CHAPTER 3
After Carnegie Corporation made its education grant to Kenya in 1925, Frederick Keppel received a ten-page plea from J. H. Oldham to finance “scientific research” in British Africa, an appeal Oldham also had made to Keppel’s colleagues at the Rockefeller organizations during his trip to New York City that fall of 1925.1
In 1925, Oldham was still an adviser to the Phelps Stokes Fund, which was still actively promoting the two surveys of education in Africa authored by Thomas Jesse Jones, whose assent as an authoritative adviser on education for Black people in the United States and throughout Africa W. E. B. Du Bois and Carter Woodson had been watching with horror since the 1910s.
Shifting focus from education to “scientific research,” Oldham made this pitch to U.S. philanthropies, not as an agent of the Phelps Stokes Fund, but largely in his capacity as adviser and liaison to the British Colonial Office, which was then interested in crafting scientifically informed public policies in British Africa. As far as what this particular network of white men in London and New York City would mean when they discussed “scientific research” and its leading purpose in British Africa, they generally would express it as a need for the meticulous collection of data on white and Black people by white government administers or scholars in the developing social sciences for the purposes of guiding white policymakers’ work.
Aware that he was making his request to individuals sitting an ocean away from London and British Africa, Oldham explained why these philanthropic organizations in the United States should invest in funding such scientific research across the Atlantic. Oldham reasoned that scientific research (at least the type of “scientific research” he had in mind in British Africa) could help pacify the “growth of a racial consciousness among black peoples [which] is likely to result in the American Negro problem coming to be regarded on both sides as only one element in a world problem of the relations between the white and black races.”2
As this chapter illustrates, Oldham’s message found a receptive audience at Carnegie Corporation, if not at the Rockefeller organizations. Keppel not only circulated Oldham’s memorandum among his board, but relied on its contents to justify developing a grant program in British Africa. Indeed, Oldham had such a tremendous impact at the corporation that he would eclipse Thomas Jesse Jones as Keppel’s leading consultant on British Africa during the next two decades. Future corporation secretary Florence Anderson would acknowledge decades later that Oldham was Keppel’s “chief adviser with regard to people and grants in the African colonies from at least 1925 to 1936.”3 While Keppel would continue to lean on other experts on colonial Africa including Jones, Oldham would become Keppel’s go-to consultant on anything beyond African education in British Africa, particularly related to funding scientific research.
This chapter focuses on this moment at Carnegie Corporation when Oldham’s memorandum played a critical role in guiding the organization to expand upon its 1925 education grant to Kenya and to fund scientific research on the continent. Making sense of the document’s impact at Carnegie Corporation and Oldham’s subsequent meteoric rise as Keppel’s main adviser on Africa, the chapter argues that Oldham gained this influence at the corporation precisely because Keppel appreciated Oldham’s perspective on the radical implications of rising racial consciousness among Black people and on the potential for scientific research to temper this threat and further solidify white Anglo-American domination on the global stage.
This first section begins with an analysis of Oldham’s general fear of Black unity and why Keppel took it seriously in 1925.
1. J. H. Oldham’s Fear of Black Unity and Why Carnegie Corporation Took It Seriously
In the fall of 1925, Oldham gathered with the Rockefellers’ Laura Spelman Rockefeller Memorial officials over the span of three days, and then met with Keppel at Carnegie Corporation. At the time, the Laura Spelman Rockefeller Memorial was displaying an inclination for financing the social sciences in the United States and Europe, while Carnegie Corporation’s grant to Kenya earlier that year would have suggested to any observer such as Oldham that the organization had some interest in financing projects in colonial Africa. Since Oldham intended to advocate the value of funding scientific research in colonial Africa, he likely reasoned that one or both of these two philanthropic organizations in New York City might be receptive to his appeal.
Sharing with Keppel a summary of his earlier discussions at the memorial, Oldham begins his memorandum by describing Africa as a “new continent” whose partition by European powers had brought problems that both Europeans and Americans should find important to address and solve.4 Of all possible tensions developing from Europeans’ presence in Africa that could impact white Americans across the Atlantic, Oldham stressed the dangers of rising racial consciousness among Black people.5 Considering that white Americans had “within their borders nearly a tenth of the African race,” Oldham calculated that his audience should become invested in minimizing any Black solidarity across the Atlantic.6
Writing these words in 1925, J. H. Oldham was then living during a decade described by political scientist Robert Vitalis as one “marked by new theorizing on imperialism, the challenge to white supremacy, and the prospects of race war.”7 Indeed, scholars long have chronicled the making of transatlantic whiteness and global white supremacy from the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.8 For example, in connection with W. E. B. Du Bois’s comment in 1910 that the “world in a sudden, emotional conversation has discovered that is it white and by that token, wonderful!” Marilyn Lake and Henry Reynolds have detailed that as “Du Bois and contemporaries on the other side of the colour line saw clearly, the emergence of the ‘new religion’ of whiteness was a transnational phenomenon and all the more powerful for that, inspiring in turn the formation of international movements of resistance, such as the pan-African and pan-Asian alliances that threatened to bring about the very challenge to their world dominion that white men feared.”9
Oldham indeed was a participant in this violent struggle to retain and strengthen white rule and Black subjection across the Atlantic in the early twentieth century. And like many of his white contemporaries, he was fearful about the radical potential of pan-African alliances. While Oldham and colleagues in London and New York and throughout British Africa were trying to justify white domination of, and violence toward, Black people and other “subject races,” critics of this making of a white world order were becoming stronger in voice and numbers.10
Particularly threatening to white Anglo-American men such as Oldham, and especially in the 1920s when he wrote the memorandum, were Black nationalists and internationalists, especially Jamaican-born Marcus Garvey, whose Universal Negro Improvement Association (UNIA), with headquarters in New York, had become the “dominant black nationalist organization in the United States and worldwide in the immediate post–World War I era.”11 As historian Keisha Blain notes, “from 1919 to 1924, the organization attracted millions of followers in more than forty countries around the world.”12 Garvey, like other Black internationalists, intended to free Black people from white domination across oceans, and in the process, directly challenge white supremacy.13
Across the world in the early 1920s, the UNIA became a significant mass movement advocating unity among people of the African diaspora. In 1920, for example, a crowd of 25,000 people in New York City’s Madison Square Garden elected Garvey the “provisional president of Africa.”14 Four years later, in the same venue, Garvey said that what “was needed was a cadre of dedicated ‘American and West Indian Negroes’ who would ‘build up Africa in the interests of our race.’ ”15 In this way, Black nationalists and internationalists such as Garvey necessarily intended to challenge directly the white rule that Oldham and his colleagues, including those at Carnegie Corporation from Andrew Carnegie and James Bertram to Frederick Keppel, long had considered critical for national and international order.
