Just this once, let's not talk about sex when we talk about Margaret Mead. Peter Mandler's tour de force, Return from the Natives: How Margaret Mead Won the Second World War and Lost the Cold War, gives sustained attention to Ruth Benedict, Gregory Bateson, and Geoffrey Gorer, but the president of the Royal Historical Society is interested in this trio as Mead's professional rather than personal partners. Return from the Natives includes an account of Mead's wilderness years during the Cold War, but it is certainly not a book about love in a cold climate. It is also decidedly not about the flapper-era young professional whose Coming of Age in Samoa (1928) was intended to help America shed some of its sexual inhibitions.

Mandler's curiosity is piqued by ideas: he has a prurient interest in what is going on under the covers of books. As a senior at Barnard College, Mead took a course from Franz Boas, the father of the discipline of anthropology in America. She also met his teaching assistant, Ruth Benedict. Mead thereby found both her profession and her intellectual school within it. Boasian anthropology opposed racism and emphasized cultural relativism. Its founder was rewarded with a martyr's death: Boas expired in the Columbia University Faculty Club in the midst of an anti-racist rant. The Boasians were dissatisfied with an ethnography which focused on structure and instead sought to find the "ethos" of a culture.

Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan catalyzed Mead and her colleagues to take the tools of their trade and enlist them to help win the war. They would no longer deploy their "culture and personality" approach just on "primitive" cultures but also on modern industrial societies. They would uncover the "national character" of the warring countries: a kind of collective psychoanalysis of entire populations. These anthropologists worked directly with psychologists, including Erik Erikson (and Mead and Bateson's baby was even in the pediatric care of a young Dr. Benjamin Spock).

Mead bravely set out to explain Americans to themselves. The result was And Keep Your Powder Dry (1942). The martial title aptly reflected her desire to aid the war effort. Mead explained that while European parents think that they are the custodians of culture and that it is the duty of their children obediently to learn it from them, the United States had reversed this model. American children see themselves as early adopters of the emerging culture and enjoy showing off by teaching it to their parents.

A tremendous success, And Keep Your Powder Dry helped to make Mead a prominent public figure. Henry Luce loved it. Eleanor Roosevelt sought out Mead's advice. The anthropologist wrote for leading popular venues, including Vogue, Mademoiselle, House and Garden, Woman's Day, Look, Harper's, The New York Times, and the New York Herald Tribune. The Washington Times named her one of the eight outstanding women of the modern world.

Mead then turned to Anglo-American relations. She had a personal interest in this subject as Bateson—her husband during the war years—was himself English. The American government organized a British speaking tour for some of its famous citizens in order to help build rapport and mutual understanding among the allies. Mead was the clear favorite. In the question times, bemused Britons could verify what they had heard: "Do American women wear lights in their hats to signal taxis? Can you get the news on any station any time? Why do you kill people in an electric chair instead of hanging them?"

And so Mead set to work trying to defuse potential misunderstandings and tensions between the lands of Churchill and Roosevelt. Americans thought of the Brits as coolly arrogant, while the English thought of the Yanks as brashly boastful. Americans are impressed by "the biggest," while the British by "the oldest." Making American traits less odious to Britons was her primary goal as—in preparation for the D-Day invasion—1.5 million GIs would soon be overrunning their sceptred isle. Mead wrote an article for the Transatlantic on a vital point of confusion: "What Is a Date?"

One should think of a GI, she confided to His Majesty's subjects, as someone who had learned to be exhibitionist as a boy and who is in some ways still "just an overgrown child, overstating and exaggerating everything." To a certain extent, Mead herself went native. Once she returned home, she could not help but see some characteristics of her fellow Americans as unpleasant. To wit, their "predetermination either to love or hate—and no intellectual interest in just understanding what it is all about."

