The Cultural Cold War
Keith Windschuttle
Quadrant
November 1999

John Steinbeck's The Grapes of Wrath is one of the most successful novels of the twentieth century. Since it was published in 1939, it has sold several million copies and is still in print. It has long been a set text on high school and university reading lists in the United States, Australia and throughout the world. In 1940 it won the Pulitzer Prize and was made into an academy-award winning movie. In 1962 it was the principal reason its author won the Nobel Prize for literature.

Like several of Steinbeck's works, The Grapes of Wrath is a parable adapted from the Bible, an American version of Exodus. It recounts how in the early 1930s, in the middle of the Great Depression, the banks and absentee landlords foreclosed on the tenant farmers of the Oklahoma dust bowl, forcing them off the land they had worked for generations and triggering their mass migration. Steinbeck tells his story through the experience of the Joad family who, like thousands of others, load their possessions onto their pickup truck and drive down Route 66 headed for California. They cross their own Sinai desert under great hardship but when they reach their land of milk and honey the only work they can get is as labourers and fruit pickers for the giant agricultural companies. These firms take advantage of their vulnerability to continually beat down their wages. When they protest or go on strike, the labourers are attacked by vigilantes and arrested by the State police who act as agents of the agribusinesses that control the government.

In other words, this is not only a Biblical parable but a Marxist one as well. The Joads and the other Okies are transformed from independent farmers into exploited proletarians, and the state is revealed not as a democratic institution of the people but an oppressive instrument of the capitalists. Around the campfires of the homeless and on the picket lines of the strikers, the hero of the story, young Tom Joad, hears organisers from the unions and militants from the Communist Party explain the reasons behind their travails. However, these agitators lead the Okies into ill conceived and badly planned strikes that leave them more destitute than ever. Tom realises in the end that it is only through their own collective efforts that the oppressed can transform their lives. He sees the best hope for the future in the grass roots movement for workers' democracy that emerges to run the San Joaquin Valley migrant camps set up for the agricultural labourers by President Roosevelt's program of economic reform, the New Deal.

As an adolescent in Sydney during the 1950s, I read The Grapes of Wrath with a sense of great excitement. At the time, our English teachers at high school were trying to enthuse us with studies of eighteenth century English essayists and Victorian romantic poets. Those of us with literary inclinations, however, found this curriculum tedious and irrelevant and instead became furtive devotees of American novels, especially, in my own case, the works of Steinbeck and Ernest Hemingway. We had come to their writings via the Hollywood movies based on their books. It was not until decades later that I discovered that these writers and several other Americans I admired had been Marxists and Communist Party sympathisers. Hemingway was a Soviet supporter abroad, most notoriously during the Spanish Civil War, and at home, a contributor to the Communist Party cultural journal, New Masses; Steinbeck, while not a party member, was a political pilgrim to the USSR in 1937. His first wife, Carol Henning, who encouraged his political writings in the late 1930s, was a Marxist who at the time took him to party meetings in San Francisco.

In the suburbs of Sydney in the 1950s, we regarded Communism as some alien and distant system afflicting East European countries that we hardly knew or even wanted to know about. Marxism was a term we never heard mentioned, let alone something we discussed. However, in retrospect, it seems clear that our covert passion for American novels had given us a very thorough grounding in Marxist thought, a grounding, moreover, that was all the more effective for being theoretically innocent. The notion that our society was governed by a system based on the greed and avarice of the rich, an oppressive and coercive state, and the exploitation and degradation of ordinary people was something we had learnt not from theorists or politicians but had discovered for ourselves, so we thought, from the experience of the world we had gained through literature. When we went to university in the 1960s it was not surprising we were enthusiasts for the Marxist revival that accompanied the protest movement against the war in Vietnam, a movement that itself gave prominent display to a new line-up of American literary lions.

Like most of my generation, I long ago became disabused of Marxist theory and political practice. Yet it still came as a surprise to find quite recently that some of the literary monuments created under its influence deserve no greater respect. It was particularly shocking to discover that the now institutionalised classic, The Grapes of Wrath, turns out to have been one of the most deceptive products of the whole era. Although it is a work of fiction, its readers had long presumed it was based on real events. After all, there are enough well known photographs of Okies struggling against dust storms and standing by broken down cars along Route 66 to give veracity to the fictionalised saga of the Joad family's exodus. Moreover, Steinbeck dedicated the book to his friend, Tom Collins, the founder-manager of the first of the migrant camps and one of his principal informants for the novel. So The Grapes of Wrath seemed like a first-hand, realist report from the front.