Predictably, Garvey’s popularity met with opposition among many white Americans. In 1925, for example, the U.S. government imprisoned Garvey on charges of using the mail to defraud the public; and by December 1927, the United States had deported him back to Jamaica. Though the UNIA continued to exist as a mass movement in the United States, it lost momentum by the end of the decade.16 And yet, in 1925, when Oldham shared with Keppel his own anxieties about a rising pan-African consciousness, Garvey’s movement was growing in popularity. In fact, Blain and Adam Ewing trace the continued popularity of Garveyism well into the 1930s, and through the work of other public leaders and activists such as Mittie Maude Lena Gordon, Ethel Waddell, Celia Jane Allen, Ethel Collins, Amy Jacques Garvey, Amy Ashwood Garvey, Maymie Leona Turpeau De Mena, and other local organizers throughout the world from the United States and Kenya to the West Indies.17
When Oldham wrote—and Keppel read—his memorandum in 1925, it was the growing popularity of Garvey and the UNIA that likely first came to mind when they discussed the threat of a rising racial consciousness among Black people. Specifically to Keppel, for example, Garvey had gained his attention and the attention of his government colleagues some years earlier during the First World War through the War Department’s Military Intelligence Branch (MIB)—also referred to as the Military Intelligence Division—which monitored activities in Black communities.18 As historian Mark Ellis explains, secretary of war Newton Baker (who later became a member of Carnegie Corporation’s board) approved the creation of MIB upon the United States’ active engagement in the First World War. While MIB initially focused on monitoring “enemy agents,” “anti-war activities of American left-wing radicalism,” and “ethnic groups ill-disposed toward the Allied cause, such as German Americans, Irish Americans, and Indian nationalists seeking the overthrow of British Rule,” Ellis explains that it also soon “became convinced that black disloyalty represented further real threat to national security.”19
U.S. Major Ralph Van Deman, who had proposed the idea of the MIB to Baker, subsequently argued that there was a real danger of a violent “black rebellion” in the United States.20 Deman thus reasoned with colleagues that Black Americans might choose to address white supremacy and Black subjection through violence, rather than by appealing to white people such as themselves, “providing only that the time was propitious and the colored population was able to carry out their plans.”21 Hence, the MIB mobilized to spy on and infiltrate Black communities throughout the United States.
While the findings of the MIB were sent to Baker, it was specifically “Third Assistant Secretary of War Frederick P. Keppel, to whom racial matters were often referred.”22 Thus Keppel read vast quantities of communications related to “Negro Subversion,” ranging from analyses of “radical organizations and activities in the black community that had a potential impact on the military; discrimination against blacks, military and civilian, including incidents leading to race riots; and treatment of and performance by blacks in the army.”23 The reports expressed a general anxiety about Black Americans’ allegiance to the white U.S. government and its allies during the war. And in this vein, they signaled out Marcus Garvey as a threat to the war effort.24 As noted in the archival records of the War Department’s Military Intelligence Division, “One subject covered from late in World War I and throughout most of the interwar period was Marcus Garvey and his Universal Negro Improvement Association and African Community League.”25
In 1925, Garvey thus likely remained for both Oldham and Keppel a most prominent example of a rising racial consciousness among Black people. Though by then, it likely was not simply Garvey who represented the rising racial consciousness among Black people that Oldham, Keppel, and their colleagues feared. Other pan-African movements at the time, while not reaching the mass popularity of the UNIA, signaled the broad appeal among Black people for resisting white rule on both sides of the Atlantic. Such individuals included Cyril Briggs, founder, in 1919, of the African Blood Brotherhood; Amy Ashwood Garvey, founder of the UNIA’s newspaper, the Negro World, and most visibly for Keppel and his colleagues, W. E. B. Du Bois.26
Du Bois was then reviving pan-African congresses intended to bring together an elite cadre of Black people to resist white rule and plan for Black freedom at an international level. A graduate of Fisk and Harvard Universities, he had helped found the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) in 1909 and subsequently had led the association’s magazine, The Crisis. Working toward greater unity among Black Americans and Black Africans, Du Bois argued some years earlier that a small percentage of Black Americans were called to serve the masses of Black people across the Atlantic: “We as American Negroes, are resolved to strive in every honorable way for the realization of the best and highest aims, for the development of strong manhood and pure womanhood, for the rearing of a race ideal in America and in Africa to the glory of God and the uplifting of the Negro people.”27 With the intention of uniting and empowering Black people across oceans, and under the leadership of Black Americans such as himself, Du Bois organized a pan-African congress in Paris in 1919, to be followed by four more between 1919 and 1927.28
Just as Du Bois convened the 1919 congress, Keppel then was living in Paris and serving as director of Red Cross Foreign Operations.29 In his professional capacity at the Red Cross in Paris, where he also participated in the international settlement meeting after the First World War—the 1919 Paris Peace Conference—it is not beyond reason that Keppel would have known about the two simultaneous, though separate, meetings taking place in the city respectively among white and Black leaders. If so, his developing perspective since the First World War that stable white domination and rising Black unity could not long coexist could have been heightened. It was in such a moment in his life, living in Paris after the First World War and engaging in discussions on the future of international order, that Keppel likely became that much more convinced—as Oldham would stress to him in the 1925 memorandum and he would endorse by broadcasting the document amongst his board—that rising Black consciousness was not simply a national problem as he and colleagues at the U.S. War Department had analyzed it, but a transatlantic threat to international order.
To this point, and further underscoring reasons for Carnegie Corporation president Keppel’s captivated reception of J. H. Oldham’s memorandum in 1925, sociologist Frank Füredi notes that Keppel’s network of white Anglo-American colleagues and advisers, many of whom, like Keppel, served in the First World War, had perceived the conflict in Europe as a “ ‘civil war’ between white nations,” and “in the minds of contemporary observers this was the death blow to the notion of white solidarity.”30
After the First World War, elite white Americans and Britons such as Keppel and his colleagues in government and philanthropy had become generally anxious about the future of international politics, with many of them reasoning in the 1920s that the existing international order “seemed precariously unstable and the manifestation of racial consciousness was now seen as a direct challenge to the international status quo.”31 Fearing that “because of the universality of white racism, the world of colour would somehow respond in kind and unite against the common enemy,” such white Anglo-Americans became preoccupied with how “to prevent an explosion of racial grievances in Africa and Asia, which was now expected.”32
Continuing to gather against the backdrop of these white Anglo-Americans’ rising anxieties about pan-African unity, the pan-African congresses subsequently convened in London, Brussels, Paris, and Lisbon. By 1927, the gathering was attracting a much larger group of 208 delegates from eleven countries. Its agenda was likewise broad and included “the history of Africa and the West Indies; the economic development and political division of Africa; education, art, and literature in Africa; and an exhibition arranged by Du Bois of fifty-two charts on the African diaspora.”33 In the final years of the 1920s and particularly with the onset of the Great Depression, Du Bois’s pan-African congresses lost funding support and momentum. But in 1925, when Oldham shared his memorandum with Keppel, these congresses were yet another example for Keppel and his colleagues and advisers that a rising racial consciousness among Black people existed and posed a threat to white supremacy at the global level.
