Browsing by Author "Roland, Alex"

In the 1950s and early 1960s, Great Britain's computing industry led the world in the development and application of computers for business and administrative work. The British government and civil service, paragons of meritocracy in a country stratified by class, committed themselves to implementing computerized data processing techniques throughout the sprawling public sector, in order to modernize their economy, maintain the competitiveness of British high-technology industries, and reconsolidate the nation's strength and reputation worldwide. To succeed in this project, the British government would need to leverage the country's existing expertise, cultivate the heterogeneous field of computing manufacturers, and significantly re-train labor.

By the 1970s, Britain's early lead in the field of computing had evaporated, government computing projects had produced disappointing results, and the nation's status as a world power had declined precipitously. This dissertation seeks to explain why British computing achieved so few of its intended results by looking at the intractable labor problems within the public sector during the heyday of the Britain's proclaimed "technological revolution." The dissertation argues that the interpretation of, and solutions for, these labor problems produced disastrous effects.

Sources used include government documents, civil service records, records of the nationalized industries (the Post Office, National Health Service, Central Electricity Generating Board, Coal Industry, Railways, and others), computing industry records, press accounts, and oral interviews. By using methodologies from the history of technology, institutional history, and labor history, as well as gender analysis, this dissertation shows that despite the government's commitment to both high technology usage and labor meritocracy, competing claims of technological expertise and management tradition led the government to misjudge the role of computing within the public sector and the nation.

Beginning with a labor situation in which women did the majority of computing work, and seeking to achieve a situation in which young men and management-level technocrats tightly controlled all digital computing, the British government over-centralized its own computing endeavors, and the nation's computing industry, leading to a dangerous winnowing of skill and expertise within the already-small field. The eventual takeover of the British computing market by IBM, and purchase of the last viable British computing company by Fujitsu, marked the end of any hope for Britain's computing dominance in either their home market or the global market.

While multiple factors contributed to the failures of government computing and the British computing industry--including, but not limited to, American competition, inability to effectively create a global market for British machines, and misjudging the public sector's computing needs--this dissertation argues that labor problems, arising largely from gendered concerns about technological change and power, constituted a critical, and unrecognized, stumbling block for Britain's government-led computing revolution.

Throughout much of the nineteenth century, the Marine Corps plodded along, a small military institution little known to the public. Moreover, the institution faced a host of problems ranging from recruiting difficulties and desertion to resisting absorption by the Army, or even elimination altogether. It also had to deal with a negative public image as promulgated by some naval officers and the press since the beginning of the nineteenth century. Marine officers were depicted as lazy and superfluous aboard ship, while enlisted Marines were portrayed as gullible fools who did not participate fully in running and maintaining the ship. By the end of World War I, however, the institution had transformed itself into a well-respected entity. Many Marines even viewed themselves as superior to sailors. Whatever problems the Corps would face throughout the twentieth century, public ignorance would not be one of them. The institution successfully had articulated an image of itself as an elite military institution of fighters.

Existing historiography on the Marine Corps tends to emphasize the institution's existential and finally successful quest for a mission. In contrast, Marines represented themselves as multidextrous, capable of all missions and responsibilities. They could not lay claim convincingly to a single mission because of their odd position between the land-based missions of the Army and the sea-based missions of the Navy. In response, the Corps promoted the notion of Marines as elite troops, suggesting it could fill any role and do it more effectively than other military branches. The institution created a flexible image that could be deployed in various forms to the public while simultaneously strengthening the institution's group identity.

This self-image required years of construction. Some aspects of this new representation grew out of the Corps' past experiences, but others had to be invented out of whole cloth. Individual officers composed a canonical history for the Corps and stressed traditions as the foundation of the Corps' corporate identity. By 1910 these foundation myths coalesced into coherent narrative. The Corps stressed it was an elite institution composed of picked men who prided themselves, albeit incorrectly, on being the nation's oldest military service and the best fighters. The Corps' Recruiting Publicity Bureau, established in 1911, adeptly fostered and even exaggerated this image. The Marine was a larger than life he-man, capable of anything and daunted by nothing.

