MacLeish published an astonishingly bitter essay in the Atlantic Monthly, “The Conquest of America,” in which he attacked the country’s postwar descent into an atmosphere of dystopia, of a utopia gone awry. Although America was the most powerful nation on the globe, the American people seemed seized by a mad compulsion to define themselves by the Soviet threat. In this sense, MacLeish wryly concluded, America had been “conquered” by the Soviets, who were now dictating American behavior. “Whatever the Russians did, we did in reverse,” MacLeish wrote. He harshly criticized Soviet tyranny, but
...more
