Gore Vidal, the American Empire, and the Cultural Vocabulary of the Post-Civil War South

Year 2012, Issue: 35, 29 - 38, 01.06.2012

Donald M. Whaley

Abstract

For the historian of ideas seeking the origin of Gore Vidal’s critique of the United States of America, that since World War II the American government has engaged in unjustified violence against people abroad while abridging civil liberties at home, William Pfaff provides a clue. In an essay published in The New York Review of Books in 2012, Pfaff examines “the decisive events shaping the condition of individual lives and providing the cultural vocabulary of an era” in several countries. For the United States, he argues, the decisive event is World War II, “although,” he adds, “at the time that World War II began for America, in 1941, the era ended would probably have been identified as post-Civil War, at least in the South” 51 . If the historian were to accept Pfaff’s argument, it becomes possible to see Vidal’s critique of post-World War II America as rooted in the “cultural vocabulary” of the post-Civil War pre-World War II South.

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