Turncoats, Traitors, and Fellow Travelers: Culture and Politics of the Early Cold War
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In Turncoats, Traitors, and Fellow Travelers: Culture and Politics of the Early Cold War, Arthur Redding traces the historical contours of this manufactured consent by considering the ways in which authors, playwrights, and directors participated in, responded to, and resisted the construction of Cold War discourses. The book argues that a fugitive resistance to the status quo emerged as writers and activists variously fled into exile, went underground, or grudgingly accommodated themselves to the new spirit of the times.
To this end, Redding examines work by a wide swath of creators, including essayists (W. E. B. Du Bois and F. O. Matthiessen), novelists (Ralph Ellison, Patricia Highsmith, Jane Bowles, and Paul Bowles), playwrights (Arthur Miller), poets (Sylvia Plath), and filmmakers (Elia Kazan and John Ford). The book explores how writers and artists created works that went against mainstream notions of liberty and offered alternatives to the false dichotomy between capitalist freedom and totalitarian tyranny. These complex responses and the era they reflect had and continue to have profound effects on American and international cultural and intellectual life, as can be seen in the connections Redding makes between past and present.
Arthur Redding
Arthur Redding is associate professor of English at York University and the author of Raids on Human Consciousness: Writing, Anarchism, and Violence.
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Turncoats, Traitors, and Fellow Travelers - Arthur Redding
TURNCOATS, TRAITORS, AND FELLOW TRAVELERS
TURNCOATS, TRAITORS, AND FELLOW TRAVELERS
Culture and Politics of the Early Cold War
Arthur Redding
www.upress.state.ms.us
The University Press of Mississippi is a member of the Association of
American University Presses.
Copyright © 2008 by University Press of Mississippi
All rights reserved
Manufactured in the United States of America
First printing 2008
∞
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Redding, Arthur F., 1964–
Turncoats, traitors, and fellow travelers : culture and politics of the
early Cold War / Arthur Redding.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-1-60473-005-0 (cloth : alk. paper) 1. American
literature—20th century—History and criticism. 2. Cold War in
literature. 3. Politics in literature. 4. Politics and literature—United
States—History—20th century. 5. Cold War in motion pictures.
6. Politics in motion pictures. I. Title.
PS228.C58R43 2008
810.9’3582825—dc22
2007045717
British Library Cataloging-in-Publication Data available
This book is lovingly dedicated to Natasha Barykina, fellow traveler
CONTENTS
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
CHAPTER ONE
CULTURAL FRONTS
CHAPTER TWO
CLOSET, COUP, AND COLD WAR F. O. Matthiessen’s From the Heart of Europe
CHAPTER THREE
WHAT’S BLACK AND WHITE AND RED ALL OVER?
The Cold War and the Geopolitics of Race
CHAPTER FOUR
WHAT IT TAKES TO BE A MAN
Masculinity, Deviance, and Sexuality
CHAPTER FIVE
THE DREADED VOYAGE INTO THE WORLD
Nomadic Ethics
CHAPTER SIX
FRONTIER MYTHOGRAPHIES
Savagery and Civilization in John Ford
NOTES
WORKS CITED
INDEX
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
This work would not have been possible without the immense support and assistance of a host of friends and allies. Seetha Srinivasan, director the University Press of Mississippi (UPM), initially encouraged me to lasso my ideas into book form. She has provided keen oversight and great encouragement throughout the writing of this work, as have others among the superb staff at University Press of Mississippi, including Walter Biggins and Anne Stascavage. Thanks as well to copyeditor Robert Burchfield. I thank James Smethurst and Bill Mullen, initial readers of the manuscript, for their generous receptiveness to these ideas and for the critical acumen of their responses to my writing, as well as for the inspiring example of their own formidable scholarship in the field.
I am truly indebted to my colleagues at York University, Oklahoma State University, and the University of Silesia. I would like to thank Ross Arthur in particular for his generous managerial assistance and Lauren Dodd for her speedy and capable proofreading.
