The Cultural Turn in Cold War Studies
Robert Griffith
Christian G. Appy, ed. Cold War Constructions: The Political Culture of United States Imperialism, 1945-1966. Amherst: The University of Massachusetts Press, 2000. xii + 340 pp. Notes, contributors and index. $18.95 (paper).
John Fousek, To Lead the Free World: American Nationalism and the Cultural Roots of the Cold War. Chapel Hill and London: The University of North Carolina Press, 2000. xvi + 253 pp. Notes, bibliography and index. $49.95 (cloth); $18.95 (paper).
A little over a decade ago, there were relatively few studies of Cold War culture;[i] fewer still that sought to explain the Cold War as a cultural phenomenon.[ii] Today, all this has changed, prompted by the entry into the field of scholars trained in literature, American studies, sociology, anthropology, communication and media studies, as well as by a somewhat belated turn toward culture among Cold War historians themselves. The result has been an extraordinary outpouring of books and articles on virtually every aspect of American culture and how that culture shaped and was in turn shaped by the Cold War.[iii] Many of these studies introduce new issues (especially the role of linguistic and visual symbols); examine new evidence (including popular culture), explore the role of new actors (including artists, writers, tourists, filmmakers and many others), employ new methodologies (drawn mainly from sociology and literary criticism), and raise new questions (about nationalism and national identity, cultural transfer, the role of race, class and gender in the construction of relations among nations, and so on).[iv]
Both of the volumes under review in this essay are part of this recent flowering of interest in Cold War culture. Both address “public culture,” what John Fousek describes as “the arena in which social and political conflict is played out and in which consensus is forged, manufactured, and maintained or not.”(p. ix). Both books focus on language and, to a lesser extent, the visual symbols out of which culture is constructed. Both challenge the failure of diplomatic historians to realize, in Christian Appy’s words, that “policy-making, intelligence-gathering, war-making, and mainstream politics might be profoundly shaped by a social and cultural world beyond the conference table and the battlefield,” reading “documents too literally and assum[ing] the events they describe can be understood as unmediated, objective realities rather than dynamic historical constructions.” (p. 4) Both studies contribute new insights to the history of the Cold War, though both also overstate the originality of their contributions. Finally, both reveal the limitations of the new cultural history as it is sometimes practiced.
The essays that comprise Cold War Constructions occupy a middle ground between the new cultural studies and traditional diplomatic history. Their authors are sensitive to both culture and politics; or, as Appy puts it, to both the idea that “culture is inherently political (and that it is embedded in, and expresses, relations of power)” and the idea that “all political struggles are culturally constructed (embedded in systems of value and meaning.)” (4) Thus, in the collection’s opening essay, Mark Bradley challenges the dominant political and economic explanations for how the United States became involved in Vietnam. “[R]anging from the potential instability of Western Europe to the need for a liberal capitalist trading order in the Pacific, the vulnerability of Southeast Asia with the rise of Mao’s China, or the domestic political threat of McCarthyism at home,” he writes, “they share a common focus in asserting that realist geopolitical imperatives were the centerpiece of American policy.” Instead, Bradley argues for “the persistence and centrality of cultural forces in decision making.” U.S. policy makers saw Vietnam through a lens heavily shaded by European “orientalism” as well as by the homegrown racialism that pervaded much of American culture. As former Soviet Ambassador William C. Bullitt told the State Department’s Division of Philippine and Southeast Asian Affairs in 1947: “The Annamese are attractive and even loveable but essentially childish.” Such perceptions, Bradley concludes, “framed the horizon of choices through which postwar American policy makers sought to meet the perceived challenges of the early Cold War period in Vietnam.”[v]
In an essay on the United
States and India, Andrew Rotter
explores how cultural perceptions (and misperceptions) influenced relations between
the two nations; focusing, for example,
on how the depiction in American culture of India as a “beggar” interacted with
Indian concepts about how to express gratitude and the obligations of donors.[vi]
John Foran examines how Time
magazine’s coverage of the overthrow of Iranian leader Mohammad Musaddiq and
the installation of Shah Muhammad Reza Pahlavi was shaped both by “Orientalist
and Cold War discourses,” and how such coverage in turn “served to further
solidify such discourses.”[vii] Essays by Penny Von Eschen and Kevin
Gaines add to a growing literature on the complex relationships between the
struggle for civil rights and the Cold War.
