Upstaging the Cold War: American Dissent and Cultural Diplomacy, 1940–1960 (review)

Studies of cultural diplomacy continue to grow exponentially—or does it only seem that way? The number of historians who have been explaining the triumph of West over East in terms of the fine arts, the popular arts, and the black arts of propaganda threatens to exceed the number of pianists, painters, and trumpeters who were showcased in the “soft power” programs that may have accelerated the end of the Cold War. Andrew J. Falk’s entry into this expanding field of historical scholarship offers a thoughtful overall schema that helps to make more intelligible the transition from the Second World War, when the alliance with the USSR did not blunt hopes for a pacific and multilateralist era thereafter, to the frozen postures of Republican foreign policy. Unlike some students of the cultural Cold War, who have emphasized the formation of a stifling narrowness and an anti-Communist absolutism, Falk highlights the ways that progressives and cosmopolitans played possum with the super-patriots. He discovers enclaves in which social criticism could be expressed until the pall of McCarthyism was lifted. The achievement of Upstaging the Cold War is to push back earlier the ways that dissent could keep alive the dream of international reconciliation that the birth of the United Nations had fostered. That belief had seemed illusory when Soviet tanks were crushing rebels in East Berlin and Budapest and when John Foster Dulles dominated the Department of State. Falk’s revisionism therefore helps to locate and elucidate the antecedents to the thaw in U.S.-Soviet relations ushered in by the nuclear test ban treaty of 1963.

What complicates Falk’s story are the disparate origins of the American style of promoting national ideals and interests. The tendency of Washington to think in terms of power could not easily be made compatible with Hollywood’s desire to earn a hefty profit. Policymakers wanted to connect with or challenge their counterparts abroad. Moviemakers wanted to seize the huge commercial opportunities that international audiences offered. The impressive growth of the U.S. government’s executive branch during and after the Second World War promoted a yearning to coordinate the various facets of foreign policy, which conflicted with the autonomy to which the studios were accustomed in seeking to satisfy popular taste. Upstaging the Cold War offers an account that ends, like a family romance, in reconciliation, when the leading sources of political and cultural authority realize the mutual benefits of penetrating the Iron Curtain with proof of the dynamism of the country’s dream life.

Surprises lurk within the book. Its readers might expect the incarnation of the 1940s vision of progressivism to be Henry A. Wallace, the editor-in-chief of The New Republic who had been vice president during Franklin Roosevelt’s third term and was a believer in the “century of the common man.” Instead, the pivotal figure here turns out to be a Republican, Wendell L. Willkie, author of the wartime bestseller One World (1943), and coincidentally a paladin for the Motion Picture Producers and Distributors of America. Falk portrays Willkie as the chief object of expectations that a more democratic America might conduct an internationalist statecraft. Who could have foreseen that Dalton Trumbo, a onetime ghostwriter for Secretary of State Edward Stettinius in 1945, would become, a mere two years later, the most ornery member of the Hollywood Ten? With the Waldorf Statement in 1947, as the studio heads agreed to impose a blacklist, Communists and fellow-travelers (and others on the left) migrated to the medium that is most associated with political timidity and is even regulated by the federal government: television.

Here Falk springs another surprise on his readers. The incessant need for drama in live television compelled the networks to hire writers and directors who might not be employable in filmdom, talents who were not then serving prison sentences for contempt of Congress. This sometimes meant bringing on board forthright...