macekura2013

The Point Four Program and U.S.
International Development Policy
STEPHEN MACEKURA
IN HIS 1949 INAUGURAL ADDRESS, President Harry S. Truman
enunciated a new direction for American foreign policy. The fourth point of
his speech proclaimed a “bold, new program” to redress the economic
backwardness and political instability that plagued underdeveloped regions
of the world. It called for an innovative policy to replace the “old
imperialism,” which Truman defined as “exploitation for foreign profit,”
with a constructive project designed to develop foreign domestic productive
capabilities as a means to foster global prosperity and stability. Truman
stated that experts from the United States should share their “technical
knowledge” with underdeveloped countries to create a domestic environ-
ment in which collaborative efforts of private capital and local labor could
facilitate economic growth and raise standards of living. Truman’s “Point
Four program” extended his “fair deal” to the development of the
underdeveloped world.1
Though Truman deemed his program “bold” and “new,” in reality, the
administration of Franklin D. Roosevelt set a series of key precedents
1
Harry S. Truman, Inaugural Address, 20 January 1949, accessed at http://www.trumanlibrary.org/
whistlestop/50yr_archive/inagural20jan1949.htm, 12 October 2007. The “Point Four Program” was the
name given to the international program of technical assistance that emerged out of the fourth point of
Truman’s inaugural. Though officially the Technical Cooperation Administration oversaw these technical
assistance projects, most policymakers in the late 1940s and early 1950s referred to these policies as the “Point
Four program.”
STEPHEN MACEKURA is a Ph.D. candidate in the Corcoran Department of History at the

University of Virginia and a Dissertation Fellow at the Miller Center for Public Affairs. He
has published various articles on U.S. foreign relations, international development, and
environmental politics.
POLITICAL SCIENCE QUARTERLY | Volume 128 Number 1 2013 | www.psqonline.org

© 2013 Academy of Political Science 127
128 | POLITICAL SCIENCE QUARTERLY
for U.S. policy toward the underdeveloped world in the late 1930s and early
1940s.2 Roosevelt established the Institute for Inter‐American Affairs
(IIAA) in 1939 to work collaboratively with Latin American governments to
oversee the extraction of raw materials, increase domestic production in
cooperating nations, and combat Nazi inroads into the New World. During
World War II, the U.S. government expanded the IIAA to facilitate the
production of materials necessary for the war effort. The United States
hosted the 1944 Bretton Woods conference to create two supranational
economic organizations—the International Bank for Reconstruction and
Development (World Bank) and the International Monetary Fund—to
promote post‐war stability. By the end of the military conflicts in Europe
and Asia, the United States slowly began the arduous processes of relief,
reconstruction, and ultimately, development of an international system
undergoing profound transformation.
To accomplish the daunting task of European recovery, U.S. policy-
makers employed government funds to establish a freer and more open
international economic system to remedy the autarkic trading practices
that characterized the pre‐war world.3 Having recovered from the Great
Depression through the government spending policies of the New Deal and
wartime mobilization, U.S. officials “were committed to a positive role for
the state in promoting the general welfare” of peoples abroad.4 A 1943
Department of Commerce report suggested that the federal government
should offer “direct material assistance” to Europe and Asia for post‐war
relief and direct future international economic development projects.5 In
the late 1940s, the Truman administration increasingly exercised the
2
“Underdeveloped,” the term that preceded the neologism of “third world,” referred to nations or regions that
produced primary products, lacked financial capital, and governed with limited democratic institutions or
had recently declared independence. For more on the discourse of “underdevelopment,” see Gilbert Rist, The
History of Development: From Western Origins to Global Faith (London: Zed Books, Ltd., 1997), chap. 4.
3
On Bretton Woods, see Fred Block, The Origins of International Economic Disorder: A Study of United
States International Monetary Policy from World War II to the Present (Berkeley: University of California
Press, 1977. Alfred E. J. Eckes, Jr., A Search for Solvency: Bretton Woods and the International Monetary
System, 1941–1971 (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1975). On post‐war institution building, see John
Ikenberry, After Victory: Institutions, Strategic Restraint, and the Rebuilding of Order after Major Wars
(Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2001), chap. 6. See also Melvyn Leffler, A Preponderance of Power:
National Security, the Truman Administration, and the Cold War (Stanford, CA: Stanford, University Press,
1992); Michael Hogan, The Marshall Plan: America, Britain, and the Reconstruction of Western Europe,
1947–1952 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987); Gabriel Kolko and Joyce Kolko, The Limits of
Power: The World and United States Foreign Policy, 1945–1954 (New York: Harper & Row, 1972); and Odd
Arne Westad, The Global Cold War: Third World Interventions and the Making of Our Times (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 2007), 152–153.
4
Michael J. Hogan, A Cross of Iron: Harry S. Truman and the Origins of the National Security State, 1945–
1954 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 5.
5
Hal B. Lary, et al., The United States in the World Economy: The International Transactions of the United
States During the Interwar Period (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1975), 18–19.
THE POINT FOUR PROGRAM | 129
administrative manpower and financial resources of the federal govern-

ment to implement economic policies to promote international trade, such
as lowering tariffs, and strategic initiatives to pursue international stability,
such as institutionalizing military alliances. The creation of the General
Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT), the Marshall Plan, and NATO
reflected this change.6 Outside of Europe, other regions ravaged by the war,
such as the Soviet Union, North Africa, and East Asia, also desperately
required recovery and reconstruction aid. New nations emerging in Africa,
the Middle East, and Asia sought assistance not only for rehabilitation, but
also for building the infrastructure required for nascent nation‐states to
compete in the global market.
Out of this context arose the Point Four program. Point Four’s basic
premises mirrored and further developed those of other assistance
programs proposed by the Roosevelt and Truman administrations. The
program used American technical expertise and a philosophy of “self‐help”
through mixed public and private investment to promote economic growth.
It also intended to create an open and extensive capitalist trading bloc.7
Moreover, the program presumed that economic growth and relatively free
trade would foster political stability, democratization, and strategic
allegiance with the United States.
Despite the similarities in objectives, Truman’s program represented a
distinctive change in the means to achieve foreign policy goals. Unlike the
narrow vision of the State Department’s IIAA programs in Latin America,
Point Four expanded development programs to include the entire
underdeveloped world and linked national economic growth to a regional
defense strategy and global trading relationships. Unlike the Bretton
Woods organizations, Point Four was explicitly an American program—it
employed only U.S. officials, used funding exclusively from Congress, and
required administrative oversight from U.S. governmental organizations.
In contrast to the Marshall Plan, Point Four had global development aims
6
On the Marshall Plan, see Hogan, The Marshall Plan; Robert Wood, “From the Marshall Plan to the Third
World” in Melvyn P. Leffler and David S. Painter, eds. The Origins of the Cold War: An International History,
2d ed. (New York: Routledge, 1994), 239–50; Marc Trachtenberg, A Constructed Peace: The Making of
European Settlement, 1945–1963 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1999); Greg Behrman, The
Most Noble Adventure: The Marshall Plan and the Time When America Helped Save Europe (New York: Free
Press, 2007). For the institutionalization of alliances, see Ikenberry, After Victory, chap. 6.
7
On this point, see the introduction in Burton Kaufman, Trade and Aid: Eisenhower’s Foreign Economic
Policy, 1953–1961 (Baltimore, MD: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1982); Diane B. Kunz, Butter and
Guns: America’s Cold War Economic Diplomacy (New York: The Free Press, 1997), Charles L. Mee, Jr. The
Marshall Plan: The Launching of Pax Americana (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1984); David S. Painter,
The Cold War: An International History (Routledge: London, 1999); Kolko and Kolko, Limits of Power.
that focused on underdeveloped nations emerging from colonial status and

proposed less governmental funding.8
Historians have often neglected detailed studies of Point Four,
disparaged the program as exploitative, or dismissed it as insignificant.9
As opposed to the simplistic and rudimentary image of Point Four
portrayed in these interpretations, the program operated on a complex
theory of development that linked small‐scale assistance with larger
geopolitical strategy. This paper explores all the dimensions that
contributed to the program’s origins—security concerns, strategic goals,
economic philosophies and intentions, and ideological visions. Point Four
was especially significant because it gave institutional expression to a
protean ideology of international development. As the first formal
government program explicitly designed to ameliorate social, economic,
and political conditions in any “underdeveloped” nation, Point Four
brought international development policy into the U.S. foreign policy
apparatus to an unprecedented extent.
Scholars have recently explored how modernization theory shaped U.S.
development policy in the Third World.10 These works focus heavily on the
nation‐building policies of the 1950s and 1960s, when modernization
theorists became influential in the policymaking circles of the U.S.
government, particularly in the administration of John F. Kennedy.
Surprisingly, only a few scholars have examined Point Four as an
8
Robert Wood, “From the Marshall Plan to the Third World” in Leffler and Painter, eds. The Origins of the
Cold War. Though Wood argues that the Marshall Plan had global implications, a claim I do not dispute, I
argue for a distinction between global implications and global intentions. The Marshall Plan focused on
recovery and reconstruction of Western Europe; Point Four focused on developing the entire
“underdeveloped” world.
9
See for instance, Kolko and Kolko, Limits of Power, 623–624; Thomas Paterson, Meeting the Communist
Threat: Truman to Reagan (New York: Oxford University Press, 1988), 152–153; Thomas Paterson, “Foreign
Aid Under Wraps: The Point Four Program,” Wisconsin Magazine of History, 56 (1972–1973): 119–126; and
Robert A. Pollard and Samuel F. Wells, Jr. “1945–1960: The Era of American Economic Hegemony” in
Robert A. Pollard and Samuel F. Wells, Jr., eds. Economics and World Power: An Assessment of American
Diplomacy Since 1789 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1984), 350–353; Arturo Escobar,
Encountering Development: The Making and Unmaking of the Third World (Princeton, NJ: Princeton
University Press, 1994), 33–36.
10
Modernization theory referred to a view of long‐term societal development that melded models of capitalist
economic growth with social science research. For a more‐detailed definition, see Michael Latham,
“Introduction: Modernization, International History, and the Global Cold War World” in David C.
Engerman, Nils Gilman, Mark H. Haefele, and Michael E. Latham, eds., Staging Growth: Modernization,
Development, and the Global Cold War (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2003), 1–22. One book
that does offer a thorough exploration of Point Four is Sergei Y. Shenin, The United States and the Third
World: The Origins of Postwar Relations and the Point Four Program (Huntington, NY: Nova Science
Publishers, Inc., 2000).
institutional precedent for such policies.11 Yet the ideas and implementa-
tion of Point Four reflected the basic approach to international
development that modernization theorists later proposed. In its initial
formulation, Point Four conflated political development with economic
modernization and affirmed American technical expertise as a guiding force
for international development policy. Point Four, and more broadly,
development, also served as a means to redress the socioeconomic
environment that some policymakers believed fostered Communist
sympathies. Thus, the ideological and institutional framework set forth
by the Point Four program during the Truman administration defined the
way in which the United States interacted with the Third World and
precipitated the acceptance of the modernization theory in U.S. foreign
policy.
FROM THE NEW DEAL TO POINT FOUR: A BRIEF HISTORY OF

