>> From the Library of Congress, in Washington, D.C.. [ Silence ] >> Good afternoon. My name is Georgette Dorn. I'm the chief of the Hispanic division, and I'd like to welcome all of you to this wonderful lecture that we're going to have today. It is my pleasure to introduce Catherine McCann, who is the editor for Humanities at the Handbook of Latin American Studies, and she will introduce our speaker. But before we start, I'm going to ask all of you to please turn off your cell phones and you're going to filmed, I mean, the whole session is going to be filmed for cybercasting, for the Library's website, so anyone who has questions, would you please identify yourself, so we know who you are, during the Q & A. Catherine McCann. >> Darlene Sadlier is director of the Portuguesee Program and professor in the Department of Spanish and Portuguesee at Indiana University, Bloomington. She is an expert on Brazilian culture and has written widely on Brazilian literature, literature, film and television, among other topics. And in fact, her book, one of her books, "Brazil Imagined" is the first comprehensive study of Brazilian culture written in English, although I should mention that her works have been translated into Portuguesee and also published in that language. Her writing has been reviewed in the "New York Review of Books," "The Washington Post," the "South Atlantic Quarterly" among many other journals, and she's won numerous awards for her scholarship and for her writing. She's the recipient of two Fulbrights, she took first place in Brazil's Ministry of Foreign Affairs International competition for the best work on Graciela Ramos, and received the Outstanding Academic Title Award by Choice Magazine for her introduction to Fernando Pessoa. She's also the author of the first English work on the film maker Nelson Pereira dos Santos, whom she has been escorting on his tour of the United States. He's the film maker behind "How Tasty Was My Little Frenchman" and "Tent of Miracles" among many other films. Today, Darlene Sadlier will be talking about "Americans All" drawing on her wide knowledge of, and understanding of Brazilian history and culture. After the talk, the book will be for sale, after the question and answer period. Please join me in welcoming Dr. Darlene Sadlier. [applause] >> Darlene J. Sadlier: Thank you very much. I'm really delighted to be here. I love libraries, so it's great to be back at the Library of Congress, and I'd like to thank Georgette and my good friend Katie for inviting me to give this presentation today. Well let me begin, because I have quite a story to tell you. In August, 1940, President Franklin D. Roosevelt named Nelson Rockefeller to head the Office of the Coordinator of Inter-American Affairs, and I'll call that the CIAA, from now on. This was a new Federal agency whose main objective was to strengthen cultural and commercial relations between the U.S. and Latin America, in order to route access influence there and secure hemispheric solidarity. An eastern, old money Republican, whose family owned Standard Oil, Rockefeller was also an art patron. He hired some of the country's best known artists and educators to work in the various agency divisions dedicated to the fields of radio, film, print materials, art, libraries and educational activities. This was the U.S. government's first major investment in culture, as a means not only to make friends abroad, but also to influence the public at home, to become what was called "good neighbors". Although the agency was not without its problems, and ideological tensions, the CIAA years have no equivalent in the U.S. history of foreign relations endeavors. It thus, was a high point of U.S. - Latin American friendship, a relationship that has never been duplicated. My talk today is about selected CIAA investments in the arts, literature and radio, as diplomatic forces. The specific projects that I'm highlighting are those based largely on my research at the Library of Congress in 2009, in the Hispanic Reading Room, and in the divisions dedicated to prints and photographs, manuscripts, motion picture, broadcasting and recorded sound. As I hope to show, the Rockefeller agency drew upon myriad personnel and vast material resources both at home and abroad, to create a hemispheric dialog in which writers and artists, for the first time, had a significant voice, with Rockefeller in Brazil. Just months after its inception, the CIAA received written approval for 26 special projects, at a cost of nearly a half million dollars. The most expensive, at $150,000 was an Inter-American exhibit of art and culture under the direction of the Museum of Modern Art, which I'll call "MoMA," to be held simultaneously with parallel exhibits in capital cities throughout the Americas. 255 U.S. paintings were curated by the MoMA, in conjunction with other major museums, and in April, 1941, these were previewed at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. Portions of the large exhibit then toured eight South American republics, Mexico and Cuba, for close to a year. The emphasis was on modern art, and included paintings by Georgia O'Keeffe, Thomas Hart Benton, Edward Hopper, and Eugene Speicher, among others. U.S. specialists accompanied the various tours. MoMA's Stanton Caitlin went to Mexico City, Quito, Lima and Santiago. New Orleans artist Caroline Durieux, who had lived in Mexico and worked with Diego Rivera there, oversaw exhibits in Buenos Aires, Rio and Montevideo; and Lewis A. Riley, who had studied art and archeology in Central America, traveled to Havana, Caracas and Bogota. Durieux said, in a newspaper interview that over 60,000 people had attended the three capital city exhibits. In Good Neighbor fashion, she emphasized fundamental similarities between the Americas, but in doing so, she put emphasis on race, and she said, "There is a definite kinship between North and South Americans who, after all, have sprung from the same European stock, and there is no reason why misunderstandings should exist between them." One might note the absence of any reference to the Americas indigenous and African heritages. She was particularly pleased that Latin Americans "were learning that there is more