William Decker and Elizabeth Grubgeld have proven for many years now to be the most loyal of friends and the most trusted of readers. Others who have offered insight, criticism, and support include Jon Beasley-Murray, Vermonja Alston, Tatiani Rapatzikou, Marcus Boon, Leslie Sanders, Lesley Higgins, Jason Sperb, Amanpreet Dhami, Tom Kerr, Eileen Schell, Simona Fojtová, Joan Redding, Douglas Shields Dix (whose Deleuzean readings of Paul Bowles and Jane Bowles have helped to inspire this work), Don Sparling, the late Karla Smith and the entire Smith family, Mischelle Booher, Thadeusz Rachwal, Agnieszka Pantuchowicz, Cary Nelson, Jonathan Arac, Ed Walkiewicz, Christine Bold, and Paul Bové.
My warmest regards, of course, go out to my students in Canada, the United States, and in central and eastern Europe. Many of the ideas herein were hashed out in collaboration with York University graduate students in two seminars on the Cold War and U.S. literature. I am deeply grateful to have had the opportunity to work with so dazzling a group of students, and I am everywhere indebted to their striking responses to the materials. I would like to give special thanks John Dale for his inspired readings of Patricia Highsmith’s work.
Chapter 2 of this book initially appeared as "Closet, Coup, and Cold War: F. O. Matthiessen’s From the Heart of Europe," in boundary 2 33, no. 1 (Spring 2006) (Copyright 2006, by Duke University Press. All rights reserved) and is used by permission of the publisher. A portion of chapter 6 appeared as Frontier Mythographies: Savagery and Civilization in Frederick Jackson Turner and John Ford,
in Literature/Film Quarterly 35, no. 4 (2001). I am grateful to both journals for permission to republish these materials in book form.
Other portions of the book have appeared previously as articles in edited collections in Poland. Some of my comments on John Ford were translated by Pawel Jędrzejko and appeared in Polish in Wielky tematy literatury amerikańskiej (Great Themes in American Literature), Vol. 2, edited by Teresa Pyzik (University of Silesia Press, 2004). I thank both Pawel and Teresa for helping me to hone my ideas on the American West and for their graciousness in hosting me while I was a Fulbright lecturer in Poland during the 2001–2 academic year. Kind thanks are due as well to Kasia Więckowska, editor (along with Anna Branach-Kallas) of The Nation of the Other (Copernicus University Press, 2004) and (with Edyta Lorek-Jezińska) of Corporeal Inscriptions: Representations of the Body in Cultural and Literary Texts and Practices (Copernicus University Press, 2005). Essays on Ralph Ellison and Paul Bowles that formed the basis of my arguments in chapters 3 and 4 were published in these two volumes, respectively.
A section of chapter 3 on W. E. B. Du Bois was first delivered as a paper at the May 2006 American Literary Association conference in San Francisco; I am grateful to Russ Pottle of the Society for American Travel Writing for his ongoing enthusiasm for my work. Portions of the introduction were delivered as a talk at the first North American conference on American radicalism, hosted by the Journal for the Study of Radicalism in January 2007. I thank the host and coeditor, Ann Larabee, for her enthusiasm about the project. An earlier version of the pages on Arthur Miller was delivered as a talk at the Canadian Association for American Studies conference on American exceptionalism in October 2006, where I was particularly lucky to have the opportunity to discuss my work with Deborah Madsen. My thoughts on On the Waterfront formed the basis of a talk at the American Studies Association annual meeting in October 2006, and those on Jane Bowles and Paul Bowles were delivered at the Popular Culture Association Conference in April 2004.
I have received invaluable financial support from York University in the form of a start-up research grant as well as university and Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada (SSHRCC) travel grants. Much of my thinking was formulated at the 2006 School of Criticism and Theory (SCT) at Cornell University, and I am indebted to SCT director Dominick LaCapra, and to Brent Hayes Edwards and my colleagues in his seminar on black intellectuals. Many of my concerns were likewise shaped during sojourns in eastern and central Europe. The project was initially conceived during a stay at the John F. Kennedy Center for American Studies at the Freie Universität in Berlin, and I am grateful as well to the Fulbright Foundation for lectureships in Slovakia and in Poland, to the Salzburg Seminar in American Studies, to the Gender Studies program at Central European University in Budapest, and to the Minsk Summer School in Globalization at the now politically defunct European Humanities University in Minsk.
