VOLUME XIII, No. 2 - History

MEMORY, COMMEMORATION, CRISIS

October 7, 2022

Fulbright, Arkansas, and the Seventy-Fifth Anniversary of the Fulbright
Program, 1946–2021
Part III

CENSURE, OMISSION, AND SILENCE

The seventy-fifth anniversary commemorations also illustrated the extent to which the State Department has had problems addressing the paradoxical political biography of Senator Fulbright that became an object of contention at the University of Arkansas after the murder of George Floyd in June 2020.¹ One year later—and after much soul-searching, debate, and deliberation by the university community—the board of governors of the University of Arkansas System passed a resolution in July 2021 to maintain the name of the Fulbright College of Arts and Sciences and leave Fulbright’s statue on campus intact but ‘to add contextualization to the statue that affirms the University’s commitment to racial equality and acknowledges Senator Fulbright’s complex legacy’.²

Since then, the University of Arkansas has made noteworthy progress in contextualizing Fulbright’s divergent legacies and embraced the debate about Fulbright as a learning opportunity for the university community that reflects the core values of the institution, including critical discourse and respect for diversity. A website with the title ‘J. William Fulbright: Arkansas Paradox’—a digital preview of the information that will be incorporated into the site of the Fulbright statue—went online in early December 2021.³ However, unlike the University of Arkansas, the Bureau for Educational and Cultural Affairs never publicly addressed the Fulbright controversy. Instead, it took the precautionary measure of tacitly ‘cancelling’ Fulbright as a potential institutional liability to prophylactically ‘solve’ a prospective problem even before it emerged.

This illustrates the differences between public universities and state bureaucracies. Universities are forums of critical public discourse that ultimately make political decisions they are required to justify. The decision-making of political bureaucracies is not subject to public scrutiny, and they operate in the shadowy recesses of sovereign immunity that lends an aura of untouchability to their authority. If one consults the ECA or fulbright75.org websites, the absence of attributions to authors responsible for creating content or editors for vetting it is striking, although all texts certainly go through some form of authorization to ensure that they are ‘on-message’. Therefore, when the State Department ‘speaks’, it does so with authoritative anonymity, and when it is silent, it is authoritatively silent, too.

Consequently, the authors and editors of the revised texts that recently appeared on the ECA website about J. William Fulbright and those who scripted the remarks and commentary for the anniversary celebration of the Fulbright Program at the Kennedy Center in Washington, DC, on 30 November 2021, were official and anonymous at the same time. However, important editorial conversations about these texts certainly took place somewhere behind the closed doors of the State Department. The tacit revision of the ECA website before the seventy-fifth anniversary commemoration of the Fulbright Program combined with egregious omissions and historical revisionism in the scripted texts at the celebration itself represented an astonishing damnatio memoriae of J. William Fulbright.

In the run-up to the seventy-fifth anniversary celebration of the program at the end of November 2021, ECA posted a new text on its website under the title ‘Fulbright Program Overview’:

As our nation continues to grapple with racial justice and civil rights issues, we need to acknowledge the mixed legacy of Senator Fulbright. While his visionary leadership on international relations gave rise to greater engagement, his voting record on civil rights contributed to the perpetuation of racism and inequality in the United States. His segregationist stance and his opposition to racial integration in public places, including in education, are clearly at odds with the ideals of the Fulbright Program.

Today, as the Fulbright Program marks its 75th anniversary in 2021, its legacy is represented by hundreds of thousands of distinguished and diverse alumni, who are contributing to a more peaceful, equitable, prosperous, and just world.⁴

This four-sentence passage is a perfunctory dismissal of Fulbright that does not remotely do justice to the intricacies of Fulbright’s ‘mixed legacy’ or thirty-two years in Congress. First, it reduces Fulbright’s complicated record on desegregation, which he had tried to justify as a ‘gradualist approach’,⁵ to a vaguely defined ‘segregationist stance’. Then with an unspecific reference to ‘public places’, it appears to suggest that Fulbright was a rigid segregationist, when he was not. Second, this passage does not engage with the paradoxical relationship between the vices of Fulbright’s voting record on civil rights and his virtues as an international educator and a dissenter. Instead, it takes his vices to discount his virtues and dismisses Fulbright from his own legacy by suggesting that ‘today’ the Fulbright Program’s legacy is represented by its alumni—his institutional offspring—not by Fulbright himself.

