice what they preach’,” the students were apparently unprepared for the Midwest's less metaphorical chill; with the arrival of winter, officials at McPherson College telephoned around town to gather warm clothes for the men, which is how they came to Switzer's restless and expansive attention. A widow in her 40's Switzer, according to Time, “smokes Pall Malls, drinks an occasional bourbon & coke, likes politics and people.” She was also “curious about the African students” and invited them to her home for coffee, music and talk.
I would like to thank Liping Bu, Rotem Giladi, Damon Salesa, Dirk Bonker and Sam Lebovic for their insights, comments and criticisms, and Vera Ekechukwu for her research and archival assistance. Any errors are my own.
1 “The One-Town Skirmish,” Time, December 29, 1952.
2 “The One-Town Skirmish.”
3 For the purposes of this paper, the term “student” largely refers to those attending colleges and universities, rather than participating in other kinds of training. Despite their different connotations, I use the terms “foreign student” and “international student” interchangeably; the former term was more commonly used in my sources to refer to students whose origins lay outside the United States. I use the term “student migration” rather than the more common term, “student exchange” because of its narrower, and more accurate, sense of the character of international student travel.
4 In my future research, I intend to approach student migration using the lens of empire. For works that examine the relationships between universities, knowledge-production and American foreign relations see, for example, David C. Engerman, “American Knowledge and Global Power,” Diplomatic History 31:4 (September 2007), 599-622; Noam Chomsky, et. al., The Cold War and the University: Toward an Intellectual History of the Postwar Years (New York: W. W. Norton, 1997).
5 On modernization, see Nils Gilman, Mandarins of the Future: Modernization Theory in Cold War America (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2003); Michael Latham, Modernization as Ideology: American Social Science and “Nation Building” in the Kennedy Era (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2000); David C. Engerman, et. al., eds., Staging Growth: Modernization, Development, and the Global Cold War (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2003); David C. Engerman, Modernization from the Other Shore: American Intellectuals and the Romance of Russian Development (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2003). For a recent special issue on the global history of modernization, see Diplomatic History, Vol. 33, No. 3 (June 2009). On the historiography of “Americanization,” see Heide Fehrenbach and Uta G. Poiger, “Americanization Reconsidered,” in Fehrenbach and Poiger, eds., Transactions, Transgressions, Transformations: American Culture in Western Europe and Japan (New York: Berghahn Books, 2000), pp. xiii-xl; Mary Nolan, “Americanization as a Paradigm for German History,” in Mark Roseman, Hanna Schissler and Frank Beiss, eds., Conflict, Catastrophe and Continuity in Modern German History (New York: Berghan Books, 2006), pp. 200-220; Jessica C. E. Gienow-Hecht, “Shame on U. S.? Academics, Cultural Transfer and the Cold War: A Critical Review,” Diplomatic History, Vol. 24, No. 3 (Summer 2000), pp. 465-94, and responses.
6 On the connections between the Cold War, the black freedom struggle and civil rights politics, see esp. Thomas Borstelmann, The Cold War and the Color Line: American Race Relations in the Global Arena (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2001); Mary Dudziak, Cold War Civil Rights: Race and the Image of American Democracy (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000); James Meriwether, Proudly We Can Be Africans: Black Americans and Africa, 1935-1961 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2002); Brenda Gayle Plummer, ed., Window on Freedom: Race, Civil Rights and Foreign Affairs, 1945-1988 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2003); Brenda Gayle Plummer, Rising Wind: Black Americans and U. S. Foreign Relations, 1935-1960 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1996); Kevin Gaines, American Africans in Ghana: Black Expatriates and the Civil Rights Era (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina, 2006); Nikhil Pal Singh, Black is a Country: Race and the Unfinished Struggle for Democracy (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2004).
