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Email this citationCIAO DATE: 07/01
Fear, Security and The Apocalyptic World View: The Cold War's Cultural Impact and Legacy
Paul S. Boyer *
March 25, 1997
In 1967, Louis Halle published a book called The Cold War as History. If that title seemed jarring and premature in 1967, it would simply appear obvious and conventional today. The Cold War is receding from our collective consciousness with breathtaking rapidity. Cold War encyclopedias are appearing; an Oxford Companion to the Cold War will doubtless arrive at any moment. To the college freshmen of 2000 C seven years old when Ronald Reagan left the White House C the Cold War is merely a chapter in a textbook, an hour on the History Channel, not lived experience.
To the dwindling band who vividly remembers the Cold War from beginning to end, this fading of a global reality that once seemed so all encompassing comes as an unsettling shock. But as both historian and citizen, I can only welcome the opportunity to view the Cold War from a distance, rather than from the belly of the beast. Agatha Christie once said that the great advantage of being married to an archeologist was that the older she got, the more interested in her he became. While it is not precisely true that, for historians, the more distant the event in time the happier we are, we do feel more at ease when the object of our study moves unambiguously into the realm of "history" and out of the category of "current events".
These reflections were triggered as I thought about the topic of this essay: American cultural history in the Cold War and beyond. But while I want to explore the Cold War's cultural impact, I must begin with a caveat. One is tempted, addressing a topic like this, to overplay one's hand: To see the Cold War as the great deus ex machina that determined all aspects of U.S. culture for decades. To succumb to that simplistic fallacy would be as misleading as to ignore the Cold War altogether in discussing modern American culture. Had there been no Cold War, many of the social, demographic, and technological realities that shaped postwar America would probably have unfolded much as they did: The postwar baby boom, which impacted U.S. society in so many ways, would doubtless have occurred even if the Soviet Union had been a friendly, peaceful social democracy like Sweden; the explosion in college enrollments triggered by the G.I. Bill of Rights; the rise of television with all its cultural ramifications; the white flight to the suburbs; the burst of consumer spending after fifteen years of Depression and war C all these would surely now be part of our postwar history even if there had been no Cold War. The moderate conservatism of the Eisenhower era was probably in the cards as well, as the nation digested the reforms of the New Deal. And the most profound social movement of the era, the African American freedom struggle, would almost certainly have unfolded absent the Cold War C though here the question of the Cold War's influence becomes more problematic, as I shall suggest later. In short, one must avoid the trap of seeing the Cold War as the sole determinant of American culture in the 1950s and beyond. The process of cultural change is far too complex for any monocausal explanation.
A final introductory note: My illustrative examples are inevitably sketchy and somewhat arbitrarily chosen. In an overview essay like this, one simply cannot cite all the evidence that could be mentioned. Given the luxury of unlimited space, the argument, and the evidence, could be elaborated much more fully. But such an approach would surely stretch the reader's patience to the breaking point, and hardly fit the format of a series entitled "Occasional Papers".
On, then, to the topic at hand. First, in assessing the Cold War's impact on American culture, one must make some selection among the myriad events, relationships, and ideological currents encompassed in the capacious term ìthe Cold Warî. For the purposes of this essay, three specific aspects of that extended era of superpower conflict seem particularly salient. The first is the fact that hanging over the political standoff between the United States and the Soviet Union was the ever present fear that at literally any moment it could erupt into hot war. And this would not be simply another conventional war of the kind the world had known before, devastating as they had been. This would be a global thermonuclear war that could completely destroy human society, if not humankind itself, leaving a dead planet in its wake. Lurid as such images seem today, they were vividly present for the Cold War generation. President Franklin Roosevelt in 1933 had proclaimed that the only thing Americans had to fear was fear itself, and in 1941 Roosevelt had listed "Freedom From Fear" as one of the Four Freedoms fundamental to America's values. Yet as the Cold War began, a new and terrible fear insinuated itself into the American consciousness.
As early as November 1945, Life magazine published a feature on "The Thirty Six Hour War" with chilling illustrations of New York City as a smouldering ruin. The fears persisted into the 1950s and early 1960s, reinforced by atomic threats during the Korean War, school civil defense drills that sent children cowering under their desks, and alarms associated with the 1961 stand off over Berlin and the 1962 Cuban missile crisis. The level of terror fluctuated thereafter, but it never went away, as the two sides, trapped in the terrifying logic of deterrence theory, stockpiled ever destructive nuclear arsenals.
