Benjamen Walker's Theory of Everything - Not All Propaganda is Art 7: Manufacturing Dissent

Episode Date: March 19, 2024

In 1959, Anti-Americanism surged in the UK. England seethed over America’s treatment of its Prime Minister who was smacked down for daring to use diplomacy to resolve the crisis over divided Germany.  In 1959 England also fretted over a new American export: the Beatnik. The British foreign office forcefully responded with a report advocating for “ an increased effort in the field of press, radio and television in the U.K. to say the right kind of things about the Americans.” This is the very moment Kenneth Tynan was commissioned to make a documentary for British Television about American Non-conformism and Dissent. We take a close look at one of the Cold War's most bizarre and inspired artifacts of Anti Anti-American propaganda.Shownotes: Laura Bradley writes on Brecht and German theater. Kenneth Tynan’s documentary aired on January 27th, 1960 and then was supposedly erased (it wasn’t).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. Previously on Not All Propaganda is Art In the mid-1950s, British theatre critic Kenneth Tynan was England's loudest champion of anti-Western artists like Berthold Brecht. This is how his wife at the time, Elaine Dundee, recalls his Brechtian conversion. He'd gone off to see Mother Courage at the Théâtre. And I stayed in the hotel. And he came back to the hotel and he said to me,

well, he said, I am a Marxist. I have seen Mother Courage and I'm a Marxist. Kenneth Tynan was not a Marxist. He was a cultural revolutionary who believed that great artists engaged with the social, political, and sexual issues of the day. In 1958, he moved to New York City and began to champion America's counterculture. And this is where his troubles began. In the spring of 1959, UK Prime Minister Harold Macmillan went to Russia. To Moscow, a Comet 4 brought Mr. Macmillan and the Foreign Secretary after a four-hour flight. The Prime Minister appropriately wore an Astrakhan fur hat, To Moscow, a Comet 4 brought Mr. Macmillan and the Foreign Secretary after a four-hour flight.

The Prime Minister appropriately wore an Astrakhan fur hat, and it was smiles all around as Mr. Khrushchev welcomed him to Russia in an atmosphere of cordiality calculated to thaw out the Cold War. Macmillan had a plan to solve the problem of divided Germany. The people sensed that the Prime Minister of Great Britain was a man who passionately desired understanding with Russia as the best means of avoiding war. divided Germany. But the Americans believed a recognition of East Germany would hand the Soviet Union a victory in their push for peaceful coexistence. So Macmillan was ordered to stand down. This was an excellent start. The British press did not take kindly to America's treatment of its prime minister.

The U.S. was denounced as weak and out of touch. President Eisenhower was called old and sick. The British Foreign Office found this rising tide of anti-American sentiment extremely concerning, and they responded immediately with a study. Several findings in the Anti-American Feeling in the UK official report were readily apparent. Apprehension that the Americans are deliberately seeking to take over our spheres of influence in the Middle East and Africa. And, A fear that American rashness will land us in a nuclear war.

This sentiment was both widespread and widely shared, because when Eisenhower sidelined MacMillan, he reportedly said, I would rather be atomized than communized. In May of 1959, the film adaptation of John Osborne's play Look Back in Anger hit British screens, and the Foreign Office's report quotes from it. Today, there is an inchoate dislike of American social and cultural influence. For example, in Look Back in Anger, the hero says, I must say it's pretty dreary living in the American age. Unless, of course, you're an American.

The problem of anti-Americanism, the Foreign Office concluded, was complex. And any solution that oversimplified things could make matters worse. What seemed to be required, one of England's top propagandists recommended, was an increased effort in the field of press, radio, and television in the UK to say the right kind of things about the Americans, to present them in a reasonably favorable light, and as far as possible soothe wounded susceptibilities. At the very moment the Foreign Office was circulating its anti-American feeling in the UK report, our man Kenneth Tynan was commissioned by ATV, the British commercial station, to produce a TV documentary about American non-conformists. My name is Benjamin Walker, and this is episode

seven of Not All Propaganda is Art. This one is called Manufacturing Dissent, and it's a story about one of the most inspired and bizarro pieces of British anti-anti-American propaganda ever made. A TV documentary called We Dissent. A film supposedly lost to history. Good evening. This is William Clark, and I've returned just a few weeks ago from several months in the United States, a country I've been to almost every year since I went as a student first in 1938. William Clark, the diplomat and public relations expert,

was the perfect choice to host We Dissent as he was one of England's top managers of its important Anglo-American relationship. But Kenneth Tynan was also a brilliant choice to lead this anti-anti-American propaganda operation because he genuinely loved American culture, especially its edgy, satirical, dissenting, non-conformist culture. As I've said before, Kenneth Tynan made anti-Americanism look totally uncool. We think it important for these varied minority views to be seen in Britain

