Book Excerpt: U.S. Public Diplomacy in the Twentieth Century

Managing the image of America that foreign observers held became increasingly fraught over the course of the twentieth century as American overseas interests and activities multiplied. To advance those interests abroad, Congress authorized, and successive administrations built, intensified propaganda agencies to spread the new American gospel. The State Department, the Marshall Plan, the CIA, and soon enough a new independent agency, the U.S. Information Agency (USIA), blanketed foreign audiences with performances, exhibits, lectures, film, radio, pamphlets, and much more. Scholars call this effort "public diplomacy," though a fair amount of it was covertly funded and produced. In this excerpt from my forthcoming book, I place this "public diplomacy" in the context of the American mass culture that necessitated it, and against which it often battled.

After the war, like much of the rest of European society, the Netherlands had been inundated with the products of American culture. Jazz, Hollywood movies, and rock and roll carved out permanent places in the Dutch mass cultural repertoire. The journal Delta observed that after the war, Dutch demand for American fiction and especially works on American sociology “was almost unappeasable.” Dutch writers profited from the exposure to American literature, especially in the realms of technique and in a newfound interest in forms associated with America, such as the short story. Dutch adolescents acquired the blue jean habit at the expense of their pre-war knickerbockers and many of the icons of the new American consumer culture became prized status symbols.[1]

European stereotypes of American culture intensified in the era, when communications advances brought populations closer. Mounting Dutch prosperity added to the demand for American mass culture. Suspicions of American cultural achievement, race relations, economic practices, social affairs and politics correspondingly grew, at least among the older generations. Very often it was Hollywood, along with American musicians, entertainers, and athletes, that carried the image of the United States to a mass European audience, not always to positive effect. Whether depictions of violence, material decadence, race prejudice, or other ideological themes commonly held to be typically American, Hollywood and American mass culture more broadly trafficked in exactly the sorts of negative images that U.S. information officials thought prudent to counter.

Public opinion surveys revealed the stereotypes held by the Dutch, and it was not hard to connect those stereotypes to the new mass culture. One folk belief concerned American family life, “which many Netherlanders believe to be almost non-existent due to impressions gained from American films.”[2] According to one 1951 poll, the following answers were given to the question “Which, if any, of the following tend to make you dislike the U.S.?” Thirty-nine percent answered because “it is a capitalist country;” 39 percent said “[t]hey do not treat Negroes well;” and 26 percent believed “America tries to dominate the world.”[3] Some of these negative views of America were less pronounced in the Netherlands than elsewhere. Still, such concerns would intensify as direct US policy levers retracted.

Dutch reception of the new images from America often exhibited a photo negative of the things Dutch citizens valued in their own culture: traditional and settled methods of production, family, religion, equality. One well-known writer, A. N. J. den Hollander, asked “What is the picture of America that is current in the Netherlands?” and answered that this picture was a reflection of, and therefore diverse as, Dutch culture itself. Those in the industrial sector saw America as “the land of new production methods, the incarnation of a high productivity ideal.” But other observers, continuing to echo Johan Huizinga and Menno ter Braak’s prewar traditionalism, rejected Americanization as a threat to European values. They feared not American economic expansion, but the proliferation of “the American conception of civilization” where efficiency and pleasure-seeking become the highest moral end, and thus American civilization “eliminates the highest human values.” “The picture the individual Hollander forms of America,” Den Hollander concluded, “still largely depends on his social position, his hopes, his fears, his ambitions, his interests, and his convictions.”[4] Such fears were especially prevalent in the religious pillars of the 1940s and 1950s, prompting attitudes highly “suspicious of US secularism,” noted one USIS report.[5]

Yet neither can it be said that anti-Americanism coalesced into a specific politics in the Netherlands as it did in France and elsewhere. Unlike France and Italy, the Netherlands did not possess a strong left-wing to drive a sustained anti-American politics. And Dutch intellectuals often segregated themselves from international discourse because of the ingrained habits of intellectual verzuiling.[6] Indeed, American observers regularly took note of the apparent cultural and political alignment of the Dutch and the Americans. Alan Valentine claimed that “The Dutch spoke the ideological language of the Long Island Quaker better than any other nation. They cherished the same ideals as those he had been taught in his childhood, and they preserved the old-fashioned virtues of hard work, strict literal honesty, and private initiative better than most Americans. . . . When [I told them I] could best understand them by thinking of Queen Victoria and John Maynard Keynes at the same time, they were not displeased.”[7]

But given the Cold War stakes, Americans remained on guard nevertheless. Both European Christianity and European Marxism were apparent enough in the Netherlands, each providing platforms from which ideological reaction to the Americans might have emerged. Christianity and Marxism both rejected the crass consumerism of the Americans. Both saw American culture as fragmented and incoherent, even inauthentic.[8] The Netherlanders’ preference for politics rather than markets—of wage austerity rather than the politics of productivity, of welfare rights rather than consumerist opportunity—remained a worrying case in point. It was this concern, that out of the wave of cultural Americanization beginning to crest in the 1950s European audiences might begin to pluck negative images that could then coalesce into a broad political anti-Americanism, to which US public diplomats were most alerted.

