America and the Intellectual Cold Wars in Europe

by Berghahn, Volker R.

• ISBN13: 9780691102566
• ISBN10: 0691102562
• Edition: Reprint
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 2002-07-29
• Publisher: Princeton Univ Pr

Summary

In 1958, Shepard Stone, then directing the Ford Foundation's International Affairs program, suggested that his staff "measure" America's cultural impact in Europe. He wanted to determine whether efforts to improve opinions of American culture were yielding good returns. Taking Stone's career as a point of departure and frequent return, Volker Berghahn examines the triangular relationship between the producers of ideas and ideologies, corporate America, and Washington policymakers at a peculiar juncture of U.S. history. He also looks across the Atlantic, at the Western European intellectuals, politicians, and businessmen with whom these Americans were in frequent contact. While shattered materially and psychologically by World War II, educated Europeans did not shed their opinions about the inferiority, vulgarity, and commercialism of American culture. American elites--particularly the East Coast establishment--deeply resented this condescension. They believed that the United States had two culture wars to win: one against the Soviet Bloc as part of the larger struggle against communism and the other against deeply rooted negative views of America as a civilization. To triumph, they spent large sums of money on overt and covert activities, from tours of American orchestras to the often secret funding of European publications and intellectual congresses by the CIA. At the center of these activities were the Ford Foundation, the Congress for Cultural Freedom, and Washington's agents of cultural diplomacy. This was a world of Ivy League academics and East Coast intellectuals, of American philanthropic organizations and their backers in big business, of U.S. government agencies and their counterparts across the Atlantic. This book uses Shepard Stone as a window to this world in which the European-American relationship was hammered out in cultural terms--an arena where many of the twentieth century's major intellectual trends and conflicts unfolded.

Author Biography

Volker R. Berghahn is the Seth Low Professor of History at Columbia University.

Table of Contents

Abbreviations	p. ix
Introduction	p. xi
From Nashua and Berlin to Pearl Harbor	p. 3
Nashua (New Hampshire) and Dartmouth College	p. 3
Student in Weimar Germany	p. 6
Reporting on Europe and Hitler	p. 12
Rescue from the Holocaust	p. 23
Defeating and Rebuilding Germany	p. 26
War Service in Europe	p. 26
Occupied Germany	p. 29
Working for U.S. Military Government	p. 33
Back with the New York Times	p. 44
Public Opinion and High Politics in Semisovereign West Germany	p. 52
Joining U.S. High Commissioner John J. McCloy	p. 52
Stone's German-American Network	p. 55
McCloy's "Harry Hopkins"	p. 59
Supporting a Democratic Press	p. 68
Mass Society and the Threat of Totalitarianism	p. 77
Elites and Masses	p. 78
Visions of America	p. 85
Totalitarian Dictatorships	p. 92
The Debate on Culture in America	p. 96
Western Intellectuals and the Cold Culture Wars of the Congress for Cultural Freedom (CCF)	p. 108
Mass Culture and the Congress for Cultural Freedom	p. 108
Communists and Ex-Communists	p. 113
Rallying the Anti-Soviet Left	p. 126
The Growth of the CCF Empire	p. 132
Internationalizing the Ford Foundation	p. 143
The Biggest Philanthropic Organization in the World	p. 143
The Conditions of Peace Project	p. 145
The Struggle for a European Program	p. 153
Exporting American Culture	p. 168
Philanthropy and Diplomacy	p. 178
Ford's International Program	p. 178
Looking East	p. 187
Midwife to European Philanthropy	p. 194
Cultural and Political Investments	p. 201
The CIA, the Ford Foundation, and the Demise of the CCF Empire	p. 214
The U.S. Government and the Funding of Culture	p. 215
The Ford Foundation's Washington Connections	p. 220
Rescuing the CCF	p. 230
Scandal and Collapse	p. 241
Coping with the New Culture Wars of the 1960s and Beyond	p. 250
The Establishment of the IACF	p. 250
Financial Straits	p. 255
The Cultural Roots of Failure	p. 265
The Berlin Aspen Institute	p. 276
Transatlantic Cultural Relations in the "American Century"	p. 284
List of West German Newspapers Subsidized by HICOG	p. 297
American Foundations Ranked by Assets, 1960	p. 299
International Association for Cultural Freedom, Table of Organization	p. 300
Notes	p. 301
Bibliography	p. 355
Index	p. 363
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