Cold War

(1)

DeVault, IIleen A. Sons and Daughters of Labor: Class and Clerical Work in Turn-of-the-Century Pittsburgh. Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1990.

Giddens, Anthony. The Class Structure of the Advanced Societies. New York: Harper & Row, 1975.

Kimmel, Michael. Manhood in America: A Cultural History. New York: Free Press, 1 996.

Montgomery, David. "Worker's Control of Machine Production in the Nineteenth Century." Labor History 17 (Fall 1 976): 486-509. Sandage, Scott A. "Gender and the Economics of the Sentimental

Market in Nineteenth-Century America." Social Politics 6, no. 2 ( 1999): 1 05-1 30.

Sklar, Martin J. The Corporate Reconstruction of American Capitalism, 1890- 1916: The Market, The Law, and Politics. Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press, 1 988. Thompson, E. P. The Making of the English Working Class. 1 964.

Reprint, London: Penguin, 1 980.

Trachtenberg, Alan. The Incorporation of America: Culture and Society in the Gilded Age. New York: Hill and Wang, 1982. FURTHER READING

Baron, Ava, ed. Work Engendered: Toward a New History of American Labor. Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 199 1 .

Bendix, Reinhard. Work and Authority i n Industry: Ideologies of Management in the Course of Industrialization. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1974.

Clawson, Mary Ann. Constructing Brotherhood: Class, Gender, and Fraternalism. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1989. DeMott, Benjamin. The Imperial Middle: Why Americans Can 't

Think Straight about Class. New York: Morrow, 1 990.

Gorn, Elliott Jacob. The Manly Art: Bare-Knuckled Prize Fighting and the Rise of American Sports. Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1 986.

McNall, Scott G., Rhonda F. Levine, and Rick Fantasia, eds. Bringing Class Back In: Contemporaty and Historical Perspectives. Boulder, Colo.: Westview Press, 1 99 1 .

Winter, Thomas. Making Men, Making Class: The YMCA and Workingmen, 1877-1920. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002.

RELATED ENTRIES

Agrarianism; Artisan; Automobile; Boxing; Business/Corporate America; Capitalism; Darwinism; Great Depression; Individualism; Industrialization; Labor Movement and Unions; Leisure; Market Revolution; Middle-Class Manhood; New Deal; Organization Man, The; Professionalism; Property; Self-Made Man; Suburbia; Urbanization; Work; Working-Class Manhood

-Thomas Winter

COLD WAR

99

The Cold War, which began after World War II and lasted through the 1 980s, was a geopolitical rivalry between the United States and the Soviet Union grounded in an ideological rivalry between capitalism and communism. The Cold War raised concerns about both external and internal threats to American strength, social stability, and security, and particu larly to material abundance, middle-class lifestyles, and cultural norms about masculinity. Motivated by fears of emasculation, effeminization, and homosexuality, Americans anxiously defined their nation and their way of life in terms culturally associated with masculinity, including power, diplomatic and military assertiveness, economic success, sexual and physical prowess, moral righteousness, and patriotism.

Postwar Anxieties

A major basis of Cold War anxiety was the fear that the defining features of American life weakened both American men and the nation, thus rendering both unable to confront the perceived threat of Soviet communism abroad and at home. In an often contradictory fashion, American commentators of the 1940s and 1950s identified the sources of this weakness as postwar material abundance, conformity (as well as nonconformity), overprotec tive mothers, negligent parents, governmental and corporate paternalism, and rampant homosexuality (which Alfred Kinsey's Sexual Behavior in the Human Male ( 1948) had shown to be far more widespread in U.S. society than most had believed). Corporate capitalism, in particular, caused anxious concerns. Bureaucratic and regimented workplaces, critics argued, seemed to have undermined the manhood of American men. Suggesting that American men had become alienated and emasculated by corporate work and suburban life, C. Wright Mills's White Collar ( 1951 ) and William H. Whyte's The Organization Man ( 1 956) maintained that manliness could be affirmed through independ ence, self-determination, and the exercise of power.

