American Way Of Life Research Articles

The FBI and the Catholic Church, 1935–1962 (review)

Reviewed by: The FBI and the Catholic Church, 1935–1962 Patrick J. McNamara, William Dinges, and Joseph A. McCartin Steve Rosswurm, The FBI and the Catholic Church, 1935–1962 (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2009) Summary Review Scholars and commentators have long noted the strong affinity that existed behind J. Edgar Hoover’s Federal Bureau of Investigation and the Roman Catholic Church in the United States during the early Cold War, a relationship that had much to do with a shared anticommunism. In the 1963 classic Beyond the Melting Pot, the late Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan famously observed that during the McCarthy era, as Harvard men were investigated for their alleged un-Americanism, it was “Fordham men” who did the checking. This period is the subject of Steve Rosswurm’s new book. What enabled this mutually beneficial relationship, he suggests, was a convergence (but not fusion) of values. While the communist issue was a major reason for Hoover’s popularity with Catholics, there was also a shared commitment to what Rosswurm calls “gendered values and institutional authority.” That is to say, both were dedicated to preserving a patriarchal mode of leadership, and both saw religion as strengthening that model. And both were dedicated to forming “real men.” During the FBI’s early years, Hoover focused his recruiting efforts on white Protestant males from the small towns of the Midwest and the South. But beginning in the 1940s, he expanded his efforts to Catholic colleges and universities in the Mid-Atlantic region and beyond. He met a positive reception. Fordham University President Robert I. Gannon, S.J., commented that “the FBI and Fordham have the same ideas.” Like the FBI, the Jesuits, known as “the Pope’s Marines,” believed in forming disciplined men dedicated to preserving the moral order. The University of Notre Dame, according to its president (and future cardinal) John F. O’Hara, C.S.C., was a “man’s school” that promoted “Red-blooded Americanism.” Both schools would provide a large number of FBI personnel through the years. Hoover considered the Catholic Church “the greatest protective influence in our nation today.” For both the Protestant director and his Catholic associates, Rosswurm notes, “Secularism . . . was the key to understanding all of America’s problems.” [End Page 77] Hoover gave due attention to Catholic leaders, who reciprocated in kind. Although he did not cultivate close personal private relationships with any particular bishop (with the possible exception of Baltimore’s Archbishop Michael J. Curley), he cultivated a close association with them in regard to their shared public concerns. On the other side, the admiration occasionally devolved into hero worship. In 1953, for example, Archbishop Richard J. Cushing of Boston equated Hoover with quoting the pope. Catholic periodicals contributed to the cult of personality surrounding Hoover. Our Sunday Visitor, one of the most conservative American Catholic periodicals, regularly reprinted his speeches, as did The Brooklyn Tablet. In time, some Catholic spokespersons would equate anti-FBI sentiments or expressions with anti-Catholicism. In other words, if Hoover wasn’t actually Catholic, he should have been. Rosswurm sheds new light on previously examined figures, such as Father John Cronin and Monsignor Charles Owen Rice, both the subject of biographies. Cronin became famous for his 1945 report on domestic communism, which the U.S. bishops commissioned. Rosswurm delineates the extent to which the FBI cooperated with Cronin in compiling information for the report (and possibly even writing parts of it). He also reexamines the extent to which Rice (long a subject of Rosswurm’s scholarly interests) himself cooperated with the FBI during his years as a labor priest. In addition, the author brings attention to two other largely ignored characters. Edward Tamm, Hoover’s assistant at the Bureau, did much to cultivate Catholic connections in Chicago and elsewhere. Edward Conway, the Jesuit whose activities as an informant helped purge “leftist” influence in the National Committee for Atomic Information during the early Cold War, also receives significant attention here for the first time. This close relationship points to an uncritical approach to the larger culture on the part of pre-conciliar Catholic leaders, many of whom assumed that the “American way of life” was inherently incapable...

Invasion USA (review)

