Origins of US Cultural Diplomacy in the 1940s, Iowa City, Iowa, May 1, 2014

- [Sue Dulek] I also want to acknowledge our university and community sponsors, the University of Iowa honors program, the University of Iowa international programs both contribute vital time, talent, and logistics to our organization. I also thank today's financial sponsors, Burns Weston and Mike Carberry. Our work is made possible by the financial support of the sponsors. Our format today is the usual one. I will introduce the speaker, and after the conclusion of his remarks, we will have a question and answer period. You can write your questions on the cards on the table. They will be collected at the conclusion of his remarks. I am very pleased to introduce Harilaos Stecopoulos, I asked him twice how to pronounce his name and I messed it up now twice and I apologize for that. - [Harilaos Stecopoulos] The second time was right on. - [Sue Dulek] Here he is, an associate professor of English at the University of Iowa, and editor of the prestigious Iowa Review. He earned his PhD in English Literature from UvA. He has authored several books, articles, and chapters and is currently completing Telling America's Story to the World, the literature of US diplomacy. Please welcome Harilaos Stecopoulos. - [Harilaos Stecopoulos] Thanks, Sue, I appreciate it. Thanks to Ed for arranging this and everyone who contributed money and time to making this possible. It's wonderful to see so many people coming out here. At first I thought everyone is coming for the free lunch, and then I was told that was only the honors student. That makes me feel better. It's a lot better. In some ways, it's strange that I'm here. I was looking over the list of previous speakers, and I think I saw a Chris Merrill somewhere, but by and large, you don't get a lot of English professors standing up here, and probably with good reason. After all, I specialize in study of Faulkner and other Southern writers, and I'm not someone you usually turn to for information about cultural diplomacy or internationalism. But in some ways, the very strangeness of my presence here is part of what I'll discuss over the next 20 to 30 minutes. I'm very interested in the relationship between culture and foreign relations. In my case, specifically literature in foreign relations, hence the current book, project, which is on the relationship between US cultural diplomacy and literary culture from about the beginning of the 1940s to the end of the cold war. Today I'm going to share some remark, some material from my first chapter which is still in process, which is basically an overview, an inflected overview of cultural internationalism in the 1940s, and its relationship, particularly to cold war of 1950s and to some degree our own, at the end, I'll probably muse a bit on the implications of what I've said for current policy emanating from the state department. And I apologize, I at the last minute decided to use some, one paragraph, actually longest paragraph on a Time Magazine cover and I do not have it to share with you but it's only one paragraph, so I'm sure you'll suffer through it. On January 12, 1953, Time Magazine presented its readers with a somewhat unusual cover. The majority of the image is given over to a three quarter profile painting of a writer Thornton Wilder, well known at that point for his plays Our Town and the Skin of Our Teeth, but hardly a figure of Faulknerian or Hemingwayesque stature. His line, mustache and gray haired, Wilder appears mature and preoccupied, even somewhat worried as he gazes to his right. His head partly obscures a Jasper Johns-like drawing of an American flag and a school blackboard, both figures stand out against the white ground. Time captions this image with the subject's name, Thornton Wilder, and one confusing sentence, the American is the first planetary mind. I'll say that again, the American is the first planetary mind. That tag must have proved somewhat confusing. It certainly was confusing to me the first time I saw this image. While Wilder, the flag, and the chalkboard resonate as pretty comprehensible references to American education, or perhaps to American literature, the phrase planetary mind proved somewhat strange. What is a planetary mind? Is it a literary mind possessed by American writers alone, say Wilder's? Is it a teacher's mind at work in a typical American classroom, if you recall the chalkboard behind his head? Does it refer to all Americans who read and study, particularly the work of well known playwrights? And why would the American be the first planetary mind and odd locution that suggests identity, not possession. The Time cover story answered such questions and others by finding Wilder's account of the planetary and affirmation of national exceptionalism. And with good reason. The playwright's contemporary essays toward the American language, the American loneliness, and Emily Dickinson first live it at Harvard, finding the works of Dickinson, Melville, Emerson, Whitman, evidence of a global disposition that defies the usual equation of national