United States Information Agency Research Articles

An African Looks at America: Picturing Racial Integration for Africa, 1956–68

The global tour of Edward Steichen’s 1955 photographic exhibition The Family of Man, sponsored by the United States Information Agency (USIA), has long been viewed as the defining moment for the medium’s engagement in US Cold War diplomacy and propaganda. Yet the attention garnered by this single exhibition has served to obscure an extensive programme of photographic diplomacy developed by the USIA during the late 1950s and early 1960s, and largely overlooked by photographic scholarship. One strand of this programme was shaped by the twin concerns of racial conflict at home and decolonisation in Africa and Asia. As the US government cultivated audiences in the newly independent nations of the emerging Third World, it became clear that it would need to adapt its message. Racial integration became a pervasive theme in the agency’s photographic output as it sought to picture America for its international audiences and visually refute accusations that the USA was an inherently racist society. In contrast to studies of US propaganda output of the early 1950s, which have suggested a limited repertoire for the representation of African Americans, the photographic records for this period provide evidence that the USIA paid close attention to the micro-politics of racial interaction and endeavoured to create a richer and more complete set of representations. Seen in the context of the time, the carefully choreographed portrayals of interracial interaction that emerge from the USIA archives are remarkable, if always highly partial and selective.

Screening sovereignty: Cold War mediations of nationhood in USIA motion picture operations in the SWANA region

This article explores how visible constructions and perceptions of sovereignty in the motion pictures of the United States Information Agency (USIA) factored into the dynamics of US Cold War foreign policy amidst the rise of the Non-Aligned Movement. Specifically, it focuses on agency films about and circulating within the Southwest Asian and North African (SWANA) region – such as the locally produced Iraq al-Youm newsreels (c.1956–58). By mapping the different policy contexts of the Eisenhower and Kennedy administrations onto the USIA films’ aesthetics and themes, the article illustrates continuities in the United States’s attempts to expressively leverage images and evocations of sovereignty to sell and consolidate its policy interests in the region.

Margaret Thatcher, British public opinion and German reunification, 1989–90

ABSTRACT Using opinion poll data collected for the United States Information Agency, the European Commission and various media organisations, this article analyses British public opinion towards German reunification in 1989 and 1990. Contrasting the public’s views with Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher’s hostile approach towards German unity, it demonstrates that the British public were largely supportive of the principle of German reunification. Nevertheless, there was uncertainty about reunification’s consequences. Furthermore, significant generational differences existed, with Britons who experienced life during periods of war in the first half of the twentieth century expressing greater concern about the prospect of a united Germany.

Christopher C De Santis (ed.). Let America Be America Again: Conversations with Langston Hughes

Even mildly intrigued readers will soon become deeply informed by this remarkable book. This overdue edition compiles and frames essential materials from Hughes’s public appearances from 1926 to 1962 with remarkable aplomb and confidence. Hughes’s proletariat speeches from the 1930s, his Windy City Press Club address of 1957 in Chicago, Hughes’s talk in Ghana in 1962 (quietly sponsored by the United States Information Agency), and his revealing interview on race with Lorraine Hansberry and James Baldwin in 1961—they are all here, in one place, for the very first time. The discerning scholar will find a treasure of Hughes’s uncollected speeches, articles, and interviews contextualized with succinct headnotes and meticulously selected endnotes. As just one of many examples, when an obscure figure is alluded to by Hughes, the editor provides not only a summary of William Klunder but also an exact citation to The New York Times article that covered his death in 1964. An established Hughes scholar who has already defined the field, De Santis is also a great sleuth.

Memorabilia of the US thematic exhibits in the USSR as a source for public diplomacy and propaganda studies

The paper analyzes the array of information materials and artifacts related to American thematic exhibitions that were held in the Soviet Union by the US Information Agency (USIA) from 1959 to 1991 as part of the Soviet-American agreements on cultural exchanges. The American National Exhibition in Moscow in the summer of 1959 was the first (and most famous) in a series of such exhibitions; it was subsequent by 18 traveling shows, which covered 25 Soviet cities — both Union and republics’ capitals and remote regional centers. The total audience of these showings is estimated at 20 million visitors. American exhibitions in the USSR left behind a deep information and cultural trace in memories, movie and photo chronicles, as well as in a variety of “handouts” and souvenirs distributed at events. Among collectors of antiques of this kind, thematic collections are known as memorabilia, or a collection of things associated with a certain historical figure, a celebrity, or event. These materials, especially the official booklets of the exhibitions, contain valuable information, which reflects not only the content of the showings, but also the political and ideological attitudes of their American organizers. The selection of exhibits, their information support (textual — in booklets, and oral — from guides at the exhibition), the engineering and visual design of the shows — all were aimed, ultimately, at the formation of a positive image of America among the Soviet public (and, as a result, a critical perception of Soviet realities). Thus, the exhibitions, even if their themes seem to be far from the ideology (science and technology, culture, life, industry and agriculture), turned into an effective propaganda tool. Moreover, the USIA was able to use this tool under the terms of agreements on bilateral exhibition exchanges. Unfortunately, visual materials and objects of material culture in general are rarely involved in studies of public and cultural diplomacy as a source. This article aims to fill this gap.

