Armed with Expertise: The Militarization of American Social Research during the Cold War

This book adds to a library of material on social science and U.S. foreign policy after 1945. Joy Rohde examines the origins and growth of the Special Operations and Research Office (SORO) that the U.S. Army established in the mid-1950s. SORO was formally a social science institute of American University in Washington, DC, but it did contract work for the military. The organization was of midrank among the proliferating groups of social scientists who served the national security interests of the United States during the Cold War. But Rohde effectively shows how SORO embodied the convictions, hopes, and tensions that many historians have found in the dominant trends of social science from 1945 to 1974. The experts of American University–SORO believed that their know-how could benefit the world and enhance free societies. To some extent, moreover, the armed forces took the researchers at their word. The men and women of...