Book Review: The Opinions of Mankind: Racial Issues, Press, and Propaganda in the Cold War by Richard Lentz and Karla K. Gower

Abstract

The Opinions of Mankind: Racial Issues, Press, and Propaganda in the Cold War. Richard Lentz and Karla K. Gower. Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 2010. 360 pp. $39.95 hbk.One of the most fruitful recent developments in the study of the civil rights era in the United States has been what might be called the global turn. Beginning with Mary Dudziak's 2000 book Cold War Civil Rights, new scholarship has increasingly viewed the postwar struggle over racial equality as an international story, necessarily examined in the context of the global cold war and the emergence of new nation-states in the postcolonial era. Seen in this broad perspective, the course of the American civil rights movement was significantly affected by the propaganda war between the United States and its communist adversaries as both sides sought prestige and influence among the nonaligned states in what were then called the third world. The American problem gave a significant propaganda advantage to its enemies. How could lynching, legal segregation, and the everyday humiliation of racial minorities take place in a nation that cast itself as a model of freedom and democracy?Scholars have long noted that racial inequality, especially when it turned violent, was America's greatest embarrassment on the global stage. The Opinions of Mankind: Racial Issues, Press, and Propaganda in the Cold War, by Richard Lentz and Karla K. Gower, is a far-reaching study of the role of the press as the forum in which these contentious issues played out. Lentz, a longtime journalism educator, and Gower, who teaches at the University of Alabama, have unearthed a great number of examples from foreign newspapers that clearly show how negative stories about race relations tarnished the American image, which is not entirely new.What is immensely useful with this book, however, is the authors' examination of the extensive efforts undertaken by the U.S. government to monitor, in hopes of countering, this negative international publicity. To some degree, this was reported in the American press. News magazines, for example, used to run articles on how the foreign press reported on stories about race relations. Much more evidence is drawn from the files of State Department foreign service officers and diplomats, who paid attention to the local press in their region and reported back to Washington on the way news about the United States was handled. Lentz and Gower have also unearthed records from organizations like the United States Information Agency and United States Information Service, which made more formal and systematic efforts to track and analyze press reports from overseas. This information was used to determine what kind of propaganda response, whether in the form of media messages or publicity tours by American jazz musicians, should be undertaken in response.The heart of the book is arranged in a roughly chronological manner, with chapters detailing foreign press response to incidents like the response to the Brown decision, the Emmett Till murder and subsequent trial, the Montgomery bus boycott, the Little Rock Crisis, the Freedom Rides, and the riots in Watts, among others. …