THE US GOVERNMENT, CITIZEN GROUPS AND THE COLD WAR
This book examines the construction, activities and impact of the network of US state and private groups in the Cold War. Moving beyond statedominated, ‘top-down’ interpretations of international relations, it explores the engagement and mobilisation of whole societies and cultures and offers a radical new approach to the study of propaganda and American foreign policy. In so doing, the book redefines the relationship between the state and private groups in the pursuit and projection of American foreign relations. In a series of valuable case studies, examining relationships between the state and women’s groups, religious bodies, labour and internationalist groups, intellectuals, the press and students, this volume explores the construction of a state – private network not only as a practical method of communication and dissemination of information or propaganda, but also as an ideological construction, drawing upon specifically American ideologies of freedom and voluntarism. The case studies also analyse the power relationship between the state and private groups, assessing the extent to which the state was in control of the relationship, and the extent to which private organisations exerted their independence. This book will be of interest to students of Intelligence Studies, Cold War History and Information Research / Security Studies in general. Helen Laville is Lecturer in American and Canadian Studies at the University of Birmingham. She is the author of Cold War Women (Manchester University Press, 2002) and numerous articles on the relationship between women’s organisations and the American government during the Cold War. She is currently working on a book on women and the implementation of civil rights. Hugh Wilford is Senior Lecturer in American History at the University of Sheffield. He is the author of The New York Intellectuals (Manchester University Press, 1995) and The CIA, the British Left and the Cold War (London: Frank Cass, 2003). He is currently writing the first comprehensive history of CIA ‘front’ operations during the Cold War.
STUDIES IN INTELLIGENCE SERIES General Editors: Richard J. Aldrich and Christopher Andrew Richard Aldrich is Professor at the Department of Politics, University of Nottingham Christopher Andrew is Professor of Modern and Contemporary History at Corpus Christi College, University of Cambridge ISSN: 1368-9916 BRITISH MILITARY INTELLIGENCE IN THE PALESTINE CAMPAIGN 1914–1918 Yigal Sheffy BRITISH MILITARY INTELLIGENCE IN THE CRIMEAN WAR 1854–1856 Stephen M. Harris SIGNALS INTELLIGENCE IN WORLD WAR II Edited by David Alvarez KNOWING YOUR FRIENDS: Intelligence inside alliances and coalitions from 1914 to the cold war Edited by Martin S. Alexander ETERNAL VIGILANCE: 50 years of the CIA Edited by Rhodri Jeffreys-Jones and Christopher Andrew NOTHING SACRED: Nazi espionage against the vatican 1939–1945 David Alvarez and Revd. Robert A. Graham INTELLIGENCE INVESTIGATIONS: How ultra changed history Ralph Bennett INTELLIGENCE ANALYSIS AND ASSESSMENT Edited by David Charters, A. Stuart Farson and Glenn P. Hastedt TET 1968: Understanding the surprise Ronnie E. Ford INTELLIGENCE AND IMPERIAL DEFENCE: British intelligence and the defence of the indian empire 1904–1924 Richard J. Popplewell
ESPIONAGE: PAST, PRESENT, FUTURE? Edited by Wesley K. Wark THE AUSTRALIAN SECURITY INTELLIGENCE ORGANISATION: An unofficial history Frank Cain POLICING POLITICS: Security intelligence and the liberal democratic state Peter Gill FROM INFORMATION TO INTRIGUE: Studies in secret service based on the Swedish experience 1939–45 C.G. McKay DIEPPE REVISITED: A documentary investigation John Campbell MORE INSTRUCTIONS FROM THE CENTRE Andrew Gordievsky CONTROLLING INTELLIGENCE Edited by Glenn P. Hastedt SPY FICTION, SPY FILMS AND REAL INTELLIGENCE Edited by Wesley K. Wark SECURITY AND INTELLIGENCE IN A CHANGING WORLD: New perspectives for the 1990s Edited by A. Stuart Farson, David Stafford and Wesley K. Wark A DON AT WAR Sir David Hunt, K.C.M.G., O.B.E. (reprint) INTELLIGENCE AND MILITARY OPERATIONS Edited by Michael I. Handel LEADERS AND INTELLIGENCe Edited by Michael I. Handel WAR, STRATEGY AND INTELLIGENCE Michael I. Handel STRATEGIC AND OPERATIONAL DECEPTION IN THE SECOND WORLD WAR
Edited by Michael I. Handel CODEBREAKER IN THE FAR EAST Alan Stripp INTELLIGENCE FOR PEACE Edited by Hesi Carmel
INTELLIGENCE SERVICES IN THE INFORMATION AGE Michael Herman ESPIONAGE AND THE ROOTS OF THE COLD WAR: The Conspiratorial Heritage David McKnight SWEDISH SIGNAL INTELLIGENCE 1900–1945 C.G. McKay and Bengt Beckman THE NORWEGIAN INTELLIGENCE SERVICE 1945–1970 Olav Riste SECRET INTELLIGENCE IN THE TWENTIETH CENTURY Edited by Heike Bungert, Jan G. Heitmann and Michael Wala THE CIA, THE BRITISH LEFT AND THE COLD WAR: Calling the Tune? Hugh Wilford OUR MAN IN YUGOSLAVIA: The Story of a Secret Service Operative Sebastian Ritchie UNDERSTANDING INTELLIGENCE IN THE TWENTY-FIRST CENTURY: Journeys in Shadows Len Scott and Peter Jackson MI6 AND THE MACHINERY OF SPYING Philip H.J. Davies TWENTY-FIRST CENTURY INTELLIGENCE Edited by Wesley Wark INTELLIGENCE AND STRATEGY: SELECTED ESSAYS John Robert Ferris THE US GOVERNMENT, CITIZEN GROUPS AND THE COLD WAR: The State–Private Network Edited by Helen Laville and Hugh Wilford PEACEKEEPING INTELLIGENCE: New Players, Extended Boundaries Edited by David Carment and Martin Rudner SPECIAL OPERATIONS EXECUTIVE: A New Instrument of War Edited by Mark Seaman MUSSOLINI’S PROPAGANDA ABROAD: Subversion in the Mediterranean and the Middle East 1935–1940 Manuela A. Williams
THE US GOVERNMENT, CITIZEN GROUPS AND THE COLD WAR The state–private network
Edited by Helen Laville and Hugh Wilford
First published 2006 by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN Simultaneously published in the USA and Canada by Routledge 270 Madison Ave, New York, NY 10016 This edition published in the Taylor & Francis e-Library, 2006. “To purchase your own copy of this or any of Taylor & Francis or Routledge’s collection of thousands of eBooks please go to www.eBookstore.tandf.co.uk.” Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business © 2006 Helen Laville and Hugh Wilford All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data The US government, citizen groups, and the Cold War : the state–private network/edited by Helen Laville and Hugh Wilford. p. cm. Based on a conference on "The American State-Private Network in the Cold War" held in Birmingham, England in June 2003. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 0-415-35608-3 (hardback) 1. United States--Foreign relations--1945-1989--Citizen participation-Congresses. 2. Public–private sector cooperation--United States--History--20th century--Congresses. 3. Citizens' associations--United States--History--20th century--Congresses. 4. Civil society--United States--History--20th century-Congresses. I. Laville, Helen. II. Wilford, Hugh, 1965JZ1480.U16 2005 327.73'009'045--dc22 2005005684 ISBN10: 0–415–35608–3
ISBN13: 978–0–415–35608–4
CONTENTS
Notes on contributors Preface List of abbreviations
ix xii xvi
PART I
Themes Introduction: negotiating freedom
1 3
SCOTT LUCAS
1
Conceptualising the state–private network in American foreign policy
13
I N D E R J E E T PA R M A R
PART II
Case studies
29
2
31
Clark Eichelberger and the negotiation of internationalism ANDREW JOHNSTONE
3
The importance of being (in) earnest: voluntary associations and the irony of the state–private network during the early Cold War
47
H E L E N L AV I L L E
4
From cooperation to covert action: the United States government and students, 1940–52
66
K A R E N M . PA G E T
5
Building a community around the Pax Americana: the US government and exchange programmes during the 1950s G I L E S S C O T T- S M I T H
83
CONTENTS
6
‘The finest labour network in Europe’: American labour and the Cold War
100
JULIA ANGSTER
7
In search of a clear and overarching American policy: The Reporter magazine (1949–68) and the Cold War
116
E L K E VA N C A S S E L
8
Double vision, double analysis: the role of interpretation, negotiation and compromise in the state–private network and British American Studies
141
ALI FISHER
9
Ambassadors of the screen: film and the state–private network in Cold War America
157
T O N Y S H AW
PART III
Beyond the Cold War
173
10 Religious non-profit organisations, the Cold War, the state and resurgent evangelicalism, 1945–90
175
AXEL R. SCHÄFER
11 ‘The permanent revolution’? The New York intellectuals, the CIA and the cultural Cold War
194
HUGH WILFORD
12 Public diplomacy and the private sector: the United States Information Agency, its predecessors and the private sector
210
NICHOLAS J. CULL
Index
227
viii
CONTRIBUTORS
Julia Angster is an assistant professor at the Department for Contemporary History (Seminar für Zeitgeschichte) at the University of Tübingen. She is the author of Konsenskapitalismus und Sozialdemokratie (Munich: Oldenbourg Verlag, 2003) and numerous articles on German labour, transatlantic intercultural relations and exile politics. She is currently working on a book on the changing role of the Royal Navy in nineteenth-century British foreign politics, empire and culture. Elke van Cassel is a PhD candidate affiliated with the Radboud University Nijmegen and the Roosevelt Study Center, both in The Netherlands. She is currently completing her dissertation on the Cold War magazine, The Reporter. Nicholas J. Cull is Professor of Public Diplomacy in the Center on Public Diplomacy at the Annenberg School for Communication, University of Southern California, Los Angeles. He has written and researched widely on the history of public diplomacy and the media, and is presently completing a history of the United States Information Agency for Cambridge University Press. Ali Fisher is based at the University of Birmingham where he is completing his PhD on the development of American Studies in Europe. He is the author of articles on the history of American Studies in Britain, the influence of philanthropy within society and the power of the state to influence Internet culture. Andrew Johnstone is a Teaching Fellow in American and Canadian Studies at the University of Birmingham. He is currently completing a PhD on Clark Eichelberger and the negotiation of internationalism during the Second World War. Helen Laville is Lecturer in American and Canadian Studies at the University of Birmingham. She is the author of Cold War Women (Manchester University Press, 2002) and numerous articles on the relationship between women’s organisations and the American government ix
C O N T R I BU T O R S
during the Cold War. She is currently working on a book on women and the implementation of civil rights. Scott Lucas is Professor of American Studies at the University of Birmingham. He is the author of numerous books and articles on US and British foreign policy, culture and ideology, including Freedom’s War (Manchester University Press, 1999), Orwell: Life and Times (London: Haus, 2003) and The Betrayal of Dissent (London and Sterling, VA: Pluto, 2004). He is currently working on a new study of US foreign policy from the Cold War to the War on Terror, emphasising the tension between ‘power’ and ‘liberation’. Karen M. Paget is a political scientist and independent scholar from California. She is also a contributing editor to the public policy journal, The American Prospect, for which she has written on a wide variety of topics, including gender, philanthropy, citizen organising, Congressional and military budget issues, and US foreign policy. The chapter included here is based on her current research into the Central Intelligence Agency’s relationship with the US National Student Association during the Cold War. Inderjeet Parmar is Senior Lecturer in Government at the University of Manchester. He is the author of Think Tanks and Power in Foreign Policy (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2004), and numerous articles on the role of foreign policy elites, philanthropic foundations and the US foreign policy establishment. He is currently working on a number of articles on US foundations and anti-Americanism from 1930 to 2004, and is writing a book on why Britain backs the United States during wars, from Korea to the present Iraq War. Axel R. Schäfer teaches US History at Keele University. He is the author of American Progressives and German Social Reform, 1875–1920 (Stuttgart: Steiner Verlag, 2000) and was awarded the David Thelen Prize of the Organization of American Historians for an article on W. E. B. Du Bois, which was published in the Journal of American History (2001). His main research interests lie in US intellectual and political history, with a particular focus on the Progressive Era and on Cold War America. He is currently completing a book, Religion, the Cold War State, and the Resurgence of Evangelicalism, 1942–1990. Giles Scott-Smith is a researcher with the Roosevelt Study Center in Middelburg, The Netherlands. His research interests include the practice and effects of public diplomacy and intellectual networks during the Cold War, particularly in transatlantic relations. His publications include The Politics of Apolitical Culture (London: Routledge, 2002) and The Cultural Cold War in Western Europe (edited with Hans Krabbendam, London: Frank Cass, 2003). He is currently working on a x
C O N T R I BU T O R S
study of the Foreign Leader Program in Western Europe (Brussels: P.I.E.-Peter Lang, forthcoming). Tony Shaw is Reader in International History at the University of Hertfordshire. His publications include Eden, Suez and the Mass Media (London: I. B. Tauris, 1996) and British Cinema and the Cold War (London: I. B. Tauris, 2001). He is currently working on two projects: a comparative analysis of Soviet and American Cold War cinematic propaganda and a history of British government propaganda during the Cold War. Hugh Wilford is Senior Lecturer in American History at the University of Sheffield. He is the author of The New York Intellectuals (Manchester University Press, 1995) and The CIA, the British Left and the Cold War (London: Frank Cass, 2003). He is currently writing the first comprehensive history of CIA ‘front’ operations in the Cold War.
xi
PREFACE
In his famous 1967 article, ‘I’m Glad the CIA is “Immoral”’, Tom Braden explained the reasoning that had led him to propose the creation of a new covert operations unit, the International Organizations Division (IOD), shortly after he joined the Agency in 1950. Like the State Department, the CIA was structured around geographical areas, with a Far Eastern Division, a Western European Division and so on. Braden thought that this form of organisation was not capable of meeting a new Cold War challenge, namely the Soviet Union’s campaign to win the ‘hearts and minds’ of private citizens around the world through the manipulation of apparently independent ‘front’ groups. Specifically, Braden identified seven central fronts: the International Association of Democratic Lawyers, the World Peace Council, the Women’s International Democratic Federation (WIDF), the International Union of Students (IUS), the World Federation of Democratic Youth (WFDY), the International Organisation of Journalists and the World Federation of Trade Unions. By appealing to citizen groups on the basis of their identity rather than their nationality, these organisations had, Braden asserted, enjoyed tremendous success in laying claim to such universal values as ‘peace’ and ‘progress’. The irony that it was the Soviet Union, rather than the United States, which had seized the initiative in this ideological battle was not lost on Braden, who observed: ‘How odd . . . that Communists, who are afraid to join anything but the Communist Party, should gain mass allies through an organizational war while we Americans, who join everything, were sitting here tongue-tied’. To deal with the threat, Braden proposed the launch of a counter-offensive based on an alliance between the US government and the American people, to be coordinated by a new CIA division that would transcend the organisation’s traditional geographical structures. In his article, Braden refers to the IOD and the state–private network it sponsored as an ‘organisational weapon’. In bringing together the essays that constitute this collection, our thinking as editors bears a curious resemblance to that of Tom Braden. The volume is, in this sense, an ‘organisational weapon’. Over the past decade, scholars working in a variety of historical sub-disciplines, xii
P R E FA C E
including film history, labour history, the history of religion, women’s history and intellectual history (to name but a few), have begun investigating and analysing various incidents of state–private interaction during the Cold War. While these studies constituted important contributions to their respective fields, illuminating aspects of the history of (for example) women’s associations, the press and American universities that previously had been overlooked, their full significance lay in the fact that they exposed a wider pattern of relationships, a developing network of connections between government and civil society. The boundary dividing the public from the private has never, of course, been a rigid one and, as several of the chapters in this collection demonstrate, there is a long history of cooperation between the two realms. However, it is now clear that the Cold War was a crucial moment in this history, when various threads of cooperation were bound, or tangled, together to create a more systematic network, one through which a great multiplicity of different activities and projects were devised and carried out. In part, the emergence of a state–private network during the early Cold War era reflected the peculiar nature of the conflict itself, which was constructed by its protagonists as a confrontation between two different civilisations, and therefore involved the mobilisation of whole cultures and societies (again, of course, not a novel phenomenon in the history of modern war, but one which occurred to an unprecedented degree during this period). It was also a product of the US government’s professed ideological hostility to state power – the Cold War, after all, cast Americans as the world’s most determined enemies of ‘totalitarianism’ – which required it to conceal its political warfare activities behind a private façade. The American people’s much vaunted history of voluntarism and associationalism, invoked by Braden in his 1967 article, made this difficult manoeuvre much easier to execute. Paradoxically, of course, the ‘privatisation’ of foreign policy operations that took place during the Cold War was accompanied by a vigorous campaign of state-building, in the domestic as well as international spheres, a development again considered in several of the chapters here. In any case, it is our contention as editors that the public–private interactions of the Cold War period are best understood when they are considered together, in the context of a developing state–private network. Indeed, existing disciplinary structures tend to work against understanding this network: as Scott Lucas argues in his introductory essay, a common tendency to assign scholarship about state–private interaction to the ‘cultural turn’ recently taken by diplomatic history is beset with problems and limitations. Similarly, while studies of the relationship between the American government and women’s organisations may expand the field of women’s history by increasing understanding of gender and foreign policy, the place of this relationship in a wider context of the US private–public xiii
P R E FA C E
dynamic in international relations risks being overlooked. It is only by adopting the sort of transcendent perspective which Tom Braden sought to embody in his IOD that scholars can fully grasp the significance of the numerous instances of state–private cooperation which occurred in Cold War America. This is not to claim that the collection is exhaustive. While it contains case studies of five of the citizen groups identified by Braden as targets of Soviet propaganda, essays on the organisation of peace or lawyers’ associations are absent. This perhaps reflects the fact that ‘peace’ was a concept peculiarly associated with the communist ideological offensive, in the same way that ‘freedom’ featured as the central trope of US Cold War rhetoric, so that American pacifist groups were more likely to earn official suspicion and harassment than support during this period.1 US lawyers’ main involvement in the Cold War came in the form of ‘fronting’ ostensibly private organisations that channelled CIA subsidies to the Netherlandsbased International Commission of Jurists; otherwise their role in Cold War-related human rights advocacy agitated by the US government appears to have been quite peripheral (although it is interesting to note the extraordinarily high representation of corporate lawyers in the upper echelons of such government agencies as the CIA).2 Nevertheless, clearly there remains a great deal of empirical research still to be done on the US state–private network during the Cold War, not just in regard to neglected groups (athletes, for example, surely deserve more attention than they have received so far, given the importance of sporting events as theatres for the enactment of superpower rivalry), but also the network’s pre-history and its activities and their reception overseas. For all that, we have attempted to treat as many facets of the subject as the constraints of a single-volume collection and the current state of scholarship allow. One other area that the volume does not investigate in much depth is the Soviet ‘peace offensive’. This omission does not indicate a lack of awareness on the part of editors and contributors that communist-front tactics of the sort pioneered by the Communist International and Moscow’s chief propagandist in the west, Willi Münzenberg, blazed the trail in the Cold War battle for hearts and minds. Nor does it spring from an anti-American impulse to denigrate the US by portraying its Cold War political warfare programme in isolation (although the editors do in fact believe that historians are right to question the ethical implications of a largely covert effort which involved misleading not only foreign audiences but also, frequently, the government’s own partners and citizens). Rather, our emphasis on the American side of the story reflects our belief that, while the US state–private network might originally have been formed in response to Soviet provocations and imitated communist organisational forms, its development can only be understood properly in light of the internal histories of the American state and the citizen groups it sponsored. xiv
P R E FA C E
Indeed, a characteristic feature of recent research in the field has been a growing appreciation of the ways in which participating groups used the state–private network to enhance their own status and legitimacy within American society, as well as a more nuanced understanding of the US ‘state’ itself, and the numerous structural divisions and conflicts that term conceals – neither of which set of insights would necessarily have been encouraged by a greater knowledge of communist front organisations. Of course, we regret the fact that much less is known about the peace offensive than the American response, and look forward to the opportunity to engage in comparative discussion of the two campaigns with historians of the Soviet Union and international communist movement, but in the meantime we should not be discouraged from continuing to investigate a phenomenon that is of central importance in understanding recent American history. Finally, several contributions to this collection suggest that study of the Cold War origins of the state–private network has become more, rather than less, important as the Cold War itself retreats further into history. As Nicholas Cull and Hugh Wilford argue here, the relationship between the US government and private individuals and organisations, formed in a context of what some might see as military necessity, continues to have an impact even today as a means of organising international cultural relations and propaganda. Indeed, as communication technologies and networks become ever more complex and diverse, the myriad of methods and relationships employed by the state to foster, counter or control the transnational flow of information move us further and further away from the geographical bloc structures critiqued by Braden. This collection is based on a conference held in Birmingham (UK) in June 2003, ‘The American State–Private Network in the Cold War’. The editors would like to acknowledge with gratitude the financial support of the British Academy and the Department of American and Canadian Studies at the University of Birmingham, without which the conference would not have taken place. We would also like to thank the participants for their contributions, both to the conference and to this collection. Helen Laville Hugh Wilford
Notes and bibliography 1 2
See Robbie Lieberman, The Strangest Dream: Communism, Anti-Communism and the US Peace Movement, 1945–1963 (New York: Syracuse University Press, 2000). See Howard Tolley, The International Commission of Jurists: Global Advocates for Human Rights (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1994), chap. 1.
xv
ABBREVIATIONS
AAUN AAUW ACCF ACE ACLS ACUE ADA AFL AIF AP ASU BAAS BDA CDAAA CCF CFR CIA CIER CIO CoC CSOP DCI DCR DGB EAG ECA ERPTUAC FBI FEC FLP FOIA FRF
American Association for the United Nations American Association of University Women American Committee for Cultural Freedom American Council on Education American Council of Learned Societies American Committee on United Europe Americans for Democratic Action American Federation of Labor Americans for Intellectual Freedom Associated Press American Student Union British Association for American Studies Business for Diplomatic Action Committee to Defend America by Aiding the Allies Congress for Cultural Freedom Council on Foreign Relations Central Intelligence Agency Committee for International Education Reconstruction Congress of Industrial Organizations Committee of Correspondence Commission to Study the Organization of Peace Director of Central Intelligence Division of Cultural Relations German Trade Union Federation Europe–America Groups Economic Cooperation Administration European Recovery Program Trade Union Advisory Committee Federal Bureau of Investigation Free Europe Committee Foreign Leader Program Freedom of Information Act Friends of Russian Freedom xvi
A B B R E V I AT I O N S
FSLP FTUC FYSA HICOG HUAC IATSE ICFTU IES IIA IIE IMG INF IOD ISA ISS IUS LNA LWV MPA NAACP NAE NAFTA NATO NCFE NCL NICC NSA NYU OCB OEF OIAA OIE OMGUS OIC OPC OSS OWI PCA PNAC
Foreign Student Leadership Program Free Trade Union Committee Foundation for Youth and Student Affairs United States High Commission for Germany Committee on Un-American Activities of the House of Representatives International Alliance of Theatrical Stage Employees International Confederation of Free Trade Unions International Educational Exchange Service International Information Administration Institute of International Education International Media Guarantee Intermediate Nuclear Forces International Organizations Division International Student Assembly International Student Service International Union of Students League of Nations Association League of Women Voters Motion Picture Alliance for the Preservation of American Ideals National Association for the Advancement of Colored People National Association of Evangelicals North American Free Trade Agreement North Atlantic Treaty Organization National Committee for a Free Europe (also Free Europe Committee) Non-Communist Left National Inter-Collegiate Christian Council National Student Association New York University Operations Coordinating Board Overseas Educational Fund (League of Women Voters) Office of Inter-American Affairs Office of International Information and Educational Exchange United States Office of Military Government Office of International Information and Cultural Affairs Office of Policy Coordination Office of Strategic Services Office of War Information Production Code Administration Project for the New American Century xvii
A B B R E V I AT I O N S
POAU PSB PTPI RFE RL SAC SHAEF SPD SSA TUAC UN UNESCO UP USAID USEC USIA USIIE USIS USSA VOA VOKS WFDY WIDF WRC WSCF WSSF YMCA YWCA
Protestants and Other Americans United for the Separation of Church and State Psychological Strategy Board People to People International Radio Free Europe Radio Liberation (also Radio Liberty) Strategic Air Command Supreme Headquarters of the Allied Expeditionary Force Social Democratic Party (West Germany) Student Service of America Trade Union Advisory Committee United Nations United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization United Press United States Agency for International Development United States Education Commission United States Information Agency United States International Information and Educational Exchange Program United States Information Service United States Student Assembly Voice of America Soviet Society for Contacts Abroad World Federation of Democratic Youth Women’s International Democratic Federation World Relief Corporation World Student Christian Federation World Student Service Fund Young Men’s Christian Association Young Women’s Christian Association
xviii
Part I THEMES
INTRODUCTION Negotiating freedom Scott Lucas In 1999, the freelance historian Frances Stonor Saunders caused a flurry of press comment with the publication of her Who Paid the Piper?, published in the US under the more prosaic title The CIA and the Cultural Cold War. Edward Said proclaimed, ‘The energy and determination of her research, to say nothing of the scepticism that nurtured it, are important signs of stirring intellectual restlessness and even of a kind of incitement, which is what is needed most of all’.1 Saunders moved on to a very different project, a study of the fourteenthcentury mercenary Sir John Hawkwood,2 but beyond narrating a new Cold War for the general reader she has made a unique contribution to scholarship. She carried out a dual recovery of the ‘missing dimensions’ of post-1945 history. The conflict was no longer defined through the manoeuvres of presidents, state departments and the military but also through the strategies and operations of their covert colleagues. Those strategies and operations in turn were concerned with the ever-present but little-noted battleground contested by the ‘West’ and its Soviet enemy: the global campaign to prove the superiority of a ‘total’ system which offered much more than geopolitical influence, economic strength and military dominance, a system that, in the words of NSC 68, embodied ‘the idea of freedom . . . the most contagious idea in history, more contagious than the idea of submission to authority’.3 When Who Paid the Piper? came out, the bellwethers of Cold War history in the United States – the leading professors defining the analytic terrain, the most prominent journals, the most prominent associations – were caught up in the effort to define, less than a decade after the break-up of the Soviet Union, what the US had ‘won’. The most egregious claims of historical objectivity were of the ‘We Now Know’ variety, books which soon left behind any nuanced analysis, indeed omitted much of the world outside the United States, to assert ‘objectively’ that, ‘Many people then saw the Cold War as a contest of good and evil, even if historians have rarely done so’, leaving the unstated but clear conclusion that this was American good and Soviet evil with no position (and no country) in between.4 Other monographs looked for a more definitive history of the American ‘national security state’ and an assessment of power transcending geopolitics and 3
S C O T T LU C A S
economics but, after hundreds of pages, fell into arbitrary divisions such as the ‘wise men’ who had fashioned the policy confronting the Soviet challenge in the early Cold War versus the ‘foolish men’ who somehow took the United States into the failure of Vietnam.5 The Groundhog Day battle of ‘orthodox’ versus ‘revisionist’ explanations of US foreign policy – had Washington secured the Free World or was it driven by a quest for economic dominance? – was played out again and again. To be fair, there was an ongoing invocation by some historians of the need for a ‘cultural turn’ in Cold War history. That challenge was met in part by studies which examined the promotion of ‘America’ by state bodies such as the US Information Agency (USIA), which considered groups, outside but interacting with formal government structures, such as African Americans and women, and which critiqued official discourses through their construction and use of race, sexuality and pathology.6 Too often, however, the ‘cultural turn’ became a cultural annex. Narratives of the USIA or of international exhibitions buttressed the established conceptions of ‘official’ strategy.7 The non-governmental groups remained in the wings, uncertain of their role, useful for an expanded title such as ‘The Cold War And . . . ’ but threatening trouble if they raised fundamental questions about the tensions within American political culture, the points where the Cold War’s quest for ‘freedom’ became problematic at home and abroad. Theorists such as Gramsci and Said were kept at a safe distance. The risk was that, as some scholars highlighted the place of ‘culture’ in the Cold War, they also sought to contain it. Examinations in the journal Diplomatic History, issued just before and after Saunders’ book was published, set up a target of alleged theories of ‘cultural imperialism’ fostered by ‘supporters and descendants of the New Left [who] often settled in university towns’ and reassured the reader that ‘we will discover that we needn’t be afraid of Steven Spielberg after all’.8 However culture was incorporated into the Cold War, the notion of a successful ‘End of History’ must not be threatened: If … democratic government is the only unchallenged form of state legitimacy virtually everywhere in the world, if social questions such as the rights of women and minorities are so widespread on almost everyone’s political agenda, if economic questions concerning the relative roles of state and society everywhere have common themes, then surely it is because of the worldwide impact of a philosophical – some might prefer to say an ideological – conviction that mobilized American resolve to win the struggles against fascism and communism….9 The present volume is thus part of a continuing response to a Cold War history that presents itself as official, triumphal or definitive. Even before 4
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1999, scholars (most of them based outside the US, and some of them represented in this volume) were examining aspects of the American state–private network through the study of subjects ranging from New York intellectuals, to women’s groups, to the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, to the American Federation of Labor, to abstract expressionists. Who Paid the Piper?, accompanied by other significant but less controversial monographs and articles, built upon this foundation by placing the state–private network at the heart of a general American campaign for hearts and minds during the early Cold War. This is only the start of the challenge posed by this collection, however, for we are five years in real time and a generation in both scholarship and context beyond Who Paid the Piper? The book was never intended to be a comprehensive analysis of the organisation and dynamics of American ‘political culture’, of which the government’s Crusade for Freedom was only a part. As Saunders has freely admitted, she was only concerned with the covert dimension of the network (and, within this, only those areas of the covert campaign focusing on ‘high culture’) and her emphasis was on documentation, rather than critique, of that network. The obvious injunction is that filling in ‘missing dimensions’ should not end in a two-dimensional depiction of the cultural Cold War. Tensions and contradictions between the actors in the state–private network, in the ideology and interests of that network, in its ‘cultural production’ and in the reception of that production must be examined. They should be examined not in a search for an easy resolution of freedom versus its totalitarian foe, but with the recognition that the creation and projection of ‘America’, and thus the construction of the Cold War (and, beyond this volume, of later conflicts such as the ‘War on Terror’), was always in flux. Some criticism of this process can be met easily. One scholar, introducing a collection of essays on the cultural Cold War in western Europe, framed it as ‘presentation . . . from which one side (the Russians, their satellites and their friends in the west) have strangely vanished. No sight or sound of them. It is America vs. Amerika’. Another review of work on ideology, culture and US foreign policy asserted: ‘To deal only with the United States and leave out the Soviet Union in discussing the role of Cold War political warfare has about as much resonance as one hand clapping’.10 The implication – that scholars raising the notion of the state–private network are ignorant of or unwilling to examine any nefarious Soviet counterpart – is a diversion. The well-documented existence of Soviet cultural campaigns has not been ignored by the authors in this volume; rather, they have examined how the perception of those campaigns helped shape the US state–private network and its initiatives. At the same time, recognition of efforts of ‘the Other’ can only be part of the story; the direction of the American crusade for freedom, and the issues 5
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that it raised, went far beyond a simple confrontation with Moscow. Making this argument in no way reduces these authors to proponents of ‘We have met the enemy, and he is us’. A similar response can be made to the charge that this scholarship is ‘anti-American’. The rights or wrongs of strategy or operations can be debated, but the purpose of these essays is not to derogate the US government or the private groups and individuals who worked with the government in the development of cultural campaigns. Consideration of the ‘America’ promoted by the network, far from constituting a condemnation of the concept, is a recognition of the power and the appeal of the ideals and practices of that ‘America’ to both producers and recipients. The interrogations in these essays should and do start from other premises. One of the central issues raised by Who Paid the Piper? concerned the relationship between the hegemony of the state and the autonomy of private groups. Saunders, in the telling of her tale, usually worked from the basis of Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) control of its private allies. Hugh Wilford, extending his research on American intellectuals, offered the memorable corrective: ‘It might well have been the case that the CIA tried to call the tune; but the piper did not always play it nor the audience always dance to it’, while Giles Scott-Smith applied and extended Gramscian theory in his book on the Congress for Cultural Freedom.11 Both continue their critiques in this volume, Wilford through his attention to an ideological negotiation beyond ‘neoconservatism’ and ‘liberal anticommunism’, Scott-Smith with the essential injunction that the relationship between the state, private sector and ‘political culture’ needs to be considered before 1945, and even before the outbreak of the Second World War. Yet, even as these essays confirm that evaluation of the state–private network has gone beyond the simple notion of ‘control’, they raise further challenges. There is always the danger that the state recedes once more before the autonomy of private groups and prominent intellectuals and political culture remains the undifferentiated output of a simple connection between official programme and private actor. Tony Shaw offers one response with the notion of a shared ‘ideological worldview’, a concept represented by Inderjeet Parmar as a Gramscian ‘state spirit’ projected through corporatism, parastates and epistemic communities. An alternative, possibly complementary, approach is to critique the homogeneity of shared ideals, structures or operations. Helen Laville offers a triple shift with her identification of a voluntarism predating but reconfigured in the Cold War, her transcendence of traditional ‘elite’ approaches with her case study of women’s organisations and her establishment of a cooperative model marrying American exceptionalism to internationalism. Far from bringing cohesion, however, the ideological/voluntarist impulse to maintain a ‘private’ sphere caused tension in the state–private network. 6
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As Laville notes cogently, the basic fact of covert support by the state undermined any conception of the ‘private’. Laville’s constant but never-resolved relationship between cooperation and cooptation should be juxtaposed with Ali Fisher’s consideration of the negotiations of the state–private network. Fisher’s previous work on the formation of American Studies in Britain moved beyond the dichotomy of the state and private by positing a triangular relationship between the state, the foundation providing funds and ‘local’ academics.12 In this volume, Fisher develops this critique of a systematic bloc, suggesting a ‘double production’ of political culture. The first transmission is the state’s construction of an ideal cultural framework and operations to project ‘America’; the second is the negotiation of that construction with another cultural producer such as a foundation. This double transmission in turn is re-shaped by the reception and negotiation of structure and operations by the local ‘private’ organisation – in Fisher’s cases academic communities, but these just as easily could be a labour union, a women’s group, a student association or a media outlet – in its own consideration and projection of America. Other essays in this volume can be read as evaluations of this more complex approach to the state–private network. Andrew Johnstone and Karen Paget, like Scott-Smith, take scholarship beyond the Cold War and beyond a simple assertion of US-led ‘internationalism’. Johnstone reintroduces the catalyst of an influential individual, in this case Clark Eichelberger, moving between the base of his private organisations and his discussions with state officials to project and, arguably, limit the internationalist vision during the Second World War. Like Laville in her study of women’s organisations, Johnstone suggests that, in the interaction between Eichelberger’s personal interests and the objectives of the state, the internationalist vision gave way to a more ‘nationalist’ construction of the world. Paget, breaking the bind of studies of the National Student Association (NSA) limited to its post-1950 collaboration with the CIA, considers the development of individual and group interests within the NSA’s forerunners. From 1942, well before the formation of the ‘national security state’ that would shape policies and networks in the Cold War, there was a complex, often shadowy, interaction between student representatives, private sponsors and the government. Paget’s conclusion, linking the pre- and postCold War periods, is a telling extension of Laville’s cooperation/cooptation argument: beyond the struggle for control and any debate of hegemony vs autonomy, what was essential in American political warfare was the ‘appearance of independence’. Elke van Cassel’s examination of the interchanges behind the pages of The Reporter magazine, centring on its editor Max Ascoli, critiques this appearance of independence. Once again, there is a narrative of internationalism, in this case ‘world federalism’, giving way to an aggressive 7
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promotion of ‘America’ against the communist menace. At one level, Cassel’s research offers the possibility that the journal was established with covert government backing (intriguingly, before the establishment of the CIA and the post-1948 state orchestration of support for the ‘private’ sphere). At another level, but equally importantly, she suggests that this formal covert connection may not have been necessary. Instead, The Reporter was established, promoted and subsidised through a web of informal negotiations. For example, Cassel identifies the relationship between Ascoli and C. D. Jackson, who would move between Time-Life, Inc., the military, state-supported ‘private’ initiatives such as the National Committee for a Free Europe and high-level service in the Eisenhower administration.13 It is important that these essays, many of which are driven by the recovery of a ‘missing dimension’ of strategy, foreign policy and operations, do not presume to replace a previous narrative of the overt organisation of American public diplomacy. Rather, Nicholas Cull’s essay on the USIA places this ‘open’ dimension within a broader, evolving, dynamic psychological/political warfare strategy which tried to incorporate overt and covert networks. Likewise, these essays do not claim that strategy replaces a ‘liberal consensus’. Julia Angster’s study of the state–private network and international labour operations establishes that this consensus could take in government officials and labour activists from across the American political spectrum. Instead, this consensus deserves a much more thorough analysis. Many public and private figures who were far from ‘liberal’, at least in the terminology of American political culture of the time, were linked in the pursuit of anticommunism and the liberation of countries in the Soviet bloc. There was never a sharp division, as the 1952 presidential campaign of Dwight Eisenhower alleged, between the ‘immoral containment’ of the Democratic Truman administration and the ‘rollback’ advocated by its Republican successor. Instead, as Axel Schäfer demonstrates, ‘religion’, from the Catholicism of Cardinal Spellman to the Protestantism of Reinhold Neibuhr to the growing evangelical movement, could be mobilised and supported by the state in the cause of freedom for ‘captive peoples’. In May 1948 George Kennan, long regarded as the father of an American Cold War doctrine of containment through his Long Telegram and the ‘Mr X’ article, set out an even more ambitious strategy. He proposed to the newly-formed National Security Council ‘The Inauguration of Organized Political Warfare’, including ‘liberation committees’, ‘underground activities behind the Iron Curtain’ and ‘support of indigenous anticommunist elements in threatened countries of the Free World’. Victory would come not only through official diplomatic, economic and military activity but also through the battle for hearts and minds waged by a state–private network: 8
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What is proposed here is an operation in the traditional American form: organized public support of resistance to tyranny in foreign countries. Throughout our history, private American citizens have banded together to champion the cause of freedom for people suffering under oppression . . . . Our proposal is that this tradition be revived specifically to further American national interests in the present crisis.14 The problem was that the ideological campaign was never separate from the state’s quest for a ‘preponderance of power’. Even as he was promoting his valiant network for political warfare, Kennan asserted: We have about 50 percent of the world’s wealth but only 6.3 percent of its population. . . . In this situation, we cannot fail to be the object of envy and resentment. Our real task in the coming period is to devise a pattern of relationships which will permit us to maintain this position of disparity without positive detriment to our national security. To do so, we will have to dispense with all sentimentality and day-dreaming; and our attention will have to be concentrated everywhere on our immediate national objectives. We need not deceive ourselves that we can afford today the luxury of altruism and world-benefaction.15 There would be a perpetual tension between power and liberation in the development and implementation of US foreign policy. A seminal document such as NSC 68 might try to reconcile the tension, using its first pages to proclaim that ‘the fundamental purpose [of the United States] is to assure the integrity and vitality of our free society, which is founded upon the dignity and worth of the individual’, before turning to substantive matters such as authorisation of the hydrogen bomb and support of colonial and anti-democratic regimes as long as they also were anticommunist. That purported reconciliation turned upon the construction of a ‘private’ sphere in support of the ideology, if not the explicit or covert policies, of the state: ‘The prosecution of the program will require of us all the ingenuity, sacrifice, and unity demanded by the vital importance of the issue and the tenacity to persevere until our national objectives have been attained’.16 The double production of the state–private network always rested on a double, linked elision. The constructions of the network rested on the assumption that they were the output of independent, private actors; asserted autonomy could negate the fundamental that these constructions rested upon some degree of state strategy, development and support. In turn, that state strategy not only promoted ‘freedom’ but also used that projection to elide ‘realist’ policies and operations which did not uphold 9
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that ideal. As the Doolittle Report, which assessed the covert dimension of US foreign policy, concluded in 1954: If the United States is to survive, long-standing American concepts of ‘fair play’ must be reconsidered. We must develop effective espionage and counterespionage services and must learn to subvert, sabotage and destroy our enemies by more clever, more sophisticated and more effective methods than those used against us. It may become necessary that the American people be made acquainted with, understand and support this fundamentally repugnant philosophy.17 Whether or not this strategy constituted a state ‘betrayal’ of private allies, particularly those who were unaware of the involvement of agencies such as the CIA, returns us to simple assumptions about control and autonomy. Instead, the exposure of the secret network, particularly in press revelations in 1967 in the context of the Vietnam War, highlighted the tensions and even contradictions between the promotion of ideals and the extension of power. As a member of the Committee of Correspondence, the women’s group highlighted in Helen Laville’s chapter, said with dismay: ‘We say we are an example and this is a democracy. You can have enough voluntary interests to carry the load. . . . Now we discover that individual organizations just don’t seem to be able to exist without government help’.18 Natasha Spender, whose husband Stephen co-edited the CIA-funded literary journal Encounter, wrote to Michael Josselson, the Agency operative who ‘handled’ Encounter and its parent organization, the Congress for Cultural Freedom, stating: I can see, looking back in the light of present knowledge, that everybody has been a prisoner of this situation in different degrees and ways. It must have been awful for you to have to deceive your friends to whom you have always been so benevolent. But I am sure it was wrong for the CIA to expect it, for the repercussions in personal honour and relationships are endless, and if one minds intensely, as one does, then one grieves over trusts broken which cannot be retrieved.19 Those tensions are in the present as well as the past. The 1967 crisis did not bring the demise of the state–private network but its reconstruction. The overt dimension benefited from adversity, with key operations such as Radio Free Europe and Radio Liberty brought out of the shadows into the open state structure, while other covertly supported initiatives were put under deeper cover. Transformation and regeneration continued in the 1980s, with ‘autonomous’ but state-funded organisations including the National 10
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Endowment for Democracy, and beyond the vanquishing of the Soviet Union. The USIA may have expired in 1999, but its demise, far from signalling the end of Kennan’s concept of political warfare, opened the way to a more diverse and more aggressive system, with ventures based in the White House (the Office of Global Communications) and the Pentagon (the Office of Special Plans) sometimes complementing, sometimes challenging, those emanating from the State Department or the CIA.20 If these recent episodes await examination in a future volume, the essays in this one lay the foundation for analysis linking the historical with the contemporary. The relationship between the US state and the private sphere – sometimes one of cooperation, sometimes one of co-optation, often one of tension, and always one of negotiation – did not fundamentally change on 11 September 2001, just as it did not begin at the outset of the Cold War in 1947. The production of ‘America’ may have been set amidst the rhetoric and ideology of good vs evil, but it did not rest on such a Manichaean basis. Government officials who drafted plans for the extension of US political, economic, military and cultural influence were able to hold visions of power and profits alongside the belief in an American exemplar of freedom. And private individuals and groups could work with those government officials, not necessarily because they shared that same vision of power and ideology, but because their own complex conceptions and interests were furthered by the relationship. It is through such relationships that ‘freedom’s war’ was and continues to be a never-ending one, not just in the activities of past and present state–private networks, but also as embodied by Edward Said, in his review of Saunders’ Who Paid the Piper?, eight years after the fall of the Soviet enemy and two years before 9/11, when he asked: ‘Is there any role, or any possibility of a role in the post-Cold War era of globalisation for . . . intellectual resistance and even freedom?’21
Notes and bibliography 1 2 3 4 5 6
Frances Stonor Saunders, Who Paid the Piper? The CIA and the Cultural Cold War (London: Granta, 1999); Edward Said, ‘Hey, Mister, You Want Dirty Book?’, London Review of Books, 30 September 1999, p. 56. Frances Stonor Saunders, Hawkwood: The Diabolical Englishman (London: Faber & Faber, 2004). NSC 68, ‘United States Objectives and Programs for National Security’, 14 April 1950, reprinted at http://www.fas.org/irp/offdocs/nsc-hst/nsc-68–4.htm. John Lewis Gaddis, We Now Know: Rethinking Cold War History (Oxford: Clarendon, 1997), p. 286. Melvyn Leffler, A Preponderance of Power: National Security, the Truman Administration, and the Cold War (Stanford University Press, 1993). See, for example, Frank Costigliola, ‘“Unceasing Pressure for Penetration”: Gender, Pathology, and Emotion in George Kennan’s Formation of the Cold War’, Journal of American History, 83, 4 (1997), pp. 1309–39, and ‘“I Had Come as a Friend”: Emotion, Culture, and Ambiguity in the Formation of the
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7 8
9 10
11
12
13
14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21
Cold War’, Cold War History, 1, 1 (2000) pp. 103–28; Penny Von Eschen, Race Against Empire: Black Americans and Anticolonialism, 1937–1957 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1997); Petra Goedde, GIs and Germans: Culture, Gender, and Foreign Relations (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2002); Laura Belmonte, ‘A Family Affair? Gender, USIA, and Cold War Ideology, 1945–1960’, in J. Gienow-Hecht and F. Schumacher, Culture and International History (Oxford: Berghahn, 2003), pp. 79–93. See, for example, Walter Hixson, Parting the Curtain: Propaganda, Culture, and the Cold War, 1945–1961 (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 1997). Jessica Gienow-Hecht, ‘Shame on US? Academics, Cultural Transfer, and the Cold War – A Critical Review’, Diplomatic History, 24, 3 (Summer 2000), pp. 477–8; Richard Pells, ‘Who’s Afraid of Steven Spielberg?’, Diplomatic History, 24, 3 (Summer 2000), p. 502. Tony Smith, ‘Making the World Safe for Democracy in the American Century’, Diplomatic History, 23, 2 (Spring 1999), pp. 173–4. David Caute, ‘Foreword’, in G. Scott-Smith and H. Krabbendam (eds), The Cultural Cold War in Western Europe 1945–1960 (London: Frank Cass, 2003); Steven Rearden, ‘The Cold War: How the Winner Won’, Diplomatic History, 25, 4 (Autumn 2001), pp. 707–12. Hugh Wilford, The CIA, The British Left and the Cold War: Calling the Tune? (London: Frank Cass, 2003), p. 301; Giles Scott-Smith, The Politics of Apolitical Culture: The Congress for Cultural Freedom, the CIA and Post-war American Hegemony (London: Routledge, 2002). See Ali Fisher, ‘The Role of the US Government and the Rockefeller Foundation in the Development of American Studies in Britain through the Creation and Initial Financial Support of the British Association for American Studies’ (MPhil, University of Birmingham, 2001). For more on Jackson, see H. W. Brands, Cold Warriors: Eisenhower’s Generation and American Foreign Policy (New York: Columbia University Press, 1988); Scott Lucas, Freedom’s War: The US Crusade against the Soviet Union, 1945–1956 (Manchester University Press, 1999). Policy Planning Staff memorandum, ‘The Inauguration of Organized Political Warfare’, 4 May 1948, reprinted at http://www.state.gov/www/about_state/ history/intel/260_269.html Policy Planning Staff memorandum, PPS-23, ‘Review of Current Trends in U.S. Foreign Policy’, 24 February 1948, reprinted at http://www.j-bradforddelong.net/movable_type/archives/000567.html NSC 68, ‘United States Objectives and Programs for National Security’, 14 April 1950, reprinted at http://www.fas.org/irp/offdocs/nsc-hst/nsc-68–4.htm The Report on the Covert Activities of the Central Intelligence Agency, 30 September 1954, pp. 6–7, reprinted at http://www.access.gpo.gov/congress/ house/intel/ic21/ic21018.html Note on Special Board Meeting, 24 July 1967, Special File, Committee of Correspondence papers, Sophia Smith Library, Northampton, MA. Natasha Spender to Michael Josselson, 1967, box 25, file 6, Spender 1965–75, Michael Josselson papers, Ransom Center, Austin, TX. See Liam Kennedy and Scott Lucas, ‘Enduring Freedom: Public Diplomacy and U.S. Foreign Policy’, American Quarterly (forthcoming). Said, ‘Hey, Mister, You Want Dirty Book?’, p. 56.
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1 CONCEPTUALISING THE STATE–PRIVATE NETWORK IN AMERICAN FOREIGN POLICY Inderjeet Parmar
Introduction This chapter focuses on the power contained within the infrastructure of the modern state and the indispensability of private elite organisations for state legitimacy and power. The cooperative inter-relationship between the modern American state and elite foreign affairs and other organisations blurs the distinction between the public and private sectors and calls into question theories (such as pluralism, statism and instrumental Marxism) that advance a zero-sum view of power, pitting the state against private interest groups and vice versa. It is argued that cooperative state–private elite networks played a powerful role in mobilising for US global expansionism during the Cold War and that such network construction and functioning can best be explained and appreciated by examining concepts that emphasise shared and mutual state–private elite interests, and thereby go beyond the conventional theories of state–private interest division and competition. The advantages to the state of such arrangements were that official policy objectives – overseas intelligence gathering, the promotion of pro-American interests and elites – could be met, or at least advanced, especially in ‘sensitive’ areas, by purportedly unofficial, non-governmental means. This chapter introduces and discusses a number of ways of conceptualising state–private group interconnections and overlaps in United States foreign affairs.1 Its principal aim is to consider those conceptualisations that focus on what state and private elites share and unite around, as opposed to what divides them. Therefore, the chapter considers the concepts of the ‘foreign policy establishment’ advanced by Godfrey Hodgson, the ‘organisational sector’ from the Corporatist School of US foreign relations history, Eldon Eisenach’s ‘parastates’ and ‘epistemic communities’. Following a brief discussion of each framework, the chapter briefly compares and contrasts the various approaches before arguing that, despite their usefulness and advantages, the four concepts may be subsumed within the more comprehensive Gramscian approach to political and ideological hegemony. Finally, the chapter considers how such 13
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approaches may be applied to state–private elite relations by considering two examples drawn from the Second World War and the Cold War.
The four frameworks According to Michael Mann, one of the most significant powers of the modern state is its infrastructural capacity; this is in addition to its considerable and growing coercive power. That is, the state’s power has increased to reach deeply into its ‘own’ society and draw upon reservoirs of legitimacy and popular goodwill, in addition to extracting tax revenues and using the benefits of a productive economy, for example bank loans.2 Antonio Gramsci, in contrast, maintains that one of the most significant powers of dominant classes is the ability to establish private institutions that become fundamental to the exercise of state power. Elite self-organisation and the organisation of private life by state agencies creates the basis of interpenetrated organisations and networks of political, ideological and cultural power, with far-reaching consequences in practically every sphere of modern life. Such interpenetrations have forced historians and political scientists to re-evaluate and reconceptualise state–private relations and develop a better understanding of ‘how power works’ in modern democracies such as the United States. Each of the four conceptual frameworks discussed below stands against theories that posit an all-powerful state (such as statism or realism) or that posit a weak state against all-powerful private interests (pluralism). Each of the four private–state network formulations go beyond the zero-sum view of power that strong state/weak group and strong group/weak state theories favour (although it must be acknowledged that corporatism retains certain elements of its pluralist origins).3 This chapter explores those approaches to state–private power that emphasise their overlaps, interconnections, shared ideals and values, and considers their differing but complementary roles in the division of labour through which power works within the political and social systems of the United States. It first explores the four major conceptualisations themselves and then goes on to suggest that, although each of them advances useful ways of understanding the behaviour of the American state and elite private groups, their insights may be comprehensively subsumed within a neo-Gramscian analysis of power in liberal democratic societies. The establishment According to Godfrey Hodgson, the ‘establishment’ concept characterised post-war US foreign policy elites. He defines the establishment as ‘the group of powerful men who know each other . . . who share assumptions so deep that they do not need to be articulated; and who continue to wield power 14
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outside the constitutional or political forms: the power to put a stop to things they disapprove of, to promote the men they regard as reliable; the power, in a word, to preserve the status quo’.4 Included within this definition are the editors of the major newspapers, Wall Street lawyers and bankers and the leading lights of both main political parties. Establishment men also tend to be alumni of Harvard or Yale and of an eastern seaboard private school. More precisely, at its heart, the establishment is made up of three core groups: internationally minded lawyers, bankers and corporate executives from New York; government officials from Washington DC; and elite university academics (including the heads of the major philanthropic foundations). These three groups were united, Hodgson argues, by a common history, policy, an aspiration, an instinct and a technique. Their historical origins and unity lie in the planning and implementation of a strategy to win the Second World War, the development and administration of the Marshall Plan, the creation of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) and the confrontation with the Soviet Union. Their agreed policy was to oppose isolationism and to promote ‘liberal’ internationalism; to deprecate national chauvinism but press American national wishes and promote the country’s strengths to be respected and acknowledged; to advocate restraint but admire the use of high-tech military power; to possess a conscience but not to permit this to interfere with robust action. Their shared aspiration was nothing less than ‘the moral and political leadership of the world’, to fill the vacuum left by the decline of the British Empire. Hodgson, quoting Townsend Hoopes, contends that, ‘The idea of a single Western coalition holding the world in balance against the infidel is fundamental to this particular establishment . . . .’5 For Hodgson, the central instinct of the establishment was directed towards the political centre: towards a purportedly judicious, pragmatic, ideology-free wisdom, the middle course ‘between the yahoos of the right and the impracticalities of the left’. Finally, Hodgson believes that the establishment’s technique was to use the executive branch of government – the White House, National Security Council and Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) – rather than the US Congress and public opinion. The establishment’s claim was to take private action for the public good. The US foreign policy establishment therefore comprised a selfrecruiting group of men with a shared bipartisan philosophy who exercised practical influence on the course of US defence and foreign policy. Sharing certain common elements with this approach, corporatism offers a number of different insights to state–society relations. The Corporatist School Corporatism is a variant of pluralist theory, sharing its idea that the American state is essentially weak, incoherent, incapable of independent 15
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action and dominated by powerful private interests. Nevertheless, it contains important advances on pluralism. Where pluralism focuses on political conflict and competition, corporatism emphasises mechanisms for conflict management and collaboration between functional blocs (corporations, government, organised labour, agribusiness). Functional blocs, it is argued, cooperate better to manage economic affairs and social and political transformations, harmonise conflicting interests and promote political stability. Corporatists such as Michael Hogan and Ellis Hawley trace the history of functional blocs to the beginning of the twentieth century, specifically to the Progressive era, a period of rising corporate power, mass immigration, rapid urbanisation and perceived social chaos and change.6 Consequently, it is argued, in order more adequately to cope with such destabilising transformations, the bureaucracies of big business and government became increasingly intertwined, thus creating an ‘organisational sector’ above party competition and narrow sectional interests. The ‘organisational sector’ is viewed as ‘an enlightened social elite’, a benign source of policies favouring the whole nation, seeking a middle way ‘between laissezfaire . . . and the paternalistic statism of an Orwellian nightmare’. Specifically, the interpenetration of functional blocs and government agencies enhanced the possibilities of pragmatic New Deal reform and an internationalist foreign policy, because the blocs were focused on capitalintensive industrial and financial institutions, and on organised labour, all of which had a vested interest in economic growth and international stability and prosperity. Such structural changes, in effect, led to the emergence of new elites – an aspect neglected within corporatist literature – that transformed America internally and projected their New Dealism abroad. Parastates As noted in the previous section of the chapter, the Progressive era witnessed the rise of a variety of reform-oriented organisations, professional associations, academic societies, universities and foundations. Broadly, these reformists concentrated on attempts to relieve poverty and social distress, to promote moral renewal and reform government and politics, and to transform America’s place in the world.7 Eldon Eisenach calls these organisations ‘parastates’ because they were not self-interested but stood for the ‘national public good’. They claimed to speak for ‘the collective ends of the national community’ as they believed these constituted ‘the authentic nation’, whereas the main political parties and legislatures were corrupt and parochial. Working outside the established channels of the party machine and electoral politics, parastates favoured extending federal executive authority: their slogan might have been to ‘strike at parties/strengthen government’.8 16
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In fact, parastates made no distinction between themselves and ‘the state’, which they saw in Hegelian terms as the embodiment of the faith of a people. Since the state is constructed by and of the people, in obeying such a state Americans would merely be obeying themselves. In this view it was taken for granted that, ‘The state must be no external authority which restrains and regulates me, but it must be myself acting as the state in every smallest detail of life . . . .’ The ‘good citizen’, therefore, is ‘state-oriented’ in the sense of seeking to achieve a larger public good in his or her actions in every sphere of life. But this, in the Progressive era, was only the aspiration, not the fact: corrupt and parochial parties and legislatures posed obstacles to the brighter future offered by the federal executive and mobilisable public opinion. The interests of a weak federal state and of active parastates coalesced around the mobilisation of public opinion: the parastates would educate the public using a reformist agenda at home, through a strong federal state and through the export of American values abroad. ‘Good citizens’ would also staff the most statist public offices as well as exercise citizenship in publicly oriented private organisations (foundations, charities and so on). Expressed in terms of the argument presented here, parastates backed New Deal reform and globalism and the institutions that underpinned them – the universities, foundations, churches and public opinion. Epistemic communities In the literature of ‘mainstream’ political science, epistemic (or knowledge) communities are recognised as playing an important role in policy processes. The concept is considered here because it relates to this chapter’s interest in state–private networks, especially in one of its particular forms. Epistemic communities are ‘networks of specialists with a common world view about cause and effect relationships which relate to their domain of expertise, and common political values about the type of policies to which they should be applied’.9 Understood in this way, epistemic communities appear to be value-/knowledge-based special interests, very much in the pluralistic mould, seeking to influence the state. In this version, influence, if any, flows from the private group to the state. However, a more nuanced version of the concept may be more helpful to the concerns of this chapter and book. One aspect of the concept of epistemic communities argues for a ‘two-tier’ dynamic within knowledge groups: the first tier consists of government officials, international agencies and corporate executives; the second comprises academics, lawyers and journalists. Both tiers share a common conceptual framework but operate within an agreed division of labour: government officials have access to policy-making and use the second tier to publicise/disseminate their ideas and to legitimate them as ‘objective and 17
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scientific’, as well as to elaborate on public officials’ ideas. Additionally, the second tier’s ideas were brought to government officials and decisionmakers as evidence of a growing consensus. When such interactions are concluded successfully, they lead to the institutionalisation of the epistemic community’s ‘policy paradigm’ and the incorporation of experts into direct state service.10 As intellectuals, think-tanks and university research institutes were such a key feature of the cultural Cold War, it is clear that state–private networks may be conceptualised, to a degree, within the epistemic community model outlined above. Certainly, the role of influential foreign affairs organisations such as the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR) and the Ford, Carnegie and Rockefeller Foundations may be assessed using this approach.
Discussion It is apparent from the discussion above that the concepts of establishment, organisational sector, parastates and epistemic/knowledge communities have much in common. It is also clear that they could be applied usefully to the Cold War to help understand the relationship between key elements of private elite and other organisations and interests with various agencies of the American state. The following section aims to compare the several concepts; to bring out their most important elements relevant to the themes of this chapter and book; to consider the advantages of subsuming the four concepts within a more comprehensive Gramscian analysis; and then to offer some evidence of how they may be applied historically, using the examples of the relations between US foundations and the CFR with the American state. Each concept clearly shares the view that there are numerous and significant overlaps in outlook and interests between the state and elite sectors of society. Despite the use of different language and vocabulary, each concept highlights the utility of blurring the distinction between state and society, moving beyond ideas of state power that set up the state against society and vice versa. They suggest that political outcomes, policies and state behaviour are better understood as an alliance between ‘state’ and ‘society’; even more, they suggest that state penetration of society and vice versa are so deep and comprehensive – physically, politically, ideologically, psychologically and organisationally – that it is almost impossible to say where one ends and the other begins. Political reform is another leitmotif of the four concepts examined here. Enlightened, elite-led change is central to each, but the changes/reforms sought and campaigned for are not purely for the sake of change: their aim is to establish a new order, to combat chaos and disorder and create a new regime in which there will be stability and progress. Even though Hodgson’s 18
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establishment and the corporatists’ organisational sector aspire to stability, they are at heart reformers who challenged the status quo (of isolationism and untrammelled competition, respectively), undermined it through political, economic and social critiques and eventually overcame their foes. They then became the upholders of stability defending their new order. Relatedly, each concept also favours elite-led, top-down, technocratic change. The masses do not make a positive appearance in any of the concepts examined. There is an underlying assumption of the superiority of expertise, certified knowledge, status, position, social origins, intellect and so on. That is, the popular-democratic spirit that extols the virtues of the people is missing in its entirety from the above concepts. The Progressives, the establishment and so on shared the view that the masses were poor judges of public issues – according to Schumpeter,11 they sank to the level of ‘primitives’ when examining matters of politics – and were too emotional, too unstable and too easily swayed by rabble rousers and demagogues. In each of the concepts examined – except perhaps the corporatist model, in which they are more or less ignored – the people are the objects of surveillance and elite guidance and mobilisation.12 Public opinion was in need of enlightenment, education and propaganda: the people had to be brought ‘on message’ lest their unstable and unpredictable mood swings – exercised through the prism of electoral politics – came to determine national policy.13 Each concept also claims to stand above sectional and partisan interests, by which is normally meant that the establishment and the others draw support from the leaders of both main political parties, attempting to condition the culture of the parties in order to exert some influence over their electoral behaviour. Yet, the parastates, experts and so on, despite declarations to the contrary, remain sectional – they are elites, a minority, wedded to unrepresentative and unaccountable institutions, that permit entry only to the ‘right people’.14 Their self-conception, however, casts them in the role of objective, scientific and impartial actors in the service of the nation. If they frown upon the dangers of electoral politics, elites are more optimistic about those men who occupy the higher echelons of the state, for it is the higher executives who are considered to be as enlightened as they, who indeed are often drawn from the same corporations, elite universities, private schools, foundation boards, churches and so on. Relatively insulated from the vagaries of electoral politics and public opinion mood swings, to some extent at least and especially in foreign affairs, the executive branch offers the opportunity of great power and influence, of realising goals of political, economic and administrative reform. The revolving door from Wall Street and Cambridge, Massachusetts, to the corridors of Washington DC, expresses and symbolises the easy circulation of establishment men in the exercise of power, the symbiosis of private elites and public power (or public service, as this is often termed).15 19
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Although the four concepts concur regarding most matters, opinion appears to divide when it comes to the issue of more deeply locating the sources of the elite. Hodgson’s establishment and the corporatists’ organisational sector are the most economistic of the four concepts, favouring the idea that elites are, at least in part, sourced from key parts of the economy, such as capital-intensive, international manufacturers and banks. By recognising the importance of economic interests for politics and the political system, the two relevant concepts move closer to a more radical interpretation of power and politics in modern liberal democracies: namely, Gramscian thought. It is argued here that the latter framework is far more comprehensive than any of those examined above and a better way of explaining state–society relations. In addition, Gramsci’s little-examined notion of ‘state spirit’ – which is explained in further detail below – offers a new insight into understanding such relations, one that, although hinted at in several of the four concepts examined above, is never satisfactorily articulated. The Gramscian view, along with orthodox Marxism, relies on an economistic analysis of power in capitalist societies. Capitalist corporations form the bedrock of economic power and, thereby, the basis of social, cultural and ideological power in civil society. Unlike orthodox Marxists, however, Gramsci made a radical departure from this view in order to explain more satisfactorily the profound resistance to the socialist revolution of western capitalism, specifically in the wake of the Bolshevik revolution of 1917. In explaining western capitalism’s relative immunity to revolution, Gramsci noted that there existed important protective layers of pro-bourgeois culture, ideology, values and institutions that had played a powerful role in shaping the minds of the masses in favour of the status quo and against violent revolution. In short, Gramsci made more explicit, and more specifically developed, what Karl Marx himself had argued when he wrote: ‘The ideas of the ruling class are in every epoch the ruling ideas’.16 Gramsci, however, located ideological, political and cultural struggle more centrally in Marxist thought, thereby creating space in the theory for those who are the principal sources and disseminators of new ideas and theories – the intellectuals. In effect, Gramsci’s argument is that there is no automatic or easy way to define capitalist, or any other, interests – in economic or political terms – and that interests are a matter of intellectual debate and competing interpretations. It is the role of ‘organic intellectuals’ – thinkers who are connected with the dominant class, such as those within the universities, the church, mass media, political parties – to develop, elaborate, refine, and disseminate and teach the dominant ideas, values and norms, to make ‘natural’ and ‘commonsense’ – and psychologically satisfying – what are, in reality, ideas to support the ruling class. Similarly, politics and the state are not mere automatic reflections of unequal economic or class relations: they are also sites of struggle, competition 20
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between rival ideas, values, policies, programmes and regimes. Through struggle, bargaining and compromise, and the building of enduring coalitions that cut across class, ethnic and racial cleavages, is formed the prevailing idea of ‘reality’, the dominant concept that underlies a particular set of political, institutional and economic arrangements – a regime. As political regimes – or hegemonic projects and alliances – are made up of cross-class coalitions, they require for their formation and sustenance the mobilisation of public opinion to convince the masses – or at least a critical proportion of them – that they have a stake in current arrangements; that they have something to gain from supporting the regime, such as a steady well-paid job and improved living standards. In short, the coalition – or historic bloc, in Gramscian terms – is generated and sustained by leadership based on the ‘consent of the governed’, under the hegemonic leadership of politicians and intellectuals of the capitalist class. As the ‘consent of the governed’ is so vital to political and social arrangements, it is not left to chance. It is engineered by intellectual, political and cultural elites through numerous channels that involve the state – for example, political speeches and the schools and political parties – but also the sort of organisations that Hodgson’s establishment, the corporatists’ organisational sector, Eisenach’s parastates and the epistemic communities would recognise: the CFR and the great east coast philanthropic foundations of Ford, Carnegie and Rockefeller.17 In Gramscian terms, hegemony is constructed by an alliance of state elites and private ruling class organisations, including those led by intellectuals. Elite and popular authority are constructed by an alliance of state and private agencies in order to undermine the old order and to usher in the new. Central to the motivation of private elites is Gramsci’s concept of ‘state spirit’, which, although a fairly ‘conservative’ sounding concept, infuses every successful social movement. In essence, state spirit is a guiding spirit that inspires leaders to see the problems of the state as their own, to take and feel personally the concerns of the nation and state and to subordinate narrow economic and political interests to the broader, long-term interests of the state/nation as a whole. State-spirited leaders contextualise themselves in the broad sweep of national and global historical development: their outlook ‘presupposes “continuity”, either with the past, with tradition or with the future; that is, it presupposes that every act is a moment in a complex process, which has already begun and which will continue . . . .’18 According to Gramsci, such leaders and intellectuals may even come to believe ‘that they are the State . . . .’19 As noted above, the leadership groups of key core components of the east coast foreign policy establishment – the elite CFR and the Ford, Carnegie and Rockefeller Foundations – provide perfect illustrations of such state-spiritedness. 21
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The CFR, an organisation founded in 1921 by rising establishment men dedicated to propelling America to global leadership, was intimately connected with the US state from its inception but especially so during the Second World War.20 A formally private, independent, scientific organisation for educating public opinion, the CFR volunteered its research and advisory services to the State Department in 1939 – two years before the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor – in order to assist with advance planning for a post-war new world order.21 Council men – such as Isaiah Bowman, Hamilton Fish Armstrong, Norman H. Davis and Whitney Hart Shepardson22 – created a research and advisory organisation within the State Department which, in 1943, was assimilated by the Department into its own official planning machinery. Despite this, the CFR’s organisation remained privately financed – by the Rockefeller Foundation, with grants totalling several hundreds of thousands of dollars: this remained a wellkept secret throughout the war due to the fears of officials and the CFR of isolationist political forces and public opinion.23 The CFR’s output was prodigious in that time: 682 papers and memoranda, their committees meeting on 253 separate occasions and the mobilisation of some 100 academics, mainly historians. One of the most controversial products of the CFR was the so-called Grand Area paper, co-authored by William Diebold Jr and Arthur Upgren, in 1941. The paper highlighted the areas and regions of the globe – including, at least, the British Empire, the Far East and the western hemisphere – thought necessary for the survival of the US economic system in its current form, a sort of American lebensraum.24 Throughout this period, the CFR was thoroughly assimilated into the culture of the State Department, with hardly any friction to note.25 It exercised some important policy influence but more importantly provided a cost-free research organisation to a State Department lacking such machinery of its own. The CFR men were seen by State as ‘excellent’, ‘respectable’ and ‘reliable’; that is, as men of the establishment. Several of their number, including Hamilton Fish Armstrong, Isaiah Bowman, Philip Mosley and Whitney Shepardson, also served overseas in the London embassy, in the creation of the United Nations and in unofficial diplomacy roles with their British counterparts at the Royal Institute of International Affairs.26 Finally, CFR leaders, through ad hoc pro-war single issue organisations, and in complete alliance with President Franklin D. Roosevelt, played key roles in mobilising American public opinion for intervention in the European war of 1939–41.27 Their status as private citizens’ groups helped legitimise their pro-war campaigns and bolster the ‘war party’ in the state which, throughout, was supplying the CFR with pro-war arguments and with advice on the timing of rallies and public meetings.28 The CFR is an example of the state and a private elite group cooperating, without any significant clashes and conflicts, to develop US plans for global expansion during the post-war period. CFR men helped build 22
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executive power, bolstering the State Department in its policy research and planning aspects and the executive in promoting increased American intervention in the Second World War. The great American philanthropic foundations also played key roles in bolstering and augmenting the American state, especially during the Cold War. Led by state-spirited, former government officials, men such as former Marshall Planner, Paul Hoffman (President of the Ford Foundation, 1950–53), Dean Rusk, Assistant Secretary of State under Truman (and President of the Rockefeller Foundation, 1952–61), John Foster Dulles, Eisenhower’s Secretary of State (President of the Rockefeller Foundation, 1950–52) and John J. McCloy, High Commissioner for Germany, 1949 and 1950 (Chairman of the Ford Foundation, 1958–65), these foundations acted as unofficial state actors in providing funds to promote proAmerican values, institutions and research programmes around the world.29 The foundations were particularly important in circumstances that made it difficult for the US government to be seen to be too actively involved. For example, in Indonesia, where ‘anti-American’ popular and government feelings ran high in the 1950s and 1960s, the Ford Foundation played a vital role in building key educational institutions with an underlying pro-western philosophy favouring capitalistic modernisation and development strategies. Additionally, it is alleged in the only published account available that several programmes funded by Ford in Indonesia were linked with covert efforts by the CIA to destabilise the leftist-nationalist government of Sukarno.30 The Rockefeller Foundation meanwhile, with American state approval, funded several key institution-building efforts in Latin America and, alongside the Carnegie Corporation and Ford, in African higher education as well. The effect was, in the words of Rockefeller official Kenneth Thompson, to construct integrated knowledge networks in all continents that were sourced in the United States and linked with elite foundation, university and US-state hegemonic projects.31 The foundations–elite universities network was integrated with a series of global networks in Europe, Africa, Asia and Latin America. This effectively constituted an intellectual–institutional network to bolster strategic states and regions during the Cold War. From Germany through Italy, Greece, Iran, India, Indonesia to Korea, the foundations network ringed the Soviet Union and China. In their programmes in Latin America and Africa, the foundations invested millions of dollars in building universities, policy-related research institutes and planning agencies. In Latin America alone the Ford Foundation invested $50 million in developing ‘basic training and research capacities in key social science disciplines . . . [in order to] stimulate an indigenous tradition of social science research, . . . to encourage regional and national networks of social scientists for collaborative work . . . and [to facilitate] the analysis and testing of development strategies’.32 23
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In Africa, the three major American foundations operated in complementary ways to increase US influence in an era of rising nationalism and decolonisation. While Ford and Rockefeller focused largely on universitybuilding, Carnegie concentrated on constructing teacher training institutions, other university programmes and on bringing together other US and global agencies such as the World Bank to take more active roles on the continent. All such efforts and investments boosted US state power by providing intellectual rationales for American expansion, US-based academic expertise, and by creating cadres of pro-western ‘modernising elites’ in the Third World.33 Foundation programmes were rarely, if ever, formulated without the input and advice of US state agencies – including the US Agency for International Development (USAID), the US Information Service (USIS) and the Economic Cooperation Administration (ECA) of the State Department. In addition to such overt initiatives, the foundations – specifically Ford – played a vital role in covert CIA programmes such as the Congress for Cultural Freedom’s campaign to isolate and divide the left during the 1950s and 1960s.34 The CFR and the foundations were, and are, very closely related to the US state and to each other. The ‘revolving door’ has been phenomenally successful in smoothing the circulation of elites in the United States. In addition, the leaders of those institutions are intimately connected through their social and educational backgrounds, as well as their numerous shared or interlocking corporate directorships. While the American elite may not be monolithic, its separate sections are very closely linked and share the same worldview: that the United States has a duty to lead the world, to police it and to ensure security and order.35 Involvement in the programmes of the CFR, the various foundations, the CIA and the State Department also extended beyond the eastern elite to include labour elites of the American Federation of Labor (AFL) and Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO). Indeed, the pro-US expansionist coalition of the Cold War reflected the coming of age of the New Deal coalition built by President Roosevelt’s Democratic Party during the 1930s and 1940s.36 The relationships between the CFR, the foundations and the American state were characterised by close cooperation, shared convictions and worldviews, a common political culture along the lines outlined by Godfrey Hodgson’s establishment and an agreed operational division of labour behind a programme of American globalism: that is, global expansion and hegemony. This demonstrates graphically that America’s mobilisation for global expansion was deeply rooted in the imperatives of an establishment – predicated on the corporate economy, the state and in its foremost educational, intellectual and philanthropic institutions – of power that felt America’s time – her ‘Century’ – had arrived. It shows that in mobilising for Cold War era hegemonic globalism, the American state 24
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drew to itself, and proved attractive to, kindred spirits and associations to form a united effort. Studies of the American state’s Cold War behaviour that do not adequately appreciate the importance of state–private networks must be questioned. Private groups of the American elite played a role in foreign policy-making, opinion mobilisation and overseas policy-implementation, both with the direct and indirect support of the American state. Indeed, foundations and think-tanks often were able to operate under the fiction that they were independent non-state institutions in sensitive countries and regions. The best way to conceptualise, understand and appreciate this phenomenon is through frameworks that provide adequate cognisance of the importance of consensus-building and network-construction – and the state-spiritedness that motivates the state–private network – both within the American establishment and in its relations with subordinate social classes.
