Over the course of the postwar period, economists, educators, and policymakers in the United States argued that the dynamism of American capitalism depended increasingly on the supply of skilled technical, scientific, and professional labor. Advocates of a federal “manpower” policy promised that a more systematic approach to education and vocational training would bolster national security, ensure continuous GDP growth, promote economic development abroad, and help to offset the social costs of technological change and regional disinvestment at home. Historians have not completely overlooked the extent to which liberals have routed economic and social policy objectives through education, but much of this literature has focused on the formal elaboration of “human capital” theory and the emergence of “job training” at the center of the War on Poverty in the 1960s. This paper, by contrast, excavates the longer history of manpower ideas, demonstrating the extent to which its intellectual origins were entangled in the political, economic, and gendered imperatives of the early Cold War. It argues that such projects as the National Manpower Council and the Inter-University Study of Labor Problems convinced policymakers that the early stages of deindustrialization could be navigated by adjusting the skills of American workers to a changing employment landscape.

If you wish to participate in the April 9 workshop, please email Mattie Webb at mattie@ucsb.edu, and she will provide you access to Neil's paper, which will be available approximately one week prior to the workshop.