Benjamen Walker's Theory of Everything - Not All Propaganda is Art 2: Outsider Influence

Episode Date: January 30, 2024

In 1956, New Yorker writer Dwight Macdonald joined Encounter, a magazine secretly backed by American and British security agencies. He arrived in London just as British Influencers turned a young Existentialist named Colin Wilson into England's answer to Jean-Paul Sartre. Meanwhile, the CIA incited a youth rebellion in communist Hungary. We investigate the covert propaganda behind Operation Free Youth Action and Operation Anti-Sartre and the Outsider’s influence on Macdonald’s famous critique of Mass and Middlebrow Culture. Shownotes: Carole Ann Gill  is the author of Carole Ann, Sarah Roth wrote on Operation Focus, Hugh Wilford is the author of The Mighty Wurlitzer, Jelena Ćulibrk writes on IRD and Newsreels, Gary Lachman is the author of Beyond the Robot, Alfred Betschart writes on Sartre, Stefan Collini is the author of Absent Minds, Geoffrey Wheatcroft is the author of Absent Friends. 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. Previously on Not All Propaganda is Art Our guest is Mr. Dwight McDonald, author and critic. 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. Thank you, Mr. McDonald. In the 1950s, writer and critic Dwight McDonald shut down his little magazine, Politics, and turned to culture. 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. In 1956, Dwight McDonald went to London to write what he hoped would be the book on the dangers of mass culture. He also signed a one-year contract with a British magazine called Encounter, a magazine secretly funded by the CIA. Coffee is big business. London, 1956.

The media can't get enough of the city's new espresso bars and coffee houses. The coffee bar boom in Britain began in 1952, when the first espresso machine arrived from Italy and was set up here in London, Soho. The press is especially curious about the young people who fill these cafes. Do you think that this will last soon? Yes, I do, because the teenage group are being educated in coffee houses, not as their mothers and fathers in the public house. And I will say that the coffee they get in my place is very good and they seem to enjoy it. Thank you, Mr. Napier.

Pleasure. Encounter magazine was also curious what the youth was getting up to in London's subterranean coffee houses. And for their May 1956 issue, they dispatched war reporter Martha Gellhorn on a fact-finding mission. From a bar lined with lynx skin, coffee is served with lemon peel or grated orange, cinnamon or anisette, to name but four of nine different varieties. She visited the Les Enfants Terribles, the Cat Whiskers, the Mocha Café, and the Posh Gondola. She was charmed by the foreign-run cafes, the Mocambo, the Cubano.

The art of conversation, too, is sharing in the revival of the coffee house. With the unhurried philosophy of the Parisian at its pavement table, a new type of cafe society is growing up in Britain. Today, places like this have become a regular rendezvous for people from every walk of life. But the shabbiness of the bohemian cafes on King's Road, Roy's Bar, and the Fantasy confuse her. These determined bohemian boys, one suspects, wait at home while their hair and beards grow, meantime shoveling dirt under their fingernails.

She writes, The bohemian girls must practice to achieve. These chewed or straggling hairdos must rumple their clothes in a rumpling machine. Since her generation was authentically shabby and fierce, Martha Gellhorn confesses she cannot relate to the insecurity of the bohemians who fill London's coffee bars. Here she says, There's only harem scaramery and amateurism.

But she concedes, tongue-in-cheek, that outsiders like herself just might not be able to see that these shabby bohemians are in fact great artists and writers in disguise. Her conclusion is remarkably prescient. Because on May 27, 1956, a young café habitué named Colin Wilson woke up and discovered that London's top two influential literary critics had both given his new book, The Outsider, rave reviews in their weekly columns. 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? This is Carol Ann Gill. In 1956, she was a 20-year-old London coffee girl. Colin came from the coffee shops because he worked there behind the counter. That was his job, serving coffee, and that's how I met him. I thought he was the most beautiful thing I'd ever laid eyes on. In her recently self-published memoir, Carol Ann recounts her time with Colin Wilson as he wrote his infamous book. I actually typed some of The Outsider. He went under a bus. The manuscript went under a bus in the rain and I ended up taking some home to type, and he took some home. And the next day it went to Glantz, who published it.

So when you were typing those pages up back then, do you remember thinking anything like, oh my God, this is so good, wow, this book is going to be huge? No, no one could possibly think that. He's an outsider, exactly. Difficult to define, but one could say that the outsider's opinion is totally different from everyone else and doesn't feel himself to be in the same boat as everyone else. Noah is a perfect example of an outsider.

He's building an ark and claiming there are going to be floods and obviously the majority of people saying nothing, so it won't rain. Over the summer and fall of 1956, the British press could not get enough of Colin Wilson. Fleet Street journalists reported his every move. A TV crew even took him out to Hampstead Heath, where he used to rough it in his sleeping bag. You were pretty hard up, weren't you? Yes, very hard up on the whole. I used to sleep out here on the heath in a sleeping bag.

