Turning Points in a New Nation, 1776–1917

This chapter examines three turning points in diplomacy’s public dimension after the founding of the United States. The first was the official diplomacy of citizen diplomats (Benjamin Franklin, John Adams, Thomas Jefferson, and Thomas Paine) during the American Revolution. Public diplomacy tools and methods were integral to their diplomacy in Europe’s royal courts, parliaments, and coffee houses and precursors to later patterns of practice. In the nineteenth century, civil society cosmopolitans pursuing niche agendas—abolitionists, women’s rights advocates, peace activists, free traders, humanitarians, jurists, and missionaries—developed methods government practitioners would use in the twentieth century. A second turning point, the US War with Mexico (1846–1848), marked the beginning of state-sponsored public diplomacy by private citizens in wartime. Spanish-speaking Catholic priests acted as “unofficial” public diplomats in Mexico, a practice continued by the North and South in Europe during the Civil War. The US Army’s information operations directed at civilian populations in Mexico foreshadowed what later became known as psychological operations. The invention of the telegraph, a third turning point, transformed diplomatic communication.