Gaines’s study explores the radical critique of both colonialism and
American racial practices by African-American expatriates in Ghana, while Von
Eschen shows how U.S. efforts to counter criticism by promoting good will tours
by prominent African-American musicians were sometimes subverted by the
musicians themselves as well as by their African hosts.[viii]
Two of the volume’s essays examine how issues of gender and family relationships influenced popular perceptions of the Cold War. Christina Klein argues that metaphors of adoption in South Pacific, in the advertisements of the Christian Children’s Fund and in the pages of the Saturday Review operated to create a sense of obligation toward Asian peoples that was analogous to the real and imagined bonds that connected white Americans to Europe and thus served to underpin the growing U.S. commitment in the region.[ix] Van Gosse examines the brief American flirtation with Fidel Castro in the late 1950s, a flirtation he attributes in part to a long tradition of fascination with foreign revolutionaries such as Lafayette, Bolivar, Kossuth, Garibaldi, Juarez and others. Castro’s popularity also derived, he argues, though less persuasively I believe, from popular perceptions of Castro’s “whiteness,” and from a particularly strong appeal to young white men for whom the dashing bearded revolutionary resonated with images of James Dean and Elvis Presley.[x]
Editor Appy’s own
contribution combines a playful discussion of a sketch Eisenhower drew during a
cabinet discussion of the CIA sponsored
invasion of Guatemala in April, 1954 and some acute observations on Eisenhower’s
highly competitive personality, with a
mostly unoriginal account of the coup itself and how it was covered in the New
York Times.[xi] James T. Fisher examines the liberal and old
left anti-communists who organized the International Rescue Committee and the
American Friends of Vietnam.[xii] Jonathan Nashel reads William Lederer and
Eugene Burdick’s The Ugly American (1958) as a text that embodies
modernization theory.[xiii] Wendy Wall’s essay describes the role played
by Italian-language newspapers and radio stations, fraternal organizations,
community leaders and the Catholic Church, in organizing a massive
letter-writing campaign in 1948 to inform their overseas kinsmen of the dangers
of voting Communist and the virtues of the “American way of life.”[xiv]
John Fousek’s To Lead the Free World is an attempt to explore the “public culture” of the Cold War era. At the heart of that culture was what Fousek calls the ideology of “American nationalist globalism,” an ideology deeply rooted in historic notions of “chosenness, destiny, and mission” which found expression in a postwar triad of powerful beliefs in national greatness, global responsibility, and anti-communism.[xv] To develop his argument, Fousek focuses on a series of Harry S. Truman’s major nationally broadcast foreign policy speeches and the response to them by a handful of mass circulation magazines (Life, Saturday Evening Post, Colliers, Ladies Home Journal), by the New York Daily News (“the period’s one true mass-circulation newspaper” and a proxy for the response of conservative nationalists), by a sampling of African-American sources (the Urban League, the NAACP, the Pittsburgh Courier and Ebony), by two labor unions (the United Auto Workers and the United Electrical Workers), and by ordinary citizens writing to Truman in the wake of his public addresses.
The story here is for the most part a familiar one: of the rapid conversion of wartime internationalism into the nationalist globalism of the Cold War and how “[b] etween 1947 and 1950 the notion that the United States was ‘the leader of the free world’ began to emerge as the dominant trope to explain America’s hegemonic role in a divided world.” (159) Fousek demonstrates how the thinking of both liberal and conservative internationalists was shaped by an emergent globalism, noting the many ideas and assumptions shared by Henry Luce’s “American Century” and Henry Wallace’s “Century of the Common Man.” In a brief but highly suggestive “visual essay,” he shows how corporate advertising helped create an “iconography of America’s new global supremacy.” (91-103). Like others who have examined the savage civil war that shattered the old New Deal left, Fousek traces the opposition to the new globalism by popular front liberals, left-wing labor leaders and prominent African-Americans, the repressive marginalization of these critics and the triumph of the new “vital center” liberalism of the Cold War. “In the mid-1940s, the CIO and the NAACP both stood for an antimilitarist, anti-colonial, multilaterialist foreign policy based upon international cooperation; by 1950 both organizations supported the main elements of the Truman administration’s foreign policy, which was increasingly militaristic, hegemonic, and unilateralist.” (161)
To Lead The Free World and Cold War Constructions are valuable additions to a literature that until the past decade or so has been far too exclusively centered on the state and on the “hard” realms of diplomacy, politics and economics. Both attempt to avoid the charges usually leveled at cultural studies: that they fail to appreciate the importance of political and economic power; or, as Terry Eagleton puts it, that they inflate “the importance of what is constructed, coded, conventional about human life, as against what human beings have in common as natural material animals.”[xvi] Neither is entirely successful.
It’s a pretty long way, after all, from the South Pacific to South Vietnam. Or, as John Nashel disarmingly confesses in the beginning of his essay on The Ugly American: “At first glance it may seem a bit of a reach to include a detailed discussion of one middlebrow novel in charting the rise and fall of modernization theory.” (134) Too many of the authors appear to implicitly endorse Alan Nadel’s contention that “[h] istory is a cipher for omission, and the process of representation is never one of proportionality but of narrativity.”[xvii] Of all the contributors to Cold War Constructions, Mark Bradley does the best job in grounding his account of racial and “oriental” stereotypes in the day-to-day observations of state department officials responsible for policy toward Indochina at the close of World War II. And he’s right in concluding that the Vietnam case suggests that “the political and economic dimensions of American power only partially reveal the nature of U.S. perceptions and aims.” (34) On the other hand, those “political and economic dimensions” still explain a great deal.