The Apollo space program in U.S. public diplomacy for the Soviet Union (1961-1972)

The article analyzes the approaches of the US Information Agency (USIA) to public coverage of the Apollo space program in the Soviet Union. The US government made a strong focus on space theme in its public diplomacy efforts, especially on the Apollo 11 Moon mission, thus seeking to neutralize the negative effect of the Soviet primacy in launching Sputnik and the first manned flight into space. At the same time, the space theme served as a cover for the USIA to broadcast to the Soviet audience theses about the superiority of the American economic and social model.

Creating Connected Constituencies: The Strategy and Limits of US Propaganda and Influence in Early Cold War Syria, 1945–60

Abstract This article examines the state-private network binding cultural diplomatic institutions, East Coast establishment elites and US psychological operations against Soviet Russia in early Cold War (1945–60) Syria. It outlines the role of the State Department, the United States Information Agency (usia), and the short-lived Psychological Strategy Board (psb)’s efforts to coordinate a coherent US psychological strategy to influence Syria’s elites and to make connected constituents of them via the “long-established instruments” of the state-private network. Among these instruments were the Near East Foundation (nef), the Franklin Books Program, and the Committee of Correspondence (CoC). A key argument of this article is that the “Eisenhower escalation” of the Cold War, which culminated in the 1957 attempted coup in Syria, was not a radical departure that ruined the previous “century of friendship” between Syria and the US. Instead, it was a risky and frustrated gamble seeking to reverse the pre-existing loss of US influence.

Культурна дипломатія Державного департаменту як інструмент зовнішньої політики США: "золотий вік" (1953 – 1961 роки)

The article is devoted to the consideration of the issue of the development of US cultural diplomacy in 1953-1961 as a tool for implementing foreign policy. In American historiography, it is customary to describe this period as the "golden age", since there was a significant breakthrough in the understanding of the importance of culture as one of the effective elements of the implementation of US foreign policy. The methodological basis of the article was the principle of historicism, a systematic approach, problem-chronological and descriptive methods. The purpose of the article is to analyze the main types of cultural diplomacy that the USA used to promote itself abroad in the context of the confrontation with the Soviet Union. The article emphasizes the problem of comparing the concepts of "cultural diplomacy" and "public diplomacy", which makes it difficult to understand their organizational histories. The author of the article starts from the position that "cultural diplomacy" is not separate from "public diplomacy" and is an integral part of it. It is emphasized that the development of the Cold War and the Soviet Union's representation of itself as a country with a great cultural heritage and potential posed the question of changing cultural policy before the US government. During the presidency of D. Eisenhower, dance tours, art exhibitions, cinematography, literature, musical performances, educational, scientific and cultural exchange programs were transformed from an element of exclusively American art into instruments of foreign policy. Not the last role in this transformation was played by the US State Department and, created later, the US Information Agency. Although at the same time, both institutions tried to avoid full responsibility for the results of cultural policy implementation. The basis for this attitude was the constant criticism of congressmen (among whom J. McCarthy played a significant and rather harmful role), as well as the focused attention of the American public on the appropriateness of using the money of American taxpayers. The article refutes the thesis that art in the United States was outside of politics and proves that culture has been in step with the US foreign policy course. Nevertheless, despite a number of obstacles and state control, the cultural diplomacy of D. Eisenhower's time appeared in other colors and really became its "golden period".

The Motion Pictures of the United States Information Agency: Studying a Global Film and Television Operation

The Motion Pictures of the United States Information Agency: Studying a Global Film and Television Operation

Transnational Environments and 'Mixed Signals' in Radio Propaganda: The Voice of America, the BBC, and the People’s Republic of China, 1949-1976

