Like any self-respecting high school student in rural Pennsylvania, I was on a quest for some sort of cultural capital. I wasn’t popular. I didn’t play sports. Those were the mainstream of respectability. I took the low road and decided to become one of the smart kids. Not just the “I get good grades” smart kids, but one of the smart kids who champions a cause or a movement in order to appear cool.
I traded in my redneck past for Red Fever.
I became obsessed with Communism my freshmen year with my stage debut at Blackhawk High School as Mrs. Trotsky, wife of Leon Trotsky, in David Ives’ Variations of the Death of T
rotsky. Between my “nyet, nyet, nyets” and atrociously groan-worthy puns (the best being “Hot-to-Trot...sky”) on stage, I devoted my time to learning everything I could about the my comrades. I made every academic project red-centered, ranging from Animal Farm to the Hollywood Ten to Dr. Strangelove. I even changed the candy hearts I included with my high school sweetheart’s Valentine’s Day present to say things like, “Pinko Love is True Love” and “Stop ‘Stalin’ My Heart.”More recently I’ve decided to return to my redneck past and embrace it. I come from a long line of farm folk and people who use the word “them” as a demonstrative. However, I couldn’t let my Commie fascination go. I needed something to marry the two. And it seems that I have: 1950s American culture. The perfect combination of ignorance and knowledge, hope and despair, common folk and my beloved Reds. I am home.
This is the excitement I brought to reading Klein’s Cold War Orientalism. Not only is about 1950s culture and Communism, but there’s a picture from The King and I on the cover. My final high school performance was this very musical, in which I played one of the King’s many wives. The whole time, I felt as though we were all being extremely offensive, but I never said no to theatre. One of my most offensive scenes not mentioned as of yet by Klein is the one in which Anna dresses the wives in hoops and heels and we clomp around the stage like cattle. When the King comes in, we all bow by crouching on the ground with our posteriors facing him, and that’s when Anna makes the shocking discovery that Easterners don’t wear “undergarments.” Oh, what Rogers and Hammerstein will do for a sight gag.
However, I’ll start out by giving Klein more credit than critique. My only other exposure to 1950s American culture was a high school class taught by the assistant football coach where I earned 20 bonus points for hula-hooping longer than anyone else. I found Klein’s writing style to be extremely accessible and clear. In the introduction, Klein gives us a great overview of some of the history that goes into the specific moment we’re going to examine with an emphasis on the U.S.’s previous Eastward attention and the process of decolonization occurring simultaneously with the expansion of U.S. power after WWII. Her defense for the work that cultural texts perform is strong overall, and I was particularly impressed with the integration of Williams’ “structures of feeling” with the upcoming sentimental education. The most important parts of the introduction were her two large questions of national/individual identity (something that thanks to our work with Medovoi we now know was a significant concern and a term coined largely by Erik Erikson) and her claim about the goal of middlebrow cultural producers. And so we all know what I’m talking about here, I’ll reproduce them below.
Question of Identity (9):
1. How can we define our nation as a nonimperial world power in the age of decolonization?
2. How can we transform our sense of ourselves from narrow provincials into cosmopolitan citizens of the world who possess a global consciousness?
Claim about Producers of Middlebrow Culture (13):
**[T]hey sought to situate their audience in relation to a world increasingly understood as interconnected, whose ligatures were defined by the logic of the Cold War.
These are addressed very well in the first two chapters, and I sincerely hope that she’ll continue to address them in the remaining chapters.
Dissent-o-Rama: My only beef with the introduction is that it doesn’t contain many definitions other than sentimentality (which has a very detailed and helpful definition). We do not immediately know what she means by Middlebrow except for through a shortlist of authors and others. She does this much better in Chapter 2, but I didn’t like having to wait to hear it. Also, I’ve opted not to discuss Chapter 2 so much until my final dissenting note because I feel like it plays into the binaries I’ll make a fuss about in a minute here.
In the first chapter on sentimental education, I must say that my mind was definitely blown. Klein recognizes that containment is the main principle taught in history courses, which is certainly true in my experience, and I had no idea about the simultaneous narrative of integration. Klein’s definitions of both are again very helpful and provide us with some kind of context for both the development of politics and the development of culture during this era.
Dissent-o-Rama: Klein states, “At a time when the U.S. economy needed truly global access to markets and resources in order to sustain itself, the defense of the nation demanded securing that access through a variety of political and military means” (25). This entire breakdown of making the right-wing happy with containment and the left-wing happy with integration (while, of course, both plans of actions will keep the other in check and educating/fulfilling the needs of the masses) seems a little too binary for me. It’s just too convenient to be entirely believable. I’ll admit I could be too skeptical here--I’m no expert. If it is working in this kind of division, then perhaps my faith in world order will be restored. In the meantime, I’m onto you, Klein...
