The Endowment honors the life and work of Lois W. Roth (1924 – 1986), American cultural diplomat.
Lois was born in New York City to Louis Wersba, a manufacturer of fine clothing, and Natalie Mann, daughter of a theatrical family; both had a discerning eye for art and theatre. Her first language was French, thanks to a nanny, but fluency in the language would always elude her. Her early education in public schools led to study at the Fieldston School, an offshoot of the Ethical Culture movement, graced by noteworthy teachers and classmates, among them the two daughters of Lois’ adoptive mother, the Swedish-American, Anne O. Thomson.
She chose to attend Elmira College, where she was enchanted by art history but little else. She transferred to Barnard College, where she drifted towards the social sciences.
An early marriage to Robert Roth, son of family friends, ended in divorce. Returning from life as a military wife in Texas and Virginia, she began graduate studies in sociology at Columbia University, under Robert and Helen Lynd, Paul Lazarsfeld, C. Wright Mills, Nathan Glazer, and other major scholars at a great moment in American social thought. One of these scholars was the Swedish sociologist, Hans Zetterberg, soon to head Sweden’s equivalent of the Gallup polls and later to serve as editor in chief for the Svenska Dagbladet.
She won a Fulbright grant to Uppsala University in the early 1950s. It was a seminal moment. She learned Swedish with ease and in depth, later translating Roseanna, the first U.S. publication of a detective novel by the Swedish husband and wife team, Maj Sjowall and Per Wahloo, in the now famous Martin Beck series. At Uppsala University, she made life-long friends, among them Hans Blix, Swedish diplomat, foreign minister, and finally head of the IAEC.
In Sweden, Lois, by nature self-conscious and reticent, though afraid of nothing--except, as close friends knew, of public speaking—-would find the way she wanted to live her life: to be the best she could be at making serious, lasting connections across cultures, friendships that overcame the zig-zags of a transient international life. Her curiosity and her warmth were boundless, and those she knew understood and responded to both. On her return to the U.S., she joined the American-Scandinavian Foundation as special assistant to president, Lithgow Osborne, and his next two successors. She did everything--translations, publications, event-planning, hosting--and swiftly became the indispensable “Girl Friday,” in the phrase of the time. One major achievement was to help persuade the Ford Foundation to give 40 extensive familiarization grants to prominent Finns, each of whom she shepherded around the U.S. Bringing Finland into the ASF program, she became in the process a kind of celebrity in Finland: arriving in Helsinki for a visit on the same day as Vice-President Lyndon Johnson, she found her picture and story above the front-page fold, with LBJ’s below.
In 1961 like many others, she was galvanized by the Kennedy moment and applied to join the U.S. Information Agency. But women were not then taken on by USIA for lateral entry, so she entered the Agency’s foreign service only five years later. She was assigned to Tehran, serving first as deputy to the Cultural Affairs Officer and then as director of the huge Iran-America Society (IAS), a bi-national organization devoted to cultural exchanges, fine and performing arts, and English language learning. The IAS had three large buildings, half a dozen branches throughout Iran, three stages, three restaurants, two art galleries, and two libraries; it taught English to 5,000 Iranians a day and ran the only student center in Iran, across the street from Tehran University. Under her direction, the IAS became one of the single most significant centers of cultural activity in Iran, then in a ferment of cultural activity and experimentation. After five years in Tehran came the first of several demanding jobs in Washington and abroad: desk officer for the Scandinavian countries and Washington consultant for bi-national centers worldwide.
She also found herself elected Secretary of the American Foreign Service Association, at a time when the so-called Young Turks were pressing for serious reform in the State Department. In April of 1973, she married Richard Arndt, a Tehran colleague. Returning abroad, she served as cultural program officer in Rome, then Paris.
In 1980, she came back to the U.S., first to spend a year in the prestigious Senior Seminar, a year-long inter-agency program preparing participants for upper-echelon leadership roles. She was named USIA’s director for centers, books, libraries, and English teaching, then moved to head the Agency’s global program for fine and performing arts (Arts America), which she began seriously to re-imagine, devoting to it the kind of energy and why-not creativity which were the hallmarks of everything she had done.
An early bout with cancer in 1982 seemed to have been overcome and failed to slow her down. In parallel to her USIA assignments, she headed the Women’s Action Organization (WAO) and played a role in reshaping embassy life for women and spouses. As always, she continued to serve as mentor to a younger generation of foreign service officers, seeking to imbue them with her spirit and offer them the kind of training in the arts of cultural and intellectual diplomacy that was usually missing in institutional orientation efforts. Lois Roth wrote two articles which had a deep impact on the thinking of USIA’s foreign service: her article for WAO, “Nice Girl or Pushy Bitch: Two Roads to Non-Promotion,” reported on two periods of service with promotion panels ten years apart; she analyzed how women officers across many years were kept or kept themselves from promotions by stereotyping.
Her second major paper was produced originally during her years in the Department of State’s Senior Seminar: published first by State, then by Tufts University, it found its fullest expression in an updated version anthologized by Ulloth and Brasch in The Press and the State (1986). The paper, “Public Diplomacy and the Past: The Search for an American Style of Propaganda 1952-1977,” examines the tension between long-standing, competing ideas of how the U.S. conducts what is now termed “public diplomacy,” detailing the struggle between the commitment of “information” to short-term foreign policy aims and culture’s approach, reaching a decade or two ahead, and leaving service to foreign policy as an inevitable by-product. Lois died of complications from recurrent cancer in January 1986.
The idea of an endowment to memorialize this generous life arose from the outpouring of sadness for the telling loss of a woman at the peak of her career. It has built up over more than two decades from the regular modest contributions of hundreds of her friends, later from those who were not fortunate enough to have known her but only knew of her, and from the gratitude of its early grantee-alumni. Spurts of growth resulted from bequests and living bequests which helped lift the Endowment sharply at various moments. These gifts came from friends like Anne O. and Fred Thomson, Fulbrighter-daughter Elizabeth Kostova, Lois’ sister Carolyn and John Rosenthal, USIA and State colleagues Dr. Martin C. and Faye Carroll Jr., Col. Richard R. and Myriam Hallock, and the Delevan Foundation, and various anonymous donors. The Endowment’s prestigious and devoted board has stood strongly in place since the beginning and has recently been joined by younger colleagues. Today, the Endowment is laying plans for continued growth into the future so that this unique effort can survive the lives of those who first built it.