Catastrophic Technology in Cold War Political Thought

The historiography on international labor politics in the Cold War era, and particularly on the AFL-CIO’s global projection, seems to be advancing in leaps and bounds. It started out at the height of America’s domestic conflict about Vietnam and empire with polarized, antagonistic accounts, which lambasted the AFL’s submission to the US government’s imperial designs1 or praised its independent international campaign for free trade unionism.2 After a lull of almost 15 years, it reemerged in the late 1980s when a new crop of scholars, mostly based in Europe, addressed new issues, and some of the old ones, from a different perspective. They produced archive-based works focused not only on the nature and intent of American labor unions’ foreign policy but also on its impact and effectiveness.3 These historians framed their main questions within the contemporary debates about the political economy of Western Europe’s reconstruction and its intricate relationships with US hegemony.4

Reviewed by: Gettysburg 1963: Civil Rights, Cold War Politics, and Historical Memory in America’s Most Famous Small Town by Jill Ogline Titus Summer Perritt (bio) Gettysburg 1963: Civil Rights, Cold War Politics, and Historical Memory in America’s Most Famous Small Town. Jill Ogline Titus. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2021. ISBN 978-1-4696-6534-4, 264 pp., paper, $27.95. Jill Ogline Titus’s Gettysburg 1963: Civil Rights, Cold War Politics, and Historical Memory in America’s Most Famous Small Town looks at the evolving memory and meaning of the Battle of Gettysburg during the 1960s Civil War centennial. Titus uses a Cold War framework to understand the battle’s political and cultural uses, arguing that Gettysburg’s “multifaceted identity as an idea, a landscape, and a living community” rendered the small town a useful tool in the fight for and against Black civil rights (2). To craft her narrative, Titus closely reads an impressive array of primary sources such as speeches, newspaper articles, monument dedications, and photographs to demonstrate that historical actors across the board attempted to use the Gettysburg centennial to serve their own contemporary interests. These attempts took the shape of three key narratives: a Lost Cause version of the War that white Southerners used to push back against civil rights agendas, a counter-narrative that suggested the fight for civil rights was the best way to honor the legacy of the Civil War and its fallen heroes, and finally, a Cold War perspective that capitalized on reconciliationist narratives of the War to promote American exceptionalism and democracy abroad. The first part of Titus’s work looks at the historical uses of Gettysburg leading up to the centennial. In the aftermath of the Civil War, tourism quickly became a mainstay for the town, as both white and Black tourists flocked to the site with their own understandings of the battle and its importance in crafting a larger American identity. As the decades passed, however, this understanding quickly became entrenched in contemporary struggles over white supremacy, Black disenfranchisement, and segregation. Beginning in the 1920s, Gettysburg became the key site for Ku Klux Klan activity, and in 1925 it played host to a two-day rally that attracted between twenty and twenty-five thousand attendees. Titus estimates that the Klan’s use of the battlefield [End Page 117] stood as a symbolic gesture intended to reinforce the idea that members of the hate group saw themselves as “modern-day defenders of patriotism and American heritage” and provided a throughline between the battles of the Civil War and what members saw as the ongoing fight for white supremacy (13). In the 1930s, the National Park Service took over management of the battlefield and officially moved Gettysburg into the orbit of Confederate memory, rendering the battle the “High Watermark of the Confederacy” (17). But Titus takes multiple angles into account, examining interpretations of the Gettysburg centennial from the perspective of civil rights workers, politicians, centennial planning-committee members, and local residents, both Black and white. As such, she explores how Black Gettysburgians actively contested white memory of the battle and its contemporary uses. They capitalized on the battlefield’s public status and used it for gatherings, picnics, and exercise. They decorated the graves of Black soldiers on Memorial Day and even refused to participate in commemorative events that portrayed racist reconciliationist narratives of the war. As Titus points out, the years leading up the centennial saw Gettysburg as a contested site where people across the nation came to debate issues of race, citizenship, and belonging. The middle chapters of Gettysburg 1963 explore the pageantry of the centennial and expertly flesh out the varied uses of the battle in a Cold War and civil rights context. A speech made by Pennsylvania governor David Lawrence during the 1961 Memorial Day celebration, for instance, insisted on the Civil War’s importance as a didactic moment in American history, providing a warning to foreign nations that Americans did not shy away from armed conflict when they believed their right to self-determination could be violated. Other politicians and centennial speakers emphasized reconciliation as the major legacy of the Civil War...

