From Europe to the Nation: American Journalistic Perceptions of European International Relations, 1933-1941

Abstract

From Europe to the Nation examines how six influential American journalists - John Gunther, Freda Kirchwey, Arthur Krock, Walter Lippmann, Anne O’Hare McCormick, and Dorothy Thompson - viewed and interpreted for their American audience the series of European events from Hitler’s ascension to power in Germany to the attack on Pearl Harbor. My study describes the interpretative frameworks through which these journalists viewed and explained what happened, namely a shared faith in the superiority of American politics and policies, a belief in the moral supremacy of the “new world” over the “old world,” a view of a racially-stratified world dominated by Anglo-Saxons, and a gendered worldview based on the binary opposites of masculine and feminine. These journalists used different interpretative frameworks in response to different events, shifting, overlapping and eventually coalescing in time. As events in Europe became increasingly dire following the Fall of France and threatened directly the national security of the United States, the interplay of these guiding assumptions prompted the rise to dominance of a shared viewpoint: what was at stake was the future of a West tom between civilization and barbarism. The civilization versus barbarism discourse had a clear propaganda value, in that it was used by journalists to support American participation, if not outright intervention, in the European war. This approach pinpoints the historical process of ideology creation. This ideology was elastic and highly effective, utilized for propaganda purpose not just for American intervention, but also to rally the home-front throughout the war and to legitimize Cold War American foreign policy. This study stresses the importance of recognizing the agency of journalists in the development of the concept because of their critical role as intermediaries between the crises occurring on the other side of the Atlantic and the American public’s understanding of what these events meant for the United States.