Cultural Policy

Toby Miller, George Yudice

• Publisher: SAGE Publications Ltd
• Year: 2002
• ISBN:
  9781446232903
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Cultural & Social Anthropology
• Index: Social Sciences

Hitherto, cultural theory and empirical work on culture have outstripped cultural policy. This book rectifies the peculiar imbalance in the field of Cultural Studies by offering the first comprehensive and international work on cultural policy. Fully alive to the challenges posed by globalization it addresses a wide range of central topics including cinema, television, museums, international organizations, art, public history, drama and performance art. The result is a landmark work in the emerging field of cultural policy. Rigorous in its field of survey and astute in its critical commentary it enables students to gain a global grounding in cultural policy. It will be essential reading for students of cultural studies and cultural sociology.

1

The United States, Cultural Policy, and the National Endowment for the Arts

When we get control of that National Endowment for the Arts, you’ll see how it ought to be done. You shut it down, fumigate the building and put the I.R.S. [Internal Revenue Service] in there – Pat Buchanan, Republican and Reform Party candidate for President, speechwriter for Richard Nixon, and CNN nightly commentator, 1999. (quoted in Roane)

This chapter addresses the great historical paradox of culture – that its principal exporter, the United States, claims to be free of any policy on the matter. In questioning this donnée, we examine the role of the state in culture, with particular reference to the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) – its birth, attempted murder, and assisted-living resuscitation.

In 1965, the year that the Federal Government began to establish such domestic cultural institutions as public broadcasting and an arts endowment, the US already housed more museums than Western Europe, more libraries than any other country, and half the world’s symphony orchestras (Moen ‘Congress’ 186). But the government’s paper at UNESCO’s 1969 Monaco Round Table on Cultural Policies began with the famous line: ‘The United States has no official cultural position, either public or private’ (quoted in Kammen 798, 795). Put another way, a profound American commitment to keeping the state separate from the production and restriction of meaning, notably evident in the free speech guarantees of the First Amendment to the Constitution, saw the Federal Government purportedly decline to elevate, discriminate or even differentiate artistically. This paper’s astonishing position, which bewilders both by its mendacity and its representativeness, has a long, bizarre lineage, and considerable ongoing resonance.

The ethos of democracy identified in Alexis de Tocqueville’s eulogy to early nineteenth-century life in the US forcefully rejected European ruling-class accounts of civilization and how to stimulate it. De Tocqueville identified a widespread belief in the US that equality militated against artistic transcendence. There could be few patrons in an economic democracy, and so profoundly utilitarian a country as the US did not recognize the value of aesthetics. From the first, then, issues of migration and citizenship were critical to the relationship of government and art. An egalitarian philosophy, in keeping with upwardly mobile immigrants, supposedly flattened tastes through cultural relativism, denying in the process the age-old route to artistic distinction provided by a socially hierarchical rank order. Ennoblement was in the eye of the ennobled, rather than a universal quality. Practicality was preferred to artistry, in a New World driven by economic pressures to manufacture for the mass market, as opposed to a single, discriminating paymaster-patron. A utilitarian faith in the market allocating cultural resources was evident early on. So the relationship of the US Federal government and the arts began with copyright provisions authorized by the Founding Parents as a means of encouraging capitalist innovation (Van Camp ‘Freedom’ 53). When President John Quincy Adams asked Congress for money to start a national university, observatories and related programs in 1825, however, this led to accusations of political ‘centralization’ from Martin van Buren and John C Calhoun. De Tocqueville’s account, and these tensions, have become touchstones of United States folklore and political culture (Filicko 221–23). There remains a special distaste for connecting culture to the state, other than in the service of dispossession and capital accumulation. Meanwhile, the entire fiction of the US as a sovereign entity of course rests on denying the link between archaeological artifacts and Native American ownership (based on the allegation that the burial sites and objects found in the North-East were Israeli or Phoenician). This is a clear and foundational instance of cultural policy (Nichols et al.).