TURNCOATS, TRAITORS, AND FELLOW TRAVELERS
CHAPTER ONE
CULTURAL FRONTS
The FBI knows that the bigger job lies with the free world’s intellectuals—the philosophers, the thinkers wherever they may be, the professors and scientists and scholars and students. These people who think, the intellectuals if you please, are the ones who can and must convince men that communism is evil. The world’s intellectuals themselves must see that communism is the deadliest enemy that intellectualism and liberalism ever had. They must be as willing to dedicate themselves to this cause as the communists have been to dedicate themselves to their cause.
—J. EDGAR HOOVER, Masters of Deceit
While Turncoats, Traitors, and Fellow Travelers comprises a relatively modest inquiry into the works and careers of a mere handful of mostly radical, mostly American, intellectuals during the formative years of the Cold War, between 1947 and 1963, I think it important to begin with a brief speculative outline of what might be at stake in this or any work of committed historical and cultural inquiry. Envisaged as a critical study of diverse but significant figures, this book investigates how their works variously accommodated, refused, refigured, or interrupted the increasingly globalized cultural and political logic of containment
instantiated and performed by Cold War ideologies, a logic that decisively pitted an abstract and often nebulous freedom
against a demonized totalitarian tyranny.
In the late 1940s, a persistent and ubiquitous psycho-political apparatus (which is designated, in gross historiographical shorthand, McCarthyite) was spawned, which was designed to disarm, swallow up, and, most remarkably, render complicit oppositional discourses via a pervasive either/or logic. What took place in the late 1940s and early 1950s involved a rapid diminishment and subsequent eclipse of sexual, aesthetic, and political alternatives: the manufacture of consent, to apply Noam Chomsky and Edward Herman’s resonant phrase, on a bodily, national, and global scale. This consensus, which should in no way be viewed as an ironclad system of repression, can best be understood as a symptomatic but highly contested cultural logic emerging at a distinct historical juncture—a logic, I argue, that Cold War texts variously perform, critique, and betray.
Thus Turncoats, Traitors, and Fellow Travelers considers significant (and lesser known) cultural figures and how they participated, responded to, and resisted the construction of emergent discourses of the Cold War around and after 1948.¹ As Elaine Tyler May, Alan Nadel, Stephen Whitfield, and numerous other scholars have documented, the Cold War was unique in the way cultural productions (Hollywood, publishing, television, the fine arts), social institutions (the church, the academy), and practices of everyday personal life (via policing of sexuality and gender roles, for example, or the reorganization of social life in the suburbs), as well as political ideologies and institutions, were enlisted in the production of consensus. This Cold War consensus made manifest a seemingly hegemonic, American, and nationally unified culture devoted to fostering the global spread of what Frances Stonor Saunders has termed freedomism,
a culture marked by a remarkable, if spurious, sense of consensus, and a culture that rewarded conformity. And yet as Daniel Bell points out in The End of Ideology: On the Exhaustion of Political Ideas in the Fifties, one of the seminal contemporary works to theorize the postwar condition, the curious fact, perhaps, is that no one in the United States defends conformity. Everyone is against it, and probably always was
(35). My own work seizes upon this paradox in order to trace out the historical contours of the culture of consent and contestation during the early years of the Cold War by critically examining a number of key thinkers and writers who understood their work to be politically and socially engaged. I argue that a fugitive culture, in part complicit but largely and in complex ways resistant, emerged as various popular front
writers and activists fled into exile, went underground, or grudgingly accommodated themselves to the new order. Further, I contend that this complex of responses had and continues to have profound effects on American and international cultural and intellectual life.
In revisiting in chapter 3 such a fellow traveler as W. E. B. Du Bois, for example, whose work so compellingly elaborates the virtues of necessary alienation, a writing and a traveling seized, so to speak, and likewise mobilized by and within the historical juncture of McCarthyite repression, I aim to unleash the fugitive powers and potentials of writing against the grain. Cultural McCarthyism, moreover, is best understood not as hysterical deviation, excess, or exceptionalism, which was to be followed by a return to political sanity; rather, McCarthyism is most productively understood to have formed a vanguard experimental technology of repression ideologically licensed to kill what Michael Denning has documented as the Cultural Front
of the 1930s and 1940s, a period marked by labor activism and artistic commitment to the workers’ cause and by the increased … participation of working-class Americans in the world of culture and the arts
(xvii) and an inclusive expansion of the culture industries and educational institutions. Insofar as the Du Bois who has come down to us has been politically bowdlerized, this effort was a success; insofar as he resisted the clampdown in his own writing and work, it points to the persistence of a complex of cultural alternatives—closeted, fugitive, exiled, suicidal, but everywhere and variously resistant—linking the struggles in which he was engaged to our own today.
