Born in Tasmania, the scholar and cultural critic Peter Conrad grew up with a colonial child's awareness of English literature and history and ignorance of his own, Australian children having been told "as little as possible" about the origins of their country. But there was a second pervasive influence: American culture, especially cinema. "Like many others who arrived in the world after 1945," he writes, "I often need to remind myself that I'm not American."
In How the World Was Won, he sets out to examine the extent and effect of American influence on global culture, from its role as saviour in the 1940s through its rise as a world power. He suggests that the world has been thoroughly Americanised but that the era of its dominance is winding down: "It is time to look not towards America but back at it, retraversing three quarters of a century that began with its promise to raise up bruised, battle-sore humanity and renovate our world." American power, Conrad argues, has been due not only to military strength but also, primarily, to its position as leader and innovator in a free global market. Now, however, that position is weakening.
Conrad unrolls the 20th century like a giant canvas and takes us on a provocative, enjoyable romp through its quarrels, rivalries and vanities. Literature, art, film and journalism are the lenses he uses to guide us through the high and low points of the United States’ relationship with the rest of the world – and with itself. The US theorises itself and other countries answer back, passing judgments of their own. That the dissenting or adulatory voices in this argument are predominantly European is a small quibble with an otherwise absorbing and highly accessible book. Conrad is a gifted reader of the hidden codes that reveal a culture, a light-touch critic who tells his story well – and as a story this has everything: power, money, attraction, revulsion, suspicion and greed.
Initially, the rise of the United States as a brash young leader guiding the world through a century of progress seemed unstoppable. Europeans quickly forgot their postwar dependency and recovered their sense of what Conrad calls historical pre-eminence. The likes of Cyril Connolly, Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir were not shy about voicing their opinions. Nor were many internal critics – to such an extent that you’d wonder if they were properly aware of their luck, living in a country where they could express themselves so freely without fear of retribution – although the interventions of Joseph McCarthy and his House Un-American Activities committee put a stop to all that for a while.
The war in Vietnam proved disastrous, but the war against communism more generally was easier to win in the end. It turned out there was no need for threat after all, because the “rowdy pleasures” of the United States’ “culture and the seductions of its commerce persuaded the rest of the world to postpone revolution indefinitely”. The cold war, Conrad says, “was won in the shops, not on the battlefield”. As the century progressed and markets opened up, the whole world was in the market for American goods, American movies and music, the American way of life.
By the end of the 1950s the free market allowed an increase in imported amenities in Japan, as shown in films such as Yasujiro Ozu's Good Morning (1959), where the unstoppable advance of Americanisation in a suburban house in Tokyo includes the arrival of toasters, blenders, washing machines and TVs. The father is deeply suspicious. He thinks the advent of television will make everyone stupid, but, in a dramatic reversal, it wouldn't be long before everyone in the wider world "coveted sets made by Sony or Yamaha". When Arthur Miller brought Death of a Salesman to China, the cast wondered why Willy Loman thought himself a failure when he owned a car, a house and – even more miraculous – a fridge.
Ireland barely gets a mention, despite Mary Harney's famous declaration that we are closer to Boston than Berlin. (Mind you, she's very quiet now.) But there is plenty to enjoy in this book. Who could resist the image of Charlton Heston as a "biblical George Washington" in The Ten Commandments? "Holding up the tablet on which the commandments were carved, Heston also resembled the Statue of Liberty, uncrowned but wearing similar sandals."
Nikita Khrushchev, determined to show off the superior size of Soviet planes on a state visit, needs a ladder to disembark at Andrews Air Force Base. Truman Capote earwigs a Soviet official at a Leningrad performance of Porgy and Bess. Leonore Gershwin offends the Russians with furs and bling and complaints about their food, but Pat Nixon's pearls and a house kitted out with goods from Macy's at the Moscow World's Fair win them over.
David Bailey declines an opportunity to photograph Jean Shrimpton beside New York Public Library lions. He takes her “slumming”, in Harlem, Times Square, Chinatown.
Le Corbusier suggested that Americans were godlike. Sartre and Graham Greene thought they were robots, while Sayyid Qutb saw them as obscene savages. But Conrad argues that disputes about the achievements and motives of the United States are actually about human possibility. “Their society sets the individual free and the removal of prohibitions and inhibitions has placed on view the best and the worst of which we are capable.” Americans, he reminds us, “continue to do a disproportionate amount of the world’s scientific and technological thinking: innovation is their national mission.”
By 2028, if not sooner, the US will no longer be the largest economy. “As Joseph Chamberlain said a century ago about Britain’s flagging empire, the Titan is weary.” The United States has its detractors, but Conrad is not one of them. In this affectionate, comprehensive survey of the art and popular culture of a century, he warns that, before celebrating its loss of power, critics should ask themselves whether its successor will be quite as keen as the US has been to entertain the world and make us happy.
Lia Mills's most recent novel, Fallen, was published in June 2014 by Penguin Ireland
