This chapter examines how the China Institute in America, a New York-based cultural organization that promoted public understandings of China since its founding in 1926, weathered unprecedented financial challenges in the 1940s and 1950s. Much more than a single cultural organization’s bottom line, the China Institute’s trans-Pacific fundraising with different American philanthropists and the Chinese Nationalist government was an understudied bellwether of the shifting political and philanthropic foundations of public discussions of China in the mid-twentieth century United States. Given existing evidence, these efforts were more about the Institute’s survival and its adaptation to increasingly politicized philanthropy than any inherent ideological orientation. A nodal point, active participant, strategic beneficiary, and collateral damage in this philanthropic Cold War, the China Institute amplifies the uneasy engagement between China and the United States in the mid-twentieth century. Following the money allows historians to make better sense of the China Institute’s political posturing in a tumultuous period rather than simply take its public rhetoric at face value.

This chapter focuses on Union Now, Streit’s first and best-known book, published in 1939, spotlighting the interaction of two factors to explain its visibility on. One factor is Streit’s energetic promotional campaign. Streit proved remarkably resourceful in attracting attention, exploiting the possibilities offered by newspapers, radio, public lectures, and the emerging practice of celebrity endorsements. The chapter highlights Streit’s first promotional strategy, that of courting a select group of opinion-makers, through case studies of several influential figures: Henry Luce, John Foster Dulles, Thomas Lamont, Dorothy Thompson, and Russell Davenport. The second factor is the cult of the US Constitution and its federal system during the interwar years but which began in the post-Civil War period. This cult provided fertile ground for Streit’s Atlantic federal union project modeled on the US Constitution.