John Hope Franklin and American Foreign Policy.

AuthorGarland, Gregory L.
PositionIn memoriam

Editor's Note: An active duty Foreign Service Officer points to the important influence played by the late Professor John Hope Franklin with respect to American Foreign Policy, an influence that was as subtle as it was profound.--Ed.

Since his death March 25 at the age of 94, America has eulogized John Hope Franklin as the great historian, public intellectual, and teacher that he was. His influence ranged widely, extending far beyond his extraordinary professor's curriculum vitae into areas that still have gone largely unnoticed. One of those areas is foreign relations.

The international connection isn't obvious. He wasn't a diplomat. To the contrary, he turned down offers of prestigious federal appointments. He wasn't a specialist on the history of U.S. foreign relations. As a thinker, he addressed domestic U.S., not international, issues. For some, his impressive bibliography isn't even national; it's regional. It's Southern, to be precise.

FOREIGN EXCHANGE SCHOLAR

If asked what mark he made on world affairs, Franklin himself might have answered that it was as a foreign exchange scholar. He hinted as much in an essay ("The American Scholar and American Foreign Policy"), in which he called on governments to nurture "the world of scholar-statesmen, only the faint outlines of which are as yet known to the politician-statesman". In this world, scholars speak directly to each other in relationships that can only thrive outside the sphere of government control.

As a young professor, Franklin doubted the ability of the U.S. Government to avoid manipulation of grantees of its flagship Fulbright exchange program. When to his surprise U.S. embassies left him to his own devices to say what he wanted wherever he went, he changed tack and commended the State Department for standing back. He absorbed the wisdom of the binational principle: that what appeared to be purely U.S.-Government programs really were jointly conducted with foreign institutions and with and decisive control often in the hands on the non-Americans.

For the rest of his long life, Franklin acted as one of the strongest advocates of the Fulbright program, including service on its board and on the U.S. Advisory Commission on Public Diplomacy--the closest he ever came to accepting a federal job. So unwavering was his commitment to Fulbright that he missed the 1963 March on Washington because he felt that he couldn't justifiably break his commitment to England's Cambridge University. (He made the point of rectifying his absence at the "I Have a Dream" speech by leading of cohort of distinguished historians in the 1965 Selma-Montgomery march.)

ACTIVIST

For all his commitment to Fulbright, Franklin's most effective single act of public service lay not in a traditional exchange program but in a behind-the-scenes role in the landmark Brown v. Board of Education decision in 1954. At the behest of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People's lead counsel, Thurgood Marshall, Franklin prepared a brief on the history of the Fourteenth Amendment. The court's unanimous ruling drew liberally from Franklin's text and, thanks to radio and the new technology of television, was broadcast instantly around the country and quickly around the world. Occurring just as decolonization was gathering steam and non-white nations such as India were re-defining the international system, the Brown decision struck a blow (though far from a knock-out) against the perception of America as a bastion of white supremacy. It was possibly the most powerful act of American public diplomacy ever.

AGENT...

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