One America … is liberal and democratic and cherishes human rights … Its symbolic representatives in Iran are Jim Bill, [and] Richard Cottam … The pre-eminent and dark symbol of the other America is [Henry] Kissinger. This is the America that is almost always seen abroad … It is characterized by imperialism in the name of geopolitical strategy.
—Ambassador William Sullivan (1979)Footnote 1
That is how the last US ambassador to Iran described the “two Americas” theory that was palpable in revolutionary Iran. Americans also constructed multiple meanings of “Iran” during the postwar years. Prior to the Second World War, some missionaries and diplomats “came to know and admire Iran and Iranians” but, as one historian assessed the perceptual panorama, “prejudice prevailed.”Footnote 2 The number of Iran experts in the United States was historically low when compared to Europe, but Cold War imperatives led the US government and philanthropists to fund the establishment of the nation's first modern Middle East studies centers. Out of those centers came Iranian studies, a field that moved the study of Iran beyond the orientalist tradition. The emergence of the field coincided with the reign of Mohammad Reza Shah Pahlavi and, as the politics of the academy and the Cold War converged, scholars debated the wisdom of the United States supporting his regime for nearly four decades.
This article argues that Iranian studies in the United States was shaped by multiple generations of critical voices, all of which were informed by historically situated encounters with Iran and expressed through a range of methodological and theoretical perspectives. While “the uncritical ‘old guard’ kind of Pahlavi historiography” framed most “mainstream research” from the 1940s through the 1970s, a critical minority challenged the “prevailing world view” about Iran's “modernizing monarch” and his relationship with the United States.Footnote 3 This argument adds texture to a body of literature that otherwise centers on the “applied Orientalism” of linguists and the “Orientology” of postwar modernization theorists that betrayed “pure knowledge,” to borrow from Edward Said, for “political knowledge.”Footnote 4 Whether through publications or public engagement, America's critical intellectuals blurred the lines between scholarship and activism, attempted to inform political debates in both countries, and more broadly contributed to public discussions about Iran.Footnote 5
Such an approach marks an outlier in the historiography of US‒Iran relations. To date, the literature remains fixed on the affairs of states, diplomats, and politicians. Since the publication in the late 1980s of James Bill's and Richard Cottam's histories, diplomatic and international historians have mined newly declassified documents to push the field onto new historiographic terrain.Footnote 6 Analysts from Mark Gasiorowski to David Collier have employed political science theories to reinterpret US foreign policy toward the shah's Iran.Footnote 7 Historians have, by and large, turned their attention to particular episodes in that history. Scholars now debate whether the Anglo-American coup that overthrew Mohammad Mosaddeq in 1953 was the product of geopolitical, economic, or cultural factors.Footnote 8 They also debate whether John F. Kennedy was genuine in his calls for reform during Ali Amini's premiership during the early 1960s.Footnote 9 With regard to the revolution of 1978‒79, historians are now complicating long-held assumptions about Jimmy Carter's Iran policy.Footnote 10 Meanwhile, “Pahlavi revisionists” follow in the tradition of Rouhollah Ramazani to restore the shah's agency vis-à-vis his American patrons.Footnote 11
Historiographic advances have not, however, come in the realm of methodology. With the exception of Ben Offiler's monograph on the 1960s, the most recent works do not seriously consider non-state actors or the transnational flow of ideas.Footnote 12 Even the literature on human rights remains preoccupied with Carter's policies rather than the network of students, scholars, and activists that thrust the question of “rights” into the binational dialogue.Footnote 13 The exceptions that prove the methodological rule are the studies of educational ties between the United States and Iran. The study of international education—whether the two-way flow of Iranian students to the United States and American educationalists to Iran, or the ways in which American scholars studied and discussed postwar Iranian developments—offers an opportunity to reveal the complexities of human interaction, along with the sociological and political dimensions of knowledge production, during the late Pahlavi period.Footnote 14
The historians that study global educational networks have likewise not historicized the academy within the context of American‒Iranian relations. Zackary Lockman and Osamah Khalil, for instance, have written about the knowledge‒power relationship in US‒Middle East relations, but they keep Persia on the periphery of the Arab world.Footnote 15 Despite the sidelining of Iran, their excellent work, read alongside David Engerman's volumes on America's Russian experts, offer models for reconstructing and deconstructing the links between “Mars and Minerva” that empowered academics to contribute at once to state power and postwar internationalism.Footnote 16 Recent articles in Iranian Studies have examined the rise of the field in Great Britain and Russia, along with Japan and Canada, but there is no comparable study on the United States.Footnote 17 Nor is there an American counterpoint to Hamid Dabashi's work on European “Persophilia,” as books on “America's Palestine” and “America's Kingdom” have not been followed by monographs on the constructed meanings of “Iran” in the American imaginary.Footnote 18
This article is a first step toward addressing those omissions. It resurrects the critical genealogy within the field of Iranian studies that began with T. Cuyler Young. An orientalist by training, he broke with professional norms after the Second World War, not unlike the British Persianist E. G. Browne decades earlier, to become a public intellectual and the country's preeminent analyst of modern Iran.Footnote 19 Young helped to build the infrastructure for Iranian studies in the United States and influenced a generation of scholars that came of age during the 1950s and 1960s. Young's professional and personal influence on America's first generation of area studies scholars ensured that political scientists such as James Bill and Richard Cottam developed more critical, reformist perspectives when compared to most social scientists. By the 1970s, a new generation of scholars challenged Cold War liberalism and offered Marxian studies that were less focused on routes to reform than in understanding Iran's revolutionary movement.
These cohorts of scholars read Iran through lenses that were given focus, not only by their methodological and theoretical dispositions, but also by their (mis)understandings of Iranian realities, the nature of postwar American politics, and the ideologies of the Cold War. For those reasons, when the revolution happened in 1978‒79, America's experts predicted everything from a passing storm to a tidal wave that would wash away Imperial Iran and bring a new, yet often undecipherable form of government in its wake. While there were many shades of grey, this “other” America, as Iran's revolutionaries described it in 1979, challenged assumptions about American power, modernization theory, and the Pahlavi government during the Cold War.
