The End of Victory Culture: Cold War America and the Disillusioning of a Generation
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  • Book Review: "The End of Victory Culture : Cold War America and the Disillusioning of a Generation"
  • one of my favorites...
  • A different perspective on post-war culture and history
  • Good on Media, Bad on History
The End of Victory Culture: Cold War America and the Disillusioning of a Generation
Tom Engelhardt
Manufacturer: Basic Books
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Hardcover

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ASIN: 0465019846

Book Description

In a substantial new afterword to his classic account of the collapse of American triumphalism in the wake of World War II, Tom Engelhardt carries that story into the twenty-first century. He explores how, in the aftermath of September 11, 2001, the younger George Bush headed for the Wild West (Osama bin Laden, "Wanted, Dead or Alive"); how his administration brought "victory culture" roaring back as part of its Global War on Terror and its rush to invade Saddam Hussein's Iraq; and how, from its "Mission Accomplished" moment on, its various stories of triumph crashed and burned in that land.

Customer Reviews:

4 out of 5 stars Nice and easy.......2007-08-31

Nice and easy - I was very pleased with the service and timelyness. Plus the book is in great condition

5 out of 5 stars Book Review: "The End of Victory Culture : Cold War America and the Disillusioning of a Generation".......2006-04-10

American "triumphalism" and the American "war story" began its decline after WWII and collapsed completely after Vietnam (or so the author thought). The victory myth is constructed out of an America history that has its roots in the Puritan struggle. The US had always fought against the evil oppressors of freedom, democracy, and the freedom of peaceful worship. The myth of American triumph was part of 1950s "boy culture" and was depicted on screen in the justifiable slaughter of Indians on the western frontier; cowboys and /or Cavalrymen who rescued families and females from savages; science-fiction and vengeance movies, and eventually in galactic villians and Evil Empires. War stories and movies consumed by Baby Boomers vindicated the annihilation of (usually non-white but always non-American) villains.
Central to the maintenance of the victory culture in American is the "war story" a tale in which there is an evil Other who threatens the United States. Contributing to the end of victory culture was the almost immediate reevaluation of the atomic bombing of Japan after WWII; an event that left the United States looking more terrifying than protective . The Cold War followed the euphoric victory of WWII . In the Cold War there was no victory or defeat; and the enemy and self became blurred and threatened to merge. Many of the villains in the Cold War were other Americans; rather than victory, the US sought containment. Then came Korea, a failed police action, better off forgotten. The Vietnam War was a disaster. Even the president lost enthusiasm for a battle where there appeared to be no definable enemy. Even the sacred cowboy was attacked as racist during the d?nouement of the victory culture. New westerns depicted sociopathic bad guys in cowboy hats rampaging around the West hunting down innocent Indians. In the late 1960s, even military toys were transformed into action figures. "Boy culture" was not recaptured until Ronald Reagan appeared on the scene with his Star Wars rhetoric. George H. W. Bush seized on the opportunity to eliminate the evil dictator Saddam Hussein; only to have his efforts to win a "war to re-establish war, American style" and capture the bad guy fail.
Engelhardt is an active journalist and writer who was surprised in 2000 when the United States elected George W. Bush President. Geroge W. Bush, he says, is a man "who had stayed way too long in those dark movie theaters" watching cowboys and Indians; a man who managed to evade both sides of the Vietnam War debate; a man who glories in the victory clture and wants to relive a period in American history when bugles blared, crowds cheered, and flags waved. In The End of Victory Culture Engelhardt failed to predict that 2005 would see a US President whose dream is to "dress up like G.I. Joe, [and] appear in front of massed ranks of soldiers chanting "hoo-rah," and assure the crowd he was going to bring `em back dead or alive (tomdispatch.com). This book's value is in its examination of the impact of popular culture in shaping public perceptions of the US and its place in the world. Sources include popular culture products such as Mad magazine, TV shows, monster movies, and westerns. Tom Engelhardt graduated from Yale University; he is a book editor and a freelance journalist. He maintains a website, www.tomdispatch.com; is co-founder of the American Empire Project; a consulting editor at Metropolitan Books; a fellow of the Nation Institute; and lecturer at the Graduate School of Journalism, University of California, Berkeley.





