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“Does this mean that institutions that imprudently allow themselves [to] be co-opted by political propagandists will henceforth be known as ‘State Department Museums’?”

Lee Rosenbaum, 20071

After the announcement of the Museums and Communities Collaboration Abroad

(MCCA) program in July 2007, National Public Radio’s “Morning Edition” questioned both Eric Ledbetter, Director of International Programs at AAM, and culture critic Lee Rosenbaum. The central theme of the report was the overt and—in Rosenbaum’s eyes—insidious use of American museums as vehicles for public diplomacy. Show host Steve Inskeep provocatively opened the segment suggesting, “Some people who run American museums are asking if they want to be used to promote foreign policy” before cutting to the responses from separate interviews conducted with Ledbetter and Rosenbaum.2 Rosenbaum focused on the State Department’s suggestion of geographical and thematic areas for consideration in the first round of grants. “Certainly, there has been a history of government support for exhibitions going abroad. But the proposals generally and the planning and the concepts behind the exhibition should come from the museums and not be dictated by the federal government.” Ledbetter’s rebuttal, however, clarified that, “It's their colleagues, U.S. scholars, not administration officials who will make the final awards.”3 This short treatment of MCCA only began to scratch the surface of Rosenbaum’s critique of Museums Connect, as MCCA was renamed in 2011. Writing later on her blog and reflecting on the radio piece, Rosenbaum suggested “Does this mean that institutions that

1 _{“My NPR Soundbite on the Museum Propaganda Initiative,” Lee Rosenbaum, accessed April 2, 2014,}

http://www.artsjournal.com/culturegrrl/2007/07/my_npr_soundbite_on_the_museum.html.

2_{“State Department Funds World Museum Exhibits,” Morning Edition, National Public Radio,}

Washington, D.C., July 17, 2007, accessed April 1, 2014.

http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=12026427.

imprudently allow themselves [to] be co-opted by political propagandists will henceforth be known as ‘State Department Museums’?”4

As Rosenbaum’s comments reveal, the issue of American museums operating as vehicles for government-sponsored cultural diplomatic programs can be polarizing for individuals who fear the encroachment of the government into every sphere of their lives or who consider governmental foreign policy, however enacted, to be insidious and imperialistic.5 _{While her}

critique of MCCA’s launch was relatively localized and based on the misinformation that the State Department was dictating which museums would receive funding, it was also predicated on the false assumption that American museums are apolitical and divorced from ideological and power considerations. This view neglects the long history of museums within the United States and the West.

The birth of the modern Western museum in the nineteenth century, Tony Bennett argues, was intimately connected to the solidification of the nation state’s power over the public en masse. “[T]he public museum exemplified the development of a new ‘governmental’ relation to culture in which works of high culture were treated as instruments that could be enlisted in new ways for new tasks of social management.”6 _{Since these early institutions were founded,}

museums have grappled with their roles vis-à-vis the public. Jeffrey Trask argues that debates about the idea of the democratic museum and the civic role of museums that began at the end of the nineteenth century possess a long and complex genealogy. “Debates about the civic role of museums—whether museums should serve primarily as places to preserve the sacred status of fine art and reify cultural capital or as institutions to promote social cohesion through democratic

4 _{“My NPR Soundbite,” Lee Rosenbaum.}

5 _{For a sample of comments related to this story see Edward Winkleman’s blog:}

http://www.edwardwinkleman.com/2007/07/matter-of-trust-bad-idea.html, Edward Winkleman, accessed 4/10/2014.

programming and educational outreach—continue to this day.”7 _{Public history sites and}

museums in the latter half of the twentieth century evolved gradually—and certainly not homogenously—away from the projection and demonstration of authority, the belief that the public is monolithic and passively receives culture and education, and the definition of the self vis-à-vis a foreign other, towards the democratization of the interpretation and exhibition of the past.8 _{Although this change has occurred slowly through the twentieth century, it gained}

momentum in the last decades of the century.9

This evolution is not the only context within which Museums Connect was created in 2007. As a public diplomacy program of the United States Department of State, this program serves simultaneously a public history and public diplomacy agenda. Thus, this chapter traces the evolution of public diplomacy since World War II including the introduction of the use of

