changing messages in early u.s.cold war print · pdf filechanging messages in early u.s.cold...

3

YarrowChanging Messages in Early U.S. Cold War Print Propaganda

Selling a New Vision of America to the World

Changing Messages in Early U.S. Cold War PrintPropaganda

✣ Andrew L. Yarrow

In both World War I and World War II, the U.S. government feltcompelled to explain itself—its war aims, its foreign policy more generally,and even its conception of what the United States stood for as a country—toforeign audiences. Not until the Cold War began, however, did the UnitedStates develop a large-scale, permanent capacity for foreign propaganda (or“public diplomacy”). The new programs were intended to curb the spread ofCommunism and win economic and military allies by disseminating messagesin a variety of media to discredit Communism and extol the virtues of theUnited States.

What were these virtues, and what, if anything, do they say about howelites conceived of America’s image in the late 1940s and 1950s? AlthoughU.S. Cold War propaganda efforts have usually been depicted as aimed at de-fending the “American way of life,”1 scholars have devoted less attention tohow U.S. print propaganda messages changed or how these shifting emphases

1. Laura A. Belmonte, “Defending a Way of Life: American Propaganda and the Cold War, 1945–1959,” Ph.D. Diss., University of Virginia, 1996; Laura Belmonte, “Selling Capitalism,” in StagingGrowth: Modernization, Development and the Global Cold War (Amherst: University of MassachusettsPress, 2003); Wilson P. Dizard, The Strategy of Truth: The Story of the U.S. Information Service (Wash-ington, DC: Public Affairs Press, 1961); Lynn B. Hinds and Theodore O. Windt, Jr., The Cold War asRhetoric: The Beginnings, 1945–1950 (New York: Praeger, 1991); Walter L. Hixson, Parting the Cur-tain: Propaganda, Culture, and the Cold War, 1945–1961 (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1997); DavidF. Krugler, The Voice of America and the Domestic Propaganda Battles, 1945–1953 (Columbia, MO:University of Missouri Press, 2000); Frank A. Ninkovich, The Diplomacy of Ideas: United States ForeignPolicy and Cultural Relations, 1938–1950 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1981); Gary D.Rawnsley, Radio Diplomacy and Propaganda: The BBC and VOA in International Politics, 1956–64(New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1996); Gary D. Rawnsley, ed., Cold War Propaganda in the 1950s (NewYork: St. Martin’s Press, 1999); Ronald I. Rubin, The Objectives of the U.S. Information Agency: Contro-versies and Analysis (New York: Praeger, 1966); Charles A. Thomson and Walter H. C. Laves, CulturalRelations and U.S. Foreign Policy (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1963); and USIA AlumniAssociation, United States Information Agency: A Commemoration—Telling America’s Story to the World,1953–1999 (Washington, DC: U.S. Information Agency Public Liaison Ofªce, 1999).

Journal of Cold War StudiesVol. 11, No. 4, Fall 2009, pp. 3–45© 2009 by the President and Fellows of Harvard College and the Massachusetts Instituteof Technology

reºected U.S. ofªcials’ evolving images of their country and its most salientand valued features. Scholars of the Cold War have described the multiplemessages imparted by U.S. propaganda agencies and have discussed explicitpolicy changes such as Harry S. Truman’s Campaign of Truth, the various di-rectives requiring radio broadcasts to emphasize factual reporting, and the in-ternal debates about the efªcacy of different messages.2 Thus far, however, noone has examined the more signiªcant underlying philosophical shift evidentin print propaganda—from the liberal idealism of the late 1940s to the mes-sages centering on American prosperity and abundance, or what came to becalled “people’s capitalism,” in the mid-to-late 1950s.

Although myriad messages were conveyed throughout the period—fromAmerica’s liberal idealism to the horrors of Communism—scholars such asWalter Hixson and Laura Belmonte have noted the use of propaganda mes-sages about U.S. abundance. But they have not evaluated the extent to whichthese messages gained in prominence during Dwight Eisenhower’s adminis-tration in the mid-to-late 1950s as the quantity and tone of printed materialsshifted from an emphasis on America’s idealism to its high, broad-based, andtechnology-driven standard of living. Nor have they explored how the mes-sages dovetailed with others disseminated within the United States by busi-ness, political, media, and educational leaders.

Propaganda is generally deªned as persuasive communication intendedto appeal to a target audience’s latent beliefs or, with more difªculty, tochange their beliefs and actions. This broad deªnition could include advertis-ing, political campaigning, and even education. Propaganda generally con-notes communication aimed at a foreign audience and has a partisan dimen-sion that, although not necessarily untrue, presents a subject only in its bestlight. The term “propaganda” acquired pejorative connotations because of itsapproving use by Nazi, Soviet, and other totalitarian regimes—a usage imply-ing that the messages were lies or distorted. The more neutral deªnition laidout above is the one used in this article. Theories of propaganda—includingthose of Gustav Le Bon, Harold Lasswell, Edward Bernays, Walter Lipp-mann, Jacques Ellul, and Cold War–era propagandists—have often paralleledideas about how opinion is shaped in general.3

During the Cold War and more recently, the term “public diplomacy”

4

Yarrow

2. The suppressed 1953 study of objectives of U.S. propaganda found signiªcant divisions withinUSIA regarding the agency’s objectives and messages. This was a transitional time in the history ofU.S. propaganda efforts and a time when the propaganda apparatus was being attacked by Senator Jo-seph McCarthy and his followers.

3. Walter Lippmann, Public Opinion (New York: The Macmillan Company, 1922), pp. 25–27; Har-old Lasswell, “The Function of the Propagandist,” International Journal of Ethics, Vol. 38, No. 3 (April1928), pp. 258–268; Edward L. Bernays, Crystallizing Public Opinion (New York: Boni & Liveright,1928); Edward L. Bernays, Propaganda (Port Washington, NY: Kennikat Press, 1928); Jacques Ellul,

has been used as either a more expansive or a more anodyne synonym for pro-paganda. As a more expansive term, it includes not only printed and broad-cast materials but also foreign exchange programs, exhibitions, and culturalprograms. These activities gained great salience during the Cold War as theUnited States sought to win the hearts and minds of those behind the IronCurtain, counter Soviet propaganda about the wonders of Communism andthe evils of the United States, and defeat the Soviet bloc without resorting tothe horriªc option of “hot” war.

U.S. propaganda must be seen in the larger context of U.S. Cold Warpolicies. The early years of the Cold War, during the Truman administration,saw not only deepening suspicion and fear of Iosif Stalin’s Soviet Union, theUSSR’s control over the East European countries, and the Communist tri-umph in China in 1949, but also varying degrees of “hot war” during theGreek civil war, the Berlin blockade, and the Korean War. This was also atime when the United States worked to solidify its sway in Western Europethrough the Marshall Plan, the establishment of the North Atlantic TreatyOrganization (NATO), and overt and covert operations to maintain friendly,anti-Communist governments. The Truman Doctrine, enunciated in March1947, emphasized “containment” of Communism while describing the stand-off in the stark terms of democracy versus ruthless dictatorship. The Eisen-hower and Kennedy years witnessed contradictory tendencies. Eisenhower’ssecretary of state, John Foster Dulles, publicly called for the “rollback” ofCommunism and “liberation” of the Soviet bloc, but Eisenhower recognizedthat Stalin’s death provided an opening for peaceful coexistence and a war ofideas instead of armies and missiles. Tensions were reduced through face-to-face meetings between U.S. and Soviet leaders, who were ready to move be-yond the hostility of the Stalin period. Yet, events such as the Soviet hydrogenbomb explosion, the suppression of the 1956 Hungarian revolution, the U-2spy plane incident, the Cuban missile crisis, and the advent of a stepped-upeconomic and technological competition after the launching of Sputnik,hardly signaled a superpower détente. U.S policies designed to counter theSoviet Union naturally helped to shape the content of U.S propaganda.4

The U.S. messages also must be seen in the context of Soviet propagandaand the battle for the hearts and minds of Europeans, less-developed coun-

5

Changing Messages in Early U.S. Cold War Print Propaganda

Propaganda: The Formation of Men’s Attitudes (New York: Vintage Books, 1965); and Jacques Ellul,The Technological Society (New York: Alfred A Knopf, 1967), pp. 370–371.

4. John Lewis Gaddis, The United States and the Origins of the Cold War, 1941–1947 (New York: Co-lumbia University Press, 1972), pp. 353–361; John Lewis Gaddis, The Cold War: A New History (NewYork: Penguin, 2005); Melvyn P. Lefºer, A Preponderance of Power: National Security, the Truman Ad-ministration, and the Cold War (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1992); and Melvyn P. Lefºerand David S. Painter, eds., Origins of the Cold War: An International History (New York: Routledge,2005).

tries, and European overseas colonies on the verge of independence. Sovietpropaganda emphasized the inevitable triumph of Communism, the “contra-dictions” of capitalism that would lead to its collapse, and the alleged mis-ery of working-class, poor, and marginalized populations such as African-Americans. The main propaganda battleªeld of the late 1940s and early1950s was in Europe, as the United States sought to ensure that Western Eu-rope would remain non-Communist and the Soviet Union tried to exploitand fan anti-Americanism. By the mid-1950s, however, the main front forpropaganda was the Communist world itself and the nonaligned countries ofthe Third World.

Yet foreign policy was not the only context for changes in propagandamessages. Domestic concerns and messages disseminated by politicians, me-dia, business leaders, educators, and others for domestic consumption alsoframed what information and ideas about the United States were dissemi-nated to the world. These opinion leaders spoke of a “new era” of “people’scapitalism,” or a “changed America” that had conquered the business cycle,producing a country in which “everybody’s rich.”5 The idea that a new chap-ter of American history (and of the history of capitalism) had dawned was afrequent subject of news reports, political speeches, business communica-tions, and even elementary and secondary school curricula, particularly afterthe Korean War.

But what was the driving force behind the new paradigm of America as aland of classless, rising abundance? Why did this new paradigm emerge whenit did, and why did it triumph?

The paradigm was ostensibly an apolitical and upbeat message that couldunite Americans, patching over the bitter social divisions not only of the1930s but of the preceding half century. The message was the answer to the“social question” that had plagued the United States since the early days of in-dustrialization, from the 1877 railroad strikes to the Flint sit-down strike of1936–1937. The aim was to undercut the appeal of socialism, turning it onits head. The rising incomes of the postwar mixed economy showed that thesocial needs of most Americans could be met and promised that remaining so-cial problems such as poverty could be solved. For business executives, the im-age of a prosperous, growing America helped them reclaim the power and es-teem they had lost during the Great Depression. For Cold Warriors, the ideathat the United States had beaten the Soviet Union at its own game—provid-

6

Yarrow

5. “Is a New Era Really Here?” U.S. News & World Report, 20 May 1955, pp. 21–23; “People’s Capi-talism,” House Beautiful, November 1956, p. 226; “Changed America,” Business Week, 6 June 1953,pp. 101–104; and “Everybody’s Rich in the U.S.,” U.S. News & World Report, 26 October 1956,pp. 27–32.

ing “classless abundance for all”—was far more palatable than simply compar-ing the throwweights of nuclear arsenals.

The alignment of a more capitalism-friendly New Deal liberalism, a moreKeynesian and consumer-oriented business community, and popular desiresfor the good life helped this new set of beliefs gain traction. Of major impor-tance was the new inºuence of economists in American politics and culture.From a small, marginal profession in the 1920s with little inºuence on publicpolicy and the American public, the economics profession—its expertise,its ideas, and its language—was enthusiastically embraced by policymakersand the American people after World War II. For economists and those inthrall to their presumed omniscience, the suggestion that economic growthcould be managed and facilitated was extremely seductive. Economists’inºuence was direct, in the form of books and articles, and indirect, throughtheir impact on political, business, and labor leaders, and via the press and ed-ucators.6

At the same time, many Americans on both left and right increasinglyworried about the country’s commitment to freedom and individual liberty.The anti-Communist campaigns of the late 1940s and McCarthyism in theearly 1950s led many liberals and others to wonder about the American com-mitment to free speech, due process, and other basic civil liberties. The Bir-mingham bus boycott, lunch-counter sit-ins, the 1958 Little Rock confronta-tion, books such as Gunnar Myrdal’s An American Dilemma (1944),7 and thebrutal response to freedom riders in the early 1960s spurred growing numbersof whites to realize that America’s professed commitment to “freedom and jus-tice for all” had been an empty promise for blacks and perhaps others as well.The reemergence of feminism, with Betty Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique(1963),8 only added to this sense that freedom and equality were not yet athand. At the same time, by the late 1950s, as Daniel Bell and others spokeabout “the end of ideology,” many American ideals seemed either dated,overly intellectual, too burdened with caveats, or not unique to the UnitedStates. Internationally, some Americans were sensitive to European and ThirdWorld criticisms—stoked by Soviet propaganda—of “American imperialism”and began to wonder whether their country was truly on the side of freedom

7


6. “The words ‘economic growth,’ previously unknown to most economists much less to ordinaryAmericans, entered the national consciousness” in the postwar era, according to Robert Heilbronerand Aaron Singer, The Economic Transformation of America (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich,1977), p. 322.

7. Gunnar Myrdal, An American Dilemma: The Negro Problem and Modern Democracy (New York:Harper & Brothers, 1944).

8. Betty Friedan, The Feminine Mystique (New York: W. W. Norton, 1963).

in Latin America, Southeast Asia, and elsewhere. For some liberals, the “na-tional liberation” and decolonization movements of the 1950s and 1960s hadusurped America’s claim to be at the champion of world freedom. Likewise,some conservatives questioned whether the United States remained true totime-honored principles of individual liberty. The growth of governmentsince the New Deal caused some to fear that the country was heading toward1984-like socialism and was well along the “road to serfdom.”9 The idea that“American freedoms,” including free enterprise, were threatened became anincreasingly insistent theme among conservative intellectuals, business lead-ers, politicians, and popular commentators.

These converging cultural changes and worries necessitated an alterna-tive, consensual national identity and ideology. Into this vacuum steppedAmerica’s supposedly unique political and economic system and “way of life”predicated on unparalleled, measurable, and rising abundance.

Key business, advertising, and media ªgures such as Paul Hoffman, Wil-liam Benton, Edward L. Bernays, C. D. Jackson, Henry Luce, T. S. Repplier,and Edward R. Murrow played leading roles in shaping and disseminating thepropaganda message of the United States as the abundant society. Business or-ganizations and individual corporations—including the Committee for Eco-nomic Development (CED), National Association of Manufacturers (NAM),the Advertising Council, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, Time Inc., Stan-dard Oil of New Jersey, General Motors (GM), AT&T, International BusinessMachines (IBM), Monsanto, and Sylvania—embarked on massive efforts tospread this new paradigm of abundance. Upward of $100 million a year wasspent by business organizations and individual businesses on public relations,employee relations, and advertising to present their messages about how a cer-tain conception of free enterprise and an expansive conception of abundancewere essential U.S. qualities.10 They contributed directly to the effort with

8

Yarrow

9. Joseph Schumpeter’s Capitalism, Socialism, and Democracy (New York and London: Harper &Brothers, 1942) and Friedrich von Hayek’s The Road to Serfdom (London: G. Routledge & Sons,1944) were particularly inºuential among many postwar conservatives, although they remained amore isolated minority until the latter decades of the 20th century.

