After the Second World War, the American state spearheaded a campaign of cultural warfare intended to foster a sociopolitical environment conducive to the solidification and expansion of American dominance in the post-war world. This campaign included programs like the infamous Congress for Cultural Freedom (CCF), which organized cultural activities such as international arts conferences and literary magazines.

In 1967, an investigation by Ramparts magazine revealed that the CCF was a CIA front operation. In 1999, Frances Stonor Saunders published a ground-breaking work, Who Paid The Piper? The Cultural Cold War, outlining the vast network of propaganda activities that the CCF carried out from 1950 to 1979. In the aftermath, a substantial body of work emerged examining the role of the CCF and related organizations.

In contrast to the CCF, semi-private propaganda operations have not been well-researched. Parallel to covert operations, semi-private actors carried out propaganda activity on behalf of the American state during the Cold War years. They remain an overlooked but integral part of the so-called Cultural Cold War. Semi-private operations are also incredibly revealing about the nature of propaganda and the reproduction of state ideology.

From 1952-56, the Ford Foundation published a cultural periodical called Perspectives USA. This periodical was created and edited by James Laughlin, of New Directions Press, and was published specifically for export.

Perspectives’ publicly stated function was to counteract negative perceptions of American culture in Europe by demonstrating the “vitality” of America’s “spiritual and artistic elements” to European intellectuals (Laughlin 5). On a deeper level, Perspectives participated in America’s cultural Cold War.

Perspectives purported to be independent but actually performed a state function. It existed as a product and facilitator of American hegemony. The periodical emerged as a result of shared commitments by individuals already inculcated in state ideology and functioned to reproduce this ideology. Primarily, it served to circulate and reproduce ideology of the American state, under the banner of liberalism, to help facilitate the transfer of imperial power from Europe to America.

In the sense used here, hegemony should be understood as a complex process in which a general consensus is cultivated in the population to ensure that the right conditions and relationships exist to uphold the domination of a specific group within a social structure. The dominant ideology is generated by, and itself generates, these conditions of dominance.

In the case of Perspectives, hegemony also means that the state’s direct orchestration of a particular writer’s work is not necessary for that work to implicitly support the dominant social order.

In order to legitimize American dominance in the post-war world, Perspectives situated America as the heir of Western civilizational progress and attempted to demonstrate the strength of its culture to justify this position.

Perspectives primarily focused on a binary network of communication between elite groups in Europe and America – a transfer of Western power. However, regions of extraction which seemingly existed on the ‘periphery’ were actually central, if often unspoken, areas of concern at all times. As Western civilizational superiority was a presumption to the editors, positioning America at the forefront of the Western world implicitly meant the domination of non-European regions.

Perspectives launched in 1952 after Robert Maynard Hutchins, Associate Director of the Ford Foundation, approached James Laughlin, owner of New Directions Press, to propose a collaboration. The Ford Foundation was the largest philanthropic organization in the world and New Directions was the most respected modernist publisher in America. Together, Laughlin and Hutchins developed the schematics for a high-brow periodical intended to improve the European perception of American culture.

The Ford Foundation gave Laughlin $5,000 to develop a proposal for “a quarterly magazine of selections from American literary and scholarly journals which would fairly represent the best American writing and thinking on the highest level” and would be distributed at low-cost across Europe (Barnhisel 184; MacNiven 325). According to Laughlin, the distribution of such a magazine would serve to counteract “the false concept of America as a commercial imperialist” (325).

In late 1951, Laughlin’s proposal was approved and the Ford Foundation established a new subsidiary company called Intercultural Publications. Intercultural Publications was then provided with a grant of $500,000 to publish Perspectives and an additional $200,000 for other cultural activities, such as the distribution of American books in India (MacNiven 326; Barnhisel 203).

Hutchins and Laughlin selected a board of directors for Intercultural Publications. This board included Laughlin, Alfred A. Knopf, H.J. Heinz II, William J. Casey, and Richard J. Weil. It also included a prominent lawyer, Charles Garside, and two bankers, Joseph Hambuechen and James F. Browlee (Barnhisel 186). William J. Casey later served as Director of the Central Intelligence Agency.

In addition to the board of directors, Laughlin and Hutchins selected a board of advisors for Perspectives with more direct ‘cultural expertise.’ Perspectives’ board of advisors included:

Arthur Schlesinger Jr.; Robert Penn Warren; W.H. Auden; John Crowe Ransom; Melvin J. Lasky; Tennessee Williams; Francois Bondy; Norman Holmes Pearson; Jacques Barzun; R.P. Blackmur; Allen Tate; Lionel Trilling; Wallace Stegner; Paul Bigelow; Mortimer Adler; James Agee; Cyril Connolly; Aaron Copland; Malcolm Cowley; Kenneth Rexroth; Delmore Schwartz; Perry Miller; Harry Levin; Harvey Breit; Cleanth Brooks; Marguerite Caetani; James T. Farrell; Francis Fergusson; W.H. Ferry; Alfred M. Frankfurter; Albert J. Guerard; Hiram Haydn; Alfred Kazin; Paul Henry Lang; Alvin Lustig; Richard P. McKeon; Robert Motherwell; Dorothy Norman; Charles A. Pearce; Duncan Phillips; Robert Redfield; Edouard Roditi; Selden Redman; Eero Saarinen; Meyer Schapiro; Gilbert Seldes; Karl J. Schapiro; Ralph E. Turner; Victor Weybright; Kurt Wolff; and Morton D. Zabel. (Perspectives 1952).

Initially, this advisory board served as a pool of rotating editors; however, following criticism from the Ford Foundation that content featured was too critical of certain aspects of American culture, Perspectives’ rotating editorship was discontinued and replaced with a static editorial board (Barnhisel 213).

Perspectives’ advisory board was comprised of an extraordinary number of high-profile figures central to the construction of America’s twentieth century canon. For instance, Ransom, Warren, and Tate were core to the New Criticism movement, which transformed the very way that literature was studied. Wallace Stegner was instrumental in the institutionalization and professionalization of creative writing in America and ran the Iowa Writer’s Workshop.

Many of the figures listed as advisors to Intercultural Publications also actively involved themselves in Cold War literary operations and appear frequently in studies of America’s cultural Cold War.

James Laughlin (1914-1997) was a wealthy American publisher, born into one of the largest steel-producing families in the United States (MacNiven 13). Due to poor eyesight, Laughlin did not serve in the military during WWII. Instead, he let troops train on a ski-hill he owned and developed a strong belief in the idea that America had a “special responsibility to advance artistic and intellectual freedom worldwide” (Barnhisel 183).

Following the war, Laughlin embarked on a state-sponsored cultural tour of Germany. During this time, he developed the belief that America suffered due to the widespread perception in Europe “that America is a nation of ‘materialists’ and ‘barbarians’ incapable of spiritual and cultural activity on a high plane” (183). In response, he committed himself to altering this perception.

The idea that American literature should serve the state was widespread in the mid-twentieth century. In fact, the American literary establishment actively mobilised for warfare during the Second World War and committed itself to propaganda and psychological warfare via organizations such as the Council on Books in Wartime, which was created by W.W. Norton and one of the founders of Random House (Ochi 90; Trysh 355).

Many of Perspectives’ advisory board members were committed to this mobilisation. For instance, professors such as John Crowe Ransom, Norman Holmes Pearson, Lionel Trilling, Allen Tate, and Robert Penn Warren worked in collaboration with major philanthropic foundations to restructure English departments across the country to maximize socio-political impact (59). Similarly, Wallace Stegner’s Iowa Writer’s Workshop received substantial funding based upon its commitment to Americanism and anti-communism (74).

In many cases, individuals who received state funding did not have specific orders from state bodies. Instead, immense funding provided to certain individuals and institutions by state or semi-private organizations enabled their particular approaches and attitudes, which state bodies identified as useful or sympathetic, to receive disproportionate circulation and influence over the overall direction of American literature and the structure of its literary institutions. For example, Stegner’s workshop committed itself to an approach to literature, firmly rooted in American liberalism, which emphasized the importance of writing about isolated individual human experiences as opposed to “reductive” structural matters (1). As the Iowa Workshop became the model for almost every subsequent creative writing program in America, the extent to which this approach shaped American writing is enormous.

A number of those on the advisory board were also involved with the Congress for Cultural Freedom (CCF). The CCF was the CIA’s foremost cultural organization during the Cold War. With CIA funding and oversight, the CCF served to coordinate and orchestrate cultural activities on a global scale by publishing magazines, organizing conferences, and facilitating networks of artists in order to cultivate a liberal-democratic consensus among the “intellectual elite.”

The CCF existed from 1950-79 and has been described as the cultural counterpart to the Marshall Plan (Saunders 245). Whereas the Marshall Plan focused upon economic liberalisation, the CCF focused upon intellectual liberalisation, emphasising the necessity of social conditions conducive to cultural and intellectual freedom. Board members involved include Cyril Connolly and Francois Bondy (Saunders 86). Other members, such as Lionel Trilling and Arthur Schlesinger Jr., were active members of the American cell of the CCF, the ACCF. The ACCF served as a “laundry for CIA and State Department funds” and functioned to mobilize American intellectuals during the Cold War (Saunders, 97; Wilford, 71).