5 out of 5 stars one of my favorites..........2006-03-23

With the outcome in Iraq still uncertain more than 3 years after the U.S. led invasion, many people have blamed the media for not being critical enough at the outset of the war. Additionally, as the war rages on, comparisons to Vietnam are becoming especially noticeable as a growing number of people continue to question our involvement in Iraq.

These two relatively recent phenomena of questioning the media's role in wartime and the tendency for U.S citizens to be skeptical of their government during war took root during the Vietnam war.

According to Tom Englehardt in "The End of Victory Culture," prior to Vietnam the media played a key role in perpetuating the idea of a noble and just United States battling savages of color including Native Americans and Japanese soldiers in World War II.

The public eagerly imbibed this "victory culture," regularly attending movies featuring John Wayne defending America by battling Indians; playing games like "cowboys and indians;" and reading cartoons featuring horribly caricatured Japanese and Chinese soldiers, never questioning the integrity of the government or doubting United States policies.

A seismic shift occured during Vietnam when, for the first time, Americans became especially frustrated over a war that could no longer be justified by statements from the President. Demonstrations raged throughout the country as the once sacred tenants of U.S. heroism and leadership were shattered.

During this time, the media's role transformed as well. Rather than mindlessly trumpeting American nobility, the media worked doggedly to unearth the truth. David Halberstam's coining of the term "quagmire" when referring to war and Morley Saffert's piece revealing the horrible killings of helpless Vietnamese villagers are just two examples that Englehardt cites.

Although accounts from Vietnam and World War II comprise the bulk of Englehardt's thesis, he provides copious examples of the movies and excerpts from television programs when talking about the 1980's in an effort to further demonstrate the dismantling of the "victory culture."

Brilliantly written and extremely well documented, Englehardt has written a gem of a book that remains as relevant today as it was 11 years ago when it was first published.

5 out of 5 stars A different perspective on post-war culture and history.......2006-03-07

Tom Engelhardt's dense but throughly readable cultural history presents the past fifty-six years of American history as an investigation of narrative. A common theme in analysis of nationalism and nationality is the concept of an historical narrative that members of a nationality look to for explaining their present position within their world. Engelhardt investigates a time period that saw, as he argues, a violent uprooting and reconfiguration of the American cultural narrative.

This narrative makes use of a wide ranging set of metpahors and images, such as the frontier and its mythology of American innocence, that have helped Americans understand their position within a complex and ever changing world. World War II provided the last war in which the innocence of America was posited with little debate (although the dropping of the atom bomb indeed challenged this innocence).

The beginning of the cold war and military endeavors in Korea and Viet Nam saw a gradual erroding of this narrative of innocence. As the enemy became harder to identify, at times even looking like ourselves in the case of anti-communism, the moral clarity and absolute innocence of American military actions disolved. Engelhardt takes a sweeping view of the last half-century of American history and tracks the profound shift in narrative and cultural understanding that we are still dealing with. It would be interesting to see what Engelhardt would say about September 11th. I would argue it has restored much of America's innocence, allowing us to attack Iraq with little domestic objection.

Engelhardt writes with an engaging voice helping to make what could be a tedious read quite enjoyable. At times his ideas can be difficult to connect, making this a book to be tackled as quickly as possible so that the plethora of information and full scope of the analysis can be engaged without loosing what was written in earlier pages. Do not expect any sort of 'traditional' work of history. This is for the students of American culture and anyone interested in the intricacies and complexities of the American identity. When you read this book, to a large extent you are learning about yourself.