Notes and bibliography 1 Clearly, the conceptualisations considered here are not exhaustive, excluding examination of both radical and classical elitism. 2 Michael Mann, States, War and Capitalism (Oxford: Blackwell, 1988). 3 This should not be taken to mean that there are no such zero-sum relationships between state and society; it is argued that such relationships are not necessarily the more decisive ones in understanding ‘how power works’ in US democracy. 4 Godfrey Hodgson, ‘The Establishment’, Foreign Policy, 9 (1972–73), pp. 4–5. 5 Ibid., p. 11, emphasis added. Townsend Hoopes was Under-Secretary of the Air Force, 1967–69, during Lyndon B. Johnson’s administration. 6 Michael J. Hogan, ‘Corporatism: A Positive Appraisal’, Journal of American History, 77, 1 (1990), pp. 153–60; Ellis W. Hawley, ‘The Discovery and Study of a “Corporate Liberalism”’, Business History Review, 12, 3 (1978), pp. 309–20. 7 Arthur S. Link and R. L. McCormick, Progressivism (Arlington Heights, IL: Harlan Davidson, 1983); William E. Leuchtenberg, ‘Progressivism and Imperialism’, Mississippi Valley Historical Review, 39 (1952–53), pp. 483–504. 8 See E. J. Eisenach, The Lost Promise of Progressivism (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 1994). 9 Diane Stone, Capturing the Political Imagination: Think Tanks and the Policy Process (London: Frank Cass, 1996), p. 86. 10 William Drake and Kalypso Nicolaidis, ‘Ideas, Interests and Institutionalization: “Trade in Services” and the Uruguay Round’, International Organization, 46, 1 (1992), pp. 37–70; cited in Stone, Capturing the Political Imagination, p. 97. 11 Joseph A. Schumpeter, Capitalism, Socialism and Democracy (London: Unwin Paperbacks, 1987), p. 262. Schumpeter argues that ‘the typical citizen drops down to a lower level of mental performance as soon as he enters the political field. He argues and analyzes in a way which he would readily recognize as infantile within the sphere of his real interests. He becomes a primitive again’. 12 For a notable exception to corporatists’ neglect of the masses and public opinion, see Michael Wala, The Council on Foreign Relations and American Foreign Policy in the Early Cold War (Providence, RI: Berghahn Books, 1994).
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13 Benjamin Ginsberg, The Captive Public: How Mass Opinion Promotes State Power (New York: Basic Books, 1986). 14 Priscilla Roberts, ‘“All the Right People”: The Historiography of the American Foreign Policy Establishment’, Journal of American Studies, 26, 3 (1992), pp. 409–34. In many regards the elites examined above fall quite easily within the categories developed in C. Wright Mills, The Power Elite (New York: Oxford University Press, 1956) and further refined by G. William Domhoff in his work, The Powers That Be (New York: Vintage Books, 1979). 15 Chadwick Alger, ‘The External Bureaucracy in United States Foreign Affairs’, Administrative Science Quarterly, 7, 1 (1962), pp. 50–78. 16 Karl Marx cited by Ralph Miliband, The State in Capitalist Society (London: Quartet Books, 1984), pp. 162–3. Marx further noted that ‘the class which is the ruling material force of society, is at the same time its ruling intellectual force . . . .’ 17 Inderjeet Parmar, ‘Engineering Consent: The Carnegie Endowment for International Peace and the Mobilisation of American Public Opinion, 1939–45’, Review of International Studies, 26, 1 (2000), pp. 35–48. The consent of the governed is ‘organized . . . . The State does have and requests consent, but it also “educates” this consent, by means of the political and syndical associations; these, however,’ Gramsci concludes, ‘are private organisms, left to . . . private initiative’; cited in Inderjeet Parmar, Think Tanks and Power in Foreign Policy: A Comparative Study of the Role and Influence of the Council on Foreign Relations and the Royal Institute of International Affairs, 1939–1945 (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2004), p. 18. 18 Quintin Hoare and Geoffrey Nowell-Smith (ed. and trans.), Selections from the Prison Notebooks of Antonio Gramsci (London: Lawrence & Wishart, 1971), pp. 146–7. The eighteenth-century conservative political theorist Edmund Burke noted that a key part of the state’s stability was derived from a partnership ‘not only between those who are living, but between those who are living, those who are dead, and those who are to be born’; see his Reflections on the Revolution in France (London: Penguin Books, 1986), pp. 194–5, first published in 1790. 19 Hoare and Nowell-Smith, Selections from Prison Notebooks, p. 16, emphasis in original. 20 L. Shoup and W. Minter, Imperial Brain Trust: The Council on Foreign Relations and U.S. Foreign Policy (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1977). 21 Inderjeet Parmar, ‘The Issue of State Power: Case Study of the Council on Foreign Relations’, Journal of American Studies, 29, 1 (April 1995), pp. 73–95. 22 Bowman was a member of Woodrow Wilson’s Inquiry group, 1917–19, America’s leading geographer, a founder of the CFR, President of Johns Hopkins University (1935–50), a State Department advisor during the Second World War and played a key role in the founding of the United Nations; Armstrong was editor of the CFR’s quarterly review, Foreign Affairs, 1928–72; Davis was a banker, and confidante and advisor to both President Franklin D. Roosevelt and Secretary of State, Cordell Hull; Shepardson was a lawyer, a CFR founder and leading war hawk, 1939–41. 23 Inderjeet Parmar, ‘“To Relate Knowledge and Action”: The Impact of the Rockefeller Foundation on Foreign Policy Thinking During America’s Rise to Globalism, 1939–45’, Minerva, 40, 3 (2002), pp. 235–63. 24 Arthur Upgren and William Diebold Jr, ‘Methods of Economic Collaboration: Introductory. The Role of the Grand Area in American Economic Policy’, 24 July 1941, Memorandum E-B34, War–Peace Studies files, CFR, New York. 25 Some friction occurred between State Department career official Harley A. Notter and CFR members, largely over issues of the latter’s undue influence in
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26 27 28
29 30 31 32 33 34
35
36
the Department; this came to nothing however; see Parmar, Think Tanks and Power, p. 116. Ibid., pp. 189–214. Particular organisations of importance were the Committee to Defend America by Aiding the Allies (CDAAA) and Fight For Freedom. Mark Lincoln Chadwin, The Hawks of World War II (Chapel Hill: UNC Press, 1968); Inderjeet Parmar, ‘Mobilizing America for an Internationalist Foreign Policy: The Role of the Council on Foreign Relations’, Studies in American Political Development, 13 (Fall 1999), pp. 337–73. Edward Berman, The Influence of Carnegie, Rockefeller and Ford Foundations on American Foreign Policy: The Ideology of Philanthropy (Albany: SUNY Press, 1983). David Ransom, ‘Ford Country: Building an Elite for Indonesia’, Ramparts (1970), reprinted in S. Weiss (ed.), The Trojan Horse: A Radical Look at Foreign Aid (San Francisco: Ramparts Press, 1974), pp. 93–116. Inderjeet Parmar, ‘American Foundations and the Development of International Knowledge Networks’, Global Networks, 2, 1 (2002), pp. 13–30; Thompson is cited on p. 21. Richard Magat, The Ford Foundation at Work (New York: Plenum Press, 1979), p. 157. Magat was a Ford Foundation officer during the late 1960s and 1970s. Parmar, ‘American Foundations and Development of Networks’, pp. 13–30. Volker R. Berghahn, America and the Intellectual Cold Wars in Europe: Shepard Stone between Philanthropy, Academy and Diplomacy (Princeton University Press, 2001); Frances Stonor Saunders, The Cultural Cold War: The CIA and the World of Arts and Letters (New York: The New Press, 2001). For statistical analysis of state–foundation interconnections and overlaps, see Parmar, ‘The Issue of State Power’; Parmar, Think Tanks and Power; Peter Grose, Continuing the Inquiry (New York: CFR, 1996); and Shoup and Minter, Imperial Brain Trust. See, for example, Ronald L. Filippelli, American Labor and Postwar Italy, 1943–1953 (Stanford University Press, 1989); and Noam Chomsky, Deterring Democracy (London: Vintage, 1992).
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Part II CASE STUDIES
2 CLARK EICHELBERGER AND THE NEGOTIATION OF INTERNATIONALISM Andrew Johnstone
In June 1946 peace activist John Pearmain wrote to former Secretary of State Sumner Welles. He asked Welles if the internationalist leader and American Association for the United Nations (AAUN) director Clark Eichelberger was on the payroll of the State Department. Welles politely replied that Eichelberger had worked with the State Department during 1942/43, when he served on a committee that Welles himself had formed within the Department. However, he had not worked for, or received money from, the State Department for over two and a half years.1 Despite this seemingly conclusive reply, Pearmain continued to insist to Welles that the AAUN, led by Eichelberger, was not ‘a free agent’ and was merely a ‘front’ for the State Department, and argued that there was no chance for liberal movements in the United States if they were being fed the Department line through supposedly independent organisations such as the AAUN. Pearmain had come to suspect that Eichelberger was a State Department stooge after speaking to numerous colleagues who held this view. In addition, Pearmain claimed that Congressman Christian Herter had informed him that the State Department did in fact use such organisations as fronts.2 Welles, who was Honorary President of the AAUN at that time, felt compelled to reply. He described the suggestion that AAUN was a State Department front as ‘frankly nonsensical’ and stated that the organisation was ‘wholly free from even the slightest vestige of Government influence’. He highlighted the Association’s opposition to recent US policies as proof that it was more than capable of criticising the Truman administration. Welles was clearly disappointed that such unsubstantiated charges were being spread, particularly when there was absolutely no evidence to back them up.3 There existed no evidence to support such a charge because the AAUN was not a front for the State Department in the sense that the Association 31
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was a mouthpiece for the Department, that it was funded by it, that its policy decisions were made within the Department or that it followed the official line on all policy matters. However, the Association and its predecessors certainly acted in a way that would encourage suspicions that it was government officials pulling the internationalist strings. A close analysis of the internationalist policies of groups involving Clark Eichelberger both during and immediately after the Second World War reveals a network of organisations willing to go no further than official government policy. While there were areas of disagreement, these were the rare exception rather than the rule, especially during the war. This chapter aims to analyse the nature of the close relationship between Eichelberger’s organisations and the state. Throughout the war years, Eichelberger collaborated with, and was largely deferential to, the Roosevelt administration. With the alignment of both Eichelberger’s lifelong ideal, the UN, and the Roosevelt administration’s policies, Eichelberger’s organisations resemble what one historian has described as a ‘parastate’, in which private leaders are loyal to the state and defer to state initiatives when their interests coincide.4 Similarly, another contributor to this volume has used Gramscian theory to describe the relationship between private elites and the government as one of cooperation in their desire to reorient US foreign policy. A significant element here is the concept of ‘state spirit’, or a ‘feeling among certain leading private figures and organisations that they bear a grave responsibility to promote a historical process through positive political and intellectual activity’.5 In this instance, that process was the creation of a new international organisation. Eichelberger wanted the UN that the US government appeared to be creating. He was so afraid that the US public would reject the new organisation, in a repeat of the League of Nations fiasco, that he did everything in his power to ensure that the new organisation came into existence. This involved throwing all of his support behind the organisation being proposed by the US government. As a result of this, Eichelberger lost critical distance between himself and the state. Shared aims and a close personal relationship meant that Eichelberger and his organisations spent the war years effectively acting as support agencies for the government. Previous work on internationalism during the Second World War has focused primarily on the role of the US government in creating the UN, and consideration of private organisations has focused solely on efforts to mobilise public opinion behind the UN by organisations such as those led by Clark Eichelberger. These assessments have usually been treated as entirely separate issues, with the result that the relationship between the two – that is, between the state and the private – has been neglected. Consequently, the attempts of private internationalist leaders to influence US foreign policy have been ignored, as have the combined state–private 32
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efforts to mobilise public opinion behind the new state–private organisation. It is this state–private relationship, and particularly the close nature of it, that merits reassessment.6 The primary reason for the particularly close state–private relationship over the question of the UN organisation was the leadership style of Eichelberger himself. Eichelberger was one of the foremost internationalist activists and thinkers during the war years, and he was involved in numerous leading private organisations. In fact, Eichelberger devoted most of his life – over twenty-five years – to promoting US internationalism, which for him meant American involvement in an international organisation such as the League of Nations or the UN. It is valid to focus solely on Eichelberger because it is no exaggeration to say that he played a role in every significant internationalist organisation during the Second World War. He was involved with the League of Nations Association (LNA) from 1927, serving as its national director from 1933 onwards. Later he was director of the Committee to Defend America by Aiding the Allies (CDAAA), the Commission to Study the Organization of Peace (CSOP) and the AAUN. With all of these organisations Eichelberger was firmly in charge, dominating them in terms of both policy decisions and how the organisation was run on a day-to-day basis. While these organisations obviously contained numerous other officers, Eichelberger was unquestionably the leader. Another internationalist leader, Ernest Hopkins, argued that after two decades of carrying the internationalist torch alone, Eichelberger ‘had become constitutionally incapable of working with anybody else’. He held an absolute conviction that his way was the correct way in terms of organisation and promotion. As a result, his personal views were usually reflected in the policies and statements of his organisations.7 Eichelberger’s views were based upon the need to avoid repeating the mistakes of 1919–20 by assisting in the successful creation of the new United Nations organisation. Understandably, he was convinced that the best way to do this was to stick closely to the official government line, not only because the Roosevelt administration supported some form of international organisation, but also because of his belief that this was the best way to influence official policy on the matter. Because of this belief, Eichelberger developed close personal relationships with both the Roosevelt White House and the State Department. As a result of both of these factors – the desire to create the UN and the close relationship with the administration – the Eichelberger organisations were almost never critical of official policy during the Second World War; the closer Eichelberger got to the administration, the less he openly questioned its decisions. This approach had the effect of limiting the critical output of his organisations. To compound the issue, the programmes of the Eichelberger organisations were largely reactive. Questions and issues were not raised publicly if it was clear this might cause discomfort for the government, because 33
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Eichelberger was unwilling to cause offence to those he saw as his allies in Washington. This left his organisations with little to do but promote the official line; they failed in their role to champion new initiatives or push forward public opinion. Despite the fact that Eichelberger’s internationalist organisations were not representatives of official agencies, they often acted as if they were, willingly and knowingly assisting the government. As a result, they departed from the traditional pluralist role of independent interest groups, spending a disproportionate amount of time listening to the government instead of promoting their own views and policies to Washington.
Eichelberger and Roosevelt In order to play a significant part in ensuring the creation of the UN, Eichelberger courted and maintained a close relationship with the government throughout the Second World War. This was the primary reason why his internationalist organisations often seemed little more than propaganda outlets for the government. Perhaps the most significant element of this state–private connection was Eichelberger’s personal relationship with President Roosevelt. This developed through three personal meetings during the late 1930s, and continued through the war years with meetings in 1942, 1943 and 1944, along with frequent correspondence by mail, almost all initiated by Eichelberger. The meetings enabled Eichelberger to ‘see the evolution’ of Roosevelt’s thinking on international organisation, an evolution that undoubtedly affected his own views on what form the UN would eventually take.8 Indeed, the most striking aspect of Eichelberger’s meetings with Roosevelt was the nature of the exchanges. Where one might expect the leader of a private organisation to take advantage of such a meeting to pursue that organisation’s objectives, Eichelberger primarily used the appointments to listen and absorb the official line from the president. This was certainly the case in November 1942, when Eichelberger heard in considerable detail the president’s provisional plans for a future international organisation. For the first time in three years the internationalist leader had access to the president, and he took full advantage of the opportunity. In Eichelberger’s own words, ‘the comprehensiveness of his outline of plans for the future and the fact that he saw me when he was so busy, all indicate that he wanted me to be fully informed and was counting on our support’.9 Eichelberger listened as Roosevelt outlined his plan for the four policemen who would patrol and disarm the rest of the world, and he was equally interested in Roosevelt’s plans for the League of Nations. Much to Eichelberger’s relief, Roosevelt suggested retaining the successful autonomous organisations, such as the International Labor Organization 34
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and the League’s health organisation, and simply incorporating them into the new organisation. Nevertheless, Eichelberger was still concerned that the president had not given sufficient thought to the future of the World Court, and he later considered the need for an international economic organisation and a further executive council to tie all of the autonomous agencies together. However, he chose not to raise these issues at this meeting.10 In addition to listening to the president’s ideas on post-war planning, Eichelberger took the opportunity to ask for the president’s advice on the mobilisation of public opinion: how could he and the internationalists immediately set about winning the peace in the minds of the people? Roosevelt commented that in 1920 when promoting the League, he never spoke to the unconverted, spending most of his time addressing women’s groups, churches and internationalists. Eichelberger agreed that the internationalists spent too much time talking to each other, and that he was especially keen to speak with interest group leaders such as John L. Lewis of the Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO), William Green of the American Federation of Labor (AFL) and James Patton of the National Farmers Union. By building up a close network of interest groups, such as they had during the debates prior to Pearl Harbor, the internationalists could spearhead efforts to mobilise the maximum amount of public opinion, providing the appearance of a broad spectrum of support at the very least. At best, they could make a significant difference to the state of public opinion.11 Roosevelt agreed that the internationalists should make a special effort to mobilise support among groups not traditionally aligned behind internationalist policies and take advantage of all meetings to emphasise the importance of the role of the United States in a future world organisation. Roosevelt even suggested that he was prepared to send up some trial balloons to test the winds of public opinion, providing they were not attributed to him. Eichelberger eagerly replied that this was what the internationalists wanted to do. Indeed, this was the ultimate approval for Eichelberger. Largely in agreement with the president on provisional ideas regarding international organisation, the internationalists could go out and promote those ideas to the public knowing that they were the thoughts of the president, not abstract notions for a distant future. After almost a year of silence Eichelberger knew that he and the internationalists were moving in the right direction. No longer confined to vague statements, the internationalists could begin to make a difference to public opinion. However, Eichelberger was not prepared to do this without a degree of presidential approval.12 At the end of his conversation, and after having been given more time than he expected, Eichelberger brought up the question of the names of his organisations and of the future international organisation. Although 35
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Roosevelt was non-committal when Eichelberger hinted that the ‘United Nations’ might be the name of the new world body, he accepted that the old ‘League of Nations’ name might no longer prove effective in mobilising opinion. He also agreed that Eichelberger should recommend the LNA and CSOP work together under the new name ‘United Nations Association’, and with the name change approved by the president, a political action committee was quickly set up under this title.13 Eichelberger’s passivity, and his desire for advice and reassurance from Roosevelt, suggests that not only could the president count on the LNA for support, but that he could also afford to take the LNA for granted. Eichelberger and his organisation appeared willing and eager to support any White House initiatives that appeared at this early stage. At the end of 1942, it seems that the LNA relied on the government for legitimacy, while the government still had very little specific need for the LNA. Eichelberger’s October 1943 meeting with Roosevelt followed a similar pattern. Tellingly, Roosevelt asked, ‘Clark, what can you tell me’, to which Eichelberger responded that he had come to see what the president could tell him. After a brief discussion of Senate Resolutions, Eichelberger went on to inform the president of the promotional efforts of his organisations, highlighting that Congressional speaking tours had been arranged and cosponsored by the United Nations Association, a fact of which Roosevelt had been unaware. Eichelberger conceded that the current campaign was ‘not as dramatic’ as that of the CDAAA prior to Pearl Harbor because people were preoccupied with the ongoing war. However, the time had now come, following Congressional impetus, to make a more dramatic appeal to the nation.14 Regarding the battle for public opinion, Eichelberger openly admitted to the president that his organisations needed more money, but he also asked the president’s advice on the two-year-old question of finding a prominent chairman to act as a figurehead for the internationalist movement, ‘another William Allen White’. Roosevelt dismissed Eichelberger’s suggestions, which included Joseph Davies, Sumner Welles and Bernard Baruch, arguing that it needed to be a Midwesterner. His suggestion, Jimmie Lawrence of the Lincoln Star (Kansas), did not impress Eichelberger, who was clearly looking for a more prominent name. Roosevelt’s suggestion that Lawrence could be built up, and that Eichelberger could inform him of their conversation, did little to satisfy the internationalist leader, who did not follow up the suggestion and left the movement to continue without a prominent figurehead. This was perhaps the only issue during the war where Eichelberger did not follow Roosevelt’s advice.15 With regard to moving ahead of the government in terms of mobilising public opinion, Eichelberger asked if a trial balloon on the issue of an international police force would help. Despite his previous support for the idea of testing the wind, Roosevelt’s response was negative, not only because 36
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it was too soon, but also because the idea did not fit in with his future plans. Roosevelt was still thinking along the lines of the four policemen who would settle disputes with the help of smaller powers. What Roosevelt did highlight was the need to organise committees in small towns of 10,000 or less, and to focus on ordinary Americans, not just ‘wealth or highbrows’. Despite Eichelberger’s own interest in the idea, no trial balloon on the issue appeared from his organisations.16 Not only did Eichelberger fail to convince Roosevelt of the need to press ahead with post-war planning, but compared to the previous year, Eichelberger’s meeting with Roosevelt provided little in terms of direction for the internationalist movement. While the president was prepared to discuss some aspects of a future organisation, such as where it might be located or how often it might meet, no concrete future plans were discussed. Eichelberger later admitted this himself, commenting that he thought it was Roosevelt’s ‘habit to think something through and try it out on someone in whose views he had confidence’, a method of which that meeting had been a classic example.17 In October 1944, in the week following the conclusion of the Dumbarton Oaks conference, Eichelberger met with Roosevelt for the third and last time during the war. He had been looking forward to the meeting for weeks, not only in order to discuss the public opinion campaigns, but also to ensure that he was on the administration’s wavelength with regard to peace aims. However, with the Dumbarton Oaks proposals already on the table, he got little from the president that was not already in the public domain. Roosevelt did express an interest in the internationalist movement, asking if there were groups being organised and how the fundraising was going. Eichelberger explained that because of taxes there were two sets of organisations – the taxable political action groups such as Americans United, and the tax-free educational organisations including the CSOP and ‘the Association’, which would soon be changing its name. As for the budget, the groups were hoping for some big cheques from the Rockefellers and the Baruchs. Despite his interest however, Roosevelt was noncommittal about providing a letter of commendation.18 In fact, Roosevelt was non-committal about most issues, giving Eichelberger very little in terms of inside news apart from his gossipy comment that Churchill was ‘very meagrely prepared’ on the issue of international organisation. When asked if he had a solution to the troubling veto question, Roosevelt weakly stated that he wanted to include an agreement in the Charter so that no nation could change its frontiers at the expense of another. As for when the final conference would be held, Roosevelt conceded that it would not be held before January, but he could be no more specific (although he did admit that it would be called a preliminary in case the discussion ran into difficulty). Even the subject Eichelberger had been involved in the planning for – trusteeship – was glossed over quickly. Despite a subsequent letter 37
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urging Roosevelt to reiterate his views on trusteeships at a Foreign Policy Association speech, Eichelberger’s pleas were ignored.19 While Eichelberger could come away from the thirty-minute meeting with a strong sense of friendship with the president, he had made no real effort to influence Roosevelt’s thinking and had gained little of significance for the coming promotional campaign. Direction for the campaign had been provided by the release of the Dumbarton Oaks proposals. Also, Eichelberger neglected to ask the president’s advice regarding the debates within the internationalist movement over whether or not to support the proposals as they stood. Yet the significance of the meeting was that Eichelberger remained close to the president, and that he retained his confidence. The discussion had been friendly, longer than scheduled and had even veered away from the topic of the UN to discuss the imminent election. It was as if Roosevelt knew that he could count on Eichelberger for his solid and continued support, and this indeed would prove to be the case over the coming months.20 The records of the three Eichelberger/Roosevelt meetings during the war years seem more like briefings than anything else, with Eichelberger leaving the White House prepared to spread the president’s word. Eichelberger asked very little of the president, and was content merely to accept the information he was given. It was very much a case of ‘what can I do for the President’, rather than the other way around. While it is clear that Roosevelt shared Eichelberger’s desire to create a new international organisation, Eichelberger’s passivity only added to the impression that he was a government stooge.
Eichelberger and the State Department: post-war planning In addition to his rapport with Roosevelt, Eichelberger had a similarly close relationship with the State Department, and this was an even more significant factor in explaining the deference of his organisations. There were two separate aspects to his relationship with the Department. First, during 1942/43 he was directly involved in the policy-making process because he participated in State Department post-war planning. Secondly, in 1944/45, he worked closely with the Department to mobilise and develop public opinion behind the Dumbarton Oaks proposals for the new UN organisation. As official post-war planning began in 1942, Eichelberger was the only individual from a popular national organisation to be included in the State Department’s planning process. When the Department set up its Advisory Committee on post-war planning in 1942, Eichelberger was drafted in to join the international sub-committee led by Under-Secretary Sumner Welles. From July 1942 to June 1943, Eichelberger missed just two of the forty-five meetings of the sub-committee that also included six or seven State Department officials. By the time the 38
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sub-committee abruptly dissolved in 1943 with the resignation of Welles, it had created a draft constitution for a new international organisation. Eichelberger’s main individual contribution to the draft was to its section on trusteeships. This work played a significant part in the final US plans for the post-war world.21 As one historian has noted, Eichelberger was the only representative from the numerous foreign policy interest groups active before Pearl Harbor. Otherwise, membership of the State Department committees was exclusive, consisting of government insiders, with members of the Council on Foreign Relations particularly prevalent.22 Eichelberger was included for a number of reasons. He was especially close to Sumner Welles while Welles was Under-Secretary during 1942 and 1943, and it was Welles who brought Eichelberger into the official postwar planning process. Yet beyond this personal connection, the Roosevelt administration was fully aware of his decade and a half of knowledge and expertise gained in supporting the League of Nations, and this experience was deemed essential in helping to avoid the mistakes of that organisation. More importantly, however, Eichelberger had been a loyal supporter of the government in the months leading up to Pearl Harbor. Through his involvement in and leadership of the CDAAA, he had proven himself a useful ally in the fight against anti-interventionist forces, helping to manoeuvre public opinion behind Roosevelt and against opposition groups such as the America First Committee. As a liberal internationalist, sympathetic to the government’s aims, he was an ideal candidate to join the administration’s post-war planning bureaucracy. His loyalty was such that despite the privileged information Eichelberger worked with, he never abused his position within the official planning sphere. Throughout 1942 and 1943, Eichelberger was able to keep the details of the state separate from the private sphere. Even in his numerous speeches, press releases and radio addresses, he rarely even hinted at the secret details being worked out in the State Department.23 However, the line between the state and private spheres begins to blur when Eichelberger’s private organisations are considered. The closeness of the relationship between Eichelberger and the government would affect his actions, and therefore those of his organisations, during his time with the State Department and throughout the remainder of the war. Eichelberger’s intimate connections to the government, set up during 1942 and 1943, restrained the critical output of Eichelberger’s organisations for the next two years. The autonomy of his private organisations was restricted in two ways. First, the private autonomy of Eichelberger’s internationalist organisations was affected by the unprecedented access he received within the official planning process. After being so closely involved with that process, Eichelberger hoped to continue to remain close to the State Department, primarily because this was the best way to influence official policy. Eichelberger had learned during his year with the State Department that it 39
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was possible to play a significant role in the post-war planning process, even if this was on a personal rather than an organisational basis. By remaining close to the government, similar opportunities could arise. In addition, he believed that White House and State Department connections would enhance the credibility of his organisations without making them look like government stooges. The second reason was related to personal involvement and interest. Eichelberger was always going to be reluctant to criticise the proposals that he personally had played a part in drafting. While he might have been willing to do so if the post-war planning strategy had shifted following his departure, the planning procedure remained agreeable to him. While there were some minor quibbles that could be raised with the government’s plans, the official planning process went a considerable way towards creating Eichelberger’s dream: the involvement of the United States in an international organisation. This coincidence of views kept Eichelberger close to, and uncritical of, the Roosevelt administration for the remainder of the war. Indeed, Eichelberger used his organisations to promote the work of the State Department. He later admitted that his inside connections enabled him to ‘guide the combined educational programs of the organizations with which I was affiliated along the lines of State Department policy’.24 Admissions like this only added to the perception that Eichelberger and his organisations were merely State Department mouthpieces.
Eichelberger and the State Department: mobilising public opinion While Eichelberger stayed in frequent contact with the Department following the winding down of the Advisory Committee, the connections were greatly strengthened in 1944 after the Department set up the Division of Public Liaison. The Division was created to foster closer relations between the Department and private organisations, and the first issue it focused on was the Dumbarton Oaks proposals and the subsequent promotion of the UN. During the debates over the creation of the UN, Eichelberger followed the official line more closely than ever. A number of meetings between representatives of private organisations and the State Department took place in the autumn of 1944, and Eichelberger was at the heart of all of them. In addition to attending personally, his organisations sponsored most of the events, many of which were held at the State Department, thus strengthening the relationship between the two even further.25 To coordinate the promotion of the proposals, Eichelberger called a meeting in New York on 6 October, the day before the end of the Dumbarton Oaks conference. The State Department sent Richard Morin from the Division of Public Liaison to provide background material and to discuss how best to utilise such material. The meeting took place under the 40
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auspices of the CSOP, but all organisations were welcome. The aim was to plan ‘a tremendous co-ordinated campaign of popular education on the purport of the Dumbarton Oaks Agreements’. Morin expressed the Department’s pleasure at all of the support the groups were offering to the proposals and offered all possible help to interested organisations. From this point onwards, the Division of Public Liaison was to maintain close links with all interested internationalist organisations.26 The campaign behind the proposals began in earnest on 16 October with an unofficial background information session, arranged by the State Department through the CSOP and Americans United, for interested private groups, internationalist or otherwise. Despite the fact that the meeting was arranged by both the State Department and private organisations, only the latter took public credit for it to avoid the suggestion that it was little more than a government briefing or an opportunity for the State Department to promote official policy. Americans United chairman Ernest Hopkins officially requested the meeting on 7 October. Press reports subsequently reported the meeting as having been initiated by Americans United alone, and Hopkins said nothing during the event to dispute this.27 The network of private organisations invited to the meeting included such diverse groups as the American Bankers Association, the AFL, the Daughters of the American Revolution, Federal Union, the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), the American Jewish Committee, the National Catholic Welfare Conference and the American Library Association. The broad educational reach of these organisations offered a potentially vast amount of assistance to a State Department determined not to repeat the mistakes of 1919–20. For the internationalist movement to be able to bring, and indeed unite, all of these groups together represented a tremendously successful start to their campaign. Some doubt remained, however, as to how the campaign would progress, how closely the internationalist movement would continue to work with the Roosevelt administration and whether the various organisations would throw their unquestioning support behind the government’s proposals.28 During the debates over how best to promote the Dumbarton Oaks proposals to the public, a split grew in the internationalist movement. One group wished to alter the proposals, especially on issues such as voting rights. One reason these internationalists wanted openly to support changes was specifically to avoid being seen as mere stooges of the State Department.29 Unsurprisingly, Eichelberger led the wing of the movement wishing to endorse fully the existing proposals; following the government line was not a problem for him because he saw this as the best option for attaining success. It was Eichelberger who personally informed the State Department of the potentially threatening divisions within the movement, effectively acting as a mole for the Department. After one internationalist 41
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meeting in October, he went so far as to call Ben Gerig at the State Department to inform him that some internationalist leaders were proposing changes to the Dumbarton Oaks proposals. A few days later he left with the Department copies of a resolution by Americans United that was merely lukewarm in its support of the Dumbarton Oaks proposals, enabling Under-Secretary Stettinius to see them before a planned meeting with the organization’s leader, Ernest Hopkins. It was noted by the State Department that neither Hopkins nor anyone else should be told who had provided this information for fear of compromising Eichelberger’s position. Eichelberger’s proximity to the State Department, however, did not go unnoticed. Hopkins later noted that Eichelberger irritated fellow organisations’ members through ‘the categorical assertion on his part of knowing the mind of the State Department at all times in regard to all matters’.30 Eichelberger’s close relationship with the Department during the debates over the UN culminated in his presence at the 1945 San Francisco conference as a consultant to the American delegation.31 It could of course be argued that, given his support for the UN, Eichelberger was bound to fall in line with the Roosevelt administration. However, there were a number of instances during the war when Eichelberger was unhappy with the progress of post-war planning, yet at no time did Eichelberger or his organisations come out and openly criticise the government. If there was a problem, it was taken directly to officials behind closed doors. For example, the first months of 1944 saw almost no discussion of international organisation or the future peace by the Roosevelt administration. Eichelberger, who had staunchly supported the president throughout the war, became privately frustrated with the delay in concrete proposals. Yet although he privately urged the president to create the UN immediately, and although he expressed his frustration to Sumner Welles, he did not openly challenge the government, criticising only those who called for a cooling off period between the end of the war and the creation of the UN.32 Similarly, when discussing possible changes to the Dumbarton Oaks proposals with internationalist leaders, Eichelberger urged that any requests for revisions be given privately to the State Department, rather than announced publicly. This would avoid giving the impression to both the government and the public that the internationalist organisations were less than wholehearted in their support for the government’s plans. This lack of critical comment from the private organisations also contributed to the perception of Eichelberger as a government stooge.33
Conclusion Although there is no evidence that the internationalist organisations of Clark Eichelberger were fronts for the government, there is no question that they could be and were in fact perceived as such. John Pearmain 42
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was not the only person to notice the close links between internationalist organisations and the government. One anonymous internationalist at the end of 1944 questioned the relationship of private groups to official agencies. He asked if the movement had ‘lost its freedom of status? Has it tended to become associated with official diplomacy or not?’ The man in question was concerned with how frank State Department officials were prepared to be, even during off-the-record discussions. How, he asked, could the internationalist organisations be entirely certain of the future policy of the State Department? They needed, he argued, to maintain their independence and their critical role.34 This begs the questions however: did it matter during the war years? Would it have made any difference if Eichelberger had been critical of the Roosevelt administration and pushed for a stronger UN organisation? In many respects, during the war years, the answer is probably no, but this is hardly surprising. After all, and particularly with regard to the creation of the UN, Eichelberger’s ambitions were realised. His involvement in both official post-war planning and the promotion of the UN could hardly have been more successful. Yet as we have seen, it certainly did matter to many within the internationalist movement who felt that Eichelberger was too close to the government and that private individuals and organisations needed to keep a critical distance. Eichelberger’s personal style certainly alienated fellow internationalists who felt he was difficult if not impossible to work with, and his unwillingness to criticise the Roosevelt and Truman administrations contributed to the ill feeling and lack of unity within the movement itself. While Eichelberger clearly felt that a close relationship with the government was the best way the organisations with which he was involved could contribute to the creation of the UN, there is no doubt that they lost a great deal of credibility as a result. Eichelberger took a long-term, gradual approach, and as a pragmatic political activist first, internationalist ideologue second, he was willing to compromise his principles in order to support proposals that were more viable politically. But it is difficult to overlook the ease with which he lent his almost unquestioning support to the government. A further notable and contradictory example of this came after the war in 1947. At the same time as the AAUN was denouncing US foreign policy for continually bypassing the UN, with special regard to the Marshall Plan, Eichelberger was helping to create the Committee for the Marshall Plan in conjunction with Alger Hiss and State Department officials.35 Perhaps it comes down to what we expect from private organisations; to the question of what their function in fact is. In the light of recent studies of the Cold War years that have revealed direct links between the government and private organisations, the reassessment of state–private relationships no longer rests upon accusations of conspiracy. Although he 43
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perhaps went too far, liberals such as John Pearmain were asking the right questions. And while Eichelberger is innocent of the charge of stooge, he can certainly be accused of losing his critical awareness during the war years and of sacrificing principle for political influence. Even though he shared the larger aim of the creation of the UN, he held back comment and criticism in other respects in return for influence. That said, this influence would wane as US interests shifted in the early years of the Cold War. The fact that Eichelberger’s influence would wane further demonstrates the government’s dominant role in this state–private relationship and highlights some of the challenges in viewing the US government as anything other than a strong state, even if Eichelberger was truly filled with ‘state spirit’. The shared aim of creating the UN and the close personal contact between Eichelberger and the government ended in 1945, as did any pretence of equality in the relationship. There were two key aspects to the change, the most important of which was the change in the international climate as the UN rapidly faded in significance as a tool of diplomacy for the US government. While US foreign policy may have been successfully reoriented away from isolationism or non-intervention, the resulting internationalism was certainly not the multilateral ideal of the private internationalist movement. The other key change was on a personal level, with Eichelberger unable to strike up a close relationship with Harry Truman and his connections with the State Department no longer at such high levels. There is no question that the government took full advantage of Eichelberger’s eagerness to support its proposals during the war. Yet it should be noted that the relationship was predicated on the willingness of Eichelberger and the private organisations to go along with the government, not on state infiltration into the private sphere. Roosevelt was happy to use the organisations as an informal test of public opinion, safe in the knowledge that Eichelberger was right behind him with regard to the bigger picture – the creation of the UN. Similarly, the State Department took great advantage of Eichelberger’s organisational capabilities and his numerous contacts within the internationalist movement. It was the government that ultimately dictated the terms, and the relationship was close only as long as the state desired it to be. While there is clearly cooperation during this period, there is little doubt that it was the state which was firmly in charge of this particular relationship.
Notes and bibliography 1 2
Pearmain to Welles, 19 June 1946, box 120, Sumner Welles papers, Franklin D. Roosevelt Library, Hyde Park, New York (hereafter Welles papers); Welles to Pearmain, 1 July 1946, box 120, Welles papers. Pearmain to Welles, 4 October 1948, box 135, Welles papers; Pearmain to Welles, 9 October 1948, box 135, Welles papers.
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3 Welles to Pearmain, 30 October 1948, box 135, Welles papers. 4 See E. J. Eisenach, The Lost Promise of Progressivism (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 1994); I. Parmar, ‘The Carnegie Corporation and the Mobilisation of Opinion in the United States’ Rise to Globalism, 1939–45’, Minerva, 37 (1999), pp. 355–6. 5 I. Parmar, Think Tanks and Power in Foreign Policy: A Comparative Study of the Role and Influence of the Council on Foreign Relations and the Royal Institute of International Affairs, 1939–1945 (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2004), pp. 18–19. 6 See D. Robins, Experiment In Democracy (New York: Parkside Press, 1971); R. A. Divine, Second Chance: The Triumph of Internationalism in America during World War II (New York: Atheneum, 1967); T. Hoopes and D. Brinkley, FDR and the Creation of the UN (London: Yale University Press, 1997); S. C. Schlesinger, Act of Creation: The Founding of the United Nations (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 2003). 7 See C. Eichelberger, Organizing for Peace (New York: Harper & Row, 1977); Hopkins to Fosdick, 18 December 1944, box 4, folder 18, Hugh Moore Fund Collection, Princeton, NJ (hereafter HMFC). 8 Eichelberger, Organizing for Peace, p. 225. 9 Eichelberger report on 13 November 1942 meeting with Roosevelt, 19 November 1942, box 198, Interviews with FDR folder, Clark Eichelberger papers, New York Public Library, New York (hereafter Eichelberger papers). 10 Ibid. 11 Ibid. 12 Ibid. 13 Ibid. 14 Eichelberger report on 25 October 1943 meeting with Roosevelt, box 198, Interviews with FDR folder, Eichelberger papers; Eichelberger, Organizing for Peace, pp. 242–4. 15 Ibid. 16 Ibid. 17 Ibid. 18 Eichelberger report on 12 October 1944 meeting with Roosevelt, box 198, Interviews with FDR folder, Eichelberger papers. 19 Ibid.; Eichelberger to Roosevelt, 17 October 1944, PPF 1820, Franklin D. Roosevelt papers, Franklin D. Roosevelt Library, Hyde Park, New York (hereafter FDR papers). 20 Eichelberger report on 12 October 1944 meeting with Roosevelt, box 198, Interviews with FDR folder, Eichelberger papers. 21 Eichelberger, Organizing for Peace, pp. 195–208; PIO minutes, box 85, Records of Harley A. Notter, General Records of the Department of State, RG 59, National Archives, Washington DC (hereafter NA). 22 L. Gordenker, ‘American Post-war Planning: Policy Elites and the New Deal’, in R. A. Garson and S. Kidd (eds), The Roosevelt Years (Edinburgh University Press, 1999), pp. 179–81. 23 For details of Eichelberger’s involvement in the CDAAA, see A. E. Johnstone, ‘Private Interest Groups and the Lend-Lease Debate, 1940–1941’ (MPhil, University of Birmingham, 1999). 24 Eichelberger, Organizing for Peace, p. 197. 25 The most detailed account of the promotion of the Dumbarton Oaks proposals can be found in Robins, Experiment In Democracy. 26 Ibid., pp. 40–2, 179. 27 Ibid., pp. 39–44.
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28 Ibid., pp. 44–5. 29 Records relating to the Dumbarton Oaks conversations 1944, Records of Harley Notter, General Records of the Department of State, RG 59, NA. 30 Hopkins to Dickey, 31 October 1944, Folder: Dumbarton Oaks general, Records relating to Public Affairs Activities 1944–65, RG 59, NA. 31 Gerig memorandum, 27 October 1944, Records relating to the Dumbarton Oaks conversations 1944, Records of Harley Notter, General Records of the Department of State, RG 59, NA; Morin memorandum, 1 November 1944, Records relating to the Dumbarton Oaks conversations 1944, Records of Harley Notter, General Records of the Department of State, RG 59, NA. 32 Eichelberger to Roosevelt, 19 June 1944, OF 4725, FDR papers; Eichelberger to Welles, 29 March 1944, box 98, Welles papers. 33 Minutes of meeting with representatives of Americans United, 14 November 1944, Folder: Meetings with representatives of Americans United, Records relating to the Dumbarton Oaks conversations 1944, Records of Harley Notter, General Records of the Department of State, RG 59, NA. 34 Letter to Ulric Bell, unsigned, 15 December 1944, 111.12 MacLeish, Archibald/1–2045, Decimal File, General Records of the Department of State, RG 59, NA. 35 Opinion and Activities of American Private Organisations and Groups, No. 97, 1 August 1947, Records Relating to Public Affairs Activities, MLR 5052, 150/68/07/03, General Records of the Department of State, RG 59, NA; M. Wala, The Council on Foreign Relations and American Foreign Relations in the Early Cold War (Providence, RI: Berghahn Books, 1994), pp. 190–3.
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3 THE IMPORTANCE OF BEING (IN) EARNEST Voluntary associations and the irony of the state–private network during the early Cold War
Helen Laville
This chapter traces the genealogy of the state–private network between the US government and voluntary associations during the early Cold War. Using women’s voluntary associations as a case study, the chapter establishes the ideological importance of the voluntary tradition as a key component of American exceptionalism. Women’s voluntary associations sought to export their model of democratic participation in the post-war world. In this endeavour they were encouraged and aided by the government, which shared their understanding of the ideological importance of private voluntary activities as a defining characteristic of American ideology. This first stage of the state–private network can be described as ‘supportive’, because both the US government and voluntary associations shared a similar ideological framework and worked independently towards the same goal. The aftermath of the Second World War saw the emergence of two factors that pushed the government and the voluntary association into a closer, ‘cooperative’ relationship. First, on a logistical level the mechanics and tradition of cooperation between the voluntary sector and the government, which had intensified massively during the war, continued into the post-war world. Second, on an ideological level the importance of the participation and cooperation of voluntary associations in the propaganda campaigns of their government became increasingly important in the face of the coercive and repressive model of both totalitarian and authoritarian regimes. This ideological weighting of the ‘private’ contribution became particularly acute in the face of a propaganda campaign waged by the Soviet Union in the international non-governmental arena. The implicit value of the active and freely offered participation of voluntary associations 47
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assumed great weight as a demonstration of the freedom and the active political, social and cultural lives offered to citizens by American-style democracy. The more the leaders of voluntary associations worked with the US government under the cooperative model of the state–private network, the less important the divisions between what was private and what was state became to them. Increasingly concerned about the activities of the Soviet Union, the leaders of the associations became ever more determined to lend their aid to the US government in whatever way they could. The outcome was a failure to recognise or respect the importance of their status as representatives of private groups rather than as employees of the State Department – they ‘went native’. At the very same time the divisions between private and state were becoming increasingly blurred, the ideological importance of maintaining those boundaries was becoming increasingly important. In the face of the propaganda campaigns being waged by the Soviet Union in the nongovernmental area, it was vital to the US government that the United States itself had active groups, not linked to the government, to represent private American life, willing and eager to counter the Soviet claims. So pressing was this need for an active international private sphere that it produced the ultimate irony: the government–private network. In order to secure a strong and active ‘private’ sphere, the government co-opted it, undermining the very ‘private’ status that made it so important in the first place.
‘A Nation of Joiners’: the voluntary ethic and American exceptionalism As early as 1835 Alexis de Tocqueville had seen the voluntary ethic as a defining principle in American society, noting ‘the American penchant for turning to voluntary actions as a solution to social, political and personal problems’ and asserting: Americans of all ages, all stations of life, and all types of disposition are forever forming associations. . . . In democratic countries knowledge of how to combine is the mother of all other forms of knowledge; on its progress depends that of all the others.1 In more recent times the function of the voluntary association as a vital component of American democracy became increasingly idealised as a result of the rise of totalitarian regimes and authoritarian states. In his 1944 article, ‘The Biography of a Nation of Joiners’, Arthur Schlesinger Sr pointed to the repression of private associations in totalitarian states as proof that they contained some essence of liberty. Schlesinger argued, 48
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It was with calculated foresight that the Axis dictators insured their rise to power by repressing or abolishing political, religious, labor, and other voluntary groups. They dared not tolerate those guardians of the people’s liberties . . . [who] were among the earliest causalities of the totalitarian system.2 Just as fascist regimes could be recognised by their repression of voluntary association, in the post-war years Americans pointed to the same repression of voluntary associations in the Soviet Union as evidence of its tyrannical nature. ‘100 things you should know about Communism’, a booklet produced by the House Committee on Un-American Activities (HUAC), noted: William Z. Foster, the head of the Communists in the United States, says: ‘Under the dictatorship all capitalist parties – Republican, Democratic, Progressive, Socialists etc. – will be liquidated, the Communist Party functioning alone as the Party of the toiling masses. Likewise will be dissolved all other organizations that are political props of the bourgeois rule, including chambers of commerce, employers’ associations, Rotary Clubs, American Legion, YMCA and such fraternal orders as the Masons, Odd Fellows, Elks, Knights of Columbus etc.3 Moreover, the voluntary ideal also offered itself as a training ground in democratic practice for newly enfranchised citizens and newly created nationstates. Edward Shils, in his 1962 study Political Developments in the New States, deplored the lack of voluntary associations in states formed after the Second World War, arguing that in their absence ‘strong attachments to kinship, caste and local territorial groups’ were allowed to exercise undue influence, working against the development of democratic practice.4 The efforts of voluntary associations to export their practices and example as a central ingredient of American democracy must be recognised as having a missionary zeal. Voluntary associations, representing the spirit of cooperation, consensus and community, were a central ideological component of post-war American exceptionalism. Americans hoped that the promotion of the voluntary association as a key building block of democracy, a practice that had proved so successful in their own historical experience, could be exported to other nations. This self-righteous confidence motivated many American organisations enthusiastically to construct a call to ideological arms, a move that necessitated their active involvement in international affairs. American women’s voluntary associations had a particular interest in the exportation of the American voluntary association model. American women understood their role to be that of teacher or leader to women 49
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elsewhere. In nations where women had been newly enfranchised, often as a result of the war, American women believed they had an obligation to instruct and guide. The Journal of the American Association of University Women (AAUW) reported in a 1948 article, ‘SOS from Korean, Japanese Women’, ‘Visitors to our headquarters emphasized the fact that women with whom they work do not know what to do with their newly won freedom. They look to American women for aid and suggestion’.5 Moreover, American women also had a leadership role to play in nations such as Germany and Italy, where, whilst women had been enfranchised before the war, repressive fascist regimes had denied them any role, depriving them of democratic experience. In an application for funding for their work in Germany, the League of Women Voters (LWV) explained, ‘Though women in Germany had the vote for many years before the rise of Nazism, they suffered the set-back of being relegated to subservient domesticity. . . . Many were so intimidated that they are still terrified of putting their name on any list’.6 Secure in their fervent belief in the superiority of the American voluntary association model, American women’s organisations launched themselves into international work. In 1946–47 the AAUW funded 33 women from Europe on year-long study grants. The Journal of the AAUW explained that the purpose of the programme was ‘to bring women from countries that have suffered from the devastation of war to the US for study, to help them to take part in rebuilding their own countries and to give them first-hand knowledge of the US’.7 The Young Women’s Christian Association (YWCA) launched a reconstruction programme in 1946, raising $2,244,470 by 1949. The programme asserted: In many countries . . . women are unprepared for the new tasks thrust upon them. The ways of democracy mystify young women reared under the blight of totalitarianism. Women of foreign countries will shape their own destinies. In this time of world flux they need help and advice. It is natural for them to turn to the women of the United States, the most privileged and the most advanced in the world. It is also natural for them to turn especially to the YWCA, pioneers in helping women to help themselves.8 A YWCA pamphlet explained the importance of the fund: ‘Americans are eager to tell the story of our conception of democracy. . . . The educational programme of the YWCA can help build international understanding’.9 The LWV launched a similar programme in 1947, named after their longserving president, Carrie Chapman Catt. The aim of the programme was described as ‘acquainting women of other countries, especially those newly enfranchised, with democratic methods of stimulating more effective citizen participation in government’.10 50
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The supportive stage of the state–private network can be seen as an expression of buoyant and confident American exceptionalism. The leaders of American voluntary associations sought to publicise and spread their importance to American democracy. Like religion, economic systems and political practices, the voluntary association was an important part of American exceptionalism, and the disciples of the voluntarist creed were evangelical in their international efforts.
The cooperative model Whilst these efforts on the part of women’s associations clearly shared an ideology of American exceptionalism and superiority with the US government, they were financially and logistically independent from it. That said, at this time they were also involved in a relationship of cooperation with the government, one characterised by a shared ideological worldview and a pooling of logistical resources. These cooperative efforts were in part a continuation of wartime cooperation. Under the pressure of war, the division between private and state efforts are rendered less significant, as the efforts of every sector of the nation – government, private groups and the individual – are focused on the same goal. Where patterns and habits of cooperation had sprung up, they continued to be exploited by the government, even after the immediate crisis of war had passed. Sociologist Grant McConnell has argued that whilst the blurring of the distinction between the private and public sphere ‘has been most visible – and most extensive – in wartime . . . it should be clear that it has continued in other times as well, albeit more loosely and less conspicuously’.11 Post-war Germany was perhaps the largest example of the cooperation model of the state–private network. The occupation of West Germany gave American work there a continuing military purpose and mission. In its efforts to recreate West Germany as a democratic state, the US government called upon the cooperation of private women’s groups. Their participation was directed through a range of speaking tours, women’s conferences, educational programmes and exchange programmes. Under the Office of Military Government (OMGUS) and the High Commission for Germany (HICOG), a total of 800 German women visited the United States, their trips being sponsored by private organisations such as the LWV, the AAUW, the National Council of Negro Women, the National Council of Catholic Women and the YWCA.12 The programme represented a sharing of resources between the US government and the private women’s organisations whereby the government provided administrative aid and financial backing whilst the women’s organisation offered hospitality and an education in the important role of voluntary associations in American life. The Women’s Bureau of the Department 51
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of Labor, which coordinated the programme, explained in its ‘Suggestions to Sponsors’ note to participating American women’s organisations: These women are brought to the United States in order that they may have a broad and sympathetic understanding of American life, culture and ideals, that they may learn about non-governmental organisations and how to adopt the knowledge and experience gained here to their important task of contributing to the development of Germany as a democratic state.13 Whilst the US government facilitated these programmes, at times soliciting the contribution of private groups and individuals, both the government and the private groups involved emphasised that these were not government-run programmes. At this stage in the developing government–private network, the importance of being in earnest was such that both the government and the voluntary associations were vigilant in policing the boundary between official and private. William K. Hitchcock, Assistant Secretary for Educational and Cultural Affairs at the US Department of State, acknowledged that the exchange programme was contingent upon the participation of private groups, asserting: ‘The Department-sponsored program has been dependent from the outset on a solid and enthusiastic partnership with a large body of private organizations and citizens too numerous to count’.14 The participation of private groups served as a tangible demonstration of the spirit of cooperation and freedom that lay at the heart of American democracy. The participation of private groups allowed the programme to describe itself as ‘state-sponsored’ rather than ‘state-run’. This important distinction meant that the education and information received by the visitor seemed more authentic and less tainted by suggestions of propaganda than that offered by an entirely state-run effort. The cooperative relationship between private groups and the state in West Germany was greatly facilitated by the military occupation there, which lent the state–private relationship a form of military legitimacy. However, post-war reconstruction was not the only reason for the growing importance of the state–private network. The emergence of what has been described as ‘public diplomacy’ created a growing awareness within the US government of the need to involve private groups in international relations. In the ever-expanding world of public diplomacy, the US government initially sought to exploit the logistical and financial resources of private groups. In writing to solicit the cooperation of Anna Lord Strauss, President of the LWV, for the People-to-People programme, President Eisenhower stressed the logistical enormity of the demands of public diplomacy: 52
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There will never be enough diplomats and information officers at work in the world to get the job done without help from the rest of us. Indeed if American Ideology is eventually to win out in the great struggle being waged between the two opposing ways of life, it must have the active support of thousands of independent private groups and institutions and of millions of individual Americans acting through person-to-person communications in foreign lands.15 The role of the government in this relationship would be to facilitate, educate and guide the work of its private partners. A course offered to participants in Eisenhower’s People-to-People programme, held in April 1957, demonstrated this. Held at the International Conference Suite of the US Information Agency (USIA) in Washington and uncompromisingly titled, ‘World Ideological Conflict’, the course aimed to extend the training and resources available to government employees, to private individuals and to groups cooperating with their government in the provision of public diplomacy. The course materials assured participants they were being offered: . . . a unique opportunity to broaden their knowledge of U.S. Foreign Relations and to consider how they and the committees with which they are working may more effectively combat international communism, further American foreign policy objectives and protect their own individual interests through positive contributions to international understanding and goodwill.16 Whilst the course did not offer any specific foreign policy objectives, it certainly can be seen as an effort by the government to ensure that it and its private partners were singing from the same hymn sheet. The government’s conception of this manifestation of the public–private network, as demonstrated in the People-to-People programme, clearly saw the relationship between the state and private participants as being one of cooperation, rather than co-option. Recognising that the field of public diplomacy demanded the participations of millions of Americans rather than merely those employed in the field of foreign relations by their government, People-to-People was an effort to facilitate and direct purposefully private participation. Indeed, the very title of the programme, ‘People-to-People’, suggests that its aim was to minimize the involvement of the government so as to allow direct contact between peoples of different nations. Ironically, in the light of later financial relationships, the government may initially have been seeking to exploit the economic resources it assumed lay waiting somewhere in the vaults of the voluntary sector. A 53
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1947 government estimate put the collective annual budget of voluntary agencies at over $200 million.17 Access to such funding was undoubtedly attractive to the division of the government that had to fight constantly to secure its own budget. The Head of the Office of Policy Coordination (OPC), Frank Wisner, explained frankly: ‘It is essential to secure the overt cooperation of people with conspicuous access to wealth in their own right’.18 However, private individuals and groups proved singularly unwilling to underwrite the efforts of People-to-People, viewing the lack of government funding for the project as indicating a lack of confidence in the undertaking. In 1958 Charles Wilson, President of the People-toPeople foundation, wrote to the Trustees complaining: ‘My inquiries among the members of the financial community indicate a decided reluctance to support the Foundation until the government shows its own confidence in the project with substantial initial financial backing’.19 Any suggestion that the government should financially underwrite the state–private network in a more substantial fashion was met however with a decisive refusal from Eisenhower, who explained to Wilson: In discovering and developing the right structure for [the] Peopleto-People project, there is no alternative to preserving efforts of the kind you are making – all based on the principle that this must be a truly private effort, with governmental ties limited to liaison only, but with a constant readiness on the part of my associates and myself to help in any legitimate way we can.20
The limitations of the cooperative model This genealogy of the state–private network traces a growth in the international activities of American voluntary associations in the immediate aftermath of the Second World War. Growth was encouraged from two directions. First, the organisations themselves were inspired by a sense of international purpose and the missionary zeal of American exceptionalism. Second, the US government recognised that rapid developments in the international communications network, together with a growing distrust of pronouncements and information issued by state agencies, meant that private groups such as labour groups, private industry and business and voluntary associations had a vital role to play in the growing field of what has been termed ‘public diplomacy’. The supportive and cooperative stages of the state–private network may have sufficed to offer an outlet for the international interests of the leaders of voluntary associations, and to produce enough pro-American statements, campaigns and programmes to convince neutral foreigners that American citizens were enthusiastic supporters of their government. However, the limitations and restrictions of the overt state–private network were to become 54
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painfully apparent to both the US government and the leaders of voluntary associations themselves under the pressure of the ‘peace offensive’ launched through the medium of the Soviet Union’s very own state–private network. The well-publicised campaigns of the Soviet Union to label the US a warmonger and to assert its own devotion to the cause of peace took place on two fronts. First, the USSR used ‘official’ diplomatic channels constantly to press its accusations that the USA was careless of, if not actively working against, world peace. Second, the Soviet Union sponsored a range of events such as conferences, publications and festivals in which ostensibly ‘private’ groups – students, artists, women, intellectuals and labour groups – denounced the US government as a warmonger. The US government firmly believed that these events were directed, manipulated, promoted and funded by the Soviet government, operating through various ‘front’ private organisations. In the case of women’s organisations, the Soviet offensive was headed by the Women’s International Democratic Federation (WIDF). Through international conferences of women, beginning with the 1945 Paris conference called by the Union des Femmes Françaises, a subsidiary of the French Communist Party, and through the publication and dissemination of its journal Women of the Whole World, the WIDF attempted to convince women across the world that the Soviet Union sought to make life fairer and better for women, whilst the United States did little to ease the burden of women and sought to destroy their families and the lives of their children with its relentless warmongering. The Women’s Bureau of the Department of Labor first became suspicious of a Soviet propaganda campaign specifically aimed at women and women’s organisations through their work in post-war occupied Germany. As the Women’s Affairs Section of the OMGUS noted in their report for the period July to December 1949: In this formative period of the new Germany, women’s organizations merit careful consideration as they are of important political potential. They may be developed as a democratic force or used as an effective instrument for propaganda. There is evidence of systematic efforts from the Eastern Zone to undermine the Western German state by appealing to certain women’s organizations through slogans of peace and unity and condemning the division of Western Germany.21 This concern intensified with the Women’s International Day celebrations held in Berlin on 8 March 1951. By that year the Bureau had labelled the efforts of the WIDF as a concerted, deliberate and well-planned propaganda campaign. In particular, the Bureau was concerned about the 55
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WIDF’s efforts to disseminate their report ‘Korea: We Accuse’, which claimed to have uncovered the use of chemical weapons by the United States in Korea. Mary Cannon, Chief of the International Division of the Bureau, alerted the State Department to the campaign, informing it: The United States Women’s Bureau is concerned that such a distorted picture of America’s character is being circulated to women’s organizations and leaders throughout the world. . . . This kind of propaganda will probably be an effective weapon in gaining support among women for the Communist ‘peace offensive’.22 Convinced that the Soviet Union was intent on influencing world opinion through a structure of ‘front’ organisations, the US government found itself completely lacking in the strategic ability to thwart the campaign. Attempts to exert state power in response to the activities of ostensibly private groups and individuals failed miserably. Whilst the claims of Soviet officials and politicians that the US was warmongering or was engaged in chemical warfare could be met by denials and counter-accusations by US officials and politicians, the activities and assertions of groups that represented themselves as being non-governmental were more difficult to counter. A case in point is that of Lily Waechter, a German woman who had been invited to speak by the WIDF at the World Peace Conference in London in 1951. Waechter had been a representative on the WIDF Commission that had visited Korea and was scheduled to address the Berlin Conference on the topic. In order to prevent her appearance at the Conference, the US occupation authorities in West Germany arrested her, sparking protests in her hometown. The US government’s strategy with Waechter was similar to that demonstrated by its denial of entry into the US of twelve individuals, including Pablo Picasso and the Dean of Canterbury, who were planning to attend the World Congress of Partisans for World Peace in March 1950. Both cases demonstrated the difficulties that the US government faced in attempting to counter what it perceived as activities detrimental to US Cold War aims carried out by ostensibly private, non-state individuals or organisations. In both instances the strategy looked heavy-handed and repressive, as the enormous coercive power and authority of the government was pitted against the actions of private individuals. Rather than engage with the hostile accusations of non-governmental groups, the US government called upon the participation of private groups with whom it shared a history of cooperation and a shared sense of purpose and ideological outlook. The government recognised that, because the Soviet peace offensive was being carried out by, through and for ostensibly private groups, the American response must similarly come from private groups, rather than official channels. 56
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This strategy can be clearly seen in the response of the US government to the ‘Korea: We Accuse’ report. Initially elements within the government sought to deal with the WIDF accusations through the cooperative framework, encouraging and facilitating the activities of American women’s associations. Doris Cochrane of the Division of Public Liaison in the State Department wrote to Mr Fierst, head of the private, non-governmental United Nations Association, encouraging his organisation to respond. Specifically, she suggested that the response to the WIDF report should come from American women’s organisations: Do you think it would be helpful for some women’s organizations to issue comments on the WIDF report? It is possible that one or more of the other organizations which has consultative status with the Economic and Social Commission might be interested in preparing statements on the WIDF report – or that the American Secretary of one of these international organizations might take the initiative.23 The willingness of American women’s associations to undertake this mission should not be doubted. As missionaries and fervent disciples of the voluntary and private ethic, the leaders of such associations were horrified by the activities and claims of the WIDF. The claims of that organisation to represent ‘women’ and to speak for private citizens rather than a government were seen by American women as nothing less than blasphemy against the private association creed. Leaders of women’s associations shared their government’s fears that Soviet agencies were attempting to appropriate the network of international women’s associations and, through appeals based on the issues of women’s rights and peace, claim the ‘natural’ loyalties and allegiance of women the world over. A report by the National Council of Women entitled ‘Information on the Communist-dominated WIDF’ asserted: the organization directs its appeal to women by championing Child Welfare, Peace and Women’s Rights. The implication is that the USSR and other communist countries are the originators and sole supporters of these causes, which in fact have long been the active concern of the free world.24 The indignation of the leaders of American women’s voluntary associations at the activities of the WIDF was compounded by their belief that, whilst purporting to represent ‘women’ and to be a private voluntary group, the WIDF was in fact directed and funded by the Soviet government. The propaganda battle between the Soviet Union and the USA on the battlefield of private organisations, networks and conferences was an 57
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unequal one. The voluntary associations of the United States, authentically private groups, genuinely and freely inspired to defend their country, struggled for adequate funding, whilst the communist groups, despite claiming to be private groups, were in fact front organisations, directed, and more gallingly still, funded by their government. Rose Parsons complained in a letter to her friend Eleanor Roosevelt: This whole problem of finances is very bothersome to me because we, in the voluntary agencies in this country, especially the women’s organisations, spend at least half our time trying to raise money, whereas the communist women have only to put out their hand and money is poured in from the government. This, of course, is why they can so easily do such a terrific propaganda job.25 Indeed, the records of women’s associations bear out Parsons’ complaint, with file after file demonstrating the time-consuming business of raising funds. Applying for grants from organisations such as the Ford Foundation, collecting membership dues, campaigning for an allocation of national subscription to be devoted to international efforts, organising and promoting fund-raising events or special appeals, careful budgeting so as to squeeze as much benefit as possible from every last penny, all these activities took up a great deal of time, effort and energy which could, Parsons argued, be expended more usefully in waging an information campaign.
