Benjamen Walker's Theory of Everything - Not All Propaganda is Art 9: Freedom or Death

Episode Date: April 16, 2024

ToE's Cultural Cold War miniseries concludes with three stories about containment and death. Richard Wright delivers his final lecture on Black Spies in Paris, Dwight Macdonald’s Mass Cult & Mid Cult finally debuts & flops, and Kenneth Tynan discovers the limits of social and cultural protest. Show notes: Matthew Tynan reads Kenneth Tynan’s 1960 speech, Michael Billington wrote a 1960 Parody of Kenneth Tynan, Jefferson Pooley recaps Personal Influence and Daphne Park explains how she got Lumumba killed. Support ToE and get access to the incredible exclusive bonus companion series to Not All Propaganda is Art by subscribing at https://theoryofeverything.supercast.com/, or subscribe directly in Apple Podcasts by hitting “Subscribe” right on the show page.

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Episodes every other week at neverpo.st and wherever you find pods. Previously on Not All Propaganda is Art People are given a whole mass of things to enjoy and a whole mass of things that liberate them washing machines, all the contraptions and gadgets that we've got all bind us more and more, not to a freedom in which we can do what we like and exploit ourselves however we like, but more and more to the grind where we've got to earn more money and so are less free. We underestimate the strength and importance of working class culture

if we think it can disappear before the impact of the washing machine. 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. Welcome to the ninth and final installment of Not All Propaganda Is Art, the cultural Cold War podcast group biography that I've been running on the Theory of Everything feed for the past three months. I do hope you have enjoyed the nine plus hours we've spent together listening back on the years 1956 to 1960. In my case, it's been four years. I'm ready to move on as well. But I do have a proper conclusion for you, dear listener. It's waiting at the bottom of this episode. First, we're going to say goodbye to our three main cast members,

Dwight McDonald, Kenneth Tynan, and Richard Wright. And we're going to begin with Kenneth Tynan, who on May 5th, 1960, was on a witness stand in a Senate hearing room in Washington, D.C. Give the court reporter your full name, please. Kenneth P. Tynan. Your address? 56 East 89th Street, New York City. And your business or profession? I am a drama critic and author.

Kenneth Tynan went to Washington, D.C. on May 5, 1960, because he was subpoenaed by Senator Thomas Dodd's powerful Internal Security Subcommittee. And what is your present immigration status here in the U.S.? My present one, entirely due to an oversight on my part and my employer's, is B1 and 2. I've been employed on an H1 visa that expired last October, without even myself or my employers realizing it. I've enlisted Kenneth Tynan's son, Matthew Tynan, to help me recreate this hearing. Matthew's actually a lawyer. Probably could have helped his dad out. I'm an immigration attorney, but I would have said, keep your mouth shut.

I'm voicing Mr. J. Sauerwein, Senator Dodd's chief attorney for the Internal Security Subcommittee. Mr. Tynan, did you produce a broadcast entitled We Dissent for the Associated Television Limited, the British television network, on January 27th, 1960? Yes, I did. Was this a broadcast which served to bring the United States into disrepute? Certainly not. I suppose you know what I have had to say about the program. That's Senator Thomas Dodd. I'm going to voice him, too. Yes, somebody sent me a copy of your speech. In episode

seven, I told you a story about We Dissent, a documentary film about American nonconformists Kenneth Tynan produced for British TV. I made the case that We Dissent was part of a British propaganda campaign designed to combat anti-Americanism

in the UK. Well, when America's Cold Warriors read about We Dissent in the press, they blew their tops. Senator Dodd was so angry he even spoke out on the Senate floor. This is why our man was summoned to Washington. Here are a few key excerpts from Dodd's speech. I consider this program to be a prime example of the kind of irresponsible criticism that undermines the Western alliance by weakening the fabric of mutual respect. Senator Dodd only saw anti-Americanism in Kenneth Tynan's documentary about American dissent. I challenge the program's contention that our proud, legitimate tradition of dissent

is in any way represented by communists, party liners, and a convicted perjurer, by beatniks, eccentrics, a dope addict, and an expert on sex deviation. Senator Dodd was especially appalled that the film included an interview with King of the Hipsters, Norman Mailer. A nationally telecast program like this could only dispose those who feel negative about America to feel more negative, and those who are neutral or friendly to feel uneasy. And who gains from all this?

The chair, of course, is correct. I will ask this question. We are back in the courtroom now. I'm doing sour wine again. Was this film intended to bring the United States into disrepute? By no means. I should say rather the opposite. Its aim, if I may continue, is to correct a distorted image of America that I had noticed to my horror in a great many countries in Europe. The idea is that America is a country of conformists and organization men. I know this country well enough to say it is untrue. Mr. Sourwine was actually one of Senator Joe McCarthy's original bulldog attorneys, and he relished going after journalists.

And Kenneth Tynan felt this. In an article he wrote about this hearing, he noted that defending a TV show to accusers who had never seen it was worse than McCarthyism. Kenneth Tynan came to Washington with a speech of his own, a speech he hoped to read into the official record. But Mr. Sourwine refused this request. So Matthew Tynan will now read his father's remarks into our amended historical record of this hearing. As an English journalist, I have paid regular annual visits to the United States for the past nine years. I've spent the past two winters here as guest drama critic at the New Yorker. During this period, I have also been employed by The Observer, a London weekly newspaper.

