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The Japanese Journal of American Studies, No. 16 (2005)

South to South across the Paciﬁc: Ernest E. Neal
and Community Development Efforts
in the American South and the Philippines1

Satoshi NAKANO*I
In the literature of America’s encounters with Asia, and vice versa,
historians on the either shore of the Paciﬁc have more or less habituallyused the term “across the Paciﬁc” to connote human ventures headed fora very distant as well as different society, in reference to tragedies caused
by mutual misunderstanding, ignorance, and distrust, and also to great
endeavors to overcome, understand, or tolerate such differences.2 Recently historians have certainly become more careful in discussing distinctions between Western and non-Western people since the time that
Said’s Orientalism3 and postcolonial studies made their impact on academic communities, many having turned the spotlight on the cultural andsocial anatomy of differentiation, arguing that knowledge and power
have become intertwined and discovering Asia as America’s distantother, and vice versa.
My concern here, however, is that such recent efforts to deconstructwith all the best intentions Orientalist notions of otherness only tend toreproduce or even strengthen the narrative of dualism, which might evennarrow and simplify the landscape of U.S.-Asia Paciﬁc history, as such

Copyright © 2005 Satoshi Nakano. All rights reserved. This work may be used,with this notice included, for noncommercial purposes. No copies of this work
may be distributed, electronically or otherwise, in whole or in part, without
permission from the author.
*Professor, Hitotsubashi University

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endeavors tend to portray people as preoccupied with ﬁnding otherness
and difference in whatever and whomever they encounter across the
Paciﬁc. Admittedly, the cultural politics of differentiation might be a useful concept for historians, especially if one focuses on the culture of imperialism during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries,4 but
such is not always the case. In this article, I would like to present a casein which a person with particular “domestic” social experiences in the
United States found himself surrounded by things familiar to him in such
distant countries as India and the Philippines. Ernest E. Neal (1911–1972) was one of the ﬁrst African American foreign aid ofﬁcers to workfor the U.S. Agency for International Development (hereafter USAID)
and devoted his life to social enterprises sponsored under the name of“community development” in various agrarian communities at home andabroad. Exploring his experiences may open our eyes to at least one alternative way to explore transpaciﬁc experiences between peoples “acrossthe Paciﬁc.”II
During the 1950s and early 1960s, the “gospel of community development”5 or “an attempt to marry Western doctrines of behavior on to asomewhat romantic or idealized notion of Asian village society”6 spreadamong U.S. foreign-aid programs aimed at Asia’s developing countries,
which were at that time considered new battlegrounds for America’s
Cold War to win the hearts and minds of local peoples. Ernest E. Neal
was an American recruited from the Deep South’s “Heart of Dixie” stateof Alabama to win this new kind of war against communism.
Before going into detail about Neal’s experiences, it might be helpful
to look back over the historical origins of community development (hereafter CD); that is, its trends and practices as experienced in the UnitedStates. In terms of social enterprises geared to the problem of mass poverty, one source of CD was the settlement house movement, which originated in Britain during the late nineteenth century and was then widely
popularized in the United States. Many present day CD enterprises havetheir historical foundations in the urban settlement houses movement at
the turn of the previous century. These ventures, however, were at thattime considered not so much a part of a social reform movement, butrather as educational opportunities for young men and women of afﬂuent families to mingle among the urban poor and discover how they lived,

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which amounted to nothing more than philanthropic ventures, by nomeans free from paternalistic as well as racist biases.7
On the other hand, the twentieth century notion of CD has been deﬁned
as a social enterprise for improving living conditions in local communities, not as charity but through active participation and self-help on thepart of community members themselves. CD also appears more like asocial reform movement in its aspirations for change and the mobilization of local communities. It is, however, mostly local and national governments that initiate and organize CD ventures and it is also mostly
professionals coming from outside the communities in question thatexercise leadership over such ventures.8 The following United Nation’s
deﬁnition of CD published in 1959 may well summarize such features.
Community Development means the process by which the efforts of the people themselves are united with those of governmental authorities to improvethe economic, social and cultural conditions of communities, . . . The distinctive features of community development programmes are the participation by the people themselves in efforts to improve their level of living withreliance as much as possible on their own initiative: and the provision of technical and other services in ways which encourage initiative, self-help andmutual help and make them more effective.9

The concept underlying the above deﬁnition is “aided self-help,” amethod to encourage the recipients of government assistance to become
as self-reliant as they could be, with technical and minimum material
assistance from the government, provided on the condition of maximum
self-help exercised by the recipients. One of its conceptual origins is the“aided self-help housing” policy, which was conceived as a practicalsolution to serious shortages of housing and manpower for housing inEurope after World War I. The idea was developed and spread to manykinds of government projects, including those in the USSR and British
India. In the United States, the Federal Housing Administration (FHA),
which was established in 1934 as a part of the New Deal, launched amajor “aided self-help housing” project in 1939 for an urban slum resettlement project in Puerto Rico. After World War II, Jacob Crane, who
had been in charge of the Puerto Rico project, lobbied for the establishment of a housing and planning section at the United Nations. This eventually led to the introduction of “aided self-help” into the broader arenaof United Nations’ development assistance programs.10
The concept was then incorporated into the basic doctrine of U.S.
foreign development assistance as shown in John F. Kennedy’s 1961

