Anticommunist liberals incessantly theorized against the creation of
oppositions. If U.S. culture was to keep apt focus on the culture
against which it should draw its own boundaries (communist culture in
all its real and imagined manifestations, especially socialist
realism), then American culture-makers would have to beware creating
unnecessary oppositions within western culture. From T. R. Fyvel's
"Reflections on Manifest Destiny," one had the sense that it was as
important not to exascerbate opposition between the American and
French cultures ("while Coca-Cola is being advertised all over France,
the French wine industry will naturally join the French anti-American
chorus") as it was to keep up the opposition between American and
Soviet cultures. But here was the rub: the same argument had it that
imposing Coca Cola on France--or exporting American anticommunist
films even as "European film makers will regard [Hollywood] as the
opposition"--entailed Americans' necessary acceptance of their role as
world arbiters of culture. "Such facts may be unpleasant, but they
are only aspects of the American imperial position, and as such not to
be bemoaned, as some American observers tend to do, but to be studied,
evaluated, and coped with--if possible." Thus liberal anticommunists
were also, along with everything else, in the business of cultural
studies. Yet these intellectuals were generally in this period
working out arguments against the growing influence of American pop
culture, fearing that very influence as indeed a sign of communism,
not its opposite. The cultural studies project described by some
anticommunist advocates of power of American pop culture as a stay
against communist influence in Europe was never generally accepted as
important enough to be given a theoretical base, thus it never got
past this contradiction.
Only a month after Fyvel's piece appeared in The New
Republic, David Daiches appeared there too, writing on "American
Culture in Britain," lamenting not just that "chips" was giving way in
London to "French fries" but, more distressingly, that a "debased kind
of American culture" was "used so freely for export" and was being
adopted by so many British youth--a "debased" culture rather than,
Daiches points out, a cultural imposition purer and thus more
tolerable: something rather from "Jefferson's America or Lincoln's
America or Whitman's America or even Carl Sandburg's America." But,
alas, these American "visions [are] wholly unknown" to the British
kids lunching on French fries and taking American culture to entail
"toughness, breeziness, cocksureness." Daiches's complaint obviously
was that "Europe is gradually being reduced to a low colonial status
vis-�-vis America," but he did not say whether the complaint would
still be valid if the cultural invasion were being supported by the
cultural manifestations of Jefferson or Lincoln or Whitman or
Sandburg. His worry is that Americans might not be aware that they
are being "misrepresented," and thus himself did not worry,
apparently, whether a Jeffersonian or Whitmanian image would
constitute a misrepresentation also.