The Strange Commodity of Cultural Exchange: Martha Graham and the State Department on Tour, 1955-1987
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The Strange Commodity of Cultural Exchange: Martha Graham and the State Department on Tour, 1955-1987 Lucy Victoria Phillips Submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY 2013 © 2013 Lucy Victoria Phillips All rights reserved ABSTRACT The Strange Commodity of Cultural Exchange: Martha Graham and the State Department on Tour, 1955-1987 Lucy Victoria Phillips The study of Martha Graham's State Department tours and her modern dance demonstrates that between 1955 and 1987 a series of Cold Wars required a steady product that could meet "informational" propaganda needs over time. After World War II, dance critics mitigated the prewar influence of the German and Japanese modernist artists to create a freed and humanist language because modern dance could only emerge from a nation that was free, and not from totalitarian regimes. Thus the modern dance became American, while at the same time it represented a universal man. During the Cold War, the aging of Martha Graham's dance, from innovative and daring to traditional and even old-fashioned, mirrored the nation's transition from a newcomer that advertised itself as the postwar home of freedom, modernity, and Western civilization to an established power that attempted to set international standards of diplomacy. Graham and her works, read as texts alongside State Department country plans, United States Information Agency publicity, other documentary evidence, and oral histories, reveal a complex matrix of relationships between government agencies and the artists they supported, as well as foundations, private individuals, corporations, country governments, and representatives of business and culture. Because four elements of Graham’s modern dance created by her biography can be traced back to ideas of American identity, human universalism, Asian culture, and the Western canon of ancient Greek, European, and biblical texts, the State Department deployed her work throughout Europe and Asia to transmit ideas about America with choreography that could demonstrate cultural convergences, or the merging of American modernist techniques with host country elements. This targeted strategy of advertisement for international leaders, which translated host-country traditions with a universal language of the modern dance, made in America, argued that the United States would and could partner with the nation states Graham visited in order to achieve foreign policy agendas. Table of Contents Acknowledgements……………………………………………………….…………. ii Introduction…………………………………………………………………..…….… 1 Chapter One: How America Made the Modern Dance………………………………37 Chapter Two: Martha Graham’s Early History Creates “Four Minds” of Modern Dance………..…76 Chapter Three: “Delightful Americana”: How Martha Graham Became a Cultural Ambassador ………….….………………113 Chapter Four: After the Rise, the Fall of Martha Graham and Modern Dance in Europe, 1957 – 1969…………………………………………………………………………..182 Chapter Five: After the Fall, the Rise of Modern Graham as an Icon in Asia, 1974……………......254 Chapter Six: Pax Americana: Martha Graham Fights for Jimmy Carter and Ronald Reagan, 1979 and 1987 ……..300 Conclusion………………………………………………….……………………...…348 Archives, Bibliography, Appendices…………………..…………………………….356 i Acknowledgements Ever insistent, never in doubt, full of duplicities, and with a diva demeanor formulated like a composite of Hollywood’s interwar finest, modern dancer Martha Graham famously quipped, “None of my work is political.” Like good children, in the 1970s we never questioned her when we learned the cartwheels, contractions to the floor and melted through spirals around the back to celebrate love in Diversion of Angels, which the company performed during every State Department-sponsored tour between 1955 and 1987. As a teenager in the New York townhouse’s Studio One, the dance felt just as it looked. We were joy. I was hooked. Age quickly overtook my body, but Martha Graham and her choreography stuck to me. As Robert Caro said, “I want to write history as exciting to read as it is to live.” Ever the skeptic, however, when I got a call from the Dance Curator, Elizabeth Aldrich, that the Library of Congress Graham papers had finally been opened to scholars after years of scandal, I was not completely surprised to find Graham’s scrapbooks filled with government reports on her tours, invitations from ambassadors, and letters from presidents. Yes, Martha, none of your choreographic works were political, but you were. How Grahamian, as the United States Information Agency would brand her work in the 1970s. Yet the depth of her involvement with the government became a puzzle: invitations to conferences on United States- Soviet relations in Asia during the 1950s; a 1957 letter thanking Graham for her service to the nation from Eleanor