How the World Was Won

The Americanization of Everywhere

Peter Conrad

• Publisher: Thames and Hudson Ltd
• Year: 2014
• eBook ISBN: 9780500772263
• Topic: Storia
• Subtopic: Storia sociale

In this dazzling book, the story of the spectacular rise and subsequent waning of American influence across the world since 1945 is told by cultural critic and historian Peter Conrad. Politics, war and commerce form the inevitable backdrop to his tale, but Conrad also treats us to a kaleidoscopic presentation of America's unstoppable creativity: its output of great, good and enjoyably bad art, of jeans and jazz, fast food and fridges, space travel, comic books and motorbikes, technologies and therapies, along with the heroic, erotic or violent cinematic visions that have Americanized even our dreams.

1 | Looking to America

Like many others who arrived in the world after 1945, I often need to remind myself that I am not American.

I happened to be born in Australia, which in my childhood was a remote outpost of two successive empires. Officially we were sustained by a colonial connection to Britain, and at school we were taught English history and told as little as possible about our origins as a penal colony. But that craven loyalty had begun to fray. At the end of 1941, seven weeks before the Japanese captured Singapore and pushed south to bomb the city of Darwin, Prime Minister John Curtin briskly exchanged protectors and announced – ‘without any inhibitions’, as he said, and with no ‘pangs’ about embattled Britain – that ‘Australia looks to America’.

I belonged to the first generation to have its gaze forcibly redirected. I grew up juggling the borrowed cultures of two foreign powers: I educated myself by reading English books borrowed from the local library, but sidled off to watch American Westerns and screwball comedies at the cinema every Saturday afternoon. The books told me about an old world that was eccentric and insular, crooked and cranky, groaning under the weight of its antiques. The films showed me an alternative – a landscape as anamorphic as a Cinemascope screen, its expanses patrolled, unlike Australia’s scorching deserts, by chivalrous cowboys; a society of scarcely credible gloss and glamour, with buildings that shot into the sky like fireworks and people who conversed in volleys of crackling witticisms. My dreams were colonized by an imaginary America.

I came to understand that Australia lived on sufferance, remotely dependent on the United States, which – as Hubert Humphrey said in 1948 – offered itself to ‘the whole two billion members of the human family’ as ‘now, more than ever, the last best hope on earth’. The offer to take patriarchal responsibility for the human brood was a reassurance, but the proviso about being the last hope sounded alarming. Shortly before the presidential election in 1960, John Kennedy warned in a speech in New York that ‘to be American in the next decade will be a hazardous experience’. The rest of us had to share in those hazards, whether or not we found them as exhilarating as Kennedy did. In 1962, aged fourteen, I remember lessons being interrupted by an announcement over my school’s public-address system to report that Russia was withdrawing its missiles from Cuba. This was an unglobal world where news was myopically local, so I had little idea what that meant; the relief of the teachers, I later realized, made it clear that we had been granted a stay of execution. I wish I had known the Cold War slogan of the historian Arnold Toynbee, who adapted the catch-call of American liberty to demand ‘No Annihilation Without Representation’. If we were all the subjects of American power, why shouldn’t we react as the colonists in the 1760s did when taxed by Britain?

In November 1963, Kennedy was assassinated. It was early afternoon in Dallas but already night in Australia; when I awoke my mother broke the news and added ‘There’ll be a war now’ – a bright thought for a Saturday morning in the antipodean spring, but a reasonable assumption. Fights were picked above the equator, where history happened. Australians would eventually be obliged to join in – or else we would patiently, passively wait until the nuclear fallout drifted down to make an end of us. My adolescence was overshadowed by Nevil Shute’s novel On the Beach, in which the last human beings messily succumb to radiation sickness in Australia after a brief, unnecessary war in the upper hemisphere. Among them is an American naval officer who, since those who outrank him are all dead, becomes the Supreme Commander of his country’s fleet. Beached in Melbourne, he deals tactfully with the local sense of unworthiness by accepting eucalyptus as the equal of New England’s deciduous trees. However, he is ‘unreasonably suspicious of Australian whisky’, and he ridicules Australian provincialism when he visits an art gallery and sees a version of bombed New York painted by an untravelled surrealist who has reassigned the Brooklyn Bridge to New Jersey and planted the Empire State Building in Central Park. At the end, he sails his submarine back across the Pacific, expecting that he and his crew will expire on the way home. ‘I guess the United States is me, right now,’ he says. Given that symbolic burden, to die in Australia would hardly be proper.

