As Mr Evans describes, it was not just Algeria's history that militated against it being aninseparable part of the French nation, but also the context of contemporary geopolitics.
Nurtured in the atmosphere of committed liberalism generated by the New Deal, and by such musicians as Aaron Copland, for whom artistic progress and the formation of an authentically American artistic identity were inseparable from ideas of social change, Bernstein developed quickly into an able spokesman for American cosmopolitan progressivism's short-lived ascendancy.