The Global Politics of Free Information: The Ironies of Liberal Universalism in America’s 1940s

In the immediate aftermath of World War II, American policy-makers sought to create a global flow of free information.  Through the drafting of international press laws at the young United Nations, through the establishment of the Fulbright educational exchange program, and through the creation of new wireless networks of global communication, American politicians, journalists, and educators hoped to universalize what they understood to be uniquely American freedoms of speech and information.  Within a few short years, however, all of their efforts had been transformed.  Rather than creating a liberal world order based on the free exchange of culture and information, these new networks of global communication were being manipulated to wage a propaganda war against the USSR.  Rather than creating a liberal public sphere free from state propaganda, American journalists and educators now worked closely with the State Department to combat totalitarianism.  Based on new archival research, this paper will explore the ironic trajectory of American efforts to create a global flow of free information in the 1940s.  It will argue that American efforts to create universal freedoms of cultural and information were always structured by deep assumptions about American exceptionalism, as well as by nationalist politics and material inequalities. It will show, therefore, that early postwar efforts to universalize free information actually laid the groundwork for Cold War propaganda struggles, and helped reconcile liberal internationalists to unilateralist ideological warfare. In all, the paper will provide a new intellectual and policy history of liberal universalism in the 1940s, help to connect a nascent historiography on the United Nations moment with an older literature on the emergence of the Cold War, and provide a pre-history to late twentieth century debates about media and cultural imperialism.