POLICY PRECEDENTS
The policy precedents for the Point Four program date back to the
nineteenth century. In his 1954 study on Point Four’s origins, historian
Merle Curti identified the earliest conceptual precedents in ad hoc
agricultural exchange programs between Western Europe and the United
States in the 1840s.12 Programs of agricultural reform, the modernization of
infrastructure, and material development in the Philippines at the turn of
the twentieth century represented a more coherent approach for promoting
development in a single nation, as well as an early instance of linking
economic modernization to social improvement and political develop-
ment.13 Bilateral technical aid missions designed to offer American
agricultural and economic consulting to many Asian and South American
11
See Michael E. Latham, Modernization as Ideology: American Social Science and “Nation Building” in the
Kennedy Era (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2000); Michael Adas “Modernization Theory
and the American Revival of the Scientific and Technological Standards of Social Achievement and Human
Worth” in David C. Engerman, Nils Gilman, Mark H. Haefele, and Michael E. Latham, eds., Staging Growth,
25–41; Nils Gilman, Mandarins of the Future: Modernization Theory in Cold War America (Baltimore, MD:
Johns Hopkins University Press, 2003); Amy L. S. Staples, The Birth of Development: How the World Bank,
Food and Agriculture Organization, and World Health Organization Changed the World, 1945–1963 (Kent,
OH: The Kent State University Press, 2006); and the conclusion of Westad, The Global Cold War. On the
importance of Point Four as a precedent for later development policies, see Rist, The History of Development,
chap. 4; and Escobar, Encountering Development, Introduction.
12
Merle Curti and Kendall Birr, Prelude to Point Four: American Technical Missions Overseas, 1838–1938
(Madison: The University of Wisconsin Press, 1954), chap. 2.
13
Paul A. Kramer, The Blood of Government: Race, Empire, the United States, and the Philippines (Chapel
Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 2006), 308–312; Leonard F. Giesecke, History of American
Economic Policy in the Philippines during the American Colonial Period, 1900–1935 (New York: Garland
Publishing, Inc., 1987), 213–214.
countries proliferated through the interwar years, as did programs that

proffered financial experts abroad to help modernize economies during the
years of “dollar diplomacy.”14
The most‐salient intellectual and policy precedents for programs of post‐
war relief, recovery, and development, however, lay in the New Deal and
World War II. The Tennessee Valley Authority’s (TVA) program of rural
electrification and community development provided concrete examples of
how to raise standards of living in an impoverished region, through methods
consonant with democratic principles.15 TVA officials taught farmers how to
increase crop yields, developed new fertilizers, laid new power lines, and
constructed powerful hydroelectric dams that used available water resources
to power the region. Herman Finer, a political scientist who worked in the
TVA offices during the late 1930s, produced a prescriptive book in 1944
entitled The T.V.A.: Lessons for International Application. The book extolled
the TVA’s successful campaign to raise the standards of living of an
impoverished rural population, and highlighted the plasticity of the TVA’s
principles and their applicability to other locations around the globe.16 The
TVA appeared as a solution to social, political, and economic problems, all in
one governmental program. Moreover, historian Nils Gilman argues that
because the TVA relied upon the three pillars of government—oversight,
private investment, and technical expertise—the agency represented a stage
within a larger technocratic movement that would shape thinking about
economic reconstruction programs abroad.17
In the 1940s, the TVA became an administrative and intellectual
blueprint for revitalizing economically underdeveloped regions outside the
United States. Vice President and former Secretary of Agriculture Henry
Wallace talked about the need for an “international TVA” at a conference in
1942.18 During meetings with Joseph Stalin at Yalta, President Roosevelt
suggested that the TVA might provide a reasonable paradigm for
approaching the problems of immediate European recovery.19 Some of
14
Curti and Birr, Prelude to Point Four, chaps 7–8.
15
David Ekbladh, “‘Mr. TVA’: Grass‐roots Development, David Lilienthal, and the Rise and Fall of the
Tennessee Valley Authority as a Symbol for Overseas Development, 1933–1973,” Diplomatic History 26
(Summer 2002): 336–337.
16
Herman Finer, The T.V.A.: Lessons for International Application (Montreal: International Labour Office,
1944).
17
Gilman, Mandarins of the Future, 38.
18
Ibid., i.
19
Former WPA director and Roosevelt’s close adviser Harry Hopkins recounted the story to State
Department consultant Isador Lubin. Isador Lubin, “Problems of Carrying out Programs of Point 4,” 14
April, 1949. Department of State Transcript, Box 1, Office of Assistant Secretary for Economic Affairs,
Records Relating to Economic Aid Programs 1946–1949, RG 59, NARA II.
Roosevelt’s contemporaries even referred to the Marshall Plan as a

“European TVA.”20 Moreover, the program’s proven ability to remedy
social, political, and economic problems implied to some observers that it
could be an effective weapon against communism. Arthur Schlesinger, Jr.,
the influential historian and public intellectual, stated that the TVA was “a
weapon which, if properly employed, might outbid all the social
ruthlessness of the Communists for support of the people of Asia.”21
For U.S. officials, the TVA offered a method for the United States to transfer
its superior technological capabilities and simultaneously develop local
capacity to use that technology.22 Foreign leaders, too, saw potential
benefits in the rapid modernization capabilities of the TVA. By 1955,
France, Australia, Mexico, and India instituted similar rural electrification
and community development projects as the TVA became a symbol for
environmental, economic, and political development.23
Whereas the TVA became a potential model for remedying depressed
economic regions, the Institute of Inter‐American Affairs represented the
first coherent U.S. policy designed to address issues of international
economic development. The IIAA originated in the efforts of private
philanthropic endeavors. In the first few decades of the twentieth century,
church and religious agency leaders traveled throughout Latin America,
where they offered food assistance, agricultural tools, and educational
services, often in the form of school‐building.24 Private foundations and
several universities soon followed. Organizations such as the Rockefeller
Foundation also financed schools, conducted agricultural research, and
instituted educational exchange programs in South American countries in
the 1920s and 1930s.25
The idea for a unified program of economic development for the
continent arose out of the experiences of quintessential modernizer and
philanthropist Nelson Rockefeller. Rockefeller visited Latin America
throughout the 1930s, where he witnessed first‐hand both low standards
of living and almost universal resentment toward American (and his
20
Gilman, Mandarins of the Future, 39.
21
Ibid.
22
Ekbladh, ‘“Mr. TVA,”’ 348–349.
23
James Dahir, Region Building: Community Development Lessons from the Tennessee Valley (New York:
Harper & Brothers Publishing, 1955), 154–156.
24
For more on this, see Philip M. Glick, The Administration of Technical Assistance: Growth in the Americas
(Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1957), 4–6; Landrum R. Bolling and Craig Smith, Private Foreign
Aid: U.S. Philanthropy for Relief and Development (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1982), chap. 3.
25
Glick, The Administration of Technical Assistance, 5; Bolling and Smith, Private Foreign Aid, chap. 4.
family’s) corporate investments.26 Upon returning from his various trips to

Latin America, especially Venezuela, Rockefeller spoke of a new‐found
commitment to increase agricultural yields, enhance modern public health
facilities, and promote infrastructure improvement.27 He gathered together
a group of advisers, including prominent New Dealer Beardsley Ruml, to
formulate a potential development program of such technical assistance
projects to propose to President Roosevelt.28 Rockefeller sought a policy
that committed U.S. government resources to Latin American economic
development, but significantly, also advocated one that would tie such
economic policy to the strategic interests of the United States. Working
with Ruml, the two presented a proposal entitled “Hemisphere Economic
Policy” to the White House in 1938.29
President Roosevelt and his close adviser, Harry Hopkins, welcomed the
report. Roosevelt viewed it as a way to implement a policy that would
consolidate U.S. regional objectives into a single, coherent program. The
President had previously advocated the Good Neighbor Policy to stress regional
economic ties and emphasized the importance of hemispheric defense against
European fascism at the Buenos Aires Conference in 1936.30 With enthusiasm,
Roosevelt appointed Rockefeller to head the newly established Office of Inter‐
American Affairs (OIAA) in 1939. The Office immediately sent diplomatic
missions throughout Latin America to examine potential locations for
Rockefeller’s proposed programs of internal improvements. To administer
these programs, Roosevelt formed the Interdepartmental Committee on
Scientific and Cultural Cooperation in 1939. In April 1940, following the
escalation of World War II in Europe, Roosevelt issued an Executive Order to
create the Office of the Coordinator of Inter‐American Affairs, chaired by
Nelson Rockefeller. The new office promptly adopted resolutions to facilitate
the production of Latin American rubber resources and to extract minerals
necessary to wartime production in the United States.31 Subsequently, in
26
Elizabeth Anne Cobbs, The Rich Neighbor Policy: Rockefeller and Kaiser in Brazil (New Haven: Yale
University Press, 1992), 28–29.
27
Claude Erb, “Prelude to Point Four: The Institute of Inter‐American Affairs,” Diplomatic History 9
(Summer 1985): 254–257.
28
“Technical assistance” was a broad term that preceded the term “development” in the parlance of U.S.
policymakers. Technical assistance referred to a variety of projects—from modernizing agricultural
techniques to offering education services, to constructing infrastructure—designed to develop a given region
or nation.
29
Ibid., 33; Darlene Rivas, Missionary Capitalist: Nelson Rockefeller in Venezuela (Chapel Hill: The
University of North Carolina Press, 2002), 38–40.
30
See Lloyd C. Gardner, Economic Aspects of New Deal Diplomacy (Madison: The University of Wisconsin
Press, 1964), chap. 3, for a brief overview of the economic and strategic dimensions of the Good Neighbor
Policy.
31
Glick, The Administration of Technical Assistance, 16–18; Rivas, Missionary Capitalist, 53–57.
1940, Congress appropriated $500 million in capital funds through the

