West Georgia College Studies in the Social Sciences, Vol. 36

STUDIES IN THE SOCIALf SCIENCES]

kVOLXXXVIj

MAY 1999]

.THE STATE UNIVERSITY OF A WEST GEORGIA^

Digitized by the Internet Archive

in 2011 with funding from

LYRASIS Members and Sloan Foundation

http://www.archive.org/details/westgeorgiacolle36unse

RECEIVED

AUG - 1 ?n

, . PERIODICALS DEPT.

rt D S oJ!! van ' ,n 2 ram Lfbrary
_CARROLLTON, GEORGIA

The Impact of the Cold War

on
American Popular Culture

Elaine McClarnand, Ph.D. and Steve Goodson, Ph.D., editors
Barbara L. Neuby, cover design

The State University of West Georgia
STUDIES IN THE SOCIAL SCIENCES

Volume XXXVI

May 1999

ISBN: 1-883199-11-5

All rights reserved. Permission to reproduce these works may be obtained by writing the
editors. Professional citations excluded. A double-blind review process was carried out
for articles contained therein.

Contents

Page
Acknowledgements/ Contributors iii

Introduction

Elaine McClarnand and Steve Goodson, editors v

Articles:

Living With the Bomb: The Retreat to the Suburban Bomb Shelter 1

Janna Jones, University of South Florida

Popular Fiction as Propaganda: Cold War Ideology in

Ian Fleming's From Russia With Love 14

Gary Hoppenstand, Michigan State University

AMERIKA, The Miniseries: Television 's Last Cold War Gasp 25

Jerry Rodnitzky, University of Texas at Arlington

Dangerous Superpowers: Comic Book Heroes and American

Masculinity in the Atomic Age 33

John Ott, University of California at Los Angeles

From Vietnam to the New World Order: The GI Joe Action

Figure as Cold War Artifact 47

Roger Chapman. Bowling Green State University

American Dream Meets Russian Nightmare: Professional Wrestling

and the End of the Cold War 56

Terence Whalen, University of Illinois at Chicago

Advertising Freedom: COMMENTARY Magazine

and the Cultural Cold War 65

Nathan Abrams, Brunei University, United Kingdom

Southern Fundamentalism and Antic ommunism at the

Beginning of the Cold War: The Controversy Between

J. Frank Norris and Louis D. Newton 81

William R. Glass, Mississippi University for Women

Acknowledgements

The Editors, contributors, and the Department of History would like to thank
the Deans and the President of the State University of West Georgia for their
support of this volume.

In addition, we want to thank Dr. Barbara Neuby, Assistant Professor of Politi-
cal Science at the State University of West Georgia, for her cover design as
well as for her advice and assistance throughout the past year.

About the Contributors...

Janna Jones received her Ph.D. in Communication at the University of South
Florida. She is the associate director of the Learning Communities and an
assistant professor in Interdisciplinary Social Sciences at the University
of South Florida. Her research focuses on how people use and make sense of
domestic and public spaces.

Gary Hoppenstand is an Associate Professor teaching in the Department of
American Thought and Language at Michigan State University. He has pub-
lished numerous articles and books on topics ranging from nineteenth-century
American literature to popular culture studies. His work has been nominated
twice for the World Fantasy Award and his recent book, Popular Fiction: An
Anthology (Longman, 1997), won the Popular Culture Association's National
Book Award.

Jerry Rodnitzky was educated at the University of Chicago and the Univer-
sity of Illinois and is currently Professor of History at The University of Texas
at Arlington. He is the author of Minstrels of the Dawn: The Folk-Protest Singer
as a Cultural Hero (1976) and more recently, Jazz- Age Boomtown (1997) and
Feminist Phoenix: The Rise and Fall of a Feminist Counterculture, which will
be published in late 1999 by Greenwood Press.

John Ott is a doctoral candidate in American Art History at the University of
California, Los Angeles. His dissertation, "The Gilded Rush: Art Patronage
and Cultural Mythologies in Victorian California," will examine how industri-
alist patrons like Leland Stanford attempted to establish social authority through
the conceptualization and institutionalization of a regional culture. He will
also contribute an essay on the promotion of motor tourism in the Golden State

by the Auto Club of Southern California for the catalog of the exhibition "Made
in California," which is scheduled to open at the Los Angeles County Museum
of Art in October 2000. In addition, he has presented scholarly papers on or-
ange crate labels, world's fairs, the California Mission Revival, and the popu-
lar visual mythology of the California Gold Rush.

Roger Chapman is a Ph.D student in the American Culture Studies Program
at Bowling Green State University in Bowling Green, Ohio.

Terence Whalen received his Ph.D. from Duke University. He is currently
Associate Professor of English at the University of Illinois at Chicago. He is
the author of Edgar Allan Poe and the Masses: The Political Economy of Lit-
erature in Antebellum America (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1999).

Nathan Abrams is currently a lecturer in American History and Film at Brunei
University where he teaches courses on US history, foreign policy, film, and
communities. He has recently completed his Ph.D. entitled, "Struggling for
Freedom: Arthur Miller, the Commentary Community, and the Cultural Cold
War." He is the editor of Containing America: Cultural Production and Con-
sumption in Fifties America, a collection of essays on Cold War culture which
will be published in 1999 by Birmingham University Press. He has also pub-
lished on American sport, music, and culture.

William Glass received his PhD (1991) from Emory University. He is cur-
rently an assistant professor of history at Mississippi University for Women.
He has published articles on American religion in Jewish Social Studies, Ameri-
can Baptist Quarterly, and American Presbyterians. He has contributed an ar-
ticle on film composer Dimitri Tiompkin to American National Biography,
and is currently working on a manuscript titled "Strangers in Zion: Funda-
mentalists in the South, 1900-1950."

iv

Introduction

Elaine McClarnand and Steve Goodson
State University of West Georgia

The Cold War. Less than a decade after the collapse of the Soviet Union,
the era has receded from public consciousness, like a bad dream best forgot-
ten. Russia lurches toward a future that is uncertain at best, and the United
States gropes for new means of self-definition in a world no longer conve-
niently polarized between "good" and "evil." A generation has come of age
with little memory of the period that helped define the lives of its parents and
grandparents. For more than forty long years, however-years marked by tense
military showdowns, strident political posturing, ideological broadsides, and
ravaged third-world battlefields-the Cold War profoundly colored American
consciousness. From the unraveling of the Grand Alliance following the ep-
ochal victories of 1945, through a series of incidents that became milestones in
the troubled history of the twentieth century-the Berlin Airlift, the Korean
War, the development of the hydrogen bomb, the Bay of Pigs and Cuban Mis-
sile Crisis, Vietnam, the Prague Spring, detente, Afghani stan-this epic con-
frontation between East and West placed its grim stamp on U.S. politics, eco-
nomics, and culture, leaving few areas of daily life untouched.

Of course, the Cold War was far from the only development that shaped the
United States in the postwar period. The U.S. emerged from World War II the
richest and most militarily powerful nation on earth, and its citizens enjoyed
the bounty of this status in a period of unparalleled economic growth. Begin-
ning with the late 1940s, home construction boomed, suburbs expanded explo-
sively, and America entered its heyday as the world's great consumer culture.
American citizens spent countless dollars on automobiles, refrigerators, and
every other erstwhile luxury under the sun. White collar workers for the first
time outnumbered blue collar workers, and an enormous baby boom genera-
tion was born and grew to maturity, vastly increasing markets for American
goods. Mighty corporations thrived, and chain stores, hotels, and restaurants
proliferated as American society maintained its march toward standardization.
Government continued to enlarge in size and responsibilities, in part due to
Cold War exigencies, but also because of a renewed commitment in the 1960s
to address social problems left unresolved by the country's dazzling economic
climb. The United States experienced a dramatic racial revolution in the fifties
and sixties. This transformation occurred largely on the shoulders of a corre-

sponding media revolution, as television radically altered Americans' percep-
tions of their government, their society, the broader world, and themselves.
The conjunction of these monumental postwar developments - the escalation
of the Cold War amid the triumphs of America's consumer economy - forms
the focus of our journal.

There is a sense that, from its inception, the ideology of the Cold War was
imposed upon the American people from above by an American government
seeking to legitimize its foreign policy through appeals to loyalty, duty, and
patriotism. It was largely to sever lingering pro-Soviet allegiances held over
from World War II that President Truman in 1 947 went before Congress to
depict a world engulfed by a titanic struggle between totalitarianism and de-
mocracy. For the next four decades the government worked tirelessly to assure
the devotion of its citizens to the cause, exhorting them, as in President
Kennedy's ringing words, to "pay any price, bear any burden, meet any hard-
ship, support any friend, oppose any foe, in order to insure the survival and
success of liberty." That the "price" might include nuclear annihilation was a
regrettable but inevitable consequence to be borne by a people proudly called
to the task of "defending freedom in its hour of maximum danger."

With the global conflict posed in such stark, apocalyptic terms, it is little
wonder that the Cold War so powerfully molded American culture and society.
For as the contributors to this volume reveal, the Cold War was more than a
series of riveting military and political events. It came to be part of everyday
life in America, penetrating deeply into popular consciousness and finding
expression in a myriad of cultural forms. It has become something of a truism
for historians that people can and frequently do adapt to their own purposes the
ideas and ideals that are offered to them. And so a central concern of this jour-
nal is the level of cooperation between the state and the culture at large, the
degree to which politics from the top influences culture, and the ways in which
popular culture in turn puts its own mark upon those influences. The following
essays show that individuals, groups, and institutions within American society
often coopted officially pronounced Cold War values of loyalty, freedom, and
democracy for their own interests and needs. From below, American consum-
ers forged their own perceptions and understandings of global conflict, while
American businessmen and manufacturers catered to and exploited both offi-
cial pronouncements and popular consciousness. Clearly, the presentation of
Cold War themes in popular culture did not always match government expec-
tations. A contentious issue recurring in these essays, therefore, is that of he-
gemony: to what extent did private entities either unquestioningly accept offi-
cial policy and initiatives, or consciously shape those demands to capitalize on
Cold War tensions?

Janna Jones, Richard Chapman, and Nathan Abrams explore this interac-
tion between public and private spheres during the Cold War. They show the
strong imprint of Cold War fears and values on American culture, manifested
in products such as GI Joe dolls and bomb shelters, but they also reveal how
manufacturers and marketers themselves consciously manipulated Cold War
ideology to sell these items. For although American businesses frequently co-
operated with government-sponsored propaganda campaigns, they proved in
turn highly skillful at employing Cold War slogans and motifs as convenient
mechanisms for marketing their own products. Janna Jones examines the cam-
paign to promote bomb shelters during the height of the Cold War, and the
dilemma of trying to sell a product which inevitably evoked fears of nuclear
catastrophe. She details the facile methods used by marketers who strove to
overcome the association of the bomb shelter with nuclear holocaust while
affirming middle-class values and projecting the optimistic outlook character-
istic of postwar America's burgeoning consumer culture. Richard Chapman
analyzes the connection between the GI Joe "action figure" and cultural hege-
mony. He approaches the GI Joe doll as a tool of socialization, designed to
impart a sense of duty and responsibility, attributes deeply and historically
rooted in American ideology. The doll became an agent in the campaign to
prepare Americans for the international military responsibilities demanded by
the Cold War. In the tense and often heated atmosphere of the period, even toys
could become political props, changing in appearance in conjunction with the
needs and policies of the US government.

Likewise, as Nathan Abrams demonstrates, advertisements for even such
benign products as grape juice and candies became vehicles for promoting
official values. Using 1950s issues of Commentary magazine as evidence,
Abrams shows how American corporations such as Ford, Amoco, and RCA
employed virtuous concepts such as "freedom" and "truth" not only to sell
electronics and automobiles, but also to support the propaganda campaigns of
the Truman and Eisenhower administrations. All three of these essays raise
interesting questions about hegemony and the nature of public-private interac-
tion in the Cold War: was there direct governmental pressure to incorporate
official themes, or did companies simply sense the mood was right to associate
their products with "trendy" ideas and symbols? Were these companies per-
forming their "patriotic duty," or were they acting more in self-interest, capi-
talizing on Cold War concerns to maximize profits?

The Cold War penetrated the realm of popular entertainment as well, from
fiction and comics to televised wrestling. Here a striking variety of heroes and
anti-heroes emerged, reflecting as well as responding to Cold War themes,

fears, and policies. Gary Hoppenstand's essay looks at the influence of the
Cold War on postwar fiction, in particular the genre of the spy novel.
Hoppenstand analyzes propagandistic elements in the work of Ian Fleming,
creator of the romantic British spy, James Bond. Focusing specifically on the
novel From Russia, With Love, Hoppenstand shows how Fleming purposefully
constructed his fictional characterizations to demonstrate the moral bankruptcy
and corruption of the Soviet system. The heartless Soviet villains stand in stark
contrast to the dashing and passionate Bond, who personifies Western values
and virtues.

John Ott examines comic book superheroes against the backdrop of the
Cold War. His work probes the strange interplay between Cold War fears of
nuclear holocaust and postwar concerns over male sexuality, as reflected in the
creation and depiction of such superheroes as Superman, Spiderman, and the
Fantastic Four. Concentrating on the comics' "silver age"of 1956-1966, Ott
suggests that these comic books present a psychological tapestry of the period.
Resonating with angst and anxiety, comic books embodied dominant values
while also deconstructing them. They represent a cultural expression of politi-
cal concerns over communism and homosexuality, but also provided a means
for readers to come to terms with their own fears and anxieties.

Jerry Rodnitsky examines television and the Cold War. He critically ana-
lyzes the ratings failure of the 1987 miniseries Amerika, which depicts the
United States under Soviet occupation in the wake of nuclear war. Rodnitsky
suggests factors that might explain the lack of audience interest, including in-
ternal ambiguities and dark overtones of defeatism that repelled sponsors.
Approaching the film as Cold War mythology and allegory, he explores the
dynamic relationship between popular culture and politics, manifested in the
politically charged and sharply conflicting interpretations of the program by
liberals and conservatives. The series, he concludes, was certainly propaganda,
yet contained enough subtle ironies and contradictions to make it richly evoca-
tive of the real complexities of the Cold War era.

Terence Whalen turns to the arena of professional wrestling, which he views
as a form of performance art that, due to its scripted nature, reflects and incor-
porates broad social and political issues. He tells the curious tale of the cre-
ation and unexpected popularity of a unique 1980s tag team consisting of the
"American Dream," Dusty Rhodes, and the "Russian Nightmare," Nikita Koloff.
To explain the willingness of American wrestling fans to embrace a Russian
known for such antics as desecrating the American flag, Whalen provocatively
suggests that class-based resentments may have displaced Cold War mistrust
as the source for determining heroes in the wrestling ring. The largely work-
ing-class audiences that cheered Koloff s triumphs identified with the Russian

as a fellow wage earner, struggling like they were to make sense of a confusing
capitalist system. Whalen's work poses a definite challenge to theorists of cul-
tural hegemony, arguing that the creation of cultural images and values is not a
one-sided process. According to Whalen, influences from above are refash-
ioned according to the tastes and needs of those generating and consuming
popular culture, a process frequently resulting in outcomes that fly in the face
of political orthodoxy.

The final paper is by William Glass, who investigates the seeping of Cold
War politics into the sphere of religion. He demonstrates the capacity of social
forces to make their own political capital out of the Cold War through his
analysis of a pre-McCarthy era attempt to use anticommunism as a means of
attacking personal rivals. During the late forties, the rising conflict between
democracy and communism played into a religious turf battle waged between
Louie D. Newton, President of the Southern Baptist Convention (SBC), and J.
Frank Norris, a feisty rival who hoped to usurp Newton and curb what he saw
as excessive liberalism within the SBC. Norris tried unsuccessfully to use
Newton's public praise of Soviet religious policy as a pretext for removing
him from his presidency. To explain Norris' failure, Glass proposes that many
in the postwar religious community may have assessed the Cold War and the
Russian people through a non-political lens, seeing the Soviet Union as an
open field for evangelical activity rather than as a forbidding enemy. Glass'
study certainly reveals that as late as 1947 public fear of and hostility toward
the Soviet Union had not yet reached the level that would be necessary to
support the witchhunts of the McCarthy era. Clearly, however, in a year which
witnessed the pronouncement of the Truman Doctrine, the first loyalty investi-
gations of federal employees, and the beginning of Congress' probe into the
motion picture industry, there were already opportunistic individuals prepared
to turn the Soviet threat into a vehicle for personal political advantage.

It is only fitting, perhaps, that a society zealously promoting the virtues of
free enterprise to a divided world would turn the Cold War itself to a profit.
Entrepreneurs - consciously, unconsciously, or somewhere in between - seized
upon America's anxieties, molded them into marketable products, and then
sold them back to the public which had given them birth. Some creators sin-
cerely supported the values that they expressed in their products, while others
promoted the values they thought most likely to sell. Some, wittingly or no,
exaggerated public fears and biases, strengthening the Cold War mentality.
Others questioned reigning principles, and may have served in their own small
ways to soften the icy international impasse. In the Cold War we see popular
culture in all its complexity and wonder - its sparkling ingenuity and its tired
banality, its ephemeral triviality and its timelessness.

The Cold War itself is over now, but much remains to be discovered and
understood. As new archives open, historians will learn more about the politi-
cal realities which created and fueled this epic struggle between superpowers.
But it will also be important for historians to continue the kinds of work seen
in this journal, so that they might understand the cultural reality that both flowed
from and modified the political and ideological foundations of the era. In learn-
ing how politics and culture interacted during this traumatic and enormously
consequential period, we may gain deeper insights into our system, into our
society, and, indeed, into our own psyches.

Living With the Bomb:
The Retreat to the Suburban Bomb Shelter

Janna Jones
University of South Florida

The author would like to express appreciation to the following for their
help: Mark Neumann, Bryan Taylor, David Payne, Elaine McClarnand,
and Steve Goodson.

Introduction

In the years following the first detonations of Russian nuclear weapons,
some Americans began constructing bomb shelters in their basements and back-
yards. Widely read pamphlets on "How to Survive an Atomic Bomb" and ar-
ticles in Popular Mechanics, Life, and Good Housekeeping urged readers to
begin digging. Construction contractors commercialized the push for bomb
shelters and promoted a variety of designs to accommodate different lifestyles
and tastes. Guides conducted shelter tours outside supermarkets, downtown
department stores and county fairs. Real estate sections of newspapers dis-
played advertisements for shelters opposite pastoral pictures of split-level dream
houses. Constructing a bomb shelter became one of the most ambitious "do-it-
yourself projects of middle-class homeowners, who could follow blueprints
published in the September 1961 issue of Life magazine. An accompanying
article claimed that these shelters could save nearly all Americans from the
mysterious and ominous specter of nuclear blasts and deadly radiation. That
same year, President John F. Kennedy proclaimed that every American home
should have a bomb shelter. By 1962, over 200,000 American families had
built bomb shelters and stocked them with food, water, and frequently a shot-
gun to protect against their neighbors, who, seeking refuge from a nuclear
blast, might attempt to enter another family's shelter. 1

This article argues that bombshelter marketing discourse during the fifties
and early sixties revealed an affirming definition of middle-class life in the
Cold War era. While the promotion of bombshelters could not entirely circum-
vent the reason why such an addition to the suburban home was necessary, the
marketing that surrounded the bomb shelter depicted a consumer society (that
existed in the shadow of nuclear devastation) as progressive, idealized, and
optimistic. As Roland Marchand persuasively argues, such promotional dis-
course can be interpreted as "social tableaux," providing direction to consum-

1

ers in the midst of a growing consumer society. 2 As consumer choices became
overwhelmingly abundant in the early decades of the twentieth century, adver-
tisers stepped in, offering consumers images of the domestic sphere that could
be achieved through the acquisition of modern appliances, furniture, and home
decor. In many ways, such social tableaux represented an art form that aspired
to what Micheal Schudson has called "Capitalist Realism." Like the genre of
Soviet Socialist Realism that offered an affirming definition of life in the So-
viet Union, Schudson finds a similar function in advertising images. Advertis-
ing is a way of validating a vision of modern American life through consump-
tion. American advertising, Schudson contends, offers a concrete representa-
tion of reality in its capitalist development that simplifies and typifies. "It does
not claim to picture reality as it is but reality as it should be life and lives
worth emulating. It is thoroughly optimistic, providing for any troubles that it
identifies a solution in a particular product or style of life." 3 Bombshelters
never became an overwhelmingly popular choice for suburban homeowners in
America, but their marketing and promotion contributed to the optimistic por-
trait of middle-class suburbia, consumerism, and aesthetics during the Cold
War, despite the fact that the bombshelter's intended function was necessarily
intertwined with the potential threat of nuclear war. We cringe in the late twen-
tieth century when we imagine bomb shelter owners believing that such a ref-
uge could possibly protect them from nuclear war. Yet, when we look closely
at the techniques of bomb shelter marketing, we can see that the promotional
images overtly celebrated the potential of domestic and consumer life, while at
the same time burying the purpose behind the shelter.

Nuclear Criticism

Before turning to the implications of bombshelter marketing, it is helpful to
establish its context by reviewing how recent criticism has evoked the domes-
tication of the Cold War. Nuclear-culture historians and critics have confronted
the cultural contradictions and tensions that faced suburban America during
the years of the Cold War, including the domestication of the bombshelter.
While little research has focused on the marketing of the bombshelter in rela-
tion to its potential aesthetic and practical contribution to the home, nuclear-
culture critics have characterized the disparities inherent in civil defense pro-
paganda.

Civil defense during the Cold War has been viewed largely as an extension
of traditional American values such as self-determination, personal responsi-
bility, and civic cooperation. Such virtues were seen as being anchored in the
domestic sphere. Guy Oakes has described the promotion of domestic civil
defense as a rhetoric that did not call for heroics or extraordinary efforts but
instead for ordinary labor and entertainment that could lead to domestic self-

Janna Jones

discovery. "In the end," claims Oakes, "civil defense for the home articulated a
strategy for survival and it also defined a way of life, an ethos that formed the
character of the family." 4 Like Oakes, Elaine Tyler May has described how
authoritative rhetoric of civil defense juxtaposed the fears of the nuclear age
with the security of traditional family values. Civil defense strategies impreg-
nated domesticity with new meaning and relevance, particularly traditional
roles of women in the home. "Above all, women, as professionalized home-
makers," writes May, "would fortify the home as a place of safety." 5 Jane Caputi
effectively argues that the "buried" model for the Cold War nuclear family was
the bomb shelter, which offered a flimsy promise of security in an insecure
world. Caputi also points to the sometimes painful contradictions contained
within the nuclear family home that paralleled the larger cultural tensions of
the Cold War. The nuclear family embodied, Caputi contends, the larger, patri-
archal power relations enacted between authorities and American citizens. The
suburban family, protected by the "guarantees" of patriarchal safety, did not
stop rape, battering, and incest. Rather the rhetoric of the nuclear family kept
such violence hidden, much like the nuclear testing and war that were kept
underground by the fathers of the Cold War. 6

Gillian Brown, like May and Caputi, makes the argument that women were
contained in the domestic sphere during the Cold War to help tame nuclear
anxiety and ensure biological and ideological reproduction. Brown, however,
also focuses on the bomb shelter as part of a larger ideology of survival by
accrual of property. Nuclear shelter, Brown contends, follows a nineteenth-
century doctrine of possessive individualism that equates freedom with pos-
sessions. Stockpiling and the construction of bombshelters during the Cold
War were an extension of a long tradition of the continuation of existence by
virtue of proprietorship. 7 Elizabeth Walker Mechling and Jay Mechling sug-
gest that civil defense propaganda attempted to domesticate nuclear fallout by
linking it to the banalities of domestic everyday life. Like other nuclear-culture
critics, they describe how the bomb shelter discourse emphasized the civic
duty of survival and how such survival was firmly centered in images of do-
mesticity. "Americans would come to understand the fallout shelter issue in
terms of the family and of the family home," they argue. "Government rhetors
attempted to exploit this 'intertextuality' between images of the home and im-
ages of the fallout shelter." 8

Spenser Weart writes that while bomb shelter owners (or at least the ones
that survived a nuclear blast) were portrayed in the media as "new frontiers-
man who could venture forth after the bomb," the mention of shelters did little
to comfort people, and instead helped to remind them of the potential dangers
of nuclear war. 9 Weart suggests that the civic defense propaganda surrounding

Living With the Bomb: The Retreat to the Suburban Bomb Shelter

the bomb shelter did little to concretize how people would survive nuclear
destruction. Instead bomb shelters were depicted "as architecture, either empty
or housing deliberately bland and impassive people . . . The shelter debate
drove home the idea of nuclear war as an indescribable catastrophe, while
reinforcing murky associations with fantasies of victimization and survival,
but it did little to bring the vague imagery into focus." 10

Finally, Bryan Taylor explores the critical relationship between home and
work sites in nuclear weapons organization. He discovers that it is "maintained
through a series of related practices in both spheres" and that "inevitable con-
tradictions between the images are alternately engaged, distorted, and de-
ferred."" Taylor contends that exploring the competing tensions between
"home-place" and "field-site" are essential for nuclear-culture studies. My study
attempts to do just that, as I reveal how bomb shelter marketers framed the
shelter as a potentially pleasant addition to the suburban home that correlated
with American values of consumerism, prosperity, and individualism, while at
the same time bomb shelter rhetoric masked the inherent purpose of the bomb
shelter in order to assuage the dread and panic of nuclear war.

Living in the Dream and the Nightmare

During the postwar era, Americans were faced with two contradictory re-
alities. Ironically, Americans' lives and property seemed to be imperiled by
forces beyond their control at a time when many were enjoying a new au-
tonomy. On one hand, most middle-class Americans were experiencing an eco-
nomic prosperity that granted them enough purchasing power to create new
lives in the suburbs. On the other hand, Americans were threatened with the
terror of ultimate and complete nuclear destruction.

The American middle-class in the fifties and early sixties was riding the
wave of prosperity that followed World War II. Unlike Europe and Japan, no
violence had erupted on American soil, so little economic and architectural
rejuvenation was necessary. Wartime technology not only ensured American
victory, but enabled American mass production after the war to thrive, creating
huge markets of consumption. "It was thrilling to know, absolutely know,"
explains historian Loren Baritz, "that the next move would be to a private house,
from the city to the green suburbs, that the new job would not only pay the bills
but bring respect, and that the growing number of children would get the sort
of education that would propel then into even more affluence." 12

American families confidently moved into the nineteen million colonial
and ranch-style houses built after 1945. By the end of the fifties, one-third of
America's population was suburban. About one million suburban houses were
built in 1946, while in 1950 a staggering 1.7 million new houses sprang up in
suburbs around the country. From 1950 to 1970 the suburban population doubled

Janna Jones

from 36 million to 74 million. 13 "To many Americans," writes Clifford Clark,
"this remarkable house boom appeared at the time to be a reaffirmation of the
American Dream of prosperity and security." 14 Growing American suburbs
seemed to embody the production-line ingenuity of the war, and families ev-
erywhere sought the comfort, safety and satisfaction of the American dream in
a preassembled package. Possession of a home, for millions of postwar Ameri-
cans, was the evidence of property that, since Adam Smith and John Locke,
had served as a marker of individualism and freedom. The builder of Levittown
saw the suburbs as an assurance that America would never become a commu-
nist country. "No man," Bill Levitt boasted, "who owns his own house and lot
can be a Communist. He has too much to do." 15

Yet, an uneasiness shadowed the dream, for nestled alongside prosperity
was the potential for nuclear annihilation. Less than a decade had passed since
the Enola Gay had dropped an atomic bomb on the Japanese in 1945. The
destruction at Hiroshima was only the beginning of America's awareness of
the bomb. In September of 1949, an American reconnaissance plane sampled
the stratosphere and reported an unusually high level of radioactivity, indicat-
ing that the Soviets had set off an atomic bomb. 16 On the first of March 1954,
the first hydrogen bomb exploded at Bikini in the Marshall Islands, a thousand
times more powerful than the bomb at Hiroshima. One hundred miles east of
Bikini, Japanese fishermen watched the explosion. Within two weeks, most of
the fishing crew became extremely ill; many of them died from cancer-like
symptoms within the year. The atomic bomb dropped on Hiroshima had de-
stroyed life at its epicenter, but radiation from the hydrogen bomb could kill
from a hundred miles away. 17 The public realized that the hydrogen bomb
could obliterate an entire city, perhaps even an entire state. "At least some
thoughtful Americans of the late 1940s, then, grappled for the first time with
the ultimate question," writes historian Paul Boyer, "what meaning can one's
individual life have when all human life might vanish at any time?" 18

This immediately and dramatically altered the relationship between America
and Russia, and set the stage for a Cold War characterized by paranoia and fear
of oblivion. During the summer of 1961, with the world focused on the Berlin
Wall, Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev became petulant over the presence of
NATO troops in Berlin. On September 1, a huge fireball rose over Russia, as
Khrushchev abruptly ended the three-year bilateral moratorium on nuclear test-
ing. He warned the United States of forthcoming 50-100 megaton warheads
powerful enough to ignite Vermont. 19 President Kennedy promised that he
would let every American know "what steps he can take without delay to pro-
tect his family in case of attack". 20 On September 7, 1961, Life published a
letter from Kennedy urging Americans to read about and construct fallout shel-

Living With the Bomb: The Retreat to the Suburban Bomb Shelter

ters for protection. The article following Kennedy's letter included simple blue-
prints for bomb shelters that could be built underneath an existing house. Some
middle-class Americans complied by returning to a familiar patriotic psycho-
sis of war production. Like the building of factories, war machines and atomic
bombs, constructing bomb shelters could help ensure America's survival.

Trying to suppress their bomb anxiety, many Americans attempted to ig-
nore the threat of possible destruction resulting from an atomic invasion. "Al-
though the nature of the disaster has been stated over and over again, most of
us act as though we had never heard of it," wrote John Ely Burchard, the Dean
of the School of Humanities and Social Sciences at MIT in 1954. "This is not,
in the present state of affairs, a position to be proud of. To say we are bored
with the hydrogen bomb is simply inane." 21 Americans were not bored with
the threat of unequivocal destruction. They were simply unable to imagine it.
The destruction during World War II had not occurred on American soil and
Hiroshima was a faraway nightmare. Public safety films focused on the min-
utes building up to destruction but avoided showing the devastation itself.

Some people. did try to cope with the knowledge of the hydrogen bomb by
building a shelter under or adjacent to their homes. The home the symbol of
prosperity, safety, success, and permanence had been the material evidence
of the American dream. The fallout shelter threatened to dismantle the security
that the suburban home symbolized. "Safety seemed beyond grasp," explains
historian Tom Engelhart. "However narrowly an exclusionary line might be
drawn around the suburban family, something threatening was already inside." 22
The home with a bomb shelter contained both hope and despair, beginnings
and endings, safety and peril.

