Notes on a Foreign Country

by Suzy Hansen

  The Henry Luce phenomenon meant that a certain kind of magazine language—phrases such as “Who Lost China?” “Who Lost Vietnam?” “Who Lost Iran?”—would become embedded in American psyches, and were automatically deployed by editors and headline writers. We journalists always mourn the loss of a more independent, more vibrant, better-paying media, especially in the era of Twitter. But ostensibly independent magazines and television programs had not so long ago engaged in pro-American propaganda. It wouldn’t be surprising if that legacy had lasted to this day, even if in watered-down forms. Was not the language of the war on terror—good versus evil, the identification of “enemies,” a sense of Islam as an enormous, monolithic force—similar to these Luceian representations of a bloblike communism? In order for Americans to believe in their own superiority, they also had to avoid questioning their own lives and the system in which they lived. I wasn’t sure I believed that American faculties, during this comparatively rebellious era of the 1950s and 1960s, could have been so easily disabled, until I came across a book called Workshops of Empire.

  In 2014, the academic Eric Bennett uncovered the history of the University of Iowa Writers’ Workshop, one of the most prestigious MFA programs in the country to this day. Iowa had been founded at a time when all over the country “American studies” departments were popping up to establish America as a distinct civilization, an endeavor that grew out of the era of Cold War attempts to counter the popularity of Marxism. Similarly, the University of Iowa writing program’s patrons were Luce-like conservatives crusading for the United States in the Cold War. They wanted to design a literature program that “fortified democratic values at home and abroad.”

  To start, the University of Iowa founders sought out specific types of American writers. They disregarded people who were devoted to social justice and leftist causes that, in their view, were juvenile. They encouraged, instead, those writers whose work was “preoccupied by family and self.” Once in the classroom, University of Iowa professors taught their students to avoid politics in favor of composing literature that would illuminate the human and smaller moments of life. As Bennett observes, a specific sensibility spread across America’s landscape of fiction, one that celebrated beautiful sentences and quiet observations, suburban malaise and inward-looking anxieties, a literary form that would naturally tend toward the domestic. “Today’s creative-writing department specializes in sensory and biographical memory,” Bennett writes, “such as how icicles broken from church eaves on winter afternoons taste of asphalt.”

  One point of Bennett’s book is that the University of Iowa’s philosophy of fiction privileged the sanctity of personal experience—the preciousness of the individual—over the idea that our identities are shaped by the community or political systems or larger historical forces. Bennett believes that the University of Iowa not only drove writers away from exploring political ideas, but in the end undermined true artistic freedom. What if American creativity had been shaped in a way that was oblivious to the limits that had been set for it? Did that not mean American minds had those same limits? Was this why Kamila Shamsie found no American novelists inclined to write about the countries with which America was militarily involved? “The thing to lament is not only that we have a bunch of novels about harpoons and dinghies (or suburbs or bad marriages or road trips or offices in New York),” Bennett writes. “The thing to lament is also the dead end of isolation that comes from describing the dead end of isolation.” It was possible that our highly valued American individualism might have been the ultimate force that detached citizens from the actions of their government, and from the fate of the country as a whole. Once I started looking, I found that the ethos of Cold War programming seeped into every public and private enterprise; under the guise of their own freedom, Americans were creating products that would inculcate in Americans a deep patriotism. Even things like international hotels didn’t escape such ideological manipulation, which I discovered after a Turkish professor of architecture told me, “You need to research Conrad Hilton to understand America’s influence in Turkey.”

  The hotel magnate Conrad Hilton was, like Henry Luce, a fervent Christian, capitalist, and anti-Communist. He believed that the Cold War should be fought not only with bombs but with room service. Hilton wanted to show off to the Communists “the fruits of the free world” with his hotels, which he explained, according to the writer Annabel Jane Wharton, were “not only to produce a profit, but also to make a political impact on host countries.” So with funds from the Marshall Plan, Hilton opened his vertical “Little Americas” in Athens, Cairo, and Jerusalem. Hilton’s most important hotel, however, was in Istanbul, whose proximity to the Soviet Union gave it symbolic and practical significance. The Istanbul Hilton would be America’s last commercial outpost before enemy territory. Even the hotel’s windows faced east across the Bosphorus.

