Early Cold War Research Articles

Two flags in the sand: anti-Communism in early Cold War Northern Ireland

ABSTRACTThis article reveals how the Cold War impinged upon not just national, but local political considerations and became woven into communal narratives. It contributes to the examination of religion in the conflict, adds to the historiography of Britain and the Cold War, and provides a context by which British Cold War experience and responses can be assessed. With Northern Ireland’s political similarities to Great Britain, its consistency with European norms and its overlaps with popular sentiment in the United States, Northern Ireland offers a gauge to better understand the nature of anti-Communism in the Cold War’s first decade and offers an unexplored perspective on the conflict.

Another Look at the Marshall Plan: Geopolitics in the Early Cold War

Benn Steil’s big book, The Marshall Plan, is well worth a careful read. It is not, as the main title suggests, a comprehensive history of the Marshall Plan. Nor does it situate the plan “more directly at the center of the emerging Cold War than earlier accounts” (xii). It covers familiar events leading up to the plan, including the Truman Doctrine and the Greco-Turkish aid program, the Moscow Conference of early 1947, and the deteriorating economic and political conditions in war-torn Europe. Convinced that Stalin had no interest in stabilizing these conditions, Secretary of State George C. Marshall decided to take the lead, with or without Soviet support, which he did with his announcement of the Marshall Plan at Harvard University in June 1947. From there, Steil moves on to discuss the Paris Conference, where a cluster of European countries drafted a response to Marshall’s proposal, and then to the Czech coup, the Berlin blockade, the formation of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, and other events in the early years of the Cold War. All along he keeps a sharp eye, as he should, on the German problem, from the disputes over reparations to economic unification and the formation of the West German government.

Controlling Knowledge, Controlling People: Travel Restrictions of U.S. Scientists and National Security*

In the early Cold War, the production, dissemination, and control over scientific-technological knowledge became a central concern of the fledgling national security state. Soviet scientific and technological achievements posed a severe threat to American military power and global political hegemony. Maintaining the United States’ competitive edge required both a major injection of federal resources to stimulate the national Research and Development (R & D) system, and a clamp down on the international circulation of knowledge, including the travel of scientists in both directions across the U.S. border. The U.S. security agencies began to monitor the international travel of scientists in order to control the knowledge they carried in their heads and in their hands. Passport denials and restrictions became one of the main instruments of control and surveillance. Jessica Wang and others have described important aspects of Cold War travel restrictions. Scholars have argued that because such impediments were based on political criteria and seen through the lens of McCarthyism, they constituted “the worst excesses of Cold War political repression.” These studies focus on the struggle of individual scientists against the “discrimination and harassment” of red-baiters and a national security state that overreached its authority.1 Admittedly analyzing the restrictions from the scientists’ point of view does throw some light on the government’s disregard for civil rights and the values of scientific freedom. However, this emphasis on the scientist as victim misses at least four crucial dimensions.

Urban Catastrophe and Sheltered Salvation

The Swedish civil defence organizations have a long tradition of balancing their messages to the public through diverse media use. Over the course of the early Cold War, however, the political and technical circumstances of the civil defence organizations changed, rendering old methods from the 1930s obsolete. To keep their relevance, the narratives of the civil defence organizations had to be carefully remodelled in accordance with the current situation, obscuring some facts while stressing others more clearly. By operationalizing the concept of media system, this article examines how the Swedish civil defence organizations used the media, broadly defined, to deal with the two main narratives that their practical work was based upon: urban destruction as war unfolds, and the safety of air-raid shelters. The article shows how these narratives were constructed and connected between various media, but also their changing and dynamic character over time. Over the course of the 1940s and 1950s, the narrative of urban destruction changed from a concrete to an abstract mediation, while the narrative of sheltered salvation took an opposite direction.

