An Appeal to Progressives by Edmund Wilson

 

January 14, 1931

In any case, American optimism has taken a serious beating; the national morale is weak. The energy and faith for a fresh start seem now not to be forthcoming: a dreadful apathy, un-sureness and discouragement is felt to have fallen upon us. It is as if we were afraid to go on with what we were doing before or as if we no longer had the heart for it. I want to suggest that the present depression may be nothing less than one of the turning-points in our history, our first real crisis since the Civil War. The Americans at the present time seem to be experiencing not merely an economic breakdown but a distinct psychological change.

 From the time of the Civil War on, all our enthusiasm and creative energy went into the development of our tremendous resources. This development had two aspects: one was the exploration of the continent and the engineering feats involved in reclaiming it; the other the amassing of tremendous fortunes. Today the discoveries have all been made: we no longer look towards the West, as the Europeans once looked to America, as to a world of untold treasures and wonders – and the excitement of mastering new seacoasts, new rivers, forests, prairies and mountains seems now completely spent. This was already true at the time of the European War (when, incidentally, we were running into a business depression), but the war gave us a new objective- new discoveries, the discovery of Europe; new heroic stunts of engineering, the transportation of our army to France. Since the end of the war, however, we have, as a people, had nothing to carry us along except the momentum of money-making. We have been trying still to find in it the exhilaration of the wildness and size of the continent – the breaking it in to the harness of the railroads, the stumbling upon sudden riches. But during these last years our hope and our faith have all been put behind the speed of mass production, behind stupendous campaigns of advertising, behind cyclones of salesmanship. Our buoyancy had become hysterical. And the reaction from a hysterical exhilaration is a slump into despondency and inertia.

What we have lost is, it may be, not merely our way in the economic labyrinth but our conviction of the value of what we are doing. Money-making and the kind of advantages which a money-making society provides for money to buy are not enough to satisfy humanity – neither is a system like ours in which everyone is out for himself and the devil take the hindmost, with no common purpose and little common culture to give life stability and sense. Our idolization of our aviators – our extravagant excitement over Lindbergh and our romantic admiration (now beginning to cool off) for Byrd – has been like a last desperate burst of American idealism, a last impulse to dissociate our national soul from a precipitate progress that was taking us from automobiles and straight through electric refrigerators to Tom Thumb golf-courses.

The old American ideal and legend of the poor boy who gets to be a millionaire, which gradually came to take the place of the poor boy who got to be President, has today lost almost all its glamor. Not only do people not hope to be Hoover – they do not even hope so often as they did to be Carnegie or Henry Ford. The romance of the poor boy was he romance of the old democratic chance, of the career open to the talents – but the realities of a millionaire society have turned out to be the monstrosities of capitalism: the children of the successful poor boy get lazy and sick on their father’s money, and the poor boys who afterwards arrive on the scene discover that – with the crippling of the grain market, the elimination of the factory worker by the development of the machine and the decimation of the white-collar class, even though sometimes apparently well on their way to getting in on the big money themselves, by enormous business mergers – the career is no longer open to the extent that had originally been hoped. What began as the libertarian adventure of eighteenth-century middle-class democracy seems to have ended in the cul de sac of an antiquated economic system.. And capitalist-minded as the Americans have now become, they seem to feel they are in a cul de sac. It is as if they did not dare to go on.

 

In spite of the fundamental absurdity of so much of what we have lately been doing, we are considerably better educated and intelligent than we once were, and since the war we have been closer to Europe. The Buicks and Cadillacs, the bad gin and Scotch, the radio concerts interrupted by advertising talks, the golf and bridge of the suburban household, which the bond salesman can get for his money, can hardly compensate him for the daily work of a kind in which it is utterly impossible to imagine a normal human being taking satisfaction or pride – and the bond salesman is the type of the whole urban office class. The brokers and bankers who are shooting themselves and jumping out of windows have been disheartened by the precariousness of their professions –but would they be killing themselves if they loved it? Who today, in fact, in the United States can really love our meaningless life, where the manufacturer raises the workers’ wages only in order to create a demand for the gadgets which for better or worse he happens to have an interest in selling them, while agriculture goes hang, and science and art are left to be exploited by the commercial laboratories, the market for commercial art illustration and the New York publishers’ racket, or to be fed in a haphazard way by a dole from the fortunes of rich men who have been conscience-stricken or simply overpowered at finding themselves at the end of their careers with enough money on their hands to buy out an old-fashioned empire?

