Children Crusading against Communism: Mobilizing Boys as Citizen Soldiers in the Early Cold War State

Abstract

Abstract In 1951, the Bowman Gum company released a collectible card set, sold with bubblegum, entitled The Children’s Crusade Against Communism: Fight the Red Menace. As a consumer item, the cards drew boys into a burgeoning form of American citizenship, but their overtly military tone also links this citizenship to ideas about national security. The narrative of the cards broadly reflects the tenets of the Truman Doctrine: that it is the duty of the United States to uphold global freedom; that communism must be contained; and that national security depends on nuclear power, a strong military, and civilian preparedness to mobilize in defense of peace. The molding of such political content in the cards to appeal to a young audience allows us to understand how such an audience was conceived of in ideological terms. A picture can be conjured of how the audience was imagined to look, what kinds of cues were deemed to be appropriate to such an audience, and how the audience was expected to respond to those cues. An analysis of the cards as they operated within the rhetorical and visual culture of the period reveals that they excluded certain groups from the narrative of American history and, thereby, certain children from the goal of becoming ideal American future citizens, citizens bearing an identity defined by a militarism and a nationalist exceptionalism predicated on pious certitude and righteous superiority.