FREEDOM, FRIGHT & FALLOUT
THE REPRESENTATION OF THE COLD WAR IN WOMEN’S
MAGAZINES AND GOVERNMENT FUNDED CAMPAIGNS
1945-1960
Hilde van Rees 11397659 Master Thesis University of Amsterdam Faculty of Humanities: American Studies Thesis Advisor: Prof. Dr. R.V.A. Janssens Second Reader: Dr. M.S. Parry June 20, 2017
ABSTRACT
This thesis explores the representation of the Cold War in American women’s periodicals and government funded campaigns during the early Cold War period from 1945 to 1960. The magazines studied in for this purpose are: Good Housekeeping, Redbook and the Ladies’ Home Journal. Both women’s periodicals and government funded campaigns played an integral part in maintaining the Cold War antagonism between the United States and the Soviet Union. Despite their similarities, this study claims that the way women’s magazines approached the Cold War was vastly different from the campaigns. Vital Cold War topics such as Soviet Union, Soviet-American relations, communism and the nuclear threat were discussed by the magazines in a much more nuanced manner. Because women’s magazines were heavily influenced by the editors’ opinions and the opinions of experts invited to share their expertise with the readers, the magazines provided the reader with a wide array of outlooks on a certain topic, leaving them to form their own opinion on the matter. The government campaigns did not leave much room for interpretation with their polarizing anti-communist and anti-Soviet rhetoric, which was recycled throughout different government campaigns, not showing a wide array of options for someone to identify with, unlike women’s magazines.
TABLE OF CONTENTS
Abstract………1
Introduction...3
CHAPTER I: THE INFLUENCE OF MEDIA DURING THE EARLY COLD WAR………...…12
1.1 American Media from 1945 to 1960………..………12
1.2 The Enemy Image………...13
1.3 Early Cold War Magazines and Periodicals………15
1.4 Women’s Magazines and the Cold War………...………16
CHAPTER II: COLD WAR REPRESENTATION IN GOVERNMENT CAMPAIGNS...20
2.1 The Cultural Cold War………....20
2.2 Educating the Masses in the Atomic Age……….………....23
2.3 Cold War Fake News………...25
CHAPTER III: GOOD HOUSEKEEPING AND THE COLD WAR...28
3.1 The Late 1940s: Confusion and Apprehension...29
3.2 The 1950s: Getting Acquainted with Communism...31
3.3 The Late 1950s: The Nuclear Apocalypse...32
CHAPTER VI: REDBOOK AND THE COLD WAR...35
4.1 Post World War II: What Are the Chances of a New War?...35
4.2 The Late 1940s: Capitalism or Communism, Lincoln or Lenin?...38
4.3 The Late 1940s, and 1950s: Much Ado About Russia...40
4.4 The 1950s: The Family and the Bomb...43
CHAPTER V: LADIES’ HOME JOURNAL AND THE COLD WAR...47
5.1 The Late 1940s: What to Expect of the Atomic Age……….……….48
5.2 The Late 1940s, and 1950s: What Do the Russians Think of Us?...50
5.3 The 1950s: Fear and Escape of Communism……….……..………....53
Conclusion………...………57
INTRODUCTION
“We may be likened to two scorpions in a bottle, each capable of killing the other, but only at the risk of his own life.”
J. Robert Oppenheimer in the July 1953 issue of Foreign Affairs.1
The above quote by Oppenheimer, a physicist involved in the Manhattan Project and often referred to as “the father of the atomic bomb,”2 perfectly encapsulates the early period of the Cold War. It shows the direct threat of the Soviet Union, often based on true events and further enhanced by sensationalist media. The quote also signifies a larger trend in media, most notably periodicals. Unlike previous wars, the Cold War was not heavy on actual warfare but rather relied heavily on speculation. The entire war was a will-they-won't-they about which party would succumb to using their atomic bomb and subsequently putting their own nation at risk of annihilation in a global nuclear conflict. Since the Cold War was not exactly a war in terms of traditional warfare, there was a great deal of speculation about the course of the war published in periodicals. Aside from providing great insights into the minds of Americans at a very precarious time in history, it is also interesting to examine these articles at a time in history when relations with a previous ally soured the way they did between the United States and the Soviet Union. Magazine editors suddenly needed to make sense of this new dynamic and a substantial number of articles were devoted to this dynamic, even in magazines relatively unrelated to politics and current events, such as women’s periodicals. Their coverage encompasses a wide range of topics: from coming to terms with the possibility of a nuclear war, to grasping the meaning of communism and understanding the Soviet mentality.
While scholars do not agree on one exact starting date of the Cold War, many believe the start to be the Truman doctrine which was announced on March 12th, 1947 by President Harry S. Truman in a joint session before Congress. Some have even labeled the Truman Doctrine a de facto declaration of the Cold War in which America promised to aid any country under threat of communism, implicitly pointing at the Soviet Union as the center of communist activity. The speech that accompanied Truman’s request to Congress focused heavily on the freedom of the Greek people that Truman asserted were under threat of
1 J. Robert Oppenheimer, "Atomic Weapons and American Policy." Foreign Affairs. Accessed June 2, 2017. https://www.foreignaffairs.com/articles/united-states/1953-07-01/atomic-weapons-and-american-policy. 2 “J. Robert Oppenheimer,” Atomic Heritage Foundation. Accessed June 2, 2017.
becoming a communist regime. In his speech, Truman established the freedom centered rhetoric seen throughout the Cold War with the United States as the shining example of freedom, whereas the Soviet Union and other countries behind the Iron Curtain were labeled as anything but free. Truman’s speech also made it clear that America was willing to relieve countries from the strain of communism, citing America’s victory of the Second World War, stating: “our victory was won over countries which sought to impose their will, and their way of life, upon other nations,”3 something which in the light of globalization and
Americanization in recent decades has been widely questioned.
Other scholars have claimed that the Cold War commenced right after the Second World War when the United States emerged as one of the dominant world powers, together with the Soviet Union. While the two nations were allies in the fight to free Europe during the Second World War, the relation further deteriorated right after the war with the establishment of the Iron Curtain along with other actions taken by both nations, deemed incompatible with their respective ideologies. Even though there is still an ongoing debate on the actual starting date of the Cold War, fact is that many articles in periodicals from 1945 onwards were devoted to issues concerning the Cold War and covers the apprehension of a potential new war and deal with Russia’s image change from ally to adversary.