sovereignty and literary formation. In these essays, and elsewhere, Wilder argues that unlike his timid old world relations, the American settler, quote, did not need to be supported, framed, consoled, by the known, the habitual, the loved. He braved the unknown and developed accordingly. Confronted by the sheer vastness of the continent, its multitude, distance and magnitude, the American experienced and absorbed what had meant to be unframed, unrooted, to be, this is Wilder, differently surrounded. A phrase I kind of like. And that lack of a stabilizing relationship to one place or any one community meant that the American lack the stabilizing relationship to any one moment in time or history. Such an abstract and disconnected identity might suggest loneliness, isolation, a pretty impoverish life, but Wilder reminds us reader of the compensatory rewards. Unlike other people, the American, this is Wilder, has a relation to everywhere, to everybody and to all ways. Isn't that, that's a good thing, right? For Wilder, the American is the first planetary mind because the American is the first to have developed through historical experience a psychology capable of grasping both the national and the global, the first to understand space and time in an almost extraterrestrial manner. Although, I don't think Wilder's going for science-fiction there, but there's an element of it. Wilder's celebration of a uniquely American, excuse me, planetary mind, can't help but suggest nationalism of a distinctly imperial variety. I always think of Henry Luce's piece, the American Century, when reading these essays, and certainly when seeing that Time Magazine cover. But his celebration also recalls a playwright's long stand investment in cultural internationalism. What Francis Fukuyama has defined, I had to use Francis Fukuyama here, as quote, the attempt to build cultural understanding, cooperation, and a sense of shared values across national borders. One of the nation's first official literary ambassadors, in 1940, Wilder traveled to Colombia, Ecuador and Peru, giving readings and meeting with the local literati, he would reprise his cultural diplomatic role in a very different context in post-World War II Berlin, where he helped the state introduce a production of his play, the Skin of Our Teeth shortly after the US Air Force had broken the communist blockade. These experiences inspired Wilder's 1949 essay, Goethe and World Literature, a piece that celebrate the capacity of nations to transcend their parochialism and usher in a new era of peace and understanding. If the writer's deployment of the word planetary urge a celebration of US global hegemony during the early days of the cold war, it also affirm an internationalism. It was the transnational circulation of knowledge and of culture with hopefully constitute an antidote to militarism. Many of my colleagues who study cold war America both in literature and history departments would likely see in Wilder's essays on the planetary American mind and their celebration by time as evidence of how an omnipresent containment culture, that is communism contained of course, co-opted or indeed destroyed the liberal idealism of the mid to late 1940s. Over the past 50 years, historians have stressed how the anti-communist fervor of the 1950s and later demanded the censure or redefinition of the vibrant internationalism of the preceding decade. This argument has played a particularly important role in the recent work of Nicholas Cull, Andrew Falk, and other scholars of US cultural diplomacy who have more in the fact that with a notable exception of the Fulbright program, cold war policymakers succeeded in eviscerating the cultural approach to foreign relations. Or worse yet, establish it as a unilateral approach to foreign relations that didn't allow for any dialectic relations. We were to tell the world America's story, but we were hardly obliged to listen. And I should say here, so we have, listeners, auditors at various ages, to tell the world, telling the world America's story was the US information agency's tagline for some time and then got cut down a bit to telling America's story, not just to the world, they cut out the world part for some reason. In any event, we were telling, but we weren't especially sensitive listeners in return. I sympathize with my colleague's perspective, but I'd like to linger more on internationalism of the '40s, if only because I see it as persisting in stronger form and contributing complicated ways to a new understanding of American culture in the world long after the turn of the decade. How else can we understand the US information agency to sponsor tour of the Edward Steichen photography exhibit, the Family of Man, which some of you may know? A quintessential example of liberal internationalism that circled the globe from roughly 1956 to 1965 under federal sponsorship, of course. How else can we explain President Eisenhower's 1955 sponsorship of the people to people program? An initiative that attempted to create US international connections through networks of like-minded