US public diplomacy thus joined in a much broader cacophony of American mass culture beamed across the Atlantic via Hollywood, pop music, advertising, and soon enough, television. American officials as often as not were concerned about the negative implications of American mass culture as they were about the affirmative propaganda messages they crafted elsewhere. The United States has no Ministry of Culture to decree, or royal patronage to promote, official taste. American culture is the product of a cacophonous private sphere, sanctified only by the power of the market. This American mass culture could be seen as decadent, enervating, confusing, banal, decadent, racially retrograde, or even tasteless by European cultural grandees. In this sense, it may be better to think of American public diplomacy officials as mediators; often as not what they were doing was contending or wrestling with the fact that American mass culture was the product of energies over which they had no control.


This sets up a perennial conflict that sharpened in the twentieth century as both American mass culture and US foreign policy became more extensive. American empire brought the American private and public spheres into contention with each other. In the postwar period, Hollywood decadence, retrograde American music, or enervating art all cast doubt for many European observers about the quality of American political leadership. American cultural diplomats in this respect functioned as the guardians of an imperfectly established membrane that sought to discourage or at least explain away the most worrying elements of American culture while encouraging the production and extension of cultural products that exemplified and fortified political goals. The essence of US public diplomacy, therefore, was to attempt—however imperfectly—to mediate the waves of American mass culture over which it had no formal control. That US public diplomats inserted themselves into this role helps explain the consistent frustration many American conservatives felt about the work of the US cultural and information agencies throughout the Cold War.

Examples of that work abound, from helping to guardrail critical discourses surrounding American art to showcasing the alleged best of American architecture or engineering. The embargoing of Paul Robeson’s passport while the State Department arranged for a global tour of Louis Armstrong illustrates this membranous quality of US cultural diplomacy. US officials in The Hague openly acknowledged this aspect of their work. “The stereotyped opinions that all too general find their best answer in” cultural diplomacy, lectured the Embassy, which "can refute effectively many widely held and false conceptions: we have great technical efficiency but no culture; we have no family life; we are all rich; divorce and working mothers are responsible for widespread juvenile delinquency; the Negro has no opportunities in America; we have no interest in religion or in intellectual matters. These are a few; they are [uninformed] and thoughtless and often contradictory, but they exist."[9]
 
Dutch stereotypes of America remained durable, and hence required a dedicated public diplomacy to combat them.

Public diplomacy can be thought of as that attempt to narrow the range of possible meanings foreign audiences derive from American culture. Where jazz may have expressed the cri de cœur of African American freedom, American public diplomats wanted foreign audiences to see democratic vitality. Where, on the other hand, American gangster films were seen as retrograde, public diplomats wanted to teach freedom of expression. Where American market practices were deemed barbaric and anti-social, American officials wished to convey the liberation associated with material abundance. Above all, they wanted to showcase the superiority of American culture to the Soviet version.

Perhaps the two most worrying dimensions for many European observers, springing forth directly from the American cultural id, was McCarthyism and racism, in each case the attempted insertion of retrograde private prejudices into the practices of public governance. McCarthyism puzzled and appalled Netherlanders. McCarthyism, according to USIS personnel, “caused a burst of angry censure in Dutch press organs of every political and religious hue.”[10] The CIA reported that “The Netherlands’ fears concerning the ability of the United States to assume world leadership have been accentuated, according to statements by public leaders and in the press, by certain aspects of the U.S. internal security program that the Dutch regard as inconsistent with their concept of individual liberty.”[11] Even Clarence Hunter, ensconced safely in The Hague, was mystified. In a private note he confided that during an upcoming trip back to Washington, he was eager “to get some first hand impressions of the hysteria that seems to have gripped our countrymen.”[12]

Nothing more called into question for the average Dutch respondent American leadership, however, than American race relations. “In a recent survey,” the embassy informed State, “the Dutch people were found to have the lowest opinion in all Europe of America’s handling of the race problem.”[13] American racism was one of the principal objections that more than a few of the visitors under the Leader, Fulbright, TA and other visitors’ programs brought back with them. The Little Rock affair, for example, spurred a wave of revulsion at American segregation practices. There was an incident, the first of its kind, in Hilversum, where a sign in a dress shop window read “Little Rock doesn’t want Negroes at school, therefore we don’t want Americans in our shop.”[14] A delegation of Amsterdam students visited the US consulate to protest the events in Little Rock.[15] As with addressing the shortcomings of American capitalism, American race relations was not a topic easily amenable to propaganda. A less direct information campaign was needed, one that relied on cultural ambassadors such as musicians and artists.

