No Respect

Intellectuals and Popular Culture

Andrew Ross

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781135200497
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Art
• Subtopic: Popular Culture in Art

The intellectual and the popular: Irving Howe and John Waters, Susan Sontag and Ethel Rosenberg, Dwight MacDonald and Bill Cosby, Amiri Baraka and Mick Jagger, Andrea Dworkin and Grace Jones, Andy Warhol and Lenny Bruce. All feature in Andrew Ross's lively history and critique of modern American culture. Andrew Ross examines how and why the cultural authority of modern intellectuals is bound up with the changing face of popular taste in America. He argues that the making of "taste" is hardly an aesthetic activity, but rather an exercise in cultural power, policing and carefully redefining social relations between classes.

151
Reading the Rosenberg Letters

The Isaacsons are arrested for conspiring to give the secret of television to the Soviet Union. (E.L. Doctorow, The Book of Daniel)

Under what circumstances could the unpretentious dwelling units of a low-rent housing project on New York’s Lower East Side come to be accusingly characterized as the “visible manifestation of the Stalinized petty-bourgeois mind”?¹ In the tradition of establishing “guilt by housing,” it has long been a commonplace to see the “petty-bourgeois mind” and its place of residence being pilloried for their respective lack of distinction, their failure of imagination, or their ready embrace of convention. But the addition of “Stalinized” to the “petty-bourgeois mind” suggests something quite different from the usual impeachment of the lower middle class on the grounds of its sorry failure of taste. In fact, it attributes sinister, menacing qualities to a social stratum whose taste in culture and politics is ordinarily viewed as respectably conformist. At best, petty-bourgeois “respectability” rests upon its claim to common and not elite authority, earned through its capacity for self-sufficiency in regard to both popular and highbrow taste; in other words, it can inhabit its own cultural house with dignity. However, when this claim to dignity and respect takes on a self-grounded political authority of its own, it is always likely to be seen as compromising the higher legitimacy of intellectual authority.

Consequently, for postwar liberal intellectuals like Leslie Fielder, the author of this critique of the housing project, the politicized petty-bourgeois mind was filled with a “sentimental egalitarianism” that dreamed of a “universal literacy leading to a universal culture.” This dream on the part of a middling culture characterized as “the middle against both ends,” would come to be demonized by Fiedler and others as a leveling threat to the class hierarchies of the national culture; hence the epithet of “Stalinized,” with its connotation of rigid standardization and homogeneity. But this demonized petty-bourgeois mind is also a haunted house. For the ghostly presence of Stalin, as we will see, is a real reminder of a pre-war cultural radicalism that Cold War intellectuals like Fiedler hastened to exorcise from their own histories or else pass off as a political apparition with no popular substance.

16The intellectual charge of “Stalinization,” belongs to a specific historical context in America. It was born in the thirties as a dissenting, left response to the Moscow treason trials (1936-38), the Nazi-Soviet Pact (1939), and the earlier Communist International policy of assailing all non-Communists as “social fascists,” and it achieved mainstream maturity amid the Cold War hysteria fomented by the U.S. foreign policy established under the Truman Doctrine and legislatively enforced at home in a whole series of repressive acts aimed at eliminating left-wing activity in labor organizations, government administration, and public culture: the Smith Act (1940), the Taft-Hartley Act (1947), the McCarran Internal Security Act (1950), the McCarran-Walter Act (1952), the Communist Control Act (1954).² Critics and historians have explained the most hysterical features of this postwar “age of suspicion” in terms of the political need for a domestic climate of fear that would facilitate a foreign policy promoting military-backed expansion of U.S. interests abroad: the Cold War redefinition of the world balance of power, the policy of containment, the Marshall Plan, and the revival and extension of open door policies. It remains, however, to show to what extent the domestic Cold War climate was also shaped by intellectuals’ contradictory responses to the domestic development of mass-produced popular culture. Cold War culture, as I will discuss in the next chapter, was crucially organized around the interplay between what was foreign, and outside, and what was domestic, and inside. Surely nothing could seem more perfectly at home in the new “prosperity state” of postwar consumer capitalism than the domestic forms of the popular culture industries. And yet, these were the same cultural forms which bore all the “foreign” traces, for Cold War liberals, of an achievement of Stalinized taste.

