Stein, Sol

Sol Stein was born in Chicago, Illinois, on October 13, 1926 to Louis (a jewelry designer) and Zelda Stein (later a translator for the United Nations). Stein attended City College in New York but interrupted his studies to serve in the United States Army from 1945 to 1947, briefly as an infantry officer, and then as commandant of the three Occupational Training Schools in the American Zone of Germany. He was cited by Lt. General Geoffrey Keyes for having commanded the best educational units in the Third Army Area (American Zone, Germany). Stein returned to his studies and the States and earned his B.S.S. from City College, New York in 1948 and an M.A. from Columbia University the following year. While pursuing a Ph. D. at Columbia from 1949-1951, Stein lectured on social studies at City College. Despite his academic success, Stein switched gears in the early 1950s, leaving academia for the arts and joining the Voice of America's (VoA) Ideological Advisory Staff as a writer and political affairs analyst.

Established in 1942 as part of the Office of War Information, the VoA's initial mandate was to use radio broadcasts to convey accurate and balanced news to an audience abroad, eventually in forty-six languages. Its inaugural broadcast on February 24th 1942 promised that: "The news may be good. The news may be bad. We shall tell you the truth." After the War, the State Department took over responsibility for the organization. By the time Stein joined in 1951, the VoA had carved a new niche for itself as an information agency to counter and challenge Soviet propaganda in Western Europe, Asia and South America, which was gaining success in the burgeoning Cold War with the Soviet Union. By the early 1950s, broadcasts tended to be more subjective in nature and frequently anti-Communist in tone. Bolstered by the Smith-Mundt Act of 1948, which encouraged the dissemination abroad of information about the United States through media, Congress used VoA to promote American foreign policy and democracy. The broadcasts that Stein wrote from 1951-1953 examined contemporary controversies through an anti-Communist lens.

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