Yet, importantly, there were other motives for building a shelter underneath
the home, reasons that marked financial well-being as well as hope for a pros-
perous future. An addition of a new room, bomb shelter or not, required a
surplus of financial resources and was a sign of prestige. A finished bomb
shelter increased a home's value on the real estate market, and the added room
helped to accommodate the anticipated the needs of a growing family, for it
could be used as a playroom or study. However, unlike typical additions, the
shelter's perceived purpose was protection against death. Its construction was
not only a symbolic marker of optimism like most home building, but also an
addition of darkness. Still, it marked a certain trust in the future because shel-
ter owners were told that in the event of a nuclear blast, their families, unlike
families without them, would have a 97 percent chance of surviving.

Yet, despite such an optimistic prediction, not all suburban home owners
began digging. Marketers had to work hard to glamorize the bomb shelter. The
shelters, they discovered, had to have aesthetic and practical appeal to con-
sumers and foster the yearning for acquisition.

Janna Jones

Marketing the Shelter

While Americans were coping with divergent ideologies of prosperity and
destruction, bomb shelter promoters were constructing a marketing strategy
that appealed to both the functional and aesthetic motives of home owners.
Bomb shelters were a difficult product to sell because they would fulfill a need
only at a time of nuclear destruction, a need people did not want to consider.
Shelters were therefore promoted as attractive additions to the home. Middle-
class materialism suppressed, or at least disguised, the purpose of the shelter
and the destruction it suggested. By creating designer facades of prosperity
and comfort, marketers made the shelter less abhorrent. Yet, the suppression of
possible destruction was the shelter designer's ultimate purpose, so the terror
could never completely disappear. The seams of such promotion were always
under threat of being exposed because of the designer's constant aesthetic at-
tention to hiding the shelter's function.

In 1960, Mayor Richard J. Daley proclaimed the first week of January to be
American Institute of Design Week in Chicago in conjunction with the "Fam-
ily Room of Tomorrow," an exhibit of upscale bomb shelters. Created as a
public service, shoppers first saw the "Family Room of Tomorrow" in the lobby
of the Merchandise Mart in Chicago. According to Marc T. Nielson, the chief
designer of the exhibit:

Anyone bent on pressing the button to trigger an atomic war will
pause when he realizes that a great many of our people can be
saved from atomic fallout while he himself might not . . . Instead
of facing the task with fear that an attack will surely come, we
feel that if we do our job well, it will never come about. In this
way we, too, contribute to the cause of peace. 23

Nielson believed that interior designers could contribute to peace by de-
signing attractive bomb shelters. Whether the bomb shelter would actually pro-
tect families against radiation and death was not the major concern. The vision
of hundreds of thousands of families burying themselves in their back yards
was a symbol of a unified front against a potential air strike. The American
Institute of Design surmised that America would be less likely to be attacked if
hostile forces were unable to kill people. Shelter promoters linked an attractive
bomb shelter design with a larger Cold War brand of paranoid logic, yet cer-
tainly they had other motives besides saving the world from destruction. They
also had discovered a new market in which to profit.

For bomb shelters to become a form of national security and a profitable
enterprise, Americans first had to be convinced to buy a shelter. Shelter mar-
keters and designers supplemented the motive of protection with an aesthetic

Living With the Bomb: The Retreat to the Suburban Bomb Shelter

incentive. To entice the public to buy shelters, designers introduced aestheti-
cally pleasing and opulent designs that would enhance the public's recently
constructed suburban homes. Nielson wanted the public to become interested
in fallout protection. In order to accomplish this he proposed that:

The shelter must be made attractive. A room constructed to all
requirements of OCDM (Office of Civil Defense and Mobiliza-
tion), with no use except in extreme emergency, cannot easily be
sold to the public, particularly on such a grim basis. A dual pur-
pose room should do much to stimulate more interest in fallout
shelters. A room that can be used permanently would have more
appeal than a secluded refuge which one would approach with
dread. 24

"The Family Room of Tomorrow" reveals several contradictions at work in
bomb shelter promotion. The cultural contradictions that manifest themselves
suggest the ways that promoters managed and marketed some of the discrep-
ancies of the period. In the 1950s, the term "family room" expressed conflict-
ing visions of the home and family as well as a design style recently incorpo-
rated into the layout of the popular suburban ranch home. In their campaign to
sell products for the family and home, appliance makers and building-material
manufacturers presented a new model of middle-class life during the late 1940s
and early 1950s. "At the center of this model," writes Clark, "was the image of
the family as the focus of fun and recreation." 2 " A family room/bomb shelter
suggested a simple integration of a shelter into the "family lifestyle" character-
ized by the architecture of the suburban home. It implied family interaction,
barbecues, and Saturday afternoon recreation. Yet Engelhart suggests that the
family enclosed in their suburban home not only invoked images of fun but
also security. "In the ranch house, the mom protected by her working husband
was to raise a new generation of children, fortified by the products of abun-
dance against all terrors." 26 The image of the family and the family room in
bomb shelters summoned visions of both fun and safety; while in conflict with
one another, these ideals fused together were persuasive promotional images.

By naming the bomb shelter "the family room of tomorrow," promoters
veiled the fear of destruction and "no tomorrows" by invoking images of
progress and the future. Yet, the name also challenged the notion of progress,
for it implied that a nuclear attack was possible as soon as tomorrow, giving
urgency to the project and to the public's need to build shelters. The incongru-
ous representations of leisure and survival were the most powerful conflicts
contained within the recreational room. Had the family room of tomorrow been
necessary in an actual nuclear attack, the idealized space for youthful fun and
recreation would recede into a space of survival where the whole family, theo-

Janna Jones

retically, could live for weeks. The images that the promotional literature de-
picted were of people merely extending their ideal family time into another
room of their suburban house, yet the emergency family room would have
been a space where the family recreated their existence after nuclear attack.

Bomb shelter designers fashioned images that appealed to suburban aes-
thetics and satisfied potential buyers' desires for comfort, domesticity and pros-
perity. At the same time, the shelters adhered to specifications of the Office of
Civil and Defense Mobilization. The designers appealed to the dual motives of
possible bomb shelter owners. Homeowners wanted to be safe, but they also
wanted an aesthetically pleasing environment that looked smart in relationship
to the rest of their ranch-style homes. Nielson's design used subdued and natu-
ral colors. Designer touches of furnishings "in fabrics of muted tones of red,
brown, and gray, and Dunbar walnut furniture and paneling" created an ambi-
ence of warmth and suggested an image of nature. The ceiling was painted sky
blue, creating the illusion of open space and the outdoors. Food was stored
behind revolving walnut doors. Interestingly, a world map covered the doors
as a "decorative interest." It seems an odd focal point for a bomb shelter, per-
haps serving as a gesture of assurance that the world could have survived a
nuclear war. A bicycle was included in the design as well. It served two poten-
tial functions; it could be used for exercise and to pump fresh air into the room,
though it is uncertain where the fresh air would have come from.

Other designers also masked the function of shelters with suburban aesthet-
ics. Jack Rees, for example, found ways to conceal water, an essential ingredi-
ent during an emergency. Rather than storing it in a closet, Rees put the water
in colorful bottles displayed on eight shelves for decorative effect. Another
designer, Roy Beal, offered a shelter that posed as a library. Beal's design
concealed all essential equipment behind panels of walnut to create "a fallout
shelter that has all the appearances of a library-study." 27 False book fronts
concealed storage space within the room, and on another wall a false book
motif on panels hid fold-down beds. Potential shelter owners were presented
at once with attractive shelter designs and with a means of coping with the
threat of desolation and isolation. The fallout shelter, like the consciousness of
the consumer, was to be fully prepared for nuclear attack, yet the consumers'
fears and the shelter's provisions were to remain concealed, as if the threat did
not exist.

Perhaps one of the most peculiar shelter design features was the frequent
use of the television set as the centerpiece of the room. A familiar suburban
icon, the television set in the bomb shelter constructed a sense of spaciousness
and connection to the outside world, yet a realization of its uselessness in the
event of a nuclear attack would not have escaped either the designers or the
potential buyers. As a focal point, the TV epitomized the contradictions of

Living With the Bomb: The Retreat to the Suburban Bomb Shelter

utility and aesthetic desire that the bomb shelter, as we have seen, represented.
For in the case of the TV set, the motive of survival was nearly buried and the
desire for attractive surroundings and prestige was placed in the center of the
room.

While the televisions in the bomb shelter designs were battery generated, it
is difficult to imagine a television station broadcasting either emergency news
or / Love Lucy after a full-blown nuclear attack. Nonetheless, the television
occupied as central a place in the shelter as it did in the world above it. In 1960,
the television was still a relatively new phenomenon which was redefining the
domestic environment and redirecting the gaze within the home. As furniture,
the TV set created aesthetic quandaries. Home magazines sought to master it,
for "television was no longer a focal point of the room," writes Lynn Spigel,
"rather it was a technological eyesore, something which threatened to destabi-
lize the unities of interior decor." 28 So why did interior designers, aware of the
desire to conceal the television, include it as a focal point of their fallout shel-
ter design?

A fallout shelter, for practical purposes of protection was essentially a cave,
completely isolated from the rest of the house and the rest of the world. At
odds with this image of the cave was the ranch-style architecture of the period,
which idealized the illusion of space. Home magazines advised readers on
tactics that would make the home appear as if it included the public sphere.
Landscape paintings and wallpaper rendering nature or exotic vistas encour-
aged the illusion of space inside the home. Picture windows and sliding glass
doors also simulated spaciousness. 29 In order for the fallout shelter to resemble
the rest of the home and the images of home that families desired, designers
attempted to create a similar illusion of space in the shelter. Obviously, it was
impossible to place windows or sliding glass doors in the shelter. By bringing
the notion of the outside to the inside, the shelter fostered the illusion of space,
and its design conformed to the rest of the house.

In a sense, the bomb shelter designs that included television sets magnified
the features of the houses above them. The model shelters mimicked as best
they could the aesthetic motifs depicted in the typical ranch-style home, and
they pointed to the seclusion fostered by suburban life. Placing the television
as the focal point of the fallout shelter conjured not only a possibility of spa-
ciousness, but assured a connection with a larger world that, as Spigel argues,
had become one of its central functions in the growth of suburbia. Public life
was created in the suburbs by private ownership, and the television set helped
generate the illusive connections of community within the walls of the home.
"There was an odd sense of connection and disconnection in this new subur-
bia," Spigel writes, "an infinite series of separate, but identical homes, strung
together like Christmas tree lights on a tract with one central switch." 30 That

10

Janna Jones

switch of course was the communications complex, most importantly the tele-
vision set. Understanding the irony of the functionless bomb shelter television
highlights the aesthetic desires and downplays the motive of utility for both
designers and potential owners. In addition, the TV set in the bomb shelter
serves as a magnified example of the isolation that existed in suburban life.

Conclusion

The discourse of bomb shelter promoters appeared in the face of a potential
nuclear nightmare, expressing the disjointed logic of the American Dream that
surfaced in the decades of the 1950s and 1960s. The construction of bomb
shelters revealed how invested some middle-class Americans had become in a
growing suburban lifestyle and how irrational the scene of their dreams had
become. The American dream of home ownership became profoundly and
paradoxically changed when the bomb shelter was built underneath the home.
Dreams of security and prosperity became nightmares of potential loss and
devastation. This disparity challenges the myths of postwar suburban Utopias,
now so pervasive and sentimental at the end of the twentieth century. A rising
income, a private house and car were not sufficient ingredients for the good
life in the post-war period, argues Loren Baritz. "It was as if the solution, or
near-solution, of the economic equation," Baritz writes, "revealed an underly-
ing psychological crisis." 31 The accumulation of material delights, suburban-
ites discovered, did not solve their problems within the home or outside of it.

The bomb shelter is one material manifestation of that crisis. No matter
how nicely designed or how secluded, no one living above a shelter built in
anticipation of nuclear devastation dreamt only of good fortune. The owner of
a bomb shelter could never forget that without warning the American dream
could disappear completely and forever. While the suburban house represented
the desire of individualism, the bomb shelter dwelling beneath it represented
the irrationality of that dream. Rather than encouraging Americans to collec-
tively confront the nuclear threat, the promoters of the shelters sold the doc-
trine of commercialized and privatized survival. If a nuclear attack had oc-
curred, the American family in their bomb shelter would have waited out the
end of the world in much the same way they lived everyday life, separated
from their suburban neighbors. In 1961 President Kennedy encouraged Ameri-
cans to bury themselves underneath their carefully trimmed suburban shrubs.
Thirty-five years later, we may perceive the building of a bomb shelter as an
irrational act, but it was rational when framed within the logic of individual-
ism, consumerism and prosperity of the Cold War era.

Most of us have buried the shelter in a graveyard of nostalgia. As the Cold
War began to defrost, bomb shelter owners started using them as convenient
storage units, wine cellars, dark rooms and storage spaces for the forgotten and

11

Living With the Bomb: The Retreat to the Suburban Bomb Shelter

neglected. Around the country Raggedy Ann dolls, transistor radios, hi-fis,
Life magazines, and bunk beds lie in the darkness of shelters. The bomb shelter
preserves and entombs the life style, the status, the dreams of consumption and
the self-improvement mindset of the fifties and early sixties. Marguerite
Stufflebean and her husband still live above their bomb shelter in suburban
Tucson. Stocked with canned water, army cots, emergency food and a Geiger
counter, the shelter, a showcase promoting civil defense in the late 1950s, was
free, courtesy of the federal government. "Eventually, it ended up being used
for storage," Stufflebean said. "It was good for that, free of moisture and even
bugs. Lizards seem to like it though." 32

Protected from the elements, the artifacts remaining inside bomb shelters
are nearly perfectly preserved. Tangible evidence of a time that has slipped
away, the entombed material culture of the Cold War may someday be discov-
ered by future generations of archaeologists. Like the antiquated merchandise
they often store, bomb shelters mass-produced a promise of security and indi-
vidualism. They promoted a design for a lifestyle in a consumer society that
differentiated some from others drawing lines between people based on eco-
nomic divisions, and confidently affirming the orders of suburban life. Today,
the shelters remain a persistent reminder, now conspicuously viewed with nos-
talgia and sentimentality, of how Americans sought to preserve a lifestyle that
could, and eventually did, slip away. That world was not lost to the bomb, but
to the necessarily changing tastes and products of a consumer society.

Endnotes

' Bruce Watson, "We Couldn't Run, So We Hoped We Could Hide," Smithsonian,
25 (April 1994), 47.

2 Roland Marchand, Advertising the American Dream: Making Way for Modernity,
1920-1940 (Berkeley, 1985), 166.

3 Micheal Schudson, Advertising, the Uneasy Persuasion: Its Dubious Impact on
American Society (New York, 1984), 166.

4 Guy Oaks, The Imaginary War: Civil Defense and American Cold War Culture
(New York, 1994), 117.

5 Elaine Tyler May, "Explosive Issues: Sex, Women and the Bomb," Recasting
America: Cultural Politics in the Age of the Bomb, ed. Lary May (Chicago. 1989). 163.

6 Jane Caputi, Gossips, Gargons, and Crones: The Fates of the Earth (Santa Fe,
1993), 101.

7 Gillian Brown, "Nuclear Survival: Sequence and Survival," Arms and the Woman:
War, Gender, and Literary Representation, eds. H.M Cooper, A. A. Munich, & S.M
Squier ( Chapel Hill, 1989), 291.

12

Janna Jones

8 Elizabeth Walker Mechling and Jay Mechling, "The Campaign for Civil Defense
and the Struggle to Naturalize the Bomb," Western Journal of Speech Communication,
55 (Spring 1991), 115.

9 Spenser Weart, Nuclear Fear: A History of Images (Cambridge, 1988), 256.

10 Ibid., 257.

1 ' Bryan Taylor, "Home Zero: Images of Home and Field," Western Journal of Com-
munication, 61 (Spring 1997), 214.

12 Loren Baritz, The Good Life: The Meaning of Success for the Middle Class (New
York, 1982), 195.

13 Ibid., 198.

14 Clifford E. Clark, "Ranch-House Suburbia: Ideals and Realities," in May, Recast-
ing America, 171.

13 David Halberstam, The Fifties (New York: Ballentine Books, 1993), 132.

16 Halberstam, 25.

17 Halberstam, 347.

18 Paul Boyer, By the Bomb's Early Light: American Thought and Culture at the
Dawn of the Atomic Age (New York, 1985), 279.

19 Watson, 53.

20 Ibid.

21 John Ely Burchard, "Architecture in the Atomic Age," Architectural Record 116
(December 1954), 123.

22 Tom Engelhart, The End of Victory Culture (New York, 1995), 106.

23 "The Family Room of Tomorrow," Interior Design 31 (January 1960). 1 14.

24 Ibid.

25 Clark, 172.

26 Engelhart, 106.

27 "The Family Room of Tomorrow," 1 15.

28 Lynn Spigel, "Installing the Television Set: Popular Discourses on Television and
Domestic Space," Camera Obscura, 16 (January 1988), 33.

29 Ibid., 15.

30 Ibid., 14.

31 Baritz, 204.

32 Michelle DeArmond, The Arizona Daily Star, June 1, 1996, 8D.

13

Popular Fiction as Propaganda:

Cold War Ideology in Ian Fleming's

From Russia, with Love

Gary Hoppenstand

Michigan State University

Only a handful of literary protagonists found in popular culture (and spe-
cifically in the various genres of popular fiction) have achieved a larger cul-
tural identity that extends beyond the pages of their original print sources.
Jerry Siegel's and Joe Shuster's Man of Steel comic book superhero. Super-
man, is one of these characters, as is Edgar Rice Burroughs' pulp magazine
King of the Jungle, Tarzan. Certainly, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's world-famous
consulting detective, Sherlock Holmes, must be included in this select group,
as must Ian Fleming's intrepid Cold War spy, the dashing and suave James
Bond, Agent 007.

Since popular fiction is fundamentally political in nature ' if "political"
can be defined as the adherence to a particular governmental system regarding
the implementation of larger ideological beliefs and values then James Bond,
of all the archetypal heroes in Western popular culture, can be considered as
one of the most political of characters. Indeed, regarding the question of
Fleming's political intent in writing the James Bond adventures, noted author
and critic Anthony Burgess suggests "There was a patriotic motive hiding be-
hind Fleming's primary desire, which was to entertain." : And, with but a few
exceptions, 3 whatever the political motivations that lurked behind Fleming's
efforts, readers and critics alike were greatly enamored of the James Bond
adventures. Burgess himself claims that Bond "has the stuff of immortality in
him," 4 while Umberto Eco legitimizes Fleming's work by devoting a lengthy
scholarly essay, "The Narrative Structure in Fleming," to a close, structural
analysis of the Bond adventures. 5 Kingsley Amis wrote an entire book-length
study on the James Bond phenomenon entitled The James Bond Dossier, which.
Amis informs his readers, began as a modest five thousand-word article. It
blossomed into an extensive monograph when Amis discovered the deceptive
complexity of Fleming's writing. Amis states in his Preface:

Part of my motive for writing about them [the Bond adventures]
was my conviction . . . that they were more than simple
cloak-and -dagger stories with a bit of fashionable affluence and

14

Gary Hoppenstand

sex thrown in. I suspected that, on the contrary, I would find them
to be just as complex and to have just as much in them as more
ambitious kinds of fiction. I was right. 6

This essay, then, seeks to examine more closely one of Ian Fleming's James
Bond novels, From Russia, with Love (1957), in an attempt to investigate how
the spy story served as effective political propaganda during the Cold War era
in Great Britain and the United States. This essay will also offer several defini-
tions of the spy story and discuss the social-psychological function of spy fic-
tion, as well as provide a specific analysis of the various thematic elements in
From Russia, with Love that identify the novel as a work of obvious political
intent. Finally, it will be suggested that there exist several powerful, specific
narrative schemes in From Russia, with Love that shape the ubiquitous and
archetypal "good" versus "evil" story into an emotionally compelling and cul-
turally dynamic example of popular culture propaganda.

Without a doubt, Ian Fleming's James Bond novels were among the most
popular and influential spy stories to appear in America and Great Britain dur-
ing the Cold War period. 7 But what exactly constitutes a "spy story"? The
editors of the reference book Spy Fiction: A Connoisseur's Guide argue that
the spy story is a difficult genre to define, largely "because it is so flexible it
can incorporate elements from the adventure novel, the romance and the de-
tective story: it may even include them all." 8 Editors McCormick and Fletcher
go on to state that the spy story "dramatizes events," offering the reader a
highly introspective fiction which examines how different people confront dif-
ferent types of conflict. 9 Conversely, John G. Cawelti and Bruce A. Rosenberg,
in their monograph The Spy Story, see a considerably more narrowed defini-
tion of the genre. "We are . . . less interested in the idea of the 'thriller,'" state
Cawelti and Rosenburg, "than in the more specific notion of the spy story,
which we define as a story whose protagonist has some primary connection
with espionage." ,0 Cawelti and Rosenburg claim that the twentieth century is
the "Age of Clandestinity," and that spy fiction is a type of literary response to,
or narrative symptom of, the collective paranoia embraced by a society that
requires clandestine acts to preserve its national security. They also claim that
the spy hero, such as Ian Fleming's James Bond, is "one of our [society's]
favorite mythical heroes." "

The most popular writer of spy-fiction-as-propaganda during the early years
of the Cold War was James Bond's creator, Ian Fleming. Fleming's experience
in British military intelligence work during World War II provided him with
essential background material for his James Bond adventures, as well as so-
lidifying his political views. As Fleming's biographer, John Pearson, states in
his The Life of Ian Fleming, "Everyone agrees that Fleming rapidly developed

15

Popular Fiction as Propaganda: Cold War Ideology in Ian Fleming's From Russia With Love

a surprising feeling for the Navy. The oddly persuasive trappings of the Admi-
ralty intensified that same pre- 19 14 brand of now unfashionable patriotism
which he passed on to James Bond." 12 Following the war, Fleming became the
manager of the Kemsley newspapers' foreign news office. Anthony Burgess
believes that Fleming's skills as a professional journalist served him well when
he began writing fiction:

It is important to remember that, like Daniel Defoe, he [Fleming]
was a journalist before he was a writer of fiction, and a good jour-
nalist too. The clarity of his style in the novels proclaims this, the
apt image, the eye for detail, the interest in world affairs on the
one hand and, on the other, the fascination with the minutiae of
everyday life. Because he is a best-seller, it is easy to forget that
Fleming is a distinguished writer of English prose. 13

Fleming's first novel, Casino Royale, published in 1954, also featured the first
appearance of James Bond. Fleming would go on to write eleven more Bond
novels and two collections of Bond short stories. Regarding the influence that
Fleming's work had on the society that read his stories, critic Ann S. Boyd
states in her monograph, The Devil with James BondV.

Regardless of what anyone says now and whatever significance
people might consider the Bond phenomenon to have a century
from now, there can be little doubt concerning the impact it made
when it struck the cultural mainland with full-fledged hurricane
force in the 1960s. The ubiquitous symbol of secret agent 007
was found everywhere from bread and bubblegum to men's fash-
ions and toiletries, from parlor games to children's dolls and pa-
per dolls, from his own image to that of imitations in books, films,
and television series. I4

Fleming, however, did not begin his literary career as a best-selling writer
of spy fiction. The sales of his first five Bond novels Casino Royale, Live
and Let Die (1954), Moonraker (1955), Diamonds Are Forever (1956), and
From Russia, with Love (1957) were moderate at best, and at one point, as
did Sir Arthur Conan Doyle with Sherlock Holmes, Fleming considered termi-
nating Bond's literary career (at the conclusion of the fifth novel, From Russia,
with Love, the reader is unsure if Bond will live or die). But Fleming did con-
tinue writing and publishing Bond adventures, resurrecting the intrepid British
spy from near death in the sixth Bond novel, Doctor No (1958). Following the
growing commercial success of both From Russia, with Love and Doctor No,
Fleming went on to publish Goldfinger (1959), Thunderball (1961), The Spy
Who Loved Me (1962), On Her Majesty's Secret Service (1963), You Only Live

16

Gary Hoppenstand

Twice (1964), and The Man with the Golden Gun (1965), as well as the collec-
tion For Your Eyes Only (1960). Each newly released book gained greater popu-
larity with a Cold War readership and elevated Fleming to the national and
international best-seller lists. The collection Octopussy and The Living Day-
lights (1966) was released posthumously following Fleming's death in 1964.
In retrospect, James Bond dominated Ian Fleming's writing. Outside of the
Bond canon, he published just one thriller, The Diamond Smugglers (1957),
and a children's book, Chitty-Chitty-Bang-Bang (1964-65), as well as two non-
fiction works, Thrilling Cities (1963) and (posthumously) Ian Fleming Intro-
duces Jamaica (1965).

In their book Bond and Beyond: The Political Career of a Popular Hero,
Tony Bennett and Janet Woollacott support the argument that James Bond was
a political hero for the middle class. They claim the novel that transformed
Bond "from a character within a set of fictional texts into a household name"
was From Russia, with Love, when it was serialized in the Daily Express. 13 As
Bennett and Woollacott state,

Unsurprisingly, perhaps, the network of cultural and ideological
concerns Bond served to condense and articulate in the late 1950s
centered most closely on the relations between East and West,
relations which had become particularly tense as a consequence
of Russia's invasion of Hungary in 1956. Bond, that is to say,
functioned first and foremost, although not exclusively, as a Cold
War hero, an exemplary representative of the virtues of Western
capitalism triumphing over the evils of Eastern communism. ' 6

Bennett's and Woollacott's point is reinforced by the fact that one of Fleming's
most famous fans was John F. Kennedy, l7 who, as President of the United
States, was the most important leader of the Free World during the Cold War
period. Though it can perhaps be debated whether Fleming's James Bond ad-
ventures are "intentional propaganda," 18 what cannot be debated is the fact
that these spy stories are effective propaganda. Indeed, of all the Bond novels,.
From Russia, with Love offers the most obvious example of how Fleming used
the spy story to create a type of Cold War-era literature of propaganda.

What Fleming did in From Russia, with Love that made it so powerful as
propaganda was to place the fantastic, larger-than-life pulp elements of the
story in a realistic frame. Fleming announces to his reader in an Author's Note
at the beginning of the novel that the Soviet organization called SMERSH
(which, Fleming notes, is a contraction for Smiert Spionam, or "Death to Spies")
was a real agency. Fleming then offers detailed statistics regarding the opera-
tional strength of SMERSH in 1956 (when the novel was written), as well as a
statement that the setting in the novel for the infamous meeting of spies in

17

Popular Fiction as Propaganda: Cold War Ideology in Ian Fleming's From Russia With Love

Moscow is accurate. Fleming goes on to claim that many of the top Soviet
officials at this meeting also exist. But, if we take Fleming's word regarding
these professed statements of accuracy, he nevertheless interjects into his "au-
thentic" portrayal of Soviet espionage an aggregation of wonderfully pulp-like
villains and plot devices. For example, he places the action of the later portion
of the novel on the Orient Express, a favorite setting for writers of thrillers.

The plot of From Russia, with Love is a rather simple one. The Soviets want
a public relations victory over British Intelligence. They select James Bond,
who has been a troublesome thorn in their sides in the past, as their target.
They plan to entice Bond to help a beautiful Russian woman to defect with a
top secret decipher machine, and then to photograph Bond secretly as he makes
love to the woman. Their scheme concludes with Bond's murder at the hands
of SMERSH's top assassin.

During the meeting in which the heads of the various departments of the
Soviet espionage bureaucracy devise the strategy for Bond's humiliation and
death, the reader is informed that what is hoped for in this "konspiratsia" is an
attack against the British Intelligence's overweening sense of morality. As Lieu-
tenant-General Vozdvishensky, a representative of the Soviet Foreign Minis-
try, tells his colleagues at the meeting table: "these men and women [of British
Intelligence] continue to do this dangerous work [with little reward.] It is curi-
ous. It is perhaps the Public School and University tradition. The love of ad-
venture ... Of course, most of their strength lies in the myth the myth of
Scotland Yard, of Sherlock Holmes, of the Secret Service." ' 9 In this speech,
not only does Fleming pat himself on the back (since he was a former opera-
tive in British Intelligence), but he also articulates what, specifically, the Brit-
ish offer the Western world a heritage of justice and law. This heritage, or
myth as Vozdvishensky terms it, is what the Soviets wish to destroy along with
Bond, the agent of justice. Fleming thus polarizes his political novel along a
moral spectrum of "good" and "evil," in the process creating a literature of
propaganda. Standing in opposition to law and justice (British Intelligence)
are the agents of cruelty, torture, and political chaos (Soviet Intelligence).

Perhaps no other passage in the novel better summarizes Fleming's attempt
to portray the evilness of the Soviet State than the following. In Chapter 3, the
Head of Personnel of the Soviet M.G.B. expresses these thoughts:

A great deal of killing has to be done in the U.S.S.R., not because
the average Russian is a cruel man, although some of their races
are among the crudest peoples in the world, but as an instrument
of policy. People who act against the State are enemies of the
State, and the State has no room for enemies. There is too much
to do for precious time to be allotted to them, and, if they are a

18

Gary Hoppenstand

persistent nuisance, they get killed. In a country with a popula-
tion of 200,000,000, you can kill many thousands a year without
missing them. If, as happened in the two biggest purges, a million
people have to be killed in one year, this is also not a grave loss. 20

Fleming intends the monstrous brutality of this character's logic to reflect
Western society's fear of Stalinist Russia. Fleming wants his reader to feel a
strong sense of revulsion for the M.G.B. officer's attitude, which, his readers
understand, is so alien to British and American sensitivities.

In Chapter 24 of From Russia, with Love, Bond is traveling on the Orient
Express and escorting the beautiful female Russian agent who (he believes) is
defecting to the West with a much prized Spektor deciphering machine. As the
train comes to a halt between lines of rusting locomotives captured from the
Germans during World War II, Bond views the wreckage, thinking "nostalgi-
cally and unreasonably of the excitement and turmoil of the hot war, compared
with his own underground skirmishings since the war had turned cold." 2I James
Bond, as this scene indicates, is a Cold Warrior who longs for the days of the
Hot War. What Bond's creator attempts to accomplish in his spy fiction is to
reestablish in the postwar world the moral contrasts that were so readily evi-
dent during World War II.

In From Russia, with Love, Fleming depicts the Cold War between the West-
ern Democracies (especially British Democracy) and Eastern Communism
(especially Soviet Communism) in overtly propagandistic terms. Fleming, in
fact, devised an elaborate metaphor in the novel that exemplifies the evil So-
viet empire. This metaphor was structured around the novel's three principal
antagonists: Red Grant, SMERSH's chief assassin; Rosa Klebb, Head of Otdyel
II (which is SMERSH's Department of Operations and Executions); and the
Russian chess master, Kronsteen. These three villains Grant, Klebb, and
Kronsteen are intended by Fleming to symbolize the corrupt "body" of the
Soviet political state.