Spies Like Us

The strangest fruit born of this contradiction was the case of the Rosenbergs, occupants of Knickerbocker Village, the housing project that had evoked such a carping response from Fiedler. As most people know, the Rosenbergs were tried and convicted on charges of espionage in 1951, and then executed in 1953 after numerous appeals to the judiciary and a worldwide campaign for clemency that had failed to budge the presidential resolve of, first, Truman, and then Eisenhower. In his sentencing speech, Judge Irving Kaufman opined that the Rosenbergs had “altered the course of history to the disadvantage of our country.” Invoking the spirit of Cold War antagonism—“this country is engaged in a life and death struggle with a completely different system”—he concluded that the Rosenbergs’ alleged crime of atom espionage was 17“worse then murder.” In fact, he held them directly responsible for “the Communist aggression in Korea with the resultant casualties exceeding 50,000 and who knows but what that millions more innocent people may pay the price of [their] treason,” a conclusion with which Eisenhower was soon to concur when he refused to grant clemency on the grounds that the Rosenbergs “may have condemned to death tens of millions of innocent people all over the world.”

Most commentators have agreed that neither the megadeath scale of these accusations nor the severity of a death sentence (for espionage) seem to fit well with the flimsy allegations produced at the trial of U.S. vs. Rosenbergs and Sobell. To this day, no hard evidence of the Rosenbergs’ guilt has ever been produced, in spite of the long and exhaustive FBI investigation of an alleged espionage ring for which Julius Rosenberg was the alleged master spy. The release of thousands of FBI files on the case under the Freedom of Information Act (1974) helped to reaffirm what had long been an article of faith for the American left—that the Rosenberg trial was a rather awkward frame-up, staged by J. Edgar Hoover and President Truman because such a trial was needed to “explain” the Soviet possession of an atomic bomb.³ While scientists had publicly made it clear, from the mid-forties on, that there was no atom bomb “secret,” and that the Manhattan Project had made no significant discoveries in the course of its development of the bomb, the assumption that a “secret” existed and had been passed on to Soviet Russia nonetheless formed the basic premise of the Cold War and, consequently, set the agenda for future U.S. foreign policy.

Unlike other famous defendants in the “trials” of this period—blue-chip liberals in the State Department like Alger Hiss and Owen Lattimore, hard-core intellectuals like J. Robert Oppenheimer, or committed cultural workers like the Hollywood Ten—the Rosenbergs appeared to be “just folks.” In fact, official calculations of the enormity of their alleged crime seemed to escalate in direct proportion to the increasingly mundane revelations of their everyday middle-of-the-roadness. While their “guilt” was being measured against the average mean of their very ordinary lives, their “innocence,” for a while, seemed to rest upon the disparity between these prosaic lives and the fantastic figures cut by spies and foreign agents in the pages of detective novels and in crime melodramas on radio and television. Michael Meeropol, one of the Rosenberg sons, recalls how the family was listening to The Lone Ranger at the time of his father’s arrest by the FBI in 1950: “The radio episode concerned bandits trying to frame the Lone Ranger by committing crimes with ‘silver-looking’ bullets. Just as someone was exposing the fraud by scraping the bullets to show they were softer than silver and only silver-colored, an FBI man turned off the radio. I turned it on: he turned it off again.”⁴ As things got worse for the family, no 18one could be sure whether the radio had in fact been figuratively turned off, or whether the “case” was being constructed out of the generic formulae of a broadcast spy fiction. This, at any rate, was his father, Julius’s, response to the FBI charges; he said they were “fantastic—something like kids hear over the television on the Lone Ranger program.”⁵ As for Michael, for whom the primal scene of his future political life had been the coitus interruptus of a radio program, his visits to his parents in Sing Sing prison were all confusingly experienced through the imaginative filter of “private detective radio shows” in which the FBI tended to be the unquestioned heroes. Television, of course, was the harder drug, and Meeropol remembers that many of the auto and beer commercials that first captured his fancy were actually the scene of a second birth; they were written by the man who was to adopt the Rosenberg children after their parents’ death.⁶

