Rockefeller Archive Center

Rockefeller Archive Center Research Reports are created by recipients of research travel stipends and by many others who have conducted research at the RAC. The reports demonstrate the breadth of the RAC's archival holdings, particularly in the study of philanthropy and its effects. Read more about the history of philanthropy at resource.rockarch.org. Also, see the RAC Bibliography of Scholarship, a comprehensive online database of publications citing RAC archival collections.

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The Role of the Rockefeller Foundation in the Origins of Treponematosis Control in Haiti, 1915-1927

January 20, 2021

There has been a surge of interest in the history of colonial public health of Haiti. This body of recent scholarship has shed light on the general construction of US colonial public health, humanitarianism during the US occupation, yaws/treponematosis control campaigns, and hegemony. While it is generally understood that the treatment of treponematosis played an outsized role in the performance of enlightened US medical modernity, what is less well described is how treponematosis became the central target of US and Rockefeller Foundation efforts to solidify the legitimacy of the US colonial state. This report will argue that there existed a wide variety of infectious diseases, some of which the US occupation believed that they could treat or eradicate, including smallpox, intestinal protozoa, dysentery, malaria, hookworm disease, and treponematosis. As a result of several material and pragmatic concerns, treponematosis became the central focus of the US occupation. With regard to the prioritization of treponematosis, the operations of the Public Health Service in Haiti can be divided into at least two periods, the first spanning from the formation of the Public Health Service in 1919 to the initiation in 1924 of the General Disease and Sanitary Survey of Haiti. The second period spans from 1925, at the end of the Survey of Haiti, to the beginning of 1930, when the Public Health Service began to be dismantled and the US influence began to wane. The first period had a more general concern with public health in Haiti, while the second period became acutely focused on eradication and treatment of treponematosis. Understanding how treponematosis came to be a priority requires understanding its social significance for both the US occupation and the Haitians communities afflicted by it. This paper will argue that treponematosis had widespread symbolic significance within Haiti. Together with its relative ease of treatment, diagnosis, and evidence of success, this disease was selected by the US occupation for eradication because it was believed that it would most clearly demonstrate the superiority of US biomedicine and culture.

Public Health; Rockefeller Foundation

The Population Council in the Decolonizing Caribbean

January 1, 2017

In the post-WWII world, a growing consensus emerged among demographers, philanthropists, activists, and world leaders that populations were increasing too quickly in the "developing world" of Africa, Asia, South America and the Caribbean. Pointing to stable/rising birth rates and declining death rates across a number of countries, commentators warned that population growth would, at best, slow the process of economic development, and at worst, fuel poverty, conflict, and/or a turn to communism. This panic over population growth became the central focus of newly created population think tanks and university courses, while also fuelling a wave of state-run family planning programs supported by an expanding international aid apparatus. By the mid-1960s, the study and control of population had become a billion dollar, transnational endeavour.

Agents of Change: the International Health Division in Cuba, 1935-1942

January 1, 2014

In 1935, after years of unofficial visits and discussions, the Rockefeller Foundation's International Health Division (IHD) was at last formally invited by the Cuban government to participate in a cooperative project on the island. The IHD anticipated a fruitful endeavor based on their optimistic interpretations of the changes taking place in the Cuban political landscape and in the official sanitation branch: "We believe that a real renaissance in public health work generally is taking place in Cuba, manifested by the real interest shown by public health officials in improving and enlargening [sic] their Services and by the active desire of the public generally for health work." Seven years later, despite the success of its two cooperative projects (of all the IHD's local health units, the one launched in Cuba was deemed "the best in the Americas"), the IHD saw no hope for future effective ventures and transferred their local representative from Cuba to another post in Latin America. On his departure, he commented that working in Cuba was "the hardest job [he] ever had."

From a Clinical to a Public Health Problem: The Control of Tuberculosis in Jamaica, c. 1918-1982

January 1, 2013

Since the publication of Randal Packard's White Plague, Black Labor in 1989 which examined the control of tuberculosis (TB) in South Africa, the focus of the historical scholarship on TB has gradually moved away from Europe and North America. While much work has been done in recent years on the history of TB in Latin America, the control and treatment of the disease in the British Caribbean has thus far been largely neglected. In July 2012, funded by a grant from the University of York's Centre for Chronic Diseases and Disorders, I undertook a pilot project on TB in the British Caribbean from the early twentieth century until the onset of the HIV/AIDS epidemic in the 1980s that focused on three parts of the region that differed considerably in terms of size, economy and racial make-up: Jamaica, Barbados and Trinidad. I spent a week on each island, visiting their national archives and libraries and also examining papers relating to TB in the Caribbean in the National Archives and the Wellcome Library in London and in the WHO archives in Geneva.