The co-opted stage The growing awareness among both the voluntary associations and the US government of the limitations of the ‘cooperating’ stage of the state–private network therefore led to the development of closer links, and what may be defined as the ‘co-opted’ stage. There were two defining characteristics to this stage. First, the government sought to secure the benefits of the state–private relationship, offering financial underwriting for the efforts of private groups. Second, elements of the relationship were, for the first time, covert. That is to say, whilst in its previous manifestations the details of the working of the state–private network were overt and a matter of public record, in this co-opted stage, the financial support of the state for the private groups was carried out in secret, money being filtered through the CIA and a network of genuine foundations and fronts that, even today, are difficult for the historian to expose in full. The Committee of Correspondence (CoC) serves as an example of the co-opted stage of the state–private network. The impetus for this group stemmed from the determination of Rose Parsons to counter the WIDF ‘Korea: We Accuse’ campaign, and it is through studying her role that we can see the network of links between the US government and the leaders 58
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of American women’s associations. During the Second World War Parsons had worked with the US government in her capacity as American Regional Director of the Red Cross. After the war she demonstrated her own desire to work on the international scene in order to promote American ideals and counter-act Soviet propaganda campaigns. Parsons had been heavily involved in the National Council of Women, specifically with their campaign to identify and counter-act communist propaganda campaigns within women’s organisations. In April 1952 Parsons called a meeting in her New York apartment of leaders of prominent women’s voluntary associations. At the meeting she presented a report: ‘What steps should be taken to rally the women of the Free World to counter-act Communist propaganda’. The report spoke to the genuine resentment of American women towards Soviet propaganda campaigns, specifically their claims to emanate from private citizens and groups. She described the ‘intensive propaganda campaign which is being waged by Communists’, pointing out ‘that women of the free world are for the most part unaware of these tactics’. She accused the communists of ‘holding large conferences, organizing letter-writing campaigns, and using other mass communications media which in many cases appeared above reproach on the surface, yet were really only clever disguises for their communist aims’.26 Parsons had confided her plans for the women’s committee to her friend Dorothy Bauman, a freelance journalist who had also served as a consultant to the US State Department and who had drafted a plan for the CIA aimed at countering communist propaganda targeted at women. Bauman’s plan envisaged ‘a group of very competent women who would form a nucleus and then start doing some constructive work with women’.27 Parsons’ Committee of Correspondence became this group. With financial backing from the CIA, the CoC became in effect a propaganda unit, advising women across the globe of the inaccuracies of Soviet ‘information’ regarding the United States and offering their own account of the relative benefits of the US and Soviet systems for women.28 The CoC represents the inevitable final phase of the state–private network during the early Cold War and demonstrates the irony of the coopted stage. As an organisation the CoC made explicit references to its private status, acknowledging that the information it produced gained authenticity from the fact it was the product of a private, non-state group. Dorothy Bauman admitted that much of the effectiveness of the Committee stemmed from its status as a private organisation, explaining: ‘The moment you put the government’s label on it that would have caused suspicion and resentment’.29 In parallel with this, the CoC was keen to point out that the supposedly private communist women’s groups were in fact no such thing, being financially supported by the Soviet government. Referring to the WIDF’s call for a Congress of Women 59
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in Copenhagen in June 1953, Parsons declared: ‘The Committee of Correspondence feels very strongly that when a congress of women is called in the name of all women in the world, women should be able to obtain accurate information as to the sponsorship, aims and purpose of that Congress’.30 The irony, of course, is that the CoC itself was not a private group. In the aftermath of revelations about the group’s funding, those members of the group who had been ‘witting’, that is, aware of the CIA funding, tried in vain to point to the lack of direction from government as evidence of their independence. In an effort to reassure the Committee that their activities had been authentic and sincere, not simply the result of orders from the government, CIA representative Spencer Arnold – coyly introduced as ‘a representative of our past donors’ – attended a meeting of the Committee. There he explained for the benefit of the highly upset, unwitting members that the co-opted state–private network embodied by the CoC did not simply mirror the work of the WIDF, but rather should be understood as a form of development work, a policy of ‘orderly development, avoiding the Soviet approach . . . and at the same time building to insure that in future those countries would not be susceptible to propaganda’. Arnold assured them that ‘the propaganda was icing on the cake if and when it came’. He emphasized the common ideology of the Committee members and the government, representing their relationship as following the cooperative model: ‘In working with groups like the Committee of Correspondence, it came down to the fact that we had the same goals, methods, and techniques and experience to do the same thing that the government wanted to see done for long-range United States policy’.31 These references to the shared ideological framework and aims of the Committee and the US government were an attempt to make the issue of funding unimportant, and to defend the Committee against accusations that it was nothing more than a government ‘stooge’. To a certain extent this argument holds a degree of credibility; there is very little evidence of direct control or direction by the government and ample evidence of the willingness of groups such as the CoC to produce pro-American, anticommunist propaganda independently, with no financial backing. Their shared ideological beliefs in effect made the issue of ‘control’ or ‘direction’ an unnecessary one. As Rose Parsons explained: ‘It was important to remember that when this started it was a real emergency and there was a great need for this kind of program. We knew it would be impossible to raise the money. We tend to forget now that it was a patriotic thing’.32 Parsons’ explanation was an attempt to represent the co-opted phase as the supportive phase, to emphasise the shared ideology of the state and the private group, as if this fact in some way negated the importance of the issue of covert funding. 60
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The irony of the state–private network In his work The Diplomacy of Ideas, historian Frank Ninkovich explained the ideological importance of the free participation of voluntary associations: A bed-rock principle underlying the cultural approach was the conviction that peoples ought to communicate directly with peoples. Although some governmental involvement seemed necessary, the voluntarist tradition dictated that the ‘task of institutionalising a set of ideals’, as one writer characterised it, should properly remain the preserve of the private sector.33 The genealogy of the state–private network that I have outlined here demonstrates the importance of this ‘bedrock’ principle during the early years of the relationship. It was ideologically imperative to both the US government and to the leaders of voluntary associations that private individuals and groups take the responsibility for defending and promoting American ideals on the international stage. Whilst this division of labour was ideologically imperative, however, it was logistically inadequate. Under pressure from the Soviet ‘peace offensive’, the cooperative and supportive versions of the state–private network were simply not strong or active enough to meet the demands of either the US government or the leaders of the voluntary associations. In order to produce a more robust, active and financially stable private sphere, therefore, the US government systematically underwrote its activities. The irony of this manifestation of the state–private network lies not in the funding of private groups by the US government but in the covert nature of this funding. The cooperation between the US government and women’s associations with regard to the German visitors’ scheme is in many ways similar to the work carried out by the CoC. While the private group organised the education, training and logistics of trips to the United States, the US government provided the finance. The difference is that in the case of the German exchange programme the funding was overt. Observers and advocates of the programme were able to point to the participation of private associations as evidence of the cooperative and voluntary principle in American democracy. The parallel between the German exchange programme and CoC conferences is an important one. It demonstrates that, as the witting members of the Committee argued, the women were only doing things in which they believed, things with which they were already engaged. Indeed, alongside the co-opted relationship between the government and the leaders of voluntary associations, the supportive and cooperative models continued to run, offering a range of programmes that demonstrated the continuing idealism and zeal in existence among American voluntary associations. At a 1963 board meeting of the Overseas Education Fund (OEF) of the LWV, 61
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board members engaged in a lengthy debate on the ethics of government funding. The board concluded, ‘up till now the proportion of government funds was very small and for services rendered. One of our main purposes is to demonstrate what voluntary non-governmental groups can do’. In an explicit rejection of any move towards a co-opted relationship, they stated: ‘The OEF should not accept Government funds for administration or other funds without which we could not continue. This does not include administration of special projects. Project money can be accepted’.34 The continued faith of voluntary associations in the importance of their private international programmes was not sufficient, however, to produce the level and volume of material and activity deemed necessary by their government. The US government did not invent the ideological zeal of voluntary associations; it did not create the interest of the voluntary associations in international relations from out of thin air; and arguably it did not even give their activities any significant direction. However, it did fund them, and did so covertly. When I refer to the final stage of state–private network as the ‘co-opted stage’, I am not arguing that the private individuals were coopted; rather, I am suggesting that the state co-opted (and, ironically, thereby destroyed) the private status of the projects. This was the ethical point made by members of the Committee when the source of their funding was exposed. One member, Rosemary Harris, complained: ‘We have set ourselves up as an example of what an organization that is private can do. We couldn’t have done it without government help’.35 A statement signed by three unwitting members elaborated: ‘It is not in keeping with our philosophy to have CIA funds used for an organization with a goal such as that of the Committee of Correspondence which was to strengthen the free world by encouraging citizen responsibility and democracy’.36 These protests were made by members of the Committee who had freely given their time and energy to the cause. Whilst they might unknowingly have been influenced by more knowledgeable members of the Committee, who in turn might have been influenced by the CIA, nonetheless it is clear that they themselves did not see their actions as controlled, directed, or bought and paid for by their government. Their point was not that their actions had been bought, but that their status as private individuals and a private organisation had been bought, and thereby destroyed. As Elizabeth Wadsworth, one such member, explained: The worst thing we could do was take government money and lie about it because that simply put the lie to the whole integrity which was supposed to underlie the organization. . . . You cannot do everything to give the impression you don’t take government money and then take it. If it’s important that you not take the government money then you don’t take it. If it’s not important that you not take the government money, then take it. That’s the 62
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point. It’s not a question of whether you take government money or not. It’s whether you make an issue of it. We did make an issue of it and then we took it. Dumb.37 The impossible, destructive irony of the state–private network was that it was vital for practical and logistical reasons to take the money and vital for ideological reasons to make an issue of not taking it. The ideological purity of the private pronouncements was so important to US government officers that, in seeking to secure, publicise and eventually produce these pronouncements, they themselves destroyed this purity. What the government sought in its construction of the network was somehow to harness and exploit – in other words to co-opt – the non-state affiliation and ‘ideological purity’ of the private association. However, in constructing it, this purity was hopelessly compromised, and ultimately negated. The New York Times recognised the destruction of the ideological authenticity of the voluntary associations in its editorial of 20 February 1967: The integrity of pro-American positions, honestly taken by groups and individuals in the worldwide battle of ideas, has been undermined. The independence of America’s private foundations has been brought into question. In short, faith in American institutions has been besmirched in a way that would have evaded the reach of any foreign enemy.38 The irony of the state–private network is like that of the oft-cited statement by the American officer in Vietnam: ‘it was necessary to destroy the village in order to save it’. The US government and the leaders of voluntary associations believed that it became necessary, as a result of the Soviet peace offensive, to channel state funding to the private sector covertly, thereby destroying the very element that made it private and so valuable.
Notes and bibliography 1 2 3
4 5
Quoted in Constance Smith and Anne Freedman, Voluntary Associations: Perspectives on the Literature (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1972), p. v. Arthur Schlesinger Sr, ‘Biography of a Nation of Joiners’, American Historical Review, 50, 1 (October 1944), p. 25. Committee on Un-American Activities, US House of Representatives, ‘100 Things You Should Know About Communism’ (n.d.), series IV, box 1741, League of Women Voters Papers, Library of Congress, Washington DC (hereafter LWV papers). Edward Shils, Political Developments in the New States (The Netherlands: Mouton & Co., 1962), p. 29. ‘SOS from Korean, Japanese Women’, Journal of the AAUW, 41, 2 (Winter 1948), p. 116.
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6 ‘CCMF Request for Ford Foundation Grant’, June 1952, file 15, Anna Lord Strauss Papers, Schlesinger Library, Cambridge, MA (hereafter Strauss papers). 7 ‘A Proposal for International Study Grants’, Journal of the AAUW, 38, 3 (Spring 1945), p. 174. 8 Pamphlet on the Reconstruction Fund (n.d.), box 32, file 11, Papers of the YWCA of Boston, Schlesinger Library, Cambridge, MA. 9 Ibid. 10 CCCMF Statement of Activities, 1948, box 1, file 9, Lucille Koshland Papers, Schlesinger Library, Cambridge, MA (hereafter Koshland papers). 11 Grant McConnell in J. Roland Pennock and John W. Chapman (eds), Voluntary Associations (New York: Pantheon Press, 1969), p. 155. 12 In total nine women’s organisations participated in the programme: the AAUW; the General Federation of Women’s Clubs; the League of Women Voters; the National Council of Jewish Women; the National Board of the YWCA; the National Federation of Business and Professional Women’s Clubs; the National Council of Negro Women; the National Council of Catholic Women; and the National Council of Church Women. 13 ‘Suggestions to Sponsors of German Women Leaders’, box 55, file 2, Ruth Woodsmall Papers, Sophia Smith Library, Northampton, MA (hereafter Woodsmall papers). 14 Quoted in Henry J. Kellerman, Cultural Relations Programs of the United States Department of State: The Educational Exchange Program between the United States and Germany 1945–1954 (Washington DC: Bureau of Educational and Cultural Affairs, US Department of State, 1978), p. 1. 15 Eisenhower to Strauss, 29 May 1956, box 9, file 182, Strauss papers. 16 ‘World Ideological Conflict’, April 1957, box 9, file 182, Strauss papers. 17 ‘Statement by the President to Delegates of American Council of Voluntary Associations for Foreign Service’, 20 February 1947, file 426–G, Harry S. Truman Papers, White House official files, Harry S. Truman Presidential Library, Independence, MS. 18 Quoted in T. Powers, The Man Who Kept the Secrets: Richard Helms and the CIA (London: Knopf, 1979). 19 Charles E. Wilson to Trustees, 12 May 1958, box 9, file 182, Strauss papers. 20 Ibid. 21 Women’s Affairs Section, Semi-annual report, 1 July–31 December 1949, box 51, file 2, Woodsmall papers. 22 Women’s Affairs Section, Semi-annual report, 1 January–1 April 1950, box 52, file 4, Woodsmall papers. 23 Cochrane to Fierst, July 1951, box 118, General Records of the Department of State, Miscellaneous Records of the Bureau of Public Affairs 1944–62, RG 59, National Archives, Washington DC. 24 ‘Information on the Communist-dominated WIDF’ (n.d.), fiche 695, Records of the National Council of Women (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press). 25 Parsons to Roosevelt, 19 June 1958, fiche 707, Records of the National Council of Women. 26 Report of the first meeting of the Anonymous Committee, 16 April 1952, box 7, Lena M. Phillips Papers, Schlesinger Library, Cambridge, MA (hereafter Phillips papers). 27 Dorothy Bauman oral history, box 54, file 888, Committee of Correspondence Papers, Sophia Smith Library, Northampton, MA (hereafter CoC papers). 28 For a full history of the Committee of Correspondence, see Helen Laville, Cold War Women: The International Activities of American Women’s Organizations (Manchester University Press, 2002).
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29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38
Dorothy Bauman oral history, box 54, file 888, CoC papers. Parsons letter, 6 May 1953, box 4, Phillips papers. Minutes of meeting, 3 April 1967, financial file, CoC papers. Notes on a Special Board Meeting, 24 July 1967, financial file, CoC papers. Frank A. Ninkovich, The Diplomacy of Ideas: U.S. Foreign Policy and Cultural Relations 1938–1950 (Cambridge University Press, 1981), p. 87. Board Minutes, 7 February 1963, carton 1, file 12, Koshland papers. Rosalind W. Harris oral history, box 54, file 894, CoC papers, emphasis added. Statement by Eleanor Coit, Elizabeth Jackson and Alice Clark, December 1970, box 19, file 9, CoC papers. Elizabeth Wadsworth oral history, box 54, file 902, CoC papers. New York Times, 20 February 1967, p. 36.
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4 FROM COOPERATION TO COVERT ACTION The US government and students, 1940–52 Karen M. Paget
Introduction When in 1967 Ramparts magazine exposed a covert relationship between the US National Student Association (NSA) and the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), US government officials insisted that this had begun in 1952. The date had significance. By locating it in the coldest period of the Cold War and at the height of domestic McCarthyism, CIA officials such as Cord Meyer Jr, who oversaw the NSA relationship, could rely on Cold War imperatives to justify the secrecy. Besting the Soviets in the field of international student organisation could not be achieved openly, Meyer argued, because a conservative Congress would never have sanctioned government funding of these, largely liberal, organisations that the CIA judged the most effective combatants.1 This author, who is researching the CIA–NSA relationship and who knew that the 1952 date might not be accurate, took for granted that the relationship could not have begun before 1947, since both the CIA and the NSA were created in that year. The quest for the relationship’s origin yielded some surprising discoveries. The trail of evidence led back to wartime activities involving educators and government officials that established patterns of cooperation that later facilitated the CIA’s covert projects. Between 1940 and 1946, several dozen university presidents and professors joined with New Deal officials, professional staff to youth organisations and philanthropists to restructure the student field. The group pursued twin agendas: to create a national student organisation free from communist influence and to prepare students for post-war international leadership. The continuity between this group’s goals and the formation of the NSA is striking. The 1946/47 founding of the NSA represents the last (and most successful) attempt over a period of years to organise American students into a national organisation. More importantly for the argument advanced here, the roots of NSA’s international 66
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programme, the target of CIA interest, may also be found in wartime plans undertaken by the same group of individuals. The educators who created a bridge between the two periods were part of a larger network that developed during the war to advise US government agencies on their burgeoning educational and cultural exchange programmes. The wartime discovery that private-sector organisations could be effective partners in propaganda (psychological warfare) led to subtle changes in the government’s philosophy regarding these programmes. What had been the sine qua non of private-sector overseas activities, namely organisational independence from government objectives, slowly mutated into a strategy for preserving the appearance of independence. If this seems too blanket a statement, consider CIA official Cord Meyer’s post-Ramparts observation that ‘the open receipt of government funds would have damaged the reputation for independence that the NSA had found valuable in dealing with foreign students’.2 The research presented in synopsis here traces the changes in the government’s philosophy towards overseas cultural and educational programmes, and shows how these changes intersected with efforts to create a national student organisation in the United States. The US government began during the later war period to create what officials called ‘instruments’ to carry out post-war international cultural relations so that private-sector programmes could be coordinated with government objectives. These ranged from formal institutions to informal associations and committees. The picture which emerges suggests that it was a short step from discreet coordination to the secrecy of covert action. As a consequence, our understanding of covert operations strictly as a Cold War phenomenon must be re-evaluated.3 But the research necessary to charting this transition is laborious. First, individuals during wartime wore so many organisational hats, both public and private, that determining the locus of decision-making is exceedingly difficult. Second, both educators and US government officials worked through a bewildering variety of mechanisms rather than through established organisations with clear boundaries. Third, whether government entity or ad hoc committee, corporate names changed with regularity, making continuity difficult to trace. Fourth, one must pierce the veil of rhetorical density, because so much activity took place in the name of freedom and democracy. Notwithstanding such difficulties, much is at stake, including our understanding of the evolution of American foreign policy and its relationship to private-sector independence.
Wartime imperatives On 23 February 1942, after the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor, the Yale Daily News summarised a speech by Yale President Charles Seymour: 67
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‘Seymour Stresses Complete Subordination of University Existence to Government’. A student editorial applauded the president’s remarks, stating that ‘we are members now and forever of a privately endowed community which faces extinction unless we can justify its existence in education and leadership towards ultimate victory for the democracies’.4 The headline and editorial captured the spirit of new relationships that developed during the war between the educational community and the US government. College presidents, faculty and students flocked to established government departments such as War and State, and staffed new wartime agencies such as the Office of War Information (OWI), the Office of Strategic Services (OSS) and the Office of Inter-American Affairs (OIAA). Others drove the planning for post-war institutions, especially the United Nations and UNESCO (UN Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization). As the new agencies embarked on a massive programme of educational and cultural exchange, they drew heavily on the educational community for policy advice and implementation. Historically the US government had opposed establishing an official Ministry of Culture; the very concept evoked the regimes of Hitler, Stalin or Mussolini. In 1938 Congress established a Division of Cultural Relations (DCR) in the Department of State; the division comprised a handful of staff.5 The absence of programme funds reflected a philosophy of cultural exchange that relied upon the private sector for implementation and emphasised its independence. The government’s role was to ‘stimulate, coordinate, and support private initiatives’. A second, forcefully articulated, principle was reciprocity: exchange programmes with a specific country were to run in both directions to avoid charges of cultural imperialism. The dedication to private-sector independence did not rest entirely upon altruistic impulse; the sector’s strategic value – its ability to generate good will – depended largely upon its ability to function free from official government policy objectives. And the new wartime agencies duly entered the cultural field unencumbered by Congressional restraint and State Department philosophy. Blessed with millions of President Roosevelt’s emergency funds, these officials pioneered exchange programmes, study tours and overseas libraries, and placed them in the service of propaganda or psychological warfare. Government officials discovered that private groups could project an image of Americans abroad and counter Nazi (and Soviet) propaganda far more effectively than could US government officials. When the government supported W. E. B. DuBois’ lecture tour in Haiti, his implicit message of improving race relations in the United States packed as powerful a message as his prepared text – and was less easily dismissed as government propaganda. An astonishing array of individuals and institutions could be pressed into service, ranging from the Yale Glee Club to Walt Disney icon Donald Duck. As the first Director of the DCR 68
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Ben Cherrington later observed: ‘too fine a line could not be drawn between sheer propaganda and education in the best sense of the term. Friends must be won and held, the enemy frustrated, divided, and conquered’.6 Charles Thomson, his deputy, also later acknowledged that cultural activities ‘were largely, though not entirely, viewed as one more channel for propaganda, or at least as preparing the way for propaganda’.7 By 1943 the DCR had reasserted its authority and was functioning as a secretariat to the wealthier agencies, mindful that most were temporary and that the Division stood to gain their programmes and resources after the war.8 The DCR’s anticipated post-war role precipitated a flurry of policy papers and project planning. If Thomson and others believed that peacetime would restore the DCR’s original philosophy of educational and cultural exchange, they seriously underestimated the temptation to continue the nexus with national security objectives.
The Turner Recommendations Ironically, the threat to the Division’s philosophy of private-sector independence came partially from within. In 1942 historian Ralph E. Turner joined the DCR research staff to implement a policy memorandum, ‘The Permanent Cultural Relations Program as a Basic Instrumentality of American Foreign Policy’.9 The report asserted that post-war American ‘leadership in international action in the cultural field will be as decisively necessary as in the political and economic fields’. Turner’s mandate included the preparation of a ‘concrete, long-term program’ to implement come the end of the war. In subsequent papers Turner advocated that private organisations with international contacts conform to US foreign policy objectives. As a model he suggested the British Council in Great Britain, highlighting it as an organisation that appeared to be private but which in fact discreetly coordinated its activities with the Foreign Office in a ‘direct and continuous’ relationship.10 At a State Department meeting on 9 June 1943, officials discussed the problem of private institutions that might not welcome US government funds. They cited as an example the American University in Beirut and Robert College in Istanbul. In the latter case, advisors suggested routing funds through the Near East College Association.11 These recommendations stirred vigorous opposition. Laurence Duggan, Director of the Office of American Republic Affairs, whose father had founded the Institute of International Education (IIE), argued vehemently that ‘any implication of a tie-in between cultural interchange and foreign policy invalidates the effect of cultural activities’.12 He and his supporters were on the losing side, however. Turner departed from the British Council model in that he did not recommend a single entity, urging instead the creation of multiple ‘instrumentalities’. His recommendations affected not only the broad field of 69
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educational and cultural exchange, but they would also influence educators who had assumed responsibility for preparing students for post-war leadership.
Response to a crisis The precipitating event in 1940 that brought together three dozen or so prominent educators, New Deal officials, professional youth staff and philanthropists was the collapse of the American Student Union (ASU). The ASU had been a vibrant coalition of liberals, socialists and communists until it broke up into bitter factions after the Stalin–Hitler Pact of 1939.13 Its demise left a vacuum that many educators feared would be filled by a resurgence of communist organising. Among those who acted to combat such a situation were college presidents George Shuster (Hunter College), Harry D. Gideonese (Brooklyn College), Alvin Johnson (New School for Social Research) and William Neilson (Smith College); and professors Alfred Cohen (Rockefeller University), Clyde Eagleton (New York University), Arnold Wolfers (Yale University), Walter Kotschnig (Smith College) and Carl Friedrich (Harvard University). New Deal officials who shared their concerns included Archibald MacLeish (Library of Congress and later the OWI) and Kenneth Holland (OIAA). Eleanor Roosevelt joined them and rarely missed a committee meeting. An even larger roster of luminaries loaned their names as sponsors, among them representatives from the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR), the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, the American Council on Education (ACE) and the American Council of Learned Societies (ACLS).14 As a whole, the group had a strong internationalist orientation. Clyde Eagleton, William Neilson and Walter Kotschnig directed the Commission to Study the Organization of Peace (CSOP), the driving force behind the creation of the United Nations.15 Most were active opponents of isolationism and spearheaded new organisations such as the Committee to Defend America by Aiding the Allies (CDAAA), Citizens for Victory, the Committee on National Morale, Fight for Freedom and the Council for Democracy. Not surprisingly, these activists chose an international vehicle as their organisational umbrella, resuscitating an American committee of the Geneva-based International Student Service (ISS). The ISS, founded after the First World War, had developed a reputation for effective relief projects and a scrupulous avoidance of politics. Smith College professor Walter Kotschnig, an Austrian Quaker who in 1937 emigrated to the United States, had served as its General Secretary from 1925 to 1934.16 In an era that had not yet seen a demand by students for self-determination, it troubled few that adults ran the ISS–Geneva and its American affiliate. By 1941 the well-funded ISS–US Committee had hired a dozen staff, including former ASU executives from the Socialist Student League for 70
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Industrial Democracy, thirty-two-year-old Joe Lash and twenty-nine-year-old Molly Yard.17 It hosted frequent conferences, launched a student newspaper, Threshold, and established a leadership training camp at the Roosevelts’ summer home in Campobello. In order to screen students for the summer programme, anthropologist Margaret Mead, an active member of the Committee for National Morale, designed a two-page application form. ISS–US Committee goals, described in a pamphlet (introduced by Eleanor Roosevelt), were twofold: to train student leaders in democratic process and for post-war work overseas.18
Government cooperation An immediate nexus was created with the wartime agencies of propaganda because some of the ISS–US Committee’s most active members simultaneously held government positions. For example, Kenneth Holland (OIAA) facilitated discussions with his boss, Nelson Rockefeller, regarding a plan to host a Pan-American student conference aimed at creating solidarity among North, Central and South American students.19 Rockefeller had a broad mandate from President Roosevelt to keep Nazi influence out of Central and South America. The ISS–US Committee was eager to establish connections with overseas student leaders and Lash had heard a rumour that the left-wing American Youth Congress also planned a Pan-American conference. Lash learned that both Sumner Welles, Under-Secretary of State, and Charles Thomson, DCR chief, were also enthusiastic.20 After the attack upon Pearl Harbor, the Pan-American conference expanded in scope to become a worldwide student conference. The expansion also led to the active cooperation of the Secretary of State, and the Offices of War Information, Civic Defense, Education, Labor and the DCR. On 2 September 1942, at the height of the war, Secretary of State Cordell Hull kicked off the International Student Assembly (ISA) in Washington DC with a press conference. On 3 September President Franklin Roosevelt gave a rousing address, piped into the Department of Labor auditorium, to delegates from fifty-five countries. The president stressed Allied unity and the United Nations.21 Later, delegates strode across the stage to sign a Declaration of Unity, which they also broadcast over OWI short-wave radios to students behind enemy lines. Delegates also decided to plan a permanent organisation and to meet again after the war was over. In a post-mortem of the conference, ISS–US Committee members Kenneth Holland, George Shuster, Walter Kotschnig and Clyde Eagleton, all of whom either worked for or advised the US government, praised the outcomes.22 The United States, said Hunter College President Shuster, had shown Nazi and fascist youth an alternative and, at the same time, ‘won great reservoirs of power’. He lauded plans to translate the proceedings ‘into 71
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the same language which communist control groups such as the ASU have always used: English, Spanish, Russian, and Chinese’.23 Alvin Johnson heralded the fact that the Germans called an emergency meeting in Vienna and jammed radio transmissions of the conference sessions. ISS–US staff were ecstatic, especially Joe Lash, his future wife, Trude Pratt, and Molly Yard. More, they had experienced their first taste of self-determination: delegates had seized control of the agenda during the conference and introduced contentious resolutions, including one in support of India’s independence from the British. Lash now argued that an international organisation (separate from ISS–Geneva) could stimulate a new campusbased national student organisation. Despite major conferences, summer camps, a newspaper and a Washington DC office, the inability of the ISS–US Committee and staff to connect with actual students had remained a problem. The ISS–US Committee fractured over the issue. One faction, led by Eleanor Roosevelt, backed staff plans to found a domestic organisation. The other faction feared losing control. International law expert Clyde Eagleton was explicit: ‘If they are not under our guidance, they may fall into left-wing hands’.24 Brooklyn College President Harry D. Gideonese agreed, reminding the group that he joined them because he was ‘concerned with helping strengthen an alternative program to what was then extremely left-wing groups’.25 In addition, several educators, most notably Arnold Wolfers, Yale Professor of International Studies, and his younger assistant William Fletcher, objected to Lash’s activist politics.26 Those closest to ISS–Geneva realised they were stretching its neutralist norms, and putting in danger ISS relief workers, who, like the Red Cross, depended for their safety upon the organisation’s reputation for neutrality.27 In early February 1943 paralysis over future plans led to abrupt action by the Lash faction. The ISS staff declared its independence and took over the New York City office at 8 West 40th Street.28 In May 1943 an expanded staff called a constitutional convention to establish the United States Student Assembly (USSA), a name chosen to signal a future affiliation with the ISA, but cut off from the resources of the ISS–US Committee, and lacking strong campus leadership, the USSA soon suspended its activities.29 Then, in 1947, the USSA re-emerged as the student section of Americans for Democratic Action (ADA). However, lacking the strength to fill the national organisational vacuum, instead it became a major constituency in the NSA with enough standing to help broker its first slate of officers. After the rupture, Wolfers, Kotschnig, Shuster, Gideonese and others cast about for a substitute vehicle. They found it in a small fund-raising entity tied to ISS–Geneva, the World Student Service Fund (WSSF). They petitioned ISS–Geneva to recognise the WSSF as its affiliated committee in 72
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the United States.30 Prior to 1943 the WSSF raised donations from American students and forwarded them (minus a percentage) to ISS–Geneva for relief activities but it neither conducted nor managed programmes. Before taking any action on the WSSF, however, the organisation first incorporated itself as the Student Service of America (SSA), with Gideonese as General Secretary, Dorothy Paley (the wife of CBS executive William Paley) as Vice-President and Alfred Cohn (Rockefeller Institute) as Treasurer.31 Incorporation served two purposes: to protect its assets, including the student magazine, Threshold, and ‘to carry forward some of the former activities of the International Student Service’. Once established, SSA would ‘lie dormant for the period, and then reactivate’.32 Only after this did the group turn its attention to the WSSF.
A student instrumentality The transformation of the WSSF into a Turner-style instrumentality occurred in stages. WSSF eventually managed NSA’s international programme, and one retired CIA official has identified WSSF as its first conduit, although he attaches no date.33 In many ways the WSSF was a logical successor to the ISS–US Committee, since their boards overlapped. In 1943 Walter Kotschnig, WSSF Vice-Chair, and Yale Chaplain Sidney Lovett, WSSF Chair, decided to reduce the fund’s dependency on the National Inter-Collegiate Christian Council (NICC). The NICC was a complex of Protestant organisations dominated by the Young Men’s and Women’s Christian Associations (YMCA–YWCA) and considered by the WSSF their vehicle for raising relief funds; they co-mingled its funds in NICC bank accounts and supplied its small staff. Within months, Kotschnig and Lovett had succeeded in affiliating the WSSF to the National War Fund, which required segregated bank accounts, and in reducing, although not eliminating, the influence of NICC. Correspondence between Lovett and Kotschnig makes it clear that they acted with the post-war period in mind. It was, said the Yale Chaplain, ‘a fateful moment’.34 In a similar vein, the IIE, whose director Stephen Duggan was a member of the ISS–US Committee, offered to administer the ISS–US Committee’s small refugee programme. The majority decided to keep the programme under the SSA because it could later serve as a ‘nucleus’ around which other programmes could be ‘built up’.35 The next phase is bureaucratically complex. Between 1943 and 1945, Kotschnig and Gideonese, among others, developed post-war student reconstruction and relief projects under other auspices that they later folded into WSSF. They opened a small office of World Student Relief, a Genevabased project that combined ISS–Geneva, Pax Romana, the international Catholic student organisation and the World Student Christian Federation (WSCF). One of its officials, Robert Mackie, left Geneva to staff the New 73
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York office. This temporary office provided a site to coordinate dozens and dozens of other organisations – established, temporary and newly created – that planned post-war relief and rehabilitation projects. Mackie, Kotschnig, Gideonese, Eagleton and others met regularly with representatives of US government agencies, including the DCR, the OWI, the OSS and the Foreign Relief and Reconstruction Office as well as new relief efforts through the UN Relief and Reconstruction Authority.36 The sheer number of actors, organisations, ad hoc groupings and name changes make mapping this period difficult. The salient fact during this time is that key individuals held government positions while simultaneously planning programmes under private auspices. In June 1943 Walter Kotschnig had followed colleague Clyde Eagleton into the State Department’s new division of International Organizations and National Security where he devoted most of his time to what became UNESCO. Kotschnig also served on the DCR Special Projects Advisory Committee, which recommended projects to an interagency committee where Kenneth Holland helped make final decisions. Shuster continued to advise the DCR. In October 1944 Eagleton chaired the Dumbarton Oaks meeting that adopted a draft UN Charter. In 1945 the OWI put Shuster on its payroll. Throughout the war, Professor Arnold Wolfers consulted widely with US government agencies, including the OSS and the Departments of War and State, while after the war he became a renowned CIA talent spotter.37 Before, during and after the ISA controversy, these men moved agendas in public and private arenas that mirrored one another. For example, on 2 April 1942, the ISS–US Committee adopted a formal statement on their role in post-war reconstruction. They then voted to ask the President of Johns Hopkins University, Isaiah Bowman, to sponsor a conference on ‘methods by which American universities may begin the training of students to participate in reconstruction work after the war.’38 Two months later, Kenneth Holland and Walter Kotschnig led an identical discussion at the State Department, ‘how can we train students in the United States who are both citizens and nationals of other countries to work on relief reconstruction and rehabilitation programs after the war’.39 On 29 October 1945 the SSA reconvened and adopted a new post-war name, the ISS Provisional Committee. Its members expanded the Committee, adding dozens of college presidents and former government officials. By March 1946 Archibald MacLeish reported that he had delivered a comprehensive international programme for students to government officials and major foundations.40 MacLeish had left his post as Assistant Secretary of State for Public Affairs in October 1945 and had transmitted the plans to his successor William Benton, who oversaw a rapidly expanding DCR. The student programmes, described in general terms, emphasised international information and exchange; they included ‘local, 74
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regional, national and international conferences’, and a re-launch of Threshold or a similar news bulletin with information on overseas opportunities. The group discussed and then voted against giving its plans any publicity.41 Throughout the winter of 1945/46, a sense of emergency prevailed within the ISS Provisional Committee. This stemmed from events outside the Committee’s control, namely the founding of the World Federation of Democratic Youth (WFDY) and the International Union of Students (IUS), regarded by many as nothing more than Soviet-backed communist fronts.42 Domestically, these developments underscored the failure to fill the organisational vacuum in the United States created by the demise of the ASU while simultaneously elevating the importance of the ISS in Geneva as a counterweight to the Prague-based IUS.43 Wolfers took charge of finding American students to attend post-war ISS international conferences. Harvard educator Malcolm W. Davis, formerly with the OSS and a new SSA board member, took over the personnel committee. With all the increased activity, the ISS needed a staff director, and so the Committee turned to Wallace Doerr, a recently returned OSS staff member from the Central European Division, who at that time was based at Yale.44 Doerr accompanied American students to the ISS conference in the summer of 1946 and 1947.
NSA–WSSF Among those selected for the 1947 ISS delegation was a Yale senior and Navy veteran, Robert S. Smith, whose rise in student politics was to be meteoric. After heading up the American ISS delegation to Århus, Denmark, he travelled widely in Europe, stopping in Prague to observe the World Youth Festival, an event co-sponsored by the WFDY and the IUS. By the time he flew home in late summer to attend the NSA Constitutional Convention, Smith found his Ivy League friends had positioned him auspiciously.45 He chaired the international sub-commission that debated resolutions before they went to the plenary floor, including the important question of whether the NSA would join the IUS, a position that afforded him the opportunity to display his up-to-date knowledge of overseas events. He was ably assisted in these proceedings by several Campobello graduates of the older ISS–US programme, particularly George Fischer and Louis Harris.46 In another minor historical twist, one of the professors who steered Smith towards NSA was Ralph E. Turner, the controversial official with the DCR, also by that time a member of the Yale faculty.47 On the last day of the NSA convention, Smith won the position of Vice-President Of International Affairs, part of a carefully constructed slate of officers. Then, on 30 September 1947 the WSSF executive committee voted to grant him an additional salary, a fact he never shared with his 75
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colleagues.48 The WSSF had previously granted funds for a campus tour to encourage prospective NSA delegates as well as funding a Harvardproduced International Student Information Bulletin.49 US government officials acted at once to legitimate the NSA by appointing Robert Smith to the US National Commission for UNESCO. Kenneth Holland, who had risen in the State Department to the position of Assistant Director, Information and Cultural Affairs, helped secure the appointment. Six months prior to NSA’s Constitutional Convention, the WSSF set up machinery for ‘cultural activities hitherto undertaken by ISS’ and for ‘a program of international education and cultural exchange’.50 The mechanism was an ‘experimental’ Reconstruction and Relief Committee with a life span of one year.51 The ISS Provisional Committee simultaneously announced its intention to terminate after the one-year experiment; in the interim, as one of two WSSF sponsors, it retained the role of overseer.52 The budget for the experimental committee, at $600,000, exceeded the average annual wartime budgets by double or treble.53 Further, its mandate forbade the use of funds raised from WSSF’s historical base – the pockets of American students. Instead, it required all income to be raised from external sources. Unfortunately, after this mandate WSSF records tend to list income by general category, ‘foundations’ or ‘individuals’, which hinders precise documentation. Shortly after the Convention, WSSF Executive Director Wilmer Kitchen invited the NSA, along with five or six other non-communist student organisations, to become sponsors.54 The transition was now complete. WSSF officials began describing their mission as a ‘service agency’ for American students. The next logical step was for the WSSF to administer NSA’s international programmes and handle the receipt and disbursal of funds. By September 1947 the WSSF listed multiple projects for NSA, including the Salzburg Seminar on American Civilization and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology Foreign Students Summer Project.55 It also managed a summer tour, scheduled for summer 1948 and sponsored by the Dutch student union that previously had negotiated directly with the US government.56 Robert Smith acknowledged in an early report that he inherited ‘a vast program of international projects’.57 The WSSF coordinated with government agencies and private organisations through committees that paralleled the Reconstruction and Relief Committee. For example, both the NSA and WSSF sat on the Committee for International Education Reconstruction (CIER), a mechanism established by the US National Commission for UNESCO to coordinate all private-sector programmes. In 1948 the WSSF acted as a secretariat to a committee established by the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace at a meeting in Paris. Led by Carnegie official Howard Wilson, its mandate concentrated on international student projects. This committee began life as the ‘Committee of Five’ before expanding to the ‘Committee of Ten’.58 76
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The US government could not keep left-wing American student organisations from joining either the WFDY or the IUS, but it could control participation in major international projects and programmes.59 While students played significant roles in these projects, in all cases they had the backing of seasoned adults and major institutions.
Covert action As competition with the Soviets grew fierce, US government officials used a variety of methods to prepare the NSA for battle. The CIA’s new covert action arm, the Office of Policy Coordination (OPC), routed some funds through individuals posing as philanthropists. Some were routed through the CFR. A few projects received overt support from the Rockefeller Foundation. In general, these patterns are similar to other CIA covert projects of this period.60 However they were supplied, a major objective of the funds was to enable NSA leaders to travel throughout the world to identify allies among western and ‘third area’ student leaders sympathetic to a new prowest international student organisation. A typical sequence included a survey tour to gather information, the establishment of student leader contacts and follow-up projects to cement any original contacts, often an information bulletin or regional seminar. Between 1948 and 1952 older graduate or law students, many with wartime military intelligence or OSS backgrounds, led these projects. In later years, NSA personnel who worked on the international staff reported directly to the CIA through its case officers. In 1952 the CIA set up a Foundation for Youth and Student Affairs (FYSA). Army veteran John Simons, the first NSA Treasurer, who served on the WSSF Reconstruction and Relief Committee (1946–47) and on the ISS–Geneva staff (1948–49), headed the student division.61 Before the creation of the FYSA, Simons offered ‘discreet’ funding to select NSA officials and generally coordinated events through the WSSF.62 After 1952 Simons, as a full-fledged CIA agent, continued to meet with the WSSF, usually identified in WSSF minutes as a ‘guest’ or ‘member at large’.63 In the mid-1960s, Simons left the FYSA, worked briefly for the Peace Corps in Washington DC and then returned to his roots, working as Executive Director of the World University Service, the new name for the old WSSF. In 1952 Kenneth Holland joined the FYSA board.64 During his time in government posts, Holland had been active with the ISS–US Committee and all its organisational successors. In 1949 he had left the State Department to become Director of the IIE, the State Department’s principal contract arm for exchange programmes. As a board member of the FYSA, Holland not only provided cover for the CIA but also annually screened applicants for NSA’s International Student Relations Seminar, a summer programme that recruited (secretly) and trained future NSA international staff.65 77
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Even Howard Wilson, the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace official who chaired the Committee of Ten, resurfaced when in 1956 the CIA created a Foreign Student Leadership Program (FSLP) under NSA auspices. Wilson, then Dean of Education at UCLA, helped screen applicants, along with Donald Shank, the second in command at IIE, and John Simons of the FYSA.66 This exchange programme, and others like it, served as recruitment vehicles for pro-west foreign student leaders who, the CIA hoped, would rise to prominent positions in their countries.67
Conclusion The wartime antecedents of NSA and its international programme raise conceptual and methodological issues relevant to this volume. The most obvious is that of periodicity, the tendency of academic historians to fall into the trap of presuming sharper boundaries between ‘wartime’ or ‘postwar’ or ‘Cold War’ periods than is warranted. The fact that this trap is well known does not mean it is always avoided. By the time the CIA’s covert arm was up and running, networks were in place and individuals were accustomed to formal and informal cooperation. Networks proved especially adaptable to changing circumstances, with individuals working through ad hoc committees, temporary offices and special projects. Bureaucratic lines of authority could be circumvented easily when necessary. A phone call or two could result in major action. Knowing such things is important because the discovery of continuity between one period and another changes our understanding of how covert activities emerged in the early post-war period. These findings also raise conceptual questions about the boundary lines between the two broad constructs, ‘state’ and ‘private sector’. When individuals wear so many organisational hats that they act simultaneously as government officials (advisors or staff) and as educators or leaders of professional educational associations, the question arises as to exactly whose interests they represent? Are they acting on behalf of the private organisation or the state? Far more than conceptual clarity is at stake here. It is impossible to answer fundamental questions about power and influence – hotly debated topics in the literature on CIA covert activities with US domestic organisations – without tackling these questions. Former CIA director Allen Dulles argued that intelligence operations work best when the parties share a community of interest.68 Is not the same assertion true of state–private sector relations when secrecy is eliminated from the equation? Perhaps scholars in this field need to ask different questions of their material, some of which are suggested by this research. What creates a community of interests? Who polices their boundaries? Who sets the agenda? What is the price of admission or the effect of exclusion? These questions connote a demanding research agenda, but 78
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they need to be answered before one can assert that government funding did or did not compromise private-sector independence.
Notes and bibliography 1 Cord Meyer Jr, Facing Reality: From World Federalism to the CIA (New York: Harper & Row, 1980). Tom Braden, Meyer’s boss between 1951 and 1954, also relied on McCarthyism to explain the secret funding. See ‘I’m Glad the CIA is Immoral’, Saturday Evening Post, 20 May 1967. 2 See Meyer, Facing Reality, p. 101. 3 For two contrary examples, see Frances Stonor Saunders, The Cultural Cold War: The CIA and the World of Arts and Letters (New York: The New Press, 1999) and Ronald L. Filippelli, American Labor and Postwar Italy, 1943–1953 (Stanford University Press, 1989). Saunders rarely refers to pre-1946 relationships, except to note the intelligence background of a participant. Filippelli documents the wartime development of a network of labour officials, ethnic associations and government bodies that aided the CIA’s post-war intervention in Italian elections. 4 Yale Daily News, 23 February 1942. 5 Cultural Relations Programs of the US Department of State, Historical Studies no. 2 (Washington DC: Bureau of Educational and Cultural Affairs, US Department of State, 1976). 6 Ibid., p. 161. 7 Charles A. Thomson and Walter H. C. Laves, Cultural Relations and US Foreign Policy (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1963), p. 55. 8 See Cultural Relations Programs, p. 161. 9 Ibid., p. 195. 10 General Advisory Committee minutes, box 18, Division of Cultural Relations, Department of State, Records of Harley A. Notter, General Records of the RG 59, National Archives, Washington DC (hereafter NA). 11 See Cultural Relations Programs, p. 202. 12 See Thomson and Laves, Cultural Relations and US Foreign Policy, p. 43. 13 See, for example, Joseph P. Lash, Eleanor Roosevelt: A Friend’s Memoir (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1964); Robert Cohen, ‘Student Movements, 1930’, in Mary Jo Buhle, Paul Buhle and Dan Georgakas (eds), Encylopedia of the American Left (New York: Oxford University Press, 1998); see also www.newdeal.feri.org/students. 14 ISS pamphlet, box 43, record group 57, Papers of the Student Christian Movement of New England, Special Collection, Yale Divinity School Library (hereafter SCMNE papers). 15 Clyde Eagleton chaired the Studies Committee. Walter Kotschnig was Director of Studies. William Allan Neilson served as Vice-Chair. James T. Shotwell, its Chair, also sponsored the ISS–US Committee. 16 US Department of State Biographic Register of the Department of State, 1943, Sec. Gen. Int. Student Service, Geneva, 1925–34. 17 See Lash, Eleanor Roosevelt, p. 224. For more detail see the Joseph P. Lash papers, Franklin D. Roosevelt Library, Hyde Park, New York (hereafter Lash papers). 18 A compete roster may be found in box 43, record group 57, SCMNE papers. 19 See the report prepared by Joseph Lash, 26 February 1941, box 10, Lash papers. 20 Ibid. 21 The entire text of President Roosevelt’s speech is available at www.ibiblio.org/ pha/policy/1942
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22 ISS Executive Committee minutes, 23 September 1942, folder 16, box 4, Walter Kotschnig collection, State University of New York (SUNY), Albany, NY (hereafter Kotsching collection). 23 Ibid. 24 ISS–US Committee meeting minutes, 10 October 1942, folder 9, box 4, Kotschnig collection. 25 ISS–US Committee meeting minutes, 22 October 1942, folder 9, box 4, Kotschnig collection. 26 William Fletcher to Walter Kotschnig (speaking for himself and for Dr Wolfers): ‘I am certain that Joe Lash has now got just what he has wanted for years – a political action organization under the cloak of ISS’, 7 September 1942, folder 9, box 4, Kotschnig collection. 27 Robert Mackie, a top ISS–Geneva official had warned the ISS–US Committee as early as 20 March 1941 that the phrase, ‘fighting for democracy’, a favourite of Lash, threatened ISS neutrality. After the 1942 Assembly, Mackie wrote a vigorous letter of protest. Unlabelled folder, box 4, Kotschnig collection. 28 Louis Harris, the future pollster, a graduate of the Campobello seminar, became a mainstay of the staff in Lash’s absence. He describes these events in vivid detail. Box 7, Lash papers. 29 USSA President Mary Lou Mundts, also a Campobello graduate, announced its suspension, citing lack of resources and campus leadership. Unpublished memoir in the author’s files. 30 ISS headquarters remained unclear for years as to which US entity acted as its representative, a confusion that was not officially cleared up until 1947. 31 SSA minutes, 10 February 1942, folder 16, box 4, Kotschnig collection. Others from the ISS–US Committee who made up SSA included Stephen Duggan and Edgar Fisher, IIE, Walter Kotschnig, William A. Neilson and George Shuster. 32 Ibid. 33 This agent is not yet on the record. 34 Lovett to Kotschnig, 22 May 1943, folder 14, box 4, Kotschnig collection. At a general committee meeting of the WSSF, 11 May 1943, Lovett emphasised that the fund must be ‘kept intact for postwar tasks’. 35 SSA minutes, 26 February 1943, SSA folder, box 7, Kotschnig collection. 36 See the voluminous reports and letters, box 4, Kotschnig collection. 37 For information on Arnold Wolfers, see Robin W. Winks, Cloak and Gown: Scholars in the Secret War, 1939–1961 (New York: William Murrow & Company, Inc., 1987), pp. 40–1. 38 ISS–US Committee minutes, 2 April 1942, folder 12, box 4, Kotschnig collection. 39 Kenneth Holland (OIAA) to Walter Kotschnig (n.d.), regarding the 19–20 June 1942 agenda for the Division of Cultural Relations General Advisory Committee, folder ‘General 3 April–1 September 1942’, box 2, Kotschnig collection. 40 ISS Provisional Committee minutes, 19 March 1946, folder OA, box 4, Kotschnig collection. Solicited foundations included Marshall Field, the Rockefeller Family Office (Arthur Packard) and the Rockefeller Foundation (John Marshall and Raymond Fosdick). Plans were also shared with Thomas K. Finletter (former Special Assistant to the Secretary of State and new SSA board member) and the Carnegie Foundation (Devereux C. Joseph). 41 Ibid. 42 The WFDY was formed at a London conference held on 31 October–1 November 1945; the IUS held a small conference immediately afterwards on 10 November 1945 but was formally founded in Prague in August 1946.
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43 Over the next few years, proposals were advanced to restructure the ISS–Geneva in order to ground its membership in national unions of students; these efforts were unsuccessful, and by 1949 CIA and State Department secrecy backed the formation of a pro-western rival to the Prague-based IUS. 44 For information on Dr Malcolm Davis’ OSS affiliation, see list attached to Special Committee on Cultural Relations (n.d.), folder (Education), General Records of the Department of State, Records of Harley A. Notter, RG 59, NA. Davis later directed the CIA-sponsored Free Europe University in Exile, Strasbourg, France. For information on Wallace Doerr’s OSS background, see Claire Hulme and Michael Salter, The Nazis’ Persecution of Religion as a War Crime: The OSS’s Response within the Nuremberg Trials Process, available in pdf at www.Camlaw.rutgers.edu/publications/law-religion/churches. Doerr spent the 1946/7 academic year at Yale before returning to government service. For more information, see State Department Biographic Register, 1948. 45 Robert Smith to Jack Peters, 1 October 1947, ISS–Geneva, box 299, WSSF files, US NSA, Hoover Institution, Stanford University (hereafter NSA papers). 46 George Fischer was the son of Louis Fischer, a contributor to the anti-Soviet volume edited by R. H. S. Crossman, The God That Failed (London: Hamilton, 1949). 47 Article prepared for an anthology of NSA officials by Robert Smith. In author’s files. 48 Appendix B, WSSF treasurer’s report, 1 October 1947, box 299, NSA papers. No amount is specified. WSSF also funded one of three issues of an International Student Information Bulletin released prior to the Constitutional Convention. 49 The International Student Information Bulletin was produced by a Harvard Student Council sub-committee founded by another returned OSS veteran from the Russian section, Douglass Cater. 50 A WSSF memorandum summarising these events (n.d.) refers to the expansion of 11 April 1947 as decided by an ‘ad hoc’ committee. See box 299, NSA papers. See also 4 April 1947 minutes, box 280, NSA papers, which indicate that the ISS Provisional Committee changed its name, once again, to the US Cooperating Committee of the ISS. 51 Historical memorandum on WSSF (n.d.), box 299, NSA papers. 52 The other sponsor in April 1947 was the National Christian Collegiate Council, an umbrella organisation dominated by the YMCA–YWCA. 53 Minutes, 24 November 1947, box 299, NSA papers. The amount of $100,000 was earmarked for administration. For information on previous WSSF budgets, which ranged from $130,000 to $233,000, see box 4, Kotschnig collection. 54 The NSA became a sponsor on 4 September 1947, box 299, NSA papers. 55 WSSF General Committee minutes, 1 October 1947, box 299, NSA papers. 56 In fact the Dutch student officer, Kees Van Heck, contacted the American Embassy in The Hague when he heard about the formation of the NSA. He was ‘considerably perturbed’ because Dutch students preferred to work through student unions. Coulter D. Huyler Jr to Secretary of State, 12 December 1947, 800.4089/12–1047, RG 59, NA. 57 December 1947 report by Robert Smith on International Activities, box 66, NSA papers. 58 Robert West, NSA Vice-President, to NSA staff on its formation in Paris, box 33, 28 January 1949, NSA papers. 59 See, for example, Secretary of State directives to deny members of American Youth for Democracy access to troop ships carrying American students to Europe in the summer of 1947, 800.4089/5–647 and 800.4089/6–647, RG 59, NA.
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60 For more detail on this phase, see Karen M. Paget, ‘From Leiden to Stockholm: The CIA’s Role in the Formation of the International Student Conference’, Intelligence and National Security, 18, 2 (Summer 2003), pp. 134–67. 61 The FYSA was first identified as a CIA conduit by investigators for Ramparts magazine. 62 See, for example, Helen Jean Rogers, NSA officer, to Herbert Eisenberg, NSA International Vice-President, regarding funding for a Brazil conference, 15 July 1951, box 171, NSA papers. 63 Copies of WSSF minutes in box 299, NSA papers. 64 FYSA letterheads, box 299, NSA papers. 65 International Advisory Board files, especially 9 June 1954, box 74, NSA papers. In the summer of 1965 the author worked as a secretary in the summer programme. 66 The Ford Foundation also funded this programme. 67 Purpose confirmed in a telephone interview with Ed Gable, formerly of the NSA and an ex-CIA official. 68 Peter Grose, Gentleman Spy: The Life of Allen Dulles (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1994), p. 230.
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5 BUILDING A COMMUNITY AROUND THE PAX AMERICANA The US government and exchange programmes during the 1950s Giles Scott-Smith
The ideological background In the last few years there has been a notable increase in attention among Cold War historians to the ideological dimension of US foreign relations. The insistence by an expanding group of scholars that US foreign policy has been driven more by a set of values that define American identity than by economic, military or all-encompassing national security interests has at the very least established a recognised position within (or alongside, or perhaps even opposed to) the field of diplomatic history.1 The result has been greater recognition of the conduct of propaganda and psychological warfare initiatives to spread these values as a fundamental basis for the US Cold War offensive strategy.2 The clarion calls of freedom and truth that would be expressed consistently from the late 1940s onwards may well have been enhanced by the Cold War, but they certainly were not created by that conflict. Michael Hunt has ably chronicled the major ideological themes that have dominated the formulation of American foreign policy since the early part of the nineteenth century, and he makes a valid argument that three core ideas – ‘a quest for national greatness’ associated with ‘promotion of liberty’, racial hierarchy and an anti-revolutionary impulse – continued to underpin American views of the world after 1945.3 However, the Cold War period did represent a new phase in this scenario. First, the level of state involvement to coordinate and facilitate this ideological campaign marks it off from what previously had been practised either as ‘dollar diplomacy’ or by the private sector.4 Second, there was the designation of a powerful enemy with an antagonistic worldview against which the campaign could be mobilised and directed. ‘Ideology’, as Hunt put it, ‘defined for the advocates of containment the issue at stake: survival of freedom around the world. That 83
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ideology also defined the chief threat to freedom: Soviet communism – which the United States had an incontestable obligation to combat’.5 However useful Hunt’s analysis might be, the ‘ideology school’ of Cold War historians differs from it on two levels. For one thing, such scholars concentrate on American ideology as the driving force behind a global offensive strategy, rather than as a set of values under threat from ‘alien’ forces. For another, there is the question of praxis, namely, how exactly did the United States go about conducting such an ideological campaign? Hunt’s working definition of ideology itself raises this question: ‘An interrelated set of convictions or assumptions that reduces the complexities of a particular slice of reality to easily comprehensible terms and suggests appropriate ways of dealing with that reality’.6 Others have tackled this issue since Hunt, most notably John Fousek in his useful study of how an ‘American nationalist ideology’ provided the basis for wide public support for an expanding role for US foreign policy.7 Yet, as Scott Lucas pointed out with legitimate astonishment a few years ago, until then little attention had been given by historians to the actual ‘organization and development of the US government’s ideological offensive against the Soviet Union’. From 1947 to 1950, from the announcement of the Truman Doctrine through NSC 4 and 4A to the drafting of NSC 68, US foreign policy developed rapidly from expressing a limited strategic vision to a ‘declaration of a “total” campaign to defeat the Soviet system’ based on a clear division of the world into free and totalitarian, good and evil.8 An essential element of this transition was the deliberate encouragement and mobilisation of private groups by the state to demonstrate national commitment to the cause of ‘freedom’ and ‘truth’ within civil society. George Kennan outlined this approach in typically succinct style in the Policy Planning Staff memorandum, ‘The Inauguration of Organized Political Warfare’, dated 4 May 1948: In broadest definition, political warfare is the employment of all means at a nation’s command, short of war, to achieve its national objectives. Such operations are both overt and covert. They range from such overt actions as political alliances, economic measures (as ERP), and ‘white’ propaganda to such covert operations as clandestine support of ‘friendly’ foreign elements, ‘black’ psychological warfare, and even encouragement of underground resistance in hostile states.9 For Kennan, the ‘slice of reality’ that American ideology was aimed at was the Soviet threat, a threat based not so much on military considerations as on the fact that ‘the Kremlin’s conduct of political warfare has become the most refined and effective of any in history’. Kennan’s response was to mobilise private citizens ‘to champion the cause of freedom for people 84
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suffering under oppression . . . specifically to further American national interests in the present crisis’.10 The main result of this memo was the founding of the National Committee for a Free Europe (NCFE) in May 1949, which aimed to provide a public front for the CIA-funded Radio Free Europe, raise public awareness of Soviet oppression in eastern Europe through an annual Crusade for Freedom and to function as overt central coordinating organisation for the many exile groups already in existence.11 Kennan himself recognised the novelty of the US government’s covert sponsorship of private groups such as the NCFE, the American Committee on United Europe (ACUE), the International Rescue Committee and the Congress for Cultural Freedom (CCF). But the urgent need to act outweighed the many risks involved. What were the reasons that the state–private network came into existence? Above all there was a need to ensure evidence of popular support for the US government’s global anticommunist strategy. This provided a perfect demonstration of the free society in action in contrast to totalitarian state-directed propaganda. It was also the case that a heavily centralised campaign would not sit well with an American ideology built on the freedom of the individual. But the crucial factor was the issue of covert support. The credibility of these groups rested on their voluntary nature combined with their ostensibly autonomous institutional identity. To ensure this, government support had to be invisible. Arguments that attempt to play down this factor by assuming that a more alert and aware US Congress could have provided the necessary funds rather than the CIA miss the point entirely.12 There are some problems with the ‘ideology school’, however. First, there is a tendency to collapse all activities into this framework of interpretation, so that every cultural event, philosophical declaration and musical interlude becomes defined solely by its Cold War political context. This can dismiss too easily the tensions existing in the politics–culture nexus, as David Caute has noted: Cold war cultural conflict had the effect of linking art to power, most obviously through censorship and repression but also by means of patronage and promotion, even when the art in question begged to be considered as an art in-itself, an en-soi, an ivory tower.13 The second, closely related, point is that an all-encompassing ideological interpretation tends to collapse the longue durée of cultural development into its Cold War moment. It is problematic, in this sense, to refer to the 1947–50 period as one which represented a ‘shift from containment, with its “full and fair” presentation of the US, to the ideological campaign against Moscow’ as if the escalation of activity means that the latter completely 85
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subsumed the former.14 In the ideological struggle, different traditions, motives and methods worked in parallel, in combination, sometimes even in opposition. A vital component of US government exchange programmes was the maintenance of the ‘full and fair picture’ ideal, this being the best guarantee against damaging accusations of political manipulation of grantees. How, then, do these exchange programmes fit within the interpretation of the state–private network and the ideological contest with communism? And how should we conceive the role of the private groups involved vis-à-vis the American state?15
Exchange programmes and the state–private network in the United States Exchange programmes now fall under the heading of ‘public diplomacy’, that catch-all term which was defined in 1965 by Edmund Gullion at the opening of the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy’s Edward R. Murrow Center of Public Diplomacy as: the role of the press and other media in international affairs, cultivation by governments of public opinion, the non-governmental interaction of private groups and interests in one country with those of another, and the impact of these transnational processes on the formulation of policy and the conduct of foreign affairs.16 Prior to 1965, these activities fell under various other terms such as ‘educational exchange’, ‘cultural relations’, ‘psychological warfare’ and ‘total diplomacy’.17 The common theme behind all of these definitions has been the extent to which the motives and operations of public diplomacy should (and could) be aligned to and directed by foreign policy objectives. The following discussion of this issue will avoid the broader aspects of public diplomacy to focus entirely on the US government’s role in conducting exchange programmes. Aside from George Creel’s Committee on Public Information, which operated briefly during the First World War, the role of the US state in exchanges dates from the creation of the State Department’s Division of Cultural Relations (DCR) in 1938. This marked the recognition that the national interest could be served in this way, and indicated a political intent to assimilate exchanges within the panoply of methods used to achieve foreign policy goals. The fascist powers were challenging US ideological (and so, potentially, political and economic) hegemony in Latin America, and the threat could no longer be dealt with purely by private initiative alone.18 But the state was never the controlling interest in this exercise. Private agencies and organisations in the United States had long been involved in promoting exchanges prior to the state deciding on their 86
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ideological usefulness.19 Therefore, the major legislation after 1938, which sought to expand exchanges for their strategic value, always stressed the inherent state–private cooperation required to run them. The Surplus Property Act of 1944 (Fulbright Act) insisted on the formation of a Board of Foreign Scholarships to oversee the Fulbright Program’s operation, and the Board itself relied on developing a wide network throughout the university community to make the programme work.20 The 1948 Information and Educational Exchange Act (Smith–Mundt Act) directed the Secretary of State ‘to utilize, to the maximum extent practicable, the services and facilities of private agencies’.21 The 1961 Fulbright–Hays Act made this connection more explicit: Foreign governments, international organizations and private individuals, firms, associations, agencies, and other groups shall be encouraged to participate to the maximum extent feasible in carrying out this Act and to make contributions of funds, property, and services which the President is hereby authorized to accept.22 Private involvement in this field was always numerically the dominant factor. While between 1949 and 1963 81,500 grants were issued under the State Department’s international educational and cultural exchange programme, in 1963 itself state programmes represented only 5 per cent of all forms of regulated exchange taking place between the US and the rest of the world.23 One of the key reasons for this was that exchanges were considered an educational matter, and education was a field in which the limits to US government control had been set during the nineteenth century. ‘American cultural proselytizing’ was the occupation first of missionary societies and then, from the early twentieth century onwards, of the philanthropic foundations.24 After the First World War efforts increased so that ‘during the 15-year period from 1919 to 1933, the interchange of students, professors, and specialists between the United States and other countries of the world was on a scale that was unprecedented in history up to that time’.25 It was during this period that the major private institutions were founded, with the aim of organising, coordinating and extending exchange activity. The American Council on Education (ACE) was created in 1918 and the Institute for International Education (IIE) and the American Council of Learned Societies (ACLS) in 1919; all had private funds. The major foundations, such as the Carnegie Endowment, Guggenheim and Rockefeller supported these developments wholeheartedly. Two broad factors lay at the root of these efforts. One was a commitment to modernisation and scientific progress to improve the way of life of others. This position was closely associated with an American exceptionalism that wanted to project the United States, 87
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because of its unique history and development, as the model for other countries.26 Another position, one influenced strongly by the First World War, was a firm belief in the benefits of fostering ‘mutual understanding’ among peoples for the purpose of undermining threatening stereotypes and contributing to peaceful international relations. After 1938 these two factors blended with a third: the strategic value of influencing opinion on the United States abroad in a favourable direction. This politicisation phase was directed through two wartime agencies oriented more towards propaganda – Nelson Rockefeller’s Office of InterAmerican Affairs (OIAA) and the Office of War Information (OWI) – and culminated in President Truman’s call for a Campaign of Truth in April 1950. The two agencies tended to focus on exchanges simply as an extension of ‘fast media’ information programmes, with less appreciation for their use as a form of ‘slow media’ that did not simply ‘sell’ US foreign policy to others and did not necessarily produce instant results. The reorientation programmes run by the US military authorities in post-war Germany and Japan, both of which used large-scale exchange programmes, were also geared towards achieving the explicit political goal of supporting the democratisation of whole societies in a short space of time. However, the ideals of genuine two-way exchange continued to be strongly represented by those in the DCR and the private sector who believed in reciprocity.27 The Smith–Mundt Act may have represented a global extension of cultural programmes in line with the expansion of US foreign policy interests, but its language was that of liberal internationalism: ‘The objectives of this Act are to enable the Government of the United States to promote a better understanding of the United States in other countries, and to increase mutual understanding between the people of the United States and the people of other countries’. In assisting private agencies towards this goal, the Act explicitly forbade the Secretary of State from trying to assume a controlling position over their activities.28 Many Congressmen, aware of the need to do something, would not support giving the state any ‘undemocratic’ centralising powers at the expense of a vibrant private sector.29 Smith–Mundt therefore represented a mix of global strategy and reciprocal cultural exchange, with all the characteristics of American exceptionalism and a belief in the US mission in the world binding the state and the private agencies together in a common endeavour. It is this insistence on private involvement, and the intricate public–private relationship that resulted from it, which sets the United States apart from other countries in the running of official exchange programmes. In his 1955 study of exchanges, supervised by the US government, Clifford Ketzel made the valid point that ‘every major programme except that undertaken under the Fulbright Act was initiated at a time and with a region or country in which American political objectives and the national 88
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interest made such a programme desirable’.30 The list is extensive. Programmes which used exchanges primarily for the export of American technical knowledge were the following: the Greek–Turkey Aid Program (1947–49), the Economic Cooperation Administration (1948–51), the Mutual Defense Assistance Program (1949–51), the Mutual Security Administration (1951–53) and the Technical Cooperation Administration (1951–53). Scientific research exchanges were facilitated via the Department of Health, Education, and Welfare and the National Science Foundation. The State Department’s International Educational Exchange Service (IES) oversaw the Fulbright Program, Leader and Specialist Programs, the Iranian Trust Fund (for Iranian students to study in the US), the Chinese Emergency Aid Program and the Occupied Areas Programs (in 1949 the Department took over responsibility from the military authorities for the exchange programmes in Germany and Japan). The Department of Defense continued to administer the Ryukyu Islands Program for leaders and students. State, Defense and the Department of Labor cooperated on the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) Leader Projects, begun in 1951, initially with the aim of taking western European journalists on tours of the United States. While it is true that the Fulbright Act was initiated separately from any particular regional strategy, it was far from apolitical. It was no coincidence that the first Fulbright agreement was signed in 1947 with China, a country that had been the target of much missionary, philanthropic and economic attention since the late nineteenth century and with which the DCR had already begun to administer exchanges in 1942.31 During the 1950s and 1960s the Fulbright Program in Europe would be used deliberately to stimulate research on the United States and promote the building of American Studies departments. The strategy met with some success: the Program teamed up effectively with other important initiatives in the field such as the Salzburg Seminar.32 This effort in the culturaleducational field, particularly through its use as a channel to introduce American research tools and results into Europe, was above all intended to legitimise the leadership role of the United States in the Atlantic community.33
Psychological warfare and the focus on elites In these circumstances, the contest between ‘realists’ (strategy) and ‘idealists’ (reciprocity) over the function and objectives of exchanges was determined wholly by the hardening attitude towards national security considerations. The influence of wartime agencies such as the OWI and OIAA played an important role in this since it was under their auspices (alongside other agencies such as the Office of Strategic Services [OSS] and the US Army’s Psychological Warfare Division) that psychological warfare approaches 89
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were introduced as an additional element of the foreign policy arsenal. An impressive array of intellectual networks and institutes played a role in developing these ideas and linking up with military and government agencies to apply them.34 By the late 1940s such approaches were feeding into the State Department, which came to regard all cultural programmes as ‘simply tools for favorably influencing attitudes and opinions within foreign countries’.35 The government may have been restricted by legislation to a coordinating and facilitating role, but throughout the 1950s it began to develop strategies to direct the private sector according to the demands of national security. While this perhaps offended the principles of some activists in the educational field, the chance of government contracts and an expanding flow of exchanges were not to be dismissed. Coupled with the general commitment to the US ideological mission in the world, state–private cooperation – and thus the private sector’s contribution to foreign policy strategies – was ensured. The reorientation programme run by the Office of the US Military Government in Germany relied heavily on the expertise of organisations such as the IIE, ACE and the Rockefeller Foundation.36 There was also a crossover of personnel between overt and covert agencies, for example, Oliver Caldwell, who was an OSS officer in China before joining the State Department’s Division of Exchange of Persons (in charge of the German programme when it was passed to the State Department in 1949) and Kenneth Holland, who worked with the OIAA before becoming Assistant Director for Cultural Affairs in 1947, head of the IIE and Board member of the CIA-supported Foundation for Youth and Student Affairs. Psychological warfare can best be understood as ‘a group of strategies and tactics designed to achieve the ideological, political, or military objectives of the sponsoring organization (typically a government or political movement) through exploitation of a target audience’s cultural–psychological attributes and its communication system’.37 As this suggests, the roots of this concept derive from mass communications research and studies of the impact that communications media could have on mass audiences, particularly in relation to the maintenance of political power. Key figures in this field included Harold Lasswell, whose Propaganda Technique and the World War (1927) was followed by a host of publications examining political power and public opinion, Paul Lazarsfeld, who followed the 1944 work The People’s Choice with further studies of the impact of mass communication on decision-making, and Wilbur Schramm, perhaps the key figure in forging a distinct field of mass communications research and applying it via contractual relations with the US Information Agency (USIA), Radio Free Europe and the military.38 One of the crucial aspects to this research was the increasing focus on ‘opinion leaders’ who, if identified correctly within each society, could serve as the principal channels for well-targeted information campaigns.39 As Ron Robin has described, this 90
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approach was a radical departure because ‘it claimed that the diffusion of ideas via respected members of an individual’s social network – the opinion leaders – was more effective than the mechanism of mass media’.40 The implications of this for the practice of US government exchange programmes are obvious. However, concentrating on the human factor opened up a degree of uncertainty as to how to ensure success. Saul Padover, an OSS intelligence officer in 1944–45 before becoming a professor of political science at the New School for Social Research, argued in his 1951 pamphlet ‘Psychological Warfare’ that: Accurate estimates of success are hard to make. For one thing, educational effects are generally long-range and take time to mature. The State Department itself is not absolutely certain whether a large-scale exchange of persons is a good thing per se; nor does it know how to evaluate it. . . . Even in the case of white European students, who usually meet with warm hospitality and courtesy in the United States, one cannot always be sure of the total effect upon them of their stay in this country.41 Nevertheless, exchange programmes became part of the information and cultural relations offensive announced by President Truman as the Campaign of Truth in April 1950 and solidified in the secret NSC 68 later that year.42 In this scenario exchange programmes played a vital role, because the United States could best confront communist propaganda about the American way of life by bringing people over to see how good it was for themselves. The issue of coordination between the mushrooming number of programmes during the 1950s was a serious one. If NSC 4 and NSC 4A in 1948 had separated the overt and covert dimensions of information policy against the Soviet Union, it thereafter became necessary to try and maintain a coherence between the two.43 Attempts to coordinate covert programmes began with the Interdepartmental Foreign Information Organization, which was replaced in 1951 by the Psychological Operations Coordinating Committee. The arrival of the Psychological Strategy Board (PSB) in the same year introduced a new body to oversee all covert and overt psychological operations.44 The PSB’s Doctrinal Program from June 1953, with its aim of undermining intellectual support for communism around the world, stated that ‘in selecting individuals in the Exchange of Persons Program, special attention should be given to those who could be expected to have influence in the doctrinal field (writers, teachers, labor leaders, etc.)’.45 The PSB’s successor, the Operations Coordinating Board (OCB), aimed for an expanded exchange programme with countries of the Far East in order ‘to build a receptive climate of public opinion overseas in which the actions and policies of the 91
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United States can be correctly interpreted’.46 While the IES cooperated fully with these developments, it is not as if there was a great deal of clarity as to the division of coordination and responsibility between covert and overt interests. Francis J. Colligan wrote to an IES colleague at this time that there was a need for a more intensive exploration of the resources available in this field of activity, the maximum utilization of these resources and their effective integration into the strategic plans and purposes which form the basis of our foreign policy. . . . What type of exchange activities are best conducted on an overt, cooperative basis? What type, on a covert basis?47 Colligan’s query was an important one, since covert and overt programmes operated side by side. For instance, the CIA supported the international activities and exchange programmes of the National Student Association (NSA) through the Foundation for Youth and Student Affairs (FYSA), created in 1952. With this back-up the NSA developed the Foreign Student Leadership Program (FSLP) to identify promising individuals abroad and offer them educational scholarships in the United States. The approach of the FSLP and the State Department was essentially the same, but CIA involvement meant that some kind of ‘firewall’ had to exist between the covert and overt operations to allow for damage control should the truth come out – as it did in the late 1960s. The covert and overt state–private networks operated side by side, but whether that meant in parallel or intertwined often depended upon the personalities and purposes involved.48 The decentralisation among the many private groups also caused a sense of helplessness at IES. It is clear that so many programmes were operating in conjunction with government departments, universities and private agencies that there existed no statistical information as to exactly how many exchange grantees were coming in or going out of the United States, or whether the objectives of the Smith–Mundt Act (or the Campaign of Truth) were actually being met.49 Throughout the 1950s, successive advisory commissions and independent committees were created to try and find the best division of tasks and the most appropriate means of oversight within the government machinery. The rearrangement that led to the formation of the USIA in 1953 increased rather than decreased this scrutiny.50 A 1960 report commented that while the State Department, USIA and the International Cooperation Administration (the successor to the FOA (Foreign Operations Administration)) were the main government units responsible for exchanges, a total of seventeen separate government agencies were involved in their implementation.51 Serious efforts to resolve this during the Kennedy administration resulted in the 1961 92
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Fulbright–Hays Act and the creation of the more prominent position of Assistant Secretary of State for Educational and Cultural Affairs. Yet, paradoxically, the relative haphazardness of the whole operation was its greatest asset. The lack of a single state-controlled apparatus was the best defence against accusations of political manipulation. Many exchange grantees, particularly those on the more sensitive politically oriented initiatives such as the Foreign Leader Program, were impressed to find that their suspicions about what seemed at the outset to be an outright propaganda exercise were actually unfounded.
