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America and the Intellectual Cold Wars in Europe
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by Volker R. Berghahn
Princeton University Press
Due/Published
May 2001, 384 pages,
cloth
ISBN
0691074798
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, Berghahn examines the triangular relationship between the producers of ideas and ideologies, corporate America, and Washington policymakers at a peculiar point of U.S. history. He also looks across the Atlantic, at the Western European intellectuals, politicians, and business men with whom these Americans were in frequent contact. While shattered 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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Review
One of the revelations of the post-Cold War world has been the involvement of culture, often funded by the CIA, in the war for the hearts and minds of the world. Volker Berghahn's engaging and original analysis focuses on the integration of U.S. political, economic, and cultural institutions in the effort to win over Western Europe after the end of World War II. While Europeans did not doubt the economic and military superiority of the United States, the continental prejudice against United States culture as vulgar and inferior persisted particularly among the intelligentsia. The United States worried that its role as the leading economic and military opponent of the Soviet threat needed to be supported by the assertion of American cultural hegemony. Berghahn keenly examines the ways in which big business, U.S. government agencies, and philanthropic organizations, worked together both overtly and covertly to advance culture and ideologies. Berghahn's study in part views this period in the context of the life and career of Shepard Stone, director of the Ford Foundation and a crucial player in funding and supporting U.S. culture abroad. This is an engrossing and incisive history of the early part of the Cold War that provides an original analysis of the intersection of European and U.S. institutions and some of the major intellectual debates of the past century. Related Title: The Cultural Cold War: The CIA & The World of Arts and Letters. Recently published titles in related categories: |
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