We shall never know how close the world came to nuclear holocaust during the Cold War, but the fear of ultimate catastrophe was inescapable, and the Cold War's larger cultural meaning cannot be understood without recognizing this underlying stratum of terror. Of course, the fear was not always on the surface; the psychiatrist Robert Lifton has familiarized us with the useful concept of "nuclear numbing". But it never disappeared completely, and its effects were far reaching.
A second important component of the Cold War, for purposes of cultural analysis, is the pervasive preoccupation with "national security" that it encouraged. Any quest for "security" is essentially defensive, reactive, and (in this case) militaristic: it seeks protection against potential threats that are perceived as likely to prevail the moment one lets down one's guard. The Social Security Act of 1935 had familiarized Americans with the term "security" and underscored its desirability, and the architects of the Cold War exploited this tradition.
In a 1998 lecture at the Carnegie Council on Ethics and International Affairs, Douglas Stuart analyzed the implications of the early Cold War shift from the language of national interest to the language of security C a shift embodied in the National Security Act of 1947 that created the National Security Council; the Central Intelligence Agency; and an independent Air Force that soon included the Strategic Air Command, an armada of long range nuclear bombers eventually supplemented by thousands of ICBMs and missile carrying nuclear submarines. This national security apparatus, stressing military dangers and military responses, quickly eclipsed the State Department, with its traditional reliance on negotiations, in resolving differences with other nations. This obsessive preoccupation with security, I shall argue, influenced American culture no less than it did U.S. foreign relations.
Closely related to these two themes is the third and final one I wish to highlight: The simplistic world view encouraged by the Cold War's ideological architects. Their public rhetoric consistently divided the world into two undifferentiated blocs, the "Free World" and the "Communist bloc", each with its respective capital; Washington and Moscow. Winston Churchill's March 1946 "Iron Curtain" speech provided a memorable metaphor for this view of a polarized world starkly divided between two hostile and absolutely distinct blocs, sharing no common interests. Appropriately, we date the Cold War's end from the dismantling of the best known tangible manifestation of Churchill's metaphorical image, the Berlin Wall.
President Harry Truman reinforced this starkly bimodal world view in his March 1947 request for U.S. aid to Greece, to replace British power in the eastern Mediterranean and thwart a leftist insurgency against Greece's right wing monarchy. Rather than discussing the actual situation and American interests in the region, Truman took a different approach. Following the advice of Senator Arthur Vandenburg that he must "scare the hell out of the American people" to secure his appropriation, Truman adopted the rhetorical framework favored by the State Department's Dean Acheson, who saw postwar U.S.
Soviet relations quite literally as the contemporary equivalent of the ancient death struggle between Rome and Carthage. Accordingly, Truman framed the issue as a global conflict between freedom and slavery, with the Greeks only bit players in that cosmic confrontation. From this apocalyptic perspective, of course, the only possible outcome was victory for the forces of good and utter annihilation of the forces of evil. As successive Cold War leaders invoked it, this world view sank deeply into the public consciousness. John Foster Dulles used it to justify anti
Soviet military alliances in Europe, the Middle East, and Asia. It underlay the "domino theory" of the 1950s and 1960s, by which the Vietnam War became only one episode in a much larger struggle. It also influenced Henry Kissinger's Latin American policies in the later 1960s and ë70s, in which that region, with all its endemic problems, became simply another arena of conflict between two diametrically opposed world powers.
This is not to suggest that the rhetoric bore no relation to reality. Joseph Stalin was a brutal dictator of a totalitarian state, and his early postwar pronouncements (as a devastated Russia lay under the shadow of America's atomic bomb, let us remember), uncannily echoed the totalizing rhetoric of American policymakers. The Soviet Union, like other great empires, pursued a policy of self interest, border security, and expansion when the risks warranted.
But when all this has been acknowledged, the apocalyptic rhetoric in which U.S. leaders cast America's postwar foreign relations, both in public speeches and in policy documents such as NSC 68, profoundly shaped the world view of a generation of Americans, and represents one of the Cold War's most important legacies. Each of these key components of the Cold War C the continuing threat of nuclear war; the preoccupation with national security; and the simplistic, bipolar view of world realities C had profound cultural ramifications. Furthermore, their impact was intensified because each resonated with potent themes embedded in American thought and historical experience.