The Cold War: A World History

Reviewed by: Gettysburg 1963: Civil Rights, Cold War Politics, and Historical Memory in America’s Most Famous Small Town by Jill Ogline Titus Erin Krutko Devlin (bio) Gettysburg 1963: Civil Rights, Cold War Politics, and Historical Memory in America’s Most Famous Small Town. By Jill Ogline Titus. (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2021. Pp. 264. Cloth, $95.00; paper, $27.95.) As Jill Ogline Titus reminds readers in Gettysburg 1963, newspaper coverage of the Civil War centennial was distributed alongside stories about the burgeoning Black freedom struggle and debates about Cold War politics and policies. Gettysburg 1963 strives to help readers understand how these threads of American cultural and political life converged on the Gettysburg battlefield, illuminating a contested landscape in which commemorative rhetoric was shaped by a desire to forge a memory of 1863 that could be mobilized in service of a wide range of social and political aims one hundred years later. Titus notes that formal commemorative bodies, such as the U.S. Civil War Centennial Commission, often sought to mobilize a reconciliation-ist vision of the war that emphasized military valor, technological progress, and reunification, which served the broader purpose of reanimating American patriotism and encouraging heritage tourism in the midst of the Cold War. Yet Titus also notes that this narrative was never unchallenged in the commemorative activity surrounding the centennial. She illustrates how an emancipatory memory of the war as a “new birth of freedom” sought to frame the conflict through the lens of racial justice during the civil rights movement, while Lost Cause rhetoric was mobilized to recast resistance to desegregation as the preservation of states’ rights. As Titus demonstrates, both of these alternative strands of memory also sought to tether their memorial claims to the politics of the Cold War, with those promoting an emancipationist vision arguing that the failure to address racial injustice undercut the nation’s position as a beacon of democracy, and those promoting the Lost Cause narrative contending that opposition to civil rights legislation served as a bulwark against government overreach and totalitarianism. Titus argues that these divergent and diverse approaches to memorializing Gettysburg meant that commemorative activities at the battlefield in 1963 “were employed simultaneously to champion racial equality, legitimize midcentury anti-government sentiments and activities, and strengthen the U.S. position internationally” (5). Gettysburg 1963 is focused on official commemorative activity— speeches, pageants, exhibits, and battlefield reenactments—but Titus evocatively notes that participants and visitors exposed to these divergent [End Page 274] interpretations of the war were not passive spectators. “Participants,” she writes, “did not simply absorb the commemoration’s messaging wholesale, but rather made decisions about where and how to participate (and what ideas to embrace) that ensured a variety of different takeaways about the connections between 1863 and 1963” (84). Indeed, Titus concludes that the divergent commemorative narratives presented during the centennial substantially disrupted the reconciliationist rhetoric promoted by the U.S. Civil War Centennial Commission and Gettysburg National Military Park in 1963, with both emancipationist and Lost Cause narratives rising in prominence in the years that followed. Titus explores public reception of these competing strands of memory most directly in her discussion of audience attendance at or reaction to various pageants, roundtables, and public addresses. She is particularly attentive to local participation in commemorative activities on the battlefield’s national stage. Indeed, Gettysburg 1963 examines how national debate about the meaning and memory of the Civil War battle played out locally in the community of Gettysburg itself and nearby Gettysburg College, where Titus currently serves as associate director of the Civil War Institute. Titus notes that local residents had a particular stake in the way the centennial was positioned in relation to heritage tourism and were invested in debates about the appropriate balance between commercialization and battlefield preservation as they sought to harness the economic potential of the centennial. Titus also demonstrates how the borough struggled with its own history of racial segregation and discrimination. The international attention focused on Gettysburg in 1963 provided the local Black community with the leverage needed to push white business owners toward the meaningful desegregation of public accommodations. Gettysburg 1963 will resonate most powerfully for...

At the 42nd New York Film Festival in 2004, an enthusiastic audience viewed a selection of propaganda films rarely seen in the USA. The exhibit, ‘Selling Democracy—Welcome Mr. Marshall. Films of th...

