The Floating University sets sail

I’ve been talking about the antics of these interwar Americans for some time now – following them down archival rabbit holes and port city back alleys, and trying to piece together what happened in 1926 on that ship, and why it matters to us today.  It’s been ten years in the making, but my book on the Floating University is finally here!

The book tells the story of the 1926 Floating University: a bold educational experiment in which 500 American college students sailed around the globe in the belief that learning at sea would make them better citizens of the world. As well as a full curriculum, the voyage included visits to foreign dignitaries including Mussolini, Gandhi and the Pope, and stops in 47 ports. But the trip was also beset by trouble: reports of sex, alcohol and jazz made their way back to an American press hungry for scandal and the Floating University became a byword for what could go wrong with educational travel. It explores this largely forgotten voyage and argues that – as well as revealing the tentacles of US empire – it exposes a much larger contest over what kind of knowledge should underpin university authority, one in which direct personal experience came into conflict with academic expertise.

The introduction and table of contents are available here, and (everyone’s favourite) the acknowledgements are attached below. Thank you to everyone who has helped me along the way, and especial thanks to my partner Ruth and my daughter Vita – the cutest book mascot I could ever dream of. I submitted the manuscript the day before she was born and every day since I have thought my heart might explode.

A 40% discount is available from the University of Chicago Press website when you enter the code FLOATING.

If you want to know more, there’s an early Q&A with me about the book in Inside Higher Ed or please get in touch with me directly.

Pietsch-FloatingU-AcknowledgementsDownload

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Transatlantic college travel in the 1920s

STCA letterhead, 318.03 Passage, 477 Students’ Triges (1925), HAL Archives

I came across the records of the Student Third Class Association (STCA) in the Holland America Line archives in Rotterdam while I was on the endless chase to track-down records on the Floating University, which also sailed on a Holland America Line ship. At first I could not believe what I was reading. Was it really possible that a major transatlantic shipping company ran a student organisation as a front for their commercial rebranding? The answer, it seemed, was yes.

My article on the STCA, which was founded in the early 1920s by a student of Yale University called James Stanton Robbins and sponsored by the Holland America Line throughout the interwar period, has just been published in Diplomatic History, and it sheds light on much bigger questions in the history of U.S. foreign relations in this period.

Working for the Holland America Line in the 1920s, J.S. Robbins presented the Student Third Class Association as a student organization and the voyage across the Atlantic as an extension of college life. Deftly exploiting cultures of trust embedded in elite East Coast college life, Robbins recruited students to sell third class travel to each other, and in the process played a major role in laundering the reputation of steerage travel by commodifying university prestige. The indignities of Ellis Island, the notorious conditions in steerage, and the prevalence of white, middle-class fears of racial and class-based contamination are well established in the history of 1920s United States, as is the generally white and elite nature of East Coast colleges and universities. This article shows that in the mid-1920s, the STCA used U.S. students to foster the idea that long distance travel was affordable, accessible, and acceptable to the U.S. middle-class.

Yet Robbins and his fellow student travel organizers have disappeared almost entirely from the history of Americans abroad in the early 1920s. The rapid growth of student third class travel across the Atlantic in this period is usually portrayed either as part of the history of U.S. tourism (a 1925 innovation of the shipping companies in response to the dramatic reduction of steerage traffic from Europe to the United States after the introduction of the 1924 Johnson-Reed Immigration Restriction Act) or as a footnote in the history of international education (which tends to cast the shipping companies as merely a means to get to Europe for the summer). This article provides a new account of the cultural and economic politics of travel in the interwar period, showing how the ground of post-1945 mass overseas tourism was laid in the 1920s by U.S. college students who, both as travelers and retailers, remade the hierarchy of steamship travel and the politics of class formation.

