Rethinking Themes for Teaching the Era of the Cold War

Norman L. and Emily S. Rosenberg

Reprinted from the OAH Magazine of History
8 (Winter 1994). ISSN 0882-228X
Copyright (c) 1994, Organization of American Historians 

The tried-and-true strategies for teaching the early Cold War period focus almost exclusively on several important, but increasingly conventional, themes. Beginning with wartime and immediate post-World War II tensions, there is the familiar story of "responses" by the United States to Soviet-Communist "expansion." Highlighting events such as the Truman Doctrine, the Marshall Plan, the Berlin Blockade, NATO, and the Korean War, this narrative about the origins and elaboration of "containment" policies inevitably revolves around political events in Washington. Even if teachers take a "revisionist" approach, throwing into question the cold warriors' images of a ruthlessly expansionist U.S.S.R. and a reluctantly-internationalist United States, the focus on a bi-partisan, anti-communist foreign policy remains essentially the same.

In addition, units on the Cold War traditionally consider anticommunism at home. Seemingly the obvious counterpart to the primary foreign-policy theme, this story has its own familiar events and cast of characters, such as Harry Truman's loyalty programs and Senator Joe McCarthy.

Although these two narratives will likely remain part of any teaching unit on the early Cold War, there are good reasons to consider supplementing them and re-focusing attention on other important themes that characterize the period from 1945 to about 1963.

Normally associated with foreign affairs, the theme of "containment" applies to other areas of Cold War history, including the lengthy debates over mass, commercial culture. In much the same way that defenders of anti-communist policies talked about safeguarding the nation from policies and ideas attributed to an expansive communism, many of the same people also spoke about protecting the population, particularly young people, from the expansion of products and images disseminated by publishers (especially of comic books), Hollywood, and the fledgling television networks.

In fact, the coalition supporting containment of mass culture proved even broader than that urging restraint of the U.S.S.R. Although only the most myopic anticommunists identified commercial culture with communism, a wide spectrum of people--progressives, middle-of-the-road liberals, and conservatives--could all identify mass culture with the kind of regimented, totalitarian society of the political right or left. Consequently, agreement on the banal, anti-social impact of television and comic books often cut across political alignments and united unlikely allies during the Cold War era.

Students of the MTV generation, familiar with contemporary debates over the impact of violence on television or rap music lyrics, may find it relatively easy--and highly enlightening--to sample analogous debates from 1940s and 1950s over questions such as TV or violent comic books. Why, they might consider, do cultural products so often become the flash point for multidimensional social issues?

The great comic book debate, which is perceptively analyzed in James Gilbert's A Cycle of Outrage (1986), provides an important point at which concerns about mass culture and the emerging youth culture coincided. Moreover, this theme, as with many others of the "Cold War" era, can be traced back to the World War II period, providing a concrete example of the ways in which postwar history was not simply a reaction to the U.S.-U.S.S.R. conflict.

Wartime social changes, especially those that seemed to be fragmenting family life, gave new importance to cultural forms specifically aimed at young people. At a basic demographic level, the boom in babies that accompanied the early Cold War period began during World War II. Similarly, Seventeen magazine and the popular Archie comic book series (which itself focused upon the specific problems of a group of affluent teenagers) were just two of the youth-oriented products that emerged, alongside a growing fear of "juvenile delinquency," during World War II. (Seventeen magazine is available on microfilm, while there are numerous reprints of Archie and other comics from the 1940s.) Another excellent primary source for exploring the connections between wartime and postwar developments is Rebel Without a Cause, which appeared as a book in 1944 and was finally adapted for Hollywood in 1955. The film, which posthumously confirmed James Dean's superstardom, can prompt discussions about the symbolic dimensions of youth politics, including family and gender roles.