Many of those involved in the ACCF and the CCF were entirely aware that the organisations were being used to further the interests of the American state. For instance, Trilling’s wife, Diana, who was in charge of the ACCF’s Administrative Committee, has since acknowledged that she was aware “even before joining” that its source of funds, the Farfield Foundation, was a front (Wilford, 87).

Other board members, such as Melvin J. Lasky, are even more implicated in Cold War activity. Lasky, who edited the CCF’s flagship magazine Encounter and a postwar propaganda magazine called Der Monat, was later revealed to be a CIA agent (Saunders 353; Wilford 78). Der Monat was sponsored by the High Commission of Germany using confidential Marshall Plan funds and served as a model for subsequent propaganda magazines including Encounter (Saunders 30).

Der Monat was initially created on the basis that it would “support the general objectives of U.S policy in Germany and Europe by illustrating the background of ideas, spiritual activity, literary, and intellectual achievement, from which the American democracy takes its inspiration” and would therefore win “large sections of the German intelligentsia away from Communistic influence” (30).

In 1954, Der Monat’s funding was taken over by the Ford Foundation and the magazine publicly celebrated its independence; however, it should be noted that the President of the Ford Foundation in 1954, John J. McCloy, was the same man who provided Der Monat with its original government funds in his former role as the High Commissioner of Germany (Scott-Smith 93). Furthermore, though Laughlin once criticized Der Monat for being “too tame,” he was involved in the private “takeover” of the periodical (Barnhisel 184; Berghahn 217).

The overlap between Perspectives and “official” Cold War activity is too extensive to overlook. Perspectives is representative of a Cold War strategy which relied upon the privatisation of operations and civil mobilisation. Such privatisation was largely based upon the apparently self-motivated commitments of individuals rather than being carried out by way of conscious coordination on the part of state actors. As a result, it is important not to view the content of the magazine in isolation when examining its function and purpose. Instead, Perspectives should be analyzed in relation to, and with the context of, the broader orientation of the Ford Foundation, the general framework of America’s cultural Cold War, and the specific conditions in which the magazine was distributed.

Examining Perspectives in relation to the Cold War should not mean reinforcing the notion that the Cold War is reducible to a power struggle between two competing pan-European blocs. In Cold War Assemblages: Decolonization to Digital, Bhakti Shringarpure destabilizes this simple colonial framework to demonstrate that the Cold War “etched itself most deeply and distinctly on the body of the postcolony” and can be understood as a continuation of “the dynamic of European colonialism” (2).

In this light, it should be noted that while Perspectives centers itself in the Transatlantic world and speaks almost exclusively to the intellectual elite of Europe, the majority of the countries in which it was distributed by 1956 were outside of Europe (Perspectives 16). Focusing upon an apparently binary network of communication between Europe and America drew upon and reinforced the colonial dynamic and rested upon the presupposed superiority of pan-European nations.

In Perspectives’ era, the Ford Foundation was by far the largest philanthropic organization in the world. In 1954, it spent four times more money than the Rockefeller Foundation and ten times more than Carnegie, the second and third largest philanthropic organizations. By 1960, its annual budget exceeded that of the United Nations (Sutten viii). According to the foundation, this wealth was intended to serve as “funds for scientific, educational, and charitable purposes, all for the public welfare and for no other purposes” (MacDonald 3). However, its twentieth century activities were so ideologically, financially, and functionally entangled with the American state that it effectively operated as an extension of the state itself (Parmar viii).

From 1950-54, Paul Hoffman was president of the Ford Foundation. Immediately prior, Hoffman was Chief Administrator of the Marshall Plan (Scott-Smith 54). The relationship between the Marshall Plan and the Ford Foundation sheds light on the rationale behind Perspectives’ distribution. Generally speaking, the Marshall Plan is cast as an aid program that served to bail out European countries devastated by the Second World War. In actuality, it was implemented to solidify America’s newfound position of global dominance in the post-war era. In fact, it was explicitly referred to as a means of “political warfare” by the State Department Policy Planning Staff (Lucas 39).

The reality of the Marshall Plan’s purpose is made explicitly clear a Top Secret “Report by the Policy Planning Staff” authored by George Kennan in 1948, which states:

”[W]e have about 50% of the world’s wealth but only 6.3% of its population. This disparity is particularly great as between ourselves and the peoples of Asia. In this situation, we cannot fail to be the object of envy and resentment. Our real task in the coming period is to devise a pattern of relationships which will permit us to maintain this position of disparity without positive detriment to our national security. To do so, we will have to dispense with all sentimentality and day-dreaming; and our attention will have to be concentrated everywhere on our immediate national objectives. We need not deceive ourselves that we can afford today the luxury of altruism and world-benefaction” (Kennan 524).

Internal documents such as Kennan’s demonstrate that, despite public rhetoric, America’s post-war activity was focused upon advancing American interests. Kennan is widely credited as the architect of America’s Cold War containment strategy, which focused upon limiting the U.S.S.R.’s sphere of power and expanding America’s (Popescu 27). He also authored the opening essay for Perspectives’ final issue.

In order to receive Marshall Plan funds, European countries were required to join the Organisation of European Economic Cooperation and take structural measures to ensure compatibility with American capitalism (Ransom 70). These measures served to maintain American control over European markets. Though America was focused upon establishing a Transatlantic (pan-European) network, this network relied upon extraction from, and domination of, non-European regions.

In his report, Kennan also expresses support for “arrangements whereby a union of Western European nations would undertake jointly the economic development and exploitation of the colonial and dependent areas” of Africa, which “is relatively little exposed to communist pressures” and “lies easily accessible to the maritime nations of Western Europe” (511). For America, bolstering the European sphere of accumulation ensured American dominance over regions which European powers extracted wealth from.

As a Marshall Plan administrator, Paul Hoffman played a central role in efforts to secure Indonesian political independence from the Dutch, while still maintaining economic dependency, in order to avoid decolonization (Ransom 95). When Hoffman moved to the Ford Foundation in 1950, he led the drive to build western educational institutions in Indonesia to establish a “modernizing elite” and restructure Indonesia as a “modernizing country” (96).

In the sense that it is used throughout Perspectives, modernization means the establishment of capitalist economic systems and American-style socio-political structures. It is the transition from a diverse array of social forms to a universalized standard in which a certain form of social organization is equated with development and progress, establishing a correlation between the passage of time and a specific pattern of organization. Alongside its programs in Indonesia, the foundation established “Asian Studies” programs at Harvard, Berkley, MIT, and Cornell, fostered networks of “scholars dedicated to policy-related work in Indonesian political and economic development” that collaborated with the University of Indonesia, and sponsored Indonesian students to study at American schools (Parmar 128; Ransom 98).

Perspectives was not insulated from such activities. For instance, in 1956, Intercultural Publications published an anthology titled Perspective of Indonesia which included essays like “Facets of Indonesia’s Economy,” “Women’s Role Since Independence,” and “Problems the Country Faces” alongside fiction and poetry (Perspectives 14 238).

Despite significant overlap with foreign policy goals, the Ford Foundation presented its Indonesian programs as apolitical humanitarian activities (Parmar 128). In reality, these programs contributed to expanded and legitimized western extraction when local elites established agricultural and economic plans in collaboration with American economists (Ransom 113).

Economic reconstruction efforts receive most of the scholarly attention but post-war reconstruction projects were far more extensive. For example, Melvin Lasky’s Der Monat was funded by the Marshall Plan through the Information Services Division of the German High Commission until the Ford Foundation took over funding in 1954 (Coleman 94). In 1947, Lasky stated that the journal would combat “the variety of factors – political, psychological, cultural – which work against US foreign policy, and in particular against the success of the Marshall Plan in Europe” and would counter “the same old anti-democratic antiAmerican formulas on which many European generations have been fed” (Scott-Smith 91).

The necessity of such a range of focus is made clear in Kennan’s first report on “The European Situation,” which states that “the present crisis results in large part from the disruptive effect of the war on the economic, political, and social structure of Europe and from a profound exhaustion of physical plant and of spiritual vigour”; as a result, he suggests, America’s role in Western Europe should be to “provide both the economic and spiritual resources for the tottering institutions of post-war European society” (Kennan, 1947). While there is no direct line of coordination, it is no coincidence that, in “The Function of this Magazine,” James Laughlin writes that “It will be the main function of Perspectives to show that the spiritual and artistic elements in American life have not been sterile” (5).

While more overt, the general sentiment of Lasky’s proposal – to win “large sections of the German intelligentsia away from Communistic influence” – is not far removed from that of Perspectives. Laughlin once wrote that the purpose of Perspectives was not “so much to defeat the leftist intellectuals in dialectical combat as to lure them away from their positions by aesthetic and rational persuasion” (Saunders 30; McCarthy 96). In support of his claim, it can be noted that in 1953, Laughlin travelled to India on behalf of Intercultural Publications specifically to counter “activities of the Indian Communist Party” and “the threat of communist domination” by “acquaint[ing] Indian readers with the basic traditions of democracy in the West” through literature (McCarthy 98).

