America’s PD Challenge: A Different America, A Different World

Part 1:  Those Cockeyed Optimists

By Patricia Lee Sharpe   

What is “soft power”?  Ultimately it’s the power of example, the power of leading by doing, the power of confidently inviting emulation, the power, where necessary, of persuasion.  It is, more briefly, the realm of public diplomacy. 

The U.S. pioneered public diplomacy, almost unconsciously, because Americans deeply believed, post World War II, that America, the savior of democracy, was also the shape of the future.  America’s story was seen as an open book, a story that could be told, warts and all, especially since the imperfections were gradually, conscientiously being removed.  America was prospering. The middle class was growing.  Racism was being attacked.  Sexism was being addressed.  Even  Latinos were learning to lift their heads with pride, thanks to Cesar Chavez.  The handicapped weren’t neglected either.  They got access to public facilities previously inaccessible.  Look and see! U.S.I.S. officers trumpeted to the world.  Come and see!   It helped, of course, that the rival Soviet political model was extremely unattractive.

Lately, the U.S. hasn’t been looking so good, and public diplomacy flounders in a conceptual morass reflecting, as much as anything, the loss of that shimmery national image.  This is a serious problem.  The present U.S. image reflects, more or less accurately, a reality that’s flawed, mundane, not tops on every chart of human achievement.  Foreign policy has been largely militarized.  Domestic politics is mired in an apparently losing fight against plutocracy.  A resurgent racism is the sub-text of the Tea Party’s clamorous nativism whose less deplorable roots tap into the dreadful realization that the economic future will be uncomfortably different from the recent past.  No one wants to run off a xerox copy of America any more.  Even cooperation is increasingly difficult to obtain.  Hence the militarization.  How do you sell damaged goods openly and honestly?  

WhirledView this week will glance back at the post World War II optimism encapsulated in the infectious musical South Pacific, which was televised live from Lincoln Center on PBS stations last Sunday.  That’s Part 1 (Oh! Those Cockeyed Optimists).  Part 2 (Take Your Babies and Run!) will consider the angry cultural backlash symbolized by the notion of  “anchor babies.”  Part 3 (Mistaking the Wrapper for the Goods) concludes the week with a look at the ugliness and perplexity that underlie President Barack Obama’s abysmal loss of popularity.

Part 1

Those Cockeyed Optimists

South Pacific is a socially-conscious drama as well as a romantic musical with  unforgettable songs.  It’s World War II.  The Japanese Navy is a major threat.  Two love stories, one tragic, one not, unroll on a nameless island populated by pert U.S. Navy nurses, sex-starved seabees, a handful of officers, French planters, Tonkinese traders and thousands of (unseen) sailors and marines. Here are the two love stories: 

A goodie two shoes from Little Rock, Arkansas, goes gaga over a widower who has sired two mixed-blood kids, half French, half Polynesian.  Miscegenation, back then, was worse than murder, for which our heroine easily forgives her paramour, while the dark-skinned kids throw her for a loop.  Hence:  “I’m gonna wash that man right out of my hair.”

A Princeton grad from the super snooty Philadelphia mainline considers marriage to a Tonkinese girl.  Lovely Liat, wed to partner number three at Cable, Cable & Cable and presiding over a big house in Ardmore, PA?  Why not?  Well, hate and fear, which, Lt. Cable declares, bitterly, “You’ve got to be carefully taught, before you are six or seven or eight,” as American kids generally were, then. (And now?)

South Pacific was first produced in 1949.  Mix-and-match romances weren’t fairy tale fluff back then.  Over half the states in the U.S. still had anti-miscegenation laws on the books.  Many of those statues forbade white/non-white unions of any sort, which means that Tonkinese and Polynesians as well as Blacks might be off limits, marriage-wise or otherwise, to Whites.  American adults’ liberty to plight a troth to whomever (of the opposite sex) they wished to marry was first curtailed in Virginia in 1661.  Color-conscious Virginia also gave us the case that closed the 300-year-long anti-miscegenation era. That’s Loving v. Virginia, decided by the Supreme Court in 1967, three years after Congress passed the 1964 Civil Rights Act.  (For a nice summary of this history, read this.)

Anyhow, in 1964, Jim Crow was officially dead, at last, and maybe the popularity of South Pacific helped to bring about a change in attitude toward people of color. Unfortunately, the momentum for legally-rooted social reform frittered out before the job was done.  The Equal Rights Amendment never got passed, though women found back doors to relative equality, and the U.S. is hopelessly behind much many countries when it comes to gay-related issues, not only marriage, but also the right of homosexuals to serve openly in the military. But, in 1949, no one dreamed that the U.S. would ever fall behind on anything.  Optimism was in the air.  Cockeyed, bumptious, never-taking-no-for-an-answer optimism.  The Old World was giving was to the New.  Victorious America was the model for the future.  

In 1931, in his book entitled  The Epic of America, James Truslow Adams had coined the term “the American dream.”  This is how Adams defined it:

It is not a dream of motor cars and high wages merely, but a dream of social order in which each man and each woman shall be able to attain to the fullest stature of which they are innately capable, and be recognized by others for what they are, regardless of the fortuitous circumstances of birth or position.

South Pacific’s Bloody Mary put it this way: “If you don’t have a dream, how you gonna have a dream come true?”   Well, America had a dream.  The American century was well under way and the American dream was being fulfilled.  Not only the idealistic part but also the part about the motor cars and everything else that went into achieving the highest standard of living ever experienced by a majority of a country’s population. 

And so, for “one brief shining moment” (to borrow a few words from a far less optimistic Camelot),  America turned itself into that all but unattainable “special island” that Bloody Mary also sings about.  Who, for the next five decades, didn’t want to come to that special island or duplicate it?  As realtors say, some properties sell themselves.