Robert Gard Lecture Series

Altering the Face and the Heart of America

Maryo Gard Ewell

June 21, 2005
Amherst, MA

If you didn’t work in community arts development in the 1940’s, 50’s and 60’s, you’ve probably never heard of Robert Gard, and yet the Arts Extension Service has a lecture series named for him. So I want to tell you a few things tonight: first, who he was. Second, what, I believe, he represents. And third, why we should care about what he represents. I’m going to tell you a lot of stories, in the best Gard tradition I guess (as his daughter, I picked up a love of story) – but there is a point to each of the stories, and I hope that I can weave them all together into a manifesto for us, contemporary arts folk, to take action in our social life today.

The turn of the last century must have been a time of big ideas in America. Social reform seemed to be at the top of a lot of action lists. The Settlement Houses – you all probably know about Jane Addams’ Hull House in Chicago – were being established in our largest cities to help new immigrants become acclimatized to life in America while not losing their own culture. In Boston and St. Louis and many other cities, sweeping projects were underway by which citizens would study the past and present of religion, education, justice, sanitation, recreation and more in their cities, and come together to design a progressive agenda for a better life for all. In the Upper Midwest, progressive populism was embodied by Governor “Fighting Bob” LaFollette of Wisconsin, who believed that if people at the grassroots were truly given a chance to participate in government, that government would be clean, the economy strong, and big business would be held in check. Congress had passed the Smith-Lever Act in 1914, creating the Extension Service, whose aim was a decent and fulfilled life for rural people. W.E.B. DuBois had published the seminal The Souls of Black Folk in 1903, addressing issues of interracial conflict and mutual need. Saying things like:

“Work, culture, liberty – all these we need, not singly but together, not successively but together, each growing and aiding each, and all striving toward that vaster ideal that swims before the Negro people, the ideal of human brotherhood, gained through the unifying ideal of Race; the ideal of fostering and developing the traits and talents of the negro, not in opposition to or contempt for other faces, but rather in large conformity to the greater ideals of the American Republic, in order that some day on American soil two world-races may give each to each those characteristics both so sadly lack. ¹

And what of the arts? Well, at Harvard, at the turn of the 20th century, a dramatist named George Pierce Baker was teaching his students – and this was revolutionary in education at the time – that plays were not just for the reading or for production by professional theater companies, but that plays could be done by anyone, anywhere. His students took this idea and started doing previously unheard-of things.

Frederick Koch, from North Dakota, started a student company that toured Shakespeare throughout the state; later, he went to Chapel Hill, North Carolina, where from the 19-teens until his death in 1945, he devoted his life to encouraging ordinary people to make, and produce, plays about their lives and their cultures and their communities. He called these locally-relevant plays, “folk plays.”

Alexander Drummond, at Cornell University, was disgusted by plays listed in drama service catalogues as “suitable for rural production” – he felt that these plays were bad plays, as well as trivial and condescending, and portrayed rural people as hicks. So he started a program in upstate New York, that he advertised in The American Farmer magazine, whereby anyone in a farm family could come to Cornell for help writing, and then producing, a play that would mean something to their community.

Alfred Arvold, starting at North Dakota State University in about 1912, developed a concept he called The Little Country Theatre. He believed that everyone in North Dakota had creative talent and it was simply a matter of enabling them to write and produce plays in their little towns; a Little Country Theatre could be a basement, a garage, a barn, a town hall – in fact, he believed so passionately in integrating the arts into ordinary daily life that he took a stand against single-purpose arts facilities; he wanted to see government, art, recreation and science all happening, creatively, side-by-side. There was an attic room in the Administration Building at North Dakota state that he took over and refashioned into the Lincoln Log Cabin Room. Its interior looked just like the interior of the cabin where Abraham Lincoln was born. After plays on campus, cast, visiting artists, audience members and anyone else was invited to a meal and conversation in the Lincoln Log Cabin Room. Arvold wanted people to remember that art, conversation, and democracy go hand in hand.

