American Experiment

by James Macgregor Burns

  By the 1940s Niebuhr could best be described as a liberal realist who was faithful to his earlier Social Gospel compassion in seeking to push the Roosevelt and Truman Administrations further to the left, in the process taking active leadership in Americans for Democratic Action and other liberal groups. At the same time he took a militant stand against Soviet expansionism and left-wing dogmatics. The old tensions and ambivalences remained. During the war he had hoped that “the companionship in a common purpose” with Russia would persuade the Soviets “to disavow political forms and fanaticisms which outrage standards of freedom established in the Western world.” This was the kind of “liberal illusion” that Niebuhr at other times denounced. He inveighed against American pride and self-righteousness but he also educated a rising generation of politicians in “realistic,” hard-nosed politics—in the notion, according to Richard W. Fox, that “moral men had to play hardball.”

  By the 1950s Niebuhr had reached the height of his fame. “He was the father of us all,” George Kennan said of him. The ADA in a formal resolution named him its “spiritual father.” The theologian’s words excited so many agnostics, backsliders, and heretics that someone proposed a new group, “atheists for Niebuhr.” How to account for this extraordinary influence? The answer lay less in Niebuhr’s own ideological “whirligig” over the years than in the power of his theology of human nature. Whatever his current credal passion, it was informed by his biblical awareness of original sin, but sin now armed by technology with new destructive power, his rejection of Jeffersonian “illusions” for a Dostoevskian recognition of human evil, his sensitivity to human alienation, anxiety, and the “dizziness of freedom,” his constant reminders of pride, aggressiveness, sinfulness. Always sin—sin as the “narcosis of the soul.”

  Audiences would never forget the sight of this man behind pulpit or rostrum, his bald pate gleaming as he pitched his hawklike face forward, his words tumbling out as his whole body seemed to weave and thrust, while his listeners tried frantically to scribble down his dazzling epigrams and polemical outbursts. His written words also had a stunning impact; for Harvey Cox his first reading of Moral Man and Immoral Society, gulped down in one sitting, was an intense revelation that made him “an instant Niebuhrian.” But when the sermons and books were digested, the question remained whether Niebuhr had done much more than clothe liberal realism in a powerful theological frame without resolving the ultimate in his paradoxes—the tension between liberal compassion, hopes and dreams, and hardheaded realism. Was Niebuhr simply one more example of the great Tocquevillian failure in American intellectuals—the failure to connect practical expedient politics informed by human possibility and limitation to lofty but explicit goals that might challenge the best in humankind?

  No more than Morgenthau or the others did Niebuhr take on the toughest intellectual task of all: to explore the dimensions of liberty, the structure of freedom, the ambivalences of equality—and the tension among these values—and to link these with the strengths and weaknesses of American institutions, politics, and leadership. What was desperately needed in postwar America was analysis of the intervening linkages between ends and means, but this would have called for an analysis of political parties and electoral processes and public opinion and governmental structures—analysis hardly conducive to evangelical sermonizing and radical rhetoric. It was this failure that—granted the empirical richness and political wisdom of Lippmann and Kennan, Morgenthau and Niebuhr—set them a rung below the intellectual leadership of the 1780s. The Framers had crafted a constitution that superbly fixed their goals of individual liberty to concrete governmental institutions and electoral processes—so superbly that leadership in the 1950s still had to operate through their centuries-old system in seeking to reach twentieth-century goals.

  Nor did these four political analysts—in even sharper contrast with the Framers in their time—hold much sway over foreign, even European, opinion. Kennan, a visiting professor at Oxford in 1957-58, lectured for the BBC on “Russia, the Atom and the West.” The stoutly anticommunist newspaper Le Figaro ran Lippmann columns. Lippmann indeed had a fan in General de Gaulle, who found Le Crépuscule des démocraties—the French edition of The Public Philosophy—full of “rare perceptions,” mainly because the two men shared strong doubts about the equation of democracy with parliamentarism and the “usurpation of popular sovereignty by professional politicians,” in de Gaulle’s words. But in general the ideas of the four were hardly exportable, conditioned as those ideas were by America’s geopolitical worldview.

  Other things American, however, were most exportable. Europeans found their continent awash in American advertising and consumer goods. Turn the corner near Beethoven Strasse in Amsterdam or push your way through Piccadilly Circus or parade down the Champs-Elysées and you could hardly escape the ads for Kent cigarettes or Coca-Cola or Ford cars. Or escape the products themselves in the shops—Maxwell House coffee and Sea & Ski suntan lotion and Heinz tomato ketchup and Revlon lipstick. American cars seemed to be conquering European streets and mores, crowding highways, requiring car parks, changing suburban and recreation patterns.

  Americans were exporting their corporations along with their goods. In the late fifties some two hundred American companies a year were settling in Belgium, Holland, and Prance, and about the same number in Britain. These enterprises employed tens of thousands of Americans and Europeans. Businessmen and politicians denounced the invaders for paying higher wages and salaries and for “disruption of orderly marketing.” American loans, or American management practices, or American competition would make Britain—or France or Italy or Belgium—the “49th State.” The Yankee traders, moreover, were taking back European art and other treasures. A London antique shop featured in its window a bristling sign: “Americans are not served.”

