Foreign Policy, Domestic Fiction: Government-Sponsored Documentaries And Network Television Promote The Marshall Plan At Home

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Acknowledgment

The author is grateful to David Ellwood, David Shumway, Kathy Newman and Lary May for their excellent suggestions on earlier drafts of this article.

Notes

Notes

1 Gordon E. Reckford, Memo to members of the administrators staff, Papers of the Mutual Defense Assistance Program (College Park, MD, National Archives), 3.

2 For more on this rhetorical strategy, see Michele Cini, From the Marshall Plan to EEC: direct and indirect influences, in: Martin A. Schain (ed.) The Marshall Plan: fifty years after (New York, 2001), 16.

3 Charles S. Maier, The politics of productivity: foundations of American international economic policy after World War II, International Organization, 31(4) (Autumn 1977), 609.

4 Victoria de Grazia, Irresistible Empire: America's advance through 20th-century Europe (Cambridge, MA, 2005), 349. Truman is quoted in de Grazia, 340.

5 Each of the 18 countries participating in the Marshall Plan used its allotment of American dollars to purchase goods and materials from US businesses, but contributed an amount in local currency equal to the total aid allocation for internal projects. Five percent of these ‘counterpart funds,’ amounting to millions of dollars, were used for information programs.

6 Albert Hemsing, The Marshall Plan's European film unit, 1948–1955: a memoir and filmography, Historical Journal of Film, Radio and Television, 14(3) (August 1994), 269–297.

7 For more information on the ‘Selling Democracy’ project, see www.sellingdemocracy.org. I introduced this research in an earlier form at a symposia sponsored by the Goethe Institut in conjunction with the New York Film Festival exhibit of ‘Selling Democracy: Films of the Marshall Plan’ on October 16, 2004. Participants in New York included David Ellwood, an expert on the Marshall Plan and propaganda campaigns in Italy, Volker Berghahn, a Cold War historian, film historian Rainer Rother and myself. For more information on the Marshall Plan's propaganda efforts in Italy, please see David W. Ellwood, Italian modernization and the propaganda of the Marshall Plan, in: Luciano Cheles and Lucio Sponda (ed.) The Art of Persuasion: political communication in Italy from 1945 to the 1990s (Manchester, 2001); and, David W. Ellwood, The propaganda of the Marshall Plan in Italy in a Cold War context, in: Giles Scott-Smith and Hans Krabbendam (eds) The Cultural Cold War in Western Europe, 1945–1960 (London, 2003), 225. Thomas Doherty provides a comprehensive review of the event in Forum: a symposium on the Marshall Plan films in New York city, Historical Journal of Film, Radio and Television, 25(1) (March 2005), 151. The George C. Marshall Foundation has compiled a list of many of the films shown in Europe and in the USA. George C. Marshall Foundation, Marshall Plan filmography, edited by Linda Christenson, www.marshallfoundation.org.

8 References to either series are very limited. Neither Albert Hemsing in his memoir nor Linda Christenson, the George C. Marshall Foundation's filmographer, specifically describes ‘The Marshall Plan in Action’ as a series, nor do the descriptions of the individual films in either filmography note that they were shown on American television. Both Hemsing and Christenson make this distinction for Strength for the Free World films. Christenson relied on a number of film catalogues and sources to trace the series information, but these catalogues were published after the series’ title change and may not have bothered to make the distinction between The Marshall Plan in Action and Strength for the Free World. Other sources indicate that the shorts were shown as a series, see Tim Brooks and Earle Marsh, The complete directory to prime time network and cable TV shows, 1946–present (New York, 1999), 632–633. A play list of episodes to be aired from June 24, 1950 to February 2, 1951 accompanies a Marshall Plan in Action press announcement, see T. Newman, Advance release for AM papers of Saturday, June 24, 1950. Records of foreign assistance agencies 1948–1961 (College Park, MD, National Archives). Nancy Bernhard, US Television News and Cold War Propaganda, 1947–1960 (Cambridge, MA, 1999) sites a similar ECA press announcement as evidence of the series. It was her citation that drew my interest and initiated this project. Of the 60 short films shown on ABC, the majority can be matched to the Foundation's filmography and confirmed as ECA-produced films.

9 Herbert Mitgang, Films from the ‘Big Glass House,’ New York Times, February 10, 1952; Jack Gould, Radio and TV in Review, New York Times, June 3, 1950, p. 8; Brooks, 100; Val Adams, Naval History: ‘Victory at Sea,’ New York Times, October 26, 1952, p. 3.

10 This narrative of the politics of early television is largely drawn from Michael Curtin, Redeeming the Wasteland: television documentary and Cold War politics (Camden, NJ, 1995). See Thomas Doherty, Cold War, Cool Medium: television, McCarthyism, and American culture (New York, 2003), 83–84. Richard Dyer MacCann, The Peoples Films: a political history of U.S. government motion pictures (New York, 1973) writes of a ‘free marketplace of ideas’ without irony.