T. Cuyler Young's Cold War
When the Second World War broke out, there was a dearth of American scholars with any knowledge of Iran. Yet there were some, and the Iranologists who did intelligence work in the Office of Strategic Services (OSS) took different professional paths after the war.Footnote 20 As Richard Frye remembered, “some who had left academia would never return, for the taste of action, or influence in government, made the ivory tower seem tame and uninteresting.”Footnote 21 The Iran-born missionary Edwin Wright moved on to a career in the State Department.Footnote 22 Donald Wilber, a student of Persian architecture, continued his “adventures in the Middle East” by coordinating Operation AJAX in August 1953.Footnote 23 Others, such as Frye and Young, returned to academia.Footnote 24
Iranian studies gestated within the context of overlapping individual, institutional, and national trajectories. T. Cuyler Yung lived in Iran from 1927 to 1935 as a missionary in the Presbyterian education system.Footnote 25 By 1930 he considered Rasht “home” and reported that “the interest elicited those first years by all that was new and strange in an oriental country has been replaced by a deeper interest in the mind and heart of its people.”Footnote 26 Young's time in Iran compelled him to “seek the roots of Irano-Islamic culture in the academic study of its past.”Footnote 27 He earned a doctorate from the Oriental Institute at the University of Chicago and, in 1938, took a professorship in Semitic studies at the University of Toronto. During the Second World War, Young left academia for the Near East desk of the Research and Analysis section of OSS. During the immediate postwar years, he was a public affairs attaché in Tehran. At the same time, America's newfound interests in the Middle East led to public and private support for a new Middle East studies infrastructure. In 1947 Philip Hitti brought Young onto the faculty of Princeton's new interdisciplinary program in Near Eastern studies, “the first of its kind in the country.” Young assumed Hitti's chair in 1954 and remained at Princeton until 1969. In many ways, Young's trajectory resembled Frye's. Both left the war years for an Ivy League campus and, like Young at Princeton, Frye was present at the creation of Harvard's Middle Eastern Studies Center in 1954. As their careers suggest, the hub of Middle East studies was the East Coast; of the seven institutions with centers and programs prior to the passage of the National Defense Education Act in 1958, five were located in the corridor between Boston and Baltimore.Footnote 28 But whereas Frye's research interests stayed in “Greater Iran's” pre-Islamic past, Young's wartime experiences transformed him from a linguist to a public intellectual and policy advocate.Footnote 29
The interaction between Young's academic and political pursuits, along with his experiences in Iran, produced a worldview that defied the binaries of compliance and dissent that have for years colored perceptions of “American Orientalism” during the Cold War.Footnote 30 Rather than a military struggle conceptualized in terms of a geostrategic chessboard, Young's Cold War prioritized calories, roads, education, and democratization. As early as 1950, he called for a “modern social revolution” and a program of “political and economic reform” in Iran that was not based on the logic of the Cold War. Young argued in Foreign Affairs, the journal of the New York-based Council on Foreign Relations, that the United States should “place our prestige and strength behind those groups and programs that make for democracy and the extension of the welfare of the people,” rather than “exercise our power blindly and irresponsibly.” The US position in Iran depended, not on the Soviet threat, but on “the accuracy with which the United States appraises the realities of the Iranian internal situation.”Footnote 31
American journalists, officials, and scholars disagreed as to what those “realities” were, particularly with regard to those two most important personalities of mid-century Iranian politics: Mohammad Reza and Mohammad Mosaddeq. Henry Luce's Time magazine described the shah as an “intelligent” and “reasonable” Swiss-educated young modernizer and Mosaddeq as a “dizzy old wizard” whose “fanatical state of mind” made him “an appalling caricature of a statesman” with no “rational plans” for Iran's future.Footnote 32 Anglo-American policymakers contrasted the “masculine” shah with the “feminine” Mosaddeq.Footnote 33 Unflattering views of the nationalists came from campuses, too. When asked in the 1980s to compare the shah with Mosaddeq, Berkeley's George Lenczowski replied that “there is not the slightest doubt that the Shah was the most rational and the wisest.”Footnote 34 When asked in the early 1950s about Mosaddeq's government, London's Ann Lambton advised her government to eschew compromise over Iranian oil and carry on with the coup.Footnote 35
During the oil nationalization period, Frye and Young saw matters differently. Frye reminded readers of the New York Times that Iranian nationalists were not “anti-American.”Footnote 36 He also praised Mosaddeq as “the savior of his people,” a view that later “proved annoying to both Iranian and American officials.”Footnote 37 Young wrote in the Washington Post that oil nationalization had “amazing public support.” With expectations for bourgeois democracy in Iran, he described modern middle class participation in the National Front as “the most important single event in the history of modern Iran.”Footnote 38
Young's relationship with the nationalist movement during Mosaddeq's premiership was complicated. He took leave from Princeton in 1951 to travel 4,000 road miles in Iran under diplomatic cover.Footnote 39 Mark Gasiorowski, an expert on intelligence, found that Young was a contractor with the Central Intelligence Agency's (CIA) Office of Policy Coordination. In that capacity, he was involved in Operation TPBEDAMN, a covert operation to undermine the communist Tudeh Party.Footnote 40 Young's covert actions may have unintentionally undermined Mosaddeq's larger coalition. For that, Young was “said to have deeply resented” whatever role he may have played in laying the groundwork for the 1953 coup.Footnote 41
As a liberal reformist with a history in intelligence work, Young misjudged his own powers of persuasion and the intentions of his government, but he did not conflate communism and nationalism. Upon return from Iran, he wrote in the Washington-based Middle East Journal that there was a “community of interest” between the nationalists and the communists. But he stressed the “need for clear demarcation of the overlap” and scolded the “too many responsible Western officials [who] easily and loosely equated the two.”Footnote 42 Young's views did not get a hearing in Washington, despite the fact that Kermit Roosevelt, the chief of the CIA's Near Eastern Division, recognized that Young, whose codename was probably Roger Black, “knew far more of Iran and of the people than any of us actually in the Agency did.” While Roosevelt seems to have respected “Black's” knowledge of Iran, he tagged him as a “fanatic” supporter of the National Front.Footnote 43
