Benjamen Walker's Theory of Everything - Not All Propaganda is Art 5: The Play's the Thing

Episode Date: February 20, 2024

In the fall of 1958, Kenneth Tynan moved from London to New York and upon arrival, clashed with Hollywood mogul Samuel Goldwyn over socially engaged art and the politics of apolitical culture on live TV. At the same moment New Yorker writer Dwight Macdonald went West to report on “New” Hollywood's ambitions to create commercially and artistically successful films. We also meet two of Professor Macdonald’s former students from a Mass Culture course he taught at Bard College in 1958. Meanwhile in France, Richard Wright suffers a number of disturbing attacks, prompting him to channel his frustrations into a revealing radio play. Shownotes: Tamara Walker is the author of Beyond the Shores, Hugh Wilford wrote The Mighty Wurlitzer, Tom Benjamin and Frances Hodes were both students of Dwight Macdonald at Bard College in 1958 and Dan Sinclair is the author of  Courteous Enemy. 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.

You are listening to Benjamin Walker's Theory of Everything. At Radiotopia, we now have a select group of amazing supporters that help us make all our shows possible. If you would like to have your company or product sponsor this podcast, then get in touch. Drop a line to sponsor at radiotopia.fm. Thanks. episode. Why is there something called influencer voice? What's the deal with the TikTok shop? What is posting disease and do you have it? Why can it be so scary and yet feel so great to block someone on social media? The Neverpost team wonders why the internet and the world because of the internet is the way it is. They talk to artists, lawyers, linguists, content creators, sociologists, historians, and more about our current tech and media moment. From PRX's Radiotopia, Never Post, a podcast for and about the Internet.

Episodes every other week at neverpo.st and wherever you find pods. My name is Benjamin Walker, and this is Episode 5 of Not All Propaganda is Art. It's called The Play is the Thing, and it features all three of our main cast members. Kenneth Tynan. That evening was a slap in the face for many people that I've been longing to see publicly slapped. Dwight McDonald. We now are threatened with something even more insidious, and that is what I call mid-cult or middle-brow culture. And Richard Wright.

Is it possible to extend the area of the rational in the world? For a while, I was going to call this one Tynan Right and Dwight, a reference to one of Kenneth Tynan's books called Tynan Right and Left. Yeah, kind of too insidery. But I have created a place for insidery stuff like that, dear listener. I think footnotes are actually a marvelous thing, very exciting. In fact, when I read a scholarly book, I always read the footnotes first. That's our man, Dwight McDonald. He really knew how to write a good footnote, and he inspired me to create my own audio footnotes.

And you can listen to them all right now by subscribing to Propaganda Notes and Sources, the exclusive companion podcast for Not All Propaganda Notes and Sources, the exclusive companion podcast for Not All Propaganda is Art. All the info you need to subscribe is at theoryofeverythingpodcast.com slash subscribe. I'm using Supercast and Apple subscriptions.

So if you're listening on Apple Podcasts right now, just tap the subscribe button on the show page. Subscribing is the way, dear listener, to support this kind of work. Your one-time contribution will directly fund more standalone limited series like this one. So head on over to theoryofeverythingpodcast.com and subscribe to Propaganda Notes and Sources.

In a footnote, you're completely free of this whole plot that you have to, you know, you have to do this structure. And you generally find that much of the most interesting things occur in a footnote. The title for this episode is The Plays the Thing, and it features all three of our main characters. We're going to begin with drama critic Kenneth Tynan. Oh, yes, go on with the story.

In the summer of 1958, Kenneth Tynan totally panned a London production of Eugene Ionescu's The Chairs in his weekly theater column in the London Observer. In this play, an elderly couple waits for mysterious guests to show up on a stage filled with empty chairs. Two years after his celebratory review of John Osborne's play, Look Back in Anger, Kenneth Tynan now saw himself as socially engaged theatre's champion and guardian. Ionescu's escape from realism, Tynan wrote, was a detour from what should be the main road for British theatre.

Ionescu did not like Tynan's review, and he sent the Observer an angry response. What really infuriated Ionesco was that he was being told that his plays weren't political enough or weren't creating enough social change. Kenneth Tynan then wrote a response to Ionesco's response. And then Ionesco responded to Tynan's response. And then luminaries like John Berger and Orson Welles piled on. People called this drama that was playing out in the letter pages of The Observer, the London Controversy. No one knows about this controversy. It's such a niche story that we just loved and just wanted to do something with. And if the way we kind of got this true story out into the world was making penis jokes about it, then so be it.

Lots of throat, not enough tongue. Dan Sinclair is the author of The Courteous Enemy, an absurdist play about the London controversy that debuted at the 2023 Edinburgh Fringe Festival. I'm a British young playwright. I would say emerging, but I haven't quite emerged yet. I'm still trying. The courteous enemy, which is a phrase Ionescu used to describe Kenneth Tynan, features all of the London Controversy's major characters, Kenneth Tynan, Eugene Ionescu,ue Orson Welles and David Astor the observers editor and

publisher but in dance and Claire's play all these men are betrayed by women for a review of my review of his review of my review of his bloody play, and you came to clue of how to handle him. For us, it was very much, if this is a story about these old boys, this very boyish, laddy, journalistic theatre club, the way we can kind of subvert that and interrogate it is all female cast. In The Courteous Enemy, Ian Esonescu and Tynan both argue their cases in a mock courtroom, which is set up in David Astor's office. The prosecution may make its opening statement.

