Beyond the Black and White TV: Asian and Latin American Spectacle in Cold War America

By Benjamin M. Han

This is the first book that examines how “ethnic spectacle” in the form of Asian and Latin American bodies played a significant role in the cultural Cold War at three historic junctures: the Korean War in 1950, the Cuban Revolution in 1959, and the statehood of Hawaii in 1959. As a means to strengthen U.S. internationalism and in an effort to combat the growing influence of communism, television variety shows, such as The Xavier Cugat Show, The Ed Sullivan Show, and The Chevy Show, were envisioned as early forms of global television. Beyond the Black and White TV examines the intimate moments of cultural interactions between the white hosts and the ethnic guests to illustrate U.S. aspirations for global power through the medium of television. These depictions of racial harmony aimed to shape a new perception of the United States as an exemplary nation of democracy, equality, and globalism.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Rutgers University Press
• Release date: Jun 19, 2020
• ISBN: 9781978803855

Book preview

Beyond the Black and White TV

Beyond the Black and White TV

Asian and Latin American Spectacle in Cold War America

Benjamin M. Han

Rutgers University Press

New Brunswick, Camden, and Newark, New Jersey, and London

Cataloging-in-Publication data is available from the Library of Congress. LCCN 2019050052

A British Cataloging-in-Publication record for this book is available from the British Library.

Copyright © 2020 by Benjamin M. Han

All rights reserved

No part of this book may be reproduced or utilized in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without written permission from the publisher. Please contact Rutgers University Press, 106 Somerset Street, New Brunswick, NJ 08901. The only exception to this prohibition is fair use as defined by U.S. copyright law.

An earlier version of chapter 2 was published as Transpacific Talent: The Kim Sisters in Cold War America, Pacific Historical Review 87, no. 3 (Summer 2018): 473–498.

www.rutgersuniversitypress.org

Contents

Introduction

Chapter 1. Narratives of Integration: Ethnic Spectacle and Las Vegas

Chapter 2. Narratives of Exchange: Asian Performers after the Korean War

Chapter 3. Narratives of Partnership: Latin American Entertainers after the Cuban Revolution

Chapter 4. Narratives of Coexistence: Pacific Islanders and the Statehood of Hawai‘i

Epilogue

Acknowledgments

Notes

Bibliography

Index

About the Author

Introduction

On January 11, 1959, Ed Sullivan conducted an exclusive interview with Fidel Castro shortly after Castro overthrew dictator Fulgencio Batista during the Cuban Revolution. The interview was broadcast on Sullivan’s variety show as part of a recurring segment known as Sullivan’s Travels, which documented his visits to many cities and countries around the world, including Hong Kong, Japan, and Italy. During the interview, Sullivan asked Castro, How do you feel about the United States? After explaining that he had sympathy for the people of the United States, Castro stated, It’s a nation that belongs to the people of every world. [The] United States is not one race but people who came from every part of the world. Castro’s response is a testament to how the United States has shaped its national image abroad as an exemplary model of democracy and freedom. More importantly, the interview speaks of the amicable political relationship between the United States and Cuba immediately following the Cuban Revolution—before their diplomatic relations would take a drastic turn as a result of Castro’s growing affiliation with Communism and the Soviet Union. While the interview was an odd moment for a commercial TV program mostly known for entertaining American families on Sunday nights, it captures how the variety show genre made significant strides as an important contributor to the circulation of geopolitical knowledge in American television during the Cold War.

More significantly, Castro’s response is an affirmation of what the United States had envisioned at the height of the Cold War: to construct a national image grounded in the democratic principles of freedom, capitalism, and more specifically, racial equality. In the United States, the 1950s were marked by racial segregation in the South that would soon explode into a full-scale civil rights movement that countries like Cuba and the Soviet Union would use as a means to denounce the United States.

Hence in the 1960s, race relations became an important subject of polemical debate among Cold War politicians. Despite the battle for civil rights and liberties on the domestic front, the growing visibility of race problems in the form of discriminatory practices in the South was negatively impacting the United States’ image across the globe. The Soviet Union scrutinized and disparaged the United States for its racism. Therefore, the U.S. government took measures to change its reputation in its battle against Communism. The U.S. Department of State began sponsoring international music tours featuring prominent African American jazz artists such as Louis Armstrong and Dizzy Gillespie.¹ On the surface, these U.S. government–sponsored jazz tours were viewed as a goodwill gesture of internationalism using popular music; in reality, they were politically orchestrated attempts to project an image of the United States as an antiracist nation. As a result, black musicians who participated in the tours not only acted as cultural ambassadors who promoted American jazz music but also spoke personally of how the United States was indeed a democratic nation of all races in order to deflect international criticism.

