Margaret Mead: Waging War with Anthropology
The anthropologist Margaret Mead, author of best-selling studies of ‘primitive’ peoples, became a major influence on US military thinking during the Second World War.
After the 24-year-old anthropologist Margaret Mead returned to New York from Samoa in 1926, bearing tales of free love from the South Seas, she rapidly became one of the most famous women in the world. In her international bestsellers, Coming of Age in Samoa (1928) and Growing Up in New Guinea (1931), she showed the western world not only that so-called ‘primitive’ peoples had rich and coherent lives of their own, but also that they had found alternatives to the supposedly inevitable neuroses of the human condition. It was a message that the West, after the traumas of the First World War and the Great Depression, was eager to receive. Towards the end of her life, in the 1960s and 1970s, she had become what the New York Times described as a kind of ‘grandmother to the world’, a source of sage wisdom on the full gamut of civilisation’s troubles, from divorce and sexuality to racial and generational conflict, from the discontents of the suburban housewife to the horrors of nuclear war. Though her reputation fell off rapidly after her death in 1978 – partly due to sensational ‘exposés’ of her alleged research mistakes by the Australian anthropologist Derek Freeman, but largely because later, disillusioned generations no longer wanted sages – in the mid-20th century she was a shining beacon of moral authority.
Yet, during her lifetime, rumours of a different sort circulated, quietly but insistently: that she had used her anthropological knowledge to make magical predictions that could alter the course of history, that might even have won the Second World War for the Allies. One such rumour alleged that Mead and her mentor and lover Ruth Benedict had done a study of Japanese morale which concluded that bombing the Imperial Palace and killing the emperor would only drive the Japanese into an ever more murderous frenzy. Mead got on the phone to President Roosevelt to say ‘our anthropological studies prove’ that only the emperor could end the war and, so the story went, ‘He said, “you’re right, thank you for calling”.’ Another rumour, more malicious, went in the opposite direction: Mead and Benedict had claimed that the Japanese would never surrender, thus justifying the dropping of the atomic bombs: ‘one of the greatest miscarriages of a little smattering of knowledge about human nature in the history of the world’, as the rumour-monger put it. Mead was not above hinting at such goings on herself. Trying to fend off attacks from a colleague in 1950, at a time when she was turning her attentions to the Cold War, she warned him ominously in a private letter that ‘continuous misrepresentations’ of her work would cost lives, just as ‘in World War II, many millions of lives were saved through a proper handling of the Japanese’.
Hidden contribution
Of course Margaret Mead did not win the war single-handedly or save millions of lives in this semi-miraculous way. But these rumours circulated because she and Benedict and a tight-knit circle of anthropologists around them did make a crucial contribution to the war effort that was largely hidden at the time and has barely been discussed since. After the Cold War anthropologists were not eager to be seen to be implicated in power politics. Their loyalties have been to ‘their’ peoples, normally powerless or oppressed groups, for whom anthropologists act as voices and advocates. As Mead saw the tide turning against her, especially when a younger generation rose up in protest against the Vietnam War, she stopped talking about her own wartime experiences. Today professional anthropologists are nearly unanimous in rejecting any involvement in ‘counter-insurgency’ work among the peoples of Iraq or Afghanistan. Yet the story of Mead’s ‘return from the natives’ to involve herself in the political and military conflicts of the 1940s might still hold some lessons for the application of expert knowledge to the conflicts of the 21st century.
Margaret Mead was born in Philadelphia in 1901, the daughter of liberal academics. She came to life intellectually in the Bohemian New York of the 1920s, where she studied anthropology at Barnard College with Franz Boas, the virtual founder of the discipline in America, and his assistant Ruth Benedict, with whom she fell in love and for a time carried on a deeply intimate physical and intellectual relationship. Boas showed bright young women like Mead and Benedict how they could advance the fashionable causes of their day – sexual freedom, anti-racism, individual autonomy – but also be of ‘service to others’ by exploring the mores and cultures of neglected ‘primitive’ peoples, such as the ‘Eskimo’ (Inuit), among whom Boas worked, Native Americans, about which Benedict wrote, and the South Pacific islanders, whom Mead ultimately took up. But Mead and Benedict had loftier ambitions than ‘service to others’, a traditional female role. Like many educated young women of the newly-enfranchised generation, they sought professional careers, too. Anthropology, a new subject in the universities, offered space for women, Jews, immigrants and nonconformists. For Mead (who would shake off two husbands by her early 30s) there were higher ambitions still: to take anthropology to the ‘top table’, to make it not just a noble cause, as Boas intended, but as something practically useful to her fellow Americans, much as economics was shaping up to be in the age of Keynes.