10. Robert Grifªth, “The Selling of America: The Advertising Council and American Politics, 1942–1960,” Business History Review, Vol. 57, No. 2 (Fall 1983), pp. 388–412, esp. 402–403. In aan Octo-ber 1946 memorandum, the NAM’s National Industrial Information Committee unabashedly ex-plained its public relations task: “Business is faced with greatest selling job it has ever faced—the job ofselling the solid beneªts of the American Way to the American people against the competition of theglittering promises of the Collectivist way.” See “The Public Relations Program of NAM,” NAM Re-cords, 1917–1970, Accession 1411, Series I, Box 110, in Hagley Museum and Library, Wilmington,DE (hereinafter referred to as Hagley). Although other business organizations such as the CED andAdvertising Council—and even the NAM a decade or so later—took the more nuanced view that thetask was more about selling the wonders of American abundance than about relentlessly bashing anyhint of Communism or New Deal/Fair Deal “collectivism,” this statement captured an important as-

written materials such as the CED’s Economic Growth in the United States(1958); the Advertising Council’s “Miracle of America” (1950), “Future ofAmerica” (1954), and “Promise of America” (1960) campaign materials; andthe NAM’s “New Dimension for the American Dream” (1956), “Americade”traveling exhibition, and 10-year TV series, “Industry on Parade (1950–60).11

Individual companies such as General Motors and General Electric not onlyproduced their own publications, such as GM’s “Design for Prosperity”(1950), but contributed products for trade-fair exhibits and spokesmen forfree enterprise such as the young Ronald Reagan. In addition, magazine arti-cles from Fortune and Life, as well as reprints of Saturday Evening Post, Reader’sDigest, and other magazine pieces, were made available by Time Inc. andother publishers eager to support the Cold War message of American abun-dance.12

The brainchild of Commerce Secretary Jesse Jones, Paul Hoffman,13 Wil-

9


pect of the postwar business community’s efforts to inºuence American public opinion. Similarly, theU.S. Chamber of Commerce launched a “Program for American Opportunity through Advertising”in 1947, working with the Advertising Council’s two constituent organizations to burnish the imageof business. As early as 1941, in a 67-page booklet, “It’s a Favorable Wind . . . Sail with It,” the Cham-ber declared: “Business cannot make friends or meet the threats that surely will materialize when thepresent emergency is over, without making its own approach to the public mind.” See U.S. Chamberof Commerce, “It’s a Favorable Wind . . . Sail with It,” Chamber of Commerce Records, Accession1960, Series II, Boxes 17 and 15, in Hagley.

11. CED, “Economic Growth in the United States: Past and Future” (1958); Advertising Council,“Miracle of America” (New York, 1948), in James M. Lambie, Jr., Records, 1952–1961, Box 12,Dwight D. Eisenhower Presidential Library (DDEL), Abilene, KS; “New Dimensions for the Ameri-can Dream” and “Americade,” NAM Records, 1917–1970, Accession 1411, Series XVI, Box 219, inHarry S. Truman Library (HSTL), Independence, MO. See also, for example, Reels 117 (5 January1953), 453 (20 June 1959), and 479 (19 December 1959), in “Industry on Parade Collection, 1950–1960,” No. 507, National Museum of American History, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, DC(hereinafter referred to as National Museum).

12. “What a Country!” Fortune, October 1956, pp. 126–130; “The American and His Economy:About Our $1,300,000,000,000 Economy,” Life, 5 January 1953, pp. 7–100; “Boom Time,” Life,4 January 1954, pp. 6–11; “Luckiest Generation,” Life, 4 January 1954, pp. 27–29; “Wizards of theComing Wonders,” Life, 4 January 1954, pp. 92–94; “The Good Life: From 1890–1975—Leisure ofthe Classes and the Masses,” Life, 28 December 1959, pp. 12–185; “The Fabulous Fifties: AmericaEnters An Age of Everyday Elegance,” 2 October 1956 (cover); “If Our Pay Envelopes Are Fatter Now,It’s because Workers Produce More,” Saturday Evening Post, 3 April 1954, pp. 7, 22, 46, 76; “America’sVast New Leisure Class,” Reader’s Digest, January 1954, pp. 12–14; “Fresh View of Capitalism,”Reader’s Digest, July 1956, pp. 137–138; “Continuing Revolution in the U.S.,” Reader’s Digest, August1955, p. 72; “Second U.S. Revolution That Shook All Mankind,” Life, 13 July 1959, pp. 28, 94–96(reprinted in Reader’s Digest, October 1959, pp. 37–40); “Our Gadgets Set Us Free,” Reader’s Digest,August 1953, pp. 33–34; and “What Marxism Promises, U.S. Capitalism Delivers,” Reader’s Digest,February 1957, pp. 173–174.

13. Hoffman, the president of Studebaker, was an enormously inºuential ªgure in shaping postwarbeliefs about the United States and its economy. In addition to being a driving force behind the CED,Hoffman was a key leader of the Advertising Council, and later president of the Ford Foundation, oneof several major foundations that led the propagation of these ideas. Hoffman also was the domesticadministrator of the Marshall Plan, a policy initiative that the CED played a major role in selling tothe U.S. business community.

liam Benton,14 and Beardsley Ruml,15 and dating to 1939, the CED was in-corporated in 1942 as a way to “enlist the services of the best brains from ouruniversities and business” to solve “the problems of how high productive em-ployment could be attained and maintained in a free society.”16 The CED is-sued a ºurry of book-length “Research Reports” and shorter “Statements onNational Policy” after the war, distributed hundreds of thousands of copies ofthe several dozen booklets that it produced each year, and placed editorials inhundreds of newspapers and got its research quoted in thousands of articleseach year. The CED was a cofounder of the Joint Council on Economic Edu-cation, which promoted economics education in America’s public schools.From 1959 to 1973, the CED collaborated each year with the Saturday Re-view in publishing extensive, multi-article annual issues on differing aspects ofthe U.S. economy.

The Advertising Council reinforced CED-like ideas among the broaderU.S. population in a series of sophisticated and massive “public service” ad-vertising campaigns in the late 1940s and 1950s. For example, the Councildistributed more than 1.1 million copies of a free booklet, “The Miracle ofAmerica,” which was reprinted in Look, in a half million copies of Scholastic inMarch 1950, and six million times in scores of company magazines. Amongthe Council’s most successful efforts to shape public attitudes were its “OurAmerican Free Enterprise System” series and its push in the mid-1950s torebrand the American economic system as “people’s capitalism.”17

In 1948 alone, the NAM produced ªve short ªlms that were seen by2.5 million high school students and workers, distributed 2.5 million pam-phlets such as “Free Enterprise” and “Our Material Progress,”18 issued1,275 press releases, submitted 45 articles to magazines and newspapers, pro-duced 26 ªfteen-minute episodes of It’s Your Business for ABC Radio, andplaced advertisements in mass-circulation publications such as Life and the

10

Yarrow

14. Benton not only was a cofounder of the prominent advertising agency Benton & Bowles but was avice president of the University of Chicago, a Truman administration appointee, publisher of the En-cyclopedia Britannica, a delegate to several United Nations agencies, and a Democratic senator fromConnecticut from 1949 to 1953.

15. Ruml, while still a dean at the University of Chicago in the late 1930s, organized the AmericanEconomic Council that, among other things, produced a radio show called the University of ChicagoRoundtable. Sol Hurwitz (ex-CED president), telephone interview, 13 April 2005.

16. James T. Howard, Improving Economic Understanding in the Public Schools (Washington, DC:CED, 1950), p. 17.

17. Advertising Council, “The American Roundtable Discussions on People’s Capitalism” (1957); andAdvertising Council, “Condensed Record of a Round Table Discussion on the Basic Elements of aFree, Dynamic Society Held under the Sponsorship of the Advertising Council at the Hotel Waldorf-Astoria, 16 April 1951,” pp. 3, 51.

18. Colleen Ann Moore, “The National Association of Manufacturers: The Voice of Industry and theFree Enterprise Campaign in the Schools, 1929–1949,” Ph.D. Diss., University of Akron, 1985,pp. 659, 661, 663.

Saturday Evening Post.19 The NAM became extremely active in the 1950s eco-nomics education movement, distributing an annual catalog of its “Educa-tional Aids for High Schools” and producing a multimedia curriculum unitcalled “How Our Business System Operates,” used by 3.5 million studentsduring the early 1950s. The most ambitious NAM public relations effort ofthe 1950s was its weekly television show, Industry on Parade, which itcoproduced with the National Broadcasting Corporation (NBC) from 1950to 1960. The program appeared on 270 stations by 1957 and was shown inschools and distributed by the United States Information Agency (USIA) in33 countries. The series had a breathless tone featuring the wonders of Ameri-can industry, the cornucopia of new products always becoming available toAmericans, the wizardry of scientists and technicians in facilitating risingabundance, and the good citizenship of the American corporation.20

The U.S. Chamber of Commerce—which, like the NAM, had begunpublic-communications efforts before World War II—developed the “Pro-gram for American Opportunity” campaign in the late 1940s to explain the“American enterprise system” and ensure that Americans believed in its prin-ciples, because “our standard of living and freedom are the envy of the world.”The Chamber organized workplace meetings and publications to win overemployees and produced booklets, radio spots, ªlms, and “economic discus-sion workbooks” to “organize and conduct a successful program for develop-ing spokesmen for the American Free Enterprise System.”21 By the mid-to-late 1950s, the Chamber’s magazine, Nation’s Business, with a circulation of750,000, and endless pamphlets and ªlms depicted an America that was richand getting richer and whose bounty was dependent on free markets and wisebusinessmen.

Similarly, ªnancial reporting not only grew enormously during the post-war era but changed from a dry recitation of stock quotes and company earn-ings and puff pieces on businessmen and companies to broader stories aboutthe national economy and the implications of economic trends for ordinary

11


19. “NAM Salesletter,”17 January 1949, in NAM Records, 1917–1970, Accession 1411, Series I, Box110, in Hagley; and Moore, “The National Association of Manufacturers,” pp. 715–716, 731–732.

20. NAM, “Industry on Parade Collection, 1950–1959, #507,” in National Museum. For an overviewand index of the collection, see Susan B. Strange and Wendy Shay, “Industry on Parade Film Collec-tion: History” (National Museum, 2001), available online through the Archives Center of the Na-tional Museum website, at http://americanhistory.si.edu/archives/d4507.htm.

21. “Program for American Opportunity through Advertising” (1947), “Your American OpportunityProgram” (1948), “Let’s Take the Offensive” (1950), and “Economic Discussion Group Workbook:How to Organize and Conduct a Successful Program for Developing Spokesmen for the AmericanFree Enterprise System” (1956), “Industry on Parade Collection, 1950–1960, #507,” Boxes 17–18,21, in National Museum. The last project in this list included a series of seventeen pamphlets andtapes to structure 1- to 2-hour public meetings on such subjects as “Progress and Prosperity” and “TheEthics of Capitalism.”

Americans. Business reporters and editors recognized that the big story of thepostwar decades was America’s dramatic economic growth and mass prosper-ity and the changes that these were bringing about in American society. Long-time Fortune editor Hedley Donovan recalled: “It is hard to remember, nowthat we have had so much of it for decades, what a big story prosperitywas. . . . We analyzed and celebrated the American boom—in prose, photog-raphy, paintings even, and of course in tables and diagrams and charts.”22

Liberally larded with economic statistics, articles regularly heralded new“records” being set, as if U.S. economic progress were the national sport to betracked by elaborate box scores. As Council of Economic Advisers (CEA)Chairman Walter Heller (or his headline writer) wrote in Life in March 1961,the “Economy Is Like a Regular .300 Hitter.”23 Commentators spoke of a“new era” of “people’s capitalism” or a “changed America” that had conqueredthe business cycle—an America where “everybody’s rich.”24 As Daniel Belllater commented, Henry Luce’s magazines preached the gospel of a produc-tive new capitalism to business and the middle class, and Reader’s Digestplayed a similar role for lower middle-class in small-town America.25 Fortunepublished four widely read multi-issue special reports,26 each including anumber of lengthy articles. These special reports were quickly turned intobooks, and the magazine’s 25th anniversary issue in 1955 mixed economicsand sociology to speculate about American life in 1980 in articles such as“The American Breakthrough,” “The New Economy,” and “The “FabulousFuture.” Another weighty, yet breathless series began in October 1956 with along, graph-laden article called simply “What a Country!”

Other business publications such as The Wall Street Journal and BusinessWeek, as well as news magazines such as Time, Newsweek, and U.S. News &World Report echoed these themes, and mass-circulation magazines—Look,the Saturday Evening Post, Reader’s Digest, and Ladies Home Journal—took asimilar tack, domesticating the economy. They transformed economic con-cepts such as output growth and productivity, as well as government policies

12

Yarrow

22. Hedley Donovan, Right Places, Right Times: Forty Years in Journalism, Not Counting My PaperRoute (New York: Holt, 1989), p. 136.

23. Walter Heller, “Economy Is Like a Regular .300 Hitter,” Life, 10 March 1961, pp. 24–25. Forthose not familiar with baseball analogies, a hitter who consistently has a batting average of .300 is re-garded as a star player.

24. “Is a New Era Really Here?” pp. 21–23; “People’s Capitalism,” House Beautiful, p. 226; “ChangedAmerica,” Business Week, 6 June 1953, pp. 101–104; and “Everybody’s Rich in the U.S.?” pp. 27–32.See also “Perpetual Prosperity: Is the Business Cycle Out?” The Nation, 29 January 1955, pp. 96–98;Sumner Slichter, “Have We Conquered the Business Cycle?” The Atlantic, May 1955, pp. 51–55; and“The Boom-Bust Cycle: How Well Have We Got It Tamed?” Business Week, 3 November 1956,pp. 176–178.

25. Daniel Bell, The Cultural Contradictions of Capitalism (New York: Basic Books, 1976), p. 76.

26. Todd May, telephone interview, 21 July 2004.

and business objectives, into housewife-friendly topics such as “The FabulousFifties: America Enters an Age of Everyday Elegance.”27 As Life said in 1954,“Never before, so much for so many.” Look, six years later, added, “No peoplein history ever had it as easy, or so good.”28

Indeed, from the mid-1940s to the mid-1960s, business executives, jour-nalists, and other domestic opinion shapers increasingly linked U.S. greatnessand “identity” with quantitatively deªned prosperity. As economics assumed anewly prominent role in American thinking, the messages that were conveyedabout the core qualities of “Americanness” shifted to economic virtues such asthe country’s high, rising, and broadly diffused standard of living and its eco-nomic dynamism and growth. This occurred as economic ideas and an eco-nomic style of thinking competed with older political and moral lenses andlanguages for viewing society. Economics increasingly became a principal lensthrough which Americans understood and deªned their country.