To Lead the Free World also stumbles at those critical junctures where culture intersects with economics and politics. Fousek writes, for example, that while the ideology of the Cold War grew out of widely shared beliefs in "providential destiny and millennial mission," the new ideology was forged by “the middle-aged, white, Anglo-Saxon, Protestant men of the foreign-policy elite [who] functioned as a hegemonic bloc….” He may be right, but nothing in To Lead the Free World supports such an assertion. Indeed, the principal evidence he cites is Thomas Ferguson’s debatable claim that during the New Deal the Democratic Party was captured by a new power bloc composed of “capital-intensive industries, investment banks, and internationally oriented commercial banks.”[xviii] Fousek’s brief chronicle of the debates among UAW and UE leaders ignores much of the rich and growing literature on labor and the Cold War and as a result fails to adequately contextualize those debates. His discussion of the response of African-Americans skims the surface mapped by the new studies on race and the Cold War with similar results. His assertions about the role of elites would have been greatly strengthened had he examined the networks of government agencies and private associations that played such important roles in developing and deploying the new ideology of global leadership. [xix]
In spite of these shortcomings, both To Lead the Free World and Cold War Constructions deepen and extend our knowledge of the Cold War. Indeed, future historians will ignore the role of culture explored in these and other recent works only at the price of a very incomplete understanding of the past fifty years in U.S. and world history.
[i] Early overviews included Paul Boyer’s widely cited By the Bomb’s Early Light: American Thought and Culture at the Dawn of the Atomic Age (1985); Larry May (ed), Recasting America: Culture and Politics in the Age of Cold War (1986) and Stephen J. Whitfield’s The Culture of the Cold War (1991). Les K. Adler and Thomas G. Paterson’s “Red Fascism: The Merger of Nazi Germany and Soviet Russia in the American Image of Totalitarianism, 1930s-1950s,” American Historical Review (April, 1970) remains a classic among early efforts to understand Cold War ideology. Christopher Lasch’s essay on the Congress for Cultural Freedom in The Agony of the American Left (1969) was among the first to map the Cold War’s cultural front. Serge Guilbaut was among the first to explore the relationship between Cold War politics and art in How New York Stole the Idea of Modern Art: Abstract Expressionism, Freedom, and the Cold War (1983). Nora Sayre examined Hollywood’s Cold War in Running Time: Films of the Cold War (1982), as did Peter Biskind in Seeing is Believing: How Hollywood Taught Us To Stop Worrying and Love the Fifties (1983). See also Michael Rogin, Ronald Reagan, the Movie and Other Episodes in Political Demonology (1987), as well as the series of books by George Lipsitz that begins with Class and Culture in Cold War America (1982).
[ii] See especially Frank A. Ninkovich, The Diplomacy of Ideas:
U.S. Foreign Policy and Cultural Relations, 1938-1950 (1981); Michael H.
Hunt, Ideology and U.S. Foreign Policy (1987); and essays by Hunt and
Akira Iriye in the June, 1990 JAH forum, “Explaining the History of American
Foreign Relations,” Journal of American History (June, 1990),
93-180. Although its coverage ends in
1945, see also Emily S. Rosenberg, Spreading the American Dream: American
Economic and Cultural Expansion, 1890-1945 (1982).
[iii] See, for example, Diplomatic History’s recent roundtable, “Cultural Transfer or Cultural Imperialism? ‘Americanization’ in the Cold War,” (Summer, 2000), 465-535.
