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October 11, 2011

September 28, 2011

I’ve been writing a lot of cover letters lately, and in every one I end up talking about my thesis. I describe my honors project as “the capstone of my collegiate academic experience”or “the culmination of my research, writing, and analytical skills.” Regardless of the number of times I write about it, I still struggle to summarize what exactly my thesis, and the process of creating it, means to me. I do know that completing it gave me an incredible feeling of achievement, accomplishment, and in all honesty, relief. Writing an honors thesis was one of the most difficult but most rewarding experiences I had at Dickinson.

During the school year I often found myself procrastinating from working on my thesis by doing other schoolwork–that’s how consuming an honors project can be. I probably spent more time working on my thesis than for all of my other classes combined. Even before starting my honors endeavor I had to realistically make sure I could handle the workload. In addition to being up to the amount of work, I had to make sure I could stay reasonably motivated and organized without the strict structure of a class. It was helpful knowing I had to being ready for my nearly weekly meetings with my thesis advisor, Professor Pinsker, but I also learned how to give myself realistic goals for the day, weekend, or week so it didn’t feel like I had to conquer my entire thesis every time I sat down to do work. Because I was the only history major writing an honors thesis this year, I also found it helpful to talk to other seniors working on honors projects to share strategies or just to commiserate with one another.

Some things I learned over the course of the year:

• Start research early, it’s really never a bad idea. Some of the non-traditional items (periodicals, microfilm) I ordered via inter-library loan took awhile to arrive, or multiple attempts to get the correct item– I ended up reading microfilm during finals in the fall. Also, keep your research organized so when you’re writing the final draft of your thesis the week before it’s due, you can go back and find the information you found back in October without wasting a lot of time.
• Speaking of research, email libraries, archives, and scholars for related information. The worst that can happen is they don’t email you back, or you can end up corresponding with a helpful librarian at the University of Wyoming who emails you PDF’s of primary sources you never would have seen otherwise.
• Start writing even before you have all of your ideas formulated. There’s always more research to do, so at some point you just have to grit your teeth and start typing. Even if you’ve had all of these great ideas bouncing around in your head, writing them out can really help you formulate them, or realize that they don’t make any sense. Either is helpful.
• Don’t be afraid to completely change what you think is your thesis statement. You’ll probably revise it at least 10 times. My proposal only vaguely resembles my final product. For a while I didn’t even know what my argument was any more. That’s fine, as long as you eventually acknowledge the fact that you’re not just showing off your research skills, but also your ability to analyze the information you’ve found.
• Make friends with the librarians. I spent an a large amount of time in the library, so it only made sense to befriend the people who could actually help me with my research. Did you know that seniors doing independent studies can check out books for the entire semester after filing out this form at circulation? It’s really helpful.
• Remember it’s your honors project. While it’s generally a good idea to listen to what  your thesis advisor and reader have to say, you have the final say. But keep in mind, the entire department votes if you get honors.

It’s hard, but it’s worth it.

It’s done. Well, I’ve finished writing the first draft. Reaching a total of 86 pages, my draft reflects the inclusive nature of the India Lobby itself. I know that I will have to make my final paper substantially more concise, but I’m currently operating under the principle of put it all in now and take it out later. I’ve actually not even fit all I wanted to say in this draft: here’s a two-page write-up of the National Committee for India’s Independence that I never seemed to find a spot for in the paper. I think that I’ll want to condense my descriptions of the official events in the U.S.-India relationship (like the Phillips mission) in particular to focus my narrative more around the India Lobby itself. I’ve added in subheadings in my two narrative chapters to provide more organizational structure. I decided to divide the narrative between the Cripps mission and the Quit India movement, the point when I argue, the India Lobby employed the internationalist rhetoric it had developed in strategic action. At this point, I sort of have nonexistent chapter titles, and I think I still need to figure out how to properly cite items from microfilm and manuscript collection, but for a March 1 deadline, I’m satisfied.

I’ve spent the past week writing the narrative paragraphs of my thesis, covering the Atlantic Charter (August 1941) through the Phillips mission (December 1942). I’m planning going up through the Phillips leak (July 1944), though I’m already at 30 pages for the combined 2 chapters.  At this stage in my writing, I’m still pretty wordy, but I not planning on editing until just before I turn it in on March 1st.