to the United States than business," a recurring slogan in cultural relations. The CIAA project included the publication and distribution of 35,000 trilingual exhibit catalogues titled "Contemporary Painting in the U.S." with a preface by novelist Waldo Frank, who was a major proponent of Latin American literature and culture in the United States. Press reaction was positive and widespread, including positive reviews by two of Brazil's most celebrated authors, novelist Jose Lins do Rego and poet Manuel Bandeira. Among the paintings on display was Eugene Speicher's portrait of Broadway star Katherine Cornell in the role of Bernard Shaw's Candida, a painting the Cornell had donated to the MoMA. According to Leonard Lyons's syndicated column, "Broadway Medley," Cornell suddenly began receiving fan mail from South Americans who had seen the exhibit and praised her extraordinary beauty. Intrigued by this outpouring of fan mail, Cornell obtained a catalogue of the show and discovered that two of the artwork titles had been switched: "Cornell as Candida" had been transposed to one of Speicher's voluptuous nudes. The second part of the international art project involved an exhibit of Latin American works to be loaned by various U.S. art museums, private companies and institutions. The San Francisco Museum of Art was one of the most heavily invested, with a contribution of contemporary Latin American paintings, drawings and photographs by Mexicans Rufino Tamayo, Diego Rivera, Jose Clemente Orozco, David Alfaro Siqueiros, and Fermin Revueltas; Brazilian Candido Portinari; Colombian Luis Alberto Acuna; and the Cuban Wilfredo Lam. As a result of CIAA initiatives, certain Latin American artists quickly came to the attention of critics and markets for their works grew in the United States. Already in late 1940, Brazilian Candido Portinari was on the rise in art circles as a result of his larger-than-life, modernist murals of northeaster "jangadeiros" or fisherman on rough-hewn rafts with sails. He also portrayed baianas and gauchos, which are displayed in Lucio Costa and Oscar Niemeyer's acclaimed Brazilian Pavilion at New York's 1939 World Fair. In November, 1940, poet and Library of Congress director Archibald MacLeish invited Portinari to paint a set of murals for the Library of Congress's Hispanic Reading Room. As a Good Neighbor gesture, the Brazilian government paid for Portinari's return to the U.S. and the CIAA matched Brazil funds, Brazil's funds to support the artist's work. Portinari began painting the murals in October 1941, and finished two months later. The Library of Congress murals were shown to the public at the official opening on January 12, 1942 where a specially produced publication titled "The Portinari Murals" celebrated the artwork as a step forward in U.S. - Brazil cultural relations. Like other muralists at the time, Portinari was drawn to the rural poor and urban working class as inspiration for his work. His World's Fair murals also depicted Brazil's three races in modernist style. While the Brazilian government under Getulio Vargas wanted to promote Brazil's modernity and put limits on images of Brazil as a poor, black or mixed-race nation, Portinari continued to celebrate the nation's racial heritage in his floor-to-ceiling paintings for the Library of Congress. The murals focused on the most humble social types: Portuguese sailors on a ship bound for Brazil; mixed-race Sao Paulo frontiersmen or "bandeirantes" pushing into the interior, to seize land for the crown and capture fugitive Indian slaves; Portuguesee Jesuits converting Indian women and children; and African slaves being transported during the 18th Century gold rush to the Minas interior. In spring 1942, Brazil's ministry for education reciprocated by inviting U.S. artist George Biddle to teach a course at the newly created Escola Tecnica in Rio. Biddle had been heavily influenced by Diego Rivera and the Mexican muralist tradition and was a central proponent of the Federal Arts Project. Brother of Francis Biddle, Attorney General under FDR, Biddle and his sculptor wife, Helene Sardeau, were invited to create two murals in fresco and bas-relief for Rio's national library. From Rio, Biddle wrote enthusiastically to Henry Allen More, who chaired the CIAA's educational activities and he wrote, "I feel very happy now the way things have turned out. The two large murals are as in fine a building as any in Rio, on the main avenue of the city; and the themes which I intend to use have, I believe, great significance. 1 - Not hatred, destruction and death over America, but 2 - intelligence and humanity shall rule our world. As far as I know, it is the first time that two artists from the States, have been invited by a South American government to execute an important mural commission." Biddle's social activism and horror of war, wedded with his various experiences as a teacher and artist in Brazil, led him to draft a document advising the CIAA to convene a congress of Latin American and U.S. artists and writers in the U.S. He compared Western Europe's long-standing program of cultural relations with Latin America with the U.S.'s historic and lamentable indifference to cultural exchange. He wrote, "Over and over again, in a year's stay in Brazil, I saw tragic evidence of the lack of such a program. Commenting on this situation a Brazilian publisher and editor said to me, 'You are thirty years late at the start. But for these next few months, you are without competition. For God's sake do something now. After the war, it may be too late. At any rate, you will no longer be in a position where you can shape an intelligent cultural program for an eager and friendly audience of 120 million.'" And end of quote and end of the citation. Along with the Latin American - U.S. art exhibits, the CIAA sponsored a South American tour by sculptor Jo Davidson, who was commissioned in the spring of 1941 to create bronze busts of 10 Latin American presidents. Davidson received especially long and favorable newspaper coverage while he was working in Montevideo and Caracas. In June 1942, the National Gallery of Art hosted an exhibition of his works accompanied by a catalogue. Presidents of the South American