as a reminder that the America of the so-called American century is not just what it appears on the surface. In fact, it is still a dynamic society with new ideas, wise and foolish, half-baked and profound, all these ideas bubbling up inside it. Kenneth Tynan jumped at the opportunity to produce a documentary about American nonconformism. In the spring of 1959, he was still living in New York City, writing theater reviews for The New Yorker, and he was bored to death of Broadway. One of the first invitations he sent out went to a fellow New Yorker writer,

whose new short story, Seymour and Introduction, was all the rage. Dear Mr. Tynan, I'm sorry we missed connections at the office, J.D. Salinter replied. The reason I thought I recognized you is that I saw you once on television and fraternally groaned with you at the impossibility of being less than rude to Sam Goldwyn.

I do not agree with Mr. Tynan 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. We talked about Kenneth Tynan's incredible 1958 appearance on Small World in episode 5. J.D. Salinger clearly enjoyed Tynan's TV performance as well. But as for appearing in Tynan's TV documentary, his answer was no.

A hard no. I don't feel equipped to say anything about nonconformity in America or about the cultural scene in America. I know there's a lot of conforming to nonconformity going around, but I haven't noticed much of the real thing. On the whole, if a practicing writer or artist values his time, then he may be making a mistake if he doesn't give culture as wide a berth as possible.

Tynan wrote Salinger back, asking if he could quote what I just read you in his documentary. A frantic Salinger replied immediately by telegram with an even harder no. But then, a few weeks later, he followed up with a nicer no. I'd be grateful if you left me off the program, he wrote. When I wired and asked you to leave me out of your film altogether, He wrote, Salinger also gave Tynan a warning. I think you're going to have a splitting headache when you're finished with the project. Around the same time, Tynan got this hard no from Salinger. He got a letter from another fellow New Yorker writer, our man, Dwight McDonald.

You didn't ask me, but being an editor at heart, I cannot refrain from a few suggestions on U.S. conformists. That is non-conformists. What a slip. Dwight McDonald really wanted to be in the documentary, and he gave Tynan a hard sell. Regarding your British non-conformist broadcast, on which I'll be very glad to appear, as I told you. As we talked about last episode, back in 1959, Western propagandists believed that Dwight McDonald's critique of mass culture, his theory that mass culture was corrupting high culture, translated too easily into a theory that American mass culture was a threat to European culture. And while I don't know what Kenneth Tynan thought about Dwight McDonald's theory of mass culture,

he did not put Dwight in his anti-anti-American film. If you're listening, you'll see me through the scales in my eyeballs and weigh my words well. We Dissent features interviews with 26 Americans who all have different interpretations of nonconformism and dissent. Our lives are very planned but very dull. There are untold thousands who don't have enough to eat. But there's one thing they all have in common.

The state of American culture today is one of the 11th hour. As one critic noted, Kenneth Tynan's TV program could have been called America's Angry Men. When there is much to say no to. But in his introduction, William Clark made it clear, We Dissent was not a film about anger. This is their document, a platform for Americans who have doubts about the American way of life. Kenneth Tynan was a huge fan of comedy and satire, and We Dissent features a number of humorists, including three popular and cool at the time stand-up comedians, like Alex King, who in 1959 was a regular guest

on many late-night TV programs. We asked him how much nonconformity there is in America today. There is very little. There has always been very little. To be a nonconformist means that you aren't a prostitute yet, not altogether. And I have been particularly aware of this because originally I was an artist, then I was a book illustrator, later I was a magazine editor, and now of course I'm mixed up

with book writing, and worst of all with television, you see, and the amount of prostitution increased in each case. Until now I'm absolutely surrounded by whores. Mr. Alex King. The standout comedian in We Dissent is Nipsey Russell, because the film showcased a bit from his actual stand-up act. And the integration in the school is progressing. I had occasion to address that group of students in Little Rock under the supervision of Miss Daisy Bates. I told them, I said, children, you're going into Central High this year.

I said, in this sociological drama, you will portray a rather poignant role. Do nothing, therefore, to disparage our cause. You represent the whole Negro faction. Don't go into that school, I beg them, with switchblades in your pocket. This is so stereotyped, it would reflect negatively upon us. Go into the school proud, with your head held high,

with a gun and some hand grenades, a dynamite cap, a flame thrower, some poison gas, artillery pieces, inter-classroom ballistic missiles. Let them see that we can be civilized too. Nipsey Russell appearing as he does each night at a nightclub in Harlem, New York's Negro Quarter. An individual dissenter who uses humor to reflect and cover the bitterness of his race. I think that there's much more attention paid to the personality rather than the intent of people. Kenneth Tynan also put his friend, the cartoonist Jules Feiffer, in his film.

