Thought in the Cold War

politics change places taking center stage, but all revolve around an underlying theme of cultural and social liberation.

Menand begins with George Kennan, architect of American Cold War policy. Kennan’s “Long Telegram,” which he cabled from Berlin in 1946 (and later turned into a shorter article in ForeignAffairs magazine), advocated a doctrine of containment regarding the Soviet Union. Soviet incursion into Eastern Europe along with a common knowledge of Stalin’s atrocities galvanized an American international liberalism. Hannah Arendt’s TheOriginsofTotalitarianism, published in 1951, solidified the tough-on-communism position abroad and pro-civil rights position at home. The CIA, unlike the FBI, embodied that liberal idealism, at least for a time. With Eastern Europe in Soviet control and Western Europe teetering on the edge by wellfunded communist parties, the CIA mounted a propaganda campaign, creating phony foundations to support traveling exhibits of American abstract expressionist artists to showcase the works of an open society. The CIA also funded journals like The Paris Review, founded by young writers Peter Matthiessen (CIA connected) and George Plimpton (unclear).

A fount of American culture in the 1940s and '50s was the obscure, small Black Mountain College in North Carolina. The talent was prodigious: Josef and Anni Albers taught painting and textiles before he became chair of the Department of Design at Yale; artist power couple William and Elaine de Kooning also taught painting; John Cage of 4’33” fame served as an instructor of composition, and his partner Merce Cunningham taught dance. Poet and literature professor M.C. Richards participated in artistic happenings with pianist David Tutor and artist Robert Rauschenberg, along with Cunningham and Cage. The Black Mountain scene moved to Greenwich Village where artistic happenings took off in the 1950s.

American culture was also heavily influenced by post-war Europe. With so many Americans in Paris, existentialist writers Jean-Paul Sartre and Albert Camus became household names to Americans by the 1950s. Simone de Beauvoir’s The Second Sex had a major impact on the American feminist movement that had suffered setbacks due to a contrived 1950s mythology of the ideal family. French philosopher Jacques Derrida and Belgian-born Yale professor Paul De Man (with a sketchy past) transformed American literary criticism, which erstwhile had been dominated by Lionel Trilling of Columbia.

Ex-pat James Baldwin completed his first major work in Paris, Go Tell It on the Mountain (1953), as well as a collection of essays, Notes of a Native Son (1955). Menand connects Baldwin’s ideas on Black identity to the anti-colonial Black intellectuals at the time from Africa and the Caribbean, like the psychiatrist and author Frantz Fanon. This proved to be formative for Baldwin’s thinking, as he assumed a leadership role in the 1960s Civil Rights movement.

There was also the British contribution to American popular culture. American rock and roll was in danger of being a temporary fad by the early sixties—Buddy Holly,

Richie Valens and the Big Bopper died in a plane crash; Chuck Berry was in jail; Jerry Lee Lewis had been discredited; and Elvis was drafted. It was the British invasion with a Delta-blues component that educated Americans on what American music really came from. And it was this movement along with electrified folk music that saved rock music. (Menand’s take on the Beatles is so trenchant that it’s worth the price of the book, and I can’t do it justice.)

Menand, as he is wont to do, puts to rest some cherished myths of Americana. For example, Jack Kerouac did not create On the Road in three weeks on a roll of teletype paper. The manuscript was based on previous journals and drafts of chapters. Nevertheless, he did hammer out a copy to work with, and by the time Onthe Road came out in 1957, it had gone through six years of revisions. The sainted Neal Cassidy (Dean Moriarty in On the Road) in Menand’s rendering is nothing but a conman and a sexual exploiter of both women and men. Jackson Pollock's painting, Mural, one of the most famous works of abstract expressionism, was not painted in a creative one-night binge but took a whole summer (nor did Pollack urinate in Peggy Guggenheim’s fireplace, a cherished myth of Pollock as drunken wildman). There are also surprises that Menand uncovers — Andy Warhol in all his weirdness had a work ethic unsurpassed by other artists of the day.

There is also a quotidian piece that Menand brings to bear, which is money. The booming post-war economy made it possible for people other than the very wealthy to afford art as well as to open galleries to support artists. After the Marshall Plan and European economic recovery, American artists of both the abstract and pop variety found an international following, and New York replaced Paris as the art capital of the world. Money found its way into the pockets of teenagers, a new development of a plentiful society called the allowance. Teenagers could now afford to buy records played on an increasing number of radio stations engaged in fierce competition.

American culture did not die with the failure of Vietnam—in fact, a cultural infrastructure had been laid for successive flourishing in arts and letters. But confidence in America waned, and with it, a question as to whether Western Civilization was worth defending. Menand also leaves us with the question of liberation as aperçu—a nice summation of the era, but what did this entail? The conservative revolt of 1964 and the counterculture constituted two sides of the same coin, a quest for self-fulfillment (or actualization in the parlance of the day). Is there a slippery slope between personal gratification and a rejection of the commonweal? Is there a right not to be offended or put others at risk to their personal health? Questions abound indeed. Good books do that.