Cold War, the

Emily Abrams Ansari

https://doi.org/10.1093/gmo/9781561592630.article.A2228066
Published in print: 26 November 2013
Published online: 04 October 2012

The Cold War was a political, ideological, and military conflict between Communist and Western
nations that began around 1947 and ended with the dissolution of the USSR in 1991. The USSR and the
United States were the principal adversaries, both superpowers after World War II. Each funded many
proxy wars during this period, but because of their nuclear capabilities never fought each other
directly, thereby creating alternating periods of high tension and relative calm. The Cold War’s only
consistent feature was thus the ideological conflict between communism and democratic capitalism. In
this context, the arts became particularly significant, both as sites in which shared anxieties could be
explored and as tools to be wielded by government. This was especially true in the United States
during the 1950s and 1960s, when the threat of military conflict appeared most acute and fear of
Communist influence was at its height.

The US government’s global promotion of music and musicians during the Cold War grew out of more
modest efforts during and immediately after World War II. To strengthen relations with Latin and
South American countries, the State Department initiated a series of inter-American exchanges in
1938: these would serve as models for Cold War arts diplomacy. Following victory in Europe, music was
again put to political use in US-occupied zones, particularly in Germany, where American military
officials deemed music a vital tool in the process of de-Nazification, re-education, and friendship-
building. The US government therefore arranged visits by American composers and performers,
particularly prioritizing experimental music.

As tensions between the Soviet Union and the United States increased during the late 1940s, the US
government initiated a global campaign that used music to educate foreigners about American culture
and values. US embassy-based information services increasingly provided a venue for local people to
learn about American music through scores, recordings, books, and concerts. Such efforts were
centralized and significantly expanded with the establishment of the US Information Agency (USIA) in
1953. The USIA also helped facilitate worldwide transmission for the United States’ official overseas
radio station the Voice of America (VOA, established 1942), thereby aiding exposure to US perspectives
even beyond the Iron Curtain. At the VOA music was considered vital, both to educate foreigners about
American culture and to draw in music-lovers who could then be exposed to targeted news
programming. Willis Conover’s jazz show “Music USA” was particularly popular in many countries,
running from 1954 until his death in 1996.

President Dwight D. Eisenhower launched the first global government-funded initiative to use touring
musicians in 1953. Eisenhower argued that such tours would increase international understanding
within the polarizing climate of the Cold War. Privately, however, government officials described the
tours as a “secret weapon” within their arsenal of psychological warfare techniques. To contradict
Soviet propaganda that belittled the United States for its lack of high culture, the State Department
sent hundreds of orchestras, choirs, chamber groups, and classical soloists into friendly and enemy

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terrain. Jazz bands were also deployed to demonstrate that the United States had created its own
unique cultural contributions and, in the case of black jazz musicians, to repudiate criticism of
American racism during the Civil Rights era.

Alongside these acknowledged government programs, the CIA orchestrated covertly funded arts
projects through a network of dummy foundations. The Congress for Cultural Freedom (CCF), for
example, staged concerts of American and European musical modernism to demonstrate the diversity
of cultural outcomes in a free society. The CCF hoped such compositions would contrast favorably with
the uniformity of music produced under the Soviet’s aesthetic policy, Socialist Realism.

While American musicians benefited greatly from these various government programs, not all interest
from Washington during this period was positive. Between the late 1940s and the late 1950s,
supporters of the anti-Communist movement publicly questioned the loyalty of many influential
musicians with ties to the political left. As early as 1947, the House Committee on Un-American
Activities interrogated German émigré composer Hans Eisler. In 1950 the journal Counterattack
published Red Channels: The Report of Communist Influence in Radio and Television. This list of
suspected Communists included musicians and music critics such as Leonard Bernstein, Aaron
Copland, Dean Dixon, Olin Downes, Alan Lomax, Pete Seeger, and Artie Shaw. Senator Joseph
McCarthy, who was the public face of the “Second Red Scare” between 1950 and 1954, personally
interrogated Copland as chair of the Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations. Musicians
suffered many repercussions from these events, including cancelled performances, problems with
passports renewal, ongoing FBI surveillance and, in the case of Eisler, deportation.

Beyond Washington, the political and ideological impact of the Cold War affected American music of all
kinds. Folk musicians were one group who contributed directly to contemporary debates, with singers
like Pete Seeger and Bob Dylan becoming figureheads in the countercultural, anti-war movement that
swept the nation during the 1960s. Country singers meanwhile typically presented a right-wing
perspective, expressing concerns about Soviet infiltration in songs such as Ferlin Husky’s “Let’s Keep
the Communists Out.” Popular musicians similarly explored American fears and anxieties in lyrics that
discussed the atom bomb, the Red Scare, and life beyond the Iron Curtain.

Although musicians from other traditions were often less overtly engaged in Cold War debates, almost
all the major styles came to be viewed as representatives of some kind of political position during this
period. Jazz music was increasingly associated with freedom and democratic values—a political
reading of its improvisatory features. In the art music world, especially during the 1950s, American
tonal music struggled with associations with the Social Realist aesthetic and thus with Communism
and authoritarianism. Meanwhile serialism flourished, deemed somehow capable of simultaneously
representing both political freedom and an art-for-art’s sake attitude that composers believed would
make it immune to political appropriation. Rock ’n’ roll, meanwhile, was globally regarded as a
signifier of American capitalism and everything it stood for, both positive and negative.

Ultimately the commercial success of American popular music overseas, with its ties to youth culture
and conspicuous consumption, was perhaps more significant as a means of bringing about political
change than any government-funded program. Critics of this development have used terms such as
“Americanization” and “cultural imperialism” to describe its negative effects. Yet there is evidence to
suggest that American and British popular music had significant political consequences beyond the
Iron Curtain. Much of this music entered the USSR illegally, often via less tightly controlled countries

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in the Eastern Bloc, while some came through official channels, including the Seventh International
Festival of Youth and Students (Moscow, 1957), which brought the first rock bands to the Soviet Union
and resulted in a surge in pirate recordings. The Soviet authorities responded to such developments by
denouncing American pop and jazz, even introducing new Russian dances as alternatives to the twist.
Their efforts to control cultural infiltration were, however, largely futile and therefore decreased over
subsequent decades.

Rapidly increasing availability to American music through commercial channels and growing access to
international travel gradually reduced the need for the US government to fund overseas tours by
American musicians, making the musical ambassadors of the 1950s and 1960s a brief phenomenon
that will probably never be repeated. Yet in a conflict so concerned with influence and reputation, it
was inevitable that music would play an essential role, just as the era’s pervasive psychological impact
left no American musical style untouched.

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