Cold War Political Thought: Art, Existentialism, Beat Poetry and Political Thinking

Abstract

In what has been termed the gray dawn of peace in the late 1940's, the avant-gardes – literary, artistic and, academic – worked out their conflicted attitudes toward the almost simultaneous announcements of victory over Fascism in 1945 and a against Communism proclaimed by President Truman in 1947. The world they had won, and were now losing once again, presented a series of confounding ironies, some obvious and some less so, and only some of which I can touch on today: 1) The shock of the new as Liberals in Washington shifted rightward, rejecting the cheerful nay-saying of radicals in the arts, humanities and social sciences, even while celebrating the freedoms that produced them. 2) In the era of HUAC and the Army-McCarthy hearings, a heightened (safer?) retreat to the classic anti-bourgeoisie perspective on the part of the avant-garde expressed in attacks on the culture of conformity and mass democracy. Particular targets were the post-War boom in 1950's suburban middle class suburbs and its twin cultures of Reader's Digest' and the organization man. 3) While the domestic cultural elites, particularly in major urban centers such as New York, were under attack by Congress for their previous Trotskyite-Stalinist fellow-traveling sympathies, New York arts and letters were being exported by the Truman Administrations CIA and State Department as exemplars of freedom of expression and aesthetic excellence. 4) In addition to the visual arts, the specifically Modernist aesthetic of risk taking and, ecstatic spontaneity in the face of the cold war mentality generated cultural movements specifically riffs on French Existentialism, together with improvisation in poetry (Beat) and Jazz, all of which were labeled cool – i.e. apolitical, abstract, foregrounding individual rather than collectivist values (socialist or American realism).5) In the social sciences, particularly Political Science, the empirical and the behavioral turns also resisted ideology by capturing experience through aggregate patterns of individual voting behavior and morphologies of institutional response, while engaging in a vigorous internal critique about the future of Liberalism.