Franklin Book Programs: The Cold War and US Cultural Imperialism

Franklin Book Programs was a non-governmental US program aimed at stimulating the publishing market and reading practices during the Cold War. It is estimated that while it operated between 1952 and 1978, it was responsible for the publication of more than 3,000 titles and 50,000 volumes – mostly translations of books originally published in English. The beneficiary of public and private funds, its principal sources of finance were the US government, through the United States Information Agency (USIA) and the United States Agency for International Development (USAID); foundations such as Ford, Commonwealth, Kellogg, and Rockefeller; local governments; and more timidly, book sales.

Due to the global scale of its action, it is essential, when discussing Franklin, to consider its presence in Southeast Asia and the Middle East, regions where it invested initially. Similarly, since it was a US program, the history of its state agencies and foundations since the Second World War has to be taken into account, in order to demonstrate that Franklin was part of a tradition of cultural diplomacy practiced by the United States which was widespread between the 1940s and 1960s, when book distribution and translation policies began to serve as vectors of cultural imperialism. These are the themes which will initially be covered here. After this general presentation, an Atlantic perspective will be adopted, with an emphasis on the experiences of the program in Latin America and Sub-Saharan Africa. Although the program ran from 1952 to 1978, our focus will be on the period between 1961 and 1973, for which there exist records of the program's activities on the two continents.

The self-declared objectives of the Franklin Book Programs were to "strengthen the position of the US and the free world and to preserve world peace"; "increase the foreign distribution of American Books"; "help the peoples of the Middle East and thus to further the welfare of humanity."¹ Its initial obvious focus on the Middle East is why Franklin established its pilot offices first in Cairo, Egypt, in 1953, and afterwards in Teheran, Iran. In the following years, other offices were opened in the region and the Southeast Asia: Tabriz, also in Iran; Kabul in Afghanistan; Beirut in the Lebanon; Bagdad in Iraq; Lahore in Pakistan; Dhaka in Bangladesh; Jakarta in Indonesia; Kuala Lumpur in Malaysia; and in the city-state of Singapore. Initially the languages Franklin translated into were Arabic, Persian, Indonesian, Urdu, and Bengali. It was in these languages that the program published its principal venture: the Columbia-Viking Encyclopedia. Portuguese and Spanish would only appear in the 1960s, when the program started its work in Latin America, first in Buenos Aires, Argentina, in 1964, followed by Mexico City and Rio de Janeiro and São Paulo in Brazil in 1965. In Sub-Saharan Africa, former British colonies were prioritized, since their official language was already English. The first local offices were in Nigeria and Ghana in 1964, followed by East Africa: Kenya, Tanzania, and Uganda, in 1966.

The history of the program goes back to an event held in the Whittall Pavilion of the Library of Congress, in Washington, D.C., in 1951. Under the justification of discussing the lack of books in 'developing' countries, a meeting was held by librarians and publishers linked to the International Relations Committee of the American Library Association and the Foreign Trade Committee of the American Book Publishers Council, which would become the Association of American Publishers. Present, amongst others, were Francis R. St. John, representative of Brooklyn Public Library in New York; Datus C. Smith Jr., of Princeton University Press; Dan M. Lacy, from the Library of Congress, then ceded to International Information Administration (IIA) from the State Department; Dana J. Pratt, from the Library of Congress Publishing Office; and Verner Clapp and Luther H. Evans, both from the Library of Congress. Evans was also a member of the United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization (UNESCO), and would become its general director two years later in 1953. The proposal to create a program aimed at stimulating the publishing market outside the United States is said to have come from Verner Clapp, who, at a certain time, called on all present to draft a plan of action. This was the beginning of Franklin Publications Inc., which after 1964, due to the expansion and diversification of its activities would come to be called Franklin Book Programs Inc. The program name was a tribute to Benjamin Franklin, one of the founding fathers of the United States, considered the first professional publisher in the country.

Initially, the program was restricted to translations of American books abroad, but as time passed it also began to include: 1) the publication of weekly magazines, dictionaries, and encyclopedias; 2) training and technical support for book sellers, editors, illustrators, revisers, and professionals from the printing industry; 3) the holding of events associated with publishing; 4) creation of school libraries. Translations remained, however, the program's central activity. Franklin's local offices contacted publishers and authors who were responsible for indicating the type of book they wished to see translated in their country (by area, theme, and profile of possible readers). Requests were then forwarded to the program's head office in New York, where groups of specialists made lists of titles suitable to the requests, purchasing the originals in English and the translation rights. The principal publisher partners of the program in the United States were Malcolm Johnson from Van Nostrand, Robert T. Crowell from Crowell, Robert F. de Graff from Pocket Books, Charles E. Griffith from Silver Burdett, and George P. Brett, from Macmillan Company. The pre-selected books crossed the ocean by plane, proof of the abundance of resources which the program had and the speed at which it operated. Received by local branches, they were filtered in a final selection and sent to local publishers for publication. This circuit aimed, at the same time, to expand the reading public of US authors and to strengthen what was called the 'indigenous publishing culture.' This involved professionalizing the publishing process in the countries in which Franklin operated, creating communication circuits and improving the technical quality of books.

Publishing patronage was not an absolute novelty for the United States. During and immediately after the Second World War, the Council on Books in Wartime (CBW) assured the publication and international distribution of books in a small format and with a low sales value. Its principal publication was the "Overseas and Transatlantic Editions" collection, a set of fifty-one titles translated into five languages and a total of eight million copies. The publication was the result of a partnership between the Council and the Office of War Information (OWI), the principal agency responsible for US propaganda during the conflict. It is estimated that between 1943 and 1947, 1300 titles and 124 million volumes were distributed by the Council, in Europe, North Africa, and the Pacific.² In the Americas, the Office of the Coordinator of Inter-American Affairs (OCIAA), run by Nelson Rockefeller, guaranteed hemispheric integration during the 1940s through a set of activities – such as the exchange of teachers and journalists, the production of content for radio and cinema, etc. – which also included book translations.