Meeropol’s reconstruction of these mass-mediated infantile memories is more evocative of the fantasmatic milieu of the whole affair than is the more objective research of those who have tried to distinguish between fact and fiction in the case. From as early as 1947, sensationalist reports about atom espionage had begun to dominate newspaper headlines. The initial tongue-in-cheek tone of New York Times editorials like “Mystery of the Stolen Atom,” gave way to a more responsible and authoritative tone as the FBI kept reporters busy with dozens and dozens of “atom spy” arrests over the next three years.⁷ In his own account of the case, published and widely read in Reader’s Digest under the title, “The Crime of the Century,” Hoover, or his ghost writer, showed that he had a shrewd eye for pulp fiction. Here, for example, is his description of the confession of government witness Harry Gold:

A startled gleam flashed through his eyes, his mouth fell open and he seemed momentarily to freeze. The map he had obtained in the Santa Fe museum, so that he could find the way to the bridge without asking questions! The shock of seeing the Chamber of Commerce folder was profound; it unmanned him, shattered the habitual, impregnable poise of an accomplished deceiver.

In a sleepwalker’s voice, Gold finally asked, “Where does that thing come from?”

An agent intoned: “You said you never had been west of the Mississippi. Or have you?”

The question seemed to pound with resistless force upon the stunned mind of Harry Gold, a man who had lived for years behind a front of lies and fantasy. There was a pause. Gold said nothing. Then the other agent prodded: “About this map, Mr. Gold. Would you like to tell the whole truth?”

Then, abruptly, Gold blurted out, “I . . . I am the man to whom Klaus Fuchs gave his information.”

19With these words the mysterious shadow we had been seeking became a living, breathing person—Harry Gold . . .⁸

The “red spy” was a new villain hastily constructed for the readers of comic books, popular fiction, and media folklore. In the postwar years, there were numerous confessors and informers (about eighty ex-Communists in all) who were willing to supplement the popular image-repertoire of the spy with fanciful embellishments of their own; the most notorious being the desperate Whittaker Chambers and the loquacious Elizabeth Bentley, “The Red Spy Queen.” When the atom espionage story finally broke, however (Spies Do Exist!), a new kind of spy was called for, partly because of the enormity and the politically inflected nature of the charges. Despite, or perhaps because of the fact that there was no real “secret” to give away—the bomb had been produced from a fund of international wartime knowledge—the cultural construction of the A-spy required a personality that was distinct from the gentlemanly stereotype of the espionage agent usually found in popular spy fiction. A more sinister espionage psychology conveniently emerged in the case of Klaus Fuchs, the British spy scientist arrested and convicted in 1950. In his confession, Fuchs described his attitude towards spying as one of “controlled schizophrenia,” a result, he claimed, of the dialectical separation of his life into dual worlds, which his “Marxian philosophy” had facilitated. The prosecuting counsel subsequently attributed to him a “Jekyll and Hyde” dual personality that may “be a unique . . . new precedent in the field of psychiatry,” but he might just as well have been describing the new spy formula demanded by the political moment: a treasonable, though “ordinary,” personality for whom the world of fact had to be shown to be more perverse than the world of fiction.

Signs of normality and of social conformity could now be regarded, by alert neighbors and friends, as the most insidious signs of treachery, since, in the Jekyll and Hyde spy syndrome, they are the most telling symptoms of deception. Accordingly, each of the main characters in the Rosenberg drama was distinguished, it seems, only by his or her lack of social distinction. Harry Gold, the informer, a “pudgy, stoop-shouldered chemist”⁹ from the “false fronts and dirty, narrow backyards” of a “grimy” Philadelphia neighborhood,¹⁰ who nonetheless was credited, by his detractors, as being a “Walter Mitty,” with an active imagination that thrived upon its exotic distance from his everyday life. David Greenglass, the conspiracy case witness, described by his own lawyer as a “slob,” (and as a “slovenly, shifty-eyed machinist” by a former client);¹¹ he was given to reading science fiction rather than “science,” and was thus to draw the disdain of distinguished scientists all over the world for his obvious lack of scientific and technical intelligence, a fact that undermined the court’s 20assumption that he had understood enough about the Los Alamos bomb to be able to pass on the secrets of its sophisticated construction.