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inaugural address, “to those peoples in the huts and villages across theglobe struggling to break the bonds of mass misery, we pledge our best
efforts to help them help themselves [italics added].”11 It is no wonderthat the concept became closely related to the presumed American tradition of self-respect, agrarian democracy and citizenry, while becoming extremely convenient for the Kennedy Administration in gaining
Congressional support, as it could be used as a proof of the government’s
willingness to restrain federal expenditures for foreign assistance. The
1961 Foreign Assistance Act declared, “Assistance from the UnitedStates shall be used in support of, rather than substitution for, the selfhelp efforts that are essential to successful development programs andshall be concentrated in those countries that take positive steps to help
themselves [italics added].”12 The Act was designed to integrate thenscattered federal agencies for foreign economic assistance, and established USAID.
While the “aided self-help” concept was adopted as the basic principle of U.S. foreign development assistance, it was federal and local government programs and efforts of “agricultural extension” that provided
the ways and means, as well as the personnel for related programs. The
origin of agricultural extension also dates back to the late nineteenth century, when various rural reconstruction efforts were spreading aroundthe world in order to address the agrarian crisis brought about by theforces of capitalist industrialization and colonialism. In the UnitedStates, Congress enacted a series of laws to establish land-grant universities, whose departments of agriculture and agricultural experimental
stations would work with federal, state, and local governments to improve productivity, farming methods, farm business management, etc.
in the interest of local communities.13 During the New Deal years, theResettlement Administration was established in 1935 and then incorporated into the Department of Agriculture in 1937 as the Farm Security
Administration (FSA), which further expanded agricultural extension
enterprises to help poor farmers and sharecroppers who had been displaced by the Great Depression and the structural transformation of theagrarian economy.14
The important thing for the present discussion is that in practice agricultural extension had to go beyond the mere improvement of farming
methods, since programs inevitably had to face various interrelated problems in CD, such as sanitation, health care, nutrition, and housing. Thiswas especially the case with the FSA farm resettlement project, in which

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displaced farmers and sharecroppers would be resettled on farms purchased by the FSA from landlords who wanted to sell them, as such ventures would entail building a new physical and social environment for
the resettled farmers. Those in charge of agricultural extension ventures,
mainly land-grant university teachers and federal and state government
employees, thus became community work professionals of sorts, who
had to acquire skills and experience in working together with the local
people to discover issues, think out their solutions, and communicate andnegotiate with outside government agencies to carry out their plans.
“Community development” gradually came into use as a more appropriate generic term for this sort of social work and rapidly spread afterWorld War II. Ernest Neal was one among such self-made CD professionals of the New Deal years.
III
Ernest E. Neal was born in 1911 to a poor African-American farm
family near Chattanooga, Tennessee. From his “narrative report of technical assistance experiences,” we can see how strongly Neal’s entire
career was inﬂuenced by the fact that he had spent his boyhood on a small
poor farm, having personally experienced the pain and sorrow of “thewretched of the earth.”15 Neal himself, however, was competent and fortunate enough to escape the misery, going on to Knoxville College (B.A.)
and to the prestigious Fisk University, where he obtained a master’s
degree in sociology. Then he started a teaching career in 1939 at Texas
College, a small black liberal arts teachers college in the city of Tyler.
After initial failures to impress his students, he thought of using Tyler“as a sociological laboratory” to stimulate them. This led him to become
involved in the city’s community projects, including building a public
library and putting in street paving for the local black community, marking his ﬁrst involvement with anything related to CD. In 1946, he went
to teach at Bishop College in Marshall, Texas, where he joined the agricultural extension work going on at Sabine Farms, Texas’ only FSA
resettlement project for black farmers, which had resettled some 120
black families in 1937. The farms were de-federalized in 1946, andBishop College acquired a 19-acre center there, which included a community center “as a laboratory for applied education,” as the successor
to the federal agricultural extension project.16 Then in 1948, Tuskegee
Institute offered Neal the directorship of its Rural Life Council. The offer

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from “the capstone of rural development in the South”17 showed how
widely Neal had become acknowledged as a rural CD specialist by then.
What Neal witnessed after his arrival in Alabama, however, was an
ongoing agricultural revolution in the South affecting the fate of the rural
black population, which even the prestigious Tuskegee Institute could
not control. Baldwin Farms, which had been granted to Booker T.
Washington (1856–1915) to assist graduates of the Institute’s Agricultural Department in becoming successful farmers, had been mostly abandoned before Neal’s ﬁrst visit there. On Colonel McLemore’s 2,000-acrecotton plantation, which was located 20 miles west of Tuskegee, continuing radical mechanization had forced 180 out of its original 200
sharecropper families to leave by the time Neal ﬁrst visited there. Then
McLemore decided to change from mechanized cotton production to
livestock raising, reducing the number of black families living on his
plantation to only 5. The uprooted families all moved to the cities to compete for jobs, without much prospect of success.18
Such scenes are indicative of what was occurring all over the agrarian states of the South on a tremendous scale: that is, the demise of the
traditional cotton plantation economy causing mass unemployment of
black sharecroppers and their exodus to the cities, Southern as well asNorthern.19 Realizing that the situation was going to “get worse” and thatthe problem was not going to be solved by the Tuskegee Institute, Nealand his colleagues decided to pour their efforts into creating “nationalawareness of what the revolution was doing to black farmers” by testifying at Congressional hearings, organizing national seminars and conferences, and urging the national media to direct their attention to the
problem. A few articles did appear in the major newspapers of the time
mentioning Neal as a spokesperson for Southern black farmers and urging the nation to address the problem of the agricultural revolution andthe mass evacuation of black farmers to the cities as unskilled, low-paid
workers.20
Apart from national awareness-raising activities, Neal thought it was
equally important to take care of the old people and small children who
would remain on subsistence farms after the working-age people left forthe cities. The Rural Life Council initiated a project to select a few small
subsistence farm communities on an experimental basis to study waysof improving their living conditions. It was at this point that Neal and
Tuskegee put the “aided self-help” concept into full swing, especiallytargeting low-cost housing and backyard equipment, teaching local peo-