7 Some of the key works in the burgeoning field of “cultural diplomacy” and “public diplomacy” studies include Laura A. Belmonte, Selling the American Way: U. S. Propaganda and the Cold War (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2008); Nicholas Cull, Cold War and the United States Informational Agency: American Propaganda and Public Diplomacy, 1945-1989 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008); Penny Von Eschen, Satchmo Blows Up the World: Jazz Ambassadors Play the Cold War (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2004); Jessica C. E. Gienow-Hecht, Transmission Impossible: American Journalism as Cultural Diplomacy in Postwar Germany, 1945–1955 (Louisiana State University Press, 1999); Walter Hixson, Parting the Curtain: Propaganda, Culture, and the Cold War, 1945-1961 (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1997), and foundational work in this field, Frank Ninkovich, The Diplomacy of Ideas: U. S. Foreign Policy and Cultural Relations, 1938-1950 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981). For an exchange on public diplomacy scholarship, see American Quarterly, Vol. 57, No. 2 (2005).
8 To make U. S.-centered student migrations fully legible will ultimately require rigorous comparative work situating the U. S. case in the context of other educational metropoles.
On the British context and colonial and post-colonial student migrations, for example, see Hakim Adi, West Africans in Britain, 1900-1960: Nationalism, Pan-Africanism, and Communism (London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1998); Lloyd Braithwaite, Colonial West Indian Students in Britain (Kingston: University of the West Indies Press, 2001); Amar Kumar Singh, Indian Students in Britain (New York: Asian Publishing House, 1963). For comparative approaches, see Hans de Wit, Internationalization of Higher Education in the United States of America and Europe: A Historical, Comparative, and Conceptual Analysis (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 2002); Otto Klineberg, et. al., International Educational Exchange: An Assessment of Its Nature and Its Prospects (The Hague: Mouton, 1976).
9 Liping Bu, Making the World Like Us: Education, Cultural Expansion, and the American Century (Westport, Conn.: Praeger, 2003). See also Jennifer Leigh Gold, “Color and Conscience: Student Internationalism in the United States and the Challenges of Race and Nationality, 1886-1965” (PhD dissertation, UC Berkeley, 2002). For a recent textbook overview, see Teresa Brawner Bevis and Christopher J. Lucas, International Students in American Colleges and Universities: A History (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007).
10 See, for example, Hongshan Li's excellent U. S.-China Educational Exchange: State, Society, and Intercultural Relations, 1905-1950 (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 2008).
11 The exemplary work here is Weili Ye, Seeking Modernity in China's Name: Chinese Students in the United States, 1900-1927 (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2001).
12 The classic example of such an in-house history would be Walter Johnson and Francis J. Colligan, The Fulbright Program: A History (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1965).
13 The quotation is commonly attributed to Robert Oppenheimer, although I have been unable to track down the original source.
14 Clifford Ketzel, “Exchange of Persons and American Foreign Policy: The Foreign Leader program of the Department of State” (PhD, University of California, 1955), p. 70, quoted in Giles Scott-Smith, Networks of Empire: The U. S. State Department's Foreign Leader Program in the Netherlands, France, and Britain, 1950-1970 (Brussels: P. I. E. Peter Land, 2008), p. 28.
15 See, for example, Jonathan Zimmerman, Innocents Abroad: American Teachers in the American Century (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2006); Motoe Sasaki-Gayle, “American New Women Encounter China: The Politics of Temporality and the Paradoxes of Imperialism, 1898-1927,” Journal of Colonialism and Colonial History, Vol. 10, No. 1 (Spring 2009); Elizabeth Cobbs-Hoffman, All You Need is Love: The Peace Corps and the Spirit of the 1960s (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1998); Merle Curti and Kendall Birr, Prelude to Point Four: American Technical Missions Overseas, 1838-1938 (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1954). U. S. students were, of course, also studying abroad. See, for example, Whitney Walton, “Internationalism and the Junior Year Abroad: American Students in France in the 1920s and 1930s,” Diplomatic History, Vol. 29, No. 2 (2005), pp. 255-78. Especially after World War II many programs, notably Fulbright, would sponsor educational travel abroad by American scholars and students as well as travel to the United States.
16 Institutional connections between early 20th century “internationalist” programs and U. S.-government sponsored ones are also emphasized in both Bu and Gold.
17 On corporatism, see Michael Hogan, “Corporatism,” in Michael J. Hogan and Thomas G. Paterson, eds., Explaining the History of American Foreign Relations (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1994), pp. 226-36.