Beyond these congresses, Du Bois, in personal correspondence and publications, continued in the 1920s and 1930s to try to build ties across the pan-African diaspora and to speak critically of the making of the very white global order that Carnegie Corporation and its advisers were trying to solidify. To this point, Du Bois would write in a personal letter in 1934 that he long had “chafed over the unfair way in which the Carnegie [Corporation] and other funds have acted with regard to visitors to South Africa.”34
Specifically, Du Bois found “intolerable that they should confine American students to white men, and allow neither the South African natives nor American Negroes to come in contact with each other.”35 A keen observer of elite philanthropies’ work over the years, Du Bois knew that the corporation under Keppel’s leadership in the 1920s and 1930s was dedicated to bridging white, rather than Black, people across the Atlantic, including in its grants program in colonial Africa.36 Du Bois would even use himself to test the theory in the 1930s, then requesting from Keppel the opportunity to visit the British dominion of South Africa.37 In 1939, Keppel ultimately ended the conversation with Du Bois by stressing that he had “just heard from our friends in South Africa, and to my disappointment they seem to be in doubt as to the desirability of your making a visit to the Union [of South Africa] just now.”38 Emphasizing just how much he valued his network of white advisers, Keppel furthermore explained to Du Bois that “we have done pretty well in the past fifteen years by seeking and following [their] advice and I hesitate to break away from the policy.”39 As Du Bois readily knew by watching Carnegie Corporation funding practices and personally corresponding with Keppel over the years, this foundation and its president long had been invested in promoting white solidarity—and dissuading comparable Black unity—across the Atlantic.
Much like Keppel, whose anxieties about rising Black solidarity arguably had roots since the 1910s, Oldham also had maintained for some years an anxiety about rising racial consciousness among Black people. Four years before his 1925 conference with U.S. foundation leaders in New York City, for example, Oldham had traveled from London to the Tuskegee Institute in Alabama. After a week there, Oldham had taken note of rising African unity among Black African teachers and so too among Black African students throughout the United States. In this vein, he had celebrated the Tuskegee educational model and its impact on Black Americans, but had written back home with caution about the manifestations of pan-African nationalism that he witnessed among some Africans in the United States.
In correspondence with Lionel Curtis—a key founder of the Royal Institute of International Affairs (Chatham House) in London, one of the “post-Versailles internationalist think tanks” alongside the Council on Foreign Relations in New York—Oldham juxtaposed Black Americans educated fully under the Tuskegee educational model with Black African students who only studied or were taught for some fleeting years under this pedagogy.40 Oldham noted to Curtis that Black Americans and Black Africans alike existed under white domination respectively in the United States and Africa, but observed that Black Americans lacked “any kind of sourness of disposition,” showed “restraint and balance of judgment” and “a cheerful optimism.”41
Bringing a global perspective to his analysis of white Anglo-American rule, Oldham explained in correspondence to Curtis that the Tuskegee educational model could play a central role in aiding white colonial officers to better subjugate people throughout the empire, if only by educating them to accept their own subordination and white Europeans’ superiority. Referring to growing Indian nationalism, for example, Oldham further reasoned that the “Indian situation would be much more hopeful than it is if Indians possessed a larger measure of [Black Americans’] gifts.”42
To Oldham’s mention of British India, Mohandas Gandhi had been leading a nonviolent nationalist movement, and although India did not gain independence until 1947, it was clear to many British observers in the 1920s such as Oldham that this “jewel of the British Empire” was heading that way. Historian John Cell observes that already by 1915, the then commissioner of New Delhi, Malcolm Hailey (the same Hailey who would lead Carnegie Corporation’s African survey) “was ready to concede that the intelligentsia were authentic spokesmen for an insurgent force that was sweeping the Eastern world.”43 Born in western India and then studying and becoming a barrister in London, Gandhi was one of these highly educated Indians whom Hailey and Oldham cautiously watched and feared as critical threats to white domination.
In correspondence with Curtis, Oldham calculated that Black Americans had gained a certain non-confrontational disposition after being educated under the Tuskegee model that allowed for an unchallenged white supremacy in the United States. If Europeans had exported this educational model to India some years or decades earlier, Oldham reasoned that they could have better managed and subjugated Indians into accepting British supremacy and Indian inferiority.
Oldham furthermore explained to Curtis that he perceived similarities between the Indian nationalists whom he vilified and some Black Africans whom he met in the United States. These included a man from Rhodesia who had studied in the northern United States before taking a teaching position at the Tuskegee Institute. In particular, Oldham told Curtis, this individual had relayed to him that he planned to return to Rhodesia in order to help his fellow people. Oldham summed up: the man “is thoroughly loyal and has the Tuskegee outlook. But as I talked with him I touched exactly the same things that one knows so well in one’s Indian friends. It may be long in coming but sooner or later we shall have the same situation in Africa that we are facing in India.”44 Oldham feared that like Indians, Black Africans such as the Tuskegee professor soon would mobilize and unite to lay claim to independence from the British Empire, casting some doubts for Oldham as to whether this model of education could be the panacea towards helping white Anglo-Americans maintain their domination over Black people, let alone many other “subject races” in the Anglo-American world.
While Oldham excluded the professor’s name in his correspondence with Curtis, historian Kenneth James King notes that it was Tuskegee’s African history professor, Simbini Mamba Nkomo, whose own personal transformation in the 1910s and early 1920s offers a glimpse of the developing racial consciousness that Oldham perceived and so feared among Black people.45
Described at varying times as Zimbabwean, South African, and Mozambican, Nkomo attended Greenville College in Illinois. Some years earlier, in 1917, and while finishing school there, Nkomo had produced a pamphlet with the intention of appealing to white philanthropists for assistance in financing a school which he intended to open after graduation and which he vaguely described would serve “African boys and girls” in his “native land” in Africa.46 In this pamphlet, Nkomo mobilized white people’s point of view on Africa and Black people generally in order to appeal to their sensibilities, including their presumed disinterest in specifying geographic regions within the continent or ethnic groups among Africans. Though by the time he met with Oldham four years later, Nkomo seemed to have abandoned past efforts to appeal to white people such as Oldham and white people’s own hopes for Black people: a perspective that Nkomo’s 1917 pamphlet suggests he knew quite well.
In this earlier pamphlet, for example, Nkomo had presented to white U.S. readers an image of Africa as a backward continent populated by “jungles,” “hut[s],” witch doctor[s],” and an “ignorant African boy” such as himself.47 By contrast, and again appealing to white readers keen to imagine the positive effects of Europeans’ presence in Africa, Nkomo had depicted in a positive light white missionaries proclaiming “Jesus, the Saviour of the world” and attributed to them and their God his decision to pursue higher education.48 At the end of this promotional document, Nkomo had comforted his targeted white readers who might be hesitant to help a Black man seek higher education by emphasizing that he intended only to expand upon white missionaries’ work among Black Africans.