Many works have been written about the subject of the early Cold War: the main works being Paul Boyer’s By the Bomb's Early Light from 1985 and Allan M. Winkler’s Life Under a Cloud: American Anxiety About the Atom from 1993.4 Even though these books were written just at the end of, and right after the Cold War era they have proved to be of vital importance to the scholarly debate of the late 20th century and the current debate. Boyer showcases the major aspects of the long-running debates about nuclear armament and disarmament that developed and took shape soon after the bombing of Hiroshima, while Winkler argues that the Cold War gave way to a much more subjugated society as a whole. Moreover, he claims that the dissimulations of governments in our ‘free’ world have left people enslaved by fear.
Furthermore, the academic discussion is centered around several subdivisions. One is scholars looking at the Cold War and its technologies in hindsight with all the knowledge
3 Harry S. Truman, “Address of the President to Congress, Recommending Assistance to Greece and Turkey” (Speech, Washington, DC, March 12, 1947), Harry S. Truman Presidential Library,
https://www.trumanlibrary.org/whistlestop/study_collections/doctrine/large/documents/index.php?documentdate =1947-03-12&documentid=5-9&pagenumber=1.
4 Paul Boyer, By the Bomb's Early Light (New York: Pantheon Books, 1985),
Allan M. Winkler, Life Under a Cloud: American Anxiety About the Atom (Champaign, IL: University of Illinois Press, 1993).
available today. Scholars like Guy Oakes even go as far as stating that the Cold War was an imaginary war, fueled by misinformation from the government. Where for instance the ‘duck and cover’ method was advertised as a means of personal protection against the effects of a nuclear explosion to schoolchildren, even though it was known by the government that these methods would not measure up against the impact of a nuclear blast. Oakes in The Imaginary War: Civil Defense and American Cold War Culture from 1994 goes on to argue that the policies of the Office of Civil Defense were designed to protect a population for whom no protection was possible.5 Oakes claims that the government knew there was no way to protect the American population but nevertheless willingly misled the masses. Susan Roy in
Bomboozled: How the U.S. Government Misled Itself and Its People into Believing They Could Survive a Nuclear Attack from 2011 takes it a step further by arguing that the fallout shelter campaign advertised by the Office of Civil Defense was designed less to protect the citizen than to groom them into becoming "Citizen Cold Warriors," ready to accept a more militarized society.6 Roy links the intrusive qualities of the government to a weakening of citizen resistance and acceptance of imposed rules and restrictions, as long as the citizens were kept safe from the terrors of communism. Andrew Grossman in Neither Dead nor Red: Civil Defense and American Political Development During the Early Cold War from 2001 follows up on this by arguing that the mobilization of the American public served as a form of social control, similar to the claims made by Roy.7 Although instead of creating a militarized society, Grossman argues that the social control gained by means of mobilizing the public helped to create and solidify the consensus necessary for American success in the battle against communism. Oakes in another article of his “The Cold War Conception of Nuclear Reality: Mobilizing the American Imagination for Nuclear War in the 1950s.” from the ‘International Journal of Politics, Culture, and Society’ published in 1993 ties into this notion.8 He claims that for the government it was necessary to mobilize the American home front to sustain what President John F. Kennedy later typified as "a long twilight struggle"9 in support of a new conception of national security. All the way on the other end of the
5 Guy Oakes, The Imaginary War: Civil Defense and American Cold War Culture (Oxford, Oxford University Press, 1994).
6 Susan Roy, Bomboozled: How the U.S. Government Misled Itself and Its People into Believing They Could
Survive a Nuclear Attack (New York: Pointed Leaf Press, 2011).
7 Andrew Grossman, Neither Dead nor Red: Civil Defense and American Political Development During the
Early Cold War (London and New York: Routledge, 2001).
8 Guy Oakes, “The Cold War Conception of Nuclear Reality: Mobilizing the American Imagination for Nuclear War in the 1950s,” International Journal of Politics, Culture, and Society 6, no. 3 (1993).
9 John F. Kennedy, “President Kennedy's Inaugural Address” (speech, Washington, DC, January 20, 1961), John
F. Kennedy Library,
discussion of the topic is Kenneth D. Rose’s One Nation Underground: The Fallout Shelter in American Culture from 2001, in which he claims that there was in fact a widespread rejection of civil defense programs.10 Boldly going on to claim that where many historians previously were assuming that most Americans translated their anxieties about nuclear war into
substantive preparations for atomic attack, there was actually a widespread rejection of civil defense programs.
Another important aspect of the Cold War addressed by scholars is the influence of propaganda on the masses, claiming that much of the Cold War paranoia was made up of propaganda. Some scholars even go as far as calling the practice brainwashing on a mass scale. Laura Belmonte’s Selling the American Way: U.S. Propaganda and the Cold War from 2010 is regarded as one of the key works on Cold War propaganda.11 In the book, she
showcases how propaganda is used by the American government to construct a narrative of freedom and abundance while subsequently protecting capitalism and undermining
communism. Interestingly, she also claims that the struggle within the American government is the reason for the global outpouring of anti-American sentiments during and after the Cold War. Kenneth Osgood in Total Cold War: Eisenhower’s Secret Propaganda Battle at Home and Abroad from 2006 similarly exposes the influence of propaganda on the American nation but he directly addresses it to the Eisenhower administration whereas Belmonte’s book does not specifically point at one person or organization in particular.12 Osgood’s main claim is that the Eisenhower administration developed and deployed an array of psychological warfare and propaganda to fulfill Cold War goals of the United States, according to Eisenhower’s notion of waging a "total cold war.” According to Osgood this resulted in a global propaganda campaign challenging communist countries worldwide, with its influence still resonating in current day society. Matthew Dunne in A Cold War State of Mind: Brainwashing and Postwar American Society from 2013 takes propaganda even further and claims that the masses were not only subjected to propaganda but were brainwashed during the Cold War era.13 He claims that by the late 1950s the concept had been associated with the oppressive aspects of American life such as the insistence on conformity due to consumerism and the
10 Kenneth D. Rose, One Nation Underground: The Fallout Shelter in American Culture (New York: New York University Press, 2004).
11 Laura Belmonte, Selling the American Way: U.S. Propaganda and the Cold War (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2010).
12 Kenneth Osgood, Total Cold War: Eisenhower’s Secret Propaganda Battle at Home and Abroad (Lawrence, KS: University Press of Kansas, 2006).
13 Matthew Dunne, A Cold War State of Mind: Brainwashing and Postwar American Society (Amherst, University of Massachusetts Press, 2013).
massive influence of advertising.