republics -- by a catalogue "Presidents of the South American republics." The CIAA's Good Neighbor agenda was foremost in the museum's mind when it placed Davidson's earlier busts of Roosevelt and Wallace, among those of the Latin American leaders. No expense seems to have been spared. The CIAA gave busts to the Latin American presidents and their families, and dispatched hundreds of catalogues in Spanish and Portuguesee for distribution through U.S. Embassies in South America. I like this slide because I am a Hoosier, and for those of you who like "pulp Fiction" detective fiction, crime fiction, you will know that Rex Stout is the author of the Nero Wolfe series of books, so this is all very close to my heart. Poster art and photography. One of the essential parts of the press and publication North to South initiative was the distribution of illustrated materials, including posters and cartoons for the largely illiterate population. In the area of poster art, a hemispheric solidarity poster contest was launched by MoMA, as part of a CIAA arts initiative in 1942. The competition required the use of one of 12 slogans in English, Spanish, and Portuguesee, such as: "Hands Off the Americas"; "21 republics, one destiny"; "Unite against aggression"; and "Fight for a free America." MoMA received 473 entries from Latin America and 382 from the United States and Canada. 34 prizes were distributed: half to Latin Americans and half to U.S. and Canadian entrants. The two largest prizes went to Jose Renau, from Mexico City, and Stanley W. Crane, from Woodstock. Renau's "Unite Against Aggression" was the most visually compelling and hard hitting poster. Colorful flags of the 21 republics formed the backdrop for a powerful image of three hands that together plunge a sharpened stake into the body of a large, writhing cobra. MoMA published a pamphlet with illustrations of the prize winning artworks and distributed 13,708 copies in North America and another 6,000 in South America. Vogue Magazine ran a full page color ad in which fashion models were artfully posed against a backdrop of the prize winning posters. By 1945, the CIAA boasted that they had the world's most extensive collection of Latin American photographs, covering a broad range of subjects. Many of these pictures were taken by professional photographers contracted to travel to Latin America. Arguably, the most important among these was Genevieve Naylor, a highly talented WPA and Associated Press photojournalist who traveled to Brazil in October, 1940, with her soon to be husband, the artist Misha Reznikoff. According to historian Robert Levine, Brazil's Department of Press and Propaganda known as DIP restricted Naylor to subject matter that emphasized Brazil's modernity and largely white, middle and upper class population. Among the Rio subjects she was allowed to photograph were buildings, homes, and beachfronts in the fashionable Zona Sul or "southern zone," yachting and golf club settings and commercial shops along the historic downtown Rua do Ouvidor. The Vargas government prided itself on its reform measures, and Naylor was encouraged to photograph various social services, including a newsboys' foundation and a school for children of fishermen, which also became the focus of a CIAA educational documentary called "Boys' Fishing School." Naylor and Reznikoff traveled widely in Brazil for nearly three years, trekking into the interior and as far north as Pernambuco, and despite the limits imposed by the government, Naylor was often able to break free and photograph less officially approved subjects. Still in her twenties, she had studied under Berenice Abbott, at the New School for Social Research in New York, and her work is very much in the tradition of the socially conscious Depression-era photographs of the New Deal's Farm Security Administration and the street photography of the New York Film and Photo League, whose famous names included Walker Evans and Dorothea Lange. The power of her black and white images derives partly from her poor or working-class subjects, who are captured in daily yet dramatic motion: a newspaper boy walking in a chiaroscuro afternoon in downtown Rio, passengers clinging to the outside of an overcrowded trolley, street performers dancing northeastern frevo, young and old enjoying the beachfront, crowds celebrating carnival, and hundreds gathering for a religious festival. Significantly, several of her photographs disclose the intimate physical proximity between the poor and the well-to-do. Among Naylor's photographs is, Vargas's portrait displayed in shops, cafes and even a samba school. Her picture of a local photographer's window display shows small framed portraits of men, women, and children reverently assembled in front of a large picture of Vargas in presidential attire. Here Vargas resembles a patriarch presiding over his family, a role that many Brazilians associated with the leader. Interestingly, a slightly smaller portrait of Vargas sits above and to the right of this reverential display, as if the dictator were carefully overseeing his own adoration as pater familias. This is the kind of photograph that the DIP might have approved of, perhaps without recognizing its panoptic implications. Naylor's sizable work, a portion of which was lost during her travels in Brazil, makes an interesting comparison to Orson Welles's incomplete film about Latin America called, "It's All True." Naylor helped Welles identify film locations in Rio. Like Welles, Naylor was intrigued by samba and carnival and had to work under the watchful eye of the DIP. But Naylor was less scrutinized than Welles, who naturally drew attention and publicity because of his celebrity, movie cameras and crew. A feature-length documentary by a world-famous director was far more important to the government than individual pictures taken by a little-known woman with a portable, still camera. As we know, Welles's filming of black Brazilians celebrating carnival and the reenactment of a trip made by four dark-skinned northeastern fishermen seeking economic justice were anathema to the DIP's desired image of Brazil. The project incurred the displeasure of not only Vargas but also of RKO studio executives and