Musical Diplomacy
The U.S. Government’s involvement with jazz began during a period of ideological crisis: the Cold War. As political leaders in Washington, D.C., struggled to present the nation as a model of peace and equality to foreign entities, civil rights struggles at home offered a strikingly contradictory image. By 1950, politicians regularly declared race as the ‘Achilles heel’ of American foreign policy, and in 1954 President Dwight D. Eisenhower decided to take action. Frustrated by the stereotype of American’s as ‘a race of materialists’ with no ‘worthwhile culture of any kind’ and determined to debunk Soviet accusations concerning America’s race problem, Eisenhower went in search of a home-grown, cultural product that could be exported around the world as proof of American innovation and diversity. Jazz is what he found.
Congressman Adam Clayton Powell, Jr., of New York was the first to suggest to President Eisenhower and the State Department the idea of using jazz as a Cold War tool.
The result of these conversations was the development of a State Department program called Jazz Ambassadors, which from 1956 through the late 1970s, sent the nation’s finest musicians around the globe, from Iran, Pakistan, and Iraq to Greece, Cairo, the Congo, and the Soviet Union.