THE COLD WAR AND THE IDEA OF FREEDOM ★^919or of hideous shape.” The State Depart-
ment abandoned the project and sold
the works at auction. In 2013, for the
first time in half a century, they were
exhibited, at Indiana University, with
the overall title Art Interrupted.
The CIA, however, funded the
Museum of Modern Art in New York,
which championed the New York
school, and helped arrange for exhi-
bitions overseas. It hoped to persuade
Europeans not only that these paint-
ings demonstrated that the United
States represented artistic leadership
as well as military power, but that
such art embodied the free, individual
expression denied to artists in commu-
nist countries. Pollock’s paintings, John
Cage’s musical compositions, which
incorporated chance sounds rather
than a fixed score, and the “graceful
freedom” of George Balanchine’s bal-
let choreography were all described
as artistic reflections of the essence of
American life.
Freedom and
Totalitarianism
Along with freedom, the Cold War’s
other great mobilizing concept was
totalitarianism. The term origi-
nated in Europe between the world
wars to describe fascist Italy and Nazi
Germany— aggressive, ideologically
driven states that sought to subdue all
of civil society, including churches,
unions, and other voluntary associations, to their control. Such states, accord-
ing to the theory of totalitarianism, left no room for individual rights or alterna-
tive values and therefore could never change from within. By 1950, the year the
McCarran Internal Security Act barred “totalitarians” from entering the United
A poster for The Red Menace, one of numerous
anticommunist films produced by Hollywood
during the 1950s.How did the Cold War reshape ideas of American freedom?