If anyone is worthy of the title of “Cold War liberal,” you think it would be the celebrity journalist and public philosopher Walter Lippmann. Lippmann coined the phrase “Cold War” in 1947 and had long been considered the guru of modern liberalism. Yet Lippmann was a harsh critic of containment and, by the time of the Vietnam War, considered himself a “neo-isolationist.” He was also self-identified as a conservative by the Cold War era and was an outspoken critic of New Deal “planning.” Lippmann’s career highlights the problem of talking about “Cold War liberalism” in the singular. At the same time, there were few greater champions than Lippmann of a large military establishment and an expansive welfare state that typified Cold War liberal orthodoxy.

In response to First World War propaganda campaigns and the emerging science of behaviorist psychology, which downplayed or even denied the existence of “mind” (understood as an agency directed by human cognition and will), American modernists performed the mind in and as writing: as a potentiating agent of mental plasticity to reshape habits, modifiy beliefs and behaviors, and dramatize the strategies by which consent is “manufactured.” An American modernist literary “aesthetics of exposure” sought to arrest habitual thought by exposing the behaviorist strategies of conditioning behavior and regimenting beliefs. The major works examined in this chapter – Ernest Hemingway’s A Farewell to Arms (1929) and John Dos Passos’ the U.S.A trilogy (1936) – deploy strategies of psychological and textual fracture and fragmentation in order to make state-sponsored propaganda technique visible and available for critique.

Chapter 2 examines the evolution of the new public relations industry in the 1920s and examines how that industry’s leaders built upon their wartime experiences to make links to foreign affairs. It examines how industry pioneers Edward Bernays and Ivy Lee justified their roles by building upon the work of Walter Lippmann. It looks at the earliest private efforts to work on foreign relations matters, such as Bernays’s efforts to promote American recognition of an independent Lithuania in 1919. It also examines Lee’s efforts to encourage American engagement with world affairs through the promotion of loans to European nations and his efforts to open up a dialogue with Russia. The latter interest led to questions about his motivations and allegations that he was a Soviet agent. The 1920s revealed that unlike during the war years, American PR firms did not always support America’s own interests.