Lonnie Johnson: "Getting to know the United States after 1945"

“Getting to know the United States after 1945 – Exemplary U.S. “exchange of persons” programs in postwar Austria: Fulbright and Smith-Mundt”

Lonnie Johnson

Austrian familiarity with the United States was exceptionally limited before the end of World War II. The United States was a completely underexposed field of study: partially due to the limited political contact of Austria-Hungary with the United States before 1914 and partially due to the cultural pretense of deutsche Wissenschaft und Kultur, which fully embraced the British imperial pretense about the alleged inferiority of American culture.  There were many different strands of anti-Americanism in Austria ranging from 19^th century German Romanticism and Roman Catholic conservativism over 20^th century Communist, Austro-Marxist, Christian Social clerico-fascist, and National Socialist traditions.

The U.S. occupation of Austria (1945-55) represented the first systematic encounter of Austrians with the United States, and the U.S. government employed a wide number of information programs (film, radio, print, libraries) to educate and inform the population of Austria about the United States and influence public opinion in the interest of the United States, especially after the advent of the Cold War in 1947.  Although it aspired to influence and inform elite opinion in particular, educational and cultural exchange was viewed as a medium distinct from “information” because it was reciprocal in nature and had fundamentally different objectives (the “promotion of mutual understanding”).

This talk will look at the first decade of the “exchanges of persons” between Austria and the United States that were facilitated by the Fulbright Act of 1946 (with establishment of a binational Austrian-American Fulbright Commission in 1950 and the first bilateral exchanges of Austrian and American students and scholars in 1951-52) and the Smith-Mundt Act of 1948 (U.S. Information and Educational Exchange Act of 1948), which facilitated all other U.S. “exchanges of persons” including the training of Austrian journalists and the identification of other “young leaders” and opinion makers for visits to the United States or the dispatch of U.S. “experts” – ranging from engineers to artists and jazz bands – to Austria under the auspices of “educational and cultural exchange.”  It also will illustrate the enormous longitudinal impact of these exchanges by identifying exemplary participants in the Smith-Mundt and Fulbright Exchange Programs. 

Bio:

Lonnie R. Johnson, a native of Minnesota and graduate of St. John’s University (Collegeville, MN), studied abroad in Vienna as an undergraduate in 1973-74 and then stayed to study philosophy and history at the University of Vienna (dr. phil).  He has forty years of administrative experience in study abroad, research management, and international education. He held positions at IES Abroad, Vienna, the oldest and largest study abroad program in Austria; das Institut für die Wissenschaften vom Menschen, Vienna; and the Austrian Academic Exchange Service (OeAD) before serving as the executive director of the Fulbright Commission in Austria from 1997 until 2019. 

He has published books and articles on Viennese, Austrian, and Central European history, with the third revised edition of his wide recognized Central Europe: Enemies, Neighbors, Friends appearing at Oxford University Press in 2010.  His recent research has focused on the history of the global Fulbright Program. He currently is working on a monograph for the University of Arkansas Press with the working title Remembering and Forgetting Fulbright: The Remarkable History of the Fulbright Program, 1946-2012.