In addition to the circulation of jazz music around the world, there was an influx of popular music from the Asia-Pacific and Latin America to U.S. television during the Cold War. The diversity of both international and ethnic music on television ranged from Oriental pop to rumba. Oriental pop enjoyed a brief moment of popularity in the United States with Sakamoto Kyu’s hit songs Let’s Walk with Our Heads Up, Sukiyaki, and China Nights in the early 1960s.² The popularity of such songs resulted in many recordings of Asian-themed tunes, including Yoshiko and Yoko-Ho-Hama. Additionally, Hawaiian music enjoyed tremendous popularity in the 1960s and 1970s through the enigmatic and romantic figures of Alfred Apaka and Don Ho. And a wide array of Latin American music from the rumba to the cha-cha was also introduced to the Americans and enjoyed popularity during the Cold War.

Commercial interests were not the sole motivation for U.S. television’s investment in Asian and Latin American music. U.S. commercial programming featured ethnic entertainers to diffuse national attention away from the civil rights movement and segregation in the South. As the American public was turning their attention to the black-white problem with the increasing coverage of the civil rights struggle in news programming, U.S. television networks’ turn to race relations intertwined with the government’s political interests. While the symbiotic marriage between the medium of television and the government was not apparent to the public, what occurred behind the small screen clearly demonstrated how these enterprises worked collaboratively for the betterment of the nation. For example, in a 1960 letter from L. D. Mallory, acting assistant secretary of the Office of Inter-American Affairs, to John P. McKnight, assistant director (Latin America) of the United States Information Agency, Mallory explains that it has come to his attention that a musical salute program for television in Latin America is in its planning stage to commemorate the independence of several countries in Latin America. He says that even though the TV program is meant as a gesture of internationalism, it might have results far different from these good intentions.³ He writes further, Impartial treatment, or at least making the various countries believe they have been treated impartially, will be difficult under the present circumstances of our relationships with the other 20 American Republics and the various points of difference between themselves.⁴ This exchange clearly illustrates the anticipated payoff of the music television program in terms of international relations but also cautions against the negative impact it might have on U.S. diplomacy with Latin American nations.

Indeed, the issue of race expanded into television at a crucial time when it was developing into a mass commercial medium. For instance, television news programming was vital in informing Americans about the civil rights movement. News and variety shows can be thought of as belonging to two separate spheres, as news programming focused on informing the audience, while variety shows were more devoted to entertainment. Nevertheless, these two genres utilized liveness to focus on the performances of raced bodies. Drawing on the late José Muñoz’s work on the burden of liveness, Sasha Torres writes about the tendency to privilege liveness over recorded performance, with a fetishizing racist or imperial gaze on bodies of color.⁵ Indeed, variety shows in the 1950s were broadcast live to the audience; thus ethnic performances were acted out onstage as objects of spectacle for the American public. What distinguished news programming and variety shows was that the former was devoted to the black performances of physical suffering and political demand during the civil rights movement, while the latter was focused more on the spectacular performances of ethnic entertainers.⁶ In addition, liveness in news programming highlighted that civil rights events were happening in real time and space, further claiming television’s privileged status to communicate immediacy and transparency.⁷ Liveness in news programming, according to Sasha Torres, not only brought more visibility to the civil rights issues for Americans but also contributed significantly to the success of the movement. On the contrary, liveness in variety shows was meant not to capture the immediacy of the performances but to claim television’s ability to represent Asians, Latin Americans, and Hawaiians. Despite the racialization of ethnic entertainers, the fact that they were playing themselves rather than performing roles written for them made them appear more authentic and intimate to American audiences. While both news and variety shows employed liveness to display spectacle in the form of ethnic performances, they fulfilled the dual function of education and entertainment. As Torres argues, television’s African American spectacle in the coverage of the civil rights movement simultaneously amused the dominant power bloc while producing outrage, trepidation, and alarm among the American public.⁸ While variety shows were considered a lowbrow form of entertainment that used ethnic spectacle to charm the audience with the talents and skills of ethnic performers, they also educated the American audience about Asian, Latin American, and Hawaiian culture in order to render television as a pedagogical medium.