Democracy, art, conversation.

Then there was a movement explicitly linking the arts to the social reform programs of the time. Today, the word “pageant” may conjure up a spectacle - well, as theater goes, probably bad theater - that includes campfires, covered wagons, perhaps a dance by Native Americans, and a happy country hoedown at the end. Oh yes, and probably an action-scene where a lot of horses gallop across the stage. ‘Twas not always so. In 1909, in Boston, there was a major self-study project going on involving literally hundreds of government and what we’d call today non-profit groups, looking at the future of the city. There was a playwright named Percy MacKaye who had ideas about theater. He said things like this:

“The Civic Theater idea implies the conscious awakening of a people to self-government in the activities of its leisure. To this end, organization of the arts of the theater, participation by the people in these arts (not mere spectatorship), a new resulting technique,…dedication in service to the whole community; these are chief among its essentials, and these imply a new and nobler scope for the art of the theater itself…” ²

“True democracy is vitally concerned with beauty, and true art is vitally concerned with citizenship.” ³

Democracy, beauty, citizenship.

MacKaye was working with the group in Boston and he took the findings from the many committees and crafted them into a huge pageant, involving, literally, thousands of people. “Sons of Veterans were listed on the program in the role of War. They stood side by side with workers from the Central Labor Union who depicted Strife, Slavery, and Serfdom.” ⁴ The idea was that people would be prompted by the pageant to think deeply about what the future of Boston ought to be. In St. Louis they went even further. The Mayor of St. Louis invited the mayors of the largest cities in the United States to send two of their best thinkers to, first, participate in the pageant alongside the people of St. Louis, and then, afterwards, to discuss for several days what a meaningful life in urban America was all about. Among the delegates, by the way, were George Pierce Baker and Jane Addams. Now, here is an interesting thing, arts-wise: the actors, playwrights, composers and choreographers who were part of the pageant movement believed that they were on the cutting edge of art-making. This was a wholly new kind of theater, music and dance, with aesthetics and techniques that no one had before imagined.

New, participatory, aesthetics in the pursuit of liberty and justice for all.

The settlement houses emphasized the arts; there were nights for various ethnic groups in which they would teach the traditional arts, and language, of their own culture to their children, so that they should not be simply molded into a generic American; and they featured drama performances and art galleries as one of many important activities there.

Rachel Davis-Dubois, no relation to, but a close colleague of, W.E.B. Dubois, was concerned about multicultural education in the 1930’s and 40’s, and in 1943 she wrote:

“…The melting pot idea, or “come-let-us-do-something-for-you” attitude on the part of the old-stock American was wrong. For half the melting pot to rejoice in being made better while the other half rejoiced in being better allowed for neither element to be its true self….The welfare of the group…means [articulating] a creative use of differences. Democracy is the only atmosphere in which this can happen, whether between individuals, within families, among groups in a country, or among countries. …Political democracy – the right of all to vote – we have inherited… Economic democracy – the right of all to be free from want – we are beginning to envisage…. But cultural democracy – a sharing of values among numbers of our various cultural groups – we have scarcely dreamed of. Much less have we devised social techniques for creating it.” ⁵

Cultural democracy.

If this isn’t enough about what was going on in the evolution of arts and culture, here are a couple of other things.

As part of the Smith-Lever Act, 6 of the 10 action areas easily included the arts, and soon the rural Extension Agents were enabling “Corn, Hogs and Opera in Iowa,” and “Farmers Write Their Own Plays” and “Informal Drama in Community Planning in Ohio,” to mention just a few chapter titles of The Arts Workshop of Rural America, published in 1938. ⁶ Interestingly, Arvold, Koch and Drummond were paid, in part, with Extension money.