Masculinity and 1 950s Domesticity

Cold War anxieties regarding American manhood often equated communism with voracious femininity or seductive female sexuality. In the novels of Mickey Spillane, such as One Lonely Night ( 19 5 1 ) and Kiss Me Deadly ( 1 952), women who work for communists take advantage of weak men who are unable to resist their seductive wiles. In these tales, only the protoganist/hero Mike Hammer-whose name suggests the association many Americans perceived between masculinity, physical toughness, and Americanism-possesses the forti tude necessary for triumph over these figures. In an even more

(2)

1 00

COLD

WAR

frightening image, the 1 962 film The Manchurian Candidate showed a brainwashed U.S. soldier accepting orders from a female enemy agent. Such popular-culture images suggested that any effective containment of communism would require the containment of femininity and an assertion of the tradi tional gender hierarchy. The Cold War thus provided a power ful impetus for a pronounced cultural emphasis on conventional domesticity as a pillar of American life.

The importance of traditional ideals of domesticity and femininity to American Cold War posturing was apparent in 1 959, when Vice President Richard M. Nixon traveled to Moscow to open and attend an American exhibit that con sisted mostly of an average American suburban home with all the modern conveniences. This exhibit became the site of the famous "kitchen debate" between Nixon and Soviet premier Nikita Khrushchev. In the debate, Nixon praised the material abundance of American life as a sign of the superiority of the American capitalist system. His argument that U.S. superiority and freedom ultimately depended less on weaponry than on material abundance and a middle-class suburban lifestyle implied that it also rested on full-time female homemakers and male providers. The containment of communism abroad, Nixon suggested, required the containment of female sexuality through motherhood-and the activity of American men in the public world of capitalist exchange.

This connection between containing communism abroad and female sexuality at home was satirized in Stanley Kubrick's 1 963 film Dr. Strangelove, Or, How I Stopped Worrying and Learned to Love the Bomb. Rife with exaggerated images of male sexual prowess, the film tells the story of a preventive nuclear assault on the Soviet Union, launched to fend off a Soviet threat to American masculine sexual potency. In the film, the Soviet Union retaliates by exploding a nuclear device that will destroy all life on Earth within a year. At that point, the president's scientific advisor, Dr. Strangelove, unveils a plan for survival that suggests sexually charged domestic con tainment: A select sample of the U.S. population with a gender ratio of ten women to every man will be sent underground into bunkers built in abandoned mine shafts, thus guarantee ing the survival of the U.S. nation and way of life.

Masculinity and Cold War Politics

In American politics, the postwar competition between the Soviet Union and the United States was often represented in terms of masculinity. Whereas the U.S. victory in World War II and President Harry Truman's confrontation of communist threats in Greece and Turkey in 1947 appeared to confirm the masculine vigor of U.S. society, the Communist victory in

China in 1 949 and the subsequent invasion of South Korea in 1 950 seemed to suggest that U.S. politics lacked manly stam ina. Losing hold over a region geopolitically important to the United States and populated by a people traditionally depicted as effeminate and decadent caused political enemies of Truman and the Democratic Party to suggest that they had become "soft" on communism.

The Republican Party, which gained control of the White House when Dwight D. Eisenhower won the presidential elec tion in 1 952, infused the vocabulary of U.S. diplomacy and military policy with a distinctly masculine vocabulary intended to signal stamina and aggressiveness, introducing such concepts as brinkmanship (taking the power struggle to the brink of nuclear war) , massive retaliation (responding to an isolated incident, or conflict, with an all-out attack), and rollback (a commitment to push back Soviet influence wher ever it had gained a foothold). This unencumbered expression of masculine strength and boldness reassured Americans wor ried about national toughness.

Amid this concern with American male toughness, Republican Senator Joseph R. McCarthy of Wisconsin and his anticommunist campaign emerged and gained wide spread acceptance between 1 950 and 1 954. McCarthy pur posefully used a flamboyantly aggressive and masculine posturing. Charging that his opponents were either commu nist, homosexual, or both, McCarthy equated support for him and his party with heterosexual, patriotic American manliness. Although his accusations about communists in government quickly turned out to be as unsubstantiated as his claims about his wartime exploits as "Tailgunner Joe" were false, his political persona may have held a certain appeal for at least some American men. It certainly reflected broader cultural anxieties and powerfully influenced subse quent politics-particularly the policies of Democrats, who felt compelled to demonstrate their toughness.