I thank you, Your Honor. The what of this trial? It matters not. It is the who? Who? Mr. Kenneth Tynan. I write there. This trial, it matters not. It is the... Mr. Kenneth Tynan. Yeah, we kind of had this scene as a way of initially laying out their ideas, their issues, and trying to really boil them down,

but also having fun with them and making them absolutely ridiculous. Mr. Tynan is a weird, pissing man. We shall now hear from the defence. Mr. Tynan, the who of this trial matters not a jot. The what, on the contrary, is precisely what is at stake.

And what is it? Little plays that now and then hit, but more often than not, do not hit. So I want to read you something, Dan, Ionescu wrote in his first angry response to Kenneth Tynan. I'm hoping you can help us make some sense of it. Ionescu's quoting something Tynan said in an article that ran in the July 1958 issue of Encounter magazine, an article actually called Theater on Trial. Yeah. Let me just read you a bit of this, okay? Mr. Tynan seems, as he made clear in an interview published in Encounter,

to acknowledge only one plane of reality, the social plane, which seems to me to be the most external. In other words, the most superficial. This is why I think that writers like Sartre, Osborne, Miller, Brecht, et cetera, are simply new auteurs de boulevard, representatives of a left-wing conformism which is just as lamentable as the right-wing sort. So my question for you, young playwright, is Ionesco calling Kenneth Tynan woke? I think it's really interesting that Ionescoco all those years ago knew that there wasn't something quite right with these new and real men plays and how it was being championed and i think he is calling uh kind of tyler's ideas woke but I think it's a step beyond that.

I don't know whether it's this idea that Ionesco in the 50s was so woke that he was calling Tynan not woke enough. Dan Sinclair's play The Courteous Enemy, debuted at the 2023 Edinburgh Festival.

65 years earlier, at the 1958 festival, Kenneth Tynan, who was there covering it for his theater column, received a life-changing phone call from New Yorker editor-in-chief William Shawn. The magazine's drama critic had died suddenly, and Shawn was hoping Tynan would come to New York and take his place. Kenneth Tynan said yes, and in the fall of 1958, he moved with his family to New York City.

This is Ken Tynan in New York. This is Sam Goldwyn in Hollywood. This is Vivian Lee in London. This is Small World, and this is Ed Murrow in New York. In 1958, broadcasting legend Edward Murrow launched a new television show called Small World. Using camera crews in different locations, he recorded his guests simultaneously.

Small World was basically a live Zoom conference call. But since there was no internet or satellite network in 1958, everyone communicated using shortwave radio and telephone circuits. Kenneth Tynan appeared on an episode that was recorded shortly after his arrival in New York. Good evening. Tonight on Small World, the world of motion pictures. From London, one of the greatest actresses of our time, Vivien Leigh Olivier. Miss Leigh is talking to us from her apartment in London. Good evening, Grandma. Good evening, and thank you. And from Hollywood, Mr. Samuel Goldwyn, a pioneer and a giant,

whose greatest picture is always the next one, which in this case is Porgy and Bess. And from New York, a young Englishman who, if not angry, is at least opinionated, Kenneth Tynan, drama critic of the London Observer, now on loan to the New Yorker magazine for a one-year hit. The episode's primary topic of discussion was the global reach and influence of Hollywood, but Edward Murrow began the show with a reference to Tynan's fight with Ionescu. This led to a heated exchange between Tynan and Samuel Goldwyn. Ken Tynan started a considerable controversy in Europe when he said that the drama as an art form had to be concerned with politics. How do you feel about that? How do

I feel about it? Yes. I think politics is a documentary problem. Every time anyone has tried to do that in a picture or a play, they usually came out so that they couldn't pay their payrolls every week. I do not agree with Mr. Tainan at all. Can I comment on that, Ed? Please do. When I say that art ought to be, in some way, a political activity, what I mean is that it can't help it. Every act that anybody performs has some kind of a political repercussion. And any film, whether it's a trivial comedy or a historical epic, is in some way connected with the political activity

of that country. Politics are how we organize ourselves and in every form of expression, in every art, every word we utter, in some way contributes to the political scene. You can't keep out of it. Mr. Thaynen, when I got the idea of doing the best shares of our life, what I understand you liked. Yes, tremendously. I did not think of politics. I only thought of what's going to happen to these people

when they return from the war, the disabled veterans, and so on and so forth. I never injected politics in. But it did explain to you how American society worked, and that was a tremendously important thing. Miss Lee, do you think movies, or for that matter the theater, ought to have a point of view? I do. Well, this has a point of view? I do. Well this has a point of view. I do. In fact I agree with Ken that they they have a point of view whether they really want to or not because any good playwright cannot help being taken up with

the way the world is going. Pure propaganda I naturally don't like because I think it's always pretty dull. But I think it comes into any play or any movie, whether that movie sets out to put it in or not. In the first episode of this series, we discussed the adversarial relationship between art for art's sake and socially engaged art, and how the Cold War reframed this age-old debate. In the early 1950s, the battle lines were clear. On one side, you had Soviet-style socialist realism,

and on the other, American abstract expressionism. However, in 1956, the battlefield began to change. Western artists and audiences, especially young people, began to lose interest in apolitical culture. New fronts began to emerge. And while Kenneth Tynan was by no means the first sophisticated critic to address the politics of apolitical culture, I'm pretty sure this is the first time the topic was discussed live on American television. This 1958 episode of Small World also shed some light on Samuel Goldwyn's final picture,

Porgy and Bess. It's almost impossible to see this film today. The Gershwin estate, who controls the rights to it, has destroyed every print they've gotten their hands on. It's known as one of Hollywood's lost treasures. But you can still watch a fuzzy copy on the internet if you know where to look. Honey, don't play tonight. Do like I say.