He assured the British public that in New York, dissent was booming. A while ago, we had here in New York a man named George Metesky, who was called the Mad Bomber, who put little bags of bombs into telephone booths in Grand Central Station. And he could have hurt a lot of people. Everybody loved him. He became a hero, a folk hero. When Dwight McDonald caught wind of who Kenneth Tynan had decided to feature in his TV documentary, he wrote him a grumpy letter. I'm a little miffed that you consider the comedian Alexander King

more representative of U.S. dissent than yours truly, Dwight wrote. King is more part of the system than a dissenter against it. To the extent he is a dissenter, he exploits this attitude for trade purposes. But Dwight was even more upset that Tynan included interviews with American communists. I'd question whether the commies are part of any American dissent movement anymore, because they dissent only when it's to the USSR's interest. Tynan wrote back in defense of his choices. If communism is not an extreme form of dissent against capitalism, I'd like to know what is. I happen to be just one of the 28 communists who served time in a federal prison, just because of my ideas.

Arnold Johnson of New York, who was imprisoned for allegedly wishing to spread the overthrow of the American government by force. In the fall of 1959, just after Kenneth Tynan interviewed him, Arnold Johnson, the legislative director of the Communist Party of the United States, was subpoenaed by the House of Un-American Activities. I found a transcript. Please tell us if you have a contractual arrangement with a group or organization for the purpose of your appearance in a television movie entitled Dissent in America. One of the prosecutors demanded, A movie that is to be shown around the world, excluding the United States, the theme of which is those who are communists are merely dissenters. I refuse to answer this question, Johnson replied. You are proceeding into the field of censorship in the field of television.

This interrogation reveals that America's security agencies were totally aware of what Kenneth Tynan was up to before he even finished shooting his documentary. But this House of Un-American Activities inquisitor got it wrong. Kenneth Tynan wasn't platforming communists. He was seizing the opportunity to showcase his own ideals, his love of free speech, and deep hatred for censorship. This is why he booked the blacklisted Hollywood screenwriter Dalton Trumbo. Dalton Trumbo, who was one of the famous Hollywood 10, who went to jail for refusing to recognize the constitutional right of a congressional committee to quiz them about their beliefs or affiliations. But in the past few days, Otto Preminger,

one of the best known Hollywood producers, has defiantly announced that come what may, he will use Trumbo as writer in his film of Ulysses Exodus. Otto Preminger announced his intentions to use Dalton Trumbo just before We Descent went to broadcast in the UK, necessitating a last minute script change And this timely news peg Greatly enhances Trumbo's stature As an American dissenter Dedicated to truth and justice

One of the greatest disasters That has befallen change in this country Has been the Cold War The result is that liberal speech in this country has acquired a preface which is mandatory. You arise to speak if you're a liberal and you say, mind you, I'm not a communist, but nonetheless I am against lying.

Or, mind you, I bow to no one in my hatred of the Soviet Union and I loathe all local Communists but really we ought to have better housing in this country let's get the opinion of Professor Wright Mills on the campus of Columbia University with his students. In the United States today, there is no broad base of dissent. There is no broad instrumentality that is available for dissent. Like Dalton Trumbo, the sociologist C. Wright Mills also warned that free speech was under attack in America.

But for him, the dangers stemmed from power imbalances created by mass media monopolies and communication technologies. In a world of Thomas Paine, all it took to speak and to speak effectively was a printing press. I don't know what it cost, but it certainly didn't cost what six issues of a relatively small circulation magazine would cost today. So that the capital requirements of these means of communication, not only newspapers and magazines, but radio and TV, have now become enormous. And hence when we speak of freedom to speak, just in that minimum sense of dissent, and any kind of effectiveness, well, you have to speak of capitalism in the sense that it now owns those instrumentalities. And so perhaps the biggest obstacle to intellectuals

dissenting, assuming that they wish to, which I don't think many do, would be access to the means of communication. This is a selling society. To illustrate Mills' point, Tynan included an interview with a small-town newspaper man who explained to the British public that in the USA, words are used to sell things. The producers have to sell words, but words are not reality. Yet another place where protest can be encouraged, where dissent is tolerated, is the universities.

We've already visited Columbia. Now we go to Harvard to question the celebrated economist Kenneth Galbraith. If communists and anti-capitalists are the radical extremists of American descent in 1959, Harvard University professor Kenneth Galbraith is the standard bearer for measured blowhards. By satisfying wants, we create wants. And in the process of satisfying those, we create more. We have a kind of squirrel wheel effect. The largest and key constituency of nonconformists in We Dissent are the Beats. Kenneth Tynan saw an opportunity in the Beats, as he did with the Angry Young Men, to express his own ideas about socially and politically engaged art. His documentary includes interviews with beat poets, beat priests, beat junkies, and beat luminaries.