18 This discourse linking international students in the United States to U. S. global influence continues down to the present: the website of the U. S. Department of State announces that “Tomorrow's Leaders are Being Educated in the U. S. Today” above a list of 207 current and past foreign leaders who are graduates of U. S. colleges and universities at both the undergraduate and graduate level. See http://www.educationusa.state.gov/home/education-usa/global-left-nav/information-for-u/international-students-yesterday—foreign-leaders-today3
19 On Nkrumah's career at Lincoln University, see John Henrik Clarke, “Kwame Nkrumah: His Years in America,” Black Scholar, Vol. 6, No. 2 (1974), pp. 9-16.
20 The Egyptian philosopher Said Qtub traveled to the United States between 1948 and 1950 on a scholarship to study the U. S. educational system, spending time in Washington, DC and in Greeley, Colorado at the Colorado State College of Education. In his writings, he would develop an intensely critical stance on American life and culture, emphasizing its decadence, immorality and materialism. His work would later inspire Al Qaeda. On Qtub, see Lawrence Wright, The Looming Tower: Al Qaeda and the Road to 9/11 (New York: Knopf, 2007).
21 On Americans in German universities in the late 19th and early 20th centuries and their engagement with European social politics, see Daniel T. Rodgers, Atlantic Crossings: Social Politics in a Progressive Age (Cambridge; London: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1998); Dorothy Ross, The Origins of American Social Science (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1991); Christopher John Bernet, “Die Wanderjahre': The Higher Education of American Students in German Universities, 1870-1914,” (PhD dissertation, SUNY Stonybrook, 1984).
22 Examples of two very different sending societies whose students arrived with self-strengthening aspirations in the United States would be Japan and Cuba. On Japan, see James Thomas Conte, “Overseas Study in the Meiji Period: Japanese Students in America, 1867-1902,” (PhD dissertation, Princeton University, 1977). On Cuba, see Louis A. Perez, On Becoming Cuban: Identity, Nationality and Culture (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1999), passim. In the African context, Tuskegee Institute emerged in many settings as what can be called a “self-strengthening” model, despite its accommodationist politics in the United States.
See Michael O. West, “The Tuskegee Model of Development in Africa: Another Dimension of the African/African-American Connection,” Diplomatic History, Vol. 16, No. 3 (1992), pp. 371-87. For American figures influenced by Tuskegee, see Richard D. Ralston, “American Episodes in the Making of an African Leader: A Case Study of Alfred B. Xuma (1893-1962),” International Journal of African Historical Studies, Vol. 6, No. 1 (1973), pp. 72-93; Thomas C. Howard, “West Africa and the American South: Notes on James E. K. Aggrey and the Idea of a University for West Africa,” Journal of African Studies, Vol. 2, No. 4 (1975-6), pp. 445-66.
23 On the Chinese Educational Mission, see Thomas LaFargue, China's First Hundred: Educational Mission Students in the United States, 1872-1881 (Pullman: Washington State University Press, 1987 [1942]). For portraits of its architects and supervisors, see Edmund H. Worthy, Jr., “Yung Wing in America,” Pacific Historical Review, Vol. 34, No. 3 (1965): 265-87; Edward J. M. Rhoads, “In the Shadow of Yung Wing: Zeng Laishun and the Chinese Educational Mission to the United States,” Pacific Historical Review, Vol. 74, No. 1 (2005): 19-58. The mission was intimately tied to China's first diplomatic delegations to the Western hemisphere: see Charles Desnoyers, “‘The Thin Edge of the Wedge’: The Chinese Educational Mission and Diplomatic Representation in the Americas, 1872-1975,” Pacific Historical Review, Vol. 61, No. 2 (1992), pp. 241-63.
24 “Japan's Annapolis Graduates,” New York Times, February 13, 1904, p. 2.
25 “Costa Rican Middy Let In,” New York Times, March 3, 1905, p. 1; “Chinese at West Point,” New York Times, June 16, 1905, p. 3; “Fears Training Foreigners,” Washington Post, March 22, 1912, p. 4.