professionals in different nations. Friendship between peoples is built understanding, and understanding, proclaims the people to people proposal, is nurtured by exchange of information and ideas and by neighborly association. Nothing could be more emblematic of the '40s, even the '30s internationalism, for that matter. Historian Christina Klein, in a great book called Cold War Orientalism, has argued that these examples of 1950s cultural diplomacy remind us of how seemingly alien internationalism had deep American roots in missionary work, private philanthropy, the Carnegie foundation for example, sentimental discourse in woman's culture, and middlebrow sort of autodidactic culture. Roots that even cold war anti-communism couldn't eradicate. She makes a wonderful point. But I like to stress as well that the internationalism of the '40s survived despite its association with the new deal liberalism, and even to some degree, the popular front left, because it offered a way of imagining the nation's state in cultural terms. Cultural internationalism retained influence, in other words, because it offered a discourse through which policy makers, intellectuals, could debate and hammer out the relationship between culture, the nation, the world, during a period in which most Americans were still new to the idea of international intervention and obligation. It performed, in other words, a certain kind of social and cultural work that even anti-communism couldn't do without. It's important to remember that the US government's slow shift to regular repeated intervention of the world had a notable cultural component. Beginning in the mid '30s, President Roosevelt and its cabinet began to chip away at the entrenched isolationism that have ruled both sides of the aisle ever since the senate refuse to ratify the Treaty of Versailles in 1920. Pointing to the dangerous rise of fascist regimes in Europe and Asia, the second Roosevelt administration argued successfully for greater US involvement in foreign affairs, and at the same time began creating the US's first offices of cultural diplomacy. And I should say, I am not going to afflict you with the endless acronyms, name changes, offices of cultural diplomacy from the late '30s well into the '40s and beyond. The federal government as you know loves initials. As is the military. So I'm going to do a little bit of that but I won't track every single permutation and name change. 'Cause life is too short, I think, at least right now. As Wilder's work in Colombia, Ecuador and Peru should suggest, the latter effort that is the creation of this new bureaus and agencies of cultural diplomacy was initially directed at the Western hemisphere in order to ward off the threat of German propaganda and takeover in South America. In 1938, President Roosevelt pushed for the creation of the interdepartmental committee on scientific and cultural cooperation and the division of cultural relations within the state department in order to facilitate relations between the US and other American republics. Citing such evidence, among many other texts and institutions, the scholar J. Emmanuel Espinosa has argued persuasively that US cultural diplomacy has an intra-American origin. A more compelling way of pointing out that US cultural diplomacy emerged in tandem with a somewhat questionable good neighbor policy. That's a subject for another paper. In the aftermath of the attack in Pearl Harbor and the subsequent US entrance into the war, the division of cultural relations still located in the state began to turn its attention to other parts of the world as well. To China and East Asia in 1942, and then to the Middle East and Africa in 1943. American cultural centers and libraries were created around the world, the voice of America took to the air and the first cultural relations officers, later attaches, were appointed. Thanks to the threat of the access powers, in other words, US culture assumed a new role in the world at large. Thanks again, also to the facilitation of the federal government. But what did this new instantiation of culture say about culture that it could be deployed in this manner? And what did it say about American culture in particular? This is the question of Wilder, I would argue, he's attempting to answer, some years after the fact. Some of the fiercest internationalists inevitably found themselves commenting not only on US relationship with other nations, say Argentina, or France, but also the problem of national cultural for society that had really thought about its culture, read European, terms. We are still very much a young country, culturally speaking in the '40s, and I should say it's a stereotype, well we're stereotyping others here, but there's some truth to it, the stereotype was the US had no real culture, of course. We had air conditioning and coke and lots of stuff, but we didn't have any great writers or great composers. We're sort of bereft when it came to true culture. Assistant secretary of state at this point, and poet, Archibald MacLeish suggested as much in his 1945 lecture popular relations