The Pentagon's Battle for the American Mind: The Early Cold War

Abstract

As Lori Lyn Bogle demonstrates, the twentieth-century American military was determined to foster a more resolute, morally centered, and religiously defined national character. Military officers admired the revolutionary generation, but in their own time they perceived an alarming degree of apathy, immorality, and uncertainty regarding the nation's historically ordained role. By the early Cold War, they concluded that the challenge of godless Soviet aggression abroad and the dangers of insidious Communist subversion at home required new efforts to create Valley Forge experiences for the American public. Bogle approaches this story by focusing on a striking variant of American civil religion, “the belief that the military as the defender of the ‘American Way of Life,’ is a holy instrument of God's will and the interpreter of national values” (p. 13). In the Progressive and inter-war periods, this conviction led to the creation of Citizens' Military Training camps in which practical skills of warfare were matched with programs intended to inculcate patriotism, discipline, and loyalty. Yet attempts to engineer a population of potential citizen-soldiers also led to decidedly conformist and coercive measures. By World War II military conservatives feared that allowing open discussion by soldiers would create channels through which fascist and Communist ideologies might take hold. During the early Cold War a powerful fusion of evangelical faith and right-wing politics drove the Pentagon to extremes. When campaigns for universal military training failed and the defection of a small group of Korean War prisoners of war appeared to illustrate the vulnerability of Americans to Communist brainwashing, the Department of Defense promoted seminars to alert military personnel and the general public to the dangers of creeping socialism, liberal democratic softness, and moral decay while infusing them with a muscular sense of Christian resolve and resistance. Once exposed by the U.S. Senate the programs gradually ceased, but not until attacks on government officials reached the point that “civilian supremacy over the military was indeed strained” (p. 162).