museums and exhibitions in foreign policy during the Cold War. In so doing it argues that there appears to be mimesis between public diplomacy’s idea of “people-to-people” diplomacy and the aforementioned movements towards community engagement, dialogism, and the “forum”

museum model in public history that grew out of the movement toward “a shared authority,” because both of these modes value placing individuals and communities in conversation. Moreover, this chapter argues that there was a similarity of immediate motivations, including cost-saving and broadening economic impact, which shaped the immediate decision to reimagine the International Partnership Among Museums (IPAM) program into Museums Connect in 2007.

7 _{Jeffrey Trask, Things American: Art Museums and Civic Culture in the Progressive Era (Philadelphia:}

University of Pennsylvania Press, 2012), 3.

8 _{Notably Barbara Kirschenblatt-Gimblett’s work on ethnological museums argues that many}

ethnographic exhibitions still create knowledge through the exhibition of objects not originally intended for display. Barbara Kirschenblatt-Gimblett, Destination Culture: Tourism, Museums, and Heritage (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998).

9 _{Michael Frisch, A Shared Authority: Essays on the Craft and Meaning of Oral and Public History}

In tracing these developments and evolution, and the underlying structures and motivations of both public diplomacy and the contemporary public history paradigm, it is argued that Museums Connect was created because of similar short-term motivations but remains predicated on a fundamentally un-resolved tension. As with so many grant programs funded by a major sponsor, the agenda of the people-to-people diplomacy of the DOS Bureau of Educational and Cultural Affairs is central to the program. While the program’s conception, approach to the types of grants that are awarded, and control of grants during their operation is based on exchange, dialogue, and collaborative relationships, it is fundamentally motivated by the desire to improve America’s standing in the world. In contrast, the more recent paradigm of public history that forms the rationale for the program’s creation by the AAM and provides the model upon which projects are supposed to operate assumes that the power and authority of the museum is not projected but instead inherently shared. Although American museums were explicitly political in their earliest years, their use in foreign policy gained significant momentum immediately

following World War II during the Cold War when culture as a vehicle of foreign policy was widely adopted.

Soft power, public diplomacy, and the power of “people-to-people” diplomacy

During World War II the United States Government began to explore new ways to further its interests abroad by engaging foreign nations and people through a broad range of public diplomacy pursuits. It was not until the earliest years of the Cold War, however, that this method of diplomacy was widely adopted. A subjective and debated term, public diplomacy is broadly understood as “the art of communicating with foreign publics to influence international

perceptions, attitudes and policies.”10 In the Cold War ideological struggle against the Soviet

10 _{J. Michael Waller, “Introduction,” in The Public Diplomacy Reader, ed. J. Michael Waller}

Union that emerged after World War II, it became an important method of pushing the United States’ “soft power” agenda in addition to the more recognized traditional diplomatic efforts of governmental communication through political figures, ambassadors, and diplomats. Although Joseph Nye, former Assistant Secretary of Defense in the Clinton Administration, did not coin the term until 1990, he explained “soft power” thus: “It is the ability to get what you want through attraction rather than coercion or payments. It arises from the attractiveness of a country's culture, political ideals, and policies. When our policies are seen as legitimate in the eyes of others, our soft power is enhanced…When you can get others to admire your ideals and to want what you want, you do not have to spend as much on sticks and carrots to move them in your direction.”11 After September 11, 2001, Nye also argued that ideas of “soft power” are motivated by the ideas of “attraction and seduction.” He suggested that American officials had erred too far in the direction of “hard power,” and that to be most effective “soft power” must work hand-in-hand with “hard power” (the carrot and stick) to advance America’s interests in global affairs.12 Natalia Grincheva argues that those interests are “global democratization,” which “has governed the dialogue of foreign-policy objectives” since the Presidency of

Woodrow Wilson (1913-1921). After World War II, these ideas gained momentum by broadly re-defining America’s foreign policy objectives “to reshape the globe in the American model.”13

Still, how to define and implement public diplomacy was not always agreed upon. Joseph Nye argues that a division emerged between “those who favored the slow media of cultural diplomacy—art, books, exchanges—that had a trickle-down effect, and those who favored the

of Kings: American Cultural Diplomacy in the Twentieth Century (Washington, D.C.: Potomac Books

Inc, 2005), xxi.