and the peace. When he attempts to define the new term and the stage cultural relations, this is MacLeish. What we wish that people of other countries to know about ourselves and what we for our part wish to know about the other peoples of other countries, is not the condition of culture in the popularly distorted sense of the term. What we wish to know, what we wish them to know is something far deeper and far wider. We want men and women in other continents to know what our life as people is like, what we value as a people, and what we are skilled and what not skilled, our character, our quality, our beliefs. We want them when they hear or read of this dramatic event or that, to think at the same time who we are, what we are like, and therefore, how the event should be interpreted. It seems to me that MacLeish here is distinguishing his use of the word culture from the famous Arnoldian sense of the term, the best, which has been thought and said, and turning instead to a more anthropological, even Herderian definition of culture as the key to a nation's character. He doesn't want the sense of hierarchy that the word culture often assumes. Who was it, is it Goebbels who says, I hear the world culture, I reach for my gun, or is it Goring, which one? It's one of them. Some Nazi official, reach for his gun when he heard the word culture. The passage suggests that, it's the MacLeish passage, that cultural diplomacy will improve international relations. It enables Americans to gain a deeper and wider understanding of other peoples and allows other communities to gain a similar understanding of man of woman in the United States. For MacLeish, still something of a radical democrat in the mid '40s, this ethnic graphic conception of cultural relations links the nation's new attempt at international outreach with a native democratic tradition that resist hierarchy and the top-down exercise of power. MacLeish has believed in what international relation scholar, Joseph Montville has called track two diplomacy, a citizen's diplomacy that stands apart from state foreign policy, draws,and help supports the idea that a US cultural relations program worthy of being called American would focus more on quotidian life and less on acclaimed figures and celebrated achievements. In other words, from MacLeish view, I should not follow example of say, Italy's Dante Society, and Germany's Goethe Institute, and create, say, an Emerson Society or an Edison Institute. We're all about the humdrum and the everyday. Indeed, MacLeish's mid-decade conception of cultural diplomacy sometimes seemed so quotidian, so low scale, that it barely seems national at all. Seems more like, to go back to good neighbor policy, a bunch of people in a village or a hamlet. His emphasis on people to people relations, a phrase which actually originates in the '40s and the Eisenhower people pick it up, seems to allow for the possibility that any community on this continent, continents a cute world for him there, might benefit from deep cultural interaction with any community on another continent. The nation form seems to somehow vanished. In the century, the common man, to borrow from Henry Wallace and in the space of one world, to borrow from Wendell Willkie, both fervent internationalists of the period, cultural relations need not be conducted between nations, let alone states. They can take place, they should take place between ordinary folks. You see there the resonance of a '30s tradition of a populist, new deal populism as well as front populism. As these references should suggest, MacLeish's speech, 1945, it was in Atlantic City, actually, reflected the wide spread appeal of cultural internationalism in the 1940s. The list of figures who publicly expressed the hope that culture, more accurately cultural exchange might prove effective in achieving what Senator Fulbright would call the humanizing of international relations, range from left to right and points in between. It included some of the most noteworthy figures of the era, Fulbright of course, but also vice president Henry Wallace, under-secretary of state Senator Wells, republican and candidate for president, Wendell Willkie, senator's republican, black activist, Mary McLeod Bathune, who's a delegate to the first UN conference, Ralph Bunche, Saturday Review editor and middlebrow impresario, Norman Cousins, and a range of cultural figures, Pearl Buck, Carson McCullers, Oscar Hammerstein, the list goes on and on and on. Much of the American public seems to have agreed with these public figures, supporting US participation in both the UN and UNESCO by a large margin. MacLeish might have exaggerated when he claimed in '47 that cultural relations is more important to the people of the United States than almost anything else they can read about or think about at this moment. But Americans were, despite his extreme exaggeration, profoundly invested in the notion that culture might prove capable of transforming international relations into something harmonious and warding off the threat of war. And at the same time, the populist