Empire of Ideas: The Origins of Public Diplomacy and the Transformation of U. S. Foreign Policy by Justin Hart

Oxford University Press, 2008
https://global.oup.com/academic/product/empire-of-ideas-9780199777945?cc=us&lang=en&# 

Examines how the FDR administration decided to promote America's image in the world to project the U.S. empire.    
Traces the emergence of "soft power" in US foreign policy to pre-World War II period, rather than the Cold War era.    
Addresses continuities between period covered and the full-scale propaganda war to combat negative perceptions of the United States in the Arab and/or Muslim world.    
Shows how communications technologies (newspapers, magazines, movies, radio, TV) were essential to public diplomacy.    
Contains fine-grained biographies of key figures, including Henry Luce, Archibald MacLeish, and others.

Covering the period from 1936 to 1953, Empire of Ideas reveals how and why image first became a component of foreign policy, prompting policymakers to embrace such techniques as propaganda, educational exchanges, cultural exhibits, overseas libraries, and domestic public relations. Drawing upon exhaustive research in official government records and the private papers of top officials in the Roosevelt and Truman administrations, including newly declassified material, Justin Hart takes the reader back to the dawn of what Time-Life publisher Henry Luce would famously call the "American century," when U.S. policymakers first began to think of the nation's image as a foreign policy issue. Beginning with the Buenos Aires Conference in 1936--which grew out of FDR's Good Neighbor Policy toward Latin America--Hart traces the dramatic growth of public diplomacy in the war years and beyond. The book describes how the State Department established the position of Assistant Secretary of State for Public and Cultural Affairs in 1944, with Archibald MacLeish--the Pulitzer Prize-winning poet and Librarian of Congress--the first to fill the post. Hart shows that the ideas of MacLeish became central to the evolution of public diplomacy, and his influence would be felt long after his tenure in government service ended. The book examines a wide variety of propaganda programs, including the Voice of America, and concludes with the creation of the United States Information Agency in 1953, bringing an end to the first phase of U. S. public diplomacy. Empire of Ideas remains highly relevant today, when U. S. officials have launched full-scale propaganda to combat negative perceptions in the Arab world and elsewhere. Hart's study illuminates the similar efforts of a previous generation of policymakers, explaining why our ability to shape our image is, in the end, quite limited.

Introduction: The Origins of U.S. Public Diplomacy
1. "Down with Imperialism": The Latin American Origins of U.S. Cultural Diplomacy
2. "The Drift of History": War, Culture, and Hegemony
3. Propaganda as Foreign Policy: The Office of War Information
4. "Foreign Relations, Domestic Affairs": The Consolidation of U.S. Public Diplomacy
5. "The Flat White Light": Revolutionary Nationalism in Asia and Beyond
6. "An Unfavorable Projection of American Unity": McCarthyism and Public Diplomacy
Epilogue The Creation of the USIA and the Fate of U.S. Public Diplomacy