Export–Import Bank to stimulate Latin American industries, and between
September 1939 and September 1940, U.S. investment in Latin American
nations increased by around $400 million.32
After the war ended, the Truman administration transformed the OIAA
into a government‐owned corporation, the Institute of Inter‐American
Affairs, to coordinate all assistance programs to Latin American nations
under Rockefeller’s supervision.33 IIAA programs proliferated thereafter.
By 1949, the organization coordinated projects related to hospital
construction, educational development, and vocational training in most
Latin American nations.34 Though managed by government officials, the
programs relied heavily upon private investment, which became the main
source of capital flows from the United States.35
The IIAA programs became an instructive model for engaging in
technical assistance projects and the most significant precedent of Point
Four. Central to the IIAA model was the servicio, a Deweyian pedagogical
approach that emphasized “learning by doing.” The servicio operated as an
exchange program, whereby U.S. agricultural, health, or other scientific
experts traveled to Latin American countries to help satisfy immediate relief
concerns or improve infrastructure. These experts taught local farmers and
entrepreneurs how to use new agricultural equipment, offered new types of
seeds, introduced new cultivation techniques, built new roads, and
provided additional information for other such projects. In return, the
United States ensured that raw materials vital to the war effort from
unstable areas, such as rubber from malaria‐infested regions of Brazil,
continued to flow northward.36
In the servicio model, American government officials worked collabora-
tively with private investors and academic experts throughout Latin
America. Rarely did the U.S. government itself undertake actual
development projects; American experts instead intended to cultivate an
ethos of “self‐help” in the host countries. Moreover, the point of the servicio
was not to allow American officials and private investors to unilaterally
exploit foreign lands for profit—that would represent the “old imperialism”
32
Gardner, Economic Aspects of New Deal Diplomacy, 129–131.
33
Cobbs, The Rich Neighbor Policy, 102.
34
Department of State Bulletin, 20 February 1949, 212.
35
See Rivas, Missionary Capitalist, chap. 3; and David Halloran Lumsdaine, Moral Vision in International
Politics: The Foreign Aid Regime (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1993), chap. 7.
36
Rivas, Missionary Capitalist, 55. For a broader overview of the servicio, see the entirety of chapter 2 in
Rivas and chapter 3 of Jonathan Bingham, Shirt‐Sleeve Diplomacy: Point 4 In Action (New York: The John
Day Company, 1954).
that Truman later deplored. Rather, the servicio proposed to train local
government officials and entrepreneurs to encourage a collective philoso-
phy of self‐reliance that could propel future development independent of
continued U.S. governmental investment. This model of technical
assistance based upon national “self‐help” also appeared in the 1946
Philippine Rehabilitation Act, which trained U.S. nationals to foster similar
programs for domestic infrastructure building.37 It also became a hallmark
of Point Four.
Whereas the IIAA represented the earliest formulations of U.S.
development policy for a specific region, post‐war relief programs offered
some of the earliest articulations of U.S. government‐funded foreign aid for
relief and recovery. Following World War I, various U.S. organizations,
such as Herbert Hoover’s Belgian Relief drive, provided essential goods and
services to devastated regions. Following the immediate food drives,
supranational bodies, such as the League of Nations, assumed a
commanding role and provided loans for post‐war relief and aid programs
for refugees in the 1920s. Though these groups aided millions of displaced
persons in Europe, programs launched toward the end of World War II,
such as the U.S. Office for Planning for Relief and Reconstruction and its
successor organization, the United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation
Administration (UNRRA), marked a distinctive change in the size and
scope of U.S. relief policy.38
UNRRA offered extensive food, medicine, and agricultural supplies to
war‐ravaged Europe. It also created and implemented immediate recovery
projects, such as rebuilding roads and hospitals, in areas throughout
Europe.39 By rebuilding national infrastructure, the program demonstrat-
ed that the U.S. government willingly embraced a leading role in
establishing comprehensive programs of post‐war relief and recovery.
UNRRA also represented a wider institutionalization of international
relationships. The central governing council of the organization extended
membership to Great Britain, the USSR, and China; and numerous other
allies signed the founding articles.40 Although the United States provided
37
Department of State Bulletin, 20 February 1949, 212. For further discussion of the Philippine
Rehabilitation Act as well as various relief and recovery acts, see Nick Cullather, Illusions of Influence: The
Political Economy of United States–Philippines Relations, 1942–1960 (Stanford, CA: Stanford University
Press, 1994), especially chap. 2.
38
Department of State Bulletin, 20 February 1949, 206.
39
Agreement for United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration, November 9, 1943, accessed at
http://www.ibiblio.org/pha/policy/1943/431109a.html, 12 January 2008. For a general history of UNRRA,
see George Woodbridge, UNRRA: The History of the United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation
Administration (New York: Columbia University Press, 1950).
40
Ibid.
the majority of the program’s funding, upwards of 70 percent, other nations

also donated to the organization.41 Accordingly, the program signified the
beginnings of two key components of future foreign aid: international
cooperation and the governmental institutionalization of relief and
recovery programs.
These components also underscored the creation of the Marshall Plan,
the largest single economic assistance program undertaken by the United
States in the post‐war period. For American policymakers, the Marshall
Plan had two mutually reinforcing purposes—it rebuilt European national
economies along liberal, capitalist lines while advancing the political and
strategic interests of the United States. The Marshall Plan bound together
the industrialized nations of Western Europe into an economically
interdependent international system. As historian Robert Wood notes,
the Marshall Plan also incorporated underdeveloped nations and colonial
dependencies into its larger reconstruction plan. The colonial territories
represented potential markets for Western Europe at a time when
traditional markets in Eastern Europe were gradually falling under Soviet
control. Additionally, American policymakers believed that these nations
would help European metropoles overcome the dollar gap as a result of
earnings that would flow to them from their possessions in the Third
World.42
By redressing Europe’s economic problems, U.S. policymakers believed
that they could create an international, capitalist system to thwart the
potential spread of Soviet Communism. Officials presumed that enlarging
the global capitalist bloc and promoting relatively free trading policies
would prevent the return of the autarkic economic practices of the pre‐war
period. By extension, this viable and economically interdependent Western
Europe could mitigate the influence of popular Communist parties in
Western Europe. This extensive capitalist system would also effectively
defend itself against any prospective advances from the Soviet Union.43
Accordingly, the Marshall Plan increasingly connected the United States
and Western Europe to underdeveloped nations and colonial dependencies
and linked objectives of economic growth with political strategy. In both an
ideological and institutional sense, the Marshall Plan employed many of the
same ideas that underscored the creation of Point Four.
41
Lumsdaine, Moral Vision in International Politics, 211.
42
Wood, “From the Marshall Plan to the Third World,” 240–241. See also Pollard and Wells, Jr., “1945–
1960: The Era of American Economic Hegemony,” 350.
43
Hogan, The Marshall Plan, 26–27.
Following the Marshall Plan, Latin American leaders made it clear that
they, too, wanted recovery assistance. In anticipation of the early 1948
Bogota Conference, State Department officials stated that “economic
development is today the major objective of Latin American policy.”44
Assistant Secretary of State Will Clayton noted that “considerable talk”
floated around on the eve of the Bogota Conference in late 1947 for “a
Marshall Plan for Latin America.” Clayton acknowledged the need for
economic development in Latin America, but foresaw that the Marshall
Plan would not translate directly to the region. Instead, he argued that
Latin America needed extensive capital investment, modern machinery,
and engineering services for its recovery. Though organizations such as the
Export–Import Bank and IIAA had offered loans and technical assistance,
respectively, they had not done enough for Latin America. Yet a program on
the scale of the Marshall Plan, in Clayton’s eyes, was not politically
expedient. “We could not think of asking Congress to duplicate [the
Marshall Plan] by grants for development purposes,” he plainly stated,
because “the Marshall Plan is wholly inapplicable to the Latin American
situation.” Latin American nations required a different program, one that
focused more on modernizing and investing in underdeveloped regions.45
By the late 1940s, U.S. foreign aid policies operated in a piecemeal
fashion. The IIAA, UNRRA, and Marshall Plan all linked national and
regional economic development to the advancement of U.S. political and
economic objectives in the international system, yet each program targeted
different regions through different means. U.S. foreign policy makers
increasingly understood the importance of developing the underdeveloped
world, but lacked a coherent program to pursue such aims. In this context,
Point Four emerged as a way to reconcile these international objectives
through a unified policy.
THE PROGRAM DEVELOPS: THE ADMINISTRATIVE AND

INTELLECTUAL DEVELOPMENT OF POINT FOUR
In anticipation of the 1949 inaugural address, Truman aides Clark Clifford
and George Elsey asked the State Department for new ideas regarding a
“democratic manifesto addressed to the peoples of the world.”46 The
advisers wanted to include a statement of the U.S. commitment to the
44
“Suggested Plan for Economic Aid to Latin America,” box 1, Office of Assistant Secretary for Economic
Affairs, Records Relating to Economic Aid Programs 1946–1959, RG 59.
45
William Clayton, December 2, 1947 memorandum to Assistant Secretary Armour, box 1, Office of Assistant
Secretary for Economic Affairs, Records Relating to Economic Aid Programs 1946–1959, RG 59.
46
Clark Clifford, Council to the President: A Memoir (New York: Random House, 1991), 248–250.
economic and political development of former colonial territories in the

upcoming speech. The most‐comprehensive response to their query came
from a mid‐level information officer, Benjamin Hardy. Hardy, a former
employee of Nelson Rockefeller in the IIAA, sent a proposal to Clifford and
Elsey that lauded the potential benefits of extending the technical assistance
model of the IIAA to any country that approached the United States for aid.
Hardy posited that America’s strength lay in its technological expertise and
industrial progress, and that the United States could employ both public
and private resources to assuage international poverty. His proposal also
envisioned a vast expansion of U.S. technical assistance funding to alleviate
the socioeconomic conditions on which the Communists capitalized.47
In the hands of Clifford and Elsey, the program shifted its focus from all
nations to “poor” nations. Clifford, who originally sought advice from
upper‐level officials of the State Department, found Hardy’s proposed
program to be a perfect fit for what he wanted to insert into Truman’s
address.48 Top State Department officials, however, urged Clifford to reject
Hardy’s proposal as “vague and premature.”49 Despite these criticisms,
Clifford presented the idea to a receptive Truman. The President thought
the proposal effectively complemented other initiatives, such as his
domestic “fair deal,” and his support for the UN, the Marshall Plan, and
NATO. Yet Truman also knew that a truculent Congress would balk at
another program of extensive economic aid.50 Consequently, in his speech,
he emphasized the role of private investment, not government funding, and
spoke of the United States as a facilitator for national self‐reliance. In this
way, Truman formally enunciated the Point Four program on 20
January 1949, in what some observers described as his finest speech.51
Despite the president’s enthusiasm, many government officials did not
openly embrace Point Four. Though some within the Department of State
hailed the idea of a humanitarian program of international technical
assistance—one that would alleviate poverty, ameliorate living standards,
47
Bingham, Shirt‐Sleeve Diplomacy, 10–11; Rivas, Missionary Capitalist, 174–75; and Clifford, Council to
the President, 248–249.
48
Clifford, Council to the President, 250. See also George McKee Elsey, An Unplanned Life: A Memoir by
George McKee Elsey (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 2005), 175–177.
49
Bingham, Shirt‐Sleeve Diplomacy, 10.
50
Alonzo L. Hamby, Man of the People: A Life of Harry S. Truman (New York: Oxford University Press,
1995), 510.
51
For information related to Ben Hardy and the formulation of Point Four, see Glick, The Administration of
Technical Assistance, 34; Rivas, Missionary Capitalist, 174–175; Paterson, Meeting the Communist Threat,
149–151; “The Point Four Program,” 20 June 1950, FRUS 1950, Vol. 1 (Washington, DC: Government
Printing Office, 1977), 846–850; and Samuel P. Hayes Oral History Interview, accessed at http://www.
trumanlibrary.org/oralhist/hayessp.htm, accessed 8 March 2008. For a brief discussion of the popularity of
Truman’s speech, see David McCullough, Truman (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1992), 730–731.
and thwart the growth of Communism—Secretary of State Dean Acheson

