The Affluent Society?: Cold War
Anxieties in the Postwar Era
Week 18
July 17, 1955 in
Anaheim, CA
Overview
• The Cold War and the military industrial
complex
• Cold War and Civil Rights
• Ideologies of gender in the Cold War
• The crisis in masculinity?
• The new televised family
• Genre: fantasies of compliance or resistance?
• Westerns: better dead than red?
1944-1950
 IMF and World Bank formed 1944; foreign currencies pegged to
dollar; USSR refuses to join
 1944-45; UN formed; 80% Americans in favor of joining; communist
China excluded
 Amnesty for Nazi elite in exchange for political ‘stability’
 Attacks on the New Deal: Taft-Hartley Act goes after Unions– loyalty
oath
 Kennan Telegram (8K); Truman Doctrine; intervention in Greece;
Marshall Plan reconstructs West Germany ($13 billion over 19481951); containment
 Federal Employees Loyalty and Security Program: Exec Order 9835
(revoked by Eisenhower)
 Berlin Air Lift; April 1949 NATO
 China ‘falls” 1949; US stockpiles atomic bombs—50 by 1949
 USSR tests bomb 1949
 Korean War: peacetime draft 54,000 US soldiers dead, 1950-53
 Attack on relativism: rise of consensus history
National Defense?
1941: federal workforce totals 900,000 with
10% in security work
By 1945, gov’t employed 4 million with 75%
engaged in security work
CIA established 1947 (National Security Act)
6.6 million people went through security
checks
McCarran Act (1952) barred ‘subversive’ or
‘homosexual’ people from visiting or
becoming citizens of US
Spies
• Alger Hiss (New Dealer and FDR’s advisor at
Yalta) convicted for perjury for denying he spied
for USSR in 30s (Whittaker Chambers of Time
Magazine names Hiss)
• UK reveals Klaus Fuchs spied for USSR on the
Manhattan project, 1947
• Feb. 1950 speech by Joseph McCarthy on traitors
within
• Julius and Ethel Rosenburg executed for
espionage 1953; died maintaining innocence
• See
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q93MkBSb
oHI
HUAC
 1938-1952 Dies committee investigates all levels of
Hollywood production for alleged communism;
supposed to inv. Klan but committee members are antiSemitic and pro-Klan
 Also involved in attacking prominent New Deal Hallie
Flanagan, head of the Federal Theatre Project, 1938
 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CqIsc6hZyPg
 Attacks on early anti-fascists (inc Shirley Temple)
 Focused on writers, women, and ‘foreign’ influences
 Attacks on industry as a whole (Paramount, 1948)
 HUAC and the Hollywood Ten (1947)
 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nJzV6-wJ3SQ
Muzzling the Unions
• Taft-Hartley Act, 1947 passed by Republicandominated Congress
• All union members must swear under oath
that they are not communists
• No union dues used for political activities
• Outlaws the closed shop
• Unions that refused were denied NLRB
services for strike arbitration
• Union leaders investigated as communists
The Blacklist
• HUAC active since 1938
• 1947 Truman signs Exec Order 9835 Fed
Employers Loyalty and Security Program; HUAC
hearings
• 1950 Internal Security Act (enforced registration
of communist organizations); Red Channels
published
• 1952 Immigration and Nationality Act
• Civil Rights Congress and Negro Youth Council
destroyed by charges of communism
• Paul Robeson, WEB DuBois, Lena Horne, Canada
Lee victimized
Noir Cultures
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
Postwar paranoia (Polan/Graebner)
Disillusionment of returning veterans
Fear of liberated women/threatened masculinity
Misogyny (reaction to wartime empowerment of
women– focus on West)
Anti-communist fears (again, focus on
Hollywood)
Urbanism (Naremore): people move out of cities
to suburbs
Race and ethnicity (Avila)
Fear of the foreign
‘Subversive’ deported following
McCarran Act, 1952
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QcvjoWOwnn4
1952: Screenwriters Guild authorizes studios to
remove name of writer (Albert Maltz) who refuses
to cooperate with HUAC
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8h_v_our_Q
Kennan Telegram: cold war discourse,
containment, and resistance
• “I know of a group of fanatics who are
desperately trying to undermine the Constitution
of the United States by depriving artists and
others of Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of
Happiness without due process of law.... I can
tell names and cite instances and I am one of the
first victims of it.... [This is] a group of exFascists and America-Firsters and anti-Semites,
people who hate everybody including Negroes,
minority groups and most likely themselves....