Now I mentioned Fighting Bob LaFollette. His close friend, Charles Van Hise, became President at the University of Wisconsin at the time that Fighting Bob became Governor, and together they hatched what became known as the Wisconsin Idea. The Wisconsin Idea was a thrilling mix in which public education, the full development of everyone’s talents, good government, and citizen participation were all rolled together. WHA Radio was the first public radio station in the nation, and its purpose was to deliver education to people in far-flung parts of the state – “the boundaries of the campus are the boundaries of Wisconsin” was the popular slogan. Faculty members pioneered what we call today “distance learning;” they created the nation’s first correspondence courses, and were rewarded for being off campus and helping to develop the talents of every Wisconsonian. The arts were very much part of the Wisconsin Idea. And it was all about participation. Listen to President Van Hise, for instance:

“I would have no mute, inglorious Milton in this state. I would have everybody who has a talent have an opportunity to find his way so far as his talent will carry him…” ⁷

So the Department of Agriculture hired a visual-artist-in-residence to help farmers paint. The Department of Agriculture also had a string quartet, not just to tour, but its the members were to help people young and old statewide learn to play stringed instruments. In the early 1920’s President Glenn Frank said:

“There’s a gap somewhere in the soul of the people that troops into the theater but never produces a folk drama … The next great dramatic renaissance in America will come when the theater is recaptured from the producers by the people, when we become active enough in mind and rich enough in spirit to begin the creation of a folk drama and a folk theater in America.” ⁸

The people making their own art.

Indeed, in 1973, when I worked for Arts Extension in Madison, there were 28 artists on the Extension staff. One helped 4-H clubs form children’s drama groups; one based in inner-city Milwaukee was an African Drumming specialist; one had a program called “Music in the Small Church” which assisted rural organists. And more.

Now, Robert Gard was a graduate student of Alexander Drummond at Cornell, and got deeply involved in the farmers’ drama project. He was also influenced, in graduate school, by the Federal Theater Project; indeed, he and his fiancée, my mother, went to New York to see Orson Wells’ revolutionary Macbeth performed by an all-African-American cast. He brought these ideas to Wisconsin in 1945, where he formed the Wisconsin Idea Theater, supported by Extension, influenced by the earlier work of MacKaye, Arvold, Addams, and the others. In his employment offer, the Dean specified that Gard was intended to “make the drama a social and cultural influence in our small towns and rural communities.” ⁹

He set to work. In his amazing account of these early years – chronicled in Grassroots Theater: A Search for Regional Arts in America – (which by the way was recently reprinted and is available from the University of Wisconsin Press) – he talks of making real his vision that every Wisconsonian who wanted to write, should be empowered to write. Here is one of my favorite passages from the book which I think embodies both the Wisconsin Idea itself and his work within the framework of the Wisconsin Idea. He’s just described a three-day intensive writing workshop he has conducted for a small group of rural people. He’s talking with one of the participants and she has said that there are thousands of rural people eager to write. He says that he hasn’t seen that, and that the writing he HAS seen wasn’t very good. She says this:

“She thought one reason the plays reflected little poetic appreciation of the area was because everything was made to seem too complex, too technical, too difficult. She said there must be a great, free expression. If the people of Wisconsin knew that someone would encourage them to express themselves in any way they chose, if they knew that they were free of scenery and stages and pettiness that the plays we do seem so full of, if they knew that someone would back them and help them when they wanted help, it was her opinion that there would be such a rising of creative expression as is yet unheard of in Wisconsin and it would really all be a part of the kind of theater we had had these past three days, for the whole expression would be of and about ourselves.” ¹⁰

New aesthetics as the people make art about themselves.

This incident was the start of the Wisconsin Regional Writers Association, which by the end of its third year had over 5,000 members in chapters throughout Wisconsin meeting monthly to exchange and critique work. I want to read you the Creed of the WRWA, written in 1950, which, frankly, leaves the vision and mission statements of many of today’s arts organizations in the dust:

Let us believe in each other, remembering each has tasted bitter with sweet, sorrow with gladness, toil with rest. Let us believe in ourselves and our talents. Let us believe in the worth of the individual and seek to understand him, for from sympathy and understanding will our writings grow. Let us believe that the mark of the cultured man is the ability to express himself competently in language; that this ability can be gained best through study and application of the basic principles of creative writing; that with this study and application grow enlightenment and discrimination; and that the democratic process of government is safest in the hands of a cultured, enlightened people. ¹¹

Creative expression and the democratic process of government.

