“The Free World: Art and Thought in the Cold War”

CHRISTIANE AMANPOUR: Now, the word freedom, of course, gets thrown around a lot these days but what does it actually mean? Pulitzer Prize winning author, Louis Menand, wanted to find out in his new book “the Free World” explores the very concept of that freedom. He joins Walter Isaacson to discuss how it has within expressed in the best possible ways through music, art and literature.

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WALTER ISAACSON: Thank you, Christiane. And, Professor Louis Menand, welcome to the show.

LOUIS MENAND, AUTHOR, “THE FREE WORLD: ART AND THOUGHT IN THE COLD WAR”: Thank you. I’m very excited to be here.

ISAACSON: You and I were both born in 1952 and we grew up with the concept of the free world, which is the title of your book. What did that concept really mean?

MENAND: Well, that was the slogan of the liberal democracies in the Cold War, particularly the early Cold War, which is the period I cover in the book by 1965. And if you grew up then, at least for me. I don’t know what it was like for you, Walter, but I kind of internalized the concept of freedom as a kind of ultimate value in life. And if you would ask me when I was, you know, 12 or 15 what’s the most important thing in life, I would have said freedom without really thinking too hard about where the idea came from. So, the title of the book refers most explicitly to the Cold War context. But then when I wrote the book and started writing about artists and writers and so on, I found everybody uses the word freedom to describe what they were doing. That was fascinating to me.

ISAACSON: How did this concept of freedom get reflected in the art of the 50s and early 60s.

MENAND: Well, there are all kind of different versions of what counts as freedom. So, the art — the main idea behind it is that artist is free to express their views or their inspirations in any form that they want. That’s important in a Cold War context because the Soviet Union had an official aesthetic. Socialist realism. And if you didn’t write or paint or compose music in what’s — as Stalin regarded as appropriate form of socialist realism, your work was banned. You couldn’t be published. People couldn’t hear your music and a lot of very well-known artists suffered in the Soviet Union. That was — and that was well known to people. So, for the United States, countries in the free world, for propaganda purposes, we wanted to promote the idea that there is no official aesthetic in the United States. You can paint abstract painting, you could paint representational painting, you can paint soup cans, you can do anything you want because the state doesn’t tell you how to express yourself.

ISAACSON: One of the wonderful things about your book “The Free World” is it is filled with these fascinating characters that are pushing the bounds of art and culture with the notion of freedom under their banner. Let’s talk about some of them and let me start with Jackson Pollock. You say he solved the problem in art. What was that?

MENAND: The problem that he “solved” was the problem of creating an abstract painting. That is harder than it seems. So, you know, late 1940s when Pollock comes on the scene, there is a lot of interest among American painters, and if we now call the abstract expressionists, about creating an abstract kind of painting. But he arrived at that style almost accidentally. Now, why did that solve a problem? So, the problem with painting from the point of view of abstraction is that most painting is illusionistic. So, when you look at a Monet painting of a hay stack, let’s say, you think you are seeing a hay stack. It is an illusion of a hay stack. What you are really seeing is paint. With Pollock, it is just paint. There is nothing behind the paint. So, it was pure abstraction. And also, incredibly effective painting that nobody ever seen that kind of painting before, nothing exactly what Pollock was doing. When you go to the museums today and there’s a number of major museums, of course, have Pollocks, got close to a Pollock. And look at it, it’s very, very delicate surface. It’s very hard to imitate. People have a hard time trying to reproduce those paintings. It looks like anybody could put a stake in a can of paint and go like this but only Pollock kind of knew how to make into a painting. So, that’s a case where — and I know it’s something you are interested in yourself, Walter, in your own work where the biography of the painter serendipitously coincides with a particular moment in the history of, let’s say, painting, that makes that painter’s work suddenly visible and important to people. And the influence of Pollock goes all the way up to the 1970s in American art. Not because of the abstractions that created and the dripping, but also because of the way he made, the way he danced around the canvas, the way his own body was, so to speak, part of the process of producing the work of art, has a big influence on happenings, performance art, even feminist art. They look upon Pollock as kind of figure who made the artist part of the artwork.

ISAACSON: You talked about James Baldwin. And nowadays, there’s been a revival with Ta-Nehisi Coates and Eddie Glaude having done a great new book on him. But why was it in the 1950s, white people in particular, had real trouble with him?

