At the Center : American Thought and Culture in the Mid-Twentieth Century

At a time when American political and cultural leaders asserted that the nation stood at "the center of world awareness," thinkers and artists sought to understand and secure principles that lay at the center of things. From the onset of the Cold War in 1948 through 1963, they asked: What defined the essential character of "American culture"? Could permanent moral standards guide human conduct amid the flux and horrors of history? In what ways did a stable self emerge through the life cycle? Could scientific method rescue truth from error, illusion, and myth? Are there key elements to democracy, to the integrity of a society, to order in the world? Answers to such questions promised intellectual and moral stability in an age haunted by the memory of world war and the possibility of future devastation on an even greater scale. Yet other key figures rejected the search for a center, asserting that freedom lay in the dispersion of cultural energies and the plurality of American experiences. In probing the centering impulse of the era, At the Center offers a unique perspective on the United States at the pinnacle of its power. As the 1950s gave way to the 1960s, we are accustomed to think, American life passed from a time of placidity to one of turbulence, from complacency to dissent, from consensus to conflict, and from behavioral conformity to the virtues or vices of individual liberation. Some have celebrated this apparent transformation as a necessary change, which helped undermine oppressive racial and sexual hierarchies, challenge the unearned authority of experts, and question the aura surrounding those holding social and political power. Others, including even some critics of the order of things in the Fifties, lament America's subsequent "unraveling," due to the confusion and excess that accompanied the erosion of strong foundations for social stability. Either way-viewing the time as a "dark age" or "proud decade"-historians and other observers have generally viewed the 1950s as a period noteworthy for its holism. Things hung together, before they fell apart. Over the past two decades, however, historians have documented the variations and unsettledness of experience, as well as persistent dissent and agitation, that actually marked the 1950s in the United States, despite the apparent unity and strength of "the American way of life." They have noted not only the depth of the growing black freedom struggle and hints of women's emancipation underlying the seeming consensus on domesticity but also the presence of sexual rebellion, pacifism, avant-garde aesthetics, and other forms of nonconformity Dedication 6 Contents 8 Foreword 10 Introduction 12 1 American Hegemony and the New Cosmopolitanism 28 2 Inventing America, Again 50 3 History and Antihistoricism 80 4 The Decentered Search for the Centered Self 112 5 American Inclusion and Its Discontents 168 6 Modern Enactments 206 7 Thinking Globally 244 8 A Phase Change 268 Chronology 288 Notes 294 Bibliographic Essay 324 Acknowledgments 338 Index 340 About the Authors 358 At the Center explores the mode of perception and reflection which grasped at consensus and sought to determine “centers” or orienting norms, and prevailed across many registers of thought, imagination, and practice in the 1950s, as well as the varieties of argument and expression that escaped inclusion within coherent wholes.