Communist Threat Research Articles

Tek Parti Döneminde Devrimsel Ric'atler: Bir Ric'at Örneği Olarak İmam Hatip Seminerleri Girişimi ve İmam Hatip Kurslarının Açılması

Tevhid-i Tedrisat Kanunu ( The Law on Unification of Education) was considered as an ideological tool by early republican elites. Despite the fact that diverging religious curriculum was out under state control, no religious curriculum was de facto allowed in education. Since 1945, the wide range of society including religious bureaucracy has mustered continuous criticism. One-party regime at that time aimed to develop some policies in enhancing ethical education of children against communist threat. In this context, even though there were some initiations to open religious education such as implementing particular classes, the authorities tried to solve the religious education issue by starting imam-hatip courses. This changing policy which contained religious classes in public schools, imam hatip courses, theology faculty, accomodating to make the pilgrimage visits to Mecca and opening religious tombs for visiting, was considered as a “revision” by the incumbent government authorities. This revision can be claimed as a retreating (ric’at) from the understanding of forbidding religion from social life.

Communism and the end of the world

Abstract Drawing on Fredric Jameson's thesis that it is easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism, this article examines recent representations of communism, anti-communism, and the end of the world, in popular film and television, and argues that both work towards re-enforcing the utopian view that there is no viable alternative to liberal democracy and capitalism. In the context of the ongoing financial crisis and global political uprisings, representations of the apocalypse are being paralleled with a return to images of the 'communist threat'. Here, it is argued that such images aim to dissuade people from thinking about alternatives to the existing system. This article concludes with a discussion of recent reconsiderations of the 'communist hypothesis'.

Linguaggi e forme dell'anticomunismo: il caso del Movimento sociale italiano negli anni ottanta

The paper provides an insight into the history of Italian anticommunism by focusing on the case study of 1980s Msi-Dn (Movimento sociale italiano-Destra nazionale). The chronological framework matches with a decade of deep transformation of the communist movement, which will have its peak with the collapse of the Ussr. The development of Msi is undoubtedly affected by the transformation of its main enemy. With the reformist course imposed by Mikhail Gorbachev on Soviet communism, and the end of the ‘communist threat’ in Italy, the homogeneity of the neo-fascist anticommunism starts cracking. The crisis of communism determines within the Msi a bifurcation between a rigidly anti-communist group, which refers to Giorgio Almirante, and a variegated minority current that considers the communist threat as out-dated. The result of the dispute on the centrality of anti-communism will turn out to be a key element of the definition of the hegemonic leadership within the post-fascist Italian Right of the 1990s.

‘Le Syndicat libre dans la profession organisée’: Rural Social Catholicism during the Popular Front, 1936–38

The Fédération des syndicats libres des travailleurs de la terre (FSLTT) was a trade union for farm workers established by the Christian confederation (CFTC) during the French Popular Front. Supported by two rural catholic action movements, the JAC and UCFA, it was a response to the wave of strikes in agriculture and viewed as a means to counter the perceived threat of communism in the countryside. Although the FSLTT remained small, its establishment and subsequent evolution is significant. Firstly, the union represented a break within social catholic thinking towards the rural world. Until the early 1930s, all wings of rural social catholicism supported the principle of syndicats mixtes—associations uniting workers, farmers and proprietors. The resulting clash between supporters of the FSLTT and the UNSA, the main association of agricultural syndicalism, whose leaders were also inspired by social catholic doctrine, left its mark on the future organisation of French agriculture under Vichy and during the Fourth Republic. Secondly, the FSLTT illustrates the contradictory nature of Christian trade unionism during the Popular Front period. During a decisive stage in its history, the CFTC's doctrinal and material link to social catholicism conflicted with the influence of pressures arising from the mass social movement. The article surveys the FSLTT from a national perspective, though much of the focus is on the Nord department, its strongest base.