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ple how to make concrete blocks and lay them for housing and how to
cultivate better gardens. They organized community councils to ﬁnd out
what the real problems were in each community and to sort out the ways
in which the Tuskegee Institute could help them. They also sent a cultural anthropologist to live in one community to study customs related
to health care, promoted cultivating gardens year-round for better nutrition, and worked with home economists, vocational agricultural economists, and church ministers to meet the needs of local communities.
Notwithstanding their efforts, which certainly improved “the morale
if not the economics” of rural communities, Neal dispassionately recallsin his memoirs that “The impersonal laws of agronomy and economics
are stronger than the magic of the greatest charismatic leaders or wellintentioned reformers.”21 The problem could only have been solved if it
had gained national attention, thus providing huge federal government
resources. Such was not the case. The ventures initiated by Neal and hiscolleagues amount to only a few drops in the bucket. One could even saythat “aided self-help” for the black subsistence farmers contributed not
so much to the eradication of their poverty as their adaptation to it. Neal
knew these limitations too well to believe in “the magic,” which could
make the life of local communities “a little better” but could neverchange it. Neal then believed, “the work had a better chance for success”
in CD enterprises in India and the Philippines, “because it was supportedby the governments of the both countries and the United States.”22
IV
Neal does not explain in his memoirs the exact reasons why he decided
to pursue a new career as a foreign aid ofﬁcer; however, it was inevitablethat the agricultural revolution occurring in the South would radicallyreduce its rural black population, the very objects of CD, and that sooner
or later CD professionals would have to ﬁnd new arenas of activity. Rapidly expanding urban black communities could certainly have been oneof those arenas. Another opportunity was development aid, which wasjust starting up when Neal was at Tuskegee. He became more and moreinterested in the latter option, since he believed that “The acceptance ofNegroes as full citizens is dependent upon their ability to become theproponents of a cause bigger than themselves,”23 and hoped that“American Negroes” would point “the way to underprivileged people allover the world, as to how they can lift themselves up.”24 In other words,

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he believed African Americans should go beyond their own “internal”
issues and become role models for peoples of the developing world inorder to prove they were worthy of the full-ﬂedged U.S. citizenship that
had been denied to them so long.
Neal might also have been inﬂuenced and encouraged in his decision
to switch careers by his colleagues. Jacob Crane, a proponent of “aided
self-help housing,” had sent a few people from developing countries to
Tuskegee Institute to see the “small” rural experiments then led by
Neal;25 and Neal’s long time colleague Arthur F. Raper, a prominentsociologist known for his brave and pioneering criticism of lynching,sharecropping and tenancy in the South, became involved in rural development problems on a global scale after he visited Japan in 1947 at theinvitation of SCAP (Supreme Commander for the Allied Powers) tostudy agrarian reform there. Raper helped Neal get security clearance asa government employee, for which the latter expressed his gratitude in
his memoir, saying, “Without Arthur’s help for security clearance during the era of Senator Joseph McCarthy, there would have been no foreign aid career for me.”26
In February 1954, Neal was appointed director of community development for the U.S. Technical Assistance Mission to India. By then CD
had become one of the most highlighted ﬁelds in U.S. foreign development assistance programs.27 It was then considered the most effective,
visible, as well as “cheap” countermeasure against the threat of communist revolution in the developing countries, and it was hoped that it
would prove effective in reforming “feudal” agrarian societies throughsuch western democratic processes as participation, self-help, and mutual help, not through the collectivist means propagated by the socialist
blocs. It was also expected to be a wildcard for increased food production and general improvement of living conditions in rural societies.
India was the ﬁrst recipient country of U.S. aid for CD, initiated in
1952. Mostly because it was at odds with the U.S. over non-alliancediplomacy, India was considered one of the most important targets of
U.S. aid, while CD was considered an ideal ﬁeld in which the two countries could work together, away from any discord in international affairs.
Two joint objectives were set: to achieve increases in food production
and to implement social reform based on the principle of citizen participation and democracy. Then several pilot villages were selected where“panchayats (village councils)” were set up. One village level aid worker with 18 months training was assigned to live in each village. The pro-

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gram was soon expanded and eventually spread to all the villages in India
by the mid-1960s.28 Though the U.S. aid mission sent a few American
specialists to reside in rural India as agricultural supervisors, the project
as a whole was carried out through the initiative and manpower of the
Indian government, while the U.S. mission provided such material assistance as jeeps, farm equipment, educational materials for agricultural
schools, medical equipment and drugs for health care centers.
Though impressed with the huge scale and enthusiasm of the overall
CD endeavors in India, Neal came to notice during 3 months of intensive traveling around rural India that the village people were working
harder on schools, health centers, and community wells than on “hardeconomic problems,” because they did not own the land they cultivated.
He also found “untouchables” were for the most part not included incommunity-wide projects. These things reminded him of the early daysof rural development sponsored by Tuskegee.
Community Projects tended to be projects that did not upset traditional ways
but were concentrated on building schools, community centers, and community wells. The problem posed by the exploitative moneylenders, tenancy,
marketing, and agricultural productivity, resisted the efforts of community
development. These were national problems that could not be solved by village-level workers.29

This observation expressed in his memoir probably reﬂects afterthoughts about CD from later years. During the mid 1950s, CD was stilla shining mantra spreading to all the developing countries. India offereda huge training ground for U.S. foreign aid ofﬁcers, who fanned out
across the globe from South Asia. In 1956, Neal was assigned to thePhilippines, where CD enterprises ﬂourished as a strange by-product of
the Cold War.
V
While U.S. aid to CD in India was welcomed due to its relative independence from the distance between the two countries over international politics, CD programs in the Philippines were from the very beginning
openly declared part of the allied “warfare” against communist insurgency. Behind the aid was the compound shadow of the Huk rebellion,
which had originated out of the leftist peasant movement that had begunin the 1930s in the breadbasket provinces of Central Luzon, and a bloody
election fraud crisis that was badly damaging the legitimacy of Elpidio