This image was integral to the Corps' preparation for World War I. By the time the United States declared war against Germany in 1917, the Corps had positioned itself to obtain the types of recruits it wanted, train them, and assure their presence overseas in a land war that was atypical of the Corps' previous experience. The Bureau simultaneously sought to ensure the recruits it had attracted with an image would embrace the institution's identity. To this end the Bureau worked to instill the Corps' group identity into recruits during training and to reinforce this identity to fully-fledged Marines. The Corps' attention to wartime publicity reaped post-war dividends. By 1918, the word "Marine" was virtually a household name. Rather than being associated with any particular duty, it conjured up visions of indomitable, elite fighters. By the 1920s, fiction and myth became more important than history in maintaining and perpetuating this image. Between 1861 and 1918, then, the Corps successfully made it mean something significant to be a Marine.

During the First World War, approximately two million troops served with the American Expeditionary Forces (AEF), the army that functioned as the material and symbolic focal point of America's commitment to the defeat of the Central Powers. This dissertation examines the impact of training, active service and combat on the social identity of the draftees and volunteers who comprised the AEF. Reigning historiography has generally minimized the importance of those experiences as factors in the formation of distinct socio-cultural allegiances among American participants of the Great War. Instead, it has stressed the historical context of Progressive-Era reforms as the key to understanding the development of corporate identity among American soldiers in the years 1917 - 1919. This body of scholarship maintains that soldiers interpreted the meaning of their war service, and evaluated their relationship with each other and with the mainstream of American civil society, through the prism of the Progressive rhetoric of social engineering, national rejuvenation, and moral "uplift" to which they had been exposed from the moment of their induction. Exposure to the optimistic slogans of Progressive reform, coupled with the brevity of America's active involvement in the conflict, assured that American soldiers would emerge from the war with a heightened appreciation of American socio-political institutions, culture, and moral norms. This dissertation offers an alternative interpretation of the impact of the Great War on the collective and individual identities of its American participants. Using letters, diaries, and memoirs penned by enlisted soldiers and junior officers, it asserts the primacy of the war experience in shaping the socio-cultural allegiances of ordinary "Doughboys." Immersion in the organizational milieu of the military, followed by overseas deployment, active service in France, and combat on the Western Front, represented a radical break with civilian forms of identity soldiers professed prior to the war. It was the sum of these life-changing experiences, rather than the Progressive indoctrination they received in the training camps, that shaped soldiers' views of their relationship with each other and to the nation back home. Under the influence of these experiences, soldiers became members of an alternative social order whose values and worldviews frequently clashed with the attitudes and norms they associated with the American home front. Convinced they belonged to a closed community whose unique experiences had set them apart from the American mainstream, Doughboys emerged from the war with a collective mentality that dwelled on the fundamental differences, rather than the similarities, between those who had fought "over there" from those who remained "over here."

This dissertation addresses one of the most vexing issues in American foreign policy: Under what circumstances should the United States use military force in pursuit of national interests? Despite not having a policy upon entering office or articulating one throughout its first term, the Reagan administration used military force numerous times. Two-weeks following Reagan's landslide reelection victory, Secretary of Defense Caspar W. Weinberger articulated six tests for when and how to use military force, which surprisingly seemed to call for restraint. Through the examination of three case studies, the Reagan administration's decisions are found to have been influenced by the assimilation of lessons from Vietnam, the reading of public pulse, the desire to placate Congress, and the need to protect the nation's strategic interests. All these factors, ultimately codified by Weinberger, were considered by the leaders in the Reagan administration as they tried to expand the military's ability to help the U.S. meet an increasingly wider range of threats. Thus this dissertation will show that, contrary to what one finds in contemporary scholarship, the Weinberger doctrine was intended as a policy to legitimize the use of military force as a tool of statecraft, rather than an endorsement to reserve force as a last resort after other instruments of power have failed.