was less excited about the idea. He recalled that other top State Department
officials, too, were “neither enthusiastic nor impressed with its utility.”52
Nor did the program have widespread support in Congress. Congress only
authorized funding for Point Four after the President emphasized the role
of private investors, reiterated the program’s anti‐Communist intent, and
agreed that the program should receive no more than $35 million in its first
year under the supervision of the Technical Cooperation Administration
(TCA).53
Along these lines, historians analyzing the Point Four program often cite
its meager funding (compared to the Marshall Plan) as an indication of its
failure and dismiss it as blatantly exploitative.54 For instance, Gabriel Kolko
asserts that Point Four’s scant first‐year funding left it “in the realm of
abstractions rather than material fact,” and that the program “was too
petty” to produce any meaningful results to match the lofty rhetoric of
Truman’s inaugural.55 But to look simply at the total sum of Point Four’s
appropriation is to miss a crucial component of the program—it was not
meant to provide extensive government‐funded, capital investments.
Rather, the program sought to endow small‐scale projects to improve
basic living conditions on the grounds that they would, in turn, pave the way
for private investments and loans from other organizations, such as the
Export–Import Bank and the United Nations. Additionally, historians also
argue that Point Four was nothing more than a guise for the United States
to extract raw materials at cheap prices from undeveloped countries. Such
interpretations, however, tendentiously skirt over the complex relationship
between technical assistance, regional economic growth, and geopolitical
strategy.56 For Point Four’s architects envisioned a clear relationship
between national economic development, international economic integra-
tion, and the promotion of liberal political institutions, a relationship that
would, in turn, comport with the strategic interests of the United States.
52
Quoted in Dean Acheson, Present at the Creation: My Years in the State Department (New York: W.W.
Norton & Co., 1969), 265. See also Robert Beisner, Dean Acheson: A Life in the Cold War (Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 2006), 124.
53
Statement by the President, “Administration for the Act of International Development,” reprinted in
Department of State Bulletin, 25 September 1950.
54
Congress initially authorized $5 billion for the first year of the Marshall Plan, compared to $35 million for
the initial one‐year appropriation of Point Four. For more on the Marshall Plan funding, see Hogan, The
Marshall Plan, chap. 3.
55
Kolko and Kolko, Limits of Power, 623; Pollard and Wells, “1945–1960: The Era of American Economic
Hegemony,” 353; and Paterson, Meeting the Communist Threat, 153.
56
Kolko and Kolko, Limits of Power, 623; Lumsdaine, Moral Vision in International Politics, 233.
Technical assistance projects formed the basis of Point Four. “For the
first time in history,” proclaimed State Department economist and Point
Four administrator Samuel P. Hayes, a nation would seek to transfer its
“knowledge” and “techniques” as a critical instrument of its foreign policy.57
Though this was an historical overstatement, Hayes nonetheless aptly
identified the core components of the Point Four program in action.
American scientists and academic experts reified their scientific knowledge
into a variety of concrete programs in receiving countries. The servicio
model of scientific education from the IIAA became the cornerstone of such
projects. Such activities included the establishment of agricultural research
and experiment stations modeled after their New Deal counterparts in the
American Midwest; public health and education services; university
exchange programs of teachers, students, and specialists; and the
translation and distribution of technical publications.58 Point Four
incorporated many non‐governmental organizations, such as universities,
missionary groups, and philanthropic organizations, into its technical
assistance programs. Often these groups, particularly Christian missionar-
ies, had long‐established relations with local populations, and therefore
provided channels through which U.S. officials could offer its programs of
technical assistance.59
The central premise of Point Four was that U.S. technical expertise—
identified as its superior knowledge and vast wealth of information—would
be the guiding force behind national development. As Gilbert Rist argues,
by defining underdevelopment as “a lack rather than the result of historical
circumstances,” architects of Point Four made quantitative, legible patterns
of assistance the only method to redress the causes of societal underdevel-
opment.60 In Point Four, the United States would send some of its leading
technicians, engineers, and doctors to educate leaders in cooperating
nations, creating a process of exchange that would, in the eyes of U.S.
officials, “raise the dignity and place of the individual in the state, and his
position and that of his nation in the free community of nations.”61
Technical assistance, in this sense, promoted development of the
individual’s status within a nation state as a prerequisite for larger
57
Samuel P. Hayes, Jr., “President’s Message on Point Four,” 12 May 1949, Intradepartmental memo, box 1,
Office of Assistant Secretary for Economic Affairs, Records Relating to Economic Aid Programs 1946–1959,
RG 59.
58
Samuel P. Hayes, Jr. “The United States ‘Point Four’ Program,” The Millbank Memorial Fund Quarterly 28
(July 1952): 263–264.
59
Shenin, The United States and the Third World, 158–168.
60
Rist, The History of Development, 79.
61
Samuel P. Hayes, Jr., “President’s Message on Point Four.”
economic growth. To catalyze this process, education, encapsulated in the

servicio model, and the transfer of technology and American experts acted
as the foundation for development. By focusing on improving the capacity
of individuals to adopt and employ effectively new technologies, Point Four
linked the rise in an individual’s standard of living and knowledge base to
national economic growth.
In the minds of policymakers, technical assistance would thus build the
infrastructure necessary for the development of civil society—education,
public health, and productive agricultural systems—that would then spur
wider changes in standards of living necessary to promote national
economic production. Significantly, the program did not necessarily signify
industrial modernization or an extensive commitment of American
financial and capital resources. Instead, the program stipulated that either
private foreign investors or the receiving country should provide the
majority of investment costs, such as financial capital, heavy machinery,
and labor. As dictated by the framework of the servicio, Point Four officials
and American experts acted as educators and consultants, not sources of
financial capital. Hayes explained that the recipient nations would jointly
finance and administer the programs, with the intention that one day, each
nation would “assume the costs of the project [which would] eventually
become an integral part of local government structure.”62
This idea of “self‐help” was a critical component of the Point Four
program. “Self‐help” implied that the United States offered technical advice
to promote indigenous development that could continue indefinitely
without perpetual U.S. investment. An early technical assistance proposal
in the Middle East stated that “the guiding principle of Point IV is that it is a
self‐help program…. The most that the United States can do is to serve as a
catalytic agent to stimulate the Near Eastern countries to utilize and
develop their own natural and human resources.”63 Truman himself
recollected that Point Four intended to help individuals in underdeveloped
areas “raise themselves from the level of colonialism to self‐support and
ultimate prosperity.”64 Because “self‐help” would in theory propel future
growth independent of U.S. funding, policymakers believed the program
would be self‐sustaining. Similar models based upon the “self‐help” ethos
62
Ibid., 264.
63
“Economic and Social Problems of the Near East,” working paper, box 2, Technical Cooperation
Administration Assistant Administrator for the Program Files, Geographic Files 1946–1952, RG 469.
64
Harry S. Truman, Memoirs, Volume Two: Years of Trial and Hope (New York: Doubleday and Company,
Inc., 1956), 232.
also underscored Marshall Plan programs that rebuilt Western Europe’s

national economies.65
Because the program emphasized “self‐help” over long‐term U.S.
investment, Point Four did not require extensive government funding.
The Republican Congress’s unwillingness to support more federally
financed programs abroad further necessitated that Point Four incur
limited financial obligations. Speaking before Congress, Dean Acheson,
by early 1950 a reluctant supporter of the program, maintained that the
purpose of Point Four was to “encourage the exchange of technical skills
and promote the flow of private‐investment capital.” He specifically
stated that the proponents of Point Four had no intention of asking for
additional commitments of governmental financial resources, which
both allayed Republican fears and reflected the program’s official
intentions.66
In lieu of large‐scale governmental funding, the Act for International
Development, which authorized Point Four, called for coordination among
private companies, philanthropic foundations, and supranational orga-
nizations to finance international development. The act required U.S.
officials and government agencies to identify potential private companies to
invest in Point Four countries. For example, historian Alfred Eckes notes
that when a country requested assistance in mining minerals, Point Four
officials turned to the U.S. Geological Survey and Bureau of Mines. These
agencies then collaborated with government officials and businessmen
from the requesting country to locate potential mineral deposits. After
deciding upon a location for mining operations, Point Four officials
identified U.S. mining firms that traveled to the area to collaborate with
local businessmen to develop the materials. This arrangement would, in
theory, benefit both countries by generating higher export earnings for the
local government and diversifying the international base for U.S. mineral
imports. Eckes argues that Point Four therefore melded “altruism and
enlightened self‐interest.”67
In addition to facilitating private investment, Point Four also permitted
receiving countries to apply to supranational organizations for grants or
loans. The Act for International Development indicated that the World
Bank, UN, and Organization of American States could supplement private
65
Hogan, The Marshall Plan, 54. For more on the ideology behind the Marshall Plan, see Behrman, The Most
Noble Adventure; Mee, Jr. The Marshall Plan.
66
Quoted in Congressional Record, 81st Cong., 2d sess., 1950, vol. 96, no. 5, 5969.
67
Alfred E. Eckes, Jr. The United States and the Global Struggle for Minerals (Austin: University of Texas
Press, 1979), 160–161.
investment.68 When necessary, Point Four allowed these institutions to

intervene to offer short‐term assistance loans and guarantees to private
investors.69 Countries receiving Point Four aid could also turn to the U.S.
Export‐Import Bank for loans, though policymakers preferred that the
Bank defer to the UN in such situations.70 In all these cases, though, private
actors remained the main source of capital investment. Gordon Gray, an
advisor to Truman who authored an influential report on U.S. economic
policy to the underdeveloped nations in 1950, concurred with the
government–private cooperation model for investment.71 Moreover, TCA
administrator and future Congressman Jonathan Bingham noted in his
contemporary analysis of the Point Four program that “the United States
government has not furnished expensive machinery or equipment on a
grant basis for industrial plants in the underdeveloped areas—except for
educational or demonstration purposes—but has left to private industry
and to the banks…the essential job of providing capital.”72 Point Four,
therefore, did not require or desire extensive human or financial capital
investment from the U.S. government. The program instead created a
model of government–private cooperation that mirrored the general
structure of the “New Deal synthesis” embodied in the TVA and Marshall
Plan, though with an increased emphasis on private investors.73
Policymakers believed that technical assistance projects, working in
tandem with private capital investment, would catalyze national economic
growth, generate regional development, and ultimately, benefit the
international capitalist bloc. This theory postulated that technical
assistance projects raised standards of living, created new national wealth,
increased domestic productivity, and expanded the purchasing power of
individuals.74 Extending this model, officials such as George Bissell of the
68
Congressional Record, 81st Cong., 2d sess. See also Hayes, “The United States ‘Point Four’ Program,” 264,
for a program administrator’s official stance regarding the importance of private, not governmental,
investment.
69
Samuel P. Hayes, Jr. to Ralph Hetzel, Department of Commerce, “Dynamic Assistance to Economic
Development Abroad,” 14 April 1949, box 1, Office of Assistant Secretary for Economic Affairs, Records
Relating to Economic Aid Programs 1946–1959, RG 59. For similar statements on the importance of private
investment, see “Transcript of Proceedings, IDAB, First Meeting November 29, 1950, Afternoon Session,”
box 1, Records of the U.S. Foreign Assistance Agencies, 1948–1961, Technical Cooperation Administration,
Office of Administrator, Records Relations to IDAB Meetings, 1950–1951, RG 469.
70
Hayes, “The United States ‘Point Four’ Program,” 264–265.
71
Gray, Gordon. Report to the President on Foreign Economic Policies (Washington: GPO, 1950). See also
Rivas, Missionary Capitalist, 186; Harry S. Truman, “Letter to Gordon Gray Regarding His Appointment as
Special Assistant to the President, April 3, 1950.” Public Papers of the President, Harry S. Truman, 1950,
accessed at http://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/ws/index.php?pid¼13756&st¼&st1¼, accessed 8 March 2008.
72
73
Hogan, The Marshall Plan, 135–136.
74
Congressional Record, 81st Cong., 2d sess.
Economic Cooperation Administration (ECA) described the potential