26 “Persian for West Point: Congress Expected to Grant Request for Entrance to Foreign Students,” New York Times, July 13, 1913, p. 2.
27 See LaFargue, China's First Hundred.
28 “Japan's Annapolis Graduates”; “Uriu, Admiral of Japan; Career in America and His Native Country of ‘The Mahan of the Mikado's Navy,” New York Times, February 21, 1904, p. SM7; “Annapolis Graduate Premier of Japan,” New York Times, February 13, 1913, p. 4.
Cross-national naval training of this kind was one element of a transnational navalist politics whose German-American axis is explored by Dirk Bonker in “Militarizing the Western World: Navalism, Empire, and State-Building in Germany and the United States before World War I,” (PhD dissertation, Johns Hopkins University, 2002).
29 Thomas J. Schaeper and Kathleen Schaeper, Cowboys into Gentlemen: Rhodes Scholars, Oxford, and the Question of an American Elite (New York: Berghan Books, 1998). On early 20th century inter-imperial dialogue between the British Empire and the United States and its Anglo-Saxonist racial frame, see Paul A. Kramer, “Empires, Exceptions and Anglo-Saxons: Race and Rule Between the British and U. S. Empires, 1880-1910,” Journal of American History, Vol. 88 (March 2002), pp. 1315-53.
30 For colonial and neo-colonial educational programs between the United States and the Caribbean, see, especially, Louis A. Perez, “The Imperial Design: Politics and Pedagogy in Occupied Cuba, 1899-1902” Cuban Studies/Estudios Cubanos, Vol. 12 (Summer 1982), 1-19; Edward D. Fitchen, “The Cuban Teachers and Harvard, 1900: An Early Experiment in Inter-American Cultural Exchange,” Horizontes: Revista de la Universidad Catolica de Puerto Rico, Vol. 26 (1973), 67-71; Solsirée Del Moral, “Negotiating Colonialism: ‘Race,” Class, and Education in Early Twentieth-Century Puerto Rico, “in Alfred W. McCoy and Francisco Scarano, eds., Colonial Crucible: Empire in the Making of the Modern American State (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2009), pp. 135-144; Pablo Navarro-Rivera, “The Imperial Enterprise and Educational Policies in Puerto Rico, “in Alfred W. McCoy and Francisco Scarano, eds., Colonial Crucible: Empire in the Making of the Modern American State (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2009), pp. 163-174.
31 “Work for Islanders: Employment for Our Newly Acquired Peoples,” Washington Post, p. 27; “Agree on Filipino Act,” Washington Post, p. 4.
32 H. Michael Gelfand, Sea Change at Annapolis: The United States Naval Academy, 1949-2000 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2006), p. 48.
33 On the pensionado program and Filipino students in the United States, see Kimberly Alidio, “Between Civilizing Mission and Ethnic Assimilation: Racial Discourse, U. S. Colonial Education and Filipino Ethnicity, 1901-1946” (PhD dissertation, University of Michigan, 2001), chapter 3; Charles Hawley, “‘Savage Gentlemen’: Filipinos and Colonial Subjectivity in the United States, 1903-1946,” (PhD dissertation, University of Iowa, 2000), chapter 1; Lawrence Lawcock, “Filipino Students in the United States and the Philippine Independence Movement, 1900-1935,” (PhD dissertation, University of California at Berkeley, 1975); Emily Lawsin, “Pensionados, Paisanos, and Pinoys: An Analysis of the Filipino Student Bulletin, 1922-1939,” Filipino American National Historical Society Journal, Vol. 4 (1996) 33-33P, 50-50G; Noel V. Teodoro, “Pensionados and Workers: The Filipinos in the United States, 1903-1956,” Asian and Pacific Migration Journal, Vol. 8, No. 1-2 (1999): 157-78. For a period sociological report, see Leopoldo T. Ruiz, “Filipino Students in the United States,” (MA thesis, Columbia University, 1924). On the role of education in Filipino travel to Seattle, see Dorothy B. Fujita-Rony, American Workers, Colonial Power: Philippine Seattle and the Transpacific West, 1919-1941 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003), chapters 2. On Filipino students who remained in Chicago, see Barbara M. Posadas and Roland L. Guyotte, “Unintentional Immigrants: Chicago's Filipino Foreign Students Become Settlers, 1900-1941,” Journal of American Ethnic History, Vol. 9, No. 2 (1990): 26-48. Sutherland quote from Hawley, p. 35.
