AFTER THE WAR, the Truman administration passed the Truman Doctrine and Marshall Plan to much fanfare. They also pushed through a considerably less famous document called the Smith-Mundt Act, which enabled the State Department to engage in pro-American propaganda operations throughout the world. The act was a reaction not only to what were considered Soviet disinformation campaigns, but to the perceived anti-Americanism in Hollywood films. The American government declared that their propaganda would be the truthful kind of propaganda, the kind that was not actually propaganda. As the writer Frances Stonor Saunders has written, from 1950 to 1967 the State Department presided over a propaganda program in Europe, the central feature of which “was to advance the claim that it did not exist.” Its partner in this endeavor was the CIA. The agency’s cultural activities abroad—its funding of Encounter, The Kenyon Review, and Radio Free Europe, its infiltration of labor unions such as the AFL-CIO, and of international student organizations such as the National Student Association—are by now well-known. But what is harder to understand is the era that the Smith-Mundt Act ushered in for Cold War entrepreneurs, so to speak, who saw themselves as crucial civilian foot soldiers in the fight against communism.
Years before the war ended, in 1940, Henry Luce published an essay called “The American Century,” in which he exalted America as, in the historian Robert Herzstein’s words, “a way station in humankind’s attempt to build the City of God on earth,” in order to strengthen American support against communism. “If we had to choose one word out of the whole vocabulary of human experience to associate with America—surely it would not be hard to choose the word,” Luce once explained, sounding like George W. Bush, or Barack Obama. “For surely the word is Freedom … Without Freedom, America is untranslatable.” Luce’s family had been missionaries in China, and viewed themselves as not only converting a backward people but generously bestowing on them all the benefits of modern medicine and hygiene. Luce himself had lived on missionary compounds and barely interacted with the Chinese people. What he took away from China instead was the missionaries’ idealized image of America and of its people as saviors.
It was this worldview that Luce disseminated to the American people in Time, an unabashedly patriotic weekly magazine. By 1945, before television and the ubiquity of the Internet, thirty million people read one of Henry Luce’s publications, Time, Life, or Fortune, each week. According to Herzstein, what they found were stories that fueled the cruelty of the McCarthy era and harangued American politicians about “who lost China” to communism—for Luce almost a betrayal of his divine cause. Luce and his magazines had a similar kind of impact as Roger Ailes and Fox News. He often threatened anyone who didn’t despise the enemy as much as he did, once even warning John F. Kennedy’s father that if the president showed “any sign of weakness ‘toward the anti-Communist cause,’ then Time Inc. would ‘clobber him.’” Herzstein recalls that Robert M. Hutchins, the president of the University of Chicago, once argued that Time Inc. did more to mold the American character than “the whole education system put together.”
The Henry Luce phenomenon meant that a certain kind of magazine language—phrases such as “Who Lost China?” “Who Lost Vietnam?” “Who Lost Iran?”—would become embedded in American psyches, and were automatically deployed by editors and headline writers. We journalists always mourn the loss of a more independent, more vibrant, better-paying media, especially in the era of Twitter. But ostensibly independent magazines and television programs had not so long ago engaged in pro-American propaganda. It wouldn’t be surprising if that legacy had lasted to this day, even if in watered-down forms. Was not the language of the war on terror—good versus evil, the identification of “enemies,” a sense of Islam as an enormous, monolithic force—similar to these Luceian representations of a bloblike communism? In order for Americans to believe in their own superiority, they also had to avoid questioning their own lives and the system in which they lived. I wasn’t sure I believed that American faculties, during this comparatively rebellious era of the 1950s and 1960s, could have been so easily disabled, until I came across a book called Workshops of Empire.
In 2014, the academic Eric Bennett uncovered the history of the University of Iowa Writers’ Workshop, one of the most prestigious MFA programs in the country to this day. Iowa had been founded at a time when all over the country “American studies” departments were popping up to establish America as a distinct civilization, an endeavor that grew out of the era of Cold War attempts to counter the popularity of Marxism. Similarly, the University of Iowa writing program’s patrons were Luce-like conservatives crusading for the United States in the Cold War. They wanted to design a literature program that “fortified democratic values at home and abroad.”
To start, the University of Iowa founders sought out specific types of American writers. They disregarded people who were devoted to social justice and leftist causes that, in their view, were juvenile. They encouraged, instead, those writers whose work was “preoccupied by family and self.” Once in the classroom, University of Iowa professors taught their students to avoid politics in favor of composing literature that would illuminate the human and smaller moments of life. As Bennett observes, a specific sensibility spread across America’s landscape of fiction, one that celebrated beautiful sentences and quiet observations, suburban malaise and inward-looking anxieties, a literary form that would naturally tend toward the domestic. “Today’s creative-writing department specializes in sensory and biographical memory,” Bennett writes, “such as how icicles broken from church eaves on winter afternoons taste of asphalt.”