The Wisconsin Idea Theater helped start countless small theaters statewide, emphasizing the writing of new, locally-rooted plays. Gard also helped start the Milwaukee-based institute of Wisconsin cultures and its annual folk festival; he had a public radio and public television series called “Wisconsin Is My Doorstep” about the stories all around us; he conceived of, and directed, “Man and His God” in which, literally, every faith group in Madison in 1958 came together to work on a pageant about the nature of faith. Catholics, Jews, the Ba’hai fellowship, Unitarians, the predominantly African-American Baptist church, and more, worked together on this pageant whose purpose was to achieve greater understanding and tolerance. According to the critic at the Milwaukee Journal,

“On what stage could you see St. Paul in company with Adam and Eve, Mephistopheles, Buddha, ancient Jewish prophets and the gods of Greek and Scandinavian mythology? Where could the sonorous words of the Old Testament be heard interspersed with a Japanese ‘noh’ play, readings from the sacred Hindu scriptures and poetry by such diverse authors as Aeschylus, Edna St. Vincent Millay and Christopher Marlowe .” …[The show was] not a play, not a pageant, but perhaps a new art form.” ¹²

Sounds like the artists in the Pageant movement who believed that by enabling Everyman to work together in the making of art relevant to them and their place, new standards, new forms, new meaning would accrue to the arts as well as to the people.

In 1967, Gard and his staff received the first grant ever awarded to rural America by the National Endowment for the Arts. This project, “The Arts in the Small Community,” would enable five tiny towns in Wisconsin, none of which had any “arts infrastructure,” to experiment with designing a program of participatory arts for themselves. It wasn’t an easy sell to the NEA. Charles Mark’s chronicle of the early days of the NEA includes the deliberation about this proposal.

“The reaction [by the national council] was completely negative. Some of the Council members were amused that we should even propose to spend $58,000 a year for 3 years on such a project….

Leonard Bernstein had not attended the morning session but he arrived during the lunch break. …he asked me to review the morning’s business. When I told him the rural arts project had been tabled he told me that was one reason why he wanted to come to the meeting. I thought he was another negative vote…

When the session resumed…Bernstein…raised his hand to speak. After a dramatic pause he said, ‘This project has…everything to do with why we are sitting here.’

He then went on most eloquently to describe the need to break out of the elite image the arts now hold and make the arts available to all our citizens wherever they reside. He talked about…introducing people to the …arts through hands-on experiences…In short, this man who represented art in its highest form was an unexpected and effective ally of Bob Gard’s concept of developing the inherent need for a creative outlet in all people…

The project was passed unanimously.” ¹³

Those of you working in rural arts today might know the manual, The Arts in the Small Community - which was the final product of the project – a practical yet visionary tool which rural groups could use to design their own programs. (It’s currently on the Robert Gard Wisconsin Idea Foundation website, available to download, and is still very relevant today.

So what was it like growing up as Gard’s daughter? Three quick stories will give you an idea.

I remember my tenth birthday. I wanted to have a normal birthday party - go bowling, maybe. Alas, my dad had another idea. When my three friends showed up we were ushered to the back yard where there were three big signs painted: Act I, Act II, Act III. We were told that the name of the play was to be “The Diamond in the Corn,” that it had four characters, and that our parents would all be over in an hour to see our play.

I remember as a high school student getting sucked in to hanging posters and selling tickets and records for “Badger Ballads” or others of The Wisconsin Idea Theater’s touring shows. They’d take shows to all of Wisconsin’s county fairs. Now, Miss Alice in Dairyland also visited the county fairs, talking about the virtues of eating butter and cheese. I’d just gotten my drivers license, but Miss Alice didn’t have hers that year, and she took the Greyhound to the county seat. So I’d be dispatched to pick her up at the Greyhound Station, bring her to the fair, listen to her pitch about butter and cheese, and then escort her to see the show. Another key part of that job, of course, was to make sure that the laughter and applause started in the right place.