Rockefeller himself, whose idea of Good Neighbor Brazil included colorful tropical settings and figures such as Walt Disney's Ze Carioca and the Brazilian bombshell Carmen Miranda. Anticipating Welles and quite unlike Disney, Naylor did not refrain from portraying Rio as a racially mixed society, but her photodocumentary was more wide-ranging and eclectic. Her pictures of Brazil's integrated racially mixed population prominently featured trolley cars, trains, luxurious hotel beachfronts and high-rise buildings, symbols of modernity. Group shots of mainly working class black, brown and white children at play and in school arguably supported Brazil's much-touted image of itself as a "racial democracy" and her focus on youth tied in well with the CIAA's emphasis on children as future hemispheric leaders. At the same time, her pictures of beggars, bread lines and black poverty contradicted the idea of a racially egalitarian society. A seemingly innocuous shot of more than one hundred uniformed schoolgirls performing in an outdoor civic pageant conveys an image of a progressive Brazil that the government was eager to show, but it also reveals that all but a few of the girls are white. On January 27, 1943, just before her return to New York, a small exhibit of fifty of Naylor's photographs, titled "Faces and Places in Brazil," opened at the MoMA. "New York Times" columnist Edward Alden Jewell's favorable review mentioned that other, out-of-town reviewers were impressed by the exhibit. The Pittsburgh "Sun Telegraph" ran Naylor's photograph of a passenger-laden Rio trolley car and in a caption added a bit of humor while acknowledging the importance of Brazil to the Allied effort, and the caption reads, on that trolley car photo, "Ticket please. You think Pittsburgh's trolleys and businesses are overcrowded? Here's a trolley at rush time in Rio, Brazil, another country where Roosevelt stopped on his return from Casablanca." Unlike Hollywood movies, U.S. commercial radio was far from an international industry in the years leading up to World War II, and shortwave was used primarily for receiving foreign programs. That situation changed dramatically with the war and the emergence of the CIAA and other information agencies, all of which recognized radio's ability to shape public opinion at home and abroad. The CIAA recruited major media figures to build a program of news and entertainment for domestic consumption and to provide Latin American listeners with alternatives to Axis radio which, along with British radio, had gained worldwide prominence in the post-World War I years. In addition to top-level administrators, the Radio Division recruited some of the foremost names in broadcast writing. Among the contributors were Arch Oboler, who had written NBC's popular horror series "Lights Out"; Norman Corwin, who had worked at CBS and was the nation's most respected writer of socially critical radio drama; Clifford Goldsmith, the creator of "The Aldrich Family"; Stuart Ayers, an NBC veteran who wrote "Land of the Free" series; and distinguished writers from Dupont's "Cavalcade of America", including playwright and journalist Maxwell Anderson, the poet Stephen Vincent Benet, and Pulitzer Prize- winning novelist Sherwood Anderson. One of the most active among the agency's contributors was poet, antifascist dramatist, and Library of Congress head Archibald MacLeish, who directed the short-term Office of Fact and Figures and Committee on Information and then became assistant director of the Office of War Information. MacLeish wrote and narrated many programs for, among others, NBC's "Inter-American University of the Air," a series that provided informal instruction to listeners to increase awareness of hemispheric relations. Latin Americans were also an important part of the Radio Division. Chilean Daniel del Solar, a writer for March of Time and the Associated Press, who produced scripts for the series "Estamos em guerra" or "We're at War"; Colombian George Zalamea, who wrote for Radioteatro de America, Radio Theater of America; and Brazilians OrĂ­genes Lessa, Pompeu de Souza, and Raimundo Magalhaes, produced material for the Brazilian government censors New York to Rio broadcast program called "Calling Brazil". Undoubtedly the most exciting and flamboyant broadcast contributor, however, was Orson Welles. Back from filming in Brazil, he wrote and narrated the CBS series, "Hello Americans", which blended instruction with entertainment, featuring Hollywood personalities such as Carmen Miranda and well-known actors from Welles's Mercury Theater. Ever interested in better relations with government, the Hollywood Motion Picture Society of the Americas regularly loaned out celebrities for radio dramas, interviews, and special programs, many of which were broadcast from Hollywood. Film star Joan Blondell greeted listeners in Portuguesee in her December 1942 interview with poet and Brazilian Consul Raul Bopp, while Welles was busy writing and broadcasting "Hello Americans" from the same West Coast office. In a sense all CIAA broadcasts were intended to be educational, but from a purely instructional standpoint one of the most original and ambitious CIAA shows, seldom free of dramatized material, was the NBC "Inter-American University of the Air." Directed by Sterling Fisher, a specialist in public opinion and radio, "Inter-American University" was a distance education program devoted primarily to topics in history and music. Designed in consultation with educators in the U.S. and Latin America, the program was broadcast in English and transcribed and rebroadcast in Spanish and Portuguesee to supplement classroom instruction throughout the hemisphere. In the words of a promotional flier for Spanish speaking audiences, its objective was "ensenar delectando," or "to teach while giving delight." The preview show for "Inter-American University" was broadcast on June 28, 1942, with the program's general supervisor, Dr. James Rowland Angell, serving as announcer and backed by the NBC Symphony Orchestra conducted by Frank Black. In his introduction Angell discussed the role of the "ethereal university" for the "spiritual defense of the Americas" as a "permanent agency for mutual understanding