Episode 8: Bully Pulpits Abroad

A full transcript of this episode is available here.

This is the eighth and final episode of Season Three: The Bully Pulpit. This season, we explored many domestic policy issues, such as healthcare, women's suffrage, and land rights. But here in the 21st century, we all know that the president's voice reaches far beyond the borders of the United States. Has it always been this way? And how does the bully pulpit reach audiences abroad?

We invited three scholars to help us understand the many ways presidents have utilized the bully pulpit to speak to the world. We'll begin our conversation with Dr. Jay Sexton, Professor of History at the University of Missouri. Dr. Sexton explains how presidents thought about foreign policy and the bully pulpit in the 19th century, and how that all changed when Teddy Roosevelt took office.

We then move to the presidents of the World War II era with Dr. Kaete O'Connell. A former fellow with us at the SMU Center for Presidential History, Dr. O’Connell is now a fellow at Yale university. She explains how WWII ushered in a new era in presidential communications abroad.

Finally, we invited Dr. Sam Lebovic of George Mason University to share his fascinating insights on how the US government expanded the use of the bully pulpit to include a much more complex, bureaucratic, and powerful web of communication that spanned the globe. We promise you'll never think of passports the same way again.

Let's get started.

Guests:

Dr. Jay Sexton is the Rich and Nancy Kinder Chair of Constitutional Democracy at the University of Missouri

Dr. Jay Sexton is the Rich and Nancy Kinder Chair of Constitutional Democracy and Professor of History. A native of Salina, Kansas, he returned to the Midwest to the University of Missouri in 2016 after spending the better part of two decades at Oxford University in England. Sexton started in Oxford as a grad student Marshall Scholar and worked his way up to being Director of the Rothermere American Institute (RAI) and, upon his departure, being elected a Distinguished Fellow of the RAI and an Emeritus Fellow of Corpus Christi College.

Sexton specializes in the political and economic history of the nineteenth century. His research situates the United States in its international context, particularly as it related to the dominant global structure of the era, the British Empire. His most recent book, A Nation Forged by Crisis: A New American History (Basic Books, 2018), argues that international forces have shaped the course of U.S. history during its greatest moments of transformative change.

His other books include Debtor Diplomacy: Finance and American Foreign Relations in the Civil War Era, 1837-1873 (Oxford, 2005; 2nd ed. 2014) and The Monroe Doctrine: Empire and Nation in Nineteenth-Century America (Hill and Wang, 2011). He also has published three major collaborative projects: The Global Lincoln (co-edited with Richard Carwardine, Oxford, 2011); Empire’s Twin: U.S. Anti-Imperialism from the Founding to the Age of Terrorism (co-edited with Ian Tyrrell, Cornell, 2015); and Crossing Empires: Taking U.S. History into Transimperial Terrain (co-edited with Kristin Hoganson, Duke, 2020).

Dr. Kaete O’Connell is the Kissinger Visiting Scholar at Yale University

Dr. Kaete O’Connell is the Kissinger Visiting Scholar at Yale’s Jackson Institute for Global Affairs. A historian of U.S. foreign relations, her interests lie at the intersections of conflict and culture. She is particularly interested in food diplomacy, the use of a nation’s resources to shape international politics, influence global markets, and foster cultural understanding.

Dr. O’Connell received her PhD from Temple University in 2019. Before coming to Yale, she was a postdoctoral fellow at Southern Methodist University’s Center for Presidential History where she worked behind the scenes producing this very podcast, The Past, The Promise, The Presidency. O’Connell also served as Assistant Director at the Center for the Humanities at Temple (CHAT), was a fellow in residence at the Leibniz Institute for European History in Mainz, and spent a year teaching in the American Studies department at the University of Tübingen.

She is currently writing a book that illuminates the historical complexities behind U.S. policymakers’ embrace of food as a diplomatic tool in the early Cold War. Under contract with the University of Virginia Press, Tasting Freedom: U.S. Occupied Germany and the Origins of Cold War Food Diplomacy provides the first in-depth study of food policy in the U.S. Zone. It argues that the origins of food aid as an anti-communist strategy are located in postwar Germany.

Follow Kaete O’Connell on Twitter @kmocon.

Dr. Sam Lebovic is an Associate Professor at George Mason University

Dr. Sam Lebovic is an historian of U.S. politics, culture, civil liberties, and foreign relations. He teaches broadly in these areas; his research focuses on the ways that democratic life and the public sphere have been shaped by corporate power and the national security state in the twentieth century. Educated at the University of Sydney and the University of Chicago, he held postdoctoral fellowships at NYU and Rutgers before coming to George Mason in 2013.

His brand new second book, A Righteous Smokescreen: Postwar America and the Politics of Cultural Globalization, focuses on efforts to manage the international flow of information from the 1940s to the 1970s – educational exchange programs, international cultural institutions, visa and passport policies. The book shows how the U.S. sought to export its culture at the same time that it insulated its own public sphere from foreign influence. The result, the book reveals, was a lopsided flow of international culture: the world knew more about American culture than Americans knew about the world, a development that helps us rethink the histories of U.S. culture, foreign policy, and globalization.

Lebovic’s first book, Free Speech and Unfree News (Harvard, 2016), provided a new account of American press freedom in the twentieth century.  It argued that the right to free speech was inadequate to produce a democratic press in an era defined by corporate media consolidation and the rise of state secrecy.  Free Speech and Unfree News won the Paul Murphy Prize in Civil Liberties from the American Society for Legal History and the Ellis Hawley Prize from the Organization of American Historians.

Lebovic’s essays and articles on media, politics, and history have been published in a number of leading scholarly journals and edited collections, as well as such places as Dissent, The Boston Review, the Los Angeles Review of Books, The Boston Globe, Columbia Journalism Review, and Politico.