In exchange for protection, Australia compliantly contributed troops to America’s war in Vietnam; along with a few Koreans, we constituted what were known as ‘Free World Forces’. The truth of the matter is illustrated in a photograph by David Moore, taken at the airport in Canberra during President Lyndon Johnson’s visit in 1966. Johnson stands at the microphone, paying gravel-voiced compliments to his ally. Two paces behind him is Harold Holt, then the prime minister, bent in an attitude of broken-backed obsequiousness. Shamingly, I can understand Holt’s bowed head. In 1968, when my number came up in the conscription lottery, I was indignant at having my immediate future taken away by America’s executive whims – yet it was also thrilling to be hauled out of obscurity at the bottom of the world and made to contribute to this grand ideological showdown between the United States and its doctrinal enemy.

Some stories by Frank Moorhouse, published in 1972 as The Americans, Baby, catch the mood and mentality of the time, with sex as shorthand for Australia’s willing submission to imperious, glamorous America. In one story, Carl stops writing anti-war speeches to let a suave American called Paul Jonson – allegedly a journalist, probably a CIA agent – buy him beers and seduce him. Twenty-year-old Cindy moves in with thirty-year-old Hugo, a hippie from Nebraska who has come to Australia as a ‘nuclear refugee’; he orders her to read The New Yorker, by which she is utterly mystified. A recurrent character called Becker takes umbrage when people mistake him for a GI on leave from Vietnam: he is a sales executive sent out from Atlanta to convince recalcitrant Australians to drink Coca-Cola, and he considers Sydney a hardship posting, good only for ‘ten-dollar screws’. In this case the colonials retaliate, and he is raped by a transvestite. The initiation turns out to be a mercy. Becker forgets about his born-again Christianity, and rather than returning to Atlanta starts a new life as a jazz pianist in the Queensland resort of Surfer’s Paradise. Another story describes an Australian tour by the poet Kenneth Rexroth, introduced by an inept host as Rex Kenroth. Moorhouse’s Rexroth, homesick for drugs that are unobtainable in this deprived place, says that ‘everything here is some sort of damn imitation of America’ – not of America now, but of ‘the States in the forties’. Sad to say, that was probably true.

As it turned out, a Rhodes Scholarship saved me from having to take up arms, and I left for England with my military service deferred. At my college in Oxford I met my very first real Americans, who impressed me almost as much as those I had seen on big and small screens in Australia. They ambled through ancient quadrangles with casual grace, larger and louder than life, conversing as sassily and savvily as characters in a sitcom. And ah, those diamantine teeth and panoramic smiles! They brought America with them – its amplitude, its confidence, its relaxed egalitarianism. Their country was not marginal, like mine; it had grown to be a digest of the entire world, so they felt at ease wherever they were. They also took their invincibility for granted: one of them said to me about a forthcoming examination, ‘I’m gonna shoot it right out of the water.’

Among these prime specimens was Bill Clinton, also a Rhodes Scholar, who told me to knock on his door if ever I was passing through his college. ‘That’s not a French invitation,’ he added, sensing my scepticism. At the time I had no reason for remembering Clinton, whose chubby bearded face faded from my memory until the 1990s, but I never forgot the phrase – so worldly-wise, and so subtly critical of deceptive European manners. Of course I did not take him up on the non-French invitation, but I did befriend a philosophy graduate from Massachusetts who once remarked, when we were exchanging reminiscences, that he could not conceive of growing up outside the United States: no Disneyland, no Little League, no ice-cream parlours, no driving licence at the age of sixteen, no Senior Prom. I suppose I should have been offended, but I accepted America’s centrality and its bear-hugging universality. I had played baseball as well as cricket, I told him defensively; I even owned a cap pistol for games of cowboys and Indians, though during the Davy Crockett craze I pleaded in vain for a coonskin hat (trimmed, since we lacked raccoons, with rabbit fur); and I remembered my first taste of Coca-Cola, its carbonated fizz exploding from the bottle like the spirit of America.