based on the finest cultural thinking." Several prominent figures helped to launch the show. Speaking from Washington, D.C., Nelson Rockefeller talked about the program's objectives, including opening new intellectual horizons and bringing higher education in reach of everyone. He called it a "free university as opposed to those in totalitarian countries whose cultural vitality was crushed and sapped." Assistant Secretary of State Adolf Berle noted the program's high level of scholarship and literacy aims, while J. T. Thorson, Canada's minister of War Services, spoke about the program's ability to bring closer understanding among the Americas. Actor Vincent Price read poetry by Walt Whitman and Archibald MacLeish. A roundtable with U.S. and Latin American representatives discussed the new radio university as a medium for promoting the democratic spirit, raising the living standard of people through education and teaching as entertainment. The program concluded with an announcement of its first series, called "Land of the Free". The stated premise for "Land of the Free's" projected twenty-seven broadcasts was "mutuality" based on four characteristics supposedly, and I emphasize "supposedly" shared by the Americas: republican forms of government; democratic principles derived from constitutions or bills of rights; a stake in world economic and political life; and an expressed common desire to maintain political, economic, and cultural independence. The first four shows, or "chapters," had laid the foundation for the series. Aired on July 6, 1942, chapter 1 titled, "The Search for Freedom" focused on the Atlantic Charter and New World immigrants who fled from religious and political persecution at home. Such historical dramatizations, as always, serve as allegories of contemporary wartime struggle. Comparisons were made between persecuted Huguenots, Irish, French, Germans, and others who escaped to the New World and the U.S. residents in Europe who had been imprisoned by the Nazis and then shipped back to the U.S. through Lisbon. Chapter 2 called, "The Few and the Many," begins with the voices of two fictionalized Nazis who scoff at the idea of representative self-government. One of whom asks: "Where can we find it today?" as if democracy were passe. A second voice jubilantly replies: "That, my friend, is a blessing of the Western Hemisphere!" a declaration followed by a narrative on the colonial struggle for representative self-government in the Americas. "Freedom of the Common Man" was the subject of chapter 3, about Spanish priest Bartolome de las Casas, who preached against the mistreatment of Indians and later African slaves in sixteenth-century Mexico. Chapter 4, on the "Freedom of Trade," began with a conversation between two Brazilian coffee growers concerned about their product reaching U.S. markets because of enemy ships in the Atlantic. Mauricio says to Joao: "Freedom of trade is the very life of our nations!" To which Joao replies: "We will have it again, Mauricio. Some day when the war is over." This brief dialogue serves as the basis for a dramatized account of the history of colonial trade in the New World. Praised by radio reviewers for its quality and originality, "Land of the Free" was Peabody honorable mention for top educational programming in 1943. That year, "Inter-American University" also featured a new series called "Music of the New World". Two years after "Inter-American University" was launched, Archibald MacLeish also wrote and narrated a new series for the curriculum, titled "The American Story." Once again, the basic focus was the similarity of the Americas based on shared history of European discovery and exploration, crown-appointed governments, and more general attributes such as the lure of the frontier and the "infection of freedom." A combination of narration and dramatization, the half hour evening broadcasts used colonial documents from the Library of Congress and other archives as source texts for the scripts. Aired on February 5, 1944, the first show was a template for those that followed. After a solemn musical opening, MacLeish tells listeners that hemispheric differences such as the "lingua franca" are real. But he immediately reverses direction and poses the rhetorical question: "What is it that binds men more closely than speech?" To which he replies, "Experience, our history" a theme that assumes the status of a mantra. MacLeish then draws from colonial sources for a dramatic account of Columbus's life and voyages which serve as a model for what he calls the "single record" of New World discoveries by the French, German and other Europeans in the late 15th and early 16th centuries. What makes MacLeish's program compelling is not only the quality of the script, but also the performances by himself and radio personality Arnold Moss, who appeared throughout the series. In many ways, this and other series in the ""Inter-American University"" anticipate "You Are There," the popular CBS radio and later television show whose dramatizations brought together figures from the past and present. The February 12th broadcast also anticipates by several decades critic Hayden White's commentary on the relationship between literary and historical narratives. MacLeish challenges those who say that an American literature has yet to be achieved by referring to the wealth of historiographies, meaning correspondence, reports and personal journals, written by New World discoverers. Although some CIAA program sponsored publication activities included titles translated into Spanish and Portuguesee, although these did not have the extensive public reach of films, newspapers, articles, photograph exhibits or radio programs, they transmitted a broad range of U.S. literary talent in scientific information to the Latin American region. The translations were a logical extension of CIAA educational initiatives which involved establishing American libraries and supporting library science training in Latin America. A June 9, 1942, memo from Robert Spiers Benjamin in the Publication Division summarizes important projects under way at the time. Perhaps no one task was as demanding as the division's role as factotum literary agent for procuring