Building a Midwest Cultural Capital: Professional Theater and Urban Development in Minneapolis and St. Paul

In the late 1950s and early 1960s, the Twin Cities of Minneapolis and St. Paul faced a situation similar to that of many American cities: a growing ring of suburbs was attracting residents and businesses out of the cities and depriving their urban centers of vitality and wealth. In addition to traditional urban renewal programs, a coalition of Twin City cultural, business, and political leaders turned to professional arts institutions, especially theater, as a way to draw suburbanites back to the cities and reinvigorate their urban economies.

This paper will examine the emergence of this particular group of culturally-inclined businessmen, cultural leaders, and politicians out of the growing managerial, white-collar class of postwar Minneapolis and St. Paul. It will focus on these leaders’ motivation for advocating the professional arts as a method of redeveloping the Twin Cities, as well as the way artists and arts administrators were able to utilize rhetoric about urban development to advance their own cause. Combined with national efforts to professionalize and decentralize the arts, meant to combat Soviet competition and stymy the feared effects of mass culture, local campaigns for the arts culminated in Minneapolis in 1963 in the establishment of the Guthrie Theater, one of the earliest and most imposing of the regional professional theaters founded across the country in the 1960s. The Guthrie not only brought excitement and prestige to urban Minneapolis, but it was also meant to position the city on the national map and help counteract the predominant image of the Midwest as provincial and unsophisticated. This paper will examine the implications of the establishment of professional arts institutions for the economic and cultural development of cities like Minneapolis and St. Paul, and explore the impact of such changes on the urban community.