Robert W. Klein/AP Photo
Mario Savio, leader of the Berkeley Free Speech Movement, is restrained by police as he walks onto the platform at the University of California’s Greek Theatre in Berkeley, December 7, 1964.
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.
