Movable Pillars: Organizing Dance, 1956–1978

The Post-War Political Climate

The Post-War Political Climate The six organizations described in this book were part of a broader federally driven expansion of art in education. The period during which they were formed, from 1956 to 1978, is significant from a variety of perspectives . It overlaps with the proliferation of modern dance in American higher education during the period often referred to as the dance boom of the 1960s and 1970s (Hagood 2000:217; Ross 2000:212). It overlaps with the “Golden Age” in American higher education between 1945 and 1975 (Ohmann 2003; Menand 2001). It also overlaps with the “crisis of Center” in American social politics—the recognition of social inequalities and discrimination that precipitated a rise in political civic activism (Lemert 1999:370). The Cold War set the tone. Following World War II, the United States found itself needing to prove its global dominance in contrast to the totalitarianism of the Soviet Union. Freedom and democracy became a premise of federal policymaking (Menand 2001). In an effort to raise American international credibility, and to contrast the culturally monolithic Soviet block, academia was configured as a cultural repository. There was an increase in federal involvement and funding of higher education. In part through the GI Bill, and in part simply through the desire to increase the nation’s strength in the international landscape, higher education was opened to a broader range of social classes (Menand 2001; Ohmann 2003). In the Cold War period, educated citizens were conceived of as “human capital,” a strategic national resource (Menand 2001:3). The National Defense Education Act (NDEA) of 1958 asserted that “The security of the Nation requires the fullest development of the mental resources and technical skills of its young men and women” (cited in Duffy and Goldberg 1998:170). President Dwight Eisenhower requested a discretionary fund, the President’s Emergency Fund for International Affairs, to stimulate the international presentation of American industrial and cultural achievements that would “demonstrate the dedication of the United States to peace and human well-being” (Prevots 1998:11). Culture was viewed as an important aspect of American international strength, and dance fit into this new national cultural framework. The NDEA focused on areas of science and technology, but its emphasis on cultural enrichment nevertheless gave new grounds for the development of modern dance in education . In this period following World War II, dance began to separate 29 itself, substantively if not yet programmatically, from physical education programs. It was increasingly conceived as an art and not merely a physical activity within academe (Hagood 2000:168–172). The overt federal involvement in higher education and the arts had to be tempered to avoid any implication of ideological totalitarianism (Menand 2001). It became important to frame intellectual and cultural production as being ideologically objective (Ohmann 2003; Menand 2001). The aversion to ideological totalitarianism was both a general national sentiment and a federally planned and financed policy, with pervasive repercussions. In the arts, it had the effect of promoting creative production that was built on formal principles or through otherwise objective methods. Within academe, it resulted in an active effort to separate politics from scholarly research. To prove that the government was not manipulating academe, disciplines were given greater autonomy. Disciplines were asked to define and codify discipline-specific measures of assessment . The social sciences and humanities borrowed from the seemingly more objective realm of the hard sciences and utilized scientistic methods of research to prove that they could provide neutral research findings for guiding public policy. The aversion to totalitarianism forced a national/cultural dissociation of knowledge from power. Menand explains this phenomenon’s interdisciplinarity tone. The idea that academics, particularly in the social sciences, could provide the state with neutral research results on which pragmatic public policies could be based was an animating idea in the 1950s university. In the sciences , it helped establish what Talcott Parsons called the ethos of “cognitive rationality.” In fields like history, it led to the consensus approach. In sociology , it produced what Robert Merton called theories of the middle range—an emphasis on the formulation of limited hypotheses subject to empirical verification. Behaviorism and rational choice theory became dominant paradigms in psychology and political science. In literature, even when the mindset was anti-scientific, as in the case of New Criticism and structuralism, the ethos remained scientistic: theories aspired to analytic rigor. Boundaries were respected and methodologies were codified. Discipline reigned in the disciplines. (Menand 2001:7) It is perhaps not coincidental that...