My terrain of investigation is the nexus of emergent social technologies of ideological coercion and philosophies of consent within cultural production, and consequently targets what Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) director J. Edgar Hoover astutely understood to be the overarching struggle of the period: the minds as much as the hearts of the intellectuals if you please,
whose work was to prove so important for the manifold ways in which it massaged the consciousness of the baby boomers. It is not merely that I want to add my voice to those calling for a reinvigorated or revisionist understanding of the complexity and variety of American intellectual and cultural production, as I assuredly do, or simply to accentuate the radical emphasis and ongoing vitality of those traditions, which I also hope to do; nor, finally, will I insist too vocally that the lives and works and struggles of such midcentury intellectuals as Du Bois, Sylvia Plath, F. O. Matthiessen, C. L. R. James, Howard Fast, Ralph Ellison, Jane Bowles, Paul Bowles, John Ford, Patricia Highsmith, Jim Thompson, or Arthur Miller will prove illustrative for contemporary writers and thinkers today and in the coming century, though I obviously believe that to be the case as well. While I will, en route, generate interpretations of their works and provide salient biographical detail as necessary, I do so in an effort to interrogate the ways in which cultural formations were embedded in and responsive to—actively participated in, in short—the rapidly changing social and political patterns of postwar American life and around the globe. In turn, then, I want to consider how such changes redefined the place, the power, and the very substance of culture and knowledge in ways that distinctively shaped the ambivalent terrain on which contemporary endeavors are carried out—to explore alternative, even underground, routes that may have gotten us from there and then
to here and now.
As Cary Nelson has claimed, for several decades the Cold War laid out the institutional arena and the philosophical biases of literary studies. In his now classic revisionist recovery of the radical dimensions of modern poetry, Repression and Recovery, Nelson reminds us that during the Joseph McCarthy era, many people destroyed their copies of political books and magazines from the 1930s. The institution of literary studies cooperated and eliminated the names of political poets from the ongoing conversation of the discipline. Like the leveling movement of the sea, the weight of our cultural memory closed over this part of our heritage, turning it into a shadowed place where nothing could be seen. Only a few books worked against this tendency. Literary studies as a whole instead devoted itself to establishing the limited canon of modernism
(9–10), and, I would add, to securing a liberal vision of American studies. Consequently, Nelson argues, the ongoing labor of cultural history, while keeping faith with the times and the texts it interrogates, will also recognize the limits of objective rigor and highlight our own investments: Literary history is never an innocent process of recovery. We recover what we are culturally and psychologically prepared to recover, and what we ‘recover’ we necessarily rewrite, giving it meanings that are inescapably contemporary, giving it a new discursive life in the present
(11). What follows in this study, consequently, is less a bona fide work of historicist scholarship than a highly selective, interlinked, and, I hope, provocative set of readings, alert to the pendulous mythic weight of received and revisionist wisdom, the aim of which is to pry open the complex of muted, suppressed, wayward, or ghostly potentialities in the texts and annals. In each chapter, for example, I gesture in my comments on the contemporary scene, even as I realize how rapidly the present dims. If nothing else, I hope to contest the narrative that perceives the Cold War as historically inevitable or necessary, and in each work I read, I highlight those aspects of the materials that resist accommodation to prevailing sensibilities, then and today.