This text is an example of the real or perceived need ECA had to document an appropriate amount of institutional ‘wokeness’, and it did so without revealing its normative standards or motives for doing so. The University of Arkansas’ approach to the complexity of the Fulbright legacies as a learning opportunity was and is much more judicious because their ‘contextualization’ is based on engaging with them in their historical entirety. ECA appears to have hastily instrumentalized Fulbright’s record on civil rights to justify dissociating him from the Fulbright Program before the seventy-fifth anniversary event at the Kennedy Center: an event characterized by the absence of the public persona and public memory of J. William Fulbright. Out of sight, out of mind.

ECA and the State Department planned this seventy-fifth anniversary event practically alone—unlike the fiftieth anniversary commemoration in 1996 that was organized primarily by the J. William Fulbright Scholarship Board in collaboration with USIA—and it was a carefully orchestrated hour-and-thirty-nine-minute-long live and live-streamed event for an in-person and online audience that consisted of some live, but mostly pre-recorded testimonials. (The entire evening or excerpted highlights thereof are archived online.⁶ ) Those who attended in person were all so happy to be there as part of the Fulbright community, with their enthusiasm magnified by the fact that it was the first big public event many of them had attended since the beginning of the pandemic. The fact that the Fulbright alumnae and alumni are exceptionally grateful for the opportunities they have received, and recognize the enduring constructive impact of the Fulbright experience on their own lives—and the lives of others—animates any Fulbright get-together, and the genuine highlights of the celebration at the Kennedy Center were the testimonials given by a diverse cross-section of grantees.

Renée Fleming, the famous American soprano and an alumna of the German– American Fulbright Program, opened the evening and also welcomed the audience in her capacity as artistic advisor to the Kennedy Center. (Unfortunately, she missed the opportunity to acknowledge the instrumental role Fulbright played in the establishment of the Kennedy Center, an achievement in which he took great pride.⁷ ) Fleming then introduced Douglas Emhoff, the husband of Vice President Harris and ‘Second Gentleman’, who spoke on behalf of President Biden, the First Lady, and the Vice President, and extended the administration’s greetings and congratulations.

Emhoff described the Fulbright Program as ‘our nation’s largest and most influential educational exchange program’ and as ‘a centerpiece of US public diplomacy’, and wanted ‘to thank and recognize a few key supporters’ of the program: Secretary of State Anthony Blinken, Assistant Secretary of State for Educational and Cultural Affairs Lee Satterfeld, the members of the presidentially appointed J. William Fulbright Scholarship Board, and the ‘champions of Fulbright in the Senate and the House’. Unfortunately, he did not include the forty-nine countries with Fulbright commissions that contribute the lion’s share of $100 million to the program annually in his enumeration of the program’s ‘key supporters’, and in the course of the entire evening partner countries and binational commissions subsequently appeared only a few times in passing in the remaining scripted remarks.

Jonathan Raab, a young Black journalist and alumnus of the German–American Fulbright Program, served as the master of ceremonies for the evening and provided scripted commentary about the Fulbright Program. In his brief introduction, he praised its established merits and recited a traditionally used metric to document its highest achievers: 61 Nobel Prize recipients, 75 McCarther Foundation Fellows, 89 Pulitzer Prize winners, and 40 current or former heads of state. He then walked the audience through the program, breaking some twenty-five testimonials down into five thematic fields—journalism, science and technology, education, the arts, and public service—with intervening musical and dance performances. It concluded with statements by the individuals and groups that ‘Second Gentleman’ Emhoff had recognized in his opening remarks.