benefits to the international system. Speaking in the fall of 1950 at a
conference hosted by members of the International Development Advisory
Board, which Truman had created to oversee issues pertaining to Point
Four’s implementation, Bissell argued that increased domestic production
and purchasing power catalyzed “rapid economic development” of
underdeveloped nations. These rapidly developing countries could then,
according to Bissell, join the United States, Western Europe, and Japan in
an ever‐expanding capitalist trading arena.75 National economic growth, in
this sense, supported international economic development.
Developing the national economic output of underdeveloped nations
also offered solutions to ongoing international economic problems. Many
economic officials in the ECA believed that emphasizing technical
assistance over rapid industrialization in former colonial territories would
expedite exports to Western Europe. They saw these primary product–
producing nations as sources of supplies to Europe. European nations could
re‐export these products to earn dollars to rectify the ongoing dollar crisis of
the late 1940s.76 Additionally, policymakers believed that advancing the
international economic system and enlarging the capitalist trading bloc
provided a bulwark against autarkic economic practices that many viewed
as significant causes of the Great Depression and World War II.77
By linking small‐scale technical assistance to larger patterns of
economic development, U.S. officials also sought to achieve political and
strategic objectives. Decolonization provided a political environment in
which foreign aid could become a foundational part of America’s security
strategy. Indonesia, for example, declared its independence in 1949.
Other nationalist movements, such as Ho Chi Minh’s in Indochina,
pervaded Southeast Asia. Almost immediately, policymakers viewed the
region as a focal point for competition in an ideologically divided world,
impelling Point Four officials to enter into technical assistance agree-
ments with many local governments.78 Elsewhere in Asia and Africa, U.S.
75
Transcript of Proceedings, IDAB, First Meeting November 29, 1950, Afternoon Session, box 1, Records of
the U.S. Foreign Assistance Agencies, 1948–1961, Technical Cooperation Administration, Office of
Administrator, Records Relations to IDAB Meetings, 1950–1951, RG 469.
76
For the role of technical assistance in Southeast Asia as it pertains to the larger question of the international
dollar gap, see William S. Borden, The Pacific Alliance: United States Foreign Economic Policy and Japanese
Trade Recovery, 1947–1955 (Madison: The University of Wisconsin Press, 1984), 31–42.
77
For a more on post‐war institution‐building, see Ikenberry, After Victory, chap. 6.
78
“Enquiry into the Technical Assistance Needs of Indonesia: Report of the Exploratory Mission,” 28
July 1950, box 3, Technical Cooperation Administration Assistant Administrator for the Program Files,
Geographic Files 1946–1952, RG 469. See also Dateline Saigon: Our Quiet War in Indochina (Washington,
DC: Mutual Security Agency, 1952).
officials established offices for similar technical assistance programs in

Afghanistan, Ceylon, Egypt, Ethiopia, India, Iran, Iraq, Israel, Jordan,
Lebanon, Liberia, Nepal, Pakistan, Philippines, Saudi Arabia, and Syria
between 1950 and 1951.79
U.S. officials recognized that in order for economic development to
benefit global geopolitical strategy, they needed to support the growth of
liberal political institutions in the emerging nations. In the absence of rapid
industrialization, George Bissell argued that “the limiting factors” of any
technical assistance program were “the absence of reasonable law and
order…and the newness of political institutions.” National economies could
not flourish without a liberalized polity that ensured the protection of
foreign investors. Bissell stated that “the immediate objective of external
aid, perhaps the primary objective, must be to increase the prestige of local
governments in the eyes of their own citizens.”80 Similarly, a 1952 policy
pamphlet stated that U.S. objectives in Southeast Asia were “to strengthen
the ability of these countries to maintain their freedom and independence,
[and] assist in the establishment of institutions and practices needed in
democratic, independent states.”81
As Point Four offices opened up across the globe in 1950 and 1951, U.S.
policymakers increasingly viewed economic development, political liberal-
ization, and geopolitical strategy as mutually reinforcing. Upon signing the
Act for International Development, President Truman remarked that the
program would “contribute to our purpose of strengthening the cause of
freedom, through economic measures which will demonstrate the
effectiveness of free institutions in meeting human needs.”82 Capus
Waynick, an early director of the TCA, believed that strengthening local
government benefited America’s vision for a liberal international system.
He argued that “the Point IV program…is a mutual sharing, self‐help kind
of cooperation designed for a free society. It is directed at disarmament of
the wants and the fears which breed hate and war, and which increase
susceptibility to the blandishments of those who would lead people into
79
“Technical Cooperation Offices—Near Eastern and Far Eastern Countries,” 9 September 1950, box 2,
Technical Cooperation Administration Assistant Administrator for the Program Files, Geographic Files
1946–1952, RG 469.
80
Transcript of Proceedings, IDAB, First Meeting 29 November 1950, Afternoon Session, box 1, Records of
the U.S. Foreign Assistance Agencies, 1948–1961, Technical Cooperation Administration, Office of
Administrator, Records Relations to IDAB Meetings, 1950–1951, RG 469.
81
Southeast Asia (Washington, DC: Mutual Security Agency, 1952).
82
“Statement by the President Upon Signing the Foreign Economic Assistance Act,” 5 June 1950. Harry S.
Truman, Public Papers of the President, 1950. accessed at http://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/ws/index.php?
pid¼13517&st¼&st1¼>8 March 2008.
political slavery.”83 Point Four, in this sense, was a program designed to

nurture the development of a peaceful world order.
In the eyes of policymakers in the early 1950s, creating a peaceful world
order meant combating the spread of Communism. Edward Mason, an
influential Harvard professor who often consulted for the State Department
and who had helped Gordon Gray prepare his 1950 report, distilled Point
Four down to its utility in the Cold War. He believed the program’s basic
strength lay in its potential as a strategic tool. He remarked that “it seems to
me that this program, particularly after the recent events in Korea and
China, has to be essentially viewed as part of the American security
program…. Will [Point Four] influence the willingness of the people in the
underdeveloped areas to throw in their lot with the US? Will it influence
them to cut their ties or lessen their ties with the Soviet Union or will it
not?”84
Point Four aimed to “influence” the underdeveloped areas by alleviating
the socioeconomic and political instability that fostered Communist
sympathies. By redressing ailing economies, the development model of
Point Four represented a means by which the United States could create
viable, capitalist societies resistant to Communist influence. Indeed,
Waynick declared in 1950 that “Point Four is the long‐range answer to
communism.”85 TCA administrator Jonathan Bingham argued that “even if
improvements are achieved in physical living standards, the objective of
Point Four will not be reached if there is not also a parallel strengthening of
the people’s desire for freedom and self‐government” to defend against the
spread of Soviet communism.86 A policy pamphlet bluntly declared that
technical assistance programs in Indochina were “from the standpoint of
the security of free and independent nations, the front line of defense
against Communist aggression in Asia.”87 Historian Mark Lawrence
similarly notes that Point Four’s implementation in the Southeast Asian
“periphery” reflected a growing belief that aid could also directly combat the
growing instabilities in the region.88 Technical assistance programs would
83
Message of Greeting to the International Development Board by Ambassador Capus M. Waynick, Acting
Administrator, Technical Cooperation, Wednesday November 29, 1950, box 1, Records of the U.S. Foreign
Assistance Agencies, 1948–1961, Technical Cooperation Administration, Office of Administrator, Records
Relations to IDAB Meetings, 1950–1951, RG 469.
84
Ibid.
85
Ibid.
86
87
“U.S. Technical and Economic Assistance in the Far East: A Part of the Mutual Security Program for 1952/
1953” (Washington, DC: Mutual Security Agency), 2.
88
Mark Atwood Lawrence, Assuming the Burden: Europe and American Commitment to War in Vietnam
(Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005), 213.
not just fight a “quiet war,” but could also contribute to military strategy in
an actual war against Communism.
Ultimately, government officials increasingly sold Point Four to both
Congress and the American public as a mechanism to fight Communism.
Program officials situated Point Four at the center of an international
struggle against Soviet influence to ensure that Congress passed the Act for
International Development.89 In a public speech on the program, Capus
Waynick declared that Point Four was a “tangible, living expression of
American democracy.” America’s “true motives,” he said, were to prove to
the underdeveloped world “that the methods and institutions of a free
society provide the environment that liberates man’s spirit and brings his
talents to full flower.”90 The 1952 Democratic Party Platform listed Point
Four alongside NATO and U.S. involvement in Korea as a key to resisting
“Communist aggression” and “mobilizing the strength of the free world.”91
President Truman often presented similar arguments for Point Four. He
stated in a letter to Speaker of the House of Representatives Sam Rayburn
that Point Four was a “symbol of hope for millions of people all over the
world,” and that the program was the only way to successfully improve
standards of living for peoples abroad.92 Upon signing the Act for
International Development in September 1950, Truman publicly pro-
claimed that “Communist propaganda holds that the free nations are
incapable of providing a decent standard of living for the millions of people
in the underdeveloped areas of the earth. The Point Four program will be
one of our principal ways of demonstrating the complete falsity of that
charge.”93
POINT FOUR IN ACTION: DEVELOPMENT PROJECTS IN INDIA