3 out of 5 stars Good on Media, Bad on History.......2005-09-12

Although he provides an in depth analysis of the modern media's role creating stereotypes of "non-whites", he actually attempts to say that this was the primary motivater to fight our "enemies" for centuries. This, of course, is nonsense. The Revolutionary War, Barbary Wars, War of 1812, World War I, and a large portion of World War II against the Rome-Berlin part of the Axis were against "white" people. And I'm probably missing other major conflicts.
Further, to say that America is unique among countries in using color or ethnicity to denigrate a people it is either at war with or has hostility towards is totally absurd. It's par for the course throughout the history of warfare and culture as a way to motivate its people to carry out and tolerate the acts of war. Unfortunately, he lets his biased political opinions biasedly spill into the pages of his book.
Nevertheless, he does an excellent job describing the power of the media to work as the Government's collective propaganda machine in their portrayal of the "eastern bloc" countries as the Cold War rose from the end of World War II.
Letters from Freedom: Post-Cold War Realities and Perspectives (Societies and Culture in East-Central Europe , No 10)
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    Letters from Freedom: Post-Cold War Realities and Perspectives (Societies and Culture in East-Central Europe , No 10)
    Adam Michnik
    Manufacturer: University of California Press
    ProductGroup: Book
    Binding: Paperback

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    ASIN: 0520217608

    Book Description

    A hero to many, Polish writer Adam Michnik ranks among today's most fearless and persuasive public figures. His imprisonment by Poland's military regime in the 1980s did nothing to quench his outpouring of writings, many of which were published in English as Letters from Prison. Beginning where that volume ended, Letters from Freedom finds Michnik briefly in prison at the height of the "cold civil war" between authorities and citizens in Poland, then released. Through his continuing essays, articles, and interviews, the reader can follow all the momentous changes of the last decade in Poland and East-Central Europe. Some of the writings have appeared in English in various publications; most are translated here for the first time.
    Michnik is never detached. His belief that people can get what they want without hatred and violence has always translated into action, and his actions, particularly the activity of writing, have required his contemporaries to think seriously about what it is they want. His commitment to freedom is absolute, but neither wild-eyed nor humorless; with a characteristic combination of idealism and pragmatism, Michnik says, "In the end, politics is the art of foreseeing and implementing the possible."
    Michnik's blend of conviction and political acumen is perhaps most vividly revealed in the interviews transcribed in the book, whether he is the subject of the interview or is conducting a conversation with Czeslaw Milosz, Vacláv Havel, or Wojciech Jaruzelski. These face-to-face exchanges tell more about the forces at work in contemporary Eastern Europe than could any textbook. Sharing Michnik's intellectual journey through a tumultuous era, we touch on all the subjects important to him in this wide-ranging collection and find they have importance for everyone who values conscience and responsibility. In the words of Jonathan Schell, "Michnik is one of those who bring honor to the last two decades of the twentieth century."
    Defending America: Military Culture and the Cold War Court-Martial (Politics and Society in Twentieth Century America)
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      Defending America: Military Culture and the Cold War Court-Martial (Politics and Society in Twentieth Century America)
      Elizabeth Lutes Hillman
      Manufacturer: Princeton University Press
      ProductGroup: Book
      Binding: Hardcover

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      ASIN: 0691118043

      Book Description

      From going AWOL to collaborating with communists, assaulting fellow servicemen to marrying without permission, military crime during the Cold War offers a telling glimpse into a military undergoing a demographic and legal transformation. The post-World War II American military, newly permanent, populated by draftees as well as volunteers, and asked to fight communism around the world, was also the subject of a major criminal justice reform. By examining the Cold War court-martial, Defending America opens a new window on conflicts that divided America at the time, such as the competing demands of work and family and the tension between individual rights and social conformity.

      Using military justice records, Elizabeth Lutes Hillman demonstrates the criminal consequences of the military's violent mission, ideological goals, fear of homosexuality, and attitude toward racial, gender, and class difference. The records also show that only the most inept, unfortunate, and impolitic of misbehaving service members were likely to be prosecuted. Young, poor, low-ranking, and nonwhite servicemen bore a disproportionate burden in the military's enforcement of crime, and gay men and lesbians paid the price for the armed forces' official hostility toward homosexuality. While the U.S. military fought to defend the Constitution, the Cold War court-martial punished those who wavered from accepted political convictions, sexual behavior, and social conventions, threatening the very rights of due process and free expression the Constitution promised.

