Early Cold War Research Articles

The Politics of Removing Children: The International Tracing Service's German Foster Homes Investigation of 1948

AbstractAfter the Second World War, the International Tracing Service's Child Search Branch (CSB) responded to inquiries for missing children and, until 1950 when funding was stopped, searched for children ‘in the field’. As the Cold War set in, the US military authorities restricted the opportunities for such children, mostly Eastern European, to be removed from their German foster parents and returned to their countries of origin. In the spring of 1948, when tensions between the CSB fieldworkers and the military authorities were at their height, ITS appointed an experienced fieldworker, Charlotte Babinski, to investigate cases of children in German foster homes with a view to streamlining policy regarding child removal. Despite her findings, as monetary and geopolitical pressures increased, the CSB had to accept that many children of Eastern European origin would remain in Germany. Children were thus a battleground in the early Cold War, in which politics triumphed over ethics.

Communism, anti-communism and education in Greece from the Axis occupation until the early Cold War era (1944–1967)

ABSTRACT This study aims to examine communist education in occupied Greece (1944–1945) in combination with anti-communist education in Greece in the Cold War era (1950–1967). It discusses, on the one hand, the intentions of the Popular Liberation Front/the Greek Communist Party in establishing Slavic-Macedonian schools and their features and, on the other, it defines the characteristics of the American anti-communist educational model and its impact on the Greek one, as the redefinition of the Greek nation, the constitution of the anti-communist legislative framework, the promotion of educational reform or the need for modernisation and the demand for technological and economic progress. Finally, it evaluates both communist and anti-communist education and their consequences for Greek society.

‘My children, you are permitted in time of great danger to walk with the Devil until you have crossed the bridge’: President Truman, Apartheid, and the Early Cold War

ABSTRACT The year of 1948 witnessed two elections that pushed race relations in the United States and South Africa in dramatically opposite directions. In November, the victory of Harry S. Truman placed the White House on the side of domestic civil rights and against racial oppression and segregation. His was the first presidential administration to publicly and privately embrace the struggle for racial justice in the United States. Five months earlier in South Africa, the victory of the Nationalist-Afrikaner coalition heralded the onset of the apartheid era. In this paper I explore the rationale behind the decision of President Truman in developing closer ties with Pretoria during the later 1940s and early 1950s. I specifically highlight the fact that despite the radically different racial trajectories of the two nations, the White House developed a policy of closer relations with the practitioners of apartheid due to their vehement anti-communism, support for Western actions against during the early Cold War era and a willingness to provide enriched uranium for the US atomic programme.

A curious case of failing sports diplomacy in the early cold war: the mediterranean friendship tournament (1949)

ABSTRACT This article argues that anti-sportsmanship of Greek audiences, players, and officials towards Turkish national soccer players during the Mediterranean Friendship Tournament of 1949 in Athens not only led to a short-term crisis in the Greek-Turkish relations due to mass anti-Greek protests in Turkey, but it also held these two countries back from enjoying the power of soccer as a diplomatic tool in maintaining and developing their Cold War alliance. The verbal and physical Greek attacks against the Turkish national team provoked a major disturbance in the Turkish public sphere, and Turkish protesters filled the streets all around Turkey. These demonstrations only stopped when the Turkish authorities declared the end of national soccer activity with Greece. In short, the tournament represented a remarkable case with respect to the role of public opinion in the making of foreign policy and in the use of soccer diplomacy.

Review: From Confinement to Containment: Japanese/American Arts during the Early Cold War, by Edward Tang

Review: <i>From Confinement to Containment: Japanese/American Arts during the Early Cold War</i>, by Edward Tang

Charlie Kersten’s war: a Catholic crusader goes to Congress

ABSTRACT Congressman Charles J. Kersten (R-WI) authored the Kersten Amendment to the Mutual Security Act of 1951, allocating $100 million annually to train refugees from Eastern European countries in national military units in support of NATO or for “some other purpose.” He advocated “positive” policies to promote liberation of captive Eastern European peoples, including waging an all-out psychological war and training the exiles; Kersten funds supported ongoing covert plans by the CIA and State Department. His career reveals the influence of religious faith on foreign relations and both cooperation and tensions between Congress and the Administration in the early Cold War.