The second French colonial empire (1830-1962) challenged soldiers, scholars, and administrators to understand societies radically different from their own so as to govern them better. Overlooking the contributions of many of these colonial officials, most historians have located the genesis of the French social theory used to understand these differences in the hallowed halls of Parisian universities and research institutes. This dissertation instead argues that colonial experience and study drove metropolitan theory. Through a contextualized examination of the published and unpublished writings and correspondence of key thinkers who bridged the notional metropolitan-colonial divide, this dissertation reveals intellectual networks that produced knowledge of societies in North and West Africa and contemplated the nature of colonial rule. From General Louis Faidherbe in the 1840s to politician Jacques Soustelle and sociologist Pierre Bourdieu in the 1950s, a succession of soldiers and administrators engaged in dialogue with their symbiotic colonial sources to translate indigenous ideas for a metropolitan audience and humanize French rule in Africa. Developing ideas in part from a reading of native African written and oral sources, these particular colonial thinkers conceived of social structure and race in civilizational terms, placing peoples along a temporally-anchored developmental continuum that promised advancement along a unique pathway if nurtured by a properly adapted program of Western intervention. This perspective differed significantly from the theories proposed by social scientists such as Emile Durkheim, who described "primitivity" as a stage in a unilinear process of social evolution. French African political and social structures incorporated elements of this intellectual direction by the mid-twentieth century, culminating in the attempt by Jacques Soustelle to govern Algeria with the assistance of ethnological institutions. At the same time, Pierre Bourdieu built on French ethnological ideas in an empirically grounded and personally contingent alternative to the dominant structuralist sociological and anthropological perspective in France.

Approached as an interdisciplinary study, this dissertation considers colonial knowledge from a number of different angles. First, it is a history of French African ethnology viewed through a biographical and microhistorical lens. Thus, it reintroduces the variance in the methods and interpretations employed by individual scholars and administrators that was a very real part of both scientific investigation and colonial rule. Race, civilization, and progress were not absolutes; definitions and sometimes applications of these terms varied according to local and personal socio-cultural context. This study also considers the evolution of French social theory from a novel perspective, that of the amateur fieldworker in the colonies. Far from passive recipients of metropolitan thought, these men (and sometimes women) actively shaped metropolitan ideas on basic social structure and interaction as they emerged. In the French science de l'homme, intellectual innovation came not always from academics in stuffy rooms, but instead from direct interaction and dialogue with the subjects of study themselves.

In the years 1866-1916, the U.S. Army changed from a frontier constabulary to an industrial age force capable of expeditionary operations. This conversion was made possible by organizational reforms including the creation of a system of professional education, a coordinating central staff, and doctrine integrating tactics, equipment, and organization. Yet formal structures acted in parallel with the informal culture of the officer corps, which proved far more resistant to change. This dissertation will follow the formulation of these reforms by Emory Upton following the Civil War, through their implementation by Elihu Root in the early twentieth century. It concludes in 1916, when new conditions produced an entirely different agenda for reform.

This period has generally been interpreted in one of two ways. Previous scholarship examining the internal workings of the Army has seen it as a transition from obsolete to modern organization. Despite disagreements as to the origins, impetus, and length of reform, the theme of progress has been consistent. In contrast, the historiography of the Army's external relationship with society has interpreted reform as a failed attempt to introduce militarism by mimicking foreign military institutions alien to American traditions. Although some of the foreign organizational forms were adopted, society ultimately rejected the militarist aims. This dissertation modifies both interpretations by arguing that these reforms were not as great a break with previous practices as generally asserted. The internal changes were actually a reordering of existing practices made possible by the sudden elevation of the reforming faction to organizational power. Individuals sought to emphasize only those limited aspects of the old professional culture that they valued. These individual aims often diverged, leading to a series of disjointed reforms that, while successful in altering the army, did so in unanticipated ways. These internal efforts were meant to improve the army's effectiveness; there was little effort to alter the Army's role in society. Yet the next generation of reformers sought such a change under the dubious guise of a return to tradition. In doing so, they falsely portrayed their predecessors as foreign-inspired militarists, a mischaracterization that has been largely accepted by historians.