To begin, we can isolate the cultural fronts on which many of the battles between freedom and totalitarianism were imagined by Hoover and others to have been fought. The postwar economic boom decisively shaped contemporary American cultural life in a variety of ways. The most glaring example of this transformation is the rapid expansion of mass consumer culture to a hitherto unimaginably large middle-class audience, an audience that, early on, was imagined to be more or less consolidated in its tastes but would prove increasingly disparate in its makeup. As Andrew Ross has argued, the temporary success
of the postwar political and cultural settlement, often referred to as the age of consensus, which established liberal pluralism as the ideal model of a fully democratic classless society,
depended on enlisting the cultural authority of intellectuals
(42). As Ross has documented, intellectuals of that generation who took seriously the task of gauging and promoting the health of the national culture displayed great anxiety in the face of an expanding popular culture. In his survey of the same field, David Cochran notes there is some irony in the spectacle of such ex-leftists
as Clement Greenberg or Dwight Macdonald seizing upon mass culture as a means of maintaining a critical stance toward American society, seeing it as a major domestic threat to Americans’ freedom
(9). And yet just as the intellectual ambivalence toward popular culture implies that there was, paradoxically enough, a surprising amount of dissensus within American liberalism of the 1950s, so too can we understand popular culture as both a mechanism of and a threat to the hegemony of consensus.
Television, for example, is a Cold War cultural technology, which in the 1950s both propagated and certified the intertwined values of consumerism, domesticity, hetero-normativity,² racial homogenization, suburban lifestyles, and the like, as well as contested the self-same values, as Thomas Doherty has convincingly and exhaustively demonstrated in Cold War, Cool Medium. As a designated and dominating technology of propaganda, video transmission was immensely more potent a cultural collaborator to hegemony than anything previously imagined, yet it would also utter defiance and encourage resistance. The Cold War and the cool medium worked out an elastic arrangement, sometimes constricting but ultimately expanding the boundaries of free expression and relaxing the credentials for inclusion
(Doherty 3); further, television would prove instrumental to the toppling of McCarthy himself as well as contribute to the civil rights movement, feminism, and the opposition to the Vietnam War. Ultimately, for better or worse, television and its video and digital offspring sowed the seeds of the market revolutions of the 1960s, discursively shaped the financial and labor revolutions of 1970s post-Fordism,³ were instrumental in bringing about the collapse of single-party rule in the Eastern bloc states in 1989 and after, and spread and publicized the digital and financial revolutions of the 1990s, thus decisively manipulating the media stylizations and migratory patterns of diasporic cosmopolitan agency, as Arjun Appadurai and others have testified. Popular culture both disseminated consensus and worked to undermine it. The Cold War, then, came to form the horizon of collective and personal expressions of self-imagination and understanding. If, as Alan Nadel has expeditiously argued, the Cold War demonstrates the power of large cultural narratives to unify, codify, and contain—perhaps intimidate is the best word—the personal narratives of its population
(4), it remains an open question whether and how such ideological containment techniques will take.
The self-same ambivalence, the tension between accommodation and resistance, can be isolated in other cultural technologies of the time, and I highlight how it courses through a number of the individual works that I examine. A similarly tangled complex of paradoxes between an elitist and liberal defense of highbrow culture, on the one hand, and popularizing and democratizing tendencies of the culture industries, on the other, can be witnessed in American institutions of higher education. In his important opening chapter of Politics of Knowledge, Richard Ohmann has charted how American universities, and English departments in particular, were substantially remade … along the lines of a cold war blueprint
(2).⁴ The national security concerns of the Cold War were one legitimating factor in the great expansion and democratization of the American academy after the Second World War; if the GI Bill was designed to be a reward to returning servicemen and women for having pulled their weight in the global struggle against fascism, it also recognized the necessity of training and enlisting a huge number of scientific technocrats as well as humanists in the fight against worldwide Communism. The southern aristocratic-Jeffersonian scholar John Crowe Ransom would repeatedly call for the professionalization
of the discipline of literary scholarship, as in his pointedly entitled early (1937) essay, Criticism, Inc.
⁵ After the war, Ransom oversaw the institutional spread of the New Criticism among English departments. The New Criticism advocated techniques of close readings for analyzing a literary genre as esoteric as lyric poetry, techniques that more or less anyone could learn. Students required very little cultural capital to mount the close textual readings that were pointedly dismissive of biographical, social, political, and historical concerns. Part of the expansion and rationalization of the American university system during this period involved the full-scale transformation of the humanities into bastions of professionalization and, as Ohmann documents, commercialization, and the New Criticism itself involved a distinctly Weberian rationalization of both textual analysis and pedagogical technique. Because of the older popular front alliance between labor and literature,⁶ it was deemed even more necessary to engage those in English departments and other humanities programs in the work of uncoupling radical labor from intellectual production, as a burgeoning generation of undergraduate students used college education to lift themselves out of the working class; they had to be trained to think of themselves as middle-class professionals and organization
men and women rather than as workers.