Go down to the museum during the day to write. It was a very good idea because I didn't have to do jobs that I loathe. It made things much easier. Were you interested to write about the outsider? I suppose the fact that I felt myself to be an outsider in my teens. The difficulty is to cease to be an outsider in my teens, and the difficulty is to cease to be an outsider, then decided that this on the whole is a problem that confronts almost every artist, every major artist anyway.

In The Outsider, Colin Wilson writes simple, easy-to-follow Wikipedia-style histories about his outsider heroes, most of whom lived difficult and troubled lives. Writers like Dostoevsky and Kafka, artists like Van Gogh and William Blake, and philosophers like Kierkegaard and Nietzsche. I mean, it's not the best summer reading. Most summer reading is light entertainment. This was like, you know, you'd be driven to suicide reading some of the accounts of the people in it. I think Wilson was just as surprised as everyone else that it had become such a tearaway success.

He was sort of like the Tommy Steele of literature at that time. And Tommy Steele was kind of the Brit Elvis in a certain way. And again, this is the same time as Elvis Presley, James Dean. So he's this youth, you know, figure. This is Gary Lockman. He wrote a biography of Colin Wilson, and he believes that in May of 1956, this 24-year-old outsider was right age, right time. Whereas our man Dwight McDonald, who reported for duty at Encounter magazine just as Colin Wilson made his grand debut, Well, he saw something much more sinister.

My name is Benjamin Walker, and this is episode two of Not All Propaganda is Art. It's called Outsider Influence, and it's about the secret propaganda behind the youth revolutions of 1956. Last episode, I introduced you to the American writer and critic, Dwight McDonald. He's one of the main characters in our series. In 1956, he went to London with a plan to write a book, a book about the dangers of mass culture. Like his fellow New York intellectuals, he has ideas about the importance of high culture in modern society. And he, like them, has always been powerfully motivated by a desire to defend high culture against various threats,

whether it's totalitarianism or mass culture. To fund his book project, Dwight MacDonald signed a one-year contract to work at Encounter Magazine, the very magazine that sent Martha Gellhorn into London's coffee shops, a magazine run by the Congress for Cultural Freedom, which was a CIA front. The Congress for Cultural Freedom is sort of running festivals and seminars, but I think it's magazines are probably the most important thing it's doing. How do you influence intellectual opinion? You put out a journal that's one of the things you do, probably the main thing that you do. Hugh Wilford's written numerous books about the CIA, the Congress for Cultural Freedom,

the Cultural Cold War, and the relationship between America and England spies. His first book, though, was actually about Dwight McDonald. He was very pleased to be in London, you know, like most of the people in the sort of intellectual media he belonged to in the US. You know, he loved European culture and was sort of pleased to be there, you know, observing it at first hand. His employers at the Congress for Cultural Freedom, I think, felt that they weren't terribly pleased with his performance during his year in London. He regarded it as a sabbatical. And I think there might have been a little bit of truth in that. When Dwight McDonald arrived in London, his bosses at Encounter tried to get him to write about NATO and European tourism.

But he really only wanted to write about one thing. I spent a year in England and there I came into intimate contact every week with about six extremely good weekly magazines, which had excellent book review sections. The Spectator, The New Statesman, Economist, The Times Literary Supplement, and so on. Dwight loved these British weeklies so much, he assigned himself an article for Encounter, a close look at the British press from the point of view of an American. This is how he came to witness the phenomenon of Colin Wilson firsthand. On July 13th, two articles about Colin Wilson and The Outsider caught his attention. The first

was a short item in the Weekly Times educational supplement. It was titled Outsider Inn, and it noted, Lately, the popular daily newspapers seem to have become increasingly inclined to poach on preserves where formerly none but their more intellectual competitors claimed any rights. For example, it added, It was scarcely a matter of weeks after the youthful Mr. Colin Wilson had published his study of the outsider that the tabloids were carrying articles about him. The second article about the outsider, Dwight read on July 13th, drove this point home. It was

an interview with Colin Wilson in the Daily Mail tabloid titled I Meet a Genius with Indigestion. I found clippings of both articles in Dwight McDonald's archive at Yale. They are the genesis of his article on Colin Wilson, Reader's Indigestion, his investigation into one of the craziest influence operations of the cultural Cold War. Dwight MacDonald frames his investigation as a mystery.

How and why a badly written work of amateur philosophy by a hitherto unknown young author, has become the most discussed bestseller in recent years. For him, the answer to the question of how is simple. The two rave reviews from the influential Sunday critics, Cyril Connolly and Philip Toynbee, practically guaranteed the outsider a good sale, he writes. But when it came to high praise, those two were merely first. Dwight points out that nearly all of England's important critics

lauded, fettered, and extolled the virtues of the outsider, and he prints some of their most effusive and fulsome accolades alongside some of Colin Wilson's most convoluted and contradictory writing. A man becomes an outsider when he begins to chafe under the recognition that he is not free. He doesn't want to become a healthy-minded, once-born person because he declares such a person is not free. And what characterizes the bondage of the once-born? Unreality, the outsider replies. Most remarkable book on which the reviewer has ever had to pass judgment.

