‘The Free World: Art and Thought in the Cold War,’ by Louis Menand: An Excerpt
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Version 0 of 1. This book is about a time when the United States was actively engaged with the rest of the world. In the twenty years after the end of the Second World War, the United States invested in the economic recovery of Japan and Western Europe and extended loans to other countries around the world. With the United Kingdom, it created the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund to support global political stability and international trade. It hosted the new United Nations. Through its government, its philanthropic foundations, its universities, and its cultural institutions, it established exchange programs for writers and scholars, distributed literature around the globe, and sent art from American collections and music by American composers and performers abroad. Its entertainment culture was enjoyed almost everywhere. And it welcomed and adapted art, ideas, and entertainment from other countries. Works of literature and philosophy from all over the world were published in affordable translations. Foreign movies were imported and distributed across the country. The number of Americans attending college increased exponentially. Book sales, record sales, and museum attendance soared. Laws were rewritten to permit works of art and literature to use virtually any language and to represent virtually any subject, and to protect almost any kind of speech. American industry doubled its output. Consumer choice expanded dramatically. The income and wealth gap between top earners and the middle class was the smallest in history. The ideological differences between the two major political parties were minor, enabling the federal government to invest in social programs. The legal basis for the social and political equality of Americans of African ancestry was established and economic opportunities were opened up for women. And around the world, colonial empires collapsed, and in their place rose new independent states. As conditions changed, so did art and ideas. The expansion of the university, of book publishing, of the music business, and of the art world, along with new technologies of reproduction and distribution, speeded up the rate of innovation. Most striking was the nature of the audience: people cared. Ideas mattered. Painting mattered. Movies mattered. Poetry mattered. The way people judged and interpreted paintings, movies, and poems mattered. People believed in liberty, and thought it really meant something. They believed in authenticity, and thought it really meant something. They believed in democracy and (with some blind spots) in the common humanity of everyone on the planet. They had lived through a worldwide depression that lasted almost ten years and a world war that lasted almost six. They were eager for a fresh start. [ Return to the review of “The Free World.” ] In the same period, American citizens were persecuted and sometimes prosecuted for their political views. Agencies of the government spied on Americans and covertly manipulated nongovernmental cultural and political organizations. Immigration policies remained highly restrictive. The United States used its financial leverage to push American goods on foreign markets. It established military bases around the globe and intervened in the internal political affairs of other states, rigging elections, endorsing coups, enabling assassinations, and supporting the extermination of insurgents. A cold war rhetoric, much of it opportunistic and fear-mongering, was allowed to permeate public life. And the nation invested in a massive and expensive military buildup that was out of all proportion to any threat. A fifth of the population lived in poverty. The enfranchisement of Black Americans and the opening of economic opportunity to women did little to lessen the dominance in virtually every sphere of life of white men. A spirit of American exceptionalism was widespread, as was a quasi-official belief in something called “the American way of life,” based on an image of normativity that was (to put it mildly) not inclusive. The culture industries, as they expanded, absorbed and commercialized independent and offbeat culture-makers, and the university, as it expanded, swallowed up the worlds of creative writing and dissident political opinion. At the end of this period, the country plunged into a foreign war of national independence from which it could not extricate itself for eight years. When it finally did, in the 1970s, growth leveled off, the economy entered a painful period of adjustment, ideological differences sharpened, and the income gap began rapidly increasing. The United States grew wary of foreign commitments, and other countries grew wary of the United States. And yet, something had happened. An enormous change in America’s relations with the rest of the world had taken place. In 1945, there was widespread skepticism, even among Americans, about the value and sophistication of American art and ideas, and widespread respect for the motives and intentions of the American government. After 1965, those attitudes were reversed. The United States lost political credibility, but it had moved from the periphery to the center of an increasing international artistic and intellectual life. [ Return to the review of “The Free World.” ] Cultures get transformed not deliberately or programmatically but by the unpredictable effects of social, political, and technological change, and by random acts of cross-pollination. Ars longa is the ancient proverb, but actually, art making is short-term. It is a response to changes in the immediate environment and the consequence of serendipitous street-level interactions. Between 1945 and 1965, the rate of serendipity increased, and the environment changed dramatically. So did art and thought. The transformation of American culture after 1945 was not accomplished entirely by Americans. It came about through exchanges with thinkers and artists from around the world, from the British Isles, France, Germany, and Italy, from Mexico, Canada, and the Caribbean, from decolonizing states in Africa and Asia, from India and Japan. Some of these people were émigrés and exiles (in one case, a fugitive), and some never visited. Many of the American artists and writers were themselves the children of immigrants. Even in an era of restrictive immigration policies and geopolitical tensions, art and ideas got around. The artistic and intellectual culture that emerged in the United States after the Second World War was not an American product. It was the product of the Free World. * * * This is not a book about the “cultural Cold War” (the use of cultural diplomacy as an instrument of foreign policy), and it is not a book about “Cold War culture” (art and ideas as reflections of Cold War ideology and conditions). It is about an exceptionally rapid and exciting period of cultural change in which the existence of the Cold War was a constant, but only one of many contexts. I had two reasons for writing the book. The first was the historiographic challenge: how to tell a story of change on this scale. I tried to take into account three dimensions: the underlying social forces— economic, geopolitical, demographic, technological—that created the conditions for the possibility of certain kinds of art and ideas; what was happening “on the street,” how X ran into Y, which led to Z; and what was going on in people’s heads, what they understood it meant to make a painting or address an injustice or interpret a poem in those years. To do this, I made a series of vertical cross-sections rather than a survey. And I focused on the headliners, the artists and thinkers who became widely known. I do not think their stories are the only interesting ones, but one of the things I was trying to understand is why certain figures became emblematic. Although this meant leaving a lot out, there is a horizontal through-line. The book I ended up writing is a little like a novel with a hundred characters. But the dots do connect. The other reason I wrote it is personal. As you have probably guessed, this is the period I grew up in. I was born in 1952. My parents were intellectuals who were mainly interested in politics and whose tastes were not avant-garde, but they were knowledgeable about what was going on in literature and the arts, and I heard all of these names, or almost all of them, when I was a kid. But I had only a vague idea who those people really were, what they actually did, or what made them important such that people like my parents knew about them. Writing this book was a way of filling in the blanks in my own story. It was (as all history writing ultimately is) a way of understanding my own subjectivity. If you asked me when I was growing up what the most important good in life was, I would have said “freedom.” Now I can see that freedom was the slogan of the times. The word was invoked to justify everything. As I got older, I started to wonder just what freedom is, or what it can realistically mean. I wrote this book to help myself, and maybe you, figure that out. [ Return to the review of “The Free World.” ] |