Donovan "Red" Grant represents the physical body itself. He is described
as the novel opens as looking like a dead man, an apt image since he is a top-
ranking Soviet assassin who possesses no sense of moral conscience. Despite
the magnificent appearance of his "splendid body," his masseuse experiences
feelings of "revulsion" when she is in his presence. The reader is told that there
is cruelty in his face, a "blankness that veiled the very pale blue eyes . . . and
made it look drowned and morgue-like." 22 Grant, who was born from a "mid-
night union between a German professional weight-lifter and a Southern Irish
waitress" (Fleming's British readers would have perceived these two ethnicities
negatively), decides to defect while serving in Berlin with the British army.
Fleming writes: "He [Grant] liked all he heard about the Russians, their brutal-

19

Popular Fiction as Propaganda: Cold War Ideology in Ian Fleming's From Russia With Love

ity, their carelessness of human life, and their guile, and he decided to go over
to them." 23 When he first introduces himself to a Soviet M.G.B. colonel, Grant
proclaims that he is an expert at killing people, that he enjoys killing. After-
wards, in a sort of reverse rags-to-riches story, Red Grant proves himself as a
master assassin, becoming a top operative in SMERSH. Fleming intends Grant
to be a "reverse" James Bond, a spy who has no morality whatsoever and who
possesses no sense of style or grace. He is merely an effective butcher, em-
blematic of the brutal Communist state that employs him.

Rosa Klebb represents the degenerate Soviet soul. When the reader is intro-
duced to Klebb, she is described as looking "toad-like." The reason she is in
charge of Otdyel II is soon made obvious by Fleming. Just as Red Grant enjoys
killing, Rosa Klebb enjoys torturing people. Fleming writes:

It was said that Rosa Klebb would let no torturing take place with-
out her. There was a blood-splattered smock in her office, and a
low camp-stool, and they said that when she was seen scurrying
through the basement passages dressed in the smock and with the
stool in her hand, the word would go round, and even the workers
in SMERSH would hush their words and bend low over their pa-
pers perhaps even cross their fingers in their pockets until she
was reported back in her room. 24

Fleming's inference in this passage is that Klebb is a monster who, like Dracula,
inspires a supernatural dread in others. Klebb, the reader is told, is a freak of
Nature, a sexual "neuter" who displaces her sensual urges by torturing others.
When the beautiful Corporal Tatiana Romanova is recruited by Klebb to be the
bait to entrap James Bond, Klebb informs the young woman that she must do
what she is told, that she must prostitute herself to the British spy. "Your body
belongs to the State," Klebb proclaims. "Since your birth, the State has nour-
ished it. Now your body must work for the State." 2S After Klebb manipulates
Tatiana's sense of obligation to her government by talking to her of patriotism
and duty to her country, the Head of Odytel II, in a horribly comic scene,
attempts to physically seduce the naive Tatiana (Klebb "looked like the oldest
and ugliest whore in the world" in her semi-transparent nightgown, Fleming
writes), who subsequently flees for her life. Fleming's political message is
clear. All that is beautiful in Russia is victimized by Soviet Communism. The
common person, as seen in Tatiana, is made to do hideous and awful things in
the name of the State.

The third Communist villain in From Russia, with Love is Kronsteen, who
represents the cold Soviet brain. Kronsteen is a brilliant strategist, a chess master
who offers his considerable talents to his Soviet overlords. His assignment in
the novel is to plan the operation that will both humiliate and destroy James

20

Gary Hoppenstand

Bond, and ultimately embarrass the British Intelligence community. Consis-
tent with Fleming's hostile view of Soviet Communism, Kronsteen's selection
by his superiors is an apt one, since Kronsteen is totally devoid of human emo-
tion. Fleming writes: "Kronsteen was not interested in human beings not
even in his own children. Nor did the categories of 'good' and 'bad' have a
place in his vocabulary. To him all people were chess pieces. He was only
interested in their reactions to the movements of other pieces." 26

Fleming sets James Bond, the hero of Western Democracy, as a foil or a
contrast to this vile Communist triumvirate. Like Grant, Bond, too, is called
upon to kill in the name of his government, but, unlike Grant, he does not
enjoy killing. Bond also possesses something that Grant will never have, the
qualities of an English gentleman. Toward the end of the novel, when Bond is
escorting Tatiana on the Orient Express, he is joined by Grant, who is imper-
sonating a fellow British operative named Norman Nash (Thinking the name
to be a strange one, Tatiana informs Bond that Nash means "ours" in Russian).
Bond views Grant/Nash as being somewhat boorish. Grant, in fact, lacks the
style and grace of Bond, the public school gentleman. By inference, the Soviet
government, Grant's employer, also lacks style and grace, especially in the
espionage game. Grant's boss, Rosa Klebb, is sexually conflicted. The only
passion she enjoys in life is the torture and death of others. Bond, conversely,
is more of a lover than a killer. His sexual affair with Tatiana is a healthy one,
and is only perverted when Tatiana's Soviet masters attempt to make it so.
"There is not much fun and gaiety in Russia," Tatiana says to Bond, and so
when Bond (the gentlemanly hedonist who embraces the finer things in life)
becomes sexually and emotionally involved with her, Tatiana subsequently
forsakes her Soviet lifestyle and becomes the happiest she has ever been. And,
at the conclusion of the novel, when Bond kills Grant and defeats Kronsteen's
elaborate scheme, he demonstrates that intellect without human emotion (i.e.
Soviet intellectualism) is wasted intellect.

Therefore if, as Bennett and Woollacott suggest In Bond and Beyond: The
Political Career of a Popular Hero, it can be argued that James Bond was a
symbol of the Cold War era representing Western-style Democracy in conflict
with Eastern-style Communism, what were the specific qualities that Bond
embodied? First and foremost, Bond is a British Public School hero. As An-
thony Burgess suggests, "In Bond there is a powerful vein of puritanism and a
capacity for self-disgust which denies the amorality of his murderous calling
and its sensual compensations." 27 Bond also is a character who possesses nor-
mal human emotions and a capacity to love. His counterparts in From Russia,
with Love Grant, Klebb, and Kronsteen are emotional misfits and socio-
pathic fiends. Finally, Bond is really not unlike the average person. Though he

21

Popular Fiction as Propaganda: Cold War Ideology in Ian Fleming's From Russia With Love

does possess a refined taste for wine, women, and song, his normality is often
contrasted with an assortment of grotesque villains (right out of Dick Tracy or
Batman) who revel in bizarre and inhumane excess and who attempt to destroy
humanity. Fleming's point in From Russia, with Love is quite clear, his mes-
sage an overtly political one. His treatment of the traditional literary arche-
types of "good" and "evil" in the spy story resounds with a propagandistic
motive that helped to fan the hot flames of a cold war.

Indeed, as illustrated in the above discussion, James Bond functioned in
Ian Fleming's popular spy fiction as a larger-than-life political hero who em-
bodied the perceived virtues of Western democracies. The spy story (as refined
by Fleming) offered its readers ideological support for the Western (read: non-
Communist, non-Soviet) political worldview. An ideology is a belief system
typically held by a group of people because of specific components that reflect
that group's interests. 2!S The romanticized spy, such as James Bond, as a per-
sonification of the virtues of post- World War II democracy, often represented
during the Cold War period ideological victories at the expense of the "wicked"
and "evil" Soviet Communists, hence legitimizing for readers the moral supe-
riority of the former and the chaotically destructive nature of the latter. And by
having a protagonist such as James Bond always emerge victorious, the spy
story, as a powerful and effective form of propaganda, proclaimed to its Cold
War-era readers that "good" will always triumph over "evil," Democracy will
always triumph over Communism.

Notes

' In American Fiction in the Cold War (University of Wisconsin Press, 1991). Tho-
mas Hill Schaub surveys the critical interpretation of the novel in his second chapter.
"The Politics of Realism: Novelistic Discourse in the Postwar Period." Schaub traces
the development of the various "schools" of social and cultural analysis of fiction that
became fashionable with literary critics following World War II. Schaub notes that
many of these critics viewed the production and reception of fiction in a political con-
text. He writes in a footnote to this chapter:

In Political Man (1960), Seymour Lipset wrote, "Since domestic politics can no
longer serve as the arena for serious criticism from the left, many intellectuals have
turned from a basic concern with the political and economic systems to criticism of
other sections of the basic culture of American society" (quoted in Pells Liberal Mind
185). For the literary intellectual, the "novel" was one of these other sections (29).

: Anthony Burgess, "The James Bond Novels: An Introduction," in Ian Fleming.
From Russia, with Love (Chivers Press, 1988), x. This brief yet informative essay nicely
encapsulates the reasons behind James Bond's popularity with readers.

? LeRoy L. Panek, for example, in his book, The Special Branch: The British Spy
Novel, 1890-1980 (BGSU Popular Press, 1981). calls Ian Fleming a "minor writer"

22

Gary Hoppenstand

who "possessed only meager talents as a maker of plots" and who "fails to render more
than cartoon reality in his characters" (p. 201).

4 Burgess, vii.

5 Umberto Eco's essay, "The Narrative Structure in Fleming," is published in an
English translation in the anthology, The Bond Affair, eds. Oreste Del Buono and
Umberto Eco (Macdonald, 1966).

6 Kingsley Amis, The James Bond Dossier (Jonathan Cape. 1965), 9.

7 Biographer Andrew Lycett states in Ian Fleming: The Man Behind James Bond
(Turner Publishing, 1995) that before Fleming's death in 1964, he had sold some 30
million copies of his books (which were primarily his James Bond novels), and that in
less than two years following his death, sales of his books had more than doubled. In
1965 alone, Lycett reports, 27 million copies of Fleming's novels were sold in eighteen
languages (p. 446). These impressive statistics rank Ian Fleming as the most popular
writer of spy fiction in the 1960s.

8 Donald McCormick and Katy Fletcher, Spy Fiction: A Connoisseur's Guide (Facts
on File, 1990), 8.

9 Ibid., 2.

10 John G. Cawelti and Bruce A. Rosenburg, The Spy Story (University of Chicago
Press, 1987), 5. John Cawelti is regarded by many scholars of popular culture as being
the originator of the academic study of popular fiction. His book. Adventure, Mystery,
and Romance: Formula Stories as Art and Popular Culture (1976), remains a defini-
tive study of the field.

"Ibid., 2.

12 John Pearson, The Life of Ian Fleming (Jonathan Cape, 1966), 96.

I? Burgess, viii.

14 Ann S. Boyd, The Devil with James Bond! (John Knox Press, 1967), 26.

15 Tony Bennett and Janet Woollacott, Bond and Beyond: The Political Career of a
Popular Hero (Macmillan Education, 1987), 24.

16 Ibid., 25.

17 Pearson, 321-323.

18 In Propaganda: Its Psychology and Technique (Henry Holt, 1935) Leonard W.
Doob defines the term "intentional propaganda" as "a systematic attempt by an inter-
ested individual (or individuals) to control the attitudes of groups of individuals through
the use of suggestion and, consequently, to control their actions." (75-76).

19 Ian Fleming, From Russia, with Love (Signet, 1964), 35.

20 Ibid., 21-22.

21 Ibid., 162.

22 Ibid., 11.

23 Ibid., 17

23

Popular Fiction as Propaganda: Cold War Ideology in Ian Fleming's From Russia With Love

24 Ibid., 57.

25 Ibid., 64.
26 Ibid., 49

27 Burgess, vii.

28 Peter L. Berger and Thomas Luckmann, The Social Construction of Reality: A
Treatise in the Sociology of Knowledge (Anchor Books, 1966), 124.

24

AMERIKA, The Miniseries:
Televison's Last Cold War Gasp

Jerry Rodnitzky
University of Texas at Arlington

When did the "hard-freeze" Cold War end? Every historian and political
scientist has a patented answer. Some say when President John Kennedy opened
the door to a kinder, gentler Cold War in his 1960 inaugural address ("Let us
never negotiate out of fear, but let us never fear to negotiate"). Others say in
1964, when Stanley Kubrick filmed his darkly satiric Cold War spoof, Dr.
Strangelove ("You gentlemen can't fight in here. This is the War Room"). Still
others argue that the Cold War melted when American youth rebelled against
the Vietnam conflict in the mid-1960s. Vietnam protests occurred at the same
time that many communist youth in Eastern Europe were vomiting on their
diet of Cold War rhetoric and began lusting for Levi jeans and hard rock mu-
sic. 1

I cannot decide when the Cold War softened, but I do know when it tempo-
rarily froze network television. It was Sunday evening, February 15, 1987,
when ABC launched its fourteen-hour miniseries, Amerika. The television com-
petition rather gave up. Neither NBC nor CBS made an effort to challenge
Amerika with innovative programs. They either ignored Amerika or criticized
it. For example, in preview ads which promoted its Sunday Night Movie, The
Facts of Life Down Under, NBC suggested that Amerika was too dark and
depressing for the average American television viewer. The rest of the first
week Amerika ran against average film fare, such as Police Academy, Bach-
elor Party, Swamp Thing, Barbarella and Bloody Mama. Its only real network
competition was the Miss USA Pageant. 2 The Pageant was anything but dark
and depressing, yet it hardly stretched minds or imaginations. Amerika exer-
cised both.

Amerika was a bold, exciting venture for television. And although Amerika
often failed in execution, ABC should get credit for taking a commercial and
ideological gamble. Amerika merged science fiction, history and world poli-
tics. The result was a genre too far. It never bridged the gap between those
categories. As science fiction, it was too historical. As history, it was too far
out and stretched credulity. As world politics, it was ill-timed. Just as the So-
viet Union was falling apart at home and abroad, Amerika gave the Soviets the
Cold War victory. 3

25

AMERIKA, The Miniseries: Television's Last Cold War Gasp

On one level Amerika's plot was too simplistic. Like Edward Bellamy's
1888 political science fiction novel Looking Backward, Amerika whisks us
into an improbable future, without really explaining how America got from
here to there. Bellamy moved the reader from 1888 to a supposedly Utopian
socialist America in the year 2000. Amerika takes us only to the late 1980s,
when a politically and economically troubled Soviet Union suddenly attacks
and conquers the United States in a wild gamble to solve the many Soviet
woes. It succeeds with a high altitude nuclear attack that kills nobody, but
disables American computer and communication systems. American missiles
lay useless in their silos because there are no computers to fire or aim them.
American armies stand helpless because there are no communication systems
to order and direct their movements. Perhaps this far-fetched scenario is some-
what more credible as we approach the new millennium, amid the current Y2K
computer hysteria.

A film prologue quickly gives viewers a short history of the Soviet con-
quest and then Amerika'?, central story begins. The film focuses on America
under Soviet occupation. More specifically it shows various American responses
to Soviet attempts to make America a model Marxist state for world contem-
plation. The plot centers on three men Devin Milford, Peter Bradford and
Andrei Denisov each of whom fights for his vision of the New America.
Milford, once an American presidential candidate, defies the regime as a ren-
egade political leader and becomes a symbol of resistance. Bradford is a ca-
pable pragmatist, honestly devoted to compromising with the new political
conditions. Denisov, an ex-KGB colonel, is the most interesting and compli-
cated character. He learns to love America for unique traits that Americans
themselves had taken for granted. Amerika is a political film that vaguely tells
us about the American spirit. Its ironies are always more interesting than its
messages or plot. 4

Red Dawn, a 1984 theater-released film, had a similar scenario of Soviet
conquest, but it was clearly camp and not to be taken seriously. Indeed, pro-
ducers probably visualized Amerika as the intelligent viewer's Red Dawn. There
were some obvious differences between the two films, besides Amerika'?, addi-
tional twelve hours. Red Dawn wasted a rather famous cast which included
Ben Johnson, Harry Dean Stanton and Powers Booth. Moreover, three of its
younger stars Patrick Swayze, Charlie Sheen and Jennifer Grey were im-
mature actors, not close to their later peaks. Red Dawn 's director, John Milius,
played the Soviet invasion and control of part of the United States much too
heavily. Not only did his characters (both heroes and villains) lack subtlety, but
he constantly relied on violence to keep the plot moving.

In contrast Amerika had no really big stars, but effectively used some com-
petent actors, such as Sam Neill, Chrtistine Lahti, Robert Urich, Mariel

26

Jerry Rodnitzky

Hemingway and Cindy Pickett. Unfortunately, it also miscast and misdirected
Kris Kristofferson. Director Donald Wrye, whose previous television films
were Death Be Not Proud and Bom Innocent (both small-set dramas), wisely
de-emphasized firepower and stressed ideas and images in portraying the So-
viet takeover. His characters often have long exchanges and even sex takes a
back seat. Several scenes are impossibly long by Hollywood (let alone televi-
sion) standards. The film spends a lot of time observing the faces of ordinary
Americans under occupation. Logically enough, it spends more time looking
at the film's hero, Devin Milford (Kris Kristofferson), than anyone. Kristofferson
is the biggest disappointment. He generally had played laid-back characters
(often with distinction) in his past films, but his acting is lackadaisical here
and he mumbles a lot. Luckily he has fewer lines per scene than the other
better-cast actors. 5

Amerika obviously plays loosely with history, but current history constantly
intruded on both its production and viewing. Some critics suggested that
Amerika was atonement for ABC's grim nuclear disaster film, The Day After,
broadcast in 1983. Supposedly TV critic Ben Stein suggested in his column
that ABC should make a film about an America under Soviet domination to
balance the liberal bias displayed in The Day After. In any event Brandon
Stoddard, the head of ABC movie production, hired Wrye to work up an occu-
pation premise. At first, it was projected as a three-hour television movie. But
Wrye's screenplay grew to over 1300 pages, before being pared to about 600,
which became the basis for the fourteen-hour film.

Perhaps Amerika's eeriest aspect was its merging of past and future Ameri-
can military failure and success in Vietnam and Iraq. Defeating America by
crippling its communication networks was not just science fiction. The United
States would quickly defeat Iraq and Saddam Hussein just three years later
with basically the same strategy, but minus the nuclear weapons. Earlier the
Vietnam War had proved how important communication networks were. Ameri-
can planes in Vietnam were not as successful as those in the Korean War, de-
spite their greater technical superiority. In Vietnam the planes depended on
sophisticated computer networks, so complicated that they often did not work
under actual battle conditions. Unlike Iraq, neither Vietnam nor Afghanistan
depended on communication networks and were thus less vulnerable to air
power than America or the Soviets.

The fictional Soviet atomic blasts in Amerika supposedly caused no casu-
alties or radioactive fallout. However, the actual miniseries caused political
fallout on all sides, in some cases before its airing. The Soviet Union predict-
ably attacked the film as Red-bashing, while American conservatives later com-
plained that the Soviet occupation was not portrayed harshly enough. Some
liberals charged that Amerika vastly oversimplified the Cold War by making

27

AMERIKA, The Miniseries: Television's Last Cold War Gasp

the Soviets formulaic villains and the Americans classic heroes and thus con-
stituted warmongering. The United Nations complained about the film's im-
age of United Nations peacekeepers as irrelevant and ineffective. 6

The international and ideological bickering made sponsors nervous. For
example, just two weeks before airing, Chrysler Corporation Chairman Lee
Iaococo pulled all thirty-six of Chrysler's planned thirty-second commercials
from Amerika time slots. Chrysler's official statement explained that their au-
tomobile ads with the upbeat theme "born in America" would be "both inap-
propriate and of diminished effectiveness," given Amerika's grim content. Al-
though giant General Foods Corporation and Northwestern Mutual Life Insur-
ance Company kept their heavy ad commitments, ABC was forced to cut its
original $175,000 fee for a thirty-second spot. 7

ABC's commercial troubles highlighted the chief difference between theat-
rical and television films. Television fare had to approximate the mood and
morality of middle America, because that's who the sponsors aimed for. The-
ater films later shown on television could be edited. Television films must be
edited in advance to please sponsors. Chrysler had been showcasing their Jeeps
in ads to stress their patriotism, since Jeeps were a vivid symbol of America's
most popular war World War II. The veiled suggestion was that Americans
should be patriotic too and buy American cars. When Chrysler saw that Amerika
suggested that even with modern Jeeps, America had been defeated, the auto
company drove off. Yet one television sponsor's poison is another sponsor's
meat. General Foods probably thought the scarcity so evident in Amerika helped
viewers appreciate its products. Northwest Mutual Insurance surely liked the
suggestion that it was an uncertain world where anything could happen. It all
harkened back to television's youth, when tobacco companies could insist that
characters in dramatic shows smoke, but never cough, on screen. In those days
General Motors could supposedly insist that the phrase "fording a stream" be
stricken from a Western sitcom that the company sponsored. 8

Of course ABC might have been trying to please the Reagan Administra-
tion, rather than sponsors. The network could have been making amends to a
popular conservative President in a new age of nationalism. For as media critic
Daniel Hallin observed, in 1986 Reaganism's effect on television was not so
much an ideological conservatism as a new-style jingoism. Reagan made popu-
lar a "We're Number One" nationalism that encouraged news networks to
shift away from political partisanship toward patriotic celebration. Television
balanced its liberal image by taking part in that celebration. It largely adopted
the Reagan theme: "America Is Back." 9

At first glance, showing an America under the thumb of the Soviet Union
does not fit in with Reagan's "we're back and we're number one" boasting.
Yet, as science fiction Amerika could serve as the other side of Reagan's new

28

Jerry Rodnitzky

patriotism campaign. Between the lines, one can see the Amerika scenario as a
possible disaster outcome, if not for America's new vigilance and resolve un-
der Reagan (and his plan for a Star Wars shield above us). Amerika created a
fictional evil empire and gave it the mythical power that President Reagan
never could. The weaker the Soviets became, the more evil the cold warriors
had to make them seem in order to justify America's huge defense budgets.
Indeed, the Soviet Union's recent weakness did the most damage to Amerika 's
credibility. Who could believe the Soviets could control America when they
recently had been pushed out of little Afghanistan?

Thus, Amerika did provide a backdoor rationale and justification for Reagan's
Cold War policies and rhetoric. Yet, even if Amerika was produced as a net-
work peace offering to President Reagan, on another level it contained educa-
tive Cold War ironies and contradictions. It even highlights classic American
contradictions. And if Amerika 's production was weak, its bold plot reminded
one of Ira Levin's best fantasies, such as The Stepford Wives (about robotic
suburban soccer moms) and The Boys From Brazil (about teenage American
Hitler clones). 10

Advance complaints from the Left suggested that Amerika lay halfway be-
tween Red Dawn and Rambo. But Amerika really played about halfway be-
tween George Orwell's 1984 and Little Town on the Prairie. The little town in
Amerika was Milford, Nebraska. Milford was a typical microcosm, much fa-
vored by American novelists and cinematographers. In its uncomplicated
milieu, one could isolate moral issues. Milford reminds one of the Texas town
in Larry McMurtry's The Last Picture Show only Milford is featured as the
last American town.

Clearly Amerika is allegorical and not really about Soviet occupation. There
is amazingly little to reinforce negative Russian stereotypes. The evil Major
Gurtman is German, while his soldiers, with their tinted face shields, look
more like imperial troops of the Star Wars empire. Sam Neill, who plays the
Machiavellian Russian strategist Colonel Denisov, comes across more as an
American playboy than a Soviet bureaucrat. His character suggests that Orwell's
Big Brother isn't watching, he's too busy scrambling for personal position and
advantage. Besides, he looks disturbingly like the ABC newsman Sam
Donaldson.

Moreover, Denisov is positively emotional compared to the American hero,
Devin Milford. Actor Kris Kristofferson delivers most of Devin's lines with all
the emotion of a toll booth attendant. Yet Kristofferson remains strangely he-
roic. He often comes across as a laconic Gary Cooper cowboy hero miracu-
lously brought from the nineteenth-century American West to modern-day
Milford. Denisov believes that if he can only understand Devin, he can under-
stand America. Similarly, to comprehend Amerika each viewer must analyze

29

AMERIKA, The Miniseries: Television's Last Cold War Gasp

Devin and decide what he represents. But obviously liberals, conservatives,
radicals, and moderates will see him differently.

Devin Milford probably warmed the hearts of the Left far more than the
Right. It's not just his bearded scruffy look, so reminiscent of 1960s agitators.
He actually chants like Abbie Hoffman and dreams like Martin Luther King.
Radical 1960s slogans such as "Power to the People," "Right On," and "Shut It
Down," never actually spring from Devin's lips, but they seem always on the
tip of his tongue. The actions Devin inspires should have shaken up conserva-
tives even more. The armed American rebels hit and run like the Viet Cong.
And the underground resisters who help Kristofferson are disproportionately
minority groups especially black Americans who symbolically move Devin
around on an "underground railroad." Even in the conservative small town of
Milford, the residents protest and defy authority like seasoned sixties demon-
strators.

By contrast, the "Amerikan" bureaucrat Peter Bradford (Robert Urich), who
works through the system, comes across as a crass politician and organization
man. His compromises eventually even alienate his wife (Cindy Pickett) and
most of Milford. Compared to Devin's simple, radical views, Bradford's tortu-
ous rationales make him a timid pawn of the town rather than a courageous
prince of the country. Bradford and other pedestrian collaborators constantly
ask people to be realistic and accept history's verdict on the American-Soviet
struggle.

The story development is so slow, the cinematography so uninspiring and
the acting so uneven, that it is hard to take Amerika seriously as cinematic art.
It offers more as Cold War mythology and as an ideological focus. Indeed
ABC probably realized early on that it had a turkey on its hands, and thus tried
to build an audience with hype. Perhaps ABC promoters reasoned that if they
could goad the Soviets into attacking Amerika as warmongering and induce
the American Left to knock the film as a right-wing nightmare, middle America
would be all eyes and ears.

The subtle ironies prove to be the most entertaining aspect of Amerika. For
example, if conservatives could not identify with Kristofferson, at least some
aspects of "Amerikan" society should have pleased them. There was little crime,
no teenage cruising, no punk rock music, and no welfare scandals. Also, pre-
sumably the trains and planes ran on time.

Yet, poor exiled squatters living outside Milford remained despised and
ignored until Soviet mercenaries overreacted and wiped out their shanty town.
Only then did Milford residents quickly befriend these outcasts and identify
with them. These actions teach both the Soviets and the television audience
that only Americans are allowed to mistreat poor Americans. Indeed 1980s
Amerika looked eerily like 1930s Depression America. One constantly expected

30

Jerry Rodnitzky

to see the Waltons in the next scene. Poverty-stricken contemporary Ameri-
cans may infer that if they can only get some dictator to oppress them, their
affluent countrymen will spring to their aid. This phenomenon had a long Cold
War history. Americans did not seem to care much about Koreans, Cubans, or
the Vietnamese until the "Communists" started threatening them.

In one sense, Amerika spoke to the fears of both the American Right and
Left. Pessimists on both sides of the spectrum fear a dictatorial takeover by
extremists of the opposite ideological camp. Both Left and Right often fear
that a totalitarian government could take power and an apathetic American
people would just go on watching television perhaps even a fourteen-hour
miniseries on the overthrow of the government.

Amerika does tell us that it is heroic to resist arbitrary power. More impor-
tantly, both history and Amerika show that people apparently without power
can create it by joining together to challenge a corrupt government. This is
Amerika 's real lesson and why activists such as Ralph Nader probably would
have enjoyed this film more than politicians, Right or Left. Amerika shows us
general inhumanity, but tells us little about the Soviets. However, it does en-
lighten us indirectly about the Cold War and American apathy. The villain
here is the crude and unfeeling bureaucratic state. It has no real national flag.
As a warning, Amerika tells Americans what Pogo told us: "We have met the
enemy and they is us." That is clearly a message beyond Left and Right.

For all the pre-show hype, Amerika was a ratings disaster, even while run-
ning against generally weak competition. Amerika opened on Sunday night
with a 34 share, but its ratings declined throughout its run. On the third night,
"The Miss USA Pageant" solidly trounced it, head to head, with a 34 share to
Amerika's 26." It is hard to pinpoint why Amerika failed to attract a larger
audience. Many even less artistic miniseries did much better. Indeed, most
successful miniseries have been syrupy romance novels or gory, true-crime
murder cases. Yet, Roots and later War and Rembrance proved that Americans
would watch very long, serious miniseries with an historical focus especially
if they were well-acted. Neither of the latter, however, risked the political
minefields, nor took the fanciful flight of Amerika.

Amerika with all its flaws remains a model for television boldness. Who
knows what Oliver Stone (or a right-wing counterpart) could do with a televi-
sion miniseries, if given the chance. Hollywood took almost two decades after
its Cold War un-American activities cleansing to regain the nerve to make bold
political movies. Television cinema is still somewhat behind a political iron
curtain.

31

AMERIKA, The Miniseries: Television's Last Cold War Gasp

Notes

1 For the view that John F. Kennedy softened the Cold War, see, for example, Arthur
M. Schlesinger, Jr., A Thousand Days ( Boston, 1965), pp. 298-319. For the view that
breakthrough films such as Dr. Strangelove both caused and reflected a melting Cold
War, see "Dr. Strangelove (1964): Nightmare Comedy and the Ideology of Liberal
Consensus," in Peter Rollins, ed., Hollywood As Historian (Lexington, Kentucky, 1983),
pp. 190-210. For the view that youthful protesters (both East and West) warmed the
Cold War, see Marjorie Hope, Youth Against the World (Boston, 1970).

2 EdBmk, "Amerika "Dallas Morning News, February 15, 1987, section C, pp. 1,1 5.

3 General Note: There has been little written about Amerika and the film will not
likely be available on video, or as a television re-run, because of both its length and
archaic historical focus. The novelized screenplay is the one standard source and thus
this film seems destined to be only an interesting relic of the Cold War. However, like
The Smothers Brothers show in the 1960s, Amerika demonstrates some of television's
unique problems when dealing with politically sensitive material.

4 Brauna E. Pouns, Amerika (New York, 1987). Since there is still no commercial
video of Amerika the miniseries, this 412 page novelization of Donald Wrye's screen-
play is the only guide to Amerika readily available. It provides the plot and dialogue,
but loses much of the film's mood.

5 See Pouns, Amerika, for characteristic convoluted dialogue. For example, see pp.
236-251.

(1 The United Nations complaint about Amerika was reported in an AP story in the
Fort Worth Star-Telegram, February 17, 1998, p. 6.

7 Richard Zoglin, "Amerika the Controversial," Time, February 9, 1987, p. 73.

s For examples of how television sponsors had censored content during the 1950s
and 1 960s, see Les Brown, Television: The Business Behind the Box (New York, 1 97 1 ),
pp. 98-102.

9 Daniel C. Hallin, "We Keep America On Top of the World," in Todd Gitlin, editor,
Watching Television (New York, 1986), pp. 35-38.

10 Fort Worth Star-Telegram, February 17, 1998, p. 6.

" A.C. Nielsen ratings reported in the Fort Worth Star-Telegram, February 19,1987,
p. 8.