In 1949, the Cooperative for American Remittances to Europe (CARE) started, in partnership with UNESCO, the distribution of technical and scientific books for schools and libraries in Europe and Asia. Luther H. Evans was in charge of choosing books. The books were sent to recipients selected by UNESCO, in the person of Milton Eisenhower, the US representative in the organization and brother of the future president of the United States, Dwight Eisenhower. The distribution included Austria, Belgium, Czechoslovakia, Finland, Italy, France, Greece, Holland, Norway, Poland, Great Britain, and the American, British, and French zones of Germany, Korea, and Japan.³ Activities were synthesized in the US effort to reconstruct Europe in the postwar period, which historic memory crystalized around the Marshall Plan. While the latter was aimed at the economic reconstruction of the continent and the eradication of the physical hunger of its inhabitants, ensuring relations of dependence on the United States and confirming its hegemony in the post-war, CBW and CARE were concerned with the eradication of 'book hunger.' The concept of 'book hunger' appeared for the first time in England at the end of the nineteenth century in reference to illiterate rural communities, which books did not reach. It was returned to after the Second World War due to the destruction of European publishing system caused by rationing, censorship, and the destruction of the physical space caused by occupations or bombings.⁴ Lack of books was not, however, a phenomenon exclusive to Europe. UNESCO calculated in 1951 that half of the world's population, then estimated at two billion people, were illiterate. Most of these were in Asia and Africa where, according to the organization, in addition to the scarcity of books could be found the underuse of land, malnutrition, and endemic diseases.⁵

Under the auspices of the US State Department, at the beginning of the 1950s book incentives were limited to the recently created International Information Administration (IIA), responsible for supporting US foreign policy through cultural diffusion programs and educational exchanges. Dan M. Lacy resented the lack of professionalization of these activities, since the titles were selected by bureaucrats and not by specialists from the publishing market. His participation in the efforts to create Franklin certified in this sense the desire to professionalize the field through the curatorship of professional librarians in partnership with commercial and university publishers. Lacy guaranteed that the IIA would endorse the creation of Franklin and ensure half a million dollars to pay for its initial activities. However, the nature of Franklin's operations encountered resistance among the members of the State Department in tune with the political agenda of Senator Joseph McCarthy, wanting publishing policies to increasingly serve the international campaign of the United States against communism. The senator railed against foreign libraries maintained with US support and against the publication of 'subversive authors,' stating that publishing activities supported by the State Department had to clearly correspond to the interests of national policies.

In 1953 the pressure of McCarthy and the McCarthyism led to the transformation of IIA into USIA, (the United States Information Agency). Directly linked to the State Department, the agency found legal precedents in the Smith-Mundt Act, dating from 1948, and had a specific program aimed at book translation: the Book Development Program. Initially Dan Lacy was incorporated in the structure of USIA, but a few years later, the political radicalization of the agency, expressed in the increasing production with anti-communist content, led to his removal from the State Department and his return to his original position in the Library of Congress. Since then the two programs – Franklin and USIA – acted in parallel, despite having common publishing projects. The book "This I believe" by Edward Murrow, director of USIA, for example, was one of the first publications sponsored by Franklin in the Middle East and in Southeast Asia in 1953. Although, the program continued to enjoy governmental resources, the continuity of its operations was only possible thanks to transfers from foundations.

The relationship between private foundations and the US government was always close. Despite their philanthropic aura, the former "were particularly active in the construction of international ties," exercising a relevant role as agents of 'private diplomacy.'⁶ More specifically the so-called 'Big Three' (Ford, Rockefeller, and Carnegie) played a prominent role in US hegemonization during the twentieth century, by making the cultural and intellectual penetration of the United States possible in various regions of the world. Between the 1920s and 1950s, they ruptured US isolation and expanded the possibilities within the reach of the country's foreign policy, assuring the consecration of a 'liberal internationalism.' Specifically between the 1930s and the 1970s, they helped bring US and overseas elites closer together, at the same time that they gave rise to other international organizations and assured the connections between them. At the end of the 1980s, with the end of the Cold War, they were important in the reconfiguration of US hegemony, affirming global civil society and the third sector as fundamental spheres for the consecration of democracy in the era of neoliberal globalization.⁷

On the other hand, the correspondence between state agencies and the foundations was not always harmonious. While it is true that the creation of the USIA translation program corresponded to the desire to politicize the publishing activity of the State Department, it is also true that the formation process of Franklin Book two years previously had denoted a certain skepticism of the US publishing market in relation to the capacity of the government to produce books which could meet minimum criteria of technical quality. Dan Lacy believed that the printing industry, linked to Franklin's permanent structure, had professionalized its publishing. Over time government criteria, whether related to the volume of resources allocated to the program or the form of intervention of its agencies in activities, had become more constant. They would remain so even after 1961, when the US government began to contribute in a more accentuated manner to Franklin's projects, through the program's contracts with USAID. Although the agency had sponsored the entrance of the program to Sub-Saharan Africa and Latin America, together with local governments, the founding of foundations – notably that of Ford − remained essential. For example, the latter foundation granted a million dollars just for the costs of Franklin's initial activities in Latin America.

