America and the Intellectual Cold Wars in Europe / Volker R. Berghahn.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Berghahn, Volker R., author.

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Economic assistance, American--Europe.

Economic assistance, American.

Anti-Americanism--Europe.

Anti-Americanism.

Ideology.

Public opinion--Europe--History--20th century.

Public opinion.

Cold War--Public opinion.

Cold War.

United States--Foreign relations--1945-1989--Public opinion.

United States.

United States--Cultural policy.

Europe--Relations--United States.

Europe.

United States--Relations--Europe.

United States--Foreign public opinion, European.

Stone, Shepard.

Genre:

Electronic books.

Physical Description:

1 online resource (394 pages)

Place of Publication:

Princeton, NJ : Princeton University Press, [2018]

Language Note:

In English.

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.

Contents:

Frontmatter

Content

Abbreviation

Introduction

CHAPTER 1. From Nashua and Berlin to Pearl Harbor

CHAPTER 2. Defeating and Rebuilding Germany

CHAPTER 3. Public Opinion and High Politics in Semisovereign West Germany

CHAPTER 4. Mass Society and the Threat of Totalitarianism

CHAPTER 5. Western Intellectuals and the Cold Culture Wars of the Congress for Cultural Freedom (CCF)

CHAPTER 6. Internationalizing the Ford Foundation

CHAPTER 7. Philanthropy and Diplomacy

CHAPTER 8. The CIA, the Ford Foundation, and the Demise of the CCF Empire

CHAPTER 9. Coping with the New Culture Wars of the 1960s and Beyond

CHAPTER 10. Transatlantic Cultural Relations in the "American Century"

APPENDIX I. List of West German Newspapers Subsidized by HICOG

APPENDIX II. American Foundations Ranked by Assets, 1960

APPENDIX III. International Association for Cultural Freedom, Table of Organization

Notes

Bibliography

Index

Notes:

Includes bibliographical references (p. 301-361) and index.

Description based on online resource; title from PDF title page (publisher's Web site, viewed 23. Mai 2019)

ISBN:

9780691186184

0691186189

OCLC:

1132221519