Leonard Bernstein at a USIA exhibit in Moscow in 1959
The vanishing presence of the arts in the American experience has implications for America’s reputation abroad, and for its pursuit of foreign policy goals.
If the US is in fact embarking on a new Cold War, the cultural Cold War with the USSR is urgently pertinent. My latest “More than Music” program on NPR is “The Cultural Cold War Revisited.” It’s based on my new book The Propaganda of Freedom: JFK, Shostakovich, Stravinsky, and the Cultural Cold War.
In a nutshell: the CIA-funded Congress of Cultural Freedom was initially a seminal Cold War propaganda instrument. In my book, I argue that, by claiming that only “free artists” in “free societies” produce great art, it failed to produce credible propaganda. Far more successful was cultural diplomacy with the Soviet Union, beginning in 1959 with Leonard Bernstein’s New York Philharmonic (a visit about which I have new things to say). But as the Cold War waned, so did cultural diplomacy. So much so that when in 1986 Vladimir Horowitz triumphantly returned to Russia, Ambassador Arthur Hartman had to raise funds on his own.
Today, cultural diplomacy could be a formidable tool in, say, Central Africa, where the US is vying with China to exert influence. My “More than Music” show features remarkable testimony from Alexander Laskaris, the US Ambassador to Chad – who recently hosted the African-American baritone Sidney Outlaw. You can hear Sidney Outlaw sing “I am a Pilgrim of Sorrow” for fishermen on an island in Chad – and hear them sing a fishing song of their own in response.
John Beyrle, former US Ambassador to Russia, contextualizes this vignette. Beyrle persuasively extols cultural diplomacy. He also worries that the arts today wind up “on the chopping block.”
A LISTENING GUIDE. [listen here]
00:00 – Willis Conover’s “Jazz Hour” on the Voice of America and its electrifying impact in the USSR
3:00 – About my new book The Propaganda of Freedom
6:00 – The late Alexander Toradze on how jazz symbolized “American freedoms” in Soviet Russia
10:00 – A knowledgeable Soviet audience boos Benny Goodman because he’s old-fashioned
12:00 – Leonard Bernstein speaks to a Moscow audience about musical bonds
16:25 – Contradicting CIA-sponsored propaganda, Bernstein extols Shostakovich in Russia
18:30 – Former US Ambassador to Russia John Beyrle on misconceived CIA-sponsored cultural propaganda
21:30 – A triumph of cultural diplomacy: Vladimir Horowitz in Russia (1986) — a visit for which the US ambassador had to raise funds on his own
25:00 – Horowitz performs Schumann before a weeping Moscow audience
30:30 – Ambassador Beyrle: the arts “on the chopping block” once the Cold War waned
34:30 – Ambassador Beyrle on the potential importance of cultural diplomacy in Africa today
35:15 – US Ambassador to Chad Alexander Laskaris on cultural diplomacy in Guinea and Chad
38:25 – Sidney Outlaw singing in Chad
40:00 – Ambassador Laskaris on the arts and US foreign policy
43:00 – William Dawson’s Negro Folk Symphony – a foreign policy opportunity
45:00 – Philadelphia Orchestra President Matias Tarnopolsky on visiting China
How does one discuss the Congress for Cultural Freedom without thoroughly addressing the central problem, that it is entirely unethical for the government of a presumably democratic society to secretly manipulate the arts with a massive covert program? We live with the harmful effects of that secret manipulation to this day.
Aside from a few token gestures, a government that does not support the high arts in its own country is unlikely to use them effectively as diplomacy abroad. It’s not what NPR says that is the problem, but what it leaves out.
On September 27, 2023, the U.S. Department of State launched the “Global Music Diplomacy Initiative” to promote world peace.
https://www.state.gov/music-diplomacy/
Ironically, the bill was included as part of the Department of Defense budget–which pretty much says it all. It appears that the focus will mostly be on American pop music. Anyone who has lived abroad knows the extent to which the American pop-music-industrial-complex dominates much of the world and the role it plays in American cultural hegemony. This makes the state department program rather ironic. And redundant.
The program will also offer a “Peace Through Music Award” which is to “recognize and honor an American music industry professional, artist, or group, that has played an invaluable role in cross-cultural exchanges and whose musical work advances peace and mutual understanding globally.” That is, to make the world see things our way.
The program has been designed to emulate the anti-communist cultural exchange programs of the 50s and 60s. Many of those programs were administered through the Congress for Cultural Freedom. It was used to move the American arts communities away from the social ideals of Roosevelt, and both Americans and Europeans away social realism to apolitical, modernist forms of art such as abstract modernism. In other words, no dangerous Diego Riveras and lots of benign Jackson Pollacks. I highly recommend Frances Saunders’ book about the Congress for Cultural Freedom which is the best and most extensive book on the subject and which documents all of this in detail.
Since the basis of the new “Global Music Diplomacy Initiative” seems to be rather disingenuine and propagandistic, it will probably amount to very little. Hollywood and the pop music industry already very effectively create the “cultural diplomacy” and propaganda the US government needs. We won’t, of course, hear about this on NPR. Intelligent and informed Americans have to go much deeper.