In the post-war era, magazines like Perspectives and Der Monat operated as part of the cultural dimension of America’s imperial strategy, bolstering the European sphere of domination and ensuring alignment with American interests. The close relationship between the state-sponsored Der Monat and the privately operated Perspectives indicates an alignment of interest between segments of civil-society and the state, regardless of their “official” status.

Under Hoffman, the Ford Foundation hired a number of senior Marshall Plan figures, including Shepard Stone, Milton Katz, Richard Bissell, and John J. McCloy (Berghahn 143). These figures highlight the overlap between the foundation and American foreign policy. For instance, Richard Bissell helped transfer Marshall Plan funds for covert CIA projects while working on the Marshall Plan. After moving to the Ford Foundation, he served as a direct contact point for the CIA within the foundation (Saunders 116). Then, within two years of joining, Bissell left to work as a “special assistant” to CIA director Allen Dulles (116). It has also been revealed that the CIA regularly used foundations to covertly pass funds to target sources. In fact, a Congressional Select Committee investigation revealed that approximately half of the grants given by American philanthropic foundations between 1963 and 1966 for “international activities” were actually disguised CIA funds (Saunders 112).

In 1954, McCloy was appointed President of the Ford Foundation. Prior to this, he was High Commissioner of Germany, President of the World Bank, Assistant Secretary of War, Chairman of the Rockefeller Chase Manhattan Bank, and Chairman of the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR) (Saunders 118; Berman 51). McCloy’s entanglement with various state and private bodies is somewhat indicative of the alignment of America’s elite establishment. Like Bissell and Hoffman, McCloy also helps to highlight the overlap between state policy and foundation activity. For example, as High Commissioner of Germany, McCloy employed CIA agents in administrative positions in order to provide them with cover – when he moved to the Ford Foundation, McCloy established a special committee specifically to deal with CIA collaboration (Saunders 118).

While the Ford Foundation’s relationship to the CIA should not be overlooked, it should also not be overemphasized. Focusing too heavily upon intelligence involvement risks what Pierre Bourdieu refers to as a “naïve artificialism which recognizes no other principle unifying a group’s or class’s ordinary or extraordinary action than the conscious coordination of conspiracy” (80). The ideological commitments of the Ford Foundation and its high-ranking officials were so aligned with those of the state that even the apparently-autonomous activities of the Ford Foundation were consistently oriented towards strengthening the American state and ensuring the expansion of American dominance. In large part, organizations such as the CIA found organizations such as the Ford Foundation to be effective partners because of the pre-existing alignment.

In addition to his Marshall Plan connections, McCloy’s work at the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR) is particularly relevant to the direction of the Ford Foundation in the post-war era. The CFR is a private think-tank, funded by foundations and corporate donors, which was established by wealthy Americans following the First World War (Parmar 75). For the most part, the CFR existed to provide foreign policy recommendations to state bodies. In McCloy’s era, its ranks included David Rockefeller, Allen Dulles, and Henry Kissinger. Throughout the mid-twentieth century, the CFR exerted such influence over American foreign policy that academics such as William Shoup and Lawrence Minter have argued that the organization effectively controlled the state itself (279). Others, such as Inderjeet Parmar, have argued that the CFR was a “key voice heard by policy makers” but was also often used to communicate State Department ideas to the public and was significantly shaped by the State Department itself (91). In either case, the CFR represents deep entanglement between corporate elite and state bodies.

From 1953-55, McCloy was chair of the CFR’s study group on United States-Soviet relations, which was funded by the Ford Foundation (Shoup and Minten 40). The study group included figures such as John D. Rockefeller III, Dean Rusk, and Walt Rostow, as well as observers from the State Department, the CIA, the Air Force, and the Army (40). In 1955, the group’s conclusions were published as Russia and America: Dangers and Prospects, a book which provides insight into the logic and attitude of McCloy and his contemporaries. In the forward to Russia and America, McCloy states that the US must “maintain military strength and vigilance” but that it is also necessary to take non-military areas “more seriously” in its struggle with the Soviet Union (x). McCloy states that:

”The strength of the Atlantic Community, of NATO, a strength not fully realized and developed, lies in a broadly shared set of political and cultural values… The tendency to regard the Atlantic Alliance as an emergency device for military protection alone must give way to an appreciation of its potentiality as a community of political, economic, and cultural interest (xiv).”

This attention to cultural, economic, political, and military elements not only demonstrates aligned interest with the state but also demonstrates an understanding, by the soon-to-be director of the Ford Foundation, that cultural activity goes hand in hand with other dimensions of foreign policy. McCloy also writes that “No objective of American foreign policy is more important than that of strengthening the solidarity of the great Atlantic coalition” and suggests developing policy with special attention to the degree to which it will “help or hinder European and Atlantic cooperation” (xiv; xv). Furthermore, McCloy argues that “the image which we Americans have of ourselves, and which others have of us, is therefore a powerful factor in the common affairs of mankind today” (xxvii). It is important, he notes, to present a certain image and demonstrate the American commitment to “gradual, consistent, positive solutions to our problems” which are “arrived at in a society constantly expanding its freedoms for all” (xxviii). McCloy concludes by stating that “In the next decade, the great opportunity and the great need is to communicate to peoples throughout the world our sense of partnership in the liberal revolution which began two hundred years ago” (xxxi).

The commitments outlined by McCloy are commitments mirrored in the pages of Perspectives. As the establishment of Perspectives predates McCloy’s tenure at the Ford Foundation, it would be a mistake to assume that the content of Perspectives is simply an embodiment of McCloy’s vision. Instead, it should be recognized that certain common notions, commitments, and principles guided the work of the Ford Foundation and its members which were more or less aligned with those of the state and its elite establishment.

The individual can be representative of the overarching ideology as it is in the individual that ideology functions and exists most concretely (Althusser 176). The individual’s internalization of ideology, and the collective systems of disposition which emerge from conditions of existence to form habitus, means that even the “unconscious” actions and thoughts of the individual tend to reproduce logic of the dominant class.

In 1953, Shepard Stone, chief of the foundation’s international division, wrote that the Ford Foundation was in a position “to take action which our Government is no longer in a position to initiate or carry through” (Berghahn 168). Among other things, Stone recommended that the foundation begin to fund the CCF and “broaden” the “scope” of Perspectives to be more propagandistic (168). Shortly after his recommendation, the Ford Foundation also took over as Der Monat’s source of funds (Coleman).

In 1967, Ramparts magazine and The New York Times published a series of exposes revealing the CIA’s ties to the CCF (Ramparts; NYT). Following this, the CCF changed its name to the International Association for Cultural Freedom (IACF), the Ford Foundation took over as its primary source of funds, and Shepard Stone became IACF president (Scott-Smith JOF 3). Though they existed as distinct bodies, Ford Foundation’s relationship to the CCF and Der Monat cannot be disconnected from its relationship to Perspectives. In fact, from 1954 on, Perspectives regularly featured advertisements for the CCF’s flagship magazine, Encounter (Perspectives 6 176). As Perspectives was fully-funded and not expected to turn a profit, it can be assumed that these ads were not included for financial reasons.

Bhakti Shringarpure argues that Cold War imperial power largely worked on two parallel planes. The first plane utilized overt violence and physical/geographical mapmaking, and “the second plane was committed to the use of soft power that mainly aimed to influence opinion and often even claimed to improve people’s conditions through aid and education” (143). While the first plane is widely condemned, “there is a tendency to profess that soft power has inadvertent positive consequences” and treat it apologetically (143).

In actuality, the two planes of power are inextricable. For instance, the fact that the CIA established the Italian Association for Cultural Freedom, which became the “center of a federation of about a hundred independent cultural groups” championing liberal democracy, should not be disconnected from the fact that the CIA also interfered Italy’s federal election a few earlier in order to ensure that the Christian Democrat Party won the election (Scott-Smith 72). These two operations simply account for different dimensions of American domination. It is, perhaps, for this reason that the CIA receives inordinate attention in Cold War studies – when CIA involvement is uncovered, the intersection between planes is laid bare. However, with the CIA, the burden of responsibility can also be displaced to a shadowy, manipulative body working without civilian oversight. In contrast, examination of organizations such as the Ford Foundation reveals that the intersection of planes is not isolated to espionage but is engrained in the very structure of America’s socio-political institutions.

Bhakti Shrigarpure’s analysis overlaps somewhat with Althusser’s theory of ideological and repressive state apparatuses, which can be understood as the various facets of the state which exert domination either primarily through physical violence or through ideology (78). Simplistically, ideological state apparatuses (ISAs) are institutions which realize and reproduce state ideology, contributing to the perpetuation of state and, therefore, ruling class domination (Althusser 77).