Despite the travails of the 1950s, Young attempted to influence policy discussions in the 1960s. In early 1961 he contacted Walt Rostow, a former OSS hand and economist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology turned adviser to John F. Kennedy. As an academic and advocate of modernization theory, Rostow was seen as a potential ally of scholars who were critical of the previous decade's security strategy. In early 1961 Young privately urged Rostow to place “an emphasis on liberalism and replacement of the present dictatorship by a more constitutional government.”Footnote 44 In late 1961 government officials attended a conference at Princeton where Young publicly called for “a showdown with the Shah” to force him to reign and not rule. “Don't get into the retail business,” Young declared. “Stay in the wholesale business and apply your pressure at the top.”Footnote 45 As was the case with the previous decade, Young communicated his reading of Iran's “continuing crisis” to government insiders and the eastern seaboard's foreign policy establishment.Footnote 46
As a fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations in the 1960s, he chaired the “unofficial but responsible” Iran Study Group “to take a close look at the crucial role of Iran in the Middle East and in our policies.”Footnote 47 While Young was told that the seminar and planned book were “your project,” his manuscript—like his policy recommendations—was rejected.Footnote 48 The council thought that it provided “unnecessary detail on historical, cultural and social matters” that creates “obstacles” for readers “professionally concerned with international affairs.” Young envisioned a book that would “be less dated and more of a substantial contribution to Persian studies.” Disciplinary and methodological questions aside, the council believed that “the question of the relative degree of democracy Iran enjoys may be only indirectly relevant” and felt that Young “stressed the issue of the royal dictatorship fairly close to the point of a political polemic.” Toward the end of his life, Young understood that, when it came to the shah, he was “in a minority amongst most Americans.” But he maintained that the relationship between the crown and the nationalists would remain “the tough, gutty central problem of Iran.”Footnote 49
The US foreign policy establishment ignored Young's calls for reform largely because of geopolitical calculations, but scholars have also shown that, in the broader American imaginary, the shah's self-image as a benevolent king resonated with US government officials, journalists, culture producers, and academics.Footnote 50 “Pahlavism,” a term coined by James Bill after the revolution, refers to the process by which influential Americans promoted the shah's geopolitical, financial, and cultural interests in the United States.Footnote 51 Pahlavism propagated a “journalism of deference,” especially after the shah launched the White Revolution in 1963.Footnote 52 National newspapers in the United States now hailed the shah as “a liberal idealist, a kind of mid-Twentieth Century European Social Democrat.”Footnote 53 To promote such an image, the shah commissioned films that “helped circulate self-empowering representations of the country abroad” and “spread the good word about the progressive Shah and a modernizing Iran.”Footnote 54 Iran's royals even captured the imagination of Andy Warhol, whose portraits captured the essence of Pahlavi modernity and the American infatuation with it.Footnote 55 In academia, Lenczowski lent his knowledge to the service of the state. He hoped that his 1949 book on great power rivalries in Persia would reveal “the program and techniques of Soviet expansion” and “the methods employed by the West to counteract this expansion.” As Lenczowski later recalled, “I had basically a positive attitude towards the Pahlavi regime” because the shah, with whom he met annually, presided over a “regime of modernization” with “proper priorities in foreign policy.”Footnote 56
Young's most important contributions, then, were to the creation of Iranian studies and the broader international dialogue between the United States and Iran. Indeed, Khalil Maleki informed the old missionary that his writings “received the most enthusiastic welcome among students, educated groups, and intellectuals” in Iran and that his work offered “the best available analysis that we have seen in the past few years under the dark and terrible shadows.” In Maleki's estimation, Young's life work had been “a great service to your people and mine.”Footnote 57 While the critical perspective never became the new consensus in government, it informed the first cohort of Iran specialists trained in the Middle East centers and programs of the postwar era.
Social Science and Iranian Studies
By the 1960s, long-running debates about the “Orient” and “Occident” moved into the broader but equally flawed “modernization” paradigm that guided the postwar US intervention in Iran, the shah's approach to development, and social science research in American universities.Footnote 58 From the perspective of Washington, the state-sponsored aid missions and development efforts of the Cold War demanded “scientific” knowledge and data-driven research to explain the process of change over time in contemporary societies, rather than the orientalist focus on textual analysis and ancient civilizations.Footnote 59 Young and those that followed in his tradition worked within the framework of modernization, but they rejected its economic determinism and, in the case of late Pahlavi Iran, increasingly militarized focus. In contrast to the “parade of bureaucrats” that frequented think tanks and read establishment journals, America's critical scholars engaged in dialogue with scholars from Iran during the “global sixties” to, for the first time in the United States, establish a professional infrastructure devoted solely to the study of Iran.Footnote 60
The postwar establishment of the nation's first area studies centers, arrival of the baby-boom generation on American campuses, widespread availability of government and philanthropic funding, and over-arching Cold War demands produced a generation of Middle East specialists during the 1950s and 1960s. Many came from political science and economics, two fields whose relative growth during the Cold War shifted the balance of power away from history and literature.Footnote 61 Political science was especially important because Leonard Binder, Richard Cottam, and James Bill wrote the first American analyses of Iran's contemporary political system. Unlike many of their contemporaries, they went to Iran and utilized Persian-language sources and interviews to study, and participate in, Iranian politics.