titles and rights for editors and authors in the U.S. and Latin America. One of the largest projects, earmarked at $80,000, was to support translations of State Department approved U.S. literary and scientific materials by Latin American publishers. The CIAA helped publishers by purchasing and distributing, through the American Council of Learned Societies, a minimum of 500 copies of each book. These negotiations were based on a report by Library of Congress and Hispanic Foundation's Lewis Hanke, who visited Latin American publishers in the fall of 1941. A status report for February 1944 lists dozens of Spanish and Portuguesee translations with details of purchase arrangements for advance copies by the ACLS and estimated costs. Books selected for publication varied according to the publisher. For example, Buenos Aires Editorial Losada published translations of Walt Whitman's "Song of Myself," Thomas Dewey's "Experience and Education" and his "Science of Education," Archibald MacLeish's "A Time to Speak," and Ralph Waldo Emerson's "Representative Men and Other Essays" while Guillermo Kraft Limitada, another publishing company, issued among others, Leland H. Hinsie's "Concepts and Problems of Psychotherapy," Oliver L. Reiser's "A New Earth and a New Humanity" and Frank Luther Mott's "History of American Journalism." Benjamin's report also refers to special subsidies for anthologies. For example, the CIAA contributed over $4,000 to "An Anthology of Contemporary North American Literature" by Editorial Nascimento in Santiago, Chile. According to the same 1944 report, publishers such as Sao Paulo's Livraria Martins and certain government agencies including the Ministry of Agriculture in Rio, received the majority of translation subventions, followed by Argentina, Mexico, Chile, and Haiti. The report also lists some of the Latin American titles published in English since 1942. And these included New Directions' "Anthology of Latin American Poetry" and their "Five Young American Poets" volume, Macmillan's volume "Germans in the Conquest of America" and "Chile: A Geographic Extravaganza." The Knopf anthology "The Green Continent" and "Peruvian Traditions" by Ricardo Palma were also translated. Houghton Mifflin's "Anthology of Latin American Literature" was included in the list as well as the University of Chicago's "Rebellion in the Backlands" by Euclides da Cunha. According to a 1941 memo, the CIAA provided small grants of $600 to $700 to U.S. publishers to help with translation expenses and the Press Division helped promote books in newspapers and magazines. There is insufficient time to list all the Brazilian titles recommended for translation. Novelists tended to dominate the list including Jorge Amado, Amando Fontes, whom no one talks about today, and Machado de Assis. Other authors suggested for translation were Vianna Moog, Rachel de Queiroz, Erico Verissimo and Graciliano Ramos. The emphasis on the socially committed northeastern novel, by Amado, Queiroz and Ramos, and southern "regional" writers such as Vianna Moog and Erico Verissimo is not surprising given their popularity at home and the radical and left-liberal sentiments of the era. One of the particularly interesting features of the translation program is the high number of book recommendations that deal with race and slavery in Brazil, as if the committee were eager to point out similarities as well as differences between the history of blacks in the U.S. and Brazil. Titles include Gilberto Freyre's "Master and the Slaves" and his "Mansions and the Shanties" the abolitionist Joaquim Nabuco's book called "My Formation" Arthur Ramos's book titled "Black Cultures in the New World" and Nina Rodrigues's "Africans in Brazil". The committee's emphasis in this case departs sharply from the Vargas government's tendency to minimize or erase blackness in the construction and promotion of Brazil's image abroad. One of the U.S. publishers most actively engaged in the CIAA translation literary initiative was Knopf, and the person largely responsible for the Latin American selections was Blanche Knopf, a keen supporter of modern literature who brought major authors Jorge Amado, Maria Luisa Bombal, Graciliano Ramos, Eduardo Mallea, Ricardo Palma, among many others, to the United State's attention. On April 9, 1942, Sumner Welles took time out to promote Knopf's Good Neighbor interests by writing to Claude Bowers about, Claude Bowers was the Ambassador to Chile, U.S. Ambassador to Chile, about Blanche Knopf's forthcoming tour of South America "to establish contacts with authors and editors and to identify materials for translation." Blanche Knopf's enthusiasm about what she discovered on her trip is apparent in her short essay titled, "The Literary Roundup: An American Publisher Tours South America": "The chief impression I gained," she said, "on my recent trip to South America was one of newness, of aliveness, of something being created virtually from the ground up by people who find joy and excitement in that creation, and a great hope for the future." She concisely comments on the book publishing world in Latin America and was particularly impressed with Chilean writers and compared Gabriela Mistral's position in the Spanish-speaking world with that of Thomas Mann in pre-Hitler Germany. She also praised historian and geographer Benjamin Subercaseux as "brilliant" and described Maria Louisa Bombal as a "first rate young novelist" whose work would soon appear in English by Knopf. The Post War. Once the war was over, cultural diplomacy in general was in scrutiny because of its association with the liberalism of FDR's New Deal or in the words of Assistant Secretary for Latin American Affairs Spruille Baden "dogooders" and "one-worlders" and "Communist fellow travelers" the latter term intended as a specific reference to the CIAA, which was closed down completely in 1946. Cultural programs were now the purview of the State Department, which in 1950, was attacked by Joseph McCarthy as having been infiltrated by communists. Among those being investigated by McCarthy, the House Un-American Activities Committee and/or the FBI were Archibald MacLeish, Orson Welles, and former Rockefeller CIAA advisor William Benton who