Consider Hollywood: film and TV are crucial to US balance-of-trade figures (exporting US$36.8 billion in 1998) and ideological transfer. Hollywood is often cited as a case of a truly open market in which cultural creativity exists outside state policy. The US claims that its success is a function of satisfying the needs of audiences, not a consequence of policy. Indeed, the appeal to markets is superficially compatible with an audience-centered approach to dealing with the politics of recognition and diversity. Despite minimally adequate representation of US minorities, not to speak of other peoples throughout the world, US audiovisual policy, like US corporate culture more generally, uses ‘diversity’ for its own ends. As the saying goes, Hollywood favors one color – green (Crane; et al.; Gordon; Newfield; Yúdice ‘Civil Society’ 1995). The film industry is supposed to be a pure market of private enterprise and consumption, so it seems sensible to evaluate laissez-faire as an account of US screen production, to question whether this is a free market based purely on consumer demand.

The US government endorses trust-like behavior by film companies overseas, while prohibiting it domestically. The local film industry was aided through decades of tax-credit schemes, the old Informational Media Guaranty Program’s currency assistance, and oligopolistic domestic buying and overseas selling practices that (without much good evidence for doing so) keep the primary market essentially closed to imports on grounds of popular taste. And after the Second World War, Hollywood’s Motion Picture Export Agency referred to itself as ‘the little State Department’, so isomorphic were its methods and contents with Federal policy and ideology (Guback ‘Government’ 92–93. 98–99; Schatz 160; K Thompson 117–18, 122–23; Vasey 160, 164; Guback ‘International’ 156–57). Today, the US Department of Commerce produces materials on media globalization that focus on both economic development and ideological influence, problematizing claims that Hollywood is pure free enterprise and that Washington is uninterested in blending trade with cultural change (Ferguson 83–84; Jarvie 37, 40). Meanwhile, the Justice Department is authorized to classify all imported films, and has prohibited Canadian documentaries on acid rain and nuclear war as ‘political propaganda’ (Sorlin 93; Parker 135, 137). In 2000, the US had 205 state, regional, and city film commissions, hidden subsidies to the film industry (via reduced local taxes, free provision of police services and the blocking of public wayfares), State and Commerce Department briefings and plenipotentiary representation (negotiations on so-called video piracy have resulted in PRC offenders being threatened with beheading, even as the US claims to be watching Chinese human rights as part of most-favored nation treatment), and copyright limitations that are all about preventing the free flow of information (which the US is forever instructing less-developed countries to permit, in order that they might prosper). The 1990s Agreement on Trade-Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights (TRIPS) saw the US government insisting on a transnational deal that would suit Hollywood’s interests. Clearly, then, Washington is intimately involved in screen culture, and claims for a naturally occurring diversity are specious. So at the overt level of cultural policy, the state continues to exclude discussion of its own screen subvention, but this hypocrisy hints at a more complex and layered history.

Despite all the rhetoric, and its international image, one might argue that the United States actually invented modern cultural policy in a Federal frame. The US Marine Band was formed in 1790 (J Alexander Command 72). The 1848 Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, which dealt with the US seizure of Mexican territory, protected people caught in the annexation, via provisions that some argue included cultural maintenance via language. Native American activists read treaties with their forebears similarly, and ongoing debates about ‘English-only’ are a sorry history of racism and xenophobia (Schmidt 114). In 1872, Congress purchased Thomas Moran’s painting of the Grand Canyon, which so engaged spectators that the area depicted was later secured for conservation. That same year, the US became the first nation to establish national parks. Legislation empowering the Federal Government to buy and maintain historic monuments dates from 1906 and 1935. In 1917–18, the US pioneered tax deductions for gifts to non-profit organizations. A Committee on Public Information was set up when the US entered the First World War, as a global advertising tool applied to militarism (Snow 16). The State Department’s Division of Cultural Relations, created in 1938, and the Office of the Coordinator of Inter-American Affairs (OCIAA), established in 1940 with Nelson Rockefeller at its helm, promoted educational, cultural and scientific exchanges with Latin American countries, and provided aid to hundreds of US schools based there to woo the population to anti-Fascism. The activities of these offices also enabled a hemispheric trading bloc under US hegemony as a means to overcome the economic blight of the 1930s. A State Department reorganization in 1944 presaged changes in cultural policy for the postwar era – combating the New Deal at home and promoting American values against communism in Europe and Asia – thus resignifying Rockefeller’s claim that cultural relations were ‘the imperialism of ideas’ (Ninkovich US 13; Rockefeller quoted in Ninkovich US 35–36).