Something not always associated with the Cold War is the return to domesticity and the role of women in that shift. This interesting shift has been studied in relationship to women’s periodicals by Nancy Walker who wrote Women's Magazines, 1940-1960: Gender Roles and the Popular Press and Shaping Our Mothers' World: American Women's Magazines.14
Walker's analysis of a wide range of magazines in the latter book reveals their depiction of a broader image of womanhood. Moreover, through reflecting on debates about the nature of domestic life in the 1940s and 1950s, she asserts editorial policies at the magazines mixed the banalities with urgent actualities to make these critical topics digestible for its readers.15 The return to domesticity ran seemingly parallel with the approach taken by the government to battle the war. Instead of taking up arms, citizens were advised to keep themselves safe and to protect themselves. This coincided with the consumer boom of the 1950s which made that a substantial amount of American families were able to live comfortably in the suburbs without having to bother with the inner cities. Hence their world became much smaller and the
suburban home proved to be a stronghold from the harsh outside world with its looming nuclear threat. Some people even went as far as building a fallout shelter in their back yard or preparing their basement as a shelter in case of a nuclear attack, literally taking shelter from the war in their own home. Women proved to be instrumental in the protection of their families from outside influences. Special gatherings were organized by the Office of Civil Defense to inform homemakers of their duties in case of a nuclear emergency and how to keep their family safe, well fed and entertained while staying underground. One of the pivotal works on this subject is Elaine Tyler May’s Homeward Bound: American Families in the Cold War Era from 1988 which argues that the retreat to the privacy and security of the home was a response to the era's political insecurities and the nuclear threat.16 The book presents domesticity as a safe haven from the dangers of the atomic age. Laura McEnaney similarly argues in her book Civil Defense Begins at Home from 2000 that civil defense preparations in the US gave way to self-help, privatization, decentralization and voluntarism.17 Both May and McEnaney argue that the Cold War was essentially a war fought in the domestic sphere, rather than on the battlefield. Kristina Zarlengo in “Civilian Threat, the Suburban Citadel, and
14 Nancy A. Walker, Women's Magazines, 1940-196 0: Gender Roles and the Popular Press (Boston: Bedford Books, 1998).
15 Nancy A. Walker, Shaping Our Mothers' World: American Women's Magazines (Jackson, MI: University Press of Mississippi, 2000).
16 Elaine Tyler May, Homeward Bound (New York: Basic Books, 1988), 102.
17 Laura McEnaney, Civil Defense Begins at Home: Militarization Meets Everyday Life in the Fifties (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000).
Atomic Age American Women” published in the summer 1999 issue of Signs, deals with the major aspects of the long-running debates about nuclear armament and disarmament which developed and took shape soon after the bombing of Hiroshima, using a more straightforward approach to describing women’s roles during the Atomic Age.18
The role of the government is one that cannot be glossed over in relation to the Cold War. Naturally there were the tensions between the United States and the USSR but there was also the dawn of the Atomic Age and the aftermath of the Second World War. William
Laurence, who was appointed as the official historian of the Manhattan project, wrote Dawn Over Zero: The Story of the Atomic Bomb in 1946 in which he presents how worldwide scientific research laid the foundation for a successful engineering task carried out by the United States government.19 Scholars have deemed his first-hand accounts of nuclear
explosions biased since he was hired by the government. However, it does show how the government wanted their actions to be perceived by the public. Similarly, Michael H. Morris in “Is the Cold War a Marketing Problem?” published in Business Horizons in 1985 exposed the government’s view on the Cold War and how they aimed to prevent the spread of
communism.20 Morris claims that convincing other countries of the United States’ foreign policy is essentially the same as marketing any other product. Using marketing as a cure for more effective foreign policies in relation to the Soviet Union. During the post-World War II era many instruction manuals were created by the government through the Office of Civil Defense and the Department of Defense to educate the masses of their duties during the Atomic Age, women in particular. The goal was to inform the American citizens what actions and precautions needed to be taken in case of a nuclear attack to protect themselves as much as possible from impact from a nuclear bomb and subsequent radioactive fallout. Alongside these instruction manuals, there were visual aids accompanying the written materials. The rise of the medium of television during midcentury made it easier to broadcast the message into people’s living rooms into the domestic sphere. Arnold Ringstad in “The Evolution of American Civil Defense Film Rhetoric” from the Journal of Cold War Studies published in 2012 even goes on to claim that there is a substantial difference between the early Civil Defense Films of the 1950s and the later ones from the 1960s.21 Claiming that the rhetorical
18 Kristina Zarlengo, “Civilian Threat, the Suburban Citadel, and Atomic Age American Women,” Signs:
Journal of Women in Culture and Society 24, no. 4 (1999).
19 William Laurence, Dawn Over Zero: The Story of the Atomic Bomb (New York: Alfred A. Knopf Inc., 1946). 20 Michael H. Morris, “Is the Cold War a Marketing Problem?” Business Horizons 28, no. 6 (1985).
21 Arnold Ringstad, “The Evolution of American Civil Defense Film Rhetoric,” Journal of Cold War Studies 14, no. 4 (2012).
shifts between the 1950s and 1960s films indicate that the civil defense establishment was capable of reacting to scientific, political, and popular pressures.
The focus of this study will be to analyze how the Cold War was presented to women in midcentury women’s magazines to expose how the Cold War was portrayed in women’s magazines in the period from 1945 till 1960. This leads to the following assumption: women’s magazines in the period 1945-1960 approached the Cold War differently from government campaigns during that era. The reason why this study is relevant in the current day academic debate is that even though the Cold War officially ended over a quarter of a century ago many of its aspects continue to shine through in modern day American society. Especially in the light of the election of President Donald J. Trump in 2016 one could observe the outpouring of disbelief in the media and politics when he announced that
Russian-American relations would be strengthened during his administration.22 This at a point where
Russian-American relations are under much strain due to the Russian annexation of Crimea in 2014, which was followed by a range of international sanctions against Russia, most of which are still being observed today, causing a major rift in relations between Russia and other western nations. The mutual tension and the subsequent militarization of borders by both American and Russian troops almost resemble the Cold War relations between the two
nations. Some journalists even argue that the Cold War never ended but merely subsided for a period of time and that presently the Cold War is back in full force.23 This first became evident with the annexation in Crimea in March 2014 and the MH17 flight which was shot down over Ukraine in July 2014, with many claiming Russia to be accountable. Currently Russia and the United States are on opposite sides in the Syria conflict and if tensions in North Korea lead to a military conflict they are expected to pick different sides as well.24 Not even to mention the possible role that Russia played in the American elections of 2016, which is still under investigation at the time of finishing this project.
Another reason this thesis is relevant in the scholarly debate is the lack of scholarship on women and mass media. Jacqueline Blix in “A Place to Resist: Reevaluating Women’s Magazines” ascribes this lack of scholarship to the fact that traditional history has centered
22 Donald Trump to Vladimir Putin, January 28, 2017, in Readout of the President's Call with Russian President Vladimir Putin, White House Press Office, https://www.whitehouse.gov/the-press-office/2017/01/28/readout-presidents-call-russian-president-vladimir-putin.