had served as Assistant Secretary for Public and Cultural Affairs after MacLeish, and was now a U.S. senator from Connecticut. MacLeish was singled out by McCarthy and J. Edgar Hoover for his communist associations. His bemused response was, and I quote, "no one would be more shocked to learn I am a Communist than the Communists themselves." [laughter] Welles was secretly and officially listed by the FBI as "a threat to the internal security" of the U.S. During the period of the Hollywood blacklist he was given few opportunities and as a result, became a European exile for nearly a decade. Benton, William Benton's criticism of McCarthy's vituperative and unsubstantiated attacks against State Department officials and his formal call for McCarthy's expulsion from the Senate resulted in similar attacks against him and U.S. cultural programs in general. According to historian Frank Ninkovich, monies that had been appropriated for the CIAA and the Office of War Information needed to be disbursed prior to June 30, 1946. An early postwar arrangement between the State Department and the National Gallery of Art, which gave the gallery authority over the government's art program, came to an end because of the State Department's dissatisfaction with exhibitions that failed to promote U.S. art abroad. To respond to the overseas demand for cultural materials, the State Department's J. Leroy Davidson used the unspent funds to purchase 79 contemporary oil paintings by figures such as Georgia O'Keeffe, Stuart Davis, Walter Gropper, and Marsden Hartley at the extraordinary low price of a total of $49,000, which as Ninkovich points out was the result of negotiations with artists who agreed to sell under market value as a patriotic gesture. Like the CIAA's earliest touring exhibits on U.S. and Latin American art, the State Department's emphasis was on modern art and its association with progress and modernity. The purchase was also in keeping with the ide- let me go back- with the idea of offering cultural media, as opposed to informational media, directed specifically at the upper and ruling class. The paintings were displayed in New York under the exhibition title "Advancing American Art" which was already a sign of changing attitudes. Formerly used to describe the Good Neighbor community of 21 republics, the word "American" was now being used to describe only the U.S. After a favorable reception in New York, Advancing American Art was shipped to a UNESCO international art exhibit in Paris, in 1946, where it received glowing reviews and, in Ninkovich's words, "provided an excellent stimulus to further intellectual cultural relations." The collection was later split into two touring exhibits, one for Europe and one for Latin America. But a cultural backlash began when the February 18, 1947 issue of "Look" magazine featured an illustrated article on the collection headlined, here's the headline, "Your Money Bought These Pictures." Denunciations from Hearst owned newspapers and Republican Party leaders soon followed, accusing the State Department of pushing a left-wing agenda through the purchase and display of art that subverted the "American" U.S. meaning, "way of life." Truman agreed with this view, as his statement, "If that's art, then I'm a Hottentot" made clear, and he stood with political conservatives who considered representational art to be the only acceptable form of U.S. cultural exchange. Yasuo Kuniyoshi's "Circus Girl Resting" was the specific source of Truman's reaction and one of the paintings most virulently attacked. William Benton, who had been Assistant Secretary at the time and approved the purchase of the paintings, received a special drubbing. Reaction was even fiercer when the House on Un-American Activities declared that some of the artists in question had communist affiliations. The populist hue and cry against the paintings was not so terribly different in style from the 1937 Nazi condemnation of modernism as degenerate art, or one might add, the Stalinist program of social realism in the arts. Ultimately, the traveling exhibits were cancelled, Davidson's job was eliminated at the State Department, and the entire collection of paintings was put on the block and auctioned off as "war surplus" by the War Assets Administration for less than $6,000. Benton was personally pursued by McCarthy in the early 1950s for his role in the purchase of the collection and for the "un-American" act of printing his "Encyclopedia Britannica" in England instead of the U.S. In 1952, at the height of the Red Scare, Benton lost reelection to the U.S. Senate. U.S. cultural diplomacy was scrutinized as never before, and became increasingly tethered to U.S. cold war interests. Looking back on the CIAA today, its policies seem, at least in comparison to what followed, a remarkably enlightened example of the government's enthusiastic prioritization of modern and relatively progressive forms of public culture as a powerful mediating force for political and economic interests. It's doubtful that Good Neighbor relations would have yielded the same degree of mutuality or cooperation without the cultural agency and its broad based program of public information and education through radio, print media, and the visual arts. Of course, as a wartime propaganda agency, the CIAA used its resources to sway attitudes, build friendships abroad, and promote an economic agenda that was abundantly favorable to the U.S. In this sense, the CIAA was more than the sum of its parts, and played a crucial role in what is sometimes called U.S. cultural imperialism. But while acknowledging the agency's self-interested character, we should not lose sight of the fact that it helped change, even if only in the short term, and to a degree we cannot precisely calculate, the way the U.S. viewed Latin America and the way Latin America viewed the U.S. Most scholars and students of U.S. - Latin American relations would agree, I believe, that relations among Western Hemisphere nations were never as good as during the period when FDR was in office. Some of the recognition for this Good Neighbor closeness belongs to the U.S.'s wartime belief and investment in culture and in its creation of an agency whose mission