Scope and Content Note
The papers of Harold Foote Gosnell (1896-1997) span the years 1931-1962, with the bulk of the material concentrated in the period 1937-1959. The collection consists of files Gosnell compiled as a political scientist and government consultant.
The Gosnell Papers treat four principal topics. The earliest material is devoted mainly to a study Gosnell headed at the National Resources Committee (NRC), later to become the National Resources Planning Board, in which a survey was made of the future of state and regional planning. Contained in the NRC files are reports, questionnaires, research data, and internal memoranda reflecting the agency’s operation. The material represents Gosnell’s own work as well as the research of students, colleagues, and other officials. Correspondence of NRC's executive officer, Charles W. Eliot (1899-1993), the director of the reorganized National Resources Planning Board from 1939 to 1943, appears throughout the files.
A government study of United States information services during World War II, begun by Gosnell about 1943 when he worked for the War Records Section of the Bureau of the Budget, was continued by him at the State Department. At the budget office, the scope of Gosnell’s research was government-wide with a focus on the activities of the Office of War Information (OWI). At the State Department, where he worked from 1946 to the end of the decade, his project was limited specifically to information services in the department itself. Titled “War Information Services,” research files from both projects are topically arranged in one section. Included are memoranda, reports, budget statements, and other documents from government agencies, as well as administrative correspondence relating to planning the research. Subjects treated include the Coordinator of Inter-American Affairs, the Office of Price Administration, press and media branches of the OWI, State Department and War Department morale programs, and the Experimental Division for the Study of War Time Communications. Correspondents include Joseph Barnes and Milton Eisenhower, former OWI officers who commented on the research while it was in progress.
Other files contain background data and articles Gosnell wrote on the organization of the State Department and source material he compiled while a foreign elections analyst for the Central Intelligence Agency after 1950. His fact-finding missions best documented in the CIA file are trips to the Philippines (1953, 1955), Indonesia (1955), and Sudan (1958). The file contains correspondence, election ephemera, maps (especially from Sudan), summaries of conversations with political leaders and Americans abroad, and related matter.