The outsider's chief desire is to cease to be an outsider. Brilliant, original, provocative. The outsider would seem to be a basically religious man who refuses to develop those qualities of practical mindedness and eye to business that seem to be the requisites for survival in our complex civilization. Astonishing book. I admire his high seriousness, intelligence, and sensibility. Now, Dwight concurs that the outsider angle has a certain dash and appeal. But, unlike all the other critics, he refuses to give Colin Wilson's barbarous style a pass. And with his own brand of stylistic violence, he demolishes both book and author.

Colin Wilson develops his argument with vigorous bold strokes, like a man painting a barn in a hurry. That a 24-year-old should have the determination to carry out so ambitious a scheme, however, crudely and with whatever outpourings of clotted journalese must induce a legitimate pride in his parents. But these virtues, which are outweighed by far greater defects, hardly explain the almost unanimous acclaim with which the English reviewers greeted the outsider, especially since none of them, so as far as I know, were relatives. To answer the question of why The Outsider has become the most discussed bestseller in recent years, Dwight fingers the ponytailed and sideburned patrons

of the cafe espresso joints that have sprung up all over London. The younger generation, he notes, has responded to both The Outs theme and the insider's praise. But, Dwight insists, Colin Wilson owes his success to more than just youth culture. It is one more symptom of the growth since the First World War of an audience that habitually lives beyond its cultural means. These people might be called camp followers of the avant-garde. They want to keep up, and they are attracted by large new theories that seem to crystallize what is in the air.

Dwight McDonald's takedown of theider marks a transition in his thinking about culture. His famous 1960 essay, Mass Cult, Mid Cult, his critique of mass culture and middle-brow culture, the book he came to London hoping to write in 1956, it's rooted in this piece. As I mentioned earlier, Dwight McDonald frames his investigation into Colin Wilson as a mystery. It's a literary whodunit. And in the case of the outsider, the who is the critic. And the it that the critic done done is a dereliction of duty. The critics most important job, he would later write in a reflection on this very article, is to discriminate between the true good and the false good.

Dwight MacDonald wrote Reader's Indigestion at his desk at Encounter in London, on their dime. But Encounter didn't publish it. Dwight's close look at Colin Wilson and the British press ran in the October 13, 1956 issue of The New Yorker. Now, there's nothing particularly weird about that. In fact, as Dwight was writing his takedown of Colin Wilson, his co-editor at Encounter, Stephen Spender, was actually courting Colin Wilson to write for Encounter. Plus, Dwight McDonald was a regular contributor to The New Yorker at this moment.

What's weird is that Dwight also wrote a close look at the British press for Encounter. That article is called Amateur Journalism, and it ran in the November 1956 issue. So basically, these two articles were on newsstands at pretty much the exact moment. But while the New Yorker piece is a condemnation of British critics for turning a badly written work of amateur philosophy into one of the most discussed bestsellers of recent years. The Encounter piece is a celebration of England's critics for their amateurism. I'm just going to let Dwight explain. I think the English critics

may best be described as amateur. The word has acquired a pejorative overtone in this business-like science-minded civilization. No one is insulted if he's called a professional or an expert, but nobody likes to be brushed off as an amateur, especially with a mirror in front. But the amateur is not necessarily inferior in skill to the professional. The difference between them is simply that the former does what he wants to, what the latter does for pay. In journalism, this means that the amateur is less vulnerable to the pressure of the market, and so to what I regard as the most corrupting influence on art in letters today,

that of the cheap cultural goods sold in bulk to the mass public. He fell in love with the English weekly papers. He thought that they were not on the same level as the mass press. And he said, in my view, absolutely rightly, that those weekly papers were far better than anything that might seem to be their equivalent in America. Jeffrey Wheatcroft wrote about Dwight MacDonald's time in London in his book Absent Friends. For him, the key to making sense of Dwight's concept of amateur journalism is his anglophilia. MacDonald was smitten by England when he came here. He said in an awestruck way that if you

were working for a mainstream paper in New York, you could spend a year without meeting any member of Congress. And that's not true in London. There has long been a tradition of mingling of politics, journalism, business, whatever, culture. So in your book, you write that when you met Dwight MacDonald, you told him that you found his anglophilia sinister. What did you mean by that? I'd forgotten facetiously calling it sinister, but I mean, the degree of MacDonald's anglophilia does make me as an Englishman smile. I mean, there was a certain innocence about him, and not genuine innocence. I mean, he was highly intelligent and intellectually sophisticated,

but in other ways, an innocent abroad in more than one sense. And of course, there was the whole CIA business. Yeah, remember, Dwight McDonald is writing this homage to the incorruptible critics and journalists of England in a magazine that is covertly subsidized by American and British security agencies. Specifically, the CIA and the IRD, the Information Research Department, England's Ministry of Propaganda. Propaganda is, of course, a dirty word. And I think they were aware, of course, that what they were doing is propaganda. And I think that was maybe one of the reasons why the IRD was kept secret. This is Jelena Chulabric, the cultural Cold War scholar we heard from last episode.