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Quirino’s presidency and the Liberal Party government with claims ofcorruption and ﬁnancial mismanagement.
The U.S. government responded to these problems in the midst of
Asia’s Cold War by strengthening military assistance to suppress the
Huk insurgency, while clandestinely staging a drama to oust the unpopular Quirino in favor of “the guy,” Ramon Magsaysay, and the
Nacionalista Party in the name of “free and honest” elections. One
important means to this latter end was the National Movement for Free
Elections (hereafter NAMFREL), which was established in August 1951
with Gabriel L. Kaplan, an election law expert and experienced civicorganizer from New York City, as the organization’s de facto chief advisor. The organization was ﬁnanced by the CIA and Kaplan himself later
turned out to be a CIA agent, although he was more of an organizer who
used the CIA as a cover for his aspirations to organize civic movements
regardless of their whereabouts.30
Kaplan initiated CD programs in the Philippines in a rather peculiar
way by using NAMFREL as the base organization. Having secured
ﬁnancial support from U.S. based companies, NAMFREL started tobuild Philippine Community Centers, the ﬁrst two being inaugurated in
February 1953 in Mabalacat, Pampanga Province, which was at the heartof the Huk rebellion, and in Marbel, Cotabato Province on Mindanao.
Kaplan declared that these centers were “not established with the idea
of ﬁghting communism, but rather to eradicate the conditions underwhich communism thrives, namely poverty, ill health, ignorance andlack of opportunity for citizen participation in community affairs.”31
Eight more NAMFREL Community Centers were to be inaugurated by
1956, when the Philippine government took over CD enterprises fromNAMFREL. Chino Roces, a respected journalist and the owner of theManila Times, worked closely with Kaplan and promoted CD projects
in his newspapers “as if it had been a major social reform movement.”32
Ramon Binamira (1927–2004), the young NAMFREL director of
Cebu City who had been discovered as a talented young law student by
Kaplan in 1951, was made director of NAMFREL CD enterprises 2 years
later. In 1956 Binamira was appointed by President Magsaysay to the
newly created cabinet post of Presidential Assistant of Community
Development (hereafter PACD) and thereafter led the Philippine CDenterprises during their pioneer days until 1961. Though Binamira himself rejected a contract offer with the CIA, it could not have been possible for him to exercise leadership over the CD projects without both open

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and covert assistance from Kaplan and various U.S. agencies, as he had
to face a serious challenge from the Philippines Rural Reconstruction
Movement under the leadership of Y. C. James Yen, an internationallyacknowledged ﬁgure in the ﬁeld, and Secretary of Agriculture Salvador
Araneta, one of the most respected senior intellectuals and politicians in
the Philippines, who wanted to gain control of rural development projects supported by U.S. aid. Only with the eleventh-hour strong endorsement for Binamira’s plan from the U.S. Embassy and foreign aid
agencies did Magsaysay withdraw his support for Yen and Araneta andadopt Binamira’s 5-year national plan for community development,
establishing PACD in April 1956.33 4 months later, Earnest Neal arrived
in the Philippines as the chief advisor to PACD and special assistant forrural development to the director of United States Operations Missions(USOM) in the Philippines.34
VI
Upon his arrival in the Philippines, Neal found that the PACD ofﬁce
consisted of Binamira and “six other bright young lawyers” alreadyfeverishly working on drafting the organization program to implement
community development. An essential part of the program was training,which was to produce “multi-purpose” CD workers (hereafter PACD
workers) who would live in rural communities, and plan and carry out
the grants-in-aid programs to be supported by the government. Though
their role was essentially similar to that of village-level workers in India,
the Filipino trainees were required to be college graduates and wereselected through a special civil service examination and interview process, with an only 8% pass rate. Coming from such ﬁelds as agronomy,sociology, social welfare, public sanitation, civil engineering, and education, they would receive training for 6 months without pay at the brandnew community development training facility at the University of thePhilippines Los Baños, which had been granted by U.S. aid. After graduation, they would be assigned to barrios (i.e., rural villages) where theywould live with the local people as “a stimulator and organizer of selfhelp barrio activities, an aide and a connecting link between the barrio
people and the government.” The “aided self-help” concept was incorporated into the PACD grants-in-aid programs in the following way.
The barrios applying for the grants should offer locally available humanand material resources as much as they could, while the government

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would provide such materials and equipment as cement and motorcycles, so that the burden would be shared “ﬁfty-ﬁfty” between the two.
Cash grants were ﬁrmly rejected.35
The PACD enterprise thus started in late 1956 with the ﬁrst 320 graduates from the CD training facility, 90% of whom had worked as teachers, lawyers and government employees before joining PACD. As more
new graduates were hired, PACD expanded its personnel to 1,200 members by 1959, taking care of more than 6,000 barrios (out of some 20,000
barrios in the country) and 21,000 grants-in-aid programs, while sponsoring short-term leadership training programs around the country formore than 26,000 barrio leaders.36 The total cash worth of the “self-help”
projects came to almost 26 million pesos (13 million dollars) by 1959,
53% of which was presumably borne by the local barrio communities.
Nearly one third (8,460 thousand pesos) of the total expense was directed to the construction of “barrio self-help roads,” which were extended
to 1,316 km, followed by 2,350 thousand pesos to 417 irrigation projects. Other major projects included 10,000 hectares of forestation, pest
extermination campaigns, the distribution of seed, seedlings and fertilizer, and the construction of community centers.37 To evaluate theprograms, the University of the Philippines was funded to establish acommunity development research and evaluation council to act as anindependent third party.38
Manila Times reports about PACD projects, which may have been
exaggerated due to Chino Roces’ collaboration with Kaplan, tell of an
enthusiasm to the point of evangelism during the early years over thework being done. The keyword in the reporting was always “self-help.”
One of the ﬁrst PACD trainees stated:[B]e it in the mountain fastness of northern Luzon or in the wilderness of
Mindanao, we will be writing history. Of course, the success of our mission
depends on us—and their resistance to our crusade: Self-Help.39“Crusade for self-help” in their terminology meant an effort to make barrio people realize “they cannot be totally dependent upon the government” and “if they want their community to be progressive, the initiative
must come from them.”40 Once they could stimulate the communities
into helping themselves, “the rest of the job would be comparatively
smooth.”41 For example, on Bohol island, the Manila Times reported,“Prodded on only by technical advice and occasional grants-in-aid, they
have realized that they can do so many things if they only pool their

