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Eisenhower's Fund
- Wesleyan University Press
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Eisenhower's Fund In a letter written on 27 July 1954 to the House Committee on Appropriations , President Dwight D. Eisenhower announced: "I consider it essential that we take immediate and vigorous action to demonstrate the superiority of the products and cultural values of our system of free enterprise." He requested five million dollars "to stimulate the presentation abroad by private firms and groups of the best American industrial and cultural achievements, in order to demonstrate the dedication of the United States to peace and human well-being [and] to offset worldwide Communist propaganda charges that the United States has no culture and that its industrial production is oriented toward war."' The 83rd Congress approved President Eisenhower's request on August 26; Public Law 663 was passed, and thus the President's Emergency Fund for International Affairs came into existence. The Fund was allocated in three categories: the Department of Commerce received $2,592,000 to develop and facilitate U.S. involvement in international trade fairs; the State Department received $2,250,000 for presentations of American dance, theater, music, and sports abroad; finally the United States Information Agency (USIA), which had been created in 1953, was granted $157,000 to help publicize performing arts and sports events. This was the first time in the history of American public policy that choreographers, composers, playwrights, and their works were systematically funded for export. Indeed, the performing arts, rather than sports, was the chief beneficiary of the $2,250,000 allocation during 1954-1955. The small sum of $83,000 was utilized for sports and various athletic events. Government funding was not meant to pay the full costs of exporting the performing arts. It was expected there would be commercial bookings and private support. What was it that might have prompted Eisenhower's decision to increase our peacetime visibility through a policy of arts export? Nationally and internationally, the political climate was tense in the 1950s. The Cold War, McCarthyism, violence over civil rights, wars for independence in the Third World, the Korean War, the bomb: these were some of the issues that clouded the American image abroad. Not long after Eisenhower was sworn in as President in March 1953, Joseph Stalin died in his dacha outside Moscow. His death ushered in the period that novelist Ilya Ehrenburg called "the thaw." The Soviet secret police chief, Lavrenti Beria, was arrested in June, and Georgi Malenkov, 12 / E I S E N H O W E R ' S F U N D Nikolai Bulganin, Vyacheslav Molotov, along with a then-unknown Nikita S. Khrushchev organized a collective leadership. In a speech to the Supreme Soviet in August 1953, Soviet premier Malenkov talked about "peaceful coexistence." Eisenhower himself, in a speech the previous April to the American Association of Editors, had talked about the possibility of normalizing relations now that Stalin was dead. Stalin's death had also brought about an increase in cultural diplomacy on the part of the Soviet Union; the amount of money spent on sending artists, writers, and performers to other countries escalated ~onsiderably.~ During the same period of time, America's attention was riveted on the Korean War, which the U.S. had entered in 1950 during Truman's administration. Eisenhower supported the war until October 1952, when he promised, if elected, to end it. The Korean War armistice was signed in July 1953. The key issue at the time was North Korea's insistence on the forced repatriation of approximately 100,000prisoners of war. O n July 27 United Nations and Communist representatives signed an armistice agreement, and North Korea accepted voluntary repatriation of prisoners. Communist China's aid to Korea during the war raised cries for a U.S. blockade of China. Eisenhower refused, calling a blockade an act of war that he was not ready to initiate. That same year Eisenhower appointed an old friend, Charles Douglas Jackson, as Special Assistant to the President. An executive with TimeLife Publications before and after his one-year appointment, Jackson had been head of psychological warfare in North Africa during World War 11. A strong supporter of the arts, he had served on the Metropolitan Opera Board and was instrumental in the development of Lincoln Center.3 Jackson's view of psychological warfare was to fight for the minds and souls of the enemy, thus potentially avoiding military combat and destruction. In early 1951, with help from the CIA, he organized the National Committee for a Free Europe. The...