I asked her to help us see what Dwight McDonald missed in his close look at the British press, something he couldn't possibly see in 1956, the IRD's covert use of the British press to disseminate propaganda. Well, the IRD would not agree that they were just doing pure propaganda because in their view, propaganda was what totalitarian states did. They thought that they were doing, quote-unquote, enlightenment propaganda because they were using an individual rather than communicating with the masses. They were interested in really creating kind of structures and networks that would collect information and then propagate it to targeted individuals,

what Friedrich Hayek called the second dealers of information. Is it okay if we just use the word influencer for that? Second dealers of information, yeah. Such as journalists and cultural workers. And I think this is very important. The IRD was very much interested in having their information disseminated from a voice that was able to insert their own personality and their own personal expertise and mold the IRD information. They add their own meaning to it. So I want to just read you a tiny bit from this essay, Amateur Journalism, that Dwight McDonald wrote for Encounter in November of 1956. One special aspect of what might be called amateur expertise is the amount of highly informed comment on events in other parts of the world that appears in the British press, reading the London Weeklys and the

Times and the Guardian, is to be constantly reminded that one is at the center of what was recently a world empire. This thing that he noticed in his close reading of the British press, this thing he calls amateur expertise, can we say that this is basically the hidden hand of the IRD? Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, absolutely. I think I was thrown off by the word amateur, but yeah, absolutely. The thing that he's praising is this whole structural information processing machine that was really working in this secret agency as part of the foreign office. This is great. At the very moment Dwight McDonald published his takedown of Colin Wilson and the amateur

critics pushing him in the British press, a revolution broke out in Budapest. We're now going to take a close look at the mystery of the Hungarian uprising of 1956. Because like the mystery of Colin Wilson, it also involves propaganda and young people. From Budapest, city of blood and bravery, tragedy and hope, come the first pictures of the battle which has shaken the world, and of its aftermath. Here, in a few fierce days, the post-war drama of Eastern Europe reached its climax. Tanks fought against civilians, and army against secret police, where a few days ago, all had seemed quiet on the surface. The Hungarian uprising of 1956 is one of the most controversial episodes of the entire Cold War.

In the fall of 1956, young people in Budapest revolted, demanding freedom from Soviet rule. They were convinced that the West had their back. But when the Russians invaded, the West did nothing, and the uprising was put down. Thousands were wounded and killed. Many of the survivors claimed that they'd been misled by American propaganda. Behind the Iron Curtain are 70 million captive people, but the free world has not forgotten them.

And Radio Free Europe lets them know it. This powerful network sends them a steady stream of truthful news, facts, essential information. Support Radio Free Europe with Truth Dollars to Crusade for Freedom. Care of your local postmaster. Radio Free Europe did not run on truth dollars. The Crusade for Freedom was another CIA front. And like the IRD, Radio Free Europe promoted itself as a broadcaster of truthful information. I actually found a declassified report on Radio Free Europe made for its 1956 fundraising campaign. Not long ago, 80 private American citizens from all parts of America

and all kinds of American life arrived in Germany. Like the American truth dollar donors, Overton was greeted by RFE boss Richard Cromby. It is our hope that this visit will help you to see RFE in action, to see it at work, and to learn at first hand some of its effectiveness. Overton also got to see the transmitters and the studios. An extensive tour of the studios showed the group the carefully planned and effective ways that Radio Free Europe broadcasts across the Iron Curtain vital facts and truthful information to the captive people. And he saw the balloons of Operation Focus.

Your representatives left Munich and journeyed to a small wooden building near the Iron Curtain border. They were on their way to see Operation Focus, the Free Europe Committee's second full-scale political warfare campaign, combining the force of the spoken and the printed word. Nearly a thousand balloons, each carrying hundreds of leaflets setting forth the twelve demands of the national opposition movement, were to be sent aloft that day into Soviet-dominated Hungary. These balloons were borne eastward by the wind and, hours later, discharged the leaflets over Soviet-dominated villages. These balloons were borne eastward by the wind and hours later discharged the leaflets over Soviet-dominated villages, towns, and fields. Like the Americans, Overton found the balloons very, very impressive. This is one of the finest exhibits that I have ever seen. Today, there have been hundreds of balloons

released to go behind the Iron Curtain to send messages to them that will give them hope of freedom someday. I'm very happy to be here today as a guest of Radio Free Europe. I represent nine million Catholic women in the United States, and I hope that in releasing this balloon to the Iron Curtain countries, it will do some good. Thank you. this balloon to the Iron Curtain countries, it will do some good. The balloons are just absolutely enormous. I've been trying to think of what's a good household item to give you a size comparison. And the closest thing I can think of is a car. This is Sarah Roth, a young Cold War scholar who's written the first, really the first, truthful article about Radio Free Europe after almost 70 years of bullshit. First of all, you cannot read a book about Radio Free Europe without at least a chapter devoted

to the 1956 Hungarian uprising and the accusations leveled against the American government in Radio Free Europe claiming that the radio had promised the Hungarian freedom fighters impending American military and economic aid. Second, most of the original scholarship on Radio Free Europe, the Free Europe Press together, did strongly imply that the United States was ready to assist the Hungarians in their opposition to the communist regime. For Sarah Roth, there's one crucial truth about Operation Focus that former employees and scholars of Radio Free Europe have been downplaying or outright denying since 1956. And that is this. There was no Hungarian national opposition movement. The whole thing was a CIA fabrication.