We liberal have professed not to love it, yet we have tried to believe in it, none the less. In a country where money changes hands so often and social position fluctuates so easily, where the minds of the working class have seemed largely to have been absorbed into the psychology of the middle class, we have been unable to believe in the Marxist doctrine that capitalism must inevitably give rise to class warfare , and we have perhaps never taken sufficiently seriously Karl Marx’s prediction that for many years to come the stupid automatic acquisitive instinct of humanity would still be so far ahead of its capacity for intelligent and disinterested behavior that the system of private enterprise would never be able to run itself with foresight enough to avoid a wreck. It used to be pointed out that in America our support of this system was indestructible, since the stock market made it possible for anybody who had been able to save a little money to become a capitalist himself, with interests presumably identical with those of J. P. Morgan and Charlie Schwab. But can we expect that to be true in the future? – and even if people persist in aspiring to be stock-market capitalists, should they be encouraged in this or even left to their luck? Should they not rather be shown that their interests are incompatible with capitalism itself?

Yet the truth is that we liberals and progressives have been betting on capitalism – and that most of our heroes and allies, heterodox professors like Dewey and Beard, survivors of the old republican tradition like Wilson and Justice Holmes, able and well-educated labor organizers like the officers of the Amalgamated, intelligent journalists like Lippmann and Chase, though all sincere and outspoken democrats, have been betting on capitalism, too. And now, in the abyss of starvation and bankruptcy into which the country has fallen, with no sign of any political leadership which will be able to pull us out, our liberalism seems to have little to offer beyond a discrete recommendation of public ownership of water power and certain other public utilities, a cordial feeling that labor ought to organize in a non-social-revolutionary way and a protest, invariably ineffective, against a few of the more obviously atrocious of the jailing, beatings-up and murders with which the industrialists have been trying to keep the working class docile.

Doesn’t this program today seem rather inadequate? We liberals have always insisted on the desirability of a planned society – the phrase ‘social control’ has been our blessed Mesopotamian word. If this means anything, does it not mean socialism? And should we not do well  to make this plain? It may be said at the present time it is utopian in America to talk about socialism: but with the kind of administration that the country has largely been getting, do not all our progressive proposals, however reasonable or modest, seem utopian? It is not obvious, as was lately made plain by an article in this magazine, that a government like our present one is incapable of acting in good faith in even the simple matter of preserving the water power which is supposed to be operated for the general benefit from being exploited by private profiteers? Our society has finally produced in its specialized professional politicians one of the most useless and obnoxious groups which has perhaps ever disgraced human history- a group that seems unique among governing classes in having managed to be corrupt, uncultivated and incompetent all at once. We know that we are not even able to depend on them today to protect us against the frankly disreputable race of blackmailers, thieves and assassins who dominate our municipal life. We know that we cannot even complain that the racketeers are breaking the laws which are supposed to be guaranteed by the government, because the government differs little from the racketeers. How can we expect them, then, to check the relatively respectable scoundrels who merely rob us of public utilities by more or less legalistic means?

Yet, as I say, it may be true, with the present breakdown, we have come to the end of something, and that we are ready to start on a different tack. If we look back at the depressions of the last fifty years, we see that through every one of them there always remained something for which the Americans could still legitimately feel ambition or enthusiasm, some to challenge the national spirit and appeal to the national imagination. After 1885, there we still the West and the consolidation of the railroads; after the prolonged depression of the nineties, the final consolidation of great industries such as United States Steel as well as the crusade led by Theodore Roosevelt against these great corporations in the interests of the dangerously increasing number of those who were being injured by the process of consolidation, and the robustious Rooseveltian imperialism; after the slump of the early years of the European War, our entrance into the war, and after the slump following the war, the period of the glorification of the automobile and the airplane. Today the further consolidation of the big business units is ruining more people than in Roosevelt’s time, and there is no sign of a Roosevelt or a Wilson to revive our political vision and to persuade the people who are out of luck that something is about to be done for them. It may be that the whole money-making and –spending psychology has definitely played itself out, and that Americans would be willing, for the first time now, to put their traditional idealism and their genius for organization behind a radial social experiment. The future is as blank in the United States today as the situation is desperate: the President seems so inhibited by dread of encouraging subversive forces and by faith in the capacity of the capitalist system to right itself and survive that it is impossible for him to act, and when he tries to, he is deadlocked by Congress; nor have the industrialists or the financiers come forwards with any constructive proposal. But this very blindness of the outlook may mean that we are looking in the wrong direction and that help may be coming from some other quarter. In the meantime, one gets  the impression that the people who don’t deal in, ideas are doing more thinking at the present time than the professional ideologues.