From Keyhole to Big Brother: The Legacies of Early Cold War Surveillance

Much of contemporary surveillance, with its reliance on remote sensors, big data, networks, and algorithmic simulations, has its origins in early Cold War technologies that were designed to provide air defense surveillance. Though the SAGE system has been examined by other historians of technology, this paper examines the origins of this system by applying a different interpretative approach by emphasizing the interdependence of epistemology (how human beings know something) with ontogeny (the emergence of things independent of whether human beings know it). The mediation between the two is identified as information, drawing attention to the importance of surveillance as a social and technical practice.

Roberto Cantoni, Oil exploration, diplomacy, and security in the early cold war: the enemy underground (Abingdon: Routledge, 2017), pp. 290 ISBN 978 1138 6929 09

Bibliography: Thompson, Helen: Roberto Cantoni, Oil exploration, diplomacy, and security in the early cold war: the enemy underground, ERIS, 1-2018, pp. 99-102. https://doi.org/10.3224/eris.v5i1.09

The Empire Departs: The Partitions of British India, Mandate Palestine, and the Dawn of Self-Determination in the Third World

This article argues that the political system established by the United Kingdom in British India and Mandate Palestine contributed to their partition in 1947. This is not to suggest that other factors – nationalism, anticolonialism, the Second World War, and the early Cold War, did not also play a part in strategic calculations. It is merely to suggest that the formation of national identity in British India and Mandate Palestine were both linked to British policies and the political system Britain established in those territories that contributed to the failure to come up with a scheme that would satisfy their political aspirations when Britain left. The problem was systemic, and was not merely due to British calculations in the final hours although these calculations undoubtedly shaped the final borders.

From Global Ambition to Local Reality: Initiatives for the Dissemination of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights in Norway, 1948–1952

ABSTRACTDissemination of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and its content started immediately upon its adoption in December 1948. This article is an exploration into how an early UNESCO initiative for what later was termed human rights education was central to dissemination efforts in Norway in the years 1948 to 1952. An underlying argument is that by shifting the scale of observation from the international level and onto the individual, we can gain new insights into early efforts to spread knowledge about human rights during the early Cold War. Based on archival material and open sources, it provides a glance into a rather understudied field of research for historians.

Seductive Alienation: The American Way of Life Rearticulated in Occupied Japan

ABSTRACTThis article explores how the notion of American domesticity promoted by US occupation forces in postwar Japan was decoded and rearticulated by non-elite Japanese women, a social group that has been largely overlooked in studies of the global promotion of the American way of life during the early Cold War years. Specifically examined here is the case of Takehisa Chieko, an actress and the wife of an American officer, who enjoyed high visibility in popular women’s magazines as the embodiment of the idealised postwar American lifestyle. A reading of Takehisa’s magazine writings, interviews, and photographs suggests, however, that she was far from a passive recipient and transmitter of this cultural message. As such, a close unpacking of her rearticulation of the idea of American domesticity toward the particular socio-cultural fabric of postwar Japan reveals the particular nature of this supposedly universal American model. In demonstrating the various dilemmas that stemmed from confronting both the seductive and alienating features of the American way as promoted in occupied Japan, this study illuminates a point of rupture in the larger US global promotion of American domesticity as a means toward cultural hegemony and political containment in the early Cold War period.

‘The trouble with treachery nowadays’: Revisiting the Age of Treason in Philby, Burgess and Maclean and Blunt