However, in 1997 the American historian Charles Shindo examined the evidence for Steinbeck's story. In his book Dust-Bowl Migrants in the American Imagination (University Press of Kansas), Shindo concluded that much of it was false.

For a start, there was no mass migration from Oklahoma in the Great Depression. While Okies did leave for California throughout the whole of the first half of the century, the two biggest movements were in 1910-30 and the 1940s, which were both periods when jobs were plentiful on the west coast. The Second World War, with its demand for labour in Californian shipbuilding and aircraft manufacturing industries, generated twice as many migrants as the whole of the 1930s, the decade that actually produced the smallest relocation figures. Those who did make the move in the Depression did not have especially deep roots in the land but had been in the mid-west for at most two generations, though usually for much less. They were not forced off by dust storms, which in the 1930s were experienced in Colorado and Kansas, not Oklahoma. Instead, they were attracted west by good wages. In the 1930s, agricultural labourers' wages in California were the highest in the world.

It is true that police intervened on the side of employers during some highly publicised union disputes. But this was because the Cannery and Agricultural Workers' Union had perfected the lightning strike and strong-arm picket line to prevent crops being harvested on any but their own terms. The tactic essentially blackmailed farmers whose crops were ripe and would ruin if left for more than several days on the trees or vines. Although those who set up the New Deal migrant camps were mostly leftists who did their best to promote a system of self-managed democracy to ensure that facilities like toilets and shower blocks were kept clean, this was widely regarded as a failure. Managers complained that there was so little enthusiasm for camp democracy that positions on camp councils were impossible to fill. And while there were some big agribusiness firms operating in California during the 1930s, the economy of the San Joaquin Valley, where much of Steinbeck's action is set, was then dominated by small independent farmers, as it still is today.

Not only was Steinbeck's novel devoid of historical reality, but so were many of the celebrated photographs of Okies taken during the 1930s by Dorothea Lange and Arthur Rothstein. The reality behind "Migrant Mother", Lange's photographic portrait of a grim-faced, apparently abandoned woman pea picker and her children, who seem too ashamed of their poverty to look at the camera, was quite different to the image. The woman and her family were neither destitute nor deserted. She was actually employed as an organiser for the Cannery and Agricultural Workers' Union and her husband and two older sons were not in the photo because they were absent having some repairs done to their late model car. Rothstein's equally well-known "Fleeing a Dust Storm" in which a father and his two sons struggle against the gale, could not technically have been shot in the midst of a real dust storm and the apparently decrepit farm house in the background was only a disused shack, not the substantial family home that was out of picture. Nor did this family flee to California. They remained on their farm in Oklahoma, enjoying the substantial rural subsidies then being bestowed by the Roosevelt government.

Shindo examines the role of leftist folk music collectors, also funded by the New Deal, who followed the agricultural labourers hoping to record songs that expressed their anti-establishment political sympathies. By and large, these efforts were in vain. They hoped to find Woody Guthrie-type songs springing from an authentic, non-commercial, collectivist, folk culture, but instead discovered the musical taste of the Okies was much the same as the rest of the population. The migrants did not compose their own songs nor pass down ballads through an oral tradition. They got their music by listening to the radio. Their favourites were the kind of popular country and western hit parade tunes that were then (and now) virtually ubiquitous throughout rural America. In 1940, the recording team found two of the most popular songs of the agricultural migrants were 'Dream Boat' and 'On the Beach at Bali-Bali'.

Two questions, then, pose themselves. If there was so little to recommend it, how did the mythology of the 1930s become so entrenched as gospel? And if the Cold War was a period of McCarthyite repression, as it is usually portrayed, how could such Marxist myth makers have remained so revered that they were showered with literary awards, academic accolades and film contracts throughout the whole of its course? Some very good answers to these questions are offered in the new book by Hilton Kramer, The Twilight of the Intellectuals (Ivan R. Dee, Chicago, 1999). This is a study of the literary and intellectual culture of New York, the centre of the American publishing business and the place where most of these myths originated. The subtitle of the book is 'Culture and Politics in the Era of the Cold War', but this is somewhat misleading since a central component of Kramer's explanation dates from his analysis of the politics of the 1930s. His commentary also runs well into the 1990s. The chapters of the book are mostly essays originally published in The New Criterion, the New York literary journal Kramer founded and of which he is still editor, but they come together in this work to constitute a coherent argument. Kramer has long been well known as one of America's finest art critics and he is a master of the essay form. His chapters are elegant and beautifully crafted, making the book a captivating as well as informative read.

