Thursday, January 7, 2010: 3:40 PM
Elizabeth Ballroom B (Hyatt)
In November 1948, Collier’s magazine proposed that the U.S. Navy send a converted aircraft carrier, replete with the buildings and shops of small-town America installed on its lower deck, to ports in the Mediterranean Sea. The idea of a “Freedom Ship,” the centerpiece of writer Pat Frank’s article, “Main Street on a Flattop,” caught on among senior State and Defense Department officials and received approval from President Harry S. Truman, all of whom were eager to score a propaganda coup in the emerging Cold War. The aim, as described by Frank, was to unleash America’s “secret weapon—the truth,” in an effort to win the hearts and minds of Europeans and convince them of the virtues inherent in the American Way of Life.
While “Operation Flat-Top” never did materialize, its rise and fall provides a window into American political culture at a critical moment in the postwar world. That such a fanciful scheme consumed the attention of Truman officials testifies to the perceived anxieties of the age; that its execution relied on the coordination of government agencies and the U.S. business community highlights the growing importance of a “state-private” network in constructing and promoting American interests. Their collective faith in the capacities of free enterprise both to fund the operation and to capture the imagination of its intended audience, moreover, speaks to the presumed universality of America’s ideological appeal. Finally, its focus on “Middletown, America,” by obscuring the many other “Americas” that existed at mid-century, reveals the idealized and, therefore, exclusive vision of the nation its backers sought to export.
In the end, the episode highlights the process by which Americans sought to construct the Cold War consensus, the identity it sought to forge, and the challenges of selling it abroad.
While “Operation Flat-Top” never did materialize, its rise and fall provides a window into American political culture at a critical moment in the postwar world. That such a fanciful scheme consumed the attention of Truman officials testifies to the perceived anxieties of the age; that its execution relied on the coordination of government agencies and the U.S. business community highlights the growing importance of a “state-private” network in constructing and promoting American interests. Their collective faith in the capacities of free enterprise both to fund the operation and to capture the imagination of its intended audience, moreover, speaks to the presumed universality of America’s ideological appeal. Finally, its focus on “Middletown, America,” by obscuring the many other “Americas” that existed at mid-century, reveals the idealized and, therefore, exclusive vision of the nation its backers sought to export.
In the end, the episode highlights the process by which Americans sought to construct the Cold War consensus, the identity it sought to forge, and the challenges of selling it abroad.