tender of MacLeish's notion of cultural diplomacy, which is not exactly anomalous, it's endemic to much of the discourse, proved something of a problem. For populism often slip into nationalism in complicated ways. MacLeish sought to resist the idea that cultural relations as practiced by the US might be manipulative or aggressive. That the new US internationalist discourse might be propaganda by another name. And I can't go into it here fully, but the relationship between other public diplomacy or cultural diplomacy and propaganda is a vexed one, it persists to this day. Most famously, in the early '60s, what's his name from Tufts, argued that, I'm going to forget his name now, argued that we would call it propaganda, if propaganda didn't have such a pejorative association, if we were being candid, but in the absence of that kind of candor and honesty, we call it public diplomacy. You see that anxiety over terminology beginning at the origins of the discourse itself. MacLeish imagined that the US practice of cultural relation would challenge other nation's propaganda through its truth-telling. That is other nations might succumb to manipulation through cultural discourse, but we would correct them through our more candid example of the same. He also had a problem thinking about the way cultural relations, that the practice of it, might redound to affect culture in the US. That is, there would be, he sort of imagined a transparent or immediate relationship between the culture we live and practice here and its export or deployment or communication to the world at large. There was no sense of backlash, that is, in the very process of changing it, exporting it, you might alter it on the home front. His allies, and to some extent disciples, Ruth McMurry and Muna Lee, weren't quite so sanguine when they took up the challenge of defining cultural relations in their co-authored book, the Cultural Approach, Another Way in International Relations, which is from '47. Like MacLeish, they understood, the cultural relations of the people as its efforts toward mutual acquaintance and the mutual understanding that such acquaintance brings. But unlike MacLeish, they defined the idea of culture in far more hierarchical and nationalist terms. Citing this time, and improvingly so, Arnold's 1876 definition of the word again, the best have been thought and heard, McMurry and Lee claimed that the eminent Victorian's account corresponds to that of the adjective in their title, the cultural approach, and with good reason. The two authors don't completely reject the ethnographic populist vision promulgated by MacLeish, but they also insist on the importance of national distinction and even national aggression to any cultural diplomatic enterprise. In their view, a nation's culture is a sum and total of its achievement, its own expression of its own personality, its way of thinking and acting, its program of cultural relations abroad is its method of making these things known to foreigners. Such a program is in effect, a self-portrait into which go all the people's creativity and technical skill, and which it wishes the rest of the world to recognize as a speaking likeness. They're a lot more fun to gloss than MacLeish, as you may have gathered. The language of this passage suggests that for McMurry and Lee, a program of cultural relations abroad is not only a collaborative mission that brings together people on different continents and sort of focus the populist apotheosis but also project that makes the sum total of a nation's achievements known to foreigners. And that word is telling you there. MacLeish never uses the world foreigner. We're all just people. They insist on distinguishing us against them. They also distinguish themselves by insisting that a cultural relations program constitutes an implicitly flattering self-portrait that will be recognized as a nation's speaking likeness by the world. The idea of the common man and woman, sort of, Wallace, Henry Wallace-like conception, communicating with our counterparts across the ocean, gives way to a new public relations conception of cultural diplomacy as a form of self-flattering representation or indeed even national theater. I should say, this conception publication, while, public diplomacy, while probably more honest, gave cold war liberals like Lionel Trilling and others, no end of sort of, annoyance and irritation. In a very interesting 1953 piece, Publish and Perspective, which is a Ford Foundation's sponsored magazine designed for global consumption, Trilling takes up the idea that cultural diplomacy is meant to project a uniform homogeneous and flattering image of the nation and of its culture to the world. And his claims that any intellectual writer, artist worth his or her salt could never participate in such a venture precisely because they have to iron out everything that's interesting. Create another, in Lee and McMurry's words, a speaking likeness into it all the nation's creativity and skill is gone, and a pleasing likeness at that. This is one of the great tangents between the people that