Roman Mars

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Misha Glenny

hi in our time, listeners. Misha Glenny here. I wanted to share a great episode from the global story, the BBC's daily international news podcast. This week they're publishing a special collection around the 250th anniversary of the United States exploring America's relationship with the world. In this episode, Asmar and Tristan speak with roman Mars from 99% invisible and the new host of the History of the United States in 100 objects to talk about soft power, how America's drive to standardize something as small as the screw meant the US now decides how the world is built. If you want to listen to more episodes from this landmark series, find it on the Global Story and If you're in the UK, listen on BBC Sounds. If you're outside the UK, find it on BBC.com or wherever you get your podcasts.

Asma Khalid

The United States is about to mark 250 years since its founding.

Tristan Redman

Most Americans know that their country has profoundly shaped the world that we all live in. They liberated most of Europe in World War II. They invented things like the electric pencil sharpener, the atom bomb, the Internet, the personal computer, breakfast cereal.

Asma Khalid

I admit I didn't know we actually invented all those things. But like many big birthdays, this is a moment of celebration over here in Washington and across the country. It is also, though, a moment of angst and introspection, a moment to reflect on America as an idea, as a country, as a people.

Tristan Redman

So we're stepping back from the news to dedicate a whole week of episodes to the surprising tales of American influence on the world stage and and in ordinary people's lives across the globe.

Asma Khalid

Since we are a show about where the world and America meet, we have been looking into some gripping stories about how over the years the United States has shaped the world.

Roman Mars

People think in stories and we have this ability to export our story and a lot of people have bought it.

Tristan Redman

And today, with the help of the podcaster Roman Mars, we tell the story of the United States as an innovator and how being inventive isn't just about creating things.

Asma Khalid

From the BBC, I'm Asmaa Khalid in

Tristan Redman

Washington D.C. and I'm Tristan Redman in London. And today on the global How America Used Soft Power to build a hidden empire. Asma, as we celebrate the 250th birthday of the United States, I want to start with a big question for you. What does the United States mean to Asma Khalid?

Asma Khalid

That is a big question. You know, I know that this is a moment in which many people in the United States are feeling really polarized, but I will also say, as you all who work with me have probably gleaned, I am somebody who believes deeply in the promise of the United States. And in major part, that's because my family's story here in the United States is so fundamentally linked to opportunities and inventions in the United States. My uncle had polio as a small child and living in Pakistan and they moved to the United States in 1962 for polio treatment. The best polio treatments in the world were here. The polio vaccine was invented in the United States. And yes, I'm clear eyed that there are many debates now happening with an administration that has cut support for Funding has raised questions about trust in vaccines and science. I know that those are the debates we are having in this moment. But you're also speaking to somebody whose life has been fundamentally reshaped because of the opportunities that the United States could provide her family.

Tristan Redman

I hear you, Asma, and as you know, but maybe some of our listeners don't. I am actually American in spite of my accent, which makes me sound very British. I was born in Detroit and I've lived a lot of my life outside of the U.S. but I'm enormously proud of my American nationality and my American identity. But it's also difficult to be an American in the world. People have questions about the United States in all sorts of ways. And when you're an American in the world, you feel like some of those questions are being aimed at you. So it's complicated.

Asma Khalid

It's a complicated thing. I think that that's one of the things, though, that I also love about the United States, this idea of America. It's an experiment. And there is a sense, not always, but for many people of optimism and striving and trying to make this American project better. And I love that optimism.

Tristan Redman

Well, Asma, this podcast is not all about us. We've got some fascinating stories lined up for our listeners this week. Asmaa, you've been looking at the American dream and whether it's still attainable.

Asma Khalid

That's right. And we're also going to be doing an episode on how American power has been used in somewhat surprising and shadowy ways. We're also looking into how the United States help create a rival superpower.

