These epigraphs highlight the persistence of an idea in the American imagination. The idea is that the Middle East—and, by extension, much of the postcolonial world after the end of the Second World War—was and remains a relatively backward place populated by people mired in “traditional” practices and values. Their only hope is to be modernized by an injection of Western values and expertise. Postwar modernization theory posited a model of societal transformation made possible by embracing Western manufacturing technology, political structures, values, and systems of mass communication. As a policy initiative, modernization was the centerpiece of Cold...

A Significant portion of Daniel Lerner’s military career was devoted to the analysis of propaganda. Lerner served with the U.S. Army’s Psychological Warfare Division (PWD) in Paris from September 1944 until the end of the war on May 8, 1945. Lerner was the chief editor for the Intelligence Branch of PWD and charged with writing theWeekly Summary of Intelligence,which was distributed to PWD offices in the war theater. He applied his talent in literary analysis and interpretation as he pored over raw field reports and synthesized his conclusions in weekly reports. He dived into the works of Harold...

Stanford university, established by Leland and Jane Stanford as a memorial to their son, Leland, Jr., opened in 1891 among fields and farms in Palo Alto, California. The university’s first president, David Starr Jordan, was determined to make the school a leading research institution on par with Harvard, Columbia, or the University of Chicago. Almost immediately, however, Jordan’s plans were dashed. Problems with the endowment, a lack of donors, and the 1906 earthquake left the university with severe financial problems.¹ Loyal Stanford graduate Herbert Hoover successfully raised some private donations from individuals and foundations during the 1920s, but the Depression...

The grant for the Revolution and the Development of International Relations (RADIR) study at Stanford expired in mid-1950. Daniel Lerner was named acting professor of Sociology and taught classes that fall. After classes ended in late 1950, Lerner flew to New York and visited Paul Lazarsfeld at Columbia University. No record of the meeting exists, but Lerner apparently negotiated a position as visiting professor of Sociology at Columbia for the spring semester (February to June) of 1951. Primarily, Lerner worked in the Bureau of Applied Social Research (BASR), analyzing data from Voice of America (VOA) listener surveys in Turkey.

BASR...

At mit, Daniel Lerner’s appointment was with the Center for International Studies (CENIS). The creation of CENIS can be traced, interestingly enough, to the State Department’s concerns about Soviet jamming of Voice of America (VOA) radio signals, a concern that also led to the Bureau of Applied Social Research (BASR) Middle East radio-listening studies. In the summer of 1950, Undersecretary of State James Webb asked MIT to help the government overcome Soviet jamming. MIT President James Killian and Harvard President Paul Buck mobilized leading intellectuals from their campuses who then formed Project Troy, an interdisciplinary study group that would examine...

In late 1957 or early 1958, when the manuscript forThe Passing of Traditional Society: Modernizing the Middle Eastwas in the hands of the publisher, the American University in Cairo invited Daniel Lerner to lecture in Egypt, Syria, and Lebanon. When he returned to Cambridge, the galley proofs forPassing of Traditional Societywere waiting, and he added a paragraph or two of updated information to the Egypt, Syria, and Lebanon case studies.¹ Although Lerner did not add much to the book after this Middle East trip, if we examine hispost-Passingpublications, it is apparent that he actually...