Perspectives functioned as an ideological state apparatus. The fact that its editors were apparently self-motivated in their commitment to the state does not lessen the magazine’s role as an ISA. Unlike repressive state apparatuses – the military, the CIA, the police, etc. – most ISAs tend to be “objectively distinct, relatively autonomous, and do not form an organized, centralized corps with a single, conscious leadership” (136). Instead, they are bound together by a largely invisible, often unconscious, commitment to a common ideology.

Perspectives launched in the autumn of 1952. Its first issue opens with a note from James Laughlin titled “The Function of this Magazine,” which begins with the following statement:

”This is the first issue of a new magazine which will be published four times a year in several different language editions: English, French, German, and Italian at the outset, with Spanish, and perhaps others, to follow. The magazine will present literary texts from and about the United States and examples of American art and music. Its editors will try to set materials before their readers that may enable them to view the culture of the United States in accurate perspective” (Laughlin 5).

Though the basic function – to improve the European perception of American culture – was made explicitly clear, the propagandistic nature of this function was hidden. For instance, Laughlin later states that “the editors are pledged to a policy which will keep the pages of Perspectives free of propaganda or political pressure” (8). This claim neglects to acknowledge the close relationship between the Ford Foundation and the state and the political commitments later established.

In particular, the editors of Perspectives were concerned that Europeans were only exposed to America’s popular culture, and that the intellectual perception of America suffered as a result. In “The Function of This Magazine,” Laughlin states that:

”America, if judged merely by second-rate motion pictures, may appear to be a land of gilded barbarians; but America judged also by the poems of Marianne Moore, the paintings of Ben Shahn, the music of Aaron Copland, or the outlook of a teacher like Jacques Barzun becomes something different: a culture that exhibits an exciting and rounded vitality” (6).

In order to alter negative perceptions, Laughlin argues that it is necessary to draw attention to America’s neglected finer elements and demonstrate the true strength of its culture. As a result, he promises to exclusively feature the “achievements of our finest creative spirits and most perceptive intellectuals” (Laughlin 7).

It must be noted that even if Laughlin and fellow editors genuinely believed that Perspectives would simply “set materials before [its] readers that may enable them to view the culture of the United States in accurate perspective,” the selection and presentation of material is never politically neutral, and the distinction between “first-rate” and “second-rate” culture cannot be taken for granted (5). Perspectives’ advisory board was made up of approximately fifty elite white males who were central to the construction of a widely accepted mid-twentieth century American canon. The shared experiences and worldviews of these individuals cannot be overlooked when examining their selection of the “finest” American works. For one thing, the works selected for inclusion in Perspectives were overwhelmingly created by other elite white males. In addition, they demonstrate adherence to a narrow and restrictive framework when it comes to the measurement of artistic value, upholding a fairly traditional canon.

Robert Maynard Hutchins, the Ford Foundation’s point-man on Perspectives, is probably most well known for his tenure as president of the University of Chicago from 1929-45. As president, Hutchins restructured the university according to a “Great Books” model in an attempt to reorient the direction of higher education in America (Burstein 84). This reorientation was based upon Hutchins’ belief that “Western civilization” was taking a “headlong plunge into the abyss,” and needed to be revitalized (Hutchins xii). At face value, Laughlin’s emphasis on modernism and Hutchins’ emphasis on “the tradition” may seems to be at odds; however, Hutchins’ focus on “the tradition” and Laughlin’s focus on “high-brow” modernism both rely upon a general consensus about the evaluation and measurement of culture. The evaluation of “first rate” and “second rate” modern culture is not disconnected from the framework of valuation for historical works.

As Raymond Williams notes, “the tradition” does not, in fact, refer directly to a historical body of work but to a modern interpretation of a selection of historical works (Williams newrepublic.com). Therefore, the weighting of “Great Books” is more indicative of the values of contemporary society than of anything else. Re-vitalizing aspects of “the tradition” provides a framework of guidance and justification for certain aspects of the contemporary socio-political structure.

R.P. Blackmur stated that the experience of editing Perspectives was tied to “a sense of American responsibility for the world after the dismantling of the old imperial structures” (Rubin 68). Throughout Perspectives, it is consistently suggested that Europe and America have a shared cultural history but that America has eclipsed Europe, and that Europeans should look to Americans for guidance moving forward. The selection of culture featured is intended to demonstrate and legitimize America’s position at the pinnacle of civilizational development.

In Perspectives, culture is treated as a measure of civilizational health and the measurement system by which culture is valued is firmly entrenched in perceptions and dispositions which presume the superiority of western civilization and pan-European culture.

Perspectives consistently attempts to establish a protective enclosure around culture, distancing it from socio-political concerns; however, the aforementioned approach reifies practices and outlooks which implicitly uphold “material” social structures, relationships, and conditions. As a result, the insulation of culture from politics results in the uncritical adherence to colonial frameworks. The implications of this are evident in instances such an art exhibition organized by Intercultural Publications in New Delhi in 1953, in which Laughlin advised organizers to “send paintings comprehensible to simple people” because “the Indian public is not yet ready for very advanced modern art” (Barnhisel 203). Such treatment enables the hierarchical relationship between extractive and extracted regions – “modern” and “modernizing” worlds – to be solidified and even extended.

For the most part, Perspectives did not target the general population. Instead, it focused upon the so-called intellectual elite of Europe. This emphasis on the intellectual is particularly evident in issue two, edited by Lionel Trilling. Trilling’s issue develops the idea that an intellectual class exists which has a special responsibility to guide the general direction of social organisation. In his introduction, Trilling states that:

”I have drawn the prose from only a few periodicals, all of relatively small circulation, although their ultimate influence is, I believe, rather considerable in the moral and intellectual life of the country. All the writers are intellectuals in the possibly special sense in which the word is used in America, where not everyone who deals seriously with intellectual matters thinks of himself, or is thought of, in this way – for example, not every university professor thinks of himself or is thought of in this way. The name implies, as I understand its use, a certain intensity of commitment, the belief that the existence and the conduct of the intellectual class are momentous in and essential to the life of society, the acceptance of intellectual activity as a mandate, a status, a personal fate” (5).

Trilling suggests that intellectuals are characterized by their active embrasure of the social function of intellectualism. Establishing a relationship between the intellectual class in Europe and the intellectual class in America was a common fixation for Perspectives’ duration. In the Gramscian sense, the social function of the intellectual is, primarily, to garner “consent” from the “great masses of the population to the general direction imposed on social life by the dominant fundamental group” (12). This notion seems, more or less, in line with the intended function of Perspectives.

Though different propaganda efforts targeted different segments of the population, winning over the intelligentsia was a common strategy in American propaganda efforts. Proponents of this approach believed that the general public would, in turn, consent to the supposedly superior knowledge held by intellectuals. As the Office of War Information stated during the Second World War, “books do not have their impact upon the mass mind but upon the minds of those who mould the mass mind – upon leaders of thought and formulators of public opinion” (Barnhisel 96). To Trilling, however, the function of the intellectual is entirely benevolent, a treatment which reveals one of the major paradoxes of Perspectives – the tendency to treat culture as something that can be a powerful social and moral force but can also be exonerated from entanglement with politics or power when desired.

In 1950, Trilling released the influential work The Liberal Imagination, a collection of literary criticism bound together by “an abiding interest in the ideas of what we loosely call liberalism, especially the relation of these ideas to literature” (Trilling 12). In subsequent years, The Liberal Imagination was widely distributed by the American government and became a common feature of America’s Cold War book programs (Rubin 69). According to Trilling, “liberalism is not only the dominant but even the sole intellectual tradition” in America (Trilling 12). In his analysis, liberalism, a “tendency rather than a concise body of doctrine,” tends to “organize the elements of life in a rational way” with the “vision of a general enlargement and freedom and rational direction” (16). Furthermore, as “it is no longer possible to think of politics except as the politics of culture,” Trilling states that while his essays are “not political,” they “assume the inevitable intimate, if not always obvious, connection between literature and politics” (14). Binding America’s intellectual tradition to liberalism serves to tie together many of the commitments of Perspectives and ensure that the “non-political” works conform to a consensus compatible with America’s dominant socio-political structures.

In “The Function of This Magazine,” Laughlin writes that “the editors are pledged to a policy which will keep the pages of Perspectives free of propaganda or political pressure” (Laughlin 8). Despite this claim, Perspectives demonstrates an overt commitment to America’s dominant socio-political structures. Its specific commitments are laid out most explicitly in Arthur Schlesinger Jr.’s essay “Liberalism in America,” in issue 14. In this essay, Schlesinger presents a brief analysis of the particularities of American liberalism for the European reader, arguing that liberalism is, in essence, the historical political condition of America – an “expression of the total national experience” (63).

In Perspectives, the term liberalism is used to categorize America’s dominant socio-political structures. The concept of liberalism encompasses political practice compatible with these structures. This sphere sets boundaries of acceptable practice and naturalizes America’s dominant socio-political structures and its predominant form of domination: capitalism. In this context, Perspectives serves to organize and structure thought, circulating, inculcating, and reproducing ideology of the American state. This symbolic and practical justification of the established order enables the perpetuation of domination to remain hidden and helps to establish an apparently self-policing structure which reproduces the conditions and logics which uphold this domination (Bourdieu 188).