11_{Joseph S. Nye Jr., Soft Power: The Means to Success in World Politics (New York: Public Affairs,}

2004), x.

12_{Ibid., xiii.}

13 _{Natalia Grincheva, “Democracy for Export: Museums Connect Program as a Vehicle for American}

fast information media of radio, movies, and newsreels, which promised more immediate and visible ‘bang for the buck.’”14 Reflecting contemporary debates about the best way to engage in public diplomacy and advance American soft power, Nye opines, “proponents of these two approaches struggled over how the government should invest in soft power. The ‘tough-minded’ did not shy away from direct propaganda while the ‘tender-minded’ argued that changing foreign attitudes is a gradual process that needs to be measured in years” and occurs through meeting Americans and engaging in conversations with wider publics.15 Grincheva explains this process thus: “Democratic principles are projected to foreign audiences both through programming and through organizational values and best practices.”16 There were also struggles over how free of government control government-supported programs should be. Nye concluded that despite the success of Cold War-era policies and programs, which made America attractive to citizens in Eastern Europe, the Soviet Union, and China, “debate over how directly or indirectly the government should try to control its instruments of soft power can never be fully resolved because both sides make valid points.”17

The ideological struggles of the Cold War saw an effective implementation of “soft power” through public diplomacy. In the transition from a hot war to a cold war, the importance of spreading America’s message to foreign publics in order to counter negative Soviet

propaganda about the dearth of American culture and other inadequacies of the United States— and increasingly by extension capitalism—gained greater urgency. The United States

Information Agency (USIA), the government agency responsible for public diplomacy between 1953 and 1999, saw American cultural products as one vehicle for effectively attracting support

14_{Nye, Soft Power, 102-103.} 15_{Ibid., 103.}

16 _{Grincheva, “Democracy for Export,” 141.} 17 _{Nye, Soft Power, 103.}

for the United States’ “culture, political ideals and policies.”18

In practice, since World War II the U.S. Government messily and contradictorily applied the implementation of cultural diplomacy as one method of advancing American interests abroad through public diplomacy. Writing about a CIA-operated program in Western Europe in the early years of the Cold War that attempted “to nudge the intelligentsia of Western Europe away from its lingering fascination with Marxism and Communism towards a view more accommodating of ‘the American way,’ Francis Stoner Saunders highlighted:

[T]he incipient CIA started, from 1947, to build a “consortium” whose double task it was to inoculate the world against the contagion of Communism and to ease the passage of American foreign policy interests abroad. The result was a remarkably tight network of people who worked alongside the Agency to promote an idea: that the world needed a pax Americana, a new age of enlightenment, it would be called the American Century.19 The expression of pax Americana was not without contradictions and ambivalence. Penny M. Von Eschen’s masterful analysis of Cold War jazz tours between 1956 and 1974 in Satchmo Blows up the World reveals some of the challenges that the government faced in attempting to use citizens, especially African American musicians from the pre-Civil Rights legislation era, to project American values abroad and counter Soviet anti-American propaganda as part of a much larger effort at global engagement. Highlighting the interconnectedness of American domestic and foreign policies, Von Eschen argues that throughout the Cold War a “can-do foreign policy culture” extended “across Democratic as well as Republican administrations.” She contended that “policy makers exhibited extraordinary confidence in America’s ability to shape the world in

18 _{Nye, Soft Power, x.; See for example, Frances Stonor Saunders, The Cultural Cold War: The CIA and}

the World of Arts and Letters (New York: The New Press, 2001).; and Nicholas J. Cull, The Cold War and the United States Information Agency: American Propaganda and Public Diplomacy, 1945-1989 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009).

its image with whatever tools it had.”20 _{Von Eschen’s analysis of these tours also uncovers the}

challenges, internal contradictions and complexities of a public diplomacy program built upon the “abiding paradox” of black musicians being asked to “promote a vision of color-blind American democracy.” “The tours foregrounded the importance of African American culture during the Cold War, with blackness and race operating culturally to project an image of American nationhood that was more inclusive than the reality.”21