[iv] A partial listing of recent works on Cold War culture includes: Nancy E. Bernhard, U.S. Television News and Cold War Propaganda, 1947-1960 (1999); Paul Boyer, Fallout: A Historian Reflects on America's Half-century Encounter with Nuclear Weapons (1998); Noam Chomsky (ed.), The Cold War & the University: Toward an Intellectual History of the Postwar Years (1997); Michael Curtin, Redeeming the Wasteland: Television Documentary and Cold War Politics (1995); Paul N. Edwards, The Closed World: Computers and the Politics of Discourse in Cold War America (1996); Tom Englehardt, The End of Victory Culture (1995); Richard Fried, The Russians are Coming, The Russians are Coming: Pageantry and Patriotism in Cold War America (1998); Jessica Gienow-Hecht, Transmission Impossible: Journalism as Cultural Diplomacy in Postwar Germany, 1945-1955 (1999); Woody Haut, Pulp Culture: Hardboiled Fiction and the Cold War (1995); Margot A. Henriksen, Dr. Strangelove’s America: Society and Culture in the Atomic Age (1997); Ellen Herman, The Romance of American Psychology: Political Culture in the Age of Experts (1995); Walter L. Hixon, Propaganda, Culture and the Cold War, 1945-1961 (1997); Elizabeth Cobbs Hoffman, All You Need is Love: The Peace Corps and the Spirit of the 1960s (1998); Richard Kuisel, Seducing the French: The Dilemma of Americanization (1993); Rebecca S. Lowen, Creating the Cold War University: The Transformation of Stanford (1997); Elaine McClarnand and Steve Goodson (eds.), The Impact of the Cold War on American Popular Culture (1999); Alan Nadel, American Narratives, Postmodernism and the Atomic Age (1995); Michael Nelson, War of the Black Heavens: The Battles of Western Broadcasting in the Cold War (1997); Guy Oakes, The Imaginary War: Civil Defense and American Cold War Culture (1994); Richard Pells, Not Like Us: How Europeans Have Loved, Hated, and Transformed American Culture since World War II (1997); Uta G. Poiger, Jazz, Rock , and Rebels: Cold War Politics and American Culture in a Divided Germany (2000); Naima Prevots, Dance for Export: Cultural Diplomacy and the Cold War (1998); Lisle Rose, The Cold War Comes to Main Street (1999); Frances Stonor Saunders, The Cultural Cold War: The CIA and the World of Arts and Letters (2000); David Seed, American Science Fiction and the Cold War: Literature and Film(1999); Christopher Simpson, Science of Coercion: Communication Research & Psychological Warfare, 1945-1960 (1994); Christopher Simpson (ed), Universities and Empire: Money and Politics in the Social Sciences During the Cold War (1998); Reinhold Wagnleitner, Coco-Colonization: The Cultural Mission of the United States in Austria After the Second World War (1994); and Jessica Wang, American Science in an Age of Anxiety: Scientists, Anticommunism and the Cold War (1999).
[v] “Slouching toward Bethlehem: Culture, Diplomacy, and the Origins
of the Cold War in Vietnam,” 11-34.
Bradley’s essay is drawn from his forthcoming book, Imagining Vietnam
and America: The Making of Postcolonial Vietnam, 1919-1950.
[vi] “Feeding
Beggars: Class, Caste, and Status in Indo-U.S. Relations, 1947-1964,” 67-85, is
drawn from Rotter’s forthcoming book, Comrades at Odds: Culture and
Indo-U.S. Relations, 1947-1964.
Interestingly enough, Rotter is the only contributor to Cold War
Constructions who examines the cultural perceptions of non-Americans.
[vii] “Time Magazine, The CIA
Overthrow of Musaddiq, and the Installation of the Shah,” 157-182. Foran relies heavily on William A. Dorman
and Mansour Farhang, The U.S. Press and Iran: Foreign Policy and the
Journalism of Deference (1987); and on Mary Ann Heiss, The United
States, Great Britain, and Iranian Oil, 1950-1954 (1997), which traces the
influence of “orientalist” thinking on U.S. and British policy-makers.
[viii] Von Eschen, “Who’s the Real
Ambassador: Exploding Cold War Racial Ideology,” 110-131; Gaines, “From Black
Power to Civil Rights: Julian Mayfield and African American Expatriates in
Nkrumah’s Ghana, 1957-1966,” 257-269.
Von Eschen’s article is drawn in part from her book, Race Against
Empire: Black Americans and Anticolonialism, 1937-1957 (1997). For an earlier version of Gaines’ essay, see
“The Cold War and the African American Expatriate Community in Nkrumah’s
Ghana,” in Christopher Simpson (ed.), Universities
and Empire: Money and Politics in the Social Sciences During the Cold War
(1998), 135-158. Among recent studies of the intersection of racial politics
and the Cold War, see especially Thomas Borstelmann, Apartheid’s Reluctant
Uncle: The United States and Southern Africa in the Early Cold War (1993);
Mary L. Dudziak, “Josephine Baker, Racial Protest, and the Cold War,” The
Journal of American History (September, 1994), pp. 543-570; Kenneth Robert
Janken, Rayford W. Logan and the Dilemma of the African American
Intellectual (1993); and Brenda Gayle Plummer, Rising Wind: Black
Americans and U.S. Foreign Affairs, 1935-1960 (1996). See also Borstelmann’s recent article in Diplomatic
History, “Hedging Our Bets and
Buying Time”: John Kennedy and Racial Revolutions in the American South and
Southern Africa,” (Summer, 2000), 435-463.
On radical African-American politics and the Cold War, see especially
the series of books by Gerald Horne, including Black and Red: W.E.B. Du Bois
and the Afro-American response to the Cold War, 1944-1963(1986); Communist
front: The Civil Rights Congress,
1946-1956 (1988); and Black Liberation/Red Scare: Ben Davis and the
Communist Party (1993). For a broad historical overview, see Robin
D. G. Kelley “ "But a Local Phase
of a World Problem": Black
History's Global Vision, 1883-1950,” Journal of American History
(December, 1999).