11 Daniel Leab, Orwell Subverted: the CIA and the filming of Animal Farm (University Park, PA, 2007).

12 The volume The Cultural Cold War in Western Europe, 1945–1960 specifically engages state–private collaborations and the production of culture. The first section includes an interview with Frances Stone Saunders, author of The Cultural Cold War, the much-debated analysis of the CIA's radical attempt to proscribe individual artistic expression for ideological ends. Hugh Wilford's rejoinder argues that the CIA was limited in its control, and that individuals and audiences were more resistant to influence than perhaps Saunder's gives them credit. W. Scott Lucas's article, ‘Beyond freedom, beyond control’ does much to move the debate past the questions raised about individual autonomy and state control. See W. Scott Lucas, Beyond freedom, beyond control: approaches to culture and the state–private network in the Cold War, in: Giles Scott-Smith and Hans Krabbendam (eds) The Cultural Cold War in Western Europe, 1945–1960 (London, 2003), 53.

13 Lucas, Beyond freedom, 57, 53.

14 Edward Said, London Review of Books, September 30, 1999, p. 56.

15 Edward Said, Culture and Imperialism (New York, 1993).

16 Christina Klein, Cold War Orientalism: Asia in the middlebrow imagination, 1945–1960 (Berkeley, CA, 2003), 9. A variation of Klein's chapter on The King and I appears in David C. Engerman, Nils Gilman, Mark H. Haefele and Michael E. Latham (eds) Staging Growth: modernization, development and the Cold War (Amherst, MA, 2003), 129–162. Klein argues that American overseas expansion can be explained in terms of modernization theory and its social scientific calibrations of progress which emerged ‘simultaneously with decolonization’ and ‘offered a means to continue Western access and authority, and third world dependency, in the absence of formal colonial ties,’ p. 137. This perception, as Klein acknowledges, masked modernization theory's complicity with the ideology of colonial powers’ ‘civilizing mission.’ American studies scholars have similarly investigated the relationship between American cultural products and claims of American imperialism. Amy Kaplan argues that American imperialism resides in cultural discourse, belief and ideology that align the ‘social relations and cultural discourses  … at home’ with foreign policy directives abroad. See Amy Kaplan, Left alone with America, in: Amy Kaplan and Donald E. Pease (eds) Cultures of United States Imperialism (Durham, NC, 1993), 14. The domestic construction of American imperialism is the subject of Lora Romero's Home Fronts (Durham, NC, 1997) and Inderpal Grewal's Home and Harem: nation, gender, empire, and the cultures of travel (Durham, NC, 1996). For the domestic ramifications of Cold War foreign policy, see Elaine Tyler May's Homeward Bound: American families in the Cold War era (New York, 1988).

17 Jean-Jacques Malo, Introduction, in: Jean-Jacques Malo and Tony Williams (eds) Vietnam War Films (Jefferson, NC, 1994) p xiii; Jeremy M. Devine notes in his compilation of Vietnam War films that many of the pre-Green Beret (1968) Hollywood movies about Indochina were quick to recognize the USA as ‘the logical successor [to the French] in the struggle for and as the guardian of freedom.’ See Jeremy M. Devine, Vietnam at 24 Frames a Second (Jefferson, NC, 1995), 2.

18 Jacqueline McGlade, A single path for European recovery? American business debates and conflicts over the Marshall Plan, in: Martin A. Schain (ed.) The Marshall Plan: fifty years after (New York, 2001), 190; The ‘irresistible empire’ is de Grazia's term for the global appeal of American products and the nation's voracious appetite for markets. See de Grazia, op. cit. David Ellwood, Rebuilding Europe: Western Europe, American and postwar reconstruction (New York, 1992), 161.

19 Brian Angus McKenzie, Remaking France: Americanization, public diplomacy, and the Marshall Plan (New York, 2005), 79.

20 This narrative is drawn from two excellent analyses of Americanization. See Voker R. Berghahn, America and the Intellectual Cold Wars in Europe (Princeton, NJ, 2001) and Victoria de Grazia, op. cit.

21 Jessica C. E. Gienow-Hecht, How good are we? Culture and the Cold War, in: Giles Scott-Smith and Hans Krabbendam (eds) The Cultural Cold War in Western Europe, 1945–1960 (London, 2003), 270.

22 Ellwood, Rebuilding, 162.

23 For an account of the personal commitment of General George C. Marshall and other administrators to the European Recovery Program, see The Marshall Plan: against the odds (Ira H. Klugerman, PBS Video, US, 1997).

24 George Meany, Why labor supports the Marshall Plan, American Federationist, 55(1) (January 1948), 4.

25 Quoted in Diane B. Kunz, The Marshall Plan reconsidered: a complex of motives, Foreign Affairs, 76(2) (May/June 1997), 165.

26 McGlade, Single path, 192.

27 Michael Wala, Selling the Marshall Plan at home: The Committee for the Marshall Plan to aid European recovery, Diplomatic History, 10(3) (Summer 1986), 247–248.

28 The narrative of the Smith–Mundt delegation in Europe and its relationship to the ERP comes from David F. Krugler, The Voice of America and the Domestic Propaganda Battles, 1945–1953 (Columbia, MO, 2000), 58–59.