In the summer of 1969 I finally visited the homeland of so many fantasies, and in a used car with some equally unkempt friends spent two accident-prone months making a road trip from New York to California and back. It was almost a delayed rite of passage into adulthood and – after my first year in crumbly, cosy England – into the revved-up stresses of modernity. I warmed to the American conviction that life should be equated with liberty or perhaps with sheer vivacity, and should be spent pursuing happiness rather than dutifully trudging down a time-worn furrow; I began to resent the way I had been discouraged from wanting an existence less middling and resigned than that of my own browbeaten family. Still, on the back roads we sometimes took in rural states and in the urban flophouses where we stayed, many people did not look free, and quite a few seemed abjectly or eruptively unhappy. While we were on our travels, Americans stepped onto the moon and left their flag behind: the high point, literally, of their advance through the universe. At the same time, they sank deeper into the slough of Vietnam. During the week we spent in Los Angeles, Charles Manson and his feral accomplices roamed through the canyons above Hollywood, slaughtering bourgeois householders they denounced as ‘pigs’. Back in New York I watched Richard Nixon arrive at the United Nations, grinning from inside his bulletproof black car at the citizens who cursed and heckled him.

I returned to Oxford at the end of the summer, feeling that I needed to convalesce. I didn’t revisit America for a couple of years, but then began to find it irresistible. Arrival in New York made my nerves jangle and jived up my speech, though in my down-in-the-mouth way I never managed to end every sentence with the eternally hopeful rising inflection that was becoming compulsory. In the 1970s it may have been danger that excited me, both personal fear – the city was then notoriously unsafe – and the sense of imminent crisis and collapse, which made me feel that I was alive in interesting times. In 1945 the United States, profiting from a war that had bankrupted Europe and Japan, undertook to be the world’s benefactor and guardian. A quarter of a century later, it was American society that seemed to be menaced, ripped apart by civil strife, its constitutional promises belied by desperate poverty. The South Bronx was a graveyard of charred, gutted tenements, bag ladies trundled their shopping carts of scraps down Manhattan avenues that were cratered with potholes, and troglodytes lived among the rats in sooty tunnels beneath Grand Central Station. Angry, lurid graffiti coated subway carriages, so you seemed to be travelling in metal cells recently vacated by a ward’s worth of lunatics equipped with spray-paint canisters. Beyond the rotting concrete pilasters of the obsolete West Side Highway, the buckled piers on the Hudson River were orgy rooms for young men with their own interpretation of what it meant to live free and pursue happiness. Everything was in a state of decay, and decadence had its pleasures as well as its perils.

In 1980, when New York was near to bankruptcy and real estate prices were low, I bought an apartment in Greenwich Village and began to spend several months there every year. It became a base from which I could travel across the rest of the country, sometimes to give lectures, more often on journalistic assignments, occasionally just for sightseeing; it made me a part-time resident of the United States and brought me closer to the glories, fads and follies of the greatest show on earth.

Not long before I moved into my lookout on the corner of Bank and Hudson Streets, Ronald Reagan announced that ‘America is back’. Had it ever gone away? And given its omnipresence, where could it go? But it did seem periodically to disgrace itself, usually at the time of presidential elections; then it would return to favour, at least until the next disillusionment.

