Benjamen Walker's Theory of Everything - Not All Propaganda is Art 1: Operation Younger Brother

Episode Date: January 23, 2024

In the 1950s the CIA weaponized culture to capture hearts and minds in Europe and Africa. We meet three writers (Richard Wright, Kenneth Tynan, and Dwight Macdonald) who got caught up in this battle both as collaborators and targets between the years of 1956 - 1960. We also meet a propagandist responsible for the CIA’s cinematic version of 1984 (Operation Big Brother) and “books that don’t smack of propaganda” aimed at European Intellectuals - including James Baldwin’s Notes of a Native Son. Shownotes: Françoise Vergès is the author of A decolonial Feminism, James Campbell is the author of Paris Interzone and Talking at the Gates, Jelena Ćulibrk writes on IRD and Newsreels, Tony Shaw writes on British Cinema and the Cold War, Support ToE and get access to the incredible exclusive bonus companion series to Not All Propaganda is Art by subscribing at https://theoryofeverything.supercast.com/, or subscribe directly in Apple Podcasts by hitting “Subscribe” right on the show page.

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Episodes every other week at neverpo.st and wherever you find pods. Hey, dear listener, it's me, Benjamin Walker, your host, and we are together here at the top of the very first episode of a new limited series that will run on the Theory of Everything feed for the next eight weeks. The series is called Not All Propaganda is Art, and it's a story about three writers who got caught up in the cultural Cold War in the late 1950s. I've spent the past four years researching and reporting this story, and it's unlike anything I've ever made before. In fact, I think it might be the first podcast group biography ever made. But before I introduce you to our incredible main cast, I've got a proper introduction for you. A 12-minute story that will explain everything you need to know about the Cultural Cold War and the world of 1956. A world that has a lot in common with the one we live in today.

Okay then, down we go. All art is propaganda, George Orwell famously wrote. But this is only half of the quotation. The full thing goes like this. All art is propaganda, but not all propaganda is art. And that latter half is perhaps best expressed by the 1956 film version of George Orwell's novel 1984, a movie secretly made by the CIA. Writer George Orwell had a dream or a, of what the world might be like in 1984,

and put his ideas into a book. The book became a film, and at the film's London premiere, that vision of the future seems to have spread into the theatre foyer. On March 1st, 1956, actors dressed as thought police herded men in tuxedos and ladies in evening dresses into the Warner Theatre. Gordon Scott, perhaps better known as Tarzan, is one of the first nighters. This mix of leather, gunmetal, and society glamour gave the scene a look that suggested more what could have been rather than what might be.

Distinguished character actor David Kossoff is here, and so is Hazel Court. Notably absent was the late novelist's widow. Now for a grimmer glimpse into Mr. Orwell's vision of the future. I would not entertain the idea of going, Sonia Blair told the Daily Mail. notably absent was the late novelist's widow. I would not entertain the idea of going, Sonya Blair told the Daily Mail. The film is not the book. And it wasn't. To refresh your memory,

1984 The Book ends with Winston Smith learning how to love Big Brother. And if you buy a copy of the 1956 film today, this is what you'll see. Winston Smith with his hands in the air, shouting his love for Big Brother. But this is not the ending the CIA screened back in March of 1956. Tony Shaw, Jr.: Okay, so this is me watching the alternate ending to 1984. So this I've not seen before. This is Tony Shaw.

I first learned about the CIA's version of 1984 in one of his books about propaganda and the Cold War. He found a copy of the 1956 screenplay in the British Library. I wasn't able to get a hold of this alternative ending, and I could only patch together what it looked like through documentation. During the first COVID lockdown, I spent a lot of time on YouTube and one day I happened across the actual alternative ending to 1984 and it was in German. Okay, I'm gonna start playing it now, yeah? Yep. Let's push start at the same time. I sent Tony the YouTube link, and we watched it together. I'm looking at Edmund O'Brien, who's the American actor who played Winston Smith in the movie.

On his right is a massive poster of Big Brother, and now he's looking, together with lots of other people, at a screen, essentially of a piece of indoctrination and propaganda by Big Brother's regime. And all the other people are showing their loyalty to Big Brother, but Winston Smith now starts yelling at the poster of Big Brother and he's shouting, down with Big Brother, down with Big Brother. And one of the secret police is coming up behind him with an obvious machine gun.

He's shot dead. Yeah, I've not seen this before. Now, the producers called this the happy ending. Can you explain what they meant by that? Okay, maybe this is confusing. So he's happy in the sense that he's clearly done the right thing. He's turned against Big Brother, but it's sad in the sense that he'd get shot by the secret police,

as does his girlfriend. Wait, wait, no spoilers. Julie's not dead yet. Look, here she comes. Yeah, she comes running towards Winston to try and save him. She's been shot, but she's still alive, and she's walking up towards Winston. Winston's dead, but she's now going to reach out. She's going to try and reach out and join hands with Winston.

