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7 The CUlTURe INDUsTRy gOes TO waR Chapter One The attempt to persuade [Latin Americans] not by facts, but by works, not by propaganda but by submission of the documents—the books, the poetry, the music and the painting—is neither hypocritical nor self-righteous. It is, on the contrary, an exceedingly frank and forthright undertaking. It is also an undertaking as difficult as it may be dangerous. Archibald MacLeish, “The Art of the Good Neighbor,” 1940 When the United States entered World War II in December 1941, most of Europe and Asia were under control of the Axis powers, and the U.S. military was small and out of date. Latin America appeared marginal to the battles being waged in Britain, North Africa, and the Pacific, but U.S. planning had focused on the nations south of the border since at least 1938, and some of those nations were now led by protofascist dictators whose peoples were increasingly subject to modern forms of propaganda. Hence as the United States began arming for war overseas, it also mounted a major cultural offensive aimed at the south, administered by a coalition of government officials and business and industrial leaders, some of whom had direct financial interests in Latin America. A huge bureaucracy with centers on the east and west coasts and in Washington, D.C., was created, recruiting and guiding the work of artists, social scientists, statisticians, and diplomats. The major production centers of U.S. culture—located mostly in Hollywood and New York—were brought to bear on a single ideological mission, outlined by the government and disseminated throughout the Western Hemisphere. This was a period in which the most powerful nations in Europe and the United States achieved all the technological, political, and economic conditions necessary for the emergence of a true mass culture, controlled by what theoreticians Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno famously called “the culture industry.” In the penultimate chapter of Dialectic of Enlightenment, a sav- 8 A M E R I C A N S A L L age critique of modernity written during World War II but not published until 1947, Horkheimer and Adorno defined the culture industry as a nexus of film, radio, and print media working in harmony with big government and big business . “Film, radio, and magazines form a system,” Horkheimer and Adorno wrote, operating by “the same inflexible rhythm” and “infecting everything with sameness” (94). All aspects of cultural production, they argued, were now answerable to the same network of industrial and economic forces—radio to the electrical companies, film to the banks, and so forth—with the result that everything was “intertwined” (96). The metropolitan production centers were creating a variety of standardized, mechanically reproduced cultural products that were distributed to widely dispersed points of reception. Under these conditions , social relations were completely reified, mapped by statisticians and sociologists: “[O]n the charts of research organizations, indistinguishable from those of political propaganda, consumers are divided up as statistical material into red, green, and blue areas according to income group . . . Something is provided for everyone so that no one can escape” (97). It should perhaps be noted here that Dialectic of Enlightenment was aimed at modern mass culture as a whole, not at the Good Neighbor policy and the activities of the CIAA, which were never mentioned in the book. As Fredric Jameson has observed (xviii), Horkheimer and Adorno thought of modernity in general in “Weberian” terms, as an iron cage constructed by a “tendential web of bureaucratic control” and “the interpenetration of government and big business.” Whatever one thinks of their dark analysis (in my own view it is insufficiently dialectical), the U.S. Good Neighbor policy was undoubtedly symptomatic of what they identified as “the culture industry” and was organized along the very lines they described. As we shall see, however, artists had minds of their own, and it was difficult, if not impossible, to impose cultural “sameness ” on neighbors to the south or even on neighbors at home. Historically speaking, the U.S. government was relatively slow to recognize the persuasive power of mass culture as propaganda, although an early effort along such lines took place under Woodrow Wilson, who convened the shortterm Committee on Public Information (CPI) from April 1917 to August 1919 to boost U.S. public support for World War I. Headed by investigative journalist George Creel and popularly known as the Creel Committee, the CPI launched initiatives in film and print media that focused...

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