The minds of the general public have, furthermore, been more affected by the example of Soviet Russia than is easily grasped by anyone who has been in the habit of assuming that it is only the radical or liberal who understands what Russia is up to, and that the ordinary American citizen is bound to be stupidly prejudiced against the Soviet system. During the NEP period in Russia, the capitalist powers were relieved to feel that the Russians had been forced to recognize the impracticability of Communism and were quietly returning to laissez faire. But with the inauguration of the Five-Year Plan to eliminate capitalism business in Russia, the aspect of things changed. The apparent success of the plan has had its effects on all classes in all the rest of the world – on the Americans, surely, not last. In the course of this winter of our capitalist quandary, the Soviets have been emerging from the back pages of the New York newspapers and are now given much and prominent space- even to interviews with Stalin’s mother; and behind what one reads on the subject in even the reactionary papers, one feels as much admiration as resentment. After all, the great Communist project is distinguished by almost all the features that Americans have been taught to glorify –the extreme efficiency and economy combined with the ideal of a herculean program- like a Liberty Loan drive – to be put over by concerted action to the tune of impassioned boosting. The Russians, furthermore, on their own side, have been studying American methods: they have imported a thousand American engineers and put them at the head of enormous enterprises with practically a free hand, and one would not be at all surprised to hear that Mr. Edward I. Bernays had been in Moscow at the time of the recent trial. We have already, in spite of the Treasury regulation, been doing a good deal of trading with Russia, and an important New York Bank was at one time on the point of advancing to the Soviets the loan that has been advocated by this magazine.

The Communists in the United States assume that, by their very nature, neither our government nor our business is capable of learning anything from or of associating itself with the Soviets. They believe that a war against Russia is inevitable. They believe, moreover that they themselves constitute a trained compact minority which, at the moment when American capitalism shall have finally broken down completely and been left helpless in its ignorance and anarchic selfishness, will be able to step in and man the works. To liberals, this idea has always sounded absurd, but who will say that it is entirely fantastic today when the machine is so badly in need of repairs, and one can see no political group in any position of power that has either a sensible plan or even good intentions? I believe that if the American radicals and progressives who repudiate the Marxist dogma and the strategy of the Communist Party still hope to accomplish anything valuable, they must take Communism away from the Communists, and take it without ambiguities, asserting that their ultimate goal is the ownership by the government of the means of production.  If we want to prove the Communists wrong, if we want to demonstrate that the virtue has gone out of American democracy , if we want to confute the Marxist cynicism implied by ‘ economic laws’ the catastrophic outcome of which is, after all, predicted only on an assumption of the incurable swinishness and inertia of human nature – if we seriously want to do this, an American opposition must not be afraid to dynamite the old conceptions and shibboleths* and to substitute new ones as shocking as necessary. Who knows but they may seem less shocking to the ordinary suffering public than to us shibboleth experts ourselves?

When John Dos Passos proposed last summer that what was really needed in the United States was a publicity expert like Ivy Lee to familiarize the public with the idea of Communism and induce people at least to remain neutral towards Communist agitation instead of clapping all the Communists in jail, the suggestion, to some, sounded comic. Yet Dos Passos at once had a letter from a publicity man in San Francisco, who said that the same idea had recently occurred to him and that he would like nothing better than a chance to carry it out. There are some signs that the liberals are having ideas as well as the publicity men: Stuart Chase has said lately that the past year may represent ‘the end of an epoch’ and has offered a set of suggestions for rescuing the economic structure, and John Dewey has just proposed to Senator Norris** that he lead a new political party. The extreme illiberalism of the post-Wilsonian period has had the effect of discouraging liberals. We have gone on complaining and recommending, but with a vigor that has tended to diminish in proportion as we came to be conscious that people were not listening to us. Who knows but, if we spoke out now with confidence and boldness, we might find our public at last?

 

* a belief or custom that is not now considered as important and correct as it was in the past. They still cling to many of the old shibboleths of education.

**  George Norris of Nebraska https://www.senate.gov/artandhistory/history/minute/George_Norris.htm

Roots of the Great Ennui by George Steiner

It is the events of 1789 and 1815 that interpenetrate common, private existence with the perception of historical processes. The levée en masse of the Revolutionary armies was far more than an instrument of long-continued warfare  and social indoctrination. It did more than terminate the old conventions of professional, limited warfare. As Goethe noted acutely on the field at Valmy, populist armies, the concept of a nation under arms, meant that history had become every man’s milieu Henceforth, in Western  culture, each day was to bring news – a perpetuity of crisis, a break with the pastoral silences and uniformity of the eighteenth century made memorable in De Quincy’s account of the mails racing through England with news of the Peninsular Wars. Wherever ordinary men and women looked across the garden hedge they saw bayonets passing. As Hegel completed Phenomenology, which is the master statement of the new density of being, he heard the hoofbeats of Napoleon’s escort passing through the nocturnal street on the way to the Battle of Jena.