Another strategic victory was Mead's influential report, "Germany After the War." There was a vigorous debate going on between advocates of a "soft peace," in which the Germans would be treated as good people who had some bad eggs in their midst, and a "hard peace," in which they would be handled as if they were all rotten. Mead's anthropological angle was particularly welcomed as she managed to be "neither appeaser nor avenger." Her study was read with interest by members of both Eisenhower's staff and the British War Office. Mead's reputation as a wartime consigliere was so strong that a rumor circulated that she had personally convinced Roosevelt to retain the Japanese emperor.

So, as the British say, Margaret Mead had a good war. Things would go awry for her reputation and influence in the cold one which followed. Thus—in what is certainly the best Soviet-era subtitle since How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb—this study is an account of How Margaret Mead Won the Second World War and Lost the Cold War.

The seeds of dissolution were already there during World War II, especially in the work of Gorer, who went in for neo-Freudian approaches with monocausal gusto. Crisis conditions necessitated rapid results. In 1943, he did a study of the Greeks in just five days. One of his main sources was "an Italian with a Greek aunt." Gorer's primary finding was that an indulgent approach to potty training created a race that lacked foresight. The Greeks themselves were not impressed.

It was easier to get away with such theories when they were applied to the enemy. Gorer's memorandum for the Pacific theater found that "early and severe toilet training is the most important single influence in the formation of the adult Japanese character." Such a childhood, Gorer "predicted," would make them brutal and sadistic in war. This effort at "culture cracking" was on message enough that Time popularized it.

Mead's crowd began to boast that Gorer had shrewdly foreseen how the Japanese would behave. Another scholar wrote to her to puncture this: "I am very sure you would have predicted the Manila reaction without knowing Gorer's data. I am sure that a knowledge of modern Japanese conduct since 1931 if not earlier would have sufficed, and that knowing about the handling of infants would not have altered the prediction one way or the other."

With V-J Day behind them and the advent of the Cold War, Gorer tried again with the new enemy, the Russians. He developed a theory based on the swaddling of infants, but this time it was widely derided. This entire approach was now mocked as "diaperology," and the muck stuck. Mead was closely tied to Gorer, and thus she got soiled as well. Commentary magazine led a campaign against her. Alistair Cooke was not the only one to observe that these dubious national character studies brought the entire discipline of anthropology into question: "It makes you wonder if it's true what they say about the Trobriand Islanders." For their part, younger anthropologists did not want to study war no more; they preferred to do "pure" rather than applied research. This was Mead's nadir. Mandler lists all the things that she had lost—she had no university connection anymore, no inside track to the government, and so on—before conceding that there was still one remaining asset: "she had only her general reputation as the most famous anthropologist in America."

Much of the back end of this book involves Mandler defending Mead against subsequent—many of them posthumous—attacks that his research reveals to be overdrawn or unfair. In the 1960s and 1970s, Mead started to be criticized for dragging the noble discipline of anthropology into the dirty world of geopolitics and militarism. Mandler responds with the commonsense retort that just because getting entangled in Vietnam was wrong doesn't mean that getting involved in World War II was. Much of what later anthropologists flattered themselves at having discovered, Mandler observes, Mead actually anticipated them on—even though she is often their foil on these very points. Far from having no sense of the dark side of humanitarian efforts, Mead was one of the first to challenge the assumptions behind the drive to help "underdeveloped" countries by referring pointedly to the "overdeveloped West."

Although all her passion was probably not spent, Mead reemerged in the last period of her life as a beloved global celebrity: honorary grandmother of the world. Mandler's bracing and lively monograph is much more than just a study of Mead having a distinguished war record and then being left out in the cold. It is a history of ideas. It is a history of the social sciences. It is also a meditation on the desire to have one's academic work influence policy makers—and the attending perils. When the gods wish to punish scholars, they grant their requests for military funding.

Timothy Larsen is McManis Professor of Christian Thought, Wheaton College. He is the author most recently of A People of One Book: The Bible and the Victorians (Oxford Univ. Press).

Copyright © 2013 by the author or Christianity Today/Books & Culture magazine.
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