purpose. As with so many other groups whose identity transcended territorial boundaries, labor being the most obvious example, the end of World War II saw youth organizations from all over the world coming together to create global bodies meant to overcome the destructive rivalries of traditional international relations. The World Federation of Democratic Youth (WFDY), like the World Federation of Trade Unions, was launched at a conference in London in 1945, and the International Union of Students (IUS) was formed the following year in Prague. Neither organization, though, was truly independent of old-fashioned power politics: both rapidly succumbed to domination by communist bureaucrats, who harnessed sincere youthful hopes for world peace to the cause of defending the Soviet Union against perceived American aggression. As in other theaters of the Cold War ideological confrontation, the U.S. government was relatively slow to respond to Soviet provocation, largely leaving it to the British and, in particular, the staff of the Foreign Office’s little-heralded Cultural Relations Department, to formulate western strategy on the youth front. It was not until August 1948 that a counterorganization to the World Federation of Democratic Youth was created, at the founding Westminster congress of the World Assembly of Youth (WAY). An alternative to the International Union of Students would not come into existence until the following decade.18
This is not to say that the late 1940s found American youth altogether lacking in stomach for the Cold War. At Harvard, an International Affairs Committee (HIACOM), staffed predominantly by young veterans with wartime intelligence experience, hatched a variety of schemes to foil the communist bid for ideological hegemony (the Salzburg Seminar, for example, was in part a HIACOM invention). In December 1946, HIACOM officers helped organize a meeting in Chicago to discuss the possibility of creating a national body to represent American students at international events. This initiative, which grew out of discussions among the twenty-five U.S. delegates who had attended the founding congress of the International Union of Students in Prague earlier in the year, led in the summer of 1947 to the first meeting of the United States National Student Association at Madison, Wisconsin. In 1949 and again in 1950, Harvard students conducted surveys of international student opinion with the thinly disguised aim of identifying potential anticommunist allies abroad, especially ones who might be counted on to join the National
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Student Association in a secession movement from the IUS. Funds for the second survey, which was administered by the NSA’s national offices in Madison, were provided by the OPC via two ostensibly private patrons, an industrialist by the name of Thomas D. Brittingham of Wilmington, Delaware, and Chicago lawyer Laird Bell, each of whom provided checks for $6,000.19 In November 1950, another “private donor” came up with the money for an International Student Information Service to coordinate preparations for a meeting of dissident western student leaders due to take place the following month in Stockholm (a not unprovocative choice of venue, given the city’s prominent role in the Soviet peace offensive).20
It would be a mistake, however, to see the National Student Association of 1950 as utterly beholden to the OPC or, for that matter, as bent on bolting the International Union of Students. The dreams of international unity nursed so fondly in 1945 died very hard, even in the freezing atmosphere of the Cold War. No national union wanted the dubious distinction of being the one to split the ranks of the world student movement.
Moreover, from the moment of its birth in 1947, the NSA was just as interested in domestic as foreign affairs, in particular liberal reform issues like race relations (the organization’s second president, James T. “Ted”