I am a visitor to the United States, not an immigrant or a resident alien, nor have I done anything during my stay to belie the statement I made when my visa was first granted, namely, that I am not and never have been a member of the Communist Party or of any affiliated organization. These may not have been the precise terms of the declaration I was asked to make, but that, as I recall, was their import. It may be worth adding that the only organizations to which I pay dues are, I believe, the Royal Society of Literature, the Critics Circle, and the Diners Club. In answering the questions that the committee may put to me, I am perfectly willing to reply

to any questions about my activities in the United States. I have no intention of invoking any of the amendments to the Constitution. I should like, however, to express my regret that the Committee should have seen fit to employ its authority to subpoena a visiting journalist. It has not done so before, to the best of my knowledge, and I respectfully suggest that there may be better ways of demonstrating to the world this country's traditional and splendid regard for freedom of speech. Will you please state your full name and present address for the record, please? My name is Bertolt Brecht,

was summoned to Washington to testify in front of the House of Un-American Activities. Now, Mr. Brecht, what is your occupation? Like Tynan, Brecht was also accused of pushing anti-American propaganda. Playwright and poet. Playwright and poet. Yes. of pushing anti-American propaganda. Brecht quit the U.S. the day after his interrogation, and likewise, Kenneth Tynan departed soon after his. But he threw a party first for 200-plus guests at the Forum of the Twelve Caesars in Manhattan. There were a lot of theater people, Vivian Lee, Stephen Sondheim, and playwright Keddie

Frings. Tynan was one of the only critics who had praised her adaptation of Richard Wright's novel, The Long Dream, when it debuted that February. Never before had I seen a trenchant exposure of the mutual degradation that ensues when February. Tynan wrote in The New Yorker, lamenting that the play had only lasted five performances. I wish you could have seen it. Also at this party were James Baldwin and Richard Gibson. Both Tynan and Baldwin were signatories of a letter Gibson had just published in the New York Times calling for fair play for Cuba. Last episode, I told you about the essay Richard Gibson wrote about Island of Hallucination, Richard Wright's unpublished novel.

Well, that essay includes a very curious remark about our man Kenneth Tynan and the CIA's covert support for the Congress for Cultural Freedom. One person who was aware of who paid the piper was Kenneth Tynan, Gibson wrote. He freely admitted to James Baldwin and me at a party in New York that the Congress's British literary publication Encounter was CIA-funded, but added that he would continue to contribute articles to it because it was a fine magazine and not filled with American propaganda. A large number of Kenneth Tynan's colleagues from The New Yorker also came to send him off at the Twelve Caesars, including our man Dwight McDonald.

Dwight was still sore at Tynan for not including him in his documentary about American nonconformists. But still, he presented Tynan with a copy of the new spring 1960 issue of Partisan Review, which contained the first part of his dissent on American mass and middle-brow culture. When the Twelve Caesars shut down, the festivities moved elsewhere. And on his way home in the early morning light, Kenneth Tynan composed a mental draft of Memoir to Manhattan, an essay Holiday Magazine would publish the following December. It is at night that a Londoner is most aware of missing New York. London, on the whole, closes down soon after 11 p.m., but New York is open 24 hours a day.

It is a nocturnal city, constructed to look more enticing as darkness envelops it. Times Square, a dusty obscenity by day, is a whirlpool of temptation by artificial light. And to survey the midtown spires at night is to feel a gregarious hunger for human companionship. So many and so inaccessible are the lives that are flourishing or fading or crashing to disaster inside those pillars of gleaming windows. The streets are flooded with the blue of dawn and the crawling whine of the garbage disposal trucks. I suddenly remember the mythical, imperturbable Broadway character

who stepped off the sidewalk and nearly had his toes amputated by a truck, whereupon he remarked, with the faintest of shrugs, that's show business. Day has broken now. The streets have lost their echoes. Before long, they will be filled with early New Yorkers. I look at their faces as I ride back to my apartment. And there, unmistakably it is, the familiar Manhattan look.

A pettish, slightly resentful frown, as if a great promise had somehow not been quite fulfilled. In the midst of prosperity, people look as if they have been robbed. But I am speaking mostly of the middle-aged. My cab passes the United Nations building, glaucous besides the river, and at once I brighten, thinking of the young. Mr. Tynan, when did you visit the United States the first time? About 12 years ago, and I've been returning ever since at annual intervals. Which parts of the United States did you visit?

New York, Chicago, California. Not, I'm afraid, anywhere in between. But you only stayed in New York for any length of time? Yes. This is the real Kenneth Tynan, but this time he's not in court. He's being interviewed by a radio host named Franz Joseph. Our man's on a book tour, talking up his 1961 collection, Curtains. What was the main purpose of your visits? I've nearly always come over here to look at the Broadway scenes through English eyes and to give some sort of an account of it to the English reader. Mr. Tynan, in your book, Curtains, in the chapter Culture in Doppel, you seem to indicate that the American theater is confronted with two dangers. The one is production for the market, which leads to commercialization and to vulgarization, and the other you seem to describe as the tendency of artwork to become more and more

a private fantasy. Would you like to explain this? Yes, I think any culture in which drama and high finance are inseparably wedded to each other is rapidly heading for some sort of impasse. That refers to the tendency to produce for the market, to consider the taste of the masses. Now, the other side of your... The second danger you refer to, would you like to comment on that? I think there is a tendency that American plays

take as their hero some tremendously disturbed individual in a high state of hysteria and to explain it in purely internal terms. But there is no tendency, or hardly any, to analyze what is wrong with the individual in terms of the society outside him. On May 29, 1960, the London Observer announced Kenneth Tynan's return to his old post as the paper's chief drama critic, along with a new article Tynan wrote called Bouquet for the British. In this one, he tried to explain what he had learned about America during his two years in New York. It has not been easy for me to be candidly critical

without feeling rather like a weekend guest who sneers at the linen. Our man called the 1958 and 59 Broadway seasons the clanking tin can of commercialism. And America's inability to produce politically and socially engaged art precepts bequeathed by Senator McCarthy. The ideological problem that hinders the American theater can be simply stated, Tynan wrote, materialism is out, metaphysics are in. Or to phrase it more modishly, it is not within the power of social and political change to heal the eternal sickness of the individual soul.