To this point, Nkomo had explained to these white American readers that upon returning to Africa after pursuing schooling in the United States, he planned to “teach the African boys and girls the things of God and His power to save them through the blood of Jesus Christ, his only begotten Son.”49 Beyond the gospel, Nkomo had comforted his white readers by stressing that he expected to teach them “something about scientific farming, because there is so much land that is not tilled properly.”50 Playing into white philanthropists’ image of white and Black people in Africa and assuaging their fears of educating Black Africans, Nkomo then had hoped to convince white Americans to support his plans to launch a schoolhouse for “African boys and girls.”
However, by the time Nkomo was a faculty member at Tuskegee Institute in Alabama and meeting with Oldham in 1921, he seemed less willing to appease white people’s derogatory image of Black people or to alleviate white people’s fears of educated Black people such as himself. Between the publication of this 1917 pamphlet and his meeting with Oldham, that is, Nkomo experienced some transformation in his views on white rule and Black subordination or, at least, on his willingness to publicly excuse these twin forms of domination and subjection. To this point, Nkomo founded and became executive secretary of the African Student Union (ASU) of America, and in 1919 he coordinated an African Student Conference in Chicago, which attracted fifty Africans and eight hundred others.51 When Oldham met Nkomo two years later at the Tuskegee Institute, he was meeting with a man who had become increasingly sympathetic to a pan-African identity uniting Africans throughout the continent and the diaspora.
Moreover, Nkomo’s promotion of racial pride went beyond his work at the ASU to his classroom at the Tuskegee Institute, a school that—at least publicly—bought into its founder’s and funders’ expectations for white rule and Black subordination. And yet, beyond the watchful eye of white funders, the Tuskegee Institute maintained some space for nurturing racial consciousness among Black students, as well as a sense of pan-African internationalism which Nkomo “regarded as the foundation of true progress for Africans.”52 For example, Nkomo told the school’s president, Robert Moton, “ ‘I am sure that I have tried to do all I could for the students who were in my history classes. In all my class work I have laid great deal of stress of the National spirit or the Spirit of racial selfvaluation which is the foundation of true progress along all lines.’ ”53
For Nkomo at least, racial pride among Black people—irrespective of national or tribal origins—was an important step toward freedom from white domination and violence in the United States and Africa. However, Nkomo’s powerful sense of self-purpose would stop short four years later, in 1925, the same year that Oldham met with Keppel and shared his evolving anxieties about Black nationalism in Africa. “Suddenly and tragically Nkomo died in 1925,” historian Kenneth King writes, “bringing to an end for a time this particular coalition of African and American Negro youth in a common cause. His presence at Tuskegee had been a great attraction for several Africans, who all, not insignificantly, left as soon as he did.”54
Four years earlier, when Oldham visited the Tuskegee Institute, though, Sambini Mamba Nkomo was still teaching at the school. In conversation with Nkomo, Oldham furthermore had learned that African students in the United States had formed an African students association, of which the Tuskegee professor was founder and executive secretary. As Oldham recounted to Curtis, all of these men had “an African consciousness: their loyalty and interest is not Liberian or Rhodesian or Gold Coast, but African.”55 With a rising African consciousness among African students in the United States, Oldham concluded in his correspondence with Curtis that Black Africans stood a chance of challenging white rule on the continent. He reasoned to his friend in London: “The number of educated Africans at present is small, but they hold their own with the European just as the Indian can do.” It was time, Oldham told Curtis, for their network of white men to plan ahead in Africa, so that “when (at however distant a time) we reach the stage which we have now reached in India and Egypt we shall have a situation more easily to deal with.”56 And by dealing with the situation, Oldham imagined neutralizing Black Africans’ internationalist claims and preserving white European rule across oceans.
It was in his 1925 memorandum to Carnegie Corporation that Oldham addressed how to do so. Explaining that the “difficulties of the situation in Africa are due in part to the fact that the powerful new forces at work in the continent have not yet been brought sufficiently under intelligent control,” Oldham proposed that a “well-considered experiment” in scientific research could help achieve “a better understanding of the real nature of these forces and thereby greater ability to master them.”57 Clearly anxious about white people’s declining abilities to maintain domination in colonial Africa, Oldham stressed the importance of scientific research as a tool for social control, a clarion call that President Keppel answered.
Focusing on Oldham’s networks in 1920s London, this next section provides further context to his recommendation in 1925 that greater data collection in colonial Africa could help white policymakers strengthen their dominance in the face of rising pan-Africanism.
2. Intellectual Context for J. H. Oldham’s Support of Thorough Data Collection in British Africa
Since the 1910s, Oldham had served as secretary of the International Missionary Council and founding editor of the International Review of Missions. It was in the latter position that Oldham had reviewed Jones’s Negro Education (1917) and suggested to readers of the International Review of Missions that Jones’s recommended form of education for Black Americans could apply for subjugated groups throughout the British Empire.
As secretary of the International Missionary Council, Oldham was in routine contact with the British Colonial Office with whom he regularly negotiated the interests of missionaries throughout the British Empire. Among Colonial Office politicians, Oldham subsequently enjoyed a reputation as a “man of reason and moderation.”58 Gaining the trust of leading policymakers in London, Oldham was able to introduce Jones to British government officials. In the process, Oldham not only brought Jones to the attention of the British government, but helped establish his own reputation as an adviser to the British government on African education. In this role, for example, under-secretary of state for the colonies William Ormsby-Gore asked Oldham in 1923 to lead a committee on African education, though it was formally chaired by the under-secretary and included several leading members of the British government. The resulting report, Education Policy in British Tropical Africa (1925), which was published two years later, largely echoed the recommendations of Jones’s two African surveys.59
During the 1910s and 1920s, Oldham was cultivating a network of leading British policymakers, U.S. foundation leaders, and education advisers on Africa. As liaison to these various groups, Oldham also would become a formal advocate of further scientific research in colonial Africa. In 1925, the same year as the publication of Education Policy in British Tropical Africa and some months before Oldham traveled to meet with U.S. foundation leaders in New York City, the report of a royal commission on labor and land practices in East Africa, chaired by Orsmby-Gore, was published.60 Historian George Bennett notes that, precisely after the publication of the Ormsby-Gore report on East Africa, there was a general feeling in the British government that further research was needed on colonial Africa.61
As an adviser with developing connections with U.S. foundations, the Colonial Office turned to Oldham and encouraged him to seek funds for such scientific investigations in British Africa and particularly East Africa, where the Royal Commission had conducted its own report.62 As Oldham noted in his memorandum to U.S. philanthropic managers later that fall in 1925, the “recent Report of the Parliamentary Commission to East Africa strongly advocated increased provision for scientific research.”63
Justifying his appeal to philanthropic organizations in the U.S. rather than the British government, Oldham reasoned in the 1925 memorandum that funding from London was going to be insufficient for social science needs in Africa.64 In light of the Royal Commission’s recommendations, Oldham explained to his potential U.S. funders that only “a small percentage of the proposed imperial loan for the development of transport in East Africa will be earmarked for scientific research.”65 Turning to the British colonial governments in Africa, Oldham also confessed that the East African governments confronted much more serious and dire problems such as plant, animal, and human diseases that would overwhelm and likely exhaust any available sums for research.66 Acting as an agent of the British Colonial Office, Oldham thus suggested to the Rockefeller and Carnegie groups that non-governmental funding sources from the United States could help finance this work in British Africa, in ways that the British imperial and colonial governments could not.