I've been sweating all day. Nighttime is man's time. Now, Mr. Goldwyn. Yes. Didn't you have a point of view when you decided to do Porgy and Bess? Yes. I felt that this was, to begin with, the first great American opera was written and secondly I wanted the public

to see the Negroes as they are. I should have said it simply showed him as he used to be and I would have thought that in spite of your your obviously sincere beliefs that politics hasn't any place in the industry, I think you will find, and perhaps have found, that a great many people will interpret your film in social or political terms. You see, it shows us Negroes as downtrodden, dope fiends. See that hussy drinking like any man? Here, Robbins, have one to all the God-fearing ladies.

There's nothing like them, thank God. No, you don't. Nobody's gonna drink my liquor. American propagandists loved Porgy and Bess. In fact, in the early 1950s, the U.S. government funded a European tour of the theater musical, showcasing successful African-American actors the propagandist believed would blunt criticisms of American racism. Samuel Goldwyn's film was Hollywood's contribution to this propaganda operation, and Kenneth Tynan totally called him out for it on live TV. Somebody remarked to me the other day, perhaps a little unjustly, I see that Uncle Sam is about to give us Uncle Tom. Now that may be going a bit too far, but perhaps not a great deal too far.

In 1958, Hollywood was changing, experimenting with new kinds of films and new ways of making films. Kenneth Tynan was an early champion of this new Hollywood. Like theater, he believed film should engage with social and political realities. But in order for this new Hollywood to succeed, he believed it first had to be emancipated from old school producers like Samuel Goldwyn. Go ahead, Mr. Tynan. Are you ever embarrassed, Mr. Goldwyn, when the artistic success of your films is ascribed not to the director or the author or the star, but to you yourself, who really haven't taken an active creative role in the picture i've seen a great many films coming out of all kinds of other countries italy um france even your own country mr gilwin poland and uh especially um out of your own country, the film's nowadays absolutely fantastically good.

And still, nobody seems to care about that job, whereas here, it's the absolute top. I agree with you, and I know that some very brilliant pictures come out of France, come out of England, come out of Russia. I see most of them. As a matter of fact, I'm seeing one tonight. But, Sam, Mr. Tynan's question was,

why is it that the producer in this country got so much more public credit than he does in foreign countries? My dear fellow, I can only talk about myself at this point. I am not yet ready to put, shove under the doors, six or seven million dollars or three million dollars or two million dollars and go away fishing. What does that mean? Mr. Goldman, this talk about shoving six million dollars under the door and going fishing, I'm not quite clear what you sort of mean by that. I forget that. May I clarify that point? I do a great many things myself that others leave to the director, but I never give

the final word to anyone but the Goldrinn. Does that answer your question, Mr. Tynan? Oh, yes, but could it perhaps be that the talented Germans and Hungarians and Italians nowadays prefer to stay at home, where perhaps they can operate with a little more... Freedom. Yes. I don't know what you mean by freedom. This little motion picture starring Samuel Goldwyn, Vivian Leigh, and Kenneth Tynan will continue immediately after this word from Olin Matheson.

This is a dramatic presentation. Coca, stop washing those delicate fabrics by hand. But I must wash these flimsies by hand, for there is no washer that can wash them safely. Oh, but there is the new two-speed RCA Whirlpool. Hold it, madam. Just a moment. Just a moment. Come with me, young man. And here it is now, the new dragon-size RCA Whirlpool washer then see your RCA Whirlpool dealer. This has been a dramatized presentation. Ow! Excuse me.

At the very moment Kenneth Tynan went on television to talk about Hollywood, another one of the main characters in our story went to Hollywood. In the fall of 1958, our man Dwight McDonald was still working on his big book about the dangers of mass culture, the one he went to England to finish in 1956. As we talked about in episode two, his London encounters had impressed upon him a need to write about the dangers of both mass and middle-brow culture. But in order to do that, he believed he needed to first visit America's capital of culture. Three or four years ago, I spent a week in Hollywood, and I felt I was on the moon. I've been in two fairly exotic cities in my life, Cairo and Istanbul, and both of them seem much closer to Western civilization and to just normal, everyday life than Hollywood did.

Dwight McDonald went to Hollywood on assignment to write about a new movie, an adaptation of Nathaniel West's novel Miss Lonely Hearts by the independent producer Dory Sherry. The article he wrote about his trip for Esquire magazine is another big one for Dwight, both in regards to the culture book he will eventually finish in 1960 and his career. He will spend most of the 1960s writing for Esquire magazine on film. I don't want to, well, I do want to attack Hollywood too much. I was going to say, I don't want to attack Hollywood too much. I do want to attack Hollywood too much. You can't attack it too much.

But our man almost missed the opportunity. You see, he'd already agreed to teach a class on mass culture at Bard College in the fall of 1958. And so he had to ask the dean for permission to cancel one of his lectures. What a lecture I could give hot from the horse's mouth, so to speak, he pleaded in his letter. The dean, of course, agreed. And that's how Dwight McDonald ended up in the office of legendary old-school Hollywood producer Jerry Wald. When I was out there three or four years ago, I had an interesting session with the late Jerry Wald. His office was full of all kinds of very high-level works of art, books that seemed to be genuine books,

not just, you know, pasteboard things pasted on. I took out a couple, and they were the real thing. They actually had pages and so on. And very up-to-date pictures, you know, Ruelo prints, Picasso drawings, and so on. And in the course of our conversation, I suggested that Ulysses would make a very good movie. He instantly replied, I got an option on it.

