The Tangled Legacy of JFK and the Cultural Cold War
America needs a new public policy for the arts.
This article is brought to you by American Purpose, the magazine and community founded by Francis Fukuyama in 2020, which is now proudly part of the Persuasion family.
by Joseph Horowitz
It is little-known that, when he died, President John F. Kennedy was about to appoint Richard Goodwin—a vigorous member of his inner circle—his advisor on the arts. Kennedy’s initiative would have vitally supported the ongoing cultural Cold War with Soviet Russia. Something like it is ever more necessary today. The American arts—as will increasingly become widely apparent—are in crisis. And the United States, incongruously, still possesses no Ministry of Culture.
Kennedy’s arts advocacy was surpassingly eloquent. His major arts address, at Amherst College on October 26, 1963, declared: “I see little of more importance to the future of our country and our civilization than full recognition of the place of the artists … I look forward to an America which commands respect throughout the world not only for its strength but for its civilization as well.” At the same time, however, the White House’s eagerness to host the likes of Igor Stravinsky and Pablo Casals was mired in Cold War rhetoric.
The central dogma of the cultural Cold War, as pursued by the United States government, was the notion that only “free artists” in “free societies” produce great art—a plainly unsupportable claim. In fact, by the time Kennedy spoke at Amherst, the late Boris Pasternak had acquired a Western halo when his 1958 Nobel prize became an embarrassment for the Russian government. A Soviet filmmaker, Andrei Tarkovsky, had in 1962 won the Golden Lion at the Venice Film Festival for Ivan’s Childhood—disclosing to the world a cinematic genius of bewildering originality. A Soviet writer, Alexander Solzhenitsyn, had in 1962 published One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich—inaugurating a career as a political novelist of the first rank. And a Soviet composer, Dmitri Shostakovich, had added to a singular catalogue of symphonies and concertos one of his most acute musical tragedies: the autobiographical String Quartet No. 8.
That the “propaganda of freedom” cheapened freedom by overpraising it, turning it into a reductionist propaganda mantra, is one measure of the intellectual cost of the Cold War. As a blunt tool of the Congress for Cultural Freedom (covertly funded by the CIA), it failed to persuade left-leaning artists and intellectuals in Europe and Latin America that the US “commanded respect” for its “civilization.” It also prejudiced Kennedy against government arts subsidies—lest artists find themselves pushed and prodded by the state. And this prejudice lingers.
We are today witnessing an erosion of the arts far beyond the arts challenge that worried Kennedy. Audiences are shrinking and so are funding sources. STEM, social media, political and social fragmentation have all contributed to a continued erasure of the arts from the American experience. Then came the pandemic—during which swift European calls to “save the arts” were not echoed in Washington, D.C. Absent a cultural ministry, there existed no adequate means of assessing need and allocating “emergency” funds voted by Congress. It mainly fell to the NEA and NEH to figure out who would get how much. The result was a hasty, under-staffed adjudication process that exasperated participants on all asides.
On top of that, there arose the risky notion that arts institutions should necessarily serve as instruments of social justice. This reductionist conviction is now pervasive—and not least among charitable foundations that once supported the arts as traditionally practiced, and no longer do. It is widely alleged, albeit sotto voce, that woke activism has alienated arts audiences and depressed ticket sales. And, as I reported in an American Purpose essay two years ago, prior recipients of generous foundation support confide thoughts like these: “I believe the foundations are engaged in a form of blackmail. The way to get other people to even consider your point of view is not by legislating morality. It disrespects the power of religion, or of art—if you believe that art has the power to bring people together. In the case of evangelicals and today’s charitable foundations—they’re trying to alter the essential DNA of religion and of culture in order to prove ‘relevance.’”
The stress on diversity and inclusivity is wholly understandable; it must be sustained. Never before in American history, however, has a common cultural inheritance seemed as elusive or controversial. It is part of what makes us a nation. In fact, the arts have been more widely pertinent to American lives than is today readily recalled. Innumerable artists and arts institutions of national renown once furnished an indispensable “we” component—a source of communal expression and self-understanding, of profound personal and interpersonal engagement.
