Borrowing from Civil Society, 1917–1947

Gradual acceptance of government-to-people “public diplomacy” in the twentieth century transformed what Chile’s scholar/diplomat Jorge Heine calls diplomacy’s government-to-government “club model.” Public diplomacy was first institutionalized in the United States when the federal government “borrowed” journalists, scholars, writers, filmmakers, and public relations experts for service overseas in World War I. Journalists George Creel and Arthur Bullard and women’s suffrage activist Vira Whitehouse led the way in the Foreign Section of the Committee on Public Information. This chapter examines their methods and ideas, many of which were later adopted in US diplomatic practice. It then looks at the cautious rediscovery of public diplomacy in the State Department in the 1930s and a second generation of civil society practitioners that served in the US government’s organizational salad of independent information organizations in World War II. The chapter concludes with America’s decision at war’s end to maintain organizations and communities of practice in peacetime.