In appealing to U.S. foundations, Oldham indeed was following direct orders from the British government. However, Oldham also personally believed in the value and importance of social research. In a book published a year earlier, Christianity and the Race Problem (1924), for example, Oldham had advocated the need for further social investigations of indigenous communities in the British Empire.67 Like the Colonial Office, Oldham believed (as he also expressed in his memorandum to U.S. philanthropic leaders in 1925) that collecting data, or rather conducting fieldwork, was an important key to maintaining white governance in Africa.68 Beyond methodology, Oldham and his network of contacts in the British government also maintained a certain public policy goal for this research in Africa: They expected that fieldwork would help white policymakers and administrators develop solutions to perceived problems in white rule and Black subjection and, in the process, help white policymakers stabilize their domination in Africa.
In 1925, the Laura Spelman Rockefeller Memorial listened patiently to Oldham, but the organization remained rather steadfast in insisting that it had no particular interest in developing a grantmaking program on the continent.69 A year later, the memorial indeed made a one-time grant of $35,000 to the Phelps Stokes Fund for education work in Africa, though under the condition that the Rockefellers’ name not be made public in connection with this funding project.70 At the time, the Rockefeller organizations wanted to avoid the public perception that they were interested in establishing grantmaking programs in colonial Africa, whether in education or the social sciences.
During the next decade, the Rockefeller organizations would go on to finance scientific research on British Africa, though again not directly in response to Oldham’s requests for greater scientific research on the continent. Rather, the Rockefeller funds would support work on British Africa, though based in London and as part of their efforts to strengthen the social science fields in Europe. For example, just as the Rockefeller organizations reorganized in 1929 with the Rockefeller Foundation absorbing the smaller Laura Spelman Rockefeller Memorial’s funding practices in the social sciences, the Rockefeller Foundation joined Carnegie Corporation in financing the International Institute of African Languages and Cultures (IIALC) in London, which Oldham had founded in 1926.
Ultimately, the Rockefeller groups would eclipse Carnegie Corporation in their support of London-based research centers such as the London School of Economics and the IIALC, and yet they never would match Carnegie Corporation’s interest in funding social scientific research in Africa. Repeatedly, the Rockefeller groups would stress that they maintained little interest in expanding their commitment to the social sciences beyond the United States and Europe, with any support they offered in the realm of research on Africa stemming from their commitment to research in these two geographic regions. By contrast, when Oldham traveled to meet with U.S. foundation leaders in New York City during the fall of 1925, he found a particularly welcoming audience with Carnegie Corporation president Frederick Keppel.
In 1925, Keppel was sufficiently impressed by Oldham’s memorandum to circulate it among his trustees.71 And far from unusual, this would prove to be a characteristic move by Keppel during important junctures in his tenure at Carnegie Corporation, whether in 1925 when he found himself inspired by Oldham’s memorandum or in the mid-1930s when he intended to commission a U.S. analogue to Lord Hailey’s African Survey (1938), which the corporation was then financing in the 1930s through Chatham House in London. To this point, as later chapters explain, U.S. sociologist Donald Young remembered a similar experience with Keppel when he decided to fund the study that would become the U.S. version of Hailey’s study: An American Dilemma. Young recounted:
I did write this long letter reiterating what I had said over there [at Keppel’s office], and got a very very warm note from Mr. Keppel, both for the conversation and the letter, but particularly for the letter, which he was having duplicated and sent to the trustees in support of the proposal. I remember taking it in to [SSRC director] Mr. Crane and saying, “Is this in support of that proposal as Mr. Keppel had it?” Crane read it over and said, “No.” But it could be so read, as a matter of fact. Sometimes when you put things in writing you don’t say quite what you meant, but maybe it was better that way.72
Much as with Young’s letter over a decade later, President Keppel shared, in 1925, Oldham’s memorandum with fellow board members as means of justifying a new grantmaking idea and deflecting his own role in promoting it.
That is, when Keppel wanted to shift the direction of board decisions at Carnegie Corporation towards new funding practices—and as fellow board member Henry James once remarked, “Keppel loved to try something new”—he preferred doing so by deflecting attention away from himself and toward an expert adviser.73 Such an adviser, whose knowledge Keppel reasoned that the board would respect, would elaborate what he himself wanted to accomplish at the organization. And there are several reasons to believe that Keppel, at a personal level, found appealing Oldham’s call for scientific research in colonial Africa. For starters, Keppel’s war service in the U.S. Department of War likely gave him sympathy for policymakers—whether in Washington D.C. or London—who were trying to create informed public policy decisions and were thus eager for data on their targeted populations. Not least, the U.S. War Department had collected field research on Black Americans as means of pacifying Black unity against white rule in the United States, and Keppel had been at the center of this knowledge-gathering. And before the First World War, Keppel had been Columbia College dean for years and, thus, had been in a prime position to appreciate the developing social science fields in a leading university.
Soon after Oldham’s visit, and with the approval of the corporation’s board, Keppel coordinated plans to travel to British Africa with an eye to expanding the organization’s presence on the continent. Though first, Carnegie Corporation would send a U.S. adviser to survey the people and institutions in Africa that Keppel should visit.
3. Carnegie Corporation Tours British Africa
In one of the first concrete steps he took in acting on Oldham’s advice, Keppel sent former Columbia University colleague James Earl Russell to East and southern Africa the following year on a reconnaissance trip. Russell had recently retired from his post as dean of the university’s Teachers College. Unsurprisingly, then, Russell contacted and met with several alumni from Teachers College including white South African alumni Charles T. Loram and Ernst Malherbe.74
As far as the geographic scope of the trip, Oldham had argued in conversation with Carnegie and Rockefeller officials a year earlier that greatest attention should be placed on East Africa, largely channeling the British Government’s agenda at the time and particularly the recommendations of the Royal Commission on East Africa.75 Carnegie Corporation indeed sent Russell to East Africa, though also South Africa: two regions of British Africa that Bertram furthermore had considered sufficiently white to merit Carnegie Corporation’s support.
Between East and southern Africa, Russell, Keppel, and Bertram would place greater emphasis on southern Africa and likely for several reasons. For starters, Russell connected with Teachers College alumni in South Africa during the reconnaissance trip. And once Bertram and Keppel retraced Russell’s steps the following year, it also would become relevant that Bertram had lived in South Africa for several years before becoming Andrew Carnegie’s secretary in 1897.76 So while the corporation, in theory, was equally interested in East and southern Africa as sufficiently white regions of British Africa, the organization shared several personal bonds to South Africa that made this region especially appealing for the organization’s leadership in the 1920s.
