A Match Made in Heaven?

Public health, foreign capital, social revolution, modern state-building: perhaps nowhere did these forces so vividly coalesce, captivate, and challenge one another than in the interactions between the Rockefeller Foundation and Mexico. For the RF, public health represented an appealing sphere of action for its domestic and international philanthropic investments, one that—consistent with its motto—could widely benefit mankind. For Mexico, public health offered a concrete, feasible area through which the state could enlarge its authority by meeting revolutionary expectations for improved social conditions, build a sense of citizenship—particularly among rural populations—and tether science and scientific professionals to renewed national goals. Beyond this shared attraction to public health, bringing together Mexico's revolutionary state and Rockefeller dollars through cooperative health activities required mutual confidence. As a civilian stand-in for U.S. foreign development policy, the RF was well attuned to Mexico's role as trade partner, investment locale, and source of laborers and well aware of its bitterness toward repeated U.S. aggressions. The RF agreed that public health could help in the building of modern Mexico, with diplomatic by-products of reduced political, social, and disease threats to the U.S. and much-needed binational goodwill. If Mexico could trust the RF's professed independence from the U.S. government, the International Health Board's (IHB) ability to support—and perhaps accelerate—Mexico’s public health modernization made it a potentially palatable associate. During the first half of the twentieth century, no agency was as far-reaching or as active in promoting international public health as the RF. Virtually every facet of public health's early twentieth-century revolution—the scientific breakthroughs in bacteriology and parasitology; the advances in epidemiology and vital statistics; the training of professionals; the awakening of public health consciousness; the building of institutions; the application of these developments to the health of populations around the world; and the very model of scientific public health—involved the foundation in some dimension. The Rockefeller family, the foundation trustees, and powerful foundation administrators and officers were in a position to channel Rockefeller capital to a bewildering array of activities, but they also recognized that public health was not always an end in itself. While RF projects were narrowly focused, the RF's executives understood the attendant value of international public health in improving productivity and fomenting economic development, stabilizing social and political conditions, protecting trade, and enabling countries to enter into the global capitalist system.

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