Reviewed by: Invasion USA Ron Briley Invasion USA (1952). Directed by Alfred E. Green. Distributed by American Pictures. 73 minutes. Americans have long celebrated their opposition to tyranny, dating back to the American Revolution and clarion call of "no taxation without representation." Many citizens take pride in the second amendment to the Constitution, believing that individual possession of firearms will prevent foreign invasion and the imposition of dictatorship in the United States. More sophisticated considerations of how fascism might come to America, such as It Can't Happen Here by Sinclair Lewis, emphasize that American fascism would most likely manifest itself in the guise of right-wing populism. Nevertheless, American popular culture perpetuates the fantasy of foreign invasion and heroic citizen resistance. While such scenarios are often reminiscent of partisan European fighters (many of whom were communists) during the Second World War, there is a tendency to view such resistance as uniquely American. This is another example of American exceptionalism, grounded in a perception that the belief in freedom is a national, and not a human, value. Red Dawn, released in 1984 when President Reagan was reinvigorating the Cold War, describes the adolescent fantasy of a high school football team, the Wolverines, who defeat communist forces from Cuba and the Soviet Union, no match for quarterback Patrick Swayze and his teammates/warriors. Although made on a much lower budget, film director Alfred E. Green's Invasion USA (1952) perhaps best places the idea of American Cold War exceptionalism in historical and global context. Invasion USA projects the scenario of a full-scale Soviet assault upon the United States. Made during the Korean War and heyday of McCarthyism in Washington, Invasion USA depicts an expansionist Soviet empire intent on world domination, abetted by fifth columnists and Americans too soft to make the sacrifices necessary for the preservation of liberty. [End Page 148] The film begins in a New York City bar, where news anchor Vince Potter (Gerald Mohr), factory owner George Sylvester (Robert Brice), Congressman Arthur V. Harroway (Wade Crosby), Arizona rancher Ed Mulfory (Erik Blythe), and attractive socialite Carla Sanford (Peggie Castle) are mesmerized by the enigmatic Mr. Ohman (Dan O'Herlihy), who suggests that the patrons should curb their carping about selfish concerns and recognize that the American way of life is being threatened. Mr. Ohman mysteriously disappears, and the group at the bar is awakened from a trance-like state by a news bulletin reporting that American forces in Alaska are under attack. The source of this assault remains unnamed in the film, but the Cold War historical context, the invasion route through Alaska, the unintended comical Slavic accents, the proclamations from the "People's Army," and the use of MiG-15 fighter planes clearly indicate that the invading enemy comes from the Soviet Union. The story of the invasion is modeled after the news bulletin technique pioneered by Orson Welles in his radio broadcast of The War of the Worlds. The startled bar patrons watch the enemy launch an invasion of the Pacific Northwest supported by the employment of tactical nuclear weapons against American military installations. The President announces that the United States will retaliate with atomic bombs and take the war into the enemy's home territory. Nevertheless, the invasion appears to be gaining momentum, and the denizens of the bar recognize that they need to do their patriotic duty. Each, however, pays the ultimate price for failing to venerate and uphold the American Way. Sylvester returns to his tractor factory in the San Francisco area. While at the bar, he complained about government intervention in the operation of his plant, voicing discontent with suggestions that he direct some of his production lines into national defense. But his return is too late, for the enemy has occupied the factory. A fifth- columnist laborer helped the invading forces gain control over the means of production, casting doubt upon the political loyalty of labor. Sylvester confronts his former employee and is shot in the back by a member of the "People's Army." Meanwhile, Mulfory arrives in Arizona to retrieve his family. As they flee their home, the enemy bombs Hoover Dam, setting off a flood, which consumes...

Sprawl, justice, and citizenship: the civic costs of the American way of life

. 1. Introduction: Sprawl as a Moral Issue NOTES FOR CHAPTER ONE 2. . Defining, Explaining, and Measuring Sprawl NOTES FOR CHAPTER TWO 3. Counting Costs and Benefits: Is Sprawl Efficient? NOTES FOR CHAPTER THREE 4. Do People Like Sprawl (And So What If They Do?) NOTES FOR CHAPTER FOUR 5. : Is Sprawl Fair? Liberal Egalitarianism and Sprawl NOTES FOR CHAPTER FIVE 6. Liberal Egalitarianism in a Cul-de-Sac? Sprawl, LIBERAL VIRTUE, AND SOCIAL SOLIDARITY NOTES FOR CHAPTER SIX 7. Sprawl, Civic Virtue, and the Political Economy of CITIZENSHIP NOTES FOR CHAPTER SEVEN 8. You Can't March on a Strip Mall: Sprawl and Civic DISENGAGEMENT NOTES FOR CHAPTER EIGHT 9. Sprawl, the Environment, and Climate Change NOTES FOR CHAPTER NINE 10. : Reforming Sprawl, and Beyond NOTES FOR CHAPTER TEN APPENDICES BIBLIOGRAPHY INDEX

A Deweyan Defense of Guerrilla Gardening

In this paper, I formulate a Deweyan argument in support of guerrilla gardening, or the political activity of reclaiming unused urban land, sometimes illicitly, for cultivation and beautification through community gardening. Historically, community gardening in the U.S. has been associated with relief projects during periods of economic downturn and crisis, urban blight and gentrication, as well as nationalism, nativism and racism. Despite these last few unfortunate associations, the American philosopher John Dewey detached school gardening from the nativist’s tool-kit, portraying it as a gateway to more enriching adult experiences, not as a technique for assimilating immigrant children to a distinctly American way of life. One of those experiences that school gardening can prepare children for is political activism, particularly involvement in gardening movements. Dewey did not mention this collateral benefit. Nevertheless, an argument can be made that garden advocacy — or, more specifically, participation in politically-motivated gardening movements such as guerrilla gardening - is an acceptable interpretation, or elaboration, of what Dewey meant by “a civic turn” to school gardening.

