I cannot speak intelligently in detail on this topic, but Victoria de Grazia's Irresistible Empire: America's Advance through Twentieth-Century Europe (Harvard, Belknap, 2006) is probably a good place to start. From the publisher: "Victoria de Grazia’s brilliant account of how the American standard of living defeated the European way of life and achieved the global cultural hegemony that is both its great strength and its key weakness today...Demonstrating the intricacies of America’s advance, de Grazia offers an intimate and historical dimension to debates over America’s exercise of soft power and the process known as Americanization. She raises provocative questions about the quality of the good life, democracy, and peace that issue from the vaunted victory of mass consumer culture."

Hopefully a modern historian can expand greatly upon this.

Happy reading!