This essay intends to be a practical aid to researchers interested in the Office of Inter-American Affairs (OIAA), also known as the Office for Coordination of Commercial and Cultural Relations between the American Republics (OCCCRBAR) or the Office of the Coordinator of Inter-American Affairs (OCIAA).1 The largest and most important part of the OIAA's sizeable archival collection is housed at the College Park, Maryland, facility of the United States National Archives and Records Administration, within Record Group 229. A smaller part is located at the Rockefeller Archive Center (RAC) in Sleepy Hollow, New York.By mid-1940, the military advances of Nazi Germany had triggered deep security concerns in the United States. While news on the events in Europe held center stage, various developments in the Americas heightened the sense of alarm in governmental quarters, the business community, and the mass media. Due to war-related disruptions of international trade and capital flows, many Latin American countries appeared to be headed toward a severe economic downturn. Such economic disruptions were expected to produce political destabilization that, in turn, was feared to provide a fertile ground for Axis interference and "Fifth Column" activities. In short, to many observers in the United States, the Latin American republics seemed ripe for a political, cultural, and economic penetration, or even invasion, by Nazi Germany and her allies.2The Office for Coordination of Commercial and Cultural Relations between the American Republics, predecessor to the OIAA, was created by order of the Council of National Defense on August 16, 1940, to respond to perceptions of a massive threat to the security of the United States. It was established, essentially, to assist in the preparation and coordination of policies to stabilize the Latin American economies, to secure and deepen U.S. influence in the region, and to combat Axis inroads into the hemisphere, particularly in the commercial and cultural spheres. This tall order seemed to require not just forceful and well-coordinated policies but a thorough mobilization of the nation's resources. The OIAA was to facilitate such a comprehensive initiative by serving as a liaison between various entities of government and between the public and private sectors. Toward this end, it engaged, as advisers or members of staff, representative and influential citizens from a variety of spheres, including finance, commerce, industry, communications and mass media, culture, and education.3 Headed by American businessman and philanthropist Nelson A. Rockefeller (1908 – 1979), who held the position of the "Coordinator of Inter-American Affairs," the OIAA engaged in a vast range of activities, many of which remain to be studied. It operated both north and south of the Rio Grande and on a truly impressive scale.During its first months of operations, the OIAA led a somewhat uneasy existence alongside other more powerful governmental entities. Its organizational boundaries and administrative competencies were ill defined, which led to considerable tensions with other agencies and with the Department of State. In April 1941, the latter moved to assert its authority on all issues related to foreign policy, and most of the OIAA's activities thereafter were subject to the department's oversight and approval.4 On April 10, 1946, the OIAA was abolished by executive order. By this date, most of its functions had either been discontinued or integrated into other federal agencies, primarily the Department of State.At its height, the OIAA's staff counted upon some 1,100 employees in the United States and 300 technicians and field experts stationed in Latin America.5 As such, the so-called Rockefeller Shop remained a rather small entity among rapidly expanding governmental quarters. Yet, even in its modest size, the agency was able to establish a considerable presence in both Latin America and the United States. This was possible because the office relied, to a considerable degree, on other entities, organizations, and networks to carry out its mission. The arguably most impressive of such networks were the coordination committees.With a total of 59 coordination committees employing (by early 1944) some 690 aides and assistants, the OIAA achieved a considerable presence in all major population centers south of the Rio Grande.6 Operating under the more or less strict supervision of U.S. embassies and legations, the coordination committees usually comprised the leading representatives of the American communities: primarily local executives of large U.S. corporations but also journalists and others.7 Many of the coordination-committee members had resided in the region for quite a number of years and, in so doing, had developed considerable local expertise, including an understanding of business practices, national sensibilities, linguistic variations, and cultural codes. While some were more active than others, the coordination committees generally assisted in program development and implementation on the ground, and they reported on the successes or failures of given strategies, particularly in the informational and cultural field. The more active ones developed highly original initiatives of their own. Thus, the coordination committee in Buenos Aires produced radio shows that, although loaded with propaganda, reached very favorable audience ratings before they were successively frozen out of Argentina's networks by state censorship. Financed partly by general appropriations of the OIAA and partly by voluntary contributions raised among the American communities, the coordination committees developed into an important component of the OIAA's organizational setup. They did not, however, necessarily see eye-to-eye with headquarters in Washington or the embassies supervising them; this created the potential for friction, but in general, it seems that the war emergency provided a force of