This paper explores Mandarin-language radio operations broadcast by the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC)’s External Service Programming and the United States Information Agency (USIA)’s ‘Voice of America’ (VOA) programming from 1949-1976, particularly the concerns over language among employees as they attempted to shape public opinion across a variety of Chinese-speaking audiences in the ‘Far East’ region. Using archival, memoir, and oral history sources, I argue that the broadcasting policy concerns of the BBC and the VOA were shaped by an entanglement between national and transnational pressures, particularly over the use of accent, dialect, and terminology which could evoke real or imagined feelings of national identity among transnational listening audiences. As the BBC and VOA staff prioritised certain language, from ‘pure’ accents to ‘acceptable’ phraseology for their diverse and disparate listening audiences across mainland China, Hong Kong, Taiwan, Malaysia, ‘Burma’ and other Chinese-speaking overseas communities, they produced ‘mixed signals’ which upheld ideas of a unified and homogeneous Chinese nation-state while attracting few to their informational programmes, especially in mainland China. One result of these ‘mixed signals’ was that many listeners on the mainland and elsewhere valued foreign broadcasts with language-free musical entertainment over informational news. By reconsidering the transnational dimensions of British and American broadcasting in the region, which have long been considered only on national terms, this paper emphasises the role of transnational listening networks in shaping the development of news systems across this diverse linguistic region.

Crafting the “Image of America”: The usia/University of Pennsylvania Certificate in American Studies (1960–68)

Abstract This essay examines the history of an academic certificate in American studies that was developed and implemented by Robert Spiller (University of Pennsylvania) at the behest of the US Information Agency, and targeted at non-US citizens outside of the US. The certificate’s genesis and trajectory were rooted in and inflected by contemporary interest in the field of American studies as offering a means of conducting cultural diplomacy by disseminating information about the US, its way of life, and the benefits offered by the democratic system. The history of the program, like that of the field as a whole, thus reveals how American studies assumed an ambassadorial role abroad for the nation in its new capacity as a world power. At the same time, it also shows the fault lines between the images of the nation that scholars and US officials sought to project, and what audiences abroad were most interested in knowing.

The forgotten process: Information disarmament in the Soviet/US reproachment of the 1980s

This article contends that just as an excess of conventional arms requires a disarmament processes, so the weaponization of media should be met with an information disarmament process. The article examines elements of this work deployed to assist in the US — Soviet rapprochement of the 1980s. Cases discussed include a mutual textbook review project, citizento-citizen conferences mounted by the Chautauqua Society and a series of forums held via satellite television links called Spacebridges. The emergence of government-to-government information talks in which the United States Information Agency led by Charles Z.Wick engaged various elements of the Soviet state media apparatus is traced. The meetings from 1986 through 1989 are summarized, including the frank discussion of the challenge of disinformation and of mutual stereotyping. It is asserted that this process was more effective than is generally remembered, but success required a rough symmetry within the US/Soviet relationship. The internal crisis within the USSR repositioned the country as a junior partner and led the US to misperceive the end of the Cold War in terms of victory and defeat, with counterproductive results.

The Truth of Cultural Diplomacy

<p><em>Since the United States Information Agency (USIA) is no longer active to operate cultural diplomacy in the post-cold war, the concept of cultural diplomacy has experienced a time of crisis in the context of International Relations studies. For a decade, cultural diplomacy was marginalized and considered obsolete until finally in the early 2000s, cultural diplomacy was revived and activated both in practice and theory. Since then, cultural diplomacy has returned to its path. The discourse of cultural diplomacy in International Relations studies has developed to gain more specific activities. This is a qualitative research, with the aim of understanding cultural diplomacy in a more holistic way. The results of this study indicate a debate and a lack of consensus on several aspects of cultural diplomacy and bringing much unclear explanation. This study also shows a dichotomy between cultural diplomacy and other approaches.</em></p>

Eileen Chang, Ralph Waldo Emerson, and the Politics of Cold War Translation

ABSTRACT In 1952, the acclaimed Chinese writer Eileen Chang began working as a writer and translator for the United States Information Agency (USIA) in Hong Kong. With Chang’s help, the USIA embarked on an ambitious translation program designed to introduce American Renaissance literature to a Chinese diasporic readership. Critical studies of Chang have generally categorized her work for the USIA as anti-Communist propaganda, but this essay diverges from the prevailing consensus by revealing how Chang’s translations of Ralph Waldo Emerson’s work influenced her fiction in subtle ways as she sought to disaffiliate herself from her American sponsor. This essay will contextualize Chang’s Chinese translation of Emerson’s “The American Scholar” and her novel Naked Earth as literary products that exceeded the ideological boundaries set by the Cold War rivalry between China and the United States. As I demonstrate through a formalist reading, Chang redeploys Emersonian negative freedom in her fiction in order to critique both sides of the Cold War divide. Chang’s translation reveals how negative freedom functions as a mobile concept during the Cold War, crossing borders to reach a Chinese readership living in exile and subtly orienting them away from Communism. Yet Chang’s work for the USIA remains unclassifiable as strict propaganda, and her translations of Emerson would go on to influence her late career in exile. In 1969, Chang invoked Emersonian negative freedom in an unpublished speech she delivered at the Radcliffe Institute. In her carefully self-censored speech, Chang constructs an alternate vision of selfhood that existed apart from both Communist totalitarian oppression and American interventionism in Asia.