23 Andras Schweitzer, “This Isn’t the Start of a New Cold War – The First One Never Ended,” The Guardian, last modified December 13, 2016, https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2016/dec/13/cold-war-never-ended-west-russia.
24 Leonid Bershidsky, “The Key to North Korea Is Russia,” Bloomberg, last modified May 18, 2017, https://www.bloomberg.com/view/articles/2017-05-18/the-key-to-north-korea-is-russia.
around the lives of great men or “exploits on the battlefield or boardroom, women absent from those arenas have been excluded from much of history, including history of mass media and journalism.”25 Instead she states that historians need to “embrace the private sphere in which women have lived out their lives,”26 which indeed has been done more often since the 1990s, but still there is much work to be done in order to fully grasp the role of women in mass media and the effects of women’s magazines on their readers.
These parallels make that this period in history is particularly interesting to study, especially in relation to women. During the Second World War large numbers of women were working in war industries and other industries to replace the men that were off to the
battlefront, while immediately after the war was over they were pushed back into their kitchens. After World War II Frederick Crawford, the head of the National Association of Manufacturers, was even quoted as saying: “not too many women should stay in the labor force. The home is the basic American Institution.”27 This notion was also exploited by the Federal Civil Defense Administration which allocated a large portion of preparing for a potential nuclear war to housewives. The abrupt shift of women being incorporated in the workforce to women being confined to their homes was also visible in women’s magazines, which promoted very different ideals during World War II than after the war. Instead of being involved in the workforce for the greater good, their job was now to provide a good home for their husband and offspring. This has been aptly described in Good Housekeeping where editor Harrison Smith states that “in times of prolonged peace the protagonists melt away into wives and mothers and are lost to the fray,”28 which is exactly what happened in the aftermath of the Second World War. Their important public duty of years earlier moved to the
background and they were merely limited to their own houses, forced to find their happiness in domestic life. While the Cold War gave housewives some responsibilities, such as keeping their family safe from a nuclear attack by making sure a fallout shelter was ready and stocked with canned food and other amenities, it was far from what women did prior the Second World War and from the 1960s onwards, which is also visible women’s magazines over the decades. Thus, showing the dynamic between the war and women and women and their freedom to pursue their dreams.
25 Jacqueline Blix, “A Place to Resist: Reevaluating Women’s Magazines,” Journal of Communication Inquiry 16, no. 1 (1992): 56.
26 Ibid.
27 William H. Chafe, The American Woman: Her Changing Social, Economic and Political Role, 1920-1970 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1972), 176.
28 Harrison Smith. "The Greatest of All Stories," Good Housekeeping 125, no. 7 (1947): 182. http://search.proquest.com.access.authkb.kb.nl/docview/1846774061?accountid=16376.
Primary sources that will be consulted are women’s magazines from the mid to late 1940s, and the 1950s. Firstly, Ladies’ Home Journal, published 11 times a year since its inception in 1883 until it became a quarterly in 2014. The magazine was originally a single-page supplement to a general interest magazine, and focused on women’s interest and lifestyle topics. Secondly, Good Housekeeping, which was founded in 1885 and has appeared monthly ever since, focused on home economics and women’s interest articles. Thirdly, Redbook, which has been published monthly by Hearst Magazines since 1903 and focuses on lifestyle and women’s interest. The former three magazines are often referred to as being part of a group of magazines called ‘The Seven Sisters’ which have traditionally been aimed at married women who are homemakers with husbands and children, rather than single and working women. The choice to focus on only three of the magazines of ‘The Seven Sisters’ was mainly because these three magazines had the largest circulation out of the seven magazines.
This study will be structured by focusing on the three magazines individually. Each magazine will be analyzed chronologically showing the occurrences and portrayal of the Cold War from the mid 1940s to 1960 in the three selected women’s magazines. The articles covered in this research are the only articles directly concerning the Cold War that are present in the three magazines. They provide an insight into the psyche of magazine editors and what topics they deemed important for their audience to read. Subsequently, it displays how these serious subjects, often considered not suitable for women, found their way into the magazine, while remaining the magazine’s original focus on women’s interest topics such as
housekeeping, beauty and child rearing. It showcases the content that was read by women during midcentury. Furthermore, these articles provide an insight of how magazines covered such a precarious time in history and how they believed these topics should be brought to women, who were often not as involved in matters outside the house as their male
CHAPTER I:
THE INFLUENCE OF MEDIA DURING THE EARLY COLD WAR
The Cold War is traditionally understood as a period during which a communist and capitalist bloc were opposed to each other. Often the media has been accused of cultivating and
maintaining antagonism between the United States and the Soviet Union during the Cold War by exploiting cultural divides. It is important then to evaluate to what extent the media
produced, contributed and maintained this opposition. Moreover, it is vital to find out the significance of the influence of media on the minds of Americans during the early Cold War. The media in this context are the traditional media; forms of mass communication which were available prior to the advent of digital media. The media included in this context are radio, television, and print media, magazines in particular. This chapter will demonstrate the different perceptions of scholars about how the media present the Cold War and how much influence their reporting had on the average American. A brief overview of developments in the media landscape from 1945 to 1960 will be provided as a background for the scholars’ arguments made about the media during that period. Furthermore, there will be a focus on the development and maintaining the enemy image which enhanced and at times distorted the way the Soviet Union was portrayed in the media. While there were grounded reasons for the negative portrayal of the Soviet Union in American media, such as violation of human rights, the doubtful state of Soviet democracy and censorship, the advocates of the enemy image theory claim that it was employed to further put the Soviet Union in a bad daylight to maintain the antagonism between both nations.
1.1 American Media from 1945 to 1960
First of all, to examine the media’s role in the production, contribution and maintenance of Cold War hostility, it is important to first examine the media in the historical context. During the 1945 to 1960 period, the media predominantly consisted of print, radio, and later,
television. In an era before social media, the media were centralized in a few institutions, which according to Nancy Bernhard in U.S. Television News and Cold War Propaganda, 1947-1960 made them extremely susceptible to state control.29 While the current day media landscape allows virtually any individual to voice their opinion online and to scrutinize anything the established media conglomerates publish and broadcast, this was not the case
29 Nancy Bernhard, U.S. Television News and Cold War Propaganda, 1947-1960 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 4.
during the early years of the Cold War.30 The media conglomerates of midcentury were broadcasting and publishing the message but in contrast to today’s media they did not receive the amount of feedback that the current day media gets from its audience.