The reconstruction of the battered world after 1945 was meant to inaugurate a new moral order, described by the magazine publisher Henry Luce as ‘the American century’, when the nation would inspire and guide ‘the progress of man’. For most of its history, the United States had followed George Washington’s advice to remain isolated from the fractious world. Now it had imperial duties, though in 1947 Simone de Beauvoir noted that America was an empire of a new kind, driven less by the love of power than by ‘the love of imposing on others that which is good’. Despite this faith, events in America often turned out not to be testimonials for goodness: Joseph McCarthy’s persecution of activities he considered ‘un-American’, the assassinations of the Kennedys and Martin Luther King, the villainy of Nixon. In recent decades there have been the diversionary oil wars of the Bushes, the sadism of ‘enhanced interrogation’ at Abu Ghraib, the shaming aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, and massacres at schools in Colorado and Connecticut. But always America redeems itself, or is forgiven. Like the banks that were bailed out in 2008, the United States cannot be allowed to fail.

Growing up in Austria in the early 1950s, Arnold Schwarzenegger took stock of changed geopolitical priorities, and added his ego to the new empire’s arsenal. ‘America was the most powerful country,’ he decided, ‘so I would go there.’ Having arrived, he set about ‘finding an apartment building to buy and move into’: ownership came first, residence second. Next he acquired a tract of desert outside Los Angeles, the supposed site for a supersonic airport that was ‘monstrous, very futuristic, exactly what I imagined America was about’. He lost money on the investment, but his vision had a certain plausibility: America administered growth hormones to our under-developed world, and pumped up reality as if with steroids.

For others, American power meant spectacle, which conquered by stunning the senses. In 1953 in New York the Egyptian philosopher Zaki Najib Mahmoud sampled Cinerama, a short-lived novelty that hoped to outwit television by projecting film onto a curved, circumambient screen. The occasion was a sunburst or thunderclap of virtually religious revelation. ‘Henceforth,’ Mahmoud declared, ‘God has destined these people to lead, and us to follow. He has destined them to produce, and us to consume.’ His act of submission was nothing less than This Is Cinerama expected as it made America’s destiny manifest. A camera attached, significantly, to a converted bomber soars above bristling Manhattan, sweeps across the Pentagon and its acreage of car parks, passes Pittsburgh with its smoking factories, swoops over plains gilded by their crops, glides above the Rockies, glances at the craggy pantheon of Mount Rushmore, plunges into an open-cut copper mine in Utah, skids beneath the Golden Gate, veers inland to follow the Colorado River through the Grand Canyon, then looks down admiringly on the ‘stupendous masterpiece’ that is the Hoover Dam and at the ‘agricultural paradise’ that blooms in the desert at Imperial Valley. Meanwhile the Mormon Tabernacle Choir chants patriotic hymns and a narrator hails the grandeur of America, exemplified by architecture, military might, agriculture, industry, geology, engineering, and perhaps above all by the cinema. This Is Cinerama ends with that aerial tour; it begins, a little more turbulently, at Playland in Rockaway Beach in the New York borough of Queens, with a screeching vertical trip on a shaky rollercoaster. America is first and foremost a ride, and a wild one.

The images that dazzled Mahmoud and so many others were accompanied by a parade of commodities. President Johnson, explaining in 1966 why he thought that the homeland was imperilled by covetous Asian hordes, said ‘We have what they want.’ Here was where all desires could be satisfied, in a continent-sized department store. Dispensing with Johnson’s paranoia, Linda Ronstadt rephrased his boast when she sang ‘Anything you want, we got it right here in the USA.’ Ronstadt rejoices when the wheels of her plane bump down on the runway, and mentions the delights she has missed while overseas: a drive-in, a jukebox, a diner where hamburgers sizzle on the grill. ‘Ah we’re so glad,’ she bawls, ‘we’re living in the USA.’ If that is how America is defined, all of us are resident there. Around the corner from my house in London, people wearing baseball caps and T-shirts stamped with the names of American football teams they do not support and American colleges they did not attend line up to buy fried chicken that claims a connection with Tennessee (Kentucky is copyrighted, therefore off-limits). McDonald’s has its largest branches in Moscow and Beijing, and even the most hostile regime cannot resist the swanky trappings of Americana: in North Korea in December 2011 the embalmed corpse of Kim Jong-il travelled to its mausoleum balanced on top of an armoured black Lincoln Continental.