This is going to be the last action of the movie. So, Tony, what's going on here? Tell us why the US government, back in 1956, made this happy version of 1984. Yes, certainly. The book, Orwell's 1984, is a pessimistic story about what totalitarianism of both the right and the left can do to society. The American government believed that by making a movie about 1984, it would spread the word of Orwell's messaging further afield rather than just through books. But the ending of it would put a little twist on what Orwell was writing about

and essentially make 1984 the book into much more of an anti-Soviet film. So we know the happy version of 1984 played in countries like England, Italy, and Germany. Why? Germany is still sort of up for grabs when this film comes out in 1956. So I can see certainly why this film would have been

directed at the German audience. Let's talk about how and when historians like yourself discovered the secret backstory to this kind of cultural Cold War propaganda. Well, the lid was blown on what the CIA was doing in cultural affairs in the late 1960s. A number of American magazines exposed that an organization called the Congress of Cultural Freedom, which had been set up by the CIA essentially in Europe in 1950, had lots of fingers in lots of different pies in literature and art, etc. And then, let's say about 20 years ago, historians started to get really interested in the Cold War in a different way. The Cold War had ended, of course, in the late 80s, early 90s. And historians started thinking

less about bombs and diplomats. And they thought, what about the cultural aspects? And historians like myself over the past 20 years have gone down that sort of cultural road of the Cold War. I in particular started digging away into material in the British Film Institute in London, looking at the making of both Animal Farm as a movie and 1984 as a movie. And I started to see the fingerprints of the American Secret Services. Then I started to dig away in the papers, the recently released papers of the likes of the CIA and affiliated organizations. I, together with other historians, started to put together this complex picture of how movies, which ostensibly came across as just commercial products,

actually had really interesting back lives and were linked secretly to what the American government was trying to do in trying to sell the American way, so to speak, particularly in the 1950s, when the Cold War, of course, in many ways was at its height. And so now that you've finally seen the happy ending to the CIA's 1984 movie, do you have any new thoughts about this seminal piece of cultural Cold War anti-communist propaganda?

Just thinking about it from a purely artistic point of view, it's not a great movie. It might have just been a whole waste of time and effort by the American agencies. When it comes to artistic value, Tony Shaw is correct. Neither the sad or happy version of the CIA's movie is any good. But when it comes to propaganda value,

I want to show you another perspective. You see, five days before this film premiered in London, something momentous took place in Moscow. At the 20th Congress of the Communist Party, First Secretary Nikita Khrushchev denounced his predecessor, Joseph Stalin, and he unveiled a new foreign policy for the Soviet Union. Peaceful coexistence between the communist and capitalist blocs. This specter of coexistence totally spooked the West's propagandists.

And so, the way I see it, this March 1st, 1956 screening of 1984 is actually their first unofficial response to Khrushchev. Peaceful coexistence? Not an option. Only freedom or death. Now, a number of Hollywood stars and producers helped the CIA put 1984 on film back in 1956. But in my book, the guy who deserves top billing for Operation Big Brother, as I like to call it, was a young propagandist named Sol Stein. Sol Stein worked at the American branch of the Congress for Cultural Freedom.

That's the CIA front Tony Shaw just mentioned. And one of Solstein's duties in 1956 was running a book program aimed, as he put it in a progress report to President Eisenhower's top psychological warfare advisor, quote, at influencing Europe's intellectuals with propaganda that doesn't smack of propaganda. One of the most successful books in his series was George Orwell's Homage to Catalonia. Brits don't say homage. Solstein repackaged Orwell's book on the Spanish Civil War with a new introduction from his mentor, the literary critic Lionel Trilling. An introduction that positioned George Orwell

as the enemy of totalitarianism right and left, and a model for intellectuals to live up to. Western propagandists adored George Orwell. They distributed thousands and thousands of copies of 1984, Animal Farm, and Homage to Catalonia all over the world. They helped create George Orwell's international reputation. Solstein also fancied himself a playwright,

and when he read the screenplay for the 1984 movie, he wrote the producer a letter suggesting some changes. He argued that if the U.S. truly hoped to sell this movie, it was going to need a new happy ending. I know I would like to hear the inside story of how that came about, and so would you listeners, I'm sure. So welcome to the Reader's Almanac, Mr. Stein. Thank you, Professor Bauer. Solstein went to great lengths to hide his relationship with the CIA, as he does in this radio interview from 1967. I'd like to know how or by what route you came into the publishing of books. Well, curiously, the very first full-time job I ever had in publishing

was as president of Stein and Day. Starting at the top. In Solstein's archives, which are housed at Columbia University, I found an undated letter in which he tries to justify his secret propaganda career. He filed this letter as unsent editorial to the New York Times. But it's really a letter to scholars, writers, and podcasters who are onto him and what he did. This is a letter Sol Stein wrote to me. Listen to this. I may not need to remind the reader that the motive behind the Congress for Cultural Freedom and its publications were the pro-Soviet publications and organizations that made anti-communist the harshest term of abuse

among so many artists and intellectuals who could not be persuaded by any amount of evidence that it might have been a good thing to be anti. Of course, the CIA's hand was eventually exposed for its founding and support of these efforts and my salary, although for a long time, I didn't know it. Such bullshit. Back when Sol Stein was working at the Congress for Cultural Freedom, most of Western Europe's writers, artists, and intellectuals, even the ones on the left, were already anti-communist. In 1956, in the cultural capitals of London and Paris, where most of this series plays out, American propagandists like Sol Stein were pushing a different kind of anti. Anti-peaceful coexistence. And this is not a trivial distinction, dear

listener, or a matter of semantics. The purpose of anti-peaceful coexistence propaganda went beyond sparking conflict with the Soviet Union. It systematically sought to attack diplomacy, erode international institutions, manipulate perceptions through false narrative and false flag operations, foster discord, sow dissent, and exploit historical grievances. Its profound legacy extends far beyond Cold War triumph. It built the world we live in today. Okay then, now that we've got that sorted, we're ready to bring this introduction to a close. But before I bring out the main cast, I have one last note. each episode in this miniseries stand on its own, it's going to make the most sense and be the most