This article from May of 1960 is a very prescient piece of writing on the so-called cultural turn of the late 1950s. In fact, I think Kenneth Tynan might be one of the very first intellectuals who understood that the cultural turn was not a turn towards artistic and cultural protest, but rather a turn inwards. words. Another critic who understood in 1960 that the times they were a-changing was the young Michael Billington. In 1960, when I was an undergraduate at Oxford feeding English, the Observer had a competition, and the competition was a parody of any of their regular contributors. So what did I do? I wrote a parody of Kent Tynan, an aesthetic column. We heard from the great British drama critic Michael Billington in episode three. As a young man, he idolized Kenneth Tynan. And in 1960, he sent The Observer a parody of his hero. I had to invent sort of plays that Tynan might be reviewing. And I invented a play,

NF Simpson had just written a play called One Way Pendulum. So I invented a play. N.F. Simpson had just written a play called One-Way Pendulum. So I invented a play called Two-Way Stretcher by a man called N.W. Seven. And I just remember I began by saying, I'm getting very worried about N.W. Seven. This is me being Tynan. That was often how he would begin a review with the word I and then he'd declare some doubt or hesitation or whatever. And to my astonishment and amazement, I won the first prize in the competition. And my parody of Tynan was published. The title of Michael Billington's parody was Protesting Too Much. I think I earned five pounds. It was my first earnings in journalism. The saga of Dwight McDonald's famous essay, Mass Cult, Mid Cult, begins with a solicitation

from the Saturday Evening Post. In 1958, the Post was running a series of think pieces called Adventures of the Mind. And on September 30th, they reached out to Dwight McDonald with an invitation to participate. Your own qualifications are so comprehensive, wrote editor John Cobbler, that we feel sure you can produce a forceful essay in the field of letters, sociology, or cultural taste. The enigma of bestsellerdom might appeal to you. Dwight found Cobbler's offer, $2,500 for a 5,000-word article, extremely appealing. And with an eye towards preempting editorial conflict, Cobbler established a few ground rules for Dwight's essay on the dangers of mass and middle-brow culture. Illustrate some of your points through analysis of specific,

well-known literary musical works that pass for art. And we do not wish to be unkind to Mr. Norman Rockwell, our cover artist, who is unhappily well aware of the dichotomy you explore.

Also, avoid the taint of intellectual snobbishness. All that glitters in the ivory tower is not gold. And finally, there is no deadline or hurry. This last piece of advice was a mistake on the part of Mr. Cobbler, as the correspondence shows. Can we expect to hear from you soon? Cobbler wrote on February 17th, 1959.

Alas, not very soon, our man replied. On April 20th, Dwight wrote to Cobbler to inform him that his article on mass culture was still unwritten. However, he added, I'm leaving this week for two months semi-holiday in England, and I can and will write it there. We will be happy to see your article at any time, Cobbler replied. May too many weeks, however, not go by. During his semi-holiday in London, Dwight delivered the America, America lecture we talked about in episode six at the Universities and Left Review Club, but he made

no progress on his article for the Saturday Evening Post. Are we to give you up for lost? Cobbler inquired on September 10th. No, don't give up, Dwight replied the very next day. I've begun the piece. Have about a third done. Hope to get the rest into finished form in not over two weeks. I didn't write you because I was ashamed of all my earlier unmet schedules, but it's now going well. That is, I only get stuck three times a day. I do think it will be in your hands shortly. And it was.

And that is when the real trouble began. Since about 1800, we've really had in the Western world two cultures. One of them the kind that's in the textbooks, which I call high culture or serious culture, high culture. The other, mass culture, which seems to be on a surface just like high culture. That is to say, there are novels written in it, there are paintings painted in it. Norman Rockwell's covers for the Saturday Night Post are an excellent example of mass culture. This is from a lecture Dwight McDonald gave on December 5th, 1959, at a symposium at Iowa State University called The Position of the Writer in America.

As you can hear, Norman Rockwell is no longer off-limits, evidence that his relationship with Mr. Cobbler had passed its breaking point. But Norman Rockwell was not the cause of the rift. The issue was mid-cult. But we now are threatened with something even more insidious, and that is what I call mid-cult or middle-brow culture. You have the exploitation in the same way that mass culture exploits real culture. You have the exploitation of high culture.

You have what seems to be a rise in the level of culture, but which actually is not. In the first draft Dwight McDonald submitted to the Saturday Evening Post, he analyzed a number of American magazines, Harper's, The Atlantic, The Reporter, and the Saturday Evening Post, in an attempt to illustrate the pernicious qualities of Mitko. Cobbler questioned why The New Yorker was missing from the list. We are quite resigned to having you kick in the teeth practically every other publication in the country,

including the Post, but not as long as you exempt the periodical with which you are associated. By your own definition, he insisted, the New Yorker would be a glittering epitome of mid-cultism and honestly demands its inclusion with two or three sentences of analysis. Dwight tried to wriggle out of the situation. He explained to Cobbler that he'd already gone

on the record and defended the New Yorker from charges of mid-cultism in an article called Amateur Journalism that he wrote for Encounter magazine back in 1956. We talked about this one back in episode two. But Cobbler refused to budge. Dwight explained all of this in a letter he sent on November 9th, 1959, to Ben Hibbs, Cobbler's boss at the Saturday Evening Post. Dear Mr. Hibbs, Dwight wrote, I think I have been treated unfairly

by your Mr. Cobbler, who has just rejected an article, Mass Cult and Mid Cult, I wrote at the Post's invitation for your Adventures of the Mind series. The sole reason for rejection is that I was unwilling and indeed unable

to change my opinion of the New Yorker to agree with Mr. Cobblers. This strikes me as unjust and also as a method of editing a series that is supposed to present serious thought. Absurd! What kind of writers are your editors used to dealing with? I don't think I should let this kind of thing go by without at least a protest, and you're the logical person to protest to. A month after Dwight wrote this letter to Mr. Hibbs at his lecture in Iowa City, someone in the audience asked if he considered The New Yorker high culture. Sadly, this part wasn't recorded, but according to the transcript, this is how he answered. The New Yorker is a middlebrow, but with a difference.