Tristan Redman

And you, our listeners, you've been sending us your questions and stories about what's next for America and its role in the world. And we'll be putting them to some of the BBC's top foreign correspondents, like our international editor, Jeremy Bowen. Please keep your questions and stories coming on our email, which is the global storybc.com but today, Asma, we are going to be looking at the question of US Soft power. What do you think about when you think about American soft power, Asma?

Asma Khalid

I guess it's all the ways the United States has sought to project its values around the globe, whether that's through Hollywood or hip hop, whether it's through sports stars who sparked political change or fashion icons. All of that.

Tristan Redman

Well, we didn't want to focus on the big things in American history. We want to focus on something small and surprising that tells us about the bigger picture. And no one does that better than Roman Mars. He's made a career of that on the hit podcast 99% Invisible, which is a show about design and all the little facets of life that we rarely think about that make the world work. And there's a story I found out about when making this episode that is just one of those stories. It's not glamorous, it's not obvious, but it really did literally shape the world in America's image. Because sometimes what makes you powerful might be absolutely tiny. Fantastic. I feel like I need to lean into my mic a little bit more, otherwise Roman is going to tell me I'm an amateur.

Roman Mars

Oh, it's not that this is mic. This is like what I like.

Tristan Redman

Roman joined us in our London studio, and he was in town working on his new BBC series, A History of the United States in 100 Objects.

Asma Khalid

All right, over to you guys.

Tristan Redman

Roman, we are here today to talk a little bit about US soft power, because that's one of the things that you touch on in the show.

Roman Mars

Yeah.

Tristan Redman

These days we live in something of a world of American empire. Empire with a small E. But it looks very different to the British Empire, capital E. Why do you think that is?

Roman Mars

I mean, throughout the 20th century, we just figured out something in the United States that we didn't have to put, you know, governors and colonies and put down insurrections and armies, that we could use our global manufacturing power in particular to control the earth in these ways that were way more effective. It's not free of coercion, it's not free of power, but it is so effective.

Tristan Redman

What have you learned during the journey you've been on about what American soft power actually looks like in the world?

Roman Mars

Well, it is really pervasive. And one of the things that we did was we have a kind of manufacturing might that is a consequence of planning, but also just the luck of history. Like World War II destroyed a lot of the manufacturing power of a lot of the world. We were mostly free of having that on our shores. And so our factories could keep running and people needed us, and we became the sort of quartermaster for the world in terms of providing all the different bits and pieces of jeeps and tanks and things like that. And through that, we ended up enforcing our will of the sort of global standards of things. And one of the stories that we do on A History of the United States and 100 Objects is about the 60 degree angle screw, which is the angle of threading on a screw, which was the US Standard that was developed, and it was not the global standard. But we told everyone in the world, essentially. Like, if you want our Jeeps, you have to adopt our standard. And therefore, it really just changed the nature of our relationship with the world.

Tristan Redman

Standardization of screws is not a topic that I thought I was going to be as interested in.

Roman Mars

That's what we. We excel in. Like, I want to take these mundane objects and make you care about them and think about the world differently because of it. Yeah.

Historian Daniel Imoh

Okay.

Tristan Redman

Well, take us to the beginning then. What was the problem with screws that needed solving? And what did the United States do so effectively that not only solved it, but created greater US Influence in the world?

Roman Mars

So the problem was, is that a screw is a very simple device. In fact, it's one of the simple machines that have existed for millennia. And the threading of a screw, where you're trying to fasten two hard things together, it has to be at a certain angle so that it fits together. But there's a problem that was developing, which was as the world was industrializing, as the United States was industrializing, certain people were noticing that if we just had greater efficiency and more interchangeable parts, that we could excel in our manufacturing. And one of those people was the Secretary of Commerce, Herbert Hoover, who was a standards fanatic.

Historical Narrator

I am perhaps one of the few living Americans who had full opportunity from high places to see intimately the moving cross tragedy of that World War.

Roman Mars

Hoover became famous for being a logistics guy who saved a lot of Belgium from starving, actually, during World War I.