32

Dangerous Superpowers:

Comic Book Heroes and American

Masculinity in the Atomic Age

John Ott

University of California at Los Angeles

After the first hydrogen bomb was detonated on the Eniwetok Atoll in the
Pacific on November 1, 1952, atomic physicist Edward Teller, the proud "fa-
ther" of atomic fusion, informed his colleagues at Los Alamos of the project's
success with the statement, "it's a boy." 1 This curious birth announcement
(who, then, was the mother?) indicates the prevalent rhetorical coupling of
atomic energy with American male (hetero)sexuality. For those outside the
inner circle of nuclear scientists, ubiquitous images of phallic bombs, missile
silos and "atom-smashers" in the mainstream press underlined this connection
and intimated their alternately generative and destructive potential. Despite
the U.S. government's attempts to make nuclear power palatable for the na-
tion, the public's concerns mounted, peaking after the April 1954 broadcast of
the Operation IVY film (which showed the effects of the fusion blast), and
again in October 1962 during the Cuban Missile Crisis. 2

Around the same time, the 1948 publication of the Kinsey report on male
sexuality, whose impact Newsweek compared to that of an atomic bomb, 3 threat-
ened to throw dominant codes of American manhood into contestation. With a
remarkable publishing run of a quarter of a million copies, the report placed
sex and sexuality under wide public scrutiny and revealed that most boys were
sexually active by age fifteen and that the incidence of male homoeroticism
was far greater than anyone had anticipated. 4

Forced to reckon with these twinned social crises, many boys would have
turned to the one visual medium they could truly call their own: the comic
book. This paper will examine the superheroes of the so-called Silver Age of
comics (roughly 1956-1966) 5 to suggest how this genre both embodied and
helped its audience come to terms with anxiety over nuclear technology and
American masculinity, two social phenomena often conflated in their expres-
sion. Thus while superpower denotes extraordinary individual physical prow-
ess and stamina, it also connotes those nations of the Cold War era with vast
nuclear stockpiles, as well as the presumed sexual potency of manhood. By
and large, I will confine my discussion to the heterosexual reading strategies
of enthusiasts of Silver Age superheroes. This audience's gay male constitu-

33

Dangerous Superpowers: Comic Book Heroes and American Masculinity in the Atomic Age

ency, as Andy Medhurst notes, could have undertaken a discrete set of cultural
negotiations, a type of reading against or in spite of the hegemonic discourses
on the superhero that I wish to foreground. 6

In part, then, this paper scrutinizes the processes by which a readership
defines and is defined by a text through visual and narrative tropes particular to
that text. Here I follow the lead of a number of cultural critics who have nu-
anced Laura Mulvey's classic model of a male spectator's psychic alignment
with a (in her case, filmic) protagonist. Writing about Clint Eastwood's cin-
ematic persona, Paul Smith asserts that:

an orthodox critique of the male heroes in these kinds of popular
culture narratives would say that they actually present too easy
and transcendent a solution to contradiction [of the male subject]:
my claim is that, to the contrary, the resolutions and solutions
really never come. ... the narrative disposition of particular tropes
of masculinity does not ultimately control or delimit them, and
leaves unmanaged and resistant representations of male hyste-
ria. 7

I would add that a historically situated subculture of viewers, such as adoles-
cent comic readers in the early sixties, are not only specifically interpolated by
a text but may have cause for identifying with this position of male hysteria. In
fact, the very narrative structure of comic books prohibits the successful recu-
peration of a male ego ideal: like soap operas, comics are serial in nature and
perpetually suspend certain types of closure or resolution common, say, to film
or the novel.

This approach challenges the conventional wisdom about what readers de-
sire in comics - that, for example, Superman embodies an ego ideal through
which all male readers can perform dominant masculinity. Umberto Eco, for
one, contends that:

Clark Kent personifies fairly typically the average reader who is
harassed by complexes and despised by his fellow men: through
an obvious process of self-identification, any accountant in any
American city secretly feels the hope that one day, from the slough
of his actual personality, there can spring forth a superman who is
capable of redeeming years of mediocre existence. 8

I would argue, however, that this process of identification on the part of a male
reader is not so "obvious," particularly since both the ideal and actual reader-
ship of Superman are not harried accountants but male adolescents who psy-
chically engage the protagonist in contradictory ways and for historically spe-
cific reasons. Silver Age heroes, as I hope to demonstrate, further deter any
facile, unmediated self-identifications with masculinist hegemony.

34

John Ott

The tradition of embedding male (hetero)sexuality within superpower he-
roes dates back to the so-called Golden Age of comic books (1938-1953). I
will briefly examine the first and most popular of these heroes, Superman, in
order to dramatize the notable shifts that occur during the Silver Age. Comic
narrative repeatedly performs the vacillation between hero and plainsclothesman
as metaphoric for the transition between man and boy; Superman's genesis
typifies the equivalence of the endowment of superpowers with the incipience
of male puberty. As even the most casual reader of comic books knows, Super-
man is a cosmic orphan who had been rocketed into space by his scientist
father just as his home planet of Krypton exploded in a fiery apocalypse. The
son's burgeoning (albeit sublimated) sexuality, represented both by Superman's
careening, phallic spaceship and his formidable superhuman abilities, stem
from or are predicated upon the death of his parents.

Moreover, Superman's masquerade as Clark Kent speaks directly to the
anxieties of male adolescents, who quite literally are sexually active men trapped
in boys' bodies. In the pages of Superman, the secret, inner manhood of Clark
Kent (and of the readers) takes tangible form, and the often painful change
from child to adult occurs not over the span of years but in a matter of seconds,
a "quick change" in a telephone booth.

Yet the productive splitting of boy/man through secret identity also serves
as an apology for a young reader's inability to realize his sexuality. Cartoonist
Jules Feiffer has observed:

The particular brilliance of Superman lay not only in the fact that
he was the first of the Superheroes (June 1938), but in the concept
of his alter ego. . . Remember, [Clark] Kent was not Superman's
true identity as Bruce Wayne was the Batman's ... Superman had
only to wake up in the morning to be Superman. In his case, Clark
Kent was the put on. The fellow with the eyeglasses and the acne
and the walk girls laughed at wasn't real, didn't exist, was a sac-
rificial disguise, an act of discreet martyrdom. Had they but
known! 9

Thus, the bizarre love triangle of Superman-Lois Lane-Clark Kent, in which
Lois pursues the Kryptonite "Superhero" but scorns the platitudes of Clark,
valorizes and ennobles a heterosexual adolescent's difficulties with the oppo-
site sex. 10 It could only be for the readers' benefit that Superman/ Clark Kent
refrained from consummating his (rather masochistic) love for Lois.

These early superheroes' success in acknowledging and fulfilling their
audience's desires precipitated a dramatic increase in sales. While in 1940 only
3.7 million comic books were purchased per month, comics' popularity peaked
in 1952 with a monthly circulation of nearly sixty million." The comics mar-

35

Dangerous Superpowers: Comic Book Heroes and American Masculinity in the Atomic Age

ket, however, contracted as quickly as it had expanded; Fredric Wertham's
book Seduction of the Innocent, published the following year, played a central
role in marginalizing the act of comic reading. 12 As senior psychologist for
the New York Department of Hospitals, Wertham's studies of psychologically
troubled urban youth led him to believe that comics, and especially the horror
and superhero genres, were the primary determinant for the rising tide of juve-
nile delinquency in America. His findings were widely challenged within his
field, but a more popular audience of Cold War Americans, inured to jingoistic
scapegoating, eagerly jumped on the anti-comic bandwagon.

Wertham charged that comics were too violent, sadistic, and erotic, fos-
tered illiteracy, and provided dangerous behavioral examples for impression-
able youth. In one of his most often-cited passages, Wertham declared, based
on the testimonials of young homosexual subjects, that Batman and Robin
shared a homoerotic relationship that exerted a corrupting influence on young
boys. 13 As a result of Wertham's crusade, the Comics Code, similar in spirit to
earlier prescriptions for the film industry, was installed to ensure "wholesome"
material. Not surprisingly, Batwoman (1956) and Batgirl (1961) were intro-
duced to the Batman title, perhaps to encourage more "family-oriented" ad-
ventures, or perhaps to secure the dynamic duo's heterosexuality. Wertham's
book, together with the widespread proliferation of television in American
homes, combined to submerge comic books in a Dark Age or, rather, an inter-
regnum between the Golden and Silver Ages. 14

Meanwhile, the constituency of comic book readers was undergoing a no-
table shift in the late fifties and sixties. While pre-war comic books found
nearly equal support from young boys and girls, the Silver Age audience was
increasingly male. In addition, many fans, carried over from the Golden Age,
were now in their late teens, twenties and even beyond. 15 The appearance of
letter pages in the more popular titles signaled the growth of a serious fan base,
who, while still a minority, fell largely within this older age group. At the same
time, professional comic writers and artists were beginning to emerge directly
out of the corps of devoted fans. Stan Lee, who would become the central
creative force of the Silver Age, was one of the first fans-turned-comic writers,
as was Jim Shooter, who began writing professionally at the age of thirteen
and became editor-in-chief of Marvel Comics by twenty-five. 16 Weaned on
Golden Age fare, Lee and Shooter knew from experience exactly what adoles-
cent readers desired from their superheroes.

The Silver Age is said to have begun with Marvel Comics' writer Stan Lee
and artist Jack Kirby, who more adequately addressed the changes in technol-
ogy and gender construction in postwar America. Marvel was something of a
nameless entity in 1961 when it launched its first costumed crime-fighters, the
Fantastic Four . I7 In a covert and hasty attempt to beat the "reds" to the moon,

36

John Ott

scientist Reed Richards, his fiancee Sue Storm, her teenage brother Johnny,
and Richards' old college roommate, the fighter pilot Ben Grimm, are inad-
vertently exposed to "cosmic rays". I8 After a miraculous crash-landing, the
foursome realize they have acquired strange abilities and re-christen them-
selves, respectively, Mr. Fantastic, who can stretch and contort his elastic body
like rubber; Invisible Girl, who is able to project invisible force-fields and
make herself disappear; The Human Torch, who can bathe himself in flame,
shoot fireballs, and fly; and The Thing, whose body becomes encrusted with a
layer of craggy orange rock, and who possesses superhuman strength. If the
Fantastic Four's powers were rather unremarkable (Mr. Fantastic and The Hu-
man Torch's abilities were essentially lifted from popular Golden Age heroes),
the group's dynamics and personalities were novel for the genre. Here were
heroes who never concealed their identities, frequently bickered amongst them-
selves, and, breaking the pattern of unrequited super-romance, were even en-
gaged to be married.

Buoyed by this initial success, Lee stuck to what Will Jacobs and Gerard
Jones have termed his "flawed hero formula" 19 and unleashed a salvo of titles.
The Hulk (May 1962) featured a Jekyll- and-Hyde plot in which meek Dr.
Bruce Banner, after being irradiated with gamma radiation, is transformed in
moments of stress into a raging, green-skinned, Frankensteinesque brute. 20
Thor (August 1962) showcased the god of thunder, brought to life by Donald
Blake, a crippled doctor who discovers a staff in a hidden cave which periodi-
cally transforms him into the Norse deity and itself into Thor's "mystic ham-
mer." Spiderman (March 1963) came into being when teen "egghead" Peter
Parker was bitten by a spider accidently blasted with radiation at a science
exhibit, endowing Parker with the powers of an arachnid. And The X-Men (Sep-
tember 1963), a group of five teenage "mutants" with various powers, were led
by wheelchair-bound mutant telepath Professor Charles Xavier.

Lee's gallery of disabled or tragic figures, monsters and misfits were whole-
heartedly embraced by the comic-reading public, with Spiderman swiftly emerg-
ing as the most popular of Lee's troubled heroes. Lee had always been dis-
gusted with the Golden Age's pesky boy sidekicks and consequently provided
his readers with a comic in which a teenager, Peter Parker, was the central
focus. 21 In his origin story in Amazing Fantasy #15, Parker, "far from being
the biggest man on campus," is depicted as a "bookworm" pampered by his his
doting guardians, Aunt May and Uncle Ben. Rebuked by the in-crowd at Mid-
town High, the embittered Parker swears vengeance: "Some day I'll show them!
Some day they'll be sorry!" 22 But when he discovers his brush with radioac-
tivity has endowed him with strength and agility proportionate to that of a
spider, Parker at first only uses his powers to win cash prizes and make appear-
ances on television. An unwilling hero, Parker is plagued not only with the

37

Dangerous Superpowers: Comic Book Heroes and American Masculinity in the Atomic Age

usual parade of colorfully sinister villains, but with more mundane problems
as well, among them financial troubles, a foul-tempered boss and an elderly
aunt who hovers in and out of illness.

As Lee boasted in a later reminiscence, the name of Marvel's flagship su-
perhero intentionally alluded to the paragon of the Golden Age, Superman; 23
the analogy signaled both Lee's deferential admiration for pre-war heroes and
his deconstruction of them. Spiderman, "the hero who could be you," 24 ac-
commodated reader identification with his litany of angst-inducing adolescent
travails. When Esquire revealed in September 1965 that even college students
had taken to the Marvel title, it was a clear sign that Lee had successfully
targeted both the mass of younger readers and the older, dedicated fans. 25
Marvel was relentless in the cultivation of its fan base, forming clubs and soci-
eties, soliciting fan mail, and exploiting these letters as valuable feedback that
would determine the direction of a given title. Lee's real talent, it was clear, lay
in making his readers feel invested in the Marvel project. He even portrayed
his heroes in the act of reading comics, as if to dramatize further the equiva-
lence between fan and hero. 26 In response, other, older comic houses attempted
to humanize their stockpile of heroes; for example, Superman's vulnerability
to kryptonite, a metal indigenous only to his home planet, was increasingly
highlighted.

Male adolescents, who might have seen themselves and their changing bodies
as grotesque and monstrous, could better relate to the new brand of superhero.
Mr. Fantastic's elastic contortions, the Hulk's sudden and uncontrollable meta-
bolic changes, and The Thing's odd and unsightly protrusions spoke to a young
man's anxiety over unpredictable hormonal changes that brought growth spurts,
the development of body hair and odor, and acne. Heroes who are not always
in control of their powers, such as the Hulk, mirrored adolescents' inability to
master or regulate their own sexuality, as manifest in wet dreams and sudden
shifts in voice range. Comic advertisements that preyed on a reader's self-
consciousness, such as Charles Atlas' promises of a "manly" physique or ads
for acne creams, reinforced these youthful apprehensions, as even Wertham
understood. 27

More importantly, the Marvel protagonists heighten and problematize the
split between boy and man. Marvel's green-colored monster vacillates wildly
between the enormous, childish Hulk and a skinny but intelligent Dr. Banner.
In the same way, the crippled Dr. Blake shifts in and out of his identity as the
strapping supernatural, Thor, whose phallic totem metamorphosizes from a
withered cane into a rock-hard, potent hammer when struck on the ground. 2s
In essence, Lee renders the "boy" side of the hero unusually helpless while
depicting the "man" aspect as excessively or monstrously virile. Unlike
Superman's easy transition in a telephone booth, the Marvel heroes' slippage

38

John Ott

between powerless weaklings and empowered gargantuans induces a troubled,
almost schizophrenic self-loathing. In the first issue of The Hulk, when he
confronts a picture of his alter- ego, the Hulk is stricken with revulsion and
terror peculiar for a peerless titan: "it is weak - soft! I hate it! Take it away!"
The otherwise dauntless Hulk recoils from the specter of his own impotence. 29

As in the Golden Age, the endowment of Silver Age superpowers (the mo-
ment of male pubescence) coincides with personal tragedy, but here the mo-
ment of horror is reflected back onto the protagonist: The Thing, for example,
is simultaneously disfigured and enabled. Whereas pre-war comic books sub-
limated these destructive urges by jumping quickly from boyhood to manhood
in the narrative, the Silver Age hero's malaise - the dark side of his sexuality -
is foregrounded and made constitutional to his abilities.

In the same way, a hero's potency interferes with mature (hetero)sexual
relationships, but here unfulfilled sexuality is not excused by a necessarily
productive and strategic dual identity, as with Superman. In the Silver Age, the
superpower itself becomes the obstacle that precludes intimacy with women.
As Peter Parker reveals in Spiderman #72 , "in order to function as Spider-
man, poor Peter Parker has to take off whenever he's needed! So how can
Gwen [his girlfriend] help but think of me as a full-time chicken!" 30 While
Clark Kent finds his passion for Lois Lane reciprocated through the manifesta-
tion of Superman (only, oddly enough, to repulse her), Parker is frustrated in
his attempts to woo Gwen Stacy exactly because of his secret identity as
Spiderman.

The myth of mastery with which Golden Age superheroes were imbued
evaporated with the advent of Peter Parker and his tragic Marvel cohorts. Lee's
characters, through a variety of visual and narrative strategies, elucidate the
agony of budding male adolescence - its monstrousness, impotence and vola-
tile unpredictability. 31 At the same time, the Marvel cast of heroes became
increasingly difficult to distinguish from the villains. In fact, foes like Quick-
silver and the Scarlet Witch, once the X-Men's archenemies, were made he-
roes, thanks in part to readers' suggestions. 32

A review of the Marvel villains' origin stories, in which scientific mishaps
are familiarly central, illuminates a strange parallelism between the genesis of
good and evil in Lee's comic universe. The creation saga of Doctor Doom,
who first appeared in Fantastic Four #5, recounts how Victor Von Doom , who
possesses both magical powers and technical genius, comes from the heart of
Eastern Europe to the U.S. to study at the same university as the young Reed
Richards and Ben Grimm (the future Mr. Fantastic and The Thing). In the
course of "conducting forbidden experiments," Von Doom's face is disfigured
by an accidental explosion and he is expelled from school; soon after, he cre-
ates a fearsome metal visage to mask his tragic defacement. Like Richards,

39

Dangerous Superpowers: Comic Book Heroes and American Masculinity in the Atomic Age

Doom is a talented scientist who jeopardizes his own safety in a secret en-
deavor to "master" technology, and both become misshapen. Like Ben Grimm,
the evil Doctor is horrified by the hideousness induced by his "powers," al-
though Doom allows his self-pity and alienation to escalate into misanthropy. 33

Likewise, a number of the Hulk's enemies, also green-skinned, are likewise
born of accidents with gamma radiation: for instance, an "enemy spy" be-
comes the colossal Abomination, whose pedigree owes to the Creature from
the Black Lagoon , 34 Readers were even impelled to identify with these tor-
tured villains, such as the Fantastic Four's first opponent, the Moleman; 35 as
Stan Lee would later recall for his fans: "Didn't you find yourself sympathiz-
ing with him [the Moleman], just a bit? There he was, ostracized by his fellow
man - and woman - because his physical appearance left a little something to
be desired." 36 When the Moleman recounts how he was mocked by women -
"What? Me go out with you? Don't make me laugh!" - affinities with
Spiderman cannot be ignored. 37 Where the costume insignias of the Golden
Age clearly differentiate between good and evil supermen (or, indeed, between
boy and man), Silver Age comics blur the distinction even while purporting to
follow the same scripted morality play. The megalomaniacal Moleman and
Abomination are defeated, predictably, but "superpowers," and thus, mascu-
linity and its (presumed) positive generative potential, are nonetheless irrevo-
cably tainted by this underlying ambivalence.

The obsessive quest for clear identity markers permeated post-war America,
especially where Cold War and sexual politics became conflated. John D'Emilio
and Estelle Freedman write: "Worries about internal subversion took on a moral
coloration as anticommunist ideologues searched for signs of decaying values,
or the corruption of youth. Pornography became associated with juvenile de-
linquency, which in turn threatened the nation's future." 38 At the core of this
project to shore up both nation and dominant sexuality was the large-scale
condemnation of homosexuals, who "suddenly found themselves labeled a threat
to national security." 30 In the same way, the comic book also became suspect
material, and its attackers reinscribed the criminality of both superhero titles
and their readership.

Hence the ambivalence of the Silver age heroes and villains refracted the
dominant culture's apprehensions about the ambiguity of identity, be it sexual
or political. Generally, it was impossible to tell, from external signs, if some-
one was mutant or "normal," Communist or patriot, hetero- or homosexual.
And as comic readers knew from experience, it was equally pointless to deter-
mine whether an adolescent had made the transition from boy to man based on
mere physical criteria. Male sexuality was thus subjected to thorough discur-
sive legislation in the post-war period. As Estelle Freedman writes, "the male
sexual deviant became the subject of special attention, particularly if he was

40

John Ott

inadequately masculine (the effeminate homosexual) or hypermasculine (the
sexual psychopath)." 40

Stan Lee, with his weakling/goliath hero formula, was also interested in the
limits of masculinity, and his Janus-faced characters helped his marginalized
comic readers negotiate the hegemonic constructions of the American man.
Depending on the reader, these codes of masculinity are either reinforced or
subversively appropriated; the superhero's sculpted physique is either ideal-
ized as a standard to which to aspire or converted into a site of same-sex desire.
To the horror of Fredric Wertham and others, the "dynamic duo" was inter-
cepted by young gay male readers as a locus of identification; the psycholo-
gist, who did not understand that cartoon heroes cannot have a fixed sexuality,
thus designated them "homosexual" in order to clinch their identities and give
form to the nation's fears. The widespread suspicion of "the enemy within"
became focused both on a political valence (the Communist) as well as a sexual
one (the homosexual). Yet "the enemy within" also bespeaks the angst of male
adolescents, who were unable to keep their sexuality in check and were thus
threatened with the prospect of being labeled "juvenile delinquents." 41 In each
case, heroes such as the Hulk, constantly at war with themselves, acutely em-
bodied these postwar anxieties.

Of course, this comic renaissance marked not only the Silver but also the
Atomic Age. A panel from Thor#115 exemplifies the widespread equation of
Silver Age superpowers with nuclear energy; whirling his mystic phallus in a
manner that visually recreates the atomic nucleus, the god of thunder informs
an unsuspecting enemy that he possesses "the power to transmute the elements
themselves!" 42 The special abilities of Lee's post-Hiroshima heroes were in-
evitably induced by radioactive materials (Spiderman) or a thinly-disguised
surrogate (the Fantastic Four's cosmic rays, the Hulk's gamma rays). The most
blatant allusion emerged in The X-Men, where the parents of both Professor
Charles Xavier and his pupils had all been, serendipitously, near atomic test
sites or laboratories during the heroes' gestation in the womb. In addition, most
Marvel protagonists were doctors, technicians, or inventors whose encounters
with science (usually atomic) empower them, but, as we have seen, this rela-
tionship with technology (as with their own masculinity) is highly ambivalent.

The Silver Age represented the high-water mark of children's anxiety over
nuclear proliferation. While the percentage of adults who expressed misgiv-
ings about atomic energy steadily declined after 1954, with a brief resurgence
in the wake of the Cuban Missile Crisis of 1962, children's fears remained
constant and proportionately outstripped those of their elders. 43 Apparently,
the admonitions of Bert the Turtle, cartoon hero of civil defense films, to "duck
and cover" during a nuclear attack did little to allay the concerns of American
youth. Moreover, the prospect that radiation could induce birth defects seemed

41

Dangerous Superpowers: Comic Book Heroes and American Masculinity in the Atomic Age

to threaten the very heart of American culture (motherhood, the family) and
reinforced the growing opinion that "mother nature" had been violated through
the splitting of atoms. 44 Correspondingly, the "mutant" X-Men's (nuclear)
powers were not entirely beneficial; Professor X, notably, loses his hair in his
youth just as he begins to experiment with his newfound abilities, while The
Hulk and The Thing are transformed into freakish monsters due to their con-
tact with atomic energies. Even the monolithic Superman saga could accumu-
late new meanings: Krypton, it was now clear, had succumbed to a nuclear
holocaust; Superman, "issued" into our world by a scientist, was quite literally
a child of the atom ("it's a boy!"); and kryptonite, which even sounded like a
by-product of fusion, weakened and sickened the Man of Steel because it was
radioactive.

As another invisible "menace" that had to be sequestered and regulated,
like (homo)sexuality, nuclear power insinuated itself into the hidden forces of
the Marvel universe. When an enemy spy learns Dr. Banner's secret and be-
comes the Abomination, he gains destructive (atomic) potential as great as the
Hulk's. And just as Lee strove to distinguish between the "benign" Hulk and
"malevolent" Abomination through subtleties in physiognomy, the U.S. gov-
ernment and dominant discourse sought to effect a productive ideological split
between "good" and "bad" atoms. 45 On one hand, the benefits of atomic en-
ergy were emphasized; an image from a 1947 issue of Collier's, which por-
trayed an impaired man healed by a mushroom cloud, typifies the endeavor to
accentuate the benevolent, healing potential of the atom. 46 Conversely, the
negative aspects of atomic power were projected onto enemies of the state, or,
in popular culture, a spate of movie monsters - which peaked in popularity
from 1958 to 1965 - that could be handily defeated through personal valor and
determination. 47

In his account of the creation of the X-Men, Stan Lee indicates his alle-
giance to this discursive project: "We decided to create two groups of mutants,
one evil and the other good. One would be eternally striving to subjugate man-
kind, and the other would be ceaselessly battling to protect the human race." 48
Yet this attempt to force the unfathomable destructive potential of the fusion
bomb - which defied both logic and ethics - into the dualistic framework of
Euro- American morality betrays its own futility. Two of Lee's "evil" mutants
(Quicksilver and the Scarlet Witch) were quickly converted into "good" he-
roes, while Professor Xavier's disability seems to fly in the face of the rhetoric
of the Collier's photomontage. If only the misuse of atomic (or super) powers
generates monsters, produces disfigurements and eventuates injudicious pun-
ishment, why is Prof. Charles Xavier bald and still wheelchair-bound? More
to the point, why must Dr. Bruce Banner live in constant fear of his own (nuclear)
powers?

42

John Ott

As in the case of male sexualities, Silver Age heroes break down carefully
erected barricades upholding the rationalization of nuclear energy. The grow-
ing anxiety over the loss of control, both sexual and atomic, surfaces continu-
ally in Marvel comics, especially in the pages of The Hulk. As Spencer Weart
writes in Nuclear Fear.

Worries about 'security' were commonly associated with that
theme [of the mad scientist]. People. . . believed that security could
be maintained only through the control of treacherous feelings,
which must be suppressed not only in others but also in them-
selves. For many people the prototype of such dangerous desires
was the bad small boy's aggressive urge to probe into forbidden
things. . . . Of course security also seemed to require controlling
and keeping hidden the catastrophic forces that the urges aimed
to uncover - forces that extended from real technical facts to the
magical powers that children often associated with the mysteries
of sex. . . . 49

This rich passage illuminates how effectively Marvel superheroes negotiated
this tangled skein of discourse for their audience. The duality of Mr. Fantastic
and Doctor Doom, scientists who are, in a sense, equally mad and obsessed
with the forbidden, dramatizes the fine line between control and chaos, "good"
and "bad" desires, security and catastrophe. When a reader empathizes with
the Moleman, whose "master plan" entails the destruction of all atomic plants,
does he not (at least partially) give in to "dangerous desires"? 50 Put another
way, will scientist Bruce Banner maintain "control," or will he revert to the
childish Hulk, who is very much a "catastrophic force," a "bad small boy" with
an "aggressive urge"? Lee's comic book figures make clear that the potency of
postwar American masculinity and nuclear energy alike are innately inscribed
with aggression and violence, "dangerous desires" ever at the threshold of re-
straint.

A hackneyed truism tells us that each era requires its own brand of hero.
The United States' Cold War epoch, in which men found themselves no longer
(if they ever were) "masters" of either technology or themselves, produced
mythic figures whose masculinity was hardly confident and irrefutable in its
construction. Action Comics #309, created just prior to the president's death in
1963, concludes with a meeting between John F. Kennedy and the Man of
Steel. In order to preserve his secret identity, Superman entreats Kennedy to
disguise himself as Clark Kent to create the illusion on national television that
Kent and the costumed crusader are standing in the same room. Assuring Su-
perman that he will "guard your secret identity as I guard the secrets of our
nation," the president effectively collapses personal (or sexual) and national

43

Dangerous Superpowers: Comic Book Heroes and American Masculinity in the Atomic Age

identities, enumerating the "secret" of Kent's powers among other items of
national security, such as its atomic "secrets." 51 More significantly, the
superhero's literal identification with Kennedy, another (flawed and tragic)
hero who brought the nation to the brink of nuclear apocalypse and fell prey to
an act of senseless violence, underscores the inability of a monolithic hero
from a long-gone "Golden Age" to serve as a panacea for modern social ills.
Superman's query, "if I can't trust the President of the United States, who can
I trust?" invites an ominous response in the wake of the Cuban Missile Crisis
and Kennedy's assassination.

Notes

' Spencer R. Weart, Nuclear Fear: A History of Images (Cambridge & London:
Harvard University Press, 1988), 143.

2 See Weart; and Paul Boyer, By the Bomb's Early Light: American Thought and
Culture at the Dawn of the Atomic Age (New York: Pantheon Books, 1985).

3 Steven Cohan, "Masquerading as a Male in the American Fifties," in Male Trouble,
eds. Constance Penley and Sharon Willis (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
1993), 211.

4 See Alfred C. Kinsey, Wardell B. Pomeroy and Clyde E. Martin, Sexual Behavior
in the Human Male (Philadelphia & London: W. B. Saunders Co., 1948); and John
D'Emilio and Estelle B. Freedman, Intimate Matters: A History of Sexuality in America
(New York: Harper & Row, 1988), 285-88.

5 The Silver Age, as I understand and employ the term, spans very roughly the pe-
riod from the revival of the Golden Age hero The Flash in October 1956 to the first
broadcast of the Batman television show in January 1966.

" Andy Medhurst, "Batman, Deviance and Camp," in The Many Lives of the Batman:
Critical Approaches to a Superhero and his Media, eds. Roberta E. Pearson and Will-
iam Uricchio (New York: Routledge, Chapman & Hall, 1991), 149-63.

7 Paul Smith, "Action Movie Hysteria, or Eastwood Bound," Differences 1:3 (1989):
90.

8 Umberto Eco, The Role of the Reader: Explorations in the Semiotics of Texts
(Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1979), 108.

9 Jules Feiffer, The Great Comic Book Heroes (New York: Dial Press, 1965), 18-19.

10 Superman #3 (1939): 9.

" Patrick Parsons, "Batman and His Audience: The Dialectic of Culture," in The
Many Lives of the Batman: Critical Approaches to a Superhero and his Media, eds.
Roberta E. Pearson and William Uricchio (New York: Routledge, Chapman & Hall,
1991), 68.

12 Fredric Wertham, Seduction of the Innocent (New York: Rinehart & Company.
Inc., 1953).

44

John Ott

13 Ibid., 187-93.

14 Parsons, 71-73.

15 Ibid., 73-75. For example, a 1964 study by George Pumphrey disclosed that Su-
perman was far and away most popular among twelve- and thirteen-year old boys.
George H. Pumphrey, What Children Think of Their Comics (London: Epworth Press,
1964), 31.

16 Parsons, 78.

17 Depending on the authority, Lee was editor, art director and head writer of either
the Canam Publishers Sales Corporation or Timely Comics when the FF was born; the
name Marvel Comics was not coined until 1963. See Will Jacobs and Gerard Jones,
The Comic Book Heroes: From the Silver Age to the Present (New York: Crown Pub-
lishers, Inc., 1985), 48; and Stan Lee, Origins of Marvel Comics (New York: Simon
and Schuster, 1974), 13-18.