[ix] “Adoption and the Cold War
Commitment to Asia,” 35-66. Klein is
completing a book on “Cold War Orientalism,” which grows out of her Yale
dissertation in American Studies. One
of the earliest efforts to explore the role of
gender and family in Cold War
culture was Elaine Tyler May, Homeward Bound: American Families in the Cold
War (1988). For more recent efforts
to introduce issues of gender and sexuality into the analysis of Cold War
foreign policy, see Emily Rosenberg, “‘Foreign Affairs’ after World War II:
Connecting Sexual and International Politics,” Diplomatic History
(Winter, 1994); Frank Costigliola, “‘Unceasing Pressure for Penetration’:
Gender, Pathology, and Emotion in George Kennan’s Formation of the Cold War,” Journal
of American History (March, 1997); Robert D. Dean, “Masculinity as
Ideology: John F. Kennedy and the Domestic Politics of Foreign Policy,” Diplomatic
History (Winter, 1998). See also,
Suzanne Clark, Cold Warriors: Manliness on Trial in the Rhetoric of the West
(2000); and Robert J. Corber, Homosexuality in Cold War America: Resistance
and the Crisis of Masculinity (1997). On the post-Vietnam era, see
especially Susan Jeffords, The Remasculinization of America: Gender and the
Vietnam War (Bloomington, Ind., 1989).
[x] “Fidel Castro and the
Romance of the White Guerrilla, 1957-1958,” 238-256. See also Gosse’s Where
the Boys Are: Cuba, Cold War America and the Making of a New Left (1993),
from which this essay is drawn.
[xi] “Eisenhower’s Guatemalan Doodle, or: How to Draw, Deny, and Take
Credit for a Third World Coup,” 183-213.
Appy is the author of Working-Class War: American Combat Soldiers and
Vietnam (1993), and editor of a book series a University of Massachusetts
Press book series on “Culture, Politics and the Cold War.”
[xii]
“A World Made Safe for Diversity: The Vietnam
Lobby and the Politics of Pluralism, 1945-1963,” 217-237. Fisher is the author of Dr. America: The
Lives of Thomas A. Dooley, 1927-1961 (1997). On the Vietnam Lobby, see also Eric Thomas Chester, Covert
Network: Progressives, The International Rescue Committee and the CIA (1995);
and especially Joseph G. Morgan, The
Vietnam Lobby: The American Friends of Vietnam, 1955-1975 (1997).
[xiii] “The Road to Vietnam:
Modernization Theory in Fact and Fiction,” 132-154 See also, Michael E. Latham, Modernization as Ideology:
American Social Science and "Nation Building” in the Kennedy Era
(2000).
[xiv]
“Italian Americans and
the 1948 Letters to Italy Campaign,” 109.
See also James Edward Miller, The United States and Italy, 1940-1950:
The Politics and Diplomacy of Stabilization (1986); and Ronald L. Filippelli, American Labor and Postwar Italy, 1943-1953:
A Study of Cold War Politics (1989).
[xv] Although Fousek draws on Benedict Anderson’s classic study of nationalism, Imagined Communities (1983) and on Anders Stephanson’s more recent essay on American expansionism, Manifest Destiny: American Expansion and the Empire of Right (1995), he fails to engage (or for that matter acknowledge) much of the recent literature on nationalism, mission and imperialism. For example, see the introduction to the revised edition of Imagined Communities (1991); as well as the more recent work on nationalism and national identity by philosophers, political theorists, journalists and historians; Tony Smith’s triumphalist reading of American mission in America’s Mission: The United States and the Worldwide Struggle for Democracy in the Twentieth Century (1995); Seymour Martin Lipset’s reprise of the case for American exceptionalism in American Exceptionalism: A Double-Edged Sword (1996); and the arguments about culture and imperialism in Amy Kaplan and Donald E. Pease (eds.), in Cultures of United States Imperialism (1993).
[xvi] “The Contradictions of Postmodernism,” New Literary History 28:1
(1997), 1.
[xvii] Nadel, Containment Culture, 8.
[xviii] Ferguson, “Industrial Conflict and the Coming of the New Deal:
The Triumph of Multinational Liberalism in America,” in Steve Fraser and Gary
Gerstle, The Rise and Fall of the New Deal Order (1989), 3-31. For a trenchant critique of Ferguson’s
argument, see Michael J. Webber and G. William Domhoff, “Myth and Reality in
Business Support for Democrats and Republicans in the 1936 Presidential
Election,” American Political Science Review (December, 1996), 824-833.
