Empire of ideas: Mass communications and the transformation of United States foreign relations, 1936--1953

This dissertation chronicles the federal government's programs in cultural, informational, and educational diplomacy between 1936 and 1953---the first attempt by the federal government to incorporate culture, mass communications, and information technology into the foreign policy process. The government's cultural programs, which began as an outgrowth of the Good Neighbor Policy during the 1930s, exploded in size over the next decade and half. They grew from a handful of exchange programs for professors, graduate students, and technicians into worldwide apparatus devoted to the dissemination and exchange of people, culture, ideas, information, and propaganda.; Empire of Ideas focuses less upon who, and what, went where than upon the motivations behind the creation of the programs in the first place and the philosophies used to run them. It is here---I argue---in the realm of motivation and philosophy that one finds the heretofore under-appreciated significance of the State Department's cultural and informational initiatives. They came to exist, at the time they did, and in the way they did, because of the perception---both inside and outside of government---that the very nature of foreign relations had changed.; The transformation of U.S. foreign relations stemmed from the intersection of three major forces of global historical significance that came together during the 1940s to alter previous conceptions of U.S. foreign relations. These forces were: first, the evolution of modern mass communications (whether print journalism, Hollywood movies, or short-wave radio), which had reached a point by the late 1930s that information could travel almost instantaneously around the globe; second, the rise of the United States during the 1940s to a position as the world's most dominant power by nearly every conceivable measure; and, finally, the prospect of decolonization and the anticipated proliferation of autonomous actors in the international arena. The interplay between these forces combined, during this period and beyond, to place a premium upon perceptions---upon the image---of the United States around the world.; "Empire of Ideas" complicates and challenges conventional accounts of this period that stress the extraordinary expansion of governmental power, focusing on the creation of the national security state. In the broadest sense, this dissertation explores the roots of the dispersal of authority over foreign affairs that we see today through the lens of cultural diplomacy. I argue that this dispersal was the inevitable, if not predictable outcome of the style of empire---an "empire of ideas"---that U.S. officials worked to implement for much of the 20th century.