The body of the program was an hour of impressive testimonials by a diverse cross-section of candidates in terms of their disciplines, national origins, colours, orientations, and identities, with two interluding performances. Its centrepiece was an articulate and moving, nine-minute testimonial by Ruth Simmons,⁸ who has had a stellar career as an educator and university leader. Born as the last of twelve children into a family of sharecroppers in East Texas in 1945, she described what it was like to grow up in the segregated Deep South, to experience non-discrimination for the first time in her life as a Fulbright student in France in 1967—‘I was no longer singled out to shun. I was just another amie [friend]’—and the transformative impact her Fulbright experience had on her personal and intellectual growth and subsequent careers as an educator and a leader.

This would have been the perfect opportunity to contextualize Fulbright in his times, to discuss the contradictory simultaneity of his faults and merits, and to point out that the guiding principles for the selection of candidates for the Fulbright Program from its very start have been merit and non-discrimination.⁹

Ruth Simmons’s testimonial exemplified the Fulbright paradox and illustrated a point that Carl Marcy, the chief of staff of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, repeatedly made: ‘that probably the Fulbright Program did more for the international education of minorities than almost any other piece of legislation that came that early. Under the program people did go abroad as scholars, teachers, or artists, absolutely regardless of race, creed, or color.¹⁰

An hour into the program, the master of ceremonies then turned to the origins of the Fulbright Program before soliciting remarks from its ‘champions in Congress’ and thanking them ‘for their steadfast support’. ECA’s scripted text for him was:

After the US and its allies defeated fascism in World War II, the US Congress recognized the need to avert future wars by fostering new generations of leaders with a commitment to international collaboration. The Congress created the Fulbright Program in 1946, and its members have sustained that support for seventy-five years.¹¹

This attempt to explain the origins of the Fulbright Program in terms of Congressional post-war swarm intelligence is fanciful, revisionist, and a falsification of the historical record: a rhetorical manoeuvre necessary to eliminate any reference to the agency of Senator Fulbright in the establishment of the program.

The Fulbright Program was a bold and pioneering idea conceived by Fulbright and Fulbright alone. It is a well-documented fact that ‘perhaps more than any other piece of congressional legislation in post-World War II American history, the Fulbright exchange program is the product of one man, former Senator Fulbright’.¹² Fulbright proposed his legislation on 27 September 1945 without previously consulting any other members of Congress or the State Department. Because it was ‘potentially controversial’, he moved it under the radar of its potential opponents through Congress with a combination of shrewdness and procedural finesse. He ‘decided not to take the risk of an open appeal to the idealism of my colleagues—deeply idealistic men though they be. Indeed, it occurred to me that the less attention the matter got, the greater would be the chance of a victory for idealism.’¹³ The bill was ‘little understood, at the time’, Fulbright said years later, and passed with ‘no debate in the Senate’.¹⁴

Finally, the initial proposal of the Fulbright Act antedated the initial proposal of the Marshall Plan in June 1947 by over a year and a half. The passage of the Fulbright Act on 1 August 1946 preceded the passage of the United States Information and Educational Exchange Act on 27 January 1948—better known as the Smith–Mundt Act—by almost eighteen months. After the end of the war, it took Congress a long time to come around to making a commitment to fund information and educational exchange programs, and this decision was more in response to the emerging Cold War than anything else.¹⁵

The participation of seven members of Congress in this event was particularly important because Congress annually amends and authorizes the federal budget proposals made by the president, and they were all enthusiastic in their praise for the program. Senator Patrick Leahy (D–Vermont) and former Representative Nita Lowey (D–New York), who have served as co-chairs of the powerful appropriation committees in the Senate and the House, praised the program and have played important roles in maintaining funding for it, along with Senator Lindsey Graham (R–South Carolina). Lowey observed that the ‘return on investment in the Fulbright Program realized by the United States over the last 75 years is incalculable’.¹⁶