And as a matter of fact, he did have an option on it. Jerry Wald made a big impression on Dwight, and he wrote about his office visit in his Esquire article. Mass audiences are hip now, Wald told him. There's no such thing as highbrow and lowbrow anymore. Jerry Wald was especially optimistic about the college-educated younger generation. They appreciate quality, he insisted. In his article, Dwight recounts sharing with Jerry Wald one of his more optimistic ideas about culture, that Hollywood could on some occasions forego the mass market and produce high-quality films for a dedicated, albeit smaller, paying audience.

This didn't go down, Dwight wrote. We never make a picture for the art houses, Mr. Wald stated firmly. You always try to make a big picture. Nobody deliberately starts out to make a stinker. Jerry Wald turned the conversation back to the younger generation. Thanks to the college grads, he said, Hollywood was now capable of making art movies that would also succeed at the box office.

When Dwight returned to Bard College to teach his class on mass culture, he tested some of Jerry Wald's hypotheses on his students. I tracked down two of them to hear how that went. He should have gone to a Midwestern college, for God's sake. I mean, Bard population was kooks and queers and misfits. Everybody was a film buff at that time. And I remember how excited we all were by The Seventh Seal. We all trooped into the local cinema to watch that and were totally bowled over by it.

Tom Benjamin and Frances Hodes can still recall their interactions with Professor Dwight MacDonald. What I remember about him is he was a very charming and tolerant man. I mean, he put up with my mishigas, really. And he was very encouraging and rather gentle. Let's see, my caveat on that is I was much more impressed at the time by more eccentric minds. I loved his approach to things and his sense of what was good literature and

what wasn't. He had figured out that, for example, Huckleberry Finn was infinitely superior to Tom Sawyer. And I was just working that out. And let's face it, Huck Finn is a very subversive work. And Tom Sawyer was just a real nice, easy Americana kind of story. Didn't make any particular demands on the reader. His attitudes toward literature and everything else are so close to mine. And it's hard to remember how much or to what extent mine had formed already or how much of that, in fact, is Dwight speaking through my voice. I told them both what Jerry Wald had said to Dwight McDonald about young people back in 1958. Frances Hodes told me she definitely would have proved Jerry Wald right. I didn't see that much distinction in a sense between high culture and low culture. I grew up

with favorite comics like Wonder Woman, and I did not see any discrepancy between reading Dostoevsky and reading Wonder Woman. Likewise, Tom Benjamin told me, Dwight MacDonald would have had to have noticed his students' appreciation for quality. We were snobs in the making and probably would have essentially rejected stuff we thought was not very well made and honestly made and authentically made.

One of the books Dwight MacDonald assigned his Bard students to read for his class was Lillian Ross's Picture, her seminal Hollywood reporting on the making of John Huston's film Red Badge of Courage. In many ways, the article he wrote for Esquire is a postscript to Ross's book, because one of the main characters in Picture, the producer, Dory Sherry, was the very man Dwight McDonald went to Hollywood to interview. Oh, then you're here on serious business.

To me, yes. Dory Sherry, who wrote and produced Lonely Hearts, Dwight tells us, is a decent, intelligent, and well-intentioned man. And so it is painful to report that Lonely Hearts is about as cinematic as the proceedings of the American Iron and Steel Institute. I don't enjoy writing this Lonely Hearts. It is also painful, Dwight adds, because I greatly admire West's novel,

which seems to me a miraculously pure expression of our special American sort of agony, the horror of aloneness and of our kind of corruption, that of mass culture. What's in that one? Divorce? Suicide? Deviated septum? She can't see. Nathaniel West's book is about an unnamed reporter who writes the Miss Lonely Hearts column for a New York newspaper. He gets hopeless letters from people to whom he can offer no help. A noseless girl desperate for a boyfriend. A 15-year-old boy whose deaf and dumb kid sister has been raped. Miss Lonely Hearts feels he should love his correspondence, but can't.

His cynical editor, Shrike, mocks him for even caring. He has a disastrous affair with one of his correspondents, disillusioned with Crippled Husband, who betrays him. The book ends with Crippledled husband shooting Miss Lonely Hearts, who then tumbles down a flight of stairs with his arms outstretched, Christ-like. All the film has in common with the book, Dwight reports sadly, is the names of its characters. Adam, your closing check. I included today. Magnanimous, I thought.

Actually, in the film, Miss Lonely Hearts gets a name, Adam, and a new ending. Are you going off on this crusade or whatever it is Adam is engaged upon? Whatever it is. I'm glad. In the movie, Miss Lonely Hearts doesn't get shot. He quits to live happily ever after with his wholesome girl, Justy, after they are brought together by cynical editor Shrike's matronly wife. Justy, some women have to run after their second chance. Others have to sit and wait.