Runaways and detractors find that America is inescapable. William S. Burroughs lived abroad from 1948 to 1974, but never defined himself as an exile. ‘One can hardly say that one is in exile from the United States as a whole,’ he explained; it would be as absurd as claiming to be in exile from the world. The Danish director Lars von Trier has made films set in Washington State, Colorado and Alabama, but he priggishly refuses to enter the United States. Still, the gesture hardly guarantees his immunity. In 2005 von Trier estimated that ‘Sixty per cent of the things I have experienced in my life are American’, which led him to conclude that, despite his dogged disapproval, ‘In fact I am an American.’ To be more precise, he is fractionally or virtually American; inside our heads many of us possess the same hyphenated nationality.

Occasionally it looks as if our Americanized world has no room for other countries or cultures. The cover of The Whole Earth Catalog, launched in 1968, did not show the whole earth, only the continent partially occupied by the United States. At the cinema, Universal brands the globe by letting it revolve until the so-called western hemisphere basks in the sun: now it can rest, ensuring that America is never on the dark side. Every October, baseball teams compete in a championship that is called the World Series even though it is confined to North America. Near the end of his life, Steve Jobs took his family on holiday to Turkey. In Istanbul he hired a local historian as a guide, but soon became irritated by lectures about the rites of the Turkish bath and the preparation of Turkish coffee. To himself, he said ‘So fucking what?’ Out loud, he commented that kids in Turkey apparently drank what every other kid in the world drinks, wore clothes that might have been bought at the Gap, and of course used cell phones. ‘They were like kids everywhere,’ he concluded, meaning that they were like kids in California. Is globalism actually the universalization of the United States?

Proclaiming the advent of the American century in 1941, Henry Luce noted the country’s jazz, slang and patented products were ‘the only things that every community … from Zanzibar to Hamburg, recognizes in common’. Inevitably, the entire world became America’s market. But some Americans were keen for this era of omnipotence to end. Arthur Miller thought he had slowed its progress in 1949 with his play Death of a Salesman, which blasphemed against Luce’s cult of success by examining a single case of failure, the career of a shabby, deluded commercial traveller. In the 1960s the student agitator Todd Gitlin expressed the hope that ‘an anti-American century’ had begun, instigated by protests against the war in Vietnam, and in 1968 Norman Mailer heard Nixon deliver a speech about a friendlier foreign policy that ‘seemed to be calling for an end to Henry Luce’s American Century’. By 1980, after the bungled rescue of the hostages in Iran, Hunter S. Thompson warned that the Arabs, unafraid of the United States and aware of the advantages their oil gave them, were ‘looking beyond “the American century”’. During the course of his confession in 1998 about his sexual peccadilloes, Bill Clinton said that he would prefer to spend his time preparing for ‘the next American century’: the phrase now sounded as hollow as his quibbling self-defence. The American century began shortly before I was born, and it seems likely to last about as long as an average human being does.

Politicians keep boasting, though their assertions are increasingly windy. In 1998 Madeleine Albright, the American ambassador to the United Nations, justified an attack on Iraq by claiming a fortune-teller’s uncanny powers. ‘We are the indispensable nation,’ she said. ‘We stand tall and we see further than other countries into the future.’ In July 2011, during the squabble about the debt ceiling, the Speaker of the House o...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Acknowledgements
• About the Author
• Other titles of Interest
• Contents
• 1. Looking to America
• 2. A Coming of Age
• 3. ‘The Meaning of America’
• 4. ‘Have We Any Friends?’
• 5. Prosperity or Tragedy
• 6. ‘Master of the Earth’
• 7. American Girls in Italy and Elsewhere
• 8. Free-Enterprise Art
• 9. Americanophilia
• 10. On the Roads
• 11. ‘Americanize Yourselves!’
• 12. Little America
• 13. Astronauts and Assassins
• 14. ‘I Want it to Come HERE!’
• 15. Nether Americas
• 16. B-Day and Other Invasions
• 17. Dialogues with Consumer Products
• 18. The Campaign to Free America
• 19. ‘Why Do They Hate Us?’
• 20. ‘Thanks, America’
• Index
• Copyright