Moreover, as the expected consuming power of the black audience became more significant to the TV networks, the National Broadcasting Company (NBC) implemented the integration without identification policy in 1953 to offer more positive black representations on the small screen. In launching this new initiative, NBC also hired an African American public relations expert named Joseph V. Baker to develop better public relations with the network’s black audience.⁹ Additionally, NBC appointed Stockton Helffrich as the head of its censorship office to monitor program scripts for any offensive or derogatory racial remarks.¹⁰ And in November 1956, NBC premiered the Nat King Cole Show, a variety show that served as a further testament to television’s contribution to the betterment of U.S. race relations.

The integration without identification policy, which was meant specifically to improve the representation of blacks on television, could also possibly lead to unintended consequences wherein Asians and Latin Americans saw blacks as receiving preferential treatment. In some ways, the visibility of raced bodies on television was a conscious effort by the networks to cater to other audiences. The main aim of the policy was to integrate black people into regular television shows in roles [in] which they might be found in everyday life.¹¹ The notion of everyday life equated with the logic of ordinariness and authenticity. Variety shows’ dependence on nonblack bodies asserted the ordinariness of Asian and Latin American performers as manifested in nonfictionalized roles. It was not their racial markers but their musical talents that constructed them as extraordinary; thus they appeared as nonthreatening figures. Hence the ethnic entertainer’s display of spectacular talent could trump the racial undertones of his or her performance.

Coinciding with a flourishing scene of blackness on U.S. commercial television, there was also an increase in the visibility of other racial bodies from the Asia-Pacific and Latin America. Between 1950 and 1970, there were approximately sixty Asian and seventy-five Latin American performers featured as guests on variety shows such as the Ed Sullivan Show and the Chevy Show. These ethnic entertainers included the Kim Sisters, the De Castro Sisters, Yukiji Asaoka, Grace Chang, Bach Yen, Ginny Tiu, the Hermanos Castro, Alfred Apaka, Charles K. L. Davis, Pupi Campo, and the Rodríguez Brothers.¹² Scholars have not given them due attention because they were considered irregular guests whose appearances were brief. Further, many of them had made a crossover from nightclub acts in Las Vegas to television; hence they were not considered true TV stars. More importantly, these ethnic entertainers quickly faded away from the television screen with the demise of the variety show genre in the 1960s, further relegating them to the fringes of U.S. popular cultural memory.

Despite the marginal status of the ethnic performers examined in this book, they were important contributors to the U.S. nightclub scene. Even though nightclubs and television were understood as two separate and independent entertainment spaces in the postwar period, Las Vegas nightclubs had been a key supplier of ethnic talent to U.S. commercial television since the early 1950s. Despite their quick disappearance from U.S. cultural memory, the growing number of Asian and Latin American performers on variety shows coincided with popular music emerging as valuable content to early television programming. As Murray Forman explains, one of the main reasons that popular music dominated early programming was because there was no clearly defined understanding of television genres. Hence television content was still in its infant stages of development, and ethnic as well as amateur musicians served as cheap substitutes to fill in schedules due to their affordable labor costs.¹³ Furthermore, ethnic performers fulfilled television’s need to offer novel entertainment to the American family.

The visible presence of Asian and Latin American performers on U.S. commercial television from the 1950s and 1970s is what I describe as ethnic spectacle. Guy Debord defines spectacle as not a collection of images but as a social relationship among people, mediated by images.¹⁴ Debord further argues that spectacle as a by-product of advanced capitalism mediates a false representation of reality through the mass dissemination of images. He writes, The spectacle appears at once as society itself, as part of society and as a means of unification. As a part of society, it is that sector where all attention, all consciousness, converges. . . . This sector is the locus of illusion and false consciousness.¹⁵ I argue that television as mass media and an embodiment of capitalist logics mediated representations of ethnic spectacle to project a false reality of U.S. race relations in an effort to battle Communism at the crux of the cultural Cold War.