The Foreign Leader Program The most prestigious of the State Department’s exchange activities was the aptly named Foreign Leader Program or FLP. The FLP, a distillation of methods pursued previously in Latin America and occupied Germany, was part of the worldwide operations sanctioned by the Smith–Mundt Act. It was a political programme targeted at specific groups in each society, identified within the annual State Department–USIA Country Plan as being the key ‘opinion leaders’ for translating US foreign policy goals to the local audience. In the early 1950s these individuals merited a Leader grant for a three- or four-month trip around the United States, usually choosing their own destinations and meetings. Just as communications research discovered early on that it was futile to try and convert a convinced opponent, so too was the FLP directed more towards those individuals wavering in their political allegiance rather than towards outright critics of US policies. A State Department instruction memo from 1950 illustrates well how the Leader Program blended the long-term perspective of ‘mutual understanding’ with the short-term political objectives of the Campaign of Truth: A distinctive feature of this program is the fact that it is primarily concerned with individuals of outstanding influence and prominence in their countries . . . making possible the interchange of distinguished leaders of thought and opinion in fields of mutual interest and usefulness. The high official position held in their own governments or communities by many foreign leaders and specialists awarded grants under this program makes their visits of special importance not only in furthering cultural and scientific cooperation in long-term projects of mutual interest, but in implementing the aims and objectives of American foreign policy.52 How far actual ‘exchange’ took place is of course a moot point. Visitors were met with curiosity and genuine interest but their primary function was to learn more about the United States. The Specialist Program, which 93
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sent American professionals abroad to provide requested expertise, was the flip-side to this. Exchanges such as the FLP occupied a special place within the propaganda panoply. Too close a connection between the invitation and the specific goals of the United States in a particular country, as if a specific pay-off was expected in return, could open up the whole programme to the charge of political manipulation. This would be to place the invitee in a compromising position and damage the prospect of others accepting similar offers in the future. Officials in the State Department’s European Bureau looked at the Leader Program as something ‘primarily intended to be a “political instrument”’ but the dangers of pursuing such a policy without due care were clear.53 An Exchange Division memo from 1957 refers to the fact that political leaders and government officials throughout Southeast Asia and the Middle East were becoming more and more reluctant to accept Department grants because of the ‘kiss of death’ effect which such grants might have upon their political and career objectives.54 This varied greatly from country to country. The same memo noted, for instance, that the only country in western Europe where remotely similar concerns were expressed was Greece. However, by the late 1960s even proAmerican Dutch parliamentarians were referring jokingly among themselves to their ‘CIA trips’. While the State Department oversaw and held overall responsibility for the programme, it was involved only in a supervisory role. In 1954 the Department passed all responsibility for the arrangement of tour itineraries for Leaders to independent agencies contracted for this purpose, the most important being the Governmental Affairs Institute for politicians, civil servants and media visitors, IIE and ACE for educational and cultural grantees, and the Department of Labor for trade union officials. These agencies in turn worked closely with the voluntary groups in each town and city which received each visitor and planned out a schedule of activities and events.55 This decentralised apparatus itself became a powerful ideological advertisement for openness and freedom, a deliberate contrast to the centralised, and obviously propagandistic, efforts of the Soviet Union.
Conclusion As Joseph Nye has pointed out, ‘hard and soft power are related because they are both aspects of the ability to achieve one’s purpose by affecting the behavior of others. . . . If a country can shape international rules that are consistent with its interests and values, its actions will more likely 94
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appear legitimate in the eyes of others’.56 Exchange programmes have played a vital role in the practice of soft power. What everyone involved, whether covertly and overtly, in running them realised was that what they were using to sell the United States were its strongest points: openness, informality, its ‘anything-is-possible’ energy. This was a prime form of American exceptionalism in operation, involving not only the major nongovernmental and philanthropic organisations working in close tandem with government policy, but also a ‘citizen diplomacy’ that required and received widespread commitment from thousands of volunteers across the country willing to show off their local communities to visitors. The sheer scale of the public–private partnership was what made the American example unique compared to other countries such as France, Britain and, obviously, the Soviet Union.57 In general, the model of the state–private network fits perfectly with the American approach to running exchange programmes. Both the covert and overt programmes aimed to put the American Way of Life on show, and by so doing demonstrate that ‘the ideological symbol of that life, the notion of “freedom”, was at the forefront not only of American rhetoric but also of American political activity’.58 That the overt exchanges run by the State Department (such as the FLP) were the perfect cover for the covert exchanges run by the CIA (such as the Foreign Student Leader Project) is undeniable. Even if they were kept separate administratively, the same guiding principles essentially applied to both: American exceptionalism and the ideological drive of American foreign policy. The level of political intent varied, from the targeting of particular groups and individuals abroad (as the Leader Program and FSLP did) to the more general aim to create a body of opinion supportive of US leadership (as with the Fulbright Program). What needs to be examined further is the element of human agency involved. Understanding the ideology of US foreign policy and the network structure created to put it into practice is one thing, but discovering what effect these programmes had on the participants themselves is quite another. ‘The exchange of persons’, wrote a Public Affairs Officer in 1953, ‘is a “slow media” in its influence. Whether or not desired results can be obtained is a gamble’.59 Yet there is enough anecdotal evidence to more than confirm the positive effects of these exchanges. To name one prime example, Margaret Thatcher, picked out in 1967 by a US embassy political officer for a Leader grant while she was shadow spokesperson for tax affairs, returned from this first trip to the United States extremely grateful for the experience.60 Many other leaders have also had their views on the United States influenced in this way at an early stage of their careers.61 Nevertheless, influencing individuals is one thing, but using exchanges to build a transnational community sympathetic to US aims can only really succeed with a foreign policy that justifies such sympathy. In the end, mutual understanding and unilateralism do not mix. 95
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Notes and bibliography 1 See Blanche W. Cook, The Declassified Eisenhower: A Divided Legacy (New York: Doubleday, 1981); S. Parry-Giles, ‘Camouflaged Propaganda: The Truman and Eisenhower Administration’s Covert Manipulation of News’, Western Journal of Communication, 60 (1996), pp. 146–67; Scott Lucas, Freedom’s War: The American Crusade against the Soviet Union (New York University Press, 1999); Kenneth A. Osgood, Total Cold War: America’s Global Battle for Hearts and Minds in the 1950s (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2006). 2 By the late 1940s ‘psychological warfare had become, in essence, a synonym for cold war’. Kenneth A. Osgood, ‘Hearts and Minds: The Unconventional Cold War’, Journal of Cold War History, 4 (Spring 2002), p. 86. 3 Michael H. Hunt, Ideology and US Foreign Policy (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1987), pp. 17–18. 4 Emily Rosenberg, Spreading the American Dream: American Economic and Cultural Expansion 1890–1945 (New York: Hill & Wang, 1982), and Financial Missionaries to the World: The Politics and Culture of Dollar Diplomacy 1900–1930 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999). 5 Hunt, Ideology, p. 153. 6 Ibid., p. xi. 7 John Fousek, To Lead The Free World: American Nationalism and the Cultural Roots of the Cold War (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2000). 8 Scott Lucas, ‘Beyond Diplomacy: Propaganda and the History of the Cold War’, in G. Rawnsley (ed.), Cold War Propaganda in the 1950s (London: Macmillan, 1999), pp. 15, 18. 9 Policy Planning Staff memorandum, 4 May 1948, Document 269, Foreign Relations of the United States: Emergence of the Intelligence Establishment 1945–1950 (Washington DC: Department of State, 1996), pp. 668–9. 10 Ibid. 11 Lucas, Freedom’s War, p. 67. 12 See for instance Volker Berghahn, ‘European Elitism, American Money, and Popular Culture’, in R. Laurence Moore and Mauricio Vaudagna (eds), The American Century in Europe (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2003), pp. 117–30. 13 David Caute, The Dancer Defects: The Struggle for Cultural Supremacy during the Cold War (Oxford University Press, 2003), p. 6. 14 Lucas, ‘Beyond Diplomacy’, p. 19. ‘Full and fair picture’ comes from a January 1946 speech by Truman’s Under-Secretary for Public and Cultural Affairs, William Benton. 15 Lucas refers to ‘the caricature of the private dimension of the State–private network either as autonomous elements in liberal democracy or as co-opted and controlled servants of the State’. ‘Mobilizing Culture: The State–Private Network and the CIA in the Early Cold War’, in D. Carter and R. Clifton (eds), War and Cold War in American Foreign Policy 1942–1962 (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2002), pp. 85–6. 16 Quoted in Hans N. Tuch, Communicating with the World: US Public Diplomacy Overseas (New York: St Martin’s Press, 1990), p. 8. 17 See Geoffrey C. Middlebrook, ‘The Bureau of Educational and Cultural Affairs and American Public Diplomacy during the Reagan Years: Purpose, Policy, Program, and Performance’ (PhD thesis, University of Hawaii, 1995), pp. 11–19. 18 Another cause was the centralising tendencies of New Deal bureaucracy in general. See Oliver Schmidt, ‘Civil Empire by Co-optation: German–American
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35 36
Exchange Programs as Cultural Diplomacy, 1945–61’ (PhD thesis, Harvard University, 1999), p. 3. Merle Curti, American Philanthropy Abroad: A History (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1963). ‘The Fulbright Act’, in Walter Johnson and Francis Colligan, The Fulbright Program: A History (University of Chicago Press, 1965), p. 331. ‘United States Information and Educational Exchange Act’, PL 402, series 15, Subject Files, 1953–2000, box 48, USIA General Records, RG 306, National Archives, Washington DC (hereafter NA). ‘The Fulbright–Hays Act, 1961’, in Johnson and Colligan, Fulbright Program, p. 336. Howland Sargeant, ‘American Information and Cultural Representation Overseas’, in Vincent M. Barnett Jr (ed.), The Representation of the United States Abroad (New York: Praeger, 1965), pp. 98–9. Frank A. Ninkovich, US Information Policy and Cultural Diplomacy, Foreign Policy Association Headline series no. 308, p. 9. J. Manuel Espinosa, Inter-American Beginnings of US Cultural Diplomacy 1936–1948 (Washington DC: Department of State, 1976), p. 49. See Seymour Martin Lipset, American Exceptionalism: A Double-Edged Sword (New York: W. W. Norton, 1996). Frank A. Ninkovich, The Diplomacy of Ideas: U.S. Foreign Policy and Cultural Relations 1938–1950 (Cambridge University Press, 1981), pp. 8–60. ‘United States Information and Educational Exchange Act’, PL 402, series 15, Subject Files, 1953–2000, box 48, USIA General Records, RG 306, NA. Sargeant, ‘American Information’, p. 107. Clifford P. Ketzel, ‘Exchange of Persons and American Foreign Policy: The Foreign Leader Program of the Department of State’ (PhD thesis, University of California, 1955), p. 11. Ninkovich, US Information Policy, p. 10; Ninkovich, Diplomacy of Ideas, pp. 55–60; Wilma Fairbank, America’s Cultural Experiment in China 1942–1949 (Washington DC: Department of State, 1976). Oliver Schmidt, ‘No Innocents Abroad: The Salzburg Impetus and American Studies in Europe’, in R. Wagnleitner and E. T. May (eds), Here, There, and Everywhere: The Foreign Politics of American Popular Culture (Hanover, NH: University Press of New England, 2000). Johnson and Colligan, Fulbright Program, pp. 119–36; Jan C. C. Rupp, ‘The Fulbright Program, or the Surplus Value of Officially Organised Academic Exchange’, Journal of Studies in International Education, 3 (Spring 1999), pp. 57–81; Rupp, Van Oude en Nieuwe Universiteiten: De Verdringing van Duitse door Amerikaanse Invloeden op de Wetenschapsbeoefening en het Hoger Onderwijs in Nederland, 1945–1995 (The Hague: Sdu, 1997), p. 203. See Christopher Simpson, Science of Coercion: Communication Research and Psychological Warfare 1945–1960 (Oxford University Press, 1994); Ron Robin, The Making of the Cold War Enemy: Culture and Politics in the Military–Industrial Complex (Princeton University Press, 2001). These included the RAND Corporation, the New School for Social Research, International Public Opinion Research in New York and think-tanks connected to the military such as the Human Resources Research Institute. Ninkovich, US Information Policy, p. 18. See Henry Kellerman, Cultural Relations as an Instrument of US Foreign Policy: The Educational Exchange Program between the United States and Germany 1945–1954 (Washington DC: Department of State, 1978); Schmidt, ‘Civil Empire by Co-optation’.
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37 Simpson, Science of Coercion, p. 11. 38 Harold L. Lasswell, Propaganda Technique and the World War (New York: Alfred Knopf, 1927); Paul Lazarsfeld, Bernard Berelson and Hazel Gaudet, The People’s Choice (New York: Duell, Sloan, & Pearce, 1944); Wilbur Schramm (ed.), The Process and Effects of Mass Communication (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1954); Simpson, Science of Coercion, pp. 130–1; Gabriel Weimann, The Influentials: People Who Influence People (Albany: SUNY Press, 1994), p. 5. 39 In The People’s Choice Lazarsfeld developed the ‘two-step flow of communication’ model which argued that opinions broadcast via the mass media had their widest impact when passed through influential persons who were recognised as opinion leaders within their society. See Robert T. Holt and Robert W. van de Velde, Strategic Psychological Operations and American Foreign Policy (University of Chicago Press, 1960), p. 58. 40 Robin, Making of Cold War Enemy, p. 83. 41 Saul K. Padover, ‘Psychological Warfare’, Foreign Policy Association Headline Series, 86 (March–April 1951), pp. 31–2. 42 Walter L. Hixson, Parting the Curtain: Propaganda, Culture, and the Cold War 1945–1961 (New York: St Martin’s Press, 1998), pp. 14–16. 43 For an excellent overview of the coordination issue, see Edward P. Lilly, ‘The Psychological Strategy Board and its Predecessors: Foreign Policy Coordination 1938–53’, in Gaetano L. Vincitorio (ed.), Studies in Modern History (New York: St John’s University Press, 1968), pp. 337–82. 44 ‘Analysis of POC Activities during 1951’, Records of Component Offices of the Bureau of European Affairs 1944–62, Entry 1601G, 250/63/09/3–4, Lot File 55D137, box 28, General Records of the Department of State, RG 59, NA; Scott Lucas, ‘Campaigns of Truth: The Psychological Strategy Board and American Ideology, 1951–53’, International History Review, 18 (May 1996), pp. 279–302. 45 ‘US Doctrinal Program’, 29 June 1953, PSB Working Files 1951–53, Lot File 62D333, box 5, General Records of the Department of State, RG 59, NA. 46 15 March 1954, OCB Working Papers 1951–55: Staff Studies and Reports, Bureau of Public Affairs: IES, Entry 3019, 250/62/35/01, box 1, General Records of the Department of State, RG 59, NA. 47 Colligan to Backus, 20 May 1954, OCB Working Papers 1951–55: Staff Studies and Reports, Bureau of Public Affairs: IES, Entry 3019, 250/62/35/01, box 2, General Records of the Department of State, RG 59, NA. 48 Sol Stern, ‘A Short Account of International Student Politics and the Cold War with Particular Reference to the NSA, CIA, etc’, Ramparts, 5 (March 1967), p. 33. See also Chapter 4, this volume. 49 ‘Potentialities of the Exchange Program’, J. N. Hayes to F. J. Colligan, 28 May 1954, OCB Working Papers 1951–55: Staff Studies and Reports, Bureau of Public Affairs: IES, Entry 3019, 250/62/35/01, box 2, General Records of the Department of State, RG 59, NA. 50 Lois W. Roth, ‘Public Diplomacy and the Past: The Search for an American Style of Propaganda (1952–77)’, Fletcher Forum (Summer 1984), pp. 356–69. 51 Warren M. Robbins, ‘Toward an American Global Cultural– Educational– Informational Program in the Framework of the Present World Scene’, series 15, Subject Files, 1953–2000, box 48, USIA General Records, RG 306, NA. 52 ‘Leader and Expert Grants’ (n.d. ?1950), Archive of the Bureau of Educational and Cultural Affairs, US Department of State, Group IV, box 153, folder 17, Fulbright Library, Arkansas University (hereafter CU). 53 T. A. Healy to S. A. Lewis (n.d. ?1960), Group IV, box 153, folder 19, CU.
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54 ‘Acceptability of Foreign Leader Grants’, 8 May 1957, Group IV, box 152, folder 28, CU. 55 Robert E. Elder, The Foreign Leader Program: Operations in the United States (Washington DC: Brookings Institution, 1961), pp. 29–46. 56 Joseph S. Nye Jr, Soft Power: The Means to Success in World Politics (New York: Public Affairs, 2004), pp. 10–11, 109. 57 See Ruth E. McMurry and Muna Lee, The Cultural Approach: Another Way in International Relations (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1947). 58 Lucas, ‘Mobilizing Culture’, p. 100. 59 US Embassy Djakarta to State Department, 2 February 1953, State Department Central Files, Entry 3029, 250/62/35/5, box 3, General Records of the Department of State, RG 59, NA. 60 See Giles Scott-Smith, ‘Her Rather Ambitious Washington Program: Margaret Thatcher’s International Visitor Program Visit to the USA in 1967’, Contemporary British History, 17 (Winter 2003), pp. 65–86. 61 See the list of recent heads of state who have participated in the Leader/Visitor Program, available at http://exchanges.state.gov/education/ivp/alumni.htm (accessed 4 October 2004).
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6 ‘THE FINEST LABOUR NETWORK IN EUROPE’ American labour and the Cold War Julia Angster
What role do private, or non-governmental, actors play in international relations? Are not foreign politics the domain of the state and its agencies? Since the 1990s, perceptions of both international relations and national foreign politics have started to change.1 The end of the Cold War and the bipolar world it had established has shaken old assumptions, and the rise of something that may or may not be adequately described as ‘globalisation’ has further undermined the old conviction that foreign politics was something that governments do – and nobody else. Looking back at the early Cold War years, there is ample evidence that non-governmental players have been taking part in foreign politics all along. In this chapter I will argue that American trade unions did play an important part in American foreign politics during the late 1940s and 1950s, especially in western Europe.2 The integration of western Europe into a western community of ideas, the establishment of a common, western ideology to hold against Soviet communism – these were crucial aims of American Cold War policies. But a government, no matter how powerful, cannot possibly make another country’s people take on and believe in a certain set of values. Cultural diplomacy, or ‘intercultural transfer’,3 needs voluntarism on the receivers’ end. Part of American cultural diplomacy was to get European labour organisations away from communism and firmly on the side of a free market economy. This was something the US government could not achieve without the help of non-governmental groups. In fact, American labour took on the part of communicator between the American and several European societies, dealing directly with European labour movements and trying to convince them of the advantages of western liberalism as opposed to communism. They also cooperated with state agencies and became involved in Washington’s Cold War diplomacy. But why did American labour take this part? Why did it cooperate with the US govern100
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ment in foreign politics? Here I will address these questions and also ask what this relationship was like. Was the state always in control? Finally, I will look at the results of this state–labour cooperation, using the German example as a case study.
The transnational labour network Soon after the Second World War ended in 1945, both American trade union federations, the American Federation of Labor (AFL) and the Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO), had embarked on a major ‘foreign policy’ programme. Their aim was to fight communist influence in Europe and set up a western community of ideas against communist ideology. The labour movements in their opinion held ‘the key to whether or not Europe will remain free or be submerged by Soviet totalitarianism’.4 The AFL was convinced that the Soviet Union was trying to control other countries’ trade union organisations, especially in western Europe. With the help of such associations the Soviets would be able to keep the situation in Europe unstable and protract European reconstruction in order to gain time to prepare for a military contest with the western allies. Stalin’s ambition was to control all of Europe. This in turn would endanger American safety and probably lead to the establishment of some kind of garrison state at home, severely damaging American democracy and jeopardising the position of American labour as a strong and independent interest group. Historical experience had shown that free labour could not exist without democracy, and vice versa: democratic societies were dependent on free trade unions, for they were a guarantee of stability and progress. It was therefore in labour’s own interest to keep the western European labour movements free, strong and anticommunist. To this end, the AFL and CIO set up international departments or committees in Washington DC and New York City, and entertained representatives in bureaus in western Europe. These bureaus were virtual embassies of the US labour movement, initiating a kind of ‘transnational foreign politics’.5 Never before in history had a labour movement installed offices of representation in another country. The international departments and European bureaus were run by Jay Lovestone, Irving Brown and Henry Rutz for the AFL, and by Mike Ross and Victor Reuther for the CIO. They formed the image the American labour organisations had of the situation in Europe and shaped their international policies in a decisive way. They not only conducted official contacts with the European labour organisations, they also built up a network based on personal relations, including politicians, trade unionists, publishers and journalists in many countries and in the international labour movement. The centre of their activities was western Europe: Great Britain, France, Italy and West Germany, Greece and Turkey; even Finland and Iceland were involved in 101
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their policies. But their contacts stretched also to eastern Europe: East Germany, Hungary and Poland; and to the rest of the world, to Latin America, South East Asia and China, Africa and the Near East.6 In 1947 Irving Brown, the AFL representative in Europe, could write home: ‘There is not a single country in Europe where we don’t have contacts whether in the majority or minority; whether legal or illegal. We have the basis for the finest labor network in Europe from both an organizational and information standpoint’.7 Brown, head of the AFL bureau in Brussels and later in Paris, was probably the most influential figure in this network, the ‘man on the spot’ in Europe. He was backed from New York by Jay Lovestone, who headed the Free Trade Union Committee (FTUC) of the AFL, the federation’s foreign policy think-tank and organisational headquarters. His job was to provide the strategy and the means for American labour’s worldwide networking effort. Lovestone was the brains of AFL foreign policies. During the 1920s he had been Secretary of the Communist Party in the USA, before becoming head of the Lovestoneites, a right-wing communist opposition group, of which Irving Brown also was a member. Both lost all affiliation with communism during the late 1930s and became ardent anticommunists in the 1940s.8
The cooperation between American labour and the US government Both the CIO and AFL cooperated with the US government in their foreign policy effort. This cooperation dated back to the days of Roosevelt’s New Deal, when trade unions first became a partner in governmental politics. The relationship continued during the Second World War, when American trade union representatives sat for instance on the War Labor Board and the War Production Board. After the war ended, relations quickly deteriorated where home and economic politics were concerned. The Taft–Hartley Act of June 1947 was the culmination of this conflict. Congress cut back labour’s legal position as well as the economic and political influence it had gained since the days of the New Deal. In the field of foreign politics it was a different picture, however. Here, state–labour cooperation even intensified with the beginning of the Cold War. The AFL and CIO cooperated with the State Department and the Department of Labor, where they participated in committees to coordinate the foreign policies of labour and the Truman administration. The cooperation between the American labour federations and the Department of Labor was channelled by the Trade Union Advisory Committee on International Affairs of the United States Department of Labor (TUAC).9 Created in December 1946, the task of TUAC was to coordinate the dealings and interests of the Labor Department and the trade unions in the field of foreign politics. Labour was also involved in the mechanics of the 102
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Marshall Plan. Trade unionists sat as representatives of the United States on the Economic Cooperation Administration (ECA). They were also engaged in trying to sell the Plan to labour movements abroad: in 1948 the AFL founded the European Recovery Program Trade Union Advisory Committee (ERPTUAC), a transnational trade union organisation dealing with matters of the Marshall Plan and a precursor of the International Confederation of Free Trade Unions (ICFTU). Trade union officials also took part in the occupation of Germany, in the Office of Military Government (OMGUS) and the US High Commission for Germany (HICOG), where it was their task to supervise and promote the reconstruction of the German labour movement. The most problematic partnership in this state–labour relationship was the one between the AFL and CIO on one side, and the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) on the other. Representatives of the AFL and CIO had worked with the wartime secret service, the Office of Strategic Services (OSS). When the European bureaus of the AFL ran out of money in 1948, Brown and Lovestone looked to the government and its agencies for support. The following year, the newly founded CIA came to the rescue and supplied the FTUC with money.10 From now on, ‘Irving Brown ran around Europe organizing things, and Jay Lovestone sent the money’.11 This money was used – by the AFL and CIO alike – to support non-communist labour organisations in Europe. Great care was taken not to let these European labour movements know from where the money actually came.12 There were limits to the common interests of this partnership. Both sides, labour as well as the CIA, deeply distrusted each other. CIA officers resented the fact that they had no control over how their money was spent abroad, and even took to opening and stealing the letters between the FTUC and its European labour representative. Jay Lovestone declared himself dissatisfied with the situation and mentioned depressing experiences with ‘the firm’. He complained that these new friends had no understanding of labour movements and were even damaging to the aims of the AFL in Europe. Lovestone and Brown decided to keep all useful information from them. Already in 1950 they were looking for a way to get away from ‘the lot’, and in 1953 Lovestone summed the situation up: ‘I think the American government and some of its agencies have been stupid and irresponsible in their method of work, in their manner of relations and in their irresponsible behavior’.13 There had indeed been instances of ‘covert actions tainting overt ones’.14 In October 1952 a scandal broke in West Germany, when CIA plans became public which provided for German socialist leaders to be liquidated in the event of a Soviet attack.15 This very much damaged German labour’s trust in American politics and at the same time proved to American labour that the CIA did not care for labour’s policies, which mainly rested on carefully built relationships and trust. During the 103
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Eisenhower administration these networks of state–labour cooperation more or less came to an end; they were only resumed during the Kennedy administration, but even then without much impact on European politics. The war in Vietnam as well as the static and out-of-date anticommunism of the AFL–CIO (as the fused federations were now called) lost them their transnational clout.16 The cooperation between state and labour agencies in foreign politics was based on shared aims and basic concepts. Also, both parties were to a certain extent dependent upon each other: labour needed financial support and at least passive consent from the administration to run its labour network abroad, while the US government in turn needed help from nongovernmental actors in order to run its policy of cultural integration of western Europe.17
American labour and US foreign policy: basic ideas and common aims The American labour movement ‘is a labor movement upholding capitalism, not only in practice, but in principle as well’.18 It was therefore distinctly different from its European counterparts. The movement consisted mainly of a trade union movement. There was no socialist or workers’ party of any real political significance. Socialism was seen as economically harmful, socially wrong and in fact unfeasible in an industrial society. Instead the AFL, founded in 1886, developed the approach of ‘pure and simple unionism’: the task of trade unions was to stick to labour matters, to try and achieve, in their very own field, the best possible result for the time being. The AFL also refused to countenance any interference in labour relations by the state and kept clear of party allegiances. Instead, labour was to have a firm political standpoint which was derived from a consideration of its own interests. Political strength combined with political independence was, in the eyes of the AFL, the best way to serve labour’s interests. In the 1930s the AFL’s anti-statist stance was challenged by the arrival of a new labour federation, the more ‘social democratic’ CIO. By that time the New Deal had brought about a profound change in the relationship between state, society and labour movement. The implementation of Keynesian concepts provided the trade unions with a crucial role in enhancing purchasing power by wage demands and guaranteed acceptance of the labour organisations and their role in the political economy. The Second World War with its massive production effort finally restored the faith in economic growth which the Great Depression had shattered and made social Keynesianism the basis for a ‘Fair Deal’ between the different sections of society. Thus, in the United States of the 1950s, there was a widespread belief that there was no more need for class struggle or similar 104
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fundamental conflicts of interests. The solution for this kind of social discord seemed to have been found: social justice was to be gained by productivity, economic growth and efficiency. Once there was enough for all, there was no reason to quarrel about the distribution of wealth or the right social order. Thus even political strife would lose its sharpness. Unions and industry were to deal with each other on the basis of mutual recognition and a consensus on the main features of the political economy. Productivity and efficiency required privately owned plants, whereas a just distribution of the fruits of economic growth required strong and independent trade unions. The government’s task was to provide stable conditions and a fiscal framework that would guarantee continued growth. This concept of ‘Consensus Capitalism’ had its counterpart in the liberal consensus that lay at the foundations of American social relations and political practice in the 1950s and 1960s, or even, as some argue, up to the 1980s, and also provided the blueprint of US policies throughout the world.19 The concept was a foundation of the western community of ideas which was promoted and kept together by US hegemony between the 1940s and the 1960s. American hegemony, made possible by the Cold War, covered not only the diplomatic and military, as well as the economic spheres, but also the realm of ideas. During the early Cold War, US foreign policy was based on the closely interdependent concepts of national security and the politics of productivity.20 American culture and American political economy were to serve as the model after which the whole western alliance was to be reshaped. This demanded an active and strategic export of values, the creation of an all-western ideology, as well as the establishment of a homogenous economic sphere in the western world, geared to American economic notions and needs. The emphasis on the interdependence of the economic and the political systems, at home as well as in foreign politics, demanded close cooperation between government and interest groups such as the trade unions.21 Both American trade union federations more or less shared the conceptual framework of the American government. They had already been involved in this liberal-corporatist cooperation at home and were ready to promote it internationally. They were convinced that in an adversary world the socio-economic order at home would not survive, and that labour had much to lose in that case. The two basic foreign policy aims of the AFL and CIO were to defy communism in the battle for the workers’ allegiance everywhere and at the same time promote consensus liberalism and the consensus capitalist economy. Even though the AFL concentrated on the promotion of anticommunism, and the CIO was more intent on spreading consensus capitalism, each of these aims was dependent on the other, and could not be separated in the political strategies of the American trade unions. Communism would plunge the world into another war, just as its twin – national socialism – had done previously.22 Economic 105
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recovery and stable growth were needed to strengthen democracy against another onslaught of totalitarianism. And it was labour’s task to contribute to the stabilisation of the free societies in the west. The Soviet Union was fighting the Cold War in the field of ideas and ideologies, and therefore the west would have to come up with a common ideology of its own in order to hold its place. As Irving Brown put it: ‘in any fight between those who defend simply a country and its ways as against those who defend a country as the incarnation of a great idea to revolutionize the world, the advocates of the idea will win – no matter how bad such an idea may be’. This was about ‘American leadership in the world of ideas and policy’.23 But such cultural hegemony could never be established without the consent and cooperation of those western European societies involved. Here, American labour was convinced it had an important contribution to make, even that it possessed crucial strategic potential, for a free labour movement could not conceivably be established by any government.24 Now the AFL’s traditional voluntarism was turned into a concept of transnational policy. The struggle against communism was about the belief systems of ordinary people, about the central concepts of the social and political order. Although poverty was seen as a main incentive for Europeans to follow communist ideas,25 there also was a deeply felt distrust among Europeans towards capitalism and the whole notion of private property. Many held industrialists and capitalists responsible for national socialism and the Second World War. This animosity towards a capitalist market economy could be overcome only by the intervention of the American labour movement, because neither the agents of American government nor the manufacturers could explain credibly to the workers of Europe the notion of private property in American democracy and the capitalist system.26 But there was, in the self-perception of American labour, not only an economic side to this role. The strength of the western model of society lay not least in its pluralist diversity, as opposed to the monolithic rigidity of Soviet rule, as long as there was an underlying consensus over basic values which would unite the west. Labour movements had to be anticommunist, sustain parliamentary democracy and be politically active so they could exert influence on their respective political economies and become a dynamic force in consensus capitalism. The European labourites needed to be shown how much political weight a labour movement could actually have. The American example was to point the way.27 The point to be made was that a labour movement could in fact be independent and critical of governmental policies without the intent to transform the political and economic order as such. Integration was the way to participation, and thus the means to achieve one’s aims. Lovestone told a German social democrat ‘that we felt sure that German labor would 106
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participate in the political life of the nation at least to the extent that American labor does when it rewards its friends and punishes its enemies in the political field on the basis of their record in Congress’.28 But at the same time, it was important for the AFL and CIO not to appear too close to government, as this would have cost them their credibility as advocates of labour interests. In dealing with foreign labour movements, the AFL and CIO therefore took great care to demonstrate their independence of the US government.29 The German case is a good example of the mechanics and results of these transnational labour relations. Using it as a case study, I will now demonstrate how important non-governmental actors were for the integration of western European countries into a western community of ideas. To make consensus-liberal values the basis for other people’s political and economic systems, they had to implement them by themselves, and on an absolutely voluntary basis. And this is exactly what happened in the case of Germany: it was German labourites who opted for these western concepts and convinced their own organisations to take them on. In this, they cooperated closely with American labour and formed part of the transnational labour network.
Transnational relations and their impact: the case of Germany In 1945 the German Social Democratic Party (SPD) was rebuilt basically according to its pre-war traditions.30 Although its chairman Kurt Schumacher (1895–1952) attempted to open up the party to sympathisers from social strata and ethical backgrounds other than its traditional workingclass electorate, he and his followers still held closely onto long-standing socialist core beliefs. Socialisation of plants in key industries, a ‘third way’ between communism and capitalism and the firm connection between democracy and socialism marked the Social Democratic Party’s basic outlook and served as a blueprint for its policies in the immediate post-war years. The German trade unions in 1945, which had to be rebuilt from scratch and were, in marked difference to the inter-war years, restructured as a cross-party movement, also mostly clung to traditional socialist beliefs.31 Their membership as well as their functionaries were convinced that the capitalist economy had failed and that an entirely new economic order was now necessary. Parliamentary democracy on its own was, as the failure of the Weimar Republic had demonstrated, unable to sustain itself unless accompanied by a socialist economy. Industrial democracy was to be the twin of political democracy. In 1949 the Munich resolution of the newly founded German Trade Union Federation (DGB) outlined the three basic demands that would ensure the setting up of an ‘industrial democracy’ and thus underpin parliamentary democracy in the Federal Republic of Germany: socialisation of key industry plants, central planning and co-determination 107
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of industry by organised labour. Capitalism and democracy were deemed incompatible, and the unions, like the SPD, sought a third concept, one falling somewhere between the political economy of the communist east, which was considered ‘alien to the German people’, and that of the capitalist west, which was regarded as not democratic.32 German labour did not believe that its country and political culture really belonged to the west as regards political thought. For although Schumacher, as well as Hans Böckler, the first head of the DGB, opted for the integration of West Germany into the political west as a bloc and, with certain misgivings, also as an economic unit, they certainly did not intend to make Germany share the liberal, free market and individualistic culture of the Anglo-American world. Instead, they meant to form something new by, as Schumacher recommended it, reconciling the traditions of the western civil revolutions, especially their liberal and pluralist elements, with German socialist traditions, mainly their collectivist approach and socialist economic thinking.33 West Germany was one of the centres of AFL and CIO activities; this was strongly emphasised by the fact that they sent additional representatives to Germany. Still, it is important to note that the American labour federations did not pursue a German policy, but rather a European one, of which Germany formed an essential, but always integral, part. As the situation of West German labour was to some extent different from that of other countries, a certain prominence was given to its affairs. Being the main stage of the early Cold War, the fight for the people’s minds, the clash of belief systems was particularly intense in the occupied and divided Germany, at least in the immediate post-war years. In the eyes of American labour the emerging West German republic was, by its double negation of national socialism and Stalinist communism, the epitome of the concept of antitotalitarianism. The representatives of the AFL and CIO in West Germany conducted their policy at two different levels. They entertained official relations with the newly emerging West German trade union movement and with the SPD.34 At the same time, they wove a network of personal contacts with individual members of German labour, who shared their basic interests and were ready to cooperate in the pursuit of common aims. These included Ludwig Rosenberg, a leading functionary and future president of the DGB; Willi Eichler, head of a left-wing group in the 1920s and 1930s and leading figure of the socialist exiles in London, who in the 1950s became head of the SPD’s ‘programme commission’ and was one of the main authors of the Godesberg programme; Werner Hansen, in the 1950s head of the Northrhein–Westfalian DGB and member of the DGB executive committee; Hans Jahn, in the 1950s head of the German Railroad Union and then president of the international trade union organisation, ICFTU; and Fritz Heine of the SPD executive committee, also responsible for the party’s ‘Eastern Bureau’. Most of these men had spent the years of national 108
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socialist rule in exile. This network between individual members of West German unions and the SPD and representatives of the AFL and CIO formed part of the larger, European and international labour network.35 The German members of the transnational network had their own very good reasons to work for these ends: they believed in the values that lay at its foundations. But in the inter-war years, many of these reformers had been ardent socialists, mostly on the far left of the political spectrum, or communists. None of them had actually been a mainstream German social democrat. Turning them into proponents of western liberal political thought took some work. The main factor was, of course, the annihilation of the German labour movement by the national socialist regime. During the years of resistance and early exile, and also during the Spanish civil war, in which some of these people took an active part, the former communists broke first with their party, then with communism as such. This was due to their disappointing experiences with the German Communist Party as well as the Communist International, but also to the experiences of working and living closely with socialists and social democrats.36 Similarly, some left-wing socialists also became estranged from Marxist dogma. This first step led to a loss of former belief systems and made them ready to look for other values. The second step was taken in exile during the early 1940s, when many of them lived in Great Britain, and some in the United States. Their experiences in these countries – the entirely different approach of a whole society to the problems of negotiating conflict and making political decisions – seemed to offer a useful answer to their own doubts and questions. Contacts with the Fabian Society, the Labour Party and trade unions in Great Britain, a growing acquaintance with their values and their political thought, especially their firm support of the parliamentary system, meant these German socialists turned to liberal, western political thought.37 In the United States, some German refugees worked for the AFL and became familiar with the positions of American labour. But only those German labourites in exile who had previously lost their political orientation were open to new values and ideas. Upon their return, they came home to a country that was now strange to them. Not only had the cities been turned to rubble, their own organisations, whose reconstruction they had planned for years, had become alien to them. The old traditionalisms did not seem to fit the new times any more. Thus the former exiles kept up their mutual contacts and used these networks to work for a fundamental change of the programmes of West German labour. It was at this point that the AFL and CIO appeared, looking for partners in their crusade for consensus liberalism. After an initial period of orientation, the European and the German representatives of the American trade union federations started weaving a network of contacts that included party and trade unions alike. The AFL 109
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representatives tried to engage in ‘closer teamwork with Schumacher, the ostburo, the SPD fraction in Bonn, [and] the DGB second line officers, and to exert constant pressure on the American Government representatives’.38 But it was individuals within these organisations with whom they worked, not the organisations as such. The simultaneous official, inter-organisational contacts with DGB and SPD were, in a way, the diplomatic background, useful for implementing and legitimating the results of the political interaction that was taking place at the informal, personal level. The history of this German cluster in the transnational network can be divided into several phases: a time of building up, a time of operation and a time of disintegration. The network in Germany was formed over the period 1945 to 1952. In this phase the AFL and CIO both placed very clear emphasis on the organisational or structural perspective, even though they differed in their choice of options. Both tried to influence the shape of the emerging West German trade union movement by influencing the politics of the military government. The result was the concept of ‘free trade unionism’ which eventually shaped the structure of the West German trade unions.39 It was not, and this is important to note, a copy of US industrial relations, but rather a reformed organisational structure catering for West German conditions, and was created to implement new political ideas in a basically conventional framework of trade union politics. The acknowledged policy of the AFL and CIO during this phase was to support a very broad range of political and ideological views, provided they were anticommunist and not opposed to the basic principles of parliamentary democracy. Eligibility was, therefore, not based on abjuring traditional socialist ideas – at least during this first phase of cooperation.40 But when between 1949 and 1952 the outer framework of West German labour politics was definitely settled, things began to change and questions of values and political thought came to the foreground. The political system and socioeconomic order of the Federal Republic of Germany had been determined, the country was on its way to integration into a political and economic western bloc and the organisations of the labour movement were set up and at work. By 1952, the second phase of cooperation began, with the transnational labour network now well established and able to operate efficiently within the SPD and the unions. Now, manifest attempts were made by the American labour representatives to bring about an internal ‘westernisation’. A very open and straightforward discussion of the mutual belief systems took place, focusing on the role of a labour movement in a liberal society and on questions of self-perception and political performance.41 The compatibility of socialist concepts with the reality of the West German political economy was openly questioned by the AFL representatives. Now the cooperation of German functionaries became essential, and the AFL started to knit closer connections with the social 110
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democratic party’s right-wing reformers and their counterparts within the DGB. These reformers tried to bring about a profound reformation of the organisations’ programmes and, thereby, of the values at the root of all their policies. Backed by the AFL and their well-connected representatives, the German labour reformers, such as Rosenberg, Eichler and Hansen, could more effectively go about their own task of westernising their organisations’ conceptual framework.42 It was not least their policies in party and unions that brought about a fundamental change in outlook. In 1959, the SPD decided on a new programme, announcing the party’s new outlook and self-perception as it had developed during the 1950s. The Federal Republic’s free market economy, with its social security net, was not only accepted by labour but was openly endorsed and turned into a basis for its own economic thinking, which was now running more or less along Keynesian lines. Central elements of socialist ‘dogma’ were thrown overboard as the party made the prevailing socio-economic order its own. German Social Democracy underwent a ‘de-Marxification’: socialism was abandoned as an ‘end-stake’. The new goals were growth of prosperity, increased productivity, a just share of the national product and full employment. The concept of the free market economy was endorsed; planning and socialisation were reduced to optional tools for the regulation of a ‘new capitalism’, to be used only when required.43 Also, the party’s electoral basis was now viewed as being pluralist and cross-class instead of its former, mainly working-class constituency. Anglo-American liberal elements of political thought had entered the programme, making the SPD regard the responsible, reasonable and self-governed individual as the basic actor in history, thus abandoning its former collectivist and statist reasoning.44 In 1963, the DGB followed suit, also renouncing socialist concepts of class, accepting the country’s political economy as it was and, finally, embarking on the type of industrial relations best described as ‘consensus capitalism’. The West German trade unions had given up on their demands of 1949: socialisation, planning and co-determination. They opted instead for corrections to the system, rather than its genuine transformation. They had come to see their own role as that of an interest group in a pluralist society, to accept private property and free enterprise as the preconditions for productivity and efficiency and a just share of the profits for the workers as the aim of collective bargaining. Thus, a western, liberal conceptual framework was adopted and amalgamated into German traditions of labour politics. But just as the German reformers in SPD and DGB had accomplished their aims, the coalition of American and German westernisers petered out in the third and final phase between the end of the 1950s and the mid-1960s. Although both programmes included most of the crucial issues for which the reformers had been fighting, the former partners were drifting apart, and by the early 1960s the network was hardly in action. Political strife over issues 111
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such as the SPD’s change of policy towards the GDR led to a lasting estrangement. By the mid-1960s, the network was at its end, and even the official contacts between the labour organisations were quickly cooling down. West German labour was now firmly rooted in a consensus liberal framework. It had not taken over American-style labour relations, let alone copied the structure of US trade unions. It had, however, taken on – in a modified way better suited to its own ends – the basic concepts of western liberalism, and had integrated itself into a western community of thought. This was a crucial step on the Federal Republic’s path to joining the western world after decades of rejecting the ways of the ‘Western Democracies’.
Conclusion: the role of non-governmental agencies in the Cold War As the German example was meant to show, American cultural hegemony in the Cold War rested firmly on shared belief systems throughout the west. This community of ideas could never have been procured by coercion or even by inducements, but only by consent, by agreement over basic frameworks. To study this kind of hegemony, one has to look at the impact of ideas, values and ideologies. To analyse their part in international relations, it is necessary to examine the intercultural and transnational level of ideological transfer, and to combine this perspective with an analysis of power politics and hegemony. Looking at the field of state–private partnerships is a good way of dealing with this wider definition of international relations. The US government could run an ‘empire by invitation’, ‘by integration’ or ‘by consent’, because the societies of the countries involved were ready to deal with each other, on a transnational level, without their governments controlling or initiating everything.45 The American trade union federations, for instance, followed their own policies and pursued their own ends abroad, without the US government being in control of their actions – even though sometimes it was the government paying the bill. The important thing to note is that there was no need for Washington to keep labour on a leash in international relations, as long as the fundamental aims and motives of their policies were in accordance with those of the State Department. This American strategy of letting non-governmental or private groups do things their own way made US hegemony far more successful, and long lasting, than it otherwise could have ever been.46
Notes and bibliography 1 2
Melvyn P. Leffler, ‘Presidential Address: New Approaches, Old Interpretations, and Prospective Reconfigurations’, Diplomatic History, 19, 2 (Spring 1995), pp. 173–89. This chapter is based on my book Konsenskapitalismus und Sozialdemokratie. Die Westernisierung von SPD und DGB (München: Oldenbourg, 2003). See also for further references and a full bibliography.
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3 Michel Espagne and Michael Werner (eds), Transferts: les relations interculturelles dans l’espace franco–allemand (XVIIIe et XIXe siècle) (Paris: Presses Univ. De France, 1988). 4 Speech by Irving Brown, AFL representative in Europe, American Club, 17 February 1949, George Meany Memorial Archives (hereafter GMMA), RG 18–003, 011/11, p. 3. 5 GMMA, RG 18–002: 008/23, 012/1–16, 015/26, 016/1–2; RG 18–003: 011/14, 56/14–16. 6 Roy Godson, American Labor and European Politics: The AFL as a Transnational Force (New York: Crane, Russak & Co., 1976); Robert H. Zieger, The CIO 1935–1955 (Chapel Hill and London: University of North Carolina Press, 1995). 7 Irving Brown to Jay Lovestone, 25 August 1947, GMMA, RG18–003, 011/7. 8 GMMA, RG 18–003, 011/9; Ted Morgan, A Covert Life. Jay Lovestone: Communist, Anti-Communist, and Spymaster (New York: Random House, 1999); Robert Alexander, The Right Opposition: The Lovestoneites and the International Communist Opposition (Westport, CN: Greenwood Press, 1981). 9 GMMA, RG 2–006, 005/23; RG 18–002, 008/2. 10 Anthony Carew, ‘The American Labor Movement in Fizzland: The Free Trade Union Committee and the CIA’, Labor History, 39, 1 (1998), pp. 25–42; John Ranelagh, The Agency: The Rise and the Fall of the CIA, 2nd edn (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1987). 11 Jay Lovestone to Irving Brown, 15 June 1949, GMMA, RG 18–003, 011/10; Tom Braden, interview, 14 November 1983, quoted in Ranelagh, The Agency, p. 248; Lovestone to Brown, 24 July 1950, GMMA, RG 18–003, 011/12. 12 Nelson Lichtenstein, The Most Dangerous Man in Detroit: Walter Reuther and the Fate of American Labor (New York: Basic Books, 1995), p. 330. 13 Jay Lovestone to Irving Brown, 15 December 1950, GMMA, RG 18–003, 011/12; Jay Lovestone to Fritz Heine, 22 April 1953, GMMA, RG 18–003, 059/26. 14 Gregory F. Treverton, Covert Action: The Limits of Intervention in the Postwar World (New York: Basic Books, 1987). 15 Henry Rutz to Jay Lovestone, 25 November 1952, GMMA, RG 18–003, 056/16; Lovestone to Rutz, 28 November 1952, GMMA, RG 18–003, 056/16; Lovestone to Rutz, 16 March 1953, GMMA, RG 18–003, 056/17. 16 Lichtenstein, Most Dangerous Man, pp. 396–419. 17 Report, Irving Brown to Jay Lovestone (n.d. ?1953), GMMA, RG 18–003, 011/18, p. 4. 18 Selig Perlman, ‘Labor and the New Deal’, in Milton Derber and Edwin Young (eds), Labour and the New Deal, 2nd edn (New York: Da Capo Press, 1972), p. 367. 19 Patrick Renshaw, American Labour and Consensus Capitalism, 1935–1990 (London: Macmillan, 1991). For the ingredients of consensus liberalism, see Michael Hochgeschwender, Freiheit in der Offensive? Der Kongreß für Kulturelle Freiheit und die Deutschen (München: Oldenbourg 1998), pp. 68–86; Steven Fraser and Gary Gerstle (eds), The Rise and Fall of the New Deal Order, 1930–1980 (Princeton University Press, 1989); Cornel West, The American Evasion of Philosophy: A Genealogy of Pragmatism (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1989). For the role of anticommunism, see Richard Gid Powers, Not Without Honor: The History of American Anticommunism (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1998). 20 Charles S. Maier, ‘The Politics of Productivity: Foundations of American International Economic Policy after World War II’, in Charles S. Maier (ed.), In
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21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34
35
36 37 38 39
Search of Stability: Explorations in Historical Political Economy (Cambridge University Press, 1987), pp. 121–52; Melvyn P. Leffler, A Preponderance of Power: National Security, the Truman Administration, and the Cold War (Stanford University Press, 1992); Anthony Carew, ‘The Politics of Productivity and the Politics of Anti-Communism: American and European Labour in the Cold War’, Intelligence and National Security, 18 (2003), pp. 73–91. Michael J. Hogan, The Marshall Plan: America, Britain, and the Reconstruction of Western Europe, 1947–1952 (Cambridge University Press, 1987), pp. 2ff. Irving Brown, speech, 17 February 1949, GMMA, RG 18–003, 011/11, p. 6. Irving Brown, report to the Free Trade Union Committee, 1953, GMMA, RG 18–003, 011/18, p. 1. Godson, American Labor, pp. 57–70. Walter P. Reuther, CIO Nachrichten, Europäische Ausgabe, 10 (January 1953), p. 1, GMMA, RG 18–003, 056/17. S. Osousky addressing the TUAC, 6 January 1948, GMMA, RG 2–006, 005/23; memorandum, 23 October 1950, ‘Program to Expand CIO Staff in Europe’, GMMA, RG 18–002, 015/26. Irving Brown, speech, 17 February 1949, GMMA, RG 18–003, 011/11, p. 5. Jay Lovestone to Fritz Heine, 30 July 1953, GMMA, RG 18–003, 056/17. Jay Lovestone to Fritz Heine, 17 December 1951, GMMA, RG 18–003, 059/23. Kurt Klotzbach, Der Weg zur Staatspartei: Programmatik, praktische Politik und Organisation der deutschen Sozialdemokratie 1945 bis 1965 (Berlin and Bonn: Dietz, 1982). Klaus Schönhoven, Die deutschen Gewerkschaften (Frankfurt/M.: Suhrkamp, 1987). Hans Böckler, addressing the Rhein-Ruhr-Club, 1 November 1949, quoted in Ernst-Dieter Köpper, Gewerkschaften und Außenpolitik (Frankfurt/M. and New York: Campus, 1982), p. 44. See, for example, Kurt Schumacher, ‘Programmatische Erklärungen vom 5. Oktober 1945’, in Ossip K. Flechtheim (ed.), Dokumente zur parteipolitischen Entwicklung in Deutschland seit 1945, vol. 3/2 (Berlin: Wendler, 1963), p. 5. Werner Link, Deutsche und amerikanische Gewerkschaften und Geschäftsleute 1944–1975. Eine Studie über transnationale Beziehungen (Düsseldorf: Droste, 1978); Hermann-Josef Rupieper, Die Wurzeln der westdeutschen Nachkriegsdemokratie. Der amerikanische Beitrag 1945–1952 (Opladen: Westdeuscher Verlag, 1993). See, for instance, GMMA, RG 18–003, 026/10–13: DGB; 037/12–30: Germany 1948–1965; 038/1–7: Germany; 056/12–19: Henry Rutz; 059/23–30 and 060/1–11: SPD; Archiv der Sozialen Demokratie: Nachlaß Kuno Brandel; Nachlaß Willi Eichler; Nachlaß Werner Hansen (Willi Heidorn); Nachlaß Siegmund (Siggi) Neumann; Nachlaß Ludwig Rosenberg; Nachlaß Eduard (Edu) Wald; Bestand Internationale Transportarbeiterföderation (ITF); Sammlung Hans Jahn; Bestand IJB/ISK. Ludwig Eiber, Die Sozialdemokratie in der Emigration: Die Union deutscher sozialistischer Organisationen in Großbritannien 1941–1946 und ihre Mitglieder. Protokolle, Erklärungen, Materialien (Bonn: Dietz, 1998). Geoffrey Foote, The Labour Party’s Political Thought: A History, 3rd edn (Houndmills: Macmillan, 1997), especially pp. 3–16, 26–33, 144–82, 184–5. Irving Brown to Jay Lovestone, 3 August 1950, GMMA, RG 18–003, 011/12. Michael Fichter, Besatzungsmacht und Gewerkschaften: Zur Entwicklung und Anwendung der US-Gewerkschaftspolitik in Deutschland 1944–1948 (Opladen: Westdeutscher Verlag, 1982).
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40 Irving Brown, speech, 17 February 1949, GMMA, RG 18–003, 011/11, p. 6. 41 GMMA, RG 18–003, 059/23–30; 060/1–11: SPD. 42 Wenzel Jaksch to Henry Rutz, 30 September 1957, GMMA, RG 18–001, 003/11. 43 Donald Sassoon, One Hundred Years of Socialism: The West European Left in the Twentieth Century, 2nd edn (London: Fontana Press, 1997), pp. 249–51, quoted on p. 250. 44 Dieter Dowe and Kurt Klotzbach (eds), Programmatische Dokumente der deutschen Sozialdemokratie, 2nd edn (Berlin/Bonn: Dietz, 1984), pp. 361–83. 45 Geir Lundestad, Empire by Integration: The United States and European Integration, 1945–1997 (Oxford University Press, 1998); John Lewis Gaddis, We Now Know: Rethinking Cold War History (Oxford University Press, 1997), pp. 26–53. 46 Julia Angster, ‘“Safe By Democracy”: American Hegemony and the Westernization of West German Labor’, in Bernd W. Kubbig (ed.), Toward a New American Century? The US Hegemon in Motion, Amerikastudien/ American Studies, 46 (2001), pp. 557–72.
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7 IN SEARCH OF A CLEAR AND OVERARCHING AMERICAN POLICY The Reporter magazine (1949–68), the US government and the Cold War Elke van Cassel
The CIA and the press In 1967 Ramparts magazine revealed the machinations of an extensive state–private network. The Ramparts exposé, which disclosed the funding by the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) of the National Student Association (NSA), was followed by exposure of the CIA’s involvement in such ostensibly private organisations as Radio Free Europe and the Congress for Cultural Freedom (CCF). These institutions were funded indirectly by the CIA’s International Organizations Division, which channelled money through a network of conduits specifically created for this purpose; examples of such institutions included the Free Europe Committee as well as philanthropic foundations run by ‘witting’ allies among America’s corporate elites, such as the Farfield Foundation.1 The secrecy surrounding the source of funding was a vital attribute of this campaign because as Frances Stonor Saunders has pointed out, the CIA was convinced that ‘the most effective kind of propaganda’ was the kind where ‘the subject moves in the direction you desire for reasons which he believes to be his own’.2 In the 1970s Stuart H. Loory and Carl Bernstein charged that one of the key components of the state–private network had been overlooked: the cooperation between the CIA and the press. In his 1974 article ‘The CIA’s Use of the Press: A “Mighty Wurlitzer”’, which was based on extensive interviews with former CIA agents as well as editors and newspapermen, Loory demonstrated that since 1948 the CIA had hired numerous American journalists overseas to plant false or misleading stories in the foreign news media. As Loory pointed out, these journalists were not always aware that they were passing on misinformation. He argued, 116
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however, that the fact they accepted payments from the CIA at all in itself constituted a corruption of the journalistic profession. In addition, the Agency frequently approached American journalists stationed abroad for information they had gathered while working on their stories. Sometimes, Loory pointed out, editorial offices in the United States also provided the Agency with information from their story files.3 In his article, Loory not only condemned such practices, arguing that American journalists had bartered away their independence and turned themselves into mouthpieces and informants, he also accused the American news media of deliberately ignoring these facts. The story had come out the previous year, but had caused only a brief stir and had not been pursued with the same vigour with which American journalists had exposed the CIA’s infiltration of nonjournalistic organisations a few years earlier. Noting that there had always been a free flow of personnel between the news media and the intelligence community, Loory concluded that the news media were covering up the story in order to protect their credibility.4 In 1977 Carl Bernstein was the first to investigate this alliance between the CIA and the American press in more depth. His Rolling Stone article, ‘The CIA and the Media’, demonstrated that throughout the 1950s and 1960s more than 400 American journalists had carried out assignments for the CIA. These journalists, who gathered intelligence, served as gobetweens in the recruitment of foreign agents and planted misinformation in the foreign press and with officials of foreign governments, included distinguished reporters, foreign correspondents, stringers and freelancers. In addition, editors, publishers and broadcast network executives, including the managements of the New York Times, Time and Newsweek magazines and CBS, cooperated with the CIA, providing jobs and credentials for CIA agents and offering the services of their staff reporters. According to Bernstein, this cooperation between the CIA and the American media was among the most important and most successful of the Agency’s covert operations.5 In spite of this, the Senate Intelligence Committee (known as the Church Committee), which investigated the CIA in 1976, failed to acknowledge the extent of this cooperation. Bernstein argued that this oversight was deliberate. CIA officials feared that the disclosure of this covert operation would damage not only the Agency’s intelligence-gathering apparatus, but also the reputations of hundreds of individual journalists. According to Bernstein, ‘top officials of the CIA . . . persuaded the Committee to restrict its inquiry into the matter and to deliberately misrepresent the actual scope of the activities in its final report. The multivolume report contains nine pages in which the use of journalism is discussed in deliberately vague and sometimes misleading terms’. The Committee ignored the evidence in the CIA files and decided against questioning the reporters, editors, publishers and broadcast executives 117
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involved. The Committee report not only downplayed the extent of the cooperation, it also drew the conclusion that the CIA had not abused its authority or violated its charter in any way; the Agency had been extremely careful to refrain from manipulating the editorial content of the American media, limiting its operations strictly to information-gathering and cover.6 In order to correct the Church Committee’s inaccurate account, Bernstein called for the disclosure of the contents of the CIA’s files.7 Since the 1970s, however, the Agency has become ever more adept at suppressing information about its own activities. As a result, access to CIA files has become very limited. Gathering information on the close cooperation between the CIA and the press during the Cold War era has become a complex process of filing Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests and assembling circumstantial evidence. As a result, the details of the close cooperation between the CIA and the press remain largely unexplored.
The Reporter: a new magazine for the post-war era This chapter focuses on The Reporter, a bi-weekly magazine which, during its 19-year existence (1949–68), embodied the Cold War pursuit of American ideology both at home and abroad. Despite the fact that much crucial information, most notably the magazine’s financial records, are missing from The Reporter’s archives, those archives, combined with material obtained through FOIA requests, offer a unique glimpse of the role the press voluntarily played in Cold War propaganda. The Reporter was founded in 1949 as a new magazine for the post-war era. The magazine’s founders realised that America’s ability to wield world power and guard its safety depended to a large extent on international cooperation. Such cooperation, The Reporter believed, could be achieved through the encouragement of mutual understanding and the propagation of American exceptionalism abroad. To substantiate such propaganda efforts, The Reporter argued, American policy-makers needed to formulate a longrange national policy.8 The Reporter, in other words, embodied the shared vision of the post-war world that united the Cold War state–private network. There were four characteristics that set The Reporter apart from other journalistic enterprises with close ties to the American intelligence community. First, The Reporter was a newly created magazine, a magazine that not only served as a platform for the worldview that characterised the Cold War state–private network, but actually came out of and was shaped by that network. The magazine’s early years coincided with the founding of the CIA, with the consolidation of the Agency’s ‘mighty Wurlitzer’ and with the creation of such covert initiatives as the CCF, the American Committee on United Europe (ACUE) and the National Committee for a 118
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Free Europe (NCFE). These were initiatives with which many of those involved with The Reporter had close ties. Second, The Reporter was specifically designed to represent the emerging post-war viewpoint of a liberal anticommunist worldview. Whereas already existing magazines such as New Leader, New Republic and The Nation served as platforms for the non-communist left and especially the New York intellectuals, The Reporter was explicitly created to serve as a platform for those anticommunists who were neither former communists nor former fellow-travellers.9 Third, The Reporter was first and foremost a political magazine. In discussing the machinations of the CIA’s covert operations it is important to differentiate between cultural initiatives, which were aimed primarily at countering preconceived notions and negative stereotypes of the United States that were prevalent in Europe, and the more explicitly political initiatives which were aimed at formulating both ideology and policy. Among The Reporter’s founding principles was the explicit aim to influence both American public opinion and American policy-making.10 This set the magazine apart from those European journals founded under the auspices of the CCF and those American journals which indirectly received financial aid from the CIA, all of which were primarily cultural magazines. Finally, The Reporter was aimed not just at an audience of intellectuals, but at a broad readership of informed citizens. This set The Reporter apart from those highbrow journals, including Encounter, Partisan Review and New Leader, that received CIA funding. The Reporter aimed for, and eventually achieved, a circulation of 200,000.11
Second World War origins The key figure behind The Reporter was the magazine’s founder, editor and financier, Max Ascoli, an Italian professor of political and judicial philosophy who had fled Italy for the United States in 1931, after having been persecuted and jailed for his anti-fascist convictions. Once Ascoli arrived in the US, he became one of the most prominent American antifascists, warning American liberals about the dangers of totalitarianism and the threat it posed not only to European nations, but also to American democracy. During the 1930s and 1940s Ascoli became acquainted with a great number of highly influential intellectuals, academics and politicians. These contacts were further developed by Ascoli’s association with the Rockefeller Foundation, which had brought him to the US and furnished him with an appointment at the University in Exile. Ascoli was the only non-German among the eleven original members of the graduate faculty of the New School for Social Research and served as its Dean in 1940 and 1941. One of Ascoli’s primary tasks as Dean was raising funds to rescue European scholars from the threat of 119
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fascism and bring them to the US. In its efforts on behalf of these European scholars, the New School worked closely with the Rockefeller Foundation, the Emergency Rescue Committee and the State Department. During this period Ascoli established a number of valuable and lasting friendships, including those with Adolf A. Berle, Assistant Secretary of State, and Nelson Rockefeller, who was deeply involved in wartime propaganda and intelligence work and would play a crucial role in the covert operations of the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) during the late 1940s and throughout the 1950s.12 Ascoli’s financial and social position was further cemented with his marriage in 1940 to Marion Rosenwald, daughter and heiress of Julius Rosenwald, noted philanthropist and executive of Sears, Roebuck & Co. Ascoli made further connections when he served as president of the Mazzini Society. The Mazzini Society served the dual purpose of steering Italian-Americans away from Mussolini’s propaganda and explaining and defending the Italian people to the American public, influencing American policy towards Italy in the process.13 This work would bring Ascoli into contact with the Office of War Information (OWI). In 1941 Ascoli joined the Office of Inter-American Affairs (OIAA), an agency, led by Nelson Rockefeller, which aimed to strengthen the bonds between the nations of the western hemisphere in order to form a united front against the Axis powers. The OIAA, which predated the OWI and OSS (Office of Strategic Services), served as a testing ground for American propaganda techniques that would play an important role in both Second World War and Cold War propaganda.14 From 1941 to 1943 Ascoli was in charge of the Bureau of Latin American Research in Washington DC, which had been set up by the OIAA and the New School for Social Research. As liaison between the agents in Latin America, the scholars at the New School and the officials at the OIAA, Ascoli played an important role in propaganda and intelligence missions during the Second World War.15 In addition, Ascoli worked together with C. D. Jackson, who served as the director of the Council for Democracy. During the Second World War Jackson was one of America’s key psychological warfare experts, serving as deputy chief of the Psychological Warfare Division of Eisenhower’s Supreme Headquarters Allied Expeditionary Force (SHAEF). The Council for Democracy was a psychological warfare initiative designed to coordinate all activities aimed at the promotion and defence of democracy. Ascoli was a member of the board of the Council for Democracy, serving as a link between the Council and both the Mazzini Society and the University in Exile.16 These activities brought Ascoli into close contact with a group of men who shared a strong belief in world federalism, the conviction that in the post-war world, peace could be maintained through international cooperation. During the war Ascoli had been a frequent contributor to Free World, 120
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a magazine founded in 1941 which was devoted to international support for the American war effort and to the ideal of the eventual establishment of a ‘permanent world organization’.17 In 1945 Ascoli participated in another magazine initiative. Inspired by the establishment of the United Nations, a group of intellectuals, businessmen and members of the press proposed to publish a magazine devoted to the promotion of world unity entitled United Nations World. John Whitney, Nelson Rockefeller and Max Ascoli would provide the funds, and Michael Straight, then publisher of New Republic, James Reston, at that time the New York Times’ Washington reporter, and Louis Dolivet, founder and publisher of Free World, would provide the editing skills.18 It is important to note that once the CIA had officially been established in 1947, John Whitney and Nelson Rockefeller would both cooperate actively with the Agency, serving either as ‘fronts’ for CIA funding, or using their own money to fund initiatives which were useful assets to the Agency. Whitney, who also served on the Psychological Strategy Board (PSB) during the early 1950s, made himself useful to the CIA by furnishing financial backing for new companies and business ventures, which he registered under his own name. As Frances Stonor Saunders has pointed out, the Rockefeller Foundation formed ‘an integral component of America’s Cold War machinery’.19 Although it may not have been an actual CIA conduit, the Foundation did play an important part in shaping US foreign policy, funding the Rockefeller Brothers Fund, a major Cold War think-tank, as well as research grants and fellowships. Nelson Rockefeller himself had strong ties to the American intelligence community and used his family’s extensive fortune to promote US foreign policy objectives. In addition to his influential position within the Rockefeller Foundation and the Rockefeller Brothers Fund, he also served as president of the Museum of Modern Art, which played an important role in the CIA’s cultural Cold War. During the 1950s, Rockefeller received briefings on covert activities from both CIA director Allen Dulles and Tom Braden, director of the CIA’s International Organizations Division. In 1954 Rockefeller was appointed chairman of the Planning Coordinating Group, which controlled all National Security Council decisions and covert operations. In that same year Rockefeller replaced C. D. Jackson as Eisenhower’s special advisor on psychological warfare.20 This information puts the United Nations World initiative, and its proposed funding by Whitney, Rockefeller and Ascoli, in a whole new light. Ascoli and James Reston both withdrew from the United Nations World venture before the first issue was published and initiated a project that would eventually become The Reporter. Together, they hoped to publish a magazine that would embody the internationalist ideals underlying Free World and United Nations World, but that would go beyond preaching to the converted. As Ascoli and Reston saw it, it was the legislative branch of 121
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government that comprised a ‘brake on the development of a broad policy of world leadership for the United States’.21 In order to change this, they envisioned a magazine that would instil in American legislators and policy-makers a sense of their role not just in the nation, but also in the world, stressing the interrelation of domestic and foreign affairs. Their goal, in other words, was to publish a magazine that would influence US policy.22 In April 1947 Ascoli took the first concrete step towards the consolidation of the project by hiring Wallace Carroll to investigate the viability of launching such a magazine and to set up and take charge of a small trial office in Washington DC. This trial period, during which The Reporter’s editorial policy took shape, would take two years, an exceptionally long time. During this period, Max Ascoli financed a full-time staff of twenty-four to experiment with the magazine’s style, content and formula.23 One of the ideas that emerged during this trial period was that The Reporter’s early issues would not carry any advertising. The editors explained when the magazine’s first issue was published; It is our policy not to solicit such advertising for the first six months of publication. When twelve issues of The Reporter have been published we will know who reads our magazine and what they think of it, at which time we will open our pages to advertisers.24 This seems an odd policy at a time when many already existing magazines were struggling financially. Apparently, money was no object. In addition it was decided that the magazine would carry no by-lines, in order to make it clear to the readers that ‘here is something which represents the collective judgement of the editors on a topic of major interest and that the magazine stands 100% behind every word of it’.25 Such a policy would make it easier to publish articles by insiders and government employees without revealing their identity. It is important to note also that at this time The Reporter depended heavily on information provided by government experts in the form of memoranda, tips and responses to specific questions for which the informants were paid in cash.26 Halfway through this trial period, in December 1948, the magazine’s head office moved from Washington DC to New York. The magazine’s first issue was eventually published in April 1949.
