This entry is a subentry of Cold War (1945 – 91).
It was no accident that nine days after Harry S. Truman asked Congress to enact a massive aid program to fight communism in Turkey and Greece—the Truman Doctrine—he issued Executive Order 9835 creating the Federal Employee Loyalty Program with a mandate to purge America's own government of any hint of political deviance. With these two actions in March 1947, the president put into place the twin pillars of foreign and domestic policy that would determine the structure of American political discourse for the ensuing four decades. Just as Truman made it virtually impossible for any American political leader to question fighting the “Red menace” wherever it threatened—this, after all, was a battle between freedom and slavery, atheistic communism and God‐fearing democracy—he also made deeply suspect any American politician who appeared overcritical of the nation's social and economic fabric, or who advocated reforms, such as national health insurance, that could be characterized as “socialistic.” No one, on either the foreign policy or the domestic front, could afford to be accused of being “soft on communism.” It was the ultimate political anathema, hence the boundary line of permissible political debate.
The implications of this new hegemony of anticommunism became crystal clear during 1947 and 1948, well before the vaunted rise of “McCarthyism” in the early 1950s. The chilling effect on cultural freedom became manifest when in 1947 the House Committee on Un‐American Activities (known popularly by the acronym HUAC) sought to blacklist any actors, playwrights, or producers who refused to “name names” and list Communists or “fellow travelers” they might have met in the course of their work or political activities. The HUAC's technique was insidious. Under the guise of inquiring about a Hollywood personality's own beliefs, the committee insisted that its witnesses list all other people who might have attended a meeting of a “subversive” group in the 1930s or 1940s. The only recourse for someone who wished to avoid betraying friends who could or could not have entertained a sympathy for socialism was to “take the Fifth” Amendment and refuse to answer—at which point, of course, “taking the Fifth” became synonymous with being a traitor, hence someone who could not be employed lest the contagion of disloyalty spread.
The exact same process occurred in electoral politics during the 1948 presidential election when President Truman denounced Henry Wallace—his main opponent on the left, and the former vice president—for his “Communist” sympathies. Wallace had urged a softer stance toward Russia and a bolder commitment to social welfare measures at home. It did not take other politicians long to learn from that exchange the degree to which one could be excluded from the political dialogue simply by being accused of sympathy toward communism. When Senator Joseph McCarthy turned that mode of debate into a political art form in the 1950s with his insistence that the State Department (and other agencies) was infested with Communists, he was simply carrying to its extreme a pattern already imbedded in the political process.
One major result of the politics of anticommunism, therefore, was to shrink the political spectrum in the United States. In Britain, France, Germany, Italy, and Scandinavia, there were political parties on the left that advocated social democratic policies such as universal health insurance, generous maternity leaves, and high unemployment benefits. Yet precisely because these political groups identified themselves with some socialist ideas, they had no counterparts in America, where expressing even toleration for such ideas was verboten. American politics thus became a dialogue between the Center and the Right, rather than the Left and the Right. Everything began with the premise of anticommunism and a faith in the virtues of capitalism as an engine of positive change. Incremental reforms in the status quo could be considered—for example, a hike in the minimum wage or in Social Security benefits—but anything more radical never made it to the negotiating table.
This shrunken political spectrum limited substantially the tactics and mobilization strategies of civil rights and labor groups. FBI agents questioned African Americans who boldly criticized the U.S. government, and interrogated whites who fraternized with such radicals. In the thirties and early forties, an alliance had begun to develop between civil rights groups and more “progressive” or radical unions such as the electrical and auto workers. Now, civil rights groups retreated to a more legalistic strategy of challenging segregation in the courts and seeking incremental reforms through modest congressional legislation—at least until the 1960s. Labor, in turn, moved away from pushing for a model of shared management/labor control toward “business unionism,” in which unions traded a share in decision making for higher wages and benefits. At the same time, organized labor purged its ranks of any Communist or Left‐leaning leadership in 1948 and 1949. Much of labor's success in organizing industrial unions—autos, rubber, the electrical industry—came from the energies of left‐of‐center activists. Now, these voices were stilled.