From Labour to National Ideals: Ending the War in Asia Minor—Controlling Communism in Greece

This paper will try to shed light on a very particular angle of Greek political geography after the end of the Asia Minor War. As a result of this conflict almost 1.3 million refugees fled to Greece and changed dramatically its political space. The traditional view among the scholars of the period promotes an “exceptionalism” of the Greek-Orthodox refugees who fled to Greece after 1922. It is argued that the Asia Minor workers did not largely espouse an a priori notion of class, since they had a bourgeoisie economic and social background. However, in the 1930s there was a sharp increase in the support of the Left. Accordingly, the Communist Party pulled 5.76% of the vote, which was the highest in the inter-war period. Although the percentage of the communist vote was not so high all over Greece, Communism had a real electorate appeal for urban refugees. This study will challenge the exceptionalist perspective and will investigate why the same people who voted for Liberals in the 1920s voted for Communists in the 1930s. It will also examine how the Greek political system managed to incorporate the left-wing vote by transforming the division of society from labour and political demands to national ones in the period under examination. The focus will be also on the interplay between Communism and refugees, which is undervalued by most research on the topic, even though the communist threat was used as a reason or pretext for the abolition of parliamentary democracy and the establishment of Ioannis Metaxas’ dictatorship in 1936.

Korean Christian Churches, the ibuk ch’ulsin Minority and the Perception of the North

Some research has already been done regarding the importance of Christian churches in South Korea and their impact on the socio-political field. Nevertheless, the case of those Protestant churches that were imported from the North into the South in the suitcases of migrants around the period of the Korean War deserves special attention for several reasons. Firstly, networking among South Korean political actors originating from the northern part of the Korean peninsula was often done through these Christian churches, not only at the familial level but also at professional and political levels. Secondly, these migrants’ particular ties with North Korea, which persist in spite of generational turnover, confers upon them a specific perception and idea about the North Korea from which they escaped. Between their will to protect themselves against the communist threat and their desire to help those North Koreans who were not as lucky as themselves, their vision regarding the North from the 1950s to the present has played a role in their actions as political actors in the South. Even though conservatism prevails, many of the activities undertaken in North Korea by South Koreans are done by Christian clergy.

Thailand. Land and loyalty: Security and the development of property rights in Thailand. By Tomas Larsson. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2012. Pp. 208. Figures, tables, bibliography, index.

Land and loyalty: Security and the development of property rights in Thailand By TOMAS LARSSON Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2012. Pp. 208. Figures, tables, bibliography, index. doi: 10.1017/S0022463413000490 Is the rhetoric that 'farmers are the backbone of the Thai nation' still relevant today? In Land and Loyalty, Tomas Larsson offers a nuanced analysis of the emergence of the Thai state very much in conversation with recent critical scholarship (such as that by Andrew Walker and Tyrell Haberkorn; details below) examining how and why appeals to such rhetoric continue to legitimise the disparate work and goals of multiple state and non-state actors within Thailand. The book begins with an overview explaining that Thailand has been hailed as a phenomenal success in land titling, particularly within Southeast Asia, but rather than stopping there, Larsson's objective is to address how this was enacted. Looking back to the 1855 Bowring treaty, he confronts the more popular images of the Thai state as 'patrimonial and predative' by highlighting the processes through which property rights were enacted. Through review of newspaper articles, archival records, official correspondence, and policy documents, Larsson carefully considers how security threats have shaped Thai property rights and regimes, and how this in turn has influenced the modern Thai state. By interrogating the Thai state's reactions (and non-reactions) to security threats--such as the interests of colonial British or French powers, or the perceived threat of communism and the American push to counter it--Larsson sheds light on a novel interpretation of the emergence of the modern Thai state and its relationships with citizens and non-citizens. Perhaps provocative for scholars of contemporary Thailand is this historical positioning of the Thai state, which will be particularly controversial for those who have considered the Thai state as the purveyor of the global market and developer of mega projects that continue to marginalise poor, rural farmers. Larsson illustrates that it was the Thai state and monarchy, in its sometimes xenophobic policy influences (perceived security threats from foreigners, and particularly the Chinese, living in Thailand) that deliberately produced a country of smallholder farmers as opposed to facilitating companies or foreigners to hold large tracts of land. This vision of the Thai state during this time--as a conservative force for smallholder farmers--resonates strangely enough with present-day rhetoric from non-governmental organisations, and with the back-to-agriculture movement that would wish to see farmers gain title over 'sufficient' land for sustainable use, but not necessarily to larger areas of land. Larsson's interpretation is rather different from the usual political economy interpretation which might be expected to emphasise either the power of landowners, or the way that the Thai state has a history of exploiting small farmers. Chapter 3, 'Weapons of a weak state', also offers a potentially challenging rereading of the Thai state--not as oppressor or authoritative regime--but as a 'weak' actor in its relationships with other states, relying on its weaknesses strategically (cf. James C. Scott's notion of 'weapons of the weak') in its dealings with colonial powers (see also: Larsson's 2007 'Intertextual relations: The geopolitics of land rights in Thailand' article in the journal Political Geography). Conceptually, Larsson argues that his 'securitisation' approach allows for a more nuanced examination of events and non-events that produce or influence the present (pp. 3-4). A memorable example of a non-event that might be easily overlooked--but nonetheless had material implications for the development of property rights and the large number of smallholders in Thailand--is the government's failure to implement a land tax in Bangkok in 1917. …

