Understanding Cultural Policy

Carole Rosenstein

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9781315526836
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Cultural Policy
• Index: Politics & International Relations

Understanding Cultural Policy provides a practical, comprehensive introduction to thinking about how and why governments intervene in the arts and culture.

Cultural policy expert Carole Rosenstein examines the field through comparative, historical, and administrative lenses, while engaging directly with the issues and tensions that plague policy-makers across the world, including issues of censorship, culture-led development, cultural measurement, and globalization. Several of the textbook's chapters end with a 'policy lab' designed to help students tie theory and concepts to real world, practical applications.

This book will prove a new and valuable resource for all students of cultural policy, cultural administration, and arts management.

1 A (Very) Short History of the Development of National Cultural Policy in the United States

Cultural policy emerged in the United States in the 1950s and coalesced in the early 1960s. During this period, a nascent set of policy principles guided the key government actions that intervened in culture, but those actions were not formed in reference to a coherent or well-plotted cultural policy in any substantive way. Instead, other prevailing factors determined how those interventions took shape. The most important of those factors include: the lasting influence of the New Deal’s Works Progress Administration, new postwar structures of power that blurred the boundaries between government and civil society, and pressing Cold War political imperatives. History and politics are at least as important to policy formation as is any governmental or administrative technique. To understand why and how U.S. cultural policy developed in the way it did, a careful look at the midcentury historical and political context is necessary.

The Culture Agenda: Prewar/Cold War

Consider the story of the American National Theatre and Academy (ANTA). In 1932, a group of Philadelphia arts patrons came together to discuss the state of theater in that city. Movies and radio were undercutting theater’s popularity, and the Depression was making matters worse. Theater patron and amateur impresario Mary Stewart French thought the group might found a theater following in the model of Eva Le Gallienne’s Civic Repertory Theatre in New York, where she was a trustee. Poet and Mainline doyenne Amory Hare Hutchinson took matters a step further, suggesting that the group move toward developing a national theater. Soon, Hutchinson, together with Broadway actress Blanche Yurka, initiated a series of meetings around the country to drum up support for their national theater proposal. In August 1933, Mary French and her housemate, Clara Mason, met with Eleanor Roosevelt to discuss whether a federal charter might be secured to develop a national theater. Mrs. Roosevelt had a special love for theater and was deeply involved in efforts to sustain it during the Depression. French came away from the meeting agreeing to adopt a suggestion put forward by President Roosevelt: ANTA should move forward modeling itself on the American Academy of Arts and Letters. That is, ANTA should request a federal charter to act not as a national theater, but rather to act as a national nonprofit association supporting and promoting regional and local theaters through private action and resources. New York Senator Robert Wagner (D-NY) agreed to install Mary French in an office in Washington, where she prepared to lobby Congress on ANTA’s behalf (R. Coe 1976: B3).

As ANTA continued its organizing for a federally chartered national theater association through 1934, two other government cultural interventions were in play. Some small public projects for unemployed theater professionals had been established as a part of the early New Deal relief programs, but sweeping Democratic wins in the 1934 midterm elections gave President Roosevelt a mandate to expand. Funding for what would become the Works Progress Administration (WPA) was introduced in Congress in January 1935 and became law in April. Planning for the WPA Federal One Theatre, Art, Music, and Writers’ Projects commenced immediately (Mathews 1967: 13). That same Spring, Representative William Sirovich (D-NY), Chair of the House Committee on Patents, introduced a Joint Resolution calling for the establishment of a Cabinet-level Department of Science, Arts, and Literature. In April and May, he held a full seven days of hearings that included testimony from scores of arts professionals and supporters, declaring the need for a federal culture department. Speaking from the bench, Sirovich criticized the ANTA proposal, which he characterized as one that asked the public to give its dollars over into private hands without any mechanism for accountability, adding:

You know what the stage would get from private enterprise: it would get the crumbs, it would get the milk when the cream is taken off, it would get what they call charity, and stage folk would be dependent on the good men and women making money and, when they are not making money, then the sponsors of the privately operated national theater and stage folk would find themselves in the pitiful plight they are in today…. This national theater of all of the stage arts should be a governmental function. If you want the Government to subsidize and help, let us get every agency together and work together for a common cause.

