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Land of Tomorrow: Postwar Fiction and the Crisis of American Liberalism . Benjamin Mangrum. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2019. Pp. x+203.

2020; University of Chicago Press; Volume: 118; Issue: 2 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1086/711164

1545-6951

Robert L. Caserío,

Political Economy and Marxism

Previous articleNext article FreeBook ReviewLand of Tomorrow: Postwar Fiction and the Crisis of American Liberalism. Benjamin Mangrum. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2019. Pp. x+203.Robert L. CaserioRobert L. CaserioPennsylvania State University, University Park Search for more articles by this author Full TextPDF Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinked InRedditEmailQR Code SectionsMoreA steely intellectual ambition propels the argument of Benjamin Mangrum’s Land of Tomorrow. Mangrum is convinced that FDR established an ideally progressive “activist-managerial state” (119), that FDR’s achievement (if only by way of the “patchwork policies of the New Deal’s active phase” [9]) fell apart after 1938, and that the idea of such a state has eroded ever since. With prosecutorial zeal Mangrum aims to get to the bottom of the demise. And he uncovers the long-lasting cause: an intellectual and literary ideology that for decades has promoted individual selfhood rather than commitment to collective action. Among the thinkers and writers whose influence Mangrum holds responsible for undoing “the political idea of an interventionist welfare state” (3) are Nietzsche, John Dewey, Freud, F. A. Hayek, Lionel Trilling, Hannah Arendt, Jean-Paul Sartre, Students for a Democratic Society, Franz Kafka, W. H. Auden, Jack Kerouac, Vladimir Nabokov, Norman Mailer, Ralph Ellison, J. D. Salinger, Flannery O’Connor, Walker Percy, Saul Bellow, Patricia Highsmith, and Sloan Wilson. That is not a complete list.1Mangrum’s method of conglomerating the accused, and of driving home their political deviation, is most interestingly on show in his last chapter, “Mergers and Acquisitions,” which is about “business fiction and the theory of liberal management” (134). “Liberal management” at this final point of Mangrum’s argument does not mean management in the sense Mangrum uses earlier, when he approvingly identifies “activist-managerial institutions” (20) in 1934–38 with “programmatic commitments of liberal bureaucracy” (23) and with “statist activism” (120). Instead, as one can gather from the chapter’s title, Mangrum means that a valuable activist-managerial ideology was acquired by big business, which merged it with antiactivist ends, and thereby replaced collective purpose with ideals of “self-actualization” (135). Those ideals, identifiable for Mangrum with management theorists Peter F. Drucker, Kurt Lewin, and Abraham H. Maslow (the root of whose works goes back not only to the 1940s but also to the 1920s), masked the profit grabbing behind “‘human relations’ solutions” (141) that “reinterpreted collective activity in psychosocial and political terms” (143). The reinterpretation “construed the workplace as the principal site for negotiating individual contentment, and it thus presented American business as the frontlines of American democratic virtue” (141).“These sentiments find literary clarification,” Mangrum proposes, in Sloan Wilson’s best-selling novel The Man in the Grey Flannel Suit (1955). Wilson’s protagonist, at first standing for anticorporate rebellion (and embraced as such by Sloan’s readers), winds up using his sense of being unique—a mode of “self-actualization”—to gain a public relations job for a media network. The protagonist’s “assimilation within the managerial ranks,” Mangrum points out, “validates the idea that authenticity and personal fulfilment are at least potentially compatible with … corporate success” (149). Thus, a novel that attacks corporate capitalism’s negation of “institutions of an interventionist welfare state” (3) (aka “institutionality” [156]) is shown to reverse itself. More than one novel, and more than one mode of thought, exemplifies what is at issue in the reversal: complicity with betrayal of “statist activism.” The betrayal is assigned by Mangrum in one segment (less than twelve pages) of his last chapter to Bellow, Ken Kesey, Kurt Vonnegut, Philip K. Dick, Madeleine L’Engle, Joseph Heller, Kerouac, Heidegger, and Arendt; and, above all, to their convergence with the postwar US canonization of Kafka. Kafka’s heroes, throttled by opponents of “the individual’s convoluted and tortuous struggle against state and corporate bureaucracies” (159), means that Kafka can’t be, Mangrum thinks, what Arendt