Kramer attributes the remarkable but now rarely acknowledged place of Marxism within American literature, art and cinema to the phenomenon called 'progressivism'. By this, he doesn't mean the reform movement of the same name identified with Theodore Roosevelt and William Jennings Bryan at the start of the century. He means the use of the term in the 1930s and 40s when it was a euphemism for support for the USSR. Kramer notes that by the 1960s the term had lost its lustre and was being used ironically, much as 'politically correct' is today. But in its heyday, it defined the mental outlook of a generation of American writers and intellectuals. The depression of the early 1930s had convinced many of them that capitalism was inherently unstable, prone to crisis, and that its days were numbered. At the same time, they believed the statistics produced by the Soviet Union to claim success for Joseph Stalin's five-year plans. In the minds of these intellectuals, modernism and Communism became synonymous.

In its period of maximum influence, Kramer observes, progressivism always occupied a much larger place in American cultural life than Communism. While all Communists were progressives, not all progressives were Communists, that is, party members. Progressives included liberal allies and patrons as well as Marxist sympathisers and collaborators like Steinbeck and Hemingway who were close to, but not controlled by, the party. "Progressivism may thus be said to have represented the laity of the Communist movement in the Stalinist era," Kramer writes, "and, as with any given faith, the style of obeisance to fundamental articles of belief naturally varied a good deal within its ranks." The underlying subtext of progressivism was the Marxist-Leninist concept of socialist revolution. However, Kramer notes, "it was a subtext that dared not speak its name too loudly in public lest more moderate liberals, upon whom progressives were dependent for allies and access, be reminded of what progressive politics was really about". Though anchored in left-wing political ideology, progressivism was always a reflection of something more than a set of political positions.

The progressivism I speak of was an ethos, a cast of mind, a secular faith that reached into every aspect of living and thinking. It was thus as much a code of feeling as it was a mode of thought. Its loyalties determined everything from literary taste and the choice of spouses to the way children were educated and political events responded to. At the height of its influence, progressivism had an answer -- or at least a response -- for every question, which is why it could not be dislodged from its position of authority in the lives of its acolytes by specific political events, no matter how shattering.

Progressivism had its greatest influence within the New York magazine and book publishing industry, the east coast university network and the Hollywood movie industry, often with the same people being employed in each of these institutions at various stages of their careers. By reviewing a wide range of biographies, memoirs and essays collected from the era, Kramer shows how they came to view life in the United States almost entirely in terms that were codified by the Communist Party. This is not to say that the party line was consistent or always the same. Kramer is both instructive and amusing in tracing its course as it evolved through several modifications, permutations and outright reversals to meet the needs of Soviet power. For instance, until the mid-thirties the American Communist Party had sponsored a network of John Reed Clubs to support writing that emulated its namesake's reportage of the Bolshevik revolution. At the same time, the party promoted reviews and criticism that stigmatised liberal writers as adherents of the bourgeoisie and as class enemies.

In 1935, however, Moscow proclaimed a new line. The John Reed Clubs were summarily dispatched and replaced by the League of American Writers, which now welcomed as allies many of those writers previously denounced as bourgeois renegades. What had happened was that, with the emergence of Hitler and the rearmament of Germany, Stalin had decided he needed allies in the West against the threat of German expansion. The Comintern proclaimed the Popular Front to bring about such an alliance in both the political and intellectual life of the West. Rather than outright support for the foreign policy of the USSR, it went under the banner of a campaign against fascism. "None of this had anything to do with an interest in literature, of course," Kramer notes, "but it completely altered the way literature was now to be assessed by the Communists and their literary fellow travellers."

In the United States, Kramer records, liberals flocked to this new progressive banner. Many authors previously denounced in Communist circles as reactionary lackeys of capitalist exploitation, were now embraced as progressive exponents of the Soviet's anti-fascist crusade. The Popular Front proved to be an immense success in shaping the course of American culture. Kramer writes:

The Popular Front mind -- intellectually middlebrow, artistically philistine, politically 'progressive', and both sentimental and simplistic in its views of human nature and the nature of the Soviet Union -- became a staple of American cultural life. It exerted enormous influence on Hollywood movies, the Broadway theater, popular fiction, mainstream journalism, the academy, the liberal clergy, and the liberal weeklies … It was in this sense that a good deal of American cultural life may be said to have been Stalinized.

This was a milieu that not only canonised Steinbeck and Hemingway but extended support in the form of publication, favourable reviews, jobs and film contracts to a great many other writers who displayed an anti-establishment bent. Kramer notes that, so far, this movement has not attracted a full-length historical study. While his own book is not an attempt to fill this gap, he does a persuasive job in explaining the need for a project of this kind and in defining its parameters. He includes analyses of both well-known and obscure figures who contributed to the progressive movement, including Lillian Hellman, Edmund Wilson, Dwight Macdonald, Mary McCarthy, Irving Howe, and the blacklisted Hollywood Ten.