Homens em evidencia: Corpos masculinos na revista O Cruzeiro (1946-1955)

This article discusses the images of male bodies published by the Brazilian magazine O Cruzeiro between 1946 and 1955. Rather peculiar bodies were shown in specific relations which have reshaped habits and attitudes into an entirely new dimension. Such images show a longing for modernity, a modernity which is marked by North-American consumption ideals – the American Way of Life, implemented in Brazil after the 1940s. Such consumption made spaces and habits more modern, through the promotion of a seductive image arsenal designed to broaden the action fields of both women and men, but at the same time reinforcing space limits and stereotypes of what was considered masculine or feminine.

Cold War “Bridge-Building”: U.S. Exchange Exhibits and Their Reception in the Soviet Union, 1959–1967

Following the presentation of the American National Exhibition in Moscow in 1959, nine exhibits organized by the United States Information Agency traveled in the Soviet Union from 1961 to 1967. This article discusses the aims, preparation, content, and reception of these exhibits, which attracted more than five million visitors and provoked diverse reactions. The exhibitions and their guides served as a unique form of communication with Soviet citizens, informing them about U.S. achievements and freedoms and the American way of life. The initiatives offset Soviet Communist propaganda, advanced popular understanding of the United States, and promoted popular goodwill toward Americans. The low-key interactions between the guides and the visitors shed valuable light on the mindset and experiences of ordinary citizens in the USSR, who were a major target audience of these exhibitions, and also, more broadly, on U.S. public diplomacy during the Cold War.

Statehood: Catalyst of the Twentieth-Century Kanaka ‘Ōiwi Cultural Renaissance and Sovereignty Movement

Unexpectedly, by the 1970s, rather than fully integrating Hawai‘i’s people into American life ways, statehood had laid the foundation for a Kanaka Oiwi cultural renaissance and revival of their historic sovereignty movement. The quest for Kanaka Oiwi sovereignty began when the U.S. government invaded Hawai'i on January 16, 1893. Critiques of Kanaka Oiwi sovereignty as unviable in a global post colonial social system cannot derail a quest that has been instilled in the hearts and minds of a people for generations. This article identifies post-statehood economic and political developments and traces the emergence of the Kanaka Oiwi movement.

'We have a lot to learn!' American Influences on Danish Social Democracy and Organized Labour in the Early 1950s: Transnational Perspectives

Focusing on the period of post-war European reconstruction, this article examines the ways in which the US influenced the course of social democracy in Denmark. Under the Marshall Plan, trade unionists were invited to see America with their own eyes to learn about 'the American way of life'. The Danes turned out not to be particularly interested in American ways of organizing trade unions and were not afraid to lecture the Americans on social rights. However, they did not have any problems in accepting that American-style productivity was a 'key to plenty'. The Social Democrats' plans for a welfare society were reinforced both by their visit to the prestigious New Deal project TVA and by their perception of what was still missing in the otherwise rich America. In their minds, the American concept of productivity and their own demand for full employment and social security would pave the way for a prosperous Denmark, where all levels of society would share the benefits of rising standards of living.

Foreign Domestics: The Filipino 'Homefront' in World War II Hollywood

In Hollywood film and media culture of World War II, the Philippines acted as a 'homefront' or a space of identification through the presence of an 'American way of life'. World War II Hollywood films set in the Philippines — Texas to Bataan (1942), Corregidor (1943), Bataan (1943), They Were Expendable (1945) and Back to Bataan (1945) — establish a dynamic of foreign domesticity by grafting domestic signifiers onto the foreign space of the Philippines and across Filipino bodies; particularly through the trope of US heroism as signified by General MacArthur, references to the Alamo and the genre of the Western, and domestic cultural objects and practices. These films served related purposes: they recruited a public into a foreign war, created a recognizable war zone 'homefront', and consolidated the image and ideology of control over the formerly 'insurgent' colony.