Working in departments and programs on the East Coast, the younger generation owed an intellectual debt to Young. Cottam studied at Harvard with Rupert Emerson and received his “introduction to Iran” from Frye, but he met Young in 1952 and thereafter benefited from his “unsurpassed” knowledge.Footnote 62 Binder and Bill both earned their doctorates from Princeton; Binder's interest in Iran was “the direct consequence” of Young's teaching, and Young infused Bill's thinking with “Iranian inspiration.”Footnote 63 The connection between Bill and Young ran especially deep. When Helen Young passed along her husband's papers to James Bill in 1980, she told him that “of all I know you are the one I feel Cuyler would most willingly have use it.”Footnote 64
With that connection came empathy for Mosaddeq. The critical scholarship of the 1960s reveals that “the saga of the United States versus Musaddiq did not end with the coup.” As James Goode has argued, the “lingering impressions,” or the “shadow of Musaddiq,” persisted, and “it remained for a group of American scholars to voice the deep concerns of the middle-class opposition in Tehran.”Footnote 65 When lobbying Kennedy, Young maintained that there was “an inadequate recognition in the West that the Mossadegh regime was … liberal and democratic.”Footnote 66 When reviewing the new literature, Young wrote that “the interpretation of Musaddiq and his role is a good test” as to whether an author would subscribe to or reject “the misleading mythology bequeathed to the West.” He was pleased that Binder’s Reference Binder1962 book “passes this test well.”Footnote 67 The same was true of Bill’s Reference Bill1972 book, which analyzed Iran's modern middle class and concluded that the shah's “politics of system preservation in the midst of a rapidly transforming world is a risky and costly business.”Footnote 68
Nobody performed better on Young's “test” than Cottam. More than any of the area specialists, Cottam's career resembled Young's. Cottam came from a Mormon family in Utah and enlisted in the navy during the Second World War. He went to Iran during the 1951‒52 academic year as a Fulbright scholar and worked for the CIA and the US embassy in Tehran intermittently throughout the 1950s. Like Young, Cottam was a Cold War liberal who attempted to promote change from within but failed to translate his opposition to the coup into policy. In 1954 Cottam earned his doctorate, developed a relationship with members of the National Resistance Movement, and worked to plant articles on political reform in Iranian and American papers until the aborted Qarani coup of 1958. After “experiencing Iran at two different historical junctures in such a brief lapse of time,” Cottam became disillusioned with government service and began a three-decade career at the University of Pittsburgh.Footnote 69 Reflecting on his personal experiences, Cottam lamented in his 1964 book Nationalism in Iran that “American social scientists must share the responsibility” for a US policy that, in 1953, ended the “brief euphoric moment” when “Iranians had deluded themselves into believing that they could assert their independence.” While the coup would “long stand as the most important date in the history of Iranian nationalism,” Cottam thought that “the distortions of the Mossadeq era, both in the press and in academic studies, border on the grotesque.”Footnote 70 Similar to Young, he employed qualitative methods and presupposed many of the foundational tenets of modernization theory, particularly its emphasis on the modern middle classes. But his epistemological, methodological, and political leanings led him to reject the “fallacy of seeking answers in economic determinism” and modernization theory as the shah applied it in Iran.Footnote 71
This question of development is another area where the critical area specialists reflected Young's worldview. Young rejected the idea that there was a singular, universal model of modernity. Instead, he wanted for Iran “a new culture that is modern yet indigenous” and “future reforms … founded upon a deeper understanding of both Western and Iranian traditions.”Footnote 72 Fully immersed in modernization theory, Binder nonetheless criticized scholars “who have disregarded the possibility that their conceptual apparatus may be culture-bound” and development officials whose government-supported efforts toward “one-way culture transmission” were fueled by “an endless store of ‘inside dope.’”Footnote 73 Also informed by modernization theories but not beholden to them, Bill argued that “development is best viewed as a continuing process and not as an end point or fixed goal.” He reminded readers that “no society, including the United States and the Soviet Union, ever finally achieves this goal.”Footnote 74 In essence, Binder, Bill, and Cottam used social scientific techniques to “modernize” Young's views on Iranian nationalism and inject “political development” into the lexicon of the academy.
Also participating in this intellectual project were Iranian scholars in the United States. In this sense, the United States was not unique. Iranian students traveled to Great Britain during the nineteenth century and, by the early twentieth century, some Iranians were teaching Persian at British universities. The internationalization of Iranian studies in Great Britain and, later, the United States, was facilitated by personal connections and circuits of migration that brought Iranians into educational systems overseas. But whereas Mansour Bonakdarian has shown that “the notable presence of ‘Iranian’ faculty teaching courses in various fields of Iranian or Middle Eastern Studies and languages in the UK … only came about following the Iranian Revolution,” scholars from Iran made an impact on Iranian studies in the United States a decade earlier.Footnote 75
While the Middle East Journal featured minimal Iranian contributions during its first twenty years, more academic journals were established as the field was internationalized during the mid-1960s.Footnote 76 Iranian-born professors were beginning to make their mark on the American academy, with Nasrollah Fatemi at Farleigh Dickinson, Firuz Kazemzadeh at Yale, and Rouhollah Ramazani at the University of Virginia. At the same time, the Iranian student community more than doubled in size, from roughly 5,000 at the beginning of the decade to more than 12,000 at its end.Footnote 77 As the ideological climate in the Iranian Student Association in the United States (ISAUS), a member of the anti-shah Confederation of Iranian Students National Union (CISNU), moved from liberal nationalism to Marxian internationalism, many Iranian graduate students and young professors charted, as the historian Houchang Chehabi put it, “a prudent and determinedly non-ideological course between the Scylla of partisan advocacy and the Charybdis of otherworldly detachment from the here and now.” Chehabi has shown that a small group of anti-shah Iranian graduate students established Maktab, the first journal in the United States dedicated to the academic analysis of contemporary Iran. These developments paved the way for the creation of the Society for Iranian Studies (now the Association for Iranian Studies), which in 1968 published the first issue of Iranian Studies and in 1969 held its first conference at the University of California, Los Angeles.Footnote 78