The Fulbright Program is also close to the hearts of the Arkansan congressional delegation, but ECA could not script the remarks of Senator John Boozman (R—Arkansas), who went off-script as the only person to utter Fulbright’s name that evening: ‘As chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, Senator Fulbright understood the immense value of cultural exchanges to US foreign policy.’¹⁷ In his brief remarks, Paul Winfree, the current chair of the Fulbright Scholarship Board, who held multiple high-ranking positions in the Trump White House,¹⁸ pontificated that despite the challenges of the COVID-19 pandemic, ‘the Fulbright Program is stronger than ever’.¹⁹

As far as the greatest immediate challenges for the program go, the pandemic is not yet endemic. Structurally, the fact is that the Fulbright Program has had a documented history of ‘fiscal starvation’ since 1960. The ‘steadfast support’ of Congress for the program in the past decade has consisted in maintaining flat funding by steadfastly warding off six budget cuts of various degrees of severity to the Fulbright Program proposed by three different presidents for the fiscal years 2015, 2018–21, and 2022,²⁰ and restoring it in each case to the levels of the previous year.

Fulbright’s diagnosis regarding the deep-seated reasons for the Fulbright Program’s perennial funding problems is as relevant today as it was when he penned it in 1976: ‘Whereas we readily spend billions for the military and hundreds of millions for propaganda abroad, it is incredibly difficult to get the administration and Congress to invest the few scores of millions necessary to sustain this activity most important to this country’s future and world peace.’²¹ As President Biden emphatically pointed out in his remarks on the end of the war in Afghanistan on 31 August 2021, the US spent more than $2 trillion in Afghanistan in twenty years: ‘[…] yes, the American people should hear this: $300 million a day for two decades’.²²

This warrants contextualization. The US spent more on one war in one country in one day every day for twenty years—for 7,300 days in a row—than it allocates today in one year for the global Fulbright Program for over 160 countries. President Biden and Congress have the power to change the traditional ‘fiscal starvation’ of the Fulbright Program together in the future, if they decide to do so—the president proposes the budget, and Congress authorizes it—otherwise the future of Fulbright exchanges will continue to be a zero-sum game of smoke and mirrors as far as US government support for this great asset goes.

None of these critical remarks diminish the festive nature of the seventy-fifth anniversary celebration, and the testimonials by Fulbright alumni eloquently documented the ongoing power, impact, and popularity of the Fulbright idea. However, the absence of Senator Fulbright at this event—his name not mentioned, his image not shown, his importance ignored—was astonishing. During his lifetime, Fulbright was widely acknowledged for his accomplishments by governments all over the world with the highest honours,²³ yet at the commemorative event in Washington, DC, for the seventy-fifth anniversary of the program he called into being, he was not acknowledged at all.

Anniversaries are like birthday parties, and the memory of Fulbright was not invited to the seventy-fifth of his program. The State Department, as host, had tacitly decided not to include the late senator as the traditional guest of honour on the guest list without telling the other guests, which was more than an etiquette faux pas. The State Department’s silence was official, and it contributed to another deafening silence. Perhaps people had premonitions about the reasons for his absence, but nobody dared to ask ‘What is going on here? Where is Senator Fulbright?’ There has been no public discussion about his absence, or the reasons for it. Qui tacet consentire videtur? Does silence imply consent? No, it does not, and silence can be a sign of the kind of fear that stifles questions and critical discourse.²⁴

In imperial Rome, damnatio memoria was the eminently political practice new political elites used after a regime change to condemn members of former political elites after their deaths. The Romans understood that fame—an attribute of ‘immortality’—depended on the permanence of an individual’s presence in the memory of the res publica, understood as the ‘public sphere’ in the broadest sense of the word. Damnatio memoriae involved removing or obliterating all public references to individuals that could possibly serve as reminders of the fact that they had previously been deemed memorable for their meritorious achievements: names, inscriptions, images, statues, texts, and other artefacts in the public sphere of the res publica. Out of sight, out of mind. It has been practiced in many cultures throughout history, with the most obvious recent examples being in Stalin’s Soviet Union, where retouching photos to eliminate those who had fallen out of grace or rewriting entire histories was an established practice. However, this kind of revisionism rarely succeeds in rectifying the historical record. It is a questionable political exercise, and it is bad historical practice.