[xix] Note, for example, the “cultural” work of organizations such as the Council on Foreign Relations, the Advertising Council and the Committee for Economic Development, as well as the many ad hoc committees such as the National Security Committee, the Committee for the Marshall Plan, and the Committee on the Present Danger. For a recent study that emphasizes the importance of such organizations, see Scott Lucas, Freedom's War: The American Crusade Against the Soviet Union (1999). See also Michael Wala, “Selling the Marshall Plan at Home: The Committee for the Marshall Plan to Aid European Recovery,” Diplomatic History (Summer, 1986); Robert Griffith, “The Selling of America: The Advertising Council and American Politics, 1942-1960,” Business History Review (Autumn, 1983); and, on the Committee on the Present Danger, James G. Hershberg, James Conant: Harvard to Hiroshima and the Making of the Nuclear Age (1993), 491-553. On the military’s use of advertising and public relations to overcome resistance to the draft and growing militarization, see Mark R. Grandstaff, “Making the Military American: Advertising, Reform, and the Demise of an Anti-standing Military Tradition, 1945-1955, The Journal of Military History (April, 1996), 279-323. For the most recent account of the cultural initiatives of the CIA, see Frances Stonor Saunders, The Cultural Cold War: The CIA and the World of Arts and Letters (2000).
[xix] Early overviews included Paul Boyer’s widely cited By the Bomb’s Early Light: American Thought and Culture at the Dawn of the Atomic Age (1985); Larry May (ed), Recasting America: Culture and Politics in the Age of Cold War (1986) and Stephen J. Whitfield’s The Culture of the Cold War (1991). Les K. Adler and Thomas G. Paterson’s “Red Fascism: The Merger of Nazi Germany and Soviet Russia in the American Image of Totalitarianism, 1930s-1950s,” American Historical Review (April, 1970) remains a classic among early efforts to understand Cold War ideology. Christopher Lasch’s essay on the Congress for Cultural Freedom in The Agony of the American Left (1969) was among the first to map the Cold War’s cultural front. Serge Guilbaut was among the first to explore the relationship between Cold War politics and art in How New York Stole the Idea of Modern Art: Abstract Expressionism, Freedom, and the Cold War (1983). Nora Sayre examined Hollywood’s Cold War in Running Time: Films of the Cold War (1982), as did Peter Biskind in Seeing is Believing: How Hollywood Taught Us To Stop Worrying and Love the Fifties (1983). See also Michael Rogin, Ronald Reagan, the Movie and Other Episodes in Political Demonology (1987), as well as the series of books by George Lipsitz that begins with Class and Culture in Cold War America (1982).
[xix] See especially Frank A. Ninkovich, The Diplomacy of Ideas:
U.S. Foreign Policy and Cultural Relations, 1938-1950 (1981); Michael H.
Hunt, Ideology and U.S. Foreign Policy (1987); and essays by Hunt and
Akira Iriye in the June, 1990 JAH forum, “Explaining the History of American
Foreign Relations,” Journal of American History (June, 1990),
93-180. Although its coverage ends in
1945, see also Emily S. Rosenberg, Spreading the American Dream: American
Economic and Cultural Expansion, 1890-1945 (1982).
[xix] See, for example, Diplomatic History’s recent roundtable, “Cultural Transfer or Cultural Imperialism? ‘Americanization’ in the Cold War,” (Summer, 2000), 465-535.
[xix] A partial listing of recent works on Cold War culture includes: Nancy E. Bernhard, U.S. Television News and Cold War Propaganda, 1947-1960 (1999); Paul Boyer, Fallout: A Historian Reflects on America's Half-century Encounter with Nuclear Weapons (1998); Noam Chomsky (ed.), The Cold War & the University: Toward an Intellectual History of the Postwar Years (1997); Michael Curtin, Redeeming the Wasteland: Television Documentary and Cold War Politics (1995); Paul N. Edwards, The Closed World: Computers and the Politics of Discourse in Cold War America (1996); Tom Englehardt, The End of Victory Culture (1995); Richard Fried, The Russians are Coming, The Russians are Coming: Pageantry and Patriotism in Cold War America (1998); Jessica Gienow-Hecht, Transmission Impossible: Journalism as Cultural Diplomacy in Postwar Germany, 1945-1955 (1999); Woody Haut, Pulp Culture: Hardboiled Fiction and the Cold War (1995); Margot A. Henriksen, Dr. Strangelove’s America: Society and Culture in the Atomic Age (1997); Ellen Herman, The Romance of American Psychology: Political Culture in the Age of Experts (1995); Walter L. Hixon, Propaganda, Culture and the Cold War, 1945-1961 (1997); Elizabeth Cobbs Hoffman, All You Need is Love: The Peace Corps and the Spirit of the 1960s (1998); Richard Kuisel, Seducing the French: The Dilemma of Americanization (1993); Rebecca S. Lowen, Creating the Cold War University: The Transformation of Stanford (1997); Elaine McClarnand and Steve Goodson (eds.), The Impact of the Cold War on American Popular Culture (1999); Alan Nadel, American Narratives, Postmodernism and the Atomic Age (1995); Michael Nelson, War of the Black Heavens: The Battles of Western Broadcasting in the Cold War (1997); Guy Oakes, The Imaginary War: Civil Defense and American Cold War Culture (1994); Richard Pells, Not Like Us: How Europeans Have Loved, Hated, and Transformed American Culture since World War II (1997); Uta G. Poiger, Jazz, Rock , and Rebels: Cold War Politics and American Culture in a Divided Germany (2000); Naima Prevots, Dance for Export: Cultural Diplomacy and the Cold War (1998); Lisle Rose, The Cold War Comes to Main Street (1999); Frances Stonor Saunders, The Cultural Cold War: The CIA and the World of Arts and Letters (2000); David Seed, American Science Fiction and the Cold War: Literature and Film(1999); Christopher Simpson, Science of Coercion: Communication Research & Psychological Warfare, 1945-1960 (1994); Christopher Simpson (ed), Universities and Empire: Money and Politics in the Social Sciences During the Cold War (1998); Reinhold Wagnleitner, Coco-Colonization: The Cultural Mission of the United States in Austria After the Second World War (1994); and Jessica Wang, American Science in an Age of Anxiety: Scientists, Anticommunism and the Cold War (1999).