And the difference is essentially that the other middlebrow magazines, like Harper's, are frightened to death of their readers. Whereas the New Yorker pays almost no attention to its readers. It never makes an attempt to get subscribers, for instance. Dwight McDonald also brought up the Saturday Evening Post's rejection of his article during this audience Q&A session. They rejected it, he said, on the grounds that I was covering up for The New Yorker. I think personally that they didn't want to print it because it was a thoroughgoing attack on mass culture and middle-brow culture. And this was a way they figured out how to put me on the spot. Dwight spent a few months feeling out editors at other magazines, The Atlantic, Esquire. He even

tried Encounter, but they all said no. In the end, William Phillips, one of the editors at Partisan Review, convinced Dwight to let him publish it. And on March 8, 1960, William Phillips recorded the financial agreement he made with Dwight MacDonald. We will pay him approximately $300 for the piece, two sections, and a $500 advance on the pamphlet, which we will publish in the fall, charging probably 75 cents per copy, and we get half. This is a far cry from the $2,500 the Saturday Evening Post had promised. Plus, William Phillips only paid Dwight 200.

Although, he did throw in a giant stack of pamphlets. Partisan Review published the first half of Mass Cult Mid-Cult in its Spring 1960 issue. As I mentioned earlier, Dwight gave Kenneth Tynan a copy before he left town for London in May. In the introduction, Dwight recounts his long history with the subject. I first crystallized my ideas about mass culture in an article in Politics in February of 1944, an article called A Theory of Popular Culture. Politics was the name of Dwight McDonald's own little magazine. He shut it down in 1949 because he decided to turn from politics to culture. My first article on popular culture, Dwight continued in his introduction to Mass Cult, Mid Cult, Part One, was recapitulated with extensive additions and deletions for an essay called

A Theory of Mass Culture, published in the summer 1953 issue of Diogenes. Curiously, this 1953 piece was supposed to run in a Ford Foundation-funded cultural Cold War magazine called New Perspectives USA. But the editor, James Laughlin, refused to publish it. He passed it off instead to a UNESCO-funded French journal called Diogenes. Dwight got his revenge in 1955 when he profiled the Ford Foundation for the New Yorker. Mr. Laughlin, having become alarmed by the congressional investigations of foundations, has tended to exclude material from New Perspectives USA critical of the American way of life.

These are the same charges Dwight leveled at Encounter magazine in 1958 when they refused to publish his article America, America, and at the Saturday Evening Post when they refused to publish MassCultMidCult a year later. In fact, the entire history of Dwight McDonald's critique of mass culture is a story about rejection and marginalization. But if you zoom in, on the years he was involved with the Congress for Cultural Freedom, from 1956 when he went to London to finish his Critique of American Mass Culture book, to the publication of his essay, Mass Cult Midcult in 1960, well, another descriptive reveals itself. Containment.

In the summer of 1960, as MassCult MidCult Part 1 was circulating, the Congress for Cultural Freedom celebrated its 10-year anniversary with a giant intellectual conference in Berlin. MassCulture was one of the main topics, and Edward Schills, the CCF guy who ran the 1959 Mass Culture Conference we talked about in Episode 6, was once again the chair and host. And Dwight McDonald was once again not invited.

Dwight expressed his frustrations and offered explanations for his exclusion in a letter to a friend. William Phillips was invited, Dwight wrote, because after all, the Congress publishes partisan review, in form at least. The second half of MassCultMidCult ran in the fall 1960 issue of Partisan Review. It contains Dwight McDonald's critique of middle-brow culture, mid-cult. Mid-brow, or mid-cult rather, combines the worst features of high culture and mass culture. It combines the pretentiousness of high culture and the vulgarity of mass culture. Dwight McDonald's concept of mid-cult is what distinguishes him from all the other critics of mass culture from this period. And this essay is really the only time he attempts

to explain his idea using examples. I believe we have the Saturday Evening Post's Mr. Cobbler to thank for that. Oh, here's some scenery for those of you who think you have to have scenery. One of the examples Dwight chose to write about was Thornton Wilder's play Our Town. Nice town. You know what I mean? What I thought of Our Town was, I don't know why nobody's mentioned this,

it's the most obvious connection with Our Town and the covers by Norman Rockwell for the Saturday Post because both of them have this absolutely perfect eye for all the corny cliches about American small-town life. You know, just the situations. I mean, for instance, that drugstore scene, you know, the guy with his girl in the drugstore in Bashful and so on, and then you discover you don't have any money, you know, to pay for the sodas and so on and so on. I mean, it's all just, we've seen it all. I don't think any small town, I've never lived in one, but I've always lived in New York City,

but I can't believe that, I just can't believe that people could have been as cliche as that at any time. On the other hand, our town also has, you know, technical innovations, or rather, what would have been at one point, the idea of town also has, you know, technical innovations, or rather what would have been at one point, the idea of the stage manager, you know, on a play, on a scene, making comments, which of course he got from the Chinese theater, and also from the Chinese theater, the imaginary sets and props. But on the other hand, the stage manager, who is a technical innovation, himself is so reassuring

because, you know, he's one of these small town editors smoking his pipe and ruminating and very mellow and philosophical. Oh, God. Our Town, Dwight McDonald says, exhibits mid-cult's two primary characteristics. In technique, they are just enough advanced to be impressive to the middle bows, but not enough to really worry them. And that's one thing. And secondly, this technique is allied to very familiar ultra-American themes. They're all very American, in quotation marks. Now, I don't believe any of Dwight McDonald's critics ever dug too deeply into the difference between his conception of mass and middle-brow culture. In fact, it's pretty obvious that as far as they were concerned, all of it was anti-American.

