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BACK TO : PROPAGANDA AND THE GWOT Year 6 - 2007
The Good Old Days Of Selling Democracy by Philip Kennicott 
The Good Old Days Of Selling Democracy Marshall Plan Films Offer History Lesson In Public Relations By Philip Kennicott Washington Post Staff Writer Saturday, January 27, 2007; C01 The obvious elephant in the room -- the State Department's Dean Acheson Auditorium yesterday afternoon -- didn't get a mention until about an hour and 40 minutes into the program. The subject was public diplomacy. The presenter at the forum was Sandra Schulberg, a filmmaker and tireless advocate for the films of the Marshall Plan, a series of propaganda flicks the United States made for European audiences to sell them on democracy, shared economic goals and the hope of a new, peaceful Europe built on the ashes of the ruined old one. But you can't talk public diplomacy without facing the sad and tumultuous state of affairs in Iraq, where efforts to win hearts and minds have not progressed much since Vice President Dick Cheney predicted, "We will, in fact, be greeted as liberators." But this is the State Department, where a genteel code of not saying painful things too directly prevails in public. So as Harlan Cleveland, a former assistant secretary of state and a top administrator of the Marshall Plan, described why the 1948 plan worked so well, you had to wonder. Was there, perhaps, a little criticism being aimed at the current administration? Cleveland, almost 90, is a frail man who walks with a cane. And he didn't mention Iraq. But he reminded the audience that while Harry S. Truman was "one of the feistiest partisans ever to live in the White House," he didn't undertake major international projects without gaining bipartisan support. And that the plan only worked because it required the Europeans to take the initiative and was not originally posed as an ideological campaign, just an effort to rebuild and recover. As he and others reminded the audience of what may be the most famous line in Secretary of State George C. Marshall's 1947 speech at Harvard, announcing the plan, ("It would be neither fitting nor efficacious for our Government to undertake to draw up unilaterally a program designed to place Europe on its feet economically"), perhaps the ominous word "unilaterally" hung in the air for a moment. You can never be sure when things are this subtle. Schulberg has been traveling around the world for three years now, championing the movies made with Marshall Plan funds -- a body of some 300 films that show the power and sophistication of American propaganda efforts during the first, parlous years of the Cold War. Her usual audience is academics and university forums, and the occasional film festival. But her visit to the State Department, as a guest speaker at the Secretary's Open Forum (billed as an occasional forum to invite "new or alternative policy recommendations to the Secretary and other principals"), brings her work to the audience that might be able to make the most immediate good use of it. There are few outside observers who believe that the United States is moving in the right direction when it comes to selling its vision of the world to audiences in the Middle East, or elsewhere, despite the recent appointment of ice skater Michelle Kwan as the nation's first "American public diplomacy envoy." Washington is awash in people muttering about the urgent need for better public diplomacy, but the current administration's attempts to reinvent it have met, mostly, with distress and sometimes mockery -- especially the first travels of Karen Hughes, undersecretary of state for public diplomacy and public affairs, who encountered chilly audiences in her first forays to the Middle East. Schulberg's presentation, which included a short film and extracts from others made for the Marshall Plan, reveals the fruits of a propaganda machine that was working on an entirely different level of sophistication than anything happening today. Before the clutter of television and the Internet, film gave governments exceptional access to the public's fickle attention span. But, as Schulberg argues, the success of those efforts depended on tone and sensitivity. She began her program with an excerpt from a film called "Hunger," made by the U.S. military in 1948, to explain to Germans why there was so little to eat on their tables. "Hunger is another legacy of the Nazi war," hectors the unseen, authoritarian narrator, as ghastly images of poverty and starvation flash across the screen. The film's heavy-handed message boils down to: You started this war, now you're suffering. It reveals one of the overwhelming temptations of the public diplomacy business: To say things that make you feel good, rather than things that might effectively change the minds of others. "That film did not go over very well," said Schulberg, adding that German audiences were so hostile it was forced out of theaters. The Marshall Plan films, she says, were different. They were made by European film directors, who were not closely monitored for ideological purity. The films were mostly positive, arguing that Europeans buy into the American plan for their mutual benefit. Imagery tended to be more appealing, brighter and optimistic. They didn't shy away from humor. "Me and Mr. Marshall," made for a German-speaking audience, follows the everyday life of a young coal miner who notes that he works long, hard hours so that Germany can get its industry running again. After the war, he says, Germany had nothing to sell but a lot of scrap iron, "and lots of other countries were already well supplied." The tone is that of a young man who's been through a lot, but whose bitter-edged wit is the mark of a fundamentally optimistic survivor. It is knowing and establishes an intimacy with the audience. Audiences in Europe, says Schulberg, were "sophisticated about the pitfalls of heavy-handed propaganda." German audiences reacted negatively to "Hunger" because they had become expert (if all too gullible) consumers of propaganda from one of its masters, Joseph Goebbels. The Americans were also competing with the determined efforts of the Soviets and communists to win public approval as well. Cleveland, the former Marshall Plan administrator, remembered villages filled with communist posters and rocks thrown in movie theaters showing films favorable to the Marshall Plan cause. But the films worked, Schulberg argues, and they may have reached an audience of more than 50 million people. There were about 60 people at the forum, and many of them had fled by the time a woman, who announced herself a career foreign service officer back from Baghdad, brought up the issue of American public diplomacy in a part of the world where one recent poll put favorability ratings of the United States as low as 12 percent. The secretary of state, Condoleezza Rice, was not there, nor was the undersecretary for public diplomacy, Hughes, who is traveling to China with Kwan. But Schulberg was ecstatic to bring the fruits of a different era of selling democracy to people who are in the business of selling it today. "I'm being heavily solicited," she said, and she was still at the State Department, hours after the forum had ended, handing out business cards. |