Empire, “Americanization,” and Public Diplomacy: Managing the Cultural Frontier

We’ve been discussing frontiers lately, a concept that extends to the cultural realm as well. The American concern with the cultural frontier reached its pinnacle during the early Cold War. Beginning in the late 1940s, as fears of Soviet expansion and then communist military incursions took center stage in the foreign policies of the Western allies, officials in Washington grew increasingly concerned to project an image of U.S. leadership not only as benign, but as reliable and trustworthy. They were aware of traditional stereotypes about American superficiality, impertinence, and unreliability and sought to counter negative stereotypes of America with positive portrayals that would shore up Western morale. We call this effort “public diplomacy,” and the outreach involved multiple U.S. agencies, from the Economic Cooperation Administration, which ran the Marshall Plan and, along with it, what is likely the largest peacetime propaganda effort in human history, to the United States Information Agency (USIA) during the Eisenhower administration. The State Department ran the Fulbright and Foreign Leader exchange programs, the Department of Defense took pains to maintain solid public relations among allied nations, and the Voice of America and Radio Free Europe broadcast to both sides of the Iron Curtain. Of course the CIA got involved as well, with a hand in everything from election manipulation to promoting the work of anti-communist intellectuals.

For the Eisenhower administration, such efforts were part of a “total Cold War” approach which sought not only to fight the Cold War on multiple fronts, but to fight it in such a way as to minimize economic and human cost. President Eisenhower himself recognized that public diplomacy “can be anything from the singing of a beautiful hymn up to the most extraordinary kind of physical sabotage.” Eisenhower considered “mutual economic assistance, trade, friendly contacts, and even sporting events” as part of his administration’s overall approach to international relations.[1] As Kenneth A. Osgood puts it, “[t]hrough propaganda, policy initiatives, and covert operations, the American government acted directly to influence the ideas, values, beliefs, opinions, actions, politics, and cultures of other countries.”[2] Such motivations, of course, are a historically stable part of all imperial culture missions, the quasi-divine mandate to spread enlightenment.

U.S. public diplomacy, in other words, was not only engaged in a war against Soviet propaganda, it was also engaged in a struggle against American culture itself. Foreign audiences held ready-made impressions and opinions about America before the public diplomats got there, and from sources outside their control. From at least the late 19th century, many foreign observers have feared inundation by American financial interests, commercial enterprise, consumer goods, and perhaps most worryingly of all, a stultifying and enervating mass culture, frequently regarded as offensive to tradition and good taste. The English writer William T. Stead gave the anxiety its name in his 1902 The Americanization of the World or the Trend of the Twentieth Century.  Stead painted an evocative picture of engulfing waves of American influence. In one oft-quoted passage he painted a melancholy, if witty, picture:
 
"The average [English] man rises in the morning from his New England sheets, he shaves with 'Williams' soap and a Yankee safety razor, pulls on his Boston boots over his socks from North Carolina, fastens his Connecticut braces, slips his Waltham or Waterbury watch in his pocket, and sits down to breakfast. There he congratulates his wife on the way her Illinois straight-front corset sets off her Massachusetts Blouse, and he tackles his breakfast, where he eats bread made from prairie flour . . . tinned oysters from Baltimore, and a little Kansas City bacon, while his wife plays with a slice of Chicago ox-tongue. The children are given 'Quaker' oats."
 
Stead neglected to mention that even the wife may have been American, given the rage in those days for trans-Atlantic marriages, at least among the British gentry.

Fears about “Americanization” would swell during and after World War II. The popular British vexation about the charismatic Yankee GI—“overpaid, oversexed, and over here”—would give way after the war to even broader concerns throughout Europe that American movies, music, dress and fashion, even slang, were undermining traditional cultural mores. Economic austerity in the wrecked postwar economies coupled with the technological and economic dynamism of the Americans led to widespread concerns about traditional European cultures being swamped. Elvis, James Dean, Marilyn Monroe, rock and roll, and blue jeans constituted cultural juggernauts, swamping all in their path. Some of the most popular American cultural exports were those that showed the United States in the worst light--immature, flighty, superficial, and ungrounded--such as gangster pictures. American mass culture was often seen as decadent, enervating, confusing, banal, perhaps racially retrograde, and certainly tasteless by European cultural grandees of different political stripes. The cultural frontier was becoming a source of central concern for those on the receiving end precisely at the time when the Americans were also busy building the lineaments of Western defense under American hegemony.