The State Department would be well advised to consult the Arkansans about the thorny task of contextualizing Fulbright’s legacies in public. The absence of Senator J. William Fulbright at the commemoration of the diamond anniversary of the Fulbright Program reflected the peculiar convergence of the US public diplomacy’s ‘functional strategy’ of advancing or demonstrating ‘American values’²⁵ with a specific partisan subset of American values that are operative in US cultural conflicts today, and it evidenced apprehension about the ‘appropriateness’ of acknowledging Fulbright. However, the State Department narrative is just one version of the Fulbright story, and the US is only one of many different countries participating in the program. The rest of the world does not necessarily share the Washingtonian view of things.

Finally, the Fulbright Program is not one program sponsored and funded by the US government, but at least forty-nine different programs, because that is the number of countries that have concluded agreements with the US government to establish binational Fulbright commissions, and they see the program through its traditional lens of its ‘binational approach’ in forty-nine different ways. The Fulbright Program is stronger, better financed, more professionally managed, and most robust in countries with binational commissions, and each of them also have their binational narratives to tell, many of which differ dramatically in perspective from the State Department story. Visit Seoul, Canberra, Brasilia, or Helsinki, and you will see.

1
See Part I of this article in Hungarian Review, XII/4 (December 2021), 50–68.
2
2 The text of the resolution is in a memorandum of University of Arkansas System President Donald
Bobbit addressed to Bill Kincaid, Interim Chancellor, University of Arkansas, Fayetteville, 28
July 2021. See ‘Providing Context: Fulbright’s History Now Online, To Be Added Near Statue’,
University of Arkansas News (3 December 2021), https://news.uark.edu/articles/58473/providing-context-fulbright-s-history-now-online-to-be-added-near-statue.
3
3 Consult Dean’s Office, J. William Fulbright College of Arts and Sciences, University of Arkansas,
Fayetteville, ‘J. William Fulbright – The Fulbright Paradox’, University of Arkansas, https://fulbright.
uark.edu/deans-office/about-the-college/j-william-fulbright.php, accessed 3 December 2021.
4
4 ECA Fulbright website, ‘About Fulbright, Fulbright Program Overview’, https://eca.state.gov/
fulbright/about-fulbright/fulbright-program-overview.
5
5 J. William Fulbright and Seth P. Tillman, The Price of Empire (Pantheon Books, 1989), 94.
6
6 https://fulbright75.org/celebration/, cited below as ‘Fulbright Celebration online 2021’.
7
7 Fulbright sponsored the National Cultural Center Act in 1958, a piece of legislation that
languished because the centre was to be funded by donations. After the assassination of Kennedy in
1963, Fulbright sponsored a joint resolution of Congress to rename it the John F. Kennedy Center
for the Performing Arts which also provided for an appropriation to fund its construction.
8
8 ‘Fulbright Celebration online 2021’, 46:40–56:47, or at https://fulbright75.org/a-message-from-dr-ruth-simmons/.
9
9 Walter Johnson and Francis J. Colligan, The Fulbright Program: A History (Chicago: University of
Chicago Press, 1965), 39–41.
10
’10 Donald A. Ritchie, ‘Interview with Carl M. Marcy, Chief of Staff, Foreign Relations Committee,
1955–1973, 12 October 1983’, Oral History Project, United States Senate, 118, www.senate.gov/
artandhistory/history/resources/pdf/Marcy_interview_4.pdf, accessed 28 October 2020.
11
11 ‘Fulbright Celebration online 2021’ at 1:04:35.
12
12 Harry P. Jeffery, ‘Legislative Origins of the Fulbright Program’, in The ANNALS of the American
Academy of Political and Social Science, 491/1 (1 May 1987), 37. See also the forty-page transcript of
Harry Jeffreys’s interview with Fulbright, 28 August 1984, OH 3736, Laurence De Graaf Center
for Oral and Public History, California State University, Fullerton.
13
13 J. William Fulbright, ‘Twenty Years of the Fulbright Act’, US Advisory Commission on International
Education and Cultural Affairs, ed., International Educational and Cultural Exchange (Fall 1966), 3.
14
