Gutenberg's Folly: Strategic Sociability, Consumerism, and the Cold War

• In Event: The Kitchen Debate 1959-2009: Containment Culture and the Good Life

Abstract

This paper provides broader historical context for the “Kitchen debate” by focusing on US-led media reorientation initiatives of the Cold War period. Its focus is on international editors invited to tour the United States under the auspices of the State Department and the American Press Institute (API). In 1950, fifteen international journalists were invited to tour the country and debate the merits of a possible International Press Institute (IPI). By 1958, 100 members of IPI embarked on a 12-day tour that seemed to have little to do with professional journalistic practices: participants visited Disney Land, lunched with Walter Lippmann and Frank Lloyd Wright, visited auto plants in Detroit, nuclear energy and weapons plants in California, along with farms in the Midwest. Mid-century American progress and consumer largesse was lashed up with the rhetorical norms of professional journalism. Foreign editors, having been made to feel part of a “worldwide fraternity” of like-minded professionals via their association with API and IPI, were encouraged to empathize with the Americans and, ultimately, come to desire the “American way”—of news, of life. Drawing on archival material from the Ford and Rockefeller Foundations, this paper traces the way “professional friendship” among international media professionals was seen as a prophylactic measure by the State Department, the major foundations, and American news professionals themselves. The tours highlight the strange mobilization of journalism during the Cold War.

Author

• Marion Wrenn, New York University