How American Culture Ate the World: A review of "A Righteous Smokescreen" by Sam Lebovi... - 0 views
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(in 2016, the six largest Hollywood studios alone accounted for more than half of global box office sales)
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Americans, too, stick to the U.S. The list of the 500 highest-grossing films of all time in the U.S., for example, doesn’t contain a single foreign film (Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon comes in at 505th, slightly higher than Jerry Seinfeld’s less-than-classic Bee Movie but about a hundred below Paul Blart: Mall Cop).
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Compared to 66 percent of Canadians and 76 percent of U.K. citizens, only about four in 10 Americans have a passport and can therefore travel abroad.
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How did this happen? How did cultural globalization in the twentieth century travel along such a one-way path?
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For the American delegates, the question belonged to the higher plane of moral principle. The delegation wanted to extend into the international sphere the classic liberal notion of press freedom, which would prohibit governments from censoring the news and enshrine the rights of journalists to access sources and to dispatch the news across borders.
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Carlos Romulo, the legendary Philippine diplomat and journalist who had uncovered Japanese atrocities in his country, went so far as to call freedom of information the “touchstone of all the freedoms to which the UN is consecrated.” World War II had been horrifying in scale and severity; information barriers were believed to have played a part. Japan’s and Germany’s bids for autarky had insulated their citizens from global currents, incubated aggressive nationalism, and, from the perspective of American policymakers, driven the world into war.
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The answer, Sam Lebovic’s new book, A Righteous Smokescreen: Postwar America and the Politics of Cultural Globalization, convincingly argues, largely comes down to American policy in the middle decades of the twentieth century.
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But when 600 or so journalists, media magnates, and diplomats arrived in Geneva in 1948 to draft the press freedom clauses for both the U.N. Declaration of Human Rights and the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, definitional difficulties abounded. Between what the U.S. meant by “freedom of information” and what the rest of the world needed lay a vast expanse.
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By 1949, American films made up around half of the European and Asian markets, 62 percent of the African market, 64 percent of the South American market, and three-quarters of the Central American and Pacific markets.
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Back in Geneva, delegates from the global south pointed out these immense inequalities. S.A. Brelvi of India called for the wealthier nations to equitably allocate the “supplies of physical facilities and technical equipment for the dissemination of information between all countries.” But the American delegates refused the idea that global inequality itself was a barrier to the flow of information across borders. Besides, they argued, redistributive measures violated the sanctity of the press
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The U.S. was able to strong-arm its notion of press freedom—a hybrid combining the American Constitution’s First Amendment and a consumer right to receive information across borders—at the conference, but the U.N.’s efforts to define and ensure the freedom of information ended in a stalemate.
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The failure to redistribute resources, the lack of multilateral investment in producing more balanced international flows of information, and the might of the American culture industry at the end of the war—all of this amounted to a guarantee of the American right to spread information and culture across the globe.
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But representatives of other states had more earthly concerns. The war had tilted the planet’s communications infrastructure to America’s advantage. In the late 1940s, for example, the U.S. consumed 63 percent of the world’s newsprint supply; to put it more starkly, the country consumed as much newsprint in a single day as India did over the course of a year. A materials shortage would hamper newspaper production across much of the world into at least the 1950s (though this did provide the fringe benefit of enabling political interference with the press: The CIA supplied Italian anti-Communist newspapers with newsprint in the lead-up to the 1948 election, while the U.S. occupation administration in Japan cut the allocation of newsprint to local Communist newspapers). The war had also laid low foreign news agencies—Germany’s Wolff and France’s Havas had disappeared entirely—and not a single news agency called the global south home. At the same time, America’s Associated Press and United Press International both had plans for global expansion,
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The focus of A Righteous Smokescreen is broader. It is a study of both sides of the globalization ledger: As the U.S. exported its culture in astonishing amounts, it imported very little
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it remained surprisingly cut off from the rest of the world. A parochial empire, but with a global reach.
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Containment, Lebovic shows, wasn’t just a territorial strategy committed to holding back Soviet expansion into Europe and Asia. Rather, it began at the American border and it involved policing the flow of people and ideas that were potentially inimical to the American status quo
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An Iron Curtain, to rejig Churchill’s famous speech about Soviet policies in Eastern Europe, had descended around the U.S.
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Throughout most of the second half of the twentieth century, Americans had to seek government approval to purchase magazines, books, and even stamps from China, North Korea, Cambodia, Cuba, and Vietnam.
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An untold number of parcels—untold because for several years of the program they didn’t have to notify would-be recipients that the government had decided to destroy their mail—never arrived at their American destination.
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Few of the films shown in American cinemas were foreign (largely a result of the Motion Picture Production Code, which the industry began imposing on itself in 1934; code authorities prudishly disapproved of the sexual mores of European films)
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Few television programs came from abroad (about 1 percent, in fact, in the early 1970s—compared to 12 percent in Britain and 84 percent in Guatemala)
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Few newspapers subscribed to foreign news agencies. Even fewer had foreign correspondents. And very few pages in those papers were devoted to foreign affairs.
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In 1910, nearly 15 percent of the American population had been born overseas, but by 1960, that portion shrank to only 5.4 percent. Similarly, bureaucrats in the burgeoning national security state kept a variety of radicals from entering and leaving the country. Since World War I, foreign anarchists, Communists, and others—ranging from German spies and saboteurs to Black internationalists—found the gate to the U.S. bolt-locked. Likewise, Americans whom the State Department identified as holding so-called “alien” beliefs were barred from the exits.
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Two exhibitions, one in the U.S., the other in the Soviet Union: Yet neither artist could attend their own exhibition because of American border policies. The State Department had denied Picasso a visa back in 1950 on ideological grounds, and it refused to issue a passport to Kent because of his alleged sympathies for communism.
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So-called “area restrictions” forbade all Americans from traveling to countries in the Communist bloc.
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in the 1940s and ’50s, hundreds or even thousands of Americans—more precise data from the innards of the national security state is rather difficult to come by—were denied passports and many, many more never thought to apply for one in the first place, out of fear of what a background check might turn up.
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(about half of all foreign scientists who sought to enter the U.S. in the early postwar years encountered visa difficulties).
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how “actively engaged” was the U.S., really? The answer in Menand’s exploration of culture in the early Cold War is: very. Menand points to the rest of the world’s ravenous consumption of American entertainment as evidence, as well as how Americans “welcomed and adapted art, ideas, and entertainment from other countries”
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as Louis Menand notes on the first page of his recent book, The Free World, it was an era in which “the United States was actively engaged with the rest of the world.”
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in Lebovic’s telling, this was a narrow stream. A lot of its contents were foreign imports that had already been thoroughly Americanized.
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The flow of foreign culture and ideas into the U.S. was so limited that building bridges with the rest of the world became an important impulse of the social movements of the 1960s and ’70s,