actually make the culture or big critics like Trilling, and those who somehow exercise and seek to deploy it. There was a vast gulf there. The additional interpretation as McMurry and Lee literally dubbed this self-portrait, bears upon the relationship between cultural diplomacy and propaganda. Throughout the novel, but particularly, sorry, throughout the volume, but particularly the end, McMurry and Lee conceived that some cultural relations programs have been used as instruments of national aggression but they find even in these instances a testament to a nation's valuation, sort of prioritization of its own culture, that will in the end, contribute to greater international communication. It's a fascinating quote, I'm going to read it slowly. A certain portion of the work of all the successful programs of cultural relations with foreign countries is undoubtedly propaganda. They're nothing if not candid. But propaganda in its original sense of propagation of the faith. This of course is the original religious definition of the term. The love which the British, the French, the Spanish, the Italians, the Russians, the Brazilians and all the other peoples have for their homeland, their faith in their own institutions and in their own life and thought finds expression in their cultural activities abroad. And that word love really resonates there. It's an extreme word given that this is to some degree a policy book. In a strange twist, a successful cultural relations program not only communicates people's love for their homeland institutions to communities around the world, it also enables that love to take form. It gives it a shape. Cultural diplomacy or in this case the propagation of the faith both depends on and helps instantiate national culture. Particularly in the case of a young nation, still in the process of understanding and evaluating its own art and expression. That the academics study of American literature and culture benefited enormously, really took shape in the cultural diplomatic initiatives of the '40s, '50s and onward. So suggest that McMurry and Lee are on to something here. American Studies Association for example, really would not exist were it not for cold war cultural diplomacy, despite its current leftist leanings. McMurry and Lee understand the national's imperative underwriting the most idealistic forms of cultural exchange. I want to stress this here, that on the one hand, they're left liberal cultural internationalists, they say all the right things. At the same time, they don't believe that the system will work. Internationalism has an engine or motivation or a force without this somewhat narcissistic self-involved and self-aggrandizing form of national love. Wilder may have been wrong about the American planetary mind but he understood their culture had emerged in a decidedly international frame. We may not be planetary, in other words, but we're certainly global. And all the more global according to Wilder, Lee and MacLeish, sorry, Lee and McMurry and then the others, because we're young , and unformed. To put it another way, the planet helps make the nation. Thanks. - [Sue Dulek] Can you comment on America's cultural exports of film, TV, and video games as a form of contemporary quote-unquote cultural diplomacy. - [Harilaos Stecopoulos] Do I have to stand? - [Sue Dulek] Yes. - [Harilaos Stecopoulos] Yeah, the one that's undoubtedly true, but you don't really need the state to do that. That's the short answer. It's exported nonetheless. Emily Rosenberg, the story makes the point that she argues, remembering her book correctly, that even as early as the very first years of 20th century, private enterprise have been doing a better job of circulating American culture than the state ever would and while I'm not sure I agree with her about the early days, even into the '60s, it's certainly true now that various private commercial enterprises do an excellent job of exporting and disseminating and circulating American film, TV, and so forth, far better I think than the federal government ever could. That isn't to say that federal government doesn't try to engineer certain things. They created was it, the Radio Sawa, was the Arab language radio program after 9/11. There was some ill-fated attempt at an Arab TV show to get more Arab Moslems to like the United States after the invasion of Afghanistan. But by large, the media programming that people actually want to watch has little of anything to do with this government excluding issues of copyright infringement and that sort of thing, legal issues, but in terms of the state department having a TV bureau that disseminate episodes of Game of Thrones, there's no need. Everyone gets Game of Thrones anyhow. - [Sue Dulek] Another contemporary question. Who are the American writers of this era who are carrying on this legacy of cultural diplomacy? - [Harilaos Stecopoulos] Chris, of course. It's my kiss-up to Chris. There are many, that's a complicated question. That continues certainly, because people are more likely to watch Game of Thrones than they are to read a contemporary