cohesion that was strong enough to secure close cooperation.8To carry out its mission in the other American republics, the OIAA also used subsidiary corporations, establishing five such entities during the course of its existence: the Institute of Inter-American Affairs, the Institute of Inter-American Transportation, the Inter-American Navigation Corporation, the Inter-American Educational Foundation, and Prencinradio. As we will explain, the subsidiary corporations facilitated the undertaking of larger-scale operations that required close cooperation with Latin American authorities and were financed through bilateral funds or dependant on longer-term budgetary commitments. In addition, Prencinradio served as a screen for covert operations that the U.S. government did not wish to be associated with in public. All five subsidiary corporations were transferred to the State Department in 1946.9In comparative terms, the Office of Inter-American Affairs has attracted rather limited scholarly studies. It is, of course, a mandatory component of accounts of the Good Neighbor policy and inter-American relations during World War II; even so, rarely has the OIAA received more than a passing treatment.10 Those readers interested in the administrative and organizational history of the office will have to consult the official account published in 1947 as part of the Historical Reports on the War Administration.11 Thereafter, a handful of studies have focused squarely on the OIAA, mainly unpublished doctoral dissertations.12 A number of colorful biographies and autobiographies inform on the leadership provided by Rockefeller, his entourage of assistants and advisers, and their interactions with the upper echelons of the Roosevelt administration.13 Much less is known about the office's activities and how these worked out on the ground. While it is well known, for instance, that the OIAA maintained large-scale health and sanitation programs in various parts of the region, very few researchers have taken a close look at these activities.14 Some aspects of the agency's film, radio, and press activities have come under closer scrutiny due to an upsurge of communications and film studies published since the 1970s.15 More recently, the turn toward cultural history and, more specifically, toward the cultural dimensions of international relations, seems to have sparked a renewed interest into the OIAA's cultural programs.16 However, much remains to be explored and the following pages endeavor to provide a glimpse into largely uncharted territories.It is rather difficult to provide a systematic overview over the OIAA's fields of operations. Not only did it engage in a vast variety of activities, it also was frequently restructured, which led to a loss of some of its earlier assignments to other emergency agencies and to the assumption of new ones during the course of its existence. Moreover, with changing war conditions, the OIAA redefined its priorities at various stages. An additional difficulty, as will be explained below, stems from the poor organization of RG 229.The OIAA's major fields of activities can be grouped under the following systematic categories: economic warfare, economic cooperation, transportation, health and sanitation, food supply, information and propaganda, and cultural and educational activities. These categories do not entirely reflect the official terminology or the organizational setup of the OIAA but were chosen to facilitate an understanding of its main functions.Among the OIAA's earliest and most urgent assignments were a number of issues related to economic warfare — that is, economic measures that aimed to eliminate real or perceived Axis channels of influence in Latin America. Thus, the office helped to compile the "Proclaimed List of Certain Blocked Nationals" (the "Black List") as part of a program designed to identify and replace agents and sales representatives of U.S. firms believed to be pro-Axis. During the early months of the war, this was a voluntary program, and it was largely left to the OIAA to secure the cooperation of American firms until the summer of 1941, when this operational field was transferred to the State Department.17 As is well known, blacklisting soon developed into a larger operation to eradicate firms and corporations owned by Axis nationals, particularly in militarily sensitive areas such as transport and communication systems. The office played a considerable role in the elimination of aviation companies owned or operated by Axis nationals, and it helped to make provisions for the training of Latin American pilots, mechanics, and engineers to facilitate the operation of national commercial airlines.18 At the same time, it compiled and analyzed data to steer preclusive buying operations — that is, the large-scale stockpiling of strategic minerals and other products to prevent them from being exported to the Axis.19 In the course of 1941 – 42, most of the economic-warfare operations were taken over by other specialized agencies. Nevertheless, the OIAA and its coordination committees continued to keep a watchful eye on Axis nationals and sympathizers, particularly in the media and communications sector. Thus, it continued to guide U.S. corporations in their placements of advertisements, in order to avoid sponsoring unfriendly newspapers and radio stations throughout Latin America, and it initiated blacklisting procedures on its own against movie theaters exhibiting Axis-produced films and newsreels.20During the early stages of the war, much of the OIAA's energies were absorbed by the search for effective means to stabilize ailing economies. It sought to develop policies that would help absorb the economic shocks produced by the sudden interruption of trade and capital flows and guide the future development of the region along what were considered sound economic principles. "Economic cooperation" entailed a wide range of activities, including financial