Genuinely American: Croatian‐American Race, Manhood, and Nationalism in Postwar Pittsburgh

AbstractEspecially during the turbulent years of the immediate postwar period, Croatian‐Americans found expediency in positioning their ethnic culture within the realm of acceptable white manhood and peaceful civilization. To be accepted was to be white, or to try to be white. Accordingly, Croatian‐Americans attempted to qualify themselves as authentic whites whose ethnicity meshed perfectly with the American way. This study examines the Croatian Fraternal Union's Zajedničar newspaper to demonstrate that during the postwar period, which was characterized by converging anxieties over disintegrating gender roles, acceptable whiteness, as structured by Protestant old immigrant Americans, and the perceived communist threat, Croatian‐Americans in Pittsburgh qualified themselves as authentically white and genuine American men and women to escape accusations of subversion.

James Angleton and the Church Committee

James J. Angleton, who served as chief of counterintelligence for the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) from 1954 to 1974, was an important figure in the Cold War and, in a sense, the first line of defense against clandestine Soviet intelligence operations directed against the United States and its allies. In 1975 a U.S. Senate investigative committee—informally known as the Church Committee and led by Senator Frank Church—called Angleton to testify in public on his approach to counterintelligence, especially how he had become involved in illegal domestic operations in the United States. His testimony to committee staff investigators preceding the hearing, along with his public statements to senators during the hearing, displayed an extreme view of the global Communist threat. Amid ongoing revelations in the mid-1970s of illegal CIA actions, Angleton proved unable to mount an effective public defense of his approach.

Brazil’s Steel City: Developmentalism, Strategic Power, and Industrial Relations in Volta Redonda, 1941-1964

Brazil’s Steel City: Developmentalism, Strategic Power, and Industrial Relations in Volta Redonda, 1941-1964

“Illegal Loves and Sexual Deviancy: Homosexuality as a Threat in Cold War Canada”

This paper analyzes the criminalization and medicalization of homosexuality during the early twentieth century in Canada. Through court records and medical texts the discourse of homosexuality as a threat to the family unit and to the nation is contextualized within Cold War rhetoric. A Foucaultian conceptualization of power and discipline helps frame questions regarding homosexuality as a criminal offense and as a mental illness. It is argued that both state control and societal pressures constructed the homosexual as criminal, the homosexual as mental patient and, as a result, the homosexual as Communist threat.

Ordeal of the European Union

ABSTRACT The European unity movement has always been a political as well as an economic project. Political objectives have included: eliminating areas of poverty and diminishing the appeal and threat of communism through economic and defense cooperation; solving the “German problem” (integration of the German economy into Europe, yet preventing German domination); completing the economic foundation by introducing a common currency; and helping to stabilize newly independent East European states. Controversy has always been present over the final goal of European unity: a full-fledged federal state capable of playing the role of a Great Power or a federation of nation-states with more limited missions. The underlying question: Is there a European “people” sufficiently cohesive to support a central state with an executive power independent of the political leadership of member states?

Raising Vietnamese: War and youth in the South in the early 1970s

This essay considers the importance of looking at writings for children for historical analysis, particularly in times of war, focusing on magazines published for youth in South Vietnam in the early 1970s. Two magazines,Thiếu NhiandThằng Bờm, in particular, are studied in terms of their editorial aims and contents, as well as their young readers' submissions in response to contemporary sociocultural issues raised in these magazines. The lively discussions in these magazines were made possible by the relative freedom of expression in South Vietnam, compared to North Vietnam, which was an important reason for the civil war being fought. Yet this freedom also challenged the fabric of Vietnamese society. The strongest concern of these magazines' initiators, editors and writers was that its readers not lose their sense of being Vietnamese in the face of the great wartime flood of American popular culture that captivated many youth. Anxiety that the younger generation would be Americanised and lose their identity struck at the core of what the war was being fought about: i.e. different versions of being Vietnamese in the modern world. This threat of Americanisation to fundamental Vietnamese values was perceived by some intellectuals in the South as more serious than the threat of communism, because at least the communists were Vietnamese.