Atomic Kids: Duck and Cover and Atomic Alert Teach American Children How to Survive Atomic Attack

first- graders. . .learned to spell 'atom' and 'bomb' before they learned 'mother' Elise E. Beiler Indian Springs School, Nevada (1952) Introduction The experiences of American kids in the Cold War were very different from those of their parents. While adults perceived threat to the American way of life- -to their health and wellbeing and those of their families- -their children learned to fear the loss of future they could grow into and inhabit. These kids of the Atomic Age wondered if they might be the last children on Earth. The prospect of war fought with nuclear weapons pervaded American culture even when the United States was the sole possessor of such weapons. The fear and anxiety intensified in the late 1940s, as the Soviet Union acquired its own nuclear weapons and the Cold War began in earnest. Massive government efforts to design, construct, and deploy nuclear weapons helped to fuel the emergence of what Dwight Eisenhower would later call the militaryindustrial complex. Another critical element of American Cold War society, as historian Michael Scheibach points out, was that educators, government officials, and parents realized the necessity, even the urgency, of preparing the country's youth for new, more precarious world.3 The students of the Indian Springs School in Indian Springs, Nevada, confronted the realities of the Atomic Age first-hand. Collier's magazine showed Americans into the two-room schoolhouse that was located in a converted supply room at the Indian Springs Air Force Base, security area attached to the closely guarded atomic testing grounds . The children have witnessed four atomic blasts in the last few weeks . Some of the children have seen as many as dozen of the atomic test detonations. A spokesman for the Atomic Energy Commission explained that these children were models for the rest of America's youngsters: children in this school by their sheer proximity to the tests are getting the same type of psychological indoctrination we are giving some of our combat troops. If all the school children in the nation could witness an A-bomb blast, it would do much to destroy the fear and uncertainty which now exist. Most American children received their lessons on the realities of the Atomic Age in less direct form: through pamphlets, films and other materials created by government agencies for use in the classroom by teachers and school officials. The information that these authorities presented to American children attempted to teach them what steps they needed to take in order survive an atomic attack, but it was coded with both intended and unintended subtexts. Their central message, fundamental to all government civil defense materials, was that you could survive an atomic attack if you learned the preparatory steps and took the correct actions. Survival, therefore, was choice. The second intended message was that during an atomic attack the social leaders, the government and the teachers, were in control of the situation. They could prescribe the simple steps to survival, and they could quickly restore order. Once you did your part, which was to follow instructions and to survive, you could trust in social authorities to maintain social order, and to maintain society itself. Paradoxically, implicit in these texts was the exact opposite message. The hyper- vigilance demanded by these survival instructions communicated that nuclear war was not only inevitable - it was imminent. The idea of imminent nuclear war portrayed an adult world that was spinning out of control. These texts suggested to children that they would not be able to rely on their adult guardians to either prevent nuclear war, or even to be present to protect and guide them through the experience. In attempting to help enlist the children of America as vigilant Cold Warriors, these texts, in actuality, conveyed the message that their own Cold War government was unreliable. …

“From a Daumier Drawing by a Process of Dehydration”

Around the turn of the next to last century, there was genre of writing attached to the historiographical turn of the late 1800s: the etat present in which the status of discipline, whether scientific studies, medieval studies, or oriental studies, would be assessed. Such efforts were in large part nationally defined, as in Maurice Wilmotte's L'Enseignement de la Philologie Romane Paris et en Allemagne (1883-1885), published in 1886, or the volume Histoire et historiens depuis cinquante ans, published in celebration of the progress of French historical studies in the fifty years since the founding of the Revue Historique in 1876. Well, fifty years is good round number, and, as it happens, it is just over fifty years since the death of Erich Auerbach, whose legacy in the U.S. included some of the people in this room: Steve Nichols, for example, as well as my own thesis advisor, William Calin. Auerbach at Yale after Pennsylvania State University, Henri Focillon at Yale where he founded the History of Art Department, Leo Spitzer at Johns Hopkins, Erwin Panofsky at Princeton, Alfred Adler at Brooklyn College, and Ernst Kantorowicz at Berkeley and then at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, were, however, exceptions. Most of what passed for French or medieval studies in America in the decades after World War Il was more on the model of W. S. Merwin's description, in recent memoir entitled The Mays of Ventadorn (2002), of studying Old French in his senior year at Princeton: Our professor was French medievalist, stooped, hollow-cheeked, gray-skinned, emaciated, barely audible. To our youth he appeared to have arrived from Daumier drawing by process of dehydration. He gave the impression at all times of being the embodiment of his archaic subject, with nothing left over to be person. There were never more than three or four students. (12) Merwin's description puts us in mind of Nabokov's Pnin, who I am told was modeled in part on Romance Philology founder Yakov Malkiel, who taught at UC-Berkeley until the time of his death in 1998; or of Nabokov's Gaston Godin, the French teacher at the Beardsly College for Women in Lolita, a flabby, dough-faced, melancholy bachelor tapering upward to pair of narrow, not quite level shoulders and conical pear-head [...] devoid of any talent whatsoever, mediocre teacher, worthless scholar, glum repulsive fat old invert, highly contemptuous of the American way of life, triumphantly ignorant of the English language.... The desiccated philologist is genre, beginning with Robert Browning's A Grammarian's Funeral (1856)--Gave us the doctrine of the enclitic De, / Dead from the waist down--and reinforced by Anatole France's description of Paul Meyer and the journal Romania in Le Crime de Sylvestre Bonnard: [J]e me mis lire une revue qui, bien que menee par des jeunes gens, est excellente. Le ton en est rude, mais l'esprit zele. L'article que je lus passe en precision et en fermete tout ce qu'on faisait dans ma jeunesse. L'auteur de cet article, M. Paul Meyer, marque chaque faute d'un coup d'ongle incisif. That's the way it was in many quarters back in the 1950s--dehydrated, pale, dead from the waist down. Medieval literature was separate country, and the passport for entering it was certain kind of positivist philology whose aire often seemed to be nothing more than keeping others out. Despite the phenomenon of emigration after WW II, there was relatively little exchange between the U.S. and Germany or France. My one visit with Jean Frappier just before his death in 1974 was punctuated by his waving Peter Haidu's Aesthetic Distance in Chretien de Troyes (1968) in one hand and Lion Queue coupee (1972) in the other with the reminder that Americans exaggerate by mixing the dish rags with the bath towels. Before Hitler began to shake the great tree of German Mediaevistik and French medievisme in the 1930s, there was relatively little back and forth across the Atlantic, Joseph Bedier's semester at UC Berkeley in 1928 being great exception. …