The Cambridge spy ring has been the subject of many dramatic representations on British television. While prior scholarship has largely focused on plays by Dennis Potter and Alan Bennett depicting the later lives of such figures, this article examines an alternative tradition: representations which re-enact events at the height of their careers in the early Cold War. I focus on two productions which centre specifically on events surrounding the 1951 defection of Guy Burgess and Donald Maclean, but from hugely contrasting perspectives. Firstly, Philby, Burgess and Maclean (ITV, 1977) by Ian Curteis covers a ten-year period from the 1945 ‘Volkov Incident’ to Kim Philby's exoneration in 1955. This production closely adheres to broadly accepted accounts of the case as known in the late 1970s, and I examine this is as a product of the public service-oriented drama-documentary culture of Granada Television. I then contrast this with the revised narrative presented in Robin Chapman's Blunt (BBC, 1987). Not only does this incorporate the newly revealed ‘fourth man’, Anthony Blunt, but it also offers a more humanised portrayal of Burgess and centres much of its drama on the marginal but implicated figure of Goronwy Rees. I explore how, in contrast to Curteis, Chapman takes greater artistic licence in examining the spies' personal lives, which resulted in a wave of controversy. I argue that this portrayal can be situated within a broader revisionist school of 1980s representation which mobilised these icons of an earlier generation's ideals in order to critique new political developments.

A Troubling Tale Brilliantly Told

A Troubling Tale Brilliantly Told Ashley J. Tellis (bio) Rarely in policy studies does a book come along that merits the adjective "masterly": Michael Green's By More Than Providence: Grand Strategy and American Power in the Asia Pacific Since 1783 is one such title. Exceeding 700 pages in length, it traces in insightful, lucid prose the history of the United States' engagement with the Indo-Pacific region—to use a contemporary term popularized by the Trump administration. As Green himself notes, the rarity of his work is somewhat puzzling, given that the Asian "rimland" has been strategically relevant, if not important, to the United States since at least the early twentieth century. Yet analyses that treat the region in an integrated fashion have indeed been scarce. The big exception here, of course, has been the oeuvre produced by theorists of classical geopolitics. The greatest names in the discipline, Halford Mackinder and Nicholas Spykman, understood and, in a manner of speaking, debated the significance of the region for world politics. But their contributions hinged more on the understanding of particular spatial relationships than the historical interactions between specific states (see pp. 208–9). When the latter have come into focus, the vast majority of work has centered on studies of specific bilateral ties, such as U.S.-Japan, U.S.-China, U.S.-Korea, and, more recently, U.S.-India relations. Detailing the broader expanse of U.S. engagement with Asia, or even rimland Asia, as a whole has proved to be more elusive. In part, the difficulties are methodological because the political construction of Asia is arguably a colonial invention. But the academic predilection, especially in the United States, for detailed but narrow analysis is equally to blame. And the demands of political necessity, however transient, have only reinforced these other constraints. Thus, for much of the early Cold War, U.S. policy focused largely on Northeast Asia, with Southeast Asia functioning mainly as a geopolitical periphery, even though Washington was consumed in a costly, decade-long war there. All told, then, a variety of pressures converged to make an integrated vision of the Asian rimland difficult, and the fragmentation in U.S. strategy during the Cold War only strengthened the analytical neglect. [End Page 136] By More Than Providence, therefore, is exceptionally relevant because it appears at a time when the previously discrete political segments of the Asian coast are linked together in unprecedented ways. This entwining is owed partly to exogenous variables such as technology—the information and communications and the transportation revolutions, in particular—but it is also driven by the most significant geopolitical development of our time: the rise of China as a new global power. China's recrudescence promises to integrate not merely the rimland but all continental Asia, if the Belt and Road Initiative bears fruit in the manner hoped for by the country's leadership. The necessity for a coherent U.S. strategy toward Asia as a whole—both its continental and its maritime dimensions—is therefore imperative. Although Green's book focuses mainly on the latter, it is nonetheless remarkable because it does intellectual justice to at least one important half of the challenge. Moreover, it impressively connects the evolution of U.S. relations with key regional powers to the fundamental transformations in larger U.S. strategy, especially the great shifts in maritime strategy that have occurred since the mid-nineteenth century, thus underscoring how the United States' engagement with Asia has been inextricably intertwined with its rise as a global power. A sound policy toward this region will prove elusive if it is not anchored in a robust ideational foundation. Green sets out to provide this foundation, in part because such an undertaking has been conspicuous only by its exceptionalism. The closest work to this one in recent years has been Bruce Cumings's magisterial Dominion from Sea to Sea: Pacific Ascendancy and American Power. But while Cumings examines how the United States and its policies shaped the Pacific edge of Asia, he focuses even more deeply on how domestic politics drove, and were driven by, the United States' Pacific engagements. As a result, the analysis of interactions between the...