So the national opposition movement is a creation of Samuel Walker, who is the head of the Free Europe Press and his deputy, as a cover story for the propaganda that they're sending into Hungary between 1954 and 1956. This organization doesn't actually exist. Last episode, I brought up Graham Greene's novel, The Quiet American, a book published in the winter of 1956. The main character in that novel, Alden Pyle, is a young 20-something CIA agent, just like Samuel Sloan Walker, the guy who's running Operation Focus.

In fact, Walker is a recent Ivy League graduate, just like Pyle. But most importantly, both men are committed to creating a third force to fight the communists. I think that Walker really has this vision that the national opposition movement is going to become a real resistance group and that all of the Hungarians are going to partake in this. And as we see in the events of 1956, that has cataclysmic effects. Operation Focus enabled Radio Free Europe to push this fiction of a national opposition movement while maintaining its journalistic, truth-telling facade. 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 so they're they're citing this print material that hungarian citizens can then go and look at and you know they're treating it kind of like a primary source and then the radio is citing it which, again, just sort of reaffirms the idea that the national opposition movement is both real and credible enough that an American organization like Radio Free Europe is citing their material. There's another aspect to Operation Focus that Sarah Roth also believes scholars downplay and deny, and that is the meaning of the balloons themselves. There's two components to the Operation Focus campaign. There's the leaflets, and then there's the balloons. And people don't

really seem to talk about the balloons nearly enough. The leaflets appear to be coming from a organic Hungarian partisan groups. The balloons clearly come from the West. And they clearly demonstrate that there is a strong relationship between Hungarian resistance to communism and Western Europe, American material support and economic support. The balloons have enormous psychological warfare impact. As part of that 1956 fundraising campaign, Samuel Walker printed up a brochure about Operation Focus called A New Weapon. The spoken and the printed word penetrate the iron curtain in combined operations.

To sum up the influencing power of the balloons and the radio, Samuel Walker cited a propaganda formula. Two plus two equals five. The Orwellian equation is a clue. None of this adds up. Radio Free Europe does not seek to incite the people behind the Iron Curtain to revolt, but rather to sustain their courage and hope. In 1956, Radio Free Europe produced a number of TV and radio spots for its Truth Dollar fundraising campaigns. And all of them mentioned the broadcast and the balloons. But none of them mentioned the youth operation Samuel Walker launched the year before the Hungarian uprising. An operation he called Free Youth Action.

This is an experimental project to assist youth operatives run psychological warfare operations in countries like Hungary and Poland, he wrote in a proposal you can find in his archive at the Hoover Institution. In this proposal, he explains that his Free Youth Action operatives will have no official relationship or receive any support from Radio Free Europe. The operatives will be recruited with a Mission Impossible-style take-it-or-leave it, understanding. On October 16th, less than two weeks before the uprising began in Budapest, Hungarian college students demanded autonomy from the officially sanctioned Hungarian Communist Student Youth Party, DIFZ, and they launched an alternative party called the Association of Hungarian University and College Students, or MEF-ESZ.

This is a recording of a meeting that took place at the University of Szeged on October 20th. This is when MEFES officially announced its 16 demands, many of which are similar to the 12 demands made by the CIA's fictional NEM. One of the demands was for the Russians to leave Hungary. On October 22nd, students at the Budapest Technical University formed their own chapter of Mephes and called for a massive demonstration the following day. The British journalist Sefton Delmar was there, brought to Budapest by his friends at Radio Free Europe and the IRD. He was the first Western reporter to file copy on the uprising.

I have been the witness today of one of the great events of history. I have seen the people of Budapest come out into the streets in open rebellion against their Soviet overlords. I have marched with them and almost wept for joy with them as the Soviet emblems and the Hungarian flags were torn out by the angry and exalted crowds. Delmar makes two important observations in his report. One, the demonstrators were overwhelmingly young.

