Cynthia Schneider
Professor of Art
Georgetown University and Former Ambassador to the Netherlands
"Explaining America: Ideas and Icons from Thomas Jefferson to Walt Disney"
March 12, 2003

Cynthia Schneider: I think that for us who live here or people who know America well it is really difficult to understand how it is possible that the country that really personifies political, social and economic opportunities that are absent in so many parts of the globe, how is it that we could be the target of so much antagonism.

Now of course, the principal answer to this question is one of policy. It is our foreign policies…most specifically our policy in the Middle East that generates so much antagonism in that part of the world. But I think if we go a little bit more deeply than that, one of the many things that seems to bother people about America is the discrepancy between what we say and what we do. Or what we allegedly stand for and then the way we behave in the world, at least recently. In other words we can talk the talk but we aren’t fooling anyone. People see that we don’t walk the walk.

The second reason how we communicate people is one that I want to spend the rest of the time thinking about with you. Now after September 11th, so many people were asking this question, why do they hate us. And there are again profound and complex reasons and answers to that question ranging from a lack of political voice, hopelessness, poverty, and many others. But another way to look at that question is to ask in a broader scale…and I am not talking about the individuals who flew the planes but the broader scale…what is the experience of America for these people outside America. How do they experience us? And certainly for many people in the Middle East and third world Muslim countries, they experience America in the form of business, the military and popular culture. And by the way, those two are more closely linked than you would think: the military and popular culture. America’s number one export is air space products. Our number two export is popular culture. The government invests a great deal of energy and money, I can testify to that. I spent a great deal of time selling the joint strike fighter to the Dutch and ultimately successfully. But the government invests a lot of time and money in marketing and strategically targeting those air space products. It spends a…none…virtually an infinitesimal fraction of money strategically targeting cultural products, which arguably is important for our security as well.

Americans are baffled when we see angry protesters dressed in t-shirts emblazoned with Georgetown or University of Virginia and wearing baseball hats as they burn effigies of President Bush or carry anti-American posters. The recent Pugh survey of global attitudes offers some insight into how that kind of discrepancy can exist. The survey which covered about twenty-eight countries…very, very thorough survey covering countries all over the world found that as individuals and as individual events there was a high level of appreciation for American culture, American popular culture almost everywhere in the world. Naturally a few exceptions such as Pakistan. But in most countries, including in the Middle East there was a more than fifty percent appreciation for American culture. Now incidentally, if you want to go to a real pocket of pro-American sentiment, I would recommend Uzbekistan. It seems to be the most pro-American country in the globe at the moment.

But, interestingly, in contrast to this appreciation for American culture, when asked how they felt about Americanization, the response was overwhelmingly negative. And that of course, has to do with globalization and a lot of other factors. But, I mean we can sit here logically and say, well wait a minute, if you keep going to those American movies, pretty soon you are going to have Americanization. But people don’t always think that logically and I would like to look on the positive side of that. That is the appreciation for American culture. High and low. And so I would like to suggest to you that it offers a tool…a greatly under used tool for diplomacy. And I think it is a tool that could help us better explain what we stand for.

Right now, I think we look as if we stand for money, the military and a monolithic country when really I think most people would find that we stand instead for democracy and we are a diverse society and dissent. We permit dissent. And it is in the arts, subjective forms of expression that you often find dissent. I think there is no better way to communicate freedom of speech than to communicate it being exercised.

We may be the greatest military power in the world but I don’t believe that our strength or our legacy will stem from that military power. To the contrary, our real strength is in our ideas and ideals. And it is from these that we derive our moral and political leadership. Machiavelli said in the Italian Renaissance it is better to be feared than loved. But modern history has not borne that out. The Soviet Union was…the leadership was feared. And during the Cold War, the United States was loved. And who lasted? In Tiannamen Square the protesters made…erected a statue of Liberty, not an F-16.

I am going to conclude this introduction with a quotation from a journalist, Zacharia who wrote about America as Empire in the New Yorker. And he wrote, "America remains the universal nation. The country people across the world believe should speak for universal values. The belief that America is different is it’s ultimate source of strength. If we mobilize all our awesome powers and lose this one, we will have hegemony but will it be worth having?"

I want to now look with you at some of the tools that I think America has at her disposal and could use to better communicate the diversity of our society and the myriad ideas and ideals that we stand for. I am going to look…make this a historical look beginning with Jefferson and touch on the themes of freedom, democracy, equality, the individual and the rag to riches story. Underlying all the things that we will look at and listen to is a belief in virtue and a fundamental optimism. But the American dream means more than just making it economically and socially. And in fact, many of our books and plays and films say over and over again that money alone will not bring happiness. Instead we find the idea and the ideal of doing well by doing good.

So where else to start but right here. Jefferson and this is Jefferson in a portrait by Rembrandt Peal. It belongs to the New York Historical Society that I was lucky enough to be able to exhibit in the residence in the Hague for a good deal of my tenure there…had it on loan which was wonderful to have Jefferson of course in the living room. But also great to have a painting by Rembrandt Peal because then all my friends in Dutch art such as Larry Geddes a professor here when they would say, I hear you have some paintings. Do you have a Rembrandt? I could say yes, I do.