considered him—“a fellow citizen, a ‘member of the community’” (159). She deceived herself, Mangrum says, for inasmuch as Arendt also looked to “community” with Kafka as an imaginative resource for the destruction of bureaucratic life, she turned Kafka into another grey flannel suit: a cultural promoter of “self-actualization” and a derogator of the virtues of “centralized planning” and “coordinated bureaucratic effort” (161).If I exaggerate the gist of Mangrum’s reductive manipulation of Kafka, I would say I am responding in kind: exaggeration is something Land of Tomorrow’s thought depends on. Its concluding assertions, wherein sentences about ideal working conditions in the Students for a Democratic Society’s 1965 Port Huron Statement are said to “govern … or enabl[e] private judgments of value in much the same way as the aestheticism [sic] of Friedrich Hayek’s political philosophy” (165), are a characteristic stretch. Unless one is already persuaded of such conclusions, wherein antithetical (let alone merely different) positions are forced together, they push persuasion to a breaking point. If the historical truth that Land of Tomorrow wants to establish does indeed matter—if by the time of the Port Huron Statement and thereafter “American liberalism had come to construe opportunities for private judgment of value as the governing moral concern for political movements and institutions” (165)—then it does not sufficiently argue the truth.To be sure, to many in Mangrum’s audience, myself included, the betrayal of rational collectivity and planful public good by our daily buying and selling of “private judgments” is a disastrous brute fact that scarcely requires argument. On that score Mangrum can count on preaching to a preestablished choir. But his case is not sufficiently laid out—or is a worrisome example of the way we can substitute politicized assertion for evidence—inasmuch as it indicts aesthetic productions for motivating political failures and public malfunctions. The American electorate and its politicians have steadily moved toward Trumpland, Mangrum in effect proposes, because they have read, absorbed, and been seductively distracted by constellations of novels. Especially by Nabokov’s novels, which inevitably one gathers, turn the minds of Nabokov’s readers against any sympathy with “social-democratic ideas” (54), and must therefore be responsible for influencing generations of voters, lobbyists, congressmen, and presidents to undo “statist activism.”Land of Tomorrow loans itself to mechanical cause-and-effect conclusiveness because Mangrum bases his arguments on stark contrasts, without cultivating dialectical or nuanced in-betweens. That basis is cemented by his impressment of multiple fictions to serve his perspective, in a continually rushed expository mode. His point, no doubt, is that we must stop being patient with mediations. They would probably be treacherous allies of “the [post-war] invocation of aestheticism as a bulwark against the threat of political tyranny” (23). “Aestheticism” for Mangrum marks any discourse that opposes “most types of organizational authority” (23). But in his opening chapter (“Aestheticism, Civil Society, and the Origins of Totalitarianism”) his usage of the term, which almost would suit a Victorian distressed by Oscar Wilde, sets up post-1938 narrative fictions above all as enemies of “institutionality.” That arraignment depends on a complementary opposition between novels before and after FDR. According to Mangrum’s literary history, naturalist narrative fiction, especially Dreiser’s, represented “the psychological”—a variant of “private judgments”—as “little more than an aftereffect” of “environmental and socioeconomic conditions” (91). Hence naturalism “drew … on a sociological and explanatory template” that expressed no “political animus toward progressive politics” (93). In a contrast characteristic of the postwar, Mangrum contends, Patricia Highsmith’s variant of naturalism in her Ripley thrillers “removes” “the mental states of her characters” “from the largely deterministic structures that shape the naturalist novel” (98)—and that prevents reading their author, if not her characters, as in alliance with progressivism.2Dreiser and Richard Wright do not sustain Land of Tomorrow’s polarization of naturalists and their successors. One of Mangrum’s bugbears is Nietzsche, because he underwent a postwar boom. The same bugbear inspired Dreiser’s novels about superman financier Frank Cowperwood, an epitome of “self-actualization,” that is, of the individualism that is for Mangrum “private judgment’s” “aesthetic” bedrock. But pace Mangrum, Dreiser in his 1920 essay, “The American