In US Constitutional law, art has generally been regarded, at least since 1952, as a source of social commentary that can be translated into political speech. Protection of free expression is given to it on the basis that art can embody the social criticisms that the First Amendment was designed to enable. Neither mimetic nor counterfactual, art is claimed as a beneficial ‘condition for imaginatively living’ that can subvert the state in the interests of liberty, as per religion (Hamilton 107, 104–105, 88, 76–77). This disturbs those conservative libertarians who see art as a mystical form of life that beggars communicative norms and rationality.

Groundbreaking initiatives for the support of arts and culture include the Works Progress Administration (WPA) arts projects of the 1930s (which employed 40,000 artists), US advocacy of a UN cultural organization in the late 1940s (which became UNESCO), the United States Information Agency (USIA), dedicated to propaganda euphemized as ‘public diplomacy’, and the 1973 Comprehensive Employment and Training Act (CETA), whose important Artists-in-Residence program, which involved income-security provisions, led to unintended social critique (French 5; Sellers 7; Ninkovich US 3; J Alexander Command 73; Kammen 793–94; Joseph B. Rose 429; Dubin 198).

The Emergence of Cultural Foreign Policy

Rockefeller’s labors established a pattern of overseas cultural policy that dominated for fifty years and set the organizational tenor for domestic activities from the 1960s. Cultural exchange, which was already being promoted within an ‘idealistic’ framework after the proclamation of the Good Neighbor Policy (GNP) in 1933, became an urgent security issue by 1939. Modest cultural and academic exchange programs were instituted in the 1930s to foster, as Assistant Secretary of State, Sumner Welles wrote, ‘wider appreciation of the culture and civilization of other peoples’ (2, 7). Welles was responsible for ‘articulat[ing] a government policy on cultural relations’, that is, institutionalizing within government the system of intellectual and cultural exchange established by philanthropic foundations like the Carnegie Endowment and the Rockefeller Foundation (Berger 51–52). As we shall see, this relationship between philanthropic foundations and government policy became the basis for establishing the Arts and Humanities National Endowments in the mid-1960s.

The US gave a salient international role to culture because of reports that Germany offered technical advice and scholarly exchange to Latin American countries. This threatened the Pan-Americanist work of US philanthropic institutions, signaling to the State Department that it needed to include cultural issues within the paradigm of security, as other countries had done. Great Britain, for example, created the British Council in 1934 as part of its defense against German nationalist propaganda throughout Europe. To similar ends, the State Department created the Division of Cultural Relations in 1938. The first chief of the Division, Ben M Cherrington, recollects justifying its programs in these terms:

When Hitler and Mussolini’s exploitation of education as instruments of nationalist policy was at its height ... our Government was determined to demonstrate to the world the basic difference between the methods of democracy and those of a ‘Ministry of Enlightenment and Propaganda’. There was to be established in the Department of State an organization that would be a true representative of our American tradition of intellectual freedom and educational integrity, (quoted in Colligan 3)

Behind this expression of freedom, however, it was clear that the US needed to manage how Latin American countries understood US culture, which frequently presented unflattering images of them. It was thus necessary to weed out these stereotypes, as well as disseminate knowledge of Latin American ways of life, in order to manage political and economic matters in ways that did not appear to be coercive. The promotion of foreign policy objectives through private corporations and non-profit organizations like the Ford, Rockefeller and Carnegie Foundations became the modus operandi of US cultural foreign policy, later evident in the workings of the Congress for Cultural Freedom and other institutions of the cultural Cold War.

Rockefeller proposed the creation of an agency for cultural, scientific and educational diplomacy after a trip with other businessmen to Latin America in 1940, and Roosevelt asked him to take command of this initiative. Fascist and Nazi propaganda had secured the sympathy of presidents and political leaders in a significant number of Latin American republics, especially Argentina, Brazil and Chile, but also Mexico, an immediate neighbor. Latin American nationalism, and the concomitant proclivity for protectionism in matters of trade, against which US policy makers railed, provided a common ground with Axis ideology. As trade with significant partners like Britain was largely cut off during World War II, the US could strong-arm Latin American countries by blocking exports of capital goods that were needed for industrial development, as well as closing its own doors to imports from these countries. The US thus used commercial and financial programs to encourage Latin America to end collaboration with the Axis powers (Thorp 118–20). Because he had direct access to the President and could raise vast sums of money, Rockefeller was able to thwart attempts to limit his activities by certain State Department officials, including the Secretary of State. In little time, Rockefeller increased his budget from US$3.5 million to US$45 million, and oversaw a staff of five hundred assistants, including an intelligence operation.