An assessment of two conferences held at Harvard in 1965 and the University of Maryland in 1966 provides an ultrasound of the field at its moment of conception. These were transitional years when the ISAUS still retained some liberal nationalist influence, the Maktab group was writing, and the Middle East Studies Association (MESA) was established. While Frye's center sponsored the Harvard event, participants were informed that “the idea of this seminar was initiated by the … Iranian Students Association in the United States.” Much of the heavy organizational lifting was left to Majid Tehranian, the seminar secretary, ISAUS leader, and Harvard alumnus who taught political economy at Lesley College.Footnote 79 The ISAUS also sponsored the Maryland conference alongside the university's Department of Government and Politics and Johns Hopkins’ School of Advanced International Studies.Footnote 80
Both conferences reflected the international, interdisciplinary, and intergenerational model of critical learning embraced by humanists and social scientists during the 1960s. The majority of the conferees were Iranian or Iranian-American, including Ramazani and Ahmad Ashraf, the eminent sociologist and editor of the Encyclopaedia Iranica. Frye attracted a wide array of Iranians to Harvard, ranging from Ayatollah Mehdi Haeri-Yazdi to Darius Homayun and Hosein Mahdavi. One year later, Tehranian presented his research at College Park alongside Kayvan Tabari and Hormoz Hekmat of the Maktab group, all of whom were founding members of the Society for Iranian Studies. From a disciplinary perspective, there were ten social scientists and six humanists (including historians) at the two conferences, and the panels featured new guard figures such as Richard Cottam, Nikki Keddie, and Marvin Zonis and old guard doyens such as Cuyler Young and Peter Avery.Footnote 81 In addition to promoting “understanding between Iranian and non-Iranian scholars and students,” the organizers wanted “to focus the attention of researchers on certain fundamental problems that contemporary Iran faces.”Footnote 82
With the expiration date long past on the old scholarly infrastructure, the two seminars marked creative and ad hoc responses to the new realities of the 1960s. The American and Iranian participants were similar in that they wrote the first social scientific analyses of contemporary Iran and either attempted to mute the modernization debate or move it toward the more sensitive question of politics. Most were not radicals calling for revolution in Iran or conservatives supporting the shah at all costs. Rather, they were part of a critical, international elite that nervously studied the shah's consolidation of power during the 1960s and distanced themselves from the “Americans playing like boys with political fire in societies they did not understand.”Footnote 83 Iranian studies was, from the beginning, international in composition and critical in perspective. It was during the 1960s that the field became a discipline with its own discursive parameters, journals, conferences, and organizations.
Revolutionary Scholarship
While the Harvard and Maryland conferences of the mid-1960s focused on politics, attendees noted that they “presented all sides of the Iranian picture” and were “by no means an unrestrained field day for anti-Shah dissidents.”Footnote 84 The move toward activist scholarship in the United States occurred during the 1970s, a decade that coincided with the radicalization of the anti-shah movement and the advent of guerrilla conflict in Iran.Footnote 85 In the United States, the era's social upheaval and the homecoming of Peace Corps volunteers reshaped the consciousness of a generation, as did an embrace of Marxian theory and a focus on social history and political economy. Despite the fact that the first half of the 1970s marked the most repressive period of the Pahlavi era, mainstream research remained conciliatory to the shah.Footnote 86 Still, scholars at the time noticed “a real disenchantment with the Shah and his leadership among those who concentrate on contemporary affairs.”Footnote 87 That disenchantment fueled a turn toward revolutionary scholarship during the shah's last decade in power.
The radical scholars of the 1970s were in dialogue with their more moderate colleagues. They knew that some of “the older books,” especially those by Bill and Cottam, were “worth consulting, despite certain ideological limitations inherent in them.”Footnote 88 Of the “ideologically liberal” work, Cottam's was considered “mandatory reading for the activist.”Footnote 89 While leftist scholars “on the fringes” looked “with a jaundiced eye” at mainstream scholarly communities and established splinter journals such as The Review of Iranian Political Economy and History, most remained involved with the Society for Iranian Studies.Footnote 90 Methodologically, however, they shied away from the elitist, “anti-democratic” approach that predominated in the social sciences.Footnote 91
They also combined activism with scholarship to call for the overthrow of the shah. In the early 1960s, Binder cautioned that “the patient working of the present system” was preferable to “violently overthrowing it.”Footnote 92 By the late 1970s, more radical scholars conceded that “the subject of reform” was “of paramount importance,” but they were “more convinced than ever before that reforms, laws, and kingly decrees” amount to little more than “changes in the tactics and strategy” to maintain “control over the … people of Iran.”Footnote 93 In Europe, Fred Halliday and other Marxist academics professed that their positions were “antagonistic to that of the present Iranian government and its international allies” and that their scholarship was “written in solidarity with those opposed to it.”Footnote 94
The Middle East Research and Information Project (MERIP) was established in 1971 and its MERIP Reports inserted the greater Middle East into the mental map of the American New Left. These scholars, as Lockman wrote, “challenged what they perceived to be the silencing within their field or discipline of discussion of current issues, of critical analytical and political perspectives, and of the relationship between knowledge and power.”Footnote 95 Georgia Mattison, a founding member of the academic collective, challenged assumptions about the shah's Iran in the first issues of MERIP Reports. After traveling through Iran in summer 1971, she wrote that the shah's Persepolis ceremony was merely “a celebration of power” for a monarch whose authority was “pervasive” and “by virtue of the US presence” in the country.Footnote 96 After the arrival of the “Nixon Doctrine” in Iran in May 1972, the MERIP staff tracked the shah's arms purchases and criticized his role as the “policeman” of the Persian Gulf.Footnote 97 American writers and Iranian students in the United States were critical of the ways in which the shah used those arms, whether regionally to put down a Marxist revolt in Oman or domestically “to blast away at protesting fellow Iranians.” These analyses were couched within the political economy frameworks of “neo-colonialism” and “the ‘open door’ for American participation in Iran's oil resources.” Summing up MERIP's views, Helmut Richards wrote in 1975 that Iran was “a haven for exploitation in an increasingly revolutionary world.”Footnote 98
