Cold War Anticommunism Research Articles

A Priest Took a Stand against Cold War Anti-Communism (1948): Political Theology for Present-Day NATO Criticism by Jean Boulier (review)

A Priest Took a Stand against Cold War Anti-Communism (1948): Political Theology for Present-Day NATO Criticism by Jean Boulier (review)

“SUBJECT’s Wife”: The Racialized Gender Logics of Anticommunism and State Surveillance

This essay examines how gender shaped Black communist and communist-affiliated women’s experiences with political repression in early Cold War Chicago. While recent scholarship on Black women leftists in the mid-twentieth century has emphasized early Cold War anticommunism as a moment of rupture, I find that the experiences of Black women organizers in Chicago complicates such conclusions. Using police archives, personal papers, oral histories, and more, I contend that sexist-racist cultural discourses rendered Black women activists’ leadership and agency less visible to the state and that anticommunist state officials, as a result, tended to treat Chicago’s Black communist and communist-affiliated women as peripheral rather than central threats. Thus, Black communist and communist-affiliated women were more capable than their male counterparts of surviving early Cold War anticommunism and sustaining the class-conscious radical Black politics they had developed in Chicago. This essay not only identifies how raced gender discourses affected Chicago activists’ experiences with political repression, it also adds to recent scholarship by exploring the measure of opportunity Black communist and communist-affiliated women accessed in this early Cold War context, despite the straitened circumstances.

Always Already and Never Yet: Does China Even Have a Present?

AbstractThis essay traces how China's changing presents have been represented in Anglo-American discourse and in China studies from the Cold War to today. It shows how, in popular opinion but also in academia, that discourse has displayed a stubborn tendency to explain—or rather explain away—China's presents, configuring them strictly in relation to pasts that can never be overcome and futures that are either never realized or always dangerously looming. This ideological framing has its roots in Cold War anticommunism, which was foundational to China studies in the US, but lingers on to this day, as China's coevalness is continuously denied.

Rerooting the core: Cold War anticommunism and North American Influence in Romanian postmodernism

Rerooting the core: Cold War anticommunism and North American Influence in Romanian postmodernism

Rose Macaulay and Propaganda

The novelist Rose Macaulay (1881–1958) had direct professional experience of Britain's secret propaganda operation during the First World War. She was among the first British novelists to take propaganda seriously as a subject for fiction, and wrote insightfully about its methods and its social implications. Moreover, her long career illuminates both the continuity and the development of the British state's clandestine efforts to shape public opinion at home and abroad, from the beginnings of systematic, state-directed propaganda in the First World War to the more diffuse strategies of early Cold War anti-communism. Despite her close connections to propaganda in both world wars, however – and notwithstanding the interest her fiction very frequently takes in the worlds of official information, disinformation, and espionage – Macaulay has hardly figured in recent scholarship on the links between literature and national information systems. This article argues that Macaulay approached the challenge of reconciling propaganda and literature differently from many of her modernist contemporaries, refusing to abandon the idea of fiction as a persuasive and socially-engaged form of imaginative writing. If this position made her an outlier in the climate of reaction against propaganda which followed the First World War, it would, by the early years of the Cold War, seem much more tenable. In its first half, the article establishes Macaulay's bona fides as a participant in Britain's wartime propaganda establishment, and describes the impression this experience left on her early fiction. It then turns to Macaulay's final novel, The Towers of Trebizond, in which religious propaganda and anti-communist rhetoric combine, to great comic effect, in the febrile atmosphere of the Cold War middle east.

