UC Berkeley

During the middle decades of the twentieth century, policymakers in the United States grappled for the first time on a national level with the problem of poverty. They did this both at home and abroad, as part of the New Deal, the Cold War, and the Great Society. This dissertation focuses on one particular approach to improving the lives of the poor that was tried in all three of those contexts: community development. Although its particulars varied from place to place, the basic idea of community development was that poverty could be best alleviated not via macroeconomic stimulation or by the replacement of traditional institutions with modern ones but rather by the generation and encouragement of democratic communities in which the poor themselves would design and implement antipoverty schemes. Community developers believed that small-scale works, local knowledge and customs, grassroots participation, and communal solidarity were the key to development. Although that approach played a minor role in the New Deal, it became a major foreign aid strategy—pursued in dozens of third-world countries in the 1950s—and was in the 1960s a major component of the War on Poverty pursued by the Lyndon Johnson administration.

The community development movement has been largely forgotten, so the first contribution of this dissertation is to simply document its existence and prominence. Other major contributions: describing the divergence between community development and modernization theory, exposing the extent of communitarianism in U.S. thought and social science in the midcentury decades, offering a new account of the origins of the War on Poverty that stresses the role of overseas development projects in setting models for domestic antipoverty projects, and explaining the failure of community development strategies—a particularly relevant contribution as such strategies have been revived and are today being pursued aggressively by development experts, especially those at the World Bank. Chapters are dedicated to (1) the new interest in communities and small groups in the United States starting in the 1930s, (2) the trajectory of anthropologists and rural sociologists as they left jobs in the New Deal and the Japanese internment camps for those in foreign aid, (3) India's influential community development program, (4) the Philippine community development program and the Philippine adaptation of community development techniques toward counterinsurgency campaigns (including in Vietnam), and (5) the War on Poverty's Community Action Program.