"Cultural czars"

This dissertation revolves around the introduction of "Russian" ballet to the United States, its evolution into an "American" form, and the funding and political opportunities created as a direct result. A confluence of circumstances--the absence of a distinct ballet tradition in the United States, the waves of Russian artists who arrived in America in the wake of Russian-cum-Soviet political turmoil, the shift in relations between the U.S. and the USSR as World War II morphed into the Cold War--brought the Americanized version of the Russian art of ballet into the national spotlight and suffused it with both public popularity and political importance. In tracing the evolution of postwar arts funding, using dance as a case study, this research does three things. First, by evaluating why a "highbrow" art like ballet became so important and popular in this period, it calls into question the perception of a fixed postwar cultural hierarchy. Second, considering the larger project of postwar American nationalism, it argues that the decision to re-invest in the arts broadly, and ballet specifically, was a means by which the United States, as an expanding superpower, validated the legitimacy of its international position while maintaining the domestic cultural status quo. Third, on a practical level the investment in a distinctly American ballet begged the question: could a physical form and its movement articulate a nationality, trumping visual markers like race? The postwar emphasis on abstraction across all dance genres forced vested parties to reconsider what made a body American. The dissertation contends that ballet's political and philanthropic consecration not only solidified the divide between the white and the ethnic dancing body but also what it meant to be an American, at home and abroad. Accordingly, the story that follows operates on several different levels, across continents and communities to bring a fresh look at sources not usually in conversation with each other. Philanthropists, artists, and governmental figures--among them W. McNeil Lowry at the Ford Foundation, George Balanchine and Lincoln Kirstein at the New York City Ballet, New York governor Nelson Rockefeller, and Senators Claiborne Pell and Jacob K. Javits--provide a new voices in the discussions of postwar American dance, cultural diplomacy, the birth of the National Endowment for the Arts, and the transcription of nationhood onto physical bodies.