Secondly, the post-war period saw the rise of a new medium: television. The post-war consumerism boom of the 1950s saw a nationwide rise of households that owned a television set. The number of households with a television set went from 12% of Americans in 1950 to 67% in 1955.31 Though the television gained influence, it did not make the magazines obsolete, it merely shifted their function from entertainment to informative. The circulation wars, that ensued due to increased competition with television, made that women’s magazines rebranded themselves in order to attract new audiences and keep their advertisers which during this period started experimenting with television commercials.32 Still, magazines
focusing on “women and home services” grossed a reported 70,729 million dollars in circulation in 1958.33 By the end of the 1950s, the ‘Seven Sisters’ alone (Better Homes & Gardens, Family Circle, Good Housekeeping, Ladies’ Home Journal, McCall’s, Redbook and Woman’s Day) reached over 34 million consumers,”34 also due to the fact that these
magazines were passed around neighbors or friends, reaching multiple readers per issue.
1.2 The Enemy Image
The main characteristic of Cold War era media output is the binary oppositions between the United States and the Soviet Union that were enhanced. While the American government often accused the Soviet Union of their presumed propaganda campaigns to promote
communism, it could in fact be said that America did the same, resulting in the creation of an enemy image of the Soviet Union. Greg McLaughlin in The War Correspondent claims that the sources of the Cold War enemy image are rooted in the West’s response to the October Revolution in 1917.35 In 1920, a study called “A Test of the News” conducted to analyze The New York Times’ coverage of the revolution, which was executed by renowned journalists Walter Lippmann, and Charles Merz, who would later become an editor at The New York
30 Ibid.
31 U.S. Census Bureau, “Statistical Abstract of the United States: 1971,” No. 768 Percent of Households with Television Sets: 1955 to 1969, https://www2.census.gov/library/publications/1971/compendia/statab/92ed/1971-05.pdf.
32 Ibid., 204.
33 U.S. Census Bureau, “Statistical Abstract of the United States: 1971,” No. 775. Newspapers and Periodicals— Circulation and Receipts: 1958, 1963, and 1967, https://www2.census.gov/library/publications/1971/compendia/ statab/92ed/1971-05.pdf.
34 Ibid.
Times.36 The study concluded the reporting of the newspaper to be propagandist and
inaccurate, remarking that “the news about Russia is a case of seeing not what was, but what men wished to see.”37 Though seemingly not much has been done with the data from the study, since McLaughlin claims that the certainty for journalism throughout the Cold War was the “bipolar world of East and West, Communism and capitalism, because it provided a framework of interpretation – a way of seeing the world and of reporting international relations – that conformed to predictable patterns and narrative outcomes.”38 Meaning that even though the reporting may not be considered as propagandist, it did have a bias when it came to reporting on subjects outside of the American or Western sphere. The effects of this “enemy image” are described by George Gerbner, who is also the developer of the cultivation theory which examines the long-term effects of television on people’s perception of the world. In an essay titled “The Image of Russians in American Media and the New Epoch” he states that:
A long-standing "enemy image" has deep institutional sources and broad social consequences. It projects the fears of a system by dramatizing and exaggerating the dangers that seem to lurk around every comer. It works to unify its subjects and mobilizes them for action. Behind the shifts from "red menace" through wartime alliance to "evil empire" and back to "Gorbymania" are pictures, attitudes, and suspicions deeply embedded in the minds
of many generations.39
Gerbner suggests that the implications of the “enemy image” are far-reaching and infiltrating the minds of the masses for political motives.
Scholars claim that the enemy image was not restricted to news media but extended far beyond that. Popular fiction in books, on television and in the cinema, claims Gerbner, also promoted images of the superpowers in “simplistic binary opposition of good and evil: Uncle Sam versus Ivan the Terrible, the Eagle versus the Bear (an image used in a Pentagon video on the arms race), the Promised Land versus the Evil Empire.”40 This led to the western news media presenting the Cold war as a standoff between two superpowers with sole
36 “Charles Merz: 1893-‐1977,” The New York Times, accessed June 17, 2017.
http://www.nytimes.com/1977/09/02/archives/charles-merz-18931977.html?mcubz=1&_r=0. 37 Walter Lippmann and Charles Merz, “A Test of the News” The New Republic 23, no. 8 (1920): 3. https://archive.org/details/LippmannMerzATestoftheNews.
38 Ibid., 162.
39 George Gerbner, “The Image of Russians in American Media and the New Epoch,” in Beyond the Cold War:
Soviet and American Media Images, eds. Everette E. Dennis, George Gerbner and Yassen N. Zassoursky
(London: Sage Publications, 1991), 31. 40 Ibid., 164.
responsibility for danger or trouble lying squarely with the Soviet Union,41 not critically assessing the involvement of both the United States and the Soviet Union in their tense relationship during the time of the Cold War. Others such as James Schwoch claim that the media, including the new medium of television, consciously employed the ‘enemy image’ to further the propaganda agenda. Schwoch consequently states that the media’s emphasis was on producing and promoting propaganda content, “searching for system wide approaches to fighting psychological warfare, and enlisting a vast armada of warriors to the cause.”42 Greg Barnhisel in Pressing the Fight claims that after the Second World War there was simply a shift from anti-Nazism to anti-Communist coverage.43 Moreover, similarly to Schwoch he claims that indeed “a large audience […] was certainly the target of Western and Soviet propaganda and “cultural diplomacy” agencies as the Cold War began.”44
1.3 Early Cold War Magazines and Periodicals
Where Time magazine publisher Henry Luce in 1941 proclaimed the twentieth century “the American Century,”45 scholars have taken this term and additionally coined the twentieth
century ‘the Magazine Century’ due to explosive growth of magazines published and the increasing number of people reading magazines.46 The “enemy image” discussed in the previous section has been eagerly employed by magazines and periodicals published during ‘the Magazine Century,’ starting with the early Cold War period. In the widely popular magazine Reader’s Digest the “enemy image” was also employed according to Joanne P. Sharp in Condensing the Cold War: Reader's Digest and American Identity. She claims that directly after World War II no new representations of the Soviet Union were introduced to readers but instead there “was a silencing of descriptions that had previously been more sympathetic to the potential of changes occurring in the USSR,”47 which fed the image of the Soviet Union as the evil ‘other.’ Alongside this, the tactic of Reader’s Digest was to promote the “American Way” since politicians claimed that the “American way of life” was under
41 Ibid., 162.
42 James Schwoch, Global TV: New Media and the Cold War, 1946-69 (Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press, 2009), 46.
43 Greg Barnhisel and Catherine Turner, Pressing the Fight (Amherst, MA: University of Massachusetts Press, 2010), 10.
44 Ibid.
45 “Henry Luce and 20th Century U.S. Internationalism,” Office of the Historian, accessed May 24, 2017. https://history.state.gov/milestones/1937-1945/internationalism.