The OWI and OSS: a breeding ground for journalistic talent In August 1947 Arthur Schlesinger Jr, one of Ascoli’s advisors and a former employee of both the OWI and OSS, provided the following advice on assembling the magazine’s staff: 122
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Perhaps the best preliminary training is wartime political intelligence work – of the type carried on, for example, in the Research and Analysis Branch of OSS. This kind of training counteracts both the newspaperman’s glibness and the academician’s timidity; and it focuses pretty much on the kind of problems which the magazine will be concerned with.27 The propaganda and intelligence services formed a breeding ground for journalistic talent, instilling in their employees an appreciation of propaganda and an attitude of government service that they carried over to their civilian careers after the war. As the long list of staff members formerly affiliated with either the OWI or OSS attests, Ascoli closely followed Schlesinger’s advice. Wallace Carroll was a case in point. The former head of the OWI’s London office, Carroll was responsible for hiring staff as well as formulating The Reporter’s founding principles and philosophy during the magazine’s planning stages. Shortly after his appointment as head of The Reporter’s trial office, Carroll published a book entitled Persuade or Perish. In this book, on which he had been working while also writing the initial memos concerning The Reporter’s policy and Cold War stance, Carroll argued that the Cold War was first and foremost a psychological war and that the United States was trailing far behind the Soviet Union in techniques of psychological warfare.28 Almost all Reporter staff members shared the experience of working for the wartime propaganda and intelligence services. As a result they shared not only a strong belief in fruitful cooperation between the press and government, but also a conviction that propaganda formed an important tool in countering totalitarianism and a commitment to making The Reporter a valuable instrument for increasing mutual understanding between the US and the rest of the world. The two most prominent examples of the connection between The Reporter and the network of former OWI and OSS employees are Philip Horton and Douglass Cater. Both Horton, who joined the staff as managing editor five months after the publication of the first issue and served as Ascoli’s second-in-command throughout The Reporter’s existence, and Cater, who joined The Reporter during its trial period and would serve as the magazine’s Washington editor from 1950 until 1963 and as National Affairs editor until 1964, cultivated their OWI and OSS networks for The Reporter’s benefit. Philip Horton had been a key intelligence officer with the OSS in Washington DC, London and Paris. He worked initially for the Foreign Nationalities Branch in Washington DC, where he cultivated contacts with European exiles. In June 1943 he was assigned to the OSS Secret Intelligence Branch officer in London, where he served as a liaison between US and Allied intelligence officers. In 1944 he was transferred to the Secret Intelligence Branch in Paris, becoming chief of that branch by the end of the war. In 123
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Paris Horton would play an important role in validating the continued existence of an American intelligence agency, shifting attention from the Second World War to Cold War concerns. Although the OSS was officially disbanded at the end of 1945, and it was not until 1947 that the CIA was created, Horton apparently continued his intelligence work. His superior, B. Homer Hall, who was in charge of Secret Intelligence’s western Europe section, explained in a 1946 memorandum: Mr. Horton has developed an intelligence chain producing information of utmost importance relative to Russian military and diplomatic activities. In fact, this particular chain is one of the few competent sources of information on Russia, and it is imperative that it be maintained. At present, Mr. Horton is the only man available possessed of the background and qualifications necessary to keep the chain intact. When the CIA was founded in 1947, Horton was appointed the Agency’s first station chief in Paris.29 Douglass Cater had also worked for the OSS during the Second World War, serving on the USSR division of the OSS Research and Analysis (R&A) branch. Subsequently, Cater returned to Harvard, where he finished his undergraduate studies and received his MA in 1948. During his time at Harvard Cater served as a delegate to the International Student Conference in Prague, where, in 1946, he and his fellow delegates founded the International Union of Students (IUS). In 1947, upon his return from a second meeting in Prague, he became one of the initiators of the NSA. In the summer of 1948, Cater returned to Prague one last time to attend a meeting of the IUS. By that time the IUS had aligned itself with the communist bloc. It is possible, therefore, that Cater went to Prague that summer with the purpose of gathering intelligence on the IUS’ platform and initiatives.30 Although the CIA’s regular funding of the NSA did not start until 1951, it seems that Cater, like Horton, may have played a crucial role in laying the foundations for the CIA’s covert operations. It is important to note, in this respect, that when the NSA was first informed about Ramparts’ plans to publish an exposé of the organisation’s link with the CIA, Cater (at the time Special Assistant to President Johnson) was the first person to whom the NSA’s president turned for help.31 By September 1948 Cater had passed up the opportunity to pursue a PhD in order to join The Reporter’s trial staff.32
The Reporter’s state–private network Throughout The Reporter’s existence, Max Ascoli, Philip Horton and Douglass Cater actively cultivated their government and intelligence 124
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contacts. In addition to senators, congressmen and State Department officials, these contacts also included numerous individuals who were working for the CIA, either directly or indirectly, through such fronts as the CCF, the ACUE and the NCFE. Many of The Reporter’s editors, staff members, advisors and frequent contributors were closely involved with the CCF’s efforts. Max Ascoli himself was a member of the American Committee for Cultural Freedom (ACCF), the CCF’s American affiliate. Arthur Schlesinger Jr, who served as an important advisor to The Reporter at the time of his initial involvement with the CCF, and Irving Kristol, who briefly served as Ascoli’s second-in-command after having left Encounter in 1958, are two other prominent examples of the close connection between The Reporter and the CCF. The Reporter frequently published articles that originated with the CCF. In 1958, for example, it was the first US magazine to publish excerpts from Boris Pasternak’s Doctor Zhivago, which was about to be published through the CIA’s covert book programme. Ascoli greatly admired the book, which he saw as proof that even in Soviet Russia the free mind could triumph over totalitarian suppression, and he devoted three separate issues to the excerpts, and one to an interview with Pasternak.33 Like the CCF, The Reporter fervently promoted mutual understanding between the United States and Europe. In addition to educating the American public and American policy-makers about European affairs, The Reporter’s editors also fiercely denounced the generalisations and oversimplifications which often inspired anti-American sentiment in Europe. The publication of a 1952 review of Simone de Beauvoir’s American diary is a case in point. The review was written by Mary McCarthy, who argued that, like so many of her leftist intellectual European colleagues, de Beauvoir harboured many preconceived notions about the US which she was unwilling to revise, even after having visited the country. It is interesting to note that McCarthy’s article had originally been commissioned by Der Monat, on the occasion of the publication of de Beauvoir’s diary in Germany.34 Clearly, McCarthy’s book review, like the excerpts from Doctor Zhivago, was part of a battle in the cultural Cold War. By publishing such articles, The Reporter itself became an important Cold War propaganda weapon. Articles such as these seem, at first sight, to have been directed at a European audience. The Reporter was read in Europe and the magazine undoubtedly played an important role in shaping the image of America for its European subscribers. In addition to reaching individual subscribers in Europe, the magazine also featured prominently in the USIA’s overseas information centres.35 Clearly, The Reporter served as an intermediary between Americans and Europeans, a characteristic that in the case of Partisan Review and New Leader had played an important role in securing covert CIA funding. It is interesting to note that there were attempts to boost The Reporter’s European circulation, even to launch an overseas 125
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edition of the magazine, similar to Time and Newsweek’s European editions, and that these attempts took place between 1955 and 1957, the same years in which the CCF became more and more closely involved with Partisan Review and New Leader. In fact, the USIA gave away subscriptions to The Reporter, just as the CCF’s associates did for Partisan Review and New Leader.36 Despite such measures, however, The Reporter’s European audience remained relatively small.37 The Reporter was, first and foremost, aimed at an American audience. The Reporter’s articles about America’s image abroad served a dual purpose. In addition to addressing Europeans directly, the magazine also tried to correct America’s image abroad indirectly, by bringing it to the attention of American policy-makers and by urging them to correct this image by adjusting their foreign as well as their domestic policy. The Reporter repeatedly stressed the fact that the way the US handled its domestic affairs had a major impact elsewhere. In order to counter Soviet propaganda effectively on issues such as McCarthyism and race relations, The Reporter argued that the US not only needed to step up its propaganda effort, it also needed to start practising what it preached.38 It is important to note that, despite the close ties between The Reporter and the CCF, there were also important divergences. Ascoli felt that the CCF’s intellectuals focused too narrowly on cultural freedom. Ascoli’s reaction to the Berlin manifesto reflects the principal divergence between The Reporter and the New York intellectuals who played such an important role in the CCF’s initiatives. Ascoli himself was more interested in policy than in ideas, culture or opinions.39 Ascoli felt much more at home with the CIA’s political covert operations. He was a member of the ACUE, which formed an important instrument in the US government’s efforts to bring about European unity. The ACUE covertly forwarded CIA money to the European Movement, providing more than half of the organisation’s budget between 1949 and 1960.40 During its first years the ACUE’s leadership formed a veritable ‘Who’s Who’ of US intelligence. William J. Donovan, former head of the OSS, was chairman. Allen Dulles, who would become director of the CIA in 1953, served as vice-chairman and Tom Braden served as executive director. The board of directors also included Walter Bedell Smith, another director of the CIA, and Raymond Allen, who would later serve as director of the PSB.41 Ascoli’s usefulness to the organisation included both financial contributions and a willingness to convey the ACUE’s principles and aims through The Reporter. In an August 1950 letter to Ascoli, Francis Adams Truslow (the ACUE treasurer) thanked Ascoli for his ‘contribution’, pointing out that such efforts were very important to convey to the leaders of the European Movement, . . . the willingness of Americans to participate in and help further the realization of a United Europe. . . . We feel confident that with 126
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the help of Americans like yourself who are fully aware of the importance of the task at hand, the goal of a United Europe will be accomplished. Truslow added: ‘We shall read with great interest the article on the Schuman Plan which is in the current issue of The Reporter’.42 As a member of the NCFE, Ascoli displayed the same willingness to promote the organisation’s agenda in The Reporter’s pages. Much like the ACUE, the NCFE, which later became known as the Free Europe Committee, had been founded by a group of private American citizens to serve as a CIA front to fund Radio Free Europe.43 Upon being invited to join the Committee, Ascoli wrote to Lucius Clay, the Committee’s national chairman, Needless to say, I will consider it an honor to be a member of your Committee. I only wish, however, that you would really call on me if you think there is anything I can effectively do for the success of your campaign. If you have someone on your Committee who is in charge of relations with publications and the press, I would like to have him get in touch with me. As editor of The Reporter, I would be only too happy to do my part in making our readers realize the importance of the work you are doing.44 Ascoli’s good friends Arthur Schlesinger Jr and Adolf A. Berle were both members of the NCFE and C. D. Jackson, with whom Ascoli had worked closely during the Second World War, was the Committee’s president. During the early 1950s, Jackson would become a key figure in American psychological warfare efforts. In 1951 he directed a CIA-sponsored study on the reorganisation of the American intelligence services, which resulted in the creation of the PSB. In 1953 Eisenhower appointed Jackson as his special advisor on psychological warfare.45 Despite Ascoli’s many valuable connections, The Reporter’s true networking genius was Philip Horton. When Horton returned from Paris in 1948 he became an associate editor on Time magazine, where he worked with Jackson. This seems an unlikely career switch for someone as deeply involved in the intelligence realm as Horton was in the immediate aftermath of the Second World War. As an undergraduate at Princeton during the 1930s, Horton had worked as a freelance reporter in Europe. He had not, however, worked as a journalist since then.46 As Carl Bernstein has pointed out, Henry Luce, who was a good friend of Allen Dulles, ‘readily allowed certain members of his staff to work for the Agency and agreed to provide jobs and credentials for other CIA operatives who lacked journalistic experience’.47 It seems unlikely that Horton 127
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would go from a very influential intelligence position to no involvement with intelligence at all. It could very well be that Horton’s short stint at Time served as a means for him to earn his credentials as a journalist before moving on to The Reporter as a CIA agent. Although there is no direct evidence of a continued official relationship between Horton and the CIA, it is beyond doubt that as Ascoli’s secondin-command, Horton used his extensive government network, which included contacts in the White House, the State Department, the PSB, the National Security Council, the Pentagon and the CIA to bring in new staff members and contributors, and to solicit articles, information and cooperation.48 A few years after The Reporter folded, Ascoli assessed Horton’s contribution: Shortly after he joined the staff, I realized his major quality. He was an extraordinarily industrious intelligence officer. But there was a drawback: he had no taste for editing and loathed writing. ‘Phil’, I remember telling him frequently, ‘what has the OSS done to you? It made a sensitive young poet into a gumshoe’.49 Horton was an active member of an informal network that met at ‘oldschool-tie OSS dinner parties’.50 In addition to Jackson, Horton also counted prominent intelligence figures such as William Donovan, Dulles, Sherman Kent and James Jesus Angleton among his personal acquaintances. Whereas Donovan, founder and chief of the OSS, laid the foundation for American intelligence, Dulles, Kent and Angleton were the men who shaped the newly founded CIA during the first decade of the Cold War. Angleton forms an especially intriguing connection. He was in charge of the CIA’s counter-intelligence operations and also ran a ‘group of journalist-operatives who performed sensitive and frequently dangerous assignments’. As Carl Bernstein has pointed out, ‘little is known about this group for the simple reason that Angleton deliberately kept only the vaguest of files’.51 Whereas Philip Horton used his contacts primarily to further The Reporter’s investigative reporting efforts and to build a strong and wellinformed network of foreign correspondents and contributors, Douglass Cater’s Washington DC network formed the pivot of The Reporter’s domestic coverage. Cater’s expertise about the city’s power structure exceeded that of an ordinary Washington correspondent. While on The Reporter’s staff, Cater wrote two influential books about the city.52 The first, The Fourth Branch of Government (1958), dealt with the intricate connections between the Washington press corps and the city’s policymakers. The second, Power in Washington (1964), was a study of the elaborate process of policy-making. In addition, Cater interrupted his career twice to serve as a government consultant. In 1951 he served as special 128
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assistant to the Secretary of the Army and in 1952 as consultant to the director of the Mutual Security Agency. Cater was a highly esteemed and very influential presence in Washington DC. In 1963 he was approached by Vice-President Lyndon B. Johnson, who asked him to come and work for him as an ideas man and a speechwriter, an offer Cater refused.53 He did however join the Johnson administration in 1964 as special assistant to the president.54 The fact that Cater could move in and out of government service this easily does not seem to leave much room for illusions about journalistic independence and objectivity. There is another, even more significant, example of Cater’s close affiliation with the government, an incident which seems to indicate that Cater was a prominent figure in the area of psychological warfare. In September 1961, in reaction to the Berlin crisis, President Kennedy appointed a committee to examine the effectiveness of US propaganda and political warfare. This committee included a number of very influential people: Attorney General Robert Kennedy, Deputy Under-Secretary of State U. Alexis Johnson, CIA director Allen Dulles, USIA director Edward Murrow and General Max Taylor. These men recommended that the Secretary of State appoint a ‘Special Assistant for Special Projects’, who would have the unprecedented mandate of coordinating and supervising all US propaganda and political warfare operations. Once President Kennedy had approved this proposal, they offered the position to Douglass Cater.55 Given the fact that he was ostensibly a journalist, it seems strange that Cater was considered for such an influential intelligence post and that he was apparently deemed more suitable for the position than former director of the CIA’s International Organizations Division Tom Braden and former head of the PSB Gordon Gray.56 The fact that the Kennedy administration wanted Cater for this position also means that he was apparently as much of an insider in the intelligence realm as Edward W. Barrett, C. D. Jackson and Nelson Rockefeller, men who had held similar positions in the past. What experience did Cater have that qualified him for such a position? He had, of course, worked for the OSS during the war, but that affiliation had officially ended in 1945. Cater did not accept the position, because he had ‘strong reservations about the sweeping nature of the job’.57 Instead, he spent two weeks working at the State Department, examining earlier attempts at coordinating all US propaganda and political warfare efforts and devising a report with recommendations for the future. The fact that Cater was considered for this position and that he was apparently enough of an insider to write such an important report implies that he was more than just a journalist. He may in fact have had direct intelligence and psychological warfare connections throughout his employment at The Reporter. His background in R&A’s USSR division, his position at The Reporter and his many connections to academia, which he continued to 129
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cultivate throughout his employment with the magazine, would have made Cater a valuable asset to the Agency.58 The most tangible link between The Reporter and the CIA was formed by the personal acquaintance of Ascoli and Horton with Dulles, CIA director from 1953 to 1961. Dulles’ correspondence with Horton indicates that he was kept well informed of The Reporter’s progress. When, in April 1950, Horton approached Dulles to write a brief statement about The Reporter for promotion purposes, Dulles was more than happy to oblige.59 In January 1952 Horton reported to Ascoli that Dulles had ‘said he thought the Reporter was improving constantly, and that he followed it very closely’, and that he had ‘asked to be remembered to you, and said you should call on him whenever he could be of any help to you’.60 According to Bruce Cumings, who explored the Allen W. Dulles Papers for his book The Origins of the Korean War (1990), Dulles also corresponded with Ascoli about the China Lobby exposé.61 In his study, Cumings refers to a letter from Ascoli to Dulles, dated 8 April 1952. This letter has, however, disappeared from the Allen W. Dulles Papers, suggesting that it has since been reclassified. In fact, neither the Dulles nor the Ascoli papers contain any correspondence between the two men, even though other sources, including Ascoli’s CIA file, indicate that Dulles and Ascoli knew each other well.62 Ascoli had known Dulles since at least the early 1950s, when he was a member of the ACUE, of which Dulles was vice-chairman. Given Ascoli’s extensive experience with intelligence and propaganda during the Second World War, and given his association with Adolf A. Berle and Nelson Rockefeller, both of whom were also close friends of Dulles, it is likely that Ascoli made Dulles’ acquaintance during the war.63 In fact, when in 1955 Horton approached Dulles to sponsor Ascoli for membership of the Council on Foreign Relations, he referred to Dulles as ‘one of Max’s old and valued friends’.64 It is also important to note that Allen Dulles referred to Ascoli as ‘Max’ in both his correspondence with Philip Horton and with Betty Parsons, who had been Dulles’ secretary during his OSS days in Switzerland and subsequently became Max Ascoli’s personal secretary, a function she held until his death in 1978.65 Neither Ascoli’s nor Dulles’ personal papers contain any information about their relationship. Ascoli’s CIA file, however, does contain reference to a meeting with Dulles. Although this particular meeting did not directly concern The Reporter, the report in Ascoli’s CIA files demonstrates his complete familiarity with the practices of the ‘mighty Wurlitzer’. During this conversation on the political situation in Italy, Ascoli proposed bringing a prominent member of the Italian Socialist Party to the United States on a special exchange programme. Ascoli offered to finance the trip, as long as it was arranged through some formal organisation and Ascoli’s involvement remained undisclosed. Although Dulles, pointing out that this 130
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was a State Department matter, did not take Ascoli up on his offer, this example not only demonstrates Ascoli’s willingness to cooperate with the US government, it also shows that he was aware of the CIA’s practice of using purportedly independent non-governmental foundations to fund covertly a wide diversity of initiatives. The fact that Ascoli offered to finance Lombardi’s trip to the US confirms the impression that he himself had been an active participant in this system of indirect government funding.66 Ascoli, in other words, was ‘witting’.
The Reporter and the State Department Throughout its existence, The Reporter served as a platform of ideas for State Department officials, as well as Foreign Service and intelligence officers, who aimed their contributions at legislators and policy-makers both in Congress and the White House as well as at public opinion in general. The magazine’s stance on propaganda and political warfare forms a case in point. Since its early days the magazine had been a fervent advocate of a coordinated political warfare effort, urging American policy-makers to integrate foreign policy, diplomacy, military operations and propaganda. The Reporter’s advocacy of such an orchestrated campaign predated the creation of Truman’s PSB and subsequent initiatives by the Eisenhower and Kennedy administrations. The Campaign of Truth forms another excellent example of The Reporter’s active role in shaping American policy. Initiated by the State Department’s Office of Public Affairs in response to Soviet jamming of the Voice of America, this attempt to take the psychological offensive was launched by President Truman in a speech before the American Society of Newspaper Editors on 20 April 1950. The similarities between Truman’s speech and The Reporter’s editorial line, as expressed in its 1949 prospectus and in subsequent editorials by Max Ascoli, are striking. There is not only a great similarity in ideas about America’s responsibility in world affairs, the importance of psychological warfare and the responsibility of the press in creating an informed citizenry and in shaping US foreign policy, but also in rhetoric as well. The terms ‘truth’ and ‘facts’ played a central role in Truman’s Campaign. The press, Truman argued, needed to counter Soviet propaganda – which was based on nothing but ‘deceit, distortion, and lies’ – with ‘the true facts’. Soviet propaganda needed to be countered with ‘the truth – plain, simple, unvarnished truth’.67 The Reporter explicitly presented itself as ‘A Magazine of Facts and Ideas’, and the term ‘facts’ featured prominently in the magazine’s prospectus. In his speech Truman pointed out that ‘one vital function of a free press is to present the facts on which the citizens of a democracy can base their decisions’.68 That was exactly what The Reporter strove to do. ‘We believe’, the editors wrote in the prospectus, ‘that the national and 131
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international facts . . . can be reported in the perspective of what they mean to the American people and what the American people can do about them’.69 It is important to note that in his address, delivered a year almost to the day after the publication of The Reporter’s first issue, Truman argued that the US needed to use ‘every means . . . private as well as governmental, to get the truth to other people. Private groups and organizations’, the president pointed out, ‘have an important part to play’.70 He pointed specifically to ‘newspapers and magazines, radio, and motion pictures’.71 Clearly, The Reporter was more than willing to do its part. In the magazine’s prospectus the editors made it clear that countering anti-American propaganda at home and abroad was one of the magazine’s main raisons d’être. The editors promised their readers that they would do their utmost to present them with ‘the truth’ about domestic as well as foreign affairs.72 In his editorials Max Ascoli also stressed the important role that private organisations could play in Cold War propaganda: Our government leaders cannot easily keep up a name-calling contest with the Russians, but private groups can more freely undertake the job of denouncing Communist lies to the people of the whole world. Only private groups and individuals can actually show the spontaneous power of men and women united for freedom.73 The great similarity between the ideas expressed in The Reporter and Truman’s Campaign of Truth speech was not coincidental. Wallace Carroll was one of the men who worked closely with Edward Barrett, the head of the State Department’s Office of Public Affairs, to devise the Campaign of Truth. As head of The Reporter’s trial office, Carroll had played an important role in formulating the magazine’s philosophy and in drafting early versions of The Reporter’s prospectus. In addition, Barrett served as an advisor to Max Ascoli, an association that began in 1950, the same year the Campaign of Truth was devised.74 It is no surprise, then, that The Reporter and the Campaign of Truth shared some key terms as well as a number of key ideas. In fact The Reporter had been advocating these ideas for some time before Truman launched the Campaign of Truth.75 As David Krugler has demonstrated in his 2000 work, The Voice of America and the Domestic Propaganda Battles, 1945–1953, the Campaign of Truth was not only international, it was aimed also at a domestic audience. It was part of an effort to counter the McCarthyist attacks on the Truman administration, and more specifically, the State Department.76 During the early 1950s, The Reporter worked closely together with the State Department to counter these attacks. As the circumstances surrounding the publication of The Reporter’s exposé on the China Lobby 132
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illustrate, this cooperation extended far beyond the magazine’s support for the Campaign of Truth. The China Lobby worked closely together with Senator McCarthy, accusing the Truman administration of having lost China and actively thwarting State Department attempts at reaching a diplomatic solution, advocating instead the reinstatement of the Chinese Nationalist government at any cost. In a series of articles published in the spring of 1952, The Reporter attacked the China Lobby, exposing its sabotage of American foreign policy-making, its smearing practices and its illegal and corrupt activities. It is clear that the Truman administration had a direct interest in such an exposé, and the circumstances surrounding the investigation indicate that this was not an independent initiative on the part of the magazine’s editors. Philip Horton, who coordinated the investigation, worked closely with the State Department in order to expose any possible illegal activities on the part of the China Lobby. He was provided with information from the Treasury Department, the Justice Department, the Commerce Department, the Agriculture Department, the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), the IRS and the CIA. Horton’s connections at the State Department even proofread the articles before they were published. In addition, Horton approached Allen Dulles, then a top aide at the CIA, to verify certain parts of the story.77 The sheer size of the China Lobby project raises questions about its funding. The investigation lasted a full year, with Philip Horton working on it full-time, assisted by a special investigator and three research assistants as well as a number of short-term researchers who worked in New York, Washington DC, California, Paris and the Far East. The entire project cost the magazine at least $15,000.78 The advertising campaign alone, which included full-page ads in the New York Times, must have cost a fortune.79 In addition to serving as an important instrument in Cold War efforts to influence public opinion both at home and abroad, The Reporter also played an important role in the struggle between the Truman administration and Senator McCarthy. It is important to point out that both the FBI and the CIA were actively involved in this struggle and that the rivalry between the two agencies, which dated back to the founding of the CIA, reached its peak during the McCarthy era. It seems that The Reporter got caught in the middle of this power struggle. The Reporter’s emphasis on the primary importance of fighting international communism and its denunciation of McCarthyism put the magazine firmly in the CIA’s camp. It is important to note that throughout the 1950s The Reporter would use its investigative reporting selectively. Whereas the magazine openly attacked the FBI, it never, in its entire history, published anything that might have reflected negatively on the CIA.80 If The Reporter was in fact bankrolled by the CIA, this use of the magazine as an instrument in FBI–CIA power struggles would have constituted a blatant violation of the CIA’s charter. 133
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The folding of The Reporter The Reporter’s origins and the timing of its founding link the magazine to the emergence of the CIA and its covert operations. The circumstances surrounding the magazine’s folding in 1968, shortly after the first revelations about the CIA’s connections to private organisations started coming out, raises similar doubts about The Reporter’s independence. The official reason for The Reporter’s folding was that Max Ascoli had grown tired of going against the current. During the 1960s, The Reporter had not only become predictable, due to a loss of investigative vigour, but its continued support of the Vietnam War and the Johnson administration had also cost the magazine much of its credibility. Although the story of CIA involvement with private organisations formed an excellent example of exactly the type of investigative reporting for which The Reporter had been famous during the 1950s and early 1960s, the magazine chose to ignore the story. Instead, the editors came to the Agency’s defence, writing in March 1967: Some of the activities the agency has apparently engaged in strike us as marginal at best and silly at worst. But to question CIA’s operations is quite different from questioning its reason for being or . . . suggesting that such a clandestine organization is alien and inimical to this country’s heritage and its interest, and that we are copying tactics of the enemy.81 The Reporter’s editors argued that the US needed to initiate legislation that would render impossible ‘the flood of intelligence gossip to which we have all been treated in recent days’.82 By no means, however, should America abolish the CIA. In its 6 April 1967 issue, The Reporter published a detailed defence of the CIA’s practices.83 In this article Christopher Felix, the pseudonym of an experienced CIA agent, challenged a number of ‘misconceptions’ about the Agency’s work. The article was, in effect, a summary of Felix’s 1963 book A Short Course in the Secret War, in which he explained to the American public that secret operations were ‘by no means diabolical inventions of the Russians or symptoms of a human spiritual decline’, but had in fact always formed an integral part of relations between states.84
CIA funding Given the magazine’s origins, history and networks, it seems entirely possible that The Reporter was bankrolled by the CIA. Although there is a lack of direct evidence, the amount of circumstantial evidence is substantial. One aspect of the magazine’s history that should not be overlooked in this respect is its financial background. In the case of Partisan Review and 134
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New Leader, there is archival evidence of money changing hands and funding through foundations that have been revealed as CIA conduits. The Reporter’s archives, however, do not contain any information about the magazine’s business side. Circulation figures, subscription lists, information about advertising and, most importantly, financial records are all missing. The fact that this information is missing can itself be construed as somehow pointing to dubious financial practices. The official version of events was reconstructed by Nathan Levin, financial advisor to Max and Marion Ascoli, in a 1983 memorandum, but this version does not contain any indication of CIA funding.85 According to Levin, The Reporter was initially financed with Marion Ascoli’s personal fortune. The magazine was subsequently sustained by the acquisition of a number of companies: Chek-Chart, Automobile Invoice Services Company, Community Antenna Systems, WBOY Radio and TV and Schwager-Wood. These companies were acquired by The Reporter’s parent company, the Fortnightly Publishing Corporation, to offset The Reporter’s losses. Even though the magazine was published at a consistent loss throughout its 19-year existence, Max and Marion Ascoli eventually broke even.86 This may, of course, all have been a cover. It was common practice for the CIA to bring in affluent sympathisers as conduits. And as we have seen, Max Ascoli was an enthusiastic contributor to a great many causes and organisations during the 1940s and early 1950s, and was very familiar with the practice of combining private and government initiative as well as private and government funding. Clearly Ascoli had the right background and attitude to play such a role. The fact that The Reporter’s financial records are incomplete does not, however, constitute proof of CIA funding. Nor does the fact that The Reporter had close ties to a number of government agencies, including the CIA, automatically make it a CIA-funded magazine. In fact, the actual funding may be beside the point. As we have seen, the connections between The Reporter and the intelligence community were first and foremost based on an exchange of ideas, not on an exchange of money. This was not a relationship based on dependency, with the CIA wielding control and The Reporter’s editors following strict orders. It was a relationship based on reciprocity and interdependence. The Reporter’s editors did not need to be told to express the ideas they did; given their ideological and personal backgrounds, they would have propagated them anyway, regardless of CIA funding. This applies in particular to Max Ascoli who, as a recently naturalised American, took his responsibilities as an American citizen very seriously. In many respects Ascoli was more American, more acutely aware of the key values and ideals on which American society was based, than most Americans. In an article published shortly after his naturalisation, Ascoli expressed his strong belief that ‘there are people, who – no matter where 135
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they were born – can fully find themselves only when they come over here. At least, this has been my case’.87 His conviction that Americans needed to reacquaint themselves with the values for which their country stood formed a recurrent theme in his writing. In light of this process of Americanisation and assimilation, Ascoli’s close cooperation with the US government can be seen as an effort to prove himself as a worthy American citizen, and as an attempt to express his gratitude for the warm welcome he had received upon his arrival. Proud to be an American citizen, Ascoli created The Reporter to propagate American exceptionalism both at home and abroad.
Notes and bibliography 1 See Giles Scott-Smith, The Politics of Apolitical Culture: The Congress for Cultural Freedom, the CIA and Post-war American Hegemony (London: Routledge, 2002), pp. 123–4; Church Committee, Final Report of the Select Committee to Study Governmental Operations with Respect to Intelligence Activities, Book I, Foreign and Military Intelligence (Washington DC: Department of State, 1976); and Volker R. Berghahn, America and the Intellectual Cold Wars in Europe: Shephard Stone between Philanthropy, Academy, and Diplomacy (Princeton University Press, 2001). 2 Frances Stonor Saunders, The Cultural Cold War: The CIA and the World of Arts and Letters (New York: The New Press, 2000), p. 4. 3 Stuart H. Loory, ‘The CIA’s Use of the Press: A “Mighty Wurlitzer”’, Ramparts (June 1974), pp. 9–18. 4 Ibid., pp. 17–18. 5 Carl Bernstein, ‘The CIA and the Media’, Rolling Stone, 20 October 1977, pp. 55–67. 6 Ibid., pp. 65–7. 7 Ibid. 8 ‘Prospectus for The Reporter: A Fortnightly of Facts and Ideas’, April 1949, folder 8, box 4, Max Ascoli collection, Howard Gotlieb Archival Research Center at Boston University (hereafter Ascoli collection). 9 Hugh Wilford discussed the role of the New Leader in the cultural Cold War in depth in the article ‘Playing the CIA’s Tune? The New Leader and the Cultural Cold War’, Diplomatic History, 27, 1 (2003), pp. 15–34. It is interesting to note that The Reporter was founded at almost exactly the same time as Der Monat, the West German magazine created by Melvin Lasky under the auspices of the US Office of the Military Government in Germany (OMGUS). Unlike Der Monat, which was aimed specifically at counteracting anti-American sentiment in Germany, The Reporter was aimed primarily at an American audience. In addition, Der Monat was more closely aligned with the CCF – Melvin Lasky served as Secretary General of the Berlin CCF – than with The Reporter. Despite these differences, the two initiatives shared the ideal of promoting mutual understanding between Europe and the United States. In addition, they both originated with the same network of former Strategic Services and War Information Office employees and were both founded around the time this informal network was reinforced by the formation of the CIA. Giles Scott-Smith has discussed the origins and objectives of Der Monat in depth in ‘“A Radical Democratic Political Offensive”: Melvin J. Lasky, Der Monat, and the Congress for Cultural Freedom’, Journal of Contemporary History, 35, 2 (2000), pp. 263–80. 10 ‘Prospectus for The Reporter’, April 1949, folder 8, box 4, Ascoli collection.
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11 Senior Editors to the Staff, 2 January 1949, folder 1, box 1, Ascoli collection; ‘Fact Sheet’ (information sent to prospective advertisers), 12 April 1965, folder 1, box 5, Ascoli collection. 12 For a more detailed account of Ascoli’s early career and his relationship with Nelson Rockefeller, see Rosario J. Tosiello, ‘Max Ascoli: A Lifetime of Rockefeller Connections’, in Giuliana Gemelli (ed.), The ‘Unacceptables’: American Foundations and Refugee Scholars between the Two Wars and after (Brussels: P. I. E.-Peter Lang, 2000), pp. 107–40. 13 Laura Fermi, Illustrious Immigrants: The Intellectual Migration from Europe, 1930–1941 (University of Chicago Press, 1968), p. 119. 14 Edward W. Barrett, Truth Is Our Weapon (New York: Funk & Wagnalls, 1951), pp. 21–2. 15 Max Ascoli to Selective Service Local Board No. 17, 21 May 1942, folder 1, box 169, Ascoli collection. 16 ‘Council for Democracy’, folder 7, box 198, Ascoli collection. 17 ‘Editorial’, Free World (October 1941), pp. 7–8; ‘Excerpts from the Program of Free World’, Free World (January 1945), p. 50. 18 ‘United Nations World’, folder 3, box 208, Ascoli collection. 19 Saunders, Cultural Cold War, pp. 261, 311–12. 20 Ibid., pp. 144–5, 260–1. 21 ‘A Magazine Project’ (n.d.), folder 1, box 1, Ascoli collection. 22 Max Ascoli to Scotty Reston, 14 March 1947, folder 7, box 172, Ascoli collection. 23 ‘Report #1 from The Reporter’, 1 December 1948, folder 1, box 1, Ascoli collection. 24 The Reporter, 26 April 1949, p. 1. 25 William Harlan Hale to Wallace Carroll, 21 July 1948, folder 8, box 84, Ascoli collection. 26 Dick Callanan and Johnny White to Max Ascoli, 1 December 1948, folder 5, box 4, Ascoli collection. 27 Arthur Schlesinger Jr to Wallace Carroll and Max Ascoli, 20 August 1947, folder 8, box 64, Ascoli collection. 28 Wallace Carroll, Persuade or Perish (Boston, MA: Houghton Mifflin, 1948). 29 The above material on Philip Horton’s employment with the OSS was obtained by means of a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request. The material was approved for release from the CIA’s files in November 2003. 30 Douglass Cater, ‘Collapse of Youth’s One World’, The Reporter, 30 August 1949, pp. 15–16. 31 Douglass Cater, ‘What Did LBJ Know and When Did He Know It?’, Washington Post, 19 July 1987, p. 7. 32 Douglass Cater to Max Ascoli, 29 April 1948, folder 5, box 83, Ascoli collection. 33 Max Ascoli, ‘Christmas, 1958’, The Reporter, 25 December 1958, p. 8. 34 Philip Horton to Mary McCarthy, 1 November 1951, folder 11, box 49, Ascoli collection. 35 Harlan Cleveland to George Hinckley and Shirley Katzander, ‘Building Foreign Circulation’ (n.d. ?Summer 1955), folder 2, box 84, Ascoli collection. 36 Ibid. 37 Foreign circulation remained around 2,500 from 1955 until 1967. It can be argued, however, that among The Reporter’s foreign subscribers were a number of opinion-makers, including many journalists who, by referring to the magazine in their various media outlets, and by running reprints of Reporter articles, made it possible for The Reporter’s ideas to reach a much larger audience than its foreign circulation figures would indicate. ‘Audit Report for The Reporter’, 1967, folder 2, box 5, Ascoli collection.
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38 These ideas about a coordinated propaganda/policy effort are expressed most forcibly in articles by The Reporter’s key contributors on propaganda and psychological warfare, William Harlan Hale, Lewis Galantière and Edmond Taylor, all of whom had close ties to the intelligence community. 39 Max Ascoli, ‘The Propaganda Front’, editorial, The Reporter, 1 August 1950, p. 5. Ascoli was a member of the ACCF, but he withdrew from the organisation in 1952, when an internal conflict arose over the question of how to deal with McCarthyism. To Ascoli this was not a question that needed debating. The protection of civil liberties formed a recurrent theme in The Reporter and Ascoli prided himself upon having taken a strong stand against McCarthy from the very start. In fact, The Reporter was the first American magazine to devote a special theme issue to Senator McCarthy, in June 1950. Philip Horton to Max Ascoli, 16 April 1952, folder 6, box 198, Ascoli collection. 40 For a more in-depth discussion of the ACUE, see Richard Aldrich, ‘OSS, CIA and European Unity: The American Committee on United Europe, 1948–1960’, Diplomacy and Statecraft, 8, 1 (1997), pp. 184–227. 41 Ibid. 42 Francis Adams Truslow to Max Ascoli, 10 August 1950, folder 6, box 196, Ascoli collection. European unity formed a recurrent theme in The Reporter throughout the magazine’s existence. 43 Saunders, Cultural Cold War, p. 130. 44 Max Ascoli to General Lucius Clay (National Chairman), 31 August 1950, folder 6, box 198, Ascoli collection. 45 Saunders, Cultural Cold War, pp. 146–7. 46 ‘The Reporter What- Why- Who-’, brochure (n.d. ?1956), folder 3, box 5, Ascoli collection. 47 Bernstein, ‘The CIA and the Media’, p. 63. 48 See ‘Research and Projects’, box 113 and box 117, Ascoli collection. 49 Max Ascoli to Martin Doudna, 23 April 1971, box 214, Ascoli collection. 50 Philip Horton to Max Ascoli, 12 January 1953, folder 2, box 117, Ascoli collection. Horton’s personal acquaintance with James Jesus Angleton is referred to in The Reporter’s FBI file, obtained through an FOIA request and released on 28 January 2004. 51 Bernstein, ‘The CIA and the Media’, p. 59. See also Robin W. Winks, Cloak and Gown: Scholars in the Secret War, 1939–1961 (New York: William Morrow & Company, Inc., 1987). 52 Douglass Cater, The Fourth Branch of Government (Boston, MA: Houghton Mifflin Co., 1959); Power in Washington: A Critical Look at Today’s Struggle to Govern in the Nation’s Capital (New York: Random House, 1964). 53 Douglass Cater oral history, 29 April 1969, by David G. McComb, Oral Histories of the Johnson Administration, Part I: The White House and Executive Departments, microfilm, frame 0438, reel 1, Roosevelt Study Center, Middelburg, The Netherlands. 54 Ibid. 55 I would like to thank Karen M. Paget for providing me with the following material from the National Archives: Under-Secretary of State U. Alexis Johnson to Secretary of State Dean Rusk, confidential memorandum re. Psychological Warfare Abroad, 11 September 1961, RG 511.00/9–1161, National Archives, Washington DC (hereafter NA); Report on committee meeting, 20 September 1961, RG 511.00/9–2061, NA; Douglass Cater to Assistant Secretary of State Lucius Battle, 9 November 1961, RG 511.00/11–961, NA. 56 Under-Secretary of State U. Alexis Johnson to Secretary of State Dean Rusk, confidential memorandum re. Psychological Warfare Abroad, 11 September
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57 58
59
60 61 62 63 64 65 66 67
68 69 70 71 72 73 74 75 76 77 78
1961, RG 511.00/9–1161, NA; Report on committee meeting, 20 September 1961, RG 511.00/9–2061, NA. Douglass Cater to Assistant Secretary of State Lucius Battle, 9 November 1961, RG 511.00/11–961, NA. It is interesting to note that in their correspondence in The Reporter archives Cater and Ascoli refer to a position as Secretary of State Dean Rusk’s press aide instead of a position directing US political warfare. What is even more interesting is that Ascoli tried to convince the State Department to take Philip Horton instead of Douglass Cater. Ascoli, who was in the midst of negotiations with Cater, whom he hoped would become his successor as The Reporter’s editor, tried to convince Rusk that Horton was more suitable for the job. Ascoli to Rusk, 3 October 1961, folder 16, box 63, Ascoli collection; Cater to Ascoli, 11 October 1961, folder 6, box 83, Ascoli collection. Philip Horton to Allen Dulles, 6 April 1950; Dulles to Horton, 28 April 1950; Horton to Dulles, 2 May 1950, folder 18, box 48, Allen W. Dulles Papers, Public Policy Papers, Department of Rare Books and Special Collections, Princeton University Library (hereafter Dulles papers). Philip Horton to Max Ascoli, 25 January 1952, folder 2, box 117, Ascoli collection. Bruce Cumings, The Origins of the Korean War (Princeton University Press, 1990). Ascoli’s CIA file was obtained by means of an FOIA request. It was approved for release from the CIA’s files in June 2003. See Adolf A. Berle’s and Nelson Rockefeller’s correspondence with Allen Dulles, which can be found, respectively, in folder 3, box 8, and folder 29, box 48, of the Dulles papers. Philip Horton to Allen Dulles, 2 February 1955, folder 1, box 199, Ascoli collection. See Allen Dulles’ correspondence with Philip Horton and Elizabeth Parsons, folder 9, box 44, and folder 18, box 48, Dulles papers. The above material was obtained by means of an FOIA request. One single document was approved for release from the CIA’s files in June 2003. Harry Truman, ‘Address on Foreign Policy at a Luncheon of the American Society of Newspaper Editors’, 20 April 1950, in Public Papers of the Presidents of the United States: Harry S. Truman, 1952–53, (Washington DC: United States Government Printing Office, 1966), pp. 260–4. Ibid. ‘Prospectus for The Reporter’, April 1949, folder 8, box 4, Ascoli collection. Harry Truman, ‘Address on Foreign Policy’, pp. 260–4. Ibid. ‘Prospectus for The Reporter’, April 1949, folder 8, box 4, Ascoli collection. Max Ascoli, ‘The World Civil War’, editorial, The Reporter, 9 May 1950, p. 7. See Max Ascoli’s correspondence with Edward W. Barrett, folder 5, box 52, Ascoli collection. Barrett, Truth Is Our Weapon, p. 78. David F. Krugler, ‘Will It Play in Peoria? The Campaign of Truth, 1950’, in The Voice of America and the Domestic Propaganda Battles, 1945–1953 (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 2000), pp. 96–116. Philip Horton to Max Ascoli, 25 January 1952, folder 2, box 117, Ascoli collection. (N.d. ?April 1952), folder 15, box 153, Ascoli collection. This figure includes the fees of the special investigator, research assistants and memoranda-writing
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79 80
81 82 83 84 85 86 87
officials, but not the salaries of the full-time staff members who spent much of their time working on the project. Advertisement for The Reporter, New York Times, 1 April 1952, p. L12; advertisement for The Reporter, New York Times, 15 April 1952, p. L13. As The Reporter’s extensive FBI file attests, the magazine and its editors were under close observation throughout the 1950s. The articles that the FBI considered most problematic were all investigative exposés: William S. Fairfield and Charles Clift, ‘The Private Eyes’, The Reporter, 10 February 1955, pp. 14–29; Fairfield and Clift, ‘The Wiretappers’, The Reporter, 23 December 1952, pp. 9; Dwight Macdonald, ‘The Lie-Detector Era’, The Reporter, 8 June 1954, pp. 10–18 and 22 June 1954, pp. 22–9; and Douglass Cater, ‘Senator Styles Bridges And His Far-flung Constituents’, The Reporter, 20 July 1954, pp. 8–21. ‘A Matter of Intelligence’, The Reporter’s Notes, The Reporter, 9 March 1967, p. 12. Ibid. Christopher Felix, ‘The Unknowable CIA’, The Reporter, 6 April 1967, pp. 20–4. Christopher Felix, A Short Course in the Secret War (New York: E. P. Dutton & Co., 1963), p. 9. Nathan Levin to Marion Ascoli, Shirley Katzander, R. C. Barnard, Leo Gottlieb and Fowler Hamilton, ‘Financial History of The Reporter–Fortnightly 1948–1977’, December 1983, box 215, Ascoli collection. Ibid. Max Ascoli, ‘No. 38 Becomes a Citizen’, Atlantic Monthly (February 1940), pp. 168–74. For a detailed discussion of Ascoli’s Americanisation, see Tosiello, ‘Max Ascoli’, pp. 119–20.
8 DOUBLE VISION, DOUBLE ANALYSIS The role of interpretation, negotiation and compromise in the state–private network and British American Studies Ali Fisher
Through a focus on the interaction between individuals and groups within the state–private network, it is possible to take advantage of the empirical research on the network, and concepts developed by Gramsci, whilst also moving away from reliance on the dialectic and the control/autonomy debate. Furthermore, by making the bloc formation and negotiation the nexus of the analysis, concepts such as autonomy and control can be freed from their fixed position to be reinvestigated. An examination of the methodology employed in the state–private network to develop a politicalcultural message can demonstrate that there is a more complex distribution of power within the network than is represented by a dialectical approach. For example, within a cultural initiative there is an evolution in content and emphasis rather than a directed, preordained vision that runs from inception to completion of the initiative. This evolution is pertinent when responsibility for production is divided between groups, and each group seeks to achieve its own goal through the initiative. As a result, rather than committing to a congruous ideology and purpose, the group prioritises an individual goal, thus preventing the formation of a united bloc. In these scenarios the vision for the initiative does not pass from the instigating group to the target audience unaltered by the interaction with groups that aid the dissemination of the message. Each group analyses the vision that it receives and, based on that analysis and with reference to the promotion of its individual group goal, passes on an interpretation of that vision. As a result there is a ‘double transmission’ of the vision, from one group to another prior to the transmission from the final producer to the target audience. This concept can be explored through an examination of the development of the British Association for American Studies (BAAS). American 141
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Studies developed in the United States on a small scale in the late 1930s but expanded into a recognisable academic discipline during the early Cold War, with the American Studies Association formed in 1951. In Britain the development took slightly longer, but when it came it was actively supported by the US government in the belief ‘that the more people knew about the United States, the more they would come to admire its political and economic values, and its foreign policy’.1 Using the academic discipline as part of a cultural foreign policy had the potential advantage that, in addition to the traditional method of Americans promoting America, once the discipline was established in each country the promotion would be carried out largely by non-Americans within the education system of the target population. The extent to which the discipline developed in each country, in this case Britain, and the balance that the academics would strike between developing an understanding of America and disseminating this image within society, would largely depend on the outcome of negotiations within the state–private network. The current focus on the dissemination of an American-influenced political culture has been characterised by a structural approach that focuses on the mobility of individuals and sources of financial support. The structures that developed through which ideology could be disseminated from political leaders to the population and the relationship between the government and private groups who served as the disseminators has become a fulcrum of the analysis of the network. As a result much of the research has either echoed or explicitly referenced Gramsci’s contention that intellectuals act as ‘the dominant group’s “deputies” exercising the subaltern functions of social hegemony and political government’.2 This has led to a focus on cooptation and convergence, but instead of developing beyond this approach to interrogate fully the relationship, many works have been drawn back into the debate between control and autonomy. To maintain the focus on ‘state’ and ‘private’ as distinct entities, and discuss whether one controls the other, is to perpetuate the Cold War myth that there was such a clear division between the two. These structural approaches contain a number of weaknesses resulting from a perpetuation of the dialectical approach. First, evidence of complete state control over private groups within an initiative is limited. Even Frances Stonor Saunders, despite demonstrating ‘who was paying the piper’, failed to demonstrate full control over the private groups, outside front organisations.3 Similarly for the other extreme – autonomy – the phrase ‘state–private network’ assumes some link between the two groups; without that link, claims of a network are difficult, if not impossible, to sustain. Second, shared ideology can be overemphasised to make an argument on either side of the control/autonomy dialectic. The dialectical position weakens state–private analysis as it does not allow for a difference in emphasis within a shared broad perspective. Third, the structural 142
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approach fails to account for the negotiation between the groups and the compromises they make to ensure a cultural initiative develops. Finally, the traditional structural approach to the network fails to engage with the role of the target audience within the formation of the message. To develop the analysis of the state–private network there needs to be a convergence between work influenced by Gramscian theory and analysis of the network that goes beyond the limits of both approaches. Giles Scott-Smith has begun to develop this synthesis between the two approaches. In his work on the Congress for Cultural Freedom he wrote that ‘Gramsci’s conception of hegemony thus offers a way to achieve a broader understanding of the Congress’ historical context and culturalintellectual purpose’.4 He went on to explain that ‘the complexities involved in achieving any level of “intellectual and moral leadership” by means of consent in a democratic society make hegemony necessarily a multi-layered, multifaceted coalition of social forces, its components and alliances changing through time’.5 Through further developing the concept of alliance formation, society can be seen as a collection of groups, or blocs. Each bloc maintains a common goal or ideology, which draws individuals together sufficiently to overcome any differences in emphasis. To gain greater influence within society a bloc must persuade various other groups to form an alliance. This can be achieved by means of negotiation and compromise that result in the identification of shared goals or ideology which can unite both blocs in working for a common purpose. Applying this concept to the state–private network, the alliance which controls the state must continue to seek out new alliances to maintain its position. In the context of the Cold War, America required a close relationship with western Europe. To foster this relationship individuals and groups within the state had to negotiate with groups in Europe in an attempt to further the production and reception of a political-cultural message favourable to the hegemonic group within the United States. However, through negotiation with these groups, the initiative was exposed to double transmission, which had the potential to alter subtly the vision proposed by groups in the US. An approach based on the development of blocs captures the dynamic nature of relationships within the state–private network that has already been demonstrated by empirical research. Furthermore, this approach creates a framework through which the weaknesses of the structural approach can be addressed. The formation of blocs emphasises the compromises made by groups in order to form an alliance, opening up the conceptual middle ground between control and autonomy. Recognition of these compromises emphasises the similarities without overlooking the differences between the groups. Such compromises stem from the negotiation which is central to this approach to the state–private network and which exposes the nuances involved in the formation of blocs. Finally, 143
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blocs seen as groups of like-minded individuals need not be confined to the designation of state and private but can come from any section of society, and indeed can form part of the target population, rather than being exclusively American, as the structural approach appears to indicate. This begins to address the role of the target audience in the development of a political-cultural message and the role that double transmission may have in this process. While research has demonstrated how elite power relations in Europe were influenced to aid the attempt by Americans to develop an international hegemonic position, this is only half the relationship. As important is the way in which the operation of the state–private network influenced or subverted the attempts of the hegemonic group within the United States to promote its position as international hegemon. This second approach to the relationship places the notion of reception alongside the study of production within the state–private network and can be explored further through an examination of the development of American Studies in Britain.6 There are conflicting interpretations of the development of the BAAS. C. D. Allen, the first secretary of the BAAS, has recalled that ‘a significant cause, as well as result, of the expansion of the study of the U.S. in Britain in the years after World War II was the foundation of the British Association for American Studies’.7 He went on to argue that the ‘BAAS . . . took off very rapidly and soon had a vigorous and (despite the constant readiness of the embassy to help) totally independent existence’.8 However, the development of American Studies in Britain leading to the creation of a national association has been described by Richard King as ‘an aspect of the more enlightened face of post-war American foreign policy’.9 These two perspectives appear to be contradictory and could be used as starting points for the control/autonomy debate. However, placing emphasis on the negotiation between the groups and the compromise which allows for the identification of a shared goal facilitates an analysis without necessarily labelling a dominant and subservient participant. Through this approach it is possible to see how these apparently contradictory statements could describe the same scenario, as independence is no longer merely the opposite of control.
The early development of the BAAS The British Association for American Studies was founded in 1955 at the fourth in a series of post-war conferences receiving support from the United States Education Commission (USEC) and the Rockefeller Foundation. These conferences became known to Americanists as the ‘Fulbright Conferences’, as funding for exchange programmes and educational conferences such as these developed as a result of the Fulbright Act of 1946. However, the negotiation and cultural interaction between the US 144
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and these British academics had begun many years earlier, influencing, although not controlling, both their perceptions of America and their career development. As a result the negotiation through which the BAAS developed had its foundations in a cultural relationship established by both inadvertent and deliberate cultural interaction that had been built up over more than a decade. For some individuals serious cultural interaction began outside the context of the Cold War, far removed from the attempt to develop American Studies as a tool to bolster the British image of America. The theoretical space between control and autonomy plays a vital role in the understanding of this relationship. The scholars were not controlled, as US state action was not building towards the development of a discipline as a Cold War weapon, manoeuvring selected scholars into the required position.10 Furthermore, scholars were influenced by experiences beyond the scope of state-run cultural initiatives, primarily involvement in the Second World War. However, neither were these scholars independent from deliberate influence: their career paths were influenced by initiatives of both state and private origin, which were designed to foster some level of mutual understanding between the two countries. Harry C. Allen highlighted the influence of the Second World War as a major factor that had shaped his career as an Americanist. His ‘year of research towards an Oxford B.Litt.’ conducted before the war ‘was concerned with English eighteenth-century political ideas’ rather than American.11 Furthermore, while he had planned to sail to the US to take up a Commonwealth Fund Fellowship at Cornell in September 1939, he acknowledged that at that time ‘it was a grievous career risk . . . to typecast oneself irretrievably as an Americanist’, and as a result he was not committed to the study of America only.12 Allen did study in the United States but not before he had served ‘more than five years in the “poor bloody infantry” . . . and it was to Harvard’ rather than Cornell that he eventually travelled.13 The ‘comradeship in Arms’, which developed when his company position opposite Arnhem was relieved in 1944 by an American parachute unit, weighed heavily in his conclusion that ‘it had been the war that had made an Americanist of me’.14 Not until 1955, when he was appointed Commonwealth Professor of American History at University College London, did he ‘enter the promised land’ of teaching only American history, but it was his experiences during the war, not cultural initiatives, that he believed were pivotal to his career development.15 Such a parallel with Philip Gleason’s emphasis on the role of the Second World War should not, however, obscure other influences on some of the individuals who formed the original BAAS committee.16 Although the war was pivotal for Harry Allen, he also acknowledged the role of exchange programmes in heightening his interest in America and in forming some of 145
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his initial images of the country. His image of the world in 1939 had in part been influenced by forming ‘lifelong friendships with American Rhodes Scholars and their like’.17 Furthermore, when he was finally able to travel to Harvard it was as a Commonwealth Fellow. Nor was Allen the only British scholar to be influenced by an exchange programme. Marcus Cunliffe travelled to the United States to be a Commonwealth Fellow at Yale in 1947 and Chicago in 1954.18 Cunliffe, who succeeded Allen as secretary of the BAAS, recalled that ‘no European who lived through the 1930s and 1940s could avoid being affected by the American ambience’, yet he was ‘obliged to recognize that in the pre-war and immediate postwar years America was far from being his sole concern’.19 Furthermore, he was ‘unmoved’ by the recommendations of American novels made by a Rhodes Scholar in his college.20 The progression from this perhaps indifferent position to that of the academic who wrote for the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA)-funded Encounter began by ‘apparent accident’ – he ‘became an Americanist without forethought’.21 This accident stemmed from the search for ‘the nicest alternative to regular employment’ which in 1947 appeared to be ‘study in some foreign country’.22 He applied for and received a fellowship from the Commonwealth Fund, leading him to conclude that he ‘went to America because it was there, and accessible’.23 Upon his return, to take up a position at Manchester University, he saw himself as a ‘New-World missionary’ with a ‘duty’ to ‘thrust upon audiences’ his knowledge of America.24 Herbert Nicholas, another member of that initial group of British scholars who formed the BAAS, also benefited from a fellowship from the Commonwealth Fund. Unlike Allen and Cunliffe his fellowship was in the inter-war years but his account nonetheless has a familiar theme. He recalled that he was in his fifth year at Oxford before the ‘idea of doing graduate work in America took hold’ and that this ‘impulse owed as much to the feeling that an American interlude would buy me time in which to find myself as to any awareness of what America might do for me’.25 The war also influenced the development of Nicholas’ teaching interests. ‘Medically graded for civilian duty’, he remained at Oxford where the reduced number of teaching staff and a fragmentation of the curriculum left him ‘freer than ever to devote his academic time to American themes’.26 Such interest in America was further developed when he joined the Ministry of Information in its American Division, serving extended periods both in the Embassy in Washington and the British Information Services in New York.27 Through this brief survey, the range of influences on individuals who later formed the BAAS committee becomes clear. As a result, even before negotiations and cultural initiatives began in a Cold War context to focus on the development of a coherent system of American Studies in Britain, these men had, to different extents, become 146
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committed to increasing the understanding of the United States. Their development had not been driven by the American state, they had not been controlled, yet they had been culturally primed to ally themselves with the ‘more enlightened face of post-war American foreign policy’.28 When the Fulbright Conferences began in 1952 they built on the interest already established within the academic community and provided a forum for the development of a ‘collective consciousness’.29 Herbert Nicholas recalled that ‘the conferences were not only water in a thirsty land; they were a tot of rum before going over the top’.30 The work of these conferences was supported by the USEC ad hoc committee on American Studies, and it was within this committee, rather than at an academic conference, that the impetus for a national association developed. All present – American officials and British scholars – shared the goal of promoting American Studies, but the specific drive to form an association came from a US government representative, Dick Taylor, Cultural Attaché at the US Embassy in London, rather than from any of the British academics. Not convinced that the concept of a national association would in itself persuade the British academics of the need to act, Taylor wrote to the members of the committee informing them that he had received from an unnamed American foundation an expression of ‘concrete interest’ in funding such an organisation in Britain.31 Almost a month later, with no sign of any action being taken, Taylor used the final meeting of the ad hoc committee on American Studies to force the issue. He reiterated that he had received offers of support from ‘at least one American Foundation’, urging the British scholars to take action ‘forthwith’ and form an association to take advantage of this offer.32 Apparently unconvinced that this was sufficient to spur the British members into action, Herbert Agar, who had served as Special Assistant to the American Ambassador in London and Counsellor for Public Affairs at the US Embassy, added: He did not seek in any way to influence their decision about the formation of an association for American Studies. He wished simply to point out the urgency of taking action immediately if it was felt that some action should be taken.33 With the financial support for the Fulbright Conferences coming to an end, the British academics had effectively been given an ultimatum. If they shared the goal of developing American Studies, they would have to form an association to be able to receive further financial support. Thus, faced with the imminent demise of the ad hoc committee and with a promise of financial support, the British academics on the committee provisionally formed the BAAS, subject to approval at the 1955 Fulbright Conference. The US representatives had convinced the committee to take action, but 147
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not with the ease that any measure of control would imply. They and the British scholars had formed an alliance to work towards a shared goal, but now action had been taken the provisional BAAS members were determined to ensure it appeared that they neither worked for, nor were controlled by, the US state.
Division over the nature of the BAAS The desire to maintain an image of autonomy and a level of independence from the US government immediately placed the provisional members in negotiation with Dick Taylor. Discussion focused on the role of the Association, as the British members were unwilling to take on too much responsibility and were keen to avoid becoming a ‘stalking horse’ for the US government.34 Taylor proposed that the BAAS should become a largescale organisation committed to an eight-point programme. Under his proposal the BAAS would have been responsible for organising university/teacher conferences and exchange programmes as well as running a library of secondary material and a repository for microfilm: ‘This would have created a centre for American studies with the potential to gain significant prestige within British society’. BAAS members were hesitant however to take on such a large workload. Herbert Nicholas recalled later that he had ‘entertained considerable scepticism about the organisations beyond the minimum necessary for survival’.35 He went on to confess that he ‘misjudged the needs and opportunities of the hour’ but that he was not alone in wishing to accept only a minimum of responsibility. When the committee finally produced the Articles of Association it was evident that its role was significantly smaller than the vision proposed by Taylor. A centre for secondary material and microfilm replaced the proposed library and the sponsorship of exchanges became only the ‘investigation and encouragement of the means of travel and study by British Scholars’.36 Taylor’s vision had been significantly reduced. Although both sides still shared the goal of promoting American Studies, they disagreed on the emphasis placed on that promotion. The development of the Association up to the production of the Articles of Association demonstrates the need to emphasise the negotiation – direct, indirect and cultural – that occurs within the state–private network. Equally important is the demonstration of the operation of double transmission within the network, although in this example it is the mode rather than the message that is being influenced by the process. The vision of the US state representative, Dick Taylor, was received by the BAAS committee and understood in their terms. On the committee’s understanding, the American vision would require additional work in the administration of the centre. Herbert Nicholas indicated that he resisted the more elaborate visions of an association, ‘grudging the time and energy 148
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[as] they subtract from the fundamental work of the scholar’.37 Still working towards the same goal of the development of American Studies, the BAAS committee nonetheless developed their own vision of the role of the Association. The Articles were the statement of this vision, and their adoption and publication in turn transmitted the vision to the BAAS membership. Acting in accordance with their understanding of the Articles, the BAAS membership influenced the position that the BAAS occupied within society. The result was an association that would operate in sharp contrast to the vision proposed by US representatives. However, this did not mean that the state representatives discarded their own vision. Dick Taylor, in an attempt to revive the vision of a high-profile centre, suggested in October 1955 that the BAAS committee become involved in the development of a permanent centre at Ditchley Park, north of Blenheim in Oxfordshire. This could include a conference venue and an American School along the lines of the British School in Athens. The BAAS committee were reluctant to become involved,38 believing that the amount of time required to run the centre would be detrimental to their study of America. The dichotomy between the two positions was clear: Taylor was keen to see the Association spend more time promoting the US vision of America while the committee wanted to devote their time to study of the country. The defence of the BAAS’ position had been achieved in the short term, but as Marcus Cunliffe recalled, ‘American Studies was a frail plant’ and, like the discipline, the BAAS ‘required irrigation’.39 Although when the BAAS was founded it was agreed that it should not give the impression that it ‘was primarily constituted to obtain financial help’, the promise of support from an American foundation had encouraged British academics in the decision to form such an association.40 Now they needed to call in this financial support if they were to proceed with even the modest British plans, let alone the American vision. The BAAS’ income for 1955 was a meagre £56 14s while the 1954 Fulbright Conference had cost £7,500. The solution appeared to be to approach the Rockefeller Foundation for assistance, which Dick Taylor offered to do on the academics’ behalf. However, concerned that they should be independent of the US government, Frank Thistlethwaite, the first chairman of the Association, contacted the Foundation independently only a day after Taylor had made his offer. Initially the response was promising, as early exchanges indicated that the BAAS could take over the Rockefeller grant for research after the 1956 American Studies conference at Oxford. The quick response was aided by the relationship that Chet D’Arms, Associate Director of Humanities at the Rockefeller Foundation, had already established with both Frank Thistlethwaite and Herbert Nicholas through previous Rockefeller Foundation interest in American Studies. However, the positive start 149
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rapidly faded away, as a Rockefeller grant would require the BAAS to have an office, supported by an alternative source of income. As the BAAS neither had such an office nor appeared likely to be able to provide for one in the near future, protracted negotiations ended in failure. Eventually in January 1956 a letter from Chet D’Arms made it clear to the committee that the lack of an office was not a factor that could be overcome. He further suggested that the BAAS did not do enough actually to warrant an office.41 The committee were now faced with having formed an association to take advantage of interest that had not materialised. Although this negotiation resulted in failure, the committee’s actions demonstrate that the BAAS were neither controlled nor autonomous. Although they had been heavily influenced to create an association, when this was formalised the Articles of Association were very different from those envisaged by the US representatives. Now in search of financial support they took the advice of the US representatives but sought to reduce their role in the negotiation. By approaching the Foundation directly, the committee were effectively reducing the role of Dick Taylor to that of interested bystander rather than intermediary. However, the failure of negotiations between the BAAS and the Foundation presented the US government with an opportunity to renegotiate its role within the development of American Studies and become once more an active participant.
Re-engagement with the US government The opportunity for the US government to re-engage with the BAAS committee occurred shortly after Taylor unexpectedly left the US Embassy in the autumn of 1955. The BAAS committee, having failed to secure funding from the Rockefeller Foundation, were looking for alternative sources of funding. Myron Koenig, who took on the responsibilities vacated by Dick Taylor, received a letter in November 1955 from the BAAS Chairman Frank Thistlethwaite. The overt nature of the letter was the expression of a ‘great sense of indebtedness to the Fulbright Commission’ but there was also a thinly veiled undertone – the BAAS committee wanted to re-engage in negotiation with US government representatives.42 The initial response was disappointing for the BAAS. Koenig replied that a review had revealed Dick Taylor’s work had provided the ‘soundest possible basis’ for the promotion of American Studies, but offered no further support.43 This disappointing start was compounded when, in a meeting with Harry Allen, Koenig commented that he hoped the annual conferences started with support from the Fulbright Commission would not ‘lapse for more than one year’, but once again did not offer any financial aid that might have ensured a continuation of the initiative.44 150
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The future for the BAAS as anything except a very small association looked bleak until March 1956. During the American Studies Conference at Selwyn College, Cambridge, Koenig told members of the committee that the US government could support the BAAS in one of two ways. First, he offered a $20,000 grant to finance a survey of library resources relating to American Studies in the United Kingdom. However, it was his second proposal that both offered the BAAS a stable future and threatened to deprive the Association of its image of independence. The offer was a ‘one-shot’ $100,000 grant ‘to set the association financially on its feet’, but Koenig noted that this could be converted into a $5,000 grant renewable annually should the committee prefer.45 He recognised that ‘assistance rendered to the association by the government might be interpreted as propaganda activity’ but sought to reassure the committee that the financial support came with no strings attached.46 Despite these reassurances, Thistlethwaite wrote to Cunliffe saying that he was ‘increasingly inclined to look this gift horse in the mouth. Oh! For a private angel!’47 He was, however, aware that ‘it would be a considerable responsibility to turn down the means of getting BAAS so comfortably established’.48 The committee eventually agreed that they could not accept the offer of $100,000 as it would create the impression that they were a ‘US Government-aided organisation’ and instead accepted the grant specifically to conduct the survey of resources.49 The BAAS now had an income beyond contributions from its membership and with state support could fulfil part of the limited vision set out in the Articles of Association.
Re-engagement with the Rockefeller Foundation Fortune would take another turn for the BAAS almost immediately, as Thistlethwaite’s plea for a private angel was answered. Just six days after the BAAS agreed in principle the $20,000 grant with Koenig, Thistlethwaite wrote to the BAAS treasurer, Dennis Welland, to inform him of a new approach suggested by Chet D’Arms that could result in the BAAS receiving a Rockefeller Foundation grant. D’Arms had indicated that using ‘the German precedent’, in which the German Association for American Studies had received £30,000, could strengthen the case for funding.50 His second suggestion was a simple solution to the problem of an office: the committee should approach the Commonwealth Fund for assistance. This was organised with little difficulty as Harkness House, owned by the Commonwealth Fund, already hosted receptions for Fulbright scholars, and Gorley Putt, the warden of Harkness House, was a member of the BAAS committee. These developments removed the obstacles to the final stage of negotiation that would result in the BAAS receiving a grant from the Rockefeller Foundation. 151
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Further good fortune aided the BAAS in these negotiations: Herbert Nicholas took over as acting chairman when Thistlethwaite took up a visiting position at the University of Pennsylvania. This isolated Thistlethwaite from the committee but put him in regular personal contact with D’Arms. Thistlethwaite would combine speaking invitations at Princeton with meeting D’Arms, who lived within easy driving distance. By November 1956 these meetings had resulted in concerted pressure from D’Arms for a budget, with the implication that any realistic request for funding would be met up to $100,000. However, the advantage of face-toface negotiation was limited by the problems of trans-Atlantic communication and an acting chairman (Nicholas) who believed the BAAS should do the minimum possible for survival. While Thistlethwaite continued to negotiate in America, the committee in Britain worried about the possible loss of autonomy, the problems of administrative costs and the amount of time that would be required to fulfil the obligations proposed by D’Arms. The offer of such a large amount of money meant the BAAS was forced to consider increasing their activities in order to utilise the available resources. The more conservative BAAS committee resisted such expansion, and at one point even Thistlethwaite confessed that he could only budget for spending $70,000 of the $100,000 on offer. In its undiluted form the vision proposed by D’Arms that had accompanied the offer of $100,000 had echoes of the centre plus library suggested by Dick Taylor in 1955. As a result, Nicholas warned Thistlethwaite that the committee felt they could not obtain holdings to be made ‘available on loan’ given that the committee only met six times a year. He went on to complain that the BAAS committee were being presented with the ‘paradox’ of ‘being asked to behave as an executive body’ when in reality he felt their role was ‘no more than a consultative one’.51 The committee believed that the BAAS should act as a guide rather than the focal point for American Studies and as such Nicholas encouraged Thistlethwaite to ‘persevere with his valiant efforts to make D’Arms see reason’.52 Thistlethwaite finally negotiated with D’Arms the possibility of ‘smuggling’ administrative costs through a loophole by combining them with conference costs, which would be met under the terms of the grant. Furthermore, the proposed activities of the association were tentatively watered down, to allow grants to be made for the purchase of certain library resources that would be held at individual institutions. The problems with conveying the nuances of these agreements across the Atlantic, however, became clear as the BAAS committee prepared for a showdown with D’Arms during his trip around Europe which brought him to England in February and March 1957. Keen to avoid such an occurrence and negotiate a compromise, Nicholas met D’Arms prior to the scheduled meeting with the committee and received a guarantee that administrative expenses could be met. This was not a blank cheque for the BAAS committee, 152
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however; it was limited to 10 percent of the expenditure of the grant, and the precise amount had to be approved in advance. This provision would also taper as the grant progressed to encourage the BAAS to identify alternative sources of income.53 This compromise, in combination with the reduction in activities already negotiated by Thistlethwaite, ensured that a showdown could be avoided. With these points clarified, suggestions that the grant might affect the image of the Association could be dealt with more easily. When Max Beloff, a recipient of a Rockefeller Foundation grant himself, suggested that the grant should not be accepted due to the image it might create, he was countered by Thistlethwaite, who, in a letter to Marcus Cunliffe, stated he believed that, on the contrary, ‘the reputation of the association might suffer . . . from turning down such an offer as this’. Furthermore, he argued that it was not a case of deciding ‘whether or not to accept this particular offer but whether’ the BAAS was to ‘grow into a national organisation recognized as such both here and in America or to remain an obscure shop-talk group’.54 Presented with this choice, and reassured about the conditions of the grant, the BAAS committee members agreed to the terms of the grant which provided them with $150,500 over five years.
Conclusion These negotiations demonstrate that the development of the BAAS could be interpreted as part of an ‘enlightened . . . American foreign policy’. Yet the BAAS members themselves perceived their roles as independent. They joined the initiative on their own terms and to benefit themselves, not the US state. The state–private network which influenced both the formation and funding of the BAAS was not based on control, but neither was it a totally independent initiative. The US state had been instrumental in encouraging the British scholars to form the Association, but in doing so it was building on the influence of wartime experience and the Commonwealth Fund, among many other factors. Furthermore, the BAAS committee manoeuvred themselves into a position which allowed them to negotiate with the Rockefeller Foundation independently of the US officials, and they were even able to reject the attempts of those officials to buy themselves a place in the process. Conversely, Allen’s claim that the BAAS had a ‘totally independent existence’ also appears to be overstating the case for autonomy.55 US representatives were not only instrumental in the formation of the Association but until his departure Dick Taylor was invited to participate in committee meetings, neither of which facts indicates total independence. The eventual development of the Rockefeller Foundation grant demonstrates the importance of negotiation filling the conceptual space between 153
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control and autonomy. Furthermore, with control and autonomy identified as extreme ends of a continuous scale, double transmission can be investigated as the result of the negotiation of roles within the network. In the development of American Studies, the double transmission focused on competing visions for the means of dissemination rather than the production of the message. The BAAS committee received the vision from the United States, interpreted it and disseminated an altered, scaled-down version to their members. This second vision, and the way in which it was received by American Studies practitioners, effectively defined the role that the discipline would attempt to fulfil within society. The emphasis on methodology rather than content stemmed from the confidence US representatives had in the image of America as portrayed by the British scholars. Joseph P. Kennedy, the US Ambassador, had complained that ‘Englishmen apparently believed that America was typified by motion pictures’.56 He appealed for greater ‘study of American history in schools and universities so that the people in England would believe that something happens in the US besides gangster shootings, rapes, and kidnappings’.57 American Studies could meet this demand for greater attention. Furthermore, the political-cultural message that would be disseminated would be based mainly on research from the Myth-Symbol School. In general this school created an image of America likely to advance US political-cultural aims. This position was compounded by the experiences of many of the influential individuals within the BAAS committee, who had returned to university teaching after forming a positive image of Americans through largely private exchange programmes and ‘comradeship in arms’.58 As a result, dissemination of information and the projection of a positive image of America were virtually assured. The BAAS developed through both a double transmission of the vision for an association and negotiation between the interested parties. As Hugh Wilford wrote of the New York intellectuals, ‘the worst mistake they ever made was not to surrender their independence but to assume that such independence was possible’.59 This can also be said to be true of the BAAS committee but, conversely, representatives of American state and philanthropic foundations were mistaken in their belief that they could control the British academics.
Notes and bibliography 1 2 3
Richard Pells, Not Like Us: How Europeans Have Loved, Hated, and Transformed American Culture since World War II (New York: Basic Books, 1997), p. 94. Quintin Hoare and Geoffrey Nowell-Smith (ed. and trans.), Selections from the Prison Notebooks of Antonio Gramsci (London: Lawrence & Wishart, 1971), p. 12. Frances Stonor Saunders, Who Paid the Piper? The CIA and the Cultural Cold War (London: Granta Books, 1999).