Schlesinger begins “Liberalism in America” by stating: “In a sense all of America is liberalism” (55). This concept is the basis of his overall argument. Quoting Tocqueville, Schlesinger argues that because America “arrived at a state of democracy without having to endure a democratic revolution,” Americans are “born free without having to become so” (55). As a result, liberalism is a basic presumption of life in America. These unique historical conditions, he argues, produced a unique political consensus which has served as the general framework for all political practice. Schlesinger writes:

“As a young American political scientist, Professor Louis Hartz of Harvard, has brilliantly argued in his recent book, The Liberal Tradition in America, the absence of feudalism is a basic factor for accounting for the pervasive liberalism of the American political climate,” (56).

Schlesinger also argues that “the absence of feudalism meant the absence of a static and confining social order,” as well as “the absence of a profound social passion to uproot and destroy that order” (56). Even America’s revolution, he states, was a struggle directed “at national independence rather than at social change” (56). As a result, he claims, social and political conflict within American politics has always existed within a generally accepted consensus (57).

By the time Schlesinger’s essay appears and defines the political commitments of Perspectives, the basic principles are already fairly well established. In fact, many of the concepts are introduced in the very first issue by the essays “Democracy and Power: The Immigrant in American Politics” by Oscar Handlin and “America’s Romance with Practicality” by Jacques Barzun. In “Democracy and Power,” Handlin argues that European immigrants – the only immigrants he acknowledges – came to America without involvement or faith in politics (43). Once they arrived, immigrants slowly learned to trust state power as they witnessed that it could be used on behalf of the people for the first time, he argues (44). Similarly, in “America’s Romance with Practicality,” Barzun argues that “North America was settled by refugees, that is, by people escaping from one worldly evil or another” and that “the fight for individual rights and constitutional government leads logically to social democracy” in the American form (76).

Barzun and Handlin’s theme carries through Perspectives in essays such as “America the Beautiful” by Mary McCarthy in issue two, “The American Genius is Political” by Peter F. Drucker in issue three, and so on. Some essays, such as “America the Beautiful,” criticize elements of American culture, such as perceived tendency toward conformism, consumerism, and materialism; however, criticism of the actual institutions and structures of America is essentially non-existent. Instead, essays like “The American Genius is Political” and “Democracy: Its Presumptions and Realities” actively champion America’s political structures. From “Democracy and Power” in the first issue to “Modern American Higher Education” in the final issue, all works included are compatible with the existing structures of America’s official political institutions and, at most, critique certain elements within the overarching liberal consensus, solidifying the claim that Schlesinger iterates.

Despite being the core of Schlesinger’s argument, the liberal consensus he refers to is only vaguely defined in his essay. The closest that Schlesinger comes to defining liberalism is when he states that basic principles of American liberalism may be best expressed in the works of Keynes and Niebuhr, and that mid-twentieth century forms of liberalism were significantly restructured by “Theodore Roosevelt and his New Nationalism, Woodrow Wilson and his New Freedom, and Franklin D. Roosevelt and his New Deal” (60). In addition, he draws attention to a number of tendencies such as realism, the embrasure of gradual change, a general commitment to a balanced and flexible “mixed economy,” and the pursuit of equality (62).

In part, the vagueness of Schlesinger’s definition is based upon his claim that “American liberalism is far too pragmatic to support an ideology or even a very explicit political philosophy,” (61). Schlesinger does not develop this idea in depth in this essay; however, the notion is extensively explored in his 1949 book The Vital Center. In The Vital Center, Schlesinger argues that liberalism exists in a malleable, fluid space, whereas right-wing and left-wing systems confine themselves with doctrinism and rigidity. “If liberalism should ever harden into ideology,” he writes, “then like all ideologies, it would be overwhelmed by the turbulence and unpredictability of history” (p. ix). According to Schlesinger, by remaining a center-point of moderation, liberalism resists the displacement of individual reason to abstract theory. In order to identify the center, Schlesinger embraces America’s status-quo socio-political structures, which he identifies as the modern stage of the natural progression of civilizational development.

As there is no naturally existing political spectrum upon which it is possible to trace inwards and discover a center-point, the establishment of liberalism as a center-point serves as a point of reference from which to determine what right and left are: a function rather than a location. Furthermore, despite claims of non-fixity, there are strict boundaries to this center which dictate how far it extends. If there were not, it would not be possible for liberals to recognize where “dangerous ideologies” begin or to even recognize the “left” and “right.” As freedom is only possible within this center-point, these boundaries must necessarily be rigid so that the center does not gradually adapt into one of these “bordering” ideologies. As “right” and “left” wing ideologies are also able to adapt within established boundaries of their own, fluidity within consensus is clearly not a sufficient distinguishing feature.

As previously noted, Schlesinger bases much of his argument about American liberalism on the work of Louis Hartz. In The Liberal Tradition in America, Hartz makes the claim that America’s political tradition has always been liberal. This argument largely stems from Richard Hofstadter’s 1948 analysis of the American political tradition, in which he argues that American political thought has historically been characterized by a consensus regarding property rights, economic individualism, and competition – in essence, a general acceptance of “the economic virtues of capitalism” (Hofstadter xxxvii). In addition, Hofstadter argues that American traditions have shown “a strong bias in favour of equalitarian democracy” (xxxvii).

Unlike Hartz and Schlesinger, Hofstadter does not conflate the consensus of capitalism with the tendency for “equalitarian democracy.” In The Liberal Tradition in America, Hartz embraces Hofstadter’s theory but merges the two concepts by applying a “Lockean” frame. This argument makes Hartz one of the first Americans, after John Hallowell, to characterize Locke as a liberal (Gunnell 131). As “Locke’s theory of private property expressed a specifically capitalistic worldview,” identifying his work as liberal has significant implications for the general consensus regarding the term (Ince 39).

In “The Archaeology of American Liberalism,” John Gunnell argues that “The image of America as a liberal society that we encounter in scholarly literature has been largely invented by that literature” (126). Unlike republicanism or socialism, there is no actual historical tradition of liberalism in America. In fact, it has been convincingly argued that “liberalism only became a widely recognized category of general political discourse after the First World War, and only assumed an important role in academic political theory in the wake of the Second World War,” (Bell 102). Though the accepted canon of liberalism often stretches back to seventeenth century, the construction of this canon itself is modern. Prior to the 1930’s, liberalism was “barely visible” in surveys of political thought (Bell 103; Gunnell 132).

Unlike something like socialism, in which theorists and practitioners generally considered themselves to be socialists, canonical “liberals” did not generally consider themselves proponents of liberalism. In the mid-twentieth century, thinkers and movements were retroactively categorized as such. In America, this categorization was largely tied to efforts to define America’s socio-political structures in relation to communism and fascism. Publications such as Perspectives played a key role in developing and popularizing the new consensus about liberalism and tying it implicitly to America’s socio-political structures.

Schlesinger was an influential participant in the twentieth century reconstruction of liberalism. In 1949, he produced a highly influential study of liberalism called The Vital Center. In an updated introduction in 1962, he states that the book was written in “a moment of transition in the post-war history of American liberalism” (ix). “[A] moment,” he states, “when the liberal community was engaged in the double task of redefining its attitude toward the phenomenon of Communism and, partly in consequence, of reconstructing the bases of liberal political philosophy” (ix). Schlesinger also argues that “In the years since, the process of redefinition has been completed: I believe that all American liberals recognize today that liberalism has nothing in common with Communism, either as to means or as to ends” (ix). The redefinition of liberalism merged underlying principles of American society with already-existing notions of liberalism.

To Schlesinger, liberalism is inseparable from capitalism. In fact, according to his argument, the emergence of freedom in the modern world is tied directly to the advent of capitalism. As he states: “Free society has its roots deep in our classical and religious past. In the modern sense, however, it began as the political expression of youthful and exuberant capitalism” (11). According to this formulation, capitalism is a necessary precondition for freedom. “The American and French declarations of natural right were the ideological reflection of the bourgeois revolution,” he states; “And the men of business, by their application and their thrift, by their readiness to take trading risks, by their organizing and productive genius, not only carved out the area of freedom but created the material abundance to keep freedom going” (Schlesinger 11). Schlesinger writes that:

”The conception of the free society – a society committed to the protection of the liberties of conscience, expression, and political opposition – is the crowning glory of Western history. Centuries of struggle have drawn a ring of freedom around the individual, a ring secured by law, by customs, by institutions” (8).

