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59 era used for thinking about their world, that of the feedback loop has proven one of the most persistent and most powerful. Once recognized, the image of a decentralized system held together by feedback loops can be identified as a key component of the democratic vista from the 1940s through the 1970s. This chapter closely examines three disparate works from the period—Gregory Bateson’s anthropological Steps to an Ecology of Mind, Max Neuhaus’s “Feed” (a realization of John Cage’s musical score Fontana Mix), and John Updike’s story “Packed Dirt, Churchgoing, a Dead Cat, a Traded Car”—in order to suggest the pervasive presence of this metaphor in Cold War American culture and to explain its history and implications . The importance of the feedback loop as an idea derives from its usefulness in modeling an alternative to the centralized authority structures that came to predominate in postwar society, profoundly reshaping American life. The centralization of power is a defining characteristic of modernity. Whether we speak of the power of national or federal governments over regional ones, of the power of large cities over their hinterlands, or of the integration of economic processes under a single corporate entity, the organization of large-scale enterprises through the concentration of power in a hierarchical “central command” structure is one of modernity’s prevailing dynamics. From the mid-nineteenth through the mid-twentieth century, the centralization of power developed in tandem with new industrial technologies and new organizational techniques such as the “scientific management” of Taylorism.1 The culture of the Cold War was profoundly affected by this, since both the United States and the Soviet Union were transformed in the mid-twentieth century by the rapid centralization of economic power and political authority. From the American perspective, the centralization of power in the Soviet Union and China became one of the most potent symbols of the demoCrACy, deCentrAlizAtion, And FeedbACk dAniel belGrAd Among the metaphors that Americans of the Cold War 3 60 dani e l Be l Grad wrongness of Communist politics. Manifested in social and economic planning as well as in cultural directives that emanated from the central authority, it epitomized the totalitarianism of the police state. Yet American society was itself undergoing a parallel, though less visible and less violent, process of economic and political centralization. According to historian George Lipsitz, America’s mobilization for World War II left behind an economic landscape radically changed from what it had been in the past. More than half a million small businesses disappeared during the war, at the same time that the federal government paid a hundred billion dollars in war contracts to just thirty-three corporations. As a result , large corporations emerged from the war with oligarchic control of America’s economy, and, as Lipsitz and many others have argued, of its government as well.2 The threat to democracy posed by this concentration of power was a source of widespread concern a good decade and a half before 1960, when Eisenhower in his presidential farewell address warned Americans against the “military-industrial complex.” George Lipsitz’s statistics and conclusions are themselves based on a report prepared for a special Senate investigating committee in 1946, titled Economic Concentration and World War II.3 In that same year, political theorist Dwight Macdonald wrote in the journal Politics that fascism, Communism, and monopoly capitalism were all versions of the same social structure, which he called “bureaucratic collectivism.”4 Sociologist C. Wright Mills is now probably the best-known critic of the centralization of power in Cold War America. In his essay “The Structure of Power in American Society,” Mills described “the enlargement and the centralization of the means of power—in economic , in political, and in military institutions.”5 As the impact of centralization increasingly shaped how life was lived in the United States, however, the idea persisted that decentralized organizational structures were both more desirable and in some ineffable way more powerful than centralized ones. Thus Harvard psychologist Gordon Allport, writing on the eve of American involvement in the Second World War, insisted that “democratic morale has far greater potential strength” than the engineered social unity of totalitarianism.6 In 1941 and 1942, Allport was among a group of social scientists recruited by the Council for Democracy to form a Committee on Public Morale: 350 expert consultants enlisted to devise ways of boosting American commitment to the war effort.The privately funded Council for Democracy had been founded...

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