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4 Giles Scott-Smith, The Politics of Apolitical Culture: The Congress for Cultural Freedom, the CIA and Post-war American Hegemony (London: Routledge, 2002), p. 3. 5 Ibid., p. 5. 6 See R. Kroes, R. Rydell and D. Bosscher, Cultural Transmissions and Receptions (Amsterdam: VU University Press, 1993), for an alternative interpretation of the approach to transmission. 7 H. C. Allen, ‘United States History in Great Britain and the European Association for American Studies: A Personal Memoir’, in L. Hanke (ed.), Guide to the Study of the History of the United States outside the US (New York: Kraus International Publications, 1985), pp. 45–85. 8 Ibid., p. 67. 9 R. King, ‘Present at the Creation: Marcus Cunliffe and American Studies’, Journal of American Studies, 26, 2 (1992), p. 265. 10 For wartime planning relating to American Studies, see D. Reynolds, ‘Whitehall, Washington, and the Promotion of American Studies’, Journal of American Studies, 16, 2 (1982), pp. 165–88. 11 H. C. Allen, ‘Foreword’, Journal of American Studies, 14, 1 (1980), p. 6, emphasis in original. 12 Ibid. 13 Ibid. 14 Ibid. 15 Ibid. 16 P. Gleason, ‘World War II and the Development of American Studies’, American Quarterly, 36 (1984), pp. 343–58. 17 Allen, ‘Foreword’, p. 6. 18 Marcus Cunliffe, ‘Backward Glances’, Journal of American Studies, 14, 1 (1980), p. 83. 19 Ibid. 20 Ibid. 21 Ibid., pp. 86, 85. 22 Ibid., p. 85. 23 Ibid., p. 86. 24 Ibid., p. 89. 25 H. G. Nicholas, ‘The Education of an Americanist’, Journal of American Studies, 14, 1 (1980), p. 10. 26 Ibid., p. 16. 27 Ibid. 28 King, ‘Present at Creation’, p. 265. 29 Nicholas, ‘The Education of an Americanist’, p. 23. 30 Ibid. 31 Richard Taylor to members of the USEC ad hoc committee on American Studies, 18 April 1955, B6, box 3, BAAS Archive, University of Birmingham (hereafter BAAS papers). 32 Minutes of USEC ad hoc committee on American Studies, 12 May 1955, B6, box 3, BAAS papers. 33 Ibid. 34 H. G. Nicholas to H. C. Allen, 29 July 1960, D4b, box 4, BAAS papers. 35 Nicholas, ‘The Education of an Americanist’, p. 23. 36 Articles of Association, A2, box 1, BAAS papers. 37 Nicholas, ‘The Education of an Americanist’, p. 23. 38 Minutes of BAAS committee meeting, 29 October 1955, A2, box 1, BAAS papers.
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39 Cunliffe, ‘Backward Glances’, pp. 83–102. 40 Richard Taylor to members of the USEC ad hoc committee on American Studies, 18 April 1955, A2, box 1, BAAS papers. 41 Committee meeting, 7 January 1956, box 5, BAAS papers. 42 Chairman to Myron Koenig, 8 November 1955, box 3, BAAS papers. 43 Myron Koenig to Frank Thistlethwaite, 10 November 1955, D5, box 4, BAAS papers. 44 H. C. Allen to Chairman, 12 December 1955, D5, box 4, BAAS papers. 45 Minutes of the BAAS emergency meeting, 22 March 1956, box 5, BAAS papers. 46 Ibid. 47 Letter from Frank Thistlethwaite to Marcus Cunliffe, 12 May 1956, A4, box 1, BAAS papers. 48 Ibid. 49 Chairman to Myron Koenig (n.d.), B1, box 1, BAAS papers. 50 Frank Thistlethwaite to Dennis Welland, 24 May 1956, B1, box 1, BAAS papers. 51 Herbert Nicholas to Frank Thistlethwaite, 11 December 1956, B1, box 1, BAAS papers. 52 Ibid. 53 Notes of special meeting with Chet D’Arms, 1 March 1957, B1, box 1, BAAS papers. 54 Frank Thistlethwaite to Marcus Cunliffe, 9 February 1957, B1, box 1, BAAS papers. 55 Allen, ‘United States History’, p. 67. 56 The Times, 19 May 1939, p. 18, quoted in Reynolds, ‘Whitehall’, p. 166. 57 Ibid. 58 Allen, ‘Foreword’, p. 6. 59 Hugh Wilford, The New York Intellectuals (Manchester University Press, 1995), p. 25.
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9 AMBASSADORS OF THE SCREEN Film and the state–private network in Cold War America Tony Shaw
If you have something worthwhile to say, dress it in the glittering robes of entertainment and you will find a ready market. . . . Without entertainment no propaganda is worth a dime. Darryl Zanuck, 20th Century-Fox production chief, 19431
Introduction: Ronald Reagan – exception or rule? In the Cold War battle for mass, as opposed to elite, opinion, few weapons were more powerful than the cinema. From the very beginning through to the end of the conflict, millions of people went to the cinema every week throughout the world, from rundown fleapits in Calcutta to air-conditioned multiplexes in California. What they saw and heard on the big screen could have a profound influence on their comprehension of the Cold War – whether it was via East German-made allegorical space adventures of the 1960s, or the overtly anticommunist Hollywood films that notoriously typified the so-called ‘Reaganite’ cinema of the 1980s.2 To many commentators the accession to the US presidency in 1982 of a former movie star provided spectacular evidence of the uniquely intimate relationship between politics and film in the United States. Some observers went a stage further, viewing it as the consummation of the long-standing marriage between Washington and Hollywood during the Cold War. After all, not only had Ronald Reagan played a prominent role in enforcing the notorious blacklist in Hollywood during the McCarthy era, while President of the Screen Actors Guild, he was also known to have acted as an undercover agent for the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI). Michael Rogin, in his work Ronald Reagan, The Movie, quotes Reagan as stating that he was fighting ‘the Communist plan to take over the motion picture business’. Moreover, Reagan’s years in the White House coincided with some of the 157
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most viciously anti-Soviet propaganda produced by Hollywood throughout the whole of the Cold War. The president gave his enthusiastic backing to films, like the Rambo series, which projected his image of the Soviet bloc as Evil. If this were not enough, Reagan’s tendency to quote lines from movies – ‘the force is with us’, he said in reference to the Strategic Defense Initiative programme in 1985, borrowing the famous phrase from the 1977 sci-fi epic Star Wars – added to the charge that the president actually confused the world depicted in movies with the world outside. Even if Reagan did not conflate real events with those he had seen on the big screen, many argued that there were surely many of his fellow Americans who did, and who therefore owed their Cold War values at least in part to what they had seen over several decades at the cinema.3 This chapter will not try to peer into Ronald Reagan’s mind in an attempt to separate out the movie images from the ‘real’ ones. Instead, it will present an overview of some of the less well-known, and more verifiable, aspects of the relationship between Hollywood and the state during the Cold War, particularly those that tell us about the use of film for propagandistic purposes. It will concentrate on the 1940s through to the 1960s, a period when for most Americans and many people elsewhere going to the cinema was still an ingrained habit and when, correspondingly, the US government put its greatest efforts into managing film for political and diplomatic purposes. When appropriate, comparisons will be made with the state–film industry apparatus in the Soviet Union. Considerable scholarship has focused on the political pressures imposed on Hollywood during the late 1940s and 1950s, leaving the impression that many American filmmakers were coerced into supporting the war against communism at a crucial stage in the development of a Cold War consensus in the United States.4 This chapter takes a fresh look at the relationship between film, politics and propaganda in America during the First Cold War, and reveals a more complex interaction between the state and Hollywood. It shows that, alongside the well-known pressures exerted on moviemakers by organisations outside the film industry such as the Committee on Un-American Activities of the House of Representatives (HUAC), politically conservative bodies within the industry, some of which were set up explicitly to preserve ‘American’ ideals on screen during the latter stages of the Second World War and the early Cold War, also had a significant influence on film content and distribution. On top of this, the chapter further argues that the state acted more imaginatively and constructively than many scholars have suggested. A whole range of official organisations, including the State Department, Pentagon, Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) and United States Information Agency (USIA), were involved in the filmmaking business to an unprecedented degree during this period: openly lending logistical and financial assistance to trustworthy filmmakers, secretly setting up a consortium of famous directors, 158
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producers and actors to project American democracy at home and overseas, and covertly sponsoring ostensibly foreign-made, anti-Soviet productions. The chapter will detail the most prominent films that emerged out of this set of state–industry alliances, including some of the biggest box-office draws of the era. Overall, the chapter posits that, in contrast to its Soviet counterpart, American Cold War cinematic propaganda developed in a fluid fashion, the result of creative and, for the most part, voluntary collaboration between the state and filmmakers. This helps to explain why American films consistently outshone Soviet ones in artistic and propagandistic terms, and, consequently, why Hollywood was of much greater value to Washington in helping to persuade people at home and overseas of the legitimacy of its cause than the Soviet film industry was to the Kremlin.
Hollywood and the state: ideology and political economy Unlike in the Soviet Union, in the United States during the Cold War cinema was not an instrument of the state. There were no nationalised studios, nor any central state administrative body for cinema.5 Neither was there any direct equivalent of the American Office of War Information (OWI), the body set up during the Second World War to ensure that all media output, including films, accorded with ‘the national interest’.6 In fact, government controls over the media were weaker in the United States than in many of the western countries with which it was allied during the Cold War; in Britain, for instance, the government appointed the BBC’s Board of Governors and had the authority to revoke the corporation’s licence.7 On the whole, American media cooperated with government during the conflict and lent considerable assistance to its Cold War policies at home and abroad chiefly because they shared Washington’s ideological worldview. Unlike in the Soviet Union, therefore, government had no need to dictate the propaganda ‘line’ to filmmakers. In the 1940s and 1950s Hollywood’s eight major film studios, which formed a mature oligopoly, supported the fight against communism mainly out of political conviction and economic self-interest, not because they felt beholden to officialdom. MGM/Loews, Paramount, Warner Bros., 20th Century-Fox, RKO, Columbia, Universal and United Artists were massive Los Angelesbased commercial concerns linked to Wall Street, whose executives instinctively equated patriotism with capitalism. The majors’ films had traditionally reinforced the reigning cultural ethos and politico-economic order, and abounded with, as many in the industry saw it, the quintessentially ‘American’ ideals of democracy, social mobility, justice and equality.8 Notwithstanding Hollywood’s conservative outlook, considerable scope for political and official influence on movies did exist. For the purposes of this overview, this influence can be separated into two categories. The first, 159
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defined as negative pressures, can be subdivided into self-regulation within the film industry, and contingent political leverage from without. The second category, defined as constructive engagement with film on the part of government, can be separated into the overt official sponsorship of films on the one hand, and covert alliances between filmmakers and government on the other.
Negative pressures Self-regulation Censorship of the movies on social, religious and political grounds had operated in the United States for many years prior to the Cold War. After 1945 a diffuse system of censorship and self-censorship operated chiefly through a number of politically conservative bodies within or closely associated with the film industry. Each acted as gatekeepers for the status quo: discouraging, cutting or banning films they deemed ‘controversial’. The most powerful of these bodies was the US Production Code Administration (PCA), set up in the 1930s. Designed to prevent federal censorship, the PCA functioned at all stages of production – selecting stories, examining scripts, approving the final cuts – and managed to control the content of all films shown in the United States, domestic and foreign. Although the code was defied by several studios and subsequently revised in the 1950s and 1960s, filmmakers continued to take its strictures seriously. At the height of the counter-culture movement in 1968, the code still called for ‘special care to be exercised’ in the use of the American flag and in the depiction of international relations in films.9 The powers of the PCA were augmented during the latter stages of the Second World War and the Cold War by the policing roles of several key organisations. The Catholic National Legion of Decency, the guardian of the big screen’s moral and political rectitude since the 1930s, continued to wield considerable authority in Hollywood well into the 1950s. Its leaders, such as Martin Quigley, the publisher of the important trade journal Motion Picture Herald, were ardent anticommunists who were apt to detect evidence of ‘Red’ influence in films that even the most zealous patriot failed to see. For instance, William Mooring, one of the Legion of Decency’s most prominent syndicated columnists, read the unwillingness of the local congregation to come to the aid of Gary Cooper in the Western High Noon (1952) as masking a sinister objective: the communist effort to prove that religion is an opiate that prevents people from working against social injustice. Absurd or not, such interpretations deterred a greater freedom of cinematic expression. ‘The Legion holds the whip hand over Hollywood’, said one politically mainstream producer N. Peter Rathvon (anonymously) in 1949, ‘and nothing can be done about it’.10 160
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This militantly right-wing pressure group was joined after 1944 by another, Hollywood’s own Motion Picture Alliance for the Preservation of American Ideals (MPA). Established to vanquish ‘the growing impression that this industry is made up of, and dominated by, Communists, radicals, and crackpots’, the MPA was headed by, among others, Eric Johnston, President of the Motion Picture Producers’ Association, and Roy Brewer, leader of the International Alliance of Theatrical Stage Employees (IATSE), the most powerful labour union in film. The MPA sought, in member John Lee Martin’s words, to ‘turn off the faucets which dripped red water into film scripts’ (although there was scant evidence of any such discoloration), and went on to issue regular advice to filmmakers on how they might best express their patriotism in the Cold War’s critical battle for hearts and minds. In 1948, for instance, it published a highly influential booklet, written by novelist and ideologue of the right, Ayn Rand. Entitled A Screen Guide for Americans, the booklet warned studios against smearing the free enterprise system or deifying ‘the common man’. As east–west tensions deepened, the more the MPA and others on the political right in Hollywood saw it as their duty, as citizens and opinion-formers, to bang the drum for US foreign policy as well as to guard against subversives. Eric Johnston had prophesied as early as 1944 that a commitment to military defence and worldwide economic arrangements would create a ‘utopia’ of production that would enable the United States to destroy the threat of global communism. In 1949, this former President of the US Chamber of Commerce with strong connections in the White House and Treasury was confidently telling the readers of Look magazine ‘How We Can Win the Cold War With Russia’.11 Surprisingly perhaps, movies made in the communist bloc were allowed to enter the United States during the Cold War. Yet, because the major film companies saw little economic and political benefit in distributing them, such films were largely restricted, like most foreign-language movies, to art theatres in the big cities, where they generally preached to the converted. Several companies relented somewhat at the behest of the State Department following the first Soviet-American cultural exchange agreement of 1958, agreeing to distribute seven apolitical Russian productions including Lenfilm’s Don Quixote (1957). However, they continued to regard Soviet films as a money-losing investment, and in 1963 the Chairman of the Soviet Society for Contacts Abroad (VOKS) complained that the USSR had been forced to market its films through the New Yorkbased Art Kino Distributors, which reached far smaller audiences than did large companies such as United Artists.12 The net effect of this relatively subtle (by Soviet standards) but stringent self-censorship system was to scare off all but the most determined filmmakers from entering into politically radical territory. A few movies questioning the Cold War consensus were made during the 1950s, only 161
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then to be suppressed by a combination of the trade critics’ damning comments, limited distribution and even opposition from projectionists. For instance, Salt of the Earth (1954), an independently made docu-drama sympathetically portraying a 1951–52 strike by Mexican-American zinc workers, was hampered by Roy Brewer’s IATSE projectionists refusing to screen it and the film appeared only briefly in ten US cities.13 When in 1956 Columbia released Storm Center, a drama about a librarian (played by Bette Davis) who is branded a fifth-columnist and fired for refusing to remove a copy of The Communist Dream from the shelves, the Catholic Legion of Decency effectively killed the movie by giving it a ‘separate’ classification, on the grounds that it was ‘a propaganda film’ that ‘offers a warped, oversimplified, and strongly emotional solution to a complex problem of American life’.14 In such a stultifying climate, it almost goes without saying that no studio made what could remotely be described as a pro-Soviet or pro-communist movie. Outside political leverage This predisposition towards the containment of radical or left-wing tendencies within the film industry was strengthened during the Cold War by a number of outside political pressures. As is well documented, in the early years of the conflict this manifested itself mainly in the form of the Committee on Un-American Activities of the House of Representatives. HUAC’s highly publicised investigations of Hollywood in 1947 and 1951 were designed to send political shockwaves through the nation as a whole, as well as cleanse the film community of ideological undesirables. Studios hastily made dozens of anticommunist ‘agit-prop’ pictures to offset further political interrogations, and more than 200 real or alleged communists in the film industry suffered the hardships associated with the blacklist into the 1960s and beyond. By the time the more hysterical elements of the Red Scare had subsided in the late 1950s, HUAC had effectively destroyed the entire liberal-radical movement in Hollywood. The populist spirit that had infused a number of films in the late 1940s, which suggested a desire to move beyond the commercial dictates of the outdated box-office formulae, had disappeared.15 J. Edgar Hoover’s FBI worked alongside HUAC, condemning as dangerously subversive those filmmakers whose patriotic credentials were considered not up to the mark. The FBI’s excursions into the cultural sphere reflected an active engagement in the process of constructing the image of the subversive in Cold War America, and the Bureau’s understanding that the film industry was ‘one of the greatest, if not the very greatest, influence upon the minds and culture’ the world over. Probably its most dramatic victim was Charlie Chaplin, whom the FBI, in tandem with the Immigration and Naturalization Service, hounded out of the 162
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United States in 1952.16 The Bureau also secretly hired industry insiders such as Walt Disney and Ronald Reagan to bolster its motion-picture surveillance operation.17 The American Legion acted as the third point of this triangle, by campaigning against those identified by HUAC and the FBI, and organising boycotts of films made by or starring those deemed politically radical. With over 17,000 posts and nearly 3 million members nationwide in the 1950s, the Legion, like the numerous other established social organisations of the right – such as the Veterans of Foreign Wars, Daughters of the American Revolution and Knights of Columbus – carried considerable economic and political weight in the film industry. Alongside the executive boards in private industry, departmental heads and politically appointed administrators in the public sector, and the editors and publishers of key metropolitan newspapers and national magazines, the American Legion both encouraged and extended the anticommunist work of the governmental investigatory committees during the Red Scare. The relationships among these various forces were characterised by acknowledged, conscious, often coordinated interaction as well as agreement on the larger goals and methods of the Cold War enterprise.18 These political pressures overlapped with the belief held by many at the higher levels of the film industry during this period that the film trade unions were either too powerful or dominated by communists. This relates to the upsurge of strikes in Hollywood in the mid- and late-1940s, which were condemned by Washington and studio executives alike. Allied to the fact that during the 1930s Hollywood became one of the most unionised industries in the US, such militancy helped bring studio owners and many conservative-minded union leaders such as Roy Brewer closer together, thus uniting both sides of the ‘private’ wing of the film network. Lary May sees this as part of a crusade during the Cold War by corporate reformers and state and union leaders to identify anticommunism with the legitimation of a new Americanism rooted in big business, class consensus and consumer democracy. As proof of the striking success of this crusade and the enduring nature of its ties, May points to Hollywood’s pronounced onscreen affirmation of entrepreneurship and classlessness during the early Cold War, and Roy Brewer’s appointment to a high post in the Labor Department when Ronald Reagan entered the White House some thirty years later.19
Constructive engagement Open assistance Had the official influence on Hollywood during the Cold War been confined to a set of coercive measures that exploited an institutionalised culture of political self-restraint, it would be inappropriate to speak of a 163
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state–private ‘network’ in relation to film. Yet both Democratic and Republican governments also acted in more constructive ways, in the first place by openly sponsoring or lending assistance to films that supported the official Cold War consensus. These films might or might not have been seen as official propaganda, depending on the audience’s alertness and the frankness of the movie credits. As is the case with pressure, official assistance took a variety of forms and involved numerous branches of government. With the image-conscious Hoover having already been its head for two decades, the FBI’s public relations machinery was sizeable even before the Cold War properly started. As the perceived threat from communist subversion grew in the late 1940s, the Bureau’s links with the press, television and the cinema grew increasingly important and sophisticated, to the point at which the FBI became one of the biggest advertisers in the nation. Hoover’s public relations director, Louis B. Nichols, collaborated on a number of anticommunist film ventures that extolled the role of the FBI, including The Red Menace (1949), I Was a Communist for the FBI (1951), My Son John (1952) and The FBI Story (1959). Not all of these films ultimately met with Hoover’s approval; his disavowal of I Was a Communist for the FBI for being crudely sensationalist, for instance, showed that there was plenty of scope for conflict within the cinematic state–private network, with different parties having conflicting aims or opposing views on propaganda strategy.20 In contrast, the FBI considered Columbia’s Walk East on Beacon! (1952), which was inspired by a prominent press article by Hoover and co-scripted by the Bureau, to be pitch-perfect because it de-glamorised law enforcement, assured the nation that the FBI was in control of domestic subversion and portrayed the agency as modern and scientific. The CIA liked the film too, setting up a leasing arrangement with Columbia, which included five copies dubbed into foreign languages, that lasted until the late 1970s. This may be related to the fact that C. D. Jackson, Dwight Eisenhower’s propaganda chief and a former VicePresident of Time-Life, Inc., counted Columbia’s President Harry Cohn as one of his key ‘friends’ in Hollywood.21 As coordinator after 1953 of the United States’ overt international propaganda and public relations activities, the USIA naturally regarded film as a vital instrument in its three-pronged cultural diplomacy strategy: supporting the Free World, wooing neutrals and subverting communist regimes. For the most part, the Agency and Hollywood formed a perfectly cooperative relationship, one in which profit and propaganda were intertwined. Hollywood used the USIA as an overseas audience service unit, while the Agency helped promote the latest developments in US film technology, such as Cinerama, as part of its campaign to prove that American capitalism was synonymous with scientific accomplishment and international progress.22 More importantly, the USIA’s hugely resourced Motion Picture Division produced scores of high-quality documentaries, using 164
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Hollywood-trained directors on short-term contracts. These films were usually targeted at audiences in the developing world, where many US officials in the late 1950s and 1960s believed the Cold War could be won or lost. Via such Oscar-winning documentaries as Nine from Little Rock, made in 1964 by Charles Guggenheim and distributed to 97 countries, the USIA directly challenged the enemy’s allegations that black Americans were still treated little better than slaves and that America’s multi-racial democracy was a sham.23 The USIA also financed and directed a weekly newsreel for audiences in Africa and Asia, produced by an ostensibly independent company, Associated Films.24 Hollywood had traditionally enjoyed a special relationship with the US military, with the armed services more than willing to offer logistical help with productions that portrayed their activities positively. Before the Senate Committee on the war effort in 1943, Colonel K. B. Lawton, Chief of the Army Pictorial Division of the US Signal Corps, described the Hollywood community as enthusiastic partners in the propaganda field: ‘I have never found such a group of wholehearted, willing, patriotic people trying to do something for the government’.25 In 1949, the Defense Department created a Motion Picture Production Office to regulate and facilitate cooperation between the military and the film industry. With filmmakers thereafter gaining unprecedented access to military bases, equipment and film clips, often in exchange for the approval of scripts, the extraordinarily strong presence of the military in Hollywood movies during the First Cold War was only natural. So too was the ringing support that these movies gave to the militarisation of US Cold War strategy. Examples of cooperation in an explicitly Cold War context include The Big Lift (1950), which focused on the US Air Force’s efforts to thwart the Berlin Blockade, and which received assistance from the Air Force Public Affairs Office and the Commander-in-Chief of the European command, General Lucius Clay. Later films about America’s nuclear strike force, such as Strategic Air Command, which was the seventh biggest boxoffice earner of 1955 in the United States, and A Gathering of Eagles (1963), which received the personal endorsement of the head of Strategic Air Command (SAC), Curtis LeMay, glorified the atomic bomb as a weapon to keep the peace. On one level, these sorts of sentimental flagwaving movies sent a clear message to cinema-goers: that the Cold War required bravery, teamwork, even the ultimate sacrifice.26 On another level, the retelling of the ‘good war’ against fascism in the scores of films made about the Second World War during the 1950s helped audiences to recognise the importance of military preparedness and the dangers of trusting extremist, dictatorial regimes generally. The absence in these films of virtually any reference to the USSR’s contribution to the defeat of Nazi Germany helped significantly in this latter respect. This lacuna also fitted in with Washington’s and Hollywood’s tendency to fuse Nazism and 165
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communism, either under the label of totalitarianism or, more emotively, that of ‘Red Fascism’.27 Behind the scenes: camouflaged alliances In more creative ways still, government also established covert alliances with filmmakers in order to communicate official Cold War strategy more discreetly. Organisations such as the USIA, CIA and the Psychological Strategy Board (PSB), which coordinated government propaganda operations aimed overseas in the early 1950s, all served as a link between official propagandists and Hollywood, and advised filmmakers on how to construct and transmit a series of negative and positive images about the Cold War, with a particular emphasis on the worldwide applicability of American democratic virtues. The best example of this was the so-called ‘Militant Liberty’ campaign of the 1950s, which secretly brought together CIA officials, the Pentagon and a ‘consortium’ of Hollywood actors, producers and directors who were willing and able to insert into films ‘the right ideas with the proper subtlety’ for domestic and overseas audiences.28 In line with the CIA’s belief that the exporting of positive ‘American values’ was often better than explicitly anticommunist messages, audiences were to be presented with images that would help them to frame the east–west conflict appropriately: for example, showing America to be a land of opportunity and affluence, teaching that competition was healthy, encouraging Good to fight Evil and explaining why Free World principles were superior to those promulgated by Moscow and Beijing. Among the most willing participants in this campaign were the acclaimed director and liberal anticommunist, John Ford, the most popular actor of his generation and a one-time President of the MPA, John Wayne, and the legendary studio owner-cum-director and evangelical anticommunist, Cecil B. DeMille, who in 1953 was appointed as the USIA’s chief film consultant. This habit of hiring film executives for senior government propaganda jobs highlights the difficulty of differentiating between official and unofficial US film propaganda during the Cold War and was a practice that continued beyond the 1950s; the director of USIA during the 1980s, for example, was former Hollywood producer, Charles Z. Wick.29 Movies that arose from the ‘Militant Liberty’ consortium include John Ford’s Second World War melodrama The Wings of Eagles. Made in 1957, this starred John Wayne as real-life flying-aceturned-disabled-scriptwriter, Frank Wead, and co-starred Ward Bond, another member of Militant Liberty who was also President of the MPA.30 The most spectacular of all – in artistic and commercial terms – was DeMille’s 1956 allegorical biblical blockbuster, The Ten Commandments. A movie that, according to historian Alan Nadel, ‘equates God’s perspective with American global interests’, The Ten Commandments 166
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characterised the powerful spiritual side of the state–private film network. The Ten Commandments grossed $85.4 million in North America in the 1950s alone, before going on to become one of the most financially successful films of all time.31 On a more clandestine level still, the CIA also established contacts in Hollywood who could alter the content of films that might run counter to US interests abroad. Akin to the FBI’s recruitment of Hollywood insiders (although constitutionally far more dubious given the CIA’s specifically overseas brief), these agents homed in on issues that potentially cast America in a bad light. One of them, the head of censorship at Paramount Studios during the 1950s, Luigi Luraschi, consistently acted to remove from that studio’s productions any scenes that depicted Americans’ racist, criminal or violent behaviour overseas, substituting instead images of a ‘moral’ USA whose citizens respected the customs and sensibilities of other nations. Luraschi even recommended the insertion of token blacks as spectators on golf links in one film, a Dean Martin and Jerry Lewis comedy called The Caddy (released in 1953), only to have this rejected by the director and studio head for fear of it upsetting southern whites – a small yet significant example of the state–private network’s limitations when up against commercial and domestic political constraints. Through his chairmanship of the Motion Picture Producers’ Association’s International Committee, Luraschi developed industry-wide powers, persuading heavyweight producers such as Darryl Zanuck of 20th Century-Fox to ‘kill’ anything that resembled a ‘commie picture’ and cajoling the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences to promote awards favourable to US interests abroad.32 When it was deemed suitable and safe, American government propaganda bodies also worked in unison on film projects with their sister organisations overseas. One example of this was the PSB’s and CIA’s involvement with the British Foreign Office’s chief anticommunist propaganda unit, the Information Research Department, in the big-screen adaptation of George Orwell’s novel Animal Farm. A milestone in cinematic animation, the film was made in Britain by Halas & Batchelor, and released in 1954. By secretly sub-contracting movies overseas in this way, US officials were, in the public’s eyes, one step even further removed from the filmmaking process. Such activities alert us to the transnational nature of Cold War cultural propaganda, and the interconnections between the state–private film network in the United States with the same networks in other states.33 Finally, but importantly, throughout the Cold War, Hollywood and the State Department worked together as natural allies, ‘colonising’ foreign film markets (and industries, in part) on a huge scale for commercial and political gain. In the 1940s, the Motion Picture Export Association referred to itself as ‘the little State Department’, so isomorphic were its 167
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methods and ideology with US policy and politics. In 1950, producer Walter Wanger trumpeted the meshing of what he called ‘Donald Duck Diplomacy’ as ‘a Marshall Plan for ideas . . . a veritable celluloid Athens’ that meant the state needed Hollywood ‘more than . . . the H bomb’. During this period, State Department officials even saw the ‘story of Hollywood’ itself as a marketable commodity overseas, presentable ‘as a community of citizens built on free enterprise’.34 There is little doubt that, for all the talk in the west of the conflict being about cultural diversity and freedom of choice, the Cold War eased the progress of US film imperialism. Whether this had the effect that US officials and filmmakers wished is, in the light of regular complaints from Europeans and others about the malignant effects of ‘Americanisation’ upon their own indigenous cultures, a point of considerable debate. Some argue that Hollywood’s celebration of conspicuous consumption may have done more harm than good for US cultural diplomacy.35
Conclusion In the Soviet Union during the period under analysis here, Cold War film propaganda was controlled virtually entirely from the centre. Although filmmakers enjoyed a degree of freedom during the ‘cultural thaw’ under Nikita Khrushchev, formal ideology – Marxist-Leninist and social realist – retained its official primacy.36 By comparison, the relationship between the US government and filmmakers during the Cold War was far more consensual and, in creative terms, something of a two-way street. It was in this sense a real network, one in which the partners felt they had a genuine stake and room for manoeuvre. Thus, the state might doctor, assist, initiate and advise on certain projects. It might even wholly finance, produce and market others. Yet, on many other occasions it might simply hitch a ride on films made entirely privately, including some dating from before the start of the Cold War proper. A notable example of this was the State Department’s distribution of MGM’s anti-Soviet satire Ninotchka (1939) during the 1948 Italian elections.37 US films might therefore reflect official ideology (wittingly and unwittingly), but they might also help to shape that ideology. Interestingly in this respect, the architect of US ‘containment’ strategy, George Kennan, criticised the ‘frontier mentality’ of the United States’ Cold War stance in the 1950s, suggesting that State Department policy was partly being modelled on the Hollywood Westerns of that era.38 From the early 1960s onwards, eased by the collapse of the Hollywood studio system, which opened the way for more independent filmmaking, then given a push by the public disaffection associated with the Vietnam debacle, American movies would even defy that ideology.39 In general, this cooperative relationship – one based at root on the need to protect capitalism – provided the platform for high-quality propaganda. 168
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Leaving aside the rash of red-baiting ‘B’ movies released at the peak of McCarthyism, the majority of which were critically derided and flopped commercially, in most people’s eyes Hollywood movies consistently outgunned their commercial and political rivals when it came to direction, acting, action and technical sophistication. Secretly, even Stalin himself was a big fan of the Johnny Weissmuller Tarzan films of the 1930s and 1940s, movies which, when shown in Moscow soon after the Great Leader’s death in 1953, caused such a sensation that teenagers copied Weissmuller’s hairstyle. By comparison, many western European cinema-goers found their own movies slow-moving and pretentious.40 Although it is difficult to prove of course, indications are that Soviet films rarely travelled well at all. Most foreigners, especially in the west, seem to have found them outmoded, mechanistic and tainted by state intervention – the films just looked like propaganda, as most people understood that word. Like much of Soviet foreign propaganda in general, internal constraints seem to have crippled creativity, bred systematic flaws and produced relative ineffectiveness.41 In contrast, critics aside, few if any people – foreigners and Americans alike – appear to have made any connection between the US government propaganda machine and Hollywood output. When details of the CIA’s infiltration into the cultural sphere were exposed in the press in the late 1960s, film was hardly mentioned. And even when Ronald Reagan occupied the White House, few ordinary people seemed to have dwelt on the implications of this for the relationship between politics, film and propaganda in Cold War America.42 All of this is not to say that the state–private film network which operated in the United States during the Cold War either started with or was confined to that conflict. The network’s ideological framework pre-dated the 1917 Bolshevik revolution, while the close relationship between filmmakers and the OWI between 1941 and 1945 provided the perfect basis for consultations between Washington and Hollywood once ‘Uncle Joe’ had replaced Hitler and Hirohito as the nation’s chief enemy. More recently, after the events of 9/11 in 2001, Hollywood responded swiftly and positively to requests from President George W. Bush to boost American morale as part of the White House’s ‘War on Terrorism’, via such films as Chuck Workman’s The Spirit of America.43 Nevertheless, given how powerful cinema’s role was during the Cold War (especially in the 1940s and 1950s, before television usurped its place), and how central the concept of ‘freedom’ (and media freedom especially) was to an understanding of the conflict among people of both the west and east, there can be little doubt that the film network was particularly important during the Cold War. A greater awareness of it, and other state–private media networks that operated in the United States and in other countries, should lie at the heart of the ‘cultural turn’ that Cold War studies has recently taken. 169
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Notes and bibliography 1 Cited in Richard Maltby, Hollywood Cinema (Oxford: Blackwell, 2003), p. 280. During the Second World War, Zanuck served as a Lieutenant-Colonel in the US Army Signal Corps, in charge of a documentary film unit. On Zanuck’s dual role during wartime, see Leonard Mosley, Zanuck (Boston, MA: Little, Brown, 1984), pp. 195–224. 2 Stefan Soldovieri, ‘Socialists in Outer Space: East German Film’s Venusian Adventure’, Film History, 10, 3 (1998), pp. 382–98; William J. Palmer, The Films of the Eighties (Carbondale and Edwardsville: Southern Illinois Press, 1993). 3 Michael Rogin, Ronald Reagan, The Movie (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1987), pp. 3, 7, 27, 31; Gary Wills, Reagan’s America (New York: Doubleday, 1987), p. 202. 4 See, for instance, Nora Sayre, Running Time: Films of the Cold War (New York: Dial Press, 1982); Larry Ceplair and Steven Englund, The Inquisition in Hollywood: Politics in the Film Community, 1930–1960 (London: University of California Press, 1979); Victor S. Navasky, Naming Names (New York: John Calder, 1980). 5 On Soviet cinema during the Cold War, see Peter Kenez, Cinema and Soviet Society, 1917–1953 (Cambridge University Press, 1992); Dmitry Shlapentokh and Vladimir Shlapentokh, Soviet Cinematography, 1918–1991: Ideological Conflict and Social Reality (New York: Aldine de Gruyter, 1993); Josephine Woll, Real Images: Soviet Cinema and the Thaw (London: I. B. Tauris, 2000). 6 See Clayton R. Koppes and Gregory D. Black, Hollywood Goes to War: How Politics, Profits, and Propaganda Shaped World War II Movies (New York: The Free Press, 1987). 7 On the BBC’s overseas role during the Cold War, see Michael Nelson, War of the Black Heavens: The Battles of Western Broadcasting in the Cold War (Syracuse University Press, 1997). 8 Richard Maltby, Harmless Entertainment: Hollywood and the Ideology of Consensus (London: The Scarecrow Press, 1983); Douglas Gomery, The Hollywood Studio System (New York: St Martin’s Press, 1986). 9 Gregory D. Black, ‘Movies, Politics, and Censorship: The Production Code Administration and Political Censorship of Film Content’, Journal of Policy History, 3, 2 (1991), pp. 95–129; Cobbett Steinberg, Reel Facts (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1981), pp. 543–6. 10 Frank Walsh, Sin and Censorship: The Catholic Church and the Motion Picture Industry (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1996), pp. 241, 269–71. On the political background to High Noon, see Stephen J. Whitfield, The Culture of the Cold War (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996), pp. 146–9. 11 Ceplair and Englund, The Inquisition in Hollywood, pp. 211–16, 258; Sayre, Running Time, pp. 18, 50; President of the US Chamber of Commerce, quoted in Lary May, The Big Tomorrow: Hollywood and the Politics of the American Way (University of Chicago Press, 2000), p. 191. 12 Walsh, Sin and Censorship, pp. 246–7; David Caute, The Dancer Defects: The Struggle for Cultural Supremacy during the Cold War (Oxford University Press, 2003), pp. 230–1; Walter L. Hixson, Parting the Curtain: Propaganda, Culture, and the Cold War, 1945–1961 (London: Macmillan, 1997), p. 155. 13 James L. Lorence, The Suppression of Salt of the Earth: How Hollywood, Big Labor, and Politicians Blacklisted a Movie in Cold War America (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1999).
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14 Boxes 3, 24, 33 and 81, Daniel Taradash papers, American Heritage Center, University of Wyoming, Laramie; Variety, 11 July 1956. 15 Thomas Doherty, ‘Hollywood Agit-Prop: The Anti-Communist Cycle 1948–54’, Journal of Film and Video, 40, 4 (Fall 1988), pp. 15–27; Garth Jowett, Film: The Democratic Art (Boston, MA: Little, Brown, 1976), pp. 368, 395–6; Ceplair and Englund, The Inquisition in Hollywood, pp. xiv, 51–2. 16 Reports, Special Agent in Charge, Los Angeles to J. Edgar Hoover, 24 August 1943 and 11 October 1943, in Communist Infiltration of the Motion Picture Industry, FBI 100–138754, in Daniel J. Leab (ed.), Communist Activity in the Entertainment Industry: FBI Surveillance Files on Hollywood, 1942–1958 (Bethesda, MD: University Publications of America, 1991). On Chaplin see John Sbardellati and Tony Shaw, ‘Booting a Tramp: Charlie Chaplin, the FBI, and the Construction of the Subversive Image in Red Scare America’, Pacific Historical Review, 72, 4 (November 2003), pp. 495–530. 17 David Eldridge, ‘“Dear Owen”: The CIA, Luigi Luraschi and Hollywood, 1953’, Historical Journal of Film, Radio and Television, 20, 2 (June 2000), p. 149. 18 Ceplair and Englund, The Inquisition in Hollywood, pp. 204, 392. 19 May, The Big Tomorrow, pp. 173–213. 20 Kenneth O’Reilly, Hoover and the UnAmericans (Philadelphia, PA: Temple University Press, 1983), pp. 6, 31–3, 76–82; Athan Theoharis and John Stuart Cox, The Boss (Philadelphia, PA: Temple University Press, 1988), pp. 203–8; Daniel Leab, I Was a Communist for the FBI (University Park: Pennsylvania State Press, 2000), p. 81. 21 Boxes 44 and 49, Louis de Rochement papers, American Heritage Center, University of Wyoming, Laramie; Sayre, Running Time, p. 91; Frances Stonor Saunders, Who Paid the Piper? The CIA and the Cultural Cold War (London: Granta, 1999), pp. 289–90. 22 Kenneth Osgood, ‘Total War: US Propaganda in the “Free World”, 1953–60’ (PhD thesis, University of California, Santa Barbara, 2001), pp. 178, 207. 23 Records of the USIA, audio-visual branch, RG 306.5160 and 306.1964, National Archives, Washington DC; Melinda Schwenk, ‘Reforming the Negative Through History: The US Information Agency and the 1957 Little Rock Integration Crisis’, Journal of Communication Inquiry, 23, 3 (July 1999), pp. 288–306. 24 Thomas Sorenson, The Word War (New York: Harper & Row, 1968), p. 64. 25 Robert Sklar, Movie-Made America: A Cultural History of American Movies (New York: Random House, 1975), p. 249. 26 Lawrence Suid, Guts and Glory: The Making of the American Military Image in Film (Lexington: University of Kentucky Press, 2002), pp. xii, xv, 136–7, 161–2, 190–1, 220–1; Steinberg, Reel Facts, p. 436. 27 Thomas Doherty, Projections of War: Hollywood, American Culture, and World War II (New York: Columbia University Press, 1999); Les K. Adler and Thomas G. Paterson, ‘Red Fascism: The Merger of Nazi Germany and Soviet Russia in the American Image of Totalitarianism, 1930s–1950s’, American Historical Review, 75, 4 (April 1970), pp. 1046–64. 28 See Osgood, ‘Total War’, pp. 273–8, for ‘Militant Liberty’ generally. 29 Palmer, The Films of the Eighties, p. 208. 30 Boxes 6 and 22, John Ford papers, Lilly Library, Indiana University, Bloomington; Saunders, Who Paid the Piper?, pp. 84–90; Joseph McBride, Searching for John Ford (New York: St Martin’s Press, 2001), pp. 461–84, 580–3. 31 Box 213, folder 14 and box 466, folder 6, Cecil B. DeMille papers, L. Tom Perry Special Collections, Harold B. Lee Library, Brigham Young University,
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32 33 34
35 36 37 38 39 40 41
42 43
Provo, UT; Peter Cowie (ed.), The Variety Almanac (London: Boxtree, 2000), p. 13. For the Nadel quote and an alternative interpretation of the politics of The Ten Commandments, see Caute, The Dancer Defects, pp. 177–81. Eldridge, ‘The CIA, Luigi Luraschi and Hollywood’, pp. 149–96. Tony Shaw, British Cinema and the Cold War: The State, Propaganda and Consensus (London: I. B. Tauris, 2001), pp. 91–114 especially. Toby Miller et al., Global Hollywood (London: BFI, 2001), pp. 23–9; Paul Swann, ‘The Little State Department: Hollywood and the State Department in the Postwar World’, American Studies International, 29, 1 (April 1991), pp. 2–19; Eldridge, ‘The CIA, Luigi Luraschi and Hollywood’, p. 183; all quotes taken from Reinhold Wagnleitner, Coca-Colonization and the Cold War: The Cultural Mission of the United States in Austria after the Second World War (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1994), pp. 230–71. See, for example, Richard Pells, Not Like Us: How Europeans Have Loved, Hated, and Transformed American Culture since World War II (New York: Basic Books, 1997). Woll, Real Images. The Ambassador in Italy (Dunn) to the Secretary of State, 16 June 1948, in Foreign Relations of the United States, vol. 3, 1948 (Washington DC: US Government Printing Office, 1974), pp. 879–82. John Elsom, Cold War Theatre (London: Routledge, 1992), p. 11. Jonathan Kirshner, ‘Subverting the Cold War in the 1960s: Dr Strangelove, The Manchurian Candidate, and The Planet of the Apes’, Film and History, 31, 2 (2000), pp. 40–4. Caute, The Dancer Defects, pp. 116–18; Pells, Not Like Us, chap. 8, passim. Caute, The Dancer Defects, pp. 162–3; Shaw, British Cinema and the Cold War, pp. 81–5, 186–91; V. Pechatov, ‘Exercise in Frustration: Soviet Foreign Propaganda in the Early Cold War, 1945–47’, Cold War History, 1, 2 (January 2000), pp. 1–27. Saunders, Who Paid the Piper?, pp. 381–90. The Guardian, 18 December 2001, p. 3. The Spirit of America was a threeminute, rapid-fire montage film that featured clips from 110 of Hollywood’s best-loved movies, and was shown on more than 9,000 American cinema screens alongside feature trailers in December 2001.
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Part III BEYOND THE COLD WAR
10 RELIGIOUS NON-PROFIT ORGANISATIONS, THE COLD WAR, THE STATE AND RESURGENT EVANGELICALISM, 1945–90 1 Axel R. Schäfer
Introduction In the half-century since the end of the Second World War the relationship between religious groups and the federal government in the US changed dramatically, with far-reaching political consequences beyond the narrow field of church–state relations. Seeking to shore up national defence, ensure international security, generate economic growth and create social stability, Cold War policy-makers developed close ties with religious charities in such diverse areas as healthcare, higher education, welfare services and foreign aid. Moreover, the post-war era provided religious groups with opportunities to reassert their spiritual mission by linking it to America’s new global role as ‘defender of the Free World’. Institutionally, as well as ideologically, state and religious non-profit organisations thus became closely intertwined under the auspices of the Cold War state. The state–private networks which developed during this time between the federal government and religious agencies have so far received little systematic attention in Cold War scholarship. A closer analysis, however, is likely to revise significantly our understanding of the Cold War state, of church–state relations and of the religious dimension of post-war political realignments. This chapter suggests that Cold War state-building integrated religious groups into the framework of the post-war welfare and national security state in ways that nurtured both the expansion of the federal government and the growth of religious agencies. It focuses in particular on religious colleges and universities, hospitals, social service providers and international relief agencies – institutions which were regarded as vital to Cold War preparedness and which became major beneficiaries of federal largesse. 175
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Research shows that the institutional and ideological construction of the Cold War state largely neutralised the two main obstacles to the integration of religious groups, namely post-war Supreme Court rulings that strengthened the legendary ‘wall of separation between church and state’ and misgivings among many religious groups about closer ties to the state. While the state drew upon the resources of religious entities, it also safeguarded their organisational autonomy and effectively sanctioned their faith-based practices. By the same token, the integration of religious groups helped cushion the political impact of the massive expansion of the Cold War state by preserving the image of limited government. Symbiotic relations between church and state developed not only with mainline Protestant, Jewish and Catholic organisations, but also with white evangelicals, who had traditionally been the most outspoken opponents of closer ties between the two institutions. Considering that since 1945 the sprawling and loosely organised evangelical movement has become the largest single religious faction in America, and that conservative Protestants now form the most strongly Republican group in the religious spectrum, these findings are of particular importance. They point to the crucial role the transformation of church–state relations during the Cold War played in the political resurgence of evangelical Protestants. This has been largely ignored by scholarship on conservatism, which locates the origins of the New Christian Right mainly in the ‘backlash’ against the political and cultural upheaval of the 1960s.2
State-building and religious agencies after the Second World War In the period after the Second World War, policy-makers had a difficult task on their hands. On the one hand they could meet the post-war exigencies of global power only by expanding the administrative capacities of the nation-state. On the other hand, they were hemmed in by the wartime and post-war rejection of New Deal-style interventionism and deeply rooted traditions of hostility to a strong centralised government. In their attempt to reconcile these conflicting impulses, Cold War policy-makers ended up constructing an entirely new administrative state which combined the publicly funded growth of private and non-profit organisations with the expansion of the federal government. This extensive reliance of the state upon the administrative capacities of non-governmental agencies is one of the least recognised and least analysed features of Cold War social and foreign policy. There is significant debate among scholars about whether ‘subsidiarity’, ‘corporatism’, the ‘allocative state’, ‘third-party government’ or, in a broader context, the ‘politics of growth’ is best suited to describe these state–private networks. There is little controversy about their basic features, however. The federal government sought to attain many of its policy objectives by funding and 176
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regulating activities of private and non-profit organisations, rather than by creating government agencies and providing services directly. Post-war policy-makers devised a subsidiarist state that combined centralised revenue gathering and policy planning with the devolution of policy implementation to non-governmental actors. In addition, planners relied upon fiscal and tax policies, rather than economic redistribution and direct public control, as the main instrument for achieving growth and social stability. Wartime cooperation between government and business had paved the way for a shift from New Deal-style planning to growthinducing policies via Keynesian deficit spending. Combining national security and welfarist components, massive federal funding was made available to private business and non-profit organisations in order to build up military industries, promote foreign investment, expand higher education and the human services infrastructure and boost consumer spending. State–private networks thus became the administrative core of Cold War public policy and a key instrument in the massive expansion of the federal government after the Second World War.3 Meanwhile, many religious charities, remembering the devastating financial impact of the Great Depression, had relaxed their opposition to public subsidies. Eager to rebuild their institutional base after the war, expand their growing foreign relief and missionary activities, and cultivate religion’s positive wartime image, even the more separatist religious organisations were willing to rethink their traditional stance. These tendencies were encouraged by the ideological convergence between church and state in the post-war years. In the social welfare field, many post-war planners saw religious agencies as natural allies in solving some of the most pressing social and moral concerns of the war and post-war years, such as family disorder, alcohol consumption, divorce, vice and crime. The ‘poverty knowledge’ underlying federal social policy throughout the Cold War attributed deprivation to behavioural deviance and social deficiencies, rather than to structural inequality and the maldistribution of income. This matched the faith-based approach advocated by many religious groups, which focused on moral norms and spiritual conversion.4 Subsidiarity and fiscal policies set the stage for closer organisational ties between church and state, but the needs of the Cold War state were not just administrative; they were also ideological. Policy-makers knew that religious belief in a just cause, a worldview based on a clear distinction between good and evil, adherence to moral principles and strong enemy images were effective tools during such a war. By depicting the Cold War as a battle against an enemy who not only needed to be defeated militarily, but also spiritually and culturally, they tied national security to a renewed commitment to traditional religion. In the words of Dwight Eisenhower: ‘when God comes in, communism has to go’.5 The link between the constitutional order and Christianity was given symbolic expression when the 177
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words ‘under God’ were added to the Pledge of Allegiance, which, as William Miller put it, had ‘its rhythm upset but its anti-Communist spirituality improved’.6 In turn, religious groups were keen to bolster the religious component in American society by showing that moral character based on JudaeoChristian teachings was an indispensable element in the battle against the evils of totalitarianism. They moved to the forefront of the process of sanctifying American liberal democracy in order to bolster the nation in the spiritual struggle of the Cold War. Many churches embraced the opportunity to counter the long-term trend towards understanding democracy and American liberty as the result of an anti-clerical Enlightenment tradition, secular values and pragmatist ethics, and few had second thoughts about the finer differences between the Kingdom of God and the American way of life. As influential Presbyterian minister Edward L. R. Elson pointed out in a sermon to an audience which included Eisenhower and Vice-President Nixon, the axe of the pioneer ‘has become America’s gigantic industrial machine, and the world sees that. His gun has become America’s powerful armament, and the world knows it well. His Book, by the power of the Person revealed therein, is pouring forth the light of a new spiritual rebirth, and the world must clearly see that’.7 Or, in Billy Graham’s words, ‘if you would be a true patriot, then become a Christian. If you would be a loyal American, then become a loyal Christian’.8 Together, Cold War subsidiarity, the ideological convergence between church and state and the religious non-profit sector’s new-found openness to government fundamentally reshaped the relationship between religion and the federal government. Post-war policy-makers, eager to expand the links with voluntary organisations, could hardly ignore the resources and capacities of religious charities, which since the 1950s have constituted about 40 percent of the organisations in the non-profit sector and account for as much as two-thirds of its donated revenues and volunteer labour force.9 Hence, in the social welfare field, tax exemptions, loans, vouchers, grants-in-aid and purchase-of-service agreements funnelled billions of dollars of public funds into religiously affiliated hospitals, nursing homes, educational institutions and social services. This enabled the vast expansion of federally funded welfare provision during the Cold War and provided religious groups with new access to public funds and political influence. By the same token, government use of religious foreign aid agencies, funding of the chaplaincy in the armed forces, the donation of surplus land and military facilities to religious charities, and support for overseas mission work undergirded Cold War foreign policy goals while underwriting the expansion of religious agencies. This integration of religious groups played a crucial role in constructing the divergent ideological underpinnings of the Cold War state, which combined the image of limited 178
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government, the sanctification of liberal capitalism and American-style democracy, and the massive expansion of the state’s military and welfare components.10
Religious agencies and Cold War funding The mutual construction of the state and religious non-profit organisations on the basis of the institutional and ideological trajectories of Cold War public policy is best observed in the areas that policy-makers considered vital for sustaining national defence, creating social stability and safeguarding international security: namely, higher education, hospitals, social services and foreign aid. Despite the prevalence of religious organisations in these fields, remarkably little reliable statistical information on religiously based non-profit organisations and funding ties with the government exists. Likewise, data on federal support to non-profit organisations is difficult to obtain. No government-wide overview is available, and although non-profit organisations were by the 1980s eligible participants in 564 out of approximately 1,000 federal programmes, few of these programmes maintained sufficient data to identify the scale of resources flowing to such organisations. Hence, snapshot information gleaned from rich but unstandardised data from a variety of sources has to suffice to trace the main outlines of this relationship and the transformation of church–state relations under the auspices of the Cold War in the social and national security policy arenas.11 While church organisations were barely involved in the vast federal New Deal social programmes, beginning in the mid-1940s the federal government broadened its use of religious agencies in its pursuit of the expansion of higher education, defence-related research, hospital building, community development and foreign aid. The 1944 GI Bill, which granted stipends for tuition and living expenses of veterans, funnelled large amounts of federal monies into religious colleges and universities. In addition, the 1958 National Defense Education Act provided new funds for college construction, student loans and science teaching. Even in the controversial area of federal funding for parochial schools, church–state ties continued to get stronger in the post-war period. Tax money subsidised bus transportation, textbooks and auxiliary educational services.12 Similarly, the 1947 Hill–Burton Hospital Survey and Construction Act made federal funds available for hospitals and other medical facilities, including those run by sectarian institutions. The expansion of this programme throughout the 1950s and 1960s resulted in the progressive increase in the share of funds received by religious organisations. In total, over half the funds allocated under the Hill–Burton Act went to the private and non-profit sectors, and of these the largest category was the religious one. The state’s expansion of the nation’s hospital 179
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infrastructure was thus to a large extent achieved by funding church institutions.13 The Great Society, more than any previous expansion of government social provision, brought religiously based organisations into the public–private funding arrangement. The higher education acts of 1963 and 1965 made an unprecedented amount of federal money available to church colleges via federal student loans, capital financing, research contracts and subsidised construction loans. Moreover, the landmark 1965 Elementary and Secondary Education Act established a precedent for the controversial funding for parochial schools by providing indirect federal funds to students, ushering in the large-scale conversion of conservatives to public funding for private schools. In the healthcare field, Medicaid and Medicare became large-scale funding sources for religiously based hospitals, mental health institutions and nursing homes. The most dramatic change, however, came in the area of social service funding, where the federal government had not played a prominent role until the early 1960s, although state and local ties with religious charities were well established. Emphasising direct federal-to-non-profit allocation, the War on Poverty helped finance congregation-based childcare, church-based anti-poverty programmes, job creation schemes, migrant worker support and mental health centres. The 1967 Social Security amendments (Title IV-A) in particular proved a watershed both in terms of the expansion of the federal role in social service funding and the reliance upon both religious and secular non-profit organisations. Prohibitions against federal funding for voluntary agencies were dropped, and the open-ended programme allocated almost unlimited amounts of money to states for contracting out social services.14 ‘Three or four years ago it was impossible for a federal agency to give a direct grant to a religious group’, Office of Economic Opportunity director Sargent Shriver remarked, ‘today we are giving hundreds of grants without violating the principle of separation of church and state’.15 Despite attempts to reign in the spiralling costs in the 1970s and the cuts during the Reagan administration, the precedent set by the Great Society remained a stable element of post-1960s relations between government and the non-profit sector. In particular, the federal government increased expenditures in established entitlement programmes, such as Social Security, Medicaid and Medicare, which frequently involved religious non-profit providers. In addition, state governments increasingly spent funds to purchase services from non-profit agencies. More recent legislation, such as the 1990 Child Care and Development Block Grant, the ‘charitable choice’ provision in the landmark 1996 welfare reform legislation and the Bush administration’s ‘faith-based initiative’, opened up further opportunities for religious agencies to participate in federal funding streams. Although many observers consider these laws a novel breach in 180
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the wall of separation between church and state, from the perspective of post-war subsidiarity they simply strengthened the legislative basis of a long-established pattern of church–state cooperation.16 These domestic funding streams which undergirded the state–private network in the welfare state had equivalents in the national security arena. Foreign aid in particular was the quintessential Cold War programme, linking the expansion of government to the growth of voluntary agencies in the pursuit of the combined goals of military support, commercial access, humanitarian aid and containment. International relief thus became a popular area of cooperation between church and state and engineered the integration of previously marginalised religious groups into US foreign policy on the basis of their embrace of strict anticommunism. The main funding ties developed in the aftermath of the federal government’s decision to fund ocean freight costs in 1947, to provide US surplus food distribution abroad under the Agricultural Act of 1949 and the 1954 Food for Peace legislation (Public Law 480) and to offer international technical assistance under Truman’s Point Four proposals, which later developed into the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) programme.17 In 1948 a subcommittee of the House Committee on Foreign Affairs acknowledged that voluntary agencies which ‘represent in part the interest of American religious groups’ should be seen as ‘an essential counterpart of foreign assistance programs’, and in 1962 USAID director Fowler Hamilton reported that the use of religiously affiliated institutions for foreign aid purposes ‘has been confirmed by legislation enacted by the Congress for every year from 1947 through the foreign aid legislation enacted this year’.18 By 1962 religiously affiliated voluntary agencies handled 70 percent of surplus food distribution. Between the 1950s and the 1980s, the Escapee Program first implemented by the Truman administration funnelled millions to religious relief organisations helping eastern European and Soviet refugees, and the State Department’s Bureau for Refugee Programs made ample use of missionary societies in the Far East. Churches also benefited from war claims legislation, in which enemy assets confiscated by the US were used to fund the building of religious institutions, as happened in the Philippines under the War Claims Act of 1948 and subsequent legislation. Moreover, the Cuban refugee crisis of 1960–61 ushered in new federal funding streams for the resettlement work of religious agencies, culminating in the Kennedy administration’s policy of extending welfare services to asylum seekers via direct assistance to voluntary agencies.19 The ‘triumph of subsidiarity’ (Bruce Nichols) was thus firmly entrenched in the foreign aid field between church and state before the Vietnam war. Despite attempts to separate secular and religious activities, the distinction remained blurry, particularly as military and humanitarian goals 181
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merged. Catholic and evangelical Protestant agencies with strong anticommunist heritages in particular were often much less concerned about taking federal funds and being identified with government goals than many secular agencies, who feared that they would become tools of American foreign policy. This was especially the case after the disaster in Vietnam, which led to a shake-up of the funding networks between the government and voluntary agencies. According to one survey, by the 1990s the number of secular agencies not receiving any public funds was higher than that of religiously based ones, and out of 13 international aid and relief agencies with total revenues of over $80 million registered with the United States Agency for International Development in 1991, seven were religiously based.20 In summation, Cold War subsidiarity, particularly during the 1960s, fuelled both the expansion of the federal government and the growth of nonprofit agencies and linked them together in ever-closer networks. By the early 1980s, overall federal support to the non-profit sector in a wide range of areas amounted to $40.4 billion, representing about 36 percent of total federal spending and 35 percent of non-profit income. State and local government added another estimated $8 billion to $10 billion to this total. Federal funds constituted on average 36 percent of the overall revenue of hospitals and healthcare providers, 22 percent of the income of educational and research institutions and 55 percent of the combined funds of social service providers and foreign aid agencies, with many individual charities receiving over 70 percent of their funds from federal and state sources. By the same token, the growth of philanthropic entities paralleled the rise of the national security and welfare state in the period after the Second World War. In 1950 there were 50,000 charitable non-profit organisations registered with the Internal Revenue Service. By 1967, the number had increased to 300,000. By 1992 there were approximately 1.4 million nonprofit organisations with a total income of $316 billion.21
Catholics, Protestants, evangelicals The available data also clearly shows that religious entities were part and parcel of both the expansion of the non-profit sector and the subsidiarist funding arrangements. Although all the main denominational groups participated in post-war subsidiarity, Catholic agencies tended to be the prime beneficiaries, reflecting both the greater willingness of Catholics to accept public funds and the greater number of Catholic charities in areas where funding ties had a long tradition. However, the others increasingly caught up, particularly Protestant organisations. Among religiously affiliated colleges and universities, a survey from the early 1990s showed that 97 percent received public funds and that the percentage of government funds was higher among religiously based institutions than among secular 182
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ones. Mainline Protestants and Catholics largely were now even, with 25 percent of mainline Protestant and 23 percent of Catholic institutions receiving more than 20 percent of their funds from public sources. Among religiously based hospitals, nursing homes, children’s institutions and children’s services surveyed in the early 1960s, 71 percent had contractual agreements providing for government assistance, usually in the form of purchase-of-service arrangements, while sectarian hospitals had received close to $330 million in Hill–Burton funds. By the 1990s 65 percent of Catholic Charities’ revenues came from government sources, as did 75 percent of the Jewish Board of Family and Children’s Services’ revenues and 92 percent of Lutheran Social Ministries’ revenues. Around 60 percent of Catholic and Protestant child service agencies received over 60 percent of their income from public sources, although religious agencies received on average less of their income from public funds than their secular counterparts. In the foreign aid field, by the 1980s close to 70 percent of the income of the Catholic Relief Services agency came from government sources. The respective figures for the (mainline Protestant) Church World Service were 43.6 percent and for Lutheran World Relief 24 percent. A survey from the early 1990s shows that, overall, 70 percent of religious agencies reported receiving public funds by the 1990s. Although religious foreign aid agencies received less of their budget from public sources than did secular organisations, the percentage of secular agencies receiving no government funds was significantly higher (36 percent) than among religious agencies (30 percent).22 The most intriguing figures, however, are not the ones that trace the growing participation of Catholics, mainline Protestants and Jewish groups, which by and large had embraced closer church–state ties and subsidiarity in the Cold War era. The real enigma is that conservative Protestant organisations, which had the longest tradition of upholding the banner of church–state separation, shared fully in this public funding arrangement and in some fields even reported larger proportions of their budgets coming from government sources than other religious providers. The desire for political access and cultural influence, the pressures of denominational competition, the longing to ‘christianise government’, identification with Cold War policy goals and the prospects of agency growth increasingly clashed with the evangelicals’ traditional separatist stance and brought about a change of attitude among many conservative Protestant organisations.23 Reliance on government funds was most evident in the higher education arena. Federal loans for Southern Baptist schools through 1962, for example, added up to $36.6 million for dormitories and $4.7 million for students even before the Great Society programmes made federal funds available on an unprecedented scale to private schools for classrooms, 183
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libraries, laboratories, teaching equipment and student aid.24 Higher education also exemplifies the fundamental revision in church–state thinking which characterised evangelicalism outside of Southern Baptism during the Cold War. On the one hand, the National Association of Evangelicals (NAE) ran a vitriolic anti-Catholic campaign against public funding for parochial schools and was closely affiliated with the separatist lobbying group Protestants and Other Americans United for the Separation of Church and State (POAU) throughout the 1950s and 1960s. On the other hand, the emphasis among many conservative Protestants was beginning to shift from insisting on church–state separation to protecting the spiritual mission under public funding arrangements. Despite denouncing the ‘syndromes of socialism’ and ‘the penetration of naturalistic humanism’, a leading speaker at an evangelical conference on church–state relations in 1963 regarded federal funds to higher education as more acceptable to evangelicals because they were available via tuition waivers rather than via direct grants and contracts. Pointing to the Christian’s ‘obligation to the defense needs of his country in a world threatened by militant, scientific, and atheistic communism’, he concluded that the main issue for evangelical colleges was ‘not whether they will accept some form of Federal aid, but how they can preserve their spiritual integrity, autonomy, and goals in doing so’.25 By the 1990s, conservative Protestant colleges and universities were outstripping Catholic and mainline Protestant entities in the receipt of public funds, with 35 percent of conservative Protestant institutions receiving more than 20 percent of income coming from public funds.26 In the healthcare field, a 1963 survey of aid to Southern Baptist institutions revealed that grants under the Hill–Burton Act amounted to almost $12.8 million. Again, these funding ties developed despite the fact that the Southern Baptist Convention had consistently condemned the acceptance of Hill–Burton money. Among both Southern Baptists and evangelicals affiliated with the NAE, pragmatic considerations, however, often clashed with church doctrine as heavy expenditure for new equipment and rising operational costs made it increasingly hard for administrators to pursue a policy of outright rejection of government funds.27 Indicating the new direction of church–state thinking, NAE Executive Director R. L. Decker warned in a 1963 review of public funding for religious institutions that the ‘complete observance of separation of Church and State often times seem to Evangelicals to be encouragement toward the development of a purely secular state’.28 In the realm of welfare, evangelicals tended quietly to condone public funding as ties between religious agencies and government had a long tradition on the state and local levels. A study of a mid-western agency of the (evangelical) Lutheran Church–Missouri Synod revealed that it received 38 percent of its total budget from public funds in 1950. By 1980 184
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this figure had increased to 59 percent. In the case of the Salvation Army, which was affiliated with the NAE, the percentage of government funds in overall agency income increased from 4 percent in 1974–5 to 17 percent by fiscal year 1979–80. Although in overall terms evangelical social service agencies received a lower percentage of their total income from public sources than did Catholic or mainline agencies, 39 percent of conservative Protestant child service agencies surveyed in the 1990s reported receiving more than 60 percent of their income from public funds.29 Finally, in the foreign aid field, government imperatives to expand administrative capacities and the resurgence of evangelicalism produced an array of new links between the state and conservative Protestantism. Seventh-Day Adventists, the Salvation Army and the NAE’s World Relief Corporation (WRC) became major players in government-funded transportation and distribution of surplus foods, hospital building, land reclamation programmes and similar endeavours. In the ensuing decades, an array of federal grants and contracts helped World Vision, a Californiabased evangelical relief agency established in 1952, become one of the largest international aid providers. By the 1990s only a quarter of evangelical international aid organisations received no government funds, as opposed to one-half of mainline Protestant agencies. Meanwhile, 17 percent of conservative Protestant foreign aid agencies received more than 40 percent of their income from public funds.30
From the separation of church and state to the politics of subsidiarity On the surface, the pervasive nature of church–state funding ties in general, and the integration of evangelical Protestants in particular, is difficult to square with both the constitutional separation of church and state and with the anti-establishmentarian traditions within American religion. However, as the following analysis will show, the structures of the subsidiarist state and the transformation of church–state attitudes among religious groups together provided a way of reconciling these divergent impulses. This sheds new light on both the nature of the Cold War state and the relationship between religion and politics in the United States after the Second World War. The expansion of funding for religious groups during the Cold War was circumscribed by constitutional law on the one hand and bureaucratic processes on the other. Legally, the long-established practice of state aid to church-related institutions came under more intense scrutiny in response to the development of large-scale federal funding for religious providers after the Second World War. Ironically, however, the various decisions by the Supreme Court in the post-war period, while rhetorically upholding the hallowed principle of the wall of separation between church and state and 185
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prohibiting public aid in primary and secondary education, left unchallenged a vast array of government subsidies to church-based hospitals, welfare organisations and foreign aid agencies.31 The landmark 1947 Everson v. Board of Education decision was a case in point. In this decision, the Court handed down a thundering defence of the no-aid-to-religion doctrine based on the establishment clause of the Constitution and Jefferson’s adage of the ‘wall of separation’. It asserted that public funds should not be used to finance religious primary and secondary education. Nonetheless, the Court also upheld the legality of New Jersey’s public support for student transportation by arguing that the money was provided for the secular aspect of parochial schools only. In turn, although the Everson decision had declared aid to religious education illegal, its backing for the state funding of services that supported the public purposes of sectarian institutions was used by the courts to uphold public aid to sectarian social welfare agencies. For example, a spate of state court cases asserted the constitutionality of the Hill–Burton Act by distinguishing between the religious auspices of an institution and its public purpose. Surprisingly, even the vast expansion of federal funding for church-related agencies during the Great Society raised few legal eyebrows. Church–state funding during the war on poverty, as one of its most vocal critics notes, ‘has appeared remarkably elusive so far as lawsuits are concerned’.32 In 1971 public funding for religious schools became yet again the basis for a Supreme Court ruling which formulated another legal principle governing church–state funding ties. Pulling the constitutional rug from under state programmes which supplemented salaries of teachers in secular subjects teaching in religiously based schools, Lemon v. Kurzman permitted funding of faith-based organisations only if the law establishing the programme had a secular purpose, neither advanced nor inhibited religion and did not foster an excessive government entanglement with religion. It also established that if a school receiving public money was ‘pervasively sectarian’, state aid violated the First Amendment. As in the Everson case, however, the apparently restrictive nature of the ruling did not seriously question the established funding ties between government and religious groups in other areas. Decisions upholding the vast government aid programmes funnelling funds to religious colleges and universities and public funding of sectarian welfare organisations show that the Court continued to apply different standards to schools than to other religious institutions. Despite landmark decisions on church–state relations, the Supreme Court thus has neither established well-developed legal principles nor been consistent in its rulings on government aid to religious agencies. In fact, prior to the 1990s, few objections were raised at all either to the large-scale government subsidies received by religious social service agencies or to the funds granted to inner-city congregations that 186
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ran job centres, neighbourhood revitalisation projects and other antipoverty programmes during the 1960s. The Court has largely condoned this long-standing practice, with the exception of primary and secondary education.33 The second potential constraint upon public funding of religious entities is procedural and bureaucratic. In keeping with Court rulings, many federal statues and regulations bar direct subsidies to churches and prohibit aid to religious agencies if they engage in religious instruction, discrimination in their employment and admission policies on the basis of religious belief and display of religious symbols. Nonetheless, as we have seen, this has not stood in the way of funding religiously affiliated institutions. Neither have the prohibitions resulted in the significant curtailment of sectarian practices among religious agencies receiving public funds. The fears expressed by many critics of subsidiarity, particularly those from strict religious backgrounds, that public funding leads to government control and loss of agency autonomy, have proven largely unfounded. Despite a number of highly publicised cases of government interference and a plethora of statutes prohibiting public support for sectarian practices, few agencies experienced any federally mandated curtailment of their religious practices. When it came to the limitations on sectarian practices, government funding came with few strings attached.34 The reasons for this ‘benign neglect’ can be found in the political and ideological underpinnings of Cold War subsidiarity. One of the crucial political assets of the state–private network is that it renders big government palatable to a public which associates allocative policies with cost reduction, self-help, flexibility and the responsiveness of local services, and regards them as alternatives to impersonal state bureaucracies. Subsidiarity mobilises political support for welfare and national security policies ‘by deemphasizing their governmental nature and pretending that they conformed to more traditional American values’.35 Much of the growth of government after the Second World War was thus hidden behind the smokescreen of subsidiarity. The number of federal employees per 1,000 people in the population declined in real terms between 1954 and 1979 by more than 10 percent, and despite the marked increase in the range of federal responsibilities, the federal budget as part of the Gross National Product remained comparatively stable around 20 percent. The elaborate funding arrangements made with state and local government, non-profit providers and private players ensured that federal support frequently did not appear in the federal budget.36 This also explains why government support often reaches non-profit organisations indirectly and why the expansion of federal funding for nonprofit organisations was in most cases accompanied by the loosening, rather than the tightening, of regulatory controls, especially during the Great Society. In 1980 only 20 percent of all federal aid to non-profit 187
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organisations came directly from the government via grants, loans and contracts. Of the federal aid to this sector, 53 percent was channelled through individuals via vouchers and reimbursement schemes, and another 27 percent reached non-profit organisations through state and local governments via block grants. One also needs to consider the least direct funding components, mainly tax exemptions. Voluntary agencies, although often viewed as alternatives to government, actually became part of the expansion of the state. At the same time, they continued to enjoy a high level of autonomy and little regulatory oversight.37 Finally, subsidiarity relied upon broad political support and legitimated the growth of government across partisan divides. Both liberal Democrats in the 1960s and conservative Republicans in the 1990s looked to nonprofit organisations to play major roles in the American system of social provision. Using non-profit agencies to circumvent traditional mediating levels of state and local bureaucracies was the centrepiece of the War on Poverty, and the Great Society’s large-scale government expansion was saturated in anti-government rhetoric. By the same token, the conservative rhetoric of ‘privatization’ and ‘empowerment of mediating structures’ did not seriously impinge upon the growth of the Cold War state. The continuous expansion of the national security and welfare components of the subsidiarist state, in spite of the highly charged debates about the role of government, indicates that in the post-war period the key conflict between liberals and conservatives was no longer about the size of government, but about which funding and delivery arrangement to privilege. Subsidiarity thus played a crucial role in the statist turn of post-war conservatism, because it packaged the growth of the state in a rhetoric of limited government.38 In summation, post-war legal rulings and political processes sustained a distinctive subsidiarist state which combined the growth of the federal government with limited regulatory control of non-profit agencies. The role of these particular features of subsidiarity in integrating religious providers into the structures of the Cold War state can hardly be overestimated. They effectively sanctioned the faith-based approaches of church-affiliated agencies and thus assuaged fears of the loss of agency autonomy, the marginalisation of religious content and absorption into a government-run system. Not only did religious agencies fully participate in the public-non-profit partnership, they were able to do so without having to compromise their religious missions. According to Stephen Monsma’s survey, 91 percent of the religiously affiliated colleges and universities, 77 percent of child service agencies and 62 percent of international aid organisations receiving public funds reported that they engaged openly, rather than subtly, in religious practices. Even though almost a third of religiously based colleges and universities receiving public funds have compulsory chapel services, only 13 percent mentioned any problems with government 188
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at all and just 7 percent reported being forced to curtail religious practices. Among religiously based child and family service agencies, 30 percent reported some problems with government pressures, especially in regard to church attendance requirements and the presence of religious symbols. Nonetheless, only 11 percent were actually forced to curb practices, and the vast majority (89 percent) viewed public funds in a positive light, as a means of expanding services. Among religious foreign aid agencies, 22 percent reported running into problems with government officials, but less than 10 percent indicated that government funds caused them to change their relief or development priorities to meet government wishes. The impression given by international aid officials was that ‘as long as the religiously based aid agencies are not too overt or up-front with their religious practices, they can get by with a significant amount of mixing religious elements into publicly funded activities and programs’.39 Limited regulatory oversight, the safeguarding of agency autonomy, indirect funding streams and the absence of effective restrictions on evangelising also became the basis upon which conservative Protestants came to embrace the public–private networks which underlay Cold War statebuilding. Foreign aid subsidiarity, the first significant area of contact, put few overall restraints upon the spiritual mission of conservative Protestant agencies. A 1973 agenda paper of the WRC, for example, shows that recipients of government surplus food in Korea ‘were exposed to the Gospel in many different ways and their compensation and reward was WRC-provided surplus food, clothing, vitamins, materials, equipment, and so forth’.40 Conservative Protestant organisations also led the field among religious agencies in restrictive hiring and encouraging religious commitment. Nonetheless, while one-third of the agencies surveyed in the 1990s reported problems with government in carrying out their religious mission, there was strong evidence to suggest that these were minor conflicts and that USAID officials appreciated the moral framework of conservative Protestants.41 A similar picture emerges in the domestic arena. Although conservative Protestant child service agencies headed the field in exclusive hiring, compulsory religious activities and encouraging religious commitment, the percentage reporting problems with government was only marginally higher than the average for all religiously based agencies (34 percent). At the same time, the highly religious agencies reported the most positive effects of public funding. Finally, despite being leaders in discriminatory hiring and admissions policies and in mandatory religious exercises, 78 percent of conservative Protestant colleges and universities receiving public funds reported no problems whatsoever with government pressures to limit their sectarian practices.42 By the 1990s, the odd man out in the Cold War state was no longer evangelicalism, but ‘that assortment of strict separationists, leftist critics, and theological liberationists who from their 189
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various perspectives find government funding of religiously grounded activities abhorrent to the best interests of American democracy’.43
Conclusion In conclusion, despite the legendary ‘wall of separation between church and state’, religious agencies became a constituent part of the public–private funding networks which underlay Cold War social and foreign policy. Subsidiarity was crucial both in facilitating the growth of the federal government and in nurturing the expansion of religious charities. Moreover, the distinctive features of subsidiarity were conducive to integrating evangelicals into the Cold War state. The Great Society programmes so frequently vilified by the political right in particular preserved the autonomy of conservative Protestant agencies and effectively sanctioned their spiritual mission. In turn, evangelicals simultaneously upheld their rhetorical commitment to church–state separation and nurtured their ties with the state. These findings suggest that the complex dynamics of the relationship between church and state during the Cold War might play a larger role in the political resurgence of conservative Protestants than scholarship, dominated by the argument that the ‘backlash’ against the 1960s accounts for their mobilisation, has so far acknowledged. They indicate that evangelicals, rather than being marginalised, became a constituent part of the Cold War state and legitimated its expansion, while using anti-statist rhetoric to create a sub-cultural self-image. They also suggest that the exigencies of global power involve the administrative state and religious entities in a process of mutual construction that has not yet been fully explored.