enjoyable if you listen to these episodes in sequence, as you would an audiobook. All right, then, let's do this. I am so thrilled to introduce you or reacquaint you with the three incredible stars of this podcast group biography. First up is Dwight McDonald, or Dwight, as I'm fond of calling him. The only example in perhaps the last two centuries of really great art being propaganda, being intended as propaganda, is the Soviet cinema of the 20s, the silent cinema. One of the first people to realize the importance of culture in the Cold War was writer and critic Dwight McDonald. But the difference has always been between their art, even in our art,

that their art is indeed propaganda. I mean, they are trying to affect the conscious mind in Russia. And we are not trying to affect any, we are just trying to make money at the box office. On the other hand, all art is entertaining, but not all that is entertaining is art. In the 1930s and 40s, Dwight McDonald made a name for himself as a leading member of the New York Intellectuals, a set of writers, poets, and artists who published little magazines like Partisan Review, The New Leader, and Commentary. These little magazines were the zines and substacks of its day. And for five years, Dwight ran his own little magazine. It was called Politics, and he published some of the biggest writers in the world,

including George Orwell. But in 1949, he shut politics down. He decided to devote himself to culture. And in a letter to a friend, he explained why. Americans have been made into permanent adolescents by mass culture. We have become relaxed, immersed in a warm bath, perverted to attain high values. If the U.S. doesn't change its mass culture, movies, radio, sports, comics, television, slick magazines, it will lose the war against the USSR. In the 1950s, writing about mass culture

was as much of an intellectual fad as action painting. But Dwight MacDonald was determined to become the authority on the subject. He signed a big publishing contract with Doubleday, and in 1956, he went to Europe for a year with a plan to write the Critique of Mass Culture book. In February and March, he taught at the prestigious Salzburg Seminar in Vienna. This was his first opportunity to test some of his ideas out on young people. And, well, there was some pushback. What is this a massacultura, said freewheeling, piano-pounding Giovanna Tagliati. American mass culture is undemocratic, said dimple-cheeked Clara Dusanovic, but even more undemocratic are the American critics of American mass culture.

These are notes Dwight McDonald made about his students at Salzburg. I found them in his archive at Yale University. Now, I want to take up your very interesting comments, and I'll read and comment on some of the typical or interesting or more violent passages. Students reacted in a similar way when he lectured at the University of Texas a few years later.

And here's one. Call me a significant or insignificant part of the inept mass cult. I am one who believes this world really is a pretty good old world after all. Well, that's in quotation marks, thank God. In this recording, he's reading his students' critiques of his critique of mass culture. And then he says the same person who preaches mass cult is condescendingly saying that his taste is better than the other man. Well, I don't know. I think my taste is better than most other men yes of course but why not i mean

i've brought a lot of time to it and i'm interested in it and i've got a certain amount of talent and of course my taste is better than most people's taste yeah i think i could i mean never occurred to me that it wasn't. Well, you see, you all get this idea that I'm a snob and that I want to prevent people from going into this. My argument is not to keep out people, but just to give the right name to the thing. I mean, don't let's talk about culture if we don't mean it.

If we do mean culture, then let's be extremely, if you want to say snobbish, discriminatory. But anyway, let's be extremely strict in what we call this. I can see why so many of Dwight McDonald's students thought he was a snob in March of 1956. Are you serious? You mean you've never heard of Bill Haley in the comments? This was the very moment rock and roll transitioned from vinyl to silver screen. Rockin' will cure anything you have. Ready, boys? 1956 also marks the dawn of a new era in comic books.

And science fiction. And art. But if you have a rigid approach to art, you've come to the wrong place. An exhibition called This is Tomorrow at the Whitechapel Art Gallery. I always thought that the critique of mass culture debate ended because young people in the 1950s and 60s, young people like McDonald's students in Texas and Vienna, saw value, high cultural value in stuff like comic books, sci-fi movies, rock and roll,

and pop art. But that is not how it went down. The real story involves psychological warfare, covert propaganda, and Cold War secret intelligence agencies who had their own theory of mass culture and mass media to promote. That's the story I'm going to tell. And I'm going to do that by retracing Dwight McDonald's intellectual journey from his arrival in Europe in 1956 to the publication of his famous essay, Mass Cult, Mid Cult, in 1960. As I mentioned earlier, the Salzburg Seminar was Dwight McDonald's first stop on his 1956 European tour. Afterwards, he spent a little over a year working in London as a writer and editor for a magazine called Encounter.

Encounter magazine was one of several international journals published by the Congress for Cultural Freedom. That's the same outfit Sol Stein worked for in New York. So yeah, in 1956, just as he set out to write his grand theory of mass culture, Dwight McDonald started working for the CIA. It's remarkable he ever got the job. This is what Mike Josselson, the CIA agent who ran the Congress for Cultural Freedom, wrote to his colleagues after he interviewed Dwight in June of 1955 in New York. The more I see of him, the more convinced I am that he is the worst possible choice for editing Encounter for the Congress. He is a lone wolf who lacks teamwork gifts and will monopolize the magazine for his own writings. These are fair criticisms. When Dwight was asked what he might write for Encounter, he suggested the magazine-run chapters from his future mass culture book.

But still, he got the job, because you see, the CIA was not the only covert agency behind Encounter. The UK's Information Research Department was a co-sponsor and co-funder. And the UK's point man for Encounter, Malcolm Muggeridge, was convinced that Dwight McDonald was absolutely the right man for the job. The non-standard American is, as far as England is concerned, the best of all counter-irritants to anti-Americanism. This is what Muggeridge wrote to Jocelson. This country has at the moment an anti-American obsession. And an authentic American intellectual like Dwight, an eccentric individualist as he is, would be a tremendous help in overcoming this. Let me explain what Muggeridge is talking about here. You see, in the mid-1950s, peaceful coexistence was not the only pressing issue for America's propagandists.