(U.S. Committee on Patents 1935: 16)

The Sirovich resolution died in committee. The American National Theatre and Academy received its federal charter in July. In August 1935, the WPA Federal Theatre Project officially was established. Although the U.S. government dramatically expanded its role in culture during this period, the development of a permanent public cultural agency was tamped in favor of a temporary relief program together, in the case of theater, with a national organization structured to maintain the primacy of private, non-governmental action in support of the arts.

The most artistically innovative of the WPA Federal One arts projects, the Federal Theatre Project sustained theater professionals through the Depression, helping theaters in New York, Washington, Philadelphia, Chicago, Cleveland, San Francisco, and other centers of theater to survive and introducing theater to smaller cities and rural areas around the country. At its height, the project employed more than 12,500 people. But as the project grew, criticism flourished. Conservatives claimed that the project systematically provided relief to Communist activists, and that the project’s plays fomented class conflict. Another attempt to establish a federal arts department, introduced by Representative John Coffee (D-WA) in the House and Senator Claude Pepper (D-FL) in the Senate, foundered. In 1938, WPA Theatre Project Director Hallie Flanagan was brought before the House Committee on Un-American Activities and required to testify about Communist influences in the Federal Theatre. Although this incident is notorious for the ridiculous and ignorant questions posed to Flanagan, the comments of Committee Chair Representative Martin Dies (D-TX) would echo across decades in Congressional criticisms of federal cultural action:

Do you not also think that since the Federal Theater Project is an agency of the Government and that all of our people support it through their tax money, people of different classes, different races, different religions, some who are workers, some who are businessmen, don’t you think that that being true that no play should ever be produced which undertakes to portray the interests of one class to the disadvantage of another class, even though that might be accurate, even though factually there may be justification for that, yet because of the very fact that we are using taxpayers’ money to produce plays, do you not think it is questionable whether it is right to produce plays that are biased in favor of one class against another?

Flanagan demurred. Congress defunded the Federal Theatre Project in June 1939. Perhaps more important for this history, the spectacle of the Dies Committee effectively corrupted the very idea of a federal arts program.

In the meantime, ANTA was working on a national design template for community theater buildings to be rolled out at the 1939 World’s Fair. Mrs. Hutchinson had decamped to her California horse-breeding ranch in 1936, but Mary Stewart French had stayed on in Washington. She continued on at the ANTA Board while working first at the World’s Fair Commission and then settling in at the State Department. Once the U.S. entered World War II, ANTA began a period of dormancy.

Then, in 1945, two theater directors and returning GIs, Robert Breem and Robert Porterfield, proposed reviving ANTA as a national theater foundation that would produce national theater programs and distribute federal funds to regional repertory theaters. Breem and Porterfield modeled their plan on England’s Committee for the Encouragement of Music and the Arts (CEMA). CEMA had been established in 1939 to provide wartime cultural programs using a combination of public and private funds. (After the war, CEMA became the Arts Council of Great Britain.) Breem believed that by providing theater programs to the returning troops, ANTA might establish lasting connections to the federal government, connections he might leverage to build a national foundation for theater.¹ Although ANTA never successfully implemented this Breen–Porterfield Plan, discussion about how such a foundation might shape a national theater reinvigorated the organization. Breen was brought on as Executive Secretary in 1946, a position he held until 1951. During those years, ANTA helped to produce tours and radio and television programs, and began to develop national services for repertory theater. Breen hoped that ANTA could found a national theater centered in New York and serving regional repertory theaters around the country, but that work was stunted because, without federal support, it lacked a viable revenue stream. In 1951, members of the ANTA Board, led by Broadway producer Roger L. Stevens, dramatically reshuffled the organization. Breen was shouldered out and the unfunded national programs he had hoped to expand were cut.