Notes and bibliography 1 2
3
The chapter presented here is part of my forthcoming book, Religion, the Cold War State, and the Resurgence of Evangelicalism, 1942–1990. On the growth of evangelicalism, see Mark A. Noll, A History of Christianity in the United States and Canada (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1992), p. 465; on political resurgence, see Geoffrey Layman, The Great Divide: Religious and Cultural Conflict in American Party Politics (New York: Columbia University Press, 2001). On the post-war state, see Steve Fraser and Gary Gerstle (eds), The Rise and Fall of the New Deal Order, 1930–1980 (Princeton University Press, 1989), p. xv; Alan Wolfe, America’s Impasse: The Rise and Fall of the Politics of Growth (New York: Pantheon Books, 1981); and Michael Sherry, In the Shadow of War: The United States Since the 1930s (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1995), esp. pp. 71–86. On subsidiarity, see Lester H. Salamon, Partners in Public Service: Government–Nonprofit Relations in the Modern Welfare State (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1995), pp. 18ff.; Steven Rathgeb Smith and Michael Lipsky, Nonprofits for Hire: The Welfare State in the Age of Contracting (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1993), pp.
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4
5 6 7 8
9
10 11
12
13 14
179–80; Peter Dobkin Hall, ‘The Welfare State and the Careers of Public and Private Institutions since 1945’, in Lawrence J. Friedman and Mark D. McGarvie (eds), Charity, Philanthropy and Civility in American History (Cambridge University Press, 2003), p. 369. On religious charities, see Robert A. Wuthnow, Virginia Hodgkinson and Associates, Faith and Philanthropy in America: Exploring the Role of Religion in America’s Voluntary Sector (San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 1990); and Michael O’Neill, The Third America: The Emergence of the Nonprofit Sector in the United States (San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 1989). On ‘poverty knowledge’, see Alice O’Connor, Poverty Knowledge: Social Science, Social Policy, and the Poor in Twentieth-Century U.S. History (Princeton University Press, 2001); and Axel R. Schäfer, ‘Evangelicalism, Social Reform, and the US Welfare State, 1970–96’, in David K. Adams and Cornelius A. van Minnen (eds), Religious and Secular Reform in America: Ideas, Beliefs, and Social Change (New York University Press, 1999), pp. 249–73. Quoted in Richard V. Pierard and Robert D. Lindner, Civil Religion and the Presidency (Grand Rapids, MI: Academie Books, 1988), p. 197. William Lee Miller, Piety Along the Potomac: Notes on Politics and Morals in the Fifties (Boston, MA: Houghton Mifflin Co., 1964), p. 41. Christianity Today, 1 (4 February 1957), p. 38. Quoted in Anne C. Loveland, American Evangelicals and the U.S. Military, 1942–1993 (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1996), p. 37. I have explored the ideological links further in Axel R. Schäfer, ‘NeoEvangelikalismus, amerikanische Außenpolitik und die NATO, 1941–61’, in Berthold Meyer and Werner Kremp (eds), Religion und Zivilreligion im atlantischen Bündnis (Trier: Westdeutscher Verlag, 2001), pp. 235–55. Peter Dobkin Hall and Colin B. Burke, ‘Historical Statistics of the United States Chapter on Voluntary, Nonprofit, and Religious Entities and Activities: Underlying Concepts, Concerns, and Opportunities’, Working Paper No. 14 (Cambridge, MA: The Hauser Center for Nonprofit Organizations, Harvard University, 2002), p. 9; Stephen V. Monsma, When Sacred and Secular Mix: Religious Nonprofit Organizations and Public Money (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 1996), pp. 8–9, 67. On public funding for religious non-profit organisations, see especially Monsma, Sacred and Secular, and Bernard Coughlin, Church and State in Social Welfare (New York: Columbia University Press, 1965). Hall and Burke, ‘Historical Statistics’, pp. 9, 27–8; Monsma, Sacred and Secular, pp. 12–13; Salamon, Partners, p. 86; and Ellen F. Netting, ‘Secular and Religious Funding of Church-Related Agencies’, Social Service Review, 56 (1982), pp. 587, 601. On higher education, see Hall and Burke, ‘Historical Statistics’, pp. 12, 29–30; Hall, ‘Careers’, pp. 364, 378ff.; Theda Skocpol, ‘Religion, Civil Society, and Social Provision in the U.S.’, in Mary Jo Bane (ed.), Who Will Provide? The Changing Role of Religion in American Social Welfare (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 2000), p. 26. On schools, see John Lee Eighmy, Churches in Cultural Captivity: A History of the Social Attitudes of Southern Baptists (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1972), p. 160. Bernard Coughlin, Church and State in Social Welfare (New York: Columbia University Press, 1965), p. 47. Eighmy, Churches in Captivity, pp. 160, 164–6; Smith and Lipsky, Nonprofits for Hire, pp. 50–71; Stephen Rathgeb Smith and Deborah A. Stone, ‘The Unexpected Consequences of Privatization’, in Michael K. Brown (ed.), Remaking the Welfare State: Retrenchment and Social Policy in America and
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15 16
17
18 19 20
21 22
23
24
Europe (Philadelphia, PA: Temple University Press, 1988), pp. 235–8; Salamon, Partners, pp. 85–6; Stanley Lowell, The Great Church–State Fraud (Washington DC: Robert B. Luce, 1973), pp. 168–70, 173–4, 178–82, 188; Martha Derthick, Uncontrollable Spending for Social Services (Washington DC: Brookings Institution, 1975), p. 8. Quoted in Lowell, Church–State Fraud, p. 178. On legislation since the 1970s, see Smith and Lipsky, Nonprofits for Hire, pp. 54–7, 62–3, 67; Mary M. Bogle, ‘A Survey of Congregation-based Child Care in the United States’, in E. J. Dionne Jr and Ming Hsu Chen (eds), Sacred Places, Civic Purposes: Should Government Help Faith-based Charity (Washington DC: Brookings Institution, 2001), pp. 226–7; Barbara and Peter Gottschalk, ‘The Reagan Retrenchment in Historical Context’, in Brown, Remaking the Welfare State, pp. 61–71; Smith and Stone, ‘Unexpected Consequences’, pp. 239–40; and Hall, ‘Careers’, pp. 381–2. On the most recent legislation, see Stanley Carlson-Thiess, ‘Charitable Choice: Bringing Religion Back Into American Welfare’, Journal of Policy History, 13 (2001), pp. 114–15; Paula F. Pipes and Helen Rose Ebaugh, ‘Faith-based Coalitions, Social Services, and Government Funding’, Sociology of Religion, 63 (2002), pp. 49–68. Bruce Nichols, The Uneasy Alliance: Religion, Refugee Work, and U.S. Foreign Policy (New York: Oxford University Press, 1988), pp. 207–8; Department of State, Agency for International Development, ‘Involvement of Religious Affiliated Institutions in the U.S. Foreign Aid Program’, in Fowler Hamilton to Clinton P. Anderson, 9 November 1962, National Association of Evangelicals Records (SC-113), Buswell Memorial Library, Wheaton College, Illinois (hereafter NAE records). Fowler Hamilton to Clinton P. Anderson, 9 November 1962, pp. 1–2, NAE records. Hamilton cites House Report 1845, 80th Congress, 2nd Session. Ibid., pp. 4, 5; Nichols, Uneasy Alliance, pp. 208–10; Lowell, Church–State Fraud, pp. 164, 168. Nichols, Uneasy Alliance, pp. 100–31, 210; Scott Flipse, ‘To Save “Free Vietnam” and Lose Our Souls’, in Daniel H. Bays and Grant Wacker (eds), The Foreign Mission Enterprise at Home: Explorations in American Cultural History (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2003), pp. 206–22; see also Loveland, American Evangelicals and the U.S. Military and Monsma, Sacred and Secular, pp. 9–10. Salamon, Partners, pp. 87–93; Hall, ‘Careers’, pp. 363–4. Robert Wuthnow, ‘Religion and the Voluntary Spirit in the United States: Mapping the Terrain’, in Wuthnow et al., Faith and Philanthropy, pp. 15–16; Virginia A. Hodgkinson, Murray S. Weitzman and Arthur D. Kirsch, ‘From Commitment to Action: How Religious Involvement Affects Giving and Volunteering’, in Wuthnow et al., Faith and Philanthropy, p. 96; Coughlin, Church and State, pp. 60, 64, 67–73, 130, 159–62; Monsma, Sacred and Secular, pp. 1, 9–10, 68–70, 72–3, 78; Eighmy, Churches in Captivity, p. 160; Nichols, Uneasy Alliance, p. 211. On neo-evangelicalism, see Jon R. Stone, On the Boundaries of American Evangelicalism: The Postwar Evangelical Coalition (New York: St Martin’s Press, 1997); Joel A. Carpenter, Revive Us Again: The Reawakening of American Fundamentalism (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997); Nathan O. Hatch and Michael S. Hamilton, ‘Taking the Measure of the Evangelical Resurgence, 1942–92’, in D. G. Hart (ed.), Reckoning with the Past: Historical Essays on American Evangelicalism from the Institute for the Study of American Evangelicals (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1995), pp. 395–412. Eighmy, Churches in Captivity, p. 166.
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25 James Forrester, ‘Federal Aid to Higher Education and the Church Related College’, National Conference on Church–State Relations, NAE, Winona Lake, Indiana, 6–8 March 1963, pp. 1, 6, NAE records. 26 Monsma, Sacred and Secular, pp. 68, 72–3. 27 Eighmy, Churches in Captivity, pp. 160, 165; Coughlin, Church and State, pp. 81–2, 108–10, 160; Lowell, Church–State Fraud, pp. 148, 170–1. 28 R. L. Decker, ‘Government Grants and Loans to Charitable Institutions’, National Conference on Church–State Relations, NAE, Winona Lake, Indiana, 6–8 March 1963, p. 5, NAE records. 29 Netting, ‘Secular and Religious Funding’, pp. 590–1; Monsma, Sacred and Secular, pp. 72–3. 30 Nichols, Uncertain Alliance, pp. 92–3, 211; Carpenter, Revive Us Again, p. 182; Report of the Executive Director, NAE World Relief Commission, Inc. Wendell L. Rockey to the Executive Committee and the Board of Administration of NAE, Los Angeles, California, 4 April 1967, NAE records; Monsma, Sacred and Secular, pp. 72–3. 31 N. J. Demerath III and Rhys H. Williams, ‘A Mythical Past and Uncertain Future’, in Thomas Robbins and Roland Robertson (eds), Church–State Relations: Tensions and Transitions (New Brunswick, NJ: Transition Books, 1987), pp. 77–90; Monsma, Sacred and Secular, pp. 30–1. 32 Coughlin, Church and State, pp. 44–8, 129. Quoted in Lowell, Church–State Fraud, p. 189. 33 Anna Greenberg, ‘Doing Whose Work? Faith-based Organizations and Government Partnerships’, in Bane, Who Will Provide?, p. 180; Monsma, Sacred and Secular, pp. 31–41; Hall and Burke, ‘Historical Statistics’, p. 17. 34 E. Theodore Bachmann (ed.), Churches and Social Welfare, vol. III, The Emerging Perspective: Response and Prospect (Proceedings of the First Conference on the Churches and Social Welfare, National Council of Churches in Christ in the USA, 1956), p. 156; Netting, ‘Secular and Religious Funding’, p. 594; Monsma, Sacred and Secular, pp. 11–12; Lowell, Church–State Fraud, pp. 147, 177, 184–5, 212; Coughlin, Church and State, p. 57. 35 Marc Bendick Jr, ‘Privatizing the Delivery of Social Welfare Services: An Idea to Be Taken Seriously’, in Sheila B. Kamerman and Alfred J. Kahn (eds), Privatization and the Welfare State (Princeton University Press, 1989), p. 101; see also Ralph M. Kramer, Voluntary Agencies in the Welfare State (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1981), p. 72; Salamon, Partners, pp. 28–30; Smith and Lipsky, Nonprofits for Hire, pp. 203–4. 36 Salamon, Partners, p. 19. 37 Ibid., pp. 19, 93–6, 99; Monsma, Sacred and Secular, p. 5. 38 Smith and Stone, ‘Unexpected Consequences’, pp. 234–5, 240; Smith and Lipsky, Nonprofits for Hire, pp. 16–17, 53, 60; Arnold Gurin, ‘Governmental Responsibility and Privatization: Examples from Four Social Services’, in Kamerman and Kahn, Privatization, pp. 181, 183; Salamon, Partners, p. 23; Hall, ‘Careers’, pp. 380–1. 39 Monsma, Sacred and Secular, pp. 82–5, 91, 94–8. Quote on p. 95. 40 Agenda (‘Miscellaneous’), Executive Committee of the WRC, WRC Headquarters, Valley Forge, 13–14 November 1973, p. 9, NAE records. 41 Monsma, Sacred and Secular, pp. 78, 95, 97–8. 42 Ibid., pp. 74–5, 84, 90, 93. 43 Nichols, Uncertain Alliance, p. 206.
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11 ‘THE PERMANENT REVOLUTION’? The New York intellectuals, the CIA and the cultural Cold War Hugh Wilford
A curious amalgam of left elements, anarchist elements, nihilist elements, opportunist elements, all styling themselves conservative, in a regular Narrenschiffe [ship of fools]. . . . The great effort of this new Right is to get itself accepted as normal . . . and this, it seems to me, must be scotched, if it’s not already too late. Mary McCarthy on the American Committee for Cultural Freedom, 19521
It is by now something of a commonplace that the ‘neoconservative’ intellectual movement associated with the administrations of George W. Bush is partly descended from the ‘New York intellectuals’, the community of antiStalinist leftists who dominated American high culture in the early years of the Cold War.2 One continuity between the two groups is ideological: the zeal with which the New York intellectuals once urged a US crusade against Soviet communism is now brought to the prosecution of the ‘War on Terror’. Another is tactical, with ‘neocon’ organisations such as the Project for the New American Century (PNAC) routinely employing polemical devices pioneered on the Old Left during the 1930s, such as issuing public letters over a long list of celebrity signatories. Finally, there is a direct bloodline, with the offspring of New York intellectuals showing up in the ranks of the neocons, the most obvious example being William Kristol, former VicePresident Dan Quayle’s Chief of Staff, founder of PNAC and son of Irving Kristol, the leading New York intellectual often referred to as the ‘godfather’ of neoconservatism.3 The question of precisely how much key neoconservative ideas are influenced by Trotskyism, the principal ideology of the New York intellectual community in its formative phase, is a controversial one: for example, the claim of writer Michael Lind that the neocon idea of the ‘global democratic revolution’ originated in the Trotskyist 194
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concept of the ‘permanent revolution’ has been hotly contested by historian Alan Wald.4 Nonetheless, there is general agreement that there are strong similarities between the characteristic beliefs and rhetoric of the literary anticommunists of the early Cold War era and the ‘defense intellectuals’ of more recent times. The aim of this chapter is not to explore this intellectual continuity per se but rather to use it as a jumping-off point for an examination of the relationship in the first years of the Cold War between American intellectuals and the US state – or, to be more exact, the government agency chiefly responsible for mobilising intellectuals in the Cold War, the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA). In doing so, the chapter will necessarily concentrate on two organisations that have already received a great deal of attention from historians of the ‘cultural Cold War’, the superpower struggle for the hearts and minds of the world’s intellectuals: the Parisbased Congress for Cultural Freedom (CCF), the CIA’s main front operation in the cultural field; and the CCF’s US affiliate, the New Yorkbased American Committee for Cultural Freedom (ACCF).5 It will also develop an argument that I have already made in previous writings: that, contrary to the images of ‘string-pulling’ or ‘tune-calling’ often employed in accounts of the cultural Cold War, in fact those American intellectuals involved proved surprisingly self-willed, so much so that their relations with the CIA were constantly troubled by tension and conflict.6 The current chapter will, however, attempt to carry this argument a stage further by suggesting that there was an ideological dimension to the disharmony between intellectuals and intelligence officers that complicates our understanding both of the cultural Cold War and the state–private network. Specifically, the New York intellectuals who dominated the ACCF displayed an embryonic neoconservative consciousness that put them at odds with the predominantly liberal anticommunist disposition of the CIA personnel responsible for managing them. In the historical short term, it was the latter impulse that held the upper hand, not least because it was the CIA who controlled the purse strings; later, however, as recent events have demonstrated, it would be the neoconservative project that would win out.
The New York intellectuals and the origins of the cultural Cold War To depict the CIA as calling the tune of American intellectuals is not only to downplay the problems that plagued the US effort in the cultural Cold War, it also fails to take into account the possibility that intellectuals influenced the views of government officials as well as vice versa. Such a scenario perhaps seems more plausible at the current moment, given the prominence of neoconservative intellectuals in the Bush administrations. It is also of a piece with two recent developments in historical scholarship 195
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about the Cold War. One of these is the importance historians such as Ellen Schrecker have attributed to private anticommunist networks in generating the domestic Red Scare of the Truman–Eisenhower era.7 The other is the growing interest shown by Cold War scholars (for example, Lynn Hinds and Theodore Windt) in the role of ideology and, in particular, ideology’s discursive embodiment as rhetoric, in shaping American attitudes towards the Soviet Union during the late 1940s and early 1950s.8 The Cold War was, after all, for the most part a peculiarly abstract conflict, one defined as much by thoughts and words as by military or geopolitical factors. As private citizens who specialised in the creation and dissemination of anti-Stalinist concepts and language, the New York intellectuals might therefore be regarded as having made a more significant contribution to the growth of what might be called ‘Cold War consciousness’ in America than has previously been supposed. It is possible to identify three major forms of anticommunist activism practised by the New York intellectuals during the first years of the Cold War. One of these was writing stylistically brilliant (but often, it has to be said, analytically crude) essays that were then published in one or other of the high-profile magazines which served as mouthpieces for their intellectual community. The most prestigious of these, the literary journal Partisan Review, which had begun life as a cultural organ of the New York Communist Party before transforming itself in 1937 into a rallying point for leftist intellectuals disillusioned with Stalinism, harshly denounced American liberals whom it deemed to be insufficiently antiSoviet (one editorial even alleged the existence of a ‘Liberal Fifth Column’).9 Another, the labour-oriented news magazine New Leader, which as well as regularly publishing New York intellectuals functioned as an American base for Russian social democrats or ‘Mensheviks’ who had fled the Bolshevik revolution, insistently and ingeniously portrayed the Soviet Union as a profound threat to US national security, helping to introduce into American discourse such axiomatic Cold War concepts as ‘Red Fascism’ and ‘totalitarianism’.10 Finally, Commentary, a new arrival on the New York scene in the late 1940s, carried the fight to the organised American Jewish community, publishing a series of provocative polemics by younger intellectuals such as Irving Kristol.11 Thanks to a combination of factors, including their undoubted intellectual virtuosity, expert knowledge of communism and the Soviet Union, and fortuitous proximity to the headquarters of ‘middlebrow’ national media such as the Time-Life empire, these magazines came to exert a powerful influence on American political culture at mid-century. As well as moulding the discursive environment of Cold War American politics through their writings, individual New York intellectuals attempted to exert a direct influence upon the making of US foreign policy. The most conspicuous example of this was provided by the ex-Trotskyist 196
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New York University (NYU) philosophy professor James Burnham, another ‘founding father’ of the neoconservative movement. As correspondence scattered throughout his private papers at the Hoover Institution in California reveals, Burnham during the late 1940s and early 1950s was in constant contact with acquaintances in the CIA’s semi-autonomous covert action arm, the Office of Policy Coordination (OPC), providing advice on, as E. Howard Hunt later put it, ‘virtually every subject of interest to our organization’12 and acting as liaison with other ex-communist intellectuals, such as the novelist Arthur Koestler.13 The same documents also reveal Burnham as increasingly dissatisfied with the liberal Cold War doctrine of ‘containment’ and attracted instead to the notion of an aggressive campaign against communism or ‘liberation’.14 This critical attitude towards official policy was shared by another New York intellectual and member of the NYU philosophy department, Sidney Hook, who performed regular consultancy work for the Director of Central Intelligence (DCI), Walter Bedell Smith, and who, on more than one occasion, denounced US government agencies for failing to take an ‘aggressive approach’ in their response to anti-American Soviet propaganda.15 In other words, Burnham and Hook were not content merely to advise official opinion; they were actively trying to shape it. A third form of political intervention favoured by the New York intellectuals was the creation of organisations intended to combat (yet partly modelled on) Stalinist-controlled front groups. This practice was traceable to the late 1930s, when Sidney Hook founded the Committee for Cultural Freedom to protest ‘totalitarian’ acts of ‘cultural dictatorship’. (As several historians have noted, some New York intellectuals, such as the thenTrotskyist journalist Dwight Macdonald, thought the Committee too ‘negative’, joining instead the League for Cultural Freedom and Socialism, which put equal emphasis on anti-Stalinism and radical activism).16 Although this tradition fell into abeyance during the Second World War, it was revived soon afterwards by Macdonald and novelist-critic Mary McCarthy (both of whom had by this point abandoned Trotskyism for anarchism) in the shape of the Europe–America Groups (EAG), an ambitious attempt to create an international support network for independent radicals. With the Cold War heating up, however, and the newly created Cominform striving to capture the ideological allegiance of western intellectuals, the EAG was superseded by a more single-mindedly anticommunist enterprise, Friends of Russian Freedom (FRF), a coalition of various leftist elements, including Mensheviks, ex-Trotskyists and Lovestoneites (of whom more below), dedicated to the principle that ordinary Russians were victims rather than accomplices of Stalinism and could therefore be recruited as allies of the western front against communism.17 In the event, FRF proved even shorter-lived than the EAG, for in March 1949 it was overtaken by a startling new development: the staging at New 197
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York’s Waldorf-Astoria hotel of a cultural conference modelled on the same lines as the ‘peace’ rallies that the Cominform had recently orchestrated in various European cities. At a meeting of FRF, Hook proposed the formation of a committee ‘to expose and counteract the work’ of the Waldorf gathering.18 The result was the launch of an even more aggressive anticommunist organisation, Americans for Intellectual Freedom (AIF), whose activities directly inspired the creation of the Congress for Cultural Freedom in West Berlin the following year, as well as preparing the ground for the formation of the CCF’s American affiliate, the ACCF.
The professionalisation of the cultural Cold War In other words, the CCF was more than merely the invention of the CIA; it also sprang from a well-developed tradition of spontaneous self-organisation on the anti-Stalinist left. Viewed from this perspective, it is possible to see the cultural Cold War as not simply an ideological projection of American–Soviet rivalry but also as a battle in an ongoing civil war within the modern western intelligentsia, between Stalinists on the one hand and various communist opposition groups on the other. Much the same can be said, incidentally, of other elements of the state–private network, perhaps most obviously labour, in which anti-Stalinist political warfare operations carried out by ex-communists located within the foreign policy apparatus of the American Federation of Labor (AFL), in particular Jay Lovestone, preceded official US activities in the same field by several years. For that matter, Lovestone, leader of the main communist right opposition group, the Lovestoneites, can be credited with helping to invent another important concept in the US’s Cold War rhetorical arsenal – the notion of ‘American exceptionalism’, a term he had used during factional disputes within the Communist Party USA during the 1920s. This is not to claim, however, that ex-communists retained control of the covert state–private network after the CIA began funding it. As has been revealed in pioneering research by Anthony Carew, the early 1950s witnessed intense competition between the Lovestoneites of the AFL and officers of the OPC to manage anticommunist labour operations, a struggle which was eventually won by the latter.19 In part, this was a straightforward ‘turf war’, with the veteran anti-Stalinist Lovestone resenting the efforts of younger and less experienced Cold Warriors (he sneeringly referred to OPC personnel as the ‘fizz-kids’) to muscle in on his territory. There were, however, other, less immediately apparent facets to the conflict, including class and ethnic tensions – the Lovestoneites were predominantly of proletarian, immigrant stock, while the upper echelons of the CIA were dominated by former military top brass and wealthy corporate lawyers – and, most significantly from the point of view of this chapter, ideological factors. It is telling that the single most divisive issue in 198
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this turbulent relationship was the determination of the intelligence professionals to involve officers of the AFL’s main organisational rival, the Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO), and in particular the CIO’s new president, Walter Reuther, in its covert labour operations. Lovestone firmly believed that Reuther, an ex-socialist turned liberal anticommunist, lacked the expertise and dedication that he, an ex-communist, brought to the anti-Soviet cause. Turning back to the intellectuals, it is possible to detect similar forces at work in the early course of the cultural Cold War, that is, a trend towards the professionalisation of covert operations and the elimination of the ex-communist influence. The first sign of this was the removal of Arthur Koestler from the governing councils of the CCF. The former Comintern officer had been the dominant personality at the CCF’s founding conference in June 1950 and clearly intended having a say in the organisation’s affairs as it was established on a permanent basis in the months afterwards. The Congress, he believed, should concentrate on anticommunist political warfare, staging Comintern-style mass rallies and propagandising behind the Iron Curtain.20 For this reason, he backed Louis Fischer, another ex-Comintern officer (and a fellow contributor to the classic statement of disillusioned ex-communism, The God That Failed) for the post of Secretary-General. Fischer’s candidacy also received the support of the Lovestoneite operative Irving Brown, at this stage the main conduit of OPC funds to the Congress. Gradually, however, it became apparent that the CCF’s emergent apparat did not share Koestler’s vision. In particular, Michael Josselson, the OPC agent responsible for running the Congress from its new headquarters in Paris, inclined to the view that, rather than engaging in spectacular political confrontations, the organisation should adopt a ‘soft-sell’ strategy, winning intellectuals to the western cause in the Cold War by fostering a sense of cultural community between America and Europe. In November 1950 Fischer was dumped and Josselson’s friend, the Russian-born composer Nicolas Nabokov, chosen instead. Not only did Nabokov share Josselson’s preference for cultural as opposed to political warfare, he was also the favoured candidate in Washington, where during the war years he had belonged to a social circle that included such anticommunist government officials as George Kennan. Plans for a mass rally in Paris in the summer of 1951 were also abandoned in favour of a festival celebrating western cultural achievements of the twentieth century. Koestler duly resigned from the CCF in July, telling a friend that he had been ‘made to withdraw in a gentle and effective way’.21 A not dissimilar fate befell James Burnham. Like Koestler, Burnham wanted to see the CCF using Comintern-style political tactics in the struggle for hearts and minds. Reflecting his growing political conservatism, he also believed the organisation should function as a true 199
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‘anti-Communist front’, embracing the ‘non-Socialist Right as well as the traditional Left’.22 He was therefore dismayed by signs that key personnel within the Paris secretariat, such as Director of Publications François Bondy (ironically, one of his own nominees), intended appealing solely to the centre-left. Burnham interpreted this development as evidence of factional meddling in the CCF’s affairs by the Lovestoneites of the AFL. Hence, when the Gaullist Daniel Apert’s position as head of the Paris office was usurped in January 1951 by unionist Jean Enoch, he wrote to CIA officer Gerald Miller claiming that Josselson had fallen into ‘a political trap’ and predicting that the Congress would be reduced ‘to a province of the Lovestone empire’.23 In fact, the Lovestoneites were withdrawing from the CCF by this point, partly as a result of their deteriorating relations with the OPC, and partly because they shared Burnham and Koestler’s preference for political warfare. The truth was that the Congress’ growing emphasis upon culture and the non-communist left (or ‘NCL’, the abbreviation used at the time in Washington) was the result of OPC agent Michael Josselson’s influence on the organisation, which was itself part of a wider drive by the CIA towards the professionalisation of citizen-group operations.
‘A deep sickness in New York’: The ACCF In part, the CCF’s bias towards the NCL arose from expediency. Discredited by its association with fascism, the right was on the political retreat in western Europe and, in any case, its anticommunism could be taken for granted. Moreover, socialists, social democrats and liberals had more direct personal experience of communism, something that could be turned to tactical advantage in the cultural Cold War. However, this was not merely a marriage of convenience. It is possible to detect a definite ideological sympathy between NCL intellectuals on the one hand and, on the other, those intelligence officers responsible for managing organisations such as the CCF, especially after responsibility for citizen group operations moved to the newly created International Organizations Division (IOD) in 1951. After leaving the CIA in 1954, IOD’s first head, Tom Braden, became a liberal newspaper publisher and political commentator. His successor, Cord Meyer, was an ardent internationalist who had previously helped create the American Veterans Committee as a liberal alternative to the American Legion. Of course, it would not do to overstate the liberalism of the CIA. Such attitudes were by no means universal in the Agency, not even within its covert operations departments, but they do appear to have set the ideological tone in the IOD. In other words, there is a great deal of truth in the argument recently made by Giles Scott-Smith that the CCF should be viewed as an element in the post-war American project of internationalising the ‘corporate–liberal 200
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synthesis’ that had been achieved at home during the years of the New Deal, a sort of cultural counterpart to the Marshall Plan.24 Still, this was not the only political tendency at work in the covert state–private network. In the labour field, for example, while the liberal internationalism of Walter Reuther and the CIO furnished the dominant theme of the official US diplomatic effort, the crudely anticommunist, business unionism of George Meany’s AFL remained a strong undercurrent, even after the merger of the two federations in 1955. Nor, for that matter, was the influence of the AFL’s Lovestoneite foreign policy personnel ever entirely eradicated: Lovestone personally retained a surprising degree of control over such official business as the appointment of US Labor Attachés.25 Similarly, in the cultural realm, the CIA’s attempt to clip the wings of excommunists such as Koestler and Burnham was only partially successful, as can be seen by examining the history of the CCF’s New York-based US affiliate, the ACCF. The ACCF was intended by the CIA to serve two practical purposes: providing (as Tom Braden later put it) ‘the impression of some American participation in the European operation’ and, after the withdrawal of the Lovestoneites from the cultural field, serving as a conduit for secret subsidies to its parent organisation in Paris.26 (The Agency had yet to perfect the method it would later use for covertly funding its client citizen groups, that is, by creating ‘dummy’ charitable foundations to act as ‘passthroughs’.) Again, it is possible to infer something of the scale and nature of this ‘backstopping’ operation from the Burnham papers. These reveal the ACCF’s Executive Secretary, Pearl Kluger (another ex-Trotskyist), engaged in a number of secret transactions on the CCF’s behalf, for example, transmitting $2,000 to the organisers of a conference in New Delhi, the sum intended to secure a foothold for the Congress on the Indian subcontinent.27 The same documents also hint at some of the operational problems involved in this complex and devious exercise. Kluger, faced with the task of managing the international Congress’ finances while at the same time providing cover for the ACCF by organising committee and public meetings in New York, felt increasingly under-resourced and overburdened. ‘When I complained to our friend that Santa Claus did not come down the chimney this month’, she told Burnham in March 1951, ‘he said he had not understood that this was a six-months Christmas’.28 Then there were the security risks involved, with Kluger on one occasion reporting to Burnham that she had ‘played dumb’ when ‘asked numerous questions concerning the financing of the Committee’ by an ‘over-eager’ visitor claiming to be from the ‘State Department’.29 Possibly it was reports such as these that persuaded the CIA of the need for extra security measures when the Committee began handling the large sums of money required to mount Nicolas Nabokov’s Paris arts festival in 1952. A ‘separate bank account and room’ were arranged to ensure that festival business 201
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was not ‘mixed up in the other activities of the organization’, and an Agency officer, Albert Donnelly, was assigned to New York to undertake ‘all necessary negotiations’.30 The IOD was by now experimenting with fake foundations as a means of concealing its clandestine patronage, in this instance the Farfield Foundation. So successful was this innovation that it was soon decided to retain the Farfield as the principal pass-through for all future CCF activities. As far as the CIA was concerned, the ACCF had now served its main purpose. Unfortunately for the Agency, this view was not shared by the ACCF itself. By 1952 the organisation had grown into a high-profile body of several hundred members engaged in a busy programme of public events. The extent to which this membership knew of the CIA’s behind-the-scenes role is still a matter of dispute, but what is clear is that most, if not all, of the Committee’s officers were ‘witting’.31 Still, this does not appear to have prevented them from treating the organisation as if it were an authentic intellectual committee, indeed, as if it were their own. The most obvious sign of this lack of appreciation of the ACCF’s intended tactical function was the organisation’s support for the two strategic options advocated by Koestler and Burnham in 1950 yet rejected by the CCF’s leadership: the adoption of an overtly political position and the inclusion of conservative elements in a united front against communism. The first of these policies, which reflected the intensity of the New York intellectuals’ anti-Stalinism and conviction that they knew best how to combat communism, even led the ACCF to criticise the tactics of its parent body. Sometimes this criticism was implicit, as when the ACCF protested Soviet violations of human rights or rebutted anti-American communist propaganda to which the CCF had not responded.32 At other times the Committee explicitly questioned the relevance to the Cold War of the Congress’ cultural activities: Nabokov’s Paris festival was a particular target for attack by the New York intellectuals, who clearly thought that the neutralist atmosphere of the French capital was rubbing off on the CCF’s officers.33 The CCF itself was understandably annoyed by these assaults from within its own camp, and took an increasingly stern line with its American affiliate during the early 1950s. Sidney Hook, the dominant personality on the ACCF, found himself in the position of mediator between the two organisations, trying to explain the CCF’s cultural strategy to his comrades in New York while at the same time defending the ACCF’s hardline political pronouncements to the Congress’ Executive Committee in Paris.34 The other main tendency of the ACCF, towards a broad, inclusive membership policy – a late victory for Burnham, who had advised Hook to advertise the organisation ‘outside of the old radical and avant-garde circles’ among ‘more conventional “American” types’35 – resulted in a body which resembled, in the apt phrase of historian William L. O’Neill, 202
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‘a Popular Front of anti-Stalinists, something like the League of American Writers in reverse’.36 At first the Committee’s leftist and conservative members rubbed along together, perhaps in part because potentially disruptive individuals on the left wing of the New York intellectual community were either not invited or refused to join. By 1952, however, the question of what position the Committee should take on McCarthyism was causing major ructions. The controversy which engulfed the organisation following Max Eastman’s defence of the Wisconsin Senator at a public meeting in March 1952 has been described in detail elsewhere, so will not be gone over again here.37 One thing worth noting, though, is the fairly clear doctrinal lines along which the schism occurred. On one side, if not positively defending McCarthy then at least downplaying the threat he posed to American cultural freedom, were former communists such as Burnham, Karl Wittfogel and Eugene Lyons. On the other, urging the ACCF to concentrate on criticising McCarthyism rather than attacking domestic communism, were socialists and liberals such as Arthur Schlesinger Jr and Norman Thomas, plus dissident New York intellectuals Dwight Macdonald and Mary McCarthy. Although not entirely clear cut, the factional dimensions of the dispute were evident enough to those involved. ‘By and large’, remarked Chicagoan novelist James T. Farrell, ‘the New York ex-radical intellectuals are not likely to be strongly antiMcCarthy’.38 Schlesinger, who the previous year had been hissed when giving a ‘mild, Anglo-Saxon address’ to an ACCF gathering of ‘ex-Coms’, agreed.39 ‘There is some deep sickness in certain sectors of the New York intellectuals’, he told Macdonald, ‘particularly in the Commentary crowd’.40 The archetypal Cold War liberal, Schlesinger was also in regular contact with senior officers of the CIA, briefing them about developments within the ACCF. When Deputy Director of Plans Frank Wisner learned about the row over McCarthyism – an extremely sensitive subject for the Agency due both to its capacity for arousing anti-Americanism abroad and the threat to liberal elements it posed at home – he was furious. ‘I can understand how . . . a group of American private citizens interested in cultural freedom would feel that it would have to take a position on McCarthyism’, he told a CIA colleague. ‘However, that is not the nature of the American Committee for Cultural Freedom which . . . was inspired if not put together by this Agency for the purpose of providing cover and backstopping for the European effort’. Steps had to be taken immediately to repair the damage. Ideally, Wisner would have preferred ‘that the entire debate on this subject, from the beginning, be expunged from the record’. If this was not possible, then at the very least, ‘an appeal to unity and concord . . . might be successful’.41 In the event, the CIA chose a third course of action, that is, secretly intervening in the ACCF via such moderates as Schlesinger in an effort to 203
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check the excesses of the hardliners. The latter persisted in their ways however. An attempt to settle the McCarthy issue once and for all by publishing a scholarly monograph on the subject in 1954 led instead to the noisy resignations of Burnham and Eastman. By September of that year, Michael Josselson had decided that the ACCF was a liability and terminated all financial assistance from the international Congress, the Committee’s main source of financial support after the Farfield Foundation had stopped funding the previous year.42 Sidney Hook, however, on this occasion siding with New York rather than Paris, approached DCI Allen Dulles directly and secured a grant of $10,000 from the Farfield.43 Cord Meyer explained the reasoning for Dulles’ decision to a puzzled Schlesinger in the following words: ‘Our hope is that the breathing space provided by this assistance can be used by . . . yourself and the other sensible ones to reconstitute the Executive Committee and draft an intelligent program that might gain real support from the Foundations’.44 Meyer’s hope was in vain. Despite attempts by Schlesinger and other liberals to rein them in, the ‘hot-heads’ kept up their calls for a policy of stiffer resistance to the Soviet threat. In his memoirs, Sidney Hook tells how on one occasion the ACCF even debated petitioning the international Congress to intervene in Indonesia against President Ahmed Sukarno (Hook succeeded in dissuading his colleagues from this ‘open foray into politics’ and struck any reference to it from the minutes).45 Similarly, despite Burnham’s departure in 1954, factional warfare carried on between New York intellectuals obsessed with the communist threat and liberal/socialist types more concerned with the stultifying cultural effects of excessive anticommunism. The pressure of attempting to unify these warring camps eventually got to the Committee’s Chairman from 1954, James Farrell, who resigned dramatically in 1957 after an apparently drunken outburst against US Cold War foreign policy.46 Coming soon after a particularly acrimonious public altercation between the ACCF and one of the CCF’s Honorary Chairmen, Bertrand Russell,47 this incident sounded the death knell of the US affiliate (a cable from Farrell to Paris suggests that he might have been put up to his resignation by Josselson, who had not give up hope of the ‘unnecessary’ New York outfit dying through lack of funds: ‘Have broken up American Committee. Your advantage. Have kept my word’48). The ACCF thus went into suspended animation in late 1957. However, even after that point it remained the focus of New York literary in-fighting. Reactivated as a tax shelter for Partisan Review in 1958, its Chair Diana Trilling became embroiled in a nasty feud with Review editor William Phillips, leading to her resignation in 1960.49 The same year saw Sidney Hook participating in his last meeting of the international Congress’ Executive Committee. ‘My inactivity by this time was not unwelcomed’, he later wrote, ‘since I was regarded 204
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by the Parisian directorate as a representative of the obnoxious American Committee for Cultural Freedom’.50
Neoconservatism redux It would not do to exaggerate the problems that recalcitrant ex-communists caused the CCF. Overall, the organisation was extremely effective in its mission of appealing to the international NCL. Take the case of Britain. True, the CCF’s early attempts to establish a presence within British intellectual life met with indifference and hostility. Even after the creation of a national affiliate, the British Society for Cultural Freedom, and the successful launch of the Congress’ London-based, English-language organ, Encounter, there were those in Britain who kept their distance, such as Bertrand Russell. Nevertheless, in the atmosphere of austerity which prevailed during the early Cold War period, the appearance of such a generous cultural patron as the CCF was bound to be greeted with some enthusiasm (Isaiah Berlin noticed a great many ‘English intellectuals with outstretched hands making eyes at affluent American widows’), especially among the cash-strapped literati of Bloomsbury.51 Most importantly, there was a natural affinity between the Congress and the ‘revisionist’, social democratic intellectuals who made up the right wing of the British Labour Party, the ‘Gaitskellites’. While the CIA did not tell the Gaitskellites what to think or say, its covert support for such ventures as Encounter, a regular publishing venue for the foremost revisionist thinker Anthony Crosland, did provide them with invaluable institutional backing in their campaign to reduce the influence over the Labour Party of traditional socialism. It also reinforced the pro-American impulses of the Labour right, a development whose after-effects arguably are still being felt today.52 If the unruly behaviour of the New York intellectuals did not derail the cultural, NCL project of the CCF in the short term, it did provide a foretaste of the events that would lead eventually to the dissolution of the CIA’s covert network in the late 1960s. Powerful though it was, the liberal, anticommunist consensus of which the Congress was an intellectual expression depended on the cooperation, or co-optation, of both the political left and right in Cold War America. As has been well documented, the emergence of the New Left and its growing identification with the movement against the war in Vietnam were crucial factors in the unravelling of the ‘New Deal order’. In the realm of CIA covert operations, it was New Left-inspired investigative journalists who exposed the secret funding of student groups, labour and, of course, intellectuals, thereby effectively wrecking such organisations as the CCF. Less written about by historians, but no less important historically, was the growth during the 1960s of conservative discontent with the way in which liberals were waging the 205
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Cold War. Although the picture is still unclear, shrouded as it is in continuing official secrecy, there are strong indications that the ‘revelations’ of CIA front activities were partly orchestrated by elements within the Agency who disapproved of the NCL strategy.53 Certainly, the embarrassment of such CIA agents as Michael Josselson produced an ‘I told you so’ attitude on the part of neoconservatives such as James Burnham who had always regarded the Agency’s alliance with the NCL as a ‘political error’.54 If the history of the ACCF provides some clues as to the causes of the CCF’s eventual demise, it also reveals the modern neoconservative movement in embryonic form. The Committee’s leading lights included such neocon ‘ancestors’ as James Burnham, Sidney Hook and Irving Kristol. Its calls for direct political warfare against regimes perceived to be part of a monolithic communist conspiracy are reminiscent of later demands for unilateral US intervention against ‘Islamist’ states suspected of having links to Al Qaeda. Neoconservative denunciations of the post-bourgeois, decadent ‘new class’ echo earlier attacks by New York intellectuals on middle-class, middlebrow liberals who were fatally soft on Stalinism. Even the ACCF’s contempt for the effete Europeans of the CCF invites comparison with the hostility of neocons to Bloomsbury (it was perhaps no coincidence that some of the Committee’s sharpest barbs were reserved for Bertrand Russell and the London literati associated with Encounter). This is not to mention the strong organisational, tactical and rhetorical similarities between the ACCF and later neoconservative bodies: the Committee on the Present Danger, the Committee for the Free World and the Project for a New American Century. Given the glimmerings of neoconservatism detectable in the ACCF, and the liberalism of many CIA officers involved in state–private covert operations, it is tempting to view the American effort in the cultural Cold War as an uneasy alliance between two distinct ideological formations, that is, ex-communist, proto-neoconservatives on the one hand, and liberal anticommunists with links to the European NCL on the other. Although the organisational and rhetorical forms of the US campaign were largely created by the former, it was the latter, with their influence over secret official funding agencies such as the IOD, who subsequently dictated the politics of the state–private network. Later, however, with the breakdown of the liberal order and the rise of the New Right, the ex-communist intellectuals, whose involvement in the ‘vital center’ had always been expedient and problematic, gained access to new sources of patronage, that is, conservative corporations, foundations and think-tanks. This meant that they now had a genuinely private institutional infrastructure from which they could themselves launch a bid for control of the state foreign policymaking apparatus, which they did once during the administration of Ronald Reagan, then again, with even more success, after 2001. To 206
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conclude, then, rather than merely playing a tune composed for them by the CIA, the New York intellectuals helped write the official score of the early Cold War, gave it their own interpretation and, finally, developed a new theme that drowned out that of their patrons.
Notes and bibliography 1 Quoted in Frances Stonor Saunders, Who Paid the Piper? The CIA and the Cultural Cold War (London: Granta, 1999), p. 208, emphasis in original. 2 The principal works on the New York intellectuals are Alexander Bloom, Prodigal Sons: The New York Intellectuals and Their World (Oxford University Press, 1986); Terry A. Cooney, The Rise of the New York Intellectuals: Partisan Review and Its Circle (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1986); Neil Jumonville, Critical Crossings: The New York Intellectuals in Post-war America (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991); Harvey M. Teres, Renewing the Left: Politics, Imagination, and the New York Intellectuals (Oxford University Press, 1996); Alan M. Wald, The New York Intellectuals: The Rise and Decline of the Anti-Stalinist Left from the 1930s to the 1980s (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1987); and Hugh Wilford, The New York Intellectuals: From Vanguard to Institution (Manchester University Press, 1995). 3 See, for example, Michael Lind, ‘The Weird Men Behind George W. Bush’s War’, New Statesman, 7 April 2003; or Michael Lind, ‘A Tragedy of Errors’, The Nation, 23 February 2004. 4 See the debate between Lind and Wald carried on the History News Network in June 2003: http://www.hnn.us/articles/1536.html (accessed 19 July 2004). 5 See Christopher Lasch, The Agony of the American Left (New York: Vintage, 1968), chap. 3; Peter Coleman, The Liberal Conspiracy: The Congress for Cultural Freedom and the Struggle for the Mind of Post-war Europe (New York: Free Press, 1989); Pierre Gremion, Intelligence de l’anticommunisme: le congrès pour la liberté de la culture à Paris (1950–1975) (Paris: Fayard, 1995); Michael Hochgeschwender, Freiheit in der Offensive? Der Kongress für kulturelle Beziehungen und die Deutschen (Munich: Oldenbourg, 1998); Saunders, Who Paid the Piper?; and Giles Scott-Smith, The Politics of Apolitical Culture: The Congress for Cultural Freedom, the CIA and Post-war American Hegemony (London: Routledge, 2002). 6 See, for example, Hugh Wilford, ‘Playing the CIA’s Tune? The New Leader and the Cultural Cold War’, Diplomatic History, 27, 1 (2003), pp. 15–34. 7 Ellen Schrecker, Many Are the Crimes: McCarthyism in America (Princeton University Press, 1998), chap. 2. 8 Lynn Boyd Hinds and Theodore Otto Windt Jr, The Cold War as Rhetoric: The Beginnings, 1945–1950 (New York: Praeger, 1991). 9 ‘The Liberal Fifth Column’, Partisan Review, 13, 3 (Summer 1946), pp. 279–93. 10 See, for example, David J. Dallin, ‘Concentration Camps in Soviet Russia’, New Leader ‘World Events’ pamphlet, 29 March 1947. 11 Irving Kristol, ‘Civil Liberties: 1952 – A Study in Confusion’, Commentary, 13, 3 (March 1952), pp. 228–36. 12 Quoted in Saunders, Who Paid the Piper?, p. 87. 13 James Burnham to Arthur Koestler, 14 September 1950, box 6, folder 49, James Burnham papers, Hoover Institution, Stanford University (hereafter Burnham papers). For more information about Burnham’s consultancy work for the OPC, see Daniel Kelly, James Burnham and the Struggle for the World: A Life (Wilmington, DE: ISI Books, 2002), chap. 7.
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14 See, for example, James Burnham, ‘The Strategy of the Politburo and the Problem of American Counter-Strategy’ (n.d. ?1950), box 2, folder 13, Burnham papers. 15 Sidney Hook to Harold M. Janis, 2 April 1948, box 29, folder 12, Sidney Hook papers, Hoover Institution, Stanford University (hereafter Hook papers). 16 See Judy Kutulas, The Long War: The Intellectual People’s Front and AntiStalinism, 1930–1940 (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1995), pp. 157–63. 17 See Hugh Wilford, The CIA, the British Left and the Cold War: Calling the Tune? (London: Frank Cass, 2003), pp. 30–4. 18 Friends of Russian Freedom minutes, 4 March 1949, series 1, box 17, Dwight Macdonald papers, Sterling Memorial Library, Yale University (hereafter Macdonald papers). 19 Anthony Carew, ‘The American Labor Movement in Fizzland: The Free Trade Union Committee and the CIA’, Labor History, 39, 1 (1998), pp. 25–42. 20 Arthur Koestler to Bertrand Russell, 22 September 1950, MSS2345/1, Arthur Koestler papers, Edinburgh University (hereafter Koestler papers). 21 Quoted in David Cesarani, Arthur Koestler: The Homeless Mind (London: William Heineman, 1998), pp. 382–3. 22 James Burnham to François Bondy, 6 February 1951, box 8, folder 6, Burnham papers. 23 James Burnham, ‘For: Gerald Miller’, 22 January 1951, box 8, folder 3, Burnham papers. 24 See Scott-Smith, Politics of Apolitical Culture. 25 See Wilford, CIA, British Left and Cold War, chap. 5. 26 Quoted in Saunders, Who Paid the Piper?, p. 203. 27 Anonymous, ‘Cable Received from Josselson’, 14 February 1951, box 8, folder 5, Burnham papers. 28 Pearl Kluger to James Burnham, 9 March 1951, box 8, folder 3, Burnham papers. 29 Anonymous, ‘Conversation with Pearl Kluger’, 19 July 1951, box 8, folder 3, Burnham papers. 30 James Burnham to Sidney Hook, 17 August 1951, box 8, folder 5, Burnham papers; anonymous, ‘Requested of Pearl Kluger’ (n.d.), box 8, folder 6, Burnham papers. 31 Sidney Hook’s papers include a bad-tempered exchange of letters between Diana Trilling and Arnold Beichman dating from 1985, in which the former claims that knowledge of secret funding was universal in the ACCF, and the latter denies having been ‘witting’. Diana Trilling to Arnold Beichman, 4 January 1985, box 124, folder 5, Hook papers; Arnold Beichman to Diana Trilling, 13 January 1985, box 124, folder 5, Hook papers. 32 See Coleman, Liberal Conspiracy, pp. 163–4. 33 See, for example, Elliot Cohen to Sidney Hook, 5 October 1951, box 8, folder 3, Burnham papers. For a list of the ACCF’s objections to the structure and policies of the CCF, see ‘Draft Statement for the Congress for Cultural Freedom’, 6 January 1955, box 7, folder 10, ACCF papers, Tamiment Institute Library, New York University (hereafter ACCF papers). 34 See CCF Executive Committee minutes, 24–5 January 1955, series 2, box 3, CCF papers, Joseph Regenstein Library, University of Chicago (hereafter CCF papers). 35 James Burnham to Sidney Hook, 20 October 1950, box 6, folder 38, Burnham papers. 36 William L. O’Neill, A Better World. The Great Schism: Stalinism and the American Intellectuals (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1982), p. 298.
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37 See Saunders, Who Paid the Piper?, pp. 198–208. 38 James Farrell to Arthur Schlesinger Jr, 6 March 1952, box 13, Farrell, James, Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr papers, John F. Kennedy Memorial Library, Boston (hereafter Schlesinger papers). 39 Arthur Schlesinger Jr to Nicolas Nabokov, 18 June 1951, box 2, Schlesinger, Arthur, Nicolas Nabokov papers, Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center, University of Texas at Austin (hereafter Nabokov papers). 40 Arthur Schlesinger Jr to Dwight Macdonald, 29 April 1952, series 1, box 45, Macdonald papers. 41 Quoted in Saunders, Who Paid the Piper?, pp. 201–2. 42 Michael Josselson to Sol Stein, 22 September 1954, box 7, folder 12, ACCF papers. 43 ACCF to Michael Josselson, 9 May 1955, box 7, folder 12, ACCF papers. 44 Cord Meyer to Arthur Schlesinger Jr, 16 May 1955, box 20, Meyer, Cord, Schlesinger papers. 45 Sidney Hook, Out of Step: An Unquiet Life in the Twentieth Century (New York: Harper & Row, 1987), p. 424. 46 See Saunders, Who Paid the Piper?, pp. 232–3. 47 See Wilford, CIA, British Left and Cold War, pp. 210–17. 48 Quoted in Coleman, Liberal Conspiracy, p. 169. 49 ACCF Board of Directors minutes, 13 December 1960, box 78, folder 1, Bertram D. Wolfe papers, Hoover Institution, Stanford University (hereafter Wolfe papers). 50 Hook, Out of Step, p. 449. 51 Isaiah Berlin to Arthur Schlesinger Jr, 6 June 1952, box 9, Isaiah, Berlin, Schlesinger papers. 52 See Wilford, CIA, British Left and Cold War. 53 See Saunders, Who Paid the Piper?, chap. 25. 54 Quoted in ibid., p. 401.
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12 PUBLIC DIPLOMACY AND THE PRIVATE SECTOR The United States Information Agency, its predecessors and the private sector Nicholas J. Cull
On 27 January 1948 President Truman signed the Smith–Mundt Act authorising the first large-scale peacetime propaganda effort overseas in US history. The Act provided funding for, and extended, the existing bureaucracy of propaganda within the State Department.1 In 1953 this activity acquired a dedicated agency: the United States Information Agency (USIA), known overseas as the United States Information Service (USIS), which operated until 1999. The government information programme found both allies and enemies in the private sector. The late 1940s and 1950s saw extensive cooperation with the commercial media and wider fields of private industry, with corporate sponsors contributing money, exhibits and expertise to trade fairs, world’s fairs and one-off shows such as the American Exhibition at Moscow in 1959. The role of the private sector in US information declined during the 1960s but re-emerged in the Reagan era. This chapter will chart the course and nature of these shifting relationships, focusing in particular on the work of the USIA’s Office of Private Cooperation. Contrary to the prevailing wisdom, this chapter does not see the 1950s as a wholly exceptional golden age of state–private cooperation; rather, it sees the state–private dynamic as a recurring response to crises in US foreign policy. It was part of the First and Second World War; it was part of the first and second Cold Wars; and it may emerge yet again to play a role in the War on Terror. Large-scale private-sector involvement in public diplomacy has required both leadership from the US government to argue that propaganda is needed and an awareness among potential private partners that the time has come to identify themselves as American corporations rather than blending in with local business communities. The US government has had to ask both for help and for the establishment of a bureaucracy to manage effectively private cooperation. Cooperation has 210
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worked best when the president himself has had a commitment to the private sphere, as in the Eisenhower and Reagan periods. When leadership has been lacking, cooperation has withered. The most obvious presence of the private sector within the work of USIA and its predecessor agencies can be seen in the background of its senior staff. While the United States eventually developed a career structure for Foreign Service Information Officers, to begin with all staff were recruited from the commercial field, with backgrounds in journalism, broadcasting or public relations much in evidence. The politically appointed non-career posts at the Agency were routinely filled from the private sector. During its 46-year history only two USIA directors had career foreign-service backgrounds; the others were two media executives, one media lawyer, two academics, three journalists and three businessmen (one of whom had worked as a film producer). Other political appointees, such as the directors of Voice of America (VOA), reflected similarly diverse backgrounds. A second level of private-sector contact came through the network of advisors and especially the advisory commissions created to support US information activity. These were designed as a watchdog but actually served as a great source of political support for an area of US government activity that lacked a significant domestic constituency. Third, the private sector acted periodically as a partner, with the USIA providing an interface to channel public enthusiasm for the cause of overseas information into effective work in the field through its Office of Private Cooperation. Fourth, a small section of the private sector developed to serve the needs of US information, as private groups and not-for-profit foundations emerged to bid for contracts to manage State Department and USIA international exchange contracts. Finally, the private sector acted as a rival. The US commercial media were consistently suspicious of government information activity. The Smith–Mundt Act required that US information work be subcontracted to the private sphere ‘to the maximum extent practicable’ and that the Secretary of State ‘reduce such government information activities whenever corresponding private information dissemination is found to be adequate’.2 At its most virulent, this suspicion resulted in attempts to close down the entire US information machine – as occurred in 1956 – but more typically the private media simply ignored the whole government information operation.3
Beginnings Just as international propaganda had been a feature of US participation in both World Wars, so had the cooperation of the private sphere. During the First World War the Committee on Public Information worked closely with US businesses in Latin America. Companies such as Ford and Remington Typewriters were happy to distribute US government propaganda and to 211
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insert government messages into their local advertising.4 During the Second World War, Nelson Rockefeller’s Office of the Coordinator of Inter-American Affairs built similar relationships, while the Office of War Information (OWI) reached out to American advertisers and Hollywood filmmakers to develop material for export. But these relationships seemed inappropriate for peace and, as the Second World War ended, some in private industry – like many on Capitol Hill – viewed with suspicion the US presence in international information. The official charged with building a post-war structure for US international information was himself profoundly rooted in the private sphere. Assistant Secretary of State for Public Affairs William Benton had made his fortune in advertising during the early 1930s.5 Benton’s first challenge came from the news agencies. In early 1946 the Associated Press (AP) and United Press (UP) suspended their newswire service to the State Department’s radio station, Voice of America, arguing that if VOA used and credited their services on air any news reported by them would be viewed as propaganda. In reality they feared that if foreign customers could hear AP or UP news on the Voice, they would not wish to purchase that news themselves. Benton hit back by noting that AP was happy to sell news to the USSR, where Pravda seized eagerly upon reports of lynching in the Deep South.6 Benton recognised that the US information machine had no obvious domestic constituency but faced many detractors. To counter this he hit on the idea of creating two permanent committees of private citizens, ostensibly to offer advice but also to act as a resource for lobbying. Veterans of the OWI featured prominently.7 The advisory committee idea survived under the apparatus set up by the Smith–Mundt Act in 1948 in the form of a United States Advisory Commission on Information and a United States Advisory Commission on Educational Exchange. Both were composed of five leading figures drawn from the private US media and, for the exchange commission, from education, all to be appointed by the president. No more than three could come from any one party. They were initially required to report to Congress twice a year. Like Benton’s committees, the Advisory Commissions could be counted on to support the overseas information programme on Capitol Hill or with a well-placed word to the Oval Office.8
The early Cold War As the private sector had rallied in 1917 and 1941, so it rallied again to the cause of the Cold War. In 1948 the State Department and the CIA worked closely with both the private sector and especially ItalianAmerican groups to ensure the defeat of the left in the Italian election in April of that year.9 The state moved swiftly thereafter to build closer links 212
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with US industry. The principal channel of contact was the Advertising Council, originally formed by the US advertising industry in 1942 to create and place advertisements on behalf of the OWI. The Advertising Council had continued this work at home into peace at an estimated one-third of wartime levels, which translated into an annual commercial value of $100 million per annum.10 On 18 March 1948 the new Assistant Secretary of State, George V. Allen, a career diplomat, met the leading lights of the Advertising Council to determine the best way to promote the Marshall Plan. They agreed on a basic theme of the US approach to Europe: ‘The United States is helping Europe to economic recovery – to promote the cause of peace and to protect the liberty of the individual – the freedom of European states – and thus keep our own liberty’. On 1 April 1948 Allen, the Under Secretary of State, Robert A. Lovett, and senior information staff and Council leaders met representatives of the biggest American corporations. They viewed samples of communist propaganda and discussed the best way for American industry to respond. The meeting produced a Marshall Plan Steering Committee, but the reactions of the industrialists present were intriguingly mixed. Harry Bullis of General Mills, Inc., argued, ‘We have got to impress the common man over there in Europe that our system is a lot better, and our propaganda could stir up a revolution in Russia’. Neil McElroy of Proctor and Gamble, whose advertisements were seen only in Britain, warned: ‘Proctor and Gamble does not want to be thought of, in England, as an American firm’. This attitude would re-emerge in the postCold War era.11 By May 1948, Allen’s staff had produced a succinct two-page guidance document for circulation to American corporations advertising in Europe. The ‘lines to stress’ included the classlessness, prosperity and rights enjoyed in American civic life. ‘Lines to avoid’ were boastful superlatives or copy that suggested the US government served the interests of business.12 Allen realised that private cooperation required a dedicated bureaucracy and in the course of 1948 established an office for liaison with the private sphere. The State Department also commissioned a study of the area by the editor of This Week magazine, William I. Nichols, who concluded that while commercial US films, books and other materials had a tremendous potential to carry the US message, their reach in Europe would be limited by the weakness of European currency. The Marshall Plan addressed this through what became known as the International Media Guarantee (IMG) programme, which allowed selected foreign countries to pay for US films and books using their own currency. This meant they could consume US culture without worrying about depleting their limited dollar reserves. The first agreements, concluded in 1949, covered media exports to Germany, Austria, Norway and The Netherlands; Italy followed in 1950 and France in 1951. During the 1950s the programme extended into the developing 213
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world and even to Poland, covering 21 countries over the course of its life. The European IMGs ended in the 1950s and the programme finally expired in 1968.13
The Campaign of Truth In April 1950 President Truman rather belatedly put his personal weight behind the cause of international information with the launch of the ‘Campaign of Truth’. This and the outbreak of the Korean War created a wealth of private enthusiasm on which the State Department could draw. The approach was the responsibility of the State Department information section’s Office of Private Enterprise and Cooperation, directed by a former associate editor of Pathé News and veteran of the State Department’s wartime information work, John M. Begg. Starting with just four staff divided between Washington DC and New York, Begg worked hard to involve US charities, corporations and publishers in information work. The Office worked with the Advertising Council to create a guide to shape US corporate advertising in Europe, extolling the virtues of the American way.14 Initiatives included a campaign at Christmas 1951 to get US businesses to mark envelopes bound for Europe: ‘Listen to special yearend Voice of America programs’.15 Office staff appealed to publishers for remaindered textbooks for use overseas. In two years they obtained 134,000 books either as gifts or sold at token rates. McGraw-Hill proved especially generous. The Office persuaded the charity CARE to appeal for funds to ship books as ‘Food For Thought’. As the campaign gathered momentum Time, Life and other major magazines donated their unsold issues. US Steel, Ford and Standard Oil donated technical and ‘know-how’ booklets for use in State Department libraries, while Chase National Bank and the National City Bank agreed to use their overseas branches to display US propaganda leaflets. Companies loaned exhibits to travelling exhibitions showcasing American material prosperity. Office staff advised Rotary, Lions and similar clubs on how to develop international projects. They encouraged some 128 US towns to ‘adopt’ a foreign town. They persuaded the creators of internationally syndicated newspaper features including Believe It Or Not to integrate anticommunist messages into their output. They enrolled the American Heritage Foundation and New York Herald Tribune as sponsors for a guide for American tourists in Europe called What Should I Know When I Travel Abroad? Issued in 1952 after input from the Young and Rubicam advertising agency, the book recommended answers to commonly asked questions about the USA.16 The Office also encouraged private letter writing, which had proven useful during the Italian election battle of 1948. In partnership with the Common Council for American Unity (an organisation set up during the 214
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First World War to promote the political education of recent immigrants to the USA), the Office of Private Enterprise and Cooperation developed the Letters from America Campaign, a plan to stimulate and then influence letters sent overseas by members of some 60 non-English language communities across America. Begg’s staff provided the Common Council with a survey of European misconceptions about the United States (an uncultured land of materialism, racial injustice and economic exploitation). They also steered the Common Council in creating regular editorials for some 260 foreign language papers and 195 radio programmes, encouraging letters home to the ‘old country’ and suggesting politically helpful themes. According to the Common Council, by the end of 1952, the firstand second-generation immigrant community (around 35 million people) had sent over a billion such letters (an average of over 28 letters each).17 Such programmes proved so successful that the Private Enterprise and Cooperation office opened regional branches in San Francisco and New Orleans.18 To the outside world the most spectacular example of cooperation between the US government and the private sphere in the field of propaganda was the launch in 1950 of Radio Free Europe (RFE), Radio Free Asia for China (1951–52) and Radio Liberation for Russia (RL) in 1953. In this case, however, while the enthusiasm was private, the funding came for the most part from the CIA.19
The Eisenhower years and the USIA Despite the Campaign of Truth, propaganda was perceived as a weakness of the Truman administration. The private enthusiasts behind RFE were supporters of Eisenhower’s Republican bid for the presidency in 1952. Within days of his election, Eisenhower commissioned a major review of US information, with the result that, in August 1953, the United States Information Agency was created. While the initiative represented a bureaucratic leap forward, Congress had dictated severe budgetary cuts and the new agency began life with a massive round of job losses. USIA’s leaders were recruited from the private sector. Its director, Theodore Streibert, was a successful broadcasting executive: president of WOR New York, a founder of the Mutual radio network and its chairman since 1949. His deputy was Abbott Washburn, a public relations executive from General Mills, Inc.20 The new USIA retained the Office of Private Cooperation (designated with the letters IOC). The administration’s interest in building links with the private sphere may be gauged from the fact that it was the only unit within the Agency to benefit materially from the transition from the International Information Administration (IIA): its budget doubled to $182,000 and it employed 19 staff in offices in Washington, New York, 215
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Chicago and San Francisco. Eisenhower called on all Americans travelling overseas to recognise that, ‘Each of us . . . is a representative of the United States of America’. The Office duly created a new edition of What Should I Know When I Travel Abroad? aimed at travellers to Latin America. An updated European edition followed in 1955, paid for by Republic Steel and the Common Council; 21 of the country’s leading travel organisations distributed hundreds of thousands of copies.21 By the end of the first year of the USIA’s life, 342 private groups had contributed to its work in some way; 61 of these received certificates of merit from the Agency. The following years saw an ever-diversifying range of further ‘private cooperation’ activities as the USIA sought to mobilise college and civic communities. Some cities mounted ‘symphonic salutes’ to communities overseas, special concerts that were relayed over commercial broadcast networks. Others sponsored reading rooms and libraries. New corporate partners included the National Industrial Advertising Association, which from 1955 instructed all its 2,500 member firms on how best to use their international advertising to support the goals of the USIA.22 When in December 1953 Eisenhower launched his Atoms for Peace initiative, the USIA arranged for 266 American firms to distribute 300,000 translated highlights of the speech in their outgoing international correspondence. The USIA added an Atoms for Peace page to the What Should I Know When I Travel Abroad? for Latin America and encouraged Rotary, Lions and other such organisations to include the Atoms for Peace message in their international materials.23 One of the best-known campaigns of the young USIA was actually created by Theodore Repplier, president of the Advertising Council. Repplier spent the first six months of 1955 touring the world as an Eisenhower Fellow, comparing USIA work with communist propaganda. Repplier urged the Agency to move beyond its attempt to counter communism with stories of labour camps and purges and instead to project the ideals of the American way of life. He called his concept ‘People’s Capitalism’.24 ‘People’s Capitalism’ challenged the communist line that in the United States only a few bosses owned the ‘means of production’; rather, Repplier argued, the ‘means of production’ belonged to every American who paid into a pension fund that then purchased stock. Eighty million Americans owned stock through insurance policies, and bank investment came from ordinary people’s deposits. On top of this the rewards of the free market had drawn forth ingenuity, which in turn had boosted productivity and brought higher wages for all. Capitalism had actually done the things that communism promised. Eisenhower commended the scheme to Streibert and People’s Capitalism entered the vocabulary of the USIA.25 The USIA launched People’s Capitalism in January 1956. All posts were briefed on the idea and offered a monthly package giving updates on key 216
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indicators of American economic life such as individual income growth and home and stock ownership. Films and radio documentaries followed.26 A few posts hosted the touring exhibition entitled ‘People’s Capitalism – a new way of living’ designed by the Advertising Council for trade fairs around the world. Covering over 7,000 square feet, the show explained the structure of capital ownership in the United States and the material progress produced by the American system. The exhibition set a full-size reconstruction of a typical home from 1776 next to a furnished American home of 1956; it placed a machine from 1775 capable of producing 16 nails-an-hour next to its 16,000-nails-an-hour modern-day descendant. When the show opened for a test run in the concourse of Washington’s Union Station in February 1956, the press hailed a great addition to the US ideological arsenal. ‘This’, Collier’s Magazine proclaimed, ‘is the matchless, true story of America as we know it’.27 The most extensive mechanism for Eisenhower-era private cooperation was the ‘People-to-People’ campaign. This grew from a suggestion by the USIA’s deputy director, Washburn, transmitted via Streibert at one of his White House meetings, that the USIA coordinate links between ordinary Americans and their counterparts around the world. Eisenhower liked the idea and proposed personally leading a recruitment drive ‘for increased participation of non-government groups and individuals in telling America’s story overseas’.28 Streibert’s first step was to turn to the sort of people who had helped during the Campaign of Truth. He invited the nineteen most-significant US corporations with personnel overseas to join an Industrial Cooperation Council organised by the Office of Private Cooperation. The USIA launched the council with a conference at the White House on 10 November 1955. The Industrial Cooperation Council became the Business Council for International Understanding embracing fifty corporations with substantial staff. Council members mounted exhibitions and film shows, and even organised English classes.29 The Office of Private Cooperation looked for more. Other ideas included letter-writing schemes, more leaflets for American travellers overseas, work though women’s and labour groups, and even films.30 Streibert and Eisenhower planned for these initiatives to come together in the new campaign to enlist private citizens to work for information goals under a banner title devised by Eisenhower himself: ‘People-to-People’. On 11 September 1956 Eisenhower launched People-to-People at a large reception at the White House.31 By September 1957 the initiative comprised 41 committees of Americans each reaching out to their equivalent overseas: doctors reached out to doctors, cities to cities, lawyers to lawyers, artists to artists and even farmers to farmers. Committee representatives received a week-long USIA training course before travelling overseas. Particular successes included a new pamphlet called Make a Friend This Trip produced by the Transportation and Public Relations committees for 217
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American tourists. But there were setbacks too. After a year, the learned societies, science, broadcasting and ‘Talent group for the Entertainment Industry’ had still to organise promised committees. The White House also had difficulty launching a parent corporation for People-to-People (with former Secretary of Defense Charles E. Wilson as president) to distance the programme from the government. The concept proved a hard sell to the big charitable foundations.32 Under the leadership of Conger Reynolds, a journalist and former Foreign Service officer who since 1930 had directed public relations for Standard Oil, the Office of Private Cooperation worked hard to meet the needs of People-to-People. Its budget grew from $205,000 in 1956 to $573,000 in 1960 and the staff swelled to 40. Although the People-to-People committees became the ‘primary mechanism’ for contact with the public, the Office provided a vital support and coordination role.33 By January 1959, 100,000 books had been shipped overseas by the People-to-People book committee, 70 US cities had affiliated with sister cities in 19 countries, with a further 73 affiliations pending, and 43 US universities had launched international twinning schemes. The more innovative elements included the Armed Services Committee, which encouraged enlisted men serving overseas to see themselves as ambassadors and to enrol in voluntary work. The Hobbies Committee covered 110 distinct leisure activities, but stamp collecting loomed especially large. Other projects included material targeted at pet owners, hikers and a scheme from the Magic Subcommittee to work with European magicians to use sleight of hand as a form of therapy for the disabled. The Cartoonists Committee, co-chaired by Al Capp, produced 40,000 copies of a 100-page booklet titled You Don’t See These Sites on the Regular Tours, showing through cartoons how American tourists ought not to behave overseas. The Motion Picture Committee built links with film industries around the world and sent out producers as guest speakers. The actor Yul Brynner provided an exhibit of his photographs for USIS Vienna. The Nationalities Committee held a gala dinner to honour foreign-born scientists Wernher von Braun and Edward Teller.34 The most successful People-to-People initiative was the Medical Committee. Following his heart attack in 1955 Eisenhower met an energetic young cardiologist named William B. Walsh. The president persuaded Walsh to participate in People-to-People and Walsh became co-chair of the Medical Committee, which configured itself as the People-to-People Health Foundation, Inc. In 1958 Walsh proposed what he called Project HOPE (an acronym standing for Health Opportunities for People Everywhere). Walsh suggested taking over a mothballed naval hospital ship, staffing it with 100 volunteer doctors and sailing wherever it was invited. The Navy gave Walsh an old US hospital ship named USS Constellation, which he refitted and renamed SS HOPE. Hundreds of doctors and nurses volunteered for the 218
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project, the pharmaceutical industry donated the necessary medicines and, when charity funding fell short, the USIA picked up the bill. On 22 September 1960, HOPE set sail from San Francisco on its first voyage to Indonesia and South Vietnam. The USIA provided the necessary cultural orientation for the crew in advance of departure. Further voyages followed and HOPE became a major display of US goodwill around the world until it retired in 1974. Project HOPE itself remains a major international medical charity today.35 The Eisenhower administration had a particular bonus for its leading corporate allies. Key advisors, including public relations pioneer Edward Bernays, Ted Repplier, George Gallup, Cecil B. DeMille, ‘PR’ chiefs from firms such as Ford and Monsanto chemicals, and senior ex-political appointees from Benton onwards were all invited to join an Executive Reserve to help lead the Agency in the event of a Third World War. The Office gave each a place in the Agency’s nuclear shelter: a ticket from the USIA to survive Armageddon. It was never clear exactly what these advisors would be able to contribute to the USIA in a time of crisis but as Deputy Director Washburn put it in a letter to Benton after a meeting of the Reserve in November 1957: ‘Our greatest need is still for support and understanding both from the public and from the Congress. If you, Bernays and the others can help us on this score that would be a magnificent contribution’.36
The USIA and private cooperation since 1960 In 1961 the People-to-People programme was incorporated as a private organisation called People To People International (PTPI) and established a headquarters in Kansas City, Missouri.37 While the organisation flourished, its privatisation greatly diminished the role of the Office of Private Cooperation. During the Kennedy administration, the Office persuaded a coalition of leading American publishers to launch Books USA, providing low-cost editions of classic texts, which citizens could then purchase and donate to the USIA.38 The campaign caught the imagination of many: US truckers volunteered to drive stocks to Agency warehouses, steamship lines carried them overseas for free and the US Postal Service donated all 150,000-or-so books found annually at ‘dead letter’ centres.39 The Office was restructured during this period to work more closely with USIS posts, approaching US private industry to meet specific needs identified in the field. The Office channelled information about such key aspects of US foreign policy as the Alliance for Progress and nuclear testing policy to American businesses with staff overseas in relevant regions. It also advised and assisted People-to-People and other international groups.40 Despite restructuring the workload was insufficient to justify an entire unit; Books USA was privatised in 1963 and, in June 1967, in an attempt 219
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to cut costs, the Office of Private Cooperation itself closed. The business advisory function, with its brief to encourage US business to promote American values overseas, was passed to the USIA Office of Policy and Research, the Information Center Service took over the acquisition of books and other materials from private donors and the State Department’s Bureau of Educational and Cultural Affairs took on liaison with People-toPeople and the Sister City organisation.41 Despite its ideological interest in private enterprise the Nixon-era USIA was slow to focus on the private sector. The Agency director for Nixon’s second term, former Time journalist Jim Keogh, saw links with the private sector as a means both to increase domestic awareness of the Agency and supplement its limited resources. On 7 March 1974, Keogh organised a conference at USIA headquarters for 50 executives from top US corporations including Ford Motors, General Electrics and Coca-Cola. The aim was to ‘explore ways and means of more effective cooperation between the USIA and US multi-national corporations doing business abroad’. VicePresident Ford provided a rousing speech of encouragement. The seminar agreed that the United States had fallen behind its competitor nations in this regard and noted that business and government in the ‘UK, France, Germany, and Japan’ ‘speak with one voice and work together hand in glove’. Ideas focused on the use of USIA channels to serve US business needs and goals.42 USIA contributions to US exports included a series of newspaper columns called ‘New Products from the United States’ launched in 1973. By 1975, 31 editions of the column had been sent into the field and had been prominently placed in the press of Korea, Yugoslavia, Greece, Taiwan and Spain.43 It was not until the Reagan administration that private cooperation really returned to the USIA’s agenda. Reagan’s director of the USIA, the ebullient financier and former TV and film producer Charles Wick, saw the private sector as an essential partner in the USIA’s work. Appeals for donations in cash or kind became a standard feature of Wick’s USIA. The Agency created a network of advisory committees to draw on private talents, including committees for publishing, public relations, marketing, film, labour and sports. Distinguished Americans recruited for this purpose ranged from the actors Charlton Heston and Kirk Douglas to philosopher Michael Novak. The conservative thinker Norman Podhoretz chaired a ‘New Directions’ committee. American Federation of Labor and Congress of Industrial Organizations (AFL–CIO) president Lane Kirkland chaired the Labor Committee which, with an Advisory Panel on International Educational Exchange, helped upgrade the USIA’s international visitor programme. Leo Jaffe of Columbia Pictures chaired a Film Acquisition Committee. The CEO of Madison Square Garden, David ‘Sonny’ Werblin chaired the Sports Committee, which among its activities raised nearly $1,000,000 in private-sector funds to help African athletes prepare for the 220
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Los Angeles Olympics in 1984. The Books and Library Advisory Committee brought together the leaders of some of America’s greatest publishing houses. A steady supply of cheap or even free books flowed from them through the Agency to the developing world as a result. The Agency managed these links through an office of private-sector committees. Wick understood the need not to take this advice for granted and mounted an event in June 1984 to honour over 100 of the Agency’s private-sector volunteers.44 Wick’s most ambitious private-sector project was the creation of what he termed the International Council Conference. This was a meeting of the 100 or so richest and most influential people in the world, with a guest list that read like a conspiracy theorist’s fantasy. The International Council would be consulted about and briefed on US foreign policy in Washington by policymakers including the president, wined and dined, and then sent home to introduce the USIA’s key messages into their media empires or to their dayto-day business contacts. The idea developed from an effort to promote democracy and prepare the way for the deployment of intermediate nuclear forces (INF) launched in 1983.45 The Agency organised three such events. The first ran from 7 to 9 October 1987 on the theme ‘US Policies and Foreign Perceptions’.46 The second ran from 15 to 17 June 1988 and discussion focused on the issues raised by the march of reform in the USSR.47 The Agency also arranged bi-national private sector conferences in Italy, France and the UK.48 Private-sector committees remained a feature of the USIA during the George H. W. Bush era, fitting the president’s personal emphasis on ‘a thousand points of light’. The Agency estimated the value of private cash and in-kind contributions to USIA programmes between 1989 and 1990 as in excess of $162 million.49 The Third International Council took place from 1–4 May 1990. Sessions included presentations on US environmental and drug policy, and group discussion about the implications of the apparent ascendancy of democracy around the world. Ted Turner of CNN joined the director of VOA and president of RFE/RL in a discussion on the communications revolution moderated by Rupert Murdoch, who was cochairman of the entire International Council project. Participants responded well, but the Bush White House sent only the White House Chief of Staff and Under Secretary of State for Political Affairs to address the meeting. The USIA found the contrast to the Reagan-era extravaganzas rather embarrassing and feared that the Council members would be insulted. The exercise was not repeated.50 With the end of the Cold War the private-sector relationship, like so much else at the USIA, had withered. The Agency experienced considerable difficulty recruiting business partners for the Seville Exposition in 1992, with many US corporations unwilling to be tied too closely to the US government, and others joining only when they contemplated the cost 221
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of building a pavilion of their own. The Agency did better with the Expo ‘93 in Taejon, Korea, effectively by allowing willing corporations to have a free hand and sticking the stars and stripes on top of the result.51 Although the USIA worked hard to remain relevant to business its public diplomacy in support of the North American Free Trade Association (NAFTA) attracted the wrath of liberal critics.52 Despite their history of cooperation, the private sector did not rally to save the USIA when the Senate Foreign Relations Committee resolved to fold it back into the State Department in 1999. Even in light of the periodic flowering of the private sector as a dimension of US public diplomacy over the course of the Cold War, one is ultimately struck by its limits. The private sector extended the reach of the USIA, patched holes in the budget and provided welcome domestic political leverage, but this was the icing on the cake and not a core ingredient. The USIA always remained distinct from the private sector. The cultural Cold War was won for the free market, but it was not won by the free market. The USIA operated only where the commercial US media saw no profit. Private capital had no reason to broadcast straight news from the west to the people of eastern Europe; that was a political choice made by the US government and sustained only by federal funding. The need for expertly directed public diplomacy remains, although with the global reach of commercial communications, the US Congress has been increasingly sceptical of the need to pay for it. In 2001 the administration of George W. Bush tried to bring privatesector talent to address the public diplomacy needs of the War on Terror. The unhappy tenure of advertising executive Charlotte Beers as Under Secretary for Public Diplomacy at the State Department served to underline the limits of international information. TV advertisements, however well crafted, are no substitute for sound foreign policy. In 2004 the crisis produced a new initiative from the private sector in the form of a pressure group called Business for Diplomatic Action (BDA), led by Keith Reinhardt of the advertising agency DDB World Wide. The thrust of Reinhardt’s campaign was that the US government should trust its international marketing to a full-blown private-sector campaign. Reinhardt’s energy and can-do-ism provided a curious echo of the arrival of William Benton in Washington 49 years earlier. Other plans to draw on the private sector include the idea of a Corporation for Public Diplomacy proposed by the Council on Foreign Relations in 2005. To an astonishing degree, the issues and the key players remain the same.53
Notes and bibliography 1
This work was, successively, the responsibility of the Office of International Information and Cultural Affairs (OIC), the Office of International Information and Educational Exchange (OIE), the US International Information and Educational Exchange Program (USIIE) and the US International Information Administration (IIA).
