Senator Fulbright and Fulbright Act of 1946
Given that Fulbright exchanges still take place between the United States and other countries, the program is a great argument in favor of the strength of the program. Since its inception in 1946, the Act has witnessed many operational changes in the program, but not to its mission of promoting international understanding. Without going into a detailed analysis of the entire history, I attempted to give a short overview of the founder of the program and a summary of a few phases of the program.
Fulbright’s early years. The “father of academic exchanges” (Dubois, 1995, p. 59), J. William Fulbright was born in Missouri in 1905 in a prosperous and respected family. While still a baby, the family moved
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Representative in 1943, he was appointed by Secretary of State Cordell Hull to head the American delegation at a seventeen-nation conference on postwar education in London.
During his first term, the House of Representatives adopted the Fulbright Resolution, which supported international peace-keeping initiatives and encouraged the United States to participate in what became the United Nations in September, 1943 (Jeffrey, 1987).
Having been elected to the Senate in 1944 did not come out as a shock. As newspapers stated, “Congressman Fulbright, in his first term in Washington, has gained more favorable publicity than any other Representative we have ever sent to the Congress” (Jeffrey, 1987, p.
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41). Over 4 million items (planes, trains, tanks, and bulldozers as well as food, tools, clothing, telephones, and hospitals) remained spread in warehouses and storage depots around the globe after World War II. No one knew the exact value of the property; however, the estimates varied from $60 million to $105 million. A surplus-property law passed in 1944 prohibited sending them back to the United States given that transportation would have consumed most of the value of the surplus. In addition, “racked by wartime devastation and unsettled economies, foreign nations pleaded for some of the surplus”; they lacked the currency, because they were broke, which meant they would be less likely to repay their war debts. As a result, “this excess equipment spread around the globe really meant that the United States had substantial amounts of currency, or the equivalent of currency, frozen abroad” (p. 42). This all added to the Fulbright’s argument about America’s “new and larger role in the world” (p.