assistance, the development of alternative export products and markets, the diversification of economies, the redirection of U.S. import requirements toward Latin American sources, and the encouragement of U.S. investments and tourism in the region. Seeking to engage the private sector, the OIAA gave much publicity to the establishment of Inter-American Development Commissions (IADCs) in the American republics. Incorporating many of the leading businessmen and banking managers of the era, it was hoped that these commissions would bring about practical, lasting and sound results. Yet, both the overall program of economic cooperation and the IADCs specifically faced manifold constraints — constraints that increased as the United States entered the war. Mobilization for war certainly stimulated demand for minerals and other strategic products from Latin America and thereby helped to resolve acute foreign exchange shortages experienced throughout the region during the early stages of the conflict. On the other hand, it also caused severe strains. It fueled inflationary pressures and critically limited efforts toward economic restructuring south of the Rio Grande, as U.S. exports of capital goods — including industrial machinery, transport equipment, and spare parts — were reduced to a mere trickle.21Transportation came to be a major concern as the war progressed and soon emerged as one of the OIAA's major fields of action. We have already referred to activities in the realm of commercial aviation; these programs were eventually taken over by the Department of Transportation. Aviation was certainly not the only sector to cause vexing problems. Severe transportation bottlenecks developed as German submarines took their toll and as U.S. and European merchant vessels serving the inter-American routes were requisitioned for other purposes. Land transportation, too, required urgent action, as the war induced major shifts in Latin America's regional economies and overburdened railway systems came to the brink of collapse. The OIAA labored to prop up transport networks and, with varying degrees of success, engaged in a multitude of activities to alleviate shipping shortages, expand aviation capacities, maintain railway efficiency, and provide roads and waterway transport. Many of these activities focused on areas producing strategic commodities.22 The largest undertaking of this kind was the Mexican Railway Mission. Through this mission, the OIAA provided massive technical assistance in order to safeguard the flow of key minerals and materials from Mexico and to provide a safe transport route for large quantities of machinery, equipment, and supplies that had to be moved to Central America for use in defense programs related to the Panama Canal. As with other large-scale projects that required close cooperation with foreign authorities, the Mexican Railway Mission was carried out through one of the subsidiary corporations, the Institute of Inter-American Transportation.23Health and sanitation came to be one of the more important fields of activity in 1942, when the OIAA pressed for extensive measures to improve health conditions in the other American republics. In arguing for the necessity of such measures, OIAA officials invariably stressed pressing military considerations. Indeed, many of the programs to eliminate malaria, hookworm, and other diseases were concentrated in areas producing strategic commodities (such as the rubber-producing Amazon basin or the mineral-producing Rio Doce valley in Brazil) or close to sites where U.S. military bases were to be established. But the internal documentation suggests that the OIAA's health officers were looking beyond the war emergency and sought to create the institutional foundations for a longer-term engagement. The OIAA's health and sanitation initiatives by and large were carried out through the Institute of Inter-American Affairs (IIAA) and under cooperative arrangements with Latin American governments. These arrangements generally provided for bilateral funding and joint field units, the so-called servicios. Modeled to some extent on the health programs run by the Rockefeller Foundation, the IIAA initiated more than 1,500 projects, including water and sewage treatment plants, hospitals, and health centers. U.S. participation was gradually withdrawn after the war, but the IIAA carried on until the 1950s with a greatly reduced budget.24Health and sanitation came to be part of the OIAA's Department of Basic Economy, which also incorporated a division dealing with issues concerning the food supply. In many parts of Latin America, largely as a result of transport difficulties, food shortages developed into a major problem, as even the most basic dietary staples underwent rapid price increases. The OIAA, however, was not entirely free to choose the areas it would target for relief efforts and was compelled to concentrate primarily on those that had an immediate bearing on the U.S. war effort, such as areas producing strategic commodities or close to U.S. military bases. Thus, it seems that much of these initiatives concentrated on the procurement of food, especially poultry, fresh fruit, and vegetables, for U.S. forces stationed in the Canal Zone and Brazil.25Although some of the methods employed were of a covert nature, information and propaganda was probably the most visible of the OIAA's activities and certainly one of its most important assignments throughout the war.26 The largest of the units engaged in information and propaganda, the Department of Press and Publications, employed some two hundred journalists, editors, translators, visual artists, photographers, and clerks, and it turned out a large variety of publications, including posters, pamphlets, comics, journals, and magazines. It also supplied news services and ready-for-publication articles to a large number of newspapers and magazines throughout the Americas. The Radio Division helped to expand