AND SOUTHEAST ASIA
In the early 1950s, Point Four transformed from a collection of abstract,
inchoate notions of international development into a series of concrete
programs across the underdeveloped world. Officials in such disparate
89
Oral history interview with Stanley Andrews, accessed at http://www.trumanlibrary.org/oralhist/
andrewss.htm
90
“Progress on Point Four,” Department of State Bulletin, 25 September 1950.
91
“Democratic Party Platform of 1952,” Public Papers of the President, Harry S. Truman, 1950, accessed at
http://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/ws/index.php?
pid¼29600&st¼DemocraticþPartyþPlatformþofþ1952&st1, 12 March 2008.
92
“Letter to the Speaker on the Appropriation for Foreign Aid, August 25th, 1950,” Public Papers of the
President, Harry S. Truman, 1950, accessed at http://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/ws/index.php?
pid¼13591&st¼PointþIV&st1¼, 8 March 2008.
93
Administration of the Act of International Development, executive order 10159, reprinted in Department
of State Bulletin, 25 September 1950.
countries as Guatemala and Afghanistan expressed interest in signing

economic development proposals with the TCA.94 Point Four programs
took a variety of forms, often addressing specific needs of local
communities. U.S. experts helped modify legal processes in Liberia,
instituted a new monetary system and Central Bank in Saudi Arabia, and
even promoted new filing systems in public offices of the Philippines in late
1950.95 By 1951, the servicio model was ubiquitous, perhaps best
exemplified in Formosa, where technical assistance programs helped
establish pineapple canning factories with local businessmen and
modernized rice farming techniques with local farmers.96
India was one of the first nations to receive extensive technical assistance
programs. In 1950 and 1951, Point Four experts oversaw the establishment
of a penicillin plant, the creation of a variety of schools, and the foundation
of medical research facilities, among other programs.97 Officials spoke of
coordinated efforts at dam construction sites throughout rural India,
building upon the TVA model for rural electrification and development.98
In January 1952, India extended its 1950 technical assistance program to
remedy a lingering food crisis and generate economic growth across the
nation. The program helped to modernize agricultural practices throughout
rural India, and also identified manganese deposits for U.S. companies to
mine. In broad terms, the Point Four agreement stipulated that the United
States would continue to supply technical assistance to promote and
accelerate India’s integrated economic development.99
Beyond the economic aspects of the programs, U.S. officials also sought
to maintain India’s nascent democratic government. The technical
assistance agreement stated that “individual liberty, free institutions, and
independence, on the one hand, and sound economic conditions and stable
international economic relationship on the other hand, are mutually
94
“Plans for Improving Guatemala’s Economy,” 17 May 1950; “Outgoing Telegram, American Embassy
Kabul 123,” 15 May 1950, box 1, Records of the Agency for International Development, Technical
Cooperation Administration, Official Policy, Position, and Information Papers on Technical Assistance, RG
469.
95
96
Fuel for the Good Dragon (Washington, DC: Mutual Security Agency, 1952).
97
“Point 4 Vaccine Technician in India,” 13 September 1951; “Point 4 Assistance in Establishing School of
Social Work in Madras,” Memorandum of Conversation, 24 September 1951; “Point 4 Policy on Medical
Research,” Policy Board Paper, 4 September 1951, box 2, Technical Cooperation Administration Assistant
Administrator for the Program Files, Geographic Files 1946–1952, RG 469.
98
George Kish, “India, Africa, and ‘Point Four,” Michigan Alumnus Quarterly Review 56 (4 March 1950), box
2, Technical Cooperation Administration Assistant Administrator for the Program Files, Geographic Files
1946–1952, RG 469.
99
M. Srinivas Chary, The Eagle and the Peacock: U.S. Foreign Policy Toward India Since Independence
(Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1995), 41–44.
interdependent.”100 Truman frequently lauded India’s democratic system

of government to both Congress and the American public when discussing
economic assistance programs. At the same time, U.S. officials privately
pressured the Indian government to avoid any diplomatic ties to the Soviet
Union and China and thought that extending technical assistance could
persuade India to remain independent of the two Communist
nations.101 U.S. policymakers hoped that continued economic progress,
spurred on by technical assistance programs, would become the foundation
for India’s “internal stability,” and by extension, the political basis for
regional security.102
Throughout the early 1950s, technical assistance programs greatly
expanded in scope and depth throughout Southeast Asia, too. The 1950
Griffin Mission to Southeast Asia explored the potential for American
technical assistance projects in the region. In its summary report, the
mission concluded that technical assistance programs should promote
economic recovery and attempt to influence the “psychological pattern” of
the area in favor of a “pro‐western orientation.”103 Within a few years, the
United States signed formal technical assistance agreements using the
report as a framework with Formosa, Indochina, the Philippines,
Indonesia, Burma, and Thailand.
In Indochina, technical assistance programs worked alongside larger
economic and military aid programs for the French as conflict with the
Communists escalated. The Truman administration deemed Indochina,
viewed as part of a larger containment strategy in Asia, as a front line for
defending U.S. strategic interests in the region.104 A 1952 pamphlet from
the Mutual Security Agency (MSA), a newly formed administrative body
that governed Point Four, stated that “a platoon of American irregulars—53
100
“General Agreement for Technical Cooperation,” 5 January 1952, box 2, Technical Cooperation
Administration Assistant Administrator for the Program Files, Geographic Files 1946–1952, RG 469.
101
Robert McMahon, The Cold War on the Periphery: The United States, India, and Pakistan (New York:
Columbia University Press, 1994), 114–116; Chary, The Eagle and the Peacock, 48.
102
“The India and Pakistan Programs for Fiscal 1954,” 5 March 1953, FRUS, 1952–1954, 11: 1693–1694,
accessed at http://digicoll.library.wisc.edu/cgi‐bin/FRUS/FRUS‐idx?type¼header&id¼FRUS.FRUS1952‐
54v11p2
103
“Report of Economic Survey Mission to Southeast Asia,” box 2, Technical Cooperation Administration
Assistant Administrator for the Program Files, Geographic Files 1946–1952, RG 469.
104
See, for instance, Lawrence, Assuming the Burden, 235–237; Lloyd C. Gardner, Pay Any Price: Lyndon
Johnson and the Wars for Vietnam (Chicago, IL: Ivan R. Dee, Inc., 1995), xiii; Michael Hunt, Lyndon
Johnson’s War: America’s Cold War Crusade in Vietnam, 1945–1968 (New York: Hill and Wang, 1996), 10–
12; Andrew B. Rotter, The Path to Vietnam: The Origins of American Commitment to Southeast Asia (Ithaca,
NY: Cornell University Press, 1987); Howard B. Schonberger, Aftermath of War: Americans and the
Remaking of Japan, 1945–1952 (Kent, OH: Kent State University Press, 1989), chap. 7; and Michael
Schaller, The American Occupation of Japan: The Origins of the Cold War in Asia (New York: Oxford
University Press, 1985), chap. 8.
men and women—are fighting the quiet war in Indochina. A small mobile
team of agricultural specialists, doctors, engineers, financial experts, and
educators are battling against the ignorance, disease, and poverty which
threaten Indochina’s existence.”105 Amidst the wartime chaos, technical
assistance funded small‐scale activities, bringing penicillin, steel hoes,
prefabricated hospitals, electric generators, school supplies, water pumps,
surgical instruments, and fertilizer to the region. American experts also
assisted in the construction of housing projects, the purchase of calico, the
allocation of rice and blankets for northern war refugees, the reconstruction
of roads, and the creation of technical schools. All in all, technical assistance
programs employed approximately $26 million of what the program
described as “economic weapons” throughout the region.106
These economic weapons signified a new method for combating
Communist influence. In one instance, agricultural experts from the
United States used technical assistance funding to reconstruct an irrigation
canal that had been destroyed by Viet Minh troops. Program admin-
istrators explained that the irrigation project “had direct military
importance”—it rebuilt Vietnamese infrastructure to potentially “hinder
a Chinese Communist invasion.” In so doing, the project represented “one of
many American aid projects designed to make an immediate impact on the
people while making a permanent improvement in their economy.”107
Such technical assistance projects represented the ways in which
policymakers intended to use Point Four for a variety of ends. The MSA’s
spurious self‐congratulatory pamphlets implied that their work was the
essential basis for a larger and more‐abstract project of political self‐
reliance. In their words, the MSA officials helped the Vietnamese become
“capable of protecting [themselves] in the modern economic and political
world.” Policymakers even identified the pineapple canning factory
constructed in Formosa as an “answer to Communism,” which they
celebrated in a pamphlet entitled “Fuel for the Good Dragon.”108 With the
successes mounting in the eyes of policymakers, funding for technical
assistance programs in Southeast Asia increased to over $166 million in FY
1952, with about half of that going to Formosa and the rest spread among
Philippines, Indochina, Burma, Indonesia, and Thailand.
Though U.S. officials praised Point Four’s successes in a variety of
internal publications, the program engendered criticism abroad. By 1952,
105
Dateline Saigon: Our Quiet War in Indochina (Washington, DC: Mutual Security Agency, 1952).
106
Ibid.
107
Ibid.
108
Fuel for the Good Dragon.
military assistance supplemented technical assistance in Formosa, Indo-

china, Thailand, and the Philippines, which raised the ire of some in the
participating nations.109 U.S. policymakers often employed extensive
propaganda campaigns alongside technical assistance projects to ensure
that the grandiose purposes of the United States would not be lost on their
recipients. In Indochina, technical assistance officials used “twelve movie
sound‐trucks,” driven by local farmers, to proclaim the benign intentions of
the United States and avert potential criticisms. The program also
distributed a myriad of anti‐Communist leaflets, which both denigrated
Communist‐style planning and preached the gospel of self‐help capitalist
development.110 The Griffin Mission’s report also stressed that widespread
distrust of U.S. motives existed in Indochina. Despite the numerous
humanitarian overtures by U.S. officials, local governments viewed the
United States as a proxy for their “colonial masters.”111 A similar question of
local distrust underscored the Colombo Plan, in which representatives from
Southeast and Southern Asian countries met with the United States and
Great Britain in Ceylon to discuss ways to improve standards of living
throughout the region.112 This indigenous skepticism of U.S. motives
necessitated that officials include extensive education and propaganda
programs with technical assistance projects abroad.
Point Four’s strict focus on technical assistance and foreign investment
also elicited criticism. In a Washington Post editorial, Manabendra Nath
Roy, a former Indian Communist, suggested that the bulk of capital
investment should come from India’s business community, not foreign
investors. While Point Four could help construct some of the necessary
infrastructure for economic development and growth in India, he noted
that “it may appear to be a long‐term program; but any short‐term plan to
help India with the hope of building a bulwark against communism will
only defeat its end. Only a democracy built from the bottom up can defend
itself.”113 Historian M. Srinivas Chary suggests that many top Indian
officials suspected that the United States only initiated technical assistance
109
Ibid; see also Southeast Asia.
110
Ibid.
111
“Report of Economic Survey Mission to Southeast Asia,” box 2, Technical Cooperation Administration
Assistant Administrator for the Program Files, Geographic Files 1946–1952, RG 469.
112
Lumsdaine, Moral Vision in International Politics, 236. On anti‐Americanism and the Colombo Plan, see
“Record of Informal United States–United Kingdom Discussions,” 22 September 1950, FRUS, 1950, 5:
212, accessed at http://digicoll.library.wisc.edu/cgi‐bin/FRUS/FRUS‐idx?type¼header&id¼FRUS.
FRUS1950v05 and “The Charge in Thailand (Turner) to the Secretary of State,” 13 October 1951, FRUS,
1951, 6:1628, accessed at http://digicoll.library.wisc.edu/cgi‐bin/FRUS/FRUS‐idx?type¼header&id¼F-
RUS.FRUS1951v06p2, 8 March 2008.
113
M. N. Roy, “India Doesn’t Need Cash, Says Asiatic Expert,” The Washington Post, 9 April 1950.
programs to open the door to exploitative Western business interests.114