After World War I, the arts were popularized for a new democratic audience. Crucially, radio became the first mass medium. The early years of commercial broadcasting featured a plethora of “cultural” and “educational” fare, including The University of Chicago Round Table and The American School of the Air. A conscious strategy of popularization was vigorously pursued, hosted by such radio personalities as Yale’s William Lyon Phelps (known as Billy). When all four major networks carried Norman Corwin’s 1941 radio play We Hold These Truths, celebrating the sesquicentennial of the Bill of Rights, its 63 million listeners comprised nearly half the U.S. population. Radio Saturdays and Sundays included four classical-music showcases—the Metropolitan Opera, NBC Symphony, New York Philharmonic, and “The Ford Hour”— said to together reach more than ten million families a week.
That is: social cohesion went hand in hand with proliferating cultural cohesion. But the subsequent fate of this phenomenon, beginning in the ‘60s, was evaporative. If by “culture” we refer to the arts as a repository of enriched memory and tradition, it suffered a remarkably rapid decay. Not remotely part of any recent President’s “State of the Union,” the arts are today a subsidiary and inchoate presence in the national experience.
In retrospect, the interwar popularization of the arts after World War I did not notably promote active engagement. The practice of singing in the home, or parlor piano and chamber music, was not part of the “music appreciation” movement. The grand choral festivals and competitions of the Gilded Age were no more. A second such trade-off was one of content. Gilded Age practitioners of the arts assumed that Americans would continue to stretch the umbilical cord connecting to the European parent culture and eventually foster traditions more their own. But, especially in classical music, the popularization of culture during the interwar decades in fact overprivileged dead European masters. The popularization of the arts proved tangible but circumscribed.
John F. Kennedy and other cultural Cold Warriors did not engage in this dilemma. For them, democracy actively fostered great art. Looking back from Covid exigencies, and from our controversies about the arts and social justice, what does Kennedy’s arts legacy signify? Picking up the thread of the propaganda of freedom, what happened after 1963? The heightened awareness of the American arts that Kennedy inspired most tangibly connects to the National Endowment for the Arts. But the NEA is and is not a Kennedy legacy. Two key figures in the NEA narrative are not even Democrats: Nelson Rockefeller and Richard Nixon.
Rockefeller’s enthusiasm for the arts was well known. He was a trustee of the Museum of Modern Art from 1931 to 1979 and twice its president. Privately, he was a noted collector of both modern and non-Western visual art and sculpture. During his long tenure as governor of New York State, the New York State Council of the Arts was a landmark 1960 initiative modeled on the British Arts Council. NYSCA became a template for the NEA five years later. It was during the Nixon presidency that the NEA began to take on significance under the leadership of a Rockefeller protégé: Nancy Hanks. An adroit politician, she built a bipartisan arts consensus prominently including senators from both sides of the aisle. Hanks left in 1977 with the election of Jimmy Carter, having served Nixon and Gerald Ford for eighteen years; her NEA budget had grown to $99.9 million. FDR’s WPA arts initiatives were often indistinguishable from New Deal propaganda. Hanks’s NEA sustained a spirit of comity and cultural optimism.
Nixon’s pertinent role is typically characterized as pragmatically political. It is true that a strategy of “offset politics” was in play: while cutting back on Lyndon Johnson’s “Great Society” programs, the new administration would defend and expand underfunded federal programs that could appeal to small but influential constituencies. But Nixon had more to say than that. Responding to a 1960 Musical America questionnaire about government arts subsidies, he produced a more substantive, more positive answer than John F. Kennedy. And Nixon played the piano. For his 1973 inauguration, he vetoed the participation of DC’s provincial National Symphony in favor of Eugene Ormandy and the Philadelphia Orchestra accompanying Van Cliburn in the Grieg Piano Concerto—music and musicians he admired and enjoyed. He quipped that most of the Republican high rollers in attendance “did not know what the hell was going on.”
Then came the Comprehensive Employment and Training Act of 1973, which allocated block grants to individual states to create jobs. For those states that elected to subsidize the arts, CETA veritably resumed Roosevelt’s WPA. Many CETA recipients were painters, muralists, poets, and musicians—in all, more than ten thousand artists nationally. But CETA was not renewed under Ronald Reagan. In a December 19, 1969 address, Richard Nixon called artists “an invaluable national resource.” They both criticized and celebrated the national experience. They gave “free and full expression to the American spirit.” In his shrewd 1988 biography of Nancy Hanks, Michael Straight, having served under Hanks at the NEA, writes of Nixon’s speech: “It stands today as the most significant statement of the decade on public funding of the arts.”
