Soul call: Music, race and the creation of American cultural policy

This dissertation examines the ways in which music, and especially jazz, was forged into a political tool in the United States between 1920 and 1970. I argue that this transformation, which culminated in the Cold War use of culture as a tool of foreign policy, had developed through African American musicians' art and transatlantic intellectual and cultural discourses and networks which reinterpreted the political function of music and influenced the creation of U.S. cultural domestic policy during the Great Depression and foreign policy during World War II, setting the stage for the Cold War, when the U.S. government used these traditions to sell a vision of America as embodiment of humane and democratic pluralism. Uniting cultural and intellectual history with policy analysis, the dissertation draws on government documents, oral histories, manuscript collections, newspapers and magazine articles, and the writings of musicians, composers, and intellectuals on both sides of the Atlantic.; For the first generation of African American jazz musicians and performers, including figures like W.C. Handy, Louis Armstrong, and Josephine Baker, the politics of their art was bound up with the political constraints and racial threats of the Jim Crow era, resulting in a style that was marked by tricksterism and its ambiguous political potential, suspended between establishing freedom from political control and forced collaboration. The rising international appeal of jazz created a critical discourse about the music which also shifted the terms of its political engagement, using the themes of Romanticism and absolute music to associate music with national and ethnic identity, exposing its potential for social engineering and control.; The political crises of the Great Depression and Second World War moved these debates from the realm of cultural and political commentary to a matter of practical urgency. Composers and musicologists, especially Charles Seeger and Henry Cowell, merged their modernist training with their social realist aspirations in hopes of constructing a progressive form of social and political engineering through music. In the New Deal's Federal Music Program they tried to use folk music to create a national community through a pluralist yet communal culture. And in service of the government's cultural foreign policy in Latin America in the late 1930s, they extended their concerns to a hemispheric and ultimately a global community in the combat against fascism, distinguishing American humanist pluralism from totalitarian propaganda. The Cold War strategy of cultural diplomacy, and its emblematic tours by African American jazz musicians would inherit these previously shaped ideas of music's political possibilities. My analysis of Dizzy Gillespie's, Louis Armstrong's, and Duke Ellington's Cold War politics complicates the common notions of Cold War cultural foreign policy as an unequivocal sellout of internationalist humanism in the name of propaganda, or of the musicians' politics as staunchly anti-hegemonic, instead showing variable combinations between the two elements, which, in the end certainly supported U.S. hegemonic ambitions.