There was also a rising current of anti-Americanism. Many Europeans were unhappy with America's gung-ho consumerism, suspicious of the U.S.'s global ambitions, and threatened by America's crass cultural exports. Graham Greene, the British novelist, best expressed this anti-American perspective in his book The Quiet American. Today, Graham Greene's novel is recognized for its prescience about how badly America was going to screw things up in Vietnam. But when The Quiet American was published, it actually came out in the U.S. in March of 1956, it was read as a powerful articulation of England's disquiet. As Graham Greene put it,

America is like a dumb leper who has lost his bell, wandering the world, meaning no harm. The reason Dwight McDonald got the job at Encounter was because he was the opposite of the quiet American. He was, as he liked to call himself, a critical American. And that is exactly what the IRD believed England needed in 1956. The IRD was very much interested in not only tackling Soviet communism and the Soviet bloc, but they were also tackling American propaganda, and they wanted to keep it at bay.

This is Jelena Chulabrik. She's a Cold War scholar who spent a lot of time recently in the Information Research Department's archives. She explained to me why this important Cold War spy agency is not as famous as MI6 or the CIA. Partly it's not as sexy. It was not in any way glamorized by Hollywood or the film industry. Also, most of the IRD's secrets are still locked away. Scholars like Yelena, who we'll hear more from in the next episode, have to do a lot of creative triangulation when it comes to this

secret agency. But still, there are some things we know about the IRD. For example, it was this agency that turned George Orwell writer into George Orwell cultural Cold War ideological superweapon. The Orwell story kind of really stuck with people because it was so ironic to the image that has been built and has been built by the IRD and all of these propaganda agencies about who we think Orba was. But having these big names supporting your project was kind of really central to the whole enterprise. In 1956, Dwight McDonald was a very big name. But when it comes to mass culture,

he and his employers had very different ideas. Which leads to some very big problems. For everyone. When Dwight McDonald started work at Encounter, he met another one of the main characters in our story, a young British theatre critic named Kenneth Peacock Tynan. I think the English have plugged this country absolutely into a cultural, what I could call a cultural dust bowl. British historians call 1956 the year in revolt, or the year that changed everything. And when it comes to culture, Kenneth Tynan witnessed these changes firsthand.

In 1956, he was the London Observer's theater critic. In many ways, his hand was on the wheel. Some historians, in fact, cite his May 13, 1956 review of John Osborne's play, Look Back in Anger, as the specific date everything changed. For the first time, my own generation was on stage, not by tolerance, but by right, saying the kind of things we'd all spend nights at the university arguing about, but saying them in public to an audience that wasn't used to hearing them. I doubt if I could love anyone who did not wish to see Look Back in Anger.

He famously wrote. Desert Island Discs. In the fall of 1956, Kenneth Tynan made an appearance on the BBC radio show Desert Island Discs. Every Monday at this time, a well-known person is asked the question, if you were to be cast away alone on a desert island, which eight gramophone records would you choose to have with you? Assuming, of course, that you also had a gramophone. As usual, the week's castaway that you also had a gramophone. As usual, the week's castaway is introduced by Roy Plumlee. Unfortunately, the audio for this no longer exists. All I have to work from is the transcript and the track listing.

Kenneth Tynan chose some pretty cool tunes, like Annie Ross's Therapy, Groucho Marx's A Rose is a Rose, and Duke Ellington's The Mooch. Discs that epitomize the atmosphere of a big city after dark, he told host Roy Plumlee. Discs that are evocative of people at cabarets and parties. Kenneth Tynan and his wealthy American wife, the novelist Elaine Dunby, hosted a lot of late-night parties in their Mayfair flat.

They were the original swinging Londoners. Kenneth Tynan knew everyone, and everyone knew him. When Orson Welles needed help with his bullfighting TV documentary, he asked the Tynans to step in as hosts and narrators. Actually, there are only about 200 people on Earth who can kill bulls at all. And of that number, about a couple of dozen who can do it well.

And it's a strange thing, though. Hundreds of thousands of people seem to enjoy watching them do it. And they aren't all Spanish, either. Yes, people say that the tourists are ruining the bullfight. There's an old Spanish proverb that you see the bull coming into the ring with a man on his back. It's probably an American making sure of a

good seat. The last time we were here, somebody told Ava Gardner after a bullfight that actually she was the only Spanish-looking person in the place. Today, Kenneth Tynan is mostly remembered for being the first person to say fuck on the BBC. But in the mid-1950s, he was a celebrity. His reviews in The Observer stood out for both his singular voice and his conspicuous opposition. For example, he was the only London theatre critic to positively review Jean-Paul Sartre's Necrosov

when it opened in London in January 1956. Everyone else wrote it off as propaganda. A few weeks later, in a column he called Art for Our Sigs, he followed up with a rousing defense of propaganda plays. Rifling through my colleagues' comments on Monsieur Sartre's Nekrasov, I see that while most of them found it witty, nearly all of them deplored the way in which it resorted to propaganda, as if the presence of propaganda in a play automatically condemned it.