We also lack a history of the future tense ( in another context I am trying to show what such a phenomenology of internal grammar would be ). But it is clear that the Revolutionary and Napoleonic decades brought on an overwhelming immanence, a deep, emotionally stressed change in the quality of hope. Expectations of progress, of personal and social enfranchisement, which had formerly had a conventional, often allegoric character, as of a millenary horizon, suddenly moved very close. The great metaphor of renewal, of the creation, as by a second coming of secular grace, of a just, rational city for man, took on the urgent drama of concrete possibility. The eternal ‘tomorrow’ of utopian political vision became, as it were, Monday morning.

 

 We experience something of this dizzying sense of total possibility when reading the decrees of the Convention and of the Jacobin regime: injustice, superstition, poverty are to be eradicated  now, in the next glorious hour. The world is to shed its worn skin a fortnight hence. In the grammar of Saint-Juste the future tense is never more than moments away. If we seek to trace this irruption – it was that violent- of dawn into private sensibility, we need only look to Wordsworth’s  Prelude and to the poetry of Shelley. The crowning statement, perhaps, is to be found in Marx’s economic and political manuscripts of 1844. Not since early Christianity had men felt so near renovation and to the end of night.

The quickening of time, the new vehemence and historicity of private consciousness, the sudden nearness of the messianic future contributed to a marked change in the tone of sexual relations. The evidence is plain enough. It comes as early as Wordsworth ‘Lucy” poems and the penetrating remark on sexual appetite in the 1800 Preface to the Lyrical Ballads. It declares itself from a comparison, even cursory, between Swift’s Journal to Stella and Keats’s letters to Fanny  Brawne. Nothing I know of at an earlier period truly resembles the self-dramatizing, self-castigating eroticism of Hazlitt’s extraordinary Liber Amoris (1832). Many elements are in play: the ‘sexualization’ of the very landscape, making of weather, season, and the particular hour a symbolic restatement of the erotic mood; a compulsion to experience more intimately, to experience sex to the last pitch of nervous singularity, and at the same time to make this experience public. I can make out what must have been contributory causes: the partial emancipation of women and the actual role of a number of them in political life and argument: the breakdown of usages of decorum and formal reticence which had been a part of the caste system of the ancient regime. It is not difficult to see in what ways an intensification and widening of the erotic could be a counterpart to the dynamics of revolution and European conquest. Nevertheless, the phenomena, with its culmination in Wagner’s amalgam of Eros and history, remains complicated and in certain regards obscure. The fact that our own sexuality is distinctly post-romantic, that many of our own conventions stem directly from the revaluation of the erotic in the period from Rousseau to Heine, does not  make analysis any simpler.

But taking these different  strands together, one can say confidently that immense transmutations of value and perception took place in Europe over a time span more crowded, more sharply registered by individual and social sensibility, than any other of which we have a reliable record. Hegel could argue, with rigorous logic of feeling, that history itself was passing into a new state of being, that ancient time was at an end.

What followed was, of course, a long spell of reaction and stasis. Depending on one’s political idiom, one can see it either as a century of repression by a bourgeoisie that had turned the French Revolution and the Napoleonic extravaganza to its own economic advantage, or as a hundred years of liberal gradualism and civilized order. Broken only by convulsive but continued revolutionary spasms in 1830, 1848, and 1871, and by short wars of intensely professional, socially conservative character such as the Crimean and the Prussian Wars, this hundred years’ peace shaped Western society and established the criteria of culture which have, until very recently, been ours.

To many who personally experienced the change, the drop in tension, the abrupt drawing of curtains against the morning, were deeply enervating. It is to the years after Waterloo that we must look for the roots of ‘the great ennui,’ which, as early as 1819, Schopenhauer defined as the corrosive illness of the new age.

What was a gifted man to do after Napoleon? How could organisms bred for the electric air of revolution and imperial epic breathe under the leaden sky of middle-class rule? How was it possible for a young man to hear his father’s tales of the Terror and  Austerlitz and to amble down the placid boulevard to the counting house? The past drove rats’ teeth into the gray pulp of the present; it exasperated, it sowed wild dreams. Of that exasperation comes a major literature.  Musset’s La Confession d’un enfant du siècle  (1835-36). The generation of 1830- was damned by memories of events, of hopes in which it had taken no personal  part. It nursed within ‘un fonds d’incurable tristesse et d’incurable  ennui.’ No doubt there was narcissism in this cultivation, the somber complacency of dreamers who, from Goethe to Turgenev, sought to identify with Hamlet. But the void was real, and the sensation of history gone absurdly wrong. Stendhal is the chronicler of genius of this frustration. He had participated in the insane vitality of the Napoleonic era; he conducted the rest of his life in the ironic guise of a man betrayed. It is a terrible thing to be ‘languissant d’ennuui au plus beau moment de la vie, de seize ans jusqu a vingt’ (Mlle. De La Mole’s condition before she resolves to love Julien Sorel in La Rouge et le noir). Madness, death are preferable to the interminable Sunday and suet of a bourgeois life-form. How can an intellectual bear to feel within himself something of Bonaparte’s genius, something of that demonic strength which led from obscurity to empire, and see before him nothing but the tawdry flatness of bureaucracy? Raskolnikov writes his essay on Napoleon and goes out to kill and old woman.