American novel, obviously. As I understand it, I have interviewed some people in the state department about this, it's done in sort of low key fashion usually as compared to the cold way literature, just tend to be a little more flamboyant and sort of noteworthy and better for people like me. Actually I just spoke to Karen Russell visiting in the workshop this semester. She has read at various consulates in Germany, where they ask her to read, they paid her way over, and she made an interesting point actually that many of the people there were German of course but there's a few percentage of people who are expat Americans. Then you have to wonder, what's the point of sending an American novelist all the way to Germany to have her read to Americans that just happen to be there for school or business for a couple of years? But that of course testifies to the globalization of the world in the way cultural diplomacy doesn't exactly work in a sort of bifurcated or a dichotomized manner, the way we sometimes imagine it does. Also, book festivals, lots of writers. I've had it told to me that all other things being equal, the state department would like their literary representatives to be young, female writers of color. I can't swear to this, but there is some evidence that that is the case, that it somehow suggests we're not sexist, not racist, open to all kinds of forums, but anyway, there's lots to be said about that, but that's probably overly drawing out the answer. - [Sue Dulek] The speaker ask the only directly reciprocal program I know of is the Japan-US friendship commission established in the 1960s, I've asked to first with US IA and now in the state department. Do you know of any others? - [Harilaos Stecopoulos] Nation to nation? Gosh, I'm sure there are quite a few. I actually don't know of any others right now, but I suspect there are, well I'll bring up the, it's not precisely the same thing but I'll say it anyhow, the One Book, Big Read One Book program which is initially a US-based program by the Any A, if I'm remembering correctly, but it was then exported to Egypt, Mexico and Russia, so say US school kids and Egyptian school kids read To Kill A Mockingbird, that's what they do in Bush administration, the second, Bush the son. I think Laura Bush came to Cairo and everyone discussed To Kill A Mockingbird. This is kind of informal relations, but as far as official, I'm not up on that, sorry. - [Audience] Can I just? Japan-US-Frenchfrom both countries and exchanged its culture-- - [Harilaos Stecopoulos] Oh, okay. - [Audience]directly with each other. And they are not US, out and others. It is, but then, Japan doesn't. I don't of any - [Harilaos Stecopoulos] There, they're occasional ones. There's a big-- - [Audience Member] Yeah. They're occasional, but-- - [Harilaos Stecopoulos] But not sustained over a number of years, yeah. - [Audience Member] No rooted. 50 years old. - [Harilaos Stecopoulos] I don't know of anything like that. After 9/11, a bunch of gulf countries sent Arab arts, some jade, some exhibit at the Kennedy Center, and we sent art to the gulf, but those are on a case to case basis mostly. - [Sue Dulek] How effective was the 1940s cultural diplomacy of portraying the life of the non-elite such as the poor farmer, the factory worker and so on? - [Harilaos Stecopoulos] That's a great question. That's complicated. There are many schools of thought on cultural diplomacy and one school is to show your best face to the world. The British excel at the opposite school of thought and we dabble in this, that is, you sort of engage in airing your dirty laundry. The play Black Watch is an example of this about Scottish soldiers in Iraq which toured under the British Council if I'm remembering correctly. The US sort of vacillates, sometimes it exposes its failure, our failures and our problems, be it poverty, racism and the like in cultural form, but there's often a backlash and some senators or congresspeople or officials go why in God's name are you showing all this to the world. Surely, there's enough bad press about us to begin with. Why would you want to contribute more? But you know, I'd say it alternates. In the '40s in particular, no, in the war, there's very little of that, of the spectacular kind. Many American literary works are reprinted and translated beginning in the '40s and some of them inevitably dealt with poverty and racism and so forth, but you really have to wait into this kind of ironic approach of cultural diplomacy you get with the Kennedy administration onward, where you sort of poke fun at the US in the hopes that everyone will take US as more of self-scrutinizing that were often imagined to be. That's a tough question. I'm not sure I answered that well at all. I feel like I'm being examined. - [Sue Dulek] Given its cultural diversity, as compared to say, French or Germany, should we not use the term quote-unquote American cultures rather than the singular American culture? - [Harilaos Stecopoulos] That's a great question. That's one of the problems of projecting cultural power when most of the nations