Nobody denies that there are bad propaganda plays, just as there are bad propaganda plays, just as there are bad poetic plays. But to hold that all plays containing propaganda are bad by definition is to run counter to a theory of art on which much great drama is based. In Art for Our Sakes, Kenneth Tynan dismisses art for art's sake, the argument that the true artist should never concern him or herself with social or political matters. The logical end of that dispute, he wrote, is to exact from every playwright a guarantee that he holds no conviction strongly enough to let them influence his writing. And that is like demanding a certificate of intellectual impotence. Now, like I said, most of the records Kenneth Tynan chose

for his Desert Island Discs appearance had a swinging, hearty vibe. But one disc revealed a totally different conviction. He chose Brecht. In 1956, Kenneth Tynan was England's loudest champion of Bertolt Brecht, the German playwright famous for forcing his audiences to use their critical faculties through his Verwandtungs-Eens effect, or distancing effect. Most of Kenneth Tynan's friends, family, and peers in the British theatre world

were baffled by his devotion to Brecht. For example, listen to this bit from an interview he did with the actor Richard Burton. Is there any great playwright whose work has never tempted you at all? Brecht. Why not Brecht? Loathsome, vulgar, petty, little, nothing. Large, poetic, universal, everything. That's what you say.

According to Elaine Dundee, Ken's conversion took place in Paris in January 1955, which is probably why he chose this French version to play on the BBC. He'd gone off to see Mother Courage at the Thé and Fé, and I'd stayed in the hotel. And he came back to the hotel and he said to me, well, he said, I am a Marxist. I have seen Mother Courage and I'm a Marxist. Now, the closest Kenneth Tynan ever got to Marxism was Champagne Socialism. But he did believe, as did both of his heroes, Bertolt Brecht and Jean-Paul Sartre, that think it's a question of defining exactly what you mean

by something like a civilized human being, because the actual word civilized means to be in a community and of it and a part of it. And if you decide that I don't want any part of this, you are technically being uncivilized. The conflict between art for art's sake and politically engaged art predates the Cold War by centuries. However, the Cold War

redefined the rules of engagement. That's the second story in this miniseries. And like the story about the mass culture debate, it involves psychological warfare, covert propaganda, and Cold War secret intelligence agencies who had their own ideas about art and engagement. To tell this story, we're going to trace Kenneth Tynan's intellectual journey, from January of 1956, when he penned his defense of Jean-Paul Sartre, to his 1960 appearance before an American Senate Security Subcommittee,

in which he was forced to defend his own ideas about art, engagement, and culture. The third character in this story is the writer Richard Wright, who, in 1956, lived in France. Greetings from American artists who live in France, and special greetings to those American artists who live in Brooklyn, Manhattan, and Greenwich Village. I wish it were in my power to project upon the screen of your television sets the kind of life where Americans live here in Paris. I think you'd find it interesting. This is a recording he made for American Radio in 1951. I find Paris a city whose sheer physical beauty feeds and nourishes the sensibilities of all those who live in France

is a broadcast-friendly version of an essay Richard Wright wrote around the same time for the African-American magazine Ebony called I Choose Exile. I think it's one of the most amazing things Richard Wright ever wrote, but Ebony magazine refused to publish it. To this day, it has never been published. It's striking and revealing to compare and contrast these two essays.

For example, this is from Greetings. The most startling things in Paris for me are its trees, which line its streets and boulevards. There are trees all over Paris, and in sections of the city, not just in those quarters where rich people live. And this is I Choose Exile. I live in exile because I love freedom, and I've found more freedom in one square block of Paris

than there is in the entire United States. In greetings from artists who live in Paris, Richard Wright steps lightly around the reasons why he chose to leave America. I have encountered among the French no social snobbery. Men are accepted as individuals. The more individualistic a man is, the more acceptable he is. Naturally, in such an atmosphere, there is no race tension or conflict. Men are not prejudged here on the basis of their skin color or nationality.

And I have never heard a Frenchman tell anybody to go back where you came from. Whereas in I Choose Exile, it's explicit. He relates a story about trying to buy a summer cottage in New England. And after he found the perfect dream house in Connecticut, he showed up with cash to buy it. But the owner refused to sell to a black man. On the train back to New York, a resolution welled up from my depths.

He wrote, Why continue this pointless grappling with the racial muck? To hell with it. I'd get out. I'd defeat the culture that shaped me. I'd go to France. When five years ago I landed at Le Havre, there was a liberty ship full of GIs pulling out for home, and they chanted and shouted to us incoming Americans,

you will be sorry. Well, I can honestly say that I've never felt a moment of sorrow for having lived in France. There is nothing in America. It's drugstores, skyscrapers, television, movies, baseball, Dick Tracy, Black Belt, Jewtown, iris sections, bohunks, wetbacks, dust storms, floods that I miss or yearn for. Barring war or catastrophe or personal calamities, I intend to remain in exile. I love this, my adopted city. Its sunsets, its teeming boulevards, its slow, humane tempo of life,

and at times its grim reality have entered deeply into my heart. The United States tried to prevent Richard Wright from leaving the U.S. In the 1940s and 50s, the U.S. government regularly denied passports to African Americans. Richard Wright was only able to get his with the help of the French government, who offered him an official invitation. But soon after his arrival in Paris, he tells us in I Choose Exile, a strange white American took him aside at a cocktail party and whispered into his ear, listen, for God's sake, don't let them foreigners make you into a brick to hurl at our windows.

There is a quality of lightness and balance about the life of the artist in Paris. As the most famous black American novelist in the world, Richard Wright understood that his choice to live free in Paris was an implicit statement about America's racial problems. And he tried to address this in I Choose Exile. A bare recital, he noted, when uttered in an alien atmosphere of the facts of the Negro's life in America, constituted a kind of anti-American propaganda. This has so affected me that even I, a rigidly conditioned American, recently took a flyer as an actor in the movies. You okay, Miss Dalton? I sure am drunk.

