Winning Hearts and Minds, or Teaching Hands? Point Four and the “Underdeveloped” World

Reflecting on his stint as a public diplomat in Brazil, Benjamin Hardy recounted that “in fall 1948 I began to wonder what new move the US could make in the ‘cold war’ which would . . . capitalize on the . . . Marshall Plan [and] make further gains in winning world opinion to our side.” Hardy conceived what he called a “democratic manifesto,” which came to be called the Point Four program. It was no accident that a public diplomat first sketched its outlines. Point Four would deploy economic and technical assistance to underdeveloped areas in what was, the Marshall Plan aside, to date the largest U.S. “foreign aid” program in history. It would showcase American generosity, expertise, and partnership in the economic development of impoverished parts of the world. The program would also flesh out long-term American Cold War strategy, beyond its military and nuclear aspects. More importantly but less well grasped, by naming poverty as a strategic concern, it expanded the Cold War map across the globe.

 The American initiative thereby played an underappreciated role in the conceptual coalescence of a proto-“Third World” defined by its shared underdevelopment. As might be expected given its origins, Point Four also influenced the evolution of U.S. Cold War public diplomacy– though in unexpected ways. Like its descendants the Peace Corps and the Alliance For Progress, Point Four would seem intuitively inseparable from its public-image dimension. Unlike them, however, outreach was at first understated– in part because it focused on instruction rather than persuasion. This paper will examine the origins of– and tensions between– the two, using Point Four activities in Latin America to trace their evolution within and impact on postwar U.S. relations with the non-European world.