But his warning about Midcult, the false good masquerading as the true good, as he called Colin Wilson's 1956 book, The Outsider, is not only one of the best descriptions of America's culture industry, it's also an incredibly easy-to-grasp definition of propaganda. Actually, the trouble with Midcult is that it isn't popularization. It doesn't give you a simplified version or an elementary version of a reality. On the contrary, it really affects and changes this aesthetic reality. In the first episode of this series,

I promised you a story, the real story about how the debate over mass culture ended. I teased a story that involved psychological warfare, covert propaganda, and Cold War secret intelligence agencies. And while both CIA and IRD play significant roles, the key acronym in this story, and the other two stories in this miniseries, is ROI. In episode six, I introduced you to Dwight McDonald's enemy, Edward Shills, and the network of Cold War sociologists and propagandists who had their own theory of mass

culture and mass media to promote. A theory that forever changed the field of mass communications when the sociologist Paul Lazarsfeld published his 1955 book, Personal Influence. Here's communications scholar Jefferson Pooley again, explaining the importance of Paul Lazarsfeld's theory of personal influence. In the late 30s, working with Frank Stanton, the future CBS president, he had found that, to his surprise, radio broadcasts don't tend to change people's opinions much. He also found that attempts to change people's opinions face-to-face tend to work a little bit better. And what he would then proceed to do is relate those two things together in different ways, with different conclusions. So on the one hand, he could say something like,

here's a blueprint to do propaganda. It's really hard because mass media doesn't work on its own. However, if you want to influence Indian intellectuals, make sure you send an American message through credible third-party Indian opinion leaders, and that will be effective in a way that American messages wouldn't be. On the other hand, he could take the same basic idea that personal influence is more powerful and treat personal influence, these small social groups, as a buffer between the mass media and the local community as reassuring evidence that the fears of domestic mass media influence are overblown and that we need not be worried.

In Dwight McDonald's archive at Yale, I found another articulation of this personal influence theory. In fact, it's the very first item he added to a mass culture research folder he created in 1956, just before he left for his year at Encounter in London. It's a news clipping from the June 12, 1956 edition of the New York Times, an article about CBS president Frank Stanton's testimony before the Senate's Interstate and Foreign Commerce Committee, a committee that was threatening America's television industry with anti-monopoly regulation. Frank Stanton testified that regulations would not only be a colossal backward step for America, they were also unnecessary. The public dictated what was put on the air because it always turned off the show it did not like. He described the viewer, not the network executive, as the industry's monitor-in-chief.

Dwight McDonald highlighted that part with a red pen. Frank Stanton began his career working, as Jefferson Pooley just noted, in Paul Lazarsfeld's lab at Columbia University. And during his June 1956 testimony, Frank Stanton brought up personal influences, core arguments, again and again to debunk the argument that a television monopoly was inherently dangerous to the American viewer. And these arguments won over the committee. It's a great pleasure, gentlemen, to introduce to you Dr. Frank Stanton. In 1962, Frank Stanton delivered a lecture on mass media and mass culture

at Dartmouth College's brand new culture hub, the Hopkins Center. It is one of the most hopeful signs of our times, I think. Frank Stanton was actually supposed to deliver a lecture at the 1959 Mass Culture Conference we talked about in Episode 6. But he bailed at the last moment when he learned that his boss, William Paley, had already called dibs on the CBS private jet. This 1962 lecture, while similar to the one he wrote for the kitsch debate in the Poconos,

is more like a victory speech. Our man Dwight McDonald even gets a kick in the teeth. Writers have had a field day visiting new deformities upon the English language in such coined words as mass cult and mid-cult that threaten to survive more for their ugliness than for their relevance. The chairman of the American Library Association's Broadcasting Committee has said, Dramatization of classics on television inspires people to read or re-read books. Public affairs commentaries and documentaries have been sending people back to history books.

We look upon television as a tremendous motivational force, and we haven't even scratched the surface. On November 8, 1960, Richard Wright delivered a lecture at the American Church in Paris. He called it, The Position of the Negro Artist and Intellectual in American Society. It was his final public appearance. In 1940, I published a novel called Native Son. For some reason, the Book of the Month Club selected that novel for international distribution, sent it into the homes and schools and libraries of white Americans.

The effect was little, short, and astonishing. You can hear him reading from the pages of the manuscript that's in his archive at Yale. This one, like many of the writings we've talked about over the course of this series, has never been published. Richard Wright often used his famous book Native Son as a starting point to introduce himself and his own position in literature,

that of a radically independent, free thinker. I can safely state that until the publication of Native Son, there had not been written a description in the United States on a national scale, a novel that did not reflect either the church attitude toward the Negro or the attitude of the philanthropically minded or determined notions of the subsidized Negro leadership. In his essay, How Bigger Was Born, Richard Wright explains how he came to write his radical novel. In this lecture, he wants to explain the consequences

that came from writing such a radical novel. But the appearance of the book had another and deeper meaning. A meaning that even I did not at the time realize until I had the honor of meeting the Dean of American Sociologists, the late Dr. Robert E. Park. I recall clearly my walking into the living room of the community center that evening and being greeted by an infirm, white-ha gentleman who insisted with a to miss Kane he was a southerner upon rising from his chair to greet me I urged him to remain seated I rise in your honor sir dr. Park said I told him that that was not necessary then dr.

Park staring at me with hard eyes said said, How in hell did you happen? I blinked. I didn't know what he meant and told him so. Don't you know, Dr. Park, again, that there are $25 million over there on Ellis Avenue to help people like you? We've been spending millions of dollars left by the late Julius Rosenwald fund to educate Negroes. This book you've written was supposed to have been done by writers we helped. Now you wrote a book and made the problem national. What happened? I knew now what the good doctor meant. I was perhaps the first independent-minded Negro that Dr. Park had ever met in all his life, and he was justly baffled. He had a good right to be. Suppose Negro literature in the United States were no longer under the control, direct or indirect, of institutions influenced by religion or a Negro leadership enjoying its prestige by being subsidized by guilt-ridden whites.

What would that literature say? Richard Wright grew up in the racist and corrupt American South. And in his autobiography, Black Boy, he credits the poverty and neglect he suffered as a child for turning him into a radically free thinker. In this lecture, he takes this ironic reasoning even further. I'm sure that if a Negro university had ever gotten hold of me or a high school, for that matter, I would have been too conditioned to prudence to have ever written a single book I've written.