Interviews he conducted during a reporting trip he made to San Francisco in the fall of 1959. But before he went west, Tynan went east, to East Berlin, to write an article on another one of his nonconformist heroes, Berthold Brecht. This street behind me used to be called the Hermann-Göring-Straße, but of course all that sort of thing's been forgotten about long ago here in Berlin.

It's got some more respectable name today, but the main point of interest about it today is that through it runs the invisible boundary between West and East Berlin. It's astonishingly easy to go from one to the other. I'm in West Berlin at the moment. Now I'm in the East. In May of 1959, when the BBC filmed this report in divided Berlin,

the Cold War fight over divided Germany was heating up. As I mentioned earlier, America refused to recognize the communist East German government. Doing so, they believed, would hand the Soviets a victory in their quest for peaceful coexistence. Likewise, the West saw this ease of movement and conspicuous lack of conflict between the two zones as a provocation. A lot of spying certainly goes on from both sides of the line. But walking into East Berlin, you can't help thinking that if Khrushchev really minds so much about this, he could tighten up precautions for a start. Western taxis charge double to go to the East, since they are unlikely to pick up a returning fare. But the trip is worth

it. This is Kenneth Tynan, writing about his June 1959 taxi ride into East Berlin to report on Berthold Brecht and the Berliner Ensemble. The aero-straight drive up to the grandiose bullet-chipped pillars of the Brandenburg Gate, the perfunctory salutes of the guards on both sides of the frontier, the short sally past the skinny trees and bland neoclassical facades of Unter den Linden, surely one of the emptiest of the world's great streets, and the left turn that leads you across the meager oily stream of the Spree and into the square-cum parking lot where the theater stands with a circular neon sign, Berliner Ensemble, revolving on its roof like a sluggish weather vane. This is from an essay Kenneth Tynan wrote for The New Yorker, an essay his editor William Sean called the definitive Tynan take on Brecht.

Kenneth Tynan once said that he thought the job of a theater critic was to write for posterity. So he was writing for people, say, in 30 years time, who couldn't go and see the play, but wanted to know what it felt like on that night and what he'd seen as a critic and what impact that play had made on him. And when I read his reviews on Brescht, that's what he does for me. And that's what he does, you know, talking about his visit to Berlin as well. Laura Bradley is a professor of German and theatre at the University of Edinburgh. She's an expert on Brecht and the Berliner Ensemble. I reached out to her because I wanted some help making sense of what Kenneth Tynan learned or took from Brecht in regards to his

own thinking about cultural revolution and politically engaged art. I think he really got what Brecht was trying to do through theatre. He got the fact that Brecht was trying to, well, not trying to present a slice of life on stage, but trying to be upfront about the fact that he was telling a story for a particular purpose and make the mechanics of the production visible and obvious so that he could really concentrate on what was important. So let's pretend that Kenneth Tynan is a student of yours in one of your advanced Brecht classes. I sent you a bunch of reviews that he wrote in the late 1950s.

Yeah. Would any of these reviews earn him top marks? I think he really nails it in his review of Galileo, which he saw in East Berlin in 1957. This was a production that Brecht staged, but it was completed after Brecht's death. Now, in his review of that production, Tynan said that the final tableau was unforgettable. And he wrote, In the foreground, the choir sings a soaring polyphonous quintet composed by Hans Eisler about the blazing light of science, while in the background, alone and fat, Galileo joyously wolfs his dinner. That, in case anyone was wondering,

is what was meant by the alienation effect. This is what I mean about Tynan's observation and his sharpness, and he absolutely gets what Brecht is trying to do in that final scene. And, you know, he sees that glaring contradiction between scientific truth and Galileo's kind of greed and love of human comfort. And we also see the, you know, that contradiction

between the scientific community that we saw gathered around him earlier in the play and the fact that he's alone here. You know, he's enjoying his dinner, but he's on his own. That's fascinating because for me, it kind of reads like a recognition that Tynan would have that, you know, it's kind of hard to be a revolutionary when you like the finer things. Yeah. But this Galileo review is in the article that he wrote on Brecht in 1959. And his editor, William Sean, wrote him really effusively about this one. Even Tennessee Williams

reached out to say that this article was more literature than review. But I'm really curious what you think. In that New Yorker article, what he does do is give an amazing sense of the atmosphere in Berlin at a time when cultural diplomacy was really important and was kind of a way of marketing the state as it were when normal diplomatic relations weren't in place. And if Kenneth Tynan said that Brecht and the Berliner Ensemble were the theatres to watch in the world. That actually really counted for something. You know, you didn't want to be on the wrong side of Kenneth Tynan. There was one person who didn't like Kenneth Tynan's article, and that was Brecht's widow, Helene Weigel.