  As an advertisement for the modern ways of American life, the Hilton in Istanbul was a magnet to local aspirants. The hotel was where the wealthy Turkish secular classes held their weddings and social engagements and, as Hilton had hoped, learned to admire America. In the novel The Museum of Innocence, Orhan Pamuk’s narrator says that “when I was ten, my parents attended the opening of the hotel, a very exciting occasion for them, along with all of Istanbul society, as well as the long-forgotten American film star Terry Moore,” and that on Sunday evenings, they “would go as a family to eat that amazing thing called a hamburger, a delicacy as yet offered by no other restaurant in Turkey.” Newspapers even dispatched reporters to the Hilton to break news of its latest technological innovations and design styles. For Turks who aspired to be “Western,” there was no better place to be seen than the American Hilton.

  But Hilton’s hotels were intended not only to fill foreigners with dreams of America. They were also meant as a refuge for Americans when traveling abroad. Hilton wanted the hotels to remind all Americans of their paradise back home, their own polished, peaceful modernity: enormous, clean-lined, and spic-and-span foyers, ice water (rare in Istanbul then), the latest technological gadgetry, and unsurpassable hamburgers. The Hilton was there to discourage American customers from spending too much time in a foreign culture, from considering other ways of life. When I had visited the Hilton, I thought it was an emissary for corporate America, but had not considered that it might be a Cold War outpost for America itself.

  Somehow this made the propaganda at the International Press Freedom conference I attended, where I had listened to the American journalist holding forth on the wonders of the military in Turkey, an even more profound occurrence. The ability to discern bias in political conversations or books was not enough. The totality of Americanism was something that often an individual couldn’t see. It was too enormous, and too omnipresent. It might be embedded in the sentences of our novels. It might be embedded in the language we read in magazines, and in the language I myself as a journalist used. As Claus Offe writes, “The United States is no longer a spatially distant entity but a military, commercial and cultural presence, here and now, in a common space. American realities have in part become our reality.” This global system, this common space, was no doubt in part due to American efforts during the Cold War, in which control, influence, and warfare needed to be unacknowledged in order to fully succeed in creating a global citizenry of American moderns who believed they came to their admiration for America on their own. If I had not known that magazines, plays, books, writing programs, newspapers—even hotels!—had all been produced to shape my sense of America’s greatness, then what sort of individuality did I actually possess? Did I possess any at all?

  * * *

  AMERICANS REGARD THE 1950S as a golden era, a time when foreigners viewed them with admiration and longing; indeed, in Turkey and much of Europe, many defeated citizens would come to hunger for the advantages, the cars and fashions and prosperity, of the United States. But in this period of imperial expansion, many saw things differently. During and after the w
ar, European exiles and expats, intellectuals and novelists, scientists and doctors, imbued with the wisdom of older civilizations, sensed deeper problems in American society. They were, after a while, alarmed.

  Some of these European writers saw similarities, in fact, between American liberalism and the totalitarianism or German fascism they had escaped. The novelist Thomas Mann fled Germany in the 1930s for the United States, grateful for its sanctuary and dazzled by its promise. But by the 1950s, when the McCarthyites persecuted anyone Communist or insufficiently anti-Communist, he reversed his position on America, seeing it as a place with a diminished sense of justice. Theodor Adorno felt “an existential debt of gratitude” for America, but, like many fellow members of the Frankfurt School, hated its conformity, which reminded him of the fascism he had left behind in Germany. The Italian writer Italo Calvino thought American liberalism “a totalitarian structure of a medieval kind, based on the fact that no alternative exists.” These foreigners saw something authoritarian in American rhetoric, American myths, and American confidence.