You have the right to say that what I've written is good or bad, but you cannot say that it was controlled by the influences extant in the black belts. It was a free expression, and even Julius Rosenwald's millions were nowhere near me when I sat down to write. Julius Rosenwald, the Chicago millionaire, comes up a number of times in this lecture. In 1917, Rosenwald invested some of his millions into a fund to support African American writers, artists, musicians, researchers, and intellectuals. In 1948, the Rosenwald Fund ceased operations. One of its final grantees was the young James Baldwin.

In fact, Baldwin used his Rosenwald money to buy his plane ticket to France. This lecture is actually the piece of writing that contains Richard Wright's version of the fight he had with James Baldwin. Over the essays, Baldwin wrote about Richard Wright shortly after his arrival in France. We talked about this fight in episode one. Unfortunately, I can't play you the audio because someone cut this section from this recording. I can, however, read you what Richard Wright wrote. Here's his setup. One night, Richard Wright and his friend Chester Himes were drinking at a Parisian cafe, the legendary De Mago. They were then joined by James Baldwin, who was accompanied by a white woman named Mrs. Putnam.

For some reason, Richard Wright removed the D from Baldwin's name in this text. So, in the interest of accuracy, we will do the same here. The four of us sat sipping beers, Richard Wright wrote. I want to talk to you, Baldwin said to me. Why not? I said. I'm here. What did you think of that article I wrote about you? Baldwin asked. Baldwin, I didn't know what you were talking about in that article, I said softly,

trying to smile to cushion the shock of my statement. Baldwin glared at me. Don't take me for a child, he warned. What are you talking about, I asked, laughing a bit. That did it. My laughter spurred him to rage. He leapt to his feet and pointed his finger in my face and screamed, I'm going to destroy you. I'm going to destroy your reputation. You'll see. Tell him, Jimmy. Tell him, the white woman, Baldwin's friend,

egged him on. Why don't you tell me? I challenged her. He's telling you for me, the white lady said. I'm sure that what I'm now describing has not been publicly and fully stated before. The recording resumes just after this story. No white feels confident enough to challenge a black intellectual. He seeks other blacks to do that job for him. They have to have in the midst of the Negro some Negro who is willing to state their point of view.

I told you about the history of James Baldwin's essay, Everybody's Protest Novel, in episode one as well. It was first commissioned by Partisan Review, the same little magazine that published Mass Cult Mid-Cult. They commissioned it before James Baldwin left New York for Paris. They ran it in their June 1949 issue, after it debuted in Zero, a Paris-based little magazine. In 1952, New Perspectives USA ran it as well.

That's actually the same Ford Foundation-funded magazine that refused to run Dwight McDonald's critique of mass culture in 1953. James Baldwin is one of the only two African-American writers who were ever published in New Perspectives USA. Everybody's protest novel was paired with a short story about a black writer who did not want to write protest fiction. A story called A No to Nothing by Richard Gibson. And in the poverty-stricken reaches of Negro life, with the strict control over money and institutions that prevail, there are many Negroes who do not even need to be told that somebody is out of line. The Negro rival sniffs money to be had,

influence to be gotten. By defeating one of his own kind, a straight coat is loose. He can sense it. A convict can escape the chain gang, and it is assumed, naturally, that a reward would have been posted for his capture. James Baldwin wrote a second attack on Richard Wright.

This essay is called Many Thousands Gone, and it's a very strange piece written from the perspective of a white person. On November 8th, 1950, he sent it to Partisan Review, this time unsolicited, with a note. The enclosed essay represents perhaps something of an imposition, for what I would like from you is not a simple yes or no, but some idea of what you think of it, Baldwin teased. It is not quite literary criticism, nor altogether social criticism. I would not like it to be read as an attack on Richard Wright, nor am I insensible, perhaps I should say that this letter is confidential, to quite possibly unlucky effects

such a piece as this may have in such a highly charged social situation. But I do think that it says, or at least suggests, certain things of value which have not been said or suggested, and one might as well begin. Partisan Review responded on January 24th, 1951, writing, We like your article very much. Would you allow us to edit it? James Baldwin replied on February 12th, consenting to the editorial request and asking if he could be paid in advance for the piece. And even though Partisan Review had a strict policy of only paying on publication. They paid him in advance. On June 18th, James Baldwin wrote a note of thanks. This is belatedly to thank you for the check. And also, I hope you do not intend to wait too long before publishing it. I would like, if you know what I mean, to get it out of my way.

Give my love to the boys in the back room, and thank you. The heart of what I have to say to you tonight deals with this aspect of the problem. The sharp, morbid attitudes engendered among Negroes, conflict set going among them by this system of control. It is a deadly fight in which brother is set against brother, in which threats of violence are hurled by one black

to another, where vows to cut or kill are voiced. Another section of Richard Wright's lecture, missing from this recording, is something he called, in a margin note he made with a red pen, the problem of the black spy.

All people dislike spies, but speaking ironically and facetiously, I'd like to ask you to view the black spy with some degree of compassion. This is a most difficult job. Spies, if they are going to be good ones, must have what is known as cover stories. For your edification, I'd like to tell you that we've spotted several black spies operating here in Paris. How did we do it? By listening carefully to their cover stories. In his unpublished novel about black spies in Paris, Island of Hallucination, Richard Wright provides Mechanical,

the novel's villain and agent provocateur, with the cover story of Writer. And just to make sure there is no confusion as to which black writer Richard Wright was referring to, he tells us that Mechanical once went to jail in Paris for stealing bedsheets from a hotel, a detail he lifted right out of James Baldwin's March 1955 autobiographical story, Equal in Paris. Richard Wright also warns in his final lecture that black spies often pose as revolutionary communists.

I'd go as far to say that most revolutionary movements in the Western world are government-sponsored. They are launched by agent provocateurs to organize the discontented so that the government can keep an eye on them. If you fail to grasp the meaning of what I'm saying, I can only recommend that you read a classic in this field. G.K. Chesterton's The Man Who Was Thursday. Violence and chaos in the Congo. Barely 11 days after official independence from Belgium, Congolese troops mutinied and began a wave of attacks and looting throughout the far-flung sectors of the former colony.