These uses of “tough-minded” approaches to public diplomacy as one vehicle of soft power during the Cold War simultaneously co-existed with more exchange-based methods of “person-to-person contacts.” Public Law 402, the United States Information and Educational Exchange Act also known as the Smith-Mundt Act, was one of the first manifestations of what Nye later called a “tender-minded” approach to soft power. The law was passed on January 27, 1948, “to promote the better understanding of the United States among the peoples of the world and to strengthen cooperative international relations.”22 The objective of this founding legislation was, “to enable the Government of the United States to promote a better understanding of the United States in other countries, and to increase mutual understanding between the people of the United States and the people of other countries.”23 _{On January 27, 1948, President Truman}

approved the Smith-Mundt Act, committing the government to conduct information, education, and cultural exchange activities on a worldwide, long-term scale during a time of peace.24

20 _{Penny M. Von Eschen, Satchmo Blows Up the World: Jazz Ambassadors Play the Cold War}

(Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2006), 5.

21 _{Ibid., 4.}

22 _{“Public Law 402: The Smith-Mundt Act” (1948) in The Public Diplomacy Reader, ed. J. Michael}

Waller (Washington, D.C.: The Institute of World Politics Press, 2007), 488.

23 _{Ibid., 488.}

24 _{The Panel on International Information, Education, and Cultural Relations, International Information}

Education and Cultural Relations: Recommendations for the Future (Center for Strategic and International Studies, 1975), 1.

Developing these ideas further, the apogee of the idea of exchange and people-to-people diplomacy in this period, and still the continuing justification for educational and cultural exchanges, was the 1961 Mutual Educational and Cultural Exchange Act, commonly called the Fulbright-Hays Act. It “enable[d] the Government of the United States to increase mutual understanding between the people of the United States and the people of other countries by means of educational and cultural exchange.” This exchange, it was hoped, would:

strengthen the ties which unite us with other nations by demonstrating the educational and cultural interests, developments, and achievements of the people of the United States and other nations, and the contributions being made toward a peaceful and more fruitful life for people throughout the world; to promote international cooperation for educational and cultural advancement; and thus to assist in the development of friendly, sympathetic, and peaceful relations between the United States and the other countries of the world.25 This train of thought supposed that by connecting Americans and foreigners through cultural and educational programs, the United States was and still is able to tacitly recruit the support of foreign audiences for its many foreign policy agendas. Or, as a one commentator suggested, at least give the United States the benefit of the doubt.26

The belief in the power of citizen exchanges as expressed in the Smith-Mundt and Fulbright-Hays Acts has formed the central justification for those preferring a “tender-minded” approach to public diplomacy rather than a more overt propagandistic approach practiced by others in the latter half of the twentieth century. However, while both of Nye’s “tender” and “tough” minded modes of public diplomacy have been employed since World War II, they rarely operate within a vacuum. Historian and cultural diplomat Richard Arndt declares, “In projecting their cultures, groups and nation states from the beginning of history had insisted on balance, on

25 _{Fulbright-Hays Act. H.R. 8666 Public law 87-256, The Fulbright-Hays Act, Code of Federal}

Regulation, Title 22: Chapter 33 (1961):

http://www2.ed.gov/about/offices/list/ope/iegps/fulbrighthaysact.pdf.

26 _{Mary Jeffers, “Expert Views on Public Diplomacy: The Next Four Years,” Take Five (blog), November}

‘exchanges,’ on reciprocity, and on bidirectional flow.”27 _{[emphasis added]}

The understanding of public diplomacy that seeks to draw upon the inherent values and virtues of American cultureto assuage negative opinions of the United States has consistently drawn on those important early pieces of legislation. A 1985 report by the U.S. Advisory Commission on Public Diplomacy suggested, “Public diplomacy supplements and reinforces traditional diplomacy by explaining U.S. policies to foreign publics, by providing them with information about American society and culture.”28 In another instance, National War College fellow Paul A. Smith reflected on the intimate connection between cultural and public diplomacy