Underscoring the significance of these personal relationships, the two Teachers College alumni in South Africa with whom James Russell met would play instrumental roles in developing the corporation’s newfound interest in funding research in the social sciences on the continent. Considered an expert in Africans’ education among this developing network of white Anglo-Americans and South Africans, Charles T. Loram had been part of the Phelps Stokes Fund network in colonial Africa for some years. In 1917, for example, Loram’s dissertation on The Education of the South African Native came to global attention after Oldham reviewed it alongside Jones’s report of Black education in the United States.77 And when Oldham and Jones coordinated the Phelps Stokes Fund’s first African report, South African prime minister Jan Smuts had sent Loram, his chief inspector of “native education” in Natal and member of the Union Native Affairs Commission, to accompany Jones.78
While funding scientific research in South Africa, Carnegie Corporation would soon learn that nurturing unity among white people was an ambitious project. For example, the dominion of South Africa had a long history of animosities between English-speaking white South Africans and Afrikaners. While Keppel would have had reason to be naïve on this point, his travel companion would not. After all, Bertram had spent years in southern Africa, which would have made him vividly aware of this strain among white people in the region. However, Bertram’s own subsequent surprise at the rising political strength of Afrikaner nationalism in the late 1920s seems to suggest that he either assumed the ultimate dominance of Britons in a British dominion or that Afrikaners, from their own reasoning and particularly after the peace agreement ending the South African War (1899–1902), would find it expedient to merge with British South Africans in shared white leadership of the British dominion.
To Bertram’s particular chagrin in the late 1920s, he would learn that this latter group of white South Africans was gaining greater political power and that their vision for white rule was increasingly hostile, rather than conciliatory, with a broader Anglo-American world.
This level of hostility among Afrikaners and colonists of British descent in southern Africa enjoyed a relatively long history. However, for some years before Keppel and Bertram’s African tour following James Russell’s own, the British dominion of South Africa had been governed by Afrikaners intent on reconciling hostilities between and among white people in the region. To this point, Jan Smuts, the former South African prime minister who had sent Charles Loram to join Jones on the Phelps Stokes Fund’s first African report, was an Afrikaner nationalist who had fought against the British during the South African War. Unlike his successor and fellow Afrikaner J. B. M. Hertzog, though, Jan Smuts had been eager to build ties among these two communities of white people in South Africa. In fact, even as the South African government became increasingly hostile to a broader Anglo-American world in the late 1920s, Smuts would remain a key player in this network of Anglo-American philanthropists, their advisers, and colleagues in government. Smuts’s own biography offers glimpses into his ambivalent role as a white Afrikaner nationalist in South Africa and collaborator with an international network of white Anglo-Americans intent on solidifying white Anglo-American rule. To this point, Smuts was born in 1870 to an Afrikaner family in the British Cape Colony, and reflecting some affinity for Britain, he studied at Cambridge and Christ’s College in England, returning to the British colony in 1895. However within some years, Smuts grew increasingly critical of British dominance in the region and during the South African War served in opposition to the British.
Ending with a peace treaty, the South African War concluded with a unification of southern Africa’s English-speaking colonies, Natal and the Cape, with Afrikaner republics, the Orange Free State and the Transvaal. Together, in 1910, these regions of southern Africa formed the Union of South Africa, a self-governing dominion within the British Empire.79
With the recently warring region transforming into a dominion of the British Empire, historian Leonard Thompson writes that Alfred Milner, appointed high commissioner of South Africa and governor of the Cape Colony, “planned to rule the former republics autocratically, without popular participation, until he had denationalized the Afrikaners and swamped them with British settlers. When that was done, and not before then, it would be safe and expedient to introduce representative institutions.”80
That said, Milner was trying to suppress a rather sizeable population with political will in the region. Afrikaners not only represented over half of the white population of southern Africa, but opposition to British rule within this group remained strong. To this point, and reflecting continued and sizeable rejection to British domination in the newly established British dominion, white South Africans did not elect British leaders to steer the new Union of South Africa. Rather, they elected former Afrikaner generals of the South African War Louis Botha and Jan Smuts.
Just three years earlier, Botha and Smuts had come to power in the Afrikaner-dominated region of the Transvaal. By then, they had realized that their wartime Afrikaner nationalism needed to develop into a more conciliatory policy toward all white people in the region, including Britons. In this way, they could secure as many votes as possible within a voting population that was half British and half Afrikaner. Louis Botha and Jan Smuts thus “described their policy as one of ‘conciliation,’ which involved reconciling the differences among Afrikaners and between Afrikaners and British Transvaalers.”81
Becoming leaders of the Union of South Africa in 1910, Prime Minister Louis Botha and Deputy Prime Minister Jan Smuts continued their strategy of conciliation among the two groups of white people in South Africa. This conciliation plan not only aimed to unite white people within the Union, but also to further suppress Black South Africans in the process. For example, historian Grace Davie notes that leading Black South Africans “felt betrayed when the white power-sharing settlement that ended the war dictated that African franchise rights would not extend beyond the Cape, where, starting in 1853, some property-owning African men had been able to access the ballot.”82 Not only were white South Africans stripping Black South Africans of the right to vote, but also of the right to own land: And these were rights that Black Africans had exercised in some parts of southern Africa before unification. The Natives Land Act of 1910, for example, “limited the territory that Africans could legally own to a mere 7.5 percent of the total territory of the country.”83
In response to these restrictions, African National Congress (ANC) leader Sol Plaatje argued for the repeal of the Act, and subsequently journeyed to London as part of an ANC delegation to appeal their grievances to the British government. But as Davie notes, “The Colonial Office refused to study the matter and deemed South Africa’s native policies a domestic affair.”84 Back in South Africa, leading white South Africans expected to further cement their unity as two groups of white people equally invested in white rule and Black subjection in the region. And far as the threat of Black political power in the region, Davie writes that white people in South Africa “could rely on coordinated state-sponsored violence to uphold the pillars of racial and economic power.”85
After Louis Botha passed away in 1919, Prime Minister Jan Smuts continued their shared policy of prioritizing the unity of white South Africans.86 Though when Carnegie Corporation adviser Russell traveled through South Africa in the mid-1920s, Smuts was no longer prime minister.87 The policy advocated by Smuts of coordinating with British settlers in South Africa and more broadly, the British Empire had comforted British officials, but it had been far from unanimously shared among fellow Afrikaners in the region. Among the latter group, this policy became exceptionally controversial during the First World War when, as historian Leonard Thompson notes, “Botha and his colleagues accepted the fact that South Africa, like the other self governing British dominions, was automatically involved, since it was not a sovereign state.”88 And so, while Botha and Smuts might have been sympathetic to white Anglo-Americans’ calls for greater unity among the United Kingdom and its settler colonies such as South Africa, they quickly would find that they were not in the majority among Afrikaners at the time, who, most immediately inspired by the First World War, sought leadership more critical of, and independent from, British settlers in South Africa and the British Empire generally.
