Penny M. Von Eschen

In Satchmo Blows Up the World: Jazz Ambassadors Play the Cold War, Penny M. Von Eschen examines the U.S. State Department’s use of jazz to promote U.S. values and goals around the world. Von Eschen writes, “The primary contradiction of promoting African American artists as symbols of a racial equality yet to be achieved would fundamentally shape the organization and ideologies of the tours, as well as the ways in which the tours were contested by artists” (pg. 4). Furthermore, “Despite the government’s complacency on domestic race relations, even Eisenhower was profoundly affected by the widely shared sense that race was America’s Achilles heel internationally” (pg. 5). Promoting U.S. culture offered further contradictions in American policy. Von Eschen writes, “In promoting jazz and American consumer culture, U.S. officials appeared unwilling to abide by their own counsel to developing nations – namely, to trust in ‘people’s capitalism’” (pg. 15).
Discussing issues in the Middle East and Southeast Asia, Von Eschen writes, “The tours were intimately linked to U.S. responses to such crises, and exposed a freewheeling, bold willingness on the part of policymakers to wield covert and overt military and diplomatic muscle to serve their immediate strategic and economic interests” (pg. 27). Of the artists, Von Eschen writes, “For those who had long been denied artistic recognition and fundamental rights as citizens, the tours represented a critical victory in civil rights” (pg. 29). Louis Armstrong’s tour served to force attention to certain issues in the U.S. According to Von Eschen, “If issues of civil rights had been relatively contained in the early jazz tours, Armstrong’s Ghana trip and his subsequent denunciation of Eisenhower during the 1957 Little Rock crisis dramatically illuminated the connections between the domestic and foreign policies underlying the tours” (pg. 65).
Examining tours in the Soviet Union, Von Eschen writes, “The Soviets’ aversion to jazz rested, in part, on a racist recoiling at black American cultural expression even as they were relying on claims to racial equality within the Soviet Union and exposure of American racism as perhaps their most effective Cold war[sic] weapons” (pg. 96). This played out in nearly every tour. Von Eschen writes, “Amid an ongoing battle over the politics of representation of black people, [Duke] Ellington, like other black musicians and their allies, perceived the State Department jazz tours as a platform from which to promote the dignity of black people and their culture throughout the world in the era of Jim Crow” (pg. 125-126). Von Eschen sheds light on the contradictions in U.S. policy, writing, “Officials’ acknowledgement of the Afro-diasporic appeal of jazz clashed with the notion that it was a uniquely American form with a modernist aesthetic” (pg. 177). Furthermore, “The State Department’s embrace of a once marginalized music to reform and revitalize the image of America shows a misplaced reliance on African American culture to project vitality and optimism on the part of a country that was deep in crisis” (pg. 184).
Looking to the last years of the program, Von Eschen writes, “For many in the State Department, the pinnacle of cultural exchange was reached with the jazz tours of Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union in the 1970s. Unlike the earlier tours, they showed a striking convergence of interest between the State Department, the musicians, and the audiences” (pg. 191). In this way, “The cultural-presentations programs not only strove to maintain the support of strategic allies in Latin America and the oil-rich Middle East, win over potential dissidents in the Eastern bloc, and court new African nations. They also targeted elites in Southeast Asia” (pg. 218). Von Eschen writes, “The State Department missed no opportunity to promote jazz in Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union. But by the mid 1970s, in the wake of the Vietnam pullout, the Watergate crisis, and the energy crisis, some officials were calling for a more modest foreign policy” (pg. 241). This led to the U.S. Information Service taking over the cultural-promotion programs.
Von Eschen concludes that jazz and the State Department “is the story of an America deeply implicated in the machinations and violence of global modernization: the slave trade that forced millions of Africans to the Americas; the U.S. involvement in coups, in countries ranging from Iran and Iraq to the Congo and Ghana; and the arming of such military states as Pakistan” (pg. 254). Finally, “If there is anything that can be learned from the tours, it is that audiences never confused or conflated their love of jazz and American popular culture with an acceptance of American foreign policy” (pg. 257).… (altro)

he civil rights movement prior to WWII and immediately after it looked at the issue of racial oppression as a global issue. African-American groups allied with African associations to advocate an end to colonialism. While this included the "Double V" slogan, it also included aggressive advocacy for the decolonization of Africa. Lobbying groups went to San Francisco for the UN conference as well as trying to influence State Department policy. The UN, in particular, was important in African-American strategy, as well as that of non-whites globally. Prior to 1946, the UN app[eared a potentially vibrant organization for justice and change. It's eventual emphasis on accepting the sovereignty of all nations severely limited its ability to have an impact in colonialism, but that took some time to become apparent.

After 1946, African-American organizations dramatically changed their strategy. The limitations of the UN was not a direct cause of this change, but was a symptom of underlying issues that would provoke the shift in priorities. The fact that the UN had little power reflected the growing conflict between the US and USSR. That conflict, which would eventually be termed the Cold War, forced African-Americans to limit criticism of US foreign policy so that they would maintain some credibility to advocate domestic change. Although there was significant disagreement among the African-American community, Walter White, head of the NAACP, eventually pushed his view into a dominant position, which was to present an appearance of loyal supporters of the US in the Cold War. Such was the dominance of the Cold War consensus that when later African-American groups, such as the Black Panthers and the Nation of Islam, challenged it, they were essentially forced to reinvent the wheel. Established African-American groups had almost completely cut-off contacts with global issues.… (altro)