Overcoming Isolationism: Film, Radio, and the Rise of the American Empire (1898–1945)

  • Eric M. Fattor
Chapter

Abstract

The British experience with changing media technologies demonstrated an increasing capacity for governments to bring about political goals with less recourse to physical coercion. By creating attractive content distributed over platforms capable of ever-growing dispersion, decisions and policies made by Britain’s ruling assemblage of power could be rendered palpable to a mass audience that might otherwise have been skeptical or hostile. Due in part to these innovations, the British Empire endured the trials and tribulations of expansion more effectively than its European rival—even if the ability of these media technologies was insufficient to prevent the collapse of the empire by 1945. Despite this outcome, however, the popularity of using the techniques and tools of soft power to entrance and capture the minds of larger and more antagonistic populations grew substantially among the other belligerents and raised the possibility, as Dwight Eisenhower hoped toward the end of World War II, that deployment of potent weapons of information would minimize the amount of coercive force needed to end the war.1

Keywords

Motion Picture Soft Power Film Industry British Broadcasting Corporation American Film 
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Notes

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© Eric M. Fattor 2014

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