Seven Days to Noon: containing the atomic threat

AbstractThe 1950 Boulting Brothers film Seven Days to Noon is one of the earliest British films to engage with the atomic bomb and uses a number of strategies to contain the public fears of the super-weapon. When an atomic scientist steals one such device and threatens to detonate it in central London, an elaborate but efficient security system swings into action. Drawing on the imagery and practices of civil defence during the Second World War, central London is evacuated while the army hunts down the scientist, who is presented as undergoing a psychological crisis as a result of his work. Although he is finally located and the bomb disarmed, the film only achieves its reassuring message by suppressing the Communist threat from within (which would become the subject of Roy Boulting's 1951 film High Treason) and from abroad, which differentiates Seven Days from comparable American films of the period. Presenting an idealized version of Londoners' stoicism, the film actually shows the disproportion between the specifics of daily life in the city and the massive destruction the new weapon could wreak. The acquiescence of Londoners in their orderly evacuation is only possible because of their virtually total ignorance of the true nature of the bomb.

Cold War Femme: Lesbianism, National Identity, and Hollywood Cinema , and: Soldiers’ Stories: Military Women in Cinema and Television since World War II (review)

Reviewed by: Cold War Femme: Lesbianism, National Identity, and Hollywood Cinema, and: Soldiers’ Stories: Military Women in Cinema and Television since World War II Robyn A. Epstein (bio) and Mel Michelle Lewis (bio) Cold War Femme: Lesbianism, National Identity, and Hollywood Cinema by Robert J. Corber. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2011, 240 pp., $66.00 hardcover, $24.00 paper. Soldiers’ Stories: Military Women in Cinema and Television since World War II by Yvonne Tasker. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2011, 328 pp., $70.00 hardcover, $25.00 paper. Robert Corber’s Cold War Femme: Lesbianism, National Identity, and Hollywood Cinema and Yvonne Tasker’s Soldiers’ Stories: Military Women in Cinema and Television since World War II consider the cinematic characters of the femme lesbian and the military woman, respectively, both of whom are contradictory and influential representations of women. These interdisciplinary studies scrutinize how onscreen portrayals of women’s gender and sexuality model dynamic historical, social, and cultural norms. The gender expression of the cold war femme is seemingly incongruous with lesbian sexual identity, thus creating an always-already taboo subject through which to render the value of normativity, the dangers of female desire, and the penalties of nonconformity. Similarly, the military woman’s subjectivity is contentious, pivoting between romanticized feminine altruism and tropes of masculine heroism; she is at once glamorous and mannish, angelic and disruptive, inaccessible and sexy. Her power evokes anxiety and challenges normative constructions of femininity. Corber’s Cold War Femme observes and analyzes the role of a purposeful femme lesbian subjectivity in the Hollywood-imagined world of women’s homosocial relationships during the period of the cold war (1940s to mid-’60s). In addition to illuminating this subjectivity, Corber brands a genealogy of the sociocultural invention and positioning of femme lesbians in cold war cinema. Through a reading of McCarthy-era anti-communist discourse and the crafted threat of homosexuals as hidden, seditious Americans, Corber establishes that fictitious femme lesbians displaced fictitious butch lesbians as the greater social threat to the U.S. nation-state. Hollywood reproduced and cultivated this gender category, steering it into acutely provocative characters. With primarily heterosexual aesthetic presentations and attractions to feminine women, these cold war and Hollywood-created femme lesbians roused alarm and curiosity as they challenged normative sexual-identity arrangements. The cold war femme demonstrated a “lack of congruity between gender identity, sexual practice, and object choice” (30). Corber asserts that directors and screenwriters summoned the cold war femme by depicting women’s sexual desire and social autonomy as mysterious and menacing, while carefully avoiding violating the Motion Picture Production Code (Hays Code) by excluding any explicit indication of lesbianism. His strongest examples include films like All About Eve (1950) and The Children’s [End Page 136] Hour (1961), in which the stories are shown to swivel and are directed through female relationships that are latently yet more reasonably interpreted as lesbian. Revealing these partially hidden scripts, Cold War Femme contributes to feminist and queer film theory, as well as to cold war cinema studies; Corber explains that even while the subjectivity of the cold war femme is created to underscore the communist threat to “American” capitalist, heterosexual, and patriarchal culture, the cross-film identity creates a successful archetypical legacy of this kind of femme. Still, the sophistication of Corber’s lens is somewhat undermined by the surprising absence of raced and classed analyses. The nationalism driving the production of cold war–era ideology was highly informed by racial and socioeconomic politics, which are ignored in the text; whiteness has been central to the construction of the “real American,” especially during the time of the cold war femme’s cinematic run. This omission confuses the historicity of the subject of the text, although the contribution to theorizing the cold war femme is still of important value. The book is divided into two parts: “Part I: Screening the Femme,” which attends directly to an explicit cold war femme construction; and “Part II: Female Stardom,” which contends with messy gender-crossings between actresses’ personas and their characters in film. In both sections, Corber presents interesting close readings of films, through which the reader is able to watch the interplay...