Don't wait. Thank you, Mrs. Shred. Dory said he didn't believe the Christ figure had to be crucified. Director Vincent Donahue explained to Dwight McDonald. The idea of an uncrucified Christ, Dwight adds, is very American. Our man called his Hollywood report No Art, No Box Office,

which comes from a quotation he attributes to an influential, unnamed producer. Art and box office, which comes from a quotation he attributes to an influential, unnamed producer. Art and box office, okay. Art and no box office, okay. No art and box office, okay. But no art and no box office? Dory Sherry's independent new Hollywood film, Dwight tells us, falls into the last category. Whenever you complain about the chronic inferiority of Hollywood films to foreign movies, at least whenever I do, I always get two rebuttals. One, that you're comparing the best foreign movies, the ones that are exported, with the whole Hollywood production.

That's first. And second, that things are changing with the rise of the so-called independents. Now, as for the second point, just how long must we wait for results from this so-called independent revolution. Now, one of Dwight McDonald's most controversial ideas about mass culture was that it would, in the end, debase and destroy high culture. His experience with the middle-brow lonely hearts, I believe, strengthened this conviction. Both of his former students recall him making this argument at Bard in 1958. McDonald was extremely opinionated in ways which are entertaining and fun to deal with, but was very anxious to have people disagree with him.

I did not see mass culture as debasing high culture. Today, both Francis Hodes and Tom Benjamin feel differently. I think we have been desensitized to subtlety by the obviousness, the repetitive aspects of the loudness of so much of mass culture. I think he was very prophetic. I could not conceive at that time the extent with which the pop culture that my friends and I were quite occupied with would just roll over the high culture that we loved also. I couldn't conceive of how the movies that we were about to see on Leaving Bard, you know, this wonderful wave of European film that really extended the boundaries of everything we expected from movies, would cease under the pressures of money, basically, what was profitable, and become a huge parade of movies based on comic books.

He was right. Goodbye, Mr. Shrike. Goodbye. Oh, um, your wife is waiting for you at Delahanty's. Miss Lonely Hearts isn't the only character

who gets a happy ending in that 1958 film. In the final scene of the movie, mean old editor Shrike has a change of heart, and he picks up some flowers for his long-suffering wife. This is not what happened in real life.

After the film wrapped, Myrna Loy, the actress who portrayed Mrs. Shrike in Lonely Hearts, flew home to New York and moved out of the Beekman Place apartment that she and her husband had shared. She left him a letter on the mantelpiece with instructions for him to contact her attorney. Dear Howland, the letter begins, with deep regret I have chosen to leave to avoid the unnecessary cruelty of unfair recriminations. I hope you know how much faith I have in the contribution that you've made and will in future make to this sorry old world of ours. With love and in friendship always. In the 1940s and 50s, Myrna Loy was one of America's most famous actresses. She played Millie in The Best Years of Our Lives, the movie Samuel Goldwyn and Kenneth Tynan were talking about earlier. And she first met the American propagandist Howland Sargent when she was a cultural ambassador for UNESCO.

They'd been introduced by his boss, Edward Barrett, who at the time was in charge of America's psychological warfare and propaganda programs. A few months after the two married, Barrett retired and Howland Sargent took over. In Edward Barrett's 1953 book, Our Weapon is Truth, we get a glimpse of what Myrna Loy's married life was like from the dedication Barrett wrote to his wife. To Mason and to hundreds of other wives who have tolerated and encouraged propagandist husbands in the frustrating toil of trying to convert men to the cause of freedom. In the fall of 1958, when Myrna Loy filed for divorce,

Howland Sargent was the director of Radio Liberty. Like Radio Free Europe, which we talked about in episode two, Radio Liberty was covertly funded and run by the CIA. Only its truthful propaganda was broadcast exclusively into the Soviet Union. 1958 was most definitely a year of toil and frustration for Howland Sargent. He spent the entire year dealing with fallout over a new agreement between the United States and the Soviet Union that had been signed in January. The Zerubin-Lacey agreement opened the door to cultural and technical exchanges in science, technology, agriculture, radio, television, film, and exhibitions. Two key members from Radio Liberty's Board of Trustees, that's Radio Liberty Code for CIA Brass,

lost their minds over this agreement. Here's one of them, Isaac Don Levine, speaking at a press luncheon in New York. The ideological struggle between the Soviet communist system and our way of life can never be solved by any treaties, any diplomatic conferences, any cultural exchanges, that it is here to stay so long as the Soviet dictatorship remains. Incredibly, the other Cold Warrior who lost his mind over this 1958 treaty, Eugene Lyons, was the emcee of this luncheon, and Howland Sargent was in the audience. These recordings are from the fall of 1963, a few months before JFK's assassination. Eugene Lyons and Isaac Don Levine, like many CIA insiders, were furious with the president for his overtures to the Soviets over Cuba. But back in 1958, the target of their anger was Howland Sargent.

That March, they presented him with 50 broadcast transcripts, which proved, they insisted, that Radio Liberty was being subverted from within. The two Cold Warriors were especially unhappy with Radio Liberty's reporting on America's labor issues, like the 1957 New York City subway strike. Is this news calculated to build up the morale of the Soviet audience, which is consistently being assured by Radio Moscow that capitalist America is on the verge of a breakdown? Howlin Sargent responded to all 50 accusations in a report he prepared for the CIA's director of international organization, Cord Meyer. Radio Liberty gives regular coverage to Western strikes

to show that in the capitalist West, workers are able to press their interests without being mowed down by tanks. But Lyons and Levine refused to back down. And Howland Sargent was forced to call a meeting. With an agenda of reviewing the U.S. government's new official country paper on the Soviet Union and how Radio Liberty's programming follows the policy expressed in said paper. That's from a recently declassified official memorandum for the meeting.