ANTA emerged from the takeover with two program areas intact: a small national service office and a burgeoning array of international programs. In her role at the State Department, Mary Stewart French had attended the 1945 conference for the establishment of the UN and, by 1946, she was putting together international cultural exchange programs for the State Department Division of International Exchange of Persons. French reached out to ANTA for help with fledgling plans to bring the Comédie Française and the Moscow Art Theatre to the U.S. ANTA was in midst of negotiations to take American productions to Europe, and this sparked a long-lived collaboration between the State Department and ANTA around international cultural exchange. By 1948, French, together with influential theater critic and editor of Theatre Arts Rosamond Gilder, had managed to cement the organization’s international role, setting up ANTA to serve as the representative of theater to the U.S. National Commission for UNESCO and as the U.S. office of the newly established UNESCO International Theatre Institute (ITI).

ANTA grew as the U.S. government’s Cold War propaganda and public diplomacy apparatus grew. In 1950, the State Department contracted with ANTA to manage U.S. participation in the Berlin Cultural Festival. That event was sponsored by the Allied High Command in Germany in the hope that cultural exchange would contribute to West German cultural and political “reorientation” and, at the same time, would begin to help the West compete with the expansive Soviet cultural programming being rolled out in East Germany and around the world. At that first Berlin Cultural Festival, Britain and France presented programs and, representing the U.S., ANTA presented six programs including Oklahoma, the Julliard String Quartet, a production of Medea featuring Judith Anderson, an operatic performance by Astrid Varnay, a gospel performance by the Hall Johnson Choir, and a dance performance by Angna Enters. ANTA continued producing the Berlin Cultural Festival annually through 1953.

In 1954, President Eisenhower secured an Emergency Fund for International Affairs, resources controlled by the Office of the President and targeted to the global fight against anti-American and pro-Soviet propaganda. A portion of the Emergency Fund went to the State Department for cultural exchange programs, and another portion went to a new propaganda agency, the U.S. Information Agency (USIA), to develop cultural programming such as the Voice of America. Once this source of funding was in place, the State Department formalized its relationship with ANTA, underwriting ANTA’s International Cultural Exchange Service (ICES).² The program became much more formal, establishing drama, dance, and music panels to select artists and productions that might be included in the cultural exchange and propaganda programs. ANTA made recommendations to the State Department, who then chose programs in consultation with USIA, the CIA, other federal foreign relations agencies, and local sponsoring embassies. In 1956, President Eisenhower signed an Executive Order making the new cultural diplomacy functions of the Department of State permanent.

ANTA’s international activities through the late 1950s and early 1960s were extensive and global. At its height, the ANTA Cultural Exchange program sent more than 125 tours abroad each year, including: Martha Graham; Jose Limon; the famous jazz tours of Dizzy Gillespie, Louis Armstrong, and Bennie Goodman; Leonard Bernstein and the New York Philharmonic; the Boston Symphony Orchestra; regular tours of the American Ballet Theatre; and a Robert Breem production of Porgie and Bess (see Prevots 1998; Von Eschen 2004; Canning 2009). From 1957 forward, ANTA produced plays for broadcast on the Voice of America, as well. UNESCO’s ITI remained at ANTA through the 1960s. Through ITI, ANTA partnered with the State Department to aid in the exchange of persons both incoming and outgoing, hosting and helping to make contacts for international travelers. ANTA staff and Board members traveled to international theater, arts, and education conferences all around the world over the entire period. ICES funding came from the State Department, but ANTA’s other international activities were paid for with covert dollars from the CIA, especially from frontman Julius Fleischman (John 1967: 267). The CIA covertly funded all sorts of anti-Communist cultural activities during this period through the Congress for Cultural Freedom as well as individual and foundation “private sources” such as Fleischman and the Rockefeller Foundation (Saunders 1999).