46 David E. Sumner, The Magazine Century: American Magazines Since 1900, (New York: Peter Lang Publishing, 2010).
47 Joanne P. Sharp, Condensing the Cold War: Reader's Digest and American Identity, (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2000), 85.
threat by the Soviet Union and needed to be protected.48 The magazine went as far as claiming that “freedom is the bomb”49 in 1947, indicating how the editors thought how the atomic bomb would bring freedom in the world. Similarly, Life magazine in 1959 published an article revolving around a newlywed couple who spent their honeymoon in a fallout shelter, which was heavily publicized in newspapers and periodicals nationwide. It proved to be the epitome of patriotism and a showcase of how to keep the destructive dangers of the Cold War age outside of their home.50 Both articles portrayed how continuing the ‘American way of life’ would need to be protected to maintain freedom in the world.
James L. Baughman, in The Republic of Mass Culture: Journalism, Filmmaking, and Broadcasting in America Since 1941 dubbed the early stages of Cold War the ‘War for Attention,’ during which different types of media competed for the people’s attention.
Furthermore, he states that during the early Cold War period, both periodicals and newspapers “continued to respect the logic of the cold war”51 in their coverage of national affairs.
Reporting would be conducted from an anti-Communist, pro-American perspective, though some magazines such as The Progressive openly protested this ‘logic of the cold war’
employed by numerous other newspapers and periodicals.52 According to Sammye Johnson in The Magazine from Cover to Cover the Cold War did affect the magazine coverage, though she claims that it merely affected specialized magazines such as Aviation Week which in 1947 published an article that caused controversy for revealing top secret military information to the Soviet Union and was investigated by the FBI and the Department of Justice.53 Other than that, Johnson claims that the Cold War was not of much influence on magazine coverage, though most scholars believe otherwise.
1.4 Women’s Magazines and the Cold War
As for women’s magazines, Nancy Walker in Shaping our Mother’s World claims that the threat of the Cold War did indeed have consequences on the way women’s magazines reported their stories, stating that women’s magazines were affected by these forces and in
48 Nancy A. Walker, Women's Magazines, 1940-1960: Gender Roles and the Popular Press (Boston: Bedford Books, 1998), 8.
49 Sharp, Condensing the Cold War: Reader's Digest and American Identity, 86.
50 Nancy A. Walker, Shaping Our Mothers' World: American Women's Magazines (Jackson, MI: University Press of Mississippi, 2000), 193.
51 James L. Baughman, The Republic of Mass Culture: Journalism, Filmmaking, and Broadcasting in America
Since 1941, (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Press, 2006), 64.
52 Ibid.
53 Sammye Johnson and Patricia Prijatel, The Magazine from Cover to Cover: Inside a Dynamic Industry (Lincolnwood, IL: NTC Publishing Group, 1999), 83.
turn exerted their influence in combination with them. The magazines became “a lens through which numerous political, economic, and cultural developments could be focused on the American home and family.”54 Furthermore, Walker states that the editorial policies of the magazines consisted of mixing the banalities with urgent actualities. The editors of the magazine interacted with experts in the field of the topic they were writing about, often influencing them in the process.55 In the light of the Cold War and the McCarthyism, which encouraged the kind of conformity for which the postwar period became known did not have much effect on the magazines. The widespread paranoia of being suspected of having
communist leanings did not cause the magazines to adopt a monolithic stance on communism, or on any topic for that matter.56 This discrepancy also is apparent in the women’s magazines analyzed for the purpose of this research. Except for some independent voices such as former First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt and World War II correspondent Dorothy Thompson in the Ladies’ Home Journal, not many critical opinions were expressed by women’s magazines on topics closely related to the Cold War. Walker argues that articles on Cold War politics such as those by Roosevelt and Thompson in the Ladies’ Home Journal were relatively rare. The relationship between “the purchase of frozen dinners and the democratic way of life remained implicit rather than explicit, articles about the American educational system, which were numerous in the postwar years, were openly inspired by a climate of international competition and conflict.”57 While the Cold War would make its presence felt in the magazines, especially concerning about the adequacy of the American educational system, the magazines “primarily went about the task of helping to create the postwar home and family.”58
By the mid-fifties, it became clear that the influence of television was becoming more far-reaching, with consumers gradually watching more television and putting print media aside, most notably magazines.59 Mary Ellen Zuckerman argues in A History of Popular Women’s Magazines in the United States, 1792-1995 that because of this shift, consumers were looking at magazines to take on an informative role, rather than mere entertainment.60 This motivated magazines to bring in experts from an array of fields to share their expertise: from notable journalists and influential politicians to military experts and intelligence
54 Walker, Shaping Our Mothers' World: American Women's Magazines, 41. 55 Ibid., 151.
56 Ibid., 28. 57 Ibid., 194. 58 Ibid., 100.
59 Leo Bogart, “Magazines Since the Rise of Television,” Journalism Quarterly 33 (Spring 1956): 153-166. 60 Mary Ellen Zuckerman, A History of Popular Women’s Magazines in the United States, 1792-1995 (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1998), 203.
officials.61 The status of the experts that have lend their expertise to Good Housekeeping, Ladies’ Home Journal and Redbook are remarkable: notable figures such as Alfred
Hitchcock, Walter Lippmann, J. Edgar Hoover, and John Steinbeck have contributed to one or more of these magazines. Walker further claims that by the mid-1950s “the magazines’
reliance on credentialed experts had, if anything, increased, reflecting both a continuing professionalization of the role of the homemaker and a national faith in scientific advancement to improve domestic life and help to wage the Cold War.”62
Walker in Shaping Our Mothers’ World states that “at no time during their histories have women’s magazines delivered a perfectly consistent, monolithic message to their readers.”63 Walker blames this on the magazines wanting to appeal to a diverse audience, while she also cites underlying opinions from editors. Where editors of magazines during the war years received the Magazine War Guide, which was considered by most editors as their patriotic duty to cooperate with the materials provided by the United States Office of War Information,64 after the Second World War was over it was back to normal. Though the notion of ‘normal life’ was slightly different from the war years, when women were called to join the workforce, something which was promoted by articles in women’s magazines.65 With the shift from workforce back to the home, came magazines which focused mainly on the housewife. According to Walker another reason that contradictory messages found their way in the magazine she claims reflected the complex cultural values and institutions at a time when the domestic world became increasingly important as both a symbol of American democracy and the site of personal fulfillment.66 Furthermore, women’s roles in society were constantly changing as well as conflicting descriptions of being a woman were given by different magazines, as well as other media. According to Nancy Walker: “magazines
sometimes celebrated woman’s primary role as home maker and at other times subverted that ideology,” which meant that magazines one month would instruct a woman how to be a good wife, while the next issue could have an article on women lamenting their married life. A wide range of topics were covered in the magazines, especially catered to the homemaker. Walker states that the wide range of topics on which the magazines provided advice, indicates “both the complexity that the domestic arena had assumed by midcentury and the magazines’
61 Walker, Shaping Our Mothers' World: American Women's Magazines, 151. 62 Ibid.
63 Ibid., vii.
64 Walker, Women’s Magazines 1940-1960: Gender Roles and the Popular Press, 16. 65 Ibid.
function as all-purpose advisers.”67 Even though women were informed about all kinds of subjects they were expected to assert their influence in the home, not outside of it.