“It’s better to forget physics”: The Idea of the Tactical Nuclear Weapon in the Early Cold War

The American physicist John Wheeler once told his colleague Richard Feynman that, in case of war, “it’s better to forget physics and tell the admirals and generals how to do tactical and strategic this-and-that.” This article explores the history of this-and-that distinctions between tactical and strategic nuclear weapons in the early Cold War. The idea of tactical nuclear weapons was intertwined with the work of a small group of defense intellectuals on limited nuclear war who explicitly framed the idea of tactical nuclear weapons as “arbitrary” and “illogical,” but nonetheless crucial to the continued survival of the Free World, as they understood it. I follow several strains of this complex history to show how a subset of these theorists viewed the new category of tactical nuclear weapons as an antidote to declining civilization and the embodiment of an anti-rationalist and anti-empiricist way of making knowledge about the world.

“Thou Shalt Meet Thy Sexual Needs in Marriage”: Southern Baptists and Marital Sex in the Postwar Era

This article traces the changing sexual politics of the Southern Baptist Convention (SBC) from the 1950s through the 1980s. It argues that the moderates who led the denomination in the 1950s, 1960s, and early 1970s joined other supporters of “sexual containment” during the early Cold War to develop a theology about the salvific power of marital sex—and the personal, social, and national harm created by extramarital sex—which undergirded the sexual conservatism of the denomination's fundamentalist leadership who rose to power during the 1970s and 1980s. This analysis reframes our understanding of Southern Baptists within the broader religious right coalition as it reveals how the SBC's commitment to marital sexuality, which was forged during the early Cold War, informed its approach to later hot-button issues like abortion and homosexuality. Rather than simply reacting against the loosening sexual mores of the 1970s and 1980s or in favor of the rising visibility of other politically engaged Christians on issues of sexual morality, the SBC instead drew on longer traditions within the denomination to engage with a changing political and sexual landscape.

From Confinement to Containment: Japanese American Arts during the Early Cold War

From Confinement to Containment: Japanese American Arts during the Early Cold War

No Right to Leave the Nation: The Politics of Passport Denial and the Rise of the National Security State

This article provides an institutional and legal history of passport denial in the United States from World War I to the early Cold War. Identifying the Passport Division as a central institution of the national security state, the article shows that the state was deeply invested in regulating the international movement of people and in monopolizing international connections in a globalizing age. It also analyzes the rise of the Passport Division as an authoritative and autonomous bureaucracy to provide new insight into the institutional development of the national security state. It emphasizes particularly the ways that the executive branch, the Congress, and the Passport Division mutually constituted travel policy as a field of state action in a decades-long process stretching from World War I to the Cold War. It explores the centrality of the reputation of the Passport Division, as personified by its head, Ruth Shipley, in facilitating its rise as an authoritative institution in the field of travel policy. And by analyzing the ways that the Passport Division was able to survive civil libertarian challenges in the 1950s, it explores the surprising longevity of national security bureaucracies.

A benchmark for the environment: big science and ‘artificial’ geophysics in the global 1950s

AbstractSecurity concerns during the early Cold War prompted United States strategists to solicit worldwide assistance in studying Earth’s physical environment. Comprehensive geophysical knowledge required cooperation between researchers on every part of the planet, leading practitioners to tout transnational earth science – despite direct military applications in an age of submarines and ballistic missiles – as a non-political form of peaceful universalism. This article examines the 1957–58 International Geophysical Year as a powerful fulcrum in the transfer of ideas about Earth’s global environment from Western security establishments to conservationists worldwide. For eighteen months, tens of thousands of researchers across every continent pooled resources for data collection to create a scientific benchmark for future comparisons. Illuminating Earth as dynamic and interconnected, participants robustly conceptualized humanity’s emergence as a geophysical force, capable of ‘artificially’ modifying the natural world. Studies of anthropogenic geophysics, including satellites, nuclear fallout, and climate change, conditioned the global rise of environmentalism.