It was this high-octane ambition that caused her, somewhat to Boas’ bemusement, to write up her Samoan fieldwork in a beguilingly literary style and to end Coming of Age with chapters applying Samoan lessons to American children, suggesting ways to lower pressure on them, averting neurosis and equipping them to make decisions for themselves. Growing Up carried similar messages about feeding children’s imaginations and offering them worthy adult role models. These books caused a sensation and made their youthful author a celebrity. The combination of the romantic associations of the South Seas with Mead’s commonsensical prescriptions for practical improvements at home appealed both to the literary and the scientific imaginations. They almost created the category of the social-science bestseller and they further fuelled Mead’s ambitions. In 1936, equipped with a third husband, the British anthropologist Gregory Bateson, she embarked on her third major field-trip, to Bali. While they were away the storm-clouds of international conflict began to gather. On their return to New York in the summer of 1939, with Mead five months pregnant, war was imminent, at least for Bateson’s home country. Mead set about finding a sympathetic paediatrician who would let her give birth her own way and breastfeed on demand. She found one in Benjamin Spock and among her many claims to fame Mead would later add that of midwife to the permissive society through the influence she may have had on Spock’s popular new baby-care strategies. Bateson, meanwhile, took an early boat home to sign up for war work. In his absence Mead turned her mind to war as well.
Outstanding women
In many ways this moment was hardly propitious for any American anthropologist – even this one – seeking to influence the course of international relations. America was not at war and public opinion did not intend it to be. Despite Mead’s excellent publicity for it, anthropology was still seen as a marginal discipline devoted to marginal people. Mead was a mother with a tiny baby and an absent husband. True, she had a well-paying and undemanding job at the American Museum of Natural History, her growing reputation and her indomitable will. But she was a female professional at a time when that was still largely viewed as an oxymoron. When a few years later the Washington Post tried to run a feature on ‘Ten Outstanding Women of the Modern World’ they failed to come up with more than eight. Starting out with the wives of FDR , Chiang Kai-shek and George VI, they scraped together a novelist, a journalist, an explorer, Marie Curie’s daughter ... and Margaret Mead.
Yet from this unpromising beginning Mead made brilliant use of what turned out to be a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity. Carefully aligning herself with more influential liberal intellectuals, who with FDR aimed to edge America into the war against fascism, she pitched herself and her coterie as experts on the full range of the world’s cultures whose knowledge would come in handy in the burgeoning world war. She raised a tidy sum from an anti-racist foundation for a little think tank on ‘intercultural relations’ (that could be code for diplomacy in peace, or propaganda in war) and when Bateson returned from England in 1940, disconsolate at not being offered any war work that would employ his professional talents, she installed him in her museum office as think-tank secretary. She assembled a team of experts: Ruth Benedict; a new friend, the wealthy British amateur anthropologist Geoffrey Gorer, who had attached himself to Mead and Benedict while lounging about the States; and a clutch of young female and male graduate students from Benedict’s department at Columbia University.
But what were they experts on? Benedict’s anthropological subjects had been Native Americans. Gorer had written about West Africa and South-east Asia, but only as a tourist. The graduate students were doing what graduate students do, writing PhD dissertations, mostly on indigenous peoples in remote locations. None of this on the face of it would be much use in a world war. To address that problem Mead and Bateson spent their time waiting for war hammering out a method to apply systematically their understandings of ‘primitive’ cultures to modern nations. They focused, in a semi-Freudian way that was then very fashionable, on family dynamics. The manner in which adults formed relationships, they hypothesised, they learnt as children growing up in a family. As their own anthropological work had shown, different cultures had very different family dynamics. There were matriarchal and patriarchal societies; there were those (like Samoa) in which children were left very much to their own devices; and others (like some they had studied in New Guinea) in which parents practically terrorised their children. Applying these principles to their own experiences, Mead the American and Bateson the Englishman compared notes and derived sketches of two quite different family dynamics in their respective countries. In America, an immigrant country, children often knew their new culture better than the adults and thus tended to show off before and even dominate them. In Britain, a traditional country, children were taught to be submissive and absorbed the lessons of their culture slowly over time from their parents. Bateson, who liked ‘systems’ (he would later be a pioneer of cybernetics and the principles of positive and negative feedback) then suggested ways in which these family dynamics spread out to characterise the whole of a culture and, further, to characterise that whole culture’s interactions with other cultures. Before they knew it they had a theory of international – or, as they thought of it, intercultural – relations. Once you ‘cracked’ the culture and worked out its characteristic ways of engendering relationships, you had invaluable clues not only to how it worked internally but to how it would respond to cues or pressures (or dirty tricks) from outside.