As for the striking normality of the Rosenbergs themselves, Ethel is described as a “plain,” “slightly dumpy,” and generally dowdy working-class housewife: “it is hard to believe that someone who chose to wear hats with six-inch high artificial flowers sticking straight out from them—as Ethel did the day she was arrested—could fully represent the international Communist menace.”¹² And the unbohemian Julius is remembered as a serious and humane fellow, struggling ignominiously to make ends meet with his small, failing machine-shop business, while allegedly running an extensive spy ring. Gold’s passion for baseball appeared to sustain his interest during the trial. Greenglass claimed that his love of popular culture like “Li’l Abner” prevented him from defecting at Julius’s entreaty. In the trial itself, judgments of great importance came to rest upon the most insignificant commodity items: the famous, torn Jello box, allegedly used to identify Gold to Greenglass, and the inexpensive, mass-produced console table from Macy’s that allegedly concealed a micro-filmmaking unit. Every further revelation about the humdrum petty-bourgeois reality of their lives served not to dull but to heighten the already “monstrous” status of the Rosenbergs’ alleged crime, and, in the absence of any “real” evidence, the defendants were made to take on the spy’s shadowy inventory of effects precisely because they themselves were all too normal—and thus boring.¹³

At the dead center of this farrago of fictions something only slightly more palpable was at stake. The question—What is a spy?—was one thing. Just as important was the question—What is a Communist?—or even—Are Communists real people?; questions that would trouble the representation of “aliens” in the science-fiction films of Cold War Hollywood. If the Rosenbergs were Communists (and there is no question that Julius, at least, had graduated from the Young Communist League to full Party membership in 1939—as a student, he was a regular of the famous Alcove 2 at City College and he later became the chairman of his CP unit, branch 16–B of the Party’s industrial division), then Communists could not be “crazy Reds.” In fact, if the Rosenbergs were Communists, then Communists were barely distinguishable from any ordinary American couple, and certainly far removed from the image of Communists as “a lot of whacked-up Bohemians” that Harry Gold presented in his trial testimony.¹⁴ On the contrary, the Cold War climate was such that the Rosenbergs could be presented as a social threat, not because they harbored subversive, or violently revolutionary views (as Popular Fronters, they did not), but because they were so much like an ordinary, patriotic American couple. The exception to this, of course, was their Jewishness, still massively identified in the public mind with unpatriotic behavior and 21opinions. And yet, like so many of the overwhelmingly Jewish hard-core membership of the CPUSA in the thirties and forties, the Rosenbergs’ allegiance to religious traditions, however orthodox (Julius had once been a very devout Talmudic scholar, the Greenglass family was very Orthodox), had long since been rearticulated in politically secular, and Americanized, terms.

Among their predominantly Jewish anti-Stalinist detractors, however, the question of the Rosenbergs’ Jewishness was much less of an issue. For them, the more specific political deception that the Rosenbergs came to represent was the apparent indifference of “Americanist” Communism not only to its parental Bolshevik origins, but also to its alleged Fifth Columnist role during the years of the Nazi-Soviet pact. The historical reasons for this seeming indifference are bound up with the vacillating policies, over twenty years, of the Communist International.

In the days of ultra-leftism, in the early thirties, real Communists were easy to distinguish. Sherwood Anderson had this to say about the difference between a Communist and a Socialist: “I guess the Communists mean it!” And John Dos Passos supposed that becoming a Socialist would be like “drinking a bottle of near-beer.”¹⁵ Fellow travelers, while welcomed if they were famous intellectuals or writers, also ran the risk of being branded as “social fascists” for their lack of real commitment to the movement. The change in Comintern policy that ushered in the anti-fascist Popular Front in 1935 could hardly have been more dramatic: the “people” replaced the “workers”; nationalism replaced international socialism; reformism ...