But what was noteworthy about the ethnic spectacle on television during this period was how music became a cultural lens to our understanding of Cold War politics. In other words, the growing number of ethnic talents from Las Vegas nightclubs appearing on television variety shows was not so much about providing entertainment for the home audience as it was about using racial integration to sell American Cold War policy while attempting to disguise domestic race relations. More significantly, ethnic performers on variety shows highlighted U.S. popular music as a global language in an effort to promote internationalism while subsuming the U.S. government’s imperialistic aspirations. Therefore, many of the songs featured in variety shows underscored the themes of getting to know one another and international understanding as fundamental tenets of U.S. foreign diplomacy in order to publicize the United States as a nation that embraces diverse races and globalism under the rhetoric of racial liberalism. Thus the white American variety show hosts such as Dinah Shore and Gisele MacKenzie participated in musical collaborations with ethnic guests. The guests sang in perfect English phonetics despite their inability to master the English language, which was not apparent to the audience. When the white hosts asked their guests how they had mastered the language so well, many of them often responded that they had learned English from listening to American songs, crediting the U.S. military for its contributions to their English language and cultural competency. These problematic moments of intimate cultural interaction between the white television personalities and their ethnic guests not only underscored the host playing the role of a cultural interlocutor but also suggested the imperial power of the United States rooted in whiteness through its military presence across the globe.

Moreover, U.S. popular music was more than just an aural language composed of easily translatable rhythms, tunes, beats, and lyrics. It was imagined spatially as a transnational conduit through which global cultural exchange could take place. Music thus became both a productive and contested space of creative interplay of cultural interventions and interactions. As Josh Kuhn points out, music resembles cultural spaces where racial, ethnic, and gender identities can be asserted. He notes, The audio-racial imagination is my way of acknowledging a fact all too commonly overlooked in the ‘culture wars’ and debates about diversity and multiculturalism, that race and popular music have always been experienced not alongside each other, not as complements, supplements, or corollaries of each other, but through each other.¹⁶ Music, therefore, is an ideologically inflected space used to investigate the different -isms significant in Cold War geopolitics: racism, Americanism, Orientalism, sexism, liberalism, internationalism, and globalism. The creative interplay of popular music, ethnic spectacle, and variety shows further materialized in the medium of television to circulate geopolitical knowledge where the Cold War logic of globalism and racism converged.

It is this examination of internationalism and racial politics as by-products of the U.S. cultural war and geopolitics that Beyond the Black and White TV aims to engage with critically. The book addresses three central questions: (1) How do we understand the growing display of ethnic performances in U.S. nightclubs and on television during the Cold War? (2) How did commercial television demonstrate the United States’ global Cold War politics? (3) How did the variety show shape interactions among geopolitics, popular music, and ethnic spectacle? While it is tempting to characterize the cultural Cold War as a coherent geopolitical period centered on the binary of the United States and the Soviet Union as the two dominant power blocs, this book expands the discussion to include three seemingly disparate yet interconnected Cold War events: the Korean War (1950–1953), the Cuban Revolution (1959), and the statehood of Hawai‘i (1959).

On the surface, the peninsula of Korea and the islands of Cuba and Hawai‘i appear to be geopolitically and culturally disconnected from each other. However, there are less apparent ties among these three noncontiguous territories. Korea, Cuba, and Hawai‘i all underwent significant economic development via tourism in the 1950s. Tourism reached new heights in Cuba as Hawai‘i became the fiftieth state in 1959. Similarly, the South Korean government implemented a major initiative to increase tourism with the establishment of the Tourism Bureau in 1954 after the conclusion of the Korean War.¹⁷ Indeed, the intertwinement between the flourishing tourist economy and the U.S. military presence in these three minor geographies is what defined them as important sites central to the expansion of U.S. hegemony. In other words, the Cold War in the Asia-Pacific and Latin America was a complex and manifold project of American empire and gendered racial formation.¹⁸

Furthermore, South Korea, Cuba, and Hawai‘i were spaces where Communism and Cold War politics intertwined. For instance, in Korea, the intrusion of the North Korean army across the thirty-eighth parallel in 1950 resulted in violence and migration as fears of Communist swept the nation. In the case of Hawai‘i, as the political tensions grew between the United States and the Soviet Union, the possibility of Hawai‘i’s ascension into statehood prompted fears among politicians, as labor strikes on the islands were seen as a form of Communist activity. In the words of U.S. Representative John R. Pillion, admitting Hawai‘i into statehood would be to actually invite two Soviet agents to take seats in our U.S. Senate.¹⁹ In the case of Cuba, the 1959 revolution not only ousted the Batista regime but also forced the migration of many Cubans to the United States as exiles and further prompted fears of Communist infiltration across Latin America. These three small territories, all under the imminent threat of Communism, developed into critical geopolitical spaces to experiment with U.S. Cold War cultural diplomacy through the medium of television.

By focusing on these islands and peninsula, Beyond the Black and White TV illustrates