America studies: Political life at the end of ideology

This dissertation investigates the political culture of the United States during the early years of the Cold War (1947--1964) by concentrating on works of political philosophy, fiction, film, and poetry that represent institutions of governance and treat the theme of democracy. To begin, I identify an antipathy toward politics at the core of Cold War liberalism, as represented by Arthur Schlesinger Jr.'s popular The Vital Center: The Politics of Freedom. By reading this text's implicit narrative of political education, I demonstrate how his "center" harbors a vitalism that codes "life" as free, democratic, and American, but only if it is extricated from the domain of politics. In American Studies scholarship on the culture of the Cold War, some mention of the influence of The Vital Center has become obligatory, and for good reason in any project that investigates either the dissent among the various constituencies of the postwar Left, or the character of the anti-Communist compact that saw Cold War liberals such as Schlesinger, Reinhold Niebuhr, and Sidney Hook oppose McCarthyism but profess a hyperbolic and uncivil anti-Communism. While my project touches on these topics, I focus on texts that attempt to revitalize politics by recuperating elements of classic liberalism that Cold War liberalism either distorts or omits. The subjects of my other chapters share Schlesinger's concern for life, but recognize that the inalienable life of liberalism is sustained by a contradiction he neglects: human life is, in principle, inviolable before the organization of any polity; the inviolability of that life can only be realized through politics.; As I explore works of political imagination by Charles Olson, Orson Welles, and Richard Wright that represent freedom by developing images of society and governance that address this contradiction of political life directly, I reveal the extent to which Cold War liberalism makes unavailable for thought any idea of recognition or citizenship outside the confines of the nation-state. Olson's Call Me Ishmael, Welles's Touch of Evil, and Wright's The Outsider, as well as his political non-fiction of the 1950s, anticipate what is often valued in the field of American Studies today: an understanding of the U.S. as a hegemonic force in an overdetermined set of international and socioeconomic relations for which it cannot be solely responsible, but from which it benefits disproportionately relative to other nations and regions. I make this observation most pointedly in a concluding discussion of Richard Wright's warnings that the Cold War could very well perpetuate, and even accelerate, the historical inequities perpetrated against the global South by European colonialism. Such arguments make America Studies a contribution to recent work in transnational American Studies. At the same time, the figures I consider express an impressive optimism about democratic governance, and the pertinence of the U.S. in its history.