United States Information Agency

Founded: 1953

Type of organization: Propaganda agency

Significance: The USIA has presented a positive image of the United States and U.S. foreign policy

The USIA is an independent agency of the executive branch. It is responsible for promoting American values and policies abroad. Particularly during the Cold War, USIA has been understood to be a propaganda arm of the U.S. government.

USIA was a creation of the Cold War. Its roots lay in World War II, when President Franklin D. Roosevelt established the Agency for Foreign Intelligence and Propaganda and the Office of War Information (OWI). Both agencies employed a variety of propagandistic devices. A division of OWI directed radio broadcasts into Germany and elsewhere as a wartime propaganda tool, and these broadcasts later became institutionalized as the Voice of America (VOA). Immediately after the war America’s discomfort with the business of propaganda, as well as isolationism and fiscal conservatism, led to the severe reduction of such programs and agencies. The VOA survived, however, within the Office of Public and Cultural Affairs in the State Department.

The onset of the Cold War a short time later forced a rethinking of America’s isolationism, and by 1947 the country had committed itself militarily and economically to Western Europe. In 1948 the Congress passed the Smith-Mundt Act, which added cultural promotion and information provision to the country’s arsenal of Cold War tools. These were carried out through a new Office of International Information and the Office of Educational Exchange, both situated within the State Department. Additional programs and agencies were established in following years to fight the ideological dimension of the Cold War.

In 1953 the Cold War confrontation between Western democracy and Soviet Communism had reached new heights (in the form of the Korean War and the Berlin uprising, for example). In the United States, McCarthyism was near its peak. It was in this environment that USIA was created. The sense of a world communist threat had inspired American political leaders to more vigorously counter Moscow’s ideological messages and propaganda with ideological propaganda of a Western, democratic, capitalistic sort. Senator McCarthy’s attacks on the State Department, OWI, and propaganda operations in general made it politic to move the programs of the Office of International Information to an independent agency. The move also emphasized that USIA was in the business of providing information, rather than carrying out America’s foreign policy. USIA emphasized people to people relations rather than the formal country-to-country diplomacy of the State Department. USIA information was required, however, to be consistent with overall American foreign policy objectives. USIA activities, however, were claimed to be more noble than mere counterpropaganda. Indeed, compared with earlier American postwar propaganda efforts, USIA programs were much less shrill and didactic, and frequently composed and reasoned.

Activities

Besides overseeing VOA, USIA has maintained an overseas presence by assigning personnel to American missions and by running a network of libraries and cultural centers around the world. At one point during the Cold War USIA was operating some 184 libraries in sixty-five countries. The America Houses that contained USIA libraries and cultural centers generally welcomed all visitors, and offered reading rooms, cultural programs, speakers, and other resources for communicating American ideas, information, and values. In carrying out these functions, USIA field operations had to consider their activities against the background of Cold War realities: the need to establish credibility with its target audience, and the necessity of retaining permission to operate from the host government.

Books in USIA libraries were meant to promote American cultural values and to undermine communist ideology. Deciding which particular books to purchase and make available were a small senior book committee. The committee considered recommendations made by the bibliographic division, whose half-dozen reviewers assessed thousands of books each year for possible adoption. Qualities considered by reviewers included whether the book supported U.S. policy and whether the book would be comprehensible to a foreign reader. The selection of books could be seen as a form of censorship, as works that were critical of the United States or that advocated communism were seldom made available at USIA libraries. At the height of McCarthyism, even the political orientation of an author (as distinct from the book) was enough to ban a book from libraries of USIA and its predecessors. Relatively pedestrian publications were construed to be anti-American, such as a 1957 pamphlet titled Profile of America, which included quotations by Henry David Thoreau. Individual issues of approved magazines were banned when an article within it failed to meet the criteria of the day. Some books which earlier had been approved were removed from USIA libraries and burned—an action that constituted a public relations nightmare for the United States and that was subsequently curtailed.

Even after the anticommunist frenzy abated, the lingering influence of McCarthyism discouraged the adoption of critical works, despite USIA’s ostensible mission of presenting an accurate portrait of American life. Yet over time USIA’s book adoption policies became more liberal. When a foreign group or a respected individual requested a rejected volume from the local USIA field library, special clearance was sometimes secured to provide the book at that library. These exceptions were meant to promote USIA’s credibility and reputation for openness.

In addition to making books and other reading materials available at its libraries, USIA assisted foreign publishers in the production and distribution of books—again, with various conditions that restricted their content. The agency also produced magazines, including Problems of Communism, that were distributed abroad. At its peak USIA published five such magazines. The Smith-Mundt Act of 1948 prohibited the distribution of USIA publications within the United States.

Post-Cold War

The collapse of communism in Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union has weakened the justification for USIA’s existence. Since the early 1990’s USIA has undergone budget cuts and a retraction of its mission. Its broadcast operations have been placed under an International Broadcasting Bureau. Some of the agency’s information dissemination functions have been adapted to electronic media, including the Internet. To overseas audiences, USIA now goes by the name United States Information Service (USIS).

Bibliography

Martin Merson’s The Private Diary of a Public Servant (New York: Macmillan, 1955) examines USIA and other information agencies during the McCarthy era. The United States Information Agency, by John W. Henderson (New York: Praeger, 1969), provides a detailed history of the agency and a full description of its functions. Robert E. Elder’s The Information Machine: The United States Information Agency and American Foreign Policy (Syracuse, N.Y.: Syracuse University Press, 1968) offers a slightly less flattering description than Henderson’s book. More recent research is presented in Shawn J. Parry-Giles’ “The Eisenhower Administration’s Conceptualization of the USIA: The Development of Overt and Covert Propaganda Strategies” in Presidential Studies Quarterly 24, no. 2 (Spring, 1994). For a description of challenges faced by the agency after the Cold War, see Dick Kirschten, “Restive Relic” in National Journal 27, no. 16 (April 22, 1995).