14 Fulbright remarks in Press Release, 1 August 1961, in Papers of John F. Kennedy, Presidential
Papers. President’s Office Files. Speech Files. Remarks on Fulbright Exchange Program Anniversary,
1 August 1961, John F. Kennedy Presidential Library and Museum.
15
15 See Nicholas J. Cull, The Cold War and the United States Information Agency (New York: Cambridge University
Press, 2008), 22–67, on the political genealogy of the Smith–Mundt Act and pre-history of USIA before 1953.
16
16 ‘Fulbright Celebration online 2021’ at 1:09:09.
17
17 ‘Fulbright Celebration online 2021’ at 1:06:43.
18
18 For Winfree’s bio, consult the website of the conservative think tank, The Heritage Foundation:
www.heritage.org/staff/paul-winfree. Winfree’s chairmanship of the FFSB is ironic insofar as he was
integral to the development of the first two budget proposals of the Trump administration which
entailed draconian cuts for the Fulbright Program.
19
19 ‘Fulbright Celebration online 2021’ at 1:29:20.
20
20 See Congressional Budget Justification: Department of State, Foreign Operations and Related
Programs, Fiscal Year 2022, 38–41. The FY 2022 proposal of the Biden administration foresaw a
flat global budget for programs managed by ECA but included cuts to the Fulbright Program ($4.7
million) and Professional and Cultural Exchanges ($3.7 million) to fund a corresponding increase
in the ECA’s administrative budget for exchange support. Congress restored funding for the grant
programs and increased the global allocation for ECA to cover its administrative needs.
21
21 J. William Fulbright, ‘The Most Significant and Important Activity I Have Been Privileged to
Engage in during My Years in the Senate’, The ANNALS of the American Academy of Political and Social
Science, 424/1 (March 1976), 1. ‘It was obvious that a new approach to international relations was
essential to avoid indiscriminate destruction of life and property. It was hoped that man could be
diverted from military to cultural pursuits. The Fulbright Act was introduced in 1945 to enable
Americans to study abroad at the graduate level and teach in an elementary or secondary school,
lecture in a university, or conduct postdoctoral research. Similar opportunities are offered to citizens of
other countries to attend American-sponsored schools abroad or in the United States. The program’s
success depends largely on the support and cooperation of private organizations and individuals. After
30 years in the U. S. Senate, I remain convinced that educational and cultural exchange offers one
of the best means available for improving international understanding. The inadequacy and peril of
traditional methods of solving differences among nations and the hydrogen bomb put us on notice to find a better way to deal with international human relations. Whereas we readily spend billions
for the military and hundreds of millions for propaganda abroad, it is incredibly difficult to get the
administration and Congress to invest the few score millions necessary to sustain this activity most
important to this country’s future and world peace.’ Funding for the entire ECA exchange budget in
1975 was $54 million, $20 million of which was for the Fulbright Program.
22
22 Joseph Biden, ‘Remarks by President Biden on the End of the War in Afghanistan, 31 August
2021’, Speeches and Remarks, The White House, www.whitehouse.gov/briefing-room/speeches-remarks/2021/08/31/remarks-by-president-biden-on-the-end-of-the-war-in-afghanistan/.
23
23 For Fulbright’s impressive list, consult the University of Arkansas Special Collections website,
https://libraries.uark.edu/SpecialCollections/findingaids/fulbright/2ful86.asp, Awards and Honors.
24
24 Many thoughtful individuals in the US are genuinely concerned that the freedom of speech and
expression are jeopardized, especially at institutions of higher education in the US. See the website
of the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education at www.thefire.org.
25
25 ECA’s Functional Bureau Strategy mentions American values twelve times in a twelve-page text.

MEMORY, COMMEMORATION, CRISIS

Lonnie R. Johnson

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MEMORY, COMMEMORATION, CRISIS

Lonnie R. Johnson

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