In the case of the nuclear menace, the relationship to Americans' prior experience was a negative one. The threat of nuclear war had such a profound impact precisely because Americans had historically felt invulnerable. Protected by oceans on the east and west, bordered on the north and south by non threatening Canada and Mexico, fortress America until 1945 felt almost completely immune to outside dangers. Not since the earliest European settlers had guarded their villages against Indian attack had white Americans felt deeply vulnerable. (The experience of African Americans, of course, both in slavery and after, was quite different.)
All this changed on August 6, 1945. Within hours of the Hiroshima bombing, radio commentators and newspaper editorial writers somberly warned that U.S. cities were now vulnerable to the same devastation. Some, looking ahead, visualized intercontinental ballistic missiles as a logical outgrowth of World War II's two great technological breakthroughs; Germany's V 2 rockets and America's atomic bomb. Others, more prosaically, imagined enemy aliens smuggling in atomic bomb components, secretly assembling them, and threatening to obliterate Washington or New York City unless their demands were met.
Whatever the scenario, the image was one of massive home front destruction, and the nightmare only worsened as the nuclear arms race accelerated. Of course, people everywhere had reason to fear atomic devastation, but for nations that had long experienced warfare on their own soil, the new danger at least fit into a preexisting awareness of vulnerability. For Americans, lacking such a sense of vulnerability, the atomic threat hit with particularly powerful intensity.
As for the Cold War planners' security preoccupations and their militarized approach to foreign relations, this spoke directly to Americans' longstanding sense of technological superiority. At England's 1850 Crystal Palace exposition, American mass produced rifles, locks, and machinery so impressed the British that they sent a delegation to study the "American System" of manufacturing. At the 1876 Philadelphia Exposition, the mighty steam driven Corliss engine profoundly affected all visitors, including the novelist William Dean Howells, who marveled at the flywheel's towering size and awesome silence. Thanks to Andrew Carnegie, America by the 1880s led the world in iron and steel production.
A host of technological wonders and feats of productivity, from sewing machines, railroads, telephones, and electric lights to airplanes and mass produced automobiles, intensified Americans' pride in their technological prowess, and their conviction that the solution to most problems lay in further technological advances. World War II strengthened this confidence, not only giving rise to the atomic bomb C widely credited with forcing Japan's surrender C but also to marvels of productivity, as tens of thousands of ships, planes, and tanks poured off the assembly lines.
Small wonder, then, that when U.S. policymakers proposed a military and technological response to the deteriorating U.S. Soviet relationship, the public overwhelmingly approved. This was a language Americans were conditioned by their history to understand and applaud. A key turning point came in 1949 when the Soviets tested their first atomic bomb. As McGeorge Bundy and others have argued, this offered the Truman administration an opportunity to again try for an agreement with Moscow on the international control of atomic energy. Such an initiative might have failed, but we shall never know, because it was never tried. Influenced by hawkish advisors and scientists like Edward Teller, Truman opted instead to raise the technological ante and build the hydrogen bomb, a thousand times more powerful than the atomic bomb. With this decision, the nuclear arms race entered the spiraling upward course it would follow for decades, only lightly restrained by periodic arms control agreements that set appallingly high limits on nuclear weaponry and were frequently circumvented by technological innovations such as missiles equipped with multiple independently targetable reentry vehicles (MIRVs). Persisting into the 1980s, this "security" driven faith in technological solutions to foreign policy issues underlay Ronald Reagan's Strategic Defense Initiative, with its vision of a laser based shield to protect the nation against foreign attack. The critics who ridiculed Reagan's "Star Wars" proposal as a Buck Rogers fantasy missed the brilliance of his appropriation of one of the most potent articles in the American credo: The confidence in technological fixes to political problems. My third theme, the apocalyptic black white Cold War mindset, also resonated with American modes of thinking. John Winthrop famously told the Puritans aboard the Arbella in 1630 that their community would be a "city on a hill", (Ronald Reagan always called it a "shining city on a hill"), a beacon of righteousness in a wicked world. This insistence on America's global mission resurfaces in every period of U.S. history, including Woodrow Wilson's 1917 crusade to make the world safe for democracy and Henry Luce's grandiose 1941 proclamation of "the American Century". American churches, meanwhile, had for generations been dispatching missionaries to spread light and righteousness in foreign lands. World War II reinforced this sense of the nation's special destiny, as the United States (and, ironically, its ally Russia) seemed the only remaining bulwark against the dark forces of fascism threatening to engulf the world. Thus the ground was well prepared for an interpretation of postwar power realities that cast America once again in a heroic and apocalyptic role, with the wartime ally Russia now the new menace. When Truman, Acheson, and the others summoned the nation to this new global crusade, most Americans found their rhetoric both familiar and compelling.