      Dr. Strangelove's America: Society and Culture in the Atomic Age
      Average customer rating: 1 out of 5 stars
      • TV's "Mister Ed" as a Cold War Rorschach test?
      Dr. Strangelove's America: Society and Culture in the Atomic Age
      Margot A. Henriksen
      Manufacturer: University of California Press
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      Binding: Hardcover

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      ASIN: 0520083105

      Book Description

      Did America really learn to "stop worrying and love the bomb," as the title of Stanley Kubrick's 1964 film, Dr. Strangelove, would have us believe? Does that darkly satirical comedy have anything in common with Martin Luther King Jr.'s impassioned "I Have a Dream" speech or with Elvis Presley's throbbing "I'm All Shook Up"? In Margot Henriksen's vivid depiction of the decades after World War II, all three are expressions of a cultural revolution directly related to the atomic bomb. Although many scientists and other Americans protested the pursuit of nuclear superiority after World War II ended, they were drowned out by Cold War rhetoric that encouraged a "culture of consensus." Nonetheless, Henriksen says, a "culture of dissent" arose, and she traces this rebellion through all forms of popular culture.
      At first, artists expressed their anger, anxiety, and despair in familiar terms that addressed nuclear reality only indirectly. But Henriksen focuses primarily on new modes of expression that emerged, discussing the disturbing themes of film noir (with extended attention to Alfred Hitchcock) and science fiction films, Beat poetry, rock 'n' roll, and Pop Art. Black humor became a primary weapon in the cultural revolution while literature, movies, and music gave free rein to every possible expression of the generation gap. Cultural upheavals from "flower power" to the civil rights movement accentuated the failure of old values.
      Filled with fascinating examples of cultural responses to the Atomic Age, Henriksen's book is a must-read for anyone interested in the United States at mid-twentieth century.

      Customer Reviews:

      1 out of 5 stars TV's "Mister Ed" as a Cold War Rorschach test?.......2000-04-07

      Deprived of its logically impoverished arguments, its lead-footed marches around the evidence, its deadening repetitions, its portentous clichés, its merciless summaries of fourth-rate works of art, and its tributes to such world-historical happenings as Woodstock, James Dean, John Lennon's "Imagine," and Barry McGuire's "Eve of Destruction" (the only political song that manages to be dumber than "Imagine"), Henriksen's book would be a great deal shorter than its current 475 pages. The obvious advice would have been to remove all the aforementioned stuff and replace it with material that even politically sympathetic readers should expect to see: a careful analysis of the way in which popular culture is produced and consumed, a really critical review of the assumptions and evidence behind both left- and right-wing political ideas, and a thorough investigation of the variety of means by which "cultures" are influenced by the modern state, with special attention to little matters like taxation and conscription.
      Jazz, Rock, and Rebels: Cold War Politics and American Culture in a Divided Germany (Studies on the History of Society and Culture, 35)
      Average customer rating: 4.5 out of 5 stars
      • Interesting Interpretation of Cold War Culture in East/West Blocs
      • Rethinking Cultural Imperialism
      Jazz, Rock, and Rebels: Cold War Politics and American Culture in a Divided Germany (Studies on the History of Society and Culture, 35)
      Uta G. Poiger
      Manufacturer: University of California Press
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      Binding: Paperback

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      ASIN: 0520211391

      Book Description

      In the two decades after World War II, Germans on both sides of the iron curtain fought vehemently over American cultural imports. Uta G. Poiger traces how westerns, jeans, jazz, rock 'n' roll, and stars like Marlon Brando or Elvis Presley reached adolescents in both Germanies, who eagerly adopted the new styles. Poiger reveals that East and West German authorities deployed gender and racial norms to contain Americanized youth cultures in their own territories and to carry on the ideological Cold War battle with each other. Poiger's lively account is based on an impressive array of sources, ranging from films, newspapers, and contemporary sociological studies, to German and U.S. archival materials.
      Jazz, Rock, and Rebels examines diverging responses to American culture in East and West Germany by linking these to changes in social science research, political cultures, state institutions, and international alliance systems. In the first two decades of the Cold War, consumer culture became a way to delineate the boundaries between East and West. This pathbreaking study, the first comparative cultural history of the two Germanies, sheds new light on the legacy of Weimar and National Socialism, on gender and race relations in Europe, and on Americanization and the Cold War.