was, for whatever mixed reasons, aimed at engaging, negotiating and making friends with neighbors. [ Applause ] Georgette. >> Thank you for this really wonderful lecture. And I would like to point out that most of the writers that you mentioned were recorded for the Hispanic [inaudible] from 1943 on, under Archibald MacLeish [inaudible]. >> Darlene Sadlier: Yeah. >> Brazil and the Chileans, and the Argentine [inaudible]. >> Darlene Sadlier: Yeah. >> Thank you. >> Darlene Sadlier: Oh, thank you very much. Yes. >> You spent abruptly quite a long time on Nelson Rockefeller's role. But I wonder if you could spend like one minute on Osvaldo Aranha because on the Brazilian side, he was really key. >> Darlene Sadlier: Yeah, as I said in my introduction, I was trying to focus on the materials that I found in the Library of Congress. I did do research at the Fundacao Getulio Vargas in Rio and looked at Osvaldo Aranha's large archive of microfilm. He had a central role before the war began, because he was in the United States, as Ambassador and when the war begins, when he's Minister of Foreign Affairs under Vargas, he was a friend of the U.S., he was extremely central in the U.S.'s attempt to build very strong ties with Brazil. I mean, he is an immensely important figure, I just didn't have time to talk about everyone, and also, because I wanted to talk about the Library of Congress materials, in particular. But yes, I talk a lot about him in the book. [laughter] >> I'll get your book. >> Darlene Sadlier: Oh good. [laughter] I told Katie that the book is being, it's interesting, the book is being translated in China. Very interesting, even before anybody has said anything about a Portuguesee translation, so I was really thrilled. A lot of Chinese, a lot of potential buyers. [laughter] No, I'm quite, I'm quite thrilled about that. Yes. >> So was it during only this time that the word "America" was used to-- >> Darlene Sadlier: Embrace... >> [inaudible comment] >> Darlene Sadlier: Yes, exactly. >> Only in this time. >> Darlene Sadlier: To my knowledge, only in this time was the word "American" specifically used to talk about- I don't know why I keep hitting this- the whole hemisphere, yeah. >> Because in Latin America we say- >> Darlene Sadlier: Americanos. >> Americanos. >> Darlene Sadlier: And I always say, "norte americana"- >> Yeah. >> Darlene Sadlier: And they always say, [speaking Portuguesee] americana, in Portuguesee, "so norte americana." [speaking Portuguesee] if I'm in Brazil, "You're Americans too." They like, it's always, people are always charmed by that. But it's important to make that comment. Yeah. >> The agency really was shut down pretty quickly after the war, and obviously things had changed dramatically post war politically. But there must have been some dissent throughout to have it sort of that quickly close down. >> Darlene Sadlier: Well I mean, its purpose was, I mean, it was a wartime agency and Rockefeller left in '45. He became Assistant Secretary for Latin American Affairs. So he was already out by the, pretty much the close of the war, and you know, pursuing other interests. I don't think anybody was surprised that it was closed down, it was just the persecution of some of the people that were in the agency and of course, then the real change in tenor of cultural diplomacy after that. The ideas were very different about you know, relations, cultural relations. And Latin America was pretty much ignored. I mean, to the great dismay of countries like Brazil and certainly Mexico, you know, the focus was on Europe, the Soviet Union, and you know, and other programs were developed. I recommend, I highly recommend if you're interested in that period and public diplomacy at that time, I would highly recommend Nicholas Cole's book on the Cold War. It's this big, but it's a fascinating reading about cultural agencies like the USIA, USIS, you know, things like Alliance for Progress, which all had dubious, I mean, I'm not, as I said, I think, you know, it's important to be, try to be objective about you know, these agencies, but, the Rockefeller agency was, I think, special in our history of cultural diplomacy. Yes. >> I know that the MoMA still has that international program going on. Is it still kind of political or is it [inaudible]? >> Darlene Sadlier: I don't really know. I did a lot of archival research at the MoMA. They, I don't know, I just, the short answer is, I really don't know about that. But of course, Rockefeller's very close ties with MoMA were vital for the promotion of you know, "Why art?" Well, hey, I be Rockefeller. Nelson was on the Board of Trustees. Nelson was, Rockefeller was very interesting. He brought on board his classmates who had become major figures in the commercial, largely the commercial world, but also the media world. So it was like, you know, it was in I might add, very, very few women at the top levels. I call attention to Grace Morley who was the Director of the San Francisco Museum of Contemporary Art, because she was just one of the, she was really one of the very few women who had a major role in the agency's activities, cultural activities and she was the one that was, that spearheaded a lot of the art exhibits. Because the San Francisco art museum had a very formidable Latin American collection. I have a wonderful picture of her, here's a teaser for the book, I have a wonderful photograph of her by Brett Weston, who was the son of Edward Weston, whom you might recall went to Mexico and photographed, has wonderful photographs and who also sort of, who was down there with Tina Modotti. I don't know if you've ever seen these wonderful photographs of bandoliers, very close up, very I mean, Brett Weston was the son of Edward Weston and he takes this photograph of Grace McCann Morley, so it's in the book. I thank you very much. I've, I loved working here. I had a wonderful time, the two trips I came here to do research. It's a wonderful library. This library and the Lilly Library, which is at my home institution, are favorite places to do research and I look forward to coming back. I love D.C. too. Thank you very much. [applause] >> This has a been a presentation of the Library of Congress. Visit us at loc.gov.