18 Fantastic Four #1 (November 1961): 10.

19 Jacobs and Jones, 88.

20 Stan Lee, The Incredible Hulk (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1978), 28.

21 Amazing Fantasy #15 (March 1963): 2.

22 Ibid.

23 Lee, Origins, 133, 134.

24 Spiderman #9 (February 1964). Quoted from Jacobs and Jones, 66.

25 Les Daniels, Comix: A History of Comic Books in America (New York: Bonanza
Books, 1971), 140.

26 See Fantastic Four #5 (1962): 2.

27 Wertham, 206-209.

28 Lee, The Incredible Hulk, 1A.

29 The Hulk #1 (May 1962): 10.

30 Spiderman #72 (May 1969): 14.

31 Peter Middleton makes a similar observation: "The Hulk series makes the split
between ordinary man (boy) and superhero (manhood) its central theme, showing that
what this division symbolizes is not the easy partnership represented by such images as
Clark Kent's telephone booth transformations." The author, however, does not account
for the historic singularity and significance of this shift in comic superheroes. Peter
Middleton, The Inward Gaze (London and New York: Routledge, 1992), 35.

32 Jacobs and Jones, 109-10.

33 Fantastic Four Annual Edition (1964): 10, panels 1-5; 1 1, panels 3-5.

34 Stan Lee, Bring on the Bad Guys (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1976), 191.

35 Fantastic Four #1 (November 1961): 22, panel 1.

36 Lee, Origins, 1 1 .

45

Dangerous Superpowers: Comic Book Heroes and American Masculinity in the Atomic Age

37 Fantastic Four#l (November 1961): 22.
3S D'Emilio and Freedman, 282.

39 Ibid., 292.

40 Estelle B. Freedman, "'Uncontrolled Desires': The Response to the Sexual Psy-
chopath, 1920-1960," in Passion and Power: Sexuality in History, eds. Kathy Peiss and
Christina Simmons (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1989), 203.

41 See James Gilbert, A Cycle of Outrage: America 's Reaction to the Juvenile Delin-
quent in the 1950's (New York & Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1986).

i2 Thor#115, 14, panels 1,2.

43 "Well after the Cuban crisis a poll [in 1965] found 40 percent of adolescents
admitted 'a great deal' of anxiety about war, more than twice the rate found in older
groups." Weart, 265. See also Boyer, 352-356.

44 Weart, 184-95.

45 Ibid., 170-82.

46 Collier's (May 3, 1947), reprinted in Boyer, 156.

47 See Michael Rogin, "Kiss Me Deadly: Communism, Motherhood, and Cold War
Movies," in Ronald Reagan, the Movie and Other Episodes in Political Demonology
(Berkeley, Los Angeles & London: University of California Press, 1987), esp. 263-67.

48 Stan Lee, Sons of Origins of Many el Comics (New York: Simon and Schuster,
1975), 14.

49 Weart, 125-26.

50 Fantastic Four#l (November 1961): 23, panels 7, 8.

51 51 Action Comics #309; reprinted in Will Jacobs and Gerard Jones, The Comic
Book Heroes: From the Silver Age to the Present (New York: Crown Publishers. Inc.,
1985), 79.

46

From Vietnam to the New World Order:
The GI Joe Action Figure as Cold War Artifact

Roger Chapman
Bowling Green State University

"I guess it's remembering a piece of history, trying to preserve a piece
of history even if it's your own personal piece of history. . . . Who knows?
Maybe a thousand years from now, some archaeologist is going to un-
earth this house and come up with these G.I. Joe figures and get some
insight into us as a culture."

-H. Kirk Bozigian, a Hasbro executive,
commenting on his personal collection
of action figures ^

In 1964, when the GI Joe soldier doll for boys was introduced by Hassenfeld
Brothers (later known as Hasbro), Congress approved the Gulf of Tonkin Reso-
lution which escalated American involvement in Vietnam. Nonetheless,
Hassenfeld designed its action toy to look like a World War II fighting man,
who at the time figured prominently in such television adventure series as
"Combat" (1962 -1967), "The Lieutenant" (1963), "12 0' Clock High" (1964-
1967), and "Rat Patrol" (1966-1967). During this period there were also tele-
vision situation comedies, some with World War II as the setting, which por-
trayed the American military man as basically good, even if sometimes whim-
sical and not always heroic. Examples include "Ensign O'Toole" (1962, 1964),
"McHale's Navy" ( 1 962- 1 965 ), "Gomer Pyle, USMC" ( 1 964- 1 968), "Hogan's
Heroes" (1965-1971), and "The Wackiest Ship in the Army" (1965). The World
War II soldier was also glorified at the time in the exploits of DC Comics' "Sgt.
Rock" and Marvel Comics' "Sgt. Fury." There are doubtless many reasons for
this lingering fascination with World War II, but any serious analysis would
have to take into consideration the interconnection of that war with the subse-
quent American sense of obligation in international affairs.

It should first be noted that the three presidents who succeeded Harry S.
Truman were all veterans of World War II. They came into office with a high
sense of duty toward the rest of the world, as can be seen by their inaugural
addresses. Dwight D. Eisenhower, the hero general of D-Day and the orga-
nizer of NATO, warned his fellow citizens in 1953 that "destiny has laid upon

47

From Vietnam to the New World Order: The GI Joe Action Figure as Cold War Artifact

our country the responsibility of the free world's leadership." Again, in 1957,
beginning his second term, Eisenhower declared, "To counter the threat of
those who seek rule by force, we must pay the costs of our own needed mili-
tary strength, and help to build the security of others." When John F. Kennedy
became president in 1961, he proclaimed that the United States would "pay
any price, bear any burden, meet any hardship, support any friend, oppose any
foe, in order to ensure the survival and success of liberty." In his 1965 inaugu-
ral speech, Johnson explained, "We can never again stand aside, prideful in
isolation. . . . If American lives must end, and American treasure be spilled, in
countries we barely know, that is the price change has demanded of conviction
and of our enduring covenant." These discourses not only represent the inter-
connection of World War II and the Cold War, they also betray a sense of felt
tensions and pressures brought on by the expanded role of American milita-
rism. World War II came to be the source of the nation's new identity as a
superpower, and that great event was also something to be looked back on for
the occasional maintenance of national courage.

Hence, the GI Joe action figure was made to look like the soldier of the
"Good War," even though American soldiers were at that time fighting in South-
east Asia. This boy's doll sold extremely well in its early years, but by 1970 the
toll of the Vietnam protests was such that it prompted Hasbro to turn gung-ho
Joes into "The Adventure Team." Instead of fighting a war, they would now
grow beards and look for sunken treasure or track down wild animals. By 1976,
the year after South Vietnam fell to communist North Vietnam, the GI Joe
action figure was given the token name of "Super Joe" while being reduced in
size from twelve to eight inches, as if there were a symbolic lowering of his
stature. Two years later, with Kenner dominating the market with its Star Wars
figures, Hasbro stopped producing GI Joes entirely.

The GI Joe story does not end here. But subsequent events would put to the
test the superpower resolve of the United States. In 1979, the year after GI Joe
was discontinued, American prestige in foreign affairs was further deflated by
the hostage crisis in Iran and, a year later, by the failed rescue attempt. The
abandoned helicopters in Desert One were psychologically reminiscent of the
ignoble withdrawal from Vietnam when, due to haste, American helicopters
had to be shoved off the deck of an aircraft carrier and wastefully dumped into
the South China Sea. : Also, in 1979, there was the Soviet invasion of Afghani-
stan and, a year later, the US boycott of the Olympics held in Moscow. This
period was also marked by labor unrest in Poland, which created tensions in
Eastern Europe. The American public's response to these and other events was
the election in 1980 of Ronald Reagan, a strong advocate of the armed forces
and an unequivocal anticommunist. James Webb, the future head of the Navy
and the man whose combat boots would be used as a model for the warrior

48

Roger Chapman

sculpture in front of the Vietnam Veterans Memorial, came out with his second
best-selling military novel, A Sense of Honor. Likewise, the theme of honor
resounded prominently in Reagan's inauguration, first with Iran freeing the
hostages, and second, through the remarks of the new president affirming
American heroes such as Martin Treptow, who fell on a World War I battle-
field. Hasbro, as if on cue, subsequently reissued GI Joe, designating it "A
Real American Hero."

This second wave of GI Joe action figures began an impressive assault, as if
scaling the black granite wall of the newly dedicated Vietnam Veterans Memo-
rial in Washington, even though they stood only three-and-three-quarters inches
tall. Actually, this was the new size standard for the toy industry, based on
Kenner's Star Wars figures. "A Real American Hero" is apparently what Ameri-
can society wanted because the new GI Joe was the best-selling toy of the 1982
holiday season. 3 Indeed, many children had written Hasbro, asking the toy
maker to bring GI Joe back, and for its part Hasbro coopted the political dis-
course of the times and used it for its marketing purposes. By the next year, GI
Joe would have its own cartoon series, reinforcing the concept of soldier as
hero.

In 1983, Reagan not only called the Soviet Union an "evil empire" and
announced plans for the Strategic Defense Initiative (Star Wars), he saw to it
that the tiny Caribbean island of Grenada was liberated from communist rule,
as he no doubt felt that Cuba should have been two decades earlier. During his
subsequent State of the Union speech, Reagan had a participant of the Grenada
invasion, an airborne ranger, stand up before a joint-session of Congress and
be recognized as an American hero. The following year Reagan easily won
reelection while using the slogan "It's morning in America again."

By the time George Bush assumed the presidency, Hasbro was claiming
that two-thirds of American boys between the ages of five and eleven owned
GI Joes. 4 In 1989, a year after Bush ordered the invasion of Panama and the
kidnaping of its leader, GI Joe was introduced for the first time with actual
shooting weapons. As one Hasbro official explained, seemingly echoing the
common refrain about why the United States lost the Vietnam War, "We felt
like we were playing with one hand tied behind our backs." 5 With such fire-
power GI Joe could now be even more of a real American hero, while main-
taining its strength in sales. In the real world of warfare, Bush vowed on the
eve of Desert Storm that "No hands are going to be tied behind backs," ex-
plaining, "This is not Vietnam." 6

The year 1991, which began with the Gulf War and concluded with the
collapse of the Soviet Union, was a moment in history when World War II, the
Cold War, and the New World Order intersected. It starred an American presi-
dent, a former World War II fighter pilot, overseeing the surgical air strikes

49

From Vietnam to the New World Order: The GI Joe Action Figure as Cold War Artifact

against Iraq, an action endorsed by an international coalition which symbol-
ized a New World Order, and it coincided with the near simultaneous dissolu-
tion of the USSR. Bush was the first American president able to proclaim, "We
won the Cold War!" and "It's a New World Order!" The following year GI
Joe, as victor, was back at his original twelve inches of height and given the
name of "Duke." Dressed in desert camouflage fatigues, as if eager to reenact
the Gulf War (maybe this time going all the way to Baghdad), "Duke" linked
the action figure with the John Wayne legend. 7 As an actor in heroic movies
depicting World War II (e.g., "Sands of Iwo Jima") and the Vietnam War (e.g.,
"The Green Berets"), Wayne ("Duke") was an apt symbol to tie together dif-
ferent periods of history, connecting the present New World Order with the
glorious past.

The above narrative treats the GI Joe action figure as a Cold War artifact,
reading it as a text that was written for, but not by, children. The inherent
presupposition is that mass-produced toys-designed, marketed, and purchased
by adults-are about more than just child's play. According to Thomas J.
Schlereth, toys are "artifacts of two cultures" and "reveal as much about a
society's adults as its children."* To read a toy as an adult text is not to ignore
or dismiss the agency of children, but rather it is to examine one important
dimension of meaning. In this case, what is being examined is the adult mean-
ing infused into the artifact.

The observation Roland Barthes made about French toys, that they "prefig-
ure the world of adult functions," 9 can also apply to the American action fig-
ure. Shortly after GI Joe was introduced, Antonia Fraser in A History of Toys
described the action figure as "openly warlike," but went on to rationalize its
existence, regrettable or questionable as it may have been, by concluding that
it is an inevitable part of a child's desire to imitate adults:

This is obviously the natural development of an age when a child's
admired father is dressed up as GI Joe. As long as men go to war
and armies exist children will want to play with soldiers, and there-
fore one can scarcely blame the manufacturers for trying to fill
the need. At the same time on the principle of the chicken and the
egg, it might be argued that as long as the children are given sol-
diers to play with, they themselves will grow up prepared to be
soldiers-but here the argument begins to extend far outside the
realm of a history of toys. 10

What Fraser deemed as being beyond "history" is essentially cultural hege-
mony, the socialization process involving the winning of loyalty to common
values and attitudes." Toys that prefigure adult functions socialize children to
think and feel in certain ways. When read as a text, the GI Joe toy can offer

50

Roger Chapman

insight into how certain American values and attitudes are passed on to chil-
dren. The chicken and the egg argument is more ambiguous than Fraser framed
it to be. On the one hand, many boys who played with GI Joes never evolved
into Cold War soldiers. On the other hand, many who never wore military
uniforms supported American interventionist policies.

Anything that is made reveals a little of the maker's worldview. Simple as
that may be, it is easy to overlook. The maker prefers that attention be given to
the finished product, not to the process that went into its making. If there are
explanations, then they will generally be focused on how the material object is
to be used. If justifications are offered, then legitimation will often be based on
universals, as if the artifact's reality is outside and apart from any human social
construction. For example, a GI Joe promotional film viewed by potential buy-
ers at the 1964 Toy Fair gave the impression that Hasbro's new action figure
was only helping to fulfill the natural desires of boys:

Since the beginning of time children have always played soldier-
with wooden swords, broomstick rifles, with cast-lead soldiers,
with plastic minatures . . . but none of these gave a boy the feeling
he was playing real soldier. 12

The GI Joe came with not only lifelike uniforms and realistic military ac-
cessories, but a body with twenty-one movable joints which enabled it to be
naturally posed in various combat situations. According to the promotional
film, children could now play soldier and, thanks to Hasbro, the experience
would seem more authentic. Here can be seen a subtle denial of cultural hege-
mony, as the very moment of invention is disguised as merely a different form
of preexisting essence. But what, in fact, was being introduced was a symbol
for the time, a visual aid of the Cold War.

According to Gene Del Vecchio, the GI Joe action figure is "Ever-Cool"
because it satisfies an "eternal emotion" with its good-versus-evil storyline,
while simultaneously being relevant to the contemporary context: "So as evils
spring up in the real world, boys imagine that they can defend their country
from it, and the G.I. Joe is the conduit through which they can fantasize." 13 If
this explanation of GI Joe's popularity is correct, it suggests that cultural hege-
mony is actualized by an emotionalizing process which connects certain ideas
of reality with latent psychological needs. Even so, explanations of "Ever-
Cool" and "eternal emotion" deny the power of creation by attributing it to
something outside itself.

Peter L. Berger and Thomas Luckman in The Social Construction of Real-
ity stress the importance of formula in transmitting experiences from one gen-
eration to the next. 14 They explain that common experiences, perhaps what
Raymond Williams would have called structures of feeling, 15 become

51

From Vietnam to the New World Order: The GI Joe Action Figure as Cold War Artifact

sedimented in human consciousness, which functions as a collective deposi-
tory. A sign system, essentially language, is necessary for the transmission and
retrieval of these common experiences. The GI Joe action figure, which is not
only an artifact but also a formulaic sign system, serves as a template, connect-
ing World War II with the Cold War, and now the Cold War with the New
World Order. The formula is part of the "eternal emotion" and allows for mean-
ing to change, as the sedimentation of the collective consciousness shifts and
accommodates new experiences and new interpretations. This kind of mean-
ing is complex, not simple, as it is based on symbols that suggest or imply
rather than denote. 16 Any attempt at understanding the operation of cultural
hegemony must distinguish between symbol and reality, or, in this case, be-
tween action figure and reality.

It is important to clarify that the theory of cultural hegemony does not pre-
suppose a single view of reality, even if it does focus on what is considered to
be a dominant one. In almost any given situation, there will be resistance, such
as the social critics who objected to the GI Joe because of its being a war toy.
Also, any view of reality is subject to change, especially during moments of
crisis. For example, in America the "rallying around the flag" phenomenon
will often take place during the initial outbreak of military conflict, and even
individuals who had beforehand been opposed to the actions or policies lead-
ing up to the event frequently find themselves siding with what they in a larger
sense do not accept. (A person in such a situation might say, "While I question
the need for us to intervene, I fully support our troops who have been de-
ployed") Or, vice versa, supporters can later transform into oppositionists, as
did many over the Vietnam War once they concluded it was a stalemated or
immoral situation. Thus, any reference to a dominant viewpoint or ideology
should be understood in a restricted sense for a particular context. At the same
time, it should be emphasized that any focus on a specific prop of hegemony,
in this case the GI Joe action figure, is not to suggest that any power it may
have (or may have had) is one that developed in isolation; any such tool is
simply one component of a multi-faceted whole. While there are dangers and
pitfalls in any interpretive effort, there is at the same time the reality of a soci-
ety having shared symbols and the researcher's dialectical safeguard of going
back and forth between texts and contexts. 17 For the analysis offered in the
first part of this essay, the text is the GI Joe action figure and the context is the
historical narrative of 1964-1992.

The last section of this presentation will focus on the "action figure" desig-
nation for the GI Joe in an attempt to discover a hegemonic meaning. At a
surface level, "action figure" is terminology which denies, or conceals, the
reality of a boy's doll. GI Joe was inspired by Mattel's Barbie (which made its
debut in 1959), but marketers realized that the typical boy would never play

52

Roger Chapman

with a doll that was actually called a doll. Hence, the "action figure" nomen-
clature, made all the more convincing by the GI Joe's many movable joints.
(Ironically, a federal judge ruled in 1989 that GI Joe is not a toy soldier but a
doll, mandating that Hasbro pay a 12 percent rather than a 6.8 percent tariff for
importing its Hong Kong-made action figure into the United States. 18 )

A feminist reading suggests that the GI Joe action figure reinforces the
stereotype that males are supposed to be active, whereas Barbie, with less
movability (because it is a fashion figure), teaches girls that females are ex-
pected to be passive. 19 This viewpoint argues that "action figure" is a rein-
forcement of male dominance. However, such observation is somewhat weak-
ened by Ken, Barbie's boyfriend, who is also less mobile than GI Joe. Further-
more, the GI Joe nurse, a female figure with blonde hair and painted green
eyes, had the same bendable joints as the male figures of soldier, sailor, pilot,
and marine. If the GI Joe nurse was just an auxiliary, Barbie at least was able to
serve as an air force pilot, a navy chief petty officer, and an army captain. 20
There was also a "Desert Storm Barbie ." 2I Moreover, since Mattel and Hasbro
are not the same company, the argument that Barbie is representative of female
passivity simply because it has fewer joints than GI Joe is all the more unten-
able because it falsely fuses two "authors" (the toy manufacturers) into one
and mistakenly attributes the differences in their "texts" (the boy's doll and the
girl's doll) to a decision made by a singular mind.

Any attempt to explain the meaning of the "action figure" designator should
be based on the context in which it was created. That context is the Cold War.
"Action figure" was the name given for a toy soldier that was introduced to the
public during a full-blown manifestation of the Cold War, the military inter-
vention in Southeast Asia now known as the Vietnam War. While the GI Joe
was literally a movable toy soldier, the "action figure" name just happened to
coincide with a fundamental American impulse. As an attitude, it was expressed
in the inaugural addresses of Eisenhower, Kennedy, and Johnson, all proclaim-
ing that the United States must lead the way, set the example, and fight war
when necessary. The Kennedy speech, for instance, offered the verbs of "pay,"
"bear," "meet," "support," and "oppose," expressing action, and anyone carry-
ing them out would be in a sense an "action figure."

This fundamental impulse or attitude is more than simply poetic matching.
Rather, it has deep roots in the American past. Michael H. Hunt in Ideology
and U.S. Foreign Policy argues that the Vietnam War was "the culmination . . .
of an old [American] impulse to impose on the world the patterns of an ideo-
logical foreign policy." 22 That old impulse, Hunt explains, can be traced back
to the eighteenth century, when Americans envisioned themselves as having a
national greatness, one founded on liberty and political moderation. Ameri-
cans also shared a view that their nation was an example for the rest of the

53

From Vietnam to the New World Order: The GI Joe Action Figure as Cold War Artifact

world to follow. However, in time there developed racist attitudes that some
foreigners were incapable of establishing democracy without outside help. That
belief, coupled with a growing intolerance toward radicalism, led to greater
and greater foreign intervention on the part of the United States. During the
Cold War, the United States' foreign policy was a reaction against radicalism
("communist aggression") and the fear that many countries were incapable of
resisting such an antidemocratic threat. The policy of containment was actu-
ally a vigorous and active vigilantism.

Hence, the GI Joe action figure was (and is) about more than child's play. In
actuality, it is an artifact of an ideology that was revived during World War II,
but which can be traced back to the founding of the country. The sense of
national greatness, as manifested during the Cold War, fosters a sense of re-
sponsibility to take action wherever and whenever it is deemed necessary. This
concept of duty, and the confidence to take action, is fostered in children who
play with GI Joes and other toys like it. While it would be absurd to suggest
that all boys who played with action figures went on to become soldiers, it
could be argued that by adulthood most were supportive of American interven-
tionism in foreign affairs. Such inculturation is not an isolated event, not ex-
clusively the result of playing with certain toys, but is a process reinforced in a
multitude of different ways over the course of an individual's lifetime.

Today GI Joe is a Cold War artifact casting its shadow into the New World
Order. As a symbol, and part of an American national depository of meaning,
the GI Joe action figure transmits mythologies and experiences to the next
generation.

Notes

1 G.Wayne Miller, Toy Wars: The Epic Struggle Between G.I. Joe, Barbie and the
Companies That Make Them (New York: Times Books, 1998), 126.

: Lynda Boose, "Techno-Muscularity and the 'Boy Eternal' : From the Quagmire to
the Gulf," in Cultures of United States Imperialism, eds. Amy Kaplan and Donald E.
Pease (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1993), 586.

3 Gary Cross, Kids 'Stuff: Toys and the Changing World of American Childhood (Cam-
bridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1997), 203.

4 Ibid.. 204.

5 Miller, Toy Wars, 127.

6 Tom Engelhardt, The End of Victory Culture: Cold War America and the Disillu-
sioning of a Generation (New York: BasicBooks, 1995), 274.

7 Dan Fleming, Powerplay: Toys as Popular Culture (New York: Manchester Univer-
sity Press, 1996), 163.

54

Roger Chapman

8 Thomas J. Schlereth, Cultural History and Material Culture: Everyday Life, Land-
scapes, Museums (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1992), 91.

9 Roland Barthes, Mythologies, trans. Annete Lavers (New York: Hill & Wang, 1972),
53.

10 Antonia Fraser, A History of Toys (Frankfort-am-Main: Delacorte Press, 1966),
230-231.

11 The concept of cultural hegemony is rooted in the insights of Antonio Gramsci,
The Modern Prince and Other Writings, ed. and trans. Louis Marks (New York: Inter-
national Publishers, 1967), and Selections From Prison Notebooks, eds. and trans.
Quentin Horace and Geoffrey Nowell Smith (New York: International Publishers, 197 1 ).

12 Miller, Toy Wars, 27.

13 Gene Del Vecchio, Creating Ever-Cool: A Marketer's Guide to a Kid's Heart
(Gretna, LA: Pelican Publishing Company, Inc., 1997), 40-41.

14 Peter L. Berger and Thomas Luckman, The Social Construction of Reality (New
York: Anchor Books, 1966). 67-72.

15 See Raymond Williams, The Long Revolution (London: Penguin Books, 1975).

16 Wendy Griswold, Cultures and Societies in a Changing World (Thousand Oaks,
CA: Pine Forge Press, 1994), 19.

17 Robert Darton, The Great Cat Massacre (New York: Vintage Books, 1984), 259-
263.

18 Sydney Ladensohn Stern and Ted Schoenhaus, Toyland: The High-Stakes Games
of the Toy Industry (Chicago: Contemporary Books, 1990), 1 12.

19 Judy Attfield, "Barbie and Action Man: Adult Toys for Boys and Girls, 1959-93,"
in The Gendered Object, ed. Patrick Kirkham (New York: Manchester University Press,
1996), 80-89.

20 Marianne Debouzy, "The Barbie Doll," in European Readings of American Popu-
lar Culture, eds. John Dean and Jean-Paul Gabilliet (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press,
1996), 142.

21 Ann duCille, "Dyes and Dolls: Multicultural Barbie and the Merchandizing of
Difference," in A Cultural Studies Reader: History, Theory, Practice, eds. Jessica Munns
and Gita Rajan (London and New York: Longman, 1995), 556.

"Michael H. Hunt, Ideology and U.S. Foreign Policy (New Haven: Yale University
Press, 1987), 170.

55

American Dream Meets Russian

Nightmare: Professional Wrestling

and the End of the Cold War

Terence Whalen
University of Illinois at Chicago

In the waning years of the Cold War, a curious series of events unfolded in
one of the American professional wrestling leagues. A popular veteran wres-
tler nicknamed "The American Dream" and an unpopular newcomer known as
"the Russian Nightmare" became tag-team partners. This partnership between
Dusty Rhodes and Nikita Koloff originated within the National Wrestling
Alliance (NWA) in the early months of 1987, before Gorbachev had imple-
mented many of his proposed reforms and long before the Soviet Union finally
collapsed in 1991 . Since professional wrestling is often treated as a repository
of prejudice and blind patriotism, the alliance between the American Dream
and the Russian Nightmare warrants further consideration. In this essay I would
like to explore several interrelated issues: the importance of "alliance narra-
tives" during the Cold War; the rehabilitation of the Russian image both in and
out of the ring; and the implications of treating professional wrestling as a kind
of performance art for the working class. 1

I should begin by admitting the obvious: of course the competition is rigged.
One look at Dusty Rhodes, fan favorite and occasional champion, should have
convinced anyone that professional wrestling is less a sport than a performance
art. By 1987, Rhodes was a flabby, fifty-year-old Texan with sagging pectorals
who absorbed blows better than he delivered them. Outside of the ring, how-
ever, the American Dream revealed the true basis for his popularity. Wearing
boots, bandanna, and a cowboy hat, Rhodes used the television interview to
transform himself into a working-class hero (he sounded for all the world like
a white Jesse Jackson, complete with stirring cadences and ringing one-lin-
ers). In the late 1980s, the NWA was able to squeeze a few more matches out
of the fading Rhodes through its distinctive emphasis on tag teams and audi-
ence participation. Unlike most forms of television entertainment, professional
wrestling responds directly to the shifting moods and desires of the live audi-
ence in the arena. 2 And unlike television coverage of professional sports, which
tends to emphasize individual performance over teamwork, professional wres-
tling foregrounds such group issues as loyalty, sacrifice, and betrayal.

56

Terence Whalen

In this and other respects, professional wrestling resembles the nineteenth-
century melodrama. 3 In each of these ostensibly lowbrow genres, exaggerated
acts of virtue and vice elicit exaggerated responses from a largely working-
class audience. The wrestling ring, like the melodramatic stage, is a site of
struggle and transformation in which honest workaday characters like Dusty
Rhodes battle against such evil powers as the Four Horsemen (managed by the
sleazy James J. Dillon) and the vicious Midnight Express (managed by an
obnoxious young millionaire named Jim Cornette). In professional wrestling,
however, struggle itself is institutionalized to such an extent that dramatic roles
become lifelong occupations. Just as no wrestler can be defeated once and for
all, Dusty Rhodes could never separate himself from the identity conferred
upon him by the spectacle. In most of the wrestling leagues now on television,
this has led to a stultifying dead end: characters wrestle week after week, but
nothing ever happens which might give permanent, irreversible meaning to a
particular match. In the mid-1980s, the National Wrestling Alliance attempted
to solve this problem by developing what might be called alliance narratives
stories based on the composition and recomposition of tag teams. Recognizing
that an utterly isolated individual was an artistic cipher, the NWA tried to situ-
ate its wrestlers within teams that had some kind of collective identity. Lex
Lugar, for example, was virtuous or vicious not in his essence but in his asso-
ciation with an established tag team. When he quit the Four Horsemen, he took
the first step toward his own redemption and, at the same time, opened up new
possibilities for future episodes of the NWA story.

Of all the alliance narratives developed during the 1980s, the strangest one
centered on the protean career of Nikita Koloff, nicknamed the "Russian Night-
mare." Once paired with his Uncle Ivan Koloff to form a Soviet tag team,
Nikita broke with his comrade to join up with none other than Dusty Rhodes.
Given the NWA's penchant for reversal and betrayal, the switch was not in
itself remarkable, especially since Koloff had already won the grudging re-
spect of fans through his powerful physique and his devastating forearm hook
called, appropriately enough, the Russian Sickle. Unexpectedly, however, fans
started to feel more than mere respect for the awkward young representative of
the Evil Empire. After Koloff defeated Magnum T. A. for the U.S. Heavyweight
Title in 1986, promoters undoubtedly decided to exploit his ambiguous status
by engineering his break with Uncle Ivan and later, by pairing him with the
American Dream. On the surface, Nikita's defection might have appeared as
yet another victory for the American way, but his transformation was handled
with more subtlety and satire than was normally met with in the political dis-
course of the Reagan-Bush years. Nikita's "own" explanation, far from cel-
ebrating free enterprise, tended to question the meaning of patriotism and na-
tional loyalty. With irony that could only have been intentional, Nikita de-

57

American Dream Meets Russian Nightmare: Professional Wrestling and the End of the Cold War

scribed what it felt like to become an American in an age of multinational
capitalism: "I celebrate the Fourth of July instead of May Day, eat real eggs
instead of caviar, and drive flashy Japanese car I buy on credit." 4

Given the mutability of his alliances and the irony of his interviews, Nikita
Koloff presents several problems for theories of mass culture. For one thing,
the conversion of Nikita Koloff questions the adequacy of any theory of pro-
fessional wrestling that derives its method from structural linguistics. In a semi-
nal collection of essays on mass culture entitled Mythologies, Roland Barthes
describes the wrestling ring as a site of "pure and full signification" through
which one can experience "the euphoria of men raised for a while above the
constitutive ambiguity of everyday situations and placed before the panoramic
view of a univocal Nature, in which signs at last correspond to causes, without
obstacle, without evasion, without contradiction."" In his account of the French
counterpart to American professional wrestling, Barthes strongly emphasizes
the "synchronic" plenitude of meaning (that is, he treats each match as a com-
plete system or structure of significance). Unfortunately, Barthes's approach
sheds little light on wrestling as a "diachronic" narrative of group conflict that
develops over time and that never reaches a conclusion (except when the wres-
tlers die or the leagues go bankrupt). NWA audiences undoubtedly delighted at
such overt gestures of dominance as the body slam or the back breaker, but
what packed the arena week after week was an appreciation for the decompo-
sition and recomposition of tag teams that gave special meaning to individual
acts of violence. Out of these acts of violence, the NWA fabricated a history
marked by wild reversals of fortune: at every match fans could witness the foe
turned into friend, the cheater defeated by his own cheating, the dominator
utterly dominated.

