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[2] andrew s. gross “death is so permanent. drive carefully.”: european ruins and american studies circa 1948 Internationalism versus Transnationalism Calls for a transnational approach or the “worlding” of American studies have become commonplace, even obligatory. It is a point of professional consensus that students of U.S.-American culture and history should move beyond the nation as the primary unit of analysis.1 While this new consensus may signal a paradigm shift, it also obscures the fact that internationalism, and especially trans-Atlanticism, was prevalent in the field during the Cold War, when thousands of scholars taught and lectured abroad through Fulbright fellowships, the Salzburg Seminar, and other venues and lecture circuits sponsored by the State Department. The first issue of American Quarterly (1949) contained Henry Nash Smith’s essay on the Salzburg Seminar, alongside essays with titles like “On What It Is to Be French” (Grace Flandrau), “The Projection of America Abroad” (Max Beloff), and “The Reputation of America Overseas (1776–1869)” (Merle Curti). The third issue contained an article by Harry Levin on “Some European Views of Contemporary American Literature” and a relatively positive review by R. C. Stephenson of a history of American literature published in the Soviet Union. Tremaine McDowell ’s 1948 book American Studies situates the field in the context of regionalism on the one hand and internationalism on the other, or what today we might term the local and the global. There are significant concerns to be raised about how international this early internationalism actually was. First, it often displays the exceptionalism—the notion that the United States is qualitatively different from other nations— that is one of the main concerns of contemporary transnationalism.2 Even McDowell, a committed internationalist, claims exceptional status for American optimism: “the temper of our idealism, the form of our government, and perhaps our ignorance of the difficulties of international cooperation bred by our geographical detachment, encourage us to dream more often and more rosily of a republic of man than do the citizens of any other nation ” (92). David Riesman, in a 1953 American Quarterly article on “Psycho- “Death Is So Permanent.” [73] logical Types and National Character,” warns against the ideological abuse of the concept of national types so prevalent during World War II, but then goes on to suggest that American friendliness is linked to American egalitarianism , speculating, in parentheses, that Europe might become nicer after becoming more democratic (327, 338). Even Partisan Review, outspokenly European and modernist in its orientation, could sometimes sound an exceptionalist note. Introducing the famous 1952 symposium “Our Country and Our Culture,” the editors extol the United States as the only political—and perhaps cultural—bulwark between Europe and “Russian totalitarianism”: “Europe is no longer regarded as a sanctuary; it no longer assures that rich experience of culture which inspired and justified a criticism of American life. The wheel has come full circle, and now America has become the protector of western civilization, at least in a military and economic sense” (“Our Country ” I, 284). The triumphalism evident in this formulation raises a second concern— one related but not identical to the problem of exceptionalism. In the context of the Cold War, criticism seemed to lose some of its critical bite, and even formerly dissident intellectuals began to treat U.S.-American culture as an advertisement for midcentury American democracy. An exception to this trend was C. Wright Mills, who objected to the “stateman’s-like worry” evident in the framing of the Partisan Review symposium; his contribution stresses the importance of maintaining communities of dissent in a time of political consensus, an argument that he would make more famously in his “Letter to the New Left,” a 1961 attack on “NATO intellectuals” (“Our Country” II, 447; Mills, “Letter,” 249). However, Cold War politics made for strange bedfellows, and former left-wing thinkers whose anticommunism would soon move them in the direction of neoconservatism also objected to the exceptionalist tone of the Partisan Review editorial statement—not because it undermined intellectual independence but because it was bad policy. James Burnham, the Partisan Review advisory editor who was already working for the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) and would in 1983 receive the Presidential Medal of Freedom from Ronald Reagan, raised the following question: “Are we going to imply to European—and Moslem, Hindu, and Chinese—intellectuals that it is illicit to prefer American political institutions and politics to Soviet unless at the same time they are ready to...

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