Mass destruction: the men and giant mines that wired America and scarred the planet

The place: The steep mountains outside Salt Lake City. The time: The first decade of the twentieth century. The man: Daniel Jackling, a young metallurgical engineer. The goal: A bold new technology that could provide billions of pounds of cheap copper for a rapidly electrifying America. The result: Bingham's enormous 'Glory Hole', the first large-scale open-pit copper mine, an enormous chasm in the earth and one of the largest human-made artifacts on the planet. Destruction is the compelling story of Jackling and the development of open-pit hard rock mining, its role in the wiring of an electrified America, as well its devastating environmental consequences. Mass destruction mining soon spread around the nation and the globe, providing raw materials essential to the mass production and mass consumption that increasingly defined the emerging 'American way of life'. At the dawn of the last century, Jackling's open pit replaced immense but constricted underground mines that probed nearly a mile beneath the earth, to become the ultimate symbol of the modern faith that science and technology could overcome all natural limits. A new culture of mass destruction emerged that promised nearly infinite supplies not only of copper, but also of coal, timber, fish, and other natural resources. But, what were the consequences? Timothy J. LeCain deftly analyzes how open-pit mining continues to affect the environment in its ongoing devastation of nature and commodification of the physical world. The nation's largest toxic Superfund site would be one effect, as well as other types of environmental dead zones around the globe. Yet today, as the world's population races toward American levels of resource consumption, truly viable alternatives to the technology of mass destruction have not yet emerged.

Walter Rauschenbusch and the Social Gospel: A Hopeful Theology for the Twenty‐First Century Economy

