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A NEWSLETTER WITH AN EYE ON POLITICAL MEDIA

Race, Vietnam, and the New Left in Mid-Century
George Scialabba discusses the limits of Louis Menand's new tome on
America in the Cold War era

I'm about three-quarters of the way through Louis Menand's 880-page
The Free World: Art and Thought in the Cold War
, and I
lack the vocabulary to say how impressive I find its scholarly range and
ambition as well as the fairness and sympathy the author shows for his
subjects. (My partner says she is really sick of me reading my Kindle at
night and then stopping to tell her all about what I just read.) There
are a few parts of the book I feel qualified to judge, even a few that
I've written about in my own books. In each of these, however, I've
still learned something, because Menand has a gift I don't-yes, I
know, many such gifts. But this is the one where he allows his subjects
to have their say, unimpeded by his own views and prejudices. If you
find yourself confusing the "Being" in Heidegger's Being and Time
with Sartre's version in Being and Nothingness, or if you weren't
certain whether "[t]he idea that Abstract Expressionism dominated the
art world either domestically or internationally [was] a myth produced
by a Cold-War-within-the-Cold-War argument about American cultural
imperialism," then this is the book for you.

As implied above, I wanted to write about the book. I could argue with a
few things in order to make it interesting, and I started to feel a
responsibility to do so when the first two reviews I read were
ideologically driven

attempted takedowns
.
Then I read an essay about the book by George Scialabba in the May 2021
issue of The Baffler
, which-like
so many reviews I've read over the decades by George-said what I had
in mind better than I might have. Menand's sympathy for his subjects,
which is evident in his discussion of the ambitions and beliefs of the
New Left (which was excerpted in The New Yorker, here
),
bent over a little too far backwards for my taste. Having read George
for decades in numerous publications ,
I expected he would be more sympathetic to Menand's view than I am (or
was in my history of postwar American liberalism
).
So, when I asked him if he had more to say for Altercation readers, I
suggested he focus on that part of Menand's argument. He was generous
enough to send back the below:

The Free World: Art and Thought in the Cold War will undoubtedly become
a standard work on mid-20th-century America, and it should. The book's
range, from philosophy and social theory to the economics of the nascent
rock-and-roll and paperback industries, along with dozens of in-depth
profiles of important figures from high and popular culture, is
breathtaking. Menand's judgments are usually right, and his prose is
clear, often elegant. But the book is not flawless, and I'd like to
take this opportunity to enter a few reservations.

Menand seems to have conceived a dislike for Irving Howe, a particular
favorite of mine. Combined with what I would diagnose as a touch of
wokeness, it results in several misjudgments. Howe's essay "Black
Boys and Native Sons" (1963) was a long, painstaking, and subtle
evaluation of African American fiction from Richard Wright to James
Baldwin, including Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man. Though the essay
devoted only a few pages to Ellison, and praised him to the skies
("brilliant but flawed"; "Ellison writes with an ease and humor
that are now and again simply miraculous"; "Ellison has an abundance
of that primary talent without which neither craft nor intelligence can
save a novelist"; "his scenes rise and dip with tension, his people
bleed, his language sings. No other writer has captured so much of the
hidden gloom and surface gaiety of Negro life"; among other
compliments), he also ventured a criticism. The novel ended, he judged,
with a "sudden, unprepared, and implausible assertion of unconditioned
freedom," which seemed to take insufficient account of the stifling
unfreedom portrayed with such overwhelming intensity by Richard
Wright's Native Son.

Menand scoffs that this supposed assertion of unconditioned freedom
emanates from the sewers, where the Invisible Man is living at the end
of the novel (though the character's physical location is hardly
decisive), and goes on to describe Howe's essay as "patronizing"
and "condescending," though it's anything but. I can only account
for Menand's annoyance as the expression of a very 21st-century
sensibility that it is somehow inappropriate for a white critic to
criticize a Black novelist, however cogently.

