How the CIA promoted the Post-Modern
Liberius
How the CIA promoted the Post-Modern
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July 1, 1999
The Times
(Books)
http://www.the-times.co.uk/
When war grew cold, it was cultural conflict that
took the heat, Malcolm Bradbury finds
WHO PAID THE PIPER? THE CIA
AND THE CULTURAL COLD WAR
By Frances Stonor Saunders
Granta, £20
ISBN 1 86207 029 6
This is the fascinating story of the vast postwar Kulturkampf, the
Cold War conflict over cultural values and ideologies amid which
several literary and cultural generations grew up. It pulled in
books and magazines, congresses and concerts, artists and writers,
political visions of economic growth and social progress. And it
dawned when the United States, the one outright victor from the
Second World War, suddenly found itself a superpower, found it had
somehow entered history.
Needing a culture to match, it stared over the wire at Russia
(which had pursued intellectual politics ever since Catherine the
Great) and sought worldwide intellectual admiration and support.
As the Cold War froze and ideologies divided, the US Government
poured huge resources into a cultural propaganda campaign. It was
covert. As Saunders explains: "A central feature of this programme
was to advance the claim it did not exist." Yet there was nothing
covert about the overall enterprise: the decision to revive
flattened Europe and develop democratic institutions through the
massive programme of aid, economic, political, cultural, which has
shaped it to this day and explains its current federalism and its
Americanised shopping-mall culture.
So came the Marshall Plan, the "Special Relationship", the
Atlantic Alliance, the denazification strategy in Germany and
Austria, the long-term presence of American troops and bases.
There was also the Fulbright Program, the US Information Agency,
the Amerikahausen all over Germany, promoting jazz, movies and
Saul Bellow, and the growth of an academic subject that was new
even to Americans: American Studies.
The programme was aided by the defection of many Western
intellectuals who had been red in the Thirties. Alienation began
with the Spanish Civil War and the Nazi-Soviet Pact; by the late
1940s Marxism was the God That Had Failed. In cultural warfare
America seemed at first to have small resources. "What is America
but millionaires, beauty queens, gramophone music and Hollywood?"
asked Adolf Hitler. Many European intellectuals felt a similar
cultural distaste for the land of chewing gum and Mickey Mouse.
Hence the Kulturkampf, which Saunders traces back to Berlin in the
time of denazification, and to three key figures. There were
Michael Josselin and Nicholas Nabokov, Vladimir's musician cousin,
both emigres, now with the American Military Command and working
on denazification and cultural policy in the Psychological Warfare
Division. When another soldier, Melvin Lasky, urged an American
government policy designed to win over the often passionately
anti-American European intelligentsia, establishing the magazine
Monat, the culture war began.
In 1947 the Central Intelligence Agency was founded: in its early
days it resembled the clubby, patrician, pipe-smoking, senior
common room spirit of the wartime intelligence community. It had
excellent contacts with the NCL (Non-Communist Left), the "new
liberals", and the emigres who, having fled the Europe of Hitler
and Stalin, had become a powerful force in the United States.
This book shows in splendid detail how CIA policy went everywhere.
Awash with funds, the CIA turned into the covert Maecenas, the new
crypto-patron of an age when the old private patrons had
disappeared. Artists, writers, intellectuals, seminars, concerts,
magazines, were now supported by "foundations". It was the age of
While You're Up, Get Me a Grant. Scholarships, travel grants and
exchange schemes shipped European intellectuals across the
Atlantic for their graduate education.
Meanwhile, American writers, plays, books, concerts and art
exhibitions came in profusion to Europe. One key instrument was
the Congress for Cultural Freedom, administered by a band of
leading European intellectuals. It circulated ideas, ran
congresses, aided magazines. In Britain, it published Encounter,
which was, quite simply, the leading intellectual and cultural
review of the day, and indispensable. By various labyrinthine
means, the Congress and much else had CIA funding.
The charge is that organisations celebrating "cultural freedom"
were steered by America's arm of espionage, that writers who were
attacking the trahison des clercs were themselves traitors, that a
systematic attempt was made to intrude on intellectual
independence. The injection of money into American intellectual
reviews by the Ford Foundation and much else is now traceable to
the CIA.
In 1967 the edifice effectively collapsed. The Camelot Court mood,
where American intellectuals had rallied to Kennedy, had gone. The
Vietnam War brought massive protest, the intelligentsia was
increasingly at odds with government and nation. When Ramparts
magazine blew the story, it opened an era of intellectual guilt
and embarrassment, a new kind of anti-American distrust and
resentment, and a suspicion of much in modern intellectual life.
As Saunders says, much of Western intellectual life, and many
individual figures, were compromised. Yet the situation was, as
she notes, filled with strange ironies. Saunders asks who paid the
piper? But how does the piper call the tune, if you don't know who
the piper really is?
Many intellectuals and artists went to America on the Fulbright
Program, contributed to the lively and intelligent literary
magazines, attended conferences, concerts, exhibitions sponsored
by the many unusual foundations.
In many cases, it is quite possible to argue that the CIA
innocently financed much radical, indeed anti-American, opinion,
as well as a whole new experimental era of the arts. For writers,
John Updike's "Bech" books best capture the atmosphere: the
radical, unreliable American writer wanders a divided Europe on
cultural tours, a CIA spook on one side, a Communist Party
apparatchik on the other, looking for truth, love, literature,
decency, the smell of independence and freedom, and maybe just a
little irony.
Another irony is more obvious. American spooks could have had
little idea of the strength of the culture they were out to
promote. Yet they were sponsoring an American Risorgimento. This
was the great age of American writing, music and art the age of
Arthur Miller, Saul Bellow, John Updike, Norman Mailer, Aaron
Copland, Leonard BernsteinJasper Johns. The culture was worth
selling, and it was not innocent: subversive, self-critical,
ironic, ambiguous, it caught the uneasy corruption rather than the
innocent wonder of the American age. The CIA were, so to speak,
the promoters of Post-Modernism, the inventors of a new culture.
The last irony is grimmer. What began as part of a high cultural
Americanisation of Europe turned into the commercial globalisation
of Europe, and the larger world. America Americanised itself as a
vast franchise or global corporation, to which all Europe became
party. The oddest truth is that the age of cultural and
counter-cultural politics was one when literature was serious,
tense, politically charged, morally dangerous, and mattered. Now
it doesn't; we live in the age of the logo and the corporate
sponsor.
How compromised was postwar American and European culture?
Certainly there were those who enjoyed walking in the shadows with
the devil while they seemed to be walking in the sun. There were
the amazingly innocent and the bitterly deceived. Saunders's book
overestimates the degree of compliance and conformism, and often
suspects motives that were not impure. Throughout, America
continued to be an intensely self-critical society, challenging
its own conformities, dismayed by its own lonely crowds. Those who
worked with government agencies often passionately challenged
McCarthyism and defended liberals. Yet Saunders is right. This
really is a crucial story, about the dangerous, compromising
energies and manipulation of an entire and a very recent age.
Copyright 1999 Times Newspapers Ltd.