Roosevelt had turned to Latin America out of expediency. He needed to link domestic recovery to an international agenda, but European governments opposed these relations, the US was racked by isolationism and the Japanese controlled Asia. As one historian put it, ‘Latin American actions played an integral part in shaping worldwide strategy’ (Gellman 17). This meant abandoning the US practice of only intervening in other countries’ internal affairs when the commercial interests or property of US nationals were at stake. The first test was Cuba, where a coup d’état had toppled a hated dictator in 1933 and brought into power a military junta, then, under US pressure, a provisional president who was hostile to foreign ownership of basic industries (Gellman 20). That same year, Secretary of State, Cordell Hull was lobbied by Latin American delegates at the Seventh International Conference of American States to commit the US to stay out of the Caribbean and Central America. Hull also made a free-trade economic resolution that led to increased commercial activity between the US and its southern neighbors. Throughout the 1930s, the US faced various crises in which the policy of non-intervention was brought up, including the expropriation of foreign (including US) oil interests in Mexico in 1938. Hull and other cabinet members helped negotiate an agreement whereby Mexico would compensate property owners.

It was recognized by some that an economic program was not sufficient to achieve hemispheric prosperity or international peace. Given the administration’s interest in Latin America, several cabinet officers developed expertise in the region and many Latin American scholars were recruited to provide analysis and policy design. Indeed, Latin American Studies was first institutionalized under the Roosevelt administration, providing a prototype for the area-studies model that emerged with the Cold War:

Beginning in the early 1940s area-studies specialists were mobilized in the crusade against fascism, and then against Soviet totalitarianism. The North American area-studies specialists, writing in the post-1945 era, readily transposed the lessons of appeasement and the Nazi threat in Europe to the rest of the world, drawing the line against international communism around the globe. (Berger 70)

Since Latin America was not the focus of the war, the Office of Strategic Services (OSS), founded in 1941 and the precursor of the CIA, which not long after was to launch the largest cultural war ever, included few Latin American specialists. Indeed, as soon as the war ended, Latin American studies receded. It did not grow again until the 1960s, in the wake of the Cuban Revolution. But while Latin Americanists were not recruited into the OSS and the CIA in its early years, some of the most important scholars, intellectuals and artists were recruited by Rockefeller for the OCIAA. It is here that we begin to see linkages between important intellectuals, Ivy League academics and government (Gellman 146), a mirror image of the social, political and financial brahmins who intersected in the CIA (Saunders 135–36). Indeed, there is overlap between the old-boy networks of inter-Americanists and Cold Warriors in the persons of Rockefeller, John Hay Whitney, René d’Harnoncourt, Lincoln Kirstein and many others. They traveled in the same circles: the Rockefeller and Ford Foundations, the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) and subsequently the CIA.

When he ran the OCIAA, Rockefeller mobilized the press, radio and motion pictures to aid the war effort. He appointed experts on these industries to establish relations with their counterparts in Latin America and conduct research on production systems and audiences for these media. The press section became one of the biggest programs, providing features, photographs and cartoons for Latin American newspapers. It published En Guardia, a magazine patterned on the format of Life that reached a wide audience. The OCIAA also subvened The Inter-American Quarterly and The Inter-American, which lasted only until the end of the war. The Division of Radio was also a major priority. To counter the Nazis, who supplied seven hours of broadcasts per week, a Pan-American broadcasting station was built; it transmitted official speeches and educational programs in concert with private commercial programs like opera presentations. The OCIAA eventually doubled the peak output of the Nazi broadcasts, producing everything from news to popular music, all to enhance the spirit of inter-American solid...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction: The History and Theory of Cultural Policy
• Chapter 1: The United States, Cultural Policy, and the National Endowment for the Arts
• Chapter 2: The Culture Industries – Citizenship, Consumption and Labor
• Chapter 3: Command Cultures and the Postcolonial
• Chapter 4: Museums
• Chapter 5: Transnational Cultural Policy
• Conclusion
• References
• Index