Kramer also devotes a similar volume of space to those who fought against it. He focuses particularly on those who sought to break the nexus between modernism and Marxism, who wanted to establish modernism as a literary and artistic movement in its own right, free from political ties. He has two chapters on Clement Greenberg, whose work he defines as the most important body of art criticism produced by an American writer this century. In the 1930s and early 40s, Greenberg was a Trotskyite, that is, an anti-Stalinist Marxist. Despite these political predilections, Kramer argues, Greenberg never allowed his politics to distort his judgement of particular artists. Hence he was able to articulate the significance of the New York School of abstract expressionism in the forties -- recognising the decline of Paris as the art capital of the West and the emergence of New York as its successor -- and became its pre-eminent critic. He was able to do this, Kramer says, because he could separate aesthetic from political judgements. He was, moreover, a defender of the high culture of modernism against what he called the middlebrow or kitsch culture approved by the Popular Front. Inevitably, there emerged a conflict between his politics and his aesthetics, and Greenberg eventually opted for the latter. With the onset of the Cold War in the late forties, he abandoned Marxism for a position of anti-Communist liberalism.

Greenberg wrote most of his early criticism in the journal Partisan Review, which started life as an organ of the Communist Party but in 1937 was taken over by a pair of anti-Stalinist Trotskyites, William Phillips and Philip Rahv, who turned it into America's premier journal of literature and criticism. Among its contributors have been George Orwell, Albert Camus, T. S. Eliot, Franz Kafka, Doris Lessing, Samuel Beckett, Saul Bellow, Vladimir Nabokov and Diana and Lionel Trilling. Given the reputation of Trotskyism in Australia as the home of several miniscule and constantly warring sects, it is hard to appreciate how the same political persuasion in the United States could have attracted such illustrious company. However, one droll observer noted many years ago that in the 1930s New York "became the most interesting part of the Soviet Union … the one part of that country in which the struggle between Stalin and Trotsky could be openly expressed". The struggle was fought to a great extent in and around Partisan Review.

Kramer devotes a chapter to this journal. It is a most revealing account of the mid-century American Left. He shows, for instance, that American isolationism in the early days of the Second World War was as much a phenomenon of the Left as of the Right. In the aftermath of the Hitler-Stalin Pact of 1939, the Communist Party toed the line of Soviet foreign policy and dropped its formerly aggressive attitude to fascism, hoping to keep the US out of the war in Europe. Though it was anti-Stalinist and anti-fascist, Partisan Review supported a policy that had just as little to recommend it. The journal urged that all support must be withheld from moves by Churchill and Roosevelt for a wartime alliance. It claimed that, "in the war or out of it, the United States faces only one future under capitalism: Fascism" and that "to support the Roosevelt-Churchill war regimes clears the road for fascism from within and blocks the organization of an effective war effort against fascism outside."

Kramer goes on to describe how Partisan Review, though retaining a Marxist theory of history and supporting an agenda for the transformation of the United States into a socialist state, emerged in the 1950s as one of the leading journals of anti-Communism in the Cold War. He also recounts how, through changes in both personnel and in the intellectual climate of the times, it reverted in the 1960s to an anti-American stance over the war in Vietnam. It then became one of the harbingers of the anti-Western, anti-white politics of identity that swept through both the media and the universities in the 1970s. It accomplished this principally by introducing and conferring celebrity status onto the postmodernist essayist Susan Sontag, who is the object of a compelling demolition job by Kramer. In the 1990s, however, with the nonagenarian William Phillips still editor-in-chief and still writing for every edition, Partisan Review has become one of the chief critics of political correctness and postmodernism itself. Kramer acknowledges the journal's politics have been a saga of "sometimes solemn, sometimes comic-opera contretemps" but argues that it nonetheless held considerable sway over twentieth century American (hence English-speaking) intellectual culture.

It was an essential part of our education, as much a part of that education as the books we read, the visits we made to the museums, the concerts we attended, and the records we bought. It gave us an entrée to modern cultural life -- to its gravity and complexity and combative character -- that few of our teachers could match … It conferred upon every subject it encompassed -- art, literature, politics, history, and current affairs -- an air of intellectual urgency that made us, as readers, feel implicated and called upon to respond.