I will flavor my own readings, then, with claims that the forcible and voluntary dismantling of the radical Left during the early years of the Cold War proceeded in part by way of prizing apart the sphere of culture from the sphere of work and organized activism, by separating the increasingly professional
fields of culture and knowledge production from the fields and factories; a corollary to this process was the redefinition of leisure into entertainment, and an acceleration and expansion of the channels of circulation of cultural commodities to the point where they came to form the substratum of subjective consumer identity: Americans became, in the second half of the twentieth century, the culture they consumed, and through cultural consumption produced themselves as free.
But the first step would be to set thinkers and workers at odds with each other. Much of the literature of the early 1950s, uncoincidentally, depicted the struggles involved in this effort by setting their plots in English departments; the denouement of Mary McCarthy’s 1952 satire, The Groves of Academe, for example, involves a poet of the masses
hitchhiking to a conference on the campus of the experimental
Jocelyn College, where he betrays the fact that the novel’s protagonist, the persecuted, blacklisted, and self-aggrandizing Joyce scholar Henry Mulcahy, had never been truly committed to the struggle: He [Mulcahy] was one of those birds that are more Communist than the Communists in theory, but you’ll never meet them on the picket line. A weird, isolated figure, with a talent for self-dramatization
(246). Keogh, the proletarian poet and self-styled free spirit in the vagabond minstrel tradition of Woody Guthrie, is, for his part, merely disappointed that he will not be offered steady employment at Jocelyn: careerism always trumps bohemianism. The comic twist of plot is that Mulcahy never was a Communist, and he loses his job simply because he is a negligent teacher, not because of a political vendetta. He can, nonetheless, parade his seeming political persecution to his own advantage by enlisting the sympathy of his liberal colleagues. Mary McCarthy, whose Trotskyite inclinations hardened rather easily into Cold War anti-Stalinism,⁷ aimed to deflate the sententiousness surrounding the campus blacklist; even so, in the chapter depicting departmental members debating whether a Marxist should be allowed space in an institution devoted to academic freedom, the novel seems to endorse the dominant opinion that membership in the Communist Party disqualified one: Intellectual freedom—that is the usual point, isn’t it? Can a Communist under discipline have intellectual freedom? We hear that they cannot, that they are under strict orders to promote their infamous doctrine; their minds are not free as ours are
(104).
The rather specious line of thinking expressed here is symptomatic of what Frances Stonor Saunders, in her remarkable and damning diagnosis of Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) infiltration into cultural production, terms the ideology of freedomism.
⁸ She defines this useful concept, which I deploy at several junctures in my own study, variously as a narcissism of freedom, which elevated doctrine over tolerance for heretical views
(415–16), and as "a kind of ur-freedom, where people think they are acting freely, where in fact they are bound to forces over which they have no control" (5). According to a logic that might delight Stanley Fish,⁹ one particular point of view is unequivocally forbidden in the very name of freedom. Further, the academics quarreling over the issue are almost willfully deceived insofar as they understand themselves to be debating abstract principles rather than partisan politics. The blacklisting of radical campus intellectuals during the period had nothing to do with protecting rights to academic freedom; on the contrary, as Ellen Schrecker and other historians have demonstrated, the blacklist was part of a broader effort to enlist and align American higher education to the quite specific cause of the declared national interest: defeating Russia. McCarthy’s book, like other campus novels of the time,¹⁰ takes a somewhat churlish delight in exposing the pomposity, naïveté, and hypocrisy of self-interested academics; the one character who survives her mockery turns out to be the moral hero of the novel, the liberal college president, Maynard Hoar. McCarthy deliberately apes the late style of Henry James, down to the very multidimensional perspectives of her sentence rhythms, and Hoar emerges as her ideal of an exemplary expansive, refined, self-abnegating, and generous—quite Jamesian, that is—consciousness. Unexpectedly, but inevitably, he resigns at the book’s conclusion. McCarthy’s