Thomas J. Kiernan and Irish diplomatic responses to cold-war anticommunism in Australia, 1946-1951

Despite being a peripheral actor in the Cold War, Ireland in the immediate post-war period was attentive to cold war developments internationally, and the influence of the Catholic Church over state and society predominantly shaped the state's response to the conflict. Irish diplomats internationally sent home repo rts on communist activity in the countries in which they served. This article will discuss Thomas J. Kiernan, Ireland's Minister Plenipotentiary in Australia between 1946 and 1955, and his responses, views and perceptions of Australian anti-communism from his 1946 appointment to the 1951 plebiscite on banning the Communist Party of Australia, which ultimately failed. Through analysis of his reports in the National Archives of Ireland – including accounts of his interactions with politicians and clergy, the Australian press, parliamentary debates and other sources – it argues that his views were moulded by the dominant Irish conception of the Cold War, which was fundamentally shaped by Catholicism, and his overreliance on Catholic and print sources led him to sometimes exaggerate the communist threat. Nonetheless, his reports home to Dublin served to reinforce the Irish state's perception that communism was a worldwide malaise which the Catholic Church and Catholics internationally were at the forefront of combatting.

Hollywood imagines revolutionary Haiti: the forgotten film Lydia Bailey (1952)

This article explores the history of Lydia Bailey, the only US studio-made film to depict the Haitian Revolutionary period. It asks why, in the late 1940s and early 1950s, such an unlikely project might have seemed commercially promising enough to justify a significant production budget. The essay draws on private studio memorandums as well as public press discussions to shed light on the high stakes in debates over racial representation and colonialism/decolonization in the late 1940s and early 1950s, and to illuminate everyday assumptions of white supremacy as these shaped the making of the film and its promotion. Production files and a range of industry, daily and weekly mainstream white press and Black newspapers document the racial divide shaping the film’s production and reception. The story of the making and forgetting of Lydia Bailey reveals the process by which transnational Black history and Black struggle became more public and legible in the wake of WWII anti-fascism and internationalism, and then was driven back off stage by the political mobilization of Cold War anti-Communism.

Beyond Nation and Empire

Beyond Nation and Empire Leo T. S. Ching (bio) Every discursive formation has its own institutional itinerary and condition of possibilities, and Asian studies and Asian American studies are no exceptions. Asian studies emerged out of American Cold War policy that divided the world into delimited regions. The underlying logic was that a region formed a complex whole that was unique and bounded, and could be distinguished from other regions by its sociocultural particularities. Asian American studies was institutionalized in response to the civil rights movement in the late 1960s United States as a politics of recognition and to create a broad coalition with African American studies and ethnic studies programs. Despite their common origins in the American Empire, abroad and at home, Asian studies and Asian American studies, until recently, have remained largely insulated from each other. This disengagement, for example, has obscured the parallelism between modernization theory as applied to Japan and later other East Asian countries and the model minority myth that aimed to divide Asian Americans from other underrepresented populations, specifically Black and brown peoples. Reading modernization theory and the model minority myth contrapuntally allows us to apprehend American imperial design as a dialectical process of expansion and domestication under the ideology of postwar liberalism. As a process of decolonizing American studies, one needs to be more attentive to this liberal imperial dialectic by opening itself to the seemingly non-American histories, aspirations, and polemics. This forum provides a much-needed conversation to deepen our understanding of this transpacific entanglement with a focus on Taiwan and Taiwan/America. This collection of essays intervenes not only in the critique of American empire but also the complicity of Taiwan's desire for a "normative" nation-state status. Unlike the conventional understanding of nation and empire as antithetical—the nation is homogeneous, egalitarian, and particular, whereas empire is diverse, hierarchical, and universal—Taiwan's aspiration for national independence and the disavowal of its settler colonialism tell another story. Instead of oppositions, nation and empire are seen as alternative or complementary expressions of the same phenomenon of power. Unlike earlier [End Page 383] scholarship that has lamented the marginalization of Taiwan, hence the desire for recognition and inclusion that often finds itself having to choose between Chinese and American empires, younger scholars included here resolutely refute this discourse of victimhood and false choices. Taiwan's long history within global coloniality, or what Arif Dirlik has referred to as "the land colonialisms made,"1 its ambiguous nation-state status, and fledging digital democracy offer possible alternatives to imagine a different relationship to nation and empire. Wendy Cheng's account of the arrest and prosecution of Chen Yu-hsi highlights the entanglement of Taiwanese/American history and the hypocrisy of American liberalism in adjudicating freedom and unfreedom that in turn silences voices of those prosecuted under Cold War anticommunism. Cheng's critique of American freedom reminds us of the long history of liberalism's intimate relationship to imperialism and colonialism. One only needs to recall that the founding of American freedom is on the backs of the unfreedom of others: the dispossessions of the indigenous population and the enslavement of people from Africa. The "rescue" of Chen Yu-hsi from the silencing of Taiwan/American history reveals the complicity of American hegemony and the institutionalization of area studies. While the East-West Center at the University of Hawai'i was ostensibly established as an instrument of Cold War policy, the transpacific network of scholars and allies mobilized in support of Chen opens up the possibility of resistance to state-sanctioned violence. Cheng demonstrates that the freedom to speak and the freedom to remain silent concomitantly enables and incapacitates, includes and excludes, certain inconvenient narratives. Cheng implores us to resist this "silencing of the past" and to expose the complicity between state power and institutional formation. If Chen Yu-hsi's case represents the "silenced" history of Taiwan/America, Yukari Yoshihara's George H. Kerr and his transpacific traversing constitutes the dominant history of American studies' institutionalization in Asia. At the same time, Yoshihara alerts us to the "forgotten" imbrication of Asian studies and American studies in Asia. As a proficient Asianist trained...