I'll call Miss Peggy to help you. In 1951, Richard Wright portrayed Bigger Thomas in the French adaptation of his novel, Native Son. This ain't my job, Miss Doctrine. Don't leave me alone. And while critics mocked his acting, he had no choice. Doctrine go to bed. They find me here, they kill me. No professional African-American actor would touch the role of Bigger Thomas,

who murders the rich white daughter of his employer for fear of being blacklisted. They'll kill me. They'll kill me. Please. Yes, the effect of Paris is deep. Paris does something to one, and what it does is good. France presented itself as being not racist like the United States. They show how they welcome African-American artists and writers and offer them effectively the possibility to live and write that they would not have had in the state at the time. So I do think that for some of them,

it remains the illusion that, okay, you did not have segregation, but segregation was in the colony. Françoise Verges is one of France's most important writers on its colonial history and decolonial movements. We're going to hear a lot more from her on Richard Wright's illusions later on in the series. But what she just said is really important. There were some issues that were off-limits to American artists who lived in France in the 1950s, especially for American artists who hoped to remain in France. And this is why Richard Wright was so troubled by an article that appeared

in the March 6, 1956 issue of Reporter Magazine, an article about him called, They're Not All Uncle Tom's Children. This article was written by Ben Burns, the very guy who commissioned I Choose Exile for Ebony magazine. It's an article based on a visit Burns made to C. Wright in Paris. It's an all-out attack. Richard Wright enjoys a good audience on the left bank for his hate school of literature, Burns wrote. Admiring French bohemians and a loyal retinue of American literary bobby socksers Burns wrote, Reporter was yet another magazine in the CIA's network of covertly sponsored publications. Only this one, with its 200,000 plus American subscribers, targeted U.S. citizens with propaganda. Fortunately, the terrible Negro life that Wright knew in America during the Depression is, for the most part, a bad memory, Burns wrote.

But Wright, who has been away from the South and from Chicago for many years years has not yet discovered this. Deep down inside of Wright, there manifestly burns a relentless insatiable loathing for white people and America that erupts whenever he sits down at a typewriter. Burns even brought up I Choose Exile. He called the essay subversive and anti-American and proudly defended Ebony's refusal to publish it. He also revealed a private conversation that he'd had with Wright back when he visited him in Paris. A conversation about Algeria. You can say or write just about anything you want, but don't get started on France's colonies, he admitted. Whoop, the police will be on your neck and out you go in 48 hours.

There's no explanation, just out you go. Ben Burns wasn't just mocking Richard Wright for his silence on French racism. He was trying to get Richard Wright deported. A few days after he read Ben Burns' reporter article, Richard Wright visited the U.S. Embassy in Paris on his own accord. He told them about an upcoming culture conference, an international gathering of black writers and artists that was going to take place in Paris in September. Richard Wright offered to help the U.S.

covertly spy on and influence this culture conference. Some of Richard Wright's biographers point to Ben Burns' attack as the reason Richard Wright made this fateful decision. And while he most certainly was unsettled and worried by Ben Burns' attack, there was something else greatly perturbing his heart in March of 1956. A small, recently launched, red-brick-sized book of essays that totally shattered his world. A book called Notes of a Native Son is the book that turned Richard Wright into the guy who used to be the

most famous Black American novelist in the world. And James Baldwin reveals the plot for his ascension to the top spot in the book's first essay, Everybody's Protest Novel. Well, I suppose it's become part of the mythology of the Baldwin-Wright relationship that Everybody's Protest Novel is a kind of attack on Native Son, which was Richard Wright's great novel. This is James Campbell. He wrote a book about Richard Wright and the Paris literary scene of the 1950s called Paris Inner Zone. And Talking at the Gates, one of the first biographies of James Baldwin, whom he knew. You would have to be a little bit thick-skinned on Baldwin's part not to realize that your teacher was going to be upset

at the fact that the pupil was about to clobber him over the head. In everybody's protest novel, James Baldwin writes that Native Son's Bigger Thomas is just as one-dimensional, inhuman, cliched, and dead as Harriet Beecher Stowe's Uncle Tom. Protest novels like Native Son and Uncle Tom's Cabin, Baldwin declares, are not art. After Richard Wright's death, James Baldwin wrote about him again. And he tells us what Richard Wright thought of his essay. At one stage, he describes himself going into one of the cafes on Boulevard Saint-Germain, and Richard was sitting there at the table. What do you mean protest? Richard cried.

All literature is protest. You can't name a single novel that isn't protest. To this I could only weakly counter that all literature might be protest, but all protest was not literature. Oh, he would say then, looking as he so often did, bewilderingly juvenile. Here you come again with all that art-for-art-sake crap. This never failed to make me furious, and my anger, for some reason, always seemed to amuse him. In both of your books, Jim, you examine this fight between these two from multiple perspectives,

including Richard Wright's. Can you read us a bit from his version? Sure. This is Richard Wright writing. Don't take me for a child, Baldwin warned. What are you talking about, I asked, laughing a bit. That did it. My laughter spurred him to rage. He leapt to his feet, pointing his finger in my face and screamed, I'm going to destroy you. I'm going to destroy your reputation. You'll see.

Everybody's Protest Novel was first published in 1949, just after James Baldwin followed Richard Wright to Paris. Baldwin came to Paris and he wrote this article which had been commissioned by Partisan Review, but he put it into the magazine Zero, which was a Paris-based magazine run by a young American. And in that magazine, there was also a short story by Richard Wright, the established black writer.

Here's a short story. And then here's the new young guy on the block, James Baldwin. And here's an essay by him. And hey, hey, presto, it just happens to be an attack on Richard Wright. After its debut in Zero, Partisan Review republished Everybody's Protest Novel in its June 1949 issue. And then in 1952, New Perspectives USA, another cultural Cold War publication aimed at Europeans, published it. And then in January of 1956, it was published once again as the opening essay in James Baldwin's book, Notes of a Native Son.