If Lyndon Johnson is a footnote to this tale, it is he who signed onto the NEA. Johnson may have had no feeling for the arts comparable to Rockefeller’s or Nixon’s. But as a disciple of FDR, he was a president without compunction about federal activism. Presented with the new arts endowment, his impulse was expansionist. Overlooking the meager budget at hand, ignoring his speechwriters, he announced that the NEA would establish a national theater, a national ballet company, a national opera company, and an American film institute. It would commission new symphonies. It would create residencies for “great artists” in schools and colleges. What is significant about this startling and implausible declaration is not its outcome (only the American Film Institute would materialize), but its lack of circumspection. Alongside Rockefeller, Nixon, Hanks, and Johnson, Kennedy alone remained captive to Cold War ideology. Might he have changed his mind?
A certain reality, right now, is that our artists and arts institutions need money merely to survive. When President Kennedy issued his call for a more civilized America, he was worrying about world competition with Russia—in culture as in every other aspect of human endeavor. He was also celebrating a widely heralded American “culture boom” that happened to coincide with pressing financial needs, especially among orchestras. Three years after his death, the economists William Baumol and William Bowen produced a seminal study, Performing Arts: The Economic Dilemma, documenting and analyzing a permanent funding crisis. In the arts sector, they showed, efficiency and production cannot be increased in proportion to the rest of the economy; the resulting income gap would only expand. A half century later, the pandemic canceled performances and closed doors. Innumerable prominent arts organizations have announced sharp cutbacks. Others will go under.
Where will new funding arise? The traditional American model is laissez-faire: private sources, including corporate and foundation gifts. But private giving to arts institutions after the fashion of a Carnegie, Mellon, Frick, and Rockefeller is not practiced by a Musk, Gates, or Bezos. The big charitable foundations are no longer arts-focused. Congressional Covid “rescue” grants were a stopgap. There exists no federal agency tasked with arts oversight. Though the need for government support is now self-evident, though the American experiment in laissez-faire arts support can by now be pronounced a failure, there is no political will to create an Arts Council on the European model. We have no Jacob Javits or Claiborne Pell in Congress, no Nancy Hanks at the NEA. Social justice activism has fractured the arts community at a crucial moment. Widespread public awareness of the arts as a necessary component of a nation’s life remains mainly apparent abroad. If, logically, American arts policy today should focus on greatly increasing government support at every level, never has this prospect seemed less likely. Now, too, is a logical moment for top-down cultural diplomacy to soften and inform relations with at least some governments deemed hostile or intractable.
For Soviet ideologues, the arts of the United States represented a vulgarized dilution or decadent tangent. For President Kennedy, they signified a validation of American enterprise and goodwill. That the Kennedy White House failed to recognize the prestige of the arts in Soviet Russia—their pride of place, notwithstanding a damaging and oppressive ideological environment—says something not just about the Cold War, but about the United States, then and now. Unhappily, the Soviet critique of Americans as materialistic and self-absorbed cannot wholly be written off as kneejerk ideology. And American ignorance of Soviet achievements risks repeating itself as China (in which state-supported classical music is thriving) becomes ever more distant and unknowable.
An indispensable Cold War asset, cultural diplomacy concentrated JFK’s vision of a more civilized nation. But reductionist misunderstandings of the arts—as ambassadors of “freedom” or instruments of social justice—ultimately disserve America’s vital interests, whether at home or abroad.
Joseph Horowitz is most recently the author of “The Propaganda of Freedom—JFK, Shostakovich, Stravinsky, and the Cultural Cold War.” His ongoing “More than Music” NPR documentaries, addressing the state of the American arts, are archived at www.josephhorowitz.com.
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"was the notion that only “free artists” in “free societies” produce great art—a plainly unsupportable claim.”
Perhaps, but historically the greatest single flowering of ‘the arts’ as well as medicine, philosophy, politics, and architecture occurred in just a one half century period in the place where democracy itself was born. Yes, great art can occur in any circumstance, and yes, using it as a political tool is at best questionable, but it’s also true that Americans have always been a more practical than artistic people. On the other hand, the most brutal dictatorship in human history was ‘nurtured’ in a country previously known for its artistic strengths.