Culture and Propaganda: The Progressive Origins of American Public Diplomacy, 1936–1953, by Sarah Ellen Graham

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Throughout the twentieth century governments came to increasingly appreciate the value of soft power to help them achieve their foreign policy ambitions. Covering the crucial period between 1936 and 1953, this book examines the U.S. government’s adoption of diplomatic programs that were designed to persuade, inform, and attract global public opinion in support of American national interests. Cultural diplomacy and international information were deeply controversial to an American public that been bombarded with propaganda during the First World War. This book explains how new notions of propaganda as reciprocal exchange, cultural engagement, and enlightening information paved the way for innovations in U.S. diplomatic practice. Through a comparative analysis of the State Department’s Division of Cultural Relations, the government radio station Voice of America, and the multilateral cultural, educational and scientific diplomacy of Unesco, and drawing extensively on U.S. foreign policy archives, this book shows how America’s liberal traditions were reconciled with the task of influencing and attracting publics abroad.

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Review of Culture and Propaganda:

Kathleen Burk

The English Historical Review, cex253, https://doi.org/10.1093/ehr/cex253

Published:

23 September 2017

To the American public in the late 1930s, their experience of propaganda during 1917–19 had not, in retrospect, been a satisfying one. As Sarah Ellen Graham points out, the trajectory curved from enthusiastic public acceptance of government propaganda during 1917–19 to a strong public and intellectual critique in the years following the war, and back to a reluctant acceptance of the need for propaganda to support democracy in the late 1930s. Many US public officials felt regret at the wartime use of propaganda, and this regret had a far-reaching impact on how they approached a second wartime attempt to mould international opinions, and later culture, on behalf of American interests—which were usually seen as identical with those of the rest of the world. There was a conflict among American officials and legislators in weighing the moral imperatives of journalistic integrity and truthful...

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