At war with Japan
During 1940 and 1941 Mead and Bateson had plenty of time to hone their theory and build their network. So they were ready when America did finally enter the war after the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor in early December 1941. They weren’t perhaps quite ready (or prescient) enough, as they had taken pains to ‘crack’ British, American and German cultures but not the Japanese. But they hurtled into action. Geoffrey Gorer was assigned to deal with the Japanese and, sure enough, within a few weeks – by gathering all the English-language material he could from emigrants, old Japan hands, film and novels and the limited amount of ethnography available – he had developed a theory about the Japanese personality, based largely on early and severe toilet training, which pointed he thought to untold stores of aggression kept (at least in peacetime) under strict public control. An early claim by Gorer, almost certainly false, to have ‘predicted’ the particular brutality of the Japanese occupation of Manila in the early weeks of the war flew about Washington and gained the method some credibility. The fact that there were astonishingly few genuine experts on Japan (one authority has suggested there were only about a dozen true ‘Japanists’ in the American university system) mattered even more.
Mead quickly ensconced herself in Washington and began to install her network in positions of influence. Her brother-in-law, Leo Rosten, a deputy director of the Office of War Information (OWI, the agency responsible for ‘white’ propaganda, that is, genuine information dissemination at home and abroad), hired Gorer on the government payroll to do ‘culture cracking’. At first he focused on Japan and Germany, feeding suggestions to OWI on how to phrase broadcasts to the enemy population for maximum propaganda effect. But as ‘culture cracking’ seemed so simple and so useful he branched out quickly, to cultures as diverse as the Greeks and the Burmese. When in mid-1943 he was offered a chance to make a more direct contribution, hired by the British to devise propaganda broadcasts to the Far East from San Francisco, Rosten ensured that he was replaced by none other than Ruth Benedict. Her methods were subtler than Gorer’s; less Freudian, less obsessed with toilet training and more interested in cultural ‘style’ and how it inflected communications of all kinds. Under her gentle rein the ‘culture-cracking units’ at OWI were expanded and a much larger team of anthropologists was assembled to provide guidance on morale and propaganda for a wider range of cultures, including, increasingly, those European countries that the Allies soon expected to be occupying. It also included Japan and, since Gorer was no longer available for this work, it was Benedict who did the ‘cultural analysis’ for OWI’s Japanese unit and whose work laid the foundation for the rumours that would later swirl around Mead.
Mead assigned to herself the job of ‘cracking’ Anglo-American relations, not only because her relationship with Bateson had made her an expert on the subject, she thought, but also because she was looking forward, beyond the war, to peacetime. The war, she felt, was an opportunity for anthropologists to raise the global ‘culture consciousness’ of Americans, but its context of aggression and adversarial thinking was hardly the best opportunity to foster the anthropologists’ ideal of a world of many cultures co-existing in mutual respect. So it behoved her, she thought, to work on the relationships between friends, not enemies. Her choice paid off when, in mid-1943, she was chosen by OWI as the principal cultural ambassador from the US to Britain, preparing the British to receive the half million Americans expected to arrive in the build-up to D-Day. She spent most of the second half of 1943 touring Britain, studying it almost as if it were Samoa or New Guinea, and applying her observations to the propaganda campaign to forge better understanding between the British and Americans. Rattling around the country in crowded, ramshackle trains, with a typewriter on her knee pounding out notes to self and letters to Bateson (still languishing in her museum office as a mere publicist), she spoke to large crowds of workers in factory canteens and to young people in cinemas; she dropped in on gatherings of social workers, Women’s Institutes, clinics, schools, nurseries and council estates. She found immense reservoirs of goodwill towards Americans but equally immense voids of ignorance. At one secondary school in Birmingham, the boys asked a series of bizarre questions which yet, she thought, held clues to Anglo-American attitudes: Do American women wear lights in their hats to signal taxis? In America do the bridges move and the cars stand still? Can you get the news on any station any time? Why do you kill people in an electric chair instead of hanging them? Which works better, your telephone system or ours? Do people live in skyscrapers?
Lost in translation
Towards the end of her tour she shifted from listening to preaching, broadcasting on the BBC, advising the US ambassador on how to manage the influx of troops and writing a series of propaganda pamphlets on Anglo-American relations, much like those ‘Instructions for American Servicemen in Britain 1942’ that are still sold as curiosities today, but with more cultural clout. It wasn’t enough, she thought, to teach Americans about pounds, shillings and pence, or about cricket and football, or to tell them not to boast or to criticise the king and queen: those were easy mistakes, easily rectified. The deeper problems were those the Americans wouldn’t even recognise without a thorough re-education. The most famous of her insights was contained in a pamphlet, ‘What Is A Date?’, aimed at assuaging British parents’ anxieties about GIs’ intentions for their daughters: the trick lay in British women understanding that the GIs’ ‘line’ was a bid for attention, not necessarily for sex. When she left, reluctantly, in November, she did so with a consciousness of a job of intercultural relations well done and in a good cause, preparing not only for D-Day but for a postwar world in which the Anglo-American friendship might serve as an international model. It was, thought the head of OWI’s London outpost, the ‘most significant job of translation that has been done in the war’.
