Extracts
1. Opening page – from the Introduction
On 2 August 1954, the Boston Daily Globe informed its readers that ‘Leaping Lena’ had landed in New York. Flown in by plane from Munich, this red-eyed carrier pigeon received ‘the kind of welcome usually reserved for human dignitaries’. Fifteen press photographers clicked away as the incomer was greeted by four ‘hero pigeons’ from the Second World War, including at least one prospective mate. Carefully primed pigeon fanciers had brought along several hundred other birds, which were ceremoniously released at the chosen moment. One carried a message telling President Eisenhower of the occasion… Read more »
2. After the Fulton speech – from Chapter 3
After the speech, honorary degrees were gratefully conferred on Truman and Churchill. The latter also received a gold watch, presented by Westminster College’s Presbyterian Professor of Philosophy. Described as a ‘kindly, bewhiskered old gentleman who walks with a jaunty step over Fulton streets’, ‘Danny’ Gage had been at the college for sixty-five years, first as a student and then as a teacher of Bible theology. ‘I don’t believe in any of this so-called liberalism,’ he had earlier told the Fulton Daily Sun-Gazette: ‘You may have your own theories of life, but there can be no divergence from the moral code.’ He now commended Churchill as the man who had done more than any other to prevent ‘the world-wide crash of Democracies, the break-up of liberal institutions’ and to stop mankind from sinking into ‘the deep mire of fathomless moral depravity’. As for the watch, ‘in many ways it reminds me… Read more »
3. Vernon Lee’s Theatre of the West - from Chapter 5
Though named ‘No Place, Nowhere’, the setting is immediately recognizable as a European town square, across which stands a prominent building inscribed ‘The World; a Theatre of Varieties, Lessee and Manager, SATAN’. The houses of the SLEEPY VIRTUES stretch out to form a crescent on either side. TRUTHFULNESS, JUSTICE, TEMPERANCE, EQUANIMITY and others can be seen yawning behind their windows or wearily stepping out into the square to gaze on as the orchestra’s players arrive… Read more »
4. Camouflage and Potemkinism: George Lansbury’s example – from Chapter 8
Accusations of ‘camouflage’ would fly in both directions as the British argued over the Soviet revolution. Visiting Russia in September 1920, H.G. Wells was repeatedly warned that he would be ‘hoodwinked’ by the Bolsheviks, and that ‘the most elaborate camouflage of realities would go on.’ By that time Churchill himself had become engaged in a ferocious correspondence with James H. Baum, the socialist secretary of Leicester and District Trades Council, who had written to denounce the British government’s ‘war policy against Soviet Russia.’ Baum insisted that ‘the great mass of the people’ had been deliberately kept in the dark, as Churchill must have known ‘perfectly well’, and that the policy had been ‘deliberately camouflaged by you, your colleagues and the vast press that keeps you in power.’ … Read more »
5. Margaret McCarthy’s Dream – from Chapter 17
Some apostates gave up on the cause without escaping the polarized logic of the iron curtain. Love became hate as they leapt from one side to the other: the one-eyed communist transmogrifying into a one-eyed anti-communist and, in some cases, including that of Freda Utley, going on to adopt a zealously McCarthyist perspective in the 1950s. But there were others who managed to remove the iron curtain from their thinking altogether. Perhaps the most sympathetic British record of this recovery of mind was provided by Margaret McCarthy. Having travelled through Russia with the Young Communists attached to the British Workers’ Delegation of 1927, McCarthy had resumed her labours in the Lancashire weaving sheds, …Read more »
6. Making out in the Camp of Peace: on Dr. J. H. Cort and other Americans in Prague - from Chapter 19
The early American newspaper reports on the Corts’ new life were not concerned with science as it was now divided by the Iron Curtain. Instead, they grouped the Corts with other Americans who had moved to Prague. This largely reviled company included Herbert Ward, a musician who had joined a Czechoslovak jazz orchestra, and also the gifted Vienna-trained African-American baritone, Aubrey Pankey, who would soon take up permanent residence in the German Democratic Republic, where he would remain (a singer of Schubert who found his niche in the Soviet bloc as a performer of spirituals in the tradition of Paul Robeson) until his death in a traffic accident in 1971… Read more »