¡Américas Unidas! :$bNelson A. Rockefeller's Office of Inter-American Affairs (1940-46) /$cGisela Cramer, Ursula Prutsch (eds.)

The contributions highlight different facets of the OIAA's wide range of operations, but they focus on those activities that aimed at influencing public opinion in support of overarching U.S. policy goals. This volume revisits one of the major efforts undertaken by the United States government to manage public opinion both at home and abroad. In 1940, as Nazi Germany was subjugating ever greater territories in Europe and beyond, the U.S. government sought to secure Latin America's allegiance and assistance in the upcoming war. Through a newly established emergency agency, Nelson A. Rockefeller's Office of Inter-American Affairs (OIAA), it underwrote a wide array of programs that were meant to mobilize public opinion in Latin America and the United States with a view to improve inter- American cooperation and understanding.'Gisela Cramer and Ursula Prutsch, as editors, have assembled an outstanding collection of essays on the Office of the Coordinator of Inter-American Affairs. Each of the eight contributors provides new information and significant analysis of the Rockefeller office, its imaginative use of the mass media contributing to changing views of Pan-Americanism, hemispheric popular culture, and “soft” diplomacy, with specific evaluation of movies, documentaries, and radio, as only three examples. This volume fills a major gap in the historiography by examining this agency as the nexus between the U.S. Good Neighbor policy and its Cold War cultural diplomacy, but above all as a major U.S. cultural agency and its interaction with the peoples of Latin America.'(William H. Beezley, University of Arizona) Contents In lieu of a preface: Friedrich Katz – an Austrian Obituary Nelson A. Rockefeller’s Office of Inter-American Affairs and the Quest for Pan-American Unity: An Introductory Essay Chapter 1. Playing the Cultural Game: The United States and the Nazi Threat to Latin America Chapter 2. “There’s Only One America Now”: The OIAA Film Programs in the United States Chapter 3. Dual-Engined Diplomacy: Walt Disney, Orson Welles, and Pan-American Film Policy during World War II Chapter 4. Soft Power: The Art of Diplomacy in US-Mexican Relations, 1940-1946 Chapter 5. Fighting for the Soul of the Mexican Press: Axis and Allied Activities during the Second World War Chapter 6. The Word War at the River Plate: The Office of Inter-American Affairs and the Argentine Airwaves, 1940-46 Chapter 7. Nelson A. Rockefeller’s Office of Inter-American Affairs in Brazil Chapter 8. The OIAA in Central America: The Coordination Committees at Work The Editors and Contributors