Walter Rauschenbusch and the Social Gospel: A Hopeful Theology for the Twenty‐First Century Economy Janet R. Nelson If production could be organized on a basis of cooperative fraternity; if distribution could at least approximately be determined by justice; if all men could be conscious that their labor contributed to the welfare of all and that their personal well‐being was dependent on the prosperity of the Commonwealth; if predatory business and parasitic wealth ceased and all men lived only by their labor; if the luxury of unearned wealth no longer made us feverish with covetousness and a simpler life became the fashion; if our time and strength were not used up either in getting a bare living or in amassing unusable wealth and we had more leisure for the higher pursuits of the mind and the soul—then there might be a chance to live such a life of gentleness and brotherly kindness and tranquility of heart as Jesus desired for men.1—Rauschenbusch, Walter, Christianity and the Social Crisis The book by Walter Rauschenbusch which shook the religious world of our nation, Christianity and the Social Crisis, appeared just a half‐century ago. So much has happened in that half‐century both to the world and to us as a nation, that it is not altogether surprising that a book which meant so much to American religious life and to the older among us personally should be so obviously dated.2—Niebuhr, Reinhold, “Walter Rauschenbusch in Historical Perspective” When Walter Rauschenbusch presented his path‐breaking vision of a Christianized economic order in Christianity and the Social Crisis in 1907, the book galvanized the reading public, going through thirteen printings in seven years and selling more than 50,000 copies.3 Writing in 1957, Reinhold Niebuhr, the renowned mid‐twentieth‐century Christian theologian, in effect dismissed the message of Rauschenbusch’s work as dated. Rauschenbusch’s views were certainly bound by the cultural, political, religious, and economic context of the early years of the twentieth century, but contrary to Niebuhr’s contention, the timeliness of Rauschenbusch’s insights are undeniably striking today, one hundred years after their publication. His outrage at the social and economic injustices of his day, his unrelenting critique of the capitalistic economic system that had produced so much human suffering and his urgent call for the democratization of that system could not be more relevant to our own times at the beginning of the twenty‐first century. There is some irony here for Reinhold Niebuhr himself is currently attracting considerable attention after having been in eclipse for several decades. Much of this attention is due to President Barack Obama’s professed admiration for Niebuhr. In an interview with David Brooks, Obama responded enthusiastically to Brooks’ question regarding the work of Niebuhr, stating “I love him. He’s one of my favorite philosophers.” Brooks quoted Obama that he took away from Niebuhr “the compelling idea that there’s serious evil in the world, and hardship and pain. And we should be humble and modest in our belief we can eliminate those things. But we shouldn’t use that as an excuse for cynicism and inaction. I take away…the sense we have to make these efforts knowing they are hard, and not swinging from naïve idealism to bitter realism.”4 Niebuhr’s worldview is a much‐needed and bracing corrective to the eight years of Bush administration hubris that their policies at home and abroad were unquestionable reflections of the goodness of the American way of life. Niebuhr argued in his many works, including his best known, Moral Man and Immoral Society,5 that humans are inherently self‐interested and that power, even when used to advance the good, is inevitably corrupted by self‐interest. Politics is always about power and the best we can strive for is a tenuous and imperfect balance of powers. In reaction to what he perceived to be the idealism of the Social Gospel movement of which Rauschenbusch was a leading proponent, Niebuhr developed the theological position of Christian realism—realism because it was grounded in Niebuhr’s appreciation of the limits of the goodness of human nature and even...

Unofficial Ambassadors: American Military Families Overseas and the Cold War, 1946–1965 (review)

Reviewed by: Unofficial Ambassadors: American Military Families Overseas and the Cold War, 1946–1965 Maurice M. Labelle Alvah, Donna — Unofficial Ambassadors: American Military Families Overseas and the Cold War, 1946–1965. New York: New York University Press, 2007. Pp. 289. In Unofficial Ambassadors: American Military Families Overseas and the Cold War, 1946–1965, historian Donna Alvah illuminates the ways in which us military families abroad influenced global perceptions of American diplomacy, state, society, and culture. During the early Cold War period, United States military spouses and children stationed in Western Europe and Asia sought to cultivate neighbouring support and friendly relations with local people on- and off-base. By serving as "unofficial ambassadors" of "the American way of life," these ordinary Americans buttressed local us military efforts and global, Cold War diplomatic objectives. "Families … could exercise international influence and advance diplomatic aims by representing a nonmilitaristic facet of the United States," Alvah contends. "Wives, children, and servicemen in their domestic roles as husbands and fathers could exert soft-power influence that both complemented and tempered the United States' hard-power martial presence" (p. 227). Through multiple formal and informal cultural encounters with residents of occupied and host countries, American military families exercised a friendly and "feminine" form of American global power, consequently proliferating the myth of us exceptionalism. As Washington envisioned the establishment of a new Cold War order after World War II, military officials encouraged military families stationed overseas to participate in American foreign relations by fraternizing with non-Americans. In the spirit of cultural internationalism, husbands, wives, and children displayed American leadership, generosity, and benevolence as they visibly took part in myriad local events and humanitarian causes. American servicemen, at this time, were expected to "teach" local families the fruits of democracy and American culture. Such efforts depicted American dominance in a paternalist light, as "portrayals of servicemen with children … appealed to the idea of international family ties, though always with the American men in the role of adult benefactors" (p. 57). "The frequency of familial metaphors in representing relationships between servicemen and host nationals, as well as actual family relationships," Alvah convincingly argues, "illustrates the centrality of ideas [End Page 479] about the family to relations between the U.S. military and peoples of foreign countries" (p. 60). US military wives, for their part, actively advanced global aims and participated in the Cold War by forging informal international alliances and assisting disadvantaged peoples, as well as promoting American "values." Through their "feminine good will," white American women acted as US diplomatic agents, as they "represented sincere efforts to do good for those who were less privileged than Americans, while helping to ease Americans' discomfort with and even morally justify their nation's global dominance" (p. 82). On the Pacific island of Okinawa, for instance, Marian Merritt and other US military spouses sought to assist Okinawans in their postwar recovery, protect them from peril, and obtain their allegiance to the American Cold War effort. While perceiving local residents as inferior, childlike peoples in need of American guardianship, they constructed themselves as maternal protectors. "This maternalism tries to ease the negative effects of paternalistic military control while reinforcing justifications for the Cold war domination of Okinawa by the United States," Alvah contends (pp. 168–69). In an attempt to present a more friendly and compassionate picture of the American occupation of Okinawa, military wives "sought to counteract the negative effects of the military through nurturing, intimate interactions with Okinawans while maintaining the power differential" (p. 178). Unofficial Ambassadors serves as an excellent contribution to the existing scholarship on gender in US foreign relations and American internationalism. By highlighting the agency of US military wives and children abroad, Alvah draws necessary attention to the involvement of non-state actors in American diplomacy. She fails, however, to offer a substantial discussion regarding the role of US servicemen when off-duty and their interactions with local residents. How did these husbands embrace local culture and espouse these social roles? Did they engage with host citizens in the same ways as their wives? Did they promote a feminine, non-militaristic vision of the so-called American way of life? Alvah, in addition, leads...