And two, these kids had a lot of propaganda. Leaflets demanding the instant withdrawal of the Red Army and the sacking of the present government are being showered among the street crowds from trams, he wrote. The leaflets have been printed secretly by students who managed to get access, as they put it, to a printing shop when newspapers refused to publish their political program. On house walls all over the city, primitively stenciled sheets have been pasted up, listing the 16 demands of the rebels. Almost all of the Western reporting on the Hungarian uprising of 1956 celebrated this persuasive power of the young rebels of Budapest. One British report even claimed that 15,000

soldiers deserted the Soviet army to join the student revolutionaries. This nonsensical math prompted Dwight McDonald to write a correction to amateur journalism in the February 1957 issue of Encounter. Amateur though I am of amateur journalism à l'anglais, I must admit it can be carried too far, he wrote. I'm afraid there are virtues, after all, in the professional approach. A full accounting of Samuel Walker's relationship with his Hungarian Free Youth Action Agents and the founding of the new Association of Hungarian University and College Students in October 1956 and the role it played in the uprising has yet to be done.

But in this case, all the numbers add up. We know for certain that the CIA secretly funded Mephes from 1957 to 1967, when it was run by exiled students who'd both participated in its founding and the uprising. And we know that in 1959, Samuel Walker turned to youth agents once again to disrupt the Communist Youth Festival in Vienna. The person most responsible for that first partial scattershot Western success at the Vienna Festival was a young student leader named Gloria Steinem. Her independent research service helped bring those freewheeling young Americans to Vienna. Samuel Walker's deputy in Vienna was actually the young Gloria Steinem. ...by the Central Intelligence Agency. She brought in fake students who started fights with Soviet delegates and duped real college students to pass out American propaganda. And in 1967, when the story finally broke that the CIA was funding cultural propaganda operations

like Radio Free Europe and the Congress for Cultural Freedom through fake dummy foundations, Gloria Steinem went on CBS News to proudly defend the youth operations that she ran with Samuel Walker. Here's the American delegation coming through. How many of these people were aware of any kind of CIA funding of their presence?

No, none. They were all, they came because they believed that it was important to come and represent the diversity of American views at the festival, where, after all, many Asians and Africans and Latin Americans had gathered. No one, they were never told what to say. The CIA funds were free. I mean, no one was told what to say. What do you mean they were free? You mean to say it was easier for you to work for the CIA than a private organization? That's right. And the reason I think that comes as a surprise is it did to me at the time. I mean, I had the conventional liberals' view of the CIA as a right-wing incendiary group.

And I was amazed to discover that this was far from the case, that they were enlightened, liberal, nonpartisan activists. Gloria Steinem, activist who sees the CIA as a sort of enlightened pal or rich uncle, quietly bankrolling worthy projects. Our man, Dwight McDonald, held similar views to Gloria Steinem when he came to work at Encounter in 1956. He didn't see anything wrong with being a critical American for hire. Personally, I think he felt the propagandist got a good deal. You know, there are these different layers of knowledge, of awareness. And I think there are

some who kind of know but don't want to know because they really like having access to this sort of money. Hugh Wilford again, the intelligence scholar we heard from earlier. Like me, he also believes Dwight McDonald had to be aware of Encounter's secret subsidies. But our man Dwight had no idea of just how vast and powerful the CIA's propaganda operations were in 1956. So it's not just intellectuals, right? The CIA is funding all of these different front groups, labor groups, students. I call it the mighty world. So that's what this guy, Frank Wisner, who was sort of the chief of CIA COVID operations in its early years, that's how he likes to think of it, as this, one of those old organs that rose through the floor

of silent movie theaters and you could sit at it and produce all these different tunes. And that's how he sees himself. He's kind of in the cockpit, able to have this extraordinary influence, secret influence on American society and thereby other societies as well,

because he's enabling these different groups to meet with sort of counterpart groups overseas. So, you know, students talking to other students in Europe and then in Africa and Asia and so on. Both Radio Free Europe and the Congress for Cultural Freedom were part of the CIA's mighty Wurlitzer. But there were many others. Publishing houses, prestigious MFA programs.

Plus, there were the other Western security agencies, like the IRD, who worked in concert with the Mighty Wurlitzer. The propagandists made a lot of music. Which brings us back to

Colin Wilson and the mystery of his spectacular rise in May of music. Which brings us back to Colin Wilson and the mystery of his spectacular rise in May of 1956. In her memoir, Carol Ann Gill relates how she was seduced and deflowered by the outsider. She told me she can still hear the tune Colin Wilson would put on to accompany them. The Sibelius Second Symphony Fourth Movement. La da da dee da da da da dum. Da da dee. Long as I live, I'll never forget it, yes.

But it wasn't very successful. He didn't know anything about how to make love. If you're really asking why the rocket that is Colin Wilson suddenly fizzes across the sky and then fizzles out, you know, I could say hubristically, I think after I treated it, it's not a mystery. I think I slightly solved the mystery. British historian Stephen Collini revisited the mystery of the outsider in his book Absent Minds.