Cold War, Culture Wars, War on Terror: the NEA and the art of public diplomacy

ABSTRACT This article reframes the conversation on the National Endowment for the Arts’ loss of funding during the 1990s. It argues morality and fiscal responsibility have been overemphasised and instead suggests one must consider the agency’s relationship to the Cold War and cultural diplomacy. Born of the Cold War, it charts the NEA’s development of international programming, its partnerships with the State Department and United States Information Agency, and the financial impact of the Cold War’s end. It extends this analysis to the agency’s resuscitation after 9/11, as the War on Terror gave new life to old approaches.

Parceiros em quê? A Aliança para o Progresso e a política editorial de modernização da América Latina no contexto da Guerra Fria

A Aliança para o Progresso, política elaborada pelo governo Kennedy, no início dos anos 1960, com fins de promover o desenvolvimento nos moldes capitalistas na América Latina, assentava-se sob um dilema de difícil conciliação. Por um lado, as demandas da região por desenvolvimento econômico não poderiam mais ser ignoradas; por outro, percebia que um desenvolvimento autônomo da América Latina, nos moldes idealizados pela Aliança, poderia levar a uma diminuição da influência regional dos Estados Unidos. Entre as pressões dos países latino-americanos e os interesses hegemônicos dos Estados Unidos, a Aliança foi rapidamente assumindo contornos coercitivos e ideológicos, esvaziando de sentido a proposta de parceria para o bem comum. Baseando-se em documentação produzida pelo Departamento de Estado e pela Agência de Informação dos Estados Unidos (USIA), o presente artigo tem por objetivo tratar da ação ideológica da Aliança para o Progresso. O foco da reflexão apresentada se centra na análise da política editorial implementada ao longo dos anos 1960, que buscava influenciar os debates sobre desenvolvimentismo travados no Brasil e na América Latina e, assim, promover a defesa de um capitalismo adequado à hegemonia estadunidense. A análise demonstra que, apesar de inovadora e ambiciosa como política externa hemisférica, a implementação da Aliança foi permeada por continuidades ideológicas e preocupações geopolíticas tradicionais do relacionamento dos Estados Unidos com a região latino-americana.

Private Life, Public Diplomacy: Tibor Hirsch and Documentary Filmmaking for the Cold War Usia

The United States Information Agency acted as a significant patron of American independent and nontheatrical filmmakers during the 1960s, commissioning short documentaries to carry positive messages about America to foreign audiences. While much of the existing scholarship on the USIA’s motion picture output focuses on works that address major policy issues such as the civil rights movement or that were made by directors who went on to have well-known careers, many of its films and directors have been forgotten. One such filmmaker is Tibor Hirsch, whose past as a refugee from the 1956 Hungarian Revolution influenced his films Transportation USA (1966) and Six Who Fled (1972). Hirsch’s earlier career as a photojournalist informed his work for the USIA, while the style he developed through making government films led directly into his later career as a highly successful television commercial director.

Enemy Number One: The United States of America in Soviet Ideology and Propaganda, 1945-1959. By Rosa Magnúsdóttir

It was an assumption of the Cold War that communist propagandists were better informed about liberal democracies than the other way around. The knowledge gap’s cause was not espionage but media. While Western reporters relied on governments for information about Soviet life, Soviet media could deride America in the U.S. press's own words. As Rosa Magnúsdóttir acknowledges in her study of Soviet media’s reckoning with the United States between 1947 and 1959, the historiography of the cultural Cold War reflects a similar imbalance between East and West to the one seen in the press. U.S. propaganda organs like the Voice of America, the United States Information Agency, and the Congress for Cultural Freedom have inspired at least one monograph apiece since the 1990s, while Soviet counterparts like Intourist or the World Peace Council figure prominently in occasional chapters in edited volumes. The USSR’s prewar campaigns to curry favor with foreign intellectuals are well documented. But the post-1945 debates discussed in Magnúsdóttir’s book, between Soviet “cultural bureaucrats” over how to handle “enemy number one,” are for the most part new ground. The disputes that figure most prominently in Enemy Number One concern propaganda for export, or how to mollify U.S. public opinion. But the book’s most intriguing insights pertain to the same question that drives Alan Ball’s provocative and illuminating anthology of Soviet magazine articles, Liberty’s Tears: how did Soviet propagandists package America for domestic consumption?

