Collateral damage: anti-communism & U.S. cultural policy

Abstract

The United States of America has never formally declared a cultural policy nor established a Cabinet-level department of cultural affairs, as many other nations have in the post-World War II era--depriving the American people a foundation and context for transparent, open deliberation over the nature and priorities of public cultural policy. The values that constitute our de facto policy must be discerned through the aggregate of specialized policymaking and action taken by federal, state, and local governments. Our reluctance to declare formal policy is partly due to the nation's stance in conducting the Cold War--focused around an exaggerated Soviet threat--and its associated domestic anti-communist campaigning. In examining the historic record, "Collateral Damage" tells the story of anti-communism through much of the twentieth century, focusing on its cultural impact. The historical narrative follows from the first mass expression of anti-communist sentiment nationally, in the Red Scare of 1919, through its later expression in the "McCarthy era" of the Fifties, and its legacy since. Various approaches to cultural policy emerge throughout; but I focus especially on the contrasting federal cultural programs of the New Deal and those of domestic cultural agencies established in the 1960's. This story reveals how politicians and policymakers relied upon religious values were for Cold War purposes, rather than crafting secular statements of national cultural values. The study identifies six other significant impacts of anti-communism on U.S. cultural policy since the Sixties: the primacy of the private sector; Euro-centric bias in defining the cultural field; an approach to cultural diversity that marginalizes voices from outside traditional fine-arts contexts; a proscription against engagement with social issues in the arts and humanities; the replacement of democracy with "free enterprise" as the driving spirit in cultural policy; and a U.S. stance in international cultural-policy deliberations that tends to interpret transnational cultural issues in terms of commerce and national security. The study concludes with a suggestion of what a secular statement of national cultural policy might resemble, using First Lady Michelle Obama's address to the Democratic National Convention in 2012 as an example