These major themes of the Cold War not only resonated powerfully with strands of American thought and culture stretching far into the past; they also, in turn, profoundly influenced the culture of the Cold War era and beyond. We are, of course, by now familiar with the role of the Central Intelligence Agency in clandestinely funding magazines of opinion, cultural festivals, conferences, and supposedly independent committees of intellectuals, as well as art exhibits and tours by poets, jazz musicians, and symphony orchestras C all in the name of battling communism. This is unquestionably a crucial aspect of the Cold War's cultural impact, exhaustively chronicled in Frances Saunders' recent book The Cultural Cold War. Indeed, as Saunders notes, before the establishment of the National Endowments for the Arts and the Humanities in 1965, the CIA was the major conduit of federal support for cultural endeavors of all kinds.
But equally interesting are the ways the Cold War shaped U.S. culture without any help from the CIA. Indeed, each of the three aspects of the Cold War mindset that I have identified had a broader cultural impact. First, and perhaps most obviously, nuclear fear quickly seeped into the culture and pervaded it for decades. This influence emerged immediately after Hiroshima at all cultural levels, from nervous jokes about Japan's "atomic ache" and country music songs about atomic destruction to somber essays by religious leaders and John Hersey's gripping narrative of six Hiroshima survivors, published in the New Yorker in August 1946 and never out of print since. Thereafter, the nuclear theme, while never absent from the culture, fluctuated like a barometer, gauging the intensity of fear at any given moment. It spiked upward in the late Fifties and early Sixties, as generalized anxieties about nuclear war were intensified by concerns about deadly radioactive fallout from nuclear tests. From the poems of Robert Lowell to the satirical songs of Tom Lehrer, nuclear apprehensions pervaded the culture. Atomic fears loomed large in science fiction, which enjoyed a surge of popularity in these years. Ray Bradbury's short story "There Will Come Soft Rains" (in The Martian Chronicles, 1950) imagined a totally automated house of the future that continues to operate long after its human inhabitants have been vaporized in a nuclear flash. Bradbury's Fahrenheit 451 (1953) wove together several cultural obsessions of the Fifties, including the rise of television, the McCarthyite insistence on intellectual conformity, and the omnipresent nuclear threat. Indeed, the novel ends as nuclear bombs rain down on a fictional American city. In perhaps the most brilliant and disturbing of these science fiction stories on a nuclear theme, Walter Miller's A Canticle for Leibowitz (1959), successive civilizations achieve scientific knowledge, self destruct, and then repeat the process endlessly. Nuclear menace reached TV viewers through such science fiction series as The Outer Limits and Rod Serling's The Twilight Zone, whose programs frequently addressed the effects of atomic fear, speculated about genetic mutations from H bomb testing, or imagined scenarios of a post nuclear war world. Hollywood, as always, both echoed and amplified the pervasive nuclear anxieties. The first film about the bomb, The Beginning or the End? (1946), a fictionalized treatment of the Manhattan Project, offered a qualified message of hope. But by 1951, in The Day the Earth Stood Still, featuring extra terrestrials who arrive to warn mankind that global cooperation is the only alternative to global destruction, the sense of imminent catastrophe ran deep. By the late í50s and early ë60s, the movies' view had grown bleaker still. In a flood of mutant films, including the monster from the sea in Godzilla, the marauding giant ants of Them!, the shriveling suburban husband of The Incredible Shrinking Man, and the ravenous corpses of The Night of the Living Dead, atomic blasts or nuclear testing bring terrifying alterations in the natural order. Stanley Kramer's On the Beach and Fail Safe and Stanley Kubrick's classic black comedy Dr. Strangelove, all from the earlyí60s, offered differing but equally chilling scenarios of the nuclear future. This cultural theme diminished after the 1963 test ban treaty, but it revived in the late 1970s and early í80s, as anxieties about nuclear power and renewed fears of nuclear war in the early Reagan years again gripped the nation. Once more, cultural manifestations of the fear surfaced at all levels, from paintings, poetry, and pronouncements by religious leaders to a flood of science fiction stories. It was expressed in the ABC TV special The Day After (1984) and films such as War Games (1983), in which teenage computer hacker Matthew Broderick barely manages to prevent World War III as the Pentagon's master computer, responding to misleading signals of an enemy attack, prepares to unleash its pre programmed retaliatory strike. As I suggested earlier, Americans' pride in their technology helped fuel early support for the Cold War expansion of the nation's nuclear arsenal. But cultural themes often include their own negation, and our love hate relationship with nuclear weapons offers a classic example. Even as Americans have flaunted their technological and productive prowess, writers and cultural observers from Henry David Thoreau to Rachel Carson have warned of technological hubris and the dangers of a technologized civilization. Concerns about technology run amok have always accompanied our pride in our machines, and in the outpouring of Cold War cultural material expressing fear of nuclear war and atomic testing, this countervailing theme emerged in full blown form.