A historically new conception of the United States as an “abundant soci-ety” emerged from the late 1940s on. Such ideas—including the notion thatAmerican supremacy and exceptionalism were founded in the country’swealth, productive capacities, and economic growth; that economics, wealth,and consumption were the principal measure of social value; that optimismand thinking about the future were deªned in economic terms; that the lan-guage of growth, prosperity, free enterprise, and consumption increasinglysupplemented the language of political liberalism and religion; and that indi-vidual psychological fulªllment and meaning were to be found in prosperity,growth, and consumption—had antecedents in the late 1920s and early1940s and began to gain traction in the late 1940s but did not come into theirown as a leading vision of the United States until after the end of the KoreanWar.

This article takes account of these foreign-policy and domestic contextsin examining how the shift in print propaganda messages can be traced in ma-terials developed and disseminated by the U.S. Information Agency and itsprecursors from the late 1940s. The article also considers the messages pre-sented at overseas trade fairs, an initiative that began in the mid-1950s, andpresents an overview of U.S. propaganda efforts during the early Cold War.The article then focuses on U.S. propaganda magazines and pamphlets fromthe late 1940s and 1950s, as reºected in three magazines—Amerika, a Rus-sian-language monthly published for Soviet audiences from 1945 to 1952,

13


27. “The Fabulous Fifties” (cover); and “If Our Pay Envelopes Are Fatter Now, It’s because WorkersProduce More,” pp. 7, 22, 46, 76.

28. “The Changing American Market,” Fortune, p. 13; “U.S. Growth: Our Biggest Year” (cover), Life,4 January 1954; and “How America Feels as It Enters the Soaring Sixties,” Look, 5 January 1960,pp. 11–12.

when vigorous Soviet efforts to obstruct distribution induced the UnitedStates to stop publication; Free World, a magazine sent to East Asia that beganpublishing in English and various Asian languages in 1952; and America Illus-trated, a Russian-language monthly published for three-and-a-half decades be-ginning in 1956—as well as the many pamphlets, comic books, and otherprinted material intended for overseas audiences. A concluding section as-sesses the content of the print propaganda and its signiªcance.

Although political and philosophical ideals of liberty, democracy, andfreedom continued to be widely touted during this period, print propagandaincreasingly focused on more materialistic “virtues,” such as the high and ris-ing standard of living and the country’s economic dynamism and growth.This shift occurred in the decade starting in the late 1940s, with a transitionalperiod that lasted from about 1952 to 1955. Changes in the messages and im-ages that the United States sent to the world in magazines and leaºetsreºected the broader shift in messages about national self-image being con-veyed at home.

Like any unique source material used in constructing or buttressing alarger argument, U.S. print propaganda between the late 1940s and 1960 hasits ºaws. Many pitfalls arise when analyzing and drawing conclusions fromU.S. propaganda. By deªnition, propaganda is to some extent designed to ªtwhat different audiences are believed to want to hear at particular times. Al-though global, one-size-ªts-all messages were the modus operandi, U.S. pro-pagandists occasionally were sensitive to the fact that certain types of messagesplayed better in East Asia or the Arab world than in the Soviet bloc or LatinAmerica. In addition, propaganda, by deªnition, is not disinterested commu-nication; it is intended to inºuence foreign audiences and, indirectly, foreigngovernments. Consequently, messages may be chosen for what is seen to bemost inºuential.

Propaganda—often seen as a form of “psychological operations” in alarger war for “hearts and minds”—is also often reactive. Messages may say asmuch about an adversary’s propaganda or opinion leaders’ image of theircountry as about the sender’s. Therefore, if the Soviet Union emphasizedtechnological or economic achievements, the United States reasonably mightbe expected to emphasize its own accomplishments in these spheres. As theadage has it, one often becomes—or acquires aspects of—what one opposes.

Moreover, different propaganda media and techniques are conducive todifferent types of messages. Radio broadcasts, which must ªll up 168 hours ofairtime each week, are especially suited to a steady diet of news, entertain-ment, and light features, whereas pamphlets obviously focus on single sub-jects. The Voice of America (VOA), the nominally private Radio Free Europeand Radio Liberty, which were secretly ªnanced by the U.S. Central Intelli-

14

Yarrow

gence Agency, and USIA’s television service offered a much broader picture ofpostwar America than did print propaganda. News reporting generally aimedto be “objective,” with in-depth features on all aspects of U.S. political, cul-tural, and economic life. In addition, American entertainment—from jazz toclassical music—not only was ideal for broadcast but was rightly seen as a keyselling point for the United States. Jazz was immensely popular on VOA andserved as a way of culturally selling America as a “hip,” multiracial society.

Trade shows and exhibits lent themselves to displays of material goodsmuch more than to abstract ideas, and exchanges or visitors’ programs wereintended to demonstrate the host’s good will. Magazines occupied an inter-mediate ground, with less news than radio but a greater range of subject mat-ter and themes than either pamphlets or trade shows could convey. Magazineswere usually aimed at literate elites and those with sufªcient political “pull” orsavvy to obtain copies that Communist censors tried to suppress. Thus, maga-zines, pamphlets, and trade shows were especially likely to reºect the shift inmessages toward portraying America as a paradise of classless, consumerabundance.

Propaganda, like any type of foreign policy, is also subject to a variety ofdomestic political pressures. These may include changes in administrationand politically appointed leadership, pressures from Congress and other con-stituencies, and cultural inºuences.

Nonetheless, propaganda also must have consistency. Broad, commonthemes were present in U.S. messages, whether destined for Moscow or Ma-nila—a consistency that reºected broader policy directives. The connectionsbetween such policy directives and domestic politics or, more broadly, domes-tic culture were more tenuous. Yet because propaganda is supposed to reºectnational values and valued qualities, messages sent abroad generally must beseen to conform to widely held beliefs within the culture.

U.S. Propaganda Efforts

The United States was a reluctant latecomer to the international propagandabusiness, long eschewing propaganda as something practiced solely by totali-tarian states. By the 1930s, the Soviet Union, Nazi Germany, and even GreatBritain recognized the value of ongoing international information cam-paigns.29 After the Second World War, the Truman administration success-

15


29. Moscow ªrst used radio propaganda in 1929. Britain launched its BBC Empire Service in 1932.The Nazis began regular international radio broadcasts in 1938. By contrast, America’s short-livedCommittee on Public Information (CPI) during World War I, led by George Creel and staffed by peo-ple ranging from Walter Lippmann to Edward Bernays, sought “to make a world of friends and well-

fully argued that sharing information promoted peace and that a permanentinformation service was necessary.30 The VOA radio network, established in1942 and broadcasting in 40 languages by the time Japan surrendered, waspreserved after the war.31 Other limited public diplomacy activities were con-solidated in the State Department’s Ofªce of International Information andCultural Affairs in 1946.32 The beginning of the Cold War in 1946–1947 re-sulted in the institutionalization and sweeping expansion of U.S. propagandaefforts, with the ªrst broadcasts to the Soviet Union beginning in February1947.

Even at this stage, however, intense domestic disputes continued aboutthe propriety, goals, and content of U.S. propaganda. Many questionedwhether a democracy, which by deªnition permitted divergent opinions,should be disseminating a single “line” about America.33 Truman, Eisen-hower, John F. Kennedy, and ofªcials at the public diplomacy agencies be-

16

Yarrow

wishers for the United States.” Rawnsley, Radio Diplomacy and Propaganda, p. 7. Similarly, the equallyephemeral Ofªce of War Information under Elmer Davis in World War II was seen as a wartime needestablished largely in response to the much more developed propaganda activities of America’s wartimeadversaries. The United States occasionally engaged in other efforts to present itself to the world priorto the late 1940s—such as its displays at the 1892 Columbian Exposition and other world’s fairs andthrough the activities of private foundations such as the Carnegie Endowment for InternationalPeace—but these were episodic at best.

30. Krugler, The Voice of America and the Domestic Propaganda Battles, p. 24; and Richard D.KcKinsey, Interview with Edward W. Barrett, 9 July 1974, in Edward W. Barrett Oral History Files,HSTL (hereinafter referred to as Barrett Interview, 9 July 1974).

31. Dizard, The Strategy of Truth, pp. 70–71.

32. Immediately after the war, Truman placed the information services under the Interim Interna-tional Information Service of the State Department, under Archibald MacLeish. See Ronald I. Rubin,The Objectives of the U.S. Information Agency: Controversies and Analysis (New York: Praeger, 1966),pp. 107–108.

33. Belmonte, “Selling Capitalism,” pp. 109–112. In 1946, U.S. Ambassador to the Soviet UnionAverell Harriman argued that the United States should tout its virtues rather than attack the Sovietgovernment. His successor, Walter Bedell Smith countered that the United States should unequivo-cally denounce the Soviet dictatorship. Indeed, propagandists and their political masters were tornbetween combating “Commie lies” and attacking “Soviet slave labor,” and touting the virtues ofAmerican freedom and democracy or, increasingly, America’s prosperity, economic growth, and “class-lessness.” Senator McCarthy accused America’s propaganda apparatus of being inªltrated with Com-munists, whereas others argued that it was not anti-Communist enough and too honest about Ameri-can faults. Others debated whether public diplomacy should be targeted solely at leaders and elites inother countries or aimed at mass audiences. Still others, including congressional leaders such as Sena-tor Lyndon Johnson, questioned the effectiveness of U.S. propaganda and whether the funds appro-priated were a waste of money. Secretary of State George Marshall, for one, opposed the idea of U.S.propaganda, arguing that “the important thing is to have people believe implicitly what we say.”Quoted in Thomson and Laves, Cultural Relations and U.S. Foreign Policy, p. 64. See also PaulHoffman, Peace Can Be Won (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1951), p. 135; Leo Bogart, “A Study ofthe Operating Assumptions of the U.S. Information Agency,” The Public Opinion Quarterly, Vol. 19,No. 4 (Winter 1955–56), pp. 369–379; Dwight D. Eisenhower, Waging Peace: The White House Years,A Personal Account, 1956–1961 (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1965), pp. 136–138; and Richard T.Davies, “The American Commitment to Public Propaganda,” Law and Contemporary Problems,Vol. 31, No. 3 (Summer 1966), pp. 452–457.

lieved in the efªcacy of U.S. propaganda in recalibrating attitudes about theUnited States behind the Iron Curtain and globally.34

In 1946, after seeing the extent of anti-Americanism (“notably in the eco-nomic area”), a joint congressional committee recommended that the gov-ernment assume a larger propaganda role.35 This push, together with the dete-rioration in U.S.-Soviet relations by 1947, spurred Congress to pass theSmith-Mundt Act in January 1948 to “promote better understanding ofthe United States,” bringing VOA under the State Department’s new Ofªceof International Information and Educational Exchange with a considerablyexpanded budget and staff.36 The legislation called for funding and dissemi-nating information about the United States through publications, print, andbroadcast media, motion pictures, and information centers.

In the late 1940s, U.S. information policy leaders successfully argued thatthe United States should take the high road, presenting a “full and fair” ver-sion of the facts in response to the “lies” of Soviet propaganda.37 Truman’s

17


34. Harry S. Truman, “Statement by the President on the Voice of America,” 5 April 1951, in John T.Woolley and Gerhard Peters, The American Presidency Project, http://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/ws/?pid?14053 (hereinafter referred to as TAPP, with corresponding URL); Eisenhower, Waging Peace,pp. 132, 637; “Policy Statements,” Agency History Program Subject Files, Box 5, Record Group (RG)306 (Records of the United States Information Agency), in U.S. National Archives and Records Ad-ministration (NARA); and “The Eisenhower Statement of the USIA Mission,” in Agency History Pro-gram Subject Files, Box 5, RG 306, in NARA; Dwight D. Eisenhower, “Remarks to the Staff of theU.S. Information Agency,” 10 November 1953, in TAPP, http://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/ws/?pid?9758; Dwight D. Eisenhower, “Remarks at Ceremony Marking the Tenth Anniversary of the Smith-Mundt Act,” 27 January 1958, in TAPP online:at http://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/ws/?pid?11196;John F. Kennedy, “Remarks on the 20th Anniversary of the Voice of America,” 26 February 1962, inTAPP online:at http://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/ws/?pid?9075; and John F. Kennedy, “Remarks Re-corded for the Opening of a USIA Transmitter in Greenville, NC,” 8 February 1963, in TAPP online:at http://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/ws/?pid?9551. See also Barrett Interview, 9 July 1974; “Memofrom Karl Ettinger to John Sherman, Nov. 25, 1951,” Psychological Strategy Board Files, Box 1, StaffMember and Ofªce Files, in HSTL; “Memorandum from Mallory Browne to the Director, Feb. 12,1952,” Psychological Strategy Board Files, Box 3, Staff Member and Ofªce Files, in HSTL; USIAAlumni Association, United States Information Agency: A Commemoration—Telling America’s Story tothe World, 1953–1999. n.d., p. 30; L. John Martin, “Effectiveness of International Propaganda,” An-nals of the Academy of Political and Social Science, November 1971, pp. 61–70; and Wilson Dizard, Jr.,“Telling America’s Story,” American Heritage, Vol. 54, No. 4 (August/September 2003), pp. 41–48.However, scholars and propagandists themselves have questioned how to gauge the effectiveness of apublication, a broadcast, or other propaganda. Many scholars believe that exposure and the familiaritycreated by propaganda generally lead to more positive views in target audiences and that messages thatappeal to the aspirations or deeper values of an audience tend to be most effective.

35. Barrett Interview, 9 July 1974.

36. Hixson, Parting the Curtain, p. 5; and Thomson and Laves, Cultural Relations and U.S. ForeignPolicy, pp. 66–67.

37. Krugler, The Voice of America and the Domestic Propaganda Battles, pp. 74–76; Ninkovich, The Di-plomacy of Ideas, pp. 170, 149; and Hinds and Windt, The Cold War as Rhetoric, p. 146. This approachpartially reºected an older, idealistic faith in the power of the truth and represented continuity withWorld War II norms for VOA programming, which, in turn, took many of its cues from the professedobjectivity of the older BBC. At the same time, the United States attempted to use the newly createdUNESCO to carry a U.S.-inºuenced message of freedom and democracy to the world in the late

“Campaign of Truth,” launched in the spring of 1950, reinforced the juxtapo-sition of America as the bastion of freedom, democracy, and civil libertieswith a Soviet Union characterized by tyranny and slavery. Less than a monthafter Senator Joseph McCarthy’s pivotal February 1950 speech in Wheeling,West Virginia, in which he alleged widespread Communist inªltration of theU.S. State Department, Truman called for much more aggressive propagandaefforts. “We must make ourselves known as we really are.”38

With these words, Truman and the liberal Democrats he had appointedas assistant secretaries of state overseeing the information programs—WilliamBenton and Edward Barrett—committed U.S. propaganda to highlightAmerica’s democratic ideals and deªned the ideological battle of the Cold Waras one between “freedom and human dignity versus slavery and tyranny.”39

Benton, a cofounder of the Benton & Bowles advertising agency, who wasalso head of Encyclopedia Britannica and an inºuential early CED leader,helped establish the United Nations Educational, Scientiªc, and Cultural Or-ganization (UNESCO) and the Fulbright program while assistant secretary ofstate from 1945 to 1949. He brieºy served in the Senate and was defeatedlargely because of a vicious smear campaign by McCarthy. As a senator,Benton helped win some of the early postwar appropriations for U.S. propa-ganda.