The Peace Corps experience was foundational to some MERIP contributors and other scholar-activists. Approximately 1,700 young Americans served in Peace Corps Iran between 1962 and 1976. In addition to aiding Iranian development efforts, the Peace Corps aimed “to promote intensive and positive mutual social and cultural interaction between Volunteers and Iranians.” If many volunteers “went to underdeveloped Iran confident that they would act upon the Iranians,” most found that “the reverse happened: the Iranians acted upon them.”Footnote 99 Mattison was a Peace Corps veteran and she was instrumental in ensuring early on that MERIP did not treat Iran as peripheral to the Arab Middle East.Footnote 100
Many of the field's leading scholars served in Peace Corps Iran, and while their views vary considerably, Thomas M. Ricks was the most active during the 1970s. He completed his undergraduate work during the early 1960s before teaching English in Mashad and Mahabad between 1964 and 1966. Ricks then relocated to the Midwest to earn a PhD in Middle Eastern and Iranian studies from the University of Indiana. After another stint in Iran at the Tehran International School, he took a position in Minnesota at McAllister College in 1973 before moving to Georgetown University by the end of the decade.Footnote 101
Ricks’ intellectual pursuits were Iran's literary and social histories. He was a Persophile who spoke of Iran's “rich and vast literary heritage” and aspired to, as the orientalists of the past had done for classical Persian poetry, “introduce the Western reader to the contemporary portion of this vibrant heritage.”Footnote 102 To that end, his first publication was a translation of Sadeq Hedayat's “Three Drops of Blood” that appeared in Iranian Studies in 1970.Footnote 103 Distressed that the historiography was “decidedly biased towards political and literary history,” his research was influenced by British Marxism, especially Eric Hobsbawm, and the social history of the French Annales School. Footnote 104 As was the case with Young, Ricks’ intellectual and political endeavors were linked. In academic journals, he criticized scholarship “without a grasp of the flesh and blood of Iran” and underscored “the need to focus on the history of the society, the Iranian people, and their struggles.”Footnote 105 On Capitol Hill, he articulated a revolutionary reading of late Imperial Iran that was translated for politicians into the language of human rights. In 1977 Ricks told lawmakers that “the interest of the King is diametrically opposed to the interest of the Iranian people” and, in a revisionist interpretation of the Pahlavi period, posited that “the last 50 years of Iran's history is a history of continuous and systematic violations of human and civil rights.”Footnote 106
Ricks was part of an international and multi-generational network of scholars, intellectuals, and activists that “reimagined” Iran and the world through the discourse of human rights during the 1970s.Footnote 107 A host of Iranian and American scholars informed the investigation of the International Commission of Jurists into human rights abuses in Iran.Footnote 108 Cottam was especially active. He testified before Congress in 1977 and wrote a chapter on Iran in the 1978 Freedom House publication on global human rights.Footnote 109 In Iran were groups of lawyers and writers, along with Mehdi Bazargan's Iranian Committee for the Defense of Freedom and Human Rights.Footnote 110 In Great Britain was the Committee Against Repression in Iran.Footnote 111 In Europe and the United States were tens of thousands of Iranian students, many of whom were part of the ISAUS and fragments of the CISNU.Footnote 112 Iranian expatriates such as poet and writer Reza Baraheni brought to life the “Iranian torture industry” for American audiences, and Ardeshir Mohasses sketched satirical counterpoints to Warhol's visual depictions of the Pahlavis.Footnote 113 The Trotskyist-influenced Committee for Artistic and Intellectual Freedom in Iran (CAIFI) organized in the United States with the hope that “international public opinion will not remain indifferent to this all-out attack by the Shah on freedom of expression in Iran.”Footnote 114 Kate Millet, a leading theorist of second-wave feminism and one of the “literary politicos” in CAIFI, remembered her educational work with the committee as “one of the most important things I’ve done.”Footnote 115
Thomas Ricks engaged with the public through the US People's Committee on Iran (USPCI). Founded in 1977 as a “national anti-shah group” and based in Philadelphia, USPCI members shared the conviction that “the interests of the American people, indeed of all people, lie with support for the principle of self-determination, rather than with the propping up of repressive regimes.” To communicate its message, the USPCI held educational events on the shah's human rights record and the revolutionary movement.Footnote 116 In Washington, Ricks and company criticized the Carter administration for “furthering American military and business interests, with no consideration for human rights,” contested the appointment of William Sullivan as ambassador, and demonstrated against “the merchants of death” that sold arms to the shah.Footnote 117 Locally in Philadelphia, the group was part of a critical community that lobbied, albeit unsuccessfully, for the University of Pennsylvania to divest from Iran.Footnote 118
By the late 1970s, the radicalization of academic discourse and Iranian politics provided the basis for new forms of thought and mobilization in both countries. As Valentine Moghadam has written about the Iranian Left, the American Left's scholarship and activism were also shaped by “anti-imperialism, dependent capitalism, neocolonialism, and revolutionary struggle.”Footnote 119
Reading the Revolution
Arguments abound about the performance of America's Iran experts during the revolution.Footnote 120 The scholars themselves were the first to admit that they made “some embarrassing mistakes of interpretation.”Footnote 121 But those mistakes did not stem from the polarization of the field. As is the case with any historical or contemporary field of study, one finds robust debate, intra- and intergenerational divisions, and discursive space between the extremes that gripped Iranian politics and some quarters of the American academy in the late 1970s. When it came to the question of the shah's survival in 1977‒78, America's critical scholars were close to the mark, but the same cannot be said of their readings of the revolutionary turn that Khomeini steered in 1979.