While she had been away, however, her colleagues had inevitably been drawn ever more closely into the more immediate task of winning the war. Bateson, to Mead’s dismay, had volunteered for the Office of Strategic Services (OSS) in the Asian theatre and in the last year of the war disappeared into the jungles of Burma, where he applied his cultural knowledge to ‘dirty tricks’ against the Japanese. Benedict, too, had been shifted by OWI into ‘foreign morale analysis’, where her energies were bent, largely unsuccessfully, on persuading the military not to do so much damage to Japan in wartime that it would be impossible to repair in peace. It is from Benedict’s OWI work on Japan, notably recorded in the postwar bestseller The Chrysanthemum and the Sword, that most of the rumours about Mead’s occult powers stemmed. The anthropologists did recommend the retention of the emperor, but MacArthur had decided on this independently for reasons of his own. As Benedict’s boss at OWI mordantly commented: ‘The administrator uses social science the way a drunk uses a lamppost, for support rather than for illumination.’ They could be dispensed with, too, when that was convenient to the authorities. Their recommendation against the dropping of the atomic bombs, confident that Japanese morale would collapse without the need for them, was completely disregarded.
Victory for the discipline
Despite these setbacks, when the war ended Mead felt sure that she had won it, not for the Allies, but for anthropology. Surely the discipline had won that place at the top table, which she had coveted, both by showing its practical usefulness in war and by preparing politicians for the notion that in an increasingly interdependent world ‘translation’ of the kind that anthropologists offered would be vital. For a time her confidence seemed warranted. Anthropologists were widely employed in the immediate postwar years in the new international agencies created around the UN: in launching educational, medical, nutritional and other aid programmes in dozens of previously ignored countries, for which they had specialist expertise; in negotiating international conventions on race and human rights and socio-economic rights; and even in the State Department’s Foreign Service Institute, training diplomats and aid workers for ‘intercultural’ tasks.
But, as the Cold War set in late in the 1940s, the progress Mead and her circle had made during the Second World War and in its immediate aftermath began to unravel. It turned out – and who could have predicted this? – that the postwar world was going to be created not out of the relationships between many cultures but out of the relationship between two ideological camps. Neither of these camps had any use for the notion that the peoples of the world differed deeply according to culture and needed ‘translation’ to each other: both West and East held rather that the peoples of the world were basically all alike and could be won over by persuasion or coercion to the economic merits of communism or capitalism. An attempt by Mead and Gorer to apply their theories of intercultural difference to the Americans and the Russians proved fatal. By 1953, with the advent of the Eisenhower administration, almost all the anthropologists employed in US government agencies had been flushed out. The economists, it appeared, had won after all.
After 1953 Mead saw the writing on the wall and returned to ‘her’ natives in New Guinea. Thereafter she would craft an entirely different career for herself and her discipline, offering anthropological perspectives on domestic issues, much as she had before her venture into power politics. When the post-Vietnam generation emerged to challenge her generation’s leadership role in anthropology, they were determined to put that experiment in power politics behind them. Their job, they felt, was not to help great powers communicate with little ones: that sounded like an excuse for imperialism. By the 1960s anthropologists were seen as that group of social scientists least likely to have any interest in applying their knowledge to real-world problems. When, in the last decade, the US military has tried, somewhat feebly, to recruit anthropologists to help them with ‘counter-insurgency’ work in Iraq and Afghanistan (the vogue phrase is now ‘human terrain’, as if anthropologists were mechanised diggers in the human analogue to mountainous physical landscapes) the profession has spoken out practically with one voice against any such collaboration. In doing so it has made itself unavailable to cultural destructiveness, but it has also limited its future availability for cultural reconstruction.
Mead had sensed instinctively the dangers of rooting intercultural work in the bloody terrain of war. By focusing on friendly relations between allies she had tried to create a space, even in wartime, where a truly reciprocal, unmanipulative idea of intercultural relations could be fostered and where anthropologists could develop their intercultural tools in forms, as she wrote to Bateson in late 1944, ‘which will make them unacceptable to the bastards’. The mistakes she made, and the lessons she learned, especially when she was working with relative success in that brief interval of peace between hot war and cold, are very much worth pondering. It is time anthropologists consider again how they can contribute not to war-fighting but to peace-making in a world which needs their powers of intercultural ‘translation’ even more than it did in the 1940s.