냉전 초(1947~1953년) 소련 포스터에 나타난 ‘평화’ 이미지

냉전 초(1947~1953년) 소련 포스터에 나타난 ‘평화’ 이미지

‘A Christian solution to international tension’: Nikolai Berdyaev, the American YMCA, and Russian Orthodox influence on Western Christian anti-communism, c.1905–60

AbstractBuilding on recent research into the religious aspects of the Cold War and the humanitarian efforts of the American Young Men’s Christian Association (YMCA) in early twentieth-century Europe, this article locates the historical origins of religious anti-communism in late imperial Russian reactions to the revolution of 1905–07. It explores the interactions of Russian Orthodox Christian intellectuals, especially Nikolai Aleksandrovich Berdyaev, with prominent YMCA leaders such as Donald A. Lowrie and Paul B. Anderson, both of whom were mainline Protestants. Using Russian and US archives, the article documents the networks and mechanisms through which Berdyaev influenced his YMCA contacts. It shows that he shaped their efforts to fight communism in the interwar period and early Cold War through the promotion of religious values, or what Anderson referred to as ‘a Christian solution to international tension’. This concept was derived from early twentieth-century Russian ideas about the opposition between Christianity and ‘nihilism’ or ‘humanism’ as integral worldviews.

One World: Wendell Willkie’s Rhetoric of Globalism in the World War II Era

Abstract During the World War II era, a time of civilizational uncertainty, globalism emerged as a rhetorical alternative both to the isolationism predominant before the war and to the Cold War bipolarity that would replace it. A primary advocate for globalism was Wendell Willkie, the failed 1940 Republican presidential candidate who went on to cooperate with President Franklin D. Roosevelt, serving as his former rival’s proxy and personal representative in two famous overseas trips. While scholarship in rhetorical studies has accounted for the Roosevelt presidency and other forces shaping public discourse during the war and early Cold War, it has generally overlooked the importance of Willkie’s globalism in providing a bipartisan vocabulary with which Americans could describe a postwar peace sustained by interpersonal economics of free trade, global human rights, and burgeoning domestic civil rights. Using Willkie’s 1943 book One World as well as materials from his archives at Indiana University, this essay reads a popular figure and his influential ideas back into our historical narrative, demonstrating how he established what Kenneth Burke termed identification through the use of the related rhetorical strategies of proximity, presence, and ethos, inviting ordinary Americans to imagine a globally interdependent postwar peace.

Children Crusading against Communism: Mobilizing Boys as Citizen Soldiers in the Early Cold War State

Abstract In 1951, the Bowman Gum company released a collectible card set, sold with bubblegum, entitled The Children’s Crusade Against Communism: Fight the Red Menace. As a consumer item, the cards drew boys into a burgeoning form of American citizenship, but their overtly military tone also links this citizenship to ideas about national security. The narrative of the cards broadly reflects the tenets of the Truman Doctrine: that it is the duty of the United States to uphold global freedom; that communism must be contained; and that national security depends on nuclear power, a strong military, and civilian preparedness to mobilize in defense of peace. The molding of such political content in the cards to appeal to a young audience allows us to understand how such an audience was conceived of in ideological terms. A picture can be conjured of how the audience was imagined to look, what kinds of cues were deemed to be appropriate to such an audience, and how the audience was expected to respond to those cues. An analysis of the cards as they operated within the rhetorical and visual culture of the period reveals that they excluded certain groups from the narrative of American history and, thereby, certain children from the goal of becoming ideal American future citizens, citizens bearing an identity defined by a militarism and a nationalist exceptionalism predicated on pious certitude and righteous superiority.

