By David Oshinsky
THE FREE WORLD
By Louis Menand
Historians who write about the early Cold War era have a particularly sharp eye for the underside of American politics. Their narratives, for the most part, stress racism, McCarthyism, the diminishment of women, restrictive immigration laws â all vital truths, but not the only truths, from our admittedly messy past. It is much the same regarding studies of Cold War culture
, with book upon book skewering lowbrow entertainment, excessive consumerism and stifling conformity. There too often is a blind spot in which the positives of this era â soaring college enrollments, record book sales, judicial blows against racial injustice, a declining wealth gap â are viewed as tangential to the narrative, or worse, as cover for the nationâs many ills.
Remember when high culture was revered? Louis Menand s The Free World made me nostalgic
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Book World: The literary inhabitants of The Free World
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The Free World explains how culture heated up during the Cold War
The author Louis Menand at his home in Cambridge, Mass., April 2, 2021. Menands new book, The Free World: Art and Thought in the Cold War, features a very large cast, including George Orwell, James Baldwin, Susan Sontag and the Beatles. Tony Luong/The New York Times.
by Marc Tracy
(NYT NEWS SERVICE)
.- In the spring of 1999, Louis Menand taught a class called Art and Thought of the 1960s at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York. He assigned Malcolm X, Joan Didion, Portnoys Complaint. Toward the end of the semester, he told his students he was thinking of writing a book about the 60s.
Louis Menand’s new book traces the decline of a defining ideal.
ILLUSTRATION BY LINDSAY BALLANT
In America today, the right has a monopoly on the word “freedom.” Conservatives talk about “freedom” at every opportunity, while liberals and leftists do so only with embarrassment, shielded with qualifying clauses. “First they came for our Free Speech, then they came for our Free Markets, next they’ll come for our Free Shipping on orders $50 or more with promo code: FREEDOM50,” Republican Representative Madison Cawthorn of North Carolina tweeted on January 28, 2021. Cawthorn’s tweet which rewrites Martin Niemöller’s famous denunciation of German quietism in the face of Hitler’s rise as a sales pitch for his official campaign webstore is a joke, of course: a play on different senses of the word “free.” But it’s a joke only a conservative could make, because it relies on the assumption that freedom, of whatever kind, is a self-evident, and preeminent, good. A