Jim, could you just say the name of the guy who published Notes of a Native Son? Sure. That was Sol Stein. I've already introduced you to Sol Stein. He's the guy who convinced the CIA's filmmakers to change George Orwell's ending to 1984. He's the guy who was publishing propaganda books that didn't smack of propaganda at the Congress for Cultural Freedom. Notes of a Native Son was one of his books. Now, there's no mention of Sol Stein in James Campbell's Baldwin biography. But in the new introduction he wrote for the 2021 edition, he tells us that this was a notable omission.

I just, I overlooked him. And I think he contacted me in the first place and said, you know, you've written this book about James Baldwin. You don't mention me. Why not? Well, in your defense, I think we should mention that you're not the only Baldwin scholar who's overlooked Sol Stein, which is why I think in 2004, he published his own book about his relationship with James Baldwin, a book he called Native Sons. Yeah, that was a little bit, maybe a little bit presumptuous. Yeah. Reading Native Sons, you really get the sense that Solstein spent a lot of his time

telling people that he went to high school with James Baldwin. Yeah, he did want to put himself forward as an important person in Baldwin's early development. And maybe he was. He did, after all, put this book together. And he gave it the title And he gave it the title,

which references Henry James and Richard Wright at the same time. In Native Sons, Solstein prints letters he and James Baldwin wrote to each other back in 1955 and 1956. And these letters make it clear Notes of a Native Son really was Solstein's idea. But the letters also make it clear, Notes of a Native Son really was Solstein's idea. But the letters also make it clear that Solstein didn't work in publishing. His job was executive director of the American branch of the Congress for Cultural Freedom. In the book's commentary, Solstein tries to downplay the significance of his secretly funded CIA job.

Notes of a Native Son, he writes, was simply his way of helping out his old high school pal with his writing. Again, total bullshit. I found a bunch of letters in the Congress for Cultural Freedom's archives that reveal Solstein saw James Baldwin as a propaganda weapon. For example, in 1956, Solstein wrote to the editor of Prove, the Congress for Cultural Freedom's French magazine, urging him to run Stranger in the Village, James Baldwin's essay about his experience as a Western person of color in a snowy white Swiss village.

Well, Baldwin had a perfectly nice time in that village. It was a Swiss village called Laukerbad. He went there several times. Let me just read you what Solstein wrote in this letter. This essay, he wrote, is undoubtedly one of the finest pieces should add is also the essay Solstein chose to close out, Notes of a Native Son. separating himself from the growing African presence on the world stage and in Paris in particular, where he was based a lot of the time. He didn't feel any solidarity with the Africans. So one of the most fascinating things we learn in Native Sons is that Solstein actually commissioned James Baldwin to write a propaganda piece about Africa for him, something called Letter to a Younger Brother. Solstein describes this in a project update I found in his files dated February 25th, 1956. He writes, Letter to a Younger Brother will be

an address to the colored races of Asia and Africa in the guise of a letter to an actual younger brother. Great government oversees interest in this one. Solstein also mentions this great government interest in a letter he wrote James Baldwin two days later on February 27th. And this letter is in Native Sons. And in this letter, Solstein is basically pressuring Baldwin. He says, I know you need money and I can give you money also did quite a lot of good work for struggling writers like James Baldwin. In other words, it paid them.

A few days after Solstein sent that letter, in early March of 1956, James Baldwin was awarded a $2,700 writing fellowship. This was by far the largest amount of money he had received at this point in his career. Some biographers refer to this windfall as Baldwin's Rockefeller Fellowship. Others call it his partisan review award. It was actually a CIA grant, and Sol Stein was instrumental in his getting it. In the pay of the CIA, this is a CBS News special report. Here's what happened. First, CIA itself set up a number of dummy foundations,

calling them by impressive sounding, if meaningless, names. Their sole function was to channel money from the CIA to a second kind of foundation. Now, these foundations were real. They agreed to become conduits for central intelligence, mixing up the government money with their own. Now, the CIA's use of foundations to funnel money to its cultural fronts is well documented. And between 1954 and 1956, Solstein, as executive director of the American Congress for Cultural Freedom, appealed to the Rockefeller Foundation numerous times seeking support for two projects, an overseas book distribution program and something he called a fellowship fund for magazine writers. Here's how he described it in a grant proposal. A fund which would be used to commission important magazine-length studies, which are ordinarily neglected because writers cannot afford to spend a month or more working on a project which is likely to net them only the small remuneration

of the serious quarterly and monthly magazines. The Rockefeller Foundation never funded Solstein's fellowship fund for magazine writers, but in January of 1956, they did create a decentralized magazine fund, a giant pot of money they would pass to writers through four series quarterly and monthly magazines. One of the magazines they chose was Partisan Review, whose executive board, a Rockefeller program officer noted in his vetting report, was almost the same as the American Committee for the Congress for Cultural Freedom.

One of the writers Partisan Review chose was James Baldwin, and they informed him in early March of 1956. The Congress for Cultural Freedom comes up a number of times in the letters James Baldwin wrote to his friend Mary Painter around this time. In one letter, he even confessed he saw the CCF as a path to a Paris apartment, no worries about money, clothes, and prestige. And in a letter dated May 20th, 1955, he brings up Solstein's plans for Notes of a Native Son. He tells her that he doesn't think it's a good idea, but that he said yes for the money. And then, in the very next sentence, he adds, I'm up for a Rockefeller. This is what gives what I like to call Operation Younger Brother away. Sure, maybe he was up for more than one Rockefeller when he

wrote this letter, but the Rockefeller partisan review grant James Baldwin did get in March of 1956, that one did not exist in any form in May of 1955. Did James Baldwin ever write a letter to a younger brother? No, never. Baldwin didn't really have much interest in Africa. My first voyage was into the Gold Coast of Africa, where a black nationalism under a black prime minister had almost succeeded in reaching the point of sovereignty in its struggle for freedom.

