Stephen J. Whitfield

Limited Engagement: The Quiet American as History

Among the most intensely absorbed viewers of John Fords The Grapes of Wrath (1940) was Adolf Hitler, who knew almost nothing of the United States but who observed how degenerate the “Okies” had become. He believed that immigration had already mongrelized the general populace and, since even farmers of Anglo-Saxon stock had succumbed to racial disintegration, the Americans would be pushovers for the Wehrmacht . This particular movie-goer failed to notice the resilience and endurance also flickering on the screen; and it would be foolish to claim that his decision to declare war on the United States was based only upon a misinterpretation of The Grapes of Wrath (which he watched several times). But since no treaty obligation compelled the Third Reich to make war, after Pearl Harbor, upon an industrial power of which the Fuhrer was so ignorant, any analysis of his motives must remain speculative. It may have been a mad urge for apocalyptic destructiveness (and self-destructiveness), springing from subterranean depths that the psychobiographer can fathom more readily than the military or diplomatic historian. Perhaps Hitlers miscalculation was not utterly irrational: with Hollands surrender in 1940, its place as the worlds nineteenth largest army was ceded to the Americans.

Stages of capitalism: The business of American Jewish Dramatists

In the explosion of talent associated with American Jewry in this century, Broadway has virtually stood at ground zero. To the New York-based stage, Jews have contributed to a startlingly disproportionate degree, whether in owning and operating its theatres, in directing and supporting its productions, or in entertaining its audiences through humor and song in the supremely American form of the musical comedy. When they get serious, Jews have also projected some of the most searing visions into our condition that the nations writers have offered us.

A crime without punishment

The death of Emmett Till (1941–55) continues to stalk the American imagination. On the sixtieth anniversary of his murder in Sunflower Country, Mississippi, independent scholar Devery S. Anderson produced a major act of historical retrieval, Emmett Till: The Murder that Shocked the World and Propelled the Civil Rights Movement. Anderson’s book is expected to be the basis of a six-episode HBO series made for American television. (The executive producers include Will Smith and Jay Z.) In addition, Keith A. Beauchamp, who produced and directed a 2005 documentary, The Untold Story of Emmett Till, has provided the script for a documentary film that Whoopi Goldberg and Fred Zollo are scheduled to produce. (Zollo’s credits include Mississippi Burning and Ghosts of Mississippi.) But Beauchamp’s documentary should not be confused with Stanley Nelson’s Emmy Award-winning The Murder of Emmett Till, which was broadcast in the United States on PBS (Public Broadcasting System) in 2003. Finally, Jerry Mitchell, whose investigative reporting focuses on hate crime in the South, is reported to be writing the screenplay for yet another film, to be produced by Michael De Luca, and directed by John Singleton, who was nominated for an Oscar for his direction of Boyz N the Hood (1991). At the Whitney Biennial in the spring of 2017, the Brooklyn-based painter Dana Schutz’s Open Casket (2016), inspired by the ghastly photograph of the tortured face of Till in his coffin, stirred widespread debate. Who, the questioners asked, can properly serve as custodians of African American memory? Schutz claimed to have identified with the grief of Till’s mother, Mamie Till-Mobley. Dissenters instead charged the artist with callow exploitation of black suffering. In the world of print, at least two Young Adult books have appeared that recount Till’s murder. This genre is grimly fitting because the books’ subject had just turned fourteen when he was murdered, a crime that went unpunished. The novelist John Edgar Wideman has recently published a short book on the execution of the father of Emmett Till, entitled Writing to Patterns of Prejudice, 2017 Vol. 51, No. 5, 453–459, https://doi.org/10.1080/0031322X.2017.1393127

