How Martha Graham Became a Cultural Ambassador

Abstract Writing about cultural diplomacy the year before Martha Graham left on her maiden tour, the United States Information Agency concluded, “Events should be planned and ‘planted’ to implement propaganda themes.” Unpacking the telling of modern dance history and Martha Graham’s position as both the global dance “Picasso” and the American “First Lady of Modern Dance” reveals how Graham’s tours became useful to the US government. During the interwar period, a formal definition of “modern dance” in the United States began with references to the pre–World War I and interwar Germans, with dancers seeking to create a distinctive medium informed by modernist tenets through a concept of the “free dance.” American Isadora Duncan, a “Mother of Modern Dance,” had performed for Lenin in the newly founded communist state, and then penned, “I See America Dancing.” Graham’s studies with Denishawn included “oriental” references in its new choreography, as well as Americana. With the rhetoric of Frederick Jackson Turner’s frontier thesis, Duncan, Shawn, Graham, and others explored a new dance for the United States in writing and practice: Graham used a technique of distillation and abstraction in Lamentation, and then utilized the approach with American pioneers and frontier nationalism. Thus in the United States, post–World War II scholars asserted that modernism could have emerged only from the “land of the free,” and not from totalitarian states such as Germany or Japan, and certainly not the Soviet Union. Freedom and universalism found through an exploration of the human psyche—tenets built into the form by Germans, Japanese, and Soviet followers—became particularly important in the Cold War “psychwar” campaigns once claimed as “distinctly American.”