Review Essay
The Art of War
Can Culture Drive Geopolitics?
By Beverly Gage
January/February 2022
Around 1949, fresh out of college at Northwestern University, my mother moved to New York to take a job at NBC. She arrived at the dawn of U.S. television. NBC had entered the business just about a decade earlier. Rather than being assigned to a sitcom or a variety show, she ended up at the NBC Opera Theatre, one of the splashiest, most expensive ventures in the new lineup. The corporation had long sponsored its own radio orchestra under the leadership of the famed conductor Arturo Toscanini, who had fled Mussolini’s Italy in the 1930s for refuge in the United States. When television came along, executives assumed that one of its functions would be to make Toscanini-style high culture available to the American masses. That dream—that a major television orchestra and opera company would be both popular and profitable—lasted an astonishing 15 years, from 1949 to 1964, before NBC concluded that the future of television lay elsewhere.
This is roughly the time period covered in Louis Menand’s new book, The Free World. Menand is less interested in classical impresarios such as Toscanini than in the cultural innovators of the age: the philosophers and composers and painters and wise-man diplomats whose ideas put them at the cutting edge of Western culture. In Menand’s telling, for a brief period following World War II, U.S. liberalism proved its power and luster by creating a society open enough to foster vibrant exchange in the realm of high culture, art, and ideas—and rich enough to sustain the men and women engaged in such work. That moment came crashing to an end in the 1960s, as challenges at home and abroad tarnished the United States’ self-conception as the epicenter of “the free world.” While it lasted, it produced something like a golden age of intellectual and artistic experimentation, with a bona fide popular audience.
https://www.foreignaffairs.com/reviews/review-essay/2021-12-14/art-war-culture-geopolitics