The Political Economy of Racial Inequality

The Political Economy of Racial Inequality Touré F. Reed (bio) In 1965, in response to President Lyndon B. Johnson's anemic War on Poverty legislation, the labor and civil rights leaders A. Philip Randolph and Bayard Rustin joined with Leon Keyserling, the former chair of the Council of Economic Advisers, to draft "A Freedom Budget for All Americans." Their $180 billion proposal ($1.4 trillion adjusted for inflation) would have established a living wage and guaranteed employment through public works projects and urban revitalization initiatives. Randolph and Rustin were socialists who viewed racial inequality through the lens of capitalist labor and housing markets. They correctly anticipated that neither the 1964 Civil Rights Act's antidiscrimination measures nor the War on Poverty would be capable of eliminating black poverty. As Randolph asserted at the March on Washington: "Yes, we want a Fair Employment Practice Act, but what good will it do if profit-geared automation destroys the jobs of millions of workers black and white?" The Freedom Budget represented the fading embers of the social democratic sensibilities that had burned in black politics during the era of the New Deal and the Popular Front. As political scientist Preston Smith has argued, Cold War anticommunism helped pave the way for the triumph of a more conservative "racial democratic" vision of civil rights—which rejected racial discrimination but accepted the legitimacy of class stratification—over a more egalitarian politics. By the late 1960s, rhetorically militant Black Power leaders and postwar liberals both embraced culturalist interpretations of inequality, which divorced racial inequality from the capitalist processes that engendered disparities. Poverty and upward mobility alike were attributed to the cultural characteristics of the poor and middle class. From the rise of Ronald Reagan through the presidency of Donald Trump, the absence of class-based understandings of racial inequality gave us crack babies, super-predators, and many other underclass tropes. While the past two years have witnessed widespread calls for a racial reckoning—influenced in no small part by the horrors of Trumpism—a majority of [End Page 31] Democratic politicians and corporate media figures have preferred to frame events in moral terms, using a cultural, race-based analysis of inequality that is antagonistic to social democratic politics. In recent years, some liberals and even a stratum of leftists have come to embrace metaphors that serve to naturalize racism. When racism is described as our nation's "original sin" or "part of our DNA," ideological or cultural attachments take on a life of their own. If racism is so ingrained, there's nothing much we can do about it. Such constructs have become especially appealing in recent years because they allow us to sidestep the material causes of racial inequality, which can be overcome only with massive economic redistribution. Cultural resentments—including racism, sexism, xenophobia, and homophobia—undoubtedly played a role in Donald Trump's rise. But we can acknowledge the important influence of race in American political and social life without insisting that it operates independently of the wider world of human affairs. Racists are not born, as is implied by the original sin and DNA metaphors; they are nurtured. Conservatives have long ginned up racial resentment for political gain. Likewise, prior to the enactment of antidiscrimination laws, employers and real-estate investors fostered resentment toward racial and ethnic groups through racially tiered labor and housing markets. Since 2016, constructs like systemic racism and diversity have drawn attention to racial injustice, but they have also been deployed against egalitarian political projects that would benefit poor and working-class Americans, who are disproportionately black and brown. In the 2016 Democratic primary campaign, for example, Hillary Clinton presented herself as the anti-racist candidate while attacking Bernie Sanders's calls for banking regulation, tuition-free higher education, and other redistributive policies. Clinton said she wanted "white people to recognize that there is systemic racism," but she failed to adequately address her complicity in the 1994 crime bill or the subprime mortgage crisis, both of which hurt black people worse than whites. A similar pattern emerged following the brutal murder of George Floyd by police officer Derek Chauvin in May 2020. Multinational corporations embraced concepts like intersectionality and...