Peripheral Nerve: Health and Medicine in Cold War Latin America

Investigations into how technologies became peculiar forms of politics in an expanded geography of the Cold War. The Cold War was not simply a duel of superpowers. It took place not just in Washington and Moscow but also in the social and political arenas of geographically far-flung countries emerging from colonial rule. Moreover, Cold War tensions were manifest not only in global political disputes but also in struggles over technology. Technological systems and expertise offered a powerful way to shape countries politically, economically, socially, and culturally. Entangled Geographies explores how Cold War politics, imperialism, and postcolonial nation building became entangled in technologies and considers the legacies of those entanglements for today's globalized world. The essays address such topics as the islands and atolls taken over for military and technological purposes by the supposedly non-imperial United States, apartheid-era South Africa's efforts to achieve international legitimacy as a nuclear nation, international technical assistance and Cold War politics, the Saudi irrigation system that spurred a Shi'i rebellion, and the momentary technopolitics of emergency as practiced by Medecins sans Frontières. The contributors to Entangled Geographies offer insights from the anthropology and history of development, from diplomatic history, and from science and technology studies. The book represents a unique synthesis of these three disciplines, providing new perspectives on the global Cold War.

Jamie Cohen-Cole, Open Mind: Cold War Politics and the Sciences of Human Nature. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2014. 368 pp.It seems safe to say that in contemporary America, is a fairly ecumenical concept. We are told to keep an open mind to the cultural practices of others, to new technological innovations, to difference in all forms. However, open-mindedness cuts both ways: we can also hear frankly racist denunciations of mainstream unwillingness to consider the evidence for the hereditary bases of intelligence as a form of close-mindedness. Indeed, the very obviousness of the metaphor and its seeming lack of ideological specificity lend the concept a certain air of timelessness. open mind, however-at least in its specifically American form-is a surprisingly recent invention. Jamie Cohen-Cole's meticulously researched monograph does an excellent job of excavating the political and intellectual context in which the idiom emerged, demonstrating convincingly the powerful role that it played in shaping the intellectual landscape of post-war America. Indeed, its contemporary idiomatic ubiquity-however attenuated its positive content may appear-only serves to demonstrate how successfully it has infiltrated American ways of thinking about thinking. Open Mind lucidly charts the history of the concept, showing how it sutured creativity, rationality, autonomy, and willingness to embrace alternative viewpoints to a politically centrist, technocratic understanding of science and governance. Open-mindedness was used as both an evaluative standard for and scientific description of human activity in a surprisingly wide range of venues.Cohen-Cole argues that this open mind emerged as a quilting point for a whole host of projects and strategies within the ideology of a newly ascendant class of problem-oriented, interdisciplinary, Cold War intellectuals. These intellectuals found in the open mind the perfect expression of, and justification for, their particular experiences and understandings. Their participation in war-time working groups and policy planning, designed to rapidly mobilize America's intellectual capital to solve concrete problems, had forced them to learn to work together with experts from radically different disciplinary traditions and social locations. As they transitioned back to civilian life, they were faced with the dual challenges of transforming the networks of patronage and collegiality forged during World War II into durable institutions for the conduct of Cold War science, and-with millions of returning soldiers entering universities and the work force-of designing an educational system adequate for training a productive and cohesive citizenry. In Chapters 1 and 2 (Democratic Minds for a Complex Society and The Creative American, respectively), Cohen-Cole convincingly demonstrates how open-mindedness came to serve as perhaps the chief ethical virtue guiding each of these ventures, as the creativity, receptivity to alternative viewpoints, and problem-solving orientation required for success in intellectuals' earlier undertakings came to be held as a model for both academic and civic life more generally. As World War II turned into the Cold War, these elites used their particular war-time experiences to develop a new ethics and a new way of understanding their own practices as intellectuals. These self-understandings became the basis for a series of practical interventions into the way that all Americans learned, worked, and understood themselves both as citizens and human beings.Of course, the problems of coordination in complex organizations and societies were hardly novel. Indeed, Cohen-Cole also traces how the open mind presented a solution to longstanding fears in the educational establishment and early social sciences about the corrosive effects of the division of labor and stratification of society on national unity. In the Cold War context, however, these fears took on new urgency when dovetailed with the political concerns of a centrist, technocratic elite-fears of both an insidious international communism, as well as the home-grown specters of racism and reactionary paranoia. …