A similar theoretical problem arises when the linguistic and extralinguistic
aspects of professional wrestling are treated as complementary parts of a single
discourse, for one of the salient features of wrestling as a working-class art
form involves the difference (and frequently the contradiction) between what
is said during interviews and what happens in the ring. The special status of the
interview is highlighted by the "Superpower" alliance between the eloquent
Dusty Rhodes and the inarticulate Nikita Koloff. Over the course of his long
career, Rhodes had become sluggish in his moves but extremely fluent in his
speech. Koloff, for all his talent in the ring, spoke so crudely that every third
word was incomprehensible (No doubt he was trying to imitate a real Russian
immigrant, but to my ear he sounded more like a moose with strep throat).
Curiously, this actually endeared Koloff to his American audience, for in pro-
fessional wrestling, a certain degree of inarticulateness can serve as a token of
authenticity (as long as it is consistent with the wrestler's persona). The two
wrestlers comprising the Rock 'n' Roll Express, for example, were consis-

58

Terence Whalen

tently bashful and reticent during interviews. Mimicking the behavior of some
young athletes and rock stars, they always managed to give the impression that
the interviewer's microphone was an imposition from official society which
they politely endured.

But if inarticulateness was sometimes an indication of a wrestler's sincer-
ity, having a manager present during questioning was almost always a sign of
deceit. There may have been a kernel of true emotion in the words of one of the
Four Horsemen, but their manager James J. Dillon was so calculating and
greedy that he regularly aroused hisses from the audience. Fans also loved to
hate Jim Cornette, but in this case the audience response was heightened by
socio-economic inequity. Cornette, manager of the Midnight Express, played
the part of a spoiled rich kid, and he used the interviews as occasions to whine,
snivel and gloat (If Dusty Rhodes sounded like a white Jesse Jackson, Jim
Cornette resembled a young George Bush). Never appearing without his ten-
nis racket scepter of the ruling class Cornette used his family money to
buy friends and titles. In 1987 he even tried to hire Dick Murdoch (Captain
Redneck) to win the U.S. Heavyweight Title and then deliver the belt to Beau-
tiful Bobby Eaton (the ugly half of the Midnight Express).

Thus, the interview is not a partial moment of a seamless, unified discourse
but the false half of a contradiction between word and deed, between ideologi-
cal claim and material conflict. However gullible the audience may seem dur-
ing actual matches, they view interviews with great skepticism, and it is fair to
say that they verify the truth or falsity of particular utterances by observing the
collisions and contortions of the bodies from which the utterances originated.
As to the bodies themselves, it is once again important to distinguish between
the NWA in the 1980s and the more popular (and commercialized) wrestling
syndicates on television today. In the 1980s, the NWA was notable for present-
ing a surprising range of shapes and sizes with varying degrees of muscularity
or obesity. In part, this was a response to loyal, longtime fans, who had greater
appreciation for old feuds and old wrestlers. There may, however, have been a
deeper meaning behind this phenomenon. Promoters could have assembled a
cast of large, finely sculpted athletes, but I think the NWA's traditional fans
would have derived little pleasure from viewing the uniform products of ste-
roids and Nautilus machines. A heterogeneous array of shapes allows an "av-
erage" body to triumph occasionally over bodies formed by self-discipline and
scientific management. For this reason a diversity of bodies allows the tran-
scendence of mere physique, and the ring therefore grants a certain equality of
opportunity to all who enter it. In doing so it implies that the men who struggle
there are something more than brute flesh and bone.

In this paradoxical manner, professional wrestling sometimes generates a
humane message out of the most calculating degradation, just as it manufac-

59

American Dream Meets Russian Nightmare: Professional Wrestling and the End of the Cold War

tures "chance" outcomes by requiring wrestlers to follow a meticulously de-
tailed script. Even if the outcome of every match were not decided in advance,
the ostensible role of error and chance would be enough to disqualify profes-
sional wrestling from being a true athletic competition. But this disqualifica-
tion allows professional wrestling to respond to the audience's most Utopian
impulses by incorporating (or travestying) broader social and political issues.
Freed from the rigors of competition and the standards of taste, professional
wrestling can occasionally function as a kind of sentinel sport. In other words,
since professional wrestling is relatively free from formal regulations, it can
quickly register and exploit the shifting attitudes of the viewing public.

As I have suggested, this capability is best illustrated by the strange career
of Nikita Koloff during the waning years of the Cold War. For much of the
1980s, Koloff was still marketed as a classic villain, that is, as a wrestler who
openly violated the "rules" for evil purposes. In addition, Koloff 's Soviet citi-
zenship was often contrasted with American patriotism. In one politically
charged match that occurred in 1985, Don Kernodle defeated Ivan Koloff and
thereby regained his American flag from the desecrating Russians. Nikita
attending his uncle at ringside refused to abide by the decision and viciously
attacked Kernodle, who had to be rescued by none other than Dusty Rhodes.
Both the malicious interference by Nikita Koloff and the rescue by Dusty Rhodes
were standard scenes in the NWA repertoire. That is, most wrestlers espe-
cially the villains ostensibly harbored deeply-felt animosity toward oppo-
nents and a corresponding disrespect for the rules of the ring. Wrestlers were
also presumed to be too strong for normal mortals to restrain, so when a villain
ran amuck, he had to be stopped by a "good" wrestler who respected the rules
of fair play. Promoters accordingly used the interference and the rescue not
only to add interest (and outrage) to a particular match, but also to develop a
wrestler's public image as a villain or hero.

In any event, Nikita Koloff was fairly consistently portrayed as a villain
throughout 1985. When Ivan Koloff and Krusher Krushev were being defeated
by the Rock 'n' Roll Express, Nikita leapt into the ring with a chain and stopped
the match. Nikita's bad behavior continued through 1986 when he met with
Magnum T.A. to sign a lucrative contract for future matches. In the televised
press conference, Magnum T.A. was accompanied by his mother while Nikita
was seconded by his Uncle Ivan. Nikita had already desecrated the American
flag, and with an embodiment of American motherhood so nearby, he could
not resist insulting "Mrs. T.A." Magnum of course retaliated, but he was no
match for the two Russians. Later, in a move calculated to outrage and thereby
attract wrestling fans, the NWA president delivered an official reprimand, not
to the Koloffs, but to Magnum T.A. Magnum punched the president and was
stripped of his title pending the outcome of seven matches with Nikita Koloff.

60

Terence Whalen

Out of this melodramatic cauldron of outrage and villainy, Nikita Koloff rose
to become the U.S. Heavyweight Champion.

But how did he become popular with American fans? The fans expect
reversals and betrayals this in fact lends drama to tag team matches and builds
interest in individual rivalries. In the case of Nikita Koloff, however, there
were several additional factors at play. First, Nikita 's age and inexperience
worked to his advantage, for his anti-American acts could be characterized as
mistakes of youth. Second, there was always a tongue-in-cheek quality to
Nikita's ostensible devotion to Soviet Communism (one of the standard NWA
publicity photos shows the hulking Nikita and Ivan Koloff struggling to under-
stand a book on Soviet political philosophy, which bears the English title Pro-
paganda). Finally, social class played a key role in Nikita's rehabilitation. As
indicated above, Nikita himself emphasized the material, practical aspects of
his move from Russia to the United States. Pro Wrestling Illustrated, the maga-
zine which helped facilitate Nikita's transformation, placed a similar emphasis
on practical conditions rather than grand ideologies:

Those born in this country find it hard to imagine the sheer multi-
tude of adjustments that someone raised in a Communist country
must make in order to live in America. ... In the Soviet Union,
everyone is guaranteed a job, no matter how unfit they might be.
It may not be caviar and roses, but it is steady. In America one can
rise to greater heights, but fail just as resoundingly. 6

Due to all of these factors, the fans were willing to view Nikita, not as the
personification of an evil empire, but as a working wrestler who was com-
pelled to practice his trade in a different social order. For Dusty Rhodes and for
NWA fans, in other words, class solidarity based on a shared necessity to work
could occasionally overcome Cold War antagonisms rooted in national differ-
ence.

It therefore became possible to turn the powerful young Nikita into an ally
of Dusty Rhodes, who was struggling to squeeze a few more victories out of
his aging and injured body. 7 On several occasions, the two wrestlers were team-
mates in eight-man matches, as in the spring of 1987, when Rhodes, Nikita
Koloff, and the Road Warriors were pitted against a version of the Four Horse-
men (Ric Flair, Tully Blanchard, Arn Anderson, and Ole Anderson). Such
anomalous, ad hoc teams do not necessarily imply a strong bond among the
wrestlers, so it was significant when promoters decided to take the next step of
pairing Rhodes and Nikita Koloff as a regular, two-man tag team. The emer-
gence of this team was partly facilitated by the actions of Dick Murdoch.
Murdoch, a.k.a. "Captain Redneck," had been paired up with Dusty Rhodes in
the 1960s. Their team, called the Texas Outlaws, had a reputation for brawling

61

American Dream Meets Russian Nightmare: Professional Wrestling and the End of the Cold War

and cheating. As one might expect, there was no honor among villains, and the
relationship between the two men alternated between periods of devoted friend-
ship and dastardly acts of betrayal. The team broke up in the 1970s, and al-
though Murdoch retained his "Texas Outlaw" image, Rhodes developed a new,
more endearing persona as "The American Dream." In any event, Murdoch
briefly teamed up with Rhodes and Nikita in 1987, but true to form, Murdoch
"unexpectedly" turned on the other two wrestlers. From Rhodes's perspective,
a loyal Russian was better than a back-stabbing Texan, so Rhodes and Koloff
became a regular two-man tag team, competing against the likes of the Mid-
night Express and the team of Ric Flair and Lex Lugar. The alliance between
the American Dream and the Russian Nightmare did nothing to hurt Rhodes's
reputation with the fans, for at the end of 1987, Pro Wrestling Illustrated named
him "Most Popular Wrestler."

For Nikita Koloff, teaming up with Rhodes was a means to rehabilitate his
image with the fans. The success of his rehabilitation was vividly demonstrated
in January 1988, in a televised match between Nikita Koloff and Mike Rotundo
of the Varsity Club. s As the name indicates, the Varsity Club served as a sym-
bol of wealth and education in professional wrestling. Rotundo himself bore
the nickname of "Mr. Wallstreet," and both his moves and his uniform (singlet
and headgear) were derived from the genuine collegiate sport. The January
match was a two-man contest between Koloff and Rotundo, so in essence the
audience was treated to a politically charged conflict between the burly Rus-
sian and the college-educated representative of the American elite. Confronted
with such a spectacle, the audience had a number of options. They could, for
example, have decided that both wrestlers were villains, and simply rooted for
a violent, destructive match. They could also have chosen to pass negative
judgment on Nikita's rehabilitation if they believed that Russians were inher-
ently villainous. Instead, the audience decided that Rotundo was the real vil-
lain, and they rooted loudly for the workaday Russian partner of the American
Dream. In the end, Nikita Koloff won a double victory in the ring and in the
hearts of his American audience.

The match was a turning point in the career of Nikita Koloff. In all likeli-
hood, promoters had decided that class solidarity could be used to increase
ticket sales. If nothing else, they recognized that the Russian image had be-
come less menacing and more fluid to a working-class audience. Paradoxi-
cally, Nikita's transformation was confirmed by a subsequent defeat. Villains
are especially coveted by promoters because they sharpen conflicts and stimu-
late enthusiasm for protagonists. In addition, promoters frequently exploit vil-
lains and villainy in televised contests to promote fan interest in local or pay-
per-view matches. A few weeks after their initial match, Rotundo and Nikita
Koloff wrestled again, this time for the so-called television title (then held by

62

Terence Whalen

Koloff). To the obvious displeasure of the audience, Rotundo won the title. His
victory signalled the emergence of a new chief villain in the NWA, but more
significantly, it indicated that class resentment had displaced Cold War mis-
trust as the ultimate source of fan animosity. It is not so easy to explain why a
match with a predetermined outcome should have aroused such passion in the
audience several years before the Cold War had officially ended. Maybe the
fans were drawn to NWA spectacles because official society condemned them,
or perhaps the NWA appealed to their buried desires for a new kind of alliance.
Whatever the appeal, the NWA reached its peak of popularity during the Reagan-
Bush era. In those years the NWA created a crude arena where the struggle was
not between lone protagonists and a seamless power structure, but between
polarized groups who were forced to put aside their lies and fight it out in the
ring.

According to some sociologists, it should have been impossible for profes-
sional wrestling to stray so far from Cold War conformity. Michael R. Ball, for
example, characterizes professional wrestling as a "liminoid ritual designed to
maximize profits and to surreptitiously promote the core values of conserva-
tive bureaucratic elites." 4 As I have suggested, the curious alliance of the Ameri-
can Dream and the Russian Nightmare demonstrates that there was on occa-
sion a much greater degree of ideological openness in the NWA than admit-
ted by such theories. Skeptics at the other end of the spectrum, including the
"bureaucratic elites" themselves, may still object that professional wrestling is
not fair competition, that it fails to conform to a free market model in which
individuals rise and fall through their own efforts. These objections are en-
tirely justifiable, but I think they have less to do with wrestling per se than with
the curious status of freedom in this class-conscious performance art. The cul-
turally privileged must, after all, view professional wrestling in much the same
way that the working class views a supposedly competitive economy in the
post-Cold War era. Ask the fans of professional wrestling about the economy,
and they'll tell you that of course the competition is rigged.

Notes

' Sharon Mazer disputes the characterization of professional wrestling as a form of
working-class entertainment. According to her, the "mass cultural appeal" of profes-
sional wrestling is a sign of the audience's "heterogeneity." See Sharon Mazer, Profes-
sional Wrestling: Sport and Spectacle (Jackson, MS: University Press of Mississippi,
1998), 3. Depending on how one defines a social class, however, "mass culture" may in
fact be aimed at the working class, and the working class may in fact be "heteroge-
neous." My experience of professional wrestling in North Carolina during the 1980s
suggests that professional wrestling was closely, though not exclusively, oriented to-
ward a working-class audience. For further confirmation of this impression, see Winfrey

63

American Dream Meets Russian Nightmare: Professional Wrestling and the End of the Cold War

M. Ruffin, Jr., "Professional Wrestling as a Resource for Social Workers," paper deliv-
ered at the Popular Culture Association of the South Annual Conference, October 1988.

2 Whatever one thinks about the falseness of the spectacle itself, be assured that the
passion of the audience is very real. For an insightful personal reminiscence and com-
mentary about professional wrestling, see Bert Randolph Sugar, "Wrestling Match a
Morality Play for Our Time," A dvertising Age (12 August 1985): 28.

3 Henry Jenkins refers to professional wrestling as "masculine melodrama." Quoted
in Sharon Mazer, Professional Wrestling: Sport and Spectacle, 18.

4 "Nikita Koloff," Pro Wrestling Illustrated (March 1988): 28.

5 Roland Barthes, "The World of Wrestling," in Mythologies, trans. Annette Lavers
(New York: Hill and Wang, 1972), 25.

6 "Nikita Koloff," 28.

7 Rhodes's celebrated leg injury was a story in itself. Villainous opponents repeat-
edly attacked the injury, which aroused fan outrage toward the villains and sympathy
toward Rhodes himself.

8 Broadcast 30 January 1988 on WTBS affiliates.

9 Michael R. Ball, Professional Wrestling as Ritual Drama in American Popular
Culture (Lewiston, NY: Edwin Mellen Press, 1990), 141.

64

Advertising Freedom: Commentary Magazine
and the Cultural Cold War

Nathan Abrams
Brunei University

As part of the Truman and Eisenhower Administrations' Cold War cam-
paigns to inform the American public of the external and internal threats posed
by the Soviet Union and the communist movement, the concept of "freedom"
was inserted into the heart of speech as a key pillar of anticommunist dis-
course. Both administrations and their various allied blocs promoted a regu-
lated discourse of freedom producing a steady proliferation of discourses from
a whole series of different institutions both official and non-official, public and
private. The concept of freedom was used as ideological ammunition against
the USSR and freedom was promoted as propaganda, producing a discursive
conflict. Private agencies functioned as particularly important sites in the ra-
diation of these discourses since they masked official efforts and their products
could not simply be labeled as "propaganda."

In this essay, I will show how a nonofficial and private agency, in this case
Commentary magazine, radiated discourses of freedom virtually indistinguish-
able from those of the United States government as it cooperated in a war of
position against the Soviet Union and communism. In order to demonstrate the
extent to which the discourse of freedom became hegemonic at this time, I will
concentrate particularly on the visualization of freedom displayed in the jour-
nal by advertisements for popular products such as Welch's Grape Juice, Ford
Motor Cars, and RCA electronics. These materials reveal how private compa-
nies consciously and willingly adapted, produced and negotiated discourses of
freedom across the pages of popular magazines during the Cold War.

Discourses of freedom were not new to America. They stretched back to
the rhetoric of the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution, as well
as the more recent "Four Freedoms" of FDR. Since the onset of the Cold War,
however, discourses of freedom entered a new phase of almost unprecedented
usage although they may have drawn upon earlier strategies. The defining cul-
tural moment for this new phase was the Truman Doctrine (delivered 1 2 March
1947), which represented the "Genesis" of the Cold War. "At the present mo-
ment in world history," Truman informed Congress, "nearly every nation must
choose between alternative ways of life." 1 Truman thus established a set of
universal structural categories through which the world was to be subsequently

65

Advertising Freedom: Commentary Magazine and the Cultural Cold War

defined and understood. These "ways of life" represented inescapable catego-
ries or binary oppositions that simplistically divided the world into two oppos-
ing factions: Good/Evil, Christianity/ Atheism, Democracy/Totalitarianism, and
Freedom/Slavery. The universality of these categories was reinforced by their
conspicuous lack of any specificity or historical rootedness: Truman did not
explicitly name the Soviet Union as the aggressor, giving his discourse a time-
lessness and transcendence that reinforced its generality. This discourse soon
became the dominant cultural capital that was filtered across and down all
sections of American society during the Cold War.

Within this speech, freedom was initially defined as "life free from coer-
cion." Later the actual conditions of a "free" society were outlined: "the will
of the majority... representative government, free elections, guarantees of indi-
vidual liberty, freedom of speech and religion, and freedom from political op-
pression." 2 Freedom was also marked by "autonomy" since it was not the duty
of the United States to impose freedom, but to enable "free peoples to work out
their own destinies in their own way." 3 Of course, this was not highly philo-
sophical; it was a definition that was made to conform to the perceived char-
acteristics of American democracy. As Daniel T. Rodgers has put it: "Freedom
was America: its refrigerators, its elections, its alliances, its swelling patrio-
tism." 4 This was further heightened by its converse, "totalitarianism," that was
characterized by "the will of a minority forcibly imposed upon the majority ...
[which] relies upon terror and oppression, a controlled press and radio, fixed
elections, and the suppression of personal freedoms." 5

The Truman Doctrine insisted that the United States had a responsibility
actively to defend and spread (its conception of) freedom throughout the world,
by any means it deemed necessary. These broad prescriptions for the preserva-
tion of freedom, however, required translation into effective policy in response
to the launch of a "peace" strategy by the Soviet Union in 1948. This initiative
sought to spearhead a worldwide campaign against the US nuclear capability
by encouraging European and American intellectuals to join a "peace offen-
sive." Through a series of congresses in Wroclaw, Prague, and Paris as well as
the awarding of "Stalin Prizes," the USSR sought to nurture public condemna-
tion of American Cold War foreign policy. 6

The United States acknowledged the urgent need to counter the Soviet
emphasis on "peace." The result was the promotion of "freedom" as propa-
ganda. The National Security Council (NSC) directive 20/4 (1948) had al-
ready recommended the "exploitation of] the potentialities of psychological
warfare. . .within the Soviet orbit." 7 The policy document NSC 68 (1950) con-
tinued this line of thought, providing what Walter Hixson has called a "con-
ceptual framework" similar to the Truman Doctrine. 8 It stated: "we have no
choice but to demonstrate the superiority of the idea of freedom by its con-

66

Nathan Abrams

structive application," for the "idea of slavery can only be overcome" by its
"timely and persistent demonstration." 9 It carried on to assert that: "It is only
by practical affirmation, abroad as well as at home, of our essential values, that
we can preserve our own integrity, in which lies the real frustration of the
Kremlin design."" 1 Indeed, NSC 68 repeatedly called for "practical" demon-
strations of the concept of freedom. It had been implicitly accepted, therefore,
that the very idea of freedom itself was a sufficient weapon against Soviet
propaganda that had coalesced around the concept of peace. In the following
years, therefore, the ideological conflict became a confrontation of discourses
couched in terms of "freedom" versus "peace."

NSC 68 emphasized an activist, positivist, and interventionist role for the
United States in this offensive. The document constantly called for a projec-
tion of the United States' moral and material strength into the wider world.
While supporting a "free trade in ideas" at home, it negated the concept abroad.
It articulated a "determination if necessary to defend our way of life." 11 It
proclaimed the necessity of "practical" affirmation and demonstration abroad
of its values and it accepted "the responsibility of world leadership," which
this necessitated. 12 This is summed up in its "Political and Psychological"
intentions:

Our overall policy at the present time may be described as one
designed to foster a world environment in which the American
system can survive and flourish. It therefore rejects the concept
of isolation and affirms the necessity of our positive participation
in the world community. 13

Deriving from the firm belief that there can be no competition in ideas, that the
only correct way is the American one, NSC 68 called for a rejection of diver-
sity abroad (while advocating it at home) and the implantation of a single
overriding system. While attacking the Soviet Union for attempting to do the
same, the United States hid its fundamental purpose behind a discourse of
benevolence, tolerance, and diversity. It spoke of "the marvelous diversity"
and "the deep tolerance" of "the free society." 14 What is more, it claimed that
free societies even tolerated those who sought to destroy them. According to
NSC 68 "the free society does not fear, it welcomes diversity. It derives its
strength from its hospitality to antipathetic ideas. It is a market for free trade in
ideas." 15 And in a supremely arrogant statement, the document prided itself on
the "essential tolerance of our world outlook, our generous and constructive
impulses, and the absence of covetousness." 16

The United States was repeatedly equated with freedom throughout the
document. Eventually, the cumulative effect was that, within the parameters of
NSC 68, the two were synonyms for one another. In contrast, the USSR was

67

Advertising Freedom: Commentary Magazine and the Cultural Cold War

equated with slavery, a discursive concept deriving from the Truman Doctrine
of 1947. Truman had defined totalitarianism/slavery as democracy's opposite.
Although he did not directly nor explicitly equate this totalitarian/slave society
with the Soviet Union, a public information campaign left the American public
in no doubt as to whom he was referring.

NSC 68 firmly located itself within this discourse. From the very outset it
left no room for doubt: "There is a basic conflict between the idea of freedom
under a government of laws, and the idea of slavery under the grim oligarchy
of the Kremlin." 17 The Soviet State "demands total power over all men...
without a single exception." 18 "The idea of freedom," therefore, can be mobi-
lized against the USSR because it "is peculiarly and intolerably subversive of
the idea of slavery." 19 Indeed, "The existence and persistence of the idea of
freedom is a permanent and continuous threat to the foundation of a slave
society." 20 The two systems were, as a consequence, "mortally" opposed. 21
NSC 68 continued the discursive speech initiated by the Truman doctrine:
America and the Soviet Union are polarized as binary opposites, the two sys-
tems were "irreconcilable" and antipathetic. 22 The United States was free while
the USSR was enslaved and since freedom can destroy slavery, America can
smash the Soviet Union.

Following NSC 68's sweeping review of US diplomacy, a "Campaign of
Truth" was instigated. Edward Barrett, Assistant Secretary of State for public
affairs, directed this offensive. Barrett proposed "an all-out effort to penetrate
the Iron Curtain with our ideas," recommending "a bold new propaganda of-
fensive, perhaps styled 'The Voice of Freedom.'" Eventually the slogan "Cam-
paign of Truth" was adopted and on 20 April 1950, Truman launched it with a
call for a "sustained, intensified program to promote the cause of freedom
against the propaganda of slavery." 23

A key part of this Campaign of Truth was the establishment of a public-
private network. The Truman Administration sought private partners to assist
in its freedom offensive. It is now well known, for example, how the CIA
covertly used a host of fronts and dummy foundations such as the Hoblitzelle
Foundation and the Kaplan Fund to cover its efforts in the field of psychologi-
cal warfare. 24 In this way, the United States struggled to mask its official
propaganda efforts precisely so that they would not be construed as propa-
ganda. Many private agencies, organizations, and corporations were willingly
mobilized in the service of the Cold War. These included the Ford Foundation,
the Congress for Cultural Freedom, the Jewish Labor Committee, the Ameri-
can Committee for Cultural Freedom, and the American Jewish Committee
(AJC).

The AJC was very active in the propagation of this "Cultural Cold War."
The chairman of its Chicago chapter, Ely M. Aaron, announced: "As a matter

68

Nathan Abrams

of principle, the AJC should ally itself openly and on the record with every
organization and concept which seek the well-being of the people of this coun-
try by democratic principles." 25 The Committee accepted its new postwar role
of defending democracy with vigour, mobilizing its 14,000 members across
35 chapters nationally as well as its offices abroad in Europe and Latin
America. 26 It circulated propagandistic materials with its own funds without
official prompting and cooperated with many elements of the government. It
demonstrated itself to be overtly loyal, pro- American, and anticommunist, yet
sensitive to developments behind the Iron Curtain. The AJC prepared excellent
research reports on aspects of Soviet behavior, in particular antisemitism and
the Soviet treatment of the Jews. It participated in many anticommunist initia-
tives such as the Crusade for Freedom in Support of Radio Free Europe, the
Ail-American Conference against Communism, Voice of America, and Pro
Deo. 27 In addition, the State Department was interested in the Committee's
French publication Evidences as a "source of valuable material." 28 In its an-
nual report of 1951, the AJC expressed pride in its level of commitment to
"aiding America in its propaganda warfare against Soviet Russia." 29 The Com-
mittee, therefore, was a useful ally for the American government.

As the magazine of the American Jewish Committee, Commentary was
also mobilized as a participant in this effort. The Committee had established
Commentary in 1945 as "a journal of significant thought and opinion on Jew-
ish affairs and contemporary issues." The magazine theoretically operated
under the principle of "editorial freedom" and did not promote any particular
sectarian agenda. Since its editorial board was composed of ex-radicals who
had abandoned Trotskyism in the 1930s and 40s, many of its writers took a
secular, liberal, and anticommunist view toward most subjects. They sought to
produce a journal of highbrow thought on a broad range of topics that distin-
guished it from both the ideas of the masses and what they perceived as the
more mediocre elements of middle-class American Jewry. Commentary be-
came one of America's most celebrated magazines. It became the premier post-
war journal of American Jewry, attracting a readership far wider than its Jew-
ish community of origin. Doubleday editor Barbara Zimmerman noted that
although the magazine dealt "with Jewish affairs, it is primarily a magazine of
general interest" with an "excellent reputation in this country among the gen-
eral and not strictly Jewish market." 30 And Milton S. Katz added that "Many
Americans in the fifties agreed with Commentary's positions,"that "its articles
elicited a heavy and emotional response from various segments of society,"
and that "its influence clearly extended beyond that of many larger publica-
tions." 31

69

Advertising Freedom: Commentary Magazine and the Cultural Cold War

Like its parent organization, the staff of Commentary actively worked to
promote the props of the Cultural Cold War. Its editorial staff had emerged
from World War II as committed anti-Stalinists and hence no conversion to
anticommunism was required. Commentary's editor, Elliot Cohen, commis-
sioned and published many articles that were consistent with the aims of US
policy at this time. 32 For example, Commentary openly supported the
government's case against the Rosenbergs and alleged that appeals for clem-
ency were a communist propaganda trap. 33 Commentary was a journal of opin-
ion so favorable to the US government that it was consistently mobilized as
part of the freedom campaign. The State Department regularly perused its pages
and reprinted its articles for global dissemination. By 1949 the State Depart-
ment had published and broadcast over Voice of America no less than twenty
Commentary articles in the German Occupation Zone because, in the words of
Time magazine, it "so ably stated the position of the democratic world." 34

Although Commentary devoted many of its pages to advancing the cause of
freedom, I shall only focus upon its advertisements here to show how the hege-
monic discourse of freedom filtered down to concrete levels of everyday life. 35
Advertisements powerfully underlined the magazine's discourses in a visual
form. I shall examine several representative examples from the 1 950s to dem-
onstrate this process. These advertisements clearly indicate that freedom as a
key construct of Cold War discourses was radiated across the pages of Com-
mentary magazine.

From the beginning, the Eisenhower Administration used advertising as a
key tactic in fighting the Cultural Cold War. Eisenhower and his advisors con-
trived ways to promote American culture through free trade and consumer goods.
The most effective method of achieving this, they felt, was through advertising
and displaying a whole range of the most up-to-date products available to the
American consumer. Together the United States Information Service and the
Advertising Council (a World War II trade group that was formed to help sell
war bonds and promote other wartime campaigns) collaborated to produce a
guide to advertising in foreign countries entitled Advertising: A New Weapon
in the World-Wide Fight for Freedom. The guide indicated the value that the
Eisenhower Administration placed on advertising. 36

In 1952, the Radio Corporation of America (RCA) ran an advertisement in
Commentary for its television and radio products with the legend: "Freedom's
clear voice goes to sea." The text of the message read:

When broadcasting Freedom's message to Iron Curtain countries,
transmitters must contend with deliberate radio interference, cre-
ated to 'jam' the air. Aboard the Truth Ship Courier, a powerful
RCA transmitter fills most of one cargo hold, while a second hold

70

Nathan Abrams

contains Diesel generators which produce 1, 500, 000 watts...
These people are seeking the Truth, and want to hear it despite a
thousand stations built in an effort to keep Freedom's messages
from penetrating the Iron Curtain.

In a discursive trend similar to the Truman Doctrine, NSC 68, and the Cam-
paign of Truth, American propaganda was associated with freedom. And in
turn, freedom was equated with America, which was radically opposed by the
"Iron Curtain." American radio broadcasts were synonymous with the "Truth."
Accompanying the text was a picture of a Truth Ship at sea with the explana-
tion: "The USCG Gutter Courier... armed with Truth, not guns... will use its
RCA transmitter to beam messages of hope to Iron Curtain countries, and will
also be a good-will ambassador to the free nations." This was a clear visual
example of the concept that America must fight to demonstrate freedom abroad
just as the ship struggles against the waves to deliver its message of truth.