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efforts to solve common problems,” putting up health centers and community centers.42
Neal apparently felt much more comfortable in the Philippines, where“a harmonious and productive team”43 could develop before long, thanin India, which he felt was “not an easy country” for a technical advisor,
because the Indian elite of the civil service were educated in England,
were “perfectly competent,” and were thus too proud to be enthusiastic
about foreign technical assistance.44 After all, Neal was working forsomething he could not even have dreamt of in the American South, eventhough it might have been made possible as a part of “psychological warfare” against communism. The PACD enterprises were far and awaylarger in scale and gained far more national attention than the Tuskegee
rural development programs. No wonder, he thought, that “the work had
a better chance for success” abroad than in his homeland.
VII
The initial euphoria, however, soon gave way to reality, and Neal
eventually came to doubt the very notion of CD, which had become “anarticle of faith” in the rural development aid programs carried on by theUnited Nations and the United States. The ﬁrst blow came in the planecrash in March 1957 that killed President Magsaysay, whose platform
had been deeply committed to the cause of rural development and on
whose popularity the PACD enterprises had so much relied. PACD nevertheless continued to operate, and Ramon Binamira, who was from thesame Bohol province as succeeding President Carlos P. Garcia, stayed
as its head.
What triggered Neal’s doubts was Garcia’s decision not to support
additional funding to increase the number of PACD workers, which
made it impossible to extend the projects to all the 20,000 barrios aroundthe country. Neal recalls that this presidential decision “forced something to the forefront of my mind that I had pushed into the backgroundover the past three years.” It was the very necessity of a national government agency with personnel extending to the village level that Neal
doubted. Having known that rural schoolteachers, rural public healthnurses and ministers in Texas and Alabama were doing almost the samekind of work that the CD workers were doing in India and the Philippines,
he wondered if it was really desirable for professionals from the outside
to be in charge of self-help projects. Then Neal and the American staff

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drafted a “think paper” proposing to pull all the PACD workers out of
the barrios and place them in municipalities and provinces as aides to
the governors and mayors and as training ofﬁcers for local public servants and elected ofﬁcials working with barrio people. Binamira strongly opposed the proposal, so Neal had to drop the idea.45
Though Neal touches upon the difference of opinion only casually in
his memoir, the argument was serious enough to question the foundation of CD and its “aided self-help” concept. While Neal thought PACD
should cover all the barrios around the country, Binamira argued theyshould limit the recipients of the grants-in-aid only within communities
where “aided self-help” could be productive. This meant that the grantsin-aid would go to only those “relatively resourceful barrios” that could
meet the conditions under the “ﬁfty-ﬁfty” principle, while “the poorestof the poor” would be excluded from being recipients of this particular
program. Binamira thought the poorest communities should be given
relief in other ways. Binamira strongly disagreed with Neal’s proposal
to pull PACD workers out of barrios, because he believed the mostimportant mission of PACD workers was to go deep into the barrio communities and directly initiate the people into the spirit of self-help andparticipation.46
It was quite understandable for Binamira, who was in charge of sucha huge national project, to insist on the “ﬁfty-ﬁfty” principle in order tosecure tangible results. This, however, meant that CD would amount tonothing more than helping those who could help themselves, which is a
far cry from the social revolution it was being advertised as. One could
even say that the “ﬁfty-ﬁfty” formula functioned to help minimize theamount of public resources earmarked for stabilizing a discontented ruralsociety, enabling the government to use more public funds for statebuilding in the form of industrialization and urban infrastructures. Thisis exactly what happened during the years of martial law regime(1972–1986) of President Ferdinand E. Marcos, whose development policy was severely criticized for its neglect of rural social improvement by
the United Nation’s research and recommendations on rural development published in 1985.47
Binamira’s assertion concerning the necessity for professionallytrained CD workers to be assigned directly to the barrio communities
was overwhelmingly more popular among CD advocates at the time thanNeal’s counter-assertion that multi-purpose CD works could be borneby local leaders. We cannot, however, ignore the fact that the former

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could very likely result in portraying aid recipients as dependent andproblematic others, since CD workers could only go into CD-earmarked
communities after presuming local people’s ignorance and lack of understanding about, and even possible opposition to, the notion of self-help,
as shown in the words of the PACD trainee quote above, who was bracing himself for “resistance to our crusade.” Within this formula, PACD
projects, which were originally designed to try and create self-help attitudes and participatory democracy among the people, could very wellturn into activities perpetuating the preconception of the poor as dependent and selﬁsh.
VIII
Despite his disagreement with Binamira, Neal was entitled to be happy
about what he had achieved in the Philippines when he left in 1958 for
his new assignment in Africa. At that time, however, the PACD projects
were already losing the momentum they had enjoyed during the earlydays. Several PACD workers were even charged with corruption andsuspended during the election year of 1961.48 Binamira himself wascharged with collusion between his family business and PACD enterprises.49 After he tendered his resignation following Garcia’s defeat by
Diosdado Macapagal in November 1961, the General Auditing Ofﬁce
discovered a 1,240,000 pesos loss incurred by PACD as the result of
overpricing supplies.50 These incidents were deﬁnite signs that PACD
projects were already sinking into the greed of the special interest politics of the country. The ofﬁce of PACD continued on, however, and cameunder the directorship of Ernest Maceda in 1965, soon after Ferdinand
Marcos was sworn into ofﬁce. From that time on PACD was deftly incorporated by the two into the Marcos political machine, to the chagrin of
its founder, Binamira.51
In August 1964 Ernest Neal returned to the Philippines from his
assignments in Liberia and Sierra Leone, this time as deputy director of
the USAID Mission there. Neal recalls, “I had the feeling that I had neverleft the Philippines,” since he was hearing the same problems and solutions being discussed and proposed that had been current 8 years previous. The rural development problem seemed not to have change one
iota.52
Around the same time, the U.S. international policy focus on CD had
rapidly begun to fade. By 1963 USAID had withdrawn its support from