While India’s desperate food shortage necessitated international aid, the
Indian government continually sought to segregate the economic aspects
of U.S. assistance programs from their political implications. Prime
Minister Jawaharlal Nehru welcomed U.S. technical assistance to alleviate
mass starvation and extensive human suffering but rejected the U.S. desire
to link free‐enterprise models of growth with regional political objectives.115
Additionally, despite frequent indigenous calls for U.S. support for
industrialization, U.S. officials committed funding exclusively to relief and
technical assistance projects.116 Ambassador Chester Bowles, who orga-
nized the earliest technical assistance–based Community Development
Programs in rural India, advocated exclusively on behalf of the small‐scale
technical assistance projects as the solution to India’s economic
underdevelopment.117 In general, too, the Point Four program lacked the
financial and administrative resources to address all the challenges that
development presented. U.S. officials also dismissed India’s alternative
development proposals that would compromise U.S. strategic objectives. By
the early 1950s, the connection between technical assistance and strategic
objectives was clear to both U.S. officials and the leaders of underdeveloped
nations, with the latter often protesting the politicized relationship.
POINT FOUR DEVELOPS: CHANGE AND CONTINUITY IN THE

EISENHOWER ADMINISTRATION
In the early 1950s, State Department officials discussed consolidating
foreign aid programs into a more cohesive administrative structure. The
first move toward consolidation occurred in October 1951 when Congress
passed the Mutual Security Act, which created the Mutual Security Agency
(MSA) to coordinate the various assistance programs. In 1953, the
administration of Dwight D. Eisenhower transferred all State Department
technical assistance and foreign aid programs to the new Foreign
Operations Administrations (FOA). Although the programs initiated
under Point Four remained intact, the use of the term “Point Four” became
increasingly rare in 1953 and 1954 as a way to designate such technical
114
Chary, The Eagle and the Peacock, 50.
115
Ibid, 48–50.
116
McMahon, The Cold War on the Periphery, 115. For a discussion of the debate between funding for
technical assistance versus funding for industrialization in Point Four’s Southeast Asian programs, see
Rotter, The Path to Vietnam, chap. 1.
117
Dennis Merrill, Bread and the Ballot: The United States and India’s Economic Development, 1947–1963
(Chapel Hill, University of North Carolina Press, 1990), 82–90; Andrew J. Rotter, Comrades at Odds: The
United States and India, 1947–1964 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2000), 108–110.
assistance programs in what scholar Sergei Shenin has termed the

“liquidation” of Point Four.118 In the summer of 1954, another Mutual
Security Act effectively eliminated the FOA and abolished the existing
statutes of the original Act of International Development. Nevertheless, the
programs that had been created, implemented, and developed under Point
Four remained operative under the new MSA.119 In 1955, the International
Cooperation Administration (ICA) replaced all the functions of the former
FOA and became a leading source for international development
funding.120
Many historians view the transition from the TCA into the Mutual
Security Agency as an effective end to the humanitarian impulse
encapsulated in Point Four’s lofty goals. Darlene Rivas regards the era
during which Point Four fell under the supervision of the MSA and when
Rockefeller left the IDAB in 1952 as an “unfortunate time.”121 Thomas
Paterson suggests that Point Four “lost its identity” after the MSA
transition.122 David Halloran Lumsdaine posits that the Eisenhower
administration failed to nurture the development impulse that began with
Point Four, and accordingly, that the creation of the Development Loan
Fund in 1957 constituted “the first positive step toward aid made by the
Eisenhower administration.”123
Yet such analyses elide two fundamental points. First, U.S. economic
self‐interest and strategic objectives always underscored the humanitarian
presentation of Point Four. Point Four was neither wholly idealistic nor
humanitarian in its intent or application, as evinced in the program’s
implementation in places like Southeast Asia. Second, technical assistance
programs, though no longer described in reference to “Point Four,” still
existed. The administrative structure of Point Four changed, yet the
ideology behind Point Four—the inchoate conception of international
118
Shenin, The United States and the Third World, 103.
119
For a complete description of the administrative history of technical assistance programs, see Glick, The
Administration of Technical Assistance, chap. 1. See also Rollin S. Atwood. “The United States Point Four
Program—A Bilateral Approach,” Annals of the Academy of Political and Social Science, 323; Partnership for
Progress: International Technical Co‐operation (May, 1959), 34.
120
“Letter From the Director of the Office of Philippine and Southeast Asian Affairs (Young) to the
Ambassador in Vietnam (Reinhardt), July 28, 1955,” FRUS, 1955–1957. Vietnam. 1: 499–500, accessed at
http://digicoll.library.wisc.edu/cgi‐bin/FRUS/FRUS‐idx?type¼turn&entity¼FRUS.FRUS1955‐57v01.
p0531&isize¼M.
121
Rivas, Missionary Capitalist, 202–203.
122
Paterson, Meeting the Communist Threat, 154.
123
Lumsdaine, Moral Vision in International Politics, 239. Burton Kaufman argues against such
interpretations, writing instead that “under Eisenhower’s leadership, the United States became more
attentive to the problems of Third World countries and assumed greater responsibility for meeting their
economic needs.” Kaufman, Trade and Aid, 6–7.
development through small‐scale technical assistance—continued to

flourish in foreign policy circles in the 1950s. In some instances, however,
countries receiving technical assistance protested the administrative
conflation between economic development projects and military assistance.
By the late 1950s, the Eisenhower administration moved away from small‐
scale technical assistance, advocating instead more‐extensive government
funding to economic development projects.
The inclusion of military aid alongside technical assistance represented a
major reconfiguration of development policy under the Eisenhower
administration. Beginning in 1951, funding for Point Four came through
the Mutual Security Agency, which also funded military assistance projects
to underdeveloped nations. In FY 1953, the TCA received $140 million
through the Mutual Security Act, ostensibly for technical assistance
projects. Yet the symbolic presentation of technical assistance as part of the
Mutual Security Program had significant ramifications. Furthermore,
technical assistance did, in fact, become enmeshed with military assistance
programs in some instances.124 In January 1953, the United States and
Indonesia renegotiated an existing TCA deal that effectively ended all
military aid. Indonesian leaders rejected the appearance of working for the
“mutual security” of the United States and asserted their ideological non‐
alignment by remaining free of any perceived military involvement with
either the United States or the Soviet Union. Syria and Egypt demonstrated
similar displeasure with America’s military assistance programs and pulled
out of existing Point Four agreements in late 1953.125 In each case, funding
for technical assistance projects from the United States continued and
increased, though the connection between technical assistance and military
aid reinforced the strategic component of development programs.126
In the mid‐1950s, the Eisenhower administration reiterated its
commitment to technical assistance programs as a means to combat global
Communism. In September 1953, Secretary of State John Foster Dulles
emphasized the administration’s support for the activities of the Colombo
Plan, and Eisenhower reconvened the IDAB.127 Dulles further advocated
expanding economic aid programs in late 1955. He acknowledged that
increased governmental funding created “greater resources and flexibility”
124
“Technical Cooperation” Memorandum by the Legal Counsel for the Technical Cooperation,
Administration (Glick) to the Deputy Legal Adviser (Tate), 28 January 1953, FRUS 1952–1954, 1:258,
accessed at http://digicoll.library.wisc.edu/cgi‐bin/FRUS/FRUS‐idx?type¼turn&entity¼FRUS.
FRUS1952‐54v01p1.p0284&q1.
125
Paterson, Meeting the Communist Threat, 156.
126
Department of State Bulletin, 9 February 1953, 212–216. See also Bingham, Shirt‐Sleeve Diplomacy, 263.
127
Department of State Bulletin, 12 October 1953, 484, 493–494.
to combat Soviet influence across the underdeveloped world. In waging this

global Cold War, Dulles sought to expand technical assistance indefinitely
to break free of the annual congressional constraints on project funding.128
Throughout Eisenhower’s second term, technical assistance projects,
generally under the aegis of the Mutual Security program, assumed a
greater role in advancing U.S. strategic objectives. Employed in the
intensifying conflict with the Soviet Union in the underdeveloped world,
technical assistance became a fundamental means for differentiating the
two competing ideologies. By the mid‐1950s, policymakers in Washington
acknowledged that the Soviet Union offered an alternative methodology for
development, one that preached the tenets of rapid industrialization,
collectivization, state planning, command economy, and political affinity to
the Soviet Union. Indeed, policymakers began to fear that the Soviet Union
was outpacing the United States in promoting their methodology of
development.129 Articulating this perception in early 1956, John Foster
Dulles remarked that “now that evolution of the Soviet Union has made a
considerable impression upon the neighboring countries of Asia…I believe
that the United States ought to try to help in ways which will not merely
relieve on a year‐to‐year basis but help to transform these economies into
better‐integrated economies of the kind people aspire to.”130 In late 1955,
the United States began transitioning aid in Vietnam to larger
governmental grants and long‐term programs of assistance and growth.131
Likewise, aid to India increased in 1957 and 1958. With India’s economy
struggling, a State Department paper proclaimed that “no American wants
to see the Communists take over India—if assistance given in time and in
the right amount can substantially contribute to forestalling this, it would
be a reasonable investment from the point of view of the national security of
the United States.”132 Overall, Congress authorized 168.9 million dollars for
technical assistance under the 1958 appropriations for the Mutual Security
Program, the highest to date.133
128
Department of State Bulletin, 2 January 1956, 8–14. See Ronald W. Pruessen, John Foster Dulles: The
Road to Power (New York: The Free Press, 1982); Frederick P. Marks, III, Power and Peace: The Diplomacy
of John Foster Dulles (Westport, CT: Praeger, 1993), chap. 5 for Dulles’s desire to marshal U.S. government
resources to combat international Communism.
129
Ekbladh, “‘Mr. TVA,”’ 357.
130
Department of State Bulletin, 30 January 1956, 159.
131
“U.S. Programs in Cambodia, Laos, and Viet‐nam,” November 22, 1955, FRUS, 1955–1957, 1: 584–588,
accessed at http://digicoll.library.wisc.edu/cgi‐bin/FRUS/FRUS‐idx?type¼header&id¼FRUS.FRUS1955‐
57v01.
132
Merrill, Bread and the Ballot, 142–143.
133
Legislative History of the Mutual Security Program for Fiscal Year 1958, reprinted in Department of State
Bulletin, 14 October 1957, 595–603.
As the desire for increased funding intensified, the United Nations and
the World Bank played more‐crucial roles in the development of American
technical assistance projects.134 Throughout the 1950s, the Eisenhower
administration worked with the World Bank and UN, particularly with the
United Nations Technical Assistance Program and the Special United
Nations Fund for Economic Development (SUNFED), to supplement
Export–Import Bank capital loans to nations receiving technical assistance.
By the late 1950s, the UN’s technical assistance programs offered around
$100 million in funds annually.135 Though most development funding still
came from private investors at the time, the creation of these multinational
funds presaged an international shift toward governmental and suprana-
tional organizational funding for economic development projects.
A series of crises in the underdeveloped world prompted the Eisenhower
administration to expand its technical assistance funding. In the late 1950s,
Communism spread in Southeast Asia threatening American strategic and
economic interests. The Suez Crisis rattled Western Europe and the United
States in 1956.136 Perhaps most significantly, African decolonization
loomed.137 In 1957 and 1958, the Eisenhower administration received a
series of academic reports that trumpeted the potential value of technical
assistance, and, more broadly, development funding in the struggle against
Communism in the underdeveloped world.138 Following these reports, and
given the administration’s growing use of technical assistance as a strategic
tool, Eisenhower placed a new emphasis on U.S. government–based foreign
assistance. In 1957, the administration created the Development Loan
Fund, a domestic version of SUNFED, to furnish grants to private sectors of
134
Department of State Bulletin, January 23, 1956, 119–120.
135
For more on SUNFED’s creation, see “Special Report of the United States Delegation to the Sixteenth
Session of the Economic and Social Council,” Geneva, June 30–August 5, 1953, FRUS, 1952–1954, Vol. I,
Part 1, 276. See also Kaufman, Trade and Aid, 146–147 for a discussion of the Eisenhower administration’s
initial hesitance towards SUNFED but later support for supranational development funding.
136
For an extensive narrative of the Suez Crisis, see Keith Kyle, Suez: Britain’s End of Empire in the Middle
East (London: I.B. Tauris, 2003). For an analysis of Suez in the broader context of U.S. relations towards
Egypt, see Peter L. Hahn, The United States, Great Britain, and Egypt, 1945–1956: Strategy and Diplomacy
in the Early Cold War (Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 1991), chapter 10.
137
Westad, The Global Cold War, 129–131. On Africa, see Peter J. Schraeder, United States Foreign Policy
toward Africa: Incrementalism, Crisis, and Change (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994); Henry
F. Jackson, From the Congo to Soweto: U.S. Foreign Policy toward Africa Since 1960 (New York: William
Morrow and Company, Inc., 1982); George White, Jr. Holding the Line: Race, Racism, and American
Foreign Policy toward Africa, 1953–1961 (Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield Publishers, Inc., 2005);
Thomas Borstelmann, The Cold War and the Color Line: American Race Relations in the Global Arena
(Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2001).
138
Kaufman, Trade and Aid, 96–99.
underdeveloped countries and to offer extensive low‐interest loans that

