Books for the world: American book programs in the developing world, 1948-1968

SCHOLARS HAVE paid much attention to the cultural Cold War in Europe, ¹ but less to its battles in other parts of the world. As writers such as Odd Arne Westad have demonstrated, the developing and non-aligned regions of the world played a vital, if not central, part in the cultural politics of the Cold War.² However, material and political differences between Europe and the developing nations resulted in culture - especially books - being used differently in those regions. Many emerging nations undergoing the process of decolonization and nation-building faced significant problems in terms of political stability, economic underdevelopment, and exploitation, and lacked much of the basic infrastructure to facilitate economic and political success. As the old imperial powers slowly faded from the world stage, the United States and the Soviet Union made these developing nations battlegrounds, further impeding their progress toward stability. In response, the superpowers (but particularly the United States) framed their engagement with the developing world as motivated by the desire to help those nations "modernize" - and thereby undergo the development necessary to make them stable and "free." Despite the challenges that American book programs faced abroad - such as low rates of literacy, limited publishing and distribution infrastructure, and political instability - U.S. Cold Warriors saw libraries, books, and print as powerful means for waging the cultural Cold War in the developing world, just as they were in Europe. Books were conceived of and used as propaganda weapons to win allegiances. This tallied with a general desire to have some kind of propaganda program as an integral part of American foreign policy, and was especially strong in the foreign policy discourse of the 1950s.³ Kenneth Osgood demonstrates in his recent volume Total Cold War (2006) just how important the psychological and ideological war was to the Eisenhower administration, and comprehensively chronicles the various government programs developed to wage this "total war."⁴ A variety of programs came to politicize books and reading during the Cold War by working within this government discourse of books as propaganda weapons, and had an impact in the developing world. The United States Information Agency (USIA), established in 1953, was the main, but by no means the only, government agency created in the early Cold War to promote America's image and American values such as "freedom," "democracy," and "private enterprise" abroad. Reading rooms and the distribution of books - in English and in translation - were important, but sometimes controversial and even problematic, parts of the government's mission to mobilize culture as foreign policy. While it is perhaps unsurprising that the Cold War saw governments mobilize books to win hearts and minds around the globe, private citizens - as individuals and as professionals - also participated in their own Cold War offensives. The American government relied on such support and participation, which Osgood argues helped to "camouflage" the agendas of the state that informed this work undertaken by private citizens.⁵ Undoubtedly, the participation of private citizens in the cultural Cold War helped to legitimate it, but it also needs to be acknowledged that these people saw the work they did as important and significant - they too were engaged with (in their view) "defending America" and fighting for 'freedom," sometimes with an aim of promoting their professional interests and status at the same time. In the example of Freedom House's "Books USA" program, we can see how such private book programs operated, what they sought to achieve, and what image of the United States was being projected by them, and even trace some evidence of how recipients viewed and utilized these programs. The final section of this essay is devoted to a discussion of Franklin Book Programs, a quasi-governmental, not-for-profit program which began its life in 1952 as an organization devoted to helping translate and distribute American books abroad, but which evolved into an agency that sought to promote a global modern book industry while downplaying or camouflaging its links to the U.S. government. Franklin's work raises perhaps some of the most interesting questions about the role of books in America's global work during the Cold War. Franklin embraced an idea of books as tools of modernization. Modernization theorists argued that if emerging nations could develop along lines deemed acceptable by the Western nations, their sympathies would tend naturally toward democracy, capitalism, and freedom. This discourse became popular in the 1960s, especially in government programs and agencies such as the Peace Corps and the United States Agency for International Development (USAID), and was enthusiastically embraced by organizations such as Franklin. What these various book programs illustrate is not simply American cultural imperialism or the ascendance of U.S. military and financial interests. Granted, when one sees them in the light of U.S. military interventions and covert operations, and the hypocrisy of American race relations, it is difficult not to be cynical about American motivations. Book programs turn up in countries like Egypt, Iran, Iraq, Nigeria, and Indonesia through the 1950s and 1960s - all nations deemed strategically and commercially important for the United States, and this was not coincidental. A rhetoric of universal values and world peace, often articulated by people working in book programs, is put into ironic relief when we look at the whole picture, from the Vietnam War to the projects of the CIA (which was undermining democracy in Iran, the Dominican Republic, and Guatemala even as U.S. cultural diplomats preached democracy). However, to dismiss these book programs as simple propaganda - as most scholars have so far done - is inadequate. Rather, the histories of these programs suggest the complexity of American cultural diplomacy efforts, and of the soul-searching that American involvement abroad provoked for some of the parties involved. Librarians, publishers, and other purveyors of books abroad saw book programs as a means to bring the world together in an "imagined community" of those who valued print, and this community would in turn promote world peace; such faith in books was surprisingly strong in the years between the devastation of the Second World War and the violence of the late 1960s, which undermined such ideals. Many participants genuinely desired to try and counteract the darker aspects of American foreign policy, but remained blind to the fact that their own values and beliefs might not be the ideal to which new nations aspired. Acknowledging that the story of American book programs abroad is complex and perhaps compromised is not to apologize for them - indeed, their story can provide some valuable insights that can inform present understandings of American engagement with the world. This seems particularly pertinent when we look at current "book aid" programs the United States funds. As the United States continues to send American books to countries with which it seeks to cultivate good relationships, revisiting the programs of the past is a valuable exercise.