He found Dwight MacDonald's analysis of how and why Colin Wilson shot to fame in the summer of 1956 lacking. If, like me, you were writing a larger account of British intellectuals, you can't ignore this episode. I mean, even though his work turns out, I think, to be empty in lots of ways, you can't ignore the episode because it tells you so much about the attitudes towards the category of the intellectual in Britain. Stephen Collini believes that critics like Dwight McDonald, who curtly dismissed the outsider, missed something important. For him, the whole Colin Wilson episode comes down to Sartre envy. Yeah, English jealousy over the most famous French intellectual in the world in 1956,

Jean-Paul Sartre. He so much seemed to embody the all-round intellectual. He was a philosopher, yes, but he was also a playwright and a novelist. He was also someone who took part in politics and helped edit a journal and so on. So he seemed to embody that kind of all-round engagement of an intellectual. And I think by my talking, it was my phrase about Sartre's envy, I really wanted to suggest that there was a kind of appetite, people on the lookout for someone who might fill this slot. You can see this too

in one of the first influential reviews that Colin Wilson receives. Philip Toynbee calls him England's answer to Jean-Paul Sartre. And of course, the fact that Wilson himself used the term existentialism. So he's kind of invoking this comparison already. But in May of 1956, Jean-Paul Sartre wasn't just the most famous French intellectual in the world. He was also the most famous communist intellectual in the world. And the anti-communist propagandists working at Encounter and the Congress for Cultural Freedom and the Information Research Department wanted to destroy him. Alfred Bistart By 1956, Sartre was one of the most hated persons in the West. He was their enemy number one.

Matthew Feeney Alfred Bistart is a Swiss Sartre scholar who's written extensively about Jean-Paul Sartre's life in the 1950s. I reached out to him because I wanted to ask him about an anti-Sartre fictional story written by Stephen Spender, Dwight MacDonald's co-editor at Encounter. Spender published this story in Encounter, and it's based on a real-life confrontation the two men had in March of 1956. This was a conference in Venice at which about,

I'm not sure, a dozen of people participated, important philosophers and intellectuals of the East and the West. And actually, Spender was more or less an outsider because most of them who participated in it were left-wing intellectuals. So I'm just going to read you a scene from this story by Stephen Spender. This is when the Spender character, who calls himself Olym,

confronts the Sartre character, who is called Sururat. Okay. I would like you to consider the following hypothetical situation. This is Olymme, Stephen Spender's stand-in speaking. You, Monsieur Seurat, have been sentenced to a long term of imprisonment in a communist state for a political crime of which you know yourself to be innocent. You are sitting in a cell, alone, and you learn through the wrapping on the wall of other prisoners who are also in solitary confinement, but in communication with the outside world, that a bourgeois journalist, an official

hack called Olym Asphalt, has written an article saying that you are completely innocent of the crimes of which you have been accused. Would you be pleased or displeased at this news? You may be surprised to hear that this is a question I've often put to myself. This is Surat now, the Sartre stand-in speaking. Of course, I do not know what my reaction in such circumstances would be, but that does not matter. I know now, not being in prison, and therefore being at this present moment impartial, what I would like it to be.

I hope that I would consider that if your article helped the cause of those who were opposed to my unjust jailers, of whom I was convinced that, nevertheless, they represented the proletariat, then you should not have published it. Yes. I feel like this scene really sums up the issue all these guys like Spender had with Sartre in 1956. It wasn't so much his left-wing communist beliefs, but more his refusal to engage with their anti-communism. Yes, Sartre refused to join the chorus of those who condemned the Soviet Union for the Gulag and the Korean War without condemning their own colonial wars and massacres.

Sartre found this attitude hypocritical. This was the reason why he was called the conscience of his time. Last episode, we learned how Western security agencies like the IRD and the CIA promoted George Orwell's books and films and transformed him into the Cold War's first ideological superweapon. While researching Dwight McDonald's encounter with Colin Wilson, I couldn't help but notice a similar game plan.

Colin Wilson's apolitical existentialism really was England's answer to Jean-Paul Sartre. He was the anti-Sartre. He wrote a very, very long essay called Anti-Sartre. Sartre is like the good enemy. Gary Lockman, Colin Wilson's biographer, told me that sometimes Colin Wilson would even refer to himself as the anti-Sartre. Sartre is someone that Wilson admires. You know, he says he admires and he admires his brain, but he just got it wrong. The idea that the existential questions and problems posed by Sartre could be somehow solved by Marxism

just doesn't work. He clashes swords, philosophical swords with Sartre. When Sartre advocates a modified communism as an answer to the metaphysical problems he propounds in Being and Nothingness, we can only feel irritation. That's Colin Wilson clashing swords with Sartre and his engagement with communism in an essay called Where Do We Go From Here? An essay commissioned by Zero Magazine and published in the fall of 1956. The real objection to this type of engagement, Wilson wrote, is that it oversimplifies and coarsens. The dedication to communism of France and Sartre only proves the limitations of their humanism. Zero is the same magazine

that first ran James Baldwin's attack on Richard Wright in 1949. And curiously, the editorial strategy here is the same. Wilson's essay follows an excerpt and a summary of Sartre's play, Nekrasov, just as James Baldwin's attack

on Richard Wright, everybody's protest novel, followed one of Wright's short stories, The Man Who Killed the Shadow. But the 1956 Zero Anthology is a much more lavish production than that 1949 zine. It's a hardcover with a belly band, with Colin Wilson's name in large type. Reporter Magazine ran an excerpt from this Colin Wilson's name in large type. Reporter magazine ran an excerpt from this Colin Wilson essay in their November 15, 1956 issue. We talked about Reporter last episode as well, another important magazine in the CIA's family of periodicals, a key component of the mighty Wurlitzer, because it targeted Americans with propaganda.