As Gilbert's book notes, concerns about the effects of such cultural products, particularly on young people, stemmed in part from the discovery of affluent teenagers as a specific marketing segment. Even before baby boomers became teenagers during the mid-1950s, businesses had already begun to target certain products, such as comic books and 45 RPM records, at a burgeoning youth audience, a development that seemed, in the context of the unsettled Cold War climate, almost subversive. Indeed, the anti-comic crusader Frederic Wertham, a "liberal" on many other Cold War issues, entitled his jeremiad about the evils of comics, The Seduction of the Innocent. One could easily imagine the same title being given to a study of the dangers of communist propaganda.

The mass and youth culture themes, with their echoes in contemporary debates, also provide an interesting way to approach broader cultural questions, especially those related to the complex dynamics of censorship. Despite a broad-based critique, for example, regulation of commercial culture often took place outside of the formal legal system: in efforts of self-regulation, such as the comic book code or the blacklist within the entertainment industry. The Front (1976), a motion picture produced by many people who had been "blacklisted" during the Cold War era, raises questions about censorship and its limitations. Students might consider what countervailing cultural forces prevented Congress from enacting a Truman Doctrine or a Marshall Plan to meet the purported mass-culture menace.

Finally, consideration of commercial and youth cultures can help to suggest the complexity of the Cold War years. Controversies in these areas cannot mechanistically be linked to familiar Cold War themes, such as anti-communism; but as the common imagery of "subversion" and "seduction" suggest, they are not entirely unconnected. More broadly, consideration of cultural issues may allow teachers to locate the desire to contain postwar changes with something deeper, and more complex, than a simple, reflexive fear of communism.

The complex interrelationships between anti-communism and other issues of the 1940s and 1950s also appear in controversies related to gender and sexuality. Conflicts in these areas often overlapped with concerns specifically related to developments in mass and youth cultures. The 1940s and 1950s, in this sense, offer numerous works of mass culture, such as Catcher in the Rye, that became identified as the "causes" for a general breakdown of "traditional" gender and sexual mores. More broadly (and much more subtly), the Cold War period saw efforts to "contain" certain changes in everyday life, especially those associated with women's roles and with issues of sexuality.

The steady expansion of the postwar labor market and new opportunities in higher education provided women with alternatives to early marriages (and family life) and, simultaneously, created important social and cultural anxieties. Similarly, despite the images suggested in popular fare such as Leave It to Beaver, even the "traditional" family of the Cold War period--one in which Dad worked in the marketplace while mother labored at home--created, as well as salved, social and cultural tensions.

In tracking debates over the role of "mom" during the cold war period, for example, historians such as Elaine Tyler May (Homeward Bound) and Stephanie Coontz (The Way We Never Were) show the extent to which rhetoric from the anti-communist crusade coincided with that used on the domestic gender front. Women who were considered "too sexy" were "bombshells," while the abbreviated swim suits, the bikinis, took their name from the nuclear tests conducted on a South Pacific atoll. And in a famous pamphlet prepared by civil defense officials to prepare citizens for Cold War conflict, deadly nuclear materials were represented as scantily-dressed, sexually-alluring women who seemed on the verge of going out of control.

In contrast, stress on a mother's "traditional" family role seemed a means by which to "contain" women within the confines of marriage and home. As mainstream TV shows like Leave It to Beaver graphically preached, the ideal mother avoided both "dangerous" attire and unorthodox ideas. She took an active interest in child-rearing, though remained wary of being too "motherly," thus smothering her children with a deadly malady that psychologists called "momism." Moreover, women who did not want to play such a different role, or played it badly, found themselves castigated for being mentally unbalanced; Life magazine once labeled women who worked outside the home as a "disease," while Esquire called working wives a "menace."

It might be interesting for students to consider how anxieties and changes related to gender roles, like those revealed in debates over mass culture, may (or may not) relate to Soviet-American tensions.

In looking at the complex interweaving of themes, it is also possible to refocus the period from the mid-1940s to about 1963 in more radical ways than those earlier suggested. Looking at this period in terms of race, one might entitle it the Civil Rights, rather than the Cold War, Era.