Though it is difficult to measure the exact effects of women’s magazine on its readers over half a century ago, Walker does claim that the magazines indeed played a significant role in defining women’s aspirations regarding family, appearance, work and happiness.68 She cites the increase in women’s magazine circulations, which rose to millions around
midcentury, as another factor of the magazines’ widespread influence. Also, the shift from magazines as a source of entertainment to a source of information, increased magazines’ credibility as a respected guide to living one’s life. While scholars still voice their doubts about large media conglomerates being susceptible to state control, the influence of the media during the early Cold War, especially with the introduction of television, is undeniable. The sheer saturation of media, which included newspapers, radio, television and periodicals was immense and has undoubtedly played a large role in the lives of Americans around
midcentury.
67 Ibid., 148.
CHAPTER II:
COLD WAR REPRESENTATION IN GOVERNMENT CAMPAIGNS “You are the target of those who would trample the liberties of free men. You are
in the cross hairs of the bomb sight, an enemy is centering on you, the United States of America.”
From the opening scene of the civil defense film Target You from 1955.69
The above quote perfectly encapsulates the paranoia that ensued about the time when the Soviet Union successfully conducted their first nuclear test in 1949. From being the most powerful force in the world the United States were suddenly undermined and their advantage over other nations, namely their atomic bomb, was gone when the Soviet Union detonated their first nuclear bomb or “First Lightning.”70 The paranoia that ensued among the public and politicians alike, with a nuclear showdown and potential communist hegemony in mind, made for some very interesting campaigns to combat Soviet and communist influence in America. Most of these campaigns were either sponsored by the government or set up as charity organizations and advocacy groups, while being secretly sponsored by government agencies such as the CIA. Over the past decades, scholars such as Laura Belmonte have claimed that some of these campaigns bordered on propaganda and were designed to instill fear into people to have them agree with increased defense spending from the government.71 This chapter will
go into the ways the Cold War was presented in government campaigns, both campaigns directly originating from the government and campaigns that were later outed as having ties to the government through the CIA or FBI. Most notable were the events of 1967 when the magazine Ramparts and The Saturday Evening Post published an exposé revealing that the CIA had been funding several front organizations with the universal goal of countering the communist influence in the world for years.72
2.1 The Cultural Cold War
Firstly, there was the Radio Free Europe campaign titled “Crusade for Freedom” that was launched in 1950, one year after the Soviet Union detonated their first atomic bomb, and
69 Federal Civil Defense Administration, Target You, film, 8' 38", 1955, https://archive.org/details/TargetYou 70 “The Soviet Nuclear Weapons Program,” The Nuclear Weapon Archive, accessed April 2, 2017,
http://nuclearweaponarchive.org/Russia/Sovwpnprog.html.
71 Laura Belmonte, Selling the American Way: U.S. Propaganda and the Cold War (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2010), 88.
72 Hans Krabbendam and Giles Scott-Smith, The Cultural Cold War in Western Europe, 1945-60 (London and Portland, OR: Frank Cass Publishers, 2003), 134.
inaugurated by then-general Dwight D. Eisenhower. The goal of the campaign officially was to raise funds for Radio Free Europe to spread the word of freedom behind the Iron Curtain. Reportedly millions of Americans participated in the “Crusade for Freedom.” They signed “Freedom Scrolls” and “Freedom Grams,” launched leaflet-carrying balloons, and donated Truth Dollars in support of the American effort to broadcast “the truth” to the citizens of communist European countries. In reality, the organization had direct ties to the CIA which were painstakingly covered up to maintain their image as a charity organization, but
eventually the CIA involvement was uncovered in 1967.73 According to Hugh Wilford in The Mighty Wurlitzer: How the CIA Played America it was one of the highest-profile domestic propaganda operations in CIA history.74 Everything was put in order to conceal the ulterior motive of the CIA. Though the targets of both initiatives were different, Radio Free Europe focused on the people behind the Iron Curtain whereas the Crusade for Freedom targeted Americans. Richard H. Cummings in Radio Free Europe's “Crusade for Freedom” asserts that “their commonality was to keep the true sponsorship of Radio Free Europe hidden from the public.”75 Eisenhower was even reported saying that the “crusade is a campaign sponsored by private American citizens to fight the big lie with the big truth.”76 While this was partly true (reportedly raising $2.25 to $3.3 million a year during the 1950s77) most of the backing did come from the United States government. Eisenhower went on to state the dangers of communism reporting on pro-communist radio stations trying to interfere with the American ones, he claimed that in the end “it is certain that all the specious promises of Communism to the needy, the unhappy, the frustrated, the down-trodden, cannot stand against the proven record of democracy and its day-by-day progress in the betterment of all mankind.”78 This conviction also shows in the print campaigns that were published in many general interest and women’s magazines during the 1950s. A Radio Free Europe advertisement in the April 1956 issue of Good Housekeeping starts with the bold headline “‘…and the truth shall make them
73 Ibid.
74 Hugh Wilford, The Mighty Wurlitzer: How the CIA Played America (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2008), 262.
75 Richard H. Cummings, Radio Free Europe's "Crusade for Freedom": Rallying Americans Behind Cold War
Broadcasting, 1950-1960 (Jefferson, NC: McFarland & Company, 2010), 2.
76 “A Labor Day Speech from Many Years ago by a Non-President Named Dwight Eisenhower,” Los Angeles
Times, accessed April 2, 2017,
http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/washington/2010/09/labor-day-speech-ike-eisenhower-1950.html.
77 Wilford, The Mighty Wurlitzer: How the CIA Played America (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2008), 33.