Carrero Blanco ante La gran baza soviética: ideología y discurso

espanolLa gran baza sovietica es uno de los volumenes de discursos de Carrero Blanco emitidos en radio y publicados en 1949 bajo el pseudonimo de Juan de la Cosa. En este articulo proponemos un analisis sociodiscursivo y de contextualizacion historica del capitulo “Espana ante la actual crisis mundial”. En el Carrero enfatiza los postulados nacional-catolicos del regimen franquista para juzgar los acontecimientos que tenian lugar en el mundo, persiguiendo disimular los vinculos con el derrotado nazi-fascismo y sacar ventaja del anticomunismo de la Guerra Fria. Asimismo, mostramos las conexiones del texto analizado con informes anteriores del propio Almirante EnglishThe Great Soviet Advantage is one of the volumes containing Carrero Blanco´s speeches, which were broadcast on Spanish National Radio and published in 1949 under the pseudonym of ‘Juan de la Cosa’. This study offers a socio-discursive analysis of the Chapter entitled ‘Spain in the current world crisis’. Carrero presents the national-catholic postulates of Franco’s regime to analyse world events taking place at that time, aiming to downplay their links with the defeated fascist Nazi government and to take advantage of the Cold War Anticommunism. Secondly, the article exposes connexions of the analysed text with reports from Carrero himself.

Inventing America, again

ABSTRACTIn US intellectual and academic life, the 1940s and 1950s stand out as a period abounding with attempts to assay the characteristic and distinctive forms of ‘American culture’ and ‘American society,’ from Gunnar Myrdal’s An American Dilemma and the oft-noted ‘Tocqueville revival’ to works by Harold Laski, Max Lerner, David Riesman, C. L. R. James, the ‘consensus historians,’ and the early writers in the field of American Studies. Viewed as the culmination of a half-century span (roughly 1900–1950) of cultural nation-building, this rush of ‘American’ definitions at mid-century was shot through with politics – but in complex ways that are not adequately captured by the familiar recourse to Cold War anticommunism as the presumed ideological bedrock of the time. By treating this cultural nationalism as the outcome of an uneven and combined intellectual-historical process, we see how elusive (and illusory) the enterprise of designating ‘American’ traits actually was.

Against a Continental Threat: Transnational Anti-Communist Networks of the Chilean Right Wing in the 1950s

AbstractDrawing on minutes, publications, diplomatic documents and the written press, I explore the transnational networks of the Chilean right wing within Latin America in the 1950s, especially around the four Congresses against Soviet Intervention in Latin America held in Mexico City, Rio de Janeiro, Lima and Antigua between 1954 and 1958. I argue that the Chilean right wing's participation in those networks alongside other Latin American like-minded actors was based on both its long local experience in fighting communism and its attachment to Cold War anti-communism. In these transnational spaces, some Chilean right-wingers gained recognition and prestige, as was the case with the conservative leader Sergio Fernández Larraín, largely thanks to his systematic denunciation of supposed Soviet penetration in the Movimiento Nacionalista Revolucionario (MNR), then the ruling party in Bolivia.