Alessandro Brogi. Confronting America: The Cold War between the United States and the Communists in France and Italy.

The Cold War confrontation between the United States and the communist parties of France (PCF) and Italy (PCI) was, this book argues, of critical importance for both sides. It was a “crucial test” (p. 59) for the Western alliance and determinate of the very “legitimacy and existence” (p. 6) of Western European communism. Alessandro Brogi examines this history by focusing on the theme of communist anti-Americanism and American responses to it from the onset of the Cold War through the 1970s, with a brief consideration of the 1980s and beyond. Brogi focuses on the interplay among cultural, domestic political, and diplomatic history, which he examines through research in archival and published primary sources from all three countries. Truly impressive in its depth and breadth, this book is a significant contribution to the international history of the Cold War. Brogi presents America's confrontation with Western European communism as a learning process in which American efforts became more subtle and successful over time. In the early Cold War, the United States engaged in a utopian crusade that emphasized American exceptionalism and sought to fully extirpate the communist threat. Believing that communism was weakly rooted in France and Italy and enjoyed influence primarily because of its propaganda and utopian appeal, the United States engaged in a blatant propaganda campaign against it that lacked subtlety and failed to achieve its objectives. Beginning in the mid-1950s, U.S. strategies shifted to a more successful effort to contain West European communism by combining diplomacy with more sophisticated psychological warfare that emphasized dialogue and pluralism and allowed limited criticism of America as an alternative to more extreme manifestations of anti-Americanism.

Canada and the Security of the Americas

Since 1940 the Americas have been fairly peaceful compared to other regions of the world. Although Central America was racked by extremely violent civil wars during the 1980s, over the past few decades the region as a whole has not experienced many military conflicts between states. Barely a handful of the various territorial disputes, past or present, have led to open warfare. The last significant episode, the 1995 war between Peru and Ecuador, lasted no more than a week. Yet this relative tranquillity must not obscure the fact that over the years, the regional security agenda has undergone major changes.From 1945 to 1990 the security of the Americas essentially meant defending the region against what was perceived by many governments as a communist threat. But with globalization and the end of the Cold War, the nature of the threat changed radically. The central concern of the United States, particularly after September 2001, shifted to the prevention of terrorist attacks. For the Americas overall, organized crime, in both its local and transnational variants, became the major security issue, primarily but not exclusively as it relates to drug trafficking and drug-related phenomena such as criminal gangs, money laundering, and corruption. Citizen security thus became a dominant concern in most countries of the region.1This article presents an analysis of Canada's involvement in the security of the Americas, particularly after 1990, and examines the impact of Canadian policy and actions on the hemispheric security agenda. After it joined the Organization of American States (OAS) in 1990, Canada identified security as one of three top objectives in its policy for the western hemisphere, along with economic prosperity and the promotion of democracy. The same objectives are mainstays of Canada's Americas strategy, announced in July 2007, and are major components of current Canadian foreign policy regarding the region.2 Our aim in this paper is to show that although Ottawa has given higher priority to security issues since 2007, the Canadian contribution in this area thus far remains modest. To this end the paper is organized as follows. The first part provides an overview of the evolution of security issues in the Americas since 1945. The second part looks at the cooperative security approach that prevailed during the 1990s and examines Canada's role during that period. We then assess Canada's policy since 2001 in the context of the new hemispheric concept of multidimensional security. Finally, we summarize our thoughts on Canadian involvement to date in the security of the region, and we consider Canada's possible contributions in the future.SECURITY IN THE AMERICAS: A HISTORICAL OVERVIEWFrom a security point of view, the situation of the Americas during the 20th century was characterized by two main elements. The first was the asymmetry of power between the United States and the other countries of the region. This asymmetry of power had two consequences, starting with Washington's belief that it could freely intervene in neighbouring countries to restore order or fight communism in application of the Monroe Doctrine or the Roosevelt Corollary.3 US authorities used these precepts to justify and legitimize US interventions in the Caribbean Basin (as part of the so-called dollar diplomacy that prevailed in the early decades of the 20th century) and, later on, to oppose left-wing governments accused of importing communism in the region. The other consequence of the power asymmetry was the impossibility for Latin American governments to compete militarily with the US, obliging those governments to use alternative and generally less effective strategies. The most prominent alternative strategy was the development of a corpus of Latin American international law through instruments such as the Calvo Clause and the Drago Doctrine, which reaffirmed sovereign immunity against external intervention.4The other major feature of the 20th century security environment in the Americas was the perceived threat of and the fight against communism. …