Hearts, Minds, Voices: US Cold War Public Diplomacy and the Formation of the Third World, by Jason C. Parker

Scholars of modern US international history tend to view the twentieth century as shaped most fundamentally by the Cold War between the Soviet-led Communist bloc and the US-led democratic capitalist sphere. But, for the majority of the world’s peoples who lived in Asia, Africa and the Middle East, the period from the 1940s to the 1970s was defined instead in political terms primarily by the struggle for national self-determination and independence from western European colonial rule. The intersection of these two axes of power—East–West and North–South—determined many of the contours of contemporary world affairs. US foreign policy after the Second World War aimed to preserve close ties with Washington’s NATO partners in western Europe while simultaneously winning the allegiance of the newly emerging nations that became known collectively as the Third World. A vast literature now documents the heavy-handed and often unsuccessful military and intelligence interventions by the United States in non-European terrain. Jason Parker’s engaging new book turns our attention instead to official American public diplomacy toward the Third World from 1945 to 1963. This was the effort by the United States Information Agency and its bureaucratic predecessors favourably to impress other peoples with American values and behaviours and thus to woo them to the American side in the Cold War struggle.

The Hidden History of the American Film Institute: The Cold War, Arts Policy, and American Film Preservation

The Hidden History of the American Film InstituteThe Cold War, Arts Policy, and American Film Preservation Brian Real (bio) [End Page 25] Paul Spehr, retired assistant chief of the Motion Picture, Broadcasting, and Recorded Sound Division of the Library of Congress (LOC), has noted that “these days, the moving image archive community has a negative opinion of the AFI’s contribution to film preservation, but the deterioration of AFI’s program came later. AFI launched the preservation program with enthusiasm and imagination.”1 Indeed, the founding of the American Film Institute (AFI) in 1967 was instrumental in creating much of the infrastructure that has allowed the modern American film preservation community to grow and thrive. This included providing support that solidified the LOC’s film preservation and access activities as well as distributing funds from the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) to the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), George Eastman House (GEH), and the UCLA Film & Television Archive through 1995, when the federal government ended its support of the AFI.2 Considering that previous scholarship has discussed why government support for motion picture preservation prior to the founding of the AFI tended to be short-lived and project oriented, being fueled by global crises such as World War II, there has been surprisingly little discussion on the reasons for the government helping to form the AFI and support it for three decades. The AFI’s success in promoting long-term, meaningful government support for motion picture preservation cannot be separated from the Cold War context in which it was founded. The founding director of the organization, George Stevens Jr., had previously been the head of the Motion Picture Service of the U.S. Information Agency (USIA). This connection to an agency that produced anti-Soviet messaging for foreign audiences has been treated as incidental in previous scholarship, when in fact Stevens’s work with the USIA was essential to him envisioning the design and structure of the AFI. Likewise, the AFI was technically founded as an independent nonprofit, but with the promise of significant ongoing funding support from the NEA. The government’s contemporary interest in the arts and its creation of the NEA in 1965 was, in part, tied to a desire to reinforce American cultural identity by showing that culture can thrive in a capitalist system. The founders of the AFI also designed it to be a peer institution to the British Film Institute and other government-sponsored cinema organizations from ally and rival nations, with comparisons to these aspirational peers creating expectations that the AFI’s administration was ultimately unable to meet. BEFORE THE AFI: EARLY EFFORTS AT FILM PRESERVATION The LOC is now America’s largest film archive, but its collecting wasn’t always intentional. Instead, there were no copyright protections in place specifically for motion pictures [End Page 26] until 1912.3 Any creative or documentary works had to be deposited with the LOC to be registered for copyright, so producers printed films onto long strips of paper and sent them to the library as a series of individual photographs, now commonly known as paper prints. When changes in copyright law in 1912 allowed motion pictures to be registered, the LOC decided that producers only needed to deposit scripts, still shots from the films, and other ancillary materials, but not actual film prints. This was because films were printed on flammable nitrate stock, making storage difficult, expensive, and risky. Additionally, motion pictures were not yet considered artistically on par with novels or other cultural works of enduring value. Thus 1912 marked the beginning of the LOC’s thirty-year retreat from collecting and preserving films, although the paper prints survived thanks to benign neglect. The studios generally saw no value in the films after their initial run, largely because of rapid changes in production techniques and styles, so they commonly let these works deteriorate or intentionally destroyed them to avoid the costs and risks involved in storing nitrate. A 2013 report funded by the Council on Library and Information Resources found that only 14 percent of feature films produced by Hollywood studios between 1912 and 1929 survive in their entirety today in their...