The American Exhibition in Moscow opened 55 years ago today—July 24, 1959—but it was almost completely derailed before it even began. Unsurprisingly to anyone familiar with American political conflicts of the 1950s, the Moscow exhibit was not without controversy on Capitol Hill. Everything from how race relations were depicted to the kind of American art that was planned to be on display became a point of controversy for conservative politicians.4 Four of the 75 American guides headed for Moscow were African American. President Eisenhower was apparently concerned about how the black guides might represent the United States and its systemic violations of civil rights in 1959. So when Eisenhower invited all 75 of the guides to the White House for a meet-and-greet on June 15th, according to historian Walter L. Hixson, the President quizzed the black guides about how they came to be fluent in Russian. According to Hixsons book Parting The Curtain: Propaganda, Culture, and the Cold War, 1945-1961, Eisenhower was satisfied by their responses, and safely assumed they werent going to criticize America and its atrocious treatment of black people in the 1950s. Americas subjugation of blacks was the one big thing that the Soviets could and would continually point to whenever questions of personal freedom in the USSR were raised. And you are lynching Negroes, (А у вас негров линчуют, A u vas negrov linchuyut) was a popular trope that permeated Soviet/U.S. relations. Sadly, they werent wrong. But it was obviously a deflection from their own human rights abuses. As if on cue in the lead-up to the Exhibition, segregationist politicians in the U.S. protested when they learned that white people and black people would be depicted in normal social situations together. South Carolina Senator Strom Thurmond (a man who after his death would be revealed to have fathered a child with his familys 16-year-old black maid) was outraged by a fashion show planned for the exhibition. The show was going to depict a black couple getting fake-married in front of a crowd of white attendees of a fake-wedding ceremony. Thurmonds protestations caused that portion of the fashion show to be cut.
Posted on: Thu, 24 Jul 2014 21:21:21 +0000
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