The collapse of revolutionary hopes after 1815, the brutal deceleration of time and radical expectation left a reservoir of unused turbulent energies. The romantic generation was jealous of its fathers. The ‘antiheroes,’ the spleen-ridden dandies of the world of Stendhal, Musset, Byron, and Pushkin, move through the bourgeois city like condottieri out of work. Or worse, like condottieri meagerly pensioned before their first battle. Moreover, the city itself, once festive with the tocsin of revolution, had become a prison.

For although politics had entered a phase of bland mendacity analyzed by Stendhal in Lucien Leuwen, the economic-industrial growth released by continental war and centralized consciousness of the new nation-states took place exponentially.  The ‘dark Satanic mills’ were everywhere creating the soiled, hybrid landscape which we have inherited. The theme of alienation, so vital to any theory of the crisis of culture, is, as both Hegel and Saint-Simon were among the first to realize, directly related to the development of mass-manufacture. It is in the early and mid-nineteenth century that occur both the dehumanization of laboring men and women in the assembly-line system, and the disassociation between ordinary educated sensibility and the increasingly complex, technological artifacts of daily life. In manufacture and the money market, energies bared from revolutionary action  or war could find outlet and social approval. Such expressions as ‘Napoleons of finance” and ‘captains of industry’ are semantic markers of this modulation.

The immense growth of the monetary-industrial complex also brought with it the modern city, what a later poet was to all la ville tentaculaire – a megalopolis whose uncontrollable cellular division and spread now threatens to choke so much of our lives. Hence the definition of a new, major conflict: that between the individual and the stone sea that may, at any moment, overwhelm him. The urban inferno, with its hordes of faceless inhabitants, haunts the nineteenth-century imagination.

Sometimes the metropolis is a jungle, the crazed tropical growth of Hard Times and Brecht’s Im Dickicht der Stadt. A man must make his mark on its indifferent immensity, or he will be cast off like the rags, the dawn flotsam which obsessed Baudelaire. In his invention of Rastignac, looking down on Paris, challenging the city to mortal combat, Balzac dramatized one of the focal points of the modern crisis. It is precisely from the 1830s onwards that one can observe the emergence of a characteristic ‘counter-dream’ – the vision of a city laid waste, the fantasies of Scythian and Vandal invasion, the Mongol steeds slaking their thirst in the fountain of the Tuileries Gardens. A odd school of painting develops: Pictures of  London, Paris, or Berlin seen as colossal ruins, famous landmarks burnt, eviscerated, or located in a weird emptiness among charred stumps and dead water. Romantic fantasy anticipates Brecht’s vengeful promise that nothing shall remain of the great cities except the winds that blows through them. Exactly a hundred years later, these apocalyptic collages and imaginary drawings of the end of Pompeii were to be our photographs of Warsaw and Dresden. It needs no psychoanalysis to suggest how strong a part of wish-fulfillment there was in these nineteenth-century intimations.

The conjunction of extreme economic-technical dynamism with a large measure of enforced social immobility, a conjunction on which a century of liberal, bourgeois civilization was built, made for an explosive mixture. It provoked in the life of art and of intelligence certain specific, ultimately destructive ripostes. These, in seems to me, constitute the meaning of Romanticism. It is from them that will grow the nostalgia for disaster.

Here I am on familiar ground and can move rapidly.  .  .

 

 

 

Let's Take Another Look by Eric Vuillard

 

After the massacre of Wounded Knee, the Indians eked out a miserable existence on uncultivated and divided territory. Those who had worked for the Wild West Show returned after a few years, but their luck didn’t improve. The Redskins were viewed as the remnants of an old world, and the watchword was now assimilation.

The destruction of a people always happens by degrees, and each phase, in its own way, is innocent of the preceding one. The spectacle which seized upon the Indians in the final moments of their history was  not the least of the violence perpetrated against them. It casts our original consent into oblivion. In every case, the initial infatuation lasted no more than an instant. Then, each time, there followed the same un-containable destruction. And no words were ever able to generate its world of things.