Red Scare Racism and Cold War Black RadicalismRadical Aesthetics and Modern Black Nationalism

Red Scare Racism and Cold War Black RadicalismRadical Aesthetics and Modern Black Nationalism

A War of Stories, Spirits, and Conspiracies in Leslie Marmon Silko’s Almanac of the Dead

This essay investigates the ways in which Silko, in Almanac of the Dead, attempts to expand the Native American storytelling tradition in order to facilitate the empowerment of political and narrative authority that has long been denied to the indigenous people in America, especially under the paranoid logic of American Cold War anti-communism. Subsuming Cold War history under the ancient history of Native American war for the land, Silko impregnates the mode of conspiracy narrative with Native spirituality and creates a genre of “revolutionary entertainment,” which, refusing to read Native American history in terms of victimization and pessimism, unapologetically revels in, rather than meekly or defensively exploits, the paranoid imagination and apocalyptic fantasy that characterize most white Cold War paranoid narratives. In Almanac, Silko unbridles the paranoid energy of Cold War conspiracy narrative and channels it into a cosmic narrative explosion of revolutionary fantasies and prophecies.

No Justice, No Peace, No Nukes: The Bomb, De-Colonization, and the Radical Internationalism of African-American Liberalism

New books by Vincent J. Intondi and Carol Anderson join an expanding shelf of historical studies on African Americans and international affairs, including important works by Gerald Horne, Brenda Gayle Plummer, Mary Dudziak, and Anderson herself. This rich body of scholarship has enriched both African American history and U.S. foreign relations history. It holds powerful insights for the study of race in global politics and contemporary transnational history. The two books reviewed here make significant contributions. Each adds to our understanding of African American perspectives on the relationship between “domestic” and “foreign” affairs; each sheds light on distinctly African-American efforts to influence U.S. foreign policy. Intondi provides a broad survey of a previously overlooked issue: the role of African Americans in opposing nuclear weapons throughout the post-1945 “atomic age.” Anderson provides a deeply-researched, provocatively revisionist analysis of anti-colonial politics within the African American community during and after World War II. Focusing on the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), Anderson seeks to overturn the long-standing view that African-American anti-colonialism was suppressed by the late 1940s as the NAACP abandoned anti-colonial politics in favor of Cold War anti-communism.

Communism as an “Asian” Threat in the Cold War Anti Communism of the Early Federal Republic of Germany

Communism as an “Asian” Threat in the Cold War Anti Communism of the Early Federal Republic of Germany

‘Baroque Spain’ As Metaphor. Hispanidad, Europeanism and Cold War Anti-Communism in Francoist Spain

The Franco regime's notion of hispanidad stood for a specific style of thought, based upon the imagery of ‘Baroque Spain’ and referring to the sense of cultural superiority and religious mission as well as to the close relations between Spain and ‘Hispanoamérica’. Using references to Baroque arts and architecture as a rhetorical instrument, the discourse of hispanidad was meant to strengthen the assertion of an essential unity between Spain and its former colonies. To assert themselves within the regime, Spanish politicians had to adapt their purposes to this discourse. Surprisingly, this principle applied also to the cautious European policy of the early 1950s as well as to the regime's aggressive Cold War anti-communism. The ideological flexibility of this concept of hispanidad is shown by the example of the Centro Europeo de Documentación e Información (CEDI). The CEDI was founded in 1952 with the active support of the Instituto de Cultura Hispánica (ICH) as a political instrument, but gradually turned into an independent platform for conservative European elites, transgressing the role it had originally been assigned within the Franco regime.