And according to this memo, Eugene Lyons expressed deep concern. The policy sections of the paper suffer in his judgment from an illusion on the part of the United States that it can coexist with a system that is dedicated to destroying the U.S. and the free world.

But Don Levine saw a way out. The country paper also provided a considerable degree of latitude for Radio Liberty to do militant propaganda. The meeting ended, the memo tells us, with a discussion about the term militant. There was considerable disagreement over what the term militant. There was considerable disagreement over what the term meant for radio liberty and for American propaganda. Now, I have no idea if these frustrating disagreements spilled into Howland Sargent's home life, or if they had anything to do with the dissolution of his

and Myrna Loy's marriage in 1958. But what I am certain of is that beginning in 1958, life gets incredibly more frustrating and difficult for all three of the main characters in this story. Dwight McDonald will be attacked and isolated by America's propagandists who determine his theory of mass culture translates much too easily into pure anti-Americanism. Kenneth Tynan also comes under attack for pursuing his interest in socially and politically engaged art in America. But no one suffers from this 1958 militant turn in cultural Cold War propaganda as much as the third man in this podcast group biography, Richard Wright. Let me give you another incident just to prove what I've said. This is Richard Wright talking about something that happened to him in the fall of 1958.

About a year or more ago, a representative of Time magazine went to the Negro artists living in Paris to take statements from them as to why they were living abroad. I, upon hearing about this journalistic venture, decided not to cooperate. So I was certain that any white man in America above the mental level of a nitwit only too well knew why we were living in France. When the journalist from Time called me, I told him frankly that I didn't wish to grant an interview. And even if I talked to him, I was convinced that in the end, he'd say what he already had made up his mind to say. He argued with me about that, saying that one ought to cooperate with the press. I told him that I was an old newspaper man myself and that he could write of me as he pleased, which I was sure he was going to do anyhow.

Then a few days later, a well-known woman photographer called on me and said that she wished to take my photograph for her photographic agency. I asked her if her visit had anything to do with Time magazine. She swore that it didn't. I told her she could take the pictures. We chatted about this and that. She laughed and moved for my kindness. A week or so later, Time came out with the article about American Negroes living in Paris, and the picture that illustrated the article had been taken by the well-known woman photographer. The article in Time attributed quotes to me that I'd never said. I was furious to be quoted directly in Time when I had not been interviewed, and that old me had called Time and protested.

Time said, the woman photographer interviewed you. She did not, I said. She asked me nothing of what you printed. You were interviewed, Time said. I hired a lawyer who looked into the case and he asked me if I could get a statement from the woman photographer. I did.

And I mailed it to New York. A lawyer wrote, we'll sue, we'll win. You'll get two dollars damages and more of satisfaction. I dropped the case. I hear a lot in his voice. I think it's kind of a sense of mirth and just resignation. I feel like that's such a common feature of Black humor, honestly, this kind of

recognition that you're dealing with a maddening situation. One way or another, time was going to get him as part of their story, whether he wanted to be or not. This is Tamara Walker. She's a professor of Africana studies at Columbia University and the author of Beyond the Shores, a history of African Americans abroad. Her book includes a chapter on the year Richard Wright spent in Argentina in 1949, one of the darkest periods of his life. What do you want?

They sent me to work here. Okay, but you don't live here. You go on by the back door. This is when he produced and acted in the movie version of his famous novel, Native Son. The pay calls for $20 a week, which goes to your family.

But I'm going to give you five extra for yourself. How does that sound? Sounds fine, okay. We talked about this movie in episode one. After Richard Wright was unable to find a professional African-American actor willing to risk playing a black man who murders a white woman, Richard Wright decided to act the part himself. You like cars, don't you? Richard Wright decided to act the part himself. Gee, that's some baby. You like cars, don't you? Yes, and the only thing I like better than one car is two cars, man. This is one of the reasons he blamed America

for the film's critical and commercial failure. But according to Tamara Walker, during the filming of Native Son, Richard Wright saw the hidden hand of the USA everywhere. Your feet are lit. Yes, sir. It made him paranoid. It made him rightly suspicious. And that's part of what shaped his experience in Argentina as this really troubling negative experience, this awareness or this suspicion.

At the time, he was suspicious that he was being watched, that his mail was being opened. And it turns out that the FBI had an attache in the ears of various Argentine officials and made sure that he was being watched and spied on and made to feel like a target. Everywhere I look, Lord, I see FBIs. Said every place I look, Lord, I find FBIs. I'm getting sick and tired of government spies. That's Richard Wright's poem, FBI Blues, a poem he wrote on the boat to Argentina in 1949. He understands that his writings about the United States and even about his own life and experiences have put a target on his back. And then, of course, the FBI and the U.S. intelligence machine has a wide reach. Argentina is also where Richard Wright first met Giselle Freund,

the woman photographer, in our 1958 Time magazine story. Giselle Freund had been exiled in Argentina like so many Jewish Europeans who had made their way following World War II to Latin America and Argentina in particular. And so it's interesting that he makes reference to this woman photographer. Is that him feeling betrayed by her or wanting to kind of leave her out of it ultimately and to kind of put the onus on Time magazine for manipulating the situation. Giselle Frond did write a statement declaring emphatically that she did not interview Richard Wright for Time magazine. But it's hard to see how she was not complicit in this ambush. I showed Tamara Walker the magazine article and asked her what she thought.