      Customer Reviews:

      4 out of 5 stars Interesting Interpretation of Cold War Culture in East/West Blocs .......2006-06-28

      Breaking new historical ground, Uta Poiger explores the American cultural mediums that influenced Post-War East and West Germany in Jazz, Rock and Rebels: Cold War Politics and American Culture in a Divided Germany. Insightful and exhaustively researched, Poiger links the divided German states by a "discourse" bridge which seeks to manipulate American cultural influences to German prerogatives. The work is topically arraigned into five chapters, which collectively, link the popular culture of America in the 1950's to social injustices such as fascism and racism. Jazz music, for instance, was articulately utilized by the author to illustrate subtle differences and evolutions by the two Germanys. Initially, there was a social rejection of American Jazz music in the German states. According to Poiger, they "invoked antiblack . . . sentiments" as a method of reducing U.S. legitimacy. Over time, as Poiger noted, this stigma for jazz evaporated and became more of an accepted norm in German culture. And reviewer, Katrin Sieg, Georgetown Professor of German Studies, lauded Poiger for her tight knit handling of racial digression, and added that "as the Nazi past was discredited, biological models of racial hierarchy, or indeed the very concept of race, disappeared from public language, to be displaced by psychology as the main paradigm explaining and articulating human differences."

      The reader will discover many anecdotes, such as the aforementioned one, that provide convincing evidence that American culture was either embraced, or thwarted, by the two states depending on each side's definition of national identity. However, Poiger falls short of weaving a compelling argument that German adolescents were politically influenced by American culture. Although it was clear that both Germanys were inundated with U.S. movies, fashion, and Elvis style Rock n' Roll, no obvious parallels were installed to illustrate how these youth translated American culture into German political alignments. One Social Historian, Donna Harsch, echoed this assessment of Poiger's treatment of German youth and added that, "cultural habits of 1950s youth were, by and large, apolitical." Rebellious German youth may have enjoyed the age of promiscuous temptations by sampling various cultural pleasures enjoyed by Americans, but how these ventures equated to Germaness, or political identity, remains nebulous for the reader.

      Logically argued, this work contributed, more than it contracted, from the cultural and Cold War history of Post-War Germany. I appreciated the healthy samplings of German artist renderings and propaganda posters, which added a rich dimension to the overall excellent scholarship of this work. Best suited for German, Cold War, gender, cultural and racial scholars, but appropriate for graduate and undergraduate students who have an eye for cultural or gender history, this work would be and interesting read to both the scholar and leisurely reader.

      5 out of 5 stars Rethinking Cultural Imperialism.......2000-07-09

      This book is an innovative study of the impact of American culture on both East and West Germany in the 1950s and early 60s. It is highly readable and always interesting, tracing the cultural and political impact of jazz, rock-n-roll, and American "rebel" movies like the Wild One or Rebel Without a Cause. The book looks at the reactions of state officials and experts, who vacillated between decrying the American imports as imperial "un-culture" and trying to appropriate them as resources for the cold war conflict between East and West. Perhaps more importantly, it also examines the reactions of the young fans, who used these American cultural products to stage their own rebellions against state authority and official norms. Always attentive to issues of race and gender, subtle and yet clear, this is a great analysis that goes well beyond the usual terms of the debate about cultural imperialism.
      Pulp Culture: Hardboiled Fiction and the Cold War
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        Pulp Culture: Hardboiled Fiction and the Cold War
        Woody Haut
        Manufacturer: Serpent's Tail
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        Enemies Within: The Cold War and the AIDS Crisis in Literature, Film, and Culture
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          Jacqueline Foertsch
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          Rainbow Quest: The Folk Music Revival and American Society, 1940-1970 (Culture, Politics, and Cold War)
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          • A remarkably informative historical survey
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          • troubled roots, vexing ambiguities, lasting legacy
          Rainbow Quest: The Folk Music Revival and American Society, 1940-1970 (Culture, Politics, and Cold War)
          Ronald D. Cohen
          Manufacturer: University of Massachusetts Press
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          Book Description

          For a brief period from the late 1950s to the mid-1960s, folk music captured a mass audience in the United States, as college students and others swarmed to concerts by the likes of Peter, Paul & Mary, Joan Baez, and Bob Dylan. In this comprehensive study, Ronald D. Cohen reconstructs the history of this singular cultural moment, tracing its origins to the early decades of the twentieth century.