MENAND: Yes. So, Baldwin is — as I’m sure many of your listeners know, he’s a fascinating figure. Very complicated man. And there are sorts of two parts of the answer to your question, Walter. One is that, what’s interesting about him, just from the point of view how his own story intersects with the civil rights movement, is he spent nine years in Paris. So, in 1948 he exiled himself to Paris. He wanted to get out of the United States. He was suffering from racial discrimination, homophobia. He was very unhappy here. And so, he went to Paris, which was much more welcoming to somebody like Baldwin. And he spent — he didn’t come back until 1957, which is after Montgomery Bus Boycott was over. And when he came back, from France, he got involved in civil rights movement because he met Martin Luther King Jr., he went to the south to write for magazines and he met King and he was very impressed by King. Remember, Baldwin was a boy preacher in Harlem and his father was a preacher. So, he knew the world of black ministry and he didn’t really respect a lot of those people but he respected King. Dr. King was a great man, which he was. And he got himself involved with the movement. And then he wrote this book, “The Fire Next Time,” which is probably his most famous book which is basically two essays that he wrote about race relations. And they are quite personally but also reported. I mean, horrible writing. It comes out in 1963. And then, there is a backlash among white liberals against Baldwin, Hannah Arendt, Susan Sontag, a number of figures start criticizing Baldwin. Why are they doing this? They are doing this because Baldwin’s message from the beginning was this is a white people’s problem. There is something wrong with white people and they need to own their participation in the regime of white supremacy. White liberals did not want to hear that. White liberals did not think of themselves as part of regime of white supremacy. They thought they were fighting to overthrow that. And Baldwin comes along and says, you have to fix yourself, man, before you can fix race relations. Don’t worry about us. They didn’t like that. That’s my pieces anyway. So, by end of the 1960, he’s very marginalized. He told the story in the book about Henry Louis Gates Jr., was a reporting “Time” in 1970s and he went to the south of France to interview Baldwin for peace, it’s 1972. And he sends it into his editors at “Time,” they said, Baldwin is pass A, we’re not interested. This is less than 10 years after “The Fire Next Time.” So, Baldwin’s message just did not resonate with certain kind of reader, certain kind of white reader. I think it’s because basically he’s saying same thing in the Black Lives Matter movement saying the same thing, which is that all white people are involved in the regime of white supremacy. And now, we get it, right? But 50 years ago, 60 years ago that was a very tough message. So, Baldwin is really prescient, I think, about identifying something about the nature of American race relations that a lot of people didn’t want to talk about.

ISAACSON: Martin Luther King, in your book, you know, frames the struggle as a struggle for freedom. He’s always talking about let freedom ring, instead of equity. How does that play into today?

MENAND: Well, I do think that is an example of King’s understanding that at that moment, the language that would appeal to the federal government. Because basically, he’s appealing to the federal government to intervene in southern rights relations. That is what he’s trying to do. The language that would appeal to them, they could get behind is the language of freedom. So, in the “I Have a Dream” speech, which is August 1963, which everybody knows that speech, he uses the word equality once in the entire speech and uses the word freedom or liberty like 20 times. So, King believed in equality. But equality was a slogan of an older generation of civil rights leaders and he didn’t think that was going to — I think, I don’t know if he ever said this, I think he didn’t feel that was going to work in appealing to people like John Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson, but they could get behind the language of freedom. Why? Because it cast the federal government in the role of rescuing an oppressed people. As they say, black people lived below the (INAUDIBLE). They could make a triumph of Democratic governments out of what had really been a failure of Democrat governments.

ISAACSON: You write about Susan Sontag and her great essay against interpretation. And you say it helps us open up to all different forms of art, high and low. Was that part of the freedom idea that informed American art in the 50s and 60s?

MENAND: Yes. Absolutely. I think it was. You know, so she comes on the scene in the early 1960. She’s an incredible predacious (ph) intellectual. You know, she knew about everything. She knew the classical music tradition. She knew film. She knew European literature. She knew continental theory. I mean, very few critics in that period who match her for that, for her knowledge. And she’s, of course, very smart person and she was interested always in figuring out what was going on at the moment. So, she writes this is essay called “Against Interpretation,” that you mentioned, 1964, and calls for “an erotics of interpretation.” It’s not quite clear what that means except it means you shouldn’t respond to art intellectually. You should respond sensually. You should let the work of art affect your feelings, indeed affect your body, the way you feel and not just try to figure out it that. That opens up a lot of stuff that was previously not considered important to pay attention to. Like Hollywood movies, pop music. So, this is the time ’64 when the Beatles come, when everyone was listening to The Supremes. You know, there’s — people getting interested in Hollywood movies again. There is a moment somebody has to come along who is a real intellectual and say, it is OK to like this stuff. Here is why.

