Crossing the Atlantic: Travel and Travel Writing in Modern Times

Internationalism, Travel Writing, and Franco-American Educational Travel, 1898–1939

50 Internationalism, Travel Writing, and Franco-American Educational Travel, 1898–1939 Whitney Walton I n 1928 a young French woman, Simone Téry, reported on her travels as a recipient of an Albert Kahn Around-the-World Scholarship. After visiting Europe, Asia, and the Americas for educational purposes, she offered these reflections on the philosophical condition of the traveler. Téry describes the effect of being torn from one’s family and from all that is familiar: the traveler “finds himself alone, alone with himself.” Being in foreign places makes a traveler feel like a shadow, “which causes a kind of uneasiness that sometimes extends to anxiety.” According to Téry, the traveler seeks stability in himself, but to no avail, for he himself has changed. She concludes that travel confronts individuals with profound questions of existence: “I think that travel is what allows us to experience metaphysical anguish most acutely, and to feel the weight and the grandeur of these commonplaces—the eternal, insoluble problems.”1 Téry’s reflections on the profound personal transformation that travel precipitates suggest the centrality of lived experience to a broader, internationalist view, a position that Albert Kahn, founder of the Around-the-World Scholarship, shared. From 1898 through 1939, three philanthropic projects for educational travel originating in France and the United States—the Albert Kahn Around-the-World Scholarship, the David-Weill Travel Scholarship, and the Institute of International Education (IIE)—manifest a complex interplay of national interest and internationalist objectives through individual study abroad. The founders and leaders of these programs believed in the capacity of individuals to disseminate and acquire knowledge in other countries as a good in itself. Moreover, Albert Kahn and the founding figures Internationalism and Franco-American Educational Travel 51 of IIE were convinced that this intellectual and personal exchange could contribute to improved international relations, and also serve French and American national interests respectively. The recipients of this philanthropic largesse—fellows—fulfilled the founders’ expectations, and their accounts of educational travel suggest a process of how knowledge is shared, mutual understanding is achieved, and personal and national identities are transformed through study abroad. Although all three programs funded study abroad worldwide, I will focus on French and American educational relations. This essay examines the following issues regarding individual fellowships for educational travel between France and the United States in the first half of the twentieth century: the intentions and goals of the three philanthropic endeavors, the ways in which fellows articulated their study abroad experience, and some implications of this particular form of intellectual and personal exchange for the diffusion of knowledge, Franco-American relations, and internationalism. Historical scholarship on travel provides important insights into class— mostly middle-class—formation, constructions of national identities, and the capacity of individuals to imagine new ways of being even in the age of mass tourism.2 As a distinctive form of travel, study abroad contributes an internationalist perspective to this literature and links travel with international relations. Historians define “internationalism” in different ways, depending upon the particular historical context. Diplomatic historian Akira Iriye, among others, has examined primarily nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) that aspire to transnational cooperation and exchange as engaging in cultural internationalism, in contrast to the nation-state rivalries that usually constitute histories of international relations.3 By contrast, for scholars of U.S. foreign relations in the twentieth century internationalism refers to various means by which political leaders, private enterprises, and other organizations and individuals sought to influence political, economic, and cultural practices in other parts of the world to conform with those in the United States.4 While acknowledgement of national interest underlying or undermining more disinterested internationalism is often warranted, some scholarship suggests that internationalism and nationalism are antithetical.5 Whitney Walton 52 Scholarship on cosmopolitanism, usually by literary scholars, philosophers, and anthropologists, is more receptive to ambiguity, multiple allegiances, and complex identities relating to internationalism and nationalism. Bruce Robbins and Kwame Anthony Appiah, for instance, claim that cosmopolitanism , referring to a conscious commitment to humanity, can and often does coexist with nationalism, and that both are lived experiences or identities .6 Appiah offers the term “rooted cosmopolitanism” or “cosmopolitan patriotism” to explain the condition of being at once identified with a region , a state, and humanity as a whole.7 For this study I propose to modify the term “internationalism” as meaning transnational cooperation and exchange...