U.S. shortwave capacities, putting the U.S. on par with other nations such as Germany or Britain that had started to expand their foreign broadcasting systems well before the war. Moreover, it cooperated with large networks and smaller educational stations to produce radio shows in Spanish and Portuguese. When the federal government took control over the nation's shortwave stations in November 1942, the OIAA took charge of the programming to Latin America.27 Shortwave radio, however, reached rather limited audiences, and the Radio Division therefore sought to push into local standard-wave broadcasting. In some countries, this was rather successful: the OIAA, through rebroadcast arrangements and programs produced by the coordination committees, came to supply a considerable volume of shows on local stations. In others countries, such activities were narrowly circumscribed by governments eager to protect the airwaves against intrusions from abroad. The Motion Picture Division, in cooperation with large studios in Hollywood, including Disney, and a host of small producers in other parts of the country, sponsored the production of a vast variety of 16-mm subjects to be used in informational campaigns north and south of the Rio Grande.28 Moreover, it worked closely with the large studios to bring the production of commercial feature films and newsreels into line with the requirements of the Good Neighbor policies and hemisphere defense.Incidentally, information and propaganda remained under the control of the OIAA even as other, specialized agencies were created to handle the government's information programs abroad. However, toward the end of the war, the press, radio, and motion-picture departments were trimmed down and incorporated into the Interim Information Service of the State Department. While it is difficult, if not impossible, to gauge their net effect, it is evident that the press, radio, and motion-picture divisions reached mass audiences both in the United States and in Latin America. Thus, to give but one example, by 1944 five million Americans a month watched OIAA-sponsored films on Latin American topics in schools, colleges, community centers, club houses, churches, and elsewhere. Toward the end of the war, roughly the same number of people may be estimated to have attended exhibitions of 16-mm subjects throughout Latin America, in large- and small-scale events organized by local coordination committees.29The messages to be conveyed, of course, were not identical. North of the Rio Grande, the OIAA sought to inspire a "sympathetic understanding" of Latin America and a positive interest in the region as an object of study, travel, or investment. More specifically, it meant to instill a positive disposition toward Roosevelt's Good Neighbor policies and an appreciation of the region's strategic and economic importance for the United States. South of the Rio Grande, the initial output of the divisions engaged in information and propaganda concentrated, to some extent, on the demonstration of the military, industrial, and institutional strength of the United States and its capacity to defend itself and the Americas. Changing war conditions brought about marked changes in emphasis.30 Yet, throughout the war, Rockefeller's propaganda divisions sought to evoke a unifying spirit and identity of the Americas by dwelling on an imaginary of Pan-American heroes, symbols, and rituals, as well as shared historical experience.31The OIAA's cultural and educational activities to some extent paralleled the State Department's Division of Cultural Affairs.32 Thus, it sponsored a number of programs that came to be staples of cultural diplomacy, including cultural and educational exchanges, concerts, art exhibitions, lecture tours, and book fairs.33 Yet, while the Division of Cultural Affairs was running a rather timid program that was largely confined to the realms of cultural highbrows and academics, the OIAA's approach to culture and education was brasher, broader, and more openly concerned with foreign-policy objectives. As a war agency, the OIAA had few qualms about explicitly addressing its purpose. Internal memoranda discuss, for instance, how to convey to Latin America's skeptical intelligentsia that the Colossus of the North was neither devoid of culture nor in any sense spiritually inferior to Europe, how to garner the goodwill of deeply Catholic circles and leaders of thought, or how to attract the educated elites into North American circuits of the arts and sciences.34 Striving to win Latin American hearts and minds on the cultural and spiritual high ground, moreover, did not prevent the OIAA from simultaneously seeking to exploit the attractions of U.S. popular culture for increasingly broad audiences south of the Rio Grande. Hence, it was not shy to employ Walt Disney and well-known Hollywood stars, who toured Central and South America in representation of a less serene, or even frolicking, side of U.S. civilization.As was the case in previously discussed fields of action, some of the activities in the cultural arena responded to immediate security concerns, while others were meant to outlast the war. Thus, the OIAA set out to survey Latin America's school systems in order to gauge the inroads of Germans, Italians, and other foreign influences into the Latin American educational sphere, as well as to support efforts to establish and deepen personal and organizational ties with U.S. institutions of learning. Looking toward the postwar world, it helped to expand teacher-training facilities open to Latin Americans in the United States, and it initiated, in various countries of the region, cooperative school projects in the primary, secondary, and vocational fields. The latter, modeled on the servicios, came to be administered by a subsidiary corporation, the Inter-American Educational Foundation (IAEF), that carried on into the early postwar period.35In the United States, the OIAA offered