          Drawing on scores of interviews and numerous manuscript collections, as well as his own extensive files, Cohen shows how a broad range of traditions -- from hillbilly, gospel, blues, and sea shanties to cowboy, ethnic, and political protest music -- all contributed to the genre known as folk. He documents the crucial work of John Lomax and other collectors who, with the assistance of recording companies, preserved and distributed folk music in the 1920s. During the 1930s and 1940s, the emergence of left-wing politics and the rise of the commercial music marketplace helped to stimulate wider interest in folk music. Stars emerged, such as Woody Guthrie, Leadbelly, Pete Seeger, Burl Ives, and Josh White. With the success of the Weavers and the Kingston Trio in the 1950s, the stage was set for the full-blown "folk revival" of the early 1960s.

          Centered in New York's Greenwich Village and sustained by a flourishing record industry, the revival spread to college campuses and communities across the country. It included a wide array of performers and a supporting cast of journalists, club owners, record company executives, political activists, managers, and organizers. By 1965 the boom had passed its peak, as rock and roll came to dominate the marketplace, but the folk revival left an enduring musical legacy in American culture.

          Customer Reviews:

          5 out of 5 stars A remarkably informative historical survey.......2003-01-11

          Rainbow Quest: The Folk Music Revival & American Society, 1940-1970 by Ronald D. Cohen (Professor of History, Indiana University Northwest) is a remarkably informative historical survey and commentary of the phenomena of folk music's mass audience appeal as represented by concerts and album sales from such luminaries as Joan Baez, Bob Dylan, Peter, Paul and Mary, Burl Ives, Woody Guthrie, The Kingston Trio, The Weavers, and scores of others. Originally centered in New York's Greenwich Village and sustained by a robust record industry, this revival of folk music through the 1950s and culminating in the mid-1960s when it was overtaken by "The British Invasion" and the dominence of Rock 'n Roll. Still, those glory years of folk music popularity have left an astonishing musical legacy that still reverberates within the American culture. Rainbow Quest is a seminal, core addition to any 20th Century American Music History reference collection and supplemental reading list.

          5 out of 5 stars Intriguing.......2003-01-03

          Any book that prompts such a lopsided anti-"Seegerite" rant must be worth reading. Pete Seeger himself would be the first to admit that he is far from perfect. Yet it is very difficult for anyone with an iota of commonsense to see him as anything other than profoundly liberal in the best sense of the world, and as the sort of figure Americans can truly be proud of.
          I would have been inclined to book on the basis of Ronald Cohen's dedication alone, but I happen also to be familiar with the quality of his scholarship. Given the subject, it is possible to recommend the book without reservation - even as I place my own order.

          4 out of 5 stars troubled roots, vexing ambiguities, lasting legacy.......2002-12-23

          In this, the first serious, comprehensive, and scholarly booklength history of the American folk revival (or at least one of them; one can argue that a kind of folk revival is occurring right now), Ronald D. Cohen draws on years of research to document a fascinating cultural moment. If you're interested in the subject, you will definitely want this book, and you will be grateful for its wealth of information. Even those of us who have followed the folk revival for a long time will learn a great deal. I expect to return to the book again and again in search of facts not readily, or at all, available elsewhere.

          This, however, is not the sort of revisionist history that one day somebody will write. That becomes apparent on the dedication page, where Cohen honors "Pete Seeger, who has sustained me over the last five decades." If, like me and the counter-hagiographical historians certain to write the next draft of revival history, you consider Seeger something of a sanctimonious hypocrite, you may find Cohen a trifle irksome. On the other hand, you'll find validation in Seeger quotes that Cohen innocently drops, such as an astounding statement about Josef Stalin on page 30. Made in 1993 -- 40 years after the death of a tyrant who killed more people, including Communists, than any other figure in history (between 20 and 40 million, according to best estimates) -- Seeger, a lifelong, self-identified Communist, finally manages what at first looks like a critical assessment, even an apology for his years of service to a spectacularly unworthy cause. On second and further readings, however, Seeger's meaning grows ever murkier and finally takes on positively Orwellian dimensions. For all his public persona as a radical liberal, whatever personal virtues he undoubtedly possesses notwithstanding, Seeger is in his ideological heart radically illiberal. Nothing in this book will convince any attentive reader otherwise.