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India’s CD programs, and the CD Division in USAID itself was liquidated.53 It was not only in the United States that the concept of CD wasbeing diagnosed as faulty, for in India, as well, an inﬂuential government
research report published as early as in 1957 had already pointed out that
CD programs had been diverted into ofﬁcially controlled “bricks andmortar” public works programs “devoid of almost any popular dynamic.”54 British scholar Hugh Tinker, in a 1960 comparative study of CD
programs in Southeast Asia, pointed out the existence of “strange disharmonies between theory and practice” in Thailand and the Philippines,
while in Malaya the entire theory of self-help and participation had beenabandoned in favor of a mixed state-private sector policy to raise income
levels.55
It was the “Green Revolution” that, of course, quickly replaced thegospel of self-help during the late 1960s under the Lyndon B. Johnson
administration, as the spotlight was again back on the Philippines as thehost of the International Rice Research Institute (IRRI), which developed the ﬁrst “high yielding varieties” of IR-8, now a “laboratory,”
instead of a battleground, to prove the triumph of western democracy,
this time through science and technology and free market economy.56 As
deputy director of the USAID Mission, Neal became a signiﬁcant byplayer in the Philippine version of the Green Revolution. Neal confessedin his memoir, however, that his involvement in the Green Revolution
was rather a passive one:
I was convinced that there was little, if anything, the Mission could do forthe urban unemployment or the subsistence farmers. It was not that my interest in and concern about these people had lessened; I just did not know what
the Mission could do about these problems. Therefore, I concentrated on the
sector of the agricultural economy that offered the best potential – the irrigated rice growing areas.57

The Mission concentrated its efforts on two provinces, Laguna andPampanga, in the vicinity of Manila, with relatively high rice productivity potentials, in much the same way as Binamira’s PACD had insisted on limiting grants to the more resourceful barrios previously. In
Pampanga, the very ambitious young governor by the name Benigno
Aquino, Jr. went crazy over the Green Revolution and threw his full
support behind the Mission, effectively mobilizing the province in themanner of a true revolutionary army general.58 During Neal’s second
assignment, the Philippines achieved dramatic increases in rice production, which lead to fulﬁllment of the long cherished dream of self-sufﬁ-

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ciency (albeit only temporary), and it even became a rice-exporting
country (albeit symbolically).59
The Green Revolution, however, was not the panacea it was portrayed
as in terms of solving rural development problems in the Philippines.
While it achieved a long-awaited improvement in low rice productivity,
it came under criticism as having no advantage for farmers, who had tobear new expenses for the seed, irrigation facility maintenance, andmechanized equipment necessary for “high yield” rice.60 Neal adds:
Under the more efﬁcient system of cultivation, the little security that the landless laborers had was taken away. I was learning how delicate the balance isin an agricultural area where most of the people are poor and under-employed
and the social consequences when this balance is upset.61

What Neal “was learning” reminds one of the experiences of black farmers in the American South, where their rural problems were ultimately
solved not by reform, but by the dissolution of their communities. Sabine
Farms, for African American farming families in eastern Texas, which
once had been a bastion of the civil rights movement, is today a completely deserted village, with only the remnants remaining.62 This reality is certainly different, but not all that far from what the Philippine
society faces today, a vast rural population with nearly one-tenth of thenational population seeking jobs overseas.63
IX
After completing his second assignment in the Philippines, Neal wasagain assigned to Africa in 1969 as a regional population ofﬁcer stationedin Acca, Ghana. There, however, he contracted amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (commonly known as Lou Gehrig’s disease). When he discovered
his life was quickly drawing to an end, he decided to concentrate on writing his “narrative report” as his last assignment for USAID. In the memoir, in which he strictly limited the topics to his public life, Neal does
not disclose any thoughts about his daughter Kathleen, who at the time
was pursuing life as a black revolutionary,64 in sharp contrast to his life
devoted to more modest social enterprises. We can gather from his words
in the memoir that he might, however, not have been all that bitter
towards his daughter, as he frankly questioned the basic concept of CD
while humbly admitting the rather futile efforts he and his colleagues
had made to improve “the quality of life of the people in traditional societies.”65 The memoir is indeed a rare document, giving us many clues to8-Satoshi Nakano(p181) 6/9 05.7.12 6:47 PM ページ 198

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the similarities and interactions between social work in the American
South and U.S. aid to developing countries.
During his entire career, Neal strove to help “subsistence farmers,”
who were “displaced people” muscled out during the restructuring
process of agrarian society under capitalist industrialization and socioeconomic modernization. While he applauded people with skill and competence, who would be able to solve their problems themselves by
getting out of the poor villages of their birth, headed for the industrialized cities or commercial farming, his own life would be concerned with“the wretched,” unable to leave their home villages, forced to derive a
livelihood from local “traditional economies.” His basic theory of community development was that rural people could solve their economic
problems through “aided self-help.” Having striven for decades to help
them help themselves, however, Neal discovered the concept to be “toosimplistic to cope with the magnitude and complexity” of village society under all the varieties of pressure to modernize.66 What Neal foundtime and again in his experiences in the American South, India, and thePhilippines was a pattern in which CD projects became concentrated oncommunity roads, buildings, wells and irrigation, thus leaving the morebasic economic problems intact.
Why did such projects continue to follow such a similar pattern fromthe Heart of Dixie all the way across the Paciﬁc Ocean? Firstly, the CDconcept itself assumed the village as a viable economic unit, which could
become self-sufﬁcient by means of aided self-help activities on the partof “the subsistence farmers,” but the modern rural village in fact was not
the Robinson Crusoe’s island it was presumed to be, and was not, norever could be, completely isolated from outside industrialized commercial sectors.
Secondly, the so-called “subsistence” families living in rural communities were already self-supportive in the various ways available to them,living on limited resources whether located within or outside the community. The basic formula of CD, “aided self-help,” would become
attractive to them not because it would instruct them in ways to help
themselves, since they already presumed they knew pretty well how to
do that, but because they could draw on outside resources, which theychose to access by accommodating CD missionaries preaching the bibleof self-help. Neal stresses that CD in developing countries, despite its
failure to underpin economic development programs, had some merit ingaining the “allegiance of the villagers to the new independent governments.”67 If one may paraphrase, through CD rural society found that it8-Satoshi Nakano(p181) 6/9 05.7.12 6:47 PM ページ 199