could be repaid in local currencies.139 By July 1959, the Fund had made or
approved 87 loans to underdeveloped nations totaling over $700
million.140 Leonard J. Saccio, director of the ICA, proclaimed in
October 1959 that “regardless of what happens to the status and cost of
defense programs, we are going to have greater, not less, need for those parts
of the Mutual Security Program which are concerned with development
rather than defense or disaster.”141 By the end of the 1950s, the Eisenhower
administration had continued the small‐scale technical assistance projects
first institutionalized under Point Four, but it committed government
funding for such projects to an unprecedented extent.
CONCLUSION: MODERNIZING POINT FOUR

Technical assistance programs continued into the 1960s and underscored
the creation and implementation of modernization theory. Historians of
modernization theory have explored the ideological development of nation‐
building policies, and often focus on how officials in the Kennedy
administration applied their social science and economic theories of
development to the multitude of Third World crises in the early 1960s.142
By analyzing programs such as the Alliance for Progress, Peace Corps, and
Strategic Hamlet policy in Vietnam, these scholars examine how policy-
makers employed theories of economic development through a social
scientific lens to transform societies and advance strategic objectives.143
Although these historians correctly point out that the intellectual
framework for the modernization theories dated back to the 1940s and
1950s, rarely do they trace the policy history of development programs back
to Point Four. For when the Kennedy administration expanded govern-
ment aid to the underdeveloped world to an unprecedented magnitude and
explicitly used international development policies to combat communism,
the administration culminated, in many ways, a long process initially
crystallized in Truman’s inaugural address.144
139
Paterson, Meeting the Communist Threat, 158; Lumsdaine, Moral Vision in International Politics, 238.
For more on the legislative side of creating the DLF, see Kaufman, Trade and Aid, 102–110.
140
Department of State Bulletin, 27 July, 1959, 119–121, 127.
141
Department of State Bulletin, 23 November, 1959, 760–764.
142
See Nick Cullather, “Development? It's History,” Diplomatic History 24 (Fall 2000): 643; Latham,
Modernization as Ideology; Gilman, Mandarins of the Future; and the Conclusion of Westad, The Global
Cold War.
143
For more on the Alliance for Progress, Peace Corps, and Strategic Hamlet program as examples of
international development policy, see Latham, Modernization as Ideology, chaps 3–5.
144
On the anti‐Communist purposes of the Foreign Assistance Act of 1961, see Westad, The Global Cold War,
156.
Ideas often change as contexts change. Development thinking in Point

Four stressed small‐scale transfers of technology and education programs
to enhance standards of living as a means to drive national economic
growth, which would benefit the strategic interests of the United States.
Throughout the 1950s, however, policymakers became more amenable to
the idea that technical assistance programs could advance broader
economic and geopolitical interests. By the Kennedy years, modernization
theorists envisioned development as a more holistic process affecting
societies and individuals on psychological and cultural levels. The Kennedy
and Johnson administration offered extensive government funding to
large‐scale development projects, infused with social science theories,
which expanded Point Four’s view of development as an economic tool for
strategic ends by emphasizing social and cultural change. These projects
were markedly different from Point Four, which sought minimal U.S.
financial involvement.
Though smaller in scope, funding, and design than modernization
programs, Point Four was an important precedent because it incorporated
an emerging liberal vision for global modernization into the U.S. foreign
policy apparatus, one which defined underdevelopment in legible economic
and political terms. Indeed, scholars such as Gilbert Rist and Arturo
Escobar have argued that Point Four established important discursive
precedents, such as the use of the phrase “underdeveloped,” to describe and
define entire societies that would appear in later modernization
programs.145 This definition, in turn, suggested that the indicators of
global underdevelopment—levels of food production, standards of living,
national economic production—could be redressed through U.S. technical
assistance. This basic premise of the efficacy of U.S. development programs
underlined the larger‐scale modernization policies of the 1960s.
Historians of modernization theory have recently critiqued the intent
and application of international development policy. In general, these
scholars argue that modernization theorists paid little attention to specific
historical conditions or cultural features, ignored local perspectives, and
frequently politicized development when implementing policy.146
145
Rist, The History of Development, 70–75; Escobar, Encountering Development, 36–43.
146
See, Latham, Modernization as Ideology, 211. For a different interpretation, see Staples, The Birth of
Development, who argues that development policies, though unable to meet all their goals, remained a
valuable enterprise for addressing the needs of the underdeveloped world. See also Nick Cullather, “Damning
Afghanistan: Modernization in a Buffer State,” The Journal of American History, 89 (accessed at <http://
www.historycooperative.org/journals/jah/89.2/cullather.html>, 8 March 2008; David C. Engerman, “West
Meets East: The Center for International Studies and Indian Economic Development” in Engerman, Gilman,
Haefele, and Latham, eds., Staging Growth, 217; Ekbladh, ‘“Mr. TVA,”’ 373–374.
Modernization theorists viewed underdeveloped nations as malleable

entities and imposed a singular definition of development that reflected
both American values and interests. Moreover, historians have argued that
modernization resonated with a particular national narrative that extolled
the virtues of American liberalism. Accordingly, international development
policies became intertwined with the ongoing process of national self‐
identification.147
These criticisms could also extend to Point Four. Point Four officials
continually focused their efforts on small‐scale technical assistance, which
had neither the financial nor administrative capabilities to meet the
indigenous demands or the extensive challenges of international develop-
ment. Similarly, too, both Point Four and later modernization policies
linked national economic and political development with individual self‐
improvement, viewing social development through the lens of technological
capacity and technical prowess. Point Four officials believed that the
economic and technological strength of the United States could replicate
successful domestic programs like the TVA elsewhere, regardless of cultural
or historical contexts. By projecting a policy of international development
based upon ideological assumptions of democracy, capitalism, and
progress, Point Four advocated a set of liberal values that ensured that
international development would reflect the fundamental premises of
American society. In Point Four and modernization theory alike, U.S.
policymakers linked their visions of national values to the pursuit of
international objectives. Thus, for all the immediate and local successes that
Point Four officials celebrated, the program’s legacy is inextricably bound to
the extent to which this conflation of American values and interests could
appropriately address all the challenges of global development.
147
See Latham, Modernization as Ideology, 224; Latham, “Introduction: Modernization, International
History, and the Global Cold War World” in Engerman, Gilman, Haefele, and Latham, eds., Staging Growth,
3; and Gilman, Mandarins of the Future, 71.

macekura2013

Uploaded by

Copyright:

Available Formats

You might also like

macekura2013

Uploaded by

Document Information

Copyright

Available Formats

Share this document

Share or Embed Document

Sharing Options

Did you find this document useful?

Is this content inappropriate?

Copyright:

Available Formats

macekura2013

Uploaded by

Copyright:

Available Formats

The Point Four Program and U.S.

International Development Policy

STEPHEN MACEKURA is a Ph.D. candidate in the Corcoran Department of History at the

POLITICAL SCIENCE QUARTERLY | Volume 128 Number 1 2013 | www.psqonline.org

administrative manpower and financial resources of the federal govern-

that focused on underdeveloped nations emerging from colonial status and

FROM THE NEW DEAL TO POINT FOUR: A BRIEF HISTORY OF

countries proliferated through the interwar years, as did programs that

Roosevelt’s contemporaries even referred to the Marshall Plan as a

family’s) corporate investments.26 Upon returning from his various trips to

1940, Congress appropriated $500 million in capital funds through the

the majority of the program’s funding, upwards of 70 percent, other nations

THE PROGRAM DEVELOPS: THE ADMINISTRATIVE AND

economic and political development of former colonial territories in the

and thwart the growth of Communism—Secretary of State Dean Acheson

economic growth. To catalyze this process, education, encapsulated in the

also underscored Marshall Plan programs that rebuilt Western Europe’s

investment.68 When necessary, Point Four allowed these institutions to

Economic Cooperation Administration (ECA) described the potential

officials established offices for similar technical assistance programs in

political slavery.”83 Point Four, in this sense, was a program designed to

POINT FOUR IN ACTION: DEVELOPMENT PROJECTS IN INDIA

countries as Guatemala and Afghanistan expressed interest in signing

interdependent.”100 Truman frequently lauded India’s democratic system

military assistance supplemented technical assistance in Formosa, Indo-

programs to open the door to exploitative Western business interests.114

POINT FOUR DEVELOPS: CHANGE AND CONTINUITY IN THE

assistance programs in what scholar Sergei Shenin has termed the

development through small‐scale technical assistance—continued to

to combat Soviet influence across the underdeveloped world. In waging this

underdeveloped countries and to offer extensive low‐interest loans that

CONCLUSION: MODERNIZING POINT FOUR

Ideas often change as contexts change. Development thinking in Point

Modernization theorists viewed underdeveloped nations as malleable

You might also like