Two takes on Ta-Nehisi Coates

A curious ubiquity, which renders its subjects at once pervasive and imperceptible, stands as an enduring element of the condition of black intellectuals in American scholarly and public life. For a time in the 1990s, for instance, one couldn’t turn a corner without encountering an essay about the emergence of the ‘new black public intellectual’. But what made figures like Henry Louis Gates, Jr, Cornel West or Toni Morrison ‘new’? Other ‘new’ public intellectuals have been present throughout the twentieth century: take, for example, the ubiquitous and brilliant mid-century troika of Richard Wright, James Baldwin and Ralph Ellison. Were these 1990s ‘new black public intellectuals’ so designated simply because a new generation of critics had discovered them? Had past black intellectuals’ ubiquity led, somehow, to a perception of their absence? Today we are bearing witness to a new articulation of a fairly ubiquitous black public intellectual: Ta-Nehisi Coates, cultural critic, novelist and national correspondent for The Atlantic. Since skyrocketing to prominence with the 2014 article, ‘The Case for Reparations’, and more recently with his book, Between the World and Me, Coates has garnered a litany of prestigious awards, including the MacArthur Prize and the National Book Award. Given the hyper-visibility of his accomplishments, it seems paradoxical that Coates’s work is dedicated to delineating how invisibility and impossibility have made themselves punishingly manifest in black life. He is not the first to come to this conclusion. In 1968, Eldridge Cleaver, soon-to-be Black Panther Party Minister of Information, published Soul on Ice, a brilliant and disturbing reflection on structural inequality, race, masculinity, violence and American culture. Reflecting on American popular culture and absence/invisibility, Cleaver writes that, during the upheavals of the 1960s,

Jeffrey S. Gurock. The Holocaust Averted: An Alternative History of American Jewry, 1938–1967. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2015. 320 pp.

early 1930s spoke of some 30,000 Europeans who may have smuggled their way from Cuba to the United States, including perhaps 18,000 Jews (94). Here, at least, we begin to get a possible inkling of scale, if not precise information. The nature of illegal immigration, after all, is that it so often escapes anyone’s notice and is inherently untabulated. Indeed, Garland tells us outright that “the number of Jews who succeeded in entering the United States illegally ... is impossible to know precisely” (145). To make up for the numerical vagueness, Garland provides rich descriptions of the techniques of immigrant smuggling, its reliance on ethnic networks, its connections with criminality, and its role in the international traffic in women. Moreover, some of the best parts of the book deal with the subjective matter of awareness of the topic in Jewish discourse, both public and private, and with the public activities undertaken by Jewish organizations with respect to liberalizing official policies. Here Garland is on much firmer ground, and her contribution to the entire edifice of Jewish immigration history—American Jewish immigration history in particular—is very significant. The subtext of her research is twofold: Jews as an American group have a stake of their own in the country’s history of illegal immigration, and consequently they have always claimed a place at the national negotiating table when it comes to immigration control. Secondly, and perhaps more speculatively, governments (including the US government) are bound to lose, in some fashion, when it comes to the strict formulation of laws regulating the different regimens of movement to which different sorts of people are entitled, and the achievement of manageable (and fair) techniques of enforcement.

Northern intellectuals and the ordeal of race: the first decade of Dissent, 1954–64

ABSTRACT Founded in 1953–4, Dissent assigned itself the task of reviving the political criticism that socialism had been articulating for roughly the previous century and a half. Though the magazine largely abandoned Marxism by the end of the decade, Dissent would remain the most durable journal of democratic socialism in the English-speaking world. The first decade of its history coincided with the intensified momentum of the Civil Rights Movement in the United States, and the quarterly certainly expressed its sympathy and support for the struggle for racial justice. But, in retrospect, the infrequency of that endorsement in the articles that were published in Dissent is noteworthy. Perhaps the two most famous articles ever to appear in the magazine nevertheless addressed the issue of race, and yet they did so with an eccentricity that made ‘The White Negro’ and ‘Reflections on Little Rock’ uncharacteristic of the stance of co-founders and co-editors Irving Howe and Lewis Coser. In 1957 Norman Mailer ignored the Civil Rights Movement itself to locate the emergence of a new kind of underground man, a hipster, who drew from the extreme and even violent alienation of the black sensibility to valorize the sensual and emotional at the expense of the rational and the civic. In 1959 Hannah Arendt repudiated the effort of civil rights organizations like the NAACP to desegregate public schools in the South, arguing that the psyches of black children were damaged by seeking to join hostile white children. Public schools, she argued, ought to be regarded as social institutions that permit discrimination. Instead the champions of racial equality ought to concentrate their efforts at eliminating the prohibitions against intermarriage. By the mid-1960s Dissent added its voice to the mainstream of the movement against Jim Crow, even as Howe celebrated black writers who managed to reconcile literary art with the imperatives of political protest.