Historical Narrator

I saw it from its beginnings in 1914, all the way down through the long years which have not yet ended. And I saw it not only in its visible ghastliness, but I lived with the invisible forces that moved and its causes and its consequences.

Roman Mars

And later he became Secretary of Commerce in the United States. Much later than that, he became president that presided over the Great Depression and became one of history's kind of villains because of it.

Tristan Redman

Well, I mean, what I found really interesting is the revisionist history job you've done for Herbert Hoover here. I mean, you've brought him back from a certain ignominy. Why was he the man for the job?

Roman Mars

He just was a man who believed in systems. He was a classic bureaucrat before that term got tainted by someone who didn't get things done. He was like a professional who believed that if we just had the proper systems in place, the proper thought about how to build a system of manufacturing, that everyone would prosper through it. And so he made it his mission in the 1920s to standardize all kinds of things. Paving stones, the type of glassware, if we just made the system more efficient, everyone got richer and it was better. And that was his solution to things.

Tristan Redman

Can you spell out, though, what the consequences would be of not standardizing things like paving stones and glassware? Like, what are the examples of inefficiencies as a result of non standardization?

Roman Mars

Well, what ends up happening is you have to sort of custom do everything at a certain point. So, like, if you have 11 paving stone sizes instead of 65 paving stone sizes, when something breaks or something needs to be replaced now you can go to a shelf and sort of get them. And having interchangeable parts does so much for you to increase the efficiency of any system. And also, it's sort of like the United States. We think of them as one body, but the different states had lots of different standards of things. And so just like a bushel of corn was more in one state than another, just in terms of weight. There's like, truck sizes were allowed in one state versus not allowed in another on a road. And you just cannot have a national system of commerce if these different parts don't talk to each other. And so he was really interested in making all that stuff smooth and standard and making kind of one nation out of our system of commerce. Part of this soft power, a requirement, is a government that functions and thinks strategically. Whereas up to that point, you could donate enough money and become a general. In the Civil War, there was nonsense about how we ran things, and it really was about currying favor and giving jobs to your friends and stuff like that. But through this era of the 1880s on and culminating this period, was it just a sense that a scientific method of doing things was going to make the country more powerful and also make the world a better place? There was just a commitment to that, and people were on board for it.

Tristan Redman

Okay, so that's Herbert Hoover's remit. Our remit on this show is to talk about stories where the world and America meet. So rationalization of things and standardization in the United States, when does that start creeping into the rest of the world? Like I put it to you, but it's not the first time that this was attempted. So in the French Revolution, that's something that they did. They. They standardized a meter. You can go and see it in a museum in Paris. They standardized temperature, centigrade, for example. I mean, France has had a certain amount of success because, you know, kilometers are used throughout the world.

Historian Daniel Imoh

But.

Tristan Redman

But how is it the United States had so much more success?

Roman Mars

What ended up happening, which really enforced Our standards on the world was World War II.

Historical Narrator

On this 10th day of June, 1940, the hand that held the dagger has struck it into the back of its neighborhood.

Roman Mars

President Roosevelt wanted us involved to save the world from the Nazis.

Historical Narrator

We will extend to the opponents of force the material resources of this nation.

Roman Mars

And there was this argument that he made that was, if somebody's house is burning, if you could lend a garden hose to them, you would. That's just good neighbors. But, well, you have to make sure your garden hose actually fits their hydrant for it to actually work. Our factories were working. We were turning stuff out, becoming part of the war. And as we were like, building and building and building and becoming part of things, you don't just send whole jeeps, you send parts of jeeps. And when they break, you have to have other parts that work with them. And it was becoming clear that very few of our parts were working. No bullet worked in a gun across the ocean. And so what we had to do is we had to have these series of meetings with the British government that was like, we need to figure this out. Because the inefficiency of having things fixed in the field was costing people lives.

Historian Daniel Imoh

And so there are a series of Anglo US meetings between 1943 and 1945. And I just sort of went through them all.