In November of 1960, when Richard Wright delivered this lecture, the Congo crisis was at its peak. The Belgians, the British, the French, and the Americans were all working behind the scenes to separate the mineral-rich region of Katanga from the newly independent Republic of Congo. Western spies were also trying to assassinate the popular Congolese leader Patrice Lumumba. The CIA tried to kill him with poison toothpaste. A harsh awakening to reality from golden dreams of independence. It's his name. I mean, it can't be direct.

All we can do is try to whenever possible. One of the most amazing things about this recording of Richard Wright's final speech is that it also includes audio from the audience discussion that followed. But the biggest part of the problem, which is all underlined, which you didn't really say, I suppose, because we're all white, is because the whites don't want the Negroes. We get to hear Richard Wright interacting with some of the individuals who came to the American church in Paris to hear him speak. They said the whites don't want them. who came to the American church in Paris to hear him speak I don't know quite how to understand why they support him. Maybe I've just been hearing false news on him, but he looks utterly undesirable.

Well, from the way he's been reported in the press, you couldn't help but think he's undesirable. Okay, now I want to know what you, what... But Lulumba is a Pan-Africanist. They didn't want the Congo, which is the size of India, to be a unitary state. There's no doubt that Lulumba is perhaps not as well qualified as he ought to be. The Belgium's sort of bad. But he was primed desperately to keep this legal state that he inherited unified. And he got a very bad press in the Western world and called them everything.

They applied there in the Congo what I've been explaining to you tonight about the Black Belt. They all divided up and made them fight each other. Yeah, a divide and rule. And a lot of these tribal-minded fellows rather fell for this. That was a tragedy, obviously. On November 27th, the day before Richard Wright's death, Lumumba was convinced to flee the safety of his UN-guarded prison. He was then caught by Mobutu and tortured and executed.

It's still unclear who aided Mobutu more, the Americans or the British. But Daphne Park, the MI6 Leopoldville station chief during the Congo crisis, confided to a friend before her death that she organized the killing. And in an interview she did for the BBC in 1992, she pretty much explained how. How good is the service of what it calls disruptive action, which we used to call covert action? Very good. If only because once you get really good insight intelligence about any group, you are able to learn what the levers of power are and what each man fears from another and what each man is capable will credit another man will be capable of doing it's all a matter of inside knowledge you destroy things from the inside is

that what you're saying you've said to people very discreetly against one another they destroy each other right You don't destroy them. Right. You say that A is sleeping with B's wife. Yes. What a pity that so-and-so is so indiscreet. Not much more. Of course there are much more sophisticated operations than that, but that's roughly the sort of thing. What kind of sophisticated operations? Ah, that I couldn't possibly tell you. translator Margaret Desablonner during the last year of his life. I strung together all the references he made to his doctor, Vladimir Schwarzman, in order to illuminate this strange

relationship. The last two letters also shed light on Richard Wright's relationship with the Congress for Cultural Freedom at the time of his death. On November 23rd, Richard Wright's relationship with the Congress for Cultural Freedom at the time of his death. On November 23rd, Richard Wright wrote Margaret in response to an article she sent him by a Dutch writer named Bep Vuk, an article about the weekend she spent with Richard Wright when he came to Indonesia in 1955 to cover the Bandung Conference. Bep Vuk wrote that she and other Indonesian intellectuals were shocked by Richard Wright's ignorance and insensitivities about racial issues. And she called the book he wrote about his Indonesian travels, The Color Curtain Distorted and inaccurate.

While the article you sent was not unexpected, Richard Wright wrote, I've been attacking here in Paris both in writing, public speeches, and on the radio. And I knew that it was about time for a counterattack to start. Now, Margaret, listen carefully. The tactic of the Americans today is to attack those who disagree with them from the left, an anti-communist left which they have bought and which they control. I'm sure that if you look into the background of Beb Vuk, you'll find that she is backed by the Congress for Cultural Freedom,

which has its headquarters here in Paris. The following day, in his final letter to Margaret de Sablinaire, Richard Wright brought up Beb Vuck again. Find out what organizations this woman works for. If she is a member of the Congress for Cultural Freedom, then all is clear. Some of Richard Wright's biographers believe that in the fall of 1960, he somehow found out that the Congress for Cultural Freedom was an appendage of the CIA rather than the U.S. State Department. But I believe this change of heart was due more to an inner revelation. A revelation that the little support and patronage he received

from the Congress for Cultural Freedom was always meant only to contain him. On December 2nd, 1960, John Hunt, one of the CIA agents in charge of the Congress for Cultural Freedom's Paris office, sent Francois Bondy, the editor of the CCF's French journal, approve an emergency telegram. I'm sending this to you urgently because Mrs. Wright has asked if you could say a few words at the cremation services of Richard Wright. The services will take place at 9.45 a.m. tomorrow at the crematorium in the Père Lachaise Cemetery. The Congress for Cultural Freedom published its final words on Richard Wright in the April 1961 issue of its British magazine, Encounter.

These were written by James Baldwin. I'm not going to read any of those. We are going to say goodbye to Richard Wright with a reading of the end of his final lecture. It's another allusion to the black spies and agent provocateurs of Paris. Unfortunately, this too is missing from the recording. In conclusion, Richard Wright wrote, I could also paraphrase from Shakespeare's Macbeth

by saying, corruption and corruption and corruption eats into petty hearts from day to day, to the last jingle of the cash register. And all our illusions are leading fools the way to moral death. Our informers make life but a walking charade, a poor pretense that struts and frets his hour of deception, and then slinks from our view. It is a tale told by betrayers, full of double-crossing, signifying deceit. Thank you. Okay, so now that we have bid farewell to all three of our main cast members,

I've got a proper conclusion for you. An eight and a half minute story similar to the introduction back at the top of this miniseries. An attempt to illuminate connections between our world and the world of 1960. We are going to end, dear listener, as we began with a movie. A movie set in the final days of Batista's Cuba and filmed just after Castro's revolution. Graham Greene's 1960 black comedy about Cold War spies. Our man in Havana. The film is about James Wormald, a British mild-mannered vacuum cleaner salesman. Did you want a vacuum cleaner?

