Book Excerpt: US Propaganda in the Netherlands

I take an expansive view of what scholars call “public diplomacy”: the information and cultural outreaches that governments make to the people of other nations. Most scholars understand that public diplomacy is a form of propaganda. In democratic societies, public diplomacy is traditionally constrained by norms and expectations, notably that governments will not tell demonstrable lies to their own or other citizens. On the other hand, governments have at their disposal the full range of psychological manipulations available to advertisers and marketers, the capacity to mobilize convincing displays or grandeur or power (including brandishing military power as a form of persuasion), and of course also the ability to conduct covet operations, of the kind the CIA performed regularly during the Cold War.
 
In those years the Americans conducted a capacious public diplomacy to nearly all parts of the world, and many of those operations clearly bumped up against, and at times violated, democratic norms and expectations. The public diplomacy/propaganda campaign in the Netherlands tended not to be as ideologically heated as in other parts of Europe where lively communist parties were deemed a real threat to American interests. But the effort, though comparatively tepid, was lively enough, offering clues as to the level of engagement that the Americans pursued with their Cold War propaganda.

​Ideologically combative it may not have been, but US propaganda efforts in the Netherlands were extensive. I did not uncover evidence of a sustained CIA campaign in Holland, but there undoubtedly was agency interest in Dutch unions and other priority target groups. The US agencies that did pursue an extensive propaganda campaign included the Economic Cooperation Administration (ECA, i.e., the Marshall Plan administration), the State Department, and later the United Staes Information Agency (USIA).
 
ECA propaganda commenced first and may have comprised the largest propaganda campaign ever undertaken in peacetime. The agency churned out an endless stream of pamphlets, books, films, posters, news items, radio programs and more. Most of this information was prosaic and factual, aiming to inform about what American economic aid was accomplishing or sought to accomplish. Much of it, however, was advocative, explicit with the lesson “You too can be like us.” Here the ECA claimed that the factors that made the American economy the envy of the world could be replicated in Europe: mass production and high worker productivity, low trade barriers, and cooperative labor relations.
 
One of the most popular items in this vein was a simple pamphlet aimed at workers, with illustrations by the famed Dutch cartoonist, Jo Speier. With stark and simple drawings, De Marshallhulp en U (The Marshall Plan and You) advanced the argument that without ECA funds, the factories would shut, the bread would go unbuttered, and the whole European economic system would collapse.

​Later in the Marshall Plan-era, after 1950 with the pressures on NATO rearmament greatly increased, the Americans would push a much more ideologically-inflected propaganda message centered on what became known as “Technical Assistance.” Arguing that only with greatly increased productivity (i.e., output per work unit) could Europe hope to afford massive new defense efforts while maintaining minimally acceptable standards of living, the Americans would insist that the Europeans would have to adopt American-style work habits, behaviors, and technology. As I show in my book, the Dutch were happy to accept technical advice where and when they felt it suitable, but otherwise rejected the larger message that only by becoming like the Americans could they find their way out of the economic trap.
 
State Department information and cultural programs came in waves, the first commencing with the passage of the Smith-Mundt Act in 1948. These efforts joined the independent Fulbright exchange program, in operation since 1946. Much of the State Department effort centered on acquainting European audiences with Americans, and included American libraries in host cities, films and publications, and the beginnings of what would become known as the “Foreign Leader” program of exchanges of prominent individuals from the worlds of politics, journalism, and labor unions.
 
A more intense period of State Department propaganda came in 1950, as the Korean War exacerbated wider fears of a general conflict with the Soviet Union. Known as the “Campaign of Truth,” this approach preached a “full and fair picture” of the USA, but in reality hawked a militant, aggressive anti-communism and anti-Sovietism. The aim was to promote a much more aggressive rearmament among the Europeans, and in pursuit of that a more strident, fear-based propaganda ensued. More intensive depictions of the dangers represented by communism in general, and the military dangers of the Soviet Union in particular, prevailed.
 