Confronting America: The Cold War between the United States and the Communists in France and Italy. by Alessandro Brogi, Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2011. 533 pp. $55.00.

<i>Confronting America: The Cold War between the United States and the Communists in France and Italy</i>. by Alessandro Brogi, Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2011. 533 pp. $55.00.

Underdogs: The Making of the Modern Marine Corps. by Aaron B. O'Connell, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2012. 279 pp. $29.95.

<i>Underdogs: The Making of the Modern Marine Corps</i>. by Aaron B. O'Connell, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2012. 279 pp. $29.95.

The Foreign Policy of Lyndon B. Johnson: The United States and the World, 1963–1969. by Jonathan Colman, Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2012, paper. 231 pp.

<i>The Foreign Policy of Lyndon B. Johnson: The United States and the World, 1963–1969</i>. by Jonathan Colman, Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2012, paper. 231 pp.

Geophysical Datascapes of the Cold War: Politics and Practices of International Data Centers

The International Geophysical Year or IGY (1957–1958) was conceived against a background of nuclear secrecy intensified by Cold War political tensions, but the IGY provided the impulse for constructing the distinct data regime which took hold in Soviet and American World Data Centers in the 1950s and 1960s — a regime that turned data into a form of currency traded by the political players in the Cold War. This essay examines that data regime in detail by taking up the issues of secrecy and access, sharing and exchange, accumulation and archiving, and finally the handling and use of the IGY data. Features of the IGY’s data centers, such as the notion of centralized storage of open data freely accessible to users from around the world, played an important role in establishing the practices of data governance that continue today in the form of Big Data. These practices, however, were outcomes of the politics, visions, and accompanying technologies that were embedded in and supported by the political culture of the Cold War. By revisiting the drawbacks and challenges that accompanied that Big Data moment in the early Cold War, this essay explores the multiple meanings of data and the ways in which data circulated in a veiled Cold War political economy that ran parallel to their use (or neglect) in the pursuit of knowledge.

Editorial

Editorial Margherita Zanasi Timothy Cheek is the guest editor of this May 2020 special issue focusing on 1957, an important "crucible" year for the People's Republic of China. This year witnessed a dramatic turning point from expectations for free political expression during the Hundred Flowers campaign to the sudden crackdown of the Anti-Rightist campaign. As Cheek explains in his introduction, rather than approaching this turning point as the beginning of a long-term trend of Maoist authoritarianism that was to escalate into the Great Leap Forward and the Cultural Revolution, the contributing authors explore the experience of actors who had no foresight of the political future of China and could make sense of the 1957 events only by relying on their previous experiences. These articles, therefore, present a local and personal narrative of 1957 rather than enclosing it in a metanarrative of political history at the level of the central leadership. In this vein, Dayton Lekner explores the local dynamics of power that shaped relationships between the individual intellectuals and the local and central authorities and how the events of 1957 changed the way in which writers understood their position vis-à-vis society and the state. Yidi Wu's contribution explores how individuals experienced the process of labeling—as "rightists," "centrists," and "leftists"—and argues that the state adopted political labeling as a strategy for eliciting people's loyalty. Stig Thøgersen assesses the long-term impact of the 1957 Anti-Rightist campaign on educational policies. The labeling as "rightists" of proponents of progressive models of education, in fact, paved the way to the adoption of a Stalinist model. Finally, Ning Wang analyzes the culture of political campaigns, focusing specifically on the "chain-of-prey" phenomenon that saw victims turning into accusers as a survival strategy. This special issue was first developed under the stewardship of the previous Twentieth-Century China editor, Kristin Stapleton, to whom goes most of the credit for bringing it to completion. This issue of Twentieth-Century China also includes two review essays. In "What Do Chinese Intellectuals Do These Days?" Peter Zarrow approaches the issue of contemporary Chinese intellectuals' search for identity and a sense of purpose by focusing on three recently published works by Ge Zhaoguang, Els van Dongen, and Sebastian Veg. David Bello's review essay, "Inner Asian Frontiers of China and Some Peoples without Others," focuses on two works on the northern Xinjiang border and the Sino-Korean border in order to explore how emerging historiography of the borderlands contributes to our understanding of imperialism in China. Accessible through Project MUSE are four book reviews. Yvon Wang reviews Howard Chiang's book on science, medicine, and sex transformation in modern China. Micah Muscolino comments on Brian DeMare's recent book on land reform. Tim Wright reviews Elisabeth Köll's history of railroads, and Xiaobing Li reviews Pang Yang Huei's [End Page 119] book on the three-way political relations among China, Taiwan, and the United States during the early Cold War years. Finally, Timothy Cheek is the author featured in our interview series, available at http://hstcconline.org/interviews-with-authors/. [End Page 120] Copyright © 2020 Twentieth Century China Journal, Inc.

