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.
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