Reviewed by: A History of Cold War Industrialisation: Finnish Shipbuilding between East and West by Saara Matala René Taudal Poulsen (bio) A History of Cold War Industrialisation: Finnish Shipbuilding between East and West By Saara Matala. New York: Routledge, 2021. Pp. 233. For over four decades, Cold War politics shaped technology and business developments in European and North American military-industrial businesses. Historians of technology, business, and politics continue to debate the nature of these dynamics and their societal implications, and Saara Matala brings a fresh perspective to these discussions with her novel study of Cold War Finnish shipbuilding. She argues that Cold War politics had a decisive influence on Finnish shipbuilders, despite the fact that they specialized in icebreakers and passenger ships—not naval vessels. She also finds that shipbuilding played a central role in Finland's transformation from a fragile, low-cost, agrarian economy in Europe's periphery into a high-cost but competitive European industrial economy with high social stability. After World War II, Finland, a young, capitalist democracy, had to come to terms with the USSR, which had just won the war and demanded Finnish war reparations, including substantial numbers of merchant ships. Finns had to sugarcoat communication with their powerful neighbor. Some observers have scornfully labeled this process "Finlandization" and suggested that Finland could and should have acted differently. However, Matala shows how Finnish businesses navigated Cold War politics to their advantage and gained substantial leverage. After the last war reparations in 1952, Finnish yards continued to supply the USSR with merchant ships. From 1945 to 1970, the majority of deliveries went there, and although domestic and Western European markets increased in importance after 1970, the USSR remained the single most important market in Finland until 1990. For shipbuilding scholars, it is not surprising to learn that shipbuilding was heavily embedded in politics in the second half of the twentieth century. Governments in shipbuilding nations have regularly employed a wide variety of support schemes to counteract the negative employment effects of depressed shipbuilding markets and the rise of Asian shipbuilders. In the long run, however, the center of gravity in shipbuilding moved to South Korea and Japan. In studying the political economy of shipbuilding, historians have focused on the United Kingdom and tended to neglect other countries. Matala's study is a refreshing contribution to this literature, and she gives nuance to the ways in which shipbuilders could gain competitiveness. As Finland balanced between East and West, Finnish shipbuilders secured high-paying Soviet orders with favorable payment terms and partly insulated themselves from the market downturn of the 1970s and 1980s. With the help [End Page 280] of Finnish politicians, including President Urho Kekkonen, they engaged in long, drawn-out Soviet contract negotiations—which differed considerably from normal yard contracting—and Finnish-Soviet technological cooperation. The USSR paid for ships via a special clearing mechanism, effectively paying for them with raw materials, including oil. Finnish shipbuilders had a strong niche focus on highly complex vessel types. Although Matala does not provide any quantitative estimates of price differentials for "newbuilding" prices for the Soviet and Western ship markets, she convincingly shows how Soviet ship demand enabled Finns to build up technological strongholds in niches: even a poor Soviet Union was rich enough to buy sophisticated, Finnish icebreakers. In the late 1980s, the Finns turned to Europe in response to the disintegration of the USSR. Although Finnish politicians claimed not to subsidize shipbuilders, Matala shows how the Finnish government provided strong support, including attractive ship-finance schemes, direct market interventions to secure ferry orders, and reconstruction support in connection with the major Wärtsilä shipyard bankruptcy in 1989. Eventually, Finland harmonized shipbuilding subsidy policies with the EU as it joined the union in 1994 and became "a normal European country" (p. 191). Matala has undertaken comprehensive archival studies in Finnish shipyards, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, and the presidential archives, supplemented with interviews with former yard managers and U.S. archival material. She did not consult Russian archives but points out their relevance for future research. My only main critique concerns the theoretical framework. Matala applies the lens of a techno-economic system, but she never explicitly...