In a way. One day, an MI6 chief named Hawthorne walks into Wormald's Havana shop and recruits him to become a spy for England. $150 a month and expenses, old man. Tax-free. Wormald, who knows nothing about spycraft or intelligence, says yes because he's a single dad with a 17-year-old daughter named Millie who loves to shop.

There is one thing I want, but I thought we might count it as a Christmas present too, and next year's, and the year after that. Millie, what have you bought? She's awfully cheap. I got all the accessories on credit. The horse is a barely disguised autobiographical reference. You see, back in 1956, writer Graham Greene's daughter, Lucy, wanted a horse ranch, and so he sold the film rights to his novel, The Quiet American, to the highest bidder. This turned out to be a disastrous decision because in 1958, Joseph Mankiewicz, with help from the CIA, transformed Green's anti-American novel into a pro-American movie. Graham Green was so enraged, he decided to personally

manage the film version of his 1958 novel, Our Man in Havana. What are you drawing this time? You made it look like a mysterious new weapon. I've started a new career, science fiction writer, and Esquire magazine's newly hired film critic Dwight McDonald noted, was a peculiar combination of spy thriller and offbeat comedy. You've all seen these drawings? Pretty horrifying, sir. Have you shown them to the Buffins? The Prime Minister asked me that just now.

Wormald sends London drawings of mysterious installations hidden in the Cuban mountains. I never mind paying for results. In reality, drawings of the fast cleaner vacuum tubes he sells in his shop. What did the prime minister say, sir? He said some of these drawings reminded him of a gigantic vacuum cleaner.

London sends the beautiful Beatrice to Havana to assist Wormald. But you have every reason to be confident. You've pulled a big scoop. You're our man in Havana confident. You've pulled a big scoop. You're our man in Havana, the best agent in the Western Hemisphere. The film is incredibly faithful to the novel. For example, the speech Wormald makes at the business luncheon after he realizes Carter, the man from New Cleaners, Fast Cleaners' competitor,

is trying to poison him, is an almost word-for-word rendition. Sorry. Take fast cleaners and new cleaners, for instance. There's no fundamental difference between the two machines any more than there is between two human beings. When Our Man in Havana, the book, hit shelves, a young British get-rich-quick schemer named John Bloom read it and was inspired. He renamed the Dutch twin-tub washing machine he was selling door-to-door the Electromatic. And on September 24th, 1958, he spent £428 on a full-page ad in the Daily Mirror, offering housewives home demonstrations and a direct-to-consumer, no-middleman-involved low-low price.

A direct challenge to Hotpoint, England's establishment washing machine dealer. By 1960, when Our Man in Havana debuted in cinemas, England's washing machine war was in full swing. And John Bloom was a multimillionaire, as he wrote in his autobiography, It isn't a sin to make a profit. And while I can't confirm the veracity of this connection to Graham Greene, it is similar to the stories John Bloom liked to tell about himself, to the celebrities and young girls who frequented the wild parties he threw at his Park Lane mansion in the early 1960s. Guests included the Beatles, the National Theater's

new dramaturg Kenneth Tynan, and Christine Holford, who was later shot to death by her husband Harvey Holford after she taunted him over her lover John Bloom's sexual and business prowess. When Harvey Holford was acquitted of murder, the public gallery erupted with applause, suggesting that they, like the judge, also saw the man with the golden washing machine cufflinks as the sordid affair's true villain. In Graham Greene's story, the British Secret Service assessed the significance of their man in Havana using equally flawed reasoning.

This is another autobiographical note. How'd you know all this? Graham Greene knew too well how badly the real MI6 had been played We penetrated that organization here. by the other side's spies, the Cambridge Five. In a way, you know, it's a compliment. You're dangerous now. But after the other side assassinates Wormholtz's friend, Dr. Hasselbacker, Wormholtz confesses that his reports were fake and his drawings vacuum tubes.

But London's spy chiefs decide to carry on with the false narrative. We've been considering your last report. When I sent that confession, it was the first she knew of. That confession was never received. Understand that clearly. Never received. I'm speaking of something quite different. The report in which you said the constructions had proved a failure. I never said anything of the sort. On the contrary.

And that the works, whatever they were, had been dismantled. In view of that, we've decided to shut down your post. We think the best thing for you... The way I see it, Our Man in Havana is a comedic heads-up, a jovial warning that any history of the late 1950s Cold War era that masks or downplays the influence of the spies is total bullshit. You see that these drawings are destroyed.

They must never get out of here. Yes, sir. I can't say how sorry I am, sir. There's nothing to be sorry for. 5-9-2-W. Happily, these plans never left our office. In our service, it is essential to better the past very quickly and very securely. In the late 1950s, America was determined to roll back and destroy the Soviet Union.

The West's cultural cold warriors and covert propagandists used this broad ideological remit to target communism, as well as anti-Americanism, anti-colonialism, and peaceful coexistence. The profound legacy of all this propaganda, the ROI, extends far beyond Cold War triumph. It built the world we live in today. Not all propaganda is art. Was researched, written, and produced by me, Benjamin Walker. Andrew Calloway mixed and sound designed the whole thing. Special thanks to family and friends for the support over the long course of this project

and to everyone who is in the series, especially Jim Campbell, Merve Fizula, and Jefferson Pooley. You can find more information about the series in the show notes and the special audio footnotes companion podcast I created for the series, Propaganda Notes and Sources. Also, thanks to everyone at Radiotopia from PRX for all the care and support getting this into the world. And now that this mini-series is complete, please, dear listener, share it with a friend and rate it on whatever podcast platform you use. Thank you. Radiotopia from PRX