Corpos masculinos na revista O Cruzeiro (1946-1955)

This article discusses the images of male bodies published in the Brazilian Magazine O Cruzeiro between 1946 and 1955. These images show peculiar bodies, in specific relationships that configure and redefined public habits and attitudes. The images carry a desire of being “modern”, and a kind of modernity marked by the American consumer goods and the American way of life inserted in Brazil since the 1940s. This modern market of space and customs promotes an arsenal of seducing images that sought to increase the space of action for women and men, delimitating their places and reinforcing stereotypes of what constitutes the “male” and the “female”. Key words: O Cruzeiro magazine, male images, history and gender.

The Latino threat: constructing immigrants, citizens, and the nation

From volunteers ready to patrol the U.S.-Mexico border to the hundreds of thousands of men, women, and children who have marched in support of immigrant rights, the United States has witnessed a surge of involvement in immigration activism. In The Latino Threat, Leo R. Chavez critically investigates the media stories about and recent experiences of immigrants to show how prejudices and stereotypes have been used to malign an entire immigrant population - and to define what it means to be an American.Pundits - and the media at large - nurture and perpetuate the notion that Latinos, particularly Mexicans, are an invading force bent on reconquering land once considered their own. Through a perceived refusal to learn English and an 'out of control' birthrate, many say that Latinos are destroying the American way of life. But Chavez questions these assumptions and offers facts to counter the myth that Latinos are a threat to the security and prosperity of our nation.His breakdown of the 'Latino threat' contests this myth's basic tenets, challenging such well-known authors as Samuel Huntington, Pat Buchanan, and Peter Brimelow. Chavez concludes that citizenship is not just about legal definitions, but about participation in society. Deeply resonant in today's atmosphere of exclusion, Chavez's insights offer an alternative and optimistic view of the vitality and future of our country.

The Use of Gasoline: Value, Oil, and the “American way of life”

Abstract: While the critical literature has focused on the geography of oil production, the politics of “outrageous” gasoline prices in the United States provide a fertile path toward understanding the wider geography of petro‐capitalism. Despite the deepening contradictions of US oil consumption, “pain at the pump” discourse projects a political sense of entitlement to low priced gasoline. I use a value‐theoretical perspective to examine this politics as not only about the quantitative spectrum of price, but also the historical sedimentation of qualitative use‐values inscribed in the commodity gasoline. Gasoline is analyzed both as a use‐value among many within the postwar value of labor power and as a singular use‐value fueling broader imaginaries of a national “American way of life.” While use‐value still represents an open site of cultural and political struggle infused within value itself, the case of gasoline illustrates how use‐values are not automatically mobilized toward politically savory ends.

The use of sports to promote the American way of life during the Cold War: cultural propaganda, 1945-1963

Foreword Introduction: Sport and the Cold War 1. Sport and the American Way of Life 2. Molding America's Youth 3. Chip Hilton, Cold Warrior 4. Rehabilitating the American Way: The NCAA and the Myth of Purity 5. Predicting Loyalty: Sport, the American Way, and Their Opponents 6. Opportunities Gained: African-Americans and the American Way of Life 7. Opportunities Lost: Women and the American Way of Life Epilogue: Bringing It All Together Bibliography Index.

