The common sunflower has a longer history than its familiar place in gardens might suggest. Native to North America, it was cultivated by Indigenous peoples long before it became widespread elsewhere. The US Department of Agriculture’s plant guide describes different uses among different communities: even one plant cannot be reduced to a single meaning.1

Culture travels too. A book is translated, a student studies abroad, a musician finds a new audience. Such encounters can create curiosity and relationships that last beyond a single visit. Governments have also tried to encourage them, hoping that cultural ties will serve diplomacy. But what happens when an exchange between people becomes an instrument of national policy? Can it still be a genuine conversation?

That question runs through Richard T. Arndt’s The First Resort of Kings: American Cultural Diplomacy in the Twentieth Century. Arndt spent twenty-four years as an American cultural diplomat. His book follows the development of US cultural diplomacy from its earlier roots through the institutional changes of the late twentieth century. It is also a practitioner’s account: he describes it as both a story and a memoir, shaped by his particular experiences.2

His answer is hopeful, but not uncomplicated. He believes patient cultural and educational relationships can matter profoundly. He also worries that governments may ask them to carry immediate political messages, leaving less room for the independence and reciprocity on which meaningful exchange depends. His history invites us to consider not only what culture can accomplish, but who gets to decide what an exchange is for.

Exchange and national interest

Arndt distinguishes the cultural relationships that develop through ordinary contact from cultural diplomacy, which he describes as government officials seeking to shape those relationships in the national interest. Students, scholars, books and ideas can cross borders without a government program. A government can also support or direct such connections.3

That distinction makes two things visible at once. An exchange may give participants a real opportunity to learn from one another, while the institution funding it has objectives of its own. A national interest does not automatically make every conversation dishonest. It does, however, make it worth asking how much freedom participants have, whose interests shape the program, and whether learning can move in both directions.

For Arndt, the difference between patient exchange and a short-term campaign matters. An educational relationship may take years to develop; its most important effects may be difficult to count. A government facing immediate pressure, by contrast, may want a clear message and quick evidence that audiences have received it. The tension between those time horizons is one of the book’s most enduring themes.

Two clocks

Patient exchange

An educational relationship may take years to develop; its most important effects may be difficult to count.

Short-term campaign

A government facing immediate pressure may want a clear message and quick evidence that audiences have received it.

Two panels. On the left, a sunflower shown at three stages over a season: seed, seedling and full flower. On the right, a vase of cut sunflowers.
Patient exchange and a short-term campaign, as a picture: a plant grown over seasons, and a bouquet arranged for the moment. A metaphor, not a finding.

A beginning shaped by competing aims

Arndt places the establishment of the US State Department’s Division of Cultural Relations in 1938 within a longer history of educational links and inter-American diplomacy. In his account, interest in closer relations with Latin America preceded the immediate pressures of the approaching European war. He also describes officials’ concern about competing foreign influence and their preference for a long-range approach built around exchange.4

This is an instructive beginning because the motives were not simple. A program could be discussed in the language of mutual understanding while taking shape in a region marked by unequal power and strategic interests. Arndt’s account recognizes both the aspiration to respect neighbours and the political context in which that aspiration was expressed.

The important question is not whether the founders possessed perfectly pure motives. It is whether the structure of a program allows people on both sides to contribute to its purpose. Who chooses the participants? Who decides what knowledge matters? Can the partners disagree, or are they expected to receive a story already prepared for them? These questions extend Arndt’s argument; they are not findings he proves for every exchange.

One-way or two-way?

One-way exchange

  • Chosen for them
  • Knowledge decided in advance
  • Agreement expected

Two-way exchange

  • Chosen together
  • Knowledge shared
  • Room to disagree

Three questions to ask of any exchange. They are Arndt’s questions to us, not findings.

The people behind the program

One of the book’s strengths is its attention to the people whose work made institutional arrangements tangible. Arndt recounts the experience of scholars and cultural officers who connected universities, libraries and colleagues across borders. In chapter 9, he discusses historian John K. Fairbank in China during 1942–47 and art historian Charles Rufus Morey in Rome during 1945–50. Both examples belong to the period before the US Information Agency was created in 1953.5

Arndt values the professional knowledge and relationships such people brought to their work. His point is not simply that an institution can send a representative abroad. It is that a representative must listen, understand local circumstances and work with others whose knowledge and priorities matter. A program’s public announcement tells us little about what those relationships looked like in practice.

