The next 250: Cultural clout

During World War II Robert Woodruff, the head of the Atlanta-based Coca-Cola Co., arranged with the War Department to ensure that GIs overseas were never without their favorite fizzy beverage. In the process Woodruff gave Coke a global reach it retained and built upon after the war. During the 1950s and 1960s the distinctive red-and-white-labeled bottles were the most obvious manifestation of the spread of American cultural influence around the world.

Some people called this influence “soft power." Others branded it cultural imperialism. Few doubted its significance. Yet what that significance consisted of was hard to pin down. Did drinking Coke make foreigners more likely to support American policies in Vietnam? There was no evidence it did. Did it enhance the spread of democracy? Again, none could say so with confidence.

It did export the values of capitalism, a nickel-bottle at a time. Since the values of capitalism and those of America overlapped substantially, Coke could reasonably be said to be an instrument of American soft power. Or of American imperialism.

Films were another cultural export during the postwar decades. Hollywood had honed its production techniques for decades. Printing extra copies for foreign distribution was cheap, even when the costs of dubbing and subtitles were factored in. At a time when film industries in most other countries were undeveloped, Hollywood hogged screens worldwide.

More fully than Coke, American films created an image of America in the minds of foreigners. It was, for the most part, an appealing image. Many who saw it wanted to move to America. Some did. Others wanted their countries to become more like America. Some countries did, in some ways. Young people wore clothes like what they saw on the screen. Sometimes those young people demanded freedom like what they saw in the movies. Protesters in Beijing’s Tiananmen Square in 1989 erected a knock-off of the Statue of Liberty.

Another element of cultural influence was American higher education. Starting after 1945, millions of young foreigners traveled to America to study. Most developed a positive impression of their host country and took that impression with them when they went home. Because the students sent to America tended to be the best and brightest, in subsequent years many attained positions from which they could act on their affinity for America and its values.

Yet cultural influence didn't flow in one direction only. American blues music inspired British bands who then exported their version to America in the 1960s. The Beatles and the Rolling Stones spearheaded the British invasion, becoming far more successful in the States than they had been in the UK. The musical traffic across the Atlantic was augmented by Afro-pop and other genres of “world music," until at times it was hard to know what originated where.

A few American sports had influence abroad. Baseball caught on before the war in Latin America and Japan. Latin American players found their way onto the rosters of American major league teams during the 1960s. Japanese players were fewer to emigrate to America and came later. But both groups left their mark on American baseball, just as American baseball had left its mark on their home countries. Basketball originated in the United States and spread through the Americas and Europe. Again there was re-export, as players from Latin America and especially Europe became a serious force in the NBA by the 1990s. 

Meanwhile Americans learned to like soccer, the sport most of the rest of the world called football. Americans and American teams struggled to be competitive at the highest level of the best leagues in the world. American women did better than American men, winning world championships and Olympic gold medals. Some top European and Latin American players semi-retired to American teams, where they earned big bucks playing out their final years.

Other countries developed film industries that challenged Hollywood. India's Bollywood—a word-mash of Bombay, now Mumbai, and Hollywood—eventually produced more films than Hollywood, and for larger audiences. Japan and China created video games that rivaled American games in quality and number respectively.

By the late twentieth century, America's moment of cultural imperialism, if that's what it had been, had passed. Riding the tide of globalization, cultural influences sloshed this way and that around the planet. The first quarter of the twenty-first century took some of the shine off globalization, but the global culture survived. 

As America entered its second quarter-millennium, it seemed likely to be but one of many contributors to that culture. America would continue to benefit from the global reach of the English language. Americans remained the most numerous national group of anglophones. Taylor Swift found large audiences in each of the score of countries on her 2024 world tour. But American artists had no monopoly on global success, not least because they had no monopoly on English. The Swedish quartet Abba, singing in English, was the biggest musical act in the world in the 1970s.

America's moment of cultural hegemony had been brief. It wouldn’t return. But Americans could still take comfort—at least the Coca-Cola drinkers among them could. The soft drink with the famously secret formula remained the single most popular brand in the world, sold in more than 200 countries and territories.