War veterans, international politics, and the early Cold War, 1945–50

Despite the importance of war veterans issues in many nation-states after World War II, Cold War historians have never examined international veteran politics. By analysing scholarship and hitherto unexamined primary sources, this article surveys the realignments taking place in veteran politics in different countries and investigates the process leading to the creation of the World Veterans Federation in 1950. It argues that the Cold War profoundly shaped international veteran politics after 1945, and that veterans’ international organisations became political instruments and spaces of Cold War tensions. By revealing how Cold War events, particularly the Korean War, created opportunities for the veterans’ international activities under American leadership, this article offers insights into the impact of the Cold War on the transnational sphere.

Truman's New Deal: Point Four and the Genesis of Modern Global Development

This paper examines the geo-political reaction to President Harry S. Truman’s 1949 Inaugural Address, wherein he catalyzed post-war global development in the form of his Point Four program. Truman proposed sharing American scientific and technical expertise, ostensibly aimed at reducing or eliminating poverty in the developing world. Newspaper accounts and analysis of internal CIA documents reveal domestic and international responses to the policy initiative. Predictably, these responses mostly varied along early Cold War ideological lines. Examining Truman’s plan and other anti-communist American policies in the late 1940s reveals that although global development may have been a laudable effect of the plan, the primary aim was to prevent communism from spreading to countries viewed as vulnerable to subversion. The Cold War imperatives behind the plan seem to have been either implicitly assumed or ignored in the historiography. A brief sampling of Cold War historians shows a lack of explicit attention to Truman’s initiative.

Crossing to Safety from Cold War America: The Collaboration and Friendship of John Paton Davies, Jr. and George Frost Kennan

ABSTRACTThis analysis probes the interwoven careers and lives of two distinguished American diplomats, John Paton Davies, Jr. and George Frost Kennan. These Foreign Service officers, who rose to prominence in the years immediately after the Second World War, were embroiled in the formulation and implementation of controversial policy during the early Cold War. The experience of Davies and Kennan illustrates the domestic hazards that have dogged American foreign policy-making even into the present. Yet the focus here is on their friendship—a subject hitherto little examined in the scholarly literature—its connexion to the evolution of their policy recommendations, its steadying power in moments of moral and personal crisis, its tempering effect on failure. The assessment also draws on a notable work of fiction, Wallace Stegner’s 1987 Crossing to Safety, to consider the ineffable nature of friendship itself.

'Co-operation and Communism cannot work side by side': Organized Consumers and the Early Cold War in Britain.

This article contributes to a better understanding of labour anti-communism in Britain through an exploration of the evolution of ideas and attitudes within the co-operative movement during the early Cold War. It demonstrates that the period witnessed an increasingly rigid separation of co-operation from communism and argues that this separation made it harder for activists within the co-operative movement to imagine a total or utopian alternative to capitalism. Drawing particularly on a close reading of the co-operative press as well as other sources, the study is divided into three main parts. The first section discusses sympathy among co-operators for the achievements of the Soviet Union, which increased during the war against fascism. The article then moves on to consider the continuing dialogue between British co-operators and their counterparts in European communist states and how international tensions shaped co-operators' views. The final major section explores the hardening of attitude towards communism after Marshall Aid was declared in June 1947, and underlines the role played by figures such as A. V. Alexander and Jack Bailey who worked with the Information Research Department at the Foreign Office to spread anti-communism within the movement. The conclusion reflects, more speculatively, on what implications this shift may have had for the medium and long-term decline of co-operation and the hegemony of capitalist consumerism post-war.

Jennifer Helgren. American Girls and Global Responsibility: A New Relation to the World during the Early Cold War.

Jennifer Helgren. American Girls and Global Responsibility: A New Relation to the World during the Early Cold War.