The second key component of the Cold War mindset, the preoccupation with security, had domestic ramifications as well. At the most obvious level, it shaped the nation's budgetary priorities, with billions ladled into military spending while projects in the arts and culture, and for social purposes, went begging. To offer but one illustrative example, the $391 billion which Congress appropriated for military spending in the 1950s exceeded the total of health related spending by a factor of ten. The interstate highway system, which contributed so mightily to the standardization of leisure and consumption in the 1950s and beyond, was initially promoted as a security driven strategic necessity, to facilitate escape from cities in the event of a nuclear attack. Although the computer was a World War II byproduct, the Cold era Pentagon, recognizing its value in strategic planning and war gaming, became a major funder of computer development. The Internet and World Wide Web, which are so profoundly shaping contemporary culture, originated in the desire of government officials and the military for a secure communications system that could survive nuclear attack. In 1969, with Defense Department funding, scientists in California and Utah linked computers in four cities with dedicated high speed transmission lines creating a web like system that could continue to function even if parts of it were destroyed. The system soon outgrew its military origins, and the Internet was born. The Cold War obsession with security had deeper cultural ramifications, however. As it eddied through 1950s America, this obsession evolved in interesting ways. For many Americans, the "security" threat became not only the obvious one of external attack, but also a subtler internal one, in which shadowy, sinister forces were seen as threatening the social order, undermining personal stability, and upsetting familiar assumptions. The quest for "security" in this broader sense emerged as a protean force in Cold War culture. With a few notable exceptions C the Beat poets, political satirists like Mort Sahl and Tom Lehrer, radical sociologist C. Wright Mills, the cultural subversion of rock & roll music C the range of permissible discourse and cultural expression narrowed, and controversial topics or radical challenges to the status quo were muffled. In films like Marlon Brando's The Wild One of 1954 and James Dean's Rebel Without a Cause (1955), as in Tootle (1945), the popular Cold War era children's story about the little engine that loved to jump the tracks and smell the flowers, the theme is actually the taming of the rebel and subjecting him to society's rules. As Elaine Tyler May argues in Homeward Bound: American Families in the Cold War Era (1988), the domestic equivalent of George Kennan's Containment doctrine was the drive to preserve a conservative, supposedly traditional patriarchal social order, and to contain any challenges to that order through a subtly insistent ideology of domesticity. By no coincidence, this same security obsessed Cold War culture also generated a stream of books and mass culture products dedicated to calming anxieties and portraying American life as comfortable, familiar, and predictable. Americans in the early Cold War made bestsellers of positive thinking books like Norman Vincent Peale's A Guide to Confident Living (1948), flocked to escapist musicals, and idolized the purveyors of bland and saccharine music like Perry Como and Lawrence Welk. TV sitcoms like Leave It to Beaver, Father Knows Best, and The Nelson Family offered a reassuringly unvarying format and a diet of minor domestic crises that could be resolved by a wise and understanding father within thirty minutes. The prevailing cultural mood, physicist I.I. Rabi concluded in 1955, was "the complacency of despair". The avuncular Dwight Eisenhower, the military hero who had vanquished America's foes in World War II, was the perfect president for a nation desperately seeking security in all realms of life.