Reviewed by: Of Vagabonds and Fellow Travelers: African Diaspora Literary Culture and the Cultural Cold War by Cedric Tolliver, and: Everything Man: The Form and Function of Paul Robeson by Shana L. Redmond Samantha Pinto Cedric Tolliver. Of Vagabonds and Fellow Travelers: African Diaspora Literary Culture and the Cultural Cold War. Ann Arbor: U of Michigan P, 2019. 244 pp. $24.95. Shana L. Redmond. Everything Man: The Form and Function of Paul Robeson. Durham: Duke UP, 2020. 208 pp. $24.95. When I was an undergraduate at Rutgers in the late 1990s, June Jordan came to give a reading in the Paul Robeson Lounge. She opened her talk by way of a joke—that this man who spoke so many languages, lettered in so many sports, was so incredibly multitalented, could have a lounge named after him. A lounge! Paul Robeson, critically understudied, and the time period he most saliently represents in Black arts and culture—the Cold War era—are finally getting their due in two new monographs: Cedric Tolliver's Of Vagabonds and Fellow Travelers and Shana Redmond's Everything Man. Joining recent work on the Black feminist political history of this time period by scholars such as Keisha Blain, Cheryl Higashida, Mary Helen Washington, and Carole Boyce Davies, as well as the literary studies work of Michelle Stephens, Cherene Sherrard-Johnson, and Eve Dunbar, Tolliver and Redmond map deeply different takes on the legacies of an unsung era of African American cultural and political work. The Cold War era is a time of unprecedented political change and artistic production, sitting as it does amid World War II and burgeoning global decolonization movements. Tolliver and Redmond want to retrace figures in Black literature and culture who didn't toe even liberal lines around Black freedom struggles of the period, rewriting Robeson and others into the legacy of figures like W. E. B. Du Bois, who also recurs throughout Tolliver's text as a key theorist of the significance of culture and class to Black political movements. Tolliver thinks deeply around those who incorporated class and economic struggles as at the center of African American bids for equality with stunning archival work and a nuanced Marxist approach to difference within the African diaspora. He centers "those confrontations in the cultural realm between the US and the Soviet Union that paralleled and reinforced operations in the political, economic, and military spheres" (5) to capture the 'hearts and minds' of a global populace. This populace, particularly in decolonial Africa, was skeptical of the US not least because of its continued racist policies and politics, including legal segregation in the South and economic injustice nationwide. Tolliver's thick (re)description of the history of Black cultural expression in the Cold War political context is both forceful and eloquent in its open insistence on "restor[ing] culture to a primary site of struggle, refusing the capitalist society imperative, intensified during the Cold War, of according culture an autonomous [End Page 343] function removed from the materiality of social reproduction" (16) and claiming some Black artists (and activists) as particularly "disruptive" (17) to this equation and political economy as usual, even as it was difficult to escape what he refers to as its ideological—and often material—enclosures. Tolliver reframes this period of African American literature around the Cold War era in a first chapter that anchors scholarly work on the diaspora by critics like Brent Hayes Edwards in his The Practice of Diaspora into the frame of the Cold War, and engages important thinkers in diaspora literature such as Aimé Césaire through Cold War politics and critiques. From here, Tolliver moves to Anglophone and Francophone Caribbean engagements with US imperial histories in the region. His reading of George Lamming's classic In the Castle of My Skin recasts it as a primer on Cold War development in the shadow of a century of American occupation. The emphasis on US foreign policy in Lamming's and Jacques Stephen Alexis's work here is thought-fully and thoroughly sutured to close readings of their texts that open up African diaspora and Cold War studies of the period's literature. Robeson appears as a...

On a comparative basis this article explores the profile of Cold War University teaching and Cold War research as carried out in the Post-Cold War period in the Nordic countries. A number of overall conclusions are drawn from this exploration. Firstly concerning teaching, that Cold War courses are mainly taught within the setting of History, and that the political aspects of the Cold War conflict are mostly in focus in Denmark, Finland, Iceland and Norway whereas a culture and society approach dominates in Sweden. Secondly concerning research, the article argues that Cold War research during the last 10–15 years has taken a tremendous leap forward, often through government-sponsored research programmes or appointed commissions. All the same, the author is critical of the strict national approach of most research and the complete lack of comparative Nordic studies, but also of the limited attempts to insert Nordic research findings into the international Cold War debate. However, and thirdly, the article is also analyzing and discussing the role of the Cold War in post-1989 politics and debates. It is demonstrated that Cold War issues have continued to play a prominent role in the Post-Cold War period albeit with a varying degree of intensity within the individual Nordic countries with Norway seeing least controversy and Denmark at the other end having experienced a very radical and intense political debate on issues like alliance (dis)loyalty, fellow travelling and police surveillance and control. The article concludes that level of intensity of these debates is mainly defined by the degree to which such Cold War issues are and can be inserted into national controversies of contemporary politics.