Scholars close to the royal court were the most optimistic about the shah's survival. One example was Marvin Zonis, a student of the Pahlavi elite. In November 1978, when asked about the possibility of the shah saving his throne, Zonis responded, “Yes, the guy's been learning his job for 37 years and he's proficient at it.” When asked about the desirability of continued Pahlavi rule, Zonis asserted that “it is in the best interest of both Iran and the U.S.”Footnote 122 Lenczowski likewise did not anticipate his friend's fate, but he spoke forcefully in the contentious month after the start of the hostage crisis about the “popular myth” of the “the Shah's ‘oppressive’ rule.” To Lenczowski, the shah “justified his authoritarianism by the two considerations of security and development” and, like the neoconservatives in the Ronald Reagan administration, he rued Carter's “human-rights crusade” for being “harmful to U.S. allies who did not practice democracy at home.”Footnote 123
Lenczowski's charges raise many questions. It is true that the shah's human rights abuses were “copiously documented by international organizations, historians, sociologists, poets, and politicians” and were “most precise about the period of Iran's history from 1953 to the present.”Footnote 124 However, scholars have since shown that human rights had more of an immediate impact on Iran's domestic politics than Carter's foreign policy.Footnote 125 It is also true, as Carter's critics allege, that the State Department's Bureau of Human Rights and Humanitarian Affairs under Patricia Derian's leadership contested the longstanding policy of supporting the shah during the “year of human rights” in 1977.Footnote 126 Yet if the minor victories of Derian's bureau were enough to topple a regime, then the emperor was truly without clothes. In response to the argument that a “reigning academic consensus” compelled the president to abandon the shah and unwittingly set the stage for the Iranian Revolution, the State Department's Henry Precht mused, “I’ll bet that few Middle East Studies Association members realized they could have such power over policy-making.”Footnote 127
The old divide between the intellectuals and the bureaucrats persisted from the early Cold War into the revolutionary years. Therefore, Lenczowski's charges were as inaccurate as Ricks’ claim that “most historians and social scientists who study Iran agreed with the assessments of the U.S. State Department.”Footnote 128 The disconnect between the academy and the Carter administration was sharp enough that, in September 1978, government officials confessed that “many academics have been calling the shots on Iranian politics much more accurately than we have.”Footnote 129 The administration held on to hope until early 1979 that the shah or his military could survive.Footnote 130 By contrast, in March 1978 James Bill presented a paper titled “Monarchy in Collapse” at a seminar organized by the State Department's Bureau of Intelligence and Research. After another seminar in October, Bill realized that “the State Department was very receptive, but I did not see my views reflected in any changes in policy.”Footnote 131
In 1978 critical specialists of all stripes saw that the shah's days were numbered. Late that year, Bill reminded readers of Foreign Affairs that the shah had long displayed “the best talents of the lion and the fox” and was “one of the cleverest political leaders of this century.” But, unlike Zonis, Bill concluded that the events of 1978 “do not support an optimistic political prognosis” because the shah “cannot control his sophisticated population by brute force indefinitely.”Footnote 132 Richard Frye summed up the views of America's critical specialists when he opined in November 1978 that it was time to write the “epitaph for the dynasty in Iran.”Footnote 133 On this point, the Left agreed. MERIP Reports dedicated issues in the summer and fall of 1978 to the revolution and featured regular columns by Ervand Abrahamian and Fred Halliday.Footnote 134 As MERIP contributors saw it, “the question for the monarchy now is not if the Peacock Throne will fall, but when … and only the Iranian people know the answer to that timetable.”Footnote 135
However, the two cohorts of critical specialists disagreed as to how to interpret the future of the revolution. Bill's reading of the revolution was informed by his sympathy for Mosaddeq and the National Front, his Iranian contacts in the urban middle class, and his own attachment to liberal modernization theory. Bill, like Young before him, highlighted “the revolutionary potential of the professional middle class.”Footnote 136 Marxist scholars offered a different interpretation, one that assumed that “the Iranian people will chase the Pahlavi dictator and his associates from power … and build a prosperous and socialist Iran.”Footnote 137 Progressive intellectuals such as Richard Falk, a non-specialist member of the USPCI, saw “a glimmer of hope” and a “Third Worldist beacon” of revolutionary renewal.Footnote 138
As knowledgeable Iran watchers, both cohorts predicted a shah-less future for Iran. But as products of the Cold War, they imagined that the future would be shaped by bourgeois evolution or proletarian revolution. With regard to the liberals, Nikki Keddie wrote in 1980 that “writers beginning with E.G. Browne … tended to overstate the role of modernized intellectuals and understate that of both the ulama and the bazaar classes.” Even among the most informed western scholars, their “progress-oriented secularist concentration” meant that they “had not foreseen the so-called Islamic revival of recent years.”Footnote 139 A case in point was Bill's prediction in late 1978 that the next government “would have to enjoy the tacit support of the mujtahids” but that “they would never participate directly in the formal governmental structure.”Footnote 140 With regard to the Marxists, Moghadam's analysis of the Iranian Left sheds light on the American and west European cases. In Iran and abroad, the clerical “blindspot” came from “an inordinate emphasis on the anti-imperialist struggle and an almost mechanical application of the dependency paradigm.” Moreover, “many foreign scholars and activists on the Left were supportive of the new Islamic Republic precisely for its anti-imperialism and its defiance of the US government and capital.” In sum, “nearly all scholars of Iran,” in distinct ways, “focused on capitalist development, modernization, the growth of modern social classes, Iran's military strength,” and other related subjects.Footnote 141 Rather than succumb to the “seductions of Islamism,” America's Iran scholars were seduced by the dominant teleologies of the Cold War.Footnote 142
These were precisely the analytic categories that the best-known western observer of the Iranian Revolution attempted to transcend. Michel Foucault was not a scholar of Iran, but a postmodernist philosopher who illuminated the centrality of the knowledge‒power axis to western modernity. In contrast to most American and European scholars, “Foucault rejected all forms of developmentalist discourse”—liberal and Marxian alike—and attempted to read the revolution outside of “Eurocentric theories of power, politics, and history.” To many, Foucault's Iranian essays “are either dismissed as another botched Orientalist venture or disparaged as an ‘infantile leftism’ of a romantic European philosopher.”Footnote 143
