Response

Abstract

16 Historically Speaking January/February 2008 whites-only suburbs exemplars of a depoliticized Happy Days? You get the idea. The struggle for racial justice burned across the post-World War II years. And that struggle goes a long way toward explaining how political activism of all kinds became an ever greater presence in the United States from the end of World War II right through the early 1970s. Without the struggle for racial justice and the models of political practice, resistance , and rebellion it produced in its many variants across racial and ethnic lines, the other political movements and modes of contentious politics of the era would have looked very different and likely would never have gained the kind of political and cultural traction they did achieve. Black Americans don't fit the Fifties imagery popular accounts tend to present—or that Whitfield outlines. If black Americans' experiences are taken seriously, the Fifties take on a different hue. And as historians place black Americans' presence in the post-World War II years more centrally, they should have a much easier time understanding how contemporary mass-media notions of the Fifties tell us more about how a certain kind of social order was culturally cast than about how Americans actually lived and experienced the era. Throughout the early Cold War years, black Americans found powerful ways to make their presence felt in die United States. They and their allies were able to break the racial order whites had cast in the decades following Reconstruction . That break had major cultural and social implications and it caused massive changes in American public policy. Americans' domestic struggles over racial justice were given political urgency and new cultural saliency by that other great postwar cause: the battle to address the communist challenge. That battle produced concerns about national identity that made racial injustice a more salient issue for political elites. But it also produced hot wars, internal hunts for subversives and spies, massive increases in the federal government's power and capacity, and a political struggle to define America's role in the world. As people in the United States and in most other nation -states around the world worked their ways through the new international Cold War order, factions in most every nation began to challenge the people, precepts, and policies that maintained and developed that order and the particular form the Cold War state took in their respective societies. Even the Soviet Union, with its barbarous Stalinist and brutal post-Stalinist internal political organization , had its factional disputes and cultural forms of resistance to the obduracy of its Cold War state. Given America's central role in the making, maintaining, and developing of that Cold War international order, Americans' relative unfamiliarity with the demands of a powerful domestic security state, and Americans' freewheeling, democratic political culture, it makes sense that Americans responded passionately and in great numbers to the demands of the Cold War. And those responses, it is worth remembering, did not begin with the Left's challenges to the Vietnam War. The John Birch Society, founded in 1 958, almost surely had more members than SDS ever did. Birchers met in small chapters all over the United States, petitioning, protesting, and organizing to impeach Earl Warren and challenge the patriotism of President Eisenhower and then Kennedy and Johnson. More direcdy, and successfully , they took on school boards and other local officials who failed to attack communism. Birchers were joined in their activism by myriad other selfidentified anticommunist grass roots activists. The Cold War produced an angry, highly organized, grassroots Right in the Fifties, and as numerous recent historians have recognized, those Rightists did not disappear in the Sixties—they regrouped and rethought their political practices (ironically, Leftists would do much the same in the 1970s—a topic for another day). The political ferment created by the frustrations, fears, and hopes of the Cold War clearly took on new shape and politicized new people as the war in Vietnam evolved differendy than had the civil war in China and the UN police action in Korea. And, yes, generational politics fueled by demographics and a host of other critical factors—some of which...