[xix] “Slouching toward Bethlehem: Culture, Diplomacy, and the Origins
of the Cold War in Vietnam,” 11-34.
Bradley’s essay is drawn from his forthcoming book, Imagining Vietnam
and America: The Making of Postcolonial Vietnam, 1919-1950.
[xix] “Feeding
Beggars: Class, Caste, and Status in Indo-U.S. Relations, 1947-1964,” 67-85, is
drawn from Rotter’s forthcoming book, Comrades at Odds: Culture and
Indo-U.S. Relations, 1947-1964.
Interestingly enough, Rotter is the only contributor to Cold War
Constructions who examines the cultural perceptions of non-Americans.
[xix] “Time Magazine, The CIA
Overthrow of Musaddiq, and the Installation of the Shah,” 157-182. Foran relies heavily on William A. Dorman
and Mansour Farhang, The U.S. Press and Iran: Foreign Policy and the
Journalism of Deference (1987); and on Mary Ann Heiss, The United
States, Great Britain, and Iranian Oil, 1950-1954 (1997), which traces the
influence of “orientalist” thinking on U.S. and British policy-makers.
[xix] Von Eschen, “Who’s the Real
Ambassador: Exploding Cold War Racial Ideology,” 110-131; Gaines, “From Black
Power to Civil Rights: Julian Mayfield and African American Expatriates in
Nkrumah’s Ghana, 1957-1966,” 257-269.
Von Eschen’s article is drawn in part from her book, Race Against
Empire: Black Americans and Anticolonialism, 1937-1957 (1997). For an earlier version of Gaines’ essay, see
“The Cold War and the African American Expatriate Community in Nkrumah’s
Ghana,” in Christopher Simpson (ed.), Universities
and Empire: Money and Politics in the Social Sciences During the Cold War
(1998), 135-158. Among recent studies of the intersection of racial politics
and the Cold War, see especially Thomas Borstelmann, Apartheid’s Reluctant
Uncle: The United States and Southern Africa in the Early Cold War (1993);
Mary L. Dudziak, “Josephine Baker, Racial Protest, and the Cold War,” The
Journal of American History (September, 1994), pp. 543-570; Kenneth Robert
Janken, Rayford W. Logan and the Dilemma of the African American
Intellectual (1993); and Brenda Gayle Plummer, Rising Wind: Black
Americans and U.S. Foreign Affairs, 1935-1960 (1996). See also Borstelmann’s recent article in Diplomatic
History, “Hedging Our Bets and
Buying Time”: John Kennedy and Racial Revolutions in the American South and
Southern Africa,” (Summer, 2000), 435-463.
On radical African-American politics and the Cold War, see especially
the series of books by Gerald Horne, including Black and Red: W.E.B. Du Bois
and the Afro-American response to the Cold War, 1944-1963(1986); Communist
front: The Civil Rights Congress,
1946-1956 (1988); and Black Liberation/Red Scare: Ben Davis and the
Communist Party (1993). For a broad historical overview, see Robin
D. G. Kelley “ "But a Local Phase
of a World Problem": Black
History's Global Vision, 1883-1950,” Journal of American History
(December, 1999).
[xix] “Adoption and the Cold War
Commitment to Asia,” 35-66. Klein is
completing a book on “Cold War Orientalism,” which grows out of her Yale
dissertation in American Studies. One
of the earliest efforts to explore the role of
gender and family in Cold War
culture was Elaine Tyler May, Homeward Bound: American Families in the Cold
War (1988). For more recent efforts
to introduce issues of gender and sexuality into the analysis of Cold War
foreign policy, see Emily Rosenberg, “‘Foreign Affairs’ after World War II:
Connecting Sexual and International Politics,” Diplomatic History
(Winter, 1994); Frank Costigliola, “‘Unceasing Pressure for Penetration’:
Gender, Pathology, and Emotion in George Kennan’s Formation of the Cold War,” Journal
of American History (March, 1997); Robert D. Dean, “Masculinity as
Ideology: John F. Kennedy and the Domestic Politics of Foreign Policy,” Diplomatic
History (Winter, 1998). See also,
Suzanne Clark, Cold Warriors: Manliness on Trial in the Rhetoric of the West
(2000); and Robert J. Corber, Homosexuality in Cold War America: Resistance
and the Crisis of Masculinity (1997). On the post-Vietnam era, see
especially Susan Jeffords, The Remasculinization of America: Gender and the
Vietnam War (Bloomington, Ind., 1989).