ISAACSON: In your book you have Hannah Arendt. And she says that there’s a central question about anything, art, society, is, will it lead to totalitarianism? He’s going to push us towards a more authoritarian system. And whether it’s George Kennan or George Orwell or Hannah Arendt, that seems to be a theme throughout the book. How worried are you about the totalitarian temptation and do you see a rise of authoritarianism coming back?

MENAND: Right now. Yes. So, this is a big preoccupation of the period. I mean, you know all about George Kennan, Walter, but — Hannah Arendt too, but Orwell, particularly. So, 1984, is a warning. This is what the future could be like for everybody. That book is not about communism. That book is about a totalitarian future that the whole planet will be living through. So, people did think, well, this could happen here. It happened to Germany. It happened to Russia. Why couldn’t — it could happen here. So, this is a big anxiety of the period. We have something of the same anxiety now. I would say — I would use the term you used, Walter, authoritarianism. We worry that people are tired of liberal democracy. It is very demanding because requires us to tolerate stuff that we don’t like and people think, oh, there is a way out of this. We get somebody to sort of isolate those people or silence those people and make things the way we want them and not worry about what other people think. So, it’s always a challenge to keep liberal democracy alive. We felt that in 1950s. I think they’re feeling it now.

ISAACSON: Is free thought and freedom under assault these days on campuses?

MENAND: It is always under assault everywhere. I mean, as you know, the whole history of the First Amendment is people trying to erode it. Look, if you say something I don’t like, I’m naturally interested in preventing you from saying that again. So, the First Amendment or — and just the protocols of free speech protect you from people who try to silence you. But there’s all kinds of ways of silencing people that don’t try to on the law. You can be shunned. You know, you could be told shut up or whatever. So, that is just — it’s just part of free speech. It is what I said earlier. That liberal democracy is very demanding on people because it requires them to put up with things they don’t feel like they want to put up with. So, speech is a good example of that right now. But as long as I’ve been in the business, I’ve been teaching for 40 years, there’s always been questions about politically correct speech and stuff like that. It is just part of campus life. And it is important that it is because schools are a place where you can have these conversations without blood being shed. At least ideally. Where you could talk to people about what counts as an appropriate expression or what might be offensive to people and so on. And that’s kind of what we’re in business to do. It is difficult. It is very sensitive but it is important.

ISAACSON: Why is freedom important?

MENAND: Yes. So, as I said earlier, when I was a kid of course, I thought, oh, freedom is the ultimate goal. And as I started thinking more about it, of course, you go to graduate school, you read sociologies, what is freedom, what does that actually mean? Autonomy? What does that mean? Freedom is a feeling. It’s not so much having to do with the conditions of your life, though, of course, the conditions could be more or less liberal, it has to do with you feel about yourself. Do I feel I’m freely making choice for myself? That is really important to people. Even if I give the example of the South Vietnamese who fled after the north took over the south in 1975. They didn’t have a word for freedom but they knew what it meant not to be free. They knew what the feeling was when they fled that country. So, I think that feeling is really important to people. Right now, in the 60s, the idea of freedom was kind of a liberal or left- wing value. Today, it is a right-wing value. But the people on the right who say that feel that they are being deprived of freedom. We feel like — I feel like what’s wearing a mask? What is the big deal? It’s a good thing to do. But they feel somehow that they are being deprived of their own autonomy. And it is important to recognize when people feel that because, I think, it’s a fundamental value of being a human.

ISAACSON: And why is it a fundamental value to value human freedom?

MENAND: Because we’re not herd animals, you know. Because we want — we have the ability, because we have minds to make choices. We’re not biologically determined in what we do. And we want to — that’s a very important aspect of our species. I think we want to respect it and honor it and cherish it and protect it. And I think — I’d assume most of our listeners feel the same way. They want to feel that way. You could live in an authoritarian country and identify with the country’s cause and leaders and values and feel free. I wouldn’t. But other people might. So — but it is important — that’s an important aspect of people. We’re all different. The higher rank (ph) was very big on this. It’s pluralism. We’re not all part of a species like a herd. We’re actually these individuals. And she thought the most important thing about political structure that they have to recognize, plurality. The way people are different. Membership in our species prerequisite is that we’re not the same as everybody else.

ISAACSON: Professor Louis Menand, thank you so much for joining us.

MENAND: Thank you. It’s been a pleasure.