Occasional quarrels with government agencies should not imprint an apolitical nature on Franklin's activities. This was precisely the argument for the image of an autonomous and politically not implicated institution which the program looked to construct. Writing in retrospect, Datus C. Smith, the longest-lasting program director (1952-1967), stated that although Franklin had faced some initial difficulties to be understood within the United States as a non-governmental institution receiving mixed resources, this status helped the program to be more easily accepted abroad. Its operations had occurred, according to him, without "bureaucratic obstructions" and without the "nightmare of propaganda," which was expressed in the contracting and training of natives for local offices and its freedom to select the manuscripts to be translated.⁸ In relation to this, it should be stated, first, that Franklin comprehended and assumed the relationship between its operations and "national interests." Many of its partner institutions − such as Aramco, Xerox, Trans World Airlines, General Motors, Morgan Guaranty Trust Company, Pan American World Airways, IBM, Shell, PepsiCo International, and Newsweek −, although they were not directly linked to the publishing market, were considered by the program as "anxious to serve the national interest and their own long-term economic interests through assistance to international education projects."⁹ Moreover, outside the US there was always an association between Franklin's operations and those of governmental agencies. In Latin America, for example, initially there was resistance to the program, which was compared to already existing translation programs, such as USIA that had not always been seen sympathetically by local publishers. Second, although Franklin stated that its agents remained in overseas offices for a period of up to five years, and were autonomous during this period, in practice the presence of Americans was constant during its operations, including representatives from USIA and USAID.

For these reasons, the disconnection between Franklin and US policy during the Cold War was always apparent. Its initial focus on the Middle East corresponded to the emergence of the region as an object of great international interest and disputes between the powers in the post-war era. In the Middle East – but not only there – Franklin started the so-called cultural war, a form of ideological combat used widely by the United States during the Cold War, characterized by the distribution of books, films, radio and television programs, etc., in tune with the agenda of the so-called 'free world.' At the time the Western powers argued that these strategies were reactive in relation to underground Soviet propaganda, made by channels of the Moscow TV and radio group, the Soviet news agencies TASS and NOVOSTI, the Romanian AGERPRESS, Soviet embassies, and 'art' cultural circuits, an expression with US agencies used in a comparative and pejorative form in relation to Hollywood production. Franklin positioned itself in favor of decolonization movements and of the dissolution of the old empires, but it was afraid that the political movement in the region would project the agenda of national self-determination and open doors to the penetration of socialism in the Arab world. Furthermore, although the program stated that it did not want to influence political questions in the Middle East, there was an awareness of the existence of an 'Anti-American feeling' which diplomatic institutions needed to mitigate.

In 1958, UNESCO calculated than four of the ten most translated authors in the world were Soviet: Vladimir Lenin (1^{st^} place), Leon Tolstoy (3^{rd^} place), Maxim Gorki (4^{th^} place), and Anton Chekov (8^{th^} place), as well as Karl Marx (9^{th^} place). Added to these were the Frenchman Jules Verne (2^{nd^} place), the American Mickey Spillane (5^{th^} place), the Bible (6^{th^} place), the Englishman William Shakespeare (7^{th^} place), and also the American Jack London (10^{th^} place) (Fig. 3). Although UNESCO was the custodian for the Postwar cosmopolitan project, with its printed material being translated into all the allied languages, including Russian, its Western nature was always clear. The information contained in this bulletin, as a result, sounded an alert to the Atlantic democracies: UNESCO emphasized that the task of the translator was of fundamental importance, since they were "the constructors of bridges in the heart of the universe."¹⁰ Not by chance, since its creation in 1947 it had been directly involved in the promotion of activities related to books and reading, such as the 'Fundamental Education' program. It was responsible for the establishment of libraries, notably in Africa and Latin America, supplied with the canon which embodied the myth of 'universal literature.' However, at the beginning of the 1960s, the relationship between literacy and economic development became more central for the institution, which in 1962 came to count on the support of the World Bank for projects aimed at basic education. Impacted by the recent educational reform in Cuba, the organization was afraid that illiteracy and poverty would present open doors to the rise of communism.¹¹

UNESCO's movements accompanied a change of direction in US foreign policy after the Cuban Revolution in 1958. The creation of USAID in 1961, during the presidency of John Kennedy, incarnated the effort to expand US presence in countries classified as 'underdeveloped' or 'developing.' Fearing the possible irradiation of the Cuban experience, the United States pushed for the creation of the Alliance for Progress, an Inter-American agreement which assured significant USAID funds for all the countries in the Americas with the exception of the insurgent island. The agency provided significant resources for Franklin, coming from funds such as the AID Rights Fund and other funding sources from the US government, such as the Central Book Fund and the Global Royalty Fund, which guaranteed with the Ford Foundation the penetration of the program in Latin America and Sub-Saharan Africa. Between 5 October 1964 and 15 February 1965, Franklin organized two seminars in New York about the printing industry which lasted for ten weeks each, at the same time that it concomitantly supported another two carried out in the city of Boston. They were attended by thirty participants composed of representatives of the middle and top scale of publishers in countries assisted by AID, especially African and Latin American ones. Focusing on the relationship between education and development, Franklin prioritized on the two continents printed material distinct from what it published in the Middle East and Southeast Asia: it abandoned almost entirely literary books and concentrated its efforts on the production of educational material. In Latin America, children's book, textbooks for secondary school, technical qualifications, and third level; and in Africa textbooks for basic education.

In harmony with Kennedy's foreign policy for the continent, in 1961 Franklin had sent to Central and South America a delegation tasked with identifying possible partners and writing an activity plan for the region. Consisting of Francisco Aguilera, from the Hispanic Foundation of the Library of Congress, Curtis Benjamin, from McGraw-Hill Book Company, Dan Lacy, from the Library of Congress, and the Council Association of American Book Publishers, the group visited six countries in total: Mexico, Columbia, Peru, Chile, Argentina, and Brazil. Although some resistance to the program was identified, sometimes seen as an agent of 'Yankee imperialism,' the emissaries assured in a report¹² that the proposal had received a good reception, indicating Argentina, Brazil, and Mexico as the regional bases of the program, due to the greatest growth potential of their publishing markets.