grants, subsidies, and other support to expand various research centers engaged in Latin American studies, promoted the teaching of (Latin American) Spanish and Portuguese at all levels, and arranged for the production of new textbook materials for classroom use. Cooperating with leading museums throughout the nation, it helped to bring about a considerable number of exhibitions on Latin American art and civilization.36 It assisted in the promotion and translation into English of Latin American authors and helped organize extended lecture tours of Latin American artists, scientists, intellectuals, and businessmen. Its activities were supported by a network of Inter-American Centers and Hospitality Centers scattered throughout the United States, staffed largely by volunteers.37The OIAA's extensive archival collections were declassified during the 1970s. A smaller set, housed at the Rockefeller Archive Center (RAC), contains a part of the correspondence, interoffice memoranda, charts, and other materials pertaining to the immediate office of the coordinator, as well as 59 films produced on behalf of the OIAA.38 The film collection includes educational subjects produced by Julien Bryan for primary- and secondary-school audiences in the United States, as well as short subjects produced by Disney for use in nutrition, health, and literacy campaigns in Latin America. The RAC, moreover, holds some of the periodical materials published by the office, including En Guardia, a glossy monthly magazine modeled on Life and published in Spanish, Portuguese, and French for free distribution throughout Latin America. It also holds periodic internal reports and directives, such as summaries of coordination-committee activities, digests of Latin American press and radio commentary, reports on political developments in the region, and "Daily Content Directives" used to guide news broadcasts to Latin America.39 Since the RAC's finding aids for the Office of the Coordinator of Inter-American Affairs provide a very detailed and accurate description, these materials do not require further explanation here.40The largest part of OIAA documents, publications, and audiovisual materials are located at NARA's College Park facility (Archives II), and most of these are to be found in Record Group (RG) 229. The latter consists of some eight hundred cubic feet of materials, filling more than 1,700 boxes. Most of these are common textual records, including correspondence and memorandums, minutes of meetings, bookkeeping journals, and contracts. RG 229 also contains a very large number of reports, studies, and surveys, ranging from routine reports to very complex technical studies, as well as radio and films scripts. Nontextual records include motion pictures, sound recordings, photographs, maps, drawings, and posters. A rather detailed finding aid is available on-site, but it is of limited usefulness, as much of the collection is poorly organized.41 In many cases, materials related to a given issue are scattered across various sections of the OIAA's vast holdings. It seems as if the contents of the agency's filing cabinets were simply tossed into boxes without any effort to sort out duplicates and insignificant materials and without much concern for the systematic integrity of the holdings. Yet, this lack of archival streamlining is also an advantage: RG 229 contains materials that are usually not considered important enough to keep, particularly in policy fields deemed of minor importance, such as cultural diplomacy.For obvious reasons, it will be impossible to provide a detailed account of these vast holdings. Instead, the following paragraphs will give a brief overview, highlighting some of the issues that might be of special interest to researchers of Latin American or inter-American affairs.RG 229's textual records are arranged in two main categories: the general records and the records of individual organizational units. The general records, grouped into 9 entries, consist of some 540 boxes. Entries 2 – 9 contain administrative manuals and general reports on the OIAA's activities, project registries, and related materials. Entry 1 holds what seems to have been the office's central filing system (Central Files, some 500 boxes). Spanning all fields of activities, the Central Files are subdivided into six major headings: (0) inter-American activities in the United States, (1) basic economy, (2) commercial and financial, (3) information, (4) administration, and (5) alphabetical (explained below).The records of individual organizational units (entries 10 – 156) refer to the files kept by the OIAA's major units — the immediate office of the coordinator and the various departments and divisions. The holdings pertaining to the immediate office of the coordinator (entries 10 – 15) are best viewed together with the materials deposited at the RAC. The departmental files are largely organized along institutional subdivisions as they had developed by the second half of 1944. This setup does not correspond entirely with the organizational scheme followed in the Central Files, as a glance at figure 1 will show. As we might expect, there is considerable overlap between the documentation held in the Central Files and that of the individual organizational units; yet, for practical research purposes they should be viewed as complementary.Thus, materials on the OIAA's activities in the United States are to be found in various sections. Some are located under entries 154 – 56 of the unit files, that is, the Department of Special Services that succeeded the previous Division of Inter-American Activities in the United States. The bulk of the records related to the office's efforts to reach and impress U.S. audiences, however, are to be found under entry 1 (0) of the Central Files. These activities included, for instance, the sponsoring of conferences, lectures, and exhibitions; essay contests; teacher-training courses and the developme