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.
Volker R. Berghahn is the Seth Low Professor of History at Columbia University. His recent publications include Imperial Germany 1871-1914: Economy, Society and Politics, Germany and the Approach of War in 1914, Modern Germany: Society, Economy, and Politics in the Twentieth Century, and The Americanization of West German Industry, 1945-1973.
"This fascinating book is both a biography of the American diplomat Shepard Stone and an intricate account of U.S. cultural policies in Europe after World War II. . . . By throwing light on this neglected but vital story, Berghahn has made a major contribution to the understanding of American hegemony in postwar Europe."—Foreign Affairs
"A valuable piece of research about an extraordinary historical event and Mr. Berghahn has told it well."—Arnold Beichman, Washington Times
"This is a thoughtful volume by someone equally at home in American and European intellectual history. It recounts the unique career of a man who felt comfortable among the best brains, enabled them to do valuable work, loved to argue, made enemies by putting people down—and made history."—Robert Goldman, The New Leader
"An excellent new book. . . . Berghahn combines biography and cultural history to provide a deft portrait of European-American relations in the modern era."—David M. Oshinsky, The New York Times Book Review
"An important contribution to intellectual history."—Arnold Beichman, The Weekly Standard
"Erudite and thoughtful."—Chioce
"This study represents a substantial contribution to the small but growing body of work on the culture and ideas of the Cold War. Above all, it is a truly international study, showing that the traffic in ideas is a worthy subject for students of international relations."—International Affairs
"Berghahn . . . successfully identifies and illuminates the too-often neglected role of nongovernmental actors in the evolution of American Cold War diplomacy."—Walter L. Hixson, American Historical Review
"This is a laudable effort that should provoke much discussion about this aspect of the Cold War. It will also provides an important guidepost for further investigations of the cultural and intellectual cold wars of this period and their lace within the Soviet-American conflict as a whole."—Gregory Moore, The Historian
"A significant addition to the burgeoning literature on Americanization."—Brian C. Etheridge, German Studies Review
"Volker Berghahn offers a superb addition to the small roster of books that incorporate the cultural as well as the traditional political, economic, and military elements of analyzing international relations and that examine the reception of other nations to the outward thrust of U.S. government and society. His book is a magnificent integration of trans-Atlantic history on the levels of the individual, the private institution, the network, and government. A wide variety of readers will be interested in this book because it combines political history and cultural history with the emerging field of the history of philanthropy."—Frank Costigliola, University of Connecticut