In the 1950s, Africa was central to Richard Wright's quest for black freedom. In his book, Black Power, he reported on the birth of the Republic of Ghana, the first African nation to break free of colonial rule. Having examined the situation in the Gold Coast, sheer chance placed within my opportunity to visit not only one country, but to witness 29 such countries meeting together at Bandung in Asia, discussing their future after having liberated themselves from European rules. Richard Wright also reported on the historic Bandung Conference, which took place in Jakarta in 1955.

This was a gathering of black and brown leaders committed to hashing out a future that was independent of both the West and the communists. Richard Wright's reporting was published as a book called The Color Curtain, and that too came out in March of 1956. When The Color Curtain was published in France, Richard Wright went on the radio to talk about it. And he explained that his travel writing was his way of engaging with reality and avoiding propaganda. but his reporting trip to Bandung

was funded by the Congress for Cultural Freedom. Richard Wright's relationship with America's Cold War propagandists was complicated. His writings on U.S. racism made him a target of attacks like the one that appeared in Reporter. But in 1956, he wasn't just the most famous black American novelist in the world. He was also the most famous black anti-communist writer in the world. His essay, I Tried to Be a Communist, was included in a book called The God That Failed,

a 1950 collection of essays by former communist writers. As they had done with George Orwell's 1984, Western propaganda agencies translated and distributed copies of The God That Failed all over the world. After the Senegalese poet Alion Diop read The God That Failed, he wrote Richard Wright a letter. Your essay opened my eyes. I think you should teach the young Africans. Ali Undiop, his wife, and their magazine, Presence Africaine, were the organizers behind the Paris Conference of Black Writers and Artists Richard Wright offered to help the U.S. government surveil and shape.

According to Declassified Cables, Richard Wright even suggested he work on this project with Michael Josselson of the Congress for Cultural Freedom. Was Richard Wright aware that there were forces conspiring to replace him in March of 1956? Personally, I don't believe he was that cynical. But I do believe that this is the moment he came to understand that his clash with James Baldwin, one of the most famous literary clashes of the 20th century was by no means a clash over aesthetics. It was a fight about freedom. Let me explain exactly what this means. I want to read you something Richard Wright wrote on March 2nd, 1956 in Paris, the day after the CIA's freedom or death version of 1984 debuted in London. It's a line from an introduction Richard Wright wrote for his friend George Padmore's new book

called Pan-Africanism or Communism. When George discovered that beyond doubt, Stalin and his satraps looked upon black men as political pawns of Soviet power policies. He broke completely with the Kremlin. The following is in all capital letters. But his breaking did not mean that he then automatically supported the enemies of the Soviet Union. And his refusal to support the enemies of the Soviet Union was not dictated by any love for Stalin. No, he continued to work alone, striving to achieve through his own instrumentalities

that which he had worked for when he was in the Communist Party. That is freedom for black people. That's the third story in this podcast miniseries. We're going to follow Richard Wright from when he wrote this introduction in 1956 to his tragic death in 1960. And like the other two stories, it also involves psychological warfare, covert propaganda, and Cold War secret intelligence agencies who had their own ideas about freedom for Black people. Terima kasih telah menonton! Not all propaganda is art. It's research written and produced by me, Benjamin Walker. The one and only Andrew Calloway mixed it. Special thanks this episode to Audrey Martovich at Radiotopia for all of her amazing care and

guidance. And to my friend, Jesse Shapins, who pushed me to connect this story from the past to the present and the future. And thanks to all the amazing folks who appear in this episode. You can find links to their work in the show notes. I've actually created a complimentary podcast to go with this series called Propaganda Notes and Sources. Oh yeah, audio footnotes. Each episode in Not All Propaganda is Art gets its own corresponding episode of Propaganda Notes and Sources.

Basically, I go through the script for each episode and cite all the corresponding original sources I consulted and the archives I visited while reporting this series. You can find a teaser for the first episode in the TOE feed. But if you want to learn how I put together the story of the CIA money that went to James Baldwin, then you will want to subscribe. You can access the entire run of Propaganda Notes and Sources, this exclusive companion series, by subscribing at theoryofeverythingpodcast.com slash subscribe.

All the info on what you need to do is there. And it's a really simple process. We're using Supercast and Apple subscriptions. And if you're listening on Apple podcasts right now, just tap the subscribe button on the show page. Subscribing is the way to support this kind of work. Your one-time contribution will directly fund more standalone limited series like this one. So even if the idea of audio footnotes sounds like something you might want to listen to later, if you're excited about this series, I hope you can subscribe. And lastly, dear listener, if you do find this series of interests, please tell a friend or two or three. The only way this podcast group biography, this exploration of intellectual history from the 1950s, is going to find its audience is through you.

Thanks again for listening. We'll be back in one week with episode two. It's called Outsider Influence. And it's a story about Dwight McDonald's 1956 encounter with England's young, rebellious anti-Sartre. He was like famous overnight. He'd take me to all the shops who sold his books and say, how many of my books have you sold today? And a new look at the covert propaganda behind Hungary's 1956 youth rebellion.

In the first 14 months of Operation Focus, the 12 demands and the national opposition movement were mentioned in 224 daily broadcasts that comes out to about roughly once every two days. This organization doesn't actually exist. That's next time on Not All Propaganda is Art.