Translated into home front terms, the search for security meant predictability, conforming to society's expectations, and not rocking the boat. Its most obvious manifestations in political culture were the Truman Administration's loyalty program and the excesses of Senator McCarthy and the House Un-American Activities Committee in their reckless quest for "subversives". The Senate even incorporated the potent word "security" in the title of a law, the Internal Security Act of 1950, passed over Truman's veto. It criminalized Communist and "Communist front" organizations, tightened the immigration law, and provided for concentration camps for suspected subversives in a national emergency. The Saturday Evening Post helpfully explained the new measure in a January 13, 1951 article entitled "How Will Our Law Against Traitors Work". Under the law, Senator Pat McCarren of Nevada headed a new Senate Internal Security Subcommittee that conducted hearings far and wide, ferreting out alleged radicals. All these efforts were avidly supported by the FBI's J. Edgar Hoover, who was fond of noting: "It took only twenty three commies to overthrow Russia."
But the obsession with "security" found expression in other, subtler ways as well. College students of the Fifties were labeled "the silent generation". David Riesman's classic sociological study The Lonely Crowd (1950) portrayed a society of timid "other directed" men and women guided neither by tradition nor strong inner convictions, but by a kind of social radar, as they constantly monitored the reactions of others, and modified their own behavior accordingly. Studies of suburbia such as Herbert Gans' The Levittowners (1967), of mid level corporate behavior C William H. Whyte's The Organization Man (1956), for example C and of mass culture such as Daniel Boorstin's The Image (1961) and Dwight Macdonald's Against the American Grain (1962), as well as such novels as Sloan Wilson's The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit (1955), all reinforced the same message: Postwar America was a cautious, conformist society, obsessed with security, with fitting in, and with conforming to the expectations of others. The sociologist Talcott Parsons, in such works as The Social System (1951) and Structure and Process in Modern Societies (1960), presented a functionalist model of society C a model with little power to account for change, disruption, or social conflict, but well adopted to Cold War America's urgent need for stability and predictability. This preoccupation with conformity as a strategy for achieving "security" in a social sense represented a cultural analogue to the Cold War's obsession with security in the strategic and military sense. Risk taking was out; a cautious, defensive posture of guarding against the unexpected was in C at home no less than abroad. This was not an entirely new phenomenon, of course: As early as the 1840s, Alexis de Tocqueville had commented on the power of public opinion in shaping Americans' thought and behavior, and writers and critics of the 1920s like H. L. Mencken and Sinclair Lewis had satirized middle class conformity and an increasingly standardized culture. But this feature of the national character was strongly reinforced in the security obsessed ideological climate of the early Cold War.
From this perspective, the most emblematic of Cold War movies may be Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1956) and The Thing (1951). In the former, a peaceful California town is terrorized by devouring aliens whose most frightening trait is their ability to replicate the bodies and personalities of townspeople, making it impossible to tell friend from foe: one's nearest and dearest may be an alien monster. In The Thing, scientists try to identify a mysterious glowing organism buried under the Antarctic ice. When one naive scientist approaches "The Thing" in a gesture of friendship, he is zapped by powerful rays emanating from the organism. In such scary films as these, as in the film noir genre so popular in theí50s, Hollywood uncannily captured the amorphous but powerful cultural mood generated by Cold War security preoccupations that saw menace on all sides. But if the early Cold War encouraged a conservative antipathy to social change, how can we explain the fact that the most important reform movement of the century, the African American civil rights struggle, arose in the mid 1950s, at the height of the Cold War? Here, I think, lies one of the great paradoxes of the Cold War's domestic impact. While Cold War ideology generally strengthened conservative social and cultural forces, and discouraged challenges to the status quo, in this instance it had the opposite effect. As the Cold War unfolded and the United States sought to win the allegiance of nonaligned, mostly darker skinned nations, the persistence of Jim Crow at home became a distinct embarrassment. When African diplomats were denied service in restaurants or motels, or when television showed the world scenes of black activists in the South being attacked by police dogs or doused by fire hoses, the State Department seethed. In this instance, then, the Cold War actually fostered activism and social change, and this must be taken into account in any assessment of its overall domestic impact.
