Book distribution as an element of cultural diplomacy

There is a new book out:

BOOKS AS WEAPONS: Propaganda, Publishing, and the Battle for Global Markets in the Era of World War II by John B. Hench

There is a streaming video of an interview with the author on C-SPAN and a useful review of the book.

Hench describes a program of the U.S. Office of War Information during and immediately after World War II to distribute books published in the United States to Europe to improve the understanding of European intellectual elites of the United States, its culture, and of the development of the U.S. culture during the war years when communication had been cut off. The program is compared with efforts of the United Kingdom and meant to counteract the propaganda about the United States that had been disseminated by the Nazis.

This program is part of what I (and many others) would term "cultural diplomacy". Dick Arndt's book, The First Resort of Kings: American Cultural Diplomacy in the Twentieth Century, is I believe the definitive history of U.S. efforts in cultural diplomacy.

I would point out that UNESCO was created with part of its mission to counteract propaganda. Thus with strong U.S. support, one of UNESCO's first post war programs reviewed text books used in Europe in order to remove falsehoods and other propagandistic elements that had been introduced by the fascists.

Hench points out that sales of U.S. published books in post-war faced the challenge of the poverty of Europeans whose national economies had been wrecked by the war. UNESCO sought to help Europeans get access to text books through a vouchers program that allowed purchases with local (ofter heavily devalued) currencies.

Hench does not focus on the post war programs for the distribution of books. Had he done so he might have learned from the evaluations of such programs. Indeed, he seems not to be aware of the number and nature of such programs. There is a good report from the Library of Congress (U.S. Books Abroad: Neglected Ambassadors by Curtis Benjamin) on U.S. international book programs that you might find useful.

One of my favorite programs of this kind was the Regional Technical Aids Center project (in two phases: RTAC I and II) supported by USAID. That program was run for more than 20 years to provide U.S. text books, translated into Spanish, to Latin America. Several evaluations are available from the USAID Development Experience Clearinghouse (do a search on the Clearinghouse database to find them).

It seems to me that the distribution of books published in the United States can have a huge impact improving the understanding of the United States by the intellectual leaders of other nations, and especially the positive opinions of Americans and U.S. culture. This will happen best if the distribution is not undertaken as propaganda managed by bureaucrats to achieve a desired effect, but rather as an effort to make the best of American non-fiction and fiction available to those who have a need or an interest in the works.