American GI's, armed with copious amounts of rationed consumer delectables, from chocolates to cigarettes to nylons, charm English lasses.

It wasn’t just the Europeans concerned with “Americanization,” therefore. The Americans, it turns out, were also concerned about Americanization. The aims of U.S. Cold War public diplomacy were to shore up the alliance systems. They wanted to portray the United States as reliable, trustworthy, and responsible, in an age when atomic weapons threatened from above and American mass culture eroded from below. U.S. 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.

Thus a kind of duality came into focus. Even as private American interests—Hollywood producers, record companies, business executives, all the exporters of midcentury American culture—were celebrating American culture’s commanding position in the global marketplace, “public” U.S. officials—diplomats, State Department programmers, policymakers of all types—were growing increasingly concerned that American culture could undermine the carefully constructed alliance edifices that the United States was spending so much energy and treasure to construct. U.S. officials in The Hague, for example, openly acknowledged this aspect of their work. “The stereotyped opinions [i.e., of the Europeans] . . . [may] find their best answer in” U.S. cultural diplomacy, 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."[3]
 
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, both foreign and domestic. U.S. propaganda became part of this much broader cacophony of American mass culture beamed across the Atlantic via Hollywood, pop music, advertising, and soon enough, television. In this sense, it may be better to think of U.S. 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.

When U.S. programmers arranged a tour of American jazz musicians, they were trying to combat the idea that American styles were retrograde. When they exhibited American artwork, they were directly combatting broader ideas among European tastemakers that American aesthetic style was juvenile (Grandma Moses did not help in this regard.) When they supported American professors on Fulbright tours or in the pages of highbrow magazines, they were trying to combat stereotypes of American intellectual deficiency. 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 freely encouraging the production and extension of cultural products that exemplified and fortified political goals. The essence of U.S. public diplomacy, therefore, was the attempt—however imperfectly—to mediate the waves of American mass culture over which it had no formal control. That U.S. public diplomats inserted themselves into this role helps explain the consistent frustration many American conservatives felt about the work of the U.S. cultural and information agencies throughout the Cold War. Examples of this mediating work of the public diplomats abound, from helping to guardrail critical discourses surrounding American art to showcasing the alleged best of American architecture or engineering. The embargoing of alleged communist Paul Robeson’s passport while the State Department arranged for a global tour of Louis Armstrong illustrates this membranous quality of U.S. cultural diplomacy.

This sets up a perennial conflict that sharpened in the twentieth century as both American mass culture and U.S. foreign policy became more extensive. American empire brought the American private and public spheres into contention with each other at the cultural frontier. 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. U.S. public diplomats directed their work, however imperfectly, to combatting those stereotypes that their own mass culture was, to a great degree, responsible for creating.

One hears the concern less these days, partly because other global cultures have found ways to compete in local marketplaces—K-Pop, Japanese manga, German cars, or Bollywood—but also because the forms of American mass culture are so ubiquitous that the battle appears over.

Foreign countries could and did practice public diplomacy toward American citizens as well, notably the British in the run-up to World War II as well as the Soviet Union during the Cold War. Even the Netherlands maintained a public diplomacy outreach to American citizens, called the Netherlands Information Bureau, with offices in Rockefeller Center and throughout the nation. Foreign public diplomacies operating in the U.S. constitutes a subject for a later post.
 
Further reading:
Nicholas J. Cull, The Cold War and the United States Information Agency: American Propaganda and Public Diplomacy, 1945-1989 (Cambridge University Press, 2008).

Kenneth Osgood, Total Cold War: Eisenhower’s Secret Propaganda Battle at Home and Abroad (University of Kansas Press, 2006)

Francis Stonor Saunders, The Cultural Cold War: The CIA and the World of Arts and Letters (The New Press, 2000).

Penny Von Eschen, Satchmo Blows Up the World: Jazz Ambassadors Play the Cold War (Harvard University Press, 2004).

There are many more titles on U.S. public diplomacy, as a new generation of scholars continues to develop the literature. Contact me for additional recommendations.

[1] Kenneth A. Osgood, “Form Before Substance: Eisenhower’s Commitment to Psychological Warfare and Negotiations with the Enemy,” Diplomatic History 24, no. 3 (Summer 2000), 413, 412. To be sure, Ike did not use the phrase “public diplomacy,” but rather the contemporary synonym “psychological warfare.”

[2] Osgood, Total Cold War, 367.

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