After she reads it, she writes Tynan this kind of frosty letter, thanking him for his kind words about the ensemble, but kind of taking him to task for also raving about this new biography of Brecht by Martin Esselin. She says, anyone who truly loves Brecht could not possibly like this book. What is this all about? The thing that strikes me about Tynan is that he never felt the need to apologize for Brecht's Marxism. And that makes him quite different from Martin Esselin, who was another leading voice on Brecht in this period. And if you read his criticism, including the book that he published in 59 and that Tynan rated very highly, that Esselin apologizes for Brecht's

Marxism, as it were, or apologizes for liking Brecht despite the Marxism, whereas Tynan doesn't engage with any of that. And in fact, he kind of does the opposite, really. So I find that contrast between him and Esselin really interesting. Hmm. But I'm having a hard time understanding how he even has the choice to do that in 1959, because, you know, at this moment that he's writing this article, the issue of East Germany and East German culture are both, you know, hot button Cold War political issues. But yet somehow same time, championing Brecht isn't the same as declaring yourself a Stalinist or a Leninist. You know, Tynan is calling for a theatrical revolution rather than a political one. And in fact, when he went to Moscow in 55, he said that, what he really wanted was a Western theatre organised on Russian lines,

but without the Russian ideology. And I think it reminds us that, you know, these positions are not nowhere near as clear cut as it might seem, or as the Cold War rhetoric might make us think. And that kind of really resonates with Brecht himself. Kenneth Tynan wrote his essay on Brecht in a hotel room in London. And in a letter that he wrote to his wife, the novelist Elaine Dundee, he noted how out of place he felt. My whole feeling is of unreality, sitting in a hotbox hotel room, a hundred yards from where we lived.

As I mentioned in episode three, when the Tynans moved to New York, they rented out their flat to the Congress for Cultural Freedom's Melvin Lasky, who moved to London in 1958 to take over editorial duties at Encounter, the CCF's CIA-funded intellectual propaganda magazine. I went into our flat on the pretext of borrowing a book, Tynan wrote to Elaine. The place is clean and well, apart from my study, which Melvin has turned into a morass of manuscript. The bull pictures have been taken down and replaced by rather she-she Chinese prints. Melvin Lasky was in Berlin, but his wife was there, a strained, thin German girl in black, overmade up, and full of horrid condescension and malice about the Berliner ensemble. Didn't like her at all. Melvin Lasky and Encounter were also champions of Martin Esalen, the biographer Brecht's widow complained about. In fact, London is where Tynan got a hold of Eslen's book, as he explained in a letter that he wrote to his editor, William Sean.

A brief note to explain the delay of the Brecht piece. I was halfway through a last draft when a publisher sent me a proof of a new book, Brecht, A Choice of Evils by Martin Esselin. It contained so much that was new to me, I decided to revise the article in the light of what I'd learned. I hope to post it off to you by the weekend. Kenneth Tynan's New Yorker piece on West and East German theater is an incredibly successful piece of cultural diplomacy. England's prime minister may have failed, but Britain's top theatre critic did not. But in his effort to calm the rising tide of anti-American sentiment in the UK, our

man oversteps. And like Macmillan, he will be smacked down. We Dissent was not the first British TV documentary produced to combat anti-Americanism in the UK. In 1956, the United States Information Agency, in conjunction with the BBC, launched Report from America, a monthly TV documentary series. We are in St. Petersburg, Florida, preparing a report on the great new American generation of elders. Some of the episodes showcased segments of American society, old people, college students.

Others took on issues of international importance, like America's embrace of Hungarian refugees. I am chairman of this church committee. We are talking about what we can do to help Hungarian refugees. We plan to take over a house in our neighborhood and will care for as large a family as space will permit. We hope they will join our community and enjoy our way of life. We are fortunate here. We have never suffered mass aggression and slaughter. Were we to suffer

such abuse, we would hope that others would come to our aid. The little we do, we do with a great deal of humility. All of the episodes in Report from America showed Americans at their very best. And Report from America was a hit with critics and viewers. What is finest about these fascinating reports is the integrity that is written all over them. The London Sunday Times reported, This is propaganda at its wisest. It makes human beings out of us and it's honest. Another TV critic added,