A similar insistence on conformity affected American family life and sexual norms during the postwar era. World War II had generated significant social changes. Millions of women, most of them married, had entered the labor force and found they enjoyed their work outside the home. Now, with the return of peace, government and civic leaders, magazine publishers and advertisers joined in a crusade to urge women back to a life of “normality” as housewives and mothers. The three‐ and four‐child suburban family became a new standard of “success” for women, with a life of segregated sexual spheres a domestic version, in the historian Elaine Tyler May's words, of the “containment” policy practiced by America toward world communism. Traditional roles for women became America's answer to the free love, antifamily, collectivist social policies of the Soviet Union. Not surprisingly, Vice President Richard M. Nixon used such traditional roles as his trump card in the famous “kitchen debate” he held with Nikita Khrushchev in 1958 to celebrate America's superiority in competition with the Soviet Union.
Similarly, gay and lesbian Americans experienced a substantial increase of official and unofficial pressure to conform to heterosexual norms. During the war, increased travel, military experience, and access to more anonymous environments had made it possible for some homosexuals openly to express their sexual preference. The politics of anticommunism, on the other hand, now placed a premium on conformity to traditional masculine and feminine roles. Denunciations of “pinko queers” went hand‐in‐hand with efforts to purge the federal bureaucracy of anyone suspected of deviance, whether political or personal. Any affirmation of civil liberties or civil rights had to take place within a framework of pledging loyalty to all the ingredients of 100 percent Americanism, including total support of heterosexuality.
In the context of this narrowed political and cultural spectrum, an enormous amount of ferment continued to develop. The musical rebellion of rock ’n’ roll and rhythm and blues signaled a growing restlessness among the young; so too did the plays of Tennessee Williams, the poetry of Allen Ginsberg, the novels of Jack Kerouac, and the rising religious commitment of young people who felt called to something more than another tract house in a suburban community. But ironically, it was still the Cold War—and the fear of losing it—that prompted the most obvious social changes of the 1950s. The Interstate Highway system emerged primarily as a means of facilitating mobilization and response to a military threat; the National Defense Education Act, with its cutting‐edge role in providing government support for scholars in graduate school, responded to the terror Americans experienced after the Russians were the first to conquer space with Sputnik; and the civil rights gains of the Brown v. Board of Education decision, and the Civil Rights Acts of 1957 and 1960 were at least in part a response to America's embarrassment in the face of Russia's Cold War propaganda accusing the United States of being hypocritical in its defense of freedom.
Yet, appropriately, it was the civil rights movement that provided the wedge for finally undermining the dominance of Cold War cultural politics. Based on the simple and patriotic claim to equal treatment for blacks and whites under the law, the civil rights movement insisted on dramatic change. Armed with the powerful religious appeal of the Judeo‐Christian tradition, Martin Luther King, Jr., and his colleagues mobilized millions to criticize the status quo. The ethical call to join in the quest for a better America galvanized all the other groups in America seeking a way of expressing their frustration with the doctrines of conformity and false pride in the status quo—women, Chicanos, gays, students, Vietnam antiwar activists. It may have been only a small segment of each group of critics who seized public attention; but the attention they secured focused the entire nation on a different perspective toward the values, behaviors, and political norms that had reigned unchallenged for the preceding two decades.
The Cold War remained central to American society and politics all the way through the 1980s. Arguably, it remains central today, even though the actual conflict has ended. But after the successful challenge of the civil rights movement in the early and mid‐1960s, the ubiquitous hold of Cold War culture and politics was broken, providing at least the opportunity for a different kind of individual and group expression of dissent.
[See also Culture, War, and the Military; Civil‐Military Relations: Civilian Control of the Military; McCarran Internal Security Act (1950); military‐industrial complex; Nuclear Protest Movements; Nuclear Weapons, Popular Images of; Propaganda and Public Relations, Government; Society and War; Surveillance, Domestic.]
Bibliography
- David M. Oshinsky, A Conspiracy So Immense: The World of Joe McCarthy, 1983
- Elaine Tyler May, Homeward Bound: American Families in the Cold War, 1988
- Richard M. Fried, Nightmare in Red: The McCarthy Era in Perspective, 1990
- Thomas Byrne Edsall and Mary D. Edsall, Chain Reaction: The Impact of Race, Rights, and Taxes on American Politics, 1991
- Kevin P. Phillips, Boiling Point: Republicans, Democrats, and the Decline of Middle‐Class Prosperity, 1993
- Charles M. Payne, I’ve Got the Light of Freedom: The Organizing Tradition and the Mississippi Freedom Struggle, 1995
- David Halberstam, The Children, 1998
- Robert Dallek, Flawed Giant: Lyndon Johnson and His Times, 1961–1973, 1998; and William H. Chafe, Unfinished Journey: America since 1945,
4th ed. , 1999