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could become dependent on the state in exchange for not rising up in
revolt. If this is what we can draw from Neal’s statement, it would seem
then that CD is attractive only as long as its recipients are able to dependon it; in other words, CD will remain as long as it continues to betray
the notion of self-help.
Thirdly and most importantly, CD was not designed to directly address
the basic economic problems accounting for rural poverty, such as tenancy, usurious farm credit, and marketing. Though it is too simplistic toargue that the kind of postwar land reform implemented in Japan could
have been carried out successfully in India or the Philippines, the failureof genuine and timely land reform certainly carried on being an important cause of continued mass poverty in their rural societies and many
more in the developing countries. Saying this, one is also reminded that,ironically enough, with respect to the southern regions of the very country that made CD such a crucial part of its postwar determination to decommunize and democratize the rest of the world, that country’s federal
government refused to allow Earnest Neal’s colleague, Arthur Raper, towork for land redistribution in favor of African American cultivators,
despite assigning him to the task of land reform programs around theworld.68
In the 1960s, the CD “movement” was re-imported into “the War on
Poverty” in America’s urban slums, especially those of racial minorities,
with its non-institutional approach and utopian notion of self-help intact.
These notions and approaches were then exported to U.S. foreign development assistance programs during the 1970s. Then, as one would expect, criticism concerning CD soon followed. As early as the mid-1970s,
one sociologist published a critical analysis of New York City’s CD
activities directed at its poor youth regarding their “professionalizationof reform,” stating, “What develops is an ‘institutionalized revolution’primarily aiming at diverting public attention from immediate social
problems and pacifying dissidents.”69 The same criticism continues tobe heard today with respect to urban CD movements, which “cannot possibly radically transform distressed neighborhoods” and “is helpless inface of the powerful economic, political, and social forces that continually reproduce distressed communities and their colored and poor white
populations.”70 Thus, it may well be said that the gospel of self-help, andthe subsequent backlash over the veracity of the doctrine has been goingback and forth across the Paciﬁc, like ripples in a pond or an echo throughthe hills throughout the era of the welfare state Pax Americana-style.
What is lacking, whether intentionally or not, in Ernest Neal’s

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memoirs are all of the paternalistic instincts and irritations, which occupied the minds of so many foreign aid ofﬁcials at the time. In the soberness and calmness with which Neal reﬂects upon his failures andhelplessness, one ﬁnds both the depths of despair as well as a ray of hopeor two, which could only be uttered by a man who had experienced pain
and sorrow under colonial situations existing on both sides of the Paciﬁc.
NOTES
1
An earlier version of this article in Japanese was published as Nakano Satoshi,“Karera no Jijo wo Tasukeru Tameni [To Help Them Help Themselves],” in Endo Yasuo
and Yui Daizaburo, eds., Henbo suru Amerika Taiheiyou Sekai [Changing World of
America and the Paciﬁc], Vol. 1, (Sai’ryusha, 2004), 109–131.
2
Such usage of the term “across the Paciﬁc” can be found in numerous book titles
including the following: Akira Iriye, Across the Paciﬁc: An Inner History of AmericanEast Asian Relations (New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, 1967); Kang Liao, Pearl
S. Buck: A Cultural Bridge Across the Paciﬁc (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press,
1997); William R. Nester, Power Across the Paciﬁc: A Diplomatic History of American
Relations With Japan (New York: New York University Press, 1996).
3
Edward Said, Orientalism (New York: Pantheon Books, 1978).
4
See Vicente L. Rafael, White Love and Other Events in Filipino History (Durham:
Duke University Press, 2000); Amy Kaplan, The Anarchy of Empire in the Making of
U.S. Culture (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2002); Yoshihara Mari, Embracing
the East: White Women and American Orientalism (Oxford: Oxford University Press,
2002).
5“Rural Workers Quit Soft Jobs, Take to Hard and Simple Life,” Manila Times, 24
October 1956.
6
Hugh Tinker, “Community Development: A New Philosopher’s Stone?” International Affairs 37, Issue 3 (July 1961): 322.
7
Judith Ann Trolander, Professionalism and Social Change: From the Settlement
House Movement to Neighborhood Centers, 1886 to Present (New York: Columbia University Press, 1987).
8
John B. Hawley, “The Professional Status of Community Development in the UnitedStates,” Community Development Journal 4, No.3 (July 1969): 124–132; Clyde
Mitchell-Weaver, “Community Development in North America: Survey and Prospect
for the 1990s,” Community Development Journal 25, No.4 (October 1990): 345–355.
9
Tinker, “Community Development,” 309.
10
Richard Harris, “The Silence of the Experts: ‘Aided Self-Help Housing’ 1939–
1954,” Habitat International 22, No.2 (1998): 165–189.
11
John F. Kennedy, “Inaugural Address,” January 20, 1961.
12
The Foreign Assistance Act of 1961, Public law 87–195 [S.1983], 75 Stat. 424,
approved September 4, 1961, Sec. 2151–1.
13
Gwyn E. Jones & Chris Garforth, “The History, Development, and Future ofAgricultural Extension,” Burton E. Swanson, et. al., eds., Improving Agricultural
Extension. A Reference Manual (Rome: FAO/UN, 1997).
14
Kubo Fumiaki, New Deal to America Mishusei [New Deal and American Democracy] (Tokyo Daigaku Shuppankai, 1988).