Beyond Smuts’s longstanding cooperation with the British government, Afrikaners found yet another prominent reason to criticize his leadership in the 1920s: they were disenchanted with his support of industry at the expense of white South African workers. Building a coalition with the Labour Party, National Party leader J. B. M. Hertzog defeated Jan Smuts in 1924.89 Against the backdrop of an economic recession lasting several years, exacerbating white South Africans’ anxieties about poverty amongst their racial group—and most recently an armed workers’ strike in 1922 ending in martial law and several hundred deaths under Smuts’s leadership—both the Labour and National Parties criticized the Smuts government “for promoting ‘big financial’ interests and jeopardizing the future of South Africans ‘as a civilized people.’ ”90 Noting the white population’s unemployment rates, the two winning parties stressed the existing problem of poverty among white South Africans. They argued that white rule in the union would be threatened without protecting “civilized labor” for the “civilized races” against primarily Black South Africans.91
This was not a new concern. The “Pact Government” of the National and Labour Parties in the early 1920s mobilized a long-standing anxiety over white poverty in South Africa. Since the turn of the century, historian Judith Tayler writes, the “presence of white pauperism was viewed as a reproach in terms of the dominant Christian value system. It was also a source of discomfort and distaste to the middle classes wherever physical proximity was unavoidable and above all it was perceived as a ‘weak link’ which enfeebled the white population and threatened its perceived mission as a civilizing agent.”92 For several decades at least, Afrikaners and English-speaking South Africans had been sensitive to the existence of poverty among whites, seeing it as a threat to their claims of racial superiority over Africans.
In the latter years of the 1920s, Hertzog’s National Party in South Africa would gain such popularity that it would no longer need to build a coalition with the Labour Party in order to win the general election of 1929. In this way, Carnegie Corporation secretary James Bertram and president Frederick Keppel would watch warily in the late 1920s as an increasingly powerful National Party in South Africa embraced rhetoric increasingly hostile to the British. As yet another affront to Carnegie Corporation’s own vision of white Anglo-American rule, the party’s campaign rhetoric was publicly hostile (rather than simply publicly patronizing) to Black South Africans.
Before then, however, in the mid-1920s when Carnegie Corporation first was developing a grant program in British Africa, Keppel and Bertram visited a South Africa where the National Party’s pro-Afrikaner and anti-British rhetoric, though present, was tempered by its coalition with a Labour Party peopled with English-speaking white South Africans. Together in the mid-1920s, a South African government led jointly by the National and Labour Parties revealed a shared concern for white unity in South Africa, a concern that resonated with both Bertram and Keppel. After all, the two men were in South Africa as part of the corporation’s general efforts to support the interests of white Anglo-Americans across the white Anglo-American world, including British settlers in Africa.
Among those in South Africa at the time who acutely reflected this heightened concern for bridging divides among white Afrikaners and British settlers, and were interested in collaborating with white Anglo-Americans toward such efforts, was former Teacher’s College student Ernst Malherbe, with whom Russell met during his trip through the region. A “tenth-generation Afrikaner and the son of a Dutch Reformed minister,” Malherbe had studied at Columbia’s Teachers College during the 1920s.93 When Malherbe met with Russell in South Africa, Malherbe was then teaching at Cape Town’s Faculty of Education and enjoying the critical success of his recently published Columbia dissertation on education policies in South Africa, Education in South Africa: 1652–1922 (1925).94
Like fellow South African Charles Loram, who served as adviser to the Phelps Stokes Fund, Ernest Malherbe had found much to learn in white Americans’ experiences with education. But unlike Loram, who was particularly interested in shaping Black Africans’ education, Malherbe imagined creating a general, national education research bureau.95 In particular, historian Brahm David Fleisch writes that one model Malherbe “had in mind was the United States Bureau of Educational Research, which collected and published educational statistics and initiated original research.”96 More specifically, Ernst Malherbe aimed to have a centralized national bureau on education in South Africa that collected empirical data on its population; analyzed problems in education empirically; and, from this empirical data and analyses, offered policy solutions to solve the problems. Fleisch writes: “What South Africa needed, Malherbe believed, was a genuinely ‘scientific’ approach to social policy making.”97 To reach this goal, Malherbe imagined that he would need the aid of Americans who presumably had expertise and money for such endeavors.
Russell alerted these white South Africans that Carnegie Corporation’s president would be visiting the following year to discuss further funding opportunities in the region.
4. The Corporation Decides to Fund Research in British Africa
In November of 1926, Carnegie Corporation’s trustees approved Keppel’s proposed trip to retrace Russell’s journey in colonial Africa and gauge opportunities for effective use of the Special Fund on the continent: the $10 million fund at Carnegie Corporation applicable in Canada and the British Colonies. They resolved to send Bertram as well.98
Years later, Keppel’s assistant, John Russell (son of James Russell) remembered that Keppel “felt that Bertram wouldn’t approve of [a grant program in Africa] unless he was asked to go. Bertram was a very difficult person.”99 By asking Bertram to accompany him on this trip, Keppel likely tried to ensure the allegiance of a leading board member who was not only reluctant to embrace new ideas, but whose interpretation of Andrew Carnegie’s philanthropic intentions in the Anglo-American world—and specifically his intentions for funding initiatives on or for white and Black people in the Anglo-American world—carried weight on the corporation’s board. It also helped that Bertram had lived in South Africa and spoke Zulu and thus could facilitate the trip.100
Aware of Keppel and Bertram’s forthcoming tour, Phelps Stokes Fund education director Thomas Jesse Jones wrote to Loram. By then, Jones was aware that Russell had met with Loram and thus too that Loram was likely to meet with Bertram and Keppel the following year. Defending his education-focused agenda, Jones cautioned Loram about the importance of his interactions with Carnegie Corporation leaders. Jones relayed:
The important consideration for you at the present time seems to me to be your approach to President Keppel and Mr. Bertram, who must be won to a constructive program in Africa. I have some fear that Dr. Keppel may be won to the research approach and also that he may turn his interest to the needs of the whites in South Africa. As you know, I believe both in research and certainly in the education of the whites. My concern is that these two interests shall not exclude the practical approach as explained in our Jeanes school program.101
While Carnegie Corporation did not publicly state the geographic and substantive priorities in its grantmaking, it seems from Jones’s letter that he was relatively aware of Bertram’s insistence that Andrew Carnegie would have condoned only financing projects in white communities in Africa that would benefit whites. Jones also seemed aware of Oldham’s influence on Keppel, and the subsequent possibility that the corporation increasingly would become interested in funding scientific research on the continent. Spelling out for Loram the vital role that he could play in Keppel and Bertram’s tour throughout Africa, Jones stressed how Loram could help steer these two foundation leaders away from the temptation of focusing so singularly on white people and on funding research.