Although Brazil showed that it was best suited for Franklin's initial efforts, the program reported an environment of 'political instability' which justified the postponement of activities in the country, referring, albeit tacitly, to the conflicts between President João Goulart and the opposition forces, which found support in US diplomacy. On the one hand, Jango's independent foreign policy and the grass-roots reforms (reformas de base) proposed by his administration insinuated an approximation with the Soviet bloc; on the other hand, industrialists and military connected in the Institute of Social Research and Studies (IPÊS), under the auspices of US institutions such USIA, engaged in a systematic anti-communist campaign which would culminate in the 1964 civil-military coup.¹³ In Argentina, although US diplomacy was suspicious of the protective measures taken by President Arturo Illia in relation to oil and electricity, the government was not seen, in principle, as unamenable to the presence of the United States and the agenda of the Alliance for Progress. The growth of dissatisfaction with Illia, above all in certain military sectors, would expand in later years, culminating in the 1966 coup, which would be supported by the United States.¹⁴

For this reason the program's first office in the Southern Cone, Fundación Interamericana de Bibliotecologia Franklin (FIBF) was established in Buenos Aires in July 1964, with the sponsorship of USAID and the Ford Foundation. FIBF was responsible for most of the 105 book titles translated by the program on the continent and distributed among Spanish-speaking countries. Only 21 were produced in Mexico. There is only one register of a publishing project in another Caribbean country, the Conocimientos para Todos collection, consisting of two volumes, "Animales del Mundo" and "Cure sus Animales," published in 1970 by Instituto Centro Americano de Extensión de la Cultura (ICECU), from Costa Rica, after Franklin held an important event in the country: the 1^{st^} Central American Book Seminar. The seminar guaranteed the expansion of the presence of Franklin in Central America, although there are records which suggest that shortly afterwards, in 1973, the program ceased its activities all over the continent.¹⁵

The areas covered by Franklin's publications in Argentina were – as would also be the case in Brazil – the publishing industry; the relationship between university and development; demography and population policy; and the life sciences. Jointly these summarized what US diplomacy – whether public or private – believed obstructed Latin American development: the lack of books, especially in the rural environment; illiteracy; low professional qualifications of young people and adults; restricted access to university, the projection of the left in the academic spheres, and the lack of connections between knowledge, industry, and the market; population imbalance, accentuated by the Catholic faith and its restrictions on contraception; the lack of basic sanitation, diseases, and high mortality rates. In this sense, books were invested with the role of contributing to literacy; eradicating illiteracy, and promoting the modernization of the countryside, reinforcing the place of Latin America as the producer of foodstuffs in the international division of labor and driving away the phantasm of rural guerrillas; increasing the quality of professionals with second and third level qualifications; supplying libraries with specialized literature in the area of university reform; strengthening the professions and quantitatively expanding the middle classes; containing the advance of communism in universities and outside of them; subordinating knowledge to the interests of industry and the market; guaranteeing population control and urbanization; training doctors, odontologists, nurses, veterinarians, biologists, pharmacists, chemists, and other professionals responsible, simultaneously, for increasing the level of public health in Latin America and ensuring the penetration of instruments, equipment, medicine, prophylactic practices, and above all, the surgical techniques consecrated by the so-called Western medicine.

Also common in FIBF was the publication of guides and manuals, which were generally published by the foundation itself and not by partners. Franklin considered them fundamental for the formation of "indigenous publishing cultures," since they started collective bibliographies capable of incarnating the intellectual circles validated by the program, especially US ones, direct readers in the choice of books and contributed to the dissemination of their own material. In order to stimulate the publishing industry, various books were published, some in partnership with the Center of Biblio-Technological Documentation from Universidad Nacional del Sur, Bahía Blanca, in the province of Buenos Aires: "Quien es quien en la Bibliotecologia Argentina" by Nicolas Matijevic, "Derarrollo de la industria editorial argentina," by Eustacia A. Garcia, and "List of Headings of Official Entities in Argentina" de Angel Fernández, under the logo of the Pan American Union, all in 1965; "Guia de Bibliotecas Argentinas" by Carlos Alberto Giuffra, in partnership with UNESCO in 1967; "Manual of Bookselling" by the American Book-Sellers Association, whose local publisher was Bowker Argentina in 1968. Bowker was also responsible for the launch of "Guide of Book Publishing" that year, written by Datus C. Smith Jr. and disseminated among all the countries in which Franklin operated in the world. FIBF published another guide the same year, aimed at the children's and juvenile markets: "Repertorio de Lecturas para Niños e Adolescents" organized by Mantovani and published by Editorial Troquel with funding from the Tinker Foundation.

In partnerships with the Kellogg Foundation and The Population Council, FIBF made the translation of books feasible in the area of the demography and population policies. In 1966, Interamericana published, with Kellogg funding, "Municipal and rural sanitation" by Victor Ehlers and Ernest Steel. The following year FIBF itself released "The Growth of World Population and the Growth of U. S. Population," originally published in the United States by the National Academy of Science and the National Research Council, and "Readings of Demography" by Clyde Kiser. Also with sponsorship from The Population Council, the publisher La Prensa Medica translated in 1969 "Population Problems" by Warren Thompson and David Lewis, and FIBF released the "Bibliografia de Demografia" guide. In 1972, "The Catholic Case for Contraception" by Daniel Callahan, released by Editorial Troquel and also sponsored by The Population Council.

The relationship between the university and development also gave a tone to Franklin's publishing choices for Latin America. In this dominion, FIBF ordered between 1965 and 1966 the translation of three books originally released in the United States by the Council of Higher Education in the American Republic: "Arts and the University," "National Development and the University," and "Agriculture and the University."

However, Franklin's largest number of publications in Spanish were in the area of the life sciences. With funding from Kellogg and the Commonwealth fund, especially the latter, the program translated 82 books from medicine and correlated disciplines, which together constituted the Pre-Clinical Libraries Project, aimed at university students and professionals from the area of health. In Argentina, the principal publishers which were part of the project were Editorial Mundi, Libreria y Editorial La Medica, El Ateneo, Lopez Editores, Medica Panamericana, Paidos, Editorial Bernades, and Alfa, as well as FIBF itself. Involved in Mexico were Interamericana, Unión Tipográfica Editorial Hispano Americana, Manual Moderno, and Prensa Medica Mexicana. Editorial Mundi specialized in the publication of odontology books, while the other publishers published books from a wide range of disciplines: anatomy, physiology, histology, endocrinology, pathology, pneumology, gynecology and obstetrics, pediatrics, ophthalmology, neurophysiology, gastroenterology, cardiology, bacteriology, immunology, microbiology, plastic surgery, pharmacology, veterinary, surgery, exams, and teaching of science, amongst others.