And finally, during the summer of 1968, I needed a summer job and the “Arts In The Small Community” program needed someone to work cheap. I was assigned to the project in one of the towns to manage the storefront office and handle everything from farmers complaints about dope-smoking by the visiting artists from Milwaukee, to taking tickets at shows. It was kind of cool, my summer pay of $500 was huge to me, but, it was 1968, I was at a Quaker college where my intention was to change the world, and this art stuff didn’t seem very relevant. I was a psychology major, and knew that I would personally find the key to bringing understanding and world peace.

But then there was a moment in grad school when I was studying Organizational Behavior, trying to understand how organizations work. The grand old man teaching the Community Psychology course in the public health department one day said:

“I have come to conclude that the truly healthy community is one that values the creative and spiritual health of all of its people as much as it values their physical and mental health.” ¹⁴

In that moment, it all came together for me. Suddenly that darned creative birthday party, escorting Miss Alice in Dairyland to shows at county fairs, the summer job, the photograph of Fighting Bob that hung over my dad’s desk, all came together with the Quaker way of doing things, the social psychology degree, the interest in organizations, and my personal drive to bring about intercultural and interpersonal understanding leading to world peace.

It was about creative communities. Healthy communities. Where everyone’s creativity mattered. Where creative expression and participation led to sounder, unafraid civic conversation about living together well. Where democracy flourished in the hands of a creatively empowered people.

Now, in the last 20 or 30 years or so, the nonprofit arts world has been concerned with building institutions. There’s been an explosion of books about building better boards, and raising more funds, and investing your funds, and strategic planning. And for every book, there are scores of consultants. We’ve been told to behave “more like a business.” Nothing wrong with that, really, but I wonder whether our desire to create the perfect institution where the infrastructure is a finely oiled machine hasn’t become the end rather than the means.

The means to enabling everyone to participate, creatively, in society and community-building. I’m not talking “access to the arts,” here; I’m talking about the complicated, messy, often unevaluable, often frustrating, process of unleashing everyone’s ideas and expressions without knowing beforehand where they will lead. Of working together on something whose result is that you might be changed. Of looking into the universe of another person or another group and being vulnerable to what you see there, and realizing that you could be stronger – if different – if you pay attention to what you see. I’m talking about the process of building a democracy that really means something – not the “democracy” that turns social life into a sort of Super Bowl of winner-take-all either-or in the name of Freedom, but a democracy that recognizes that everyone has something to say and that it’s our responsibility to listen as well as to speak.

I see things out there that tell me that it is possible to think about our organizations in ways that both strengthen us and also transcend institution-building. An organization called Art in the Public Interest has a monthly e-newsletter with stories about this kind of work and an online archives.

And I love the recent RAND study on why people participate in the arts. One of the themes of that study is our need to think about our audiences as participants, not consumers, whether they are of the so-called “disinclined” group that typically doesn’t get involved in the arts, or the “inclined” group, or the “engaged group.” Another of the themes that RAND puts up front in its summary of the study is that “Institutions seeing the biggest gains are those that are making service to their communities as important as promoting artistic quality.” ¹⁵

And then Bill Moskin and Jill Jackson wrote what I think was an incredibly important Monograph for Americans for the Arts in 1999. They had begun to notice that there is a group of organizations that have attained the institutional goal of “stability” but not in the traditional way. Bill says that these organizations are as diverse as the Bronx Arts Council, Handmade in America, the St. Louis Symphony, and the Cumberland County Playhouse. What they have in common, though, is seven things:

