On 18 March 1941 Duff Cooper, the British Minister of Information, sent a short but important letter to the President of the Board of Education. In it he discussed the lack of American studies in British schools and universities and called upon the Board urgently to consider ways of improving the situation. On the face of it, the moment was hardly propitious for minor educational reform. Britain was fighting on alone against Germany and Italy, the Battle of the Atlantic had worsened, and new setbacks were about to befall British armies in Libya, Greece and Crete. Yet Duff Cooper's suggestions were adopted with an alacrity that was remarkable by Whitehall standards. An ambitious programme to promote the study of America was quickly set in train for elementary and secondary schools, followed, though more slowly and less successfully, by action at the university level. Throughout, the Ministry of Information and the Board of Education enjoyed the enthusiastic support of other Government departments, particularly the Foreign Office, and of outside bodies including the BBC and Oxford University Press. Also closely involved were the American Ambassador, John Winant, several US Consuls around Britain and distinguished American historians such as Allan Nevins and Henry Steele Commager. These developments constitute an important and neglected episode in the story of American studies in Britain. They also offer an interesting sidelight on the place of cultural diplomacy in the foreign policies of the British and US Governments during World War Two.

In analyzing the thought of the 1930s, historians have usually concentrated on the reactions of various liberal and leftist critics of Roosevelt's New Deal reform programs. A few, however, have stressed that in opposition both to the New Deal's regulated welfare capitalism and to the left's many-faceted demands for a more openly radical program, the period also witnessed some significant theorizing that remained conservative and even reactionary. Considerable attention, for instance, has been given to the Nashville Agrarians who in November 1930 published I'll Take My Stand, their ardent manifesto of Southern cultural independence from the capitalistic, urban-industrial north. Yet it is not so well known that the Jeffersonian social theory they espoused was the basis for a broader, national effort to promote the decentralization of American government and industry and to foster greater economic self-sufficiency through a wider distribution of property. For ten years, 1937–1947, the journal Free America served as an organ for this “decentralist” movement.

American planning in the twentieth century has been dominated by a meliorist approach to environmental problems. This dominance has been challenged, more or less ineffectively, by a more radical tradition. The sharpest exchange between the two took place in the interwar years in the city and state of New York, respectively the nation's largest metropolis and then its most populous state. The problems of city and state were the problems of the new industrial-urban nation in microcosm. They attracted the attention of the leading figures in each camp and led to an abortive proposal for a state plan on the part of the radicals or insurgents and, in terms of its implementation, a much more successful Regional Plan of New York and its Environs (1921–30), the work of meliorist planners. This essay explores the problems of the metropolitan region in the interwar years, the alternative strategies put forward, the controversies between the opposing schools of thought and their relative successes and failures.

In October 1938, Edmund Wilson advised Malcolm Cowley to get out of politics, both “revolutionary and literary alike… because what you're really practicing is not politics but literature…. ” Within two years, in the wake of the Hitler—Stalin pact and war, Cowley had withdrawn from radical politics. In early 1940, politically confused and dispirited, he wrote to Wilson:

I am left standing pretty much alone, in the air, unsupported, a situation that is much more uncomfortable for me than it would be for you. Since my normal instinct is toward cooperation. For the moment I want to get out of every God damned thing.

Cowley publicly announced his resignation from the League of American Writers in August 1940. He had helped to create the League in 1935 and had once been one of its officers. Deciding to avoid all further public political debates, he retreated to his Connecticut farmhouse. “Anyone who was as close to the radical movement as I was is going to be deeply shaken by breaking connection with it,” he explained to his close friend Kenneth Burke. “At that point the religious metaphor is absolutely accurate. You leave a church, and like a defrocked priest you can't think about anything else for a while.”