But Reporter seemed only to be interested in the anti-Sartre sections of Colin Wilson's essay. They kind of butcher it. The excerpt they ran makes him sound way more political than he really was. I don't think he thought that deeply on politics. He never really discussed politics. Now, on November 9th, just as the CIA's magazine Reporter went to press with this weird politicization of Colin Wilson's apolitical existentialism,

demand for an anti-Sartre evaporated. Jean-Paul Sartre did the one thing he swore to Stephen Spender he would never do. This is Radio Free Europe, crowing about Jean-Paul Sartre's November 9th denunciation of the Soviet Union over its invasion of Hungary. This news item was broadcast into Hungary countless times by Radio Free Europe after the Soviets put down the uprising. You can find the original recordings in the OSA's Hungary 1956 online archive. On November 15th, William Phillips, one of the editors at Partizan Review, wrote to Daniel

Bell at the Congress for Cultural Freedom's Paris headquarters, asking if he should run Sartre's denunciation of the Soviets in partisan review. Daniel Bell wrote back on the 20th, suggesting that Phillips instead focus on the French intellectual scene as a whole. Sartre is by no means the only French fellow traveler who's renounced his anti-communism, Daniel Bell wrote, Thanks to Hungary, he gloated,

France now has a whole new breed of anti-communist communists. which even the concentration camps could not change, the Hungarian revolution changed. The communist friend and a few associates, the peaceful French observateurs and the Esprit-style army leaders openly opposed the Soviet Union. The Congress for Cultural Freedoms, Daniel Bell, was correct. Jean-Paul Sartre was not the only intellectual who denounced the Soviet Union over the Hungarian Revolution.

In November of 1956, an entire generation of young intellectuals in England broke with the Communist Party. They called themselves the New Left, and like Dwight McDonald, they turned from politics to culture. November 1956 is also when the Colin Wilson rocket turned in mid-air and fell back to Earth. By December, both the British tabloids and weeklies were calling him a fraud. Even Time and Newsweek reported on his immediate collapse. So at the beginning of this episode, I told you that Dwight McDonald saw something sinister in Colin Wilson's sudden and spectacular rise.

And while he may have failed to see the cultural Cold War politics at play in the promotion of Colin Wilson's apolitical existentialism, his 1956 encounter with the outsider transformed his thinking about mass culture. After this encounter, Dwight MacDonald started writing about the dangers of mass and middle-brow culture and propaganda. We now are threatened with something even more insidious, and that is what I call mid-cult or middle-brow culture. Mid-brow, or mid-cult rather middle-brow culture. Mid-brow or mid-cult, rather, combines the worst features of high culture and mass culture. It combines the pretentiousness of high culture and the vulgarity of mass culture. In technique, they are just

enough advanced to be impressive to the middle-brows, but not enough to really worry them. And this, that's one thing. And secondly, this technique is, is allied to very familiar ultra-American themes. They're all very American, in quotation marks. Not All Propaganda is Art is researched, written, and produced by me, Benjamin Walker. Not all propaganda is art. It's researched, written, and produced by me, Benjamin Walker. The one and only Andrew Calloway mixed it. Special thanks this episode go out to Andrew. He not only makes sure this series sounds good,

he's really been my most important listener, supportively nodding and smiling for the past four years as I went on and on and on. 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. I take you through the script and cite all the corresponding original sources I consulted and the archives I visited while reporting this series. So if you want to know more about how the USA got away with inciting a revolution in Hungary and the deep ties between the Congress for Cultural Freedom and Radio Free Europe and hear about my own crazy research trip to Hungary, basically I thought I could double book my wedding anniversary. Well, all that and more awaits you in episode two of Propaganda Notes and Sources.

You can access the entire run of Propaganda Notes and Sources, this exclusive companion series, by subscribing at theoryofeverythingpodcast.com. Click on the subscribe button. All the info on what you need to do is there. It's a really simple process. We're using Supercast. 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 might sound like a bit much to you, if you are excited about this series, I hope that you will subscribe. And lastly, dear listener, if you do find this series of interest, please tell a friend or two. The only way this podcast group biography is going to find its audience is through you. Thanks again for listening. We'll be back in one week with episode three, The Man Who Was Thursday's Children. It's a story about another youth rebellion that began in 1956 in England.

The Angry Young Men. They've been called everything from messiahs of the milk bars to the new intellectuals. Who are these angry young men? Are they a cult or only a myth?