Kramer also traces the impact of the American anti-Communist Left in a chapter on the Congress for Cultural Freedom. This is largely a summary of The Liberal Conspiracy, a history of the organisation written in 1990 by Peter Coleman, the former editor of Quadrant. The Congress for Cultural Freedom was founded in 1950 and, although those of us who came of age politically in the 1960s always regarded it as a bastion of the Right, it was sustained in its early life by people who, on any objective measure of political allegiance, were almost all on the Left. They ranged from American liberals and English and Continental social democrats, to backers of various versions of state socialism, including some Trotskyites who still advocated their own variety of Bolshevism as the solution for the ills of mankind. Kramer argues that this was probably the only kind of political alliance that could be marshalled at the time to mount a cultural and intellectual campaign against the Soviets. "For it was only on the Left -- which is to say, in the ranks of what came to be known as liberal anti-Communism -- that eager and knowledgeable recruits for the intellectual struggle against Stalinism were to be found," Kramer observes. "Political conservatives played little or no part in this endeavour."

In fact, Coleman shows the members of the organisation were initially designated in Washington as the "Non-Communist Left" and the acronym NCL was constantly used in US State Department circles. It was under this political identity that the American Central Intelligence Agency decided to covertly finance the organization. However, the CIA used the influence this gave it not, as conventional wisdom might expect, to pull the organisation to the Right but, instead, to push it further to the Left. The strategy, as Coleman explains it, was as follows. The aim was to build a united front composed of the democratic elements of the European left and thus to isolate those in the West who were members of the Communist Party or who supported the USSR. Pablo Picasso, Jean-Paul Sartre and other fellow travellers in France and Italy, both countries where the Communist Party regularly polled up to one quarter of the democratic vote, were special targets for this kind of separation.

The strategy was to be pursued less through the publication of political tracts and more through the sponsoring of cultural events, especially in music, art and literature. In particular, it wanted to identify the high culture of modernism as the product of Western liberal democracy, rather than the property of the "progressives" of the Left. For instance, the first secretary-general of the Congress in Paris, Nicholas Nabokov, cousin of the novelist, in 1952 organised a Festival of Paris, a massive arts festival that presented one hundred symphonies, concerts, operas and ballets by seventy twentieth century composers, including works by the Russians Prokofiev and Shostakovich that were banned in the Soviet Union. When the novelist Arthur Koestler argued the Congress should be less of a cultural organization and more of a political movement, he was overruled and subsequently withdrew from its affairs. The rejection of his proposals for a more militant anti-Soviet movement was most likely the result of a CIA directive.

Although the recent publication of Frances Stonor Saunders' critical study of CIA involvement in the Congress, Who Paid the Piper? has produced a number of defences from Congress sympathisers arguing that this was one of the best things the CIA did during the Cold War, Kramer takes a different view. He argues that the revelation of CIA funding in 1967 was very damaging and "the ensuing scandal had the effect of shattering whatever prestige the Congress still retained". This was certainly the view that the student radical Left took at the time. We could hardly contain our glee. We had already heard about the Moscow Gold that sponsored the Western Communist parties and so to find a prestigious defender of Western capitalism also being funded by the secret police only heightened our sense of moral self-righteousness and only fuelled the argument for moral equivalence between the two sides in the Cold War.

With hindsight, it seems that had the CIA funding not been secret but doled out openly by a government cultural department, none of this would have followed. But this whole issue is very small beer indeed, compared to the main lesson that Kramer insists upon throughout the whole of his book. The idea that there could in any sense be moral equivalence between the brutal and incompetent tyranny of the Soviet Union and the liberal democracy of the United States now seems so bizarre that one can only wonder how anyone, including oneself, could ever have entertained the idea. Yet a great many people, especially those who enjoyed the best education then on offer, took this view seriously. "It hardly seemed to matter," Kramer notes, "that the rule of Soviet-style socialism had turned the societies upon which it was inflicted into despotisms of the most extreme and unrelieved cruelty and deprivation. Reality counted for little or nothing where belief in the ultimate goodness of the socialist ideal persisted; and that belief -- hard as it may now be to understand or forgive -- was a widespread phenomenon among Western intellectuals."

If reality could count for so little in this case, if intellectuals were especially prone to pursue their theories despite their falsification by all the known facts, it is highly unlikely that the history of these events will remain an isolated phenomenon. The fall of the Soviet Union cannot be assumed to have put an end to the matter. The probability is that what we have witnessed in the twentieth century is likely to recur. If this is so, it makes it all the more important to take up the leads Kramer offers in his book, in particular to study the cultural shifts required for this to occur. We still need a full explanation of how, in the environment of a largely prosperous, liberal democratic capitalism, a generation of writers and artists, many of whom were dedicated to high culture, could persuade so many people, not the least themselves, that the political and economic arrangements of their own country masked a system that was so degenerate and corrupt it deserved to be overthrown by social revolution.