When I was writing I didn’t create a break between the two chapters because I wanted to see how my research fit into the narrative. Right now I’ve made a tentative chapter break after the Cripps Mission (April 1942) as the point where India Lobby activity begins to really pick up, but if I can condense the first section a bit, I might move this later. So far the narrative has naturally lent itself to alternating between Lobby testimony (India Today, NAACP Papers) and a more official account (FRUS) of the events. Most of my writing is centered around primary source evidence, and I’m not sure if I should be incorporating more secondary source arguments in these two chapters, or not as much because I will have a chapter devoted to historiography.

Here’s the chronology that I’ve made from my primary sources that I’ve been using while writing my narrative chapters. This version goes through 1943, though I’m working on expanding it through 1945. Because I made indexes for the NAACP Papers and Emanuel Celler Papers previously, I haven’t completely combined all of the sources into this one document, but it’s pretty complete.

As far as research goes, I haven’t done too much this past week since I’ve being doing a lot of writing. I have continued reading Nico Slate’s, Colored Cosmopolitanism, now that I have the physical book, and I’ve started to look into sources on the American Zionist Emergency Council using the book that Prof. Commins lent me: Edward Tivnan, The Lobby: Jewish Political Power and American Foreign Policy (1987).

At this point I’ve written about 8 pages that focus on the period from the Atlantic Conference (August 1941) through Pearl Harbor. Because I’m framing the Atlantic Charter within the context of FDR’s state of the union, “Four Freedoms,” speech and earlier Wilsonian internationalism, I’ve begun to introduce what I mean by “liberal internationalism,” and who J.J. Singh and the India Lobby attempted to affiliate themselves, and Indian independence, with.

Using sources like Warren Kuchl’s article on internationalism in Alexander DeConde’s Encyclopedia of American Foreign Policy: Studies of the Principle Movements and Ideas (1978) and  G. John Ikenberry’s, The Crisis of American Foreign Policy: Wilsonianism in the Twenty-first Century (2009), I’m trying to get an idea of the historical transformation of internationalism without delving into the political science meaning of “liberal internationalism.” In Bruce Cummings’ study, The Origins of the Korean War (1990), for example, Cummings describes two camps of internationalism at the end of WWII: the left-liberal-internationalism that would be embodied by Henry Wallace and his 1948 presidential campaign that emphasized an “open door” and principles of universalism and democratization vs. the Republican internationalists, who in the Cold War would advocate containment to combat the spread of communism (27-29).

In a more practical application, I’ve been able to find connections between the ACLU and the India League of America. Roger Baldwin and John Haynes Holmes, who were cofounders of the ACLU, and were members of the League’s Advisory Board by March 1942. The League elected Baldwin as its treasurer in December 1942. Holmes wrote to Walter White on January 18, 1943 (not in his capacity as a member of the League), before White joined the League. I’ve flipped through a history of the ACLU, Judy Kutulas’ The American Civil Liberties Union and the Making of Modern Liberalism, 1930-1960 (2006), which describes the institutionalization of the ACLU from a radical organization to one that “deliberately cultivated liberal respectability,” which seems in line with the evolution of the India Lobby to a certain extent (Kutulas, 2). Kutulas’ book also introduced me to the “People’s Front,” which she describes as promoting “the fusion of civil liberties and liberalism by shifting the national conversation toward shared values” (Kutulas, 6). Because this coalition was intertwined with undercurrents connected to the American Communist Party, I’m not sure if this is the type of liberal group I want to explore further as an example of the India Lobby’s tactics.

Based on my recent discovery of the Baldwin connection between the India Lobby and the established American liberal coalition, it seems like I can draw the lines between the India Lobby and liberal internationalists (like Pearl Buck for example), but my evidence for these characters is based on letter heads and not necessarily firsthand testimony. Because I do have more substantial evidence for both White and Celler, perhaps I can use them as tactical case-studies to demonstrate Singh and the Lobby’s larger strategy vision–placing Indian independence in the greater coalition of liberal internationalists.

On a side note, a passage in Christina Klein’s Cold War Orientalism: Asia in the Middlebrow Imagination, 1945-1961 (2003), seems to confirm Professor Pinsker’s suspicions that American missionaries in Asia weren’t connected to the liberal establishment:

The Protestant missionary movement, although not allied exclusively with the Republican party, provided right internationalism with a number of outspoken advocates and a steady stream of intellectual energy. Grounded in the universalist values of Christianity, missionaries had been powerful promoters of internationalist thinking since the nineteenth century. In general, they encouraged a U.S.-centered internationalism based on spreading American values and institutions and transforming other nations along American lines (Klein, 29-30).

As a counterexample, however, Pearl Buck’s parents were Christian missionaries in China, and Buck aligned herself with not only the China Lobby, but the India Lobby, and black civil rights activities in the U.S.