34 On the Boxer Indemnity Remission, see Michael Hunt, “The American Remission of the Boxer Indemnity: A Reappraisal,” Journal of Asian Studies, Vol. 31, No. 3 (1972): 539-60; Richard H. Werking, “The Boxer Indemnity Remission and the Hunt Thesis,” Diplomatic History, Vol. 2, No. 1 (1978): 103-6; Delber L. McKee, “The Boxer Indemnity Remission: A Damage Control Device?” Newsletter of the Society for Historians of American Foreign Relations, Vol. 23, No. 1 (1991): 1-19. On both the Remission and the Qinghua School, see Hongshan Li, U. S.-China Educational Exchange. On returned students, see Edwin Clausen, “The Eagle's Shadow: Chinese Nationalism and American Educational Influence, 1900-1927,” Asian Profile, Vol. 16, No. 5 (1988), pp. 413-28; Edwin Clausen, “Nationalism and Political Challenge: Chinese Students, American Education and the End of an Era,” Asian Profile, Vol. 16, No. 5 (1988), pp. 429-440; Yung-Chen Chaing, “Chinese Students in America in the Early Twentieth-Century: Preliminary Reflections on a Research Topic,” Chinese Studies in History, Vol. 36, No. 3 (2003), pp. 38-62; Yung-chen Chiang, “Chinese Students Educated in the United States and the Emergence of Chinese Orientalism in the Early Twentieth Century,” Taiwan Journal of East Asian Studies, Vol. 1, No. 2 (2004), pp. 37-76.
35 The literature on the American missionary movement in the late-19th and early 20th centuries is extensive. For some of the principal works, see William R. Hutchinson, Errand to the World: American Protestant Thought and Foreign Missions (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987); Daniel H. Bays and Grant Wacker, eds., The Foreign Missionary Enterprise at Home: Explorations in North American Cultural History (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2003); Ussama Makdisi, Artillery of Heaven: American Missionaries and the Failed Conversion of the Middle East (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2008). On U. S.-China missions, see Jane Hunter, The Gospel of Gentility: American Women Missionaries in Turn-of-the-Century China (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1984); Valentin H. Rabe, The Home Base of America China Missions, 1880-1920 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1978); Lian Xi, The Conversion of Missionaries: Liberalism in American Protestant Missions in China, 1907-1932 (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1997). On Chinese-American missionary education, see Daniel H. Bays and Ellen Widmer, China's Christian Colleges: Cross-Cultural Connections, 1900-1950 (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2009); Jessie Gregory Lutz, China and the Christian Colleges, 1850-1950 (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1971). For one lasting international connection that was inaugurated with missionary work, see David A. Heinlein, “The New Brunswick-Japan Connection: A History,” Journal of the Rutgers University Libraries, Vol. 52, No. 2 (1990), pp. 1-20.
36 The specific mechanisms through which overseas U. S. missionaries channeled students to U. S. colleges remains to be explored further. Dr. L. H. Pammel, president of the Association of Cosmopolitan Clubs of America, noted in the 1925 survey that “foreign students returning to their country often recommended the particular institution they attended, or some missionary in a foreign country speaks highly of a certain institution. The Methodist Church directs foreign students from Methodist missions to attend its institutions in this country. The Presbyterian, Episcopal, and other colleges do likewise.” W. Reginald Wheeler, Henry H. King and Alexander B. Davidson, eds., The Foreign Student in America: A Study by the Commission on Survey of Foreign Students in the United States of America, under the Auspices of the Friendly Relations Committees of the Young Men's Christian Association and the Young Women's Christian Association (New York: Association Press, 1925), 270.