So now let’s look. Yes, let’s look very hard, with all our might. Let’s look at them, from the vantage point of our outrageous ease and prodigality.

And then let’s imagine for a moment – oh, just a brief moment – that everything we have around us, our houses, our furniture, our kit, even our names, our memories, and then our friends, our jobs, everything, absolutely everything could be taken away from us, jeered and confiscated. ‘Oh, of course,’ we say, ‘Yes, yes, we’ve thought about it’, and ‘Obviously we knew about it. ’But it’s all abstract, just words, a hypothesis. Yes, it’s a hypothesis. Other people. A hypothesis. Well, let’s try harder, just a little but harder, to see if we can deduce anything from it. Let’s try telling ourselves, now,  that this hypothesis has been going on for a very long time, in fact, my God, it’s been going on forever.

And the people in this photograph no longer have a home, and most of their memories are gone. For them, it’s not just a hypothesis. Look more closely. Yes, you know them, in fact,  you know them very well, you’ve seen them a hundred times, two hundred times. Oh of course, they’re not exactly the same, not exactly the same as these people, and yet, if you look carefully, you’ve seen them before.

 

Let’s take another look. You don’t just feel a strange unease at the sight of their destitution, you also feel a sort of sympathy. It’s existed since the dawn of time, but where, in God’s name, does this sympathy come from? No one knows. It’s something that courses through your body, your eyes, it takes you by the throat and fills your breast with tears. It’s a strange phenomena, sympathy. We must be little like these poor wretches. Because poor wretches is what they are, always the same frail figures, the same cluster of children, the same rags.

Yes. Let’s take another look at them. At the time their history is coming to an end, and ours is beginning. Ah! It’s both moving and painful to look at them. And if we find it painful, if we feel a dull angst, its because, despite the smile we detect on the man’s face, we know, yes, we know very well that they’re going to die. And because they are going to die, and we know it, sensing without seeing it, we suddenly feel very closer to them, like them; except that we are not actually dying; we hardly ever die.

Let’s look at them: they’re the survivors of Wounded Knee. They must be in some sort of camp, a few days after the massacre, a few hours before the grand spectacle takes hold of them and delivers them up to us. And they look at us: the women, the children and the fellow on the right with his funny fur hat, his sad smile, his sorrowful eyes and his US Army jacket snatched, perhaps by an irony of fate, out of a need to cloth himself.

A photograph is a peculiar thing. Truth lives within it as if it were inseparable from its sign. And, all of a sudden, I seem to see not just these poor wretches, but the very incarnation of poverty – as if this testimony exceeded its occasion. And I say to myself: These are Big Foot’s Miniconjou, and will be to the end of time, they’re the performers in the Wild West Show, they’re poor devils, and they belong to the same family as the people who hold out their hand to us, anywhere we find ourselves, outside the cathedral or McDonald’s. Yes, it’s still the same fellow and the same few women sitting on the ground with the ugly face of poverty.

May the fellow from Dakota forgive us, and if he can, return from his past narrative tense with his beggar’s pouch of worries, where shards of History lock together like jaws. Let us take one last look.

Let us love his sorrow: we share his incomprehension, his children are our own, his funny hat suits us! Let’s take a good look at him. It’s a sleepless night. Whisper to me what I must write. But please don’t show me your face anymore, don’t look at me. The earth sorrows, the body is alone. I can’t see anything now. And there you are, a destitute king because you picked the wrong card.

Introduction to the Cultural Cold War by Frances Stonor Saunders

 

During the height of the Cold War, the U.S. Government committed vast resources to a secret program of cultural propaganda in Western Europe. A central feature of this program was to advance the claim that it did not exist. It was managed, in great secrecy, by America’s espionage arm, the Central Intelligence Agency. The centerpiece of this covert campaign was the Congress for Cultural Freedom, run by CIA agent Michael Josselson from 1950 until 1967. Its achievements – not the least its duration- was considerable. At its peak, the Congress for Cultural Freedom has offices in thirty-five countries, employed dozens of personnel, published over twenty prestige magazines, held art exhibitions, owned a news and features service, organized high-profile international conferences, and rewarded musicians and artists with prizes and public performances. Its mission was to nudge the intelligentsia of Western Europe away from its lingering fascination with Marxism and Communism towards a view more accommodating of ‘the American way.’