Bruce Catton, Middlebrow Culture, and the Liberal Search for Purpose in Cold War America

This essay provides a case study of one man's transition from the reform-oriented liberalism of the New Deal period to the burgeoning rights-focussed liberalism of the 1960s. It contends that Bruce Catton, the most popular Civil War historian of his generation, played an influential role in forging the culture of Cold War America. He did so in his capacity as a prominent “middlebrow” intellectual who sought to instil his legions of adoring fans with a sense of moral purpose at a time when political elites were fretting about ordinary Americans' ability to fight the Cold War effectively. While his finely crafted narratives of the Civil War demonstrated the courage and conviction of nineteenth-century Americans, his many public appearances in the 1950s enabled him to disseminate further his conviction that the timeless values of American democracy remained as relevant in the disturbing present as they had been in the country's divided past. Catton's characteristically middlebrow commitment to antiracism as a contribution to the Cold War struggle was by no means unfaltering but an assessment of his writings and actions during the Civil War centennial reveals his continuing determination to render American democracy sufficiently vigorous to counter the ongoing communist threat.

Division in the (Inner) Ranks: The Psychosocial Legacies of the Border Wars

During the apartheid era, a key component of the Nationalist government's strategy in combating both African nationalism and the perceived threat of communism was the compulsory conscription of young white men into the South African Defence Force (SADF) between 1968 and 1993. Conscription was one relatively small component of a system in which all South Africans' lives were profoundly affected by the political domain's imposition of racial, class and gender stratifications. This paper is based on ongoing research into the psychosocial legacies of the apartheid wars. It explores how some of the burgeoning publications about this period of South African history reflect the intrapersonal legacies and psychological stresses that were caused by the social and political discourses of this context. A particular focus in this discussion is the way in which the social and political fracturings that characterised South African society during the apartheid era have been mirrored in the psychosocial constructs that significantly shaped some conscripts' lives, both at the time and in the post-apartheid context, and continue to influence current South African society.

‘A most interesting chapter in the history of science’ intellectual responses to Alfred Kinsey’s Sexual Behavior in the Human Male.

[[history of scienceintellectual historyinterdisciplinary researchAlfred Kinseysexuality ]] There were three broad categories of academic responses to Alfred Kinsey’s Sexual Behavior in the Human Male (Kinsey, Pomeroy and Martin, 1948): method; findings; and broader reflections on the book’s place in American social life and democracy. This article focuses primarily on archival academic responses to Kinsey’s work that appeared in the year following the book’s publication. Many academics agreed that some aspects of Kinsey’s method were flawed and that his interpretations sometimes overreached his raw data. Nonetheless, they also agreed that no one else had gathered such a diverse sampling of interviewees whose behaviors Kinsey could use to create new interpretive models of human sexuality. As Kinsey’s research was deliberately interdisciplinary, his research and statistical methodologies began to catch on in the human sciences and to encourage academics and intellectuals to rethink their human science practices. As academics reflected on the volume’s larger meaning in American life, several of them thought it exemplified the worst American values (emphases on money and size) while others saw the very existence of the Male volume as an excellent example of the ability of free citizens to pursue and to publish research on any topic. While members of the American intelligentsia championed the Male volume and its findings as democratic, the reception of Sexual Behavior in the Human Female (Kinsey, Pomeroy, Martin and Gebhard, 1953), published at an intense moment of the cold war, was viewed as a communist threat to American security for revealing the sexual secrets of the public.