• Passion for, and knowledge about, their place. The art that they make or commission is intentionally relevant to the community.
• A clear vision that includes the arts evolving and people growing simultaneously.
• A commitment to inclusivity – we’re not just talking “access” here – but the belief that all people in their community are participants and potential participants in creative work that furthers community life. “Believing in one another,” said Bill to me recently, “cuts through all barriers.”
• A clear vision of excellence that refers not only to excellence of technique but also melds inclusivity of process with authenticity of expression into a whole that includes technique but does not emphasize it more than the other two. And that aesthetic decisions, usually reserved for the artistic director, can be safe in the hands of people.
• A bias towards collaboration
• A creative understanding of the marketplace – their earned income strategies relate to their core mission.
• A vision that they are stewards of the community, and that by capturing the meaning of living together today, they pass the community on to the people who will come next. ¹⁶

Coupling the Moskin-Jackson perceptions based on listening to the stories of these strangely “stable” organizations, with the RAND conclusions based on scientific research, I can only be reinforced in my belief that the time is now for us to revisit the ideas of Jane Addams, W.E.B Dubois, Percy MacKaye, Frederich Koch, Alfred Arvold, Alexander Drummond, Robert Gard, and countless others. What these people articulated so eloquently was a belief in the intimate relationship between personal creativity, evolving aesthetics, community-building, and democracy.

We have a responsibility to take these ideas, make them our own, and further them, and we have an urgency about doing this now. We look at an increasingly globalized economy where money leaves our communities quicker than you can say Jack Robinson, where the gap between rich and poor in our richest nation on earth has become horrifying, where we don’t have to share much of anything any more (bottled water has replaced the drinking fountain, cell phones have replaced the public pay phone) and we can recreate with people of our choosing across the world with a simple click of the mouse instead of people nearby. We’re good at saying “It doesn’t apply to me” whether we’re referring to service in the armed forces or ethical behavior. Political scientist-philosopher Dan Kemmis has noted that we have acquired the skills to block or wreck anything in America, blocking one another’s initiatives with a resulting failure of public life and increasing timidity on the part of public officials. ¹⁷

Can we suspend our need to raise the money to make Friday’s payroll, the 80-hour-weeks we must put in to get the paperwork done, the irritation with a fellow artist or board member, long enough to step back and say: “What am I, what are we, really doing to further the viability of our community as a group of interdependent neighbors? What am I, what are we, really doing to further democracy in America?”

Is there anything more important, really?

And I believe that if we start thinking like this, perhaps initially by calling on Jane, and W.E.B., and Fred, and Alfred, and Alex and Bob to understand where we lie on the continuity of creative thinking in the service of a just and democratic society; and then perhaps by looking around at our communities in new ways and understanding what we need and aspire to; and then perhaps by looking at the new research to see if it offers insights into moving ahead as re-invented, effective arts organizations; and then by taking a conscious place in that continuum of visionary, believing individuals, that we will take a place that really means something in building America. Not to mention created new art forms and standards of excellence along the way.

We’ll have taken our place at the intersection of a commitment to democracy, a commitment to place, a commitment to people, and a commitment to creativity.

We have a unique and vital role to play. I can’t think of another sector who could possibly make as great a difference right now. Lives are at stake. Democracy itself is at stake.

Let me close by turning to the final page of Gard’s The Arts in the Small Community. The words on that page were set to music this spring by LaMoine MacLaughlin of Amery, Wisconsin ¹⁸ Appropriately, artists ought to have the last word here so I call on some of the singers in the audience to sing it for you. And the second time, I invite us to sing it together; you’ve got the words in front of you.

If you try, what may you expect?
First a community
Welded through art to a new consciousness of self:
A new being, perhaps a new appearance –
A people proud
Of achievements which lift them through the creative
Above the ordinary –
A new opportunity for children
To find exciting experiences in art
And to carry this excitement on
Throughout their lives –
A mixing of peoples and backgrounds
Through art; a new view
Of hope for mankind and an elevation
Of man – not degradation.
New values for individual and community
Life, and a sense
That here, in our place
We are contributing to the maturity
Of a great nation.
If you try, you can indeed
Alter the face and the heart
Of America. ¹⁹