The Pre-Clinical Libraries Project was replicated in Brazil, becoming Franklin's principal project in the hemisphere. The emphasis on the question of medicine and public health inscribed the program in a long tradition of state agencies and US foundations, which justifiably considered Latin America as a poor place lacking adequate health services, above all in the countryside. Although international health agencies, notably from France and Germany, had also been present in Latin America in the 1920s and 1930s, US protagonism in the continent had been well known since the beginning of the century. This presence was linked to the modernizing agenda of various Latin American governments, among them the Brazilian Getúlio Vargas, under the administration of Gustavo Capanema in charge of the Ministry of Education and Health.¹⁶ The Rockefeller Foundation, particularly, was involved in research about virology and tropical diseases, such as yellow fever, smallpox, and malaria, acting in various regions in the country, including the Amazon, during this period and afterwards. Among the most notable activities in Brazil was the partnership between the Faculty of Medicine of the University of São Paulo (USP), an incubator for a project of scientific excellence which was supposed to be mirrored all over the country, at the same time that it gave the university international prestige. In Latin America and the Caribbean Rockefeller established intellectual networks which included the Brazilian Carlos Chagas, the discoverer of the disease which received his name, the specialist in Colombian tropical medicine Roberto Franco, and the person responsible for the eradication of malaria in Venezuela, Arnoldo Gabaldón. These networks demonstrate the importance which Latin America acquired in the creation of an international health system, representing not only a receptacle or experimentation space, but an agent for the "circulation of people, ideas, and biological products that were essential for the validation of modern Western medicine." On the other hand, due to the evident intrinsic hierarchies in the scientific field, the health system created in the hemisphere in the first half of the twentieth century was "unquestionably a piece in the puzzle of U.S. hegemony, not only in the region, but more widely on the world stage."¹⁷

Taking as a reference the Argentine experience, the Vice-President of Franklin Book and director of its division for Latin America, Wilbur Knerr, drafted the proposal¹⁸ for the establishment of the program in Brazil. In September 1964, after the overthrow of President João Goulart and the stabilization of General Humberto de Alencar Castelo Branco's administration, the US program was organized in the country around two axes: the Library Science Center (CB) of IPÊS in Guanabara state (Rio de Janeiro), and the Library Science Center for Development (CBD) in the Roberto Simonsen Foundation of the Federation of Industries of São Paulo State (FIESP). IPÊS possessed three years experience in book publication and distribution, as well as a network of partner institutions and readers spread all over Brazil. Founded in 1961 by entrepreneurs and military, the institute had actively participated in the arrangements which led to the overthrow of President João Goulart, sponsoring anti-communist content packaged in the form of documentaries, pamphlets, seminars, and books. The recently created Roberto Simonsen Foundation, the entity that represented industrialists from São Paulo, also had book and reading incentive projects as one of its central activities. Décio Guimarães de Abreu, General Propício Machado Alves, director of Distribuidora Record de Serviços de Imprensa and assistant director of Ao Livro Técnico publishers, respectively, as well as Cândido Guinle de Paula Machado and Geraldo Jardim Pereira, were responsible for the IPÊS Library Science Center, together with the American Roger Ross. Ross' presence on the board is an important piece of information: although Franklin stated that local program staff were exclusively made up of natives and that the presence of emissaries from the head office was topical and provisional, the Brazilian experience reinforces that they not only closely accompanied the activities, but permanently operated in overseas offices.

The National Federation of Book Publishers (SNEL) and the Brazilian Book Council (CBL) were also partner institutions of Franklin in Brazil, which were responsible, amongst other things for the tasks of raising funds locally for the program. There are records of Franklin publications in Portuguese between 1966 and 1973, with a total of 42 titles,¹⁹ produced by the publishers Ao Livro Técnico, Artes Gráficas Gomes de Souza, Atheneu, Companhia Editora Nacional, Cultrix, Dominus, Editora da Universidade de São Paulo, Editora José Olympio, Edgard Blucher, Empresa Gráfica O Cruzeiro, Globo, Guanabara Koogan, Lidador, Melhoramentos, Mestre Jou, Pioneira, and Record, as well as the Brazilian Association of Printing Technicians, Salesian Vocational Schools, the Brazilian Institute of Bibliography and Documentation and the Commission of Technical and Text Books (COLTED),²⁰ created in 1966 within the Ministry of Education and Culture (MEC), as part of the University Reform carried out by the military.

The process of creating COLTED, like all the reforms, caused controversies. The first decree which created it, no. 58.653, dated 16 June 1966, was revoked shortly afterwards, on 4 October of the same year, being replaced by decree no. 59.355. As well as the change of name from 'council' to 'commission,' the most substantial alteration in the text of the decrees was related to the institution's revenue. In the former, the funds from USAID, via the Alliance for Progress, were clearly identified. In the latter, in response to persistent criticism of US actions in Brazil, incarnated in the well-known MEC-USAID Accord, the name of AID was suppressed and replaced by the expression "foreign or international agencies."²¹ The decree also established a central place for the publishers represented by SNEL, seen in the presence of a member of the federation in the agency's collegiate body. Through the partnership between MEC, USAID, and SNEL, the Brazilian government assured the publication and distribution of text books, as well as the establishment of libraries aimed at children and adults.