However, one point in the first chapter where this sort of binary is helpful is in the discussion of where the pro-Commie in the U.S. comes into play in the 1930s with the Spanish Civil War and the fight against fascism. It is a critical point, I feel, that it is made perfectly clear that Communism was really seen as opposite of fascism, which was at the time a serious problem, particularly in Spain as Franco’s troops were terrifying everyone. This transition to the establishment of the Popular Front makes more sense with that sort of a context. However, I was surprised to discover that the Popular Front dropped the political value/agenda and art and focused on how it unites people. I suppose it’s an admirable quality, but as a theatre folk, I think art is always used for a political purpose.
And now let’s get into my favorite part of this book so far: People-to-People. Now here’s something I have only heard of, but I didn’t know anything about really. I appreciated Klein’s great attention to this program as it combines elements of missionary traditions of internationalism as well as Soviet cultural strategies to form some kind of a sense of “community” where everyone is helping out everyone else. It also helped gloss over some of the negative practices that right-wing containment advocates pushed for (i.e. naming names and a slew of other party games that McCarthy developed). Here is a point in Klein’s argument where I am 100% on board. She notes that People-to-People is both “a failure and a success” (55). It made people back in the U.S. feel great, but where it was working in Asia, it was seen as “lip service” and being entirely fake.
I think this point is extremely pertinent to today where there are all sorts of “causes” to advocate, and a Facebook page and a bracelet to go with each and every one of them. I’d like to look at People-to-People as a cautionary tale of what happens when you think that donating a little money through a group to a cause means that you understand what’s going on with the cause as a whole or what the money is specifically doing. Now, don’t get me wrong, I have several causes (aside from communism) that I support, and I consider myself to closely align with the idea of integration and being a part of a global community (though I think Klein would say that this is a result of my education, and I’ll agree to that with enthusiasm). What I’m really saying here is that in helping others whether it’s through a national program or just the goodness of your heart, there is a fine, fine line between actually helping and making yourself feel better to gloss over something else. Lesson learned, Klein.
OVERARCHING DISSENT: Rather than going on in this style throughout the rest of Chapter 1 and Chapter 2, I’ll cut to the chase and jump to my dissent. I am concerned about how the information is ordered in this book. I don’t know if it’s because I’ve been thinking about postmodern literature lately (where we can’t trust the narrator as he or she chooses to tell you a story in a particular order and we become paranoid about the way the narrator is holding power over our reading experience--sorry, I’ve returned to Barth’s The Floating Opera as of late) or exactly what it is, but let’s look at the main players in order.
*Chapter 1: Government and their policies, bundled under the metonymy of “Washington.”
*Chapter 2: Middlebrow folk--presumably white because everyone else addressed in that section falls into the “other” category.
*Chapter 3: People who leave America.
*Chapters 4 & 5: Musicals (I’m very much looking forward to these chapters so I won’t attack the order of them until I know what she’s saying).
*FINALLY Chapter 6: Asians in America.
Why do we have to wait so long? During Chapter 1, I kept wondering about the reception of all of these programs and policies. I suppose that is better addressed in Chapter 2 as we can see by the sales of the two magazines where people were getting their information about these projects and policies. However, who is considered to be an American? Who’s a reader? Since this is a book about Cold War Orientalism, I was really hoping to see something about Asian-American identity. I took a class in undergrad on Asian-American identity and memoir, and all I can think about is how Asian-Americans and immigrants must have felt during this time period. There certainly isn’t any clear sense of identity, and the fact this demographic has been excluded thus far in Klein’s work in the earlier part of the book. I know that in the last chapter, we’ll get to that. But I really think that this is an issue that should be included earlier and throughout--or at the very least in the introduction. For as much as Klein shows us about propaganda and government control of education, she may not have considered that we may begin to question her arrangement of information. I know that arrangment is a great challenge in writing any sort of longer work, but still, I have concern with this.
But to end on a high note, I do believe that this text contains great information and reveals to us the side of integration that we do not get from our regular history classes. She also works hard to provide enough background to understand how containment of communism made the Cold War a heroic duty while integration made the Cold War much warmer and a way to expand our horizons to include the entire globe. In this way, there was something for everyone in the Cold War.
Finally, I leave you with a modern day example of integration and the promotion of world unity/coexistence with a video from They Might Be Giant’s recent Grammy-winning album, “Here Comes the 1, 2, 3s.” The song is called “One Everything,” and it even includes some mapping, which I know Thomas will appreciate. It’s not one of TMBG’s Communist songs (there’s one about Stalin that I particularly liked in high school), but it will warm your Cold War hearts. You’ll never be the same:
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