The example also raises a question for the reader. Arndt’s vantage point is largely that of an American official looking at diplomats and institutions. To understand a particular exchange more fully, we would also need to hear from the people who met them: local scholars, students, cultural workers and others whose choices shaped what happened. Their perspectives could support, complicate or challenge the official account. They cannot be assumed from it.

The story in dates
  1. 1938Division of Cultural Relations
  2. 1942–50Fairbank in China; Morey in Rome
  3. 1953US Information Agency created
  4. Oct 1977Reorganization announced
  5. Apr 1978New agency begins

Dates as Arndt's account gives them; see sources 4 to 6.

When institutions change

The later chapters return repeatedly to the relationship between educational exchange and government information work. Arndt regards institutional independence as a condition that helps cultural work resist pressure to become a vehicle for immediate persuasion. His account of the Carter administration’s reorganization gives this concern a concrete setting.6

The plan to reorganize the information and cultural functions was announced in October 1977; the new agency began in April 1978. Arndt is sharply critical of the change. Yet his own discussion also records that cultural officers did not all respond alike: some continued to hope a merged organization could work. That disagreement matters. The arrangement was contested by the people involved, not simply experienced in one uniform way.

The issue is bigger than the name of an agency. Combining functions might offer coordination and resources; separating them might protect professional independence. Neither structure alone guarantees an equal or open exchange. To assess the result, we would need to look at how decisions were made, what participants could say and do, and whose interests were served over time.

Two panels. On the left, two potted plants side by side in separate pots. On the right, two plants sharing one larger pot.
Separate or combined? Each arrangement has strengths; neither alone guarantees an open exchange.

What closeness can and cannot mean

Arndt writes with conviction, and at times his confidence in the power of cultural diplomacy reaches beyond what his narrative can establish on its own. In the afterword he considers whether a stronger cultural effort might have helped repair trust or bring opposing sides closer. Those are possibilities he argues for, not outcomes the book demonstrates through a controlled comparison.7

The distinction matters because understanding and agreement are different things. People may learn about one another’s histories and values without resolving a political dispute. Cultural contact can create openings for further conversation, but it cannot by itself settle questions of power, resources or justice. Equally, the fact that an exchange has a political context does not mean the relationships formed within it have no value.

This is where the book is most useful as a starting point. It encourages us to look beyond the visible event—a performance, a scholarship or a visit—and ask about the relationships around it. Was there room to listen? Did partners have a say in the exchange? What continued after the program ended, and how would its participants describe its value?

Beyond the event

  1. The event

    A performance, a scholarship, a visit.

  2. The relationships

    Who met whom, who had a say.

  3. What continued

    What lasted after the program ended.

Was there room to listen?

Look beyond the visible event to the relationships around it.

A sunflower is not proof that culture brings people together. It is a reminder to look more closely at something that appears familiar and ask about the people and histories behind it. Arndt’s book invites a similar curiosity about cultural diplomacy: not to choose between friendship and interest as if only one can exist, but to examine how both shape the encounter.

A small table with a teapot, two cups and two chairs, one of them pulled slightly out as if inviting someone to sit.
Was there room to listen?

What this evidence can and cannot tell us

It can tell us how one experienced practitioner, Richard T. Arndt, describes the way American cultural diplomacy was organized, funded and argued over in the twentieth century, with dated examples such as the 1938 Division of Cultural Relations and the 1977 to 1978 reorganization.

It cannot tell us whether exchanges actually improved relations between countries (the book argues this; it does not measure it), how the people who received these programs experienced them, or whether the American pattern fits other countries, including Canada.

Sources

  1. USDA Natural Resources Conservation Service, Annual Sunflower (Helianthus annuus L.), p. 1.
  2. Richard T. Arndt, The First Resort of Kings: American Cultural Diplomacy in the Twentieth Century (Potomac Books, copyright 2005; first paperback edition 2006), introduction, pp. ix–x and xv–xvi. Bibliographic record.
  3. Arndt, introduction, pp. xviii–xix.
  4. Arndt, chapter 3, pp. 49–55.
  5. Arndt, chapter 9, p. 197; chapter 12, p. 264.
  6. Arndt, chapter 23, pp. 509–511.
  7. Arndt, afterword, pp. 544–546.

Credits

Written by Dr. Abdelrahman Kamel

Illustrations: Melos botanical plates (generated, edited by the author)