Cold War Modernists

European intellectuals of the 1950s dismissed American culture as nothing more than cowboy movies and the A-bomb.

In response, American cultural diplomats tried to show that the United States had something to offer beyond military might and commercial exploitation.

Through literary magazines, traveling art exhibits, touring musical shows, radio programs, book translations, and conferences, they deployed the revolutionary aesthetics of modernism to prove particularly to the leftists whose Cold War loyalties they hoped to secure that American art and literature were aesthetically rich and culturally significant.