Cold War Modernists: Art, Literature, and American Cultural Diplomacy by Greg Barnhisel (review)

A term like “modernism” exudes the sort of elasticity that is bound to attract scholars eager to parse its various meanings, no matter how elusive. An entire journal now exists that is devoted to the classification of modernism and to studies in relevant works of literature in particular. Because the standard experimentalist works emerged at roughly the same time as the rise of fascism and Nazism, modernism ought to be a good candidate to set off against the despotisms of the right. The key episode in this regard was the notorious exhibition of Entartete Kunst (degenerate art) that the Nazis mounted in Munich in 1937. And yet Ezra Pound, a supremely modernist poet (“Make it new!”) who championed T. S. Eliot and James Joyce, broadcast so many dreadful speeches from Fascist Italy that only a clinical diagnosis of his madness spared him from a postwar conviction for treason. That a tyranny of the left, in the Stalinist USSR, also impugned and outlawed modernism, and exalted the style of socialist realism instead, suggests how tempting it is to define modernism—at least in part—by its incompatibility with totalitarianism. Yet, in 1947, when Harry Truman came across Circus Girl Resting, a painting by the Japanese-American Yasuo Kuniyoshi, the president exclaimed: “If this is art, I’m a Hottentot” (p. 55). Perhaps no artistic movement ever provoked so varied a spectrum of political resistance. But in the United States, hostile Fair Dealers like Truman tended to be outnumbered by conservatives, who were typically members of Congress of conventional aesthetic taste, insofar as they thought about the sublimity of painting or music at all. In the name of commonplace opinion and the thrift that taxpayers expected, such foes snapped at a visionary effort in public diplomacy that helped win the Cold War in the art galleries and in the little magazines. Calculations of the throw-weight of missiles were not enough; Abstract Expressionism could be enlisted to defeat Communism as well. What Greg Barnhisel crisply labels “Cold War modernism” constituted a claim that American culture could trump its Soviet counterpart, because the United States promoted individuality of expression and the freedom to be as creative as one’s talent might permit. America meant the right to paint a model who has three eyes and a body that could be blocked out into cubes, or to compose a piece of music that may reveal a beginning and middle and end—but not necessarily in that order. Such works demonstrated the autonomy of art in a democratic society at a time when the exemplars of the avant-garde elsewhere were imprisoned and even executed. Ideas are weapons,

The theme of indivisibility in the post-war struggle against prejudice in the United States

ABSTRACT Whitfields essay seeks to identify and explain a tendency that emerged in the United States in the 1940s and extended through the 1950s. It was then that a notion became commonplace, especially among liberals, that the victims of prejudice were interchangeable and that bigotry was undifferentiated. Before the 1940s, the problem of prejudice was not widely believed to be urgent; but the war against the Third Reich heightened awareness of the price of an irrational hostility to minorities. American liberals in particular came to the understanding that bigotry was indivisible; and, for its objects, the cards of identity could easily be shuffled. Whether the victims were Jews or Negroes or homosexuals, the hatred that they elicited appeared to be formed without making any distinctions among them. Evidence can be found in the culture of those two decades, in novels, plays and films. The unitary view of the character of prejudice had some support in social science, including in the authoritative volume The Authoritarian Personality. The theory would also be reflected in a major shift in the agenda of Jewish civil rights organizations, which redefined their mission as promoting the democratic rights of all minorities rather than the particular interests of American Jews. This distinctive tendency vanished in the 1960s, however. One reason for the change was a fuller appreciation of the hostility that minorities could harbour towards other minorities. The realization also deepened of the singular vulnerability of black Americans under the pressure of racism, which demonstrated a tenacity as well as a proclivity for violence that had been largely absent from other forms of bigotry. Finally, a broader legitimation of difference itself emerged in the 1960s to bury the notion that minorities were fungible.