Dutch concern with American race problems persisted throughout the period. “It should be remembered,” the embassy reported, “that almost no single aspect of the U.S. arouses as much consternation amongst the ‘righteous’ Dutch than this.”[16] The preoccupation could turn up in surprising places. The dean of the University of Amsterdam School of Medicine, for instance, was obligated to quell rumors that the prevalence of African Americans and Jews among a group of American exchange students was due to the fact that they could not find positions in the US.[17] The Dutch jazz pianist Pia Beck, on her first visit to the States, repeated the two complaints that the Dutch made about America time and again: the intense focus on business above all else, and the racial problem.[18] It could hardly be said that historical Dutch treatment of people of color was very much better than the Americans. However, the Dutch measured American progress in race relations against the increasingly extravagant claims US information was making about the quality of democracy in America.

​The waning of the intense clientelism of the postwar period was evidence in other areas as well. By 1957 the USIA downgraded the USIS/Hague from a Class B information priority to Class C. US Ambassador Philip Young protested that he was “surprised, hurt, and amazed” over this, and now assumed that “all other Western European posts downgraded to class D.”[19] USIA’s decisions had more to do with budgets than with local effectiveness. By 1958, only Portugal had a smaller USIS post in all of Europe.[20] By 1959, with cultural diplomacy all but shuttered, the greatest concern for the officials that remained was not to present a full and fair picture of the United States, but rather the semi-trailers loaded with the dismantled Het Atoom exhibit and which now blocked an alleyway in Amsterdam, officials worrying about the negative press that would ensue should an unsuspecting bicyclist round a corner and smash into it.


[1] Delta I (Sept. 1959): 52.

[2] Embassy to State Department, “Semi-Annual Evaluation Report,” 18 June 1953, no. 1493, RG 59 Central Files 511.56/6-1853, NARA.

[3] International Public Opinion Research, Inc., “Netherlands Attitudes on the East-West Conflict and Related Issues,” 9 Sept. 1951, 14, RG 306 Records of the USIA, Office of Research, Country Project Files, 1951–1964, Netherlands 1956, NARA. Lesser minorities that believed “American big business wants war” (15%); “Americans have too much money to throw around” (15%); “Americans act as though they are better than other people” (13%); “gangsters have too much influence on men in politics” (10%); and “[t]heir political inexperience will drag us into war” (8%), indicated the information challenge for the Americans.

[4] A. N. J. den Hollander, “The Dutch Image of America,” in Delta I (1959): 36–45.

[5] “Revised Draft, Proposed Country Plan for the USIE Program, The Netherlands,” Embassy dispatch no. 1656, 20 March 1952, RG 59 Central Files 511.56/3-2052, NARA.

[6] Brogi, Confronting America; De Vries, Complexe Consensus.

[7] Valentine, Trial Balance, 166.

[8] Brogi, Confronting America, 3 and passim.

[9] Embassy to State Department, 15 Oct. 1956, no. 222, RG 59 Central Files 511.563/10-1556, NARA.

[10] Embassy to State Department, “Semi-Annual Evaluation Report,” 18 June 1953, no. 1493, RG 59 Central Files, 511.56/6-1853, NARA.

[11] Central Intelligence Agency, “National Intelligence Survey: The Netherlands,” June 1954, section 55, 44, RG 263 Records of the CIA, National Intelligence Surveys, RSC.

[12] Hunter to Katz, 14 Jan. 1950, European Coop. Administration, Personal Correspondence (G–R), folder Personal Correspondence, H, Katz papers, HSTL.

[13] Embassy to State Department, 24 July 1958, no. 87, RG 59 Central Files 511.563/7-2458, NARA.

[14] Consulate to State Department, 4 Sept. 1958, no. 46, RG 59 Central Files 756.00/9-458, NARA.

[15] Consulate to State Department, 6 Oct. 1958, no. 68, RG 59 Central Files 756.00/10-658, NARA.

[16] USIS/Netherlands to USIA, “Revised Country Plan for the Netherlands,” 28 July 1961, no. 13, 13, RG 306 Records of the USIA, Despatches, 1954–1965, NARA.

[17] Embassy to State Department, 5 Nov. 1951, no. 242, RG 59 Central Files 511.56/11-551, NARA.

[18] Delta I, 1959, 93. Beck reported that she was “struck by the immensity of everything. This made me feel dishearteningly small.”

[19] Embassy to secretary of state, 22 Oct. 1957, no. 683, RG 59 Central Files 511.56/10-2257, NARA.

[20] “Inspection Report, USIS The Netherlands” 14 Nov. 1958, RG 306 Records of the USIA, Inspection Staff, Insp. Reports and Related Records, 1954–62, folder “Netherlands,” NARA.