29 Kunz, Marshall Plan reconsidered, 167; Hemsing, 269; Rudy Abramson, Spanning the Century: the life of W. Averell Harriman, 1891–1986 (New York, 1992), 416; Michael Hogan, The Marshall Plan, in: Charles S. Maier (ed.) The Cold War in Europe (New York, 1991), 206.

30 Sandra Schulberg, The men behind the Marshall Plan films, Selling Democracy, Films of the Marshall Plan: 1948–1953, brochure of the 42nd New York Film Festival exhibition (October 2004), 12; Hemsing, 270–272. For additional biographic information on Lothar Wolff, please see Daniel J. Leab, Animators and animals: John Halas, Joy Batchelor, and George Orwell's Animal Farm, Historical Journal of Film, Radio and Television, 25 (June 2005), 235–237.

31 Kunz, Butter and Guns, 35; Stuart Schulberg, Making Marshall Plan Movies, Film News, September 1951, 19; Hemsing, 293; Schulberg, 10.

32 Joris Ivens was a (perhaps nominal) member of Frontier Films, a group of progressive film-makers and screenwriters, see Russell Campbell, Cinema Strikes Back: Radical filmmaking in the United States, 1930–1942 (Ann Arbor, MI, 1982), 145–164; Jack C. Ellis and Betsy A. McLane, A New History of Documentary Film (New York, 2005), 92–93.

33 ECA Office of Information files, record group 469, Box 13, File: MP in Action, National Archives, College Park, MD.

34 TV Show to Depict E.C.A., New York Times, June 24, 1950, Proquest Historical Newspapers.

35 The Marshall Plan in action: a report to America via ABC television. Economic Cooperation Administration (Washington, D.C., 1951), 1 leaf.

36 John Hutchison, Memo to Andrew Berding, April 28, 1952, ECA Office of Information files, record group 469, Box 15, File: Motion Pictures—Television ABC, National Archives, College Park, MD.

37 Ellwood, Rebuilding Europe, 179–180; The Marshall Plan in action: a report to America via ABC television.

38 Schulberg, 19.

39 Gordon E. Reckford, Memo to members of the administrators staff, Papers of the Mutual Defense Assistance Program, College Park, MD, National Archives, 3; Andrew Berding, memo to all MSA information officers at home and abroad, Informational Guidance for 1952, January 16, 1952, ECA Office of Information files, record group 469, Box 16, File: Mutual Security Information Program, National Archives, College Park, MD.

40 John Hutchison, Memo to Andrew Berding, April 28, 1952, ECA Office of Information files, record group 469, Box 15, File: Motion Pictures—Television ABC, National Archives, College Park, MD.

41 James Baughman, Nice guys last fifteen seasons, in: Gary R. Edgerton and Peter C. Rollins (eds) Television Histories: Shaping collective memory in the media age (Lexington, KY, 2001), 327; Hutchison, Memo, 2.

42 Hutchison, Memo, 1.

43 This narrative of Berding's career in Italy was drawn from David Ellwood, Italian modernization, 25–30.

44 Berding, Film sent …, 1; M. Jones, Memo to R. Mullen, Publicity on non-theatrical film distribution, December 18, 1950. Documentaries General Correspondence. College Park, MD, National Archives; C.H. Bernhard, Arrangements for field distribution of ECA films in this country, Records of Foreign Assistance Agencies 1948–1961, National Archives, College Park, MD, 1; Mary Anne Guitar, Facts on Film, The Nation, December 9, 1950, p. 537.

45 John Hutchison, Memo to Andrew Berding, April 28, 1952, Records of foreign assistance agencies 1948–1961, College Park, MD, National Archives, 1.

46 Harry Truman, Inaugural Address, 1949, Truman Presidential Museum and Library. www.trumanlibrary.org

47 See Curtin and Bernhard, op. cit.

48 The Red Menace (Springsteen 1949) and Red Nightmare (Waggner 1962), produced for the Department of Defense by Warner Brothers, are two incarnations of this story. Red Dawn (Milius 1984) attests to the theme's staying power. The numerous ‘invasion’ movies of the Cold War era are also relevant: for example, Invasion of the Body Snatchers (Siegel 1956). Dan Leab describes the political conditions of much of Hollywood's Cold War production in Daniel J. Leab, How Red was my Valley: Hollywood, the Cold War film, and I Married a Communist, Journal of Contemporary History, 19(1) (January 1984), 59–88.

49 ‘Indochina’ was a political designation useful to French colonial administration—its discursive purpose was to organize the many cultures and peoples of the peninsula between China and India in Southeast Asia into ‘la France d’Asie.’ For a political history of the region during the Cold War, see Edward Rice-Maximin, Accommodation and Resistance: The French Left, Indochina and the Cold War, 1944–1954 (New York, 1986); for a postcolonial cultural history that focuses on the representation of ‘Indochina’ in French arts and letters, see Panivong Norindr, Phantasmatic Indochina: French Colonial Ideology in Architecture, Film, and Literature (Durham, NC, 1996).

50 Hemsing remembers the process of making Strength for the Free World films as ‘mostly cannibalized out of films previously made for Europe.’ See Hemsing, The Marshall Plan's, 275.