From June to September of 1927, Keppel and Bertram visited the British colony of Kenya and the British protectorates of Uganda, Tanganyika, and Zanzibar; Southern and Northern Rhodesia, which were, respectively, a British colony and a protectorate; and the Union of South Africa, a British dominion. Loram indeed had prioritized the visit by using his vacation time to travel with the two U.S. men over the span of several weeks.102 However, Keppel and Bertram ultimately agreed with Russell’s assessment that Malherbe—whom Keppel also had met years earlier at Columbia—was a particularly useful contact with a worthy project idea.103 During the trip, Keppel heard Malherbe suggest that Carnegie Corporation should fund a scientific study of white poverty in South Africa.104 In a Cape Times piece published before Keppel’s trip to Africa, Malherbe had explained this idea in some detail, writing: “ ‘We shall never solve the Poor White problem adequately until we get thorough and first-hand knowledge of the causes underlying this malady.… Only when we have made a correct diagnosis and are certain of the causes can we remedy them.… The results must be published so as to be accessible to the whole of the public.’ ”105
Upon their return to their New York offices in 1927, Bertram and Keppel shared a report of their trip with fellow trustees at Carnegie Corporation. Referring once again to Bertram’s own geographic limitations for the foundation, they reasoned that the British colonial governments in West Africa, with the help of the Phelps Stokes Fund, were already providing support for Black education in the region, and that its “white population [was] too small to offer any opportunities to the Corporation.”106 In East and southern Africa, Keppel and Bertram explained in the report that they had visited 124 institutions and met with 439 government and education leaders to discuss the corporation’s potential work in Africa.107
As Jones had feared, Keppel and Bertram arrived at a list of grantmaking recommendations that included “scientific research.”108 To this point, Keppel and Bertram suggested to fellow trustees a five-year limit in the corporation’s involvement in Africa, with “scientific research” listed as the first of seven foci for potential funding on the continent.109 This first category was followed by “library service,” “native education and culture,” “other non-Europeans,” “art and archaeology,” “adult education,” and “visits to and from Africa.”110
Under scientific research, Keppel and Bertram recommended supporting the South African government’s Research Grant Board, which the two men deemed was “both competent and willing to work with the corporation.”111 Established in 1918, Fleisch writes that the aim of the Board was to encourage research in South Africa, though it “was only partly successful as it was confined to distributing research grants to individuals, but was not permitted to initiate research projects itself,” a role that Carnegie Corporation then could play on its behalf.112
In the following months, Carnegie Corporation would confirm its intentions to work with the South African Research Grant Board and would decide to organize projects through it. However, it would not fund the board directly. Instead, the corporation would empower a group of local trustees to manage and disperse funds on its behalf in South Africa, and so too, to decide on projects worthy of Carnegie support in the region. Loram, while unsuccessful in preventing the organization’s growing interest in financing scientific research in British Africa, would continue to remain a trusted adviser of Carnegie Corporation; and to this point, he would serve as one of the organization’s three trustees in the region.113
As a second line item under the general category of “scientific research,” Keppel and Bertram suggested “A Co-operative Research” on poor white people in South Africa. Explaining the problem of white supremacy and Black subordination, the two men wrote to fellow Carnegie Corporation trustees: “There are now more than 120,000 of the small total of Europeans who have sunk below the economic level of the more advanced natives and who present a problem of the utmost gravity, which neither sociology, nor economics, nor public health, nor psychology and education can deal with alone.”114 By reaching a level of poverty below that of some Black Africans, the two men noted, poor white South Africans had destabilized white rule in the region. And this problem merited the corporation’s attention. As sociologist Frank Füredi underscores: “Keppel’s enthusiasm for the poor white study was motivated by his concern with the maintenance of existing racial boundaries.”115
In their 1927 report to Carnegie Corporation’s board, Keppel and Bertram also proposed another study, which they listed under the category of “native education and culture.” Specifically, they argued the importance of analyzing Black Africans’ minds with a view toward creating tests “suitable to the Bantu mentality, and in one of the more widely distributed tribal languages.” In this way, they imagined that schools and governments could more easily and scientifically determine the most qualified applicants, without relying completely on missionary recommendations or “on the good opinion of some native commissioner or other official.”116 This would be research on Black Africans to be used by white colonial administrators in their efforts to better govern on the continent.
Almost immediately after the trustees in New York City approved this 1927 grantmaking plan in colonial Africa, President Keppel telegrammed J. H. Oldham the news.117 Oldham was, and would remain, a hovering presence in the corporation’s fund for Canada and the British colonies throughout the span of Keppel’s presidency. During the next months, and in actualizing one of their recommendations, the corporation selected Richard A. C. Oliver, a white U.S. psychologist, to develop elementary educational material “in one of the native languages.”118 In the process of selecting a region of British Africa to conduct this work, the corporation followed Oldham’s suggestion to locate it at the same school in Kenya that had received the corporation’s support some two years earlier.119 Oliver arrived in Kenya in March of 1930 and, in 1932, published his General Intelligence Test for Africans: Manual of Directions. A year later, he submitted to the corporation his final report on educational research in East Africa.120 Before arriving in Kenya in 1930, though, Oliver spent six months in London where he conducted preparatory research work. During his time in London and at Keppel’s urging, the psychologist met with Oldham several times. It is difficult to overstate the many times that Oldham and Keppel corresponded, and the extent to which Keppel would continue to lean on Oldham for advice in his use of the corporation’s fund for Canada and the British colonies throughout the duration of his tenure at the foundation.121
All that said, throughout the 1920s and 1930s, Carnegie Corporation would remain a loyal advocate of the Tuskegee educational model for Black people and of Jones’s surveys of Black education, specifically. In fact, President Keppel and Secretary Bertram further celebrated Jones’s work in their seven recommendations to the board in 1927, observing: “Without question the most important single step in the advancement of the African native has been the adaptation, under the leadership of Dr. Thomas Jesse Jones and Dr. J. H. Dillard of the Phelps-Stokes Commission, of the principle of supervision for rural education which has been so successful in our own negro schools.”122 Indeed, throughout these two decades, the foundation remained enthusiastic about the role that it was playing alongside peers in U.S. philanthropy in helping to export this educational model across the Atlantic.
And yet, inspired by J. H. Oldham and the general intellectual trend toward scientific research at the British Colonial Office and among white policymakers in British Africa, Carnegie Corporation’s trustees and staff would respond to calls for greater support of scientific research as yet another important tool for white rule on the continent. Led by Keppel, Carnegie Corporation would be moving beyond its peers’ preferred universal cure at the time for securing white domination and Black subjection across the Atlantic: the Tuskegee educational model for Black people.
Within the corporation’s general turn to scientific research in British Africa, the next chapters show that Keppel would introduce his personal affinity for cooperative research studies and finance two such studies with the explicit goal of helping white policymakers fortify white domination in colonial Africa. The first of these investigations, which this chapter already has introduced, would be The Poor White Problem in South Africa (1932), followed by Malcolm Hailey’s African Survey (1938), for which Oldham would play an even larger role as its principal coordinator between Carnegie Corporation in New York City and colonial officers and researchers at Chatham House in London. This second study in colonial Africa furthermore would motivate Keppel to commission and fund a national study of Black Americans that he expected to be a U.S. analogue to the African survey, both in its research structure and in its public policy intent to aid white policymakers across governments—whether across imperial governments or states in the United States—better coordinate their public policies on Black people and, in the process, strengthen white unity, solidarity, and domination across governments.