The Culture of the Cold War
After world war one peace looked inevitable. Everyone was wrong about this because a few years later world war two erupted. This great war was supposed to be the war to end all wars. In this war it was crystal clear who was the good side and who was the bad side. Almost everyone figured that if the bad side was defeated then peace couldn’t possibly escape us again. We defeated the evil Axis powers, but of course another serpent would rear its ugly head from behind the curtains. This period of a “cold war” after world war two has become one of the most complex and studied eras since America’s birth. This state of paradoxes, paranoia, and public disorientation has only ended a few years ago, but its consequences will probably stretch on into the distant future. Stephen Whitfield exhibits flawlessly how the culture that has arisen from this extraordinary era is truly a marvel of the psychology of the human mind.
During the era after the war a truly devastating “specter”, as Whitfield puts it, was present. This monster’s birth came from the writings of Karl Marx whose views were almost completely opposite from all of our capitalistic views. With these teachings Vladmir Lenin had taken over the entire country of Russia. This revolution spread to a few other countries so many figured that it could quite possibly happen here. All those with any sort of power or holding in these present state of affairs would stop at nothing to keep halt a new sort of reign. These people, according to Whitfield, were politicians of all kinds, businessmen, clergy, almost everyone. By communism infringing on sacred trysts of American ideals it became more hated then almost any crime during this time.
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...the other wonderful aspects of America that dominated the culture during this time. Whitfield truly demonstrated the unique culture of this era of the cold war. America was a conformist, paranoid nation that obeyed everything and anything which the authority commanded in fear of persecution. This oppressed culture is best expressed by the expulsion of all of these bottled up sentiments in the next decade. Our culture was based on the old FDR adage regarding World War II, “There is nothing to fear except fear itself”. The politics of this era created an invisible, evil scapegoat for all the problems in the world and kept the people under an almost Stalinist totalitarian rule with this propaganda for a little over a decade. The culture of this era was truly something else and Stephen Whitield really did a fine job trying to figure out what that “something” really was.
One of the biggest fears of the American people is that the concept of communism contrasts drastically from the concept of capitalism, which the United States was essentially founded upon. The United States, as the public believed, was not a land of perfect communal equality, but rather a land of equal opportunity. However, what made communism so dangerous can be succinctly described by Eisenhower who compared the spread of communism as the domino effect. As his secretary of state, Dulles, put it, the propagation of communism “would constitute a threat to the sovereignty and independence” of America (Doc B). In addition, the Cold War also planted the seeds of rational fear of a global nuclear war. As Russia caught up to the United States in terms of technological advancements, they successfully developed the atomic bomb as well as the hydrogen bomb, which caused Americans to believe that the USSR would use these weapons of mass destruction to forcefully extend their ideologies to the USA. In fact, Americans were so frantic about a potential nuclear disaster that it...
The opposing look on communism sparked a massive conspiracy theory that set neighbours, friends and family against each other. People were accused of being communists, and, in order to free their name and the risk of being blacklisted, they had to give the names of other that were communists. This set off a long chain of innocent people that were accused by people trying to free t...
In the mid-1900’s, communism was a big issue worldwide. Communism is a political theory created by Karl Marx in which everyone essentially gets an equal share in society, including the fact that houses are publicly owned by the government. The controversial issue to this concept is that some jobs make money than others, so people of a higher class didn’t feel like they were getting their fair share. The case and trial of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg has to do with communism because the couple was accused of committing espionage against the United States. Showcased in the article “Case Against Rosenberg Falls Apart,” published by Achieve3000, Americans were afraid of communism, and the acts by the government were very impactful to society.
...en’s novel shows the soldiers’ innermost thoughts and concerns and internal conflicts which appear to outweigh the communist cause. The Things They Carried demonstrates the soldiers’ opposition to the war. However, the U. S. remained focused on preventing a communist takeover. The United States enormous political power affected history
Evans, M. Stanton. “Mccarthyism: Waging The Cold War In America.” Human Events 53.21 (1997): S1. MasterFILE Premier. Web. 24 Jan. 2014.
Within this controversial topic, two authors provide their sides of the story to whom is to blame and/or responsible for the “Cold War.” Authors Arnold A. Offner and John Lewis Gaddis duck it out in this controversial situation as each individual lead the readers to believe a certain aspect by divulging certain persuading information. However, although both sides have given historical data as substance for their claim, it is nothing more than a single sided personal perception of that particular piece of information; thus, leaving much room for interpretations by the reader/s. Finding the ...