78 Los Angeles Times, accessed April 2, 2017, http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/washington/2010/09/labor-day-speech-ike-eisenhower-1950.html.
free,’”79 and asks the reader to imagine themselves living behind the Iron Curtain. The ad poses the situation in which their respective official state radio claims that the U.S. “Now suppose that you hear on the official state radio that the U.S. threatens war! Could it be true? How can you know where truth stops… and propaganda begins?”80 The ad itself is surely effective as it really focuses on the supposed misinformation people behind the Iron Curtain receive and it surely plays on people’s empathy, especially since the contribution they make is rather small for such invasive actions as radio programs. Other advertisements of the
organization focus more on the concept of “truth dollars”; each dollar you donate will become one minute of truth for people living in communist countries. The advertisement in the
Redbook issue of March 1955 underlines the urgency by asking people to donate truth dollars for “70 million freedom hungry people.”81 Another advertisement in Ladies’ Home Journal of February 1955 urges people to donate to help them “fight communism in its own
backyard.”82 This further perpetrates the image of an evil that should be kept at bay and should be stopped before it gets its hands on American people. It declares a sense of urgency as well, since one would not want to have those “70 million freedom hungry people”83
fighting against their country. One would want to nip it in the bud and go on living a normal life. The Crusade for Freedom propaganda campaign while merely disguised as a charity organization to garner support from Americans for increased defense spending does seem to have an underlying wish. This was clearly done to spark some protest among the citizens of these countries as a tactic to weaken the Communist Bloc from the inside out.
Secondly, besides The Crusade for Freedom another organization under the name of The Congress for Cultural Freedom (CCF) started out as an anti-communist advocacy group in 1950. It was revealed in a 1966 feature in The New York Times that the CIA had played a substantial role in founding and funding the organization, amongst other false front
organizations. This has also led scholars to believe the organization had ulterior motives beyond upholding the importance of intellectual freedom in the world. Left leaning intellectuals generally were suspected to have sympathies for communism or aspects of communism, and in turn they would be convinced through the CCF that communism was the
79 "Crusade for Freedom," Good Housekeeping 142, no. 4 (1956): 133.
http://search.proquest.com.access.authkb.kb.nl/docview/1847818372?accountid=16376. 80 Ibid.
81 "Truth Dollars," Redbook 104, no. 6 (1955): 86.
http://search.proquest.com.access.authkb.kb.nl/docview/1807529604?accountid=16376. 82 "Truth Dollars," Ladies' Home Journal 72, no. 2 (1955): 108.
http://search.proquest.com.access.authkb.kb.nl/docview/1879254645?accountid=16376. 83 "Truth Dollars," Redbook 104, no. 5 (1955): 77.
enemy of art and free thought. While the focus of the organization was on cultural freedom, many scholars in hindsight saw it as the United States forcing their own ideas of culture onto other countries, something which is still being debated in the light of Americanization in recent decades. Government sources now claim that the CCF indeed “helped to solidify CIA's emerging strategy of promoting the non-Communist left—the strategy that would soon
become the theoretical foundation of the Agency's political operations against Communism over the next two decades.”84 This was apparent in the first Congress of Cultural Freedom held in 1949 at the Waldorf Astoria in New York City, where political philosopher Sidney Hook proclaimed:
Give me a hundred million dollars and a thousand dedicated people, and I will guarantee to generate such a wave of democratic unrest among the masses--yes, even among the soldiers—of Stalin's own empire, that all his problems for a long period of time to come will be internal. I can find the people.85
Aside from organizing congresses to discuss the current state of intellectual freedom, the CCF funded publications in the United States as well as globally. Most notable was the popular British magazine Encounter, which was created to fight Cold War neutralism in Europe. The CCF ideas spread their anti-communist body of ideas not only in the western world but far beyond that: from Mexico to India and from the Philippines to Uganda.
2.2 Educating the Masses in the Atomic Age
Another source of government propaganda was the Federal Civil Defense Administration which from 1950 to 1958, among other activities, produced films such as Duck and Cover in 1951 and Target You in 1955. The Duck and Cover movie was shown mostly in schools since they were the main target of the public awareness campaign and the film catered to children with the animated figure of ‘Bert the Turtle’ who taught them to “duck and cover” in case of an atomic explosion. The movie states that nuclear war could happen at any time without warning and Americans should keep this “constantly in mind and be ever ready.”86 By
84 “Origins of the Congress for Cultural Freedom, 1949-50,” Central Intelligence Agency, accessed June 3, 2017.
https://www.cia.gov/library/center-for-the-study-of-intelligence/csi-publications/csi-studies/studies/95unclass/Warner.html. 85 Ibid.
86 Federal Civil Defense Administration, Duck and Cover, film, 9' 14", 1951, https://archive.org/details/gov.ntis.ava11109vnb1.
continuing to emphasize the danger of a Soviet nuclear attack, civil defense propaganda was arguably also used to justify increased defense spending.87
While Duck and Cover was mostly aimed at schoolchildren, there were other films catered to homemakers that were shown during special workshops to instruct housewives of their duties in case of an atomic explosion. The film Target You played on the enforcement of traditional gender roles to invoke a sense of national purpose.88 By preparing a fallout shelter and by keeping their family’s safe women would do their civic duty. As Elaine Tyler May states in Homeward Bound, women were “to marshal their energies into a “New Family Type for the Space Age,”89 meaning that a women’s task went further than serving as a moral guardian and that she needed the required skill set to keep her family safe from the dangers of the Atomic Age. May continues that the civil defense administration was actively involved in “developing the concept of professionalized homemaking for the atomic age.”90 They further
enforced this idea by appointing Jean Wood Fuller as director of women’s activities at the Federal Civil Defense Administration who went on to promote the benefits of atomic warfare to women. She is quoted to have said that women had special skills and qualities that enabled them to cope with atomic war.91 Furthermore she was one of the only females present at an atomic bomb testing in Nevada in 1955 which she cited to be “terrific, interesting and exciting.”92
According to Guy Oakes in “The Cold War Conception of Nuclear Reality: Mobilizing the American Imagination for Nuclear War in the 1950's” it was vital that Americans accepted the nuclear reality presented to them. He states that “the preferred conception of nuclear reality would demonstrate that Americans were capable of confronting a nuclear emergency through their own efforts.”93 This is exactly what prevails from the Civil Defense films; by taking action one can safe oneself from the terrors of a nuclear attack. The films create an alternate reality of sorts in which one could defend oneself from nuclear fallout by means of protecting oneself with as little as a newspaper or a jacket, as shown in Duck and Cover. When nuclear bombs were dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in August 1945, civilians had their first glimpse of the new reality: a world where one massive bomb
87 Belmonte, Selling the American Way: U.S. Propaganda and the Cold War (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2010), 88.
88 Federal Civil Defense Administration, Target You, film, 8' 38", 1955, https://archive.org/details/TargetYou. 89 Elaine Tyler May, Homeward Bound (New York: Basic Books, 1988), 102.
90 Ibid., 103. 91 Ibid. 92 Ibid.
93 Guy Oakes, “The Cold War Conception of Nuclear Reality: Mobilizing the American Imagination for Nuclear War in the 1950's,” International Journal of Politics, Culture, and Society, Vol. 6, No. 3 (1993), 340.