Roman Mars

Daniel Emerwar, who I talked to, you know, describes these series of meetings where the British Empire very unused to taking orders from anybody, and especially not these upstart Americans.

Tristan Redman

They got used to it eventually.

Roman Mars

Yeah. And, you know, they begin to go, well, we'll hear you out.

Historian Daniel Imoh

So the first meeting they have, like, meeting one, they say, we would be willing to talk about screw thread standardization.

Roman Mars

And there's a meeting about that.

Historian Daniel Imoh

Second meeting, they say, we would agree to consider retooling.

Roman Mars

And then there's another meeting that's like,

Historian Daniel Imoh

okay, we are retooling, but it is just temporary. It is just for the purposes of the war, don't think that you own us.

Roman Mars

And then there's another set of meetings where it's just like, okay, we're just capitulating completely. Because the UK had a 55 degree screw angle. And the insidious thing about a screw is that you cannot look at it and say, that's 55 degrees versus this is 60 degrees. You have to, like, you only figure that out when you put it in and it doesn't quite work.

Historian Daniel Imoh

You have to see the symbolic humiliation. You know, it's one thing for the United States to declare independence. This is the British declaring dependence. This is the British basically saying that in the realm of objects, which turns out to be a really important economically determinative realm, we're gonna take orders from you rather than the other way around.

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Roman Mars

Once you get the British Empire and all the sort of associated territories in the US on one standard, then everyone else falls in line. From there it just locks in. And we were just in the lead of that. But we were in the lead of that because we had people like Herbert Hoover deciding that stuff for us a generation earlier. And then one of the things about having that type of power and our ascendancy in the 20th century is not only do we get to impose our standards on others, we get to decide to not take part of standards that we don't like, which is the metric system, which for some reason, I don't

Misha Glenny

know why,

Roman Mars

but we've just. It doesn't feel good in our gut. I don't even know why the Metroid

Tristan Redman

system doesn't feel good in America with guts.

Roman Mars

I don't know. We just got used to it. And there's a certain part of, like, once you start feeling your power of like people are going to do what you want to do, you start capriciously sort of exercising that power. And that seems to be one of them.

Tristan Redman

So the Second World War is definitely a demonstration of US hard power. Is there a case that the US Soft power extension around the world, though, was actually a greater result of the Second World War?

Roman Mars

Again, it's not free of coercion and force. It's not all benevolent, but it is so much better than guns and bombs, and I argue it's so much more effective as proof of the fact that the 20th century was very much the American century by the time it was done. And it was done in a way that was really new. Like its empire was a small e empire of influence. But then the other part of that, of our equation was that the cultural exports of the United States are second to none. The rock and roll and the music and stuff like this. We painted ourselves as the heroes of the world. And just getting English around the world, which is like, I don't know, the UK did a good job getting that going. But people think in stories and we have this ability to export our story, and a lot of people bought it in ways that benefited the United States in so many ways.

Tristan Redman

Well, not everyone loves it.

Roman Mars

Nope.

Tristan Redman

You speak with a historian, Daniel Imoh, and he says a thing to you which really made me sit up in my chair. He says, that little thing, the screw thread is such a potent, hard to notice, but nevertheless deeply consequential symbol of the way in which the United States has remade the world, or the world has had to remake itself to accommodate the United States.

Roman Mars

I imagine it's annoying at the least and infuriating. The world has bent to accommodate English speakers all around the world and English desires, like American desires. And I think everyone's acting rationally in some ways, like, that's a good choice to make for tourism and for all kinds of reasons. But I imagine having that sort of cultural hegemony, like rolling over you at all times, it has its miseries.

Tristan Redman

What are the other examples of American design? I mean, you're so immersed in the world of design what are the other examples that have stood out to you as well as the screw?