Dulles, sister of the Secretary of State and Central Intelligence Agency. Despite, and even because of my passion as a teenage disciple, I have striven to remain objective as I unpacked Martha’s government suitcases as she toured over twenty-eight countries in thirty- one years to represent the nation internationally. What work did this woman do for the state, and what can it tell us about how the American and modern represented, or were thought to represent, American interests abroad? ii A long list of mentors and professors at Columbia University, professors and professionals outside my home institution, colleagues, friends, and family have encouraged me and added significantly to what would have been a small study of a single series of performances in the 1950s. Professors Eric Foner and Lynn Garafola pressed me to expand the work to cover all the known tours and then encouraged me to explore later tours where little archival evidence could be found. They never doubted the power of my research tenacity. As an advisor at Columbia. Eric Foner provided advice and guidance that was invaluable and ever prescient. As a reader, he provided insights and suggestions down to the word choices. I have had the privilege of working with Lynn Garafola for the last decade. I began in her class at Barnard as merely a curious post-graduate student. Her rigor and the intellectual curiosity she inspired in her students gave me a new perspective on dance and the possibility that solid history could be written. For this I will always remain grateful, and strive to encourage this in my own students when I teach. I only hope that the dissertation captures a fraction of the quality that they have demanded of the process and the work. Up to the minute, they have challenged constructs and sentences, and for this I will be forever grateful. The other members of my dissertation committee have been mentors well beyond the call of duty. Carol Gluck challenged me to push beyond the constructed borders I had put on my abilities. She unfailingly confronted me and demanded that I become a better historian and teacher than I thought possible. Just when the work seemed to be spiraling out of control, she could see the bones of it. Teaching next to her for two semesters has showed me the internal workings of a master. And, to boot, she has offered me her home and friendship in the hardest of times. In the face of challenges, she taught me to find the mantra, “The only thing you can iii control is your dissertation.” Without Carol, the dissertation would still be a hope and a dream. Beyond the dissertation, I will always value her wise council. I have had the honor of teaching foreign policy for Anders Stephanson for two semesters while at Columbia as a teaching assistant. He took me on as a TA although I had no background in foreign policy, and even less in teaching history to undergraduates. I have had the pleasure of working for him and with him on several conferences at Columbia. In all cases, he has generously volunteered his expertise and insightful commentary. At a joint Columbia University-West Point Military Academy conference, questions he directed at the keynote speaker, Col. Gian Gentile, led to an article in which the Colonel revised the thinking he had used to guide his own approach to history both in his own work, his teaching at West Point to cadets, and his interaction with those who worked for him when he acted as head of the History Department. Professor Stepahnson brings this same critical eye to my work, and for this I will be grateful as I rewrite and rethink the dissertation. The Chair of my committee, Alice Kessler-Harris, was the second professor I met before I applied to the Ph.D. program in history at Columbia University. One of the early struggling drafts of the dissertation was written for Alice during a seminar on women and gender. As I grappled with the ideas and the archives, she remained tolerant of my ramblings and committed to the value of the work. She has helped me to sort through its meaning and to focus my thoughts. All the while, she provided wise council when I limped through a law school- history course on women and motherhood during which the personal met the professional. Her parting smile and Alice Kessler-Harris hug always mark our conversations. Although she has been on leave, Victoria de Grazia has combined elements of all the official committee members. During her class on empires and imperialism, the Graham iv archives opened, and I used the newly available material for a paper. As I struggled with the final draft, she said, “You can’t write it because it’s your dissertation.” I did not know it at the time, but she had, as always, nailed the issue. A formative part of my development took place during a conference at Aarhus University in Denmark. She took me as her student, and I was challenged both during the day at presentations and over dinner to refine and rethink arguments.