Democratic morality and the Freedom Academy debate: Thought control, propaganda, and the United States government, 1954--1968.

摘要

During the 1950s and 1960s, over a period spanning three presidential administrations, American officials in and out of Congress debated establishing the “Freedom Academy”—a proposed institution where both private American citizens and government officials would receive training in political warfare and propaganda tactics to help fight the cold war. As conceived, the academy was to become a “West Point” for “fourth-dimensional war” studies. This dissertation describes and analyzes how and why enthusiasts of Freedom Academy legislation sought to institutionalize their propaganda program, and how and why their critics labored to prevent it. Debate about the academy in and out of government is traced from its origins to its conclusion, with the primary focus being on the creation of counterarguments and counter-legislation by John Kennedy's administration.; The dissertation proposes that debate about the Freedom Academy should be located within the broader context of ongoing propaganda dialectic in America. Illustrating how the dialectic has expanded and retracted over time since 1906, the dissertation demonstrates that the dialectic was expanding during the cold war at the time of the Freedom Academy debate. The roots of the dialectic, the dissertation theorizes, are explained by intellectual history, which argues that a residue of traditional republican values in the American psyche—long subordinated by the ascendancy of liberalism—has created enduring tensions in American political culture. This, in turn, accounts for competing definitions of democracy among Americans. The twentieth century's propaganda dialectic, the dissertation concludes, was therefore an extension of these older, competing philosophies and political doctrines. By virtue of this fact, it was also a manifestation of America's enduring struggle to define its national identity and the nature of its own democratic experiment.