Roman Mars

A lot of stuff gets developed, you know, in terms of design haphazardly. And when it came to stop signs and most traffic signals and stuff like this, every location had their own traffic signals. The octagonal stop sign was invented by a Detroit police officer. There used to be a yellow square was a stop sign. He didn't feel like that was like different enough from other signs. So we clipped the corners off and made an octagonal sign. Everyone recognized that that's a good idea. But it was a yellow octagonal sign, and we put that down as one of these standards that we conformed to, and it was spread across the world. But at a certain point, chemists came up with a nice reflective red color. And they just thought, you know what? Red would be better. Red would be a better color as a stop sign because it would match traffic lights. And all of a sudden this became a better standard. And right when everyone in the world had agreed that a yellow octagonal sign would be a stop sign, a few months later, the US Was like, no, nevermind, we're going to do red ones. And then the rest of the world just got in line.

Tristan Redman

And it even goes on to change language because, for example, you know, a stop sign in France is exactly the same as a stop sign in the United States. And stope S T O double P E R has entered the French language to mean exactly that. And I'm sure there were people who fought rear guard actions against stope ever entering the French dictionary. But it is there to stay now.

Roman Mars

It's an amazing thing, that influence, and this is just unstoppable for us, the United States.

Tristan Redman

I mean, we've arrived at a place now where the focus on soft power is maybe not quite what it was.

Roman Mars

Yeah, I think so. I mean, this soft power, this influence in these ways was an incredible invention. It was a new kind of imperialism that saved lives and maybe made some people's lives a whole lot better. It's probably the greatest thing America has ever done.

Tristan Redman

Well, I mean, it's not just happening in the United States though. It's happening all over the world where leaders are pulling back from engagement with other countries and focusing on inward concerns.

Roman Mars

Yeah, and this is, you know, it's not being responsive to people and their needs leads to people's discontent. And that's the big cost of this is like maybe in the effort to become global manufacturer to the world or to have this type of globalism, we left behind a lot of people that React poorly to those notions.

Tristan Redman

I'm going to ask you a kind of journalistic two part question. Is the world a better place for having 60 degree screws in it? And by extension, is the world a better place for having the United States in it?

Roman Mars

Huh? I would say 60 degree screws, yes. Our machines across the world should talk to each other. And that makes the world a better place, a more efficient place. Is the world a better place for having the United States in it? Interesting question. I think I have to have enough pride in my country to say, yes, there's having a, a place built around an idea of all men are created equal. And having that moment where we knew that we didn't mean all men, but it was because we had that idea to point to. Like, there was a lot of people, you know, in the sort of in the course of American history who looked at our hypocrisy and said, what does the 4th of July mean to an enslaved person? Like, it means nothing. And there's some people looked at it and said, if you really believe this stuff, it includes us, it includes women, it includes people of color. And having a place built on an idea like that is a powerful thing in the world and worth, like paying attention to and preserving. Part of me, like, the reason why it is fun for me to tell these stories is because I believe in those ideals. And it's fun to talk about how we deviated from them and how we lived up to them. And there's fun stuff to talk about, our influence on the world. I mean, you know, just like rock and roll alone, Elvis takes black music, turns it into rock and roll. Heartbreak Hotel comes out. Paul McCartney hears Heartbreak Hotel, decides he wants to make music that is a great arrow of things happening in the world. That is a good thing to talk about and preserve and to celebrate.

Tristan Redman

Roman Mars, thank you so much. It's been a pleasure.

Roman Mars

Thank you. It's been great to be here.

Tristan Redman

That was Roman Mars. You can find his fantastic series A History of the United States in 100 objects on BBC.com or wherever you get your podcasts. Today's episode was produced by Sam Chantarasak and it was edited by James Shield. It was mixed by Travis Evans. Our digital producer is Matt Pintus. Our sound engineers were Johnny hall and Microgard. Our senior news editor is China Collins. And I'm Tristan Redman.

Asma Khalid

And I'm Asmar Khalid. Thanks for tuning in.

Tristan Redman

Cheerio.

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