Experiments in Propaganda: Reintroducing James Blue’s Colombia Trilogy

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In a newspaper column published in April 1953, the American social critic Walter Lippmann sharply criticized the creation of a newly bureaucratized government propaganda agency by noting the ineffectiveness of counterpropaganda tactics. “As a way of stimulating the appetite for the American way of life,” Lippmann wrote, “it is like serving castor oil as a cocktail before dinner.”¹ Fundamentally opposed to the creation of a mass media monopoly, but more concerned that exporting state propaganda was simply counterproductive, Lippmann seized on the obvious falseness of the gesture: “Foreigners are in more ways than one a good deal more like Americans, and certainly like us in that they do not wish to feel they are being manipulated and made fools of by someone with something to sell.” Nevertheless, or perhaps precisely because of the common desire people have to not be manipulated, in the years to follow, a semantic forest would spring up to complicate and obscure the operations of the United States Information Agency (USIA; or USIS, for United States Information Service, overseas), the government office that was established as its own entity outside of the Department of State in August 1953 and shuttered in 1999.

Those who worked for this agency no longer referred to themselves, in the direct language Lippmann might have preferred, as propagandists. The nomenclature invented to describe the work of influencing foreign opinion and other state-to-state activities was nuanced and muted: USIA agents now worked in public diplomacy, cultural diplomacy, public affairs, and cultural affairs. At the same time, combining in one agency the opposing pursuits of multilateral cultural education and propaganda meant that while the job of the cultural attaché was recast in the language of informatics, the overseas communications fieldworkers, too, had to adjust to older notions of cultural diplomatic practice. Over the years, the USIA hired an array of specialists for work in both fast and slow media who had backgrounds in entertainment industries, information and library science, journalism, and media technology. Information transmission was the supposedly unproblematic nature of the agency’s mission. But it was the other side of the communications dynamic, its encounter with culture, the public, and the affairs it conducted on foreign soil—its ideological and psychological operations—that came to epitomize and symbolize the Cold War bureaucracy.

Indeed, between 1946 and 1974, even as the CIA conducted its own covert propaganda efforts, the USIA experimented with an array of cultural and educational programs designed to export and celebrate American culture.² While Voice of America was the agency’s audio emblem, the lesser-known Motion Picture Service incorporated experiments with documentary into its operations, with some notable success. Among the film-makers recruited for this program in creative propaganda were a number of well-known, or soon to be well-known, American auteurs of independent documentary and avant-garde cinema. Comparable to the work of studio directors such as Frank Capra, John Ford, and John Huston on behalf of the U.S. military during World War II (WWII), the participation of filmmakers such as Ed Emshwiller, Charles Guggenheim, Bruce Hirschensohn, and Leo Seltzer in the Cold War work of the USIA has been—like the films themselves—a well-kept secret. The purpose of this short essay is to shed light on this remarkable alliance, and to provide historical and political context for the propaganda work of one such Cold War artist, the documentary filmmaker and writer James Blue. The 2008 Orphan Film Symposium provided the occasion to reintroduce three of Blue’s USIA films to the viewers, who watched the projection of pristine 35mm prints, loaned from the collections of the National Archives and Records Administration (NARA) in Washington, DC.

USIA was a complex and ideological entity, divided in both its mission and its internal operations. On the one hand, the agency was rooted in the foreign affairs traditions of state envoys and the arts of ambassadorship and reflected the hierarchical structure and mission of the Department of State. On the other, it was a media organization attempting to modernize international communications and shape...