In the immediate aftermath of the 9/11 attacks, millions joined vigils held worldwide in response to what Pope John Paul II called the “unspeakable horror.” Le Monde proclaimed, “We are all Americans.” During a changing of the guard at Buckingham Palace, a band played “The Star-Spangled Banner.” In Tehran, a million people marched in sympathy for the 2,8oo victims. This singular display of harmony bequeathed the United States a priceless opportunity to transform its foreign policy and end years of vacillation following the collapse of the Soviet Union. The Bush administration seized the moment and implemented a sweeping strategy combining...

As world war II ended, U.S. policymakers relished their nation’s new predominant status. They expected to build a world order based upon the financial, military, and political superiority of the United States and resolved to protect the “American way of life” from the vicissitudes and dangers of the postwar world.¹ Their challenge was to design a security apparatus that protected the nation without making America a garrison state or destroying the country’s unique political culture.²

Reconciling these material and ideological goals proved exceedingly difficult. For years, fascist propagandists had claimed that Americans were weak, lazy, immoral, greedy, and uncultured. Despite...

During the 1950s, President Dwight D. Eisenhower and his secretary of state John Foster Dulles raised the stakes in the Cold War. Marshaling their considerable foreign policy expertise, they implemented a “New Look” in which the United States dramatically expanded its nuclear arsenal, confronted revolutionary nationalism in the developing world, and entered new alliances with noncommunist nations. Although eager to exploit the political uncertainty behind the Iron Curtain following the death of Joseph Stalin, Eisenhower and his aides realized that “liberating” Eastern Europe could trigger a nuclear strike, exacerbate refugee crises, or antagonize Western allies.

Determined to defeat communism without...

Throughout the 1950s, USIS motion picture units showed the film Social Change and Democracy to foreign audiences. Using an apt metaphor for America’s efforts to instruct the world about itself, the film begins with a teacher lecturing his class about the horrors of World War II-era totalitarianism. Images of jack-booted Nazis and Stalinist gulags accompany his narration. The film then cuts away from this conflation of fascism and communism to a homey story about a group of fishermen who prevail upon their city council to protect local waters from pollution. The men win redress peacefully and are not imprisoned or...

In 1960, economist Walt Whitman Rostow published The Stages of Economic Growth: A Non-Communist Manifesto. Explicitly challenging Karl Marx’s portrait of capitalism as an oligarchic and unstable system, Rostow defended capitalism as the surest path to political freedom, personal fulfillment, and economic security. Rostow outlined an economic progression in which “traditional” societies reached a “take-off,” attained “maturity,” and then entered an “age of high mass-consumption.” Not surprisingly, Rostow identified the United States as the exemplar of enlightened modernity and democratic values.¹

Like most of his contemporaries, Rostow fervently believed in American exceptionalism. Americans have long viewed themselves as a free...

On September 12, 1947, the State Department’s Air Bulletin contained an article entitled “Mr. and Mrs. America.” Drawn from eleven years of Gallup polls, the profile depicted the “typical” American man and woman. The average U.S. male, the study noted, “spends fifteen minutes traveling two miles to work, gambles occasionally, and says he loses more than he wins.” Six-tenths preferred brunette women, only three-tenths blondes, the rest redheads.

“Mr. America” considered married men happier than bachelors and valued his wife’s companionship, intelligence, and homemaking talent more than her beauty. He thought women nagged too much, and opposed the idea of...

In October 1957, K. A. Gbedemah, leader of the Ghanaian delegation to the United Nations, and his personal secretary, Bill Sutherland, stopped at a Howard Johnson’s restaurant near Dover, Delaware. They ordered soft drinks. But when they sat at a nearby booth, the manager asked them to leave. Black customers, he asserted, were not permitted in the dining room. Gbedemah immediately protested, explaining that he was a diplomat. The manager stood fast. Furious, Gbedemah slapped sixty cents on the table, left the drinks untouched, and departed.¹

After Gbedemah complained to the State Department, the incident received international media attention. Already...

From the inception of the postwar information program, U.S. officials wrestled with the contradictions inherent in a democracy engaging in propaganda. While communist propagandists were aided by a state-controlled press and a one-party political system, U.S. information strategists faced the continual and often hostile scrutiny of the mass media and Congress. Because the 1948 Smith-Mundt Act barred domestic dissemination of American propaganda materials, U.S. citizens knew little about what the information programs actually did. Accordingly, politicians and journalists eager to prove their credentials as unassailable patriots, culture warriors, or fiscal hawks could easily attack information activities. Caught in a maelstrom...