Barrett, who had served in the Ofªce of War Information during WorldWar II and was a Newsweek editor before and after his government service,was assistant secretary from 1950 to 1952. He sought to beef up VOA pro-gramming, making ªlms with actors such as Henry Fonda, Rock Hudson,and Ronald Reagan for foreign distribution, as well as producing text for over-seas editorial writers. A Psychological Strategy Board (PSB) was set up in1951 to coordinate the propaganda activities of various agencies. Ofªcialfunding for overseas information activities was doubled in 1951–1953 to$170 million, and stafªng was increased from 7,500 to 13,000. Howland

18

Yarrow

1940s. The Truman Doctrine, enunciated in March 1947, cast the Cold War as a struggle between“freedom” and “slavery.” Indeed, some have argued that the reason that New Deal and DemocraticParty liberals bought into the Cold War in the late 1940s had less to do with national security argu-ments than with it being a ªght for fundamental democratic principles.

38. Ninkovich, The Diplomacy of Ideas, p. 73; and Krugler, The Voice of America and the Domestic Pro-paganda Battle, p. 96.

39. Edward Barrett, Truth Is Our Weapon, (New York: Funk & Wagnall’s Co., 1953), p. ix; Barrett In-terview, 9 July 1974; “Report on Social Science Research in Cold War Operations,” 11 April 1952,Psychological Strategy Board Files, Box 3, in HSTL; Memorandum by Mallory Browne to the Direc-tor, 2 February 1952, Psychological Strategy Board Files, Box 3, in HSTL; and Michael Nelson, Warof the Black Heavens: The Battles of Western Broadcasting in the Cold War (Syracuse, NY: Syracuse Uni-versity Press, 1997), p. 60. Eisenhower and Benton also urged the creation of an independent propa-ganda agency, calling for a “Marshall Plan of ideas.”

Sargeant, who later ran Radio Liberty, served after Barrett, from 1952 to1953.40

These themes of U.S. democracy opposing Communist “slavery” in thename of “freedom” were mirrored in the inºuential April 1950 explication ofU.S. Cold War objectives, NSC 68. The document, approved by the NationalSecurity Council (NSC), spoke of defending “our society’s principles of free-dom, tolerance, the importance of the individual, and the supremacy of rea-son.”41 At the same time that U.S. ideals were to be highlighted, U.S. propa-ganda was given license to wage vigorous attacks on the policies, beliefs, andaccomplishments of the Soviet Union and other Communist states.

The early 1950s, however, were trying and confusing times for U.S. pro-pagandists. McCarthy’s anti-Communist crusade pushed the Truman admin-istration toward a more aggressive posture. But the senator from Wisconsinalso charged that VOA and the USIA—established by President Eisenhowerin 1953 to consolidate propaganda activities—had been inªltrated by Com-munists.

When Eisenhower created the USIA under the authority of the Smith-Mundt Act, all information programs except educational exchanges werebrought under the aegis of the new agency and separated from the State De-partment. He also established an interagency Operations CoordinatingBoard, which absorbed Truman’s PSB and brought together Central Intelli-gence Agency (CIA), NSC, USIA, State Department, and other representa-tives. Theodore Streibert was appointed the USIA’s ªrst director (he serveduntil 1956), and a private National Committee for an Adequate Overseas In-formation Program, headed by the public relations Edward L. Bernays, wasestablished to advise the agency. Eisenhower was a strong supporter of theU.S. propaganda effort, calling its value “incalculable” and urging that gov-ernment support be “generous.”42

A long-suppressed 1953 study of the objectives of U.S. propagandafound deep divisions over several issues—whether to focus on countering So-viet propaganda or to “tell the truth” about the United States, whether to ªghtCommunism or make people more friendly toward the United States,whether to serve as a “mirror or show window” for the United States and, if a

19


40. Barrett Interview, 9 July 1974; “The Voice of America,” 4 April 1952, Psychological StrategyBoard Files, Boxes 1 and 3, HSTL; and Nelson, War of the Black Heavens, pp. 48, 58–59.

41. Rawnsley, ed., Cold War Propaganda in the 1950s, p. 13.

42. Eisenhower, Waging Peace, pp. 132, 637; “Operations Coordinating Board,” September 1955,Historical Program Subject Files, 1953–2000, Box 2, RG 306, in NARA; Eisenhower, “Remarks tothe Staff of the U.S. Information Agency”; and Eisenhower, “Remarks at Ceremony Marking theTenth Anniversary of the Smith-Mundt Act.”

“show window,” which themes to portray. The 1953 study found that USIAstaff members suggested projecting themes that Americans are “nice, gener-ous, democratic, freedom-loving, spiritual, cultured, successful economically,and peaceful.” At the same time, they were ambivalent about emphasizingAmerica’s material wealth, thinking that materialism might be equated withimmorality or invite envy rather than admiration.43

McCarthy’s attacks and other Republican criticisms of VOA as ineffectiveled to massive budget cuts in 1953 and a decline in morale. A March 1953 di-rective called for VOA broadcasts to stop directly countering Soviet propa-ganda and return to “straightforward, factual, [and] forceful” reporting. Ef-forts to “roll back” Communism were put on the back burner after Stalin’sdeath in 1953, Khrushchev’s post-1956 liberalization, and the ªasco of the1956 Hungarian uprising during which some Hungarians apparently believedthat the United States would come to their support.44

However, the supposedly private Radio Free Europe (RFE), which waslaunched with CIA funding on May Day 1951 under the aegis of Gen. LuciusClay’s Crusade for Freedom, and Radio Liberation (later renamed Radio Lib-erty), established in 1953, broadcast a more stridently anti-Communist mes-sage to the Soviet bloc.45

20

Yarrow

43. Eisenhower established the President’s Committee on International Information Activities underWilliam Jackson immediately after taking ofªce. See U.S. President’s Committee on Information Ac-tivities Abroad Records, Box 26, in DDEL; C. D. Jackson Papers, Box 62, in DDEL; and Leo Bogart,Premises for Propaganda: The United States Information Agency’s Operating Assumptions in the Cold War(New York: Free Press, 1976), pp. 4, 12, 16, 69–90. This study was not published commercially until23 years later. However, the administration’s ambivalence about emphasizing America’s materialwealth, noted by Belmonte, clearly changed in the mid-to-late 1950s. See Belmonte, p. 334.

44. Hixson, Parting the Curtain, p. 83; and Peter Grose, Operation Rollback: America’s Secret War be-hind the Iron Curtain (Boston: Houghton Mifºin Company, 200), pp. 188, 206, 211.

45. See Sig Mickelson, America’s Other Voices: The Story of Radio Free Europe and Radio Liberty (NewYork: Praeger, 1983); Psychological Strategy Board Files, Box 3, in HSTL; C. D. Jackson Papers, Box79, in DDE Library; Nelson, War of the Black Heavens, pp. 55–56; and Gene Sosin, Sparks of Liberty:An Insider’s Memoir of Radio Liberty (University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1999),pp. 2, 16. RFE, which claimed to be supported by “millions” of individual donations, had 1,100 em-ployees based in Western Germany, broadcast aggressively anti-communist messages tailored to eachof the Soviet satellites, and also distinguished itself from VOA by seeking a popular, rather than a moreintellectual audience. The National Committee for a Free Europe also used balloons to drop millionsof anti-communist leaºets in Eastern Europe in the early 1950s. It was only in the early 1970s that theCIA funding of Radio Free Europe and Radio Liberty was acknowledged. Allen W. Dulles, Eisen-hower’s CIA Director, was the driving force behind both stations, which regularly denounced “the sys-tem of terror, forces, and all forms of slave labor” behind the Iron Curtain. C. D. Jackson—a long-time Time Inc. executive who was publisher of Fortune and later Life and was brieºy an Eisenhowerspeechwriter and special assistant for international affairs—headed the Free Europe Committee,which ostensibly supported Radio Free Europe. Jackson believed that the same messages about theAmerican system advocated by his boss, Henry Luce, and colleague John Jessup, were ideal for sellingthe United States overseas. The American Committee for Freedom of the Peoples of the Soviet Union,or Amcomlib, also was led by journalists such as Reader’s Digest senior editor Eugene Lyons and TimeInc. vice president Allen Grover.

Only with the eclipse of McCarthyism in the mid–1950s did the USIAbegin to grow. Under Director Theodore Streibert, the agency inaugurated acampaign to deluge Communist countries with magazines, pamphlets, exhib-its and trade fairs, radio and TV shows, and sports teams and other delega-tions. By the late 1950s, the USIA had 1,200 overseas information ofªcersand libraries in 162 foreign cities, and was distributing millions of pamphletsand magazines (including Free World to Asia and America Illustrated to the So-viet Union), showing educational ªlms to millions of non-Americans, andhad mounted dozens of large-scale trade fairs.46

The tension between honest reporting and putting America’s best faceforward continued into the early 1960s as Kennedy’s USIA director, EdwardR. Murrow, proclaimed that “the truth must be our guide, but dreams mustbe our goal.”47 The Kennedy administration upgraded the propaganda func-tion by placing Murrow on the NSC. This signaled a recognition that U.S.propaganda needed to be more closely tied to overall foreign policy and thatpolitical decision-making needed to consider the propaganda consequences ofpolicy decisions. In addition, in 1963 the USIA’s mission was restated from“informing” to “inºuencing” public attitudes in other nations.

From Liberal Idealism to “People’s Capitalism”

During the late 1940s, idealism about American identity was fueled and rein-forced by a number of factors. The country had successfully led a world warto destroy fascism and bring the blessings of freedom and democracy to Eu-rope and Asia. It had led efforts to create in its own image a United Nations asthe linchpin of a rational, democratic world order. It was the benevolent bene-factor helping to rebuild a destroyed Europe and Japan. In the early stages ofthe Cold War, the Truman Doctrine posed the struggle as one between Com-munist “terror” and “oppression” and a U.S. “way of life based on the will ofthe majority, distinguished by free institutions, representative government,

21


46. Theodore Streibert Oral History and U.S. President’s Committee on Information ActivitiesAbroad, Box 14, DDE Library; Dizard, The Strategy of Truth, pp. 58, 60, 96; Hixson, Parting the Cur-tain, p. 138; Robert H. Haddow, Pavilions of Plenty: Exhibiting American Culture Abroad in the 1950s(Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1997); and Nelson, War of the Black Heavens,pp. 58–59, 101–102. George Allen, who headed the agency during the last three years of the Eisen-hower administration, put increased emphasis on cultural programming after the ªrst U.S.-Soviet cul-tural agreement was signed in January 1958. Likewise, Henry Loomis, who ran VOA from 1958 to1965, emphasized objective, credible reporting.

47. USIA Alumni Association, United States Information Agency: A Commemoration, p. 30; and His-torical Collection: Biographic Files Relating to USIA Directors and Other Senior Ofªcials, 1953–2000, Box 15, RG 306, in NARA.

free elections, guarantees of individual freedom, freedom of speech and reli-gion and from political oppression.”48 Moreover, despite political setbacks forthe more liberal wing of the New Deal coalition, many Americans lookedfondly on Roosevelt’s idealistic vision of a polity girded by his “Four Free-doms.”

The liberal, or more idealistic, view of the Cold War did not succumb toa more hard-edged Realpolitik until after the consolidation of Soviet rule inEastern Europe in the late 1940s, the 1949 Berlin airlift, the 1949 “fall” ofChina, the outbreak of the Korean War in 1950, and the subsequent rise ofMcCarthyism. However, the national image projected by opinion leaders inthe late 1940s was deªned by more than the deepening conºict with the So-viet bloc. Against this backdrop, America’s written propaganda of the late1940s should be considered.

One of the best sources of written propaganda during this period isAmerika, the glossy, Russian-language monthly magazine published for Sovietdistribution by the State Department’s Ofªce of International Informationand Cultural Affairs (USIA’s precursor) from late 1945 to 1952. The maga-zine and its successor, America Illustrated, are good proxies for U.S. print pro-paganda because the money invested and production values of both maga-zines were unusually high, and they were aimed at the heart of theCommunist empire, the Soviet Union. Both had glossy color front and rearcovers, with a dozen or more feature articles.

Although the 55 issues of Amerika did not have a set format or quota ofcertain types of stories, the generally 72-page, 11-by-14-inch magazine fea-tured varying combinations of stories about American political institutions,leaders and history, American arts and culture, a proªle of a state or region,and Americana, with a smattering of other subjects. A content analysis of 157articles in fourteen representative issues reveals that 43 percent were devotedto upbeat, Reader’s Digest–style stories about American life, ranging from fash-ion, sports, and hobbies to motherhood, games, and holidays. A striking 26percent were devoted to the arts, pointedly asserting that the United Stateshad a vibrant cultural life. About 12 percent focused on America’s democratictraditions and ideals. Another 14 percent addressed science and technologytopics, ranging from advances in medicine to atomic energy. Just 6 percentwere devoted to economic topics, and, with two or three exceptions that tooka bigger-picture look at the nation’s economy, these tended to focus on partic-ular industries.49

22

Yarrow

48. Quoted in Hinds and Windt, The Cold War as Rhetoric, p. 146. These were themes with whichBenton and Barrett were particularly comfortable. See Psychological Strategy Board Files, Box 3, inHSTL; and Barrett Interview, 9 July 1974.

49. Publications about the United States, 1945–1999, Entry 1053, America Illustrated Magazine,

The 74-page issue no. 10, published in 1946, is a good illustration.Stories describing and emphasizing U.S. ideals and political institutions in-cluded “The Making of a Law in the U.S. Congress,” a proªle of “GeorgeWashington, Father of His Country” by Henry Steele Commager, and Tru-man’s address to the United Nations. Cultural stories, which always loomedlarge—perhaps out of a sense of idealism, perhaps from a sense that Russiansin the USSR were particularly interested in the arts and scholarship—in-cluded stories about Tanglewood, the John Lomax Archive of American FolkSong, U.S. business patronage of the arts, and anthropologist Margaret Mead,as well as a Faulkner short story. Stories that can be classiªed as Americana in-cluded features on the American drugstore, the Boy Scouts, and an ice show.Articles on a progressive school in Illinois, U.S. airplane engineers, the massproduction of men’s suits, and the affordable “Small House” go somewhat be-yond the rubric of “Americana” to subtly emphasize particular virtues ofAmerican life—its liberal and diverse educational system, its technological ca-pabilities, its industrial capabilities, and, in a modest way, the economic well-being of its citizens. Additional articles on chess in the United States and Rus-sian language training in American schools seem geared to Soviet citizens’ in-terests.50

Liberal Idealism

An eclectic mix of subjects broadly characterized most issues of Amerika from1946 to 1952. However, what is most striking is the emphasis given to Ameri-

23


1945–1952, Boxes 40–41, RG 306, in NARA (hereinafter referred to as America Illustrated Archive,with appropriate box number).