Drawing on an extensive, highly influential network of intelligence personnel, political strategists, the corporate establishment, and the old school ties of the Ivy League universities, the incipient CIA started, from 1947, to build a ‘consortium’ whose double task was to inoculate the world against the contagion of Communism and to ease the passage of American foreign policy interests abroad. The result was a remarkably tight network of people who worked alongside the Agency to promote an idea: that the world needed a pax Americana, a new age of enlightenment, and it would be called the American Century.

The consortium the CIA built up –consisting of what Henry Kissinger described as ‘an aristocracy dedicated to the service of this nation on behalf of principles beyond partisanship’- was the hidden weapon in America’s Cold War struggle, a weapon which, in the cultural field, had extensive fallout. Whether they liked it or not, whether they knew it or not, there were few writers, poets, artists, historians, scientists, or critics in postwar Europe whose names were not in some way linked to this covert enterprise. Unchallenged, undetected for over twenty years, America’s spying establishment operated a sophisticated, substantially endowed cultural front in the West, for the West, in the name of freedom of expression. Defining the Cold War  as a ‘battle for men’s minds.’ It stockpiled a vast arsenal of cultural weapons: journals, books, conferences, seminars, art exhibitions, concerts, awards.

Membership of this consortium included an assorted group of former radicals and leftist intellectuals whose faith in Marxism and Communism had been shattered by evidence of Stalinist totalitarianism. Emerging from the Pink Decade of the 1930s, mourned by Arthur Koestler as an ‘abortive revolution of the spirit, a misfired Renaissance, a false dawn of history,’ their disillusionment was attended by a readiness to join in a new consensus, to affirm a new order which would substitute for the spent forces of the past. The tradition of the radical dissenter, where intellectuals took it upon themselves to probe myths, interrogate institutional prerogative, and disturb the complacency of power, was suspended in favor of supporting ‘the American proposition.’ Endorsed and subsidized by powerful institutions, this non-communist group became as much a cartel in the intellectual life of the West as Communism ha been a few years earlier ( and included many of the same people).

‘There came a time .  .  .  when, apparently, life lost the ability to arrange itself,’ says Charlie Citrine, the narrator of Saul Bellow’s Humboldt’s Gift. “It had to be arranged. Intellectuals took this as their job. From say, Machiavelli’s time to our own this arranging  has been one great gorgeous tantalizing misleading disastrous project. A man like Humboldt, inspired, shrewd, nutty, was brimming over with the discovery that the human enterprise, so grand and infinitely varied, has now to be managed by exceptional persons. He was an exceptional person, therefore he was an eligible candidate for power. Well, why not?’ Like so many Humboldts, those intellectuals who had been betrayed by the false idol of communism now found themselves gazing at the possibility of building a new Weimar, an American Weimar. If the government – and its covert action arm, the CIA – was prepared to assist in this project, well, why not?

That former left wingers should have come to be roped together in the same enterprise with the CIA is less implausible than it seems. There was genuine community of interest and conviction between the Agency and those intellectuals who were hired, even if they didn’t know it, to fight the cultural Cold War. The CIA’s influence was not ‘always, or often, reactionary and sinister,’ wrote America’s preeminent liberal historian Arthur Schlesinger Jr. ‘In my experience its leadership was politically enlightened and sophisticated.” This view of the CIA as a haven of liberalism acted as a powerful inducement to collaborate with it – or, if not this, at least to acquiesce to the myth that it was well motivated. And yet this perception sits uncomfortably with the CIA’s reputation as a ruthlessly interventionist and frighteningly unaccountable instrument of American Cold War power. This was the organization that masterminded the overthrow of Premier Mossadegh in Iran in 1953, the ousting of the Arbenz government in Guatemala in 1954, the disastrous Bay of Pigs operation in 1961, the notorious Phoenix Program in Vietnam. It spied on tens of thousands of Americans; harassed democratically elected leaders abroad; plotted assassinations; denied these activities to Congress; and, in the process, elevated the art of lying to new heights. By what strange alchemy, then, did the CIA manage to present itself to high-minded intellectuals like Arthur Schlesinger as the golden vessel of cherished liberalism?

The extent to which America’s spying establishment extended its reach into the cultural affairs of its Western allies, acting as unacknowledged facilitator to a broad range of creative activity, positioning intellectuals and their work like chess pieces to be played in the Great Game, remains  one of the Cold War’s most provocative legacies. The defense mounted by the custodians of the period- which rests on the claim that the CIA’s substantial financial investment came with no strings attached – has yet to be seriously challenged. Amongst intellectual circles in America and Western Europe there persists a readiness to accept as true that the CIA was merely interested in extending the possibilities for free and democratic cultural expression. ‘We simply helped people to say what they would have said anyway,’ goes this ‘blank check’ line of defense. If the beneficiaries of CIA funds were ignorant of the fact, the argument goes, and if their behavior was consequently unmodified, then their independence as critical thinkers could not have been affected.

