By Sarah Ellen Graham

In the course of the 20th century governments got here to more and more savor the worth of soppy strength to assist them in attaining their international coverage objectives. overlaying the an important interval among 1936 and 1953, this e-book examines the U.S. government’s adoption of diplomatic courses that have been designed to cajole, tell, and allure international public opinion in aid of yankee nationwide pursuits. Cultural international relations and foreign info have been deeply debatable to an American public that been bombarded with propaganda in the course of the First global struggle. This booklet explains how new notions of propaganda as reciprocal trade, cultural engagement, and enlightening info cleared the path for techniques in U.S. diplomatic perform. via a comparative research of the nation Department’s department of Cultural relatives, the govt. radio station Voice of the United States, and the multilateral cultural, academic and clinical international relations of Unesco, and drawing greatly on U.S. overseas coverage files, this ebook indicates how America’s liberal traditions have been reconciled with the duty of influencing and attracting publics out of the country.

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53 Raymond Dodge, “The Psychology of Propaganda,” Religious Education 15 (October 1920), p. 241. 54 Everett Dean Martin, The Behavior of Crowds: A Psychological Study (New York: Harper and Bros, 1920). M. Biddle, “A Psychological Definition of Propaganda,” The Journal of Abnormal and Social Psychology 26: 3 (October 1931), p. 284. 56 Sproule, Propaganda and Democracy, p. 49. 51 52 32 Culture and Propaganda became a testament to American intellectuals’ ultimate ambivalence on the question of whether propaganda could be considered legitimate in times of national emergency.

As the end of the war drew near, Woodrow Wilson’s plan for the post-war peace settlement increasingly became the focus of the CPI’s international propaganda campaign. 24 Commentators after the Second World War thus looked back on this effort to cultivate American leadership in the peace negotiations as so successful that “by the time of the Armistice the name of Woodrow Wilson, and a general idea that 20 The CPI had bureaus in Shanghai and Vladivostok. See Jerry Israel, Progressivism and the Open Door: America and China, 1905–1921 (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1971), p.

89 Another prominent contributor to the public debate on the implications of propaganda for international politics and the future of Europe was theologian Reinhold Niebuhr. In his 1932 book Moral Man and International Society, Niebuhr questioned the cultural internationalist sentiments that had motivated the European founders of the League of Nations International Committee on Intellectual Cooperation and other international cultural projects. He rejected their cosmopolitan logic, which held that peace could be achieved through the creation of an international public sphere rooted in substantial international understanding.

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