Refusing Marcuse: Fifty Years after One-Dimensional Man

One-Dimensional Man was published just half a century ago, catapulting a rather obscure professor in his sixties to international fame. In less than five years, over 100,000 copies of the book would be sold in the United States alone, with translations extending the influence of Herbert Marcuse into sixteen foreign languages. He addressed packed auditoriums all over the United States and Europe. At a student-occupied university in France, young rebels put on a kind of teach-in they called a “journée marcusienne.” In Paris, Marcuse met with Nguyen Than Le, North Vietnam’s chief delegate to the peace talks with the United States. At the University of Rome, students brandished placards proclaiming their allegiance to Marx, Mao and Marcuse. Before the sixties had ended, he was commonly designated as the unofficial faculty advisor to the New Left.

Stuart J. Hecht. Transposing Broadway: Jews, Assimilation, and the American Musical . New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011. vii, 240 pp. Jeffrey Magee. Irving Berlin's American Musical Theater . New York: Oxford University Press, 2012. xiii, 394 pp.

In 1932 an aesthete from Iowa named Carl Van Vechten visited Vienna and reported back home that “they don’t play Johann [Strauss] here anymore; it’s all [George] Gershwin and [Irving] Berlin.” The exaggeration was defensible, given the extraordinary impact overseas that American popular music had been exerting for at least two decades. Emanating mostly from Jews based in New York, such songs were seeping into the nation’s imaginative life as though through osmosis. In 1938, when Richard Wright published his first full-scale work of fiction, the epigraph to Uncle Tom’s Children quotes from “Is It True What They Say About Dixie?”. Wright identifies it only as a “popular song,” as though no one had actually written it or deserved credit for it. In fact, the song was then only two years old; Irving Caesar and Sammy Lerner were responsible for the lyrics, and Gerald Marks for the music. The unpretentious charm, the sublime buoyancy that such songwriters contrived to convey was inescapable. Berlin’s “A Russian Lullaby” was the first song Leonard Bernstein recalled hearing as a child. He would grow up to compose the score for the bestselling LP ever included in the catalog of Deutsche Grammaphon (West Side Story). That the final phase of Bernstein’s career as a conductor was more closely associated with the Vienna Philharmonic than with any other orchestra loops back to (and magnifies) what Van Vechten had noticed during the interwar period. No one’s career had a trajectory more astonishing than Berlin’s, however. Like Stephen Foster and Stephen Sondheim, Berlin was both a composer and a lyricist, though he could neither read nor write music, and though his formal education was close to null. Yet no one in American history wrote more indelible songs, which constitutes a mystery that no scholarly research or flashes of insight can satisfactorily resolve. Biographers have noted that Berlin’s father, Moses Baline, had been a cantor, though he died when his son was only thirteen; and the influence of liturgical music is extremely elusive. To be sure Berlin worked incessantly, and the formidable talent against which he was competing for popular acclaim must have intensified his drive for the success in the marketplace that was his only standard of excellence. “The mob is always right” was Berlin’s credo, and for half a century no one was more inventive in satisfying mass taste. But how he managed to do so remains too puzzling to be penetrated. Jeffrey Magee’s volume nevertheless illuminates the theatrical songs with impressive exactitude, and offers a meticulous and very admiring account of what made Berlin’s music tick. Writing an extensive sequel to the late Charles Hamm’s scholarship on the early songs, Magee insists that Berlin was fundamentally a creature of the theater, rather than a throwback to the gags-and-gals era of Book Reviews