Turncoats, Traitors, and Fellow Travelers: Culture and Politics of the Early Cold War (review)

In Turncoats, Traitors, and Fellow Travelers, Arthur Redding offers an insightful look into the formation of American Cold War culture. Redding contrasts the dynamic potentials of the Popular Front era of the 1930s with the limited prospects of plurality that dominated the early Cold War. Conformity was ironically justified through "American freedomism" as an antithesis to Soviet totalitarianism. Redding's study reveals that the key to ensuring conformity was not simply coercion, but creating the perception of individual free choice, as long as that choice complied with dominant values of anticommunism. In short, the most powerful medium for enforcing conformity was creating the illusion of a pluralistic culture.

Redding's project reinterprets the complex cultural world that shaped the consciousness of the baby boomer generation. His work covers a wide number of intellectuals who challenged and constructed the patterns of McCarthyist culture. Unlike liberal interpretations, Redding contends that cultural McCarthyism was not simply a "hysterical deviation . . . followed by a return to sanity"; instead the McCarthy era produced a repressive paradigm aimed at wiping out the cultural, intellectual, and political advances of the Popular Front. Intellectuals were co-opted (and consequently won over the general public) into this new dynamic of "cultural production" that paradoxically emphasized both conformity and individualism in contrast to the socially engaged collectivism of the pre-1947 era. Through the guise of anticommunism and free will, such intellectuals helped construct a new consumerist culture; Cold War culture was defined by hetero-normative gender roles, neo-imperial racism, an emerging suburban (and often demasculated) lifestyle, and a national mythology of rugged individualism aimed at wiping out the urban collectivism of the Popular Front. Even those who considered themselves to be "cultural fugitives" were often unconsciously assisting in the manufacturing of consent by directing their critiques through acceptable forms of Cold War liberalism. Redding argues that by 1952, even the most prominent of rebels had been effectively marginalized or at least partially "assimilated into dominant cultural narratives" (66).

The greatest strength of Redding's work is his personalization of culture, history, and politics inspired by his own anarchist sympathies. For Redding, events like the Cold War, much like the modern Bush era, were not "historically inevitable or necessary," but were produced by a myriad of factors defined primarily by human agency (6). Redding's writing is inspired by Mattheisen's plea of "continually reassessing and repossessing . . . our history" to reformulate our contemporary cultural and political life (17). Studies of Cold War culture empower us to "invent, elaborate, and mobilize the new possibilities of joy" and liberation in the present and future (151). Redding contends this is a mission made all the more necessary as the world begins the turbulent journey out of the trauma cast on civilization by the Bush regime.

Redding uses historic examples to illuminate the potential personal peril and limitations of cultural rebellion. The case of Sylvia Plath warns us that "the effort to cultivate a uniquely liberating consciousness would lead only to madness and social ostracism" (102). Paul and Jane Bowles teach us that along such a path, the individual must be willing to make painful ethical choices, not based on dominant morality, but by accepting the unpredictable nature of the universe that produces "potentially productive or destructive" outcomes that cannot be managed or predicted. This process rejects Cold War understandings of "selfh ood" and "identity," instead accepting an incalculable "process of becoming" (122). Arthur Miller unintentionally illuminates the limitations of individual moral resistance that is inspired by "exceptionalist" national mythologies of the past; Redding postulates that "perhaps America never was America," hoping the shedding of such illusions will "mobilize whatever new possibilities of opposition are emerging today" (97). In other words, though the past is distinct from the present, lessons from these historical struggles might liberate future generations from dangerous and illusionary cultures of "freedomism."

On a critical note, Redding's text is...