  When he visited New York for the first time in 1946, Albert Camus wrote in his journal that America was a “country where everything is done to prove that life isn’t tragic.” In his view, “one must reject the tragic after having looked at it, not before.” Here again was Baldwin’s accusation that white Americans had no sense of tragedy, which I had begun to see operating in tandem with the country’s terrible innocence about its own deeds. When they met in New York, an elderly Alfred Stieglitz, the photographer, told Camus, “Don’t hope for anything from America. Are we an end or a beginning? I think we’re an end. It’s a country that doesn’t know love.”

  Baldwin once explained that what he meant when he said Americans lacked a sense of tragedy was that they couldn’t grasp that life itself was a risk, that there was no such thing as safety, that eventually we all suffer and die, and that the acceptance of this fact is precisely what empowers us to struggle and endure. Black spirituals, he said, conveyed this sense of tragedy. I can only guess that Camus and Stieglitz sensed that a country in denial of its own history of slavery—that had in fact, as I knew, defined its own best qualities against a prejudiced and hateful image of blacks—would become a country that at its root was hollow. Because the Americans had never looked their tragic history in the face, they could delude themselves into believing that their own comparable superiority might create a better world, a life so ideal that tragedy wouldn’t even exist. It was an American dream that demanded the denial of all those who suffered from its hopeless pursuits, and could only be achieved if Americans stopped feeling. Octavio Paz, writing from Mexico, observed that the Americans’ “self-assurance and confidence” didn’t prevent self-criticism necessarily, but only as long as it was the kind of criticism “that respects the existing systems and never touches the roots.” The sense of tragedy that Baldwin had been talking about would have been one Americans carried with them if they were aware that their miraculous country had been founded on a crime. The love that they couldn’t feel, as Stieglitz had said, was the love they didn’t manifest for all of their compatriots. Octavio Paz, as a Mexican well acquainted with the American way of empire, watched the coming half of the century with dismay. “It is impossible to hold back a giant,” Paz writes. “It is possible, though far from easy, to make him listen to others; if he listens, that opens the possibility of coexistence.”

  From a distance, foreigners could see this American tidal wave enveloping their lives. Along with the CIA and the State Department propaganda schemes came the NGOs and the military, even to places as unfamiliar as Pakistan. There, observers recognized that something unprecedented was happening throughout the world; that their own lives would be affected by this new form of empire rising in the West. In 1954, a man from the American consulate in Islamabad asked Saadat Manto, a well-known short story writer, to contribute to the consulate’s “magazine,” which it published in order to sway Pakistani sympathies toward the United States. In his “Letters to Uncle Sam,” Manto told a different story. As early as the 1950s, Manto saw that the demonization of communism in Asia would empower the only social and political force that might have the will to defeat it: Islamic fundamentalism. “I think the only purpose of military aid is to arm these mullahs,” he writes. “I can visualize the mullahs, their hair trimmed with American scissors and their pajamas stitched by American machines in strict conformity with the Sharia.”

  But Manto knew the Americans only wanted to hear about their achievements, and so with the same sarcasm and faux flattery Malaparte employed about the good-natured, careless American soldiers of Naples, Manto praised the Americans like a schoolteacher.

  “You have done many good deeds yourself and continue to do them,” he writes. “You decimated Hiroshima, you turned Nagasaki into smoke and dust, and you caused several thousand American children to be born in Japan.”