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2 United States Information and Educational Exchange Act of 1948, 27 January 1948, PL 80–402, USIA General Records, RG 306, National Archives, Washington DC (hereafter NA). 3 This campaign included a book by businessman Eugene W. Castle, Billions, Blunders and Baloney (New York: Devin Adair Co., 1955) and a press campaign led by Roy Howard of the Scripps–Howard news chain. Cushing (I/R) to Allen (USIA director), 7 May 1957, file Public Info/Press, box 5, RG 306, NA. See also ‘USIA as a Scapegoat’, Washington Post, 19 May 1957. 4 James R. Mock and Cedric Larson, Words That Won the War: The Story of the Committee on Public Information (Princeton University Press, 1939), pp. 235–47. 5 Sydney Hyman, The Lives of William Benton (University of Chicago Press, 1969). 6 Benton interview, 23 January 1960, box 523/5, William Benton papers, University of Chicago, p. 8 (hereafter Benton papers); file Associated Press, box 7, Subject File, 1945–50, Records of the Assistant Secretary of State for Public Affairs, 1945–50, RG 59, NA. 7 Benton to George C. Marshall, 13 June 1947, box 375/16, Benton papers. 8 Public Law 80–402; Hulton to Howe, 5 May 1952, box 379/8, Benton papers. For documentation on the setting up of the Advisory Commission, see file US Advisory Commission on Information, box 167, Official File (hereafter OF) 20R, Harry S. Truman Presidential Library (hereafter HSTL). Since 1978 there has been one United States Advisory Commission on Public Diplomacy. For the website, see http://www.state.gov/r/adcompd/ (accessed 29 August 2004). 9 Wendy L. Wall, ‘“America’s Best Propagandists”: Italian Americans and the 1948 “Letters to Italy” Campaign’, in Christian G. Appy (ed.), Cold War Constructions: The Political Culture of United States Imperialism, 1945–1966 (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2000), pp. 89–109. 10 The Advertising Council archives are located at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. The figure comes from remarks by John R. Steelman (Director of War Mobilization and Reconversion) made at a White House Motion Picture Conference, 20 November 1946, box 420, OF 73-A, HSTL. 11 Office of Government Reports: Overseas Information Meeting, 1 April 1948, box 11, Charles W. Jackson papers, HSTL; notes of discussion period, Washington meeting, 1 April 1948, State Department Overseas Info., file 1, Charles W. Jackson papers, HSTL. 12 Allen to Repplier, 25 May 1948, file ECA–OII (Economic Cooperation Administration–Office of International Information) overseas, box 8, Records Relating to International Information, 1938–55, RG 59, NA. 13 On Nichols, see Nichols to Sargeant (Acting Director, OIE), 18 October 1947, box 375/5, Benton papers. For a discussion of the IMG programme, see Curtis G. Benjamin, US Books Abroad: Neglected Ambassadors (Washington DC: Library of Congress, 1984). Mellen (IMG branch ECA) to Begg, 16 February 1950, Office Symbol Files, 1945–50, envelope: IMG, box 1, Assistant Secretary of State for Public Affairs, 1945–50, RG 59, NA. 14 John M. Begg, ‘Cooperation with Private Enterprise’, 6 October 1948, State Department Overseas Info., file 2, box 30, Charles W. Jackson papers, HSTL; see also Begg interview, HSTL. 15 Voice of America, Advertising Council Radio Fact Sheet, December 1951, box 3, Charles W. Jackson papers, HSTL. 16 The Campaign of Truth: The International Information and Educational Exchange Program 1951, 15 November 1951, file Campaign of Truth, State Department Public Diplomacy Historical Collection (hereafter SD PDHC);
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17
18 19
20 21
22 23
24 25 26 27
‘IE/PR Projects in Cooperation with Private Enterprise, July 1 to December 31, 1951’, file Private Enterprise and Co-operation, 1952–53, box 2, Office of Administration, 1952–55, RG 306, NA. A useful statement of office projects dated 31 December 1950 can be found in box 378/7, Benton papers. For a summary of activity by the IOP (Information – Office of Press and Publications) during the second half of 1952, see reports filed under ‘Begg’, file correspondence B (8), box 2, USPCIIA (Jackson Committee) papers, Dwight D. Eisenhower Presidential Library (hereafter DDEL); also memorandum of conversation, 3 February 1951, file ‘L’, box 2, Bureau of Public Affairs, Office Files of Edward W. Barrett, 1950–51, RG 59, NA. Campaign of Truth; statement, 31 December 1950, box 378/7, Benton papers. For more detail on Letters from America, see Barrett to Henry Lee Muson (Associate Director, Common Council), 24 October 1950, Campaign of Truth, box 167, OF 20S, HSTL. Also ‘Letters from America Campaign, progress report for 1952 to friends and supporters’, 24 March 1953, Department of State Information programmes, 1953–general, box 14, Hulten papers, HSTL. Begg’s staff also advised the National Committee for a Free Europe in its appeal for funding for Radio Free Europe. See Campaign of Truth. Sig Mickelson, America’s Other Voice: The Story of Radio Free Europe and Radio Liberty (New York: Praeger, 1983), pp. 30–42; and Arch Puddington, Broadcasting Freedom: The Cold War Triumph of Radio Free Europe and Radio Liberty (Lexington: University of Kentucky Press, 2000), pp. 20–1. For parallel projects and context, see the Jackson Committee report, 30 June 1953, Foreign Relations of the United States, 1952–54, vol. 2, part 2 (Washington DC: Department of State, 1984), pp. 1831–4 (hereafter FRUS). Theodore Streibert interview, 10 December 1970, OH-153, DDEL; Abbott Washburn interview, 1 December 1995, OH-153, DDEL. Streibert to C. D. Jackson, 20 October 1953, box 909, WHCF OF 247 United States Information Agency, DDEL; USIA 1st Review of Operations, August–December 1953, p. 3; USIA 4th Report to Congress, January–June 1955, p. 14; Krill to Newpher, 29 January 1971, with ‘Brief History of the Office of Private Cooperation’ attached, file Office of Private Cooperation, History 1971, box 14, RG 306 A1 (1072), NA. USIA 2nd Review of Operations, January–June 1954, p. 18; USIA 3rd Report to Congress, July–December 1954, p 16; USIA 4th Report to Congress, January–June 1955, p. 14. Progress Report of the Working Group of Operations Coordinating Board, 30 April 1954, FRUS, 1952–54, vol. 2, part 2, pp. 1403–12; USIA 1st Review of Operations, August–December 1953, p. 3; Streibert to Eisenhower, 27 February 1954, box 37, USIA (2), DDE Papers as President (Ann Whitman file) Administrative Series, DDEL. Speech by Repplier, 27 October 1955, Washburn (4), box 111, C. D. Jackson papers, DDEL. Lambie (White House) to President, 3 August 1955, with Repplier, ‘Some Thoughts about American Propaganda’, 17 June 1955, USIA (2), box 99, WHCF Confidential File, DDEL; also Washburn interview. Streibert to all country public affairs officers with attachments, 10 January 1956, Washburn (4), USIA CA-1244, box 111, C. D. Jackson papers, DDEL. Washburn interview; ‘People’s Capitalism: This is America’, Collier’s Magazine, 6 January 1956; Repplier to Eisenhower, 1 February 1956, box 910, WHCF OF 247 (USIA), DDEL; USIA 6th Report to Congress, January–June 1956, p. 6.
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28 Washburn interview; quoted in Washburn to Eisenhower, 20 December 1955, box 37, USIA (2), DDE Papers as President (Ann Whitman file), Administrative Series, DDEL. 29 Streibert to Adams, 21 October 1955, and attachments, box 912, WHCF OF 247–B, DDEL. 30 Quoted in Washburn to Eisenhower, 20 December 1955, box 37, USIA (2), DDE Papers as President (Ann Whitman file), Administrative Series, DDEL. 31 USIA 6th Report to Congress, January–June 1956, p. 15; USIA 7th Report to Congress, July–December 1956, pp. 19–20. 32 Larson to Adams (White House), ‘People-to-People Corporation’, 12 October 1957, file Private Enterprise – People to People Committees, 1957, box 2, Director’s Office Subject Files, 1957–58, RG 306 64–A-0536, NA; USIA 8th Review of Operations, January 1–June 30, 1957, pp. 20–1. 33 USIA 7th Report to Congress, July–December 1956, p. 8; Krill to Newpher, 29 January 1971, with ‘Brief History of the Office of Private Cooperation’ attached, file Office of Private Cooperation, History 1971, box 14, RG 306 A1 (1072), NA. 34 Allen to President, 25 February 1959, Annual Survey of People-to-People Activities, January 1959, box 2, George V. Allen, DDE Papers as President, Administrative, DDEL. 35 Washburn interview; Reynolds to Allen, ‘Project of Dr William B. Walsh’, 28 November 1958, file People-to-People Committee, box 5, Director’s Office Subject Files, 1957–58, RG 306 64–A-0536, NA; Allen to C. D. Jackson, 13 October 1959, microfilm reel 34, Director’s Chronological Files, 1953–64, RG 306, ZZ entry 1 (formerly 1006), NA; Allen to Reinhardt (State), 15 January 1960, microfilm reel 35, Director’s Chronological Files, 1953–64, RG 306, ZZ entry 1 (formerly 1006), NA. For further background on Project HOPE see: http://www.projecthope.org/ and http://americanhistory.si.edu/hope/ (accessed 29 August 2004). 36 Washburn to Benton, 7 November 1957, microfilm reel 20, Director’s Chronological Files, 1953–64, RG 306, ZZ entry 1 (formerly 1006), NA. See also box 382/7, Benton papers. 37 For up-to-date information on PTPI, see: http://www.ptpi.org/about_us/ index.jsp (accessed 29 August 2004). The Sister Cities programme also owed its genesis to People-to-People. 38 Sorenson to President, 16 April 1962, box 91, President’s Office Files, Depts and Agencies USIA, John F. Kennedy Presidential Library (hereafter JFKL). On Books USA, see Murrow to Bundy, 19 March 1963, box 290, NSF, Depts and Agencies: USIA, Arthur Schlesinger papers, JFKL; and Wilson to Schlesinger, 26 September 1963, box WH 23, USIA, Arthur Schlesinger papers, JFKL. 39 Office of Public Information to USIA employees, ‘Some changes in USIA since March 1961’, 28 October 1963, memoranda, file 3, box 1, USIA, JFKL, pp. 7–8. 40 Wilson to all posts, ‘Revised Functions and Organization of IOC’, 20 October 1961, file IOC Historical, box 4, USIA Subject Files, IOP/C, Business Files, RG 306, 74–044, NA; ‘US Information Agency Cooperation with American Business’, 14 June 1962, file IOC Historical, box 4, USIA Subject Files, IOP/C, Business Files, RG 306, 74–044, NA. 41 Krill to Newpher, 29 January 1971, with ‘Brief History of the Office of Private Cooperation’ attached, file Office of Private Cooperation, History 1971, box 14, RG 306 A1 (1072), NA. 42 Pike to Fluor (Fluor Corporation internal minute), 13 March 1974, and associated correspondence, box 2, Exec., WHCF FG Federal Government 230 (USIA), Richard Nixon Presidential Materials (currently at NA). See also box
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43 44
45
46 47 48 49
50 51 52 53
76, Office of Legal Counsel, Depts and Agencies: USIA, Ford Vice-Pres., Gerald R. Ford Library (hereafter GRFL). James Moceri (IOR) to Keogh, ‘USIA accomplishments 1974–1975’, 15 April 1975, box 7, A1 (1070), USIA historical collection, reports and studies, RG 306, NA. Walter Raymond (member of Reagan-era National Security Council), author’s interview, Washington DC, 12 December 1995; USIA private sector committee, 21 June 1984, Ryan, Fred files, Confidential File, Oversize Attachment 753, Ronald Reagan Library (hereafter RRL). Wick put together a small group comprising David Rockefeller, the major conservative funders Dwayne Andreas and Henry Savatori, the British financier Sir James Goldsmith and two media moguls, Rupert Murdoch and Joachim Maitre (the senior editor and executive manager of Axel Springer Publishing in Hamburg), and arranged for these men to meet President Reagan for lunch and be briefed on the need for private support for the INF deployment. Raymond interview; William Clark to Sadlier (presidential appointments), 15 March 1983, White House Office of Records Management, subject file (hereafter WHORM sf) Public Relations 130946, RRL. Report on International Council Conference, 1997, WHORM sf FO Foreign 006, 540170, RRL. Wick to President, with attachments, 12 September 1988, WHORM sf FO 006, 592417, RRL. Ryan to President, 5 February 1988, WHORM sf FO 006, 541107, RRL. Gelb to Petersmeyer, with attachment, 19 November 1990, Misc. files, OA/ID 076287, USIA 1990–89, George Bush Presidential Library (hereafter GBL); Bush message to Private Sector Committees, 24 October 1990, ME Messages 008, 194989, GBL. Gelb to Bates, 7 September 1989 and 17 January 1989, file USIA (1) and USIA (2), Doug Adair files, OA/ID 06111, Bush presidential records, Office of Cabinet Affairs, GBL. Bruce Gregory (US Advisory Commission on Public Diplomacy), interview with the author, Washington DC, 28 November 1995; and Jim Ogul (USIA exhibitions), telephone interview with the author, 27 November 1995. Nancy Snow, Propaganda Inc.: Selling America’s Culture to the World (New York: Seven Stories, 2002), pp. 75–6. Ira Teinowitz, ‘Keith Reinhardt critiques US diplomatic PR efforts: tells Congress the government is no longer a “credible messenger” abroad’, Advertising Age, 24 August 2004; for BDA press release see: http:// www.aaf.org/news/pdf/bdapress.pdf (accessed 28 August 2004); ‘Selling the Flag’, Economist, 26 February 2004; on the Corporation for Public Diplomacy, see Council on Foreign Relations, Finding America’s Voice: A Strategy for Reinvigorating U.S. Public Diplomacy (New York: Council on Foreign Relations, 2003).
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academic communities 7; cultural interaction between US and Britain 145, 147–8 Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences 167 advertising: and limits of public diplomacy 222; US propaganda during Second World War 212 Advertising Council 213, 214, 216, 217 Africa 24, 165 Agar, Herbert 147 Al Qaeda 206 Allen, C.D. 144 Allen, George V. 213 Allen, Harry C. 145–6, 150, 153 Allen, Raymond 126 America First Committee 39 American Association for the United Nations (AAUN) 31–2 American Committee for Cultural Freedom (ACCF) 125, 194, 195, 198, 201–5, 206 American Committee on United Europe (ACUE) 85, 118, 125, 126, 127 American Council of Learned Societies (ACLS) 70, 87 American Council on Education (ACE) 70, 86, 90, 94 American exceptionalism: ideological importance of voluntary tradition 49, 51, 54; and internationalism 6–7; Lovestone’s concept 198; role of exchange programmes 87–8, 95; role of The Reporter 136 American Federation of Labor (AFL) 25, 35, 220; activities in West Germany 108, 109–11; exiled Germans working for 109; original political stance 104; relationship with CIO
103–4; transnational foreign policy programme 101, 102, 106, 198, 201 American Heritage Foundation 214 American Legion 163, 200 American Student Union (ASU) 70, 72 American Studies 7, 89, 142; see also British Association for American Studies (BAAS) American Studies Conference, Selwyn College, Cambridge 151 American University, Beirut 69 American values: extolled in Campaign of Truth 91, 214; and foreign policy 83; Max Ascoli 135–6; propaganda of Militant Liberty Campaign 166; reinforced in films by major studios 159 American Veterans Committee 200 American Youth Congress 71 Americans for Democratic Action (ADA) 72 Americans for Intellectual Freedom (AIF) 198 Americans United 37, 41 Angleton, James Jesus 128 Angster, Julia 8 Animal Farm 167 anti-American sentiment: charge against scholarship 5; in Europe 125; roused by McCarthyism 203 anti-Stalinism: Congress for Cultural Freedom (CCF) 198; New York intellectuals 194, 196, 197, 202, 203 anticommunism 8, 9; and church–state cooperation on foreign policy 181; Hollywood films 157, 158, 159, 162, 164; New York intellectuals of early Cold War 195, 196–8, 199, 200, 206; in regulation of film industry 160;
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represented by The Reporter 119; US government’s global strategy 85; US labour organisations 102, 105, 106, 110; US propaganda campaigns 214, 216 Apert, Daniel 200 Armstrong, Hamilton Fish 23 Arnhem 145 Arnold, Spencer 60 Art Kino 161 Ascoli, Marion (née Rosenwald) 120, 135 Ascoli, Max 7, 8; Americanness 135–6; background and origins of The Reporter 119–22, 123; and folding of The Reporter 134; government and intelligence contacts 124–5, 125, 126–7, 128, 130–31, 131 Asia: US broadcasting propaganda 165, 215 Associated Films 165 Associated Press (AP) 212 Association of American University Women (AAUW) 50, 51 atomic bomb 165 Atoms for Peace initiative 216 Austria 213 autonomy: concept 141; debate/dialectic with control 142, 142–3, 144, 154 Barrett, Edward W. 129, 132 Baruch, Bernard 36 Bauman, Dorothy 59 BBC (British Broadcasting Corporation) 159 Beauvoir, Simone de 125 Beers, Charlotte 222 Begg, John M. 214, 215 Beloff, Max 153 Benton, William 74, 212, 219, 222 Berle, Adolf A. 120, 127, 130 Berlin, Isaiah 205 Berlin: Blockade 165; crisis of 1961 129; Women’s International Day celebrations 55 Bernays, Ted 219 Bernstein, Carl 116, 117–18, 127, 128 The Big Lift 165 Bloomsbury set 205, 206 Böckler, Hans 108 Bolshevik revolution 21 Bondy, François 200 books: overseas information campaign 218, 221
Books USA 219–20 Bowman, Isaiah 23, 74 Braden, Tom 121, 126, 129, 200 Brewer, Roy 161, 162, 163 Britain: CCF’s attempts to establish presence in 205; CFR men in diplomatic roles 23; exiled German labour activists 109; Foreign Office anticommunist propaganda unit 167; government control of BBC during Cold War 159 British Association for American Studies (BAAS) 142; conflict over nature of 148–50; conflicting interpretations 144; early development 144–8; reengagement with Rockefeller Foundation 151–3, 153–4; re-engagement with US government 150–51 British Council 69 British Information Services, New York 146 British Society for Cultural Freedom 205 Brown, Irving 101, 102, 103, 106, 199 Brynner, Yul 218 Bullis, Harry 213 bureaucracy: and management of state–private cooperation 210–11, 213 Burnham, James 197, 199–200, 201, 202, 203, 204, 206 Bush, George W. 169; administrations 194, 195, 222 business: and decline of state-private cooperation 221–2; USIA campaigns for 220 Business Council for Understanding 217 Business for Diplomatic Action (BDA) 222 The Caddy 167 Caldwell, Oliver 90 Cambridge University: American Studies Conference (1956) 151 Campaign of Truth 88, 91, 92, 93, 131–2, 132–3, 214–15, 215, 217 Cannon, Mary 56 capitalism: and economic power 21; protection of through US propaganda 168; sanctification of by religious groups 179; see also ‘Consensus Capitalism’; ‘People’s Capitalism’ Capp, Al 218 CARE 214 Carew, Anthony 198
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Carnegie Endowment for International Peace 70, 76–7, 78, 87 Carnegie Foundation 19, 22, 25 Carroll, Wallace 122, 123, 132 Cassel, Elke van 7–8 Cater, Douglass 123, 1234, 124–5, 128–9 Catholic National Legion of Decency 159, 161 Catholic organisations 176, 182, 183 Catholic Relief Services Agency 183 Catt, Carrie Chapman 50 Caute, David 85 CBS (Columbia Broadcasting System) 117 censorship: films 160–62, 167 Chaplin, Charlie 162–3 charities: involvement in US information work 214 Chase National Bank 214 Cherrington, Ben 68–9 China 89, 90, 215 China Lobby exposé 130, 132–3 Christianity 177–8; see also evangelical organisations Church Committee (Senate Intelligence Committee) 117–18 church organisations see religious organisations church–state relationships 175–6, 181, 185, 190 Churchill, Winston 37 CIA (Central Intelligence Agency) 6, 7, 10, 16, 85; and American Committee for Cultural Freedom (ACCF) 201–4; cover of Foreign Leader Program 95; covert arm (Office of Policy Coordination) 54, 77, 78, 197; covert financing of private groups 58, 59, 60, 62, 85, 126, 215; covert funding of Encounter 146, 205; covert relationship with NSA 66–7, 77–8, 92, 116, 124; in cultural Cold War 198, 206, 207; establishment of 118–19; exposé of infiltration into cultural sphere 116–18, 169, 205–6; involvement in film industry during Cold War 158–9, 164, 166, 167; power struggle with FBI 133; press cooperation with 116–18; relationship with Cold War intellectuals 195, 200; relationship with labour organisations 103–4; and The Reporter 125, 128, 134, 134–5; role of major foundations in covert
operations 25; role of Rockefeller in covert operations 120 cinema: in Cold War battle for mass opinion 157, 158, 159; FBI’s links with 164; see also film industry; Hollywood cities: twinning schemes 218 citizenship: idea of ‘good citizen’ 18 class: in Gramsci’s theory of power 15, 21 Clay, Lucius 127, 165 CNN (Cable News Network) 221 Coca-Cola 220 Cochrane, Doris 57 Cohn, Alfred 73, 164 Cold War: as abstract conflict 196; cultural conflict 19, 85, 121, 125; doctrine of containment 8, 197; end of 100, 221–2; ideological dimension of US foreign policy 83–4, 95; as justification for CIA secrecy 66, 67; political warfare 5; rallying of private sector to cause 212–14; role of American philanthropic foundations 24, 121; subsidiarity 182, 190; US hegemony and global expansionism 14, 25–6, 105 Cold War studies 3–4, 175; ‘cultural turn’ 4, 169; recent developments concerned with ideology 196; revealing state–private networks 43–4 Collier’s Magazine 217 Colligan, Francis J. 92 Cominform 197, 198 Commentary 196, 203 Commission to Study the Organization of Peace (CSOP) 33, 36, 41, 70 Committee for Cultural Freedom 197 Committee for the Free World 206 Committee for International Education Reconstruction (CIER) 76 Committee for National Morale 70, 71 Committee on the Present Danger 206 Committee of Correspondence (CoC) 10, 58–60, 61, 62–3 Committee on Public Information 86, 211–12 Committee to Defend America by Aiding the Allies (CDAAA) 33, 36, 39, 70 Common Council for American Unity 214–15, 215, 216 Communism: battle with Stalinism within US intelligentsia 198, 202;
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Committee of Correspondence campaign against 59; German activists’ break with 109; repression of voluntary organisations 49; US ideological battle against 84, 91, 100, 101, 105, 106 Communist International 109 Communist Party, USA 102; New York branch 196 community of interest 78–9 Congress for Cultural Freedom (CCF) 6, 10, 85, 126, 143, 206; anticommunist campaign 25, 198, 199–200, 200–201, 202; attempts to establish presence in Britain 205; as CIA front operation 116, 118, 125, 195 Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO) 25, 35, 101, 102, 201, 220; activities in West Germany 108, 109; relationship with AFL 103–4, 104 ‘Consensus Capitalism’ 105 control: concept 141; debate/dialectic with autonomy 142, 142–3, 144, 154 Cooper, Gary 160 cooperation: relationship with cooptation 7, 11, 48, 58–60, 62 cooperative model (voluntary associations and state–private network) 51–4; American exceptionalism and internationalism 6–7, 54; limitations 54–8; in post-war Germany 51–2 corporations: decline of relationship with government 221–2; involvement in US information work 214, 217; power in capitalist societies 21 corporatism 15, 15–16; organisational sector 13, 16, 18, 19, 20, 21 Corporatist School 13 Council for Democracy 120 Council on Foreign Relations (CFR) 18, 21, 22–3, 24, 38, 70, 77, 130 Creel, George 86 Crosland, Anthony 205 Cuban refugee crisis (1960–61) 181 Cull, Nicholas 8 cultural Cold War 19, 121, 125, 222; FBI’s engagement with film industry 162–3; New York intellectuals 195, 200, 201, 202; politics–culture nexus 85; professionalisation of 198–200; two ideological formations 206 cultural diplomacy: role of film 164–5; US labour organisations’ role 100–101
cultural imperialism 4 cultural programmes: exposé of CIA infiltration 169; government and student activities 67, 68; interaction between US and British academics 145; International Media Guarantee 213–14; Smith–Mundt Act 88; see also exchange programmes cultural relations 86, 90 Cumings, Bruce 130 Cunliffe, Marcus 146, 149, 151, 153 D’Arms, Chet 149–50, 152–3 Davies, Joseph 36 Davis, Bette 162 Davis, Malcolm W. 75 Davis, Norman H. 23 DDB World Wide 222 Decker, R.L. 184 Defense Department 165 DeMille, Cecil B. 166, 219 democracy: dependence on free trade unions 101; economy and US foreign policy aims 105–6; ideological campaign and voluntary associations 48, 49, 52; in message of religious organisations 178, 179 Department of Labor 94, 102 Diebold, William (Jr) 22 Diplomatic History 4 Disney, Walt 163 Division of Cultural Relations (DCR), State Department 68, 69, 74, 75, 86, 89 Doerr, Wallace 75 Dolivet, Louis 121 Don Quixote (film) 161 Donald Duck 68 Donnelly, Albert 202 Donovan, William J. 126, 128 Doolittle Report (1954) 10 Douglas, Kirk 220 DuBois, W.E.B. 68 Duggan, Laurence 69 Duggan, Stephen 73 Dulles, Allen 78, 121, 126, 127, 128, 129, 130–31, 133, 204 Dulles, John Foster 23 Dumbarton Oaks conference and proposals 37, 38, 40, 41–2, 74 Eagleton, Clyde 70, 71, 72, 74 Eastern Europe 85, 222 Eastman, Max 203, 204
230
INDEX
Economic Cooperation Administration (ECA) 103 economy: post-war rebuilding of state 177; sourcing of elites by key sectors 21; US foreign policy aims 105–6 education see higher education; schools educational exchange programmes 68, 74–5; Fulbright Conferences 144–5; NSA–WSSF 76–7 educators: wartime activities with government officials 66–7 Eichelberger, Clark 7, 31; and creation of United Nations 33–4, 36; relationship with Roosevelt 32, 33, 34–8; relationship with State Department 33, 38–42, 44 Eichler, Willi 108, 111 Eisenach, Eldon 14, 17, 22 Eisenhower, Dwight 52–3, 54, 120, 177, 178; administration 8, 131, 211; and USIA 215–19 elite foundations 22–5 Elson, Edward L.R. 178 Emergency Rescue Committee 120 Encounter 10, 119, 125, 146, 205, 206 Enoch, Jean 200 epistemic communities 13, 17–18, 21 establishment: framework 14–15, 20, 21, 24 Europe: American labour’s role in cultural diplomacy 100–101; animosity towards capitalism 106; International Media Guarantee programme 213–14; The Reporter’s circulation 125–6; US establishment of transnational labour network 101–2, 103; US propaganda activities 143, 144, 213, 214–15 Europe–America Groups (EAG) 197 European Movement 126–7 European Recovery Program Trade Union Advisory Committee (ERPTUAC) 103 evangelical organisations 176, 182, 183–4, 184–5, 190 Everson v. Board of Education (1947) 186 exchange programmes: as form of American exceptionalism 95; Fulbright Conferences 144–5; German women’s visits to US 51–2, 61; influence on British scholars 146; role in Campaign of Truth 91; and state–private network 86–9; see also
cultural programmes; Foreign Leader Program (FLP) Expo ‘93, Taejon, Korea 222 Fabian Society 109 Far East: exchange programmes 91–2 Farfield Foundation 116, 202, 204 Farrell, James T. 203 fascist regimes 49, 50, 86 FBI (Federal Bureau of Investigation) 133, 157, 162–3, 164, 167 Felix, Christopher (pseudonym) 134 Fierst, Mr 57 film industry: censorship and self-regulation 160–62; state organisations involved in 158–9; see also cinema; Hollywood First Amendment 186 First World War 87, 210–11, 215 Fischer, George 74 Fischer, Louis 199 Fisher, Ali 7 Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy 86 Fletcher, William 72 Ford, Gerald 220 Ford, John 166 Ford Foundation 18, 21, 23, 24, 57, 115 Ford Motors 211–12, 214, 219, 220 foreign aid: funding and religious organisations 178, 179, 185, 189 Foreign Leader Program (FLP) 93–4, 95 foreign policy: covert dimension 10; debates and discussions 4, 9; ‘establishment’ 14, 15–16; ideological dimension 83–6, 95; instrumentality of cultural relations 69, 88; and International Council Conference 221; involvement of labour organisations 100, 101, 102, 104; key role of private organisations 100, 121; New York intellectuals’ attempts to influence 196–7; and People-to-People programme 53; role of Foreign Leader Program 93; and ‘state spirit’ 32; state–private network 210–11; US internationalism 17, 44; USIA information campaign overseas 219 Foreign Student Leadership Program (FSLP) 78, 92, 95 Foster, William Z. 49 Foundation for Youth and Student Affairs (FYSA) 77–8, 78, 90, 92 Fousek, John 84
231
INDEX
France 213; see also Paris; Union des Femmes Françaises free market economy: and cultural Cold War 222; Federal Republic of Germany 110; in US ideological campaign 100 Free Trade Union Committee (FTUC) 102, 103 Free World 120–21, 121 freedom: American ideology 3, 95 Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) 118 Friedrich, Carl 70 Friends of Russian Freedom (FRF) 197, 198 Fulbright Act (1946) 87, 88–9, 145 Fulbright Commission 150 Fulbright Conferences 144–5, 147–8, 149 Fulbright Program 89, 95 Fulbright–Hays Act (1961) 87, 93 functional blocs 16 Gallup, George 219 A Gathering of Eagles 165 General Electrics 220 General Mills, Inc. 213 Gerig, Ben 42 German Association for American Studies 151 German Communist Party 109 German Democratic Republic (GDR) 112 German Social Democratic Party (SPD) 107, 108, 110, 111–12 German Trade Union Federation (DGB) 107–8, 110, 111 Germany: effects of US transnational labour relations 107–12; exchange activities during Occupation 93; International Media Guarantee programme 213; post-war work of women’s voluntary associations 50, 51–2, 55; trade union activities during Occupation 103, 106–7; US military’s post-war reorientation programme 88, 90; work of elite foundations 24 Gideonese, Harry D. 70, 72, 73, 74 Gleason, Philip 145 ‘global democratic revolution’ 194–5 global expansionism: American mobilisation for 25–6; aspirations and role of CFR 23–4; role of state–private network 14 globalisation 100
government: cooperation of American labour with 102–4; covert sponsorship of private organisations 85; influence on films during Cold War 164, 166; internationalist organisations’ links with 42–3; post-war relationship with religious groups 175–6; and role of non-governmental groups 100, 176–7; role of subsidiarity in post-war period 188, 190; state–private links with voluntary associations 47, 61; wartime activities with educators 66–7 Governmental Affairs Institute 94 Graham, Billy 178 Gramsci, Antonio/Gramscian ideas 15, 21–2, 141; hegemony 14, 22, 142, 143; ‘state spirit’ 6, 21, 22, 32 Gray, Gordon 129 Great Depression 104, 177 Great Society programmes 180, 188, 190 Greece 23, 94 Greek–Turkey Aid Program 89 Green, William 35 Guggenheim, Charles 164 Guggenheim Foundation 87 Gullion, Edmund 86 Hall, B. Homer 124 Hamilton, Fowler 181 Hansen, Werner 108, 111 Harris, Louis 75 Harris, Rosemary 62 Harvard University 16, 124, 145 Hawley, Ellis 16 healthcare: funding and religious organisations 184; People-to-People initiative 218–19 hegemony: American global expansionism 25–6, 105; development of blocs 143–4; Gramsci’s concept 14, 22, 142, 143 Heine, Fritz 108 Herter, Christian 31 Heston, Charlton 220 High Commission for Germany (HICOG) 51, 103 High Noon 160 higher education: funding and religious organisations 179, 180, 182–3, 183–4, 188–9 Hill–Burton Hospital Survey and Construction Act (1947) 179, 183, 186
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Hinds, Lynn 196 Hiss, Alger 43 Hitchcock, William K. 52 Hodgson, Godfrey 14, 15–16, 16, 19–20, 21, 22, 25 Hoffman, Paul 23 Hogan, Michael 16 Holland, Kenneth 70, 71, 74, 76, 77–8, 90 Hollywood: alliance with State Department during Cold War 167–8; anticommunist/anti-Soviet films 157, 158, 159; McCarthy era blacklist 157, 162; marriage with Washington during Cold War 157, 159, 169; relationship with CIA 164; and US wartime propaganda 165, 212 Hook, Sidney 197, 198, 202, 204, 204–5, 206 Hoopes, Townsend 15 Hoover, J. Edgar 162, 164 Hoover Institution, California 197 HOPE (Health Opportunities for People Everywhere) 218–19 Hopkins, Ernest 33, 41, 42 Horton, Philip 123–4, 124–5, 127–8, 130, 133 hospitals: funding and religious organisations 179–80, 183 House Committee on Un-American Activities (HUAC) 49, 158, 162, 163 Hull, Cordell 71 Hunt, E. Howard 197 Hunt, Michael 83–4 hydrogen bomb 9 ideology: background of Reporter editors 135; continuity between antiStalinists and neoconservatives 194; dimension of US foreign policy 9, 83–6, 95; formations in US cultural Cold War 206; and importance of voluntary associations 47–8, 61; and political culture 142; role in shaping attitudes towards Soviet Union 196; of Soviet Union during Cold War 168; underpinning Cold War subsidiarity 187–8; and use of religion by policymakers 177–8, 178–9; western community of ideas 100, 101, 112 ‘ideology school’ (Cold War historians) 84, 85 Immigration and Naturalization Service 162–3
India 24, 201 Indonesia 24, 204 Industrial Cooperation Council 217 information see overseas information; propaganda; United States Information Agency (USIA) Institute of International Education (IIE) 69, 73, 78, 87, 90, 94 Interdepartmental Foreign Information Organization 91 intermediate nuclear forces (INF) 221 International Alliance of Theatrical Stage Employees (IATSE) 161, 162 International Confederation of Free Trade Unions (ICFTU) 103, 108 International Cooperation Administration 92 International Council Conference 221 International Educational Exchange Service (IES), State Department 89, 92 International Information Administration (IIA) 215 International Labor Organization 34–5 International Media Guarantee (IMG) 213 International Organizations Division (IOD) 121, 200, 202, 206 international relations 88, 95–6, 100 International Rescue Committee 85 International Student Assembly (ISA), Washington DC 71 International Student Conference, Prague 124 International Student Service (ISS), Geneva 70, 72–3, 73; see also ISS–US Committee International Union of Students (IUS) 75, 77, 124 internationalism: and American exceptionalism 6–7; during Second World War 32; Eichelberger 39, 42–3; group of people restructuring student field 70; split in movement 41–2; US policies 16, 17, 35 Iran 23 Islamism: current US intervention against 206 ISS Provisional Committee 74–5 ISS–US Committee 70–71, 73; government cooperation 71–3, 74 Italian Socialist Party 130 Italian-American groups 212
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Italy: election of 1948 212, 214; International Media Guarantee programme 213; role of Mazzini Society 120; work of elite foundations 24; work of women’s voluntary associations 50 Jackson, C.D. 8, 120, 121, 127, 128, 129 Jaffe, Leo 220 Japan 88; see also Pearl Harbor Jefferson, Thomas 186 Jewish community: New York intellectuals 196 Jewish organisations 176, 183 Johnson, Alvin 70, 72 Johnson, Hewlett, Dean of Canterbury 56 Johnson, Lyndon B. 129, 134 Johnson, U. Alexis 129 Johnston, Eric 161 Johnstone, Andrew 7 Josselson, Michael 10, 199, 200, 204, 206 Journal of the American Association of University Women 50 journalists: hired by CIA for misinformation overseas 116–17; investigation of CIA 117, 205 Kennan, George 8–9, 11, 84–5, 168, 199 Kennedy, John F. 129; administration 92–3, 131, 181, 219 Kennedy, Joseph P. 154 Kennedy, Robert 129 Kent, Sherman 128 Keogh, Jim 220 Ketzel, Clifford 88–9 Keynesianism 104, 111, 177 Khrushchev, Nikita 168 King, Richard 144 Kirkland, Lane 220 Kitchen, Wilmer 76 Kluger, Pearl 201 Koenig, Myron 150, 151 Koestler, Arthur 197, 199, 200, 201, 202 Korea 23, 56, 57, 189 Korean War 214 Kotschnig, Walter 70, 71, 72–3, 73, 74 Kristol, Irving 125, 194, 196, 206 Kristol, William 194 Krugler, David 132 labour organisations: cooperation with US government 102–4; ideological battle within state–private network
198, 201; role in American cultural diplomacy 100–101; transnational network 101–2, 103 Labour Party, Great Britain 109, 205 Lash, Joseph 71, 72 Lasswell, Harold 90 Latin America 24, 86, 93, 211, 216 Laville, Helen 6–7, 7, 10 Lawrence, Jimmie 36 Lawton, Colonel B. 165 Lazarsfeld, Paul 90 League for Cultural Freedom and Socialism 197 League of Nations 32, 34–5, 36, 39 League of Nations Association (LNA) 33, 36 League of Women Voters (LWV) 50, 51, 62 the Left 25, 198; see also non-communist left (NCL) LeMay, Curtis 165 Lemon v. Kurzman 186 letter writing: US propaganda campaign 214–15, 217 Levin, Nathan 135 Lewis, Jerry 167 Lewis, John L. 35 Life magazine 214 Lincoln Star (Kansas) 36 Lind, Michael 194–5 Lions Club 214 London: literati associated with Encounter 206; OSS Secret Intelligence Branch 123 Look magazine 161 Loory, Stuart H. 116–17 Los Angeles Olympics (1984) 221 Lovestone, Jay 101, 102, 103, 106–7, 198, 200, 201 Lovett, Robert A. 213 Lovett, Sidney 73 Lucas, Scott 84 Luce, Henry 127 Luraschi, Luigi 167 Lutheran organisations 183, 184–5 Lyons, Eugene 203 McCarthy, Joseph R. 133 McCarthy, Mary 125, 194, 197, 203 McCarthyism 66, 126, 132, 157, 169, 203, 204 McCloy, John J. 24 McConnell, Grant 51 Macdonald, Dwight 197, 203
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McElroy, Neil 213 McGraw-Hill 214 Mackie, Robert 73–4 MacLeish, Archibald 70, 74 magazines: anticommunist vehicles 196 Manchester University 146 Mann, Michael 14 Marshall Plan 15, 43, 103, 201, 213 Martin, Dean 167 Martin, John Lee 161 Marx, Karl 21 Marxism 13, 20 mass communications research 90–91 Massachusetts Institute of Technology 76 the masses 20 May, Lary 163 Mazzini Society 120 Mead, Margaret 71 Meany, George 201 media: background of USIA staff 211; and International Council Conferences 221 Meyer, Cord (Jr) 66, 67, 200, 204 Militant Liberty campaign 165 the military: Hollywood’s relationship with 165; post-war reorientation programmes 88, 90 Miller, Gerald 200 Miller, William 178 Ministry of Information, American Division 146 Der Monat 125 Monsanto chemicals 219 Monsma, Stephen 188 Mooring, William 160 Morin, Richard 40–41 Moscow: American Exhibition 210 Mosley, Philip 22 Motion Picture Alliance (MPA) 161 Motion Picture Herald 160 Motion Picture Producers’ Association 167 Motion Picture Production Office 167 multi-national corporations 220 Murdoch, Rupert 221 Murrow, Edward 129 Museum of Modern Art, New York 121 Mussolini, Benito 120 Nabokov, Nicolas 199, 201, 202 Nadel, Alan 166–7 The Nation 119
National Association of Evangelicals (NAE) 184, 185 National City Bank 214 National Committee for a Free Europe (NCFE) 8, 85, 116, 118–19, 125, 127 National Council of Catholic Women 51 National Council of Negro Women 51 National Council of Women 57, 59 National Endowment for Democracy 11 National Farmers Union 35 National Industrial Advertising Association 216 National Inter-Collegiate Christian Council (NICC) 73 national security 89, 105 National Security Council (NSC) 9, 16, 121, 128; NSC 4 and 4A 84, 91; NSC 68 3, 84, 91 National Student Association (NSA) 7; Constitutional Convention (1947) 75–6; covert relationship with CIA 66, 77–8, 92, 116, 124; roots of international programme 66–7, 78; and WSSF 73, 75–7 National War Fund 73 NATO (North Atlantic Treaty Organization) 16, 89, 222 Nazism: in Hollywood films 165–6 Near East College Association 69 Neibuhr, Reinhold 8 Neilson, William 70 neoconservative movement 194, 195; founding fathers/ancestors of 197, 206; question of influence of Trotskyism 194–5 Netherlands 213 New Christian Right 176 New Deal/New Dealism 17, 18, 25, 102, 201; shift away from 177, 205 New Leader 8, 119, 125, 126, 135, 196 New Left 205 New Republic 119, 121 New Right 206 New York Herald Tribune 214 New York intellectuals 194, 199, 207; and ACCF 203, 204; anticommunism in early Cold War 196–8, 202; and exposure of CIA covert operations 205–6; and neoconservative consciousness 195, 206; relationship with CIA 195 New York Times 63, 117, 121, 133 Newsweek 117, 126
235
INDEX
Nicholas, Herbert 146, 147, 148, 149, 150, 152 Nichols, Louis B. 164 Nichols, William I. 213 Nine from Little Rock 165 Ninkovich, Frank 61 Ninotchka 168 Nixon, Richard 178, 220 non-communist left (NCL) 200, 206 non-governmental organisations see private organisations Norway 213 Novak, Michael 220 Nye, Joseph 94–5 Office of Inter-American Affairs (OIAA) 68, 88, 89–90, 90, 120, 212 Office of Military Government (OMGUS) 51, 55, 90, 103 Office of Policy Coordination (OPC) 197, 198, 200 Office of Private (Enterprise and) Cooperation, State Department 210, 214–15, 217, 220 Office of Strategic Services (OSS) 68, 74, 89–90, 103, 120; background The Reporter’s staff 122–4, 129 Office of War Information (OWI) 68, 74, 88, 89–90, 159, 169, 212, 213; background The Reporter’s staff 120, 122–4 O’Neill, William 203 Operations Coordinating Board (OCB) 91–2 Orwell, George 167 Overseas Educational Fund (OEF) 61–2 overseas information: Books USA campaign 219–20; intelligence gathering 14; letter-writing schemes 217–18; work of USIA 211 Oxford University 146 Padover, Saul 91 Paget, Karen 7 Paley, Dorothy and William 73 parastates 14, 17–18, 20, 22, 32 Paris: CCF headquarters 195, 199, 200; Nabokov’s arts festival 201–2, 202; OSS Secret Intelligence Branch 123–4 Parmar, Inderjeet 6 Parsons, Betty 130 Parsons, Rose 58, 58–9, 60 Partisan Review 119, 125, 126, 134–5, 196, 204
Pasternak, Boris: Doctor Zhivago 125 patriotism 159, 161 Patton, James 35 Pax Romana 73 Peace Corps, Washington DC 77 Pearl Harbor 23, 67–8, 71 Pearmain, John 31, 43, 44 Pentagon 11, 128, 166 People-to-People 52–3, 54, 217, 218–19 People To People International (PTPI) 219 ‘People’s Capitalism’ 216–17 Phillips, William 204 Picasso, Pablo 56 Pledge of Allegiance 178 pluralism 14, 15, 16–17 Podhoretz, Norman 220 Poland 214 political culture: structural approaches 142–3; studies 5, 7, 8 political reform 19–20 political warfare: Cold War 5; Kennan’s proposal 8–9, 11, 84–5 post-war reconstruction 50, 52, 74 power: in Cold War cultural conflict 85; of the establishment 15–16; hard and soft 94–5; state–private networks 14, 15 Pratt, Trude 72 Pravda 212 the press: cooperation with CIA 116–18; FBI’s links with 164; The Reporter as embodiment of Cold War role 118, 121–2 private elites 14, 15; and public power 20–21, 25 private organisations 4, 112; control and autonomy dialectic 142–3; cooperation with state in Reagan era 220–21; funding of by the state 176–7; involvement in Dumbarton Oaks conference 40–1; promotion of exchange programmes 86–7; rallying to cause of Cold War 212–14; role in Cold War propaganda 132; role in international relations 100; role in US wartime information 210–11; staff of USIA from 211, 215, 216; State Department’s liaison with 213–14; and USIA since 1960 219–22 private sector: blurring of distinction with public sector 14, 39–40, 48, 51 Proctor and Gamble 213 Production Code Administration (PCA) 160
236
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Progressive era 17 Project for the New American Century (PNAC) 194, 206 propaganda: authorised by Smith–Mundt Act 210; CIA idea of 116; cooperation of private sphere and government 211–12, 215; in Hollywood films 158, 159; importance of Foreign Leader Program 94; Kennedy’s committee on 129; post-war Soviet campaign 47, 48; spreading American values 83, 91; US–Soviet battle 57–8, 91, 126, 131; US wartime agencies 88, 89–90, 120, 123 Protestant organisations 176, 182, 182–3, 184, 185, 189, 190 Protestants and Other Americans United (POAU) 184 Psychological Strategy Board (PSB) 91, 121, 128, 166 psychological warfare 68, 83, 86, 90–91, 121, 123 public diplomacy 52–3, 54, 86, 210, 222 public opinion: campaign for Dumbarton Oaks proposals 40–41; in view of Progressives 20 public sector: blurring of distinction with private sector 14, 39–40, 48, 51 publishers 214, 219 Quayle, Dan 194 Quigley, Martin 160 Radio Free Asia 215 Radio Free Europe (RFE) 10, 85, 90, 116, 127, 215, 221 Radio Liberation (RL) 214, 220 Radio Liberty 10, 127 Rambo films 158 Ramparts’ magazine: exposé of state–private network 66, 116–18, 124 Rand, Ayn 161 Rathvon, N. Peter 160 Reagan, Ronald 157–8, 163, 169; administration 206, 210, 211, 220 Reinhardt, Keith 222 religion: post-war relationship with politics 185 religious organisations: funding during Cold War 179–82, 185–6, 190; and post-war state building 7, 174–9; subsidiarity in church–state relationship 181, 190
Remington Typewriters 211–12 The Reporter 7–8; characteristics 118–19; CIA funding 134–5; Second World War origins 119–22; staff experience of OWI and OSS 122–4; and the State Department 131–3; state–private network 124–31 Repplier, Theodore 216, 219 Republic Steel 216 Reston, James 121, 121–2 Reuther, Victor 101 Reuther, Walter 201 Reynolds, Conger 218 rhetoric: Cold War 196 Rhodes Scholars 146 the Right 200 Robert College, Istanbul 69 Robin, Ron 91 Rockefeller, Nelson 71, 88, 120, 121, 129, 130, 212 Rockefeller Foundation 19, 22, 116; Ascoli’s association with 119, 120; and BAAS 144, 149–50, 150, 151–3, 153; financing of CFR 23; financing of educational projects 77, 87, 90; institution-building in Third World regions 24, 25; as integral to US Cold War machinery 121 Rogin, Michael 157 Rolling Stone 117 Roosevelt, Eleanor 58, 70, 71, 72 Roosevelt, Franklin D. 23, 25, 32, 68, 102; address to International Student Assembly 71; Eichelberger’s relationship with 33, 34–8, 39, 40 Rosenberg, Ludwig 108, 111 Rosenwald, Julius 120 Ross, Mike 101 Rotary Club 214 Royal Institute of International Affairs 23 Rusk, Dean 23 Russell, Bertrand 204, 205, 206 Russia 124, 215; see also Soviet Union Russian social democrats (‘Mensheviks’) 196, 197 Rutz, Henry 101 Said, Edward 3, 11 Salt of the Earth 162 Salvation Army 185 Salzburg Seminar on American Civilization 76, 89
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Saunders, Frances Stonor: Who Paid the Piper? 3, 5, 6, 10, 116, 121, 142 Schäfer, Axel 8 Schlesinger, Arthur (Sr) 48–9 Schlesinger, Arthur (Jr) 122–3, 125, 127, 203–4, 204 schools: funding and religious organisations 180, 186 Schrecker, Ellen 196 Schumacher, Kurt 107, 108, 110 Schumpeter, Joseph A. 19 scientific exchange programmes 89 Scott-Smith, Giles 6, 7, 143, 200–201 Schramm, Wilbur 90 Screen Actors Guild 157 Sears, Roebuck & Co. 120 Second World War: American values on film during 158; effect on economic ideas 104; Hollywood films about 165–6; influence on British scholars 145–6; internationalism during 32, 33, 34; and origins of The Reporter 119–22, 124, 127; relationship between trade unions and government 102; role of CFR 23; state–private network during 210; US plans for intervention 16, 23, 24; US propaganda organisations 120, 212; see also Pearl Harbor Senate Intelligence Committee see Church Committee Seville Exposition (1992) 221 Seymour, Charles 67–8 Shank, Donald 78 Shaw, Tony 6 Shepardson, Whitney Hart 22 Shils, Edward 49 Shriver, Sargent 180 Shuster, George 70, 71–2, 72–3 Simons, John 77, 78 Smith, Robert S. 75, 76 Smith, Walter Bedell 126, 197 Smith–Mundt Act (Information and Educational Exchange Act) (1948) 87, 88, 92, 93, 210, 211, 212 social sciences: work by elite foundations in Latin America 24 social services: funding and religious organisations 180 socialism: American labour movement’s view of 104; capitalism’s resistance to 21; postwar West German rejection of 108, 109, 111
Soviet bloc countries 8; film industry during Cold War 161 Soviet Society for Contacts Abroad (VOKS) 161 Soviet Union: AFL’s perception of threat 101; break-up 3; Cold War film propaganda 168, 169; ideological battle during Cold War 77, 106; neglected in discussions of Cold War 5; neglected in Hollywood films about Second World War 165; ‘peace offensive’ 55, 56, 63; post-war propaganda campaign 47, 48; propaganda battle with US 57–8, 126, 131; US confrontation with 16; US ideological offensive against 84, 85, 85–6, 94, 100; see also Pravda; Russia Spanish Civil War 109 Spellman, Francis Joseph, Cardinal 8 Spender, Natasha and Stephen 10 The Spirit of America 169 sport: private sector fund-raising activities 220–21 Stalin, Joseph 101, 169 Stalin–Hitler Pact (1939) 70 Stalinists: battle with communists in cultural Cold War 198 Standard Oil 214 Star Wars 158 the state: frameworks of power 15; links with industry during Cold War 212–13; and parastates 18; and politics 21–2; and private organisations 11, 14, 15, 40–41, 176; relationship with Hollywood during Cold War 158; and religious organisations 176–9 State Department 68, 69, 74, 120, 128; advisory agencies and elite foundations 23–4, 25; alliance with Hollywood during Cold War 167–8, 168; educational and cultural exchange programmes 87, 89, 90, 91, 92, 94, 95; Eichelberger’s close relationship with 31, 32, 33, 38–42, 44; involvement in film industry during Cold War 158–9; liaison with private sector 213–15; post-war overseas propaganda 210; questioning of integrity of 43; and The Reporter 131–3; see also Division of Cultural Relations (DCR); International Educational Exchange Service (IES)
238
INDEX
state–private network: covert and overt operations 92; epistemic communities 18–19; in exchange programmes 86–9, 95; government and religious organisations 175–6; government and voluntary associations 47, 51, 54, 58; and Gramscian idea of hegemony 22; ideological battle within labour 198, 201; influence on development of BAAS 153; irony of 61–3; methodology for political–cultural message 141–4; The Reporter and shared vision of 118–19, 124–31; role in foreign policy 210–11; role of subsidiarity 187; role in US global anticommunist strategy 85; role in US global expansionism 14, 26; scholarly approaches 5–8; in US film industry during Cold War 164, 169; and US internationalism 32–3 ‘state spirit’ (Gramsci) 6, 21, 22, 32 statism 14, 15 Storm Center 162 Straight, Michael 121 Strategic Air Command 165 Strauss, Anna Lord 52 Streibert, Theodore 215, 217 Student Service of America (SSA) 73, 74 Student Socialist League for Industrial Democracy 70–71 students: restructuring into national organisation 66–7; see also educational exchange programmes Sukarno, President Ahmed 24, 204 Supreme Court: decisions on funding of religious organisations 185–7 Surplus Property Act (1944) 87 Taft–Hartley Act (1947) 102 Tarzan films 169 Taylor, Dick 147, 148, 149, 150, 152, 153 Taylor, General Max 129 The Ten Commandments 166–7 Thatcher, Margaret 95 Third World 24 This Week magazine 213 Thistlethwaite, Frank 149, 150, 151, 152–3 Thomas, Norman 203 Thompson, Kenneth 23 Thomson, Charles 69, 71 Threshold 71, 73, 75 Time magazine 117, 126, 127, 214 Time-Life, Inc. 8, 196
Tocqueville, Alexis de 48 totalitarian regimes 48–9, 85 tourism: US propaganda in Europe 214 trade unions: cooperation with government during Cold War 105; effect of New Deal on 102; effect of US labour relations on post-war Germany 107–12; involvement in Foreign Leader Program 94; involvement in US foreign politics 100, 102–3, 112; perception of Soviet threat to 101; strikes in Hollywood 163 Trilling, Diana 204 Trotskyism 197; as influence on neoconservative ideas 194–5 Truman, Harry S. 44, 88, 91, 181, 210; administration 8, 43, 102, 133; Campaign of Truth 131–2, 214, 215 Truslow, Francis Adams 126–7 Turner, Ralph E. 69–70, 75 Turner, Ted 221 UNESCO (UN Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization) 68, 74, 76 Union des Femmes Françaises 55 United Nations (UN) 23, 67, 69, 70, 73; Eichelberger’s role in creation of 31, 32–3, 35, 37, 41, 42, 43 United Nations Association 57 United Nations World 121 United Press (UP) 212 United States (US): Cold War histories 3–4; idea of duty to lead the world 25; labelled as warmonger by Soviet Union 55, 56; propaganda battle with Soviet Union 57–8 United States Agency for International Development (USAID) 24, 181–2 United States Education Commission (USEC) 144, 147 United States Information Agency (USIA) 4, 11, 90, 92, 93; campaigns during Eisenhower years 53, 215–19; presence of private sector within 210, 211; and private cooperation since 1960 219–22; propaganda link with Hollywood 158–9, 164–5, 166; support of The Reporter 125, 126 United States Information Service (USIS) 24, 210, 218 United States Student Assembly (USSA) 72
239
INDEX
universities: elite network created by foundations 23, 24 University College, London 145 University in Exile (New School for Social Research) 119–20, 120 Upgren, Arthur 22 US Army: Psychological Warfare Department 89 US Steel company 214 Vietnam War 4, 10, 63, 104, 134, 168, 182, 205 Voice of America (VOA) 131, 211, 212, 214, 221 voluntary associations: cooperative model 51–8; ideological importance 47–8, 61; involvement in Foreign Leader Program 94; as key part of American democracy 48–9, 49; links with US government 47, 178, 181; and Soviet–US propaganda battle 57–8 Wadsworth, Elizabeth 62–3 Waechter, Lily 56 Wald, Alan 195 Walk East on Beacon! 164 Wall Street 16, 20, 159 Walsh, William B. 218 Wanger, Walter 168 War Department 68, 74 War on Poverty programme 180 War on Terror 5, 169, 194, 210, 222 Washburn, Abbott 215, 217 Washington DC 16, 20, 34; marriage with Hollywood during Cold War 157, 159, 169 Wayne, John 166 Wead, Frank 166 Weissmuller, Johnny 169 welfare: funding and religious organisations 178, 179, 180–81, 189 Welland, Dennis 151 Welles, Sumner 31, 36, 38, 39, 42, 71 Werblin, David ‘Sonny’ 220 West Berlin 198 West Germany: Allied occupation 51, 52; breaking of CIA scandal 103 What Should I Know When I Travel Abroad? 214, 216 White House 11, 16, 128, 217, 218, 221 White, William Allen 36
Whitney, John 121 Wick, Charles Z. 166, 220, 221 Wilford, Hugh 6, 154 Wilson, Charles 54, 218 Wilson, Howard 76, 78 Windt, Theodore 196 The Wings of Eagles 166 Wisner, Frank 54, 203 Wittfogel, Karl 203 Wolfers, Arnold 70, 72–3, 74 Women of the Whole World (journal) 55 Women’s Bureau of the Department of Labor 51–2, 55–6 Women’s International Democratic Federation (WIDF) 55–6, 57, 58, 59–6 women’s voluntary associations: exportation of voluntary association model 49–50; links with US government 6, 47, 51; response to WIDF report 57; work in post-war Germany 50, 51–2 Workman, Chuck 169 World Bank 24 World Congress of Partisans for World Peace (March 1950) 56 World Court 35 World Federation of Democratic Youth (WFDY) 75, 77 World Peace Conference, London (1951) 56 World Relief Corporation (WRC) 185, 189 World Student Christian Federation (WSCF) 73 World Student Relief 73–4 World Student Service Fund (WSSF) 72–3, 75–7 World Vision 185 Yale Daily News 67–8 Yale University 16, 68 Yard, Molly 71, 72 Young Men’s Christian Association (YMCA) 73 Young and Rubicam advertising agency 214 Young Women’s Christian Association (YWCA) 50, 51, 73 Zanuck, Darryl 157, 167
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