The Advantage of Being Swiss: Nestlé and Political Risk in Asia during the Early Cold War, 1945–1970

Multinational enterprises faced new political risks after World War II in the context of decolonization and the Cold War. The risks were particularly high in Asia between 1945 and 1970. Although the relevant literature has focused essentially on organizational innovation and strategic choices in explaining how firms dealt with these new political risks, this article explores the informal roles that governments of small, neutral countries played in supporting their multinationals abroad. Looking at the case of Nestlé in Asia, the article argues that the backing of the Swiss federal authorities was crucial for the company to overcome various kinds of risks and ensure a long-term presence in the region.

"Hands Off Korea!": Women's Internationalist Solidarity and Peace Activism in Early Cold War Cuba

"Hands Off Korea!": Women's Internationalist Solidarity and Peace Activism in Early Cold War Cuba

The Greatest Movie Never Made: The Life of the Buddha as Cold War Politics

ABSTRACTThis article explores the backstory of a 1953 screenplay on the life of the Buddha conceived by the CIA as a psychological warfare strategy to draw Asian Buddhists away from the Communist orbit and into the Free World. Developed in collaboration with Ceylonese Buddhist scholar G. P. Malalasekera,Tathagata: The Wayfarer(hereafter,Wayfarer) is best read through the lens of the U.S. Campaign of Truth propaganda effort launched by Truman in 1950. I draw on declassified government documents and archives to highlight the screenplay's trajectory as a covert attempt by the U.S. government to work with Asian Buddhists to further U.S. foreign policy needs in Asia and to demonstrate a truth rarely recognized by scholars of religion and American culture: For the early Cold War American state, Buddhism was an object of foreign policy.

Nature Empowered: Hydraulic Models and the Engineering of Niagara Falls.

Under a 1950 U.S.-Canada treaty the majority of the Niagara River is diverted to massive hydroelectric complexes. To hide the aesthetic impact of turning Niagara Falls into an energy waterscape, and retain tourism, the waterfall was physically reshaped and shrunk, and remedial works were built to control water flows and hydropower diversions. To achieve this, hydraulic engineers from the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers and Ontario Hydro relied on hydraulic models of Niagara Falls. Using an envirotech approach, I show how these physical hydraulic models were an integral part of the disguised design approach to remaking Niagara Falls, and I use this Niagara case study to critically explore the evolution of hydraulic modeling in early Cold War North America. The river and waterfall were transformed into a hybrid envirotechnical system, a submerged infrastructure that relied not only on steel and concrete, but also water, ice, and weeds.