The only book written by COLTED published under the auspices of the Franklin Program was "Edições Brasileiras – Bibliografia Brasileira de Livros Infantis", released in 1968 by SNEL. The guide was part of a wider set of activities carried out by Franklin in Portuguese aimed at the children and youth market, including the creation of libraries. Included among the publications were "Guia dos pais na escolha de livros para crianças" by Nancy Larrick, published by the CBD of the Roberto Simonsen Institute in 1969, a richly illustrated introduction to science books. In its initial soundings in Latin America, Franklin had identified support for the publication of children's books as a demand of Latin American publishers, who felt discouraged to produce this type of publication due to the many color matrices demanded in the projects – and the high costs they represented.²² To meet this demand, using funds from the Commonwealth I program Franklin guaranteed the publication of two encyclopedias by Ao Livro Técnico, the publishing company of General Propício Machado Alves: "As maravilhas da vida," from the original "Golden Book of Biology" by Gerald Ames and Rose Wyler, and "As maravilhas do corpo humano," "Human Body" by Mitchell Wilson. José Olympio, in turn published the Scientific Library collection Life, funded by the Kellogg Foundation, consisting of four volumes and published in 1967: "A célula," "A energia," "A matéria," "O homem e o espaço".

Between 1968 and 1969 the Brazilian Association of Printing Technicians, together with the Library Science Center of the Roberto Simonsen Foundation, and the Library Science Center of IPÊS, published "Offset - Processos de Produção de Chapas" by Robert Reed and "Offset – Princípios Básicos de Impressão" by Charles Latham, both with a subsidy from the Graphic Arts Technical Foundation. Also in relation to the printing industry, Franklin published in 1968 "Curso de Bibliografia Geral" by Laura Maia Figueiredo and Lelia Galvão, issued by Record and sponsored by Kellogg and "O Livro e a Indústria do Conhecimento" by Décio de Abreu, released by IPÊS through O Cruzeiro publishers.

Divided into three parts the book contained a summary of the Seminar on Information Science, Technical Studies, and Social Sciences, held by IBBD in November and December 1967 and which had been based on an article in the US magazine Fortune; the talk given by Abreu at the I Central American Book Seminar in San José, Costa Rica, the same year; an analysis entitled "The Book of Agriculture," about the importance of books for agricultural development in Latin America. In the talk, ordered by Wilbur Knerr and reproduced in the volume, the publishing industry was seen as an index of development in the most advanced societies where the most basic needs of man had been fulfilled and it was possible to contemplate the most noble activities of the human spirt. This was the reference and the horizon for 'developing' countries. Although the tasks carried out in Brazil were part of a single and indistinct project for Latin America, initially tested in Argentina and Mexico, Abreu reached Costa Rica with the stature of an authority, bringing the Brazilian standard to the Caribbean islands. In his talk he considered the specificities of Central America, but argued that there were similarities between Portuguese and Spanish America, such as "linguistic and cultural homogeneity," which justified the modular nature of his explanation. This supposed homogeneity favored the overcoming of "book problems," notably distribution, different from Africa and Asia, where ethnic, religious, and linguist diversity hindered the desired uniformity. In Latin America, all of it supposedly Iberian – Hispanophone or Lusophone -, there was also the facilitating element of "religious unity," due to the "great predominance of Catholicism."²³ In the Brazil of Abreu, exhorted as a reference for the Caribbean, there did not exist the indigenous vernacular, nor the languages and creeds brought (and forged) by the African diaspora.

IPÊS' partnership with Franklin, configured in the proximity of Décio de Abreu and Wilbur Knerr, who the Latin Americans only called by his nickname, "Buzz," was part of the change of direction in the institute's trajectory. Initially aimed at the publication of material with an anti-communist content, IPÊS then sought to affirm its identity as an institution concerned with disseminating technical and scientific knowledge. Glycon de Paiva, one of IPÊS' most important directors, even considered transforming it into a post-graduate institute after the 1964 civil-military coup. It was common for Latin American dictatorships to base themselves on a technical discourse as think tanks gained projection, lending a liberal aura to authoritarian governments. IPÊS assumed this role after 1965. Together with Franklin and the Roberto Simonsen Institute, in 1966 it held the Publishers Seminar, an important event concerned with identifying the problems of the Brazilian publishing industry and market, highlighting solutions and offering training to participants – most of them publishers or librarians –, through talks and workshops.

Another product funded by the program was the Medical News Review, edited by Philip Querido (born in the Netherlands and a naturalized American based in São Paulo) and published between 1965 and 1968, which came to have a print run of 20,000 copies. Also in the medical area, in partnership with the Directorate of Higher Level Education in the Ministry of Education and Culture (DESu/MEC) the program organized the Pre-Clinical Libraries project, inspired by the experience in Buenos Aires, connected to FIBF and financed by the Commonwealth and Kellogg funds. Through this program the libraries of at least 35 Brazilian universities were supplied with a bibliography from the US in the scenario of the 1968 University Reform. The Library Science Center of IPÊS was charged with establishing partnerships with the Brazilian publishers responsible for the production of translations, as well as choosing the institutions which would receive the book and assure their distribution. MEC was responsible for assuring the guaranteed purchase of books with funds from the Brazilian government. The principal publishers in the Pre-Clinical Libraries project in Brazil were Atheneu, Companhia Editora Nacional, Editora da Universidade de São Paulo, Guanabara Koogan, Melhoramentos, and Mestre Jou.

Third level Brazilian institutions which received books from the Pre-Clinical Libraries Program

Source: Prepared by Laura de Oliveira based on documents from the Franklin Book Programs fund in Mudd Manuscript Library, Princeton University.

