Conceiving Liberty in Pax Americana

In 1945, after decades of destruction and deprivation, freedom in Europe seemed to be within grasp. In contrast to the post-World War I retreat into isolationism, the United States, intent on forging a world order grounded in liberal democracy and capitalist prosperity, assumed global leadership. Melvin Leffler’s seminal A Preponderance of Power: National Security, the Truman Administration, and the Cold War (1992) set the terms of debate regarding postwar national and international economic, political, and colonial rearrangements. That doorstopper of a book began as the guns fell silent in Germany, a moment the defeated nation dubbed Stunde Null (“Zero Hour”), and representatives of Imperial Japan signed the Instrument of Surrender aboard the USS Missouri. Louis Menand’s The Free World: Art and Thought in the Cold War surveys the same landscape, but from a different angle. The Free World seeks to map out why, in this Pax Americana, paintings and poems, music and movies seemed to actualize liberty. Menand canvasses the shearing forces that caused this faulting and folding in art and ideas as Americans pivoted away from war footing. The Free World does not explore the use of culture as a weapon against Communism abroad, a field expertly mined by Frances Stonor Saunders’ landmark The Cultural Cold War: The CIA and the World of Arts and Letters (1991) and, more recently, Cold War Modernists: Art, Literature, and American Cultural Diplomacy (2015) by Greg Barnhisel. Nor does Menand concern himself with the impact of politics on national identity, a vantage point first sketched by Stephen Whitfield’s The Culture of the Cold War (1991). In the context of superpower rivalry, totalitarian peril, and decolonization, Menand carves out deft insights as they form, strike, renovate, and ricochet—sometimes with a chisel, other times with a scalpel. The Free World ends with a bang rather than concludes, bringing Kennan’s prescription of Soviet containment to its logical conclusion in Operation Rolling Thunder, which rained down three-hundred pounds of bombs for every woman, man, and child in North Vietnam. The engines of American political, intellectual, artistic, and moral authority, developed over the previous two decades, came screeching to a halt, shifting