ANTA effectively had been taken over by the government public diplomacy apparatus. Its cultural exchange program continued through the end of 1962, when its functions finally were absorbed into formal programs at the State Department. By 1966, the organization was bankrupt. Roger L. Stevens, still a member of the ANTA Board and preparing to take his place as the first Chair of the National Endowment for the Arts, merged the organization into the National Council for the Arts and ANTA disappeared into the new federal arts foundation. Mary Stewart French—who had “pawned her family diamonds to start ANTA” and then shepherded the organization in its work as the lead private partner in a generation of Cold War cultural diplomacy—retired from the State Department in 1968 at the age of 78.³

Throughout its history, ANTA supporters had envisioned that the organization would lead the development of a national theater by building: a center of knowledge about how to manage a regional repertory theater; a national network of theaters that could provide sustained work for producers, directors, playwrights, actors, and designers; a safety net of resources to support that network during lean times; and funding for experiments that would push the field forward artistically. ANTA accomplished none of those goals. However, most would be achieved by a major Ford Foundation investment in national theater begun in 1957. The Ford initiative instigated the founding of regional repertory theaters across the country and, at the same time, established and funded the Theater Communications Group (TCG), a national service association for those theaters. This was the beginning of the national theater so many had been working to achieve since the 1930s, seeded and cultivated by millions of private philanthropic dollars.

Philanthropy and Cultural Policy

Wealthy individuals, coalitions of the wealthy, and private foundations always have played a critical role in sustaining the nonprofit arts, humanities, and preservation in the United States. The humanities were fostered in private, nonprofit colleges and libraries founded and governed by wealthy donors. The arts, in private, nonprofit museums and symphony orchestras, similarly established, led, and provisioned. Although elite tastes and priorities fundamentally shaped these institutions, founders and supporters put them forward as contributing in important ways to the public at large and as being necessary to civic life (see DiMaggio 1982, 1991b, 2011). By way of those assertions, elites leveraged various sorts of government support for nonprofit cultural institutions: donations of public land, long-term leases on public buildings, underwriting for capital development, subsidies, tax exemption for donations made to nonprofit culture organizations. This leveraging is an oblique form of policymaking; in indirect ways, it moves government toward what it does and what it fails to do. In U.S. cultural policy, the effects of elite cultural entrepreneurship in the nonprofit sector are substantial because historically the wealthy have had much more interest in the humanities and the arts than has government. This is evident at the local level, in particular. In cities, wealthy elites drove the development of nonprofit culture institutions, using their influence to bring local and state government along in support of the institutions they founded.

A distinctive type of philanthropy in which large expenditures of private wealth were used systematically to shape public life through planning and the formation of expert opinion rather than through institution building alone emerged in the 1920s and continued through to the 1960s. That style of philanthropy also significantly influenced the development of cultural policy. Each of the twentieth century’s wealthiest and most influential foundations—the Carnegie Corporation, the Ford Foundation, and the Rockefeller Foundations—took on large-scale cultural programs that were national in scope. Those programs fundamentally shaped both nonprofit culture and cultural policy, and their influences continue until today.

Andrew Carnegie first published the Gospel of Wealth in 1889. In that founding document of modern philanthropy, Carnegie argued that the great concentrations of wealth and the enormous income inequality that characterized the Gilded Age demanded that the wealthy take on new social responsibilities.

This, then, is held to be the duty of the man of wealth: To set an example of modest, unostentatious living, shunning display or extravagance; to provide moderately for the legitimate wants of those dependent upon him; and, after doing so, to consider all surplus revenues which come to him simply as trust funds, which he is called upon to administer, and strictly bound as a matter of duty to administer in the manner which, in his judgment, is best calculated to produce the most beneficial results for the community—the man of wealth thus becoming the mere trustee and agent for his poorer brethren, bringing to their service his superior wisdom, experience, and ability to administer, doing for them better than they would or could do for themselves.

(1901: 15)

Carnegie went on to list the eight sorts of institution a philanthropist should b...