50. “The Making of a Law in the U.S. Congress,” Amerika, Issue 10 (1946), pp. 4–9, in America Illus-trated Archive, Box 40; “George Washington: Father of His Country,” Amerika, Issue 10 (1946),pp. 38–41, in America Illustrated Archive, Box 40; “President Truman’s Address at Opening of GeneralAssembly of the United Nations, October 23, 1946,” Amerika, Issue 10 (1946), pp. 2–3, in AmericaIllustrated Archive, Box 40; “Tanglewood: Music Center in the Mountains,” Amerika, Issue 10 (1946),pp. 10–11, in America Illustrated Archive, Box 40; “John Lomax and the Folk Songs of America,”Amerika, Issue 10 (1946), pp. 47–49, in America Illustrated Archive, Box 40; “Margaret Mead: Stu-dent of Primitive Societies,” Amerika, Issue 10 (1946), pp. 22–25, in America Illustrated Archive, Box40; William Faulkner, “Two Soldiers,” Amerika, Issue 10 (1946), pp. 66–69, in America Illustrated Ar-chive, Box 40; “The American Drugstore,” Amerika, Issue 10 (1946), pp. 58–61, in America IllustratedArchive, Box 40; “Boy Scouts of America,” Amerika, Issue 10 (1946), pp. 18–21, in America IllustratedArchive, Box 40; “Theater on Ice,” Amerika, Issue 10 (1946), pp. 16–17, in America Illustrated Ar-chive, Box 40; “The Winnetka Schools,” Amerika, Issue 10 (1946), pp. 36–37, in America IllustratedArchive, Box 40; “Flying High,” Amerika, Issue 10 (1946), pp. 50–53, in America Illustrated Archive,Box 40; “Factory Production of Men’s Suits,” Amerika, Issue 10 (1946), pp. 42–46, in America Illus-trated Archive, Box 40; “The Small House,” Amerika, Issue 10 (1946), pp. 26–31, in America Illus-trated Archive, Box 40; “The Soviet Union in American Education,” Amerika, Issue 10 (1946),pp. 70–72, in America Illustrated Archive, Box 40; and “Chess,” Amerika, Issue 10 (1946), pp. 62–65,in America Illustrated Archive, Box 40.

can political ideals and principles. These articles in Amerika took variousforms. The processes and institutions of American democracy were a recur-rent subject. From 1946 to 1951, seven articles appeared that described howCongress, the courts, and the presidency functioned in the United States.51

Another 1951 article presented a broad paean to the American system called“The Strength of Democracy.” The authors described how “in a democracy,ideas compete, and democratic society constantly absorbs and digests the bestideas, responding with the necessary changes to meet economic, social andpolitical needs.” They added, “And democracy means friction—a state offruitful tension between freedom and order, cooperation and protest.”52

America’s great political leaders and their beliefs were another commonfeature. The emphasis was heavy on the country’s Founders and their ideals,with articles on Washington, Jefferson, James Madison, and Benjamin Frank-lin. Abraham Lincoln was the only later ªgure to be proªled.53 A 1947 biogra-phy of Jefferson proclaimed, “Many of the rights and privileges Americans en-joy today stem directly from the wisdom and foresight of Thomas Jefferson.”Jefferson’s ideas were also described in a 1946 article on the Declaration of In-dependence.54

America’s freedoms were also the subject of a number of speciªc articles.Freedom of the press, freedom of worship, free scientiªc inquiry, and civilrights were subjects of six articles from 1946 to 1951. Two articles extolled“the story of journalism in a free society,” and another described John PeterZenger’s “ªrst major victory for a free press in the American colonies.”55 Thefreedom of worship story focused on Roger Williams, whom the author de-scribed as “the ªrst American to organize a political community based on ab-solute political liberty.” The article went on to say that “more than 100 years

24

Yarrow

51. These included such articles as “Making of Law in the U.S. Congress”; “The Role of the Courts,”Amerika, Issue 14 (1946), pp. 2–7, in America Illustrated Archive, Box 41; “John Marshall and thePowers of the U.S. Supreme Court,” Amerika, Issue 14 (1946), pp. 7–9, in America Illustrated Ar-chive, Box 41; “Small Town Lawyer,” Amerika, Issue 14 (1946), pp. 10–13, in America IllustratedArchive, Box 41; “Electing a President,” Amerika, Issue 23 (1948), pp. 2–11, in America Illustrated Ar-chive, Box 41; “The Little Parliaments,” Amerika, Issue 40 (1950), pp. 2–9, in America IllustratedArchive, Box 41; and “A Congressman Is Elected,” Amerika, Issue 53 (1951), pp. 2–11, in AmericaIllustrated Archive, Box 41.

52. “The Strength of Democracy,” Amerika, Issue 55 (1951), p. 40, in America Illustrated Archive,Box 41.

53. “George Washington: Father of His Country”; “Abraham Lincoln,” Amerika, Issue 12 (1946),pp. 25–29, in America Illustrated Archive, Box 40; “Benjamin Franklin: Citizen and Scientist,”Amerika, Issue 20 (1947), pp. 10–12, in America Illustrated Archive, Box 40; “James Madison,”Amerika, Issue 26 (1948), frontispiece, in America Illustrated Archive, Box 40.

54. “The Fourth of July,” Amerika, Issue 12 (1946), p. 72, in America Illustrated Archive, Box 40.

55. See, for example, “Newspapers in America,” Amerika, Issue 13 (1946), pp. 2–4, and “A CityDaily—The Indianapolis Star,” pp. 4–7, in America Illustrated archive, Box 40; “Glimpses of AmericanHistory,” Amerika, Issue 40 (1950), pp. 48–49, in America Illustrated archive, Box 41.

later, his ideas on liberty of conscience, separation of church and state, andrepresentative government were incorporated into the Declaration of Inde-pendence.”56 Freedom of thought and inquiry were described as Americanvirtues in an article by scientist Robert Oppenheimer, who argued thatscientiªc progress was predicated on a “tolerant, open-minded and coopera-tive community of men.”57 The nation’s commitment to civil rights for all—asubject on which the Soviet Union frequently attacked the United States—was presented in an article on “The Negro in American Life.”58

The U.S. global role in promoting democracy and freedom also was fre-quently emphasized. Not only were early issues in 1946 and 1947 oriented toarticles on the heroic war effort, but at least four features about U.S. activitiesin the United Nations appeared in Amerika in the late 1940s.59

One of the most interesting presentations of American ideals can befound in the most elaborate series ever produced for the magazine—a 7-part,73-page series called “A Brief Survey of American History,” which appeared inissues 24–30 in 1948 and 1949. In part one, the article discussed “the inter-play between the varied ideas, customs, and national characteristics of theseEuropean peoples and the environment of the new country [that] resulted ina vigorous, pioneering mode of life which was uniquely American.” Whileemphasizing American individualism, the article traced the origins of “freepublic education, the principle of religious liberty, freedom of the press, andpopular representation.” The second article in the series deªned the AmericanRevolution as being about the country’s abiding principles of “individual lib-erty, dignity, and self-government.”60

The emphasis in Amerika on describing the United States in terms of its

25


56. “Roger Williams,” Amerika, Issue 45 (1950), pp. 28–29, in America Illustrated Archive, Box 41.

57. Robert Oppenheimer, “Science and Freedom,” Amerika, Issue 53 (1951), pp. 14–15, in AmericaIllustrated Archive, Box 41.

58. “The Negro in American Life,” Amerika, Issue 50 (1951), pp. 2–15, in America Illustrated Ar-chive, Box 41.

59. Early articles on the United Nations included “President Truman’s Address at the Opening ofGeneral Assembly of United Nations”; “The U.N Builds Its Home,” Amerika, Issue 33 (1949),pp. 50–53, in America Illustrated Archive, Box 41; “The World Health Organization,” Amerika, Issue44 (1950), pp. 2–6, in America Illustrated Archive, Box 41; and “The United Nations Builds,”Amerika, Issue 45 (1949), pp. 2–9, in America Illustrated Archive, Box 41.

60. “A Brief Survey of American History Part 1,” Amerika, Issue 24 (1948), pp. 2–13, in America Il-lustrated Archive, Box 40; “A Brief Survey of American History Part 2,” Amerika, Issue 25 (1948),pp. 38–49, in America Illustrated Archive, Box 40; “A Brief Survey of American History Part 3,”Amerika, Issue 26 (1948), pp. 63–71, in America Illustrated Archive, Box 40; “A Brief Survey of Ameri-can History Part 4,” Amerika, Issue 27 (1948), pp. 28–35, in America Illustrated Archive, Box 40; “ABrief Survey of American History Part 5,” Amerika, Issue 28 (1948),, pp. 18–27, in America IllustratedArchive, Box 40; “A Brief Survey of American History Part 6, Amerika, Issue 29 (1949), pp. 40–49, inAmerica Illustrated Archive, Box 40; and “A Brief Survey of American History Part 7,” Amerika, Issue30 (1949), pp. 48–59, in America Illustrated Archive, Box 40.

political principles was mirrored in some of the pamphlets and booklets pro-duced by American propagandists in the early 1950s for distribution else-where in the world. For example, “The March of Freedom,” a 1952 bookletdeveloped by the advertising agency McCann-Erickson, featured the coverimage of a hand clenched to a torch, and described the Declaration of Inde-pendence and the UN Declaration of Human Rights as the culmination of a“march of freedom” that began with Hammurabi’s code. “Liberty in theThought of Three Great Men” (1951) paired Lincoln and Franklin Rooseveltwith Juarez, Bolivar, or San Martin—depending on the Latin American targetaudience—with Franklin Roosevelt declaring, “freedom means the supremacyof human rights everywhere.” A rather turgid “Primer for Americans” (1952),which was printed in Arabic, French, Spanish, and Hungarian, listed 41 rightsand principles gleaned by ad agency Young & Rubicam from America’sfounding documents, the golden rule, and common sense.61

At the same time that many pamphlets and articles extolled America’sdemocratic virtues in the early 1950s, many also directly and scathingly at-tacked Communism as the antithesis of American freedom. Titles included“Inside Soviet Slave Labor Camps” (1953), “It’s a Great Life Comrades”(n.d.), “Magniªcent Accomplishments of the Soviets” (1951), “Proof ofGuilt” (n.d.), “Proof of Soviet Slave Labor” (1953), “Swindled by the Com-munists” (1953), and “Red Star over Asia” (1952), whose cover featured a Sta-lin-like ªgure with a hammer-and-sickle insignia on his sleeve bludgeoning aman lying on his back.62

Although American freedoms—and their purported opposite in the formof Soviet Communism—loomed large in U.S. propaganda of the late 1940sand early 1950s, how were economic subjects treated during this period? Thenumber of economic stories in Amerika paled in comparison to the number ofarticles about U.S. political principles, the homey beneªcence of Americanlife, or even the arts—as well as in comparison to the number of economicstories that appeared in the late 1950s in America Illustrated.

Signiªcantly, the articles in Amerika adopted a pre–consumer society fo-cus on U.S. industry rather than looking at the dimensions or consequences

26

Yarrow

61. Pamphlets and leaºets produced from 1953 to 1960, Boxes 5, 7, Entry 1252, RG 306-99-008, inNARA.

62. These hard-hitting attacks on Communism and the Soviet Union were produced for foreign con-sumption during a period when the most virulent attacks on Communism were taking place domesti-cally. During the heyday of McCarthyism from 1950 to 1953, U.S. readers were treated to more arti-cles demonizing the Soviet Union and Communism in Reader’s Digest than during any other period inthe magazine’s long history. See Joanne P. Sharp, Condensing the Cold War: “Reader’s Digest” and Ameri-can Identity (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2000), p. 84.

of mass prosperity. These few industry articles included ones on packaging,transportation, telephones, and steel.63

Nonetheless, broader articles about U.S. economic conditions did ap-pear—albeit rarely, and more toward the end of the period. On two or threeoccasions, high and rising living standards were mentioned. One of the ªrstarticles, “Economic Stability in the United States,” discussed the govern-ment’s responsibility for individual “security” and economic “stability.”64 Theimplication was that Americans enjoyed economic security but not prosperity.Similarly, an article on “Workers’ Wages and the Cost of Living, 1950–51”defensively described how “weekly wages have kept pace with the rising costof living” at a time of “cutbacks necessitated by the increased defenseefforts.”65

More intriguing are three articles that appeared in 1950 and 1951,which—for the ªrst time—began to tout America’s “high standard of living”and a variant of capitalism that was creating an allegedly “classless society.” Allthree describe America’s new prosperity, its foundations in a new capitalismthat emphasized business-labor collaboration, and a narrowing of class lines.For example, a Frederick Lewis Allen essay reprinted from Harper’s describedchanges in American life in the century since 1850, noting “how conve-niences totally lacking 100 years ago are taken for granted today, [and] howthe gap between rich and poor, in living standards and cultural patterns, hasnarrowed.”66 Another article, with the provocative title, “American Labor andthe Classless Society,” emphasized the harmonious partnership between busi-ness and labor: “Under capitalism as it has developed in America, both busi-ness and labor unions see increased production and the ever wider distribu-tion of goods as the most essential ingredients of a successful economy; bothrecognize the fallacy of Marx’ class-struggle formula as applied to Americancapitalism.” Yet, the author harkened back to American political principles toexplain the economy’s success: “The American Revolution and the govern-ment it gave rise to made possible an orderly evolution toward a society inwhich the individual has an opportunity to develop according to his talents

27


63. “Packaging,” Amerika, Issue 14 (1946), pp. 62–72, in America Illustrated Archive, Box 40; “Trans-portation and Progress,” Amerika, Issue 17 (1947), pp. 2–9, in America Illustrated Archive, Box 40;“Person to Person,” Amerika, Issue 20 (1947), pp. 2–9, in America Illustrated Archive, Box 40; and“Steel,” Amerika, Issue 30 (1949), pp. 2–9, in America Illustrated Archive, Box 40.

64. “Ensuring Stability in the United States,” Amerika, Issue 15 (1947), pp. 2–6, in America Illus-trated Archive, Box 40.

65. “Workers’ Wages and the Cost of Living, 1950–51,” Amerika, Issue 55 (1951), pp. 15–19, inAmerica Illustrated Archive, Box 41.

66. Frederick Lewis Allen, “The Big Change,” Amerika, No. 49 (1951), pp. 2–11, in America Illus-trated Archive, Box 41.

and achievements.”67 Neither article elevated prosperity to be a deªning char-acteristic of mid-twentieth-century American life—instead seeing it as a con-sequence of America’s political system and of a long economic and politicalevolution.