The president of RCA, David Sarnoff, was an energetic participant in the
Cold War public-private network. Prior to World War II, Sarnoff had overseen
RCA's total conversion to defense production. During the war he offered his
services to the military and was appointed Eisenhower's chief of communica-
tions. He organized and coordinated all radio communications on the Western
Front. In recognition of his service during the war, Sarnoff was named a briga-
dier general in the US Army. His involvement with government projects did
not stop at the end of the war. 37 Indeed, with the onset of the Cold War it
deepened, as he submitted regular proposals for fighting communism. He also
advised Radio Free Europe and Radio Liberation, whose staff members trained
at NBC studios. At his suggestion, Voice of America adopted the sign-off:
"This is the Voice of America, for freedom and peace." RCA also cooperated
with the United States Information Agency to produce advertising that would
sell its products as well as "selling" America. RCA's advertisement, therefore,
signifies the relationship between the public and private networks during the
Cold War and the discourse that only freedom could achieve peace. 38 This is
extended in a further advertisement that appeared in Commentary in February
1954. General Sarnoff, as he is now known, is shown operating a transmitter
to the fleet units around the world under the guidance of Admiral Robert B.
Carney, Chief of Naval Operations.

Another sign of the promotion of freedom in America was manifested in an
advertisement for the Ford Motor Company. The text read:

The American Road is more than a highway that has helped bring
prosperity to this country - it is a way of living, wrought out of
the character of a people constantly moving forward toward a better
life for mankind. Ford Motor Company is dedicated to the Ameri-

71

Advertising Freedom: Commentary Magazine and the Cultural Cold War

can Road, in the belief that it will lead toward freedom, justice
and security for all men.

America was praised for its freedom of movement as signified by a full-
page image of the/reeway. The "American Road" was also a sign of the on-
ward and upward progress of its people, which would eventually benefit all of
humanity. America was thus exportable, for everyone all over the world could
enjoy the technological benefits that its roads could bring. Not only was Ford
Motor Company "dedicated to the American Road" as a signifier of freedom,
it was also benevolently dedicated to advancing the cause of "freedom" for
"all men."

However, the advert contained a conspicuous omission. Automobile adver-
tising in the mid-fifties focused on the image of the car, whether it was in a
showroom, an elaborate set, or on the road. 39 The American Road advertise-
ment, in contrast, did not take the car as its central image. Instead, it took a
more general approach emphasizing the freeway rather than focusing on a spe-
cific product. The full-page depiction of a highway interchange not only rein-
forced clearly the discursive notion that freedom was America (and its roads),
it also presented Ford as a benevolent and tolerant American company more
concerned with protecting freedom than with selling its own particular prod-
uct.

The American Oil Company (Amoco), another corporation connected with
the motor industry, radiated similar ideas. Its "Freedom Message" of July 1952
stated: "Singing the Star Spangled Banner isn't enough. . . work for defense. . .
your country needs you." In this way, Amoco exhorted Commentary's readers
and the consumers of its products to the sort of intensified mobilization against
the Soviet Union that the Administration believed was necessary to win the
Cold War. Again, like Ford, it presented the notion that Amoco was more con-
cerned with the freedom of the nation than with selling oil.

Commentary did not just include advertisements for consumer products.
Specifically political appeals also appeared on its pages. One such appeal that
appeared in Commentary in February 1955 was sponsored by another Cold
War enterprise, the American Committee for Cultural Freedom (ACCF). The
ACCF was a non-partisan community of intellectuals dedicated to taking "ap-
propriate steps against whatever forces in the present-day world threaten our
free culture" and to exposing "the Communist conspiracy and its totalitarian
threat to America and other free countries." The ACCF expressed its benevo-
lent mission in terms no different from those articulated by the Truman Doc-
trine and NSC 68. The ACCF felt it was worthwhile to advertise and request
contributions for its activities in Commentary magazine. The Committee obvi-
ously felt that Commentary's readers were conducive to the ACCF's ideas:

72

Nathan Abrams

"We," the executive board of the ACCF wrote, "feel we have a special claim on
your attention. You would not be a reader of this magazine if you were not
committed to the free life of the mind and spirit." Indeed, many of those who
signed the appeal edited and wrote for Commentary: Elliot Cohen, Daniel Bell,
David Riesman, Diana Trilling, and Sidney Hook. 40

In April of the same year, an advertisement placed by the Crusade for Free-
dom depicted a graphic image of a fist clutching "Truth Dollars," which were
used for "fighting Communism behind the Iron Curtain" and to "support Ra-
dio Free Europe broadcasts to 70 million freedom hungry people" (Fig. 1).
Radio Free Europe (RFE) had been created as an ostensibly private corpora-
tion designed to target anticommunist propaganda at Eastern Europe. Although
the government continued to fund RFE covertly using unattributed funds, an
elaborate fund-raising campaign termed the "Crusade for Freedom" encour-
aged the notion that it was a genuinely private station. 41

At the same time, the Welch Grape Juice Company, Inc. ran an advertise-
ment in every issue of Commentary entitled "This I Believe." They amounted
to a series of quotes on the subject of freedom and liberty from well-known
intellectuals and were dubbed a "public service" on behalf of the company.
Two in particular advanced the specific cause of the United States in its free-
dom campaign against the Soviet Union. In July 1954 an excerpt by Adlai E.
Stevenson appeared:

The short of the matter is that the survival of our freedoms, indi-
vidual and collective, is closely linked to the good name, the pri-
vate reputation, if you please, of our government. Its preservation
is necessary to evoke the loyalties, both at home and abroad, upon
which government must make heavy drafts.

The second advertisement, appearing in December 1952, cited Lord Acton's
"Essays on Freedom and Power" (1948): "A generous spirit prefers that his
country should be poor and weak and of no account but free, rather than pow-
erful, prosperous and enslaved." Thus through its ads for Grape Juice, Welch's
reminded its consumers of the ongoing struggle to preserve freedom against
the tyranny of the Soviet Union. Again, like the other advertisements, a spe-
cific emphasis on a particular product was conspicuous by its absence.

All of the above advertisements in Commentary were for products that ap-
pealed to all Americans regardless of ethnic origin. As befitting a magazine
primarily aimed at a Jewish audience, advertisements also appeared that ap-
pealed to specifically Jewish concerns. These adverts fused discourses of Ju-
daism to discourses of freedom. The clearest example of this was one that
appeared in April 1954 on behalf of Barricini, a confectionery company (Fig.
2). The header explicitly equated Jewish ritual practice with the concept of

73

Advertising Freedom: Commentary Magazine and the Cultural Cold War

freedom: "PASSOVER holiday of freedom !" it read. Underneath, in terms in-
distinguishable from the discourses of the Eisenhower Administration, the text
stated: "What does Passover mean to the Jew? It means freedom." This free-
dom represented "an uninterrupted tradition of countless generations." The
Jewish discourse of freedom, according to Barricini stores, "means the victory
of the spirit over oppression and brutal tyranny," which was explicitly "inter-
twined" with "the memories of days long past." This advertisement consciously
exploited narratives of Jewish tradition and ritual to construct a memory of
freedom in Jewish history that echoed those produced by the Truman Doc-
trine, NSC 68, and the Campaign of Truth.

The text is reinforced by the depiction of a happy, content, and secure fam-
ily gathered together around the ritual Seder table. The family unit was ad-
vanced at that time as the basic building block of containment and the bulwark
against communism. 42 It has been pointed out that the Eisenhower Adminis-
tration was "convinced that the United States would not survive unless the
domestic ideal. then in force in the nation could be successfully exported to the
rest of the world." 4 ' What is more, the observance of religious traditions was
construed to be another method of fighting atheistic communism since the
Truman Doctrine positioned America against godless atheism. In addition, the
abundance of food displayed on the table projected the notion of freedom from
want and hunger, especially since the goods advertised were luxury items and
not commodities (Chocolate Wafer Matzos; Macaroons; After-Seder Mint
Leaves; Paradise Fruits; "Barri" holiday's Seder Record and Passover Candy).
Nonetheless, the visual emphasis on the family unit rather than on the adver-
tised products reinforced the notion that Barricini was more concerned with
protecting the family unit as a defense against communism than with merely
selling its candy.

During the Cultural Cold War, therefore, hegemonic discourses of freedom
were produced, consumed, and negotiated by many private and public agen-
cies. The discourses achieved a position of hegemony to such an extent that
they even began to appear in advertising. The motives of the advertisers were
many and complex. In the case of RCA, Ford, Amoco, and Welsh's Grape
Juice, the advertisements signified the willingness of these corporations to as-
sist in the cultural struggle against the Soviet Union and the extent to which
they believed in American capitalism and consumerism. These companies were
not willing dupes merely passively reflecting hegemonic discourses. Many of
these corporations' ideas were adopted by the Eisenhower Administration at
their suggestion, as I have shown with the example of RCA. In addition, these
particular companies were also involved in government initiatives.

At the same time, however, there was also an element of business acumen.
These discourses of freedom were in circulation throughout American society

74

Nathan Abrams

during the Cultural Cold War. It is unsurprising, therefore, to find them used
in advertising as they represented the latest trend in marketing strategies. More-
over, Commentary's readership was regarded as intelligent, aware of interna-
tional events, and thus conducive to such selling techniques. For example, Vice-
roy rationalized that by advertising its cigarettes in Commentary, it would reach
Commentary's intellectual and highbrow audience. 44 As the ACCF put it: "You
would not be a reader of this magazine if you were not committed to the free
life of the mind and spirit." 45 In the case of Barricini candy, this seems to have
been the motivation behind their conscious use of freedom and Judaism.

Through its advertisements, therefore, Commentary was not only able to
reflect discourses of freedom aligned with hegemonic positions, but also to
promote them as well. Consequently, freedom was privileged and naturalized
by its setting in everyday, mundane contexts. Freedom was advertised as an
indispensable commodity inextricably linked with other products: grape juice,
cars, roads, radios, sweets, and televisions. As a highbrow, intellectual maga-
zine, Commentary was somewhat unique in this respect. While similar jour-
nals such as Partisan Review, The New Leader, and Encounter engaged dis-
courses of freedom in written terms, Commentary was almost alone in uphold-
ing them visually as well. This use of freedom was evident beyond magazines.
As new research has shown, Disney was active in deploying discourses of free-
dom within its newly opened theme park, Disneyland. 46 Thus, these advertise-
ments within Commentary can be fitted into a larger framework during the
Cultural Cold War. The Eisenhower Administration believed that the United
States had a holy duty to export freedom, democracy, and capitalism abroad.
Consequently, advertising freedom became a key strategy implemented by the
United States Information Service and the Advertising Council during these
years. At world and international trade fairs, American corporations aggres-
sively promoted consumer products and the ideal of progress and material abun-
dance. In doing so, they not only hoped to win the struggle against commu-
nism, but also to convert others to the American way. 47 Overall, freedom meant
capitalism because only capitalism could provide the freedom to consume.

75

Advertising Freedom: Commentary Magazine and the Cultural Cold War

Appendixes

(Fig. 1)

FIGHT
COMMUNISM

with

"Truth Dollars"

Join the millions of Americans who
are fighting Communism behind the
Iron Curtain with "Truth Dollars". . .
dollars that support Radio Free Eu-
rope broadcasts to 70 million freedom
hungry people. Send your "Truth Dol-
lars'* to Crus&de far Freedom, cfo your
local Postmaster, today*

Nathan Abrams
(Fig. 2)

PASSOVER

holiday of freedom!

What does Passover mean
fo the Jew? It means freedom.
It means the warm glow and the prida
and glory of an uninterrupted tradition
of countless generations. It means
victory of the spirit over oppression
and brutal tyranny. It means
the joy of family and all those near
and dear gathered around the
festive Seder table, and the memones
of days long post intertwined
with the wide-eyed wonder of the
youngest member of the family

la help you enjoy every moment
of this most joyous holiday of all,
the Sorricini family has prepared
its greatest Passover assortment
Selected Miniatures for Passover
a "Seder" in itself; Cnocofote Wafer
Malzos; Mocoroons, After-Seder
Mint looms; Paradise fruits;
'' aorr '" Holiday's Seder Record end
Passover Condy the perfect
Afikomen gift for every child;
ond many other delicacies.
Aloft of ffie candies are also PARBVE

a

arncin> stores are located throughout
the New York area, Newark ond
Philadelphia. Visit your nearest
Barricini store today or write for
Passover brochure to:

22 Iv 41st Ave.
long Island Cily 1. N.Y.
or phono Miu Blanche;
STidw.ll 6-220O

77

Advertising Freedom: Commentary Magazine and the Cultural Cold War

Notes

' Harry S. Truman, Speech before Congress (12 March 1947), extracted in Martin
McCauley, The Origins of the Cold War (London and New York: Longman, 1983),
121.

2 Ibid.

3 Ibid.

4 Daniel T. Rodgers, Contested Truths: Keywords in American Politics Since Inde-
pendence (New York: Basic Books, 1987), 217.

5 Truman, Speech before Congress, 121.

6 Robbie Lieberman, '"Does That Make Peace a Bad Word?': American Responses
to the Communist Peace Offensive, 1949-1950," Peace & Change 17 (1992): 198-228.

"NSC 20/4: Note by the Executive Secretary on U.S. Objectives With Respect to
the USSR to Counter Soviet Threats to U.S. Security" (24 November 1948) in Foreign
Relations of the United States, 1948 (Washington DC: Government Printing Office.
1949), Vol. 1, 665.

s Walter L. Hixson, Parting the Curtain: Propaganda, Culture, and the Cold War,
1945-1961 (New York: St. Martin's Griffin, 1998), 14.

' "NSC 68: United States Objectives and Programs for National Security" ( 14 April
1950), reprinted in American Cold War Strategy: Interpreting NSC 68, ed. Ernest R.
May (Boston: Bedford, 1993), 32.

10 Ibid., 29.

11 Ibid., 26.

12 Ibid., 29, 30, 32.

13 Ibid., 40.

14 Ibid., 27.

15 Ibid., 28.

16 Ibid., 42.

17 Ibid., 27.
IS Ibid., 28.

19 Ibid., 27.

20 Ibid., 28.

21 Ibid., 29.

22 Ibid.

23 Hixson, Parting the Curtain, 13-14.

24 Christopher Lasch, "The Cultural Cold War: A Short History of the Congress for
Cultural Freedom," in his The Agony of the American Left: One Hundred Years of
Radicalism ( London: Pelican, 1973), 64-111. According to Thomas W. Braden. the
person responsible for supervising the CIA's cultural activities in the 1950s, the rules

78

Nathan Abrams

for using such fronts were: "Use legitimate, existing organizations; disguise the extent
of American interest; protect the integrity of the organization by not requiring it to
support every aspect of official American policy." See his "I'm Glad the CIA Is 'Im-
moral,' " Saturday Evening Post (20 May 1967), 14.

25 Ely M. Aaron, quoted in Ways to Human Freedom: 40 th Annual Report oftheAJC,
1946 (New York: American Jewish Committee, 1947), 101.

26 44th Annual Report of the AJC, 1950 (New York: American Jewish Committee,
195 1 ), 35. These figures are drawn from the 42'"' Annual Report oftheAJC, 1948 (New
York: American Jewish Committee, 1949), 70.

21 - For a history of the first fifty years of the AJC, see Noami W. Cohen, Not Free to
Desist: The AJC 1906-1966 (Philadelphia: The Jewish Publication Society of America,
1972).

28 Seymour J. Rubin, letter to Simon Segal, 15 February 1954, AJC Records, YIVO
Institute for Jewish Research, New York, RG 347 GEN- 12, Box 139, France: Rosenberg
Case Reaction FO-EUR, 52-54, 3.

29 Irving M. Engel, quoted in 45 th Annual Report of the AJC, 1951 (New York: Ameri-
can Jewish Committee, 1952), 33.

30 Barbara Zimmerman, quoted in Ralph Melnick, The Stolen Legacy of Anne Frank:
Meyer Levin, Lillian Hellman, and the Staging of the Diary (New Haven and London:
Yale University Press, 1997), 15.

31 Milton S. Katz, "Commentary and the American Jewish Intellectual Experience,"
Journal of American Culture 3:1 (Spring 1980): 158.

32 See for example, Irving Kristol, "'Civil Liberties,' 1952 - Study in Confusion: Do
We Defend Our Rights by Protecting Communists?" Commentary 1 3 ( 1 952), 228-236.

33 See Robert Warshow, "The 'Idealism' of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg," Commen-
tary (November, 1953); Lucy Dawidowicz, "Antisemitism and the Rosenberg Case:
The Latest Communist Propaganda Trap," Commentary 14 (July 1952), 41-45.

34 Time, 29 January 1951.

35 For a treatment of Commentary's discourse of freedom in a written rather than
visual format please see my unpublished Ph.D. thesis, "Struggling for Freedom: Arthur
Miller, the Commentary Community, and the Cultural Cold War" (University of Bir-
mingham, 1998).

36 Robert H. Haddow, Pavilions of Plenty: Exhibiting American Culture Abroad in
the 1950s (Washington and London: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1997).

37 Erik Barnouw, The Image Empire: A History of Broadcasting in the United States,
Volume III -From 1953 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1970), 145.

38 As part of its discourse of freedom, the United States denigrated the USSR's
discourse of "peace" as empty rhetoric. It was noted that "the 'peace policy' of the
Soviet Union, described at a Party Congress as 'a more advantageous form of fighting
capitalism,' is a device to divide and immobilize the non-Communist world, and the
peace the Soviet Union seeks is the peace of total conformity to Soviet policy." See

79

Advertising Freedom: Commentary Magazine and the Cultural Cold War

"NSC 68," 28. According to Lieberman, the placing of the word "peace" in quotation
marks "suggested that the words were disingenuous, not representing any serious con-
cern for peace." See Lieberman, "Does That Make Peace a Bad Word?", 205.

19 James L. Baughman, "The Frustrated Persuader: Fairfax M. Cone and the Edsel
Advertising Campaign, 1957-59," in The Other Fifties: Interrogating Midcentury Ameri-
can Icons, ed. Joel Foreman (Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1997),
36.

w Commentary 19 (February 1955), no pp.

41 Hixson, Parting the Curtain, 59-60.

4: Elaine Tyler May, Homeward Bound: American Families in the Cold War Era
(New York: Basic Books, 1988).

43, Haddow, Pavilions of Plenty, 1 .

44 Martin Mayer, Madison Avenue U.S.A.: The Inside Story of American Advertising
(London: The Bodley Head, 1958), 148.

45 Commentary 19 (February 1955), no pp.

46 See Emma Lambert, "'Don't Fight It, You Can't Whip Mickey Mouse':
Disneyland's Cold War 1955-1959" (unpublished M.Phil diss.. University of Birming-
ham, 1998).

47 See Haddow, Pavilions of Plenty, 1-47.

80

Southern Fundamentalism and

Anticommunism At the Beginning of the

Cold War: the Controversy between

J. Frank Norris and Louie D. Newton

William R. Glass
Mississippi University for Women

In 1946, after touring the Soviet Union to see how its leaders used Ameri-
can relief, Louie D. Newton, President of the Southern Baptist Convention
(SBC), offered a few words of praise concerning religious life in Russia. New-
ton suggested, "Religiously we should regard Russia as our great ally. It is a
virgin field for freedom ... because Russia never knew freedom of religion
until the present regime." Moreover, Newton found some similarities in prin-
ciples between Baptists and Russians: "The Baptists stand for the same thing
as the Russian Government renouncement of resistance to coercion in mat-
ters of belief." 1

Eight months later, the renegade Ft. Worth fundamentalist J. Frank Norris
attacked Newton as an "appeaser of Moscow." 2 He hoped not only to score
some points concerning Newton's worthiness as leader of the SBC and, by
general association, cast suspicion upon the SBC's leadership, but also to tie
his ongoing fundamentalist crusade against the Convention to the rising tide of
anticommunism at the beginning of the Cold War. Furthermore, Norris's as-
sault gained some extended regional notice because Norris sued Atlanta Con-
stitution editor Ralph McGill for libel concerning a McGill editorial criticiz-
ing Norris's attacks on Newton. This incident shows how the public's percep-
tion of Russia began changing from that of wartime ally to Cold War adver-
sary. Additionally, it reveals how one southern fundamentalist used anticom-
munism as a weapon in denominational politics in his war against what he saw
as theological liberalism in the SBC. Finally, Norris's attacks on Newton fore-
shadow the accusatory methods that politicians would use later in the decade
to tar the reputations of their opponents.

Fundamentalism as a movement within American Protestantism had its ori-
gins in the evangelicalism of the late nineteenth-century northern cities. It rep-
resented an attempt to defend certain doctrines against the effort to restate
traditional Protestant orthodoxy in modern, theologically liberal terms and in
light of historical and scientific findings. 3 The most important of the doctrines

81

Southern Fundamentalism and Anticommunism at the Beginning of the Cold War

fundamentalists defended was the inerrancy of the Bible, that is, the idea that
the Bible is without error not only in what it teaches concerning sin and salva-
tion, but also in its statements on history and science. Additionally, fundamen-
talists worried that liberal denial of miracles and stress on the social gospel
undermined what they saw as the Bible's central message: Christ's death on
the cross providing salvation for lost humanity.

The defense took two forms in the 1920s. One aspect was a battle within
denominations between fundamentalists and liberals over the definition of doc-
trinal standards and the control of denominational institutions like seminaries
and mission boards. The other area of conflict was over the teaching of evolu-
tion in public schools, a fight which symbolized to fundamentalists their effort
to restore American culture to its Protestant roots. 4 Fundamentalists failed to
achieve their goals in both areas and left the mainline denominations, in some
cases splitting individual congregations. During the 1930s, their movement
fragmented into overlapping networks of churches, missionary organizations,
and Bible colleges, with no unifying organization or institution. 5 Except for
the evolution controversy, southern Protestants watched from the sidelines as
fundamentalist strife racked northern denominations. In part southerners be-
lieved that their denominations were orthodox and that regional institutional
divisions kept the disease in the North. 6

Some southern Protestants did not read the evidence in quite the same way,
and one was J. Frank Norris, pastor of Ft. Worth's First Baptist Church. For
most of a career that stretched from the 1910s into the 1950s, Norris waged an
unrelenting attack on the SBC for what he viewed as deviation from traditional
doctrines and practices. His attack on Newton was only one campaign out of
many, but its significance lay in his use of a nontheological weapon, anticom-
munism, and in the effort to link his campaign to broader cultural and political
trends.

Of the three largest southern denominations, the Southern Baptists experi-
enced the most fundamentalist agitation, in large measure due to the presence
of J. Frank Norris. 7 He regularly assaulted the Southern Baptist Convention
and its schools in his newspaper The Searchlight (later called The Fundamen-
talist ). Though not ignoring theological liberalism and evolution in the 1920s,
Norris's most potent issue for recruiting followers out of the SBC for the fun-
damentalist movement was the growing bureaucratization of the convention,
which diminished the autonomy of the local church. 8 His efforts won him
supporters in the Southwest but also alienated Baptists in other regions who
doubted his charges of liberalism in the convention and questioned the dangers
he saw in the growth of denominational boards. The limited range of Norris's
appeal can be measured in his troubled relations with other Baptists in Texas.
By 1924, city, county, and state Baptist associations had excluded Norris from

82

William R. Glass

attending their meetings due to his censorious attacks on other pastors and
non-cooperation with SBC programs. 9 A series of scandals also undercut
Norris's appeal. Twice, in 1912 and 1929, fire destroyed the sanctuary of the
First Baptist Church. Rumors circulated that Norris set the fires in order to
collect insurance to finance the construction of a larger building. A jury found
Norris innocent of arson the first time, and prosecutors filed no charges in the
second case. In 1927, Norris was acquitted of charges that he murdered a man
in his church study. Norris did not deny killing the man but pleaded self-de-
fense, even though the man was unarmed." 1 By this time, most Southern Bap-
tists had adopted the attitude articulated earlier in the decade by A. T. Robertson:
"We just pay no attention to him and go on with our work.""

In the 1920s, Norris failed to build a Southern Baptist constituency under
his leadership within the northern interdenominational fundamentalist move-
ment. He attempted to recruit Southern Baptists for the interdenominational
World Christian Fundamentals Association and the Baptist Bible Union (BBU),
but the prominence of Norris in these organizations seemed to limit their ap-
peal, and some Southern Baptists saw a sinister purpose in Norris's efforts.
According to F. S. Groner, editor of the Baptist Standard , Norris's purpose in
sponsoring this "cult" (the BBU) was to create a "new denomination" that he
and his fellow "reactionaries ... could boss till their heart's content." 12

During the 1930s, Norris invested more of his time and energy into trying
to expand his fundamentalist constituency by developing a northern base and
into building an organization that avoided the faults he found with the Conven-
tion. 13 His first step in enlarging his following was taken in 1935 when he
assumed the pastorate of Temple Baptist Church in Detroit while continuing to
lead his Texas congregation. 14 Then in 1938 he reorganized his Premillennial
Baptist Missionary Fellowship into the World Fundamental Baptist Mission-
ary Fellowship. He moved the Fellowship's offices to Chicago and broadened
the scope of the Fellowship's activities to include promoting evangelistic ef-
forts in North America, educating pastors, and opposing liberalism. Within a
few months, over two hundred churches joined the Fellowship. Additionally,
in 1939 Norris started a Bible institute in his Ft. Worth church, and the school
became the Bible Baptist Seminary in 1944. 15 Norris was well on his way to
giving his opposition to the Convention a permanent institutional structure. 16

During these years, Norris began offering a sustained commentary in his
sermons and newspapers about the threat of communism to Christianity and
the American way of life. i7 Though Norris had preached against communism
before 1935, his assuming the pastorate of Temple Baptist represented a sig-
nificant turning point in his consideration of communism. Several factors height-
ened Norris's sensitivity. For example, the Northern Baptist Convention's em-
phasis on the Social Gospel sounded suspiciously communistic to Norris's

83

Southern Fundamentalism and Anticommunism at the Beginning of the Cold War

ears. Also the labor unrest Norris saw among Detroit's auto workers looked
like a communist-inspired threat to capital. Perhaps most significant, Norris
fell under the spell of some of Detroit's leading industrialists, and, according
to Barry Hankins, "the allure of these friendships was too much for Norris's
ego." 18 Norris called for typically fundamentalist measures to combat the com-
munist threat: evangelistic efforts and prayer for the Second Coming of Christ.
But he went beyond this general call to meet specific challenges. He charged,
for example, that communists sought to undermine American society and po-
litical institutions by infiltrating American churches and universities. He be-
lieved that the process had already begun and was evident in the activities of
the leadership of the Northern Baptist Convention. For this reason, he led the
members of Temple Baptist into voting to withdraw from the Convention. He
further suggested that universities had the duty to fire professors who espoused
communist ideology.

Communism represented such a peril for a variety of reasons. Its collectiv-
ist ideal threatened American individualism; its espousal of racial equality chal-
lenged Jim Crow; its advocacy of state ownership of the means of production
undermined the right to private property; and most important of all, its atheism
represented a secular version of theological liberalism that jeopardized the vi-
tality of American churches. So great was the danger that Norris set aside his
virulent anti-Catholicism to recommend cooperation with Roman Catholics to
fight the communist menace.

During World War II, Norris focused on combating fascism without com-
menting on American aid to communist Russia, perhaps accepting the neces-
sity of this alliance to defeat Germany. 19 After 1945, however, and under the
influence of the Cold War, Norris resumed his assault, warning now not only
of a communist threat within America, but of the external dangers represented
by an aggressive Soviet Union and China.