          Cohen himself has nothing unfavorable to say about the Old Left/Popular Front culture that saw traditional music as a useful agitprop tool and proceeded to purge it of all "unprogressive" elements, fashioning a crude caricature of the real stuff. To Cohen the enemies are the anti-Communists -- he appears to make no distinction between liberal anti-Stalinists and demagogic reactionaries like Joe McCarthy and his ilk -- and phrases such as "dark clouds of anticommunism" hover over the text.

          He rightly condemns the abominable, anti-democratic practice of blacklisting, which sidelined, for a time, the careers of Seeger and the Weavers. Such victimization, however, does not make them heroes, only victims; in Stalin's Soviet Union dissident balladeers and writers went to the gulag, often never to be seen again. In America in the meantime, after the unpleasantness had passed, Seeger et al. went back to well-paying careers. All the while, they managed to compose not a single protest song about the fate of their counterparts in the unfree nations of the Soviet empire. The Seegerites, after all, were members of that generation of ideologues who, in George Orwell's wry observation, were opposed to fascism but not to totalitarianism. Even their opposition to fascism, however, was conditional. When Stalin and Hitler formed the alliance that started World War II and ended only when Hitler later turned on the USSR, Seeger and his fellow Almanac Singers were unrestrained in their opposition to American intervention against German/Soviet aggression. The conflict in Europe, their songs informed us, came about because of the sinister machinations of greedy British capitalists (the theme of the Almanacs' jaw-dropping rewrite of the traditional "Liza Jane") and therefore Britain's fate was of no concern to decent people. After Hitler attacked Stalin, of course, nobody supported intervention more fervently than these putative pacifists.

          The early folk revival was at its core a political movement, and Cohen's is in good part a political book. That affects his treatment of the music, about which he utters scarcely a discouraging word. But it needs to be said that, with the exception of the magnificently gifted Woody Guthrie, the Stalinists produced a vast body of very bad music. Seeger and the Weavers trafficked in a preposterously sentimentalized portrayal not only of Soviet dictators but of ordinary Americans, prominently including union members. As a liberal Democrat who grew up in a union family, I used to entertain fantasies about banjo-smashing whenever I'd hear Seeger burbling another patronizing ditty about the workers' struggle. Seeger, the Weavers, and their comrades seemed to infantilize everything they touched. And yet....

          For all their moral and musical failings, they alerted their fellow citizens to our country's (and others') rich heritage of traditional song. They played a large and honorable role in the discovery (in some cases rediscovery) of authentic rural folk artists -- no one more so than folklorist and Marxist Alan Lomax, who alone or, in his youth, with his father John Lomax found Lead Belly and Mississippi Fred McDowell, among many others, and gave them stages and careers. They started folk-music recording labels (most prominently Folkways) which afforded both rural and urban performers a voice and a new audience. Most of the urban music from those days is forgettable, some of it downright cringe-inducing, but the best of it endures. Besides such talented performers as Dave Van Ronk, the Kossoy Sisters, Fred Neil, the Dillards, the New Lost City Ramblers, and Ramblin' Jack Elliott (all, with the exception of the anti-Stalinist socialist Van Ronk, at least artistically apolitical), the second stage of the revival produced one of the towering figures in American music, Bob Dylan -- about whom, oddly, Cohen has relatively little to say. Yet, in going electric at the 1965 Newport Folk Festival, Dylan both revitalized folk music and freed the revival from the suffocating effects of the Stalinist culture that made it possible. Today's folk musicians are better for it, and so is their music.
          Twentieth Century Europe: Politics, Society, and Culture
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            Twentieth Century Europe: Politics, Society, and Culture
            Spencer M. Di Scala , and Spencer Di Scala
            Manufacturer: McGraw-Hill Humanities/Social Sciences/Languages
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            The Cold War (Anthropology, Culture and Society)
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