In contrast, a 1950 article by economist Robert Heilbroner stands out inforeshadowing the frequent celebratory articles about high and rising livingstandards that begin to appear in U.S. propaganda in the mid-1950s.Heilbroner used the familiar journalistic convention of ªrst describing hownational living standards had risen (by 40 percent since 1939, with wages upby 75 percent) and then describing how that translated into the life of “fac-tory worker John Winters” and his family. Noting that the United States wasmore prosperous than ever, he emphasized:

Such facts document the greatest economic well-being America has ever known.Perhaps the most striking feature of this postwar prosperity is that it is morewidely and evenly shared than ever before: there are fewer rich, fewer poor, andmore people in the middle. This in turn has broadened mass markets, thus giv-ing a new stability and strength to the economic system of the United States.68

The Transition

The shift to propaganda messages focusing on American prosperity began toget under way early in the Eisenhower administration, in 1953 and 1954,after the Korean War and the worst of McCarthyism had ended, and aspropagandists at the newly formed USIA started to pull back from the stri-dent anti-Communism characteristic of 1950–1954. Amerika stopped pub-lishing after 1952 because of Soviet efforts to stop circulation, and its succes-sor magazine for the Soviet Union, America Illustrated, did not beginpublishing until four years later, after the political climate improved in thewake of Iosif Stalin’s death and Nikita Khrushchev’s liberalization.69 Duringthese transition years, a key source of written propaganda was Free World,USIA’s magazine geared to “the free nations of Asia” that began publishing in1952. This 46-page, 8-by-10-inch, black-and-white monthly was put out bythe USIA Operations Division and printed in Manila. Unlike Amerika or

28

Yarrow

67. Frederick Martin Stern, “American Labor and the Classless Society,” Amerika, Issue 54 (1951),pp. 20–21, in America Illustrated Archive, Box 41.

68. Robert Heilbroner, “Wages and Prices in the United States,” Amerika, Issue 46 (1950), pp. 2–7, inAmerica Illustrated Archive, Box 41.

69. Yale Richmond, Cultural Exchange and the Cold War: Raising the Iron Curtain (University Park:Pennsylvania State University Press, 2003).

America Illustrated, all but one or two of the articles each month were aboutEast Asian subjects. Covers regularly featured color photos of Asians in somesort of “native” dress.

Each issue, however, also included at least one feature story about theUnited States and one other U.S.-focused article, usually about a prominentAmerican. These ranged from stories about Henry Ford and Alexander Gra-ham Bell to baseball player Roy Campanella. Early articles such as “TheMeaning of American Labor Day” contrasted American workers’ “high wages[and] good working conditions” with the “slave laborers behind the Iron Cur-tain.” “How a U.S. Labor Union Works” described how “unions help create astrong democracy.”70 Whereas these articles touted Americans’ ability to “livedecently,” they did not yet revel in the country’s growing abundance, andtheir arguments were still couched in terms of the sharp contrast betweenAmerican democratic ideals and the evils of Soviet oppression.

Transitional articles also appeared in 1954. Discussions of American lib-erties still appeared alongside articles about American prosperity, and discus-sions of abundance often were couched in terms of its underpinnings inAmerican political freedoms. For example, the article “America 1900–1950:Fifty Years Brings New Concept of Good Living for Everyone” described thecountry’s transformation during the preceding 50 years in terms of “the goalof American democracy” being a “better life and equal opportunity for all.”“Social Welfare in the United States” spoke of U.S. beneªcence in idealisticterms: “As did their forefathers, Americans today rally to the aid of those inneed. . . . Americans are good neighbors—to the family across the street, andto the friends across the seas.” In both stories, Americans’ economic well-being was still largely described as a function of a political system founded onideals of freedom, democracy, and equality.71

Articles emphasizing American freedoms still predominated. A 1954 is-sue of Free World printed a statement by Secretary of State John Foster Dullesdescribing U.S. policy as “loyal to . . . the truths expressed in the Declarationof Independence” and a speech by Vice President Richard Nixon during a re-cent Asian trip, titled “We Are All Brothers in Our Hearts,” emphasizingAmerican “liberties.” A remarkable story on the Brown v. Board of Educationdecision, titled “The Greatest Success Story in the World,” celebrated how “at

29


70. “The Meaning of American Labor Day,” Free World, Vol. 2, No. 10 (1953), pp. 42–45, Free WorldArchive, RG 306, in NARA (hereinafter referred to as Free World Archive); and “How a U.S. LaborUnion Works,” Vol. 3, No. 3 (1954), pp. 34–37, in Free World Archive.

71. “America 1900–1950: Fifty Years Brings a New Concept of Good Living for Everyone,” FreeWorld, Vol. 3, No. 2 (1954), pp. 21–24, in Free World Archive; and “Social Welfare in the UnitedStates,” Free World, Vol. 3, No. 4 (1954), pp. 12–15, in Free World Archive.

no time in the history of the world have a people risen from slavery to equal,responsible citizens and free men in 89 years.”72

Also commonly appearing in Free World were testimonials by Asian visi-tors to the United States. Two 1955 articles show that such items were in-tended to convey American ideals. “So This Is America!”—the story of a visi-tor from Saigon—gushed, “This is America where many cultures have beentranslated to ªnd freedom.” In the next issue, a Filipino student wrote in “IWas an American for Three Months”: “Democracy [is] something they cher-ish like a rare treasure. To them democracy is synonymous with America it-self.”73

However, just as Heilbroner’s Amerika article foreshadowed a change oftone, a 1954 article by CED leader and Studebaker chairman Paul Hoffman,titled “Mutual Capitalism—An American System,” suggested a new way ofdeªning America to the world. Picking up a theme that had been gaining cur-rency among liberal opinion leaders in the early-to-mid-1950s, Hoffmanwrote,

One of the deep sources of America’s strength and prosperity that is too little un-derstood both at home and abroad is the unique character of our economic sys-tem. . . . It is a new kind of capitalism that beneªts everybody, not just the capi-talists. . . . In our mutual capitalism, decisions are made by the many, rather thanthe few. . . . There are few have-nots in America . . . [and] most of us are prop-erty owners.74

Hoffman, who also headed the Economic Cooperation Administrationthat oversaw the Marshall Plan, argued in a 1951 book for a more aggressivepropaganda effort based on a “crystallized” “free world doctrine.” Althoughhe began by rooting this doctrine in Christ’s Sermon on the Mount and theDeclaration of Independence, he quickly turned to the key selling-point—“the new, socially conscious capitalism which, in the United States, has beendeveloped to an extent which the world as a whole little understands; a systembased on widespread ownership, diffusion of initiative, decision and enter-prise and an ever-widening distribution of its beneªts.” The heart of the mes-sage was that all would be right with the world, and the Cold War would be

30

Yarrow

72. John Foster Dulles, “A Spirit of Justice,” Free World, Vol. 3, No. 4 (1954), p. 42, in Free World Ar-chive; and “The Greatest Success Story in the World,” Free World, Vol. 3, No. 12 (1954), pp. 2–5, inFree World Archive.

73. “So This Is America,” Free World, Vol. 4, No. 9 (1955), pp. 32–33, in Free World Archive; andRamon A. Cruz, Jr., “I Was an American for Three Months,” Free World, Vol. 4,No. 10 (1955),pp. 28–31, in Free World Archive.

74. “Mutual Capitalism—An American System,” Free World, Vol. 3, No. 5 (1954), pp. 12–15, in FreeWorld Archive.

won, if everyone had a high and rising standard of living as in the UnitedStates.75

People’s Capitalism

Just as business organizations and the media had begun to talk about a“changed America” and a new capitalist system roughly after the Korean War,the idea that the United States embodied a “new” capitalism clearly had be-gun to take root in U.S. propaganda by the mid-1950s. Pamphlets such as“Meet Some Americans at Work,” “Consumer Capitalism in Action” (1953),and “The Structure of the American Economy” (1955)—of which millions ofcopies were distributed—reºect this change.76 Whereas the former pamphletemphasized, still somewhat defensively, that U.S. capitalism had evolved “farbeyond the classical conception of that economic system,” the latter pro-claimed, “A new economy is evolving in the U.S. which has no parallel any-where in the world” either in “magnitude” or in “structure.”77 Although theideas had gelled by 1955—as politicians and journalists began to speak effu-sively of the qualitative and quantitative changes in the American economy—the propagandists still needed a catchy name for this new order of things.

Although some opinion leaders like Hoffman and New York Stock Ex-change President Keith Funston had been batting around the term in theearly 1950s, in 1955 Advertising Council leader T. S. Repplier providedUSIA director Streibert with the outlines of a “people’s capitalism” campaignthat would include print, broadcast, and trade fairs.78 Repplier had spentmuch of 1955 evaluating U.S. propaganda efforts on the ground and hadconcluded that they were too fair and balanced, too vague, and too focused onSoviet negatives. What was needed, he concluded, was clear, inspirational ide-als that would appeal to the world’s people.79

“Our propaganda “needs to sharpen its ideas” and counter the “unpleas-ant odor” that the term “capitalism” has in much of the world, Repplier wrote

31


75. Hoffman, Peace Can Be Won, p. 141.

76. Belmonte, “Selling Capitalism,” p. 113.

77. Pamphlets and leaºets produced between 1953 and 1960, Boxes 2, 8, Entry 1252, RG 306-99-008, in NARA.

78. James M. Lambie, Jr., Records, 1952–61, Boxes 17, 23, 31, 38, in DDEL; C. D. Jackson Papers,Box 95, in DDEL; Hixson, Parting the Curtain, p. 133. Repplier headed the Advertising Council fromits wartime incarnation as the War Advertising Council in 1942 until 1966. The Ad Council main-tained close relations with the Truman and Eisenhower administrations, running massive domestic“public-service” campaigns and frequently advising White House ofªcials on foreign and domestic in-formation policy—what would come to be called, by 2000, “message.”

79. Haddow, Pavilions of Plenty, p. 49.

to Eisenhower. “There still exists an urgent need to make clear that a new eco-nomic system has been born—a system which gives more beneªts to morepeople than any yet devised—a system I should like to call ‘People’s Capital-ism.’” In many ways, the campaign grew out of domestic Ad Council cam-paigns such as its “American Economic System” and “Future of America”campaigns in the late 1940s and early 1950s.80

The name played off the Communist use of “people’s” and was also in-tended to counter Soviet attacks on “Wall Street capitalism.” In “People’sCapitalism: Man’s Newest Way of Life,” which he wrote to accompany a trialpropaganda exhibition at Washington’s Union Station in February 1956,Repplier wrote that the United States had accomplished what the Commu-nists only promised: equal comforts and beneªts for workers and bosses.81

“People’s capitalism” had many enthusiasts in high places—from Presi-dent Eisenhower and Henry Luce to Defense Secretary Charles Wilson, Trea-sury Secretary George Humphrey, and Commerce Secretary Sinclair Weeks,as well as among prominent journalists.82 A few critics derided the idea. In afamous article, “The Nylon War,” the sociologist David Riesman poked funat the idea that the United States would win the Cold War by bombing theUSSR with consumer goods.83

From 1956 to 1960, pamphlets, articles, and trade fairs extolling Ameri-can “people’s capitalism” inundated every country USIA could reach. As thetrend in Figure 1 shows, the new theme became the dominant message ofU.S. propaganda in the late 1950s. A good overview of these ideas can be seenin a Free World three-part series that appeared in late 1956 and early 1957 andwas tied to the ªrst of USIA’s “people’s capitalism” exhibitions that toured var-ious foreign cities.84 The ªrst part of the series, titled “A New Name—‘Peo-

32

Yarrow

80. James M. Lambie, Jr., Records, 1952–61, Boxes 17, 23, in DDEL; Charles Jackson Files, Boxes15, 16, in HSTL.

81. James M. Lambie, Jr., Records, 1952–61, Box 31, DDEL.

82. Fortune described the transformation to “popular capitalism” in 1951. The phrase “people’s capi-talism” became popular a few years later. See “Fresh View of Capitalism,” Life, 9 April 1956, p. 58, re-printed in Reader’s Digest, July 1956, pp. 137–138; “People’s Capitalism,” The New York Times, 15February 1956; “U.S. Capitalism Seen as Ideal for the World,” The New York Times, 24 November1956; “People’s Capitalism: This Is America,” Collier’s, 6 January 1956, p. 74; “The People’s Capital-ism,” House Beautiful, November 1956, p. 226; “People’s Capitalism,” Nation, 25 February 1956,p. 151; and “People’s Capitalism?” The New Republic, 20 October 1962. The New York Times men-tioned “people’s capitalism” 105 times between 1945 and 1965, although most references came in themid-to-late-1950s.

83. David Riesman, “The Nylon War,” in Individualism Reconsidered and Other Essays (Glencoe, IL:Free Press, 1954).

84. “A New Name—’People’s Capitalism’ in America” [part 1], Free World, Vol. 5, No. 10 (1956), inFree World Archive; “A New Name—’People’s Capitalism’ in America” [part 2], Free World, Vol. 5, No.11 (1956), in Free World Archive; and “Classless Capitalism,” Free World, Vol. 6, No. 1 (1957), in FreeWorld Archive.

ple’s Capitalism’ in America,” began with a bold assertion: “‘People’s capital-ism’ is a term which accurately describes the economic system under which166 million Americans enjoy the highest standard of living in the world to-day—a system that has been fabulously successful in beneªting not the few,but the many.”

Gushing with superlatives, this was a far cry from the cautious depictionin the late 1940s of the U.S. economy providing “security” and “stability.” In-stead, the article—like many others to come—combined three principal fea-tures to make its case: an almost Soviet-like recitation of statistics, the story ofan “average American,” and ºorid, Panglossian language implying that Amer-ica was on the verge of becoming the promised land. Average American “EdBarnes” was shown playing with his three children in his ªve-room house,while his wife shops above a caption saying that they “use only 29 percent oftheir income on the vast array of foods found in the markets.” The articlewent on to explain that “Mr. Barnes is a capitalist because it is his investedcapital, and that of millions like him, that industry uses.”85

33


85. “A New Name” [part 1].

Fig. 1. Comparative content of articles in Amerika (1952–1956) and America Illustrated(1956–1960).

The second article hammered home that people’s capitalism was produc-ing both a consumer’s and a worker’s paradise: “Competition [has] provideddream homes and powerful automobiles and labor-saving machines that arein the price range of the majority . . . [and is also producing] better workingconditions, higher wages, and shorter hours.”86

Finally, in “Classless Capitalism,” the third installment in the series, theauthor asserted that the new capitalism has brought “a time in history whenmen are equal as never before.” Not only are they equal, but they are prosper-ous as never before because “items formerly considered luxuries leap overnightinto the category of necessities.”87

A 1957 pocket-size brochure, “People’s Capitalism,” which was also pub-lished as a supplement to Free World and reprinted in a number of languagesduring the next few years, captured the essence of the new ideology: “Capital-ism in America is something new under the sun. . . . People’s capitalism—farfrom creating progressive poverty—has spread wealth ever more widelyamong Americans.” Noting the decline in the work week from 70 hours in1900 to 40 in 1956, the brochure went on to say that the work week

may become still shorter in the not distant future. Meanwhile, an hour’s workproduces more and at a higher rate than ever before. . . .