No amount of national propaganda can equal the feeling of goodwill and neighborliness that this sincere presentation I saw last night affected. A British viewer wrote in to say, Our report today is going to be about one fragment of the broad and continuing story of social and cultural change in the United States. We're going to show you the Louisville fragment of the story of racial desegregation in American schools. The episode on desegregation took on one of America's most sensitive issues, showing the British public Kentucky's mixed classrooms, mixed

PTA meetings, mixed teachers lounges, mixed school yards, and a principal from a newly desegregated elementary school. Our school is built on love and affection. We don't have any serious problems. No name-calling is allowed. We discourage any fighting. A mixed little boys chorus from this school sang at the Marine Hospital at Christmas. They traveled on the public bus to get there, and the people on the bus asked them how they liked desegregation. They said they liked it fine. Now this broadcast is from 1957. The very year the whole world watched violence erupt in Little Rock over desegregation.

Older children are able to express their own thoughts. Reporter Bob Kay at Western Junior High has that story. What's your name? Joanne Decker. Joanne, how do you like being in an integrated school? It isn't so bad. There hasn't been any trouble and everything's working out nicely. Have you made any new friends? Yes, I have.

Thank you, Joanne. You're welcome. And what's your name? Walker. Come over here and talk to me, Walker. Walker, how do you like being in an integrated school? I like it very much. Thank you very much. You're welcome.

This slow yet steady progress on racial justice was the image of itself America projected onto the world stage in all of its propaganda in the late 1950s. Great changes take time, but desegregation is closing in around the Old South. There are and there will continue to be more stories like Louisville. Report from America was shown in 26 European countries and dubbed into French, German, Spanish, Polish, and Arabic. But still, in the fall of 1957, the USIA cancelled the series.

Most disappointing news about TV I have heard for years, noted Marsland Gardner, TV critic for the London Daily Telegraph. England's propagandists also voiced disappointment over report from America's cancellation in the Foreign Office's 1959 Anti-Americanism in the UK Report we talked about earlier. And there are obvious echoes of the cancelled series, and Kenneth Tynan's 1959 documentary about American nonconformists. We Dissent, like Report from America, is a projection of Americans at their very best, or most idealistic. Although America's propagandists would never, in a million years, have put Harold Call of the Mattachine Society in one of their films.

Our program, in a nutshell, is to educate the general public about the problems of homosexuality in our culture today, to advocate a change of law in our 50 states, which will make it no longer criminal when adults engage in sexual activity in private, where both partners are willing and where there is no harm or force involved. Kenneth Tynan's decision to put Harold Call in his documentary is more evidence of his own idealism. He loathed the sex police, and he believed that the persecution of homosexuality was a form of totalitarianism and rank hypocrisy. There's quite an anti-sexual attitude in the United States.

We're not just an anti-homosexual country. In many ways, we're an anti-sexual country. However, on the other hand, we're a very hypocritical country about it because, for instance, almost everything in our advertising, in connection with almost any product, whether it's food or an automobile or an automatic washing machine, is designed to make everyone more sexually attractive, it seems, and more rested so that he or she is enabled to enjoy the act of sex, and yet we come right up to that wall where we say, beyond this, when you're ready, we must not go.

Until two days ago, that sound had never been heard on this earth. It's a report from man's farthest frontier, the radio signal transmitted by the Soviet Sputnik, the first man-made satellite as it passed over New York earlier today. Six months after Sputnik sent shockwaves through the West, Herb Cain, a columnist at the San Francisco Chronicle, identified another threat to the free world. Look magazine preparing a picture spread on San Francisco's beat generation. Oh no, not again. Hosted a party in a North Beach house for 50 beatniks. They're only beat, you know, when it comes to work, Kane explained in his April 2nd, 1958 column, the first appearance of the word beatnik in print. By 1959, the American press

was constantly pushing stories about the potentially communist, definitely un-American beatniks. In fact, the very week our man Kenneth Tynan landed in San Francisco to record his interviews with the Beats. Life magazine published Squaresville versus Beatsville, eight full pages of beatnik, cold war, real politic. Hutchinson, Kansas, the nicest small town in the whole world, was Squaresville. The personification of traditionally accepted American virtues, a stable, prosperous community given to conservatism, but full of get-up-and-go.

And Venice, California? The ramshackle, chaotic frontier of so-called civilization? Beatsville. A place throbbing with all-night sessions of poetry reading, bongo drumming, and wine drinking, and the rebellion of the beatnik,

who ridicules U.S. society as square. For me, the most intriguing aspect of Kenneth Tynan's 1959 commission to create We Dissent is this timing. It came at the very moment when the projection of the beatnik onto the global stage threatened to heighten the already rising tide of anti-American sentiment in the UK. The beats I met in San Francisco were different, nicer, and less pretentious. That's from an article Kenneth Tynan wrote about his reporting trip to San Francisco for the London Observer. The article is called Bearding the Beats, and it features many of the same beats he interviews in Weed Ascent. The cradle of the movement is way out west in San Francisco.

