One point of Bennett’s book is that the University of Iowa’s philosophy of fiction privileged the sanctity of personal experience—the preciousness of the individual—over the idea that our identities are shaped by the community or political systems or larger historical forces. Bennett believes that the University of Iowa not only drove writers away from exploring political ideas, but in the end undermined true artistic freedom. What if American creativity had been shaped in a way that was oblivious to the limits that had been set for it? Did that not mean American minds had those same limits? Was this why Kamila Shamsie found no American novelists inclined to write about the countries with which America was militarily involved? “The thing to lament is not only that we have a bunch of novels about harpoons and dinghies (or suburbs or bad marriages or road trips or offices in New York),” Bennett writes. “The thing to lament is also the dead end of isolation that comes from describing the dead end of isolation.” It was possible that our highly valued American individualism might have been the ultimate force that detached citizens from the actions of their government, and from the fate of the country as a whole. Once I started looking, I found that the ethos of Cold War programming seeped into every public and private enterprise; under the guise of their own freedom, Americans were creating products that would inculcate in Americans a deep patriotism. Even things like international hotels didn’t escape such ideological manipulation, which I discovered after a Turkish professor of architecture told me, “You need to research Conrad Hilton to understand America’s influence in Turkey.”
The hotel magnate Conrad Hilton was, like Henry Luce, a fervent Christian, capitalist, and anti-Communist. He believed that the Cold War should be fought not only with bombs but with room service. Hilton wanted to show off to the Communists “the fruits of the free world” with his hotels, which he explained, according to the writer Annabel Jane Wharton, were “not only to produce a profit, but also to make a political impact on host countries.” So with funds from the Marshall Plan, Hilton opened his vertical “Little Americas” in Athens, Cairo, and Jerusalem. Hilton’s most important hotel, however, was in Istanbul, whose proximity to the Soviet Union gave it symbolic and practical significance. The Istanbul Hilton would be America’s last commercial outpost before enemy territory. Even the hotel’s windows faced east across the Bosphorus.
As an advertisement for the modern ways of American life, the Hilton in Istanbul was a magnet to local aspirants. The hotel was where the wealthy Turkish secular classes held their weddings and social engagements and, as Hilton had hoped, learned to admire America. In the novel The Museum of Innocence, Orhan Pamuk’s narrator says that “when I was ten, my parents attended the opening of the hotel, a very exciting occasion for them, along with all of Istanbul society, as well as the long-forgotten American film star Terry Moore,” and that on Sunday evenings, they “would go as a family to eat that amazing thing called a hamburger, a delicacy as yet offered by no other restaurant in Turkey.” Newspapers even dispatched reporters to the Hilton to break news of its latest technological innovations and design styles. For Turks who aspired to be “Western,” there was no better place to be seen than the American Hilton.
But Hilton’s hotels were intended not only to fill foreigners with dreams of America. They were also meant as a refuge for Americans when traveling abroad. Hilton wanted the hotels to remind all Americans of their paradise back home, their own polished, peaceful modernity: enormous, clean-lined, and spic-and-span foyers, ice water (rare in Istanbul then), the latest technological gadgetry, and unsurpassable hamburgers. The Hilton was there to discourage American customers from spending too much time in a foreign culture, from considering other ways of life. When I had visited the Hilton, I thought it was an emissary for corporate America, but had not considered that it might be a Cold War outpost for America itself.
Somehow this made the propaganda at the International Press Freedom conference I attended, where I had listened to the American journalist holding forth on the wonders of the military in Turkey, an even more profound occurrence. The ability to discern bias in political conversations or books was not enough. The totality of Americanism was something that often an individual couldn’t see. It was too enormous, and too omnipresent. It might be embedded in the sentences of our novels. It might be embedded in the language we read in magazines, and in the language I myself as a journalist used. As Claus Offe writes, “The United States is no longer a spatially distant entity but a military, commercial and cultural presence, here and now, in a common space. American realities have in part become our reality.” This global system, this common space, was no doubt in part due to American efforts during the Cold War, in which control, influence, and warfare needed to be unacknowledged in order to fully succeed in creating a global citizenry of American moderns who believed they came to their admiration for America on their own. If I had not known that magazines, plays, books, writing programs, newspapers—even hotels!—had all been produced to shape my sense of America’s greatness, then what sort of individuality did I actually possess? Did I possess any at all?
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AMERICANS REGARD THE 1950S as a golden era, a time when foreigners viewed them with admiration and longing; indeed, in Turkey and much of Europe, many defeated citizens would come to hunger for the advantages, the cars and fashions and prosperity, of the United States. But in this period of imperial expansion, many saw things differently. During and after the war, European exiles and expats, intellectuals and novelists, scientists and doctors, imbued with the wisdom of older civilizations, sensed deeper problems in American society. They were, after a while, alarmed.
Some of these European writers saw similarities, in fact, between American liberalism and the totalitarianism or German fascism they had escaped. The novelist Thomas Mann fled Germany in the 1930s for the United States, grateful for its sanctuary and dazzled by its promise. But by the 1950s, when the McCarthyites persecuted anyone Communist or insufficiently anti-Communist, he reversed his position on America, seeing it as a place with a diminished sense of justice. Theodor Adorno felt “an existential debt of gratitude” for America, but, like many fellow members of the Frankfurt School, hated its conformity, which reminded him of the fascism he had left behind in Germany. The Italian writer Italo Calvino thought American liberalism “a totalitarian structure of a medieval kind, based on the fact that no alternative exists.” These foreigners saw something authoritarian in American rhetoric, American myths, and American confidence.