The discovery of the Americas by Franklin at the beginning of the 1960s occurred at the same moment when the program was starting to work in West Africa. The importance acquired by the two continents was noted in the elections for Franklin's board in 1965. Cândido Guinle de Paula Machado, publisher and businessman, member of the board of IPÊS and the Library Science Center, was elected honorary editor of the program together with Chief S. O. Adebo, Nigeria's representative in the United Nations.²⁴ With contracts with USAID and the Ford Foundation, the Americas and Africa won centrality for the program. In 1959, Datus Smith had visited countries in West and East Africa in an apparently modest approach which saw in decolonization and nationalism an opportunity for the entrance of Franklin. In the same year as Franklin's first mission in Latin America, 1961, William E. Spaulding, president of Houghton Mifflin publisher, former president of the American Textbook Publishers Institute, and a former Franklin board member, together with the president, Datus C. Smith Jr., carried out research to establish the program in Ghana and Nigeria. In a report,²⁵ they stated that in the two countries, both recently freed British colonies, the affirmation of English as a national language clashed with the persistence of various African vernacular languages. These formed the matrix of family communication and the primary linguistic reference of children, who reached school almost always ignorant in relation to English. Since Franklin considered the language to be "the key to progress in all sectors in Ghana and Nigeria," it proposed to offer support to tutors and teachers so that during the two or three first years of basic education the language spoken in schools would be English. In light of 'Africanization,' however, the emissaries warned that there was resistance to the abandonment of Yoruba, Igbo, Hausa and other languages, which made it recommendable that the program adopt a hybrid nature, subsidizing the publication of texts in local vernaculars and in English in order to guarantee the gradual literacy of populations and favor English-speaking in the long term.

Specifically in terms of Nigeria, Franklin established itself there between 1964 and 1968, with funding from USAID, the Ford Foundation and local government. Although the Civil War which began in 1967 had affected its activities in the country, the program was successful, taking advantage of the pre-existing publishing industry which being mostly English was a powerful colonial heritage. This thwarted a local aspiration, identified in the soundings made by Franklin in Ghana and Nigeria: the Africanization of a publishing industry until then dominated by the English. Although Franklin had assured the gradual autonomization of 'indigenous publishing cultures,' the belief of the program in the protagonism and cultural superiority of the United States was a premise of its activities. They emphasized the preparation of professionals for basic education and the creation of school libraries, supplied both with text books written by US authors and music books in Yoruba. They were released by publishers which disputed the Nigerian book market, such as Oxford, Nelson, Longman's, London University Press, Heineman, MacMillan, Falafin, African Education Press, African Universities Press, Onibojone Press, Nigercity Publishers and John West Publications. Among the principal events held by Franklin in the country were the US Training Seminars on Publishing and Related Fields and the Educational Writers Workshop, held in Ibadan University and in Nigeria University, which had the objective of identifying, encouraging, and instrumentalizing new talent for literature.²⁶

In 1966, the program expanded its activities into East Africa, again choosing former British colonies: Kenya and Tanzania. The group who prepared the project for the two countries consisted of Shirley Smith Anderson, former member of the Franklin's African-American Institute, who had lived in the region; Eunice Blake Bohanon, a children's book consultant, a former publisher from J. B. Lippincott Company and president of the Children's Book Council; Emerson Brown, vice-president of McGraw-Hill Book Company and former president of the American Textbooks Publishers Institute; Alden H. Clark, vice-president of Franklin for Africa; George Lenox, associate director of East-West Center Press from the University of Hawaii; Hilary Ng'weno, director of Franklin in Nairobi and former publisher of The Daily Nation, also in the capital of Kenya; and John Rensenbrink, associate professor of Bowdoin College in Maine, United States. Franklin encouraged three principal types of production encouraged by Franklin in the two countries: 1) books imported from the United States and African countries; 2) translations and adaptation of books from the US and other places; 3) books written by local authors, whether in Swahili, the principal local language, or in English. Also emphasized was the purpose of stimulating primary and secondary school libraries, as well as guaranteeing the distribution of the US bibliography through the already existing networks, such as the Tanganyika Library Service. As in West Africa, the teaching of English was incorporated as an important task, not only in basic education, but as a second language for adults. In the case of Tanzania, the program met this demand through a partnership with the Institute of Adult Education and Community Development.²⁷

After Kenya's independence, proclaimed three years previously in 1963, Franklin's emissaries interpreted that there were four different systems of education coexisting in the country: European, Asian, African, and Arab. The European was concerned with the training of public employees; the Asian for artists and traders; the African, for workers; the Arab existed principally for religious purposes. The system was seen by Franklin as unequal and discriminatory, responsible for deepening social asymmetries. As a result the Kenyan education unit and the consequent development of a sense of nationality became the principal objectives of the program. Kenyan traditions had to be respected, but the schools had to be lay, extirpate racial, tribal, or religious distinctions, encourage respect for the individual personality of children, promote adaptability to change, and teach them "modern methods of productive organization."²⁸ Franklin's operations in the country were part of educational reform enacted by the president, Jomo Kenyatta, a former guerrilla from the Mau Mau anti-colonialist group who, once in the presidency, conciliated an exotic aesthetic, appealing to Kenyan national identity and to Africanity, and policies with a pro-Western nature, which included the control of information by press agencies, which ironically were British, such as Reuters.

Books certainly played a central role in this process. Franklin proposed the creation and expansion of school libraries under the auspices of the Kenya National Library Services, linked to the Ministry of Education. In relation to text books for basic education, they were divided into three sections: English, Swahili, and mathematics, issued respectively by Oxford, Sheldon Press, and Longman's. Other contracts were made with publishers already active in the country, such as the Africa Literature Bureau, Macmillan, Nelson, and Evans Brothers. According to the program's emissaries, the local publishing industry was still, and would remain so for a long time, dependent on English publishers, such as Oxford, Longsman's, Macmillan, Nelson, Evans Brothers, and George Phillips. Nevertheless, the program relied on the training of Kenyans with the potential to gradually assume the publishing market. Local contacts included Noah Sempira, director of the East African Literature Bureau and Jonathan Kariara, former Book Production Officer from the same institution, which until that moment had been little used by Oxford publishers.