And the place where the cradle really rocks is Grant Avenue, a precipitous street full of bars, coffee houses, and hardcore beats. At times, they erupt into parades like this one, held to celebrate the launching of a new publishing house in their district. My name is Philip Lamantia, and I go around with whoever, which means all kinds of weird persons I like. Junkies, tricks, demi-poets, mads... Beat poet Philip Lamantia showed the British public his nicer, less pretentious, and higher way of life.

I am high most of the time. I want opium. public his nicer, less pretentious, and higher way of life. I am high most of the time. I want opium. Police confiscate opium. I want police to give me opium. And beat poet Bob Kaufman read a bit from his famous Abominist Manifesto. Abominism's main function is to unite the soul with oatmeal kippis. Festo. Bob Kaufman also explained his credo of beat disengagement. I think that what we're looking for is a rediscovery of ourselves as artists and as people. And in America, it has become necessary to embrace some form of voluntary poverty and some form of voluntary ostracization from society in order to sort of wipe the dirt off your face and create some decent literature.

In his film We Dissent and his article Bearding the Beats, Kenneth Tynan tries to square his own belief that great art comes from a social and political engagement with life, with beat disengagement. What interests me least about the Beats is their philosophy of aesthetics, he wrote in his article, and I believe it misguided to defend their way of life on the ground that it is a way of art.

This seems to me dubious since art that is divorced from life cannot be other than sterile. To bolster this argument, Tynan quotes Pierre de Latre, a young minister who runs the Bread and Wine Mission on Grant Avenue, who says, he likes the Beats because they live a communal life, more selfless and unworldly than he has ever seen outside purely religious groups. Pierre de Latre also appears in We Descend, but there, his assessment of the communal life of the Beats is less convincing. Here at the mission, what we're trying to do is simply to respond to the creative urge in people to expose people to the creative act,

to respond to their rebellion and encourage them not to adjust to conventional society, which I think is every bit as corrupt as they say it is, and which I myself rebel against, but to try to get them to carry their rebellion full course if they can. And what, as a minister of the church, does he think of the fairly frequent references we've heard

to the use of drugs and narcotics? Well, many people use narcotics in order to gain insight into what they feel is a deeper reality, even to see the face of God, as some have put it. I go up on top of the RCA building and gaze at my world, Manhattan. The Beat Network, or grapevine, threads its way back and forth across the United States. On the other end of this saw-toothed axis in lower Manhattan is Allen Ginsberg, one of the most internationally famous of the beat poets?

Men walking the size of specks of wool, panorama of the bridges. We Dissent contains the first UK television appearance of Allen Ginsberg and his partner Peter Orlovsky. Together, they provide the British public with a convincing portrayal of beat non-conformism and dissent. Are we protesting? No, no, no. Is the poetry protest is the next question. Our poetry is concerned with beauty, and beauty gets never trapped in death. Poetress, poetress, poetress, poetess gets trapped in death. Because when poetress get into war, beauty never gets trapped in death. Because when a poet tries to get into war, beauty never gets trapped in death.

That's all right. Let us also, let me give a big literary answer. Like all the English and American criticism has been pretty incompetent in that it's got hung up with all sorts of social ideas hung over from the 30s, mostly jealous old liberals who've never made it into some area of beauty. The poetry is not primarily a protest, it's more an attainment of a kind of epiphanous mental state. Like a religious ecstasy has come to some of us, and it's a question of finding... Sweet that rolls off the tongue.

Finding a way of communicating it. A few months before Allen Ginsberg recorded this interview, he wrote a letter to the editor of the New York Times Book Review to protest a malicious review of Jack Kerouac's novel Dr. Sacks, a review called Beatnik Boogeyman on the Prowl. If beatniks and not illuminated beat poets overrun this country, they will have been created not by beats like Kerouac, but by

industries of mass communication, which continue to brainwash man and insult nobility where it occurs. Prophetically, Allen Ginsberg. We Dissent went out for broadcast on Wednesday, January 27, 1960. Many critics noted the program's 10.20 to 11.50 p.m. time slot. Top rate, but why so late? asked the Daily Herald. If dissent is important, and few things are more important, it deserves the presentation and an hour that catches maximum audience and keeps it awake,