Varieties of Muslim Experience: Encounters with Arab Political and Cultural Life by Lawrence Rosen

242 BOOK REVIEWS / COMPTES RENDUS Lawrence Rosen, Varieties of Muslim Experience: Encounters with Arab Political and Cultural Life, Chicago University Press, 2008. The weight of contemporary events encourages historians and other professional academics to deviate from their routine fields of study and to write on current issues. 1 Lawrence Rosen, a well-known Princeton anthropologist and lawyer, has taken this road too. 2 In the book under review Rosen accumulated 12 chapters, arranged in three sections. Some of the chapters are read as an endeavour to decode various episodes viewed by television spectators. Others transmit Rosen’s impression of the encounter between the American way of life and Muslim citizens of the United States. In a paraphrase of Bernard Lewis’s What Went Wrong? Rosen deconstructs Arab society, claiming that in the Arab world no autonomous self ever developed fully. Yet can we deduce from the stories grouped in this chapter a general theory on social relations amongst ‘the Arabs’? Chapter 3 asks the question: ‘Why do [young] Arab terrorists kill themselves?’. In posting this question Rosen is searching for a lucid interpretation of the news headlines. Yet does his reading of the martyr’s death as a ceremonial exchange ( in the style of Marcel Mauss) explain the atrocity? This seems to be a reductionist interpretation. The political and social realities and the Arabs’ conceptualization of personal identity prevent us from adopting or accepting Rosen’s exegesis. Moreover, suicide bombing is not a masculine domain and accounts of women self-bombings are not rare at all. Chapter 4 aims to illuminate the problematic of property in Moroccan culture. He claims that the standard Maliki theory holds that all the land belongs to the Merciful One (rahmaniya, although this concept of land tenure is not common in classical Islamic texts). To secure immobile property, Muslims in Morocco have elaborated various mechanisms, such as habus (waqf). This highlights the importance of social networks in protecting possessions. Adl is a key Islamic concept. It is associated with balance (mizan). Rosen scrutinizes a wide range of texts from the Qur’an to a modern-day Pakistani teacher in order to highlight his presumption that justice is a most essential virtues for Arabs. Ibn Khaldun has attracted much attention from modern historians, sociologists and political scientists. Rosen narrates the intellectual biography of this well-known Mamluk cadi and ambassador. He sees him as a Muslim and as an Arab thinker attached to Sufism. This is an extensive domain and the reader 1 Stephen R. Humphreys, Between Memory and Desire: The Middle East in a Troubled Age (University of California Press, 1999). 2 Lawrence Rosen, The Culture of Islam: Changing Aspects of Contemporary Muslim Life (Chicago University Press, 2002). BOOK REVIEWS / COMPTES RENDUS 243 of this short chapter does not have the sense that Rosen covers this wide topic adequately. The conspicuous presence of science students in Islamic radical movements has been noticed by observers, who asked how it happened that faculties of engineering, medicine and sciences were dominated by Islamists.3 In Chapter 10, ‘Muslim Scientists as Fundamentalists’, Rosen seeks an answer to this question in the history of Arab science. He elaborates on the importance of ilm in Islamic discourse and Arabs’ view of causality and worldly experience. They did not distinguish between ‘pure’ science and knowledge for the sake of knowledge. Lawrence Rosen writes straightforwardly and empathetically on a world civilization that in the mass media is too often related to violence and brutality. Muslims who are troubled by the worldwide barrage of xenophobic rhetoric would find Rosen’s book a sympathetic account. YEHOSHUA FRENKEL Haifa University 3 Emmanuel Sivan, Radical Islam Medieval Theology and Modern Politics, enlarged edition (Yale University Press, 1990), chap. 5. ...

Diaspora and Health? Traditional Medicine and Culture in a Mexican Migrant Community

AbstractAs members of the Mexican diaspora acculturate/assimilate to life in the United States they gain skills that help them improve their socioeconomic status and overcome barriers to the mainstream American healthcare system. Thus, we might expect better health among more acculturated Mexicans. However, most of the research conducted during the past 20 years shows that the health of Mexicans living in the United States deteriorates as acculturation increases. This suggests that certain health promoting aspects of Mexican culture are lost as migrants adapt to and adopt American ways of life. This paper is the first step in testing the hypothesis that declining health among acculturated people of Mexican descent is related to a loss of traditional medical knowledge.During an ethnographic study of women’s medical knowledge in an unacculturated Mexican migrant community in Athens, Georgia, I observed many ways low‐income, undocumented migrants maintain good health. Migrant women encourage health‐promoting behaviors and treat sick family members with a variety of home remedies that appear to be effective according to chemical and pharmacological analyses. Additionally, migrant women in Athens learn how to navigate the American medical and social service systems and overcome barriers to professional healthcare services using information provided through social networks. Nevertheless, migrant women often prefer to treat sick family at home and indicated a preference for Mexican folk medicines over professional medical care in most situations.This case study suggests that migration and diaspora need not always lead to disease. The maintenance of a Mexican culture that is distinct from the rest of American society helps ensure that traditional medical knowledge is not lost, while the social networks that link Mexicans to each other and to their homeland help minimize threats to health, which are usually associated with migration. Thus, increased access to professional medical care may not improve the health of migrants if it comes with the loss of traditional medical knowledge.