“Down with Imperialism”

Abstract

This chapter traces the Latin American origins of the United States's cultural diplomacy. It begins by citing a conference held in Buenos Aires in December 1936 which epitomized America's prewar approach to foreign policy under President Franklin D. Roosevelt. The chapter examines why America's deliberate attempt to deploy cultural affairs in pursuit of foreign policy objectives as part of its “cultural diplomacy” started in Latin America. It also considers how U.S. policymakers combined cultural diplomacy, highlighted by a series of multilateral cultural exchanges, with overseas propaganda, domestic information campaigns, and technological modernization initiatives to form the matrix of what became known as public diplomacy. Finally, it explains how the U.S. government conceived of a new kind of foreign relations that accommodated the full range of cultural and ideological forces shaping the relations between nation states.