As with mass culture and gender roles, World War II also brought significant changes in the area of race. African-American leaders immediately pressed for guarantees that discriminatory hiring practices would not deny black workers jobs in the burgeoning defense industries. In order to dramatize the need for this goal, A. Philip Randolph, an African-American union leader, announced plans for a massive march on Washington on behalf of jobs. Anxious to head off the demonstration, President Franklin Roosevelt created an executive agency, the Fair Employment Practice Commission, that was charged to investigate jobs issues and to press for non-discriminatory hiring practices. In response, Randolph canceled the proposed march, though later developments proved this cancellation merely a postponement.

World War II exerted a powerful effect on racial developments. Responding to the federal initiative set in motion by Randolph and other civil-rights activists, nearly two million African-Americans left the South in search of jobs in the northern and western states during the 1940s. Similarly, nearly as many new immigrants from Mexico, who arrived under the national government's bracero program, settled in California and the Southwest. Seeking wartime jobs, they joined an already significant Mexican-American population in finding discrimination. In the short run, these demographic changes brought tensions, including violent confrontations in Los Angeles, the "Zoot Suit" Clash of 1942, and in Detroit, where there was serious racial conflict in 1944. At the same time, of course, the Roosevelt administration forcibly removed more than one hundred thousand people of Japanese ancestry--citizen and non-citizen alike--from their West Coast homes to "Relocation Centers."

In the longer run, however, the 1940s saw the beginnings of aggressive campaigns for greater national protection of civil rights. Even during the war itself, for instance, a federal court, under prodding from a citizen's review panel, held that the Mexican-Americans arrested during Zoot Suit clashes had been denied their civil rights. And in an ironic way, the wartime internment camps and the postwar tensions associated with the Cold War aided a broader civil-rights campaign. Following the war, for example, the Supreme Court decision legitimating the relocation camps, Korematsu v. U.S., seemed the kind of acute constitutional embarrassment that only new legal decisions, which were more favorable to civil rights claims, could undo. Similarly, the nation's world-wide crusade against communist tyranny and on behalf of American-inspired freedom appeared to demand more aggressive efforts to address civil rights issues at home. In this sense, the anti-discrimination decisions of the United States Supreme Court, such as Brown v. Board of Education (1954) seem (in the words of one legal historian) almost "inevitable." (The video documentary The Road to Brown explains legal developments in a clear, non-technical manner.)

Yet, if World War II and postwar international conditions weighed toward some measures to protect civil rights, nothing in this structural backdrop predetermined either the timing or form of the steps actually taken. Here, students should understand how the commitment of civil rights activists--in actions such as the Montgomery bus boycott--translated the possibilities for civil rights activities into positive legislation and programs. Using 1963 to mark one end point in the "civil rights era," of course, allows the March on Washington, the old dream of A. Philip Randolph, to serve as an important focal point for discussing how ideas from the past reappear in new situations. Similarly, ending a unit with the August 1963 March on Washington, and with Kennedy's November assassination, may allow students to prepare for a post-1963 unit by speculating on what type of civil rights legislation might be expected during Lyndon Johnson's presidency.

In short, shifting the focus from the Cold War to civil rights helps to suggest how the Cold War, while not irrelevant to a wide variety of issues, should not be seen as the only story of the period from the 1940s to about 1963.

As U.S.-Russian relations cease to dominate international relations in this post-Cold War era, frameworks other than simple bipolar rivalry may increasingly emerge as more relevant to Cold War events as well. One possible historical framework is the rise of the national security state; another would focus on issues of state-building and anti-colonialism abroad.