I mean, it seems like an attempt to paint him as angry, right? We've got this image of him with a book on his lap and he's gesturing towards the camera and he's got an expression on his face that, you know, he seems to be mid-sentence, mid-statement. But what kind of statement is he giving? Well, in the article, Richard Wright is quoted twice. First with saying, I like to live in France because it is a free country. And secondly, the Negro problem in America hasn't changed in 300 years. Yeah, and the caption, more natural, seems a bit sarcastic and snarky, right? And taking aim at what they perceive to be his pretensions, right? There's this sense of him as this sort of angry critic

of the United States' anti-patriotic figure. Giselle Freund is famous for her iconic photographs of writers and artists. Matisse, Samuel Beckett, Picasso, you've seen her work. And in her archives, there are a number of images from this 1958 photo shoot with Richard Wright. And most of them, unlike the one Time magazine chose to run, are amazing. One of them is actually my all-time favorite photograph of Richard Wright. It's an image of him walking through the Luxembourg Gardens in Paris. The pantheon looms over him in the distance. It's a photo that captures his artistic power and genius.

I showed it to Tamara Walker. I wanted to see what she saw. This is such a gorgeous space, right? You've got this tree-lined avenue and all the trappings of Paris that you see in countless photographs. And it's an image of him looking tremendously dignified, right? Wearing this trench coat and this suit and holding a book, right? A man of letters in this place that is a source of inspiration to him or that seems on the surface to be a source of inspiration to him. But there's another subject in the image, the Greek actor statue that still stands in Luxembourg

gardens. And the Greek actor is holding in his left hand a manuscript and holding his left hand, a manuscript, and holding his right hand out. And on his head is wearing a mask. And it leaves us to guess whether it's a mask of tragedy or comedy. The statue of the Greek actor is one of the most famous landmarks in Luxembourg Gardens. Tourists are always taking selfies with it. The statue is also about a four-minute walk from the Café Tournon, which is where the two met up for that 1958 photo session. In a way, this statue of the Greek actor is a visual in-joke between the two because they met when Richard Wright was an actor. But Tamara Walker helped me see that it's much more than that. You know, in some ways, if you look at the image, you see Richard Wright exactly where he sees

himself as belonging and kind of of a piece of this place that has a long history and that is devoted to deep thinking and to humanity in ways that really drew him to this place. But to me, what is interesting is all the things that come out beneath the surface when you look more closely at the image and recognize that no matter where he went in the world, the United States was always right beside him in ways both kind of tangible and more abstract. This image is part of this larger narrative, not only in 1958, but also just within the arc of his life and career. In the fall of 1958,

Richard Wright's novel, The Long Dream, was published in the United States, a coming-of-age story set in the corrupt, racist American South. And Richard Wright had high hopes for this novel. It's one of the reasons I think he said yes to Giselle Freund. He wanted publicity for this book. It's what makes this story such a tragedy, because almost all of the press coverage he did get for The Long Dream

was in lockstep with Time magazine's take. Richard Wright, the critics all proclaimed, was out of touch with his native land. And so Richard Wright decided to do another non-fiction book, another travel book, this time on French Africa. It's not like his non-fiction books did well. As we talked about last episode, his 1957 book White Man Listen was a total flop. But the press did not savage him for his non-fiction writing on Africa, as they did when he wrote about American racism.

Richard Wright compiled a 70-plus page book proposal outlining what he hoped to accomplish in French Africa. He planned to explore history, politics, social issues, and art, specifically sculpture and masks. Some statues are used for healing and some are commemorative figures, he noted in his proposal. In the West African term, statues and masks are spirit or god traps containing their vital force. To fund this project, Richard Wright turned first to his friends

at the Congress for Cultural Freedom. But they turned him down, which came as a shock because at this moment, Richard Wright was regularly saying yes to everything the CCF asked of him. In early 1959, he participated in a seminar on black culture for the Congress's French magazine, Prove. And he said yes when they asked him to moderate a CCF event with the Indian ambassador on the problems of black Africa. And he said yes when they asked him to give a lecture on American black literature at the Sorbonne. But when he shared his proposal to report on French Africa, the CCF made it clear they were not interested. So Richard Wright turned to another cultural Cold War organization for financial support,

the Society of African Culture, an organization that came out of the 1956 Congress of Black Writers and Artists, an organization also funded by the CIA. There are some financial records of the American Society of African Culture, and you can see where the CIA kind of enters the organization and how its money reaches it. We heard from Hugh Wilford earlier in the series. He's the intelligence expert and the author of The Mighty Wurlitzer, a book that documents numerous CIA cultural front groups of the 1950s and 60s, like the Congress for Cultural Freedom and the American Society of African Culture. This international organization, the Society of African Culture, is created in 1956, and then shortly after it,

an American affiliate. So that instantly is kind of a sign. These operations tend to have similar characteristics. There's often a sort of a dedicated additional pass-through that often has some sort of very bland name. In this case, it's the Council on Race and Caste. That funds the day-to-day operating costs of the organization, and then foundations later identified as CIA conduits

in the late 1960s fund specific projects. Here's the official version of how the American Society of African Culture was founded. In 1956, five American Negroes attended the first international congress of Black writers and artists in Paris. This is from a promotional brochure that you can find in the AMSAC archives at the Schomburg Center in New York. After the congress, the five-member delegation took the initiative in setting up the American branch of a new international organization called the Society for African Culture. During his research, Hugh Wilford discovered a number of reports on that 1956 Congress of Black Writers and Artists. Reports written by the founders of the american society for african culture for their covert funders these reports refer to all these kind of like these tensions between