The death of Stalin and a new Republican administration in the United States began to release some of this pressure, and after 1953 a softening in US propaganda came into focus. After 1953, most State Department programming was folded into a new agency, the United States Information Agency. The USIA represented several new developments: First, it saw, somewhat ironically, an intensified effort by the Eisenhower administration to center information and cultural programming. Eisenhower, as Kenneth Osgood points out, understood the costs of war and reckoned that if propaganda could undermine the USSR more cheaply than bombs and bullets, more effort should be placed there. The Eisenhower team also sought to protect US information and cultural programming by removing it from the State Department, where it was under constant attack from conservatives, into the new agency where it could more readily be sheltered from Congressional undermining.
 
USIA programming tended to emphasize cultural affairs. It was something of a golden age for officials who prioritized deeper cultural relations, including in the rarified worlds of music and high art, as opposed to the harsh propaganda themes of the Campaign of Truth. Exhibitions and arts exchanges in painting, music, and dance occurred. Heavy emphasis was laid on American fine arts, and American painters, jazz masters, dancers, and singers were celebrated by their government, often for the first time in American history. Dutch audiences made enthusiastic patrons for these events.
 
Before the end of the decade, however, the steam had run out of the USIA effort. The American National Exhibition held in Moscow over the summer of 1959 seemed to herald a new era in US-USSR relations, hinting even at normalization. Vice President Richard Nixon and Premier Nikita Khruschev would engage their famous “Kitchen Debate” at this exhibition, suggesting that geopolitical rivalry might further vent itself into the arena of friendly consumer competition. Future dangers awaited when the Berlin Crisis would once again make Europe a flashpoint of superpower rivalry, but for now peace and friendly competition, not nuclear showdown, was in the air. For many conservatives, the USIA’s high-mindedness—which they did not appreciate under any circumstances—seemed increasingly a lavish waste.

In the Netherlands, the last great propaganda spectacle would be the exhibit Het Atoom, at Schiphol, in 1957, part of Eisenhower’s “Atoms for Peace” initiative that occupied so much of the softer USIA approach. USIA budgets in Holland were slashed in 1958, and then all but shuttered in 1959 as budgets cratered. The most serious concern that year was that the now-trailered Het Atoom exhibit posed a danger to unsuspecting bicyclists rounding a corner unawares.

​As I conclude the chapter on this topic in my book:

Exhibitions of American art, music, and architecture offered leisure and cultural opportunities for Dutch audiences, but patrons were perfectly capable of forming their own impressions as to the quality of the texts and artifacts on display. Indeed, the postwar world accelerated a pre-war trend of international exhibits focusing on art and architecture, music, science, and all forms of culture. The Dutch engaged in these as part of their new international consciousness. But there is no evidence that Dutch consumption of American cultural products occurred on the same terms that the American benefactors would have had it. The Dutch participated in many bilateral cultural exchanges that excluded the US, some with countries and nations that were on the fringe of what the United States defined as the free world. Moreover, Dutch patrons welcomed other exhibits into Holland from behind the Iron Curtain. As the persistently qualified critical reception of American culture testifies, the Dutch did not surrender their critical facilities in a haze of Americanization.
​
What was true for the economic and diplomatic policies described earlier remained true for the culture and information programs: The Dutch wanted the forms, not the ideological substance of the American presence. US culture and information filled a gap in Dutch leisure and mass culture, filled lacunae in technical knowledge, and exposed culture lovers to dynamic new forces of modern art, enriching but not inundating the cultural landscape of an economy in austerity conditions.

Further reading:
Laura A. Belmonte, Selling the American Way: U.S. Propaganda and the Cold War (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2008.)
 
Nicholas J. Cull, The Cold War and the United States Information Agency: American Propaganda and Public Diplomacy, 1945–1989 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008.)
 
Michael L. Krenn, Fall-Out Shelters for the Human Spirit: American Art and the Cold War (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2005.)

Scott Lucas, Freedom's War: The American Crusade Against the Soviet Union (New York: New York University Press, 1999).

Kenneth A. Osgood, Total Cold War: Eisenhower's Secret Propaganda Battle at Home and Abroad (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2006.)
 
—David J. Snyder