The Home Front
BOHN, WILLIAM E.
THE HOME FRONT By William E. Bohn The U.S. Information Agency Is Finally on the Upbeat Again I will put into this first paragraph the one idea I don't want my readers to miss: This column is...
...In many of the countries they have native allies...
...Director Larson's workers send and carry their messages by means of radio, television, papers, leaflets, books, movies, art and industrial exhibits...
...In parts of Asia and Africa where TV sets are scarce, it is the style to hold parties in order to listen to the news from the United States...
...What we are doing now is quite different from any sort of international activity which we carried on before the Second World War...
...How American capitalism actually operates, how American farmers, workers and Negroes work and amuse themselves, what life here is actually like has been pictured in detail far and wide...
...It came to be regarded as a crime to know anything about the subject...
...The weekly News in Review, a TV series, reached a total distribution of 59 prints in 32 countries...
...They did all of this in 1956 for $1,566,119...
...This outfit is at the very heart of our cold war...
...That was in 1953 and 1954...
...During the last years of the Truman Administration, its appropriation was considerably more than it is now and it was doing a bang-up job of fighting Communism...
...This organization deserves all the encouragement it can get from interested citizens...
...Most of them merely lived with what dignity they could muster on their moderate salaries and, properly attired, attended now and then a formal dinner or ball...
...It would help a lot if our citizens could get hold of this report...
...we may need it at any time...
...Our defense outfit gets about $40 billion a year...
...Now the people can save all of that money and get the broadcasts for nothing...
...On November 23, a Warsaw newspaper announced that the jamming of American broadcasts had been discontinued...
...It took a severe and undeserved clouting when McCarthy was riding high...
...Up to recent times, we have sent to foreign lands only a few ambassadors, ministers and consuls...
...If I am to judge by what I hear in Washington and from the spirit of this official report, I should say that the USIA has entered on a new and better period...
...Washington...
...There was a warmth about the anti-Communist fight that was beginning to carry everything before it...
...So it is up to us to penetrate everywhere, to carry the message about what America is and how democracy works to every city, every village, even into the forests...
...During the past six months, USIA people have been sending to all corners of the world the truth about Hungary and Poland, the Middle East and Suez, the American election and racial integration in our schools...
...Members of the USIA staff were dropped in squads...
...Information Agency Is Finally on the Upbeat Again I will put into this first paragraph the one idea I don't want my readers to miss: This column is based on a report sent to Congress by Arthur Larson, the enterprising and popular new director of the United States Information Agency...
...Now the Russians are trying—and not without success—to teach the world that we are imperialists, robbers, liars...
...Billions for planes and bombs, little more than pennies for the spread of ideas...
...It is the USIA which is fighting directly against Communism—not the Army, Navy, Air Force or the Marines...
...It had a corps of fine experts on Bolshevism...
...You can get a copy by writing to the United States Information Agency...
...I am not complaining about that...
...The new director seems to have the right sort of ideas...
...It is a bright and interesting piece of publicity...
...To do this job requires the utilization of every sort of medium in every sort of language...
...Then came the campaign against the mess in Washington and immediately afterward the McCarthy hullabaloo...
...Since those days, a lot has happened...
...Many of those who were fired or who resigned were the topnotch experts on Bolshevism, the ones who really had their hearts in the fight, In consequence, the spirit of the whole institution went down...
...The agency s radio and television broadcasts are being picked up by commercial stations in many parts of the world...
...Here is an interesting item from Poland...
...But the USIA, which carries on the war of ideas, the war on which everything may depend, received something less than $3 million in 1955 and a little more than $1.5 million last year...
...He has...
...The next day, it was revealed in Parliament that poor Poland had been spending $17.5 million a year to keep out the truth about America...
...Cohn and Schine took their free trip across Europe to throw the books on Communism out of USIA libraries...
...It was all exciting news in the far places of Asia and Africa...
...especially, the kind of liveliness and enterprise which this sort of effort requires...
Vol. 40 • April 1957 • No. 14
