The Rôle of American Books Abroad

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IN the postwar decade the United States has been deeply concerned with problems of international communication and particularly with the flow of information and ideas from this country abroad. Our efforts in this field have had two principal objectives. The first has been to counter Soviet propaganda and bring other countries to a fuller and therefore, we hope, more friendly understanding of the United States and its policies. The second has been to make technical knowledge available as a means of assistance in economic development abroad.

Massive though our program has been, it has generally been conceived in relatively narrow and short-run terms. The effort at political persuasion has been concentrated largely on immediate issues. Technical assistance has been devoted primarily to providing the skills for particular projects and programs rather than raising the general level of economic competence. In general, all overseas information efforts have been in the charge of agencies with rather specific and limited purposes and under pressure to produce immediate results. Hence there has been a tendency to rely for communication primarily on ad hoc missions and madeto-order materials: broadcasts, press stories and specially prepared pamphlets and films. Since books constitute a more generalized medium of information, one less easily controlled and more slow to produce results, they have been used less.

Recently there have been evidences of a marked change of emphasis in this regard. Vice President Nixon, on his return from his first visit to the Orient, is reported to have stressed inexpensive books as the foremost of the information needs of the United States in the area. In the State Department Bulletin for October 17, 1955, Nelson A. Rockefeller, then Special Assistant to the President, stated: "Because we have so long delayed a really major effort in this field of books, a major program is now absolutely necessary."^[i] And in the terse language of the President's Budget Message of last January appears this significant sentence: "Overseas libraries will be expanded, and increased emphasis will be given to supplying books to foreign readers at low prices." This shift in emphasis has already been reflected in increased allotments for the use of books by the United States Information Agency and the International Coöperation Administration...