People’s capitalism, by reducing the number of very rich and very poor, hasproduced a very large, growing middle class; the so-called “class struggle” has lostits meaning in the United States. . . . The prosperity of the United States has allbut removed want as a major social problem and leisure time increases steadily.88

While recognizing that “many problems remain to be solved . . . the dyna-mism and ºexibility of the American economy are conducive to improve-ments and peaceful change.”89

Free World’s formulaic Asian visitor stories also shifted from an emphasison U.S. freedoms to U.S. prosperity, as can be seen in a 1959 article by an In-dian man. In “The Common Man in America,” he wrote that Americans are“brought up on a religion of work, output and productivity. . . . [They] exertthemselves to the utmost to make money and live well, [yet] curiouslyenough, they do not believe in amassing great wealth.”90

Nowhere are these themes more evident than in the pages of America Il-lustrated during the late 1950s. Launched in 1956 as a result of an October

34

Yarrow

86. “A New Name” [part 2].

87. “Classless Capitalism.”

88. “People’s Capitalism,” Pamphlets and leaºets produced between 1953 and 1960, Box 6, Entry1252, RG 306-99-008, in NARA.

89. Ibid.

90. “The Common Man in America,” Free World, Vol. 7, No. 10 (1959), in Free World Archive.

1956 U.S.-Soviet accord, this expensive, full-color, Life-magazine-stylemonthly was described by one former USIA ofªcer as making “Vogue lookcheap.” America Illustrated, a 62-page magazine printed on 11-by-14-inchheavy color stock paper, cost taxpayers $2.92 per copy in the late 1950s.About 50,000 copies were sent to the Soviet Union each month. Its editors’mission statement in the ªrst issue described the magazine as being about howAmericans “live, work, and play,” and many articles were reprinted from pop-ular U.S. magazines such as Collier’s, Life, Look, Reader’s Digest, and The Sat-urday Evening Post.91

What most differentiated its overall content mix from that of Amerika inthe late 1940s and early 1950s was the new and frequent appearance of arti-cles on Americans’ high and rising livings standards and the smaller numberof stories on U.S. political beliefs and institutions. Stories on the arts andAmericana continued to ªgure prominently, and articles about U.S. scienceand technology were more common than in the earlier magazine. A contentanalysis of 106 articles in eight issues from 1956 to 1960 reveals that although35 percent were still devoted to stories about American life ranging from aboy and his cat to the traditions of Thanksgiving, 19 percent were now de-voted to economic subjects, and 22 percent focused on how technology wasmaking American life more abundant. The arts still accounted for 20 percentof articles, but stories on American political and philosophical ideals nowmade up just 3 percent of the total.

A number of articles took up the larger message about America’s new cap-italism and remarkable growth, reveling in statistical superlatives and breath-less descriptions of the fruits of the new abundance. Proªles of well-off “aver-age Americans” and stories about the many consequences of prosperity, suchas the ability to take vacations, were especially common in America Illustrated.Through such articles, themes about America’s high living standards, impres-sive economic growth, and new, classless capitalism were conveyed.

The lead article in the ªrst issue, “America Today,” reºects this changedemphasis: “The fabulous march of 20th century technology and science hasled to the most abundant and stable economy the country has ever known. Ithas wrought deep social changes in community and family living, in increasedfreedom and increased responsibility so far-reaching it is only beginning to beunderstood.” The same issue included three other articles on high U.S. livingstandards—a proªle of an oil worker whose family lives “in a comfortablehouse that Lou built himself,” a story on American farmers’ “production mir-

35


91. John Melby, Foreign Affairs Oral History Project, Association for Diplomatic Studies andTraining, Washington, DC, 16 June 1989: Interview, William E. Hutchinson, 10 August 1989; andAmerica Illustrated Archive, Box 47.

acle,” and a feature on “Vacation Time,” describing how “most people take atrip.”92

Among the average Americans proªled in the magazine was “JoeGiacoletto, a certiªed mechanic and shop steward” whose progress “Up theLabor Ladder” was evidence of the “system of job advancement worked outby management and labor at many American plants to give ambitious youngworkers an opportunity to get ahead.” Another story looked at three SanFrancisco workers who go home when “The Day’s Work Is Done” to “a placein the country for Jim, a city apartment for Keith, [and] a sunsprayed subur-ban hillside for Martin.” Yet another proªle paired a bookstore manager and asteelworker who “each has achieved, in substantial measure, the good life asthey see it.”93

Unlike Amerika, whose economic articles tended to focus on industry,America Illustrated included many stories about how American “people’s capi-talism” was creating prosperity and touching people’s everyday lives. “Revolu-tion in the Kitchen” described how the American housewife spent “less thanhalf the time in the kitchen than her mother did a generation ago, yet herfamily is getting a better-balanced diet and a bigger and better variety of foodsthan ever before.” The cornucopia of consumer goods was featured in articlessuch as “City of Stores for the Suburbs,” which described America’s new shop-ping centers, offering “a vast variety of goods and services to satisfy the wholefamily’s needs,” and “Shopper’s Paradise,” which told of the miracles of themodern American department store. America’s abundance of leisure was high-lighted in “Leisure in a Changing Society.” Vacation opportunities weretouted in articles on “Vacation Time,” “Boats for Everyone,” and “SecondHomes for Family Vacations.” An article on “Teenagers’ Economics” told of“the billions of dollars pouring into their hands every year,” and “AssemblyLine Home-Building” boasted that standardized construction “gives thehomeowner a better house at a lower price.” In addition, regular articles aboutU.S. fashion, home decorating, and new car models contributed to the imageof America as the consumer’s paradise. Several late 1950s articles celebratedthe facts that Americans could buy twice as much food as 30 years before, thatthe population had 61 million phones, and that Americans had so much lei-sure that long and varied summer vacations were commonplace.94

36

Yarrow

92. “Vacation Time,” America Illustrated, No. 1 (1956), p. 56, in America Illustrated Archive, Box 47.

93. “Up the Labor Ladder,” America Illustrated, No. 37 (1959), pp. 47–49, in America Illustrated Ar-chive, Box 50; “The Day’s Work Is Done,” America Illustrated, No. 26 (1958), in America IllustratedArchive, Box 49; “Three Ofªce Workers at Home,” America Illustrated, No. 26 (1958), p. 37, in Amer-ica Illustrated Archive, Box 49; and “Four Family Budgets,” America Illustrated, No. 29 (1959), p. 12,in America Illustrated Archive, Box 50.

94. “Revolution in the Kitchen,” America Illustrated, No. 17 (1957), p. 34, in America Illustrated Ar-

Bigger-picture articles about America’s remarkable economic growth wereespecially common by the end of the 1950s. “Ten Amazing Years” and “Dec-ade of Growth” offered gushing descriptions of America’s advances on everyimaginable indicator—from “medicine and automation” to “rising worker’swages and family income, increased farm productivity, higher school enroll-ment, stronger old-age protection, and wider automobile ownership.” In “TenAmazing Years,” the author reported that

a backward look over the past decade in America reveals striking changes—surging population and employment, new production levels, advances in medi-cine and automation. . . . This picture of a vigorous United States, drawn in textand charts, shows how the restless energy that has characterized the Americanpeople continues to ªnd and conquer new frontiers of economic and social well-being.95

“Facts about the U.S. Income” asserted that “the redistribution of incomeis a signiªcant fact of American life today.” The 1959 article went on to claimthat “taxes make the accumulation of great wealth difªcult, labor legislationhas improved the bargaining position of workers, and steadily rising incomelevels have been accompanied by a shorter work week and a wide variety ofsupplementary beneªts, paid by employers and government.96

The scope of Americans’ abundance—and the government-business part-nership to achieve it—was elaborated on in “Facts about U.S. Labor’s Supple-mentary Beneªts.” The author declared that “the American worker’s risingstandard of living is not based on higher wages alone. Increasingly, in the past20 years, it has been buttressed by a whole new group of beneªts and

37


chive, Box; “Leisure in a Changing Society,” America Illustrated, No. 40 (1959), p. 2, in America Illus-trated Archive, Box; “Vacation Time,” America Illustrated, No. 1 (1956), p. 56, in America IllustratedArchive, Box; “Boats for Everyone,” America Illustrated, No. 35 (1957), p. 6, in America Illustrated Ar-chive, Box; “Teenagers’ Economics,” America Illustrated, No. 26 (1958), p. 53, in America IllustratedArchive, Box 49; “Assembly Line Home Building,” America Illustrated, 38 (1959), pp. 56–61, inAmerica Illustrated Archive, Box 49; “Second Homes for Family Vacations,” America Illustrated, No.47 (1960), pp. 27–31, in America Illustrated Archive, Box; “About Telephones: 65,000,000 of Them,”America Illustrated (Polish edition), No. 6 (June 1959), pp. 139–144, in America Illustrated Archive,Box 49; and “The ‘Family Vacation,’” America Illustrated (Polish edition), No. 7 (August 1959),pp. 116–122, in America Illustrated Archive, Box 49.

95. “Ten Amazing Years,” America Illustrated, No. 16 (1957), p. 2, in America Illustrated Archive, Box48; and “Facts about the United States: Decade of Growth,” America Illustrated, no. 46 (1960),pp. 16–17, in America Illustrated Archive, Box 50. See also “The Changing American Society,” Amer-ica Illustrated, No. 48 (1960), pp. 2–7, in America Illustrated Archive, Box 50and “The 1960s: A Fore-cast of the Technology,” America Illustrated, No. 48 (1960), pp. 34–39, in America Illustrated Archive,Box 50.

96. “Facts about the U.S. Income,” America Illustrated, No. 33 (1959), p. 6, in America Illustrated Ar-chive, Box 49.

protections,” including paid vacations and holidays and various insurance andwelfare programs.97

In “The Changing American Society,” Fortune writer Robert Seligmandrove home the message that the United States had achieved the Commu-nists’ purported goal of classless abundance:

The traditional concept of class divisions has become totally inaccurate. In con-temporary America, occupations distinctions are blurred, incomes increasinglycluster at the middle range, and families of diverse social and economic back-grounds are ever freer to choose their styles of living. . . . No longer burdenedwith the struggle for economic survival or rankling under invidious social dis-tinctions, more and more Americans have the security and leisure to experimentmore freely in taste and idea.98

Against this assortment of articles on U.S. living standards, growth, andthe new people’s capitalism, America Illustrated treated older themes and mes-sages about American democracy and freedom only occasionally. A three-partseries by Clinton Rossiter on the branches of government appeared in 1957,and an article on Congress appeared in 1960, but such articles were far lessfrequent in the pages of America Illustrated than in its predecessor, Amerika.Moreover, stories on speciªc freedoms, such as freedom of the press or reli-gion, and broader essays on democracy or freedom—which were common inAmerika—were nowhere to be found in its successor. Similarly, other than a150th-birthday portrait of Lincoln in 1959, America Illustrated eschewed arti-cles on America’s political heroes or the country’s history.99 Instead of the ide-als-ªlled seven-part U.S. history featured in Amerika, readers of America Illus-trated would discover a country in which every worker was a capitalist, had acomfortable home, sent his children to college, took vacations, perhaps had aboat or vacation home, and had a multitude of things to buy. To the extentthat freedom was discussed—and it was—it was largely in the context of de-scribing the freedoms that enabled America to prosper and the freedomsmade possible by prosperity.

Another signiªcant indication of the shift in emphasis in U.S. propa-ganda during these few years can be seen in the subtly different conclusions to

38

Yarrow

97. “Facts about the U.S. Labor’s Supplementary Beneªts,” America Illustrated, No. 37 (1959),pp. 50–52, in America Illustrated Archive, Box 50.

98. “The Changing American Society,” America Illustrated, No. 40 (1960), pp. 2–7, in America Illus-trated Archive, Box 50.

99. Clinton Rossiter, “Role of the President,” America Illustrated, No. 6 (1956), p. 13, in America Illus-trated Archive, Box 48; Clinton Rossiter,”Congress of the United States,” America Illustrated, No. 16(1957), p. 34, in America Illustrated Archive, Box 48; Clinton Rossiter, “Supreme Court of the UnitedStates,” America Illustrated, No. 17 (1957), in America Illustrated Archive, Box 48; Dennis S. Feldman,“150th Anniversary,” America Illustrated, No. 29 (1959), p. 2, in America Illustrated Archive, Box 50;“Congress at Work,” America Illustrated, No. 40 (1960), p. 22, in America Illustrated Archive, Box 50.

a 1953 edition and a 1957 edition of a 50-page comic book, “A Picture Storyof the United States.” This comic book went through huge, multilingualprint runs for distribution to Asia, Latin America, and the Middle East. Theªrst edition ends with the idealistic creation of the United Nations and con-cludes: “This story has been one of quest . . . quest for opportunity, materialhappiness, quest for better ways of doing things, and above all, quest for free-dom, freedom of mind and spirit, for all men are created equal in the sight ofGod.” Four years later, the 1957 edition concluded with a story about Amer-ica’s “economic transformation,” in which “92 percent own real estate” andworkers are “enjoying the fruits of people’s capitalism.” The ªnal line againmentions the “quest for more opportunity, material well-being and betterways of doing things,” as well as the need to make “freedom secure,” but it nolonger talks about the “quest for freedom,” “freedom of mind and spirit,” orall men being created equal.

A host of pamphlets produced during the late 1950s, with hundreds ofthousands of copies printed in a multitude of languages, repeated thesethemes. The thrust of “American Capitalism: The Economic Progress of aFree People” (1956) was that exploitative capitalism in the United States hadgiven way to a new capitalism in which workers, management, and govern-ment cooperate to foster high production as well as “meet the needs of allmembers of society, and provide the opportunities for real personal growthand recognition.”100 The average American citizen-”capitalist” like ThomasBrackett lives well: He owns property, has savings and public-private provi-sion for old age, is able to send his children to college, enjoys increasing lei-sure, and can buy “hundreds of new products at reasonable prices.”