While focus is placed upon the individual, Schlesinger’s statement demonstrates that the particular conception of individuality referred to implicitly carries a very specific structure of laws, customs, and institutions with it. In Perspectives, it is these external factors which create freedom. In the sense that Schlesinger uses the term, liberalism conflates capitalism and democracy; however, politics and economics are treated as relatively distinct realms and economic inequality can co-exist with purported political equality – the capitalist “sphere of domination” is left untouched (Meiksins Wood 202). As Ellen Meiksins Wood notes:

“The characteristic way in which liberal democracy deals with this new sphere of power is not to check, but to liberate it. In fact, liberalism does not even recognise it as a sphere of power or coercion at all. This, of course, is especially true of the market, which tends to be conceived as an opportunity, not a compulsion. The market is conceived as a sphere of freedom” (Meiksins Wood 203).

Binding the idea of freedom itself to capitalism solidifies the necessity of very particular relationships and forms of social organization. In a sense, liberalism serves as a dual center for Schlesinger. There is the realm of liberalism, which sits at the center of the political spectrum, and there is also an internal center at the middle of the realm of liberalism. In order for liberals to be able to tend towards the “left” or “right” within liberalism, there must be an assumed locus point – a center point to stray away from. Because liberalism is treated as the only space in which freedom of thought and intellect is possible, this center-point serves as a way of organizing, structuring, and orienting political thought within liberalism, erecting the boundaries in which thought was able to be free without threatening the freedom it created. Furthermore, by claiming that this center-point is the only space in which freedom can exist, a definition of freedom is established which purports to be universally applicable but is also entirely unique to liberalism. In order to attain freedom, then, it is necessary to conform to the structures which make liberalism possible.

Schlesinger repeatedly emphasizes that liberalism, not communism, is the path to “modernity.” For instance, in his introduction, Schlesinger writes that: “the very eagerness with which intellectuals in emergent nations often embrace Communism itself suggests that Communism is not the wave of the future and is, if it is anything, a passing stage to which some may temporarily turn in the quest for modernity” (xi); “Communism is historically a function of the prefatory rather than the concluding stage of the modernization process” (p. xi); and that “[Communism] is a phenomenon of the transition from stagnation to development, a ‘disease’ (in Walt Rostow’s phrase) of the modernization process” (p. xiii). In contrast, “the modernization process, contrary to Marxist prophecy, will vindicate the mixed society” (p. xi). The mixed society, in this sense, is capitalism with certain Keynesian regulations in place to avoid crises such as the Great Depression. Here, modernisation can be understood as a process of transitioning from a vast, diverse array of social forms to a universalized standard, assuming that a certain “evolution” of social organization is natural.

Throughout Perspectives, America is consistently identified as the manifestation of modernity. According to Perspectives, the “New World” provided an empty space for modern civilizational progress to manifest purely for the first time. For instance, in “America’s Romance with Practicality,” in the first issue of Perspectives, Jacques Barzun argues that America provided the soil for the “massive embodiment” of western civilization and culture (77). Simultaneously, America is treated as something entirely new and unique. For example, Barzun also writes that “For once in history the men and the land were beginning even. Here was no pre-existing culture… the American colonist had to start from scratch” (70).

The combination of these two notions leads to the overarching idea that, as Mary McCarthy writes in issue two, “Europe is the unfinished negative of which America is the proof” (22).
To Schlesinger, the American “tabula rasa may not have been totally blank” because “no American could escape the history he brought with him from Europe,” (56). It is significant that Schlesinger’s reason for believing that the American “tabula rasa” is not entirely blank is because it must, inherently, carry European civilization not because its existence requires the erasure of an array of other peoples (56).

If American history is examined accurately, the idea that its political history can be encompassed by a liberal umbrella is entirely untenable. For instance, the fact that the very existence of the American, “born free and democratic,” relies upon the seizure of Indigenous land and the genocide of Indigenous peoples is ignored in Schlesinger’s theory. Likewise, the slave system upon which the American system was built is not even alluded to in Perspectives. The reality that only elite white males were extended democratic privilege for most of American history is ignored or treated as insignificant.

The closest that Schlesinger comes to acknowledging systemic oppressions or structural inequalities is his claim that “American liberalism can point to concrete national gains… to the great strides toward achieving better opportunities for Negroes” (63). Rather than demonstrating the success of liberalism, however, this statement reveals a contradiction in Schlesinger’s theory. Schlesinger ignores the fact that, if the American system really has been liberal from the outset, liberalism was the source of this oppression in the first place. The fact that black resistance eventually wore down aspects of the repressive structure of the state cannot be cast as evidence of this same system’s commitment to freedom.

In Perspectives’ entire presentation of American culture, which is broad enough to encompass topics from “townscapes” to “ethnic patterns,” Indigenous peoples are practically invisible. One of the only references to Indigenous peoples in the entire magazine is in an essay titled “The Age of Frontier: Reflections on the End of 400 Years of Worldwide Expansion,” which serves to cement and justify this erasure. In this essay, Walter Scott Webb states that “the American concept of a moving frontier can be applied where a civilized people is advancing into a wilderness, an unsettled area, or one sparsely populated by primitive people” (55). Webb argues that, rather than perceiving the “frontier” as a purely American phenomenon, the frontier should be viewed as the crux of all western civilizational development (54). The “Great Frontier,” Webb argues, was the expansion of European peoples into “vacant” land “from about 1500 to about 1900” (55). He also states that:

”If we conceive of Western Europe as a unified, densely populated region with common culture and civilization – which it has long had basically – and if we see the frontier also as a unit, a vast and vacant land without culture, we are in a position to view the interaction between the two as a simple but gigantic operation extending over more than four centuries, a process that may appear to be the drama of modern civilization” (59).

To Webb, the history of the modern world is the history of civilization expanding into empty space. Casting the American liberal order as the natural continuation of this process, equated with as progress and modernity, serves to justify social, cultural, and economic colonialism. This analysis overlaps with Schlesinger’s. For instance, Webb argues that the particular conditions of America – the absence of pre-existing socio-political structures – enabled the freedom sought after in Europe to manifest for the first time. He states: “The desire for freedom men surely have always had but in the old metropolis conditions prevailed which made freedom impossible” (67).

Webb also claims that America had no pre-existing civilization or culture – that because “before nature all men are free and equal,” the American “did not have to win his freedom. It was imposed upon him and he could not escape it” (68). Much like Schlesinger, he argues that “the American frontiersmen did not fight England to gain freedom, but to preserve it, and have it officially recognized” (68). Furthermore, Webb draws a direct connection between modernity, America, and individualism. For example, he says:

”Since we are dealing with the modern age, it would be very helpful if we could discover what it emphasized most. Where was the chief accent of modernity? What has been its focus? Who has held the spotlight on the stage of history since 1500? There can be little doubt, though there may be enough to start an argument, that the answer to all these questions is: the individual” (67).

In his essay, Webb argues that the individual is the “common denominator” of modernity and that “an examination of any strictly modern institution such as democracy or capitalism will reveal an individual at the core, trying to rule himself in one case and make some money in the other” (67).

In Perspectives, a myth is constructed which presents America as the pinnacle of Western civilizational development and, therefore, modernity. The concept of liberalism serves to categorize America’s dominant socio-political structures, marrying the concepts of democracy and capitalism, and organize political practice so that it is compatible with these structures. In addition, these structures become tied to the very idea of freedom itself. Protecting and expanding American liberalism becomes equated with the protection and expansion of freedom and modernity. This not only serves to justify American expansion but also serves to restrict transformation of America’s socio-political structure, upholding the domination of its elite class. In Perspectives, the individual becomes the manifestation and bulwark of liberalism.

In Perspectives, the concept of individualism is used to isolate artists and works of art from their socio-political context. In addition, it enables the critic or theorist in question to severely limit and police the potential significance of a work. This not only ensures that the ‘apolitical’ works in Perspectives remain compatible with the explicitly political works and, therefore, do not destabilize the established liberal framework but also enables Perspectives to maintain the appearance of unbiased judgment when it comes to artistic works.

In The Vital Center, Schlesinger states that “the twentieth century, which began as the century of democracy, has become the century of totalitarian revolt” (59). “There are important differences between Communism and fascism,” he writes, “which one must understand if one is to cope with each effectively. But, from one viewpoint, the similarities are vastly more overpowering and significant” (59). According to Schlesinger, the uncertainty of freedom and individuality has resulted in an “age of anxiety” which people flee from in fear (52). One of the major similarities between the right and left, he argues, is that they both provide an “escape from freedom” and rely upon the surrender of individuality to “a massive, external authority” (53).

In Perspectives, as elsewhere, the apparent antidote to totalitarianism was the embrasure of liberal individualism and the social structures which enable it. Editors such as Laughlin, Trilling, and Barzun attest to the “diversity” and variance within American culture; however, the portrait of American culture that they paint has, to appropriate Schlesinger’s words, vastly more overpowering similarity than difference. For instance, Perspectives initially featured a rotating editorship. With the exception of Blackmur, its editors – Laughlin, Barzun, Trilling, Cowley, and Edman – all attended either Columbia or Harvard. In contrast, Blackmur took courses at Harvard without enrolling and later taught at Princeton.

