| In "America the Beautiful," a 1947 essay, Mary McCarthy wrote, "Those who argue theoretically that (the A-bomb) is the true expression of our society leave us, in practice, with no means of opposing it." She argued that U.S. citizens "differentiate" themselves privately from the violence that their government enacts publicly, and that doing so is necessary to forestall greater violence, or even the ultimate violence of nuclear annihilation. Her reference to "the true expression of our society" demonstrates that the tasks of resisting violence and achieving peace are intricately related to assertions about identity: she is outlining a manner of citizenship based upon individual resistance to power. However, the Cold War era's most popular assertions about identity avoided acknowledging the relationships between power, citizenship, and identity. The prevalence of arguments that American society had reached an "end of ideology," by coalescing into a "vital center" of political and civic agreement, countered McCarthy's interest in "differentiation" and excused the violence motivated by differences of class, ethnicity, gender, or sexual orientation as an unavoidable, if not necessary, part of the Cold War struggle against the USSR. The vital center's sense of "individualism," predicated on a faith in objectivity, universality, and a narrow view of common American experience, had no tolerance for differentiations. McCarthy's view of "America the Beautiful," which she was unable ultimately to differentiate from the vital center's more celebratory assessments of Cold War American culture, is one of many examples of the relationship between the ideology of American individualism and resistance to it expressed in individualist terms. American prose and poetry of the Cold War often dramatizes the ideological compulsion by which arguments about identity produce conformity; the variety of political uses and critical readings to which these dramas are put is the focus of my work. |
