426
PARTISAN REVIEW
better, sterner life, which would be a true culture because it would
come no longer out of Bohemia but out of workaday life justly
organized.
To
all
this, the experience of the WPA in the arts added an
unsuspected and perhaps contradictory touch of nationalism. The
state guidebooks, the historical murals in post offices, the local theater
groups, inevitably drew the attention of artists and public alike
upon native subjects and resources. Those engaged in the programs
developed for the first time a sense of solidarity-with one another
as well as with their birthplace. Intellectuals were being acknowledged
as a working part of the nation, not individually but collectively.
This was new and it communicated something of the American tradi–
tion that had never been congenial to artists before-the get-together,
corn-husking democracy of mutual help.
The Second World War completed the course of spiritual rein–
statement. In the briefest span it showed that the promises of the
"New Orders," whether based on myth or on Marx, were fraudulent;
that European folly, treachery, and disregard of human rights refuted
the claim of superior "civilization"; and that our lumbering Amer–
ican republic, with all its glaring faults, was fundamentally sounder
and stronger than its enemies. Countless deeds of valor, of organized
brawn,
and of intellect,
showed that the nation as a whole could
act and learn and achieve; so that it was no disgrace, no provincial–
ism, to accept America and admire it. The great inflow of intellectual
refugees throughout the period certainly encouraged this acceptance
on any number of rational grounds : if a good foreign judge could
praise our institutions, so could we; and if his prejudices, stubborn–
ness, or pride of caste kept him from improving the opportunities of–
fered him by this hospitable land, we could gauge from his unhappy
resentments some of the reasons for Europe's plight. In short, by
1945, America having won a war on both her oceans, and finding
herself involved in the four quarters of the earth, was quite simply
the
world power, which means: the center of world awareness: it was
Europe that was provincial.
As
for Russia and Asia, they had clearly abandoned the
promoting of any culture distinctively theirs, and were making every
effort to beat American industry and "materialism" at its own game.
But in order to propel at breakneck speed their vast populations