Financier,” weighs “the impossible demands of the people” against “the almost impossible individualism of the egoist,” and decides that Nietzsche’s “preaching” of “greater individuality” was right (“at best, all we have is the individual”).3 The individual’s private judgment, Dreiser concludes, “may not always agree with the ethics of his time, … but if he prove essential, as he nearly always does, his revolt against the commonplace fixity … cannot be looked upon as either wholly evil or vain.”4 So Dreiser seems a good fit with Mangrum’s postwar enemies of the activist state. Indeed, when it comes to the “lawless”5 aspects of individuation, Dreiser goes so far—in his play The Hand of the Potter (1918)—as to plead for compassion for a pedophile who murders one of his victims. An activist-managerial state might not find the plea consonant with “collective” aims based on “a sociological and explanatory template.” The play suggests that there is more to life than explanation. At the same time, Dreiser could produce the essay and the play, and attach himself nevertheless to the ideological position that Mangrum approves. Dreiser’s refusal of either-or alternatives might equally mark “literary clarifications” of the postwar.The same refusal marks Wright. Mangrum concedes as much: Native Son (1940) and Black Boy (1945) “suggest [sic] a form of social protest that aspires to reform the environment, to make structural space for the individuality of the person of color whose humanity … [external] forces deny” (64). But in Black Boy, one might say, it is also the other way around: “the individuality of the person of color,” whose “individuality” all constituents of racial conflict deny, makes space for the social protest that could reform the environment and “humanity.” It makes that space via young Wright’s rebellion against the solidarities of family, of church, of racist “templates.” Wright’s reiteration of his struggle on behalf of self-actualization—“to learn who I was … what I might be”6—argues a complex compatibility of distinct thoughts, feelings, and allegiances that might apply equally to authors for whom Mangrum does not make similar concessions.Land of Tomorrow’s title is unexplained, but its scorched-earth address to the last eighty years of “culture” seems a younger scholar’s urgent quest to understand our national demise (which started in the Vietnam era at the very least) in a way that might yet yield a livable future. All persons of goodwill are likely allies of that quest. No matter one’s scholarly generation, however, progressive desires need not simplify the past or the present in order to serve a valuable thesis. Simplification results from disjoining one era of fiction or thought from another. Despite critical fashions du jour, texts from different eras (and nationalities)—naturalist ones, for example—go on being read and being influential simultaneously with texts that are supposedly their ideological successor-antagonists. If readers can hold together in their thoughts and feelings diverse ideological sources or leanings, as Dreiser and Wright do, then how those conjunctions affect politics or morality or life is hard to tell. The difficulty of telling can’t be left out; nor can the possibility that a new ideological formation is underway as a result of fresh conjunctions among originally separated perspectives. Had Land of Tomorrow allowed such difficulty and possibility, if only as temporary but thorough counterarguments to its contentions, it would have been more convincing. Authorities on whom Mangrum depends for conclusive support—for example, Michael Szalay’s New Deal Modernism (2000) and Wendy Wall’s Inventing the “American Way” (2008)—are admirably open to complications of view. Their discourse is politically committed, yet more patient than Mangrum’s. A finer-grained intellectual patience would have better served Land of Tomorrow’s hopes.Notes1. A complete list would not include Ayn Rand, even though Mangrum in effect sees his objects of study as partisans of The Fountainhead (1943).2. Highsmith’s best-selling lesbian romance, The Price of Salt (1952), and its possible relation to “progressivism,” goes unnoticed.3. Theodore Dreiser, “The American Financier,” in Hey Rub-A-Dub-Dub (New York: Boni & Liveright, 1920), 83, 90.4. Ibid., 88.5. Ibid., 84.6. Richard Wright, Black Boy (New York: Harper & Row, 1966), 284. Previous articleNext article DetailsFiguresReferencesCited by Modern Philology Volume 118, Number 2November 2020 Article DOIhttps://doi.org/10.1086/711164 Views: 210 HistoryPublished online August 25, 2020 For permission to reuse, please contact [email protected] Crossref reports no articles citing this article.