Carl McIntire and the Fundamentalist Origins of the Christian Right

Recent scholarship has argued that Cold War anticommunism was key among the tools with which conservative evangelicals in the United States negotiated their return to the mainstream of American public conversation. While useful, such renderings of the anticommunist leaven in the repoliticization of religious conservatives remain misleading as long as they remain pivoted on the small cadre of reputedly moderate new evangelical intellectuals. Entirely obscured in such portrayals is the agency of the militant separatist fundamentalists whose engagement with anticommunism was at once broader in scope, more systematic, organized and pervasive, and of significantly earlier lineage than that of their new evangelical rivals. The roots of the Christian Right do indeed lie in Cold War Christian anticommunism but the lines of influence stretch as much, if not more, from the fundamentalists gathered around the controversial pastor Carl McIntire and his American (and International) Council of Christian Churches as they do from the new evangelicals. A pivotal transitional figure who nurtured, renovated, and passed on to a new generation the anticollectivist public doctrines of the original fundamentalist movement. In his anticommunist work McIntire pioneered, as well, the faith-based mass demonstration and petition, the political use of Christian radio, and the lobbying of government officials that the later Christian Right perfected.

Ascensão e queda do pacto populista em Cuba, 1934-1959

O regime que pôs fim aos "100 dias de reforma" em Cuba é rotulado com frequência como "contrarrevolução" quando, na verdade, a expressão mais apropriada seria a de "populismo autoritário". O novo regime não reverteu a Revolução de 1933; muito pelo contrário, suas lideranças valeram-se da violência combinada com reformas revolucionárias como forma de incorporar, de maneira compulsória, um número cada vez maior de pessoas em um novo e ampliado sistema estatal de liderança. Fulgencio Batista recebeu o apoio de parte da classe trabalhadora ao longo do período democrático que vigorou durante a Segunda Guerra Mundial, mas o anticomunismo da Guerra Fria desestabilizou seu regime, esvaziando o populismo cubano de grande parte da sua substância.

On American Conservatism and Kim Phillips-Fein's Survey of the Field

756 The Journal of American History December 2011 It was in 1994 that Alan Brinkley published his celebrated article, “The Problem of American Conservatism,” although an earlier version had been presented to a symposium in 1989. He argued that while “the quantity and the quality” of scholarship on conservatism had recently decidedly increased, historians were still not giving it the degree of attention “that its role in twentieth-century politics and culture” merited. Many years have passed since his observations, and thanks to Kim Phillips-Fein’s “Conservatism: A State of the Field” we are in an excellent position to assess the subsequent development of the historiography of American conservatism. As her article shows, this is an area that has developed enormously. In 1994 Brinkley noted a study that claimed to have reviewed “all the relevant scholarly material published by sociologists, psychologists, political scientists, and historians” since the mid-1950s, involving only a small contribution from historians. Since then, writers in other disciplines have continued to make contributions, but the role of historians has impressively increased. Panels at meetings of the Organization of American Historians and the American Historical Association have testified to the flourishing nature of the field, while published work has ranged from an examination of conservative activity among youths in the 1960s and the early politicization of conservative evangelicalism to a discussion of women’s roles in conservatism across the decades.1 One recent study has traced the development of two importantly different conservative women’s organizations, Concerned Women for America and the Independent Women’s Forum, while another has explored the long career of the antifeminist (and anticommunist) crusader Phyllis Schlafly. Other work has traced the important part that women played in Cold War anticommunism and examined the part that a fervent defense of the family and fear of Bolshevism played in opposing the Left in the aftermath of World War I. When we turn our attention to youth, we are indebted to two studies of a crucial conservative organization of the 1960s, Young Americans for Freedom, and another that brought us the product of interviews with participants on both sides of the campus conflict over the Vietnam War has revealed fascinating material about those right-leaning young people On American Conservatism and Kim Phillips-Fein’s Survey of the Field