In the third decade of the Cold War, less than two years after the United States population had been scared half-way to death by the Cuban Missile Crisis, Dr. Strangelove invaded the nation's movie theatres and showed the country the end of the world. Touted by critics then and now as the film of the decade, Dr. Strangelove savagely mocked the President, the entire military defense establishment, and the rhetoric of the Cold War. To a nation that was living through the stress of the nuclear arms race and had faced the real prospect of nuclear war, the satiric treatment of the nation's leaders was an orgasmic release from deep fears and tensions. Its detractors argued that the film was juvenile, offensive, and inaccurate. Viewed, however, in its context of the Cold War and nuclear proliferation, Dr....
“In the wake of the Cold War, Americans felt it was their patriotic duty to buy consumer goods to help the economy grow. In turn, the U.S. became the world’s dominant economic power” ("Cold War Influences on American Culture, Politics, and Economics").
Odd Arne Westad, Director of the Cold War Studies Centre at the London School of Economics and Political Science, explains how the Cold War “shaped the world we live in today — its politics, economics, and military affairs“ (Westad, The Global Cold War, 1). Furthermore, Westad continues, “ the globalization of the Cold War during the last century created foundations” for most of the historic conflicts we see today. The Cold War, asserts Westad, centers on how the Third World policies of the two twentieth-century superpowers — the United States and the Soviet Union — escalates to antipathy and conflict that in the end helped oust one world power while challenging the other. This supplies a universal understanding on the Cold War (Westad, The Global Cold War, 1). After World War II, the United States and the Soviet Union opposed each other over the expansion of their power.
Gaddis, John Lewis. “We Now Know: Rethinking Cold War History.” Taking Sides: Clashing Views On Controversial Issues in United States History. Ed. Larry Madaras and James M. SoRelle. 14th Edition. New York: McGraw-Hill, 2011. 302-308.
New York: Oxford University Press, 2000. Gregory, Ross. A. Cold War America: 1946 to 1990. New York, NY: Facts on File, 2003. McQuaid, Kim.
There have been many attempts to explain the origins of the Cold War that developed between the capitalist West and the communist East after the Second World War. Indeed, there is great disagreement in explaining the source for the Cold War; some explanations draw on events pre-1945; some draw only on issues of ideology; others look to economics; security concerns dominate some arguments; personalities are seen as the root cause for some historians. So wide is the range of the historiography of the origins of the Cold War that is has been said "the Cold War has also spawned a war among historians, a controversy over how the Cold War got started, whether or not it was inevitable, and (above all) who bears the main responsibility for starting it" (Hammond 4). There are three main schools of thought in the historiography: the traditional view, known alternatively as the orthodox or liberal view, which finds fault lying mostly with the Russians and deems security concerns to be the root cause of the Cold War; the revisionist view, which argues that it is, in fact, the United States and the West to blame for the Cold War and not the Russians, and cites economic open-door interests for spawning the Cold War; finally, the post-revisionist view which finds fault with both sides in the conflict and points to issues raised both by the traditionalists as well as the revisionists for combining to cause the Cold War. While strong arguments are made by historians writing from the traditionalist school, as well as those writing from the revisionist school, I claim that the viewpoint of the post-revisionists is the most accurate in describing the origins of the Cold War.
The attitude of the citizens of the United States was a tremendous influence on the development of McCarthyism. The people living in the post World War II United States felt fear and anger because communism was related with Germany, Italy, and Russia who had all at one point been enemies of the United States during the war. If the enemies were communists then, communists were enemies and any communists or even communist sympathizers were a threat to the American way of life. "From the Bolshevik Revolution on, radicals were seen as foreign agents or as those ...
Along with the Korean War, many Americans were also affected by the tensions between America and communist Russia. The Russian hydrogen bomb of 1953 had scared people into believing that Communist Russia could start an atomic war, ending life as most people had known it. Scholars of the time period were scared to teach anything about what Marxism (communism) was about. According to Daily Life in the United States, 1940-1959, Shifting Worlds (Kaldin, 2000). There were also very few communists teaching at universities such as Harvard during the 1950s because of the fear that Americans had of communists during this time. From the years 1951 to 1957, 300 teachers were fired from New York City public schools because they did not give the names of teachers who were supposedly communists. This shows how uneasy of a topic communism was for Americans to talk about, even when the culture had started to become more liberal towards the end of the decade, when the 1960s began.
The Cold War had an impact regarding Americans socially and culturally. What was the Cold War? The Cold War was a small war between the US and the Soviet Union. It ended up to be that the Soviet Union ended after this.What specifically in social and cultural life did it impact? It impacted how people bonded and they got closer with different cultures, such as African Americans.