What many scholars, such as Daniel Yergin and Athan Theoharis, have called the "national security state" grew up in the context of the Soviet threat. The National Security Act of 1947 constituted a massive reordering of governmental power by its creation of the National Security Council and the Central Intelligence Agency. By the end of the Korean War, a sprawling federal bureaucracy, dominated by military spending and increasingly concerned with surveillance at home and covert action abroad, had transformed the relationship of the national government to everyday life. Although these transformations cannot be abstracted from the perceptions of cold-war dangers, like many cultural issues of the era, they can also be seen as part of a continuum that reached back to World War II, the New Deal, and before. The growth of executive branch power and of bureaucratic secrecy constitute long-term trends that helped create the Cold War even as they were also strengthened by it.

Other long-range trends in the political economy of the postwar years may also prove to have more lasting repercussions than the international Cold War itself. Some candidates to become central themes of the postwar era include: spending on the military sector as a means of stabilizing the economy and promoting growth (military Keynsianism); the shifts in regional power associated with the rise of the sun/gunbelt in the South and West and the relative decline of the North and East; the environmental and health implications of the nuclear arms race together with the assorted chemical pollutants piled up at governmental military sites. Even when the international Cold War is a badly faded memory, Americans will still be grappling with its domestic consequences.

Some scholars are now also refocusing the story of the international politics of the Cold War. Rather than examining how U.S.-U.S.S.R. rivalries shaped politics in client and allied states, they show how political dynamics in these other states helped to create the global bipolar division between the two superpowers. This recasting edges U.S.-Soviet relations away from center stage and brings forward other issues, such as ethnic/regional rivalries in some states and disputes over anticolonial strategies in the so-called "third world."

For years, the implicit or explicit interpretations of the Cold War suggested that during the 1950s and 1960s the superpowers increasingly targeted the "third world" as an arena of conflict. Countries in Africa, Latin America, and Asia came into the story of the Cold War more as pawns in superpower chess games than as players themselves. As scholars have looked more closely at what once seemed to be "the periphery" of the Cold War, however, the question of who manipulated whom seems ever-more ambiguous. As societies tried to reestablish themselves after World War II or to move out of colonial status, for example, rival political factions often appealed for superpower support to enhance their domestic positions. (Korea and Vietnam might be illustrations.) Superpower rivalry was thus often enhanced by the internal dynamics of many emerging nations.

In another example, superpowers could find that their "credibility" became so beholden to certain allies that they could often feel manipulated by them. The Soviet Union was saddled with Cuba's Fidel Castro and his demands; the U.S. had Ferdinand Marcos and his embarrassingly corrupt regime in the Philippines. The more carefully one looks at Cold War crises, in other words, the less one sees dominant superpowers grabbing for client states and the more one sees a complex world in which internal rivalries and postcolonial politics fed a bipolar split. As with earlier social and cultural themes, such a framework, acknowledging the extraordinary complexity of ethnic/regional rivalries and the active, rather than passive, role of many states, has greater relevance to the post-cold-war order in which students now live.

Obviously, most teachers will not want to drop entirely the familiar cold-war themes of bipolar rivalry and the anticommunist crusade at home. But to students living in a decade in which both the U.S.S.R. and "world communism" have disappeared, any of these other topics may seem much more salient and provoke more penetrating discussions.

Coontz, Stephanie. The Way We Never Were: American Families and the Nostalgia Trap. New York: Basic Books, 1992.

Gilbert, James B. A Cycle of Outrage: America's Reaction to the Juvenile Delinquent in the 1950s. New York: Oxford University Press, 1986.

Lindner, Robert M. Rebel Without a Cause: The Hypnoanalysis of a Criminal Psychopath. New York: Grune & Stratton, 1944.

May, Elaine Tyler. Homeward Bound: American Families in the Cold War Era. New York: Basic Books, 1988.

Salinger, J. D. The Catcher in the Rye. Boston: Little, Brown, 1951.

Wertham, Frederick. Seduction of the Innocent. New York: Rinehart, 1954.

Norman L. and Emily S. Rosenberg are DeWitt Wallace Professors of History at Macalester College in St. Paul, Minnesota. The fifth edition of their book, In Our Times: America Since World War II (Prentice-Hall) is currently in preparation.