We wanted to do better than Russia. According to Harvard Professor and New Yorker staff writer Louis Menand, the Cold War wasn’t always just an arms race, it was a battle for knowledge,  and the spoils of war were The Cat in the Hat and the SAT.

    At 7 p.m. on Thursday April 19, a group gathered in Craig Lecture Hall to hear Menand speak. Those who had managed to spot the sporadic signs posted by the Classics department around campus slowly filled the swiveling chairs and waited patiently. The Jesse Floyd Mack Lecture in the Humanities, a lecture that had been forgone in past years, was taken up this year by the Chair of the classics Department, Thomas Van Nortwick, who brought Menand to speak about “Art and Ideas in the Cold War.”

    Menand won the Pulitzer Prize in History in 2002 for his book The Metaphysical Club: A Story of Ideas in America. A cultural critic and historian, he has been a published writer since he was 27.

    When asked about how he became a writer, Menand said that he had forever envisioned himself writing. His career began after a brief attempt at law school. He was published by the now-extinct Bennington Review, and later became an associate editor at the New Republic. There he first learned to edit and work staff jobs, after which Menand became a contributing editor for the New York Review of Books for seven years.

    As Menand noted, “a little schizophrenia isn’t a bad thing.” Far from attributing any benefits to a debilitating psychological disorder, he was speaking of the eclectic nature of his work.

    The binding theme of his lecture was the hyper-anxious atmosphere surrounding intellectualism during the late 1940s and 1950s, the result of political and social anxieties about Soviet superiority during the Cold War. Menand leapt from a critique and explanation of the origins of The Cat in the Hat by Dr. Seuss to the beginnings of standardized testing to the popularity of film noir in Hollywood in France and the U.S. in the late 1950s.

    In the end, he described the lecture and his work in general as a post-structuralist “attempt to explore the oppressed political or economic or social element” of a piece of intellectual or artistic expression.

    Throughout his lecture, Menand referred to the complex relationship between artistic ideas and political and social realities during the Cold War as “pinballs,” bouncing off of one another, reflecting changing ideas and Cold War anxieties while creating and propelling new ones.

    While the lecture was attended in likely equal numbers by humanities professors and undergraduate humanities majors, it wasn’t limited to stiff academic catch-phrases. I know I just scared you by using the word “post-structuralism,” but don’t worry; he wasn’t that scary.

    Rather, he gave us an entertaining reading of The Cat in the Hat. Had you ever wondered why the mother left those kids alone all day? What “murderous or erotic errand” was she on, exactly? Had it occurred to you that the Cat’s mission might not have been to inject some fun into these poor kids’ lives, but rather to introduce them to their libidos? Menand referred to the no longer innocuously named “Thing One” and “Thing Two” as “personified genitalia.” Ultimately, in such a scary Cold War world, if the mother leaves her domestic role, sexual predators and other threats will find their way to her kids.

    The threat behind the story echoed more concrete Cold War fears, such as that of the widely-publicized “technology gap” between the United States and Russia, a concept that fanned the flames of an already tense nation’s fears of intellectual inadequacy.

    With the surprising launch of the Russian satellite “Sputnik” in the late 1950s, U.S. politicians responded to the threat that we might be dumber than our Soviet counterparts by creating programs and adding funding to support science, math, foreign language and technology training.

    By 1959, The Cat in the Hat had become the best-selling children’s book of all time — all by using only 220 easily read words. Theodore Geisel (“Dr. Seuss”) had introduced phonics to our nation’s children, and, armed with the ability to correctly pronounce “rake,” “cake” and “make,” the scientists of our future would out-smart those Soviets.

    From The Cat in the Hat, Menand moved quickly on to an introduction to the institutionalization of the oft-hated SAT as a tool for college admissions — this, too, was a part of our “cultural educational anxiety.”

    From there he spoke of the Central Intelligence Agency’s efforts to promote an image of U.S. culture as open to intellectual ideas in art — the “Congress for Cultural Freedom” in Berlin was one arm of this endeavor. The idea was to lure back the European, leftist, bohemian intellectuals (such as Jean Paul Sartré) who gravitated toward the U.S.S.R. and its communist ideals.

    As Menand put it, “Highbrows choose America” could have been their slogan.

    The Cold War thus became an intellectual “pressure cooker” of modern art and ideas in American culture (just try googling “Jackson Pollock” and “CIA” and take a look at those results), contributing to the creation of many pieces of cultural expression that we couldn’t even begin to imagine living without today.