[xix] “Fidel Castro and the
Romance of the White Guerrilla, 1957-1958,” 238-256. See also Gosse’s Where
the Boys Are: Cuba, Cold War America and the Making of a New Left (1993),
from which this essay is drawn.
[xix] “Eisenhower’s Guatemalan Doodle, or: How to Draw, Deny, and Take
Credit for a Third World Coup,” 183-213.
Appy is the author of Working-Class War: American Combat Soldiers and
Vietnam (1993), and editor of a book series a University of Massachusetts
Press book series on “Culture, Politics and the Cold War.”
[xix]
“A World Made Safe for Diversity: The Vietnam
Lobby and the Politics of Pluralism, 1945-1963,” 217-237. Fisher is the author of Dr. America: The
Lives of Thomas A. Dooley, 1927-1961 (1997). On the Vietnam Lobby, see also Eric Thomas Chester, Covert
Network: Progressives, The International Rescue Committee and the CIA (1995);
and especially Joseph G. Morgan, The
Vietnam Lobby: The American Friends of Vietnam, 1955-1975 (1997).
[xix] “The Road to Vietnam:
Modernization Theory in Fact and Fiction,” 132-154 See also, Michael E. Latham, Modernization as Ideology:
American Social Science and "Nation Building” in the Kennedy Era
(2000).
[xix]
“Italian Americans and
the 1948 Letters to Italy Campaign,” 109.
See also James Edward Miller, The United States and Italy, 1940-1950:
The Politics and Diplomacy of Stabilization (1986); and Ronald L. Filippelli, American Labor and Postwar Italy, 1943-1953:
A Study of Cold War Politics (1989).
[xix] Although Fousek draws on Benedict Anderson’s classic study of nationalism, Imagined Communities (1983) and on Anders Stephanson’s more recent essay on American expansionism, Manifest Destiny: American Expansion and the Empire of Right (1995), he fails to engage (or for that matter acknowledge) much of the recent literature on nationalism, mission and imperialism. For example, see the introduction to the revised edition of Imagined Communities (1991); as well as the more recent work on nationalism and national identity by philosophers, political theorists, journalists and historians; Tony Smith’s triumphalist reading of American mission in America’s Mission: The United States and the Worldwide Struggle for Democracy in the Twentieth Century (1995); Seymour Martin Lipset’s reprise of the case for American exceptionalism in American Exceptionalism: A Double-Edged Sword (1996); and the arguments about culture and imperialism in Amy Kaplan and Donald E. Pease (eds.), in Cultures of United States Imperialism (1993).
[xix] “The Contradictions of Postmodernism,” New Literary History 28:1
(1997), 1.
[xix] Nadel, Containment Culture, 8.
[xix] Ferguson, “Industrial Conflict and the Coming of the New Deal:
The Triumph of Multinational Liberalism in America,” in Steve Fraser and Gary
Gerstle, The Rise and Fall of the New Deal Order (1989), 3-31. For a trenchant critique of Ferguson’s
argument, see Michael J. Webber and G. William Domhoff, “Myth and Reality in
Business Support for Democrats and Republicans in the 1936 Presidential
Election,” American Political Science Review (December, 1996), 824-833.
[xix] Note, for example, the “cultural” work of organizations such as the Council on Foreign Relations, the Advertising Council and the Committee for Economic Development, as well as the many ad hoc committees such as the National Security Committee, the Committee for the Marshall Plan, and the Committee on the Present Danger. For a recent study that emphasizes the importance of such organizations, see Scott Lucas, Freedom's War: The American Crusade Against the Soviet Union (1999). See also Michael Wala, “Selling the Marshall Plan at Home: The Committee for the Marshall Plan to Aid European Recovery,” Diplomatic History (Summer, 1986); Robert Griffith, “The Selling of America: The Advertising Council and American Politics, 1942-1960,” Business History Review (Autumn, 1983); and, on the Committee on the Present Danger, James G. Hershberg, James Conant: Harvard to Hiroshima and the Making of the Nuclear Age (1993), 491-553. On the military’s use of advertising and public relations to overcome resistance to the draft and growing militarization, see Mark R. Grandstaff, “Making the Military American: Advertising, Reform, and the Demise of an Anti-standing Military Tradition, 1945-1955, The Journal of Military History (April, 1996), 279-323. For the most recent account of the cultural initiatives of the CIA, see Frances Stonor Saunders, The Cultural Cold War: The CIA and the World of Arts and Letters (2000).