The culminative image of American culture which emerges from the various issues of Perspectives reflects the relatively similar perceptions and dispositions of this collective, developed by immersion in relatively similar conditions of existence and shared class experience. Differences can, of course, be identified in the lives and works of these editors, however, a general alignment binds them together. Individual dispositions within the overarching consensus demonstrate a degree of variance and conflict but it is only to an extent which can safely exist without threatening the stability of this consensus. While this may, to some, appear to validate Schlesinger and Trilling’s claims about liberal consensus, the consensus acknowledged by these editors is not actually the sole, definitive, consensus in American culture.

One of the most strongly emphasized markers of artistic merit in Perspectives is the “embodiment” of individualism. For example, issue four features an essay by LeRoy Leatherman which explores “The Dance-Theater of Martha Graham” (46). In this essay, Leatherman writes that “the question of image” is central to the theater of Martha Graham and that the “dominant image” in this theater is “of man in his individuality, his wholeness” (46). According to Leatherman, the true purpose of art is to reveal or represent individual experience uniquely. “In spite of many experiments,” he writes, the novelist and dramatist “must still, and rightly, work with the details of personality, the every-day masks we wear, and hope that individuality, whole, half, or quarter as the case may be, will somehow come out from behind it” (46).

Graham’s theater is so powerful, Leatherman argues, because it embraces and embodies this task. As he writes: “The technique is so strikingly beautiful because it projects a series of images which have grown out of that central image of man in his individuality” (48). Leatherman then concludes with the following statement:

“The Graham theater is the closest thing we have to theater in the classical sense. Like the Greek, it uses man’s mythical life, his struggles in isolation, and makes of itself a form in which they may be relieved. It is not, and neither is its dance technique, a revolt against human traditions or even institutions; it is rather a continuance of what was liveliest in both; it is discovery, and that makes it at once very American and very human. The greatest of all modern art searches for and discovers aspects of the Self. The Graham theater turns, naturally, therefore, to the best modern music, sculpture, and design, and in its use of them, through its own insight, pushes the search forward, toward man in his wholeness, where his only certain freedom lies” (51).

Leatherman’s analysis of the Graham theater not only emphasizes individualism but, like other works in Perspectives, assumes an inherent connection between individualism, freedom, and America. Furthermore, it draws a line from “the classics” – the Greeks – and American culture, establishing, once again, America’s place in the history of western civilization.

Similar emphasis is evident in Delmore Schwartz’s “The Fiction of Ernest Hemingway” in issue thirteen. In “The Fiction of Ernest Hemingway,” Schwartz argues that both Hemingway and his writing embody a particularly American individualism. The gist of this argument is summed up in its concluding lines:

”Of all modern novelists, it is Hemingway who has written the most complete moral history of the American Dream in the Twentieth Century: the greatest of human dreams is the beginning of heartbreaking hope and despair; its premise is the cause of overwhelming ambition and overwhelming anxiety; the anxiety and the hope make courage an obsession and an endless necessity in the face of endless fear and insecurity: but the dream, the hope, the anxiety, and the courage, began with the discovery of America” (Schwartz 88).

In this piece, Schwartz reiterates the argument that the true purpose of art is the embodiment of individual human experience; however, in much the same vein as Schlesinger, Schwartz suggests that the fullest manifestation of individuality was not actually possible until it was allowed for by the “discovery” of America. Also like Schlesinger, Schwartz emphasizes the anxiety and fear that accompanies freedom.

The two pieces discussed above are illustrative due to their overt nationalism; however, Perspectives’ celebration of individualism is often less explicit in its propagandistic nature. For instance, the second issue features an essay by Theodore Spencer called “Technique as Joy,” which analyzes the poetic technique of e e cummings. Like Schwartz and Leatherman, Spencer argues that cummings’ art is a direct embodiment of his own individualism. According to Spencer, “Cummings is obviously an individualist poet: his experiments, his failures, his discoveries, and his successes are examples of what an individual can do for himself” (28). This claim is presented as an indisputable position from the very first line: “There is no doubt about what Mr. Cummings stands for. He has said it again and again. He is for the individual human being against mechanical regimentation” (23). To Spencer, cummings’ “poetic technique is a direct, almost inevitable, consequence of his point of view” (24).

In his piece, Spencer equates his own interpretation of e e cummings’ poetry with the authentic opinion of the poet. He writes, for example, that cummings “thinks of evil as ‘not being’; negation” (23). In order to prove this, he references lines of poetry – “squads right impatiently replied/ two billion public lice inside/ one pair of trousers (which had died)” (23). He then argues that, to cummings, “There is no ‘squads right’” because “squads right” would be “the equivalent of death, of nothingness, of evil” (23). Such a claim, neglects to acknowledge that, as Barthes states, “a text consists not of a line of words releasing a single “theological” meaning (the “message” of the Author-God), but of a multi-dimensional space in which are married and contested several writings, none of which are original” (52).

The text does not contain or release meaning at all, instead, it is a body of signs representing meaning which is constructed, and contained, socially. The attribution of meaning is the role of the reader, mediating with their own knowledge and interpretation of this social body of meaning and literary convention. However, treating the text as the direct manifestation of an author’s point of view casts the text as property and the author as a possessive individual, a conception compatible with liberal and capitalist ideology.

The fact that Spencer’s claim is not purely aesthetic is also clear – he states that cummings “hates standardization, communism, all planning and ordering that kills the sensuous and emotional awareness by which people are kept alive” (23).

According to Spencer, cummings stands against “not being, which is continually being created and enforced by governments, political ideologists, race groups, and advertising agencies” and “waves his gay delightful banner of individual joy” in opposition (24). Spencer’s claim that “political ideologists” or “race groups” create and enforce “not being” is a method of naturalizing the status-quo, neutralizing the political nature of dominant structural forces. Again, the displacement of individualism – the influence of collectivity – is treated as the ultimate danger, a perception which neglects to acknowledge that individualism, in the form that Perspectives celebrates, requires a very particular “abstract” socio-political structure of its own.

By drawing focus to the individual, and acting as if the individual can be insulated from social and political factors, Perspectives manages to exclude critique of America’s socio-political structure and only include works compatible with the framework of liberalism that it establishes elsewhere. In addition to reinforcing external structures of domination, this approach serves to reinforce internal structures of domination, maintaining a reductive and limited canon. For example, the same issue of Perspectives contains a section titled “Two Protests Against Protest,” which includes the essays “A No to Nothing” by Richard Gibson and “Everybody’s Protest Novel” by James Baldwin. These essays are the only works in any issue of Perspectives which focus upon black Americans or black literature. Within the framework of Perspectives, Gibson and Baldwin’s essays serve to quell critique of the American system.

Gibson’s essay addresses the fact that white publishers advance and enrich themselves by marketing and commercializing systemic racism; however, he also claims that no black writers have produced anything that can be considered a masterpiece and places the burden of resolving this on black writers themselves. In order to write better literature, he argues, black writers should embrace individualism and shift focus away from social concerns. Gibson’s essay opens with a fictionalized account of a young black writer dealing with a publishing executive who loses interest in his work when he realizes that it does not deal with “the Problem” (89).

Gibson states that the “monotony and mediocrity of much that parades itself as ‘Negro Literature’” may be blamed upon the fact that young black writers are treated as if their only duty “is to probe the Problem’s labyrinthine depths” (90). Furthermore, he argues that while “The Professional Liberal” expresses sympathy and allyship for black Americans, the liberal actually “needs the Problem, he needs a cause, a people, to defend. And, in defending, he finds some satisfaction for his own neuroses. He becomes the Great White Father” (90). In response, Gibson urges the young writer to “remember that he lives in the age of Joyce, Proust, Mann, Gide, Kafka and not merely that of Chester B. Himes… of Eliot, Valery, Pound, Rilke, Auden, and not merely of Langston Hughes” (91). He states that “The young man must fight for his individuality” and that:

”He need not forget his race; let him work as a private citizen for whatever goals he sees fit, but let him read a few anthologies of ‘official’ Negro literature and when he has reached the point where his sensibilities are outraged, where he has nothing but disgust... let him then soberly reflect that there is not as yet a single work of literature by an American Negro which, when judged without bias, stands out as a masterpiece” (92).

Gibson’s critique can be read as critique of the treatment of black writers by the American literary establishment. However, black writers are also almost totally invisible in the pages of Perspectives. Rather than including an essay which addresses the system by which the quality of literature is measured, Perspectives offsets responsibility to black writers and suggests that the reason that no works by black Americans are considered masterpieces is because black writers have not actually written any. The solution to the underappreciation of black literature, it is suggested, is for individual black writers to ‘write better’ individually and move away from systemic critique. It also cannot be forgotten that Gibson’s essay is included in a section titled “Two Protests Against Protest,” implying that the predominant problem is the tendency for black writers to write works of protest.

