Conceiving Liberty in Pax Americana

Abstract

Conceiving Liberty in Pax Americana Lisa Szefel (bio) Louis Menand, The Free World: Art and Thought in the Cold War. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroud, 2021. 880 pp. Notes and index. $35.00. In 1945, after decades of destruction and deprivation, freedom in Europe seemed to be within grasp. In contrast to the post-World War I retreat into isolationism, the United States, intent on forging a world order grounded in liberal democracy and capitalist prosperity, assumed global leadership. Melvin Leffler’s seminal A Preponderance of Power: National Security, the Truman Administration, and the Cold War (1992) set the terms of debate regarding postwar national and international economic, political, and colonial rearrangements. That doorstopper of a book began as the guns fell silent in Germany, a moment the defeated nation dubbed Stunde Null (“Zero Hour”), and representatives of Imperial Japan signed the Instrument of Surrender aboard the USS Missouri. Louis Menand’s The Free World: Art and Thought in the Cold War surveys the same landscape, but from a different angle. The Free World seeks to map out why, in this Pax Americana, paintings and poems, music and movies seemed to actualize liberty. Menand canvasses the shearing forces that caused this faulting and folding in art and ideas as Americans pivoted away from war footing. The Free World does not explore the use of culture as a weapon against Communism abroad, a field expertly mined by Frances Stonor Saunders’ landmark The Cultural Cold War: The CIA and the World of Arts and Letters (1991) and, more recently, Cold War Modernists: Art, Literature, and American Cultural Diplomacy (2015) by Greg Barnhisel. Nor does Menand concern himself with the impact of politics on national identity, a vantage point first sketched by Stephen Whitfield’s The Culture of the Cold War (1991). In the context of superpower rivalry, totalitarian peril, and decolonization, Menand carves out deft insights as they form, strike, renovate, and ricochet—sometimes with a chisel, other times with a scalpel. The Free World ends with a bang rather than concludes, bringing Kennan’s prescription of Soviet containment to its logical conclusion in Operation Rolling Thunder, which rained down three-hundred pounds of bombs for every woman, man, and child in North Vietnam. The engines of American political, intellectual, artistic, and moral authority, developed over the previous two decades, came screeching to a halt, shifting [End Page 408] democracy into reverse. In the wake of this wheelspin, new articulations of freedom gained traction. Menand’s Tolstoyan epic examines a geometry of “vertical cross-sections” and “horizontal through-lines” (p. xiv), which unveils a deep and broad panorama. What results is not War and Peace, but a series of Polaroid snapshots, a device created in 1948 as one of the era’s technological innovations. Menand captures the moments when creators conceived their art: Jean-Paul Sartre jumping into the void; Jackson Pollock tossing a canvass on the floor; Merce Cunningham chucking choreography for chance. Critics charted this new territory, explaining films, explicating texts, criticizing consumerism, unveiling misogyny, and diagnosing racism. A second goal animates the inquiry: the education Menand absorbed from his parents, a more activist and elevated version of the kind of general readers Joan Shelley Rubin illustrated in The Making of Middlebrow Culture (1992). Considering art and thought in the Cold War might, Menand suggests, render a more complete portrait of his own subjectivity. What launched the notion that ideas matter? Menand argues that it began with George Kennan’s famous 1946 “Long Telegram,” which laid out in despairing detail the inherently expansionist nature of Communist ideology. With little hope of peaceful coexistence, only a policy of “vigilant containment” offered protection against yet another global conflagration. Among the first to gauge Atomic Age geopolitical threats was George Orwell whose attempt to join a Communist cell became fodder for Down and Out in Paris and London (1933). In Homage to Catalonia (1938), Orwell chronicled his battle against fascists during the Spanish Civil War, while the now-canonical Animal Farm (1948) and 1984 (1949) illuminated the despotic impact of Stalinist cant and dissimulation. Eastern bloc consolidation gave ballast to the publishing fortunes of another political prognosticator, Hannah Arendt. Her etiology of...