37 Wheeler, et. al., eds., The Foreign Student in America, xiii.
38 Walter L. Williams, “Ethnic Relations of African Students in the United States, with Black Americans, 1870-1900,” The Journal of Negro History, Vol. 65, No. 3 (Summer 1980), pp. 228-49. On African-American missions to Africa, see Sylvia M. Jacobs, ed., Black Americans and the Missionary Movement in Africa (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1982).
39 On the Committee on Friendly Relations among Foreign Students, see Bu, Making the World Like Us, esp. chapter 1; Gold, “Color and Conscience.”
40 See, for example, the annual reports of the Committee on Friendly Relations which contain reports from Chinese, Japanese, Korean and Filipino Protestant associations. Unofficial Ambassadors (New York: Committee on Friendly Relations among Foreign Students, 1929-1953). On the Chinese Students Christian Association (CSCA), see Timothy Tseng, “Religious Liberalism, International Politics, and Diasporic Realities: The Chinese Students Christian Association of North America, 1909-1951,” Journal of American-East Asian Relations, Vol. 5, No. 3-4 (1996), pp. 305-330.
41 For an account of corporate-internationalist ideology in Euro-American projections, see Victoria de Grazia, Irresistible Empire: America's Advance through Twentieth-Century Europe (Cambridge: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2005).
42 On the history of the IIE, see Stephen Mark Halpern, “The Institute of International Education: A History” (PhD dissertation, Columbia University, 1969); Bu, Making the World Like Us, esp. chapter 2.
43 On Rotary, see Brendan Goff, “The Heartland Abroad: The Rotary Club's Mission of Civic Internationalism” (PhD dissertation, University of Michigan, 2008).
44 For German-American encounters, see Mary Nolan, Visions of Modernity: American Business and the Modernization of Germany (New York: Oxford University Press, 1994).
45 On tensions at the intersection of U. S. and European cultures of commerce, see De Grazia, passim.
46 For worried reflections on precisely these reactions to American culture and society, see Wheeler, et. al., eds., passim.
47 For disillusioned Filipino migrants see, for example, Paul A. Kramer, The Blood of Government: Race, Empire, the United States and the Philippines (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2006), pp. 402-7.
48 New York Times, October 24, 1906, p. 9.
49 “Fears Training Foreigners.”
50 “Against Philippine Policy,” Washington Post, March 27, 1908; “Filipino Army Officers,” Washington Post, May 28, 1908, p. 6.
51 On the rise of anti-immigrant politics in the late-19th and early 20th centuries, see John Higham, Strangers in the Land: Patterns of American Nativism, 1860-1925 (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1988).
52 On the tensions between exclusionists and promoters of Chinese student migration to the United States, see Qingjia Edward Wang, “Guests from the Open Door: The Reception of Chinese Students into the United States, 1900s-1920s,” Journal of American-East Asian Relations, Vol. 3, No. 1 (1994), pp. 55-76.
53 On the 1924 Johnson-Reed act and subsequent exclusionary state, see Mae Ngai, Impossible Subjects: Illegal Aliens and the Making of Modern America (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2004).
54 The IIE, for example, compiled a guide to immigration laws as they applied to foreign students, for the use of both students and their advisors. Ruth Crawford Mitchell, Foreign Students and the Immigration Laws of the United States (New York: Institute of International Education, 1930).
55 For the pre-1912 period, I rely on the informal surveys published by Rudolf Tombo in 1905, 1906, 1907, 1909, and 1912 in Science.
See Tombo's similarly-titled articles: Science, Vol. 22, No. 562, (Oct. 6, 1905), pp. 424-8; Science, Vol. 24, No. 606 (Aug. 10, 1906), pp. 166-73; Science, Vol. 26, No. 656 (Jul. 26, 1907), pp. 97-104; Science, Vol. 30, No. 770 (October 1, 1909), pp. 427-35; Science, Vol. 36, No. 930 (Oct. 25, 1912), pp. 543-50.
56 As I pursue this research further, I hope to build in both a gender analysis and a discussion of the distinctiveness of female students' experiences in the United States. To date, the historiography of female students from outside the United States is limited. For a notable exception, see Huping Ling, “A History of Chinese Female Students in the United States, 1880s-1990s,” Journal of American Ethnic History, Vol. 16, No. 3 (1997), pp. 81-109.
