Www.WorldHistory.Biz
Login *:
Password *:
     Register

 

4-07-2015, 23:56

Cold War mobilization and domestic politics: the United States

General syntheses of the postwar era usually address the Cold War's domestic politics, but several collections give the topic full treatment and debate the particular question of whether there was a distinctive Cold War culture. Anthologies offer the best sampling of the scholarship. Lary May, Recasting America: Culture and Politics in the Age of Cold War (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989), was one of the first collections to debate the issue. Peter J. Kuznick and James Gilbert (eds.), Rethinking Cold War Culture (Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution Press, 2001), take up the question with fresh perspectives from a variety of subfields. Christian G. Appy (ed.), Cold War Constructions: The Political Culture of United States Imperialism, 1945-1966 (Amherst, MA: University of Massachusetts Press, 2000), looks at the cultural underpinnings of Cold War diplomacy in a variety of world areas. Rana Mitter and Patrick Major (eds.), Across the Blocs: Cold War Cultural and Social History (London: Frank Cass, 2004), adds an important international perspective to US scholarly debates. Stephen J. Whitfield, The Culture of the Cold War (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1991), is an adequate survey of the excesses of American Cold War culture. Michael S. Sherry, In the Shadow of War: The United States since the 1930s (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1995), is one of the best syntheses of the postwar era, offering an original interpretive framework through which to assess all dimensions of the early Cold War experience (and beyond).



Works that examine the domestic Cold War through the career of Senator Joseph McCarthy are plentiful; many are journalistic, but academic historians have tried to place McCarthy and his crusade in a broader historical context. One of the earliest collections to probe McCarthyism as more than the man himself is Robert Griffith and Athan Theoharis (eds.), The Specter: Original Essays on the Cold War and the Origins of McCarthyism (New York: New Viewpoints, 1974). More recently, Richard M. Fried has written two useful chronicles of McCarthyism's political and cultural impact: Nightmare in Red: The McCarthy Era in Perspective (New York: Oxford University Press, 1990), is a good synthesis of McCarthyism as part of twentieth-century political history; The Russians Are Coming! The Russians Are Coming! Pageantry and Patriotism in Cold-War America (New York: Oxford University Press,



1998), is one of the few to detail how grassroots organizations practiced anti-Communism locally. Ellen Schrecker, Many Are the Crimes: McCarthyism in America (Boston: Little, Brown, 1998), argues a "many McCarthyisms" thesis, offering fresh insights on the American Communist Party's postwar activities and exhaustive research on the government's myriad modes of political repression.



Recent studies have broadened our understanding of the ideological and political crosscurrents surrounding the creation of the national security state. On the Harry S. Truman years, see Michael J. Hogan, A Cross of Iron: Harry S. Truman and the Origins of the National Security State, 1945-1954 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1998). Jonathan Bell, The Liberal State on Trial: The Cold War and American Politics in the Truman Years (New York: Columbia University Press, 2004), looks at the fate of postwar liberalism through analysis of state and local elections in the Cold War's first decade. For an analysis of how American antistatism shaped both the Truman and the Dwight Eisenhower administrations' domestic policy, see Aaron L. Friedberg, In the Shadow of the Garrison State:



America’s Anti-Statism and Its Cold War Grand Strategy (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2000).



The rise of a Cold War nuclear culture has been examined by social critics, historians, cultural-studies scholars, and linguists. An excellent introduction to the topic is Paul Boyer, Fallout: A Historian Reflects on America’s Half-Century Encounter with Nuclear Weapons (Columbus, OH: Ohio State University Press, 1998). Margot A. Henriksen's Dr. Strangelove’s America: Society and Culture in the Atomic Age (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1997) uses a cultural studies approach to reveal a nascent "culture of dissent" emerging in response to the pursuit of nuclear supremacy. Laura McEnaney, Civil Defense Begins at Home: Militarization Meets Everyday Life in the Cold War (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2000), examines the political debates and social movements that gave rise to the "duck and cover" programs of the 1950s. Allan M. Winkler, Life Under a Cloud: American Anxiety about the Atom (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993), offers a good survey of postwar nuclear culture, extending the narrative to Ronald Reagan's presidency.



Scholars have explored how the Cold War intersected with and was shaped by other domestic political phenomena. Mary L. Dudziak was one of the first to suggest a connection between the race problem in the United States and its Cold War foreign policy. See her path-breaking article, "Desegregation as a Cold War Imperative," Stanford Law Review, 41, i (November 1988), 61-120, and her Cold War Civil Rights: Race and the Image of American Democracy (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2000). For a broader sampling of the scholarship on race and Cold War foreign relations, see Brenda Gayle Plummer (ed.), Window on Freedom: Race, Civil Rights, and Foreign Affairs, 1945-1988 (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 1993). See also Plummer's own study, Rising Wind: Black Americans and US Foreign Affairs, 1935-1960 (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 1996). The Cold War's effect on gender and family ideals has received even more scholarly scrutiny. Elaine Tyler May, Homeward Bound: American Families in the Cold War Era (New York: Basic Books, i988), was the first to suggest that "containment" might apply to postwar gender and family relations. Joanne Meyerowitz (ed.), Not June Cleaver: Women and Gender in Postwar America, 1945-1960 (Philadelphia, PA: Temple University Press, i994), offers essays that challenge or reconfigure May's thesis on domestic containment. Similarly, Susan Lynn, Progressive Women in Conservative Times: Racial Justice, Peace, and Feminism, 1945 to the 1960s (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1993), reveals a robust women's movement pushing liberal reform at the height of the Cold War. Helen Laville, Cold War Women: The International Activities of American Women’s Organisations (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2002), highlights women's engagement in Cold War politics at home and abroad, despite the emphasis on domesticity.



 

html-Link
BB-Link