the Daily Mail concurred. Not many viewers would have the mental and an hour that catches maximum audience and keeps it awake, the Daily Mail concurred. Not many viewers would have the mental and physical stamina to stay with it. Caught myself nodding off once or twice, and I was seeing an afternoon preview. Some critics had concerns with the film's time slot and the film. One of the most indigestible documentaries ever slipped into the network at the somnolent hour of 1020, the Glasgow Herald's critic wrote. It is ironic, he added, that possibly its greatest value was to debunk the rosy mistaken picture of upholstered American life which ATV promotes. Now, I can't tell you exactly why ATV chose to air We Dissent at such a late hour, but I imagine Val Parnell and ATV's other executives were well aware that Kenneth Tynan's

anti-anti-American documentary could be interpreted, especially by the inhabitants of Squaresville, USA, were they to hear about it, as vicious anti-American propaganda. But I doubt anyone imagined just how much outrage and condemnation we dissent would generate once the U.S. press got wind of it. Well, besides J.D. Salinger. Recall his prescient warning. I think you're going to have a splitting headache when you're finished with the project.

We're going to deal with the subpoena Kenneth Tynan received from the U.S. Senate's Un-American Activities-Like Security Committee and his testimony in the last episode of our series. But I want to linger for a moment on the afterimage of this late-night TV broadcast from January 27, 1960. In his letter to the New York Times, Allen Ginsberg spoke of a battle between the beatnik and the beat poet. We talked about this letter earlier. Ginsberg prophetically warned that by promoting the beatnik, a subversion of the beat, the industries of mass communication were brainwashing humanity.

What Allen Ginsberg did not anticipate was the subversion of the subversive. Today, we call this particular brand of subversion the commodification of dissent. And Kenneth Tynan's 1960 projection of American non-conformism and dissent into England is an early, perhaps even the first, prototype. And despite its late-night time slot and relatively small viewing audience, it turns out We Descent was extremely influential. Here's one example. Around the time Kenneth Tynan's documentary aired on ATV, Booth's House of Lords gin, one of England's most valuable exports, decided to change up its marketing. In the 1950s, Booth's used British stars like Basil Rathbone of Sherlock

Holmes to market gentlemen martinis to Americans. In 1963, Booth's awarded its $250,000 marketing budget to Daniel & Charles, one of Sponsor Magazine's top 10 hot young advertising agencies to keep an eye on. Now, Charles Goldschmidt of Daniel & Charles rejected this label. We don't subscribe to the popular conception of the hot young creative shop, he told Sponsor Magazine. We attempt to translate sound marketing objectives and an understanding of consumer motivations into striking graphics and provocative copy. To us, the only real measure of creative effort is the success of the product.

In 1964, which is also the year the Beatles first came to America, Daniel and Charles launched Booth's new campaign. It is most certainly not for everybody, one advertisement proclaims, using a photo of a plain-looking man who looks horrified by the question, Are you everybody? hanging over his head. Another advertisement invites readers to

complete a sentence. I hate conformity because, tell us your beef against society in 25 words or less and we will send you this Booth House of Lords protest tie. The copy continues. The fine print reveals that the offer is ironic, but the handsome protest tie pictured was real, a variation of the most famous advertisement in this campaign, a poster designed by Seymour Quast. In September 1964, Bob Dylan and Joan Baez, both 23 at the time, stumbled upon this poster at the Newark Airport and spontaneously decided to pose with it for their photographer, Daniel Kramer. The photo he took is an illumination. These two young idealists stand on either side of the poster, framing the provocative ad copy. Protest against the rising tide of conformity.

Serve Booth's House of Lords, the nonconformist gin from England. Not all propaganda is art is researched, written, and produced by me, Benjamin Walker. The one and only Andrew Calloway mixed it. Special thanks this episode go out to the Doctrine of Fair Use, a law that makes it possible for journalists, scholars, and podcasters to work with important archival documents from our past. Also thanks to Laura Bradley. You can find links to her work in the show notes on the show page. I've actually created a complimentary podcast to go with this series called Propaganda Notes and Sources. 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 some of the early influence We Dissent may have had, well, you're going to have to tune in. You know, it aired a week after the young Stuart Sutcliffe bought his bass guitar in a Liverpool shop and joined his friend John Lennon's band, the Quarrymen. The guys were also spending a lot of time watching late-night television at George Harrison's house

at this very moment. By March, they had decided to change their name to the Beatles. of everything podcast.com slash subscribe. All the info on what you need to do is there. And it's a really simple process. We're using supercast and Apple subscriptions. And if you're listening on Apple podcasts right now, just tap the subscribe button on the show page. Subscribing is the way to support this kind of work. Your one time contribution will directly fund more standalone limited series like this one. And lastly, dear listener, please, if you like the show, tell a friend about it, or two, or three. Next episode, we return to France with a new look at the mysterious death of Richard Wright.