Preface Acknowledgements Introduction I - Jammu and Kashmir: Post-colonial Relations 1. Jammu and Kashmir: Geopolitical and Strategic Position and Anglo-US Involvement 2. The Accession of Jammu and Kashmir to India 3. Plebiscite 4. The Kashmir Question in the Security Council II - Cold War Politics and India's Relations with the West 5. Beginning of the Cold War and the United States and India 6. Britain and India: Post-colonial Relations III - Dialogues of Hope 7. Indo-Pak Dialogue on Kashmir Epilogue Bibliography Index

Editor's Note

Despite the supposed end of the Cold War in the early 1990s, its legacies remain unresolved in Asia and continue to shape Asian Canadian writing. The presence of what are now called Asian Canadians became increasingly visible in the 1960s and 1970s. In 1967, the federal government passed a new Immigration Act that abolished national quotas which had effectively excluded most immigrants from areas outside Euro-America and introduced new opportunities for students and skilled immigrants. In the late 1970s, 60,000 refugees from Southeast Asia entered Canada, the first time that Canada had admitted a significant number of non-European refugees. This period also marked the height of postwar Canadian nationalism: in 1967, Canada celebrated its Centennial and tried to project an image of liberal inclusion; this would be further consolidated in 1971 with the adoption of state-sanctioned multiculturalism. However, this specific Canadian national identity failed to address racial discrimination, including those forms directed towards Asian immigrants from the mid-19th century until past the World War II. While Canada’s Cold War politics are informed by these unresolved historical traumas, the multiple intersections between Asian Canadian experience and the Cold War remain largely illegible when read through the frame of the Canadian nation. Alongside the tradition of Asian Canadian cultural activism, Asian Canadian writers, such as Joy Kogawa, Roy Miki, Paul Yee, SKY Lee, M. G. Vassanji, and others, produced texts that sought to address the erasure of Asian historical presence while exploring and depicting the psychic as well as social costs of racial exclusion and discrimination during the 1970s and 1980s. SKY Lee’s novel Disappearing Moon Café (1991) explores how issues such as Asian–Indigenous relations, gender hierarchies, class relations, racialization, queerness, and the politics of memory are shaped under the subtext of the Cold War. Laotian Canadian writer Souvankham Thammavongsa’s second book of poetry, Found (2007), engages with the history of her parents’ migration from Laos to Canada via a refugee camp in Thailand, and in doing so, Thammavongsa challenges the Cold War representations of Southeast Asian countries. Kim Thuy’s Ru (2009) examines migration in relation to the narrator’s journey from Vietnam to a Malaysian refugee camp and then to a small town in Quebec. Madeleine Thien’s Dogs at the Perimeter (2011) raises questions about post-Cold War justice by drawing attention to Canada’s involvement in the conflicts in Cambodia and implicitly posing the question of Canada’s unacknowledged responsibilities. Thammavongsa, Thuy, and Thien’s texts can be read as post-Cold War literature as the Cold War created the conditions for these literary projects to emerge. Beyond a source of thematic or historical content, the Cold War remains embedded, if ambivalently, in the very construction of Asian Canadian literature.

This essay investigates the International Writing Program at the University of Iowa under the directorship of Paul Engle and Hualing Nieh during the Cold War. It argues that the exchange and translation of literature at Iowa had been enabled and circumscribed by Cold War politics, interrogating the proximity between US Cold War agenda and Iowan literary ideal by critiquing Cold War liberalism embodied by Engle and Nieh. Their translation of Mao Zedong’s poems epitomizes a political and literary archive of the Cold War, symptomatically illustrating the figure and signification of “China” in the US imagination, and demonstrating the intimacy between literary production and political endeavor. Reading Nieh and Engle’s translation of Mao’s poems as letters of the US Empire specifically scripted through and within Cold War geopolitics, this essay interrogates the neutrality of creative writing and literary translation foundational to and claimed by the International Writing Program since its establishment in 1967.