The Cold War premium on asserting American masculin ity was especially evident in the presidency of Democrat John F. Kennedy ( 1 961-63). His campaign presented him as a youth ful, vigorous, and sexually appealing contrast to the aging incumbent, Dwight D. Eisenhower. His promise of a "New Frontier" appealed to longstanding mythologies of American manhood, and his call to "ask not what your country can do for you" but "what you can do for your country" assured American men that there would be opportunities to demonstrate their masculine vigor. On December 26, 1960, President -elect John F. Kennedy launched his campaign to reinvigorate American men and the nation with a Sports Illustrated article titled "The Soft American." He wrote that prosperity, suburban life, television,

(3)

movies, and everyday conveniences had enervated Americans, leaving them and the nation unable to compete with commu nists. Closing the "muscle gap:' he said, would allow the nation to close the "missile gap" and compete successfully in the space race with the Soviet Union, which had launched the first satel lite, Sputnik, in 1 957. Presenting space as the ultimate frontier of masculine endeavor and space technology as symbolic of American power and prowess, Kennedy made the space pro gram a top priority.

Kennedy's foreign policy suggested similar concerns. His persistent confrontations with Cuban Communist leader Fidel Castro-who himself viewed his relation with the United States as a contest of masculine strength-was driven by a conscious need to assert his and America's might, as was his brinkmanshiplike confrontation with the Soviet Union during the Cuban Missile Crisis in 1 96 1 . More portentous was his determination to resist communism in Vietnam and avoid the loss of another Asian nation. This commitment led his vice president and successor, Lyndon B. Johnson, who was equally anxious to assert his, his party's, and his nation's masculine power, into a full-scale war. Men who opposed such policies, particularly the U.S. military involvement in Vietnam, found their masculinity questioned and were depicted as effeminate or homosexual.

In 1980 the Cold War ideological complex of containment and masculinity received a new boost with the election of Ronald Reagan, a Republican, as president. During the presi dencies of Reagan and his successor, George H. W. Bush, a compulsive masculinity again informed American foreign pol icy, often casting minor states, such as Grenada or Panama, in the role of global enemies. Reagan's proposal to install a mis sile defense system in orbit indicated that space had once again become an arena for proving American masculinity. Political supporters and sympathetic historians credit Reagan's rhetoric of masculine toughness with contributing decisively to the end of the Cold War in the late 1980s.

Conclusion

The Cold War tapped currents of masculinity that had been activated during the second half of the nineteenth century, particularly the notion that warfare validates and invigorates manliness, the idea that national survival requires masculine toughness, an equation of masculinity with bodily strength and vigor, and a concern with the dangers of unbridled female sexuality. It both reinvigorated and reinforced these pre-exist ing currents, thus contributing to the persistence of masculine rhetoric and militarism in American foreign policy after the Cold War itself ended.

COLD WAR

1 0 1

B IBLIOGRAPHY

Cuordileone, Kyle A. '''Politics in an Age of Anxiety': Cold War Political Culture and the Crisis in American Masculinity, 1 949-1 960." Journal of American History 87 (September 2000): 5 1 5-545.

Faludi, Susan. Stiffed: The Betrayal of Modern Man. New York: William Morrow, 1 999.

Griswold, Robert. "The 'Flabby American,' the Body, and the Cold War:' In A Shared Experience: Men, Women, and the History of

Gender, edited by Laura McCall and Donald Yacovone. New York: New York University Press, 1998.

Kimmel, Michael. Manhood in America: A Cultural History. New York: Free Press, 1 996.

May, Elaine Tyler. Homeward Bound: American Families in the Cold War Era. New York: Basic Books, 1 988.

Savran, David. Taking It Like A Man: White Masculinity, Masochism, and Contemporary American Culture. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1 998.