The United States began to look beyond its continental boundaries and acquire a new, far-flung empire in the late nineteenth century. Two decades later, a national draft and mobilization program brought millions of men into the army when the United States intervened in the First World War. The U.S. Army also experienced several major changes in the first four decades of the twentieth century, including massive growth in the size of the army's forces, changes in the demographics of soldiers and a related effort "Americanize" the army, and increased professionalization and internal reform as the army attempted to improve its performance and increase its standing in the nation. Along with these changes came the efforts of influential Progressive social and moral reformers who sought to reform the U.S. Army and inculcate newly enlisted soldiers with middle-class values and behavior. Over time, army leaders and War Department officials found that they needed to address the perennial set of problems that soldiers' sexual relationships created for the army and its new long-term missions in Asia and Europe. While the U.S Army was initially interested in the sex lives of soldiers primarily for utilitarian reasons, it eventually assumed an institutional interest in cultivating particular kinds of masculine identities for soldiers.

This dissertation explores how the U.S. Army of the early twentieth century conceived of a host of issues related to sexuality: marriage and family life, prostitution and venereal disease, rape and sexual violence, same-sex sexuality, and conceptions of masculinity, among others. It examines how the army sought to regulate and shape the sexual behaviors of soldiers and the civilians with whom they came into sexual contact. The sexual cultures, practices, and behaviors of soldiers and their partners, along with the U.S. Army's efforts to regulate their sexuality, constitute what it describes as the "sexual economy of war." This dissertation argues that the U.S. Army first attempted to gain control of almost all aspects of soldiers' sexuality and then tried to carefully manage and regulate that sexual economy to best fulfill the army's missions. The army suppressed soldiers' sexual behaviors and expressions that it perceived as running counter to the good of the service or creating inefficiencies. It encouraged those aspects of sexual identity that the army believed benefited the service - for instance, hypermasculine demeanor and actions - eventually purging soldiers who engaged in same-sex sexual activities because these practices became linked with effeminacy and mental disorders and producing a set of militant masculinities among soldiers.

These issues are explored through five case studies of specific time periods and geographic areas: Fort Riley in Kansas from 1898-1940; the Philippines from 1898-1918; Camp Beauregard in Louisiana, 1917-1919; the American Expeditionary Forces (AEF) in France and the American Forces in Germany (AFG), 1917-1923; and Hawaii, 1909-1940. The army's new position in American society, especially after World War I, and its overseas operations opened up a host of new and different kinds of sexual politics, possibilities, and relationships for all those touched by the U.S. Army's regulation of sexuality.

This dissertation analyzes the history of the press bureau of the German Foreign Office before the First World War. Methodologically, the work tries to locate European international history in a larger political, intellectual, and cultural context by examining German statesmen and their attempts to cultivate a consensus for their policies in the Reichstag and the press from 1890 to 1914. Relying upon official documents, memoirs, personal letters, and published newspaper articles, it argues that the death of the "Old Diplomacy," usually associated with the years after the Versailles Peace Treaty, actually began as early as 1890. This development caused German statesmen after Bismarck's dismissal to invent new ways of building public support for their policies through the creation of what is labeled here the "Bülow-Hammann System" of public relations. Eschewing Bismarckian methods of compulsion, this new system cultivated personal connections with journalists from trusted newspapers who would toe a government line for inside information. The system initially worked well to meet the new openness of the international milieu after 1890. But eventually these methods failed to stem criticism on the nationalist right and socialist left after 1909, when Germany's position vis-à-vis France, Britain, and Russia greatly deteriorated. As a result, more modern methods of dealing with public opinion had to be developed in Germany after 1914--the dissemination of outright propaganda and the use of modern press conferences--to cultivate support for governmental policies.