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157 5 THE CULTURAL COLD WAR AT ITS PEAK Mass Culture and Intellectuals, 1948–1956 The Most Insidious Challenge The Cold War struggle over ideas and mass culture was as crucial as the confrontations in the political, economic, and military arenas. This is now a widely accepted conclusion. The United States strove not only to demonstrate cultural superiority over the Soviet Union but also to defuse widespread anti-Americanism in Western Europe. The French and Italian Communists privileged cultural resistance because they recognized that their leverage was strongest on those issues. By the late 1940s, however, both the Communists and the Americans had come to realize that culture was the most elusive element in their confrontation. Even so, both concluded that a core challenge came from their opponent’s “soft power.” Recent literature has covered separately each side’s actions and debates in the cultural Cold War.1 The purpose of this chapter is not to revisit these debates in detail but to add perspective to the ideological cultural struggle by juxtaposing and comparing the perceptions and responses from both sides of the Atlantic. According to the PCI’s Gramscian project, cultural hegemony could be achieved by assimilating the intellectual elites and molding a new mass national culture in order to disarm the structural power of the ruling classes. Following the decisions of a national organization conference in January 1947, the party created an intellectuals’ section within its propaganda commission . In 1948, the section became a cultural commission, headed by Emilio Sereni. Between 1948 and 1949, the PCF, like its Italian counterpart, created an ideological section within the central committee (directed by François Billoux). That section was divided into three commissions: one for the party schools, a second for general education, and a third for the organization of intellectuals, headed by Laurent Casanova.2 Achieving hegemony also meant resisting the most dangerous forms of American influence. Indeed, cultural power was considered most threatening and most insidious. U.S. economic, military, and political presence could be blatant and easier to target than social and cultural seduction. As I noted in chapter 3, in the midst of the 1948 electoral campaign, Pietro Secchia had warned against the combined military, economic, and (lowbrow) cultural 158 THE CULTURAL COLD WAR threat posed by the American trusts controlling Italy. Three years later, the new director of the cultural commission, Carlo Salinari, still lamented a general mood of “indifference” toward the American “contraband of a pseudoculture .” In contrast to some success on the political and economic level, Salinari added, the party had lowered its guard against the “degradation” of national culture and the “demoralization” of Italian intellectuals. Catholic intellectuals may have unsuccessfully tried to absorb “the Crocean and the decadentist [sic] currents of thought,” he continued, but, in alliance with the Americans, they were forging a new combination of provincial and cosmopolitan —all in all, in the party’s opinion, superficial and inane—national culture.3 Repeated communist indignation about indifference, “disorientation ,” and corruption indicated a growing sense of vulnerability toward a cultural presence that was pervasive at the mass level, and that might even reenlist progressive intellectuals to the capitalist cause. In beginning its assault against the American film industry, the PCF also recognized the peril of what it called a tempting and tentacular presence. At the Central Committee of Paris in October 1947, Maurice Thorez defined Hollywood as no less than an “enterprise of disaggregation of the French nation, an enterprise of moral corruption and perversion of our young men and women, with such stultifying films, where eroticism competes with bigotry , where the gangster is king; these movies . . . are not meant to prepare a generation of French conscious of their duties toward France, toward the Republic, but rather a troop of slaves crushed by the ‘iron heel.’”4 The Communists considered Hollywood a threat to French youth, most likely because they sensed that American popular culture portrayed a new generational freedom, liberated from parental and ideological constraints. Also, for both ideological and nationalist reasons,Thorez felt compelled to portray enslavement to American hedonism or conformity as an aberration from militant service to the country. European scrutiny, as we have noted, had already pressed the United States to a great deal of self-scrutiny in the years immediately after the war. Now that the Western European Communists, under the guidance and inspiration of Soviet propaganda or, worse, on account of their nations’ own cultural traditions, had begun a relentless attack on American cultural imports...

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