which or contending for power in the culture sphere tend to imagine themselves, correctly or otherwise, as homogenous, monolithic units, although that itself is a fiction, of course, there's no one singular French culture even in the '40s, arguably. That conceivably puts you at something at a disadvantage. There's a vacillation even to this day between projecting an American culture which tends to be kind of vaguely folksy and populist or acknowledging diversity and saying that American culture is, as the question put it, cultures, that pluralism, cultural pluralism is a strong suit or a hallmark and that we can't be compared, of course, to say the Italians or the French or the Nigerians, 'cause we're just too darn diverse. That overlaps with the Wilder point as well. In that extraordinary diversity, that pluralism, there lies a buried claim to basically we are the world. Who else has some many people speaking so many languages, expressing culture in so many ways. Surely that gives us a greater voice or more persuasive voice which to speak to you constituencies in various continents in various places. I'll say one last thing and I'll shut up about this. What's happened, there are interesting cases where Jade Snow Wong, a little known memoirist from San Francisco's Chinatown in 1952, is selected by the state department to go on a literary tour of the Far East, although the state department could care less about Asian-American literature in the 1952. In fact, it doesn't even exist as a literary category. But because our competitors don't have Chinese-American writers to send to the Far East and we do, you get that with Arab-American writers now, we'll send, say, Yemeni-American writers to Yemen. It's hard for other people to do that. It's almost as if we have a barrack, ethnic writers and cultural producers. We can select when needed and deploy them. That's going toway of looking at it, but there is that element. In a sort of instrumentalist approach to our pluralism. I'll shut up there. - There are a couple questions that are somewhat related. That is, whether it conceptualize either as propaganda or information, how effective was it? - [Harilaos Stecopoulos] That's the $64,000 question of cultural diplomacy. Does it work? Does it have effect? It has to be done on a very localized, case by case basis. I think in some instances, it does. This question pertains to the '40s in particular? Or generally? - [Sue Dulek] It does say was, but you could answer both was and is. - [Harilaos Stecopoulos] I mean, there are many instances, not just in a literary sphere, but, did the fact that Soviet youth listen to jazz and rock and roll lead to the demise of Soviet Union? You'd have these kinds of arguments. Maybe, but then does cultural diplomacy have anything to do with that, their capacity and to acquire and listen to those records, where they're smuggled through other channels and through other means. I think in the '80s in particular, there is the embassy in Prague did bring in people like Kurt Vonnegut, Edward Albee and Frank Zappa of all people, to support and sort of affirm the value of writers like Vaclav Havel. Apparently that meant something to Havel and other Czech dissidents in that point. There are consequences. I think it's hard to quantify them, although of course the state department and the US government likes quantification. Dismal failures, the recent Twitter episode in Cuba that are outright disasters. It's very easy to pinpoint those. But the successes, they're tricky. The usual, most successful program that everyone points to, putting scholars in the field, is the Fulbright program. Again, I'm not sure you can quantify in distinct measure year by year, country by country or scholars by student, but I think it's fair to say that since the late '40s and its inception, the Fulbright program has done things to improve the US image abroad and probably facilitated good international communication. Again, impossible to pinpoint exactly, but I would say on the whole, it's been a boon for our concern. - [Sue Dulek] That brings an end to the presentation. I want to just give another round of applause for our speaker today. I also want to thank the sponsors once again, the University of Iowa international programs and the University of Iowa's honors program for the generous support. Thank you to the financial sponsors, Burns Weston and Mike Carberry. Here is a small token of our appreciation. I didn't tell you that. - [Harilaos Stecopoulos] That's good. - [Sue Dulek] We present you with a much coveted Iowa City Foreign Relations mug. And again, should you wish to become a member of the ICFRC, or support our programs with a tax-deductible contribution, you can visit us at the back of the hall, call us at 319-335-0351 or mail donations directly to the Iowa City Foreign Relations Council at 1120 University Capitol Centre, Iowa City, IA 52242. Thank you again for joining us. Hope to see you next week. We are adjourned. - [Narrator] You are watching City Channel 4. On TV, online, on demand, on Facebook, and now on the go, on your mobile device.