Cold War Comes Home

1
Cold War Comes Home

• The Great Fear and American Society

2
Great Fear Historiography

• Cold War Liberals
• New Left Revisionist
• Post-New Left
• We Told You So School
• Evaluating the Great Fear
• Subjects of study commies or red hunters?
• Costs of Great Fear
• Example Venona v. Victims

3
Cold War and Anti-Communism

• Background
• Depression and CPUSA
• 1946 Elections and Republican Party
• Federal Employee Loyalty Program (1947)
• Backfired as it became proof of communist threat
• 1948 Election
• Labor Union Purges

4
Hollywood, Universities, and the Great Fear

• Hollywood and HUAC
• 1947 hearings
• Committee for the First Defense
• Hollywood 10
• New Themes for Movies
• Television Hearings 1951
• Red Channels
• Blacklisting
• University of California Loyalty Oaths

5
Politics of Anticommunism

• Nixon
• 1946 election and Voorhis
• Alger Hiss Case Trial
• Rosenberg Spy Case Trial
• Rise of Joseph McCarthy
• Context of post 1949
• Wheeling Speech
• Army Hearings (1954)
• Murrow on McCarthy

6
Meaning of the Great Fear

• Undermined power of organized labor
• Help Republican party rise to power
• Weakened New Deal liberalism
• Contributed to culture of conformity
• Narrowed Political Debate

7
Culture of Conformity

• American Society in the Cold War 50s

8
Historiography

• Happy Days or Not?
• Prosperity and suburbs
• Nostalgia and amnesia
• Consensus America and Domestic Weapons of War
• Religion
• Gender and Sex

9
Booming 50s

• Kitchen Debate
• Prosperity and Affluence
• pent up demand and govt spending
• consumer industries
• GI Bill and middle class
• I Like Ike
• Baby Boomers
• 1946-64 --high BR
• Dr. Spock

10
Culture of Conformity

• Levittown
• mass production
• problems and costs

11
Disneyland, McDonalds, and Conformity

• Disneyland
• order and homogeneity
• McDonalds
• Standardization
• Ray Kroc

12
Television and Conformity

• Television
• Cleavers and family sitcoms
• Middle-class suburban lifestyle
• School Educational Films

13
Cracks in the Wall of Conformity

• The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit
• C. Wright Mills
• White Collar
• Youth CultureBeatniks, Comic Books, and Rock N
  Roll
• Blackboard Jungle and Rebel Without a Cause
• Rock and roll is the most brutal, ugly,
  degenerate, vicious form of expression lewd,
  sly, in plain fact, dirty a rancid-smelling
  aphrodisiac and the martial music of every
  side-burned delinquent on the face of the
  earth.       Frank Sinatra (1957)

14
Sex and the Cleavers

• Peyton Place
• Playboy Magazine
• Hugh Hefner
• Kinsey Reports
• Reports