The Jamaica Hookworm Commission (1918-1920)

January 1, 2012

In his final days as the Director of the Hookworm Commission in Jamaica, Dr. P.E. Gardner wrote to his superior Hector Howard about his experience in setting up the first public health demonstration campaign on the island. He lamented, " it has seemed to me at times that my best efforts had produced very poor results ... It was not a satisfactory piece of work to me and at the same time it was the most difficult piece of work I have ever done." Gardner was the second official from the Rockefeller Foundation's International Health (IHB) to take up work on the island since the arrival of the Rockefeller Foundation (RF) in 1918. He shared the pessimism of his predecessor Dr. M.E. Connor, who held out little hope that the efforts of IHB in Jamaica would bear any fruit.

Jamaica Advancing: The Rockefeller Tuberculosis Commission and the Tensions Between Research and Eradication

January 1, 2010

The Rockefeller Foundation's International Health Board (IHB) first arrived in Jamaica in 1918 as part of an expansion of its work on hookworm in the American South, the British Caribbean and Central America. Using the methods perfected in British Guiana, Trinidad and Costa Rica of survey, education and mass treatment, known as the "American" or "Intensive Method", the Rockefeller Foundation (RF) was able to gain the support of both the colonial and local governments in Jamaica. It soon expanded its work into many other fields of public health and education. By 1928 International Health Division, under the direction of Dr. Benjamin Washburn, had created the Hookworm and Malaria Commissions, established a training school for sanitary inspectors, organized local health boards in each parish with trained medical personnel and instituted programs of nutrition and dental care in local schools. In addition the Bureau of Health Education, under the direction of Washburn, published the popular Public Health Bulletin to spread the message of sanitation to the masses.

Transnational Medicine: The Rockefeller Foundation and Cuba, 1913-1950

January 1, 2010

Incorporated in 1913, the Rockefeller Foundation (RF) was established to address the biological threat posed by tropical diseases to developing regions throughout the world. The RF participated in efforts to promote public health, scientific discovery and research. They established various commissions aimed at addressing issues of science, modernity, and development. At the end of the nineteenth century, Cuba was under military occupation by the United States immediately following the conclusion of Spanish-American war. U.S. participation in Cuba continued past the period of formal occupation in the form of non-profit organizations. Initially working on yellow fever research, scientists from the United States and Cuba collaborated on eradication efforts. Decades later, Cuba was again the site of tropical disease research on malaria. These groups, including the RF and its subsidiary, the International Health Commission (IHC), established programs to advance technology, while dealing with public health and scientific education within Cuba.

In the Times of Shots and Shells: Early Contacts between the Rockefeller Foundation and the Dominican Republic, 1911-1946

January 1, 2009

The Rockefeller Archive Center holds a large number of documents pertaining to the years between 1920 -- the time of the first visit by an International Health Board/ Division (IHB/D) staff member, Dr. John Grant -- and 1946 -- the year in which the Dominican government signed a cooperative agreement with the Rockefeller Foundation (RF). There are also a large number of documents for the period after World War II, the Cold War years, which were also crucial to the development of public health and sanitation in the Dominican Republic with input from various international agencies, including the RF. This report will sketch out the earlier period of the relationship between the Rockefeller Foundation and the Dominican government, as background to the very complex role that the RF came to play in the transformation of the structure of the health-care system in the Dominican Republic from a mostly private endeavor to an exclusively state-managed system in the decades between 1930 and 1960.

The Role of International Aid in Creating Ties Between Haiti and The United States, 1934-1957

January 1, 2003

A one-month research visit at the Rockefeller Archive Center (RAC) allowed me to examine records which document how the association of the Rockefeller Foundation (RF) and Nelson A. Rockefeller (NAR) with development projects in Haiti contributed to the process of Haitians identifying the United States, its citizens and institutions as viable resources for achieving both national and personal development goals. Records from the medical and humanities divisions of the RF, educational and economic development activities of NAR as Coordinator of Inter-American Affairs, and general correspondence between Haitians, NAR's office, and RF officers provide supporting evidence for a dissertation on how the study of international aid practices can teach us about the linkages between international relations and transnational behavior.

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