  Other Europeans fought back in ways known to old cultures. Despite much advertising, some American products simply could not make a go of it: Campbell soups had trouble competing in the home of famous potages; the British did not take to motherly Betty Crocker and her cake mixes; General Mills tried to market Cheerios but Londoners stuck with their cornflakes and their kippers. Europeans attacked American economic and cultural “imperialism”: the Marshall Plan as a “dollar noose,” American loans as the work of a “shabby moneylender,” American managers as crass and unknowing, American GIs as “overpaid, oversexed, and over here.” For some Americans the height of indignity was a report by a Russian, the Soviet writer Ilya Ehrenburg, after a trip to the States that Americans suffered from “spiritual standardization”—“the same houses, the same furniture, the same crockery.”

  No place on the globe, critics complained, escaped “Coca-colonization.” Arthur Koestler noted: “The motorbus which carries the traveller at 5 A.M. from Bangkok airport to the center of the capital of Thailand has a loudspeaker through which American crooners purr at him, and makes him wonder whether his journey was really necessary. The Arabian desert is ploughed by Cadillacs, and the exhibition of Eskimo handicrafts at the airport of Anchorage, Alaska, bears the same hallmark of the Late Woolworth Period as the idols of Krishna, made of plastic, which are worshipped in Indian homes.”

  How could the “other” America be presented abroad—the good America, the America of books and music, of the Bill of Rights and representative government, especially at a time when the Kremlin was reputed to be spending half a billion dollars a year on propaganda? This was the job of the United States Information Agency, the successor to a series of agencies going back to the wartime propaganda units. By the end of the decade the USIA was running a wide range of information and cultural activities— books, films, lectures, radio programs, exhibits, student and teaching exchanges—through 200 posts in over 80 countries. No agency was more vulnerable politically both at home and abroad; while young European radicals were assaulting overseas libraries from the outside, McCarthy’s men were doing so from the inside. Some overseas librarians hid books by Tom Paine and o
ther radicals; a few timid souls actually burned books— only about a dozen, but enough to touch burning memories of the Nazis. “For the free world outside the U.S.,” wrote a Canadian journalist, “McCarthyism is not just a spectacle. It is a tragedy.”

  McCarthy’s assault on the Bill of Rights symbolized the USIA’s broader problem. Which America, what kind of America, should it seek to present abroad—America in all its variety, its freedoms and oppressions, its high culture and its barbarism, its noble principles and its often egregious practices? “France was a land, England was a people,” Scott Fitzgerald had written, “but America, having still about it that quality of an idea, was harder to utter.” America was liberty, individual rights, Freedom—these were the foundation stones. But then there was that spectacle of the long-tolerated McCarthy.…

  By the 1950s private philanthropic foundations were deeply involved in international affairs, especially in the Third World. The Ford Foundation devoted over $50 million—about a third of its total spending—to international programs from 1951 through 1954.While much of this effort abroad was for practical economic development programs, it also had a strong ideological cast. For years Ford helped finance the Congress for Cultural Freedom, which Ford officials defined as an effort “to combat tyranny and to advance freedom in Europe and Asia.” The tyranny was Marxism, Soviet style, and the freedom was the Bill of Rights, American style, but the implications of extending civil liberties to poverty-stricken peoples rather than helping them achieve social and economic freedoms were left largely unexplored.

  The men and women who had the most influence, however unwittingly, on European perceptions of the United States were American writers and artists. The late 1940s and the 1950s brought an Indian summer of the sparkling literary era that had stretched from World War I through the 1930s. Still shining or at least flickering in the afterglow of that era were the giants of the 1920s. Sinclair Lewis died at the start of the fifties but only after publishing a final volume of social criticism, Kingsblood Royal, an attack on racial prejudice. Although the best work of Robert Frost was behind him, he was still the most widely read serious poet in America. Ernest Hemingway published Across the River and into the Trees in 1950 and The Old Man and the Sea two years later, followed by the award of a Pulitzer Prize and, in 1954, the Nobel Prize in literature. William Faulkner, who had won the Nobel five years earlier, published Requiem for a Nun in 1951 and A Fable in 1954, and he completed his trilogy about the Snopes clan with The Town and The Mansion during the late fifties. Soon after the end of the decade, the pens of Hemingway, Faulkner, and Frost would be stayed for good.

  Crowding onto the literary scene were younger writers who brought a springtime of creativity even while the Indian summer waned. Between 1947 and 1955 playwright Arthur Miller gave to the stage All My Sons, Death of a Salesman, The Crucible, A View from the Bridge. Ralph Ellison wrote a single stunning novel, The Invisible Man; J. D. Salinger published The Catcher in the Rye and Franny and Zooey; Saul Bellow contributed The Adventures of Augie March and Henderson the Rain King; playwright Tennessee Williams, after his brilliant The Glass Menagerie and A Streetcar Named Desire, wrote The Rose Tattoo, Camino Real, Cat on a Hot Tin Roof. These five men were in their late thirties or early forties; even younger was Norman Mailer, who had brought out The Naked and the Dead, a war novel, at the age of twenty-five and wrote two significant works, Barbary Shore and The Deer Park, in the 1950s.

