From: jeffreydanielrubard@gmail.com   
      
   PREFACE   
      
   This book is about a time when the United States was actively engaged with the   
   rest of the world. In the twenty years after the end of the Second World War,   
   the United States invested in the economic recovery of Japan and Western   
   Europe and extended    
   loans to other countries around the world. With the United Kingdom, it created   
   the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund to support global political   
   stability and international trade. It hosted the new United Nations. Through   
   its government, its    
   philanthropic foundations, its universities, and its cultural institutions, it   
   established exchange programs for writers and scholars, distributed literature   
   around the globe, and sent art from American collections and music by American   
   composers and    
   performers abroad. Its entertainment culture was enjoyed almost everywhere.   
   And it welcomed and adapted art, ideas, and entertainment from other   
   countries. Works of literature and philosophy from all over the world were   
   published in affordable    
   translations. Foreign movies were imported and distributed across the country.   
      
   The number of Americans attending college increased exponentially. Book sales,   
   record sales, and museum attendance soared. Laws were rewritten to permit   
   works of art and literature to use virtually any language and to represent   
   virtually any subject, and    
   to protect almost any kind of speech. American industry doubled its output.   
   Consumer choice expanded dramatically. The income and wealth gap between top   
   earners and the middle class was the smallest in history. The ideological   
   differences between the two    
   major political parties were minor, enabling the federal government to invest   
   in social programs. The legal basis for the social and political equality of   
   Americans of African ancestry was established and economic opportunities were   
   opened up for women.    
   And around the world, colonial empires collapsed, and in their place rose new   
   independent states.   
      
   As conditions changed, so did art and ideas. The expansion of the university,   
   of book publishing, of the music business, and of the art world, along with   
   new technologies of reproduction and distribution, speeded up the rate of   
   innovation. Most striking    
   was the nature of the audience: people cared. Ideas mattered. Painting   
   mattered. Movies mattered. Poetry mattered. The way people judged and   
   interpreted paintings, movies, and poems mattered. People believed in liberty,   
   and thought it really meant    
   something. They believed in authenticity, and thought it really meant   
   something. They believed in democracy and (with some blind spots) in the   
   common humanity of everyone on the planet. They had lived through a worldwide   
   depression that lasted almost ten    
   years and a world war that lasted almost six. They were eager for a fresh   
   start.   
      
   [ Return to the review of “The Free World.” ]   
      
   In the same period, American citizens were persecuted and sometimes prosecuted   
   for their political views. Agencies of the government spied on Americans and   
   covertly manipulated nongovernmental cultural and political organizations.   
   Immigration policies    
   remained highly restrictive. The United States used its financial leverage to   
   push American goods on foreign markets. It established military bases around   
   the globe and intervened in the internal political affairs of other states,   
   rigging elections,    
   endorsing coups, enabling assassinations, and supporting the extermination of   
   insurgents. A cold war rhetoric, much of it opportunistic and fear-mongering,   
   was allowed to permeate public life. And the nation invested in a massive and   
   expensive military    
   buildup that was out of all proportion to any threat.   
      
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   A fifth of the population lived in poverty. The enfranchisement of Black   
   Americans and the opening of economic opportunity to women did little to   
   lessen the dominance in virtually every sphere of life of white men. A spirit   
   of American exceptionalism was    
   widespread, as was a quasi-official belief in something called “the American   
   way of life,” based on an image of normativity that was (to put it mildly)   
   not inclusive.   
      
   The culture industries, as they expanded, absorbed and commercialized   
   independent and offbeat culture-makers, and the university, as it expanded,   
   swallowed up the worlds of creative writing and dissident political opinion.   
   At the end of this period, the    
   country plunged into a foreign war of national independence from which it   
   could not extricate itself for eight years. When it finally did, in the 1970s,   
   growth leveled off, the economy entered a painful period of adjustment,   
   ideological differences    
   sharpened, and the income gap began rapidly increasing. The United States grew   
   wary of foreign commitments, and other countries grew wary of the United   
   States.   
      
   And yet, something had happened. An enormous change in America’s relations   
   with the rest of the world had taken place. In 1945, there was widespread   
   skepticism, even among Americans, about the value and sophistication of   
   American art and ideas, and    
   widespread respect for the motives and intentions of the American government.   
   After 1965, those attitudes were reversed. The United States lost political   
   credibility, but it had moved from the periphery to the center of an   
   increasing international    
   artistic and intellectual life.   
      
   [ Return to the review of “The Free World.” ]   
      
   Cultures get transformed not deliberately or programmatically but by the   
   unpredictable effects of social, political, and technological change, and by   
   random acts of cross-pollination. Ars longa is the ancient proverb, but   
   actually, art making is short-   
   term. It is a response to changes in the immediate environment and the   
   consequence of serendipitous street-level interactions. Between 1945 and 1965,   
   the rate of serendipity increased, and the environment changed dramatically.   
   So did art and thought.   
      
      
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