Behrooz Ghamari-Tabrizi rejects both charges and provides a framework for Foucault's Iranian experience. Foucault considered himself a “philosopher-journalist” and was, before 1977, a novice when it came to Iranian affairs. His ability to see the late 1970s as “a moment of making history outside the purview of a Western teleological schema” was possible because “neither was he an expert on Shi‘ism nor did he have a deep understanding of Iranian history.”Footnote 144 Foucault was drawn to Iran because of what it offered to his own understanding of (post)modernity, not unlike non-experts on the other side of the Atlantic. Richard Falk, for instance, saw in Iran a realization of his conception of global justice, and Kate Millett momentarily saw a repudiation of the US-backed patriarchal state.Footnote 145 But as Ghamari-Tabrizi notes, Foucault's essays on Iran's revolution marked an attempt to “look at the revolutionary events in Iran outside the discursive frames that make revolutions legible.” By contrast, Bill and Cottam, along with other American “pundits and scholars,” were compelled “to make these historical events legible to a global audience.” Whereas Foucault was attracted to the “ambiguity” of the revolution, that very ambiguity frustrated a generation of scholars reared to see the world from the epistemological basis of Cold War modernity. Foucault found liberation in the Iranian Revolution's “lack of an affirmative and precise description of its agenda.” However, that very imprecision frustrated American analysts who were expected by state and society to offer precise prescriptions and prescient predictions about complex global developments.Footnote 146
The framework offered here challenges the notion that all American scholars “misread” the revolution. To be sure, Zonis and Lenczowski were wrong to suggest that American and Pahlavi power in Iran was benevolent and sustainable. However, Cottam and Bill were not entirely wrong in their analysis of the revolutionary coalition of 1978. While they were limited by their own personal views and historic experiences, the judgment that they misread the revolution derives from “Whiggish” narratives that project the Islamic Republic backward onto the diverse coalition that overthrew the shah, all the while framing “the entire history of the twentieth-century Middle East as a struggle between progressive, democratic, secular forces against reactionary, autocratic Islamists.”Footnote 147
After Khomeini returned to Iran in February 1979, the public role of American scholars changed. With Ambassador William Sullivan on his way out of Tehran, Iranian representatives in the United States suggested that either Cottam or Bill might make effective ambassadors because they were “sensitive and knowledgeable.”Footnote 148 Those overtures never materialized, but the Carter administration relied on “Third World Americans” like Cottam with bona fides among Iran's revolutionaries.Footnote 149 As archival documents and Christian Emery's scholarship reveal, Cottam used his contacts in the Liberation Movement to help the United States remain on good terms with Mehdi Bazargan's Provisional Revolutionary Government throughout 1979.Footnote 150 Cottam's relationship with Sadeq Qotbzadeh, a veteran of the Liberation Movement abroad and foreign minister of the Islamic Republic, proved constructive enough during the hostage crisis to elicit a personal thank-you letter from President Carter.Footnote 151 When, in January 1980, the president's chief of staff flew to Pittsburgh for an Iran briefing, Cottam reminded him that he “spent a lot of time trying to offer Washington my advice on Iran, but no one listened.” Cottam could not refrain from commenting on the irony that he now had “the President's top man coming to me asking for my opinion.”Footnote 152
Conclusion
This article has drawn upon archives and published texts that most historians neglect. Its aim has been to reorient the historiographic conversation in the field of U.S.-Iran relations from one centered on state power, decision-making, and causation to one focused on cultural power, the transnational politics of knowledge, and the broader world within which Americans and Iranians lived from the Second World War to the Iranian Revolution. While Americans had long been fascinated with the “Orient,” just as Iranians engaged with the “Occident,” the study of modern Iran became professionalized in the United States during the postwar years at a time when “autocracy” and its personification in the form of Mohammad Reza Shah Pahlavi entered the critical imagination of Iranian intellectuals and American scholars.Footnote 153
As Touraj Atabaki has written, “a small community of scholars emerged, especially after the Second World War” in the United States and Great Britain, that “showed distinct preferences for certain aspects and issues” but “made important contributions to the Iranian historiography.” More important, their field had, by the mid-1960s, become an “integrative endeavor by both native and non-native historians.” As an intentionally international academic community coalesced during the 1960s and 1970s, the scholarship on Iran was, as has been the case since the nineteenth century, shaped by “Western” and Iranian voices and “by politically contentious projects,” Washington's Cold War strategy of containment and the shah's White Revolution foremost among them. While some scholars assumed “the historiography's task to provide recognition to a regime and legitimize its authority,” many American scholars contested the authority of the Pahlavi state and US foreign policy, not unlike Iran's own critical intellectuals, or rawshanfekr. Yet their projects were, in different ways, “shaped by today's needs and deeds.”Footnote 154
For many specialists, the American political arena informed their empirical studies and policy prognoses alongside the data they collected and the cross-cultural dialogues in which they engaged. For that reason, American scholars often produced skewed interpretations of Iranian realities. Equally significant was that most of their contacts came from the ranks of the National Front in Tehran and the Liberation Movement in Europe and the United States, rather than religious circles in Najaf and Qom. But the early works of James Bill and Richard Cottam were highly informed on particular segments of Iranian society. And while the scholarly focus of liberal and leftist academics shed next to no light on Khomeini's wing of the revolutionary coalition, their respective interests in Iran's bourgeois and proletarian classes defied Orientalist imaginings of Muslim-majority nations with social bases allegedly inimical to the so-called West. Highlighting both the strengths and the weaknesses of America's Iran scholars produces a more nuanced understanding of the field than do calls from critics of the Islamic Republic and the anti-shah movement that helped to bring it about for the “self-cancellation and repudiation of the efforts of an entire generation.”Footnote 155
Despite their limitations, America's critical scholars made a significant impact on Iranian studies during the field's founding decades. Given where the majority of Middle East studies centers were located during the early Cold War, East Coat elites held paramount responsibility for institutionalizing the field and training America's first generation of area specialists. As the 1960s gave way to the 1970s, an increasing number of Iran experts left the coast and took academic positions throughout the United States. During the decade prior to the revolution, James Bill was at the University of Texas, Richard Cottam was teaching in rust-belt Pittsburg, George Lenczowski was at Berkeley, Thomas Ricks was based out of Minnesota, and Marvin Zonis was at the University of Chicago. Whether in lecture halls or seminar rooms, journal articles or scholarly monographs, and, in some cases, political activism and public outreach, these individuals exposed increasing numbers of Americans to “Iran” and disseminated knowledge of the country throughout a national, rather than a regional space.
The field that T. Cuyler Young helped to build was, prior to the revolution, home to a cross-current of ideas that spurred lively political and historiographic debates. Differences aside, scholars across the political spectrum employed innovative theories and methodologies that, during the Cold War, kept the study of modern Iran in dialogue with contemporary global developments. In the process, American thinkers worked within a transnational space alongside their Iranian colleagues to articulate a multi-generational critique of state power and embed a critical gaze in the field of Iranian studies.