But official documents relating to the cultural Cold War systematically undermine this myth of altruism. The individuals and institutions subsidized by th CIA were expected to perform as part of a broad campaign of persuasion, of a propaganda war in which ‘propaganda’ was defined as ‘any organized effort or movement to disseminate information or a particular doctrine by means of news, special arguments or appeals designed to influence the thoughts and actions of any given group.’ A vital constituent of this effort was ‘psychological warfare,’ which was defined as ‘the planned use by a nation of propaganda and activities other than combat which communicate ideas and information intended to influence the opinions, attitudes, emotions and behavior of foreign groups in ways that will support the achievement of national aims.’ Further, the ’most effective kind of propaganda’ was defined as the kind where ‘the subject moves in the direction you desire for reasons which he believes to be his own.’ It is useless to dispute these definitions. They are littered across government documents, the données of American postwar cultural diplomacy.

Clearly, by camouflaging its investment, the CIA acted on the supposition that its blandishments would be refused if offered openly. What kind of freedom can be advanced by such deception? Freedom of any kind certainly wasn’t on the agenda in the Soviet Union, where those writers and intellectuals who weren’t sent to the gulags were lassoed into serving the interests of the state. It was of course right to oppose such un-freedom. But with what means? Was there any real justification for assuming that the principles of Western democracy couldn’t be revived in postwar Europe according to some internal mechanism? Or for not assuming that democracy could be more complex than was implied by the landing of American liberalism. To what degree was it admissible for another state to covertly intervene in the fundamental processes of organic intellectual growth, of free debate and the uninhibited flow of ideas? Did this not risk producing, instead of freedom, a kind of ur-freedom, where people think they are acting freely when in fact that are bound to forces over which they have no control?

 

The CIA’s engagement in cultural warfare raises other troubling questions. Did financial aid distort the process by which intellectuals and their ideas were advanced? Were people selected for their positions, rather than on the basis of intellectual merit? What did Arthur Koestler  mean when he lampooned the ‘intellectual academic call-girl circuit’ of intellectual conferences and symposia? Were reputations secured or enhanced by membership of the CIA’s cultural consortium? How many of those writers and thinkers who acquired an international audience for their ideas were really second-raters, ephemeral publicists, whose works were doomed to the basements of secondhand bookstores?

In 1966, a series of articles in the New York Times exposed a wide range of covert actions undertaken by America’s intelligence community. As stories of attempted coups and (mostly botched) political assassinations poured onto the front pages, the CIA came to be characterized as a rogue elephant, crashing through the scrubland of international politics, unimpeded by any sense of accountability. Amidst these more dramatic cloak-and-dagger  exposés came details of how the American government had looked to the cultural Brahmins of the West to lend intellectual weight to its actions.

 

The suggestion that many intellectuals had been animated by the dictates of American policy makers rather than by independent standards of their own generated widespread disgust.. The moral authority enjoyed by the intelligentsia during the height of the Cold War was now seriously undermined and frequently mocked. The ‘consensocracy’ was falling apart, the center could not hold. And as it disintegrated, so the story itself became fragmented, partial, modified – sometimes egregiously – by forces on the right and left who wished to twist its peculiar truths to their own ends. Ironically, the circumstances which made possible the revelations contributed to their real significance becoming obscured. As America’s obsessive anti-Communist campaign in Vietnam brought her to the brink of social collapse, and with subsequent scandals on the scale of the Pentagon Papers and Watergate, it was hard to sustain interest or outrage in the business of Kulturkampf, which in comparison seemed to be fluff on the side.

‘History,’ wrote Archibald MacLeish, ‘is like a badly constructed concert hall, with dead spots where the music can’t be heard.’ This book attempts to record those dead spots. It seeks a different acoustic, a tune other than that played by the official virtuosi of the period. It is a secret history, insofar as it believes in the relevance of the power of personal relationships, of ‘soft’ linkages and collusions, and the significance of salon diplomacy and boudoir politicking. It challenges what Gore Vidal has described as ‘those official fictions that have been agreed upon by all together too many too interested parties, each with his own thousand days in which to set up his own misleading pyramids and obelisks that purport to tell sun time’. Any history which sets out to interrogate these ‘agreed-upon-facts’ must, in Tzvetan Todorov’s words, become ‘an act of profanity. It is not about contributing to the cult of heroes and saints. It’s about coming a close as possible to the truth. It participates in what Max Weber called the ‘disenchantment of the world’; it exists at the other end of the spectrum from idolatry. It’s about redeeming the truth for truth’s sake, not retrieving images that are deemed useful for the present..’