The third major strand of the Cold War mindset that I have identified C its apocalyptic, black white world view, which saw every conflict as part of "the global communist conspiracy" C had its domestic cultural impact as well. The popular TV Westerns of the early Cold War such as Gunsmoke offered sagebrush morality fables analogous to the simplistic world view emanating from Washington. The 1952 Gary Cooper film High Noon is particularly interesting in this context, because it explores the contradiction between two central Cold War motifs C the cautious, security seeking impulse, on the one hand, and the urgency of mobilizing to overcome the forces of evil, on the other. In the end, Cooper, the town sheriff, aided only by his young Quaker wife (Grace Kelly), battles alone against the powers of darkness C embodied in the sinister Frank Miller gang, while the timid townspeople cower and hide. Historians and political scientists of the early Cold War dwelt on the theme of "American exceptionalism", insisting that the uniqueness of America's historical experience made it radically different from the Old World. Playing down the nation's obvious racial, ethnic, gender, religious, geographic, and class differences, scholars offered sweeping generalizations about "the American people", "the American character", and "the American mind", and celebrated the consensus nature of American politics. Consciously or unconsciously, these themes matched precisely the rhetorical stance of the Cold War ideologists who were at the same time insisting that the nation must unite against menacing forces abroad and stressing the absolute polarity between "the Free World" and the Communist enemy. The apocalyptic, absolute versus absolute evil theme of Cold War ideology found its cultural analogue, too, in the resurgence of evangelical Protestantism in the early postwar years, expressed in the wildfire growth of denominations such as the Assemblies of God, the Youth for Christ movement featuring rousing Saturday night rallies in evangelical churches, and Billy Graham's evangelistic crusades, beginning with a 1949 Los Angeles tent revival just as the Russians tested their first atomic bomb. Graham offered a theological version of the apocalyptic Cold War world view: Righteousness and evil are struggling for dominance not only throughout the world, but in each individual heart; hope lies only in a transforming conversion experience, in which Satan is vanquished and God takes control.
Significantly, the Cold War saw the popularization of a system of interpreting Bible prophecy that reinforced the apocalyptic world view promulgated by many Cold War ideologists. According to this scheme, history will end in a cataclysmic final struggle, the Battle of Armageddon, when Christ will return to vanquish the Anti-Christ and his armies and establish a millennial kingdom in Jerusalem. Scores of paperback writers, TV preachers, and other prophecy popularizers cited the account of Earth's destruction by fire in II Peter 3:10 as prophecies of World War III and taught that Ezekiel 38, which describes the annihilation of the mysterious northern kingdom of "Gog", foretells the ultimate destruction of Russia. This line of prophecy interpretation had been around for a long time, but in the favorable ideological climate of the Cold War, it gained enormous public attention. The best selling U.S. nonfiction book of the 1970s was Hal Lindsey's The Late Great Planet Earth (1970), a slangy popularization of this apocalyptic version of Bible prophecy, including Russia's coming doom and the Battle of Armageddon, which Lindsey called "World War III". To the millions of readers of Lindsey and other prophecy writers, the Cold War demonization of the Soviet Union as the embodiment of evil made perfect sense. President Reagan's longstanding interest in Bible prophecy, as well as that of other high Reagan era officials, is well documented. Lindsey has boasted of prophecy lectures he gave at the Pentagon in the 1970s that were so jammed that people had to be turned away. If I have persuaded you that the ideology of the Cold War did, indeed, draw strength from central and longstanding themes in American culture, and that the Cold War, in turn, had significant cultural ramifications, a final question remains: Is this merely of historical interest, or do these cultural effects continue today? Clearly, world realities have changed radically since the 1980s, and, again, one must avoid oversimplifying. Nevertheless, I am convinced that remnants of the Cold War mindset still shape our culture. The difficulty we have as a nation in grasping the complexity of events abroad, and our chronic tendency to look for villains and heroes, seem clearly a legacy of the black white Cold War world view.
