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This chapter focuses on David Lilienthal when he returned to the US public eye. Businessmen who had long shaped and implemented domestic policy faced a grave crisis of legitimacy, and Lilienthal cast his lot with corporate executives desperately seeking a place in the Great Society. Corporate executives who had spent the early postwar decades wringing profits from international development, military, and Indian policy brought a distinctive perspective to insurgent demands for social justice, state action, and community control at home. Lilienthal belonged to a cohort of skilled institution builders, publicists, and political strategists who carried that lesson from the supposedly “underdeveloped” world to domestic business associations, government advisory boards, and community action programs of the 1960s. As far as these men were concerned, grand questions about the role of the private sector in public life had been resolved by the time the War on Poverty began, and the Great Society seemed an opportunity to consolidate their gains across domestic and international spheres.

This chapter highlights the confluence of territory, sovereignty and state-building in South Asia with the international politics of the Cold War. It deconstructs the idea of international cooperation in the Indus Basin, asking how the framework for accommodating competing Indian and Pakistani demands become discursively framed as “cooperation”, and how the Indus Waters Treaty acquired a positive reputation despite its severe limitations. The chapter analyses an ambitious 1951 plan for unifying Indian and Pakistani management of the Indus system by David E. Lilienthal, a prominent American technocrat. Analysing the plan’s implicit assumptions about scale and the basin’s political geography, it argues that the principle of cooperation was as much a rhetorical device as a real relationship. Even though it helped lure India and Pakistan to the World Bank’s negotiating table, cooperation was quickly abandoned.

The fourth chapter explores the ways in which radioisotopes were used as political instruments—both by the federal government in world affairs, and by critics of the civilian control of atomic energy—in the early Cold War. Congress established a civilian agency for atomic energy, with support from scientists, with the expectation that peacetime benefits would materialize. But the controversies the AEC faced in the immediate postwar years, particularly whether to ship radioisotopes to foreign scientists, demonstrate the program’s political vulnerabilities. The core of this chapter analyzes these debates, particularly during the first year of the program, during which time no shipments were sent abroad.

This chapter provides a background of the journeys across the postwar Americas to uncover the mid-century world to which David Lilienthal belonged and the unseen possibilities that lay within it. It starts from the idea that the fate of the US welfare state and Latin American developmental states cannot be understood in isolation from one another. Lilienthal belonged to a generation of North Americans who threw their energies into the Third World after 1945, and their work overseas did more than remake foreign lands; it shaped the possibilities of policy making at home. Within the Western Hemisphere, long exchanges between US and Latin American societies endowed their political economies with some of the same internal contradictions. When the crises of the 1970s and 1980s came, the divergent promises that they harbored became vividly apparent. The mobilization of the right and the explosive conflicts of those decades did not simply substitute one set of ideas for another, obliterating all that came before. Instead, they sorted out the elements of midcentury mixed economies, destroying some practices, redeploying others, and retrospectively redefining them all as emblems of two different eras.

This chapter traces the first leg of Jonathan Daniels's trip through the textile mill towns of North and South Carolina and into Tennessee. His ambivalent attitude toward working-class white southerners related to the popularity of poor-white caricatures in Erskine Caldwell's novels Tobacco Road and God's Little Acre. Daniels saw the impact of the Civilian Conservation Corps in Great Smoky Mountains National Park and pondered the effects of the Tennessee Valley Authority in Knoxville, Norris, and Chattanooga. TVA commissioner David Lilienthal reassured him that New Deal programs were committed to grassroots democracy rather than social planning by outsiders. Yet Daniels was conscious of the challenges to segregation and white supremacy the New Deal was likely to bring. Wary of federal intervention in the South, Daniels looked to the road ahead with even greater concerns about far left and far right, Communist and proto-fascist, alternatives.

Following World War II, the publication of accounts such as John Hersey’s Hiroshima (1946) documented the devastating effects of atomic weaponry on inhabitants of the two Japanese cities targeted by atomic bombs. Yet the American government presented a positive image of the atom, particularly in medicine. This chapter examines this apparent paradox. In the late 1940s and 1950s, the U.S. Atomic Energy Commission (AEC) sought to harness atomic energy for humanitarian uses, including advancing cancer research, therapy, and diagnosis. Yet the growing concern about the hazards of low-level radiation exposure, particularly from atomic weapons fallout, changed the public perception of radioactivity. The fear of cancer, which in the 1940s could be exploited by the AEC to justify its status as a civilian agency bringing medical benefits to the citizenry, was by the 1960s a threat to viability of the agency’s other long-term benefit prospect, nuclear energy.