James Baldwin’s essay “Everybody’s Protest Novel,” criticizes Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin and Richard Wright’s Native Son. It is no accident that the Baldwin piece featured in Perspectives is “Everybody’s Protest Novel” rather than an excerpt from Go Tell it on the Mountain or another essay from Notes of a Native Son such as “Carmen Jones: The Dark is Light Enough,” which directly addresses systemic racism by critiquing cultural whitewashing in Hollywood (Baldwin 52). Instead, within the framework of Perspectives, Baldwin encourages writing about individual human experience and appears to discourage writing about structural inequality or racial oppression. Baldwin states that, in the protest novel, “Whatever unsettling questions are raised are evanescent, titillating; remote, for this has nothing to do with us, it is safely ensconced in the social arena, where, indeed, it has nothing to do with anyone” (97).

The sentiment here – the abstract nature of social commentary or critique – fits well in conversation with the content discussed earlier. Furthermore, the essay’s final lines state that: “The failure of the protest novel lies in its rejection of life, the human being, the denial of his beauty, dread, power, in its insistence that it is his categorization alone which is real and which cannot be transcended” (100). Like Gibson’s, Baldwin’s essay indicates that focusing upon the individual is the antidote to oppression, like totalitarianism; however, without rigorous critique of America’s institutions, the individualism allowed for, and the correlating structure deemed necessary, carries systemic oppression with it.

Even though both Baldwin and Gibson present critiques of racial inequality, their essays can safely sit within the framework of Perspectives without destabilizing or disrupting the magazine’s overall commitment to America’s actually existing institutions. Contrasting the works included with alternatives helps to highlight the significance of selection.

Gibson and Baldwin’s works paint a very different portrait than the one presented by Ralph Ellison in “Twentieth Century Fiction and the Black Mask of Humanity,” which was published the same year. In this essay, Ellison bluntly states that “Perhaps the most insidious and least understood form of segregation is that of the word” (134). In contrast to a seemingly paradoxical position of Perspectives – that literature can simultaneously serve as a guiding moral force but can also be exonerated from any entanglement with politics and power – Ellison states that “if the word has the potency to revive and make us free, it also has the power to blind, imprison, and destroy” (134). “Thus it is unfortunate for the Negro,” Ellison continues, “that the most powerful formulations of modern American fictional words have been so slanted against him that when he approaches for a glimpse of himself he discovers an image drained of humanity” (134).

In the same manner that Baldwin and Gibson critique the dehumanization of black people in American literature, so does Ellison. In contrast to Baldwin and Gibson, Ellison places blame squarely on the shoulders of those in power and on the system. In the most celebrated works of American literature, he states, black people, if even acknowledged, are lifeless caricatures. Rather than attempting to draw focus away from structural issues of racism and oppression, Ellison argues that they must be accounted for in order to accurately represent black experience in America. According to Ellison, the collective experiences of slavery, racism, and alienation mean that black Americans do not have the same type of individual experience as white Americans (134). As a result, the conditions which structure experience must be accounted for when depicting their lives. If the difference between the white experience in America and the black experience is not evident in literature, the very possibility of viewing “the culture of the United States in accurate perspective,” as the magazine claims to enable, is disallowed (Laughlin 5). Ellison states:

”Obviously the experiences of the Negroes – slavery, the grueling and continuing fight for full citizenship since Emancipation, the stigma of color, the enforced alienation which constantly knifes into our natural identification with our country – have not been that of white Americans. And though as passionate believers in democracy Negroes identify themselves with the broader American ideals, their sense of identity springs, in part, from an American experience which most white men not only have not had but with which they are reluctant to identify themselves even when presented in forms of imagination. Thus when the white American, holding up most twentieth-century fiction, says ‘This is American reality,’ the Negro tends to answer (not at all concerned that Americans tend to fight against any but the most flattering imaginative depictions of their lives), ‘Perhaps, but you’ve left out this, and this, and this. And most of all, what you’d have the world accept as me isn’t even human” (135).

Without directly accounting for the impact that the conditions of America have upon massive segments of the population, the American experience which Perspectives is willing to account for is only that of a limited group and class of Americans. Ellison’s conclusion demonstrates this powerfully:

”[T]here is more in this than the verbal counterpart of lynching or segregation. Indeed it represents a projection of processes lying at the very root of American culture and certainly at the central core of its twentieth century literary forms, a matter having less to do with the mere ‘reflection’ of white racial theories than with processes molding the attitudes, the habits of mind, the cultural atmosphere and the artistic and intellectual traditions that condition men dedicated to practice, accept and, most crucial of all, often blind themselves to the essentially undemocratic treatment of their fellow citizens” (136).

Perspectives’ treatment enables the entirely uncritical embrasure of perceptions and traditions which justify and uphold racial oppression. Individualization allows the work or author in question to appear insulated and distanced from socio-political factors. In the form that it takes in Perspectives, individualism enables the white supremacy engrained in the very fabric of American society and culture to be hidden. Instead of accounting for the “habits of mind” and attitudes which normalize and privilege certain experience, critics condemned or excluded those with incompatible experiences.

Perspectives’ selection of works by America’s “finest creative spirits” and “most perceptive intellectuals” does not produce a varied and diverse assemblage, with roots stretching out into a range of cultures and experiences, but produces exactly the kind of restrictive, artificial singularity that the editors claim to resist. Heavy emphasis on certain aspects of American culture is supplemented by an even more powerful negation or erasure of works incompatible with the consensus produced – particularly any works which do not support the “absence of deep differences of principle in American society” (Schlesinger 58). As culture is treated as a measure of civilizational health in Perspectives, the establishment of an American culture which displaces or erases the inequity of its civilizational structure and practice serves to bolster the false legitimacy of American “leadership” or domination, pacify critique from leftist Europeans, and nullify resistance from oppressed populations.

From 1952-56, Perspectives exported a carefully curated selection of American culture around the world. The magazine’s distribution was global but it specifically targeted the so-called intellectual elite of Western Europe.

In his analysis of the periodical, Greg Barnhisel suggests that Perspectives “had little quantifiable strategic effect in the Cultural Cold War” (731). This may be true; however, the difficulty of quantifying opinion and perspective must be considered. Even the culminative impact of a half-century operation such as the Congress for Cultural Freedom, which published over thirty different periodicals, is difficult if not impossible to gauge.

The impact of a text largely exists in the unchartable interaction that occurs when the reader mediates between the text’s signifiers and the socially-constructed mass of concepts to which they refer, attributing and delimiting meaning. It also exists in the aftermath, in the equally unchartable impact that this process has upon the reader’s understanding and experience of the world, and the manner in which this informs their subsequent existence. Whether or not the impact of Perspectives is quantifiable has more to do with the framework of quantification than with lack of consequence. It also cannot be forgotten that Perspectives was just one facet of the cultural dimension of a vast, multi-dimensional campaign.

The existence of Perspectives, and its editors professed lack of political affiliation, is indicative of an already-effective hegemonic project. James Laughlin and the magazine’s advisory board were apparently self-motivated in their commitment to the furtherance of state interest.

Perspectives pledged to remain free of propaganda or political pressure but it actually functioned as an ideological state apparatus, realizing and reproducing ideology of the American state. Constructing an export canon compatible with America’s dominant socio-political structures contributed to the continued domination of a specific group of American elites and worked, hand in hand, with more overt political, military, and economic operations to facilitate the transfer of imperial power from Europe and expand American domination.

Often, America’s cultural Cold War focused on cultivating sentiments compatible with American state interests. It was not generally deemed necessary to entirely quell critique or for art to simply parrot official state doctrine. Instead, supporting and distributing compatible works and practices was assumed to be implicitly beneficial.

Perspectives operated as part of the cultural plane of American expansion in the post-war era. Examination of its content provides insight into the kind of cultural apparatuses which contribute to and manifest the ideology of America’s elite groups, serving to solidify their dominance both internally and externally.

In Perspectives, America is characterized as the modern stage of Western civilizational development and, therefore, as the most advanced and legitimate power in the world. A strong and vibrant culture is used to justify and solidify this position. By serving as a bridge between the so-called intelligentsia of America and Europe, Perspectives intended to facilitate acceptance of American dominance in a Transatlantic, Pan-European sphere of accumulation.

The Ford Foundation bound Perspectives to the American state. In many ways, the periodical served as a means of privatising propaganda and psychological warfare. The privatisation of operations simultaneously mobilised the American population and was more palatable to those who genuinely believed in the American state’s commitment to liberty, freedom, and democracy.

Under the banner of liberalism, Perspectives celebrated America’s dominant socio-political structures and justified its position of post-war domination. Liberalism serves to categorize and police political thought and practice. It establishes a sphere of acceptable political practice, compatible with dominant socio-political structures, and characterizes other practice as dangerous or harmful. Furthermore, this vital center serves to draw focus to the individual, purportedly humanizing culture and shifting away from abstract structural approaches which tend toward totalitarianism; however, the fact that very specific structural conditions are deemed necessary for individualism to exist is ignored.

The domination of America’s elite groups is naturalized so entirely in Perspectives that the structures and dispositions upholding and reproducing their position are presented as the natural and inevitable products of modernity. The socio-political conditions which correspond to these structures and dispositions are, then, considered to be objective conditions of existence. As a result, the exploitative, oppressive, and domineering nature of these structures is safe from critique and transformation is severely limited.

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