  * * *

  AFTER THE WAR, and the defeat of the European powers, the Americans suddenly found themselves able to take advantage of a ready-made empire of formerly colonized peoples that would come to be known as the “Third World.” In response, the Truman administration conceived of what is known as his Point Four Program, a plan ostensibly meant to aid the benighted countries of the planet. “We must embark on a bold new program,” Truman said, “for making the benefits of our scientific advances and industrial progress available for the improvement and growth of underdeveloped areas.” Truman’s words had the magical effect of turning a colonial endeavor into a humanitarian mission, in effect saying to the developing world, “We can help you be like us.” “Modernization” would end up being the Americans’ cleverest euphemism for empire building after 1950, and though the history of “modernization theory” has been deconstructed in countless academic books—Nils Gilman’s Mandarins of the Future, Hemant Shah’s The Production of Modernization, among many others—this most indestructible of American Cold War mentalities still seems to underpin Americans’ fundamental sense of reality.

  In the 1950s, a group of sociologists, economists, and political scientists that would over time include Daniel Lerner, Lucian Pye, Walt Rostow, and to a lesser extent “clash of civilizations” theorist Samuel Huntington, gathered under the auspices of the Center for International Studies (CIS) at MIT in Boston—at the behest of the CIA—in order to conceive of a new Cold War foreign policy. These white men knew better than to formulate foreign policy based on old racist notions of genetic superiority as the Europeans had done. Colonialism had gone out of fashion. Instead these white men conjured new racist notions in order to justify their involvement and expansion throughout the post-colonial world.

  Among their decisions, in the words of the historian Michael Hunt, was to “diminish other people by exaggerating the seemingly negative aspects of their lives and by constricting the perceived range of their skills, accomplishments, and emotions.” Once such backwardness was established in places such as Turkey, Iran, and Afghanistan, then the Americans could justify any kind of intervention, whether economic, cultural, or military. This “modernization theory” meant imposing the West’s system of governance (“democracy”), its system of economy (“capitalism”), and its lifestyle practices (“freedom”) on foreign countries in order to lead them down, according to Hemant Shah, the “irresistible and obviously superior path” to modernity. The Americans decided not to use the word “Westernization” to describe their theory, so as to appear neutral. As Gilman writes, the difference between the Europeans and the Americans was that the Europeans never even imagined that colonized peoples were capable of being as modern as Europeans. The Americans wholeheartedly believed they could make anyone into an American.

  That is why, Shah explains, when Americans speak about foreign countries, they use a rhetoric of “development,” words like “resistant to reform,” “left behind,” “spread of democracy and free markets,” “a place of despair,” and “strengthening civil society.” Much of that language w
as language I myself used all the time. Even when I asked Turks the seemingly basic and obvious question “Will this country ever become a democracy?” I was not, as I thought, being a tough journalist. I was parroting the assumptions of modernization theory, the only paradigm I had for understanding the rest of the world.

  The theorists of that time, however, had a problem: Americans did not want to think of themselves as imperialists, or occupiers. Someone else would have to force foreigners to embrace modernity. Who would it be? Modernization theorists feared that democratic leaders vulnerable to communism, Islamism, or any other enemyism of the United States would fail to carry through American industrialization programs and create a capitalist system. Instead, the types of leaders the Americans preferred to accomplish these tasks were military dictators. The popular argument that America had erred in the twentieth century by “tolerating” military dictatorships—Turkey, Pakistan, Iran, Egypt, half of Latin America—missed the point completely. The United States didn’t tolerate military dictatorships; it fostered them.

  In 1961, the CIS grandee Walt Rostow, whose book The Stages of Economic Growth was a bestseller in the 1960s, became President John F. Kennedy’s national security advisor. To Rostow, modernization was “unidirectional,” as if it were a path set by God. As Kennedy’s advisor, Rostow’s academic faith in America’s missionary role in the modernization of other countries led to the invasion, occupation, and destruction of Vietnam. At the same time that Walt Rostow was “sincerely interested in improving the welfare of postcolonial peoples,” Gilman writes, “he was directing the killing of Vietnamese peasants.” Again, that word “sincere.” William Appleman Williams and Nils Gilman seemed to be saying that Cold War Americans were sincere when they oppressed and killed people in order to transform their countries into one similar to America, which makes these American intellectuals seem sociopathic, or delusional, or both.