America and the Intellectual Cold Wars in Europe
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A01=Volker R. Berghahn
Adolf Hitler
Aftermath of World War II
Allied-occupied Germany
Allies of World War II
American Capitalism
American Committee on United Europe
Anti-Americanism
Anti-communism
Anti-globalization movement
Antifascist Circle
Atlantic Community
Author_Volker R. Berghahn
Between Hitler and Stalin
Category=JBCC
Category=JPS
Category=JPV
Category=NHK
Cold War
Cold War liberal
Congress for Cultural Freedom
Conservatism in Germany
Criticism
Culture war
Demagogue
Democracy in America
Eastern Bloc
Eastern Europe
eq_bestseller
eq_history
eq_isMigrated=1
eq_isMigrated=2
eq_nobargain
eq_non-fiction
eq_society-politics
Europe
European Defence Community
European Foundation (think tank)
Existentialism
Federal republic
Ford Foundation
Foreign policy
Foreign Policy Association
Foreign policy of the United States
Frankfurter Rundschau
Funding
German re-armament
Germans
Imperialism
International relations
Isaiah Berlin
Karl Jaspers
Konrad Adenauer
Marshall Plan
Mass politics
Mass society
McCarthyism
Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact
Nazi Germany
Nazi Party
Nazi propaganda
Nazi seizure of power
Nazism
Newspaper
Partisan Review
Philanthropy
Political radicalism
Politician
Politics
Radicalism (historical)
Soviet Union
Stalinism
The New York Times
Totalitarianism
United States Department of State
War crime
War of ideas
West Berlin
West Germany
Western Europe
World Politics
World War I
World War II
Product details
- ISBN 9780691102566
- Weight: 539g
- Dimensions: 152 x 235mm
- Publication Date: 18 Aug 2002
- Publisher: Princeton University Press
- Publication City/Country: US
- Product Form: Paperback
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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".