57 On U. S.-Latin American cultural programs, see Manuel Espinosa, Inter-American Beginnings of U. S. Cultural Diplomacy, 1936-1948 (Washington, DC; U. S. Government Printing Office, 1976). For an insider's account of wartime Chinese-American educational programs, see Wilma Fairbank, America's Cultural Experiment in China, 1942-1949 (Washington: Bureau of Educational and Cultural Affairs, U. S. Department of State, 1976). On the tensions between U. S. and Chinese officials that surrounded these efforts, see Frank Ninkovich, “Cultural Relations and American China Policy, 1942-1945,” Pacific Historical Review, Vol. 49, No. 3 (1980), pp. 471-98. On students of Japanese descent, see Gary Okihiro, Storied Lives: Japanese American Students and World War II (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1999); Allan W. Austin, From Concentration Camp to Campus: Japanese American Students and World War II (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2004).
58 Beginning in 1948, the Institute for International Education began publishing its own census of international students in the United States, entitled Open Doors. For additional years, see Open Doors (New York: Institute for International Education, 1948-present). The initial figures here are drawn from Unofficial Ambassadors, the earlier CFRFS census.
59 In this paper, I use the term “foreign student” because it reflects contemporary categories—the term “international student” appears to have come to prominence later—conveying what was an important and palpable sense of the students' “alien” presence in the United States.
60 Kenneth Holland, “Who is He?” Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science, Vol. 335: The Rising Demand for International Education (May 1961), p. 9.
61 Holland, “Who is He?”; Ernest Boynton, “African Students Have Their Brushes with American Racial Prejudice,” Chicago Daily Defender, p. 11.
62 On the Foreign Leader Program, an exemplary “exchange of persons” program, see Giles Scott-Smith, Networks of Empire.
63 On the Military Assistance Program, see Chester J. Pach, Arming the Free World: The Origins of the United States Military Assistance Program, 1945-1950 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1991). Its specifically educational dimensions, which may have constituted the single largest U. S.-government sponsored educational program in the post-1945 period, remains to be studied. On police training, see Jeremy Kuzmarov, “Modernizing Repression: Police Training, Political Violence and Nation-Building in the ‘American Century,‘” Diplomatic History, Vol. 33, No. 2 (April 2009), pp. 191-221.
64 Lesley Gill, School of the Americas: Military Training and Political Violence in the Americas (Durham: Duke University Press, 2004).
65 Ernest W. Lefever, “The Military Assistance Training Program,” Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science, Vol. 424 (March 1976), p. 88.
66 Lefever, p. 86.
67 For a detailed account of this episode, see Yelong Han, “An Untold Story: American Policy toward Chinese Students in the United States, 1949-1955,” Journal of American-East Asian Relations, Vol. 2, No. 1 (1993), pp. 77-99.
Quotation on p. 80.
68 On the development of NAFSA, see Bu, Making the World Like Us, esp. chapter 5. For works that reflects the new, postwar professionalism, see Cora DuBois, Foreign Students and Higher Education in the United States (Washington: American Council of Education, 1956); Edward C. Cieslak, The Foreign Student in American Colleges: A Survey and Evaluation of Administrative Problems and Practices (Detroit: Wayne University Press, 1955).
69 On postwar German-American programs, see Karl-Heinz Fussl, “Between Elitism and Educational Reform: German-American Exchange Programs, 1945-1970,” in The United States and Germany in the Era of the Cold War, 1945-1990: A Handbook (Washington, DC: German Historical Institute, 2004), 409-416; O. Schmidt, “Civil Empire by Cooptation: German-American Exchange Programs as Cultural Diplomacy, 1945-1961” (PhD dissertation, Harvard, 1999); H. Kellerman, Cultural Relations as an Instrument of U. S. Foreign Policy: The Educational Exchange Program between the United States and Germany, 1945-1954 (Washington, DC: Department of State, 1978). On postwar Japanese-American programs, see Takeshi Matsuda, Soft Power and Its Perils: U. S. Cultural Policy in Early Postwar Japan and Permanent Dependency (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2007).