Toward Kennedy, Johnson, and Nixon, Menand is a bit more indulgent.
"American presidents who pursued a policy of engagement in Vietnam
were not imperialists. They genuinely wanted a free and independent
South Vietnam, and the gap between that aspiration and the reality of
the military and political situation in that country turned out to be
unbridgeable." As an explanation of the Vietnam War, this is woeful.
It is true that the United States never intended to occupy and annex
Vietnam, any more than it occupied and annexed Iran, Congo, Guatemala,
Chile, or any of the dozens of other countries whose governments it
subverted, overtly or covertly. The United States is not primarily a
territorial empire. It is a commercial/financial empire, an empire of
freely moving capital, foreign direct investment, and minimally
regulated and repatriated profits, unhindered and untaxed; of
"free-trade agreements" that load investors with protections and
strip governments of rights; and of free, friendly training programs
that teach local police and militaries that union organizers, human
rights workers, liberation theology-infected priests, and even
literacy tutors are the enemy.

And global empires play a long game. Clever people in the 1960s and
'70s used to point out that since Vietnam was a poor country with few
resources, the American intervention could not possibly be
self-interested. This was not clever enough. What the United States
accomplished in Indochina was a demonstration. If even an economically
and geopolitically insignificant region that defied the United States
could elicit such extraordinary savagery in response, imagine the fate
of a more important nation that tried to dispense with American economic
tutelage. Leftists in Thailand, Indonesia, and the Philippines were put
on notice, and generals in those countries rejoiced.

Menand's coverage of the civil rights movement and Black protest is
generally full and generous; his chapter on the New Left is shorter,
though mostly sympathetic. There are detailed sections on the CIA's
involvement with the National Student Association and other cultural
organizations; the Berkeley Free Speech Movement; and the drafting of
the Port Huron Statement; as well as profiles of Mario Savio and Tom
Hayden. C. Wright Mills makes a few appearances but is one of the few
characters in the book to whom Menand does not do justice, I'd say.
The ten pages devoted to the CIA/NSA relationship are very entertaining,
but I would rather have had five more pages about Mills and five about
Herbert Marcuse or Edward Abbey. And there is next to nothing about the
New Left's political strategy and evolution. About the issue that kept
the New and Old Lefts apart-and though their unity would hardly have
sparked a revolution, it might have protected the younger people from
continual harassment by the FBI-he has only this to say: "The
students did not think of themselves as pro-Communist. They thought of
themselves as anti-anti-Communist." True enough, but thereby might
have hung a long and interesting tale.

It would be foolish to expect to agree with everything in so large and
ambitious a book, and ungrateful to make too much of one's
disagreements. I hope the reader will immerse her/himself in The Free
World and perhaps, on encountering the passages I've discussed here,
will give my criticisms at least a fleeting thought. -George Scialabba

Odds and Ends

* I thought this nutty column by Lee Smith

in Tablet was the craziest thing I'd ever read in a publication that
does not admit to being fully in the tank for Donald Trump and his
fellow (wannabe) fascist lunatics, until I remembered it's not even
the craziest thing ever to appear in Tablet
.
I'll let Jeffery Goldberg tell you about that one

(lest we encourage more such articles with additional clicks).

* I happened upon excerpts from what looks to have been a terrific
tribute to Al Green doing what nobody does better, with Bonnie Raitt,
Joss Stone, Michael McDonald, and Hall & Oates, among others. Here they
are doing "Love and Happiness " and
"Let's Stay Together ."
These-together with the 50th anniversary of Philadelphia International
Records (celebrated this week by Terry Gross on Fresh Air
)-led
me to search for one of the most moving performances I've ever seen.
Here are Green, Chuck Jackson, Ben E.
King, and Teddy Pendergrass at the Apollo in 1993. Try not to cry.

* And finally, happy anniversary to the release of this album
, June 2, 1978, three painful years after
Born to Run. I don't think I've ever waited so long for
anything-or at least anything I can mention here.

See you next week.

~ ERIC ALTERMAN

Become A Member of The American Prospect Today!

Eric Alterman is a CUNY Distinguished Professor of English at Brooklyn
College, an award-winning journalist, and the author of 11 books, most
recently Lying in State: Why Presidents Lie-and Why Trump Is Worse
(Basic, 2020). Previously, he wrote The Nation's "Liberal Media"
column for 25 years. Follow him on Twitter @eric_alterman

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