Franklin's experience in Africa is indicative of the program's conditions in its last decade. After the retirement of Datus Smith in 1967, the program faced the reduction of federal transfers and came to focus almost entirely on the production of teaching material until its termination in 1978. Smith was followed by three presidents: Michael Harris, a former member of the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, Carroll Bowen from MIT Press (who had participated in projects with USIA), and John Kyle, from East-West Center Press, University of Hawaii. While the Smith era represented the apogee of the program, the following three administrations were marked by financial and operational difficulties and the gradual shrinking of Franklin. In 1966, the program was the beneficiary of the assets of the former CBW, to the value of US $17,000 under the justification that the two institutions had similar nature and activities.²⁹ This inheritance reinforced the idea that Franklin operated in tune with US government agencies, at a moment when a series of denunciations against USIA and CIA practices of funding publishing appeared in the print media in the US. Also in 1964, the Republican deputy Glenard Lispcomb, from California, an opponent of President Lyndon Johnson, had presented an accusation to the US Congress against the two agencies, stating that they practiced underground propaganda within and outside the country. Despite the legal opinion favorable to the agencies issued by the Comptroller General of the United States, Joseph Campbell, who analyzed the case, Lipscomb's complaint reverberated in the press, in reports published in various American newspapers, USIA was required to make clarifications to Congress and the people. Two years later, at least 14 newspapers returned to the question, including the two largest periodicals in the United States: The Washington Post and The New York Times.³⁰ The scandal impacted on Franklin Book, the beneficiary of funds from the Asia Foundation, a secret partner of CIA, as well as USIA. Confronted, Datus Smith alleged that if the program had received funds from CIA, it was neither directly nor consciously, and that they were unaware of the origin of the money.³¹

Despite the excitement, USIA continued its activities and kept funding Franklin's projects, increasing the pressure for the latter to use 'definitive' lists, aprioristically prepared by the agency. In 1965, Datus Smith had already lamented the US obsession with communism – and fighting it –, as well as how this had impacted on Franklin's activities. At the beginning of the 1970s, however, Nixon reduced the funds used by the agencies for the production of books and the formation of libraries, which represented not only a response to the internal crisis, but the skepticism of the government in relation to its effectiveness in US propaganda. After that Franklin only received a small amount of funding from USIA and USAID. Since 1967 the program had operated without an important source of income: the Ford Foundation, which made the end of public funding an even more serious question. In 1972, the program's director Kyle decided to look for money from other sources, creating the following year the 'Friends of Franklin' program in which supporters, common citizens enthusiastic about the cause, had to contribute US $1,000 to the program. In 1975, Director Bowen stated that there "was no money in virtue", demonstrating that the decline of Franklin was related to the emphasis of governmental agencies on propaganda – and the decrease of this.³²

In addition to the publications crisis, which threw suspicions on US agencies and foundations, as well as private publishers, accused of association with the shady practices of the government, other factors contributed to the decline of Franklin's operations. The Vietnam War had undermined the international image of the United States, leading to skepticism in relation to the capacity of the country to lead the world towards an emancipatory project. The Watergate Scandal which culminated in the resignation of President Nixon, incarnated the fragility of American democracy in relation to secrecy, privacy, and information security, and served to worsen the international crisis of the authority of the United States. To this was added the association of Franklin with authoritarian regimes accused of disrespecting human rights, such as Middle Eastern autocracies and the military dictatorships of Latin America. In the internal environment of politics and Third World political theory, the crisis of modernization theory and the rise of alternatives, such as dependency theory, put in cheque the optimistic faith in progress and the effectiveness of international aid for the purpose of 'development,' submitting programs such as Franklin to total mistrust.³³

Franklin's first office to close was that of Lahore in 1972. The Arab programs continued to operate in Cairo, some of them receiving support from USIA, but they were closed down in 1974. In 1975 the head office in New York was deactivated, the staff dismissed, and its operations transferred to a space within McGraw-Hill. In 1976, some new projects commenced, such as text books for the Philippines funded by the World Bank, but there were few of them. They dragged on until 1978, when the program's directors met and decided to close it down. The books were donated to the Library of Congress, in which there exists a collection within the Rare Books and Special Collections Division in which the Franklin publications are grouped by language. Despite the melancholic end, during its 26 years of operation, the program created important Transatlantic human and intellectual networks, which Smith remembered with nostalgia in his memories.

The relative judicial, financial, and logistical autonomy of Franklin in relation to the US government, certainly, singularized and distinguished it in relations to other programs, above all USIA, as well as the nature of its printed material, which initially was aimed at the areas of the arts, literature, and the humanities, and over time, was directed at applied natural sciences and text books. However, these characteristics did not exempt it from a place in the cultural diplomacy of the United States. To the contrary, the program acted in parallel with governmental institutions and it was precisely its aura of independence – partially corresponding to reality –, as well as its refusal of flagrantly political themes, which guaranteed it the legitimacy necessary for the success of its projects. Presenting itself as a democratic institution, wanting to stimulate in the countries in which it operated an autonomous publishing market and to encourage the native intelligentsia, Franklin made itself effective as a powerful arm of propaganda.

The propaganda dimension of its operations should not suggest a lack of belief in the emancipation of men by knowledge. In effect Franklin considered reading networks to be important for the strengthening of civil society and for the sedimentation of democracy. In this sense it resembled the cosmopolitan communication networks which presided the emergence and creation of liberal societies.³⁴ The consecration of vernacular languages and the circulation of printed material were capable of awakening the sense of community, belonging, and empathy between people who lived in regions that were relatively distant from each other, making possible the imagination of something such as nations at the beginning of Western modernity.³⁵ Similarly, book circulation networks were important mechanisms for the creation of nineteenth century empires which, at the same time, approximated the colonizers from the civilization matrix and created among Europeans ideation about their overseas dominions. In British India, for example, the members of the Indian Civil Service constituted a hybrid body among English and natives, all enlightened and responsible for the task of translating books and also the censorship of authors and publishers which, supported by interminable process, wrapped in judicial clothing, ensured the liberal appearance of the government.³⁶ The books translated and distributed by Franklin thereby incarnated a typically contemporaneous civilizing mission and in tune with the Cold War agenda: relating education and literacy with the pretended universality of the US liberal democratic platform.