[T]hese people are engaged in a conspiracy
outside all the legal processes to undermine the
very fundamental American concepts upon
which our entire system of democracy exists.”
Lionel Stander, first fired in 1941 for alleged
communist ties, speaking before HUAC, 1952
See It Now, 1954
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e4LZsDqSSfk
Civil Rights
•
•
•
•
1945 AK state civil rights act
Mendez vs Westminster, 1947
GI forum (Felix Longoria case)
Massive impact of blacklist on ethnic-led unions
(Luisa Moreno deported 1950 under operation
wetback; settled in Guatemala—forced to flee
when CIA overthrows govt)
• Hernandez v Texas, 1954
• Brown v Board of Education, 1954
• Montgomery Bus Boycott, 1955-6
Cold War ‘Nuclear’ Families
 Postwar spending spree and baby boom (118 per
1000 women in 1957); the shopping mall
 Women lose high-paying jobs in manufacturing but
go back to work in higher numbers in 1950s (2
million more wives worked in 1952 than in the war)
 86% disapproval rating in polls; worries that
working women will lead to fall to communism
 Women made 40% college graduates in 1940 but
only 25% in 1950
 J. Edgar Hoover urges women to fight communism
by being good housewives and mothers
Frontiers of Gender in the Cold War
Masculinity and anonymity
The Organization Man (1956): fit in or else; C.
Wright Mills and The Power Elite (1956)
Cold war misogyny: Generation of Vipers;
Modern Woman: The Lost Sex
Crabgrass frontiers
Vance Packard and the popular critique of
mainstream society (The Status Seekers)
The Feminine Mystique (1963): critique of
Cold War domestic discourse’s limitations
of female roles; critique of Freud,
functionalists, and male ‘professionals’
William Whyte, The Organization Man,
“This book is about the organization man.
If the term is vague, it is because I can
think of no other way to describe the
people I am talking about. They are not the
workers, nor are they the white-collar
people in the usual, clerk sense of the
word. These people only work for The
Organization. The ones I am talking about
belong to it as well. They are the ones of
our middle class who have left home,
spiritually as well as physically, to take the
vows of organization life, and it is they
who are the mind and soul of our great
self-perpetuating institutions.”
Western heroes and contained
masculinity
Television
• 2/3 homes had at least one TV by 1952
• Early shows feature ethnic minority families and
working-class families (Honeymooners, The Goldbergs,
I Remember Mama, Life with Luigi)
• By late 1950s all urban ethnic comedies off the air
(Donna Reed Show, Father Knows Best, Leave It to
Beaver)
• Primetime avoids any controversies to get
sponsorship (Ed Murrow’s show off air by 1958)
• Westerns dramatize a gun in the hand of one good
man: Gunsmoke (1955-75); Clint Eastwood in
Rawhide (1959-65) and Steve McQueen in Wanted
Dead or Alive (1958-61)
Cold War Westerns
 Rise in production numbers postwar
 Effort to link this with rise of cold war: Ie: Westerns
said to mimic fight against communism (better dead
than red)
 But was it the other way round? Policy makers
learned about frontier thesis at college from Turner’s
students (Schlesinger, etc)
 Universities a factory for producing intellectual
fodder for Cold War (National Defense Education
Act, 1958)
 Westerners and cold war male bodies: ‘uncontained’
aspects seen as aberrant (women, crying men, dark
races, homosexuals)
 Rise in films about Mexico
Counterinsurgency Westerns
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DcmzHtokiMw
Science Fiction
 Themes of invasion, totalitarian control,
displacement, disease, annihilation (George Orwell,
1984)
 Return of H G Wells: The War of the Worlds (1953)
 Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451 (1953) banned
 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s84lX0OFbKI
 Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1956)
 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WLsjlmrQ6Mw
 Star Trek and late cold war ‘federations’
 Nevil Shute’s On the Beach (1957): impact in US
By 1960
• McCarthy discredited, but anxieties about
communism abroad increase (Sputnik, 1957;
Cuba, 1959); Eisenhower warns of MI complex in
early 1961
• Some Civil Rights legislation in place, but not
implemented effectively
• Women increase in the workforce, but media
constructs increasingly limited, domesticated
image
• Youth culture explodes; rebellions on horizon