PARTISAN REVIEW
441
John Henry Raleigh
I really do not understand what is meant by "the new cul–
tural conservatism." As far as I can see, there has always been one
great, central, even monolithic, cultural tradition in the West. Its roots
are in Judaic, Greek and Roman culture, and it was transmitted through
historical Europe, having been both "conserved" and revitalized by
various European cultures, and subsequently by America and Russia, in
the Middle Ages, the Renaissance, the seventeenth, eighteenth, nine–
teenth and twentieth centuries. This culture has survived the fall of
Rome, the vicissitudes of the Middle Ages, the French Revolution, two
World Wars, the Russian Revolution and various other national and
international outbreaks, upheavals, new starts, old beginnings, horrors,
cataclysms and the like. It is certainly likely to survive the "happenings"
of American culture of the last twenty years or so.
Taking a similarly long view of American history itself, one is struck,
first, by the extraordinary evolutionary development - successive con–
quest and assimilation of native space and the riches thereof; irresistible
growth; rise to world dominance, in what is a very short period of
historical time. A kind of meteor in the history of power relations in
the world. (Unlike Rome which labored for centuries to achieve its
world-power; unlike China, which seems always just to be
there
in all
its enormity and eventuality.) In any event the meteor - one might
call the United States the Napoleon of world history - is now beginning
to wobble and may perhaps have passed its apogee. One hopes not, but,
in any event, act two has begun. How many acts the play will have,
and whether one of them will have a Waterloo, no one knows.
But evolutions are never straight lines. In the case of the American
rise to power, the seminal booster shots were the Civil War and World
War II (World War I was a secondary booster), under the urgency of
which enormous technological-industrial-scientific machines were built.
At the conclusion of each war the armies were disbanded and the troops
sent home, but the economy itself went marching on,creating successive–
ly "The Gilded Age," the 1920s and the 1950s and 1960s. But there
were differences in what aspects of the national culture were caught up
in the three successive "booms." The one of the 1950s and 1960s ex–
tended for the first time to education and the arts, and these two ac–
tivities were subsidized on a scale unprecedented in American history
and perhaps in human history. The subsidization of education is easy
to document: the G.l. Bill; the subvention of scientific research by the
federal government; the enormous growth of the educational system
itself. The subsidization of the arts was less grandiose and less apparent,
but it was real: the opening of the university to writers and artists ;
the proliferation of cultural centers on the university campus and else–
where; the discovery by the entire array of the media, from publishing
houses to TV, that the arts were interesting, real
and
profitable. This
intrammelment of education and the arts in the national prosperity and
the national sense of destiny and purpose was good in all kinds of ways,
if only as a
pr~cedent
and beginning of a national tradition. Mistakes,