I think the history of the STCA is important to the history of U.S. foreign relations because it collapses boundaries between consumer and producer, campuses and commerce, and the United States and the world in the 1920s. In doing so it helps de-naturalize this series of binaries that remain stubbornly entrenched in our histories. The STCA highlights how central universities and colleges were to the United States’ commodifying empire, not just as engines of expertise and ways of knowing, but also as sites that fashioned what Paul Kramer has recently called “bourgeois internationalism’s structuring habitus”—the college ties, elite mobility, and geopolitical imaginary that functioned as a key component of U.S. internationalism and cultural and dollar diplomacy before and after the Second World War.

In uncovering the intimate relationship between the expansion into Europe of the networks of this commercial empire and the thick cultures of sociability cultivated in elite white East Coast college campuses in the period after the First World War, this article responds to Kramer’s call for “bridge-building projects that join local, subnational, and national histories of U.S. capitalism to transnational histories of the capitalist world economy.” Highlighting the centrality of college students as commercial as well as cultural intermediaries, both domestically and abroad, it shows how post-1945 U.S. foreign relations drew upon the commercial and cultural entanglements of the interwar period.

You can read the full text of the article here.

Tamson Pietsch, “Commercial Travel and College Culture: The 1920s Transatlantic Student Market and the Foundations of Mass Tourism” Diplomatic History, Volume 43, Issue 1, pp 83-106 https://doi.org/10.1093/dh/dhy059

 

Chasing Constantine Raises (Part 3)

Constantine Raises (R) and Dr. John Tymitz (L), one of the original members of the Institute for Shipboard Education, photograph by Paul Liebhardt c1984

Or: A reflection on the sadistic humour of the goddess Clio.

(continued from Part 2 and Part 1 of Chasing Constantine Raises)

The official records of the 1926-27 Floating University have disappeared. The Raises collection overview notes that Raises himself presented this material to the University of the Seven Seas (a successor enterprise launched in 1960) after which it “may have been permanently lost”. I contacted Semester at Sea (the organisation that now runs the university cruises) and they have confirmed that this early material does not exist. 

So I’ve followed up the other threads of the story. I’ve been to the Riesenberg archives in San Francisco and found nothing more than drafts of salty books on naval adventure, none of which bears evidence of a Greek translator. Of the books Riesenberg published in the 1920s that I  managed to find, none features Raises in the acknowledgments. But all archives are partial records and this one especially so. I have failed to find Andrew J. McIntosh’s papers, and similarly had no success in my search for the records of the diplomat George Horton. I am in the process of trying to chase down the copies of the New York World (on microfilm at the New York Public Library) to see if the editor Herbert Swope wrote the articles Liebhardt suggests he did, though again it would not be remarkable if he had – so many newspapers carried accounts of Lough’s plans. But perhaps, just perhaps, such an article might mention the Newport dinner?

When did Raises began to tell this version of his life? Maybe, in late 1920s New York, after Horton’s book on Smyrna had received such huge attention, Americans made the assumption for him? Possibly it was only after Lough’s death in 1952, when the other members of the original cruise had all gone, that the Newport story emerged. By then Raises was in his early 50s and trying to relaunch the student cruise while also running his own travel agency. He organised a very successful reunion in 1952 of the alumni of the 1926 voyage and a similar event in 1954 for the 1928 successor voyage, and in 1958 he had connected with a small businessman and Rotarian called Bill Hughes who wanted to launch a university that would sail around the world studying international problems. It was the early years of the Cold-War. After the horrors of the Holocaust, the Nuremberg trials had introduced the world to the concepts of genocide and crimes against humanity; Senator Fulbright had just launched his international scholarship exchange program, and the United States was seizing a new and more interventionist global role. An origin myth that invoked one man’s survival of an earlier catastrophe and linked it to an American innovation in international education may have fitted the times? 

But this is all speculation. Much of the story Raises told Liebhardt is plausible. Possibly the dinner on the Newport did happen.

Why should the reader believe the version I present, over Raises’ testimony? My account grows out of the kind of expert knowledge about the world that is certified by universities and the conventions of historical scholarship,with its socially sanctioned apparatus of source analysis. Raises’ version was embedded in his own personal experience of travel and migration in the American century.

Which of us gets to know?