Empire of Ideas
The Origins of Public Diplomacy and the Transformation of U. S. Foreign Policy
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- $27.99
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- $27.99
Publisher Description
Covering the period from 1936 to 1953, Empire of Ideas reveals how and why image first became a component of foreign policy, prompting policymakers to embrace such techniques as propaganda, educational exchanges, cultural exhibits, overseas libraries, and domestic public relations.
Drawing upon exhaustive research in official government records and the private papers of top officials in the Roosevelt and Truman administrations, including newly declassified material, Justin Hart takes the reader back to the dawn of what Time-Life publisher Henry Luce would famously call the "American century," when U.S. policymakers first began to think of the nation's image as a foreign policy issue. Beginning with the Buenos Aires Conference in 1936--which grew out of FDR's Good Neighbor Policy toward Latin America--Hart traces the dramatic growth of public diplomacy in the war years and beyond. The book describes how the State Department established the position of Assistant Secretary of State for Public and Cultural Affairs in 1944, with Archibald MacLeish--the Pulitzer Prize-winning poet and Librarian of Congress--the first to fill the post. Hart shows that the ideas of MacLeish became central to the evolution of public diplomacy, and his influence would be felt long after his tenure in government service ended. The book examines a wide variety of propaganda programs, including the Voice of America, and concludes with the creation of the United States Information Agency in 1953, bringing an end to the first phase of U. S. public diplomacy.
Empire of Ideas remains highly relevant today, when U. S. officials have launched full-scale propaganda to combat negative perceptions in the Arab world and elsewhere. Hart's study illuminates the similar efforts of a previous generation of policymakers, explaining why our ability to shape our image is, in the end, quite limited.
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Since 9/11, the importance of American public diplomacy has been self-evident, even as the State Department's failures and shortcomings make the news more often than its successes. Hart, associate professor of history at Texas Tech Univ., puts such programs in their historical context, charting the beginnings of official efforts to sell America's image abroad. From roughly the end of the Great Depression through the Korean War, the United States grew into its role as a major superpower, developing the policies and institutions that have come to define it. Hart makes extensive use of primary sources to untangle the internecine debates and bureaucratic wrangling that gave rise to the initiatives designed to shape international public opinion. Occasionally, he focuses too much on esoteric squabbles within the diplomatic corps, but in doing so demonstrates just how difficult much of the early work was, particularly with figures like Senator Joe McCarthy a prickly presence to both Democratic and Republican administrations. Concerned throughout with the uneasy balance between journalism and advertising, Hart explores the genesis of arguments that have continued relevance today and makes the national and global implications of public diplomacy painfully clear.
