"Those white guys are working for me": Dizzy Gillespie, jazz, and the cultural politics of the cold war during the Eisenhower administration.

• Author: Carletta, David M.
• Position: Influence of jazz and culture in international politics

Convinced that cultural influence was linked to political and economic power, the Eisenhower administration (1953-61) sponsored America's premier jazz musicians' goodwill tours abroad as part of its cultural foreign policy agenda. These tours helped the United States government in its global propaganda campaign against the Soviet Union and its communist allies, who widely reported and successfully exploited the racial tension and violence that accompanied the rise of the civil rights movement in the United States. These "jazz ambassadors" also helped the United States government counter claims made by communist propagandists that hyper-materialistic capitalists were "cultural barbarians" who produced commodities rather than sophisticated culture. (1) In short, they helped the Eisenhower administration combat communism during the early years of the Cold War.

Wary that the Soviets were making political gains around the world through their cultural diplomacy offensive, (2) the Eisenhower administration launched a two-pronged effort to counter communist propaganda activities. In August 1953, it established the United States Information Agency (USIA) an agency within the executive branch, separate from the State Department, to support American foreign policy objectives and national interests around the world. The agency was active in anticommunism propaganda, particularly efforts to refute the anti-capitalist rhetoric of TASS, the official news agency of the Soviet government. USIA's mass media activities were buttressed by its operation of libraries, cultural exhibits, and exchange programs overseas. (3) One year later, President Dwight D. Eisenhower secured emergency funding from Congress for "psychological" anti-communist programs. In both 1954 and 1955, the President's Emergency Fund for International Affairs spent $5 million to support the presentation of American industrial and cultural accomplishments abroad. In 1956, Congress enacted the International Cultural Exchange and Trade Fair Participation Act, establishing permanent funding for the Eisenhower administration's cultural international relations programs. (4)

In addition to establishing the USIA, securing funding for its cultural foreign relations programs, and providing economic, military, and technical foreign assistance, the Eisenhower administration used the State Department to sponsor cultural programs as a means of bolstering American influence throughout the world. Wide-ranging psychological warfare programs were developed both at home and abroad, including campaigns such as Atoms for Peace and People-to-People, that presented to the world an image of daily life in the United States where its citizens enjoyed fulfilling and cheery lives in a classless society where economic abundance was shared by all. (5) Jazz was incorporated into this cultural diplomacy offensive.

These tours, inspired by the success of the Voice of America radio show Music, U.S.A., financed by the State Department, and promoted by USIA, served the needs of the United States government, civil rights advocates, and those interested in securing federal support for the arts. The State Department sent interracial jazz bands overseas to portray an image of the nation progressing towards racial harmony and to prove to the world that the capitalist system bestowed cultural as well as material benefits upon those who embraced it. Civil rights advocates tried to exploit the United States government's pursuit of global leadership by linking moral credibility in foreign relations to domestic justice and equality. At the same time, many of the nation's politicians and cultural enthusiasts used the Cold War to seek federal support for the arts, arguing that the arts were a feature of national prestige that could serve as a useful tool for attracting allies. (6) That argument influenced the State Department's decision to use jazz to portray a positive image of African-American life. This, in turn, served the interests of the music and its admirers, who sought to take advantage of the nation's cultural battle with communism in order to preserve jazz as a valuable American art form, broaden its audience, and sustain the big band jazz format during hard economic times.

The legendary trumpeter Dizzy Gillespie headed the first jazz band sent on a State Department-sponsored overseas tour in 1956. Two years earlier, in May 1954, the United States Supreme Court, in Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka, Kansas, had ordered the nation's public school systems to desegregate, unleashing a wave of anti-black protests throughout the southern states that were publicized in the global mass media. Later that same year, Rosa Parks, an African-American seamstress in Montgomery, Alabama, had disregarded the order of a local bus driver and refused to give up her seat to a white person and move to the back of the bus. Her arrest for violating "Jim Crow" segregation laws ignited a year-long citywide boycott of Montgomery's bus system that brought civil rights leader Martin Luther King, Jr., to national attention. (7) Gillespie's tour, which followed these momentous events, demonstrated how African-American goodwill ambassadors played a special role in the United States government's cultural diplomacy agenda as the struggle for civil rights at home had global significance for American foreign policy during the Cold War. The success of Gillespie's tour led to an expansion of the use of jazz as part of the United States government's Cold War cultural offensive. Gillespie's experience, in turn, illustrates how these goodwill tours offered jazz a new lease on life and increased its international following at a time when rock 'n' roll was replacing jazz as America's popular music.

This study on the significance of jazz in Cold War cultural politics enriches the expanding body of literature that examines the relationship between diplomatic and cultural history. (8) Since the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, there has been both a cultural turn in Cold War studies and calls for internationalizing the study of American history. There also has been increased interest in exploring the intersection of domestic racial politics and American foreign relations. As part of this effort to reconceptualize the study of America's past within a global context by examining the influence of international developments on the nation's political, social, cultural, economic, and intellectual life, many historians and legal scholars are now paying more attention to the linkage between the international arena and the African American struggle for equality. Carol Anderson has studied the failed efforts of U.S. civil rights organizations to register their complaints at the United Nations. Thomas Borstelmann has described the connection between the civil rights struggle at home and anti-colonialism and the Cold War abroad. Mary L. Dudziak has studied how the State Department and the USIA presented the issue of race in America to foreign audiences between the end of the Second World War and the 1960s. Kevin Gaines has investigated the critique of both colonialism and United States racial practices by African-American expatriates in Ghana. Michael L. Krenn has explored African-American leaders' use of their government's anti-communism to pressure Washington to live up to its democratic rhetoric. Brenda Gayle Plummer has documented how African-American organizations pressed the United States government to recognize race as a global concern and to recognize the link between domestic racism and foreign policy concerns. And Penny M. Von Eschen has shown how African-American activists, artists, intellectuals, and writers linked domestic and global racism. (9) Such studies have led Jonathan Rosenberg to argue that one cannot fully comprehend the civil rights movement in the United States during the mid-twentieth century without first understanding how African Americans perceived and made use of international affairs to advance their cause. (10)

By highlighting the issues of federal support for the arts and the development of jazz as a serious art form in their international contexts, this study of Gillespie's groundbreaking State Department-sponsored jazz tour explores the role of culture in diplomatic history and, conversely, the role of foreign policy in shaping cultural history. In so doing, it builds on Von Eschen's survey of these tours, which emphasizes the "disparities between the aims of the artists and those of government officials, and between their respective views of American culture." (11) Unfortunately, she neglects to take into account the domestic issue of federal support for the arts. In an effort to fill this gap, this study explores the confluence of interests between United States policymakers, musicians, and jazz aficionados. Federal support for the arts, the African-American civil rights struggle, and the foreign policy of anti-communism are interwoven issues in the story of Eisenhower administration's use of jazz as propaganda.

In a 1955 Music Journal article titled "Are the Communists Right in Calling Us Cultural Barbarians?" Representative Frank Thompson, Jr. (D-NJ), a strong advocate for the use of the arts to promote state interests, argued that "making Washington the cultural center of the world would be one of the very best and most effective ways to answer Soviet lies and defeat their heavily financed effort to support the spread of communism." (12) Thompson, in drawing a connection between the state's role in domestic cultural activities and its international image, reasoned:

if we have no respect for our own best cultural efforts, if we show no concern as a people and as a nation for our own contemporary culture and our living artists, then the peoples of other countries are hardly to blame if they ignore and are indifferent to the cultural contributions which we have to give the world. We have only...