This renewed postwar crusade against communism, however, did not dis-
tract Norris from his campaign against the SBC nor from his efforts to recruit
new members to his organizations. One of Norris's favorite tactics was to try to
discredit SBC leadership with the goal of convincing Southern Baptists to leave
the Convention. One of his best opportunities to strike out at the Convention,
and to combine that battle with his efforts to expose communist influence within
American institutions, came following the war when the SBC President Louie
Newton offered a few mild words of commendation concerning the religious
situation in Russia. 20

Born in 1 892 and raised in rural eastern Georgia, Louie D. Newton took an
unusual path to the pastorate. After earning his bachelor's degree at Mercer
University and a Master's from Columbia University but having no theological
training, he worked for Georgia Baptists in a variety of ways in the 1910s and

84

William R. Glass

1920s. He began by teaching history at Mercer from 1913 to 1917. Next he
directed publicity for an effort to raise money from Georgians for the Conven-
tion, and then he edited for most of the 1920s the Christian Index , the newspa-
per of the Georgia Baptist Convention. Called and ordained in April 1929, to
lead the Druid Hills Baptist Church in a wealthy Atlanta suburb, Newton en-
larged the scope of his work by holding several offices in the Convention bu-
reaucracy as well as serving as Secretary in the Baptist World Alliance. In May
1946, the messengers to the annual meeting of the SBC elected Newton their
President, the youngest man to serve in that office. 21

Newton had only been President of the Southern Baptist Convention for a
few days when he learned that he had been invited to be its representative on a
summer tour of Russia sponsored by the American Society for Russian Re-
lief. 22 During his twenty-five days in the Soviet Union, in addition to observ-
ing how Russians used American relief and conferring with Soviet officials on
the people's needs, he met with Baptist pastors in nine different cities and
preached in their churches. 23 The pastors in Moscow told him that "we are
now enjoying a measure of freedom unknown by the Baptists in all the years of
our witness in Russia" and that "we are free to preach what we believe." 24 The
pastors may have been exaggerating, but it is true that during the war Joseph
Stalin had modified the anti-religious policy of the Soviet government. Offer-
ing a "tactical compromise," 25 he had permitted the appointment of the first
Patriarch of the Orthodox Church since the Bolshevik Revolution, had allowed
churches to reopen, and had encouraged the creation of the All Union Council
of Evangelical/Baptists. The latter step was so significant that Walter Sawatsky
has described it as marking "the birth of Soviet Protestantism." 26 Thus,
Newton's visit occurred when religious life in the Soviet Union was freer than
at any other time during Stalin's reign, and these conditions may account for
Newton's perception of religious liberty in Russia. He also met with Stalin,
giving him a pocket New Testament in English. Upon his return to America,
Newton sent a Russian version with the inscription, "From one Georgian to
another Georgian." 27

Based on these experiences, Newton made the suggestions noted earlier
about regarding Russia as "our great ally" and describing the country as "a
virgin field for freedom," particularly in matters of religion. Additionally, he
told a crowd of 3,500 Baptists gathered in Atlanta's Municipal Auditorium that
"the Soviet Government has at last recognized that religion is a vital thing"
and that it was "smart enough to grant what appears to be complete freedom of
worship." 28 Time was reasonably generous in suggesting that Newton's re-
marks resulted from his "holy innocence," 29 while some mainstream Southern
Baptists sought to dissociate the SBC from them. Frank Tripp of Montgomery,
Alabama, told Time that Newton was "not authorized to speak as a representa-

85

Southern Fundamentalism and Anticommunism at the Beginning of the Cold War

tive of the Convention but ... has a perfect right to express himself as an indi-
vidual." 30

Newton, though, had several defenders, and their comments reveal that the
hardline, Cold War antagonism toward Russia had not completely formed by
the summer of 1946. Tripp's hometown newspaper, the Montgomery Adver-
tiser , criticized those who had accused Newton of defending communism and
supported Newton's privilege of free speech. In an interesting query, the editor
wondered, "Are we approaching a state of mind in the United States which
will permit no comment considered friendly or favorable to Russia?" The
lesson the editor drew from Newton's ordeal was that it would "intimidate and
silence any report on Russia that happens to interpret the people there as half-
way decent and the possible sharers of a world at peace." 31 In a letter to the
Editor of the Christian Index , Carl Bennett of Georgia's Wesleyan College
argued that Newton was not "pro-communist" but

pro-humanity. If he did not exploit our fears of an admittedly to-
talitarian regime, perhaps it was because he was more interested
in telling us what every American needs to know and to keep in
mind; that the Russians, first of all before being communists, are
people , that they have known pain and heartache and suffering
magnified beyond our experiences in the war, and that they have
aspirations for the same peace we are working and praying for. 32

Newton's words, though, were too easy a mark for Norris to pass up, and,
perhaps sensing a division he could exploit, Norris called for Newton to resign
his office. 33 But he misplayed his hand by trying to force the issue at the next
annual convention held in St. Louis in May 1947. Renting an auditorium for
the same days as the Southern Baptist meetings, Norris planned to hold rallies
and preach in a counter-convention. 34 Moreover, he had a special surprise for
Newton and alerted the press to attend a pre-Convention session where New-
ton would report on his Russian trip. 3 "' As Newton rose to speak, Norris began
shouting out a list of questions designed to embarrass Newton and to challenge
his loyalty to America. 36 He questioned Newton's description of Soviet reli-
gious freedom, pointing out that the state owned all church property, sent spies
into church services, and forbade criticism of the government. Under these
circumstances, yelled Norris, "how then can there be religious freedom?" 37
Drowned out by congregational singing, Norris renewed his harassment at the
end of the hymn. By this time, police were on the scene and Norris retreated,
claiming that he had successfully exposed Newton and other Southern Baptist
leaders as "appeasers of Moscow." 38

Rallying to Newton's defense was Ralph McGill, editor of the Atlanta Con-
stitution . 39 In a May 8 editorial, he called Norris "a Ku Klux yelper and a loud

mouth shouter in many demagogic political and hate rallies" and denounced as
ridiculous Norris's accusations that Newton was sympathetic to communism.
Knowing Newton through his ministry at the Druid Hills church, McGill sug-
gested that Newton may have been duped by the Russians into making his
"naive" comments but that Newton was no "appeaser." McGill reviewed
Norris's career, incorrectly locating his church in Austin and suggesting that
Norris's attacks were motivated by his desire to become president of the Con-
vention. Calling him a "pistol-toting divine," McGill reminded his readers of
Norris's murder trial. McGill concluded by noting his regret in not being able
to attend the Convention and "to shout with the ministers." 40

Disturbed and angered by McGill's characterizations, Norris responded,
first writing to accuse McGill of including false statements then cryptically
warning that "you will hear from me again." 41 Within a week, a Fort Worth
District Attorney indicted McGill for criminal libel, but, on the advice of his
Atlanta lawyer Samuel Hewlett, Norris did not aggressively pursue the charges.
However, he did authorize Hewlett to file a civil libel suit. 42 By the end of the
summer of 1947, Hewlett had negotiated an agreement that McGill would pub-
lish an apology and retraction in return for Norris dropping the criminal com-
plaint and any claims for monetary damages. 43 Norris did not indicate his
approval until the following February, so the retraction appeared in the 20 March
1948 edition of the Constitution . 44 Apparently Norris was more upset with
McGill's characterization of him as a gun-bearing minister than with the com-
ments linking him to the Klan. The only retraction and apology in the column
concerned the "pistol-toting divine" remark. "There is no evidence," McGill
wrote, "that Dr. Norris carried or 'packed' a pistol... The Constitution retracts
that statement and regrets it." 43 Pleased that Newton's hometown news paper
had published his accusations concerning Newton's procommunist leanings,
Norris called his $500 lawyer fee "the best investment I ever made." 46

Little evidence can be mustered to suggest that this incident had much ef-
fect on realigning factions among Baptists in the South or persuading South-
ern Baptists to leave the Convention. The results, nonetheless, are instructive
for understanding Norris's inability to influence Convention affairs through an
anticommunist crusade and for studying the reflection of American society's
emerging anticommunist consensus in the SBC. Norris's efforts failed for two
reasons: distrust of the messenger and disbelief in the message. Indicating his
desire to take advantage of the disaffection with Newton he saw among South-
ern Baptists, in April 1947 Norris predicted, "We are winning a most glorious
war among Southern Baptists. This fight at St. Louis will bring a thousand
churches into our Fellowship." 47 Thus, if Norris intended his performance at
the convention to rouse opposition to Newton by embarrassing him and so
deny him the customary second term as the Convention's president, he mis-

87

Southern Fundamentalism and Anticommunism at the Beginning of the Cold War

read the mood of the Convention. His effort failed as Newton easily won re-
election. 48

To Norris, the vote demonstrated the apathy of the rank and file Southern
Baptist pastors to the issues before the Convention. Writing to E. P. Alldredge,
he observed.

But the most serious thing of that 23,000 [orthodox Southern
Baptist pastors] is their absolute indifference. Proof of their indif-
ference is that when Louie Newton was out with his appeasement
campaign for Russia, not a one opened their [sic] chops. They
told me privately that they were with me and then turned around
and voted to elect him. 49

Perhaps the vote was more a response to the character of the messenger than an
indication of apathy to the message. Harold Frey, an observer at the 1947 con-
vention for the northern liberal newspaper Christian Century , believed that
Norris's attacks "solidified" Newton's support so that he won by an "over-
whelming vote.'-' 50 Furthermore, Convention pastors did not seem much influ-
enced by Norris's attempt to capitalize on McGill's retraction. Norris printed
enough copies of the column to send to every Baptist pastor in the country,
some 35-40,000, but the effort seemed to do little more than confirm the
recipient's predisposition. Writing to ask Norris to send 500 extra copies, a
Texas pastor proclaimed that "this retraction is the greatest blow Louie New-
ton and his followers could receive," while a Charlotte pastor asked for 1 ,000
copies, declaring, "Truly, this is V-C Day for Fundamental Baptises]."" 1 ' Most
Southern Baptists pastors probably threw Norris's mailing into the trash.' 2

Perhaps a more significant factor than Southern Baptists' misgivings about
Norris's motives was their skepticism about the content of the accusations.
First, they did not accept characterization of Newton as an "appeaser of Mos-
cow," and second, the political and intellectual climate that created the oppor-
tunity for Norris's attack had not shifted enough so that his efforts would be
effective. In just a few years, some politicians, like Richard Nixon and Joseph
McCarthy, would find that charging their opponents with being procommunist
or even not sufficiently anticommunist would win a following and elections.
Investigations like those conducted by the House Un-American Activities Com-
mittee ruined careers when witnesses tried to defend their First Amendment
rights. By the early 1950s, accusers did not need proof. Innuendo and half
truth were sufficient to convict. 53 But in the spring of 1947, Southern Baptists
demanded more than Norris's charges to convince them of Newton's commu-
nist sympathies.

Newton's contributions to the Christian Index make clear that he was not
procommunist but rather was primarily concerned with the opportunity to preach

William R. Glass

the Gospel to the Russian people. Writing a column called "This Changing
World" and occasionally contributing editorials, Newton commented on a va-
riety of public issues, including politics and foreign policy. 34 The dangers of
communism was one theme, but Newton distinguished between the ideology
and its followers, condemning the former as a threat to Christianity while ex-
pressing sympathy for the latter who needed to hear the Gospel. Newton feared
that Cold War tensions would end what he believed was an opportunity to
evangelize the Russian people. 55 In one column, he suggested that American
interests would be better served if policy makers tried "to understand Russia
rather than build up a case against Russia." 56 Understanding rather than con-
frontation, Newton believed, would lead to an opening to preach the Gospel to
the Russian people. Undergirding Newton's comments was his concern that
Russians were being duped by the false promises of communism. Discussing a
secular columnist's description of communism as a religion, Newton claimed
that this commentary vindicated his analysis of what he saw on his Russian
trip:

The challenge here implied is to Christianity, which is exactly
what I have been trying to say since my visit to Russia last year.
Communism is not the answer Christianity is the answer. 57

Newton's concern for missionary opportunities reflected the general ten-
dency of Southern Baptists to evaluate activities according to their evangelistic
potential. Thus, the immediate postwar years saw two major SBC campaigns
for European relief, one a 1946 effort to raise $3.5 million for aid, and a second
in late 1947 and early 1948 as a part of the Baptist World Alliance's attempt to
gather "clothes for one million people and $1 million for food" to sustain Eu-
ropeans during the winter. 58 Southern Baptist leaders justified involvement as
concrete expression of both Christian charity and of the Gospel people needed
to hear for their souls' benefit. 59 For example, Duke McCall, executive secre-
tary of the SBC, reported that a German Baptist pastor said that his people
"need practical Christian help" and that such assistance would aid in reaching
Germans "for Christ." 60 Newton endorsed the participation of Southern Bap-
tists in the Baptist World Alliance campaign, assuring his readers that their
contributions to this program would be used to sustain fellow Baptists. 61 Both
efforts were very successful. In a little more than three months, Southern Bap-
tists raised over $2 million of the $3.5 million and within another two months
raised the entire amount. 62 In the first 15 days of November 1947, the SBC
relief center in New Orleans received over 80,000 pounds of clothes, and ma-
terial continued to pour in through the end of the year. 63

Interestingly, the coverage of these efforts in Baptist papers lacked a dis-
cussion of the potential the relief had for preventing the spread of communism.

89

Southern Fundamentalism and Anticommunism at the Beginning of the Cold War

Leaders called the Southern Baptist rank and file to participate for religious
not political reasons. Occasionally, a few leaders reminded their readers of the
connection. In the same article in which McCall noted that relief could aid in
evangelizing Germans, he also noted that the troubled circumstances in En-
gland created the potential for revolution and warned that "if England falls, all
western Europe drops into the lap of Communism." 64 Such comments were
just enough to remind readers of what they had learned from the secular press.
Thus, SBC leaders did not need to make explicit anticommunist appeals to
support the relief efforts because the secular press had clearly made the con-
nection. Churchill's Iron Curtain speech, Truman's call for aid to Turkey and
Greece, the coup in Czechoslovakia, the effort to force Russian troops out of
Iran, the success of communists in China, and the development of the Marshall
Plan were but a few of the events that the press and politicians used to remind
Americans of the communist threat and of the necessity of American involve-
ment in world affairs. The SBC relief campaigns thus became a means for a
concerned Southern Baptist to act not only out of religious principles but also
for political reasons. Which motive was paramount for an individual contribu-
tor is impossible to determine, but this circumstance offers another factor to
consider in understanding the failure of Norris's attack on Newton. Southern
Baptists could interpret their donations to relief efforts as one part of the
denomination's contribution to stemming the tide of communist advance and
could view the endorsement of these efforts by leaders like Newton as evi-
dence of his anticommunist credentials.

For Norris, this episode was merely one part of his anticommunist crusade
and his campaign against the SBC. That his efforts this time seemed to have
little impact did not deter him from making other attacks in the few remaining
years of his life. In the summer of 1952, while preaching at a youth rally in
Florida, Norris had a heart attack and died. 6 ' After his term as SBC President,
Newton continued to serve the denomination in several offices but focused his
attention on leading the Druid Hills congregation until his retirement in 1968.
He also resumed his campaign against alcohol, becoming a thorn in the side of
Atlanta mayors for their lax enforcement of liquor control laws. 66 But Newton
remained typically Southern Baptist throughout the rest of his life in viewing
world affairs, including the Cold War and communism, in terms of the pros-
pects and obstacles they presented for evangelism. He died in 1986 at age 94
after a bout with pneumonia. 67

That public opinion in the immediate postwar years underwent a radical
shift in its perspective on Russia and its communist leaders was evident in
many areas of American society. Not surprisingly, religion reflected this change.
This emphasis is not to suggest that religious leaders merely absorbed political
trends and did not contribute to shaping those trends. Clearly, Norris and

90

William R. Glass

Newton's opinions helped mold the attitudes of their followers, but measuring
the extent of that influence is beyond the scope of this essay. However, it might
be worth noting in broad outline some of the ways religion contributed to the
emerging Cold War consensus. As early as 1947, a Gallup poll reported that
seventy-two percent of respondents believed that a stated goal of communism
was to destroy Christianity and that seventy-seven percent denied that a good
Christian could be a member of the communist party. 68 These figures suggest
that a general religious anticommunism existed in American public opinion
which politicians and other leaders might tap for support. Furthermore, reli-
gion played a central role in America's self-definition. Not only did Americans
during the Cold War claim to be democratic, free, equal, and open, but also
religious, unlike the atheistic communists in Russia. In 1954, that avowal be-
come official when Congress added "under God" to the Pledge of Allegiance
and ordered that "In God We Trust" appear on American money. 64

The controversy between Norris and Newton was but one small episode in
the emergence of an anticommunist consensus, yet it affords the opportunity
to analyze the transformation of public opinion that occurred. In general out-
line, Norris's tactics anticipated those of politicians like Nixon, McCarthy and
other redbaiters where accusation was sufficient for conviction. That Norris's
attack on Newton failed to dislodge him from the presidency of the SBC was
due in large measure to the distrust most Southern Baptists had of Norris. But
his failure may also have come from the fact that broader cultural attitudes had
not shifted so far that charges of being soft on communism would ruin a career.
Norris clearly hoped that accusing Newton of being sympathetic to commu-
nism would discredit Newton and win for Norris a small victory in denomina-
tional politics. That he failed may suggest that he was ahead of his time.

Finally, this incident furnishes the chance to consider the connection be-
tween fundamentalism and anticommunism. Norris was a fundamentalist, and
his primary interests were religious. That his rhetoric and activities regularly
rose to extremes was due in part to his personality and desire for publicity, but
also to his patriotism. For Norris, as for most fundamentalists, the United States
was a Christian nation, and a nineteenth-century evangelical Protestantism was
a key element in its foundation. The late nineteenth and early twentieth centu-
ries saw the development of a number of challenges to this orthodoxy, not the
least of which was theological liberalism. For fundamentalists like Norris, the
threat liberalism represented was not just to religious faith but to the survival
of America. Over the course of the twentieth century, Norris came to see com-
munism as a secular version of liberalism, with its atheism a direct threat to the
Christian foundation of the nation. Norris and his fundamentalist allies fought
a holy war to defend that which made America great in their eyes and to attack
that which threatened this foundation. The Cold War raised the stakes so that

91

Southern Fundamentalism and Anticommunism at the Beginning of the Cold War

even the gentle words of praise that Louie Newton offered could not be al-
lowed to pass without comment.

In some ways, Newton represented a more invidious threat in Norris's esti-
mation than a card-carrying party member because Newton's position as a
religious leader made his opinions all the more dangerous. Newton was a wolf
in sheep's clothing, leading astray millions of Southern Baptists. That Newton
was neither liberal in belief nor procommunist did not matter to Norris. Funda-
mentalists after Norris continued to make this connection between liberal the-
ology and communist doctrine so that to be a fundamentalist was by definition
to be fervently anticommunist. 70

Notes

1 Quoted in "Innocent Abroad," Time, 26 August 1946, 68.

2 Quoted in "St. Louis Blues," Time, 19 May 1947, 70.

3 The best discussion of fundamentalism's origins is George M. Marsden's Funda-
mentalism and American Culture: The Shaping of Twentieth Century Evangelicalism,
1875-1925 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1981). This theological liberalism
treated the Bible as simply an ancient manuscript not divinely inspired, doubted the
reality of miracles, emphasized the ethical teachings of the Bible, and applied the mes-
sage of salvation to society's sins. Standard studies of liberalism include Kenneth
Cauthen, The Impact of American Religious Liberalism (New York: Harper and Row.
1962) and William R. Hutchison, The Modernist Impulse in American Protestantism
(Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1976).

4 In The Divided Mind of Protestant America 1880-1930 (University, Ala.: Univer-
sity of Alabama Press, 1982), 107-135, Ferenc Szasz has the best explanation of the
connection between the two campaigns arguing that William Jennings Bryan captured
fundamentalists for his crusade against evolution while fundamentalists turned to anti-
evolutionism as they were losing their denominational battles.

5 Joel A. Carpenter, "Fundamentalist Institutions and the Rise of Evangelical Protes-
tantism, 1929- 1942," Church History 49 (March, 1980): 62-75.

(1 William R. Glass, "The Development of Northern Patterns of Fundamentalism in
the South, 1900-1950" (Ph. D. dissertation. Emory University, 1991), 63-129.

7 The best study of Norris and his career is Barry Hankins, God's Rascal: J. Frank
Norris and the Beginnings of Southern Fundamentalism (Lexington: University of
Kentucky Press, 1996). While Hankins may overstate Norris's role in introducing fun-
damentalist doctrine and controversy to southern Protestants. Norris is nonetheless a
central character in the story. For a slightly different context to Norris's career, see
Glass, "The Development of Northern Patterns," 124-128, 281-346, 383-403.

8 In Tried as by Fire: Southern Baptists and the Religious Controversies of the 1920s
(Macon, Ga.: Mercer University Press, 1982), 137-165, James J.Thompson discusses

92

William R. Glass

Southern Baptist fundamentalism but describes little fundamentalism outside the orbit
of Norris.

9 C. Allyn Russell, "J. Frank Norris: Violent Fundamentalist," in Voices of Funda-
mentalism: Seven Biographical Studies (Philadelphia: Westminster Press, 1976), 39-
40.

10 Ibid., 34-37.

" A. T. Robertson to Lewis Sperry Chafer, 20 April 1928, in Lewis Sperry Chafer
Papers, Mosher Library, Dallas Theological Seminary, Dallas, Texas. Robertson was a
respected New Testament scholar at Southern Baptist Seminary in Louisville and made
this remark in the context of a minor controversy surrounding his appearance at Chafer's
schools to deliver a series of lectures. On the announcement of Robertson's lectures,
Norris wrote Chafer that Robertson was a theistic evolutionist. Chafer cabled Robertson
for a response to the charge which Robertson emphatically denied. Thereupon Chafer
politely told Norris to mind his own business. J. Frank Norris to Lewis Sperry Chafer,
17 April 1928; and Lewis Sperry Chafer to J. Frank Norris, 20 April 1928, in Lewis
Sperry Chafer Papers.

12 F. S. Groner, "Editor Norris Promotes a New Sect," Baptist Standard, 26 April
1923,7.

13 Norris continued in the 1930s his assault on the Convention by shifting his criti-
cisms to new targets. Specifically, he charged SBC leaders with financial mismanage-
ment and attacked their efforts to encourage SBC cooperation with ecumenical Protes-
tantism. See J. Frank Norris, "What Has Been The Record of the Machine in Texas," in
Inside History of First Baptist Church, Fort Worth and Temple Baptist Church, Detroit:
Life Story of Dr. J. Frank Norris (Ft. Worth: privately published, 1938), 173-175, 186-
189. See also comments in J. Frank Norris, "The Triple Major Operation in Detroit," in
ibid., 159-161; J. Frank Norris to Victor I. Masters, 5 March 1932 and letter with no
date (internal evidence suggests summer, 1932), in J. Frank Norris Papers, Box 27
Folder 1228, Southern Baptist Historical Library and Archives, Nashville, Tennessee
(hereafter cited as J FN papers).

14 On his ministry in Detroit see, Russell, "J. Frank Norris," 30, 40; cf., J. Frank
Norris, "How the Dual Pastorate Was Brought About," in Inside History, 269-271 .

15 Bible Baptist Seminary, Catalog, 1948-49, 11-12, in JFN Papers, 15-703. The
Catalog, 17, made clear the dependence of the school on the church for its facilities.
The seminary had a rent-free 199-year lease on all the property of the church.

16 Billy Vick Barlett, The Beginnings: A Pictorial History of the Baptist Bible Fel-
lowship (Springfield, Mo.: Baptist Bible College, 1975), 19-21.

17 In this discussion, I am much indebted to the fine analysis of Norris's anticommu-
nism in Hankins, God's Rascal, 138-160.

18 Ibid., 116.

19 In this regard, Norris may have been different from other fundamentalists. In An
Undercurrent of Suspicion: Anti-Communism in America during World War II
(Brunswick: Transaction Publishers, 1990), 148, George Sirgiovanni notes that many

93

Southern Fundamentalism and Anticommunism at the Beginning of the Cold War

fundamentalists continued "to preach vigorously against the evils of communism, [but]
to a rather insular audience of true believers." He devotes a significant portion of one
chapter to the ranting of Gerald L. K. Smith as an example of an extreme Protestant
critic of the wartime alliance with the Soviet Union. But Sirgiovanni argues that more
moderate fundamentalists endorsed the necessity of cooperation with communists,
though they still worried that the results of such cooperation might end up benefitting
the expansionist goals of communist leaders. Ibid., 163-4.

20 Hankins, in God's Rascal, 281-300, makes clear that Norris's attack on Newton
was one part of a much larger anticommunist campaign Norris conducted in the late
1940s.

21 "President Louie DeVotie Newton," Christian Index, 30 May 1946, 4 (hereafter
cited as CI).

!: Newton chaired the SBC committee that coordinated the collection of funds for
the distribution of 175,000 kits of household items to Russian families in 1945. "Dr. L.
D. Newton Will Tour Devastated Areas of Russia," CI, 30 May 1946, 1 1 .

23 Newton gave an account of his tour in a series of articles published in Baptist
newspapers. See Louie D. Newton, "What I Saw and Heard in the Union of Soviet
Socialist Republics," CI, 12 September, 1946, 5-6; 19 September 1946, 5. 23-24; 26
September 1946, 5-6; and 3 October 1946, 5-6, 28.

24 Ibid., 26 September 1946, 6.

25 William C. Fletcher, The Russian Orthodox Church Underground, 191 7-1970 (Lon-
don: Oxford University Press, 1971), 153.

2(> Walter Sawatsky, "Protestantism in the USSR," Religious Policy in the Soviet Union,
ed. by Sabrina Petri Ramjet (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), 329. On
the Orthodox Church, see Dimity Pospielovsky, The Russian Church under the Soviet
Regime, 1917-1982 (Crestwood, NJ: St. Vladimir's Seminary Press, 1984), vol. 1, 193-
219.

27 "Dr. Newton Welcomes Discussion of His Report on Russia," Baptist and Reflec-
tor, 2 January 1947, 5.

2S Louie D. Newton, "Baptist Leader Makes Official Report on His Russian Visit,"
Atlanta Constitution, 26 August 1946, 9. Newton also affirmed that he returned to
America "more deeply committed to the doctrine of Democracy than ever before" and
that he believed "Communism is not the answer to the world's greatest need." In "3,500
Hear Dr. Newton in Report on Russia," 26 August 1946, 1 , 4, the Constitution reported
that two white supremacists picketed the meeting with a banner charging Newton with
"selling Communism to the U. S. A."

2 " "Innocent Abroad," 68. The Louisville Courier-Journal agreed and suggested that
Newton had seen what the Russians had wanted him to see and therefore "innocently"
wanted to believe "the best of another fellow," even if he was Stalin. Quoted in "Louie
and the U.S.S.R.," Time, 9 September 1946. 80.

30 "Louie," 79.

31 Editorial reprinted in CI, 12 September 1946, 5.

94

William R. Glass

32 CI, 19 September 1946, 14.

33 Ibid; "Baptist Pastor Urges Dr. Newton to Resign Post," Atlanta Constitution, 29
August 1946, 13.

34 J. Frank Norris to Luther C. Peak, 19 March 1947, in J FN Papers, 34-1508.

35 This according to an anonymous letter sent to Ralph McGill, 23 May 1947, in
J FN Papers, 28-1318.

36 Norris gained access by having his church donate $50 to the Cooperative Pro-
gram designated for foreign missions which entitled First Baptist to send two messen-
gers to the convention. The church selected Norris and William Fraser, an evangelist
who was a member of the church. E. P. Buxton to F. Mattison, 31 March 1947; and
Jane Hartwell to the Southern Baptist Convention, 30 April 1947, in JFN Papers, 29-
1356.

37 J. Frank Norris to Louie D. Newton, 7 May 1947, in JFN Papers, 29-1356. Norris
sent the press a copy of the questions he tried to ask which were published in various
newspapers including the Dallas News and the Ft. Worth Star-Telegram. J. Frank Norris
to J. Wesley Edwards, 20 May 1947, in JFN Papers, 29-1355.

38 "St. Louis Blues," Time, 19 May 1947, 70. See also Russell's account in "J. Frank
Norris," 42-43.

39 The previous year, McGill came to Newton's side by affirming editorially that
Newton was "right" in suggesting that Russia had more religious freedom under the
Soviets than under the czars. Ralph McGill, "Religion Can Be a Club," Atlanta Consti-
tution, 29 August 1946, 10.

40 Ralph McGill, "J. Frank Norris Gets Shouted Down," Atlanta Constitution, 8 May
1947, clipping in JFN Papers, 28-1318. McGill also noted, "As a Ku Klux shouter, J.
Frank Norris naturally exhibits the Ku Klux ideal." In God's Rascal, 165-166, Hankins
reports that he found no evidence that Norris was a member of the Klan or that he
spoke before Klan rallies. Hankins does indicate that Norris's views on race relations
and Catholics were in line with the Klan's but that Norris developed these views inde-
pendent of the Klan.

41 J. Frank Norris to Ralph McGill, 10 May 1947, in JFN Papers, 28-1318.

42 Samuel D. Hewlett to J. Frank Norris, 22 May 1947, in JFN Papers, 2-60. Hewlett
explained that Georgia law prevented criminal libel actions until a newspaper had the
chance to correct misstatement of facts.

43 Allen Post to Samuel D. Hewlett, 15 August 1947, typed copy in JFN Papers, 2-
60.

44 J. Frank Norris to Samuel D. Hewlett, 27 February 1948, in JFN Papers, 2-60;
and J. Frank Norris to Samuel D. Hewlett, 4 March and 8 March 1948; and Samuel D.
Hewlett to J. Frank Norris, 12 March 1948, in JFN Papers, 2-61. In the first letter,
Norris explained that the delay resulted from his extended tour of Palestine.

95

Southern Fundamentalism and Anticommunism at the Beginning of the Cold War

45 "Concerning a Previous Article," Atlanta Constitution, 20 March 1948, clipping in
JFN Papers, 2-61. McGill also corrected the misinformation concerning Norris's ca-
reer.

46 J. Frank Norris to Samuel D. Hewlett, 31 March 1941 [sic, 1948], in JFN Papers,
2-61.

47 J. Frank Norris to Luther C. Peak, 19 April 1947, in JFN Papers, 34-1508.

4S Victor I. Masters to J. Frank Norris, 14 March 1948, in JFN Papers, 27-1229.
"Convention Head Re-Elected," Baptist Standard, 22 May 1947, 1.

49 J. Frank Norris to E. P. Alldredge, 3 1 August 1948, in E. P. AUdredge Papers, box
1, file 30, Southern Baptist Historical Library and Archives, Nashville, Tenn.

50 Harold E. Frey, "Why They Behave like Southern Baptists," Christian Century, 21
May 1947, 649.

51 Roscoe Turner to J. Frank Norris, 15 April 1948; Maylon D. Watkins to J. Frank
Norris, 9 April 1948, in JFN Papers, 2-61. Both men indicated they wanted to send the
copies to each person on their mailing lists.

52 Evidently, Norris had the habit of sending unsolicited mailings and subscriptions
to his newspaper to whomever he desired, including members of Newton's Atlanta
congregation. He regularly received requests from the recipients to have their names
removed from his mailing list. A flurry of such requests appeared after Norris's attack
on Newton in St. Louis. One congregant wrote to Norris, "We have been receiving
your paper for several months now, and it has been consistently thrown in the trash
basket every week... We did not subscribe to this sinister, sordid trash and have no
desire to receive it." Mrs. Julian L. Crook to J. Frank Norris, JFN Papers, 29-1354.
This folder and the next (29-1355) contain many such letters as well as others support-
ing Norris in his crusade. Another part of his harassment of Newton included sending
Sunday morning telegrams to try to disrupt Newton's services. The deacons at Druid
Hills Baptist Church intercepted them and threw them away as well. Dallas Lee, "State
Baptist Leader Louie D. Newton Dies," AC, 4 June 1986, A6.

53 A good overview of these points is Stephen J. Whitfield's The Culture of the Cold
War (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1991), especially Chapter 2 "See-
ing Red: The Stigma" and Chapter 6 "Reeling: The Politics of Film."

54 The columns cited in subsequent notes usually had comments on one or more of
these topics. These columns usually consisted of several paragraphs on a variety of
topics. Rarely did a column deal with just one issue.

55 This perspective was responsible for his muted criticism of Churchill's Iron Cur-
tain speech. Though he called the speech "significant," he suggested that Churchill's
criticism of the Soviet Union's aggressiveness was misplaced in light of the record of
the British Empire. Louie D. Newton, "This Changing World," CI, 21 March 1946, 7.

56 Ibid., 4 April 1946,7.

57 Louie D. Newton, editorial, CI, 26 June 1947, 4.

96

William R. Glass

58 See reprint of telegram, Frank Tipp to O. P. Gilbert, 21 May 1946, in CI, 30 May

1946, 5; R. Paul Caudill, "'Complete the Doing,'" CI, 4 July 1946, 6; "Baptists Seek
Clothes for Million, Also Million Dollars for Relief," CI, 16 October 1947, 3; and
Harvey R. Mitchell, "Baptists Must Give Food to Europe," CI, 18 December 1947, 3.

59 H. C. Goerner, a professor of missions in an SBC seminary, described the efforts
of other denominations and urged Southern Baptists to accept part of the burden for
relief because "God is giving us one last chance in our generation to evangelize a world
before a pagan world destroys itself and us." H. C. Goerner, "Southern Baptists and the
World Emergency," CI, 28 February 1946, 3.

60 Duke McCall, "McCall Pleads for Baptist Relief in Europe," CI, 4 September

1947, 5.

61 Louie D. Newton, "This Changing World," CI, 16 October 1947, 7.

62 "World Relief Report," CI, 5 September 1946, 1; and "It Was Done Last Year," CI,
17 July 1947, 8.

63 "Georgia's Churches Unite for Relief Drive," CI, 27 November 1947, 3; and "The
Answer is You," CI, 11 December 1947, 4.

64 McCall, "McCall Pleads," 5.

65 Russell, 25.

66 According to Lee, A6, famed Atlanta mayor William B. Hartsfield "winced" when-
ever Newton appeared in his office door.

67 Ibid.

68 Cited by Mark Silk, Spiritual Politics: Religion and America Since World War II
(New York: Simon and Schuster, 1988), 88.

69 Ibid., 94-100.

70 See, for example the discussion in Louis Gasper, The Fundamentalist Movement,
1930-1956 (Netherlands: Mouton & Company, 1963; reprint ed., Grand Rapids, Mich.:
Baker Book House, 198 1 ), 46-49, 59-71 ; and in Michael Lienesch, Redeeming America:
Piety and Politics in the New Christian Right (Chapel Hill: University of North Caro-
lina Press, 1993), 211-223.

97

98

ISBN: 1-883199-11-5