70 New York Times, quoted in Sam Lebovic, “To Finance Out of the Sale of War Junk a Worldwide System of American Scholarships”: The Origins of the Fulbright Program and the Production of American Cultural Globalism, 1945 – 1950 “(unpublished manuscript).
71 Arthur Power Dudden and Russell R. Dynes, The Fulbright Experience, 1946-1986: Encounters and Transformations (New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Books, 1987); Richard T. Ardnt and David Lee Rubin, eds., The Fulbright Difference, 1948-1992: Studies on Cultural Diplomacy and the Fulbright Experience (New Brunswick: Transaction Publishers, 1993); Johnson and Colligan, The Fulbright Program: A History. On Senator J. William Fulbright, see Randall Bennett Woods, Fulbright: A Biography (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995).
72 Colligan and Johnson, pp. 3-4.
73 Lebovic, “To Finance Out of the Sale of War Junk”
74 J. William Fulbright, “Open Doors, Not Iron Curtains,” New York Times, Aug. 5, 1951, p. 140.
75 Harold Taylor, “The Student: A Key Man in Asia,” New York Times, July 10, 1960, pp. SM11.
76 James H. Meriwether, “‘Worth a Lot of Negro Votes’: Black Voters, Africa, and the 1960 Presidential Campaign,” Journal of American History, Vol. 95 (December 2008), pp. 737-763.
77 Seymour M. Rosen, The Development of Peoples' Friendship University in Moscow (Washington: Office of Education, Institute of International Studies, 1973).
78 “African Students Play Key Role in Cold War Battle for Minds,” Chicago Daily Defender, June 5, 1963, p. 13.
79 Walter Lippman, “Today and Tomorrow: Wanton Carelessness,” The Washington Post and Times Herald, May 27, 1954, p. 17.
80 Liping Bu discusses these tensions in Making the World Like Us, pp.157-9.
81 Duggan, quoted in Bu, Making the World Like Us, p.. 159.
82 Quoted in Bu, Making the World Like Us, p. 233.
83 W. L. White, “Foreign Students: An Opportunity,” The Reader's Digest 59 (September 1951), p. 116.
84 “Foreign Students Get Welcome Here,” New York Times, August 27, 1949, p. 15.
85 A few selected works in the much larger genre of social studies of foreign students would include: Richard D. Lambert and Marvin Bressler, Indian Students on an American Campus (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1956); The American Experience of Swedish Students: Retrospect and Aftermath (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1956); Ralph L. Beals and Norman D. Humphrey, No Frontier to Learning: The Mexican Student in the United States (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1957); Survey of the African Student: His Achievements and His Problems (New York: The Institute for International Education, 1961); John W. Bennett, et. al., In Search of Identity: The Japanese Overseas Scholar in America and Japan (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1958).
86 Barbara Bundschu, “African Students Find U. S. Friendly, but Rap Apathy, Racial Intolerance,” Chicago Daily Defender, Dec. 5, 1961, p. 9
87 The incident is described in Ye, Seeking Modernity in China's Name, p. 81.
88 Gertrude Samuels, “‘One World’ under One Roof: All Races and Creeds Live at International House and are Inspired to Combat Divisive Prejudices,” New York Times, May 8, 1949, p. SM22.
89 “Foreign Students Query Racial Bias: Negro Leaders Here Concede Weakness in Democracy, but Stress Press, Communism Here Minimized,” New York Times, December 29, 1951, p. 9.
90 Just as I am aware of Time's mediation/construction of this particular narrative, I am conscious of the evidentiary issues involved in drawing as heavily on newspaper and magazine journalism as I have in this paper. This essay represents a preliminary framework for archival work in foreign exchange program archives, such as the archives of the Institute for International Education. Such research will, I hope, allow me to cross-check journalistic sources in ways that I am still not able to do in the present draft.
91 “The One-Town Skirmish.”
92 “The One-Town Skirmish.”.
93 The politics of student migration to the United States in the post-9/11 landscape are described in Bevis and Lucas, chapter 8.
94 Powell, quoted in Bevis and Lucas, p. 210.
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