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15

201

Ernest E. Neal, The Hope for the Wretched: A Narrative Report of Technical
Assistance Experiences (Washington, D.C.: Agency for International Development,
1972), 1.
16
Ibid., 11.
17
Ibid., 17.
18
Ibid., 18–22.
19
Fujioka Jun, America Nanbu no Henbo [The Transformation of American South](Aoki Shoten, 1985).
20“Brannan Asks Social Security for Farms”; Washington Post, 6 December 1949;“South Acts to Aid the Negro Farmer: Conference on Rural Life at Tuskegee Urges
Greater Acreage and Training.” New York Times, 21 June 1950.
21
Neal, The Hope for the Wretched, 27.
22
Ibid., 122.
23
Ernest Neal, “A Positive Approach to Race Relations in the South,” Social Forces
26, No.4 (May 1948): 467.
24
Ernest Neal, “Two Negro Problems Instead of One: A Challenge to Negro Colleges,”
The Journal of Negro Education 21, No.2 (Spring 1952): 166.
25
Harris, “Silence,” 12.
26
Neal, The Hope for the Wretched, ix.
27Louis Miniclier, “Community Development as a Vehicle of U.S. Foreign Aid,”
Community Development Journal 4, No.1 (January 1969): 8.
28
Garvin Karunaratne, “The Failure of the Community Development Programme inIndia,” Community Development Journal 11, No.2 (April 1976): 95.
29
Neal, The Hope for the Wretched, 38.
30
Nakano Satoshi, “Gabriel L. Kaplan and U.S. Involvement in Philippine Electoral
Democracy: A Tale of Two Democracies,” Philippine Studies (Ateneo de Manila
University Press) 52, No.2 (2004), 149–178.
31“NAMFREL ofﬁcials name sub-leaders,” Manila Times, 4 February 1953.
32
Ramon Binamira, interview with the author, Cebu City, Philippines, September 6,
2003.
33
Jose V. Abueva, Focus on the Barrio: The Story behind the Birth of the Philippine
Community Development Program under President Ramon Magsaysay (Manila: University of the Philippines, 1959), 300–383.
34
Neal, The Hope for the Wretched, 43.
35“Community Development Workers,” Manila Times, 31 May 1957.
36
Ramon P. Binamira, “It Has Taken Root: Program Successful, Says Reply from
PACD,” Manila Times, 25 December 1959.
37
Ramon P. Binamira, “Rural Progress Reviewed,” Manila Times, 29 December 1959.
38
Neal, The Hope for the Wretched, 47–48.
39“Rural workers quit soft jobs, take to hard and simple life,” Manila Times, 24
October 1956.
40“Community Development Workers,” Manila Times, 31 May 1957.
41“173 More Shoulders Ready for Rural Uplift’s Wheels,” Manila Times, 23 July
1957.
42
“Cebu and Self-help: Barrio Folk Discovering the Pleasures of Doing it Alone,”
Manila Times, 24 June 1957.
43
Neal, The Hope for the Wretched, 44.
44
Ibid., 39.
45
Ibid., 52.
46
Binamira, interview with the author.

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R. P. Misra, Rural Development: Capitalist and Socialist Paths, Volume One: Overview (United Nations Centre for Regional Development, 1985), 65.
48“2 PACD Brass Suspended,” Daily Mirror, 15 December 1961.
49
Roland Villacorte, “Reply to Binamira,” Evening News, 11 January 1962.
50“GAO bares P1-M loss at PACD,” Manila Times, 8 January 1962.
51
Binamira, interview with the author.
52
Neal, The Hope for the Wretched, 81.
53
Miniclier, “Community Development as a Vehicle,” 10–11.
54
Hugh Tinker, “Authority and Community in Village India,” Journal of African
Administration 12, No.4 (October 1960): 201.
55
Tinker, “Community Development,” 322.
56
Nick Cullather, “Miracles of Modernization: The Green Revolution and Apotheosisof Technology,” Diplomatic History 28, No.2 (April 2004): 227–254.
57
Neal, The Hope for the Wretched, 125.
58
Robert Shaplen, “Letter from Manila,” New Yorker, 15 January 1966: 100–102.
59
Neal, The Hope for the Wretched, 81–100.
60
Umehara Hiromitsu, “Firipin ni okeru ‘Midori no Kakumei’ to Nomin [The Green
Revolution and Peasants in the Philippines].” Ajia Keizai 19, No.9 (September 1978):26–40.
61
Neal, The Hope for the Wretched, 125.
62
“Sabine Farms Left Its Mark in Harrison County,” Marshall News Messenger, 31
August 2002.
63
Commission on Filipinos Overseas, Handbook for Filipinos Overseas: Fifth Edition(Manila, 2000), 21.
64
Neal’s daughter Kathleen, who had been in the Philippines with him during his ﬁrst
assignment as a grade school girl, grew up to become a radical black power student
activist in the United States. She dropped out of college and joined the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) in 1966. Then she met Eldridge Cleaver of theBlack Panther Party in 1967 and married him the same year, bringing her to national
attention as the only female executive of the most radical black revolutionary party at
the time. The Cleavers even had to live “in exile” in Algeria, North Korea and in France
after Eldridge’s shootout with police in 1968, though Kathleen with two children returned to the United States for a few months before Neal’s death in January 1972 (The
Cleavers ﬁnally returned to the United States in 1975). Jessie Carney Smith, ed., Notable
Black American Women, Book II (Detroit: Gale Research, 1995), 101–103. Kathleen
Neal Cleaver, Interview with the author, New Haven, Conn., November 16, 2003.
65
Neal, The Hope for the Wretched, 122, 126.
66
Ibid., 122.
67
Ibid., 123.
68
Akimoto Ei’ichi, New Deal to America Shihon Shugi [New Deal and the American
Capitalism] (Tokyo Daigaku Shuppankai, 1989), 404.
69
Joseph Helfgot, “Professional Reform Organization and the Symbolic Representation of the Poor,” American Sociological Review 39, No.4 (August 1974): 490.
70
Henry Louis Taylor Jr., “Building a Bridge between Community Development and
School Reform.” July 19, 2004. [http://uumin.org/Taylor-2002.htm (September 3,2004)].