Integrating U.S. Regionalism into “Americanization” Narratives in the Era of Development

The Green Revolution – the U.S. campaign to teach capital- and science-intensive agriculture to poor farmers in the nascent “Third World” – was a cornerstone of Cold War international development. Historians have invariably described that campaign as one of “Americanization,” demonstrating how U.S. agricultural scientists hoped to ameliorate poverty abroad by remaking the global countryside in the image of the prosperous American farm. This paper complicates that narrative by emphasizing U.S. regionalism, revealing that there was not one but many Americas in the imaginary of development planners, some of which suggested dramatically different ways to think about poverty and underdevelopment abroad. What if the American South, rather than a mythical and idealized Midwest, served as a model for remaking rural societies? I explore the Rockefeller Foundation’s influential Mexican Agricultural Program (MAP), begun in 1943. Rather than the Foundation’s first exercise in rural development, however, the MAP was modeled on earlier Rockefeller programs in the American South, a region they imagined as analogous to Mexico in its rural poverty, uneven land tenure, and eroded soils. Paul Mangelsdorf, the MAP’s lead corn specialist, had previously worked with tenant farmers in East Texas during the 1930s and had rejected the gospel of double-cross hybrid corn that was then revolutionizing corn culture in the American Midwest, because it required the annual repurchasing of seed and was thus beyond the reach of most poor southern farmers. Arriving to Mexico, Mangelsdorf grew convinced that Mexican campesinos closely resembled poor southerners, and that the Foundation ought to pursue a corn breeding strategy that was more appropriately tailored to their social and economic limitations. Ultimately, I argue that the American South served as a wiser model for the project of development than the Midwest, as the Cotton Belt more closely resembled the post-colonial nations of the Global South.