Jefferson did have an agenda for the arts and for him it was emphasizing the form of architecture. And that was for him an essential component in the definition of the young America. Now we have many monuments that help to define America. And looking here at the one to Jefferson, of course, from classical ones such as the Jefferson Memorial to more modern ones such as of course the Vietnam Wall on the Mall. But I think that Monticello right here is one that exemplifies very well the openness, the populism and the distinctive blend of old and new that distinguished early America and I think still distinguishes us today. Jefferson in drawing inspiration for this building looked both to the republican past of Rome. Particularly he was interested in the Maison Carre in Nimes, which he described in his own words that he used to gaze on it for hours like a lover at his mistress. And also, at the Renaissance style of Palladio from Italy.
What Jefferson did was to translate these classical styles built of course in marble into an American vernacular. So while he adopts many of the architectural features of the leisure villas designed by Palladio he builds himself not a villa but a permanent residence. And he does so using local brick.

Noah Webster sought to transform language in much the same way that Jefferson transformed architecture. He wanted to provide the tools for a more consistent word use in the new republic. So by basing language on American reality and character, Webster gave that language a national character. He had high hope for American literary arts. He declared, "America must be as independent in literature as she is in politics. As famous for arts as for arms." He believed that a system of national education was of grave importance for the development of a democracy. And underlying that system was the foundation of language, a national language nurtured by Webster through spelling, grammar manuals and finally his great masterpiece, the dictionary.

Webster laid the verbal foundation for the new republic but it was the so-called bard of democracy, Walt Whitman who transformed poetry in telling America’s story. Whitman’s original combination of lyricism and blunt honesty created a new voice in poetry. A voice who’s no nonsense language matched his favorite theme, the common man. One of many foreign observers of America, the Dutch historian Johan Housagood understood well how Whitman personified democracy. In 1926 he wrote, "Anyone who wishes to understand America must first carry over his concept of democracy from the political and social field to the cultural and generally human. The best way to do this continues to be reading Walt Whitman."

In his preface to "Leaves of Grass", Whitman addressed the fundamental principal of equality in America. "The Americans of all nations at any time upon the earth have probably the fullest poetical nature. The United States themselves are essentially the greatest poem. Other states indicate themselves in their deputies. But the genius of the United States is not best or most in it’s executives or legislatures nor in it’s ambassadors or authors or colleges or churches or parlors nor even in it’s newspapers or inventors but always in the common people." Whitman’s poems translate the politics of democracy into terms of everyday life while his contemporaries Mark Twain and Harriet Beecher Stowe in their novels tackle the most difficult issue in American political life, the conflict between a nation founded on principles of individual freedom and the practice of slavery.

Mark Twain was vilified for setting before America’s youth such a disreputable character as Huck Finn, someone who stole, smoked, lacked respect and lived in deplorable conditions. In fact, Huck Finn gave flesh and blood to the ideal of the common man whose praises had been sung for Jefferson and Franklin to Thoreau, Emerson and Whitman. In all but unintelligible slang, Huck voiced America’s deepest anxieties. What does it mean in a nation based on individual rights and equality that some men are more equal than others? Huck’s gradual realization of the individuality of Jim the slave with whom he escapes the tyranny of his father, mirrors the process the entire nation underwent in the aftermath of the Civil War. Even more challenging was Twain’s premise that Jim was not only an individual in his own right but judged by universal standards of integrity, courage and loyalty, he was a better man than many whites including Huck’s father.

Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin first published in 1852 takes another look at slavery. No less an author than Leo Tolstoy called Uncle Tom’s Cabin, "One of the few genuine modern works of art." Stowe’s essential message about the cruelty of slavery is conveyed through her unrelenting exposure of how slavery destroyed family life. Probably the most influential novel of the 19th Century, Uncle Tom’s Cabin was the first American novel to sell over a million copies. It may have been one of the many factors that eventually led the nation down to the road to the Civil War.

So if writers such as Mark Twain, Whitman, and Harriet Beecher Stowe introduced an American voice into literature, then artists such as Winslow Homer and the Hudson River Painters do the same for art. Facing the emergence of a true American voice in literature and art makes clear that these developments were inextricably tied to politics in that they reflected and manifested the emerging sense of an American identity and national character.

And here we are looking at Albert Bearstadt’s Sunset at Yosemite. And paintings such as this or Thomas Cole’s Sunday Morning on the Hudson River, reflect just as Jefferson’s Monticello reflected European movements, in this case the Romanticist movement, the American artist still infused these ideas of the old world with an energy, an optimism and a spirit of exploration. We see this also in the many examples of paintings of Niagara Falls by Frederick Church. Many focus on the west, that mythical last frontier which beckoned the brave, the rugged individuals ready to load their possessions onto a wagon and stake their claim in virgin territory. At the time that these were painted, America still represented an exotic destination. And Europe’s hunger for things American led to the overnight popularity of the Legend of Wild West personified in Europe by Annie Oakley and Buffalo Bill.