different groups of of african intellectuals are attending the event you know clearly there's a big divide between french-speaking and english-speaking um black intellectuals and i'm sure they were eagerly ready at cia because, for obvious reasons, really, it was fairly difficult for the CIA to penetrate. So this was a huge source for them. In the 1950s and 60s, the CIA used the American Society for African Culture to establish relationships and build networks with some of Africa's new post-colonial leaders. In 1961, AMSAC brought Nina Simone, Odetta, and Lionel Hampton to Nigeria for a historic series of concerts. But when Richard Wright asked for financial assistance to travel to French Africa

in 1959, AMSAC's president, John Davis, turned him down. It might turn out that we ought not to associate ourselves with your book for purely organizational reasons, Davis wrote to Wright. And should that prove the case, we would be in the position of having gotten nothing for our money. After this rejection, Richard Wright enlisted his friend Franklin Frazier, the prominent African-American sociologist, to help him approach the Ford Foundation. But they, too, turned his request for funding down.

For Hugh Wilford, all of these rejections were most likely coordinated. He even brought up Howland Sargent's boss at the CIA. So I can imagine, say, Corb Maia, who's running the International Organizations Division at the moment, coordinating all of these different mighty world and subfront operations. I can imagine him saying, passing this order down the line, let's let him go. And that having gone out to both the American Society of African Culture and the Congress for Cultural Freedom at the same time. By the end of 1959, Richard Wright gave up on going to French Africa. The only money available is dirty money, he wrote his agent.

That is, people who want me to go into Africa and spy on the Africans. Some American Negroes are tough enough to do that, but I'm just not. At the very moment Richard Wright gave up trying to raise dirty money, he wrote a short story about a man who tries to get a job as a domestic house cleaner. The story is called A Man of All Work, and it's a radio play. A radio play he wrote for German Radio. The story has a simple setup. An out-of-work man named Karl and his wife Lucy have just had a second child.

Lucy, who's recovering, cannot work. But the only job listings are for domestic house cleaners. And so Karl decides to try on his wife's dress to see if he can pass. Lucy is horrified and she tells Karl that he could be locked up or worse for dressing as a woman. But Karl needs to feed his family. And so, the following morning, he sneaks out of the house wearing his wife's dress and applies for the housecleaning job as Lucy. Both Anne and Dave Fairchild like what they see,

and Karl gets the job. But before she heads to work, Anne Fairchild has Karl soap her back in the bathtub. It's a classic Richard Wright mix of danger and humor. Anne tells Karl that her husband Dave is a drinker and that she'd caught him making passes at their former maid, who was then fired. Sure enough, that afternoon, Dave comes home for lunch

and makes numerous passes at Karl, who warns him to stop. They start to wrestle. Dave is furious to discover his maid is as strong as a man. And then Anne walks in. With a gun. Enraged, she fires off a shot. But it is Carl who is hit. The Fairchild

summon their neighbor, a doctor, to help with the situation. He patches Carl up and then informs the couple that their maid is a man. Now, in Richard Wright's fiction, numerous black men and boys suffer violent and horrible deaths at the hands of white men like Dave. But this story is different. It's a comedy. Okay, okay, give him what you want out of my closet. The doctor gets the Fairchilds to buy off Carl's silence with a check for $200. And then he returns Carl home to his wife.

The story ends with Carl promising Lucy that he will never again about in a magazine. But I'm convinced the comedy in Man for All Work comes from Richard Wright's friend George Padmore, the British-based Pan-Africanist who had a very gendered outlook on culture. Dear friends, I want to thank you for all your communications sent to me, either directly or through the London Committee. Last episode, I played you this recording of Richard Wright reading George Padmore's greeting to the 1956 Congress of Black Writers and Artists. Padmore, who fell ill,

wasn't able to travel to Paris for the gathering. And in his message, Padmore extends his compliments. Yet it's unmistakably a backhanded jab at culture. Although the conference will be primarily

concerned with problems of writers and artists, I hope it will not fail to take note of the political aspirations and demands of Africans and people of African descent in the present international context of pan-African nationalism. George Petmore. In his personal correspondence with Richard Wright,

George Padmore frequently criticized the French-African intellectuals of Paris, calling them For George Padmore, pan-Africanism was masculine and culture feminine. While the Arabs fight, these boys spend their time in cafes talking culture. As I mentioned earlier, Richard Wright began this story about Carl's brush with death at the very moment his relationship with the Congress for Cultural Freedom began to sour. That's where the tragic overtones in this radio play come from. Because while Carl survives his encounter with mortal peril. Richard Wright will not. Not all propaganda is art.

It's research written and produced by me, Benjamin Walker. The one and only Andrew Calloway mixed it. Thanks again to all the amazing folks who appear in this episode. You can find links to their work in the show notes. And special thanks this episode go out to all the folks out there in listener land who have signed up for Propaganda Notes and Sources, the companion series for Not All Propaganda is Art. Your support is much appreciated. Each episode of 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. Think audio footnotes. And you can access the entire run of Propaganda Notes and Sources right now. All you have to do is subscribe at theoryofeverythingpodcast.com slash subscribe. All the info on what you need to do is right there. And it's a really simple process.

We're using Supercast and Apple subscriptions. So if you're listening on Apple Podcasts right now, just tap the subscribe button on the show page. We're going to take a two-week pause to catch our breath and finish the last four episodes. And then weekly drops for the second half of this miniseries. Four more exciting episodes of Not All Propaganda is Art, beginning in two weeks.