Lest anyone should think that these developments were not signiªcant,“The American Consumer: Key to an Expanding Economy” (1960) approv-ingly quoted French observer André Siegfried describing the new Americaneconomy as “surely one of the great achievements in the history of man-kind.”101 Reprising the argument from his book, People of Plenty, David Potterprovided, in “The American Economy” (1960), an only somewhat less grand

39


100. “American Capitalism: The Economic Progress of a Free People,” Pamphlets and leaºets pro-duced between 1953 and 1960, Boxes 1–9, Entry 1252, RG 306-99-008, Records of the United StatesInformation Agency, in NARA. “American Capitalism” and “People’s Capitalism” were printed forAsian distribution between 1956 and 1958. Other pamphlets included “The People: The Real Sinewsof the U.S. Economy,” printed in Spanish and English in 1956; “Primer of the American Economy,”printed in English and Spanish in 1958; “Thomas Brackett: American Capitalist,” printed in 1957;“The American Economy: Prospects for Growth to 1965 and 1975,” printed by McGraw-Hill in1958; “The American Consumer: Key to an Expanding Economy,” printed in 1960; and “The Ameri-can Economy,” a 28-page essay written by historian David Potter. See Pamphlets and leaºets producedfrom 1953 to 1960, Boxes 1–9, RG 306-99-008, Entry 1252, Records of the United States Informa-tion Agency, in NARA.

101. “The American Consumer: Key to an Expanding Economy” (1960), Pamphlets and leaºets pro-

historical patina:”When Americans saw that for the ªrst time the possibilityof having more than enough to go around was a reality and not a dream, theyset themselves another goal which ªtted well with the goal of democracy. Thiswas the goal of creating a rich economy with a wide distribution of materialbeneªts.”102

Trade Fairs

The idea that abundance was the chief selling point of the United States led tothe raft of trade fair exhibitions on American life that were shipped to citiesaround the world from the mid-1950s until the early 1960s. Amid much con-cern that the Soviet Union was besting the United States in the propagandawar of the early 1950s, Eisenhower won passage of a Special Emergency Fundin 1954 under which the government would partner with corporations to ex-hibit their wares as well as the new American image.103

The Department of Commerce, Department of State, and USIA collabo-rated with major U.S. companies, the NAM, and leading designers on scoresof these fairs that were much more about selling an appealing vision ofthe United States than about selling cars for General Motors or appliancesfor General Electric. After participating in ªfteen such fairs in 1955 underthis “emergency” authority, Congress passed the International Cultural Ex-change and Trade Fair Act in late 1956 to demonstrate “the contributions be-ing made by the United States economic and social system toward a morepeaceful and fruitful life for its own people and other people throughout theworld.”104

A prototype exhibit explicitly based on the theme of people’s capitalismwas displayed in Washington, DC, where AFL-CIO leader George Meanyspoke of the inseparability of “material abundance” and freedom in Amer-ica.105 During the months and years ahead, the trade fair program was

40

Yarrow

duced between 1953 and 1960, Boxes 1–9, RG 306-99-008, Entry 1252, Records of the United StatesInformation Agency, in NARA.

102. David Potter, “The American Economy” (1960), Pamphlets and leaºets produced between 1953and 1960, Boxes 1–9, RG 306-99-008, Entry 1252, Records of the United States Information Agency,in NARA.

103. U.S. President’s Committee on Information Activities Abroad Records, 1959–61, Box 14, inDDE Library.

104. Cited in Claudio Gonzales-Chiaramonte, “What Is Americanism Anyway? Exporting an Ameri-can Identity,” paper presented at Dickinson College, 7–9 April 1999; and “The U.S.A. Goes to theFair,” Reader’s Digest, December 1955. Roy Williams, a NAM vice president, said that the fairs wouldgive foreign audiences “a new realization of what free enterprise in a democracy really means.”

105. Haddow, Pavilions of Plenty, p. 52.

ratcheted up at fever pitch. In 1960, 97 exhibits were sponsored in 29 coun-tries, where they were seen by an estimated 60 million people.106

Most of these exhibits featured a model American home equipped withthe latest appliances, as well as ªlms and displays of other consumer goods.Lawnmowers, color televisionss, juke boxes, synthetic fabrics, and even freeblue jeans, Pepsi, and cornºakes became the ambassadors of the Americanway of life at “people’s capitalism” exhibitions as far aªeld as Bogotá in late1956, Kabul, Poznañ, and Moscow. An entire U.S.-style supermarket was in-stalled at a 1957 Zagreb fair. Child-oriented exhibits at the 1957 Barcelonaand Milan fairs and the 1958 Brussels fair emphasized the link between anabundant economy and healthy, happy children.107 The connection betweenabundance, technology, and domesticity was emphasized in the fairs’ appli-ance-bedecked kitchens. Frequent fashion shows were used not only to juxta-pose svelte U.S. models with their more matronly Soviet counterparts but alsoto demonstrate that America’s wealth allowed all of its people to enjoy the lat-est fashions. A monthly publication at the 1958 Brussels fair, together with anexhibit on the New York Stock Exchange, expressly paired the voting machineand the stock exchange as the twin expressions of democracy.108

The degree to which trade fairs became the object of intense Cold War ri-valry was particularly evident in the cases of the 1958 Brussels fair and thepaired 1959 U.S. exhibition in Moscow and Soviet exhibition in New York.In the months leading up to the Brussels fair, U.S. policy and media circlesdiscussed at length which Cold War adversary would have the more appealingpavilion.

As a result of this highly publicized “battle of Brussels,” the U.S. govern-ment poured resources into the U.S. exhibition. Architect Edward DurrellStone designed a huge circular pavilion, Monsanto installed a “House of To-morrow” like the one that had recently opened at Disneyland, a Children’sCreative Center was built, and Fortune magazine sponsored a controversial ex-hibit on America’s “Unªnished Business.” This exhibit, developed at the timeof the Little Rock segregation battles, was intended to note that the UnitedStates still faced racial problems but that blacks were making economic andpolitical progress. Designed by Fortune art director Leo Lionni, and conceivedby the unlikely trio of Victor Reuther, Walt Rostow, and Henry Luce, the ex-hibit won praise from European visitors but was shut down within a matter of

41


106. Ibid., p. 15; and U.S. President’s Committee on Information Activities Abroad Records, 1959–61, Box 14, in DDE Library.

107. Haddow, Pavilions of Plenty, pp. 63, 65, 113, 123, 147.

108. Ibid., pp. 156, 169.

days by the State Department under pressure from Southern U.S. legisla-tors.109

The best known example of U.S. trade-fair diplomacy and the use of thepeople’s capitalism argument in the Cold War came with the 1959 AmericanNational Exhibition in Moscow—made famous by the Nixon-Khrushchev“kitchen debate.” The Moscow exhibition, made possible under an executivecultural agreement that also facilitated a parallel Soviet display in New York’sColiseum, was open in late July and early August in Sokolniki Park. Orga-nized by the USIA and Commerce Department, with signiªcant input fromAssistant Secretary of Commerce and former NAM president HaroldMcClellan, the U.S. pavilion was a huge geodesic dome designed by Buck-minster Fuller—an icon of overseas displays of U.S. abundance through Expo’67 eight years later in Montreal. The exhibition included short ªlms on theAmerican workday by Charles and Ray Eames and on American leisure byBilly Wilder, fashion models enacting lavish American weddings and casualAmerican barbecues, endless technology, and free Pepsi that generated longlines of curious, thirsty Russians.110

The centerpiece was a prefabricated $14,000 ranch house contributed byLong Island developer All-State Properties and furnished by Macy’s and Gen-eral Electric. The house was displayed as the average American’s palace ofcomfort and technology. The home featured an RCA Whirlpool “miracle”kitchen, a robot cleaner, foods from General Mills and General Foods, and ahome workshop.

In the often-told story, Nixon and Khrushchev toured the exhibit to-gether. Nixon then delivered a speech, “What Freedom Means to Us,” inwhich he said little about American rights and liberty and instead emphasizedthe “extraordinarily high standard of living” in the United States and theachievement of “prosperity for all in a classless society.” Khrushchev—whohad vowed to surpass the United States economically by the late 1960s—shared Nixon’s mindset that the Cold War would be won by the system mosteffective in bringing material abundance to the most people. As the two menpaused in the model kitchen, Nixon proudly argued that the kitchen’s cornu-copia of consumer goods—emblematic of the general abundance of theUnited States—was the essence of the American way of life; that democracymeant the ability to choose from limitless goods made available by the free

42

Yarrow

109. Ibid., pp. 181–188.

110. Karal Ann Marling, As Seen on TV: The Visual Culture of Everyday Life in the 1950s (Cambridge,MA: Harvard University Press, 1994), pp. 246–248.

market; and that the United States had advanced to a new level of freedom:freedom from long, arduous work for the worker and housewife alike.111

Although Khrushchev pledged peaceful coexistence with the UnitedStates and the Soviet newspaper Izvestiya lambasted the American pavilion—asking, “What is this—a national exhibit of a great country, or a branch de-partment store?”112—Nixon easily “won” the kitchen debate for his country.Whether the the Soviet Union or the United States was setting the terms,those terms were all about success in providing broad-based abundance—andthe United States, with its “people’s capitalism,” was the hands-down winner.

Domestic U.S. media frequently covered the trade shows as examples ofthe United States putting its best face forward. Life often featured photospreads on these shows. A 25 May 1957, New York Times story reported thatan exhibit in Ceylon told of the “growth of the middle-income group in theUnited States and . . . the great advances in American productivity, . . . [andthat] without laying it on thick that Karl Marx was wrong so far as the U.S.was concerned, instead of the rich getting richer and the poor poorer, almosteverybody became a ‘capitalist’ in some form.”

The NAM-produced TV show Industry on Parade in 1959 gushed aboutthe “pattern of advantages never before enjoyed in all world history by somany.” Rhetorically asking what these “advantages” were, the show surveyedAmerican homes, clothing, highways, foods, and leisure and concluded,“First, comes to mind the material—the tangible things. . . . Abundance is thebest description—a word easier said than demonstrated to the people of othernations.”113

Conclusion

Why did U.S. print propagandists come to believe that the country’s chief vir-tue or selling point was its economic prowess and prosperity rather than its

43


111. U.S. Department of State, Foreign Relations of the United States, 1958–1960 Vol. X, pt. 1; U.S.President’s Committee on Information Activities Abroad Records, 1959–61, Box 14, DDE Library;Marling, As Seen on TV, pp. 243, 277; Eric Foner, The Story of American Freedom (New York: W. W.Norton & Co., 1998), p. 271; and Haddow, Pavilions of Plenty, pp. 214–17. The PR man for the dis-play was later Nixon speechwriter and New York Times columnist William Saªre. Nixon declared thatthe best book about America to give the Soviets was the Sears catalog. Cited in Lawrence B. Glickman,Consumer Society in American History: A Reader (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1999), p. 8.

112. Marling, As Seen on TV, pp. 243. Yet, as Jackson Lears and others have noted, the kitchen debateexpressed the idea that “the American way of life [was] equated with the American ‘standard of liv-ing.’” Richard W. Fox and T. J. Jackson Lears, The Culture of Consumption: Critical Essays in AmericanHistory, 1880–1960 (New York: Pantheon, 1983), p. ix.

113. Industry on Parade Film Collection, Reel 453, 20 June 1959, RG 0507, in National Museum.

“older” freedoms? Why did this change occur by the late 1950s? Why didsuch views wane thereafter?

Propaganda reºects both domestic considerations on the home front andpropagandists’ beliefs about what is perceived to be most inºuential and ap-pealing to target foreign audiences. Business, media, and other opinion lead-ers had recognized the need for a new version of “Americanism” that couldplay both outside and inside U.S. borders. Given the universal claims ofCommunist ideology, the United States needed to project its own universalideology during the Cold War.

Why democracy and civil liberties were no longer seen to be enough andneeded to be supplemented or downplayed in favor of the new economic “vir-tues,” is explained by largely domestic causes. The liberal idealism of the NewDeal was eclipsed by a more centrist “growth coalition” that redeªned andnarrowed the differences between liberals and conservatives over domesticpolicy.114 At the same time, business prestige was restored, and its outlook andpriorities gained a central place in national thinking. The excesses ofMcCarthyism, and the attendant pressures for political conformity, may wellhave undermined American faith in the country’s commitment to freedomand fundamental liberties. The sheer reality of U.S. economic growth con-tributed to a sort of self-satisªed national elation. In response to this expand-ing prosperity, a growing chorus of economists, journalists, and politicians be-gan to argue that a new form of capitalism was emerging in the United Statesand that postwar economic growth was bringing about a qualitative transfor-mation of the country. Ideas that economists were beginning to broach at thebeginning of the 1950s about economic growth, mass consumption, and theroots of abundance began to appear in a ºood of popular articles by the mid-to-late 1950s.

At the same time, the Cold War and Soviet propaganda undoubtedlyinºuenced U.S. print propaganda and Americans’ attitudes about what wasimportant. In many ways the United States was a follower when it came topropaganda, at least in the early stages of the Cold War. The relentless “mate-rialism” of Soviet propaganda, with its emphasis on Soviet economic achieve-ments, clearly led the United States to respond in kind, particularly after theearly 1950s policy dictates to hit back hard and respond with the “truth.” Tothe degree that Soviet propaganda had a salience for Americans—eventhrough a highly critical lens—it may well have led many American opinionshapers to see economic achievements as being of greater importance.

44

Yarrow

114. See Alan Wolfe, America’s Impasse: The Rise and Fall of the Politics of Growth (New York: PantheonBooks, 1981), pp. 22–28; Godfrey Hodgson, America in Our Time (New York: Vintage Books, 1976);and Robert M. Collins, More: The Politics of Economic Growth in Postwar America (New York: OxfordUniversity Press, 2000).

The more thoughtful—and more grandiose—observers of these changesin American life began to situate mass prosperity and “new capitalism” in thefamiliar context and tropes of American exceptionalism. In other words, U.S.abundance and the purportedly new and unique economic system that hadbrought it about were what made the United States exceptional and, at thesame time, showed that it was a “chosen” land.

Thus, as the older bases for American exceptionalism—its pioneer/frontier character and its commitment to the ideals of 1776—had come tolook less relevant or exceptional in a time far removed from the frontier andwhen democracies could be found in many parts of the world, new groundsfor exceptionalism took their place. The United States still saw itself—andtold the world that it was—a beacon for others to follow, but now the guidinglight was less the democratic, individualistic freedoms than the notion thatAmerica’s economic system provided a model of “modernization” for others tofollow to prosperity.

However, the messages about American abundance that continued to“sell” domestically well into the 1960s had largely run their course by the timethat Murrow took over USIA. Propagandists recognized that such messageswere often seen as gloating and shallowly materialistic and hence counterpro-ductive in the relatively poor dictatorships of the Communist world.115

Yet, the shift in U.S. propaganda in the mid-to-late 1950s mirrored thedebates among opinion leaders about how they should view and understandtheir country. As a consequence, the virtues of the United States as an abun-dant society—virtues Americans increasingly saw at home—were the sameones that its propagandists were conveying to the world by the late 1950s.

45


115. In a 1964 memorandum, Theodore Sorensen expressed concern that American propaganda si-multaneously showed Americans as too “materialistic” and also was too honest about the economy notgrowing as fast as might be desired. Memorandum by Theodore Sorensen, Agency History ProgramSubject Files, Box 5306, RG 306, in NARA.

changing messages in early u.s.cold war print · pdf filechanging messages in early u.s.cold...

Documents