Advertising, Anticommunism, and the Making of the Cold War Consensus in the United States, 1950–71

This paper explores the role of advertising in shaping the anticommunist consensus in postwar American politics.  It focuses on the longest-running and most extensive campaign of political propaganda in U.S. history: the Crusade for Freedom.  A complex advertising campaign that blanketed the American media with anti-communist propaganda for more than two decades, 1950-1971, the Crusade linked the CIA to the Advertising Council, conservative organizations like the American Heritage Foundation, special interest groups, local politicians and celebrities, major corporations, and the mass media.  Officially, the campaign was run by the American Heritage Foundation and by the Advertising Council, but it was heavily subsidized by a wide-range of businesses and it developed from the CIA’s efforts to hide its covert sponsorship of Radio Free Europe (which broadcast propaganda to Eastern Europe during the Cold War).  Since the radio station claimed to be a “private” entity funded by donations from American citizens, the Crusade for Freedom purported to be a fund-raising campaign to solicit support for the RFE broadcasts.  In reality, the radio was funded almost entirely by the CIA, and the Crusade spent almost as much money in advertising as it received in donations.  The drive thus functioned less to raise money than to publicize the evils of communism, the perils of life behind the “Iron Curtain,” and the moral righteousness of the Cold War “crusade.”  Based on documents from over twenty different archives, this study analyzes the ways in which the Crusade sought to whip-up anti-communist fervor and stir American patriotism. The Crusade exerted a powerful impact on American political culture but to date the Crusade has received only passing mention in the historical literature.  This study will be the first to assess systematically the history of the Crusade and its impact on the postwar politics of consensus.