  Of all the tests of great literature, two are most clearly measurable— longevity and universality. The permanence of the notable work of the Indian summer could not be tested for another century, but the universality of the older generation of writers had striking demonstration during the 1950s.

  France had been the supreme testing ground abroad for American writers, in part because French critics viewed themselves as the ultimate tribunal of international letters. The literati of Paris had been peculiarly generous to American novelists, some of whom they had known during the novelists’ self-imposed exiles in France in the twenties. Lewis’s Babbitt had sold 80,000 copies in France within a few months of publication; at least thirteen of his other works were translated into French by the end of the thirties. During that decade, the “greatest literary development in France,” in the judgment of Jean-Paul Sartre, was the discovery of Faulkner, Dos Passos, Caldwell, and one or two other writers; at once, he added, “for thousands of young intellectuals, the American novel took its place, together with jazz and the movies, among the best of the importations from the United States.” Even André Gide, the grand old man of French letters, said that “no contemporary literature” excited his interest more than that of young America.

  And of these “young” Americans, no one excited the French more than Hemingway. His subjects fascinated them—bloody prizefighters, hired killers, disemboweled matadors, crippled soldiers, hunters of wild animals, deep-sea fishermen, as André Maurois summed them up. They liked his style even more—the simplicity of word and deed, the flat unemotional perceptions, the code of courage and personal honor, the clean, hard writing style, the celebration of nada—nothingness. It was a style that was said to have influenced Camus. By 1952 For Whom the Bell Tolls had sold over 160,000 copies in a French-language edition.

  In the long run, the reputation of Faulkner in France surpassed even Hemingway’s. The literati liked the sense of tragic pessimism in the Mississippian, his metaphysical approach to time, his “magical, fantastic, and tragic” universe, as one reviewer wrote, inhabited by “a strange music, an unforgettable rhythm of incantation.” If Hemingway influenced Camus, Faulkner, according to Sartre, inspired Simone de Beauvoir’s technique of substituting a more subtle order of time for the usual chronology. Some French critics viewed Faulkner as America’s best—even the world’s best— novelist, much to the discomfiture of Hemingway, who at least had the consolation of vastly outselling Faulkner in France. Americans were wrong to treat Faulkner as a regionalist, Paris critics asserted; he was rather a “universal writer” in the fullest sense.

  It was not only Faulkner and Hemingway that France celebrated, and it was not only France that celebrated American writers. Across the Continent there appeared a hunger for Steinbeck, Dos Passos, Fitzgerald, and others, and for Westerns and detective stories as well. A German writer told many years later of how he had cadged books from American GIs during the occupation and built his literary education on crates of Armed Services Editions, “courtesy of the American taxpayer.”

  Why this transatlantic appeal of American writers? Italian novelist Cesare Pavese, who translated earlier American classics as well as Faulkner and Hemingway, said he had found “a thoughtful and barbaric America, happy and quarrelsome, dissolute and fruitful, heavy with all the world’s past, but also young and innocent.” Was this all there was to it—Europeans in one of their recurring “discoveries” of a simple, innocent, youthful America, refreshing to jaded continental sensibilities? Were either the established or the rising American writers of the 1950s telling them anything about the heart and mind and soul of America? What ultimately did this big, bustling country stand for?

  Hemingway did not answer this question—he had no intention to. He dwelt on men’s—it was almost always men’s—individual fear and bravery, desire and frustration, struggle and death. Like Robert Jordan in For Whom the Bell Tolls, he had no political beliefs except a furious antifascism and an all-embracing individualism. “You believe in Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Happiness,” Robert is told by “himself,” but himself wants these good things for individuals, not nations. Hemingway’s The Old Man and the Sea superbly portrayed a man’s struggle against a personal adversary and a fated defeat by an inexorable environment, but had nothing to say about collective effort and frustration.

  With his closeness to the land, his love of community and region, his feeling for the “presentness of the past,” his old-fashioned sense of religious morality, William Faulkner appeared far more likely than Hemingway to plumb the min
d and heart of the country. He was very much in the American literary tradition—indeed, two traditions, as Hyatt Waggoner suggested: the romantic symbolism of Hawthorne and Melville, the naturalism of Howells, Twain, and Dreiser. The people of Yoknapatawpha County—their greed and cunning, their moral and physical vulgarity, and the struggles of some to break the chains of fate and rise to some kind of human stature—were lifted in his charged prose to the level of universality and tragedy that the French critics so praised. But Faulkner, like Hemingway, was far more concerned with private values and personal afflictions than with public substantive values like political and economic freedom. When he did call for individual rights and liberty in his books and public addresses, they were largely his kind of rights and liberty—a sphere of private space, artistic independence that no government could be allowed to invade. The broader picture of “what the country stood for” that emerged from his writings was murky, even muddled.