The Soviet Union is no more, but the apocalyptic mindset and the search for villains survive. Some now see the new enemy as Islamic fundamentalism, "rogue states", or shadowy terrorist groups. Others, such as televangelist Pat Robertson in his deeply conspiratorial book The New World Order (1991), pinpoint the emerging global economy, multinational corporations, international bodies such as the United Nations and the World Bank, and even the U.S. government itself. In the "Left Behind" series of novels by Tim LaHaye and Jerry B.Jenkins, a fictionalized version of the Bible prophecy scheme described above, the UN Secretary General emerges as the Anti-Christ, a gullible U.S. president turns over America to his control, and a remnant of true Christian believers are tracked down and persecuted by agents of the Anti-Christ's demonic new world order. The "Left Behind" novels sold many millions of copies in the later 1990s, and a movie version was released in 2000. The obsession with "security" C another Cold War legacy C remains a potent theme in contemporary mass culture and political discourse. In movies like Arnold Schwartzenegger's True Lies (1994), a radical Islamic terrorist group, the Crimson Jihad, acquires a hydrogen bomb and threatens to obliterate southern Florida unless its demands are met. With a different set of villains, this paranoid movie could have been made in 1955. In the 1996 John Travolta film Broken Arrow, the security menace is internal: A demented Air Force pilot threatens to nuke Denver unless his grievances are addressed. The villains change, the apocalyptic world view survives, with the demonic enemy today just as likely to be an obscure American malcontent C or an American president C as a foreign power. This, too, is part of the Cold War's continuing cultural and political legacy.
Cold War America's ambivalence toward science and technology C both a guarantor of national security and a source of menace C has also survived in post Cold War culture. Americans continue to be fascinated by technological wizardry in data processing and communications, yet they are also haunted by fear, of the loss of privacy and individual autonomy in a technocratic mass society, of cloning, gene splicing, chemical biological weapons of mass destruction, and of other developments in the burgeoning realm of biotechnology.
The fin de siecle decline in the cultural authority of science and the concomitant rise in fundamentalist religion, myriad forms of New Age mysticism, and the "self actualization" mantras of a therapeutic culture may be, in part, another of the Cold War's lingering legacies. Anti intellectualism in American life has a long history, as Richard Hofstadter noted in a 1963 book of that title, but it was certainly encouraged by the comic book simplifications of much of the political and foreign policy discourse of the Cold War era. Indeed, in the 2000 presidential campaign, many voters viewed Al Gore's ability to discuss complex foreign policy issues articulately as a distinct liability. A decade after the Cold War's end, conservative politicians (and those from districts heavily dependent on defense spending) still perpetuate the obsession with security in a rather literal way. Invoking the Cold War's reliance on military strength and technology to assure the nation's "security", they call in apocalyptic tones for a military build up against vague potential enemies and doggedly keep Reagan's failure prone Strategic Defense Initiative on life support. Meanwhile, the Clinton Gore wing of the Democratic party has sought to update the concept of "national security" to include such diverse issues as trade with China, global warming, and the African AIDS epidemic. Invoking the familiar vocabulary of the Cold War, they have directed attention to new, post Cold War issues.
In summary, the Cold War at its height profoundly impacted American culture, and its long twilight afterglow continues to have significant cultural ramifications. Like the "living dead" of George Romero's 1968 movie, the fears, preoccupations, and world view of the Cold War remain woven into the fabric of American thought and culture long after the Cold War as a military and diplomatic reality has faded into the past. 1. D. Stuart AReconsidering National Interest and National Securityî, summarized in the Newsletter of the Carnegie Council on Ethics and International Affairs, Spring 1999. See also, D. Stuart, Editor, Organizing For National Security, U.S. Army War College, November 2000.
Endnotes
Note *: Director of the Institute for Research in the Humanitiesm University of Wisconsin at Madison. Paul Boyer is the Merle Curti Professor of History at the University of Wisconsin in Madison. He received his Ph.D. from Harvard University. Dr. Boyer has been a visiting professor at UCLA and Northwestern University. In 1974, Boyer co-authored Salem Possessed, which won the John H. Dunning Prize of the American Historical Association and was nominated for a National Book Award. Boyer's book, When Time Shall Be No More, received the Banta Award of the Wisconsin Library Association for literary achievement by a Wisconsin author. Dr. Boyer has been an active member in the Organization of American Historians. He has chaired its program committee and served on its nominating council and executive board. He is the Editor-in-Chief of The Oxford Companion to United States History, forthcoming in 2001. Dr. Boyer also serves on the national advisory board of the public television series The American Experience. Back.