The entrepreneurs of the 19th century, the pioneers were willing to risk all to make it on their own piece of land. When later in the century that piece of land became one that might contain gold, the seed for the west as a place to strike it rich was sown. And even today, a western destination, Las Vegas, invites people from all walks of life to forget their cares and try to take their chance just as the gold diggers had done a hundred years before, to strike it rich.

Long after the frontier was settled and the Indians had lost their land and their buffalos, Buffalo Bill and his Wild West show sustained and kept this memory of the drama and the valor of the West alive. Not only that but Buffalo Bill also exported this dream of the wild west to the choicest of audiences including Queen Victoria herself. The original spin-doctor, Buffalo Bill, puts today’s public relations firms to shame. Skilled as he was in building upon a myth, William Frederick Cody succeeded because of the power of that myth itself. He personified the western ideal and satisfied the power nostalgia for it that still endures today.

Now the spirit of exploration that informed images, both visual and written, of the frontier has it’s parallel in skyscraper in urban America. And there you see that same sense…the same combination that we talked about with Jefferson of utility and a certain kind of classic beauty, and of course as always, the practical…tall buildings were the most cost effective. Once again, architecture was transformed.

The ultimate risk taker though in American art is the jazz musician. And that is the ultimate jazz form of the American art forms. [music] I think it is a pretty well accepted thing that jazz is the American art form, the American signature form of music. But what is perhaps the most…it’s most extraordinary quality is the degree to which it has become international. Of course it began internationally…it draws on many other kinds of music, but it is a language that speaks to people all over the world.

Jazz during the Cold War, during WWII in Germany, jazz could express thoughts of freedom that words were not allowed to say and that had to go unexpressed. The German jazz pianist, Jutta Hipp, said that during the war, the impact of jazz was very, very powerful and it was the primary linked to America. She said, "To jazz…to us, jazz is some kind of religion. We really have to fight for it. And I remember nights when we didn’t go down into the bomb shelter because we listened to jazz records. We had the feeling that you, the Americans, were not our enemies even though the bombs crashed around us. We felt safe." [music]

Now, jazz also revealed the best and the worst in America because of course all the musicians that we have been listening to whose music personified freedom enjoyed no freedom in America when they were first playing. And they would play in clubs and go in the colored door and of course the audiences would go in the main door. And in a way that seems extraordinary in today’s climate many of these musicians were sent by the State Department on tours in the fifties and the sixties and they were sent to the most amazing places. They were sent to Iraq and Iran and Saudi Arabia and all over the Soviet Union. I mean, the Russian people know American jazz incredibly well. Much better than most Americans do. And in a famous incident before one of these tours…they were long they would go on tours for a month really all over whole regions of the world…India…they went over Asia. Dizzy Gillespie was at…brought in for a briefing and he said to the person who was briefing him; you know I don’t need to be briefed by you. I and my people have had two hundred years of briefing in this country. I don’t need to learn anything more from you. And extraordinarily enough he was sent. No one told him what to say or not to say. And I think it is regrettable that we don’t do more of that…send people who maybe will personify the kinds of freedoms that we stand for.

Another very strong representation of American ideals is in another American invention and that is the musical. Not of course all musicals or all examples of theatre, but certainly many of them really display that characteristic American optimism. Well finally of course, in cinema we can and do reach a great number of people and there you see many cases this theme again of the virtuous underdog comes out over and over again. And sometimes we even impose it on other traditions…other civilizations. We think of Spartacus or Ben Hur. And this underdog myth comes out again and again particularly in the movies of Disney. So the strength and the potential strength of these movies that we send out is I think really great. And instead of taking advantage of what we could do with our popular culture, instead I think we tend to disparage it and say this is terrible, terrible influence. And I am not saying it is all perfect. But you don’t have to look very far to find a lot of positive qualities and some of those positive qualities are dissent, are self-criticism, are showing that we in fact don’t think that we dominate the world but we do find problems in ourselves and strive to do better.

And I think we have historically and we do at present have these resources at our fingertips. And in the age of global communication, you know, when we have built up Madison Avenue and so many other ways in which we have the capacity to communicate to the world, it is so regrettable that we don’t use our imagination and use our cultural expressions, our artistic expressions in all different forms to help communicate what kind of country we are and what we stand for. This would of course require money and it would require investment. Currently we spend, for all our cultural and education and exchange efforts as part of foreign policy, the amount that we spend is one seventh of one percent of the proposed defense budget. And I think with just a little bit more investment we could have a much greater return. And then we might have a sense of something suggested by John F. Kennedy when he said, "The life of the arts far from being an interruption, a distraction in the life of the nation, is very close to the center of a nation’s purpose and is a test of the quality of a nation’s civilization."